Film Review

This is a list of how we operate. Its useful reading for all volunteers.Operating Schedule for The Star and Shadow Cinema

1. Nature of venue:

1.1 The Star and Shadow Cinema (hereafter referred to as “The Premises”) is an 80-seat cinema with a café/bar social space, offices and vestibule.

1.2 The Premises is planned to run as a membership venue. This membership is not part of the license but is instigated in a social capacity. It is also as a way to raise revenue and will help as a security measure as numbers on Premises can be regulated. Unless we change our plans, membership will be compulsory for all patrons. We will not change these plans without consultation with the Licensing Authority. Membership will be available at a minimal cost and our policy is not to turn away visitors for lack of funds. In such cases membership fees may be waived although membership rules will still hold. The membership rules explain the nature of the Premises and ask members to respect and support these. The Premises is a small venture run as a benefit to a broad community and to promote cultural activities beyond the mainstream. As such, our membership is open to all and will only be restricted if allowing membership would constitute a breach of the licensing objectives and general safety.

1.3 The Premises is run as a Community Interest Company and staffed entirely by volunteers. This allows for as little hierarchy in our structure as possible and to be open to new volunteers at any point. It also allows our costs to be much less in running the venue. All volunteers are members of the company and can be part of decision making on issues at meetings. All volunteers working in a public capacity will be trained to the standards laid out in the Operating Schedule and any risk assessment or other health and safety documents.

1.4 Our clientele will vary depending on our programme, but the majority will be sympathetic to our position as a socially conscious, volunteer-run space promoting local, ethical and fair trading policies as far as possible and an open policy with our programming.

2. Opening Hours

2.1 Standard public opening hours during which film screenings or other licensable entertainment may be take place:
10am-12am Sun-Thurs
10am-1am Fri- Sat

2.2 Hours during which alcohol may be sold:
3pm-11pm Mon-Thurs
3pm-12am Fri
12pm-12am Sat
12pm-11pm Sun

2.3 Our closing times are in line with The Tanners public house opposite.

2.4 Last entry will be at the end of serving time.

2.5 The hour after last orders allows for winding down the evening slowly and for staggered leaving.

2.6 Special hours:
We will make ACPO applications for special hours opening to the police 14 days in advance of any such events, up to 12 times per year as agreed by the Licensing Authority.

2.7 Due to the nature of the Premises its is possible that the Premises will not be open all the times stated as opening depends on programmed events, staff availability and audience interest.

2.8 Staff have 24-hour access to the building

2.9 A conspicuous notice will be displayed on or immediately outside the Premises adjacent to the entrance to the Premises that gives details of the times when the Premises are permitted to be open for any licensable activity.

3 Smoking

3.1 Smoking will be allowed in all areas of the building aside from the auditorium until such time as the law changes on smoking in public venues. We may choose to restrict smoking in certain areas.

3.2 When children under 16 are present we will make every effort to ensure they are not affected by smoking. 

4 Screenings of films

4.1 There is one fixed screen at the cinema in the auditorium. From time to time we will screen films more informally in the café.

4.2 Most screenings will be in the evenings though we may also show films during the day within our opening hours and occasional ‘midnight movies’ when we have late openings.

4.3 The nature of the films shown at the Premises means that not all of them are certificated. (see 26)

5 Music and dancing

5.1 The Social area will have background music during opening hours. A license for playing copyrighted material will also be in place if such music is played.

5.2 On evenings where there are no films and after films we may employ a DJ to play music.

5.3 There is a provision for dancing in the social space and in the auditorium.

5.4 Live music events will take place in the auditorium or in the social space. Both spaces are soundproofed.

6. Sale of Alcohol

6.1 We will use ‘meter measuring equipment’ for the sale of spirits.

6.2 No patrons shall be allowed to leave the Premises whilst in the possession of any drinking vessel or open glass bottle, whether empty or containing beverage. (This condition shall not apply to patrons who have purchased beverages for consumption off the Premises (within the curtilage of the Premises licensed area) with the express consent of the Licensee, DPS or responsible person).

6.3 Alcoholic drinks shall only be sold for consumption off the Premises as closed bottles.

6.4 All members of staff at the Premises shall seek credible photographic proof of age evidence from any person who appears to be under the age of 18 years and who is seeking to purchase or consume alcohol on the Premises. Such credible evidence, which shall include a photograph of the customer, will either be a passport, photographic driving license or proof of age card carrying the PASS logo.

6.5 A suitably worded sign of sufficient size and clarity will be displayed at the point of entry to the Premises and in a suitable location at any points of sale, advising customers that they may be asked to produce evidence of their age.

6.6 The licensee shall not advertise, promote, sell or supply alcoholic drinks in such a way that is intended of likely to encourage persons to consume alcohol to an excessive extent.

6.7 Any reduced price offers will be in conjunction with other activities, such as a ‘Friends’ membership scheme entitling patrons to a complimentary drink at the bar; special events may include a complimentary drink with the price of entrance. Short dated drinks may be sold at a slightly reduced price in order to prevent waste. Any special offers will be in place for whole days.

6.8 The licensee shall not sell or supply alcoholic drinks in such a way which will enable, or which is intended to enable, persons to consume unlimited quantities of alcoholic drinks on payment of a single payment or a payment arrangement which is not related to the quantity or volume of alcoholic drinks supplied.

7. Late Night Refreshment

7.1 Within our opening hours we will make available for sale hot drinks.

7.2 If plans are introduced to serve hot food, we may make this available within our opening hours.

8.Capacity:

8.1 The maximum number of persons permitted on the Premises at any one time shall not exceed that recommended by the relevant authority

8.2 As all patrons will be members, entrance will include becoming a member or showing a membership card to a trained staff member. Numbers of patrons will therefore be counted in and out of the Premises. This will allow the license holder, Designated Premises Supervisor (DPS) or manager for that day to be aware of the number of people on the Premises at any time, and to provide this information to any authorised person on request.

8.3 Membership and ticketing ensures the auditorium will not go beyond capacity. The social space will also be maintained through membership entrance. On occasions where we may reach capacity the DPS or manager for the evening will support the member of staff on the door to ensure capacity is not breached.

8.4 The maximum number of persons permitted on the licensed Premises, or relevant parts of the Premises, shall be indicated by a fixed notice bearing the words “Maximum Occupancy” with letters and numbers not less than 20mm high conspicuously sited (at each relevant part of the Premises and) at the reception point to the Premises.

9. Private hire

9.1 We will make the Premises available for private hire.

9.2 Private hire will not entail the visitors becoming members

9.3 In all other respects, private hire events will be staffed and run in accordance with the Operating Schedule.

9.4 In the case of a private hire, capacity will be a part of the hire agreement. Staff will be instructed to ensure capacity is not breached.

10. Seating

10.1 Seating shall be provided for all cinema patrons in the cinema. Seating will usually be available in the café as standard but will be available on request at all times the Premises are open for licensable activity.

10.2 A copy of the seating plan will be available at the Premises to be shown to any authorised person on request.
 
10.3 All staff will be trained in the safe use of the auditorium which includes the following rules:
(i)No article must be attached to the back of any seat which would reduce the clear width of seatways or cause a tripping hazard or obstruction.
(ii) Sitting on floors is not permitted except in front of the first row of seats and by the attendants when a chair would obstruct a fire exit.
(iii) In no circumstances will anyone (except for a single attendant as above) be permitted to –
(a) sit in any gangway;
(b) stand or sit in front of any exit; or
(c) stand or sit on any staircase including any landings.
(iv) Any drinks sold to be consumed in the auditorium will not be supplied in glass containers.

10.4 A copy of any certificate relating to the design, construction and loading of any temporary seating will be kept available at the Premises and shown to any authorised person on request.

11 Toilet facilities

11.1 The provision for toilets in the Premises is beyond the minimum recommendation of the licensing policy. There are 5 WCs and 2 washbasins for females; 3 WCs, 2 urinals and 2 washbasins for males; 1 disabled access WC with 1 washbasin (unisex); 1 WC and 1 washbasin for staff.

12 Disability access

12.1 The Premises has been designed to ensure access is not restricted due to disability. This includes the auditorium, entrance and exits to the Premises, the fire plan and the toilet facilities. We will always support the broadest range of audience accessing our activities.

13 Staffing:

13.1 The Licensee shall ensure that at all times when the Premises is open for any licensable activity there are sufficient competent staff on duty at the Premises for the purpose of fulfilling the terms and conditions of the License for promoting the Licensing Objectives.

13.2 Minimum staff requirements are:

Film screening or other event in cinema:
3 (1 door/membership, 1 usher/bar, 1 projectionist/bar).

This is in line with the Licensing Statement. As such, the usher will not be engaged in any other duties that would hinder the prompt discharge of their duties in the event of an emergency or entail their absence from the auditorium when on duty for the duration of the screening and until all patrons have left the auditorium. Attendants will be readily identifiable to the audience although they may not be wearing a uniform.

Evening Café/bar event only:
2 members of staff (door/membership, bar)

Day café only
1 member of staff to cover membership and bar

13.3 Each of the above cases represents the minimum number of staff. Many screenings and events will attract very small audiences and this number of staff would be sufficient. In the case of events which are expected to be busy or reach capacity we will aim to have more staff available.

13.3 There shall be phone points available in the café and the projection booth for emergency purposes.

13.4 Staffing will be managed by the DPS along with other volunteers that run the Operations team, ensuring that there are enough staff available for each event. The Operations team is a group of volunteers that meet regularly to plan the staffing of the cinema and training of staff.

13.5 The DPS is Ilana Mitchell, who has good management and bar skills.

13.6 Due to the nature of the Premises as a volunteer project we are likely to have a reasonably large pool of staff, some of whom will not work very often. All volunteers will be trained either by the DPS or by Jo Burke (volunteer and personal license holder) or by a regular volunteer who has been trained by one of the personal license holders or any other volunteers that become personal license holders. The training will include the rules set out in this operating schedule. All volunteers will sign a form to say they have been trained. A separate training for volunteer projectionists will also be in operation.

14 Public Safety

14.1 All staff will be trained in security and public safety. Routine safety checks will be carried out before the admission of the public, details of which will be kept in a logbook. The safety checks and training will correspond with the risk assessment and the conditions of the license.

14.2 When disabled people are present, adequate arrangements will be in place to enable their safe evacuation in the event of an emergency. All staff will be trained to be aware of disabilities and react according to a pre-determined plan. This will include making disabled people on the Premises aware of the arrangements in place to enable their safe evacuation in the event of an emergency.

14.3 All escape routes and exists will be kept unobstructed in good order with nonslippery and even surfaces free of trip hazards and clearly identified.

14.4 All exit doors, whenever the premise are occupied, will be easily openable in the case of an emergency without the use of a key card, code or similar means.

14.5 All exit doors will be regularly checked to ensure that they function satisfactorily and a record of the check kept.

14.6 Any removable security fastenings will be removed whenever the Premises are open to the public or occupied by staff.

14.7 All fire doors will be maintained effectively self-closing and will not be held open other than by the approved devices.

14.8 Fire resisting doors to ducts, service shafts, and cupboards will be kept locked shut to prevent unauthorised access and preserve integrity.

14.9 The edge of the treads of steps or stairways will be maintained and conspicuous.

14.10 Drinking water (e.g. tap water) shall be available or served to patrons in sufficient quantities at all times when patrons are present on the Premises.

15 Fire Alarm and evacuation

15.1 The fire alarm on the Premises has been designed to and installed in accordance with British Standard 5838 current edition by ADT and will be maintained by them regularly as required.

15.2 Fire fighting equipment: the premise holds fire extinguishers and other fire fighting equipment in line with recommendations from the relevant authority. All staff will be trained in their use and in the evacuation procedure in the event of a fire alarm.

15.3 Notices detailing the actions to be taken in the event of fire or other emergency, including how to summon the fire brigade, will be prominently displayed and protected from damage and deterioration.

15.4 The responsible person where there is an outbreak of fire, however slight, will raise the alarm, evacuate the building, and call the fire brigade. Following the incident, the responsible person will ensure that the details are recorded in a Fire Log Book. Any remedial work necessary to restore fire precautions to their original standard will be completed with systems fully functional prior to re-admittance of the public.

15.5 The responsible person will notify the Licensing Authority as soon as possible if the water supply to any hydrant, hose-reel, sprinkler, drencher or other fire extinguishing installation is cut off or restricted.

15.6 Access to the Premises for emergency vehicles will be kept clear and free from obstruction.

16 Fire Prevention

16.1 Upholstered seating will meet, on a continual basis, the pass criteria for smoldering ignition source 0, flaming ignition source 1 and crib ignition source 5 when tested in accordance with section 5 of BS 5852:1990 or equivalent standard.

16.2 All hangings, curtains and temporary decorations will be maintained in a flame retardant condition.

16.3 All hangings, curtains and temporary decorations will be arranged so as not to obstruct exits, fire safety signs or fire fighting equipment

16.4 Prior advice will be sought from the Licensing Authority before temporary decorations are used, and the risk assessment amended accordingly.

16.5 As the Premises is a cinema and film production resource, flammable film will be kept on the Premises. All film will be kept within the designated areas for film storage when not in use. No other flammable films will be allowed on the Premises without the prior notification of the licensing authority/fire authority.

17 First Aid

17.1 Adequate and appropriate equipment and materials will be provided for enabling first aid to be rendered to members of the public if they are injured or become ill whilst at the licensed Premises.

17.2 As the premise is run by volunteers, and has a small capacity, training will include the necessity to appoint a member of staff to take charge in any situation relating to an injured or ill member of the public every time the Premises are open. Steps will be taken to ensure that as many volunteers as possible are trained as first aiders but due to the nature of the Premises, it may not always be possibly to have a first aider on site.

18 Lighting and emergency lighting

18.1 As the building does not get much daylight, it is fitted with lighting in all areas accessible to the public, members or guests.

18.2 The cinema lighting has been designed to meet the purpose of the cinema and be as great as possible consistent with the effective presentation of the film, complying with the standards specified in BS CP 1007 (Maintained Lighting for Cinemas).

18.3 Fire safety signs will be adequately illuminated.

18.4 Emergency lighting has been designed in accordance with BS5266 (current edition) or an equivalent standard approved by the Licensing Authority and will not be altered without prior consent of the Licensing Authority.

18.5 The emergency lighting system will be checked to ensure it is operating correctly before the admission of the public, members or guests.

18.6 In the event of the failure of normal lighting, where the emergency lighting battery has a capacity of one hour, arrangements will be in place to ensure that the public, members or guests leave the Premises immediately. Where the emergency lighting battery has a capacity greater than one hour the public, members or guests may remain in the Premises for the duration of the system less one hour. Note: In addition an investigation into any failure of the system must be carried out to ascertain whether it is safe for persons to remain in the Premises when only the emergency lighting is operating.

18.7 The entrance to the Premises faces away from the residential areas in the vicinity and as such lighting should not cause a nuisance. Any signage or security lighting will be designed so as not to cause nuisance to neighbouring or adjoining properties.

19 Sport

19.1 No sport will take place on the Premises in a licensensable capacity.

20 Alterations

20.1 No alterations will be made to the Premises which make it impossible to comply with an existing license condition without first seeking a variation of the Premises license proposing the deletion of the condition in question. In such cases the licensee will propose a new operating schedule reflecting the proposed alteration to the Premises and will outline intended alternative steps to promote the public safety objective and amend the risk assessment accordingly.

20.2 Temporary electrical wiring and distribution systems must not be provided without notification to the licensing authority at least ten days before commencement of the work and prior inspection by a suitable qualified electrician. Premises must not be opened to the public until the work is deemed satisfactory by the above parties.

20.3 Where it is not possible to give ten days notification to the licensing authority of provision of temporary electrical wiring and distribution systems, the work must be undertaken by competent, qualified persons.

20.4 Temporary electrical wiring and distribution systems will comply with the recommendations of BS7671 or where applicable BS7909.

20.5 All temporary electrical wiring and distribution systems will be inspected and certified by a competent person before they are put to use.

21 Special effects:
21.1 Where special effects are intended for use, including:
– dry ice machines and cryogenic fog
– smoke machines and fog generators
– pyrotechnics, including fireworks
– real flame
– firearms
– motor vehicles
– strobe lighting
– lasers
– explosives and highly flammable substances
the responsible person will notify the Licensing Authority and submit a relevant risk assessment at least ten days prior to the event. In the case of any other special effects with safety implications prior notification will be given in writing to the responsible licensing authority at least 10 days before the event with details as to their use to enable the Authority to consider if further inspection by the Fire Authority is necessary. It may be required that staff trained in fire prevention and extinction be present during any such performance

21.2 Any special effects or mechanical installation will be arranged and stored to minimise any risk to the safety of the audience, the performers and staff.

21.3 All special effects will be tested before public performance in respect of audience safety and to ensure that there is sufficient ventilation and extraction to avoid activation of fire protection equipment.

PUBLIC NUISANCE

22 Sound levels

22.1 The café and the cinema auditorium are two sections of an existing brick built building inside the brick built exterior of the Premises. (see plans). The auditorium is the middle section and is soundproofed on all four walls and ceiling. The café area is the section closest to Stepney Bank, furthest from the residential areas in the vicinity. The café has been soundproofed on the ceiling and is sound insulated by its position and design. Noise and vibration will not be audible outside the Premises.

22.2 External doors will be kept closed except for access and egress. This will be maintained by a self-closing mechanism and staff checks.

22.3. Noise generated by amplified music will be controlled and kept at or below the level determined by the Local Authority Environmental Health Officer, such level being confirmed in writing to the Licensee.

22.4 Loading in and loading out: the nature of the Premises allows access to vehicles inside the building and therefore noise will be significantly reduced. Where possible this will take place before 11pm.

22.5 Clear and legible notices will be displayed at exits and other circulatory areas requesting patrons to leave the Premises having regard to the needs of local residents.

22.6 The DPS and staff will ensure members of staff monitor the activity of persons leaving the Premises and remind them of their public responsibilities where necessary.  A bus timetable will be available and a relationship will be established with the local taxi company so the bar can organize taxis for patrons. Directions to the nearest car park will be available although driving will be discouraged as far as possible to avoid parking problems and drink driving. From experience of programming films at Side cinema, we expect many of our clientele to travel by public transport, foot or bicycle rather than by car and we will aim to encourage this in our publicity.

23 Ventilation

23.1 Suitable ventilation and extraction systems are planned to be installed to eliminate noxious odours. Once installed, such systems will be maintained on a regular basis.

24 Refuse

24.1 As outlined by the Licensing Policy, the Licensee will ensure that waste and refuse are removed in a timely manner to a licensed waste disposal facility and will establish a waste removal agreement with a licensed waste disposal contractor and keep documented evidence of the agreement.

24.2 Empty bottles will be recycled. They will be stored in a lidded skip or a bin within the curtilage of the Premises prior to collection. Operationally, bottles will be removed from the public area on a frequent basis and transferred to the skip. It is recommended that transfer to an external skip will not be undertaken after 10.00 p.m. to minimise noise disturbance to adjoining properties.

25 Deliveries

25.1 As far as is reasonably possible, all deliveries of stock for the bar or equipment will be kept to normal working hours (8am-6pm).

26 Protection of Children from Harm

26.1 As a cinema open to all and catering to as broad and audience as possible, we will not restrict children form coming into the building. In particular we hope that there will be specific times when films suitable for children or family will be shown. We may also run workshops suitable for children.

26.2 The bar will not serve alcohol before 3pm on weekdays. Alcohol sales during the daytime on weekends will be regulated depending on the nature of the activity.

26.3 No children under 12 will be admitted unaccompanied by an adult over 18 after 11 p.m.

26.4 A list of all films to be screened will be submitted to the council before the start of each season with their classification or an example of previous screening situations. The Licensee will adhere to any British Board of Film Classification classifications or age restrictions imposed by the Licensing Authority.

26.5 In the case of open submission screenings, all filmmakers will be asked to inform of any material that would be unsuitable for screenings for children under 18 and signage and admissions made to correspond accordingly.

26.6 Immediately before the exhibition of a film there will be exhibited on screen for at least 5 seconds a representation or written statement of the film’s classification in such a manner as can be easily read by all persons attending the entertainment and also in the case of trailer advertising any film.

26.7 Where a film is to be shown that has been classified as 12A, 15 or 18 the licensee will cause a notice to be displayed, in a conspicuous position, at the entrance to the Premises or room in which the film is to be shown reading:

PERSONS UNDER THE AGE OF [insert as appropriate] CANNOT BE ADMITTED TO ANY PART OF THE PROGRAMME.

This notice must refer to the oldest age restriction where films of different categories are included in one programme.

26.8 In the rare case of entertainment wholly or mainly for unaccompanied children the licensee will comply with the rules of the Licensing Authority:
• There must be at least one attendant per 50 children or part thereof who must be on duty in the area(s) occupied by the children and stationed in the vicinity of each exit and at the head of each stairway
• attendants must wear distinctive clothing or suitable armbands
• attendants must be present throughout the entertainment and while the audience is entering and leaving the building

26.9 It is unlikely that we will show performances involving children. In the event, we will comply with the regulations in the Children (Performances) Regulations 1968.:
•    The show venue must be large enough to safely accommodate the children backstage.
•    All chaperones and production crew must receive the fire instruction procedures applicable to the venue prior to the arrival of the children.
•    You must consider the adverse effects of special effects upon the health and safety of children.
•    Children must be supervised by an adult at all times.

26.10 The Licensee will comply with the Portman Group’s Retailer Alert Bulletins.

A Low Down Dirty Lack of Shame, The Gutter Snipes Back, and Lost in La Manchesta, by Tom Jennings

[Reviews published in Variant, No. 19, February 2004; Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 7, April 2005; and Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 12, June 2007A Low Down Dirty Lack of Shame, The Gutter Snipes Back, and Lost in La Manchesta, by Tom Jennings
[published in Variant, No. 19, February 2004; Freedom magazine, Vol. 66, No. 7, April 2005; and Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 12, June 2007]

A Low Down Dirty Lack of Shame[Variant, No. 19, February 2004]

One of the most interesting aspects of Channel 4’s new drama series Shameless (2003), written by Paul Abbott, is its lack of explicit moral judgement – either on the part of the characters within the script, or in the structure and rhythm of the narrative and its logic and (partial) resolutions. This despite the fact that the scenario and subject matter seem almost obsessively to invite criticism of both the individual characters – their behaviour, choices and interactions; in fact their very being – and the collective attitudes, orientations and situations that accompany them. The result is a complicated balancing act between representation and caricature, honesty and romanticisation, comedy and tragedy, empathy and patronisation, celebration and pathos. For that matter, the chaotic and tumultuous existence of its main protagonists, the Gallagher family, is also a complicated balancing act – comprising six siblings aged three to twenty-one, living on a sink estate in a contemporary northern city, with a progressively absent, unemployed alcoholic father and whose mother has done a runner.
Friends, Neighbours, Fellow TravellersA corollary to the deliberate amoralism of Shameless is precisely the absence of feelings of shame exhibited by the characters, not only in their vulgar and uncouth manners, but in their responses to their apparently hopeless plights and prospects and their sense of responsibility or moral culpability for their situation. The title of the series is both ironic and apt: apt because the Gallaghers oscillate wildly between good intentions, indifference and hurtfulness towards loved ones, but there is little sign of the overweening feelings of self-worthlessness and self-disgust that characterise real shame; and ironic because accusations of shamelessness, for example made by ‘respectable’ neighbours, represent moral condemnation that tends (and intends) to render its targets beyond the pale of acceptable humanity. It reveals far more about the accusers, hinting at their deeper hidden shame and insecurity concerning their own lowly social status, and furthermore legitimises in their eyes the hostile actions and persecution by ‘the authorities’ that ultimately disrupt or preempt any meaningful sense of their own community.
The attitudes of the conservative, respectable and aspiring working class thus neatly dovetail with, for example, state initiatives concerning policing and welfare – demanding stringent monitoring, control and punishment, not only for transgression but for the offensive of their existence. Likewise, middle class charitability and much of socialism – from the Fabians, Eugenics and Leninism through to old and New Labour, has also comprehensively nurtured, articulated with, and fed upon such reactionary beliefs about the innate inferiority of the poor and the need to intervene and ‘do something about them’. Shameless thus invokes several conventional discourses relating to the nature and potential of working class people, only to then flout and undermine them – and in the process to question the social and political philosophies and programmes that, at root, depend on class-based ideologies of moral deficit and ethical inadequacy for their normative and pragmatic utility.
Family AffairsThe main tactic used to achieve this confrontation with accepted homilies, stereotypes and cliches about the degraded poor is a resolute refusal to centre the story around supposedly objective ‘problems’ or ‘issues’. The focus instead is the family’s determination to stay afloat together, and to maintain a sense (or illusion) of agency and hope. In the way are a multitude of obstacles and constraints, most of which are clearly shown to be overdetermined by a combination of historical shaping, situational reality and personal attributes. Any positive outcomes (such as they can be) always emerge from a deliberate (although usually not self-conscious) meshing of sociality, imagination and desire.
But this is no glib, easily or effortlessly achieved solidarity, and neither is it straightforwardly positive. Indeed the violence, abuse and humiliation the characters sometimes heap on each other, and the occasionally indiscriminate volatility of their anger, hatred and destructiveness, are intrinsically linked to their mutual affection, respect and active commitment to each other. This dense patchwork effect is reinforced by the contemporary setting of material which originated in Paul Abbott’s childhood and adolescence in the 1960s and 70s – which partly accounts for distinct residual tinges of nostalgia (as well as the absence of  the panoply of ‘child protection’ professionals which might be expected given current hypocrisies and hysterias). But although details of events, characters and storylines are massively condensed, jumbled up and redistributed, what shines through is a sense of trying to comprehend and deal with the apparently ineffable wash of life – from a point of view simultaneously of innocence and thoroughly streetwise worldweariness. The family members are at times so emotionally close as to feel part of each other, and at other times so distant in their thoughts and preoccupations as to be alien to each other even while under the same roof. The fascination with sexual antics  rings especially true from this perspective, in an environment where both emotional and physical overcrowding can make common knowledge – but only very partial understanding – of private passions and their effects and ramifications.
Clear and Present DangersDespite the all pervading conflicts and crises, the predominant styles of fictional representation of working class life in social realism are also refused. Gone is the tragic pessimism which can only be overcome by individual heroism or the painstaking work of diligent self-improvement. There is no pandering whatsoever to the notion that the family are an imminent threat to themselves or to (polite) society, which can only be averted or contained by the enlightened action of outside forces (the state, employers, experts, etc). Such institutions are recognised as only having the capacity to destroy both the Gallaghers’ fragile practical unity and their sense of who they are, as fully imbricated in each other’s lives rather than separate individuals with isolated needs. So Shameless replaces earnest negativity with exuberance, the yearning for passionate fulfilment, and outrageous comedy bordering on farce.
The price paid to avoid succumbing to the tragic vision may appear to be a trivialisation of the levels of drudgery, misery and suffering experienced by many people in similar positions. Furthermore the exoticisation of their pleasures and the general comic rendering skates over the more ominous manifestations of depression, envy, malice and hatred which regularly afflict those reared in emotionally and materially deprived and dysfunctional environments (clearly, what counts as dysfunctional is crucial here), where urgent necessity prevents distance or reflection. However, it should be clear, to anyone who cares to pay attention, that all of the characters in Shameless are deeply unhappy about many things for most of the time. The difference is that, since this is a mode of being which is entirely familiar and expected (‘it’s how life is’), there is no particular reason to dwell on or agonise over it. Personal or social catastrophe may often follow events within a family which can be attributed to individual psychology and conflict. But it is just as likely to be precipitated by more or less unpredictable externalities – particularly the intervention of state agencies, or activities resulting from crime and the pathologies of those outside one’s immediate social nexus. The sheer number and range of threats and their potential origins means that a pragmatic fatalism is the only sensible policy, if stultifying depression or reactive paranoia are to be avoided.
So, as with all the best television depictions of working class life, it is the emotional realism on this phenomenological level which will most strike a chord with viewers from similar backgrounds. But unlike virtually all other examples that I can recall, there is an overriding sense in Shameless that given the ongoing state of emergency, everyone knows that things will – and will have to change. And while all manner of disasters are just around the corner or are already beginning to unfold, the only strategy that makes sense to effect change for the better, irrespective of how desperate circumstances are, is to mobilise that single most important source of hope, imagination and practical agency which is embodied by the local social network where individual strengths and heroics only matter if they contribute to collective effort.
The Uses of EnchantmentAccounts of working class experience expressed in social realism in the arts, literature and media or in the social and human sciences often also mirror prevailing discourses of class, particularly by constructing a uniformity of ‘the masses’. This contrasts with the differentiation and distinctions found at higher levels of society which have the power to institute general programmes and solutions from above. Similarly the guardians of interpretation and taste (reviewers, critics, academics) try to force representations of lower class life into narrow and rigid categories, leading to a most unseemly disarray in newspaper and magazine reviews trying to categorise Shameless in terms of its genre status, quality and relationship to current politically sensitive issues. Seen through these lenses, the complexity and  diversity within and among the characters and the fecundity of their ensemble is lost – when it is precisely this differentiation, woven in practice into a wealth of meaning and possibility, which yields the promise of active, productive, collective self-organisation. As postmodern pastiche, and in wit and irreverence, comparisons with Roseanne or The Simpsons surely make sense; and in terms of affection and unapologetic self-criticism, The Royle Family, Till Death Us Do Part and Bread spring to mind. But the predictable, static and safe sitcom framework has been removed along with the fundamental appeal to respectability that all of the aforementioned series relied upon. With a level of explicitness entirely appropriate to its subjects, the proximity of horror and the sublime, and most of all its dynamic indeterminacy, Shameless is in a class of its own – in which optimistic reading it is anarchic in the best sense, rather than the worst.

The Gutter Snipes Back[Freedom magazine, Vol. 66, No. 7, April 2005]
The filthy fables of Paul Abbott’s Shameless trample over bourgeois morality. Tom Jennings tries to contain his laughter.
Channel 4’s comedy drama Shameless riotously restarted in a 2004 Christmas Special curtain-raiser to the second series. A north-west community defeats army quarantine and besiegement, after – in timely fashion for the festive season – a consignment of meat falls off the back of a lorry. With typically inspired symbolism, Paul Abbott1 pits the grandiose poisonous stupidity of official power against the informal ingenuity of ordinary folk, who rally when it transpires that the bonanza was deliberately contaminated in a disaster-contingency exercise. Various central characters – the Gallagher clan and their nearest and dearest – are instrumental in the imaginative ducking and diving that restores (dis)equilibrium on the (anti)utopian Chatsworth council estate. Rounding off this holy fantastical yarn – minus po-faced wise men pomp and circumstance – the new lover of pathetic patriarch Frank then goes into labour. As in all its storylines, Shameless’ gutter surrealism elevates a barful of lowest common denominators into both art and politics.
The narrative arc of the original series concerned the survival together of the six Gallagher siblings –  aged 3 to 21, with an increasingly absent, unemployed alcoholic father and long-gone mother. Despite their chaotic social situation, desperate finances and violently conflictual personal dynamics, they ward off dangers arising from their own self-destructive urges and mistakes, the hostility of local State agencies and malicious fellow residents, and the not inconsiderable inconveniences of pure misfortune. Throughout, social control mechanisms of pressures to respectability via the isolated nuclear unit are flouted with haphazard self-fashioned mutual care-giving full of warmth, generosity and spontaneity – which, while frequently fractious and abusive, has no truck with emotional blackmail, self-disgust or meanness of spirit. These themes mature in the new stories. Having established the Gallaghers as a viable entity with fluid and variable interconnections in their local environs – now beset by more and bigger threats – the question becomes, how will the family change?
This broader problematic deprives series two of so clear a unifying thread, and the uneven tenor of successive episodes veers wildly between melodrama, romance, personal dilemma and crime caper – with new characters and guilt-free secrets, lies, perversions and purposes parachuted in soap-operatically to add dysfunctional flavour. However, the immense wit and intelligence in the scripting consistently fashions satisfyingly unlikely scams and dodges, averting catastrophe with a remarkable social synergy where even the most feckless shine. The ensemble acting needs to be, and is, superb – enhanced with a postmodern bag of filmic tricks, styles and devices to complicate and distort perspective, manifesting the confused richness of subjective experience.
A closing chorus of ‘Jerusalem’, sung enthusiastically over a wide-angle aerial pan of the estate, sees the remaining friends and relatives contemplate with apprehension, love and goodwill the departure of eldest daughter Fiona and her boyfriend (de facto parent-figures-in-chief). The strong family brew of differentiated vulnerabilities gives its members the confidence to pursue their desires, and next year’s third run will hopefully enlarge on this theme with similarly sophisticated levels of integrity and self-deprecating affection. ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ is afforded further irony by the humiliation in the local pub of a bullying rotten-borough councillor. The prejudicial hatred crystallised in his bluff and bluster hastens his decisive rejection by a clientele (the public sphere of this ‘nation’) of irrevocably mixed background and colour – comparable to the diversity and complexity intrinsic to each of the Gallaghers and their collective identity. It will be fascinating to see if this righteous idealism can be followed up too.
As outrageous comic entertainment, Shameless foregrounds the positive potential inherent in the lives of the vulgar great unwashed, along with its cultural and situational basis in material conditions and social history. Romanticisation, sentimentality and patronisation are largely sidestepped in its hilarious scenarios because their resolutions depend on the interweaving of so many characters’ flaws, fuck-ups and unexpected capacities. However, the fragile civic balance forged by British working class extended family networks, neighbourhood mutual aid, irreverent expression and ‘creative accountancy’ has been systematically savaged by governments slavishly following the new ‘logic’ of capitalism, replacing jobs and welfare with drugs, guns and jails. The damage inflicted by our more troubled members as well as external ‘betters’ now often escalates far beyond the unfeasibly benign atmosphere on the Chatsworth.
Sure enough, Abbott condensed and exaggerated his own experiences among ten abandoned children in 1960s/70s Lancashire for grist to his mill. This accounts for the authenticity as well as the whiffs of nostalgia in absurdist escapism effectively melding satire and critique at a time when the criminalisation of lower-class anti-social behaviour blurs into War on Terror rhetoric. These days, refusing to conform to middle-class hypocrisy – offending sensibility or ‘quality of life’ (or merely hysterically inflated perceptions of threat) – attracts dehumanising, punitive reprisals from the State. Legitimising their assaults on flexible labour indiscipline as protection against yob culture, the real thugs profiting from neoliberal misery instead glorify selfish narcissism as the end-point of aspiration. That’s what I call shameless.
Meanwhile Shameless gives a very rare mainstream media portrayal of organic lower class communal solidarity, doing justice in depth and texture to what’s possible when individual action is valued principally for its contribution to collective effort – without pandering one iota to the bourgeois agendas reiterated in dramatic genres and, disastrously, in left-wing traditions.2 Soul-searching, preaching, laments and defeatism remain the preserve of documentary balance, liberal issue genres and social realism – which are only too eager to emphasise the depressing likelihood of tragedy rather than pleasurable farce. Preoccupied with the short-term demands of everyday life, Abbott’s characters articulate no explicit ideology – but then art (like ideas) can’t make history, though its material presence contributes to the stew of cultural resources nourishing political movement. Shameless has much to say – and, no doubt, “they know how to throw a party!”
Notes1. writer of many excellent television dramas, including Cracker, Clocking Off, Linda Green and State Of Play.
2. see my ‘A Low Down Dirty Lack of Shame’, Variant 19, 2004 (www.variant.org.uk) for a contrast with conventional representations of working class life.

Lost in La Manchesta[Freedom magazine, Vol. 68, No. 12, June 2007]
Shameless,  series 4,  Channel 4 (January-March 2007)
The occupational hazard in long-running drama series of cast members bailing out has helped spoil the fourth series of Paul Abbott’s Shameless chronicling the (mis)fortunes of the Manchester estate Gallaghers. Since the trauma of eldest daughter Fiona eloping at the end of series one, the scriptwriters have consistently failed to develop, deepen and enhance the story by depicting characters succumbing to depressingly realistic reasons for departure, and the repercussions for those remaining. Instead we’re served up ridiculously over-the-top soapy melodrama – witness neighbours Kev and Veronica banged up in Romania for orphan abduction. Such shenanigans shatter the suspension of disbelief and undermine the aim to counterpose the strength, complexity and resilience of the contemporary ‘underclass’ against the patronising poverty-traps laid by liberal handwringing, middle-class moral managerialism and New Labour police-state discipline and punishment.
In effect, the show’s ambition and refreshing originality are sacrificed on the short-term altar of trash TV for middle-class cool-Britannia youth. Pivotal events and actions in one episode are forgotten by the next, whereupon fashionably topical revelations parachute in to simulate narrative drive. Personality becomes so flattened that believably nuanced and sustained webs of relationships dissolve in short-term infantile whims – a kitchen-sink Dallas/Dynasty. So portraying the children’s prodigal mother as a vacuous narcissist with no redeeming features might be interesting with genuine depth or complexity in or surrounding her. Neither are the Maguires moving in next door more than grotesque caricatures of local gangsters, disallowing any exploration of venality affecting community dynamics; even the local Keystone coppers are characters in their own right (who gives a shit?). Worst of all, young Debbie grasses up the lodger out of selfish spite, imperilling the household despite hitherto holding it together. That her nearest and dearest hardly notice this betrayal, let alone care, epitomises a plot comprehensively lost.
                Fortunately many strengths persist through the blunders, as the Gallagher offspring fitfully flower in barren soil. As the pathetic anti-Don Juan at the centre of this joyfully perverted romance (as young Carl muses, sometimes “families fuck you up, but in a good way!”), Frank’s fatalism about the better management of capitalism offering his ilk any hope attracts Abbott’s most concentrated attention in booze-fuelled soliloquies – including appealing for improved conditons for the abandoned poor: “Make poverty history – cheaper drugs now!” The critique of pretension and old-fashioned defensive conservatism underlying his disillusionment later coalesce in a rant about council estate kids going to college, losing their accents and conviviality and “using long words”. Tellingly, while empathising with his position, his children refuse to be constrained either by it or respectable alternatives, and the unruly melange of sex and drugs and karaoke culminates in a rousing chorus of “Never forget where you’re coming from …” It’s just a shame that  Shameless parrots so many trivial pursuits in remaining an exception to both the real-world and media rule.

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

Inauguration of Pleasure Dome : ‘The Star and Shadow’
Inauguration of Pleasure Dome : ‘The Star and Shadow’

Neil
Young

My
favourite cinema, ‘The Star and Shadow’, is only two minutes from a bus stop,
but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their
way there, even on Saturday nights. Its
clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of ‘regulars’ who occupy the
same seat for every screening and go there for conversation as much as for the
films. If
you are asked why you favour a particular cinema, it would seem natural to put
the films first, but the thing that most appears to me about ‘The Star and Shadow’
is what people call its ‘atmosphere…’

Admirers
of George Orwell may recognise the above paragraph – it’s the opening of his
classic 1946 essay ‘The Moon Under Water’ (in which he describes his ideal
imaginary pub) rejigged by myself in accordance with the theme of the
publication which you currently hold in your hand.

‘The Star and Shadow’ does sound
more like a pub than a cinema, of course – especially as the name doesn’t make
any astrological sense, unless said ‘star’ is the nearest one, aka the sun. I’m
guessing that the ‘star’ here is a human one of the showbiz variety – like the
brassy trouper who features on the painted sign outside that semi- (but not quite disreputable) boozer ‘The Star’ on
the bottom section of Westgate Road, opposite what has recently become the
Carling Academy, and was previously the Gala Bingo (boo!) and the ‘Majestic
Ballrooms’. Before that, it was a
cinema: ‘The New Westgate’ was opened in 1927, on the site of what had been the
‘Picture House’ – which burned down in 1918.

But this isn’t a place to dwell on cinemas burning down and closing down. There
are plenty of buildings in Newcastle that used to be cinemas. Now we have a
cinema that used to be a building. One, brief, furtive look back should be
enough: I saw my first film at CineSide (aka The Side Cinema) on November 11th
2001. It was Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the
Game from 1939. While fine, the picture didn’t match up to its uber-lofty critical status – even more
disappointing were other lukewarm Side ‘classics’ like Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Nov 01), Fellini’s 8 1/2 (May 02); Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (Nov 02); and
Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (May
03). But the point wasn’t that the films were only so-so – it was the fact that
Side Cinema gave me the chance to see them on a big(ish), local(ish) screen,
and decide for myself.

And there were just as many times that a picture I saw there justified or
wildly exceeded expectations: the legendary tequila-soaked screening of Sam
Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head of Alfredo
Garcia (May 03); William Burroughs (disappearing) in Anthony Balch’s
short Towers Open Fire shown as
part of the legendary red-wine-soaked ‘beat’ evening (Jun 02); Hal Ashby’s Harold & Maude (Dec 02); Peter
Bogdanovich’s Targets (Mar 04);
Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man,
projected in eerie (near-)total silence in Dec 04; Mervyn Le Roy and Busby
Berkeley’s euphoric Gold Diggers of 1933 (May
02); Albert Finney’s Charlie Bubbles (Nov
03) and, the last film I saw there, John Farrow’s Where Danger Lives, a cracking little thriller from 1950
that I knew nothing about until I saw it in the Side programme for November
2005.

‘The Star and Shadow’ has a lot to
live up to: but if Side was any guide, part of the fun will be discovering
weird and unlikely stuff in a weird and unlikely setting. And hopefully the
organisers will continue to be open to audience suggestions for their
programming. Me, I’m dreaming of Limite, Mario
Peixoto’s silent Brazilian classic from 1931. And that, when I settle down in
my comfortable ‘regular’ seat, my enjoyment isn’t imperilled by any ‘drunks and
rowdies’. Or maybe just one or two: ‘where danger lives,’ and all that…

23rd
February 2006

Neil Youngs film
site:

http://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/index.php

What A Man’s Gotta Do by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 21, October 2005]

Tom Jennings applauds the success of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in linking the attractions of action cinema to ideologies of control and conquest by force.What A Man’s Gotta Do by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 21, October 2005]
 
 
Tom Jennings applauds the success of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in linking the attractions of action cinema to ideologies of control and conquest by force.
 
Two sleazy mobsters wipe out a motel clerk and maid and their little girl; Edie (Maria Bello) and Tom Stall (Viggo Mortenson) comfort their daughter after her dream of monsters. Ostensibly content community pillars in the Midwest boondocks, the Stalls are quietly  stagnating – until the murderers hold up the diner he runs, whereupon Tom promptly despatches them with considerable élan. After the ensuing media spotlight, goons arrive led by Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) who insists to protestations of mistaken identity that Tom is actually notorious Philly hitman Joey Cusack. Meanwhile Jack Stall (Ashton Holmes) has trouble with highschool hardnuts, but inspired by his dad’s antics discovers his own vicious streak and beats up the bullies. The town sheriff is suspicious about Tom, but Edie (a bigshot lawyer) pulls rank and covers for him. Fogarty becomes increasingly threatening until Tom kills the made-men in a blur of kung-fu gunplay, also involving Jack. After bruisingly passionate sex with Edie, Tom journeys east into his past, and kills big boss Richie Cusack (William Hurt). He returns to the family, but things will never be the same …
 
Cronenberg compulsively blurs boundaries of fantasy and reality in his surreal science fiction and shocking tales of horror, gore and mutant depravity, often mobilising machines as metaphors for aspects of experience we prefer to overlook. This time the technology of cinematic representation itself – Hollywood storytelling strategies and the ways these smuggle ideology into audiences – takes centre stage. A History of Violence blends visions of small-town utopia with the more overtly masculinist fantasies of security in a hostile world of the Western and crime and action thrillers. Corny comic characters and stock dialogue from these genres stretch the ironic limits of pastiche – but the quality of acting and careful construction of this exemplary postmodern film carry it off. The director juggles multiple levels of interpretation and significance in calculating, equating and integrating symbolic and physical violence – unflinchingly laying bare the weighty aftermaths for the characters, the fascination for viewers, and the implications for personal biography and redemption all the way to historical allegory and the general body politic.
 
Systematically deconstructing the cinematic language of ordinary maleness and respectable gender relations and roles, all that survives of the classic nuclear ‘family romance’ is superficial collusion in hiding dark secrets. The ‘feminisation’ of men in post-industrial service sectors, as women become more professionally dominant in the public sphere, is juxtaposed with growing female assertiveness in personal relations and the complexities of dominance and submissiveness in adult love. Once Tom begins to vent “Dirty Harry” tendencies, the spouses initiate and respond to both sexual and nonsexual aggression with ambivalent arousal and disgust that damages trust. Meanwhile the cosy reproduction of masculinity and femininity is disrupted as the children watch their parents meet external evils with their own suppressed demons – the girl seeing through the fairy tale that “there are no such things as monsters”; and the wisecracking adolescent nerd pragmatically kickstarting manhood, first against the bullies then by saving his dad.
 
 
What A Man’s Gotta Do 
The storyline works simultaneously as conventional narrative and macho fantasy, destabilising and questioning happy endings and neat resolutions. Everyone and everything changes due to the ‘return of the repressed’ – whether violent action or imagination, desire, ‘manly’ strength and ‘womanly’ weakness, or other brutal truths of past and present. In the conventional narrative, traditional complacencies are thoroughly trashed – of the main character, his happy family and the idealised small town community as well as the integrity of ‘external’ forces such as official hierarchies and the outsider drama of organised crime. Likewise, as dream or fantasy, the attempted wish-fulfilments of pleasure and certainty at the individual level inevitably self-destruct, since the inconvenient realities of impulse and excess, bodily intransigence and social conflict refuse to be denied – not least from their uncomfortable proximity to what makes life worth living compared to the cloying, static boredom of perfection.
 
Furthermore, the spiritual overtones hint at wider historical and philosophical dreams and fantasies. The audience’s relationship to violence in the media (and especially American cinema) as innocent entertainment is no longer straightforward – and, extending further, the political roles of national, societal and religious mythologies in solving conflict and legitimising authority are exposed as inadequate and dishonest. Cronenberg’s key theme comes across more strongly than ever, despite A History of Violence’s mainstream appeal and big-budget glossiness. This is that extraordinary reserves of psychological work must be devoted over a lifetime (thus being diverted from more constructive pursuits) to maintaining a classically ‘scientific’ European type of self-image – a coherent, conscious, voluntarily controlled and consistent rationality – in the face of the absurdities of the unconscious, the incorrigible sensuality and/or abjection of flesh and the general horrors of human ‘civilisation’.
 
Once the delusions they’ve built their identities around dissolve, the pathos of the family’s disorientation shows that isolated heroes solve nothing. The American Dream leaves its banal representatives stalled in no-man’s land, where banishing monsters to nightmares leaves them unable to face real ones except by creating their own. The film weaves together umpteen of the ramifications without wishing away their intransigence, yet still captivates viewers. Independent cinema’s usual depressive alienation, pretentious middle class angst or fashionable nihilism are avoided, and no magnificently sentimental denouement or fatal gesture lets us (or the status quo) off the hook. Sadly, Cronenberg’s existentialist detachment preempts solutions by individualising the problem and concealing its crucially social origins in the mists of time. Nevertheless the conclusion is inescapable that only genuinely mutual and honestly  collective effort will allow the family (or society) to survive and grow together, rather than violently splitting apart.
 
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Downfall (Der Untergang) – Oliver Hirshbeigel- Germany 2004 – Bruno Ganz

Viewed at Tyneside Cinema Newcastle – 19 May 2005 – £6-00Downfall (Der Untergang) – Oliver Hirshbeigel- Germany 2004 –  Bruno Ganz
Viewed at Tyneside Cinema Newcastle – 19 May 2005  – £6-00
 
Out of a cradle endlessly rocking…..
 
From the opening shot of Traudl Junge descending into the Wolf’s Lair bunker on the eastern front, to the final shot of Traudl cycling away from Berlin to freedom Downfall reveals itself as a film concerned with the manufacture of innocence. As such Hirshbiegel and his producers are making a statement of intent in relation to German cinema.  Downfall is the admittance that it is Hollywood and American cinema that are to be the salvation of the Germans.  It is WG Griffith and Steven Spielberg, not Murnau, Pabst, Lang and Herzog, who will exorcise the demons of Germany and point the way to happiness and forgetfulness.   Downfall’s mission is the Americanisation of the German nightmare.  Wake up Germany and have a latte.
 
Downfall is predicated as a project on the faking of realism to recreate the final days of Hitler(the bunker set looks and feels like the real thing) In recreating the Fuhrer Bunker and filling it with actors and actresses dressed up in Third Reich period costumes, Hirshbiegel and his collaborators are setting their sights on the obdurate problem of the Third Reich as history: no one was innocent.   This state of affairs is simply not acceptable either to the cannons of Hollywood or to Hirshbiegel: there has to be a solution.  Hirshbiegel’s solution is simply  to run the Bunker part of the movie again and see if anything can be done.  The first time in the Bunker wasn’t quite right: Hitler got married and died in setting of Wagnerian proportions which was OK; but there were no obvious good guys, no positive messages coming out.  If the Bunker could be run again(a la Bunuel with everyone going back to the positions from which they started) things could be improved; a flame of innocence might be kindled in the story.
 
So was the Downfall Bunker Project set in motion. The big idea was to film the story with scrupulous attention to detail in order that the structured realism of the set would validate the authenticity of this re-running of history.   Within this setting, introducing a language of gesture (mostly from the actors) would give an expiatory framing to this final act of the history of the Third Reich, overwhelming and winning audiences through the suggested pathos.  Using filmic devices of montage and shot construction to shape and mold understanding of  the  critical areas of the action, Hirschbiegel effects a significant modification of the Bunker story: the insinuation of innocence.  Audiences may no longer look behind the screen to see where the train has gone, but they have advanced so much that they can forget to look behind the screen at all. 
 
In the manner in which the film has been conceived,  shot and edited  Downfall’s object is to establish ‘innocence’ as sufficient moral authorisation to distance the self from responsibility.  Typically we often suffer children a degree of this authorisation.   The Downfall project at inception had to locate child-innocence in its characterisation of at least one of the main historical players and then work the authenticity of this characterisation into the grain of the film – into its style and look.  Obviously Traudl Jung Hitler’s personal secretary, was seen right from the beginning of the project as the character with this potential. Such potential in fact that the film pivots on her story to suggest something primally innocent about her and her point of view as a character.
 
The selection of the actress(Alexandra Maria) to play Traudl was a key decision but not a particularly difficult one.  For the part of Traudl as required by Downfall, the facial look of the actress had to suggest a deep  set childish innocence – a Lillian Gish sort of look(as in Intolerance) – soft features with nicely set eyes and wavy undulating brown or champagne blond hair framing the face  – no angular features(this is Bambi territory).
 
The film divides up(opposes)between shots and sequences in the calmness of the bunker that are paralleled to events outside the bunker in the hell of a burnt and burning Berlin as it falls to the Russians. The Bunker is an evenly lit space, a bit like an American hotel. Although there is lots of bustle and tracking movements through the narrow corridors providing a sense of compressed enclosure, Traudl is rarely part of this.  She floats in a child space gazing at every horror she sees with the same look of surprised sadness and wide eyed innocence.   Her face, with its emotional vocabulary has a specific role in the script and in the intentions of the director:  it is as a sort of mirror of innocence.  Whenever Traudl hears and sees something of the real Third Reich, it’s as if she has learnt it for the first time. Hitler raging as summary executions are ordered, Hitler’s vindication of the Final Solution for the Jews, his callous fury the failure of  the German people, the detached preparation for the suicides.  At these revelatory moments there are reaction cuts to Traudl’s face.  We see: the small movements of her eyes; the merest widening of her eyes or eyebrows; the slight stretching of the skin over her cheek bones and the tremble of her lips.  She registers child like reaction of innocence to the horror of knowing.  Her facial vocabulary cues the audience to understand that these are terrible things that have been revealed to her and that she had never never heard these things before.  Downfall rewrites history as gesture.
 
In the locked-in world of the Fuhrer bunker, where the truth of the actual situation, the truth of the Third Reich is plain to see and known to everyone present, Traudl with her soft wistful features, is always filmed, captured in sequences and shots, standing a little aside from all this:  as if she is outside history.  That’s why the film allows her to escape on the bike( assimilating a boy-child for added-value innocence) and, like ET she can go Home on the bicycle as if none of this had happened.  By extension the audience are invited by means of the power of filmic suggestive logic, as co-innocents, to join Traudl the child on her bike. The downfall project is delivered.
 
The new German Hollywood cinema creates for its audiences, as does Speilberg, the face as an ideological comfort zone.  It commands from its key actors in any setting, carefully calibrated responses  to the exigencies of history that exonerate individual responsibility in the name of innocence to deliver a message that all is basically well and we can continue to eat ice creams and cookies.   The film message of Fritz Lang, on the complexities of personal responsibility and institutional contamination; Werner Herzog’s ideas about the infectious nature of madness are now discarded for simpler more reassuring explanations.   In Hirshbiegels film world, everything can be sorted out by a cut or a pan that takes us to a close-up of an actress whose eyes open wide in horror as she hears terrible things.  Innocence – there’s nothing else to understand.  Though of course every facial tick and nuance produced to cue by Traudl is a fraudulent trick – a lie –  designed into the Downfall project to subvert history for ideologically motivated ends.
 
Of course no one knows how much Traudl had come to realise after two years at the centre of the Nazi web.  Nobody knows how she thought or felt or responded to events as they unfolded in the Fuhrer Bunker.   But a series of responses from her can be falsified and staged that suit the Downfall project. The clip of an interview with the actual Traudl spliced onto the end of the film did not convey to me the image of an innocent woman, more like the idea of a woman trying to evade uncomfortable truths about herself.  
 
If Alexandra Marie as Traudl represents a faked intuitive naif female innocence, then Christian Berkel and Andre Herricke as General Mohnke and Dr Schenck play out the lesser but equally faked roles of male heroic(if muted) resistance, giving the Downfall project a trinity of fake exemplary characters on which to close down the Bunker and by extension the history of the Third Reich.
 
A final note on the Hollywood method.  The overall emphasis of most mainstream Hollywood projects is to create in the film a feeling of ‘realness’.  The aim is the suspension of audience belief through this style of filmic representation.   The settings, the stagings,  the acting has to feel ‘real’.  Current Hollywood actors are very proud of the detail to which they research and prepare for roles.  Obviously in Downfall Bruno Ganz playing the Hitler role went togreat lengths to establish his authenticity.  The objective intention of this emphasis  on ‘real’ seems to have an quasi ideological basis, in that it facilitates only a small number of readings of any film, preferably only one.  At most points in a Hollywood project the audience will know exactly what the characters are thinking(this of course leaves the film directors free to engage in easy manipulation of character expectations and situations by misdirection of the audience)  But by the end of a  film the preponderance of definitions available in the film will lead to only one interpretation, the desired one.  
 
As German film embraces Griffiths and Spielberg, it should remember  that one legacy of Hollywood to America is an arrogant inability to distinguish between the real from the fake. It was precisely this type of error that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler.  Hitler as many before him, but few with such devastation, exploited the relationship between real and imagined grievances.  In Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler found a film maker who could also exploit and manipulate faked images of reality.   German cinema should be aware of the consequences of taking any road that falsifies history: there are unfortunate precedents.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Kuhle Wampe – 1932 Germany directed Slaten Dudow script by B. Brecht.

Score Hanns Eisler

Hertha Thiele as Anni

Side Cinema – 1 2 04 Kuhle Wampe – 1932 Germany directed Slaten Dudow script by B. Brecht.
Score Hanns Eisler
Hertha Thiele as Anni
Side Cinema – 1 2 04
The last shot of the film remained with me long after the lights came up. And I mean the end of the film, not of the polemic drama. Because Kuhle Wampe was a film with two creative impulses pushing through it. Although Brecht and Dudow achieve congress as collaborators, you can see which of them is in the driving seat at any point of the film, in which dialogue and image work in counterpoint.
So to return to the ending ……..there is long and played out but amusing piece of theatre that takes place on the U-train in which the riders react to a news item read out by one of the passengers about the thousands of tons of coffee that has been destroyed in Brazil. On the train common man and woman react with the intellectual tools at their disposal – common sense, bigotry, bewilderment and the arithmetic of poverty. Also on the train, the young communists, returning from their week-end jamboree, are savvy to the algebraic formulae of world commodity markets. They understand and can explain that scarcity is a product of the market.
This cleverly penned scene with small groups of passengers talking arguing swopping insights about coffee is fundamentally theatrical in composition and orchestration. Conceptually its built up like a piece of music, a cannon or a fugue: no one individual dominates and the different sub groups build on and repeat with variations their points of view and ideas. There is some emotional input from the bigot, but emotion does not disrupt the balance of the section which works filmically because of its formal musical construction. We experience repeat sequence of characters to whom we return with variation. It is a successful piece of filmed theatre: the innate humour and intelligence of the writing shine out(as it does in the rest of the film) but the scene would sit equally well performed on stage.
The culmination of the sequence arrives when the question is asked: how things are ever going to change? (the question is no different today). The sequence cuts to a high key shot of Annie – the female protagonist(with a haircut that is pure Bauhaus) – who answers direct to camera with the polemic line: It will change because we will not accept it the way it is. The line immediately feels like the end of the drama – the dynamic switch to a full face close up, the line enunciating a concluding idea.
It is the end of Brechts drama. But it is not the end of the film. Slaten Dudow has the final sequence, the last image. From the close up of Anni, the film cuts to a subterranean tunnel, part of the U-Bahn. A long wide mouthed structure funnelling through shadows into darkness. From the camera side crowds file past into the tunnel: perhaps people who have just got off the train – old young well dressed poorly dressed, everyman all life, all Germany filing into the darkness.
All though the film, being on the hind side of history where all has been told, I am acutely conscious of the date and time, 1932, and the implications this has for how I see this film. Kuhle Wampe, a camp for the unemployed and dispossessed a benign proleptic image of the Nazi concentration camp. Such imagery of dispossession was perhaps familiar and vaguely comforting to Germans. But no where in the film is there any reference to the political situation in Germany. No reference that on the streets of Berlin extraordinary events are taking place. The Nazis, the Stromtroopers don’t exist. Perhaps it raised issues that were uncomfortable. Both Nazis and Communists made similar use of propaganda, youth organisations and rhetoric of the oppression and certainly the long sequences in the movie portraying the Communist Youth Organisation, the club, the sports rally and jamborie, had a frozen mechanical quality, which if different in detail from the organised Nazi youth activities, seem parallel in spirit. Neither the Hitler Jugend, the Hitler Band, nor Hitler and the Nazis appear or are or alluded to. Except in the last and final shot which silently wordlessly directs us towards this future which is endlessly streaming out of this present as the people get off the train.
The shot depicts people, perhaps the people who have just got off the U-bahn coming into shot from behind camera and moving past it to go down into a large wide dark tunnel. The shot is held for some considerable period. It is a shot in itself. It is not part of a sequence. A shot in and for itself that in concluding the film references it without specific sign. The people advance endlessly press forwards into the shadow (of the future). In ending his film in this way Dudow uses image to suggest fears emotions feelings for which Brecht lacked words. Perhaps Dudow, an outsider, a Bulgarian recently come Germany after studying in the USSR, knew that his film had to end not with the challenge of socialist polemic but on the vista of the uncertain. I don’t know how contemporary audiences understood this ending, but many in Germany were wired into the foreboding zeitgeist. The end of the film both presages the descent into darkness and death that came with the Third Reich. But also, in another key, this shot anticipates the development of post holocaust cinema with its abstracted locations its dislocation of time and its awareness of perception.

Crimson Gold – Directed by Jafar Panahi

Iran 2002

Script by KiarostamiCrimson Gold – Directed by Jafar Panahi
Iran 2002
Script by Kiarostami
The film opens with a revelation which encapsulates both the film’s structure structure and content: the opening credits – white on black – fade and the black shifts to one side to reveal we have been looking at the back of a shopkeeper who is being robbed. The camera remains at one fixed point throughout the long robbery sequence until at the end it tilts up as the robber Hussain calmly shoots himself. As it is at the end so it is at the beginning: both the film and Hussein travel the full circle,
The film is a continuous internal dialogue with Tehran as experienced through the cracked screen of Hussein’s motorbike. Crimson Gold depicts Tehran as a city that looks like ‘nowhere’ inhabited by people who don’t exist. Jafar Panahi and Kiarostami have a vision of Tehran as schizoid society unable to move, trapped in contradictions between repression and desire. And a society stalled by this conundrum is doomed to go round in circles going nowhere always on the same plane alwaays returning to where it began. In tune with this gyrating monotonous endless rhythm Hussein bikes round the highways of Tehran at night delivering pizza to the rich. The pizza itself, of course being round American style food delivered in plane square boxes. The Pizza is food that in itself contains opposing messages: the desired and the forbidden; to the poor it is just a meal; to the wealthy a social statement.
From a circle there can be no escape unless first you realise that you are in a circle. The performance of Hussein lies at the heart of Crimson Gold. It is performance of few words that grows in stature and nobility as inarticulately he moves foreward to irrevocably smash the circle – and at the same time within the temporal format of the film confirming its existence.
Hussein circles Tehran in his nightly work delivering food to the rich, and prowls round the wedding ring in the shop that he will never be able to afford. The night scenes are shot like affirmations of the idea of eternal recurrence. The eternity trap in which you will deliver Pizza for ever or until you die knocked off your motorbike. The Tehran streets unending necklaces of street lights; the dark citadels of the rich where the pizza is delivered. Hussein like the warrior he is, knows this terain as a familiar battlefield. Streets fast and dangerous and the experiences in the closed apartments batter against his seemingly imperturbable being. Each of the night deliveries made by Hussein opens up a crack in Iranian society casting momentary light on the dark disturbed regions of this culture experienced and filmed like an underworld. A dream like underworld.
And then there is day when the netherworld slips away and the dream ends. And Hussein still on the bike still looking through the crack in the screen is locked into his own contradiction. He has been set up to marry – an honourable marriage to his best friends sister whom he respects. But for Hussein there is something not right. He should not marry it will continue to drivew his life out of his control, perhaps he has seen too much. We don’t know and it doesn’t matter there is no reason for us to specifically understand. It is not our business nor is it the film’s business. The film’s business is that the unwanted business of the marriage is instinctively employed by Hussein to break the circle. The ring breaks the circle.
The wedding ring foreshadowed from the start of the film is not wanted: the bride to be does not want it, Hussein does not want it for itself. The ring is that gap between desired and forbidden and the unattainable. The ring is unattainable because of its grossly expensive price, forbidden also because it is part of a world in which the Husseins of this world simply do not exist.
The logic that Hussein comes to is to break the schizoid vicuous circle by having the ring. He undertakes an armed robbery to have the ring he desires, not for itself, but for its intrinsic value as something that he is not allowed to have. The robbery is amateur in conception and execution. For Hussein it is clear that it doesn’t matter whether this robbery is sucessful or unsucessful. What matters is to say no; what matters is that to take control. He is redeemed by his action. The robbery ends in fiasco: Hussein shoots himself. The film comes the full circle but the existential knot is cut.
The film is sometimes like a fusion between the style of Alphaville and the content Taxi Driver, but without the Taxi Driver’s self indulgence and fake Hollywood bravura – simply staying true to the situation of the individual in the dark recesses of city society.

A Cut Above? by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 64, No. 22, November 2004]A Cut Above? by Tom Jennings  
[published in Freedom, Vol. 64, No. 22, November 2004]
  
In the Cut’s exploration of women’s sexuality and personal agency continues director Jane Campion’s project (The Piano, Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke) to represent, in diverse contexts, the ambivalence, conflict and pain, and the potential for individual freedom, growth and fulfilment, found in women’s experiences in the face of the powerful forces – both internal and external – which constrain all of our efforts to live better lives. In its sophistication and hard-won optimism, it’s probably her best yet.
 
Based on a bestseller by Susanna Moore, who co-wrote the screenplay with Campion, In the Cut references many cinematic subgenres – a ‘postmodern’ strategy which may merely reinforce and celebrate shallow style over content, but here enhances depth and potency. Dion Beebe’s cinematography conveys well the claustrophobic paranoia of life in New York (or any contemporary city) with an inspired combination of blurring and sharp focus, restless camera movement and judicious hints of classic film noir’s dark shadows and neo-noir’s flashiness. But rather than mysterious femme fatales or the glossy predators of The Last Seduction et al, these female characters echo the troubled formulae of sexual expression, pleasure and danger found in films like Klute (1971) and Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977). Similarly, while promoted as ‘erotic thriller’, the narrative has more in common with straight-to-video softcore pornography –often foregrounding female erotic sensibility and empowerment – rather than the blatantly exploitative and hysterically misogynist blockbusters based on softcore source material, such as Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct.
 
Further complicating the identification of viewers with the stars, both female leads are cast against type – Meg Ryan from vacuous romantic comedies, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as hapless, helpless and not at all a latter-day Katherine Hepburn. Finally, unflattering close-ups and lack of make-up (among other devices) avoid the cheap titillation that the explicit sexual imagery might otherwise provide in portraying the complexities of desire. Succeeding in this precarious balance places In the Cut in the company of the new wave of European art cinema aspiring to sexual-emotional ‘realism’ – e.g. L’Ennui (1998),  Romance (1999), Le Secret (2000), The Piano Teacher (2001) and Swimming Pool (2002). However, In the Cut’s layering of genre conventions and resolutely female perspective arguably take it to a level beyond even these brave and intelligent films.
 
Although making the detective story work was felt by Campion to be crucial, many mainstream critics have panned In the Cut as a failure on this score. True, the police investigation procedure is shoddy, and the poor calibre of the red herrings allows viewers to easily identify the psychokiller. But then bungled policework is hardly uncommon where women victims have ‘dubious morals’; and there was only time to sketch the various male ‘suspects’ (candidates as lovers and/or murderers) who were treated fully in the novel.  But anyway, all this misses the point, because the crime framework was primarily deployed to weave together Meg Ryan’s character Frannie’s efforts, on several levels, to make sense of life. Her Oedipal fantasies of  her parents’ courtship, her own awakening desires and fears, and her public, professional role as an English professor researching urban slang and poetry – all revolve around romantic myths and conventions, hope and tragedy. In short, her quest is to understand the relationships –  both in language and culture, and in bodily, lived reality – between the search for passionate fulfilment and the risk of spiritual death. And while psychological dynamics, identity and desire have been underlying motors for many crime narratives (classic private dicks/dangerous women; Hitchcock’s vulgar Freudianism; lesbian detective fiction), this film achieves an unusually intricate mesh of popular cultural form, gender-political content and philosophical depth.
 
 
A Cut Above?
 
Campion’s films, though, can hardly even begin to resolve some dilemmas. In particular, her heroines’ white middle class trajectories damage any feminist generalisability. In The Piano, Ada (the luminous Holly Hunter) exemplified high-bourgeois colonial taste, reproducing perceptions of New Zealand plantation Maoris as lazy, passive subhumans – and only Harvey Keitel’s Baines  (a Western immigrant ‘gone native’) offered a path to aesthetic, sexual and economic salvation. Things are a little less static in the multicultural modernity of In the Cut, where Frannie’s stepsister (Leigh) has a lower class background –  hinting at a rather different perspective on women ‘choosing’ physical danger in pursuit of pleasure. But the stereotypical shorthand of race, ethnicity and class still signpost the male threat – the working class Irish/Hispanic cops’ schoolboy sexism and the Black student’s lack of sexual restraint carry a sinister charge hardly matched by the inadequate narcissism of Frannie’s WASP middle class ex. At least, though, the ascription of obsessive, delusional, violent and masochistic tendencies are spread around more among the characters, making possible a response in terms of our own social situations.
 
Finally, the lack of any sense of collectivity obscures the political usefulness of stories like In the Cut. However, it can be read as pointing towards the whole array of interconnecting levels where liberation is sought – from the unconscious, social, and cultural to the public and institutional – in all of which intimate personal relations are likely to be heavily implicated. The film’s central (erotic) relationship is the most convincing and promising, with characters who admit their flaws and share vulnerability. That prospects for change and redemption in an honesty of purpose are best found in the messy human reality of everyday life, rather than in the deadly idealisation of grand romantic narratives, should be an affirming message for revolutionaries as well as those seeking love.
 
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Moral Politics at Play School by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 11, June 2005]

Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators has some interesting angles despite its sneering at childish idealism, finds Tom JenningsMoral Politics at Play School by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 11, June 2005]
 
 
Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators has some interesting angles despite its sneering at childish idealism, finds Tom Jennings
 
The Edukators surf the new wave of smart, sophisticated and popular German language cinema which – even better – tackles ticklishly controversial social and political subject matter.1 Here Jan (Daniel Brühl), Peter (Stipe Erceg) and Jule (Julia Jentsch) manifest their revolutionary zest in a postmodern pastiche of cod-situationism, terrorising the upper classes by rearranging their furniture to prefigure revolution turning the world upside down. The ethics of violence loom once their playful innocence turns sour in the crucible of realpolitik (symbolised by Burghart Klaussner’s yuppie tycoon), and the spectres of Baader-Meinhoff and all the other spectacular disasters of modern ‘propaganda by the deed’ cloud the horizon. Tackling far too many complex levels at once, excessive ambition here inevitably trivialises and patronises much more than it edukates.
 
True, most cinematic treatments so far have conceived the Western urban guerilla purely in terms of personal conflicts and inadequacies fully determining political motivation, consciousness and action – with attention to character depth and ideology in the context of involvement in real struggle omitted in the unseemly haste to ram home the message that all resistance is futile.2 This film sidesteps such conclusions, while flirting with them – for example the only genuine activism we see is an earnestly inoffensive anti-sweatshop high street demo mopped up by the riot squad. And, whereas many of the hundreds of thousands descending on meetings of the G8 and other organs of the New World Order have already moved robustly beyond the celebratory passivity of ‘Feed the World’ charitability, concrete agendas resonating with the everyday concerns of ordinary folk have yet to crystallise. If you can stomach its contempt (and total ignorance of current radical politics), this is an enjoyable and entertaining contribution (of sorts) to such debate.
 
Co-writer (with Katharina Held) and director Hans Weingartner claimed to want to depict the quandary facing contemporary European youth in embracing revolutionary politics – given the death of communism, decline of the Left and neoliberal triumphalism. He didn’t specify exactly which youth he meant, and the social background and present position of his protaonists are somewhat lost in translation. Worse – and with a significance unnoticed by the critics – the film’s title mutates from the evocatively ominous ‘Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei’ (‘The fat years are over’) to the vaguely uplifting progressivism of the English release. As one of the slogans graffitied on yacht club members’ walls,3 the original emphasis appears to identify the trio’s targets, but actually refers to their political discourse itself – the edukators’ relentlessly (and tiresomely) moralising judgmentalism representing conversations with the ruling classes rather than any autonomous sentiment of what might be done about them.
 
The only glimmer of strategic savvy is Jan and Peter’s relish at newspaper coverage of their growing notoriety, anticipating a copycat epidemic of enforced feng shui infecting the private spaces of power.4 This is an amusing (if unthreatening) fantasy of a ‘revolutionary situation’ – though which historical agents might foster the transition from home makeover to insurrection are similarly unclear. The plot enlightens us in this respect in the transition from student pranks to serious matters of life and death, where Jule’s experiences as a downmarket femme fatale undermine the Boys Own adventure. Her humiliation by the boss and patrons of a posh restaurant compound her outrage at the ‘injustice’ she suffers, having been diverted from aspirations for a comfortably useful life as a teacher by her uninsured collision with Hardenberg’s Beamer. The ensuing ‘oppressiveness’ of damages payments leads to her dead-end waitressing, and then further blunders – hitting his pad on a whim, the kidnapping, and subsequent shilly-shallying disarray.
 
 
Moral Politics at Play School
 
Put bluntly, the ‘fat years’ are certainly not finished for the rich – and given their propensity for rapid-fire condemnatory statistics, the edukators would hardly be unaware of this. But the good times are precisely over for the contemporary new middle classes facing the rapid proletarianising precariousness of their previous privileges.5 Read through conventional Freudian spectacles, these late babyboomers are rebelling against the world bequeathed to them by their parents. In routine middle class adolescent fashion, their moral disgust clothes itself in rhetoric of the global poor, but its emotional force derives more from self-pity and criteria of taste and lifestyle. These are values inculcated in them by, and showing their complicity with, consumer society – reproduced also in the camera’s loving fascination with those sumptuous but emotionally frigid mansions. Meanwhile, the older generations grew up with utopian dreams of a better society, but went with the flow trying to get by – only to get slapped in the face by the infantile tantrums and highminded self-indulgence of their kids.
 
Then, when the power relations are reversed, so too is the conventional ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Secluded with fat cat hostage in the mountains, our heroes are seduced by his self-effacing fatherly realism and personal charm, forking out for provisions and disclosing that, back in the day, he too was a revolutionary hanging out with the Berlin class of ’68 SDS leadership. The pace of The Edukators slows to a standstill as the utter bankruptcy of their oppositional project becomes clear – most fatally flawed from its dependence on the enemy to provide tactical momentum. At the end they waken from their hypnotic trance in thrall to bourgeois power, having learned that comradeship can transcend Oedipal complexes and the complexities of love. Again, their decision to break properly from their roots is precipitated by Hardenberg’s entirely predictable betrayal, but the upbeat denouement shows the newly adult edukators outwitting the government. And who knows, if they get round to formulating worthwhile aims external to their insecure egos, they might yet proceed to genuinely radical shenanigans …
 
 
Notes 
1. including the good humour of Goodbye Lenin (dir. Wolfgang Becker; also starring Daniel Brühl), Michael Haneke’s savage dissections of  bourgeois mores, and Fatih Akin’s subversive genius – all reaching beyond the various austere modernisms, elitist arrogances and existential angstiness of Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder et al.
 
2. Recent examples being Marco Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night (Red Brigades) and Robert Stone’s Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (Symbionese Liberation Army). Manuel Huerga’s forthcoming Salvador (yet again starring Brühl) may or may not buck the trend in portraying anarchist bank robber Salvador Puig Antich (the last Spaniard garrotted under Franco).
 
3. along with strictures such as ‘You have too much money’ (duh!).
 
4. the results of which suggestively resemble so much contemporary installation art.
 
5. see contributions to Mute, issue 29, which usefully outline European ‘precarity’ theory and practice so far (www.metamute.com).
 
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Ydessa, the Bears, and etc. Agnes Varda – Fr 2004

viewed: Film Forum, New York, 26 Feb 2005 – ticket price Ydessa, the Bears, and etc.     Agnes Varda – Fr 2004
viewed: Film Forum, New York, 26 Feb 2005 – ticket price
 
The avowed intent of Agnes Varda in her documentary films is to explore photography and its ability to preserve a moment for eternity while remaining open to an array of interpretations that themselves evolve over time.   In relation to Ydessa, the Bears, and etc. this statement of intent sounds to me both unimaginative and trite.  A tagline that might come from a Fuji film ad accompanied by a banal truism about the nature of perception and understanding.  However,  Ydessa, the bears, and etc delivers a spacio-temporal study that engages with both private and personal history in a disturbing and clever simply shot film with an extraordinary subject at the centre of its focusing. There is also the question of to what exactly, “….and etc.” that is part of the title, points.
 
Varda’s film treats of a personal story of an unusual subject.  Ydessa is a jewish woman born in 1948 in Germany to parents who were both survivors of Auschwitz.  We see a picture of Ydessa as a child  tucked up in bed with her teddy bear.  Her parents remained living in Germany until Ydessa was 5 at which time they emigrated to Toronto.  We are never told anything of the circumstances determining this emigration.  Perhaps that is part of the question raised by the ‘and etc.’   What we glean from the film is that its subject Ydessa is a very very rich woman who plays a significant role in the Toronto art and gallery scene.
 
The story jumps 55 years from the emigration to Canada back to Germany: to an exhibition at the Munich Kunsthaus of an exhibition designed presented and curated by Ydessa, of Ydessa’s collection of photographs of people with Teddy Bears taken in a vast array of situations and settings.   The Kunsthaus was built by Hitler as a gallery for pure correct Nazi art and artists.  In the main room of this Kunsthaus show, Ydessa’s photos are hung on the walls and exhibited closely together, and mounted from about 6 inches off the floor almost up to ceiling.  The impression is of an overwhelming density of photos crowded into too small a space.
 
 The film has its first meeting/interview with Ydessa at her gallery in Toronto.  Although we hear the questions Varda puts to Ydessa; it’s as if we see the replies.  We see the replies because this interview is shot in close-up and it’s as if Ydessa’s  replies to Varda are in fact inscribed into Ydessa’s extraordinary face.  It is the face that gives the answers.  It is a face that demands fascination.  On the close-up inspection given us by Varda’s shot, Ydessa’s face has a twisted contorted aspect – perhaps she has had a stroke or perhaps she has been under the knife of cosmetic surgery. Perhaps not. Pain, compressed pain is burnt into every pore of this face,  pain that has now frozen into a look of death. 
 
Subjective/objective?  My companion at the film simply couldn’t look at Ydessa.  Perhaps this reaction is extreme.  The response of one interviewee at Ydessa’s exhibition at the Kunsthaus to Varda’s question of how she found the Teddy Bear photo exhibition, was to say that: ‘… it was like ….death.’  Death haunts this film as a sort of aesthetic supplement to what we see on the screen.  We do hear Ydessa’s words as she connects the early photo of her with her Teddy to a later impulsion to collect photographs of the same sort.  It seems reasonable enough.  Later in the film we learn from her how rare and difficult to find such photos are; and that locating them becomes an obsession pursued relentlessly through contacts in the art world, auction houses and of course on the net – ebay.   An activity of a driven nature pursued by a wealthy woman with huge resources of time and money.  A driven woman.  Could childhood memory alone, a sentimental personal ikonography be sufficient to energise the drive?  Or is it valid to ask supplementary questions?
 
Her parents were inmates in a German concentration camp – Auschwitz.  Ydessa lives in Toronto.  She lives alone in a huge English style manor house with 18 bedrooms.  She lives in this space that is home to her Teddy Bear photographs and her collection of sizeally inverted sculptures that represent as small some things that should be big(like a bathroom suite) and as big, some things that should be small( a Zippo lighter) as if the world had been made subject to a corrective perspective on importance.  The thought occurs that perhaps being in a death camp also subjected the victims to inverted shifts in perspective.
 
Most of the Teddy Bear pictures in Ydessa’s collection predate the second world war and were taken in Germany and the USA.   The photographs show people in all sorts of situations:  children alone(in bed, in gardens, dressed up, on tricycle), family groups(at the seaside, or more formally at the photographic studio) and associational groups(sports clubs, drinking clubs, armed forces) .  And certainly Nazi party members are well represented.  But putting the latter consideration aside or in some form of bracketing, something in the nature of the situations and many of the backgrounds of these photographs representing hundreds of different families, set as they are on the plane of the ordinary and everyday, recalls to my mind only one other set of groupings: the photos of concentration camp victims taken before the catastrophe.  These groups often represented by prosperous Berlin Jews look out not just from another era, but from a collective state of mind in which they were unaware of their destiny as Jews in Germany.  The factor of randomness underlying the survival of these ordinary photographs taken to perpetuate or commemorate individuals and groups underlies their poignancy as does our knowledge that most of the people depicted will be murdered in the concentration and death camps. 
 
The Teddy Bear pictures too have survived through the forces of random selection.  And in Ydessa’s curatorship their destiny has been to be collected together individually and then exhibited as a concentration of images.   It is not the individual photos that stand out as memorable in this context: it is their concentration that is the salient feature of the show.  A concentration that overwhelms, not just the people attending the Kunsthaus who in interview with Varda attest to their confusion in being confronted with this dense presentation, but also the viewers of the film as they scan the walls of the space wallpapered with the imagery.  The fate of the Teddy Bear Photographs is also ultimately to be confined in a sort concentration camp, sanctioned by art.   There is another room in the exhibition.  You enter; the walls are painted white.  The room is an empty save for a life size figure kneeling on the floor as if in prayer:  it is a model of Adolf Hitler. And I wonder: is Ydessa a curator or a deterritorialised camp commandant?
 
As the film unwinds – and it is a supple engrossing unwinding – it is clear that Agnes Varda is treating her material with a light touch.(except perhaps the close ups of Ydessa.  They press on me, connecting to ideas that link physical outer form with inner states; asking questions of by what outer marks individuals may be linked to their collective histories. Unfashionable stuff.)  Ydessa, the bears, and etc. is certainly open to different readings of Ydessa and her world, as long as the historical material that is embedded in the film is regarded as incidental and not part of a structured layering.  If the material is suddenly seen as a historical layering, then Ydessa, both her identity and her physical features, her migration from Germany to Canada, her wealth(unexplained), her obsessive pictures of people with Teddy bears, all take place and can be understood in the historical context of the Jewish Hollocaust.  And the ‘…and etc.’ of the title points to a supplementary aesthetic of time moulding the structure(the film has the formality of a uundertakers) and figuration of the film as a death mask.
adrin neatrour       3 March 05
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk