Film Review

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

Hunger – Steve McQueen (UK 2008) Michael Fassbender; Stuart Graham, Rory Mullen
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 4 Nov 08; Ticket price £6.85

Film morphs into installation

Steve Mc Queen’s Hunger takes as its subject Bobby Sands (BS) IRA commander and prisoner, who elects to die on hunger strike rather than to bow his head to the will of the British political establishment. With its bold use of close-ups and mounted camera to frame its subject it looks like McQueen has paid close attention to Carl Dreyer’s 1928 movie the Passion of Joan of Arc. Hunger might well be titled The Passion of Bobby Sands, as flesh transmutes into spirit. This Passion is divided into three distinct parts each of which emphasises both an attribute: body mind spirit; and an outer form based on: opposition, dialogue, unity.

It is the first section of the film that takes on the structure of installation. By this I mean that it resembles an assemblage of elements which are ingenuously offered to the gaze of the viewer to connect understand and interpret. Also Hunger as installation creates for the viewer temporal space to absorb and understand what has been shown. Hunger uses time images such as the long shot of the screw in passing down the length of the block using a squeegee to clear up the pools of piss thrown out of the cells. The camera is still as the screw works his way down the length of the corridor into the eye of the camera. We need real time, our own time to understand this shot.

The installation section of Hunger is defined by a series of oppositions that define the visual and audio fields: clothed and naked, the flesh and the will, inside and outside, cleanliness and filth. Hunger as an installation located in an infamous setting at a time now passed. A film set up in an H block of a present now past where the fittings fixtures and authentic props are frozen forever and the corridors landing and cells are haunted by holograms and soundtracks of the prisoners and screws locked into the eternal recurrence of their enmity. Walk through Auschwitz. Walk through Abughraib. See. Listen. Walk thru. Walls imprinted with collective memory.

The installation section is charged with the key idea that the Maze prison ( like so many prisons, what a strange yet appropriate name) contains both the prisoners and the guards. There is no escape from the confines of this gaol. When the screw exits the gates of the prison to go home he never escapes its shadow; he is held ever closer in its thrall. The Maze confines and contains always and everywhere. It is defining in the same way as the Court Room in Rouen contained and defined Joan and her enemies and tormenters. In Hunger the prisoners and guards in this situation are bound together by ties of blood piss and shit, in unwanted inescapable intimacy. The Maze isn’t metaphor. It’s microcosm. It is the political situation in Northern Ireland compressed to its unbearable essence. Casual cruelty and cold murder. The body politic of intimidation denial and forceful suppression is faithfully replicated within the confined space of the prison onto the form of the human body.

The body is at the centre of the opening section. The body as an instrument of the collective will of political power. The body as an extension of the singular will of the individual, a protoNietschean statement of an overcoming. Hunger opens in the home of a screw with a series of big close ups as in the morning he washes his hands in the wash basin. His grazed knuckles rinsed in the pellucid water. The sequence proceeds through his breakfast and the shadow that falls over him as we see the security procedure he follows before getting into his car. This opening sequence, with its series of close-ups comprising: tap wash basin plughole fried egg underside of car, set up a set of heightened oppositions against which we are able to understand the forces that are in play. In the Maze the IRA prisoners are ‘on the blanket’ – naked. They refuse to wear issued prison clothing and demand the right to wear their own clothes. Denied access to the toilets ( in order to slop out) by the screws (government) they exist in the putrid conditions of their own piss shit and bodily filth. Their bodies are caught up in a system of constraints privations obligations and prohibitions which their will refuses to acknowledge. In their nakedness, with their shit daubed on the cell walls, and their piss spilt out into the corridor, they oppose the political will of Margaret Thatcher.

As Bobby Sands notes in the diary he kept at the beginning of his hunger strike, “ All the power of the British Empire never broke the will of a single man.” In performance the body lies at the epicentre of volatile concerns, a signifying system that is a battle ground for competing ideologies. Hunger works on the bodies of both parties in the Maze capturing them in their oppositional systems: the clean and the dirty, the shaved and the unshaven, the naked and the clothed, the beaters and the beaten, the alive and the dead, the inside and the outside. The screws break the bodies of the IRA; the IRA can kill in revenge culpable screws. In Hunger Mc Queen testifies to the separation; he also gives witness to the greater terrible unity of which both sides are also a part. The prison of Northern Ireland contains them all forever.

The second section of the movie is a 17 minute long dialogue between Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest. It seems to represent mind as BS and the priest verbally joust over the morality of BS’s intention to go on hunger strike. Again there are echoes in this section of the verbal jousting between Joan and her interrogators in the interplay of subtlety and mental strength that characterises the exchanges. The only section in the dialogue which I felt was suspect (others might not find it so) was the long story BS tells about an incident in his childhood which is intended to justify and explain his nature. It falls into a long line of such stories told on screen ( and to lesser extent on stage) such as Brando’s Kurtz telling the story in Apocalypse Now. BS story in this situation seemed formulaic, hence uninteresting. A sign the film was flagging.

The last section – spirit – the culmination of the Hunger Passion, with its medical ritualisation and all white spiritual ‘production look’ is the culmination of the film.
I think that this attempt to transpose the medical into the spiritual doesn’t work. We have a series of images, all immaculately posed and framed with that ‘white look’ taking us through the stages of BS’ death. The section never transcends or becomes anything more than a series of medical shots. McQueen has not found a language or an image that expresses the final stage of Sands’ Passion. In the final part of this section Hunger abandons its premise of staying with the BS in the now, and filmically elects to take us on a fake trip, supposedly his final vision complete with natural sounds, back to an arcadian reconstruction of Sands’ childhood (are we in the final section of 2001). This finale fails to do justice to what has preceded it; it feels like a cliché. The final section of the Passion needed a huge coup of bold imagination to complete. It probably might need to be short in duration and comprise of very few shots, as was Dreyer’s manner in finishing his Passion of Joan of Arc.

For all its perceived weaknesses, McQueen’s Hunger remains a film bold in concept that remains true to a governing filmic idea that is mostly executed with stunning confidence and filmic awareness.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Gomorrah – Mateo Garrone (2008 Italy) Salvatore Cantalupo, Carmine Paternoster, Alfonso Santagale
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 21 Oct 08 ticket: £6.80

Location Location Location Location Location

Gomorrah has been flagged as a realist portrayal of the situation in Naples where whole areas of life are under the control of the local Mafia the Camorra.
The film is structured in what seems to be the favoured fashionable form of the moment as: five intercut stories. Five stories that involve different characters unrelated to each other except that generically the characters are all either part of the criminal network or member of communities in which the networks operate. The characterising feature of the stories is that they are not interrelated or interlaced rather strips of action that serve only as exemplars of types of criminal activities: trash disposal, drug dealing, garment industry etc that define the relationship between gangs and populace. As such the film is a simple transposition of some selected elements of Roberto Saviano’s book that adds nothing filmicly or challenging to his propositions. Indeed this film of book, like most such adaptations detracts and cheapens the substance of its original form.

In effect the film is an impoverishment of the books thesis ( the toxic effect of gangster control of areas of society) because lacking the book’s facility to support its point of view and journalistic incrimination of the Camorra, by piling up detail and statistics of the effects of a criminalised culture, the film is reduced to a banality of affective detail in which the links between action and effect are mechanically transposed onto the screen only through the medium of expressed violence. In Garrone’s Gomorrah there are no cognitive or ideational linkages through sound or picture allowing the audience to make connections that characterise a sick culture. The links in Gomorrah are all through the glamour of the gun; not through the effects of what happens after the gun. The realist settings are just a type of architectural backdrop to what is just another gangsta movie.

When I say that the linkages in Gomorrah are mechanical I mean for example that the connections that the film suggests to its audience mostly film stem from either violent action or architecture. We are given simplistic film generated cause effect relationships that gloss over the latent forces at work.

Linkage in relation to action. Gomorrah shows us men with guns. They shoot other men whom they see as opponents or in their way. The men with guns deal in death and fear, they get their way and assert control over whatever: drugs trash garment industry. The film is a simple fable of the ganagsta means: the ends of the gangsta in Gororrah are actually unclear. By repute I understand that the Camorra liked the movie. Of course they did. The gangsta loves the exercise and demonstration of his original power which stems from force and violence, and he approves of its filmic celebration.. What Garonne has achieved is a celebration of the gangsta through banal mechanical linkages. What Garonne has not filmed, and what was object of Saviano’s book are the consequences of the gangsta take over of social mechanisms, and the freezing (through fear) of social response to these consequences. The ends rather than the means. What we don’t see in Gomorrah are the piled up mountains of trash and filth that are caused by this situation; what we don’t see are the effects in disease caused by dumping of toxins in landfill. The corruption. Garrone sticks to the banality of the action, which we all know from long series of gangsta films. What the gangster’s fear, and what has caused them to run Savione out of Italy is the exposition and detailing of the real price people pay when the gangsta moves to take over vital areas of economic and social activity. The bang bang your dead bit is the least of the interesting connections to be made. The other mechanical connection made in Gomorrah is ‘architecture’. I think that the film fails because it substitutes, or perhaps confuses a concern with architecture for a concern with ‘world’. At one level this looks like copping out. It is much easier to send out a location scout and find fruity sexy backdrops for the action than to undertake the filmic chore of creating a sense of ‘world’. The function of architecture is fundamental to the working of Gomorrah. The exteriors and the interiors work as metanyms. In particular the main setting of the concrete housing project where the turf wars rage. The concrete structure of the housing project is used as an encompasser, a building that literally doesn’t just contain the life within it but also defines and orders it. In this sense the building is a metanym: its function in the film is to stand for something rather more than what it is. Gorarrah is using this structure to say that the compression and squalor that it represents mould and contaminate the people whom it accommodates. The problem is that I think that Garonne was content to leave the housing project as a symbol. We never get closer to the people who live there than this statement of architectural determinism. The people, except those busy killing each other, are sort of phantom entities who fill out the crowd scenes the way dust fills in cracks. The huge housing project is ultimately an empty shell, just another setting, a theatrical backdrop against which action can take place. Even in a film like Meirelles’ City of God which has a gangsta action/ revenge core, there is more of a feeling for the texture of Rio favella life. In Gomorrah there is an absence of anything other than fat men wearing T shirts of gruesome taste. It’s not enough. Likewise with most of the other locations: the quarry, the marshes, the subterranean car parks. The filmic objective seems to be to overwhelm rather than inform. The five strip intercut structure of Gomorrah seems to lead nowhere. The structure is a favoured shape for contemporary directors and such a structure it should give to the film some dynamic. A dynamic that might reveal itself in many ways: some emotive such as interdynamic bathos or pathos; some cognitive such as exemplative or understanding complementing or contrasting or both. There might be connections such as colour, geometry or auditory. The problem with Gomorrah was that the five action strips were all of a muchness. They had few characterising idiosyncrasies or distinctive features other than the architecture. The individuals populating the stories were often difficult to distinguish and the only character whose name I could remember was the tailor, Pasqualle. The only purpose served by the intercut sequences is to provide a series of dramatic cutting points. Even this has diminishing returns as the film progresses through its two hour plus duration. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Fall – Peter Whitehead (UK 1969) Doc with Peter Whitehead and Alberta Tiburzi

Viewed 16 Oct 08 Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; ticket price £4 In the beginning was the image

The final shot of The Fall (TF): Peter Whitehead (PW) is peering down the viewer of the moviola and looks up at the camera; the camera pans to the right bringing into view an early reel to reel black and white Sony VTR which displays on the adjacent monitor a grainy image of PW; the picture is poor in definition but strong in its etched solidity as an image of PW. PW has become an image and as we look at his image, the tape runs out and the screen turns blank radiating a white picture noise; there are no sound effects. A shot that is in effect a condensation of the film journey.

It feels that through both the political uprising and social excess documented in TF, as if PW in the course of making his film has stumbled upon realisation about the nature of the image in the media. That at the very moment of filming TF, PW sees that image poised to take over the channels of communication: to pervade and invade our senses distorting consciousness and corrupting perception. TF, at some point in its making (edit stage?) becomes PW’s personal journey in which his camera as a scalpel opens up the vista of a multiplication of new types of manipulated realities which like cancerous tumours will overwhelm and destroy us.

‘The Fall’ is of course a reverberating Biblical idea. It encompasses both the Fall of Lucifer and the Fall of Man. Differentiated events but both conveying a similar idea: the establishment of a new situation in which the forces of evil and malice are let loose in the world, abroad in the cosmos to do as they will. Lucifer and Adam and Eve, fall from a state of Grace into a state of sin. Both are caste from the numinous all embracing presence of God into a world of dark putrescent matter, in which they must survive howsoever they may. Alan Ginsberg who features in TF published a collection of poems in 1971 entitled the Fall of America.

I think that PW’s camera probes not only America’s fall from Grace, the political inability to see or accept the evil that the US was perpetrating in the name of democracy (in particular at this time the war America was waging against Vietnam). His camera also probes the advent of the image and the fall from Grace that this moment heralded, as Western society and culture embraced the image as a primary source of perception, as a primary tool upon which judgements would be made and opinions formed. A situation developing where no one is innocent and also where no one is guilty.

TF is shot by PW at the moment when democracy is shifting from the shibboleths of class and party, to a new situation in which everyone can form an opinion: or more presciently, have their opinions formed for them. In the beginning is the image: and in the image is manipulation. In the media ideas persons places start to exist as a sort of intensified concentrated iconography: nothing else. Increasingly form this point in ‘time’ (and I mean PW’s time. TF is his film; it has guided him to this insight) things would be judged not for their intrinsic worth, but for their extrinsic value to interested powerful parties. Perhaps the crystallising event was PW’s participation and presence at Columbia University student occupation and his witness to the distorted way images of the event were to be manipulated by the media and political establishment. But the PW’s disquiet goes deeper than this specific instance and broadens into a general realisation that this is the way things are and will be.

Amidst the rawness of the footage of a New York in turmoil, PW is the star of his own movie. At first I found his mannered acting out, in particular of the relationship with his ‘girlfriend’ Alberta Tiburzi (AT) annoying and over deliberated. As if PW had seen Blow Up and had decided to make and perform an affected fashionable homage. As the film progresses this relationship declines in prominence, overtaken by PW’s documenting the New York streets and his confessions and ruminations during the edit. However as the film develops, I began to think that perhaps there was a point to the manner in which the personal had been incorporated into the film. For instance there is a ‘Blow Up’ type sequence in the first part of the film when AT models’ a ‘Peace’ dress made up from fabric whose pattern comprises the multiple replication of the CND anti nuclear peace symbol. The CND symbol in its multiple replication becomes a pure pattern, loses its power of protest as it is sinuously subsumed, through the curvaceous posing of AT, into fashion statement. Likewise the relationship between AT and PW also feels like a fashion accessory rather than something real. Relationship as gesture. The director and the model. An exemplar of the media marriage, consummated for effect not affect. In this situation gesture is empty of everything except the selling of the self. Narcissism. It is possible that PW accepted even enjoyed this casting of his relationship with AT; but that he was aware of the process both at a personal and social plane. The process leads directly to entrapment in the appearance of things not the actuality of things: entrapment within the self for the self rather than life for the world.

Looked at from an historical perspective PW documents the streets saying ‘NO!’ to what was taking place in the US. And in this respect the film shames us today. Comparing the anger and ferocity in New York in ’68 and comparing it to reaction to the Iraq war between 2003 and 2008. The question is posed, ‘What has happened to us today? ‘ Why did protest against the Iraq invasion barely register? In’68 with wild swinging camera PW documents an uncompromising rejection of this system that makes war on the world: whether it be Vietnam or students demanding fairness and justice in education. Today we seem so much more contained. Unable to break out of the confines of an intellectual and mental prison in which we are trapped. Our responses tend to be more self absorbed and distracted from what is happening about us in our ‘democracies’. And there is an answer to our shameful contemporary inertia that is located deep in the fold of the Fall as the second half descends into a gloomier mood and PW analyses with his camera and talks through with his Moviola what is happening and what is to come. We are now trapped in the image of someone else’s movie, the movie of the government the big corporations and the media.

In a sense the pivotal point of the film is PW’s documenting of a piece of performance art. PW is filming in a small room where something’s going on. Who are the people performing in the small room? Who (besides PW) comprises the small audience in the small room watching the performance. We see a man and a woman on a ‘stage’ with an upright piano. The woman has a chicken on her lap. The man takes the chicken from the woman and using its feet plays a series of rills up and down the keyboard of the piano. The man returns the chicken to the lap of the woman. He picks up a long handled axe and sets to demolish the piano. The piano is destroyed. The steel wires of the sound-board remain upright amidst the shatte0red casing and frame. The man replaces the axe and takes the chicken from the woman. Holding its body firmly under his arm to prevent it struggling he drags its head back and forth along the piano wire until it has been decapitated and reduced a bloodied stump. He gives the chicken back the woman. The camera pans to the audience who watch in silence. gazing at the stage area. PW has filmed what has happened: we still do not understand what has happened. It was real; the suffering brutal. We have no language to describe what we have seen. Perhaps we reject what we have seen. In TF this scene is the pivot. The mood darkens. We do not understand what is happening.

The film turns to on the unravelling of political events. In particular the revolt by Columbia students and the occupation of the Columbia University faculty. But it is not straight reportage. PW is now aware (at least at the editing stage) that this is an event that is the subject of media manipulation. This is the moment when PW peers into the future and the events are documented not only dynamically as they unfold in the presence of PW’s camera, but also accompanied by PWs insights and reflections as he edits and reconstructs the events of which he has been a part. Looking through the viewer of PW’s moviola we see an empty white screen. Blank.

Finally filmically PW shoots his film to deny himself the fake authenticity of the documentary film maker. There is no match cuts no formal continuities. It is in the spirit of the time. The camera is used in a wild libidinous frenzy denoting more an intense emotive subjectivity that is true to itself not any externalised objective statement of fact. PW’s camera is a statement of the truth owed to the self: to thine own self be true. But there are powerful filmic statements built up within the body of the film at the editing stage. None more powerful than the creation of a pure sound picture of the retaking of Columbia by the military and the police. Shot at night the picture is almost black nothing can be seen but edited onto the picture are the ritualised sounds of the men preparing themselves for violence beating their shields with their night sticks and chanting in unison. It is a moment of the promise of death intended to be heard by the students in the darkness behind the barricades waiting for their own destruction.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Adrin Neatrour writes:Everyman as nowheremanLinha de Passe   Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas – Brazil – 2008;
   Sandra Corveloni
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 30 Sept 08 Ticket price £6-80

Everyman as nowhereman

With Linha de  Passe (LP) Salles and Thomas have produced a curiously ineffectual and anodyne movie.  LP is based on the idea of threading together five separate stories of one slum dwelling family. Each story leads to a moment of epiphany or revelatory realisation.   Where Salles and Thomas falter is in the creation of a filmic world of the slum in which their characters can move.  The consequence is a movie that is possessed by a sense of emptiness, in which meaning depends on the audience filling in background and making connections that only exist symbolically on the screen.  

For the individuals and their stories to carry the weight of authenticity(why else  unless your name is the Disney Corporation, film a story about poor slum people?) the film would have express something of the palpable nature of the compressive forces exerting pressure on the individuals in this environment.  A place which has moulded them and  encompasses the horizon of their vision.  Bunuel’s Los Olvidados is one obvious example in which the texture and weight of the inner city shanty works as a defining force on the characters and permeates their stories.  The environment in Los Olvidados doesn’t delimit but it is elemental to the filmic project:  the closeness of man and beast, the closeness of man to man, the bounded nature of the individual’s perception. This sense of world is weak in LP.  Sao Paulo is depicted rather than experienced.  It is understood more as a background against which the stories unravel, not a milieu in which they take place. From time to time LP cuts to very wide establishment shots of the city which we see splayed out in its vastness.  But it’s as if Salles and Thomas were unable to figure out any other way of signing to their audience that their stories are actually linked to this city other than by this iconography. 

Without a world to contain them, the five stories in LP are detached from any source and float in bubbles of a discrete internalised relevance.  The effect is for the individuals in the stories to lose the very singularity which place lends body and psyche to form character.   The characters in LP come across as individuals who are construed as modern types.  They are reduced to being examples of urban slum stereotypes: defined by religion, race, sport, motorbike  unending serial pregnancies. The characters become sort of anyperson anywhere.  The perfect human counterpart to the modern development of urban space which from city to city is anyspace whatever anywhere: the mall the skyscraper, the contemporary piazza the inner city highway with its decks ramps tunnels and bridges.  Now we have anystereotype whatsoever fitted out in jacket trainers and jeans.  The trouble is decontextualised types can generate interest only through their doings. 

It is possible that Salles and Thomas are trying to communicate this observation to us and  have developed LP as an expression of the characterless nature of the modern.  No one is singular space and time: there is only anyone anywhere; there are no stories just general patterns.  But if this is the point and intent of the LP, then it lacks wit and intensity of vision in its communication. To make their points, in relation to their stories, the ultimate expressive recourse of Salles and Thomas is the mordant sentimentality of the soap opera rather than structural rigour and intelligence. 

The recurring image:  the mother attacks her blocked kitchen sink with a rubber suctioned plunger.  An ineffectual remedy for a deeper malaise; a shot that repeated half a dozen times exemplifies the poverty not of the woman’s resources, but rather of the film’s thinking.  It feels as if the film makers wanted this shot to work as a sort of metaphor, saying that underneath what you see in LP there is a compressed solid of rotting matter that blocks anything that tries to flow away.   And now I understand why LP is so ineffectual.  Metaphor and the metaphoric replace the actual:  and the film is the poorer for it because the viewer is given a symbolic interplay of  filmic material that invites the audience to invent an interpretive schema to understand what they see.  In LP impression is favoured over expression as the film’s currency.  The problem is that everything in LP slides inexorably towards the disaster area of metaphor as the film lurches towards  the interpretative and everything comes to stand in for something other than what it is: the buses, the sink, football, Episcopal religion, the motor bike the pregnancy.

In making LP Salles and Thomas have chosen to structure the film using linkages of a conventional classical Hollywood manner. The sensory motor linkages within  and between the stories are charcterised by conventionally shot and edited images: action, perception and affection images.  Use of images which build a conventional form of relational narrative dynamic, a dynamic that fosters the idea of continuities and the consequent interpretation of those continuities.  In creating filmic worlds that represent particular moulding and encompassing environments (such as the slum or the monastery) it is in fact the discontinuities that comprise the strongest formal elements of expression, discontinuities of both sound and vision that pitch the characters and the audience into an expressive world of compelling signs.  Interthreading 5 stories does not create discontinuities it simply gives an unending supply of editing points and invites the viewers to create an interpretative schema for understanding what they have viewed.

LP seems to have been produced the wrong way about. The project looks like it started with the question of how five stories could be inserted in the slum milieu of Sao Paulo, rather than asking how the milieu might surrender its secrets in the form of the wondrous characters that haunt its streets.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:Machine gun dreams: a moral taleBilly Liar   John Schlessinger   UK  1963; Tom Courtenay ; Julie Christie
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 18-09-08  Ticket price: £4-00
 
adrin neatrour writes: a body without organs – a moral tale

retrocrit
Billy Liar (BL) is usually described as a movie about a habitual dreamer fantasist called Billy Fisher.  Billy the young man with ambitions to be a writer trapped in a small Northern industrial town.  The usual explanation of the film is that Billy gets away from his actual reality by escaping into a world of his own imaginative longings.

But Billy doesn’t escape reality through his fantasial life; his fantasies in fact bind him more tightly to the reality he wants to put behind him.  Each indulgence in his imaginings commits him the more deeply to what he opposes.  And each indulgence increases the need to feed the habit of escape that is no escape.  The device of fantasy Billy uses as a means of escape is actually the path to deeper entrapment. Billy is a dreamer: a body without an organ: a pure psychic effect.

Billy is usually described as a ‘dreamer’ without however the nature of his dreams being examined.  The core of BL is Schlessinger’s (JS) filmic realisation of  Billy’s  dreams and JS’s understanding of the context of the fantasy. Billy’s fantasies don’t centre on pleasure but on power.   There are two main motif’s in Billy’s fantasy sequences: the obliteration of his enemies; and Billy as dictator: the leader of a  military machine.  As in the case of Hitler, who is certainly parodied here by JS, the powerless often have their psyches colonised by the very forces that they perceive as constructing their personal humiliation. The warped internalisation of the very forces that are seen as destroying the self, has ironic and often unpleasant consequences.

Set in the encompassing thrall of a small Lancashire industrial town, Billy’s fantasies of death and militaristic power point not so much to Billy as dreamer but to Billy as a frozen entity.  A Billy who is frozen into the  economic and social matrix of a  culture defined by mechanical hierarchical relationships.  A culture where the machine form defines all the  areas of social interactions: life and death, family and work.  It is a culture in terminal decline captured at the point in time where the machine will start to breakdown to be replaced by cultural form based less on constrained cohesive relations and more on organic/desire relationships.   Where failure will be a personal rather than a collective responsibility.

 Billy appears not as a young man escaping through fantasy but as a young man whose fantasies reveal that he is actually a psychic projection of  the encompassing mechanistic regulatory system.  His fantasy world doesn’t oppose the machine; rather it seeks to control the machine and thereby is of course controlled by it.  Lacking the resources to build an opposing fantasial apparatus Billy simply appropriates the machine’s hierarchic and mechanical form for his own ends and  satisfactions.  People are reduced to puppets under his control and those who oppose are exterminated.  The concentration camp and the execution squad, the logical extension of Billy’s imaginings, are the frozen products of a society built on mechanised life and death.

 
BL  is not structured on plot but rather on state of mind:  the frozen fantasy.   The film comprises a series of strips of action, triggers that fire Billy’s subjectivities.  The action strips are located in different parts of the social/economic machine but the fantasial responses from Billy indicate an internal time mechanism in which the hands on the clock are immobile.  In a sense it is replication of the state of mind of Adolf Hitler whose pent up frustrations during eight years in Vienna taught him ( according to Mein Kampf) everything he knew.  The years in Vienna, a hierarchical mechanical apparatus taught Hitler to hate and project the sclerotic forms of the Austro-Hungarian empire onto a solution of  the Jewish question.  Hitler frozen into his fantasies carried forewards his fantastic hatred into an eventual programme of mass murder.  JS’s Billy has similar artistic ambitions to Hitler ( Billy wants to write) but like Hitler suffers from an internalisation of the very institutions that humiliate him.  An internalisation that sabotages both development of ability and vision.   

Billy fails to see that he is living in a form of social organisation that is in its death throws.  The sequence which comprises the opening of the first supermarket is a filmic tour de force, but it works to indicate the development of a new form of social contract based on desire rather than mechanical obedience.  Billy sees nothing of this.  Death riddles his psyche boring through outer carapace of the film like the worm with a message.  Billy himself works in the the death industry, his gran is dying and some of the most effectively shot sequences in BL take place in the municipal grave yard as death itself watches over life.  Eventually Billy offered the chance of life by the charged vital ( but irrelevant ) presence of Julie Christie, chooses death. There was never any other alternative and JS remains true to moral intent and purpose rather than giving way to a faked ignoble open or ‘happy’ ending. 
adrin neatrrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Fiction passing for fact or fact passing as fiction?
Man on Wire – James Marsh – UK 2008  Doc (with dramatic reconstructions)
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 16 August 08;  Ticket:  £6-80

Fiction passing for fact or fact passing as fiction?

Marsh’s Man on Wire (MoW) is interesting in that it poses heuristic questions concerning the nature of the documentary tag.  Of course it isn’t the first film to sell itself on its documentary status but leave open issues pertaining to the validity of its claims to be factive.  MoW opens up the debate as to what constitutes a documentary film?  After viewing MoW with its archly crafted dramatic story and  finessed style I was left asking if it had any more claim to documentary status than films like Dam Busters or The Great Escape. 

Like the Dam Busters and The Great Escape, MoW  is about an Event.  It is event filmed as a pure discrete occurrence which is set in a time stream that comprises a deeply mythologised past and closed off future.  Marsh apparently got the idea to make a film about Philippe Petit’s (PP) epic wire walk across  the Twin Towers of WTC, after hearing PP on Desert Island Discs.  (Desert Island Discs is a staid BBC radio show, a vehicle that allows celebrities to select the music they’d take with them to a desert isle.)  Marsh in putting together MoW has in many ways modelled the film on the Desert Island Disc ethos.  Celebrities on DiD are interviewed in an uncomplicated manner, and unchallenged are allowed to be ‘celebrities’.   Likewise  MoW  permits PP to present his take on the Event, his heroics undisturbed by any awkward questions.  MoW celebrates the crossing as an event preserved in aspic drawing an iconic and decontextualised image of Petit, decontaminated from the forces of life and time.  The  film is constructed so as to present a unidimensional and consistent picture of PP.  PP is given a concentrated form as pure heroic image.  Like John Wayne, Bogart or those propaganda biographies of Stalin.  And yet life itself is never like this.  Even in MoW, with its carefully composed and edited contributions from friends companions and colleagues, there is a discernible darker shadow that lurks behind PP.

The Event, the wire walk, is transposed into a sort of mythological Great Time by allowing PP to present the crossing as a occurrence that was destined to happen from  his earliest days.   Destiny and the hero.  It is a common feature of myth that the subject is preordained to achieve their fame by signs that can be read in their childhood.  By the child shall you know the man (or woman).  Hercules is an obvious example but people like Houdini were also quick to claim childhood provenance. MoW encompasses time within the heroic fold of destiny. In an early sequence we see PP, as a boy at the dentist reading in a magazine about the proposal to build the Twin Towers.,  PP claims to have been imaginatively fired by what he read on that day, and at that moment somehow knew that these proposed gargantuan structures would one day play a defining role in his life.

And yet right from its opening, MoW seems to need to distort unwelcome facts and to bend them to the film’s project of mythologizing PP.  The sequence at the dentist appears to be falsely presented.   According to WikiPedia, PP read the article on a visit to the dentist in 1968 when he was about 19 years old, an adolescent (PP was born 13 August 1948) .  In the film’s reconstruction PP is represented as being a boy, certainly not an adolescent. This type of misrepresentation is grist to the mill for Hollywood film biopic vehicles that claim to be a dramas; but for a movie vehicle claiming to be a documentary it simply poses the question as to what terms and conditions are in play in regard to the validity of the product?  And what is the relationship of the validity of the material in a film to its claim for documentary status?  And how the intentions (as they reveal themselves on screen) of the film maker relate to the claim to documentary status?  The answer of course may be that like the wire they are highly elastic and that, for instance  misrepresentation of fact is no bar at all to documentary status. All that matters is that you intend to make a film and claim that it is documentary: either as a marketing ploy or because you believe it to be so.   
 
 Marsh uses much of the first part of the film creating the myth of PP.  PP’s childhood is structured as a hallowed pathway leading to the Event.  In re-constructed sequences we see soft focus recreations of PP learning to walk the wire and evidencing the necessary personal philosophy, firmness of purpose and purity of intention that will be necessary to meet the demands and strictures of the Event.  The key to the nature of the film is Marsh’s decision to represent PP as a mythic image.  The consequence of this decision is to decontextualise PP and construct his persona strictly according to the needs of the Film.  

MoW tells nothing of PP’s past, his family parents or geography.  All these are subsumed into the halo effect of the Event.  PP emerges from nowhere, stands alone and proceeds through the success of Event into a future that is nowhere.   Marsh exploits  PP  as a celebrity frozen in celestial space and time, like the figures in the great constellations of the night sky.   We are not informed in any certain manner about how PP earned his living.  We see ( in reconstruction) that he busked the streets in Paris with his act: but did he make enough from this to fund the Twin Towers walk?  His financial affairs about which there are legitimate questions of interest are left unprobed.  PP is a figment of the celebrity heavens and nothing sordid or earthbound, the money or the rent, is permitted to sully him.   We see PP, throughout the film interviewed in 2007, 33 years after the Great Event.  We find him frozen in time, defined only by this one action, the Event.  Nothing has changed, we have the same folksy quasi superman philosophy, a man who has learned to wear his media mask with ease.   As if he were a prisoner of the Event, and 33 years have passed in this prison.  PP has grown older ( more slowly than some), but nothing else seems to have happened.  

Marsh has made a film according to the old rules:  you tell the audience what is going to happen: they see it happen; and then they are told it has happened.  MoW is like the classic film of the man slipping on the banana skin.  Marsh has carefully stylised MoW to give it a contemporary feel.  He exploits the convention of tastefully filming the respondents with high key lighting against black or greatly dimmed settings to decontextualise their inputs. The interviewees feel like people playing themselves, taking on pre-agreed roles  in describing the Event. It feels as if they have been well rehearsed (or possibly edited by Marsh) in the course of their responses.  They only exist in relation to the Event not in relation to PP the man. They avoid or are edited by Marsh, so that it appears they avoid, really talking about PP as a person rather than as the projection of the film.  Two of the respondents – the ex girl friend Annie and Jean- Louis, intimate some deeper psychic reservations and ambiguities that caused them to disassociate themselves from PP.  But they remain covert, guarded intimations that are not allowed to disturb the polished reflective surface of  PP the celebrity. It feels like we are experiencing the careful construction of a lie, the filmic reduction of life to myth.

 Marsh appears very confident about the film he wants to make.  However there are odd signs of a latent insecurity.  The use of date and time intertitles.  These titles, which are typically used to lend a spurious authenticity to dramatic reconstructions may appear either as title cards or superimpositions informing the viewer, for instance, that a particular establishment shot represents:  New York –   4th January 1974 –  09:21.  This technique is now so hack and incorporated into spoof and mockumentaries it is often avoided.  In particular what should be avoided is specificity in relation to the minute hand of time.  But Marsh uses this device on a couple of occasions in reconstructing the Twin Towers preparations.  On both occasions it was unnecessary since minute by minute planning was not the order of the day (as it might be in a heist).  

Another sign of Marsh’s insecurity with the material is his decision to reconstruct the sex scene as a mock humorous silent movie. The humour in the sequence being reinforced by shooting (or editing) at 18 fps and projecting at 25 fps creating out of the action, funny jerky movements.  What happened is that after the sky walk the conquering hero PP was propositioned by a young woman – nymph(ette). In terms of Marsh’s mythic recasting of PP this is perfect.  All earthly women desire the seed of the hero.  PP as the hero gets his lay.  But there are indications in the interviews that this tryst was a turning point: a time when everything changed and old relations fell apart. Instead of celebrating the success with his friends and supporters he went and fucked a strange woman.  A God-Hero can do as he pleases.  Perhaps it was the final straw, the final act of arrogance perpetrated on his team by PP.  PP is allowed to get away with explaining what happened with a shrug of the shoulders.  This is his privilege.  But Marsh takes things a step further.  In filming the sequence as an opera bouffe,  he reduces it to a silent comedy.  In pandering to the viewer’s prurience MoW effectively minimalises the importance of what happened in personal terms and effectively folds the seduction and sex scene into the mythic.  A filmic act of displacement.

The film often seems to fall short creatively. For instance, the score is undemanding and emotionally honed to induce in the audience a certain compliance with PP’s iconic status.  The music at one point seems to me indicative of creative bankruptcy when Marsh for the film’s highlight, the Event, the Walk Between the Towers chooses to regale us with Satie’s Gymnopedie ( the usual one that is all the adverts and all the films) .   To exploit such an overworked piece of music belies either insecurity or lack of imagination. But that’s show business folks!

Man on Wire (MoW) celebrates an extraordinary event with a very ordinary film, a sort of standardised glossy re-enactment and recapitulation of the event that asks no questions and gets no answers in an exercise in stylistic misdirection.  Ultimately it is not in principle distinguishable from a regular biopic such as Reach for the Sky or Bonnie and Clyde.  All the news that fits, all the material the fits the film.

Of course MoW has been very popular, popular because it is built on an extraordinary event which the public want to believe in.   People enjoy believing the myth and Marsh has made a popular film fictionalising  the situation surrounding the Event, fashioning of the Event a feature film of crass simplicity and little integrity.  I might conclude that it falls into a category of degraded documentaries.  However I think MoW raises deeper questions about our confidence in our abilities to discriminate.  The category or even genre of documentary panders to the conceit that we can tell the real from the fake and fact from fiction.  In the world of endless manipulation of image and information our facilities are increasingly unable to make these distinctions.  But the sake of our self esteem and self image we cling to the idea embedded in the word ‘documentary’ as a sort of protective shibboleth.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Retrocrit: pleasure for pain; sex for death
Kiss Me Deadly – Robert Aldrich  USA 1955:   Ralph Meeker – Maxine Cooper
Viewed Star and Shadow Newcastle  13 July 08 Ticket price £4-00

Retrocrit:  pleasure for pain; sex for death

The Kiss Me Deadly (KMD) opens with a disorienting travelling shot that is dominated by its sound.  We are in almost complete darkness.   We’re in the back seat of a car, behind the driver and his female passenger and we’re driving through the night.  Our attention is fixed not on the visual field which comprises of poorly defined shapes outlined in the blackness, but on the sound issuing from the woman.  At first I thought that the panting and clonic gaspings of the woman were sexually stimulated which given the year of production surprised me.  It was only when the film cut to the reverse shot, face on to the couple, that I realised that in fact the woman was crying. 

The mistake had the effect of making me feel self conscious for being so palpably wrong footed, for completely misconstruing the sound effect and interpreting pain as pleasure.  Was I conditioned by the sexual crudity of contemporary drama so that I automatically equated rhythmic female panting with sex? Or did Aldrich exploit, as his opening gambit, the ambiguity of the sound made by the woman,  intending to put the viewer on alert, to induce latent uncertainty as a core premise in the working out of the movie.  Beware:  pleasure is uncovered as pain; beware what men covet and prize beyond value is deadly and worthless: it will lead us into doom. 

The female passenger in the car – a hitchhiker on the run – is the first victim in the film: the first of many.   And the opening sequence, the unrelenting drive through the hell black night, ends with her words –“ Remember me!”  The drive has a dream like ominous quality that engendered in me a gloomy and oppressed state of mind, a mood that remains imprinted in the film till its explosive eschatological ending.  This driving sequence is a powerful filmic device, a metaphor that anticipates the terrible drive into the future, and its cost in human dignity and lives, not just in the play out of the mechanics of the plot of KMD but also for the  future of a planet driven by consuming desire to possess nuclear weapons that ensure mutual annihilation. We are on the road to the doomsday machine of Strangelove.

“Remember me…!” the hitchhiker commands Mike the gumshoe as they drive through the night.  The film lingers and worries about the meaning of her words, the words of the first victim, underlining and reemphasising them in the course of the plot.  What did she mean?  But where else do we have we heard and read these words?  “They shall not be forgotten…”   “Remember!” is the rubric that adorns the graves of the war dead, the headstones and walls where the names of the Fallen are carved in stone so that they are not forgotten but remembered.  “Remember me” is the command of the war dead lest we forget the reason for their dieing.  The young woman’s words are a sign pointing to the potential bleak future where millions of innocents might be annihilated in nuclear war.     

Neither the mechanics of the plot nor the acting are any more than accessories to the real dynamic of the movie which is the strategic use of the camera set-ups and movements to create both worlds of immanence and amplified circuits of tension that inform the states of mind of the viewers.   Two long sequences in particular stand out (the sequence establishing the swimming pool at the gangster’s house is also very fine) that are composed in one single shot: Mike’s visit to the gym; and his visit to the garret of opera singer.  The in-frame edit of the action through camera movement engenders in both scenes an amplified spatial tension.  And as the camera tracks through the spatial axes it works as a force amplifying and transforming the spatial tensions in relation to the verbal intercourse that takes place between Mike and the other players.  This heightened tensile awareness could not have been created through use of the  traditional montage device of cross cutting which generally through action cutting increases pace and attempts to induce tension through juxtaposition opposition etc but at the cost of losing durational time dynamic.  In KMD Aldrich has produced a movie that creates its spatial tensions not through action cuts but through time images. Having noted above that the mechanics of the acting are accessories to the film it must be said that all the players, in particular Meeker, have the fine technical sense of timing necessary to the delivery of the film in this particular form. 

The set-ups used by the camera are also definitive of he KMD.  The consistent framing of shots so that they conceal rather than reveal. The framing of feet and legs is integral to the style of the film.  This has of course been done before, but integrity and panache with which the shots are et up and incorporated make them part of what KMD is expressing, a world that is corporate rather then individual.  Likewise the use of the camera set-ups from surveillance angles points to more than just a Hitchcock conceit: it seems to be saying something a society which is in the process of developing  collective paranoia.  Likewise the most noteworthy prop on the set: Mike’s early prototype Anasphone which is a ¼ inch tape recorder fixed into the wall and tripped by the phone.  It’s prominence and position in the film rather than its role in the plot suggest that like the rubric ‘Remember me!’,  it is a sign not a symbolic function.

Some Hollywood films have gone for fiery Armageddon types of endings – White Heat for example. But as far as I am aware although the visual effects were uncompromising the message of such endings is always moralistic.  Aldrich in KMD brings down the curtain with a holocaust, a nuclear explosion from which his protagonists vainly flee.  There is nothing moralistic, only the moral that the technology that we have brought into the world is indifferent to our desires and works on the simple logic of being a force for universal annihilation. No prisoners are taken. There is no salvation.  There is no hope. I imagine Antonione watching KMD with some interest.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Film as installation: first there was drive in now we got walk through movies. There Will Be Blood – Paul Anderson – USA – 2007   Daniel Day-Lewis, Dillon Freasier, Paul Dano, Kevin J O’Connor
Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle   30 June 08  Ticket: £6-80

Film as installation: first there was drive in now we got walk through movies.

There Will Be Blood (TWBB) is a Hollywood gloss on Upton Sinclair’s big novel, Oil!  One of the most politically radical of America’s 20th century writers, Oil! is written on a broad historical canvas taking in the Great War, the Russian revolution and the tide of socialism in Europe and setting it against labour and political strife in the oil fields of Southern California.

Oil!  Chapter X11 The Monastery: ‘It had become clear to him that the present system could not go on forever – the resources and wealth of the Country carried off by the greediest.  And when you asked who was going to change the system there was only one possible answer – the great mass of workers who had learned that wealth was produced by toil.’

Anderson’s solution as to how to film Oil! is to replace Marx with Freud, to deflect the shaping of the narrative away from  political concerns inwards into psycho familial dynamics.  Upton Sinclair’s observations that chiliastic religious fervour de-energised and deflected American labourers from more pointed class concerns is taken up by Anderson, but then twisted and deformed to serve his own purposes in  providing TWBB with a final gothic  tableau:  the death of Eli bludgeoned to death by Daniel Plainview in private bowling ally of his mansion.  In TWBB religion justifies the final cryptic setting for this contemporary take on American Gothic involving the oil business –  fire – murder – blood.

Anderson has styled TWBB as  modern American Gothic, and it is Gothic script which provides the only opening title of the film, the date 1898  (white on black field)  which opens up the first of Anderson’s photo tableaux.  Sinclair’s novel is not stylistically gothic.  Rather it is informal and conversational in form and politically didactic in content.  Anderson’s solution to the transposition of the written to the filmic is to make of the film a series walk through photo installations, a set of tableaux as beloved of nineteenth century artists or current practitioners such as Bill Viola

So TWBB opens with the silver mine installation (birth)  and proceeds through a series of linked set-ups, the business meeting (sharp practice),  buying the farm to exploit the mineral wealth below its surface (underhand mendacity); the oil well blow out (the demonstration of the forces of nature), the dismissal of the son (rejection), the murder of the false brother (Cain and Abel), the humiliation of Daniel at the Temple by Eli (shame and humiliation) and the final tableau, Daniel’s slaying of the Preacher Eli ( Death: revenge on God and his two faced priests on earth)  The tableaux are spread over time, each temporal sequence introduced with the date in Gothic.

It is the camera work that indicates that what we are watching has been conceived as a photo installation. The film is characterised by a large number of long tracking shots that take us through each of the tableaux. I wondered at first what the tracks were accomplishing: they didn’t seem to have an obvious purpose either moral or instrumental. In fact the tracking shots in TWBB are a simulated replication of the effect the audience would get if they were walking through a photo installation.  The film is simply an installation in film form. The big production value centrepiece of TWBB the Biblical column of fire caused by the oil blow out reminded me of one of Viola’s walk through installations that featured a  cascade of water.  The hyperrealisation of natural phenomena, overdetermines response of the viewer to create awe (Fear and Awe) without engaging the question of meaning.  Anderson has adapted Oil! as a walk through installation.    TWBB has been made to fill out the gaze of the audience as it moves through the film.  TWBB is filmed to be cool  and to satisfy  all consuming but ephemeral vapid ambulatory curiosity.  It has not been written and shot for audience engagement with either context issues or emotions.  

To complete the installation effect, two other characteristics of the film production  are fully articulated.  The sound design concept is central to the walk through experience.  From the opening establishment shot of mountains accompanied by a crescending siren effect TWBB is only rarely (for instance when cutting to the deaf  mute point of view) without a sound accompaniment that fills out and points to the angle of the gaze; and meaning that the gaze should construe.  The score literally presses down and in and onto the film. With the its surround technology the sound is an active physical presence that preempts audience reaction to the visual stimuli.  By turns it is  ominous, the biosuggestive,  cosmic and of course weird.   The object of the sound concept is the colonisation of the viewers understanding, or at least the denial to mind of coherent response to the offered stimuli. Like the adverts on TV the sound track to TWBB is an enforcer; it is not a deepener of insight or reflection.

In similar manner, the mis-en-scene,  sets and costumes. are designed to fill out the gaze’s field of vision with confirmations of authenticity.   Attention to detail, another aspect of photo installation work, ensures all the detailing of the sets has a hyper real perfection so that nothing interferes with the smoothen path of the spectator’s trail through the film.  Anderson’s objective is total immersion in the encounters with the installations mediated by the richness of the interiors and costumes of the turn of the nineteenth century.  TWBB is populated by a series of players whose screen persona is characterised by a sort of Biblical patina invested with fake mythological persona.  DDL looked at times like a gremlin sorcerer out of the Lord of the Rings.  

The fragmented temporal structure serves Anderson’s purposes by being coherently inchoate.  TWBB time fragments intrerconnect but not in a way that compels specific readings; rather in such a way that the individual viewer can construct there own understandings as to what has happened.   Anderson\s replacement of Sinclair’s out front Marxism with back door Freudianism results in subjectivities determining meaning.  The viewer instead of  looking at the failure of organised labour in the US, instead can muse on the meaning the death of Eli in the bowling alley or the deafness of HW. In Anderson’s recourse to ever more heavy handed symbolism, an increasing vacuity and emptiness characterises the film.  By the final credits I had a feeling that I had been watching a shell of a movie in which  the core of the drama was missing: as indeed was the case.  I left the cinema saying to myself, not Oil! but So What!
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk