Star & Shadow

Bloodlands (episode 1)     Pete Travis (BBC Prod,2021 ) James Nesbitt, Charleen McKenna

viewed as broadcast, 21 Feb 2021

mechanical dulls

‘Bloodlands’ is the most recent example of that kind of ‘Who done it’ ( and why?) series that comprises a drama told over many episodes, wrapped round some kind of ‘police’ investigation. In the guise of ‘Bloodlands’ the genre starts to look more tired than ever. The appearance of this genre on TV screens, first announced itself some years back with the ‘Scandi Noir’ TV series re-purposing and transposing Agatha Christie type designs and devices into the mood of the current zeitgeist. These types of TV series may be well or badly made, served by lesser or better scripts and casts, but they all draw on the same implanted script mechanics.   They all comprise the same ingredients that can be shaken and stirred in infinite variation: the motivation puzzle, the false trails and red herrings, the usual suspect, the skeleton in the cupboard, the stooge, the patsy etc. But as readers of Agatha Christie discover in the end these plot designs tend to become outworn, the gears ground down through overuse.

‘Bloodlands’ judging from its first episode, looks like it’s come to the very end of the line: it’s hit the buffers. Even the title, ‘Bloodlands’ points up a level of desperation in marketing.   Its direct titular somatic reference looks to attract an immediate prurient interest. This is a gimmick more confident series haven’t needed: The Bridge, Line of Duty etc. The problem with this type of title is that is quickly leads to a sort of semantic inflation, producers feeling the title of their series has to ‘top’ that of any rival in attracting sales interest.

The salient feature of all these types of cop/tec dramas is that their scripts define their form. They are a mechanical apparatus. The scenatios are built on a design that shares analogous properties to the maze: dead ends, circuitous paths that double back on themselves, false leads, the illusion of progress and the engendering of false hope of success. The popular appeal, as per Agatha Christie, is the posing of a certain type of problem whose solution is in theory possible through the application of logical reasoning and a ‘common sense’ understanding of psychology and motivation. Shake into the mix the fiery condiments of murder, corpses and kinked sex and you have the perfect distraction machine.

These shows are Heath Robinson type artificial contraptions, but some certainly have successfully plumbed into other other areas of psychic resonance. ‘The Bridge’ characterised by its dark tenebrous setting, felt it was set in the Viking underworld of the dead, with the eponymous bridge as a sort of symbolic lifeline out of Hel. This may not have had much to do with the convolutions of the script but it provided quasi-mythical undertow to the drama.

Nothing as interesting as this was evident in ‘Bloodlands’. Everything about ‘Bloodlands’ came across as a collection of tired clichés and repetitive tropes. The opening sequence was a series of night shots of Tom Brannick driving through Belfast. They were all very familiar types of images: the confusion of lights, the confection of refraction and reflection through the car windows, all intercut with Tom’s face and eyes, a montage assembled to express the man confronting the anarchic dangerous energy and dynamic impersonality of the big city.  But the opening section delivered nothing more than a visual cliché. The which opening was followed up with familiar story tropes: Tom, the tec with the murdered wife, the in-house police dysfunctional tensions, the suspicion of the local community, an act of sudden unexpected violence in the petrol bombing of a police car. Each card was played out by the script writers was a familiar contrivance, underscored by a dull script and workaday cinematography that occasionally resorted to drone shots to leaven the visual monotony.

You might say that these crime series have good actors. But only if in saying that you mean that these actors are good at doing what they are told to do.  Because that looks like what they’re doing. Most of the directors of these pieces are instructed to keep a high level of control over the productions which are made with a view to being sold across the world. With this is mind the actor’s face must be rigorously disciplined to exude only appropriate expression: in practice this requires the actor hold back on the emoting. Their expressive palate is usually restricted to small number of face masks: the po face – hard eye/mouth muscles non reactive; the doe face – soft eye/mouth musculature, reactive; the gloat of trimph/self satisfaction, reactive. There are others, but not so many. The permitted expressions dominate because they are safe and easy to constrict within the undulating frantic plot and sub-plot lines. In relation to this ‘Bloodlands’ in its corralling of the expressive faces of its actors, in particular of course, Nesbitt and McKenna, goes to extremes, an indication perhaps of the world wide sales ambitions of its producers. By the end of episode 1, all we had seen of James was an invariant po face, sometimes hard eyes and sometimes harder eyes, there were some doe eyes from his daughter and some gloat face from McKenna as she made a cock joke. That was it. A kind of Europudding one dimensional playing that could either turn Europe on or turn the audience off, depending on who can be bothered to watch the expressive monotony of the next episodes.

The scripting of ‘Bloodlands’ comes across as compromised. In particular in relation to its setting in contemporary Belfast with ‘The Troubles’ as backstory.   The main use of the setting and back story in this first episode was the justificatory phrase that was repeated again and again was: that at the time of the Good Friday peace accord nothing could be done about these suspicions as any action might have put it in jeopardy. This was repeated so often that I started to feel I might join in.  

‘Bloodlands’ looks like a cynical attempt to exploit its Belfast setting but it offers little else to its chosen format or genre. Dull acting, plodding dialogue, unconvincing script, predictible camera work.  The emphasis is to play safe. The Northern Ireland situation is not taken on, as represented it is nothing more than an interesting backcloth against which to play out the standard tec fare. Ironic at a time of course when post Brexit, that Irish question again looms large on the geo-political horizon. Across the water from the BBC’s England events are moving that might make ‘Bloodlands’ look more like history than it already is.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne de l’Arc) C T Dreyer (Fr. 1928; 1:34) Renee Jeanne Falconetti.

viewed: MUBI 4^th Feb 2021

Machinery of the Law

When I saw ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ (‘The Passion’) for the first time some years ago. I watched it in a cinema on a big screen; seeing it again at home, Dreyer’s film again took my breath away.   The first shot proper in the film, after the archive montage (which tells us where we are and what is happening) is a track of the Great Hall in which the ecclesiastical Court has been convened.   It’s a long tracking shot that travels quite slowly, moving behind the assembled clerics filming them from the rear or in profile as they sit and wait: some craning for a view, some rub their face, some look bored, some exchange gossip remarks and meaningful looks.

These men are gathered for a purpose. As one by one we pass them they all present as domed forms: all of them have pronounced domed heads either tonsured or capped, introducing these men (and they are all men) as representatives of religion and also allowing us a premonition of their religious idea of mercy: severe. They look like men of severity. The shot is animated and given depth and vitality in that there are three separate planes of action recorded by the camera as it tracks: in front of the row of monks and prelates there is a line of soldiers, setting up laughing joking relaxing but in their uniforms, threatening. Interspersed is a third plane occupied by yet more priests some still and some walking, engrossed in meditation or prayer, looking absented from this gathering. This is Dreyer’s set up in the moments before before Joan’s entrance.

This shot is remarkable in the associations it establishes between the images it brings together. Condensed in this one shot, the dome headed priests, the soldiers and the praying monks, is the presentation of huge judgement machine that has come togather togather to crush its victim.

In next shot we see the intended victim of this huge machine: Joan.   She is small, hair cropped, dressed in a simple jerkin. She looks like a boy.  Her ankles are shackled in chains as she enters the hall. Her interrogation begins: after some hesitancy she tells the court she is 19 years old.   This is a shock! This mighty judicial show has gathered itself in this huge hall to crush a creature who is little more than a child? Joan shows no fear. She is not afraid in this place. She is herself. Before this Court, with its unbearable contempt and malice towards her as an insignificant unclean woman who sins by dressing as a man, who has mistaken ideas about her station sex and status, Joan is only herself.   And this is ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ and this is her trial before the Pharisees.

Like the New Testament Jesus, Joan stands alone in front of her accusers. Dreyer’s ‘Joan’ is a Christ transposed as a woman, a Christ become woman. These high and mighty prelates are Pharisees, stooges of a secular arm whose only one use for her is as a dead heretic. In her ordeal her ‘Passion’ like Christ’s will show her voluntary renunciation of life itself, her self sacrifice in the name of the one who is ‘truth’ the one who is ‘higher’: God.  Joan will assume her ‘Passion’.

Like Christ in front of Pilate, Joan’s simplicity and extraordinary vision of God shine through during her interrogation. She cannot be trapped into self incrimination because she is at one with with her own truth.   Like Christ, duplicity cunning evasion are unknown to her as she responds to those who would try to trick or trap her into a heretical reply to their questions. Her spirit takes on her accusers and reveals them for the vile bodies that they are.

Against the background of Dreyer’s extraordinary set, it is the close-ups that dominate and concentrate the scenario. Much of the scripted exchanges between Joan and her accusers guards and wardens is shot using big close ups in classic montage style: shot – reaction –shot, cutting between the faces of Joan and her adversaries. Dreyer’s set is a white plastered simulacrum of Rouen Castle. In its abstraction it mimics Mediaeval form and critically it allows an even pale luminescence to fall across Joan’s face which heightens her screen presence. The pauses, the silences between question and response engender the cross questioning as a series of intensities as we look into Joan’s face trying to read her emotions. As the trial progresses, the huge male ancient harrowed faces of her judges, mocking and contemptuous, bear down on Joan. They are the same religious judicial machine that destroyed Christ and they will destroy her.  As Dreyer films her very close in long loving shots we see that Joan is psychically indestructible. She is an immovable object. Through Dreyer’s mode of presentation of Joan, he makes the demand that we look at her without flinching and as she fills the screen understand who she is. She is a Christ figure, a re-incarnation of the Word.    

Dreyer’s script moves through the major episodes of a ‘Passion’. In her cell she is tormented reviled threatened with rape by her captors who mock her by giving her a crude Crown of interwoven willow that can only suggest the crown of thorns worn by Christ. Joan is led to the torture chamber (though she is not actually put to the Question) and beguiled by trickery before finally in full acceptance of her fate she is led out, tied to the stake and in public executed by being put to the fire.

Although Dreyer’s film most strongly suggests a female iconographic recasting of Joan, Dreyer’s film also points up another sensibility: that of the coming era of the Show Trial. Dreyer will have been well aware of the Allies policy during the First World War of shooting both ‘deserters’ and ‘cowards’ after going through the motions of trial by military tribunal. These military trials with their brutal summary executions look as if they have fed into his scenario; they are present in Dreyer’s images of the British Soldiery, the Tommies, menacing and omnipresent, ready to see that the will of the Armed Forces be done. Dreyer’s ‘Passion’ also seems a presentment of the terrifying aspect of judgement machines that were yet to come, the judicial squalor of Stalin and Hitler as they liquidated their enemies by due process.

My feeling is the size of screen surely plays a part in estimation of ‘The Passion’. Some criticism of the film points to the lengthy duration of Dreyer’s close-ups, in particular those of Joan. But is this criticism an affect of scale? When a still image is scaled down to fit on a small screen, the information stream is impoversihed, less data to hold the gaze and invite the eye to explore. The smaller image quickly exhausts the visual potential of a picture leaving the mind impatient for the next image to replace it.   Hence modern directors dictum to keep the image moving, keep the picture moving: that’s the way to tell the story: movement.  

But when an image fills out the line of sight, the fact of little or no movement is not necessarily a problem; on the contrary it is potential. Stillness is an opportunity for the eye to engage with what is before it, to read into an image. The slowed or stilled image, in particular when it’s a face (and this is mostly the case in ‘The Passion’) becomes an affect image an invitation for the viewer to project meaning onto the the flow of events. As the eye has time to range across the screen, we may look, examine without flinching, at Joan and her tormentors. I think this was Dreyer’s intention: to make us look at Joan and see her. The design implicit in ‘The Passion’ is Dreyer’s refusal to compromise on this point. We are not allowed to forget Joan, whether she is before the Court, in her cell, in the torture chamber or tied to the stake where she will be burnt alive. She is herself, she is a simple human being, a women who has more spirit and soul than any of her judges guards torturers or executioners and is killed because she is a threat to them to the male world of judgementation.

Dreyer’s film comes to end in spectacle. All public execution is by definition spectacle, whether it be crucifixion or burning at the stake. And of course this is always the final episode of the Passion, the public destruction of the body, the final most painful test of the spirit: “My God my God why hast thou forsaken me?’

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

L’Avventura   (The Adventure) Michaelangelo Antonioni (It. 1959, 2hrs 23min) Monica Vitti, Gabrielle Ferzetti; Lea Massari

viewed Mubi 26 Jan 2021

I love you

I was thinking about Antonioni’s title for his film ‘L’Avventura’. What does the idea of ‘The Adventure’ point to? The final sequence of his movie suggests one answer. In this final section, after a number of close shots, the last image in the film, is a long shot of Claudia standing behind Sandro. He is sitting slumped on a bench overlooking an ocean vista with a mountainous island away in the distance. Claudia’s hand mechanically combs through his hair. They are not young people any more. They look like an elderly defeated married couple who are incapable of movement.  Antonioni’s title is perhaps mordant sardonic.   In a narrow sense ‘The Adventure’ that Antonioni points to, is that of women escaping ‘marriage’; the wider sense ‘The Adventure’ is that of women escaping men and the consequences of them not being able to do so.  

In ‘L’Avventure’s’ scenario Anna gets away from men, escapes both her father her boyfriend, escapes from them radically permanently mysteriously. But Claudia for all her hesitation her doubts and uncertainty in that last shot denotes that she cannot escape, perhaps cannot even quite see there is a problem, she has become a adjunct of the male.  

‘L’Avventura’ is a woman’s film. Antonioni’s script concerns itself with and focuses on women.   To do this he uses ‘situation’. His female characters are trapped in the world of men, their souls snuffed out. This is not addressed directly by the female protagonists. The women simply don’t have the voice to confront what is happening to them, which is of course Antonioni’s point. Their entrapment is something he shows us, that we see directly on the screen. Through Anna and Claudia’s situation we see that something is terribly wrong in their world.

The opening title sequence is underscored by a piece of contemporary jazz (repeated over the final shot and end credit). The music is driven by rhythmic guitar, it’s a dissonant nerve jangling track that might have been composed for a mystery murder movie. The music sets up the psychic state of the female protagonists (who are in effect being murdered). The music has edge; the women are edgy. They are suffocated. They are aware that they have no air but still they must breath. And it is this disturbance in the women’s psyche between the in-breath and the out-breath that interpenetrates ‘L’ Avventura’. As the camera focises on the faces of Anna and Claudia, the affect image we read in their expression is that of derangement. Their clothes are perfectly arranged but beneath the outer garments, under the skin, a derangement of body and mind.  

Anna the fiancé, caught between Papa and Sandro, dives off the yacht and swimming out in the Mediterranean cries out: “Shark!” …there’s a shark in the water.   However she’s crying ‘wolf’ though no one realises it; this time she is playing a game, her next scream will be silent, next time she will not be heard because she has no voice with which to scream out: ‘Me!”. Another later scene: Claudia and Sandro are together in the country locked in a charade of intimacy. He looks across the landscape, remarks: “Look there’s the town!” Claudia replies: “That’s not a town, it’s a cemetery.” Sandro mistakes life for death, As he forcefully takes possession of Claudia, she has no defence against him, her face increasingly assumes an expression internal panic; the look of a wild bird in the hunter’s hand. Until that final shot when she appears to have resigned herself to entrapment in Sandro’s cage.

Antonioni doesn’t confine himself to the private sphere of his female protagonists interpersonal relations. L’Avventura’s script extends out into the vulnerability of women in the public arena. This is the domain men have claimed for themselves, in which unaccompanied females are the subject not only to the male gaze but surrender their right to body space. They are prey to be hunted. In the scenes in Palermo and the small Sicilian town, Antonioni’s scenario unleashes scenes of the savage depraved nature of male desire unleashed by the appearance of the lone woman target. The scenes are a reminder of the reason for the disturbance underscoring Claudia’s derangement, that detached and out by herself on her own she is subjected to the hostility of men and their implied punishment of gang rape.   Without a voice she is defenceless.    

‘L’Avventura’ is set in the wealthy high bourgeois strata of Italian society. This a world of privilege where the men are judged by the degree of ownership and control they exert on others through their possessions: their cars their yachts and their women. It is a world where the women are trophies.   Their looks their couture and culture simply reflect back onto the glory of their consorts. The women have little actual significance, they are appendages, ultimately replicants, spare parts. If one goes wrong, vanishes or gets old, they can be replaced. Hollowed out and colonised by the male all that is left to them is an assemblage of deranged psychic responses. As Sandro moves with intent to replace vanished Anna with present Claudia, the interlinking theme of ‘L’Avventura’ is woman as a disposable entity; the one is as good as another. And of course the deal cuts both ways, as in one scene Claudia blurts out to Sandro: “You look like some one else.”   In times when we are increasingly defined by our consumption and leisure, people can start to look like some one else.

The island setting used by Antonioni for his scripted ‘coup’ of Anna’s anti-climatic disappearance, is reminiscent of Rossellini’s film ‘Stomboli’ which is set on the eponymous Aeolian island.   Rossellini’s protagonist Karen is ravaged by malignant hostile social forces but in the final sequence the volcanic physicality of the island in itself overwhelms her being. She submits to the force of nature. It is certain Antonioni saw this film and that it’s powerful climax fed into his script for ‘L’Avventura.’  The raw power of the natural environment frees Anna from the chains of a world conformed to men’s authority. The island sets her free. Perhaps as with Karen, it becomes clear to Anna that she must answer to the logic of the island not men.

Outside of the island section of ‘L’Avventura’, built structures dominate the locations. These buildings feed both Antonioni’s aesthetic and also the film’s subtext about the expression of power. The modernist construction of Sandro’s apartment, the new buildings in Sicily are the backdrops against which a new and more defined visible sort of power can be expressed: the coming of man the consumer giving clear and unambiguous unornamented expression to the world. The older buildings with their rococo interiors and exteriors signify a world where power is more concealed less brutally announced, more hidden, but nevertheless real.

Seen today after 70 years after ‘L”Avventura’ was made, Antonioni’s film shocks as a reminder of the debasement of women’s role in this era.  There have certainly been critical changes since 1960 in the status of women. Feminist sensibility has primed both women and men to challenge the whole range of their social and economic relations. But Antonioni through his film still has something to say; something to show us. It has to do with being possessed or dominated by an externality, something that that you are not able to oppose with a voice. The consequence of this is aderangement, self obliteration. Also Antonioni shows himself to be a film maker, a director who uses film to that we may see. He doesn’t use polemic, he doesn’t preach through his characters, he simply shows us things, perhaps obliquely, giving us the space to think through what we have seen for ourselves. One piece of dialogue stays in my mind:

“I feel like I don’t know you.’

“I want what you want.”

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

Ratcatcher   Lynne Ramsey (UK; 1999) William Eadie, Tommy Flanagan, Mandy Matthews

viewed Mubi 14 Jan 2021

After image

‘Ratcatcher’s’ opening shot is a slow motion long duration close up of a young lad as he twines and twists a net curtain around his head, surrendering to the immediacy of the moment. Seeing his visage through the delicate tracery of the lace, the boy’s image calls to mind the experience of an archaeologist who on removing the last bandages from a mummified corpse, catches a momentary glimpse of its face last seen thousands of years back, which then almost immediately turns to dust.

Lynne Ramsey’s ‘Ratcatcher’ sets its stall out from the beginning as a quasi mythical recasting, a re-representation of life in the slums of Glasgow. The poverty, the trampled lives, the daily struggle are all represented in this milieu. But they are not her central focus. Her concern is to express this place not so much for what makes it particular but rather for the universal psychic qualities it shares with human experience  No matter that this is neither Ancient Greece nor ancestral Alba. But look, here in the Glaswegian tenements there’s a primordial landscape in which archetypal characters play out myriad variations of mythic themes.

Running at the back of the old tenement blocks is a living river. Its spirits have coursed through the lives of all who have ever lived here. It’s a stream that in particular attracts and holds the young in its traces. These waters are an ever present motif coursing through the film which is set in the 1970’s. A time when the long strike of the rubbish men causes huge piles of black bags to pile up in the tenements and from the river comes the visitation of a plague of rats upon the people.  

‘Ratcatcher’s’ scenario is set in an unstable in-between time. A time between heaven and earth, between movement out of the old slum built by the river into the new arcadian housing development built by fields of barley. A drama is played out in the opposition between the old river gods of the slum and the coming gods of the new estate, a citadel of hope built close to the fruits of the earth.   Abandoned, the old river gods demand a human life and claim as their victim, Ryan the young boy seen in the first shot already shrouded as if preparing for his own sacrifice, his drowning in the waters.

Ramsey’s script is a patchwork of themes and mythical strips that interlink to provide a mosaic like depiction of her subject.   She doesn’t use narrative. ‘Ratcatcher’ is an impressionistic imprint of evanescent experiences which nevertheless like the face of the mummy suddenly exposed to air, leave an indelible psychic scar. Her guide over and beyond the Styx is Jamie. In the script Jamie is fitted out with a full family but from way in which he moves through the scenario, Jamie is an orphan archetype whose fate is not linked to the past but is determined by other cosmic forces.   Jamie in the Celtic tradition is accorded the status of seer, one who is guided by visions and dreams. Ramsey occasionally uses point of view shots, but mainly we watch Jamie, the object of the camera, as he moves through space and time entering into relations of life and death.

Scouring the land, patrolling the river are the Glaswegian gangs. Violent unpredictible hunters re-incarnates of the Fenians bands or Tuartha, but with nothing to hunt, they vent their warrior frustration on whatever crosses their path. The central female character is the young post-pubescent girl who takes on the opposing roles of sacred prostitute and virgin bride. Whore to the Fenians but sacred virgin to the chaste James who like Finn macCoul relates to seeing as much as to being. As Jamie’s dad becomes a ‘hero’, the river yields life in the form of fish insects and rats, so Jamie sees the escape to the newly constructed housing estate on the edge of town, surrounded by fields of gold. But as we see images of the gorgeous wind swept barley, and the last image of the film sees the family running through it, the thought occurs that the mythic cannot be avoided by simple re-location. In the midst of the fields although they have escaped the river gods ands spirits, John Barleycorn lies in wait.

There will be those who watch this film and be troubled by Ramsey’s assembly of mythic types in the slums of Glasgow. In particular her depiction of the young girl, whore and virgin.  However it seems to be a core premise of her movie that she is not setting ‘Ratcatcher’ up as a judgement machine. ‘Ratcatcher’ sets itself to catch something else, physic reverberations. Ramsey is looking at reflections in the mirror of life and understanding these as archetypal images not ideals: violent gangs as deterritorialised Fenians, child whores, boy seers. All existing in this microcosm of a Glaswegian slum in phantom archaic form that stand apart from political correctness or conventional values.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Festen (Celebration)   Thomas Vinterberg (Den; 1998) Ulrich Thomsen, Paprika Stein, Thomas Larsen

viewed on MUBI 7^th Jan 2021

Overloaded

‘Festen’ was the first feature film produced after the Dogma 95 declaration which was written by Vinterberg and Von Trier. Dogma 95 was a film makers manifesto, pledging commitment by the signatories to a code of film making practice (‘The vows of chastity’, so called). Like most such artistic manifestos it was a manifestation of silliness (Frank Capra once said: ‘There are no rules in film making only sins and the cardinal sin is dullness) but of course Vinterberg and Von Trier knew that the sillier their Manifesto, the more seriously it would be taken by film critics and thus fulfil its purpose: assure them lots of publicity.

Taken on its own terms Vinterberg’s ‘Festen’ delivers a film that in structure content and style, takes its cue from the core traditions of European film making. ‘Festen’ as a product of Dogma simply exemplifies continuity of film structure and form as exemplified by directors such as Renoir, Vigo, Bresson, and of course Luis Bunuel. Bunuel never bothered with manifestos, but many of his films fall within the parameters and technical imperatives of filmmaking set out in Dogma 95.   In respect to content it is Bunuel’s perspective as a film maker that Vinterberg also animates and re-visions. Two of Bunuel’s outstanding films, the Exterminating Angel and Viridiana, involve themes central to Festen: Epater le bourgeoisie: to make movies that are transgressive, blasphemous and that expose the hypocrisy of the middle classes and their rituals of eternity.

Bunuel’s aimed his satiric barbs mainly at the Catholic Church; Vinterberg points his camera at ‘the family’ which by the twentieth century, with the invention of man the consumer, has replaced religion as the West’s most sacred institution. It is no longer possible to offend by blaspheming God, it is the family has become the quasi religious symbol of the times.   The family is the subject of Vinterberg’s movie. His setting is the 60^th Birthday celebrations of a paterfamilias, the patriarch Helge.  The invited guests are his three surviving children, Christian Michael Helene and a host of other relatives, all summoned in effect to render their homage. Missing from the celebration is Christian’s twin Linda, who has committed suicide earlier in the year. ‘Festen’ is to the ritualised family gathering what the Black Mass is to the Holy Eucharist. It is a desecration of a sacred ritual that profanely mimics the very form that it inverts. The host at this communion is raised up not to be blessed but to be pissed on, spat at, reviled.

‘Festen’ is a comedy of manners that ridicules the complacency and inertia of the middle classes. When Christian exposes the gross sexual abuse perpetrated by his father on himself and Linda, the gathered family prefer to continue eating their celebratory dinner as if nothing had happened. They act as if they have heard nothing; at all costs embarrassment is to be avoided and everything should just continue exactly as before. All would be well if the inertia of the event was allowed to take its due and predictable course.  The scandal would simply go away if everyone surrendered to the soothing rhythms of the meal: the toasts, the soup course, the main course, the dessert, the wines the brandy and cigars in the drawing room. Everyone could, sort of, pretend nothing had happened.

As course follows course at ‘Festen’s’ birthday gathering, an atmosphere is engendered that is similar to the situation in ‘The Exterminating Angel’. Bunuel uses ‘The Exterminating Angel’ to depict the emptiness of the mannered classes as the guests at a smart cocktail party find themselves unable to leave. Each attempt to leave further enmeshes them in the folds of the event. The lack of awareness of what is happening, the desire to continue as if nothing were happening has parallels with elements of the ‘Festen’ script. Unlike Bunuel’s movie, Vinterberg’s scripting employs a series of intensifications, as the provocateur Christian, refusing to be silenced returns repeatedly to his allegations, escalating the charges levelled against Helge which are finally vindicated by Linda’s retrieved suicide note.

As in Bunuel’s two films, much of the humour in Vinterberg’s script is grounded in the structured opposition between the escalating violence of Christian’s accusations of sexual abuse, and the imperturbable aspect of the formal 60^th birthday celebrations which continue like clockwork. Finally reaching to the point where Helge, after admitting to his crimes simply vacates the table as if leaving a boardroom meeting after being voted out as chairman. The family has become a corporate body.

‘Festen’ is superbly served by its actors as a set piece requiring both collective company discipline and strong idiosyncratic characterisation. But it is the stylistic imprint of the camera work, reinforced by the edit, that defines the film. The hand held camera, as per the ‘Dogma’ ‘Rules of Chastity’, works to energise the setting creating a vibrancy of relations between the main characters and the large numbers of extras filling out the screen as Helge’s friends and relations. The edit complements the camera movement with the cutting jagged and on the move. The end result is to make ‘Festen’ a stylistic statement of involvement that works on the audience both subjectively and objectively. The camera work creates an agitated framing analogous to the subjective experience of these sort of events: interactions that are superficial, unfinished , interrupted, half understood. Objectively the camera work and edit create a mood of edginess, inter-shot tension, insecurity, that sets up both the nature and manner of Christian’s interventions and underscores the brittle nature inherent in the pretensions of family ideology.

Vinterberg works two diversions into his script. Parallel to the events taking place at the festive table the scenario tracks the events under the stairs in the kitchen where the multicourse feast is being prepared. The representation of this other world, the servants and their complex relations with their masters, works both as a muted reminder of other social realities necessary to keep the façade in order. It also functions as a distraction, a de-intensifer that takes the heat out of the main action. I thought at one stage that the ‘kitchen’ and the relations within it might have a key role in the play out of events in the dining room. This didn’t materialise but nevertheless the kitchen provided another perspective on the family upstairs.

The second diversion was the arrival of Gbatokai, Helene’s black boyfriend. An arrival that immediately cues a racist reaction from Michael, a reaction that is taken up and repeated by the whole party when the boyfriend joins the table. My feeling is that there is not room in the ‘Festen’ script to shape a response to this racism. The whole film is directed towards the outcome of ‘exposure’ of ‘revelation of truth’. All the energy of the film is targeted towards those moments where we see this family for the ‘lie’ that it is. The addition of the black boyfriend, sub theme – motif, simply reveals something of which the audience are already aware: these people are vile bodies, unpleasant destructive human beings. The consequence of trying to overload ‘Festen’ with another social concern is that the occurrence of a casual socially primed racism is relegated to a mere script appendage, a secondary concern which few people who see the film will probably remember. It looks like this strand of the script has been included without being thought through. The problem is that as victim of the racist atmosphere Gbatokai is simply left to play second fiddle to the main concern of the film. Whereas the forces of righteousness in relation to the abusive father are finally justified and vindicated, the racist abuse is simply something that Gbatokai has to suffer. He has a few resources to confront the horror that assaults him. In the maelstrom of the melodramatic finale, he’s consigned to being wallpaper. My feeling is that Vinterberg should have seen that overloading his script with a somewhat gratuitously introduced secondary theme was an act of bad faith in his key material.   Viewed some twenty years after Festen’s original release, the role of the black boyfriend and its cursory treatment in the scenario castes a shadow over the production.

As Gbatokai was writen into Festen’ he should have been acorded action. Had Lars von Trier made this movie, at the moment of revelatory truth the reading of Linda’s letter, Gbatokai would have picked up the cheese knife, climbed up on the table and smashing through the crockery and glass strode across to Helge and buried the knife in his belly.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

New Wave to Black wave addendum to ‘Red White and Blue’

Viewing the films made for the BBC by McQueen about black lives in the UK I got to thinking about the ‘British New Wave’ of the 1960’s. This movement marked a period in British Cinema when a fresh wave of film makers emerged who represented and described a neglected part of the social matrix: the lives of the British Working Class.   This ‘New Wave’ located their films within industrial and inner city locations, more importantly the intention of the scripts was to depict the lives of the people who lived and worked in these places. And these depictions were contextualised and more rounded, more gender balanced than the formulaic presentaton of working class people that characterised the scenarios of most British film productions in the post-war period. For example working class women were often key figures in these ‘New Wave’ films: sometimes as abused parties; sometimes as the lynchpins of family and community; sometimes as emotional amplifiers of the everyday. And these representations flew in the face of dominant cultural filmic norms that kept a tight rein on emotional expression.

Prior to the films of Clayton, Richardson, Reisz, Schlesinger, Anderson, Forbes and slightly later Loach, my impression is that in British movies the working classes were subject to a more or less consistent character stereotyping. They were shown as funny loveable cockneys, criminals, respectable working people (including police officers) and of course often as servants, honest but poor.   ‘Ordinary’ working people were shown in this manner via Ealing Comedies, costume dramas, other ranks in War movies and as the criminogenic elements in Scotland Yard themed police thrillers. Parallel to the British theatre, the film industry in its scripting of working class people had barely moved away from the familiar Dickensian tropes.  But in the work of the above directors working class lives were centre stage, with camera and scripts focused on them. The political and artistic drive was for authenticity.

Taking cue from writers such as Osborne and Sillitoe there was often a mood of anger underlying the ‘New Wave’ films. The anger was characterised by a feeling of working class betrayal, the experience of being cheated by a class system which exploited ignorance and vulnerability and left its victims with broken bodies and broken lives. There was also the observation made by Sillitoe about working class ‘pride’.   Working people had their own codes, their own sense of justice. They resisted being patronised but the ethos of the new consumeriusm weakened them, made them easy targets for manipulation.   As their lives were undermined by shifts in the socio-economic system, ie employment, some workers were absorbed into the new prosperity whilst others were simply abandoned, becoming long term dependents of the Welfare State, signing up to a future of drugs alcohol and mental illness. Cue some thirty years later, Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’.

Many of the New Wave films read like reports back from another country. ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and ‘A Kind of Loving’ were commercially successful, but the films taken as a whole were dynamic vectors of information, a kind of trans-social communication path to middle class sensibility about how life was lived on the other side of the economic divide. On re-view these films resonate as socio-cultural historical relics.

I think there are significant differences and some similarities between today’s emergent black film makers and the British directors of the ‘60’s.  There are two pertinent similarities, which are related. Firstly, there is the use of the social tensions employed by both generations of film makers. Here I am refering not to the actual intra-dramatic tensions that are explored both within the scripts and the filming processes probing class and race interaction. The tensions I am thinking about are those that are excited between the screen and the audience. Both New Wave and this generation of Black Wave film makers intended that their films shock the audience  The films’ tensions cross the line and confront the audience with home truths about the nature of their own society. The audience have to watch the constant battle to find the money to live, they have to watch as two policeman savagely beat up Leroy’s dad, letting him know he’s just a black bastard. The audience have to carry these messages home in themselves and come to terms with the emotions released by exposure to the viewing experience.  

The second similarity is closely related to the first and relates to the manner in which Black film makers, like their British New Wave forbears, have projected onto our screens an ‘other’ neglected area of life in British society. However well meaning thay may be, most white directors charged with realising scripts involving black experience have tended towards stereotyping or locating the lives of Black people in ways with which white people were familiar. Onwubolu, McQueen and Coel in very different ways fold their subjects within the ‘black experience’, as something with which they are familiar. They are able to present their characters and their relations with both the ‘black’ and the ‘white’ world as complex. As with the ‘New Wave’ directors their grasp of authenticity serves the intention of black film makers to push out through the screen and communicate to the viewing audience its own involvment, even collusion, in racism.  

Onwubolu’s ‘Blue Story’ is reminiscent of British ‘New Wave’s’ way of seeing things. It is about entrapment, entrapment in a socio-cultural matrix. ‘Blue Story’ is a chronicle of young blacks living in a economic system that has little to offer them. Even their families are unable to provide a protective carapace.   Protection and succour are now found in the gang and gang culture which is all male. In relation to self empowerment, it is black male identity that is under threat. The re-acton to this threat is the adoption by young black males of an alternative ‘home’, the gang, with its own validating system, built about values that in many respects run counter to mainstream rules of the game.   There is some echoing here of the tensions found in ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ and ‘Saturday Night Sunday Morning’. ‘Blue Story’ seems to me to lack the direct anger expressed in these two films. But like them, ‘Blue Story’ is a report from a strand of social life that sits in our midst, which we don’t see, but has its own destructive dynamic.

Looking at the output of Steve McQueen and to some extent of Michaela Coel (their recent work all on shown on TV) there is a break with the themes of the British New Wave directors.   The characteristic theme of McQueen and in a different way also of Coel’s, is: ‘overcoming’. ‘A Kind of Loving’ does play out the idea of social mobility, of self betterment, but even so Schlessinger hints at the price paid for this mobility. But the feel of most of these New Wave films is envelopment. The subjects are immersed in a reality where class and class differences in life chances are endemic; those who see the possibility of change and who confront the system, usually experience heroic failure, viz ‘This Sporting Life’.  

Of course being black in UK society is different type of experience to being working class in the 1960’s, though there are some similarities in the economic coupling. Race to some extent overlays class but with the additional discriminatory factor of racism from all sections of society. Working Class culture always placed its hope of improving life and life chances through the political social mechanisms it forged for itself: Trades Unions, the Labour Party, NHS, Education. There was certainly improvement in Working Class life chances as a consequence of Working Class organisation.  But Black experience was different. Although Black immigrants had their own cultural legacy to draw on, there was no easy way to develop out of this the political and social mechanisms to improve life and to fight endemic racism. Working Class institutional resistance evolved over some 150 years. Black people did not have that sort of time. The solution, for many blacks was to use the system itself and the leverage available within it to improve life for themselves as individuals, to succeed in achieving some social mobility and hope that individual success would open the door to wider community betterment. The idea of individuals committed to an ethos of individual overcoming, is an optimistic perspective that has the ring of an imported value. It’s an outlook alien to the ‘New Wave’ directors of the ‘60’s but one that since Thatcher’s ideological war has become familiar.   The primacy of an individualistic ethos not only had political endorsement from the 1970’s onwards but it’s an idea that underlies much of the output of Hollywood feature films and imported US TV series.  It’s a theme taken up by both McQueen and Coel in relation to black experience and which they exemplify in very different ways.

What is characteristic of McQueen’s films and makes them quite different from the ‘60s new wave is that they are stories built about precisely this idea of ‘overcoming’.   The main example is ‘Red White and Blue’ which tells an the story of Leroy who joins the Force with the explicit intention of ‘overcoming’ the systemic racism of the police in order to improve the life of the black community. It’s a true story, or shall we say based on a true story (I haven’t read the original auto-biography) but one that is directly out of mainstream Hollywood tradition (The reforming cop, the reforming politician: ‘Mr Smith goes to Washington’) Likewise, in ‘Education’ Agnes Smith takes the decision to fight for the right of her son to be educated in a mainstream school, to get him out of the backwater system of Special Needs where he has been dumped. Agnes’ action is about ‘overcoming’, both the discrimination of race and exploitation of class ignorance.   And Frank in ‘Mangrove’, finally takes up the challenge of his indictment and trial on charges of riot.   Frank fights and wins the case in an almost classic replication of US Court Drama movies (‘Inherit the Wind’, ‘The Chicago Seven’. Classic in the sense that in such dramas the individual takes on the might of a powerful institution, usually the state – and wins).

McQueen’s precursors are American rather than British, and as argued there are particular reasons for this. To be clear there is no judgement here, implied or otherwise, of this ‘overcoming’ theme. It reflects the reality that in the British context this re-invention and re-casting of an American ideal, was perhaps the only way to oppose the cultural and institutional forces of discrimination in our society.

I only watched some episodes of “I may destroy you’. Coel sets her drama in a milieu that is similar to American preppy sit coms. The drama centres on a clique of young hopeful successful multi-ethic Londoners whose lives revolve round bars and media, with relationships which are both straight and gay. But although the settings and locations are familiar, as a black film maker Coel has moved her story into new territory.   Coel’s self played hero, Arabella (beautiful arab), conforms to none of the stereotypes of race class or gender. She has made it, she’s successful and it is her look in itself that communicates this, that captures the viewers’ attention. Image rather than script dominates the screen.  Her outfits are visually arresting, but it is her hair, with its different and contrasting styles and locks, that is the medium that is the message. Arabella’s hair changes from shock peroxide to black entanglement, coding her identity in a series of contradictory symbols and claims that assert her right not to be defined by race or gender. Coel has moved beyond the messaging of McQueen to dis-locate blackness from its anchoring in both physicality and place. It is an ‘overcoming’ of any preconceptions about race, preconceptions which are integrated into the scenario where she is eloquently assertive and self confident in her pursuit of the malfactor who drug raped her.

It is interesting how Coel’s and Onwubolu’s work come from radically different ends of the Black experience, the generative and the de-generative. Onwubolu’s gang members possessing few advantages are using a collective solution to the problems of identity, a solution that involves them creating their own distinctive subculture.  Coel’s characters with marketable abilities and life skills are progressing as individualistic success stories, but like their working class predecessors, they might also find that leaving behind their roots is the road to cultural assimilation.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk .

 

 

 

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Red White and Blue   Steve McQueen (BBC, UK, 2020) John Boyega

Viewed terrestrial TV, 29 Nov 2020

Just so…story                       

Steve McQueen’s film, Red White and Blue (RWB), is one of five dramas he’s made for the BBC about the Black UK experience. RWB tells the story of Leroy Logan, the black police officer who rose to the rank of Superintendent in the Met before retiring from the force after some 30 years service.

McQueen’s film follows the early days of his career and is a succinct portrayal and accounting of what it was to be a black man in an alien antagonistic environment like the Metropolitan Police in the mid 1980s.

The early part of McQueen’s drama covers Logan’s extraordinary decision to join the Met. A decision he’d made, but hadn’t acted on, before the racist beating given to his father by two constables. Anyone who knows anything of the black community at this period will know that such treatment was routinely meted out to black men by police officers. It was a quasi – fascist technique used to remind blacks of their place in society. (Before the black community became whipping boys for the police, the Irish immigrants suffered similar attentions). Despite the severe injuries done to his father by the Force, Logan continued with his decision to join the police, seeing the decision as an attempt by himself to bring change to this homogenous close-ranked institution.

McQueen’s film is a regulation drama structured about the idea of a situation, and it’s a situation that plays out, rather than a narrative.   It’s filmed in the conventional manner, with the camera operating like an unseen privileged witness or observer. RWB is well shot well acted and well scripted.  McQueen’s script works because unlike some polemic dramas it never becomes a formulaic polemic, it focuses on being in the moment, not a retrograde hindsight. It has classic fimic narrative virtues which both constrain it to some extent and but tellingly also enable it to portray the experience of Logan’s situation.

McQueen’s account of Logan’s life is told not as a subjectivity, using techniques such as voice over, point of view shots etc. Rather it is shot as an ‘objectivity’ with the camera observing what happens when Black people encounter Police culture. RWB’s telling contribution to the cannon of TV is that it tells the story Black people from their perspective. It’s a rendering of the consequences of being black in this society at that time and what that meant. By extrapolation from the evidence today, the indication is that many of these features of police/black community relations, have not changed.    

The Police as an institution were founded in the 19^th century as a civic paramilitary force. From the beginning they were tasked with a political purpose: to suppress any overt unrest among the lower orders. They were established as a unit that patrolled and intimidated (Police officers has to present as physically dominant: vix – the helmet and until recently the minimum height requirement was 5ft 10 inches). Officers were recruited from either retired armed services personel or from the educated working class: a usually conservative gene pool. Like regiments in the armed forces the Police have significant tribal characteristics. The nature of the work promoting a mechanical solidarity relating to core identity (how they define who they are and what they are doing), a core ideology and justificatory system and a sense of being one. That the police should see themselves as White British, carriers of White British culture and values (or at least particular ‘police’ take on British life style – food – mores –religion), and closed off against outsiders, is not surprising. But a new situation arises when the official encompassing system of values and ethics, set by the political and managerial hierarchy, has to change to reflect major shifts in societal composition; but the mechanical value system the permeates the active organisation on the ground, simply continues, unchanged.  

What happens is that there is a critical divergence between the official code of conduct and the actual operational code, between surface and substrate.  In the organisation those opposed to or with no interest in change (and from the top of the pyramid there may not be any real encouragement or insistence on actual change, the preference being to concentrate on image and how things look {they mustn’t look bad}) simply play lip service to the new code, and mostly continue as before. And of course this is the police service that Logan joins.   A milieu that McQueen objectifies in the person of Logan with its: hypocrisy, its coded language, its barbed interactions, its polite dismissals, its subtle implications of black inferiority, the smirking sardonic comments, the smiles on the faces of fellow officers following Logan’s complaints. These all leading up to the incident in which Logan when chasing a suspect finds that the mechanical forces governing the behaviour of his so-called colleagues close down on him: they refuse to back him up, to go support help him when he is in danger. Except for the circumstance that he is black, this would be an egregious violation of the tribal code: help, look after your mate. Because Logan is black, he is abandoned to his fate by his fellow white officers.

So we witness what Logan lives through after ‘joining up’. Probably the key element of RWB is the manner in which the Met as an institution is inculpated as a black man takes steps to become ‘One of Them.’ Through McQueen’s rendering of Logan’s account the viewer gets some experience of what systemic racism is in British society through an institution like the police.  The viewer also understands that institutions such as the police where the formal and informal interactions merge in the behaviour of individual officers, are highly resistant to change. They are Red White and Blue, not Black.

McQueen highlights the heroic stoicism of Leroy Logan but he also raises questions about the extent to which individual gestures such as Logan made with his life, can qualitatively effect change in institutions such as the police, a sort of white man’s tribe. As Logan progresses from situation to situation in the drama, the reaction is: how and why is this man persevering with this? To which the response is: his ideational intention to show the bastards what a black man is – he’s their equal if not better. McQueen’s script works because unlike some polemic dramas it never becomes a mechanical polemic, it focuses on being in the moment, not a retrograde hindsight.

Looking at the faces of the Hong Kong Police, the actions of the CRS in Paris, the faces of the the Police in Belarus all seem to highlight the contradictions inherent in reforming the police, organisations that operate on the principle of assimilation and absorption not diversification.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.uk

 

 

  

 

The Colour of Pomegranates   Sergei Parajanov (USSR- Armenia; 1969) Sofiko Chiaureli; Medea Japaridze

Viewed on dvd at home, 23 November 2020

size is important

Some years ago I programmed Chantal Akerman’s ‘Je Tu Il Elle’ as the first film of a season of her movies.   I hadn’t previously seen it and because I wanted to introduce this season of Akerman’s films to the audience I decided first to view the dvd at home. I found watching it on a small screen was hard work.   In particular the opening sections which comprised long takes of an abstract nature. As the camera panned very slowly (in close up) across the white washed walls of Akerman’s bedroom, I looked at my watch and felt a sense of tedium. Watching on to the end of the movie I was thinking I was going to have to sit through all this again the next day. However the next day as I watched ‘Je Tu Il Elle’ on a large screen, Akerman’s images filling out the field of vision, the experience was completely different. Small scale the shots lacked detail and significance; on the large screen Akerman’s slow spacial pans opened up vistas into which I could enter and connect with her perception.

On viewing ‘Pomegranates’ my re-action was somewhat similar, some tedium and bemusement about what I was watching. Parajanov’s film declares itself to be a symbolic rendering of the life and work of Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat-Nova. I viewed the series of static but extraordinary framed compositions – comprising carefully assembled imagery – that fed into each other and linked by intertitle texts taken from the writings of Sayat-Nova, mostly of a religious or quasi religious nature. Parajanov’s film was interpolated and invigorated by the sort of music associated with Sayat-Nova; in particular the visceral penetrating sounds of the lyre and the tambour and religious chanting. What was it about? And was this even the question? What is the Colour of Pomegranates – blood? Sayat-Nova’s blood? Probably.

On the small screen I had watched as a series of tableaux vivants were presented and tried to understand something of what I was viewing beyond a literal itemisation of the images; how events in frame that were connected to the life of Sayat-Nova. Dissatisfied at the end of the film by not being able to engage with it, my thoughts were that this was a film that was made for projection on a large screen. To be seen as intended, Parajanov’s flow of images needed a screen that expanded out into the world and enabled a ‘seeing into’ state of mind. ‘Pomegranates’ isn’t a story; there’s no narrative pillar holding the scenario together. It’s a composition, perhaps with some resemblance to classical music, Eastern or Western, a relationship between form and cognition, form and emotion. After my viewing I could see something of how Parajanov had structured ‘Pomegranates’; but I hadn’t been able to get inside it to open myself to exposure of the contents.   Was it simply a question of system of viewing, that not being able to see ‘Pomegranates’ projected as he intended, was a betrayal of Parajanov? Or was the film in some sort of final reckoning a magnificent visual specacle but flawed or made problematic because it is simply a massive exercise in self indulgence, a film that ultimately Parajanov made for himself?

  My feeling after first viewing was that Pomegranates was a piece of visionary film making. It was like an abtruse poem; and I didn’t get it. But in that first meeting there was something glimpsed just beyond my grasp to which I needed to return to see if it was real or illusionary.

Not being able to view ‘Pomegranates’ on a proper screen, all I could do was to revisit the film, look at it a second time. This re-viewing would be pre-informed by my first screening. Second time around ‘Pomegranates’ ’ structure would not be a surprise. I had the feeling that it was a film to which you either surrendered or resisted. On a big screen, surrender would be facilitated by scale. I hoped that my second viewing would also make some form of surrender a possible response.  

Watching ‘Pomegranates’ a second time with a vague commitment to allow the film to absorb me, did release another level of appreciation of Parajanov’s vision. I saw many of the same things that I had seen before in his compositions: the presence of the animal kingdom, the dancing movements and moments of hands and feet, the monumental solidity of stone, the fluidity of water, the soft concealing nature of fabric, the statuesque immobility of the face, all images repeated and brought together in different combinations in the progression of the tableaux. But this second time I was able to link the elements. The movement through the film was not concerned with formal or logical progressions but moved through states of consciousness, each image calling up different states of psychic arousal, sensitising mind to respond. Parajanov’s work is a quasi-liturgical expression of the life of the poet-troubadour, presenting the audience with a series of compositional statements in relation to: birth life death the hidden the known union faith love loss.   ‘Pomegranates’ is about a particular life, that of Sayat-Nova, but it has a universal resonance. A life as liturgy. The constituent elements of the tableaux are simple: the animals, the body parts, water, the stone structures, the icons, the faces. And the faces! The very directness with which they are filmed: mostly still, without movement, without tricks. Parajanov never films the face as a means of exploiting the types of emotional manipulations inherent in the possibilities of Cinema.   The audience are simply given the face.    The faces are as icons; they look out from the film as pictorial affects which draw the audience to themselves and ask the viewer to confront complete and make their own association.

Second viewing deepened my appreciation of ‘Pomegranates’, not just in relation to the way Parajanov assembled his symbolic exegesis of Sayat-Nova, but also for his ‘moral’ presentation of the material.  Like an Indian Raga or Chinese classical music Parajanov’s ‘Pomegranates’ there is both a cerebral engagement and possible emotional connection. As film composed of images and moods, is an extreme and magnificent act of directorial self indugence, but one in which the humanity of Parajanov, his connection to life makes possible multiple readings and multiple ways for the audience to connect with its extraordinary content. It is not a film that meets everyone’s idea of what a movie should be, but it is a film that can engage an audience prepared allow the space and time to see into what Parajanov has put onto the screen.  After my second take on Pomogranates I felt in the main pulled into its mental and cognitive associations, but only during a couple of the compositions did I feel any emotional affect from the material. One tableau featuring a series of carpets stretched out on a series of lines from beind which figures emerged and engaged in short hypnotic dances, mainly with their hands: for some reason this pulled on me.

One observation I make about this symbolic rendering of Sayat-Nova’s life and work relates to the religious psychology expressed throughout the film, mainly through the text.   I have no knowledge of Sayat-Nova, but the film – and I only saw the shortened version – has a mono-emotio-religious text, centred about suffering. There is humour, in the strange juxtapositions and off-beat imagery but the psychic line drawn through the film is that life is suffering, a Buddhist – like Christian affirmation of life as sorrow. I had always thought that poets if they spoke of suffering would also have things to say about joy about ecstacy about passion. This one note spiritual emotional message is off-set by the extrordinary music which cuts into another dimension: perhaps that was Parajanov’s answer. 

The original edited version of the film was over four hours and the version I saw was about 90 minutes. I would not view the long version of the film on anything other than the large screen.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

Billie                James Erskine (USA; 2019; Doc) Based on research of Linda Kuehl

viewed: Everyman Cinema Newcastle, 3rd Nov 2020; ticket £12.50

white lives matter

I found it disconcerting that James Erskine the white director of this biographical documentary about Billy Holiday should chose to embed within ‘Billie’ the story of the white journalist who provided much of the material that comprised his film. Whilst Billie Holiday’s story is painfully and uncompromisingly black Erskine’s movie feels skewed towards a white audience, empathically loaded as it is by the framing presence of its white female researcher.  

Linda Kuehl a New York writer and journalist spent the last 5 years of her life interviewing and gathering material for a biography of Holiday. She died 1978 in Washington DC. She fell from the window of her hotel in circumstances that were never cleared up to the satisfaction of her family, who inherited her trove of research.

My feeling about biographers is that, as for the most part their writing pitches their subjects into the foreground of public awareness, that they should choose to take their place in the background. They shouldn’t really compete with what they are writing about. There are good ethical reasons for this in relation to this type of authorship which to a greater or lesser extent comprises a calculated exploitation of another’s life and life facts.   If the subject is the motivating energising influence for the writing, then a level of humility in relation to them is appropriate. Linda Kuehl as far as we are informed by Erskine always stressed the primacy of Billie’s life in relation to her work. The importance she attached to the documenting of Billie’s life was to try and understand her as a being and in relation to the social-cultural milieu in which she lived and worked.   Linda attached importance not to herself, but to Billie. Whether Linda was or would have been able to grasp the actuality of her subject’s life as black and female is unclear from Erskine’s script.

Erskine’s movie frames Billie’s life and death around Linda’s life and death. The film opens and closes with Linda and a parellel editing structure is used as Erskine cuts between the lives of the two women. Billie to be sure gets the most screen time, but the way that Erskine manipulates his editing schema results in the two women vieing for the interest and attention of the audience.  The intercutting is given pretext and substance by a number of observations voiced in the film that Linda’s life and circumstances might lay claim some sort of equivalence with that of Billie. Her status as a Jewish woman is cited as an example that Linda like Billie ‘experienced’ discrimination. As if, being a Jewish woman in Brooklyn or New York in the 1960’s and 70’s was a comparable discrimination to the experience of being a Black female performer on the road in the USA. Linda’s problems with men was cited, it was said that like Billie she had consistently chosen the ‘wrong’ type of guy. Fellah trouble! As if Billie’s life, a child prostitute in Atlanta and New York from the age of ten, a damaged soul, victim of vicious segregation and ripped apart by need for black male torment and heroism, can really in any way be compared with Linda’s relationship problems. This is not to belittle Linda’s unhappy experiences with men, only to say they are on a different page to that of her subject. The two women lived different psychic realities, which Linda readily understood, and I think she may have been upset by the way in which her life has been exploited in this movie.

I have these questions in relation to ‘Billie’: did Linda Kuehl’s family or whoever it is now that holds the license for her estate, insist, as part of the license deal that Linda Kuehl’s story should feature prominently in the script?   The family, and it is mainly her sister who is appears, provided plenty of 8mm home movie footage of her (used rather repetitiously) to bulk out the film, so they obviously at least to some extent approved its form and structure.   If not the family, was it Erskine who wanted to structure the film around Kuehl’s story, feeling the story within a story was a neat formulaic solution to the film’s shape, even at a cost to the films integrity?

Just questions but as I viewed the film I would have liked to know the answers because ‘Billie’ is a terrible film. In this documentary Erskine is completely unable to give Billie Holiday’s performances the respect she deserves. There is not one number featured in the film (they are all drawn from the archives of her performing) that she is allowed to complete in picture. I think the point about Holiday is that she expressed herself her race her femininity when she sang. The singing is quintessential to her being. Yet right in the middle of ‘Strange Fruit’, which Billie depicts as much as sings, so that in her performance everything is seen, Erskine cuts away from the power of her presence to throw us some litteralistic visual giblets: graphics of lynching’s, faces whatever. To cut away from the visceral power of Billie’s ‘Strange Fruit’ is an act of dereliction, an abandonment of Erskine’s subject. And Erskine does it not just once but each time Holiday performs. Abandonment of Billie Holiday, is that Kuehl?

The cutting pace of ‘Billie’ resembles a manic pop video with any shot longer than 5 seconds regarded as slowing down the pace. Erskine’s relentless splicing diminishes Holiday’s monumental presence which demands a subdued pace to assimilate. In putting his film together Erskine has abandoned imagination and opted for mechanical simplistic solutions to the problems posed by his material. The film has a lot of audio material from Kuehl’s archive. But to cover the hole in the picture Erskine has resort the repeated use of the same visual cliché: the tape recorder, either reel to reel or cassette. Erskine has nothing more to offer than clunk of the switch and the whirl of the spools, then lay the voice over. It feels like he can’t be bothered to try and develop any other idea of how to handle the voices: no pic cut to machine. He’s unable to work his way out of this tired repetitive trope. This is dead end stuff that stands in representation of an artist who was truly alive.

Nearly all documentaries carry within themselves seeds of relevance to their subjects. Even when poorly conceived and made, they can retain at least a modicum of interest for the viewer. And this is still the case with ‘Billie’, even though the film leaves something of a bitter taste that even so long after Holiday’s death, it is still Whites who are framing her story.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

The Death of Louis XlV     Albert Serra (Fr 2016) Jean–Pierre Leaud

viewed via obscure streaming ap 20 Oct 2020; free

 

two for one

Serra’s movie comes across as a reflection upon death, both in the actual and in the cinematic/political sense.   Unlike the monarch he depicts J-P Leaud is of course not dying but the cinema he personified in his earlier career, the French New Wave of Godard,Varda, Truffaut Rivette et al, is all but played out. Like Louis XlV ‘La Nouvelle Vague’ was product of its age. And as Godard himself has said: “Cinema est mort.”

What characterises New Wave is that it epitomised the idea of Cinema as a way of thinking. The New Wave and the Cinemas of other cultures moving along similar lines in Germany Italy, Iran India and Africa, made films as a means of exploring exploiting extending moving images text music voice sound, to penetrate and open up situations to certain modes of analysis to certain kinds of ideational juxtapositions. The scripts (such as they were) and/or the mis en scenes were not in general built about the narrative form, but rather grounded in ideas propositions and politico/philosophical statements. The purpose of narrative for these film makers was to allow certain kinds of manipulation of the material, for it to function as a testing track for thoughts and ideas. Narrative per se was rarely the keystone of this cinema. And the acting was also distinctive, the characters in the films, tended to represent certain types rather than individualistic personas. The successful actors in these films were those who could simply transpose their own beings into the demands of the film scenario. There was not a requirement for ‘method’ acting or building up a character, back story etc; what was required was professional non-actors. And in playing Louis XlV, Leaud does not play a role or a character: he is not a king he is simply a type, a man who is dying.

Like The Divine Right of Kings, the legitimising philosophy developed by Louis XlV, the idea of a cinema, that is in part a way of thinking or being in the world has receded as a idea. Production of actual films has been overwhelmed by the default to the Hollywood norm of narrative and the cinema of the Superspectacle. An ideology of form taking precedence over an ideology of content. ‘Apres moi le deluge’ is a saying attributed to Louis XlV, and could also sum up Godard’s final judgement on the future of cinema. Louis in the person Leaud sees the lights go out, not with a bang but with a whimper, killed by the manipulations of his doctors anxious to pin the blame for his death on a convenient scapegoat, an outsider, a migrant.

Sarra’s movie does not take on a narrative form; rather it is an observation of a process whose outcome is never in doubt: the death of the monarch.   The filming is emblazoned in a rich chiaroscuro of dark colour, predominantly reds. Doctors come and go with their probings and examinations of the body of the king, intent not so much to cure, rather to go through the necessary motions that will protect their reputations. As Louis dies, issues of urgent state importance are brought to his attention and those ministering to his soul come and go. But none of these interpellations, can compete with Serra’s central positioning of a man taking leave of life and moving with a certain calmness into the realm of death.

Serra’s movie works on its own terms as a study of dieing. A monarch dies like any other human, in the fold of dramas that in the last analysis are rendered irrelevant by death. But Leaud’s presence in his playing of Louis XlV adds an analogous track to the scenario. It’s a phantom track, a shadow that his recumbent body casts over the film, the demise of Cinema. Just as after Louis’ death the advance of social cultural and technical forces eventually closed over the monarchy and destroyed it.

The French Revolution of 1789 can be understood as an acceleration of the world away from the static heliocentric vision of the Sun King and the Divine Right of Kings, as the worlds of science and philosophy overtook the domain of Louis XlV and left the certainties of his age behind in their wake. And some similar process affected the New Wave as the early1990s witnessed huge wave of technical and accompanying social accelerations. These accelerations closed over Cinema, whose dominance had already been challenged by TV, but which now was submerged under oncoming waves of vibrant new technologies controlling information and communication: video games, IT forms extending into social media, image streaming.

This acceleration of particle information across different modes of discourse and its transmission created worlds of relevance and immanence that increasingly take the form of closed loops. Worlds where thinking is heretically sealed and characterised by reactivity not pro-activity, and in which situational dialogue the creative spark of life, dies the death.

Dialogue was always at the centre of the New Wave filmic expression. And of course dialogue as a creative intensifier is the opposite of everything that Louis XlV as an absolute monarch, believed in. In a strange and ironic fashion you might say that today’s worlds of media driven closed loop reality are also absolutist, the consumer is King.   In the 21^st century we have returned to a situation in which Louis XlV, as an individual, would have felt very comfortable. To be able to speak without fear of contradiction.   As a culture we have come the full circle, and probably done so many times.

adrin neatour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk