Star & Shadow

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

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

psychic archaeology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

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

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

living with menace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

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

viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 26 Feb 2023; ticket £10.25

timely thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But…

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

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

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

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

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

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

viewed Tyneside Cinema 11 Feb 2023; ticket: £10.25

now you see it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Enys Men     Mark Jenkin   (2022; UK;)   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