Film Review

Br(other) Rabbit’s Tale by Tom Jennings

[essay on hip-hop, Eminem and 8 Mile, dir. Curtis Hanson, 2003; published in Variant, 17, May 2003]Br(other) Rabbit’s TaleOne of the central conceits of 8 Mile – Curtis Hanson’s (2002) film about an aspiring hip hop performer, starring controversial rapper Eminem – seems to have eluded the notice of critics and reviewers. This adds to the levels of contradiction and irony in the way the film tackles the subject of hip hop – which, if not ignored altogether in serious debate and polite conversation alike, is generally condemned and dismissed as one of the most scandalous, degraded and degrading forms of contemporary popular culture. Partly this opprobrium results from rap’s refusal to practice the subterfuge usually necessary to sidestep sanctions when bringing lower class vernacular into the public domain. But whatever its significance in terms of social class, hip hop and rap music derive from and draw upon the rich veins of African American culture, even if in America itself and on a global scale young people of all races and backgrounds have taken it to heart, and take part in it in their millions. Even so, the musical forms, performance sites and conventions, expressive styles and lyrical and narrative structures employed in rap are most usefully seen as developments – in the context of today’s social, cultural and technological environments – of African American community and artistic traditions also prominent in the blues, jazz, soul and funk, and in Black oral folklore, storytelling and literature.2
Black and White and Read All OverSo despite its commercial success US rap is still generally perceived as a predominantly Black artform, even if increasingly marketed to white youth. What, then, does it mean for the main protagonist of 8 Mile not only to be white, but also to choose the stage alias of ‘B. Rabbit’? In the script his friends affectionately clarify the ‘B’ as the rather childlike ‘Bunny’. This is appropriate given the Oedipal conflicts experienced by Eminem’s character, Jimmy Smith Jr., and as a bonus also refers to cartoon trickster Bugs Bunny. But his ‘official’ nom de guerre as an M.C. who competes for supremacy in lyrical ‘battles’ is not Bunny, but B. Rabbit – referring to a figure from a different genre, but with similar levels of complexity and ambivalence and a parallel degree of social and political significance. Brer Rabbit, along with the predatory Brer Fox and other animals living in the ‘briar patch’, is a mythic hero of children’s stories, and for older generations something of a lower class antidote to Beatrix Potter et al. His origins lie squarely within fables and parables refined and passed down orally in enslaved communities – as social practice rather than literary form – educating Black youngsters in the ways of the world, how to stay out of trouble and even, maybe, come out on top.
From their humble beginnings (at the cotton-picking grass-roots, so to speak), these cautionary and inspirational tales passed into acceptable literature courtesy of Joel Chandler Harris, from Atlanta, Georgia, who was the first author to publish such an extensive collection of ‘Negro’ stories, as related by fictional narrator ‘Uncle Remus’ standing for the realism, wisdom, benevolence and political savvy of Black elders. In literary criticism starting from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, Harris is cited as an exemplary case of the appropriation by white people of Black cultural resources. Now in 8 Mile we have the first Hollywood representation of underground hip hop, but written, produced and directed by white people, telling the story of a white rapper trying to get by. The choice of moniker refers to this troubled history, and to the contemporary exploitation of Black culture via the commodification of rap music and the ambiguous presence of white people within this field.
Tourism, Tarzan and ToryismTo many critics, this presence is not ambiguous at all, but represents straightforward colonisation – a view appealing to politically correct liberals, who are already predisposed to rubbish hip hop (and any other lower class cultural expression resistant to their moralising). So novelist Jeanette Winterson sees Jimmy Smith as merely: “a tourist … a white man going into Black culture and, lo and behold, he does it better”.3 This echoes Black separatist discourses aiming to maintain the purity of hip hop as Black culture. In US rap magazine The Source, Harry Allen invokes the figure of Tarzan to explain the success of both Eminem and Jimmy Smith Jr.: “a white infant, abandoned by its mother and father and raised by apes, who rises to dominate the non-white people and environment around him”, taking advantage of “the Black facilitation of white development”. This process is argued to be pivotal to the contemporary “refinement of white supremacy” where, for example, “hip-hop is valuable for one reason only: because a lot of white people are into it”.4
Both kinds of criticism are persuasive to a certain extent, arguing in essence that any active involvement of white people in Black culture necessarily implies theft and mastery – and, after all, the history of imperialism and white racism (not to mention, more specifically, Western popular music) has consistently led in that direction. Unfortunately, as well as entailing a rather simplistic, static and closed conception of both Black culture and hip hop, such judgements are extremely pessimistic about the potential for meaningful interaction between Black and white people, whether in culture, politics, or any other arena. However, Eminem’s character is not dubbed ‘Lord Greystoke’; and the origins and associations of Brer Rabbit have survived Joel Chandler Harris’s colonisation as well as Enid Blyton’s bourgeois white supremacist erasure. Maybe hip hop’s Black roots are still hardy and perennial in the briar patch, whatever their fate in the well-to-do garden.
If so, a distinction must be drawn between what happens at the grass roots of hip hop among real live individuals and groups, and how this is mediated, transformed and distorted in the public sphere. The film clearly wants to straddle both realms in purporting to depict participation in a local hip hop scene, while itself being a commercial product aiming for mass consumption. Yet critical positions such as those outlined above refuse to consider such complexity, preferring ‘black and white’ caricatures which are just as crude, restrictive and downright unhelpful as those found in the discourses of politicians, the media, elite cultural institutions and all the other vested interests inimical in principle to any of our subversive pleasures.
Into the Melting PotSo, in a post-industrial Detroit suitably photographed by Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros) as toxic and rotting, Jimmy Smith Jr. struggles to carve out some autonomy and escape the rabbit’s fate (to be tamed, captured and eaten). The hostility and hopelessness of the ghetto offer him only insecure drudge jobs, reinforced by his equally bankrupt family dynamics and relationships with women. His crew provides a nurturing surrogate family for its members, immersed since childhood in hip hop as part of the popular cultural landscape. They have gravitated towards the local rap scene, led by Future (Mekhi Phifer) who hosts regular nightclub events featuring contests between aspiring MCs. Witnessing and encouraging his emerging wordplay skills, his friends urge Jimmy to overcome his shyness and insecurity and take part. The film covers the period in which he tentatively enters and negotiates the contours of this vibrant public sphere, practising and elaborating his lyrics in various settings – culminating in victory over lead rapper of rival posse ‘The Free World’.
8 Mile does capture, if sketchily, the atmosphere of grass roots underground hip hop – and is thus one of very few representations in the mainstream visual media of a phenomenon common in urban centres globally.5 It marks out the different interests and agendas of those involved, and correctly emphasises the quintessential site of hip hop performance – the party. Here boundaries between production and consumption blur as DJs, MCs and the dancehall audience collectively interact in call and response, bodily and aesthetic appreciation and ritual communal celebration.
Slaughtered, Skinned and GuttedBeyond that, the meagre characterisations and backstory barely hint at how Jimmy Smith’s personal trials and tribulations have given him the drive and energy (let alone the poetic skill) to craft the rap performances that the film is structured around. Worse, B. Rabbit’s lyrical attacks as a battle MC are similarly one-dimensional. They do conform to some conventions of the form, weaving biographical and local material into references to popular culture, current affairs and the traditions and history of hip hop – focusing on the socio-economic position shared with his audience in the here and now. But he avoids deeper issues of identity, difference, roots and origins, except when criticising in others the commonplace discourses of racial prejudice and machismo’s sexism, misogyny and homophobia. So, pre-empting the recycling of ‘poor white trash’ stereotypes, he acknowledges and embraces these, glosses their injustice and external causes, and trumps them with well-rehearsed elaborations exposing their lazy repetition.
Most seriously, the price of failure to invoke a positive presence of his own is an inability to boast – that archetypal rapping device crystallising one’s rhetorical manouevres and stylistic prowess into a stage embodiment of gravitas and purpose. Thus at one point he ‘dies’ on stage, unable to respond to a Black audience’s collective ridicule of his whiteness. He can deal with it individually, though, using his smart mouth to puncture his opponents’ pretensions. He cuts The Free World adrift from their roots in Black oral traditions, accusing them of empty posing (by copying 2-Pac – a seminal 1990s MC), rather than engaging in a genuine process of growth using the wisdom of the ancestors. Capped with the revelation of their middle class backgrounds, this clinches the argument for the crowd.
B. Rabbit’s self-erasure is intelligible, given the historical status of ‘whiteness’ as a badge of automatic (fictional) superiority and (actual) domination over others. Flirting with the white racist denigration of Blackness, he insists on the pathetic nature of whiteness, and is content for the Black audience – as his social equals – to judge. Nevertheless, his rejection of minstrelsy (pretending to be ‘Black’), while important, extends to a weak integration of style, lyrics and music – he has no charisma, raps with a clumsy, fractured ‘flow’, and his rhymes consistently miss the beat and work against the rhythm. All that remains is linguistic trickery fuelled by disembodied anger, detached from a coherent personality, historical anchorage and the sense of cultural continuity implicit in African-American popular music. As it happens, this recalls the passage of Brer Rabbit from subversive West African trickster, via transgressive free-living slave, to sanitised cuddly toy.
White, Sliced and WholesomeHaving rendered its hero insubstantial, inoffensive and bland, 8 Mile works as a safe, conformist narrative of ‘poor boy makes good’ in that long tradition of conservative Hollywood films exhorting the popular mass audience to keep their heads down, work hard and fulfil the promise of the (white anglo saxon) protestant ethic. But if the talent to justify success is now sacrificed to local ordinariness, hip hop’s invention and imagination are lost along with the complex, diverse artistry of its practitioners. As usual cinema can only represent the richness of lower class life in reductive stereotypes. But the big payoff is that the main attraction rap offers its audiences – a Black challenge to the hypocrisies of mainstream society – is falsified. All signposted in the allusion to Brer Rabbit.
Ritual naming as transformation is a frequent theme in Black cultural visions of transcendence, yet this choice of name marks a space made vacant by violation, exactly signifying a lack of progression. Drawing attention to their own deceit is thus the film makers’ alibi for viewing hip hop through the lens of whiteness – because a biopic about any of the Black superstar rappers would have required none of these levels of concealment and evasion to guarantee healthy box office. But it would have had to tackle an issue that the big money behind Hollywood blockbusters is terrified of – the increasing centrality of race combined with class – a theme familiar in the daily lives of the mixed hip hop nation of American youth. Instead, 8 Mile counterposes class against race, just as all shades of reactionary and separatist US political discourse have consistently done since the 1970s – mystifying deprivation with euphemisms of Black deficiency in the former, and nailing the prospects of the Black poor to the interests of the vanguard middle classes in the latter.
Convenience Food for ThoughtNaturally, in its cynical exercise of postmodern irony, the film wants to have it both ways, so the aspirational trajectory as well as the promotional strategy devolve onto Eminem. But he has been eviscerated of his exhilarating deployment of infantile excess, the shock tactics aimed squarely at respectable society and hysterical cartoon exaggerations exposing the effects of poverty and despair on the personal and social fabrics. Surely only the ignorance of critics, the gullibility of consumers, and the complacency of power could confuse this performer with this role. Now that is an unsavoury alliance – albeit one very convenient for those to whom culture is simply entertainment and hence profit.
For 8 Mile to fit Hollywood conventions and its own publicity, the most salient features of both rap’s Black heritage and Eminem are effaced, so that the film hides its most serious flaws by trading on his reputation. Hamstrung by their wholesale collusion in this, the reviews were able to recognise neither the flaws nor the (limited) achievements.6 Now, the status of critics in the popular media is often predicated upon the public’s naive susceptibility to the commercial wiles of the Brer Foxes of capitalism. But here they unwittingly reproduce it, obliterating the distinctions between the marketing hype generated around a commodity, and what the material used might mean to its audiences. No surprise, either, that 8 Mile’s most convincing stereotypes are the hustlers picking over local rap for its juiciest packageable morsels, just as mainstream record companies do with their raw material. With Eminem this means crafting a celebrity brand image that isolates, fetishises and falsifies each of his attributes as unique and unsurpassed individual achievements of (white) genius, rather than the minor (if interesting) variations on well-established hip hop themes that they undoubtedly are.
The Multiple Slim ShadyEminem’s vision starts from vicious infantile revenge fantasies, switching indiscriminately among targets – his mother, wife, peers, other MCs, the social environment, economy, media or government – attacked for their various failures to support his needs and wishes, in moods veering from depression and self-disgust to persecution mania and full-blown paranoia. The rage is channelled into lyrical anecdotes in the familiar hip hop registers of lower class teenage rebelliousness, abusive hypermasculinity and gangsta rap nihilism, with video vignettes dressed in the lurid iconography of exploitation film genres, comics, animation and a general wallowing in trash culture, kitsch and bad taste. Ice-T – an original ‘gangsta rapper’ – aptly describes him as the “Jerry Springer of rap”, practising the art of “saying the most wrong thing possible”.7 This captures the sense of a community of grievances being played out, but misses the psychotic core – a splintered and embattled self, deriving purpose and energy in combatting the absence of unconditional love (e.g. respect as an MC) with hatred, bile and malice.8
The comic artfulness of the rendering of nightmare into narrative, and its catharsis as performance, positions Eminem as a tragic clown more in the comedy tradition (from Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor onwards) linking pain, shock and mirth. Whereas the many talented hip hop jokers have tended to play it just for laughs, the feelings Eminem expresses are audibly and visibly heartfelt. And what takes the shock tactics beyond the adolescent exuberance and sleaze of rap acts marketed as teenage rebellion, like the Beastie Boys or Smut Peddlers, is the focus on the dire social implications and circumstances of his existential misery, as well as the converging political and economic interests that demand it. Put bluntly, the party always goes (badly) wrong.
This configuration follows the ‘deranged MC’ subgenre – itself derived from the urban mythic ‘mad and bad’ Black man. There is even the occasional presence of producer and father figure Dr Dre, or Detroit rap crew D12, as a social safety net, as with other famous rap portrayals of lunacy and inadequacy. But Eminem is basically solipsistic. Alone in his internal universe of conflict – not alienated from others but within – he has no shared aim or project for successful performance to embody. Unable to take solace and courage from a Black heritage, he accepts that the self-destructive logic of his abjection promises no escape.9 Thus the lyrics lay scattershot blame, vehemently but without specificity or the explanatory power to convince, at a system which is mad, or “politically incorrect”.10
Hip Hop HypeJust as the compulsive staccato processing of language in multiple alliteration, rhyming and metaphor reproduces the obsessive repetition of psychosis; so the integration of linguistic elements into spoken flow and rhythm is likewise fragmented. Whereas what Adam Krims11 terms ‘speech-effusiveness’ is now typical of the most skilful and innovative rap, many practitioners of it are far more accomplished than Eminem – both in terms of the musicality of the vocals (pitch, timbre, texture), and their meshing with the antiphony and polyphony in the instrumental. Failing to align the voice and poetic metre with the beat hinders the pleasurable experience of the music with the body as well as the mind – hence the usual judgment within hip-hop that Eminem is very far from being the best rapper around.12
But the publicity terms he has been saddled with – and which he consents to for the sake of a career – say otherwise, because those who succeed can then be held up as examples of ‘the American Way’ able to transcend their backgrounds (of class and/or race) – exceptions which prove the rule. So Eminem is produced and sold as universal (i.e. white) novelty pop,13 even while coincidentally undermining various racial stereotypes that neither he nor his commercial backers or critical detractors, for their diverse reasons, dwell on. A foul-mouthed, drug-crazed psychopath hardly fits the historic white ‘genius’ profile; there is none of the middle class ‘wigger’s affected pose of fashionable Black styles; and the depiction of family dysfunction and moral failure turns on its head the politically-charged discourse of Black pathology hiding behind class rhetoric – the latter being notable given rap’s reluctance to tackle this directly.14
However, Eminem’s silence on his personal experience of racism – except individual prejudice against his whiteness – shows that he is no ‘race traitor’15. This avoidance allows him to assert the irrelevance of race, substituting the world view of the universal loser – just a “regular guy”16 like millions of others. If challenged, he projects back onto whoever is his enemy at the time – “I am whatever you say I am” – where the simulacra of his personae and their progress in the mediated world preclude any  ‘real’17 His personal route to salvation is instead implied by the honesty and humility of his engagement with hip hop. Against all the odds, this gives the gratification of finding a voice and deploying a language – a conclusion common to adherents of hip hop in all its manifestations across the world.
Hip Hop HopeIf Eminem’s ravings lack the social embeddedness to provide historical perspective or communal insight into the nature of the processes which afflict people and make them mad – these are precisely the kind of criteria which have consistently given Black artists the desire and wherewithal to seek paths to redemption. This kind of ethics has been a preoccupation of hip hop since the start – notable in Afrika Bambaata’s Zulu Nation; Grandmaster Flash (‘The Message’); KRS-One, Public Enemy and Rakim; through to hardcore via NWA, 2-Pac, Wu-Tang Clan and Nas (among thousands of less famous examples). However, each new wave of rap styles has been facilitated, amid accusations of dilution, by the steady growth of relatively independent music industry sectors with a strong Black presence, striving to influence and moderate commercialisation. In this climate, class politics of any kind have rarely been prioritised, although a quietly persistent strand alongside the much heralded Black nationalism and pride.18
So, Chuck D of Public Enemy is surely correct in saying that, being white, Eminem can tackle “issues that Black rappers are encouraged to leave alone for marketing and commercial reasons”.19 But that’s not the whole story. The Black traditions have persistently militated  towards subverting oppression by wresting its adverse cultural and discursive conditions into some form of social agency and control. Since the ideology of Black capitalism – popularised by the Nation of Islam, Spike Lee and Public Enemy, for example – came to be embraced by US hip hop entrepreneurs (and reflected in the music), economic control has taken centre stage. Thus record labels and management companies that are (at least partly) Black owned and controlled have gained commercial footholds by deliberately packaging the music to appeal to local Black community markets (in Atlanta, California, Miami, New Orleans, etc.), pandering to corporate media (so-called ‘hip-pop’) and/or crossing over to white rock and heavy metal (Run DMC, Ice-T, Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, etc).
However, even the current ‘ghetto fabulous’ fairy stories of wealth and glamour, which incorporate mainstream pop and R&B, still retain muted elements of social critique in Blues laments and lower class sentimentalism. Similarly, the Black Mafia subgenre could be interpreted as an oblique critique of capitalism as crime, equating the competitive rivalry of the music industry with mob families who were once mere street gangs. If so, gangsta rap might represent an underclass corrective to the moral sophistry inherent in a philosophy of uplift through the success of the few – but which absolutely requires the continuing failure of the many.20
Sadly, if predictably, marketing imperatives work hard to hinder such incipient political potential from clearing the space to develop. The media, politicians and major record companies may have their pound of institutionally racist flesh, but money sets the parameters. 2-Pac is a typical case – his attempt to meld lower class manifesto (‘Thug Life’) and Black Panther-derived social credo was sabotaged by the commercial strategy of his label, Death Row, who progressively spiked all but the most nihilistic material.21 On the whole, the transgressive power of lower class vernacular retains the affiliation of core audiences, but being presented solely in terms of Blackness sells more widely, engages the pro-censorship Black and white middle classes, suits the scaremongering of the media and conservative politicians, and fits various agendas of racial essentialism and Black unity (hence the furore over Eminem’s casual disruption of these rhetorics). Paul Gilroy characterises the outcome of this ideological tangle in the cultural compromise formation that is contemporary hip hop as “revolutionary conservatism”. He points out that its utterly hybrid and syncretic nature, and the diversity (especially in terms of class) of its producers and users account for both hip hop’s unprecedented global popularity and the consistent failure of public discourses to understand it.22
Arts of ResistanceRussell Potter argues that the resistive potential of hip hop lies in its continuing capacity to articulate contemporary vernacular subversions of dominant cultures, in late capitalist conditions of increasingly global and frantic commodification. The significance of African American traditions is that their particular cultural trajectory from slavery till now has enhanced the ability to creatively steal, mock, honour and re-present ideas, words and sounds simultaneously, in order to convey experience, history, pain and desire in artistic expression – and have thus been especially well-placed to exploit post-modern forms of bricolage and revision.23 So from a core, or benchmark, of black practice, hip hop has mobilised the whole range of cultural material at its disposal, using all available techniques and technologies, to suit its own local and equally subordinated expressive needs – including those of racially mixed and culturally hybrid communities and scenes. This has enabled its worldwide dispersal, through a commodified ‘word of mouth’, to overflow and sidestep all of the clumsy and misguided attempts at policing and suppression.24
But while these vernacular cultures can provide the necessary grounds for transgression, this can easily resolve into mere coping mechanisms on the part of the oppressed, who remain contained by power. This danger is acute given that the fetishised fashion accessory of superficial ‘blackness’ in style without content is now offered unremittingly for consumption, including the purely commercial manufacture of simulations of grass-roots practice. Many marketed hip hop acts, black as well as white, could be interpreted as domesticated Brer Rabbits in this sense, such as Puff Daddy/P.Diddy (a bourgeois ‘class minstrel’ and rather bad MC), Vanilla Ice (fake ‘black’ and fake ‘street’) or N’Sync’s Justin Timberlake (fake everything) – not Eminem, though, who is to some extent honourable even if failing to outwit the Fox. Conversely, various derivations of hip hop have virtually offered themselves up for recuperation, taking themselves too seriously through pretension or elitism. In the UK this might include the trip-hop and drum and bass genres, which sought to legitimise themselves in terms of mainstream aesthetic values and the accumulation of cultural capital; or the remnants of rave cultures whose absorption into mere weekend recreation seems virtually complete. Whereas in rap music the dense and sophisticated vernacular, the oppositional stance and refusal of respectability, and grass-roots credibility, affiliation and involvement combine in ways that, even after more than two decades, still seem to completely confound the status quo – as the reception of 8 Mile in clueless celebration or malicious dismissal suggests.
James Scott has revealed how colonised and enslaved subjects communicate among themselves using ‘hidden transcripts’ in language and cultural activities.25 These nurture resistance to domination and keep hope alive, while the explicit versions in ‘public transcripts’ purport to and seem to fit the demands of the ruling groups – to whom the ‘real’ meaning is opaque. Scott concludes that when political action does develop against domination, it is the hidden transcripts which provide the discursive and cultural weaponry and ammunition which explode into overt expressions of revolt. Maybe hip hop’s enduring achievement will be that, in terms of surface appearance in the age of Spectacle, the hidden and public transcripts are the same – although the meanings are worlds apart. The complacent networks of privilege try to suppress the open expression of the vernacular, mistaking symptom for cause and in the process revealing the stupidity, venality and complicity of their cultural disciplinarians. But the politics of rap’s reception provides the younger, newer strata of colonised, enslaved, migrant and surplus urban populations with the opportunity to bear witness to the obscenity of the globalised New World Order and its neo-feudal military economy.
This isn’t politics in the recognised formal, programmatic sense; it’s a set of cultural patterns which adeptly resist the hitherto false promises of such straightjacketing – on the part of those excluded from all other sites and systems of cultural and political expression. By the understanding and generalisation of the details of specific experience into actively shared anger, private dissatisfaction can be transformed into a rap(t) productive engagement when, all around, defeatist cynicism is a more intelligible response to today’s most unpromising of circumstances (and fostered as such as a deliberate tactic to shortcircuit opposition). As Paul Gilroy stresses, quoting Rakim, “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”.26 The question of where you want to go is still open.
Notes1. from ‘The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story’, Joel Chandler Harris, in Uncle Remus:His Songs and His Sayings, illustrated by A.B. Frost, Appleton Century Crofts Inc., 1908.
2. The best introduction to hip hop is still Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Discussions of the African American genealogy of the Blues and Black literature respectively can be found in: Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1984; and Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifiying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Oxford University Press, 1988. For the global reach of rap music see: David Toop, Rap Attack 2: African Rap to Global Hip Hop, Pluto Press, 1991; and Tony Mitchell (Ed.) Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the U.S.A, Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
3. in: BBC 2’s Newsnight Review, 17th January, 2003.
4. ‘The unbearable whiteness of emceeing: what the eminence of Eminem says about race’, The Source, February 2003, pp.91-2.
5. other than music videos, of course. The nearest mainstream cinema has come recently is the portrayal of a rap poet (Saul Williams) in Slam (Marc Levine, 1999), and a documentary on hip hop DJing (Scratch, Doug Pray, 2001).
6. for example Ryan Gilbey, ‘In the ghetto’, Sight & Sound, February 2003, pp.36-7.
7. in: Lock Up Your Daughters: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll, BBC 1, 2003.
8. Most clearly seen in The Slim Shady LP (1999) and The Marshall Mathers LP (2000, both Aftermath Entertainment/ Interscope Records); and D12’s Devil’s Night (Shady Records/ Interscope Records, 2001).
9. In ‘Insane in the membrane: the Black movie anti-hero of the ‘90s’, The Source, May 1997, pp.36-37, Marcus Reeves shows how this staple figure in Blaxploitation films relates social conditions to behaviour rather than to being. See also S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema, University of Chicago Press, 1999.
10. Eminem, in: Rhythm Nation, BBC Radio 1, 28th March 1999. His latest release, The Eminem Show (Aftermath Records, 2002) leavens the shock tactics with faltering attempts at serious commentary and some rather bland pop and rock sentimentality parachuted in.
11. Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
12. Eminem freely acknowledges his shortcomings here, for example in Angry Blonde, Regan Books/Harper Collins, 2000, and Chuck Weiner (Ed.) Eminem ‘Talking’: Marshall Mathers In His Own Words, Omnibus Press, 2002. Hilariously, Will Self mistakes this for a “white sensibility”: Newsnight Review, BBC 2, 17th January, 2003.
13. UK rap critics generally appreciate the wordplay skills (and little else) in the Eminem “circus”: e.g. Philip Mlynar’s review of The Eminem Show in Hip Hop Connection, July 2002, p.77. But again, the final judgement still tends to come down to race.
14. unless veiled by ‘the dozens’ or displaced into sex stories. See: Robin D.G. Kelley’s contemporary-historical analysis, Yo Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, Beacon Press, 1997; and bell hooks’ painstaking and moving discussion in Salvation: Black People and Love, Women’s Press, 2001. Paul Gilroy examines related questions of freedom, race and gender relations in Black music in ‘After the love has gone: bio-politics and etho-poetics in the Black public sphere’, Public Culture, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1994, pp.51-76.
15. in the sense of “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”, Noel Ignatiev & John Garvey (Eds.) Race Traitor, Routledge, 1990; and contrary to Tom Paulin’s wish-fulfilment (ascribing to Eminem sentiments like “I don’t want to be white any more”), in Newsnight Review, BBC 2, 17th January, 2003. For whatever reasons, Eminem has scrupulously edited out of his lyrics all signs of the lower class white racism and much of the Black ghetto vernacular he will have grown up with. Incidentally in UK hip-hop, racism is also viewed depressingly often as mere individual prejudice rather than a historical and institutional phenomenon.
16. This is Eminem’s mantra, repeated in countless interviews, apparently unaware of the skin privilege giving him the luxury of asserting it. So, receiving probation in April 2001 for a weapons offence, he stated that the judge “treated me fair, like any other human being” (Mansel Fletcher, ‘A year of living dangerously’, Hip Hop Connection, January 2002, pp.59-61).  Whereas a Black ‘regular guy’ would get jail time – particularly pertinent given the new ‘plantation slavery’ of US prisons and sentencing policy.
17. ‘The Way I Am’, The Marshall Mathers LP. Meanwhile, the  media’s celebrity chatter remains oblivious to creative licence, obsessing about the lyrics’ literal truth, for example in Nick Hasted’s, The Dark Story of Eminem, Omnibus Press, 2003.
18. Nelson George’s Hip Hop America (Penguin, 1998) gives a concise account of the commercial rap industry’s development.
19. in: Lock Up Your Daughters: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll, BBC 1, 2003. Apparently Dr Dre also expected less censorship pressures on a white artist (Ian Gittins, Eminem, Carlton Books, 2001, p.17).
20. see Todd Boyd, Am I Black Enough For You? Popular Culture from the Hood and Beyond, Indiana University Press, 1997. As well as the liberal-conservative themes of films like Boyz N The Hood (John Singleton, 1991) and The Player’s Club (Ice Cube, 1996), there is now a sickening trend for hip hop celebrities to publish self-help homilies and cliches about believing in yourself and working hard to gain success (for example in books by Queen Latifah and LL Cool J). Also note that ‘gangsta’ now conflates the earlier terms ‘hardcore’ and ‘reality’ rap in a classic African American Signifyin’ move.
21. see Armond White, Rebel for the Hell of it: the Life of Tupac Shakur, Quartet, 1997; and Michael Eric Dyson, Holler If You Hear Me: Searching For Tupac Shakur, Plexus, 2001. Earlier, the inspiring political initiatives from the 1992 LA uprising and subsequent gang truce were neglected in commercial LA rap: see, for example Mike Davis, L.A. Was Just the Beginning. Urban Revolt in the United States: A Thousand Points of Light. Open Magazine Pamphlets, 1992.
22. Paul Gilroy, ‘After the love has gone’ (see note 14), and Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, Serpent’s Tail, 1993. The importance of hybridity and syncretic processes in the development of Black culture is stressed in his The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993. Many writers of the ‘hip hop generation’ use this kind of analysis to avoid the critical impasse which results from the assumption of a singular Black (or any other) identity – for example in Mark Anthony Neal’s superb Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, Routledge, 2002.
23. Russell A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. State University of New York Press, 1995.
24. including occasionally from within the rap industry: see for example ex-The Source editorial staff member Bakari Kitwana’s The Rap on Gangsta Rap, Third World Press, 1994.
25. James C. Scott, Domination: the Arts of Resistance, Yale University Press, 1990.
26. Paul Gilroy, Small Acts, see note 22.
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Cock and Bull Story – Michael Winterbottom UK 2005 – Steve Coogan Rob Brydon

Viewed – Tyneside Cinema – Newcastle-upon-Tyne – Gala screening for Northern Lights Film Festival – 24 Nov 05 – complementary ticket.Cock and Bull Story – Michael Winterbottom UK 2005 – Steve Coogan Rob Brydon

Viewed – Tyneside Cinema – Newcastle-upon-Tyne – Gala screening for Northern Lights Film Festival – 24 Nov 05 – complementary ticket.

A Cock and Bull Story(C and B) is Michael Winterbottom’s(MW) film rendition of Tristram Shandy, an eccentric eighteenth century English litterary work written by Rev. Laurence Sterne as a notional autobiography. The driving concept of MW’s piece as it appears on screen is to produce a filmic approximation of this work by thematically shooting it as a film about the making of a film. This genre is typically exemplified by films that use their own original material rather than movies deriving from book adaptations as is the case with C and B.

The ‘We’re making a movie theme’ was possibly derived from a reading of the book that picked up its detached language when describing intimate and close details, Tristram Shandy’s consciousness of itself as a literary product, and its persistent wanton determination to disregard the rules of sequential prose by inventing itself as a form of long digressions, lists, asides and punctuation’s in time. Tristram Shandy deconstructs long before Derrida coined the phrase.

But Tristram Shandy is more than an exercise in style. Its style is always secondary to its voice, and it is this voice that one can hear over the two centuries since it was writtten, and it is this voice that as a reader, you come to love. Because it is a brave voice, a brave voice that is committed to truth. A voice that tells the truth. It is an intelligent voice that faced with the chaos and pain of life has discernment awareness and discrimination. If this were not the case Tristram Shandy would long ago have been discarded.

It is this voice, the central character striving with humour. for truth, that is the defining core of Tristram Shandy, not its style. Its style defines its superficial form. This superficial form is critical, artful and necessary for its success, but not sufficient. If Tristram Shandy had been all form and no voice, it would have gone the way of a million magazine articles and films.

A voice seeking to express truth is what is missing from a Cock and Bull Story. It feels from beginning to end that the director, MW, is absent. MW has nothing to say either in or through the characters that people his film. And having nothing to say MW as a compensation has recourse to a purely stylistic rendition of his Tristram. But A Cock and Bull Story is not even superficially in style a coherent film. It looks and sounds like a mish mash of different influences: Fellini’s 8 ½; Hopper’s the Last Movie; the Office; and sketch driven Python derivative TV. C and B fails to exert over its disparate elements any form of stylistic unity; which is of course precisely Sterne’s achievement.

C and B opens with a sequence in which the two male leads exchange persiflage about actor stuff. In the opening sequence the subject of their talk is Rob Brydon’s yellow teeth, which conversation sets up a recurring motif of actor rivalry that is intercut through the film. But the trouble with actors talking actor stuff is that a little goes a long way. The egotistical concerns of actors without any anchoring in plot or structure or character, are vacuous and fail to hold audience interest. Another ingredient in C and B pudding, are sequences from the production script meetings. These like the actor sequences tend to use hand held roving camera to sign that they are unscripted impro. These production group inserts like the actor sequences are uninspired and ultimately uninteresting(why should the audience be interested in the minutiae of an uninteresting film). It is during one of these sequences, a discussion about the why and the how to film the sequence of the Siege of Namur, that the film finally gets bogged down and lost.

Interstitially placed between the actor and production crew sections, MW films pieces to camera by Tristram( with picture inserts), sections of filming the film itself and the filming of sequences of the book mainly dominated by the funny sexy bits and the birth of Tristram. These sections look to have been shot by MW without resolve as to what kind of film he is making. He seems to be trapped by the otherness of eighteenth century prose and a demand to play the book for laughs: the result is an uneven unconvincing farrago of slapstick and formality.

Without a strong clear concept and ideas about how to film Tristram Shandy, A Cock and Bull Story is a movie adrift. It is hard to see why Michael Winterbottom took it from project to realisation. It is possibly a measure of the paucity of directorial talent in UK feature film production that he was able to get backing for a film that turns a literary conceit into an act of filmic arrogance.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Same Difference? by Tom Jennings
[Essay on cinema representations of European Asians & Muslims, published in Variant, No. 23, May 2005]
[see also Part Two: ‘Breaking Cover’, Variant, No. 24, September 2005 – discussing documentary representations of British and European Muslim women]
Same Difference? by Tom Jennings
[essay on film representations of British and European Asians and Muslims, published in Variant, No. 23, May 2005]

“The media and politicians don’t talk about Christian extremism, fundamentalism or terrorism – but everyone who considers themselves a Muslim feels tainted due to the propaganda use of 9/11” (Paul Laverty)1
Adding to the abiding casual cruelty of skin prejudice, people of Asian descent in Britain have faced a panoply of extra pressures in the last three years or so as a result of government panic based on ‘intelligence’ concerning external and internal threats of international (unofficial) terror – handily projected into the ‘strangeness’ of diasporic Islamic culture, in concert with displacing the blame for the withdrawal of welfare onto migrants and refugees instead of needing to feed the greed of corporate gangmasters. However, from recent current affairs and documentary exposure of the dishonesty and duplicity of mainstream institutional and megabusiness interests,2 it is becoming more widely understood how political ideology in the age of hyperreal spin routinely manufactures history in ways fictional genres hitherto scarcely imagined. Narrative construction and the elaboration of fantasy with contemporary visual technologies clearly resonate with media-saturated publics at levels of effectivity different from the more traditional reliance on dispassionate journalism and intellectual integrity. In any case, given the age-old capacity of stories to appeal to our deepest feelings and to change perceptions and behaviour, fiction may also have a role in subverting the patterns of domination in late capitalist governance – just as the hidden transcripts of folk culture and common vernacular have always sustained the oppressed and confounded power.
So, this essay reviews two high profile fictional film representations of the lives of British Muslim people. Their production was motivated by a wish on the part of non-Muslims to set the record straight with realistic portrayals of men, women, families and social networks just as complex and multilayered in morality, ethics, problems and behaviour as any other groups within a modern multiracial, multicultural society. Readings of these films are then set against a work of European cinema released at the same time to similar levels of acclaim but with no such issue-led raison d’être – but whose subject matter might offer comparable if contrasting depth in this respect. Finally, the closing section assesses the significance of these and other popular cultural representations of Asian or Muslim Westerners, attempting to sketch out the grounds upon which a recognition can be nurtured of the presence of conflictual diversity in us all. Acknowledging how differences between us necessarily and irrevocably cohabit and mingle with our similarities may undermine the us-and-them crusader rhetoric of Islamophobia along with the deeper-seated (conscious and unconscious) white racism lurking behind it – as well as in the long run eroding the further horizons of all cultural/ethnic and biological essentialisms too.
Family Matters1. Home and the Broken-HeartedDirector Ken Loach and scriptwriter Paul Laverty changed tack for Ae Fond Kiss (2004) – their third collaboration set in the West of Scotland following My Name Is Joe (1998) and Sweet Sixteen (2002) – in response to the dehumanising vilification of Muslims whipped up by the media and politicians since 9/11, and the consequently heightened everyday hostility experienced by British Asians. Laverty felt obliged to “do a story that saw Muslim people as rounded human beings; and family life as family life is everywhere, with its tensions and jealousies and guilts and the rest of it.” Similarly, to Loach: “Families are families; the surface details change but the emotional blackmail is the same … and there’s always rebellion”.3
Ae Fond Kiss sees the comfortable Khans from Glasgow’s southside arrange marriage between a distant cousin from Pakistan and their only son Casim (Atta Yaqub). He intervenes in a fracas between his sister Tahara (Shabana Bakhsh) and classmates when meeting her from her Catholic school, and a mutual attraction with Irish music teacher Roisin (Eva Birthistle)4 leads to them becoming lovers and a short break in Spain. They split over his impending marriage but reconcile when he comes clean with his parents. Then she is sacked because her priest (Gerard Kelly) denounces her for living in sin with a Muslim. His older sister Rukhsana (Ghizala Avan) plots to wreck the relationship to save her own marriage plans, and parents Tariq (Ahmad Riaz) and Sadia (Shamshad Akhatar) plead with Casim for family honour, offering as collateral the house extension built for him. His friend Hammid (Shy Ramzan) lives with a white woman but keeps it secret, and advises against sacrificing the entire family for a girl.5 Their final ploy flies in prospective bride Jasmine (Sunna Mirza) plus family behind Casim’s back, contriving Roisin to witness the scene. She storms off but when Tahara tells him all, he rushes to Roisin’s side …
The narrative arc of the story depends on Tariq’s insistence on ruling the Khan roost. Starting as effective comedy,6 this increasingly turns to pathos and farce as he refuses to acknowledge the limits of his power, culminating in hysterically smashing up the extension. Unfortunately his tragic experiences during the 1947 post-imperial partition of India7 are declaimed like a sermon halfway through the film rather than being woven into the story, which short-circuits any audience sympathy won by Riaz’ ebullient performance. Similarly, in the early sequence where Casim and Roisin first meet, Tahara makes a political speech listing her many conflicting loyalties and identifications.8 But while her intelligence and determination are heartening, we can’t appreciate the context of her (or her siblings’) development in and outside the family. Unexplained individual traits are forced to extremes in recognisably Loachian melodramatic fashion, and the chances of resonance among those whose families are “the same everywhere” correspondingly recede.
Variously lined up in traditional family structure positions – a device to represent diversity among UK Muslims – scant depth is shown in the Khans’ personal relationships, and we struggle to sense their feelings for each other. Worse, Roisin’s biography (including a failed marriage) is only mentioned in passing, so no parallels can be imagined between the lovers in terms of the demands of the past, the development of self in the family or its influence on present orientations and decisions. Birthistle is a strong and convincing actress playing a resolute character, whereas Casim’s dissembling makes him a rather unconvincing lover for her – seeming morally cowardly in concealing his concerns. But Yaqub is a novice actor and fails to convey ambivalence – unfairly matching the disproportionate pressures forming Casim’s character against her scripted mystery and fortitude – and we are further unable to interpret her surprise at the trouble their relationship causes among his family.9 Roisin’s apparent lack of connection to her ‘roots’ may indicate a decline of family values compared to their importance among those of Pakistani descent, but the erasure of her backstory makes it impossible to compare strategies of negotiation under varying terms of parental control. Plus, if the filmmakers’ preferred culture clash was in fact regressive conservatism versus secular modernism (in Islam/Rome disguise), then equity would surely require showing the kinship of both.
Seen as an unremarkable classic romance, Ae Fond Kiss unbalances the middle class aimlessness of its personable lovers with Casim’s ‘issues’, rather than critically examining these.10 Their future indeed seems full of hope; however, we learn nothing either about Roisin’s or the Khans’ class backgrounds. The nearest we get to economic threat is her priest’s “Tom, Dick or Mohammed” prejudice complicating Roisin’s career, while the Khan seniors’ intransigence revolves around social, cultural and economic capital – and Casim’s accountancy degree and college DJing coalesce in entrepreneurial nightclub ambitions, Rukhsana aims to maintain family integrity and achieve happiness in her arranged marriage into higher social status, and Tahara intends to escape to train in journalism. However, in lower class contexts family honour may be felt as a more desperate matter – where, given the prevailing institutional and everyday white racisms, the status at stake is that of survival and acceptance as part of society/humanity rather than stratifying superiority. Poorer young British Asians who find economic autonomy more problematic thus face different “fetters on their choices”11 in responding to generational and official control. Perhaps Yasmin (2004), grounded in West Yorkshire’s more downmarket provincialism, could contemplate some of the commonplace socio-economic realities that Ae Fond Kiss ignores.12
2. Marriage of InconvenienceYasmin was developed by director by Kenny Glenaan because “There’s an invisible war happening in Britain which British Caucasians may or may not see, but for the Muslims of our country, it’s similar to being Irish in the 70s and 80s – guilty until proven innovent”; with the intention of giving “a positive portrayal of British Muslim experience, post 9/11, as a way of almost putting your fist through this notion of Islamophobia that’s grown up since”.13 The eponymous local authority care worker (Archie Panjabi) drives from a terraced house on a Keighley estate in traditional Muslim hijab and burqa and en route changes into casual Western gear for work and pub sessions with colleagues – including John (Steve Jackson), with whom friendship may develop into intimacy (though she confides nothing of her home life). Then she reverts to dutiful unpaid caregiving for her strict father (Renu Setna) and teenage brother Nasir (Syed Ahmed) – who also defers to custom in morning prayer duties at the mosque, but otherwise indulges in petty drug dealing and consorting with local girls.
Yasmin’s respect (though not, perhaps, ‘love’) for and loyalty to her father has even stretched to agreeing to unconsummated marriage to rural Pakistani goatherd Faysal (Shahid Ahmed) until his UK citizenship is assured, but she barely tolerates his presence or parental authority – and her increasingly caustic tongue suggests she’s marking time. Then after September 11th the uneasy local equilibrium goes sour, with increasing hostility at work, abuse in public, and a complex range of fear, confusion and anger on the home front. Faysal’s regular international phone calls to relatives lead to SWAT teams swooping on him, Yasmin and John; but rather than seize the chance to get shot of her spouse she stands vigil till he’s finally released and falls into her arms. Meanwhile Nasir’s seduction by recruiting jihadis sees him preparing to leave for training in Afghanistan.
Yasmin may capture the outrageously arbitrariness of Blunkett et al’s blind bungling sweep through Muslim neighbourhoods. But shoehorning in so many urgent domestic ramifications of the War on Terror means that the thoroughness required to portray the details of how Yasmin’s personal situation has developed get squeezed into perfunctory signposted moments and backstory references to make time for the menacing armed police thriller farce.14 At least the denouement is left open when she visibly begins to reorient to her marriage and future and the place of Muslim customs in her life – Ae Fond Kiss also refused to foreclose on any options, though in woolly optimism compared to resignation here. But, again, what is sacrificed is the emotional ebb and flow of individual growth amidst the seductions of Western lifestyle and consumerist fulfilment as against submersion in or submission to whatever illusory or real comfort and security home and community can promise. The former offer little beyond her second-hand cabriolet, given Yasmin’s white Keighleyites’ implausibly unanimous cruel indifference shading into violent hatred – apart from one elderly shopper chastising youths throwing milk over Muslim women in the street.15 Before and after being banged up, John also far too easily succumbs to basic prejudice for Yasmin ever to have taken him seriously.
In fact all her work, family and neighbourhood relationships are rendered in cursory cartoonish sketches16 – yet it is precisely the fine-grain of these that would have encouraged genuine understanding of and empathy with her choices (such as they are), especially when both script and Panjabi’s superb acting illuminate a forceful, imaginative and highly intelligent, as well as believably impatient, ambivalent and troubled, personality.17 Not that weak, boring, stupid simpletons like Faysal deserve their fate either, but the unintentionally victimological nature of Yasmin’s diagnosis squashes any agency for local British Muslims beyond surrender to the righteous proponents of violent jihad parachuting in to regiment their confusion. Its most effective exaggerations reflect the shifting local tectonics after 9/11 whereupon everyone’s complacencies are shaken – but the orchestration of collective neurosis in the background hum of Bush/Blair’s banal ‘peace and freedom’ bullshit are mirrored in the film’s subsequent lazy hyperbole. Nowithstanding the alibi that “everything in the script actually happened”,18 the question of what might happen next eludes active viewer involvement almost as much as the cast’s heavily circumscribed capabilities.
Furthermore, both Yasmin and Ae Fond Kiss unnecessarily situate their young protagonists’ dilemmas predominantly against the stark demands of first-generation immigrant parents trying to sustain dignity in the face of massive dislocations in their lives, translated into a determination to bequeath to their children the emotional and cultural resources that have kept them going. Obviously this has been a central unifying dynamic in most British Asian family histories; but its defensive, backward-looking construals have for at least two decades been overlain with the desire and practical orientation to explore the fullest range of possibilities available in UK society. Put briefly, second, third and fourth generations increasingly grow up with a phenomenological ‘knowledge’ of being British – blurring into  an immense diversity of other entangled individual and social identifications.19 Regrettably, the structural imperative in these two films to instruct ignorant white viewers of the historical underpinnings of Asian traditionalism leads to oversimplistic opposition rather than complex interaction – implying that acknowledgement and incorporation of Asianness inevitably compromises Britishness and vice versa.20
This crude dichotomising of lived spectra extends most damagingly in Yasmin to Nasir’s unlikely lurch from general Western adolescent decadence into Al-Qaeda training21 – when lifestyle, cultural, economic and political developments are infinitely richer even in the grimmest parts of West Yorks.22 Yet again the material expressions of the white liberal imagination show accidental affinity with explicit far-right racism in reducing their objects to cardboard stereotypes.23 In the process, centuries of radical humanist and internationalist Islamic philosophy and practice24 – as well as recent British Asian mobilisation in grassroots labour militancy, Black anti-racist politics and contemporary multicultural interplay25 – all disappear into the medievalist fundament. But surely, even if casualties of integration and assimilation must be seen at the purely individual level beloved of UK social realism, their putative tragedy should still be capable of imaginative moulding into some manner of positive potential without disavowing the potency of poisonous circumstances. The German film Gegen die Wand relishes this task and tackles it Head-On.
3. DIY Arrangements Although chronicling the self-arranged marriage, separation and love of two Turkish-German misfits and family exiles via a variety of traumatic vicissitudes, Head-On’s writer and director Fatih Akin26 had no intention of engaging in social critique: “I never thought much about the cultural environment; that’s really from my subconscious … The media focused on the background; the audience beyond the media see the love story and not the culture clash”.27 Like the two UK films, Head-On hysterically ratchets up the melodramatic excess arising here from the psychically fragile main characters’ self-destructiveness. Thus no one could mistake them as representative of anything other than human distress in extremis – so if their struggles to live and love are to be interpreted in terms of social, cultural and political reality, this will have to be a deliberate conscious exercise rather than any spoon-fed pat contrivance.
Starting in the working class Hamburg district of St Pauli,28 young Sibel Güner (Sibel Kekilli29) notices middle-aged potman loser Cahit Tomruk (Birol Ünel) at a psychiatric hospital, after he drove into a wall when debilitating depression overtook the palliative of drink and drugs. She has slit her wrists (again) to escape the traditional family suffocation ordered by father Yunus (Demir Gokgol) and violently enforced by brother Yilmaz (Cem Akin) – while her mother Birsen (Aysel Iscan) is sympathetic but helpless. Intrigued by Sibel’s spirit and passion for sensation, Cahit agrees to her proposal of sham marriage, and his old friend Seref (Güven Kiraç) helps fool the folks.30 After the wedding he gradually falls for her despite her reckless promiscuity, and gets her a hairdressing job with occasional girlfriend Maren (Catrin Striebeck). But when he’s jailed for the manslaughter of one of her more misogynist flings, her furious family patriarchs rumble the deception thanks to the media coverage. Fearing for her safety she flees to yuppie cousin Selma (Meltem Cumbul) in Istanbul after pledging to wait for him.
Crop-haired, devoid of ornamentation and drained of zest, she confides in a letter to Cahit that she is “the only lifeless thing in this city”. Abandoning drudge work as a chambermaid at Selma’s hotel, she roams the streets in a chemical haze and is raped by a barman at a disreputable club. Her downward spiral culminates in trumping the insults of three thugs with florid speculation about them, their wives and mothers, and she is found in the gutter beaten to a pulp and gutstabbed – apparently fatally. On leaving jail Cahit borrows Seref’s savings to reach Istanbul, and patiently seeks to link up with her. Eventually she comes to him and they make love for the only time. Though now living with her taxi driver saviour and their son, she agrees to consider starting afresh with Cahit in his ancestral family village. However, she doesn’t turn up at the bus station rendezvous, so Cahit embarks alone …
The film segments are separated by scenes of a traditional Turkish band playing gorgeously haunting love songs to camera on the shore of the Golden Horn (the Asian side of the Bosphorus) with Istanbul’s St Sophia over the water. This foregrounding of Turkish cultural aesthetics grows in satisfying effect, meantime recalling Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Brechtian use of narrative dislocation to enhance emotional intensity.31 Conversely Cahit’s somewhat naff (despite Ünel’s valiant efforts) punk posing is reminiscent of the amour fou of the fashionable French cinema du look. If yet another influence was the uncompromising grit of (the far from black and white) La Haine – itself referencing nouvelle vague and new African American cinema – and the ghettocentric cinema du banlieue cycle that film inaugurated, 32 the sense grows of a postmodern existentialism where many popular and artfilm roads cross.
Head-On’s unique and truly innovative cinematic culture crash envisages the past, present and future – as well as ethnic identification, pride and straitjacketing – as utterly and intrinsically inseparable. Each tangle layers, filters and deepens the significance of events; in the process rendering as redundant all simple or absolute moral judgements. Generational and gender conflict, the exigencies of class and social status and tragic romance also blend, but in this film conventional characterisations are utterly upturned while the chances of personal redemption depend on the sharing of love, pain and hope between men and women in social networks they shape according to their own biographical, family, friendship and cultural accidents. All chime inwards and outwards and can be mobilised – in turns or simultaneously – for narcissistic, cathartic, affectionate, defensive or altruistic purposes. Choices made are provisional and ambiguous – including the ending where utopia of love fails to transpire; but hope is not lost.
The prodigious volume of blood, guts, death and darkness on show (though annoying most critics) refers steadfastly to all the mortifying wounds both of history and of the spirit – representing social-psychosomatic resources which belong to the protagonists to deploy on their own account, whether purposively or on autopilot. When Cahit muses, “Without her, I could not have survived”, the film is so characterising all of the poignant, magical and dangerous uncertainties in life, including the cultural materials available for reclamation by personal and collective selves. Similarly there is absolutely no hypocrisy in Sibel resisting male street hassle by declaiming her protected status as a married Turkish woman. The performative subversion of identity in the languages of institutional discourse and discipline allows liberation to be conceivable if the future is destabilised – or it can be fixed in reactionary stasis.33 Even the major structural lacuna in the final cut – Sibel’s uncharted conversion to loyal partner and mother – can be interpreted as Akin’s respectful bow to the ‘unknown continent’ of femininity; or as an acknowledgement of the limited capacity of Eurocentric knowledge, Occidental genre or liberal capitalism to orient to the mysterious Orient in everyone.
Collisions, Collusions, Conclusions British cinemagoers now have twenty-years of cross-cultural romance under their belts since director Stephen Frears and writer Hanif Kureishi started the ball rolling with My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) – and their detailed imbrications of class, race, gender and sexual orientation in dynamic domestic political contexts continued with Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels (1991).34 However,  it wasn’t until Gurinder Chadha’s marvellous Bhaji on the Beach (1993) that a British film could treat these themes by adopting a perspective wholly within the social network of a specific ‘ethnic minority’ community – whose characters, furthermore, weren’t primarily concerned with the condescending vagaries of either upper middle class sensibilities or lower middle class aspirations.35 Since then the range of Asian experiences and contexts depicted comically, melodramatically or tragically has broadened, though problematic and/or forbidden love is still usually a key narrative driver.36
The exploration of comic potential has also been exhaustively mined, finding its most effective expression in television comedy’s time-honoured antecedents in music hall vulgarity and the deflating of pretensions and the sitcom preoccupation with class and family respectability. The BBC2 series Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42 partook of both old and new generic markers,37 and its affectionately exuberant skewering of British Asian stereotypes succeeded in appealing to unprecedentedly large audiences while consistently exploding the one-dimensional attributions that white racism (and ‘well-meaning’ liberal efforts) typically doles out to British Asian men, women and children.38 Capturing with such flair the intimate fluctuations of warmth and callousness common to ‘quality time’ in most families of all backgrounds may have been the crucial stroke of genius here. And whether the viewer’s connection to narrative hinges on laughter or pain, it’s striking that relationships between the generations provide the most poignant tensions in virtually all of the fictional families so far discussed.
Generational conflict embraces the expectations, hopes and aspirations for children which stem from the parents’ own experiences of being parented in specific circumstances, but now reversing roles in new contexts, environments and more or less pressurised conditions. The offspring’s responses further vary according to the degree of cognitive, emotional and material autonomy carved out so far, and the relative amenability of parental authority to reinforcement in the extended family, neighbourhood, culture, religion and patterns of government. Economic constraints are, as always, crucial in that the comforts and agonies of home life derive their most powerful significance depending on the choices available or withheld – and the physical, spatial and psychic room there is to come to know about and reflect on these possibilities as well as in ascribing responsibility for them.
In particular, the interplay of gender and generation inflects responses to masculinism, in British Asian families just as for other groups despite the massive divergences of historical and biographical particulars. Gender differences are especially acute in poor areas, where macho orientation and camaraderie provides differential access to the public sphere for men39 – while also allowing the reproduction of imperious male rule irrespective of religion; whereas middle class education, career and mobility horizons offer a spectrum of escape routes for both sexes. No doubt this helps sustain myths of the passive victimhood of Muslim women, but the arrogant class and race blindness of some feminists only adds insult to injury40 – blaming the primitive sexual politics of medieval cultures which the women in question understand as a defensive haven in a heartless world. Even if the latter is a private hell, blanket condemnation simply reproduces the heartlessness and practically ossifies the isolation. Nowhere is this clearer just now than in the absurd characterisation of the Muslim hijab as symbolic of the fundamentalist crushing of women’s individuality – unless miniskirts and makeup as modernist Western female disguise are to be interpreted as the complementary Christian test case.41
Nevertheless, the integrity of Asian women prevents them from publicly blaming their men or masculinist aspects of culture or religion for the same reason that Black womanists and working class white women repudiate feminisms which treat machismo and patriarchy as singular transhistorical law rather than overdetermined symptoms of wider malaises of domination.42 Once the concept of social class is postmodernised to engage with the cultural diversity we now see clearly all around (and within) us – enriched with the vestigial hangovers of feudal divine rights (of whatever creed) and the ethnic absolutism of caste familiar from the Indian subcontinent and South Africa, for example – the political utility of the notion of postimperial decolonisation thus begins to seem more than a metaphor. Instead of merely the tragedy and farce of proletariat and alienating money; a complex set of dominative dispositions of human resources is glimpsed – by men over women, powerful geographical forces over external populations, and internally in a society via ethnic and  economic enslavement.43
Be that as it may, British culture has always been decisively hybrid throughout its recorded history since the Romans (and probably before).44 This should come as no surprise given that even the language is a hopelessly irrational melange – even more mixed when lower class and regional dialects are considered. Ironically, the resulting linguistic flexibility and openness of English is a logical justification for its candidature as ‘world language’ – rationalism as usual being the handmaiden of imperialism. So it’s no accident that James Kelman, for instance, feels little affinity with high-British or Scottish literature but more between African postcolonial writing and the existential prose materialisastion of his own Glasgow vernacular.45 Nevertheless, in cool Britannia a national cuisine of chips, curry and pizza, sweatshop-produced sweatsuits, Chinese consumer goods and the melting pot of teenybop pop look like the far horizon of liberal capitalism’s capacity to nurture a lasting tolerance of difference that extends further than  exchanges of fond kisses.
Multiculturalism in school education can do little more than enumerate and exacerbate the surface diversity of culture, because the liberal consensus requires the playing down of the cruel origins of lived practices (at home, abroad or in diasporas) in situations of oppression and suffering. Neither history curricula nor citizenship classes are likely to honestly assess the past, present and future certainty of dislocation and desperation accompanying the exigencies of colonial, capitalist and globalising economics that the political elites are currently implementing. Similarly, the institutional embrace of equal opportunity excuses for inaction or PR leads to the invention of oppression everywhere, leading concurrently to vicious victimisation and the imposition of victim status on those who otherwise, off their own bat, were getting on with the slow depressing drudge of dealing with and transcending it.46 This is why portrayals which mention only the most unfortunate examples of state- or religion-sponsored racial and cultural terrorism are so spectacularly unhelpful (to say the least).
So, the multicultural recipe-mongering which isolates each ethnicity in separate entries on a list of oppressions or identities not only cannot avoid but insists on the reification of essential otherness to be the root of conflict, rather than the denial of one’s own unbearable experiences and conflicts projected into convenient others and misperceived as their attributes or responsiiblity – thus preventing the recognition and acting-upon of affiliation. Fantasies of the heroic progress of civilisation, industry and science likewise feed into a simplistic complacent ideology of transparent social worlds with no room for reflection on shared experiences of suffering across culture, race, geography and history – forcing ‘difference’ to appear as cause in the defensively monolithic reaction of ‘faith schools’ and the equally nonsensical religions of rationalist liberal secularism.
The only route to genuine solidarity (if and where required and requested) – and hence to worthwhile political movement with any potential to transcend oppression (including in the politics of identity and representation) – is to take one’s cues from those bearing the brunt. Dictating to people how it is they suffer and what they should do about it – whether from abstract principles of law or philosophy, legal or bureaucratic rights or rules of governance, the profitable careers of market commodities and capitals, or the entrenchment interests of academic or professional experts – turns the tactics of freedom on their head into the patronising removal from above of patterns that the victims have had no agency in knowing or defining. This can only ever perpetuate dehumanisation and detract from the social self-determination and liberation from below that is so urgently and universally felt and sought.47
Notes1. interviewd by Demetrios Matheou, Sunday Herald, August 2004.
2. in particular Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Adam Curtis’ groundbreaking BBC 2 series The Power of Nightmares (both 2004) – see my reviews respectively in: ‘Extracting the Michael’, Variant, No. 21, and ‘A Pair of Right Scares’, Freedom magazine, Vol. 65, No. 22 (<www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk>).
3. James Mottram, ‘In the Mood For Love’, Sight & Sound, March 2004, p.23.
4. Roisin was scripted as Scottish, but Birthistle was a Catholic girl at Protestant school in the north of Ireland. Preferring actor proximity to role, Loach points out that, “then the question is: who’s the immigrant?”. Laverty: “When Catholics first came to Scotland 150 years ago they were seen as aliens with a loyalty to something foreign to the indigenous population … And now we’re demonising asylum seekers” (Mottram, note 3).
5. Atta Yaqub had kept a white girlfriend secret from his family/community, again facilitating role immersion (Diane Taylor, ‘Up Close and Personal’, The Independent, 6th August 2004).
6. The Daily Record billboard headline outside his shop reads: ‘Church tells Celtic fans no nookie in Seville’. One dog too many urinates on it, so Mr Khan wires it up and the next dog gets a nasty shock.
7. Loach: “He isn’t just a repressive father. His own history has been traumatic, and he has to live with it every day. That’s why he’s so keen to keep hold of Casim”; Laverty: “Partition left a shadow of massive suffering. It’s sectarianism, in another continent and in another time, but it still has a deep resonance in the personality of the children’s father today” (Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘When Sex Meets Sectarianism’, The Telegraph, 17th September 2004).
8. “I am a Glaswegian Pakistani teenage woman of Muslim descent who supports Glasgow Rangers in a Catholic school …” Another Laverty and Loach teenage encyclopedia instructed Robert Carlyle on Nicaragua in Carla’s Song (1996).
9. or the pedagogical clumsiness using Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ soundtrack to a slide show of racist lynchings – ringing true as vacuous multiculturalism, but hardly connecting with her or her pupils’ daily lives.
10. To Loach this is “a situation where the circumstances are evolving … Essentially there will be a good outcome. The people of Casim’s generation are integrating into the rest of society, however it’s defined, and bigotry and intolerance, particularly on the Christian side, will fade … people will assimilate and learn to live together well … We are who we are now, but God knows what we will be like in 30 years’ time. The film challenges the whole idea of monogamy, of permament marriage that is either arranged or a love match” (Taylor, see note 5). The title’s more melancholy origin – Robert Burns’ poem, ‘Ae Fond Kiss And Then We Sever’ (1791) – includes the lines: “Had we never lov’d sae kindly / Had we never lov’d sae blindly / Never met or never parted / We had ne’er been broken-hearted”.
11. Loach: “The young protagonists are all graduates and they’re not from broken families. But for reasons of culture, language and religion there are fetters on their choices” (Mottram, p.22, see note 3).
12. Not surprising, despite Ken Loach’s track record, given his membership of the National Council of the Respect Coalition, whose electoral novelty – cosying up to ‘community leaders’ – resembles police tactics when legitimising ‘race relations’ PC/PR. Those at the sharp end may by default defer to conservative patriarchs or arrogant careerists of respectable church, business and local government agencies when busy defending themselves against outbreaks of the persistent UK anti-Asian prejudice (see, for example, succinct commentary on the pre-9/11 Bradford ‘race riots’ in <www.muslimnews.co.uk> 27th July 2001, or the recent Birmingham Sikh controversy), but surely no one imagines they represent any community’s multiply conflicting interests. This Left pandering to elites combines a Stalinist disposition and Leninist opportunism, with predictably alienating effects at all grassroots levels (as in the SWP’s regularly discredited fronts and u-turns, from Anti-Nazi League days through to recent anti-globalisation incarnations – see coverage of the European Social Forum, London, October 2004:  <www.enrager.net/features/esf/> or SchNEWS, no. 470).
13. Yasmin (2004) screened on Channel 4, 13th January 2005. Quotations are from the production notes <www.yasminthemovie.co.uk /iframes/synopsis.php> and Alan Docherty, February 2005 <www.culturewars.org.uk> respectively. Glenaan also made Gas Attack (2001, an even more sensationalist ‘docufiction’ about Kurdish asylum seekers in Glasgow) and the forthcoming Ducane’s Boys (about neo-colonial exploitation in contemporary football).
14. also rushed onto television after European cinema success and acclaim, when UK cinema distribution and exhibition faced years of market-cowardice delay – see Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 13th January 2005.
15. one of two such unscripted moments where passersby were unaware that a shoot was underway (see Jeffries, note 14).
16. comprehensively nailed by Munira Mirza in <www.culturewars.org.uk>
17. including a proclivity for class/caste-based racial insult. Darcus Howe’s Who You Calling a Nigger? (Channel 4, 2004) gave rare public insight into this subject. Conversely, the film’s most moving moment comes at the end – encapsulating its heroine’s ultimate dignity, integrity and humanity with a close-up of Panjabi’s face as Yasmin comforts the husband she’s previously so maligned.
18. The script was written by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) after exhaustive research and workshops with Northern Muslim groups, drug rehabilitation programmes, university lecturers and many others.
19. just as in the rest of us, showing the inadequacy of conflating disparate generations – for example my own industrial working class ‘English’ family has ancestry from Wales, Ireland and Southern and Northern France (just to start with), and as little as two generations ago included itinerant agricultural workers roaming against destitution.
20. For comprehensive discussions of hybridity and diaspora, see Barnor Hesse (ed.) Un/Settled Multiculturalisms, Zed Press, 2000. Incidentally, both Ae Fond Kiss and Yasmin are interesting, enjoyable and/or affecting on many levels; not least in their different fusions of generic realism, naturalism and fiction, and some outstanding cinematic and acting skills on show. For the purposes of this essay, though, it’s mainly in struggling to meeting their predetermined artificially partial and formulaic aims that they get messed up.
21. left over from the issue-shopping concept (scuppered by 9/11) of Glenaan and producer Sally Hibbin (who previously worked with Ken Loach on Riff-Raff, Raining Stones, etc) of a young Yorkshire suicide-bomber (production notes, see note 18).
22. though Yasmin tells him “I preferred you as a drug dealer”.
23. taking a lead from Kilroy-Silk, BNP fuhrer Nick Griffin publicly characterised Islam as a “vicious wicked faith” before proclaiming his parliamentary candidature in Keighley. Note, though, that the far and libertarian Left fare little better in terms of “universal bigotry towards Muslims” and the ambivalently progressive potential of religious culture in general – see Adam K’s scattershot ‘Anarchist Orientalism and the Muslim Community in the UK’, and Ernesto Aguilar’s wise US perspective in ‘Winning the Grandmas, Winning the War: Anarchists of Color, Religion and Liberation’ (both 2004) at <www.illegalvoices.org/knowledge>.
24. see for example: S. Sayyid, ‘Beyond Westphalia: Nations and Diasporas, the Case of the Muslim Umma’ (in Hesse, see note 20).
25. Contemporary ‘urban’ music features increasing numbers of Asian performers and producers (see Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music, Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk & Ashwani Sharma (eds.), Zed Press 1996). Since the 1980s bhangra renaissance working class Asian youth have also been staunch supporters of local R&B club scenes (racist door policies and clienteles permitting), rather than the more upmarket trendy student-yuppie venues Ae Fond Kiss’ Casim probably envisages. On the marketing of UK Asian culture, see also Kaleem Aftab, ‘Brown: the New Black! Bollywood in Britain’, Critical Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2002, pp.88-98.
26. Gegen die Wand translates as ‘Against the Wall’ (UK release as Head-On, 2005). Akin has also directed Short, Sharp, Shock (Kurz und Schmerzlos, 1998; lauded as the German Mean Streets), the road movie In July (Im Juli, 2000), and Solino (2002). Head-On has won innumerable film festival Audience Awards and was voted the European Film Academy’s Best Film of the Year 2004 (ahead of Ae Fond Kiss, Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Weeping Meadow, among many others).
27. quoted in Kaleem Aftab, 11th February 2005 <www.bbc.net.uk/dna/collective/>
28. famous for militant anti-racist SHARP skinheads and a radically community-oriented professional football team. Akin – a dual-national child of Turkish immigrants – hails from Hamburg’s Altona district, and is a veteran anti-fascist, former DJ (hence the outstanding soundtrack which accounted for much of Head-On’s budget) and hip-hop MC (he gave up the latter to attend film school). With Germany’s drift rightwards nationality by blood is now increasingly reasserted, and dual status is no longer available to the progeny of gastarbeiter (‘guest workers’) – noted in Head-On’s Istanbul taxi driver deported as a teenager for a petty drugs offence to a country he’d never seen whose language he didn’t speak.
29. cast from an encounter at a supermarket checkout; and giving a superbly nuanced performance. Her only prior acting experience had been in a couple of gonzo pornos – allowing the tabloids to controversialise Head-On preceding Kekilli’s disowning by her Turkish family (see Ahmet Gormez’ solidaristic celebration: ‘We Love You Sibel Kekilli’, 8th March 2004 <www.counterpoint-online.org/>). This prurient bad faith is itself mirrored within the film text in Yilmaz’ invitation to Cahit (which he declines) to join the men of Sibel’s family in a brothel session.
30. such DIY arrangements are not uncommon, according to Akin: “A Turkish girl once asked me to marry her … A lot of Turks marry very early, just to get away from their families and have legal sex”. Perhaps surprisingly, Akin receives more criticism from younger (rather than older) generations of Turkish Germans for the film’s sex, nudity and drugs: “It is a mirror of their own double morality and they don’t like what they see” (interviewed in Sheila Johnston, The Telegraph, 11th February 2005).
31. thereby connecting with his landmark anti-racist tragedy Fear Eats the Soul (W. Germany, 1973) with its middle aged German woman and young Moroccan lovers (see Asuman Suner, ‘Dark Passion’, Sight & Sound, March 2005, pp.18-21).
32. La Haine was written and directed by Matthew Kassovitz (France 1995). The first cinema du banlieue flush included Raï (Thomas Gilou, 1995), État des Lieux (Jean-François Richet, 1995) and Bye Bye (Karim Dridi, 1996).
33. and, quoting a 96-year old German reminiscing on his resistance against the Nazis (“It’s our duty every day to change the world”), Akin concludes: “I want to do that with my life, too” (Sheila Johnston, note 30).
34. Frears has recently turned in an equally nuanced response to contemporary UK immigrant life in Dirty Pretty Things (2002; written by Steven Knight). Young Soul Rebels was written by Paul Hallam, Derrick Saldaan McClintock & Isaac Julien (see Isaac Julien & Colin McCabe, Diary of a Young Soul Rebel, BFI, 1991).
35. Chadha has since embarked on a fascinating populist trajectory, progressively weaving in various aspects of the scramble for cultural capital on the part of those whose background lacks it, in Bend It Like Beckham (1999) and Bride and Prejudice (2004) – the latter a Hollywood/Bollywood hybrid drawing “parallels between the class differences of Jane Austen and the cultural divisions of India, which are fuelled not just by caste difference, but by the globalisation caused by air travel [among Non Resident Indians]” (Kaleem Aftab, ‘A Marriage of Two Minds’, Independent on Sunday, 8th October 2004).
36. for example in Brothers in Trouble (dir. Udayan Prasad, 1995; written by Robert Buckler); My Son the Fanatic (dir. Udayan Prasad, 1997; written by Hanif Kureishi), and East Is East (dir. Damian O’Donnell, 2001; written by Ayub Khan Din).
37. Of the latter, the Kumars’ sitting room chat show format stands out. Both series were conceived by Anil Gupta, screening between 1998-2001 and 2001-03 respectively.
38. The new Lancashire-set film comedy Chicken Tikka Masala (dir. Harmage Singh Kalirai, 2004; written by Roopesh Parekh) also ticks many pop-cultural crossover boxes – culture-clash, arranged marriage, North v. South, gay v. straight, Carry-On-style soap opera farce, trendily inept DV DIY aesthetics – and has promptly been critically savaged as more of an all-round turkey on the basis of its cretinous reproduction of stock characters complete with thoroughly regressive connotations. For another European corrective, see Only Human, dir. Teresa de Pelegri/Dominic Harari, Spain/United Kingdom/Argentina/Portugal 2004 – a Jewish/Palestinian family farce with a “tragi-comic final row in which the lovers blame each other not just for the events of the night but for the whole history of the Promised Land” (Liese Spencer, Sight & Sound, May 2005, p69). Or, for more sophisticated postmodern and Islamic ironic referentiality, see Kamal Tabrizi’s Lizard (Iran, 2004) – poking fun at clerical government and breaking box-office records  in Iran before being banned –  with its escaped con disguised as a mullah, and describing Quentin Tarantino as “The great Christian film-maker” tackling “salvation in ultimate darkness” (John Wrathall, Sight & Sound, May 2005, p.65).
39. for meticulous analyses respectively of the white working class masculine habitus and the political effectivity of conjoining gender and racial discourses, see: Simon J. Charlesworth, The Phenomenology of Working Class Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2000; and Claire Alexander, ‘(Dis)Entangling the ‘Asian Gang’, 2000 (in: Hesse, see note 20).
40. see the writing of bell hooks for comprehensive discussions in the context of African America (for example: Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Turnaround Press, 1991; Black Looks: Race and Representation, Turnaround Press, 1992; Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, Routledge, 1995; Killing Rage, Ending Racism. Routledge, 1996). Note also the contradictory US emergence of modern ethnic cultural distinctions at around the same time as racial identification and skin privilege – for example, in that the first waves of Swedish immigrants were not included in the category ‘white’ (see Noel Ignatiev & John Garvey (eds.), Race Traitor, Routledge, 1994; then fast-forward to 1950s Little England guesthouse signage (‘No Blacks, No Irish’).
41. Actually bothering to ask those who wear it about the hijab’s significance tells as many different stories as there are respondents.  See, for example: for the UK, photographer Clement Cooper’s Sisters (The Gallery Oldham 2004/5; also published in book + CD form); or the BBC2 documentary about the French government’s school ban on veils, The Headmaster and the Headscarves (written and directed by Elizabeth C. Jones, 2005).
42. Here, the experience of mixed-race love relationships can illuminate the dense co-entanglements of class and gender within and between individuals and families. For deep reflections from divergent positions on these matters, including the implications for practical negotiations around racism and societal meetings of cultures generally, see: Timothy Malinquin Simone, About Face: Race in Postmodern America, New York, Autonomedia, 1989; and Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Mixed Feelings: The Complex Lives of Mixed-Race Britons, Women’s Press, 2001.
43. The conjunction of charity corporations, international aid and humanitarian ‘just war’ may perhaps be an especially disabling contemporary coalescence complementing the rather straightforward neoimperialism of global capital.
44. not to mention wider question of Western Europe’s cultural, religious and philosophical origins in prior cultures – see the controversies surrounding Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, Vols. 1 & 2, Free Association Books, 1987/1991; and Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to his Critics (ed. David Chioni Moore), Duke University Press, 2001.
45. for some of the ramifications Kelman forges, see ‘Oppression and Solidarity’ and ‘On the Asylum Bill’ in Some Recent Attacks, Essays Cultural and Political, AK Press, 1992.
46. true, for example, of the police in their modern liberal guises just as much as the old-fashioned fascism – see The Secret Policemen’s exposé of police trainee racism (BBC1, October 2003); and Munira Mirza, ‘Debating the Future: Living Together’, September 2001 <www.culturewars.org.uk>. The same, in principle, can easily apply to the equal opps. agencies and professionals who police us elsewhere in the social fabric.
47. This essay’s delineation of the concepts needed to express such a political ‘polylectic’ are necessarily vague. But the notion of dialectic is also completely inadequate to do justice to human history on God’s – or anyone else’s – earth; and any sensible deconstruction of Hegelian philosophy (and thus Marxism) will doubtless reveal its core Enlightenment problematic of religion as the Emperor’s New Clothes, with scientific materialism as an intelligible (but only provisional) poor man’s two-step beyond. So, I console myself with the ancient Eastern saying to the effect that pondering which are the appropriate questions may sometimes be more productive than prospecting for the (politically) correct answers.
www.variant.org.uk
www.freedompress.org.uk
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

The Return – Andrei Zvyagintsev Russia 2003

Tyneside Cinema – 10th July 2004The Return – Andrei Zvyagintsev  Russia 2003
Tyneside Cinema – 10th July 2004
The Return starts as an apparent vehicle for a mythic narrative – perhaps something like the story of Abraham and Isaac – but hesitates before settling on a narrative style that draws its inspiration from the Hollywood genre relating to dysfunctional one parent families. Russian mythic cinema pales into the American suburban vision.  But whilst it is Hollywood that seems to determine the style and look of the film,  mythic thematic undertow still pulls at the historical sinews the Return pointing up  Zvyagintsev’s entrapment in an irreconcilable opposition  between the film ethos of Russia and made in the USA.  The director ultimately abandons his film as an impossibility and resorts to completing it in the form of a  travelogue with a soap opera story bolted on.   Finally the Return is consumed in the banalities released by its own contradiction: there is nothing in the film to think about and nothing in the film to look at.  You wait for it to pass in your time.
The film is witness to a sell out by Russian cinema to the stylistic cannons of Hollywood.  It’s a sell out that doesn’t go to plan as the film ends up feeling like a British lottery funded movie.  A feature of the typical Hollywood product is the characters in the scenario are without significant contextual grounding(and in this Hollywood is true to the American context of immigration – the idea of starting a new life).   Instead of context we have ‘situation’. Situation replaces context: this works for Hollywood’s American consumer society where the characters in any given situation come linked to assemblies and circuits of signifiers(often commercial products; language forms; typecast blue and white collar types {the detective, the single high powered business woman} and discourses{age, gender, back story}) This interplay of signifiers culled from visual retinal and audio cues enables the audience to place the characters  in any given Hollywood film in a relevant psychic setting.  The signifiers feed readability into the situation.
In the Return there is a single mum who has two boys and who looks after them with the help of her mother.  They live something like a middle class lifestyle – not comfortable by American standards  –  but the kids do possess things like fishing rods and reels.  In a Hollywood film we could read this(perhaps as an essentially good battling suburban mum).  But the Return’s setting, somewhere in Russia( opening Armenian music).  In modeling himself on an opening  typical of Hollywood genres Zvyagintsev feeds us a situation without context but also without the sort of signifiers Hollywood uses to ground the action.  The audience struggle to place or locate any of his characters who thereby are doomed, not in any mythic manner, but artistically never to engage us at any but the most superficial level – the machination of plot.
If the film is supposed to be set in the domain of myth then I think it fails lamentably though there are the ingredients set in place to make me believe that this might have been the intention of the original scenario.  The film opens with water.  The idea of water.  It moves then to a tower that rises high over the sea with the gang of boys hurling themselves from its height, calling up a sacrificial image, Inca step pyramids etc.  The film moves quickly to its liminal event, sudden almost like Pasolini,  the return of the father.  An entrance that  has a mythic resonance as the father demands that his two sons come away with him.  The breath of Abraham or even Laius.  But it is not to be.  The mythic subtext does not sustain itself.  It switches and focuses on becoming a cutesy contemporary children’s film, with the rebellion of one of the sons occupying the central holding space of the scenario.  The film switches from myth to faciality with the rebellious son’s face taking the camera’s prime attention:  His grimaces, his sulks, his defiance.  Caught up in the demands of a scenario centering on the children’s demands The Return has no where to go and lapses into a travelogue with soap opera plot and dialogue, to the accompaniment of mega doses of rain which is nothing more than rain. By the time we arrive at the climax of the film which centres on another huge tower built in the middle of a small island somewhere in Russia, any resonance of its early mythic symbolism is totally absent.
Part of what diminishes the film is its camera work which follows the Hollywood pattern of being agitated and dedicated to movement for its own sake for fear that unless the camera moves the audience will suffer restlessness.  There are examples of long sequences where the focus is pulled during shots to resolve the one who is speaking.  The focus pulling in the film serves no purpose other than the literal function of focusing on he who speaks.  A kind of passe literalism.   The camera tracks to no clear purpose other than to show it can go round corners.  The purpose of the camera work other than to demonstrate that the film maker can set up a track is never clear.  Early in the film the two brothers race each other back from the sea tower to their house – in fact its a chase that turns into a race back to mother.  Now obviously great planning went into this long sequence which contains a lot of fast moving tracks. But the sequence doesn’t work to move the audience any deeper into the film.  It just seems like a Hollywood set piece.  The race in and for itself its own justification – a situation within a situation, a piece of film slipping into another piece of film.  It probably inhibits any chance of the film developing mythically: the overactive camera work works against the establishment of mythic development, at least in the way Zvyganitsev shoots it.  But perhaps this wasn’t his intention.
Perhaps his intention was to make a Hollywood calling card with a recognisable American theme of the estranged and vanished pop returning back to take his sons on a camping trip and to show them the things they will never have been able to learn off their mother and her mother.  In this case the focus pulls, the twitching tracking camera that can’t stay still are all his way of showing Hollywood that he speaks their language.  He also knows that the film must look good so that for the most part exteriors should be shot as if the film were a travelogue, and there should be plenty of rain.  Not for metaphysical reasons but for plot development, to keep the picture moving and to show that you can handle rain machines even Russian ones. As we are talking Hollywood not myth its the plot which will have to have a twist. Not character.  And where there are children and adults together, it’s Hollywood’s  rule(occasionally flaunted) that the kids win no matter what.  The kids should be cute and perspicacious seeing through the world of the adult – in particular if he is a man.  The man on the other hand should have no realistic understanding of kids, be mostly concerned with getting the kids to see or do things his way, and when all else fails in communication  resort to violence threreby revealing his character.  And so on and so forth.
The dialogue in The Return follows the Hollywood approved pattern of grumpy dad, smart kids.  So perhaps  Zvyagintsev is marking his card.  The trouble is that the Russian actors who all look OK, in particular Mum of whom we see little but who has a Jocasta quality, don’t seem comfortable with their words.   The way pop and his younger son deliver their lines it felt to me that there was a gap between the delivery of the lines and the accompanying expressive faciality.  Even though I don’t understand Russian there was an alternating current driving the acting that swung from a stilted quality which then overcompensated by swinging through the pendulum to an overblown melodramatic delivery.  Certainly not the stuff dreams are made of.
A last note.  The cast was overpopulated.  There was no reason for having two sons in the script; it crowded the stage and added nothing to the dimensionality of the father son relationship.  The two sons simply functioned as one but in a manner that was much less interesting than if there had been just one juvenile psyche to answer the alternating push and pull of compliance and rebellion.  Splitting the roles instead of unifying them deprived the film of its dynamic.  The energy was dissipated and ultimately the film was unable to sustain interest in a three sided relationship that never had any possibility of resolution between its discrete parts.

Old Boy – Park Chan-Wook – Korea 2003

Tyneside Film Theatre 29 Oct 04 Ticket £5-95Old Boy – Park Chan-Wook – Korea  2003
Tyneside Film Theatre 29 Oct 04 Ticket £5-95
 
The final shot of Old Boy, over which the end titles roll, seemed to me to be an entity detached from the rest of the film.  The camera pans across a huge snow covered mountain ridge and stops at a gap through the mountains.  The shot, suggesting space or the possibility of space on the other side of the ridge, stands apart from the rest of film which is shot in urban confines, in ‘any space whatever’ where we rarely see the whole picture or any place that in itself is culturally coded(in the way New York Paris or Tokyo are iconically tagged).  Old Boy action takes place and moves through ‘cross sectional space’ – interior sets bounded by wallpaper(lots of fine wallpapered surfaces) plaster, glass,  mirrors and exterior locations set on streets with anonymous urban vistas. Sets that are defined by the coordinates of intimacy and detachment rather than geography or building plans. 
 
Old Boy shot by Park in ‘anywhere space’ ends up somewhere.  In the mountains with a shot that moves slowly across a complete ridge coming to rest at an opening through the rocks through which we can see into the distance perhaps into the future.  
 
At some point during this pan (during which most of the audience leave) I see a credit for the New Zealand crew.  New Zealand……I’m surprised.  Of course any space whatever can be shot wherever: these mountains were New Zealand.  I am thinking that they are probably located on the South Island – the setting for the Lord of the Rings movies.  There are all sorts of cinematic referencings burrowing through Old Boy – spot them for yourself –  but does this last and final referencing event by the camera point directly to a ironical metaphysical juxtapositioning of the two films?
 
Both Lord of the Rings and Old Boy have a metaphysical imperative as an engine that drives them as respective filmic assemblages.  The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy realised and heightened through digital technology.  Old Boy uses parody as a stylistic expressive medium but counterweights the distancing effects of parody by grounding the film in the physicality of its protagonist Oh Dai-Su, brilliantly played by Choi Min-Sik in a performance that calls out to de Nero’s in Taxi Driver.  LoR explores as a simplistic metaphysic, the battle between the forces of good and evil – forces that seem defined in terms of race and culture.  LoR in closing with the triumph of the forces of the Shires is moral tale attuned to the nutritional requirements by the nursery for simple easily digested food.
 
Old Boy operates on a metaphysical plane that is personal and built on a mythic foundation overlaid with a recasting of familiar Judaic-Christian psycho religious psychological states.  It’s formal parody but the visceral and immediate nature of its imagery at critical moments heighten understanding of the processes at work(Dai-su’s use of chop sticks to dig his way out of his prison cell).   In the course of the action which begins( in fact there is a strange double start) with the  proposition of a man locked up fifteren years in a prison for reasons that  are not explained to him, Park and  Choi  plot out the dynamic overlayering of Judaic/Christian psycho religious concepts – guilt and atonement –  onto an oriental psychic and mythic code.   It is an overlayering that energises the film with the paraschizo fuel that burns through all the world.  There is no space left – only time zones.  As Western culture disperses, it melds and merges with other forms to create new twisted hyrid social types.
 
 Incest is the key myth underlying Old Boy, the Oriental version of the taboo not the Western.  In the Hellenic story of Oedipus, mother /son liaison is the forbidden relationship.  The East,  such as the Japanese myth of Amaterasu and Susanoo, favours the story of the forbidden nature of the brother / sister  relationship.  It is the oriental dynamic of forbidden incestuous relationships between brother and sister and the consequent terrible sense of shame(attached to public revelation) that works through Old Boy.  Drawing on a mythic wellspring the protagonist of Old Boy,  Dai-su journeys across a metaphysical plane impelled by the need the understand his condition – why me.  The temporal imperatives of TV, mobile phones, constant incessant monitoring, glass and mirrors are devices that collapse the coordinates of space.  Ideas of far and near are delusions in a world where you are never nearer an event than when you believe yourself distant from it.  Answers to questions sought in the quest lie in crossing time not space.  Far and near, near and far are not oppositional ideas but collusive spatial contractions.
 
Time is now a personal journey rather than a collectively experienced history.  Dai-su has assimilated a Judaic-Christian ethos into the machinery for coping with the demands of individual time travel.  Dai-su  in his quest for the answer moves through the idea of revenge into the processes of forgetting and remembering that lead to awareness of his own personal guilt.  Perhaps his own personal guilt is a state he always knew but had to forget but whose recognition could only be followed by penance expiation and redemption.  Personal redemption  – the shot of the gap through the mountains of New Zealand.   
 
Park has a story to tell ( and  at the end of Old Boy Dai-su also has a story to tell but part of the story is that he is unable to tell the story)  of how East meets West – how cultures and societies fuse schizoid responses to this mergeance.  The story encapsulated in the strange form taken by the title in the title sequence where the titles appear first as a sort of computer encrypted script that resolves briefly into legible characters before morphing back into a cipher.  Drawing on visually skewed references to Bunuel Tarrentino Goddard Scorcese etc  Park tells how it is with a sure understanding of what this global contraction implies for all of us.  
Adrin Neatrour 6 11 04
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

9 Songs – Michael Winterbottom – 2004 – UK – Keiran O’Brien – Margot Stilley

Tyneside Film Theatre 2 April 2005 – price £5-959 Songs – Michael Winterbottom – 2004 – UK – Keiran O’Brien – Margot Stilley
Tyneside Film Theatre 2 April 2005 – price £5-95
 
Performance as Dick-tat
 
During the opening sequence of 9 Songs a small plane flies over the icescape of  Antarctica – or what Keiran O’Brien in voice over claims is Antartica.  As the shadow of the plane travels across the ice Keiran O’Brien (KOB) says that: he will always remember her smell the texture the feel of her skin.  That’s what he says.   But a question raised by the film is who is KOB? Is he KOB himself or a character in a film?  Depending on the reply will he always remember the her smell and the feel of her skin; or will he actually remember the whir of the camera and Michael W and cameraman’s faces squeezed towards him as he fucks Margot Stilley(MS) or she fucks him.
 
9 Songs takes its form its from the intercutting of three sections:   9 Songs performed at the Brixton Academy(where KOB and MS meet each other): short sequences from ‘the Antarctic which permit KOB voiced geophilosophic musings on the nature world and of permanence of memory; and scenes from the relationship between MS and KOB.  The performances of bands such as Franz Ferdinand and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are not immediately problematic.  The depicted relationship of KOB and MS(which Winterbottom contrives as a chronological story voiced by the male, with a beginning a middle and an end) raises some issues.  This section is defined and expressed on film, mainly but not entirely, by scenes of supposedly unsimulated hard-on fucking and licking.  This is the heart of the film.  The performances of KOB and MS touch on issues central not just to the film but also to a critical socio-cultural movement away from the rigid lines that define the performed and actual – a line that Performance artists have always explored – but which the acting profession struggles to maintain. 
 
 Is there or is there not a line separating the frame of acting from the frame of the real? Have the times blown apart and away the distinctions between performance and actual so that the expressive plastic arts are celebrated on the plateau of the now.  For in these times there is only: now and then; in and out.  What will KOB and MS remember and take away from the experience – anything or nothing:  the memories of each others smells and intensities – apologies to each other – satisfaction at a job well done, the film in the can – resentments at Winterbottom?
 
The sex scenes were graphically and somatically real.  Perhaps prosthesis was used occasionally in the filming; but we are ‘told’ (and that’s important; though do film publicists never lie…?) the sex was for real and mostly it looked dripping and tumescent body parts –  sex organs which are connected to our strongest drives, emotions and increasingly self image. Or perhaps not?  Everyone’s different, actors and actresses no less anyone else.  Actors spend much time and expenditure of energy in faking emotionally charged drives and states: fear, remorse, sorrow, dispair, anger etc.   Actors train to develop an expressive range of  facial and bodily responses for displaying through simulation and mimicry these arousal’s.  Actors also develop skills for enacting (faking) physical acts – dying – being wounded – being tortured – panicking – and sex.  Psychic involvement with character allows the actor to explore the parameters and ranges of responses –  while always retaining expressive control needed for direction.  Actors sometimes seem to utilise a form of mild self hypnosis that allows complete identification with the part whilst in character, but enables this state to be shaken off quite quickly when role is dropped, set left and cues of everyday life re-introduced.  (most players move in and out of role with relative ease, but failure to master this knack can cause personal and career problems).  Why in this film did Winterbottom  demand that his actors perform actual sex, rather than ask them to fake simulate and act out the action?  This could have been done, but it would have been a different film with a different point. 
 
The point about ‘acting’ is(was?) not to engage in real physical acts because real acts may have real physical consequences.  The traditional trick is to make the emotional experience  real  because engagement with feelings is through psychological mechanisms and triggers( as well as the whole mis-en-scene) Actions involving potentially fateful engagement with others are traditionally all simulations: fights – injuries – murders – slaps – full kissing – sex.  You do have a physical theater of the body based on dance, gymnastics, acts and feats of strength stamina and endurance.  But in the case of physical theatre there is the absolute injunction to take care – of yourself and the other.  The ethos of acting has been to fake action using mime skilled simulation use of prostheses and careful rehersal etc.  It is based on a notion that if there was a real engagement of the body, if the slap to the face was real, if the cut and blood drawn were real, the line would be crossed and actors would no longer be having to deal with a fabricated scenario but an event with real consequences for them and acting relationships; the cost would also be unpredictable loss of expressive control which the contriving machine – the camera or theatre was attempting to impose. 
 
The trends in public entertainment have mostly been to move away from the traditional  boundary  lines of acting on stage or the film set.  The movement is towards creating new machines where manipulation and exploitation of the real, of the visceral can be presented as entertainment with actual consequences.   Reality TV as a sort of Roman circus where there is expectation that participants will experience ‘real stress’ ‘real pain’ not the acted out faked stuff in a bottle of theatrical make up.  The line mapping the border between the real and faked is blurred and crossed.  Participants are subjected to both psychological and physical stress in a manner in which the authenticity of  reaction is ensured.   
 
The blurring between doing and being has long been the working assumption of both the pornography industry and the sado masochistic industry.  Both these expressive industries(including snuff movies) have progressively edged into mainstream media in the form of girly mags like Cosmopolitan and the Male laddish press.   Sex in the porntrade is not performance art – the players in pornographic films simply put in their days at the office, projecting  themselves into doing sex. Most of these performers stake little claim to thespian status: their cocks tits and orifaces are the business and the stars of the system are supposed know how to look after themselves physically and psychologically. (Though exploitation is rife and the industry has serious casualties).  The sex performers whether on stage screen or behind the curtains of the brothel may use mechanisms of distance and deterritorialisation from their working bodies.  These are shizoid psychic shifts of conscousness(sometimes anaesthetizing) that in themselves do not involve acting skills .
 
In some respects the acting profession has also incorporated trends from these marginal zones.  This blurring – merging  – this lack of discontinuities – between being and doing.  Actors are increasingly pressured (by society? By producers and directors?) to become their roles.  It’s what we come to expect.  An actress works as a waitress to prepare herself for a role, which in itself is more important than scenario or text.  But it’s not just an issue acquiring a mind set or gestural vocabulary: there are also demands that the body must be prepared.  Christian Bale to become the Mechanic(“ Total Film”) undertakes a three month ordeal of starvation to reduce weight and find the character.   The body becomes the central spectacle for our gaze.  We are back to the circus where the spectacle is at the centre of the arena.  Discontinuities.  What special preparations,  exercises did KOB and MS undertake to ready themselves for 9 Songs?
 
 This is what 9 Songs points to.  The inexorable movement in entertainment towards the exploitation of the actual.  Perhaps its corollary is inexorable movement in the other direction in film, towards the exploitation of the virtual, in that digital technologies are taking over huge swathes of the action images to the extent that it may soon be possible for films to star digital actors and actresses.  How interesting to see digital beings fuck?   9 Songs asks an ethical question at the core of the of the socioentertainment culture about whether distinctions between the forms of the faked and the real have any meaning for us.  And in this 9 Songs is a moral statement.  We are moving into an ethos where the issue is that for many audiences  the real has an overwhelming authenticity of effect.  And the image industry exists to fulfill the expectations of its audiences.  All those engaging in it will have to adapt to this transformation, that we are moving into a culture of discontinuities in which acted sequences will be replaced by the real with real consequences for the performers. How long before an actor(agreeing freely in his contract) agrees to be shot and killed as part of a sequence in a movie.  It’ll be real though it  won’t look any different from the faked. But we will be told its real.   This is the song that 9 Songs sings.
 
The film also calls attention to another interesting aspect of sociocultural experience and that is the nature of performance itself.  In 9 Songs music is performed; sex is performed; (a Voice Over snow is performed but this is an acted faked sequence; or is it?).  The music gigs and the sex have the same attributes in that they are real and presented as such.  But what is the connection between real performance and feeling?   There is no necessary connection: on tour, bands perform their songs every night and from their performance ellicit strong emotional reactions from audience(just like Hitler).  But the bands don’t actually have to feel anything.  In performance they can connect with their gestures and actions, they can surf the power unleashed and the reaction to the power unleashed.  As they actually make the music they perform it out but they don’t have to feel anything – even though the audience does.  Similarly with sex as performance.  Sex may be performed with great prowess, drawing on a knowledge and confidence both in your own body and in other bodies, but as sex  becomes performance so link to feeling becomes another discontinuity.  Cultures based on actual performance tend to deterritorialise emotional feeling.  Did KOB and MS have feelings when they fucked, or like porntrade stars did they adopt strategies of self alienation or whatever?  Having no access to states of mind obviously these sort of questions cannot be answered.  But at the end of 9 Songs the feeling that came through for me was one of emotional deadness and flatness(matching the male voice over – and why did Micheal W chose the male party to tell the story?)  Emotional deadness is a possible price for the uncoupling of action and feeling a process that is also part of the machine of mainstream culture production.
 
Adrin Neatrour  5 April 2005
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Down by Law – Jim Jarmusch – USA 1986 – John Lurie, Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni

Viewed: Side Cinema, 19 June 2005 – ticket price £3-00Down by Law – Jim Jarmusch – USA 1986 – John Lurie, Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni
Viewed: Side Cinema, 19 June 2005 – ticket price £3-00
 
Retrocrit
 
Haircuts at dawn
Down by Law opens with a series of floating tracking shots of a series of facades shot upwards from a acute low angle.  Filmed as if from a Venetian gondola the buildings glide through the lens the camera as a particularly flat perception of the world.  Slum tenements, industrial units, middle class lawn-girt spruce white detached houses, roccocco mid town 19th century blocks with ornate caste iron balconies, no man’s land all slip by and out of sight as we listen to a latino Creole fusion of complex cross rhythms laid over the picture.
 
 In this opening Jarmusch assembles the American South as a world of facades.  Like an opera set on a proscenium stage it is a land populated by two dimensional stick figures, a world defined only by its surface.  In Down by Law surface is all there is in the world and the narrative is but a  device a for movement across this surface.  In this it shares some characteristic features with opera where plot is also a simple device, a narrative welded together out of non sequiturs and improbable coincidence that serves to cue a series of emotional states driven by the music.   Whereas Opera uses music as an intensifier of the emotional affects and responses, in Down by Law, Jarmusch uses film as a deintensifier of emotive and affective states.  A world in which in a similar manner to opera the narrative line is essentially overblown and  episodically implausible; different to opera in that there is no associational emotive linkage.  Down by Law works through an integral disassociation of emotion from image   What matters here is what you see and hear in the now. In Down by Law there is no back story, there is no front story, there is no story: there is only what you see at and on the surface.  This is a world of flowing disassocation.
 
Moving into the first act of his opera bouffe, Jarmusch utilises a high key American gothic style of lighting.  The point here is not to use this lighting rig as an intensifier of whatever – character, emotion, plot line.  The lighting serves to amplify dissonance between the lighting frame and what we actually fills frame – in particular the characters.  As the sequence of scenes setting up Jack and Zak unfold,  it is evident that Jarmusch is not interested in any sort of Hollywood acting style – method, deep characterisation or anything like this.  The acting style is a put on.  In a film comprising layers rather than the illusion of filmic unity, the acting is another detached layer in the film, a spoofed  playing that goes through the motions of action and reaction only in so far as they are surface bound.  Its an act – not acting. 
 
As with the Marx Brothers or Jean Harlow hair style undercuts and underlies the affect of the performance.  The performance is always now. In Down by Law it is the haircuts that are the central gestural pivot of the act.  Not faciality; not body language.  The hair in the film is all thick black greased up stuff devoid of certain line or form, that falls about the head and moves according to its own rights.  It is the New York punk style de rigeur of the early ‘80’s.  Its deterritorialised shift to New Orleans not only heightens the alien quality of the 3 stooges but it is the edge to their occupation of space and their dialogues(brilliant written) which layer into the space impermanence vulnerability  dissonance and anarchy.  It all happens beneath the hair line.  Wherever that is.
 
The delimiting surfaces are intrinsic to the look and style of Down by Law.  The wall, whether of gaol home or fantasy accentuates the idea of containment within a two dimensional world.  The idea that what we living here is a two dimensional culture that has the illusion of depth that is created by an accumulation of layerings.  The walls are covered with graffitti – cumulations of words images calculations which build up deeply patterned milieus.  There is one moment of formation of the set surround that points to core of the film and its relationship to the spirit of America.  Roberto in the prison cell, picks up a pencil which Zac has been using to mark off the days spent in custody.  He goes to a wall of the cell draws the outline of a window frame complete with cross pieces.  It is a blank window endowed with the complete quality of intense opacity.  Looking at nothing.  It is an idea.  Its complete functional uselessness suggests the joke of there being nothing to see except what is on the surface. Later in the narrative after the 3 stooges escape and find the fairy tale cottage, they are eating a meal in the house.  Behind them as they eat is the same window: blank empty smiling looking out to nothing.  From gaol to home from containment to freedom, its all the same view.  There’s nowhere to go.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A History of Violence – David Cronenberg USA 2005 – Viggo MortensenA History of Violence – David Cronenberg  USA 2005 – Viggo Mortensen
 
Empty form
I think that David Cronenberg’s (DC) movie demonstrates – QED – the bankruptcy of the mainstream forms of Hollywood film making.  A History of Violence is built around a  back story that has been used many times before. It’s the story of the man -Tom – with the past – when he was called Joe – which comes back to haunt him. The film proceeds to fill out the machinations of the plot line with a series of graphically violent encounters as the protagonist Tom struggles to square his present reality with Joe, himself of yesteryear.  It’s not that either the idea or the story do not have interesting possibilities.  Rather it’s the way the film is structured round a series of violent set pieces that reduces the movie to the level of yet another parody.    A History of Violence is tricked out with a stylistic hyper real look with regular measured doses of sex and violence and has made box office.  But it is evidential testimony for the proposition that film based on narrative action image is now running on empty and that any attempt to make such films that do anything other than pander to the debased currency of entertainment is either the result of dishonesty or self deception.
 
The film is built up on a skeletal framework of five epically composed episodes of extreme violence connected by the narrative of the suburban man whose past is provoked into finding him.  This key idea is a Jackle and Hyde schizo story in reverse, with suburbia as a  drug induced state of catatonia,  that is only relieved by engaging in acts of violence.  Violence is the antidote that overcomes censorious inertia.   Violence is a suppressed mode of behaviour that stems from a state of mind characteristic of earlier consciousness.  America realised as a prepubescent repressive culture.
 
To highlight the shizo awakening DC employs his usual hyer-real stylised mis-en-scene.  The film looks like its shot on HD with separation of foreground and backgrounds suggesting dis-association.  This effect is reinforced by the set construction and of wide angle lens all working effect sense of distortion and proportion.  Complementing the settings the action adopts a highly stylised and graphically expressed representations of violence.   But for violence to work in this situation at any level beyond that of fantasy entertainment, the violence has to have some moral basis that grounds it within the fabric of the film.  But moral basis there is not.
 
In the violence DC renders in all the usual vivid heightened details such as: a knife driven right through a hand, a neck crushed under the heel of a shoe so that the jugular blood shoots out, brains slurping out of a shot blasted skull.  The overall effect is parody but even on its own terms within the movie the parody does not maintain a consistent moral line.  This is evidenced in the first sequence of the film which shows the aftermath of  the violent murderous robbery of a small motel by psychopathic killers.  Before the leaving the scene of the crime one of the hoods is surprised by a little girl.  The hood and the girl look at each other: we see the hood takes his gun aim and fire it from point blank range at the little girl. Cut.  We do not see the little girl. Unlike the other scenes of violence we do not see what the bullet from this gun does to her body: DC cuts and switches the action.  DC might say that he is working with a convention in which only ‘the badies’ get hurt.  But in which case why have the little girl in the script?  It is a moral failing that defines and typifies the film.  Graphic violence is central to A History of Violence: it is the very premise of its structure.   Throughout the film our retinas gaze on images of blood   mangled flesh and crumpled bodies.  Yet the most ‘shocking’ violence in the film is omitted.  DC pulls away from it.  He suddenly becomes reticent and shy as if he cannot allow himself to admit the full force of his own filmic logic.  The scene is suppressed; perhaps even unshot.  DC in making A History of Violence is caught up in the schizo contradictions of the culture as much as his subjects.  Lacking any moral stature the film becomes just another exercise in style another vacuous violent exploitation flic.   Empty parody without substance without life.  A film for the dead like the zombie gangsters that inhabit its frames, but collapsed and without meaning.
 
The last shots of the Stall family having diner together is perhaps the low point of the film. This sequence, in which wife and son know the truth about Tom/Joe is shot without dialogue.  We see the whole family eating around the table and cut to a series of close ups in which the faces reflect a sort of gross disturbance.   DC seems to say that the horror of the knowing of truth has permeated their bodies their spirit, and results in the affect of this realisation  streaming out of their sensory expressive organs.  The visual effect acheived by DC is as if the actors are pissing with their faces, or about to be sick.  As a coda it is at least in tune with the rest of the film: an overblown stylised affectation.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Fog of War – Errol Morris 2003 USA

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

On yer bike, Che! by Tom Jennings

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