Adrin Neatrour

Taxi Tehran (Taxi)
Jafar Panahi (Iran, 2015) Jafar Panahi

viewed:
Tyneside Cinema Newcastle, All Saints Day 2015; ticket: £7.75

perception that is not me…

What is a film? It’s a perception, says Jafar Panahi talking to his niece about making films. But not just any perception: it is your perception, your awareness of what you are looking at, the mediation of the world through your mind.

And in his taxi, picking up and putting down people thoughts ideas attitudes, Panahi places himself in the middle of a world in constant movement around him. Like a Mediaeval theologist placing man at the centre of the cosmos, Panahi in his cab locates himself in the midst of Tehran, and the series of encounters such a position inevitably entails.

Jafar Panahi doesn’t drive like any big city cabbie I ever caught. The placement and light sometimes uncertain touch of his hand with the steering wheel betokens the driver/philosopher not a battle hardened hack . He manoeuvres his car gently sometimes haltingly through the mayhem of the Tehran streets, confesses uncertainty about destination, and has the look of a gentle soul searching for something that is not on the meter: by and large he doesn’t charge for the ride.

So what is quality of the ‘perception’ Panahi intends to capture with his camera, that is mostly but not always mounted on the dashboard of his ‘taxi’? Obviously in one critical sense it must be himself. But not a static subjectivity rather himself in the world in which he’s moving. Although the camera often points at Panahi, the perception guiding the shots is not narcissistic. he is not one of these Big Shot TV presenters; his ‘film’ is never about ‘me Panahi’. The camera points at him but it is as if the ‘He that is Panahi’ dissolves into the context of the situation: the taxi. ‘Taxi’ is never ‘grounded’ or signified in Panahi’s subjectivity, because the role of the taxi driver is simply to serve others, to carry them, body mind spirit, a little way along. To hear where they are going. That’s all. The driver isn’t going to change their destination. Pick them up put them down.

Panahi taxi driver stands for Panahi director. At this point Panahi has changed stance from earlier films which sold a point of view. When the taxi man sets out in the morning there is no direction to take. He sets out into the streets to find people. Panahi as director is an intermediary, a medium for the chaos of Tehran. He picks up the collectivist of the city thoughts, fears, beliefs and hopes. Panahi doesn’t judge disagree or dispute, responds only when cued. He moves across the city.

Panahi drives without fear. he knows that in his situation he can be arrested, canned flung in prison anytime. Without fear perhaps because he knows the joke is on him. He drives his cab making a ‘film’ that is not a screenable ‘film’; knowing that until 2030 he is under legal ban from screenable film making. By the end of the film, we understand that Panahi has been setting ‘Taxi’ up as an exercise of gallows humour, the ultimate form of humour that pays homage to death with an assertion of life. Panahi’s film is suffused with humour; observational humour, like Chaplin’s, grounded in the small details of the everyday. An angle that sees life in Tehran the way the people of Tehran see life: as a movie. Everyone caught up in the same farce, the contradictions between the orthodoxy of the sacred precepts of fundamentalist religion and the boisterous profane celebrations of secular life.

Life rages in the cab. The appeal of the uncompromising humourless nature of Sharia. In the cab we understand that how the religious abyss has opened up and swallowed those including women, for their transgressions of the code. In the cab we understand that there are important rules you have to obey to make a screenable film; Panahi’s niece recites them for his benefit. And the camera in the taxi complies with none of these rules. We see men wearing neck ties, scavengers, pornography peddled, dissident lawyers questioning the operation of the law, and more, superstition and parody. As the camera records all of this, its material cannot by definition be a screenible film. So Panahi has not violated the terms of his sentence. ‘Taxi’ is joke in itself; it is not a film. The conclusive proof that it is not a film is that it has: no credits. There is nobody at whom to point the finger of accusation. No name only the image of a self effacing cabbie, who is there to help people to move around the city.

We know from the final scene that Panahi can be obliterated at any time by the state and its projected force. He can be beaten up, his camera smashed, arrested detained put in gaol. But he isn’t afraid because he can look them in the eye and say: I haven’t made a screenible film; this is not a movie: Gallows humour, just a joke! Just a taxi. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Macbeth Justin
Kurzel (UK 2015) Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard

viewed: Empire Cinema Newcastle 6 Oct 2015; ticket: £3.75

Bewhiskered!

I thought this offering of Macbeth by Kurzel was closer to Mad Max Fury Road than to Polanski’s or Wells’ versions of the bard’s Scottish play. That is to say the film was a very contemporary offering, a take on the tragedy in which the tensions and psychic contradictions of the text were of secondary order to the immersive quality of the experience.

This Macbeth owes more to contemporary forms, video game and the art installation, than it does to the textual theatrics of Shakespeare’s drama. As movie, the question is not the integrity of the production to its theatre provenance but whether the material can be structured and moulded to the new forms of distraction. The nature of the multiplex audiences inclines them to demand something in the presentation of material that meets their visual expectations, approximates to the nature of other kinds of media to which they are habitually exposed.

So this Macbeth doesn’t take us into meaning but into experience. And in this experience Shakespeare’s writing ceases to exist as series of psychic signs and symbols; it operates more simply as a pointer to the state of the game, the action and psychological states that are in play. The text is subsumed in the sound track and image. One key element of video gaming that is replicated is the continuous stream of sound, mostly percussion driven. In this Macbeth the music has a direct physiological quality, an elemental somatic effect on perception, bonding eye and ear to the affective material on screen: locating the viewer in-screen. The effects tracks likewise highlight the body: the foley effect of the sound of Duncan’s ribs cracking open as Macbath plunges his dagger into his heart.

The control element of game consuls cannot be duplicated with current technology, but the use of heavily edited big close ups is a partial simulation of the game idea, which together with the music, fuses the audience with the characters.

The two main characters in the kind of movie Kurzel is making, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, don’t work through identification in the classic movie association, rather they work as sort of avatars. They don’t actually represent us, but the experience is mediated through them. In relation to the idea of filming Shakespeare, this is advantageous. Olivier in his time on the back of post war elation could work Henry V, as an interpretation of nationalistic identification. But often Shakespeare translated on screen, with honourable exceptions such as Kurosawa’s Ran, hits the twin buffers of difficult language and characters with whom it is hard to identify. Medium shots, long shots lay bear the naked difficulty of Elizabethan language. Kurzel castes us right into Macbeth’s whiskers, into the follicles, overwhelming the meter of soliloquy and dialogue with the physicality of his being. Where there are medium shots often there is an overwhelming sense of body in play. Most obviously in the scene, mostly one long duration shot, where Lady Macbeth persuades her husband into betrayal and murder. But it is the subtext,to coin a phrase, that arrests the attention. As this key dialogue takes place, Lady Macbth explores its tantric possibilities, opening her legs and tilting towards her husband who fucks her as she corrupts him. The words slip away from the attention of the audience, as they do from Macbeth, who in the time honoured tradition, simply says “Yes dear!”

Landscapes are much abused in current cinematological use. Gratuitously often out played, durationally over long and often trying to suggest states of mind. Kernel uses them to effect here. The scape shots appear like a installation, a walk through experience which leads into a situation. The panoramic shots in Macbeth work with dramatic effect to set up the situation, so that in a film that is dominated by close shots, we can see where we are, we understand the location is a vastness.

If in form and style Macbeth pitches into a quasi world of game like experience, Kurzel understands that the three weird sisters cannot be part of this world. In renderings both theatric and filmic that I have seen of Macbeth, the witches come from an ‘other’ world. In this movie, the ‘other’ world, the larger than life game dimenrsion, is already occupied. Kurzel draws his ‘witch’ women from the realm of the ordinary. Their appearance and presence, (usually long or medium shot, is as simple cottars: in fact women come off the local Highland Council estate. What is important is that they stand in a separate location to the kingdom of Macbeth, that they occupy a different reality. This is their purpose, and with effect Kurzel has understood this. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Palio Cosima Spender
(It; UK. 2015) doc

viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 2 Oct 2015; ticket: £8.75

Horse feathers

Cosima Spender’s Palio works at the level of spectacle and tourist brochure bravura. Otherwise it presents as a confused statement uncertain of its focus. It is able only to come to terms with its key spectacle, the bare back horse races of Sienna, but not with the elements and the forces in play that constitute this event. And of course, well shot as it is and as photogenic as are the horses, spectacle is not enough to fill out the film which seems over long, tendentiously edited to fill out its ‘feature film’ slot length.

The crux of Cosima Spender’s problem was that the race is ultimately just a spectacle, these days a tourist spectacle attracting visitors from around the world. And the Palio as spectacle has of course its own built in tendency to degeneration, hence might need a little refreshing.

One of Spender’s scripting ploys is to scratch a little below the surface of the Palio. But it is difficult to arouse audience interest in the strata of reality that underlie the race, in part because it is in everyone’s (i.e. the parties and the players of the Palio) interest to minimalize the other layers of reality that may be orchestrating the illusion presented to spectators. The interested parties in Sienna will have a vested interest in trying to control and misdirect the probing eyes of outsiders. And Spender’s film does seem a little coy in following up lines of investigative probing. For all the statements made throughout the film that beyond the spectacle there is another game going on, Spender never gets to grip specifically with what this ‘game’ might be. In fact it starts to feel like she doesn’t want to ‘go there’. Where? Into the heart of the tourist trap…?

Palio, the movie, seems content to palm off its audience with nods and winks that the race is corrupt, that the the jockeys are paid off, the horses doped out without really advancing through of the fog of vague assertions and expressive Siennese shrugs. As the movie clomps about in the mire of allegation, viewer interest dries up. There doesn’t even seem to be any gambling associated with the Palio. Is it so corrupt that even gamblers won’t touch it?

The movie turns increasingly to the competition between Gigi, the rogue old time rider and the new jockey on the block, Giovanni. The movie segues into a familiar archetypal myth: the intergenerational saga of the old making way for the new. The problem for Spender was that neither of her two respondents are able to make good claim on the audience’s interest. They both seem remote, content with trotting out formulaic and occasionally gnomic answers to her questions, giving little away. The respondents drabness leads us back to the spectacle and to myth: the agonistic contest between the old and young jockeys that the director with a little help from the organisers of the Palio had set up. At least with myth we know where we are.

And what a set up! Hollywood could not have fixed it better! (well today you’d have a young woman first time rider flicking horse tail dust into the eyes of the old male champ) The contest between the young virtuous innocent and the old corrupt fixer. But attaching to the film’s set up, with its constant re-iterations of the heroic nature of the race, was a feeling of fake build-up, like the tub thumping of an old fairground boxing booth.

It was at this point I felt the lack of the voice of the director. I’d have liked to have heard her voice. because…

The situation of the filming seemed increasingly problematic. The film had presented a state of affairs where it was suggested, albeit coyly, that the race was corrupted and had often been fixed. We then have director Spender come along, and with permission and cooperation of the organisers of the Palio, shoot her film. Of course she wants a story, we all want a story; the organisers of the Palio probably wanted a story. Now far be it from me to suggest that it might have been in everyone’s interests to have a story, but I began to wonder if it was entirely implausible that the Palio people had not only given her the characters of story, but had they also written the script? Surely this was totally impossible: to fix the result of the Palio so that it had the dream mythic ending, with victory for the young pretender? In the 2014 Palio filmed by Spender, the young tanist Giovanni toppled the old king Gigi, beating him twice and supplanting him. Had the Palio organisers got their horse feathers together and given Spender’s movie the perfect climax. Surely not!

The parties involved in organising the Palio were surely righteous men and women with no interest in ensuring that this film would be successful, that the Palio would be seen as a clean horse race. And of course Cosima Spender surely had no interest in ensuring everyone was a winner: herself, all the people involved in the Palio, all the good people of Sienna and the Italian tourist industry.

Of course I am not actually suggesting the races filmed as part of them movie’s climax were ‘fixed’ in any sense. But it is remarkable that the forces the movie documents as being in play in the mounting of the Palio, looked more than capable of arranging reality. And the arrangement of convenient realities is part of the history of documentary film making. (Leni Riefenstahl – who made interesting use of spectacle) Which is why I would like to have heard the voice of Cosima Spender. Sometimes viewed on other terms than its own, a staged documentary can be more interesting than a straight one. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Pasolini Abel
Ferrara (2015 Europod) Willem Dafoe

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 22 Sept 15; ticket: £8:75

death is politics

It used to be that the way a film’s opening title credits flipped through was first: the distributor – Fox – Columbia – Universal – followed by film title, then the stars….there were variations through the eons of cinema, which variations reflected the movie power game. Now it’s the money that’s up front. ‘Pasolini’ like most other films these days, has its front end loaded with the names of production companies and finance big cheeses making sure the audience sees who’s put the plums in the pudding. These credits take a substantial time to roll through, as if telling the audience: it’s the money that counts.

It always has, of course. But before, the money people just haven’t wanted their names up ‘in lights’ as badly as now.

They want it bad. What might Pasolinin have thought?

I think Ferrara’s Pasolini is a very poor movie. It seems to be neither one thing nor another, stuck in a no man’s land between fake verisimilitude and cod realisation of Pasolini’s last script. For the most part the film looked like an excuse to put Willem Dafoe (the talent bringing in the Euros) through his paces, to let him walk through the shots peering intellectually out at the world through his heavy rimmed glasses, monolithically po faced. Dafoe has nothing to say other than what he has said before.

Nothing to say squares with Ferrara’s ‘Pasolini’. Ferrara is a great admirer – fan – of Pasolini. In a way that should have been enough to warn him not to make a movie about his idol. Never touch the stuff you love; love when expressed in film unless tempered in the fire of other emotions, always communicates as a tepid force. And that is part of the problem with the film: in relation to Pasolini, Ferrara never shows us the forces at work within and around his protagonist. We just get a lot Pasolini quotations, chapter and verse, but they don’s say anything real in the context of a movie about his last day. Pasolini’s quotes come across as merely ornamental.

Perrrara poses no questions with this film. As if he was frightened of asking questions; as if to make his film it is enough to follow Dafoe around pretending to be Pasolini. This is dire stuff, and I believe Pasolini would have cringed at this spectacle of himself.

There don’t seem to be any ideas within the film itself, Farrera’s ideas that is. Is he too much in awe of his subject? We have a smattering of Pasolini’s ideas sprinkled though the dialogue as Dafoe enters and brushes against different worlds: low life world, high life world, family, film world. But there is no idea enfolding the movie; only on constant, the image of the man in glasses. There is nothing either in the camera set ups or in the shots that establishes any way of understanding what we are shown (we do not ‘see ‘in this film we are shown, and that is part of the problem) or any point of view other than the privileged observer who follows his quarry through his last day on earth.

Most viewers seeing the film will know the final outcome: the sudden violent slaying of the film maker. So in a way what is the point of making this the defining point of the movie, the end marker? Do we have to see it, does the violence of the image make it real. Ferrara has gone for the obvious, when there were other perhaps more powerful and affecting ways Pasolini’s death might have been expressed.

There might be a point to imaging of violence but not in this film. Death runs through Pasolini’s work. His psyche and the voices within him are a familiar of death and physical suffering. The forces that surround him, that have surrounded him all his life are murderous. But instead of pushing at Pasolini’s line of escape and his inability or perhaps lack of desire to find one, Ferrara opts for the ‘escapist’ option and fills out his material, a significant proportion of the movie, with a rendering of a script Pasolini was preparing to shoot, but might never have shot. It feels like an opting out of a core difficulty of what and how to film; and a choosing of a cheap easy way out to justify the script to the Euro-money boys, so fulsomely credited.

Pasolini’s death as shot by Ferrara is disturbing in its violence. But not as disturbing as the autopsy report on his death which I read in Wikipedia. The autopsy (perhaps Ferrara has evidence that this autopsy was incorrect or inaccurate, in which case this itself is relevant material) revealed that Pasolini had been run over multiple times, his testicles crushed by something like a steel bar and that his body had been partially burned.

The form of this death is a statement. But whose statement? Ferrara isn’t interested; Ferrara’s response is no comment. Just feel the fun and joy in the last script, the realisation of the dark clown, ‘the buffon’. And Pasolini was a buffon at heart, so what does it mean to be a ‘buffon’? Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Last
Days – Gus Van Sant – USA 2004: Michael
Pitt

Viewed
Tyneside Film Theatre 20 Sept 05; Ticket – £6-00 (I looked up this old review as I had seen a number of biopics recently and thought it appropriate to rekindle this crit by way of comparison with todays offerings.)

Do what thou wilt

In his last two films GVS has turned to myth as structural device. In both Elephant and Last Days there is no doubt as to what will happen. It is mythically certain. The point is our relation to and understanding of what we have experienced.

In these two films GVS is not only employing a mythic structure but also taking up the central mythic theme of death and reworking it in the context of America as a necropolis, the new world of the dead. In GVS’ vision of America it is not only people who die whether they be superstar deities or ordinary folk. Something essential is dying: the idea of America. The America whose people are free to pursue happiness through the satiation of desire. America the last Titan, as an autophage, consuming her own constitution in which happiness is an object rather than a state of being.

Elephant and Last Days, are both observational in form. GVS’ camera takes a definitive role in relation to the action on screen, present yet detached, playing the part of quasi historical observer like a Pliny the Younger witnessing the eruption of Mt Versuvius. What we see is not explosion but implosion of a culture that has become a death centred. Both films are characterised by camera tracks that have the stylised movement of an Egyptian funerary procession. GVS uses these long tracks to follow the paths of the doomed young Americans. In their pacing and deliberation the camera movement is like a remodeling of the tomb paintings and friezes in the Valley of the Kings, where the Egyptian golden ones, bearing their treasure, process towards their deaths. Last Days and Elephant are ‘descending’ films in style and intent. They are constructed as long going downs into the earth. Going downs that are orderly and controlled without melodrama or fake emotion, going downs as a cultural observation.

GVS has centred his last two films around specific structures located in specific milieu. We know ancient Egypt though its surviving monumental structures. America too is observed through the portals of its architecture. In as much as the structures of ancient Egypt, the Pyramids, Karnak, the tombs of the Pharaohs directly communicate their obsession with the dead so GVS mediates the idea of the death of America through its contemporary vernacular architecture.

In ‘Elephant’ the victims have a sacrificial quality as if they were sleep walkers in some Nietschean parable where a mad man crashes into the school and cries out: “America is dead! America is dead!” No one hears. They are all walking towards oblivion. The students don’t understand that the society whose culture they are assimilating died years ago. No one notices. No questions are asked. They continue as if nothing has happened. Nothing can save them from being claimed by the forces unleashed. In some respects they are like the faithful trusting slaves and retainers whose throats were slit before being entombed with their ancient kings and queens.

GVS’ setting for ‘Elephant’ is the school, a building that has a sepulchral quality. Set in a vast headstone suburb the school is white and bony, a structure that encloses its inhabitants and sends them on long mazy journeys. Like a catacomb it is a sealed enclosed world, a perfect medium for the unremarked entry of avenging angels. The house in Last Days where the singer songwriter Blake(a character dedicated by GVS to the memory of Kurt Cobain) resides, is in itself a sepulchral peeling decaying edifice, harbouring an outhouse in the familiar shape of a Victorian mausoleum.

Last Days is centred on this big house in the woods. As the desert is the setting for the Pyramids so the woods are the setting for the big house. The natural world and the man made world exist as counter attractions for the human soul which becomes a virtual extension of the meaning embedded in these outer forms. The woods are part of the natural world and in entering them personal history becomes insignificant, only the body is important. In the woods there is the abrogation of individual destiny. To go into the house is to accept individual destiny, a destiny that is bound to culture and history.

The house in up state New York, which is the setting for Last Days, resembles one of those stone piles that are found everywhere in Scotland. Comprising many rooms the houses are labyrinthine, riddled with stairwells and passages. Mostly they were built by wealthy industrial magnates to serve a lifestyle and culture now gone. As with the monuments of Egypt, you can feel in these houses a permanently frozen way of life: the presence of the dead. Appropriately these buildings are usually very cold a phenomenon often mentioned by contemporary visitors to these houses in their hay day. In Last Days although the house is cold there are no fires in any of the grates. The only fire in Last Days is the bonfire Blake lights in the woods when it gets dark.

During the film I kept getting images of Alistair Crowley who owned one these Scottish piles called Baleskine situated by the edge of Loch Ness. Crowley is part of the drifting subterranean current of American / Californian thought forms. Crowley bought Baleskine in order to exploit its remote situation to further his ‘magik’, magik that revolved about the idea of the Great Invocations and calling up of the spirit world in particular the Egyptian spirit of Horus. His house like those Egyptian tombs with their multiple chambers became part of the world of the dead.

Crowley an interesting but bloated egotist was consumed by desires above all to be the greatest ‘ master mage’ of his generation. But Crowley by his own account nearly had his brains and sanity blasted away as a result of an invocation ritual that went out of his control. He was totally overwhelmed by what he had summoned and his inability to halt the process. He wandered about for days in shock at what he had called up into his presence.

There is something similar in the dazed existence of Blake. Blake has called up something which overwhelms him: the terrible forces latent in the idea of America. Its as if GVS is suggesting that the desires that fed Blake’s ego and drove him to his destiny as a rock stargod once satiated, assumed form of a terrifying and manifest presence that tore his mind apart. Unlike Crowley, Blake does not have the strength to take on these forces and physically survive. Most people don’t resist these types of demonic forces. They permit the dark powers possession of their souls whilst indulging the delusion born of their pride that there will be no price to pay. But the price to be paid for desire fulfilled is the human soul. And, ‘Do what thou wilt’, was the motto of Crowley.

Last Days is an examination of the flip side of Faustian myth. What happens to the soul unable to make the pact which is the everyday business of successful Americans? Its premise is that a society dedicated to the pursuit of individual desire at any cost creates a culture of death and destruction to protect itself. The obverse is that those who refuse or are unable to make this pact with the forces of success are either declared insane or driven to self annihilation. This is the state of affairs in America. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 28 Sept 2005

Straight Outta Compton F Gary Gray (USA 2015) O’Shea
Jackson Jnr, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell

Viewed: 8 Sept 2015;
Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne; Ticket £3.75letting the word go out

Many bio-pics, in particular outta Hollywood are predictable
vehicles, aimed at the fan base with an agenda structured format designed to
make product promotion and American values an intrinsic part of the
scenario. The idea of story degenerates
into a series of fabrications designed to omit anything countervailing or inconvenient
that disrupts the selling of this type of image.

Early European literature both Greek and Roman often
mythologised biographical subjects. The
invention of the hero. The stated
justification for this idealisation of type was grounded in the prosocial idea
the model life, a life lived for an ideal over and beyond the self; dedicated
to city to state to an ideal as in the case of Lucretia an ideal of womanhood. The idea was that the lives of the great
(usually men) would act as exemplars for others to emulate. A path that would lead individuals out of the
narrow solipsistic confines of self interest to embrace the greater values.

Heroic mythologies firmly implanted in the civic psyches of both Athens and Rome, and post Enlightenment taken up as models for the emerging nationalisms of Europe. Straight Outta Compton has something of this same heroic sensibility at least in the first 90 minute section of the movie which documents the rise of Niggaz wit Attitudes in the personages of Ice Cube, Eazy E and Dr Dre. F Gary Gray puts something rare into a Hollywood Movie: a hard core look at the actuality of American ghetto life, a focus on group consciousness, and the way in which the young black rap and proto hip hop artists represented an artikulation of the despair of their race and generation. Gray films his protagonists as was: members of a disadvantaged repressed despised ethnic group, deracinated blacks, fighting back to tell it; demand a voice. A voice outside the bullshit. “You are about to witness the strength of street knowledge…..” quips a young black mugging the school bus…and his words resonate through the film’s depiction of the rise of NWA. The generations of blacks have had to come to terms with their position in US society. Alternatively feared and despised. Feared if successful; despised if perceived as being part of the lumpen underclass. With most Blacks seen as lumpen with police and whites struggling to make any distinction: black is black. Shoot first. The latter being the motto of many police forces which seem to see their duty as being to keep niggers in the dirt. The black response: THE anger. Deep unfocused anger, that runs through the arteries of the black community. But there is a recurring resolve of this anger into actions words and deeds. A remarkable but uneven political social cultural and musical re-action. There has always been black political community reaction – such organisation caused Grithiths Birth of a Nation to be kept from screening in many American cities such as Chicago. But Music is the expressive language that first penetrated the black message of consciousness through the communication veins of the nation. The first language of anger: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Billie Holliday played out that all was not well.

The generation of radical political action Newton, Carmicheal the Black Panthers, black power activists blew itself out but left a trace of consciousness raising and local activism. But 15 years on from this revolutionary ethnic social explosion nothing much had changed in most US cities. The experience of being black little changed, the experience of being young black in the ghetto, a humiliating powerlessness life.

The pressures of daily white racism, instrumental in policing, on black experience led to a new music of protest and truth saying. Niggaz wit Attitudes absorbed the anger turned to hate on the streets, internalising the frustrations of the hoods and spat it out back at America. Straight Outta Compton. The rap of Ice Cube Lazy E et al, like the wordless solos of Coltrane and Davis, and Billie’s lyrics are spontaneous inspired speaking in tongues. The unconscious expression of the spirit of those who aren’t going to take it any more. The point made by Greek and Roman that there are moments when individuals cease being individuals and transform into mediums, sensitised oracles of their times. As F Gary Gray builds up the documentary form of his movie and we see NWA perform locally and tour nationally, taking on the police and authorities with the sharp edge of uncompromising Niggaz Attitude. Like Billie H their words cutting out the shape of truth of anger and resistance. A group of men outta Compton defined by being part of black experience as much as by their talent. It’s true Gray or perhaps his producers sometimes seem uncomfortable with this attitude, try to soft pedal what we witness. When we see NWA in Detroit with the local police going to stop the show if the play Fuck tha Police, they play the song but we don’t distinctly hear the words. The words with their brazen attitude of contempt are muted. We don’t really experience the Niggaz act of resistance. But for all that, Gray’s movie does represent Ice Cube Dr Dre Eazy E and the others as a collective response to the actuality of toxic race relations, ghetto life. The final third of the film chronicles individuation. Much more Hollywood comfort zone. The break up of NWA over managerial and money. The personal stories, including Eazy E’s death from Aids, overwhelm the collective expression. It’s another story; perhaps one that Straight OUTTA Compton didn’t need. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Diary of a Teenage Girl
Marielle Heller (USA 2015) Bel Powley

Viewed
Tyneside Cinema 11 Aug 2015; ticket: £8.50

Things that go bonk on the screen

Heller’s ‘Diary’ is encapsulated in one image about mid way through. Minnie and Monroe are filmed lying on his bed post coital in the sort of pose that might have come out of a ‘Hello’ photo shoot. A piece of artful fabrication that panders to the fakery of fuckery. A normalising piece of the new American dream, peddled by Hollywood that can only handle both sex and insanity with the pretence of sham simulation. It’s a lie.

Interesting the film I saw before ‘Diary’ , Ferreri’s 1975 movie ‘La Grande Bouffe’, mannered as it is, deals only with truth. ‘Diary’ also a product of its times, only expresses the need for self deception. “ Bouffe’ knew what it was about, the obscenity of male dominated relations, and attacked its target with honesty and gusto.

Diary of a Teenage Girl doesn’t know what it’s about. Instead it has an agenda. And honesty is not on the agenda, but sex is. And that is what Heller is selling or rather pimping: the shibboleths of 21st century movie feminism. A film that aims to vindicate an ideological take on female sexuality with a crass script which reads like a tick list. With Minnie’s Diary we go on a journey with her: through sex fantasy, my first fellate, my first fuck, sharing mom’s boy friend, getting paid for going down on it, my enlightened lesbianism etc, the realisation that men are stupid…etc…

The journey is guided by Minnie’s narcissism, in tune with a generation of ‘me’ film directors. Actually of course Minnie is going nowhere just deeper into her own self admiration society. And the film goes nowhere: like the game played by Minnie and Monroe in the diner when he gives her his hand to bite….and nothing happens. For a film that has as its core event a daughter taking her mom’s lover, Diary is strangely detached decontextualized. It’s…its as if nothing happens. Except, life is one big opportunity for the photo-shoot pose, the selfie and the one liner. But of course, appearances are all that really matter.

In the 70’s Barbara Loden and Chantal Akerman made films with women at the core of their filmic consciousness. These films were characterised by honesty of depiction and development. By contrast Marielle Heller seems content to banish truth from her concerns and resort to the lazy formulaic conventions of Hollywood feminism.

I don’t think there is a moment of honesty in “the Diary’. Minnie evasion is perfectly captured in her acting (and that of the rest of the caste) which with its pouting, grimacing and phoney smiles barely does justice to a Disney Toon let alone its soap opera provenance. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

La Grande Bouffe Marco Ferreri (1973 Fr, It) Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Phillippe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi, Andrea Ferreole Viewed: 4 Aug 2015 Tyneside Cinema Ticket: £8.50

Fin de partie

In the best epater and fuck the Bourgeoisie tradition, La Grande Bouffe is an uncomfortable film to watch. Garnished with black humour its scatological scenario centres on the social and physical relations of the great orifices. The caste glide through the film effortlessly acting out the gross and indecent gestures and directions, guided by the mechanics of a script and scenario which offer them the safety of detached but implicated roles.

Watching La Grande Bouffe I was reminded of the terrible ordeal of the Trough. The Trough was the cruel means of execution meted out to traitors (and others) in the Archaemenid (early Persian) Empire. The theatre of the Trough went as follows: first the condemned was fed a large sumptuous feast. He was then placed in a stone tough which was covered over with a stone slab that left only his head sticking out. He continued to be fed rich foods, spooned into his mouth by beautiful maids. But inevitably and inexorably he would evacuate the contents of his stomach, emptying the contents of his bowels into the stone trough where he wallowed in the deepening pool of fetid slime of his own making. As the victim sat in his own foulness his body was slowly and painfully eaten by the bacteria from his own shit.

In the course of this gruesome ordeal the victim was witness to the spectacle of his own death. Perforce his attention directed to the fact that the forces of physical corruption that were consuming and destroying his body were directly related to the corrupt moral forces that had infected his mind. The Trough was a metaphysical lesson for the King’s subjects: that moral turpitude was a process replicated in and on the actual body. The instructive nature of the Trough was not lost on spectators and calls to mind Kafka’s short story : In the Penal Colony. Of sorts, a story of mindful replication: infraction on the moral plane being inscribed physically upon the body of the perpetrator, as a death sentence.

Watching La Grande Bouffe I see a similar moral lesson being played out for today’s spectators. The four male protagonists are consumed by the forces at play in a social system overwhelmed by the excesses of individual desire. A society driven to the frenzy of self annihilation by a capitalistic moral and social imperative that has reduced all relations to the operation of profit and power. And in La Grande Bouffe the cock and the mouth are the chosen emblematic means that point directly to this corruption. The strength of La Grande Bouffe as film is that it is not symbolic; it films image to point directly to effect.

Ferreri is a director of the warrior class. In La Grande Bouffe and Dillinger is Dead he wields film like a battle axe to smash through the glass plated hypocrisy of the times. At its most straightforward Bouffe documents bourgeois society no longer defined by self satisfied mechanical rectitude, but now defined by self satisfied mechanical excess. Wealth food leisure sex all reduced to the satiation of desire. Ferreri’s understanding is that this is a society in the process of self destruction. Bourgeois society, in a spiralling cycle of out of control consumption, will dissolve in its own excreta.

Perhaps Ferreri was thinking of another cycle of degeneration that was clearly seen. The processes that led Communism to destroy itself in the 1930’s 40’s ‘50’s, purging itself to the point of complete denigration, so that in the end all that was left was a group of geriatric psychopathic tyrants.

The active force filmed in Ferreri’s scenario is the social dominance and arrogance of the male. This is a sufficient but not necessary condition of the film’s moral purpose. But it is maleness that is made exemplary. It is what the film points to with its images of the four guys exercising their orifacial prerogative. What we see is the unfolding of Ferriri’s uncompromising logic of truth when life is driven by desire. So the men’s behaviour makes for hard viewing, and in as much as the film in making a truth statement, it defies the viewer to avert their eyes

Like Bunuel’s films, La Grande Bouffe uses film to show the viewer directly what is actually happening. In the blasphemous feast in Viridiana, we see directly the destructive forces unleashed by the situation; in the entirely different social setting of ‘Bouffe’ we see another type of nihilistic behaviour. The men’s mouths and cocks serve the same purpose – saturation through power. The men stuff their mouths with the food their power commands; they strut their cocks which they expect and demand of the women to suck stroke insert. Prostitutes are hired to perform whatever is demanded by the men’s whim, as when Marcello picking up the Bugatti’s exhaust manifold tells the prostitute that he’s going to stick it up her cunt instead of his prick. She smiles and says: that’s OK.

Ferreri shows a society reduced to the gestures of exploitation and excess. Looking back to 1973, it’s interesting that this time also witnesses the burgeoning of the new radical feminism. It would be difficult given today’s political discourses to produce a homocentric film of this nature, but certainly possible to make a film that implicated both men and women in amplified cycles of corrupted desires. What is lacking is the film climate that would permit the complete honesty, possessed by Ferreri Bunual Bergman, needed to make a film that pointed directly and logically to the corruptions that underpin our consumer society of appearances.

Interesting that in Ferreri’s script, it is the woman Adrea (wonderfully personated by Andrea Ferreole) who is the only survivor of La Grande Bouffe. She cooks eats fucks wanks, equals in all respects the men. She remains the only one left standing to oversee the second delivery of the meats which will never be eaten. She stands perhaps as a portent of a future in which overweening desire will also take on the female visage.

Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Love and Mercy Bill Pohlad (USA 2014) John Cussack; Elizabeth Banks Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 11 July 2015; ticket £8.50

An alternative Life of Brian

The spectacle of Hollywood trying to simulate mental illness is as degrading unedifying and unconvincing as Hollywood’s simulation of sex. It all looks hammed up.

Everyone is an object†. We watch the objects move around and go through their routines, sex madness, both have their film routine. In Love and Mercy three of them pretend to be Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Two (John Cussack and Paul Dano) of them have to pretend to be ill, their performances aided and abetted by the designed sound sound mix of ‘Voices off’ and ‘internalised chaos affects’ that tries to ‘dope’ out what our Brian might be hearing.

With its formulaic gestural TV acting; a scenario with a structure that flip flops promiscuously between different times without the honesty to provide a temporal context, this is a typical biopic. One strictly for the worshippers of the life of Brian and the Boys.

Love and Mercy is pitch for Brian’s somewhat shaky claim on genius and thereby to secure both his artistic legacy and also importantly, the royalty incomes from the songs that the rights owners hope will roll in for many a year. Let the Good Times Roll…. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Slow West John
Maclean (UK NZ 2015) Kodi Smit-McPhee,
Ben Mendelsohn; Michael Fassbender

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema; 3rd July 2015; ticket: £8.50

Flatpack Western

Like a flatpack of MDF with bolts and washers, MacLean’s Slow West is assembled out of all the bits and pieces you need to make a Western. There are some guns, a couple of nags, scenic backdrops, bearded dodgy looking baddies in old boots etc. But still Slow West amounts to little more than a transposed British road movie of 70’s vintage.

Set in 1877, Slow West follows Cavendish, a young Scot (he describes himself as British but quickly and correctly changes this to: Scottish) on his quest to find Rose, his old sweetie. In the course of his search Cavendish in the tradition of the ‘80’s Scottish road movie, meets up with a lot of funny old eccentric geezers; a soldier, a rough likeable villain, a seer. These all help guide him towards the object of his desire and his destiny.

These road encounters are accompanied by dialogue encrusted with words of putative wisdom and insight in the same way a ships hull is encrusted with barnacles. They weigh it down. The dialogue staggers along under the weight of its own cleverness and banality: “ Love is universal – like death.” Writer director MacLean is more interested in showboating his writing talent (such as it is) than using dialogue to open up character for the viewer. Another trait that inspired Brit 70’s film making.

The film is so politically correct that I waited on the credits to see if there was a political commissar on the payroll. But I forgot that these days directors, particularly male ones, are on a self censoring autopilot. So: the women are good and most (but not all) of the men are bad or perhaps stupid; the native peoples are all subject to anachronistic positive evaluation, there is a yoga lesson in the middle of a stick up; the upper classes are bad the peasants good etc. All unusually interesting.

The film is supposed to be a post modernist conceit, the stick up Yoga session has a Monte Python feel: Just “Breath !”. But Slow West looks and feels as much traveloguesque as Pyhtonesque. We pass through the woods and mountain plains of New Zealand accompanied by anodyne music and come across flat pack structures. The store in the mountain pass, the cabin on the plain both look like Ikea builds. Conceits accompanied by story telling and wiseacring and laboured visual jokes.

It’s difficult to care about anything in the movie. By the end, after its Straw Dogs like siege with the ‘correct’ ending (no rape the sweetie kills all the bad men), the film amounts to little more than: Welcome to New Zealand – you can do whatever you want here – make a Western.

One element in the film that I enjoyed was Kodi Smit-McPhee’s performance. He does possess the face and presence of the clown. There were moments in the film when it seemed as if the film would honour this clown and release itself from the strictures of post modernist indulgence. But these moments were fleeting and this strand of development of the material never sufficiently realised. MacLean’s vision seemed to look past the clown attribute of his movie, and followed a plot line into the blue mountains of forgetfulness and the immense field of wheat. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk