Film Review

The Discreet Karma of the Bourgeoisie. Short review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 5, March 2006.The Discreet Karma of the Bourgeoisie by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 5, March 2006]
 
 
Hidden, dir. Michael Haneke [orig. Caché; in French with English subtitles]
 
This unsettling masterpiece continues Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke’s merciless dissection of middle-class complacent complicity. An implacable domestic thriller, Hidden exploits contemporary paranoia around video surveillance, with tapes of their stylish Paris home delivered to the Laurents – highbrow TV presenter Georges (Daniel Auteuil), publisher Anne (Juliette Binoche) and their twelve year-old son Pierrot. The affluent intellectual couple’s relationship unravels as they wrestle with memory, guilt and denial once the anonymous ‘stalker’ also shoots Georges’ childhood home and a grubby high-rise flat. The latter is the present address of Majid, who was banished to an orphanage by Georges’ parents after his own (their domestic servants) were among hundreds of Algerian immigrant protestors killed by Parisian police in the ‘Black Night’ of 17th October 1961. In exploring how individual biography and social hierarchy dovetail in producing history, the film provocatively punctures the self-serving vanity of Western liberal superiority.
The manipulation accomplished by its meticulous structure exploits the encroachment of media simulation on our understanding of reality – with the efforts of the Laurents to conceal from themselves and each other the centrality in their lives of their various evasions, hypocrisies and duplicities paralleling the audience’s puzzlement. The static high-definition video photography blurs boundaries between different levels of representation – natural footage and staged action; external event and replay; internal experience of dreams, fantasies and flashbacks – with similar symbolic codes mobilised in visual design, perspective and editing. Being unsure of the status or significance of what they/we see fuels feverish imagination, failing communication and tragically escalating misunderstanding.
 
Compared with, say, Hitchcock’s reactionary conservatism or Lynch’s mystical fetishism, Haneke’s forcefully innovative cinematic sadism is more expansive and forward-looking. If the clinical deconstructions of miserable bourgeois inadequacy in his earlier films indulged neurotic obsession, here the integrity of younger generations refuses the parent society’s dishonesty. The suggestiveness of Georges’ infantile envy and resentment wrecking Majid’s life may seem an unsatisfactorily heavy-handed allegory for differential power and the class and race hatred still fundamental to mainstream Western society. However, emotional and cognitive patterns conducive to domination are nurtured early in the egos and cultures of the respectable middle-classes – operating precisely through misrecognition, displacement, denial and projection overlain with rationalisation and aestheticisation. Whereas the children’s rebellion (signposted throughout, and with their collusion explicit in the end-credits) shatters smug pretensions via direct solidaristic engagement – but decidedly not when Hidden by higher tastes and dissembling moral dispositions amongst those whose comfort necessitates ignoring the social roots and ramifications of its constitution.
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Weapons-Grade Funk, by Tom Jennings. Music review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 16, August 2006
Weapons-Grade Funk  by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 16, August 2006]
 
 
MUSIC
 
Pick A Bigger Weapon, The Coup, Epitaph Records, 2006
 
The fifth album from political hip-hop act The Coup continues their evolution from underground West Coast US rabble-rousers into international recognition and acclaim. This process was helped no end when their early-2001 cover design for Party Music – a metaphor for the revolutionary destruction of capitalism featuring DJ Pam the Funktress and MC Boots Riley brandishing drumsticks and guitar tuner with the World Trade Centre exploding in the background – was hastily withdrawn by their record label after 9/11. The resulting publicity gave Boots an unanticipated mainstream media platform to air the insurrectionary class-struggle views familiar from the lyrics of Kill My Landlord (1993), Genocide and Juice (1994) and Steal This Album (1998) – conveyed, as in the new release, via pithy, witty tales of woe, frustration, anger, humour and hope in everyday life on the mean streets of Oakland.
The group’s progression is further audible in the album’s synthesis of 1970s soulful funkadelia and the whole sophisticated gamut of hip-hop referentiality – so that Pam’s stellar turntablism and Boots’ accomplished delivery reach another level in the instrumental company of sundry Parliament, Gap Band, and Frankie Beverly & Maze-era veterans along with Silk-E’s beautifully-pitched R&B vocals. Whereas if The Coup’s compelling beats ever more satisfyingly integrate the strengths of their musical antecedents with present demands, the same cannot be said of political prospects from their, and our, perspective. The injunction to Pick A Bigger Weapon refers to the failure of our tactics thus far, and the contents reiterate the grass-roots grounds of any worthwhile future movement.
 
Preceding his music career, Riley spent four years on the central committee of a Leninist group before realising the arrogant sectarian irrelevance of such forms of organisation. Since then he’s emphasised the potential of the lower classes to overcome their situation – which art has the capacity to engage with, share in, crystallise and facilitate rather than summon up or dictate. Avoiding the superior preaching disappointingly prevalent among many prominent ‘raptivists’, he twists ghettocentric narratives to signal what becomes possible when individuals interpret their lives in terms of collective understanding and action. So the street hustler’s soul-searching in ‘We Are The Ones’, drudge work subversion of ‘Ass-Breath Killers’, celebration of shoplifting in ‘I Love Boosters’, and social/sexual yearning of ‘Ijuswannalayarounalldayinbedwithyou’ and ‘BabyLet’sHaveABabyBeforeBushDoSomethingCrazy’ all acknowledge the painful intransigence of daily struggles. Meanwhile the rebellious class pride and explicitly political themes of other tracks on Pick A Bigger Weapon focus precisely on the centrality in any genuinely liberatory impulses of such acknowledgement from experience – a poetic balance encapsulated in the opening metaphor of the Intro: “I’m a walking contradiction / Like bullets and love mixin’.”
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

The Art of Brill O’Pads, by Tom Jennings. Art review published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 66, No. 5, February 2005.
The Art of Brill O’Pads  by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 66, No. 5, February 2005]
 
 
ART 
Bob & Roberta Smith’s Help Build the Ruins of Democracy (Baltic, Gateshead, November 2004 – April 2005) surrounds a copse of birch trees adorned in sketchpad pages with jumbled banners, plaques and furniture. ‘Degraded’ materials, found objects and amateurish typefaces refuse conventions of beauty or the sublime, and the personal identity of Patrick Brill is effaced by the multiply-gendered open-ended fictional Smiths – an identity supporters are encouraged to inhabit like a “cultural virus”* spreading worldwide.
Various conceptual art strategies mobilise DIY aesthetics into creative expression as part of everyday life rather than the preserve of elites and genuises, and viewers add their sketches and sayings to the artist’s own texts. The latter – cast in cement or painted on plywood lining walls and sofas – combine the absurd and irrational with bile towards New Labour, the media, celebrities and art heroes. Alongside, a video replays a performance event staged in the parliament of Bremen, Germany, with actresses improvising histrionic debate among Jesus Christ, Mozart, Jacques Tati, Churchill, etc. All of this is mildly amusing, while Eileen – a new commission – clads a shed’s exterior with concretised fragments of a North of Ireland biography beset by communal cleavage, false ethnicity and “the stupidity of prejudice”.
 
Unfortunately, history is reduced throughout to mere accumulations of individual attitudes and attributes. The satirical offensiveness and Little England eccentricity therefore resolve the fascination with fame and leadership (in both politics and art) into timid liberal whingeing about today’s “flaws in democracy” – guaranteeing the artist safe passage into globetrotting art stardom and lecturing at fashionable Goldsmiths. No more profound than public opinion surveys sampling the momentary whims of passive publics, the “participation” of viewers amounts to a few hastily-scribbled cartoons and slogans chosen by gallery staff (using criteria of political correctness) – but if punters attempt to remove any they are frogmarched out. Brill will then cannibalise the archive of used and unused contributions for future projects – mirroring his recuperation of utopian Dada, Lettrism and Fluxus desires. Touted as ‘oppositional’ – even “anarchic” – this whole sordid deception is lent populist gloss with mantras like Make Your Own Damn Art (book accompanying the exhibition) and “Create Your Own Reality”. Ultimately, Bob & Roberta Smith practise neither –  instead inoculating a largely contemptuous contemporary art scene against the “catalyst for change” that radical artists hope their germs will mutate into.
 
*quotes from exhibition blurb and catalogue.
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

The Empire’s New Clothes, by Tom Jennings. Review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 5, March 2006.

The Empire’s New Clothes by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 5, March 2006]
 
 
Hollywood’s New Radicalism, by Ben Dickenson (published by I.B. Tauris, January 2006)
 
 
Hollywood’s New Radicalism is a fascinating account of attempts to subvert the film industry from within, according to Tom Jennings
 
The old-fashioned vertically-integrated movie business, where studio moguls reigned supreme and rigidly controlled all aspects of film production, broke down in the 1960s in the face of the commercial deregulation and restructuring needed to cater to changing cultural and technological landscapes and patterns of consumption. Those inspired by the countercultural and grass-roots energy of the era took advantage, extending the range of material reaching the public in films that were profoundly innovative, politically challenging and often extremely popular. Hollywood’s New Radicalism intelligently documents the subsequent interplay of commercial agendas and American political retrenchment, focusing on the efforts of liberals and leftists involved in film production to reflect their social awareness in their work – eventually culminating in today’s explicitly political mainstream cinema.
Sixties directors harnessed avant-garde art and European film styles and  philosophies, taking advantage of the liberal atmosphere to realise freedom of cinematic expression, and their appeal to newly-affluent rebellious youth audiences massively expanded the cultural production sector. Impressive box-office business attracted venture capital throughout the 1970s, which rationalised the industry’s chaotic structure and narrowed content to the most predictably profitable. Previously buccaneering individualist outsiders were absorbed into Hollywood by the 1980s when the enterprise revolution tightened corporate grips and abandoned social commitments. Aristocrats like Oliver Stone screamed betrayal, but younger, more pragmatic independents continued exploring narrative and style on the margins. Many signed with newly consolidating 1990s studios – themselves desperately seeking niche markets – only to encounter the triple whammy of Clinton’s duplicity, Seattle’s protest revival, and the Old Testament logic of 9/11 and its aftermath.
 
The discomfort of film industry professionals concerning the inability to articulate progressive political change is best conceived in terms of the general disillusionment among the middle classes with social democracy, given their failure to predict or comprehend the unravelling liberal consensus. 1980s and 90s neo-noir, postmodern and ‘slacker’ stories then symbolise thoroughgoing refusals of traditional fallacies (not paranoid detachment or self-indulgence as Dickenson seems to assume) by those growing up without the benefits of 1960s naiveté, making possible new forms of collective mobilisation such as anti-globalization. However, the current Hollywood activism is unfortunately translated onto the screen using largely retrograde narrative conventions, without the stylistic and technical experimentation previously employed to reflect underlying malaises in Western society. The most obvious symptoms of war and  corporate excess are thus mistaken for ultimate causes – whereas, ironically, the deeper colonisation of intimate life by the instrumental logic of commodification has Hollywood at its vanguard.
The book’s argument that commercial studio pressures are decisive constraints on the degree of social consciousness allowed into films makes intuitive sense. However, the implication that suitably nimble strategies among liberal filmmakers guarantees progressive content does justice neither to contemporary political circumstances – where the intentions and interests of the intelligentsia are so widely, thoroughly and understandably distrusted – nor to a media culture in which superficial appearance is seductively fetishised to mask the depressing difficulties of real life. It also downplays independent cinema’s diverse and troubled ambivalence. 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 latter’s rich social dynamic is often simultaneously homogenised into frozen victimised masses thawed by individual heroics.
Therefore judgements of films like Cradle Will Rock (1999), Erin Brockovitch (2000), or Dogville (2003) as ‘radical’ is highly problematic given their respective nostalgia for elite ‘proletarian art’ when ‘people knew their place’; sanctimonious self-marketing by the diligently aspirational underclass; and patronising contempt for resentful victims of history struggling to maintain humanity. Conversely, Bulworth (1998) transcends charges of cynical fatalism with its respect for ghetto philosophy and disavowal of hope in professional careerism; and Fight Club (1999) is dismissed as reactionary nihilism despite demystifying middle class ‘consumer politics’ – specifically the fascistic appeal of cult violence viscerally countering the sterile slow death offered by corporate and therapeutic lifestyles. In short, political implications surely depend on the responses and subsequent actions of viewers, not simplistic readings of film narratives as realist manifestoes or their makers’ complacencies as gospel.
 
Hollywood’s New Radicalism is certainly justified in identifying a fresh wave of liberal content – as last year’s I Heart Huckabees, Crash, Lord of War and The Constant Gardener show, and to which a slew of forthcoming films will further testify. The resurgence of cinema documentary also shows the dissatisfaction of sizeable audiences with both blockbuster entertainment and corresponding current affairs spin. But while 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 screen, merely updating clichéd cinematic formulae reproduces traditional resolutions revolving around heroes and leaders. As Dickenson emphasizes, prominent figures like Tim Robbins and Sean Penn belatedly realised that mainstream party politics is constitutionally incapable of keeping progressive promises. But then many moviegoers saw through that façade years ago, yet elections are still won by media stars (e.g. Governors Schwarznegger of California and Jesse Ventura of Minnesota) and presidential circuses still distract activists.
Hollywood liberals now initiate and support grass-roots campaigns rather than just cosying up to Democrat stooges. But, as the Live 8 debacle again proved, any ‘anticapitalism’ advocating stronger states, fairer trade and global institutional charity scarcely dents the status quo. Neither will we hold our breaths waiting for serious revolutionary politics from such a notoriously dictatorial and capricious system as the cinema, whose ‘talent’ cherish charisma over depth or substance. Nonetheless, its global output seeps into billions of psyches, spectacularising the obsessions and fantasies of the powerful. Along with this book’s clarity in dissecting the recent history of the entertainment sector, it is most useful for understanding how the more well-meaning creative denizens of tinseltown wrestle with their consciences in Hollywood’s new recuperation. Complementary analysis of how their efforts influence the lives of viewers can then illuminate cultural industry strategies for profiting from 21st century dissent, along with suggesting tactics for resistance for ordinary producers of cultural meaning (on screen and off) which do not depend on enlightenment courtesy of the stars in their firmament.
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Slam Dunk Funk Sunk by Clunky Punk Junk, by Tom Jennings. Music review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 13, July 2005
Slam Dunk Funk Sunk by Clunky Punk Junk  by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 13, July 2005]
 
 
MUSIC 
Saul Williams, The Fader Label, 2005
 
Saul Williams fails to translate potent political polemics into poetic musical magic for Tom Jennings’ ears 
Performance poet Saul Williams first came to prominence (rather than just being supreme Nuyorican Grand Slam Champion) thanks to the superb cinematic showcase, Slam (dir. Marc Levin, 1998), portraying a low level soft drugs dealer honing his rapping skills and ambitions in prison before trouncing his trendy peers in an arts café spoken word competition. Since then he has solidified his rep as a premier exponent of oral street literacy, including providing the name, theme song (with Coldcut & DJ Spooky) and publicity text, ‘Pledge of Resistance’, for the anti-war Not In My Name coalition:1
“America is at war, not only with Iraq but with itself. Many Americans are slowly beginning to realize that the norms of American comfort come at the cost of foreign discomfort. Our leaders have always known this. Yet, we have not always truly known our leaders. Thus, now, we are led astray. Our current regime is see-through. They aim to manipulate the world for their own personal gain. As an American of an antebellum bloodline I recognize colonial imperialism under any name and refuse to allow the goals of our leaders to be perpetuated in my name. George Bush is not president of me. He is not representative of my beliefs. He claims no earned authority over the American people. Those who follow his command are misguided. They are many, yet outnumbered. I stand on the side of humanity, marching in the streets of Cairo, London, Paris, Mexico City, NY, Los Angeles, screaming these songs for the world to hear.”2
 
The eponymously titled Saul Williams (The Fader Label) is his second foray into mainstream music releases (after Amethyst Rock Star, 2001 – co-produced by rap-rock veteran Rick Rubin). His searing, excoriating and exhilarating vocals are set to heavy guitar-based quasi-rock beats  which he ambitiously describes as industrial punk-hop – evoking techno and electro, Public Enemy’s cacophonous Bomb Squad production, and sundry descendants of punk ethics: “the tracks range from politics to relationships and the politics of relationships. What I ended up with was something that captured the authoritative cool of hip-hop, the playful angst of rock and roll, the raw emotional torment of emo … and the fuck offness of punk.”2
The lyrics themselves are outstanding and often inspired, especially when nailing the laziness, foolishness, complacencies or darker hidden downsides of everyday clichés and common sense and the dishonest malice of politicians. There is humour aplenty, too, as in the intro to ‘List Of Demands’ riffing on the pretensions of gangsta hip-pop: ‘Saul Williams DID NOT almost die, get shot, beat up, stand trial for murder, but he does have babies by two different women if that counts. Say word.’ However, the percussion and rock focus bring to mind the relative slickness as well as the political sensibility of Rage Against the Machine (with whom Williams worked closely on ‘Not In My Name’) – as well as the punk influence, with more ragged rough and ready slashing guitars echoing 1980s New York pioneers Henry Rollins, Black Flag, and Bad Brains.3
And there’s the rub (but minus the dub). The rhythmic qualities of poetry as literature (with a big ‘L’) are intrinsically tied into the conjunctions of syllable, word, line and stanza; whereas in oral traditions co-rooted in music it is necessary to dissolve ego to some pragmatic extent in the beating of hearts or drums, for example, and in the generally interacting vibrations of audiences. This he seems unwilling or unable to contemplate, instead preferring to thrash his fantastic lyrics to death-by-metal:
“I did most of the music myself. The cool thing about recording before there was an actual deal in place was the fact that most songs simply started as experiments done in my free time with absolutely no pressure to anyone. I was the only one whose head nod determined the fate of a song. Oh, and, of course, your’s too …” (www.contactmusic.com).
 
Hmm … dead giveaway, that tagged-on acknowledgement of the listener’s existence … Furthermore, while I’ve yet to snag any new versions, Newcastle upon Tyne beatmakers extraordinaire DC Joseph deployed an artfully offbeat snare kick in their slow funky house remix of ‘Amethyst Rocks’ (from the previous album) in a valiant attempt to accommodate Williams’ rhythmically errant diction. But even this couldn’t disguise his refusal to meet the demands of music halfway. And I don’t think it’s just a technical problem of marrying divergent literary traditions. After all, our own dub poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah never have such trouble – and neither do American  spoken wordsmiths such as Sarah Jones, Ursula Rucker or Dana Bryant.
Perhaps things are different in the Big Apple, where the freaky cliquey fashionable arts scene has long specialised in co-opting street expression into high-concept commodities. But these days the only obvious reason to dredge up a rock sensibility is the commercial pressure to sell to middle class white kids, who tolerate developments in Black culture only when accompanied by posing shrieking angst.4 Otherwise, the younger mixed urban generations in particular are quite capable of appreciating the real thing, thank you very much – whoever it’s produced by. Next up, check out the website hype (at www.saulwilliams.com):
“In an age where boundless leaps are being made in communication, Saul Williams is evolutionary proof that age old concepts can be fused with new age precepts and expressed with mind opening precision. Never before has the power of word and our ability to dictate our reality been expressed so clearly and creatively, at once. Saul’s poetry represents an evolution of thought, artistry and spiritual consciousness delivered with the lyrical fervor of hip hop and the grace and linguistic mastery of Shakespeare. Saul channels the voice of the New Age, yet allows a wide ranging stream of consciousness to distort the melody like some sort of lyrical Hendrix.”
Exactly. Sounds a little on the hippy-dippy tip, don’t it? … Saul, I’m not saying you’re (musico-culturally) extinct; but you’re definitely late.
 
Notes
 
1. which included luminary liberal celebrity signatories such as Ossie Davis, Susan Sarandon, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, Sean Penn and Kurt Vonnegut. Saul Williams has also recorded on Lyricist Lounge compilations; toured with Blackalicious, Cursive and The Mars Volta; co-starred in the Kevin Spacey vehicle K-Pax; has a current broadway show; and plans to perform ‘Said The Shotgun To The Head’ with the Basel Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland.
2. see (www.artistsnetwork.org)
3. Thanks to Kev Anderson for setting me straight there.
4. recent examples being Jay-Z & Linkin Park, and Limp Bizkit & Wu-Tang Clan; or, back in the day, Ice-T’s Body Count, Run-DMC’s work with Rick Rubin, and countless Public Enemy and Cypress Hill collabos. For greater blues-rock-rap profundity, see Mos Def’s Black Jack Johnson project (on The New Danger, 2004) or the Nas & Olu Dara father and son reunion in ‘Bridging the Gap’ (on Street’s Disciple, 2004).
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Exchanged and Marked, by Tom Jennings. Book review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 3, February 2006
Exchanged and Marked  by Tom Jennings  [published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 3, February 2006]  
BOOKS 
Class, Self, Culture, by Beverley Skeggs, Routledge, 2004, price £21.99
 
This thought-provoking book examines the historical development of representations of the working-class, and the contemporary variations on age-old themes that currently beset us. Although dense and theory-based for sociology and cultural studies audiences, it crystallises many concepts of considerable interest to anarchists while decisively arguing for the central organising roles of the middle- and working-classes in Western societies – despite the great and the good (as well as many radicals) somehow believing that class has become irrelevant while poverty and destitution spiral. Crucially, identity politics and the privileging of oppressions are thoroughly trashed by an author demonstrating throughout how prejudicial characterisations and definitions of the working-classes have always overlapped and traded those based on race, gender and sexuality – though without (spurious) biological essence lurking behind the difference.
And, rather than focusing as marxists would on the ‘objective’ struggle between ‘capital’ and ‘labour’, attention is shifted to how the fields of language and ideas shape lives and determine history. But this is no bourgeois idealism, because these fields are simultaneously produced by and make possible both the deployment of money and material resources, and the government of bodies. The latter is achieved via what modern social theory variously terms the ‘symbolic economy’ or ‘order of discourse’. So systems of naming, classification and evaluation are physically made material in sets of ‘facts’ and prescriptions based on their truth and legitimacy, translated into disciplines guiding action in the world and institutions exerting power. The state, as well as what counts as the ‘economic’, co-determine and co-constitute each other’s effects – and to critique one and excuse the other would be fatal.
However, for several centuries the effort to persuade people to govern themselves rather than using force has trickled down the social hierarchy. Neoliberal globalisation recasts definitions of who counts as a valuable citizen – in brief a separate individual who ‘rationally’ calculates and exploits personal characteristics and abilities in an objectively neutral and increasingly informational market. And those failing to so define themselves and act accordingly are conceived of as moral, social and political problems to be devalued, punished, and kept regimented in place with more precarious lives. Working class people, of course, are especially likely to be unwilling and/or unable to be as obligingly mobile and flexible as employers and governments demand, given our different cultural values and social dispositions – not to mention the small matter of being systematically denied the resources and opportunity to cultivate the requisite social, aesthetic and knowledge distinctions so jealously guarded by the middle-classes. And we’re supposed to ‘respect’ them? I think not – and neither, in this respect, does Skeggs.
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Clarifying the Muddle East, by Tom Jennings. Short review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 13, July 2006.Clarifying the Muddle East by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 13, July 2006]
 
 
Paradise Now, dir. Hany Abu-Assad
 
This outstanding film fictionalises preparations for a Tel Aviv suicide bombing by young Palestinians Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) from the West Bank – happy-go-lucky car mechanics metamorphosing into deadly serious terror protagonists. Viewer expectations and sympathies are juggled by deploying thriller, comedy, romance and rites of passage narrative conventions – within an overall arc of tragic realism – rendering intelligible the context, conditions and complications accompanying this act of extreme violence. Writers Hany Abu-Assad and Bero Beyer effectively detail the humiliations and hopelessness of everyday life in the colonised territories under Israeli military stranglehold – its victims’ experience blending with their social and cultural history in trying to make sense of an unbearable existence, responding with a complex range of political and personal orientations.
                An Israeli/European co-production, Paradise Now’s perilous filming in Nablus included the kidnapping of one crew member and the subsequent flight of others, near-miss mortar and missile attacks, and baleful suspicion from both the IDF and local militias. Thereafter completed in the director’s home-town of Nazareth, the traces of conflict in the final cut are far more restrained – subtle indications of the absurdities inherent in maintaining community routines in a ruined war zone being preferred to grandstand posturing. Abu-Assad’s previous features heightened tragicomedy to salute ordinary Palestinians’ courage and persistence. Here it highlights ambivalence in attitudes and preoccupations – for example puncturing the fundamentalist austerity of the martyr video ritual with references to water filters (West Bank water being, in effect, Israeli sewage), malfunctioning cameras and the noisy snacking of bored onlookers.
 
Nevertheless, though the fateful mission is finally accomplished despite all the poignant doubts expressed, an inspired move was having  Said’s tentative love interest Suha (Lubna Azabal) – the daughter of a militant hero returning from exile – articulate the hopes for peace, negotiation and co-existence held by many in the ‘West’ (including the film-makers). But after so many broken promises of justice and democracy from privileged outsiders, elements of Islamic fervour do furnish a faltering rationale for atrocity in the brutal isolation of the present; whereas Muslim customs simultaneously facilitate a semblance of dignity amid daily degradation. Even so, more secular personal and collective pursuits of agency and meaning – not to mention various vested interests for control of what little remains – clearly hold sway. After all, as one of the planners shrugs, “If we had airplanes, we wouldn’t need martyrs”.
Abu-Assad knows that “the system of capitalism … [offers] no solution for the differences between rich and poor”, instead inventing enemies “in order to keep authority, to keep power, and hope that some miracle will happen”.* In tackling its highly-charged themes so effectively, Paradise Now itself represents something of a minor miracle – especially compared with other recent efforts at Middle-East illumination (e.g. Syriana’s patronising parapolitics or Spielberg’s odious Munich**). If his next film – about a Palestinian taxi-driver in L.A. – can successfully bring the same sensibility to bear on contemporary America, it should be well-worth looking out for.
 
* quoted in: B. Ruby Rich, ‘Bomb Culture’, Sight & Sound, April 2006, pp.28-30.
** As’ad Abu-Khalil’s comprehensive demolition of the latter is at: http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2005/12/spielberg-on-munich-humanization-of.html.
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

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

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

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