Star & Shadow

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

 

 

 

 

 

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