Film Review

Witchy business

The opening shot of Volver (v. to return) tracks through the graveyard of the village where the women are washing and cleaning the graves of their loved ones: women’s work with a menacing undertone carrying the tacit idea of woman’s implication in the process of death – especially the demise of the male. Like a lot of Almodovar’s filmic images it promises to open up for us a cinematic world. As in most of his films, the occasional visual flair displayed by Almodovar in Volver leads only to hopes dashed, an experience that by the end of the film, amounts to no more than substandard TV visual fare fleshed out with female leads posing as iconic feminists.

Volver – Pedro Almodovar – Spain 2006
Penelope Cruz

Viewed Tyneside Cinema – 17 09 06
Ticket price £6-20

Witchy business

The opening shot of Volver (v. to
return) tracks through the graveyard of the village where the women
are washing and cleaning the graves of their loved ones: women’s
work with a menacing undertone carrying the tacit idea of woman’s
implication in the process of death – especially the demise of the
male. Like a lot of Almodovar’s filmic images it promises to open
up for us a cinematic world. As in most of his films, the occasional
visual flair displayed by Almodovar in Volver leads only to hopes
dashed, an experience that by the end of the film, amounts to no
more than substandard TV visual fare fleshed out with female leads
posing as iconic feminists. Volver is a witchy film whose scenario,
laboriously constructed out of tired old plot ideas, finally
predicates the witchy world as the consequence of an originary primal
act: incest. Incest of father on the daughter. The which(sic), in
terms of the nuclear family, is a double betrayal of the model
female: the wife’s love and trust and daughter’s innocence. The
disturbance of ‘nature’ by the male’s unnatural acts, leads not
as in the Arthurian legend to myth but to soap opera.

In Volver the cemetery scene is
simply a device – it has no other function than to introduce a
situation rather than an idea. It is a scripted a plaster and wood
contrivance that exists to introduce us to Raimunda (Penelope Cruz)
and to the world of suburban witchery that she personifies. In
Almodovar’s kitsch suburban world the women outlive the men and the
men are either mad bad or false. But this world with its sisterly
collusion, its knowing looks, its explosive kissing (the soundtrack’s
tricksy amplification highlights the suck-smack sound of the lips as
the women kiss each other) its situational humour, is a Disneyesque
creation. Volver is a flat two dimensional cartoon, where the
characters emit the fake intensity of Donald Duck as they go through
the motions of their witchy affective parody.

At the centre of Volver’s action is
Raimunda(Penelope Cruz). Raimunda is voluptuous acarnal witch.
With her permanently glowing eyes framed with black liner she looks
like an escapee from the Adamms family house. The plot, such as it
is, follows Raimunda as she, with the help of her coven, takes on and
surmounts the challenges of murder, men, low income and family
problems. The script with its interweaving dramatic lines is
structured like a soap opera. All the tired plotting devices of this
format are brought into play: we have a murder, we have disclosure of
a false father, death, the return of a character thought to be
dead(at the core of the film is the return of Raimunda’s mother –
not dead but hiding). The situations the secret return of
themother, a new business enterprise, the disposal of the body – all
these are given the comedic treatment by virtue of their dissonance
with domestic routine. The script with its intertwined strips of
action, gives license to the actresses, Penelope Cruz in particular,
to emote pose and witch in different situations as doors open and
close with mechanical regularity to divide and partition the scenes.

The mechanality of the plot line is
matched by the camera work which in slavish response to the banality
of the action laboriously tracks and pans in order to find any excuse
for movement. Keep it moving said the director. The laborious
camera movement underscores the predictibility of the script. When
Raimunda returns to her apartment, the camera tracks then pans with
her car, as she slows down and pulls into in a parking space. We see
the parking space, we see the moving vehicle we see her park in the
space: so we know, with know with banal certitude that this space and
no other is where this movie has destined her to park her car.
Almodovar seems to believe that in shooting a film he owes it to the
audience to make everything that is to happen in the film
predictable, including his shot sequences. For example: on the way
to the village there is a large wind farm, a huge agglomeration of
turbines. This cues a meaningful close up of one of the turbines the
rotation of its sails…symbolic perhaps…. of the circular nature
of life and death or whatever.

No less predictible is the script. In
the sequence leading up to the murder of the false father by his
daughter: first we see him drunk; then we see (point of view of the
‘father’ a pan down)his look at his daughter’s crotch as she
sits open legged in front of him in pink tights; then we see him
sneaking past her room looking at her titties whilst she is
undressing; finally, in one take, we see him refused sex by Raimunda
and then hear his grunts and cock pumping as he masturbates.
Almadovar doesn’t engage in anticipatory hints he telegraphs his
intentions. The consequence of the dead and heavy uninspired camera
work and the lumbering clumsy script is that Volver has no tension.
It feels like a dead film: in composition, scenario and in
characters.

Volver as movie without tension offers
little more that an occasion to create an excuse for a contemporary
Spanish witchy world. Like musicals that exist only as an excuse
for the star to go through a series of numbers, its OK if you like
the star and the music. Usually these vehicles have few cinematic
qualities. As a film maker Almodovar has made films which are by and
large stylistic vehicles for conveying a certain brand of post
feminist chuzpah. Their filmic quality depends on the engaging
qualities of his female leads and their encapsulation of the outer
form of feminist attitudes without the substance.

adrin neatrour 18 Sept 06

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

I had forgotten what a terrific assemblage Nashville comprises. A series of interfolded action strips and situations, and vignettes all encapsulated within the idea of documenting American society in the throws of undergoing the transformations that were visible in the 1970’s but are now in the 21st century, virtually complete. So we see in Nashville a society which is being taken over by disembodied entities. A society being colonised by political parties and large corporations and the social interests that they front. A society in which personal values are dying and replaced by amoral greed and materialism disguised as fake sentimentality. . A society in which people no longer represented by themselves but images of themselves. A society in which the people no longer exist.

Nashville Robert Altman 1975 USA :
script: Jane Tewkesbury: cast: Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Shelly
Duvalle , Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin,

Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 26 7 06
ticket price £6-00

Voices of the Disembodied…

I had forgotten what a terrific
assemblage Nashville comprises. A series of interfolded action
strips and situations, and vignettes all encapsulated within the idea
of documenting American society in the throws of undergoing the
transformations that were visible in the 1970’s but are now in the
21st century, virtually complete. So we see in Nashville
a society which is being taken over by disembodied entities. A
society being colonised by political parties and large corporations
and the social interests that they front. A society in which
personal values are dying and replaced by amoral greed and
materialism disguised as fake sentimentality. . A society in which
people no longer represented by themselves but images of themselves.
A society in which the people no longer exist.

Giles Deleuze notes, “ ….that if
there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis…the
people are missing.”* Epic American cinema in the tradition of
Ford Capra or Vidor testifies to the existence of a people, in
hardships as well as in ways of recovering and rediscovering
themselves. In Nashville, the home of the C and W music a form which
had its roots in the folk traditions of the Appalachian country
regions, whose initial articulation and expression stemmed from these
roots, the people as a dynamic are constrained and marginalised into
a passive fulfillment of desire by the mechanisms of power. Deleuze
continues, “…if the people are missing, there is no longer
consciousness evolution or revolution, it is the scheme of reversal
which in itself becomes impossible.” Nashville is an epic film
exposing the social mechanisms that have lead to the disappearance of
the people and the appearance of the consumer. . A society in which
people no longer represent themselves but are represented by images
of themselves.

At the heart of the film, from the
beginning of the first sequence proper at the airport, (There is an
opening title sequence during which the BBC reporter in Nashville
visits the recording studio where Karen Black and Ned Beatty are both
cutting records) we hear the voice of a disembodied political message
from the truck mounted loud speaker calling on the people to vote for
the Replacement Party. The truck mounted loudspeaker with its
political message is a constant presence folded into each segment of
the film as a subliminal message, bland yet insistent calling on the
people who are always absent in this voided city, to vote for change
by going back to a past, a mythic past that is the invention of the
advertising industry and public relations industry. Although of
course the Replacement Party message, subliminally inserted into the
body of the film eventually leads us to Altman’s kitsch denoument
of assassination, its real function seems to be to say that
underlying all aspects of life in the USA today is a disembodied
mechanical political imperative: the reality of who owns America and
the interests of greed and accumulation that they represent. With
this disembodied and remote reiterated political message continually
issuing from the sound system, it is difficult to hear and understand
what is being said. There seems to be a meta message that is
actually in play that says simply that things are and will be OK.
The political voices, the corporate voices use words in a particular
way. They are common words yet like ivy they twist themselves round
commonplace ideas and notions and strangle the life out of them
through a process of steady banal misrepresentation of meaning. The
political voice pervades Nashville but no one heeds it. Increasingly
no one is there.

In Nashville, Altman documents his cast
as they parade through various locations: airport, car crash,
hospital, diners, clubs, home, church, hotels, bed, performance,
political rally. Often these situations comprise sequences that are
captured in one long choreographed shot. As Altman moves the players
through these situations it is clear that some people belong to the
past and that some belong or are conditioned for the future. The
casualties the old man whose wife is dying, Sue Ellen the Madonna
like Country star have decency and a direct truthfulness of being
that condemns them to be victims of the processes of the times. For
the rest some survive with the necessary accommodations but it is the
representatives of the disembodied who materially thrive, those whose
future it is to be ciphers of the image, whether their own or of a
large corporate body.

The final act of Nashville is pure
comedy. As Sue Ellen is led away bleeding to death, the massed black
choirs assembled for the rally sing the final song of the film.

“You tell me I ain’t free: I
don’t care, I don’t care…”

This refrain is sung over and over
again until the words becoem totally meaningless in their repetition.
This is the final political message delivered by Altman, the blacks
fronted by a trashy white wananbee sing out the message the real
message of the black revolution, that they are disappearing – along
with everyone else in the USA, and that they don’t care.

Adrin Neatrour 11 Au8 06

* Giles Deleauze – Cinema 2 pp216
University of Minnesota Press

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Wobbly camera

The opening sequence comprised of digitally mastered shots plots the course of a small convoy of cars as it crosses a schematic political map of the USA, out of Texas and into the South. This convoy comes to a halt in the blackness of von Trier’s theatrically contrived studio space which contains the iconically and ironically named cotton plantation of Manderlay. As in the house of the same name in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, it is the past that permeates and controls the present of this eponymous foundation.

Manderlay – Lars von Trier – Denmark
2005 Bryce Howard

Viewed: 6 03 06 Cine Centre
Shaftsbury Avenue London: afternoon screening, ticket price £6-50

Wobbly camera

The opening sequence comprised of
digitally mastered shots plots the course of a small convoy of cars
as it crosses a schematic political map of the USA, out of Texas and
into the South. This convoy comes to a halt in the blackness of von
Trier’s theatrically contrived studio space which contains the
iconically and ironically named cotton plantation of Manderlay. As
in the house of the same name in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, it is the
past that permeates and controls the present of this eponymous
foundation.

Lars von Trier(LvT) picks up Manderlay
where Dogville left off. It’s still the Depression. It’s still
the same characters in the limousines. But it is not Nicole Kidman
who steps out at Manderlay but rather Bryce Dallas Howard. BDH now
plays the role of Grace, naïve torch carrier for the white
liberal conscience and the core values of rationality. Grace
arrested by the spectacle of the public flogging of a black slave,
decides to stay to impose on these people a new order for living.

For all its theatric devices, Dogville
worked as film. The inherent tendency of melodrama to break up and
degenerate into a soap opera parody of a self referential world was
checked by LvT’s bold invention and the caliber of the players.
The decision to use a bare stage with minimalist sets stripped of any
props that did not have a function, intensified the affect of the
actors. Seen against and pressed out of the encompassing and
encircling off stage darkness their presence was magnified; whilst at
the same time the ideas that they represented were proportional to
the mechanics of setting: Grace wants shelter; Grace wants work;
Grace wants to escape; Grace wants vengeance. These core
propositions in the script were realisable within the embrace of the
sparse sets. The tension between individual desire and the
circuitry of the collective machine was tested amplified and resolved
as drama. The relevance of individual desire and collective
responsibility to wider philosophical ideas was implicit rather than
explicit. The wider political and social implications of Dogville
were subtext not text. The dynamics of the scripting, the
intelligence of both Kidman’s playing of her lead role and the
supportive ensemble playing, were elements drawn together by long
hand held camera takes, producing a film that delivered a strong
dramatic statement to serve a moral vision.

Manderlay in contrast fails to convince
me that it is any thing more than a series of contrivances. The
initial situation is a contrivance: Manderlay is presented as a
plantation that some 70 years after abolition is still practicing
outright slavery. The role of Grace as the kick-ass feminist reformer
and the roles of the blacks as reluctant followers of the democratic
path all follow from a script that seems to have been contrived as a
heavy handed allegory on the dangers of enforcing compliance with a
one dimensional definition of freedom. An allegory that fits the
contemporary events in Iraq better than the situation of blacks in
the US today. Grace wants the practice of democracy; Grace wants the
practice of equal opportunities; Grace was social discrimination
banned. Grace gets her way because she can enforce it by using her
with superior force.

Like those seventeenth and eighteenth
century dramas which had persona named for their character traits
such a Coward, Rascal, Cheat, Hope etc, Manderlay’s characters are
intentionally overdetermined by their inventor and not permitted
behavioral deviations. LvT creates a mythic universe constrained in
time and space by his sets but the filmic language he uses doesn’t
serve to develop his mythic allegoric form, it works against it. His
camera, set to an agitated drifting autofocus, constantly moving
ducking diving bobbing weaving, deconstructs the mythic form. And in
losing its mythic form the construct loses its tension; the film
becomes a set of demands on the actors that they perform for the
camera, that they go through the motions of playing their parts. The
script instead of being a living thing dies in the camera and the
film becomes an apparatus for transporting the actors from the
beginning to the end of the script. A mechanical device.

This mechanicality is highlighted by
the ritualised humiliating fuck that BDH has to bend into with the
Cunning Black. As part of his antiromantic Hollywood crusade
LvTs lead actresses usually have to get a bad fuck. In
Dogville the tensions surrounding and permeating the space occupied
by Kidman through the camera, make the bad fuck work. It feels part
of the escalation of events in Dogville. In Manderley the bad
fuck is a deadly scripted device and mediated by what looks
increasingly like clumsy and cack handed camera work on the part of
LvT. The agitated restless hand held camera work makes Manderlay
feel more like soap opera than melodrama. And whereas myth can be
played melodramatically it doesn’t sit easily with soap form. And
the drift towards soap is compounded by the performance of BDH who
pouts beautifully in many and different ways and occasionally smiles
but has little by way of nuance to offer. This may have been LvT’s
reason for casting her(she has the haircut) as the architypic modern
organised female lead, but as played and shot she becomes
increasingly detached from the process of the film.

One questionable aspect of Dogville was
the use of the Voice Over as a character/narrator. This Voice,
played by John Hurt was written by LvT as a privileged text, privy to
the inner states of mind of some of the players and able to see
clearly what was happening and make succinct comments on the current
situation in the film. This Voice, rounded to inform us of its
intelligence and carefully modulated to insinuate itself into our
good graces, was the device that set up the action. At times it
threatened to subsume the action but in Dogville LvT avoided the
danger of the Voice becoming overbearing. If Hurt’s Voice was
occasionally overused in Dogville, in Manderlay the device becomes
increasingly irksome and finally plasters over all the cracks in the
film with a unitary layer of explanation. Where in Dogville the
voice fills in, in Manderlay it fills out explains, rounds and signs
off. Its not a layer, its a complete surface that exerts over the
material an expressive supremacy.

Manderlay is a film that spins out of
control. The constituent parts fail to interrelate or
interpenetrate. Camera work acting scripting and mise en scene each
pursue their own logic. But behind the facade of the film their
lies the intensity of Lars von Trier. Manderlay for all its
imperfections is intent that filmic expression should have a moral
intent. And Manderlay is always a film made with intelligence and
for this alone it is all the more worth seeing than most of the stuff
on the screen at the moment.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Alain Resnais 1959 Fr: script Margaruite Duras: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada

Viewed 7 May 06 at Curzon Mayfair;
double Resnais bill; ticket price – £6-50

One of Resnais’ protagonists is
French from Nevers, staying at the New Hiroshima Hotel in Hiroshima
whilst working as an actress making a movie about peace; the other is
an architect from Hiroshima having an affair with her whilst his wife
is away. There is no story as such – only a strip of action. Two
people come together in this town 13 years after it was blasted by
the atomic bomb.

The concern of Resnais (R ) is to probe
into the mechanisms of deterritorialised memory. The first section
of the film probes how memory when detached from its locus in the
personal becomes the basis of new kinds of activities or even
industries. The Auschwitz industry, the Hiroshima industry,
industries based on the endless mechanical replay of atrocity
footage, industries based on a certain assumptions about the nature
of memory.

The opening sequence of HMA intercuts
images of post bomb survivors with images of the couple entwined in
bed: the interweaving of their arms and legs the sensuous patina of
their skins providing ironic counterpoint to the burnt blistered
twisted torsos of the victims. Resnais assembled this opening
montage to shock. But not to shock with the intention of creating in
the viewer pornographic retinal excitement. To shock in order to
provoke us to think. To think about the nature of the victim
imagery and how it is actually internalised by the watcher. The
voices of the lovers intoning Duras’ singular script are laid over
the visuals: she says, today I went to the museum, he replies, there
is no museum; she says, I’ve seen everything, he replies you’ve
seen nothing. Image generated consciousness cannot replace memory.
In actual memory there is some essence that is generically somatic.

The opening sequence with visuals
accompanied by a sound world of voices invokes the idea that mostly
we do not have memory of terrible events; we only have received
images derived from terrible events. We can respond by saying that
from those images this was a terrible event. But how we incorporate
these pictures into our beings or into our psyches is neither
straight forward rational nor predictable. In the current state of
an informational world overloaded with images competing to be part of
our memories, R’s film uses images to question the validity of
image as a source of derived memory of events. R has grasped the type
of distortion that takes place when actual images of atrocity are
exploited for their inherent potential to create a bank of memories
representative of events for those who did not experience them. The
intention and rationale of such a bank may be that these image
derived experiences will act in the future as an atrocity
prophylactic. In fact the detachment of the images from their
anchoring in consciousness simply opens the door to manifold
manipulations and banality. It is a short step to the ‘See it all
Hiroshima Bus Tour’, and the souvenir shop. Detached from the
individual minds and psyches of those who suffered such experiences,
events as museum experiences, offer to the visitor’s gaze a series
of emotional charges empty of primary signification and open to
exploitation and manipulation. There is no evidence that individuals
experiencing emotional arousal in the face of such stimuli connect
with such stimuli in the prophylactic manner intended. There is no
evidence that these institutions actually work to prevent further
outrage.

By 1959 R has become aware that human
memory has become subject to new and changed forms of appropriation.
In a society characterised by control, memory is now something that
is manufactured by the powerful forces of vested interest and large
corporations. History becomes a theme park, part of the heritage
industry. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are tourist destinations which
people visit. When they visit they are presented with a certain
account of the past. It is not that these accounts are certain types
of constructs that is of concern. Everything said is probably true.
Rather it’s that museum presentations, as public relations
exercises will be mounted in such a way that certain types of
questions cannot be asked of the event and that certain kinds of
contradictions inherent in the events will be excised. The
attraction will concentrate on exhibits arranged in a simple and
emotionally charged form. They claim to promote understanding, but
will guilefully suggest a single reading of the past and present of
which the atrocity is the link. A visit to a tourist atrocity
attraction will usually provide only an emotional account of an
event; it will not address simple and real questions of why. Why
questions don’t have easy answers, require context and lines of
enquiry. Tourists demand an experience and in response to this
demand they are given images that overwhelm and flatten leaving them
emotionally drained and either oversensitised or insensate. Images
manipulate us, use us and refer only to themselves. Suffering can
only be suffering; death can only be death. Why? is too
uncomfortable as a question and draws us into examination of
ourselves.

In the age of mass communication memory
is now a battleground. What dictates what we remember how we
remember and why we remember? Resnais in Hiroshima Mon Amour is
asking the questions and responding by pointing to the difference
between human personal memory and the manufactured.

The second strand in the film develops
the obverse story of the woman, opening out into the her remembered
experience in Nevers as an ajudged wartime collaborator who is
ritually humiliated and punished for loving a German soldier. Again
we have to refer to memory and its linkage to the archive footage.
We have all seen the footage of the Liberation of France in’44. If
we haven’t it’s of HMA. At the core of this footage, after the
tiumphant parade of the GI’s through the cheering crowds, comes the
next bit of action: the moment of calling the guilty to account. And
at this point in the archive memory movie we always see the fury of
the woman as takes they take their revenge on sex. It’s like a
ritualised response which has its roots in very early primitive
European culture, the cult of the sacrifice of the young virgins –
Iphigenia. The French vented their fury on the young girls who
fucked the Bosch instead of fighting them. They are caste down by
the female avenging furies, they are beaten, have their heads shaved
and their brats taken from them. In the movies the presentation of
righteous indignation complete with gloating male commentary tells
the story and underlines its moral. There is no place for personal
memory. And those who might have personal memory – of a young German
boy – have no right to such memories. They only have a right to see
themselves in the image of their shame. As sinners punished they see
their role played out over and over again in the newsreel. The
actress with her Japanese lover, the other enemy, calls up for him
her personal memories in defiance of the images that control her
past. This strand of the film with her personal memory actualised in
flashbacks that are melodramatically realised, is less taut than the
Hiroshima thread but critical to completing the thesis of R’s film.

From his experience in making
documentary films, R realised that we were entering a completely new
era in the relationship between individuals and the projected images
amongst which they lived and believed. Images purporting to be
actual were both defining of events and defining of the people caught
up in those events.

The young woman has a collective
memory of an event of which she as a young woman played a part. Her
situation is that although she has images that are personal they do
not reconcile with what happened to her. Memory cannot connect with
event. She herself is deterritorialised from Nevers, alienated from
herself as a child. This strand of HMA feels less at ease with
itself than the Hiroshima strand because R the melodramatic nature of
the images of the forbidden lovers sits less happily with the formal
concerns of the film, and it is during these sequences that the film
seems to waver in intensity. But for the film to be complete the two
sides of the coin of memory need to be addressed. As the
generalised somatic memory is distorted by its own images so personal
memory with its own images can be distorted and twisted by the
general.

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

There is the possibility…of grace

The setting is a youth training centre in Belgium where young men without skills are sent to learn practical trades. The opening shot is of a functional overhead light fitting that castes its harsh glare down onto the floor and walls of an adapted featureless partitioned industrial unit…..

The Son (Le Fils)- Jean-Pierre/Luc
Dardenne France 2002 – Olivier Gourmet

Viewed Riverside Studio – 6 Aug 06 –
Double Bill with L’Enfant. Ticket price £6-00

There is the possibility…of grace

The setting is a youth training centre
in Belgium where young men without skills are sent to learn practical
trades. The opening shot is of a functional overhead light fitting
that castes its harsh glare down onto the floor and walls of an
adapted featureless partitioned industrial unit.

The unit is revealed in several long
shots as the camera tracks down from the light and follows the flow
of the action as it passes through a world of plasterboard, metal
personal lockers, concrete floors, unit shelving and teaching areas.
It is an impoverished visual world with its low level fluorescent
lighting creating the illusion of a monochrome grey environment in
which little colour is able to bleed through. It is a soulless world
populated by monosyllabic young men. An institutional place which
however well intentioned has a tangible deadness at its core.

The camera is mainly positioned behind
Olivier the main character who is the carpentry trainer at the
centre. With the camera filming over the shoulder of Olivier we
become conscious of the space in which Olivier moves and how he
relates to and operates in his space. As the viewer follows him in
the long camera takes through the corridors of training centre, up
and down the stairs, into the office, the car park, town and home we
latch onto his interest in a young trainee whom he has accepted on
his course after initially rejecting him. Always outside Olivier the
camera never makes any claim to be acting as a proxy for Olivier’s
consciousness.

There is something in the way we
experience Olivier’s actions particularly as a trainer that is very
humbling, even contradictory. We see Olivier teach his charges the
simple rudimentary woodworking skills: how to carry lengths of timber
safely, how to use the set square, how to measure correctly. But he
brings to this practice an intrinsic message about the dignity of
labour and a belief that the simple habit of attention to detail is
basic to seeing the world in the way proper to the trade and dignity
of the carpenter. Olivier imparts his knowledge without affect and
with few words; there is an innate conviction at the core of his
sparse teaching style. A sparsity that is carried over into what the
Dardennes show of his personal world. Olivier – divorced – lives
alone in a small apartment where he carries out the rituals of his
existence – doing remedial exercises for his injured back( he wears a
large leather brace) and mechanically going through the routine of
preparing and eating bachelor food. It seems a world without hope;
a world of day to day existence and world whose greyness and monotony
has perhaps been triggered by the death of his only son. But we
don’t know. Understanding of Olivier’s world is always a
question weighing up the possibilities inherent in different readings
of the signs emitted by him in the film. We are allowed no access to
Olivier’s internal state of mind. (Indeed we have no access to
internal states of mind other than our own) Perhaps Olivier was like
this before the death of his son. Dardennes give us no access to
Olivier’s consciouness, either through sentimentality of his
actions or his words. We can only arrive at tentative understandings
of his inner world through reading the potentialities in the signs he
gives out in his praxis.

There is something in the Dardennes’
films that I have found one dimensional, monochromatic. They seem
over determined with both characters and action severely constrained
by situation and environment. The story line is filtered along one
dimension with all tracks closed off except the intended outcome.
They are behaviourist soap operas, worthy in approach but ultimately
uninteresting as there is little development from the original
thesis. However Le Fils is different: the controlled discipline over
affective response(in Olivier) in the scenario, the intelligence of
the camera, the integrity of the acting open up an avenue of light
into the film so that the provoked dramatic situation, the
confrontation of the father of the murdered child with his killer
excites the latent potential of the material to effect multiple
possible lines of development.

The extreme situation of the encounter
provokes neither melodrama nor affected expression of sentiment.
Rather it engenders questions about Olivier’s consciousness, his
state of mind. Because the viewer is presented with a situation
which puts into play strong emotions but has little affective
information about how these emotions are effecting Olivier, the
viewer has to posit, to interpose from the action what is happening
to the states of mind of Olivier. In Le Fils the one and only
central issue is the state of mind of Olivier and what changes are
taking place in his engagement with the world consequent to changes
in his consciouness. From what we are shown there is the
possibility at the end of the film that Olivier has been touched by
grace. Perhaps Olivier at some moment (whether for a second or for
eternity) has accepted the gift of grace, an overwhelming ability to
live and to be without desire, to live without ego to move in the
world with love. For the viewer it is an overwhelming thought that
such a thing should even be possible in this world. Of course other
possibilities, more mundane, also present themselves as other
possible explanations for understanding Olivier. Explanations that
are more mechanistic: perhaps his behavioural responses to the young
boy are driven by a substitution / replacement impulse, or by the
desire on his part to taste the thrill of forbidden fruit, and so on
the list is of course long because we don’t have access to
Olivcier’s state of mind, it is only something we can infer.

But it is the idea of grace that
somehow insists as the most potent suffusing channel for coming to an
understanding of Olivier’s actions and movement during the final
frames of the film. In making a film about the possibility of grace
as a state of consciousness, the Dardennes are working outside the
limited confines of most cinematic drama, where the usual states of
mind portrayed amount to no more than the obvious easily read
emotions – anger, sadness, happiness, unhappiness etc. and the
actions that stem therefrom. A state of grace can perhaps only ever
be a fleeting possibility. It is not a state that can ever be laid
claim to but only inferred from outer signs. For the Dardennes to
evoke such a possibility for the viewer is a testament to the
discipline they possess as film makers who understand the use of
signage.

However such discipline is hard won and
easily lost. Accompanying Le Fils on the same bill was L’Enfant
that lacks the disciplined and sure understanding of signs that made
Le Fils an assemblage of the potential and possible. In L’Enfant
the story is probably overdominated by the physical presence of a
young child, a symbol rather than a sign. In L’Enfant, the
Dardennes instead of directing signs that allow the viewer to see and
evaluate what’s happening allow the film to dissipate into mawkish
sentimentality and one dimensional story telling. To see both films
on the same bill (both good prints) was to see the difference between
the success and failure of the Dardennes and to understand that their
strengths lie in the registration of signs and ideas related to the
internal states of mind of their protagonists.

Adrin Neatrour 14 Aug 06

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

To thine own self be true

The titles that open the film are burnt in black letters on a white background, a shimmering field that sets the tone for a film that is an optical rendering to spirit what is spirit’s, to all that which is not of the flesh. And the eponymous subject of Effie Briest is not of the flesh.

Effie Briest – Rainer Fassbender – 1974
– Hanna Schygula

Viewed ICA London 6 May06 Ticket
price – £6-50

Retrocrit

To thine own self be true

The titles that open the film are burnt
in black letters on a white background, a shimmering field that sets
the tone for a film that is an optical rendering to spirit what is
spirit’s, to all that which is not of the flesh. And the
eponymous subject of Effie Briest is not of the flesh. She is a
being totally vulnerable to the machinations of the world. The film
is structured as a series of shots that fade to white, a slow pulsing
surrendering of form to the intensity of pure light. There are fades
to black and there are straight cuts, but the dominant visual
experience of the film consists of long takes with Effie B as central
subject, that terminate with a slow burning of the image to white.

These rhythmic burnt in transitions
call in a realm governed by an idea about the non-corporeality of
life. Life without body. Life that is a becoming spirit. All
about Effie the social machines with whom she is trapped in space
engage in the machinations that will lead to her death. She alone is
unaware of the plot, alive in the clutches of convention she is
consumed. Effie has neither defenses nor understanding to withstand
the forces that destroy her. She can only be true to her nature.
And it is this only being true to her nature that is the essence of
the film, a burning into celluloid that makes of Effie B an imprint
of purity a spirit that is never broken. In that Effie is only true
to herself she is not a victim any more than Jeanne d’Arc. Both
are unbroken heroines. However mistreated however punished for being
what she is, Effie remains true to her nature.

Through each transition each event that
she transcends, she becomes more spirit so that in the end only death
can claim her. This is not a victim film. Had Effie changed to
protect herself or to turn to attack those who would harm her then
essentially she would have become victim – a woman forced to change
her nature, to be untrue to herself, in order to survive in the world
of social machines. In short she would be reacting to convention, but
in reacting would inevitably in herself set in train correspondent
conventions.

From the opening shot of the house
exterior which contains the world of Effie’s childhood, to her
death, Fassbender creates an optical world which is a literal mirror
for the constancy and intensity of light. Mirrors dominate the mis
en scene and shot set ups to the extent that we become lost in the
competing domains of light and uncertain as to which world has been
exposed to our gaze, the real or the virtual. The mirroring opens
up different modes of understanding. For instance, the idea of not
looking directly at Effie, as if the camera were a very well brought
up entity that knows that it is rude to stare directly at people but
that it is permissible to look at them obliquely by means of
reflection. Fascination with Effie is indulged through direct
indirectness of the mirror. The mirror also works by presenting a
parallel universe: the real world and the virtual world where things
are other. Effie’s world not directly accessible but enterable as
another dimension, a dimension where time moves differently. The
social machines march and clank through secular clock time getting
from one place to another, engaging in one machination or another;
Effie moves through another type of space/time continuum that is of
her own creation.

It seems as if at some point in the
post production that Fassbender may have lost his nerve. Having
rendered Effie as a vision of constancy of nature, he suddenly,
perhaps at the last moment, had doubts about the way in which the
film might be seen. Did he become concerned that Effie B might be
misunderstood as a chronicle of female victim passivity. Perhaps the
nascent but ideologically ferocious women’s movement caused him to
question his motives or even lose his confidence. Consequently he
became concerned that Effie Briest might be attacked as another
example of a passive female victim unable to respond to male cultural
repression. So at the last moment he inserted into his opening
credits the following long didactic subtitle :

Effie Briest or many people are aware
of their own capabilities and needs, yet acquiesce to the prevailing
system in their thoughts and deeds thereby confirming and reinforcing
the system.

In terms of the film that he has
produced this long subtitle makes no sense. It might conceivably
refer to a film he originally intended to make out of Theodore
Fontain’s novel. But it’s nothing to do with film he made.
Somewhere in the dynamic of: vision, writing, and production, his pen
his imagination the camera and Hanna Schygula created a film that
comprises a world of sensibilities beyond action /reaction or the
logic of dialetics. A film that sets out a space beyond the
constraining logic of his long sub-title.

Watching Effie Briest it occurred to me
that Lars von Trier must have viewed Effie B and and taken some
notes. In Effie B, Fassbender uses voice over in a consciously
literary manner(acknowledging the provenance of the material) but
constructing the dynamic of the voice over so that it becomes as a
separate track in the film – having a life and logic of its own. The
nature of the Voice, which is probably Fontain’s writing, is
Dickensian and judicious in manner but not modulation. Through
different filmic modes, action shots with and without dialogue, it
interpelates, calling attention to some of the different planes that
are in play in the film: Effie’s state of mind and varying
perspectives, it fills out lacuna in time and space. Although
literary in origin the voice is filmic in form as it is structured
into Effie B as a separate entity that has a life in the film
distinct from the visual and affective components of the film. In
this the Voice resembles those in Dogville and Mandalay, though
unlike these two films the Voice in Effie B is never overused or
overdetermining of the action.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

How to cook the rice
What to make of this film: it is the product of a totally schizoid society, a society ripped open by a cultural hurricane called the USA. Suzuki’s episodic story line links a series of increasingly violent confrontations all played out to a very cool jazz score by Naozumi Yamamoto. Branded to Kill reflects Japan as a broken society seen through the multiplexed reflections of smashed shards of a zen mirror. The here and now as a nightmare. A document produced by a defeated society, but made with the extraordinary lucidity of the state of affairs: a twisted deterritorialised Samurai gangster culture shaped by an ethos of sadism played out in depersonalised spaces with guns and American cars..

Branded to Kill – Seijun Suzuki – Japan
1966; Nanbura Koji, Jo Shishido

ICA 2, 1st July 2006 Ticket
price £6-50

How to cook the rice

What to make of this film: it is the
product of a totally schizoid society, a society ripped open by a
cultural hurricane called the USA. Suzuki’s episodic story line
links a series of increasingly violent confrontations all played out
to a very cool jazz score by Naozumi Yamamoto. Branded to Kill
reflects Japan as a broken society seen through the multiplexed
reflections of smashed shards of a zen mirror. The here and now as a
nightmare. A document produced by a defeated society, but made with
the extraordinary lucidity of the state of affairs: a twisted
deterritorialised Samurai gangster culture shaped by an ethos of
sadism played out in depersonalised spaces with guns and American
cars..

However at the centre of the film is
the image of the pot of rice. The enduring symbol of Shintoism rice.
This image of a pot full of cooked rice is returned to regularly. The
pot belonging to the protagonist and as in fairytale, it’s a pot
that for him is always a full and which nourishes him physically
and psychically. Rice is his favorite food, the food he craves. Yet
the pot is not a traditional pot: it is an electric rice cooker.
The white rice fluffs up perfectly cooked in this gadget. A
automatic device that is a double sign: a sign of the quintessential
world of the American – slick electric efficient non traditional and
– also the food that is the core of Japanese culture, symbolising
genesis and purity. The rice pot, at the centre of the Branded to
Kill is a cursive elegant statement about Japan in the 1960’s: a
traditional culture cooked up in the encompassing embrace of a alien
society.

For the most part, Seijun Suzuki uses
the film as a full blown suicidal assault on traditional Japanese
values and sensibilities. Violence and sex intertwine and twist as a
pastiche of American iconic imagery: the moll, the gun, the gangster
are taken to extremes in sequences that are exercises in a parody of
controlled ironic Japanese detachment. In Branded to Kill the
various sequences comprising: chase fight torture or sex are defined
by stylistic detachment and frequently use the sound track as a
deintensifier of the extreme action. For example when the sexy
gangster’s moll is being tortured to death with a blow torch her
face retains an amused insouciant playful demeanor and hums to
herself: this attitude of amused exteriority audio and visual
effectively deintensifies the horror of the blow torch sequence
transforming it into something like an amusing game, a childish
conceit.

Most of the film there is a rendering
of the acting and the fractured plot that make Branded to Kill an
assemblage of the world of the child. Perhaps this is endemic in the
gangster movie genre: because certainly both Edward G Robinson and
James Cagney both had baby faces and there is in the violence of the
gangster the fury of the wronged and angered child. The idea of
gangster unleashes and frees these destructive forces. I think that
Suzuki is saying something parallel but different within Branded to
Kill that relates the Japanese experience of military defeat and
cultural invasion had caused Japanese society to revert to a
collective infantilism where its core institutions and values had
undergone a sort of inversion of the playground.

Adrin Neatrour 11 Aug 2006

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

This is a list of the checks we need to make for the building to be fire safe (daily, weekly, monthly, 6-monthly, yearly). Printed version to sign is in cinemaDaily Fire Routine

Every day:
All exits quickly and easily openable
Fire doors clear of obstructions
Escape routes clear
Panel indicator showing normal
Exit signs in good condition and undamaged/obscured
Extinguishers in place
Extinguishers visible/unobscured

Weekly Fire Routine – carry out Wednesday every week:
All emergency fastenings working correctly
External routes clear and safe
Test call points
Check alarm system worked correctly
Check the alarm was audible
Check charging indicators are visible
Check condition
Check supply to hose

Monthly / 6 month / Annual  Fire Routine

First Wednesday every month
Check condition of fire seals and door closers
Check external fire escape.

First Wednesday October and April
Alarm to be looked at by competent person
Test emergency lighting for 20 mins
Take records of checks to a meeting and discuss fire strategy

First Wednesday October
Check self-closing doors fit correctly
Check escape route compartmentation
Test emergency lighting for 1 hour
Check over emergency lighting circuit.
Have fire extinguishers serviced.

Col 01Col 11Col 21Col 31Col 41Col 51Col 61Col 71Col 81Col 91

weirder And wheirder and whearhder

The King – USA 2006 – USA -James Marsh;
Gael Garcia Bernal, Pell James, John Hurt

Viewed Tyneside Cinema – Newcastle; 8
June 2006; ticket price £6-00

weirder And wheirder and whearhder

I was trying to understand why exactly
this film left me so profoundly dissatisfied, and why being left in
such a state bothered me.

There is now a well documented style of
film-making, mostly but not exclusively comprising American film
makers, that comprises ‘the Weird genre’. This genre was of
course signposted by film noir and 50’s horror movies, and the path
further trailed by David Lynch. The trouble is that as a genre most
of the examples lead nowhere. Most of the films are trapped in a
circularity of logic and they develop as a litany of caricatured
poses and attitudes. Their banal content leads to a deadening of
their dramatic form.

Of course all genres in their
structural form are salient products of their culture. The Western
in the course of its history moves from embracing the loner as a
hero, to questioning his role and function. The scifi films of the
50’s with their plots that parallel the political paranoia of the
era. Weird movies reflect societies where values of consumerist
capitalism create characters who, beyond a surface performance of
conformity, have little social cohesion, and who as individuals are
released into a notional freedom driven by the desires of an object
and product based culture. My problem with Weird lies in the fact
that unlike the Horror Film, this genre draws heavily on the social
matrix, but similar to the horror film, it has little to offer except
an escalation of effect as the substance of its form. So the Weird
as genre takes up the idea of a particular form of socially
determined isolation, but is unable to develop it any way other than
a circuit of amplification. It is the filmmaker’s lack of ambition
to do anything other than devise gestes of amplification that grounds
this movie genre in banality. This is the source of my frustration
with James Marsh’s film.

One of the salient features of ‘Weird’
is to employ a narrative form that comprises a strip of action in
which a character (or characters) experiences or provokes a chain of
weird linked events. In ‘Weird’ the general rule is that no
character in the movie is aware of the weird because most of the
central characters are woven into the same level of perception. The
characters may say: “That’s weird!” the comment is usually
reserved for the ordinary. The weirdness of the characters is for
the viewers gaze to observe and understand. In these genre movies
‘weird’ is a shorthand for personality types who have found a
line of retreat or escape from society. Their retreat does not
alienate them from the culture: rather their psychic response is of
an unbalanced but exaggerated conformance to certain dimensions of
the commercial/political culture. This is a trait they share as a
defensive response with the exploited subjects of Colonial regimes.
So in Weird movies, a common personality feature of the characters
is, that figures of iconic status from the movies or from rock n
roll/ pop culture, provide derivative models for character
assemblage. The feeling you get in Weird is that character is a
function of an egregious random assembly from the drifting flotsom of
mass communications. A core central feature of the weird
personality type is an inherent unpredictability caused by
disintegration of the assemblage which disintegration is oftem key to
the unravelling of the narrative.

In ‘Weird ‘ the face of the
protagonist is often the key geste of the narrative. In The King,
Bernal plays Elvis – the eponymous lead – with an invariant fixed
look that is dominated by the fixed set and tone of his eyes – the
outer socket musculature of his eye socket is relaxed but the eyes
have a glowering quality caused by hardening of the inner eye socket
muscles. This look, an attitudinal affect, dominates the film. It
works as a non reactive mask through which the film’s events of
increasing violence flow without emotive registration. Bernal’s
role is allowed an occasional lapse into a rictus: a tensing of the
jaw muscles to form a smile or half laugh for the sake of social
easement so that some level of interaction can be imputed to Elvis by
the other characters.

The plots of Weird films, and ‘the
King’ is typical in this respect, normally 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. The
structure of the King takes the form of an escalation of the weird
events and responses leading to a final act of destruction followed
by an unresolved last sequence about which there are few doubts as to
outcome. The weakness of ‘the King’ is that to explain the
events that it depicts, the only referential logic is the dynamic of
escalation demanded by the form of the film. This is often the case
with Horror films but these usually allow total suspension of belief
and work hard to parody both themselves and nature of our fears.
‘The King’ like other Weird movies, doesn’t want us to suspend
belief, rather the opposite: great care is taken to evoke a
realistic mis-en scene. However within the classical structure of
film created reality director Marsh wants to evoke a simplistic
belief that the world is weird, particularly America. But it is over
the simplicity of this thesis that the film stumbles and finally
trips.

‘The King’ is typical of its genre
in that the scenario is a series of weird events linked by the
central weird character. ‘Weird’ films are often hyper-real in
style, but the King hovers somewhere between an expressive mode of
realism and hyperrealism. The characteristic feature of ‘The King’
is that everything is subservient to the dominant concept of weird.
The passage of time, constancy of character, ideas suggested by the
script are all ditched in the rapid progress through the linkage of
weird events. Director James Marsh seems particularly lost when
trying to build any coherence of time in ‘The King’. Despite the
fact that the film is built on a time line, and there is a
pregnancy(incestuous) and other critical time based references in the
film, the director simply gives up any attempt at control over
temporal issues, the action image drives time. Time in fact hardly
exists in the film: there is neither emotional time, nor spacial time
or movement time. Instead there are simply a string of events that
take place without any time reference. So states of mind, the
mother’s perception of her daughter who has engaged on an
incestuous affair, the pregnancy are all reduced to the banality of
the manufacture of the escalation of events.

The locus for Weird movies such as ‘the
King’ tends to be USA. But it is as a country that is more a
psychic geographical place rather than a specific location. The
Weird is of course a cultural product, and it’s interesting as a
type of film about the world’s culturally dominant force. But
characteristic films such as ‘the King’ are decontextualised,
dehistoricised and depoliticised. The individual is king and
controls everything within the contorted bounds set by the gentre.
‘The King’ left its mark on me asan empoverished strain of
endeavor that contributes little beyond its membership of a
particular class of movies.

adrin neatrour 10 July 06

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

AeroSoul, by Tom Jennings. Art review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 4, February 2005
AeroSoul  by Tom Jennings  
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 4, February 2005]  
ART 
Stencil graffiti by Arofish often succeeds in transcending formula and cliché, according to Tom Jennings Arofish is a London-based stencil graffiti artist whose output ranges from slogans and cartoons to more abstract and opaque designs and imagery.1 Diverse traditions of political art are referenced – from satire, surrealism and the modern tweaking of mainstream or commercial discourse and iconography (Adbusters, Banksy) – whereas more tentative, existential subject matter (akin to the Paris work of Blek le Rat) is reminiscent of the Situationist critique of everyday life. Throughout, the limits are tested of the political and visual subtlety which can be achieved using this artform, given the constraints on its clandestine, unofficial decoration of public space.The London graffiti includes anti-war and Palestine solidarity graphics, plus ‘Alien Contact’ – masquerading as a cashpoint machine (i.e. of the Fortress Europe people-bank) with instructions to asylum seekers highlighting the intrusive surveillance spreading through our carceral society (the “liberty zone”). ‘Waves of Terror’ retreats from literal clarity to evoke the menace of colonial adventure, and various other examples are even more indirect and suggestive.  Impressionistic flashes of mournful figures appear in limbo, enduring the meaninglessness of life waiting to happen. Some of the website texts echo these themes, but far more angrily – denouncing the drudgery and misery visited on so many (insult seen as added to injury by, for example, crap TV and pop music). Rage thus provides creative energy, but the painstaking stencil process and precarious realisation seem to drain the excess. Vaguely sinister, ghostly renderings remain, bleeding out of the solemn surfaces and rough edges of city landscapes. The specificity of place imbues each scene with a sense of the weight that has to be borne – both by the dead physical infrastructure of mass society, and by the living souls of those flattened into conformity with it. The ephemeral nature of the original brick and concrete canvases (more so than their reproductions in gallery shows or on the website) only intensifies the pathos. 
The device of portraying single or small groups of figures in subdued intimate relationships with neighbourhoods  proved especially fruitful in the winter of 2003/4 when the artist joined International Solidarity Movement direct action activities in Palestine and Baghdad. The straightforward agitprop images mobilising elements of local customs (and their Western connotations) would work equally well as posters or cartoons, with punchlines stressing the venality of Israeli/US imperialism. So ‘Ali Baba’ (Iraqi slang for thief) deploys enjoyable irony in the Arabic caption, “Hey American, take your oil!” (in the story the oil was used to kill the forty thieves and save Ali). All well and good. But there are much more moving pieces combining personal empathy (concerning the calculated horror and madness of military occupation) with a precision of location – each effectively conveying the predicament of that place, and the anguished experience of being in it.
Arofish starts from his own responses to particular sites and situations. If the images awaken their curiosity, passersby may then connect with the more or less submerged concepts underpinning them – without experiencing this as posing, preaching or stating the obvious.2 The evocative poignancy of the Middle East figurative work is especially powerful in this regard – manifesting creative engagement during the otherwise brutal routine of conflict, and prompting direct and immediate feedback from local viewers. Perhaps overwhelmingly obvious oppression provides a clearer backdrop for focusing on the human condition via the interaction between sympathetic outsiders and those bearing the brunt. I look forward to the artist developing further this dimension to his palette at home, where the postmodern apparatuses of power magnify the rootlessness of existence in our fragmented communities. Here, questions of agency, domination and creativity easily dissolve in hubris, hysteria, narcissism and psychosis; the positions of artists, viewers, producers and consumers being so difficult to disentangle. In this context, shunning the stifling seduction of institutions – while spraying onto their external surfaces shared emotional contours of suffering, despair, hope and solidarity – seems a highly promising endeavour.
 
Notes
 
1. collected at www.arofish.org.uk.
2. from an email conversation, January 2005.
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk