Film Review

adrin neatrour writes: He could not tie his shoe laces. I think this is an old story. A twisted post modern retelling of the return of Odysseus with Nietschean and Freudian shifts of consciousness. An eternal recurrence where the returning male is never able to get it together to tie his shoes; he is unable to enter the world of total self absorption demanded by shoelaces because he is sucked into the black hole created by the filmic projection of Nikolaides, a dark orifice comprising of two voracious all consuming women.
Singapore Sling    Nikos Nikolaides – 1990 – Gce/Fr –  B&W  Meredyth Herold; Panos Thanassoulis; Michele Valley

Original title: O anthropos pou agapise ena ptoma (The man who turned into a corpse)

He could not tie his shoe laces

When Odysseus returned from Troy he had no problem tying his boot straps, not so Singapore Sling the eponymous protagonist of the film.  And that’s a big difference.  Singapore Sling’s original Greek title. ‘the man who turned into a corpse’ points to a film of deeper resonance with key issues of Greek and Western culture than is commonly credited.  Normally Singapore Sling is dismissed as a sleazy exercise in bondage and SM.  However framed up as a pastiche of a Hollywood Film Noir (cf The Big Sleep) I think this is an old story, a twisted post modern retelling of the return of Odysseus with Nietschean and Freudian shifts of consciousness.   An eternal recurrence where the returning male is never able to get it together to tie his shoes; he is unable to enter the world of total self absorption demanded by shoelaces because he is sucked into the black hole created by the filmic projection of Nikolaides, a dark orifice comprising of  two voracious all consuming women.

Singapore Sling (SS) is a complete world of sensory satiation.  Complete with cod voice over and moody groovy jazz from the record player, the film is styled as a pastiche of Black and White Hollywood ‘40’s film noir.  High key lighting silhouetted faces scarred by shadow and make-up; foregrounds of furling wrapping enveloping female costumes; backgrounds of textured material from lace to heavy brocades, shadows of swaying fronds and deep dark architectural recesses;  exteriors sodden with unending deluge of water and menacing vegetative matter; soundtrack dinning with wind torrential rain and thunder and music from another era.  This is a world.

It is a world of singular density, of unrelenting fluidal compression. where the three characters play out rituals of bodily and carnal hyperstimulation.  In the which mouth and vulvavagina transform into mutant conduits of sensation, become  perversed body parts that wantonly engage in flux and reflux, reception and issuance.   The compressive quality of the mis-en-scene is a setting within which the mouth and the vulvavagina are explored and exposed as locations for a mutating female investment of sex and death.  An exploration that is perhaps all that is left after the failure of the male phallic imposition.  

It is as if Odysseus comes back to Ithica and doesn’t find Penelope surrounded by suitors.  It’s just too late for that the world has become too twisted . Too late for the male prick.  The modern take is that Odysseus has no son;  he has a daughter and  Odysseus finds Penelope encoiled physically and mentally with her  young female progeny.  The bed Odysseus has built is a puzzle not because it is a bed of love but because it is now a bed of torture and death.  In strange but different ways the women have taken on hybrid and new relationships with their bodies in which the penis has only the most marginal psychic reality.   The changed relationship involves flux and reflux.  The penis can only discharge.  It has only a one way relationship with the world.  The mouth and vulvavagina can both gorge and disgorge thus establishing a symmetrical relationship with the world of matter, a taking and a giving back. 
This reciprocating relationship to the the world appears to the male as a perversion: the vulvavagina should be the receptacle of semen; and the mouth the receptacle for the food prepared by the bigmother. 

Nikolaides has two tableaux that are central to his design.  The bed and the table.    Both are established in closed dense oppressive locations in which space is squeezed out of existence by the dense texture of matter.  The table is an extraordinary setting, because filmed in black and white, the prepared mountainous piles of food have mass and tactility but no other defining signs of fitness to eat.  The result is the creation of a banquet of repulsion in which difficult to define matter is alternatively gorged into the mouth and promptly disgorged out of the mouth.  Ingestion and vomit.   The heightened makeup of the actresses and their extraordinary haute couture gowns offset the grossness of the visceral oral sequence, which however posits a recharged and renegotiated relationship to the food with which we feed ourselves.  In a culture of surplus a new relationship is developed on a giving back by the oriface.  

The bed is the other location, the second main tableau on which Nikolaides designs are insinuated.  The bed cannot be looked at separately from the role of the male and female bodies in SS.  In SS the male penis is never seen.  The man, braces and all, keeps on his trousers. He is never undressed.  When the women rape him, to use his penis. kneeling on top of him, grinding towards their orgasm, it is as if they haven’t inserted his penis but rather the idea of his penis.  Their acts of  sex are self sufficient.  The vulvavagina sucks in and spits out; it is self sufficient.  The penis has become irrelevant.  Odysseus has nothing further to accomplish in the world than to self castrate.  The bed is no longer for fertility.  In the new world to which the recurrent Odysseus returns the bed is the locum for torture castration and masturbation.  The bed is a dense world of post phallic possibilities.   The vulvavagina draped in luxuriant garments and sheer fabrics set amidst deep linens, strapped up in a chastity belt, explores the intensities of a post penile world. 

The acting style that defines the action in SS is highly physical at least from the two female leads.   The male lead, despite the denouement, is largely passive. The performances elicited from his players by Nikolaides’ works in terms of a demanding a sort of over investment in the role which allows the viewers to critically detach rather than invest in the action. This distance allows the film, at critical junctures, to take on a spoof element and to be occasionally very funny.  The underlying seriousness of the theme and the physical commitment of the film to the body, prevents SS from simple degeneration into parody or Woody Allan territory where everything is played for laughs.  In SS nothing is played simply for laughs.   

Some people will find SS very disturbing without however quite being able to say why.   They will perhaps point to the bondage or sequences of torture (cod) or where the vulvavagina is explicitly used as a mouth and perhaps claim the film is simply cynically exploitative of its material.   However I think Nikolaides has made an extraordinary film, using film to do what film does: to create a world in which the meaning of the situations and events can be absorbed through the filmic elements.  SS is superbly shot composed in the main of though long unflinching takes, mostly medium and medium close shots, that impel us to look at what is happening and invite our collusion or opposition.   Nikolaides post Odyssean statement is a radical physical film about the terminal failure of the male based cultural forms that have dominated written history.  He knows that if Odysseus returns now he has no other choice than self castration and the slaughter of Penelope in order to prevent her spinning and twisting her own threaded path out of the nightmare.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Adrin Neatrour writes: Retro crit: cinema of obsessive desire, this is a film of pure expressive form that uses camera sets props and costumes to create a world characterised by the dark obsessive marriage of sex and death. With his ability to create mood ideas associations and drama through purely filmic means, Powell equals Visconti at his best. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – Powell and Pressburger (UK 1943)  Roger Liversey; Deborah Kerr

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle  Ticket Price £4-00

Retro crit:  cinema of obsessive desire
The apparent central concern (the one about which most commentators on the movie talk) of Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (LDCB) is the demise of the old fashioned world of the professional soldier’s code of honour and decency. This notion is probably a comforting mythic recasting of history and as a recurrent film theme it’s better handled by Renoir in La Grande Illusion than by Powell and Pressburger.  However probing past its narrative form which is interestingly structured as a series of fragments, but actually weak in its cohesion, this is a film of pure expressive form that uses camera sets props and costumes to create a world characterised by the dark obsessive marriage of sex and death. With his ability to create mood ideas associations and drama through purely filmic means, Powell equals Visconti at his best.   

The three lead female roles – Edith Barbara and Angela are all played by Deborah Kerr whose face and features in all her manifestations become the obsessive object of desire for protagonist Clive Wynne-Candy, career army officer. 

 As in Peeping Tom, Powell’s camera and his mis en scene work to engage the  audience’s collusion in the process of sexual fixation. The camera seeks out the innocent female object with keen eye of the bird of prey for its quarry drawing the subjectivity of the viewer into the shot.  The tracking of the camera into Deborah Kerr brings her affective innocence into the dominion of our gaze where we scrutinize her performance for signs of vulnerability. As indeed does Candy.   In LDCB, Deborah Kerr remains one pace outside of the male world, enclosed in her own bubble of femininity.  Later in Peeping Tom, Powell will create circuits of intensity in which the female through violence and murder will be  transposed as an object of the lens into the male ambit of dominion.  Nevertheless in LDCB there is one scene exploiting Deborah Kerr’s image in her Barbara incarnation that is as extreme as any in Peeping Tom where she is subjected to the most shocking of deterritorialisations and reconfigured as pure victim, the forcible transportation of the female into the male domain.   The militiant culture that offers to the female death as the final solution.   

The opening shot of Deborah Kerr sees her as ‘Edith incarnation’ in Berlin 1902.  She is seated opposite Candy as the camera tracks in on the two shot.  Both parties are talking in matter of fact manner; she giving him information about a certain German officer and Candy seeking elucidation on various points.  The setting is neutral as is the positioning of Edith and Candy.  But we cannot hear anything that is being said because their conversation is overshadowed by Edith’s hat.  She is wearing a white bonnet  in the middle of which pinned out like a specimen prepared for anatomical dissection, is a black raven.   A dead very black raven.  Is this woman a witch or sorcerer?   That  LDCB is shot in Technicolor accentuates the startling explicit image of a woman wearing a dead bird.   It is difficult to follow the thread of Edith and Candy’s talk because we are fixated upon this extraordinary appurtenance completely circumscribes our perception of Edith and  colours the way in which we view and understand the rest of the film.    It is seizure by the animal, an act of bewitchment by the female; a movement into myth and fairy tale. The moment with the hat is the moment where everything in the film changes.  From this point the film is endowed with  a psychic resonance of the realm of  the sorcerer.

The defining moment in the relationship between Barbara and Candy takes place after her death.  Death the moment of appropriation. Candy takes Krettschmar-Schuldorff (more about the political aspect of  KS and his marriage to Edith later) into his den and inner sanctum  The room is his trophy room and Powell has carefully documented throughout the film that Candy shoots big game and has the heads mounted and brought home.  On the  main structural wall the animals he has shot seem to be alive   in their nobility as they protrude intrude and swell out into the room: lion, tiger, rhino, elephant. It seems to be part of his purpose in life to kill beautiful creatures.  Over the fireplace plumb in the middle of this assemblage of death hangs the portrait of Barbara, the dead wife.  The shot leaves the viewer speechless.   Like the totemic bird on the hat, the dead woman’s portrait in the trophy room completely short circuits the faculties.  You can neither see nor hear what is happening in the room,  only physically absorb the shot.  As it is viewed and its implications register, the viewers again are trapped as collusive agents.  Through its deep field of vision the shot becomes a  pure time event for the audience who cannot escape the flood of associations triggered both by the internal dynamics of the film and the external points of reference from their own lives.  There is no escape from what we are seeing and the ironic position of the audience is heightened by the fact that  Candy seems totally unaware of the meaning of his actions, which oblivion compounds our complicity.  The film renews its energy as a dark elliptical fairytale carved out of time that moves from the dead raven on the hat to the dead woman on the wall.

(Unfortunately the projector broke down 15/20 minutes form the end of the film so I DID NOT SEE THE END.  I don’t know if there is a similar shot/scene involving the image of Angela.) 

The camera work is central to the structure of the film and the way in which Powell defines time in the world of LDCB.  The camera movement is integral to the context of the sets and the Technicolor medium both of which create a detached high intensity world.  The sets have a phantasmagorical quality.  In particular the Turkish Bath set and the German military gymnasium both of which are settings the cue key camera movements that define the concept of time in LDCB. 

The Turkish bath sets are built as pure Hollywood sybaritic fantasy.  The textures are soft and coloured by alluring pinks and blues.   The  set’s structure comprises cubicles built around a long central pool which seems to breathe steam and a heady cocktail of vapours.  From  the first,  the pool has a magnetic faerie allure. It is into this water that Candy falls during his confrontation with the young upstart when the pool is revealed to be the fountain of eternal life.  It is indeed comprised of magical qualities that restore youth to all who take its waters. As Candy falls in the pool camera tracks him as he swims along under the water simultaneously transforming space into time. It is the old grizzled rotund 60 year old Candy who enters the top of the pool;  the figure who emerges at the other end is the young officer of 40 years earlier who has just returned from South Africa and is on his way to Berlin.  In one moment the scene is set for a fairy tale in which time is the essential element.

The camera movement in the military gymnasium is an equally powerful statement..  It is the setting for the dual between Candy and KS.  The gym has an  otherworldly quality in its coloration and spacial dimensions.  Moulded out of a light blue wash it suggests the idea of infinite space.  The dual sequence is simply constructed in long and medium shots with the focus on the necessary brisk pace of the preliminary ritual.  As the two opponents take guard and prepare to ‘attaque’ there is suddenly a great sweeping camera movement swinging the lens vertically up high into the ceiling for an overhead shot that pauses for a moment to take in the two tiny figures below still on guard in infinite space before resuming its headlong flight out of the gym finally coming to a stop hovering high in the sky over the roof of the building which twinkles in the darkness of the early winter morn.  The perspective is cosmic and the movement suggests  a switch into cosmic perspective and faerie time. in which anything is possible including time splitting up into different dimensions.  What happens?   The opponents become brothers and there is a reordering of  life as Edith chooses to marry KS.   But in a sense there is a fusion suggested.  In the same way as Deborah Kerr is the fusion of three woman,  so Candy and KS become fused as one split identity operating in different dimensions.   

When critics summarise or talk about LDCB they usually mention that the film was nearly banned by Churchill because of the sympathetic portrayal of the main German character, KS.  In fact these critics miss the point.( let alone the idea that Candy and KS become fused bidimensional identities)  True, the script treats KS as a discrete individual and not as a raving German military stereotype. So Pressberger makes the uncomfortable political point that many Germans including ex-army officers, did oppose Hitler. But the film is much much more radical than this.  It is this deeper radical element buried at the heart of the film that prompted the authorities to want to ban it.  After their dual it is KS who marries Edith and they have two sons.  In his last conversation with Candy,  KS reveals that although he and Edith opposed Nazism and Hitler their sons had become fanatical fervent Nazis.  At this time in 1942 in Britain, this was a  bombshell idea to place in a film script.  The implication was that the Germans weren’t Nazi because of their German-ness. The Germans became Nazi through the social and political matrix of forces unleashed in their country. Pressburger was telling his British audience that being English or even half English offered no immunity from this disease.  No amount of English ‘decency’ (and Edith, on the surface at least,  is a very decent woman) could necessarily protect either us or the Germans from the political sicknesses of the age.  At a time when British propaganda was belting out the message of the intrinsic good qualities of Englishness, Pressberger and Powell’s refusal to submit to biocultural comforting British propaganda in a film intended for popular consumption must have been viewed as treacherous and unpatriotic.

LDCB is a fairy tale implanted into the psycho-sexual war zone.  It has an overt message that seems to be saying something about the nature of war and the British character. Implanted under the skin the tegument of the film is a covert film, abetted by stunning use of décor and creative camera work, which drives deep into the dark sexual recesses of the warrior sees into the military ethos which gives birth to the death machine.  LDCB is not what it seems to be. Even if you don’t get it, its wake leaves behind a wash of psychic disturbance.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Film as text message
Stop-Loss – Kimberley Pierce – USA 2008  – Ryan Phillippe  Channing Tatum  Abbie Cornish
Viewed: The Empire Cinema – Newcastle upon Tyne
 Ticket: £6-80

Film as text message

Kimberley Pierce is a filmmaker who’s lost her way and ended up tied to Hollywood’s apron strings.  Her first film directed in 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, exploiting the fine edge of Hilary Swank acting presence, showed that she had the skill and understanding to fashion an intense world out of the contradictions of contemporary blue collar culture.   Stop-Loss (S-L) creates nothing resembling a world and with MTV as the main credited production company, it evidences as a film the combined depth of the text message and an MTV promo.

‘Stop-Loss’ is the clause in the contract American soldiers sign when they enlist. It’s a clause which gives the US armed forces the right to compel military personnel to extend their service beyond the time for which they originally signed.  During war it’s a means of ensuring good soldiers have to undertake further tours of duty – even against their will.  Pierce believes in particular in relation to the Iraq and Afghan wars, that this one sided clause is a heinous affront and denial of rights. Her film is made is response to her feelings about this issue.  The problem is that film (or for that matter the novel or poetry) is generally not employed to its most powerful or persuasive effect when it is reduced to being a vehicle for an issue; when used as a mere vehicle, a simple conduit for a message.  And Kimberley Pierce has one main message here and that is that the Stop-Loss clause is a violation of fairness and justice.

The message is delivered amidst the emotively acted machinations of a conventional soap drama.  Buddies fall in and fall out with each other against a background concern that connects the vicious experience of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to the final price paid in damage to the bodies and  minds of the young working class men who do the fighting.   

But there are a large number of films that equate the  waging of war with a destructive effect on individual character personality and psychic equilibrium.  The strongest of these films relate the experience and shock of the soldier to the political and socially structured responses that are endemic in the culture.   S-L fails to achieve this connection not because the constituent elements are absent, the set piece of the public  returning home parade/jamboree is a case in point; but  the style of the filming never allows for these socio cultural elements to be observed.  Altman’s Nashville is powerful because the public aspect of the political element is never overtly interpreted but presented to the viewer as something to observe. IN S-L. the scenario, the camera and editing are always busy interpreting what is happening, and underscoring the visuals with emotionally charged music.  Much of S-L is filmed through close-up shots of the faces of the players which lends the film a reactive soap opera feel: emotions and emoting responses displace understanding as the film’s focus point.  The face replaces the body, surface replaces depth of field.

In depriving the viewer of observational means to see into characters Pierce resorts to ‘devices’ that are intent on making us understand what the characters are experiencing. The use flashbacks is inelegantly crude: Brandon – protagonist – sitting on the dive board stares into the Motel pool and sees his buddy in the depths.  The flashback seems to be used to try and construct meaning in the film where the film script in itself is unable to.  Likewise to express the meaning of damaged young men Pierce and her fellow scenarist Mark Richard   resort to the device of contrived incident mostly in the form of violent outbursts by the characters.  Again it is a crude method of making the point but one that is not necessarily effective in engaging the viewer in understanding. Perhaps because mindless violence is now the currency of most mainstream movies.

Finally I was interested to see that the cinematographer on S-L was Chris Menges. This film and veteran cinematographer of Killing Fields, the Mission, and Dirty Pretty Things would have been handy to have had on board  for the shooting of the ambush fire fight sequence.  It seems like a typical Hollywood match: the veteran cinemat and the tyro director(KP has only directed two films); but was Menges Pierce’s choice or the studios? I am certain that Menges is a model of discrete advice but his presence as key production presence raises the question to what extent the look of the film, which is sort of his department, dictated the delivery of the film.  It raises the general point that overall ( the need for marketing short hand) the director probably gets more than their share of public credit in a product that is very often a team effort.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 
Stop-Loss – Kimberley Pierce – USA 2008  – Ryan Phillippe  Channing Tatum  Abbie Cornish
Viewed: The Empire Cinema – Newcastle upon Tyne
 Ticket: £6-80

Film as text message

Kimberley Pierce is a filmmaker who’s lost her way and ended up tied to Hollywood’s apron strings.  Her first film directed in 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, exploiting the fine edge of Hilary Swank acting presence, showed that she had the skill and understanding to fashion an intense world out of the contradictions of contemporary blue collar culture.   Stop-Loss (S-L) creates nothing resembling a world and with MTV as the main credited production company, it evidences as a film the combined depth of the text message and an MTV promo.

‘Stop-Loss’ is the clause in the contract American soldiers sign when they enlist. It’s a clause which gives the US armed forces the right to compel military personnel to extend their service beyond the time for which they originally signed.  During war it’s a means of ensuring good soldiers have to undertake further tours of duty – even against their will.  Pierce believes in particular in relation to the Iraq and Afghan wars, that this one sided clause is a heinous affront and denial of rights. Her film is made is response to her feelings about this issue.  The problem is that film (or for that matter the novel or poetry) is generally not employed to its most powerful or persuasive effect when it is reduced to being a vehicle for an issue; when used as a mere vehicle, a simple conduit for a message.  And Kimberley Pierce has one main message here and that is that the Stop-Loss clause is a violation of fairness and justice.

The message is delivered amidst the emotively acted machinations of a conventional soap drama.  Buddies fall in and fall out with each other against a background concern that connects the vicious experience of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to the final price paid in damage to the bodies and  minds of the young working class men who do the fighting.   

But there are a large number of films that equate the  waging of war with a destructive effect on individual character personality and psychic equilibrium.  The strongest of these films relate the experience and shock of the soldier to the political and socially structured responses that are endemic in the culture.   S-L fails to achieve this connection not because the constituent elements are absent, the set piece of the public  returning home parade/jamboree is a case in point; but  the style of the filming never allows for these socio cultural elements to be observed.  Altman’s Nashville is powerful because the public aspect of the political element is never overtly interpreted but presented to the viewer as something to observe. IN S-L. the scenario, the camera and editing are always busy interpreting what is happening, and underscoring the visuals with emotionally charged music.  Much of S-L is filmed through close-up shots of the faces of the players which lends the film a reactive soap opera feel: emotions and emoting responses displace understanding as the film’s focus point.  The face replaces the body, surface replaces depth of field.

In depriving the viewer of observational means to see into characters Pierce resorts to ‘devices’ that are intent on making us understand what the characters are experiencing. The use flashbacks is inelegantly crude: Brandon – protagonist – sitting on the dive board stares into the Motel pool and sees his buddy in the depths.  The flashback seems to be used to try and construct meaning in the film where the film script in itself is unable to.  Likewise to express the meaning of damaged young men Pierce and her fellow scenarist Mark Richard   resort to the device of contrived incident mostly in the form of violent outbursts by the characters.  Again it is a crude method of making the point but one that is not necessarily effective in engaging the viewer in understanding. Perhaps because mindless violence is now the currency of most mainstream movies.

Finally I was interested to see that the cinematographer on S-L was Chris Menges. This film and veteran cinematographer of Killing Fields, the Mission, and Dirty Pretty Things would have been handy to have had on board  for the shooting of the ambush fire fight sequence.  It seems like a typical Hollywood match: the veteran cinemat and the tyro director(KP has only directed two films); but was Menges Pierce’s choice or the studios? I am certain that Menges is a model of discrete advice but his presence as key production presence raises the question to what extent the look of the film, which is sort of his department, dictated the delivery of the film.  It raises the general point that overall ( the need for marketing short hand) the director probably gets more than their share of public credit in a product that is very often a team effort.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Adrin Neatrour writes:Here comes the bogyman
No Country for Old Men – Joel and Ethan Coen   USA 2007   Tommy Lee Jones Javier Bardem  Woody Harrelson   Kelly Macdonald
Viewed at Tyneside Cinema 14 April 08  ticket £6-50

Here comes the bogyman

The opening shots of No Country for Old Men (NCOM): dawn over Southern Texas the harsh lands captured in the light of the spinning sun.  The sequence seems to augur a presence in the film of  primal cosmological and topographical forces that shape the men’s lives.  But this sequence is no more than a coat hanger, a series of pretty pictures, a frame on which to hang a concatenation of the mindless violent events that make up the scenario.

The Coen’s trademark is to depict down home good ol’ boys in situations of extremis. The message is that in the rural heartlands of the USA the twisted threads of violence that make up the warp and woof of the American cultural matrix are have taken endemic root.  Looking in from on the outside, the rural areas of the USA might appear to be an unchanging scape of clapboard houses and trailers governed by grizzled folksy can do and know how.  This is façade, and behind the façade of the shingle and the rockwall is a society in disintegration.  The moral to NCOM might be that mythically at least the hoodlum used to take on the Police Department and lose (even if it was at the cost to the Department of abrogating the moral code of society); today the hoodlum takes on the Police Department and wins. 

However on rereading the above I feel immediately as if I am reading into NCOM a meaning that is not justified by what I saw: though some of these elements are present in NCOM, their presence is cursory and gestural.  The sunrise, the folksy wise voice over delivered by ‘sheriff’ Tommy Lee Jones, the trailer parks and motels, the conversations about drugs and immigrants all function as plausible filler to NCOM ‘s variant on the formulaic chase/stalk movie, a genre that has become knotted into its own conventions from French Connection onwards.   

NCOM’s psychopathic stalker killer Anton is a mutant beast with ‘haircut’: a cross between one of the family members in the Texas Chain Saw or Evil Dead or the Terminator android, and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry.  Anton is a machine:  programmed to kill, unstoppable, targeted like a homing missile, and with a Jackal like intelligence.  The only human feature possessed by the Anton machine is a morbid curiosity.  NCOM then is a simple exercise in unleashing the machine in pursuit of its quarry, and scripting in the usual sequences of violence, chase and collateral damage, covering the resultant potage with a garnish of folksy observations.

This is a mechanical movie that once the initial premise is established carries few surprises. The dynamic of the plot is a drugs deal gone badly wrong. Subsequently a small time shit kicker makes off with the loot and the machine is dispatched to retrieve the dosh.    The trouble with having a machine as the prime focus of a film is that everything else is reduced to mechanicality.  There is no intelligence, there are no ideas no thoughts just a mechanised reckoning bracketed by a few one line cracks.

The way the film is shot and edited reflects the simplicity and crudity of the scenario.  I don’t think there is an interesting shot in the film, either in camera or in the editing.  (There is one stupid cut to a group of Mexican street musicians when Woody Harrelson regains consciousness in Mexico)  In the main the Coens’ camera seems to have been placed to move from action to action, and the editing follows the shooting script with a series of action cuts.  Few scenes are allowed to develop in their own time – one exception is the garrotting at the front of the movie which is done in more or less one take – mostly time is violated by the editing and by the plot line itself in which it is not possible to make any sense of time other than by reference to the demands of the plot.   Mostly the film moves through camera and Avid/final cut pro ministration with an increasingly predictable rhythm, mechanical modular filming making that works against the tensions and oppositions that the Coen’s try to set in play.

A number of people have commented on the mumbly delivery of lines in NCOM.  After viewing the film I think this mode of delivery is a conceit, a desperate means to claim for the film a down real authenticity.  The fact NCOM needs to stake out such a claim places it in the same category those adverts that appropriate authentic looking signs, linguistic visual or audio, to try and sell their products.

 It was interesting to see two films in the same week that had at their core, concern with violence.  Whereas Funny Games (Michael Haneka)  is structured as a machine (like the apparatus in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony) and uses cinematic frame and time based theatrical devices to explore and make manifest the presence of violence in American society; the Coen’s are unable to do little more than make yet another film that exploits violence and substitutes a psychotic robot for a machine to carry the plot line to its conclusion.

The Coen’s may suggest that NCOM is a parody, an inverted filmic comment on films like the Dirty Harry series. My response is that these films with their big pricks with big guns, with their mordant one liners “Make my Day”, their action ethos in camera and editing, already occupy that space which we call parody.
You cannot parody that which is already a parody, for at that point the candle gives no light.   
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle the theatre is not possible:…it is through our skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds. (Antoine Artaud) “It was just for fun!” Testimony of Private First Class Lynddie England at her trial for her part in the murder torture and abuse committed by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib.
Funny Games US – Michael Haneka – 2007 – USA/Fr/UK/ Ger/It  Naomi Watts; Tim Roth; Michael Pitt; Brady Corbit; Devon Gearhart.

Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle the theatre is not possible:…it is through our skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.  (Antoine Artaud)        “It was just for fun!” Testimony of Private First Class Lynddie England at her trial for her part in the murder torture and abuse committed by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib. 

In his films Haneka is taking up and inventing an expressive filmic form of  the metaphysics of theatre articulated by Artaud, ideas about theatre that Artaud  developed through his concept of the Theatre of Cruelty.  By cruelty Artaud was pointing to the need for a violent physical determination to shatter the false reality, which he says, lies like a shroud over the arrogant perceptions of Western civilisation. Haneka’s work, like Karl Dreyer’s, is a form of filmic theatre.  In both Haneka and Dreyer the frame is used like a stage and the core of the film is conceived as a series of long takes. With Funny Games US (FGUS), as in Hidden and Dreyer’s Ordet, the cumulative expressive effect of the filming is achieved through the use of long takes, with the camera either still or manipulated with artfully choreographed movement ( or a mixture of the two as in the scene in the master sitting room after the murder of George jun.).  The effect created is of a metaphysics of space with a moral purpose.  FGUS is a fusion of  Artaud’s concept of Theatre of Cruelty with a specifically filmic expression of space.   (Interestingly there is a strong connection between Dreyer and Artaud in that Artaud played a lead role in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc -1929)

Know them by their space.
In this defining of his films through compositional theatricality Haneka resembles Dreyer in allowing space through frame to speak for itself; to interpose itself as a metaphysical element in the film that has temporal value allowing passage of time to invest the image.  In Dreyer’s films space is represented as austere and economically pared, reflecting both Danish culture and his own transcendent concerns.  In Haneka’s FGUS the spacial metaphysics of American culture is represented as a plane of immanence replete with matter: matter to be used and consumed at will.  In FGUS we have no other information about the victims other than the spaces in which we see them, and what we absorb or glean from this information.  We see their car: big comfortable and filled with Classical Music.  We see the exterior of their house: gated isolated and with many outbuildings; we see their dog: big.  We see the interior of their house: big rooms filled with matter and their possessions, none of which – aside from those in the kitchen – is any way productive but rather intended for consumption or used in the pursuit of consumption.

So familiar are we to this organised orgy of material matter filling the world that we hardly notice it.  We give it not a second thought.   Haneka has: it defines us as surely as our genes.  In FGUS this suffusion not only fills the visual field to overflowing but it also invests the fields that we cannot see.  The youth asks for eggs.   We cannot see eggs. The eggs are in a carton; the carton is in the fridge, the fridge is in the kitchen.  Ann goes to get the eggs, which are in the carton.  The carton is full of eggs: 12 of them (all to be broken but no omelette).  The egg carton is in the fridge, a huge cavernous multishelved space ( even so small by American standards) which is stuffed full of food: meat milk cheeses spreads mayonnaise.  The fridge is in the kitchen which in its turn is crammed with gadgets utensils and appliances.  And all this suffusion of matter seems to us in the West an entirely normal situation.  Are we not Lords of the Universe.  It is in the kitchen that the first of Haneka’s long master takes occurs:  the visit of Peter to the house to ask for ‘eggs’.  Haneka’s kitchen take is a long choreography of movement and incident, boxes and fridges opening and closing, pirouettes spins turns approaches of bodies in space and time; etiquette and dialogue.  In defining the resources of the two parties, in creating a sense of immanent unspoken unperceived threat, this take is the moment in the film that defines with total clarity what is taking place in the space and what will happen. 

For all their claims to ownership of the space, the family are defined more by occupation of the space without real claim on it.  They are sort of interlopers.  They possess great wealth of material matter with apparent aplomb and certitude but without any awareness of what it is that they have.  It is an incorporeal claim on the space. Ultimately without substance and made the more vulnerable by the physical isolation and aloneness built into the defensive culture of which they are part. ( The neighbours have to visit one another by boat)  Their dilemma is that they see none of this.  They walk blindly in life seeing nothing.  In the old John Ford films the settlers at least understood their situation and used the gun to kill perceived threats.  The victims, Ann and George lack the psychic insights to understand what is happening.  They are deficient in these resources. 

The interlopers Peter and Paul (sic) are revealed through the film as possessing the space, not owners, even temporarily because they do not desire to own anything materially. Rather they desire to have use of it. Their resources consist not just of surprise and ambush by which they attain control over the family.  Their resources comprise the fact that they are machines.  Machine designed to move into materially suffused space and take control; machines calibrated to occupy consume and use without responsibility or ownership.  Peter and Paul – machines designed and finally honed by the parent culture to kill.  The raison d’etre of their existence: machines that  kill.  Machines manufactured by a culture that is based on killing to acquire what it wants to possess.  Murder the native Americans for land; murder Iraqis for oil.  In FGUS murder outs and turns on itself. 

Murder and execution as moral theatre is an established imperial tradition.  From the execution troughs of the Achaemenian Persian kings and the crucifixion of Jesus, through to the execution of Damien and the death tortures of  SAVAC the Shahs secret police, cruelty as public spectacle with a didactic coded moral message is the debased means by which imperium seeks to exercise and demonstrate the reach of its force  directly onto the body.  As the officer comments to the explorer when demonstrating the apparatus in Kafka’s the Penal Settlement: “Guilt is never to be doubted.”  In the degenerate system of justice in the Settlement, not only was guilt never to be doubted but the guilty offender was never aware that he had been charged tried and sentenced to death.  It was the task of the apparatus to inform him, an elaborate machine that would execute him by penetrating his body with needles and piercing him through the body with the name of his crime.  During the course of his execution on the machine, the victim slowly comes to understand, corporeally the nature of the crime for which he is dieing.  The theatre of cruelty. 

Peter and Paul resemble in some respects Kafka’s apparatus.  Both are products of a specific culture and both in the particular form they take undermine sabotage and subvert that original culture.  Peter and Paul like Hitler are machines; assemblages and constructs of a particular culture at a particular time.  Powerless in a culture of diffuse but class segmented lines of power they internalise power’s attitudes gestures and semantic glosses as an internalised cognitive circuitry.  Empowered by mastery of culturally empowering interactive skills they proceed to use these to for their own ends.  The polite submissive tones of Middle Class America, the conventions of incorporiality, of class considerations are married to a bastard child whose language is detachment and hedonism, whose state of mind is boredom and whose life is driven by the ambition of the dream of  turning of fantasy into reality. For fantasy to become reality what is needed is power.  Peter and Paul not being military personnel at Abu Ghraib, take power into their own hands.   They are the children of their age. They are the children of Ann and George.  They are a murderous machine that kills for thrills.   They are incubi, the demonic offspring of the culture that turns on its progenitor and bores back into the flesh of their dreams turning life into nightmare. Peter and Paul are to American culture what Hitler was to German culture.  Perhaps that’s why Haneke made this film twice.  Once in Germany.  Once in the USA.  When Empires abuse power they produce the monsters that consume them.

In FGUS Haneka also subverts the Hollywood/ neo European action image film conventions.   By complete inversion of the conventional narrative dynamic opposing good and evil he uncovers their terrible moral vacuity.  They are based on simple power relationships not on any intrinsic values. In FGUS Haneka is looking to all those Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry films, vigilante vehicles that correspond to an apologia for the American way of Life, and demonstrating their shallowness and shabbiness.  Peter and Paul deconstruct the relationship between hero and villain showing it to be simply a matter of manipulation and linguistic styles allowed to the different players.  This is most powerfully demonstrated with a scene replayed twice: first when Ann succeeds to getting hold of the shot gun and killing Peter. Paul’s response to this is to pick up the remote, wind back the scene and have it replayed so that he stops Ann’s action before she grabs the gun.  As in vigilante movies, so in FGUS it is important that we know what is going to happen.  In Dirty Harry films we are onside because we know that Dirty Harry will win out and decency be saved even if decency itself is therein totally compromised. In FGUS we know that the family are doomed. They have been committed to a death machine from which there is no escape within the conventions of this movie. The shift in perspective tilts the viewer ambiguously towards the locus of power.  Peter and Paul are accorded all the privileges of the successful protagonist.  In this case not  an archly defining voice over; but direct to camera comments by Paul validating his role and actions in the movie: a movie which he points out is for our entertainment: thus enlisting us as colluding agents. Peter and Paul have all the controlling one liners that define what is happening and what is to happen. There is no Clint saying to the hood: “Make my day!”. Rather we have Paul  telling Ann that killing her and her husband straight away would be to forget the entertainment value. And to the husband’s plea as to why they are doing this Paul responds: “Why not!” All the weapons of psychic power and control rest with the murderous forces and the cumulative effect of this distribution of power is to lay bare the fact that Hollywood conventions of Good and Evil are no more than simple arrangements of forces of power in play – not moral fables.
adrin neatrour  –  adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:The Jan open screening was remarkable for the broad range of material screened and the extent to which the viewings were testimony to a state of affairs in which film rages across the landscape as a force that that is alive and vibrant.Eyes Wide Open –  Jan open screening at the Star and Shadow featuring Filmmakers:
Craig Wilson; Mat Fleming; Brian ? ; Conor Lawless; Brighid Mulley. Irit Batsry; Tina Gharavi; Bill Ormond; David Aspinal, the Koreshi Brothers; Adrin Neatour; Unknown German Film Maker(UGFM)

Seen at Star and Shadow Cinema 24 Jan 08.   Cost of entry – free for contributing film makers; non contributors: £4 and £3

Seeing’s believing

The Jan open screening was remarkable for the broad range of material screened and the extent to which the viewings were testimony to a state of affairs in which film rages across the landscape as a force that that is alive and vibrant.

The films viewed ranged in type from the tactile explorings of Brigid Mulley’s Fibres, the visual humour of  Brian ?’s level crossing gates to  Adrin Neatrour’s  political statement, Echolalia.  There was also material from other times so to speak, or at least from the ‘80s including the agitprop of Bill Ormond piece, a film in grand style about a grass roots movement in Newcastle opposing the extension into a public park  of the city’s football stadium;  Craig Wilson’s architypal punk video, Dead Boards,.  In the homage section there were two films: Tina Gharavi’s Two Lighthouses remembering the poetry of Julia Darling and Irit Batsry’s  1989 video of Joanna Peled’s remarkable performance of the 4th sentence of Joyce’s Molly Bloom soliloquy .  Most of the films screened were about film as a type of seeing: the filmmakers made use of film as an expressive form choosing to use possibility of film because it was the only medium which could tell what they saw – using the verb ‘to see’ in its wide  sense to embrace perception understanding and ordering of reality as well as the pure visual faculty.  

Conor Lawless’ Midio Vampyros Lesbos uses acquired footage which he modifies through his own software.  In his film the picture and sound were run through a programme so that the individual notes in the Bach fugue triggered a picture in the looped footage of the same durational value as the note.  On viewing the film engendered a mild disoriented state.   I struggled to piece together what was happening.  It was a pure film field in which mind experienced a certain sort of assault on its processing capabilities. But there was no other intention other than effect.  As such it was like a media film lab experiment and the subject/partipant  knowing the intention of the film was pure effect, could open up to  the stream of images and sound allowing the effect to permeate and infiltrate consciouness.  Nothing was being sold; there were no arrows of desire.  And Conor’s film was a trip. A pure optical sound experience that took all those firing neurons in your head and momentarily tripped and scattered them in different configurations.

The last film exhibited was shot and projected on super 8 and made by in the early 80’s by an unnamed german film maker (UGFM)working in France.  The scale of  buildings used to say something about their importance and also focused attention on their specific function: church and mosque. law courts and legislative builidings,  palaces theatres and cinemas.   The contemporary built environment is characterised by a giantism whose only rationalisation is the economics of intense land use. We struggle still, even given our familiarity with these spaces to cope with these  forms of modern architectural expression.   Modern urban projects create environments to which we don’t know how to react, spaces which we  don’t know how to describe and in which we still don’t know how to move our bodies,  Spaces which dwarf us and render us temporarily mute and paralysed.  We can’t easily possess these spaces.  They tend to take possession of us.  Graffiti and film are two modes of confronting(there are others) what is happening: graffiti  by claiming ownership of place,  film through its ability to be a force for understanding what is happening.  In film we can move through them with or without a shopping trolley with or without trying to mutiliate them.  As Deleuze notes they are not so much narratives as pure optical / sound  settings.  That is how we can approach them with our minds and bodies. 

The UGFM’s film is not in itself original but the film realises a particular vision of this world of concrete steel and cardboard.  Many of the settings and cityscapes captured have become familiar through contemporary film  content:  the  Autoroutes,  the vast housing projects, the rebuilt concrete town centres with their ramps and walkways, the shopping malls.  These images are easily usable as visual clichés, but the fact that they can utilised as lazy short hand images or cheaply won metaphors is no barrier to their incorporation in forms other than the cliché: as poetry or as building blocks or sets of statements.  Their use by the mind and the eye of the UGFM to reach into reality with a primal urge to make an utterance: in this case an  utterance in filmic form that exploits the melding soft dyes of colour super 8 to express something that only film could express with this intensity of realisation. The manner in which the human form is both absorbed alienated entrapped and bewitched and set to abrupt cosmic scale in these modern built environments.   The UGFM;s film perhaps not in itself original in the choice of its component parts, but it is an intense self validating response to contemporary settings and situations.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:A film made out of the ordinary everyday elements of the social matrix: a drunk, an old man in his ‘70’s, a second rate journalist. A film uses these elements to initiate a process that engages with the historical myth pertaining to what happened in Romania on 22nd Dec 1989.12:08 East of Bucharest – Cornelieu Poromboiu Romania 2006 – Mircea Andreiescu- Theodor Corban – Ion Supdaiu
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle UK 13 Jan 2008. Ticket price £4-00

In Bucharest the snow quickly turns to black slush

A film made out of the ordinary everyday elements of the social matrix: a drunk, an old man in his ‘70’s, a second rate journalist.  A film uses these elements to initiate a process that engages with the historical myth pertaining to what happened in Romania on 22nd Dec 1989.

Poromboiu’s East of Bucharest (EB) provides us with a continuous strip of action, over the period of a day, comprising the preparations for and the enactment of a TV chat show.  The stream of action allows the actors no escape from envelopment in time: the day unfolds, shot mainly in wide, and the film in the first section cuts between different situations but without montage per se, without cuts within and between actions.  Poromboiu does not use editing techniques as his source of tension in EB,  i.e. juxtaposition of shots to create energised action image links between images.  EB is not a film of ‘image’.  Poromboiu as director works to devalue image as a source of filmic information in EB and to enhance the meaning of time.

Every aspect of the film from its desaturated low contrast colourisation its ‘found’ framing and shot composition work against the primacy of  the image in the production of EB.  What is central to EB as a formic process, is that it is a film taking place within and through time.  The endemic tensions within EB emanate from forces released and worked through by the film, both in picture and in sound, that are generated by the propositional question: was there  or was there not, a revolution here in our small Romanian town?  And it is, as this proposition is examined in the ‘real time’ filming of the chat show that the tension is expressed, released and compressed within the dialogue.  The tension comes from within the process, which is humorous but relentless in its discipline and leaves us with a final picture of Mr Manescu one of the two participants in the chat show with his head totally bowed down, bent at the end of the process in which he has valiantly participated.  But we also know that this Mr Manescu from the incidents of the day that have informed us about him.  Mr Manescu is no stranger to humiliation, it is one of the ways in which he copes with life. He will recover and continue as if nothing has happened.  So one way there is no humiliation as an event there is only the continuing process of Mr Manescu’s life. There is no image of humiliation rather an embraced ritual, a recurring process repeated endlessly.  There was no revolution. Simply a man with a bent head. This is not what the picture says. 

Looking across the current filmscape it is unusual in my experience to view a film that does not engage in the explicit exploitation of  visual images.  Most European films are in thrall to a specific visual culture reliant on the excitement of visual stimulae and on retinal pornography.   A culture whose touchstone is the advertising industry which comprises of the worlds: of enflamed desires of iconic brands and of associative psychic linkage to self image/identity.  An industry that is founded on the manipulation and twisting of  human needs (that it describes as freedom of choice for the consumer).  An industry that has developed slick marketing machine to deliver the products which feed the artificially created needs.  And at the centre of this business is the image.  

Many of us have passed formative years experiencing a  Pavlovian conditioning through our exposure to our visual commercial culture.  We have been conditioned 
like the great man’s dogs to slobber at the chops when presented with the right stimuli.  An image is worth a thousand words. A smiling woman with white teeth and blond hair holds up a pack of Kellogg’s cornflakes. We desire to possess what that image represents, But the logic it also works in a sort of reverse sense.  We  see an emotive image – perhaps of suffering, a child in the final stages of malnutrition – which triggers another set of emotive judgemental reactions related to our internalised self image.  The problem is that image when wrenched out of context and detached from processes becomes open to manipulations and desires.  Image in Western culture over determines reactive relaxes at the expense of understanding processes through time. 

Poromboiu has understood this as a problem.  His response is not to have one set of images replace another, but rather to make a film in which time is the principle agent forming the structure of the film.   Everything in the film points to time. It’s in the title. It’s set on the day of the anniversary of the ‘revolution’.  The question in relation to the revolution is defined strictly in terms of time, which of course a joke, and the film takes place through real time experience of the chat show.   

In EB Poromboiu seems to suggest that the Romanian revolution belongs in that category of events that may be called trance. The image is of the revolution that took place in the squares of Romania but the temporal stream opposes this image. The revolution took place in a trance. The violent events in Timisoura started a process that was broadcast by the media to the people  who were entranced by the images that were relayed to them.  They understood that with the sudden downfall of Ceausescu that a revolution had taken place.  But they were in trance and very little had actually happened outside of the image of the dictator and his wife being executed.  The image was of crowds gathering in squares and calling for the overthrow of the regime.  But it was mostly an image a comforting illusion based on the simple device of reversing cause and effect.   There was no revolution so of course when the crowds dispersed and went home little had changed.  Without Nicholas and Elena in fact the same people continued in power using similar but slightly modified methods.  The people, by and large absent from the revolution came out of the trance and continued with their lives much as before. 
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Adrin Neatrour writes:The riddle of the Sphinx – Reflections on the most expensive Egyptian film ever.The Yacoubian Building – Marwan Hamad  Egypt 2007 – Nour el Sherif; Adel Eman; Hend Sabri
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 6 Jan 08
Ticket price:£4-00

The riddle of the Sphinx – Reflections on the most expensive Egyptian film ever.

The opening  title sequence with its grainy soft focus macro shots of the stone cladding of the Yacoubian building followed by a sequence (probably pasted in directly from the novel)in which a warmly toned voice explains the history of the building, intimate a film form that might  comprise of some particular characteristics: a closely observing camera, a sensibility that understands ambiguity and a film that engenders time as a dimension.    The Yacoubian Building(YB) is a overlong grossly inflated soap opera better suited to afternoon TV.

TB looks like a typical example of what happens when one from of expression –a novel  is interpreted in another form of expression – in this case a film.  What happens is that the film makers unable to find expressive equivalent filmic modes for novelistic internal dialogue and musing subjectivities reduce the adapted book to a series of externalised operatic melodramas. 

Featuring a large apartment block as the axis around which a multiplicity of plots revolve is of course a classic film genre that exploits a certain culture of congestion as a vehicle for generating a universe characterised by parallel and interconnected stories.  The interstitial areas of lobby, elevator and landing are the key promiscuous locations.  Films in this genre include Grand Hotel and Airport : both of which are  characterised by a dull mechanical mediocrity.  YB doesn’t break the mould.

Marwan Hamad makes no attempt to endow his film with any real sense of place or  time.   The Yacoubian building is an extraordinary piece of adaptive social engineering with its different levels of habitation.  The core of the apartment building is inhabited and used by a solid affluent middle class.  Coexisting above them in sublet tiny store rooms is a shanty town of the disinherited, living in conditions of high compression.  The YB seems unable to explore any of the intensities or  circuitries of this arrangement: the curious spacial juxtaposition is represented simply as a film image, a curiosity of time and place: something for us as sort of privileged  tourists,  to gaze upon.  The active force moulding and shaping the spacial elements in YB is the convention of the American soap opera.  Rooms exist  not to absorb or extrude but to admit and discharge.  Doors incessantly open and close, their only function being  to accelerate the action cuts.  Cairo and the Yacoubian building are used as picture ‘fill’ operating at the same level as a pub in a soap opera such as the Rovers Return in Coronation Street.    There is little sense made of the building itself or its apartments or the city in which it is located.  Cairo as a metropolis is used either to staged romantic affect as in the film’s final shot of the newly married couple walking at dawn down the middle of the street: or it is used as a series of bland establishment shots.  It never has a role as part of the film.    Hamad fails to allow the Yacoubian building or Cairo to make any claim on our imaginations.   

As the Yacoubian Building lacks any spacial dimension there is also a lacking in the perception of the passage of time. The characters never observe, nor are they observed:  they simple simply exist in perpetual action time for the sake of the story lines in which they are embroiled.  The dimension of time which YB’s opening sequence suggests is a defining force in play, is disregarded at once, Hamad happy with a token opening gesture.  The rest of the film is played out in the temporal anarchy the characterises most of the Hollywood action image output, a form increasingly mimicked and copied.  Time is subservient to action cuts.  There is no time stream in the film. Rather there is a stream of action.  Time becomes meaningless and impossible to reconstruct or understand.  Simply put: one thing leads to another. That’s all there is.  Chains of events are compressed or etiolated( more rarely) according to the demand for action.  Action shot through the lens of highly agitated cameras: craning swooping panning tracking hand held and angled, but never still.  The camera movement is effected not for reasons underlying the meaning of the shot or of the film but to disarm the viewer of any awareness of  subjective time.  The camera movement in constantly engaging the eye with a stream of events, disengages the viewer from the stream of time.   YB then, is a series plots and subplots that claim our attention not for what they represent but simply as  a mechanical series of events and how they end. 

There are claims that YB is a courageous film because it tackles taboo subjects in Egypt and the Arab world- taboo subjects such a homosexuality and terrorism.  I can’t really accept this point of view.  The homosexual subject, the newspaper journalist is a trite stereotype, represented in the script as a crude amoral exploiter of simple peasant men.  He is shown as having little personal morality, living a life dedicated to his own pleasures.  In what is the lowest point in the movie (and there are a few low ones notably in the becoming terrorist story) there is clumsy imbecilic flashback sequence involving the character which blames his parents for his homosexuality!   In the penultimate sequence he is murdered with expert dispatch by one of his pick-ups.  The event evokes no sense of loss within the film’s own conventions.   In that the moral stance of the film in relation to the homosexual character simply panders to the most prejudiced bands of attitude and opinion both in the Moslem and the Christian world YB  is not a film that tackles homosexuality in the media.  Just the opposite.  The plot line which describes  ‘becoming a terrorist’, is likewise reliant on an automotive mechanicality for its concatenation of events leading to outcome.  Just as having ‘bad parents’ makes a man homosexual: so being socially deprived and discriminated against leads to a boy becoming a ‘jihadi’.  Like the homosexuality theory it’s crass and untrue neither necessary nor sufficient but certainly uninteresting.

The disturbing aspect of YB is its total adoption of Hollywood forms to try and explain the historical social situation of Egypt. That Hamad thinks he can make his film work in this fashion is either testimony to his ambition (he wants demonstrate he can make feature films in Hollywood or Europe) or to his deluded state of mind.  The potpourri of characters and events strung together without reference to place or time, not only fails to speak of Egypt or Egyptians; it is an act of cultural colonialism allowing American forms to define the state of affairs in this Arab country.  As such YB, as the most expensive Egyptian feature film ever made, is not a pointer to the future but  part of the present problem.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Adrin Neatrour writes: Paul Schrader’s film compromises its own intention and ambitions. Schrader’s intention as I read it was to conduct an expressive exploration of the form taken by American power during the Bush administration. This intention would be actualised not through a script that directly probed the central machinations of power, but through an examination of the peripheral zones – the hangers on, the petty criminals the courtiers, courtesans and lackies – such as Carter Page. Instead of allowing Page’s hollowness to pursue its own dance its own logic to find his own lines of flight, Schrader’s script follows a sentimental humanising line of development to suggest the possibility of redemption for his protagonist.

The Walker Paul Schrader – USA /UK
2007 Woody Harrelson, Lauren Bacall Lily Tomlin, Kristin Thomas

Viewed: 6 Aug 07 Empire Cinema
Newcastle upon Tyne: Gala screening free ticket

Empty Centre

Woody Harrelson as Carter Page, is the
eponymous walker, the name given to a male consort who accompanies
high placed ‘society’ ladies to events or situations which their
husbands (if they have one) don’t want to attend. Page walks his
ladies round and round the social whirl. Schrader’s camera
(continually moving – tracking panning) registers an incessant
agitation but that does find a point of stillness in the scene in
Page’s bedroom, a sort of Egyptian tomb like space where he stores
and displays the tools of his trade: his clothes jewellery and male
sartorial appurtenances. This scene takes place early in the film.
It not only reinforces the perception of Washington as a necropolis,
but when Page divests himself of his wig, his manly mane is replaced
by stark baldness, a nakedness that points directly to the charade he
conducts. A hollowed out man in a dead hollowed out city. A man
without a centre in a town without a centre.

I think Paul Schrader’s film
compromises its own intention and ambitions.

Schrader’s intention as I read it was
to conduct an expressive exploration of the form taken by American
power during the Bush administration. This intention would be
actualised not through a script that directly probed the central
machinations of power, but through an examination of the peripheral
zones – the hangers on, the petty criminals the courtiers,
courtesans and lackies – such as Carter Page. Instead of allowing
Page’s hollowness to pursue its own dance its own logic to find his
own lines of flight, Schrader’s script follows a sentimental
humanising line of development to suggest the possibility of
redemption for his protagonist. This chosen line of development
involves a homosexual relationship which becomes increasingly
meaningful and central to the plotting in as much as it offers a
solution to Page’s problem of personal vacuity. A relationship in
which he can ‘find’ himself and confront his Oedipal demons. Of
course this is bullshit – redemption of a kind may have worked in
Taxi driver, but in The Walker it is unconvincing on its own dramatic
terms. At the point that Schrader picks him up, Carter Page is too
deeply excavated by the cancer of vanity empty desire and outward
presentation for the pat mechanism of a relationship to offer any
hope of a new start. Page is a citizen of a bloodless corrupted and
debilitated culture. To permit Page the easy relational route
through the script compromises the vision and undermines the force of
the film’s logic with no dramatic or filmic gain.

Basing the film on the periphery of
power was premised on the perception that from the point of view of
power the US at this moment is an empty centre. The empty centre of
the world. Power has abandoned Washington DC, leaving the town with
all the outward signs and indicators of power such as its
architecture the self importance of the minor players(courtiers) and
an enforcement system. But there is no substance. It is a city of
tombs memories and monuments where the living are long gone. It is a
city of the dead that is true to a Kafkaesque image of a power that
recedes eternally and becomes ever more remote except when suddenly
its close up and personal. Like the big corporation that suddenly
threatens you with a bill or the consequences of their pollution.
Remote and close. Washington has become like Japan under the
Shoganate where real power belonged to a war lord who concealed
himself behind a series of puppet institutions. Real power lay
concealed away from the vacuum of the empty centre.

The Walker works as an assemblage of
expressive settings and players Strips of action taken from the
social cultural business and criminal events that comprise life in
Washington DC. The mood of the film is caught in the opening shot:
a wallpaper shot. An endless circular pan across the wallpaper and
fittings of the card room in a grand classically apportioned house.
As the camera revolves we hear the chatter of the card players who
are eventually revealed as Carter and his ladies. The circular
nature of the shot evokes the idea of an eternal recurrence with the
wallpaper exerting a mesmerising effect (more interesting than the
dialogue which is held back) with its richly pattered geometric
surface suggesting entrapment and introducing the idea of prison or
tomb. Motifs that work its way through the Walker: entrapment; life
of the tomb, Rome in precipitous decline, the Egyptian worship of
the dead. Moods reinforced by Harrelson’s speech, remarkable not
for what he says, “I’m not a very interesting person, ” but
more for manner of his enunciation, the monotonal bass quality of his
deep Southern accent. Enunciation of death.

The shot also called up for me memory
of the opening shot of Resnais’ Last year in Marienbad. Except
Resnais’ shot tracks relentlessly forwards in its repetitions,
whereas Schraders shot rotates. And the two shots perhaps share
something of the same intention to establish a mood and lay out the
parameters of the films loci of concern. Among Resnais’ concerns
are the problem of memory with its invocation of differential
perception the perception of time in the otherness of the other.
Resnais has both his own discipline, and that of his scenarist Robbe
Grillet to ensure that he never allows plot line to sabotage the form
and content of his film. Clarity of intention and commitment to his
thesis of the nature of time and film never waver. Schrader allows
his film to be muddied by meaningless clutter of oedipal character
concerns and a weak plot line which weaken and attenuate the real
forces that the film initially sets in motion.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:
Ten Canoes is an idyll – beautifully shot respectful treatment of the Australian aboriginal world. But ultimately it made me think of Walt Disney’s ‘Bambi’. Ten Canoes is set in a primeval forest world where man and nature are so closely intertwined that the natural and social systems vibrate sympathetically in close harmony. But it doesn’t have a ‘Bambi’ movement.
Ten Canoes – de Heer. Djiggir – 2006 Australia – Crusoe Kurddal; Jamie Gulpilil
Star and Shadow – 8-07-07 Ticket price £4-00

No ‘Bambi’ moment here…

Ten Canoes is an idyll – beautifully shot  respectful treatment of the Australian aboriginal world.   But ultimately it made me think of Walt Disney’s ‘Bambi’.  Ten Canoes is set in a primeval forest world where man and nature are so closely intertwined that the natural and social systems vibrate sympathetically in close harmony.   But it doesn’t have a ‘Bambi’ movement.

Where ten canoes ceases to resemble ‘Bambi‘ is that it lacks in the whole of its course a real moment that connects this virtual idyll to the actual encompassing world that threatens it with a specific set of other desires.  ‘Bambi’ which is also set in an idyll – a drawn animated world comprising a natural forest setting – has as its central feature groups of heavily anthropomorphised animals and insects whose function is to legitimise the Disney values of  family and America.  The great set piece in ‘Bambi’ is the sequence portraying the destruction of the environment by a natural force – fire – which destroys both habitat and individual animals who fail to escape in time.  But before this disaster ‘Bambi’ has one other real moment: a moment that sabotages the idyll;  a moment that briefly but completely undermines the whole Disney sugared world of American family values.

Hearing a sequence of loud short retorts (gunshots) Bambi’s mother calls him to her in alarm.  Nestling close together mother and son watch as in the distance a figure carrying a gun emerges out of the trees into a clearing. This distant image is all we see of the hunter. Bambi asks his mom, what creatures are these? And Mom answers ‘Man’.  Man enters the forest by right to hunt and kill without discrimination.  Man is the terrible reality invading and subjecting the forest to his will. Mom will eventually fall before the hunter’s gun but it is in that short moment  when the man appears – the white man –  from out of the trees that the Disney film rents the veil of illusion that covers the myth of  the expressed primal forest kingdom.  The idyll is revealed as a sham state: a escapist fantasy nurtured by idealists,  animation artists, dreamers and children.   After the ‘Bambi’ moment (even given the ‘off screen’ death of  mom shot by the men) the film returns straight back into the recreation of the self contained vacuum packed ideal forest world.

We know whatever the cartoon creators may represent to us that today the forests are not the kingdoms of old.  The contemporary forest is a satrap state, a political dependency that endures only at the willing connivance of man.  Its survival rests on the changing needs and desires of the state.  Because ‘Bambi’ allows itself a real creative moment where an actual state of affairs is revealed, we know that the last shot of Bambi as he takes his father’s place as a majestically pointed stag represents a perilous condition.  Man will want his horns and pursue hunt and run him down in order to kill him and acquire the antlers as their trophy by right. 

To a degree, ‘Bambi’ is informed by its own content that it is propagating a childish illusion.  There is no such ‘moment’ in Ten Canoes. Ten Canoes is a distillation that encases the viewer within a perfectly sealed hermetic image of the aboriginal world.  There is no referent in the movie to the encompassing political world that presses in on the originary domain. Today when we are sensitised to and aware of  the atrocities predations and betrayals that have been perpetrated on the aboriginal peoples of Australia in an attempt by the whites to deny and destroy them, this lack of external referents turned Ten Canoes into vacuous experience, something irrelevant to both aboriginals and the white world.  The unwillingness of Ten canoes to allude to the forces controlling the Australian forest and desert, make the film read like a children’s illustrated book,  a Disney cartoon –  a film about a remote far off people not the actual aboriginal men and women who have to come to terms within the compass of contemporary Australia.       

The directors of Ten Canoes, de Heer and Djiggir might contest that so deeply have the aboriginal people and their culture been derided and unvalued, regarded as something grotesquely primitive and worthless,  that their film had as its overriding  purpose the affirmation of these people, their society and their culture.  To restate the worth and dignity of the autochthonous culture in order to restore respect and balance after 150 years of genocide attrition and cultural defamation.  And it’s true that in its representation of the physicality of the people and their beliefs, in the acting, in its cinematography and in its story telling form, Ten Canoes treats the indigenous people with respect and observes their lives as interactions with both endogamous social forces and the natural environment. Ten Canoes expresses the sentiment that these are people who live their lives in tune with each other and the environment.  They have the wisdom to know that in this land this is the only way.   In the act of filming de Heer and Djiggir  using mainly wide and medium shots with long steadicam tracks and takes find a style that is in sympathy with the way they want to represent their subjects.  The music in the film the didgeridoo rattles and percussion is an exquisite extension of the natural sounds everywhere about, in the trees and swamps.  The structure of Ten Canoes that shifts in time between the story teller and the story he is telling, creates a simulacrum of aboriginal life as locked into a primordial reality where everything happens in one big reoccurring time. de Heer and Djiggir do justice in simulating this world as a place to be valued but at a cost.  The cost is that the production starts to look false; to resemble a cartoon film whose concern is with appearances, and  to reduce judgement to values that can be ascribed to outer forms,  rather than actual inner situations and states of affairs. 

One of Disney’s big hits of the ‘50s was a film called The Living Dessert.  In the Living Desert the lives of desert creatures were subjected to anthropomorphic interpretation so that their behaviour was simply reduced to the level of the cartoon  creatures.   The film was heavily loaded by the presence of an avuncular voice over.  A voice – never seen and existing on a different track and plane within the movie – which purported to understand and explain everything we saw.  Real elements in the natural history of the  animals were by and large omitted in favour of a sort of make believe recreation of their lives as creatures of Disney’s polico-semantic environment complete with humanised motivation ( “…here’s a cute little fellah {speaking of a racoon) what’s on his mind….?) The Living Desert showed that in the animal kingdom contrived shot and edited footage can be easily manipulated into signifiers of Disney values.  Although  the values are different  the same falsifying process seems to be at work in Ten Canoes.  Using a heavy interpretative voice over technique, throughout the film the aboriginal culture is reduced to an exemplifier of certain moral values.  The story teller appropriates all of the interpretative space in the film and speaks for everyone  It is done perhaps with good intentions but its effect is to substitute judgements for other expressive possibilities. .

Ten Canoes presents an autochthonous originary situation that is a hermetically sealed world in which the indigenous people are part of a primal kingdom.  This Aboriginal world,  some of whose inhabitants are played by actors, is represented as a model idealised world in which everything is more or less perfect.  The men are strong hunters, in the young there is respect for the elders and the traditions, the spiritual element of life is recognised and given due weight, the women are wives and behave as women should behave they do not transgress into the world of men, and ( as in the jungle book) the tribe behave and respect the law.  Everyone is satisfied with their place in the order of the cosmos. The film as an interpretive narrative is didactic, pointing up the necessary relationship between the world as a paradise and the social wisdom necessary to sustain it.  Unfortunately this model is a lie.  The behaviour of the people and the world sustained by this behaviour in Ten Canoes is a contrivance.  It is a mythologised state that owes everything to Walt Disney and the world of children’s illustrated bibles and nothing to life itself.  In an important sense Ten Canoes is  contrived and well intentioned lie that peddles a bowdlerised world without conflict, where wives all behave like women are supposed to, where the young do as their elders say and where there is no conflict.  It is of course a world without the encompassing discomfort of white civilisation.  It is the world of the lie just as Disney is the world of the lie.

Ten Canoes says little about the experienced conditions of life of the Aborigines.  It is happy to peddle a cleaned up sort of politically environmentally acceptable aboriginal face for white inspection.  As such it leaves us out of touch with the Aboriginal condition today, it leaves us out of touch with a people having to come to terms with their own experiences of degradation devaluation and near extermination. 
Perhaps these films makers and their collaborators have a bolder more difficult film within them but this is a film that is static and goes nowhere.  There is a line in the film when one of the men jokes about a stranger who has been found in their territory. This stranger covers his loins with a clothe. Why does he do this the men ask? Perhaps he has a small cock: “ – never trust a man with a small cock…” jokes one of the men.  This is a film that goes off half cock.
adrin neatrour   
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk