Star & Shadow

The Duke of Burgundy  Peter Strickland (UK;  2014)   Sidse Babett Knudson; Monica Swinn        

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 29 Jan 2026; Ticket: £7.00

Insecti=cide…the bugs have the excuse of being dead

My feeling after viewing Strickland’s ‘Duke of Burgundy’ was that I had viewed a sub-standard piece of formulaic erotica directed by a director seduced by his own amour propre. The film dominated by Strickland’s input as writer director, feels like a love note to himself, an exercise in a particular sort of contemporary narcissism.

The title is taken from the name of a type of highly patterned butterfly of which we see many in the course of the film, mostly dead, like the film itself.

The Duke of Burgundy is an indulgent movie lacking tensions and ideas that reveals Strickland as a film monger, who in this movie manipulates form and structure 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 his 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’ the idea of evil as a pervasive overflowing overwhelming psychic force.   

Intercut visual imagery and sound fx as filmic devices can work as signifiers pointing to something in the nature of the film. The use of landscape or skyscape shots cut into the flow of a drama implies that the audience should make some sort of cognitive or emotional link (or perhaps make an absurdist non-link) implicit in the juxtaposition of the two different sources of  imagery.  Likewise the use of suggestive emotive or violent sound superimposed on images out of the visual context is a signifier or a manipulator that radically changes the viewers’ state of mind and understanding of what they are seeing on screen. 

 ‘Katalin Varga’ justifies its cut-aways to scenic imagery by suggesting the linking of the idea of revenge with the forces of nature; ‘Berberian Sound Studio’s’ demonic sound fx work effectively for the first half of the scenario before collapsing in on themselves, overused and unable to sustain the weight of its soundscaped and infested netherworlds.  In ‘The Duke of Burgundy’ there’s a lack of underlying idea.  Strickland’s filmic devices register as tricks, spurious effects used to fill out his soft porn scenario,  to leaven footage  that is otherwise drearily monotonous.  For all the SM baggage the seamed stockings, high heeled boots, bodices, encasement, bondage and SM persiflage eventally come across as rather silly but not particularly interesting.  

‘The Duke of Burgindy’ locks into the mistress/servant game that  Cynthia and Evelyn are playing (a game that sometimes breaks down).  The relationship is characterised  by long mannered invariant looks that pass between the two players and Strickland’s dialogue.  I know that most of the dialogue takes place ‘within the game’ but delivered in dead-pan deliberation the actual lines are at the level of a subpar Monty Pythan spoof.

The Duke of Burgundy script, without a driving idea or perception, lacking in tensions has no where to go and ends up going nowhere.  To the relationship between Evelyn and Cynthia Strickland adds the trees the bugs and bug talk asking the viewer to buy into spliced manipulation rather than significance.   Strickland’s film traps the audience on the surface of life but it’s a flat dull surface.   

If you really identify with flat surface, then this is the movie for you.  So perhaps it’s an identity thing.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Producers           Mel Brooks (USA; 1967) Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God    Werner Herzog (FDR; Peru; Mex; 1972) Klaus Kinski

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema new Year Jan 2026

new lamps for old

Mel Brooks’ ‘The Producers’ is a one joke movie (it’s a good joke) built around the proposition of making money out of a scam by spoofing Hitler.  Werner Herzog’s ‘Aguirre’ set during the period of the Spanish conquest of South American is a visceral recreation of the the insanity of colonialism.

Look up into the firmament of socio-political history and gaze at the stars.  From our time anchored perspective some are rising, some falling.   Star Churchill is definitely on the wane.  Star Hitler by way of contrast is on the rise.  Re-appraisal of Winston’s colonial record has caused him to slip in the heavens.  Hitler who was below the horizon for most of the 20^th century has in the last twenty years become well visible particularly on dark nights.

The last fifty years have witnessed the unabashed rise in genocides and radical ethnic cleansing.  World wide there have been attempts to intimidate and if necessary to drive or wipe out civilian populations whose diverse ethnicity is seen as a challenge to a dominant racial or nationalist grouping.  As these politically inspired  racial or socioreligious murderous campaign have increased – the Bosnians, Rohingya, African Sudanese, and most visibly the Palestinians – so have apologias for Hitler started to counter balance his pariah status.  In targeting diverse civilian populations either as a political ploy of distraction or as an easy means of state/individual enrichment through plunder, Hitler’s light starts to shine through. Typically from the hard core right there is the usual formulaic acknowledgment that he went too far (too far being a euphemism standing in for multiple genocides and homicidal wars); all told he did much that was right.  What interests the apologists most is Hitler’s strap line: ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer’.  Hitler’s creation of a state consolidated by one regimented political party disciplined by terror unified by the creation of a common racial enemy: the Jews.  

As advertising agencies know one means of familiarising a brand is to relate it to a friendly human face – hence the use of smiling celebrities to front out sales messages.  Foibles and imperfections are ok, they can all help the consumer associate with a product.  This type of thought makes ‘The Producers’ more problematic viewing today than when it was originally released.  Brooks depicts the Hitler regime as an all singing all dancing spectacle; not the hard assed reality of the grim faced Nuremberg rallies (no one smiles in Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens) that were the hallmark of Nazism.   Of course `The Producers’ is a spoof, intended to be outrageously silly.  But in today’s environment of the normalisation of mass slaughter, perhaps it backfires.  The representation of Hitler as a dotty ‘camp’ figure with a friendly smiling face, who inspires the gushing sung out acclamation: ‘Springtime for Hitler and Germany, Winter for Poland and France, Deutschland is happy and Gay,…Look out here comes the Master Race’ – is exactly on message for the current crop of authoritarian despots.  Hitler as a progenitor of MAGA: a silly boy who did some bad things but overall was on the right path.  Brooks’ movie may have been made to exploit Hitler for laughs.  At first they laughed at Trump: fewer people are laughing today.  Now ‘The Producers’ feels like it could be incorporated into the rehabilitative wave set on justifying Hitler as part of the broader campaign to legitimise the murderous policies and genocide practices of today’s despots.   

Although most people viewing Brooks’ film will enjoy and laugh at the cleverly extended joke (delivered by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) the passage of time has fundamentally altered the film’s premise. What was seen as a bit of harmless fun in 1967 has in the 60 odd years since it was made taken on a more disturbing dimension. We see Hitler transformed from a mass murderer into the innocent happy  acceptable face of power, on the way to becoming a poster boy for the current crop of ruthless dictators.  It would be difficult to remake this film in these times.

They seek Gold.

Re-seeing Herzog’s ‘Aguirre’ it felt like the core themes underlying the film had intensified in relevance since it was made.  More than ever the insanity of greed and desire sing through the depiction of Aguirre’s colonial project, as if the whole history of colonialism up to Trump had been condensed into the Herzog’s idea.   It’s a quest movie in which nothing gets in the way of the pursuit of wealth and glory. The Spanish came seeking gold the gold of their dreams; they ended up both with precious metals and ruling the vast lands of S America.  This is also the story of much of colonial history India, Indonesia, China, West Africa: they who came to extract ended up as rulers over vast lands.

Through the character of Aguirre (played on the edge of madness by Klaus Kinski) we see that the story of conquest is the story possession: being possessed by demons.  Blinded by the dream of gold and conquest, whatever the cost, Aguirre’s demons drive him.  Rooted in his psyche they equate power with terror and violence.  To attain his goal of emulating Pizarro nothing’s allowed to stand in the way. He forces his company through impassable terrain, raging waters; he kills, put his company at risk, to follow righteousness of his path.

What gives the film immediacy and authenticity is its visceral quality.  Shot on location on and about tributaries of the Amazon, the viewer sees that the players (and by extension also the crew) are facing many of the same hardships experienced by the conquistadores.   No studio sets, no trick shots or ‘green backgrounds’ Herzog’s scenario is grounded in the actual. And it’s through this actuality that the audience gain measure of the nature of these conquistadores at this time with the resources available to them.  Their main resource was that of the insanity of will.  The colonial project, the film project, Aguirre Herzog Pizarro were driven by the forces of maniacal megalomania.  South America, Middle East, the Indies, then Africa, Vietnam Afghanistan, Iraq all destined to suffer the violence of White Man’s demons and his greed to possess what is not his.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Apartment    Billy Wilder (1960; USA)  Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine;   Fred MacMurray

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 31^st Dec 2025; ticket: £7

the coming of the ID

I saw Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’ when it first came out as young boy about 12 years old.  I remembered three things about it: Jack Lemmon’s performance (as C C Baxter), the wit of the script and thirdly the images of the office of Consolidated Insurance where Lemmon worked:  a vast hall, a cathedral of commerce and capitalism.  It was filled with hundreds of desks in serried rows stretching out horizontally and laterally forever into the distance. An incredible sight.  It seemed to me impossible that such a huge array of workers could exist, impossible to imagine what all these people were doing (perhaps it didn’t matter whether they did anything; so deployed, like ceremonial parades of soldiers marching past the great leader, they were simply a symbol of the power to compel such orderings): impossible not to feel that this space did anything else but crush the soul of those chained to their desks in a grid iron of overwhelming banality. 

I remembered nothing of the role of Shirley MacLaine, of which more later.

Wilder opens ‘The Apartment’ with a  montage of New York City.  From above we see the great city, we see its monumental buildings, moving in we track the workers on their way to labour in these huge structures. The final shot in the sequence establishes CC working at his desk, behind him we see the vastness of the office space on the 29^th floor. On this second viewing it immediately occurred to me that I’d seen almost the same shot in King Vidor’s 1928 movie ‘The Crowd’.  ‘The Crowd’ follows the life and career of an ordinary American John Sims who ends up as another expendable clerical donkey working for a large corporation in another vast office space that expands to look even larger than ‘The Apartment’ space and contains thousands of workers all bent over their desks, heads bowed in existential submission.

‘The Crowd’ is a ‘silent movie, a melodrama but Vidor’s use of symbolic imagery takes the viewer outside of the binding clinch of the plot.  Vidor’s realisation of the office is to make the space resemble hell.  This world of work is a creation of the devil.  The vast space filled out with bent-over clerks arranged in lines stretching back to infinity tells that the individuals here are lost and helpless. Trapped: there is no way out of this world.  Vidor’s movie is a moral statement.

Vidor is pointing to the death of America as land of opportunity. All that’s left is empty rhetoric and the mesmeric quasi religious repetition that anyone in America can make it.  John Sims’s father drills into him that through hard work and ambition anyone can move from Log House to White House.  It’s become a chimerical lie.  In reality the large corporations have taken over the country with the consequence that achievement in America is restricted by oligarchy and nepotism.  ‘The Crowd’ chronicles the consequences for those cheated by the promise of ‘The Dream’. A life of endless drudgery and insecurity as a rent and wage slave.  Promised the world but rewarded only with the distraction of entertainment.  ‘The Crowd’ is an indictment that refuses to conclude on a note of hope.

Move on 30 years 1960 and ‘The Apartment’.  It a different ballgame.  We have the same setting, the huge dehumanised office space, the desks occupied by those condemned to labour in such places.  But Wilder’s perception is quite different.  The office space is not seen from its evident surface as a symptom of oppression; the focus has shifted to what lies beneath the surface.  Wilder strips away the surface and represents the office space not as hell but as a rhizome of sexual desires. Underneath each of those desks lurks an activated ID, desirous of freedom.  Escape from the reality of work lies not in collective solidarity, rather through individualised fantasy pivoting about the needs and desires of the body.  There is of course gender differentiation: for the men sex is both power and physical satisfaction, for the women the body for all its pleasures is a means to desired security.  And as represented by Wilder the corporate office is a sort of executive’s harem, a privilege that goes along with the key to the executive locker room.   ‘The Apartment’ signifies that by 1960’s the representation of the work situation has shifted from above the belt to below the belt; from the representation of oppression to the satisfaction of and indulgence of individuated fantasy. 

And C C Baxter?  He’s a below the belt operator.  Whereas in the hard assed world of the office workers in ‘The Crowd’ the division between workers and executives had the structural elements of the Indian caste system: no way across the surface, everyone stays put.  However with the development of the rhizome of desire the possibility opens up for individuals like CC to tunnel through the system and  working from beneath the surface, able to corrupt it for their own purposes.  Wilder thereby in ‘The Apartment’ acknowledges that other elemental factor that destroys what’s left of the American dream: corruption – and corruption’s handmaiden, cynicism.

‘The Apartment’ is a sitcom in the ‘Whitehall Farce’ mode animated by mistimed assignations. Wilder’s shrewd scripting locates it at the core of the social and political relations that were starting to characterise American society. 

I remembered Jack Lemmon’s playing even years later because his performance reminded me of Buster Keaton.  Lemmon at his best has the stoic deadpan facial reactions that were BK’s trademark.  Of course Lemmon smiles in the film, but then ‘The Apartment’ is a talkie.  It’s much more difficult to avoid smiling in the talking pictures and BK never really came good after the end of the Silent Era.

But I had no memory of Shirley McLain (plays Fran).  Perhaps it has to do with agency? Fran like the other women characters in the film has no agency.  For all that he is put upon Wilder’s script assigns CC Baxter with choice.  MacLaine is just a puppet of the script, a pawn in the game of plot machination, having to duck dive bob and weave to enable the narrative to come to its rather staid conclusion. But the cost to MacLaine is the destroying of any semblance of the integrity of her character.  The low point comes when the the script demands she declare her infatuation with the bossman Jeff.   MacLaine tries hard with these lines.  She can’t make ‘em stick: it is simply unbelievable that anyone could love this croaking reptilian sleezeball.  At this point, Fran’s credibility disolves like silk in acid, leaving the audience indifferent to her fate.

Overall ‘The Apartment’ represents a low point in Hollywood’s depiction of women though reflecting accurately the status of women in America in the 1950’s.  Although Jeff’s wife kicks him out, in general the female parts are demeaning. Women are represented as beings without agency as little more than second rate citizens and objects for male sexual exploitation.  As a specimen cultural product of the era Wilder’s movie is a sure indicator that the gender imbalance in power of the times had reached criticality and was in dire need of radical correction.  Interesting to note 1960’s saw the dynamic manifestation of contemporary feminism start to make some inroads into the patriarchal hegemony.   “The Apartment’ is an amusing comedy, but with women the butt of much of the humour the thought occurs as the extent to which it may have caused female viewers to look at the film from a another particular angle and draw their own conclusions.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

It was just an Accident     Jamal Panahi  (2025; Iran Fr Lux)  Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afsari

viewed Tyneside Cinema 9^th Dec 2025; ticket £13.25

no accident

The core of Panahi’s film is the simple question of what it is to be human under extreme circumstances.

The opening sequence of ‘It was just an Accident’ is  a compressed expression of some of Panahi’s main concerns.  A car, man driving his wife beside him, travels through the night. Loud music playing and his excitable child in the back distract.  Suddenly there’s a thud.  The man gets out and finds that he has run over a dog, injured it, so he kills it.  As he drives on his wife remarks in response to the child’s upset question:  “It was just an accident…” She goes on to peddle some justificatory religious cant about it being God’s will, the dog’s death part of God’s design.  

The driver as it turns out is the prison torturer who’s later taken hostage by one of his victims, the which provides the fulcrum for the film’s plot.

In ‘Taxi Tehran’ Panahi is asked by his niece how films start? Panahi tells her films start with a perception.  A perception. Of course it depends on what sort of perception.  Hollywood’s driving perception is that a film project will hit big at the box-office.  Panahi’s ‘perception’ relates to a state of seeing, seeing something that warrants attention, that warrants a film. 

Prior to making ‘It was just an Accident’ (JA) Panahi had spent some seven months in prison for subversive anti-Islamic State of Iran activities. This was not his first stretch inside Iran’s prison system where torture and maltreatment are routine concomitants of incarceration.  But perhaps this last visit sharpened his insight into the differences between the victims of cruelty and its perpetrators.  The difference  between the corrupted and the innocent, the justified and the unjustified.  A perception.

At the heart of the perception is a fundamental psychic contradiction between the prison officers and their helpless victims.  

The former murder torture mutilate torment and subject their victims to psychological terror such as fake preparation for execution.  They carry out their acts of violence on a daily routine basis, often in an arbitrary whimsical manner, without compunction.  They wear the uniform that distinguishes them, marks them off, and which gives them the right to abuse the prisoners both for punishment and for extracting information.  Their cruelty is mediated and condoned by the ideological corrosion of religion that declaims the implementation of a regime of death and torture as the immutable will of God.  The God from whom they claim this dispensation is simply a hideous projection of the Islamic state’s desire to eradicate anyone who at any level opposes it.   The prison officers have the basic attributes of a shared humanity stripped out of them unable to relate to the pain of others.  

And the victims?  

As Panahi observes. they suffer not just pain but horror of an enforced intimacy with those who inflict the pain both on themselves and others.  In the closeness to their guards they become familiar with the face the body the voice of the tormentors as they torture and kill.   The sufferer is released into a world of the imagination by their ordeal. How will they be able to get out of this darkness; to eat properly; to be with those tbey love; to take revenge on the killers and torturers who have smashed up their body and mind.  The fantasy of having the tormenters in your grasp to do unto them as they did unto you.  You’d kill them like a rabid dog.  Wouldn’t you? 

Black humour.

But as to ‘revenge’ Panahi charts its course as something like a black comedy.  Vahid kidnaps Eghbal (his prison torturer, nicknamed Pegleg) with the intention of taking his revenge by killing him.   But as Vahid is in the process of burying Eghbal alive, Eghbal denies being Eghbal.  Vahid, ‘suddenly’ doubtful, desists and having rendered Eghbal unconscious and stuffed him in a box, then proceeds to a round of visitations to other political prisoners tortured by Pegleg.  My thinking is that as the round of attempted identification proceeds it becomes clear that although the victims want revenge they cannot carry through with it.  Their individual suffering at the hands of Pegleg has perhaps deepened their feeling of what it is to be human of their gratitude for life.  They cannot kill. They cannot torture.  More than this their arroused compassion even extends farcically to saving the life of Pegleg’s wife.  When finally Pegleg is trussed up like a turkey around the bole of a tree, with Vahid’s knife ready, he flings it down, Vahid cannot kill.  What he and  Shiva actually do is confront and challenge Pegleg passionately and verbally, to his face.  They cannot harm him but they can shame him, confront him with what he is and what he has done to them.  This is the time for truth.   Truth is spoken as catharsis and vindication of the human spirit.  And it breaks Pegleg open he understands and is overwhelmed by his own tears.  He is released.

But Panahi’s instincts as a film maker leave him unable to end his film on anything other than a note of black humour.  In the course of JA we have heard how Pegleg could always be recognised by the sound he made as he walked: a shuffle then the thud of his wooden leg as it came down of the floor. A sound and a rhythm. In the final scene Vahid is in his workspace leaning over a bench. Behind him approaching he hears the familiar rhythmic sound of a shuffle followed by a thud.  It is the Panahi’s final dark joke.  Always haunted the victim forgives but never forgets….

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 

Nouvelle Vague      Richard Linklater  (Fr; 2025)  Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch

viewed Tyneside Cinema 8^th Nov 2025; ticket £13.75

old Macdonald had a farm…

Godard’s movies are always about truth; but Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague peddles the false. 

Godard’s films may express his truth; but Godard’s truth is always grounded in the path of  struggle.   Linklater likes the way to be easy going.  Don’t think just recreate and replicate.      ‘Nouvelle Vague’ takes ‘A Bout de Souffle’ (BdS) and degrades it into a period costume dramas with  a  scenario  that panders to a time line filled out with emotive pouting and dialogue lines that exploit best quotes from J-L G.  Linklater’s film is act of manipulation, the false tricked out to represent the real.

I suppose you either like Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’ perhaps finding it has something to novel say about the process of film making – scripts actors directing; or you find it an empty vessel that under the pretext of honouring Godard’s making of ‘A Bout de Souffle’ (Breathless) simply exploits enlarges distorts manipulates certain aspects of the production to churn out cinematic convenience food fit for Netflix.  A MacFilm.

‘Nouvelle Vague’ is presented as a more or less simple replication of the process of making BdS from pre-pre-production to the post production.  Structured chronologically it leads us through Godard’s insistant selling of himself as director, through to his casting and crewing, the shoot and the edit.  Guillaume Marbeck plays J-L G; Zoey Deutch plays Jean Seberg.

The film structures BdS as taking place in constant time a mechanical passage in which only the aspects of the story deemed screen worthy get  on screen.  So we have plenty of time with Godard’s push to direct, his casting of Seburg and then certain scenes in HdS.  The scenes that make it into the scenario are mainly the crowd pleasing exteriors. But it is the scenes in the hotel room, riveting in their intensity  that define Godard’s film.  Viewing  Linklater’s reset you wouldn’t know this.   Linklater likewise skits over the editing.  According to Godard’s DP Raoul Coutard, the film’s expressive vitality (in part due to Godard’s use of jump-cuts) was created in the editing room where Godard had an intuitive feel for how to manipulate his footage.  But the business of splicing film is not sexy, so the cutting room is cut  reduced to one short scene, difficult to comprehend where the editors seem to be initially shocked by Godard’s idea of breaking up and thereby exposing the filmic fabrication of continuity. 

But of course Godard’s cutting through the shiboleths of film construction is honoured in absence by Linklater.   ‘Nouvelle Vague’s ’ script is devoid of Godard’s wit particularly characterised by his use of graphics.  With some filmic wit Linklater could have made a film that played fast with some of Godard’s ideas, including his politics.  Less time with the dullness of replication more time having playing with Godard.  Instead we have to turn our gaze upon on Marbeck and Deutch, doing their imitations going thorough the motion of walking in dead man/woman’s shoes.

Linklater’s final graphic at the end of ‘Nouvelle Vague’  reveals the extent to which he seems to hold Godard, the man the film maker the thinker, in contempt.  It might be that he is unaware of Godard’s legacy or that his anxiety to draw down the money on offer from the French Government, led him to avoid making any political statements in ‘Nouvelle Vague’.  The graphic, white on black, the last image of the film says that Jean Seburg made some 34 films after ‘A Bout de Souffle’….the implication being how beneficial her role in the movie had been to her career.  Let’s all clap hands, nice one J-L G. 

The salient fact about Jean Seberg, that surely must have drawn Godard’s attention was that at the age of 40 she committed suicide in Paris by overdosing on barbituates.  There were however graphic reasons for her death.

Because of Seberg’s support for Black Panthers and other radical organisations in the 1960’s,  Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to use a programme of techniques to harass intimidate defame and discredit her.  As part of this campaign the FBI created the false story that the pregnant Seberg’s child was not fathered by Romain Gary, her husband, but by Raymond Hewitt a Black Panther.  The child died in her womb; its death haunted her for the rest of her life.  Hoover also made sure she was was black listed in Hollywood and pursued her relentlessly for 10 years.  After her death Gary called a press conference in which he blamed the FBI’s campaign against her for her deteriorated mental state. 

This feels more like the story that Linklater should have filmed or somehow referenced in ‘A Bout de Souffle’.  Jean Seberg ended up dead.   Breathless;   Out of breath;  ‘A Bout de Souffle’ literally.   Whacked by the FBI.  As Godard said towards the end of his life:  ‘Cinema is dead.’  Linklater’s film shows that Godard as usual knew what he was talking about.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Ran   Akira Kurosawa  (Japan 1985) Tatsuya Nakadal; Mieko Harada

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 13 Nov 2025; Ticket £7.00

Ran meaning: riot – uprising – disorder; disturbed – confused

Ran is riotous filmic feast in which traditional Japanese plastic arts are promiscuously entangled with Hollywood’s;  in larger writ plastic values of  US and Japanese society and culture are seamlessly (if not shamelessly) interwoven. 

Ran’s confusion of stylistic and expressive affects structures the core underlying motif: a statement by AK about the disintegrative effects caused by the penetration of American values and practice into Japanese culture.  A culture no longer protected by self policed isolation; a society and culture in turmoil but inventive and creative enough, to absorb and replicate on its own terms, to reinvent itself as a hybrid.

Ran (R) is a conscious play on form, a confusion of genre and expression.  It is a triumphant mangling of Hollywood and Japan a sort of filmically structured paean to post war cultural buggery. Ran is witness to AK’s self evident delight in shuffling together: samurai and cowboy; ‘NOH’ acting tradition and US daytime soap  convention; classical Shakespeare and Hollywood; the mobile and the immobile, the vertical and the horizontal.

The large set piece battles are majestically staged but the form of the battles strongly suggests John Ford.   As the army of the King’s son charges on horse and foot across the field it is ambushed by devastating volleys of raking firearm fire decimating the attackers. The opposition of sword spear and bow and arrow against the gun, suddenly re-casts the battle as the traditional Hollywood spectacle pitching primitively armed Native Americans (Red Indians) against the superior arms of the US cavalry with their Colts and Springfields.  The clash of the Samurai warriors instead of being represented as a traditional sword/spear based ritual, is filmed as a Hollywood slaughter vehicle, a massacre ensuant on the mismatch of unequal forces.  The battles in Ran don’t pander to traditional notions of the Japanese Samurai Code.   Death strikes anonymously without honour from a distance.  When the cowboy shoots the lesser armed Sioux or Cheyanne, the gun acts as more than a tool. It is also a valedator.  Its technological supremacy legitimises the victory of the White Man’s culture.  In the same way, atomic weapon technology justified American cultural supremacy.

In Ran AK also exploits the dynamic and expressive possibilities of intermixing two styles of acting tradition which  draw on very different formal expressive ideas and tradition.  Noh tradition: the use of the mask, little or no facial expression; this is not a theatre of expressive faciality, rather of codified gesture where hand and body combine to create a system of signed meanings.  The American soap style in contrast emphasises the face as the expressive medium, with full use of eyes mouth lips and teeth used to convey the required emotion.  The signage in soap is mostly primary animalistic response, like a dog bearing its fangs you don’t need to be conversant with a code of cultural signs to get the meaning.  Likewise the delivery of lines is emotively charged to convey unambiguous intent, even if the words are not explicitly understood.   In the playing of characters such as Lord Hidetora and Lady Kaede, AK synthetically fuses these two opposing acting styles.  The affect is an intensification of tension between the mobile and the immobile.  The audience is caught suspended in anticipation of the character’s response: whether it be control or loss of control.  Lady Kaede initially is all mask, a complex of archaic gestural signage, every movement initiated out of the depths of  theatric stillness.  In one sinewy terrifying moment like a snake pouncing she is at the throat of her brother in law and suddenly all Noh convention is completely abandoned and like a suburban housewife contorting her face she screams at her brother in law to marry her and bring her the head of his wife.  Lady Kaede then with equal suddenness switches back to the still Noh mode of expressive presentation. 

Ran is sometimes described as a Japanese version of King Lear.   Ran is not pure as a narrative form.  AK as part of a culture that traditionally has purity of form at its core, abandons this idea in Ran, and has recourse to the Hollywood idea of adaptation of the material: stripping the scenario down to a simple base line. Ran’s story is a conflation of Macbeth (with which K was very familiar) and a Lear type story, with sons substituted for daughters.  Two ideas welded together: the conceit of power that is unable to see behind the formulaic countenance of love, behind which lurk simmering contempt and desire to usurp; and the mythic disaster caused by a weak usurper unable to resist the destructive forces of the feminine.

Fire seems to me to be the defining filmic element of Ran.  Visually it periodically intrudes and finally dominates the visual field.  In the first sections of Ran AK’s fills frame with horizontal movement.  Bautifully staged pans, the flow of horses and people through and across frame.  This is movement that in all its magnificence suggests continuities, as if it were the template of a timeline.  In the final sequences but also intermittently through the final sections,  ‘fire’ fills frame vertically.  Cutting in disrupting on the vertical axis the easy harmony of flow.   AK has structured into the visual syntax of Ran the core notion of disruption; time itself is subject to being broken, its flow smashed up, disrupted.  This idea built into the grain of Ran is the deepest level of communion with his times as AK understands them.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A House of Dynamite Kathryn Bigalow (2025; USA)  Ensemble piece that includes as players:  Idris Elba. Rebecca Furguson

 Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there

OK! This is serious stuff, we’re talking assured mutual destruction the nuclear winter the end of life on earth as we know it but….

…something in Kathryn Bigalow’s ‘A House of Dynamite’ is lacking.   Her film has an empty centre, there’s a hole in the scenario where meaning and tension seep out leaving her ensemble of actors looking like they’re going through the motions of being busy busy in their bunkers responding to the nuclear attack situation: Bigalow’s drama becomes abstracted rather than real.

The proposition which governs the scenario is that an unknown country has launched a nuclear missile at the USA aimed at Chicago.  The film’s structure centres around the ‘final minutes’ time window of this nuclear attack as experienced from different American defence and executive perspectives.  The script takes up its story when there are some 18 minutes to ground zero.  The film opens with the scene in the Washington monitoring hub, moves onto the missile defence, the military response centre finally ending up with the chief executive, the President, flying in a helicopter to his safe place, who must decide how the USA is going to respond.  As the scenario moves to each of the locations, the countdown clock is wound back to allow each setting to play out its own ‘drama’. 

Bigalow’s script bigs up on the human side of the action.  Many of the settings  are realised as shots full of crowded movement centred about screens that dominate the spaces whilst the countdown clock ticks away the minutes and seconds left until impact.  Within the crowded frames the scenario focuses on particular individuals who are split in their attention between the looming disaster unfolding before them and immediate concerns in their private lives.  

Rooms are not just rooms…

…but the way in which these private concerns are realised is the problem with House of Dynamite. The various rooms/locations in which the drama of the countdown plays out are not just spaces:  they are a states of mind; states of mind that are all encompassing.  To be in the room is to be enclosed in a state of mind.

Bigalow’s script wants to show us the ‘human’ side of her characters, the individual the personal. In order to do so she makes the decision to move her film away from the clock, out of the confines of the monitoring rooms into specific places of the personal world.  Her movie leaves the collective state of mind in the room and embraces a distant personal literality.  The Washington incident room’s manager is worrying about her sick child, so the script literally cuts away to shows us her little boy at the doctors; likewise we’re shown see the Secretary of State’s daughter being cute in Chicago, the President’s wife out on safari in Africa. 

The consequence is that the inherent tensions of the film collapse. The proposition, the core of the movie, becomes distant and less urgent.  

The clock ticks down nobody’s watching.

The count down image is tethered to the respective spaces; the clock has no existence outside the room.  Each time Bigalow moves outside room the clock vanishes and it becomes progressively more difficult to re-establish its ominous presence as it ticks down towards mass death.  The parallel cutting between the rooms that engender their own state of mind and the littoral location of the  personal stories rather than allowing the images to intensify by playing off each other, has the opposite effect.  It dulls the senses, renders the approaching catastrophe as an increasingly abstract proposition.  

The clock vanishes.

The  shortcomings of Bigalow’s movie are epitomised in the final scene in which the President is being flown to a safe space accompanied only by the man with the nuclear codes.  He decides to call his wife who’s on Safari in Africa watching baby elephants.  At this point in House of Dynamite, baby elephants seem more interesting than the President.  Before he can really explain the nature of the problem to her – that he has to decide whether or not to end the world – the connection between them is cut.  No more baby elephants and Mr President turns his mind to figuring out the conundrum:  whether to let the strike on Chicago go unanswered; or order a full retaliatory strike against the possible enemies China or Russia.   But no matter what kind of face Idris Elba pulls no matter how much he writhes about in his chair, he looks no more than an overwrought academic wrestling with some abstruse philosophical argument, and House of Dynamite splutters and peters out with the damp squid of an anti-climax.  And as the President pales into indecision he starts to come across a little like President Obama in his second term: “…The man who wasn’t there….”

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Damnation Bella Tarr (Hung, 1984) Miklos Szekely, Vali Kerekes

viewer 4^th Oct 2025 dvd

all tomorrow’s rain

 Tarr’s Damnation opens with a wide shot of industrial desolation.   We hear atmospheric music accompanied by an invariant industrial clatter, as buckets of coal dangling from wires suspended from multiple pylons, are transported endlessly through the blasted landscape.  Diagonally moving through frame from right to left they appear from nowhere on their way to a distant nowhere.  The  opening shot of Tarr’s ‘Damnation’ in its very longevity establishes both a desolate actuality and a state of mind.  It’s an image that re-appears throughout the film as leitmotif for….. …ineluctable emptiness…..

The mesmeric nihilism of the long first shot sets up a mood that pre-empts the rest of the movie, whose thematic composition adds little to the first 10 minute opener.  Tarr’s movie is shot in high contrast black and white designed to draw the viewer into the darkness of its psychic vision.  The imprinted aesthetic of bleakness soaks into the viewer (and on screen there is rain aplenty) folds over the protagonist ‘Karrer’ as he pursues the woman  who’s the object of his obsession.  She’s a singer (‘…she’s a witch, a swamp…’). In her persona she’s strongly reminiscent of Nico (of Velvet Underground fame and also had a long solo career) who in the 1970’s  established herself as the embodiment of Gothic Existentialism: “What costume shall the poor girl wear To all tomorrow’s parties? “  Does ‘Damnation’ take us any further than Nico’s lament?

Besides the almost ever present image of the despair blighted Karrer, Tarr’s movie is packed with the tropes of unmitigated hopelessness.  Some visual: the incessant downpouring of rain, the stray dogs, the textural quality of stained cement: some scripted, Karrer’s story of the bloody suicide of one of his previous girlfriends; quotes from the doom mongering old testament prophets;  bleak self referencing drawn out monologues referencing love decency madness and tunnels. 

The plot which centres about manipulation double crossing and betrayal always plays second string to film’s design, its high contrast look and its camera work, the slow lateral tracking shots composed as  ‘reveals’. The arch deliberation of the camera movement is its defining quality.  The tracking becomes something the viewer starts to anticipate….you know the camera is going to move; you know that it is going to reveal a different perspective; you know that the director is making a certain deliberation. 

Tarr’s movie transmutes existential anxiety into an aesthetic. ‘Damnation’ is a siren call of emptiness designed to pull unwary sailors into its clutches and turn them to stone.  But what if you don’t want to be turned to stone?  Then Tarr’s movie will be no more than a series of overburdened familiar clichés wrapped up in a dressing of hi-art European camera work and left to stew slowly as it moves like the coal buckets steadily and slowly from nowhere to nowhere.   Enjoy!

adrin neatrour 

 adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Toxic Avenger       Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman (USA; 1984)  Andree Maranda, Mitchell Cohen, Mark Torgi

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 18 Sept 2025; ticket: £7

toxic society

On the dark side of the internet there are channels devoted to monkey torture: graphic monkey torture. The victims are mainly Capuchin monkies highly intelligent small primates whose facial features bare a marked humanoid resemblance.  Immobile tied down arms and legs akimbo, the little creatures are subjected to unspeakable torture.  Their screams of pain provoke enjoyment and howls of laughter, shared by that online community.  It’s all good fun.

Viewing ‘The Toxic Avenger’ (TA) made me think of the little monkeys. 

Made 10 year after Hooper’s ‘Chainsaw Massacre’ TA lowers the bar of legitimation in relation to the graphic effects of the damage that can be inflicted on the body by force. ‘Chainsaw’ as a feature film, abandons plot. The form of the film comprises a series of episodic events depicting the ‘Bonemen’s’ perpetration of escalating acts horror upon the unwary intruders.  Savagely slaughtered the victims are reduced to the status of mere things for the entertainment of the audience.  We are invited to enjoy and openly revel in human torture and death.  At one level of course it’s all in good fun.  With a wink and nod Hooper might claim that his over the top representation of horror is simply intended to be seen as a sophisticated parody of the genre.  It’s all a bit of laugh along sing along movie.  But Chainsaw’s indulgence of sadism stopped short of overt graphication of what was done to the flesh.  When the first victim is lifted up like a piece of meat and impaled on a butcher’s ‘S’ hook, there is no close-up of the penetration of the steel into her body.

Herz and Kaufman’s ‘TA’ rectifies this.  As in ‘Chainsaw’ there is no real plot, again it is a series of episodes with a tagged on ending.  The script is basically one thing after another, a series of events invoking extreme violence as ‘The Monster’ takes on disparate hard core of evil men and women.  But ‘TA’ shows all.  When the road killers find a child victim and run him down, when they see he’s not dead, they reverse over his head.  Cut! The audience are then shown the boy’s crushed head.  We are fed image after image of the effects of the Monster’s exercise of extreme violence.   The Monster after all is a force for good, a cross between Frankenstein and Superman with the traditional mission ‘to clean up the City’.  So we see hands that have been deep fried, face with gouged out eyes etc. all apparently sanctified in the name of parody. 

Still thinking about those little Capuchin monkeys. 

When thinking about them thoughts move in many directions.  As with the videos  of the monkeys, the viewers will be very aware of the shadow caste by the ‘creators’ of these extreme images.  The film makers are not absent: they feel present, winking at us as they show their wares.  When viewing a film directors are not usually in the forefront of the audience’s mind.  But when graphic material is produced, the compact between maker and viewer changes.  The makers are in effect asking for collusion. They are asking the viewer to actively accept the legitimacy of what they are being shown. Perhaps similar to the initiation rituals into places like interrogation centres and concentration camps.  Newcomers are quickly exposed to the extremities of the violence, so that it is legitimised and they are immediately colluding with the system of applied pain and humiliation.   In watching TA to view is to collude, even though we know the imagery is faked.  In ‘TA’ we have a particular relationship with the film makers: we absorb their shadow.  

American culture has increasingly emphasised the cult of the individual.  It is the dreams of the individual that shape society, it is individuated desire that drives the circuitry of the economy. The rights and protections of community are hindrances to gung-ho liberal capitalism.  But the price of this particular bias is that deprived of membership of collectivities individuals drift into becoming ever more isolated.  And one of the effects of isolation is increasing feelings of powerlessness.   An impotence that may then express itself in developing fantasies of violent revenge upon those perceived as enemies.  Film producers and studios have of course picked up this gravitational psychic shift and catered for the need, vicariously, by an ever increasing number of revenge movies characterised by acts of extreme violence.  The message projected is simple: the world is divided into the forces of good and evil; the only way to deal with evil people is to kill them – preferably after inflicting pain and humiliation.

As mass killings and humiliation stream into our monitors it’s as if huge tracts of people have become not just desensitised to human suffering and humiliation but actually enjoy it.  They see these kinds of movies as being shown not only to amuse and distract but also for people to align with their fantasial projections of good versus evil mythologies. Obviously the systematic perpetration of violence can by definition only be meted out on the evil.  As the audience in the Cinema giggled and laughed it felt that we were on a long dark road to where sadism becomes an inherent part of the mix of our future entertainment. 

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

Rebel Without a Cause    Nicholas Ray (USA: 1955)  James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 4^th Spt 2025: ticket £7

Film without cause but with purpose

Nick Ray’s ‘Rebel without a Cause’ doesn’t stack up to the 70 year viewing test.  It feels ponderously paced, labouriously scripted with a scenario that lacks tension. It looks like a film whose purpose was to promote James Dean.  A film crafted around his persona and faciality, his alternating looks of confusion and defiance registered through the lens of a camera instructed to magnify him.   

‘Rebel’ was made to be Dean’s rocket to Stardom.

Ray’s movie makes considerable demands on its audience to suspend belief.  Of course this is ‘film’ and we go to see films on the understanding that we will often have to ‘go along’ with hiatuses jumps multiple implausabilities or impossibilities because theme mood and intention override litterality.  This said the actors representing High School students all look a lot older than 18 years old, the idea that they are all at school, looks a stretched notion.  The accelerated animosity between new boy ‘Jim Stark’ and his school contemporaries feels like a plot artefact, not helped by unconvincing dialogue AND Ray’s centre piece the ‘Chicken Run’ also leaves a question hanging as to: HOW when Jim jumps out of the speeding car which barrels on, why doesn’t it go hurtling over the cliff onto the rocks below?

None of the above would register if Ray had made a film with a coherent theme.  Dean’s character represents the generation of the ‘50s that was the first to enjoy the fruits of the huge wealth generated by the American capitalist industrial machine (gorged on war).  This wealth found its way not just into the pay checks of the middle classes but also to their children who were now recipients of many of the accoutrements of money, including use of automobiles exemplified by Jim as he drives about in a buggy with white wall tyres.  Of course he doesn’t rebel against any of this.  It simply further feeds into his evident family derived neurosis and insecurity which he shares with the other two adolescent leads Judy and Plato. Psycho-disturbance is the actual focus of ‘Rebel’.  I suppose a film title such as ‘Neurotic without a Cure’ wouldn’t have done box office.   

The pacing and developmental structure of Rebel always feels ponderous. There is something about a lot of 50’s Hollywood movies that viewed today come across as stilted in the playing out of their core expressive content. Certainly there are many exceptions in particular some films by Wilder, Hitchcock and Siegle but where the theme of a movie revolves about relations often the restraining hand of self censorship inhibits both actors and scripts.   Today’s audience are often left with the feeling of a crabbed scenario, as sexual relations and intense emotion are swerved or avoided.  Of course there is the obvious consideration that films as cultural products will reflect their society but the best of 50’s films were able to create expressive modes that went beyond these inhibitions. ‘Rebel’ is not one of them.

Ray’s laborious pacing of ‘Rebel’ is characterised by the opening sequence of the film after the credits.  During the opening credits we see Jim dead drunk pushing himself along the ground fondling a little mechanical toy he’s found.  Ray then cuts to the key establishing scene in the police station where we’re introduced to the lead characters, Jim Judy and Plato who’ve all for one reason or another been picked up by the cops.   At the station we get the background gem on the three ‘kids’.  The script of course centres on Jim and being interviewed, he reveals to a detective something about his home situation.  The tec dropping his police persona evinces a paternal concern for Jim.  Eventually he’s led away by his parents in a manner that suggests Jim is a prisoner of his own family. But the scene is slow characterised by archetypal dialogue and has a forced scripted feel. The same applies to other key scenes such as Jim’s clash with the high school gang leading to the knife fight and even celebrated the chicken run sequence.

The real core of ‘Rebel’  is a substrate of the scenario: the depicted isolation and warping of the nuclear family relations in the middle classes.  A class that had become highly mobile and moved out of the city into the isolation of the suburbs, moves made possible by the expansion of car ownership.  This is the actual theme of ‘Rebel’. As suggested when James is led way from the copshop by his family, the feeling is that he is being taken from a place where he is understood, back to being misunderstood.  In the long confrontation between Jim and his dad, dad wears a frilly apron.  The apron suggests a cross dressing proclivity that together with his fathers subservience to his wife and her insistence on continually moving, create in Jim neurotic anxiety and insecurity.  The scenes in Judy’s home reveal a heightened state of sexual tension between Judy and her father pointing up a terrified fear of incest, a fear of course intensified by the enclosed nature of suburban living.  And Plato abandoned by his mother is left only with the recourse to murderous violence, violence perpetrated on defenceless puppies, as helpless as himself, but a means to deflect his rage and anger away from either himself or its real cause, his parents.  This is a fucked up society creating emotional mutants.   And of course the evident love felt by Plato for Jim is far more convincing than the formulaic ‘falling in love’ relationship scripted between Jim and Judy that effuses the last scenes of the movie, culminating in their: ‘First Kiss’.

It’s understood that Ray’s movie is a product of its times.  It’s true that some of the graphic scenes in particular the switch blade fight, ‘cut’ into new ground of film depiction ( the knife scene caused ‘Rebel’ to be banned in several countries including the UK).  But as the graphic spectacle element in popular films has become ever more extreme, Ray’s knife fight now looks on the tame side.  Movies that endure tend so to do not because of particular scenes, but because at some level they express some kind of truth.  A truth that resonates with audiences across time. A truth that can be political perceptual situational social or psychological but is imbedded in the heart of the film.    

‘Rebel without a Cause’ has elements of ‘truth’ in its peripheral domestic scenes. Otherwise it’s a a formulaic period melodrama that panders to Hollywood values and is devoid of truth content. 

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk