Film Review

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – John Cassavetes USA – 1976 – Ben Gazzara

Viewed Side Cinema 27 November 2005 Ticket price £3-50
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – John Cassavetes USA – 1976 – Ben Gazzara
Viewed Side Cinema 27 November 2005  Ticket price £3-50
 
From the death of a salesman to the killing of a chinese bookie it’s all a blur….
America’s trip to the theatre of the absurd.
 
John Cassavetes(JC) did not make films because he was paid to do it.  He wasn’t  making films with that sort of arrangement.  The reverse is true – he paid to make his films even if they cost him everything and he had no illusions about the likelihood of them ever making money.  His films represent a pure form of output rare in cinema and he is amongst a small group of film makers each of whose films answer to a specific intent.  Each film that is made by JC has its point.
 
The killing of a Chinese bookie is an extraordinary film in which JC has a complete grasp of  his chosen genre and filmic form and a certainty as to how to subvert the conventions that he has adapted as his expressive vehicle.
 
The genre that JC chooses (fronted with a stunning performance by Ben Gazzara as Cosmo Vitelli) is the gangster movie.  Certainly after Coppola has had done with it the gangster genre in US cinema  becomes a little more than parody, a mechanical exercise in visual cliché and violence allowing lazy directors to lay claim to all sorts of spurious meaning in their output.
 
JC plays the gangster genre as a spoof to undermine itself.  But JC moves beyond this re-active impulse to make use of the genre and the material it releases as a means of pointing straight at the soft underbelly of the American dream. From the Nixon presidency onwards America was transforming itself into the theatre of the absurd, a grotesque Ubuesque spectacle.  And who now gazing on the spectacle of the US led invasion of Iraq would not acknowledge that JC as a seer saw it right?  JC film maker of the absurd has moved from Salesman Willie Lomax to Night Club owner Cosmo Vitelli, from the pathos of the Salesman to the bathos of Cosmo.  Where once the American dream was to sell dreams now the American dream is to consume the dream.  The Dream becomes a Dream of dreaming and we are lost in the Dream and the Dream loses us. 
 
 In the world of the ‘absurd’ from the players point of view nothing is unusual or wrong.  Everything seems quite natural and as it should be.  In the world of the absurd the players accept the rules and connections of absurdity as a given condition – they are not aware of any other possible world.  Even in the trapped world Arthur Miller creates for Willie Lomax his salesman has some level of self-insight some degree of awareness; Cosmo Vitelli the night club owner(the night club is always called ‘the joint’; ‘I’m the owner of this joint’ – sic) has nothing neither insight nor self awareness.  Cosmo lives the blur.  He lives out a fantasies from the world of movies and popular song which he projects onto his club.  He lives out the disconnections of his existence as if they were connected. Ultimately it doesn’t matter because so does everyone else: the US has become a culture of the absurd without real connection between cause and effect; the connections are all projections of the banality of wish fulfillment.
 
The heart, the very core of the film is the night club with its floor show.  The film revolves around the fantasy of this modern expression of Utopia.  An interior world of the night dedicated to escape – and for your delight and delectation a show with beautiful girls and an ugly performing MC (Hollywood Fosse recipe)   In the central sequence of the night club,  the floor show  Mr Sophistication, the MC performs a version of  ‘I can’t give you anything but love…’ whilst the showgirls dance against the backcloth of an exotic location and posture like string puppets and flash titty.  The floor show is terrible.  Its unbelievably very bad.  Not just tatty or just tacky but lousy. Its a poorly performed and executed. It is a mechanically contrived hand-me-down facsimile of whatever it is it’s supposed to be modeled on.(Caberet?)  As is, in fact, the actual reality in this type of  ‘joint’.   Cassavetes doesn’t give it the Hollywood pazazz make-over.   And in the film nobody notices: neither Cosmo, nor the performers not the audience.  The show girls dress and pose with the conventional outward trappings of an accessible sexuality.  The high cut of the costumes and linear demarcation of the tights and boots draws the gaze of the eye to their cunts and tits and with the eye in thrall to the conventions of available sex, audience projection does the rest.  The reality is:  Mr Sophistication is dead: the girls are dead and asexual: it’s a floor show for zombies by zombies.  Cosmo’s dream is that he believes he has created something that gives something a glimpse of happiness to people’s lives.  The reality is he gives the audience death, and of course he gives the Chinese Bookie death.  It is all he has to give.  The floor show bleeds over life in the same way as Cosmo’s wound bleeds over his white shirt.
 
In the last long sequence of the film(before the final shot where Cosmo exits the club to stand out in the street) we see and hear Mr Sophistication sing what  becomes the films leitmotif  ‘I can’t give you anything but love baby…’ The way it is sung and delivered and filmed the song feels more like, ‘I can’t give you anything but death baby…’ The audience love it.  The floor show is central to the movie because it highlights the confusion between reality fantasy and filmic projection that is becoming essential to understanding America.  A country that has lost the ability to distinguish life and death.     
 
Emotionally from his guts JC believed in the close up – in the big close up.  The face for instance: that the face is the affect per excellence through which every thing can be expressed – not specifically about individuals but about their milieu and their culture.  Faces for JC are not interesting if they are only an individualised melodramatic affect: to be interesting faces for JC have to move into the realm of cultural currency or universalism.
 
In Chinese Bookie although the close up of the face or faces is still an important as part of the filmic language, the close up shot of face loses the explosive intensity it accumulates in earlier films.  The filmic articulation of the absurd is interaction of the blur with the long shot.  The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a blur. A big close up of the blur.   The film is shot – not every shot of course – as a blur of reality.   Characteristic shots are pans across the midriffs of the club performers, shots into the lights, shots out of focus.  Life as a blur.  Cassavetes fills his frames – particularly the club sequences as an inert gaseous blur: the frames possess none of the latent explosive volatility of Faces or Shadows.  But out of the gaseous core of the movie, out of the blurred hazy atmosphere of the joint, comes a  hallucinogenic clarity, life as a dream. Even the Chinese Bookie as he looks directly at Cosmo at the moment before he is shot looks as he thinks what is happening is unreal.
 
In The killing of the Chinese Bookie the series of sequences that comprise the Cosmo’s quest to kill the bookie, have a dream like quality – perhaps it is a dream of sorts. The instructions he is given by the gangsters are absurd, as if ripped from a demented fairy tale. Item: Cosmo abandons his stalled car in the middle of a freeway, then turns back remembering something. He walks across back across the busy murderous freeway to the car in order to leave the bonnet up and open which the conventional manner of marking a vehicle as broken down.  Image:  The car now sits in the outer lane of the freeway with its bonnet up cars hurtling past it narrowly avoiding collision with it at the last moment.  But all is well.  Its bonnet is up.  Cosmo is in a dream world.  Whilst waiting for the cab that he has ordered to drive him to the house of the Chinese Bookie, he calls his club to find out how the floor show is going.  The problem is that the barman who he calls who has worked at the club for 9 years has never noticed there is a floor show in the club.  Cosmo finds the conversation strange. It is his hallucination.
 
With the Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Cassavetes combines form structure and content to describe the USA.  JC creates an enclosed world comprising of interior space.  Exteriors have become either passage ways to different structures or parking lots mere adjuncts to buildings.  Interior spaces define the horizon and contours of this world, spaces that are essentially plastic and like the night club can be molded  or reformulated to fit any current fantasy.  The natural world, the world of the American range have been forgotten.  The exterior world has receded: once on the sound track we hear a news bulletin about Israel’s foreign secretary tinkling in the background like something that must have been imagined.
adrin neatrour 30 November 2005
adrinuk@ yahoo.co,uk

Notti di Caberia – Fellini – 1957 – Giullietta Massina

Side Cinema – 28 11 04 – ticket £3-00
Notti di Caberia – Fellini – 1957 – Giullietta Massina
Side Cinema – 28 11 04 – ticket £3-00
 
            Retrocrit:
 I don’t see a film that uses clown motif for ages then two come along at once.  After Themroc the Side programmed Notti di Caberia a film I’d not viewed. Fellini’s film(co-scripted by Passolini) is like a precursor to Lou Reid’s song Walk on the Wild Side,  dark at times but more innocent, an echo of other street carnivals from another era.  Instead of the deterritorialised male transexual at the centre of the song/picture we have whore transposed into a clown(the extraordinary Giullieta Massina)  Notti di Caberia is a lyrical film that reaches us like a piece of music with its central poetic and filmic motif of life as flow.
 
In Notti, Guillietta as the eponymous Caberia, plucks her eyebrows and draws two proscenium arched black lines in their place so that her face turns into a mobile mask signing innocent astonishment with the world, an innocence underscored by her legs and  feet which support her through the world. encased in white socks and flat heeled shoes.  Caberia does not look like a prostitute, Caberia is clown; clown in Fellini and Passolini’s eternal carnival of life and death. Carnival (place of flesh consumed) is life experienced as a continuous flow of events into which individual personality is subsumed but in which there is still place for architype.  The carnival dance moves through the vistas of Roman life – street, theatre, nightclub church.  Here  Caberia as clown lives in the immediate the flow of events responding directly to spectacle before her.  As clown she has charmed life and moves effortlessly through the multiple scripted meanderings of the character.
 
What is remarkable is the strange role within role that constitutes the character of Caberia.  Caberia is a clown whore; a whore who keys her performance in the role of the clown – a clown who plays at and with the part of being a whore.  As clown Caberia pulls off the doubled-up role-act of being a whore/clown by entering each of the different carnival worlds as  clown and allowing the situations to define her a whore but never defining herself as whore. 
 
Caberia is prostitute completely desexualised.  Clown and prostitute cannot mix as categories on equal terms. Clown can only play at being prostitute in the same way as clown can only play at being doctor or being interior decorator: obviously nothing will go right.  Caberia is perhaps the only prostitute in the history of the cinema without the usual paraphernalia of erotic signage that label her as sex pot.  So what’s going on?   The men the dark men do not want her sex or her pussy: they want her money.  The men of darkness are ready that she should die in order to get her money(were Fellini or Pasolini ever tempted to end the film by having her murdered by the last suitor for her money; and did they refrain because this would have made of the film a banal narrative;  whereas they knew that they wanted film of associative flow):  but money ultimately does not seem to comprise Caberia’s power as it does with most prostitutes.  The money seems external to her essence her core power which is clown being.   And the audience understand this right from the first sequence of the film in which a long tracking shot covering what appears to be a playful game with a man, turns nasty as she is pushed in to the river.  Saved from drowning her reactions are those of the circus clown run over buy the circus taxi. Anger followed by an immediate appetite to rejoin the carnival.  Audience understand that she is only clown playing at whore – dressed in white socks, low heel shoes fluffy jacket and eyebrows.  So audience does not seriously ask what happens when Caberia climbs into the cab of the trucker’s lorry.  That we should concern ourselves with the sexual nature of the encounter is out of sorts with the script.  The complete incongruity of the situation( also captured during her night with the rich and famous film star) makes us easily glide over what is according to the logic of the film, inherently meaningless. Lack of concern works because it is not Hollywood hypocrisy about the distasteful and sometimes dirty business of paid sex.  It works because it is a necessary consequence of the clown logic set in motion by Fellini.  Desexualised sex is at one with flow, as it is in song and ballad.
Adrin Neatrour 30 11 04
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Devil Doll – 1936 – Todd Browning Lionel Barrymore – Maureen O’Sullivan Script Eric von Stroheim, Garrett Fort, Guy Endore

Viewed Side Cinema – 30 01 05 Devil Doll – 1936 – Todd Browning   Lionel Barrymore – Maureen O’Sullivan  Script Eric von Stroheim, Garrett Fort, Guy Endore
Viewed Side Cinema – 30 01 05
 
Devil Doll is the almost last crack of the whip for Todd Browning his last show as the heretic Ring Master before being outed and dumped by the Hollywood Inquisition.  The last shot of Devil Doll sees the protagonist descending the heights of the Eiffel Tower from the domain of the Gods to the inconsequential level of the mortals. It is a long descent in the gloom and feels like a final  exit.    
 
Devil Doll is a film that flows across the screen like a dream that is comprised of a number discrete sections, all interrelated but characterised by breaks in continuity. The discontinuities resolve themselves as dream unfolding, a circus circus of dreams.  Devil Doll is Browning’s transposed circus of the freaks and the disinherited and it is structured as a series of circus acts.  Devil Doll is a film of the vengeance taken by the mutants on the straight world.  It is Browning’s coda, a final statement of his integrity.    
 
As in dreams or circuses, discontinuities don’t matter because the strength of the underlying logic drives the imagery and story we are watching, short circuits the need for narrative rationale.  We take each sequence, each act as it comes.  From Devil Doll’s opening shot of a searchlight beam  directed straight out from the screen into the eyes of the audience temporarily dazzling us before swinging round into the  forest where the hunt is on for two escaped prisoners, to the strange Parisian toyshop and the miniaturisation sequences, we are caste into the circus of revenge.   With sardonic charm Ring Master Browning introduces us to his collection of freaks cripples and clowns who will grapple and finally overcome the forces of the straight world of the smug the mean and the fat.
 
Barrymore, the clown in chief, plays to the house as a cross dressing old lady whose mission is the revenge killing of the greedy bankers who have robbed him and destroyed his life completely. The high points of the film are the miniaturisation sequences in which the live humans are reduced to the size of tiny dolls, in order to carry out the revenge as directed by Barrymore.  There is something in the technical affectation of these ‘freak’ sections which are effected  by mechanical and optical devices(traveling mattes and the building of large sets) that  makes them the more powerful than the seamless digital effects of today.  The point I think is that although the effects are technically superbly done in Devil Doll ( in particular the scene where the miniature woman doll extricates herself from under the crooked elbow of little girl sleeping in her cot) there is in them an aspect that is both slightly gauche and magical.  The sequences have the quality of Hans Christian Anderson’s stories like the Tin Soldier of the Little Flower Girl, where fragility is central to the creation of the character. The Tin Soldier and the Little Flower Girl are coruscating shimmering creations whose vulnerability permeates their stories.   Browning’s image creations with use of effectively simple mechanical technology has a similar quality: it is child-like and warm .  Today’s digital effects  have a colder feel to them.  The comparatively easy production of digitised effects makes anything possible and fragility of  image is often less in evidence than the confident excess of facile mastery.         
 
The subplot has two lovers(one of whom is Barrymore’s estranged daughter) whose preferred meeting place is at the top of the Eiffel tower.  Only when up in the Gods can they find meaning away from the humdrum  pull of life’s gravitational mass. There is something about this arrangement that belongs to dream logic. But it is also a part of the film’s circus assemblage, as you realise that these lovers are Browning’s trapeze artists, dazzling aerialists who only find happiness in the defiance of gravity.   
 
The end sequence takes place on Eiffel’s high platform and ends the film on the dark directorial note alluded to earlier,  with Barrymore’s descent of the tower in the lift. Down down down.  The shadows of the girders move across his face as he goes down.   From what he has said we know that having completed his revenge that he is going, in one form or another, to kill himself.  Given that Browning knew that this would be one of his last films, if not his last this is surely a personal statement.  Browning’s realisation of Freaks had disgusted Mayer at MGM and Browning knew he was working out his contract.  It was the end for him. He was an apostate filmmaker who had challenged the Hollywood ideology of ‘ideal type’ representation.  In the Hollywood catechism, it is not the place of the crippled or the mutants to lead the way.  These are outcast.  Only the whole and the unblemished may take the lead across the silver screen.  Browning broke this primal canon of the Hollywood coda.  He paid the price.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

O Lucky Man Lindsay Anderson; UK 1973; Malcolm McDowell; from an idea by Malcolm McDowell

Side Cinema Newcastle 23 April 2005 Price £3-50O Lucky Man     Lindsay Anderson;  UK 1973;  Malcolm McDowell; from an idea by Malcolm McDowell
Side Cinema Newcastle 23 April 2005      Price £3-50
 
Retrocrit
A Shaggy Dog Story
 
I think that Lucky Man points directly to Anderson’s limitations as a director/auteur.  Giving himself three hours to develop his theme – the something rotten in the state of England – he creates a film that comprises of an episodically structured closed system, a looped circuit that ends up by resorting to and feeding off cumbersome plotting rather than ideas as a source of image and film movement. 
 
What happens in Lucky Man is that the film closes down on and around itself unable to move beyond the core reactive idea of:  ‘the young man on the make’ who is repeatedly thrown back by the forces of social corruption.  For about an hour before the film ‘closes down’ around plot, the film works stylistically to probe and play with its central theme, but as it progresses Lucky Man does no more than excavate the same idea in a number of closed settings.  There is no feeling that the film progresses and as it degenerates into increasingly theatrical mode, it feels like Anderson has a tick box list of big targets for his critique: the police, local politics, the military/industrial complex, religion, alternative life styles, the medical business, business, the penal system and charity. O Lucky Man becomes a vehicle for Anderson systematically to get through this list in a series of discrete episodic cameos.  
 
The intellectual political insights cohering the film are not matched by any actual film vision, and Anderson is exposed as a director who does not use film.  He takes stylistic flourishes from obvious sources such as Bunuel and Goddard, but they feel no more than borrowings that he fails to make him own.  The devices Anderson uses: the fade to black, the structured intercutting of the Alan Price music, initially promise that a filmic sensibility and a film, rather than a theatrical experience, are in store.  In fact these two devices are simply relegated to the status of periodic film markers used lamely to partition sequences.  By the end of the film these two devices seem as if from another movie; as do the use of the inserted graphics and text that are never assimilated or made the movie’s own.     
 
Unable to articulate the richness of film possibilities to develop political social ideas Anderson is forced to use theatrical conventions and to play out a plot rather than play with ideas.  The problem seems to be that locked into repetitious utterance of one idea( an episodic script idea always has the problem of either exploiting the obvious course of its logic or twisting the logic or otherwise being stuck with the nature of the logic)  Stuck with the nature of  the logic Anderson is forced increasingly into melodramatic acting out of sequences to maintain interest and dynamic in the images.  The movement to melodrama( as in This Sporting Life) is disastrous for the film as it shifts mode from parody to burlesque  caricature, from discipline to camp overdrive, from heightened insight to indifference.
 
One question seems to be what happened to O Lucky Man ?  Possibly Anderson’s ambition overreached his resources as a film director  The opening hour has qualities that mark it out as film of potential.  The caliber of Malcolm McDowell’s winsome shaggy innocence mark him as a natural for the Candide type role of Travis.  The young men on the make all are coded by the shaggy haircuts of the era which oppose the smooth gents barber look of the establishment.  The hairy men and the smooth men.   The film opens with a spoof Ministry of Information/ Colonial Office propaganda film about coffee.  Instead of the soothing and reassuring tones of the narrator informing us of the benefits that British rule and commerce bring, we see the reality of the system of oppression based on a crude administration of a vicious penal code with disproportionate sanctions.  The coffee bean thief (Malcolm Macdowell), has his hands cut off.  However even in this wonderful opening there lurks the seed of the film’s lurch into an undisciplined theatricality.  By ending the sequence on a full close up facial shot of Malcolm Macdowell’s ‘scream’ as his hands are amputated by the sadistic military policeman,  Anderson intimates and signs an early preference for theatric solutions rather than film movement.  Spoof preferred to the discipline of parody.   Moving out of this sequence to a opening set by Alan Price playing the title theme the scenario goes straight to the interior of the coffee factory in West London where Travis’ career with Imperial Coffee(we know where that comes from) takes off as a salesman.  The episodes on the road accompanied by the sound world of the little transistor radio, the theme of the women left behind and encounters with police local politics and the military industrial all have pace  certainty of touch and movement. But as it progresses the film loses its coherence.  O Lucky Man stops letting the audience put the pieces together and starts to underline and explain.  It becomes patronising.  It loses its thread of intelligence and starts to preach.  It becomes more overtly theatric (starts looking like a Carry On movie) and crude wanting to do the thinking for its audience.    
 
Perhaps the failure of O Lucky Man represents the failure of a certain type of left wing political thinking which is founded ultimately on a distrust of audiences abilities to think things through for themselves.  The consequence of this is an indulgence in gross simplifications of situations and a willingness to distort any message to cohere and fit the line of left wing political argument.
 
Adrin Neatrour
 
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Dilemmas of a Bleeding Heart by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 3, February 2005]

Vera Drake vividly portrays the paradoxes of backstreet abortion without passing judgement, writes Tom JenningsDilemmas of a Bleeding Heart by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 3, February 2005]
 
 
 
Vera Drake vividly portrays the paradoxes of backstreet abortion without passing judgement, writes Tom Jennings
 
Director Mike Leigh’s latest effort continues his career-long depiction of ordinary British people struggling with intolerable situations, examining the effects of mundane circumstances on personality, relationships and the strategies we fashion to cope. Much of his work illuminates troubling social issues in the fine grain of individual pain and intransigent immediate environments.1 Vera Drake likewise tackles head-on the implications of backstreet abortion – and even though the film (like Leigh) is emphatically pro-choice, it has been acclaimed equally by liberals, feminists and religious and conservative opponents.2 So it’s worth outlining first the broad contours of an approach able to sidestep easy categorisation and pat political prescription.
 
Early television work hilariously caricatured the grotesque aspirations of 1970s suburban new middle classes, puncturing the pretensions arising from their socio-economic (and other) insecurities.3 Leigh heightened the vicious comic effect via a tortuous scripting, improvisation and rehearsal process involving cast members endlessly exaggerating individual tics and stock phrases to the point of outrageous stereotype. Realism, naturalism and complexity in the acting seemed sacrificed to exploitative melodramatic excess – courting accusations ever since of misanthropically ridiculing hapless victims (especially lower class characters, given the long and continuing history of contempt reserved for us in most UK mainstream and ‘alternative’ comedy).
 
But, despite posing considerable dangers for his progressive and humanistic intentions, Leigh’s method developed into a unique cinematic technique reflecting more generally on the hopelessness and despair inherent in contemporary society.4 Stories of abject damaged souls juggle personal inadequacy, social fragility and economic necessity. Emphasising complicated class positions and mobility (rather than the traditional ‘kitchen sink’ industrial working class), Leigh hints that we are all fucked-up and stuck – money, status and power merely altering the parameters of complacency used to avoid acknowledging it. Nevertheless, the most cruelly lampooned working class characters often have more potential – for empathy and generosity and as catalysts of change. Precariously balancing destructiveness towards self and others with small victories and revelations, room to manoeuvre is carved out – thanks to social networks that facilitate a loosening of the external repression of conformism and the internal repression which forges rigid and defensive patterns of behaviour and expression. The drama is always harrowing, though, and Vera Drake is that in spades.
 
 
A Low Vera
 
Diverging from Leigh’s usual conventions in two important ways, the new film is not contemporary5 but set among the claustrophobic interiors, postwar privations and equally constricting social mores of 1950s North London. Also, the eponymous heroine (a powerful performance from Imelda Staunton) and her close-knit, devoted family6 have none of the visible flaws and conflicts that usually get hammed up. Vera seems perfectly happily adapted to her multiple social support roles: paid to clean middle class households; housewife; carer for bed-bound neighbours and relatives; … and backstreet abortionist. Narrative tension looms from the illegal and secretive nature of the latter; meanwhile all activities are conducted in the same brisk, cheery, routinised manner, with cliches and homilies many will recognise (e.g. the ubiquitous ‘nice cup of tea’). The arrest, trial and prison sentence of this selfless altruist is a personal tragedy mirroring those of various desperate pregnant clients she ‘helps out’ (because no one else will) – differing conspicuously from the daughter of one of her employers, who sails through the official rigmarole available to those able to pay.
 
The sequences depicting both classes of abortion scenarios are meticulously true to real-life experiences7 – and the staging, visual design and camerawork accurately evoke the general mood of ordinary daily life at the time. The film aims to propose, as minimally as possible, the grass-roots ethical quandary of unwanted pregnancy and the woman-centred communal knowledges and practices which have evolved, in all of recorded history, in response. The choice of period avoided unnecessary complications – such as the profiteering and otherwise corrupt conduct accompanying the involvement of feral medics and criminal organisations as demand skyrocketed through the 1950s and 60s.8 And the Drakes’ sheer humdrum respectability – almost to the point of the complete absence of anything resembling opinions or conscious reflection – undercuts all questions of ideology, religion and other moralising discourses which tend to saturate and conceal the immediate physical and emotional dilemma facing the women involved.
 
Vera’s dignity and equilibrium unravel when confronted with the gravity of her actions, with the film demonstrating that no solution can be found in simplistic moral terms. The suffering of women stripped of control over bodily reproduction will inevitably be exacerbated by the cruelty of organised coercion – therefore safe abortion is a pragmatic mortal necessity. However, neither glib permissiveness and liberal rights nor the moral fascisms of religion, State, political correctness or the cosy bulwark of respectable righteousness can wish away the trauma and anguish of decisions to terminate potential human life. In a current climate of reactionary clamour for certainty encouraged by diverse powerful political interests, these are both important messages. But Vera Drake also resonates strongly with Leigh’s underlying preoccupations – the contradictions between the surface cleanliness of conformity to social norms and expectations and the messy reality of people’s lives. The negotiation of these gaps and fractures flirts with frustration and farce in blending honesty and directness, spontaneous warmth, conviviality and generosity of spirit. Most of all, the chances of mobilising these resources in working through life’s quagmires increase the further down the slippery slope of class stratification you go – less encumbered with maintaining face, taste and superiority. But, crucially, only if the Drakes’ stultifying paralysis – suffocating debate and difference under a blanket of bourgeois decorum – is collectively resisted.
 
 
Notes 
1. such as bulimia (Life Is Sweet, 1990), adoption (Secrets And Lies, 1995), homelessness (Naked, 1993), and dementia (High Hopes, 1988).
 
2. including in fundamentalist America and Catholic Europe. Vera Drake is dedicated to Leigh’s midwife and GP parents.
 
3. notably Nuts In May (1976) and Abigail’s Party (1977).
 
4. also in Bleak Moments (1971), Meantime (1983), Career Girls (1997) and All Or Nothing (2002).
 
5. neither was the tedious turn-of-the-century Topsy-Turvy (1999) about operetta composers Gilbert & Sullivan.
 
6. loving husband Stan (Phil Davis), employed as a mechanic by his brother; upwardly-mobile tailor’s assistant son Sid (Daniel Mays); and painfully-shy factory worker daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly).
 
7. according to a friend who suffered both types shortly before abortion was legalised in 1967. However, Vera’s method – flushing the uterus with soapy water – is shown as relatively benign; but is actually just as agonising and life-threatening as knitting needles etc.
 
8. only suggested by procurer Joyce (Heather Craney) who, unbeknownst to Vera, charges clients two guineas for her services.
 
 
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Confusion Is The Beginning of Wisdom – The beginning of an unfinished treatment by Chris GowensConfusion is
the beginning of wisdom -Socrates

It’s amazing, after what, twenty years, as I look out of my
window I can see maybe fifteen to twenty houses, houses in ‘my’ street, a
street that I have lived in for one fifth of a century, yet I couldn’t tell you
who lives there, I couldn’t tell you the names of more than four or five of
them,…call them the others. Granted not all of my neighbours have lived here as
long as me but still… After listening to it twice, I can remember most of a
song or from two ‘meals’, the cooking times of a microwavable meal, stored for
future reference, I’m sure I must have heard their names before, and things
that may have occurred, so why not the details from this wealth people, a tribe
who might own answers, whom I’ve never tried to look at never mind talk to, I
mean it would be strange if I was trying to make friends with everybody in the
world, probably ostracise myself further than the indifference in me does at
the moment….  …. I wonder if they know me… unless they’ve stopped asking
questions.

Now as I wonder about names and the things these folk do,
I’m asking myself why I’m dissatisfied with my lot ‘round these parts, is it
actually the place that’s moribund or just the dead people, like me, who trudge
on with full bellies, no hunger in their hearts, people who have stopped asking
questions. There are questions that you can’t answer and there are questions
that you answer without trying as part of who we are and the things we do….
just fading away, sleeping, working, drinking, smoking, watching, thinking, and
moving nowhere,… telling me, myself and anyone else who still asks questions
why I’m not particularly happy, today, or yesterday and possibly tomorrow. So
why am I thinking so much about it, it’s obvious, to change things, well you do
exactly that, change events or practices and habits that occur in your day or
week or whatever time frame you want to think about… but it’s crazy, it’s as
simple as this, stop doing ‘a’ and do ‘b and c’ instead, so why
isn’t it so easy? I don’t know.

 I hope that when I stop asking and wondering it is
from happiness or the completion of a goal or dare I say it love, and not from
a catharsis or misery, a misery that you can’t grasp just a fog that slowly
clouds. Even the people with something to say they state and don’t probe, speak
without ponder or wonder as the fog and mist restricts their view to such an
extent that they just want to get by without a thorn in their side… at least
I’m still asking questions….   One more question, who am I to judge
the others.

Me

I’ll tell you who … it as good a place to start as any….
Well where do I begin? With the truth? What’s that? Am I finished growing as a
person? Who knows? Some substantial sideburns would be nice.

Ok, I’m 25 at the time of writing, if we get to the last
chapter together I’ll probably be very middle aged, I think this could take a
while… on that note I hope we don’t get there as I may have stopped asking
questions, for the right reasons though! So as I was saying, I’m 24 at the
moment and that is a truth, what does that say about me? I’ve seen the rise and
fall of Thatcher’s Britain, boom and bust, Blue Labour and relative wealth, but
understand poverty, or I can say that I do, and believe I have enough in me to
say this. I’ve had an easy ride though, Iron chancellors for parents, never had
it all and never had a feeling of neglect materially, however I was forced to
wear bad woollen cardigans on occasions in the early eighties when I was dressed
by my legal and natural guardians. So I’ve never had to do without above and
beyond the basics, but you know I’m never satisfied in terms of having things,
not that I want them on a plate, but I want items, products, consumer goods,
clothes, electricals, lots of…  you’d think I was an advertisers dream,
but I hate them, I think I actively advertise goods to myself consciously and
subconsciously, in my sleep, and in the day, I burn with desire, validating
mobile phones and new mobile phones with MP3 players built in even though I
already have a watch with an MP3 player built in that I don’t use to tell the
time, or even listen to music on all that much! The strange thing is though I
didn’t want an MP3 player particularly, or a new watch, now I have a limited version
of both that I don’t use because they are limited, I made a bad choice. I’ll go
on to tell you more about me, more rational things, coherent things and, to you
maybe, more relevant things, but this says quite a lot about me I think, I made
a bad decision.

So me, I think I am, I know I am, one of the few assertions
I’ll make, I am a good person, I am perverted, I must be to think that someone
might want to read this, sometimes I shine and make others shine, sometimes I
am the darkest most evil spirit imaginable, the dark side I resist however. I
think a lot, but I feel like ‘my’ thoughts are exactly that, ‘mine’, and valid
and not idiotic, na<ve maybe, but not idiotic. I bet everyone thinks that
about their own thoughts, that they own them, that they cultivated them, I beg
to differ, I can smell the stench of brainwash daily, I know that people rarely
look in the mirror daily and think about things, they just look in the Daily
Mirror, and think that they’ve thought, they don’t choose to poison themselves,
because they think that they’ve thought what they speak about. Validating their
uniform opinion on an editorial which must be good and proper because it’s news
and it keeps them in the know, because of the safety net that millions of
‘others’ think that they think the same. I’m not specifying the news or the
media or the advertisers or the Church, I mean the World, it seems numb to me,
I know this is rich coming from a self proclaimed good person who hasn’t
bothered with much more than a pea sized fraction of life’s ocean but I really
think if you look and listen there’s not enough ‘people’ anymore. People want
to fit into a demographic and be a piece of something big but not exciting,
wallow in a safe pool of normality as long as they stand out enough, to like,
be loved and to love and be liked, dressed in the right clothes in the meantime
of course. I border on all of my accusations, that’s hopefully why I’m able to
think about it, I hope I can see it, I hope I’m looking in the right direction
and not into the mirror that tricks me into believing in what’s not quite
there.

I digress, back to me, well I really don’t know how to
define myself on paper, being my friend or lover or something would let you see
me, but I can’t understand how to tell you who I am, what are the facts that
you need to know? A friend and a lover would see me, but different parts of me.
Take pieces from the jigsaw and you get an incomplete picture, people who don’t
think that there are pieces missing mistake what they see for the whole nine
yards. So do I exist in an infinite amount of ways? Do I have a single self
reserved for me and myself, well I think so. I am to you what you know of me,
what we have talked about, what we have done together, what other people have
said to us, to you about me, told us to do, where we have been, so my point, we
are defined by experience and perception, these things that we share.

 So me!  I can’t define, I don’t know if it’s relevant
to me, so what do I tell you,  I’m afraid you don’t get a list or much
more of a description, I’ll ask us questions and tell you stories and give you
some words on this paper, you can know me from hereon in Feel free to love me,
or hate me, or vote for none of the above, my story is unorganised and messy
and might not make much sense but the meaning will drip through, these words
strung together are some of my life, some of what shape me and some of what I
think, a neurotic northern boy and his views, a slice of a life and this boy’s
thoughts. I hope you read on.

Boxing Booth – Adrin Neatrour 1984

Sceened at Side Cinema 7 2 04

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

New Age Paranoia by Tom Jennings

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