Film Review

Crimson Gold – Directed by Jafar Panahi

Iran 2002

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

A Cut Above? by Tom Jennings

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

Moral Politics at Play School by Tom Jennings

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

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

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

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

A Pair of Right Scares by Tom Jennings

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

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

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

The Edukators (Die Fetten Jahre Sing Vorbei) – Hans Weingarten – Germany 2004

Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 7 5 05 Ticket price £5-95The Edukators (Die Fetten Jahre Sing Vorbei) – Hans Weingarten – Germany 2004
Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 7 5 05 Ticket price £5-95
 
No message from the dead
 
Its interesting to note that the English title of this movie owes nothing to the original German which I think points directly to the past as a source of ideas. The English distributors have gone for a sort of neo punk handle contrived as hip gesture of semi-illiteracy in the hope of suggesting a film that has at least something vital in its craw.   But there is nothing here – it is an empty vacant movie with round smiling faces.
  
I think that as film The Educakors is not even a film: its a TV sit com, a sort of German version of Friends without the Manhattan haircuts but with similar if less well contrived  plot devices.  Looking at The Edukators it appeared to me so visually impoverished that it probably would have worked better as a radio play.  There are certainly no film ideas in evidence. The camera work comprises little more than the technical feat of pointing the thing in the right direction and remembering to turn it over;  the editing is characterised by cute little jump cuts in the action and little else and the acting is stolidly mediocre.  For which mediocrity, the actors are possibly blameless in as much as the script requires them to go through vacuous gestures in response to ideas that have been decanted of all meaning.  The political/social ideas that lurk as the historical background to the Edukators are not introduced in order to be probed examined put to the test suffered or destroyed.  Their existence in the film is marked only to the extent that they are milked for their entertainment value, for their value in manipulating ironic contretemps and as wallpaper for the light comedic situations.    This use of ideas let alone politics in movies  fully accords with the thinking of most Hollywood studios and looking at this work I wondered if Hans Weingarten might be marking his menu card for a possible piece of american  pie.    
 
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

ELEPHANT – Gus Van Sant – USA 2003ELEPHANT – Gus Van Sant – USA 2003
Elephant is a very dry film. Like a dream permeated by a mood of dryness. Movement down long corridors connecting dry people with dry space. Only once does moistness obtrude into the film(the group vomiting in the lavatories is an evacuation moistness) when we glimpse in a brief shower scene, a kiss shared between the killers. We can see that they are very wet. But we are not part of their wetness, its something we see as part of the ritual of the killers, their decision to shower, to become moist. But that’s it. The rest of the movie is dry as dry as the water in the drinking fountains located at strategic points in the long corridors of corporate America.
As befits a dry film the core of Elephant is its structure. Its structure takes the form of a number of long tracking shots – the film comprises of about 30 (? – didn’t count) long tracking takes mostly shot from behind an individual or group – as the camera follows its characters across the school campus and though the internal space of the school.
The formal structure issues from Van Sant’s perception of the shared cultural features of American psycho geography. The corridors, with their rooms off, linking specialised zoned spaces, such as refectory library sports hall, could be anywhere in America. This is America: whether you work for the City, Hospital, School, College Corporation or Government: this is the geography that constrains life. Its dry.
At first when thinking about the film I found it difficult to see beyond structure. It was all structure. I think that contained within the film’s structure is the idea of ‘re-enactment’ as ethos. Dramatised re-enactment is, after all, a form of ritual: sometimes empty of sometimes replete with emotive involvement. One ritual associated with serious crime is the staged re-enactment of the event by the police. This often involves retracing the victim’s passage to their fate. Police re-enactments are played by non professional actors(often police personnel) who are asked to take on the various roles required by the situation. Members of the public who believe that they might have been in the area traversed by a victim are asked to be present.
One justification (though by no means the only one) for these police simulations is to stimulate the public into recalling things they have forgotten. To jog memory. Typically these re-enactments are depersonalised walk throughs, dry runs, in which nothing hot takes place. The police video recording of these events does not run to music cues or spot effects. Of course the TV crime industry has picked up on these re-enactments and filled them out with hot material such as dialogue and music. Even though filled out, the sparse personal detail released about victims results more in audience sympathy than involvement. The viewing response remains one of detachment. The TV dramatisations retain the character of their police model a high level of detachment and impersonalisation. As the audience already know the outcome narrative tension is low but spacio temporal tension can be exploited. As with the police re-runs, the purported justification of TV recreations is to shake down viewer memory for information about the victim, perpetrator or the crime, etc. But the TV re-enactments also feel like they evoke a collective response to the event. These films are like machines that produce a mechanical reaction of collective horror. Elephant does not do this. In Elephant my response was to be reminded of the normality of the action. The re-enactment, the walk throughs the unending corridors and spaces produced an effect of depersonalised normalisation of the massacre. It didn’t trivialise or minimalise let alone desensitize. It reminded me that in this sort of environment this is the sort of thing that can happen. Even the music – such as the Beethoven Sonata – richly emotive and redolent of Western individual values is dislocated and removed from the events that unfold: the music is like the background to another movie and its emotional charge negated in the context of Elephants re-staged walk throughs. Elephant’s audience have to remember that familiar anaesthetised institutions ferment their own wide awake fantasies.
In structure the film works to richly suggestive effect. The long super real trance like tracking shots one of which opens the film, start exterior to the school and lead us into the school building and enable us to understand American culture as a psycho-geometric setting. The school’s box like interior which with its long connecting corridors and passage ways, cross junctions and 90* intersecting rooms, represent an institutionalised tunnel vision, an angular geometric experience like the rat mazes of psychology departments.
American psychogeography – Elephant’s tracking recreates the living – movement of the institutions of suburban American. From the interior, the vastness of the monolithic buildings controls angle of vision and at the same time excites movement which permits a person to enter a space similar to the one they have left. The environment engenders a continual molecular agitation as the rigidity of suburban sprawled space engulfs being. In the suburbs with their endless monotonous lines of evenly spaced boulevard lawn fronted housing, public space is mostly an interior organised grid that channels through a vast area. People shop, work or go to school/college in vast buildings whose vista is a straight line leading to a dead-end. Passage ways of unending interstitial corridors linking spacial zones.
Part of the justification of elephant’s structure is that these same vistas have a parallel existence in the virtual space time matrix of computer games. In these the psycho-geography of the suburbs is exploited to create the compulsive experiential movement imagery of the kill-or-be-killed game scenario. Replicated and intensified graphically, examples of this world typically comprise tracking shots down narrowing vistas, 90* intersections, zoned space, no-man’s land, enclosed chambers, narrow passageways. These architectural features are exploited for lurk zones, blind spots, misframing possibilities, both to reveal enemies and wild aggressive monsters and to mount ambushes and surprise attacks in which you the player kill or be killed.
The strongest point in Elephant is this layering of the real and the virtual as a movement experience. Its weakness seems to me that although beautifully shot with lots of young people catching the eye and a resonant emotive film score, it is a little thin. Rather dry. Its a bit dead. Like a beautifully lit shot track of a corpse on the slab in the morgue: the stainless steel glints; the marble purrs; and the body has a silky sheen. But the body would be more interesting if alive. Also I think Elephant deviates when it got slow-mo artsy – was Van Sant trying to hint at eternal recurrence a la Exterminating Angel. But what he does do is see something in the American way that few others either see or want to depict.     adrin neatrour Feb 2004

Targets – Peter Bogdanovich – USA 1967Targets – Peter Bogdanovich – USA 1967
Side cinema 21 March 2004
 
Seeing Targets at the Side Cinema last Sunday made me want to visit Peter Bogdanovich and talk to him.  It was made at a critical time and place: America in hightail engagement in the Vietnam War; the assassinations of JFK and MLK.  Targets comes out of a society where after 35 years of the talkies and Hollywood global dominance, 15 years drip feed TV, the psycho-reality of the movie has invaded everyday streamed consciousness so that Americans (they first but quickly joined by the rest of the world) are starting to see and interpret actuality through the disjointed and distorting nature of the filmed image.  And also at this point our society is about to incorporate the computer and its programme into psychic functioning.
The critical moment in Targets defining both the film and its concerns is when the killer types out a note written to himself which reads something like: ”It is now 11:40 in the morning.  My wife is about to get up and when she comes  over to give me a kiss I will shoot her and then I will shoot my other……then it will all happen.”   In this typewritten note killer is writing his own software, programming his mind to carry through a series of actions almost as if he were a prototype video game.   Targets at this level is a philosophical investigation into the nature of killing.   Belying the apparent visceral nature of its subject matter it is cerebral film looking at the controlling aspects of mind.  What Bogdanovich locates at the centre of his film is the idea of programming; the idea of individuals overcome by multiple circuitries of intensifying stimuli – the movies -TV – the suburbs- the family – constructing a simple override programme that resolves his situation with maximum economy.  Targets is a film, a cerebral investigative examination of the idea of self programming.  In the past evil may have inhabited us, taken possession of us or manipulated our actions and thoughts.  Today we do it ourselves: we write our own programmes.   Interestingly, Targets close film contemporary is Kubrick’s 2001 which also has a central preoccupation with computers and programming but is a very different take on the issue.
In form Targets has a neo-realist feel.   We see it from the killer’s point of view. The settings are nondescript: drawn from anywhere any place-ville: the suburban house, the hotel, the gas storage tank.  There is no architecture of set, in fact the reverse.  The final setting of the drive-in movie lot is a deconstructed exhibition space, emptied of everything except essence – the huge screen.  The film is restrained in its use of expressive resources: the roles are played out neutrally by the actors with little emotive gesturing, the script pared back, the scenes mostly shot wide or medium in long takes with spare use of the close up.  This stark economy strips the film back to its working parts allowing clear uncluttered sighting of the critical intersection point that is the target of the film –  the programming soft ware that develops from  the meeting of the proliferating promiscuous and incestuous gun culture – with –  the absorption of  individuals into the movie scripts,
In the gun store two old codgers (Mutt n Jeff) sell lethal hardware, guns as if they were  ball hammers, and bullets like they were nails.  The reality of the gun is not so much that it’s a tool for killing (it does do that) but rather it’s a cool tool to engender radical change of scene.  At a point where for whatever uninteresting reason an individual feels hemmed in, terminally bored, angry, trapped etc.  There is recourse to the scenario mapped out by the movies. Pick up the gun, aim and shoot; everything is changed.  It’s a machine for radically altering everything.  And as you squeeze the trigger, no matter who you hit: the foreigner, the wife or passing stranger you are the one in control. You come to power with power. In an atomising society: each is alone.  In the movie there is only individual destiny. To close his loop Bogdanavich calls on his protagonist (brilliantly played by Tim O’Kelly) to shoot and kill the audience from within the cinema screen itself.  This is Bogdanovich saying directly without metaphor, analogy, or any sort of circumlocution, pointing to what is in the movie screen and saying – killer.  The killer is literally in the screen; who is not seen because our senses are overwhelmed by the sensual experience of watching. These images upon which we gaze, line us up in their sights and one by one corrupt us and pick us off.  Just like the sniper shoots the audience in the cars watching The Terror. Interwoven with the snipers story is the Boris Karloff story.  This is told as the story of the old movie star who is tired with his film image, bored with the repetition and cliché of film and so determines to retire. Before retiring he agrees to attend a screening of his film The Terror at the drive -in and meet the fans.  Karloff looks into the nature of the film image and perceives that it is empty and vacuous and that it has sucked the life out of him. It is Karloff’s tired form that clinches the denouement.
Bogdanovitch takes his film to its logical conclusion.  This is not a film about killing people it is a film about programming and how image works in the programme.  The ending called down upon Tim O’Kelly is to be defeated by multiplicity of imagery.  Emerging from within the screen he is overwhelmed by the merged images in his head of the real and virtual Boris Karloff. Confused by the moving images that he can’t reconcile he is reduced to a catatonic immobile state.  His destiny a little like the sort of psychosis induced experimentally in laboratory rats when exposed to conflicting stimuli.  They break down we break down he breaks.
Stylistically Targets feels like a B sci-fi movie of the ‘50s and 60s. These films often used the subterfuge of a fantastical script device to record the underlying paranoia in US society.  The in-part politically induced social fear of invasive alien forces and the in-part culturally bound fear of living on and feeding on land that had been stolen from its rightful users.  Targets does away with any pretext that the alien forces might be anywhere else but in the here and now.  The force at work is the programming manufactured distributed and retailed in the USA and exported world wide.
Adrin Neatrour 26 March 2004