Film Review

Watching Sunshine was a detached experience. I felt remote and uninvolved with anything happening on the screen. The crew seemed to have been beamed up from an episode of ‘Friends’ and were going through the motions of pretending to be in a space ship. All around them techni-wizards organising the CGI , were busy making the futurist wallpaper.

Sunshine – Directed Danny Boyle – UK – 2006 – Ensemble caste.
Viewed: 14 April 07 – Empire Screen 6 – Newcastle.  Ticket price £6-50
 
‘Friends’ in space

Watching Sunshine was a detached experience. I felt remote and uninvolved with anything happening on the screen.  The crew seemed to have been beamed up from an episode of ‘Friends’ and were going through the motions of pretending to be in a space ship.  All around them techni-wizards organising the CGI ,  were busy making the futurist wallpaper. 

There is deadness the core of Sunshine that pervades the script, the acting the art direction camera and the direction.   The deadness is I think the consequence of Boyle and his collaborators having nothing of substance to say.  They appear to believe that computer imagery combined with stylistic homage to Kubrick Tankovski and Scott  would be enough to carry this movie.  It’s evident that this mimicking of style increasingly cramps and stifles Sunshine.  Finding itself chained to and boxed in by  expectations which it  cannot deliver, Sunshine becomes a chaotic exercise in stylistic vacuity.   

2001 the Alien cycle and Solaris all mapped out ideas about journies undertaken by men and women in space.  Although projecting onto the space mission the concerns and anxieties of their times they succeed through their filmic expression in creatively developing and refining their core ideas.  They all took on the sci-fi genre with some ambition and used film to shape define and respond to particular worlds of concern.   Boyle and his writer are unable to do this. 

In his direction of  Sunshine Boyle lacks vision.  I  can see a couple of incipient notions in the material: the primal environmental quest;  the notion of the sun as a landscape-becoming-state-of-mind which interpenetrates the waking and sleeping hours of the crew (James Ballard territory), the sun as a deluding deity.   None of these ideas is allowed any obstetric freedom either in the script or the camera.  They are aborted still born.   Boyle without confidence in any of the possibilities that were obviously alive at some stage early drafting of the script defaults Sunshine  to a banal action thriller dominated by CGI.   In consequence both players and his camera are reduced to ciphers, pawns in the game of meeting the technical requirements of complex digital mattes.

Neither the players nor the camera created any forms to which I could relate either emotionally psychically or visually.  The overall affect was a feeling of  disengagement from fom the film which was almost completely without tensions.  There was no tension either its plot or in its acting out, or in way the film was the visually structured through the camera.  Visually what I watched was a series of complex orchestrations between camera and digital effects. The camera work was uninformed by any other intention than to mesh with its digital matte and achieve a certain competence of fusion.  The camera is employed simply a mechanical device for recording the image making process,  and is unable to disguise its studio provenance.  The acting like the camera work was without point or conviction.  Amongst the ensemble group of actors, it was difficult to tell one role player from another and Boyle, asks of them no more than to go through the motions the gestures and expressive range  familiar in sit com formats.

As a film Sunshine is a descent into incoherence with little integrity either of plot or the internal devices adopted to carry the film.  The robot that controls the space ship, Icasus ll all is a lacklustre cloned version of HAL.  The distinguishing feature of HAL  is that his identity emerges as a centre about which the film orbits both visually and psychically.  The on board computer of Icarus ll is not permitted to develop any personality: she ( it has a female voice) exists purely as a function of the plot that requires that she be turned off or overridden from time to time purely to facilitate the action.  Sunshine is not even able to sustain itself within the sci-fi genre and the final section of the with the introduction of the bogey man on to the ship, sees it segue into another genre – old fashioned gothic horror. 

Sci –fi is a tough genre : at one end of the spectrum there are the films of Kubrick and Tarkovski;  but  at the other end of the spectrum there is spoofland  Red Dwarf, and the Hitchiker’s Guide.  To cut it in sci-fi you can’t borrow other people’s clothes.  You have to make your own path and succeed or fail on your own terms mapping out response and answers to the challenges that you set yourself within the genre. 
adrin neatrour  
adriinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Jean Paul Sartre probably saw this film when it opened in 1938. Did he go with Simone de Beauvoir? Did they identify with Gabin and Morgan?FilmcritQuai des Brumes – Marcel Carne Fr 1938 – Jean Gabin, Michele Morgan
Screened Star and Shadow Newcastle UK; 1st April 2007; ticket price £4-00

Retrocrit:  Jean Paul Sartre probably saw this film when it opened in 1938.
           Did he go with Simone de Beauvoir? Did they identify with Gabin                      and Morgan?

Viewed today La Quai des Brumes looks like it has been premised on an existential text in set in the fog of the pre-World War ll era.   It’s made in France in 1938 at the time of the publication of Sartre’s first novel La Nausee (of which the Penguin edition was a common accessory to 60’s black garbed angst) which developed Heidigger’s philosophical ideas about the nature of existence into a literary form.  Quai des Brumes(QdB) lays out a similar philosophical agenda in an era where sick Europe gazing into the rise of absurd murderous atavistic politics and the abyss of nazi terror found itself unable to respond.  It’s an era of moral equivalence and inability to act in response to evil.  An era in which society in a state of entropy was just passing the time sipping and supping, waiting for the inevitable cataclysm and the final render of accounts. Bit like today maybe.   In 1938 existentialism with its emphasis on existing now, the absurd, perception and the failure of reason wasn’t something that people had to be taught: it was out on the streets.  In the air, the cafes bars and clubs, the music – mainly jazz and the movies.  An attitude for living through the times and like the smoke from the cigarettes, deeply internalised. 

The core of the film is the performance of Jean Gabin, the deserting soldier on a line of flight a journey from nowhere to nowhere or anywhere.  His presence pervades the moral heart of the film – with similar power but different effect to his contemporary Bogart.  Bogart is an agent of a judgemental system usually based on an outsider’s idea of justice. Gabin is moral in the sense of not being judgmental, of being true to the imperatives of his existence distrusting all judgemental systems whatever their rationality.

Gabin’s acting style tends towards doing little. In QdB his minimal gestural language is central to the moulding of the film as a  contemporary state of mind.  His  face and eyes are perfectly tuned in QdB as a certain kind of statement in time.  I think that the elemental mode of Gabin’s face in QdB is ‘seeing’.   The seeing eyes.   Gabin does not employ expressive or emotive mode.  Compared to today’s pouting grimacing gurning acting crowd, or to the one dimensional fixed faciality adopted by players to get them through feature films, Gabin’s non movement is a revelation.  Aided by Carne’s direction Gabin sees into every situation that he encounters – perhaps like the café people seeing what was happening to the Jews in Germany – but is not inclined to take action except to communicate that he has seen.  Action of course he does take when the events provoke.  The action sequences as conceived in QdB  are cursory anticlimactic and mechanically choreographed, in effect down played: things that have to be done in order to get back to the film.  The film is not the action. The action events – fights etc – are shot in a naturalistic rather than realistic register.  They are simply devices for moving on from one situation to another.

QdB is all shot on sets.  The design of settings is such that they could be anywhere.  There are few overt signs that point to specificity of place whether it’s the hotel rooms, the domestic interiors, the bars or the quayside.   They have an intrinsic nowhere feel, they are nondescript borders.  This is a conceptual idea that is developed by filmmakers in the ‘40s and 50’s who take states of consciousness as a central concern. The unity and fixation of purpose is no less evident in Carne’s film hence the primacy of the idea of fog, a weather condition that makes everything look the same.  Out of the mist which is both real and moral Gabon and Morgan step out in clear definition towards the absurd but unsurprising ending.

Two final points about QdB.  First: the coat worn by Michelle Morgan as Nellie is quite amazing. I think it’s made from some kind of transparent plastic material and to me it seems disarmingly modern or perhaps timeless.  Transparency can serve many different purposes. I think it’s point here is to say: I have nothing to hide: my existence is bared to your gaze but  beyond what you see, there lies something you can know.   Second: Jean Gabin has in the film a sort of alter ego in the form of a dog.  The incident in the opening sequence whereby the dog attaches itself to him triggers the focal concerns of the film. When asked why he put his own life at risk to save the dog’s life Gabin responds that a life is a life.  The relationship between Gabin and the dog is totally unsentimental but it runs the duration of the film and then some, leaving you with an idea.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Retrocrit:
I had never realised that Visconti’s first film, his adaptation of the James M Cain novel the Postman always rings Twice preceded Tay Garnett’s Hollywood version with Lana Turner and John Garfield by some 4 years. The manner in which the two protagonists eye each other for the first time highlights the ambition scope and styles of the two films. Ossessione – Luchino Visconti – 1942 – Italy : Clara Calamae; Massimo Girotti
Viewed Star and Shadow Jan 2007.  Ticket price £3-50

retrocrit
I prefers the woman with a basket full of eggs to the woman with lipstick

I had never realised that Visconti’s first film, his adaptation of the James M Cain novel the Postman always rings Twice preceded Tay Garnett’s Hollywood version with Lana Turner and John Garfield by some 4 years.

The manner in which the two protagonists eye each other for the first time highlights the ambition scope and styles of the two films.  Garnett introduces them using a cute gimmick: Lana Turner drops her lipstick case across the diner floor to where Garfield sits.  The lipstick a snare like device catches in its traces both Garfield and the audience initiating a film of  relationship intensities that are self referential, plot bound and plot driven.  The audience is carried from the lipstick to the Chair subject to two judgmental systems: the internalised voice over delivered by Garfield and the externalised justice system that represents the accounting of the second half of the movie.  In short the connections that Hollywood asks both the players and the audience to make are in the main mechanical linkages of the action – the plot.  

In Ossessione the eyeball scene has the drifter sitting at the back of the empty bar look up – his eye catching a peripheral movement – and see the owner’s wife facing him from behind the bar holding before her an immense basket of eggs.  She turns and goes into the kitchen.
The image is both natural in the sense the eggs are supplies for the kitchen and powerfully suggestive of multiple latent possibilities.  The lipstick is a simple signifier, a mask of sexuality which can only point to what it is an intensifier of desire.   The egg is primary and hence ambiguous – containing within its the form ideas of sex and fertility, and also within its form strongly implying the creation of new life.  Eggs also suggest comfort ingestion and sensuality of texture and colour.  They are fragile and can break easily.  In short eggs are a world.  And it is with the idea of self contained but open worlds that Visconti opens up the dynamics of  Ossessione.  Visconti, who had before the war been working with Renoir is about worlds and domains and the states of mind that they evince.  Hollywood  is about plot  and stars.

Osessione not only contains within itself multiple worlds and domains but it is also in itself contained and held within the world of rural Italy.  Garnett’s Postman takes place in a bubble (a bubble beside the road but the highway intrudes hardly at all).  Ossessione is not just located in the countryside it is part of the countryside.  The eggs, the food the country activities and the work of fields in which the workers are winnowing.  Ossessione is located in the calendar and rhythm of the seasons of which it is both a part and an  aberration like unseasonal weather.

Visconti’s drifter moves from world to world.  The opening is a long tracking shot, the point of view of the drifter from the cab of a lorry, in which we see the road open out and then rush past us.   The lorry stops at the first world – the bar – which contains the dissatisfied wife of its owner.  The shots that comprise this first sequence, composed still images and tracks create a world of potential destinies: but not a world of overdeterminations. It seems to me it is a world that in the main is constituted out of the state of mind of the drifter who is both attracted and repelled by its inherent possibilities.  In the course of the film the drifter explores at least two other worlds.  The world of travelling entertainer whose invitation to accompany him is accepted.  This world contains within itself  a different sexual domain:   homosexuality with its implied less onerous and lighter form of commitment – no eggs.  The world is experienced as floating ever changing and without a centre.    The world of the prostitute is encapsulated within her room which is an extraordinary assemblage of wallpaper and objects calling up  mood identity and memory that overwhelms the emotions both of the drifter and the viewer. State of mind takes the drifter back to the bar and the world, now darker in which it is contained, though by now it become a multi faceted world each returning an altered reflection back to the viewer.  The bar the kitchen the bedroom the wardrobe containing the murdered husband’s clothes all trigger a different understanding of what is happening.   

Visconti closes his film by transposing the action to a world characterised by undifferentiated space, shots that are set in unreferenced locations. The drifter and the wife float in a world that is comprised of the consequences of the decisions that have been made.   The woman is pregnant as they try to escape, one of her eggs has been fertilised.  The final sequences in the scrub by the river and in the car squeeze the two lovers together, and in a way the little car is like an egg in which they are both contained.  An egg that will crack.  The final playing out of plot which always remains a background feature of the film has nothing to do with the judgemental system but everything to do with human fragility.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Once upon a Lynch there was a film maker who worked off energy released from an insight that beneath smooth suburban lawns there was a rich primal schizoid earth which produced strangely deformed psyches. But Lynch seems to have progressively forgotten his starting point, the lawn itself, and developed little interest in examining the necessary conditions for the development of lawn culture.Inland Empire – David Lynch –  Fr – Pol –USA – 2006  Lorna Derne
Viewed Rotterdam Film Festival –  3rd Feb 2007

Like playing your collection of old records

When I told my friend Graeme Walker that I had just seen Lynch’s Inland Empire he looked at me and asked: was it like this? Graeme pumped out his cheeks and made some delicate squelching noises, produced some muted clicking sounds with his tongue and inblown squeekings with his mouth, before finally hardening his eyes turning to me and saying in a deliberate tone accentuating the second word by raising its pitch slightly: “ Who are you?”   I replied Inland Empire had been something like that but much longer (three hours) and not as entertaining.   In short Lynch has reached  the point to which many film makers come:  the cupboard is bare, they have nothing to express,  just empty form to fill.

Once upon a Lynch there was a film maker who worked off energy released from an insight that beneath smooth suburban lawns there was a rich primal schizoid earth which produced strangely deformed psyches.  But Lynch seems to have progressively forgotten his starting point, the lawn itself, and developed little interest in examining the necessary conditions for the development of  lawn culture.  His formal concerns have concentrated on simply providing visual fields for a set of psychically mutated characters to do their thing, to strut their stuff.  It becomes the American Weird genre, in which everything in the film is subordinated to a demonstration of weirdness.  The acting, the sets ( distorted perspective, labyrinthine channels) the cuts, the dialogue, the camera lens, the musical set pieces, each element of the film is designed to accentuate the weird.  The amplification circuit of the film not working to increase tension or suspense or awareness but simply to escalate the magnitude of the weird.
In this sense Inland Empire is typical of Weird movies which usually rely on a single device or motif  to drive a concatenation of events which are either weird in themselves or to which the characters have weird reactions.  In Inland Empire the driver is the idea that the actors are involved in a replaying of actuality(one of the opening shots of Inland Empire is of an old 78 rpm record being played on an old turn-table).  The structure of the film takes the form of an escalation of the weird events and responses leading to a final act of destruction followed by an unresolved penultimate sequence. The  weakness of Inland Empire is that its only referential logic is the dynamic of escalation demanded by the form of the film.  By three hours this has long run out of steam, with Lorna Derne bankrupt in the expressive department, the script dead and the camera work repetitious.

David Lynch has said that Inland Empire is a movie about time.  I think that it’s a film about space, with the action cuts used to by-pass time, shifting the action from space to space, not from time to time. Inland Empire is an edited film not a film that is composed in shot or frame. And most of the edits are action cuts designed to move on the action.  They don’t filmically suggest time – even if that is the director’s intent.  Just because there are impossible cuts in Inland Empire, in the sense that through an edit two non adjacent spaces are linked, in themselves these suggest space not time, in particular when there is no character through whom we can experience time.  We see Lorna Derne shift in space but we don’t get her take on the shift, we simply see an act of manipulation, the vacuity of a cut.

In a way Inward Empire is just a cop out.  Located and invested in a world where there are no consequences and no meanings, just a world that comprises of unending unrelated sequences of weirdness.  In a sense this is a tacit social comment on the satiated gorged material state of US culture, but this  is a social comment about the genre – the  Weird. There’s nothing in Inland Empire to suggest anything interesting such as broader social readings.

 In the final sequence of the film, David Lynch plays one of his favourite records Nina Simone’s Sinnerman.  As at the end of Kitano’s Zatoichi (I’m sure there are other examples but this is the most recent I could think of), Inland Empire ends with the caste and the director laying aside  the outer pretence of the movie and  partying.  It might be that Lynch’s intention for this ending was to suggest yet another layering of time, the Russian Doll effect (which is space rather than time anyway) For me the effect of the dance party was simply to underline the emptiness of the Lynch’s filmic conceit.   Nina Simone had more class and energy than anything glimpsed in Inland Empire, and her song way eclipses the film. 
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

We Are All Fine is a metaphysical black comedy which as a double take offers an oblique and penetrating look at contemporary Iran. We Are All Fine    Bizhan Mirbagheri  Iran 2005  Ahu Kheradmand;Mohson Moradi; Lehla Zarch
Viewed Rotterdam Film Festival 1 Feb 2007

Beware the empty centre

We Are All Fine is a metaphysical black comedy which as a double take offers an oblique and penetrating look at contemporary Iran. 

Mirbhagheri’s film begins with an event that comes close to being a proposition.  A family – an extended family of three generations – is visited by a stranger who says he is a friend of the eldest son who has left Iran to work abroad but has not been heard from in two years.  His message is that the son wants his family – mother father brother sister wife and child – to make a video letter to be sent back to him with the stranger.  The son wants to know how things are with them.

The visitor goes leaving behind him uncertainly, endless unanswered and unanswerable questions and, as proof of his authenticity, a nondescript recently taken photo of the son.  The family believe it’s their boy: the full length picture shows a man standing in front of a wire mesh fence wearing jeans trainers a light jacket. The location( as one member of the family observes) could be anywhere; in a sense the figure is also everyman. 

Borrowing a camcorder, the family decide to make the video for their son.   At this point the film starts to shift between two expressive modes: the film which documents the action and the video mode which records the feelings of the family trapped in their own expectations. The structural dynamic of the film stems from the alternation between the two systems of recording, between monologue and dialogue.   After considering and briefly trying to speak collectively the family take the decision that what they really want to do is to talk individually to their son so that unconstrained they can commune with him from their hearts.   At the point at which the video monologues are taken up the film enters a realm of communication that is religious in form: it’s like prayer, communication with the unseen.  The family, who continually try to revise edit wipe and redo their performances in attempts to find the right key or the ‘right’ tone offer their son:  accounts, justifications, confessions, brutal statements of unalloyed truth (“I am dieing” his father tells him).   They are speaking to the male who is the absent and empty centre of the house.  He is not there yet they have to speak to him and in this absence and emptiness he assumes a sort of god like abstraction.  He becomes an empty vessel for the outpouring of lamentation supplication and truth.  A man functioning and being as the form of God.  The absent male? Absent but omnipresent.

I think that We are All Fine(WAAF) is a finely tuned reflection of a certain internalised psychic state of affairs in Iran.  Of course the film has social context: the revolution and the Iraq war are strongly alluded to. But in WAAF nearly all the action takes place inside the home of the family.  There are some exterior shots:  the military academy, the garment shop where the sister works (where her male manager is fired by the female boss), but essentially this is an interior film and it is through the interiority (both in monologue and dialogue) that we know what is happening.  The father is old sick and dieing; the sister is keeping the family afloat by working; the mother keeps the hearth; the wife takes their daughter to the out of school drama club.   The woman and the old father all have their problems and get on with living and dieing.  The younger brother is a good natured soul; perhaps naïve but  he  understands why his brother has deserted the family, and admits that he too might do the same thing.  The actuality is that it is the women who are living sustaining life; for how long can they take the strain? The men dream and then plan the execution of some sort of flight either abroad or perhaps to another kind of place.   With elegance and simplicity Mirbhagheri suggests that the empty centre he describes is not just a feature of this family but is replicated through his country.  Without intimate knowledge of Iran I do not know if Mirbhagheri is representing something actual.   But certainly Mirbhagheri (and his script writer) is a filmmaker with vision who has looked at his society and seen somewhere at  its core the phenomenon of the absent centre that is transformed into a vessel for outpourings as a component of the social assemblage.  He has conceived a subtle and telling form for conveying his insight, for by removing the male presence he has freed himself to be able to deconstruct the fabric of Iranian society.   Looking to filmmakers in the West, in comparison we have a generation of filmmakers who lack the capacity to see and understand their own situations.  Some see symptoms (lots of films about problems) but not the conditions.  Filmmakers who struggle to make films about ideas and as such are incapable of making films that probe and deconstruct psychic assemblage of  schizoid Western societies and their values.     

Checking the film on the imdb to find the cast list I saw that (unsurprisingly) few people had seen the film. One person who had seen it commented on the bad acting.  In the West the acting profession has become part of the communications industry.  The consequences of this industrialisation of the art have in the course of 80 to 90 years completely taken over expectations of and demands made on actors.  In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller through Willie Lomax, points out that to sell the product you first of all have to sell yourself.  The emphasis on the actor adopting a heightened emotional individuality as the chosen expressive mode to the exclusion of other styles of performing, has led to actors and actresses ‘selling’ themselves for role and ‘pitching‘ themselves into roles, to the exclusion of other expressive styles drawn from folk or classical traditions of performance.   In particular over the last 30 years in the UK and USA the soap opera has become the dominant form of an industrialised output defining the demands made of actors and actresses.  This form has increasingly exerted influence in curtailing the acting profession’s repertoire of dramatic responses.  The soap opera which is not a arena of ideas relies on idiosyncratic roles (parts) that have  to be filled out emotively by the players. The industry needs a type of overdetermined emotive response from its actors  to fill out the vacuity and  the emotional similarities of the various switchback plot lines.  The actors are required to respond and react in particular with expressive faciality (many shots and even complete sequences are in full face close up).   The players gestural responses have become corrupted or delimited by: multiple but crude variations of the rictus the forehead and eye muscles and expressive use of arms and hands as if they were huge levers pumping out reactive cues. (Sales men and women are taught a similar gestural vocabulary).

In Iran there seems to be an acting tradition that isn’t distorted by the selling ethos.  Much of the action of WAAF is shot wide. and in its playing WAAF is understated and so shaped to allow to Mirgbhageri’s idea primacy.  It is the idea that unfolds and develops in the course of the film, rather than the characters.  Had it been played otherwise it would have been at the cost of the increasing urgency and power in the development of the film.    
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Viewed Rotterdam International Film Festival 3 Feb 2007
The background actuality of Teresa Villaverde’s film lies in the criminal racket of people smuggling and in particular the entrapment of young Eastern European girls into prostitution. Transe is not as a movie about issues or dramatised statement of the obvious levels of exploitation in this activity. Transe is film. Transe – Teresa Villaverde – 2006 126 mins Ana Morcira
Viewed Rotterdam International Film Festival 3 Feb 2007

Once upon a time…

Transe opens with the sound of the wind laid over the titles.  A wind that blows within and without through the film.

The background actuality of Teresa Villaverde’s film lies in the criminal racket of people smuggling and in particular the entrapment of young Eastern European girls into prostitution.  Transe is not as a movie about issues or dramatised statement of the obvious levels of exploitation in this activity. There’s no shortage of that material.  Transe is film.  Film as a sensualised experience grounded in life but owing nothing to expectations about the form that life might take.  Villaverde renders her material as a film experience using camera light voice and portrayal to create an optic and sound world built on the premise of fairytale. 
 
Towards the end of the brothel sequence in Transe Sonia (Ana Morcira) the protagonist sits on a chair in pick-up room.  She faces the camera looking back at but over and beyond the lens whilst a mirror ball (out of shot) reflects a recurring pattern across her.  The shot lasts perhaps 2 to 3 minutes. The flowing multifaceted pattern repeats itself across her face and on the wall behind her.  Sonia is rooted in an immobility of being.  The thing for me about this shot is that I can’t remember if it is mute or not. The power of the optical effect is both meditative and dynamic.  It suspends it animates  As it holds the viewer in its delicate tracery simultaneously it engenders a connection with Sonia’s wordless movement into retreat and defines the object status of her condition.  The shot (and there are others in the film) creates fusion of the objective and subjective: the objective and subjective points of view become one. We move from action into time.   We see the choice Ana makes: to take an internal line of flight that leads away from the world into which she has been trapped, into another world of ice and stillness where all you can hear is the wind.  Like the old Russian folk tales; except this is a tale of modern Europe.

Transe is a fairy tale in the classic mode of Anderson in that in his tellings. Anderson’s descriptive writing is strong but economic, the action moves simply forward, the actors have feelings in relation to their situations but not generally in relation to other people and the forces in play are clearly boldly delineated.  Villaverde’s fairytale is an amalgam of motifs: Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, the Little Match Girl.  Villaverde’s story is a recasting of the fairytale in contemporary darkness.  Of course the material of the Fairytale often comes from dark recessive spaces of the collective mind and touches the reader with raw psychic fear before closure with some kind of redemption.  Transe is naked fairytale without the redemption coda.    Sonia in Transe is the little match girl reinvented in a malign godless universe.  When she has exhausted her own resources there is no God to pick her up shield and cradle her in his arms . From her sleep of death, the chamber of her flight, there will be no prince to wake Sonia with a kiss;  she must sleep forever.  From Bluebeard’s seventh room there is no escape – Sonia must join the dead wives.  Transe is not gender politics it is a psychic realisation of a loss of will.  No will to power life. 

Transe moves from flow to immobility. Before leaving St Petersburg for Europe (because she wants to be rich), Sonia smears her sleeping young son with her blood.  The movement of the camera as Sonia leaves Russia tracking down ice, rails and  river, has a primal menstrual quality.  The camera takes on a biological rhythm that mimics the slow steady quickening of the womb.   As her sexuality is stripped out of her, Villaverde moulds Sonia’s situation on film using twists of the pan and the immobility of the locked off camera.  The life flow ceases: as Sonia finds herself abandoned her biology shrinks back, she withdraws into an internal psychic space where nobody can find her.  In a catatonic drift all sensation is withdrawn and she drifts between sleep and barely extant consciousness.  A body in name only, a body without organs.

With Transe Teresa Villaverde has made a film that retains in its form the integrity of the ideas that energised it.  It‘s a film made as an exploration of a certain type of life unfolding in a particular situation. The events that are filmed are selected because they develop the notion of the central character’s actions and reactions to what is happening.  There is restraint and little overt violence on screen (though the violence and pornography of the situation is not in doubt) and as in the fairy tale it is the simplicity and directness of the telling that implicates the viewer in the film.  Villaverde’s faith in her form – the fairytale – contrasts strongly with Andrea Arnolds film Red Road. Also in the festival Red Road seems beset by compromises.  Again it has a fairytale mode, but the director seems to lose confidence and sells out her film to cinematic tricks and a banal plot line which ends up the dominant shaping force of the material.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Viewing Haensel’s film Sounds of the Sands,shot in and about Africa, triggered thoughts about my own experiences of having my picture taken; having my image captured, by my dad. Appropriation of image……Sounds of the Sands – Marion Haensel (Belgium) – 2006
Viewed Rotterdam Film Festival 1 Feb 07

Lie back think of dad…….

Viewing Haensel’s film Sounds of the Sands, triggered thoughts about my own experiences of having my picture taken; having my image captured, by my dad.
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There’s this thing about having your picture taken.  A lot depends on who’s behind the camera.  When I was a teenager one thing that really bugged me was dad pointing his camera at me.  The resentment I felt at being asked to do something I didn’t want to do –  to pose – was great, seemingly out of proportion to the situation.  Of course the paternal demand existed in a context: the context of an underlying bad relationship between me and my father.   I resisted what I saw as an attempt to make to do something I didn’t want to do.  Later I realised that what I was fighting was an appropriation of myself into his world of the false and the fake. My pic would be seamlessly inserted into his series of photographs and come to represent a line of memory perception.

Marion Haensel’s film points up a characteristic of films made by Europeans or Americans in or about Africa –  they are not in or about Africa.  The films are about  what Westerners would like Africa to be.  The motivational concern of Sounds of the Sands seems to be to depict Africa as an image.  An image of Africa is presented as if the actual product that Haensel had in mind was a stunning poster and/or the tasteful coffee table book.  Here is Africa as images snatched out of context deterritorialised and appropriated for the benefit of the gaze of the Western consumer.   

Sounds of the Sands(SoS) is no more than a parade of such images that flesh out exotic settings stripped bare of referents to both of time and place, leaving the viewer with a sanitised children’s story, a sort of Swiss Family Robinson fiction in which beautiful Africans die tastefully and without protest in the Sahara desert.

Image – African’s are beautiful, and beautiful filmicly connotes noble(CF Leni Riefenstahl pics of the Nuer).  But this notion of nobility also points to potential disaster: the idea of the noble savage is lethally disempowering.  Ever since the eighteenth century Enlightenment European thinkers have described and noted with philosophical approval African (and AmerIndian) superiority of spirit over the West.  This Western projection and has sown seeds of disaster for the Continent, in that the Western interests and agents that have raped the land and its people, have been aided and abetted by a projection of African response of which they have no fear:  a sort of beautiful metaphysical fatalism.   Whatever trials tribulations atrocities are ‘sent’ upon the African they respond with nobility and generosity of spirit.  So it is in SoS. The actors in this film are physically beautiful, they are well behaved, they are noble.  What is more(and it one of the SoS’s features that betray its white provenance) they speak perfect received French not some damn patois) The man the woman the child:  the camera caresses their faces in close-up even as they experience death without protest.  The film in its shot composition which mimics a biblical iconography projects this statement about Africa to the audience.  They will take whatever shit is thrown at them with fateful equanimity.  We can let whatever happens to these people happen.   The serenity of the people will see them through and they won’t blame or be angry with us.  No shit.

Of course the film, in its structure is a series of sequences without context.  No context means no focus for feelings, action or discourse.  Time and place are left vague and undefined, its set any place any time. It’s in Nowhere Africa.  If you’re an African farmer stuff happens. A drought drives the farmer teacher to make a decision to cross the Sahara with his wife family and live stock.  Except that he’s in a francophone African state we don’t know where he is or the reasons why there might be drought. It happens. And it happens that he thinks it best to cross the desert, which seems a difficult thing to attempt, though of course he is cheerful about it all. The lack of basic context: when – where – what – makes SoS seems entirely abstracted as an account.  An abstracted film about a part of the continent where we know there is turmoil and dislocation.  But we know there are causes for these things.

Not only is the specific situation of the film decontextualised, the family of whom it tells are unlike any African family.  African families are known to be multigenerational and cross generational.  But in SoS the African family represented is nuclear.  A family form that for Africa seems to me to be a complete misrepresentation of how the people live.  No explanation is provided as to why there are no older generation present from either of the two family braches.  The suspicion remains that Haensel has Europeanised nuclearised his family in the script to present a more familiar and easier image of Africa to Western audiences.  To sell the idea that they are just like us: mama papa cute kids.  Meat for Freaudians.  Everything is cut to suit the faked profile of the film – nothing real must be allowed to sully the desired image.  If an older generation had been present in the script it would have necessitated  the filming of some tough difficult sequences.  Sequences that would have been difficult even for noble savages to handle without losing their fateful serenity.  The old folks would either have been left behind to die of thirst; or if they’d gone on the walk through the desert they would have been the first to die of exhaustion and heat.  So much the better for the plot to restrict it to the sanitised nuclear family.

Bad things happen as the nuclear family and their stock cross the desert.  Bad men demand ransom, bad men want to fuck the women, want to take the boys away to train up as bad men.  Everything happens in vacuo, as if the only reason for the events was the dramatic, the ‘need’ of the film for incident.  So SoS scripts in a heavy macho dude in shades to make badass threats, point guns and generally play heavy.  The crossing of the desert is also something of a joke.  You might think that a film should pay attention to some of the detailed demands that this environment imposes on those who would travel across the barren dry interior.  But the African couple might as well be Bogart and Bacall for all they are seriously inconvenienced by the desert.  Even on its own terms SoS is profligately forgetful.  The man and his friend spend all their money buying a compass from a soldier.  Later when they split to go their ways we never know who took the compass; yet this tool is necessary for survival.

It is difficult after viewing to see SoS as anything other than a neo-colonial vehicle aimed at further undermining the stature of the African psyche for European audiences.  The final sequence in a way says it all.  What remains of the little nuclear family group(after mum and one boy have died and the other boy been taken by bandits) finally sink down in exhaustion, lose consciouness and await death.  But what happens?  They wake up to find themselves safe and sound in a refugee camp run by a French aid agency.  The whites have found them and carried them back to the tents.  The whites have saved the noble savages – as usual –  so that they can ride again.  They couldn’t do for themselves.  Get it.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Bahman Ghobadi is a filmmaker who is making films from within the people. He is not an outsider coming into a culture or a society and then making a movie about the people and their problems. Ghobady is of the Kurds. Half Moon is about them and him and it’s a simply shot road movie in which every sequence is informed by understanding of the Kurdish situation.  
Half Moon – Bahman Ghobadi (Iran 06) viewed Rotterdam Film festival 2 Feb 2007 
 

Where you get to depends on how you travel

Bahman Ghobadi is a filmmaker who is making films from within the people.  He is not an outsider coming into a culture or a society and then making a movie about the people and their problems.  Movies made by outsiders rarely amount to more than a series of superficial glosses impressions and images stitched together with themes derived from either character or issues (cf In this World – Winterbottom).  Films made by incomer directors usually say more about the director’s concerns than the society.  Ghobady is of the Kurds.  Half Moon is about them and him and it’s a simply shot road movie in which every sequence is informed by understanding of the Kurdish situation.  The shots in the film represent not just images and impressions but the complex matrix of the Kurdish people and their lives.  It is a film not so much about issues or problems but rather about music as a condition of a people.  

In Half Moon the bus carrying the musicians is a dynamic vehicle that opens up the relationship between a people and the historical and geographical vectors that contain and shape their destiny.  In the West the road movie usually engages with character and forced situational encounters that typically resolve through violence.  Perhaps this is because there is nowhere for us to go in the literal geographic sense; for us the psychic fulcrum of the journey tends to pivot on an inner vector such as identity quest.  In Half Moon the travelling musicians have no doubts about who are.  The questions posed by Ghobadi revolve about an overcoming, a refusal to permit the world to corrupt spirit.    

In Half Moon the old master musician charters a bus to take him and his sons from Iran to Iraq.  They undertake a journey from one country that does not exist. Iranian Kurdistan, to get to another country that does not exist, Iraqi Kurdistan, in order to participate in a large Kurdish music festival.  To make the journey they have to cross political religious cultural and social fault lines that deny the legitimacy of their people their journey and their music. 

The master musician has spent months ensuring that he has all the correct travel permits, passports that will be needed to negotiate the complex series of barriers that will impede their progress.  Ghobady’s film is a road movie that is actually on the road.  Its strength is that in order to progress, the musicians have to engage in a continuous discourse with the worlds through which they are travelling.  In effect Half Moon is a discourse: with landscape; with social fabric of life; with the religious; with the geopolitical divisions of the land.

The landscapes are overwhelming in the film, shimmering realities that suggest an absorption of individual subjectivities into their vastness. The land is a powerful presence: but it’s a presence not an image.  The landscapes are not beautiful celluloid backcloths against which a story unfolds.  They are, ‘in the story’, at the heart of the film’s discourse. Half Moon begins in the bright sun of Iranian Kurdistan and ends in the mountainous snow vistas of Turkey.  In this final sequence, what remains of the little group of musicians tries to pass over the snow covered heights of Turko-Iraqi border.  As the master musician ploughs through the snow we understand something about landscape: that it is of the earth and we are part of it.   The snow is a harsh environment and in its whiteness spreads across the visual field effacing all referents other than itself.  As it overpowers it becomes an embrace of death.  A death that is in the end accepted and even welcomed: a return to a primary union with the earth for which there is a longing and a belonging.  And this is neither sentimental nor romantic: it is simply the consequence of the spirit taking certain decisions in particular circumstances. The landscapes are, ‘in the story’, at the heart of the film’s discourse.  The landscapes are an evocation, a calling up of a history that is happening as the bus moves on its journey.  The landscapes are crisscrossed and marked out by invisible hidden lines that represent clan religious social and political boundaries and borders.  Each landscape has a menacing aspect and in their hidden folds they are guarded and policed by men with guns who enforce the integrity of these imaginary lines by force.

One motif running through the film is the search by the master musician for a female singer.  The female voice is the soul of his music and without it his music is incomplete.  The female singer whom he had arranged to sing with them is unable to accompany them because of events in the natural world – severe floods have disrupted the life in her village.  For the master the female and the male are conjoined when they come together to play and sing.  In the moment of playing and performing they are in complete communion.  But in the non Kurdish fundamentalist religious culture the female is absent: contained constrained and bound tightly about with the male injunction to be invisible.  The female is missing from public life; where she should be, there is simply a hole, a not being there.  The female in public is undermined in two ways.  Through public censor and opprobrium her self confidence is destroyed, and lacking self belief through she is unable to find her voice.  Should the female retain self belief and assert her right to sing in public she may be assailed from without by the sentinels of religious policing who suspicious of  public performance by women and intolerant of musical interaction between men and women, forcibly intervene to prevent such occurrences.   The reality of this culture is that woman are absent from many fields and Half Moon is a psychical discourse into the consequences of this suppression, not just for the musicians but for the culture. 

The bus follows an ever more demented and circuitous passage across Iran Turkey and Turkmenistan in its attempts to find a way across the forbidden borderlands.  As they crisscross the land they pass through the villages of the country, the musicians get off the bus for tea and to talk to the villagers.  And it becomes apparent that in this land the only people you see are old men.  Everyone you see is old and bent.  The women (young and old)are absent; and the young men are not there.  Some force has rounded them up like steers and taken them to another place.  The country is full of absence. Where there should be people they are not there.  The bus on its tortuous route runs into check points and road blocks all manned by young men.  It seems clear that all the young men have been appropriated by the state and given Kalashnikovs to intimidate and kill.  There is a process of brutalisation in play in which guns have replaced musical instruments in the stream of life.  The sounds in currency are the crack of the gun and the thud and ricochet of the bullet.

The integrity of  Ghobady and his musicians make this a film of the affirmation of spirit.  Half Moon is not vacuous feel good road movie; it is a film that affirms faith in spirit and vision . The music in the film is wonderful.  In itself it is a force that asserts its right to have a central place in the world.  It can meet oppression death meanness of spirit with a call to joy to which the organised forces of destruction have no means of resisting.  The political regimes will come and go, religious fanaticism will rise and fall.  Music like the land will persevere.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

No clowning about
He who gets slapped presents as a film about collusive victimhood, a subject area at the core of European and American political sensibilities. Authoritarian cultures and societies develop mechanisms through which scapegoat becomes a role voluntarily adapted by despised and excluded groups as a strategy for their survival.

He Who gets Slapped – Victor Sjostrom (aka Seastrom)  –  1924 – with piano accompaniment
Paulette Goddard Lon Chaney John Gilbert,
Seen Star and Shadow –  17 12 06 – ticket price £3-50

Retrocrit
It seems useful when the opportunity arises to appraise films long forgotten and submit them to a contemporary critique.  Its also interesting to speculate who might have been exposed to the thought forms and influences of films such as ‘He who gets Slapped’.   Did Sergei Eisenstein Fritz Lang Orson Welles  von Sternberg or Wilder see it?  Sjostrom often seen as the father of Swedish Cinema made many films including this one in Hollywood for MGM.

No clowning about
He who gets slapped presents as a film about collusive victimhood, a subject area at the core of European and American political sensibilities.  Authoritarian cultures and societies develop mechanisms through which scapegoat becomes a role voluntarily adapted by despised and excluded groups as a strategy for their survival.
  
The film is set in the world of the circus – which is represented as a transposed variation of bourgeois life.  It is a film about clowns with no clowns: a film about clowns that involves no clowning.  Sjostrom’s film is energised by his  vision of a world created out of spiralling vectors.  In some of the key shots everything moves with a dynamic of circular fluidity.  Sjostrom endows his film with a centrifugal force which governs the core aspects of its realisation: the script, the settings, the camera work and the special effects.  They’re all informed with the powerful movement principle of the film that sucks matter out of the centre to the periphery before guiding it back to the centre again.  This centrifugal action works both actually and morally creating a complex interplay of ideas and technical skill. 

This understanding of the world as a moral spiralling motion is most strongly realised in the beautiful special effect transition sequence which takes us from the world of the humiliated bourgeois professor to his reincarnation as clown.   Using mattes and in camera effects, the huge spinning globe to which the professor clings resolves magically and unexpectedly into a circus ring.  The effect is breathtaking as the professor sitting astride the giant globe is thrown to the edge of the world by the centrifugal forces in play.  For a moment he is threatened with being hurled off the face of the world into oblivion, only for the edged outline of the world to dissolve and transform into the perimeter blocks of the circus ring.  We are in the world of the circus:  a world whose rationale is circularity and non stop centrifugal motion. 

The film contains both ourselves and the performers in this circuitous motion.  None   more so than the ridiculed professor who has transformed himself into the eponymous clown called: He who gets Slapped (HWGS).  HWGS is clown reinvented as a sado/masochistic iconic scapegoat.   The clown figure invented for the circus spectators – the masses – who have come to laugh at the clown’s slapstick pain.  It is difficult to escape the notion that at the core of Sjostrom’s filming is a political/social idea: that the enjoyment of another’s pain is the basis of certain political psychic forms.  A political psyche characteristic of hierarchic societies which exploit sadistic humour to undermine and demean attempts by individuals seen as representatives of despised groups to challenge in any way the established order.   The use of poisoned  humour to humiliate is a key weapon favoured by societies based on suppression through stereotypes.  HWGS is famous and popular as a clown simply for his ability to be slapped hurt and abused as the circus geek.  HWGS takes his public humiliation with a smile and comes back for more:  more pain equates with more laughs.  In one shot, an extraordinary superimposition, a huge blazing lit up sign erected over the big  top, shows HWGS in neon getting whacked and bouncing back. Masochism has become an addictive and collusive survival technique raised to an art form in societies that are grounded in the abasement of t groups and individuals through corrective humiliation.

There is a powerful mechanicality in Sjostrom’s filming of  the circus scenes.  Like other social performers such as prostitutes, clowns however they feel, have to play out a utopian entertainment ethos to the spectator.    In the sequence where a crowd of 60 clowns erupts into the ring, the performers are filmed as if they were clockwork toy soldiers (vide Laurel and Hardy in Toyland) with a relentless and impassive automative intent to entertain.  The clowns with their white emaciated features have two faces: one turned to the public that represents the desire to entertain, the other turned in on itself.  
 
In a compelling way the film creates out of the circus a world that either seems to anticipate the concentration camps, or perhaps recalls the POW camps of the First World War.   There is something in the compressed collective experience suggested in some of the circus sequences that call up ominous portents.  The circus seems a place of confinement.  The shots in the changing room, where men turn themselves into white-faced clowns and in the arena where they have to play the clown, have the quality of punishment parks.   Sjoberg seems to understand the entertainment business as a very dark metaphor for a world in which you are made to be the hand maiden of your own psychic mutilation (vide Singing in the Rain the big production number “Make ‘em Laugh”):  for a world in which one day there will be whole races and peoples forced to act out their own roles – as victims.  A world of the future where Jews Palestinians Tibetans (perhaps in another sense Big Brother Wannabees) will be reduced simply to the status of He Who Gets Slapped and find themselves powerless to be anything other than victims who provide political entertainment for the hierarchies that define them. 

The clown facial make-up devised for HWGS anticipates this type of social development.  HWGS doesn’t make-up to look like a clown.  The design of his make up turns him into a mutant, a freak of nature who should have been strangled at birth.  The make up effect is extraordinarily powerful in its effect as a justifier for abuse, and a righteous excuse for the crude childish enjoyment of the spectators in his pain.   There are disturbing resonances again in the way that in the future the costume and appearance of the Jew, of the Palestinian and other minority groups will be exploited as a source of ridicule and contempt.

The film ends by having recourse to the natural world albeit from the periphery of the circus.  The circus lion effects the end of the sources of evil in the film.  Sjostrom seems to be saying that the powerless cannot by themselves resolve the problems of their exploitation and abuse.  Once a certain stage of descent into powerlessness is reached the only solution is to invoke or call in outside powers.    Sjostrom in his resolution of the problem, whilst it might not tally with the ethos of self assertion,  at least avoids the fake pat solutions more usual in Hollywood plots, in which the hero transformed by his negative experiences returns to the fray with the weapons and knowledge to defeat the power of evil.  Sjostrum  declines the fake romanticism of the returning hero and opts for an outside intervention from the natural world,  as the equaliser. 
adrin neatrour 
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

High Street Art-Lite, and Bombing Babylon, by Tom Jennings.
Art reviews published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 24, December 2006; and Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 8, April 2007.High Street Art-Lite, and Bombing Babylon by Tom Jennings 
 
[art reviews published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 24, December 2006, and Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 8, April 2007]

High Street Art-Lite 
The Baltic’s ‘street art’ exhibition bites off much more than it can chew, according to Tom Jennings
 
Spank the Monkey, at Gateshead’s Baltic Centre, claims to straddle contemporary art and graphics, urban interventions and global youth culture, with work chosen by director Peter Doroshenko and independent curator Pedro Alonso. Three floors of the building and a handful of outdoor venues around Tyneside have since September hosted a bewildering confusion of commissioned graffiti, poster and billboard pieces, massive doodlings and small stylised sketchings, multi-media and found-object sculptures and installations, slick manga-inspired dreamscapes, psychedelic fantasias on canvas and computer-generated cartoons, topped off with a garishly-painted skateboard ramp. To make sense of the apparently random juxtapositions, visitors are helpfully advised that the artists featured, from all around the world, earned their stripes outside the conventional gallery system. ‘So what?’ you might ask. Proximity to official approval may fascinate those who aspire to it, but affords no coherence whatsoever to this ramshackle mish-mash of a show.
Spank the Monkey was inspired by the success of the American travelling exhibition Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture (2004) in exhaustively detailing the development of forms of visual expression associated with diverse US youth subcultures since the sixties. The often countercultural concerns of their exponents were mapped onto the local contexts in which their activities became differentiated as ‘art’, with varying levels of subsequent incorporation into the mainstream alongside cross-fertilisation with prevailing styles fashionable in conceptualism, installation, film, photography and graphic design. Work by original graffiti art stars Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring was included (early Haring sketches are also currently showing at the Baltic) alongside hundreds of others (Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee and Ryan McGinness being represented in both shows), but its focus on the social scenes out of which the art emerged lent the project a depth and integrity entirely absent at the Baltic – where ‘art-market versus supermarket’ is the nearest we get to profundity.
 
So the tame, desultory efforts permitted at Metro stations betray no sign of the tagger’s lawless compulsion to mark alienated space. Inside the gallery, heart and guts are similarly at a premium. At least Faile’s cut-and-paste posters deploying press headlines about the Israel-Hezbollah clash effectively parallel media bombardment when plastered up and down walls, while seeming innocuous when isolated in frames surrounded by white space. Better still, Brazilian duo Os Gemeos’ shack with ski-masked accoutrements mixes shanty deprivation with outlaw soul, whereas Shepard Fairey’s impressive billboards achieve the opposite with his ‘Obey’ range pastiche of Soviet modernism, spinning empty radical chic with the usual heroic suspects – Ché, Mao, Black Panthers, Castro, Subcommandante Marcos, whoever … Whether he’s drawing attention to or celebrating big business authoritarianism while pocketing paychecks from Nike, the implied inevitability of assimilation from underground into mass commercial media is facile and tendentious, dismissing the imaginative and subversive potential of independence, even when a decent living alongside self-determination is sought from design and thematic innovation.
And such potential’s not hard to find – for example, designs by James Cauty (ex-KLF, K-Foundation, anti-Turner Prize pop/art outsider based at the Aquarium, London) are also showing in Newcastle. Exploiting the decidedly low-brow tradition of stamp collecting, the CNPD (Cautese National Postal Disservice) first day covers, prints and books – marketed as low-priced limited editions – comment pointedly on the absurdities of national identity, art and iconography. Past provocations include images of the queen in a gas mask, and burning Houses of Parliament with the legend ‘5/11′; now supplemented with the ‘America Shut Up’ series and the Angel of the North upside down with its head in bedrock, ridiculing the “we’ve never had it so good” cultural triumphalism of the Sage, Baltic et al. Unfortunately, irreverent title aside, Spank the Monkey risks barely a glimmer of such reflexive humility or humour – surely showing the insecurity beneath the arrogance of power which, moreover, so many contemporary urban stencilists and adbusters deliberately expose.
 Banksy presumably saw the writing on the wall (so to speak). His sole contribution is an old master-type portrait of some anonymous grandee just after being custard-pied – succinctly puncturing the pretensions of art institutions and patrons, even as he cashes in on the commodity status they sanction. More abject still is Barry McGee’s giant ‘Smash the State’ daubed in red on the opposite wall as a reminder of the energy and anger that can animate autonomous public art when its makers (or curators, for that matter) neither prostitute themselves for government funding nor speculate on niche market cool. Spank the Monkey may bolster the Baltic’s ‘edgy’, ‘relevant’, ‘youf-friendly’ credentials as the end of Lottery support looms, but promoting Sony Playstation and selling rat stencil merchandise to a few skater kids scarcely scratches the surface of the significance of grassroots street-level creative endeavour.
So, domesticated urban graffiti, Mexican tattoos, Japanese polaroid porn, etc, are wrenched from their complex origins – which are ignored, along with the vast majority of producers shunning respectable careers for collective work, self-publishing, artist-led networks and other marginal, occasionally politicised and/or illegal activities. Proposing trendy ‘guerilla marketing’ (any cultural economics not corporate-controlled) as common denominator simply projects the gallery’s own recuperative desire onto an infinitely more variegated and engaged field than the organisers can acknowledge in their haste to kowtow to capital. Ironically, rhetoric about global youth hawking their aesthetics to the highest bidder, while undoubtedly accurate for some, renders most of these exhibits more, not less, unintelligible. Naturally, the far more salient sidestepping of elitist and hierarchical disciplining is anathema to the British contemporary arts establishment (and other cultural industries). No prizes, then, for guessing whose Monkey is really being Spanked.
 
Spank the Monkey and the Keith Haring exhibition are at the Baltic Centre, South Shore Road, Gateshead until 7th January, followed by G-Word showcasing North-East graffiti artists until the 21st. James Cauty is showing at Electrik Sheep, Pink Lane, Newcastle through December.

Bombing Babylon  by Tom Jennings 
 
[art review published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 8, April 2007]
 
 
The ‘G’ Word, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, January 2007
 
Postscripting the disappointing Spank The Monkey international street art and design extravanganza (see Freedom, 16th December 2006), thirteen local graffitists filled one floor of the Baltic for ten days with massive wall pieces, a thumping soundtrack, and a large van in the middle submerged in aerosol bodywork. Encompassing many popular styles, most were based on conventional building blocks – expanding and exploding graphic signatures (tags) to transcend the grey desolation of urban environments and experience with vibrant spraypaint dreamscapes, sexualised cartoon fantasies, and generally inventively troubling renunciations of the domesticated surfaces of institutions and egos. This 360-degree in-your-face sensory riot of colour and shape urged emotional immersion, making no concessions to ‘white cube’ architecture’s clinical bleaching out of passion in rarefied distance from the fragmented packaging of sanitised art.
 
These artists typically commit surreptitious ‘mindless vandalism’ rather than having everything laid on – and with several actively sought by the law for their exploits, the arms-length New Line Graffiti conferred anonmyity. This pragmatic necessity allowed several conventional artworld pomposities to be pleasingly traduced. The traditional ‘private view’ opening barred the usual worthy suspects in favour of a piss-up for artists, friends and families – who in turn comprehensively tagged the entrance. Having ascribed authorship to social networks rather than individual creative genius, the collective nature of the work was further emphasised by a speeded-up video projection in a side-room showing its convivial accomplishment. Despite the legendary competitiveness of the scene, the crucial role of successive overlayerings of rival tags as substrate and embellishment also makes explicit the sedimented history of sites and emphasises the ongoing rebellion of daring to claim expressive space.
                Most of The ‘G’ Word contributors simulated a dirty, flaking, crumbling background for the monstrous beauty of their creations, suggesting that this was an exhibition about graffiti rather than the ‘real’ thing. But then it has no proper context, specifically perverting ‘official’ contours of geography, ownership and activity. Whereas illegal graffiti is only anti-social if the obscenities of modern capitalism represent an otherwise healthy urban garden sullied by such artistic weeds – and its subject matter routinely asserts otherwise, as in Zee TTK rendering the Tyneside skyline as simultaneously alien, exotic and toxic, or Inch adding architectural features to make sense of a dysfunctional gallery surface. So while bureaucrats and politicians inevitably bleat about providing opportunities for safe, legal locations for inoffensive muralism, the passionate determination and painstaking skill demonstrated here originated and developed precisely beyond the pale of polite society.
 

www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk