Film Review

The Innocents
Jack Clayton (UK 1961) Deborah
Kerr; Michael Redgrave

writing credits: John Mortimer, William Archibold, Truman Capote

viewed Tyneside Cinema 5 Jan 2014; ticket: £6:95

There is a moment at the height of Miss Giddens’ epic contest with Miles where she is seen in full ‘battle regalia’ her luxuriant hair let down like a warrior. Until this point her hair, neatly pinned up has been a symbolic token of her reason and self control. As her rolling locks cascade over her shoulders we see for the first something of her primal energy. In the movies, hair cuts tell their own stories about the characters, suggesting in the lines and contours of the hair something about the landscape of personality underneath. In this letting go moment it felt like Miss Giddens had arrived at an epithany, a point where she recognised that to ‘win’ she would have to call up from within herself unfamiliar latent forces. A ‘hair-down’ shot in which Clayton would start to release something of his own invention into the scenario. A moment of truth which would transform the staid dull neuroticism of Deborah Kerr’s playing into something energised. The Innocents would be transformed into a film inspired by not inhibited by, Henry James’ magnificent short story: The Turn of the Screw.

But this moment remains simply that, a brief ‘hair encounter’. After which the movie returns to the mechanics of its laboured plodding Gothic plot. A telling of the plot that significantly diverges from the original telling of the story in as much as where James teases and finally opts for a phenomenological ambiguity, Clayton plays out a literalistic interpretation. Of course every film finds its own path through its material to its own form. Clayton in opting for development of specific plot mechanics over character development, leaves his film with an empty centre.

The Innocents pivots on the performance of the role of Governess Miss Giddens. She is the soul of the work and Henry James wrote his novella in the form of a letter written by her. This letter structures the work as a point of view: a seeing and recounting of the events. This is one of things James explored: how seeing informs understanding. However in the Innocents film version, we don’t see things from her point of view. Sometimes we do but mostly we get a camera taking up different narrative roles dominated by overdetermined affect images that Clayton asks Deboral Kerr as governess to give. The role of governess is defined by stereotypical faciality of the melodramatic horror genre characterised by the lowering of the jaw, the stretching of the skin over cheek bones, the widening of eyes. Locked into her rigid characterisation Kerr, directed by Clayton is unable to suggest the chaotic mental states that characterise perception and judgement in unstable psychic relationships. And so, like a fire, without sufficient psychic energy to consume, the film slowly dies down and goes out. There are a couple of moments with both Miles and Flora that kindle, but in the end instead of a focus of intent, there are just images edited and manipulated to impose the occasional shock on the audience.

The other weakness of the Innocents is the failure of Jack Clayton to create a world within which to locate his action. The action mostly takes place in a large country house called Bly. For the film to work the location should take on some numinous identity of its own. The setting should emanate a sense of presence and immanence in relation to the events that it secretes. But Clayton doesn’t develop the house as anything more than a backdrop to the action. Looking at the garden and the house, the props suggest a polymorphous raiding of the studio’s prop cupboard. None of the items, the statues the pictures the drapes have any resonance. The best shots are the over the shoulder tracking shots down the corridor (which might have influenced Kubrick’s Shining) and the use of the windows as mirror reflectors of faces. But neither of these more effective shots are intrinsic to the fabric of the setting, they could be part of any large house.

David Lean, in films such as Great Expectations and Brief Encounter, anchored his films within the numinous possibilities inherent in created and imagined worlds. His characters and plots were embedded in in the very fabric of his settings. In this film adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, Jack Clayton needed to better understand that the content and features of his setting were central to his artistic vision. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Double Indemnity Billy Wilder (USA
1944) Barabara Stanwyck, Fred McMurray, Edward G Robinson

Viewed DVD Boxing Day 2013

Mythic Surprise Party
One thing that struck me about Double
indemnity was that it was on the whole in terms of its images highly
abstract. Its actual concerns were located in the realm of ideas and
myth and the film was the more the powerful
for this bias.
Most commentators or at least the ones
I have read, pick out Wilder’s Double Indemnity as a prime exemplar
of the film noir genre. Reviewers agree that all the film’s
constituent elements were superbly crafted and delivered to produce a
very fine movie.

Let’s start with the structure of the
film. Double indemnity is structured as a back story told in the
course of Frank’s confession into Keyes’ dictaphone. This appliance
is a sort of confession machine; a mythical hole in the rock into
which you whisper your sins. It’s an automated depersonalised
confessional that intensifies and triggers the truth telling reflex
in an immoral irreligious age that responds to technology but not to
authority. In Wilder’s hands it’s a device which is never strained
or stretched and in the final scene the machine is cleverly but not
artificially, integrated into the film’s climax.

The script from a James Cain story has
a relentless narrative drive boned and honed by Raymond Chandler and
Wilder, spiced with sour dark dialogue for Phylis and Frank, and
variant wiseacring from Keyes.

The acting; high energy performances
from Stanwyck (the allure of the fake and brittle, in a wig) McMurray and
Robinson.

The cinematography: John Seitz’s
high key noir mood lighting rigs reflect the protagonists states of
mind. And the camera movement: Wilder’s direction makes use of
tracking shots to shift perspective and heighten psychological
affect. We see a scene that starts with a CLOSE SHOT of the
conspiring couple about to make love on the sofa in Frank’s
apartment. The camera suddenly tracks back pulling Phylis and Frank
into a WIDE PERSPECTIVE. The effect of the movement is to strip back
the naked raw desire driving their intention; but at the same time
also reveals them as vulnerable and alone together, pre-doomed by
the crime that lies before them.

But Double Indemnity is more than the
sum of all its qualities because it’s caste in a mythic form, which
gives the film a psychic authenticity that connects its action to a
grounded meaning. I don’t think that any one myth underlies Double
Indemnity, rather that the script suggests a number of mythic
sources, some Biblical and some Classical.

The core of the film’s mythic grounding
lies in the relationship between the two male protagonists. At the
end of the film Frank lies bleeding to death on the floor at the
door of the Company with Keyes beside him. He tells Keyes that Keyes
was too close to him to see what he was doing. Keyes replies: “Closer
than that…” Frank looks up at him and says: “Love you too.”
Extraordinary final dialogue! At once we understand that the theme
of the film is betrayal. This dialogue might construe a homoerotic
relationship between the men, the love that dare not speak its name.
More plausibly in relation to what we have seen, it might indicate
the love that develops in the relationship between master and
apprentice, master and disciple. A love characterised by an immense
fondness: The love of Moses for Aaron, of Jesus for Judas, the love
of Laius for Oedipus. The mythic theme underlying Double Indemnity
is the epic of betrayal, the leaving of the true and righteous path
of virtue for the gratification of desire. The forsaking of the love
of the master and his teachings for the blandishments of the flesh

The Pacific Insurance Company (shot as
a modern Temple of Commerce) is represented as a good and decent
place. It is the repository of a belief system that serves the
decency of the American way of life. Keyes is a high priest and
Frank his acolyte and successor. Both men symbolise in their roles
the forces of truth which have to stand firm against the
destabilising forces of putrescence and deception that seek to
undermine the Temple. Seduced by the flesh Frank betrays his love
for the Master, leaves the Temple and takes up residence in the
Brothel. In so doing, like Judas, he also determines the course of
his own destruction. Psychically castrated Frank cannot survive
without the sustaining love of his master.

Interestingly it is perhaps this very
love between the two men that overburdons Frank. As if Frank is
overwhelmed by the expectation of Keyes’ too great a love, and can
only respond to the inner tensions that it causes by betrayal, a
course of action that will destroy himself and perhaps Keyes. A true love story.
There is a wonderfully scripted
leitmotif that defines the relationship between the two male
protagonists: the Promethian spark. Throughout the movie Keyes asks
Frank for a light for his cigar. Frank always obliges. He takes a
match and flicking the nail of his thumb against its head, ignites
it. It’s a cheap trick, but as an image it effectively suggests the
idea of an energised cathartic relationship bonding the two men. The
spark that passes from the the younger man to the older: sexual
energy, the spark of knowledge, the fire of life. A metaphor for a
Promethean pact, a pact that is expertly reversed in the final scene
when Keyes demonstrates that he too is a consummate fire master and
lights Frank\s final cigarette with a match lit by a flick of his own
thumb.

The film works and retains its power
because working through a mythological casting of images, fire,
sacrifice, betrayal castration love it links the audience to a series
of primal archetypal elements that engage and link psychic states of
mind to action.

One final thought. Wilder when he made
Double Indemnity still seems to retain a belief in the moral solidity
of American capitalism. There is a certain collective commitment
that morally sustained the system. Wilder (and Chandler presumably)
saw that it was under threat from the new and increasingly
intensified forces of individuated desire. But in this movie, the
moral collective, the Temple holds its ground; it sees off the
brothel and the raging forces and the chaos of the id. Decency
represented by high priest Keyes wins, even if it is sorely wounded
as there are still enough good men left standing. By the time Wilder
makes Ace in the Hole in 1951, he has lost belief in the ability of
the American system to be decent. He sees the organisation of big
business irremediably corrupted by individual desire. The good no
longer can withstand the bad. On the outside the Temple might still
look like it is standing but inside it has turned into a brothel.
The era of an unashamed and unrestrained individualism is beginning.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Wages of Fear (le Salaire de la Peur) Henri-George Clouzot (Fr 1953) Yves Montard; Charles Vanel; Vera Clouzot Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 8 Dec 2013; ticket price: £5 Requiem for white trash….requiem for us all… Clouzot’s Wages of Fear is a filmic probe into the colonial and neo-colonial relations between the West and the developing world in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although film contains superbly crafted action sequences, its power derives from two defining elements. The scenario written as a series of beautiful and powerful metaphors: insects, the dusty town, the trucks the lake of oil the fire. And secondly its action is never detached from its driving theme: exploitation. The opening setting is in some Central American country, an arid clapboard sun bleached small town in the middle nowhere: but close to oil. The opening shot of the movie is a condensed visual symbol of the film’s theme, a movement image, a tracking shot that links the initial close up to the wide perspective. In close up a clutch of insects, scorpions perhaps, murderously crawl over each other in a hollow in the ground, scooped out of the dust. As the camera pulls back we see that each of these venomous creatures is attached by a piece of string to a small wooden frame held in the hand of a small boy. The child has these creatures, which could kill him, by the balls. Distracted by something happening in the street, he yanks up the stick frame, leaving the creatures spinning helplessly in mid air. A perfect expression of what is going on in this place. Clouzot’s camera, in this tracking shot as elsewhere in the film uses the shot to pull together disparate images into one idea. The function of the town is to supply the oil industry with cheap labour. Seen through the eyes of the white trash marooned in the town, the first part of Clouzot’s movie establishes the economic realities of a rentier economy. The oil company controls everything. They hold all the strings. They decide who works. The men in the town supply the non unionised cheap labor to the company: they either send remittances back or they come back as corpses. The white trash gaze on with indifference as a woman angered by the return of nine shrouds, pours out a political tirade of scorn and condemnation of the oil company. Her anger attracts and raises a crowd who temporarily overrun the company guards. But they are a demoralised people and lack the resources to sustain a prolonged struggle. If the town and its people are the fulcrum of exploitation, then the poor whites represent an expendable but useful alternative resource: a sort of social counter balance. The whites also have lives of little value, but their need to define themselves apart from and as essentially different from the natives, gives them a certain value to the company for certain types of dirty work. Today they are mercenaries hired by companies such as Blackwater. In Wages of Fear, they are the drivers of the death trucks. Wages of Fear divides into two parts. The first part, realist in representation, establishes the town as two groups of people with separate relations, states of mind and attitudes vis a vis the Oil Company. The second part, focusing on the whites, depicts their journey of terror as they ferry nitroglycerine to the blown out oil wells. Much of this second part is shot so that it has an abstract quality. Even the final ordeal of driving the truck through through the lake of black oil, has an abstracted metaphysical resonance. Like evil the black slime overwhelms Joe and Mario. In the image of the oil spill we see they ( and us) are drowning in forces of corporate capitalism, which penetrates into the totality of being. In this second half of the film, the focus is on the abstracted interior of the cab of the trucks. As the landscapes ghost by in the headlamps, it is in these compressed psychic spaces where the schizo states of mind of the men play out. Living with the possibility of death at every jolt and hole in the road, goaded by the promise of a huge cash payment, the scenes in the darkened cabs take place at the intersection of the men’s fear and desire; the forces that finally kill them. The forces exploited and controlled by oil. But although the forces set to work by Clouzot have an abstract quality, his actors, in particular Yves Montard as Mario, bring,with their bodies, a raw physicality to their roles. They are flesh and blood. In contrast to Anglo Saxon world, France in the pre 60’s period presented an open minded attitude towards homosexuality (at least in Parisian arts circles). Acceptance of homosexuality tended towards its quasi glamorous representation, emphasising the cerebral rather than the physical. Clouzot breaks out from these artsie boundaries. The mercenaries are rough trade. Their gender doesn’t define their sexuality. Ingenuous acceptance of homoerotic relations, is part of who the men are. Clouzot places this undifferentiated sexuality at the core of his characters. The physicality between men pressed together in the tiny cabs, is emphatically realised when Big Joe, the macho guy with the gun, adopts the passive role of the woman. Mario ends up treating Joe with the same callous indifference with which he treated Linda.. Vera Clouzot the director’s wife, plays the part of Linda. With her painfully thin waif like figure she represents a terrifying but almost comic book figure of frailty. In Wages of Fear the men have scorned women, and she is little more than an object of Mario’s abuse. But she is also the foil for her husband’s black Bunuelesque anti religious humour, that runs through the script. As Linda prays fervently, like Viridiana, in a scene of mawkish religious sentimentality, she looks up and sees the soles of the shoes of one of the white trash who has hung himself suspended from the beam above her. In the penultimate scene Clouzot presents his final visual metaphor. The shots of the fires at the well head. It is an apocalyptic vision of hell: raging fire, black smoke. A vision of the where the big oil companies and the world of oil, are taking us. As if to say the Gods whom we serve are implacable and will destroy us: if not today then tomorrow. Be warned. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Selfish Giant Clio Barnard (2013 Uk) Connor Chapman; Shaun Thomas Viewed Tyneside Cinema 22 Nov 2013 Ticket: £7.50 Film as an act of grace… Clio Barnard’s eponomous movie credits itself with being inspired by Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale. Judging from what has been written about the film, most reviewers have obviously not read the Selfish Giant and think that the film is based on the story. It’s certainly not. As the end credits state: it is inspired by the story. Wilde’s work (possibly co-authored with his wife) is a transparent allegory on the working of grace and embued with religious symbolism. A morally improving work such as Oscar possibly read to his children. So there is a question that can be asked: what inspirational element in the Selfish Giant does Clio Barnard’s film draw on? The Selfish Giant is set in the alienated lumpen welfare world of Bradford. A world abandoned to social agencies characterised by dependency and criminality. It was described by Andrea Dunbar’s 1980 play the Arbor which was also set in Bradford. So it is no surprise that Clio Barnard’s first film was a documentary about Dunbar and her play. So this is a territory and a social strata very familiar to Barnard who references. Dunbar’s work directly in the Selfish Giant by giving her lead boy protagonist the name, Arbor. Thereby laying claim to a direct line of provenance and descent. The Arbor, named after a road on a sink estate, opened up an abandoned world of intergenerational deprivation. Andrea Dunbar, herself a teenage single mother born on the Arbor, lived and described a culture often characterised by economic desperation and degraded relations between people. Women laid claim to life by serial procrearation; many men lived off the women in bonds defined by violence and/or made out through crime. Drugs and alcohol abuse were an endemic part of life on the Estate both as a palliative and a way of life. Dunbar in the very act of her writing shone light on and gave an actual recognition to the lives she described. Her observations including those of herself, staked out a claim for acknowledgement that her people were also a part of social matrix. The condition of their lives a price paid by them for the wealth of others. The Selfish Giant takes from where up the Arbor’s setting and situation leaves off. But as it develops, moves beyond it, extending out into a dimension that goes beyond Dunbar’s work reaching out into a sort of mythology. The opening shot is a wide night time shot of a field of horses. A shot chartacterised by both its urban setting and its stillness. There are a number of these sort of shots throughout the film: electricity substations, giant cooling towers, the moon. Shots that suggest in their manner and pacing, something of the film’s expressive code . Although contemporary in setting these shots have a quality that locates them in a zone outside of time, before before written history. They are derived from an originary world of primal forces, where the pacts of survival are between men and nature. not between men and social agencies. The actual world inhabited by Arbor and Swifty, documented in the first section of the film, is dominated by forces of control; as the scenario develops these forces fade and the shape of destiny is moulded by other possibilities. The story is set in the world of the scrappers. The scrap yard bears no resemblance to the Giant’s garden, except its wall which has two functions. But like the Giant’s garden, the scrap yard has allegorical meaning. It’s a place where people who have been scrapped live off society’s junk and trash. The scrap yard is a mythical zone, like Hades or the caves of the dwarves. Those who work there are outcastes, unclean and tainted beings. What happens in the yard is a source of mystery: Out of the chaos those who recognise the true value of scrap turn base metal into riches. It’s a form of alchemy. And , as the work of the scrapper is to return everything they touch to its originary form. Put to the fire stripped of all outer sheathing and markers the legimate and the illegimate become one, an indistinguishable molten mass. The scrap man has the laugh, everything is finally reduced to money, and his money in the melting pot of society built on respect for wealth, is as good as anyone else’s. It pays the bills. I Of course the scrapyard in Selfish Giant locates a story that directs the actions of the characters, But the impression is that Barnard is not so much interested in the mechanics of narrative, rather the location of the stream of events. Barnard does not accept that her characters are bound by the destiny of deprivation. Arbor, troubled as he is, and Swifty, lacjing confidence, are drawn to and seek out another reality for the entrapped doomed male. And they find it through the portal of the scrap yard. The yard releases them into primary contact with elemental forces: the animal totem, fire, precious metal copper, and the ferocity of nature. Through the scrap yard they are at least partially take on the mantel of Celtic Princes. Freed from the immediate scrutiny of agents they become aristocrats of their own making, and aas well as reeping the rewards have to pay the price for this. Freedom that is won always cmes at a cost. The Selfish Giant is not about horse race, criminality or social relations. All these have a place in the scenario. It is about spirit. A spirit that cathects, energises its protagonists in an elemental contract and in so doing ennobles them. The purpose of the film is relocation of its subjects. The selfish giant removes its protagonists from the realm of judgement into the realm of mythe. Barnard simply points to a possibility. She employs film as an art form and and uses film as a means to induce another way of seeing, another way of looking at the world presented. And that surely is one of the ways in which art works upon us: to help us to see. Inspired by the Selfish Giant. I think Clio Barnard’s film is an act of grace. As the Selfish Giant was transformed by his realisation, so the she transforms her characters from base into pure, from dead end sink estate kids into Celtic princes. But this case, the act of grace has to come from the audience. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Gravity Alfonso
Cuarón (USA 2013) Sandra Bullock. George Clooney

viewed 12 Nov 13 Empire Cinema newcastle ticket £5:95

Gravity is the story of Ryan, a woman with a man’s name. What was
this about I wondered?

The long opening shot of Gravity establishes something of the
qualitative nature of the space experience: its solitude. Out there
you are alone. This opening shot is of very long duration. It
carries us seamlessly from a long and distant vista of the space ship
to a fluid series of close ups of Matt and Ryan, the two astronauts
at work outside the ship. And beyond the two figures in space we see
the Planet Earth, a vast presence, the source of life.

However I felt that the opening shot’s length beyond a certain
point became counter productive. It ends up simply drawing attention
to itself as the director’s self referential act of filmic
narcissism. As it goes on and on and on, the shot delivers
diminishing returns adding nothing to the movie. Instead the shot
only draws attention to itself as an outer force unanchored in any
premise. It is neither, point of view nor state of mind nor
perception. It is a gaze; the gaze of a space tourist. The shot
taken by the unseen Steadicam operator like an iphone snap for the
Face Book page. It draws attention to the sender not the image.
Wish you were here!

Cuaron’s opening shot makes a statement about the film’s form:
rather than set up a situation. This is a Hollywood movie and we’re
here for the beer, to see what the camera’s got on offer.

Cuaron having overindulged with his first shot sets in play and
tests out relations, that like Ridley Scott’s go beyond cosmic
metaphysics. The scenario sets in play a series of propositions that
relate to the social matrix. These propositions, are not be found in
the million dollar surface of 3D digital FX that define the look of
Gravity. Cuaron is no Kubrick able in one stroke to make
cosmological connections through use of the pure image. Overall I
found Gravity visually less compelling an experience than Kubrick’s
2001. Even in 3D there is simply nothing in his film that remotely
matches Kubrick’s visionary realisations. Gravity to my eye lacked
cinematographic edge, with the exception of one particular shot
which connected directly to Gravity’s underlying story.

The two protagonists Matt and Ryan spend most of the film in their
spacesuits, which are quite different from swimsuits. Space suits are
a complete protective carapace, worlds in their own right, the
sequester the flesh. They are interfaces that remove the wearer from
all direct contact physical contact and interaction. The suits are
functional extensions of the body, designed for specific purposes. As
mediaeval knights in heavy armour were effectively extensions of one
function, combat; so Matt and Ryan in their astronaut suits are
simply extensions of functions for surviving and working in space.
In their spacesuits humans are machines, fit only for the functions
of space. The most powerful scene in the film, Cuaron’s coup de
cinema, is when Ryan divests herself of her space suit. She strips
it off like a burlesque performer, revealing her body and visually
laying claim to possession of flesh and blood as a psychic reality.
In shedding her carapace Ryan in fact affirms that she is a prisoner
of the forces that have projected her into space. The space suit
carries to the extreme the subjugation of being human to becoming
machine. In space as in the large corporations that dominate earth
machine precedes essence. As you look upon the worlds created by the
the great IT corporations: Facebook, Google, Apple, this is a future,
the large corporations envelope us as certainly as the space suit.
Escape is ecstatic and exhilerating, but illusionary.

Gravity’s narrative is simple: it’s the old story of boy meets
girl: Ryan meets Matt. A girl meets boy story which plays out in a
very particular manner. Strapped into their spacesuits and seen
through the camera lens, the girl and boy, are not so much characters
as specimens. They are Cuaron’s laboratory specimens. As if
Gravity’s plot line was a thought experiment, in which Cuaron
extrapolates what is visible in contemporary human relations into the
future. As experimenter Cuaron places the boy /girl diad in the bell
jar of outer space, cut off from any external contact or
communications. Like in a video game based on trail by ordeal, a set
of purely functional tasks have to be completed for survival. Having
locked in his specimens, Cuaron films and records the outcome.

In Gravity Cuaron has given his female specimen the male name of
Ryan, whilst his male has the generic everyman name of Matt: Matt
AnyMan of our times. Hi Matt.

We see that it is the nature of the space suit to be an
integument defined by pure function. What happens when function
precedes being. Much of the attention of Gravity’s camera is focused
on the consequences of the increasing masculinisation of the female.
Or to put it another way, the subsumation of the female into the
pure world of male function. Gravity, in the form of Ryan
extrapolates a certain type of future. With her male name, her
space suit that decouples sexuality and gender from identity,
untethered from her biological drives which are but a memory, and
required only to function or die, Ryan personifies the future of
social relations. The course piloted by the female is not just that
of non dependance on the male, but of the complete expendability of
the male. And the male realises this. Male specimen Matt decoupling
the lanyard clip that holds him to Ryan’s umbilical cord realises the
inevitability of the male destiny. It’s Goobye Matt. Extinction and
replacement by the masculinised female.

Working beyond this interesting but comic book experiment, there
was a deeper idea I felt implicit in Gravity: the idea of isolation.
The extent to which isolation both as a situation and a state of
mind is an increasingly characteristic of contemporary society.
Increasingly loneliness is becoming a default state and plotted onto
a map of the future looks only to increase. Clamped into devices,
wired into computers, strapped inside machines for living, we are
alone. Functional physical extensions displace other areas of
psychic space.

As a corollary we become happy to live by ourselves in a world
defined by technological relations not human relations. Ryan the
masculated woman exists outside human relations. She is without a
prayer, using the radio as she drives home from work to anaesthetise
herself and be ready for work next day. She has become a robot
defined by function: a worker bee the sterile servant of a vast
machine. Isolation is a characteristic feature suburban and
corporate America, as the carapace of work becomes the defining
feature of identity. And it is the extrapolation of the forces of
isolation that lie at the heart of Gravity. Gazing at the mother
planet, near but far off, spat out alone onto its surface Ryan is the
future woman degendered by the disappearance of the male, isolated in
her sex, occupying a virtual body within a machine.

When Ryan is catapulted back to mother earth she is alone: no one
comes to her.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Filth Jon S Baird (2013 Scot Ger Swe ) James McAvoy

Viewed Empire Cinema newcastle upon Tyne 17 Oct 13 ticket: £6.40
Now here’s a funny thing: when I left the cinema after seeing
Filth, protagonist Bruce Robertson’s catch phrase: Same rules apply
– kept on ringing about in my head. Whenever Robertson did the
dirty on some poor sap who crossed his path, he would quip: ‘Same
rules apply’ Although I didn’t quite get it at first, the phrase got
me thinking about Rules which I presume is what both Director Jon
Baird and writer Irvine Welsh, who wrote the novel, intended.

The opening sequences of Filth introduce two locations : the
bedroom and the police station, settings which provide much of the
film’s action. Bottoms up and bottoms down you might say; sex and
power lie at the heart of the film’s concern. In the opening
sequence of Filth we see a sexy woman provocatively dressing and
talking about power being the ultimate turn on and how she keeps hold
of her policeman husband by playing the tease. The scene providies a
significant cue that sex as a power tool would play hard ball in this
scenario.

The second sequence of shots introduces the protagonist Bruce
Robertson of the Edinburgh CID as, during a breifing for a murder
case, he leeringly appraises and evaluates his rivals for promotion.

In the screen tradition of Touch of Evil, LA Confidential and Joe
Orton’s Loot, I had thought that Filth would feature police
corruption in its narrative. But in the same way that at a given
level Welsh’s Trainspotting is not about drug dealing, so Filth is
not about police corruption. It’s not even about the police.
Although its key setting might be the Edinburgh CID, this is not
central to the situation that Baird set ups and develops. The plot
hinges on the manipulations and gambits made by Bruce Robertson in
his attempt to secure promotion to the rank of Detective Inspector.
As a promotion competition the plot could be set inside any corporate
body: Amazon, BA Systems, Ford or some large Council.

Filth is grounded not so much in particiulars as in universals.
Same rules apply. Filth is not concerned with the particular
relations and practices engendered by the police in their role as the
interface between Society and the Law. Filth’s focus of concern is
raw competition; the battle between men for scare resources: the
battle for Promotion. An indivisible prize only one man or woman can
win.
In Filth. Baird probes the state of our society in a manner that
might be philisophically grounded in the writings of Thomas Hobbes,
the 17th century political philosopher. Although Hobbes
was writing to justify the state, his ideas can be transposed to any
level of catastrophic social disintegration. In the 20th
and 21st centuries Welsh and Baird realise that it is the
break down at the micro level of social ordering which is leading to
chaotic social conditions. The disappearance of collective
institutions, with their values and structures, in the face of
attack by sociopathic individualism. A collapsed social situation
that is well summed up by Hobbes: “it is manifest
that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all
in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a
war as is of every man against every man.”
The moral consequences of this break down of social order provides
the framework for Filth. In vacuum caused by break down of the moral
order, the sociopath fills the gap. In persuit of promotion Bruce
Robertson is at war with everyone, and as war has become the default
state: same rules apply.
As is the case in the bedroom where sex is persued both as a war
strategy and as a basis of personal identity. With sex and power
linked, sexual relations also become located within the chaotic
conditions of the war of all against all and become the centre of a
dysfunctional self identity. Like drugs sex can be both adictive and
subject to what Bill Boroughs calls the bitch of tolerance: you
always need more of a substance to get the same effect.

As Filth develops Bruce needs more sex. Detached from feeling,
his power play sex becomes an increasingly isolated masturbatory
ritual . Sex drives Bruce into a kind of blindness, a black hole
through which light neither enters nor leaves.

As constructed by Baird and Welsh Filth is a dystopian fable
grounded in the breakdown of the micro order. interesting
that at the beginning of the film the audience were laughing at the
slightest sugestion of a smutty joke or risque reference; at the end
of the movie, there was not much laughter. Hobbes is worth
quoting again as he summerises human life in relation to the
conditions of the war of all against all: (quote) ‘ in this condition
the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short.’ Which is a accurate desciption how Baird and Welsh have
mapped the moral career of Bruce Robertson.

So: Same rules apply….what does it mean? It’s
telling you there are ‘no rules’. So watch out.
Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Blue Jasmine Woody Allen (USA 2013)
Cate Blanchette
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 2nd
Oct 2013 Ticket £8.20

Blue Jasmine got me thinking about
clowns.

In the Music Halls when disaster struck
the cry would go up: “Bring on the clowns!” The idea being that
clowns would divert the audience’s attention from whatever it was,
that had gone wrong. Treating the funny men and women as a
distraction does less than justice to their artistry and genius. In
particular those who have dominated cinema such as Chaplin and
Keaton, whose ranks also include Woody Allen.
But Cinema today has less space for the
wise fool. They are crowded out by films that exploit either
spectacle or emotions or desires.
Films of course are signs of the times.
They say something about the states of mind and psychic moods that
underlie the social matrix. The tsunami of apocalyptic films
flooding over our cinema screens attests to the insecurities and
fears that characterise our world.
And then there’s films like Woody
Allen’s latest movie Blue Jasmine. It doesn’t really seem to know
what it is. Perhaps appropriate in that it mirrors a society where
many people don’t know who they are. Also, like many of us, it is a
film that would like to be taken seriously. Indeed the final shot of
it’s A list star Cate Blachette sitting in a public place without her
make up and showing her age, stakes out Blue Jasmine’s claim to be a
drama, perhaps even a tragedy. But the problem is that the preceding
hour and a half of its footage have made any such claims ridiculous.
Comparisons have been made between the
plot line of Tennessee Williams’ Street Car named Desire and Blue
Jasmine. Comparisons have been made between butter and margarine.
Time usually sorts these things out; and as with butter and
margarine, any comparison between Blue Jasmine and Street Car is a
case of at best an errant judgement; at worst a cynical marketing
ploy.

Williams play, filmed in 1951, is a
testosterone soaked wake up call to America about the dangers of the
delusional states of sentimentality pedalled by Hollywood and Madison
Avenue. Tennessee Williams pitched Streetcar at post war audiences
who had not yet totally embraced the consumerist ethos. The
collective psyche was at a turning point and audiences were prepared
to hear out Williams play. But whatever understanding you had of
Streetcar, it was not an advert. Williams was not selling anything.
It was a moral statement.

In contrast Blue Jasmine looks and
feels like a life style advertisement; and it is assembled in a
similar way to those adverts for glossy consumer products that
preceded it on the screen. Like a advert or a cake for that matter
Blue Jasmine is an assemblage of a number of key ingredients. The
Hollywood recipe says: mix into the script one good looking lead
actress on whom to hang the story; add sexy locations – New York San
Francisco; fold in moody music in the form of a sultry jazz sound
track, and sprinkle with products flaunting a pantheon of desirable
consumer goodies: BMW Dior Versace etc. Blue Jasmine is a product
of a mass communication industry where material desire is now the
bed rock of an audience’s expectations.

Blue Jasmine is styled like a
commercial so how does it work dramatically? It’s flashback
structure, which seems de rigour for lazy film-makers at the moment,
is flabby and delivers little tension as it builds up to the big
revelation that Jasmine it was who shopped No pun intended) her
husband to the Feds. As a wannabe tragedy Blue Jasmine poses as a
morality fable based on the Bernie Madoff story, (Jasmine’s husband
Hal even has a passing resemblance to Bernie and I wonder if Woody
lost a bundle of money in Bernie’s Ponzi swindle). But the ethical
posturing of Blue Jasmine is not strong enough to overcome its
stylistic provenance. That last shot, onto which so much is staked,
the naked face of the A lister, is supposed to flag that Cate’s
character, Jasmine is paying the price for her collusive badness, as
she descends into alcohol fuelled madness. But her wretched
condition doesn’t seem to be the result of any personal moral crisis,
any moment of confronting the truth about herself. Her downfall is
not the consequence of her self condemnation. Her madness is the
result of her loss of her enviable life style and a failure of her
make-over as she tried to pass herself off as an innocent. The
lesson of Blue Jasmine is that if you collude in your husband’s
criminality, even if you find out he’s cheating on you, don’t shop
him to the cops,or you’ll lose everything.

Ok so Blue Jasmine is a drawn out life
style promo which is unconvincing as a drama. But none of this would
matter very much if it were funny. Blue Jasmine is not very funny.
The issue of its unfunniness goes right to the core of the assembly
of the film. Cait Blanchette has all the qualities needed to sell
the movie. But she is not a clown. And Woody Allen’s scripts
usually demand a clown, as the lead roles are alter egos of Woody
himself, and and without a clown they don’t work: it’s like Hamlet
without the Prince.

Woody Allen as a performer was a
natural clown, and the clown corresponds to a certain sort of
archetype. The clown courts disaster without meaning to and always
find themselves in the shit; clowns always falls flat on their face
because they think they can do something very very well, but can’t do
it at all; and clowns fail to understand the situation they are in.
The clown’s face mirrors their mental state: alert idiocy,
irrepressible optimism, and well meaning if occasional malicious
incompetence. Allen and Diane Keaton were funny because they were
clowns who knew how to work the clown material. Cate Blanchette
lacks this gift. In consequence her relations in the film with Ginger
and her boyfriends lack bathos; the running gags about her work and
relationships as a dental receptionist are clumsy and vacuous.
Without the clown persona Blue Jasmine
is reduced to being a plodding stylised comedy of manners, a genre
which it doesn’t fit. I say “Bring back the the clowns!”

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Reflections
on the Bergman Season at the Star and Shadow: 1st Sept 2014 to 21st Sept 2014

The
retrospective season at the Star and Shadow of four of Ingmar
Bergman’s films, the Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Through a glass
darkly and Persona was a chance to view and to appraise a director
who is regarded as one of the foremost film makers of the twentieth
century; an opportunity to understand what he offers today’s
audience in the age of the iphone.

Bergman’s
reputation is huge. But he has also been mercilessly parodied as a
gloomy scandinavian whose films for the most part trail dark despair
about the human condition.

Bergman’s
views of human nature and the incapacity of humans to communicate have
been criticised for their emotional and spiritual bleakness.

After
seeing the films my feeling is that these negative reactions to
Bergman are understandable. However they are unbalanced and less
than fair to Bergman as an artist film maker and thinker. Of course
much his work will not be what some cinema goers are looking for.
Bergman’s films are not about entertainment value although they can
certainly be entertaining. The films are personal. They represent
Bergman’s own understanding of world.

And
one key quality stands out in relation to Bergman’s work. He is not
selling anything: a belief system or a justification. Although
Bergman made films before 1951, in 1951 his financial situation
forced him to work for a year making cinema advertisements. And this
year seems to have been critical in developing his film making
technique and also in shaping a personal resolve that his films would
not sell anything. Like the man in the Leonard Cohen song, he would
not be a dealer in solutions, and this had a defining effect on both
the form and content of his films, and the way Bergman shot and
composed his scenarios, in particular his use of the Close Up of
which more later.

Refusing
to be a wheeler dealer in cinematic snake oil remedies was a
fundamental moral imperative for Bergman. He could only work from
the position in which he was truthful to himself. To thine own self
be true. Bergman’s being truthful is an overwhelming and
fundamental impression gained from viewing his work. They come
across like a casting of the shadows of his own inner dialogues, onto
the complex exterior form of his films.

In
these dialogues questions arise that are part of the weave of daily
life; the nature of our relations with and communication with others,
the reality of our aloneness, issues of our identity and place in the
fold of life. These questions emerge in the films through the
interplay of script character and image. Bergman not only refuses to
answer the questions, he states unequivocally, that for us, there are
no answers: Karin in Through A Glass Darkly says she has seen God and
that he was a large hairy spider; when the Knight in the Seventh Seal
asks about the existence of God, the after life and all that, Death
replies that he has no secrets to reveal. Something the knight
already knows.

Now
you might say this is bleak stuff. But my impression from the
audiences is that they were
overwhelmingly appreciative of Bergman’s moral stance. The AP people
understood that Bergman was an artist prepared to say that: life,
communication is hard – that we have to understand that there are
often no answers – that in some respects life comprises problems
not challenges. These may be unfashionable notions but some audiences
find a moment of black and white honesty, more positive than the rose
tinted philosophical twaddle, wrapped in High Definition cosmic
reassurance, peddled by directors such as Terrence Mallick.

If
there is honesty about our condition, at least we’ve got our feet on
the ground. The elements: the sea the sky the earth, are always
present in Bergman’s cinematography almost as reminders. The knight
as he progresses across the plague ridden Medieval Sweden, is framed
by earth sea and sky. For Bergman these elements surround us
externally, as do our memories and dreams internally. They are not
answers but resources for individuals to understand.

As
in a Trial at Law when an attorney finally asks a key question and the
witness responds with an actual answer, there is a palpable shock in
the Court room; so likewise there is shock in the cinema seat as
Bergman without flinching asks questions; and his films, as crucibles
sweat out the responses.

Returning
to the earlier point I want to look at the particular use that
Bergman makes of the close up. In film, it is the face, above all
that characterises the close up. As social beings we are face
readers, we read faces not just of others, but we see faces in
flaking paint, clouds and patterns in the sand. The face is a sign
that we interpret. A face always suggests a possibility. Bergman’s
facial close ups define the experience of viewing his films and are a
key element in the relationship between the films and the audience.

The
characterising feature of Bergman’s close ups is that they are
uncompromising: they are shots of long duration, they are mute and
within them there is little or no movement. They present as a pure
quality, an unindividuated affect, a passivity. Bergman’s close
up’s: Death’s face, the Wallpaper in Glass Darkly, Liv Ullman in
Wild Strawberries and Persona all have an impersonal quality, as if
they do not belong to the actors but could be masks taken on by
anyone. The way they are shot and edited into his films gives them a
quality that can absorb the viewer. In their immobility their
muteness and duration the close ups draw the audience into the shot
giving the audience the space to contribute something of themselves
into the fabric of the film, a sort cinematic short circuit of the
near and far. Absorbed by the close up, which is pure possibility,
the audience become the interpretants of the film, actively engaged
in its unravelliing.

As
the technical means of communication proliferate and multiply in our
society, perhaps there is also an increasing awareness of how
difficult it is to communicate. The thin wavering dieing signals
that we get from our friends, the notices of unavailability and the
ansaphone messages never returned, are like the signs from God at the
waning of the Middle Ages. A warning that we need to start and think
differently. Perhaps that’s a message Bergman still gives out to the
iphone generation of movie goers.

Adrin
Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Elysium Neill Blomkamp (USA 2013)
Matt Damon; Jodie Foster; Wagner Moura

Viewed Empire Cinema 3 Sept 13
Ticket: £3.75
The more remarkable Sci Fi films that I
have seen have been memorable, because in some way they left me with
a thought; which is a nice present to get from a movie. Ridley
Scott’s allegorical Blade Runner posed a question about the nature of
what it means to be human; Kubrick’s parable, 2001 contrasted the
unknowable vastness of space/time in the face of man’s ineffable
smallness; Don Siegal’s filmic metaphor, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers – probed the manifestation of political paranoia.
Whilst stylistically Blomkamp’s movie Elysium owes big time to these
precursors, the impression left by Elysium was one of confusion and
incoherence. It is a mish mash of forms, as if Blomkamp couldn’t
decide if Elysium was one thing or another, parable or blockbuster.
But in the end the motif of personal quest wins out. Elysium’s
commitment to the mega production values crushes all the light out of
the social forces that are initially set into play.
I can’t say if Elysium is a good or bad
movie; that depends as to whether you like your sci-fi bean feasts
served up as a spectacle of special effects and combat; or if you
prefer to leave muscular machinations to the men from Marvel and look
to the Sci fi genre for some cogent expression of ideas.

Anyway Elysium prompted within me the
following observations.
The film’s initial set up divides
planet earth into two contrasting worlds: Elysium and old Planet
Earth. Elysium is where the rulers and controllers of Planet Earth
live. Elysium is a vast tubular ring set in geo-stationary orbit,
modelled as an idealisation of American suburbia: with meadows,
colonial houses, lawns and 2.4 kids. The inhabitants want for
nothing ( materially at any rate) and every home has a very handy
healing machine that cures all ills. Aside from these images we are
given almost no hard data about Elysium. Are they practicing
Mormons? Scientologists? We are not told. Though some might think
on viewing Jodie Foster’s performance as Madame Delacourt, the evil
thin controller, less is more.
Opposing Elysium is dirty old planet
Earth, a slave colony of Elysium. Its population live in vast shanty
towns, oppressed and terrorised by Elysium controlled robots. The
earthlings do not have handy healing machines at home; if sick they
have take their chances in the familiar surroundings of chaotic
overloaded general hospitals.
Wardrope has kitted out Elysium people
with designer suits, very good teeth and expensive haircuts: Perhaps
the clever machines do grooming as well. Earthlings wear stuff from
Primark or patched up rags, with bad teeth and worse haircuts, with
the notable exception of Frey protagionist Max’s sweetheart. You
see immediately that these are two different peoples.
Now this setting of opposing worlds is
a situation that South African Blomkamp will be familiar with from
the continuation of Apartheid era racial and social divisions of his
native country. It is a familiar also in the geophysical division
between Israel and the Palestinians. So, the opening of Elysium
suggests a story that will have a political premise and hence a
certain underlying social weight pushing the narrative forward.
This is a bit of a shock! Elysium is a
Hollywood movie. Will Hollywood caste aside 40 years of resolve not
to make political films and allow Blomkamp to produce a transparently
political allegory. Bless its cotton socks! Of course not. For 40
years Tinsel Town has made films about personal acts of overcoming,
movies with individual self determination at their core of their
scripts. This is not going to change in 2013. Next year – maybe.
Although Blomkamp’s script has an
opposition organisation on Earth, it’s never clear what this
opposition actually wants and as the film progresses any latent
treacherous political tendencies are subverted and transposed to the
acquisition of desire: a desire for something everyone wants: a cure
for cancer.
Of course the provision of Health Care
has a symbolic significance in Apartheid situations such as Gaza,
where Palestinians can only access advanced health care in Israel.
But it is symbolic. Health provision is seen only as part of the
wider issue of repression. In Elysium it becomes the whole issue.
With a trick of the script, the political is flipped over and becomes
Max’s quest for health. Tragically over exposed to radiation in the
course of his assembly line work, Max has to get cured or die. And
the only cure in town is on Elysium with one of those nifty machines.
The plot driver becomes personal not political, and the story
regresses to a simplistic series of CGI battles as he takes on those
who would deny him the right to live.
Max’s quest is given legitimacy in the
scripting by the fact that Frey’s little girl, Matilda, has leukaemia
and so needs one of those Elysium machines. Noting President Obama’s
recent claim that: “it would be immoral not to go to war when small
children have been gassed…”, we can see that children’s stock has
high currency value these days. Children in Hollywood have long
played the role of moral validators. As American Political Life
increasingly imitates Hollywood, so Hollywood repays this tribute in
trumps as violence and war are ultimately justified by the child.
Final thoughts: firstly the idea of
exo-skelitans as in Iron Man, is gaining increased leverage on the
popular imagination. Elysium’s script again services the idea of
mankind overcoming personal body limitations by the fusion of the
mechanical and the biological. Secondly: Blomkamp again exploits the
computer age and its love of the technical fix. Solutions must be
instantanious. A computer is plugged into the master server and at
once a wholescale social about turn is effected: the inhabitants of
Elysium and Earth become one inclusive society. And of course those
handy omnicure machines: lie down count to ten and you’re healed,
except interestingly the machines cures the body but not the mind,
I said that Elysium did not leave me
with a thought. Well not immediately. But whilst writing this piece,
a thought happened. Perhaps the ELYSIUM as a manifestation of
Hollywoods belief system is correct in anticipating the demise of
politics in the face of individual desire. Perhaps the National
Health Service was the precursor to ushering in the post political
era. Now there’s a thought. Not perhaps one intended by Neill
Blomkamp.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Elysium coda:

A brief addition to my comments about
Elysium. It occurred to me when watching Elysium that Hollywood
suffers from a kind of belief system envy syndrome in relation to
Jihadists and their jihad. However misguided and misled the West
believes them to be, there is no doubt that the religious motivations
and intentions of the Jihadists are pure. Their objectives are not
contaminated by personal goals and gains; they fight for Allah.
Jihadists believe in the religious legitimacy of their struggle. To
fight for Allah lends the warriors the lustre of martyrdom and
justifies the atrocities and destruction of war, exonerating such
extreme practice as decapitation. To have such a clear super
personal goal to fight for, places Hollywood in an asymmetrical
ideological position vis a vis Jihad.

Hollywood scriptwriters have to justify
the actions of their protagonists in the name of something as
nebulous and imperfect as American democracy or the freedom to chose
between MacDonald and Burger King. This simply does not have the same
resonance as fighting for a religious ideal. Hence the strange
ideological void at the centre of action movies such as Elysium;
there is simply nothing there only personal desire.

And in Elysium it was interesting to
see that decapitation of one’s enemies, a primal primitive impulse
perhaps but religiously legitimate in the eyes of Jihardis, is on the
cusp of a certain level of acceptance by Hollywood. The baddie,
Spider attempts but fails to decapitate one of Max allies. But Max
himself does triumphantly decapitate an android robot. Thus taking a
couple of timid Hollywood steps towards legitimising imitation of the
Jihadist practice of humiliation of the foe. The problem being such
an extreme practice needs a clear ideological or religious stamp of
approval.

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Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Tony Richardson(UK 1962) Tom Courtenay

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Karel Reisz (UK 1960) Albert Finney; Shirley Anne
Field; Rachel Roberts

Viewed: 11 July 2013 and 14 July 2013
Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; ticket £5

Retrocrit: pride and prejudice

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner were both novels written by
Alan Silitoe. Silitoe was one of that generation of post war British
writers who chronicled the lives working class people in the 1950’s
when they were being told that they had never had it so good.
Silitoe’s novels were keenly picked up by the new wave of British
film makers epitomised by directors such as Tony Richardson ( Who
directed Loneliness)and Carol Reisz ( director of Saturday Night and
Sunday morning) These film makers, like Silitoe, were driven by
ideological opposition to the traditional British class system; they
were committed to listen to rather than to gaze patronisingly at
Britain and the voices of her workers.

A contemporary film critic wrote of
these directors:

….when they came together, we
felt they had an attitude in common. Implicit in this attitude is a
belief in freedom, in the importance of people and in the
significance of the everyday.

Both Loneliness and Saturday night
which were also scripted as films by Alan Sillitoe, share one
critical attribute: attitude. They were iconoclastic products and
were perceived as such at the time. The intention of Alan Silitoe’s
writing was to give the lie to the contemporary smug propaganda messages that Britain was somehow a fair and pleasant land. As far as
Sillitoe was concerned Britain wasn’t even one land, he saw two
lands, governed by two codes. It was a feudal society of controllers
and the serfs, serfs chained not to the land but to factories shifts
and poor housing. Reisz and Richardson’s films stay true both to
this iconoclasm and to the moral vigour of Sillitoe’s writing. It is
not betrayed.

These films shocked the usual suspects
at the time were made. Ealing Comedies they were not. And when we see
these films today, they’re not only a voyage into another country,
they also resonate as a cry of pain for something that is about to
be lost ; even if what was lost was hardly noticed as everyone was
too busy watching the telly. These films are no cosy up Hovis style
nostalgia fests of terraced housing, enamel signs and chimney stacks.
The films capture and express working class life in the early
sixties. It’s a culture of full employment and extensive family ties
but it is also a culture of resistance and resilience. What Sillitoe
foresaw and foretold and is captured in both films, was the loss of
working class Pride. And that is the source of the pain. Because it
was a pride that was on the point of being undermined and destroyed
by the fostered desires of consumerism and the dependancy culture of
the Welfare State.

Noises off: Trainspotting and the skag
boys wait in the wings.

The protagonists, Colin in Loneliness
and Arthur in Saturday Night, are complex characters; spontaneous and
generous, twisted and two faced, but they have an intrinsic pride,
born of their class, that cannot be bought. Colin burns a one pound
note in one scene. However destructive their pride, it defines them,
and this pride, for all its fault lines and even bad faith, lies at
the core of their being. As Arthur says: You don’t let the bastards
grind you down.

So the two films probe not physical
landscapes but psychic landscapes. Attitudes shaped by social
conditions class work and graft. In their focus on these relations
Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson are closer to films made today in
developing countries that are still characterised by social and
cultural matrices of the kind we no longer have. The contemporary
Western movie industry has desire at the root of its narratives,
rather than struggle of one form or another.

Of the two films Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner is the more politically radical. In fact it’s not a
very well made film. It has a clumsy structure based on flashback,
which fails to deliver tension, and it is over reliant on the use of
the hymn Jerusalem in the soundtrack. But Richardson’s casting of Tom
Courtenay is inspired and is enough in itself to carry the film.
Courtenay’s skewered meat body look, hungry mien, misshapen head and loose
mouth, in themselves define the film’s theme of defiance and
resistance. As an actor of working class origins, Tom Courtenay has the authenticity necessary for the film to deliver Colin
Smith’s punch into the solar plexus of middle England: the refusal of
the petty thief, Borstal Boy, to play the establishment game.

Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning is also superbly acted. Albert Finney, as Arthur and Rachel
Roberts as Brenda, came from hard backgrounds that made them able to
work in the grain of their characters. And it shows in their
performances. Unlike Loneliness, Saturday Night is an exceptional
film not just because of the acting but because it is suburbly
crafted. The editing energises the action and always adds a
dimension to the narrative. With confidence and verve Reisz and his
editor, Seth Holt manipulate Freddie Francis’ superb cinematography
to shift the film through its gears, energising the tension between
images as the film cuts from the close and the intimate to the wide
and impersonal. The point here is that the dynamics of the editing
serve to heighten awareness in the viewer to shifts in perspectives:
from the bed to the factory, the pub to the kitchen. The way the
film is spliced sensitizes us to the different codes that operate in
these contexts, deepening and sharpening our understanding of
relations within the film. The main story is the moral rendering of
an extramarital affair. But this explicit narrative thread is never
allowed to dominate the scenario. It has to take its place within
the context of the images and cameos of working class in Nottingham
that Sillitoe Richardson and Reisz have woven together to produce the
film.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning both retain the raw
power of film to shock and make visible things that otherwise we
would not see.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk