Film Review

Reflections on Fassbinder Season at the Star and Shadow April 09
Fear Eats the Soul; Fox and his Friends; Chinese Roulette; The Marriage of Maria Braun
Tickets for screenings priced at £4-00

Fassbinder and The Phantom Fuhrer

Germany has a long tradition of the myth of the sleeping Emperor. The archetypes are Charlemagne and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa whom tradition held did not die but rather sleeps beneath the Kyffhaeuser Mountain awaiting the Fatherland’s call in time of need.

To see a season of films by a director opens the viewer up to the substance of their ideas and the means they employ to express their concerns. Seeing three of the four Fassbinder (RF) films shown at the Star and Shadow shows how he starts from a situation that he shapes into a proposition, a theorem. The situation is Deutschland.

RF is not the only film maker whose work revolves about this cultural point. The Straubs (Not Reconciled for instance) also have a driving concern with Germany, but for RF the situation of Germany is the pivot on which his work is balanced and levered. The situation that RF sees is summed up in the opening and closing shots of the Marriage of Maria Braun (MMB) The opening shot of movie is of Adolf Hitler, the official touched up photo-portrait that hung in all the registry offices of Der Drittes Reich; the last shots of the movie comprise a series of photos of post war West German Chancellors, and the last photo we see is that of Helmut Schmidt. From Hitler to Schmidt. RF has lead us on a journey from Hitler to Schmidt. But is the journey and its meaning a little more complex than this?

RF is dealing with the psychic forces behind the collective amnesia of his country. This is a people who for ten years were complicit in mass murder, who supported a regime based on terror and genocide. People with blood on their hands. But suddenly after the war with a wave of an American wand they are transformed into good industrious folk, a bulwark of Western-American democracy. All is not just forgiven, it is forgotten. And of course not talked about. The political needs of the West dictated that as per the secret pact at Yalta, Germany be restored to full statehood in the Western sphere of influence, complete with the trappings of democracy to oppose the Eastern hegemony of the USSR. Germany never was allowed the chance to engage and confront its own past. It was sanitised and pushed back into the front line of the cold war kitted out as a key ally of the USA. Germany never had the time to reconcile with its history.

For Fassbinder the inherent tragedy consisted in precisely this: that with the imported capitalist ideology from the USA Germany was given the means to distance disengage and to untangle itself from its past. Germany was bought with a pair of nylon stockings as the USA with the Marshall plan provided the means and policies to transform Germany, at break neck speed, into a capitalist consumer society. At the drop of a hat, its industries, Siemens, BASF, Krupp and many others, which had used slave labour were revived and supported, and millions of apparatniks who had made the Nazi war society work, were reinstated with past wiped clean. Germany never had a chance to find its own way. It was handed back to those who had betrayed it to Hitler and Nazism to feed their greed for power; their appetites would be swelled and their greed would now be assuaged in the coin of the consumer. All forgiven all forgotten. A rotten amoral pact against which Fassbender opposed all of his work.

The more I look at Fassbinders films and the three I viewed were: Fox and his Friends, Chinese Roulette and the Marriage of Maria Braun the more they present themselves as allegories, moral fables with a political point.

Consider the MMB. Hanna Schygulla plays Maria, and struts through the film with a series of hairstyles and beautiful elegant costumes that command the frame. The rate at which Maria switches clothes is almost bewildering. Why? Because Maria Braun is in fact Eva Braun, Hitler’s loyal wife and mistress

The reasons for equating Maria with Eva are cogently present in the film.
The first obvious indicator is that both women share the same name: Braun. That RF should endow his protagonist with the eponymous name of Hitler’s mistress without intending to make this point, is hard to believe. Eva like Maria was married to her husband for only one day and both men are seen for the last time on the day of their wedding. In the opening sequence of MMB Maria’s marriage to Herman is interrupted by the shelling or bombing which destroys the registry office, which situation faithfully replicates the conditions of Eva’s marriage to Adolf characterised by the Russian shelling of the bunker. Eva, like Maria was a one man gal, and both women have a loyalty to their Fuhrer that overrides all other considerations, rational or irrational. Loyal to the grave as they say. They have total belief in their Man, the more so when he is not there for them, allowing them to project an idealised form of His being. Physically Hanna Schygulla who plays Maria certainly resembles Eva Braun whom contemporaries remarked for her huge wardrobe of stylish clothes and her stunning peroxide blond hair that Hitler adored.

I think that MMB is an account of what would have happened to Eva Braun had she survived the Berlin bunker. Maria Braun is a projected future of Eva. Thus conceived the film can be understood as a savage satire on the idea of a Germany that continues to wait for the return of its Fuhrer even when conditions had so changed as to make the prospect of his return a farce. The country remains psychically married to Adolf. MMB filmically is expressed in a naturalistic theatrical form, this form in fact conceals a simple and stylised allegory. In a country characterised by its forgetting Maria/Eva can flourish in a system where an evil ideology has been simply replaced and supplanted by a greed driven capitalistic reward system. The essential congruity of the two superseding systems allows Maria/Eva as everywoman (supported by everyman) to remain true to the Fuhrer – as projection of aspiration. The commitment of Western Germany all through the economic miracle stays true to their architect of hate.

RF in the films that I saw presented at the Star and Shadow is in essence a film maker who works through allegory and the satire that the allegorical form allows.
Chinese Roulette is most obviously an allegorical conceit in which a ‘respectable’ upper middle class couple called the ‘Chirsts’ give birth to a crippled girl child ‘Angela’ who terrorises them. Both the Christs are having affairs and the film’s principle location is an isolated chateau where all the players the Christs their child her carer and their lovers are transposed, under the controlling scrutiny of a dominating concierge/owner and her son. Germany conceived as a psychic prison where there are only questions no one dares pose and questions no one can answer.
A film that works through stylised playing and camera work that nurtures the ideas of intrusive observation alienation and the passage of time.

Fox and His Friends (FHF) like MMB presents in form as a naturalistically composed film but also is an allegory of corruption. Set against the backdrop of the homosexual world Fox is both seduced and traduced by the ethos of materialism which has come to replace fascism as the controlling psychic conforming agent. The principle RF satirises is that in his contemporary Germany the ability to think for oneself is replaced by the automatic adoption of a state of mind that conforms to the current controlling social ethos. In Das Drittes Reich conformity to belief in the Fatherland, the Fuhrer Principle, the Ayrian Racial Superiority was the mechanically adopted mind set and belief system of all who wanted to progress themselves. In FHF it is the dictates of consumerist capitalism that controls the world Fox wishes to be a part of and to which he surrenders himself and which of course eventually destroys him. That FHF is located in the gay world is an expedient that enables RF to make the point of inclusivity, but is not central to the theorem of spiritual corruption.

RF is of course a marvellously fluent filmmaker. His signature cinematic devices involve the use of conceals and reveals, mirrors reflections and tracking shots that are artfully adapted to the allegorical form of these films. The tracks allow different perspectives of the same scene, a deepening of focus and the forces at work, as in the final circular track in CR incorporating movement refraction and reflection. For a film maker working with a double time perspective, mirrors are a central motif. The power of the mirror to suggest time transposed and time distorted, represented by shifts between virtual and actual image. The nature of reflection and refraction to dislocate and shift what we see into a zone ambiguity so that we are uncertain as to how we are seeing and what we are looking at. The power of the mirror to ask what is it that we see and by extension for us to ask of other subjects, what is it they see when they look in the mirror: projection phantom or person? The achievement of RF is that at his best he takes these elemental inputs of cinematography and incorporates them into the fabric of his movies in a unification of content and visual style.

The problem I think RF fails to overcome is the limitations of the allegorical form. Allegory is a unitary figure both in film and literature, a figure that is not easily diversified. In allegory characters tend to be ciphers of the motif. and their role is to do as they are morally bid, not to develop lives of their own. And allegory does not allow rival claims to be made upon her expressive form. Hence there are no subplots or diversions from the unravelling of allegory’s theorem. The three films discussed here all at certain stages ran out of ‘steam’. The allegorical material is exhausted. At which point the films should end, but each of the films had to continue to fill out their logical narrative conclusions. Chinese Roulette has made its point before they play the actual game which exists primarily to caste the question to the swine: “ Which of the top officials in the Third Reich would you have been?” FHF becomes highly repetitive without the corresponding inventiveness of a Voltaire to sustain it. MMB runs out of ideas in the relationship between capitalist Oswald and Maria./Eva.

However Fassbinder in his unswerving moral message and his sublime capacity to create the shots and the scenarios to fulfil this vision is one of the key filmmakers of the twentieth century.
adrin neatrour
adrin@yahoo.co.uk

The Wrestler Darren Aronofsky USA 2008; Mickey Rourke; Marisa Tomei

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Tues 10 March 2009 Ticket price £6.45

Now hair’s a funny thing…

Just as in some stories and myths, the hair of the principle characters is central to plot, Samson the Princess in the Tower, in some films the protagonists are defined by their hairstyles. I thinking of Lucretia Martel’s La Nina Santa and the sensualised locks of Lauren Bacall. In both examples the films flow out of the sensual stylistic visual rhythm of the women’s hair. In viewing the Wrestler it seemed to me the whole of the movie was grounded in Randy’s haircut; a lion’s mane of peroxide tresses swept back from his brow to the base of his spine, a tumbling cascade of energised filaments that defined the man in the movie.

The mass of hair carried by Rourke as Randy the Ram, is a aqueous medium that carries us from affect to idea. His hair, as it is tousled, flung back, shaken. disciplined, splayed out in its magnificence, encased and hidden in protective plastic, coiffured, neglected, leads us to Randy as an objectified entity his hair a metonym for his condition. A shake of his crowned head and his weakness and vulnerability are displayed. His pride and his folly all contained and mediated through the white mass that falls from crown of his head. His hair a badge that has changed from being a showbiz gimmick into the defining elemental substance of his being. A device so central to the film that without it there would be no film. Because it is the hair which we watch and through which imaged cadence we engage with the content.

Although located in the world of wrestling, this is not a film about a world. It’s a film about a situation mediated by a visual device. The situation is that of the complete and devastating isolation of the individual. The matrix of isolation is the culture of the USA where the cult of the individual has overwhelmed the collective instincts and institutions of humankind. Randy’s hair is initially a mark of his individuality adopted to give him a profile that will stand out in the world of World Professional Wrestling. Ironically it is a mark into which his individuality is subsumed and which in time traps him in an image of himself that he cannot escape. Like the salesman’s Lenny in Miller’s play and the characters in Cassavetes Woman under the Influence, we are looking at the effects of a culture in which people are damned to eternal isolation, trapped inside their bodies and left with little more than the justifying shibboleths of capitalism to comfort them.

Randy the Ram has nothing in life except his work, wrestling ,which has come to define him and compress him in a circuit of amplified alienation. Randy although a wrestler could as well be a stock broker or the floorman of a commodities broker. The world of work sold by the culture as the ultimate expression of American identity and individuality involves an adopted enforcement code where there is room for nothing else, neither friends nor family. There are only fellow workers united in the bond that each understands the others situation without being able to do anything about it. The Maysles Brothers doc Salesman (1968) captures the situation. The Wrestler attempts to ground the film in the body with its images of bandages and pain as the by product of the business of wrestling. But this is a false trail. This is a simple American tragedy well trailed and explored by many previous writers. It says nothing new, but maps the spiral path to Randy’s inevitable death. In the Wrestler it is through the medium of the Randy’s white mane which engages us as an optical sign that we follow the course of the tragedy and which as a pure visual contains the film.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A Woman under the Influence – John Cassavetes (USA 1974) Gina Rolands; Peter Falk
Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne; 12 Feb 2009;
Ticket price: £4-00

retrocrit, Adrin Neatrour writes: accept me as I am or leave the cinema.

The wondrous nature of Woman Under the Influence (WUI) is that in its form, as film, WUI replicates in itself the actual state of its subjects’ (Mabel/Nick) responses to the stimuli to which they are exposed.

Created out of intensive workshops involving players director/writer and technical crew, WUI in the nature of its conception, comprises a parallel filmic track of Mabel/Nick’s symptoms of disturbance so fashioned as to mimic its subjects behaviour. WUI does not proceed by orthodox sensory motor linkages but rather by a series of scenes which alternate in presenting to the audience what are predominately pure optical or sound situations. Both WUI, as a film entity and Mabel/Nick, as characters in the film, present what initially seems a disbalanced juxtapositioning of responses. The structural shifts between the world of work and the citadel of home, between her silence and his vociferation seem initially disjointed. However the structure of WUI finally overcomes audience resistance and reveals itself as an intensely vital reaction to the cultural nightmare of individual entrapment and the usual clichéd melodramatic media representation of individual disturbance. The consequence is the audience leaves the cinema with a deepened sense of foreboding about what it has witnessed.

A key scene takes place in the first part of the film in which Nick (Mabel’s husband), in the morning brings home the 8 men of his work gang to eat after a hard nights emergency work. (He tells them she’s a good wife but sometimes acts a bit strange) The men turn up at the door, like Medieval warriors, and enter the house where Mabel cooks spaghetti for them. The long scene takes place in the dining room where Mabel presides at the head of the long table. These are all people who know each other to some extent but are not necessarily comfortable with each other. In the typical Hollywood sensory motor schema the scene would be characterised by the banter of naturalistic dialogue. But Cassavetes solution is to treat it initially as a pure optical situation. It is what we see that is important: the body language, the clothes. the shapes and ethnicity of the faces, these are what stamp their impression on the first part of this scene. Something is happening. The scene then suddenly switches in form. WUI changes from being a pure optical into a pure sound situation as one by one the men take turns to sing starting with one man’s rendering of a Verdi aria. Drawn by the power of the voice, Mabel gets up and approaches each of the singers, mutely, getting so close to them that it is as if she wants to get inside them to discover where this beautiful music is coming from. Her behaviour engenders what Nick sees as inappropriate physical contact and triggers a terse verbally violent control move on his part. WUI presents a pure optical situation transmuting into a pure sound situation that leads to a dramatic resolution.

WUI uses this splitting of optical and sound situations to realise dramatic form throughout the film. The children’s party sequence, the committal sequence, the family parties are all constituted as separations of sound and picture. The creation of composition out of sound and optical elements changes the experience of time. The long takes comprising only compositional elements become time images, sequences in which we are as conscious of time as a dynamic in the process rather than action. It seems to me critical that both of understanding both WUI and the mental disturbances which it answers, can only be understood in the context of time – the dimension missing from most action/image films.

Mabel and Nick’s behaviour like WUI’s form is also composed through explorations of discrete optical and sound representation. Roland’s presents a predominantly optical presentation of Mabel, a characterisation she has created to be visually experienced by the audience. Her dresses, her faces, her positioning in the room (standing on the couch for instance) and her gestural responses constitute a filmically pure visual series of statements. When she switches to a vocal mode, as when playing with the children, the sounds she makes are emitted as a series of nonsensical utterances: an abstracted sound. The strength in the film lies in the playing of Mabel as a pure optical situation, a series of responses that render her mute as her dilemma is a classic double bind of the expectations laid upon her (also in the same way as there is no defence against the accusation of witchcraft, so there is no defence against the accusation of insanity). In contrast Falk plays Nick as a sound events. Nick is constituted out of utterances composed from bewilderment, aggression and violence. There are a couple of occasions in which his uncomprehending rage bursts out into a physical assault on Mabel. But for the most part he is a pure sound system in as much as what he says matters less than the tone, the pitch rhythm pace of his utterances. His meaning (though not always unimportant) is less significant than his expressive vocal mode.

In a radical filmic manner, John Cassavetes actors and crew are saying that to understand what is going on you have to be there looking listening, observing the forces in play.

When I wrote about the workmen as being like warriors and Mabel’s silence reminding me of the witch’s dilemma in defending herself I was alluding to something within the film that suggested to me a phantom Medieval dislocation that is inherent to the film’s dynamic. I think there is a powerful medieval logic working through the film. WUI points up one archetypal situation that can arise when power relations between men and women go out of joint: Demonisation. The spaghetti banquet, the children’s party (‘the child is naked’) and in particular the committal sequence are all pertinent sequences in the film portrayed as in the evidence and process of a witchcraft trial. In the committal sequence, Nick’s mother in allure and expression takes on the mask of an embittered old female accuser, a turncoat informer witch, accusing and giving evidence against her enemy as revenge for Mabel’s threatening sexuality (wearing short skirts); the doctor figure looks like a fanatical Dominican monk exorcising demons. The actors, in particular Rolands may have consciously modelled their Medieval witch trial interpretations of these scenes as part of their workshopping of the material. For instance at the height of the committal scene Mabel uses the index fingers of her right and left hands to form a cross which she holds up to protect herself against the encroachment of the Doctor.

The use of a Medieval paradigm to drive the drama not only corresponds to the contemporary sensibility of understanding witchcraft as a question of gender politics but also makes of WUI answer to a moral rather than a medical question. WUI as created by Cassavetes Roland and Falk is a moral concern with the catastrophic social developments of contemporary USA and the terrible personal price paid for a culture and society that has gone terrible wrong. A society that has taken from people the core of their collective and communal life and given them in return the empty shibboleths of American individuality.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Slumdog Millionaire Danny Boyle, Lovelen Tanden (2008 UK India) Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Medhu Mittal
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 26 Jan 09 Ticket price £6.65

Disneyfication of India

Watching the early establishment sequence in Slumdog Millionaire (SM) where we are introduced to the Mumbai slum background of Jamal and Salim the tone the look and style of the film immediately referenced Disney and the Jungle Book. The doe eyed innocence and the stylised quality of innate goodness with which Jamal is imbued by script and camera suggested a filmic reincarnation of Mowgli. SM on reflection presented as a farrago of borrowed qualities taking its characterisation from a Disneyfied Kipling, its narrative form from Dickens via Lionel Bart and its structure from the pop video. No wonder it’s so popular. But this mare’s nest of creative inputs makes it a film driven by production values and stylistic gloss, abetted by its intercut structure, rather than a film with the energy and authenticity of voice that characterised some of Danny Boyle’s (DB) earlier work such as Train Spotting. And the price paid for this treatment is a cheapening of a country and its culture rather than a deepening of understanding.

The current solution to story structure adopted by much of the mainstream film Industry is to construct film narrative along parallel strips of action comprising of a number of ‘presents’ or different ‘sheets of past’. The director is then in a position to use montage to exploit and manipulate the viewers, through the shifting of the film’s focus. The parallel story structure also provides an endless stream of opportunities for directors to energise their films through the manifold cutting opportunities offered by the manifold permutations of time and place. This is precisely the structural solution adopted by DB in MS.

This form of filmmaking takes its current inspiration from the pop video which adopted the form of twin or multi track parallel visuals to manipulate and hold attention in the adolescent market place. The rapid cutting style solves the problem of keeping the audience attention. The opening sequences of SM intercut the Game Show with the torture chamber, deliberate choice of radically contrasted settings which as well as getting the film of to dynamic start also gives a message that it is the director who will pull all the strings: there is not going to be much for the audience to think about.

As is it is in the beginning so it is throughout SM. The film cutz from the Game Show to the interrogation to the long back story which links all the story tracks. The problem with the structure is that it never allows any of its sections the space to develop organically; the sections are all reduced to being component parts of the SM machine. Mechanically scripted and played out by the actors so that the SM’s final scene can be delivered in its wrap. In consequence The Game Show and the torture /interrogation sequences are little more than leaden badly acted parodies. Except for their role as parts of the SM machine, they have little intrinsic value. Of course the structure of the film is used to hide this bare mechanicality as audience attention is manipulated by the way the film is cut. But even so the continual cutting does start to obey the laws of decreasing returns, as the cuts back and forth to and fro became increasingly predicable and automate.

The back story itself the childhood and adolescence of Jamal and Salim is simple cod Dickens. It is supplied. naturally, with appropriate villains, an evil Mumbai ‘Fagin’character, and realistic settings. Like the sets in the musical Oliver, the SM settings, slums, modern day Mumbai, have the ‘wow’ factor but no context. The SM settings are no more than theatrical backdrops which have become the dark side of a world cinema whose production lust for confective atmosphere drives producers and directors around the world in search of ever more authentic sexy locations for the gaze of the audience, that lend themselves to decontextualisation. For instance although Indian audiences will understand the nature of the mob violence that kills Jamal and his brother’s mother, Western audiences will not understand that these were Hindu led pogroms against Moslems and that this is critical to knowing some of the social strains defining India. Although it exploits the real, the real is not DB’s concern any more than it is Disney’s concern in Jungle Book. What we are watching is in fact are the forces in play in the Disneyfication of India. India, a land of poor but essentially happy people, where the bad people get their comeuppance and the good folk live in a haze of music and happy endings.

As SM develops it is clear that the music and style are heavily influenced by the pop video and in the last sequence what had been threatening to happen all through the film finally takes place; the film breaks out , like a butterfly, and shows itself as pure pop promo. As In Zatoichi its an all singing dancing finale which castes all that had gone before it as a sort of pupae for its ultimate destiny.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette) – Vittoria de Sica Italy 1948; Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 23 Dec 08. Ticket price: £6-65

Retrocrit: seeing as thinking

There is one shot that takes place in the first reel of Bicycle Thieves (BT) that serves as a concentration and encapsulation of the film’s creative endeavour and as a visual realisation of its creative concerns.

Maria Ricci hands her husband Antonio her wedding dowry, their quality cotton and linen bed sheets, to take to the pawnbrokers, so that he can use the money to redeem his bicycle. He hands over the bundle of bedding to the ledger clerk in exchange for 7500 lira. Going through the building on his way to redeem his bicycle he passes a doorway that leads to the cavernous interior of the pawnbroker’s storage area. As Antonio stops and looks in the film cuts to a point of view shot. From Antonio’s point of view we see a huge set of storage shelves, perhaps ten or more meters long and nine stacks high filled with nothing other than bedding. A figure enters the space with the bundle of bedding that Antonio has just pledged; using the foot rests attached to the mountain of shelving the figure climbs up this huge structure and deposits the Ricci family’s wedding dowry in a space on a shelf near the top.

The characteristic feature of this shot is the way it is executed and editorially structured to represent the point of view of Antonio. Antonio doesn’t say what he sees. He does not tell us what he thinks. The premise of the movie is: we see what he sees. And in seeing what he sees we are given an opening into his state of mind as he carries on with his business at the pawn broker. We are present with Antonio, experiencing his thoughts and ideas, even though they may perhaps be unformed. We, audience, in seeing as Antonio sees also have thoughts, perhaps also elusive and unformed about what we are seeing. And in this tacit dialogue with Antonio the film allows us to experience a state of mind and related emotive responses that are triggered by the world of the pawn shop. The stimulus of this world engenders different sorts of thoughts. For instance from one point of view there is some reassurance that the vast bureaucracy that comprises the pledge business looks after your property and knows where to locate it when you come back to get it out of hock. Another thought triggered by the experience is the overwhelming nature of need served by this business, which reflects the desperate situation of the country where thousands of people are reduced to having to sell their bed linen. The thought occurs that the individual is simply one amongst millions struggling to survive; an insignificant cell in a body of poverty and social deprivation. Yet for all that an individual in the world making sense of the world.

Bicycle Thieves is about thoughts and states of mind that are engendered through visual and audio situations in the worlds that are discovered uncovered and explored through the course of the movie. The psychological linkages are weak in the sense that it is the audience through what is framed by the camera and who through the medium of the main character, have to make connections between thoughts ideas emotions and actions. The determining elements in the film are weak and the audience cannot be certain about their understanding of what they see; though BT’s structure of opening up worlds, allows them the privilege of entering into open dialogues of possibilities through and with the characters.

By contrast in a recent Italian film Gomorrah (G) by Matteo Garrone, all the connections are strong. The characters and the situations allow of no ambiguity; they are simply stereotypes with the usual strong linkages. The meaning of Gomorrah is simplistically located within the action; in the main the banality of gangsters killing gangsters. In BT the worlds do not impose themselves, they insinuate themselves into the viewers consciousness through medium of the point of view of the actors. which allows a number of potential meanings to be construed. The housing estate, the pawn shop the markets the church the faith healer the restaurant are all worlds about which the audience can make their own evaluations. But we do so tempered by the state of mind of Antonio and Bruno. We will bring our own prejudices to understanding these worlds; but in BT they are never locked down as clichés in the main because their salient features take meaning from the particular point of view of Antonio and Bruno. In G worlds are presented in a quite other manner. The architecture for instance is presented not through the eyes of the players but as a determining background to action which establishes buildings and locations as having significance. The film bestows signification upon the depicted brutalist architecture, which becomes a sign pointing to a particular cause and effect: brutalist buildings create brutal conditions create brutal people. Lacking in Gomorrah are any mechanisms for linking the characters thoughts and ideas and states of mind to the situation in which they find themselves. The poorer for it, G is simply little more than a sausage machine churning out action image sausages.

BT under de Sica’s direction (and there are also seven credited writers) is a strip of action exploring through a period of some 48 hours Rome in 1947. In a way there is no story just a human situation which allows some of the many worlds of Rome to be opened up to us through the instrument of a human dilemma. Central to the enterprise is not the social setting of the film, the hard condition of the working class, or its use of non professional actors and actual locations. What is central to BT is the way it is shot to release a dialogue between the players and the audience in which the state of mind of the players and the meanings and emotions felt are central and the use of worlds not as signs, but as sources of pure audio and visual experience.

When I left the cinema I met some friends who commented that the film had a sad ending. The last sequence in BT shows Antonio’s unsuccessful attempt to steal a bicycle, witnessed by his young son Bruno. He is caught red handed: a humiliating experience but one from which Antonio escapes without police involvement. The final shot shows the rear a large crowd of people moving slowly away from the camera. The crowd: everyone ultimately in Rome is part of this huge shuffling moving social body of people. However I didn’t think that you could construe sadness from this final sequence. Or at least not a sadness that might have lasting and defining impact on the relationships in the film. The reason being that BT had woven far too complex a pattern of reciprocating ties between Antonio and Bruno, for Antonio’s failed theft to be understood as having only one meaning in relation to emotional construct, either in relation to his own psyche and state of mind or the relationship between him and Bruno. Without going down the path of imagining other possible interpretations that might arise out of the incident of the failed theft (for instance a deepening of wisdom and compassion in Bruno for the situation of his dad) all that can be said is that the films ends at this point and nothing more is shown. But in the course of the film we have learnt something. And so perhaps have the characters.

There are many intensely enjoyable vignettes throughout the movie; characters glimpsed from other worlds: the lovers by the river, the wife of the suspected bicycle thief in the market screaming at Antonio that she didn’t ask him his shoe size so why should he ask her the serial number of the bike; the rich boy in the restaurant. But one small piece of action I particularly enjoyed was the incident when Antonio sets off from the apartment to go to work. He tries to take Maria by surprise with a kiss but she fights him off with vigour and energy. When she has stopped him they face each other, look each other in the eye and then kiss, with passion. Maria is the type of woman who will only accept a kiss on her own terms: terms of equality.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Waltz with Bashir – Ari Fisher (2008 Israel) Animation using testimony from Israeli soldiers who fought in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Not so much Waltz with Bashir, rather Tango with False Memory Syndrome.

AT the heart of Waltz with Bashir is a fundamental philosophical problem. If you have lost your memory of certain traumatic events, how do you know whether any of your ‘retrieved’ memories of the events are true or false?

In Waltz with Bashir (WB) I have to conclude that Ari Fisher, in failing to address even obliquely, fundamental issues relating to memory retrieval, uses animation as a means of reducing history to a Disneyfication process. That is to say WB turns the real events and the people involved into displaced de-intensified images that tell a story that is a travesty of truth: in effect he uses graphics imagery to muddy the real and to misrepresent the actual.

I noted that whereas the film tells its story of the war, using the metaphor of memory retrieval, reliant only on animation, Fisher lays aside this stylised format at the end of the film when we see the consequences of the Israeli sponsored Phalangist massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The final pictures of this slaughter are not ‘toons’ but actual images. The stylised animation of WB cannot ‘contain’ the real human effects of the Israeli sponsored slaughter: any attempt to convey these scenes using ‘toons’ would at once reveal the immoral impoverished and dishonest nature of employing animation to retrieve history. Hence at the click of a mouse, for the final sequence, Fisher abandons animation and cuts to archive footage of the bodies and the mourning broken Palestinian women. Of course once the cut to ‘the real’ is made, there is no way back to the funky little line drawings that represent ‘the human’ in the film; so the movie has to end.

Before WB begins there is a statement of intent, a sort of disclaimer, that reads, white on black: “This film is an attempt to recover the memories of a young soldier in the 1982 Lebanese War.” Of course memory retrieval here feels like a metaphor for a wider forgetting by Israeli society, perhaps not only of the atrocities they sponsored during the invasion of Lebanon but also of the traumatic psychological damage done to their young men who were both invaders and witnesses to the criminal activity at Sabra and Shatila. Memory retrieval however is not a straight forward process. It is a process in which there is no guarantee that memories retrieved and lodged in the mind will be truthful. In fact there is strong evidence from clinical studies to show that false memories can be easily absorbed and assimilated into identity by compliant minds. Judging by the evidence presented in WB, this movie is about the absorbion and internalisation of false memory.

The reason for this conclusion is that at the heart of the movie is a major provable historical error. There is a lie at the heart of the film. The memory retrieved by Fisher of the Palestinian camp massacres was that they took place over one night. This allows for a plausible Israeli claim that, by the time they realised that a massacre had been perpetrated by their allies the Phalangists, it was too late to prevent. The Israelis would still have to explain: their use of flares to light up the camp so that the Phalangists could see their way around; the Israeli blockade of the camps to prevent any Palestinians escaping; and the presence of senior Israeli officers on the roofs of strategically placed high buildings overlooking the camps. But the time factor as represented in the film is critical to the Israeli plea for mitigation of their failure to stop the Phalangist revenge. But the duration of the massacres is misrepresented in WB. The massacres took place over two nights; two nights of killings and Israeli collusion with the slaughter. There is no plausibility to Israeli claims that there was not time enough for them to comprehend that massacre was taking place in the Palestinian camps. They had all the time they needed to intervene if they had chosen so to do. They chose not to. So WB is exposed as a metaphor not for memory retrieval but the Israeli need to implant false memory into its collective history to shield itself from the shame of complicity in the slaughter of defenceless innocents.

The use of filmed animation technique to paint a picture of and hear the voices of historical events is I think highly problematic. WB has an opening that shows us a pack of bestial dogs running wild through an urban setting. It is sequence that would not be out of place in either Lady and the Tramp or 101 Dalmatians. The dogs, figments of a dream, eventually lead us to the main character, represented as a two dimensional line drawn figure, the main character author and film maker Ari Fisher, whose quest is to recover his memory of the 1982 Lebanon war. Fisher’s journey through the ‘toon’ landscape of war leads him back to his ex-comrades, and their witnessing and testimony; and like him rendered in the form of drawn simulacra. These simulacra, the ex-soldiers give accounts of their experiences in the war. And as they so do, they assist Fisher rebuild his own memory (or perhaps false memory) of the events.

The problem presented by these line drawn simulacra is one of credibility. Animated figures, testifying on film can be given little credibility by the viewer. The problem is that each of the individuals, represented as simulacra of themselves, carry as much resemblance to themselves as human entities as do the drawn dogs to a real pack of baying hounds. However the dogs are drawn they still look like Disney creations; the vital animal nature of their dogness is absent. Anthropomorphic qualities displace and abstract their dogness. The problems presented by animal simulacra are replicated but compounded many fold when we try to appraise the testimony of the animated interviewees, the avatars of ex comrades that Fisher seeks out in the two dimensional world of WB .

Words are fragile things. The more so when we want to appraise and evaluate their worth and weight, and when we know that those speaking the words may have good reason to mispresent or distort what they say, either with or without self belief. When we see actual people interviewed we can appraise their responses and statements by some monitoring of body language, by observing pauses and hesitations, verbal errors etc. With the use of simulacra in WB none of this is possible. There is in fact little of the human in their spoken transcripts: no humour, no irony no uncertainties. Just a two dimensional flat line phonetic rendering of testimony as monotonous as the picture. Further when we see interviews on film conducted in the flesh, we can at least see where there have been cuts and edits of the material. When the interview is represented in animation everything in the editing process is opaque, hidden from the scrutiny of the viewer who has no means of re-marking anything in the editorial process.

For myself, WB represents a distressing mode of quasi-documentary form. The film is caste as a heroic quest by one man for the truth But with actual human input represented by the use of line drawn figures and all the tricks of drawn facial manipulation to depict emotional honesty and candour, Fisher has produced a film in which the heroic national quest is for false memory and the fake replaces the real at the core of historical experience.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Telling Tales of Torture, by Tom Jennings

Iraq, 2003. Thousands of fleeing civilians and comparable numbers rounded up on extremely tenuous suspicion of involvement in the full-scale insurgency cower at its epicentre in Abu Ghraib prison between Baghdad and Fallujah under constant mortar attack and with guards outnumbered several hundreds to one. Ranking Guantanamo veterans and military, CIA and privately-contracted interrogators parachute in to extract information by any means necessary, backed by the Commander-in-Chief and his White House cronies with policies trashing the Geneva Convention. A contingent of young army grunts fresh to this hellhole witness the routine humiliation, torture and murder of detainees. Some complain, but are told it’s their professional and moral duty as warriors for liberty, and with varying degrees of diligence and enthusiasm comply with orders to ‘soften up’ prisoners using ‘standard operating procedures’ devised by superiors. Still partially disbelieving, many shoot cameraphone stills and videos of the planned and sanctioned insanity. These then leak into the public domain, and the rest is history – which director Errol Morris proceeds to comprehensively dissect in his new cinema documentary.

Standard Operating Procedure centres around spoken testimony from five of the seven low-ranking ‘bad apples’ scapegoated by subsequent inquiries. Sergeant Charles Graner and Ivan Frederick – ringleaders choreographing the sexualised humiliation rituals – were still in jail, but Javal Davis, Sabrina Harman (notoriously smiling thumbs-up over a murdered ‘ghost’ detainee unlisted in prison records), Lynndie England (with hooded prisoner on leash), Megan Ambuhl (now married to Graner; supervising with Harman and England the ‘human pyramid’ of naked Iraqi men) and Roman Krol feature, as do several other former military police alongside their Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski (now demoted to colonel) and the Criminal Investigation Division’s Brent Pack (who assisted the prosecutors) [1]. The interviews – filmed using Morris’ famed Interrotron, whereby interviewees answer straight to camera while actually seeing the questioner – and the gigantised iconic snapshots and video clips (some never seen before in mainstream media) are supplemented by staged ‘illustrations’ of the events described, with ominously-lit widescreen cinematography and melodramatic score reconfiguring Abu Ghraib’s bedlam as sinister gothic otherworld.

The film’s rendering of human beings in an inhuman situation rather than emblems of evildoing erodes stereotypes of underclass psychopaths relishing malevolence, despite rationalisations of unconscionable cruelty characterised by ambivalence, alienation and disgust at themselves, colleagues, and military and government hierarchies as well as towards purported enemies. Facing uncertain prospects for physical and career survival, the pathetic patriotic training-camp pep-talk of ‘noble causes’ couldn’t completely erase their intelligence and sensitivity or fully underwrite the twisted sadism required of them. And certainly neither could it equip them to comprehend their later demonisation without hefty doses of the bitter fatalistic cynicism and resentful detachment radiating from them now. So letters home from Sabrina Harman to her partner support her assertion that, whereas she saw no option but to follow orders, the photographs were intended as proof of what occurred. Naturally she didn’t imagine them scuppering an otherwise successful cover-up orchestrated by her top-brass – explicitly commanding all relevant visual evidence destroyed once the shit hit the fan – or that she would end up in the dock when those who actually tortured, maimed and killed detainees were never even considered targets of justice. In that sense, then, the whitewash worked.

Telling Tales of Torture

Thus far may have sufficed for your bog-standard crusading investigator exposing the stitch-up of relatively defenceless underlings as primary villains of the piece – their bosses all the way to the top wriggling and squirming behind pseudo-legalistic sophistry while pinning medals on each other. But ex-private eye Morris always digs deeper to deconstruct the framing of images (as well as of people) and their deployment in media and informational management to advance institutional interests – The Thin Blue Line (1988) famously saving the life of a prisoner on Death Row, and the Oscar-winning The Fog Of War (2003) laying bare the delusional arrogance of the powerful in the person of Robert McNamara (one of the US government architects of the Vietnam War). Here the material leads in many fascinating directions – most only hinted at, such as the much-vaunted prominence of women in the US armed forces unraveling into archetypal virgins (e.g. Jessica Lynch subjected to faked ‘rescue’ by US Special Forces), witches (Karpinski as ‘bad mother’) and whores (Harman et al fucking with Iraqi men’s heads); yet all, of course, puppet-mastered by patriarchs large and/or small-minded.
In interviews Morris emphasises that ‘The Photographs Actually Hide Things From Us’ [2] and a rare achievement of his film is showing this awareness emerging naturally among the MP patsies, irrespective of philosophically sophisticated ruminations on virtual hyperreality and spectacle [3]. To Ambuhl, “The pictures only show you a fraction of a second. You don’t see forward, you don’t see behind, you don’t see outside the frame”; Harman concludes “The military is nothing but lies. I took these photos to show what the military’s really really like”; and England shrugs, “It’s drama, it’s life” – cementing the theme of fictionalisation at all levels. The questioning thus extends beyond why these particular images arose, survived and proliferated, to not only their editing and incorporation into discourses concerning the war but, most crucially, what focusing on them as the ‘truth’ of the matter therefore facilitated being excluded from consideration. More conventionally worthy efforts sometimes tackle such complexity – such as the Tate Modern media art exhibition 9 Scripts from a Nation At War [4], which presents the thoughts of various protagonists and observers with different positions, perspectives and prevailing understandings of the Iraq conflict. But the visceral impact of Standard Operating Procedure undermines any simplistic or transparent relationship between information and scientific ‘reality’, exposing the manner of its manipulation in wider structures of contemporary power.

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Notes
1. The book version, Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story by Philip Gourevitch & Errol Morris (Picador, 2008), integrates the participant accounts of the operation of Abu Ghraib’s torture regime gathered in research for the film.
2. see, for example, www.greencine.com/central/morrissop for a comprehensive discussion.
3. An exhaustive analysis of Sabrina Harman and the Cheshire Cat McGuffin of‘that’ smile can be found in Morris’ New York Times blog (‘The Most Curious Thing’ at http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/).
4. June-August 2008; see Imogen O’Rorke’s review, ‘Flipping the Script’ at www.metamute.org.

for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

New Wave Goodbye, by Tom Jennings

East Midlands film-maker Shane Meadows has consistently crafted acutely-observed studies of the effects of capitalism’s structural adjustment in contemporary Britain where it has hit hardest in post-industrial working-class communities – his distinctive theme being male efforts at forging functional social networks to survive drudgery and despair under pressure from both material and psychic infrastructures decaying beyond repair. In scripts co-written with Paul Fraser, sharp wit and spot-on dialogue retain affection for and empathy with realistically conflicted characters while developing an understated but sophisticated understanding of personal pain – contriving hope without either pretension or patronisation. After the micro-financed Small Time (1996) captured aimless slacking and scamming on a Notts sink estate, Twenty Four Seven (1997) focussed on Bob Hoskins’ boxing club keeping kids (and himself) out of trouble, before A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) delved deeper into absent/bad father dialectics spinning teenage friendship and family breakdown. Then the bigger-budget Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) wove ersatz Western heroics into humble romantic comedy – falling rather naffly flat in the process – before the darker Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) convincingly twisted generic macho conventions with Paddy Considine’s Falklands vet relentlessly avenging his intellectually-challenged kid brother’s victimisation.

Returning to intimate resonance, the partly-autobiographical skinhead story This Is England (2006; discussed in Freedom, 30th June and 14th July 2007) more successfully conveyed modern social and political interconnectivity. Now, before the long-planned King of the Gypsies (about a bare-knuckle prize-fighter from Meadows’ hometown of Uttoxeter), Somers Town visits pastures new – geographically, anyway – exploiting cinema history with renewed confidence to widen the narrative remit. Here, sixteen year-old Tommo (Thomas Turgoose) abandons Nottingham after a miserable childhood. Cheeky likeability doesn’t prevent him from succumbing to the mean streets of London, however, and on his first night after arriving at Kings Cross station he’s beaten-up by local thugs who steal his belongings. Meanwhile introverted Polish adolescent Marek (Piotr Jagiello) spends lonely days photographing the titular square-mile between Euston and St Pancras his brickie dad Marius (Ireneusz Czop) is working overtime to help gentrify – in particular taking countless snaps of Maria (Elisa Lasowski), a French greasy-spoon waitress he has a crush on. The unlikely lads hook up and vie for her attentions in between skivvying for low-rent spiv Graham (Perry Benson), and Marek smuggles Tommo into his room unbeknownst to Marius. The arrangement goes pear-shaped when they drunkenly wreck the flat after Maria suddenly disappears back to Paris, whereupon Graham puts Tommo up and he and Marek fantasise reunion with her courtesy of Eurostar.

New Wave Goodbye

Despite its deceptively light touch, slender running time (71 minutes) and generally life-affirming tone, Somers Town harbours more interesting undercurrents than may be initially apparent. As usual the comic accuracy of the banter is enhanced by improvisation, so that the subtle, engaging performances render somewhat unbelievable relationships satisfying and highlight the many set-piece gags and pratfalls. Moreover, Meadows’ trademark attention to details of place and movement within neglected and transitional spaces offers crucial small measures of freedom otherwise belied by heavy constraints on possible action. But the film transcends even these worthy (if parochial) achievements by deftly incorporating moods, scenarios and developments originally deployed in a whole swathe of distinctive European social-realist codes – the viewer’s long experience of which (irrespective of awareness) prompting specific expectations that can then be played with. Yet such elements are not flaunted with knowing postmodern flash and artifice. Instead they emerge unobtrusively and organically in the characters’ trajectories through happenstance, idle choice or practical necessity – and never distort or mystify a story more salient to the world-weary disoriented DIY cynicism of this rotten new millennium than the over-simplistic clean-cut idealism of the last century’s angry young grammar-school graduates marching into the media.

So, minimal co-ordinates would include postwar Italian neo-realism’s naturalistic portraits of hard labour and even grimmer class and gender norms yielding stoic tragedies of wasted life, shading into 1950s Northern UK kitchen-sink protagonists impotently banging heads against the brick walls of an unjust status quo. And whereas the French New Wave’s iconic Jules et Jim et al shocked elders and betters with rebellious lifestyles, London’s Swinging Sixties dreamt of dissolving all tradition in consumer ecstasy while Polish and Czech experiments with black-and-white expressionism and surrealism were soon crushed by Stalinism. Traces of all these dimensions and levels of cultural rites of passage converge and collide here – referencing universal youthful naïvete morphing into adult disillusionment as well as the hopes and fears of 20th century social democracy’s disappointed children, and perhaps also Shane Meadows’ own directorial maturity in wielding such weighty themes in a whimsically subversive response to Eurostar’s tainted shilling commissioning a cool art-film to feed corporate vanity. As for the prognosis – for the likes of Tommo and Marek, and the rest of us – it may be naïve to predict we won’t get fooled again. But if false promises of consumerism are capitalism’s carrot, its stick is the engineered destruction of lifeworlds – and Somers Town sensibly suspends any resolution even when the die is decisively cast in the real location. Nevertheless the film clearly proffers horizontal rather than upward mobility, and collective as opposed to individual engagement, as the only realistically productive options.

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

Nils All, by Tom Jennings

Salles reunites with long-term collaborator Thomas in the low-key social realism of early successes Foreign Land (1996) and Central Station (1999), which skilfully knit together narratives of everyday life in portraying the contemporary history of Brazil from the bottom-up. Linha De Passe is therefore an interesting contrast to both the director’s recent films – Behind The Sun’s (2001) intense magical-realist village vendetta, the fluffy tourist portrayal of young Che in Motorcycle Diaries (2004), and the naff Japanese ghost-story remake Dark Water (2005) – as well as lurid contemporary stylisations of ‘favela chic’ in City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002), City of Men (Paolo Morelli, 2007), and Elite Squad (Jose Padilha, 2008). The new release combines true-life scenarios, sophisticated construction, inspired cinematography and editing, and sympathetic casting and direction to avoid the overblown grandiosity and simplistic social stasis of these other films, while exploring individuality and collectivity via twin metaphors of family and football to illuminate with great humility social complexity and potential. Moreover the title has several ‘beautiful game’ connotations – from ‘keepy-uppy’ and developing teamwork to a wider philosophy of transcendence – but a resolute refusal of ‘Roy of the Rovers’ cliches make this, to my mind, the best football film ever.

Nils All

Single-matriarch cleaner Cleuza (a majestic Sandra Corveloni, best actress winner at Cannes) is pregnant by a fifth different absent father after another escape into drunken delirious fandom. She struggles to hold together four sons in a decrepit concrete shanty in Sao Paolo: Dario’s neighbourhood ball-playing genius, at eighteen too old to break into the minor leagues; Dinis’ womanising motorcycle courier, already with a child he can’t support, turns to violent car-crime; Dinho’s petrol-pump jockey looks to evangelical religion; and Reginaldo, the youngest, truants on local buses searching for his Black father. The petty filial conflicts and fierce loyalty, oscillating between selfishness, spite and big-heartedness, of these young working-class men with few prospects beyond endless drudgery – but still varying measures of agency – are seamlessly interwoven so as to deny neither crushing frustration nor the stubborn intelligence, resourcefulness and determination of lower-class life. A homage to the Italian neorealist classic Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960), Linha De Passe thus trumps its negativity – though the fairytale denouement of Dario getting a break and scoring the winning goal is hedged with cautionary suspicion that the pervasive corruption of the sport’s institutions will smother him. Meanwhile Cleuza gives birth screaming, Dinis decides he can’t hack wrecking people’s lives, Dinho assaults his boss, and diminutive Reginaldo drives away a bus in search of past, present and future …

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org

Hardboiled and Hardwired, by Tom Jennings

Mobilising the distinctive features of Iceland’s insular history and comparatively recent breakneck modernisation, Baltasar Kormákur’s 101 Reykjavik (2000) cleverly spun indie cinema’s staple of aimless slackers from dysfunctional families adrift in trendy youth culture. Heavily indebted to Pedro Almodóvar’s subversions of social and sexual conformism in contemporary Spain, he has continued to mine the tragic farces of kinship in sundry genres – from The Sea’s (2002) sins-of-the-patriarch saga to stock white-trash grifters in the over-Hollywoodised A Little Trip to Heaven (2005). Now, the debut’s counterpointing of harsh Icelandic geography and the long-suffering travails of its inhabitants returns with a vengeance – both literally and metaphorically – in another crime thriller scenario in Jar City, based on a novel by Arnaldur Indridasun. Here, however, while still brim-full of manipulative melodrama and mordant humour, there is also a recurring poignancy which transcends the director’s earlier comic misanthropy – evoking empathy for otherwise thoroughly unlikeable characters whose misery seems both self-inflicted and pre-ordained.

The film’s sense of stifling structural determination is enhanced by Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson’s alternately majestic aerial pans across the Arctic landscape (with dramatic choral score) and claustrophobic interior cinematography. We descend into this forbidding environment via a grotty urban basement with dour world-weary detective Erlendur (Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson) expressing disgust at a “typical Icelandic murder – messy and pointless”. Lonely lowlife lorry-driver Holberg’s skull was caved in with his own ashtray, but the sole crime-scene clues are a penchant for porn and a decades-old photo of the grave of a child – whose later exhumation shows her brain removed before burial. Meanwhile genetic database administrator Orn (Atli Rafn Sigurdarson) obsessively mourns his young daughter succumbing to the same rare brain condition. These threads dovetail as the investigation implicates Holberg’s old criminal muckers – but one (the country’s “most notorious maniac”) is now in prison and the other found hidden under Holberg’s floor having been killed years earlier. Suspicions of their past sexual violence then also evaporate once a search for rape victims yields only Orn’s mother disclosing hitherto concealed youthful indiscretions. Realising Orn has independently pieced together his real parentage and killed Holberg (as we see in flashback), Erlendur is too late to prevent his suicide which extinguishes the catastrophic bloodline.

Hardboiled and Hardwired

The domestic box-office success of this entertaining and accomplished movie testifies to the strong resonance of thematic concerns which have wider, even universal, relevance. The obvious hook is the Icelandic DNA mapping project run by private company deCODE Genetics Inc, with the usual hype promising medical revelation via Big Pharma’s monopoly over life’s biological substrates – despite its empirical basis being as dangerously shaky as the governmental thirst for scientific population management supposedly necessitating exhaustive identity intrusion. But the title namechecks Reykjavik’s repository of the treasure troves of previous generations of pathologists – endless samples of pickled organs, etc – whose fleshy monstrosity now upgrades to sanitised digital simulacra. As Erlendur has it: “Tragedies, sorrows, and death, all carefully classified in computers. Family stories and stories of individuals. Stories about me and you. You keep the whole secret and can call it up whenever you want. A Jar City for the whole nation”. Whereas the novel was originally called Myrin (‘the marshes’ of Iceland’s lowland) – more sharply capturing the complacent edifices of our time built upon far murkier, unstable foundations; with the brave new hi-tech rhetoric merely a clinical corporate veneer on persistent older fictions which regiment racial purity, moral health and social conduct to suit the reproduction of hierarchy.
The point, of course, is that whatever significance is ascribed to the role of genetics, it’s what people do with such ideas that really matters. And the attitudes of those involved in the plodding investigation here revolve around a comparable jarring of inward- and backward-looking fatalistic conservatism against the demands of an uncomfortable present and uncertain future. So prevailing homespun wisdom about dark deeds misguidedly blames the dire products of ‘tainted blood’ on “incest, rape, or foreigners” – thus attributing to biological imperative various skeletons actually closeted by purely cultural prejudice. Meanwhile dialogue is peppered with the detectives’ banter concerning their own and the suspects’ personalities and tastes, with his assistants’ contrasting narcissisic yuppie pretensions and sympathetic no-nonsense womanly intelligence offsetting Erlendur’s authoritative macho. Yet his response to the wreckage of his private life transcends blind obedience to warrior stereotype – tending an injured thug he’s chucked down the stairs, and caring for the pregnant daughter he’d previously abandoned to promiscuous junkiehood. Ingrained laws – whether of the State or jungle – make humanitarian sense neither of the case at hand nor the routine redemptions of altruism, conviviality and love.

For that purpose, more open minds and hearts are required – precisely the potentials, as it happens, that decisive mutations in hominid evolution unleashed with the retention of infantile simian features. Neoteny – especially in brain morphology, and hence language and learning – relaxed fixed instinctual control allowing greater individual and collective adaptability and creativity. The rest is (human) history, with no programmed, predictable outcome – to the eternal dismay of control-freaks of all stripes. Ironic, then, to witness current regressions to the comforting delusions of innate determinism, as sociobiology – neoliberalism’s ideological handmaiden – fashions just-so fantasies of perfectly calculating psychopaths maximising profitable ‘fitness’. But not as organisms, peskily stubborn as we have proved in insisting that a better world is possible. No, instead we’re animated by swarms of sinister ‘selfish genes’, somehow orchestrating unbelievably intricate biochemical, behavioural, even conceptual patterns sidestepping social, cultural and political agency. And with this wholesale philosophical disavowal to be biotechnologically operationalised in the dissection and correction of chromosomes, you have to ask: Is this the apex of advanced civilised rationality, or proof positivist of the criminal insanity of capitalism?

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

for further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings, see also www.variant.org.uk and http://libcom.org