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.

Boxing Booth – Adrin Neatrour 1984

Sceened at Side Cinema 7 2 04

Directors commentsBoxing Booth – Adrin Neatrour 1984
Sceened at Side Cinema 7 2 04
Directors comments
A friend asked me guess the composer of a piece of music he was playing. It sounded contemporary and I thought it might be Arvo Part. In fact it was Beethoven, one of the last quartets he wrote. Viewing my film 20 years after making it brings home how time referenced films are. The look and the feel of what we see are frozen into time. Realised immediate archaism. There are perhaps a few exceptions: film being film everyone will have their list of exceptions. Not only does film comprise multiple indicators and signs of its era or year of production even; but its medium its style and its structure all connote specific temporal provenance. To exist as archive does not mean that old films lack relevance meaning or the immediacy of saying something to us now – independent of historical signification or nostalgic attraction. And this was the question I wanted to pose about my film.
When viewing Boxing Booth I tried to look exactly at what was on the screen. This was torture. The editing sometimes seemed awkward and lacking rhythm; the dialogue sometimes arch and self conscious. But although I cringed and hated this they were central to the integrity of the film which was a self portrait emeshed in a documentary about the old fairground Boxing Booth. This was me. And I wasn’t smooth and still ain’t – though I have learnt to mimic smoothness. This was me as was, bad cuts silly lines and all. It was me taking on the boxing booth to find pain as a means of atoning a failed relationship and a messy abortion. It was made as my gesture. I think the film archaic as it looks still holds to this intention of seeking out judgement as self chastisement.
There is another aspect that struck me on reviewing this film – how little I’ve changed. Not physically but rather in mind in the way I make films. I regard this as my first film because I made the discovery that I wanted the films I made to be a journey started without destination or certain outcome in mind. Boxing Booth was started with the idea that I would travel with the fair and when the time came take my turn. I did not know the outcome of the film when I started making it: I knew there was a situation in which the possibility of a film existed, but that possibility could only become actual if my entire being was concentrated into it and I had confidence in the momentary forces that could resolve into the imagery action and sounds of film. But the initial step was a act of faith: there was No film. No script. Only the chance of movement.
Looking at the film at this screening I also realised that it was important for me to have made a film about myself that incorporated physical revelation and attempted honesty. The taking of unadorned and often ugly self as subject matter gave self confidence to me as a film maker. It somehow meant that in the future, as long as I retained humility before all life, that I was the equal of the people with whom I worked to make film. No matter what the subject matter – death – pain – dishonesty – I had been there in my film. And there was confidence in having made that trip that gave me the internalised right to intrude. I don’t say that my intrusions should be accepted; often they have not been. But I was not afraid on making demands; I ask questions as an equal not as a child.

New Age Paranoia by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 24, December 2004]New Age Paranoia by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 24, December 2004]
 
 
Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate effectively updates John Frankenheimer’s classic 1962 Cold War conspiracy thriller – with Gulf rather than Korean War veterans brainwashed into becoming political moles and assassins by corporate, not Russian, agents. Given the present ‘War on Terror’ and the better-understood amoral criminality of the military-industrial complex (as well as the prevalence of government via mythology, mystification and spin), these revisions seem appropriate – as do the science-fictional (but only just!) electronic surgical implants replacing good old-fashioned behavioural conditioning. The unfolding plot (in both senses) shows the Army bureaucrat (Denzel Washington in Frank Sinatra’s role) and Vice Presidential candidate (Liev Shrieber for Laurence Harvey) gradually resisting their ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ zombification amid manipulation by Shreiber’s Senator mother (Meryl Streep instead of Angela Lansbury) and sundry political, big business and media masterminds, crooks, lobbyists, lackeys and lickspittles.
 
However, while the new denouement is very neat, we lose much of the political sharpness of the source novel by Richard Condon,* wherein McCarthyism succeeded thanks to the Soviet plotters who found it thoroughly congenial to their authoritarian aims – a fascinating, if muddled, attempt to disentangle the contradictions of right-wing politics. Unfortunately, the supposedly liberal-left Demme substitutes benign intelligence agencies which only ever use dirty tricks to foil the multinational menace (I kid you not!) and honourable old-school patriotic Party patricians who have fought corporate takeover for years (yeah, right …).
 
Conspiracies have long been fertile territory for cinema – where the close-up simulation of intimacy renders historical phenomena in individual terms. Action films hysterically mobilise adolescent masculinist muscle in desperate response, whereas at least political thrillers sense the world’s complexity. And given that paranoia represents the psychotic underbelly of individualism, parapolitics likewise seductively suggests that humanity’s ills result from the hidden agendas of evil elites. Of course the latter exist, and create havoc. But the more difficult truth – that domination is sedimented into the routine material of institutions, discourses, bodies, societies and economies – remains opaque to mainstream media, culture and politics. Both Manchurian Candidates aspire to stir up the murky depths. In their different ways, both fail enjoyably.
 
* author of Winter Kills – which similarly smuggled unusually interesting political speculation into Hollywood (dir. William Richert, 1979).
 
 
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

The Silence between two Thoughts – Babak Payami – Iran – 2003

The Other Cinema – London 12 June 04
The Silence between two Thoughts  – Babak  Payami – Iran – 2003
The Other Cinema – London 12 June 04
In Iran they imprison filmmakers for making films and censure and ban their films.  The mullahs confiscated the negative of Babak Payami’s film but he pieced it together from scraps and virtual slithers garnered from one light colour rushes tape and captured fragments.(I remember when the US abandoned their Iranian embassy in 1979 after the Islamic revolution the CIA station shredded all its secret files and the revolutionary guards spent 5 years reconstituting these shards of intelligence back to their complete and revealing substantial form)  Payami’s restored film in a battered and desaturated print shimmers through the projector an assertion of life over death,  voice over silence. 
Two thoughts – they can only be life and death.  The village has been overwhelmed by a regime, a curse of death which advances as a polyevaporative force sucking out the moisture from life,  leaching the water from the earth.  The camera becomes one with the relentless creep of this spreading dryness tracking and panning with the process of desiccation.
The village has been duped or tricked in to accepting the religious authority of a prophet called Hadji.  The belief system postpones the execution of a virgin so that she may first be deflowered and with hymen broken caste down to hell. The executioner, the film’s protagonist stays his hand.  “But where is it written ?” he asks of Hadji.   There is no answer. Only silence. Perhaps it is written in the sand.  The executioner becomes silence.  His brain is dried out by the aridity of a theology that can equates hymeneal blood with the blood that is death.   “…where is it written?   There is no reply.  He is turned to stone.  Like the crumbling walls and cracking surfaces. Dry and silenced.  Tongue tied.  No answer to the riddle of the virgin. Tongue tied.   He has no words to say no. He has no lines of escape.  When theological or ideological babble sequester the working of mind silence is the price that is paid.  In the dryness of the silence  death comes and leads the way forward through the half light into darkness.  The riddle of the virgin is necessary.    
As the film moves over the psychotic landscape from face to wall to earth the dryness lays over the village like a spell in a fairy tale.   Like the impenetrable vegetative growth that surrounds Sleeping Beauty.  The impenetrable babble of dried out theology covers everything.  This is a film of dust.  As with Marx and with fairy tales situations change because of they are unable to contain the forces of their own inherent contradictions.  It is possible to awake from the dream.  The numinous quality of water and women force open our eyes.  In their wild dance at the end of their pilgrimage the village women release a sweated energy which smashes the circuitry of dryness and takes possession of the film.  In the sequence after the dance of the women there is the moment of water.  A moment of magic which breaks the spell of dryness.  We awake from the spell.  The young virgin prisoner stands in front of a fathomless dark container of crystal clear water.  At this point only an action can destroy the silence not words.   Her hands break the surface of the water immersing completely combining with the fluid.  At once the curse is banished the weight lifted.  Too late for those trapped in silence.   Afterwards it is not possible to know if anything has changed, we cannot see that far but dryness has experienced the power of water to germinate and purify.  Adrin Neatrour 21 June 04

Dogville Rendezvous by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 7, April 2004]

In some ways a marvellous film, Dogville is at root a con trick – which neither its director nor the critics acknowledge, argues Tom JenningsDogville Rendezvous by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 7, April 2004]
 
 
In some ways a marvellous film, Dogville is at root a con trick – which neither its director nor the critics acknowledge, argues Tom Jennings
 
In Dogville, Lars Von Trier claims to tackle big themes – (among others) religion and humanism; a community’s treatment of refugees; forgiveness and revenge; and the nature of modern (US) society. If that wasn’t enough, we’re saddled with various devices and genres – a starkly-lit, minimal, Brechtian set with white outlines painted on the floor instead of walls and roads; Dickensian chapter titles and all-knowing European voiceover; the American tradition of literary fables and parables, and its cinema of small town life (from the Western and Frank Capra through to David Lynch); all filmed in jerky digital video with realistic sound effects bearing little or no relation to the visual aesthetic. Despite vast overegging, the pudding’s artifice unexpectedly works, in the sense of fully engaging viewers with emotional power and immediacy for all three hours – justifying Von Trier’s ambition in artistic terms at least. In the calibre of its philosophy and politics, though, the film narrative suffers a similar fate to the mainstream bourgeois culture parodied – barely even raising the questions it purports to explore. But, unlike the director’s previous pretensions to profundity – e.g. Breaking The Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), Dancing In The Dark (2000) – this heroic failure still gives more food for thought than most entertaining provocations can aspire to.
 
A glamorous Grace (Nicole Kidman) seeks refuge from a carload of heavies in a bleak Rockies village where a selection of stock stereotypes eke out an impoverished living. Middle class Tom (Paul Bettany) persuades the town meeting to grant her sanctuary in exchange for her communal labour, as part of his omnipotent fantasy of fashioning noble meaning in his life. The superb ensemble acting (particularly Kidman’s open-hearted humility) makes believable the defrosting of Dogville’s chilly conformist piety into something like loving collectivity, making its subsequent cruelty to her when the authorities close in all the more shocking. Once Grace exposes Tom’s motives he grasses her up, and after a lofty confab with her bigshot father his henchmen massacre the townspeople.
 
In effect, the structural trickery and cliched characterisation conceal Dogville’s underlying dishonesty. Grace is no outsider of equal status – she is not only posh, but specifically represents those historically responsible for the townspeople’s miserable grind. The twists and turns of the melodrama hinge on their response to this history – displaced onto her since active struggle against oppression has long since disappeared from their consciousness, just as the elite and their money have absconded over the mountain passes. This comprehensively compromises all talk of faith, arrogance and redemption among ordinary people, leaving the film merely as a meditation on the duplicitous malevolence of institutions whose pious pontification is ably backed up by their cultural lapdogs – in this case the megalomania of cinema, recalling Paul Virilio’s metaphor of it as a (class) ‘war machine’.
 
It certainly isn’t the anti-American tract many have supposed – it could have been set anywhere, although local idiom and provenance were obviously necessary; and box office returns would have suffered if it had been set in the director’s native Denmark. So, the harrowing final credits sequence of photographs from the 1930s US Depression documents the contemporary reality of Dogville’s period, with the clear implication that its contrived horror can in some way illuminate or explain the human condition and the real tragedies of history. But the hysterical hubris of the director, along with the great cultural traditions he references, merely exemplify the ascription of evil to the weaknesses of us lesser beings, which it is then the godlike responsibility of power to clean up (the state, capitalism or other gangsters in the political economy; and their religious and artistic apologists in the imaginative realm). Like many former New Left utopians, Von Trier delights in focusing his misanthropy on the potential for solidarity among us hapless ordinary dogs and bitches – which fails miserably due to our venality. Whereas in their moral superiority, the rich and powerful create spectacular havoc. Responding to this pessimism, we might intuit that the former is to a large degree (whether by accident or design) sedimented and structured into our lives precisely by the activities of the latter – and, adding insult to injury, subsequently interpreted as evidence of our unworthy status. OK, so we’re reminded what a vicious doghouse we’re in, but how we get out is trickier still. Unfortunately, amongst its other agendas and subtexts – which are accomplished most impressively – this is a tale that Dogville refuses to wag.
 
 
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Barmy Liberation Army by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 20, October 2005]

Guerilla: the Taking of Patty Hearst (dir. Robert Stone)Barmy Liberation Army by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 20, October 2005]
 
 Guerilla: the Taking of Patty Hearst (dir. Robert Stone) 
Screening on BBC2 on September 12th, Guerilla: the Taking of Patty Hearst is a feature from veteran liberal documentarist Robert Stone tracing the career of the Symbionese Liberation Army – a mainly middle class white student militia engaged in armed struggle in early 1970s California ‘on behalf of’ Black and working class Americans. Clandestine interviews with surviving SLA founders Russ Little and Mike Bortin, along with the views of prominent journalists covering the story, an FBI case officer and hostage negotiator, are expertly woven together with found footage of the most dramatic events and other material in a vivid, snappy narrative that captures the imagination while emphasising the wider context and drawing interesting parallels with the present.
 
The very first modern media circus followed the SLA kidnap of Patty Hearst – heir of the huge media conglomerate built by grandad William (‘Citizen Kane’) Randolph – and, in regularly ending her communiqués with: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the lives of the people”, her apparent ‘conversion’ to the anti-government cause. This was preceded and followed by generally botched SLA actions – assassinations, bank robberies, minor shoplifting – and when the initial ransom demanding exchange for imprisoned comrades also failed, the Hearst family agreed to distribute m dollars-worth of ‘food aid’ to the Bay Area poor. Even this ended in riots since the authorities were equally inept, and a vastly excessive SWAT shoot-out in South Central LA left most of the cadre dead.
 
 
Barmy Liberation Army 
Bortin stresses the frustration of educated youth after the optimism of the 1960s – what with poverty and racism at home, the arms race, and especially Vietnam: “We grew up being told we saved the world from Hitler … but we’re now being Hitler”. Little  concludes “The country was being run by criminals … I feel sad that I felt forced to extremes by Nixon and his thugs”. And while those from less sheltered backgrounds probably found the corruption of power less surprising, many others who turned to armed rebellion at that time managed without quite so much arrogance, pompousness and politically clueless sub-Maoist posturing as the SLA (not that the Black Panthers, MOVE organisation or Weather Underground, etc, ultimately fared much better). However, the SLA’s narcissistic fascination with media responses rather than organic links with struggle had more in common with later, equally futile, urban guerilla groups such as those in Europe – condemning them as grist to the Spectacular mill while also supplying their propaganda coup courtesy of the American princess.
 
Nevertheless Guerilla’s subtitle is for marketing purposes only, and the tedious celebrity autopsy of whether Hearst (who endorses this film) really was the brainwashed Stockholm Syndrome stooge she claimed is rightly avoided. The motivations for making the film included the 9/1 experience, the government use of ‘terrorism’ to erode civil liberties and the central role of the media in setting and pursuing agendas in this morass – and the coverage of the SLA’s exploits coincided with major technological and political developments in that industry (plus retrospective prosecutions have jailed several members since the film was made –  including Bortin). As for the group itself, Stone thinks that their mistake was not taking “the moral high ground, like Gandhi”. But moral certainty and self-righteousness was precisely the fundamental flaw, as within all grandiose vanguards bolstering each other’s inflated self-importance. Whereas humility, integrity and ethical transparency measured collectively at, by and for the grass-roots can avoid both the delusions of bourgeois radicalism flirting with power and the fatal distraction with the vicissitudes of newsworthiness.
 
 
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Zatoichi – Takashi Kitano – Japan 2003 Zatoichi – Takashi Kitano – Japan 2003
Takashi’s film starts where it should have finished with Takashi remembering that what film does best is movement: shifting consciousness across many levels of perception through movement.
Zatoichi closes with an unabashed rhythmic celebration of the film itself. A hip hop Hollywood dance routine that’s full of life and movement as the caste insinuate themselves into the choreography and we see everyone, the good the bad and the ugly, let rip in the music. In comparison the rest of the film is static. As actor/director Zatoichi is Takashi’s homage to Kabuki – Japanese popular theatre in which stock characters wearing heavy make-up and mask mix theatrical overstatement with rude farce and melodrama. Kabuki tells traditional stories told in a specific theatrical tradition and mode – different to but not dissimilar from pantomime. Film homage always risks dieing on its feet. Something to do with film and formal respect being a potentially ponderous combination. And in Zatoichi the Kabuki theatric form isn’t really shifted or structurally unravelled. There is immobility at the centre of the movie. The framing of the action, the shot-reaction shot sequences, the tracks and cranes are all heavy handed. The camera is not looking for anything. Its dead. the boundaries and interstitial zones marking potential areas of development and concern are unexplored. Except.

Except for some brief almost glossed over sequences in Zatoichi where the camera looks at peasants as they work the fields and then prepare for what looks like some sort of fertility festival(large life sized corn dollies in evidence). In these truncated moments we glimpse the possibility of a film energised by rhythms and tempos of the earth. But these trail off to become no more than cinematic gesture.
In Zatoichi what we have is a deadened outer theatrical form which gives us the retinal layered theatric experience of watching: actors playing yakuza gangsters in kimonos and dressing gowns(fancy dress) – some of them engagingly bald – hacking each other to death at regular interludes to gratify the needs of a revenge driven back story. It’s regurgitated reimported spaghetti Western with a catch all fake set which in long shot (except for the bridge which is quintessentially Japanese) suggests the plywood back lots of Hollywood Western.
If it wasn’t for the detail that this was Takashi’s film I would let it pass as not my kind of movie. But coming out of a director who has demonstrated flare sensibility and insight into the potential of filmic forms, Zatoichi needed further thought.
Even on its own terms the oppositions that it set in place are not interesting in themselves. The blind man who ‘sees’ everything is not interesting as it deprives him of his nature de-natures him. And the boy who chooses to be a geisha and the old gang boss who poses as a pot boy(usual suspect) are simply formal requisites of the narrative, purely mechanical theatric devices and treated as such.
Although Takashi as the blind warrior masseur has a winsome charm of a smile and the camera likes him and his haircut(well so it should) the character is caught in a major dilemma. Unlike – Clint Eastwood films for instance – Zatoichi can’t do eyes, because the character is blind. As the film fails to locate any affective replacement for the eye, the film’s protagonist mechanically dissolves as the film progresses – interest in him dissipates. And the idea of playing the blind man by having his eyes closed doesn’t work: the theatrical ‘play’ inherent in this idea allows does not compensate for its lack of filmic conceit.
Coming out of the film left me with the thought that Takashi needs to improve his massage technique. The massage he gives to the woman in the film was as unconvincing as his ability to massage the life out of costumes.
Zatoichi will probably make the money but leaves me wondering if this was the driving reason behind the film. adrin neatrour – 21 March 2004.

Shadows – John Cassavetes -USA 1958 Ben Carruthers Lelia Goldoni Hugh Hurd

Viewed Side Cinema: 13 November 2005 – dvd – ticket price £3-50Shadows – John Cassavetes -USA 1958  Ben Carruthers  Lelia Goldoni Hugh Hurd
Viewed Side Cinema: 13 November 2005 – dvd – ticket price £3-50
 
Retro-crit
 
Like a bomb going off…..
 
The first hit is the most intense.  Shadows is Cassavetes’ first film and its like he’s mainlining on some potent essence.   Shadows is the rush of the real through the veins of consciousness.   He’s the poet who captures the crazed and phased world of New York.  As visionary he knows that the shadows that bleed through his lens are a true imprint of the times as they enfold him.
 
Like a bomb because this film is shot by compressing as tightly as possible the highly volatile elements of New York in the 1950’s.  This city-society was the crucible of the modern.  The beat ethos was redrawing the psychic map breaking down the defining social stratifications of sex class race and age.   Poetry art music film drugs suddenly become central to the parameters of the self as the new consumer driven communication industries took shape.  But in a crucial sense these industries hadn’t yet taken on a defining shape.  So Shadows begins at the beginning, a time when everything seems young, possible and full of liberating potential.  To the wail and burr of the jazz sax new personality types develop – the cool – the detached – the emotionally distanced –  sexes races developing attitude to survive the new processes of  radical individuation.  And Cassavetes sees all this.  And probes for the veins with the needle of his movie.    
 
Shadows like a bomb, a hit, because the film is shot almost entirely in close up to capture the generation of these New Yorkers.  Very few long shots, the opening club scene, a couple of street scenes, the sculpture garden, the rest is up close: very big close-ups of the faces of his characters. Cassavetes packs these faces and piles them into his frames.  One face two faces three faces four faces five faces squeezed togather as unstable gassious particles, compressed explosive charges that will detonate at the slightest provocation.
 
Cassavetes understands that it is through the faces of his actors, his living exemplars of the City that the fault lines and the vulnerabilities as well as th energy of this world will be seen.   The film can only be the film it is as a living laboritory because the actors played roles close to themselves – self projections – and within these roles found many of their own lines.  Within the encompassing embrace of Cassavetes, this is a film founded on individuation and all the acting has this quality.
 
The individuality of American society had been given a new edge by the beat ethos.  At an overt level there is a measure of solidarity shared values and attitudes in relation to the embracing of the hip and the rejection of the square.  But there is also a heightened competitive assertiveness in  a neo-Hobbsian war of all against all.  The rictus and the laugh define most of the close-up interaction.  The characters josh kid and joke with one another.  But subjected to the harsh light of Cassavetes’ lens the aggression underlying most of the relationships is laid bare.  Behind the smile and the bared teeth of the laugh lie the snarl and the growl.   And to formally express this reality Cassavetes makes radical use of framed space.    Loading his faces into frame, Cassavetes understands that this world is a milieu where personal space and body distance as segregation devices have been abolished.  Everyone sits very close in this world.  Cassavetes shoots in cabs in booths in compartments and packed club settings – all spaces designed to compress without discrimination.  And as he squeezes his people together he uses space as an intensity amplifier.  Denied physical space his characters spar and fight for psychic space, for that momentary instant at the top of the pile.  A continuous writhing heap characterised by the outward expression of conviviality and humour but underwritten by aggression that at any point may explode into violence.  And it does.  Brief unimportant interludes that permit regroupings.
 
Shadows is world – the hip world.  No story but incidents with individuals and groups working their way back and forth through the frame defining and redefining the action.
 
And why Shadows?  Impossible not to think of the idea of Plato’s cave.  Cassavetes making a point. Having his joke.  Shadows.  In the Platonic cave the prisoners sit in front of the fire and watch the shadows made on the wall by objects behind them. It is the only reality they know; they have no notion of the real world; they are deceived by shadows.  One of the prisoners escapes, and in the light of the sun sees the real things, but returning to the cave to enlighten the rest cannot convince them of the truth.  Cassavetes carries warning: however much the hip world thought it was being true to itself, alive on the beat the life, creating new being and new words, people were fooling themselves if they thought they could so easily escape the shadow of American culture and history.
Adrin Neatrour 25 Nov 05
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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