Film Review

The Fog of War – Errol Morris 2003 USA

Seen Tyneside Cinema Newcastle UKThe Fog of War – Errol Morris 2003 USA
Seen Tyneside Cinema Newcastle UK
I think that the Fog of Film is a good alternative title for this movie.  Film technically becomes fogged if exposed to light before going through the gate of the camera; artistically film gets fogged when the marketing intentions of the film makers delimits or distorts the light they can throw on the subject. 
At the core of this film there is a deeply ingrained dishonesty, in which the film’s structure and presentation confer a protective halo over the person of  Robert McNamara (US secretary of Defense 1961-67).   Whatever ‘mistakes’  McNamara admits to on camera such as the US declaration of war on North Vietnam and the subsequent carpet bombing of Vietnamese civilian populations, the film as vehicle transposes and elides these acts and omissions into mistakes, understandable mistakes rather than the consequence of deeper malaise in an empire out of control.  The interview of McNamara’s with its artsy framing, tasteful background, continuous jump cuts, slick computer graphics and archive footage represents the triumph of style over substance.
The USA as a deeply conservative and conformist consumer society has developed a culture that validates and evaluates reality through appraisal of image.  The concerns of the makers of visual products  are often to control and validate outer expressive gestures tokens and  signs at the cost of disregarding inner meaning.  This predominant concern with image and style at the expense of a concern to seek out the truth is particularly disturbing in documentary film about such a key figure in the development of US foreign policy.  But it is perhaps an inevitable concomitant of the featurisation of documentary films which now  pitch in the market of the large corporations to attract investment, either at the production or distribution end of the process.   The fog of film.
In Errol Morris’ film some of McNamara’s insights about what was happening in Vietnam have salience for the American Empire’s contemporary foreign policy, but he doesn’t talk about the internal driving mechanism of policy – long term industry and military perspective.  He doesn’t want to, and he’s a man who only talks about what he wants to, on his terms.  Like a written or unwritten contract.  But the result is that the overwhelming impression left of McNamara, is of McNamara as image.   The old senator, the Avatar who has achieved wisdom, the survivor who has a message for us from the past.   This image however is communicated not just through the form of the film  – the intercut interview – the settings – the cutting – but through its structure. The Fog of War is structured as “Ten Lessons and an Epilogue”  which leads the viewer of the film towards a quasi pedagogique reading with strong religious overtones.  This structure gives to McNamara an aura of the wise one and induces an inclination towards reverence, an inclination reinforced by the soundtrack.   
It was the Philip Glass score that alerted me to the nature of this film as a marketing device selling Robert McNamara rather than an instrument trying to seek truth.  Glass’ piece is a very classy  contemporary score, restrained almost to a fault, mixing interesting percussive effects with moody modal sequenciations.  Like the music accompanying certain kinds of adverts it is designed to make the selling proposition easy to swallow. The music evens out the film providing a consistent emotional tonality to  the  roller coaster ride of events punctuated by assassination wars deaths and bombings.   The music works to unify the film in the same way that McNamara’s life is unified by his implicit claim to have attained wisdom as a reward for surviving.   The selling proposition in Fog of War is that this is a classy piece of film making about a classy subject matter, Robert McNamara one of the erstwhile rulers of the planet.  Meet the Avatar.  Once he was a cold murderous Secretary of State for defense in love with mass bombing as a solution as long as was efficient; the bombs sent by his hand were responsible for mass destruction and killing mainly of Vietnamese but others as well.  Now he is still cold but old and wise.  Old and wise.
The pedagogique structure of the film, with its use of  twee title cards informs us that he has attained the wisdom of age and has ten lessons and (of course) an epilogue to impart.  Most of this wisdom amounts to no more than the specious knowledge contained in self help books sold at supermarkets checkouts – ten steps to enlightenment.  McNamara’s wisdom amounts to turkey truisms dressed up in the fancy dress of the statesman:  Truisms such as: never say never; you can’t believe all you see…etc.  Morris might well reply that his objective was to reveal the vacuity and empty nature of McNamara’s wisdom by allowing the viewer to see and judge.  But the structure of the film,. its score, its lesson structure, its artsy framing of McNamara with classy light paneled background,  all these conspire to frame McNamara as a glossy image for reassuring consumption.  Like a reassuring public service announcement for the benefits of growing old.
In relation to this last point and the idea that perhaps Errol Morris was really giving us the viewers the material we needed to make up our minds,  I began to worry about all those little jump cuts in the master interviews.  They are the sort of cuts, the ones we take for granted these days where continuity is no longer an induced state of mind but an illusion.  In TV documentaries the  situation is that if the guy under interview hums haws stops or digresses whatever, they cut out whatever they don’t like to keep the pace up, to rock and roll with the meat of the story.  To cover obvious jumps in continuity, filmed interviews used to employ a device called the ‘cut away’ in order to literally cut away from the subject to another image, such as the interviewer nodding, and then cut back to the subject.  This presents the illusion of a continuous stream of sense.   Few film makers now bother with this laborious device, they just jump the cut; what we see is a funny little dissolve or a blip in the picture.  Given that this convention is accepted, the effect is the same: to make the subject(in this case McNamara) appear fluid and controlled in intelligence: more fluent and focused than people in general are able to speak… erm…ummmm….long silence(prompt).  All the little hesitations, all those signs of the fallibility of age, lapses of memory, all losing of the thread of thought, the meaningless digressions, are in effect censored.   The point is that there were a lot of these jump cuts. I don’t know what or how much lies on the cutting room floor; I can only hazard a guess based on the observation that at times in the interview there were scarce 10 seconds passed without the characteristic little blip of the jump cut.  The end result of this approach is McNamara is rendered by the Fog of War as an image:  cut out all the crap and you’re left with the image of McNamara as a fallible but articulate old man who has attained wisdom in his old age.   The trouble with such a filmic approach is that it starts to say less and less about the subject – McNamara in this case – than it does about the conceit of the film maker.
Robert McNamara tells how before accepting the post of Secretary for Defense he insisted to Robert Kennedy that he write his own contract.  I can’t imagine that he insisted on a similar contract arrangement with Errol Morris.  But perhaps he didn’t need to; because it was evident that Morris was going to make a high gloss film based on marketing led production values.  Given the evident nature of the intended film, whatever the form of final product Robert McNamara knew that Robert McNamara’s image could only be enhanced as the subject of such a product.   Adrin Neatrour 8 July 04

On yer bike, Che! by Tom Jennings

[film review published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 20, October 2004]On yer bike, Che! by Tom Jennings [published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 20, October 2004] 
 
Remember those 1960s t-shirts favoured by trendy-lefties? (recently dredged up by French Connection – so perhaps my title should be worded more strongly …). The iconic pop-art image of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara stood for the heroic struggle of the Cuban revolution, and Western middle class youth could affiliate (or pose) with the aspirations of the world’s poor to transcend oppression. Now, the more comprehensive commodification of The Motorcycle Diaries also encompasses the road movie, tourism brochure, coming of age story, and even documentary realism. Box-office success at multiplexes and art cinemas suggests that the resulting melange works, thanks in particular to Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station, 1998; also a producer of Rio ghetto blockbuster City of God, 2002) and cinematographer Eric Gautier. A frisson of dangerous glamour doubtless helped – the script being loosely based on some of Che’s memoirs (exceedingly turgid and self-important though those are), reinforced by heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien, 2001; Bad Education, 2004) as leading man. But whether or not viewers know or care about the political history, this subtle film still has interesting things to say – if you can stomach the shallow smugness and picture postcard beautification.
 
Twenty-somethings Ernesto and Alberto (Rodrigo de la Serna) take a year off their studies in the early 1950s, and leave their upper-middle class Argentinean families for an awfully big lads adventure round South America on a knackered Norton. The overwhelming landscapes they pass through echo aspects of their experience and growing awareness: the Pampas are as empty as their idle bourgeois morality; crossing the Andes shows the arbitrary majesty of nature (i.e. history); fertile valleys are populated with evicted peasants; a copper mine in the Atacama desert reflects the  impoverishment of industrial capitalism; and Incan traces (at Cusco and Machu Picchu) contrast with the mess of Lima, giving poignancy to notions of ‘civilized progress’. They randomly encounter and hear the stories of those who suffer and toil without their luxury of playful choice – recounted by local extras whose biographies are little different fifty years later – and whose dignity, passion and generosity belie their desperation, anger and pain.
 
The travelogue arrives at San Pablo leper colony in Amazonian Peru, where our heroes get their teeth into contributing to the lives of others for a change (not that big a change, but revolutions have to start somewhere …). They still occupy immensely privileged positions, of course, but the trials and tribulations so far – repeatedly crashing the bike, temporarily running out of pocket money, Che’s chronic asthma, the repercussions of adolescent scamming, drinking, womanising, and so on – begin to crystallise into something approaching adult maturity. Alberto gets a medical research job whereas Ernesto continues north in his search for a worthwhile life. The film ends with a sepia-toned montage of the ‘ordinary people’ in the film and a brief textual exposition of Che Guevara’s central role in Cuba before his CIA-sponsored assassination. There’s also footage of the real Alberto – now in his 80s, having been a pioneering health service mandarin in Cuba – musing on his formative years.
 
 
On yer bike, Che!
 
Some have lambasted The Motorcycle Diaries as facile soft-liberal populism – an insult to those it purports to sympathise with. The ‘historical’ barbarism the film mentions in passing is intensifying, right now, all over the world – especially in Latin America where widespread grass-roots resistance continues. The inspirational significance of today’s struggles in Mexico and Argentina (among others) lies partly in their rejection of both neoliberal economics and authoritarian government. But here there is no political analysis, no exploration of vanguard elitism, Stalinist personality cults, or charisma and celebrity in general – all salient to both Che’s and our situations. Because we may not otherwise give a toss about the personable (but basically tedious and narcissistic) protagonists, the patronising pedagogy before the credits reminds us that they later devoted themselves to alleviating the misery caused by Latin America’s ruling classes and their US backers. That they were disaffected members of those same classes, and ended up inflicting similar degrees of dictatorial damage (and, crucially, that those two facts might be connected) could have injected some welcome melodrama and irony – as well as overall depth – into the weak narrative.
 
But getting all that right would be a tall order – just to construct; never mind fund and distribute. Lacking the wit, conviction and industry clout required, the director’s strategy is more humble in intertwining biography, geography and history. His previous hit, Central Station, vividly portrayed a middle-aged ex-teacher as a bitter failure consigned to the lumpen-bourgeoisie, cynically exploiting the illiterate clients of her letter-writing service. She recovered faith in herself and humanity, almost inadvertently, by helping a destitute orphan find his family after a tortuous and sometimes surreal journey through the Brazilian hinterlands. The narrative arc succeeded because the characters could intuit each others’ dilemmas and thus negotiate their relationship socially, emotionally and cognitively. The aesthetics intensified and gave expressive counterpoint to their lived experience – thus allowing enchantment for the characters in the context of their culture (and for film viewers in theirs).
Central Station thus offered a nuanced account of class and its conflicts (albeit at the individual level), but The Motorcycle Diaries is less optimistic – documenting charitable sympathy rather than engaged empathy. The camera only reveals what the characters see – no violence, no police, no scenes of exploitation, not even any poor people until we’re halfway up the continent. Even then, no exploration of context, and scarce evidence that the lads have a clue about anything much. Their personal tastes and sensibilities are increasingly offended, to be sure, and their friendship is transformed – but that’s hardly a sound basis for a revolutionary programme. They even misunderstand their well-meaning efforts in the leper colony, where Che makes a first feeble soapbox speech and risks a dangerous swim to spend his birthday with the patients – whereas for the latter it was any old excuse for a party.
 
Salles effectively demonstrates (whether intentionally or not) the uncomprehending naiveté of romantic idealism among affluent youth. That’s his background too – with language, worldviews, social structure and culture evolving specifically to facilitate the performance of their functions in whatever systems of domination prevail. In this paradigm it’s almost impossible to conceive of the way that economic necessity, bodily suffering, social prejudice and political oppression fundamentally shape the vast majority of human existence throughout history. Instead life’s problems are perceived as exceptions to a benevolent rule, to be resolved in grand hysterical gestures and personal redemption (just like at the pictures). Little wonder that when the privileged few generalise their trivial ethics into political prescriptions for the multitude, breathtaking arrogance and presumption transpire along with baleful practical consequences. This filming of Che’s journal infinitesimally punctures such fatal illusions.
 
* ‘Che’ is Argentine slang for ‘pal’.
 
 
 
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Hackney(ed) Crossroads by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 10, May 2005]

Hyped as a Brit Boyz N The Hood, Saul Dibb’s Bullet Boy hits more ambitious bullseyes, according to Tom Jennings.Hackney(ed) Crossroads by Tom Jennings[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 10, May 2005]
Hyped as a Brit Boyz N The Hood, Saul Dibb’s Bullet Boy hits more ambitious bullseyes, according to Tom Jennings.
Curtis (12) meets adored brother Ricky (20) at the end of his stretch for aggravated assault, driven by best mate Wisdom (Leon Black). Ricky is determined to go straight and keeps the peace in a stand-off with their old gang enemy Godfrey (Clark Lawson). Curtis returns alone to mum Beverley’s welcoming party as Ricky hooks up at a ragga club with faithful girlfriend Shea (Sharea-Mounira Samuels). Later Wisdom kills Godfrey’s pitbull before gifting the pistol to Ricky. Agreeing with Shea to leave town, he again fails to placate Godfrey, who trashes Wisdom’s car. Curtis and friend Rio (Rio Tison) bunk school to smoke dope on Hackney marshes, and Ricky misses another family get-together – this time with Beverley’s close friend, lay preacher Neville (Sylvester Williams). Instead he stands point when Wisdom busts into Godfrey’s crib and shoots up the place. Armed police raid Beverley’s flat and arrest Ricky, while Rio and Curtis play with the gun he’s hidden – but Rio is accidentally shot in the arm. Trying to protect Curtis, Beverley throws Ricky out. Shea also breaks with him and then he discovers Wisdom dead. Having given Curtis a man-to-man pep-talk on his return from making up with Rio, Ricky is shot dead by Godfrey’s gang as he awaits the last train out. After the funeral Beverley falls into Neville’s sexual and pastoral arms. Curtis retrieves the gun and throws it in the canal.
The film’s restrained picturing of northeast London’s towerblocks, terraces, playing fields and waterways showcases the troubled biographies, conflictual spaces and questionable futures of its characters. The uniformly assured performances are further testament to a first-time feature director of documentaries and a screenplay of accurately youthful Cockney vernacular. So as Ricky, Ashley Walters1 conveys a fully convincing self-fashioned code of adult integrity whose intelligence is fatally undermined by the ambivalent egoism of macho brotherhood that Wisdom can’t see beyond. As Ricky’s mother, Clare Perkins perfectly captures the contradictory nobility of working class single parents, whose strength in surviving thus far has demanded singlemindedness – but also an inflexibility which prevents her from helping Ricky with his very different difficulties. However, in beautifully distilling the nuances of pre-teen bewilderment and sagacity, Luke Fraser decisively makes this Curtis’ story.
Bullet Boy’s generally heroic struggle partakes in – but is not imprisoned by – the hoary old generic conventions of the coming of age crime melodrama. Against the usual odds, Curtis seems to emerge with a chance of neither succumbing to anti-social criminality (in striving to thrive in unpromising environs) nor decisively severing ties with his background (in class aspiration elsewhere). This is an achievement that the recent US cycle of ghettocentric cinema has so far largely forsaken, despite the purportedly political intentions of its exponents.2 Nevertheless, the more modest traditions of UK social realism allow the fine-grained attention to relationships and their vicissitudes to not be drowned out by neo-blaxploitation thrills or the more vintage baggage of hysterically overblown liberal issues and spectacularly reactionary menaces to society.3
Hackney(ed) Crossroads
Saul Dibbs and Catherine R. Johnson’s subtle script shows dawning adolescent masculinity in a context where peer pressure reserves mutual respect and consideration for those in closest proximity to the public self. The wider (middle class) social ethics spouted in educational and other local institutions – when not ignored as irrelevant – may be despised as hypocritical duplicity; yet the realm of private kinship suffocates desire and constrains growth within the childish purview of the mother’s embrace and overwhelming needs. Curtis clearly appreciates her position but understands why his brother rejected its ministrations. Meanwhile, merely reproducing the arbitrary authority of patriarchs is recognised to deliver none of its promises beyond recuperation into one of the useless status quos –  including the upped ante of ‘gun crime’ at increasingly hazardous lower class UK street levels.4
At this point it would be easy to ‘blame the parents’ – as in the currently fashionable reality TV treatment of ‘problem children’ or all the other class- and race-prejudiced nanny-state discourses. This is another mistake Bullet Boy avoids, along with its honourable disavowal of the nonsense that media glorification and youth culture ‘cause’ violence. So, destined for disappointment and pain, the mother’s lioness love for her seeds and her yearning for hope and meaning in life are eventually displaced into religious ecstasy – which offers communal experience, valuation of the self and an anticipated transcendence of suffering. This makes sense in the absence of neighbourhood cohesion or mutual solidarity or any dynamic or shared ideology (whether or not enforced with guns or father-figures), since the nuclear family womb can never fulfil the hopelessly excessive demands placed upon it as haven in a heartless world.
Finally, important ingredients missing from Bullet Boy include, firstly, the lure of the cult of consumerism, where a pseudo-spiritual fervour to fend off insecurity by hoarding cash and trivial secular commodities meshes perfectly with both globalising gangsterism and government wars on crime.5 Secondly, in reifying isolated individuals as representative of entire societies or historical epochs, European cinematic naturalist realism unfortunately forecloses on portraying the larger-scale reverberations of personal stories in the potential collective synergy of social action. And while one film could hardly cover all these bases, is it really too much to imagine several levels of analysis at once – for example, a Bullet Boy who could Do The Right Thing in these Strange Days?
Notes1. aka Asher D (of UK Garage supremos So Solid Crew) – himself recently released from jail for possession of a firearm.
2. for example Spike Lee, John Singleton, or Ice Cube. Paradoxically, the absence of moral agendas seems to enable postmodern nihilists such as Albert & Allen Hughes (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) or even blockbuster stylists like Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days) to drop more hints of the possibility of collectively creative solutions.
3. see also the French ‘cinema du banlieue’ inaugurated by La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), which likewise references Hollywood without pandering to it.
4. so, before ultimately ditching the weapon, Curtis tells Rio “I’d rather be a mummy’s boy than a crack-head”. And, despite her prior soulmate loyalty, Shea also refuses to accept Ricky’s repetition compulsion; thus Bullet Boy grounds optimism in both younger genders.
5. rendering New Labour’s fascination with faith and fundamental morality more intelligible – as desperate rearguard defences against the damage to sociability done by the feeding frenzies of spending which, ironically, represent their only vision of economic ‘health’.
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A State of Mind – Daniel Gordon – UK 2004 – 94 mins

Viewed : International Documentary Film Festival – Amsterdam – November 2004

BBC/ARTE/WNET commission. Coming to a BBC channel – probably 4 – soon.A State of Mind  – Daniel Gordon – UK 2004 – 94 mins
Viewed : International Documentary Film Festival – Amsterdam – November 2004
BBC/ARTE/WNET commission. Coming to a BBC channel – probably 4 – soon.
 
Ends justifying means – an old story.  As far as I know this doc has only had limited screenings at film festivals.  As a BBC commission it’ll be showing on TV soon and  I hope anyone reading this crit will watch A State of Mind  check it out and let me know what they think.
 
In the course of A State of Mind, the director who’s also the voice over commentator tells us not once, but twice, that the filmmakers negotiated with the North Korean authorities privileged access to film in North Korea without controls or censorship over what they might shoot.  To say it twice was certainly not accidental. What was it he was wanting to tell us?  Whatever it was my attention was drawn not to the implied ‘freedom’ of the film makers but to the restrictions and limitations endemic in shooting in a totalitarian state and how the film production company might respond to these restrictions and limitations. 
 
In a totalitarian situation – whether it be a state like N Korea or a large multinational corporation – the  very notion of ‘privileged access’ is problematic.  Why can’t you have access without privilege?  Privilege is the concomitant of one party’s control and the power to dispense favour.  By definition unprivileged access is not permitted.  Of  what  are the mighty ones who grant the privilege, frightened?   Something that you might see; something you might hear?  And suppose that there are things which  ‘they’ are determined to conceal and that they don’t want you to see?   How can you as filmmaker with privileged access know whether what you see and film is ‘real’ or in some way staged for your benefit?  The resources and control of a totalitarian state are certainly capable of complex stagings. 
 
Further if you film under conditions of privileged access, the implication is that this access has been traded for a relationship of trust with the party ceding this privilege.  This very relationship of trust between the parties implies a certain kind of contract, often in the form of unspoken understandings about limits.   In return for privilege the filming party often tacitly agrees not only to a degree of self censorship but also to refrain from asking certain types of awkward questions.  In this case where the production company, VeryMuchSo Productions boasts a long term relationship with the regime and has plans to make a further documentary in North Korea I feel it of relevance to examine carefully the way A State of Mind has been made and to ask whether the film is characterised by an ingenuous collusion  as a state of mind rather than the spirit of free enquiry.
 
The film is based on the instrumental premise that in following the progress of two young girl gymnasts through their training and selection programme leading up to the North Korean gymnastic mass games(the high point of the totalitarian leader worship bullshit), our understanding of this closed society demonised by the West, may be extended or even deepened.  Further by experiencing through the mediation of film ordinary North Koreans living their ordinary lives we will also perceive something about the truth of human nature and universal values.  Daniel Gordon seems to say: you see North Koreans are no different from us! They may say be prone to mouthing off  propaganda and stuff about America but in fact human nature is the same everywhere and everywhere lots of young girls love gymnastics and dedicate themselves to its practice with the support of their families.   These are folk living under a rather peculiar organised system of indoctrination – but just folks!
 
This is the message I received.  But I need neither Walt Disney nor Gordon to inform me about human nature.   In fact the issues in relation to people in North Korea or in Stalin’s USSR or Hitler’s Reich have nothing to do with the universal characteristics of human nature but with what is going on in this society that controls and contains people who  look and act as if everything were normal?  What is the nature and construct of these normal appearances?  And what’s going on under the surface?  What’s the crack – do people tell Great Perpetual Leader jokes?  Do people know its all bullshit?   Under what strains do North Korean people live out their lives?   In the situation in which A State of Mind was produced, universal truths are no more than decontextualised platitudes, the resort to which is a ploy to disguise the fact that a film made under ‘privileged access’ in  these conditions can only be either dishonest or banal or both.  Either which way A State of Mind is a film that whilst pandering to the North Korean State by refusing to pose any questions about society,  risks betraying its people.  .  
 
The choice of  two young girls as drivers of the film narrative conforms with the compromised ambitions of this production.  The idea is that in following the lithe flowing tumbling innocent  bodies of these girl child gymnasts, a crack will open up in the monolithic wall of North Korean society which will allow us to peek in to see and meet the people.  We are used to seeing young dedicated girl/woman child gymnasts.  They are part of the TV furniture,  moral tales of success through dedication.  We have seen Olgas and Nadias,  Dianes and Debbies going through their asexualised prenuptial Olympic routines on floor asymmetric bars vault and beam.  We know them and we are also aware, because we have been told, of the abusive forces that sometimes lurk behind these bodies in flux.  The spectre of mummydaddycoach in the various guises; twisted authority figures colonising young feminine bodies and minds in order to develop the necessary athletical synthesised  bodies.   It seems strange that Gordon should chose a practice involving a fascism of the body to lead us through the concentric circles of state totalitarianism.  
 
A State of Mind would not be the first film to exploit young athletic bodies as a front for a totalitarian regime.  It was the stock in trade device of German and Soviet documentary makers in the ‘30s.  Leni Riefenstahl’s Olypische Spiele is the key example.  I am not suggesting either that Gordon has her caliber as a director or shares any of her propagandist intentions – probably he simply wants to sell TV programmes.  But whilst aware of these differences in motivation between the two, nevertheless some overlap in form and structure suggests itself.  There is something about the flow of young bodies in agonistic display, in the fluidity of athletic intention and achievement that overwhelms and inundates context.  That these perfectly balanced muscular yet frail  frames filmed from tracks angles and unlikely rigs, images edited (with music often) to heighten aesthetic effect and deepen emotional affect, sweep away context and setting.  In a way there is no time in these films only space that extends through an all encompassing present.  Berlin 1936 is simply the collective spacial experience of bodies – most of whom happen to be German.  The context of what the German state has become is rendered irrelevant by the imagery which seamlessly excludes the black star of the games Jesse Owen because of his blackness.  This sort of effect works through A State of Mind – it is all place and no time.    This is particularly evident in A State of Mind’s opening sequence which establishes the visual style of the film which is to look ‘good’  and beautifully shot.  This opening sequence sets out its stall as having 35mm Hollywood production values with all that that connotes.  In the opening sequence the picture fades up to a high key spot in a totally dark space to reveal in the cross fading spots the two young gymnasts dressed in leotards,  as individually and then together they appear and disappear performing items of their routine. The edited cross fades between the two performers continue as they move nearer the camera.  From the start A State of Mind is invested with the pure aesthetics of space.   
 
Time and its ponderable considerations are as absent here as they are in the average travelogue.  
 
If in some way Gordon thinks that he is parodying Riefenstahl, then I think the problem is that you can’t parody Riefenstahl.  In Riefenstahl’s films where the fake distorted and dishonest is raised up to high heroic kitsch status, she is already a parody of herself.    
 
A State of Mind presents as a glossy travelogue of a forbidden country fronted by cute gymnasts, perfect euro-fodder.  But still there are things that bother me, and it’s all the in between bits(and there are quite a lot of them) where we see the home life of the two girl gymnasts.  How to evaluate these sequences in the context that they are shot behind the closed walls of North Korea?
 
In the West the limits of fabrication(leaving out the often dubious nature of re-constructed events – with dialogue!) are in some ways defined ( as some producers for C4 have found out)by the openness of Western society and the fact that participants involved in filming any fabrication or faked sequences may spill the beans, revealing for example, that what purported to be a gang bang or fight, was an event staged for camera.  At this point the disclosure that something framed as ‘real’ has been staged, castes any documentary as morally suspect and discredited. No such openness exists in North Korea.
 
Aside from these exterior discreditings, audiences can generally, but not always,  within the flow of imagery  purporting to be a documentary film( and at IDFA about 50% of the films purporting to be docs were composed primarily of reconstructed material – but that is another story) perceive or identify some traits events or items through which they can authenticate different aspects of a strip of action.  Audiences by continuous reading of audio and visual cues can gauge respondents behavior and evaluate their replies to questioning.
 
In A State of Mind in order to know what is going on and whether to trust what we are shown, we are very much in the hands of the director and the translators.    We don’t speak the language: we can’t read  North Korean culture so we don’t have a language of gestures for looks glances stutters verbal glitches uncomfortable pauses and  body.  The problem is how do we evaluate what we are shown; even at the level of basic structural narrative components, how can we know that the things we view are true?  Can we trust the judgment of the film makers that what they filmed were real strips of life?  But  perhaps all those family sequences are faked, perhaps the individuals purporting to be mummies daddies and grannies are actors…….suppose it’s all staged?  Certainly many visitors to Stalin’s Russia came away with the impression that what they had seen was a real when they were witness to carefully staged pieces of theatre.  The resources of the totalitarian state which has the ability to bring large numbers of discontinuous effects into play mean that the staged events can often be convincingly presented as real.
 
There is an interesting parallel here with people who want to investigate paranormal phenomena.  Scientists, like film makers, look at what they see.  Perhaps for this reason they have often shown themselves to be easy to fool into believing in performed paranormal effects. Magicians when looking at the same phenomena are not  so much interested in what they see; rather they are interested in what they don’t see – underlying structures utilized for the practice of deceit.   Film makers can be easy to fool because they often want to see what they are looking at: looking and seeing are conflated.  In the film the girls are real gymnasts, but we have no way of knowing who they are – perhaps those claiming to be their families are in fact acting out these roles so that the state is controlling the staging of all events. (acting normal, appearing to be normal when acting familiar roles is simple and something most people are capable of doing)
 
My suspicions about how to frame what I was looking at started when I watched the sequences of the families eating: I wondered about the good food that was going into their mouths. We know North Korea has had severe food shortages(this is admitted in the film) but was the food the people were eating provided as imagery for the Western camera, special food provided as part of the staging of normal appearances?  And the apartments where the families lived with their carpets and wood wall panels?  Were these normal every day appurtenances or part of a set for the camera to film?  
 
The fact that the families in their homes looked so real on film draws attention to the latent problems in looking for signs of authentication.  Those features of a situation which we may judge most difficult to fake are precisely the ones which those seeking to deceive will take the greatest pains to faithfully replicate. Although many may think the above points are far fetched, a totalitarian system such as North Korea has the means and the perhaps the motivation to carry through such devices.  And film makers should be aware that in closed systems either capitalist or communist nothing is necessarily what it seems. 
 
I was left unconvinced by A State of Mind that from the point of view of veracity, that it is a worthwhile project to shoot in North Korea in the way exemplified by this film.  Privileged access is really just a smoke screen through which you peer into the mirrors of distorted reality with no way of knowing what is going on. 
Adrin Neatrour    8th Jan 05
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

La Nina Santa – Lucretia Martel – Argentina 2004 – Mercedes Moran; Maria Alche; Carlos Belloso

Viewed – Tyneside Cinema 31 March 2005 – £5-95La Nina Santa – Lucretia Martel – Argentina 2004 – Mercedes Moran; Maria Alche; Carlos Belloso
Viewed – Tyneside Cinema 31 March 2005 – £5-95
 
 An Argentinean/Spanish chamber piece which avoids the cutesy archeness that cinema of this provenance often embraces as a solution to dramatic imbroglio’s.  Martel’s oblique framing and use of fragmented scenes allows the development of two parallel domains to flow out of three intersecting worlds which fold into one another like a complex origami construction.   La Nina Santa(LNS)  builds on intercourse between these worlds:  the fluxes of female adolescence, a rundown out of season hotel, a conference of doctors.
 
The three worlds are psychically and physically marked out by the hair of the principal players which has the power of an interlubricant.  Hair in LNS is not a control statement.   Hair in LNS is a manifest independent physical force of the actors that creates powerful fields of attraction and resistance independent of will.   In most Hollywood movies hair is something that is kept under the strictest control and carefully contoured as part of costume.  Hair is tamed and modeled to suit the needs of  the actors and the film script: it can be understood as a sort of production value: it operates as optical sign encoding moral character and mood.  As hair per se, as matter, it has no independent function or role(Garbo and Ingrid Bergmen exceptions here).   In the world of the girls, their hair is part of their sensualites and sensibilities;  the dry and frazzled hair of the hotel people and their shampoo(‘it dries out your hair’) personified by Mecedes Moran, is located at the centre of identity; the creeping baldness of the doctor(Carlos Belloso) is part of the aridity of  conference world.  Physical attributes such as hair can interweave and interflow through being in such a way that it becomes life.  Their are no haircuts so to speak in LNS; just hair as an attribute of being.
 
LNS is not just an interpenetrating of worlds.  Underlaying these worlds are domains: the domain of the visible and the domain of the invisible.   Lucretia Martel uses invisible musical instruments and the spraying invisible enemies as the outer markers of the things we can’t see.  Unseen domains are folded into the characters, carrying them and releasing in them the impulse to action.   The domains of past relationships, the domain of spirit, the domains of sexual yearnings and desires meld achieve transient intensities that instantly fragment and re-form. 
The opening shot of LNS sees the young girls at religious instruction listening to the song of the unseen forces of religion.  Looking at the group, it is a sea of trailing hair falling through faces punctuated by eyes.  The last shot we see  the two main young girls floating togather in the waters of the pool with their hair flowing about them as far away and above in another unseen world, we know that a tragi-comic script is being played out.
Adrin Neatrour 7 April 05
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

I Vitelloni (1953) / Amacord (1973) – Fellini double bill

Viewed Curzon Mayfair 17 07 05 Ticket price -£5- 00
I Vitelloni (1953) / Amacord (1973) – Fellini double bill
Viewed Curzon Mayfair  17 07 05  Ticket price -£5- 00
 
There is an tendency to see films through the telescopic concept of the auteur principle understanding film through the singularity of the director’s voice.  Certainly it is valid to look at a director’s output and try to discern their underlying film attributes and themes as they develop over the course of a career:  style – formal concerns – structure – subject and content.    Viewing two examples of Fellini’s output, one relatively early and the other relatively late was for me also a strong reminder that filmic output is often collaborative  work and that for some directors there are essential collaborations in their careers that determine the force of their attraction.  Collaborative partnerships can be with producers, writers, cameramen, editors and actors.  From a viewing Fellini’s films recently I think that Fellini’s owes his reputation as a director to Guilietta Masina the actress whom he married and who was the clown star of most of the work central to his reputation.
 
With I Vitelloni Fellini shows that he is a director endowed with a fluid musicality in his composition, in his use of his tracks and pans and his ability to orchestrate space and spectacle. But these achievements in their visual aesthetic qualities, divert attention away from the fact that I Vitelloni feels like a film, visuals excepted, without a strong core either in focal concern or subject matter.  Autobiographical in inspiration, I Vitelloni sentimentalises provincial Italy of the early’50s.   The 5 young men, whom the film follows in their contextual world of the out of season sea side town, all feel too old too formed.  This is not an absolute age connected observation.  The characters feel like they are already formed beings so the film can never deliver a sense of the process of forming or of change.  The rebellion of the characters, such as it is,  is circumscribed by the preformed boundaries of the originary world of the film – physical metaphysical and social.  The revolt by the characters is a sham.  A sham which is beautifully captured as spectacle by Fellini.  But is a sham with which he seems happy to conspire, a pretend reaction to what is a phantom world with which he is ultimately content.  Interesting to compare I Vitelloni with Antonioni’s Il Grido.  Shot in a provincial canal side setting, it is a film set in the fog of post war Italian society where all certainties are now blurred and society and social relations are torn apart with no obvious ways in which to repair the rents. A strong forceful work showing the forces of disintegration at work in post war Italy.
 
In its focal concerns, its originery world and main subjects (but not in visual style) Fellini’s I Vitelloni resembles something of the output of Ealing Studios in the 1940’s and ‘50’s.  In particular those which were based on the concept of a world:  Whiskey Galore, the Titfield Thunderbolt, Passport to Pimlico.  All products of an unashamed sentimental vein of filmmaking, all constrained in their capacity to make social connections by the hermetically sealed nature of their context.  Films locked into sealed worlds with scripts tricked out with fake social and character tensions – enjoyable as sacred social relics(charm)and for the strong social character acting but weak in ideas and filmic impact.
 
 Fellini’s I Vitelloni has visual style and charm but nothing to say.  But this at least in relation to Amacord makes it watchable movie.  Amacord is unwatchable in the sense that by this stage in his career Fellini is only interested in indulging his craving for creating and filming spectacle; as if spectacle alone were the necessary and sufficient effect to justify a film.  Like fireworks they are spectacular to view two or three times a year; to view them every night – unless you are the pyrotechnican – is tedious.  Amacord delivers a firework display every 15 minutes.  In fact the opening 20 minutes presents as full of promise: this opening suggests the idea of  a visual examination of fascism through use of spectacle.  An idea which held me in thrall until the repetitive motif’s of the made up faces, the red dresses, the uniforms, the fires and the fireworks revealed that to realise such an idea was beyond Fellini’s powers.  Without a collaborator such a Giulietta Masina to work with, Fellini becomes increasingly trapped in his own self referential world, entrapped in a barren circularity.  Doomed to recreate vacuous fluid works in the opera bouffe manner.
 
When I Vitelloni and Amacord are compared to films that he made with Guilietta Masina the critical difference seems to be the ability of  these works to connect the formal visual style and the subjects of the films to the wider referential world of contemporary Italy.  Something happens to Fellini’s films when Guilietta is involved.  The films are linked into a wider field of concern and they possess vitality, allowing Guilietta clown to escape out of the confines of the originary context and connect with social processes.  Il Bidoni, La Strada, La Notti de Cabera all have a clown entity in the form of Masina but as such an entity she transposes her clown nature, without sentimentality, onto a wider social canvass.  From La Strada -1953 – to Juliet of the Spirits -1965 – this seems to be the period when Masina was in most of Fellini’s films.  As collaborator and Fellini’s wife it is her spirit as the ultimate clown that fills out these films not with mindless indulgence but with a sure understanding of how the character and dilemma of the clown could be tuned to focal connections with society.  The clown cannot exist in vacuo.  The clown – she who is always in the shit – has to exist in a world of wider references or she quickly uses up all her material a series of gestures that yield increasingly diminishing returns.  
 
That film is often a collaborative undertaking is seldom recognised.  Both Lean and Eisenstein have acknowledged the role played by Young and Tisse as their respective cinematographers.  Sydow  Bjornstrand and Anderson seem to be involved in Bergman’s films far beyond their calling as actors.  As wife and partner to Fellini, Guilietta Masina’s influence on the films in which she was involved during this period have the effect of raising Fellini’s work out of the mediocrity of his self indulgence to a level of significant filmic achievement where ideas, visual concerns and style, attention and subject matter combine in complex interplay.
 
I don’t know if Masina’s influence on Fellini,  her consummate acting abilities and strength of personality worked to inspire him to move beyond the boundaries of his natural egotistical concerns, or whether there was collaboration between them at the level of ideas and/or in the composition of the scenario.  I do think that the Masina effect is an effect that can be seen in the films in which she and Fellini worked togather, and the consequences of her lack of presence are evident in the ordinary output of his early period and the dire product of his later films.
adrin neatrour     
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
 8 September 05

The Maybe Men by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 7, April 2005]

The Yes Men, dirs. Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, Chris Smith (USA 2004)The Yes Men, dirs. Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, Chris Smith (USA 2004)
This latest liberal-left documentary on the big screen follows anti-globalisation performance-activists Mike Bonnano and Andy Bichlbaum spoofing neoliberalism on the internet, in the media and at international trade conferences. Faking World Trade Organisation and GATT websites, they parody corporate-speak so convincingly they’re invited to global industry junkets – pronouncing and powerpointing on squeezing niche profits from contemporary slavery and market-driven fascism. So, on the problems of keeping the peace on remote factory plantations, they zip open their business suits to reveal giant inflatable phallic panopticon surveillance gizmos; or resolve uneconomic patterns of agriculture along with world hunger by unveiling surreal Soylent Green junk food recipes for Third-World burgers made from First-World shit. And they’re taken seriously, applauded politely, and welcomed into the prestigious think-tank fold. It should all make energising material in the service of some larger anticapitalist tactic – and much fun is clearly had. Nevertheless, despite the creative intelligence at work, there’s a sense of naïve fluffy left-critique gone horribly wrong, sucked into the Quatermass of its antithesis.
Entertaining, insightful and potentially productive though this kind of ‘culture jamming’ may be, it doesn’t occur to the film makers to address viewers not converted to the cause – or to design the narrative so as to solicit active participation. We’re left in a curiously passive position, open-mouthed like the hapless corporate patsies at the cleverness of Bonnano and Bichlbaum’s interventions. This is a wasted opportunity if the film reaches multiplexes, which was crying out for a sharper promotional hook than merely  trumpeting student rag week japes. After it was made, another ‘triumph’ was achieved when a purported representative of Dow Chemicals admitted responsibility for the Union Carbide chemicals disaster in Bhopal, India. Considerable international news coverage elapsed before the Yes Men were rumbled; whether or not they accounted for the survivors’ falsely raised hopes and anguish is unclear …
Populist political comedians like Michael Moore or Mark Thomas would never make these mistakes, and their grandiose schemes always at least hint at smaller-scale efforts that us lesser mortals might consider. Genuine personal involvement helps – with those resisting domination, on a comically human level with adversaries, or direct bodily engagement with your ‘issue’. And if the film was intended for internal consumption by the anti-globalisation movement (not being expected to attract commercial interest), then finding a politically strategic focus for Situationist stunts should top the agenda. Simply cheerleading our heroes’ sneering at the cretinism of capitalism’s flunkies doesn’t cut it. We’re all stupid, after all.
Having said that, The Yes Men is well worth seeing and recommending – for a laugh; as food for thought and inspiration; to enrich our polemical vocabulary … and as encouragement to aim for more than protesting the moral evils of late capitalism.
[The Yes Men is on general release, and can also be seen on April 21st at the CCA, Glasgow, as part of the RISK: Creative Action In Political Culture programme.]
www.variant.org.uk
www.freedompress.org.uk
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Abu Ghraib all in the Mind’s Eye – an American movie on release everywhereAdrin Neatrour, 7 June 04
Abu Ghraib all in the Mind’s Eye – an American movie on release everywhere.
Events at Abu Ghraib are represented by the US President as being anomalous out of the ordinary events – caused by a few bad people. The form taken by the abuse – photographed and videoed sexual torture, reveals deeper evolving processes endemic not only in US culture but also that of the UK.
Each culture will bring its own particular twisted psychic development to the perpetuation of atrocity. Atrocity is something that is prone to happen in war. Either because the combatants are stripped of normal restraints by the shock terror and degrading aspects of combat; or in territorial disputes the intensity of desire to intimidate conquer and occupy acts as a justifying disinhibitor; or war in its outcomes offers opportunities to those who win to take control and power of life and death over those delivered into their hands. In this latter instance war corresponds to situations in prisons labour camps or any sort of closed physically bound institution in which a powerful few exercise total power over those in their charge, and where the detained are dependent on cultural rather than legal protective mechanisms.
The form of abusive sexual humiliation and torture to which the Iraqi prisoners are/were subjected obviously is/was sanctioned by US high command – General Sanchez was aware of and approved the treatment of the Abu Ghraib inmates. And in the same way that the SS generals could give genocidal and murderous commands to their troops with the knowledge that the men were socially and culturally primed to execute the orders, so with like confidence American command could order and approve a prisoner regime that centred on the genitals of their prisoners. The pornographic admixture of sexual physical torture humiliation and degradation is now endemic to the mainstream American culture, accompanied by its validifying process, the objectification of the subjective through use of imagery in the form of video or photos.
Susan Sontag thinks that the pictorial has come to the fore because it rests on the use of images as repositories for memory: she says that major events ‘lay down tracks ‘ governing how important events are remembered, ‘The memory museum is now a visual one.’ I believe that the culturally engrained use of photo video and sound image effects a deeper part of the way in which we experience the world than memory alone. I think that replicated images effect the nature of our consciousness as we engage with the world. The use of replicated picture and sound imagery is central to how we experience the living of our lives: consciousness.
We are born into an immersion of manufactured images comprising both picture and sound, mostly idealised and continuously assimilated as part of our being. As we develop, a significant part of consciousness which determines and directs our psychic functioning is absorbed from this world of projections – sound and image – and our behaviour comes to mimic these forms. We start to live the movies we project in our heads. We experience the world as a projection of our internalised idealised sounds and images. And when we make our own mechanical or digital replications of the sound and visual images – video photographs sound tapes such as staged dialogues – an important part of their purpose is to be external validifiers of the inner experience. To give objectivity to the subjectivity.
The past 100 years or so have seen the USA increasingly subjected to a cosmic storm of moving image particles that penetrated first through the shield of public consciousness and then with the arrival of TV and video through the defences of the private domain. In a shifting deracinated melting pot culture, this total imagery, comprising from the 1930’s onwards moving picture and fluid sound, was increasingly taken up as a model for individual actions defining: pose – verbal cues – and attitude – all attributes relating to the individual’s identity. A central aspect of the movie video and music action imagery, that is critical to the provision of a psychic identity, is that everything in mechanically produced forms has a script: everything has a beginning middle end.
The notion quickly develops that if you, in your outer expression of subjectivity take on the outer symbolic signifiers assimilated from the moving image (sound and/or picture) experience, then your internal scripting can run the desired course. You can live the film that you shoot in your head. Desires material, desires carnal are the drivers of the internalised moving image life in a culture increasingly defined by desire. And what is it we most desire: control over destiny, the script. With the invasion of desires film was no longer restricted to something seen on a screen or monitor. We live with movies we project in our minds; complete scripted sequences with music and sound in which each individual is an actor/director. In those societies defined by the inflation of infinite multiplications of image, our consciousness seems to draw on two track perception: one track is switched to the movie channel where we live the script of our desires; the other track deals with actuality in which we have to live through the real with all its difficulties and frustrations.
Of course the movie channel’s ambition is to realise the movie completely. And using selective perception of the actual and intensified projection of desire, the conscious mind can experience the feeling of achieving the scripted outcome. Some groups are in particular structural positions to make real the movie: individuals with social power who can impose their movie on underlings; and socially isolated individuals. Both US society in particular and British society are defined in this respect by the relative social isolation of individuals. People who are alone or in small nuclear groupings are not subject to collective forms of psychic correction and containment of internalised movie fantasies.
The problem remains for consciousness that it is often aware that there is a lack of tangibility in its perceptions. At this point the culture has provided cheap and readily available forms of technology that allow easy mechanical replication of ‘experience’ to all. The digital camera and video are everywhere available to give objectivity to the subjectivity so that consciousness in its various psychic operations has objective tangible proof that the script works. Film and video, cheap digital images allow everyone access to proving that the movie is going OK and that it is going according to the script. Of course the images objectively captured have to cover short strips of action or truncated sequences evidencing simple gratifications; longer scripts involving more subtle play are difficult. The realm of sex is perfect for photography and video. It’s a contained bounded realm, an activity that can be treated as discrete to power and gratification, and the pay offs-hard-ons, ejaculations, grunts and groans, simple role play/acting involving parameters of dominance/subjection and allied posturing – are easily captured objective proof on tape disc or film, of the individuals power to realise the objects of their desire. They objectify that we’re having fun in our movie.
In the USA the sex/pornography industry is vast and in the fertile soil of American psychic needs has spread everywhere interpenetrating consciousness and legitimising and fixating carnal and sexual desire in all its forms. The question is why simple sex scripts should have taken such a dominant defining part of American consciousness. The prime social experience for many Americans seems to be powerlessness and isolation. Characterising features of social and economic experience are large corporations and small nuclear groups. Within the large corporation most people exist to sustain the projections of the bosses and managers; and the nuclear family grouping is too small to sustain a power/ status system as witness the interdependence of men and women and the separation of the generations.
There are strong forces at work, particularly in the USA but also in the UK promoting the heightened social isolation of individuals whilst at the same time projecting sound movie images celebrating individual power and control. But Hollywood projects mythical realms – Middle Earths, Normandy Beaches, Hogwarts. The porn industry advertises a real achievable realm that you can get your hands on and hard on and in which you can be king or queen for a day. A realm where the individual can play out the movie without interruption. In a society defined by social isolation carnal sex becomes an issue of power; power over the flesh, both of the self and others, and as such drifts naturally towards the domains of sadism masochism and torture. Sex mutates into a discrete power gratification zone. A zone which takes us straight to the action(sic) at Abu Ghraib. A familiar movie to the American participants who want to have fun and objectify their roles in so doing. © Adrin Neatrour

Shock Corridor – Written Dir Prod Sam Fuller 1963 –

Peter Breck, Constance Towers.
Viewed on 16mm print at Side Cinema, Newcastle June 6 2004 by Adrin NeatrourShock Corridor – Written Dir Prod Sam Fuller 1963 –
Peter Breck, Constance Towers.
Viewed on 16mm print at Side Cinema, Newcastle June 6 2004 by Adrin Neatrour
The overt story here is that a newspaper reporter – Peter Breck – goes undercover into a mental hospital to find out who murdered man called Sloan who had been a patient in the hospital. The purpose of the reporter’s quest is to win ‘the Prize’. In Shock Corridor the Prize is not ‘an apple from the tree of life’ or ‘water from the well of youth’, but ‘the Pullizter’ America’s most prestigious award for outstanding investigative jounalism. The story from its opening fake psychiatric session, in which Breck is being coached by a psychiatrist friend to play the part of an incestuou s brother who is fixated at an early age on his sister’s ‘braids ‘ (Goldilocks), has a distorted mythic/fairy tale like structure – the architypal quest. Donning the mantel of insanity the reporter has to pass into and through the rings of hell in order that he may return to claim his Prize. The trophy he covets is public acclaim and recognition of himself as hero. Breck is a loner in the Hollywood tradition of the individual driven to achieve his goal but caste by Fuller into the quasi mythic realm of fairytale the story is given a psychic twist that jolts it into dimension that undermines its Hollywood format. The film is a journey into the madness of America, a Dantesque descent. A film in which America is a lunatic asylum in which the victims of communist witch hunts, race and the military industrial interests are opponents of social mechanisms that conspire to destroy their minds. However its most powerful visual component is the specific use made of superimpositions of the ‘Beatrice image’ in the form of Cathy, Breck’s girl friend who poses as his sister. As Breck lies on his hospital cot at night his demon conjures the presence of Cathy beside him and the sequences are burnt through with a radioactive element of incestuous eroticism. The pretext for Breck’s forced hospitalisation is the claim by his girlfriend Cathy that she is his sister and that he has incestuous designs on her. Cathy -the sister/ girl friend stripper, madonna/ whore role is played out with high octane carnal charge by Constance Towers. In Breck’s dreams she appears in superimposition hot and close to his body. Her image in these sequences is suspended in space and time and like x-rays burn into Brecks consciousness brazenly flaunting the sexual contradictions of a culture that has two dominant female roles – virgin and slut. A culture which not only expects women to perform both parts in the appropriate setting, but which in the filmic world of the American male imagination has no other roles for women. Certainly Fuller’s depiction of Breck’s splitting male ego, is as a schizoid response to these inherent contradictions, the double bind Breck experiences in trying to contain these two polar ideas within the persona of Cathy. The end result of the process for Breck is violence and catatonia – total emotive investment (confusion of you/me) followed by complete emotional withdrawal(total immobility). Fuller in his powerful use of erogenous superimposition points directly to the decontextualised nature of the female and the price paid for this process. As Breck moves through the rings of hell he encounters America as machine that destroys its finest minds at the point where they experience the contradictions which like fault lines lie just beneath the surface of this society. The inherent tensions between phantom recognition of equality and engrained racial oppression, between the coercive military imperative to build an empire of death and the individual conscience, between state certainty of its invincablility and individual confusion. These inherent and multiplying oppositions between the ideal and the actual create chasms of insanity into which those unable to internally resolve the flow of contradictions, disappear. The most brilliant sequence depicting this process is the ‘race riot’. In this section the hospitalised young black civil rights champion takes on the mask of a Klu Klux Klan leader and incites the inmates into a lynching mob against the only other black patient. Introducing this sequence are a number of archive/ documentary shots of what I think was a New Guinea village. The figures in this sequence are dressed in their extraordinary constumes and as a presage of what is to come act as prefatory images to the lynching sequence giving context to situations in which peoples are both broken up in and by space and time and exist eternally through time in memory. People who have lost everything can still remember what they once were. Even shards of reliquary documentary footage have this power. Breck’s descent into the circles of madness is motivated solely by the prospect of attaining his pure self ordained intrumental ends. A fairy tale architype terminally distorted by Hollywood scripting: the enthronement of the individual success. Breck is fixated on finding out who murdered Sloan – who Sloan was matters not; all that is important to Breck is the instrument of his death. Breck’s fixation on his own personal desire to get the Prize, leads him to purely exploitative relationships with his respondents. The inmates only exist to supply him with the leads that he needs to take him to Sloan who takes him to ‘the Prize’. Overwhelmed by his desire he cannot hear their voices. He is deaf to their real story told in their real voice as his cynically manoeuvres and manipulates the patients to get the information that he needs. Uninterested in what they tell him he leaves them who desperately need voice, without voice. Finally having squeezed them for facts he abandons them ever more deeply embedded in their schizoid states than when he first encounters them. Betrayed. For Breck the final sum of the totality of contradictions and betrayals experienced within the insane asylum is the loss of his own voice. He who uncoupled the stories of the voices that spoke to him from what he wanted to hear (in the tradition of poetic justice) pays physically with the price of his own voice. The detachment of the means of expression from the actuality experienced conducts Breck into a state of muteness. As the doctor of charge of the hospital says: “ It’s tragic: he’s the first Pullitzer Prize winner who’s a schizophrenic mute.” At the heart of the film lies a deluge of truly Biblical proportion as Breck hallucinates that the asylum has been overwhelmed by the realm of water: a realm that at once cleanses and is a reminder not to forget. The section is fine piece of film, it succeeds in having the intensity of eschatological prophecy, it feels like the end of the world. The sequence is suberbly shot and crafted using post production superimposition of lightening to direct Olympian bells and bolts intimately and directly at the crazed Breck. The use of supereimposition of lightening with an erotically charged personal intensity mirrors the earlier images of Cathy, in fact they are like the return of the female furies, conjured by Breck, who after driving him insane with their body now return in the form of pure electrical presence to turn his body to immobile stone. This Flood in total seems to be part of the deeper circuity of the film that channels the film into phases of forgetting and remembering, remembering and forgetting, forgetting to remember and remembering to forget. The characters forget and remember what has happened to them, they forget and remember who and what they are. Shock Corridor seems to have as the primal charge coursing through its circuitry the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence. All this remembering and forgetting all these cosmic reminders are the destiny of the damned forever to repeat the experience of history. Shock Corridor is framed within its opening and closing shots. The film opens with a caption on which is written a quote from Euripides: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” The film closes with a caption on which is written a quote from Euripides: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” Adrin Neatrour June2004

Bad Taste and Good Sense by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 19, October 2005]

Of several summer film releases tackling themes of sexual expression and repression, Tom Jennings judges John Waters’ A Dirty Shame the daftest as well as the most radical.Bad Taste and Good Sense by Tom Jennings 
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 19, October 2005]
 
 
 
 
Of several summer film releases tackling themes of sexual expression and repression, Tom Jennings judges John Waters’ A Dirty Shame the daftest as well as the most radical.
 
For nearly forty years John Waters has exposed the damaging hypocrisy of respectable sexual morality, using aesthetic and narrative shock tactics to provoke disgust, fascination and outrage – in the process demonstrating how close psychologically these responses are. Long before radio jock Howard Stern, Jerry Springer and sundry other media gross-out specialists paved the way for ‘reality’ TV, Waters (the ‘Pope of Trash’) tested the limits of acceptability with a series of extravagantly awful undergound cult classics.1 Hairspray (1988) then initiated a cycle of films which increasingly subsumed rampant sexual excess under more explicitly critical and progressive aims2 – in effect, ironically echoing the social suppression of dangerous libido he made his reputation attacking, while travestying his own biography in the process. And although mainstream success and talk-show celebrity status certainly coincided with a blunting of the early edginess and impact, A Dirty Shame rediscovers some of Waters’ original Queer aesthetics and trademark  tastelessness. Mixing in deeper social, cultural and political insights, it is both profoundly silly and genuinely innovative.
 
Prudish shop assistant Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) refuses husband Vaughn (Chris Isaak) sex – bemoaning the moral degeneration of their working class Baltimore neighbourhood (a location Waters always returns to), and locking erotomaniac daughter Caprice (Selma Blair with enormous prosthetic breasts) in her room to stop her stripping as ‘Ursula Udders’ in local bars. However, Sylvia becomes uncontrollably randy after a tail-ending en route to work when awoken from concussion by breakdown mechanic and sexual evangelist Ray-Ray (Johnny Knoxville). He proclaims that her liberated libido will usher in the ‘resurrsextion’ and ‘day of carnal rapture’ to win the war of the freedom-loving perverts against the sex-hating fascistic neuters. Her frenzied and public search for pleasure antagonises her mother Big Ethel (Suzanne Shepherd) into leading a burgeoning campaign for the ‘end of tolerance’. Sylvia encounters other locals emerging from their closets after also hitting their heads, revealing a cornucopia of unlikely and obscure fetishisms that inexorably cross-fertilise and proliferate, overwhelming the decency brigade and climaxing in communal headbanging orgiastic bliss.
 
A riotous rollercoaster of affectionate naffness, slapstick, pastiche and kitsch complete with pathetic dialogue, ham acting, dodgy plotting, goofy design and editing, and even-handed comic stupidity, A Dirty Shame is often hilarious (if you can recapture your scatological adolescence). It also insidiously introduces several arguments subverting conventional wisdom about sex, society and politics (which most critics predictably missed). So, while clearly favouring sexual indulgence over oppressive restriction,3 Waters locates moral degeneracy in both extremes as childish self-absorption precluding negotiation and coexistence – but where each depends on the other for its coherence. Smug liberal clichés are thus avoided – exemplified in the city slicker yuppies who advocate cultural diversity in theory but leave town unable to handle the messy ramifications in practice.4 And when older neuters make comments like “I’m viagravated and I’m not gonna take it any more!” and “It wasn’t this bad in the 60s!” the film’s surreally retro Baltimore comes into focus as a contemporary USA where the puritans are presently winning politically and in the culture wars.
 
 
Bad Taste and Good Sense  
But this is no ordinary blue-collar America. There is no portrayal of sex-related work, abuse, exploitation, media or policing – neither prostitution nor patriarchy nor pornography, and precious little in the way of actual physical sexual relations either. It is actually rather chaste and almost childlike in its innocence. There is plenty of rhetorical posturing, though, and what makes A Dirty Shame scandalous is what it says, how, where and by whom this talk is conducted, and the use made of it by various vested interests. Paradoxically, in retreating from recognisable realism, the film scores by flirting with the dominant modern discourses rendering sex so problematic – revelations of original sin and ecstasy; the obsession with sexual identity as the core of human personality and society; and the consequent institutionalisation, control and commodification of sexual expression. In the realm of individual privatised consumption, sexual energy thus provides the means to divide, discipline and profit, whereas in uncontrollable vulgar public display it exposes and threatens power and prompts moral panic.
 
Waters’ finely-tuned cultural class-consciousness replaces the fashionable intellectual niceties of twentieth century sexology with contemporary working class lives dominated by drudgery, misery and no expectation of fulfilment. Sexual desire is here embodied in conjunction with exhaustion, frustration and resentment, so that carving out space for pleasure is a serious and difficult matter. Its achievement is often thus wild, reckless and even destructive – but far from the relaxed decadence of upmarket erotic gourmets. Further, given that the strategic security-blanket of respectability is heavily reinforced by religion and the state, sexual license is highly inconvenient to all sides of the status quo, and thus always under threat. But the perverts simply present a mirror image to those who deny their own dirtiness. Both attempt to impose religious regimentation on unruly diversity – recalling Michel Foucault’s insight that injunctions to rationalise and classify sex extend biopolitical government of the body by imposing shame and neurosis on physical intimacy, and thus wrecking autonomous ethical practice.5
 
Fortunately A Dirty Shame offers escape from this intransigent dilemma. Generally mistaken as merely the crowning glory of its freak show, the ‘headbanging’ hypothesis simultaneously evokes the parent’s impatience with squabbling children and skilfully answers both apologists for censorship and apostles of sexual liberation. If the biographical origins of sexual preference lie in the rich texture of personal responses to random events, then conflictual diversity is simply inevitable. Attempts to analyse, normalise, legislate for and reform personality as rigid individual certainty necessarily fail to do justice to this differentiation while violating its subjects (‘fixation’, indeed). Meanwhile the inherent inseparability of physical, emotional and psychological sensation in the complexity of felt experience weaves together fantasies and relationships with intensities of pleasure and pain. Subsequent patterns of arousal and behaviour yield ongoing social performances of self that sediment the most salient recurring tendencies into the structure of identity while always remaining subject to change. Of course, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that shape and change one’s course are more or less traumatic and susceptible to conscious understanding, and may or may not be associated with the sinister motives, misplaced love or carelessness of others. That’s life. The trick is dealing with it without wishing away the unwanted complications – and  this neither neuters nor perverts will be inclined to be capable of.
 
 
Notes 
1. such as Mondo Trash (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970) and the breakthrough Pink Flamingos (1972) – all featuring 20-stone gender-bender Divine (in the latter film eating a real dog turd on screen).
 
2. In Hairspray Ricky Lake’s white-trash teenage dance enthusiast urges grass-roots racial integration; in Cry Baby (1990) Johnny Depp plays havoc with stereotypical masculinity; Serial Mom (1992) has Kathleen Turner detonating the nuclear family; Pecker (1998) recuperates Edward Furlong’s naïve photographer into artworld pretension; and Cecil B Demented (2000) both applauds and ridicules avant-garde attacks on popular cinema.
 
3. arguing against the film’s US NC-17 rating, he asked: “Is it that bad if dirty dancing broke out in an old folks’ home?” – referring to a scene where Ullman flexes to pick up a bottle without using her hands.
 
4. see also J. Hoberman’s interesting comparison of A Dirty Shame with the “earnestly middlebrow” biopic Kinsey (dir. Bill Condon) in ‘Back At The Raunch’ (Sight & Sound, December 2004, pp.24-27). The documentary Inside Deep Throat (dirs. Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato) also fails to transcend the corruption/liberation dead-end dialectic left over from sixties counterculture, feminism and  ‘porno chic’ (see Linda Ruth Williams, ‘Anatomy of a Skin Flick’, Sight & Sound, June 2005, pp24-26.
 
5. as explored in The History of Sexuality, Volumes 1-3 (Penguin, 1979, 1987, 1988).

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