Film Review

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).
 
 
 
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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

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