Star & Shadow

Scrapper     Charlotte Regan   (UK; 2023) Lola Campbell, Alin Uzun

viewed Tyneside Cinema 31^st August 2023; ticket £11.75

“It’s a scrapper!”

Charlotte Regan’s ‘Scrapper’ portends to be a film about a child, 12 year old Georgie who has been brought up by her mother. The situation is that after Georgie’s mum dies, she manages to continue living by herself in their family home on an East End Estate. Then she’s suddenly confronted with the re-appearance of her dad Jason, who abandoned her when she was a baby and whom she has never known.

There is a significant roll call of movies with children at the heart of their script: Truffaut’s 400 Coups, Bresson’s Mouchette, Clio Bernard’s The Selfish Giant, all of these directors work to locate us in the world of child. We see something of what the child sees, the scripts open up alien vistas out of kilter with the way things are normally understood by adults. But Regan’s movie is not about a child. Regan’s protagonist, 12 year old Georgie is a transposed adult woman and the film is about adult relationships.

‘Scrapper’ opens with a sequence of Georgie hoovering, doing the housework. The film closes with Georgie and dad Jason becoming friends, the final shot shows them walking off hand in hand into the sunset.

The film seems to actually chronicle the subsuming of Georgie into her mother’s persona scripting the reconciliation of what had been failed relationship. Georgie’s presentation as a child by Regan doesn’t work. Dressing her up in an old football top and leaving her hair dangling in a pigtail is simple window dressing, it can’t disguise what’s in the shop. Georgie in poise attitude and dialogue is a contemporary woman; there is no vision of the child, no entry into the parallel space of the seeing of the unformed mind.

Consequently this is a film in which the Regan’s script is unable to set any real tensions into play. In the films of Bresson Bernard and Truffaut that centre on the child, the scripts work in a particular way by engendering critical tensions between the worlds as experienced and acted on by the child protagonists, and the realities of the grown up world. Tensions that are endemic in the mismatch between the formed and the unformed psyche, the attached and unattached consciousness; perhaps the types of tensions that play out today in the kind of knife crime committed by children.

But Georgie is not a child: she enters the film as a preformed adult without emotional or psychic tensions between her and the world. Without tensions ‘Scrapper’ becomes a dead movie, dull beyond distraction offering the viewer only the slow play out of what turns into the closure of a faux-romantic relationship.   

This narrative trope is reinforced by the care taken by Regan over the art direction of ‘Scrapper’. Much has been made of Regan’s design, in particular the colourisation of ‘Scrapper’, it’s candy coloured gloss suggesting her film as a contemporary ‘Disney’ style fairy-tale, a ballad of a returning Prince rescuing a Princess. With the transformative technology of digital editing systems, Regan’s colouring mimics the type of look used by films such ‘Barbie’ and foisted on us by adverts whose creators of course aim to lure us into associating their products with a make believe wish fulfilment. Regan’s adoption of this look, which she justifies as giving up-lift to the usual down beat depiction of Working Class life, seems to me disingenuous: as if subsuming working class life into the world of MacDonalds and late capitalist consumerist projections makes everything better.

If the film says anything at this point it’s that all relationships have become infantilised, but it is not clear that Regan intended her film to be such a sophisticated parody of contemporary life.

Regan’s problems in understanding the issues implicit in building scripts centred about the child may stem from her script which replaces content with form. Given that there are no structural tensions built into the scenario Regan has opted to give her film an interpolated form. The action is regularly interrupted by regularly cutting away to a series of characters who are scripted to give an opinion or make a judgement about what has been going on in Georgie’s life.

Like as if I write: “Macdonald’s I’m loving it.”

Her notion was perhaps to create a form of visual interchange that would serve to energise ‘Scrapper’. This sort of structural device is well exercised in current cinema adverts and the Macdonald’s ad before Regan’s movie was certainly a case in point. But what works for a two minute ad doesn’t transfer to a feature film; the more   these tricksy devices were repeated the less they delivered. Regan seems to have believed she could make her film work by gimmicks rather than understanding the forces her idea might release.

There is little left to say. The scenario is monopaced, and overlong. It’s easy to see that some sequences in ‘Scrapper’ have been over-extended so that the film can collapse over the finishing line of ‘feature film length’ demanded by the ‘Money’. The script is plodding, mostly badly written. When I saw the film at the Tyneside, the sound was strange, in particular the dialogue tracks. It may have been the cinema’s system but Georgie’s voice in particular had a peculiar hyper real quality.

There were 6 people in the cinema, a large 300 seat auditorium.   It felt like they were present to witness the death of cinema if films like this keep getting made. I don’t know what meaning Regan intended to be understood by her title ‘Scrapper’, but before I saw this film I had always understood it to be a colourful term used by second hand car salesmen to describe a vehicle that had been sold to a punter which should have been scrapped. ‘It’s a scrapper’.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Barbie     Greta Gerwig (2023; USA;) Margot Robbie; Ryan Gosling

viewed Tyneside Cinema 7 Aug 2023; ticket: £6

Display function

Barbie is the most successful film release this year, grossing $1B+, and as Siegried Kracauer notes: ‘… success like this is a sign of a successful sociological experiment, showing that its constituent elements have been blended in such a way as to correspond to the needs of a mass audience.’

I have never owned a Barbie, but I have seen them displayed in toyshop windows, and wondered at these dolls in their pertly dressed outfits and pinched in bodies. Greta Gerwig’s script which plays out as one long spoof, kicks off with a cod ‘2001’ derivative sequence showing little girls located in a primal landscape playing with trad baby dollies, before the trumpets of Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra sound out announcing the new age of Barbie.

From this section it’s observable that there are differences in the types of play mediated by these two types of toy dolls. The little girls engage with their trad dollies in a number of ways, as well as dressing and tending to them, children cuddle embrace protect hold them close to their bodies: the little baby dollies invite touch invoking a physical relationship. These baby dolls trigger the impulse to ‘care for’, to ‘look after’. The Barbies are to some extent coat-hangars: model doll-women who can be affectively dressed in all manner of different costumes and mantels. They don’t invite physical engagement or intimacy, they exist as types to be transformed by their apparel into different exemplary models that exist for displaying what they are.

My feeling is that contrary to the notion peddled by Gerwig’s script that Barbie dolls are enablers, helping little girls to achieve the lives of their dreams, rather Barbies invoke the idea of life as ‘display’. Barbie dolls are accurate representations of a culture of ‘display’ and Gerwig’s scenario mainlines straight into veins of a culture of spectacle.

The transition from baby dolls to Barbie dolls is in some respects witness to a system moving from trust to control. The transition from baby dolls to Barbie dolls is one marker of the social movement from a collective culture to an individualist display culture based on the currency of attention.

A few days after seeing the movie, travelling on the Metro in Newcastle, the carriage doors swished open and a large group of young 14-15 years old girls bundled in jiving laughing decked out in full display kit. All wore high cut leisure shorts and sleeveless tops; they all had nail extensions protruding at least 2cm beyond the finger tip, and their eyes were dramatised by long thick up-curled black false eyelashes. They looked like real life Barbies. The costume and prosthetic effects on display were statements, the look as a projection of social values as refined by 10 years of iphones and social media. The young girls were presenting as spectacles, exo-shows designed to be looked at displayed appraised by their peers. The image machine at work and at play.

Barbie is a drama played out by actors but in effect it’s an animation with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Gerwig’s ‘toons’. Nevertheless like the girls on the Metro, display image and control are central to the film’s pretension and its claim on the mass market. The Barbie’s LA based cool street look (face – body – wrap) is designed for exhibition and exhibition value depends on beautiful looks or a contrived representation of ‘look’, a sort of commodified identity signing off on both the components parts and the whole statement of who you want to be. Like an advert for ‘Coke’ or a two hour movie about Barbie Dolls, ‘being’ becomes display. Consumer societies have developed as societies of spectacle, where the desired effect is ‘attention’, for which read: competition for attention. Given the imperative of the exhibition ethos everyone wants to be in the picture and with the ubiquity of the smart phone everyone’s on display everyone’s in the photo. Gerwig understands that in the transposed nature of capitalist consumer ethos the underlying driver motivating social interactions is: ‘attention’ – that’s the pay off. Social competition is for attention rather than power (Which is not to say they are not linked). The mass appeal of ‘Barbie’ is built firmly on the psychological foundation of this social fact.

The other characterising element of Gerwig’s script is confusion. Gerwig has produced her own alt Marxist dialectic that reads: thesis; antithesis; confusion. Confusion replacing synthesis may actually be a better outcome predictor of change than Marx’ socio-historical take on Hegel. Confusion and diffusion as the basis of the narrative for mass entertainment has the huge advantage of being a mish mash of oppositions that cannot possibly offend anyone. With it’s Disneyfied logic Gerwig’s scenario sets up all manner of oppositions: male/female; capitalist/ communal; real world/unreal world; life /death. Her oppositions are all resolved by way of unclear or even incomprehensible compromises as the script opts for philosophical fudge and sludge. Which of course is exactly as it should be in a film catering for the needs of a mass audience where it is better that embarrassing questions sink into the abyss of confusion, leaving the audience gaze firmly fixed on the surface.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Gummo     Harmony Korine   ( USA; 1997)   Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, Chloe Sevigny, Linda Manz

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 23 July 2023; ticket:£7

and another american dream

Looking at the year in which Korine made ‘Gummo’ I remembered that Michael Haneka had made his first version of ‘Funny Games’ in that same year, 1997.  Haneka’s film, had its metaphysical roots in Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, an artistic testament pointing to the need for violent physical actions and determinations to break through the audience’s carapace against ‘reality’: a kick in the balls to wake up.

Haneka’s movie is a brutal assault on the American middle class consumer. The original Funny Games was shot and made in Germany, but it was clear that the intended target of the eviscerating satire was the ‘home’ of consumerism, the USA.  To make this clear Haneka re-made Funny Games shot for shot in 2008, this version filmed and located in America.  The films achieved their effect by sabotaging standard Hollywood script protocols using the mind scrambling device of complete inversion of the power relations between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ characters, and writing the dialogue so that the bad guys were scripted all the vicious triumphant violence and got all the best ‘one liners’.  There is no ‘Dirty Harry’ play out.

What Haneka shows in ‘Funny Games’ is that Middle Class America is defined by occupation of space without any real claim on it (hence their love of hotels and the imitation of hotel style interiors) and the propensity of this class to define themselves by the products they choose to buy.  Haneka’s middle class family are sort of interlopers, with an incorporeal claim on the space in which they live; with aplomb and certitude they possess great wealth of material matter, but lack awareness of what they actually have, represents.  Time to call in the avenging angels.

I have talked about Haneka’s movie because for me it suggests a way into thinking about what Korine was doing in making ‘Gummo’.  It’s set in the poor white community of Xenia, among the people regarded as ‘white trash’ by those who consider themselves socially superior.  Korine’s ‘Gummo’ represents the people who are the antithesis of the family in ‘Funny Games’, but have a certain phantom relationship, in as much as the lives of the poor whites can be seen as a strangely distorted sometimes warped shadow of  mainstream middle class culture.

At the heart of ‘Gummo’ is the idea of the fragility of life.  This is an idea for the most part alien to the Middle Class ethos.  Perhaps this explains the resistance of the wealthy in industrialised and post-industrial populations, to accept the inescapable reality of encroaching climate change.  They don’t understand their relationship to what is happening.  ‘Gummo’ opens with a voice over by Solomon (the film’s main adolescent lead) spoken over grainy images (super 8 or VHS) of the passage of a tornedo through Xenia.  Solomon tells what he saw of the death and destruction left in its trail.  Nature can wipe you out any time.  It’s a moral perspective.

And Korine’s ‘Gummo’ is a film made with moral intent.  His use of violence is an intrinsic part of the film’s design; violence that is allowed to play out to its aesthetic moral and logical conclusions.  A design that makes a claim on many of his scenes as spectacles of cruelty. The sometimes demented, sometimes coldly inflicted, nature of the violence, is (as in Heneka’s Funny Games) intended to cut straight through the viewers’ resistance to get through to the moral quick of the perception that I believe guides and drives Korine’s movie.  As per Haneka’s observations in ‘Funny Games’, the middling classes walk through life seeing nothing, without understanding the complex relations upon which their comfortable lives are built.  They possess, without ever having to fight for their possession. Their claim on wealth is by right of inheritance, an inheritance that they have forgotten was itself won by acts of applied violence.  Haneka’s middle class couple have been able to write even the possibility of violence, out of their life scripts; for the most part, they’re able to envelope their well protected privileged lives in the stultifying justificatory re-assuring blandishments of corporate speak.  They have the magic pass for getting through life.

Korine’s underclass possess no such magic pass.  The conditions and experiences of any underclass are generally shaped by a high level of physicality.  It is a culture that revolves closely about the body:  health housing proximity social relations are all primary physical experiences. And this closeness to body engenders a sort of primary honesty that mediates the way people live and transmits to the children.  There is (at least until social workers come along) nothing to hide.  The violence in ‘Gummo’ both in the adult world and in the world of children expresses something of this honesty and something of the core physicality of the world as experienced. 

Middle Class parents work hard to socialise their children in accord with standards of behaviour in which violence cruelty and antisocial tendencies are traits, tendencies, inclinations, to be suppressed, transmuted into more socially acceptible and progressive  impulses. But there can be an honesty in violence as a prime response.  And there no doubt that children can readily take to violence and cruelty, both for their own sake and to gain advantage for themselves.  It may be that many children (but not necessarily all children) are self centred, lack empathy, and struggle to understand the suffering of others. I think it is certainly true that causing hurt and pain can be a particular way that some children use to explore experiment and exploit their relations with the world.  Solomon and his friend kill cats.  They kill cats for money to buy glue and visit a local whore. It’s an instrumental act on their part: more or less neglected and penniless, they kill cats.  As children they kill honestly and without remorse: like children they know it’s wrong but they lack the inhibiting conditioning or empathic ability to cause them to stop.  And for this reason the film, in the form of Korine’s script does not judge them.  It observes them and how they live, as does the viewer.

It might be a criticism of Korine that he is exploiting underclass American culture for his own ends as a film maker. To make a sensationalist film.  The film’s setting is not his background.  He is not ideologically driven (as say was Pasolini) in any obvious manner.  He makes ‘Gummo’ to assert himself as a film maker.  Difficult charge to answer, we don’t have access to his thinking.  However he says that what he shows in ‘Gummo’ is an America that is more or less hidden, unexplored in the dynamic of film.   There are some documentaries, but nothing that uses the resources of drama to probe the psychic realities of marginalised life.   But this aspect of America, the derelict communities abandoned by the post industrial world are an enduring part of this society and a necessary element in understanding how America works.  They are the cannon fodder.  In some ways Korines world and his characters, in particular the children are the wasted heirs of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.  And of course the Solomon’s of America are the boots on the ground of the American army, the front line of Vietnam and Iraq, togather with the blacks they are the backbone of the country’s projection of power.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Samurai             Jean-Pierre Melville   (Fr; 1967) Alain Delon. Francois Périer; Nathalie Delonviewed Star and Shadow Cinema 2^nd July 2023; ticket: £7

the way of the camera

Melville’s ‘The Samurai’ is in some respects a walk through experience. The plot is derived from a neo-noir template following the familiar twists and turns of the noir genre. The key point in the movie being the script’s volte face when the hired killer has to turn his gun onto the people who originally hired him. A old complication: you sometimes have to bite the hand that fed you. The script features many familiar and well loved tropes: the loner anti-hero, an adoring moll, the sudden eruption of man with gun into a room (as per Chandler’s dictum that if things get little slow and uneventful, insert a man with a gun into a room – everything changes), a watertight alibi and a pernickety meticulous cop determined to get his man and of course ‘The Samurai’ the hired killer in the form of Delon. In the long durational wide shot that opens the film, at first we don’t see him; we hear his caged bird chirping and at last notice cigarette smoke wafting above the sofa which is back to the camera. When ‘Jeff’ pushes himself up from his prone position we barely make him out in the low light as he walks over to the front door, dons coat and carefully adjusts his hat before going out. The opening sequence is an introduction to the man who in some respects is inexistent. An idea.

With all it’s stylistic gloss the film belongs to Delon as ‘Jef’ who literally walks through the film occasionally breaking into a run, his brusque walk and angular movements highlighting the pursuit scene set in the Paris metro. The part was conceived and written for Delon who functions as a noirish phantom with signature trench coat and a fedora hat moving like the spectral ghost of movies past through the scenario with invariant expression invariant stance and invariant silhouette, doing the necessary to keep the story moving.

What makes the film more than a cinematic work-out is Melville’s understanding of the role of the camera in shaping the audience’s perception of his film. Cinema differs from theatre in that through placement the camera can represent oppositional points of view. To put it simply (and it is certainly more complex than this) the camera can be subjective or objective in its placement and in the implication of what it ‘sees. The ‘subjective’ camera is the classic ‘point of view’ shot where the camera is so placed as to stand for what the subject is seeing/experiencing.   The audience are also aware that what they are seeing in the shot is what the subject is seeing. By contrast the ‘objective’ shot records what is happening from the point of view of what is sometimes called a privileged observer (though who they are and how this can be manipulated is part of the craft of film composition). Filmic tensions are easily manipulated by creating uncertainty confusion etc in the viewer as to what point of view they being shown.

‘Le Samourai’ works superbly well because Melville’s shooting script instructs the camera to be exclusively objective. We never see a ‘Jef’ point of view. ‘Jef’ is the object of our gaze. A sort of specimin. We stare at and into him but he gives nothing back. He is an object entity, like a man from Mars or perhaps a Samurai. He is an unreadable affect image. When he ‘kisses’ his moll, who is putting her life on the line for him, we see he shows no trace of emotion: the embrace no more than a mechanical gesture.  Throughout the film whether he is killing, loving, on the run, under cross examination or dying he is the perfect Samurai, presenting to the camera to the watching audience the same baby faced blank immobility. He is an entity dominated by an ethos of service to murder. Melville’s understanding of the nature of his camera and Delon’s affect image combine to produce a film that is a realisation of ideas, all process but cool and engaging.

‘Le Samourai’ is a witty piece of film making. In effect it’s an homage to Hollywood’s golden era of gangster movies with their wonderful scripts derived from writers such as Chandler Cain Hammet et al. ‘The Samurai’ works as a parody, a playful parody of the tropes that play out in the genre. The humour lies in Melville’s realisation that the scaffold of the ‘Noir’ genre, with its oppositions and tensions could sustain and deliver a film that although it was shot quite differently from the Hollywood model and in a setting outside its original purlieu of the USA, it could still deliver almost as an abstract transcendentance, a statement about finality and futility.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Masculin-Féminin     J-L Godard (Fr; 1966) Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 18 June 2023; ticket: £7

lest we forget

As per Godard it’s not the romancing that counts but the social constructs that define and delimit it’s possibilities. As romance goes the relationship between Paul (a romantic young idealist) and Madelaine (a wannabe popstar) is cool, as in it’s a cool relationship with, as in the words of the Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields song, A Fine Romance “…with no kisses…” The kissing being replaced by a detached dialogue that probes sex life expectations and political attitudes.

The relationship is a device for probing the facts of life of the times in the mid twentieth century.

In ‘Alphaville’ Godard’s scripting exhibited a prescience about the way in which computers were to develop. What Godard understood about computers was not just their inevitable transition into machines that would have the capacity to take over and control all aspects of our society; computers would also imprint their algorithmically contrived language upon human consciousness; our own thinking would inevitably start to align itself with machine communication, turning us into proto automatons. We were going to end up ‘brainwashed’, with our minds invaded by the computer virus and be unable to think in any other way. In ‘Masculin-Féminin’ Godard has also seen into the future. His scenario probes another nascent feature of control technology which was also going to transform the way we live and interact: the opinion poll. The opinion pole as the harbinger of the data driven society.

At mid point in the film Paul abandons his interest in politics and gets a job with a polling company. Paul’s job is to gather peoples responses to questions about their personal life sexuality and their buying preferences. Godard sees that the forces starting to operate in the social matrix of the mid’60’s are steadily working against and undermining the political and the communal. The real arguments about the division of power wealth and class inequality are in process of being overwhelmed by the burgeoning imperative for everyone to consume…. more and more and more…and for these patterns of consumption to start to define us.

As the apparatus of capitalism gives consumers the goods they are incited to desire: the car, the TV, the holiday, the clothing, the music, all considerations surrounding how and why and at what cost these things are produced become irrelevant. Everything belongs in the domain of possession. The people are addicted to Coca Cola. But at the same time as this marriage to consumption takes place, something else also happens that marks a change the social psyche: the arrival of the pollsters.

Where once we might have been defined by class and politics, we are now defined by the data that is collected about us. The pollsters back in the 60’s with their questionnaires and clip-boards were the start of a process where over time we have all become agglomerations of our possessions. Of course there is a feed back loop between the objective and subjective, in which our own self identity and the identity of others are increasingly moulded by the data relating to the way we live. We become what we consume, what we watch, the music we listen to. In 1966 Godard was witnessing and documenting what he understood to be the beginning of an atomised fragmented society defined by patterns of individualistic consumption and the end of community. The pollsters were the start of the data driven society that now with the internet and its ‘likes’ cookies, personalised ads, and tracking, has reached a point of satiation and satiety.

In his later films I think Godard understood that ‘1968’ and all that had been a final act desperate of resistance against the overwhelming pressure of the capitalist driven forces of consumption, completely remoulding the social sphere as an apolitical realm. His films following 1968 can be understood as acts of defiance and analysis.

‘Masculin-Féminin’ is not so much a narrative rather a series of clips pinpointing events in the course of ‘a perhaps’ relationship. Intercut between these sections are clips depicting defining images of the times: the shops the billboards the neon signs and brightly lit boulevards of Paris. Intra-cut into the clips are short sharp depictions of the violence witnessed without surprise and ‘coolly’ by the protagonists, almost complete indifference. These violent actions epitomise the savagery of the times spontaneous sudden destructive actions that characterise a psychotic individualised society fed on images of death and wars of cruelty and murder.

The era of Vietnam war: the war that runs through Godard’s films as a reference to the ultimate expression of US Corporate and Military Industrial hegemony and to remind the audience that this war was not something that could be forgotten. However much Europe and the politicians might find it convenient real politique to ignore and forget.   It was a cruel criminal war in which the might of the USA attempted to crush a country which was diametrically opposed to capitalism. It was a cruel and criminal war to which Europe for the most part turned a blind eye. Europe was to happy up to a point to allow its youth a luxury of gestural opposition but for the most part Europe simply wanting to get on and join the big fat party of consumer excess and life style celebration that was the necessary correlate of the murder in Vietnam.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

  

 

The Dam     Ali Cherri (2019 Sudan – Euro finance) Maher el Khair

viewed at Losing the Plot 10 June 23; ticket £5

Neptune Frost     Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams (2022; Rwanda + US/Eur finance)

viewed at Losing the Plot 11 June 23; ticket £5

out of Africa…?

Two films seen at the Star and Shadow’s ‘Losing the Plot’, both with African settings, both written by non Africans, though Neptune frost has a Rwandan co-director, Anisia Uzeyman (who also is credited with the cinematography). Ali Cherri is a Lebanese artist; Saul Williams a New York poet rapper music-artist.

With directors such as Diop Mambéty, Sembene, Sissako, Lacote we have African directors making films in Africa, depicting African situations and issues. So when artists/filmmakers enter the continent to make films with African players that depict Africa the question is to what extent are they playing out their own imported scenarios and using the African actors and settings simply as a legitimising backcloth against which they can endorse or give a spurious legitimacy to their own outlooks and ideas. Sometimes ‘outsiders’ can bring a fresh dynamic vision to new areas of concern; sometimes they simply exploit novel settings to foist their own preconceived notions upon situations they do not understand.

There is one other point to consider in relation to the co-directors of Neptune Frost: Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman. The latter is Rwandan born and described on-line as an international actor playwright and director. The ‘international’ tag of the description has a putative implication about the self image of Uzeyman who is married to her co-director Saul Williams and lives in LA. But these are perhaps unfair observations. More to the point about the claim by ‘Neptune Frost’ to be an African film is that the script was written by Saul Williams. ‘Neptune Frost’ is a film in structure and content that has been formed by the writer, who has then co-directed his own script. The film comes across as being at least 75% Williams.  In particular the dialogue and the faux sci-fi thematic is strongly marked out as being part of the substance of the body of his work over the past 25 years. It’s a New York film characterised by the concerns (legitimate in their own right) of black African Amerikans. Williams owns the Neptune Frost script. The rest of the movie is scissors and paste.

Ali Cherri’s movie ‘The Dam’ has a primal authenticity, both actual and psychic. Because the film has core concerns in relation to the forces working through the social and psychic interplay of inequality, to a certain extent these issues might be depicted anywhere (in this particular ‘The Dam’ reminded me of Mark Jenkin’s ‘Bait’: the setting was perfect but the issues underlying the script would have fitted other places other times). Again in the case of ‘The Dam’ Cherri’s concerns are all the stronger for being set in Sudan, at a location by the river Nile. Cherri’s script foregoes the use of classical narrative connections.  It is an associative scenario. The film is structured around an oppositional contrivance: the 2019 popular uprisings (relayed through television pictures) in Khartoum against al-Bashir (which led to the military coup that toppled him), set against the men labouring at a mud brick works situate on the banks of the Nile beneath the Merowe Dam, from which his film takes its title.

The making of the mud bricks is done entirely by hand. Hard back breaking work that has a physical language that references Pharaohic times, ‘the dawn of civilisation’. The process is covered in detail by Cherri: the shaping drying stacking firing. Cherri’s opening comprises a wide shot of an antediluvian desert valley (reminiscent of Monument Valley). A man on a motor cycle, Maher, rides across the vista. He is one of the ‘brick’workers. As the film develops we understand that Maher rides out regularly to a remote hidden gorge where he is constructing a huge mud human effigy. It’s a vast figure, with its own wood scaffolding, that he builds and moulds with the skills used in his work.

This effigy is the product of Maher’s mind. His psychic response to a primal urgent unbearable need to externalise the monstrous forces that are consuming him, as if all the evil forces abroad in the world could be contained, compressed in this figure. But of course as a product of the intensity of his need to create this figure (which like the biblical Adam, like the Golem, is made of mud) it comes alive with an awful vividity its terrible aspects working burrowing through Maher’s consciousness bestowing on him deluded but awesome and chaotic powers of destruction. He experiences delirium that mimics the experiences of Sudan itself, like the Merowe Dam that both bestows and takes away life, contains and unpredictably unleashes its waters according to its own hidden deathly logic. In the end a Biblical torrent of rain destroys Maher’s effigy, dissolving it back to the liquid mud from whence it came, the liquid mud from which all life came. And as the sluice gates of the dam open once again, the huge pipes spewing out millions of litres of water, there is a sweeping away of all before it, the mud and Maher himself who swims away with the current.

Cherri’s ‘The Dam’ presents as an allegorical tryst which contrasts the collective action of people to change the political regime with Maher’s individualised need to fashion a psychic response to his situation, his urge to fashion a symbolic structure that represents the terror he lives with. It’s a projection that can only consume him and allow him to embrace his own self destruction. A fate which given the consequences of the conflict in Sudan today between the two opposing war lords, also seems to have overtaken the optimistic projections of the collective. In a sense the collective and the individual response though very different in form both flow from the same well spring of injustice oppression and the daily threat of annihilation.

William’s and Uzeyman’s Nepture Frost, shot in Rwanda feels like an opportunist projection of New York/ US black culture onto the screen of Africa. Perhaps taking cue from Bowie’s Ziggy, William’s has fostered a script, inspired by the mining of coltan, revolving about a cyber sci-fi conceit, that allows the characters to travel through space and time. It comes across as one thing after another, a script that serves no other purpose other than to get from one music video set up to another. The music is fine; the interlinking dialogue by contrast is clunky. What might work in the context of rap, spat out in conviction, when spoken as ‘lines’ comes across as po faced gnomic utterances so tricked out with meaning as to be meaningless: metaphysical gobbledegook. As image is piled on image – masks – extreme make up – magical realist stuff – shimmering graphics – the feeling is of an exploitation of Africana exploiting the exotica of Africa to express an Afro-American not an African rap sheet.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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 (Fr; 1965) Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina

viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 7^th 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 (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