Star & Shadow

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 (Euro co-prod; 2022) Vicky Krieps; FlorianTeichmeister

viewed Tyneside Cinema 29^th 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

White Noise                Noah Baumbach (2022; USA) Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig

viewed 20th Dec 2022 Tyneside Cinema; ticket: £12.25

and

His Girl Friday                       Howard Hawks (USA: 1940) Cary Grant Rosalind Russell

 

viewed 22^nd Dec 2022 at Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; ticket: £7.00

then and now

I came out of Noah Baumbach’s ‘White Noise’ bored disaffected and understanding something about the death of Cinema.

I came out of Hawks ‘His Girl Friday’ in high spirits happy understanding that I’d been party to classic Cinema in full flow.

Hawks’ movie forms itself about the proposition of a strategic manipulation.   As the title suggests, the premise of the script is Walter’s intention to shape Hildy’s behaviour in accordance with his own preference: that she remain a newspaper reporter working for him. Hildy in the embrace of the finely crafted script and scenario, has to remain blithely unaware of how her behaviour is being influenced. ‘His Girl Friday’ is an intense situational comedy in which Cary Grant’s amused detachment pervades the action, imbuing it with a patriarchal omniscience that is almost God-like (in this era newspaper editors like Walter were major deity to their employees), but which is never malignant. Grant’s intervention in human affairs is justified by persuading Hildy to stick to her true nature of being an all American go-getter, a successful player in a competitive occupation rather than doubling down after an emotional disappointment (with Walter! Though this doesn’t play out hard in the script – Walter’s motivation, as remote as he is, appears instrumental – not to lose his best reporter) and settling for marriage and 2.4 kids.

Hawks’ movie never deviates from its basic premise that all the events in the script are mediated through the continuous interplay between Walter’s devious ‘disguised’ intentions and Hildy’s responses as her reporter’s instincts overwhelm her wifely inclinations.

And thereby hangs the manic nature of ‘My Girl Friday’s’ comedy. Plot and sub-plots dovetail in the newsroom: the immanent execution of a mentally ill man, local pork barrel politics, the escape of the condemned man and Hildy’s proposed marriage to Bruce. All feed into the script’s cooking pot creating an energised riot of verbal slapstick to rival the Marx Brothers. Rosalind Russel’s Hildy with her fast talking ripostes and repartee performs like a Doppelganger for Groucho himself.

Directing ‘His Girl Friday’ Hawkes adheres (well more or less) to the classical Greek theatrical unities: action – place – time. The action is continuous and for the most part takes place in the news room overlooking the prison where the condemned man will be hanged in the morning; the events take place over one night. ‘His Girl Friday’ is a theatrical construct as might be expected from its provenance as a Broadway play but Hawks superb direction marks it off as a movie well distanced from the conventions of the stage. (unlike many British films of this era which are in main archly theatrical)

To move away from ‘Girl Friday’s’ theatrical mould Hawks decided to work up one particular element of dramatic presentation: pacing. ‘His Girl Friday’ is paced in a manner that is filmic and outside of the norm theatrical production. The overall pacing of the action is fast, up-beat, but when the plot thickens the pace quickens accelerating the action exponentially and energising a supercharged high rev rate of ‘line’ delivery that calls to mind the climax of Duck Soup (a film which surely Hawks must have looked at). Multiple peaks of accelerated dialogue between the main parties create a chaotic cacophony that lifts the film onto the plateau of the absurd, only understandable by being anchored into the governing thematic of manipulation. These high intensity dialogue scenes were pulled off in one take without sound or picture splicing, relying on the disciplined rehearsed practice of the players and director.

Hawks’ movie represents a triumph of scripted logic. From the beginning it is clear where the movie’s going. It’s a bus with its destination written large on the front roller board. Hawks’ strength lies in his understanding of the situation with its manipulation thematic which he follows through with unwavering acuity. Today a director would perhaps feel ideologically constrained to script the last word for Hildy, her part re-written so that Walter gets his come-uppance. I think that this misses a point. As suggested although Walter is represented as a man, Walter’s part as directed by Hawks and played by Grant, is actually construed as an affable deity of the ingratiating sort beloved by Hollywood. Walter in a sense represents the hand of fate. Interesting to note that in the original script of “His Girl Friday’ Hildy’s part was in fact a male lead. Hawks decided that switching the gendering of the part would lend an extra tensional dynamic to the play out.

‘His Girl Friday’ is adapted from Ben Hecht’s Broadway play ‘The Front Page’; ‘White Noise’ is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Don DeLillo.

 

Noah Baumbach’s movie is the antithesis of the classical unities. It is a vast sprawling movie that moves different types of action though discrete zones of time and space. It’s a post modernist conceit. A product of contemporary artistic sensibility and also being in some ways an analogous rendering of contemporary life experience.  The theme that one can extract from the shifting focus of the disparate story lines are the emotions of fear and insecurity expressed through the travails of two main protagonists: Babette and Jack.

In contrast to ‘His Girl Friday’ Noah Baumbach’s script has little cohesion: it comprises one thing after another. The different strands of action: the Hitler expert strip, the fear of death motif, the down home family strand, the environmental destruction sequence, the drug that assuages fear of dying strip, are connected through the characterisation but they don’t intertwine; they are simply butted together like a series of disparate text messages received on a mobile phone.

Baumbach’s script lacks one of the defining elements of drama: tension. The script lacks tension as each of the separate story strands simply peters out as anticlimax. Perhaps this lack of tension reflects Baumbach’s failure to transpose DeLillo’s novel into film. The novel is written exclusively in the first person; it is Jack’s take on his life; the tensions are generated by the expression of Jack’s true feelings as opposed to what happens to him and the way other people see things.   All that is left in Baumbach’s scenario are anticlimaxes. As a result Baumbach’s script very quickly starts to run on empty, becoming listless and dull.

Films for the times. ‘Girl Friday’ is a film structured very much of its time. It reflects an era defined by an hierarchic ethos and where the typical features of popular entertainment forms were an expressive singularity in design which was delivered by both social and psychological mechanistic devices. A characteristic theme whether output as novel or film, was often supplied by the murder/gumshoe genre. These films were tightly scripted products that comprised the most part the development of particular forces set in motion following a provocation – such as a murder. Whilst the background of these types of entertainment might burn in some level of social observation (as in Chandler’s novels) this was not central to the thrust of the work which was to sustain its invoked tensions to the last frame or word. They were like fairy tales to provide a completion for the audience, in a way that ‘life’ itself never has.

‘White Noise’ too reflects its temporal provenance. A post-modernist arts ethos situate within a cultural matrix now defined and substantiated by the smart phone. Attention and social relations remarked by diffusion, distraction, interruption multiplicities.  A typical product of the era is the TV series comprising multi-episodic dramas based about procedural/ espionage/fantasy/historical themes. A defining feature of these products is that although they usually have a mechanistic play out, the plot line is used as coat hanger for attaching multiple sub plots revolving about personal issues family issues historical political social issues, enabling the episodes to segue into keystone of the narrative.

The problem with film is that it does not have a multi-episodic structure: it has _+ two hours. Noah Baumbach takes the tropes of post-modernism – incompleteness – discontinuities – diffusion – but uses them ( as most Hollywood directors do) simply as a formula to contrive a production, without giving attention to the psycho-social underpinnings of the form. The result is a failed movie trapped within its formulaic externalities unable to express an internalisation of its subject.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

Night of the Hunter   Charles Laughton (USA; 1955;) Robert Mitchum; Shelley Winters; Lillian Gish

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 26 Nov 2022; ticket £7

scaled up

This is the second time I have seen ‘Night of the Hunter. My first viewing was at home on dvd. My impressions of the film were that it was rather dull, with a simplistic laboured story line. My impressions were negative: maybe it was something I’d eaten earlier in the day or maybe it reflected how I had seen the film. Because when I saw it again on a big screen I found that Laughton’s film was imbued with a magical quality that held me fast from first to last frame. It is a truly disciplined ensemble piece of film making. The acting – Mitchum and Gish in particular, the luminous black and white cinematography, the set designs and the vision of Laughton – all come togather to make a film that is greater than the sum of its parts.    

Under Laughton’s direction ‘Night of the Hunter’ is a fairy-tale transposed into filmic form. It’s a Hansel and Gretal type story, with a wicked Uncle instead of a witch, ending with the triumph of a good fairy who possesses the psychic resources to defeat evil. The setting is West Virginia and much of the action takes place alongside of or on the Ohio River. The cinematography of Stanley Cortez renders the river as a mythic waterway. When on the boat fleeing Harry Powell, the children don’t row paddle or punt, they drift down stream trusting to the flow of the current as if in the thrall of some Arthurian legend that will deliver them into the embrace of safety and love.

The acting style that Laughten developed with his cast to project the story onto the screen is at one with the film’s fairy-tale patina. Mitchum in particular, central to the story as the force of evil, delivers his role to perfection. He carries off the rogue preacher gig with a line delivery mode that is slightly heightened whilst at the same time engenders an feeling of distance, not inhabiting the role but rather self consciously expressing its formulaic utterances, understanding that as this is fairy-tale land, the formulaic is apposite but delivery is critical. Mitchum’s face and body language all emphasise his ‘evil preacher’ persona’ moving from detachment to engagement with a series of effortless gestural devices. Lillian Gish and the rest of the cast all make the same accomodations to the acting ethos of ‘Night of the Hunter’ enabling them to play out their fairy-tale roles. But it is Mitchum’s part as the resident ‘baddie’ that is the critical performance hinge upon which the movie hangs.

My enjoyment of Laughton’s movie, seeing it for the second time on a big screen, indicates the importance of scale it viewing a movie. Most of the films made prior to 1990 ‘s were made to be seen on the big screen. That was where the return to investment was made and directors and producers spent considerable time looking at the material in the viewing theatre before finalising the cut on the large screen. Films were made to be seen under conditions where the image filled out the audience’s field of vision. This consideration of scale effected the types of shots used – the balance between close-ups and other types of shots – and also shot duration, in particular but not only in relation to wide shots.

On a big screen wide shots can be held for considerable length of time. The eye has so much to look at and to process as it scans the frame, probes into recesses of the image evaluating what is happening. On small screens, the wide shot cannot sustain itself; there is not sufficient information in the image to hold the eye’s interest: on small screens every shot has the same value that equates to the information that can be extracted from it. The eye having taken in the limited information, exhausted interest demands to move on to another image. When films are edited for the small screen the constant demand is for the image to keep moving. Move move move move streadycam steadycam steadycam, zoom zoom zoom. We demand constant agitation, shoot on the run or the eye dries up in boredom. This is the way adverts, TV serials and films are now shot. An attention span that where material is watched on a phone exhausts a shot in 3 seconds. Cut cut cut cut cut…Actually although wide shots are particularly difficult to appreciate and hold attention on small screens, big close ups have a similar problems. Seeing big close-ups on a cinema screen that are held for long duration such as used by Bergman in ‘Persona‘, is a wonder of affect. Writ large the eye is invited into the huge image searching for signs, invited by the huge faciality to read into the shot. Reduced in size these large very big close-ups are just another 3 second image, a staging post to the next shot and the next and the next, as all we have left in film is one shot after another and the triumph of the banality of narrative.

Cinema in slow-mo celebrating its own death.

‘Night of the Hunter’ is a marvel of old Cinema. A film that only really works when writ big upon the screen. The film itself was a commercial failure, a flop. Hollywood had no idea how to market a film that existed well outside the bounds of any commercial genre, a movie that didn’t fit any conventional form. Laughton discouraged never attempted to direct again, and Cinema lost an unusual talent, a man with a distinct perception of how to make his films.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  

No Bears         Jafar Panahi (Iran; 2022) Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Jafar Panahi

viewed Tyneside Cinema 22 Nov 2022; ticket £10.25

No bears….when no means yes…?

The structure of Panahi’s ‘No Bears’ is key to understanding not only his perception of the state in which Iran finds itself today but also defines the director’s own parlous situation.

Pahani has structured ‘No Bears’ so that he the director is the pivot about which two different fictive scenarios play out their own laminations of realty. Within the folds of these laminations, Panahi finds himself increasingly implicated in and then overtaken by the development of events. It is a movie about positions: the actors in relation to the play out of the two contrasting scenarios which are themselves in a constant state of flux; and the consequences of this for his own position as ‘director’. Panahi’s creative use of the position of the director as both an overt active and passive covert manipulator is subjected to an intensification of relational pressures, as his attempts to control both sides of his camera break down, exposing him to the psychic emotional and fateful consequences of social interpolation.

Panahi’s use of this particular filmic structure is testimony to film’s ability to render a complex idea as a simple cinematic expression. For whilst it’s hard verbally to explain the finesse of ‘No Bears’ structure, when viewed by an audience as an inherent part of the film’s design, the structure is self explanatory and easy to follow. And the structure in itself is a key element in the audience’s ‘enjoyment’ (sic) of the film as they witness and understand something both of the collapse of the relations underlying Panahi’s filming and Panahi’s retreat in the face of forces that he cannot resist. Darkness falls across the land.

Panahi’s position as the remote director of his film, overseeing a shoot in a small Turkish border town from an Iranian border village, enables him to contrast the opposing elements making up Iranian society: the mostly urban middle classes and the poorer rural population. The filming of ‘No Bears’ alternates between these two social groups observing that they have little in common in the way they experience the world and that very different types of constraints hold them in place.

The urban couple Panahi is filming have fled Iran illegally and are trying to get to Europe, for which journey they need to ‘acquire’ passports. Panahi’s scenario in this section comprises multiple interfused laminations so that it is not clear whether the interactions between all the parties (including Panahi) are fiction, filmed reality or comprise some intermediate point between the two. It doesn’t matter because what Panahi shows is ‘pain’. The pain felt by these people of having to live under the crushing weight of a fundamentalist state. A system that governs and judges them by its own invariant rigid religious ideology and that imposes upon them an alienated lifestyle. The only solution is escape. Most escape into the intimate protective carapace of family or friends. Some decide on literal escape, either legally or illegally: they want to get out. But it’s a decision that brings its own particular angst, intense feelings of loss and betrayal, which for many is insufferable. Whether they stay or go, there is no escape from their situation. It doesn’t matter whether Zara’s suicide is scripted replicated or actual, her psychic reality is that her choosing death puts an end to the intolerable. That’s the reality.

In the small rural village, as Panahi is informed, life proceeds by way of tradition and superstition. There may be intensities but there is little angst. In the passage of time change is apparently slow but such changes as come about are perhaps less perceptible for being elided into the notion of tradition. Panahi insinuates himself into the border village and its social relations. At first there is no problem. He directs his film ‘remotely’ using his computer and observes the interactive life of the community: and they observe him. They see and understand that he is not just an outsider but a ‘towny’ – a man with a camera quite other to themselves but an otherness that they accept. Panahi is taken for his own worth as he presents himself to and interacts with the inhabitants.

But Panahi discovers as he lives in the village, as with his middle class subjects, that he cannot exist outside of the network of extant relations. He is folded into events and situations. The director becomes the ‘directed’ as different parties ‘direct’ upon him their own intentions and purposes, and some want to implicate Panahi as a saboteur of their traditions. The growing suspicion of and antagonism towards him is influenced by the presence of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard in the village. This is not traditional. The presence of a state police in the community is something that is non traditional, bringing a new sort of fear to this community. Whereas previously (one way or the other) they would have sorted out Panahi’s presence using their own resources, now the governing Mullah’s and elders have to obey the strictures of the State. They confront Panahi with the Revolutionary Guard’s decision that he must leave, get out immediately. On the surface the village may look and claim to be a repository of tradition: but the notion of tradition has at this point been subverted. Tradition has been truncated to mean the simple mechanical compliance with prior practice. But other traditions the ones governing the manner in which people should relate to one another, the mediation of relations between people – respect and tolerance – have been forcibly eliminated, dropped. Bad tradition.

The deep ideological penetration of the State into the village’s affairs and governance has radically undermined the basis of its life. The State has cynically exploited ‘the idea of tradition’ in order to undermine and discredit ‘tolerance’ and replace it with an enforcement system of strict observance to law and custom. A familiar political stratagem that is now evident almost world wide. And it is this enforcement system that is probably responsible for the killing of the two ill starred lovers as they try to flee the village.

Panahi’s position in ‘No Bears’ is analogous to the actual situation in his life. In ‘No Bears’ Panahi’s position as director is progressively undermined as events not only move outside his control but actively work to crush him. This is film as participation in a shared life of pain: not film as an exercise in narcissistic power. This is cinema as an expression of mutual oppression. But throughout the film with all its difficulties and injustices Panahi’s humanity, imbued with patience toleration love and understanding, shines through as the way he makes films as the way to live.

Premonition of a time to come. It’s difficult to separate out Panahi’s ‘No Bears’

from the situation that has defined his life in Iran for the last 13 years. His arrest in 2010 charged with propaganda against the Islamic State, his 6 year prison sentence and concomitant 20 year ban on making films. Throughout this period he has been steadfast in his decision to stay in Iran and on his own terms to confront the Iranian State with the persistence of his refusal to leave and his continued determination to make films that express other Iranian values of tolerance and understanding. He has chosen to live dangerously with the bears.

‘No Bears’ reads like his premonition that he has used up all of his ‘lives’. The ‘bears’ are about to come for him, strike him down and destroy him. Indeed shortly after ‘No Bears’ was completed Panahi was again arrested and gaoled. We don’t know that he will ever come out alive.

‘No Bears’ is a consummate piece of film making, endorsing Panahi’s own observation in ‘Taxi Tehran’ that all films begin with a perception. Panahi sees that he is stranded in a culture where death closes in on all sides, in all states of mind the fictive and the actual. The repression set in motion by the Iranian state has reached the point where torture and death have become the chosen means of ensuring the survival of the state. The only way in which the bears can survive is by feeding on the bodies of its citizens. The revolution is eating its children.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE,1080 BRUXELLE Chantel Ackerman         (1975; Fr)  Delphine Seyrig 

Dec 2022 voted best film by Sight and Sound poll

Hommage to observation

This film drills.  ‘Drills’ in both senses of the word. I watch the housewife-sergeant Jeanne Dielman ‘drill’ herself as the consummate performer of the same perfected acts and motions in an series of endless repetitions.  Drills in the other sense of the word because most of her actions takes place in real time and are captured by one prime fixed 50mm lens that takes up only two angles – at 90 or 180 degrees – in respect of its subject. The physical effect of this in itself ‘drills’ what is happening into consciousness as you watch.  The audience in this respect are more than just the usual privileged observer; Ackerman’s creative decision to restrict filming to two angles (representing the natural point of view of an observer who is present) give the viewer the feel of being ‘with’ the action.

The title of the film itself suggests a military ethos: the soldier when asked who he is gives his name rank and number.  That’s all the information you need to know about him.  Jeanne Dielman is given her name and address as her identity.  That’s all that you need to know. She is simply defined by these externalized parameters of her civic personage.   

It is Winter and the mornings are dark. In kitchen hall bedroom living room bathroom the housewife carries out her chores (the drill of the the dead soul).  Chantel Ackerman’s film, title role played by Delphine Seyrig, manifests as a rhythmic tattoo of light and sound, in which the housewife machine paces out patrols and controls with obsessive military precision the space she occupies in her world.

Because the film as a consciousness drill that is similar to the parade ground, the sound track is as important as images.  The sound effects operate as an independent syncopated accompaniment to the image.  My impressions of the film are as much acoustic as visual.   When I recall this film I hear: the pacing feet between the rooms – bathroom bedroom sitting room kitchen hall – each space distinguished by a different beat as each of Jeanne’s migratory passages through her apartment has its own sound key determined by the need to open and close doors, switch on switch off the light.  Jeanne’s progress is a percussive orchestration of  foot beats, light switch clicks, sprung catches, door closures and other intermittent domestic adjustments.  Each room has its own characteristic sound: bathroom bedroom kitchen etc. are respectively associated with splashings, smoothings, rubbings and scrapings.  Each room has its own slightly demented offbeat visual style with movement through the rooms given edge by the brutal sudden interplay of light and dark as Jeanne obsessively and meticulously switches the lights on and off as she travels through the bowels of her apartment.

The soundtrack has obviously been carefully designed to heighten the ideas of the mechanical,  the machine and the dissonnant .  In contrast the dialogue, such as there is, is indistinct and fuzzy.  In fact there are no human sounds (until that is Jeanne’s break down when we hear her gasp as she services a client with her body).  In Jeanne’s meal time scenes with her son, the sound of the spoons on the plates rings out, and the other table sounds, picking up and replacing things, are distinct.  But the sound of eating, which locates eating as human, such as sucking of soup, is absent.  

Jeanne Dielman is not located in the land of the living.  It is located in the underworld. 

Everything in the film has a feeling of being dead.  The film is a report from the land of the dead.  Each space in the house has a mythological resonance culled from Hades. In this body there is not one sign of life.  Delphine Seyrig plays ‘the housewife machine to perfection. As housewife she smooths folds cooks cleans washes fucks.  A machine in which  the thought processes that created each of these ritual tasks and their solutions has long ceased. All that is left is for a zombie psyche to carry out these chores as an outer simulation of something that once had meaning. 

Although often represented as a feminist film my thinking is that Ackerman’s representations in Jeanne Delmann have wide significance not limited to a particular group.  Ackerman wants to show what happens when people become deadened by ideology and repetitions ingrained in the life process itself.   In these conditions people become dead, they die to life and to love. Just like the soldier on the parade ground they are stripped of the ability to think and feel.  They become deadened – and ultimately ready to kill or be killed.  Ackerman was aware that something of this nature happened in Nazi Germany with its cult of the Mutter –  Kinder Kuche Kirche and the Soldier – Ein Fuhrer.

In  the course of its two and half hours the film shows what happens when dead machines break down. They become dysfunctional and stop working.  We are now in the era of the computer and the smart phone, where mechanicality has now insinuated itself into the very processes of thinking and feeling.  Today ( and for a long time before) in our cars and with our destructive consumption, our world has become dysfunctional and attuned only to self destruction as like the Dielman Zombie, we sleepwalk towards environmental disaster.    

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

Touch of Evil     Orson Wells (USA;1958) Charlton Heston, Orson Wells, Janet Leigh

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 20 Nov 2022; ticket: £7

voodoo cops

Wells set ‘Touch of Evil’ on the border between USA and Mexico. For him it was a political statement. In retrospect the setting comes across as less political rather more a psychic divide: a voodoo border where sanity and madness, derangement and clarity, dark priests and spirits merge inseparably…. an hallucinogenic zone triggered by the car bomb which detonates at the end of the opening shot pitching all the players into a maelstrom of chaos.

The story line, the prized narrative flow that bedraggles and condemns to insipid mediocrity so many contemporary films is ditched in favour of attributes that film language expresses superlatively well; presence, atmospherics and settings (Film Noir directors such Dmitryk Hawkes Huston all in own way prioritised mood over plot). In these respects Wells is masterful: it’s the effect that matters and on leaving the cinema the audience is left with an abiding sense of experiencing being ‘touched’ by evil.

The film’s dominating presence is Wells as detective Quinian. His vast bulked out body fills the screen with menace and malice, a presence that seems to suck the light out of the picture casting us all into darkness. A corrupt and corrupting influence in the border area, he stalks the streets like an out of control venomous soul called up out of some primal cosmic soup by the towns resident priestess, Tana. Wells’ vision of Quinian is expansive: his engrained corruption and his unremitting service to the forces of evil are depicted as the characteristic traits underpinning the agencies of law enforcement in the USA, in particular the FBI. It is possible that Wells’ development of Quinian’s character was primarily based on J Edgar Hoover. Hoover was first director of the FBI, whose embrace of voodoo law enforcement shifting it away from criminals to his political opponents, employed cynical use of all the dirty arts to frame and neutralise targeted individuals. Like Quinian, Hoover was a self appointed amoral upholder of a personalised agenda, whose objective was primarily to extend and protect his own power over life and death. Wells surrounds Quinian with a posse of men in suits – again similar to the FBI look – all the agents in ill fitting suits, shirt tie and black shoes. A respectable gang of ‘yes’ men and time serving courtiers lending Quinian a sort of specious plausibility and legitimacy.

In Citizen Kane Wells established his reputation as a director who could use the cinematic camera language of film to to define the register of his scenario. Likewise in ‘Touch of Evil’ it is the movement vision and lighting design adopted by the camera that comprises the quick of ‘Touch of Evil’. The long crane tracking shots with deep focus unify the disparate elements in the first shot, and continue throughout the film to sustain the tension between the characters and their location. The lighting through use the obtuse angles and vignetting about Quinian, renders the settings as simulacrums of hellish antechambers.

The interiors though a little sparse, perhaps reflecting a pared down budget, work because they are replete with the presence of men or of victim Janet Leigh. But the exteriors, the town streets and above all the fantastical ending shot against the industrial background of Venice (California) signs off the film against a claustrophobic nightmarish setting. In best film tradition the sign off setting was not part of the original scenario, but taken up by Wells late in production when he came across it. It has some of the qualities of Tarkovsky’s Stalker setting.

adrin neatour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

The Banshees of Inisherin   Martin McDonagh (UK; 2022) Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson

viewed Tyneside Cinema 1^st Nov 2022; ticket £5

finger licking

Martin McDonagh’s Banshees of Inisherin is a psychodrama in which the wills of two men are pitched against each other.   It’s a common enough film thematic and well represented in English movies such as the Losey’s ‘The Servant’ and Jenkin’s ‘Bait’. Another recent example is John McDonagh’s ‘The Forgiven’ which in contrast to Losey and Jenkins’ films is a weak and unconvincing play out of its protagonists’ opposition.

The scripts of ‘The Servant’ and ‘Bait’ both engendered high levels of intensity.

Inherent in the relations established by these films were the countervailing influences of class and family and their respective scenarios were developed so as to probe and exploit the inherent and endemic tensions in the situations. ‘The Forgiven’ whilst establishing an initially strong dynamic between perpetrator and victim delivered a flat flaccid experience as its script shied away from exposing the deep personal and socio-cultural chasm that divided the protagonists, relying on a parallel editing structure to deliver fake suspense rather than the tension of physical proximity.

Set on an Irish island location of the kind beloved by Hollywood, Martin McDonagh’s ‘Banshees’ pits Paidraic against Colm in a psychodramic test of ‘will’.

The proposition is as follows: from being ‘close friends’ Colm has suddenly and pre-emptively shut Paidraic completely out of his life; a decision Paidraic cannot accept. The immediate problem is that we the audience are dropped into McDonagh’s script at the point of crisis, without insight or perspective on how things had been previously between the two men; our only source of information about the background to the event – life on a small Irish island – is drawn not from experience but in the main from the film industry. Contrast this with ‘The Servant’ or ‘Bait’; we also enter into the flow of these films at a certain point in the story. But firstly the respective back stories of ‘class history’ and ‘family history’ are introduced so that the viewer has a strong and specific understanding of these types of relations. In addition audiences have personal background experience of both ‘class’ and ‘family feuds’ so that they can use their own experiences in reading the development of these films.

In ‘Banshees’ we are simply presented with the fact that Colm has made a particular decision. Statement of this fact is continually re-enforced by the script in which every character repeats the same fact: Colm and Paidraic used to be ‘great inseparable friends’. A pall of deadness from the beginning seeps over scenario as the script closes off personal history by repetitive dialogue about a backstory that has to stand in for the scenes we never see. We never see the originary scenes presumably because McDonagh was unable to figure how to carry off such back clip dialogue. Colm’s decision is particular to Paidraic. Although he says he doesn’t want any more distraction in his life, Colm doesn’t retreat into a cocoon of silence. At the pub he’s happy to engage the local policeman in the art of conversation. Which seems strange as the policeman doesn’t seem any more interesting than Paidraic.

In short the opposition of the two men takes place in a psychic vacuum.

Because the script lacks a natural engine of opposition to drive the conflict, the scenario has to resort to invented spectacle as a device to fuel the engine of the narrative.  The device is the threat by Colm to self mutilate by cutting off a finger on his left hand each time, if and when Paidraic tries to speak to him. The script itself runs out of patience with this device and shortcircuits the process of de-digitalisation by having Colm, after cutting off one of his fingers at Paidraic’s first infraction, suddenly cutting off his four remaining ones, as response to Paidraic’s second misdemeanour. As if Colm too had got bored with the prospect of a long drawn out scripted process of finger mutilation.  McDonagh’s writing was unable to develop a working scenario that could economically crank up tension in his film, finger by finger. So like one of those washing powder ads, his script skipped the in-between bits. All he wanted was to get to the final spectacle of the fully bloodied cropped hand.

‘Banshees’ fails to develop the characters in a decisive manner that engages the audience. With the the men stepping into the screen out of a narrarive void it needs some deft scripting to fill out the omitted relational significations. Both Colm and Paidraic are dull characters and dull characters make for dull films. In both ‘The Servant’ and ‘Bait’, the characters develop out of a back story, expanding as individual types to fill out the screen with their personas. To fill out Colm, McDonagh relies on the physical presence and close up affection images of Gleeson, which asks the audience to read into his state of mind. Paidraic’s sudden change in character feels overdetermined, ie those scenes representing his development scripted into the end of the film meet the need of the film for spectacle; rather than being events that develop out of the internal logic of the scenario. Paidraic burns down Colm’s house, claiming to be a changed man; he is not ‘nice’ any more. But despite his actions and his words, he doesn’t feel any different; he seems to be going through a series of false claims and motions to satisfy the commercial priority of delivering the product to the market.

Shot with crowd pleasing beautiful landscapes, in a clichéd Irish vernacular setting, this is a film that deals in tokens. Token characters, token Irishness and token Banshees. The Banshee flaunted in the title is represented in the film by the occasional appearance of an old looking woman whose face is slapped over with white foundation (very original). She utters stuff about immanent deaths. She has little centrality or indeed only makes an unconvincing sparse contribution to the film. But the service rendered is to the title, because it is a good title for a movie. The ‘Money’ liked that.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Close-Up        Abbas Kiarostami (1990; Iran) with Hossain Sabzian; Hossain Farazmand, Mohsen Makhmalbaf; the family Ahankhah; Abbas Kiarostami

viewed home dvd 21^st Oct 2022;

metaphysics of existence: everyone should play themselves including the director.

Post viewing of Kiarostami’s ‘Close-Up’ I was left with a feeling of mental exhaustion: so many countervailing forces packed into a film, wrapped up as a cosmic joke and played out as a humanist statement.

There is a moment early in the film when the cabbie waiting for reporter Farazmand, gently sets in motion a discarded empty aerosol can. As the can rolls downhill it rattles loudly creating jagged percussive effect until lodging against the side of the kerb, it comes to a halt.

‘Close –Up’ is in part an observation on media culture. Kairostami’s ‘can’ shot suggests itself as an allegory on the general curve governing the shape of media attention: events are blown up out of proportion, make a racket for a short period of time then collapse back into forgetful silence, as if they had never existed.   But Kiarostami in ‘Close-Up’ is not going to play the game according to the media rule book. He has other purposes.

‘Close-Up’ is a documentary, re-enacted in part as a drama in which everyone gets to play themselves, including of course the director, Kiarostami.

The narrative centres about Hossain Sabzian’s impersonation of Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Pretending to be the filmmaker he fraudulently gains entry to the middle class home of the Ahankhah family, claiming that he is going to film their house and the younger son in his next movie. Alerted by the suspicions of the pater familias, the journalist Farazmand, in search of a scoop, goes to the house with two policeman, who arrest Sabzian. The journalist gets his story which rolls off the press as a news headline, waiting to disappear in the next day’s events. The object of the newspaper industry is to squeeze maximum salacious coverage for the shortest amount of time. Events are compressed and the individuals simply pawns in the media play out.

The film’s title is ‘Close-Up’ which is a precise description of the manner in which Kiarostami (K) approaches his subject Hossain Sabzian. ‘Close-Up’ describes not just a type of shot of the subject (though there are plenty of these) but effectively the relationship K establishes with his subject. K’s role as film maker is a necessary but not sufficient description of how he relates to Sabzian. K is not just film maker, an exploiter of certain situations, but also questioner, affirmer, enabler. K’s role is never to exploit judge or manipulate Sabzian; rather to understand why he behaved as he did, to honour him for his responses, to respect him in the process of making the film. K doesn’t throw Sabzian aside at the end of the trial, but enables him to enter further into the ‘actual’ of film direction, by meeting and doubling up with Mohsen Makhmalbaf the film director whom Sabzian had impersonated. ‘Close-Up’ is about the ‘why of filming’, the underlying intentions of picking up a camera, rather than about ‘form’ ‘structure’ or ‘content’. ‘Close-Up’ is K’s take on Cinema Verité, the fundamental truth of what cinema ‘is’.

At the core of ‘Close-Up’ is K’s belief that film making is a way of mediating with the world. It doesn’t matter whether the pertinent relations are subjects of documentary or actors in dramas. There are always concerns and purposes to be explained, ideas to be negotiated. The mediation is founded on dialogue honesty and equal exchange between all involved on both sides of camera. K’s approach is humanistic grounded in an existential philosophy which makes his filming stand out in stark contrast to the controlling ethos of exploitation that characterises most of the media industry.

Overlaying the humanistic ethos of ‘Close-Up’ is K’s existential probing of the effects of media media on identity. The issue of ‘being’ probably attracted K to the idea of making a film about and with Sabzian. The film seems to be shot partially as actual real time filming and partially in re-construction, but the core content is Sabzian’s obsession of wanting to be a film director. Sartre observes generic Parisian waiters going about their work. He says they play out their roles in an exaggerated manner as a quasi- theatrical way of making a claim on being. They become waiters by absorbing the outer modes of being waiter.

With the huge expansion of media, societal attention became focused not only on the traditional loci of power, politics, high status, wealth, business, but on the creative industries feeding off the news. Film stars, film directors, singers, musicians, designers, architects, models etc. Individuals in these creative industries were accorded high status. Their lives seemingly opened up by publicists and their photographs widely published, the images of this new elite penetrated deeply into the collective public consciousness. Deracinated urban working people were particularly prone to merging their identities with these projected images from the media. The pop stars, the film stars could all be assimilated into the ‘being’ of those without history without ‘substance’ of social belonging.

Sabzian is an unemployed man, normally working in the printing trade. Divorced from his wife who regards him as a failure, he lives at home with his mother and one of his children. As he describes it his life is closed down. He has no past and no prospects. But his being is suffused with the idea of being a film director. From his knowledge of film he has come to understand the role of the director in production. He sees the film director as possessing all the attributes and capacities that are missing from his own life. The director has high status, the director commands both his crew and his cast, they do what he says, the director gets respect from people who listen to what he has to say. Sabzian has built up within his being an alternative persona, the phantom director. Which identity looks thinks and acts like a film maker. But his being director is always held back by the mundane claims made on him by the life of Sabzian. Like a psychic Houdini he yearns to burst free from the chains that bind him to a meaningless life. When a chance encounter presents him with opportunity, he takes it like a seasoned pro, moving in on the Ahankhah family as director in residence. (They of course in a different way and to a lesser extent also live under the spell of world of film).

And all the time in his filmic re-telling of the impersonation event, K questions and coaxes Sabzian into responding from his heart. Without judgement K accepts him as a film director, not as a charlatan or a fraud, but as an honourable man.

At the end of ‘Close-Up’ we come out of the cinema understanding something of the extraordinary nature of Kiarostami and the way in which he takes up the world in order to film.   The film elaborates and opens up multiple realities all folded into Kiarostami’s mediation, but through the course of the complex interweaving of these strands there emerges an emotional coherence relating to the fragility of human endeavour.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.ukv

Where is the Friend’s House?   Abbas Kiarostami ( 1987; Iran) Babak Ahmadpour

viewed 16 Oct 2022 Star and Shadow Cinema; ticket £7

Where is the friend’s house?.…an existential question?

The first shot in Kiarostami’s ‘Where is the Friend’s House?’ is a long duration shot of a section of a nondescript door over which the opening credits are burnt in. The door’s paint is a worn cream sort of colour and you can see screwed onto one side of its frame a little retaining hook. It looks like a cleaning cupboard door; behind it the soundtrack comprises a high pitched racket. When the door finally opens, it reveals the interior of a classroom full of young boys revelling in high spirits. It is the teacher who has just entered, his presence bringing the immediate control of silence.

This opening shot introduces Kiarostami’s thematic: childhood – as a stage in life – defined by an undifferentiated anonymity with adult presence that is only a door away.

Kiarostami is filming in a remote rural area of Northern Iran. His film location is a mud built village called Koker where he observes a series of child/adult social relations that are particular to their situation but whose governing dynamics are universal their in their general relevance.

The universal dimension is the extent to which children are in essence a function of the phenomenological constructs of the adult world. This is to say that relations with children are viewed by the controlling adult world as a series of prescriptive ‘oughts’. Children ‘ought’ to do as they are told, children ‘ought’ to do their homework children ‘ought to’ help’ look after siblings, children ‘ought’ to pay attention; or alternatively children ‘ought to be free to do what they want, children’s opinions ought to have the same weight as adults;. Of course the obverse applies to the adults in their relations with children. Adults have their ‘oughts’ as well as ‘ought not to’s’: adults ‘ought’ to bring their children up to be obedient, adults ‘ought to’ take responsibility for their children’s development, adults ought to listen to children.

In this sense children have an existential problem: they only exist as extended projections of the adult mind. They don’t exist in their own right; and Kiarostami’s script maps out, in a prescriptive environment the line of a particular child’s development.

In the world of Koker Kiarostami’s scenario observes the relations between adults and children. In Koker as perhaps in many other cultures, in a sense the children are almost invisible to the adult eye, do not exist except in relation to adult need. The scripting begins with the school teacher’s non negotiable demand that each boy possess a notebook. The notebook has a symbolic importance. It is defined by the teacher as a sign of the pupil’s commitment to the both the state’s and the school’s values; Ahmed’s mother makes a series of demands on Ahmed: that he fetch carry help do his homework; Ahmad’s grandfather demands that Ahmed obey the first time; the old carpenter demands that Ahmad listen. But even as Ahmad child revolves about the nucleus of his actual inexistence to adults, something at the core of his being is at work. An act of witnessing a classroom incident and a moment of carelessness on his part, creates a situation for the inception of an operational consciousness. His spirit shifts enabling him to escape from the gravitational pull of his inexistent orbit around the adult body.

Ahmad learns to say: “No!” I do what I think I should do because I know that I have to help my friend – whatever.”

Ahmad decides to go and look for his friend, to find where he lives so that he can give the friend back his notebook which Ahmad has accidently picked up. Failing in this quest, he takes remedial action. In the said notebook Ahmad forges the friend’s homework for him, thereby achieving his moral purpose: to keep his friend out of trouble by defying the prescripts and percepts of the adults. The point is that his behaviour is not reactive, it is a conscious move on his part to do what he does. It is an existential move into being.

Ahmad reaches a point in his life where he is asked to make a decision on his own that will entail a step away from being a phenomenological captive of others, to become an active being. Although Kiarostami’s observations derive from a society ideologically far removed from Western belief systems, the psychic shift in Ahmad’s consciousness seems no less relevant in those societies that pride themselves in addressing an understanding of child development, where the child is regarded not as inexistent but rather the centre of the socialisation process. These are also societies in which gang culture, drugs and somatic dysfunction may be playing out in their own way re-active functions rather than existential development.

There is something in the manner in which Kiarostami shot his film that reminded me of Kafka’s ‘The Castle’. The dark compressed look of the village, with its interminable maze of streets alleyways and passages, the circuitous nature of the search and its ultimate failure. The meetings with strangers who at first seem to offer hope but it’s hope that turns out to be illusionary. And ultimately the determination of the seeker, whether it be ‘K’ or Ahmed not to concede to disappointment but to continue with the task however difficult.

Kairostami’s titular question: ‘Where is the Friend’s House’, points not so much to a literal quest or question, but to an interrogation about a state of being.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk