Star & Shadow

The Bad Seed     Mervyn Leroy   (USA; 1956) Nancy Kelly; Patty McCormack

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 6^th April 2025; ticket: £7

to have and to have not

‘The Bad Seed’ is a title that did the venerable journey through various expressive modes.  It started life as a novel by William Marsh, was developed into to Broadway play, then made it to Hollywood as a feature film, and finally adapted for TV remakes  a couple of times  In all its first three forms ‘The Bad Seed’ was a huge success. A best selling novel, a long running Broadway show, and a successful high grossing movie, finishing in the top 20 US box office for ‘56.

‘The Bad Seed’ as a realised idea certainly struck a chord with its audience.  It may   be partially accounted for by a fascination with the disjunction between the well brought up pretty little eight year old girl (Rhoda) and the cold blooded murders she commits.  But perhaps to some extent its appeal to the audience was partially embedded in its setting.  ‘The Bad Seed’ takes place in ‘The Suburbs’, in a generic representation of the real estate developments that were becoming the preferred homes of millions of Americans.  Increasingly wealthy in an increasingly confident USA this expansion of the suburban way of life represented a psychic deterritorialisation as people turned their backs on their ethnic roots and embraced a new form of identity founded upon the burgeoning individualist consumer culture – represented most completely by the automobile – the mechanical bride.

 

Interestingly there are significant alterations to ‘Bad Seed’s movie plot that make it distinctly different from both the original novel by William Marsh and the Broadway play which stayed true to Marsh’s work.  The Production Code Association (PCA), basically Hollywood’s movie censor, was hostile to any movie adaptation of ‘The Bad Seed’.  So when Warner purchased the rights the PCA insisted on one major change. Both novel and play conclude with the mother (Christine) dying (committing suicide after poisoning her murderous little girl) and the Rhoda surviving the poisoning, and able presumably to continue her merry dance of death.  Mervyn Leroy’s film treatment reversed this outcome: now Rhoda’s mother lives (somewhat improbably) after her suicide attempt and Rhoda who survives the poisoning is subsequently killed off in a final coda, struck down by a falling tree in the middle of a huge thunder storm.

So ‘poetic justice’ a la PCA sort of triumphs (the bizarre post end credit sequence in which Christine after addressing the audience, bends Rhoda over her knee and smacks her bottom, may or may not have been Leroy’s gesture of contrition, as if murder deserved at least a formal smacking) though not in a very convincing manner.  The bolted on changes to the original story line look what they are: formulaic genuflection to the requirement of movieland propriety.  Actually the ending with its primal earth shaking lightening and cracking thunder works to re-inforce a feeling that grows ever more insistently in the course of the film that what is at work in the scenario is the force of evil.  Within the suburbs evil lurks.   This makes Rhoda in some respects a precursor of Regen (The Exorcist) and to some extent the films of David Lynch.  John Carpenter was certainly influenced by the film and novel.

The fundamental changes that the PCA insisted on (They were probably responsible for removing from the script earlier examples of Rhoda’s crimes that come up in both book and play but not the film: killing her pet dog and her babysitter. In the movie she is suspected of killing an old lady by pushing her off the fire escape. For a child to kill

her pet dog was simply off the Hollywood map; to kill an old woman, just about ok.)  actually make the film a more resonant critique of the forces at work in America in the 1950’s.

Both book and the play revolve around the problem suggested by the title: “The Bad Seed’.  At issue is whether Rhoda’s murderous psychopathy has been inherited. In book and play it’s revealed that Christine was an adopted child, and that her biological mother had been a serial killer who was sentenced to death by frying in the ‘chair’.  In play and book the central issue revolves about Christine’s fears that Rhoda has inherited a bad gene from her grandmother (a recessive gene that determined her bad nature!).  Christine undergoes nervous collapse at the thought that she has passed on bad seed to her daughter.  But the movie is different, the inheritance issue never gains persuasive dramatic traction.  The script treats the issue with diffidence. It’s never revealed (did I somehow miss it?) that Christine’s mum was a serial killer.   In Leroy’s scenario Christine breaks down at the thought that her mother was wicked, but beyond her own insistence it is never convincing that she has strong reason to blame inheritance for Rhoda’s character.  A kind of vacuum envelops the issue of bad seed.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

But if nature is not responsible for Rhoda’s behaviour then it must be the environment, and Rhoda’s environment comprises the new kind life styles that are evolving in suburban America.  The suburbs are the source of psychic instabilities whether they be intro or extra – verted.  Could it be that ‘Evil’ ‘Psychopathy’ call it what you will, oozes out of the ‘burbs’, like dark blood from an infected wound?  With the pressure they exert on people to conform to the all American ideal, with their materialistic ethos and spoilt children the suburbs are incubators of the bad seed.  In its comfortable setting in the concerns of the characters, these elements are all present in ‘The Bad Seed’ which of course has a significant Hollywood precursor in ‘Mildred Pierce’.  Like ‘The Bad Seed’ ‘Mildred Pierce’ is dominated by a twisted mother daughter axis, set in the midst of American plenty.   Rhoda feels like a younger model of the precocious spoilt Veda, Mildred Pierce’s daughter.   Both ‘Pierce’ and ‘Bad Seed’ are unusually for the movie business female dominated scenarios, less concerned with action more focused on state of mind, the states of mind that were coming to define American life. 

I think Leroy’s direction is self absenting.  Like fellow Warner director, Michael Curtis (also director of Mildred Pierce) Leroy is experienced enough to know when to engage in Cinematic manipulations and when to let the script speak for itself with seemingly minimal direction.  Coming from the stage, the script is adroitly fashioned to represent the key characters and ideas.  It doesn’t necessarily need big production heightened camera work or deft splicing.  Leroy is happy to stay a lot of the time in long or medium shot, enabling the viewer to see the interactions and relations, and the camera movement when it happens, works with effect.  ‘The Bad Seed’ has a stagey feel, but what we are seeing is theatre; and in contemporary life it is theatre that has come to provide the role model for many of our relationships.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  

 

 

Monsieur Verdoux    Charlie Chaplin (USA; 1947)  Charlie Chaplin; Martha Raye; Maryilyn Nash

Viewed: dvd

no more Mr Nice Guy

In movies the dead speak.  And of course besides M Verdoux and his victims there is some one else who dies in this film. 

As Chaplin’s opening shot tracks through a cemetery past the gravestone of Monsieur Verdoux, the eponymous subject (based on serial killer Henri Landru) provides in voice over a short justificatory explanation of his journey to the grave. The Voice relates how he’d been a bank teller for 30 years before being summarily dismissed. With a family to suppor (comprising as we later find out, a disabled wife and young son) he had resorted to a series of business transactions involving the liquidation of wealthy women.  Monsieur Verdoux explains that for him this was ‘a business’, but a business in which one needed some luck – which unfortunately he didn’t have.

The use of the word ‘liquidation’!  It has a double meaning: one of converting assets into cash;  the second, a vernacular euphemism, meaning to kill without compunction.   Using the word in this manner sets up the philosophical consideration offered up to the audience by Verdoux during his trial for murder at the end of the movie.  Delivered with Chaplinesque panache it’s his ironic rapier thrust into the heart of contempary hypocrisy where he points out that the Capitalist system produces vast industries for the production of armaments and weapons with the consequential need to foster wars of mass destruction and the slaughter of millions. In contrast Verdoux points out that he is being tried and condemned for the death of a few people. Verdoux concludes that he is a mere amateur by comparison.   The point made is not to justify his actions, but to place them in the context of a moral counterbalance.  Just a thought.

Verdoux is a black comedy centred on Charlie’s superb playing of the killer. His play out of the clown murderer is immaculate: his precision in action – such as preparing the poison –  his balletic balance – his mobility of face  – allied to the soothing British charm of his voice are all compressed into the character, the clown intent on the business of marrying and killing rich women for the sake of their money. There are a couple of unconvincing scenes in which Chaplin in the style of Harpo Marx has resort to Sennet style slapstick routines in going after a potential women victim.  But in his controlled expression of comic purpose Chaplin has never been better.  And of course the blood money from his dark deeds has ‘an innocent purpose’: it’s used to maintain Verdoux’ disabled wife and son.  Verdoux, a selfless dark Harlequin. 

There are wonderful highlights – Verdoux counting the victims’ money –   Chaplin breaking through frame and full face addressing the audience as to the nature of his ‘work’ – the sequences with Martha Raye.  There were also strange holes in the scripting: in particular the death of his wife and son, announced precipitously by Verdoux raising the unanswered question as to whether they had died natural deaths or had he killed them, unable to bare the brutal reality of not being able the continue to care for them? This question is left hanging on Verdoux’ coat-tails.  And the bad luck?  This seemed to entail, not his getting caught but rather his decision to invest his ill gotten gains in stocks and shares before the  market crashed.

What is central to the emotional feel of Chaplin’s ‘Monsieur Verdoux’ is its complete lack of either sentimentality or regret, both in relation to the inner scripting of the film and to its outer metaplay of Chaplin’s own career trajectory.   There’s one apparent exception.  Verdoux has no doubts no stabs of conscious in relation to his ‘liquidations’ whether it be the wealthy women or the cop who gets wise to him.  They all have to die.  The apparent exception is ‘The Girl’, a waif whom Verdoux sets up as a victim, a lab rat in effect, to test out the efficacy of his poison.  He nearly carries through with her murder, but stops at the last moment when her story and her goodness touch his heart.  She is spared as Verdoux affected, obeys the dictates of  his conscience.   You might say: “Sentimental!’  But no Chaplin countervails this moment in a later scene where he meets up again with the waif, now come good, who tells him her fortunes have changed because she has married an arms manufacturer and business is booming!   They’re in the money!

So no sentimentality is the order of the day and this of course applies to Chaplin himself in making ‘Verdoux’.  The film in which he makes the decision once and for all to kill off his alter ego, ‘The Little Tramp’.  Without regret without compassion in cold blood.  His time is up.

Verdoux now exemplified the times, the man of the moment: as amoral as the arms manufacturers and like them, a good father and husband.   

Chaplin did not have to make of himself an unsentimental serial killer.  He chose to adopt a persona that was the complete opposite of ‘The Little Tramp’. After Verdoux there could be no way back to the innocence of a character who was now out of place in a world without innocence.  

 Verdoux is not caught.  He is discovered. He could have escaped but he choses to give himself up of his own free will to the police.  There’s no bathos nor pathos,  simply his calculated decision to chose certain death.

The scenes comprising Verdoux’s last moments are cool and completely lacking in emotion, not tragic, simply timely, and these moments equate with Chaplin’s own disposal of ‘The Little Tramp’.  It’s time for him to go and he’s dispatched with the same equanimity with which one might discard a pair of old worn and holed socks.  Verdoux initially refuses the rum he’s offered, then commenting he’s never tasted rum and might as well try it, picks up the glass and necks it.  He faces the priest, no last rites, simply responding with a contained dignity to the visitation.  Then the final shot: head held high without hesitation he walks past the camera, turns with his back to us and walks to the (unseen) guillotine.  And as he moves away from us towards the place of execution a guard either side of him, we see just the merest hint of that ‘walk’.   A walk towards the end.  For Veroux and ‘The Tramp’.

Black comedies about serial killers were choice filmic morsels of the post World War ll era. Besides ‘Verdoux’ there was also Robert Hamer’s ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ (1949) starring Alex Guinness.  It tells of a disowned son murdering his way to an inherited Baronetcy.  But it’s difficult to imagine any one wanting to make black comedies about the serial killers of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, men such as Ian Brady, Fred West and Peter Sutcliff.    For some people, in the age of the self-made image,  to be a serial killer has become a (self fulfilling?) career choice: killings perpetrated in order to become famous or rather infamous.  The era of increasing hostility by some men to the changed and increasing status of women in society appears to be linked to increasing murders of women, usually women in relationships, but many carried out simply as a function of ingrained sexual hostility.  Chaplin had his own axe to grind with money chasing women and with Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, but the film stands as dark metaphysical fable of ‘business’.  Likewise ‘Kind Hearts…’ works as satire on class prejudice.  But I think in our contemporary charged psychic atmosphere it is no longer possible to see these films as grounded in metaphorical or social concerns, as black comedies with unusual settings.  The form taken by the narratives of quasi justified serial killing, for many people will outweigh any parodic or satirical intent of the film maker.   The which makes the public exhibition of the titles problematic. Programmers will have to weigh up moral psychological social political as well as artistic considerations in deciding whether or not to screen these titles.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Nosferatu – a Symphony of Horror       F W Murnau  (Ger; 1922) Max Scheck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroder

Live tracked by S!nk

Star and Shadow Cinema 14 Mar 2025; ticket £12; £10

the with and the without

By today’s standards Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ lacks the literalist rendering of Robert Eggers’ recent 2024 re-make of the same title.  Eggers’ movie with its promiscuous use of CGI replaces narrative coherence with a series of spectacles: hallucinations, tomb openings and the final sexual parody, the energetic absurdist coupling of the monstrous Nosferatu and Ellen.  Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’ piling one thing on top of another devalues any sense of climax (sic), or plot line as the film comes to resemble a series of spectacular adverts.  For which one might conclude that it’s in tune in with the attention demands of today’s audience.

Murnau in 1922 delivered a completely different type of ‘Nosferatu’ which takes the form of a dark quest.  It’s a journey of evil in which the tensions are built up slowly as Nosferatu’s journey reaches its end goal the seeking out and possession of Greta (Eggers’ Ellen).  Murnau’s structure incorporates lyrical watery sequences that leaven the blood fuelled intentions of the Vampire as his coffin is carried by river and sea towards its destination. 

Murnau’s 1922 picture had no synchronised sound track. No dialogue no stings no reinforcing mood music.  But the experience of the audience was of course not silent.  Separated from the picture, music was played in the cinema as the accompaniment to the projected film. 

And this was the case at the Star and Shadow screening where the impro musicians – S!nk – live tracked ‘Nosferatu’.

To view film with sound married to picture (which is the universal situation today) and viewing film where the sound is separated from the picture is a very different experience; without the synchronised sound the audience has a completely different relationship with the image.   More intuitive, more direct, opening up the viewer to another level of involvement with the material. 

With sound on film the primary engagement of the audience is usually with the dialogue.  Dialogue makes a cognitive demand: in order to follow the plot to assess the psychological motivations of the players, the thinking mind has to be engaged.  Of course some of the narrative and characterisations are achieved by the picture,  but if the dialogue is removed from a sound film (or if it is in a foreign language without subtitles) the action usually becomes incomprehensible and the viewer usually loses interest.  Together with the dialogue sound on the picture is also represented by the music track and the FX track.  These tracks tend to be manipulative.  There are stings (either musical or FX) which underline moot points in the action and moments of realisation or in horror films characterised by exploiting sudden high volume. The music tracks typically reinforce the intended emotional response or mood the director thinks appropriate to any given scene.  Sound on picture tends to be designed for manipulative affect – steering plot and plot rationale and reinforcing desired audience response.

Something different happens when the sound (usually musical accompaniment) is separated from the image. The audience moves into a very different state of mind, developing a distinctly different kind of relationship with the projected images. Without dialogue, the viewer’s consciousness locks directly onto the picture.  Viewing becomes a non-verbal experience that replicates something close to the way in which the child experiences the world.  Although accompanying music might have stings and mood re-enforcement, the primary effect of the music is to ease the psychic passage of the viewer into flow of the film.  As the film develops the music starts to weave a trance-like atmosphere, creating the conditions for the viewers to pass out of their everyday state of mind and to be absorbed into the picture.  To become  again, for these moments, as children, at one with what they are seeing.    A condition where there’s no separation between subject and object: the viewer is in the screen.  And this surely is the ‘Magic of Cinema’ a magic that we have by and large lost.

This ‘Magic’ was re-activated by the audience, re-claimed by S!nk’s live tracking of ‘Nosferatu’.  Of course not all ‘silent films’ are live tracked with the artistry finesse and sensitivity that S!nk bring to the task.  But when it happens, then we are privileged to be able to take a step back in time both objectively and subjectively.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 

 

Johnny Guitar     Nickolas Ray  (USA; 1954)  Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge

the eye’s have it

Nick Ray’s ‘Johnny Guitar’ is an inverted Western, where many of the familiar tropes and expectations of the Hollywood genre are turned on their head.   It’s movie that induces into its chosen form a deep vein of psychic substance that is rare for Hollywood let alone cowboy pictures. 

The opening section comprises three sequences that indicate Ray’s movie is not going to honour the genre by following the familiar path: Johnny Guitar’s entry is heralded by explosions – the ripping apart of the mountains through which he is riding; a stagecoach hold up which he spectates; and a powerful overwhelming dust storm which blasts across the land.  Man made environmental destruction, extreme weather and indifference to stick-ups immediately suggests Ray’s Western has a alternate focus of attention.

This is confirmed quickly through the opening master scene that’s set in Vienna’s saloon where Ray’s script sets up his main protagonists as women.  In this era (and many others) women roles in Westerns are normally either non existent (except as extras) or more or less token petticoats whose role in the scenario to soften the exclusively male action.   Women are not players they’re pawns.

In ‘Johnny Guitar’ the women are the players: Vienna and Emma in ruthless stand off.  As in most scripts the two adversaries both hold different values which define and feed their animosity and provides the rationale for the play out of the plot. Vienna, with her Saloon built to profit from the new railroad, stands for the quickening forces of change, the increasing ease of migration, that are redefining power in the Western territories; Emma, a large rancher sees these changes as a threat to her interests, and determines to fight them – and of course Vienna.

So far so good. We have two women as the players in a theme that whilst having a socially and historically grounded script has the traditional oppositional structure. But Ray’s scenario, guided by his female leads, takes his Western deep into psycho-sexual areas that are almost entirely foreign to the genre. Westerns typically depict emotional relationships such as they are from the male character point of view. This is normally defined as a self sufficiency: the man does not need the woman.  The Cowboy is by definition the lonesome Cowboy (cf John Wayne). 

This suppression of emotion is subverted by Ray, feelings albeit conflicting feelings are poised like loaded springs at the core of the film, defining the characters and investing the action with a substrate of intensity which is both expressed and repressed giving edge to every line of dialogue every movement.  And it feels real.

Ray’s narrative play out is underscored by a matrix of cross referencing relationships. The aforementioned long key scene in Vienna’s saloon bar not only establishes the oppositional plot device centred on Emma and Vienna, it also opens up the two women’s contrasting sexualities. Emma’s self loathing shame at her physical attraction to a gangster which leads her to the twisted logic of wanting his death as the price of eliminating the warped internal conflict caused by her desire.  Emma’s eyes are hot with self anger.  Vienna’s eyes are cold.

Vienna’s sexuality has been used and abused.  Her eyes are cold because she is emotionally dead.  But Vienna has self awareness and at some level within herself; she’s unable to accept the end of love.  She has sent for her old flame Johnny Logan (Johnny Guitar) to give herself one final emotional test.  And in the key saloon section when all the shouting’s done, Emma’s gone, everyone’s left, Johnny and Vienna are alone.   

This is a long scene in which Vienna and Johnny are psychically folded into each other’s space. In their movement through Ray’s framing and dark low key lighting with its shadows and half seen faces, there builds up a erotic intensity between the two ex-lovers of desire acknowledged and desire denied that creates an unbearable tension between their two bodies, their two psyches trapped between acceptance and denial of feeling.  Vienna played by Joan Crawford, her face a mask of blood red lipstick and dark proscenium arched eyebrows, is the most vulnerable;  she has the most to lose as Johnny’s physicality presses upon her. But both of them reveal something at the core of their inner selves, the wounds and vulnerabilities the underlie the play out of their lives.   

Vienna’s embrace of the ritual elements of Ray’s script: the Pieta scene with the wounded gangster, the Blood Wedding and the calmness with which she sits on her horse, a noose about her neck waiting for Emma to hang her, are made all the more credible by the audience’s understanding of her inner toughness, as understood from the scene with Johnny.  Compared to living with her own inner turmoil, the externalities of life, however terrible, can be confronted with equanimity.

Many contemporary movies don’t contrive to be erotic. Films like ‘Anora’ don’t deal with emotions or feeling they just do endless scenes of fucking and humping, squealing and moaning: spectacle has taken over life so that all we see is ‘the fireworks’.  Ray’s ‘Johnny Guitar’ in connecting outer life with inner feeling is a film that not only  blows the traditional Westyern apart, it occupies a space that all to rare in Cinema.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 

      

The Seed of the Sacred Fig           Mohammed Rasoulof  (Iran/Ger; 2024)  Soheila Golestani, Missagh Zareh

Is that a gun in your pocket

Mohammed Rasoulof’s film is a response to the oppression of women in Iran and the regime’s brutal reaction to civil protest against its core theocratically justified laws. However Rasoulof to some extent models the film satirically on the ‘Hollywood Western’ which genre like theocratic Iran, is often marked out by the non-existence of women, or at least their relegation to shadow status.   So ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig Tree’ is characterised by the theme of the ‘gun’  ‘cabin fever’ and the final ‘shoot out.’

‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ (Sacred Fig) is a film made in a spirit of complete defiance of the Iranian Islamic State.  Complete in that Rasoulof makes any film at all in that he has been banned by the Revolutionary Courts from film making (hence the film was shot in secret); complete in that his film is not an oblique or indirect attack on the regime. Both in subject matter and script ‘Sacred Fig’ comprises an uncompromising sustained frontal assault on both the values the Islamic State and the hypercritical bureaucratic apparatus that enforces and sustains them both through intimidation and the promiscuous use of the death sentence.

After ‘Sacred Fig’ is discovered by the authorities to have been produced and subsequently entered into Cannes Festival 2024, there’s no way back for Rasoulof.  He was sentenced to an eight year stretch, sentenced to being flogged, sentenced to the confiscation of all his property. He has managed to escape Iran and find refuge in Europe (using the sort of underground route that in ‘Hit the Road’ Panah Pahani made a film about).  Given the long reach of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard he will always be at risk of assassination by their agents.

This is the film of a brave man, prepared to die for his open hostility and opposition to the regime.  Likewise, unthinkably brave everyone involved in the film, in particular its key players Soheila Golestani, Missagh Zareh, Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki and cinematographer Pooyan Aghababael.  At risk from the vengeful state judiciary they have put life and limb on the line.  As far as is known most of the above are still in Iran.

‘Sacred Fig’ is in two parts which comprise a ravelling of the plot and an unravelling, an intensification and a climax.  In the opening pretitle sequence we see a series of shots: a close shot of bullets rattling down onto a table leading through to Iman (antogonist) driving to a remote shrine where he recites a prayer of thanksgiving.  This section introduces the change in Iman’s work situation from which point the script plays out the forces unleashed by widespread women’s protests consequent on the killing of Mahsa Amini whilst in police custody. 

Iman (sic) has been promoted and he now a judge/investigator for the Revolutionary Courts.  Part of his work will involve signing off the death penalty for ‘politicals’ hence his identity and work are kept secret.  Just in case, he is issued with a gun for self protection.  Cue the vectors of intensification as through their smart phones Iman’s two daughters Razvan and Sana watch the eruption of protest caused by Amini’s death.  These protests also cause a rapid increase in Iman’s workload as he is called on not to investigate incidents arising out of the protests, but rather to rubber stamp the increasing number of death sentences passed by the courts.

To go with his new corporate theocratic status Iman has been given a new spacious apartment in a block reserved for special servants.  Like any employee of a large company or indeed a monolithic dictatorship, those who do the dirty work get well looked after.  But Iman’s new dwelling, which he shares with Najmeh his devout wife   and his two daughters, becomes a strange incubator of all the contradictions and oppositions that riddle contemporary Iran.  As the pressure at work ramps up, the increasing issuance of death warrants starts to exert a toll on Iman, and then something disconcerting happens: HIS GUN DISAPPEARS.

This is Rasoulof’s strategic plot device.  It’s a sort of Hollywood antithesis.  As Raymond Chandler famously quipped when you want to ramp up the action in a movie, get a man with a gun to enter the room: everything changes.  Here the opposite occurs: suddenly a man is without a gun: everything changes.  From becoming a de facto symbol of male authority the gun becomes a defacto symbol of male weakness.  A strange equalisation is premised as Iman supported tacitly by his boss tries to find out what’s going on, which of his family (if any) has the gun. Although the apartment is searched high and low the gun is not found.

Events become more violent. One of Iman’s daughters Razvan, is with her friend who is seriously injured by police buckshot when they are out on the streets of Tehran.  Likewise Iman’s boss increasingly concerned by Iman’s inability to regain possession of his gun, organises a ‘discrete’ interrogation of the women by one of the department’s specialists. But despite this intimidation and being subjected to the tricks of the interrogation trade, the gun continues to elude the men.

The ravelling up section engenders a growing the feeling of claustrophobic paranoia characterising relations between the members of this small family. (a claustrophobic paranoia that perhaps replicates the underlying mood in Iran)  Hermetically sealed in the apartment with only a small uncurtained section of a window out of which to peer at an increasingly unpredictable world, they are trapped between the  violence of the male validation of ‘God’s Law’ and the women’s passive resistance.  The tension evolves out of this power disequilibrium: Iman’s ranting opposed by the tacit silence of the women whose communicative response is mainly mediated through their body language and their eyes.  Iman’s wife plays a pivotal schizo role in this situation.  Although pious and supportive of her husband, she’s torn between her sense of wifely duty and her instinctive desire not just to protect her daughters but to see that the violence they are all experiencing directed against women, can’t always be justified.

For his climactic end section Rasoulof transposes the action.  Iman removes his family from Tehran, drives them to a ruined abandoned city.  At this point the actors are set down in a mythic primal landscape and arriving here the gun ‘issue’ is stripped back to its essence without subterfuge.  It is the male pitted against the women.  Iman finally convinced that one or perhaps all of the women is lying to him and has the gun, drops the mask of polite circumspection and subterfuge, resorting to the unalloyed male capacity for violence.  He assaults his wife and daughters locking them up without food or water. By this stage we have seen that Sana the youngest daughter has the gun, and that perhaps the two girls have been complicit both in taking the gun and successful in their protestations of bemused but affected innocence. Perhaps even Najmeh at some point knew or realised the truth, but kept ‘mum’. 

As Iman’s violent rampage of frustration escalates, Sana escapes and frees her sister and mother.  Following a chase through the ruins, there is finally a ‘high noon’ moment, an absurdist replaying in mock tribute to all such movie tropes, where Sana and Iman (who has been given another gun by his boss) face off against each other with their guns:  the final gun fight.  Slowly approaching her, Iman in classic mode challenges Sana to shoot him. Her guns barks out its defiance but as Sana fires the ground beneath Iman’s feet collapses and he vanishes into the ruins down below. 

So at the last Rasoulof signs off with Marxist-type philisophical observation:

What begins as tragedy ends as farce.

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 

 

 

 

Three Colours: Blue        Krzysztof Kieslowski (Fr; 1993)  Juliette Binoche, Benoit Regent

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 2^nd Feb 2025; ticket: £7.

Kieslowski’s opening montage in ‘Blue’ is a finely honed piece of film making.  The first shot, taken from underneath a speeding car, shows the spinning front onside wheel of the car focussing attention on the point of contact between road and tyre. The montage comprising mainly big close-ups has the quality of a classic Eisenstein assembly as it moves between the interior of the car, with its occupants and the exterior as represented by its underside.  The contrast between the close up shots of the riders and the actual mechanical contact that carries them, sets up oppositional tensions, between surface and the latent. It also in film terms, where anticipatory tropes are part of montage language, establishes the disaster that is to come.

After the presaged crash, ‘Three Colours: Blue (‘Blue’) ’ simply runs out of road. Kieslowski is unable to unable to develop his script into any thing beyond a chocolate box melodrama, which is enunciated in the shot following the immediate aftermath of the crash in which we see out of the opened rear door of the wrecked car, a child’s ball spill out of the vehicle and bounce gently away.   This sentimental staged piece of filmic theatre introduces an immediate false note.  It feels like a labourious attempt to re-create the pathos of Lang’s balloon shot in ‘M’ but without Lang’s (and Harbou’s) ability to seamlessly incorporate this kind of signifying symbolism into the flow of their material. 

Perhaps I’m on weak ground in writing about Kieslowski because ‘Blue’ is the first and only film of his that I’ve seen.  What I know is that most of Kieslowski’s career as a film director was in Poland where he worked under a communist regime that ruled through social oppression and artistic censorship.  After Lech Walesa’s rise to prominence, the government became more inconsistent and prevaricative in its enforcement of the rules in the face of prevailing political tensions endemic in the country.  Kieslowski like other directors from Eastern Europe may have functioned better as an oppositional  creative worker. To have to pit one’s work against constraints delimitations and mono-ideological perversities of a dictatorial regime demands creativity intelligence and resilience on the part of those artists who choose to engage in the subversion of the established and condoned ways of thinking.  The purpose of such artists is clear: at some level their work must engage in a critique of the established order, a critique that without overly signing its oppositional nature, points unerringly to the limitations and failure of the ruling regime. 

But once the political tide turns and the ideological straightjacket is removed artists can find themselves at a loss as to how to re-activate purpose in and of their work.    Andrei Tarkovski exemplifies this.  His work was always grounded in a cosmological  metaphysics of life and death. But his metaphysical presentation of ‘time as an instability’ for instance always stood out in contrast to the Communist Party’s obligatory adoption and endorsement of the Marxist understanding of time as a progressive historical force. Tarkovski’s idea of ‘time’ was all the clearer for being contrasted with the pure mechanics of ‘time’ represented as a materialist concept.   Tarkovski’s last two films, ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Sacrifice’ made when he migrated to the West having left the Soviet Union, seem to me the work of a lost man.  Tarkovsky in his Russian films allied himself with fools and mad visionaries and by default stood against the system. A system which he understood all too well.  But coming to the West, and making his films with a similar psychic alignment but without understanding the destructive forces at work in Capitalism was a different situation.  His films become unconvincing metaphysical expositions that come to look like subjective filmic platitudes lost in a vacuum of meaning.  Having faced out the tyranny of obligatory collective thought he seemed unprepared when he moved West to see the potential disasters endemic in the unrestrained capitalist individual ethos.

Thinking about Kieslowski’s ‘Blue’ I was wondering what purpose lay behind his script.  What’s it all about, ‘Blue’?  It is apparently the first of a trilogy of films that explores the ‘virtues’ of the French flag: le Tricoleur. These virtues I presume to be the mottos of the French Republic: liberty – equality – fraternity.  I have to say that I find it  extraordinary in 1993 that this idea, a fantastical ideological construct, could be seen as anything more that a calculated conceit designed to excite the vanity of the French; but guarantee Kieslowski’s films production money from the big French national money pot. 

As I understand it Kieslowski’s ‘Blue’ perhaps stands for the first of the republic’s virtues: liberty!  But what can the notion of ‘Liberty’ stand for in this flag that fluttered proudly over the destruction of vast swathes of Asia Africa and the Caribbean, murdering millions of colonial subjects who simply demanded the freedom not to have to live under this disavowed discredited flag.  Perhaps blinded by the glamour and freedom of working in the free West, Kieslowski didn’t feel at liberty to ask this sort of question.  He was an individual now.

Even on its own terms ‘Blue’ doesn’t cut the mustard as any sort of representation of any notion of ‘liberty’.

Left alone after a car crash kills her husband and daughter, a wealthy widow (she may have been the actual creative agent behind her husband’s success as a composer) rebuilds her life.  She chooses to cut her self off from her previous society and live alone.  She has adventures, meets new and different people, but in the end returns to the fold where she learns of her husband’s systematic double life with a mistress, who is about to give birth to his child.  The film amounts to little more than shoo through for ‘Juliette Binoche’ who though she walks through the tastefully shot scenery with a certain monopaced aplomb, does little to advance the notion of ‘liberty’.

Of course this may be Kieslowski’s tongue in cheek riposte to the French who were thinking  ‘La Gloire de France’ was somehow refracted in ‘The Colour Blue’. In fact the movie they actually paid for was a satirical rejection the notion of ‘Liberty’ simply imbedded in a vehicle that looked like just any other classy French movie of the era.  The trouble with this is that although possible, no one seems to have read this type of signification into ‘Blue’.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk        

  

Nosferatu    Robert Eggers  (USA; 2024)  Bill Skarsgard, Lily Rose Depp, Nicolas Hoult.

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 4^th Jan 2025; ticket £13.25 (price increase of £1 as of 01/01/25)

do you like being fucked by a monster

Robert Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’ is a dead film in which technology replaces imagination.          

Time was when technology’s effect on the movie industry was to better enable or to extend the engagement of the audience with the material they were viewing. I am thinking of the changes from monochrome film through to full colour stock; the development of camera mobility from the tripod through to cranes and steady cam; the movement of editing technology from simple assembly through to opticals and colour manipulation.  There are of course other important areas of change, but the above will suffice as exemplars.

Critical use of the above mechanical technology could work to stimulate the audience to engage with film as an act of individual interpretation, the material working to open up the imagery to the viewers’ imagination.   The development of CGI together with the rapid advance of AI has reached the stage where there is complete competency in the creation of virtual image creation.  Filmmakers have access to a perfect marriage of computation and cognition that short circuits the imagination of the audience by rendering the ideas suggestions and concepts in the scenario as literalist images.  The picture as presented is complete unto itself.  There are no cracks in the image integument, the which is complete in itself and offered for visual consumption in similar manner to the popcorn nachos hotdogs and ice-cream that are offered as the  complementary oral part of the viewing experience.   In fact the CGI film product and the food accompanying it have many similar characteristics: they are both synthetic products and both in a sense can be said to be pre-consumed – meaning they deliver to expectation and are consumed without pause as a mechanical experience.

Films such as ‘Nosferatu’ that make considerable use of CGI virtual imagery often diminish the importance of a narrative line.  Rather they are structured so that they move from CGI generated spectacle to spectacle.  The narrative line of these films is often obscure complex and somewhat flimsy. OK agreed! Many Hollywood movies, in particular ‘film noir’ have impenetrable plot lines, but they are sustained by the audience satisfaction of being drawn imaginatively into the circuitry of the characters and the narratives;  with CGI spectacles the audience expect no more from the plot lines than they would from a fireworks display.   Films such as ‘Nosferatu’ are about a series of spectacles designed to immerse the viewer in the experience, and like the hotdog sloshed out with mustard and ketchup, once it’s gone it’s gone, instantly forgot.  ‘Nosferatu’ type productions are stitched togather by a series of spectacular set pieces each of which has its own resolution and outcome, and designed as mounting crescendos of affect.    

As befits the horror genre the sound track is designed to manipulate the audience and in alignment with the image, it is also intended to overwhelm.   In ‘Nosferatu’ the sound is repetitively overbearing in particular the synthesised boom of Orlok’s voice which is invariant from start to finish.  At the movie’s end his voice not only has no effect it also starts to feel tiresome obtrusive lacking affect.  Overplayed effects which characterise Eggers’ movie, add up to diminishing returns and are also an indication that basic understanding of the how to craft film has largely been forgotten by Eggers in his headlong rush to embrace all the riches of technology which often like fool’s gold turns out to be worthless.

The style of acting and dialogue appear to be premised on ‘Hammer Film Productions’ of the 50’s and 60’s. Without a Christopher Lee or a Peter Cushing around whom to pivot the script and shape the interactions, there is something central lacking in Eggers’ movie, that can never be filled out with the technology he employs.  Automation can never replace the human presence, though I suppose AI generated actors may cause me to repent this statement.

Tech literalism in Eggers’ movie is taken to the limits of the absurd in the penultimate sequence of ‘Nosferatu’ which sees Ellen being screwed by Orlok.  Orlok is depicted as having disgusting warty lizard type skin, as a giant horny (whoops) entity dripping with mucous.  The audience are asked to take seriously the graphic depiction of their impassioned coupling.  It’s supposed to be the ‘climax’  (whoops!) of the story but the proposition and representation of their fuck, Orlok thrusting between Ellen’s  thighs, is so silly and unbelievable, that it has the effect of an ‘anti-climax.’   Given the general mediocrity of ‘Nosferatu’ it’s appropriate that it should end on an anticlimax.

After seeing Nosferatu my feeling was that this is a film not about the undead but rather made by the undead.     

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Anora        Sean Baker (USA; 2024)  Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn

viewed Tyneside Cinema 29 Dec 24; ticket: £12.25

no glass slipper

Sean Baker’s ‘Anora’ like his earlier movie ‘Tangerine (2014)’ is a drama revolving around the sex industry.   

‘Tangerine’ is grounded in the life and experiences of its two transgender stars Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor who bring a street wise knowledge of hustling and prostitution to their parts, embedding the film in an existential honesty.  Working with physical intimacy as ‘cum enablers’ Kitana and Mya (Sin-Dee and Alexander) obey the first rule of their profession: always stay in control of the interaction. They have also mastered the necessary psychic flip of protective distancing from their customers.  This necessary psychological sheaf of course comes at the cost of the radical separation of the body sensations from emotional responses (something victims of sexual abuse also experience).  As real life actors prostitutes often (but not always – as with other service providers you get what you pay for – low rent buys low rent product, high rent comes with high client expectation) have to play out hot whilst staying cold inside.  The corollary is that, as the essential professional recourse to the splitting of the self becomes the default behavioural mode, close relationships are affected and emotional feelings become difficult to handle.

Sin-dee and Alexander, as pro-ladymen whores ply their trade with sardonic humour style and a nose for danger.  Shot on adapted iPhones against the fractured background of Sunset Boulevard the production has spacial immediacy and the hokum script is characterised by sharp edged dialogue that although written by Baker seems to be indebted to the attitudes and life style of its two leads.  ‘Tangerine’ looks like it began with a perception of a situation: the LA streets as portals of forbidden desire.

Whereas ‘Tangerine’ begins with a perception, the starting point of  Baker’s ‘Anora’ is ‘in general’ the “Cinderella’ story, and more specifically a mouldy pile of second hand scripts dealing with the half baked male fantasy of the ‘reformed prostitute’.  A script idea as stale as yesterday’s spent sperm.  ‘Tangerine’s’ scenario is given life by staying faithful to depiction of actual experience, ‘Anora’s’ script peddles the lies and falsehoods of Hollywood fairy tales.  A tired story bloated out with production values and orchestrated set piece slapstick. 

Baker’s uses the cheap trick of repetitive banality to divert the audience’s attention from the feeble working out of the script’s premise.  To distract from the unconvincing proposition that Anora has feelings for Vanya, the viewer is subjected to scene after scene image after image of them screwing. The repeated spectacle of their thrusting pelvises and clonic orgasms (accompanied by requisite moans and groans) is intended to batter the audience into acceptance that her professionalism as a whore has been compromised because she’s being fucked brainless by her Russian toyboy. 

Baker’s scenario after the sex courtship section, breaks down into three further sequences: Anora’s detainment, the search for Vanya and the pay off of the enforced annulment. And there is also to cap it all,  a final coda.  These sections are all overlong and characterised by shifts in mood and mode moving between slapstick, violence and ruminative dialogue – the latter of which is mostly predictably laboured.  The distraction of the spectacles of violence and physical farce allow the scenes to be temporarily extended far beyond any dramatic purpose. The combinative effect is to progressively undermine interest in any of the characters (who become increasingly cardboard) and its feeble plot finally entirely deadening the audience’s attention.

 

And that’s before we get to the coda which sees Ani, taken home by one of the Russians who had violently held her hostage.   Instead of getting out of the car, she suddenly falls prey to the Stockholm Syndrome, mounts him and getting her hips thrusting into his cock, she fucks him.  Pandering all the more to male wishful thinking, the which scene takes us more or less back to square one and the realisation that Anora might not have the glass slipper but she doesn’t have knickers either.    

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

Theorem     Pier Paolo Pasolini  (It; 1968;)  Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Giroti    

viewed star and Shadow Cinema 1^st Dec 2024: ticket – £7

where’s our visitor

In similar fashion to Pasolini’s final film, ‘Salo‘ (1975) his movie ‘Theorem’ is structurally grounded in a sort of mathematical logic: the systemic working through of series of equations/situations.  In ‘Salo’ one step at a time, one line at a time, the group of kidnapped young people are subjected to a series of increasingly degrading and violent actions by their masters.  

The victim/torturer relationship in ‘Salo’ parodies the power relations in fascist regimes and by extension power relations under capitalism.  With the depiction of the casual infliction of painful physical humiliation, Pasolini keeps tight rein on the expressive reactions of his players.  The victims as a group respond in a casual fashion to the systematic application of pain that is taking place around them, often chatting and laughing amongst themselves as one of their number is selected as the butt for the next round of sadistic amusement. And those selected don’t act out any reaction to what is being done to them.  Flooding out mimicry of pain would be an insult to those who have suffered sadistic treatment or torture.  Pasolini simply asks viewers to register what they see as being done to these people. The audience don’t need cheap acting lessons from the actors to understand the effect of  physical abuse.  To this extent ‘Salo’has an abstract quality.  Emotional and physical expression are flattened back as Pasolini’s asks his actors to walk through the crescending series   ordeals they have to suffer.

Pasolini asks the audience to fill out his metaphorical linkage between power and the infliction of degradation.   Likewise in ‘Theorem’ the viewer is asked to make the link between ‘the Visitor’ and the effects he has on the bourgeois family:  daddy mummy son daughter and maid.  Like ‘Salo’ there is a mathematical type of progression at work in the scenario as the visitor methodically castes his influence over each member of the family and in due course we see the effect that the ‘Visitor’s’ disappearance has on each member of the same family.  Like ‘Salo’ there is a certain sort of abstract effect put into play.

The visitor is never explained.  He appears he interacts he leaves.  An abstraction.

In the opening documentary style montage we see the workers at ‘daddy’s’ factory, protesting against their low wages.  The workers understand that ‘daddy’ the factory owner  and by extension his family are parasites.  Parasites who live off the work of others and who live a privileged life of luxury, removed from the stream of the everyday.  But their wealth, the way of life enjoyed by this bourgeois family are facades behind which there is a terrifying emptiness of meaning.  The family exist to live in the big house to consume to be the boss to go through the motions of being alive.  As long as they just continue as they are,  everything’s Ok.  They’re simply on cruise control living their lives as machines of exploitation and enjoyment.

But if they stop! Or if something stops them?

‘The Visitor’ is the intervention that brings the whole bourgeois charade to a halt.  The machine breaks down. It’s what William Burroughs describes in the ‘Naked Lunch’ as the moment where everyone sees what’s on the end of the fork.   We don’t know who ‘the Visitor’ is.  We don’t know what he represents or how it is that one by one he castes his spell over the family.  We see he is a sexual presence through the which channel he touches and permeates their being. And there’s something suggested in his calmness and the certainty with which he sees intuits and then guides their needs. But this ‘something more’  is left for the audience to think about, to figure out.  

Perhaps it isn’t important. ‘The Visitor’ represents a moment of epiphany.  The moment in life when people with great clarity see themselves for what they actually are: sometimes it’s ok they can live with it: sometimes it is devastating –  and as with St Paul on the road to Tarsus – everything has to change.  

Whilst in the moment of epiphany in the moment of  the presence of‘the Visitor’ the family exist in a state of elevated immanence serene in their new found identities.  As soon as the visitor leaves, they are suddenly confronted with their emptiness the parasitic loveless nature of their lives.   The vistas of death nothingness and schizophrenia open up to them unless they can find a path to redemption which path is left by Pasolini as an open question.

Viewing Pasolini’s film its concerns seemed to me to transpose to our own current environmental crisis.  As Bourgeois life styles consumption patterns aspirations and attitudes have spread across the Western world and its imitators, many of us have  become parasites feeding off planet Earth.  We are parasites devouring the environment that sustains us without thought to either cost or consequences.  We own the earth so we can do with it as we want.  For us there is no ‘Visitor’; no moment of epiphany only a determination to keep the machine of plenty running on, terrified of what might happen when it breaks down. As it will.    

And when we are brought to a halt by our ‘Visitor’ when we see the consequences of what we have done, after the unending party, we shall fare no better than the players in ‘Theorem’: desperate atonement, schizophrenia, physical indulgence, religious fervour compulsive repetition and probably also uncharted by Pasolini, survivalist acts of indiscriminate violence.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

            

Theorem     Pier Paolo Pasolini  (It; 1968;)  Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Giroti    

viewed star and Shadow Cinema 1^st Dec 2024: ticket – £7

transpose to now

In similar fashion to Pasolini’s final film, ‘Salo‘ (1975) his movie ‘Theorem’ is structurally grounded in a sort of mathematical logic: the systemic working through of series of equations/situations.  In ‘Salo’ one step at a time, one line at a time, the group of kidnapped young people are subjected to a series of increasingly degrading and violent actions by their masters.  

The victim/torturer relationship in ‘Salo’ parodies the power relations in fascist regimes and by extension power relations under capitalism.  With the depiction

of the casual infliction of painful physical humiliation, Pasolini keeps tight rein on the expressive reactions of his players.  The victims as a group respond in a casual fashion to the systematic application of pain that is taking place around them, often chatting and laughing amongst themselves as one of their number is selected as the butt for the next round of sadistic amusement. And those selected don’t act out any reaction to what is being done to them.  Flooding out mimicry of pain would be an insult to those who have suffered sadistic treatment or torture.  Pasolini simply asks viewers to register what they see as being done to these people. The audience don’t need cheap acting lessons from the actors to understand the effect of  physical abuse.  To this extent ‘Salo’has an abstract quality.  Emotional and physical expression are flattened back as Pasolini’s asks his actors to walk through the crescending series   ordeals they have to suffer.

Pasolini asks the audience to fill out his metaphorical linkage between power and the infliction of degradation.   Likewise in ‘Theorem’ the viewer is asked to make the link between ‘the Visitor’ and the effects he has on the bourgeois family:  daddy mummy son daughter and maid.  Like ‘Salo’ there is a mathematical type of progression at work in the scenario as the visitor methodically castes his influence over each member of the family and in due course we see the effect that the ‘Visitor’s’ disappearance has on each member of the same family.  Like ‘Salo’ there is a certain sort of abstract effect put into play.

The visitor is never explained.  He appears he interacts he leaves.  An abstraction.

In the opening documentary style montage we see the workers at ‘daddy’s’ factory, protesting against their low wages.  The workers understand that ‘daddy’ the factory owner  and by extension his family are parasites.  Parasites who live off the work of others and who live a privileged life of luxury, removed from the stream of the everyday.  But their wealth, the way of life enjoyed by this bourgeois family are facades behind which there is a terrifying emptiness of meaning.  The family exist to live in the big house to consume to be the boss to go through the motions of being alive.  As long as they just continue as they are,  everything’s Ok.  They’re simply on cruise control living their lives as machines of exploitation and enjoyment.

But if they stop! Or if something stops them?

‘The Visitor’ is the intervention that brings the whole bourgeois charade to a halt.  The machine breaks down. It’s what William Burroughs describes in the ‘Naked Lunch’ as the moment where everyone sees what’s on the end of the fork.   We don’t know who ‘the Visitor’ is.  We don’t know what he represents or how it is that one by one he castes his spell over the family.  We see he is a sexual presence through the which channel he touches and permeates their being. And there’s something suggested in his calmness and the certainty with which he sees intuits and then guides their needs. But this ‘something more’  is left for the audience to think about, to figure out.  

Perhaps it isn’t important. ‘The Visitor’ represents a moment of epiphany.  The moment in life when people with great clarity see themselves for what they actually are: sometimes it’s ok they can live with it: sometimes it is devastating –  and as with St Paul on the road to Tarsus – everything has to change.  

Whilst in the moment of epiphany in the moment of  the presence of‘the Visitor’ the family exist in a state of elevated immanence serene in their new found identities.  As soon as the visitor leaves, they are suddenly confronted with their emptiness the parasitic loveless nature of their lives.   The vistas of death nothingness and schizophrenia open up to them unless they can find a path to redemption which path is left by Pasolini as an open question.

Viewing Pasolini’s film its concerns seemed to me to transpose to our own current environmental crisis.  As Bourgeois life styles consumption patterns aspirations and attitudes have spread across the Western world and its imitators, many of us have  become parasites feeding off planet Earth.  We are parasites devouring the environment that sustains us without thought to either cost or consequences.  We own the earth so we can do with it as we want.  For us there is no ‘Visitor’; no moment of epiphany only a determination to keep the machine of plenty running on, terrified of what might happen when it breaks down. As it will.    

And when we are brought to a halt by our ‘Visitor’ when we see the consequences of what we have done, after the unending party, we shall fare no better than the players in ‘Theorem’: desperate atonement, schizophrenia, physical indulgence, religious fervour compulsive repetition and probably also uncharted by Pasolini, survivalist acts of indiscriminate violence.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

            

 viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Oct 2024; ticket: £7

 I AM NOT A WITCH I AM A CHILD      

The most stiking image in Rungano Nyomi’s ‘I am not a Witch’ is of the broad white ribbons that are attached to the backs of each witch in the ‘witch camp’, ribbons which unwind from giant spools. It is beautiful haunting image that contains within itself a symbolic wider warning. ‘Ribbon tethered’ is how we first see the witches. The witch camps are the places where the government has gathered together the assorted women accused of witchcraft and where they are exhibited as ‘specimens’ of real Africa. The African Witches.   The claim made is the white angelic fetters somehow weaken the power of the witches rendering them safe for tourists to approach and to gaze upon. The witches have been neutralised, made safe. Witches are no longer a source of social anxiety, but a spectacle for tourists. Besides being exhibits, when the tourist trade gets slack the Government has no compunction in putting out the witches to hard labour in the fields – still of course attached to the magical white ribbons which as the women move unspool off giant spindles attached to the specially adapted trailer of a truck. Life’s a scam.

‘Shula’ is an abandoned child accused of witchcraft. She is peremptorily found guilty of such by a witchdoctor’s reading of a sacrificed chicken. A phone call later and she is drummed off to the witch camp as the newest and youngest recruit a prime specimen witch now attached to her white ribbon ripe for exploitation by a government official.  

Naomi’s film is structured as a series of episodic clips comprising a series of situations to which Shula witch is exposed. Her Government supervisor drives her round to a number of different places where she has to perform as a witch, thereby increasing her credibility and profitability for the minder. She’s a little gold mine. She is not a witch. She is trailed to an impromptu court where she is asked to find and point out the thief from a group of suspects; she is asked to bring rain to parched land; she is brought onto a TV chat show and introduced to the wife of a politician who tells her how co-operation with the powerful leads to a comfortable life. A nod and wink that proablbly pass by Shula.

In none of these episodes is there any emotional manipulation of the material. The strips of action are captured by Nyomi as wide shots which allow the viewer to see and judge for themselveswhat is happening to Shula.

Shula’s face is core to the film. But her face is not exploited to soak emotional response from from the audience. There are (with one exception) no soap opera tropes tears, strtched lips, tightened eyes or trembling jowels. Nyomi films Shula’s face as an affect image. This is a term coined by Deleuze to describe filming the face in a neutral expressive mode to which the audience has to ascribe meaning and understanding. We have to make what we can of Shula, not by reading her face, but by understanding her situation. The only telling exception to the affect image, is the brief clip in which we see her in school with other children – here we see her face fill out to become a smile, for a moment she is transformed only to be wrenched out of the classroom by the Minister to continue his profitable use of her as a witch.

In the final episode of ‘I am not a Witch’, there’s a tracking shot of an ox cart. We are following it from the rear as it moves before us at the traditional slow pace of such things.   We wonder why we are following it. It stops. The two men on the cart’s box seat stand up. From the back of the cart they pick up a small white shroud and lower it to the ground beside the cart. We know it is Shula’s shroud.

The corruption the chicanery the dishonesty with which she has been forced to participate, have crushed her soul and the body has died. As her body lies on the ground her sister witches arrive transported on their special truck with the ribbon spools on its loader . They gather round the shroud: tethered to their white ribbons spooling off the lorry they sing to her departed soul.

Shula’s life as a witch is presented as an individual story. We see the particular forces of greed and manipulation slowly squeeze life out of her, kill her spirit.

But there is also a universal angle to Nyoni’s script. Shula also stands for the wider issue of the infantalisation of Africa. Nyoni’s film is a statement of a deeper more universal issue relating to the post-colonial experience: Africans are still defined as children. Africans were characterised by the colonial Western powers as children a characterisaton that gave quasi legitimacy to theft abuse slavery and manipulation of Africans: they are children, they are happy with beads and brightly coloured cloth.  This characterisaton has been conveniently taken up by their post colonial successors. In many African countries the colonial regimes handed power over to local elites many of whom more or less continue many abuses of the colonial era: appropriating to themselves the wealth of the country, keeping tight rein over the social matrix by rewarding themselves and their close relatives and allies with the significant political and economic and commercial positions.  

Africans, like Shula are tethered to metaphysical white ribbons which neutralise them. Africans like Shula are described and treated like children justifying assertions that they need adults to decide their best interests. This characterisation of the people is central to maintaining a psychic grip on the their ability to stand up for their own interests. Being labelled and treated as child undermines belief in agency, that one has the ability and resources to be responsible for making decisions. Defined as lacking these attributes Africans are judged by those in power as not ready for democracy or self determination. One of the duties of children is to learn to respect and obey their adult betters. As children of the State they must accept the rule of those who understand the world and its complexity. Resistance to the adult has to be punished, severely if necessary. To cast the populaton as children legitimises the klepocracy of the state and can undermine the will to oppose power, embrace inadequacy and engender a proclivity to accept the words judgements and decisions of the big boys and girls.

This defining of the native population as ‘children’ also provides a justificatory framework for the exploitation of African countries by big corporations who are sold or given franchises to exploit the wealth of Africa. No one is frightened of children.   Without fear there is an amoral carte blanche. There are no constraints on businesses exploiting their assets as quickly as possible, polluting the environment to save money and prohibiting Union organisation. Children don’t understand these things. They are not really concerned about them unless stirred up by trouble makers. If you are seen as a child you have the rights of a child. That is to say the rights of Shula. The right to be forever attached to a broad white ribbon that controls you, the right to be cynically exploited for all of your life, the right to die in an unmarked shallow grave mourned only by the old witches themselves tethered by white ribbons singing beautiful haunting songs which drift off into the distance.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk