Film Review

Peeping Tom – Michael Powell – UK 1960 – Karl Bohm – Anna Massey – Moira Shearer

Viewed: Curzon Soho – 6 12 04 – Ticket price £6 double bill with Blow Up.Peeping Tom – Michael Powell – UK 1960 – Karl Bohm – Anna Massey – Moira Shearer
 
Viewed: Curzon Soho – 6 12 04 – Ticket price £6 double bill with Blow Up.
 
Contemporary reviewers saw Peeping Tom as a sordid very unpleasant film.  A nasty story about a killer (Mark) with a penchant for skewering prostitutes.  Even the fact that the part of Mark was played by Karl Bohm, a German, thereby lending the protagonist the persona of a stereotypical proto-Nazi, did nothing to redeem the film for the critics. (Interesting to conjecture if the reason for casting Karl Bohm, who is very good, was prompted by anticipation of criticism of the film on moral grounds, and the casting was an attempt to partially deflect this by not having a Brit play the part of a driven upper middle class killer.  Or was there some other reason such as none of the eligible Brit actors of the day wanted the part.  If the latter it is a good example of perceived moral contagion, the way in which an actor avoids playing a role because of fear that attributes of that role might be assigned either to his real life or his acting career in general).
 
In fact, seen now, the story line is a flimsy vehicle, extreme in form but lacking in any substance simply a pretext for a film project.  The project is a spatial exercise looking at the limits of what we can understand from what we apprehend, a red and sometimes wry satirical meditation the meaning and nature of truth.
 
Claims are made sometimes by film makers (and others) that the object of the process of filming/recording is get to, to apprehend the truth of the subject, to penetrate a subject so deeply that the nature of its truth is revealed: that camera and recording technologies in accessing the spontaneous can split people open so that their inner psychic functioning can be seen.  That we somehow have access to others’ states of mind.   Similar such claims were made by the Inquisition – that their techniques of interrogation and torture opened up the very mysteries of the errant soul so that the-truth-for-the-heretic could be clearly exposed by the Inquisitors.  Delusion. All delusion avers Powell here.
 
Mark, using a killing apparatus, the sharpened spiked leg of a tripod with 16mm running camera attached, impales his female victims through the jugular in order to understand the exact nature of  fear which he records and will be able read in the expression on their faces at the instant of their cognizance of their own death.  Mark is never satisfied with the results of his filming as each time  ‘the moment of truth’ always seems to elude him and evade his apprehension (unlike for example the officer in charge of the killing apparatus in the Penal Colony who feels the elation of his subjects) .  At the core of Peeping Tom is the idea of using technologies of reproduction – film and tape – as intensifiers of experiential situations, as intensifiers of moments of truth.  What Powell shows in Peeping Tom (which is ultimately a metaphysical parody) is that these various technologies alienate us from direct connection with our own experiences; that technologies of mechanical reproduction do not lead into zones where truth is immanent.   In relation to ‘an other’ these technologies in reaffirming victim-nature,  the other’s victimness is multiplied as they become objects of desire whose destiny is to be the mechanically re-lived retrieved projected fantasy of the perpetrator. Mechanical systems of image reproduction whether of picture or sound take us further into our own projections and distance us from others.   Here, there is no ‘truth’ in or of, sex, fear, death, loneliness etc. except the truth of our own desires. This is Peeping Tom, the retinal image, the eye, the big close up of the eye the opening shot of the film.  The only character in the film (Helen’s mother) who can ‘see’ things that can be known is blind and has no retinal images to project.    
 
Peeping Tom ravishes the eye, abuses the retina of the viewer to the point where the film’s narrative form is submerged underneath a sea of highly visual detail.  It is a submarinal liquid experience, a film of undulating surface, of dense closely patterned planes, of red that wash through the film in the detail of its sets, costumes and lighting.  The red lights of the dark room, the red lights and costumes of the prostitutes, the deep red decor of Marks flat and the red hair of the principle actresses.  The film has a fluid restless deadly quality which dissolves both the story line and the cod psychology of the back story into a vacuous irrelevant gaseous matter. 
 
Peeping Tom also describes the full arc of the worlds invested by Powell, perhaps it represents the last world he discovered.  Many of Powell’s films were about worlds – superficially both real and make believe worlds.  Real world in The Edge of the World – his first film as director about the abandonment of St Kilda – about the end of a world, the vibrant sociable world of a remote island; Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus  are about displaced worlds that are real (in some sense) but fantastical.  Red Shoes creates the meeting point of a real world and an unreal domain, artificial in the sense that it is construed by the demands of performance.  In Red Shoes the two worlds, both narrow and self contained in their concerns, coexist driven by compulsion.  Each though only exists for the other and there are no outside frames of reference, two worlds mutually inclusive are locked together in a contrapuntal tension, like the dancer and her shoes.
 
In Peeping Tom it seems that Michael Powell had come at last a place where the world has finally closed down behind the eye.  In Peeping Tom, except for the vision of the blind woman there is no other world other than Mark’s movie of fear.  Everything is subsumed into this – which is why the mis en scene works as it does – like a watery grave – everything is part of Marks’s movie which is made in isolation from the rest of the world.  Mark is alone with his projections which are leading him straight down the road of his own death with no escape possible (not even Anna Massey dressed in colour coded blue outfits) In Peeping Tom,  Powell seems to have come to the end of a certain logic inherent in film making in which it is necessary to understand that all images threaten to slide towards or degrade into acts of solipsism.
 
Adrin Neatrour  7 12 04
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

2046 -Wong Kar Wai – Hong Kong – 2004, Tony Leung – Su Lizhen – Bai Ling – Faye Wong

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 11/ 2/ 05 Ticket – £5 – 95

When the bubble pops.2046 -Wong Kar Wai – Hong Kong – 2004, Tony Leung – Su Lizhen – Bai Ling – Faye Wong
Viewed: Tyneside Cinema Newcastle  11/ 2/ 05   Ticket – £5 – 95
 
When the bubble pops.
 
As soon as I saw the opening credits that announced where the money to make 2046 came from – ARTE France and ZDF- the film was announced as a hybrid product of  Euros and HK dollars.  So I wondered what sort of a movie I was going to see.  From experience the odds were it was going to be a variation on Pot Noodles.  A dish with Chinese ideograms wrapping a meal prepared for the European palate. 
 
2046 is a coffee table movie with a dynamic of intensification modeling its structure. The feel of the film is for a saturation along certain dimensions such as texture and colour  in particular green, Vermeer rather than jade; a visual saturation over laid with mannered movement in particular the mannered acting style extracted from all the lead players.  IN relation to its sound track ‘2046’is washed through with both music – some of it perhaps parody but most of it middle of the road Western classical sentimentality ; and rather twee dialogue exchanges.  ‘2046′ is trailed as having a sci-fi  framework, but in fact this section feels pure gloss(more metaphoric than actual – but I’ll come to this later)  and has little substance. The dip into the future becomes an excuse for Won Kar Wai to raid the stylistic larder of films past to brighten up ‘2046′ –  a little Blade Runner, Alphaville etc.  Stylistically even those sequences not set in futuristic zones (‘2046 where nothing changes everything is always stays the same’ this description of course describes Hong Kong), have a Hollywood production look to them.  Something of  Scorcese and Coppola on that  ground where the Italian American eye with its sensibility for the movement meets visceral action – intensity developing out of violence. In Kar Wai’s world there is little overt violence rather an intensity constructed around a void.  An empty middle.
 
There is no doubt that Wong Kar Wai knows how to frame his pictures:  his use of blocked off partial lines of sight and his tracking shots as either reveals or occludes are usually(but not always) effective.  And he fills his frame with some beautiful images: in particular the curvaceous forms of his women(with beautiful asses) who are erotically off set in the rich fabric of their costumes and high heels.  Wong Kar Wai’s (WKW) composition of tactilely rich settings – fabric wood flesh – sensually energises his film and carries the somewhat weak scenario. 
 
In relation to Scorcese and Coppola their films worked not only because they understood the business of Hollywood in creating films with certain type of style leading out of and made possible by the production values; but also because the style itself was grounded in the articulation of certain  aspirational projections of Italian American experience.  WKW seems to be directing in a sort of cultural vacuum.   Perhaps this what  HK is?  A culture of passive assimulation.  A sort of sponge soaking up indescriminately the cultural influences of East and West.  The embodiment of no-place and WKW  the conjurer and creator of notional intensities.
 
‘2046′ feels locked into an introspective vision.  A sort of international marketing Hong Kong style.  Notionally set in 1960’s the supposedly future year 2046 always feels close to the present.  The characters face inwards their faces turned away from the world, with little connection to actual space or time. They are part of the HK bubble world; perhaps making movies out of HK no- place leads politically and socially to a sort of never never land of regressed personal and social  relationships ‘…….nothing ever changes here’.  WKW doesn’t try to break out of the HK mould,  putting in play human relationships to examine HK.  His investigations only find that it is a series of closed circuits leading nowhere.
 
There is a significance to the year 2046.   2046 is the year that the 1997 agreement(one country two systems) concerning the governance of HK, made between the British and the Chinese People’s Republic, ends;   2046 is the last year in which the status of HK as an independent enclave, a separate little statelet, with its own  ‘way’ is guaranteed.  It is the year when something will change.   The year when this little plot of land where nothing changes, will have to change.  The year when (perhaps) HK’s internalised circuitry will short out. In the meantime HK is sentenced to this period of introspection – as are her lovers – being nowhere going nowhere. 
 
As the film progressed 2046 evoked memories(sometimes painful)of a certain strand of French romantic films from the 1960’s onwards typified by Lelouche’s un Homme et une Femme(1968) and repeated ad nauseam with their central ideas about the demons that love’s desire always releases to torment and in the end defeat us.  These films often had a theme music that would cue key points of the film and were interspersed with much cod philosophising about the nature of love and lovers.  The better examples of the genre avoided over use of ‘the music’ and had a certain gusto in the playing and energy in the mis en scene to get them through their paces.  All these films took place in a bourgeois  bubble world.  The personae lived in a stream of endless money cars and apartments -all relationships were bound into the world of the film in which the events of the world were bypassed.
 
 In this sense 2046 is unlike its European precursors in that the social relations are a real reflection of the political matrix form which they evolve.  In this case everyone waits for the bubble to burst.  But of course it never does.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Dogville – Lars Von Trier – USA/Denmark 2004Dogville is film as machine, a well oiled machine designed to process Nicole Kidman. The machine is heavily larded with John Hurts voice over explaining in detail the sociopathic mechanisms inherent in the design and function of the mechanism( at times it seems he’ll never shut up) Each section of the machine is introduced by an often tongue in cheek title card. We watch the Dogville machine at work adopting its stray dog raw material, shaping it, masticating it and finally trying to destroy it before itself being destroyed by the consequences of its own actions: simultaneously we hear the voice of machine minder sardonically calling our attention to the ever mutating mechanisms of desire that are at work. As machine film Dogville is a parody of the Hollywood movie factory where dreams and delusions and fake states of mind roll off the production line. Dogville as a referential work takes up on one film which is an essential component of Hollywood’s gospel of idealised americana: Our Town. It’s a long time since I saw Our Town, but I instantly recognised its characteristic features: the stock american small town characters of a certain era(1930’s), the cadence of its spoken home-spun words, the set. Sam Wood’s film, shot in a studio built town is a machine(larded by the voice of Frank Craven[whom, unlike Hurt, we do see as a character] ) built on simple socially constructed mechanisms that function as a endorsement of the values and behaviour of real America. The fable that Our Town spins is that there is no real discrepant gap between values and action in this, the real America. Out of this referent with its carefully built and painted sets, camera set ups and artfully contrived lighting all seamlessly edited, comes Dogville like the anti-matter machine with its highly charged strangely named particles of energy – such as hand held digital camera and jump cut. All the action takes place in the crucible of the set which is simply made up of spaces marked out in white chalk which are sparsely littered with emblematic and economically employed theatrical props. Our Town was a big production set that mimicked reality. Its characteristic quality is opaqueness: it comprises of closed spaces characterised by walls doors and other obstacles to lines of vision. The set in Dogsville is open: the light(there is much commentary on light and its nature in the film) passes through and exposes all the set. The action is transparent. In Dogville the translucent set functions as a glass housing for the machine that unchains the dog of desire and examines its effect on smalltown. The overlaid pastiche of stock characters, stock situations and a carefully parodied script produce in the glass crucible of Dogville, a bestialisation of the town. Its nature and the nature of its desire, cock shit and meanness, is open to the light. There is no redemption for the characters who fail to see(or in the case of Tom who understands too late) that they are the components of a desire machine. In case it might seem there is a saving Grace in Dogville, in the form of a canonisation of Nicole Kidman as sainted product, Von Trier, after allowing Nicole and her dad a little philosophical babbling, closes the story grand guignole Hollywood style, with an apocalyptic Old Testament revenge ending. As if it were the destiny of all such machines to destroy themselves. Dogville is moral film literal in purpose and in detail. Each section of the machine has a function and that function can only be understood by seeing each process. Machine films that don’t skip processes can only work through time and generally(I’m sure there are exceptions put I can’t think of any) employ the classical unities and continuities to make them intelligible as machines. Dogville is a wonderful machine but with one irritation the over elaborated dog-matic Voice Over. Perhaps it is part of the dogma to rub the audience’s nose in the shit. – adrin neatrour – 7 March 2004

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

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

Notti di Caberia – Fellini – 1957 – Giullietta Massina

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

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

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

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

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

Dilemmas of a Bleeding Heart by Tom Jennings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me

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

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

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

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

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

Boxing Booth – Adrin Neatrour 1984

Sceened at Side Cinema 7 2 04

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