Film Review

  • Lower City, dir. Sergio Machado

    The Hard Labour of Love, by Tom Jennings. Review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 11, June 2006.The Hard Labour of Love by Tom Jennings  
    [published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 11, June 2006]
     
     
    Tom Jennings glimpses seeds of hope in Lower City’s vividly lurid portrayal of the seamier side of lowlife. 
    An impressive first feature by director Sérgio Machado, Lower City strives to express the predicament of the modern Brazilian underclass adrift without social, family or government support, but somehow mustering the motivation to persevere. With its love triangle inspired by Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, the film’s naturalism (spoiled by hamfisted subtitling) avoids ‘state of the nation’ polemics, explicit political commentary and objectifying social realism, with a superb fusion of form and content benefiting from half a century of independent filmmaking alternatives to Hollywood spectacle. Its very rare achievement is to effectively condense the desperation of entire strata into three marginal lives without pathologising, psychologising, moralising, sentimentalising or heroising. Instead, in crystallising self-destructive inadequacy, the energy generated from the collision of passionate affinities is presented as a precious source of shared courage and potential.
    The restless, claustrophobic, handheld camerawork, intense colours and low lighting are characteristic of the ghettocentric Latin American new wave (Amores Perros, City of God, etc). The raw immediacy and urgency of lived experience is conveyed by staying close to the actors’ physicality: telephoto lens narrowing perspective; soundtrack accommodating audible breathing; patterns of camera movement matching emotional states; editing synchronised with heartbeats to suit prevailing moods. Very short scenes express realms of subjective meaning: fast and furiously emphasising the pressure of necessity; rarer slow episodes and fleeting static long shots hinting at space for reflection spoiled by the brooding aftermath of biographies full of hassle. The growth of love then symbolises something powerful to hold onto amidst unpredictable flux.
     
    Fiercely loyal childhood friends Deco (Lázaro Ramos) and Naldinho (Wagner Moura) ply a cargo trade along the northeastern coast. Karina (Alice Braga) hitches a lift to Salvador, the provincial capital, paying by having sex with them both. When Naldinho is stabbed protecting Deco from racist attack, her altruism and care adds mutual loving recognition to ecstatic release. The negotiation of this shift means re-evaluating priorities and perspectives on life, and they orient differently to the shared dynamic of yearning. Naldinho is impulsive and reckless, with love representing self-control to be achieved by proxy in looking after Karina. Deco is less patriarchal, seeking reciprocal caring and containment. Karina, meanwhile, insists on autonomy – demanding friendship, sexual satisfaction and sufficient security to relinquish control. Openly acknowledging for the men their and her vulnerability, her refusal to abandon either of them holds the story together while seemingly preventing resolution.
    The dilemma is accentuated by untenable economics, which Deco and Naldinho displace onto their relationship with Karina. They consider selling their boat, which like their ‘brotherhood’ no longer sustains them outside of lucrative illegalities. Deco boxes for a local agent, but has to throw prize bouts against lesser talents with better social contacts. Naldinho embarks on small-scale hold-ups, but the risks far outweigh paltry rewards, especially when ripped off by the local godfather. Karina works as a stripper and prostitute, with the most developed sense of community shown among her co-workers in the nightclub. Then, when she becomes pregnant, both men flatter themselves as individual ‘saviours’. Violence ensues as neither can modulate their envious ‘marriage’ fantasies. Deco’s fighting career is an expedient outlet for his frustration at the elusiveness of equilibrium, allowing him to offer Karina tenderness without strings: a heartfelt offer of shared childrearing; the sexual gift of cunnilingus; and consistent concern for her welfare as much as his. Naldinho’s paternalistic bravura, however, crumbles into infantile rage with the collapse of his delusions of criminal grandeur.
    The wider social structures enclosing the trio are efficiently sketched in their illicit drudges earning a crust. Karina’s situation is most complex, and the tricky intersection of erotic display, prostitution and sexual romance is cleverly handled without moral judgement. The advising Bahia Association of Sex Workers surely helped sidestep stereotypes of exploitation and abuse, with the prostitutes forging some agency in their work and in the ways it overflows into personal life. As practical economics, any personal degradation is contextualised by the available options – familiar to women everywhere whose only remaining resources reside in their sexualised bodies. Conversely, the clients are pathetically at the mercy of lust covered up, for example, with macho bluff and bluster. Explicitly marked as defensive reactions to vulnerability and neediness, this is alternately tolerated, impatiently dismissed, or reversed in  manipulative hustling (most enjoyably in the simulated drug overdose scam). Better-off customers are inadequates to be pandered to, with the hypocrisy of bourgeois mores typified in one client’s impotence and suicide after showing Karina family snapshots.
     
    This episode exemplifies institutional complicity with sexual commerce when the nightclub madam bails Karina out after the local police threaten her with trial for drugs offences. She realises that she is caught in a trap arising from servicing the needs of others. Her ambivalent desires to do this while being looked after as well as valued romantically and sexually – which all seemed conceivable with Deco and Naldinho – are under attack from the diversely intransigent pressures of legal dictate, economic survival, biological reality and social complexity. Her immediate impulse is to flee ‘up north’ to the Amazon – a mythical land of riches (‘gold nuggets for blowjobs’) free from official rule and the law of the father – with colleagues providing solidarity (e.g. abortifacient pills) and companionship, leaving behind men’s fatal inability to relinquish childish self-absorption.
    Ultimately, though, this wish-fulfilment dissolves, along with her hard-nosed facade of self-sufficiency, into uncontrollable tears as she tends the wounds from Deco and Naldinho’s mutual battering – they too being unwilling to surrender intimate caring to perpetual paranoia and predation in the war of all against all. By extension, the film also highlights what political philosophy has long ignored or downplayed – the critical role of women in social and cultural (as well as sexual and economic) reproduction – and hence in the prospects for political advance at all levels. The exchanges of sidelong glances in Lower City’s final extreme close-ups then imply a dawning shared understanding that the trio can only move forward together. But rather than the destructively vicious circles of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or the comfortably pretentious superficiality of Jules et Jim, the social engagement of suffering bodies, minds, hearts and souls might yet generate the synergy necessary for a better life to be wrought from the hard labour of love.
     
    www.variant.org.uk
     
    www.freedompress.org.uk
     
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • Küba, by Kutlug Ataman

    Ghetto Fabulous, by Tom Jennings. Art review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 19, October 2006.
    Ghetto Fabulous by Tom Jennings
     
     
    [published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 19, October 2006]
     
     
    ART
     
    Küba’s multitude of screens give a fascinating but flawed portrayal of  community, finds Tom Jennings
     
    Küba, by Kutlug Ataman, simultaneously telling the stories of forty residents of Istanbul’s most notorious shantytown, showed at the Waygood Gallery/Robert Stephenson Centre, Newcastle, in July-August 2006. Backed by blockbuster commissioners Artangel, the installation has toured galleries and alternative spaces in America, Australia, Europe and the UK, and is due to visit Liverpool and Southampton before returning to Turkey in 2007. The London-based artist was born in Istanbul but left after imprisonment for filming outlawed left-wing militants in the 1980s, since experimenting with cinema (most famous for Lola and Billy the Kid, 1999) and video art portraits of the socially and politically excluded. Access to the ‘closed’ world of Küba, crammed between high-rise blocks near the  airport, was gained via a respected former resident, and the trust to allow interviewing developed over two years – a rare level of involvement mirrored in the commitment required of viewers to do justice to so many hours of minimally-edited footage.
    The subjects are a cross-section of the population willing to testify, of varying degrees of lucidity, and from children to elders. Asked what Küba means to them, some are humble, shy or reflective in talking to camera, others self-serving or effusive, even apparently obsessed; all matter-of-factly confiding the mundane routines of bare existence punctuated by extremes of abuse, suffering and tragedy; or, far less frequently, triumph. There is however an overriding sense of protectiveness of their own (such as it is) in the face of unremitting external hostility and an obstinate pride in collective survival when the converse seems perpetually imminent. On circulating around successive screens, the effect is a strange blend of heightened feeling: moved and then bored; involved and detached. The shabby furniture and battered second-hand television sets hiding the DVD gear help you feel at home, and the flickering images and soundtracks bleed into peripheral perception as in a real social gathering. But of course there’s no interaction, and a mere juxtaposition of individualised accounts loses the intense flesh-and-blood co-presence producing the interpersonal cement of this community – though more suitable, perhaps, for the atomised existences and simulated relationships of Western media-addicts.
     

    If the installation’s innovative strategies conceal unresolvable contradictions under rhetorics of empowerment, bearing witness and transcending documentary limitations, the waffle of critics and curators goes further. Framed to befit the special status of art, Küba is characterised as uniquely distinct from any other place, diverting attention from parallels with lower-class neighbourhoods across the world and throughout history and favouring fetishistic fascination with personal pathologies, perversions of consciousness and ethnic abjection. Litanies of the exotic grotesque – “drug addicts, criminals, transvestites, prostitutes and the mentally ill, Kurds, former left-wing militants, Islamic fundamentalists and nationalists” – strive to increase distance between marginal lives and some assumed and unquestioned ‘normal’ mainstream, downplaying the shared burden of the impoverished recounted vividly on the DVDs. So, despite geographical and historical specificity and their relative diversity, embattled matriarchs, unrepentant adolescents and dignified losers make sense of their struggles via biographical narratives mobilising wish-fulfilment and fury, wit and pathos, poignant nobility and bluff and bluster – emotive rationales resonating in anyone with the relevant experience and empathy.
    Having pre-empted class recognition with fragmentary identities, the exhibition blurb claims that the settlement is also “quite different from traditional anarchist squats” (whatever they are) “… in the sense that entire families reside in Küba and not just young intellectuals, students or bohemians”. Undoubtedly true for some, this does no justice to many such social experiments whose achievements under harsh pressures of necessity cannot be dismissed so cavalierly as ‘lifestylism’ – especially when feelings of collective sanctuary from state control and bureaucratic conformity are so prominent, and hard-won in being reproduced across generations. Even more specious is the argument that “Küba cannot be compared to the favelas of Latin America because rather than being an easily recognized zone of the city reserved for the poor, Küba is first and foremost a state of mind”. No, the favelas illegally occupy substandard real estate outside of government control – certainly not granted by benevolent authorities – tolerated as reserve armies of labour and the ramifications and practical expense of eviction.
    The Kübans’ anti-state sentiments, nurtured by extreme levels of arbitrary police harassment and detention persisting since the 1980s military dictatorship, are also hardly exceptional – often evolving further. So in El Alto, La Paz, Bolivia, the shanty neighbourhood associations are among the most radical of new political groupings in a country already renowned for insurrectionary tradition. Or, in the Rio favelas – usually dismissed as sunk in the mire of criminal gangsterism – the Afro-Reggae movement hints at inspirational cultural-politics incubating there. A more meaningful contrast is scale, with millions rather than hundreds of people – so that bottom-up organisation would represent a convergence of many thousands of Kübas at once; a quantum-leap in terms of possibilities for resistance. Finally, the megaghettoes of the global south can be seen as a most enduring product of IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programmes, rather than historical anachronisms. This puts into context the insistence that the future of Küba be interpreted as a measure of how ‘modern’ (even ‘humane’) the state of Turkey – and, by implication, the broader fortress EC that country aspires to join – will be.
     
    Ataman’s motivations included to respect and air his subjects’ reality – rather than any ‘truth’ – in their own words. That their unity seems based on a “generationally-transmitted instinct to defy the forces of law and power rather than through any more observable markers of identity” then contradicts the differentiating presumption in touring the installation around the world of “alien narratives coming into an alien city and mixing with it”. Ultimately, then, this complex and ambiguous artwork raises many intriguing questions which it cannot answer. The mantra of a ‘state of mind’, holding together an otherwise unlikely local society, has no more explanatory power than the ‘imagined community’ of nationhood or the self as a performative personal mythology – though conveniently reinforcing the art consumer’s superior detachment from dirty realities of social and material intensity and threat. A measure of Küba’s success might be how hard the accompanying public discourse has to work in simultaneously hyping up, narrowing down, and generally mystifying its relevance to make it palatable to those more comfortably off in the New World Order.
     
    www.variant.org.uk

    www.freedompress.org.uk

    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • Manderlay, dir. Lars Von Trier (2006)

    Grace, Favour and Farce, by Tom Jennings. Short review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 15, July 2006.Grace, Favour and Farce by Tom Jennings 
     
    [published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 15, July 2006]
     
     
    Manderlay, dir. Lars Von Trier
     
     
    This is the second of Von Trier’s ‘Land of Opportunity’ provocations, parodying the patterns of American national mythology to expose the intimate interplay between elite liberal philosophy and practical brutality in shaping history. In Dogville (2004), an impoverished 1930s Rockies community cruelly abuse Grace – a stranger seeking sanctuary – as both the self-righteous superiority of her erstwhile advocate and the pious rectitude of the other townsfolk decompose into suppressed sadism. Their ambivalence at her sweet-natured humility is trumped by hidden resentment at her privileged background – she was escaping the dictatorship of her gangster father, but finally revels in his vengeful massacre of the miscreant populace.
                    The marauding gangsters next hit the Manderlay plantation in Alabama, where slavery persists six decades after abolition. Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) elects to stay and oversee the implementation of democracy and free trade – a regime change backed by some of her dad’s henchmen. But despite her moral repugnance at prior methods of classification and control of the Africans, her leadership makes error after blunder thanks to similarly overweening pride and arrogance, ignorance and bad judgement, and deeper levels of unacknowledged prejudice, self-disgust and conflicted desire. The freed slaves can’t match her high-handed high standards, and eventually vote for the old system to be reinstated – with her at its head. Again she flees – this time from her own dictatorship.
     
    Manderlay’s minimalist staging and photography are again hypnotically effective, as is the final devastating Jacob Holdt photomontage showing the degradation of southern states black life after abolition – though John Hurt’s cynically reactionary narration is superfluous since this story has no hidden twists or puzzles beyond the apparently unredeemable small-minded passivity of the oppressed. Von Trier’s method narrows down characterisation as well as cinematic language, so that all we see are simplistic stereotypes rather than grandiose philosophy’s pretensions to universal essences. And this is precisely the subject matter of the films – here, Grace’s misrecognition of her own faulty perceptions, dubious motivations and fallible ethics as the objective reality of the external world, subsequently used as the basis for forcibly rearranging other people’s lives. The absurdity of hierarchical power imagining itself as benevolent is thus comprehensively deconstructed.
                    What remains unexplored are the complex subjectivity and sociality – and hence active potential – of the victims, beyond the manifold psychic contortions necessary for the Black characters to deal with their impossible situation. Conversely, the white former owners work together well with their ex-subordinates – the only glimpse of optimism in the film thus being partly attributed to the penitence of oppressors after their humiliation by Grace for their sins (she exempts herself despite protestations that ‘we’ perpetrated the injustices of slavery). Manderlay is certainly a withering critique of US racism, colonialism and exploitation everywhere, and the general delusions of statecraft –  achieved through exemplifying and heightening the dehumanising strategies it derides. Ultimately, such exercises in bourgeois self-contempt may undermine authoritarian fantasies, but scarcely represent revelations for liberation.
     
    www.variant.org.uk
     
    www.freedompress.org.uk
     
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • The Road to Guantanamo, dirs. Michael Winterbottom & Mat Whitecross (2006)

    Likely Lads in the Global Gulag, by Tom Jennings. Short review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 8, April 2006.Likely Lads in the Global Gulag by Tom Jennings 
     
    [published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 8, April 2006]
      
    The Road to Guantanamo, dirs. Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, Channel 4, 9th March 2006.
     
    This dramatised documentary speaks for itself as the testimony of the ‘Tipton Three’ – a bunch of Brummie scallies who travelled to Pakistan in 2001 for Asif Iqbal’s wedding. After taking an ill-judged detour to Afghanistan, they lost one of their number (Munir Ali, presumed dead) as the war there intensified, and were hoovered up for three years of abuse, humiliation and torture as ‘enemy combatants’ by the US-funded Northern Alliance and subsequently in Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before release without charge in 2004. Dubbed by Dubya as among ‘the worst of the worst’ of global terrorists, the Three come over as completely apolitical, scarcely religious, even clueless fools (to start with), who emerged stronger and wiser thanks to steadfast friendship and the inspirational integrity of fellow Muslim prisoners.
    As in other Michael Winterbottom films the visual design, cinematography and editing mesh seamlessly in narrating the characters’ point of view. The juxtaposition of contemporaneous news footage with to-camera commentary by the Three and staged reconstructions of their experiences effectively demonstrates the arrogance, stupidity and dishonesty of the ‘War on Terror’, as well as highlighting the media poodles’ parroting of government propaganda. So despite videotape ‘evidence’ purporting to show them training with Osama bin Laden in 2000, Shafiq Rasul was working in Currys in Birmingham all that year and Rhuhel Ahmed also had cast-iron alibis. Lawyers privy to the evidence against them confirm that the ‘intelligence’ agencies had nothing to dent their story – as with hundreds of other anonymous detainees eventually released from Guantanamo with no media attention. Meanwhile 500 remain there – many with equally strong evidence of innocence.
     
    British nationality led Jack Straw to request our lucky heroes’ release. Ironically, ‘Britishness’ may have contributed to their ordeal, in the form of that particular postcolonial complacency about blundering into other people’s misery (whether for solidarity, charity and/or mundane tourism). Family links with the Subcontinent obviously occasioned this journey, but the narrative tone is equally suggestive of stereotypical Brits abroad – and once the intense anxiety in Karachi for the Afghan people aroused their sympathy, macho overconfidence prompted the pointless jaunt even further out of their depth into the war zone. But in the present intensifying politicisation of space, the wrong body in the wrong place is presumed guilty. At home or abroad, the new world order hysterically redefines the transgression of borders (more generally, failing to fit official requirements) as criminal – and making waves in media space is suspect too. Returning from the Berlin Film Festival (where Road to Guantanamo won an award for direction), Rasul and Ahmed, along with the actors playing them, were detained at Luton Airport and questioned about their politics. Like the ageing heckler at the New Labour Conference arrested under the same anti-terror legislation, you couldn’t make it up …
     
    www.variant.org.uk
     
    www.freedompress.org.uk
     
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • Political Themes in Recent Mainstream Cinema

    Rose-Coloured Spectacles, by Tom Jennings. Essay published in Variant, No. 27, October 2006Rose Coloured Spectacles  by Tom Jennings
     
     
    [published in Variant, 27, September 2006]
     
     
    Jonathan Demme’s anti-Bush broadside The Manchurian Candidate (2004) effectively updates John Frankenheimer’s classic 1962 conspiracy thriller – with Iraq rather than Korean War veterans brainwashed into becoming political moles and assassins by corporate, not KGB, agents. Given our familiarity with the amoral criminality of the military-industrial complex and government via mythology, mystification and spin, these revisions seem highly appropriate. The unfolding plot shows Army bureaucrat (Denzel Washington in Frank Sinatra’s role) and Vice Presidential candidate (Liev Shrieber for Laurence Harvey) grappling with Gulf War Syndrome zombification amid manipulation by Shreiber’s Senator mother (Meryl Streep instead of Angela Lansbury) and sundry electoral, big business and media masterminds, crooks, lobbyists, lackeys and lickspittles.
    However, despite a very neat new denouement, much of the political sharpness of the source novel by Richard Condon is lost, wherein McCarthyism succeeded thanks to Kremlin plotters finding it thoroughly congenial to their authoritarian aims – a fascinating, if muddled, disentangling of the contradictions of Cold War politics. Unfortunately, the supposedly liberal-left Demme substitutes benign intelligence agencies which only ever use dirty tricks to foil the multinational menace, plus honourable old-school patriotic patricians who have for years fought Party takeover bids by tycoons. In other words, the radical potential of a critique of the interdependency of the state and capitalism is squandered in favour of regressive conservative recuperation – much like, in fact, the 2004 Democratic presidential campaign itself.
    The changing contours of cinematic conspiracies can thus be interpreted as adjustments to what filmmakers and studios understand ‘politics’ to mean (to themselves and viewers) in these cynical postmodern times – in a trajectory from stark Orwellian paranoia through nihilistic neo-noir to recent efforts such as Demme’s glossy pastiche, Traffic, The Quiet American, Silver City, The Constant Gardener and Syriana. Moreover, the last few years have seen a growing tendency for supposedly progressive themes to be explicitly tackled in big-budget Hollywood fictions in most other film genres too, along with the incorporation of originally marginal aesthetic and stylistic choices and strategies in the production of cinematic blockbusters, brands and franchises. The brief survey below describes some of these rather surprising phenomena and the critical response to them, and discusses their ambivalent implications and limitations.
     
    Shifting Perspective 
    In A World in Chaos, Carl Boggs and Thomas Pollard match recent developments in cinema to the lived experiences of its audiences in the “globalizing, consumer-oriented capitalist order: gross material inequalities, social polarization, possessive individualism, civic fragmentation, and impending chaos”.1 Elements of classic Hollywood genres are combined and attenuated in many recent films so that their narratives depict incomprehensible and corrupt worlds where conventional rational understanding, collective organisation and public action have lost the capacity to offer explanations or effect political change – thanks in no small part to the saturation of our psyches with corporate media trivia. And although the book’s overly loose definition of postmodernism in films encompasses many long-established forms and styles, its proposition is surely plausible that earlier representations of brutal, miserable, hopeless and confused lives in specific marginal, urban, criminal and/or nightmare milieux have been increasingly glossed and generalised to apply to society as a whole.
                    Other treatments of significant trends in contemporary American films have no patience with such pessimistic and totalising assessments of the sector’s long-range value and significance. Bucking the tendency of major studio output in the 1990s converging towards ever more inflated and repetitious replicas with little more than special effects enhancements and celebrity presence to recommend them, a diverse collection of creative film-making talents brought instead the sensitivities and dynamism of subcultural and cult media and genres to bear. The achievements of some of these in persuading major studios to part with substantial production budgets are celebrated by James Mottram in The Sundance Kids.2 This title furnishes a spurious collectivity – when many, such as Soderbergh and Tarantino, had little or no truck with Robert Redford’s nursery and showcase at the Sundance Institute. It also encourages a strained intergenerational comparison with the 1970s New Hollywood of Scorcese, Spielberg and Coppola et al, who rose to prominence from the sixties countercultural demolition of outdated industry practices before subsequently finding themselves thoroughly tamed by what replaced them. Sharon Waxman’s anecdotal Rebels On The Backlot3 at least concentrates on detailing insider gossip and dissecting networking patterns in showing how an arbitrary selection of younger independent directors have combined personal entrepreneurial prowess and self-promotion with genuine artistic flair in advancing their careers.
    Conversely, rather than translating cinematic texts as sociocultural reflections, and with a much less sanguine approach to cultural commerce, Ben Dickenson’s Hollywood’s New Radicalism4 charts the changing structure of an industry whose consolidation and profit-seeking agendas fluctuate according to wider political and economic trends, focusing on the efforts of liberals and leftists involved in film production to reflect their social awareness in their work. Recent generations of independent innovators gained arthouse footholds with regular box-office hits refreshing moribund blockbuster formulae – and now that niche marketing and diversification are prominent megastudio strategies, successful Hollywood progressives can juggle mainstream fare with personal commitment to lower-budget releases paid for with its proceeds. Moreover, after Clinton’s neoliberalism, Seattle’s protest revival and post-9/11 Bush barbarism, many also vociferously criticise orthodox politics, publicly supporting grass-roots campaigns instead. By this account, subversive hope unexpectedly supplants cynical despair.
     
    Focusing on Power
     
    Obvious manifestations of these phenomena may be sought in film treatments of formal political processes themselves. Conventional 1990s satires centralised the network of PR spin and corporate and media influence on dodgy leaders, from the Machiavellian machinations of Bob Roberts (1992) to more sympathetic power-seekers led astray both by their own narcissism and the electoral farce. Primary Colors and Wag the Dog (both 1998) were comically pertinent to the Clinton regime’s practice, but said nothing about either political consequences or ordinary viewers/voters beyond them being suckered (which might apply more to liberal filmmakers falling for Clinton’s progressive rhetoric). Meanwhile the historical revisionism of JFK (1991) and LA Confidential (1997) had already applied film noir devices to national and local institutional and governmental structures, implying their utter moral bankruptcy. More complex and less conventional narratives followed suit, exploiting the flexibility of genre crossover to link the lives of the citizenry into the degradations of politics.
                    Most trenchantly, elite Democrat Senator Bulworth (1999) goes AWOL in South Central LA after a nervous breakdown on the campaign trail, emerging as a champion of the underclasses. Borrowing elements of 90s ‘hood film’ style works here thanks to immense respect shown for ghetto philosophy, intelligence and creativity, counterposed by Warren Beatty’s hysterical vanity and, crucially, laughably incompetent rapping.5 Other recent films also bridge the gap between culture and politics, in diverse ways and with varying degrees of success. However, apart from Bamboozled’s (2001) exposure of corporate media’s racism in colonising Black traditions, all invoke heroic individualism to drive history: Cradle Will Rock (2000) revisits the political context of the 1930s US Federal Theatre Project in a musical celebration of proletarian art served up by elite intellectuals like Orson Welles and John Housman; Good Night & Good Luck’s (2005) implied critique of modern media requires merely journalistic integrity to scupper McCarthyism; and 8 Mile (2003) and Erin Brockovich (2000) connect uplift from the constraints of working class culture only with personal success in music and law respectively – reducing those represented (whether in the hip-hop or legal senses) to passivity.
    More ambitious is Silver City’s (2004) bitter denunciation of prevailing power. This crime thriller-cum-political conspiracy follows an ex-crusading journalist (Danny Huston) grappling with environmental destruction and the exploitation of migrant workers perpetrated by corporate greed – all fronted by cretinous mouthpieces elected through omnipresent soundbites and photo-ops. Although crippled by annoyingly patronising expositions (when the message emerges more effectively from the narrative), the film is effective in critiquing left, right and centre while still hinting at hope. So the right-on countercultural veteran does eventually uncover the ‘truth’ – but to no effect other than his own satisfaction (signalled by a successful romantic denouement); while his ‘concern’ for the plight of immigrants doesn’t extend to any regard for their welfare as he exploits their goodwill in helping him. The self-obsession of the sixties generation thus neatly trashed, potential is nonetheless glimpsed in the lead character’s former associates – still committed, but now engaged in muckraking internet activism.
     
    Treatments of transnational political and corporate conspiracies themselves adopt more complex narratives – The Quiet American (2002) and The Constant Gardener (2005) show middle-ranking professional protagonists nudging toward an appreciation of the dirty institutional deeds they’re implicated in, and that they’ve somehow hitherto avoided awareness of – but they are helpless given their isolation. Traffic (2001) and Syriana (2005) claim to represent a global range of ‘stakeholder’ perspectives on the wars on drugs and terror respectively. But although no one sees the bigger picture, and all subplots end more or less tragically, characters are given more depth the higher their social status – reflecting the possibility of meaningful agency, and hence some kind of redemption if only in noble failure. In the process, hierarchies are meticulously preserved along with the identification with middle class pathos required by the stereotypical rendering of everyone else. Even Lord of War’s (2005) attempt to stitch together personal deployments of national mythology with the globalising sociopathy of capitalism (via the evils of the international arms trade) only acquires narrative drive – and thus purchase as metaphor – by shadowing Nicolas Cage’s crazed Ukrainian-American entrepreneur with Ethan Hawke’s ineptly idealistic Interpol authority-figure.
    The comforting banality of simple-minded redemptive (an)aesthetics is taken to extremes in the treatment of war itself. Continuing Sam Mendes’ generic deconstructions of inadequate US existential masculinity begun in American Beauty (2000) and The Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005) demonstrates the hysterical convolutions of redundant macho among marines in the desert of the 1991 Gulf War. Unfortunately the film adopts the perspective of Jake Gyllenhaal’s pretentious nerd frustrated by the military’s failure to resolve his dysfunctional family coming-of-age drama – while most army recruits must rationalise their positions after joining up to give their lives income, rather than meaning. At least here the adolescent ‘philosophising’ is bracketed as defensive response to insane reality; whereas in Spielberg’s odious Munich (2005) it is privileged as ideological support for Israeli state terrorism.6 Much more interesting is the postmodern playfulness of Three Kings (1998), with the first Iraq war cast as heist movie where heartfelt solidarity replaces the cynical self-interest of an American platoon once the malevolence of official policy becomes clearer during a surreal excursion in pursuit of buried treasure. Jarhead and Three Kings are also saturated with reference to cinematic precursors – in style, structure and the social and internal intercourse of their characters – and precisely such dissolving of boundaries seems to give these films more chance of saying something interesting and original.
     
    Blurred Vision
     
    The mixing of genres resonates with viewers’ media and cultural biography and literacy, while simultaneously questioning the reliability of conventional patterns of knowledge and understanding of our own lives and the world.7 The apparently apolitical nihilism of postmodern cinema, especially in its treatment of transgression and excess – violence, crime, sexual and social – began to extend in the 90s away from the virtual solipsism of Lynchian fantasy, yuppie nightmares and neo-noir, as narratives became fractured in time and space as well as according to character psychodynamics. Tarantino’s exuberant comic book capers and Natural Born Killer’s (1995) venom against media opiates reflect the mundane madness and horror visible in contemporary society, finding echoes in later films tackling similar themes in highly original ways. Now it is commonplace for skewed perceptions and private fantasies to overflow and reverberate among participants in social networks, influencing or overdetermining prospects for the future of the self and others.
    In particular, the status of the ‘reality’ presented to viewers is unsettled when visual design and cinematography confuse perspective; with subjective states no longer conveniently tagged as ‘flashback’, ‘daydream’, ‘nightmare’, etc. Together with the unpredictable vicissitudes of the external world, its implacable material force and proclivity for coincidence, this hints at the open-endedness of history rather than closure – modulating the emotional rush traditional denouements aim for as ‘entertainment’. Then, when the juggling of genres leaves a narrative no single obvious outcome, dissonant resolutions may be tacked on whatever the thrust of the foregoing would conventionally suggest. You’d think the indie rebels and radical mavericks purportedly populating Hollywood could exploit these profitable fashions as golden opportunities to represent political struggle in their work. But only very few films have shown public, collective action and conflicts of interest – involving varying forms and levels of explicit political ideology and motivation – to be suffused and surrounded with, and energised and confounded by, the misrecognition and desire both practical and cinematic experience suggest are inevitable.
     
    Based on the iconoclastic cult novel by Chuck Palahniuk, David Fincher’s Fight Club drips with comic invective concerning the comfortable alienations of commodity fetishism and managed misery. Corporate bureaucrat Jack (Edward Norton) has a solipsistic private life of Ikea catalogue completism, filling the resulting spiritual vacuum with self-pitying voyeurism at self-help groups for cancer sufferers. This pathetic existence is blighted by escalating narcissistic insults and material disasters, until libidinal nihilist Tyler (Brad Pitt) rekindles his anguished masculinity in regular bareknuckle fistfights on city backstreets. Fascinated onlookers from all walks of life join in, mushrooming and coalescing as an underground movement to overthrow consumer society via unspoken male solidarity. Their plan to blow up finance companies’ headquarters proves too much for Jack, who shoots himself in the head – merely wounding himself physically but killing Tyler (revealed as schizoid personification of suppressed desire) – and the newly-integrated Jack finds heterosexual love as the bombs detonate.
    Even if dismissed as hermetic schoolboy fantasy – or worse, flirting with the fascistic appeal of cult violence powered by psychotic charisma – Fight Club at least foregrounds passionate bodily yearning as potential antidote to the poison of capitalism.8 David O. Russell’s I [Heart] Huckabees follows the more unthreatening route of surrrealism-lite (as favoured by global brand advertisers), sacrificing the urgency and emotional desperation conjured by Fincher. The gentler, screwball farce comedy is likewise enervating rather than energising – but both choices suit the film’s theme of the New Age reduction of politics to personal morality and lifestyle marketing. Here, Jason Schwartzman’s earnest environmentalist agonises over the ethics and efficacy of single issue campaign compromises with corporate interests. So troubled that he fears for his sanity, various counsellors and consultants are invited to compete in obsessing over his sense of identity, making suitably shallow interventions in his social and activist circle. ‘Finding himself’ quickly takes precedence over preserving wilderness – implying that the previous concern for ‘real’ nature merely externalised anxieties concerning his own self-indulgent whingeing human nature.
     
    Crowd Scenes
     
    Fight Club and Huckabees are unquestionably highly original films, with wildly inventive camerawork, editing and plotting, and complex characterisations and cultural reference points. And despite their considerable limitations – for instance depicting political action as, at best, misguided – both complicate the striving for commonality with the difficulties inherent in the uncertain status of knowledge and interpretation experienced by characters and viewers. More conventional ensemble dramas also emphasise the influence of randomness, shared fantasy, flashbacks and alternative versions in shaping local social contexts. The fractured stories and multiple perspectives pioneered by Robert Altman have been very influential among independent filmmakers –  though rarely exploited to illuminate political themes.9 Moreover, other groundbreaking work – such as the ghettocentric cycle initiated by Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, films directed by Sean Penn (The Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard, The Pledge) and those written by Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) – locate agency and potential most firmly within individual protagonists, but these are always flawed, damaged and disruptive of simplistic solutions, and the ramifications of their normal or abnormal pathology ripple out into their social environments to highlight collective implications.
    Paul Haggis’ Crash focuses on the sickness of racism infecting all levels of American society in a tapestry of neatly  interlocking and sharply scripted vignettes featuring a dozen-and-a half characters crossing fractious paths over two days in Los Angeles. Its manipulative conceit is to include only occasions dominated by racialising attributions, with scant contextualisation in  deeper backstories and a fuller range of interactions. Despite consequently actively stereotyping those it accuses, the scenarios frequently overflow this constraint to reveal the bases of conflict in class distinction and economic inequality – with particularly acute detailing of the complicit hypocrisy of liberal elites and the fatal delusions of political correctness. But with the redress to racial prejudice artificially overdetermining the narrative ebbs and flows, acts of humility and humanity on the part of those towards the bottom of the cosmopolitan heap are isolated as exceptions to the rule rather than countervailing force. Crash thus embodies and exemplifies the organising power of racism yet, paradoxically, was lauded and awarded best film Oscar for its bravery in exposing it. But the film is much less honest than Short Cuts’ pinpointing of the bitter pressure-points of the city’s downwardly-mobile trajectory, ultimately being just as distanced and melancholic as Magnolia’s meandering meditation on the ineffable strangeness of LA life.
                     Refusing the panoramic omnipotence of such efforts, Kathryn Bigelow’s magnificent Strange Days experiments viscerally with the phenomenology of simulation offered by new media, gradually expanding the significance of their alienating distraction for confused thrill-seekers out into the seething public sphere of a chaotic neo-noir 1999 LA under brutal martial law. The troubled pairing of ex-vice squad porn merchant Ralph Fiennes and streetwise action heroine Angela Bassett tangle with corrupt entrepreneurs and lowlives in a decadent cross-fertilising cultural milieu of hip-hop punk, blundering into a conspiracy to assassinate a Black revolutionary leader which threatens to tip the civic millennium festivities over the brink into grass-roots insurrection. Through an unprecedented synthesis of film and psychoanalytic theory, exploitation of cinema traditions and bravura design, editing and photography, it is far more nuanced than Crash in tackling the subjective and social significance of race, as well as of gender and class.10 The film also works hard to specify its historical contingency in the best traditions of science fiction as speculation on the present (for example by Stanislaw Lem, William Burroughs or Philip K. Dick) – rather than hysterical inflation into universal values, or the fashionably subversive adolescent hype which passes for philosophical resonance in the Wachowski brothers-produced V for Vendetta (as in The Matrix series).11 Strange Days even excuses its major flaws (such as a deliberately implausible, if arguably utopian, central relationship) by managing to render its politically ultra-conservative resolution as dystopian recuperation – a final knowing flourish on the role of mass entertainment in taming desire in labyrinths of repressive desublimation.
     
    Changing Lenses
     
    The general timidity of dream factory visionaries in tackling political change may, then, be best conceived in terms of a wider disillusionment among the middle classes with social democracy as the handmaiden of capitalist progress in our strange days, given their failure to predict or comprehend the unravelling liberal consensus. 1980s and 90s neo-noir, postmodern and ‘slacker’ stories appeal for their thoroughgoing refusal of traditional disciplines and delusions, which is partly also what makes new forms of collective mobilisation such as anti-globalization possible among those growing up without the benefits of 1960s naiveté and aristocratic modernist optimism. However, the recent spate of films translating oppositional attitudes into populist cinema use largely retrograde narrative conventions and characters, without the stylistic and technical experimentation elsewhere employed to reflect underlying malaises in Western society. The most obvious symptoms of war and corporate excess are thus presented as ultimate causes, to be adjusted by enlightened reform. Similarly, whereas the deeper colonisation of intimate life by the instrumental logic of commodification ironically has Hollywood at its vanguard, any cinematic response more robust than trivial lifestyle tinkering leads to shattered identities or social breakdown which only the desperate reassertion of established authority can resolve.
    While at least corruption and malpractice by government and business, environmental damage, and the effects of corporate imperialism on the poor at home and abroad are now gratifyingly familiar on the big screen, merely updating clichéd film formulae reproduces traditional resolutions revolving around heroes and leaders. The corresponding notion that suitably nimble strategies among liberal filmmakers guarantees progressive content does justice neither to contemporary political circumstances – where the intentions and interests of professional elites are so widely, thoroughly and understandably distrusted – nor to a media culture in which superficial appearance is fetishised to mask the depressing difficulties of real life. Negotiating prevailing tastes and engaging deeper desires while also offering genuine critique is much trickier than the voluntaristic idealism of celebrities suggests. So radical directors often skilfully portray middle class protagonists striving to maintain their positions entangled in complex local hierarchies and histories, with very mixed consequences for those with less room to manouevre. Regrettably, the latters’ rich social dynamic is usually homogenised into frozen victimised masses – either destined to be thawed by personal heroics and histrionics, or simply functioning as a reactive backdrop against which the stars shine.
     
    Conspiracy theories have long been fertile territory for cinema, with political thrillers sensing the world’s complexity while rendering historical phenomena in simplistically individual terms. Action films hysterically mobilise adolescent masculinist muscle in desperate response and, given that paranoia represents the psychotic underbelly of individualism, parapolitics likewise seductively suggests that humanity’s ills result from the hidden agendas of evil elites. Of course the latter exist, and create havoc, but the more difficult truth is that domination is sedimented into the routine material of institutions, discourses, bodies, societies and economies – conditioning the patterns of stratification, distinction and difference which constitute the texture of everyday life irrespective of whose interests can be said to be ultimately served. This is precisely the terrain which postmodern existential nightmares effectively excavate, albeit usually inside single isolated and tortured psyches. Furthermore, expansive dramas of community life are eminently capable of depicting the ways in which the interests, beliefs, actions and affiliations of friends and neighbours, lovers and strangers mingle subjectively and socially. When parallel storylines and biographies clash and intersect, this is as likely to yield collective synergy as the familiar cinematic staples of destructive conflict or sterile equilibrium.
                    These tentative and emergent representational paradigms seem to offer the possibility of providing visions of the grounds for genuine solidarity and the pursuit of shared purpose in circumstances in which business as usual is decisively threatened. However, it would be necessary to acknowledge the central role here of autonomous grass-roots activity or expression outside of the boundaries, preoccupations, conceptual frameworks, guidance and control of middle class mediators. But this would entail the latter surrendering their recuperative power, and accordingly the privileged positions granted for loyal opposition to the status quo. Even the more challenging of the films referred to above can therefore be interpreted in terms of a reluctance to tackle such suffocating restraints in their makers’ own cultural practice – amounting to a wholesale failure of nerve as well as self-censorship. This helps explain why manifestations of conscious struggle, collective public dissent or mass action are so rarely properly explored, and certainly not celebrated – and, especially when their subjects lack social status, hasty negation and patronising contempt are the order of the day. Instead a regular refrain of self-important gestures by and about special ones creating history emanates from aspiring or actual cinema industry heavyweights and their (un)critical cheerleaders – whose rose-coloured spectacles conceal an inability to conceive of alternatives to the political coordinates of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
     
    Notes1. Carl Boggs & Thomas Pollard, A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, p.249.
    2. James Mottram, The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood, Faber & Faber, 2006.
    3. Sharon Waxman, Rebels On The Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System, HarperCollins, 2005.
    4. Ben Dickenson, Hollywood’s New Radicalism: War, Globalisation and the Movies from Reagan to George W. Bush, I.B. Tauris, 2006.
    5. see Paula J. Masood, ‘Ghetto Supastar: Warren Beatty’s Bulworth and the Politics of Race and Space’, Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 30, No.4, 2002, pp.287-293.
    6. the grounds for which, in this case, are presented as neutral historical record rather than falsified propaganda; for a corrective, see As’ad Abu-Khalil, ‘Spielberg on Munich: the Humanization of Israeli Killers, and the Dehumanization of Palestinian Civilians’, 2005, http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2005/12/spielberg-on-munich-humanization-of.html. For a relevant discussion of the deeper relationship between media images and contemporary international government, see: Retort [Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews & Michael Watts], Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, 2nd edition, Verso, 2006.
    7. see my ‘Class-ifying Contemporary Cinema’, Variant, No. 10, 2000, pp.16-19.
    8. as, in various contexts, Slavoj Žižek concludes re: Fight Club: “Liberation Hurts!” (Eric Dean Rasmussen, 2003, www.lacan.com/zizekillinois.htm). See also Žižek: ‘I am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Doug Henwood’, Bad Subjects, No. 59, 2002, http://bad.eserver.org (and in Joel Schalit, ed., The Anti-Capitalism Reader: Imagining a Geography of Opposition, Akashic Books, 2002); and ‘Art: The Talking Heads’, in Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Routledge, 2004. For the director’s take on his film, and the controversy it spawned, see: James Swallow, ‘Hit Me’, in Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, Reynolds & Hearn, 2003.
    9. significant exceptions being City of Hope, Lone Star and Sunshine State – like Silver City, financed by John Sayles’ journeyman scriptwriting and independently produced and distributed by his and partner Maggie Renzi’s company, The Anarchists’ Convention.
    10. see: Christina Lane, ‘The Strange Days of Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron’; and Steven Shaviro, ‘“Straight from the Cerebral Cortex”: Vision and Affect in Strange Days’; both in: Deborah Jermyn & Sean Redmond (eds.) The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor, Wallflower Press, 2003.
    11. see Robert Allen’s and my comments on V For Vendetta in Freedom magazine, Vol. 67, No. 7, April 2006.
     
    Films Cited
    American Beauty (dir. Sam Mendes, 2000)
    Amores Perros (dir. Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, 2001)
    Bamboozled (dir. Spike Lee, 2001)
    Bob Roberts (dir. Tim Robbins, 1992)
    Bulworth (dir. Warren Beatty, 1999)
    City Of Hope (dir. John Sayles, 1991)
    The Constant Gardener (dir. Fernando Mereilles, 2005)
    Cradle Will Rock (dir. Tim Robbins, 2000)
    Crash (dir. Paul Haggis, 2005)
    The Crossing Guard (dir. Sean Penn, 1995)
    Do The Right Thing (dir. Spike Lee, 1990)
    8 Mile (dir. Curtis Hanson, 2003)
    Erin Brockovich (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2000)
    Fight Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999)Good Night and Good Luck (dir. George Clooney, 2005)
    I Love Huckabees (dir. David O. Russell, 2005)
    The Indian Runner (dir. Sean Penn, 1991)
    Jarhead (dir. Sam Mendes, 2005)
    JFK (dir. Oliver Stone, 1991)
    LA Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson, 1997)
    Lone Star (dir. John Sayles, 1996)
    Lord of War (dir. Andrew Niccol, 2005)
    Magnolia (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
    The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1962)
    The Manchurian Candidate (dir. Jonathan Demme, 2004)
    The Matrix (dir. Andy & Larry Wachowski, 1999)
    Munich (dir. Stephen Spielberg, 2006)
    Natural Born Killers (dir. Oliver Stone, 1994)
    The Pledge (dir. Sean Penn, 2001)
    Primary Colors (dir. Mike Nichols, 1998)
    The Quiet American (dir. Philip Noyce, 2002)
    The Road To Perdition (dir. Sam Mendes, 2002)
    Short Cuts (dir. Robert Altman, 1993)
    Silver City (dir. John Sayles, 2004)
    Strange Days (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)
    Sunshine State (dir. John Sayles, 2002)
    Syriana (dir. Andrew Gaghan, 2005)
    The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (dir. Tommy Lee Jones, 2006)
    Three Kings (dir. David O. Russell, 1998)
    Traffic (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2001)
    21 Grams (dir. Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, 2004)
    V for Vendetta (dir. James McTeigue, 2006)
    Wag the Dog (dir. Barry Levinson, 1998)

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

  • London Counterculture and People Power of the 90s, by Stefan Szczelkun

    Documents of Dissentiment, by Tom Jennings. DVD review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 12, June 2006.Documents of Dissentiment by Tom Jennings 
     
    [published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 12, June 2006]
     
     
    London Counterculture and People Power of the Nineties, by Stefan Szczelkun, Redz under Bedz DVDs, Nos. 1 and 2
     
    These skilfully shot and assembled video documents each contain two short films depicting important events and grass-roots protests and campaigns from the last decade. DVD 1 starts with a digital video record of “J18: the post modern revival of Stop the City, enacted on the streets of the City of London, 1999. The experience of one person with a camera at this historical and unique protest against global capital. The closest thing to being there yourself”. Mixing impressionistic still images with an evocative soundtrack and direct point-of-view edited footage as the day progresses, moments of celebration increasingly overlap scenes of confrontation with police, hinting at the darkening mood which characteristically accompanies carnival’s tendency to overflow the limits set for it by power. The second film, shot on Hi-8 and entitled ‘Memorials to Diana: spontaneous popular expressions of loss and treason in Hyde Park, September 1997′, is a contemplative forty minutes with Szczelkun’s camera roaming in a leisurely fashion among acres of floral tributes and scrawled doggerel dedicated to the maverick so-called ‘people’s princess’.
    DVD 2 includes a short edited Hi-8 video (shot with Thomas Zagrosek) at a South London eco-warrior camp in 1998/99, including on-site interviews with two of the protesters. This was a successful action against the development of a multiplex cinema on a wild corner of Crystal Palace park, showing how dedicated determination – especially given widespread local support and suitably imaginative tactics – is capable of warding off the depradations of capitalism in its ongoing global quest to enclose the commons for primitive accumulation. Then, ‘Reclaim the Streets and the Liverpool Dockers’ (April 1997) celebrates the first large-scale example of the spectacular demo technique which emerged in 1990s Britain from a resurgent class awareness among newly-politicised younger generations, allied with the traditionally radical communal militancy of this locked-out workforce in “the temporary occupation of urban areas by huge playful crowds – a  kind of instant carnival that came out of the eco road protest movement”.
    Subjects of forthcoming DVDs include campaigns around disability activism and inclusive education, grass-roots film group Exploding Cinema, the Sharsted Street shared ownership self-build co-op, and archives from Kennington Park – along with a new series of digital video artworks by Szczelkun starting with Housework X, a project in which a plywood shed on wheels was dragged across South London in an exploration of second generation immigrant loss and relocation, continuing with an archive of self-produced t-shirts hinting at the creation of culture through the social production, negotiation and recognition of meaning and difference. This impressive breadth and depth of coverage shows the general significance of work such as the Redz Under Bedz project in supplementing the negligible inclusion in the existing historical record of self-produced representations of working-class experience, struggle and cultural expression – where the scant information that can be gleaned is typically framed within the agendas, tastes and structures of knowledge of middle-class disciplinary interests.
     
    Stefan’s website (www.stefan-szczelkun.org.uk) explicitly deals with these larger philosophical questions as well as containing a wealth of texts and images enlarging on some of the themes tackled in the DVDs – employing throughout his enjoyably down-to-earth practical utopianism which, combined with serious theoretical ambitions, always avoids patronisation or academic obfuscation. Of particular interest here is the fascinating short essay on Diana, which explores the ambivalent and contradictory significance of the strong feelings generated among ordinary people. This really ought to be included with its DVD – in fact both would benefit from extra material aimed at viewers unfamiliar with thinking seriously about the kind of collective action portrayed. The films do stand up by themselves as effective physical records, supplementing the memories of those involved and interested which might otherwise fade in these times of incessant mediated novelty trivia. However, their utility in encouraging the potential for future activism might be enhanced with carefully chosen text and images –  within the DVDs and/or as printed inserts.
                    The website is packed with various highly original and thought-provoking reviews and short essays on art and folk expression, discussions contrasting popular and high culture, taste and aesthetics, and a history of Working Press –  a working-class writers and artists self-publishing group responsible for unique and valuable output which would otherwise never have reached the public domain. In line with the author’s emphases on grass-roots self-organisation and on the production of culture as well as its consumption and policing, there is also a comprehensive account (also submitted as a PhD thesis) of his own involvement in umpteen local artistic collectives in the 1980s and 1990s. And, contextualising these recent narratives with those from earlier in the twentieth century, there are links to his documentation of self-build shanty communities, including images of surviving examples at Shepperton-on-Thames, near Edinburgh, in the Tyne Valley, and on the Gower peninsula.
    The most substantial and important contribution to the site, however, is the revised version of his book ‘Conspiracy of Good Taste: Class Oppression and Culture’ (Working Press, 1993; with a new Conclusion added in 2001), laying bare the role of professional arbiters of artistic value in modern Western society – dictating from above acceptable forms of expression and lifestyle, thereby disallowing the creation of culture and the material lifeworld by ordinary people from the bottom-up, and consequently softening us up for the intimate government of everyday life. The British examples of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts proto-fascist purification of vernacular design, Cecil Sharp’s sad evisceratation of folk culture, and Clough Williams-Ellis’ bureaucratic wage-slave housing plantations illustrate the early tactics used – firstly to tame the rebellious dispositions perenially rooted in working-class culture; then as templates for the more sophisticated imposition of consumerism to short-circuit the re-emergence of its autonomy. Stefan Szczelkun’s multi-faceted deconstructions, reclamations, celebrations and exhortations to sociable human imagination represent a thoroughgoing and effective corrective to the inhuman consequences of class elitism and state prescription.
     
    www.variant.org.uk
     
    www.freedompress.org.uk
     
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • Anti-GM event at RISK: Creative Action in Political Culture, CCA, Glasgow, April 2005

    Gene Genies, by Tom Jennings. Art review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 14, July 2005
    Gene Genies  by Tom Jennings 
     
    [published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 14, July 2005]
     
     ART Anti-GM event at RISK: Creative Action in Political Culture, CCA, Glasgow, April 2005
     
    A fascinating presentation and debate around genetic modification was held on 2nd April at the CCA, Glasgow in the midst of the collectively self-controlled chaos of the RISK art exhibition. Present were Carey Coombs from the Soil Association lambasting the patently despicable multinational copyrighting of genetic material (thus outlawing farming mutual aid such as seed sharing); and Susan Bardocz and Arpad Pusztai – sacked in 1998 from the Rowett Institute, Aberdeen for speaking publicly about findings of damaged growth and immune systems in rats fed GM food – on the political restrictions imposed on researchers. Also detailed was the arrest and prosecution of CAE’s (Critical Art Ensemble) Steven Kurtz for possession of harmless common bacteria and an over-the-counter device altered to detect the presence of GMified cells.  His emergency phone call (after his wife had just died) – was answered by a SWAT team who confiscated his gear (and her body). The Fed retreated from their trumped-up bioterrorism charges to mail and wire fraud (maximum 20-year stretch). You couldn’t make it up … At least the CAE support campaign has heightened awareness of anti-terrorism laws used to harass artists and restrict public discourse.1
    The CCA debate – with CAE’s Free Range Grain banners in the background – started from the best ultra-scientific guesses (little meaningful research having been commissioned) on likely effects of GM: growth promoters accelerating cancer progression; antibiotic resistance and allergies mushrooming; interrupting the sequence of gene functioning causing multiple and catastrophic organ and developmental failure, etc, etc. This is all bewilderingly complex as science, let alone common sense; but genetic control basically operates by switching key chemical processes on and off – which are usually implicated in many bodily processes simultaneously, not just the one you’re modifying (a far cry from the triumphalist one-gene one-cure balderdash peddled by education, the media, and corporate interests). A heartening variety of tactics for contestation and levels of attack were then illustrated, including those mobilising the artistic and cultural – rather than merely the traditional agitational – imagination. We need these things in our (political) lives. 
    In general the RISK programme has offered immense free-range food for thought – not least on artistic activity itself away from the usual snooty careerist middle class networks. Likewise, government definitions of the role of arts in ‘social inclusion’ never engage with the real politics of power. This project manages to do that, and more, in the realms of direct action, protest and political change – with some success in terms of genuine participation.
    Regrettably though, when it comes to science, the development of fully-rounded grass-roots mobilisation is often hamstrung by entire schools of red herrings (e.g. rationalism vs. mysticism or  primitivism, as in recent debate in Freedom). And, fair enough, some folks are partial to herrings. But if rationality can only solve problems when its limits are acknowledged,2 then letting elites decide what those limits are will be suicidal politically (maybe even literally). And if creativity and passion are just as important as brains, credit goes to RISK for getting to grips with all such good stuff. Some wisdom just can’t be put back in the bottle.
     Notes 1. also a convenient excuse for blind sweeps on poor inner city neighbourhoods, deporting tens of thousands of immigrants and refugees (terrorists found = 0): see, e.g. Alisa Solomon, ‘The War on Immigrants’, Mute 29, pp.8-9, 2005.
    2. see Mike Michael’s excellent ‘The Power-Persuasion-Identity Nexus: Anarchism and Actor Networks’, Anarchist Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp.25-42, 1994.
      
    www.variant.org.uk
     
    www.freedompress.org.uk
     
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • Judgement Days, by Ms Dynamite

    MsJudged Blandishments, by Tom Jennings. Music Review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 23, November 2005
    MsJudged Blandishments  by Tom Jennings 
     
    [published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 23, November 2005]
     
     
    MUSIC
     
    Ms Dynamite, Judgement Days, Polydor, 2005
     
    Tom Jennings judges Ms Dynamite’s second album a mismatch of unremarkable smooth music and remarkably self-indulgent rant.
     
    Exploding out of a vibrant UK Garage underground in 2002 with A Little Deeper, Ms Dynamite injected conscious womanist ire and exuberant streetwise mischief into the ever-moribund mainstream of British popular music, with hit singles like the anti-bling ‘It Takes More’ garnering industry awards and highly creditable sales. Since then, things done changed (slightly) thanks to her success, and record company doors have opened a crack for talented and more-or-less socially-aware British female urban artists: in hip-hop (the superb Estelle, and M.I.A.’s innovative stylistics), the drum-and-bass-derived hardcore of Grime (Shystie, Lady Sovereign), and R&B (Jamelia and Terri Walker in addition to queen Beverley Knight). Now returning after babymother business, Dynamite’s new album is touted as a milestone as significant here as 1998’s magnificent Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was stateside. Sadly, Judgement Days squanders its good intentions and self-righteous fury on what amount politically to little more than lame liberal laments.
    True, the blistering attacks in the album on the state of the world are refreshing compared to the prevailing pop gloss and glitter and ‘indie’ whingeing and posing. The title track opens by juxtaposing the collective abuse perpetrated by the global system on women, children and the poor with that experienced individually in personal relationships. But rather than exploring the connections, the different levels are simple-mindedly equated and those responsible castigated as sinners requiring absolution. And because “in permittin’ greed and violence, then we got blood on our hands too”, the appeal to conscience fatally misinterprets government, religious, corporate and military violence by confusing politics with voluntarist ethics. The obliteration of complexity and refusal to envisage alternatives persist through a withering anti-ode to an absent ‘Father’, the heartfelt ‘Put Your Gun Away’ and unflinching ‘Self Destruct’, culminating in ‘Mr Prime Minister’ – cataloguing the failings of representative democracy before fading into fatalistic whining:
    “How many hundred seats in parliament / It’s so unfair but so clear / Don’t none of them represent me / And ain’t one of them represent my peers / And it don’t matter who we vote for, nor who gets in / The poor keep dyin’ and the rich keep livin’ / … You said things would change when you wanted our vote / But it stays the same, Mr Prime Minister / And we continue to die, Mr Prime Minister / Not a damn thing changed, Mr Prime Minister / Nobody hears our cries …”
     
    Punctuating the focus on ‘issues’ are more wistful songs of love and loss, representing staple R&B fare. These are pleasant enough but scarcely distinctive, with neither the strength and depth of vocal rendering to convince as soul, nor much correlation with the anger and bombast elsewhere – helping explain why Judgement Days is so disappointing. The formulas of the best black music have been adopted, but to serve such clumsily imposed ‘lessons’ that the unselfconscious energy of the first album disappears. Instead of integrated thematics mingling private and public, hard and soft, love and pain – no doubt crystallised from the dynamic give-and-take of an organic underground scene – we have an awkwardly-assembled commodity.
                     Next time, let’s hope Dynamite returns to biographical reportage emphasising experience rather than cod-ideology, involvement over detachment, and complicity as opposed to priggishness. Thereupon witnessing and testifying to struggle articulates women’s complaints from a sympathetic ‘round-the-way-girl’ perspective rather than generalised feminist dismissal; representing ‘reality’ from the neighbourhood reflects social embedding rather than separation or superiority; spiritual suffering keeps redemptive hope alive for earthly change; and ‘talking to the enemy’ doesn’t just vent moral spleen. As a genuine emissary of your people, the pretence is of engaging with power – but actually you’re reinforcing grass-roots awareness of the pointlessness of the conversation unless it’s on your terms. At all levels, when this rich tricky texture is absent, mimicked or exploited as commercial gambit, hollow gestures result – or smug platitudes, if the arrogance of the artist overshadows immersion in signifyin’ tradition.
     
    And unfortunately, Judgement Days just plays it straight. The subtly deceptive multiple meanings generated from black culture’s historically-honed rhetoric are squashed flat almost as thoroughly as manufactured stars cluelessly expropriating the artful kudos of blues, soul, funk, reggae and hip-hop. However, even your average NY studio pseudo-gangstas acknowledge the tragedy of selling their souls for the bottom dollar, exemplifying in lyrical lifestyles the all-round damage that’s done. Whereas this album’s simplistic blame-game echoes conventional discourses of the moral inadequacy of the poor, while imploring power to self-reform. Maybe Dynamite has swallowed the style-mag adoration, celebrity hyperbole and promotional  hullabaloo – like Geldof and Bono et al, mistaking maudlin’ sentimentality for analysis, powerful fair-weather friends for influence, self-importance for seriousness, and media presence for strategic action. Hell, her pompous circumstance has even suckered her into corporate charitability and the SWP’s Love Music Hate Racism recruitment drive. Naff or what?
    Further signs of commercial domestication have blunted the sharp edges of a bragging rapper skewering her peers with wit, now replaced by humourless bluster from the pulpit. Sonically, the first album mingled drum-and-bass-tinged urgency with inventive melanges of ragga and hip-hop beats to counterpoint expert rapid-fire lyrics, among which even the mellow cuts sparkled. Here the radio-friendly R&B-lite production from Chink Santana, Bloodshy & Avant and Reza Safinia is slickly competent but won’t light up any party outside suburban teenage bedrooms. In such markets holier-than-thou histrionics might pass for politics, and MTV consumers weaned on pretty vacant pop idols may not register her reedy singing as infinitely weaker than the trickster MCing she’s traded for preaching. Overall, Judgement Days is far too bland to pass muster as action thriller and much too po-faced to inspire. More damp squib than Dyna-mi-tee – despite her potshots at elected leaders – for now she’s lost the gunpowder plot.
     
    www.variant.org.uk
     
    www.freedompress.org.uk
     
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, by Carolyn Cooper

    A (New) Message from Rudy, by Tom Jennings. Book /music review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 6, March 2005
    A (New) Message from Rudy  by Tom Jennings 
     [published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 6, March 2005]  
    BOOKS / MUSIC 
    Carolyn Cooper, Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 Carolyn Cooper’s Sound Clash sees contemporary reggae as rebel music, still. Tom Jennings is mightily impressed. 
    Britain, the 1970s: skinheads rocked steady to ska and punks embraced reggae as their dance music of choice. Disaffected white youth across the UK embraced these Jamaican ghetto fables set to irresistibly pulsing beats, primarily due to the resonance they felt with the incendiary politics woven into the lyrics alongside spiritual yearning for unity, love and relief from suffering. Then – after Bob Marley’s international canonisation and the multicultural populisms of two-tone and UB40 – UK roots, dub and lovers rock production, recording and performance thrived for a while among Jamaican diasporans and the new converts. Over time, though, much of the youthful energy dissipated into trip-hop, jungle, bhangra and drum and bass, leaving reggae as another nostalgic niche commodity for collectors …
    … Except in West Indian communities, where the explosive 1980s Kingston dancehall style known as ragga quickly took over – paralleling the rise of hip-hop in America, and sharing its cutting edge minimalist aesthetics, vocal gymnastics and scandalous lower-class content. Largely ignored or dismissed by the commercial mainstream and critics, reggae dancehall is now entrenched in urban club playlists, and strongly influences R&B and rap on both sides of the Atlantic. Even better, like its predecessors, it embeds uncompromisingly radical sentiments in its profane and sensuous sound and fury.1
     
    Carolyn Cooper’s Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) is the first book-length critical examination of ragga’s ambivalent cultural politics. The social space of the dancehall is contextualised as an authentic and vigorous response of the postcolonial Caribbean urban poor to their repression by vicious governmental gangsterism bolstered by utterly regressive and hypocritical class/race elitism and reactionary official Christianity. The author captures the ways the dancehall vibrates with tensions juggling acceptance of the status quo (such as in scapegoating unacceptable lifestyles or glorifying consumerism) and containment via the safe release of frustration (hedonism and the carnivalesque traducing of authority) – a dialectic common in genuinely grass-roots cultural forms.
    What elevates Sound Clash beyond academic interest, however, is its careful attention to the emancipatory potential arising from this unruly environment. Drawing sustenance from the mismatch between the hatred and disgust shown by their ‘betters’ compared to their own passionate enjoyment, audiences and performers mutually nurture and reinforce each other’s prowess. In the process abolishing boundaries between production and consumption, success is measured concurrently as a dance event for punters and in the lyrical and musical dexterity and creativity of selecters and DJs, so that experimentation, provocation and excess are (within the collectively agreed rules of the sound clash) required on both sides.
     
    As a scholar of literature, the author carefully inscribes superstars like Marley, Shabba Ranks, Bounty Killer, Capleton and Lady Saw in their backgrounds and milieux rather than the unique creative geniuses preferred in bourgeois worldviews. Their sophisticated poetics evoke and evolve the oral, rhetorical strategies and devices originating in Africa and plantation slavery so as to encapsulate modern versions of impoverishment.2 Dismissing Western politically correct liberal distaste as merely high-and-mighty ignorance echoing Jamaican elite class hatred, Cooper interprets the lyrics’ grounding in Jamaican ghetto life, where even the most troubling themes – such as violent macho, homophobia and misogyny – reflect ‘border clashes’ negotiating the deepening fractures and fissures in the island’s increasingly brutal and desperate body politic.
    The dynamic of border crossing also illuminates the global migration of ragga and its adherents, smuggling its intrinsically oppositional stances into local fusions with rap and Asian styles, for example.3 The metaphorical patois allusions to guns as verbal weaponry, the righteous burning of Babylon merging revolution with hardline Bobo rastafarianism, and, especially, the obscenities of sexual slackness, all serve as ‘hidden transcripts’ defeating the understanding of detached observation – allowing and reinforcing flights of free expression in a heavily policed party scene: “simultaneously resisting and enticing respectable culture” (p.2).
     
    The close analysis of sexual politics in dancehall lyrics will surprise many readers the most. Despite both forms reserving their harshest critique for middle class morality, classic reggae largely conforms to traditional patriarchal conventions whereas ragga celebrates realistic and egalitarian relations between the sexes. True, male performers seem to gleefully and duplicitously wallow in the objectification of women’s bodies while also urging strength, pride and independence. But the personification of all these traits by hugely popular and immensely powerful women artists like Patra, Tanya Stephens and Lady Saw – who are, if anything, even ruder while fully maintaining integrity and class clarity – demonstrates that the language of display, pleasure and erotic commodification is deployed precisely to subvert the sexual (and the social, economic and political) status quo.
    Of course, formations such as reggae cannot map directly onto political struggle and movement. But whether in Jamaica, the Caribbean diaspora or via wider influences in popular genres and subcultures, the achievements of this music can continue to inspire out of all proportion to the clout of its humble downtown creators. Their exhilarating reformulations of the contradictions inherent in our increasingly polarised world under barbaric 21st century capitalism transform daily life emotional and material agonies into collective imagination and possibility – when the sneering of the superior denies such potential altogether. Respect is due to Carolyn Cooper for going against the prevailing grain, arguing so fiercely and cleverly on behalf of the dispossessed.
     
    Notes
     
    1. see Norman Stolzoff, Wake The Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2000) for a comprehensive history of the dancehall industry. Reggae’s general significance for today’s urban music is discussed in my ‘Dancehall Dreams’, Variant No. 20, 2004 (www.variant.org.uk).
    2. the literary angle being fully covered in Cooper’s equally groundbreaking Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Macmillan 1993).
    3. and in films such as Dancehall Queen (dirs. Rick Elgood/Don Letts, 1997) and Babymother (dir. Julian Henriques, 1998).
     
    www.variant.org.uk
     
    www.freedompress.org.uk
     
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • The Gerbil’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Sally Madge

    Rodent’s Eye View, by Tom Jennings. Art review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 14, July 2005
    Rodent’s Eye View  by Tom Jennings 
     
    [published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 14, July 2005]
     
     
    ART The Gerbil’s Guide To The Galaxy by Sally Madge, Bookville, High Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne, April 20051
     
    Who thinks postmodern art is so much smug pretentious vacuous wank? Not always. Here, a pet gerbil enthusiastically munched its way through The New Illustrated Universal Reference Book – recycling via its physical labour the arrogant presumption that collections of information can encompass history and teach anything worth knowing. Who controls what goes in; what’s left out; how it’s presented and used? This rodent representative of the teeming masses followed its own universal agenda to keep warm, comfortable and secure – with no respect for the supposed wisdom and disciplining power dispensed by elites.
    Unfortunately far too many exponents of contemporary artistic practice prefer to pose in the safety of their self-important cliques, venturing out only occasionally to lick the recuperative arses of art’s institutional markets. However, its unique capacity to condense, explore and encapsulate ideas and feelings means that art can critique the intersections of life, culture and politics in such a way as to intrigue and affect us – rather than bludgeoning us with the preachy self-satisfied ideological bullying that politicos are occasionally (!) guilty of. In this case the deployment of ironic reflexivity also illustrates an understanding that aesthetic manipulation (as in other kinds) always entails a rhetoric of power. So, as a ‘pet’, the gerbil has no ultimate control over the contours of its lifeworld. Instead these are provided by an apparently omnipotent superior agency claiming to be well-meaning but serving its own interest … Remind you of anything?
    Footnoting the artist’s marvellous Underdog,2 this exemplary and humble bookwork straddles and references conceptual art and popular culture with more biting political pertinence than Douglas Adams’ middle class dressing-gowned slacker tourist3 ever dreamt. Beautiful. Go gerbil!
     
    Notes
     
    1. The gerbil gets a second bite at the cherry throughout July when the exhibit resumes at the Waygood Gallery, High Bridge Street, Newcastle.
    2. a 1999 video installation remake, with Sam Hooper soundtrack, of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s classic surrealist film Un Chien Andalou.
    3. in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
     
    www.variant.org.uk
     
    www.freedompress.org.uk
     
    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

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