Star & Shadow

 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

 

 

 

 

 

The Substance             Coralie Fargeat (USA;2024) Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley

viewed Tyneside Cinema 28 Sept 2024; ticket: £12.25

 

live by the image die by the image.

Coralie Fergeat’s ‘The Substance’ derives from a Dr Hyde and Mr Jackel structured script with good and evil retained as an underlying register but formally transposed into today’s trope: young and the old.

Image: the film is about image. It picks up and reflects back certain core social psychic elements that affect the way we experience and re-act to contemprary conditions of our lives. Image.

‘The Substance’ is a latex wonderland overlaid with digital FX.   Most of the effects have appeared before in other latex fantasias – films by David Cronenburg come to mind.   Fergeat’s movie is described as a satire but it’s a particular form of satire, a parody of physical body horror using the effect of gross exaggeration to expose the absurdity of aspects of contemporary America.  

Fergeat and some commentators suggest that folded into the layers of flesh that characterise the movie’s special effects there is a feminist issue; a core concern with the way in which women in Western society are judged by their looks. oHow ageing in women as they lose the bloom of youth, affects their identity self esteem confidence and ability to get work. Cue the burgeoning billion dollar industry geared up to produce all sorts of forever young products: creams applications injectable face lifts and other surgical interventions to prevent wrinkles, hard skin cellulous etc. But the appeal of ‘The Substance’ goes wider into the experience of living in today’s image dominated environment than concerns that are specifically feminist.

In some respects Fergeat’s claim for a feminist angle looks ingenuous. Sparkle – the protagonist – is the script’s exemplar. (whether she is one or two) In the script Sparkle’s aging results in her losing her show. (This never seemed to be a problem for Jane Fonda) But setting the script in the privileged razzle dazell of Tv culture effectively removes it from the real world. The script might insist Sparkle’s an ordinary sort of person but the viewers know she inhabits a world removed from the everyday. She is no gal next door. The full on body sex dance workouts that Sparkle fronts are pure projections of her image as a celebrity, and celebrity status overrides age. Celebrity exerts a protective influence over aging, but ‘The Substance’s script demands a human sacrifice, and Sparkle fits the bill on this count.

Sparkle’s dilemma such as it is, simply works as a pretext for the substance of the movie. The spectacle of a full on body fest of bone blood fluids open wounds that makes up the rest of the movie. The body as a horror show the body as a site of rotting flesh. The body projected as an image of decaying matter.

 

My feeling is the motivation to produce and to receive movies such as ‘The Substance’ is linked to the pervasive images of perfection that range across the entire spectrum of American and Western life.   We have moved out of the Christian ethos which stresses innate human imperfection in relation to God, into another moral zone: the market capitalist ethos whose pitch is that we are all or can be perfect beings.

Fashion advertising even public information all project a world in which social images are almost entiraly made up people of perfection. The smile the teeth the relaxed demeanour the presentation of ease with self is what we see. This idealisation of perfection has moved out of the commercial industrial into everyday practtice on the internet: projecting self image is a central feature of people’s on-line presence. Users cannot only talk themselves up but now employ quick picture edit tech to project images of themselves on platforms such as Tiktok. The governing imperative is to: airbrush out the warts and present a smooth blemish free image.

To conform to the pervasive presentatoin of image perfection has become a source of significant social pressure. But this provokes re-action, to oppose of the image idealisation of body relations with another idea: the damaged smashed up body as the countertype. The wounded body presented as an act of rejection of the objectification of the body.

My thinking is that the audience for films such as ‘The Substance’ are those who feel unhappy with or hostile towards the overwhelming pervasive effects of image in our society.    Going to and enjoying body horror movies is an enjoyable form of protest to the omnipresence of image perfection.  ‘The Substance’ is not a particularly good film, its repetitive derivative and arbitrarily amoral. But as a commercial statement it’s part of the psychic opposition to our ‘image’ society.

I suppose this is just one way of thinking about “The Substance’. But it seems to me that one the characteristics of film in popular culture is how to a greater or lesser extent either directly or indirectly it feeds and picks up on significant themes coursing through the social matrix. Film (and other forms of expression) working either consciously or more or less unconsciously, reflecting on hopes anxieties fears dreams acquiescence protest, giving them expressive realisation in the form of entertainment.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

    

The Trial       Orson Wells (1962; Fr)  Anthony Perkins; Jeanne Moreau; Romy Schneider

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 24 Sept 2024: ticket: £7

un-american activity

Orson Wells’ film of Kafka’s novel ‘The Trial’ suggests that his talents as a filmmaker were lopsided.  As a director he was a master of mis-en-scene, of understanding how to design chose and activate settings with maximum effect, how to work both camera and actors to deliver the action he wanted.  For instance in ‘The Trial’ Anthony Perkins as K delivers a sustained performance of shocked ambivilence. But Wells was not an outstanding writer-director in the style of Godard Fassbinder Pasolini.  Unlike these film makers he was not driven by lines of ideological conviction or a particular grasp of life itself that informed and filled out their scripts.  Wells had self belief.  He seems to have been driven to make films by his belief that he was an artist bounteously gifted in film making.  But he was never a great script writer, not remotely on a par with Hollywood studio director, Billy Wilder.  He did not write the script for the outstanding ‘Citizen Kane’. ‘Kane’ was written by Herman Mankievicz; Wells’ vision as director gave it life intensity and meaning.

‘The Trial’ comes across as a confused work with Wells struggling to produce a scenario that expressed a filmic reading of Kafka’s novel.  Wells’ sets in particular the vast spaces of K’s office and the Court, the distortions of scale, the hemmed in sets all combine to create dramatic atmospheric settings;  but in themselves the settings are not sufficient for Wells’ film to establish for itself  stylistic mode of expressive realisation.  And when filming the work of a writer like Kafka surely such a project can only be undertaken as act of interpretation, not an act of translation. The key element of any film interpretation is that script and scenario establish and sustain a design for the material, a stylistic statement upon which an interpretive schema can be overlaid. Atmospherics are not enough. 

‘The Trial’s’ opening scene takes place in K’s bedroom, which is a rented room in a modern apartment block.  K is roused by the intrusion into his space of a number of detectives who have come to tell him he’s ‘under arrest’.  The scene is conceived shot and scripted in the manner of a 1950’s US TV procedural cop drama such as ‘Dragnet’.  Off-set by K’s intelligent protestations, the aggressive non-sequiturs and oblique accusatory tone of the intruding cops fashion an opening of understated menace, augmented by the revealed presence in the adjacent room of some of K’s work colleagues.  Creating a mood of disassociated perturbation the scene has an unsettling effect, not the least of which is that the USA might be the perfect foil for probing Kafka’s novel.   

And surely Wells as the director of ‘War of the Worlds’, given its notorious first radio transmission, the director of the ‘Voodoo Macbeth’ with its all black caste and the maker of ‘Citizen Kane’, had some elemental feel for the dissonances and derangements that ran under the surface of the matrices of  1950’s American society.  ‘The Trial’ as a movie could never have significance or resonance if all it attempted was a sort of literalist rendering of the material.  

But after the first scene the ‘American cop’ style drops out of Wells’ design. It’s replaced by a rococo mid-European stylistic gloss.  This style is true to Kafka’s own background and the setting of his novel, but as a film design it always has the feel of being something of a pastiche.  The large set piece spaces work wonderfully well to create that feel of a visual overwhelming against which K can assume a heroic pose.  But many of the other settings: the passageways the advocates chambers the inner intimate recesses such as Tintorelli’s studio are for the most part somewhat formulaic. But not just formulaic, it also feels that they are not properly interrogated as images, as Wells employs them for immediate effect after which they are consigned to being backdrops to dialogue.  It feels as if Wells has replicated in his film the surface elements of the book, he’s held back from making the novel his own.  As such the longer the film continues the more de-energised it becomes as it is not driven by any unifying vision any compulsive hallucinogenic probing the stranger deeper off-centre recesses that are endemic in Kafka’s work.   

The strange deterritorialisation of the the first scene is not maintained and much of the rest of the film comprises a series of repetitions, scenes that come filled with outpourings of dialogue that often have a quasi-philosophical/didactic tone and in the context of watching a movie are hard absorb.  Images are subsumed to words to the extent it’s as if Wells has forgotten he is a film maker a being who is charged with the task of giving birth to ideas not representing them.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

Peeping Tom       Michael Powell; Script: Leo Marks (UK; 1960) Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxime Audley.

viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 20 Sept 2024; ticket: £7

cracking the code

Before becoming an author, Leo Marks, Michael Powell’s scriptwriter was a leading Army cryptographer during World War ll. Perhaps embedded in the imagery of Peeping Tom there’s a coded message; perhaps it’s no coincidence that ‘Peeping Tom’s’ protagonist and his creator share the same name: Mark (s).

 

In nearly all Powell and Pressburger films women play a key role. In titles such as ‘One of our Aircraft is Missing’, ‘Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ the women characters tend towards being angelic types, handmaidens resourceful and brave; but the parts they play more or less revolve about a male narrative. But in the late 1940’s the writer/directorial team made series of films in which women were at the core of the action. ‘I Know where I’m Going’ ‘Black Narcissus’ and ‘Red Shoes’, all feature women as the protagonists, the characters making the decisions. These movies all have a mythic substrate. The scripts locate the protagonists at the liminal bounds of competing and contrasting worlds, at which point they have to make the conscious irrevocable decision to step over a boundary line and embrace a new affirming reality. In these films the women characters exist in psychic space outside the stereotypes of Hollywood, space in which women assert agency and in which they live life on their own terms without reference to the male.

The scripts reflect perhaps Powell and Pressburger’s perception not just of the growing influence of women in society during the war years but also of the manner in which feminine agency might differ from the male.

Cue 1960 ten years later: Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’. Everything’s become dark. The women in ‘Peeping Tom’ (with the exception of Helen, of whom more later) are victims chosen by Mark so that he can inflict upon them lethal sadistic force. The women have no agency no life no choice. They are reduced to ‘things’ that exist only for the satisfaction of Mark’s needs.

In the course of some ten years there has been a complete reversal of Powell’s understanding of women’s situation. Powell’s film is structured about the creation of image. The opening shot comprises a big close up of an eye intently peering through the viewfinder of a movie camera at the object of the lens: a prostitute. With the exception of a couple of establishment shots, for the rest of the pre-title sequence the audience share the frame of that privileged peering ‘eye’. We see with Mark through the viewfinder of his movie camera; we share with him his murder of the prostitute who is killed as he is in the act of filming her. Objectification. Life has become a process of objectification. Mark films women as he murders them; skewering them through the neck with a stiletto (sic) attached to one of the legs of his tripod. Fixed to the body of the camera is a mirror, Mark’s devilish refinement, so that the women can witness their own deaths as the steel pierces their throats. In death they witness their own becoming object.

Mark wants to film fear, to understand fear, as if his camera can capture in the very moment of heightened terror, the essence of fear as an objective record. But the camera reveals only an image, a surface that is detached from the actual.

The camera takes and feeds us images. The camera captures flat two dimensional images, particles of light, that feed the desire of the eye corrupting the eye trapping the eye into an amplified feedback loop that does not deliver understanding only demands an endless cycle of intensification and repetition. ‘Peeping Tom’ cuts between the film images that Mark’s father has taken of him in his childhood and Mark’s reciprocal filming of women. Both are psychically locked into the same demented compulsion.  

Like father like son. In a spurious faux scientific exercise (calling to mind the work of the Nazi’s in their death camps), Mark’s father, in the quest for ever more decisive imagery, is incited to inflict upon his son ever increasing pain and humiliation, deluded by the belief that image in itself can reveal some sort of truth.  

Images have a strong tendency to became ends in themselves, to detach themselves from any rationale or justification and take on a life of their own. For the image seeker they have their own in-built logic of multiplication intensification acceleration and subversion of being. One image is not enough we need to be immersed in multiple series of images that eventually overwhelm us.

The rise of the image was an explosive element in culture in the ‘50s. The huge expansion of TV (along with an advertising industry that becomes increasingly image rather than information biased), the spread of ownership of both still and 8mm movie cameras, and the pop music industry driving fashion all attest to development of an image based culture. Not least in importance is the imaging of women as singular objects of male sexual desire, evidenced in the development of the porn magazine industry.

Two of Mark’s victims are sex industry workers. They are the ultimate psychic objects of male vilification and reduced by Mark to dead objects. The third victim, Vivienne (name means life) is more interesting. She’s an actress working as ‘a stand in’ for a Star of a film being made in the studio where Mark works as a focus puller. Vivienne is alive. Believing she is going to be filmed (not killed by Mark) she warms up with a dance. Wearing ‘slacks’ and jumper she executes in the studio a modern routine that calls to mind Gene Kelly. Her movement exhibits athleticism rhythm assertion. It’s a dance that takes her into another realm of being where she crosses an existential border into an expressive world of her own making. This is dance. But there is no escape for her. Her movement incorporating the spirit of freedom has condemned her. Her dance is over. Mark has selected her because he sees she has life, she resists becoming object. He thus commits to consigning her to body objectification, literally slamming her dead body back down in a trunk and closing the lid.   Andrew Tait and others can be seen as Mark’s direct descendants.

 

Both Powell and script writer Marks will have absorbed the pervasive incremental dominance of image in our society. Powell as an image worker and Marks as a screen writer whose father ran a Charing Cross Road book shop, located in the centre of Soho’s ‘under the counter’ and ‘top shelf’ porn business. I somehow imagine them both repulsed and attracted by the film industry but in ‘Peeping Tom’ they faithfully track the consequences of those who live by the image.

As mentioned the Powell Press burger partnership also represented women as ‘Madonna’ types’ – ‘angels’. Women who were male enablers and whose function in the script was to be a partner to the men in helping them achieve their goals. But in “Peeping Tom’ Helen, who is such a character, is helpless in her attempts to ‘save’ Mark. Mark who lives by the image is slated to die by the image. No one not even a handmaiden can help.

The mis-en-scene of ‘Peeping Tom’ works to outwardly reflect something of Mark’s inner state of mind. The characteristic feature of Powell’s sets is that they compress the space. The sets are so filled out with matter, so full there’s no room to squeeze in anything more. The newsagents, the film set, Mark’s photographic studio every square inch is taken up by some sign artefact or machine. This compression of the space represented by the sets feels like a simulation of the internal stresses and contractions experienced by Mark as he carries out his compulsive murders.

Only the blind can see. Perhaps that’s Leo Marks’ coda. Helen’s mum, blind Mrs Stevens is the only person who feels there is something wrong. Today as we move into social and cultural matrix where the camera incorporated into the smart phone dominates, there is image after image after image. Like Mark we live by the image. We are as Powell and Mark’s foretold on the path to psychic destitution.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Only the River Flows           Wei Shujun (2023; China) Zhu Yilong

viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 19 Aug 2024; ticket £12:25

It’s cold in China

It is a sign of the barrenness of Wei Shujun s ‘Only the River Flows’ (even his title feels pretentious and meaningless) that he has to fill out the music track with repeated renderings of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, the Pathétique. My feeling is that Wei has made such promiscuous use of this piece because he was looking to exploit its resonance and gravity in the hope of lending to his shallow scenario some form of emotional depth.

Only the River Flows (ORF) is a police procedural drama whose script (derived from a novel) is structured about a number of intersecting elements feeding into the life of his protagonist, detective Ma: his actual tec work, his personal mental state, the in-house police politics and his home life which incorporates his wife’s increasingly complicated and uncertain pregnancy and term.

Older style police or ‘tec procedural scripts fronted up with ‘process’ and left any socio/political/personal issues to take the form of background shading. Certainly in the best of these films, such as Lang’s ‘Big Heat’ and many of the adaptations of Chandler and Cain’s novels, this restrained intrusion of dark forces worked very effectively. As the narratives developed the contextual shadows often pressed in a little closer revealing to the audience the corruption darkness and emptiness within which the protagonists were enmeshed as they pursued their investigations.    

But fashions change with the times. And in times of transparency inclusiveness etc,  scripts now have to give the protagonists ‘rounded’ lives. A kind of obsessive literalism dominates the contemporary script rule book. Of course this works well in typical series which employ multiple episodes to string out their narratives, the which need multiple sub-plots to extend the material. Series scriptings have to feature lead characters who have partners (on whom they may cheat) difficult children/families, health and mental health problems, loads of red herrings etc to fill out the time. Whether this works effectively in feature films is a moot question, but certainly in this respect Wei flounders.

Intercutting between the political the procedural the personal and the intimate, Wei’s script is simply a device that switches from one thing to another, from one area of concern to another. In working so many elements into ORF none of the disparate parts have time to strike a relational chord with the audience. The relations depicted are expressed as series of mechanistic events designed to direct the audience’s attention not to engage them. The most obvious example in ORF is the suicide of Ma’s immediate buddy who jumps off the roof of the police station. This is depicted as a sudden unnerving event: the shocking crash of his body thumping onto the roof of a car next to Ma as he is leaving the police station. This suicide event is too extreme for the scenario to cope with, ORF’s narrative occupies a narrow emotive space and incorporating this drastic public suicide into the play out of the story is beyond Wei’s capacity. It has the feeling of being an event that is capricious, in the sense that it’s written into the scenario purely for its value as spectacle.

Likewise the script’s plotting of Ma and his wife coping with the news that her unborn child may well suffer from a genetic defect. The effect, the abort or not not abort positions, is to turn his home life into a piece of emotional soap opera a cheap way of giving Ma’s relationship with his partner any sort of heft or meaning.    

Perhaps these scripted events were designed as part of Wei’s vision of his film as a pallet of darkness, his intention to paint a picture of China as a twilight landscape. But the outcome is the feeling that instead of engaging the audience Wei tries to manipulate them by exploiting over determined stimuli. But the mechanistic nature of his script ultimately works against engagement because the characters and their situations are not developed in such a way that the audience is able to invest in any reason to care about them.

The procedural sections of the film are developed so that they become intertwined with Ma’s personal breakdown. Wei cuts away from Ma investigating/tracking down suspects to Ma’s hallucinatory nightmarish encounters with the serial killer. Horror sequences, employing mostly rather familiar tropes, are used to create an interplay of the real and the imagined which in contemporary film making has become the norm. The object filmically is familiar enough: to be adroit enough in the intersplicing of the real and the imagined so that the viewer is confused as to which is which, making the point that the subjective and objective can combine in the realm of personal experience. Scripted intelligently something of this nature can be effectively realised. Mostly however such intermingling comprises a one thing after another style of film making permitting lazy script writers to hammer the audience with a series of tricks, indulging in spectacle at the cost of meaning.

As Wei’s film moves flips through its multiple plots and subplots, it rains is heavily. Wei lets know this is dark China. Rain is introduced sort of as an idea in the first section of the film, and continues as a thematic throughout ORF. Rain is now an established metanym in the movie business: it’s everywhere (perhaps the cinematic rain making technology is easy and cheap now), but like a lot of visual tropes, overuse more or less as a repeated leitmotif, simply diminishes effect.

adrin neatour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fear Eats the Soul       Rainer Fassbinder (FDR; 1974) Brigitte Mira; El Hedi ben Salem

Viewed 29 July 2024 Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; ticket £7

 

it’s a fairy tale

 

Fassbinder’s ‘Fear Eats the Soul’ (FES) is a film that works in spite of the anomalous relationship that lies at the core of Fassbinder’s script. The film works because of Fassbinder’s decision to frame his story as a sort of fairy tale, an ironic inverted telling of a familiar narrative in which the forces of evil conspire to prevent a relationship between two people who love each other, a relationship that is defined as unacceptable on account of its mixed race nature: an Arab man and a European/German woman.

Script wise Fassbinder reworks the logic of traditional folk tales in terms of the anomalous attributes of the two main characters. The anomaly arises from the difference in age and physicality between Ali and Emmi: Ali young tall handsom Moroccan – Emmi a short dumpy woman in late middle age. To make this relationship plausible on screen Fassbinder employs a de-intensified theatrical structure to present the action, so that whilst off stage levels of physicality are suggested between the couple, the physical attraction shown between them is restrained and evokes the idea of mutual need rather than passion, affection rather than love. A Disneyesque touch perhaps but subverted by radical intent.

Fassbinder’s scenario draws on Brecht’s theatrical ideas which centre about what should constitute effective drama. For Brecht it was the representation of ideas that was critical. In theatre it was essential to avoid the simplistic emotional manipulations that characterise Bourgeois entertainment. The purpose of the characters is to represent expressive ideas in relation to their situations. This doesn’t banish emotions, far from it, but understanding and reflecting the characters’ position (in particular social positions and their contradictions) in wider relational terms should be the paramount purpose of the writer and director.

Built on the structure of the fairy tale, Fassbinder’s script employs a mechanics of social relations. His script works because the societal relations he draws on to drive and shape the narrative are real, even if anti-architypal. (in Sleeping Beauty it is the male who is the active agent; in FES it is Emmi who is instigator) The relationship between Ali and Emmi enable us to see the social reactions it provokes. Fassbinder’s filming is stage oriented in that the unfolding scenes are contrived and composed so as to allow the viewer to see what is happening, but always implanted in the wider social perspective. Through the lens of the camera, the viewer is allocated the role of the privileged observer. There are no point of view shots, the personal reactions of Ali and Emmi are not (until late in the film) the issue. At key moments in the scenario the camera tracks in close or wide or moves to reveal a situation, but always so that we may better see/ understand the forces at work on Ali and Emmi.

As they move in together and commit as a couple by marrying, we see how the net of the surrounding condemnatory interactive social forces draws in to isolate and reject them.  Both the neighbours and her grown up children punish Emmi for forming a relationship outside her racial group. The family scene when Emmi gathers her children togaether to tell them she has married Ali, takes the form of the classic moment of revelation (such as when a family all gather in the lawyer’s office to hear the reading of a will). Emmi’s revelation is the most emotionally charged sequence in FES, as one of her sons kicks in her TV unable to supress his rage at what he sees as his mother’s racial betrayal. This incident is immediately defused by Emmi’s refusal to react, her impassivity, her acceptance of her son’s action.

The first part of FES documents the winding up of the mechanics of racial discrimination to leave Emmi completely isolated from the social matrix; the second part of the film scripts the somewhat humerous unwinding of these same dramatic mechanics, as the self interest of the various parties, both neighbours and family proceeds to temper their rejection of Emmi and Ali, engendering in them at least a superficial acceptance of the relationship. This ‘unwinding’ of socially prejudicial racism happens purely at the individual level: as Fassbinder makes clear in a late scene comprising a conversation between Emmi and her follow cleaners, the social forces generating xenophobia and race hate with their underlying negative stereotypical justifications don’t go away. They lie dormant waiting an appropriate pretext or moment to reassert themselves. Ali as an Arab may be tolerated, may be awarded a sort of status as an honorary German, but all the underlying prejudices remain in play, ready to re-assert themselves given a justificatory excuse.

‘Fear Eats the Soul’ is Fassbinder’s representation of racism at work in Western culture. Laying bare the mechanics of racism through ingrained stereotypes expressing themselves through direct aggressive discrimination. Fassbinder makes his point to a nation where these same forces manifested themselves in the final solution of Nazism.

But there is also strange logic of the fairytale that makes up the substrate of the film, underlying the scenario and shaping the viewer’s response to the material. The logic is of course centred on Emmi and Ali, but it is Ali who really stands out by reason of his physicality, his body. There is an intrinsic nobility about El Hedi’s person: his dignity his presence his magnanimity his beauty. He has the characteristics of a ‘fairy tale prince’, an ideal type rather than a regular guy. Towards the end of the film when angered or perhaps slighted by Emmi’s casual possessive behaviour towards him he leaves her and briefly resumes a relationship with the young woman who runs the bar where some Moroccans gather to socialise. But when Emmi shows up in the bar, heart broken by his leaving her, his innate nobility asserts itself and he tells her he will return to her, remaining true to his marriage vow. It is an ending that is pure fairy tale, a sort of ‘…and they lived happily every after….’ Not the usual ending associated with Fassbinder.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Naked                          Mike Leigh (UK; 1993;) David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 25 July 2024; ticket £7

Made in those times before actors had to whiten their teeth to get work

The opening shot of Leigh’s ‘Naked’ is a night time tracking shot down a dark barely lit dirty back ally, which shot develops into a hand held sequence in the ally in which we see a man screwing a woman – it looks like rape. The woman pushes him off and the man, who turns out to be protagonist Johnny runs off, gets in a car and drives to London. In many ways the film fails to develop anything beyond the this initial scene, except for Leigh’s script to present Johnny’s thinking as a range of scatter gun cosmic ideas delivered to his hearers as combative aggressive monologues. Johnny doesn’t do dialogue any more than he lets anything get in the way of his sexual proclivities.

Leigh is one of a group of UK film makers in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s who were grounding their scenarios in what was becoming a post industrial society, with traditional male employment closing down and employment seen by a disenchanted post punk working class generation as a degrading scam designed to suppress and kill them.

The core of the script is Leigh’s representation of his two male characters, Johnny and the ‘Landlord’, as living in a ‘male fuckosphere’.

Outside of Johnny’s cosmic rap, sex and sexual exploitation are the focus of the script. The portrayal of sexual relations between women and men is bleak in its unremitting repetition of the tropes of male fantasy. In the scenario every time a woman looks at one of the men, it’s interpreted as being a ‘come on’, an excuse for the ‘Landlord’ to rape and for Johnny to use his aggressively honed ideas to manipulate the situation between himself and his female target. Leigh’s world in ‘Naked’ is centred around sex as death. Johnny at one point asks Sophie: “Do you think women enjoy being raped?” Sophie is not scripted with a reply, which just about sums up the film, in which Leigh gives full expression to a male obsession that women exist to serve and service men. ‘Naked’ communicates itself as a precursor of the Andrew Tait’s blogs as one woman after another is victim to either Johnny or the ‘Landlord’s’ intents and desires.

It’s difficult to make sense of the ‘Landlord’ character who in Leigh’s scenario is a psychopathic serial rapist. What’s he doing in the film? Is he a purely symbolic entity who’s role is to symbolise the amorality of the male British ruling class, who own most of the land? If so his behaviour including rapes are the symptomatic actions of an engrained masculine historic entitlement. But if this sort of arch symbolism was intended by Leigh, it doesn’t sit easily with either his use of everyday settings or his directorial naturalist acting style. Perhaps symbolic gender personation of class wasn’t the purpose of the character, who otherwise can only be understood as a representation of evil in the world, a bad ass presence who’s proclivities are exploited by a script that feeds him a series of suitable women incapable of resistance. In fact given the prominence of the ‘Landlord’ in the film and the violent nature of his role, Leigh’s scripting and direction fail to make any sense of the purpose for the inclusion of this character in the film, besides arbitrary sensationalism or a particular need to express hateful violence towards women on the part of Leigh.

Johnny has two facets to his persona in ‘Naked’. The compulsive womaniser who exploits his penchant for quick acidic repartee to try to beat down or cajole women into bending to his will. Again this type of patter has been elaborated as a softening up technique adumbrated by the current generation of misogynists. Johnny’s style of repartee is generally a sort of assault on the woman victim aimed at asserting male dominance having the last word and breaking resistance.

Johnny’s intellectual/philosophical interests are expressed in ‘Naked’ in the form of long dull monologues. This is most tediously evidenced in the long scene at night in the empty building with the security guard. Johnny’s ideas are drawn from sources such as Vonnegut Boroughs and Ken Campbell’s Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool to name only sources that come immediately to mind: there were many other sources skimming about the alt world of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. It is difficult to get monologues to work well in film.   Leigh obviously has no idea how to do it. In particular Johnny’s rapid fire delivery of his chains of thought quickly loses off audience interest leaving little for them to do except, much like listening out the pub bore, waiting for the torture of being talked at, to end.

Looking at ‘Naked’ it presents a picture of a film maker who has come to a dead end. In thought and word and deed. ‘Naked’ feels like a man in crisis using film and the power it gave him as a director/writer to work out and through his inner hidden ambivalences towards women. ‘Naked’ looks like nothing more than the expression of Leigh’s need for some sort of personal catharsis, exploiting his actors for his own purposes.   ‘Naked’ has nothing to say, except to actors who should: beware Film Makers bearing gifts.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

Kinds of Kindness     Yorgos Lanthimos; screenplay – Efthimis Filipou (2024; USA) Emma Stone, Jesse Plemens, Willem Dafoe

viewed Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 2^nd July 24; ticket £12.25

little ideas on the widescreen

Lanthimos’ ‘Kinds of Kindness’ (KoK) comprises three short films. All the stories have similar and familiar all-American settings, they are all filled out with the same players, but each revolves about a different situation. The three separate scenarios sort of pick up on the ideas realm suggested by the lyrics of Eurythmics number ‘Sweet Dreams’ referencing abuse and manipulation. This rollocking pre-title track is laid over the opening image of a typical aspirational American suburban house/home, complete with its mock classical white portico.

According to Wikipedia, Lanthimos’s original title for the film was ‘RMF’. Which title Lanthimos has said is meaningless in itself and not in reference to anything. Anything, that is, other than empty meaninglessness of such referent signs where multifarious initials (initialism) and acronyms have insinuated themselves into our consciousness as a daily part of our language, effecting even the way we think, or perhaps even the way we are able to think. These semantic ‘shortcuts’ often replace full nomenclature, allowing in a sense a sort of bypassing of the actual or, a dislocation between what is said and what is represented. Any way these shortcuts are very much part of the way we communicate, and each of Lanthimos’ shorts is preceded by the use of the initials RMF as part of the title, each of which titles incorporates the absurd ethos.

So far so good; obscure but witty titles wrapped around a perception. The same cannot be said of the rest of the movie which fails to lead us further into any of the places that Lanthimos and Filipou haven’t already explored, and doesn’t even approach the calibre of ideation expressed in either ‘Lobster’ or ‘Killing of the Sacred Deer’. To the extent that by the time (a rather long time given the length of the movie) Lanthimos presents the last story the impression is of a dull mono–paced experience.

A short intercalcatory note: Lanthimos and Filipou as Greeks have a certain fascination with America in relation to the Founding Fathers huge admiration for classical Greek political and philosophical thought which they incorporated into their constitution. They wrought a constitution based on rationality and democracy and prided themselves, contumaciously, on founding a nation where these attributes would become governing virtues. Of course, the Greeks saw no essential conflict between slavery and these central features of their political culture which of course suited the writers of the American Constitution who were in a similar position and like the Greeks could well rationalise the contradiction. The Greek love affair was further affirmed in American architecture. But what seems to interest Lanthimos and Filipou is the selective nature of the American espousal of Hellenic culture. The Greeks were committed to reason as a principle but the obverse side of their culture was the myth and extent to which mythology and the power of Myth was also embedded in the Greek culture and psyche, a state attested to by Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus and Euripides. In myth there is no reason; simply surrender to fate. The Americans were never able to come to terms with myth as the Greek twin shadow of reason. But it is a necessary shadow.

‘The Lobster’ at least its first half, revolved about the strange representation of distinctly separate areas of the social matrix being compressed into one expressive module. The key idea is that formulaic conformist coupledom (that underlies the moral strictures of suburban USA) is made subject to a regulatory corporate ethos, which in itself is characterised by a absurdist consequential framework reminiscent of Lewis Carroll. Failure to graduate with a partner is ‘punished’ by being transformed into a creature of one’s choice. Hence the title. The second half of ‘The Lobster’ moves into a different narrative prescription, but the first half set within the walls of the shadowy corporate organisation charged with implementing this tortuous partnering regime, is a superb parody and play out of core satirical ideas, wonderfully marshalled by the deadpan acting style.

‘The Killing of the Sacred Deer’ comprises a skilfully contrived scenario in which the main character, heart surgeon Steven Murphy, finds himself being subsumed into myth. In the heart land of the American Dream, the land of the brave and the free, the symbolic home of individuality, the protagonist finds himself drawn down the same ineluctable path that saw Agamemnon kill Iphigenia at Aulis as punishment for killing a deer sacred to Artemis. We in the West have the illusion we are free; but our destiny is to be folded into mythology and variously and in different ways live out the old archetypal responses to life. Myth is not just a story. It is a psychic reality; Lanthimos and Filipou transpose this perception to the sweetly manicured lawns of mid-America.

The short stories that comprise KoK have nothing of the depths of insight of these two earlier movies from the same team. They are light weight re-visitings of similar thematics that all have a derivative element of content. The first story is a parody of Corporate Power – it reprises the core proposition of ‘Lobster’ namely the intertwining of the personal and the corporate in a skein of warped power relations. There are the now familiar absurdist trappings bolted into the scenario but the whole plays out as one dimensional thesis with the acting, locked into functional representation of an idea spectrum, eventually loses conviction, a tendency that pervades all of the three stories.

The second of the three stories like ‘Sacred Deer’ has a mythic resonance.  But in contrast to ‘Sacred Deer’ it is a garbled ramble through its material which is set in the broken life of a cop as he experiences complete mental disintegration. Through its tangled imagery it presents as a potpourri of different fairy tale like themes such as the idea of the double (the form shifting witch) and the allure of human flesh; divine hunger as a compulsive act of either restoration or revenge. It calls to mind old tales such as The Juniper Tree or Hansel and Gretel.

The third story titled ‘RMF Eats a Sandwich’ comes across as merely confused. The action follows the obscure meanderings of two members of a religious cult intent on finding a particular woman who has (unbeknownst to herself) the power to resurrect the dead. The effect intended is parody, which works up to a point, the point being that cults are already parodies of belief systems, and the oppositional humour starts to lose its edge. Otherwise the story struggles to find the conceptual unity that usually underpins the short form and the scenario flails about desperately seeking ‘Susan’, so to speak. At thispoint, the film and in particular the acting, with its use of the same cast who are all locked into representation mode, starts to pale and Lanthimos’ short film tryst looks more a more like a series of little ideas fleshed out beyond their own value.

KoK is to an extent carried by Lanthimos’ understanding of way in which the vistas setting and architecture that characterise suburban America, psychologically mould their populations. Lanthimos’ camera films the main settings, the office suites, the medical and suburban zones as dis-connected from the human characteristics that should define them. The interiors record the flat nature of the interfaces and surfaces: the long corridors the vast interiors have the effect of deflating the personal and inflating the impersonal. The opening shot over which the Eurythmics track is played sees a suburban exterior a house of the American dream, vast with a white columned portico. This is a house of myth, not the house individual achievement.

 Lanthimos fails to match his acute optical perception of American with a script of equal insight.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

The Dead Don’t Hurt                         Viggo Mortensen (USA; 2023) Viggo Mortensen, Vicky Krieps

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema as part of BFI sponsored ‘Escapes’ screenings, 3^rd June 2024; £0 free ticket

The dead may not… but the living do…

Viggo Mortensen’s ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ comes with a five star Guardian Review. This often doesn’t mean it’s a good movie rather one that scores high on the Guardian’s scale of values. Of course reviews are simply outpourings that play an important endemic role in the Film Industry – part of the publicity and marketing apparatus needed to put bums on cinema seats.

DDH might be described as a ‘slow western’. It is full of long slow shots and long big close ups of glowering eyes and the studied probing facial looks which actors seems to specialise in these days of the 10 hour box set. As if long duration in itself means anything outside the delusions of the director. In this Mortensen’s DDH takes after Jane Campion’s 2021 movie ‘The Power of the Dog’ with which it shares a number of attributes and perhaps a particular purpose: namely to re-cast the Western as a psychological relational genre outside of its normal action and buddy conventions. An act of deliberated reclamation.

But as an act of reclamation the ambition of both these films never really extends beyond transposing contemporary mores and usages into the traditional historical settings and locations of the genre. And certainly in the case of DDH this involves a script that nonchalantly skips over the context of the Western setting as a guide rail to the scenario.

In his book about film ‘The Devil Finds Work’ James Baldwin ridicules Jewison’s vehicle for Sidney Poitier, ‘In the Heat of the Night’ for its foundational scripting premise: namely that a black Northern street-wise cop in the 1960’s would ever ever let themselves be in a situation where they changed trains in the middle of the night at a station in a small town in the deep south. No way. No. Likewise significant areas of Mortensen’s scripting of DDH come across as laughable conceits that go beyond the artistic demand of the audience for the suspension of belief. In his scenario Mortenson subjects his viewers to a special pleading to indulge his absurd plot machinations. But when a film pivots about a certain realist setting, the repeated claim by Mortensen on the audience’s patience to go along with his blatant abuse of context, passes a point of no return. Vivienne trots out from her remote home into town to get a job in the local bar, as if she were a young student in San Francisco seeking work as a waitress in a coffee shop. This is a hard swallow, swallowing made all the harder when Olsen her husband airily pops off to war for 5 glossed over years, leaving her in this obviously total vulnerable situation. Likewise Vivienne dying of syphilis after she’s been raped and made pregnant? First up: Syphilis takes 15 – 30 years to slowly kill you. In its final stages it leaves the body and face hammered with open pustules and sores, and the brain demented. Vivienne looks like she’s dying from some fashionable tubercular condition; she’s all wan pale, a beautiful specimen in her dying. Syphilis it ain’t and syphilis is highly infectious. It’s most likely she would have infected both her child and Olsen her partner. But filmwise they escape scot free.

Syphilis aside, Mortensen prefers to get on with the business of soft focus cinematography and leave the hard stuff out of the script. Except for making the point about the issue of of rape and syphilis, it is difficult to see why Mortensen chose syphilis as the cause of Vivienne’s death. As Oscar Wilde quipped: good intentions make bad art.

DDH is is a dull overlong film with a desperately contrived plot, clumsy dialogue mediocre playing and tracked with the inevitable electonic go-on-forever drone type music. Like its precursor ‘The Power of the Dog’ its emotional machinations leave the actors having to invest the characterisation of their roles with a sort of fake intensity, a played out fake intensity that the audience has to sit with for two hours plus. The dead may not hurt whatever banality of the title that points to, but what about the viewer?

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

Targets                Peter Bogdanovitch (USA; 1968)   Boris Karloff; Tim O’Kelly

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 26th May 2024; ticket £7

 

Ironic play out of the cool.

 

The year before Bogdanovitch made ‘Targets’ there occurred the first mass killing by a shooter in post war USA. It was carried out in 1966 by Charles Whitman who went to the top of the University of Texas Tower Building from where he shot and killed 15 people, wounding 31 others. He was eventually shot dead by the cops some 90 minutes after first opening fire.

It’s obvious that Bogdanovitch made ‘Targets’ as a response to this event. Like Charles Whitman, Bobby, Bogdanovitch’s fictional killer in ‘Targets’, murders both his wife and mother prior to his killing spree. But what Bogdanovitch took from the Tower murders was not the bemusement horror or moral outrage provoked by the murders or even the sensational reporting of what happened. What Bogdanovitch sees is that killing in this particular way has become an expression of the ‘cool’; an extension of a certain stylistic mode out into an extreme behavioural zone.

Post Whitman mass murder has become an expressive statement, a ‘life’ or rather ‘death’ style consumer choice. Using pump action rifle with telescopic sights the killings by Bobby, patterned on Charles Whitman’s actions can be understood as a particular behavioural geste not dissimilar to sunglasses a leather jacket a tattoo, a sports car or use of a particular fashionable word or sign.

‘The Cool’ in this respect denotes on the part of the individual a level of expressive calm disassociation in relation to their manifestations and actions. ‘Whatever.’  

The radiation of the Cool Ethos through the American social matrix may be connected to the alienation of people’s lives from a root culture.   In ‘Targets’ Bogdanovitch depicts a domestic world dominated by the output of TV, where time is on hold and rhythms of life are shaped by the blandishments of the mass entertainment industry. The culture of the ‘cool’ develops out of this suburban world of psychic containment and disassociation. The gun is cool because it represents a force that reduces people to ‘thingdom’. The TV kills minds the gun kills bodies. The gun’s cool because like TV it is also has a detached mechanism, the trigger; and through the rifle sights the victims are unreal, like the figures on a TV screen. When the trigger’s pulled there’s nothing personal, no involvement no messy blood. The targets just roll over: dead. That’s cool. As if it could be contained.

But Bogdanovich’s achievement in writing and directing ‘Targets’ was to give a particular ironic form to the film, exploiting the actual process of casting to imbue the scenario with wit and lightness of touch. Counterbalancing Tim O’Kelly’s rendering of Bobby as a methodical killer gunman is the performance of Boris Karloff as the imposing figure of Horror Movie star Byron Orlok.

On every metric Bobby is a little man, petty, inconsequential in demeanour. Bobby the little man driven by a certain feeling of insignificance for which the culture has no redress, is ironically offset in the scenario by Byron Orloc, a giant gracious Gothic presence both in life and on screen. The irony is that the future belongs to the little man and all his countless imitators; the big man, the giant is a dinosaur the purveyor of old phantom horrors that no longer count for anything consequential. Bobby heralds the dread that will characterise the time to come when a legion of anonymous men will turn their guns and shoot anyone – men – women – children, anyplace – church – mosque – school – mall – carving their mark deeply into the flesh of the social body. Byron the King of Horror movies has now been relegated into the world of the fairytail, a faded eidolon, symbolic of stories that might once have have stirred up fear but are now relegated to the nursery. Realising this Byron Orloc has decided to retire with immediate effect; he knows he is out of time that in the world of fear he has been superseded by a new generation of intense psychic anxieties.

‘Targets’ is structured about the intercut ironic counterpoise between the coming inarticulate actual manifestation of horror and the receding old school theatrics of gothic fright. Bogdanovitch climaxes ‘Targets’ with a scene wittily modelled on the denouement of Welles’ ‘Lady from Shanghai’ where the two protagonists face off in the shoot out in a hall of mirrors, image be-lying image, the actual and the virtual inseparably intertwined. In ‘Targets’ Bobby tries to escape from his snipers nest behind the drive-in screen where the last movie of Byron Orlok is being projected (amidst all the carnage). As Bobby moves to escape the actual Byron sees him and sets off in pursuit; simultaneously Byron’s on screen presence is also engaged in a chase. A he looks about Bobby melts down into a state of panic, brain sent haywire by the two schizo images of the same man coming after him. Finally overwhelmed by image he is reduced to a state of psychic paralysis, cornered and disarmed by Orloc.

Unlike Charles Whitman, Bobby is captured alive and led away by the police. In the last shot as Bobby is strong-armed to the prowl car he turns to one of the cops and quips: “I hardly missed a shot…didn’t I?” How cool is that.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk