Star & Shadow

The Favourite Yorgos Lanthimos (UK 2018) Olivia Coleman, Emma Stone Rachel Weisz

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 2^nd Jan 2019; ticket £9.75

fable for the times

Lanthimos’ script weaves its narrative as a web of relations between three women, Queen Anne, and her two favourites. Sarah and Abigail, transposing an eighteenth century event into the realm of contemporary filmic drama.   The problem with period settings is that often the backgrounds the costumes and appurtenances get to take centre stage. This can leave the content visually overwhelmed causing it to meld into inconsequentiality. A case of style taking precedence over substance.

Lanthimos’s movie doesn’t fall into the latter category. But Lanthimos seems to have fallen foul of the English Country House Syndrome in as much as filmmakers have often found it difficult to connect to these artificially preserved domains that represent lives now alien to us.

Lanthimos’ previous movie ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’ was enjoyable for the way in which he conscripted the American settings, the hospital, the suburbs, into the film’s mythic structure. These settings, depicted as emptied out space culturally evacuated of human drama, were transformed into satirised locations in which the black comedy of a ritual meaningful death was played out.

This fusing of setting and theme is also remarkable in films like Petri’s ‘Property is No Longer a Theft’ and Resnais’ ‘Last Year in Marienbad’.   As in ‘The Favourite’ the settings of these films are of an historical provenance; the rich decoration of the interiors is given force by complex camera choreography lending to Petri and Resnais’ films another layer of cinematic immanence to their themes.

“The Favourite’ for all Lanthimos’ tracks, long shots and fish-eye wide angle shots (ugly and distracting to my eye; but perhaps Lanthimos in using this lens wanted to point to artifice) he creates neither feelings of immersion nor possession; only the feeling that these long galleries, these wainscoted chambers, these high ceilinged salons, are ultimately nothing more than backdrops.   For all he tries Lanthimos just seems to be stuck with the space. Anne Sarah Abigail are all detached from the spaces in which they move, not enveloped.  The built structures and their embellishment play no actual part in psychic dynamic of the film. It is melodrama that envelopes the women.

But whilst the script uses a classic melodrama engine to drive the scenario, ‘The Favourite’ is more about form than content, form that is based on opposition.   The opposition of the male and the female is the key proposition.   The melodramatic goings on, the power play between the three protagonists, takes second place to their relationship and confrontation with the male dominated world.

The trio of woman are all anachronistically wig-free. Their freedom of expression and their modernity expressed by the free locks of their hair. Contrarily the men are grounded in the times, bewigged and emotionally straightened and symbolically condemned to immobility by the artificiality of their headwear. When Abigail asks Harley to remove his wig so that she can see who he is, he is abashed, reluctant to remove this totemic symbol of his male power.

Sarah and Abigail (in particular) are represented as modern women ready to pick up the baton of power from men who are unable to move foreword into our times.     The women are self confident, through their own internal force they are the equal of men: they can shoot like men, ride a horse like men, take a tumble like a man, swear like men and fight.  And they are sexually self sufficient, able and able to satisfy their physical sexual needs by themselves or through the ministration of woman.

The actual historical elements of The Favourite are unimportant. the film is a modern parable, a statement of today’s oppositional gender politics. A point concentrated in the ball room sequence where instead of moving to the restrained conventions of the baroque, the women launch into a wild unrestrained Greek taverna dance. It might be said that the the Favourite depicts a female zero sum competition, but it does so within a world where the power play is between women. It’s a film that points to a future that is governed by female not male humours.

As far as I am aware this is the first movie Lanthimos has made that he has not himself co-scripted with Fillipou.   I think the film reflects his lack of ownership of the script. His difficulty handling the locations and sets, the reliance on a trite melodramatic device (similar to All about Eve but less effective), the use of the current directorial fad for dividing the script up into little chaptered sections that are meaningless, all add up to a film that is curiously vacuous. This contrasts with the impression left after seeing The Killing of a Sacred Deer, scripted by Lanthimos and Fillipou. Coming out of this movie the feeling was that this film conveyed something the director has seen, that there are forces at work beneath the surfaces of life. IN the Favourate there is only surface, and excepting its oppositional form there is little impression. But the Favourite plays out well to the taste and conceits of the day, and will probably be festooned with the appropriate garlands.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The House that Jack Built   Lars von Trier (Dmk, Europudding 2018) Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Bruno Ganz

viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 23 Dec 2018; ticket £9.75

it’s a wrap around

Serial film maker Lars Von Trier wraps his gore fest around a dialogue with Verge (This character played by Bruno Ganz, representing the Virgil of Dante’s Inferno) as he guides eponymous Jack down through the caves towards the gates of hell.

In fact most of the dialogue, spoken to Bruno Ganz by Dillon in a po-faced de-flected sort of monotone, is the obverse of the pseudo-philosophical twaddle that permeates the films of Terrence Mallick and his numerous imitators. During one sequence, Jack talks to Verge about Blake’s vision of a humanity divided into the Tygers and the Lambs, seeing the Tyger as the creative artist to whom all is permitted. But just because Jack’s lines veer towards a psychopathic demonic logic, this lends them no more than a specious authenticity comparible to the moronic insights dropped from the Tree of Life.

In fact a lot of the dialogue between Jack and Verge (Their voices are given a synthetic deep bass treatment with heavy reverb) is densely expressed and difficult to decipher, but you get the general drift. Jack is smart, self satisfied but occassionaly mildly self critical, solipsistic and pleased with the logic he has contructed to justify his deeds.

Jack’s character as a serial killer was apparently deeply researched by von Trier who as a result has come up with a movie-fit protagonist, an assembly line character who combines all the traits of out favourite movie killers. Jack doesn’t do empathy, in particular when he is on the job; he has OCD which not only lends a few moments of levity to the goings-on in particular in the penultimate section, but also gives him lines to feed to Verge about his need for meticulous order and attention to detail. Jack through killing discovers he is an Schlachtkunstler (slaughter artist) who expresses himself through the creativity of his chosen mode of expression. In particular he is driven to photographing and then freezing the people he has killed.

With the bodies frozen, he takes to arranging the bodies in increasingly complex tableaux. This might be seen as a savage satire on the cancerous spread of the narcissistic art ethos through the social body of USA and Europe (and also beyond). But this insight into the theory and practice of contemporary art was better expressed in Ostlund’s ‘The Square’. Von Trier’s satire (if satire it is) is highly derivative. In relation to Jack’s scene of crime photographs (which he fashionably captures on an old camera with analogue film {though we are spared wtinessing the development and printing of the images} ) combined with the grotesque posing of his victims for the shots, the effect is that it is all too familiar: we have seen stuff like this before. The final coup de film the frozen house of corpses (a concept credited to Lars von Trier – how desperate is he for recognition?) IS anti-climatic because its appearance as a construct has been so OBVIOUSLY telegraphed.

It might be Von Trier’s point that the House of Jack Built is intended as parody. His intention being to demonstrate the desensitising and distancing effects of this type of film.   As if we hadn’t noticed. But if so this is an inconsequential intention as by now movies made in this killer genre mode, can only be parodies. And you can’t parody a parody; you produce just another parody and there is no enlightenment or seeing from the light thrown by this type of candle.

From the manner in which events develop by way of Jack’s film career, it appears at first that von Trier might be contriving a filmic vehicle that implies some moral coda governing Jack’s decisions.   Von Trier films have a muscular morality in the sense that many of his characters actions follow an unwavering and undeviating conceptual and behavioural logic, at whatever the cost. His character’s behaviour is moral according to their own code.   In the first incident, his victim incites her own demise by invoking the curse of Genet. In accusing Jack of being a serial killer, she opens the box and he becomes one. The greed of the second victim brings about her downfall and the third victim together with her two young boys is gunned down by the gun she had hoped the boys themselves would learn to use to kill. But when Von Trier gets to the point in his script where Jack mutilates and murders his prostitute girlfriend (who’s weakness is to be blind to the warning signs), and the final set up where Jack plans to kill half a dozen men with a single full metal jacket bullet, all we are left with as a source of moral justification is Jack’s narcissistic self importance as rattles off to Verge the sort of mumbo-jumbo you find in neo-Nietzschian self help manuals: that which does not kill me makes me stronger….etc.

Who’s the little boy at the piano?

The House that Jack Built has elements within it that suggested to me, a level of identification on Von Trier’s part with his material. One of von Trier’s structural devices (another is his now fashionable division of the movie into ‘incidents” or chapters. Hardly a film is made today without the director borrowing from this litterary device) is to insert into the scenario a series of flashbacks to Jack’s childhood. On what looks like 8mm footage, we see the image of an isolated talented boy obsessively practicing the piano; we see the same boy trapped like a prisoner in the clutches of a certain kind of bourgeois family bent on keeping up appearances. I wondered if this material was the director’s re-creation of a filmic substitute past for himself; Von Trier’s compensatory in-filling into the House that Jack Built, of his own re-imagined childhood. The fabrication of the missing past of the serial film maker as the serial killer he might have been.

Just a thought.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

The Last Movie     Dennis Hopper (USA 1971) Sam Fuller, Stella Garcia, Dennis Hopper

viewed Tyneside Cinema 17 Dec 2018: ticket: £9.75

acid vision

The last scene of Hopper’s film is a superb condensing of the core strand of the thinking that energises ‘The Last Movie’. Seated in a darkness penetrated only by a paraffin lamp, Kansas (played by Hopper) and his gold prospector partner talk about the business at hand, finding gold. They talk and Kansas keeps asking his partner how he would recognise gold, how he can even imagine he can find gold if he can’t recognise it? The partner’s response justifies itself purely in terms of the formal logic of cinema precedent: the Treasure of Sierra Madre. In this film Walter Huston (note the transposing/confusing of the real actor Huston, for the character Howard) found gold. Huston just went into the hills, looked in a river and found it. Easy! Nothing to it, no problem.   You just do it like they do in the film and it will be OK. Despite Kansas’ insisting that it may not be so easy to recognise gold, it isn’t just shiny stuff glinting out at you saying ‘I’m gold’, the partner can’t be shifted. He doesn’t really listen and just repeats with conviction that the Treasure of Sierra Madre shows how prospecting works: the gold’s there; you just go out and find it. Simple. End of movie. Roll credits.

Hopper’s movie penetrates deep into the actuality of what the movies are, how they are actually understood by their audiences.   Like the LSD scene in Easy Rider The Last Mover feels as if it were conceived written filmed and edited with the clear visceral seeing that acid sometimes lends to the trip. What Hopper sees and what is expressed in The Last Movie is that movies are folded into the way in which live in the world. Movies are now part of the way in which experience life. To put it in a fancy they they are as much part of our minds, as our language. Movies function as a conditioning factor shaping the way in which we are able to think.

At one point, Sam Fuller thanks the caste and crew at the end of the film within a film shoot, booming out: “God bless you all, and I’ll see you back in Hollywood!”

To the fabricators of dreams the end of the movie is another job done, another piece of carefully crafted fakery in which lines are remembered, takes crossed off the slate and no one gets hurt, physically or emotionally. But there is a movie within the movie, the movie that is released into the world. The movie in which a world is called up as a series of images that are in themselves complete representations of action and affect. The very reality of the situations depicted easily overrides any inclination of mind to differentiate between actual and fake. There is one image after another streaming into mind absorbed into consciousness.   Overwhelming us, the movie stream becomes the default reference and model for, ‘a life’.

The form of The Last Movie, the Western shot by Sam Fuller as the movie within the movie, the people’s movie, the edit with its flashbacks and foreword flashes, its insertion of random inconsequential intertitles, the cuts to idyllic landscapes all reinforce the Hopper’s thematic vision of the movies as a state of mind that creates its own magico-religious imperatives.

And The Last Movie is structured around two spectacles: the spectacle of the Western shoot which has to do with the fabrication of reality and the magico-religious shoot which has to do with realisaton, film making as a ritual to bring about a changed state.

Both spectacles share organisational features. They both have high priests whose proclamations must be obeyed, and both are hierarchic in the their power structure. Otherwise they are in an inverse relationship to each other.

When Sam Fuller’s Western has wrapped and the caste and crew go back to Hollywood, the local people, fascinated by the process of film making and its relationship to changing the real, want to make their own films. At this point Hopper’s scenario expands out into a grandiose parody. The populace construct fake filmmaking equipment out of bamboo: bamboo cameras, dollies, booms, mics, brutes, spots, key lights. With this equipment with its voodoo power, they proceed not to fake the action and situations, but to ‘film’ real actions with real consequences. The Hollywood movie used real equipment to simulate reality, the people simulate the equipment to create their own reality. Hopper’s perfect analogous bamboo inversion of life to craft.

Interspersed between the spectacles are Kansas’s relationship with Maria and the gold prospector. Both relationships are satires on the American illusions of gaining wealth and notions suburban bliss, swimming pools jacuzzis etc. But located within the tread of the movie is a strata of deep misogyny, that I think emanates from Hopper’s nature. This misogyny may pose as satire but this doesn’t feel convincing. There are two times in The Last Movie when Kansas quite viciously and with little provocation strikes Maria. These arre moments of shock. In a film which plays on the idea of the movie within the movie, on the intermix of fabrication and actual, Hopper suddenly produces a moment that feels real.

These two scenes of Hopper’s male violence feel like Hopper making a statement about himself. He is saying; for better or worse I am real; this is me. I am what I am and I am not a good guy or a nice guy. I am an ugly man, don’t fuck with me. I hit women.

“The Last Movie’, why did Hopper chose this title? I don’t know if he ever commented on this. Perhaps it points to his moment of insight about the nature of the movie business:  this was The Last Movie he could make in a state of innocence.

 

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

The Image Book ( Le Livre d’image)   Jean-Luc Godard (Swi 2018) J-L Godard (narrator)

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 2^nd Dec 2018; ticket: £9.75

consciousness is an old movie

There is the cliché that when you die your life passes before your like the unravelling images from a film. So is Godard dying? He talks about the film as his testament (and there is a clip in the film from Cocteau’s Testament of Orphee in which Cocteau himself is pierced through the body by a huge spear thrown by a God). Or is Livre’d’image a testament of a civilisation that is now dying, moribund asphyxiated swamped by its own images?

What does J-P want to make us conscious of…?

Does Godard ask questions to which there are no answers?

Questions are sometimes more pertinent than answers.

As the fate of Narcissus tells, what started off as a mirror image in pool of water was never an innocent moment. Once the image is released from the bounds of the psyche, immobility follows. Death follows immobility.

The last clip in The Image Book: we see a French open air dance hall where formally dressed men in top hats sport with some Can Can dancers. It is a long clip almost as long as a couple of the train clips. As the camera tracks and circles with one of the couples the man collapses onto the dance floor, falling prone as if dead. The last image in the ‘Book’.

Godard’s last dance…

The sound track has all the hallmarks of a Godard movie. The mix comprises: voice over, music and sound effects. Much of the voicing is done by J-L himself adopting different pitches and timbres, but the most characteristic of his voicings revisits the voice from Alphaville, a voice that comes from the depths of the time, lending to Godard’s text a faux prophetic absurdist quality. The tracks retake Godard’s play with music: ironic counterpoint, his overlaying of images a sudden overwhelming sample from a full orchestral arrangement, which dies back as quickly as it unexpectedly appears. A score that underlines, undermines, undercuts overwhelms underplays, the images.   Likewise Godard’s use of sound effects: the rap of the gun, the piercing whistle of the train, the sound of the ocean.   Viewed mutely the train is a powerful image, departing or arriving like Chiron’s boat. But married to the sound image of the whistle, the effect of the train image deepens, draws in the viewer, leaves us vulnerable and opened up or startles us awake. Likewise the sea as image captivates. Our eyes focus on its surface whether in stillness or in violent motion. Add sound to the image of the sea, and we are connected to creation and thanatos. The gun is the sign of power, when we hear it bark, we know everything is changed.

The use of sound image by Godard teases us: picture + sound = film image. But this revisiting of sound a la Godard in Le Livre d’image, suggests that Godard’s intention is to make us the audience conscious that the film image is first of all, manipulation. And consciousness is the only protection against those things that would be done to us in the name of Cinema.   A celebration and a warning about Cinema.   In the name of being conscious we can love those things that would distort and twist what we see.

Godard quotes Brecht: Only fragments have the mark of authenticity. What’s it mean?

Today a whole section of the film industry is dedicated to ‘mining’ archive film in the name of presenting us with authenticity. In Jackson’s ‘They shall not grow old…’ First World War archive is not only colourised and restored but rendered in 3D to ‘give’ us the ‘real’ experience of being there in the trenches. But what is this ‘give’? Is anything more ‘given’ than the rendering up to us of archive as spectacle?

In this type of restoration archive becomes a double spectacle: a spectacle both in itself and of itself, of both means and ends.   Seeing spectacle as spectacle restored to us as spanking new, the viewer is overwhelmed by the technological wonder that this material represents. New film for old. The transformation of this old stock by heroic feats of digital engineering and manipulation. This technological achievement in itself almost outdoes the content it presents: the trenches, the dead, the wounded, the tanks, the artillery, the scenes behind the lines.  After the digital rebirthing of all this material, what we see is the shiny surface of an alien time and place, a war and its appurtanences now long gone. A seductive spectacle of detail that persuades us we have looked on the face of war: the bad teeth of soldiers, the grin on the face of the man about to go over the top. A spectacle that draws us into a specious familiarity with content, as witnesses to what we did not witness; as objective observers to that which is not objective.

The fragment in its very incompleteness pulls us closer to ourselves, focuses our consciousness.  There is no pretence that the fragment is anything other than fragment. The fragment is all that is left of a whole that is not there. The fragment calls upon not just the eyes but the mind to penetrate and complete what have before us. Through fragment we are directed into an engagement with ourselves to complete imaginatively that which is absent, to bring what is latent into presence. We are conscious that we ourselves are the instruments of this process of recreation. Ourselves as an agent, not another. The fragment and the glimpse authenticate ourselves.   When we see what appears to be the whole, it is a surface pitted with the acts of bad faith in which we abdicate responsibility for our own instrumentality.

 

Le Livre d’image is filled out with images that refuse to resolve. Images that are degraded distressed incomplete. Images that trigger responses in us but without clear object. Responses that are triggered as if by some precognitive emotional memory. But responses that are our own. Responses that are not directed to any end or purpose, responses not designed to manipulate us or to make us want to believe or disbelieve some story, to buy some consumerist junk, or to judge or to choose. A film of pure affect. Timeless.

I can’t read Godard’s intention in making his last film. On his part it may be a sort of playful act of creation, a sorting through, an arranging of image clips for his pure joy in the material. A desire to bring together in one filmic steam all he knows and loves in Cinema. Be that as it may, Godard’s film and tv output has always been directed towards the idea of making the viewer aware of what is set before them. Put together like a filmic variation of one Gysin and Burroughs’ cut ups, the clips create a state of receptive affect which communicates a streamed sense of pure being, where our consciousness is allowed freedom to look to search to be affected but never to be controlled nor allow questions to be answered.

PS a question to which there may be an answer.

The (I)mage Book? Why have the UK distributors chosen to give the word image a capital letter? In Godard’s title ‘Le Livre d’image’, ‘image’ is caste in lower case.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shoplifters (万引き家族 – literally: Shoplifting Family)  Kazoku Kore eda   (Japan 2018)   Lily Frankie, Sakura Andu

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 27 Nov 2018; ticket £9.75

Dickens with chop sticks

When in one of the final sections of the movie Osamu is asked by the cops if he isn’t ashamed that he taught his adoptive son Shota to shoplift, he shrugs looks down and answers with a shrug of resignation: this was all he knew.

Interesting that the original title of the movie is not ‘Shoplifters” but rather:   ‘Shoplifting Family’. Because the core of the movie is not so much transgression (though after its own fashion there is certainly transgression in the film) but rather inclusion, a tale of a multi generational family that functions positively on its own terms even for the children who are not ‘kin’ but whom they have compulsively assimilated.

In ‘Shoplifters’ Kore eda reaches back into both the historic and also the mythic movie past, groping for an era that was not defined by: information technology, gadgets and communication media. A time that was characterised by traditional values pertaining to human relations and their organisation in space. A once upon a time when eating sharing food and touch was the focus of life, not the smart phone. When people looked not at a luminous screen but at each other.

The Kore eda’s film has a medieval feel.  The family and the characters portrayed echo in filmic terms directors such as Mizuguchi and Kurosawa, referencing the peasant lives that fill out the backgrounds of their scenarios.   Kore eda’s characters have the qualities of cunning and resilience portrayed by these directors as Japanese virtues. Of course ‘Shoplifters’ has a contemporary setting, but the family portrayed are not representative of the mainstream. The family lives on the margins of Japanese society. From oldest to youngest their lives are enmeshed in money making rackets from theft to extortion. Their disparate and distinctive trespasses could be justified by low income and their need to live, to eat. But for the family their behaviour is simply enfolded into their way of life and their values.   They are a homogenous unit, there is no life/work split, there is just life.

Their infractions (or unconventional work) are absorbed into their collective life which rests on a stable (but not inflexible) matriarchal hierarchy from grandma down to the youngest, Lin (so renamed by the family). Living in a shack situated in an in-between zone, a sort of any space whatever, the family live in compressed chaos. Kazoku fills his frames with matter piled over matter, as the family eat sleep groom dress bathe in dense physical promiscuity.   They live lives that are folded both into the space they occupy and into each other, engendering an intercaring/concern that is perhaps love. There’s an idealised message here. And this is Kore eda’s purpose: a lament for the kind of life, a traditional Japanese kind of living.

The collective life he epitomises in ‘Shoplifter’ is all but vanished. It has been replaced by individuated self bound existence, a life style accelerated by digital technologies which speak to the individual not to the collective. It is a life where something in the soul of Japan has died where Japan has lost something.

Western eating utensils replace chopsticks. Doors and stud walls replace screens; beds replace mats; the physicality of eating, moist foods requiring sucking and stuffing, tipping the bowl to drink down the essential mixture of juices and stocks, replaced by dry American foods directed into the mouth by the hand. The erotically suggestive nature of traditional cream coloured Japanese Udon noodles is captured in Kore-eda’s love scene where Nobuyu, susceptible to the sensuality of the noodles, coaxes Osamu into making love to her. A love making characterised by both pre-coital and post-coital humour that is at one with a traditional line of Japanese erotic art.

The fall of the family is occasioned by two events unrelated except for their moral consequences. Firstly, the death of grandma when it is unclear who can replace her and her wisdom. And Osamu’s act of bad faith.   Osamu has told Shota that it is Ok to steal from supermarkets because the food doesn’t belong to anyone. But after grandma has died, Osamu breaks into a car, smashing its window with a hammer, stealing the handbag left of the passenger seat. Shota is shocked. The handbag had belonged to somebody.   And something in Shota snaps, he decides to break out of the family.

Kore eda films ‘Shoplifters’ framing his camera to capture the contrast he sees between his reliquary family and Japanese society. He uses a particular settings such as the landscape and the milieu in which the family lives. Not the bold geometric lines of the new cities and high rise apartment blocks, neon lit and dense with traffic. The family’s dwelling (hovel) is located in residual low value land, in-between space, neglected and overlooked by developers and governments, scrub land and unremarked space. A sort of existential space for the left over and the left out. The density of the interior of the shoplifters home contrasts both with the modernist ordered environment to which Lin is returned and with the utilitarian space of the enforcement agencies which in the end take over direction of their life and relationhips.

At the end, the final sequence, Kore eda’s camera reveals his any-space–whatever as a transformed zone. A zone purged by the magic of a virgin fall of snow. A promise of hope, this snow covering comes as a revelation, like one of Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji.   It is a sudden revelation that things can change, and the relations between ‘father’ and ‘son’ are given another type of possibility.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

A Star is Born   Bradley Cooper (USA 2018) Lady Gaga; Bradley Cooper

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 30 Oct 2018; ticket: £6.25

ggooggoogachoo

Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born is not so much a film as a comfort vehicle designed to transport Lady Gaga from A to B and back again with the minimum of fuss whilst extracting the maximum fare for the ride from the Gaga’d fan base. As a vehicle, A Star is Born is not so much directed rather deliberately manoeuvred from A to B as it floats, love side up, down the channel of its slow 136 minutes.

The movie itself doesn’t have to do much either as film or as script. The script panders to the usual tropes of success via dedicated talent and self destruction by alcohol. The shooting flicks from close shot to close shot, Gaga faciality dominating the screen with all it attendant frantic gesturings. The film has a leaden pace and except for a moment or two of brotherly confrontation is devoid of any filmic tension. A Star us Born just does what it promises: delivers up Gaga, big and close with some new songs.

What is interesting about A Star is Born, is that in a similar fashion to Battle of the Sexes in which Billie-Jean King emerges triumphant over Bobby Riggs, the emergence of the woman as the winning ticket, constitutes a sort of narrative non-event. In film terms, though differing in causal origination ( The Battle of Sexes being actual, A Star is Born deriving from Hollywood mythology) both films are mechanically directed outcomes that comply with contemporary ideology that the female protagonists succeed.

Unopposed uncomplicated plotting is dull, whether it tries to celebrate the success of women, proletarians or white American men.   In the case of Battle of the Sexes and A Star is Born, both movies are saved from terminal life threatening dullness by the sinister left field side of their respective scripts, the man story: little Bobby and Jackson.   Bill-Jean may have come won on the tennis court but Bobby Riggs took the movie, as the wheeler-dealer bad boy whom even the film’s formulaic script was able to suggest secreted unseen layers of devious calculation and manipulation.

In A Star is Born, Ally and Jackson aren’t formally opposed as were Billy and Bobby. Rather they are in affect, contrasted: she on the rise; he on the descent. But the ‘she’ in the ascent, can’t escape the curse of predictability in the role of the complete product. The model career girl with the model attitude Gaga rolls off the assembly line, doing little more than wait for the script-belt to advance her to super star status. The performance, other than moments of acted out concern about Jackson, (some cued pouting) requires little other than parading her different outfits and haircuts. Enough of course for the fan base.

Obversely Jackson on his way down, via the bottle and substances, is the more absorbing character. Even his voice is more interesting that Gaga’s, whose popsie brittle delivery confirms the general rule (there are of course plenty of exceptions anger for instance) that sincerity is in inverse relation to volume. Bradley Cooper as performer, even though singing is not the root of his claim to fame (arguably neither is singing at the root of Gaga’s, she is noted for being a celebrity meat pie, but she does claim to sing), produces a musical singing performance in A Star is Born, that outplays Gaga. Jackson’s soft pedalled lyrical voice delivers an emotive charge that is absent from his Star. His acting performance, which no more than replays the gestures and expressive devices familiar from Cohn Brother movies, still occasionally notches up moments of authenticity, so when the camera unlocks itself from Gaga onto him, the waning interest in the movie flags up a little. Cooper can’t carry the movie in his performance, any more than he can direct it. He does stop it from dropping dead on its feet.

Both Battle of the Sexes and A Star is Born have an allegorical weight that fits the times.  A kind of sub-prime Aesopian moral fable or a Jungian message? Perhaps Jung fits better.   If we see Billy/Bobby and Ally /Jackson not as discrete entities but as composite characters comprising male and female psychic strands, then there emerges the internalised drama of intertwined oppositions that is characteristic of the times. The female half of Billie/Bobby and Ally/Jackson striving for a pure type of female completion of object attainment as if life itself could be satisfied by striving for an abstract type of form.   But the female is compromised and thwarted by the male anima which reaching for perfection crashes falls lost in the mire of contradiction and destruction but retaining a certain nobility which life itself bestows. The states of righteousness and trickster, female and male, defining internalised forces at play in the times. Forces so deeply internalised that they are at constant risk of playing out into chaos.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Climax   Gaspar Noé (Fr; 2018) Soffia Boutella, Romain, Houheila Yacoub

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 2 Nov 2018; Complementary screening.

Did you climax?

Did I Climax? Was this dance? I felt was watching a two hour long masturbation death ritual. Like masturbation Gaspar Noé’s ‘Climax’, using contemporary dance as a medium, intersperses arousal tedium and exhaustion on its long road to detumescence.

Viewing Climax called to mind Pasolini’s last movie ‘Salo’, completed just before he was murdered. ‘Salo’ was Pasolini’s take on de Sade’s long censored work ‘120 Days of Sodom’. ‘Salo’ was a contribution to a cinema of cruelty that places the human body at the centre of a logic of ideological driven pain psychosis and death. A cinema of corpses blood shit and body fluid. A cinema that confronts the audience with images of somatic viscerality that are not signs pointing to something other than themselves, but rather images that point to nothing but themselves. In ‘Salo’ the viewers, like the actors, are contained in the space of the film. We do not gaze; we witness.

The core structure of both Noé’s ‘Climax’ and ‘120 Days’ is that they are both located in an enclosed world, a pure world (that is to say unadulterated by external distractions) governed by forces which play out according to certain mathematical formulae and operations. Operations that target the body as a site for the demonstration of pain. Once the body is reduced to a site for the imposition of power, soul rarely survives. It is destroyed, as the Nazis and Bolsheviks well knew, and

which corporate capitalism also understands very well.

Pasolini’s movie is his transposed fable of the operation of the mechanics of power in fascist social organisation. Although he exemplified fascism in ‘Salo’, there was an intended analogy with the potential for Western capitalism to reduce the body to a mere site of consumption. Where Pasolini (perhaps cut down by those powers he was opposing) left off , Noé picks up.

‘Climax’ in taking up Pasolini’s ideational thread, also invokes the Theatre of Cruelty’s expressive language. Like Pasolini Noé understands the physical body as a experimental site for the diagnosis of psycho-social sickness. In ‘Salo’ Pasolini depicts fascism an externalised political/social mechanism, that inflicts a series of gradated cruelties upon passive but innocent victims.

The victims in ‘Salo’ were both innocent and naïve. In ‘Climax’ the victims are helpless to do anything other than to collude in the design of their own death. The power of repression in no longer external; it has become internalised.   As individuals we have opened both our subtle and carnal bodies to be sites of occupation and isolation.   Severed from social bonds we are thrown into existential crisis that is answered by object relations. An era of unopposed orgiastic consumption folded into accelerated information technologies has produced the ultimate object fetish: the self.

Our worship and erotic arousal are now dedicated at the altar of the self. Narcissism has developed into a default psychic state of being in Western cultures. But one critical element of human nature, our sexual relations, presents as a potential obstacle to the complete self absorbion that narcissim ultimately demands.

Narcissism’s addendum to the sermon on the Mount: Love thyself not as others love thee but only as thyself can love thee…

Whilst there is external existence to contend with or rely on for sex and physcial completeness, narcissism’s total world view and complete self containment cannot be achieved.  As part of the changed psychic economy of being, masturbation is the solution offered by the politics of self. Sex for the self by the self.   Masturbation allows absolute self sufficency and complete control over sexuality’s somatic imperative. The diddling finger and pumping hand, the vivid tactile happening of masturbation gives the body over to omnipotence fantasies and fortifies the enduring hallucinatory qualities of the moment. Masturbation enables discharge of internal tensions, fosters a realisation of the self as a self contained system. Masturbation furthers a total introverted development freed from any exterior relations.

Masturbation in itself is neither good nor bad. A number of Indian creation myths tell of masturbation’s potency, attesting that the spilling of seed that can be a source of creativity. But when masturbation becomes the self bounded locus of sexuality for the narcissistic self, forces come into play that mark out masturbation as part of a process of death.   And it is through the process of the descent into the abyss that Noé draws in his thread, employing modern dance as his metaphorical vehicle.

‘Climax’ uses masturbation and what it represents, as an allegory for the dance of death. A dance in which we witness the complete cycle of narcissism’s birth flowering attraction and final destruction. As the motions of masturbation are more violent than sex, Noé structures his film about the acrobatics of modern dance. Centred on the self centred way in which the dancers flaunt their bodies, allows Noé to give ‘Climax’ the form of a long durational masturbatory ritual. The body mounted steady-cams stay with the dancers through long durational shots, tracking touching pursuing them seeking out their sexual organs and erogenous zones. Flushed out in blood red filters, Noé’s filming presses into the dancers’ bodies, close to flesh, mirroring in form the relentless agitation and uninterrupted tenacity necessary for the climax of orgasm. A camera movement that in itself predicates the contradictory admixture of intensity boredom and nausea that makes up masturbation.

Through the body, Noé’s ‘Climax’ takes us through the dance of our masturbatory psycho-culture, a culture that is at the nexus of the natural history of narcissism. The film opens with the bright and optimistic affirmations of the dancers, spoken straight to camera, voicing their dreams hopes and ambitions. This is followed by their opening dances.   An initial explosion of self contained energy, each dancer quite alone, presenting themselves celebrating themselves, opening up their genitals for proud exhibition, reeling spinning in gymnastic caress of self’s body.  But now as the first sequence of dance finishes, ‘Climax’ starts its descent into the dark zones of narcissism. As they dance now in pairs and intermingle the dancers start to sicken. Nausia. (cf Sartre’s novel La Nauséé) As they fall sick the dancers fail to understand (as does Sartre’s protagonist) that the sickness comes from within themselves, instead they blame a poison that has been introduced into their bodies by spiked wine. Caught up in hysterical enveloping wave of panic, the dancers believe they’ve been poisoned by LSD. The mass hysteria spreads and infects the self’s containment; the dance dissipates coagulates detumesces. The dancers fail to see that the delirium the fantasial panic comes not from without in the form of LSD but from within. HALLUCINATION is part of the fantasy of masturbation, in the celebratory masturbation of the dance they have sickened, fallen into nausea. Disoriented and unhinged the self fails and there is nothing to hold them.

 

As they sicken some reach out to others. It is too late for these dancers to close in on relations with an other. One by one in the blood red haze they fall to ground, comatose or dead, narcissism burnt out by their final long failed attempt at orgasm.

 

Even with its mesmeric quality, Noé’s movie is a hard watch. Like Pasolini, like Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe, it is hard because he has something to say about how we live. Like Bacon Grosz Céline, Noé sees something. He is a moral film maker because he does not temper the hardness of his vision with reassurance or comforting modification. And he is not a judge, he does not judge the dancers anymore than Pasolini judged the young victims in ‘Salo. The dancers are exemplars of a sort. It may be that Noé has caste them as heroic figures: they do not flinch from their destiny. In the dance they have embraced without reservation the logic of our culture. Intuitively they accept in totality their own death as the logical consequence of an internalised masturbatory narcissism. The dancers have danced to the end of time.

We the witnesses to the spectacle, excuse ourselves, leave our seats and return to the culture that is invading and corrupting us. We avert our eyes from our own deaths. We do not dance.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

BlacKKKlansman       Spike Lee (USA; 2018) John David Washington

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 4^th Sept 2018; Ticket: £9.75

Comic book radical chic

Spike Lee can point to the unflinching ethical core of BlacKkKlansman (BKK) to justify the specific way in which he has marshalled his various resources to tell his story and to play out his message.

BKK is characterised by an unwavering moral code, but cinematically it is sometimes a bit of a mess with its promiscuous admix of imagery from different source material.

And if ends justify means, then that’s Ok. But the problem is that once you take this stance, there is a certain moral jeopardy in disregarding the legitimacy of the means employed to achieve a desired outcome.

Lee’s movie assembles BKK from a wide range of different sources: old Hollywood movie clips (in particular from Gritthith’s Birth of a Nation, though the film opens with a clip form Gone with the Wind), his own reconstructions, contemporary news footage and a scripted drama based on Ron’s Stallworth’s memoire ‘Black Klansman’. Ron Stallworth’s story is the spine of the film. In Lee’s hands Stallworth’s story is given the comic book make-over. ‘Black Klansman’ becomes a cinematic romp with pantomime heroes and villains. The villains in particular are depicted as stock in trade psychopathic retards, endowed with the malice of Trump (a comic book President if ever is) and the physical attributes of zombies.   All of which works fine at its own parodic level and permits Lee’s script to develop its thematic proposition: that there is a socially active rabid racism underlying US society and social relations that you can trace consistently through the 20th to the 21^st century.  This racist strata does not go away. A phenomenon that under adverse conditions becomes a substrata, withdraws and tones down signs of its visibility; but in the ‘right’ (sic) conditions it erupts into the streets, parading its full regalia.

BKK as drama is realised through a racist themed pantomime, that deals with actual issues but stylistically anchors them in form of a hyper real parody. The film is shot and edited to resemble the drawn elements of a comic book in which situations and characters are demarcated in bold outline.

By and large the comic book style of the drama plays out true. But there are key areas in the movie which are built on the interweave of Lee’s drama and his documentary material. And it is the collision between the hyper drama and actuality that raises questions. At the dramatic heart of BKK there is a parallel edit sequence: we see the Klan ritually affirming their racist values cross cut with Harry Belafonte relating explicitly to a group of politically conscious Black Students, the terrible obscene racist killing of a young black man. The two track edit struggles because of the disparate nature of the two intercut sections. The cross cutting is not so much between two simultaneous events but between two worlds of different originatory material: comic book and primary source.   These worlds collide, not lending a greater intensity to the film in their juxtaposition, but rather the each trespassing on each other, detracting from each other. Each scene in its own right as a continuous event would have been strong. Which is not to say that they lack power, but that there is a net loss from Lee’s script/editing decision to intercut the material.

Likewise the use of the Charlottesville clips. BKK moves out of the Ron Stallworth drama into actuality. Lee’s last shot of Ron and Patrice uses a strange corridor of time SFX, a clunky device to emphasise continuity and directly connect Lee’s protagonists to today’s explosive re-emergence of political street racism, lent savage legitimacy by the Trump presidency.   In its final sequence the movie makes a shift from the comic book to the actual. OK, Haneka does something similar in Cache (Hidden) but his drama is not pitched in a Comic Book key but rather in a subdued neo-realist key. The shift from Comic coda to actual coda of documented footage risks stylistic contamination that works to devalue the actual. Lee’s response to this might well be that today’s viewer, in particular the black audience is so sophisticated at reading images no matter what, that this observation is null. Still I think that doc clips and footage offer opportunities and risks, and there are risks.

Lee’s film is a realisation of current state of American politics. It’s clear moral purpose is to link black experience to the continuities of the psychic dark realm of American fear. Lee nevertheless needs to remember that there is also a moral responsibility in using primary sources. Cavalier use carries its own dangers.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lek and the Dogs Andrew Kotting (UK 2017) Xavier Tchili, written by Hattie Naylor and adapted by her from her stage play: Ivan and the Dogs.

Viewed: Star and Shadow Losing the Plot, 9^th June 2018; ticket £5

Down in the mines

I was wondering why Andrew Kotting changed the title of Hattie Naylor’s stage play?

Nothing in the movie indicated any reason or motive: perhaps as a name Lek with its curt one syllable trips better off the tongue than Ivan. Movie stuff.

And that is what we get from Kotting’s film: movie stuff. A film filled out with images, defined by image, rather than defining or questioning image.  A film where a large percentage of the footage is derived from archive sources.

Early in the movie after the title sequence there is a big wide shot of an arid expanse of land. In the distance we see a form approach, and as it comes nearer we can see that the form is a naked man on all fours. It is Kottin himself, who advances close to the camera, rises stretches and displays his physicality. He is man. At this early point in the movie we know the title of the film and we have seen Kotting as an artist in the flesh, in this one shot making a filmic statement that seems to claim a physical affinity with his subject.

The problem is that this claim is not sufficiently validated in the movie. Like a legacy hunter with an invalid claim to the title of a property, Kotting never gets to take somatic possession of Hattie Naylor’s play. Kotting in body abrogates responsibility for meaning and context of Lek’s situation. Kotting’s film banishes Lek to psycho-somatic exile, Kotting shifts the centre of the film from the physical to the abstract: from the body to archive footage. Kotting tries to solve the problem of how to represent Lek’s experience by mining generic archive material.

Generic archive in the form of bundles of images is imported into the film to supply it with an associative emotional commentary to parallel Lek’s experience. The spine of Kotting’s film comprises Lek’s acted out reading from the transcipts of the original cassette tapes he recorded. These pieces are intercut with the commentaries of expert witnesses, child and animal psychologists, who give their understandings of the what Lek would/might (?) have experienced during his two years living with Moscow’s wild urban dogs.

Kotting’s use of old film is a device to pull the wool over our eyes and fool the audience into thinking Kotting understands something: that he has solved the problem of finding meaning.   The proposition in the use of multiple archive clips is, that a series of contiguous images can in themselves be invoked to represent something more than they are: not indexes but associative signs.   Perhaps Kotting imagines it is poetic communication.

In short intense bursts some archive footage might have worked as a poetic flourish. But the problem with this form of expression is that it is exploitative. It exploits the same crude associative mechanisms used by the advertising/propaganda industry. Using film as a sign to invoke mental states (bombed out city reduced to rubble to suggest despair) exploits and manipulates the audience’s desire to understand as a mechanical connection.   The viewer through strong signage is told what to feel, to connect an image with state of mind. This is exactly the same linkage as in adverts (or propaganda), with the only defence in Kotting’s case being that he is not trying to sell you anything other than his film and his philosophy.

When used as a particular pointing to a particular subject, as in Kapadia’s ‘Amy’, the archive material usually justifies itself.  But over the last decade or so archive footage has become a highly valuable resource greedily acquired and exploited by interests of large media companies: Getty Images, Sony, BBC, Mary Evans.   But generic use of archive increasingly suggests a sort of mining activity (akin in some ways to bit coin mining) digging deep into our celluloid and magnetic reserves to try and discover some rare jewel

Kotting’s Lek and the Dogs is to be admired for its ambition: to make a film that drifts out of the usually formulaic narrative structure. Ultimately his film does not deliver on its ambition. Its structure whilst making the film bearable by subdividing it into intertitled chapters, does not work as the propositions in the chapters remain opaque. And the delivery towards the end of the movie of Kotting’s justifying philosophy for choosing to make his film, is underwhelming and unconvincing.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

La Religieuse (The Nun)         Jacques Rivette (1966) Anna Karina

viewed: Tyneside Cinema 9 August 2018; Ticket: £9.75

The Age of Enlightenment

Rivette’s movie La Religieuse is a product of an age of cinematic enlightenment, the era of European cinema of 1960’s and 70’s that represented a different way of thinking about cinema. A time when both filmic form and content were cut free from the narrative strictures of both Hollywood and its pale European imitators to be an expressive outlet for the play of ideas, practical jokes and political polemic. Rivette’s movie, echoing the form of Diderot’s original text plays on the idea both of the joke and the possibility of film as a palette for ideas.

Diderot’s novel started life as a series of faked letters purporting to be from Suzanne, an unwilling nun, to an enlightened grandee begging for him to help her to escape the nunnery. The letters were subsequently contrived into a novel, part English gothic, part philosophical/didactic, somewhat in the manner of Voltaire and Rousseau’s work.

Suzanne, Diderot’s heroine, like Candide, is put through the mill, experiencing life in its full rigour. Like Candide she keeps her head above water and stays true to her philosophical principals. In Rivette’s script Suzanne is a modern existential hero. Her guiding light similar to that of Sartre’s lost characters whose personal cannon revolves about freedom. However confused they may be, the existential protagonist gropes for a personal freedom that they intuit gives authenticity and meaning to life. They know life cannot be lived in bad faith, as a series of acts of betrayal of the self.

And Rivette understands how to express these ideas without compromising their integrity. He understands that the forces he puts into play in La Religieuse comprise a series of events that take place in absurd worlds.   Worlds that make no sense. In themselves Suzanne’s family, the nunnery, the church and its representatives are absurd institutions creating situations which although degrading are not worthy of serious consideration by the individual. In La Religieuse, Rivette and Anna Karina adopt discipline when confronting the spectacle of the absurd. They do not invest in emotive stratagems to oppose the ridiculous. They do not indulge emotional displays, melodramatic intensities, explicit devices such as torture, sex or nudity. These would simply grant quasi legitimacy to absurdity. Instead these institutions are opposed by ideas. Idea which are fleshed out with a script and acting style designed to prevent Rivette’s movie from colonisation by the purely personal.

La Religieuse is a film of ideas. And in the script itself and its filming, it is the ideas in themselves that are the statements, Suzanne says: ‘I am not a nun’; ‘God has not changed me.’ Ideas point strongly enough to states of mind and actions that don’t need explicit acting out. Rivette directs his movie so that there is a consistent miscalibration between scripted suggestion and what we see. La Religieuse in this respect becomes a running joke. The insistence of the ideas underlying and driving the action allows the viewer full appreciation of the situations and processes, the punishments, the severities, the mortifications, the orgies and indulgences without literalistic enactment.

The familial/nunnery rites are all portrayed, but employing an acting style that is restrained and deintensified. A style that uses formulaic gestures to indicate to the viewer what is happening – pain humiliation intimidation etc. – but not to exploitively manipulate these states by using the usual imagery of close up faces set in rictuses of pain anger grief. La Religieuse is like the Sixties: cool. Rivette authenticates La Religieuse by attention to the sets and costumes. He locks Suzanne into a historical period where although in the earlier scenes Ana Karina is bewimpled, she later comes more and more to resemble an archetypal sixties wild child, wondrously and humouressly incompatible with the settings in which she is imprisoned.

Rivette also gives clarity to La Religieuse in the way he uses his camera. For the most part the film uses wide shots to develop its theme. This is critical to the film’s intention as it enables us to see relations clearly, the interconnectedness of the characters in respect of their family social and religious status. For this is a political film about the nature of power relations and how they are brought to bear on Suzanne.

The weight of patriarchy, both in the confessional and in the family, the weight of those claiming to act in the name of god. The absent father when Suzanne confronts her mother, the absent god when mother superior gives her orders, the flurry of nuns carrying out the diktats of religion, the absence of sin in the confessional. Carried by tracking movements of the camera Rivette captures the urgency and primacy of space not the face.

Stripped of the encumbrance of melodrama with its accompanying faciality, Rivette can give clarity to the primacy of Suzanne perception that she and she alone will dictate what she is and what she can become. Her freedom has nothing to do with where she is, the nunneries are simply types of forces that oppress her.   It is everything to do with what she is. She cannot be manipulated, bought, sold, bribed or given a fake phantom release from the clutches of power.

Rivette’s conclusion brilliantly sums up the film. Suzanne, escaping out of the frying pan world of religion, has leapt into the fire. She finds herself trapped in the world of patriarchy, of men who want to conform her to their desires to their belief system about the destiny of women. Understanding what is happening, and Suzanne is now an expert in those who would shape her to their will, she calmly evades the the clutches of a would be suitor, goes over to the open window, sits herself on the sill. Calmly without fuss or advertisement leans back against the non resistant void behind her and falls to her death. No melodrama, no last words, simply a statement in action, the perfect existential riposte to the intolerable: praxis.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk