Star & Shadow

  • Review for ‘SISU’ – 2023 – Director Jalmari Helander – Finnish production.

    Whoever said violence and murder isn’t funny never saw ‘SISU’…

    It began when I was watching a review on YouTube of the upcoming sequel to ‘Becky’, a film I really enjoyed.  The reviewer, ‘Beyond the void horror podcast’ https://www.youtube.com/@btvcast, a YouTube channel I recommend for the enthusiasm alone was making some comparisons to ‘SISU’.  I thought, ‘SISU, what is this, is this an action gore fest?’  I watched the trailer and I thought I had to see this film.  It looked bonkers.  This had been a dry year so far real enthusiasm for a film, for me so far.  Although I have very much enjoyed the variety of S&S company I have gone with.

    The night began with me going for dinner to a Chinese restaurant and having a bowl of PIG’S EARS and some noodles.  I thought I’d never had pig’s ears before and I am a bit of a chancer.  Alas I literally made a pigs ear of it and it was all rather bland but at least that’s something ticked off someone’s bucket list somewhere.  ‘SISU’ on the other hand was not bland although I can understand how some would think it is because they are tired of violence and murderous mayhem.  I on the other hand am not tired of these delicacies and this film delivers so much of it and often in very creative ways.

    ‘SISU’ proudly puts its homages to film history and action/violent tropes front and centre.  There is no message and there is minimal story and its goal is to make the audience to experience a  catharsis through the fear and bloody, violent deaths of the cartoonishy, villainous Nazis who have evil scarred right in to their flesh.  At this the film is far more than successful.  There is very little dialogue in the film which is welcome in a sea of films that rely so much on exposition and our hero says nothing until the end of the film.  The spaghetti western’s man with no name of the 21st century.  This film take many other cues from the Sergio Leone classics including long close ups on rugged faces and its own version of the title cards seen in ‘The good, the bad and the ugly’.  Title cards which gradually deteriorate in conjunction with the on-going suffering of our heroic prospector.  A level of both comical and squeamish levels of suffering that is very much in the vein of John McClane making his way through the Nakatomi plaza.  Realistic it ain’t, so if this is what you are expecting you will be disappointed.  The violence is laugh out loud funny and the film leans in to this, however this does not mean it does not take itself seriously.  No one is playing this for laughs.  The humour comes through in the editing and cinematography.    

    ‘SISU’ is completely a Finnish production although is mostly in English language with just the title and the ending being in Finnish.  Which is fine, most of the characters are supposed to be German Nazis and they don’t speak German.  The cinematography and set design is fantastic.  Like the film it is sparse with spots of destruction which look great.  The music too is simple and satisfying complementing the lead up to and the outbursts of ultra-violence.  The editing is where this film really shines using all the tricks at its disposal.  Slow motion hero shots of armed women coming out of the smoke after being freed from imprisonment and torture.  Close ups of our hero treating his wounds in ways that that will make you squirm in your chair.  He really couldn’t care less about his own body.  My main criticism would come in some of the effects, where the film makers on occasion bite off more than the budget could carry.  Especially on the exteriors of the plane.  Thankfully these were brief moments.

    ‘SISU’ is a blast.  It well deserves the 90% it has on Rotten Tomatoes.  An instant, cult classic

  • Pamfir                  Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk

    Pamfir                         Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk (Ukr; 2022) Oleksandr Yaksentyuk, Stanislav Potiak, Solomiia Kyrylova

    viewed Tyneside Cinema 11 May 2023; ticket: £10:25

    visceral

    Sukhollytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ seemed to me to be a strange convoluted chaotic film. At its core ‘Pamfir’ is located in the tensions generated in Ukraine between individualistic and collective ethos, between the visceral demands of village life and the experience of corruption as a social constant. ‘Pamfir’ is visceral in look, of the body and of the marks that corruption makes upon the body; and the atmospherics of Sukhollytkyy-Sobchuk’s scenario create an atmosphere of delirious despair.

    It’s to be noted that Sukhollytkyy-Sobchuk wrote and shot (but didn’t edit) his film before the Russian invasion of his country. The film can perhaps be understood as a sort of psychic prelude to that event and its consequences. In this I was reminded of Kirill Serebrennikov’s movie ‘Petrov’s Flu’, a Russian film made in 2021 which comes across as a prelude to Putin’s war, a dispatch from the collective state of mind of Putin’s Russia. In Serebrennikov’s film life is an alcohol fuelled hallucination experienced as a constant state of fear punctuated by acts of paranoiac violence: a collective death trip. Seen in Feb 2022, a few days after the invasion of Ukraine, Russian brutality, its capacity for destruction and self deception, the incoherence and nightmare quality of Putin’s Special Military Operation were all prefigured by Serebrennikov (who I believe has left Russia). Serebrennikov had looked into the hellish foundations of Putin’s state and shown us the demons that occupy and drive it.

    In like manner I read Sukhollytkyy-Sobchuk’s film as a dispatch from Ukraine. It’s film says something about an underlying schizo situation that defines his country.

    The film opens with a primitive arresting image: a Shaman like figure, enveloped in a straw body costume, grasping a skull capped staff and wearing a grotesque animal mask, sits on hay bale in a barn facing the camera square on. As the scene unfolds (comprising of a single shot like much of the filming) the figure is revealed to be the returning paterfamilias Pamfir (Pamfir is his nickname; actual name is Leonid). The costume and mask he has donned is his way of turning his coming back into a surprise joke. The costume is one of a number that Pamfir’s son Nazar and friends are making for the upcoming collective celebration of a pagan festival. References to the festival (which is possibly an early winter festival like Samain) run through the scenario, and are returned to multiple times. The feeling from Sukhollytkyy-Sobchuk’s script is that, as in most of the West, this festivity based on primitive masked dance and re-enactment, is form without content. It has become a pretext, an excuse to revel, but it is no longer part of way in which the villagers actually understand or relate to life. The festival is celebrated as part of the annual round of life, but compartmentalised. This in some respects is strange; the life of the village and its people, its deep rural isolated location, the physicality of human and animal relations, suggests that the people might retain some element of a shared vital connection with a pagan pre-modern tradition. But they don’t. They are corrupted by other forces.

    The people now have a new religion. Here in Pamfir’s village, the old Ukrainian Orthodox Church is represented as having no presence. There are no signs of orthodox priests, no bearded patriarchs walking through the village sprinkling holy water. There is a new religion. The village has been colonised, converted to a form of American style evangelicalism in which interpretation of the Bible is put to the service of the American way of life with its insistence on the primacy of individual salvation and its distrust and devaluation of collective endeavour. God is on the side of the little man, behind him all the way. The Pastor sermonises during the service: “God puts each of us to the test but never asks of us more than we can do.” And Olena, Pamfir’s wife, tells him: “God transforms pain into duty.”

    Sukhollytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘letter’ ‘Pamfir’ teases out the contradictions endemic in the Ukrainian psychee between a past collective form of life and the new American style individualistic modernism.

    As an individual Pamfir is helpless to determine his own fate, whether or not God is on his side. He is a strong and self reliant but is crushed by both the social and corrupt collective forces that surround him. He cannot fight the lesions of corruption which strangle the village. Unemployment and perhaps the force of his own character mean he cannot get work that pays enough in his own village. To sustain himself and his family he resorted to smuggling (cigarettes to Romania – the village is very close to the border) and when caught doing that, he traveled to Poland to find work. On his return his wife and son are both want him to stay with them. His individualist ethos and pride, make this impossible for Pamfir. His work papers destroyed in a fire caused by his son, Pamfir decides to undertake the smuggling run last time. But times have changed. Whereas cigarette smuggling was once possible as an individual enterprise, the business has now been taken over by a criminal gang whose boss has the resources to pay off the police and border guards. Smuggling is stitched up territory. Smuggling has become part of the endemic corruption of the state, and an individual has no chance of disturbing this criminal monopoly. Pamfir’s last ditch attempt to smuggle is doomed to failure which consequently plays out in disaster and in the end he is shot like a dog.

    ‘Pamfir’ may be read as an analogous microcosm to Ukraine’s pre-war state, buffeted between remembrance of a mythic collective history and the vistas of a promised individualised future, squeezed between endemic corruption and a yearning for self affirmation. But on my reading at least it ends with a metaphysical proposition.

    Pamfir is forced to deliver a package from the criminal gang to their opposite number in Romania. The route he is instructed to take from Ukraine to Romania is by means of a narrow pipe that has been laid across the border. Instead of taking the package himself Pamfir gets his son Nazar to do the job. The concept of the narrow bore pipe suggests of the idea of rebirth for Nazar. The father dies, the son is reborn. As Pamfir is shot dead beside the entry to the pipe line, the son crawls through it as through a birth canal; albeit one that leads to Romania. A joke perhaps, but Romania is filmed as if seen in a vision. On getting through the pipe it is as if Nazar has not so much come to another country but into another dimension. A dimension of purity. As he walks over the ground towards the Romanian border guards, snow has fallen. The world is become white, purest white, the white of rebirth, unsullied, presenting a vision of the purity of the soul. ‘Pamfir’ for all the dark tropes actions and despair it depicts – ends on a note of hope.

    And…

    Of course Romania, is a member of the EU. It’s also a country that is and has been notorious for corruption. But at this point being in the EU is kin if not a state of grace then at least the possibility of a hope to which Ukraine aspires and for which she is fighting a war of necessary, unto death.

    Adrin Neatrour     adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Alphaville – Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution   – L Godard

    Alphaville – Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution   – L Godard (Fr; 1965) Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina

    viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 7th May 2023; ticket £7

    back to the future – why/because…

    At the start of the movie the distorted voice over in Godard’s ‘Alphaville’ observes: “Sometimes thought is too complex to be represented by the spoken word.” Hence we have ‘Cinema Godard’. Godard’s ‘Cinema’ of course uses verbal means (and graphics) to posit and develop ideas. But his films are also characterised by allowing us: ‘seeing’. Godard exploits both his film’s structure and visual imagery to represent things about about the world we live in. For instance he points up the contradictions of capitalism and Western life using the interplay and juxtaposing of the symbolic and actual images, to render complex ideas simply and immediately graspable. To see is to understand.

    To create and develop his idea forms Godard brings into play the wide range of cinema resources. Graphics are an important part of the repertoire. Godard’s opening titles (and the accompanying sound) function as a portal into his films. Their purpose is to communicate to the viewer that they are entering into another world, a cinema of ideas. Godard’s graphic techniques are simple but work with effect. They exploit pace, scale, colour, animation of fonts in unusual ways, creating new ideations out of familiar material. Of course Godard’s playful graphics run through many of his films from intertitles to the end credits. In ‘Alphaville’ the opening credits effect a mood of pastiche. The credits are intercut with the leitmotif of a menacing (but obviously absurd and harmless) flashing light, which is overlaid with a parody of tense musical ‘stings’, such as used by Don Siegel in the ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. The names of the cast appear in random order flickering to life against images of two strange paintings. The music the paintings the computer style of the graphics lettering pre-empt a film that in look and play out is unabashedly absurd. But which in the philosophical traditions of absurdist art, contain a hard core social commentary.

    Godard’s music is never used with the usual movie reasons: event affirmation and/or reinforcement of emotional mood. The purpose of this sort of music is to unify sound and image in order to exploit and overwhelm the sensory motor receptors of the audience. Godard’s tracks are used with opposite intent. He works to separate image and music. In Alphaville he separates them by use of humour as a device; the device of humorous exaggeration. His intent in this separation is to alert the audience to their susceptibility to manipulation, to prompt them into questioning the basis of manipulation. At moments of ‘high drama’ Lemmy Caution’s quest through Alphaville is rendered absurd by use of multiple repetitions of a discordant musical sting, of the sort used in ‘film noir’ to mark out a moment of dangerous realisation; but in Alphaville it’s used to signal to the audience the empty mechanics of the plot line. Likewise in Alphaville his repeated use of a soft romantic melodic leitmotif parodies typical ‘noirish’ male/female dyads such as those between Bogart and Bacall in Hawk’s ‘To Have and Have Not.’ (interestingly the age gap between Constantine and Karina is similar, but no one for a moment will imagine real attraction between them). The exaggerated lyrical score overplaying Lemmy and Natasha’s relationship works to effectively undermine if not dispel any notion of its credibility outside the demands of the script.

    Encased in an absurd plot structure in which modernist quartiers of Paris double for the futurist city of Alphaville, Godard addresses one feature of the present that in 1965 he saw as a threat to our humanity. The increasing development and exploitation through computers of the logic underlying the development of capitalism. A logic that through the relational structures of capitalism – work – consumerism – the commodification of relationships – was to feed into and refine our own human psychic responses and development. The ultimate logic of capitalism is to reduce everything to the equations of maximal profit and structural efficiency. All the extraordinary advances in science and technology are immediately subsumed to the purpose of making profit and the development of monopolies is logically the most efficient means to maximise profit: Coca Cola.

    Seen in 2023 Alphaville is as relevant today as in 1965 to the situation in which find ourselves as regards the development of computers and consequences that algorithmic logic have in controlling so many aspects of life: the economic – the social – the personal.

    Godard focuses on the incremental development of the computer logic languages that were in 1965 starting to become an omnipresent in industry and government. Godard immediatley saw that it was only a question of when not if, that computers would enter the social personal and intimate zones. If the primary and secondary forms of capitalism worked to possess the body the next stage of capitalism would work to possess the mind. Godard understood when the power of computer logic was harnessed by large corporations to accelerate consumption, we would all to a greater or lesser extent become the slaves of capitalist algorithms. The latter statement may not be explicit in Alphaville, but it is implicit. What is explicit in Alphaville is Godard’s perception that only escape from mechanical enslavement lay in the very essence of our human nature: our conscience and our capacity to love. Our conscience sets us apart from machines because it is a personal moral sense of right and wrong, the capacity for taking responsibility for things we have done. As machines are not responsible for the things they do, they are programmed, conscience bypasses them.

     

    And love. Love is illogical.

     

    Just to return to the point made earlier about Godard’s use of film to make us see complex things simply. In one scene Lemmy chances upon an execution site. The execution ritual is set in a modern swimming pool. The condemned men step up onto a diving board, they are shot, they fall into the water their bodies retrieved by groups of synchronised female swimmers. The imagery is absurd, but in this visual concatenation of death and fetishistic spectacle is a condensation of the contradictions of algorithmic capitalism. It kills us but our dead bodies do not sink are kept afloat by the blandishments of beautiful models holding out the promise of life after death.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Talking to Strangers                  Rob Tregenza

    Talking to Strangers                  Rob Tregenza (USA: 1988) Ken Gruz

    viewed: vimeo link 18 April 2023; download price: £2-95

    out of wack    

    Tregenza’s movie, ‘Talking to Strangers’ comprises nine single takes. Except the first and last, each take features a meeting by the lead character Jesse, with a stranger (or strangers) whom he encounters for the first time. These single shots comprise intricate more or less ten minute long choreographical interplays of location and character, using pans tracks and cranes.

    Each of Tregenza’s takes focuses on a particular area of content taking the audience from confusion to isolation by way of sex violence and god.

    ‘Talking to Strangers’ has strong filmic input and in the era where the normal maximum length of a take was 1000 foot magazine of 35mm film, Tregenza has adopted a singular formal design in which to present his subject. The question arises which came first: the script or the structure? Of course this is a question that the film itself answers definitively in the sense that the viewer simply watches the film and evaluates the content and structure as one delivered product.

    My feeling is that ‘Talking to Strangers’ is dominated by its formal structure which works well to begin with. The camera work in the opening take sets up a strong expectation that this will be a film about seeing. The sequence comprises a long overhead shot of a road intersection. There is no dialogue. The sound track is made up entirely by distant diegetic sound as the camera periodically panning, captures the uncertain wandering movement of the protagonist. But it is the street scene itself that takes centre stage, captures the imagination as the eye takes in all its details and enjoys the understated spectacle of the everyday and ordinary, whilst capturing the occasional movements of a lost soul.

    But as soon as the second take begins (set in a canteen for deprived people), Tregenza introduces actors into the scenario. The balance of the movie changes, setting up an antagonistic relationship at the core of the film between the acting style and the camera style, the former derived from soap opera melodrama, the latter from art house aesthetics. A cinema of ‘seeing’ and a cinema of ‘melodrama’ are oppositions, filmic elements that work against each other. Cinema is an expressive form in which of course anything is possible. But neither in direction nor in scripting is Tegenza able to resolve the disjunction of his primary filmic elements; ultimately this undermines ‘Talking to Strangers’ as the ‘seeing’ aspect of camera movement is undermined by the melodramatic banality of the expressed emotion.

    There was a realisation in the ‘50’s to ‘70’s era that for certain types of films the sort of acting required by Hollywood and its imitators, could not deliver the qualitive impressions demanded by the new kinds of directors and the script material with which they worked. These directors realised there were alternative styles of creating and acting out ‘a character’ that would work more effectively in the communication of ideas. One strategy widely explored was experimentation with the Brechtian idea of the actor adopting a certain role distance. Instead of the Stanislavski and Actor’s Studio inspired ‘method’ involving the actor’s complete immersion in character, the Brechtian school looked at the possibility of the actor adopting a role to communicate what a character represented in the realm of ideas and in particular situations. One consequence of this was the tendency to demote the primacy of expressed emotion and its concomitant manipulations in favour of more detached utterance. The need for a cooler style demanded a different sort of actor, one who was able to incorporate into performance and delivery of lines, a natural level of de-intensified playing.

    Most of Tregenza’s one take strips of action in ‘Talking to Strangers’ revolve about the expression of certain ideas within his highly formal visual structure. But his actors expressive modes are modelled on TV melodrama. This type of drama is structurally filmed as series of comings and goings, doors opening and closing, one thing after another, filmed as shot reverse shot and edited as a montage that aims to exploit the movement image to max out emotional discharge.

    Perhaps distracted by the complex demands of camera choreography, Tregenza simply did not give attention to what his actors were bringing to the frame as long as they were on the ‘mark’ and on the ‘line’. In relation to the actors’ ‘lines’, it seems to me that the script highlights the problems with the film. The dialogue often feels like it reflects opposing production impulses. Some of the scripting seems ok but there is in much of the dialogue a ‘forced’ written element, mostly expressive of ideas, that impedes what should be natural interaction between the players. This forced dialogue fights with another type of voice in the scripting that suggests an uneasy attempt at using improvisation as a source for the interchanges. This intermix of different dialogue types reinforces the impression that Tregenza’s film that outside of its formal visual style is uncertain about what is about and how to achieve its ends.

    ‘Talking to Strangers’ with its crafted cinematic look, risks being a film of form without content. This is certainly not the case, but nevertheless Tregenza has made a film whose confused expression of content leaves form the dominant force.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Gods of Times Square         Richard Sandler

    The Gods of Times Square                 Richard Sandler (USA; 2004 – this is the latest edit; I believe there was an earlier edit )

    viewed Bronx Documentary Centre, NYC; ticket: free; nb – on YouTube (at time of writing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0-BaBALfDY)

    psychic archaeology

    Richard Sandler’s ‘The Gods of Times Square’ opens with a subway sequence taking us into the 42nd St. Station that serves the Square. The series of shots: abstract travelling across and through the multiple reflecting planes of the intersecting car windows, create a sense of delirium. The opening section continues with a series of close ups of riders, and the feeling persists that we are hallucinating, witness to the stygian transit of ghostly tortured souls through a macabre underworld.

    Then suddenly we surface out of subterranean gloom into the neon glare of the cinemas theatres and huge advertising hoardings that assault the senses and freeze consciousness.  

    Sandler’s documentary, filmed between 1994 and 2001 is built on a series of contrasts: sanity and madness, delirium and lucidity, black and white, the still and the frantic, scale – the human and the outsized, the momentary and the eternal, the saved and the damned. All captured by his repeated stoic cinematic peregrinations on the sidewalks of this New York landmark, penetrating the psychic reality of his chosen patch.

    Central to the ‘The God’s of Times Square’ is Sandler’s singular methodology, the manner in which he has collected his material. It’s a film shot entirely from the hip.    Night after night on the prowl with his camera the director goes out to shoot a film from material that can only be gathered from chance encounters. His guiding motif is the attraction of religious and quasi religious groups and individuals to the Square and its environs. This location, which at the time was not only a tourist attraction but also centre of the New York porn industry, provided preachers teachers ranters and ravers with the grist to the mill of their respective belief systems. ‘The Gods of Times Square’ is a singular expression on the paradoxes that define critical areas of American society: the primacy of religious belief in personal salvation existing side by side with the capitalist imperative of identity through consumption, both grounded in a dream culture of mindless oblivion. A symptom of a collective insanity.

    Sandler walks and talks on his camera driven odyssey about the Square and its environs. His encounters range from one off confrontations to meetings with other regulars when their respective paths cross. Most of the interactions have an intensity that’s lent them by virtue their being ‘on the street’ and therefore publically ‘on the line’; but also by Sandler’s questioning. Sandler engages his street people and preachers with respect intelligence and humour (much of it purely visual exploiting frame linkage), whether he’s filming the raw hostility of blacks preaching the revenge that ‘Black Jesus’ is going to wreak upon white people or questioning the enigmatic dog collared man who calls himself ‘James’.

    But along with the sidewalk material: delirium and wonder. The wonder is totally unexpected and comprises Sandler’s stunning representation of the natural world in the form of ‘The Square’ pigeons. Interspersed throughout the film a series of breath-taking shots of vast flocks of pigeons soaring planeing arching as one body across and through the frame of this eerie neon lit space. Life where there should be no expectation of life. In a strange way these shots called to mind the shots of stampeding buffaloes in John Ford movies. Despite everything a life force is in evidence.

    The delirium: captured by Sandler’s camera and edited in as interpolations throughout the course of the film, is the environment of ‘Times Square’. It is represented as a fantastical interplay of ever changing light, reflection refraction through multiple planes. ‘The Square’ is in constant movement creating for the viewer the experience of continuous spectacle. Spectacle is the transmission of strong emitted streams of stimulae which as absorbed by consciousness overpower the mind so that only these images of the present exist. There is no past; no present: mind is trapped in the experience of the moment. There is no memory; all is forgetfulness.

    Perhaps to some extent the advent of smart phone mediated access to social media has led to an internalisation of spectacle. Individuals now expose themselves to the continuous transmission of a stream of ever changing information that overwhelms consciousness and also traps mind into a continuous present.

    But over and above the interplay of a million lights, high up in the sky are ‘The Square’s’ huge advertising hoardings. In contrast to the spectacle of light, these hoardings are immobile but explot the spectacle of scale. Represented on these massive canvasses are the almost naked forms of men and women, supersized images pretending to advertise undergarments but in fact flaunting an unrepentant strangely perfected sexuality that, at odds with the shoddy seedy actuality on sale in the adult shows and cinemas of 42nd Street, mocks the merely human. The psychic impact of these flaunted bodies is Olympian, they challenge the mortal gaze and the spectacle they offer suggests they are the real ‘Gods of Times Square’.

    Sandler’s film seems to me to be a triumph of perseverance intentionality and stamina. He has gone out time and again over a period of some ten years and caught something essential about NYC. He filmed ‘The Gods of Times Square’ during a period of major transition when the patch was subjected to a complete change about from being a centre of the adult entertainment industry into an extension of Disneyland, a centre for family entertainment. Though of course the Times Square spectacle continues but now fronts out a different variety of consumption. Same Gods but another form of iteration.

    So ‘Times’ Square has now been cleaned up. The human detritus yearnings and utterances rage and wisdom that characterised it have been swept away. However although the expressive features which were the subject of Sandler’s ‘Square’ are gone, my feeling is that they are simply repressed. The ‘Square’ hasn’t just gone away. Its insanity its life its intensity its urgency are simply for the moment submerged. In the vaults of New York’s psychic memory they lurk ready to when the time is right, to emerge and reclaim their place on the sidewalk.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

     

  • Pacifiction                               Albert Serra

    Pacifiction                               Albert Serra (Fr; int co-prod; 2022) Benoit Magimel

    viewed: Howard Gilman Cinema, Lincoln Centre NYC 15 March 2022; ticket $18

    living with menace

    ‘Pacifiction’ (French title: Tourment sur les Iles) – was co-produced written directed and co- edited by Albert Serra who also chose the film’s location and its title(s). Using a system of shooting that often involved three camera set ups, the shot footage gave scope for a high degree of control over the the final cut and the film was given its particular form in the edit suite. ‘Pacifiction’ is Serra’s movie. The obvious question to pose is: the ‘why’ question. Why did Serra make the film;  what does he want to say?

    In ‘Pacifiction’ Serra is asking us to see something in the material he is showing us. Serra casts us the audience very much as spectators, privileged spectators, presented with events in a strange but familiar land. In this place we are shown that some things are hidden; so that the film is in some respects a process of revelation, a revealing of what was ‘hidden’ (but is known to be hidden) so that it gradually assumes a particular and undeniable sort of form. In this respect Serra’s film has some affinities with Haneka’s ‘Hidden’.

    In ‘Pacifiction’ as perhaps in our own lives, we are the privileged observers of a slow inexorable process that begins with tendentious suggestive indications of a world that has gone amiss but which then proceeds by degrees to develop into overwhelming but subjective conviction of immanent disaster.

    ‘Pacifiction’ pivots about its central character De Roller, High Commissioner for a French Overseas Pacific Island Territory. A place that Occidentals, like us, once construed as ‘Paradise’.   De Roller as the central attraction is rather like the Ring Master in a circus. All eyes and attention focus on De Roller as they might on the Ring Master of a circus (though without the whip). De Roller is in complete control of the proceedings in ‘Circus Pacifiction’ manipulating with authority disdain elegance and charm the disparate acts that make up the production: the casino performers, the local businessmen, the local opposing politicos, the ex-pat community, his own staff and any individuals that arouse his interest or suspicion. Unlike the Ring Master he doesn’t wear red waistcoat tails and black leather boots. But he is equally distinguished in his own neo-colonial uniform of an immaculately laundered but slightly crumpled white linen suit.

    Unlike the Ring Master who is always a distant figure, Sarra brings De Roller up close to us. As the film develops we are not just spectators to his performance as High Commissioner, in all its effortless arrogant masterful execution, but have some muted access to the back channels of power that direct him and his public response in relation to the approaching singular event of a nuclear bomb test apparently planned to take place in the vicinity. But De Roller is power and is possessed by all the cognitive accoutrements and adjusted thinking that are the hallmarks of power. I remember McNamara once arguing that a thermo-nuclear war was ‘survivable’   and thus could be moved from the category of an unthinkable event to an event that could be thought through. McNamara was demonstrating the neutralising assuagement of effects that justify mass murder, an utterance of power common to all mass murderers, a specious real politique of justificatory logic. And De Roller exposes himself as one touched by the virus of power.  In one monologue he approves the mass extermination of native peoples because it enabled the advance of civilisation; likewise he justifies nuclear weapons and the consequences of their use, by the fact that they would give the civilised people the understanding of how to survive them.

    De Roller is the personification of ‘power’. ‘Power’ that places itself over the interests of all humanity, is inured to criticism and confident in its entitlement to survive all threats to its existence, both physical and social.

    ‘Pacifiction’ charts a slow inexorable movement towards a disturbing nuclear event. Man made climate change is a slow inexorable movement towards climate disaster.

    My feeling is that Sarra has made ‘Pacifiction’ as an analogous parable to the mounting crisis of man made global warning and consequent climate change. Like climate change the revealing of the proposed new nuclear testing is a gradual process. Both the nuclear testing and climate change, only slowly become clear; but they are never allowed to become undeniably clear by power which obfuscates and prevaricates and ultimately justifies what is doing in the name of its own power, which no one has the organisation to oppose. Only when it is too late will the catastrophic effects make themselves felt by the victims. By which time the perpetrators will have vanished and/or re-invented themselves in another form.

    De Roller might well argue Global Warning is a positive process for Power. It will get rid of a lot of unnecessary people and allow ‘civilisation’ to flourish under new conditions perhaps on a new planet. Interesting to note that threat in ‘Pacifiction’ is represented by the submarine. The submarine of course functions as a metaphore or the unseen menace that threaten us, threats that are always under the surface. And another thought: the French Pacific Island Territories are amongst those islands most threatened by rising sea levels, and it is perhaps a reflection of Sarra’s black humour, that the French will get away from the scene of their crime using a vehicle that is impervious to increasing water levels that will erase many of these islands from the maps of the world.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

     

     

  • Creature       Avis Kapadia

    Creature       Avis Kapadia – based on the dance production by Akram Kahn (UK, 2022) Jeffrey Cirio; Erina Takahashi

    viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 26 Feb 2023; ticket £10.25

    timely thoughts

    After seeing Avis Kapadia’s ‘Creature’ the question that came to mind is what value there is in transposing dance form from stage to film, from live enactment to representative image? Whether dance with its stylisation of performance translates into filmic two dimensional representation. On the evidence of ‘Creature’ my feeling is that the returns from such filmic exercises accrue more to the prestige of the producers than to the satisfaction of the the audience. And without more thought than Avis Kapadia is able to give the project, ‘Creature’ does not work as film.

    An audience can obviously enjoy this spectacle of dance on film but it delivers not only something less than the experience of live performance, but it is a quite other experience.

    In some critical respects dance as part of its inherent nature resists transfer from floor to screen.

    There is one obvious consideration: the pure physicality of dancing. A physicality that transfers itself with electric immediacy in shared space with the audience. Both performers and audience are in the same place, the latter immanently present to movement and adjustment of muscular co-ordination of the dancers: the audience are not just viewers but witnesses.

    But besides this consideration of audience presence there are problems implicit in the the film form itself that inhibit the representation of dance on film. There are issues with the very basic language of film: the editing – the montage – the manner in which psychically they function utilising different dimensional combinations. Film occupying height width time; dance using height width depth.

    Film, even in 3D, works by exploiting the dimension of time; dance works by exploiting the dimension of space.

    In a film drama when the editor or director decide to make a cut in the action, for instance from a wide shot of two people talking to a close up of one of them, in order to capture the ‘reaction’, it is ‘time’ that is being controlled not space. Whenever there is a cut in the action it is a cut in time. And time is also being controlled in the decisions relating to the cut: when to cut, how long to hold the second shot, when to cut away again.   These are temporal decisions that dictate the pacing and weight of the clip. It’s all about time. This can be seen most obviously in many contemporary films where some sequences are built up of very short durational shots, designed to accelerate the subjective experience of time. But even in classically cut films it is the actual change of shots, the weight given them by duration, that render meaning and are a function of time.

    But…

    Dance takes place not as a function of time but in and through the existence of space. The dance venue is a shared bounded space, defined by both physical boundaries and lighting. Dance takes place in a three dimensional physical world. Space is occupied not time. Dancers exploit space for its three dimensional potential. They invest space with content and meaning, in making use of a traditional number of actions and positions there is an element in dance that is timeless. As pure body dancers expand compress extend define themselves as beings subject to the laws of gravity but yearning to defy it.

    The problem with the way Kapadia has directed ‘Creature’ is that he has worked multiple cuts into the action, trying to manipulate a locational expressive form so that it coheres with his decision to impose on it time based montage. Each time Kapadia imposes his temporal decision to cut into the movement of ‘Creature’ he destroys the spacial imperative of the dance causing it to lose its claim on authenticity which is based on the primacy of space.

    Dance is mainly organised about archetypes, characters who display certain types of universally recognised attributes. The young woman, the orphan, dives, the old man, the prisoner: all of these ‘types’ can be developed along multiple lines of possibilities in three dimensional movement which can be choreographed through multiple planes, using an infinite number of dance developed variations of the walk the run the fall the lift the skip the stretch etc organised so as to produce by exploiting the possibilities of the body in space: expression.  Dance cuts through space, compresses space within and between bodies, makes lines in space. In the dance the performer is nearly always mute. It is the body in space that communicates and this of course includes the head as part of the body. In dance the face as part of the head, is a mask. Unlike spoken drama where the face is usually the focus of expression, the face in dance normally has little discrete value. The reason for this is that if dance gives faciality value, if it emphasises face, it simultaneously devalues the line of the dance, the commitment of the whole body to express itself in space. The face cannot exist in ‘space’. The mask completes the body in space, the face with its whole expressive capacity, destroys the dance. And yet Kapadia again and again in ‘Creature’ negates the integrity of the dance by persistent use of facial montage.

    Kapadia’s ‘Creature’ does not work as a transition of dance to screen. He has not put the requisite conceptual work into realising the transposition of one form to another. For some ‘Creature’ may work as a documented spectacle, but for the most part it looks like a typical stranded blue chip ‘arts’ project.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

     

     

  • EO         Jerzy Skolimowski (Pol; 2022)

    EO         Jerzy Skolimowski (Pol; 2022)   Sandra Drzymalska, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz

    viewed Tyneside Cinema 11 Feb 2023; ticket: £10.25

    now you see it

    Jerzy Skolimowski’s ‘EO’ is a contemporary re- realising of Robert Bresson’s ‘Au Hazard Balthazar’.

    In ‘Au Hazard Balthazar’ Bresson uses a donkey named Balthazar as device to enable him show something about human relations, to say something about the human soul. Bresson in a fashion posits Balthazar as being a creature in a state of grace, subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. As he is passed from hand to hand in rural France we see before us ordinary everyday human behaviour: the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, the violent and the tender. Balthazar is a touchstone for the cruelty and love endemic in human-animal interaction, and also a prism for us to see human relations laid bare, to see something of the fullness and emptiness of the human soul. When Balthazar dies, it is not through any direct act of malice or cruelty, but rather the accidental outcome of an act of human selfishness.

    Skolimowski’s ‘EO’ develops the idea of ‘Balthazar’ as an invention who allows us to see things. Skolimowski’s opening shot is of the circus ring. The circus has become an emblematic symbol of the mistreatment of animals: where they are caged, tormented, reduced to living as spectacles for human amusement: but they do have a role. In accord with the times the circus folds; the animals including EO are sold off or sent to the knackers; what use does a modern society have for these creatures? For EO there is still some marginal use to which he can be put: traditional donkey work. But mostly he exists as a token a tolerated anomaly, occasionally useful. As he escapes is captured/re-captured, set free wanders across the asphalt of industrialised European landscape, EO is an animal out of time in an alien place. Rather like ourselves.

    Bresson made ‘Balthazar’ in an era when Western society was still characterised by proximate relations between sentient beings, whether they were animal or human. Skolimowski is making his film when these relations are no longer so dominant in Western society. Of course interactions between EO and humans still have a significance; but Skolimowski’s donkey is a medium, a kindred being allowing us to open our eyes to the kinds of relations that shape our society: the relations between humans and their environment, humans and their technology.

    It’s a moment of truth for an individual when the scales fall from their eyes and they see themselves as others see them. Through the eyes of EO we see something of ourselves, something of the world we have built. What characterises EO’s experience is the constricted point of view. In ‘EO’ this is often a travelling shot from a vehicle as EO is moved from place to place or the cropped views visible to him from out of the stalls in which he is housed. These all point to the existence of a world without vistas, a world that doesn’t open up to us. It’s a world where everything is framed or truncated. And there is something in the way EO is constrained to see the world that resembles how we also have come to see the world. Mostly it’s a world that is viewed through contemporary impedimenta such as the car window or a world seen through the framing of the screen. From whatever portal we might look out at the world, it is now often a world from which physically we are cut off. But so habituated are we to the restricted nature of what we can see, we are no longer aware of how limited our field of vision has become.

    In relation to the built environment that surrounds us there is another aspect which the presence EO brings into focus. Through EO’s eyes we see the extent to which we are alienated from the structures that make possible much of our daily life; or perhaps better to say there is ‘distance’ now between us and strategic industrial parts of the environment we have created.  

    We no longer move into the world, we move across the surface of the world: on roads and highways, motorways, autostrada. When we move in the ‘natural world’, we can merge with it become part of it, part of originary creation. Travelling on asphalt concrete and tarmac we move across surfaces that resist us. We can never be part of this world even though we have created it. There is one sequence where EO crosses a bridge built next to what looks like a hydro-electric scheme. It’s a vast structure built for the management of a river. It is huge and violent with its cascading churning water, terrifying in its non-human scale which defies our immediate apprehension. Surely it is not a human construction – rather an enterprise of Gods? We inhabit a world where its impossible for us to relate to the vast infrastructure systems that sustain our lives: they exist simply for us to use not to understand. In this sense the modern world reduces us to an ‘animal’ level of consciousness, we like them use and exploit without comprehension.   ‘EO’ draws us into an animal ‘being in the world’, a simpler mode of being enabling us to see how distanced we are from the most significant technological emanations of our civilisation.

    Music tracks on film are mostly used to either reinforce or exploit emotional or emotive content. Skolimowski’s ambition for his music track in ‘EO’ is altogether different: his sound track is construed as an input discretely separate from that of his images. Skolimowski’s tracks have their own logic creating a world of suggestions moods and possibilities that run parallel to the picture but are never reduced to a mere supportive function.   The sound/music fills out and extends. Skolimowski’s sound is in a continually changing relationship to the picture: sometimes conjoined to image sometime creating soundscapes that exist in their own right independent of what we are seeing, encircling penetrating expanding the thematic content of the film.

    Balthazar and EO are donkeys, the main characteristic of their animal presence is their facial inscrutability. Neither Bresson nor Skolimowsi resort to tricks that might endow them with anthropomorphic expressive qualities: we are at the opposite end of the horrific Disney spectrum. As filmed the donkeys main features are their eyes, which is apposite in these films which are about seeing ourselves. The donkeys are links, the links to ourselves.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

    him show something about human relations, to say something about the human soul. Bresson in a fashion posits Balthazar as being a creature in a state of grace, subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. As he is passed from hand to hand in rural France we see before us ordinary everyday human interaction: the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, the violent and the tender. Balthazar is a touchstone for the cruelty and love endemic in human-animal interaction, and also a prism for us to see human relations laid bare, to see something of the fullness and emptiness of the human soul. When Balthazar dies, it is not through any direct act of malice or cruelty, but rather the accidental outcome of an act of human selfishness.

    Skolimowski’s ‘EO’ develops the idea of Balthazar as an entity who allows us to see things. Skolimowski’s opening shot is of the circus ring. The circus has become an emblematic symbol of the mistreatment of animals: where they are caged, tormented, reduced to living as spectacles for human amusement. In accord with the times the circus folds, the animals including EO are sold off or sent to the knackers; what use does a modern society have for these creatures? For EO there is still some marginal use to which he can be put: traditional donkey work. But mostly he exists as a token a tolerated anomaly, occasionally useful. EO, as he escapes is captured/re-captured, set free, wanders across the asphalt industrialised European landscape, is an animal out of time in an alien place, perhaps rather like ourselves.

    Bresson made ‘Balthazar’ in an era when Western society was still characterised by proximate relations between sentient beings, whether they were animal or human. Skolimowski is making his film when these relations are no longer so dominant in Western society. Of course interactions between EO and humans still have a significance; but Skolimowski’s donkey is a medium, an analogous device for us to see anew of kinds of relations that now shape the society we live in: the relations between humans and their environment, humans and their technology. Skolimowski’s film allows us to see where and how we live through the eyes of EO.

    It’s a moment of truth for an individual when the scales fall from their eyes and they see themselves as others see them. Through the eyes of EO we see something of ourselves, something of the world we have built. What characterises EO’s experience is the constricted point of view. In ‘EO’ this is often a travelling shot from a vehicle as EO is moved from place to place or the cropped views visible to him from out of the stalls in which he is housed. These all point to the existence of a world without vistas, a world that doesn’t open up to us. It’s a world where everything is framed or truncated. And there is something in the way EO is constrained to see the world that resembles how we also have come to see the world. Mostly it’s a world that is viewed through contemporary impedimenta such as the car window or a world seen through the framing of the screen. From whatever portal we might look out at the world, it is now often a world from which physically we are cut off. But so habituated are we to the delimitation and restricted nature of what we can see, we are no longer aware of how limited our field of vision has become.

    In relation to the built environment that surrounds us there is another aspect which the presence EO brings into focus. Through EO’s eyes we see the extent to which we are alienated from the structures that make possible much of our daily life; or perhaps better to say there is ‘distance’ now between us and strategic industrial parts of the environment we have created.  We no longer move into the world, we move across the surface of the world: on roads and highways, motorways, autostrada. When we move in the ‘natural world’, we can merge with it become part of it, part of originary creation. Travelling on asphalt concrete and tarmac we move across surfaces that resist us. We can never be part of this world even though we have created it.

    There is one sequence where EO crosses a bridge built next to what looks like a hydro-electric scheme. It’s a vast structure built for the management of a river. It is huge and violent with its cascading churning water, terrifying in its non-human scale which defies our immediate apprehension. Surely it is not a human construction – rather an enterprise of Gods? We inhabit a world where its impossible for us to relate to the vast infrastructure systems that sustain our lives: they exist simply for us to use not to understand. In this sense the modern world reduces us to an ‘animal’ level of consciousness, we like them use and exploit without comprehension.   ‘EO’ draws us into an animal ‘being in the world’, a simpler mode of being enabling us to see how distanced we are from the most significant technological emanations of our civilisation.

    Music tracks on film are mostly used to either reinforce or exploit emotional or emotive content. Skolimowski’s ambition for his music track in ‘EO’ is altogether different: his sound track is construed as an entity separate from that of his images. Skolimowski’s tracks have their own logic creating a world of suggestions moods and possibilities that run parallel to the picture but are never reduced to a mere supportive function.   The sound/music fills out and extends. Skolimowski’s sound is in a continually changing relationship to the picture: sometimes conjoined to image sometime creating soundscapes that exist in their own right independent of what we are seeing, encircling penetrating the thematic content of the film.

    Balthazar and EO are donkeys and the main characteristic of their animal presence is their facial inscrutability. Neither Bresson nor Skolimowsi resort to tricks that might endow them with anthropomorphic expressive qualities: we are at the opposite end of the horrific Disney spectrum. As filmed the donkeys main features are their eyes, which is apposite in these films which are about seeing ourselves. The donkeys are links, the links to ourselves.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Enys Men     Mark Jenkin   (2022; UK)

    Enys Men     Mark Jenkin   (2022; UK;)   Mary Woodvine, Edward Rowe

    Viewed Tyneside Cinema 26th Jan 2023; ticket: £10.25

    Plastic flowers

    Mark Jenkin’s ‘Enys Men’ is a assemblage of images revolving around a group of plastic flowers stuck into the ground on a cliff top setting on a remote island off Cornwall. It is not clear whether Jenkin’s protagonist ‘The Volunteer’ in responding to some deep psychological need, has stuck them into the ground herself or whether Jenkin himself misguidedly believes his audience might take them as real. Either way ‘Enys Men’ is a film, that in substance and form amounts to little more than a series of laborious filmic constructs, in particular his use of intercut historical ‘portraits’ reminded me of the films of Huillet and Straub, but lacking their intellectual rigour.

    Like Jenkin’s first film ‘Bait’, ‘Enys Men’ is shot on 16mm. This system as used to shoot ‘Bait’ worked well in incorporating the suggestion of ‘memory retained’ into the actual body and fabric of the medium. The 16mm stock was edited so that the release print included reel ends, film processing marks and grain working into the film’s ‘present’ the idea of the omnipresence of ‘times that had passed’. As shot by Jenkin there was no need in ‘Bait’ for the structure of the script to incorporate flashbacks or other symbolic devices to represent the temporal tensions implicit in the scenario. The concept of ‘time’ was endemic in the use made of the characteristics of the film stock. “Enys Men’ was also shot on 16mm. In similar manner to ‘Bait’ it incorporates into its imagery similar features of the stock.

    But can Jenkin pull off the same effect twice? My feeling is that in ‘Enys Men’ the use of 16mm yields greatly diminished returns to its artistic investment.

    Besides the obvious problems involved in repeating the same film stock contrivances – repetition of same idea spectrum – there is the issue of the appropriateness of this stock to the subject of ‘Enyse Men’.   In ‘Bait’ the temporal aspect implicit in the way Jenkin used his 16mm film worked well as an expressive device underscoring the tensions in the relationship between the two brothers, with their contrasting attitude to change. In ‘Enys Men’ the central relation explored by Jenkin is between the volunteer and her own memory and its fusing with a collective memory. But in addition to the temporal aspect suggested by the 16mm film, we also have a script structure that uses flashbacks and other types of symbolic shots (tin miners; fishers; children in traditional Cornish costume a la Straudb and Huillet) to incorporate, to ‘block’, other ‘time’ into the scenario. In this respect the use of 16mm stock contributes little to the film which is sciptively structured so as to have ‘time’ itself as central to its concern.   Jenkin’s manner of using his stock comes across as a gimmick – or perhaps the conceit of stamping his signature onto his material.

    Looking at some of the ideas Jenkin works into the scenario of ‘Enys Men’, they look like a mish-mash of ‘borrowings’ from other directors, ideas to which he fails to make any claim on ownership. Jenkin exploits the repeated imagary of the Volunteer’s daily round: her getting up, leaving, visiting the cliff top plastic flowers, dropping a stone into an old mine shaft, keeping a daily log of her observations. A routine that in form closely resembles Ackerman’s compulsive subject: Jeanne Dielman. The Volunteer’s two way radio communication, her ‘squawk box’ looks pulled straight out of Cocteau’s ‘Orphée’ and the sudden appearance and immediate disappearance of images from the past strongly recalls Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Back’. Second hand as it is, and lacking Roeg’s flair, the effect of Jenkin’s use of this device is flat. It’s part and parcel of many contemporary films to deploy ‘landscape’ ‘seascape’ ‘skyscape’ shots to imply some sort of psychological resonance with theme. But these sort of shots, spliced into an edit have simply become visual tropes, stand-by clichés exploited to bulk out impoverished scenarios with ‘meaning’. Occasionally as in Strickland’s ‘Katalin Varga’, there’s some psychic return; but Jenkin’s repetitious use of Cornwall’s sea girt rocks as suggestive of unchanging time simply overstates and overdetermines the obvious.

    As the end credits rolled I noticed that Jenkin occupied all the key creative roles. He is: director – writer – DP – editor – composer – a man of many talents. Perhaps. In relation to ‘Enys Men’ the cinematography is second rate with a horrible over use of zoom shots, often accompanied by Jenkin’s music underscoring the emotional meaning of the zoom with a predictable crescendo. The editing seems uninspired as does such scripted dialogue, such as there is. Looking at Jenkin’s direction of his actors, for the most part they seem wooden as if frightened to do anything off their own bat and reduced to waiting on ‘the director’s instructions’. My feeling is that on this evidence Jenkin is a control freak, who needs to understand that film making is a collective enterprise.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

     

  • Corsage                       Marie Kreuzer

    Corsage                       Marie Kreuzer (Euro co-prod; 2022) Vicky Krieps; FlorianTeichmeister

    viewed Tyneside Cinema 29th Dec 2022; ticket: £10.25

    to die perchance to dream

    ‘Corsage’s’ opening credits show that the producers of ‘Corsage’ and director Marie Kreuzer made full use of subject Empress Elizabeth of Austria’s peripatetic life style to play a sort of Eurofilm version of ‘Monopoly’. The rules of the Euro production money game are : land on a country square and you can claim production finance from the country’s square on which you’ve landed + plus guaranteed film and TV deals. Seeing the different country ‘squares’ pop up in the credits, I feared the deals might have impinged on the integrity of the film. But the financial strategy worked ok, and the constant change of backgrounds fed into the restless wanderings of Elizabeth.

    There have been a number of films recently that exploit female historical characters with the objective of re-purposing them to exemplify current ideas about female identity. Yorgos Lanthropos’ movie ‘The Favourite’ was a study of Queen Anne. ‘The Favourite’ was a conventionally conceived period piece, staying more or less true to its historical grounding but doing a ‘make over job ‘ on Queen Anne whose character outlook and philosophy were aligned so as to be in tune with contemporary mores and values. Nothing new here of course. Hollywood scripts have always fitted out historical characters, Kings and Queens Counts and Countesses etc with transposed contemporary outlooks and attitudes towards characterisation and social relations. Otherwise how would a mass audience identify with them?

    Kreuzer’s ‘Corsage’ in its depiction of the ‘life’ of the Empress Elizabeth goes along with Hollywood’s fast and loose attitude to historical characterisation. Kreuzer’s ‘Elizabeth’ is moulded as an exemplar of the consequences of the social constriction of women. ‘Elizabeth’ is an ideatic construct restrained both by her own bodily corset and by the corsetry of social relations. Kreuzer’s take on Elizabeth’s life requires the totalistic voiding of anything irrelevant to her core idea. It’s as if Kreuzer has held Elizabeth upside down by her ankles and shaken out any character or other attributes that are not in alignment with her authorial governing purpose.

    In re-visaging Elizabeth’s life Kreuzer gets radical. She also takes the scissors to the date and actual form of death of her protagonist. Elizabeth of Austria died in 1898, aged 61, assassinated by an Italian anarchist in Geneva. But Kreuzer’s ‘ideal feminist’ filmic Elizabeth commits suicide aged 40. In the best cinematic traditions Elizabeth filleted of any inconveniences becomes a suitable medium for message, a message about both contemporary feminism and death.

    Kreuzer’s purpose is to demonstrate that Elizabeth’s life came to an end at the age of forty. At this age the pressures both of her position and of status as a woman, with its concomitant imperatives regarding her appearance deportment and manners so impressed themselves upon her that they in effect left her with no future, no life. With a terrible future that she could see all too well, she took her life into her own hands and committed suicide.

    ‘Corsage’ opens up the cinematic space that permits Kreuzer to fashion ‘Elizabeth’ as a necessary invention. The scenario with its anachronistic interpolations is designed to de-construct any possibility that the film might be interpreted as having any actual historical setting or lay claim to historical authenticity. ‘Corsage’ is designed as a modernist conceit, and the regular intrusion into the picture of anachronistic material serves as continuous reminder to the audience that they are watching a contemporary construct. Much of the music on the sound track is rifled from contemporary pop; in one diegetic musical moment, one of Elizabeth’s courtiers sings the Jagger/ Rchards /Loog-Oldham number: ‘As Tears Go By.’ (originally recorded by Marianne Faithful)  And: innumerable images regularly pop upthat are out of place out of time: a tractor, X-Rays, motion pictures, electric light, thereby giving the audience the wink that any suggestion of historicism in ‘Corsage’ is not to be taken seriously.

    What is to be taken seriously is the proposition implied in the metaphorical title, ‘Corsage’: that the strangulating effect caused by women’s internalisation of male/patriarchal judgement of them by their appearance, effectively controling their lives, sentences women to a kind of slow death by asphyxiation. All the oxygen is taken out of the air as when you drown.

    In ‘Corsage’ whatever Elizabeth does, her athletic achievements her abilities her lovers her independent attitude count as nothing in comparison to the demands made upon her for: duty, perfect outward presentation, correct behavioural deportment. These she cannot escape, try as she might in her restless agitated movement from place to place.

    and…what about the invented death that Kreuzer has so thoughtfully arranged for Elizabeth?

    In the final shot we see Elizabeth in silhouette standing at the front end of a steamer. She steps up onto the edge of the prow and jumps serenely overboard into the sea. It feels like an act of nobility. Kreuzer has composed an elegant and beautiful image: Elizabeth’s form plummeting down down down through the air towards the water into death.

    When life has reached a point where you understand that it is intolerable and that there is nothing you can do to change this, then you can take the brave and impeccable decision to end your life. As well as making her point about ‘Female Corsage’ my feeling is that Kreuzer is also making a refined observation about suicide. Self inflicted death has a noble and well documented history. To kill oneself is a decision in which the individual takes full control of their own lives, the supreme moment of self determination. This is not to say that suicide is unproblematic. Certainly in relation to people with mental health problems or adolescents. But self inflicted death has long been an area where both the state and religions have attempted to take control of individuals’ life and death, in effect taking ownership of all life and death.  Suicide, for Elizabeth, and for many, is the individual act of reclamation against social religious state claims on being. Suicide is about life; for the individual life and death are interconnected states.

    My feeling is that Kreuzer as well as employing Elizabeth as a retro-activated contemporary woman working against implanted patriarchal patterns of behaviour, also poses suicide as a feminist issue. ‘Corsage’ it seems to me takes on suicide as a decision that can be both brave and noble. A action that is at once an act of complete defiance but also in its own way a celebration of the dance of life.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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