Adrin Neatrour

The Neon Demon Nicholas Winding Refn (2016 Fr, Dk, USA) Elle Fanning, Christina
Hendricks, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves

Viewed
Tyneside Cinema 25 July 2016; ticket: £9.15

goodbye ‘Nevernever Land’ hello ‘Whatever Land’

Nicolas Refn’s the Neon Demon is a conceit of a very contemporary nature: form without content. Completely dedicated to the stylised image it could almost be an advert for some sort of Apple product. In one sequence model Jesse is positioned in front of a huge dazzling saturated white backdrop which almost seems to envelop her with its cold sensuality. As she poses in this setting, she is painted gold by the fashion photographer, I expected a gold Apple iPhone to somehow appear and transfix itself into the scene. The setting was perfect opportunity for product placement.

Neon Demon is very much the product of the Apple generation, a parallel cinematic form of the mediated reality that permeates and defines the iPhone life style in which life is not experienced directly but only indirectly through a screen which accesses image and information. Screen takes the place of life. Gazing becomes living.

The cool.

Refn wants to make a cool film. He only requires of his audience that they watch the screen with detached interest as he invents and shows a succession of locational architectural backdrops accessed by tracking shots down narrow runs walkways and corridors. He then fills the spaces with content. It doesn’t matter what the content is. The only point of the content is as a product to attract the gaze. Colour, eye catching interiors, blond women from the parallel universe, violence, sex, blood, cannibalism etc. The more transgressive the image the less it affects. In fact there is an inverse relationship between the extremity of Refn’s provocations and the intensity of audience reaction. Penetrative necrophilia, eyeball eating become “plaisirs des yeaux”, bagatelles. The important thing about the content is that it should be and is vacuous, empty. The scenario develops situations, events, actions in which the audience cannot invest with meaning. ‘Never never’ land becomes ‘Whateverland’.

Into this refined space, characterised often simply by colour and architectural form, Refn promotes Jesse, who is in many ways rather like an Apple product. Jesse is blond shimmering white and perfectly designed by nature. She does not attract empathy as she is a decontextualised product. She tells that her parents are ‘gone’ but otherwise she is carefuly screened to remove the personal. She is an object to be gazed at. Like the objects in the Apple universe, admired as image. Like a product, Jesse has little to say about or for herself. She lets other people do the talking. It is for others to fill her out with their projections.

For the most part Jesse is the subject of other people’s observations and desires. Jesse has such beautiful skin hair nose. She is just so perfect. And desired. They want to suck her. (except her boyfriend) As heterosexual sex, except abusive rape (suggested but not realised in a dream sequence), wouldn’t fit with the extreme product design, Refn and his writers, have gone for a baroque rendering of that old movie stand-by: Lesbian Cannibals from Outer Space. And the final sequence of the film plays out with a series of grotesque tableaux, like some kind of 18th century masque, of the hunting killing and eating of Jesse by a group of deranged other worldly blond coat hangers.

The Neon Demon, is not a horror film or anything like that. Refn has made film that is produced for the state of mind that is characteristic of certain patterns of contemporary consumption. A state of mind that finds significance in objects and products, and by engaging in life through the isolating filter of a screen that is detached but desirous of visual excitement through image. As Marshall McLuhan observed: the Medium is the Message. And how ‘cool’ is that? Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Men and Chicken (Moend og
Hons) Anders Jensen (2015 Dk) David Dencik; Mads Mikkelsen

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 19
July 2016; ticket: £9:15

Mawk and skwark and orcs

Anders Jensen’s Men and Chicken gives the impression that as a director he may have been influenced by watching too many Scandi-noir TV fillers.

Men and Chicken is a Danish noir comedy and shows its Danish TV provenance in the way it is structured by drawing on the lessons of these successful dark toned audience pleasers such as the Bridge (to which Jensen sort of gives homage in one peninsula island shot repeated several times). Its scenario is built around one key input idea which is embedded deeply into the scripting ; the key characters are all deeply flawed and have signature facial expressions, looks which are directed both inwardly and outwards and which are inscrutably Nordic.

Whilst this structural format may work OK with a weekly TV serial format, it is harder to make it work for a one off feature film. This format of TV serial slowly builds up to the ‘big secret’ that lies at the cancerous heart of its scenario. To maintain interest and to develop its characters, a TV scenario works through sub plots counter plots parallel plots and side plots, engaging the audience in distractions, ambiguities and red herrings all the while moving portentously towards its mega exposure. On the small screen the facial tics of the actors, the monopacing, together with the banality of the editing and shooting style can be carried through by a scripting/editing style which uses multiple parallel stories (in the various guises of sub plotting) to shift energy and hold audience attention. These TV pot broilers are designed /intended for broad durational parameters to take up multiple TV scheduling slots. They work mainly through stylistic intensity and the complexity of their narrative strands.

Condensed into feature film length rather than a 5/6 hour TV sleep over, Men and Chicken looks like a one trick pony, and at the end when the trick is revealed, it’s not very convincing.

Jensen opens his film, with some egg shots and with the voice of a girl who in fairy tale style tones explains over picture that this is the story of brothers to whom nature hadn’t dealt the best cards. Jensen seems to be trying to cast the film as a fairy tale or perhaps archetype myth (Thanatos the father figure is one of the Greek bringers of death; and Ork the name of the island where the action happens is a fictional humanoid creature that is part of a fantasy race akin to goblin.) But nothing in the film works as myth or fairy tale. And when the girls voice is heard for the second time, it is at the end of the film, where her voice makes a non mythic type of plea for acceptance of diversity. A plea with is in line with political correctness but not with fairy tale or myth.

The use of the young girl’s voice and her dissociation with anything seen in the film points to Jensen’s insecurity with his material. He doesn’t know what film he is making. Is is a comedy, a horror movie, a buddy movie sci-fi movie or whatever? Jensen tries to cover all bases and ends with a production that is simply tendentious and doesn’t feel like it is about anything. Hence perhaps the mawkish summary at the end, a desperate attempt to salvage something in the sphere of contemporary ethics.

Unable to focus clearly, Men and Chicken instead plumps out its script. The scenario is pumped up with obsessive masturbation and vomiting, bestiality, mutantcy, cosmetic prosthetics for the actors, the idea of a slightly deranged or simple class of island dwelling people, a boys’ excursion to the nursery. None of this material is developed enough to sustain interest.

Along other filmic dimensions Jensen’s film has few qualities. The shooting/editing of the film is conventional shot/reverse shot, and adds nothing to style. And the acting, for all the prosthetic work carried on the actors faces, never rises above the one dimensional. Perhaps had more thought been given to mutations that could not be seen, either psychic or somatic…there might have been a more interesting movie. But that movie would probably be better made with the imagination of Lars von Trier.

Men and Chicken ends up a dull movie. In another life time, the idea with intricate multi-phased elaboration in a closed community, might have made very good TV fodder. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux J-L Godard (Fr 1962) Anna Karina, Eddie Constantine (spectre)

viewed Tyneside Cinema 5th July 2016; ticket
£9.25

I film therefore I am

After the opening title sequence Godard’s Vivre sa vie cuts to a long durational close shot in which the camera, tracks between a couple who are seated beside each other on bar stools at the counter of a café. They are talking about the nature of their relationship and its break up. As the camera tracks back and forth across the space between them, only one of them is ever in frame, and the shot set up is from behind, so that as they talk, we see only the back of a head.

The what is said by this shot is in itself both witty and analytic. It allows the camera to express the opening concepts of alienation, separation within a context of movement. The wit lies in emotionally de-saturating the dialogue from faciality as Nana and her ex talk about the failure of their relationship her beef about his attempts to control her and his economic angle as Nana’s ex signs off with the observation that as a musician, Nana is leaving him because he is poor. The ultimate deficiency in a culture based on consumption rather than production.

With Anna K playing the role of Nana Godard’s film is in content, a modernist rephrasing of Zola’s eponymous novel charting the transformation of a young operetta star into a high class prostitute, whose allure and cold blooded exploitation of her sexuality destroy all the men who become infatuated with her.

The power of Nana’s presence is described by Zola as a psychic emanation that irresistibly attracts male desire. Godard’s transposes elements of the Zola story. But because this is now an image driven culture, his Nana in the form of Karina, exists as an object of desire for the camera. It is Godard’s camera that loves her image embraces and devours her. When Nana leaves her job in the record shop and takes up prostitution, her male clients barely seem to notice her. Throughout the film the men are self absorbed, as if playing pinball or engaging in masturbation, they barely notice Nana. She is simply someone they pay. Unlike their wives or girlfriends they have to shell out coin.

The Cool.

The ethos of cool detachment pervades Vivre sa vie. The guys all wear coats turned up at the collar as they move through a world of artefacts, cafes, and automobiles. The women, immaculately coiffed and kitted out with couture outfits and shoes. It is a world without emotion, the world of advertising, where there are settings backdrops and product display.

But Godard fixes his movies with pure concept. To oppose Nana’s image defined world he uses a number of cinematic devices, simply interpolated that he cuts into the body of the film. Like the chapter headings they comprise a breaking up of flow, an opening up different idea spectra about what we are seeing.

The intercutting of a section of Dreyer’s The Passion of Jean d’Arc. Godard uses a scene with Artaud, theoretician of the theatre of cruelty who plays the monk, Massieu questioning Falconetti’s Jeanne. The Material grilling the Spiritual. A section of Edgar Allen Poe, the master of unnameable dread (uncool) is read on camera and later during one of Nana’s assignations with a client, the results of the statistical survey of Parisian prostitution are intoned as voice over.

There are two more extraordinary interpolations inserted of the body of the film. The scene where a guy mimes the process of a little boy blowing up a balloon. As performance it is intense funny and suddenly in its intensity and power feels like a transposition of male ejaculation. A hyper parody of inexistent sexuality. In a nondescript section of a cafe, Nana and a Philosopher talk about life specifically focusing on ‘love’ (uncool) at the end of their discussion. Unlike the tracking two shot at the front of the movie, this is shot full face with and pans from Nana to the Philosopher, with the Philosopher finally concluding, in response to Nana’s question that love is real “…on condition it is true.”

In a culture of image how to find what is true and be able to distinguish it from what is not true? In a world of mirrors….

Eddie Constantine appears as a spectre throughout Vivre sa vie. His presence as an image inside Nana’s head a constant source of reference. And it is almost as if he were in the film, and if you squint your eyes you may see him.

With Godard, film doesn’t just think, it lives and breaths a world of unseen possibilities . adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare)
Gianfranco Rosi (It 2016)

viewed Tyneside Cinema 28 June 2016; ticket £9.25

knock knock who’s there…? someone missing…? Lampedusa as filmed by Gianfranco Rosi is a visual paean to oppositions: the empty /the full, the ordered/ the chaotic, the open/ the closed, internal / the external, within time/without time And more. Oppositions organised in geographic proximity. Islanders and refugees both sharing space on this small Mediterranean island. But now you see them now you don’t. On the island we see the islanders but we don’t see the migrants, they are invisible, their new European identities as the ‘unseen’ already anticipated. On Lampedusa the streets are empty, the escapees confined to their own enclaves. The islanders lead out their traditional lives on Lampedusa, life ordered by a natural unfolding of time that divides into past present future. The refugees and migrants live outside the order of time, compressed into a chaotic hallucinogenic now. The islanders are rooted on rock and lapped by the sea. The migrants travelling across water, crashing onto the rocks or scooped out of the Mediterranean are alive if they are lucky, dead if they are not. They are trapped in endless motions in which time has ceased to be a significant marker of life. For the migrants the imperative is ‘escape’ to not stop fleeing until they find something. When in due course, they leave Lampedusa they leave no imprint on the island other than on the statistical compilations of NGOs. More than 400,000 thousand passed through, ghosts rather than solid entities. Without commentary and working though image simple, many of Rosi’s shots comprise two great encompassers of Lampedusa: sea and sky. Images that Rossi exploits, but which conjure different associations for the islanders and migrants. The sea before and sky overhead stretch out around and over, containing the sentience of all beings. For the islanders the surrounding waters are their environment, a living testament to their collective history, the source of their food and livelihood. For the arrivees, the migrants the sea is experienced otherwise: as barrier ordeal and death. The sky that hangs over Lampadusa hangs over all beings. For the islanders this sky with rolling clouds signifies the here and now, the intensity of the present, it mediates action, reflects back consciousness of life. For the arrivees it barely exists as a psychic immediacy. On Lampedusa the migrants are as if in a state of trance they are trapped in their own internal landscapes.

An island boy whittles wood to make his catapult; a Nigerian recounts as a liturgy in collective form the ordeal of his flight: “We crossed the dessert the dessert could not stop us, we crossed the mountains the mountains could not stop us, we ran to the sea, the sea could not stop us.” The effect of his words echoes the power of the old testament, the cry of a people lost in the wilderness, a people possessed by the spirit. Although the images are not juxtaposed in Rosi’s edit, I somehow connected this liturgical listing of ordeals survived and overcome with the long duration shot of the grandmother making up her bed. The order the certainty represented in this act of meticulous physical geometry; the ecclesiastic lay out of her bedroom with its saints and sacred objects. A feeling of deadness in this bedroom, reflected and compounded in the images of dead migrants suffocated in the steerage hold of their boat, lying in filth and squalor, perhaps many of them without names. The dead are everywhere. I understand that Rosi wanted to make a pure film. In which images manipulated and exploited would stand for any words that might or could be said. But the human voice is part of our world. Rosi’s Fire at Sea felt like a piece of filmic surgery, a clinicians assemblage of images. As Rosi knocked on the door of Lampedusa it seemed as if he was not there. He had absented himself. And perhaps this is OK. No voice. Rosi in avoiding the stories of refugees and migrants the staple of radio and TV, Rosi, abstracting his material reaches out into the reality of the the void of refugees and migrants. They are people stripped out of time, stripped out of history, a group of people living in a timevoid. A void which groups like Isis seek, in their own time to fill, by giving back to those lost in time the precious gift of time. This is a film about the medium of time. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Rocco and his brothers
Luchino Visconti (It 1960) Alain Delon, Renato Salvatore, Annie
Girardot, Katina Paxinou

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 16 June 2016 Ticket: £8:75

Opera

From the graphic impact of the opening titles, large white blocked out font on black which finally fades through to the great shed of Milan’s station, this is Visconti’s opera: playing out a charged melodrama against an epic backcloth that encompasses and contains the both the plot and state of mind of the protagonists.

Rocco has the veneer of a neo-realist movie but seeing past its surface the theme of the film is not so much social but psycho-sexual. The psycho-sexual theme is located and established within the context of an cultural matrix which gives cogency to the idea. The issues of social relations (though not that of migration) recede as the movie develops its real focus: the development of new forms of personal identity grounded in the experiential conditions of urban alienation.

Visconti’s narrative device of exploring the relationships between brothers calls to mind Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov. The way in which both Visconti’s film and Dostoyevsky’s novel render of the intensity of male relations, highlighting the the polarisation of the spiritual and the visceral, as between Alyosha and Dmitry, and Rocco and Simone. In Rocco and his brothers Visconti realises a scenario of emotional and sadistic savagery as individually Rocco and Simone strive to define who they are and come to terms with their destinies as migrants in a new theatre of life.

Rocco’s family have traded: the security of slavery to the land in the South for the insecurity of industrial life in the North; moved from a kind of primal state of innocence to a state of sin. Once they were figures in a landscape; now they are figures in a man made world that overshadows them. Once they had few desires, now they are overwhelmed by desires.

Visconti’s settings in Milan: the station shed, the tenement blocks, the factories, the Cathedral, the bars and boxing arena are architectonic stages for the playing out of the psychic saga of the Parondi family’s deterritorialisation. Visconti exploits the sets beyond the suggestive power of their presence. His camera tracks cranes swoops pans through the densities of the urban structures penetrating their resistance as the family, both as group and as individuals, are absorbed into their new environment. An arcing crane shot tracks the family’s arrival at their first tenement flat, glides over the exterior wall and then follows them into the interior of their new dwelling. The complexity and unexpected movement suggests something of the journey of the family itself; the admix of wonder and apprehension at the new trials they face as they are swallowed down into a new concrete world order.

Two of the brothers Ciro and Vincenzo are absorbed into the mechanicality of industrial Milan. They internalise the life of the worker trying to realise the capitalist dream, trading self and soul for wages, freedom for a new kind of servitude, adopting the gestures and motions of work. But Visconti’s focus is on Rocco and Simone who dance to another urban rhythm: the fast track. To short circuit the proletarian fate, you take what you want using violence. The violence that is a property of the body. In the USA the protagonists would be gangsters; in ‘Rocco’ the protagonists take up boxing.

Both Rocco and Simone emerge in Visconti’s movie as new kinds of homoerotic beings. Men defining their sexuality in an environment where the rules and roles have changed. The brothers develop as two sides of the coin of male sexuality. Simone’s drive and lust released by success as a boxer overwhelm him; his demand is to possess women, fuck them, impose his will on life. He is the beast who smashes everything that gets in the way of his desire, and as he falls into a spiral of failure and pathetic decrepitude only the delusion of being a big man keeps him alive. Simone’s response, the exageration of the male qualities becomes a parody of heterosexual behaviour, a leaden barren path to death of body and soul.

Rocco takes a different path. Visconti marks his film with a number of powerful close up’s of his main characters. The most potent of these affect images spliced into the film are those of Alain Delon who plays Rocco. The close-up’s of Rocco’s are visually stunning. They are moments of stillness that immediately absorb the viewer into a face that resonates with a pure beauty, a suggestion of a more diffuse male sexuality, an androgynously forming identity, a psyche alert to the possibilities of sensualities outside the bounds traditional relationships. It is in his use of these defining close-ups as much as in the action that Visconti shapes Rocco’s development. Rocco is the other, the saint like figure who though immersed in a twisted world wants to try and help, even if he is confused, doesn’t know how to and his actions contradictory and are in vain. Rocco fuses both male and female identity in both his actions and body.

It is this clash between Simone’s assertion of an identity built on purely male attributes, and Rocco’s movement towards an androgyny, that in opposition legitimises the extreme episodes of sadistic sexual violence that are resolving mechanisms in the film, allowing us to see clearly what is happening. Simone’s vicious rape of Nadia and beating of Rocco are staged as grand opera: we see small figures against large backcloths. It defines and clarifies the emotional psychic space between the two brothers, and throws into terrifying relief the extent to which the pure female, in the person of Nadia, has become simply a pawn in a game she cannot control. A game which is played out to the bitter end in the penultimate section of the film where a demented Simone, unable to live with himself, tracks Nadia down and in his final aria, kills her with a knife. She becomes a sacrificial offering to Simone’s failed masculinity.

Visconti’s movie pulls together significant themes relating to male relationships and male psychic adjustment. Visconti holds them together using masterfully sure and expressive film techniques. Viewing Rocco, I felt that Scorsese and Coppola had carefully studied Visconti’s film, for there are similar themes and techniques replicated by them. Their settings of course are also Italian, and Scorsese in particular in Goodfellas captures this same fetid crucible of intense fraternal male relationships that characterise his New York gangsters. The same sweated bodies in undershirts play out relations in both movies. And in Raging Bull, the stunning cinematography that characterises the fight sequences can be seen in embryonic form in Rocco. In relation to the Godfather, Coppola’s magnificent ‘family’ epic is famous for its sequence that intercuts the Christening in the church with the murders of the New York dons. This sequence is very similar in idea Visconti’s intercutting of Simone killing Nadia with his knife with the joyous event of the Parondi family celebrating Rocco’s victory. Rocco and his brothers has been a pivotal significant film at many levels.

Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The
Leopard (Il Gattopardo) Luchino Visconti (It 1963)
Burt Lancaster; Claudia Cardinale

Viewed:
Tyneside Cinema 8 June 16; ticket £8-75

The Leopard about whom it is said that he cannot change his spots………………..

Visconti’s The Leopard is permeated by filmic ideas relating to movement and false movement.

The real movement in the film is there before our eyes continuously present for us. In the furling and unfurling of cloth drapes and curtains. In the billowing of dresses as they swath the female form and suggest and anticipate the ebb and flow of psychic tides: the incessant agitation in the spirit of times trapped in the rigidity of death. Visconti’s (V) intelligent eye is fascinated by the suggestive possibilities of the fluid. In the opening sequence the wind breezes through the opened French windows; the lace curtains billow gracefully; as do the winds of ideas that gust and fill out the action.

The false movement is the incessant movement of people as they flow through the frames of the film. The people are false in their moves: across rooms, in religious piety, in presentations. All this movement leads nowhere. The populated zones in the film self consume swallow themselves in determination to set things in a motion that is circular as the serpent that swallows its own tail.

There are moments that are still in the film. The longueur of the unchanging immobile land. The landscapes still and devoid of people shot by V as choreographed tracks and reveals, paintings characterised by ochre faded under the intensity of the sun. This burnt pastel quality of the land contrasts with the interiors which are set pieces densely peopled and colourised, the men bound in and woman billowing out and flowing as if anticipating a real change, a feminisation of the social order. V uses this contract this movement to suggest that all this out flowing all this female excitement and movement is the new force that cannot be contained.

At its narrative surface the film relates how the times change. How the old order of Sicilia gives way to the new order of the Resorgimento: Garibaldi and Philip Emmanuel guiding the people, the youth of the country to a new united Italia. But as V unravels the film we see, through the intelligence of the Prince that nothing in the essence of the political order changes. There is the illusion of change, the conceit of social movement. But nothing in fact happens and the Prince sickens as he watches the nothing happening. In all the talk of revolution he understands that there is only an adroitly played out political game of musical chairs.

The thought occurs that perhaps that one of the reasons the Prince is enervated and sick, is because he has nothing to resist. He reaches a point in his life when he wants to fight; he wants to oppose something, to define himself by noble opposition, to stand up for what he believes in. But there is nothing to believe in: nothing to oppose because nothing real has changed in the world. People may believe in the notion that something has changed, but there has been no real political transformation.

But nevertheless the film is about change. Not political change: the wind of change. A wind that blows as the dresses of the women bustle, this world depicted in the film is full of change. The Prince comes to understand this. What is changing is not the things that everyone thinks. Another spirit is moving, and it has been picked up and imprinted in female spirit and captured by V in the grain of his film. It lies in the growing consciousness of the Prince in the contrasting forms of the feminine in the character of Angelica that move through his consciousness.

In contrast the Princess rejects joy love and sex. She is bound to a male world of procreation and honour where the feminine spirit and ethos are rigidly and anally bound to the duties of child production. But Angelica is different. She is free. From the moment that we and the Prince first caste eyes on her as she enters the Palace almost bursting out of the bodice of her dress, we know that she’s the carrier of change. She is the fulcrum of the films meaning representing something in the female spirit that is quite independent of the world of men. Completely free of the rigid coded stratifications that bind this society. Whatever happens to her, something of her spirit will always survive in the same way that the Sicilian psyche always survives.

The film’s climax is the union of Angelica and the Prince in dance. The dance is her idea, her proposal to the Prince. In the dance as they move serenely across the floor, the Prince ,who yearns for change for release from the dead world of duty that he inhabits, is briefly shown, as if in a trance or dream, the possibility of another world.

This dance with Angelica in her white floating dress is like a fairy vision bestowed upon selected men who are permitted to see clearly and deeply into the real nature of the world. Like the stories in which a fairy takes a man for a day and a night revealing to him the world of magic dance and music, only for him to return and find that everything has aged. So it is with the Prince. After the dance, which is an intensified surrogate marriage and heightened revelation of a course in life not available to him, there is nothing left for him to do but die. After the dance he is broken because he has fallen out of time. He belongs to a present that is receding accelerating into the past. Angelica is the future denied him. Angelica’s life is for the succeeding generations. It is time for him to move out of the picture. But he understands why. Not intellectually, but as an animal understands, viscerally. The Prince accepts death as it blows across the fields and down the mountains, only seeking somewhere to lie down forever. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Russian Woodpecker
Chad Gracia (2015 USA) Andrei Alexandovich

Viewed: 12 June 2016; Part of Losing the Plot Film Festival
Burnlaw Northumberland;

ticket £3.00

The cooked and the raw

The charismatic figure of Ukrainian artist Andrei Alexandrovich fronts up Gracia’s film. Alexandovich is both protagonist and shaman/clown. As protagonist, a driven investigator of a terrifying conspiracy theory. As shaman, a sensitised litmus paper responding to the psychic wounds inflicted on the Ukraine by the USSR. Alexandovich’s shaman is a pained visionary, a raw embodiment of the emotional reactions that characterise his country’s past and present relationship to Russia. An inventor of ritual to neuter the lies and poison of the past and make libations to the future. As clown, he makes us laugh.

Gracia’s film interweaves Alexandrovich’s rituals with: his attempt to find the real cause of the catastrophic Chernobyl reactor melt down; and the ‘street revolution’ of 2014 in Kiev that resulted in the deposal of the Ukrainian pro Russian elected leader, Yanukovych. The intercutting of the political, the real and the magico religious characterises the Russian Cuckoo, dynamically shifting the film’s focus, moving from the street, to the intellectual to the performance. But all these sequences these discrete elements are unified in the film as they draw on a similar quality: rawness. Gracia’s film is energised by the ecstatic rawness of street violence, the raw inebriation of a forensic quest, and the raw elemental intensity of ritual.

It is this rawness that comprises the truth content of the Russian Cuckoo informing the quality of relations between past and present, the Ukraine and Russia. The Rawness of history.

The film’s title refers to the electronic frequency, so called because it had a similar tempo to that of a woodpecker drilling a tree, that had been emitted by a huge structure, acronymically called the DUGA which was situated adjacent to the Chernobyl site. The DUGA was supposed to be the advanced USSR early warning system to alert against a surprise US missile strike. Apparently despite its huge cost, DUGA did not work.

From the first shots we see of Alexandrovich he presents as one possessed. And there is always something of the clown in him. His appearance, the way he looks, the way he plays with people and ideas. His personal history is closely tied to Chernobyl. As a young child in Kiev, after the Chernobyl explosion, he had been evacuated to escape the disastrous nuclear fallout over the city; despite this he had still suffered radiation poisoning. Chernobyl has invaded his being, penetrating and defining his body sensitising his soul.

Alexandrovich uses his power as an artist/shaman to reject history. He takes on the mantel of the shaman to re-form on his own terms his relation, physical and spiritual, to the toxic polluting nuclear plant, and through ritual makes his own bonds with earth water fire air, invoking the elements directly as his kindred spirit.

Rejecting History is to refuse to accept the orthodox Soviet line that Chernobyl was an accident. A vision of Alexandrovich’s father leads Andrei to the discovery of the DUGA. The revelation of the DUGA (and through the film’s cinematography we see and comprehend the size of this structure which is in itself a revelation) becomes the starting point for Andrei’s rejection of the conclusions of the cooked books of the Soviet investigation that the disaster was an accident. Alexandrovich guided by instinctive intuition follows the tortuous forensic trail through the undergrowth of Soviet bureaucracy. He finally locates in this undergrowth the name of a deceased but very high ranking member of the Soviet politbureau, who he believes would have had both reason to sabotage the Chernobyl reactor and the power to bully the technicians there into conducting the dangerous experiments that resulted in the catastrophe. Hence the Chernobyl disaster was not an accident, it was a wanton act of sabotage by the USSR. History.

I don’t think that it is critical to Gracia’s film whether Alexandrovich’s conspiracy theory conclusion convinces the viewer or not. What is important is the intensity of the psychic imperative to remould history that lies at the heart of Alexandrovich’s quest. His quest is tied to the sense of dread and terror posed by Putin’s re-invention of the Soviet Union, and implications of oppression and subjection for its neighbouring and client states. Most painfully denying these client states the opportunity to write/make their own histories and to come to terms with the horrors of their past.

The past is quickly subsumed into myth.

Gracia’s Russian Woodpecker shows, through Alexandrovich, the interplay of the key elements invoked at moments of attempting to shape the forces of history: the political the historic the personal. Most important perhaps is the personal. The recasting of personal identity to create a sense of destiny, a concentration of the qualities of conviction needed to provoke and survive revolution. The immanent feeling that as an individual you are connected to apersonal, cosmic forces. Alexandrovich becomes shaman, and in casting himself as a being connected to the elements, his nature takes on their elemental quality. In one sense Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky were themselves Shamans, ritually invoking and identifying themselves with the forces of history to justify and strengthen their own sense immovable sense of purpose. They are at one with historical destiny.

As the events of the 2013-14 revolution unfold so Alexandrovich is folded up into the events. Deeply implicated by his Chernobyl research he disappears from view, intimidated after a visit from the secret police. The final sequence of Russian Woodpecker takes place on a stage in Maiden square at some point in the climax of the violence. Alexandrovich returns, not as Shaman but as Clown. Alone on the stage, in strange light to he declaims his findings about the Chernobyl conspiracy to an emptiness. His raw strangeness of his disclamation falls into a huge pit of emptiness and indifference as smoke and chaos of revolution fill out the void. A clown playing out a performance for the camera or for history. Or perhaps both. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Mustang Deniz Gamze
Erguven ( 2015; Tur, Fr) Gunes Sensoy, Doga Doguslu; Tugba Sunguroglu,
Elit Iscan, Ilayda Akdogan

Viewed
Tyneside Cinema 17 May 2016; ticket £9.75

Princesses in a tower

More extravagantly, but in some ways similar to Lucretius Martel’s La Santa Nina, Deniz Erguvan’s Mustang takes place in the sensual milieu of adolescent sisters. The screen is filled with the aqueous flowing hair and skin that defines the presence of the five girls and characterises the un-self conscious natures of their emotional closeness. Erguvan’s hand held camera moving over faces, limbs locks and bodies captures the physicality of relationship defined by intimacy not by sexuality. As the sisters flow into and over one another their individualities merge and they transform as if into one organic primordial form, temporarily occupying an undifferentiated psychic state of being. A primal state of physico-consciousness that absorbs the world into itself.

Of course this is hallucination, a realm of enchantment that cannot last. And Erguvan’s Mustang is a fairy tale. The tellers of such tales know that states of Arcadian joy in life cannot endure; a fall from grace must come. Awakenings incursions invasions and other forces in play in the social and psychic domains will rip apart the frail threads of preconscious existence.

And so it is in Mustang. The sisters primordial unity is broken up as one by one the sisters are detached from the multiplicity of their organic body, and caste into a heightened world of sexual imperatives, a world desaturated of intimacy where the physical relationship given prime consideration is the intactness of the hymeneal membrane.

Mustang works because it takes on the form of a fairy tale. Erguven’s film is grounded in myth not in her depicted setting of La Turquie profonde. The setting is fabulous because although some of the visual gestures and accoutrements possess Turkish qualities: bread making, pastry making coffee making, sewing and lots of shrouded bescarfed middle aged women sitting around tut-tutting. These qualitative elements are specious qualities belonging to a scenario that is in fact decontextualized.

Mustang is decontextualised because it omits the defining elements of social relations that connect its various parts to the whole: religion, work and the past.

The house into which the sisters are progressively walled up exists in a vacuum of smiles hand wringing and threats. Although the mosque is depicted as close by in the village no call to prayer is heard; there is no attendance at Friday prayers, there is no reference to the Koran in the dialogues with the sisters. Religion in itself is bracketed out. Likewise work relations, the matrices of industry or agriculture that form the basis of the wealth of the lives of the families represented, are completely absent. Work is bracketed out. And the past, the sisters inhabit a cocoon of the present with no apparent ties to their parents. As in the fairy tale we are simply informed that their parents are dead. The sisters are being brought up by relatives who take on the role of foster parents.

The sisters are represented as being unconcerned with their orphaned status. In classic fairy tale mode they looked after and over by others who are removed form them. With this status, as beings bound not by blood ties but by artificial arrangements, they are free to allow their stories to transmute into the mythic realm.

Of course the stories as collected by the Brothers Grimm’s often feature multiplicities of siblings: six brothers three sisters. This multiplication of identities allows the individual psyche to play out differentiated responses to testing situations. Typically the older siblings in one way or another fail the tests they are set. Generally it is the youngest of the sibling group who solves the problems, who overcomes the obstacles and gains the prize. The idea being perhaps that success results from multiple failures and that an open soul unburdened by process of age will pass the tests. Lale in Mustang who also acts as narrator, is the youngest of the sisters and is the heroine of the tale.

The psychic tests set in fairy tales are many, but most seem to embody the idea of completing or advancing onto a higher form of self: a spiritual development to complement the physical; the searching within to connect with complementary powers not assigned by birth gender or sex. Common themes are escape from imprisonment or enchantment, searches for cures, searches for completion.

Erguven’s Mustang tells of escape from entrapment. As the sisters are progressively walled up and married off, mostly against their will, Lale observes the unfolding horror and makes plans to thwart her fate. Like all successful escapees in the realm of myth she knows that to escape she has to understand her prison intimately, both its physical and its psychic lay out. And she also has to recruit allies to assist her when she needs help. Lale needs to be energetic resourceful and brave if she is to make her jump. She will have to connect with her male energies that have been suppressed by her culture of confinement: the bullying of the men, the blandishments of the women. She will also have to find an ally, a good fox who will appear at the critical moment to give her assistance at the moment of greatest danger.

And so it comes to pass, Lale with her sister Nur, escape from their confinement, breaking the spell of the wicked uncle. There can of course be no going back, as the two sisters are transported into a new world, a city of multiple spires and different relations. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Brand New Testament
(le Tout Nouveau Testament)
Joco Van Dormael (2015 Bel) Benoit Poelvoorde, Pili Groyne, Catherine
Deneuve

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 10 May 2016; ticket (matinee screening) £8.25

Pollyanna Pollyfilla

I was wondering before checking in to see Van Dormael’s movie whether it would be a black 21st century comedy in the style of Belvaux’ 1992 movie Man Bites Dog? Would Brand New Testament wrap up, implicate me in another dark Belgium vision of European society? Belvaux’ movie was a bleak vision of 20thst century man but justified itself by its truth commitment and unflinching camera that pointed to the consequences for lives colonised by the invasion of the media.

In the age of Facebook, instagram, twitter what insights would Van Dormael’s film open up to probe our interconnected narcissistic culture? Questions!

Questions largely unasked so thereby unanswered by the Brand New Testament.

The movie starts with a dystopian premise. Van Dormael invents his own version of ‘God’ in the form of a blue collar slob who controls the world through his computer. God works out of a virtual subprime apartment located far from anywhere. In his omnipotence God spends ‘time’ torturing humanity by inventing malevolent laws; in his downtime he abuses his wife, the Goddess, and his daughter Ea. Ea finally decides she’s had “enough” and revenges herself on dad (God). She logs onto dad’s computer and texts ‘everyone’ (at least everyone with a smart phone) with the exact hour of their death, including a helpful countdown so they can keep tabs on their progress to hour zero. After disabling the computer she escapes down a worm hole to Earth to get away and to try to rectify some of the bad dad has done. Just like bro JC.

At this point, rather early in the scenario, the the film breaks down, unable to sustain the weight of its own internal logic or to handle the critical implication of the death countdown for human and social relations. The count down to death is an idea beyond the imaginative scope of Van Dormael’s film to handle. Van Dormael doesn’t have the conceptual resources to represent this idea. His character God is vexed that Ea’s actions in revealing to people the hour of their death “…has taken them out of his power, cut out the fun.” But the film never seems to take this idea on. Van Dormael’s script opts for his particular subjects to revert to kind of infantilism, death releases the 100 things to do before you die fantasy. Hence the need for Polyanna to appear as the girly amanuensis. Otherwise, outside the little cameos that comprise the movie life mainly goes on as before.

Van Dormael’s main expressive tools are not conceptual but literal depictions of ideas event situations. So he has recourse to SFX and digital tech to show us actual things rather than to represent concepts filmicaly.

Abandoning the conceptual situation, the death countdown, it has proposed, the Brand New Testament concentrates on Ea who becomes a Pollyanna figure selecting 6 people she will help out on their way to their appointment with death. She hears their inner music (biased towards the Baroque composers as presumably there was limited budget for expensive copyright clearance), and encourages them to fulfil themselves before they die thereby revealing the movie’s cheap ambition to betray European scepticism and embrace an all American ethos of dream fulfilment: the middle class ambition of overcoming. Things to do before you die, ensure you get Eurimages distribution.

The Brand New Testament as it progresses loses cohesion and becomes a medley of parallel cut disconnected events and situations.

There is also another level at which the film betrays a disturbed level of filmic consciousness.

Although the ‘God’ premise and the ‘death’ premise both call up the idea of a whole (the God idea the death idea affect everyone) Van Dormael fails to connect with any posited whole. The society we see in his scenario is represented only by white people (mostly middle class). Blacks, immigrants, Moslems, Jews are all absent. Completely absent. For a movie that sets out to encompass the whole of society this is a strange omission. It would have been a funny had Van Dormeul’s ‘God’ invention just been a god of white folks. Brand New Testament in this situation could have been a requiem for white man society. But this does not seem to have been the idea. We just have another disconnected film unrelated to European ‘society’ in which we live, because most of the people are simply ignored. Non ‘whites’ written out of the script probably because it was felt to be too complex to include them and simpler to revert to Pollyanna scenario. Whites only.

As Brand new Testament progresses it resorts to ever increasing use of SFX, the digital filling in for the lamentable lack of actual interest. The film finishes with a sort of soggy biscuit finale where the Goddess (God’s wife) inadvertently stops the death countdown and invents Patterned skies instead of clouds, making everyone feel happy. What patterned skies might do for global warming is a moot point, but what is certain is that Van Dormael ends with a complete cop out to the soft porn of political correctness. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

High Rise Ben
Wheatley (UK; 2015) Tom Huddleston,
Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller.

Viewed: 29 March 2016 Empire Cinema Newcastle; ticket
£3.75

What a carry-on.

J G Ballard’s work is a grounded writing project of observation and analysis that is guided by metaphysical speculations. In Ballard’s work it is his characters state of mind and speculative psychology that interpret structures and events generated by the built environment. The Ballard characters understand life as a rhizome of interconnected abstract forces that shape and mould their destinies. His work is a virtual dissection of modernism probing through the skin of contemporary life in order to expose a collective para-sympathetic nervous system as it responds and adapts to the provocations of the new order; a thought experiment that tests the careers of physical bodies and their prosthetic extensions into cars airplanes hermetically sealed structures and media. The novels record new connections and paradigms of psychic possibilities in response to the changing order of existence.

For Ballard it is not so much that the traditional drives governing human behaviour have changed. Rather that they are warped and distorted and cannibalised by the new parabolic connections and geometries of modern living. In the actual novel High Rise, Wilder speculates whilst he and one of the continuity girls from the studio are making love. He imagines that if they were interrupted, that on resumption of their enjoyment she would pick up perfectly from the place where they had left off, recalling every one of their gestures thrusts caresses and kisses that had proceeded the interruption. Or in Love and Napalm USA the character equates the bend of a elevated highway with the inner curve of Jackie Kennedy’s thigh, linking them in a future of blood caked deaths.

Ballard doesn’t do characters so much as types or occupations. In effect all his characters are introjected self imaginings of states of consciousness moulded by an outer function: the cost accountant, the orthodontist, the airline pilot.

None of this is easy starting point for film.

Film doesn’t do metaphysics easily. Goddard and Tarkovsky have in different ways produced wondrous movies with a metaphysical core, as have Hitchcock and Mackendrick. But these film makers all knew what they were about, understood the types of statements they were making. In the hands of Ben Wheatley and his script writer Amy Jump, High Rise turns to metaphysical dust. Unable to transpose these projected abstractions onto the screen, Wheatley is left with a setting, a couple of familiar ideas, situations and characters. The resultant mix comes out situation and character dominated which lumps High Rise into a sort of sub-genre Ealing Comedy, driven by familiar British class oppositions intermixed with a dystopian Lord of the Flies play out.

High Rise’s recreation of the high rise structure is the one element of the film that works visually to define the concrete mausoleum envisaged by Ballard. But the problem is what is happening inside this wonderfully conceived digital edifice? Orgies?

This unknowing of what it is that is happening inside the tower dogs High Rise. It is a potpourri of different inputs that are mixed together in increasing desperation. We have a couple of ideas, the symbolic acting out of class conflict in the maw of the tower, the idea of atavistic reversion, but the expression of these ideas is mediated through the expressive device of the British eccentric, the character actor expert at delivering the cameo role. Eccentricity replaces metaphysics as the film’s conceptual resource. Besides the setting of the tower, there are significant subsettings within its carapace: individual apartments, corridors, lifts, the stairwell. Wheatley uses these subsettings for events, and the main type of event in High Rise is the orgy. The orgy is the dominant feature of the film, taking up a lot of its footage. Perhaps Wheatley felt orgies were metaphors for the idea of degeneration, perhaps he felt the audience would be titillated gazing at the sexual posturings of actors body doubles and extras. The duration of the orgy scenes points to directorial anxiety rather than directorial confidence, as the orgies in themselves only incoherently fill out the screen with the explicit rather than the implicit.

Ben Wheatley’s High Rise seems to me to be the very worst sort of filmmaking. Buy a property and exploit it by filling it out with stuff you hope the audience will buy. If it’s a British film you don’t need to worry much about the reviewers, most of them, as part of the UK film industry, will fall in line. It’s a Film making industrial culture encouraged by a financing system dominated by TV companies and private finance companies. It is interesting to note that in the film credits it is the money that comes first. Once it was the stars and actors, once it was the tech people, now the first front credits of most films are dominated by the production companies who have put up the finance. It seems to mean that any potential director has to meet multifarious and perhaps conflicting demands from all the ‘interested’ parties, before they can even begin to want to understand their material. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk