Adrin Neatrour

Citizen Jane – the Battle for the City Matt Tyrnauer (USA 2017)

Viewed: ICA Cinema London
15 May 2017.

and what about today!

It is interesting to compare Matt Tyrenauer’s ‘Citizen Jane’ with Raoul Peck’s ‘I am not your negro’. Peck’s movie had the singular virtue of being written by its subject James Baldwin. James Baldwin’s words still have a pointed relevance to race relations in the USA today. Peck uses the urgency of Baldwin’s text to fashion a film documenting the situation of Black people, using images drawn both from the past and the present day, to show that little has changed. Peck’s film takes up Baldwin’s analysis and shows its contemporary relevance for an America psyche still marked by an imbued sense of white racial superiority. This is today; welcome to the USA, says Peck. Says Baldwin.

Like Peck’s film, Tyrnauer’s ‘Citizen Jane’ (CJ) has at its centre of gravity a voice that rings out as clear perceptive true and uncompromising. The voice of Jane Jacobs. The difference between the films lies in their truth content. ‘I am not your negro’ has as its truth content Peck’s proposition that Baldwin is relevant now because the fight against white supremacy continues. Baldwin is, in this respect, but one powerful fighter in a long line of warriors taking up the struggle for Black respect. The truth content is the continuity of the fight.

By way of contrast, Tyrnauer’s truth content centres not so much about a proposition, but rather about the person of Jane Jacobs, locating her and her battle exclusively in the 1960’s and 1970’s. ‘Citizen Jane’ is locked in a time bubble.

CJ is pitched as a battle between Jane and Robert Moses who was planning supremo of New York City for some 40 years. Moses was an insensitive arrogant power broker who out manoeuvred and crushed opposition to his gargantuan urban planning schemes. Moses’ planned improvements were often, but not always, justified in terms of facilitating greater ease of road transport. They ended up smashing the very fabric of the city. They threatened to destroy the city as a place for life itself, its natural capacity to mediate complex and rewarding human interaction. Often Moses’ policies also had the effect, never stated but which may have been intended, of decanting the poor out of high value locations, in particular Manhattan, making it a better safer place for the rich. For poor, read ‘Black’ or ‘Hispanic’.

‘Citizen Jane’ works as a movie because Jane Jacobs and her writing stand in the centre of the film. Jacobs was extraordinary because she saw what Moses and the planners were doing to New York. At a time when most people were blind to what was happening, she saw what was going on and used her extraordinary clear mind to write and explain what Moses and the NYC planners were up to, and just how much damage they were doing to city life. Jacobs saw that Moses was not a god but a deeply flawed man corrupted by hubris who had lost touch with reality. Moses had become a destructive force. Jacobs was able to take him on because of her ability to articulate a clear alternative vision of the city, that was simple powerful and persuasive. She was also a formidable streetwise political organiser.

Jane Jacobs won her battles with Robert Moses. But Citizen Jane’s truth content is no more than re-telling of the David and Goliath fairy tale. The little woman takes on the ogre and knocks him down. A good story. The kind of story the Disney Corporation likes to tell.

‘Citizen Jane’ presents as a film with a knock out thesis. Wham bang, Goliath felled, we can all go home and lie safe in our beds.

Tyrnauer extends his material horizontally across space as geography, showing contemporary images and film of other cities. These clips are usually interspersed with academics and some contemporaries of Jacobs talking about what has been learnt from her insights and analysis. The problem is that this film material is diffuse vague and unfocused. It is difficult to make sense of the footage of the various cities we see, because cities are particular places and we are not given any information to understand them.

We are given a considerable amount on information about New York. But Tyrnauer even as an epilogue does not let the film develop through time, to give us some idea of how we might connect Jane Jacobs thinking in the 60’s to what is happening now on her old battleground.

Peck looks at what Baldwin’s words say today about Blacks in the USA. Tyrnauer‘s film suggests that somehow the struggle for New Yorks physical and social fabric was won by Jane Jacobs in the 1960’s. He does not see that in relation to the forces that Jane Jacobs took on, battles come and go, battles are won and lost. But the war goes on.

Moses was an exceptional figure, even so he was ultimately just the representative of the vested economic interests that have always shaped the use of land of the USA. The same forces that created the suburbs, gated communities, inner city ghettos, industrial parks now vision the city as a high tech service economy, characterised by high rents and leisure driven life styles. Mobility and de-politicisation characterise the new vision which has slowly come into full focus over half a century of development. Robert Moses has come and gone, but he is replaced today by a plurality of hypercharged real estate developers, who are perusing very similar goals to Moses. They are not driven by civic ideological righteousness, but rather driven by greed for the huge returns and profits they make on blue chip residential projects. The consequences are the same: a city for the rich, the poor banished to the margins bereft of community and politically contained. the creation of a prototype Eloi culture based on leisure. The death of the life of the city.

Jane Jacobs’ struggles were only a episode of the war between people who live in cities – like new York – and those who would destroy them. This is the Tyrnauer’s limitation. The forces in play in issues of land use are historical forces for which individuals sometimes hold the banners and wield the sword. But they are players, they don’t control script development. Today as more and more of New York ( and other cities) is ripped down and apart to provide high rise apartments for the rich, where are the Jane Jacobs? . Where are the people prepared to take on the developers and their political sponsors who now stay well in the shadows aiding and abetting the dirty work of destruction.

I think Jane Jacobs would have been disappointed in Tyrnauer’s film. It is locked into a Disneyesque re-iteration of the past. She won her battles but she would have known that this war continues. Tyrnauer fails to understand this. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Lady Macbeth William Oldroyd (2016 UK) Florence Pugh, Cosmos Jarvis

viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle 2nd May 2017;
ticket: £4.00

vacuum packed

As in Chazelle’s La La Land the defining shot in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth is a female faciality. Oldroyd and Chazelle’s through both the camera and the edit indulge long slavering shots of both Emma Stone and Florence Pugh. Both these young actresses are sat nicely preened, motionless on the set, posing for the audience with looks of self satisfied smugness as the lens laps up their faces in an act of optic devouring.

Both films are about desire, and today’s directors, in particular but not exclusively male ones, seem spellbound by the images of the faces of their female protagonists as they play to realise the object of their desire. In the Public relations hand-outs this is called female empowerment. Katherine and Mia are caste as representatives of a rewritten ‘desire’ retro-history, and both heroines achieve the 21st century feminist dream of having it all. These movies might be understood as the consequence of the pact production companies and their directors make out with the juggernaut of pseudo-feminism orthodoxy that rolls over the global arts and political landscape. We are experiencing the implementation of a fake feminist canon of political correctness in which the female presentation, as image, vies with Bolshevik strictures concerning the historic correct destiny of workers and peasants, for the mantle of being the most deadening sterile social paradigm.

Lady Macbeth is adapted from Nikolai Leskov’s Russian novel, Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District. Leskov’s novel seems to have been completely corrupted in its filmic representation. Whereas the novel’s actual back ground of serf culture with its underlying violence, serve Leskov’s plot well and embed the action in a specific culture, Oldroyd’s film is a decontextualized vehicle. Lady Macbeth is set in a narrational black hole. The ‘period look’ setting reminded me of the final sequence of Kubrick’s 2001 in which Bowman finds himself deposited in a neo classical apartment. Lady Macbeth seems likewise beamed up. But Katherine unlike Bowman has not been scripted to die, but rather like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, been sent to right the wrongs of history and restore a feminist gloss to literature and history. (Leskov’s novel ends with Katherine and her serf lover guilty of murder and sentenced to exile in Siberia). Oldroyd’s land Macbeth has as its final shot Katherine smirking into the camera.

There is an immobility in the sets which together with the acting style and the lines of dialogue, give to Lady Macbeth a theatrical aspect. Both Becket and Pinter as playwrights used decontextualized settings, mannered delivery of dialogue and non naturalistic dialogue to specific dramatic effect. These writers exploited lack of context and freedom from external constraints, to probe explore and evoke metaphysical and psychosocial tension in the characters. Oldroyd’s script doesn’t do metaphysics; it does mechanics, the mechanicality of Katherine’s career of ‘desire achieved’. There is nothing for the audience to see or to understand, other than the script progressing from one event to the other, from one success to another. From Katherine’s romps with Sebastian to her final murder of the young heir. There is no ‘out damn spot’ moment, no moments of irony or self awareness. Only that one reiterated image: Katherine sat facing outwards looking towards camera like the cat that got the cream.

And a cat periodically appears throughout the film, as do landscape shots, both serving the filmic conceit of referencing nature as a transposed states of mind. Visual clichés that at this point have long out served any purpose other than pretension.

As there were no serfs in England, Leskov’s underclass characters in Lady Macbeth are given over to be played by blacks. I think the idea will have been to migrate contemporary racial sensitivities back into a decontextualized 19th century thereby deepening the meanings underscoring social relations in the film. But race relations are always mediated by context, and the interposing of race simply deepens Lady Macbeth’s ontological confusion. In an English setting, race and class issues imaged in lady Macbeth, only blur and confound. A more appropriate background for the film might have been in the Southern States.

By the time the end credits rolled Lady Macbeth had left me without a thought. The truth content of the movie was a void. The assembly of the movie pointed only to external relations of film making as an act of ideological purity. I did wonder if they had filmed a lesbian scene between Katherine and Anna, but wisely left it on the cutting room floor. This idle thought merely underscores the banality of a film that flaunts its credentials as an empowering medium, a piece of junk thought that underlines only that Lady Macbeth is a dishonest disempowering medium. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Raw (Grave) Julia Ducournau (Fr/Belge 2017) Garance Marillier

viewed Tyneside Cinema 15 April 2015; ticket £9.75

No one does it like KFC

Ducournau’s Raw (Grave) is another movie off the assembly line of films whose scenarios are built out of ‘purple’ events defined by ‘images’ and linked by script rods whose function is to hold together what is an unwieldy shapeless molecular structure.

Like ‘Elle’ the rationale of ‘Raw’ is to be found in its financing which in the age of multi institutions and companies coughing up the money, produces a nouvelle cuisine take on the traditional Euro pudding idea. The Euro Pudding film emanated out of film financing by a small number of blue chip European TV stations or their commercial spin offs, typically C4 Arte DFS RTI. There were some interesting successful movies coming out of this sort of arrangement, but often the artistic results seemed to be compromised by a primary rule of: thou shalt not offend. The Nouvelle Cuisine film cooks, of which Lionsgate for instance is a lead player both in production and in distribution, ties in a wide number of sources of finance, and often target a specifically young cool age group (there are plenty of films however that target the grey pound) taking as their the primary rule of film production: offend – transgress ( but not too much ) at all costs. In this way it is thought that ‘dullness’ can be avoided.

Raw has twenty companies with a finger in the pie: Petit Film; Rouge International (co-production) Frakas Productions (co-production); Wild Bunch; Canal+ (participation); Ciné+ (participation) Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) (participation) ; Le Tax Shelter du Gouvernement Fédéral de Belgique (participation) ; Casa Kafka Pictures Movie Tax Shelter Empowered by Belfius (participation); La Wallonie (participation); Bruxelles Capitale (participation); Centre du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (participation); Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (RTBF) (co-production); VOO (co-production), BE TV (co-production); Arte / Cofinova 12 (participation); Torino Film Lab (participation) (as Torinofilmlab); MEDIA Programme of the European Union (support); Angoa-Agicoa (support); Ciclic – Région Centre (developed with the support of); Rouge International. This list doesn’t include the distributors whom of course it is vital to have on board when selling the proposition of a movie like Raw to back end investors.

The title of Raw gives the clue to what is happening in La la Land. The French title of Raw is ‘Grave’, not as you might think, ‘Cru’. Grave means ‘Heavy’ (metaphorically rather than physically). The title of movie productions put together in the manner of Raw and Elle, doesn’t point the film’s content or source. Rather the title points to the expectations of the intended audience. The title is a semantic ‘one word’ associative hook, like a candy bar cigarette brand or a soft drink.

The result in Raw’s case is a movie that is like bad soft drink, a bit of fizz no substance. Ducournau’s Raw is an empty assemblage of components that have been filmed for their image value. Raw doesn’t so much lurch from event to event as from image to image. There are no events in the film, only images which are scripted shot and edited into Raw to dose it with regular shocks to keep the audience awake.

Such is the paucity of Raw’s script material that even the background setting of the Veterinary College (named amusingly as some sort of private literary joke for St.Exupery) has to be pressed into service to provide a regular image fix. St Exupery has a hazing initiatory semester which gives Ducournau not only plenty of scope to dish it out to her young female protagonist, Justine (sic. another lit reference) but also allows plenty of time to be used up with long boringly repeated shots of young kids, with tits hanging out, partying. (this is reminiscent of Wheatley’s High Rise also padded out with long duration orgy shots with sex on the side). Even these party shots can’t give the necessary durational lift, so the St Exupery background, with its animal patients, provides a convenient bottomless pit of images that can be mined for content. Animals make strong images even if the images are innocent of any implication in the narrative (such as it is), but allow the film to be dragged out to its necessary 90 or so minutes.

The acting in Raw is very close in style to the adverts for automobiles and mobile phones that proceeded it in the cinema’s programme. Lots of hardened eye looks, pouts and stretched rictus. But of course Raw is an advert in a way but for what? Cool self image perhaps; as Justine sucks on her sister’s severed finger as it were a nice KFC winglet. No one does it like KFC.

In fact nothing is clear in Raw. If you try to pursue what its subject might be: power relations, body image, sibling rivalry, vegetarianism nothing is sustained, all the strands peter out pathetically. It becomes a film about nothing except money. If you try to fathom out Raw’s truth content all that you come to is the money. The only truth embodied in this film is money, the money it is supposed to return to its financial backers. Raw’s distribution strategy bears this out. After somehow getting positive reception from Cannes (the film industry is notoriously generous to some productions), the distributors decided on a quick blanket release to exploit the blood and sex filled trailer and the positive reviews, before the word of mouth did its damage.

For all Raw pitches in as a transgressive movie, it is in fact rather demure even in its confusion. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Graduation (Bacalaureat) Cristian Mungui (Romania 2016) Adrian Titieni

viewed Tyneside Cinema 4th April 2017; ticket £9.75

Feels like one of those calling cards

Cristian Mungui’s Graduation has elements that suggest a sort of family-centred gothic drama, a sub-branch of a David Lynch style of movie. A series of proto Gothic events which punctuate the movie, are the strongest moments in Graduation. These events comprising a number of ‘unexplained’ incidents one of which, the breaking of a window, opens the film; and another of which, the sexual assault on Eliza, gives the film narrative direction, if not its substance.

The problem is that these elements fail to cohere, and Graduation as film is less than the sum of its parts. The movie registers as if it were the first chapter of a six part TV drama. But Cristian Mingui is unable to make Graduation work as a stand alone piece. It doesn’t develop as anything more than a series of events linked by a network of characters, about whom there is little reason to care because they are less characters more ciphers called into existence to activate the script. Graduation is peopled by roles who don’t possess identities but rather function as interlinking rods in the engine of the scenario. Like multi part TV series, Graduation is a densely scripted metaphoric representation, a depicting of the social matrix that relies on links between action and events to drive it foreword.

The action is set in Cluj the regional capital of Transylvania. Mungui’s settings are contemporary renderings of various backgrounds: the unremarkable housing projects the places and apartments where people where people live and work. The mundane nature of these settings, the music ( a lot of Handel and Purcell emanating from Romeo’s car radio), the repeated shots of the stray dogs in the streets, all signify the film’s claims to a certain type of contemporary authenticity. Likewise the socio- psychic setting of the film which embeds all relations within webs of failure and corruption that bind togather the institutional matrices of post communist Romania. But again, like the backgrounds, the matrices of corruption seem to emanate from a stylistic noir conceit, representing the film’s claim on authenticity within the TV drama tradition. Everything has to be expressed as corrupt because in accord with the conceit, developed from Marlow onwards, the corrupt is the best dramatic representation of the ‘real’. The trouble is that in Graduation so much of the content describes corruption that it is reduced to cliché. As cliché folds over cliché the film starts to pay the cost of the script’s inability to avoid predictable development.

Graduation’s script becomes a series of conventional devices that are overdetermining and fail to create tension in the drama: the film starts to become dull. A quality that affects an acting style adopted which again looks derivative from TV noir model. The main gestural resources of the acting are invariant sets of: eye shots – the hard eyed stare being the most overused, the stretched rictus, the facial gesture of down cast eyes signifying wait and see. Such is the invariance in body language and gesture in particular of Romeo’s wife that she becomes a sort of running joke.

Initially Graduation starts out as an assured drama with the notable moment of a glass window shattered by a stone. As it develops, in particular after Eliza’s ‘rape’ it quickly resorts to trading in plot moments. The characters become pawns of the frenzied plot. We are not given the space to see something in the relations. We are manipulated by events: the heart attack of Romeo’s grandmother, the endless machinations of the corruption machines, Romeo’s love affair, the abortion, an autistic boy, the continuous hints in the scenario that Romeo has some unrevealed secret.

Mingui has made a confused film. The gothic content the inter personal and the social relations don’t mesh but rather vie for primacy making a film that is out of focus and looking more like the opening episode of a mini series that will never be completed. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Elle Paul
Verhoeven (Fr 2016) Isabelle Huppert

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 14 Mar 2017; Ticket: £9.75

Many fingers in the pudding

Verhoeven’s ‘Elle’ like many of today’s movies, opens with the Money. The Money people, the Investor’s names, fade in and out through the film’s opening credits. Of course every image tells a story and after viewing the ‘Elle’ credits, if you follow the Money, you get the finance story.

It goes something like this. Once upon a time finance for feature films came from one or a small number of main sources who Ok’d the project’s script, talent and production team including the director. Personal relations were often important in getting projects off the ground and many projects although subject to the signing off of the final cut by the Money, would more or less be left to trust, with the director given some leeway in bringing his interpretation of the script to realisation.

My thinking is that this ‘old’ production format is now often superseded. Now there are often a large number of financial players investing in the production of a feature film. The major players, TV channels and theatrical distribution companies provide the core finance and the rationale for other investors to come in and spread the risk endemic in the business. But the risk has appear of low order to bring the back end finance on board. So the normal requisites of proven director production team and talent are of course put in place. But added to this, a new degree of attention is paid to the script and scenario of feature movies. To attract a wider range of investors a format of script is demanded which is qualitively different from traditional script designs. The script has to have a ‘wow’ factor, a spectacle format as its definitive statement. Scripting craft no longer cuts the mustard. The script has to promise: ‘Money’. It has to have the meachanics of money.

Once talent and director were in place, old Hollywood built its scripts on the concept of ‘the through story’ more or less linked to the idea of character/life development. The new movie scripting does not do character development; and the through story concept is replaced by ‘events’ which dominate and define the scenario. Modern scripts, as exemplified by’Elle’ resemble adverts. Adverts don’t do character development, (obviously their short duration doesn’t quite allow this) but the point of the ads is completion. In the ads the characters are completed by the product they use. The characters are usually enigmatic constructs, emblems of desired attributes who in the script are associated with a consumer product. The attractive woman in the shower is completed by the washing gel that sets off her hair or her body. There is one event, or perhaps sequence of events (as in automobile ads), that links product and character completion.

Like adverts contemporary scripts don’t have character development. The characters are effectively completed by the product, which is a developed scenario that comprises a series of events. What these ‘events’ comprise doesn’t matter as long as they are spectacular, a huge variety of events can be bolted on to the core of the film. The efficacy of stylistic juxtaposition will seamlessly assemble all the parts togather.

Verhoeven’s Elle is constructed out of a series of events, played out so as to escalate through the duration of the script. The characters are loose constructs comprising of types that are representative of the demographic target audience. Michelle Blanc is a type of successful business woman with a type of dark past. Construed as an enigma who undergoes a series of either real or imagined ordeals, she has no more intelligibility than the woman in the shower gel advert. But instead of a ‘shower event’ we have a series of ‘violent rape events’ which complete her being in the world. The darkness of her past, the darkness of her video game business give a phantom depth to the assaults on her body. The script remains coy about her degree of complicity, preferring to wrap up Michelle in the mystery of her sexual completion. This gives the film producers and the PR department of the distributors some wriggle room in which they can disingenuously plead the violent rape scenes may be construed as real or imagined; but that if imagined explained by Michelle’s traumatised past.

Michelle’s traumatised past like most of the events in the film feels like a bolt-on section that exists to fill out the film with spectacle. The core of the film is the spectacle of Michelle, legs akimbo, (Huppert performing like a inflatable sex doll) being slapped about by a ludicrous ‘Batman-like’ intruder into her house. As this is a repetitive spectacle the script/scenario needs bolt on events; a bad psychopathic daddy, a fallatio scene, a lesbian scene, a sexually violent video game, a mother death bed scene, car crash scene (without airbag!) etc. This pans out to a two hour film, some of it slightly tongue in cheek, but a film nevertheless. None of the bolt on’s are essential to ‘Elle’, any could have been left out without effecting the film in any respect except its length. And half way through it is clear the movie is painfully too long as there is almost nothing in Elle except padding.

The film reviewers seem to like ‘Elle’. Film reviewers are of course part of the assemblage of the cinema industry, and their role in the film machine is to put bums of seats, because this is an industry, and no bums no seats no jobs. Occasionally for form’s sake they pan a movie but for the most part they seems content to play along with the distributors PR departments take on their products. The Independent reviewer judged that ‘Elle” was “…unpredictable and confounded audience expectations.” In fact I have rarely seem a more predictably dire set of events. The fact that “Elle’ has as its main character a strong successful woman played by Huppert who is an established representative of intelligent role playing, seems to have banjaxed reviewers into buying the PR hype and being cowed by obtuse political correctness into giving it good review. All those stars.

There is a better argument for seeing “Elle’ as demeaning and degrading pumped up piece of film making. There are moments, mainly in the choreographed group sequences but also in the trysts between Michelle and the masked man where Verhoeven gives a nod to Bunuel, hints that his scenario might take on the dark surreal caste of a Bunuel movie. But Bunuel’s films are underscored by a moral vision. Moral doesn’t make money, and Verhoeven, after a couple of nods gets on with the simple mechanics of bolt-on film making. Elle is the product of opportunistic hypocrisy that presents sexual violence as spectacle, wrapping up fake female empowerment as a saleable product that can make the return on Money. And speaking of money, Isabelle Huppert could make a bundle selling anti-wrinkle cream. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Salesman Asghar
Fahadi (Iran 2016) Shahab Hosseini,
Taraneh Alidoosti

viewed Angelika Film Center NYC, 13 Feb 2017; ticket: .00
What’s for sale?

After filming ‘The Past’ in France in 2013, Fahadi returns to Iran in 2016, to make ‘The Salesman’. Fahadi’s concern as film maker to judge from the three films of his that I have seen is locked onto human relations their functioning and the way in which they break down, within the social and cultural context.

‘The Past’ was ineffective as an expression of the human comedy, perhaps because Fahadi, marooned in France outside his native milieu, produced a movie in which melodrama and plot driven concerns dominated the scenario, whereas ‘A Separation’, his previous film, was about process. Those processes, emotional legal social that mediated at the intersections between the personal and the public domains. In ‘A Separation’ plot resolution was subordinate to situation development.

In ‘The Salesman’ returning to a home Iranian setting, Fahadi again focuses on relations not plot. Fahadi incorporates into his focus on the marriage situation of Emad and Rana, the dynamics of the amorphous shifting cultural and social forces that shape and form their relationship. Dynamics that ultimately suggest meanings for us the audience, but meanings that are implicit in the behaviour and demeanour of the characters; rather than explicitly stated melodramatic acting out.

Fahadi bookends and intercuts ‘The Salesman’ with sections from Arthur Miller’s play, ‘The Death of a Salesman’. Emad and Rana play the lead roles of Willie and Linda Loman in this small theatre group production. The manner in which Fahadi uses his chosen excerpts from this particular play seems problematic at the level of meanings in the dialogue, but is strongly suggestive in a more structural formal sense.

Fahadi opens “The Salesman’ with shots of the ‘Death of a Saleman’s’ stage setting; periodically throughout the film he cuts to short clips of the play both in rehearsal and performance. But there is never enough information from the text in these excerpts for an audience to have any notion of what the play is about. You have only the play’s title as a hook telling you that the play somehow concerns ‘death’. For the rest Fahadi simply presents us with observable formal processes of this American drama: Emad and Rana are in a play where they pretend to be/act out the roles of main characters; they dress up in clothes that are disconnected from their way of life; they put on make up to disguise and present themselves as other, in Rana’s case, as Linda, appreciably older; they take on roles and speak lines of dialogue that are exterior to their culture. Yet in spite of this otherness, they somehow remain true to themselves. In contrast as the script develops the particular situation that presses upon their marriage, they become less true to themselves. They become trapped in and by events, estranged from each other, incapable of communication and honesty. This strange concept of Western drama exploiting the possibility of individuated personal malleability (role playing) to illuminate otherness, alien to mainstream traditional Iran, reflects a parody of truth of which the main players, constrained by inhibition, are incapable. And it is Rana herself, not playing Linda, who ages and wilts before our eyes, old and wise before her time, crushed by forces outside her control. The assault on Rana in her own home, shapes the development of ‘The Salesman’. It is the event in the movie that triggers the impulse that drives Fahadi’s script to range over elements of the social and cultural matrix that have fateful implication for both individuals and Iranian society. At the heart of the film lie the relations between the sexes. The weight of law attitude and tradition render women, in certain situations, almost powerless to oppose the male will to control. In particular in relation to those types of circumstances that concern any type of female sexuality exposed to the public gaze or knowledge. At the point of this exposure there is no personal there is only public and the woman in her interiority and her exteriority is identified only in terms of the male imperative. Rana’s mistake has consequences for her, both in the social domain, where she has to endure the mute censor of her neighbours, but most crushingly in her personal relationship with her husband.

It is not absolutely clear from the scenario, if Emad accepts unconditionally his wife’s account of the event. What is clear is that Emad becomes less concerned about Rana’s feelings than his own. The critical point for Emad is the cultural meaning of what has happened. What has happened is that this violation of his wife has impugned his honour. There is an inversion of victim primacy: Emad sees himself and becomes the main victim. And he is unable to give replete and deep acceptance of the damage done to Rama, because his honour, even if it is a fake display dishonestly assumed in bad faith, castes a shadow over the relationship.

The relationship is now about display as Emad defaults to the cultural prescription to restore his honour. Not hers. He becomes ‘the salesman’ determined to sell to her the outward signs of his vindication. Of course Rana does not want this, she desires the opposite, an intimate private acceptance. Instead of this she has to buy, in silence, the commodity of honour which is all the salesman has on his tray. She also has to know that she and her husband can never again engage in the charade that they are equals. He is the salesman, and she has to buy whatever he sells.

Psychically crushed by the developments in this situation, Rana retreats into a sort of cataleptic state. Muteness: the traditional sanctuary of those who have been emotionally wounded. Obversely there is an irony that in her theatrical role Rana, as Linda, can speak. In the play Rana and Emad are equals. They both speak. In filmic role Rana cannot speak. Emad cannot speak. What lies before them is silence.

Silence seems to be an active force in Iranian society as Fahadi, in scripted tangential moments, references elements that make up the everyday experience in a city like Tehran. The ruthless nature of real estate, the wide use of smart phones , fear of the police, the omnipresence of censorship. Fahadi seems to say that you might think that the headlong rush into modernity in a city like Tehran could undermine some of the foundations of tradition; in fact it is more likely to deepen and harden brazen hypocrisy. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

I Am Not Your Negro
Raoul Peck; written by James Baldwin (2016 USA) Samuel Jackson

viewed Film Forum NYC, 21st Feb 2017; ticket .00

one voice

As I left the cinema with my companion Ana Marton, she turned to me and said: It’s a labour of love! And I immediately understood that she was right because if there is one thing that stands out in Raoul Peck’s ‘I Am Not Your Negro , it is that there is love at the heart of his film.

‘I Am Not Your Negro’ feels like the film of a director who has read and reread James Baldwin many times, each time absorbing him the more deeply into his blood. Reaching the point, from all considerations, where a film, not made about but with Baldwin, was possible. A film in which not everything could be said, but in which much that was essential in the writer could be uttered.

Viewing ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ it feels like Raoul Peck (RP) has consciously minimised his own presence, almost disappeared from the film. Because this is Baldwin’s film. And RP knows he has made Baldwin’s film and no one should take the credit for Baldwin’s film but Baldwin. His is the voice.

Of course ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ is a finely crafted film and in that respect it is Peck’s seamless fusion of Baldwin’s strong voice and the film material that almost renders his own presence invisible. RP writes himself out of the script allowing him to refine his task so as to actualise the life and writing of the poet and writer who has inspired and shaped the lives of those many born without the protective carapace of white skin.

Raoul Peck’s intention in the film is to give total primacy to the writing. Nothing is more important. Baldwin’s writing commands the screen, allowing his voice to ring clearly across the years since his death in 1987. Releasing Baldwin’s words so that they might resonate today with acuity intelligence and insight into the heart of present day America.

An America that in Baldwin’s terms is still a sick troubled society. Baldwin’s predictions bear witness today to the primacy of Donald Trump; perhaps a sicker more troubled culture now than in the 1960’s and 1970’s epitomised in the continuing fate of its black population to be looked upon as a despised degenerate slave people. A fate made more urgent and cogent by the fact that the political discourse about ‘blacks’ is spoken in a euphemistic code of political correctness that overlays the deeply buried prejudice and discrimination.

Peck’s script is largely based on Baldwin’s 1975 work, ‘No name in the street’. This is sometimes described as a group of essays. It is not. It is rather an autobiographical work that is structured in the manner of a stream of consciousness. It intermixes the personal memory, reflection and analysis of white culture and society, and interpolates into the text the significance and deaths of the the three great black American resistance figures of the 20th century, with all of whom, Baldwin had worked and fought. Medgar Evans, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King.

Baldwin’s utterance, voiced by the deep sonorous bass of Samuel Jackson, is the dominant affect in the movie, Baldwin’s writing is the truth content, energising and organising the visual material, the affect that points to the significance of the visual imagery. What we see is images that are an extension of the voice’s perception: images drawn from originary material of Baldwin himself such as his 1965 Cambridge debate; archive material of King Evans and Malcolm X; and movie clips from popular Hollywood film that range from the 1920’s to the 1970’s. In addition RP makes some use of present day coverage of race riots in Milwaukie and Ferguson to extend the scope of Baldwin’s vision into the present day, and to give the lie to the endless stream of white faces appearing on televisions to tell the black people that they are: “Sorry!”. Sorry for what?

And: ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ did not win a 2017 Oscar. No surprise. The boys and girls in the Hollywood back rooms were never going to give the gong to James Baldwin. I mean you have to take the film’s title seriously. Baldwin’s idea was to tell truth, his truth: not to entertain. Thanks RP. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Manchester by the Sea
Kenneth Lonergan (USA 2016) Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle
Chandler

viewed
Tyneside Cinema 23 Jan 2017; ticket £9.25

half man half music video

Sometimes when viewing Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (MBS)I was put in mind of the very fine set of films made by Bob Rafelson in the 1970’s, King of Marven Gardens and Five Easy Pieces. Also in watching Lonergan’s movie it was a relief to view a Hollywood movie whose voicing and dialogue wasn’t characterised by turgid gaseous delusional philosophy.

MBS is grounded in relations between people as were Rafelson’s two films. As far as that goes, the film is dynamic in its observation and depiction of the difficulties of close relations; communication between generations and between men and women are brought into relief in Lonergan’s script.

Although the script centres on the generational boy- father/man nexus it is the dysfunctional response of women partners that shapes the situations that are picked up in the script and it is the female influence (often in absentia) that shapes the development of the scenario. MBS’s scenario rather than being a narrative, drives through strips of life, cutting between a time past and an ongoing present as the established situation evolves and develops through character rather than plot mechanisms. These are not totally absent, but do not in themselves define Lonergan’s film.

The problem with MBS is that it feels ungrounded, both in the local environment and in environmental nexus in which the script is located. There are very few connecting ties between the close intimate circle which is the prime concern of MUS, and the wider social. The film’s material is focused almost entirely in the personal milieu. As if personal relations in a small town such as Manchester could be completely disconnected from the wider community with its social political and economic considerations.

One scene in particular in MBS, Joe’s funeral service, exemplifies this disconnection and also strikes an inauthentic note that jars the credibility of the film. It seems inauthentic that a popular well liked man, as Joe is depicted, and a fisherman to boot, should attract such a low attendance at his funeral service. In small fishing towns, funerals are large as they are both a mark of respect and a social event. Lonergan’s failure to depict the communal marking of Joe’s death, seems symptomatic of his failure to depict how small towns and tight groups of people such as fishermen function.

Rafelson’s King of Marvin Gardens was not only an acidic observation of the destructive relationship between the two brothers; also by setting the film in Atlantic City, Rafelson located the film in a failing America, an America coming apart at the seam of its dream. Lonergan’s MBS in contrast might as well be set on a Facebook page. The intensity of human intercourse is there, but without context with no real setting. Manchester, its people, its connection to the sea are photo-shopped backgrounds, pictures whose purpose is to decorate not to authenticate or substantiate. In Joe’s character and the legacy of his existence left to his son Patrick, there is no feeling for the work that Joe does. But people who live by toil in the sea are marked by it to the core of their being. You are a fisherman, it is not something you do. From the script it was not possible to understand if Joe was an actual fisherman, had been a fisherman and then became just a boat captain taking people out for line and rod fishing trips.Something core to Joe’s identity is uncoupled by the script. Likewise Manchester, a New England sea town with a long history, becomes an abstract entity, a vacuous continuation of the suburban sprawl that characterises American towns.

It’s possible that this is the truth that Lonergan wanted to express: Americans live in the world of disconnect, where people have lost all their ties with externalities and that all that is left is an intensification of personal relations, Facebook, twitter You Tube. Possible, but in terms of the way MUS is shot this is not convincing argument for Lonergan’s production.

It is interesting that whereas Joe, whom the viewer might expect to be connected with externalities, the sea, other fishermen, business etc is bereft of these types of liaisons. But Lee his brother, is given a lot of script time to establish his janitorial credentials. This is of course to set up Lee both as a certain type of failed flawed individual and his relation with Patrick as his guardian. It is Affleck’s assimilation into this dual role that pivots the film, and where MBS is most compelling. By contrast, the characterisation of Joe is a comparitive failure.

I don’t know if Lonergan has previous as a music video producer or if he is touting for work in this area. Whichever, but at key moments the transforming of MBS into a music video to solve expressive problems is an intrusive trick. It demeans and undervalues the rest of the film. In particular the use the the Albinoni Adagio to wallpaper the scene in which Lee watches his house burn down. The Albinoni has been used in something like 70 movies (including Last Year in Marienbad) and its employment here seems like the imposition of the most clichéd of solutions to ‘finding’ this scene, rendering the images inflated overlong pompous and emotionally superficial. Lonergan undermines MUS because he has set it up as a film in which the viewers can observe the action and are allowed the space to come to their own understanding of what is happening. By switching over into music video territory Lonergan betrays his audience and their intelligence by imposing a crude manipulative device over the visual material. Lonergan makes the demand for the audience to understand what they were seeing on his terms: not their own. And of course the house burning scene did not need this type of interpretative jacket. The film has an internal integrity: in its acting, in its script, in the way it is filmed (favouring wide shots) and in its finely tuned editing. All of which allow its audience ‘to see’. The forces set in play by Lonergan in MBS are powerful to carry viewers with it, without the musical exercise. To adopt a music video form as an expressive tool to overwhelm his audience, betokens a lack of confidence by Lonergan both in himself and his movie. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

La La Land Damien
Chazelle (USA 2016) Ryan Gosling, Emma
Stone

viewed 18th Jan 2017 Empire Cinema Newcastle;
ticket: £3.95

follow the dream follow the money

Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (LLL) didn’t register with me a musical. Rather it was a romcom movie with very ordinary dance routines and some immemorable songs, bolted on.

What was most interesting was its pitch. What’s it selling? In a similar way to Aronofsi’s Black Swan, it’s selling Narcissism. The pitch is the legitimation of self engrossment. LLL is an ad, one of those singing dancing life style promoting adverts wrapped up in a Romantic geste.

Of course this is what makes LLL an interesting mass product tuned into its times audience and culture; no more relevant than a hair conditioner or a Porsche promotion, but of a different cultural weight in that it is not selling a tangible product through narcissistic association, rather narcissism itself is sold as the intangible product. As community and family as a source of identity are replaced by commercially factored indicators of presented individuality, image and self image become core components of defining self.

Of course evangelical politics and fundamental religions (as Isis know) can reterritorialise voided selves. But aside from these radical identity shifts, in the West it is the mix of music social media movies and adverts that define and reflect self image. Cue LA LA Land which, like ‘the Black Swan’, is primarily aimed at the manipulation of its female audience.

The way LLL is shot is reminiscent of a two hour selfie with the iPhone pointed at Mia. The camera loves Mia, its lens caresses her and whenever it gets the chance, it zooms in for a kiss, tracking in for that Big Close Up of her happy smiley face. Mia’s face, or perhaps a faciality Mia’s implied affective state that comes to exemplify the ‘Dream’; not just any dream but the ultimate defining dream that everything is possible. Just pursue your dream: everything you desire will be yours. In her exemplary mediocrity, Mia in herself epitomises this for her audience, in that Emma Stone’s execution of the specifically technical demands of the film is very ordinary. Neither her singing nor her dancing are particularly good. This in itself is important; it flags up the message to the audience about the levelling out of their own aspirations. LLL says to its adoring public that it doesn’t matter if you can’t do stuff very well, there’s no need to spend too much time on proficiency; just trying reasonably hard is enough to fulfil your dream. Mia is a simple uncomplicated undemanding role model.

Sebastian interestingly is not. It feels as if Chazelle has scripted him not as a boyfriend but an animus: Mia’s psychic shadow, the unstated repressed elements of her being. Sebastian, as Chazelle sets him up, comes across as so contradictory that even the LLL script gives up trying to understand or develop him coherently. For instance, Sebastian claims to love jazz; but when he plays the piano for himself, he gurgitates the La La Land theme music which sounds like a middling Einaudi composition. Not Jazz. In the end Chazelle’s gives up the pretence that Sebastian is an independent character, and he is assimilated into Mia’s dream of perfect romance. Of course he is marginally more interesting as a shadow.

LLL is trailed as a homage re-visiting of the ‘classic Hollywood musicals. But it is not. The great Hollywood musicals worked through de-individuation. Minnelli Donen et al created dream worlds into which their characters were assimilated. In dance the outer forms, the identities and characters of Astaire Kelly Rogers or Charisse, fell from them as they became dancers pure released into another world. But these guys could dance; the same cannot be said of Gosling and Stone. Chazelle, with the exception of the opening number, has the opposite intention than that implicit in the great era musicals: that the dance advances individuality. In particular with Mia dance serves her rather than she serving the dance. As such, given the low level of performance, the musical numbers are flat rather than elevating. Even the opening number set on the upper deck of a highway snarl-up falls victim to the curse of the one shot fetish. The camera movement although fluid always has a feeling of being ill at ease with itself, of perhaps drawing attention to itself, its individuality and taking attention away from the dance. There is one moment of energy when the tailgate of a truck rolls open to reveal a band playing; otherwise this ten minute shot falls victim to its own mechanics. The less said about the homage shot to ‘American in Paris’ the better; its not even a pale imitation. The problem with the choreography and settings of this homage are augmented by the low calibre musical composition; but Gershwins are thin on the ground these days.

Of most interest in the development of the film was the end section of the credits roller. Up and past went an unending series of names of financial backers and co-production deals (There was significant product placement in the movie). La La Land has been an expertly sold prospect to international investors, including the Chinese. In the era of the soft machinery, the malleable ego, expect business model clones to follow. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Silence Martin
Scorsese (2017 USA) Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver

Viewed Empire Cinema 10th Jan 2017; ticket £3.95

A deadness of being

Hollywood doesn’t do certain subjects very well: sex, mental illness and spirituality. Sex is handled as pornography image and status; mental illness as overcoming and spirituality as outward acting facial gestures and gloopy text and music.

Silence has at its core an idea of the religious spirit as conveyed through the persona of Garrpe and Rodrigues, two missionary Jesuits. But Scorsese’s Silence never develops any spiritual key, and is unable to move beyond spectacle. It presents as a sort of Japanese Spartacus or Quo Vadis, with about the same claim to spiritual insight as these classic epics.

This outcome may have something to do with the way in which Hollywood movies are put together as productions. After the purchase of a property, there is the script development sometimes proceeding alongside putting talent in place. The script development is the key stage in getting the project to production and a Hollywood script, given the green light, normally has certain key characteristics: strong characters who have potential to grow into the narrative; good plotting with a realisable through story which the viewers can understand and a stylistic gloss packaging up films for specific genres or audiences – family – horror – male youth etc. which stylistic gloss also determines the music input and tracks.

This is the tried and road tested Hollywood production schema. Subject matter is usually less important than character or through story, though content is important for sell pitch and trail. The problem for Scorsese when he tries to work a spiritual dimension into his story, is firstly that there is no place for the spiritual outside the resources of his actors. And secondly that the domain of the spirit is usually dysfunctionally served by scripts, either as voice overs, texts or lines of dialogue. Directors who have managed to insinuate faith and spirit into film are few: Dreyer, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bresson there are a others, but all these aforementioned directors carry spirit into the grain of the medium of film and the image. Dialogue is often sparse; characters, and the relations of the characters are revealed by the mis–en-scene. They are for seeing, for the audience to see. The dynamics are to include the viewer by enabling seeing; not being told or manipuated as per text in a script.

The aforementioned directors rarely resort to voice over to tell the audience their characters state of mind or struggles. The use of voice over in Silence is a crass, crude device that destroys itself in utterance. Instead of playing out ‘Silence’ through his characters, Scorsese plays out through the script. Instead of acting presences, the people on the screen filling out the scenario (and directors in the past have often, but not always, resorted to amateur players), Scorsese employs two cute dudes, pretending to be Jesuit priests. At certain VO places in the script, where Rodrigues has ‘ internal moments’, such as doubting the existence of God or the reason for suffering, Scorsese resorts to close up affect images of Rodrigues. The effect is that it looks like some one is reading out the VO script while Scorsese gives direction to Andrew Garfield to look spiritual. This is according to the soap opera guide to the art of coarse acting.

The scene that is most indicative of Scorsese’s inability to be anything other than a crude action movie director is the long sequence where the four Japanese Christians are crucified in the ocean. The camera keeps cutting back to Rodrigues and Garrpe as they spectate from behind some convenient bushes ( ridiculous conceit of a shot ). Although they mutter on about suffering the two priests are absurdly suggestive of a couple of school kids playing hooky who have crept in behind the bleachers to see the game.

The sea crucifixion scene, as a prolonged sequence, is unnecessary ( I mean we’ve seen or can see, if we so chose, Isis obscenity) and shows that Scorsese is really only interested in spectacle; adding the two priests into the sequence, relinquishes any claim by ‘Silence’ to be being taken seriously. And the rest of ‘Silence’ adds nothing more to this contiguity of physical abuse and over voiced anguish that characterise the sea crucifixions. The debates between Rodrigues and the Inquisitor are comic book bubble speech dialogues, and the meeting between Ferrara and Rodrigues seems like two old actors getting together. Brando or Max von Sydow might have given something to the Ferrara character.

Scorcese signs off ‘Silence, with a typical Hollywood manipulation. The final shot is the consummation of the through story: the zoom into the crucifix in Rodrigues’ palm. But this shot has been set up by the manipulation of the point in time at which Rodrigues’ Voice Over dries up. Having been drip fed Rodrigues’ internal state of mind for the first part of the movie, his inner voice dries up at the point at which the audience might like to know if he had actually become apostate or whether his outer actions concealed an inner deep resistance. Anyway this manipulation at least gives the script writer or Scorsese the satisfying feeling that he has given his audience a spectacular surprise send off with the last shot. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk