Adrin Neatrour

Boxing Booth – Adrin Neatrour 1984

Sceened at Side Cinema 7 2 04

Directors commentsBoxing Booth – Adrin Neatrour 1984
Sceened at Side Cinema 7 2 04
Directors comments
A friend asked me guess the composer of a piece of music he was playing. It sounded contemporary and I thought it might be Arvo Part. In fact it was Beethoven, one of the last quartets he wrote. Viewing my film 20 years after making it brings home how time referenced films are. The look and the feel of what we see are frozen into time. Realised immediate archaism. There are perhaps a few exceptions: film being film everyone will have their list of exceptions. Not only does film comprise multiple indicators and signs of its era or year of production even; but its medium its style and its structure all connote specific temporal provenance. To exist as archive does not mean that old films lack relevance meaning or the immediacy of saying something to us now – independent of historical signification or nostalgic attraction. And this was the question I wanted to pose about my film.
When viewing Boxing Booth I tried to look exactly at what was on the screen. This was torture. The editing sometimes seemed awkward and lacking rhythm; the dialogue sometimes arch and self conscious. But although I cringed and hated this they were central to the integrity of the film which was a self portrait emeshed in a documentary about the old fairground Boxing Booth. This was me. And I wasn’t smooth and still ain’t – though I have learnt to mimic smoothness. This was me as was, bad cuts silly lines and all. It was me taking on the boxing booth to find pain as a means of atoning a failed relationship and a messy abortion. It was made as my gesture. I think the film archaic as it looks still holds to this intention of seeking out judgement as self chastisement.
There is another aspect that struck me on reviewing this film – how little I’ve changed. Not physically but rather in mind in the way I make films. I regard this as my first film because I made the discovery that I wanted the films I made to be a journey started without destination or certain outcome in mind. Boxing Booth was started with the idea that I would travel with the fair and when the time came take my turn. I did not know the outcome of the film when I started making it: I knew there was a situation in which the possibility of a film existed, but that possibility could only become actual if my entire being was concentrated into it and I had confidence in the momentary forces that could resolve into the imagery action and sounds of film. But the initial step was a act of faith: there was No film. No script. Only the chance of movement.
Looking at the film at this screening I also realised that it was important for me to have made a film about myself that incorporated physical revelation and attempted honesty. The taking of unadorned and often ugly self as subject matter gave self confidence to me as a film maker. It somehow meant that in the future, as long as I retained humility before all life, that I was the equal of the people with whom I worked to make film. No matter what the subject matter – death – pain – dishonesty – I had been there in my film. And there was confidence in having made that trip that gave me the internalised right to intrude. I don’t say that my intrusions should be accepted; often they have not been. But I was not afraid on making demands; I ask questions as an equal not as a child.

Kuhle Wampe – 1932 Germany directed Slaten Dudow script by B. Brecht.

Score Hanns Eisler

Hertha Thiele as Anni

Side Cinema – 1 2 04 Kuhle Wampe – 1932 Germany directed Slaten Dudow script by B. Brecht.
Score Hanns Eisler
Hertha Thiele as Anni
Side Cinema – 1 2 04
The last shot of the film remained with me long after the lights came up. And I mean the end of the film, not of the polemic drama. Because Kuhle Wampe was a film with two creative impulses pushing through it. Although Brecht and Dudow achieve congress as collaborators, you can see which of them is in the driving seat at any point of the film, in which dialogue and image work in counterpoint.
So to return to the ending ……..there is long and played out but amusing piece of theatre that takes place on the U-train in which the riders react to a news item read out by one of the passengers about the thousands of tons of coffee that has been destroyed in Brazil. On the train common man and woman react with the intellectual tools at their disposal – common sense, bigotry, bewilderment and the arithmetic of poverty. Also on the train, the young communists, returning from their week-end jamboree, are savvy to the algebraic formulae of world commodity markets. They understand and can explain that scarcity is a product of the market.
This cleverly penned scene with small groups of passengers talking arguing swopping insights about coffee is fundamentally theatrical in composition and orchestration. Conceptually its built up like a piece of music, a cannon or a fugue: no one individual dominates and the different sub groups build on and repeat with variations their points of view and ideas. There is some emotional input from the bigot, but emotion does not disrupt the balance of the section which works filmically because of its formal musical construction. We experience repeat sequence of characters to whom we return with variation. It is a successful piece of filmed theatre: the innate humour and intelligence of the writing shine out(as it does in the rest of the film) but the scene would sit equally well performed on stage.
The culmination of the sequence arrives when the question is asked: how things are ever going to change? (the question is no different today). The sequence cuts to a high key shot of Annie – the female protagonist(with a haircut that is pure Bauhaus) – who answers direct to camera with the polemic line: It will change because we will not accept it the way it is. The line immediately feels like the end of the drama – the dynamic switch to a full face close up, the line enunciating a concluding idea.
It is the end of Brechts drama. But it is not the end of the film. Slaten Dudow has the final sequence, the last image. From the close up of Anni, the film cuts to a subterranean tunnel, part of the U-Bahn. A long wide mouthed structure funnelling through shadows into darkness. From the camera side crowds file past into the tunnel: perhaps people who have just got off the train – old young well dressed poorly dressed, everyman all life, all Germany filing into the darkness.
All though the film, being on the hind side of history where all has been told, I am acutely conscious of the date and time, 1932, and the implications this has for how I see this film. Kuhle Wampe, a camp for the unemployed and dispossessed a benign proleptic image of the Nazi concentration camp. Such imagery of dispossession was perhaps familiar and vaguely comforting to Germans. But no where in the film is there any reference to the political situation in Germany. No reference that on the streets of Berlin extraordinary events are taking place. The Nazis, the Stromtroopers don’t exist. Perhaps it raised issues that were uncomfortable. Both Nazis and Communists made similar use of propaganda, youth organisations and rhetoric of the oppression and certainly the long sequences in the movie portraying the Communist Youth Organisation, the club, the sports rally and jamborie, had a frozen mechanical quality, which if different in detail from the organised Nazi youth activities, seem parallel in spirit. Neither the Hitler Jugend, the Hitler Band, nor Hitler and the Nazis appear or are or alluded to. Except in the last and final shot which silently wordlessly directs us towards this future which is endlessly streaming out of this present as the people get off the train.
The shot depicts people, perhaps the people who have just got off the U-bahn coming into shot from behind camera and moving past it to go down into a large wide dark tunnel. The shot is held for some considerable period. It is a shot in itself. It is not part of a sequence. A shot in and for itself that in concluding the film references it without specific sign. The people advance endlessly press forwards into the shadow (of the future). In ending his film in this way Dudow uses image to suggest fears emotions feelings for which Brecht lacked words. Perhaps Dudow, an outsider, a Bulgarian recently come Germany after studying in the USSR, knew that his film had to end not with the challenge of socialist polemic but on the vista of the uncertain. I don’t know how contemporary audiences understood this ending, but many in Germany were wired into the foreboding zeitgeist. The end of the film both presages the descent into darkness and death that came with the Third Reich. But also, in another key, this shot anticipates the development of post holocaust cinema with its abstracted locations its dislocation of time and its awareness of perception.

Dogville – Lars Von Trier – USA/Denmark 2004Dogville is film as machine, a well oiled machine designed to process Nicole Kidman. The machine is heavily larded with John Hurts voice over explaining in detail the sociopathic mechanisms inherent in the design and function of the mechanism( at times it seems he’ll never shut up) Each section of the machine is introduced by an often tongue in cheek title card. We watch the Dogville machine at work adopting its stray dog raw material, shaping it, masticating it and finally trying to destroy it before itself being destroyed by the consequences of its own actions: simultaneously we hear the voice of machine minder sardonically calling our attention to the ever mutating mechanisms of desire that are at work. As machine film Dogville is a parody of the Hollywood movie factory where dreams and delusions and fake states of mind roll off the production line. Dogville as a referential work takes up on one film which is an essential component of Hollywood’s gospel of idealised americana: Our Town. It’s a long time since I saw Our Town, but I instantly recognised its characteristic features: the stock american small town characters of a certain era(1930’s), the cadence of its spoken home-spun words, the set. Sam Wood’s film, shot in a studio built town is a machine(larded by the voice of Frank Craven[whom, unlike Hurt, we do see as a character] ) built on simple socially constructed mechanisms that function as a endorsement of the values and behaviour of real America. The fable that Our Town spins is that there is no real discrepant gap between values and action in this, the real America. Out of this referent with its carefully built and painted sets, camera set ups and artfully contrived lighting all seamlessly edited, comes Dogville like the anti-matter machine with its highly charged strangely named particles of energy – such as hand held digital camera and jump cut. All the action takes place in the crucible of the set which is simply made up of spaces marked out in white chalk which are sparsely littered with emblematic and economically employed theatrical props. Our Town was a big production set that mimicked reality. Its characteristic quality is opaqueness: it comprises of closed spaces characterised by walls doors and other obstacles to lines of vision. The set in Dogsville is open: the light(there is much commentary on light and its nature in the film) passes through and exposes all the set. The action is transparent. In Dogville the translucent set functions as a glass housing for the machine that unchains the dog of desire and examines its effect on smalltown. The overlaid pastiche of stock characters, stock situations and a carefully parodied script produce in the glass crucible of Dogville, a bestialisation of the town. Its nature and the nature of its desire, cock shit and meanness, is open to the light. There is no redemption for the characters who fail to see(or in the case of Tom who understands too late) that they are the components of a desire machine. In case it might seem there is a saving Grace in Dogville, in the form of a canonisation of Nicole Kidman as sainted product, Von Trier, after allowing Nicole and her dad a little philosophical babbling, closes the story grand guignole Hollywood style, with an apocalyptic Old Testament revenge ending. As if it were the destiny of all such machines to destroy themselves. Dogville is moral film literal in purpose and in detail. Each section of the machine has a function and that function can only be understood by seeing each process. Machine films that don’t skip processes can only work through time and generally(I’m sure there are exceptions put I can’t think of any) employ the classical unities and continuities to make them intelligible as machines. Dogville is a wonderful machine but with one irritation the over elaborated dog-matic Voice Over. Perhaps it is part of the dogma to rub the audience’s nose in the shit. – adrin neatrour – 7 March 2004

The Qeros, directed John Cohen Doc 50 minutes. 1977Shown at Side Cinema Sunday 6th November 2003.
A floating film about a floating world high up in the Peruvian Andies. A political film about gravity and what happens when you come down. Simply shot powerfully voiced record of a way of life that seems doomed to extinction as ruthless market forces gather in, like sheep, the last of the stray ecomonically free tribal groups.
The film is a journey that starts high in the mountains, miles up above man and ends down in the town with man. The opening shots look down on the clouds like the old gods and then reveal a stone landscape where the people and their animals float across the screen. Like the stone everything is hard, like the stone there is little artifice. Cohen does not make a faked sentimental picture of these people. They are as other people: some are arseholes, some fucked up. Death hunger and illness are tightly woven into life but the people endure though their culture which gives resiliance and resolve. The physical and the mental. Then gravity the elementary force exerts its pressure as the film moves forward and leaves the floating plain falling down the side of the mountain – first into the jungle.
The rain forest is vital to the indians as a source of seed for their maize crop. But they don’t like the rain forest because it stifles them entraps them chokes them pinions them, with its folliage liens and tubers. The film’s descent stops at the town of Cuzco. Cuzco is the fall. Outside the gates of Eden. The future. It is what lies in store for the Runi. In Cuzco we see the actualisation of the political and social process that reduces the Indian to the level of beasts of burdon, lumpen proletariat carrying huge loads for remote economic forces. Where once the Indian used the llama to as a pack animal, now they themselves take on this role. The loads are of extrardinary dimensions: huge unwieldy shapes strapped to their backs so that they look like exotic insects, beetles with huge carapaces. And these loads, pinion them and press them down.
The indians of Cuzco are not of the air. They do not float; they stagger through the streets heads bent and bodies doubled over. The Runi of Qeros walk lightly, heads upright parading wonderful colourful hats . In Qeros the Indians carry their own loads. They do not carry other peoples cargo. Their llamas carry the loads of corn up the mountains, but not more than 50 pounds. Neatly stashed and trim, the llamas carry easy; it looks a reasonable load, more reasonable than the the burdons that the Indians have to carry in Cuzco. The film floats because the Runi Indians are at the moment free of burdons; they do not have to lump cargo that belong to other people’s econonmic interests. They survive where they are and on what they have, with tradition and ingenuity and their piercing flutes. Flutes that play notes that are light and etherial and which bear no relation to the heavy melodic despotism of the commercialised Spanish music. This is music as energy and being. The sounds owe nothing to world of products or any rules governing artistic form or content. The sounds the Runi make are of the air and travel though the thin atmosphere going where they please.
Despite the hardship of life the Runi have a freedom which also lets their spirit soar and a freedom to move without burdons. And this lightness is something you carry away when the film is over: perhaps you are glad that you don’t have carry the huge loads of the enslaved Indians; and you yearn to experience life above the clouds. I can still here the flutes, breathy atonal piping.
Adrin Neantrour 2003
more about John Cohen can be found at www.johncohenworks.com

Cock and Bull Story – Michael Winterbottom UK 2005 – Steve Coogan Rob Brydon

Viewed – Tyneside Cinema – Newcastle-upon-Tyne – Gala screening for Northern Lights Film Festival – 24 Nov 05 – complementary ticket.Cock and Bull Story – Michael Winterbottom UK 2005 – Steve Coogan Rob Brydon

Viewed – Tyneside Cinema – Newcastle-upon-Tyne – Gala screening for Northern Lights Film Festival – 24 Nov 05 – complementary ticket.

A Cock and Bull Story(C and B) is Michael Winterbottom’s(MW) film rendition of Tristram Shandy, an eccentric eighteenth century English litterary work written by Rev. Laurence Sterne as a notional autobiography. The driving concept of MW’s piece as it appears on screen is to produce a filmic approximation of this work by thematically shooting it as a film about the making of a film. This genre is typically exemplified by films that use their own original material rather than movies deriving from book adaptations as is the case with C and B.

The ‘We’re making a movie theme’ was possibly derived from a reading of the book that picked up its detached language when describing intimate and close details, Tristram Shandy’s consciousness of itself as a literary product, and its persistent wanton determination to disregard the rules of sequential prose by inventing itself as a form of long digressions, lists, asides and punctuation’s in time. Tristram Shandy deconstructs long before Derrida coined the phrase.

But Tristram Shandy is more than an exercise in style. Its style is always secondary to its voice, and it is this voice that one can hear over the two centuries since it was writtten, and it is this voice that as a reader, you come to love. Because it is a brave voice, a brave voice that is committed to truth. A voice that tells the truth. It is an intelligent voice that faced with the chaos and pain of life has discernment awareness and discrimination. If this were not the case Tristram Shandy would long ago have been discarded.

It is this voice, the central character striving with humour. for truth, that is the defining core of Tristram Shandy, not its style. Its style defines its superficial form. This superficial form is critical, artful and necessary for its success, but not sufficient. If Tristram Shandy had been all form and no voice, it would have gone the way of a million magazine articles and films.

A voice seeking to express truth is what is missing from a Cock and Bull Story. It feels from beginning to end that the director, MW, is absent. MW has nothing to say either in or through the characters that people his film. And having nothing to say MW as a compensation has recourse to a purely stylistic rendition of his Tristram. But A Cock and Bull Story is not even superficially in style a coherent film. It looks and sounds like a mish mash of different influences: Fellini’s 8 ½; Hopper’s the Last Movie; the Office; and sketch driven Python derivative TV. C and B fails to exert over its disparate elements any form of stylistic unity; which is of course precisely Sterne’s achievement.

C and B opens with a sequence in which the two male leads exchange persiflage about actor stuff. In the opening sequence the subject of their talk is Rob Brydon’s yellow teeth, which conversation sets up a recurring motif of actor rivalry that is intercut through the film. But the trouble with actors talking actor stuff is that a little goes a long way. The egotistical concerns of actors without any anchoring in plot or structure or character, are vacuous and fail to hold audience interest. Another ingredient in C and B pudding, are sequences from the production script meetings. These like the actor sequences tend to use hand held roving camera to sign that they are unscripted impro. These production group inserts like the actor sequences are uninspired and ultimately uninteresting(why should the audience be interested in the minutiae of an uninteresting film). It is during one of these sequences, a discussion about the why and the how to film the sequence of the Siege of Namur, that the film finally gets bogged down and lost.

Interstitially placed between the actor and production crew sections, MW films pieces to camera by Tristram( with picture inserts), sections of filming the film itself and the filming of sequences of the book mainly dominated by the funny sexy bits and the birth of Tristram. These sections look to have been shot by MW without resolve as to what kind of film he is making. He seems to be trapped by the otherness of eighteenth century prose and a demand to play the book for laughs: the result is an uneven unconvincing farrago of slapstick and formality.

Without a strong clear concept and ideas about how to film Tristram Shandy, A Cock and Bull Story is a movie adrift. It is hard to see why Michael Winterbottom took it from project to realisation. It is possibly a measure of the paucity of directorial talent in UK feature film production that he was able to get backing for a film that turns a literary conceit into an act of filmic arrogance.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Crimson Gold – Directed by Jafar Panahi

Iran 2002

Script by KiarostamiCrimson Gold – Directed by Jafar Panahi
Iran 2002
Script by Kiarostami
The film opens with a revelation which encapsulates both the film’s structure structure and content: the opening credits – white on black – fade and the black shifts to one side to reveal we have been looking at the back of a shopkeeper who is being robbed. The camera remains at one fixed point throughout the long robbery sequence until at the end it tilts up as the robber Hussain calmly shoots himself. As it is at the end so it is at the beginning: both the film and Hussein travel the full circle,
The film is a continuous internal dialogue with Tehran as experienced through the cracked screen of Hussein’s motorbike. Crimson Gold depicts Tehran as a city that looks like ‘nowhere’ inhabited by people who don’t exist. Jafar Panahi and Kiarostami have a vision of Tehran as schizoid society unable to move, trapped in contradictions between repression and desire. And a society stalled by this conundrum is doomed to go round in circles going nowhere always on the same plane alwaays returning to where it began. In tune with this gyrating monotonous endless rhythm Hussein bikes round the highways of Tehran at night delivering pizza to the rich. The pizza itself, of course being round American style food delivered in plane square boxes. The Pizza is food that in itself contains opposing messages: the desired and the forbidden; to the poor it is just a meal; to the wealthy a social statement.
From a circle there can be no escape unless first you realise that you are in a circle. The performance of Hussein lies at the heart of Crimson Gold. It is performance of few words that grows in stature and nobility as inarticulately he moves foreward to irrevocably smash the circle – and at the same time within the temporal format of the film confirming its existence.
Hussein circles Tehran in his nightly work delivering food to the rich, and prowls round the wedding ring in the shop that he will never be able to afford. The night scenes are shot like affirmations of the idea of eternal recurrence. The eternity trap in which you will deliver Pizza for ever or until you die knocked off your motorbike. The Tehran streets unending necklaces of street lights; the dark citadels of the rich where the pizza is delivered. Hussein like the warrior he is, knows this terain as a familiar battlefield. Streets fast and dangerous and the experiences in the closed apartments batter against his seemingly imperturbable being. Each of the night deliveries made by Hussein opens up a crack in Iranian society casting momentary light on the dark disturbed regions of this culture experienced and filmed like an underworld. A dream like underworld.
And then there is day when the netherworld slips away and the dream ends. And Hussein still on the bike still looking through the crack in the screen is locked into his own contradiction. He has been set up to marry – an honourable marriage to his best friends sister whom he respects. But for Hussein there is something not right. He should not marry it will continue to drivew his life out of his control, perhaps he has seen too much. We don’t know and it doesn’t matter there is no reason for us to specifically understand. It is not our business nor is it the film’s business. The film’s business is that the unwanted business of the marriage is instinctively employed by Hussein to break the circle. The ring breaks the circle.
The wedding ring foreshadowed from the start of the film is not wanted: the bride to be does not want it, Hussein does not want it for itself. The ring is that gap between desired and forbidden and the unattainable. The ring is unattainable because of its grossly expensive price, forbidden also because it is part of a world in which the Husseins of this world simply do not exist.
The logic that Hussein comes to is to break the schizoid vicuous circle by having the ring. He undertakes an armed robbery to have the ring he desires, not for itself, but for its intrinsic value as something that he is not allowed to have. The robbery is amateur in conception and execution. For Hussein it is clear that it doesn’t matter whether this robbery is sucessful or unsucessful. What matters is to say no; what matters is that to take control. He is redeemed by his action. The robbery ends in fiasco: Hussein shoots himself. The film comes the full circle but the existential knot is cut.
The film is sometimes like a fusion between the style of Alphaville and the content Taxi Driver, but without the Taxi Driver’s self indulgence and fake Hollywood bravura – simply staying true to the situation of the individual in the dark recesses of city society.

Shadows – John Cassavetes -USA 1958 Ben Carruthers Lelia Goldoni Hugh Hurd

Viewed Side Cinema: 13 November 2005 – dvd – ticket price £3-50Shadows – John Cassavetes -USA 1958  Ben Carruthers  Lelia Goldoni Hugh Hurd
Viewed Side Cinema: 13 November 2005 – dvd – ticket price £3-50
 
Retro-crit
 
Like a bomb going off…..
 
The first hit is the most intense.  Shadows is Cassavetes’ first film and its like he’s mainlining on some potent essence.   Shadows is the rush of the real through the veins of consciousness.   He’s the poet who captures the crazed and phased world of New York.  As visionary he knows that the shadows that bleed through his lens are a true imprint of the times as they enfold him.
 
Like a bomb because this film is shot by compressing as tightly as possible the highly volatile elements of New York in the 1950’s.  This city-society was the crucible of the modern.  The beat ethos was redrawing the psychic map breaking down the defining social stratifications of sex class race and age.   Poetry art music film drugs suddenly become central to the parameters of the self as the new consumer driven communication industries took shape.  But in a crucial sense these industries hadn’t yet taken on a defining shape.  So Shadows begins at the beginning, a time when everything seems young, possible and full of liberating potential.  To the wail and burr of the jazz sax new personality types develop – the cool – the detached – the emotionally distanced –  sexes races developing attitude to survive the new processes of  radical individuation.  And Cassavetes sees all this.  And probes for the veins with the needle of his movie.    
 
Shadows like a bomb, a hit, because the film is shot almost entirely in close up to capture the generation of these New Yorkers.  Very few long shots, the opening club scene, a couple of street scenes, the sculpture garden, the rest is up close: very big close-ups of the faces of his characters. Cassavetes packs these faces and piles them into his frames.  One face two faces three faces four faces five faces squeezed togather as unstable gassious particles, compressed explosive charges that will detonate at the slightest provocation.
 
Cassavetes understands that it is through the faces of his actors, his living exemplars of the City that the fault lines and the vulnerabilities as well as th energy of this world will be seen.   The film can only be the film it is as a living laboritory because the actors played roles close to themselves – self projections – and within these roles found many of their own lines.  Within the encompassing embrace of Cassavetes, this is a film founded on individuation and all the acting has this quality.
 
The individuality of American society had been given a new edge by the beat ethos.  At an overt level there is a measure of solidarity shared values and attitudes in relation to the embracing of the hip and the rejection of the square.  But there is also a heightened competitive assertiveness in  a neo-Hobbsian war of all against all.  The rictus and the laugh define most of the close-up interaction.  The characters josh kid and joke with one another.  But subjected to the harsh light of Cassavetes’ lens the aggression underlying most of the relationships is laid bare.  Behind the smile and the bared teeth of the laugh lie the snarl and the growl.   And to formally express this reality Cassavetes makes radical use of framed space.    Loading his faces into frame, Cassavetes understands that this world is a milieu where personal space and body distance as segregation devices have been abolished.  Everyone sits very close in this world.  Cassavetes shoots in cabs in booths in compartments and packed club settings – all spaces designed to compress without discrimination.  And as he squeezes his people together he uses space as an intensity amplifier.  Denied physical space his characters spar and fight for psychic space, for that momentary instant at the top of the pile.  A continuous writhing heap characterised by the outward expression of conviviality and humour but underwritten by aggression that at any point may explode into violence.  And it does.  Brief unimportant interludes that permit regroupings.
 
Shadows is world – the hip world.  No story but incidents with individuals and groups working their way back and forth through the frame defining and redefining the action.
 
And why Shadows?  Impossible not to think of the idea of Plato’s cave.  Cassavetes making a point. Having his joke.  Shadows.  In the Platonic cave the prisoners sit in front of the fire and watch the shadows made on the wall by objects behind them. It is the only reality they know; they have no notion of the real world; they are deceived by shadows.  One of the prisoners escapes, and in the light of the sun sees the real things, but returning to the cave to enlighten the rest cannot convince them of the truth.  Cassavetes carries warning: however much the hip world thought it was being true to itself, alive on the beat the life, creating new being and new words, people were fooling themselves if they thought they could so easily escape the shadow of American culture and history.
Adrin Neatrour 25 Nov 05
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk