Film Review

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

Neil
Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

23rd
February 2006

Neil Youngs film
site:

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

What A Man’s Gotta Do by Tom Jennings

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

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

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

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

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

Score Hanns Eisler

Hertha Thiele as Anni

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

Crimson Gold – Directed by Jafar Panahi

Iran 2002

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

A Cut Above? by Tom Jennings

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

Moral Politics at Play School by Tom Jennings

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

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

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

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

A Pair of Right Scares by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 22, November 2004]A Pair of Right Scares by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 22, November 2004]
 
 
BBC2’s fascinating ‘The Power of Nightmares’ (2004) documentaries offer nothing new, argues Tom Jennings
 
Adam Curtis’ basic insight in The Power of Nightmares (PoN) is that similar moral philosophies – decrying the moral degeneracy of consumerism and the godless absolutism of State communism – underpin the politics of both neoconservatism (Bush, Reagan, Thatcher, etc) and radical Islam. Collaborating to repel the USSR from Afghanistan, each interpreted success – including the collapse of the Soviet bloc – as down to them. Their divergent fortunes since have turned them into protagonists in the ‘War on Terror’. Now that their promises of better lives are no longer believed, the political elites can only offer protection against evil – with society uniting in fear and sanctioning whatever measures are fantasised to ameliorate it. Not only the elusive WMDs, but also Al-Qaeda, don’t actually exist. Hot stuff for mainstream TV (if that’s any recommendation …).
 
The main strength of the series was its visual style and structure. Profoundly enriching a rather dry narrative by weaving together archive news footage with excerpts from popular culture, this editing technique parallels the form in which information is encountered and assimilated by ordinary people in the media age. Further, given that the ‘politics of fear’ require the routine exaggeration of threat, it was refreshing to hear it stressed that the propaganda must not be swallowed by the elites – and that it’s the leader’s job to persuade us of ‘great myths’ in order for society to survive (and, coincidentally, for the elites to flourish). So much for the ‘integrity’ of Bush, Blair and power politics in general.
 
In most respects, however, PoN was fatally selective, oversimplistic and tendentious. Clues were liberally (and literally) scattered thoughout in assertions about what ‘we’ do, ‘they’ think and ‘everyone’ believes – constantly generalising its narrow focus and universalising the positions of its comfortable Westerm middle class primary audience. This is bourgeois liberalism’s history as a ‘battle of big ideas’ at its cleverest and most interesting. But its ideology – like the forms of governance it inspires –  is constitutionally unable (in all senses) to acknowledge that the control and disposition of resources are central to political change. Thus neoconservatism is best seen as the political wing of neoliberalism, which demands that corporate market imperatives operate unhindered – whether this be in North America and Europe, the Latin dictatorships, the thin veneer of secular Islamic democracies or the modernised barbarisms in Saudi, Iran, China and Eastern Europe. A hell on earth of increasing poverty, misery and suffering for billions of human bodies is all that neoliberalism can deliver, along with lives wasted on trivial consumption in a shrinking proportion of ‘First World’ populations. The series merely reproduces an alternative nightmare of cynical reactionary pessimism.
 
 
A Pair of Right Scares 
Even in terms of ideas and idealism, PoN was dishonest. Many influential 20th century critiques of Western popular culture were ignored, from Freudianism to the Frankfurt School to Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism), as was the overwhelming  tradition of tasteful class-bound contempt for ‘the mass’ – felt by liberal elitists as much as marxist intellectuals and their Leninist dictatorships, along with adherents of other regressive fundamentalist religions. Its main claim to originality (in the title) requires amnesia towards thousands of years-worth of the political mobilisations of nightmares – the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, witchhunts; Stalinism and McCarthyism; Nazism and racial essentialism; nationalism, myths of foreign contamination and cultural racism (or even primitivist ecology, political correctness and identity fundamentalism).
 
The emphasis on fantasy, lies and mystification was at least thought-provoking in terms of how they get away with it – not only in sidestepping popular resistance, but in engineering the appearance of collusion via voting and consumerism. Unfortunately, in cutting off the entire spectrum of critique, PoN spontaneously reproduces the commonplace institutional process of presenting an extremely narrow range of ‘loyal opposition’ as the only conceivable alternatives. Curtis’ previous BBC2 series, The Century of the Self (2003), was very enlightening on the history of PR and advertising  campaigns, and could hardly avoid some of the analysis of capitalism missing-in-action in PoN. Better still, the forthcoming feature-length The Corporation (Canada 2004, dirs. Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar – the latter responsible for the Chomsky documentary Manufacturing Consent) understands its subject as exhibiting all the traits characteristic of psychopathy if observed in individuals. Of course, even the best of liberal psychology is just as partial and compromised an interpretive tool as its philosophy – shown here in a voiceover musing that corporations “seek their narcissistic reflection” in fascism”. More pertinent is their commitment to it in practice – both in internal functioning and as by far the most conducive political environment. PoN could not make even this simple observation without exposing its bankrupt idealist premises.
 
Curtis insists that ‘ideas shape history’. Why then did he have to, so artfully and artificially, hermetically seal off these particular ideas from all their material, as well as ideological, context? On the surface, because he wants to present himself as so much more clever, liberal and knowledgeable than us poor mugs – and the BBC wouldn’t have gone for the more accurate title: ‘A pair of Right scares’.
 
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Hidden (Cache) Michael Haneke – France – 2005: Daniel Auteil; Juliette Binoche

Viewed 12 Feb 2006: Tyneside Cinema: Ticket price £6-00
Hidden (Cache)  Michael Haneke  – France – 2005:  Daniel Auteil; Juliette Binoche
Viewed 12 Feb 2006: Tyneside Cinema: Ticket price £6-00
 
It’s all in the frame……
Michael Haneka’s film is a forensic investigation beneath the skin of bourgeois life, a surgical incision into the hidden inner body that is history.   The thesis of the film is simple: the life of a wealthy bourgeois couple, Pierre and Anne, both working in the media, is disturbed after a nondescript video showing surveillance of their apartment, is anonymously sent to them. As the archetypal successful couple, Juliet Binoche and Daniel Auteil sleepwalk through a series of locations and situations in which events finally focus   attention back to the 1960’s and the personal consequences of the massacre of hundreds of Algerians by the riot police in Paris, during a peaceful demonstration for Algerian independence.
 
In effect, ‘Hidden’ is a mirror in which past present and future  become lucidly clear.  Haneka makes a pun out of  ‘time’  by using  the nature of video to fuse the past and the present. As the successful couple watch images of the past(surveillance of their flat)  colonise their present, they experience a growing sense of disconcertment and powerlessness. They feel increasing insecurity with the arrival of each tape whose implication one of them Pierre gradually understands.  The intrusion of the videos into their life, into the sanctuary of their home, is immediately perceived as an implied subjective menace.  It smashes their immunity from the middle class time machine in particular in relation to the future of their 12 year old son whose failure to return home from school one day unleashes venomous effects of their middle class insecurity.  But it is the idea of the bourgeois immunity from the effects of time which Haneke lovingly builds into the expressive features of his film – the camera placement and movement, the framing and the sets and settings. In its structure ‘Hidden’ becomes a metaphysical statement in which the ideas of luminance, mirror imaging and eternal recurrence are intrinsic to the action.
 
This is a film of interiors, interior states of mind and the interiors of buildings that are both reflections and  projections of those states of mind.  The interior of Pierre and Anne’s apartment is an envelope that contains them and their world.   The rooms – with the exception of the bedroom have a theatrical quality.  It’s space that yearns to be filled by gesture and ritual.  The kitchen, the TV area, the dining area, all assemblages of a taste spectrum, have a quality similar to that of church interiors.   Untouched by time these spaces yearn to be filled with the timeless ritual of bourgeois good manners and those outward markers of bourgeois identity, success and positive self presentation.  The TV area is wonderfully realised with a wide screen monitor set into the gargantuan book case(sic).  The visual effect is that of a baroque altar piece, with the TV taking the place of the tabernacle.  The TV is a portal through which the outside world is filtered in.  The outside world, which exists as a sort of permanently breaking present, is also a construct of power in which Pierre, as a TV celebrity, is complicit.   But this TV, this item of baroquerie, has its normal substantive function subverted by the tape sent to Pierre and Anne.  This tape is raw footage. It’s an unfiltered communication in which nothing in particular happens but in which the exterior of their apartment is depicted as if under surveillance in a mirror.  In present time Pierre and Anne watch the exterior of their apartment as it was in the past when some one was watching them.   Past and present conflate at the altar but the couple have no ritual for dealing with this situation.  They can only bring to it their angst and the state of mind bordering on panic that is the mark of the insecurity of those who are used to living in immunity from the consequences of time.  Fear. Pierre and Ana’s apartment is a reflection of the immunity that is the greatest of the privileges of the bourgeoisie.    The kitchen, the dining table, the study area, the TV altar are assemblages born of  a religious-like belief that time can be tamed by the knowledge of how to organise space and objects.  When this fails the theatre of time collapses and the naked impulses of aggressive and violent control are revealed beneath the surface.  The bedroom is the exception to the way in which space is depicted in ‘Hidden’.  The bedroom is dark in this bourgeois household, a place of sleep and sex.  It’s a  backstage area where the actors can leave the theatre of life and step out of their costumes and roles.  They can be themselves if there is any self to be.  In the encompassing darkness of the bedroom Pierre dissolves into a puddle of moral turpitude before the questioning of his wife about the death of Majid.  In the penultimate shot in the gloom of the bedroom he undresses and his body is without any covering.  It is a shock to see this man without clothes.  All through the film he has been covered less by his elegant casual clothes than by his denial of time. Then suddenly he is before us: naked.  For a moment no longer possessing the conceit of  individuality now an archetypal sinner seeking the forgetful embrace of sleep.  Pierre’s flesh  liquefies as he melts between the bed sheets seeking the narcotic of oblivion.    Seeking the escape from time. Like all of us.
 
Haneke’s camera watches his actors.  ‘Hidden’ is mainly filmed with long shots and simple camera movements.  Mostly the camera is still: there is movement through frame and where there is camera movement it is typically a pan(though there are some tracks).  The still distant camera and the simple pans, which build the story out of action in the shot, demand that the viewers become an audience.  If this were a Hollywood film, the shooting would be all tricksy weird angled shots(meaningless but visually arresting) tracking shots, point of view shots: all the usual camera stunts to heighten and intensify visual tension as a psychological state so the film would take on the character of the thriller.  But ‘Hidden’ is about watching and the audience are the watchers.  Their emotions are not wildly manipulated at every opportunity, pulled every which way in the course of the film: for the most part they are simply given the wide picture and allowed to construct out of the events the story that they see.   The simplicity of the framing also allows Haneke to work the film as an objective mirror and insinuate the idea and structure of time, past present and future, as it permeates the film, the sets, the TV, the video, the dream.  Time as expressed in ‘Hidden’ becomes an objectivity that the viewers can apprehend – not a subjectivity, the mere function of a state of mind or a point of view.
 
The framing of ‘Hidden’ is also critical to its expressive intent.   The luminance, the source and direction of  light in the framing of the shots in Hidden, layer into the film a metaphysical dimension.  The scenes comprise a mixture of artificial and natural light, but  for those scenes in which there is a natural source of light, it always feels that when Pierre in shot that he is occluding the light.  When Pierre is present he blocks the light.  He prevents the inflow of light, the streaming intensity of grace illuminating the point that he occupies.  In Bresson’s films characters are in light.  Pierre is a reagent turning light to darkness.  A black hole.   And in order that we may see this the more clearly, the framing of ‘Hidden’ is kept very clear and clean.  The shots are composed within uncluttered clean frame lines,  giving the film a mirror like quality and telling the viewer that one thing you see if you look in the mirror is yourself.  Unless you are tricksy and angle the plane of the glass away from yourself
 
The ‘hidden’ of the film’s title points to what lies beyond the mist of forgetfulness that shrouds the legacy of wealth that determines our way of life in the West.  The amoral haze, in particular in relation to the West’s colonial past, that defines our life styles, our personal relations, our structures of work and play, our architecture, our homes. This is a film about us.
 
The strength of Haneke’s film is that it is never polemic.  Theme is negotiated through the personal, through strips of action in which the connections between the forces that mould our responses and the way in which we react to events in our life are sketched out and finally connected to the direct issue of personal honesty.  As Majid’s son says to Pierre after Majid has committed suicide in Pierre’s presence, its about being able to look at yourself in the mirror with good conscience.  But Pierre doesn’t look in the mirror.  He chooses unconsciousness: takes a couple of pills.  When he wakes up it will probably be too late for him to remember.    But there are others who will not forget, even if they do forgive.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk