Adrin Neatrour

Mad Max: Fury Road George Miller (2015 USA) Tom Hardy; Charlize Theron

Viewed: 15 June 2015 Gate Cinema Newcastle upon
Tyne; Ticket: £7.95

They’ll love this in Ramadi.

Mad Max: Fury Road, the colon in the film’s title is interesting. It anticipates the movie in as much as the self important looking colon seems to mean something but actually means nothing. A bit like the portentous philosophical twaddle disguised as dialogue put into the mouths of the the film’s characters.

The movie opens with the lines spoken in deep gravelesque male gothic: ‘My Name is Max my world is Fire and Blood.’ Add Allah as a final flourish to Max’s opening declamation and you have a perfect advert for Islamic State. And the movie’s script written by Miller seems to have picked up a trait or two from the killer Islamists.

For instance the War Boys, sort of punk Rude Boys stylistically cloned from one of the Ring cycle farragos, are Jihadi simulacra’s scripted by Miller to seek death in battle so that they may enter Valhalla, rather than Isis’ preferred destination: the Garden of Allah. And Max’s punishment for trying to escape is to be lashed to the front bonnet of War Boy battle vehicle, with his face shackled in a steel mask. Shades of the Daish’s cruel execution pranks such as burning men to death in steel cages and executing people with rocket propelled grenades. Terror is the best advert both in fact and fiction.

The problem is that it is not possible to make a movie like Mad Max without paying homage to the current practitioners and masters of Terror. Which is why I suspect that just as Hitler and Stalin liked nothing better than to spend the evening watching Hollywood gangster movies. The current master practitioners of extreme politico religious ideologies will like nothing better than to settle back in their bunkers in Ramadi Mosul and Fallujah, light a fag and press play on the pirated DVD and cheer on the War Boys.

Away from Islamic State turf, Mad Max impresses as a cultural desensitising vehicle for the mass audience. A film that in a sense normalises extreme violence both proactively and perhaps in our response to these sort of events in the world. The issue is whether this desensitisation is a consciously adapted Hollywood stratagem or rather a absorption of the mood of the times. Either way you could say that films like Mad Max are preparing us for the logic of evil, a moment when we might have to decide whether we in the West are to become ciphers in that logic.

The film itself although it looks like a quest\chase movie, in fact belongs to that genre that we may call ‘Computer Game’ movie. The film takes its characterisation, its format its testosterone fuelled reactive insistent pace from the world of the electronic game. There is only technically induced tension and there is no dialogue only declamation (cf Allah Akbar) as people ask: Who killed the world….? ( I said the fly with my little eye!). The film is designed like computer games to be immersive: incessant action repeated time and again in escalating variations, overwhelming the audience with image, music and big sound effects. Don’t think – you exist only in the action. One for the Jihadi recruiters.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a stylistic scatter gun sampling of every epic ever churned out in the history of Hollywood, made possible of course by the modernist galley slaves thousands of SFX manipulators and compositors chained to their machines. So we have appropriately enough given the quasi religious text, lashings of Cecil B de Mills, full on old testament stuff, Niblo’s Ben Hur (also OT), Grithiths, and more recently LeRoy’s Quo Vadis. In some ways the stylistic form reminded me most strongly of the Western, you know cowboys and Indians where the Indians circle endlessly around the wagon train allowing themselves to be neatly if acrobatically picked by the whites. And of course Miller also owes big time to Scott and his sci-fi design teams as well as Jackson for his characterisations of Tolkien. Mad Max is not original in concept but certainly cleverly stitched up in a familiar way.

And of course it is a successful and popular movie, so perhaps subliminally it is giving us what we want: an initiation into the dynamics of a coming world order. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Tribe Miroslav
Slaboshpitski (Ukr 2014) Grigory Fesenko. Yana Novikova. Rosa Babiy

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema; 19 May 2015; ticket: £8:50

The new brutality: fear and craving

The film’s title, the Tribe,
points away from its actual setting to a new emergent world ethos.

Slaboshpitski’s Tribe is widely
remarked for using its setting in a boarding establishment for deaf adolescents
to dispense with spoken language. The
whole movie has its interpersonal communication signed. A few films post silent era have done without
language, noticeably Themroc. As in Themroc,
so in Tribe the lack of conventional communication is a metaphore, rather than
a device for suggesting a social realist ethos.

A metaphore for our inablilty to
listen or speak to each other.

The critical element in Tribe is
the creation of a world that works according to its own internal rules with
relations to outside worlds restricted to strict economic exchange: Slaboshpitski’s deaf tribe, like a remote Amazonian tribe
that wants to preserve its own world,
even if the cost of that preservation is a corruption and distortion of that
world.

As film, The Tribe creates a world
where no one can hear and no one can speak.
Rather than being set in the realm of an actual institution for the deaf, the tribe is set in a world where all
communication has been reduced to the expression of need and the satisfaction
of need. Slaboshpitski persues a line of development based on the
empoverishment and debasement of intellectual and emotional
life. With no one able to hear or speak
what is left for the Tribe is a one dimensional premise that constrains their
relations their communications and lives
within the crude parameters of fear and craving.

At its broadest the Tribe encompasses a moral parody of Western consummerist capitalism with its politics increasingly defined by the amplification circuitry of the media. Consumers are whipped up into states of fear and then placated by the soothing balms of holidays or products. But the specific moral target of the Tribe is surely the erruption into the world of a new order of rule by brutality. As a Ukrainian film, Slaboshpitski is pointing directly to the forces unleashed in Ukraine by the break up of the Soviet Union and Russia’s attempt to redraw the map that it drew in 1991. The defining characteristic of the conflict: the inablility of the antogonists to hear or speak to one another and their consequent recourse to mindless brutality that is perpetrated in cold blood and immediately minimalised denied or blamed on the other side. The politics and mind set of Hitler, in which a look is as good as a command to exterminate, re-appear. And in the face of this brutality, civilian aircraft shot out of the sky, the outside world, like the authorities in the deaf insititution, tur away themselves lost for words, unable to respond. The brutal has become the everyday,and the inflation of horror leads to ever greater desensitisation to what is happening. Isil as well as other forces are re- familiarising the West with the rule of brutality. The logic of the one dimensional world governed by religious belief systems establishing a new order of regime based on self destruction and annihilation for the sake of eternal paradise. As under the Nazi’s ethnic beliefs, so under Isil’s religious beliefs, mass exterminations and killings are a calculated expression of the belief system. The ideology of brutality, the public and vicious executions carried out in a manner to maximise pain both to the victim and their relations, carry the twin message of the self confidence of the perpetrators and intimidation of those who oppose. The Tribe reaches out as a filmic expression of the new regimes of Terror. Slaboshpitski matches his moral intent with the way he has shot his film. Filmed almost entirely in long takes there are two predominant types of shot. The still frame shot. Where the action takes place within frame. The camera doesn’t flit from shot reaction shot, it is not interested in point of view or state of mind, it is only intersted in what is in front of the lens, and makes the demand that we look at what is before our eyes without flinching. The cultured West perhaps always wants to look away from what is disagreeable. We turned our gaze away from Nazi Germany. because we found it more comfortable to look away and pretend not to have seen. But what is happening is happening in front of us: on all our media. So Slaboshpitski presents us with a camera that does not turn away. The other type of shot which features is the tracking shot down straight lines: institutional corridors, rows of trucks. This shot builds into the film a representation of a view into the future always restricted to the narrow dimensionality of two sides, vision is always tunnel vision. There are no broad vistas, no outside, just the world tapering to a disappearing point. A world strictly bounded by closed in borders. Tribe is a film without hope. It is a world of brutality. It is a world the West has not yet woken up to. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Phoenix Christian
Petzold (Ger 2014) Nina Hoss; Ronald
Zehrfeld;

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 12 May 2015; Ticket: £8.50

McGuffin forgotten

The history of post war film is riddled with bad movies that take their cue from the Holocaust and exploiting the Camps as either foreground or background for cheap melodrama. Pontecorvo’s Kapo (1960) earnted itsellf the gong from Jacques Rivette for worst shot in the history of cinema, a zoom into the hand of heroine dying on the wire barbed mesh of the camp fence.

Rivette’s point here is a particular contempt for using the Concentration Camp as an indulgence of individualistic fate. A cheap trick to extort a reflux of emotion from an audience preconditioned to expressive emotive venting by the calamity of this collective disaster. When the documentary evidence is so strong and well known, when the facts of the mass exterminations in the Nazi work and death camps already overwhelm response, anything other than an approach that transcends the individual subjectivity flirts with attracting brazen contempt from both the victims and the survivors, who include us as mute and late witnesses. As with Pavilowski’s recent movie Ida (2013), Chriastian Petzold’s Phoenix does little more than use the Holocaust background as an exploitation device against which to set a melodrama centred on an identity crisis. The core script driver in both Ida and Phoenix is a narrative process in which two women, the eponymous Ida and Nellie have to figure out the meaning of their lives. In both these stories the Nazi death camps serve as a mechanism, a sort of spring loaded contraption for depositing their protagonists out of the past into their present situation, from where the respective scripts pick up the story.

There is nothing in the narrative structure of either film that requires such a strong determining force as the Nazi camps. Any number of back stories would have worked fine. In fact the camps, as the back story element, in both films are overdeterministic of both Ida’s and Nellie’s situation. Overdeterministic meaning that the enormity of the evil that both the camps and the culture of death unleashed by the Nazis, overwhelms the victims. They are as if emptied out. They have no words. Unable to respond they are incapable of present assimilation of the enormity of their situation and what has happened to them. In both ‘Ida’ and ‘Phoenix’ to countervail the actual affect of the experience of evil, both directors resort to dishonest scripting to rescue their subjects, Ida and Nellie from the maw of history.

What we see in both Ida and Phoenix is soap operas for the times Ida projected in academy aspect with black and white print has a strong retro look, that works to disguise the plot mechanics. These mechanics comprise of Ida learning about her real Jewish ancestry guided by her maternal aunt (who commits suicide), and subsequently her flirting with modernism before returning to the fold of the Church. Ida is like a machine. We watch her experience all these situations but we never see what she sees. The film avoids relations as the script is like a walk through installation. The film attracts our gaze not our understanding, as Pavilowski is unable to deal with the overwhelming actuality of legitimised murder of Jews in Poland under the Nazis.

Phoenix amounts to no more than a ‘betrayal situation’. For some reason Petzold has wanted to give ‘betrayal’ experience a sort of borrowed legitimacy by exploiting the idea of a camp survivor.

Interestingly I saw one reviewer who compared Petzold to Hitchcock! Desperate stuff! Of course Petzold in fact honours Hitchcock only in the breech. Petzold shows no sign of understanding the key element of much of Hitch’s scripting. Petzold has forgotten ‘the McGuffin’ a concept Hitch used time and again in his movies. The McGuffin kick starts the narrative. It is a device. A device that leads into the core of the story. It is not the core of the plotting, which is always in relations. As the film develops The McGuffin seldom retains its importance or centrality.

So Nellie’s disfigurement is a McGuffin. What should then become the focus of the film is the psychological interplay, the relations between Johnny and Nellie. Instead Nellie’s disfigurement remains at the heart of the film. Her disfigurement becomes an increasingly unwieldy fabrication, played out by the actors in a sort of realist style that becomes less and less convincing as they struggle to maintain the illusion that he cannot recognise her. The Phoenix scenario never takes up the idea of relations between Nellie and Johnny. Instead it becomes bogged down in gestural detail as Nellie goes through the tedious motions of unconvincingly impersonating herself.

Phoenix comes to a dead end halfway through failing to develop the scenario, to take the film onto another level: the relations that should have been the real core of the movie. No relations between Johnny and Nellie, no tension. No relations no states of mind: the film slides into indifference in its performances. In particular Ronald Zehrfeld, as Johnny, is unfortunate. He acts as if he doesn’t know what to do, or how or why he should be doing whatever it is that he is supposed to do. And Petzold doesn’t seem to have been much help.

I suspect that Rivette would hold Ida and Phoenix in something of the same disdain as he felt for Kapo. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Force Majeure (Turist) Ruben Ostlund (Swe; 2014)
Johannes Kuhnke; Clara Wettergren

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema; 30 April 2015; Ticket £8.50

Postcard from IKEA

Sweden used to be cinematically defined by the films of Ingmar Bergman. Dark nights, vigils of God abandoned individuals, the impossibility of communication, often set against untamed moody seas. This notion of Sweedishness complemented perhaps by Volvo cars has, as Ostlund realises, long ceased to have any contemporary resonance. Today Sweden has IKEA with its big idea of tasteful design endlessly replicated in a thousand settings. IKEA’S walk through spaces are now a force in themselves conditioning the sensibilities of the Middle Class experience.

In Force Majeure (FM) the proposition of design forces shaping consciousness, is an idea that is filmically put to the test. A sort of thought experiment if you like. Necessary because IKEA has conquered the world.

The active dynamic of FM is not so much the characters (Ebba and Tomas) or the plot but the backgrounds against which they are depicted. The film comprises series of interiors and mini settings that might have come from any IKEA store on any continent. It is these background ‘installations’ that condition the reactions of the actors to the script’s provocation: Tomas’ abandonment of his family at a moment of danger and his refusal to admit to his behaviour.

Ostlund’s camera is his main forensic device, presenting Tomas’ behaviour against the smooth surfaces of the resort hotel. The camera suggesting in the way it frames the action that the ethos of modern IKEA design. and contemporary shifts in the values underlying Western personal relationships, are wired into the same circuitry.

Like Ozu, Ostlund uses his camera to frame areas. He employs the still frame as his main type of camera shot, within which and through which we see the movement image. However whereas Ozu’s ‘ still frame’ captures screens and bamboo woven walls, the closed- off sight lines that characterise Japanese culture, Ostlund’s still frames capture the open plan nature of IKEA life. The sight lines in IKEAland are wide; an environment where everything is seen. Like Ozu’s closed off spaces, the open spaces which are the focus of Ostlund’s camera weave their own mesh of influence over the actors. The openness of these IKEA zones places everyone in full view of everyone else, everyone is on show, adults and children alike. The hotel with its long corridors open to gaze, the hotel suite with its bed area, with its eating area, its bathroom area all these spaces exert a sort of imperative cultural gravity towards conformity and consensus in relations and in behaviour. The uniform nature of design conditioning a uniformity in response by the actors, the open spaces conditioning a fear of oppositions and a gravitational pull towards consensus

Particularly interesting in FM are the scenes set in the ‘his and hers’ en suite bathroom. Filmed in the vast mirror against a dark jade background Ebba and Tomas brush their teeth in their individual basins with their individual electric toothbrushes. Lars von Trier might have shown the couple fucking, but the toothbrush shots say more about their relationship then sex. They have left the domain of the pure physical body and now occupy a zone characterised by shared automated gestures. They perform a mechanical soulless duet that celebrates their IKEA identity which has replaced the old opposition of raw sex.

If IKEA conquers the world it does so in the sense that it becomes a conscious type of choice for a certain class or strata of people who seek to define their lives not through oppositions but through something we might call consensus. IKEA’s design and graphic constructions represent a decontextualisation of history. IKEA design (ditto Apple design) bypasses history social cultural ethnic and race divisions, all the messy stuff, with something that appears to come out of a hat from nowhere. Pure techno products unreferencing of anything but themselves. IKEA artefacts, like Apple products blue jeans and T shirts are the products for those who embrace a ‘silicone identity’, living out careers ( not lives) detached from the old analogue oppositions. The relationship between products and constructed environments is locked into circuitry that reinforces a continuous loop of mutual product /identity affirmation. And the reward for staying in the Ikea /Apple consumer loop is to become a tourist. Decontextualised, de-gendered the person/consumer is free to live like a tourist. Free from history and culture, free to roam the earth, guided and hooked up through the mobile phone in a constant stream of information.

And it is interesting to see that Ostlund’s own title for the film is: ‘Turist’ (Tourist). The title FM foisted on the film by its UK distributors points to what is ephemeral in the film, the phantom avalanche. Ostlund’s title Turist points to what is essential to the film. The intrapenetration of desire and design to create a strata of tourist people. A people living in one domain a consensual domain where space is abolished not just by acceleration, but by the rendering of all environments as consensually equivalent and similar. Environments are built so that oppositional realities are engineered out of them, so that they always comprise familiar non conflicting representations of reality.

And for the new tourist, nature herself must ideally be conformed to the same ethos that defines built structures. The forests and woods must look wild but have safe paths and sanctuary. The mountain sides which are the specious object of the tourists’ visit must look white and wild but conform to the moulding of the ski industry which lights them up, sanitises them, builds natural looking dwellings in the valleys and covers the slopes with mechanical contrivances for effortlessly lifting the tourists up. The IKEA impulse now transforms nature which becomes an extension of the en suite twin bathroom.

So the world reconfigures itself according to the tourist gaze which demands nothing less than benign detachment of their career from the actual.

In FM Ostlund points up the dangers of the new ethos A ethos based on self referencing de contextualisation of the world sets up a self reinforcing and amplifying circuit of consensus. But if oppositions arise this type of consensus culture may be critically unprepared and too inexperienced to meet this kind of problem.

Japan’s model prewar society based on partitions and compartmentalisation represented in Ozu’s filmic projections of a world of screens and woven bamboo, created a cultural dis-connected state of mind that made it possible for Japan to embrace the madness of brutal war and visious colonialisation.

Threatened by a phantom avalanche, Tomas abandons his family to save him own skin. And then denies it. Was his failure to admit to what he did, conditioned by the IKEA installations in which he lives? Is his inability to admit to his act of omission directly caused by the amplification consensus circuitry of this homogenous environment? The tourist defined by conventional gesture and consensus forgets the the reality of opposition Tomas could only recognise behaviour in himself that accorded with the IKEA consensual world in which he lives. And Ebba struggles with the same problem. She cannot initially cope with the discordance provoked by oppositions raised by Tomas. Slowly Ebba summons up the will to shift the IKEA furniture and challenge Tomas. But the process is difficult. The furniture is big and heavy and when she finally moves it, it falls on Tomas. He floods out, unable to handle oppositional stress. So Ebba replaces the furniture and the IKEA equilibrium is restored. The problem of opposition unresolved.

In the penultimate sequence Ebba and Tomas leave the ski resort as tourists. But in the final sequence something happens. Ebba frightened by the manoeuvres of the bus driver, demands to be let off the bus mid way down the mountain road. The fellow travellers, bar one, follow her off the bus. The final shot of the film is this group of de-bussed tourists, walking long ways down the road. They look like they have escaped from a Lars von Trier film like the Idiots. But they haven’t . Perhaps Ebba has learnt the wrong lessons from Tomas’ oppositional crisis, and is now fatally overreacting becoming an Idiot striding meaninglessly towards engagement with false oppositions.

The IKEA effect de-intensifies and mutes the experience of life. But it becomes a source of danger when situations arise that it can no longer contain. Wild energies. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A Matter of Life and Death
Powell and Pressburger (UK 1946 )
David Niven, Kim Hunter

Viewed: DVD 11 April
2015

Retrocrit: only truth is a matter of life and death

In re-evaluation of their work Powell and Pressburger have emerged out of the relative obscurity of British Cinema to lay claim (both collectively and individually in the case of Powell) to a certain stature in the history of film. A significance perhaps. Specifically Martin Scorsese has cited Red Shoes as influential on his personal development as a film maker.

But what of the critique’s of Powell and Pressburger made by continental critics and filmmakers who have viewed examined and evaluated these film makers? These critics have looked for those qualities in film that made it the expressive medium of the age: the knife cutting through to the quick of cultural and social heart of the twentieth century, the era of the image.

The contributors to Cahiers du Cinema and others have generally passed over the work of Powell and Pressburger, in silence. On viewing A Matter of Life and Death I can understand the cause of their silence. I think this silence emanates from a sense of unease about the core motivations that certainly underlie Matter of Life and Death and to an extent their other films.

The surface of their film work is beautiful. It presents as a filmic equivalent of haute couture, turned out like a beautiful model strutting the cat walk displaying garments of colour line and texture. In Life and Death the camera work is wonderfully fluid: movements are sometimes spectacular as with the tracks where the camera pulls back to reveal the size and scale of the celestial reception area and the Court room; sometimes intimate as per the track through the Doctor’s library. The camera movement has purpose connecting the audience either to scale or to character, it reveals something we should see. The camera movement is part of the film as are the sets: the intimate cockpit of the doomed Lancaster, the epic Stairway/escalator to the heavens. The sets encompass the characters and and have a magical theatrically that holds the audience within their thrall.

But concealed beneath the films model surface there is the nagging feeling that Matter of Life and Death is rotten at its core: it has no truth value. It is a lie foisted on its audience.

It claims to be a film about love: a love passion conceived at the moment of death. But as a love story even for the times it is devoid of passion, when Niven and Hunter look at each other, you see the directors instructions not desire. Compared with the passion evinced by Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, then June and Peters’ feelings are a strangely mechanical scripted love affair.

The image that captures the film show June and Peter together, but not looking at each other; rather looking off into the middle distance as if they had stepped out of some Soviet agit prop vehicle imploring the workers to build better tractors.

The audience response asks a question: if this is not love, but something mechanical, then what is the machine?

It was a political machine. An administration that needed to address the problem of maintaining good relations between Great Britain and the USA at a critical moment at the end of the War. One threat to these relations was the simmering popular discontent about US servicemen using greater wealth and alluring glamour of America, to woo bed and take away British women. The priority was to do try and prevent an incident that might escalate out of control. Part of the answer lay in propaganda whose object would be to de-intensify this issue, to reframe it. And Powell and Pressburger had shown themselves adept propagandists, not just for the war effort but in their uncritical and sanctimonious embrace of all things British: her Empire and moral code.

Matter of Life and Death is not about love as such, its about message, a message that justifies love between British and Americans. The core of the film is not passion but a quasi legalistic pleading for the sanctity of love between ‘others’ – Brits and Yanks. Powell and Pressburger reverse gender/ sexual roles from the actual pressure issue of American men claiming British women: in this case Peter – Brit and Joan – Yank. This is a deintensifying scripted strategy allowing cultural inequalities to be stripped out of the chemistry, but this new paradigm still allows the process of legitimising US/Brit relations to take centre stage.

Which it duly does in its celestial afterlife setting.

At this point the film loses both pace and rhythm as it focuses on series of arguments played out in judicial arena before a collective audience of the allied nations of the world with a symbolically critical jury of Americans selected to decide whether a good Bostonian girl should be allowed to have a relationship with a Brit airman. It’s a convoluted shananagem, a piece of glamorised Agitprop.

Powell and Pressburger’s films often have a disturbing repressed core, a terror of the flesh. This psychic constant works through all of the movies (culminating in Powell’s Peeping Tom which of course has a German protagonist). The other constant as referred to above was their uncritical embrace of all things British. Britain is festooned in their movies as a magically blessed land inhabited by gentle decent folk of the shire, rarely stirred to anger, but when so stirred are implacable in their search for justice. And the more you look at this Disneyesque vision, the more it seems to be either a lie or the product of filmmakers totally cocooned in an unreal world of privilege, filmmakers unable to use their eyes to see anything that is happening around them. Liars or fantasists, or some admix of both of these.

And this is the reason for the silence of critics. Powell and Pressburger are unable, even in the slightest detail of scenario or scripting to countenance any other proposition than that Britain is the most benign and best of all possible worlds. An untruth raised in their films to series of propagandist images.

Technically Powell and Pressburger’s films, including of course matter of Life and Death create resonant and powerful streams of images. Perhaps like adverts. But like adverts they are untrustworthy images, propagated by a belief system whose purpose is to sell a lie. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Crowd King Vidor
(USA 1928) Eleanor Boardman James Murray

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 22 march 2015; Ticket £6

Retro-crit: We see what he does not see…

Almost right from the start of the Crowd, Crowd King Vidor puts his audience on notice that they are viewing a film that is a critique of American ideology. And the manner in which this critique will be effected is through the interplay of a routine but brilliantly executed melodrama which Vidor juxtaposes with images that undercut and undermine the belief systems endemic to the plot. These images reveal the macrocosm the real context against which the family, the microcosm has to play out its hopes. The lay bare the reality that for most people the idea of success, of being able to emerge out the crowd, is an illusion. Vidor may have been influenced by Metropolis, Lang’s futurist parable where the world is divided between worker slaves and masters, with no social mobility.

The early shot in the film that caught my attention came in the second sequence of the movie. In the first we see John Sims our protagonist being born and his father declaring, in the ripe cliché of the ‘American Dream’ a great future for the boy. We cut to John Sims about 10 years later, finding him on a bench with his gang of kids, who are talking talking about what they want to be when they grow up.

As the camera pans across the bench we see the kid at the end is black. This is surprising in a feature film of this era. In the clothes he wears the black boy is in no way differentiated from the other kids, he just seems part of the gang. But he takes no part in this talk. His future is written in the colour of his skin. The camera pans back along the line to John and the intertitle card reads that John is telling the gang that his dad has said he is going become ‘somebody’ in the world, perhaps President. The formulaic belief has passed down the generation. For the black boy there is nothing to discuss, no illusion, only the reality of race. But will John Sims realise the dream?

Cut to New York City, the crucible of individualistic hope. Vidor follows John through work and home, marriage and children, using the building blocks of melodramatic form to create a characteristic life for him and his wife. We see the emotional relationship between them which is brilliantly executed and the cramped homes where they live with their children. The consistent vein of belief that sustains the family is the idea that the American way will ultimately reward John with success for his hard work and ability.

Vidor’s use of moral imagery transposes the viewer outside of the binding clinch of melodrama. It enables the audience to see what John himself cannot see: that his hopes are vain and illusionary. He is the subject of a con game. He hasn’t really got a chance, only crooks and the amoral get out of the ‘crowd’. Everyday decency has no future, except as a wage slave.

Actuality shots of New York City brilliantly evoke it as a thronged city, compressed masses of workers scrambling to earn a buck. Vidor returns to actuality sbots periodically through the film: Coney Island, hundreds of men in line trying for work. But the film is mostly memorable for the three amazing sequences employing huge expressionist sets to depict the reality of John Sim’s situation. It is a moot point that the viewer sees what the sets represent, John does not, he is simply in the movie, where King Vidor has placed him.

The sets represent the world of work, the hospital and the entertainment industry. John’s Office, a vast space filled with serried lines of clerks, stretches back almost to infinity creating the sense that the individuals there are lost and helpless. There is no way out of this world. The second set that takes the breath away is the maternity ward where John visits Mary. The door to the ward opens up to John revealing a huge space filled with beds of new mothers. The space is a huge incubating factory for workers. How you are born is how you will live. John’s walk into the maternity ward is filmed as an extraordinary track in which the space seems to expand out before him. These scenes certainly evoke Metropolis, but are stunningly executed and contrived to respond to Vidor’s specific purpose: to express the America of his day.

The third set that dominates the film doesn’t use a specially built structure, but utilises an existing building, the huge auditorium of a theatre,. Vidor treats the theatre as a set in the same way as the hospital ward and the work place. It is the final shot of the Crowd. May John and their son are in the auditorium of the theatre. John’s future is uncertain, no job no prospects of realising the Dream, and at risk of losing his wife. We see the little family watching the clowns on stage. They are framed as a tight compact group laughing enjoying themselves. The camera moves up away from them tracking back away from them towards the stage, revealing the whole auditorium packed with people watching the stage, all happy all enjoying themselves. The movement of the camera over and revealing this huge crowd seems to continue an impossibly long time, revealing more and more people, until eventually the picture fades and credits roll.

The end shot suggests that the future for the crowd is to be entertained. Distraction is their fate. The Crowd draws on Metropolis and anticipates Chaplin’s Modern Times. And with its vision of America Vidor presages the Great Depression. It is a remarkable film. The melodramatic scripting and the playing of Eleanor Boardman and James Murray, are both superbly handled. Boardman’s resilience and naturalness ground the film in the everyday. James Murray gives a performance which calls up the idea of the Clown. Without ever using exaggerated gesture, Murray in mien and movement at moments suggests both Chaplin and Buster Keaton: the both archetypal victims of fate. Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Duke of Burgundy
Peter Strickland (UK 2015) Sidse
Babett Knudson; Monica Swinn

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 6 Mar 2015; Ticket: £9.00

Insecticide…the bugs have the excuse of being dead

My feeling after viewing the Duke of Burgundy was that I had viewed a sub-standard piece of formulaic erotica directed by a director so seduced by his own imagery, that he is unable to make films any more. The film dominated by Strickland’s input as writer director feels like a love note to himself, a contemporary exercise in narcissism .

The Duke of Burgundy is an indulgent graceless movie that lacking tensions and ideas reveals Strickland as a film monger, who in this movie exploits form and structure without content to engender the illusion that his films have some sort of substance.

In Katalin Varga Strickland made extensive use of landscape to extend out the emotional mood of his revenge narrative; in Berberian Sound Studio he made similar use of Sound Track to feed and extend the layered narrative threads. In both these movies the form and structure of the material fed directly into the film’s themes and subject matter: revenge in the case of Katalin and in Berberian, a notion of evil.

Visual parallels and sound fx, as types of bolted on imagery can be a director’s cheap trick or a sign pointing to something about the nature of the film. In the sense that they don’t cost much and there is little risk involved in the exploitation of this type of material there needs to be some sort of signage. The cut away landscape shot in a drama demands the audience to make links implicit in the juxtaposition of the two different sources of imagery. The use of suggestive and emotive sound as an intensifier, is a stimulus that imposes itself on the audience’s anticipation of and grasp of what is happening on screen. It is almost impossible for an audience to either disattend it or disassociate strong suggestive sound effects from accompanying visual material.

These devices used profligately are cheap tricks. Cheap tinny tricks can of course be turned to cinema gold if the director understands something about the purpose of the film. If there is a understanding of the worth, the truth content of the film that corresponds to the extrinsic devices. Sometimes the signage comprises a moral (or historical) step outside of the parameters of the film, an induced reference that connects all the material. This idea of reference which underlies films by Godard, von Trier, Haneka, is lacking in Strickland’s film.

Katalin Varga perhaps justifies its vegetative references, Berberian Sound Studio collapses in on itself unable to bear the weight of its soundscaped and infested netherworlds. The Duke of Burgundy simply retreads Strickland’s previously used tricks into the vacuous premise of a soft porn scenario delivered with high end stylistic politically correct gloss. The action shots of the film, similar to other high end soft porn vehicles (L’Histoire d’O) are characterised by long meaningful looks between the players (meaningful only if the audience decides to impute meaning to them, seeing in them something beyond director’s instructions). These looks are always characterised by a lack of blinking, blinking being an action of the eye, an event, which interrupts the durational flow of the look and hence changes the shot and the director’s imputed meaning of the shot. The mannered non blinking looks are complemented by a equally mannered delivery the the lines of the dialogue. The dialogue is delivered in the sort of dead pan abstracted manner that might belie the production of a Monte Python SM spoof.

So the Duke of Burgundy all gets a bit silly. For all the paraphernalia of seamed stockings, high heeled boots, bodices, bondage and SM persiflage that defines the politically correct relationship between the female leads in their big house, with their big bed, this movie runs on empty.

Interlaid (no pun intended) with this gash formulaic footage are an multiple cutaways to two kinds of visuals: landscapes (mostly trees) as in Varga, and specimen bugs pinned to display boards ( I device I first saw used in the 1965 movie the Collector). The scapes are mostly fixed point shots, the bugs are mostly tracked. The bugs belong to Evelyn who enjoys entomological studies. The multiple intercutting of the bugs and trees seems an act of despair by Strickland. The Duke of Burgundy script, lacking in tensions or externalities has no where to go and ends up going nowhere. Void of meaning Strickland appeals to the conceit of the audience, asking them to find meaning (or perhaps escape) where there is none. To the long looks between Evelyn and Cynthia Strickland adds the trees and the bugs asking the viewer to buy into spliced in manipulation rather than significance. The use of sound effects in the film, likewise replays Berberian, trying to overwhelm the viewer with the suggestion that something is happening, when there is nothing except the presentation of turgid stylisation of SM.

Filled out sound effects and tracks, incessant cutaways to eternalities without referents, endless looks between puppet actresses, are symptomatic of a lazy director, whose film empty of content has only saggy stylised form, characterised by baggy shots, leaden pace and no tension. Adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Timbuktu Abderrahmane Sissako (Mauritania / Fr 2014 ) Ibrahim Ahmed Viewed: Quad Cinema NYC USA; 2nd March 2015; Ticket:

Where to run….? Only to death.. ? ….and Allah?

Sissako’s ‘Timbuktu’ opens and closes with running shots. The film opens with a mute tracking shot of a gazelle fleeing through desert scrub from the Ansar Dine (Islamist fundamentalists) fighters who have taken control of the Timbuktu area. In the final shot Toya, the herders’ daughter who we have just seen orphaned by the Ansar Dine, runs gasping with despair towards the camera.

Neither the gazelle nor Toya have any future, both are quarry. The gazelle’s future we know: it will be run down until exhausted and then have its throat slit. Toya’s future is also certain. With no one to protect her she will be captured and either killed or forcibly married to a fighter, one of whom has been circling her mother even when her mother was protected by her father Kadir. When Kadir is killed by Ansar Dine, Toya’s life has ended,: it is difficult to see any future for her.

I think it is this notion of the future that constitutes the question that inspires Sissako’s film.

And it is a question that is put into relief by one extraordinary shot in the middle of the film. Viewed from a promontory we see a big wide view of the river. Kasim has just had a fight in the river with the fisherman and accidently shot him. The river is shallow and slow moving, not more than a meter deep. On the right hand side of frame we see the prone body of the fisherman. Whilst to his left, Kadim exhausted wades across to the left hand side river bank away from the dying man, who staggers up for a few paces before his final collapse. The river flows through the increasing gap between the two men, the alive and the dead. The river flows through the shot opening up space for us to think about the nature of the forces that we have seen unleashed in the early part of the film, and wondering how these forces will be respond to this event: a killing.

I think this river shot is the key shot in the Timbuktu scenario. I think Sissako inserted as a key shot: the conjuction of the eternal and the flowing, the sometime terrifying vicissitudes of the everyday within which we have to live.

In ‘Timbuktu’ (the film) the people experience change in the very grain of their lives. But strangely enough not to the rhythm of life. The people are exemplified by the small family of herders, Kadim, Satima and Toya, about whom a significant section of the film revolves. They live under canvas with their small herd of cattle. Enriched with music that has become illicit their life, is rhythmic and honest. Sissako lets us see through them the intense beauty of beings integrated both with themselves and their environment. And almost from the first time we see them we know that they are doomed. Foredoomed by the merciless forces that have now entered their lives and will inevitably destroy them.

The people we see in ‘Timbuktu’ are only a small group but representative of the millions of people whose lives have been destroyed and smashed up by the emergence of a strain of ruthless intolerant fundamentalist Islam that has developed and advanced as a moral religious political and social force across huge swathes of the Middle East, Africa and Asia. ‘Timbuktu’ is an intimate portrayal of the forces at work in the particular context of Mali society and the dessert landscape which has formed and shaped human relations through many ages. But here as everywhere the question raised is what happens next? How will the living adopt and come to terms with life under a new and uncertain order. What resources are needed to go on living?

Sissako’s film is set in Timbuktu (but not shot in the town itself) and its surrounding countryside. The country landscape with its quality of the eternal, the townscape with its quality of an ancient and unchanging focus of life, are both subjected to brutal usurpation by alien forces. The town occupied, the countryside penetrated. The town people subject to an regime of intolerance imposed with religiously legitimised certainty and defined by extreme punishment. The country people where once they watched their animals the wind and the stars now watch out for the arrival of the new Masters the enforcers of the new order.

Sissako’s scenario captures the adaptations made by the people to the sudden imposition of series of absolute laws. In a series of surreal cameos we see people clinging to the outward form of previous enjoyments whilst having to forego their essence: ‘air’ music without music, football played without the ball. The odd illusion of the rhythm of life unchanged but everyting changed. The new order, proclaimed in the streets, is particularly aimed at the repression of women’s presence in the public domain, neither women’s hands nor their feet may be seen, socks and gloves have to be worn at all times. But the women represented by Sissako when threatened are not cowed. They return the gaze of the men as equals.

And it at this point that Sissako’s film seems to illuminate something about the way in which violent extremist groups interact and operate with captured populations. Their occupation centres on an ‘Allah’ discourse, and their claim to legitimate power by representing the will of ‘Allah’. Timbuktu is an ongoing and substantive discourse relating to the nature of Allah and Islam and the claim by groups like Ansar Dine to legitimise their power in relation to: people’s activities, the status of women and the practice of Sharia Law.

One of the opening scenes is a debate between an Imam of Timbuktu and a religious spokesmen for the new order. The Mullah simply cannot accept the extremist interpretation and practice of Islam: he does not recognise it for it is in essence without mercy. But the extremist position is that justice is literally for Allah, they simply carry out his will. The jihadist sentiment similar in portent to the words of the blood thirsty Christian Bishop, justifying massacre at the siege of Beziers: “God will recognise his own.”

So it is a Law without mercy that is practiced upon the people, a practice that is reminiscent of the early days of young zealot commissars touring the USSR bringing soviet ‘justice’ to the furthest reaches of the Empire. The new order the Ansar Dine do not shout bully or enforce in an individually expressive statement of power. Their justice is a quiet insistance. The extreme discourse mediates itself through practice of the ‘law’. The occupying militants are channels of the will of Allah. The brutality, the stoning the whipping the executions are carried through with silent resolve: legitimate sentences of Islamic law.

In ‘Timbuktu’ Sissako carefully exposes the claims of the Islamists to represent the pure practice of Islam. The extremists cannot answer the opposing point of view of the local Imam except by force. As the occupation proceeds to impose itself, cultural and racial splits are exposed. The occupiers whatever legitimacy they claim, can only impose their will through the application of legalised terror. The primacy of the sexual desires exposed among the young hoodlums as they forcibly take wives for themselves by right of conquest not consent. And in the central theme of the film, the Sharia law through which they claim legitimacy is itself shown to be a façade, a cover for hypocritical carnality.

The herds people, representitive of harmony and beauty are destroyed. The head of the small family, Kadir is sentanced to death for killing a man in a fight, perhaps accidently in self defence. At his ‘trial’ under Sharia, the commutation of the death sentence was set impossibly high by the demand (for thirty cattle when he only has seven) for blood money compensation he does not posess. As he cannot not meet the bloodmoney he must die. The impossible demand almost certainly stems from the extremist’s second in command’s desire to possess Kadir’s wife Satima. A desire not possible to fulfil as long as Satima is married to Kadir. Once Kadir is dead, then she and their daughter Toya can be taken.

Realising this and knowing that she has been betrayed by Ansar Dine exploitation of Sharia to get rid of her husband so that one of their commanders can take her, Satima joins her husband at his execution, immediately dieing with him in the hail of bullets that greet her arrival.

Sissako’s film has been accused of not being critical enough of the Islamist extremists. But Sissako is not making a Hollywood action movie. He also knows that depictions that misrepresent what happens are counterproductive. The militants are as they are, by their own lights lawful. Sissako has made a film that is in accordance with what is experienced: that extremist fundamentalism is partly a legitimacy issue, and that the ‘Allah’ discourse, and the corruption innate in claiming monopoly of truth and mercy, is where the extremists can be defeated.

Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Birdman or the unexpected virtue of ignorance Alejandro Inarritu (USA 2014) Michael Keaton

Viewed Tyneside
Cinema 20 Jan 15; ticket: £8.50

Showboat camera…

Inarritu’s film peddles a film version of magical
realism, a dishonest melange of images where
real and imaginary are seamlessly mixed to manifest the idea of a sort of
omnipotency through will. Inarritu’s
elision of the real and imagined/hallucinated accords with the dominant theme
of contemporary Hollywood scripts: the individuation of life and the abandonment
of the social. Hollywood’s scripts
comprise multiple variants of the individualised: ‘story’ ‘dream’ or ‘overcoming’. The Birdman scenario mines this worked out
vein of vainglory. And the protagonist Riggan is an assimilation of these
‘dream’ vanities; an all too contemporary character, playing out all too contemporary conceits.

From his literary originated material Inarritu has
contrived a confused story line. An
SFX superstar wants to do his Hamlet thing by producing an on Broadway, ‘art’
play based on a Robert Carver short story: ‘What we talk about when we talk
about love. ‘ Of course this being 2014
not 1981 when the story was written, the point of the film story is melodrama
and action. Inarritu replaces the passive ending written by Carver with the
film convention of guns and screeching dialogue/ monologue (since no one
listens to anyone all dialogue is in effect monologue). The story is confused because its subject focus
is never clear. Love, schizophrenia, (split personality) and personal ambition
all get mashed up to meet the needs of the camera as it doggedly pursues its
quarry. Personal relations are mixed in with magico realism – telekinesis
and levitation (the movie’s first image), to produce the workflow of a seemingly
seamless camera which follows through the action of the whole movie (more
thoughts on this later).

For most of the film schizo Riggan (with his
hallucinations visions or whatever) is compartmentalised into particular places
in the shot flow where he occupies his own private space. His schizo mental states are not represented
in his relations to other aspects of the script – relations to his play as a
project, his family etc. This compartmentalisation
which asks the audience to put into the brackets the nature of his images of
paranormal power, is breeched by the scripting of final sequences which depict Roggan’s real or
imagined ability to fly. In the last
sequence Riggan’s daughter looking for
her father out of the top floor hospital
window appears to either affirm the actuality of his being able to fly or colludes in Riggan’s
schizo fabrication. Either way the film
at this point becomes a fantasy, a
product suitable for the delusions of an infantilised society.

Birdman’s confusion of subject matter is compounded
by its jack-ass cod philosophy.
Sententious meaningless truisms in the form of words (as beloved by Terrence
Malick) run like a swollen sewer through
the script. Epitomised by the film’s
alternative title and the clapped out questions in the beginning: did you get
what you wanted from this life? And Riggen’s
opening soliloquy asking: “How did we get here …? We don’t belong in this
shithole…”. Roughtrade wiseacring a la
Taxi Driver. But all these faux maxims in
terms of the Birdman scenario, don’t
mean anything, they lack grounding in
the script or scenario. Like an aerosol
cream layer of a cake, injected into the script they comprise only hot air.

The film is actually held together, both content and
form, by the way the camera structures the reality experience for the
viewer. The camera work comprises the
illusion of capturing and composing the images as one seamless shot. The camera in general follows the action of
Riggan or picks up tangential engagements on the side before returning to flow and
picking up the protagonist again. It is
a dogged camera never shaken off. In
fact it is like a dog, with a dogs eye of view of what is happening. Inarritu is never able to establish an ‘eye’
or define any perspective in relation to what we are seeing. In fact we cannot see because the
camera blocks our vision.

This camera is not a privileged spectator. Inarritu’s camera as an information carrier is
like internet billboards or social media picking up multitudinous strands of
comment and image but failing to put together anything that coheres or
converges on a theme. This is a self
satisfied camera. A camera that regards
itself as the star of the movie. The
camera is a showboater happy to jump up from behind itself and project itself
into the limelight. The camera in itself
replicates social media in as much as platforms such as Facebook and Twitter
are in themselves the stars of their own shows.
In themselves they are the
signification of their usage. The
medium is the message. The subject
matter of Birdman, like that social media is mostly insignificant seldom going
beyond indulgence of melodrama and ranting dialogues. The real message of Birdman is the perfection
of a certain type of technical achievement and the omnipresence of recording. The camera is the star.

The key to Birdman’s success is that the film replicates
something of the matrix of life in the era of social media (twitter starts to
play an increasingly significant role in the script). Like social media, the technology is the star
that feeds back to the viewer a world where: there is no centre no point of
view, images and text seamlessly stream in from multiple inputs, data overload feeds constant acceleration of
media and information in a confusion of voices and digital media feeds and accelerated
emotionally driven feedback drives cycles of re-action. This is a dog world, a world of reaction.

My own response to Birdman is that it is a film that
does not allow the viewer to see. Like social media its object is to wrap up the
viewer in a delusional world that has a delirious quality of being real, but
simply allows the user the more space to immerse themselves in its shadows.

Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

He Who Gets Slapped
Victor Sjostrom (USA 1924) Lon
Chaney; Pauline Goddard; John Gilbert

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 10 Jan 2015 Ticket: £6

Retrocrit: Rituals of eternity

Victor Sjostrom does not only directs He Who Gets Slapped, but also plays the role of psychic ring master presenting his film as an elaborate ritual. The core of Sjostrom’s vision is the ritual, the deliberate playing out of the forces he has assembled in a choreography of death. The film reminded me of: the ceremonial aspect of the bull fight; of the elaborate costumes of the auto da fe with the doomed penitents dressed in white and of large folk processions commemorating ancient sacrifice and fertility rites.

The elements put into play in the story of ‘He’ all have a primal quality: theft and humiliation, ritual self punishment, revenge and death. Sjostrom from first to last image sets the story in this symbolic framing opening and closing the movie with elided superimposed images of the spinning globe, the ball and the circus ring dissolving into each other. An eternal recurrent destiny holds us all. Death is the only escape; in the films final image the clowns hurl ‘He’ ‘s corpse off the ring parapet into the void.

Silent films with their immobile sets, fixed camera and gestural playing contain the seeds for scenarios drawing on ideas developed out of archaic ceremony. Seldom is this potential realised. Most film companies and directors played out the scripts for melodrama: complex plots held together with regular inter-title cards. Noticeably ‘He’ needs few inter-titles. The film ‘s flow guides the audience’s attention to the inner psychological unravelling of the scenario. With the elemental forces set in play the characters and scenes speak in the screen images. There are extraordinary visual sequences: ‘He’ before the academy with its mocking academicians; ‘He’ in the circus ring where surrounded by and regaled by the clowns in their penitent white make up and costumes, he is subjected to pain and humiliation for the amusement of the public and his own personal need to suffer. A perfect alignment of an objectify and a subjectivity. The power of these sections carries an empathic charge for the viewer who needs little extra information as to the motivation of ‘He’. Trapped in ritualistic abasement there is only one way out: revenge and death. Primary elements.

Sjostom’s visual design complements his ritual form. The lighting is stage-like. The characters often caught in high light, with the settings around them darkly etched in. The visual look is reminiscent of Rembrandt’s paintings, calling to mind that Rembrandt’s powerful use of light effect to highlight the depiction of his characters and settings. Sjostrom’s lighting also heightens the psychological intensity of ‘He’s’ experience isolating him and allowing the viewer space to see. One shot in particulate stands out: a shot of ‘He’ in clown costume and make-up. When we see ‘He’s’ clown make up lines drawn through his eyes and the disturbing three tufts of stiff hair sticking out symmetrically from his bald head there is the overwhelming feeling of understanding the lies ahead for this doomed abused figure. We see there is nowhere left for him to go. In Sjostrom’s devising of ‘He’ we can see at once why Bergman claimed to have been so much influenced by him and how the same sort of thinking, the unity of psychic truth and devised settings is implicit to Bergman’s cinema.

By using archetypal material, Sjostrom understands that the power of the setting and the form of the story releases his actors from the need to adopt the mannerist gestural playing that characterises many films of this era. At times the acting comes across as naturalistic, without artifice and Lon Chaney’s performance in particular has an unforced quality that doesn’t over play or indulge the nature of his sacrificial role but allows it to unfold with dignity as the simple consequence of the decisions he has made. Again there is something here of Bergman, certainly as seen in the character of the knight in the Seventh Seal. An underplaying of the fate that one has freely chosen. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk