Film Review

Beyond the
Hills (Dupa
Dealuri) Christian Mungiu (Romania
2012) Valeriu Niculescu; Comina
Stratan; Christina Fluture

viewed: NYFF Ticket:

Not dug into the Hills…

Beyond the Hills (BH) looks like and is written and acted like a TV movie. I didn’t see Christian Mungiu’s (CM) feature Four months three weeks two days, but looking at BH he does not seem to me to count amongst the innovative distinctive group of filmmakers who have emerged out of Romamia in the past decade.

BH is set in a rural Orthodox community of nuns who are led by an priest. Its driving narrative mechanism invokes Alina’s search for reaching for an old friendship within the parallel world of a religious space. BH presents as a movie that is uncertain of itself, or its theme and this uncertainty is most of all communicated in the way in which it has been produced and shot.

BH is a laboriously played out drama that attempts to adopt some of the outer signing of filmic signification, but in this signing it simply lacks, significance. For example CM’s deployment of long hand held tracking shots and cinematic ploys such as focusing his camera’s attention onto the details of the set or the setting. As if such gestures could in themselves be enough to substantiate a claim that we are watching a film rather than a TV movie. BH flaunts some of the outer appurtenances of filmic technique, but lacks understanding of how they might actually work as part of the movie.

There is a problem with the long tracking shots, such as the one in the opening sequence in which the steadicam follows Alina as she walks beside the length of a train at the station, to find Vouhita. All that is indicated here in this long shot, is a laborious durational literalism. It does not invoke a transposable relational structural idea that might inherently link the shot to core theme of the script which which is a certain type of ‘seeking out’. Perhaps the shot would have worked better if Alina had been filmed walking into the steadycam. A recurrent weakness of BH is that a heavy handed sort of literalism characterises most of the long duration shots. A literalism that leads nowhere. The camera that can record everything but reveal nothing. The long shots, devoid of any filmic thesis or inherent tension only add duration to the material, ( the film is 2 ½ hours long) and contribute nothing in substance to the film’s core ideas: neither the quest for unequivocal friendship; nor contribute anything the audience’s understanding of the unfolding of events.

CM’s directorial handling if BH raises questions as to how the technical and cinematographic structuring elements of a movie relate to its filmic theme or subject.

For instance in a recent film, Once upon a time in Anatolia by Nuri Ceylan, the theme, and the narrative revolve round the idea of ‘uncovering’, an uncovering at different levels; both physically in the form of a body, and psychically in the musings and fears in the minds of the protagonists. In the long night of the first section of the film, the long takes have the effect drawing the audience into the nature of searching for things in the darkness; of a groping towards and of an uncertainty in the characters, the which mood lies at the heart of the film. The way the film is shot, including the long shot of the girl serving tea to the searchers by oil lamp, is grounded within the film’s core. The setting, the use of illumination as an the idea that little can actually be seen, and the shot duration, are intrinsic to the film’s unfolding, the nature of the manifestation of light let into obscurity..

Those film makers who are certain of what they are doing, contemporary film makers such as Ceylan, Porumboiu, von Trier, Haneka, the themes and structure of their films are grounded in the way in which they are designed shot and edited. So lighting and sound designs the nature of the originating medium, the way the film is shot are all intrinsic to the theme of their material.

What seems to happen is that more derivative film makers admire some of the affects arising out of grounded movies, perhaps mistaking them for stylistic gloss, and adapt ideas or borrow these production and filmic affects for their own purposes. In effect they graft onto their material technical and production solutions without understanding exactly how they actually work as grounded signifiers.

I believe that CM in BH has mistaken simple duration of shot as an affect that can transpose the idea of the search for meaning. In fact other shooting techniques in relation to intensity and quest, might have worked better. In this case the HD origination of the material was also counterproductive; visually also presenting a literalist image rather than the softer more inchoate yearnings for an uncompromised relations.

Even on its own terms as a plodding narrative I did not find BH convincing. My festival companion at the movie was Ana Marton, who had seen CM’s ‘Four months…’. She felt that the critical relation in BH the friendship or ex friendship Alina and Vouhita had been written and depicted by a writer who knew little about woman’s friendships. The friendship as depicted in BH seemed designed to express conformity with the demands of the script rather than authentic movement of two vulnerable women. The two actresses seemed to have been given personality instructions by CM and then had to keep to that character profile, to do as they were told. The result is two mono dimensional performances that hardly seem to register the one to the other, as if each actress were isolated from the other in a sort of character bubble. I do wonder how the ‘jury’ at Cannes arrived at the decision to give both actresses the Palme d’ Or’ for these perfomrances? I don’t get it. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Charlie is my Darling
Peter Whitehead (UK 1965) Doc – The Rolling Stones

or

The Rolling Stones Charlie is my Darling Peter Whitehead (UK
1965;) and Mick Gochanour (USA 2012)

Viewed: New York Film Festival 29 9 2012 Ticket Price:

Schizo movie

Complete with an on stage post – movie guest appearance by Andrew Loog Oldham (ALO), Charlie is my Darling (CMD), or as they like to call it, The Rolling Stones Charlie is my Darling, came across as a film with a split personality; a film that had been handed over to a foster carer, and didn’t know who its actual daddy and mummy were.

The explanations given by ALO after the film left me in no doubt that CMD is schizo film of the first order. It evidences all the symptoms of a subject experiencing the classic double bind situation: a film that simultaneously admits and denies two opposing types of propositions: that Peter Whitehead is the director and editor of the film, but at the same, he is not the editor and director of the film which blazons his name, like a symbolic shield at the head of the opening credits.

Schizo as it is, CMD is of course an eloquent statement of the convoluted tortured and contradictory claims that the corporate bodies ABKCO, have had resort to, in their anxiety to justify their manipulations and exploitations of the CMD material in question. In their practice of contradiction, they are like the Red Queen in Alice; and almost as funny.

Every medical condition has a case history and the history of CMD is the key to its schizo development. CMD was made in 1965 by Peter Whitehead (PW) and commissioned and produced by ALO. PW directed the film, shot the original footage on an Éclair, then edited it: his film. According to ALO speaking at the New York screening, he as producer never really meant the film to be seen. ALO suggested that at this time. the mid’60’s when other groups such as the Beetles were experimenting reaching out and extending their audience and income through movies, he ALO only wanted to see what the Stones would look like on film. ALO said he never wanted PW’s film to be released. It was made as a sort of group audition, for appraisal and their eyes only. ALO seemed to suggest that he never seriously considered releasing CMD.

I found this explanation, though it may be true, less than convincing. It occurred to me there might have been other reasons for shyness. Perhaps PW’s edit of the material had been problematic: in one way or the other.

In fact the original CMD had a screening at Berlin Film Festival, and caused a stir. It then seems to have had some limited form of exhibition. I say this because on-line there are people who say they have seen it, but this remains a little uncertain to me.

From his original footage, PW cut a film that I think was originally about an hour, a little less perhaps. This cut and all the outtakes were then withdrawn in an act resembling a sort of distributive coitus interruptus. Perhaps the film and all the rushes were sold on with constraining contractual clauses and eventually in the mid nineties, 30 years after the original shoot and edit, they re=appear in the ownership of Abkco, a large media conglomerate.

Contacted by Richard Pena in 1995 who wanted to screen CMD at that years NYFF, Abkco say they have acquired the film and the rights and are at work restoring the material.

Cut to 17 years later, 2012, a film called The Rolling Stones Charlie is my Darling turns up on the NY festival programme. A film by Peter Whitehead, directed shot and edited by Peter Whitehead; but also crediting a new role call of creative and technical personelle: director – Mick Gochanour; Editor – Nathan Punwar; Producor – Robert Klein! A schizo films with two sets of everything. A film that took 17 years to sort out before this potentially desirable and profitable piece of merchandise could be released.

After the screening I asked the director who was present but not on stage with ALO what percentage of PW’s original cut was now in the film we had just seen and which seemed to be titled: The Rolling Stones Charlie is my Darling. His reply was that it was about 60% recut. Which is fair enough. But is this any longer Peter Whitehead’s film? it is not his cut. And is the claim on the publicity postcard I have in front of me, that the film is directed photographed and edited by PW in any sense meaningful?

Abkco are desperate for some reason (one wonders what this reason might be – contracts?) for Peter Whitehead’s name to stand emblazoned over and across the film like an endorsement – not that there are many left today except a few old film buffs who even know his name let alone his fame as a film maker.

What I saw was a schizo film from one of the homes of schizo capitalism, the entertainment industry.

The film, the one with director Mick Gochanour bears the unmistakable intensity and presence of all the camera work by Peter Whitehead, and I was glad to have seen it for this reason. It lacks the originality and dynamic that PW brought to fashioning and editing his material . The edit on view is OK but is pretty standard treatment. So the original footage is extraordinary and apparently if you buy the whole dvd package the original cut is included in the deal, though at this point I don’t know if you would get all the original cut or whether some scenes or lines, might have got the snip. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Shadow Dancer
James Marsh (UK 2012)
Andrea Risborough; Clive Owen

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema: 29 Aug 2012
Ticket: £7.00

Famous red raincoat

James Marsh’s (JM) Shadow Dancer (SD) looks like a TV mini series condensed into a feature film. It brings nothing to cinema except TV values, both in its aesthetic and structure.

The main characters Max and Clair and Kevin are no more than cogs in SD’s mechanical espionage like plot Max an MI5 officer who turns the IRA operative Claire who is in her turn hunted out by her IRA minder Kevin. This being TV the character roles depend on haircuts and costumes rather than more internalised attributes. The protagonist, Claire as a women has to be drawn as a fully rounded character, a mother with a young child as well as a terrorist. But even this dual role doesn’t extend the range of responses in her as a character.

TV films like to make the claim that they are about ‘real people’ (perhaps this means they are like the average viewer) This controlling concept introduces into the core of SD a primary clash of interests in the life of Claire: her family which defines her and her tribal loyalty which prompts her action. Clair’s dilemma, set up in the second section of SD is that she has to decide for whom she is playing: herself or the IRA.

At the level of its narrative SD is a concatenation of unlikely initial propositions that proceed to become ever more far fetched. Although in desperation JM tries to graft on a covert passion for Claire by her handler Max, it simply reflects the film’s problems in maintaining its own internal credibility. JM as director is increasingly caught in a familiar pincer movement of his own devising. He wants his film to have a realist core: characters that appear to be located within the strong folds of the everyday; but JM also wants action. A certain internal structural narrative logic is erected: the struggle, the family the housing estate the political background. But this establishing narrative structure is increasingly discredited by the logic of the action which makes demands that are at odds with background. The background is in effect degraded left behind by the primacy of the action generated tensions: erotic violent emotional.

In SD, particularly in relation to Clair the two strands of the scripting become increasingly detached. In fact SD is difficult to swallow even in its initial proposition at the point when we realise the IRA have ordered Claire to bomb London. She will be vulnerable as an agent if caught (because of her family situation), but her IRA minders overlook her unaccounted time in London. If we go with the poetic license implicit in this opening proposition, we then have a narrative and action development which becomes increasingly absurd. Claire goes to meet her MI5 handler in a ‘remote’ location which she can only get to by walking or public transport because she does not have a car. She walks or perhaps buses (the film is silent on this point) to this rendez-vous dressed in a bright red fashionable macintosh. Looking like a sexy telephone box in case anyone should have failed to spot her. The action demands of film mean that Claire has to look attractive and alluring and vulnerable, so she has to be provided with some sort of outer garment sheath to signal these defining features.

What the film tries to do is to transpose the tensions of Le Carre spook culture onto a more natural Irish setting. The poster for SD contains the strap line: Mother daughter sister spy. Le Carre’s world, as depicted in novels and even in film, functions on its own terms in a world parallel to the everyday. The mechanisms at work in the espionage world work better as an abstracted tenplate on which the forces in play can be seen clearly. The tensions the contradictions the stratagems of the spooks gain greater force and piquancy. And the roles played by the characters gain clarity from the fact that they are not the rounded individuals beloved by the TV industry.

Caught in this classic pincer of opposing purposes, SD has nothing else to do but take itself seriously as its story becomes more and more of a joke. Though it is a telling point that this is a film totally devoid of intentional humour. Though there is in the cack handed set ups, such as the attempted assassination, a certain amount of unintentional humour.

Steve McQueen’s Hunger as a movie/installation added a layer of understanding to Bobby Sands: the desperation of his situation, the Maze prison, the state of mind that impelled him to direct confrontation with Margaret Thatcher. There is nothing like this kind of ambition set in play here. The acting is all contemporary monogestural unipart posturing, and the state of mind of the lead players ignored, they are no more than the sum of their actions.

Max and Clair sleep/walk their way through the film. She in her famous red raincoat he in his regulation fit spook English suit that says MI5. Their different conflicts are depicted as purely mechanical processes instigated by the wheels of the plot which in itself is no more than a sub standard le Carre fare. JM uninterested in anything other than his plot mechanics, is unable to engineer any insight into character. He simply opts for expressive safety and confines his players in a straightjacket of the one dead pan look

With so much Cinema sold out to the demands of the TV companies, it is no surprise that the mechanics of SD’s are complemented by the mechanics of the shooting script. JM’s film does nothing to alarm TV buyers. Its camera work concentrates on the routine collection of regulation shots/ reverse shot. After its routine editing, add some tinkly music and few old ‘70’s records, one red hot fetish raincoat for the poster and the channel trail, and you have a very saleable TV movie that is not cinema. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz) Patricio Guzman ( 2010 Chile) Viewed Tyneside Cinema 12 08 2012 Ticket: £7.00

After viewing the film, I still could not immediately understand the significance of the title. What does ‘Nostalgia’ in this title point to?

Perhaps I missed something that was said, or blinked. There was an acknowledgement in the end credits I think to the person who suggested this phrase, ‘Nostalgia for the light’ (NL) as I thought about the film I began to suspect that it was another instance of Patricio Guzman’s (PG) poetic affectation. Nostalgia implies an idea of a heartfelt sorrowful longing; a sentimentalisation of the past.

Despite some of its harrowing content, the NL is a sentimentalised vehicle of sorts. PG’s film reads like a carefully crafted documentary assemblage that has been designed to produce a film for international distribution. A typical teleological product. In itself that’s fair enough; but the problems arise when such assemblages are constructed out of parts that don’t work in the way they are meant to. The ingredients assembled to whet the appetite of the documentary commissioners, landscape, science, justice don’t work for each other, perhaps even work against each other and have to be forced into coexistence as a kind of filmic sausage. The cost to NL is to vacuously compromise in the conceit of its structure the main concern of its content: the continuing history of the ‘disappeared’ murdered by Pinochet. The stories of the women who search the dessert for bodies, of the architect who memorised the layout of his prisons to be able to reconstruct them when they had gone are core material whose meaning and impact is lessoned rather heightened by the associational structure of NL.

The opening twenty minutes of NL introduces the film’s main proposition. The claim that there is some sort of relationship, a conceptual parallelism between the star gazers located in the desert and the women scouring the dessert for remains of the disappeared. The fact that both these activities share the same location, the extraordinary environment of the Atacama dessert, is given weight and signification at a high metaphysical level. In the ponderous opening sequence, mainly characterised by an unremitting voice over of PG, and an interview with an astronomer, we hear the laborious exploration of the self evident where it is revealed that these astronomers, as they measure light and photons emitted by far away stars, are actually looking into the past! If we don’t get the meta lingo, there is even a comment by one of the star gazers that….”…the stars are looking at us” These people are presented as deep thinkers, involved in the deep paradox of time. This sort of mumbo jumbo is supposed the flatter the audience into believing that ‘deep truths’ they have not previously considered, are being revealed. Following this establishing proposition, the mumbo jumbo about ‘time’ is transposed as a metaphysical framework through which we can understand the way in which the past of Pinochet’s Chile, is seen today, by his victims.

My own feeling was that the audience were being fed a series a specious connections. Connections strong enough to pitch the film, but not strong enough to carry it.

The Atacama dessert is an extraordinary location, whose physical properties, its size and meterological conditions that favour slow decomposition, thereby give a defining quality to the outlook of the women of the lost generation who search there for bodies and body parts. Other than this, the Atacama dessert filmed by PG, has little connection with the core of these women’s concerns either metaphysical or actual. And the accident of the siting of the world’s most advanced telescopes in the desert is again an accident, a particular that no amount of musing about time can actually connect to the disaster of the General’s years. As contextualised in NL is has little relevance.

PG attempts to overcome the paucity of the intellectual/moral nexus of NL by overwhelming us with intercut images. Shot like an airbrushed National Geographic Magazine photo-shoot, PG resorts to the techniques of the advert or of propaganda. Hard cut two ideas from two different domains: you get strong association, connections and sales. We see it in adverts all the time, and we should be equally aware when documentary film makers use these techniques to bypass out critical faculties. The editing style used by PG has nothing to do with the intrinsic material arising out of content in the film. Neither the scientists nor the women reference each other in this cross associational way. It is the filmmaker’s pitch. The continual hard straight cuts from dessert to the intricate marvellous machinery of the telescopes; from the searching women to the analytical astronomers. Of course accompanied by synchronised music characterised by a ponderous series of sonorous chord changes.

I was left with the feeling that a writer like the late JG Ballard would make better and more insightful sense of this encompassing dessert and the worlds that it contains, in particular their essential remoteness from each other. ‘Time’ as a concept in this place has a disconcerting implacability, an indifference to the plight of the women and the camp survivors. The monitors of the scientists suggest that all memory will be filtered down to little blips of electrons on a screen gazed at by educated and cerebral scientists who chart calibrate and record. The scientists in their detachment and sequestered intellectual worlds are as far removed from the emotions of the women as the stars themselves, for they are part of the world that moves on continually endlessly almost at the speed of light.

If further confirmation were needed that PG’s film was primarily an exercise in the expression of an empty sentimentalised production, the final scene provided evidence for the same. In this scene the two main human strands of the film are brought together in one image. As if in this image, this conjoining of concepts, the film’s proposition can become a theorem. We see two of the women who scour the dessert for their disappeared, sitting on the old telescope, their faces smiling and radiant. They have come to look at the stars; this is the moment they yearned for; to gaze on pure time. (perhaps rather pretending to look at the stars from what I could judge)

It is like the pack shot in an advert, neatly even if implausibly, two phenomena from different worlds are married into one image. Truth is presented as self evident, the more so if it is not the truth. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Batman – The Dark Knight Rises Christopher Nolan (USA 2012) Christian Bale; Anne Hathaway; Tom Hardy Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 03 08 2012 Ticket: £7.00

James Holmes is kinda hot – chelseah’s twitter

Pun in the sub title of the movie: the Dark Night Rises. As knight closes in on the American Empire only a purging apocalyptic violence remains.

What does the audience see when they view the movie?

Better to begin with the film as affect rather than a stream of thoughts that link the movie to the world and the social relations out of which and from which it is projected – both in itself and in its associated epiphenomena of death, represented most immediately by the murders committed by James Holmes (JH).

The genesis of Christopher Nolan’s (CN) look and style in Batman are the DC comic books fused with the imagery of the computer game. The movie replicates the characteristics of the comic; nothing happens beneath the surfaces. Everything that happens takes place on the surface of the screen: its sets locations and computer generated graphics. We read the movie in images, pictograms to follow what is happening. Likewise nothing is left unsaid: what you get in the speech bubble is all that is said. Everything can be taken at face value. Batman then has a mythic quality in this respect in that the issue of meaning is not intrinsic but rather extrinsic and belongs in the realm of cultural responses.

Neither in structure nor camerawork nor CGI is there anything of filmic interest, CN defaults to Hollywood’s tried and tested methods culminating in a cross cut finale. Interest devolves onto the internalised specific details of production and what these signify.

The character of Batman himself is central to the film. It seemed to me that Batman is no longer an alter ego of Bruce Wayne. The Wayne/Batman two hander is not just a simple character switch using tights a mask and a cape. In the movies depiction of Batman, Bruce Wayne is a cripple. A figure rendered powerless and impotent by his evident handicap. Of course he is smart but this makes his crippled state the more frustrating as his body can no longer impose his will on situations.

The Batman costume has become more than a disguise. It is no longer a tight fitting suit made of a yielding material that follows the contour of body. It has evolved into an exoskeleton, a responsive total body prosthesis enabling Batman to justify himself. The Batman exoskeleton enables his body to impose his will on his enemies. To this extent it has the same quality as the gun, say the gun used by James Holmes, which in US society has become a prosthetic extension of the body. The prosthetic extension of choice for the child that needs to impose the dictates of his frustrated will upon an indifferent world.

Likewise the machines used by Batman and Catwoman are not actually machines. They too are prostheses. Fantasial creations stemming out of the fusion of comic and game. These devices are objects that are without traditional operational considerations capacities or limitations. They are devices that are responsive extensions of body and mind, seamlessly interfacing human desire and action through the medium of speed. In the age of the drone it is almost as if the power speed and intensity of these machines enables them to accelerate through reflective ethical considerations and to present the spectacle of the destruction they have caused as a logic in itself that is right . Right because it is too late to argue, and there never was time anyway. Military drones the Batmobile the Batbike exist as prostheses to create situations that are by the immediacy of their nature irreversible. The magical moment when the speed of the missile or the machine or the bullet changes everything. The gunman looks down at the dead bodies in the cinema knows that he has done this and things can never be as they were before. And this too is rightful.

A culture, not just American but world wide, in which there seem to be changes to the psychic processes structuring the way we think. Increasingly action is an ideal that bypasses thought. Action an outcome driven by and governed by internally projected images drawn from the collective resource bank of computer games and movies and given efficacy by speed. Acton precipitated by the rage of the child processed in an adult body unable to escape its deeply internalised infantile needs. Immediate gratification of desire; intolerance of frustration. A culture that encourages fosters and exploits these needs as part of our consumer culture. What we pursue is no longer the collective dream but our own personal nightmares.

Progress adjusted to the profit motif finally seemed to have come down to the irruption of a host of machine toys for adults who could with their aid, do what they had been forbidden to do as children. (Paul Virilio – Ground Zero)

As the child has overtaken the adult so the image has overtaken the process of thought. Cut off from any real collective life we revert to a stream of consciousness in which a fantasy life of images is superimposed on our own internalised states of mind. We transform ourselves into the superstar of our own action movie. And since the Hollywood action movie (imitated of course in cinema around the world) specialises in the cathartic playing out of individual redemption by violent murderous closure, then this too is the scenario of choice for numbers of battered bruised psyches, who experience impotence and powerless opposition to the perceived controlling forces that deny them.

James Holmes another way of being in the movie.

One feature of the Batman plot is that it is ultimately meaningless. Well almost. The group who take over NYC do so without any overt purpose. There is no purpose to these people only state. We are to understand that they are evil. It is difficult to understand what is happening as anything else other than meaningless destruction for the sake of it. Sense you cannot make of it; all you can accept is the outcome: the destruction of the city as providing its own justification. Right at the end of the film we are given an explanation by the ‘uncovered’ antagonist. All this destruction, and the final detonation of the atomic bomb in the middle of the city is revenge upon you and the way you treated me and continued to enjoy your rich consumer lives as I watched on in fury – but now my revenge is your destruction. This of course to some extent, in personalised parenthesis is a slight echo of a jihadist statement. But more to the point it is the revenge of the child. Mass destruction no longer a function of personal gain, ideology, religion, war, competition but of individual will. The spectacle of destruction is consequent to the rage of the child inside the body of an adult that finds its expression in the speed of imposed death.

CN’s Batman is characterised by the brutal periodic irruption of meaningless violence throughout his scenario. Meaningless in that the extreme violence is the mechanism for moving action along. But then into the cinema during the film steps James Holmes to perpetrate an action, to overlay the film with another act of violence; meaningful to him but meaningless to the audience who at first simply assumed he was part of the movie. And in a sense Holmes was part of the movie. He’s part of the movie released into the theatre by the same forces that create Batman as an archetypal cultural product. Enabled by gun weaponry prostheses to act out his own personal movie on the biggest screen in the world inside his own head; the child man bearing the fruit of his own frustrated desires. Be that the whole world is destroyed, I am vindicated.

In the penultimate scene of the movie the camera looks over the destroyed infrstructure of Manhatton. The bridges blown away, huge areas reduced to rubble. A message does ring out: this is what happens when America lowers her guard and puts down her guns…..but the message seems to have overlooked the fact that the terror is now within the grain of America itself and it has sown the individual seeds of its own destruction. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Hors de Loi ( Outside the Law) Rachid Boucharab (Fr 2010) Jamil Debbaya, Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouailla. Viewed National Film Theatre London: 10 07 2012, Ticket : £ 5.00

Everything comes out in the wash

Boucharab’s (RB) concern is to caste Hors de Loi (HL) as a validating vehicle for the Algerian revolution, lending filmic authority to fictive revolutionary archetypes and associative characters. As such it is an exercise that in itself dramatises the inevitable fate of revolutions as the moss of history clings to them, the movement from the polemic and political to the fake melodramatics of the soap opera. HL is more melodrama than political history.

However it is the principle setting of HL that is its most noteworthy characteristic.

Although the action moves back and forth between Algeria and Paris, it is Paris that presents as the real location of the film. Not as a background but as a setting of signification. It is this setting that gives RB’s film a contemporary resonance that stands on firmer ground than its claim to either emotion or historical authenticity. HL’s main action does not take place in remote Algiers but in ‘near’ Paris. Interpenetration of peoples is the underlying theme. In HL the war in Algeria is depicted as being played out in its own right, on its own terms, in the capital of France. Algerians were not some far away people. They and their struggle, their goals and aspirations, whether consciously articulated or not, were immediate and present even if hidden away in the bidonville of Nanterre, the late shifts of Renault car factories and shady bars. In Paris, as in the rest of Europe it is the unseen peoples of Africa and Eastern Europe who do the work. Often exploited in neo colonial relationships, if they cannot make themselves heard legitimately, they are close enough to make themselves felt. It is not possible to disconnect the conditions which these people have left, from the conditions in which they live amongst us.

Other then its close to home setting HL offers nothing in itself as film. It presents as medium through which to plough a chronology that takes its main characters from rural Algeria in 1925 to Paris in 1962. It is a sort of break neck charge through significant dates in Algeria’s anti colonial history. The speed and broken nature of the film’s time line betrays the complexity of events to a narrative device. The device stitching RB’S sprawling material together comprises of the ‘follow’ mechanism: follow the three brothers. Three Algerian brothers are the core of film’s scenario and they are tracked through their relationship both with the forces of the age and their relationship with each other.

The problem with this mechanism in film is that the end product is usually pure surface: all the energy of the film is expended on stapling together the complexities of the surface relations: history and personal relationships. In this HL calls to mind Lean’s Dr Zhivago a failure in everything other than its good looks and memorable theme tune: otherwise essentially empty. A vacuous statement that was unable to point the viewer further than Jarre’s ‘Lara’s Theme’ , used with indecent frequency to hold together the whole bag of collapsing affects and events.

We watch events unfold. In this type of structure where outcome is known, there is no tension working through the scenario, working through the deeper grain of the material. Conflict, tactical and strategic and ambiguities are at the core of every political endeavour, but the tensions which they create often only become visible when a different phase of operations commences. RB has tailored his script to avoid real tensions relating to ends and means, tensions involving Islam and the FLN. The script’s set up of the three brother mechanism is exploited to indicate tensions: the opposition of ends and means that arises between two of the brothers Abdulkadir and Messaoud. But the latter’s initial distaste and personal disinclination to use the garrotte as an extrajudicial means of capital punishment is resolved all too easily; as is Said’s (the third brother) resistance to the FLN interfering with his boxing promotion.

To generate tension, having decided to eschew interpersonal fraternal conflict, RB relies on the tried and tested set piece of action. This revolves about violence and fire fights: the killing of rivals of political factions, the assassination set piece and the attempted military style operation. These events are cathartic male film rituals familiar from war gangster and sci fi genres. The extended use by RB of action sequences particularly in the Paris setting reduces HL to an action genre rather than claiming HL as a significant political interpretent.

With other possibilities RB makes of his film a series of events, rather than a process, to the detriment of HL which had the potential ini ts setting and in the forces it depicts, to be a different kind of film. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Killer Joe William Friedkin (2011 USA) Matthew McConaughey, Juno
Temple, Emile Hirsh

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 3 July 2012 Ticket: £6.95

The flat and hollow ring of a Zippo lighter…

Viewing some of William Friedkins’s (WF) output, French Connection, the Exorcist and now Killer Joe, the tangible connection of ‘possession’ runs right through them, in different guises: heroin; the devil; the need for money.

The French Connection and the Exorcist were both expressive visceral instruments of desire. Given form by a one dimensional take on actuality both movies had filmic and structural unity that took their respective tones from the narrow focus of their source material. In both cases these were books: one factual, the other a novel. Killer Joe’s (KJ) origin is as a theatre piece. What we see is WF’s tryst at transposing the form structure and language of a play into a film.

It doesn’t work.

Theatre even as narrative can be a supple layered and coded vehicle for the integration of action and ideas. Theatre works through the medium of the live actor working in the set which seeks to represent reality rather than replicate it. Actors can be both witness and witnessed, open to interaction with the audience or blind to them; actors can, at directorial will, change relationship to their role, playing a part methodically and fully entering character, or employing various distancing techniques and devices to comment on a role rather than playing it. The actor can move easily from self parody to communicated self consciousness for political social or emotional purposes. The switches in an actors key, tone, and relation to role can be sudden like a switchback or ambiguous, finely nuanced. What opens up for the audience in live performance is the possibility of different levels of reading the manipulations with which they are presented.

The decision by WF to structure KJ as a more or less straight narrative with bolted on theatricals makes this transposed adaptation reliant less on the muscular potential of the writing rather almost totally reliant on image exploitation of the usual gratuitous kind: graphic sex and violence, unnuanced by some of the factors that would have characterised the stage version. Stripped of ambiguous nuanced playing and role distancing, all that is left is the banality of literal image.

The movie KJ clearly shows its stage provenance. The play written by Tracy Letts was an off Broadway success in the ‘90’s. From the movie it looks like a typical piece of writing of its era. A sort of sub species of work in the style and form of Sam Shepherd. The typical settings are located in the white trash homelands, often cabins or trailer parks. The plots exude violent menace, black comedy and the absurd in varying quantity and degree, taking their cue from the sort of material to be found in the National Enquirer. Lobsters and psychopaths loom large and the affect of the situations is mediated by a theatrically knowing style of acting out, which has the effect of affectively distancing the player from the role and the action. Action which although realised in intent, is carried through on sets that are representations. In this sense the virtual and the intentional are the dominant features in this theatrical form.

None the less effective in engaging both emotional and intellectual responses.

WF has adapted KJ as a comic book so that the look and feel of the movie conform to this formula. Lurid inked in colours of the settings provide the background against which one dimensional characters play out the mechanics of the scenario. As suggested it is not one dimensionality per se that constrains the affect of the movie; rather it is the actors’ immobility of affect as WF locks them into a stylistic strait jacket as they act out what is a black comedy scenario, without the flexibility of role and gestural responses.

Only extraordinary directors such as Godard have being able to bring to screen this flexibility of thespian role play. And in so doing, plot becomes a relatively minor consideration; movement in itself becomes the driving force.

Without the theatric devices of varying role and stylistic commitment, KJ is exposed as a vacuous narrative shell. Lacking unitary cohesion, it is uncertain of what it is. Characteristic of the mis en scene is the filmicly weak and empty gimmick that eponymous Joe uses to announce his presence: a metallic ring caused by flicking a Zippo lighter cover. It doesn’t work because on film it seems an overdeliberated rhetorical gesture that the actor can do nothing to salvage from pretension.

The narrative is emptied out into a sort of no man’s land of signification: not a black comedy nor a study in contemporary manners, neither a piece of social crit nor a comment on the lunatic boundaries of American belief systems. What’s left is a heavy handed piece of film making, over wrought with theatrical contrivances. The weather the storms and lashing rain; the pole club and the ravenous dog add up to no more theatre effects that work as a sort of proscenium arch to the content.

These difficulties coalesce, coagulate during the chicken leg fallatio scene between Joe and Sharla, late in the film On stage however viciously Joe’s lines might be delivered, the audience would always be conscious of and in control of the fact that Sharla was sucking on a chicken leg: the ambiguities of intention, the absurdity of the situation would have to be factored into perception. With WF, calling the shots and controlling perception images of the action, the scene is just a conventional series of shots filmed to provoke disgust with the chicken leg sometimes even looking like a penis with Joe’s reactions simulating ejaculatory anticipation. The scene coming after the actual realistic beating Joe gives Sharla, construes as just a monotonous continuation of the violence. In fact I thought Joe was going to kill Sharma by ramming fried chicken leg down her throat, because that seemed the direction of his actions. The scene is locked into contradictions in form: It can’t push over into the domain of black comedy where it needs to go, because it trapped in a depictation and replication. At this point KJ and WF come to a dead end.

As a play KJ may have worked (I didn’t see it) because it had actors playing out virtual and intentional desires in a representational encompasser of the theatre set. WF’s KJ fails because it has actors trapped in actual playing of characters folling intentional lines of desire in realist settings. Nothing fits, only confusion and cross purpose are expressed. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Ran Akira Kurosawa (Japan 1985) Tatsuya Nakadal; Mieko Harada Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 17 June 2012; Ticket £5.00

Ran meaning: riot – uprising – disorder; disturbed – confused

Ran is a masterful exercise by AK in synthesising culturally opposing expressive forces in the exposition of his theme. Ran is riotous filmic feast in which traditional Japanese plastic arts are promiscuously are entangled with Hollywood’s; in larger writ plastic values of US and Japanese society and culture are seamlessly interwoven.

Ran’s confusion of stylistic and expressive affects structures the core underlying motif: a statement by AK about the disintegrative effects caused by the penetration of American values and practice into Japanese culture. A culture no longer protected by self policed isolation; a society and culture in turmoil but inventive and creative enough, to absorb and replicate on its own terms, to reinvent itself as a hybrid.

Ran (R) is a conscious play on form, a confusion of genre and expression. It is a triumphant mangling of Hollywood and Japan a sort of filmically structured paean to post war cultural buggery. Ran is witness to AK’s self evident delight in shuffling together: samurai and cowboy; ‘NOH’ acting tradition and US daytime soap convention; classical Shakespeare and Hollywood; the mobile and the immobile, the vertical and the horizontal.

The large set piece battles are majestically staged but the form of the battles strongly suggests John Ford. As the army of the King’s son charges on horse and foot across the field it is ambushed by devastating volleys of raking firearm fire decimating the attackers. The opposition of sword spear and bow and arrow against the gun, suddenly re-casts the battle as the traditional Hollywood spectacle pitching primitively armed Native Americans (Red Indians) against the superior arms of the US cavalry with their Colts and Springfields. The clash of the Samurai warriors instead of being represented as a traditional sword/spear based ritual, is filmed as a Hollywood slaughter vehicle, a massacre ensuant on the mismatch of unequal forces. The battles in Ran don’t pander to traditional notions of the Japanese Samurai Code. Death strikes anonymously without honour from a distance. When the cowboy shoots the lesser armed Sioux or Cheyanne, the gun acts as more than a tool. It is also a valedator. Its technological supremacy legitimises the victory of the White Man’s culture. In the same way, atomic weapon technology justified American cultural supremacy.

In Ran AK also exploits the dynamic and expressive possibilities of intermixing two styles of acting tradition which draw on very different formal expressive ideas and tradition. Noh tradition: the use of the mask, little or no facial expression; this is not a theatre of expressive faciality, rather of codified gesture where hand and body combine to create a system of signed meanings. The American soap style in contrast emphasises the face as the expressive medium, with full use of eyes mouth lips and teeth used to convey the required emotion. The signage in soap is mostly primary animalistic response, like a dog bearing its fangs you don’t need to be conversant with a code of cultural signs to get the meaning. Likewise the delivery of lines is emotively charged to convey unambiguous intent, even if the words are not explicitly understood. In the playing of characters such as Lord Hidetora and Lady Kaede, AK synthetically fuses these two opposing acting styles. The affect is an intensification of tension between the mobile and the immobile. The audience is caught suspended in anticipation of the character’s response: whether it be control or loss of control. Lady Kaede initially is all mask, a complex of archaic gestural signage, every movement initiated out of the depths of theatric stillness. In one sinewy terrifying moment like a snake pouncing she is at the throat of her brother in law and suddenly all Noh convention is completely abandoned and like a suburban housewife contorting her face she screams at her brother in law to marry her and bring her the head of his wife. Lady Kaede then with equal suddenness switches back to the still Noh mode of expressive presentation.

Ran is sometimes described as a Japanese version of King Lear. Ran is not pure as a narrative form. AK as part of a culture that traditionally has purity of form at its core, abandons this idea in Ran, and has recourse to the Hollywood idea of adaptation of the material: stripping the scenario down to a simple base line. Ran’s story is a conflation of Macbeth (with which K was very familiar) and a Lear type story, with sons substituted for daughters. Two ideas welded together: the conceit of power that is unable to see behind the formulaic countenance of love, behind which lurk simmering contempt and desire to usurp; and the mythic disaster caused by a weak usurper unable to resist the destructive forces of the feminine.

Fire seems to me to be the defining filmic element of Ran. Visually it periodically intrudes and finally dominates the visual field. In the first sections of Ran AK’s fills frame with horizontal movement. Bautifully staged pans, the flow of horses and people through and across frame. This is movement that in all its magnificence suggests continuities, as if it were the template of a timeline. In the final sequences but also intermittently through the final sections, ‘fire’ fills frame vertically. Cutting in disrupting on the vertical axis the easy harmony of flow. AK has structured into the visual syntax of Ran the core notion of disruption; time itself is subject to being broken, its flow smashed up, disrupted. This idea built into the grain of Ran is the deepest level of communion with his times as AK understands them. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Dictator
Larry Charles, script: Berg and Cohen (USA 2012) Sacha Baron Cohen; Anna Faris; Ben
Kingsley

Viewed: Empire Newcastle upon Tyne 29 May 2012; Ticket: £3.50

The Dictator (D) opens with a dedication to Kim Jong ll issuing a spoof claim that it’s a film that is designed to be a satirical political vehicle for Sacha Baron Cohen’s (SBC) performance. But it’s not; D is SBC as a vestigial archetype a repository for a recurring psychic type: the trickster.

D is uninteresting from the point of view of its formal filmic qualities. As film it simply lurches from one cameo set up to the next, to drag the plot line through its beginning middle and end. The plot is a rigid mechanical structure that lacks the fluidity improvisation or relational complexity that characterise other filmic comedians such as Chaplin, the Marx Brothers or Woody Allen. D is a crude construct, but a construct that reflects, in script and performance, the essence of its core intent: transgression. The eruption of the forbidden and the shocking out of the shadows into consciousness.

The cinema was full (it was the Tuesday cheap seat night) and the crowd had come in expectation of a laugh. But what constitutes a laugh? SBC is not a clown. He never really gets into the shit in any meaningful sense. SBC is the nightmarish emanation arising out of the tension between the animal and culture: grossly sexual, stupid, and although not really evil he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelated ness. He is saved by his almost divine animal nature. SBC’s role is that of the Trickster, the violator, a serial malicious profane transgressor.

Violator of the sacred.

SBC in all his films plays: the Trickster. A psychic figure who occupies a latent place in our psychic functioning and who spontaneously manifests in external expressive representational form when the gap between the stated values, the cant and shibboleths of civilised culture and our own animal nature, reaches points of extreme tension.

The phantom of the trickster haunts us….a faithful reflection of an undifferentiated human consciousness that has barely left the animal level. (Carl Jung: Four Archetypes)

The Trickster manifest is a projection of our needs.

At a time when Western Liberal Culture is characterised by discourses of quasi religious intensity in respect of: human rights, women’s rights, individuation, the sanctity of mother family and children: enter the trickster to hold up to us the reversal and opposing debasement of these values. To allow us smash through the tensions of civilisation in the darkness of the cinema.

In the same spirit as in the Medieval church where a simpleton was elected anti-Bishop during Epiphany and presided over a mass attended by donkeys where the congregation brayed in liturgical response; so BSC sticks his hand up the vagina of the mother whom he has just helped give birth, and retrieves his ringing mobile phone he’s left in her uterus. Both actions stem from the Trickster role as a mythic archetype: manifest violation of the sacred. And both actions are part of a psychic reaction to a dominant cultural imperative. They transgress or reverse carefully defined spacial borders as a radical gestural performance that is aimed specifically, if temporarily at sabotaging the psychic legitimacy of the dominant discourse.

D’s main effect is not to be funny but rather to shift psychic response from the unconscious to the consciously maifest. A cathartic shift that is often necessitated by an overwhelming of our defences and resistance to the stimulus of the antics of the trickster If D is not by and large actually funny the movie nevertheless educes laughter from the audience. Laughter that is the expressive ejaculative response that we have recourse to when we have no other immediate means of release from physical and emotional tension.

The Trickster’s radical transgression, even in ritual form, causes a sudden rise in psychic/emotional stresses as we witness a sacred phenomenon systematically assaulted. The releasing outlet for this tension is laughter; remembering that the rictus of the laugh shares a common physiological root with the rictus of aggression, which is also consequential to a sudden rise in unbearable tension.

Tricksters, as mythic characters have very crude natures. There is no point in expecting subtlety from them. They are physically gross and sexually explicit, their sex organs prominent and dominant when and where least appropriate as when the Dictator is taught how to masturbate himself by Zoe the health food store manager.

The targets of human rights, feminism, United Nations, democracy, mother and apple pie have no political significance, only a collective mythic imperative to debase and upend.

Superficially D tries to lay claim to making some form of political statement. It’s opening dedication to Kim Jong, and in the penultimate sequence when BSC as the Dictator delivers a speech to UN officials satirically praising democracy as being the most desirable form of government because in democracy: 1% of the people own 99% of the wealth, in democracy the poor pay all the taxes and the rich pay none, and in democracy the gaols can be full of specific poor ethnic grouping. I think the claim to be a political satire is spurious. SBC’s delivery of his UN speech is the weakest part of his performance, as if he realised the speech/diatribe was of course undermined by the nature of his role as Trickster. In this sequence SBC’s delivery seems mechanical formulaic and underplayed. It’s not political rather the weakest part of the Tricksters repertoire of transgression.

SBC in performance has strong representational qualities kin to the Trickster. The beard and the thinness of his body both play a part in suggesting a manifestation from the depths. The beard (and its loss) is a wondrous cheap device perfect for the guise of trickster and SBC’s thinness has a menace such that although a tall man he’s thin enough to slip inside your defences and unbalance you; slim enough to slip inside your urethra. And SBC’s delivery has a quality of the ventriloquist’s dummy, the removed insinuating of a wicket schoolboy automaton.

According to Jung The Trickster is a vestigial figure surviving from a barbarous consciousness of aqn early phase of human consciouness: a collective shadow figure. As architype the Trickser remains pyschically close to us often revealing his presence in popular culture. He can be repressed but never goes away, never entrirely absent from our collective life. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A Kind of Loving John Schlesinger (UK 1962) Alan Bates; June Ritchie

Viewed: dvd 14
May 2012

retrocrit: The past as a crystalised image

John Schlesinger’s (JS) Kind of Loving belongs to that category of drama (both theatrical and film) that were at the time called ‘Kitchen Sink’. This phase is less a description of settings more a sleezy put down, a piece of cheap journalese, designed to demean a series of expressive dramatic outputs that laid bare the hypocrisy of an old social order that resisted change.

To me, A Kind of Loving (KL) is like a still photograph. A film that freezes a particular time, the year 1962, after which inexorably the increasing momentum of social change of the ‘60’s would systematically undermine every certainty that featured in the picture: biological cultural and ideological. The certainty with which JS (with sure guidance from Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse’s script) handles the themes of Stan Bairsow’s novel causes me to believe that JS was sensitised to the ‘lull in time’ during which his film is set. He knew that the forces in play in the becoming consumer societies would wreak such a storm as to blow away the rules and behavioural certainties that that held together the façade of gender and class that controlled individual behaviour.

A film made at the cusp KL is set at the cusp of the social shift in the UK from a collectivist to an individual ethos; and at the cusp of the psychic shift in the balance of forces between male and female in the social sphere. A point where the discourses defining the social domaine were rapidly and radically changing, responding to and shaping irreversible change.

KL is both structured and shot to make the situation that the film depicts absolutely clear. Shot in black and white, KL exploits visually the tension between the naturalistic atmospheric containing settings of the industrial North – the huge factory – the terraced housing – the semis – the railways – the grime and the smoke – and the unfolding social changes that are destabilising and demolishing these structures so that they are no longer able to contain people. The certainty with which the tension between the visual and psychic is handled, made KL a popular film at the time of its release. It has also made it an enduring film. It engages a stylistic motif and themes to which JS would return.

KL is conservatively structured with a theatrical filmic perspective so that the audience watch the drama being played out. It’s strengths are directness and economy. Every setting is cued as a statement, the factory, the suburban semi, the canteen, the park where what is public space is annexed by individuals for personal business as ‘home’ is not private space (a situaion which was changing rapidly) Every scene has a purpose, or rather an event, which is to develop audience understanding of what is happening at different psychic levels. The scene in which Ingrid loses her virginity is both a statement of the pressure of changing social mores but also the starting point for a different sort of discourse in relation to sexual relations between men and women.

The film exists in a sort of time-out when in the social domain nothing seems to be happening. But KL makes clear that this time out, this lull, is an artefact of fear. By 1962 the economic and social changes were already in play effecting change. The ethos of the collective life was cracking and breaking in response to the demands for an individuated life, based on consumption. The strengths and obvious benefits of the primacy of collective values, cohesion in the will to survive, were no longer tenable in a consumerist matrix emphasising desire and self determination. The social edifices of both working class solidarity and middle class respectability are maintained by the application of social tyranny and repression: the last resort, the sting in the tail of moribund cultural structures. We see this application of fear in the factory where Vic works as a draughtsman; its patriarchal punishment system threatening dismissal to those who don’t obey. KL shows the way fear is used as a weapon most vividly through the agency of Ingrid’s mother who in herself and through the medium of her controlled daughter, attempts to terrorise Vic into subscribing to the dieing value system.

This lull is an illusion. Vic’s fellow workers, his male co-workers quit their jobs at the vast factory, which is dependent on their collective labour, to become salesmen: individuals wheeling and dealing in the interstices of desire. And Vic is pulled in this direction, realising that the factory where he works, with its rites of work and leisure, is already slipping into the past. But more: he also rejects the sham morality of appearances that governs the solidarity of class. The film opens with a wedding, filmed by JS to emphasise its social function as a community ritual of solidarity. Vic already intuitively sees through this; he knows that it is part of a social pact that is breaking up. Vic wants to move outside the collective certainties and falls for Ingrid a middle class girl who is a secretary at the works. In the KL scenario, initially we see the romance between Vic and Ingrid solely from the male point of view. Ingrid figures as a trophy as much as a person, a trophy that comes at a price: marriage. And marriage comes at the price of becoming the subject of a regime of terror and repression through the agency of Ingrid’s mother who expects the price for her daughter to be paid by the castration of Vic. A castration that is desired not just by the mother in law, but also by Vic’s working class parents who refuse to support him.

Ultimately it is Ingrid, who moves from being desired flesh to a voice with moral force who abandons her class credo and sides with Vic in his refusal to lie down and die. The forces of change also work through Ingrid’s body and mind to make possible the transition to a new start for the couple outside the inert social matrix from where they came.

The other discourse JS expresses in KL is the gender discourse. The movement in position of men and women as a consequence of the loosening of the gender roles as apportioned by class and ideology. The movement of women out of private space into public space, the movement of women from being primary reproductive machines to being consumers. KL makes it very clear that Ingrid’s position is intolerable. She is trapped in a double bind of contradictory expectations which bear no relation to her changing situation. KL is pre-the pill era, yet even so change in gender relations can be seen as an imperative. As the males move away from the controlling systems of class bound marriage, so the women become increasingly pure objects, defined by their flesh not their place in the social system. Ingrid desired by Vic for her unattainable beauty which in the new order becomes accessible to him. At the same time as Ingrid becomes an object for Vic, in the eyes of her class bound mother, she has to stand and uphold values that are no longer of any use to her in a rapidly changing world. KL makes it clear that Ingrid’s situation is intolerable, and whilst it notes a change in Ingrid’s state of mind and the way she sees her situation it is the clear presentation of the evident instabilities in her life that makes the film radical.

KL may be a filmic theatric device but it is not a mechanically driven plot. Both Ingrid and Vic are moral players. The solutions to their dilemma are not given them, rather they are wrested from the situations in which they find themselves. As a discourse the sub theme revolves around the nature of relationships not based on traditional foundations of shared social class and milieu, on intimate relations not necessarily defined by marriage vows. As the reality of her changing situation is assimilated by Ingrid she starts to understand that relations based on ‘love’ rather than shared circumstances, are different but more difficult, and engender the need for mutual respect without which there can be no relationship. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk