Film Review

Police, adjective (Politist adjectiv) Corneliu Porumboiu (Rom 2009) Dragos Bucur

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 5 Oct 2010; ticket: £7.50

From a psychic space where there are no full stops or colons only commas,

Having decided to see this movie I was thinking that it had a strange title. What did the comma mean? You don’t come across them often in film titles. By the end you know that the title is taken from dictionary usage in which police is defined first as noun: police, noun; then as adjective: police, adjective. The comma operates in the syntax of the dictionary as a device separating the use and meanings of the different parts of speech. So Porumboiu’s (CP) title points to the adjective, and its function in Western languages, which is to give attributes to nouns; the adjective gives the noun a specific quality. As in: police state. In western Europe we don’t think much about adjectives, we just scatter gun them into our language. In Police, adjective (P,a) more thought is given to these matters.

And P, a is a film about state of mind, or rather the work that has to be done to have no state of mind. For mind to be dead: to make people blank. CP in his earlier film 12:08 East of Bucharest (The actual Romanian title was: Happened or Not?) used the simple set up of a TV talk show commemorating the December 1989 revolution to show that the belief people invested in the idea that a revolution had happened in their town, was the simple function of their delusion. In fact the nothing of a sort had really happened. On the surface there were certain signs and indicators that a revolutionary event had occurred. But on inspection this was simply an hallucination fostered by propaganda of vested interests, vanity, and an inflated sense of self importance. Surfaces are prominent in CP’s films, in the way doors are prominent in Haneke’s movies. They say something about the filmmaker’s ideas about the act of seeing.

If 12:08 E of B is about belief in occurrence that is mediated through non occurrence. P, a follows the consequences of this belief. P, a is about the oppression that is made possible by a false belief system; an oppression which leads to a blanked state of mind. The consequence is a deadness, mediated in the film through the policeman Cristri. who as protagonist is supposed to have a suspicious state of mind, perhaps even a conscience which directs his work. But suspicion, the archetypal state of mind of the cop, is not required in Romania. It might lead to the gangsters at the top. What is required is obedience induced by cognitive deadness. And that is where Cristi is pushed. In Romania, and perhaps other places, everyone should stay in their own coffin. Including the police.

P, a is about the state of mind necessary for the sustaining of totalitarian state. Under Ceausescu there was deep seated corruption underpinned by a secret police and sustained by a cognitive strait jacket, in effect a self justifying and self policing dialectic mechanical system of thought. A cognitive system whose moral circuitry ultimately justified all ends, whatever the means, to the teleological triumph of the workers and peasants state: the victory of the proletariat. The actual was justified through the dialectic schema. The victory of diagramatics.

In the penultimate sequence, which is almost achieved in one shot, CP shows that present day, nothing has changed. Dialectical materialism has gone; cod Marxism is no longer invoked to justify tyranny and corruption in the name of the victory of the revolution. But in an unchanged dynamic of power the needs of the political apparatus remain the same . It requires a thought system that functions so as to cognitively demonise and oppress any inner resistance of the individual mind. The individual mind is a critical battleground where the war is won or lost. Post Ceausescu dialectic materialism has to be replaced with another system to regulate thought. Another dialectic is needed. It might be the Bible, the Koran whatever: the important point is authoritative text rigidly interpreted and backed with threat of enforcement. CP in his script uses the dictionary as the cognitive enforcer. And in this extraordinary sequence we see the meaning of key words rammed down Cristi’s throat as he attempts to protest and rebel against the command he has been given. The dictionary dialectic is a system that involves an interrogating agent, a subject and the achievement of a specific idealised state. The dictionary can be used to invoke a system for the categorisation of words according to their ideal qualities. Morality becomes a thing; conscience becomes a thing, the law becomes a thing. There are no processes just things defined in themselves: without the context of the individual experience. The humble dictionary, in the hands of authority becomes the prefect rod with which to beat the resistant back into submission. Nothing has changed in this society. The self serving cynicism of the controllers defines the game.

The consequence is that everything dies back. There is no life just a continual cycle of oppression which kills the ability to think the ability to feel. As CP’s camera holds still or gently pans across a scene we have plenty of time to see the surface of this society. Seen through its surfaces, Romania looks like a country where nothing has changed. These same surfaces would have met the eye 50 years ago. Surfaces that are tired old and cracked reflecting back only a blankness. There seems to be no way to penetrate these surfaces which are everywhere.

The style of shooting uses long takes, composed often as wide or medium shots. The long duration shots effectively take us into real time experience. When Christi endlessly stakes out and watches, so do we; when Christi waits so do we; when Christi tails a subject so do we. when Cristi eats so do we. The point about the shot duration is that it releases the viewer into the space. The nondescript walls, the streets, crumbling buildings, the drab interiors are spaces we have to actually confront and experience as actual, and through these surfaces we are taken deeper into the film into thinking about what lies under the surfaces that we have been seeing.

P makes much use of two shots, two people together in wide or medium frame. What is remarkable is that the sense of isolation of individuals is heightened in the use of the two shot. Individuals never seem more alone that when they are with another person. Christi with a colleague, with his wife, seems more desolate and alone than when he is on the stomp or staking out his quarry. We are shown situations where not only is there is no communication between people, there is no possibility of communication between people. Contact between Cristi and his wife is a arid dry dialogue broken only once when she tells him that there is something not quite right between them. It’s as if all that is left is for the people to watch each other until they die, and they die very young correcting each other’s grammar and speech.

But the plot fascinates. As we follow it, all seems surface: small time marijuana users and dealers, a couple of crummy kids, trailed and staked out by a low level policeman. We see the surface traits of the operation. And yet gradually and sporadically a number of facts bleed up from beneath this surface to suggest that what is really going on is the result of a deep seated corruption. Corruption that holds the key to life in this small town.

Following 12:08 E of B, and now viewing P,a what I call film, not installation, not life style advert. not music video, not text message, is alive and kicking in a town in Romania called Vaslui. adrin neatrour adrin@yahoo.co.uk

The Secret in their Eyes (El Secreto De Sus Oyos) Juan Campanella (Argentina 2009) Soledad Villamil; Ricardo Darin

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 20 Aug 2010; Ticket price £7.50

The cocked leg shot that says it all

For me it was the cocked leg shot that gave Juan Campanella’s film away. The cocked leg shot revealed that the ambition of The Secret in Their Eyes (SITE) was limited to being a filmically inept piece of soap opera. The shot takes place early in the movie in the first (1970’s) section of the time spanning narrative. Prosecuting magistrate Benjamin attends a scene of crime where the battered body of the raped and murdered young woman lies face up on the floor of her bedroom. Given the title of the movie we don’t really need to see the body. Nevertheless we see the body. JJC might suggest we have to see her body to understand Benjamin’s outrage. We certainly don’t need to see it either so often or so long as the camera drifts across her belly breasts and face. JCC might suggest: that’s the movies, the audience want to gaze.

What is false in the scene of crime shot is the posture of the body. The woman’s body lies in the narrow channel between her double bed and the wall. If as natural her whole body lay prone in this restricted space it would be photographically uninteresting. Not cinamatagraphic. To resolve this issue, JJC decided to pose the dead woman’s body so that her legs are cocked up on the bed. The body in this position has a dynamic line but it’s a position at variance with the violence of her assault and death. The cocked leg position of the cadaver is a theatrical contrivance to improve the quality of the audience’s gaze and a calculated manipulation by JCC to secure the gaze. His cocked legs shot is a piece of fakery the characterises SITE as surely as the crumbling talc beneath the eyes of the cast which is supposed to signify their ageing. The moral starting point of SITE the shock of a beautiful life destroyed is founded convenience and contrivence.

Viewing JJC’s movie it’s clear why SITE clinched best foreign movie in this year’s 2010 Oscars. It’s a calling card film from a director who wants to show that he can make Hollywood product. Michael Haneka’s co-nominated film, The White Ribbon was European in form and style with a sensibility independent of and indifferent to Hollywood values. JJC chimes with the Tinsletown vibes. SITE is characterised by: mechanical plot driven action, laboriously contrived romantic subplot with a smattering of political correctness and political comment, dialogue comprising one liners cod philosophy and street wise obscenity; and actors required to span 25 years so caked in plaster and talc that their faces almost come off.

Characterised by Hollywood style production values, SITE comprises complete filmic bankruptcy, an expressive capitulation of film form to TV standards.

The narrative of SITE relies on a series of TV plot devices rather than dynamics of structure to develop the film. Devices involving the dead woman’s family photos and the coded references embedded in a letter written home, drive the film, not character world or moral issues. Likewise the manner in which JJC has shot SITE is in replication of soap opera motifs. There are two prime shot ideas: the laborious use of shot followed by reverse shot to cover the dialogue; and the use of long affect images of eyes staring out of make-up caked faces to convey the emoting without words. The problem I had with these shots is, not only are they repetitious seemingly used by JC when he didn’t know what else to do. They are also used manipulatively to tease the romantic sub plot rather than as a expressed perception.

Benjamin is writing a novel about real events in his past: recasting fact as fiction. SITE’s use of flashbacks is crude but also confusing: some flashbacks may be actual and some fictive from the writing of Benjamin. At the beck and call of a banal plot line JJC is not in sufficient control of the structure of his film to be able exploit this fact /fiction potential in the material, which is simply left irresolvable. In the best Hollywood tradition of abandoning initial structures that prove too complex for movies whose main purpose is the simple manipulation of the audience.

SITE is I think about a state of mind: regret, regret for what is lost. But JJC film approaches regret from the exteriority of faciality: big on faces. There are few expressive long shots in SITE and JJC is unable through the vocabulary of his film to do more than go through the motions of replicating the stereotypical idea of what regret is supposed to look like. JJC is unable to transform regret into a language of relations, or place or interiority. We gaze on the regret as we look on the only expressive device JCC uses in the movie to mediate his expressive message: the Big Close Up.

Perhaps it is because they are so heavily made up, but the main protagonists seem lifeless and overburdened with their roles. Perhaps it was the direction of JJC . The performances seemed to me to be leaden and over directed evincing a series of monodimensional responses. For me there was nothing of thinking in the acting. nothing of the creative. Only doing and playing to camera with an affected elusive look. Running more than two hours SITE the actors long exhausted their expressive play.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

I Hired a Contract Killer Aki Kaurismaki (Finland/UK 1990) Jean-Pierre Leaud; Margi Clarke

Viewed: 15 July 2010 Star and Shadow Cinema; ticket price £4

retrocrit: sound as essence

Aki Kaurismaki (AK) understands music as a portal into other dimensions. I think that his work as a film maker consistently testifies to his ability to use the music as a track that creates mood and state of mind independently of the picture. This is particularly the case with I hired a Contract Killer. Without its use of music I Hired a Contract Killer (IHCK) would be a film that was rather less than the sum of its parts.

The parts are in themselves finely tuned in a sense of being fluid stylistic statements in relation to film composition. AK’s London is a decontextualised zone comprising any-space-whatevers, inhabited by a supporting caste of geezers and wizzened old gits. The main characters are affectively cool and non emotively engaged in the material which AK has fashioned for cognitive clarity rather than manipulation. The characters lines comprise a series of distancing alienated offbeat observations. The statements by protagonists Boulanger and Margaret are pared back, announiatory, declamatory: statements about situation rather than discourse. As in Film Noir and Godard’s takes on film noir, the dialogue is grounded in bleak sociopathic humour and the absurd, and the action follows filmic logic rather than narrative rules.

AK’s characters in IHCK work within a set of frames both interior and exterior in which colour provides the affective key note. The city, as it is shot and framed, and the interiors, lobbies rooms bars nondescript entrances and exits, all have an ochre key note. The film look is dominated by the muted colours of autumn, the keynotes of a melancholia that pervades the film and is complimented by AK’s placement of his camera. The ‘still’ shot dominates the film, trapping the audience and the characters in the atmospherics of the sparse mis-en-scenes, giving them and their ochre colorisation, an inescapable dynamic presence in the structure of the movie.

The problem with IHCK is that it feels like a series of TV sketches, skilfully stitched together. The film seems to be structured as a sequence of discrete scenes. These sequences can almost stand alone each comprising a thesis and an antithesis, an event that is developed within its own logic to its pay-off. The jewellery store robbery is a case in point. Boulanger interrupts the robbery and after a series of gags, ends up the prime suspect. There is a sort of self contained element in this episodic structure which recalls TV comedies such as the Young Ones and Monty Python that perhaps AK viewed at a impressionable time in his life. With the film viewed as a series of linked events a feeling of repetition intrudes and the logic becomes mechanical, each section of IHCK like a contrived device to move the film on until it comes to the point AK decides is the last device and the movie ends. Yet the music and the way it is used by AK changes the dynamic; without the music it is difficult to see what AK is trying to achieve.

The music changes everything. From the first sounds of Billie Holliday through to the series of songs by Joe Strummer and the blues numbers, I understood that this is a film about loneliness. About the experience of being inescapably alone in the world; about the world being an inescapably lonely place. Billie’s voice, in Time on My Hands exudes the note of personal desolation, a tone that is sustained by Joe Strummer’s plaintive performing of his songs culminating in the number he performs to camera in the pub. His performance here is an extraordinary intensifer of mood: a lament for all that is lost . The only logic for the incorporation of the whole song into the sequence is as an statement of the films emotional colour, blue, and of its alienated existential philosophy.

Without the music, the ideas supporting IHCK are at risk of being flooded out by the mechaninics of film making however fluid they may be. It was this route that Godard, as thinker auteur, determined never to travel. With his sensitive use of music IHCK is a film that travels. But it it is a problem for AK, as evidenced in his next movie “ La Vie de Boheme.” in which he tries to pull of the same trick with a cod rendering of La Boheme. With this film AK ends up with a less convincing pot pourri of mechanical scquences, showing that to be a film maker is not enough. It’s about ideas. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

I am Love Luca Guadagnino (2009 It UK) Tilda Swinton; Eduoardo Gabriellini

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle; 27 April 2010 Ticket price (for matinee) £4.50

Junk food in a glossy package

I am Love (IAL) reminded me of the sort of fashion shoot images you find in glossy women’s life style magazines. The model is photographed in front of a series of backgrounds: domestic, grunge, hi-tech industrial etc. The idea behind the shoot as in all advertising, is to associate the product with some quality represented in or by the setting. The model is in effect a superimposition, and the setting is an affective decontextualised alienated space, a backdrop, without linkage to its key expressive component, the figure in the foreground

IAL takes the form of an installation featuring desirable life style choices. Luca Guadagnino’s (LG) camera tracks and pans continuously as a structural cinematic effect leading the viewer on a guided walk through his movie which features nouvelle cuisine, bourgeois domestic settings and idyllic natural phenomena. These elements are stitched together by a narrative that is that is less acted than mediated by a series of mannerisms and gestures, and which espouses the cause of cliché’d individual freedom as epitomised by sexual relations.

Luca Guadagnino’s movie feels labouriously dated both in its concerns and in its expressive style.

Emma is the wife of Tancredi an Milanese industrialist who rediscovers her Russian origins and her real name Kitiesh in the course of her ‘liberating’ affair with a friend of her son, Antonio who is a chef. Antonio’s occupation is a cue for LG to turn over meters of film in shooting his gloopy gastronomic creations. Why are we presented with so many long filmed sequences depicting food? I think that the reason has to be LG’S endemic insecurity with his material. As LG has nothing to say, everything in IAL, as in an advert, has to be literalised. As if by filling out the movie with streams of images that might or might not have symbolic connotation, he could compensate for lack of meaning in the material. When Emma reads a letter revealing her daughter is a lesbian, she is filmed reading it on the roof of Milan cathedral (she takes quite a number of shots to climb up) ; there is talk about industrial relations, the film cuts to the factory; there is talk of food, and it has to be shown as a close-up gloopy image.

The problem with IAL is that there are no ideas in the movie. It’s just a stream of images that are supposed to represent something more than their presenting banality. It feels like LG has looked at Visconti and Rossellini and imagined that by imitating external aspects of their movies that he could emulate them. GL has failed to see that the externalities of these directors were held together by an inner core of strong concepts employed in the pursuit of purpose.

The impoverishment of idea extends into the structure of the film. ‘Marked off’ fantasy sequences are used to illustrate Emma’s desires. Like a bad ‘60’s movie when LG cuts to Emma’s fantasy, LG goes for out of focus and soft visual effects. When LG wants to film something real and to communicate the feelings aroused he opts for the montage of signs, as when Antonio and Emma (Kitiesh) make love. This sequence is composed of big close up’s of the flesh of the lovers intercut with close up metaphoric suggestive shots from the natural order: flower stamens, insects, thistles, ants etc. Like the shot of the train entering the tunnel this sequence is no more than a parody representing physical love, and announces LG’s cinematic bankruptcy.

When Antonio fucks Emma (Kitiesh) what he wants really is her secret Russian recipe for clear fish soup which Kitiesh was taught by her grandmother. Is that an idea or a narrative device? If Kitiesh hadn’t made love to Antonio she would never have given him her recipe and so her son Eduardo would not have died and she would not have been liberated and gone to sleep in a cave.

The filmic composition through the camera work looks like it is based on the old adman’s adage of: keep the picture moving. In LG’s tracking shots and in the innumerable camera pans, there is little to no purpose in relation to the dynamics of the film. The motive for the camera movement seems to be the director’s fear of allowing stillness to be part of the frame. The audience may get bored. The panning shots in themselves are often slow and devoid of point, to such an extent that many have been aborted in mid movement. in the edit. You can imagine the scene in the editing suite as the editor watches yet another laborious pan meander its way through a setting in order to set up a sequence; the editor politely points out to LG that it might be better to cut out of it and get into the action. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Luis Bunuel ( 1972 Fr ) Fernando Rey; Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier

Viewed 24 JUNE 2010, Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne:

Ticket price £4.00

retro crit: From inside the mind…

Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie (DCB) isn’t top of my list of the films by Luis Bunuel(LB). But it’s outstanding as an expressive medium that reveals to the viewer the immanent world of LB. Through DCB in both its form and its content, LB is experienced as a personal film maker. The material with which he works is his: there is nothing extraneous. LB as a writer/director is not selling anything. What he is doing is opening up to the audience his state of mind his way of seeing his obsessions. LB approaches film making as an act of faith, in which he uncovers and peels back the layers of his thinking and perception. Without apology or self censorship within the course of a shot or short sequence, he juxtaposes ideas and interposes values from divergent sources and remote ends of the cognitive spectrum: from the heightened to the venal, from the ‘awake’ to the ‘dream’ from the chaste to the erotic, from the cerebral to the visceral, from the tender to the cruel. In the mind of LB ‘life’ whether it be personal or collective is in constant tensile vacillation between these forces. But the working out of these relations is a moral issue the which underpins LB’s work both with DCB and with most of his other movies.

In the key recurring sequence of DCB, we see the bourgeois group walking purposefully down a long straight flat road that leads between fields. Normally we only see them move if they are in their limos. But in these shots they are walking: stripped of their normal outer shell. The group seem to come from nowhere and to be going nowhere. There is nothing in their manner or gait to suggest anything other than that they have complete self assurance in their journey or destiny. Within the logic of DCB they may be someone’s dream; they may be playing out a statement of their complete belief in the efficacy of appearances which is central to both the self image of the bourgeois and their claims upon the world; they may be looking for their automobiles. Who knows? But each return to these walking Bourgeois is an opportunity to wonder what is going on in LB’s mind: what’s he pointing to…? We’ll never know for sure.

DCB like the best of LB’s films is a sort of filmic mortification, a flaying of the skin in order to reveal what lies underneath. The veins and nerves under the dermis: society as a cadaver écorché. Underneath the veneer of exquisite manners, of apparent goodness, savoir vivre, fine apartments and beautiful accoutrements lies the corruption of drugs and gangster money; scourge the façade of religion to reveal that the real concern of this organisation is not with the souls of the poor but rather with the wallets of the powerful rich and cruel whose corrupt money buys the endowments. In DCB, in a brilliant coup, the Bishop of the diocese applies for and is granted, the position of gardener to the drug baron. What is at work beneath the surface is the fear of the Bourgeoisie: their fear of losing their money. Everything follows from this one simple observation.

It is the genius of Bunuel’s thought in film, that he can never be caste simply as a social satirist. Life is too complex to be formulaic. LB’s mind is claimed by kingdoms other than the social and DCB like other of his films enters the realms of the flesh the dream and the dead. These realms define the actual cognitive ground explored by LB. In DCB dreams radically break up the patina of the depicted ‘actual’ erupting as psychic forces, when least expected to smash open the controlling narrative. But the structure of DCB interweaving ‘actual’ ‘dream’ and ‘dream within dream’ calls in notions and ideas, the seeds planted by LB, that life itself, with its narratives of death, its smug rewarded killers, and its persecution of the innocent, may be a nightmare. That if life is what we make it then we have made of it a bad dream from which there is no escape, simply eternal recurrence.

LB is a very cool director and DCB is a very cool movie. Cool in the sense that he does not invest his images with emotive significance, au contraire he is careful to empty the image of emotional resonance as image in itself. He does not use image to manipulate: his image is about meaning and it is to the meaning that we react as we may. He films situations and sequences so that they propagate a world of ideas in the imagination of audience. DCB is LB’s vehicle of mind transference: his mind, his players. The incomparable Rey Seyrig and Ogier glide through DCB as ectoplasmic emanations of an idea: perfect in form and in execution of their roles as rulers of the cesspit. DCB in its control economy and audacity is an act of intentionality by a master.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Killer Inside Me – Michael Winterbottom (USA 2010) Casey Affleck; Kate Hudson

Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre; 8 June 2010; Ticket price £7.00

“There is something inside every man that keeps him going long after he has any reason to.” ( Jim Thompson)

Viewing The Killer Inside Me it is evident that Michael Winterbottom has not understood the bitter sweet words of Jim Thompson, and continues to make movies long after he has any reason to. However deranged and twisted it might be, there is self knowledge in Thompson’s losers that is beyond this director.

“I like it when you hurt me….!” drawls Amy in her best throaty breathless voice, as Lou straps her. And her words in Winterbottom’s (MW) rendering of Jim Thompson’s novel The Killer Inside Me (KIM) become a sort of literal strap line, selling the idea of the movie as if it were a designer label or brand of leather goods accessories. The movie instead of finding a form to transpose Jim Thompson’s voice from word to image, is mutated under MW’s direction into an extended glossy advert which could have been shot for Prada or Comme des Garcons, but instead is selling fashionable rough-stuff sex, a classy looking snuff movie

Jim Thompson’s dime novels are telegrams from the nether world of US society. The works are tersely written, often in the form of monologues delivered by rogue males from the internal space of paranoid violence that is America. Characters created by JT were actualised by damaged rootless loners such as Perry and Dick who massacred the Clutter family in 1959 and were chronicled by Truman Capote with his book, ‘In Cold Blood’. The world of the deterritorialised schizo, the damaged product of a society that with no place or function for them, cuts men lose with their internalised pent up resentments, both imagined and real. Desperate psyches often with smooth exteriors painfully and expertly forged so as to be able to pass through life without attracting too much attention.

The qualities expressed through the characters of JT’s writing, are informed by a level of self knowledge, fear and surprise at the world which feed into intense feedback loops that drive the men to action. The action is always precipitated from within the psyche; never as in Chandler’s work from without. The worlds occupied by JT’s protagonists are not high definition or glamorous in character; they are messy stained fucked up streams of thought that are punctuated by action that is mechanical but filled out with observational detail. MB just doesn’t get it. His approach seems to be that he has a text to adapt and to fill out with image. He is unable to do anything more with his film than replicate the Hollywood Coda. In MW’s hands KIM is delivered as a life style statement.

Remove the internal thinking from JT and what’s left is a series of mechanically contrived events. In sum: nothing. And despite the use Lou’s voice over to inform the images the core of ‘thinking’ eludes MW’s movie leaving only the autopilot of the plot line as a basic structure. The camera makes no contribution to the film beyond obeying the strictures of central casting and getting into the action, leaving nothing to the imagination. The violence and the sex are graphically communicated in image, as MW has nowhere to take his camera other than into the banality of depictation. Intercut into the plot structure are a series of flashbacks: some to Lou’s childhood, some to his relationship with Joyce. But the flashbacks delinked to any core expression of Lou’s voice, seem to me a tired device, indulging a need to break up the monotony of the plot rather than giving any substantive expressive form to Lou’s state of mind. Likewise the sound track is dominated by a farrago of ‘50’s pop music that is supposed to ironically underlay and counterbalance the drama. In fact the music comes across as the equivilent of a musical tourist bus tour. It’s symptomatic of the project that MW choses style over substance, opting for facile authenticity rather than the tough option of finding a note for his film

KIM will probably be very popular movie. The dead speak to the dead. The explicit and gratuitous are favoured as categorical imperatives, justified in themselves, because they sell. MW in a sense is a cultural product, reinterpreting Jim Thompson’s internal dialogues as easy viewing for burnt out male castrati. The dead are not alive in themselves, they live in the image. Psychopathic killers living out images of themselves in the movies as they cut their murderous swathes through life. In early June Derek Bird just killed 12 people in Cumbria. What movie was he in as he took his guns and aimed point blank at his victims and blew them away? Perhaps it’s a movie MW will make. A lifestyle choice.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Rear Window A Hitchcock (USA 1954) James Steward; Grace Kelly

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 29 May 10; ticket price – £6.00 ( Matinee screening)

Castration angst

Under the polished grain of Rear Window’s surface (RW) Hitchcock (AH) has produced a film built on a matrix of interlocking psychic states that still resonate with contemporary concern. Concerns in relation to: the way in which we see, affects how we live our lives; concerns that pivot about the balance of power in sexual relations. Ideas which are worked into RW’s narrative structure and which in their filmic development form the substance of the film.

AH has made RW into something that is experienced by audience as a series of intensities that are never quite resolved, that is until the relatively uninteresting mechanical finale that wraps it all up the end of the movie. These experiences in RW are fashioned out of the opposing forces that AH sets into play in building the states of mind that are at the core of the film: obsessiveness, ambiguity, conflictedness and inadequacy. These mental states characterise not only James Steward as the protagonist, Jeff, but also the audience as they are captured by the structure of the movie and drawn into AH’s psychic cobweb.

RW is based on a primary opposition of place: inside Jeff’s apartment, and the view outside from inside Jeff’s apartment. The life Jeff experiences and the lives of other’s as perceived by Jeff. The opening shot of RW is a long pan of the apartments across the courtyard from him, which finally ends with a track taking the viewer inside Jeff’s place and revealing him asleep with his back to the window. He sits propped up in his chair with a broken leg supported out in front of him. The shot not only shows opposing sides of the courtyard, the different worlds about and across which the film will be structured; it also implies the potential conjoining and subsumance of each world into the other. The shot implicitly sets up the viewer as a collusive agent: not only do we gaze as invisible entities on the courtyard world; we gaze on Jeff and his apartment. This puts us in the same relationship to Jeff as Jeff has in his gazing out upon the worlds of the courtyard windows.

The story is premised on the immobilisation of Jeff (James Steward) who in his helplessness spends his time looking out of his rear window at the flats opposite. A function of this devotion of his time to gazing at the lives of others as they are played out in the windows in front of him is that he is drawn into their theatre and starts to live their lives and their dramas rather than his own. To the extent that he starts to premise his life on this vicarious experience, he becomes ever more helpless. In some respects AH’s idea anticipates the relentless rise of continuity TV experiences whether Soap Operas or ‘Reality TV’. in which the lives of the actors take on greater meaning for many viewers that their own lives. But I don’t think this is enough. The wiring of RW into Jeff’s psych is deeper and darker than this superficial layering. There comes a point where it is as if he ceases to exist as Jeff. He is there physically and in the habitual sense, but the spark of energy of the real man, has been extinguished. None of his close acquaintances, in particular his girlfriend, seem to notice. Or if they do notice what is happening, in a ghoulish way they accept and abet the death of his life.

AH makes RW work on its audience almost without let up. Through most of RW’s sequences AH uses his film to stream to the audience two tracks of information. These opposing tracks cause perception and psyche to split and alternating between the two different streams of information, the viewers perceptive abilities are pushed and pulled in different directions. In the sequences that comprise the gazing at the lives in the windows opposite AH exploits the use of the separate nature of the picture track and sound track. In key sequences of RW they work independently to create heterogeneous disturbance, a conflicting perception of what is perceived and how it is perceived. The vignettes, taking place through the apartment windows, are viewed over the soundtrack of a telephone call; the views into and pans of the windows are accompanied by sounds emanating from different and heterogeneous worlds creating again a dislocation of information a break between sound and image which film, particularly on a big screen can exploit to cause a level of ambiguity in the viewer rather than certainty.

As well as using the physical characteristic of film to split sound and image tracks, AH also exploits a psychic track in the main protagonist: Jeff’s obsession with the other. So central to RW is the ‘obsession’ track in Jeff’s mind that he is unable to free himself from the attraction of his rear window. His need to gaze overrides everything. This state of mind allows AH to compose sequences in RW in which whilst Jeff in image is imagined by his girl friend as being absorbed in making love to her, he has in fact detached from this activity and has entered the world of the gaze. As opposing psychic tracks Jeff and Lisa ( Grace Kelly) when together create a conflicted message and state of mind both in the film and in the viewer.

There also seems one last opposition that AH has built into RW. I have alluded to it but it is that divide between the active and the passive. In particular in relation to the male. At the time of RW’s production the trend towards an increasing number of sedentary male workers employed in offices was evident. AH picks up on the angst of passive man and the symbolic emasculation effected upon those who neither hunt nor gather. Jeff’s immobility which at the start of the film is balanced by his ability to run his own life, in the course of the movie, runs down. By the end of the film this immobility is anchored not just in his physical body but in his psyche; he has been castrated: lost symbolically not just one leg but two as Lisa takes over not just control of his life, but also of the gazing. The female in the film has become the active agent, the male the passive. The years of Hollywood stereotyping inverted in one movie. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Dogtooth (Kynodontos) Giogos Lanthimas (Greece 2009) Christos Stergioglon, Aggleki Papoulia, Hristos Passalis

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 11 May 10, Ticket price: £6.50

Toothless or what….

By the time Dogtooth reaches the dark humourous final shot of the daughter trapped in the trunk of Papa’s Merc, it‘s too late. Dogtooth has lost the plot. As it progresses through sequence after sequence instead of embracing its subject matter the more surely and firmly, Dogtooth (DT) becomes increasingly evasive in treatment of its chosen theme. The problem with Dogtooth is that it finally opts for parody as a response to the situation rather than allegory; it develops into an extended sitcom rather than a satire. Guiding his material down the road of cheap laughs rather than the terror of absurdity, director Giogos Lanthiman takes the easy option and his film drifts into inconsequentiality. An outcome that betrays the intelligence of the camera work and the finely moulded nature of the performances.

Giogos Lanthimas’ (GL) subject matter is envelopment. Envelopment by a ma and pa of their children in a home environment in order to render the occupants immune from the vagaries and threats of the outside world. The home in DT becomes a filmic realisation of the gated communities that are characteristic of a particular response to living in late era consumerist capitalism.

I think that the intention of GL was to hold up to the lens of his camera the absurdity of believing that sequestered life behind walls is a solution to the problem of being in the world. House and family in DT are absurdist exaggerations of those suburban ‘communities’ found in contemporary society. Life behind gates and walls is elective isolation that entails the creation of a supportive belief system whose function is to justify enforce and reinforce, the blocking out the world. Gated communities, are reactive, based on fear and the desire to protect possessions illusions and desires from unwanted intrusion and desecration. GL’s script at the beginning sets up the Dogtooth situation with the creative demonic élan of an Ionescu , so that a familiar architectural and social world is turned on its head by the perversity of the expressed cognitive logic of the situation.

What is interesting in the idea of the gated community is the underlying issues that are raised. These issues can be internal relating to the dynamics of the group, and/or external relating to the dynamic of the group and the wider encompassing society. These issues have an inexorable logic that has to be met with an equal and opposing logic on the part of the gated community. Logics which Ionescu knew and analysed in different contexts. Logics unleash forces of contradiction and paradox which for survival require extreme responses: anti-logics, dishonesty and brutality.

Dogtooth establishes as its starting point, a logical fulcrum on which is balanced on the absurdist world of extended childhood in which silly stories, euphanisms and lies provide the basis of continuations communication and identity. But GL does not permit this logic to shape direct and drive the film. Sex is a central concern of Dogtooth and a concern around which much of the action is organised. But there is no tension in the play out of these concerns; no iron logic driving the sexual developments that exert pressure on both the characters and the plot line. DT instead of allowing logic and underlying tensions to give shape to the content and plot, substitutes a sequential structure. The film, like a soap opera is divided into sequences, each of which has a sort of resolution but through which there is no development of the controlling logic. As DT is abandoned to episodic sequences, it slides into parody and increasingly played for laughs; tensions are quickly resolved and defused and not permitted to direct the narrative. Instead of taking us somewhere, a journey in systematic twisted logic, DT goes nowhere and leaves us almost where we started.

The most distinctive device shaping DT is GL’s use of his camera. The film is composed using certain key shots that in themselves suggest the presence of alien logic at work. The lens favours a narrow depth of field; and the framing favours tight close ups, often favouring body parts such as feet or hands. The defining key shot mode is the still immobile camera, which frames space that is filled with close ups or medium close up shots of faces, body sections, objects (the opening shot is a cassette tape recorder). The perceptions engaged by the cinematography in relation to framing are several. Firstly the creation of film space that compresses the characters into a box, a filmic special representation of the family’s situation; the immobility of the camera also works to suggest that we are watching lives frozen in time, lives that are still, with no temporal development. Also the feeling given by the camera is one of disengagement: the family are detached both from there own body parts and from each other, and from their environments the house and garden. The house is a space which we never really see. It exists as a segmented reality a detached remote otherworldly space. In relation to the opening sequences, the establishment of a logic, the camera is a dynamic element nurturing the proposition of an ‘other’ logic in play.

The performances are also critical to the film. The children in particular project the quality of aliens, as if they had just stepped off a spaceship. Their disciplined acting works because it is always controlled and structured, part of the look and style of the movie. Likewise the playing of mama and papa is characterised by a furtive purposefulness that is underplayed and understated. As DT’s scenario fails to develop the ideas implicit in the logic of the material the expressive potential of both camera and acting is under-realised.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Escape from New York, John Carpenter, 1981

Screened at the Star and Shabby Cinema

Set in 1997, so the opening intro voice informs us, the entirety of New York has been turned into an open prison incarcerating the very worst of criminal society. Give us a break John. Sure the place was run down in the seventies and had many social problems, but are we expected to believe that Wall Street is going to relocate from all that prime real estate without a fight. I don’t think so.

So what is the story. Well it can be sumarised in the title “I’m a celebrity. Get me out of here” Following the hijacking of the US presidential airplane by a group of suicidal freedom fighters, with the Pres and his entourage on board, it is crashed into the hell hole that New York has now become. Ideas for 9/11 here folks? The Pres survives by ejecting in his escape pod, a rather unconvincing red egg shaped module which ejects from the doomed plane, but, unfortunately for him, into a chaos in which as head of state he has the honour to preside over. Hint of schardenfreude here?

Being the indispensable person that all right thinking, read brain washed, Americans believe him to be he must be rescued at all costs from this hell hole. Surely Mr Carpenter the story could have been more interesting having him try to assert his authority in what still is his rightful domain and let the outside world go to hell.

Enter the rescue party, organised by Hauk, Governor of this prison, and one assumes responsible for the lack of humane conditions which exist and Snake, ex war hero turned villain, but whose skills as a infiltrator into enemy territory has been successfully tested in Leningrad, so presumably we were at war with the USSR. Although given the proliferation of nuclear weapons had such a war occurred there is likely to have been little call for the services of Snake, before he turned bad.

Casting Kurt Russel as Snake Plissken and Lee Van Cleef as Hauk, Carpenter appears to be trying to recreate the Eastwood –Van Cleef relationship of a Few Dollars More. However this fails to materialise as there is limited interaction between the two roles to establish any rapport between them. Russel however does give it a go, paying lip service homage to Eastwood by hissing his lines through gritted teeth in the initial dialogues with Van Cleef. Perhaps this was the snake element of his character, although much later it is revealed that he has a tattoo of a hooded cobra, which is a more likely reason for the appellation.

Offered a pardon for all his past crimes, does that include all those killings in Russia on behalf of the state?, of course not, he was an American hero then, Snake agrees to rescue of the Pres from the nick. However there is a catch he has to do it in 24 hrs because the Pres goes on air then.

To keep him to the deadline he is provided with an incentive. A biological inserts in the neck which will explode in 24 hrs unless neutralised and a fancy digital watch which will tell him how long he has to do it.

Flying in on a glider he lands on the twin towers, so that’s why the presidential plan didn’t target them, using some nice green graphics little more sophisticated than the original Space invaders graphics of those days.

Dressed in Rambo style, minus the bandana, he shorts out some electrical wires to get the lift working and descends into the darkness, well they had power to the twin towers lifts but no street lighting.

How does he find the Pres. So, as well as being chained to his brief case the Pres has a gadget on his wrist the size of an alarm clock which transmits his location as well as his pulse. Snake with the latest technology, the size of a house brick, has a Pres locator. Come on John, even the Men from UNCLE had miniturised gadgets.!!! The loudest laugh resonated from the audience when Hauk picked up what used to be called a walkie-talkie hand set, twice as large as ever the real thing was. Even the weaponry looked like 70s hardware with scope sights attached. When it comes to futuristic gadgetry Carpenter falls flat on his face.

Following various escapades and escapes from the Crazies, a tribe of troglodytes who live in the sewer systems, Snake meets Cabbie, Ernie Borgnine, a greasy Yellow Cab jockey, at the camp, take that literally, concert party in a run down theatre and is taken to meet Brains, a former accomplice in crime and Maggie, who dresses in what appears to be a satin night gown and has a 70 porno star hair perm the main thrust of her character being the prominent embonpoint and generous cleavage. Both of whom agree to help in his rescue of the Pres.

The Dook, [Issac Hayes] that’s the Duke to you or I, is the evil black overlord of the prison with a nice line in 19th century cavalry jackets , references to Idi Amin and the Emperor of the Central African Republic who has captured the Pres with a view to getting the prison more open to the outside world. Is Carpenter making a statement about the taste for the gaudy and taudry by blacks, particularly when he shows the Duke driving his car adorned with chandeliers on the front wings and a disco glitter ball suspended in the front wind screen?

Donald Pleasence, playing the Pres, looks as myopic as he did in his part as the prison of war master forger in “The Great Escape”, only that he has been on a course of steroids. One could almost hear the echo of those famous words he uttered in that film, “I can see, I can see perfectly. Take me with you, I won’t be any trouble”, as he pleads to be included with the escapees.

True to Carpenter’s plots there is the obligatory overlong fight scene. This time a gladiatorial combat ,reminiscent of the Coliseum of ancient Rome, between Snake and the Duke’s champion. Not content with mere baseball bats to knock the shite out of each other the have to up the tempo with base ball bats with six inch nails sticking from the end. Needless to say the bad guy, who looks like a cross between a Victorian strong man and Genghis Khan, gets nailed by Snake with one of those six inch nails.

Time is running out for snake as the glances at his personal timer tell us and he needs to get the Pres back to the outside world to get those explosives neutralised which following the demise of all the other characters, bar the Pres, he manages to do with only 2 seconds to spare.

Phew! A close shave that. Which is what the Pres is having as Snake gets his thanks and a job offer from Hauk.

So did the Pres have a change of heart over the conditions in the American penal system and vow to improve them. You betcha he didn’t.

What message did the film make about US attitudes to criminals and their reform. . Lock em up, throw away the key and let them rot in hell

Is the US President second only to God. You betcha he is and like God isn’t in the habit of getting his own hands dirty.

Cue credits to the end of to film to the sound of Carpenters’ music “Its Yesterday Once More” but not like I knew it John.

Phil Eastein

Brief Encounter David Lean (UK 1945) Script: Noel Coward: Celia Johnson; Trevor Howard

Viewed: Riverside Studio London; 12 April 10; Ticket:: £7.50 (double bill with Letter from an Unknown Woman)

Adrin Neatrour writes retrocrit: Love in a mechanistic country

In filming Brief Encounter, David Lean (DL) took Noel Coward’s play Still Life, and re-cast it as a dream, a dream subjectively experienced as one of those bitter fairy tales. Dl worked his material so as to make the idea of a hallucinatory ‘world’ the centre of the film. In concept and design Brief Encounter (BE) is imagined as a world, or rather worlds. Brief Encounter is designed as a vehicle for a female voice and following Laura’s the voice (Celia Johnson) we track her migration through the different states of mind triggered by the film’s zoning. Lean’s decision to realise BE through the creation of worlds gives Coward’s moralistic fable of Middle Class mores a nightmarish emotional depth that endows the original material with a mythic quality.

BE is fashioned around the three distinct loci as witnessed through ‘Laura’s voice’: the trapped, represented by Laura’s family home; the station which is the transitional dream zone; and the town/country locations, hallucinatory spaces, Arcadia, where Laura and Alec are together, and like spirits released from Hades, allowed a short respite from their doom.

The heart of the film is the railway station. A conceptual area realised in the creation of a number of different discrete spaces. The station works as a setting that mediates a dream world. A fairy tale which creates intensifies and transforms the impossible notion of two comfortably married people falling desperately in love. The sets, the atmospheric effects the composition and camera movement are all exploited creatively to extend the viewers’ perception from the surface of the film, the dialogue and voice over, through to the psychic forces underlying the action: primal instinct and repressed desire.

The opening shot comprises a slow track along the counter of the tea room to find figures of Laura and Alec sitting together at a table. The gliding camera immediately introduces a dream quality into the film and comprises a sequence that will be repeated at the end of the film. The tea room is a purgatorial space, a zone where the lost and damned must wait to discover their fate; an antechamber to the unspeakable that recurs in dream and nightmare. It is where Laura meets Alec for the first time as he restores her sight to her by removing the mote from her eye. Outside the tea room lies the subterranean passage to Arcadia through which you must pass to enjoy the illusion of freedom; and the terrifying mechanics of the platforms where the business of the station occurs mired in hissing steam and smoke: a diabolic region of flesh eating monsters The station functions like some terrible in-between place, a diabolic machine that processes peoples lives and determines their fate. Woe to the soul trapped here.

Laura’s nightmare does not only trap her in space. She is also trapped in the mechanics of time: a tyranny

of clockwork timetables and rigid temporal matrices. In dreams, time is never an ally; it is always a fiendish element. In dream there is never enough time and it is always too late to avoid fate. In BE time is an enforcement agency cut into the grain of the film. DL resolves the structure of film about the railway system: the iron hand of its clock formatting the schedules and timetables that drive everyday life. Centred on the station Wilford Junction, Laura and Alec are depicted filmically by DL as pawns in a mechanised system of dispatch delivery and retrieval. They have no will of their own but are products of a linear temporal programme, a steam driven conveyor belt system which summons and calls them at set and specified times; there are serious implied penalties for non compliance. The couple’s fear throughout the film is centred on ‘missing the train’: you have to catch the train, it will save you. The railway timetable as an apparatus of course extends through life itself. Laura and Alec are tightly controlled by schedule. She can only come to town on Thursdays; he can only work in town on Thursdays. They both live by inflexible temporal imperatives, deeply internalised and unquestionable.

BE works as film because of DL’s interlayering of a mechanistic temporal structure over a filmic creation of worlds. The effect is make a fairytale out of Laura’s subjectivity. The form of BE has the necessary elements: time, as an enforcer is often a critical feature of the fairy tale (Cinderella for instance). And fairy tales are also set in particular worlds or series of worlds: the forest the palace the cottage ( the Twelve Swans). Lean’s filmic vision led him not to centre BE about the somewhat everyday (but very well written) melodrama of an unrequited love affair, but to resolve the story about the setting and timetables of the railway system. Instead of focusing attention on the social and personal moral dilemma of Laura and Alec, he uses film to transform the material into a fairytale set in the dark restless world of the of the railway station where yearning spirits live in fear and trembling of the span of mortal days. BE as an updated and rejigged Little Mermaid.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk