Film Review

The Kid with the Bike (Le Gamin au Velo) Jean Pierre et Luc
Dardennes (2011 Be. Fr) Cecile de
France; Thomas Doret

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 5 April 2011; ticket price: £7:95

Bad child archetype: what’s locked up in our heads

The de-industrialised zones of Belgium have spawned their
own recent depressing history of serial child abuse. It is possible to
caricature the place as a smashed landscape of twisted sexual desire, a carnal
parody of the dominant consumer culture that sates its appetite on the flesh of
its children.

Of course it’s probably no different from anywhere else in
Europe.

The Dardennes’ Rosetta (1999) seemed to me a philosophically walled off world. Its eponymous heroine was trapped in
the mechanical process of a scenario that seemed to have been created in order
to show the role of deterministic principles in the playing out of fate. The idea of freewill in Rosetta’s
situation was demoted to some sort of fanciful propagation of the ivory tower.
After Rosetta something changes in the outlook of the brothers. Perhaps some consideration of the
serial crimes of Marc Dutroux sensitised the Dardennes Freres (DF) to look
again at the underlying philosophical direction of their scripts and the relationship of their scenarios to the
fate of their child subjects,
particularly from the underprivileged areas where they choose to locate their
films. The determinist notion
leads only to darkness. With children there needs to be at least the notion
that there is the possibility of avoiding complete blackout.

With their next two films, Le Fils and L’Enfant, the collective Dardennes’ philosophy of
mind has moved on. In particular
Le Fils has at it centre an exploring of the idea of free will. Focusing on
Oliver the protagonist and carpentry instructor at a training centre, the film
is a subtle probing from without
of his state of being as he struggles to make a series of critical
decisions. The viewer doesn’t have
access to Olivier’s state of mind, that has to be inferred or more correctly
interpreted, from the signs given out by him in the film. DF don’t engage the
audience with certainties only with possibilities. The characteristic feature
of Le Fils is that we are in Olivier’s world; it is in his world that the film is set and develops.

In contrast KB seems to have too many worlds competing for
attention.

The signs and wonders that constitute the opening section KB
indicate that we are in situations where there is the possibility of free will,
where the players decisions shape and change the course and outcome of
events. However in KB there are a
number of significant worlds put into play, which crowd each other and engender
confusion. The world of the kid,
Cecil dominated by the absence of his father, the world of Samantha, which is
in fact two worlds a personal one and professional one as the owner of a hair
styling salon, the world of the gang, and the world of the community where the
action takes place. All these vie
for primacy. DF might contend that
life is like this; a myriad of worlds surround and confuse us; but I think this
would be a weak defence of the film’s structure.

Film is not real life, or rather it is like ‘real’ life in
that it is selective and the ‘real’ is accessed through one operating mind or
consciousness.
Consciousness of another we can observe but never penetrate, a fact the
Dardennes use as the basis for their film practice As in Le Fils where the fulcrum is Olivier, so in KB the
fulcrum appears to be Samantha, the small business woman who fosters Cecil. But
her operations and capacity to inform us an emitter of signs, is simply crowded
out by a scenario that is more interested in following the mechanics of a
script which is driven by the idea of the gang and a botched violent robbery
(the which is not very credible). In Le Fils as we follow Olivier there is the
possibility of understanding his decisions and actions, which sustains the life
of the film. In contrast when Samantha is ‘followed’ in the scenario, she is
immediately blocked off or taken off stage by different events. The consequence is that KB loses the
possibility of a deepening and operates only in the shallow waters of affect
signs, rather than in the deeper zones of actions and gestes. Too much happens without
anything being revealed. Although Samantha’s outer behaviour
suggests an underlying free will, as the film progresses, in the confusion of
competing worlds, she diminishes rather than increases as an intensity, and the
film dwindles into an inconsequentiality.

Le Fils was characterised by a distinct visual style that
incorporated in its look, the paucity of the environments: the training centre,
the bachelor apartment. Everything looked sparse rather bleak, worlds that offer no encouragement to the soul. The film’s visual look is an important
part of its story. KB in contrast
lacks the complement of a strong visual statement: it looks like any other
product originated on 35mm film and screened on HD. There is little to detain or attract the eye
everything is big and clear and in a way uninteresting. For a film whose
intention appears to have been to engage the viewer as a seer, the visuals are
counter productive, acting as a barrier to rather than a gateway for the eye to
enter. The film is composed using shots of long duration, but that’s not unusual
these days, so the film looks like everything else, when in fact it certainly
intends not to be like everything else.

I think if DF continue to produce films, built about the nodal points of their socio-philosophical interests, they will have to attend to the business of film makers in making their productions visual filmic quality relate to the content. KB and Le Fils share a certain mirror symmetry from the point of view of the male and female relationship with the bad child. Both titles imply that the subject of the films is a child. In fact in both films, the male children are devices that infiltrate the adult psyche. The adults are the subjects. The children in this sense are not so much actual; rather they are archetypes. They are archetypes that play complex functions in the inner life and movement of the two adults. The incorporation of the bad child or rejected child into the psychic life, implies a process of development completion and healing of the wounded soul. These ideas complete the cycle of this piece of writing which began commenting on the spectacle of Western culture’s sexual abuse of children, whether real or imagined. In their films DF point to the deep resonance of the bad child archetype within the adult soul, as potential healing force. This function is clearer in Le Fils than in KB, but is the underpinning strength of their recent work.

adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Viva La Muerta Fernando Arrabel (Fr 1971) Anouk Ferjak; Nuria Espert;
Mahdi Chaouch

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 16 March 2012
Ticket price: £5.00

Imagination as the primary act of resistance

Fernando Arrabel’s (FA) Viva la Muerta is a full frontal assault on Franco’s Spain, a country with its back broken by Franco’s fascist death machine; the people murdered or driven to madness and denial by repression and fear.

FA’s assault on the terrible damage wreaked by Franco and his allies the forces of political/religious conservatism, harnesses the intellectual and visceral power of savage satire exploiting the intermeshed expressive elements of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, Dadaism, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd, to fashion a filmic expression of deep passionate anger.

The opening title sequence comprises a series of panning shots across a large scroll of sequential organised drawings, economically penned cartoons of distorted figures caricatured in bestial form and depicted in cameos of cruelty and sadism. The film starts with these disturbing images of body laid over a soundtrack that comprises the voice of a child who nonchalantly and brazonly sings a repetitive rhythmic refrain: to my ear a sort of crazy nursery rhythm. The repetition of the song chews into the consciousness of the viewer. I didn’t understand the words, which are in Danish (but may be ‘nonsense’ like all the best child’s rhythms) but this child’s voice is saying something that anyone can understand within the context of VM. The song is a challenge: it sets a mood and opens up a mental space through which the film can filtered and understood. This song defines VM. Repeated as a ritornello. a leitmotif, it carries the film’s key message. In its provocation, its invariance of tone, it communicates an indominitable mocking spirit. However deep we are in the shit, however they kill us and subject us to lies oppression torture and violence, we have within us the means to fight back. The song links our consciousness to the possibility of resistance and struggle. It is a challenge to view the film in the state of mind that spits in the face of the dealers in death.

This is the message FA has fashioned. A film grounded in a child’s song.

After the song the first words we hear are those of some fascist soldiers on the back of a truck, singing they will murder half the people if necessary in order to ‘save’ the country. Viva la Muerta!

A defining character of VM is that it is autobiographical. In terms of structure, VM is episodic in form, but intimate in content. And it is the quality of intimacy that colours and fills out understanding of FA’s film. Episodic films, employing dissonant disturbing images that define the content are usually remote and distant as socio-political critiques. L’Age d’Or never feels intimate; it feels produced to broaden consciouness as an ideological act.

Employing every technique in the agit prop lexicon of surrealism and theatre cruelty, VM is up close and personal. Using this broad palette of deranged imagery, FA is always in control of the effects of the images he creates and releases. I think this is because he knows these people. They are not abstract or abstracted tokens representing the forces of death. In flesh and blood they are the people who killed his father and wanted to kill him. What in episodic films can seem arbitrary and disconnected, in VM is hot wired to emotional necessitythrough the umbilical cord linking his life to that of his mother. The personal and the political are one.

The mother is the hub of VA. She is woman as living flesh. We feel her hand, smell her skin and witness her charged repressed erotic relation to fascism, the Roman Catholic Church and the forces of death. The film starts with a structured narrative core that connects through the eyes of the child (Fando) his mother’s betrayal of the father and her embrace of Franco. Interspersed in the key narrative (though the narrative is never absolutely straight in its telling FA is too supple in his conceptualisation for such restriction) are fantasial /dream sequences. In the film they are presented as hazy colour washed sequences, often savage and beautiful, psycho/temporal events in which cruel insights and visions are perpetrated and experienced. As VM progresses the distinction between the two strands breaks down, cracks up. The sequences characterised by the narrative ‘look’ open up to extreme expressive material, (the priest eating his own balls, the mother bathing in the blood of the slaughtered bull). In the world of Franco’s Spain there is no longer any means of distinguishing different aspects of life, the real – the imagined.. The deployment of systematic violence and cruelty has taken over the whole of the national psyche: everything is nightmare.

VM is a totality of commitment by FA to record what he saw and heard as a child, with nothing unobserved through the scales of innocence. But this commitment, to stand up to fascism ( when it was still a live force in Spain) communicates through all who took part in the realisation of VM. In answering the need to oppose Franco’s Spain VM is part of the creative will of all those who contributed to its making: the mask and prop makers, the cinematographer, the editor, but in particular the actors who were prepared to undergo privation and undertake provocation for the film to be made. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Honour of the Knights (Honor de Cavalleri) Albert Serra (Sp 2008) Lluis
Carbo; Lluia Serrat.

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema (Newcastle AV festival) 15 March 2012; ticket price £5.00

Touched by immanence

Honour of the Knights (HK) is about the immanence of vision. I note that some critics have commented that Serra’s (AS) interpretation of Don Quixote depicts an aimless rambling. But I don’t think this is the case, it is simply that the film’s actual movement is not so much upon the earthly domain rather it is on the metaphysical or celestial plane.

HK is grounded in the contrasting physicality of the two principle actors. The squire Sancho presents as a mass, a mountain a colossal being of the earth, a man of the clay. That he can move at all seems in defiance of gravity, an act of will to move when his physical nature seems to demand immobility. Yet when he moves he has a lightness of foot, a nobility of demeanour and when in water the effortless motion of the cetacean. The knight is a being almost without body. A body that is ethereal even when strapped into his metal cuirasses and pauldrons. It is as if he were not there, an immaterial being locked into the material. With his whitened hair, pale skin, white chemise, Quixote, a shimmering luminescence.

And there is no doubt as to who leads who follows. The earth bound, head bowed squire follows the knight who head up moves upward released into his vision. AS takes Cervantes tale and extracting a critical motif, makes it his own. AS recasts Don Quixote as a fable from an age now past where spirit guided the body. Not always successfully perhaps, but nevertheless a fabled time when the desires of the body ultimately ceded primacy to the yearnings of the spirit. A fable of course, but in an era defined by the over arching imperative of consumption and the circuits that amplify individual desires, it’s a shock to be presented, even in fabulous form, with a simple statement of another possibility, another way of being.

Quixote is of course moving, and moving with huge acceleration towards death. It is not a death that is oppressive of life. It’s a death that is at one with life. Death that Quixote equates with the oneness of God. God is all creation in immanent form. To die is simply to experience this oneness. Quixote is a becoming more luminous as he moves through the keys of nature into vision. It is vision that attracts Quixote and vision is the metaphysical gravity that attracts him upwards pulling him out of his body out of the skin bones and white chemise, that contain but no longer delimit him.

The world is an evil place corrupted by actions of men but the chivalric calling transcends it. As Quixote moves on his journey he realises the presenting power of water, the presenting power of the trees of the moon and the sky. Their intensity signifies the nature of the world and of man, as being God given. It is an insight that is mystical whether in the Sufi Christian or Hindu tradition, where life is union.

HK is realised with defining simplicity by AS. The film comprises only of exteriors which are shot both day and night without lighting. The shots sequences and dialogues are refined to simple gesture both of body and speech. The editing decisions are never based on match cutting or continuity in reverse shots, but seem to have been made to affirm the integrity of ‘the moment’ whether it be Sancho’s bodily integrity or Quixote’s translucent integrity as his voice affirms the presence of God and his body and face reflect the affect of this realisation.

I think for AS Sancho follows Quixote because he realises a lacking a void within himself. Sancho does not perhaps understand the transformed state of mind of Quixote. He does not understand or share Quixote’s vision of immanence of life and death. Sancho does understand that Quixote’s vision is something that is important and that if he can be of use to Quixote then this will have been of worthwhile importance. Perhaps in time Sancho will understand things better. Or not. But for now he can be useful in an ultimate sense of the term, helping a man to die well. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Carnage – Roman Polanski (2011 Fr, Ger, Pol. Sp) Jodie Foster, Christopher Waltz, Kate Winslett, John Riley

Viewed: Tyneside Film Theatre 16 Feb 12; ticket price £8.00

carnage = verbiage

I think that the failure of Carnage and Polanski (RP) is that the film never makes the audience feel uncomfortable. Either with the film or with themselves. It’s relentless blandness makes it comfortable viewing for the arts film set. RP sticks relentlessly to the surface of a script which, as a comedy of manners, holds out for our inspection two married couples as stereotyped representatives of contemporary professional strata.

I think the event which triggers the situation is wonderfully chosen; the assault by the son of one of the married couples upon the other’s boy. Following the incident, the consequent visit by the perpetrator’s parents to the victim’s parents provides a psychic and emotional setting for a penetration beneath the visible surface of the protagonists. It sets up a possible scripting, both filmic and in dialogue, where conflict, ambiguities, ambivalences, competition, uncertainties can be explored; where states of mind and body can be probed and brought into play.

But in Carnage, with everything primed, nothing critical happens at any level. By the end it feels it as if these people didn’t really exist: except as dialogue bubbles. Not flesh and blood but a series of attitudes and opinions defined by a stream of scripted positions that starts to resemble after a time, the delivery of amateur theatrics.

Although occupying similar middle class positions, the couples represent quite different strata within this broad category. One couple are corporate in ethos; the other a mix of aspirational blue collar sales and creative careerist, whose income and artistic identity has levelled them out as arrivist bourgeoisie. The tensions of the two different strata are occasionally visible, as when the two men exchange dialogue about toilet flushing mechanisms, but overall this is not a seam of tension or ambiguity the script explores.

Carnage rather prefers to reinforce the specifically America notion that these people are all basically the same, and all subscribe to the same value systrem and live under the same American moral and legal codex. So that’s Ok then, it ain’t about strata/class, Carnage is going to reassure its audience that these differences are not significant in contemporary US urban experience. So what happens?

The script tails into an excuse for a number of running jokes: the mobile telephone, the hamster joke, the vomit joke and the Africa and good intentions joke. Each of the running jokes concerns one of the four characters, but the jokes never really take on a life an intensity a immanence that marks them out as a realm of experience. None of the jokes amplifies or becomes filmically real, even when the bleed of the corporate lawyers (Allan) conversation about drug trials reveals that Mike’s mother is taking a potentially hazardous drug. The information is assimilated and after commencing with a preliminary spike, in the end the drug issue is pleasantly dealt with to the satisfaction of all. Everything is eventually pleasantly resolved and perhaps this is the point of the film: to show that contemporary Americans are pleasant non violent beings whose principle objective is conflict resolution with minimum pain. The avoidence of anything real like unpleasantness. Perhaps RP hopes that his own little contretemps with the US law enforcement agencies might be so engagingly resolved.

The debate about the respective roles of their sons in the incident takes a circuitous route visiting the same issue and resolving different solutions. The proceedings involve multiple exits and re-entrance’s for the visiting couple which reminded me a little of the Avenging Angel, but without Bunuel’s moral passion and dark humour. It also brought to mind a sort of parody of the US legal system: a soft parody of the endless repetitions, adjournments, characteristic the US legal circus.

Technically the film’s insipidity was re-inforced by the manner chosen by RP to edit the material. Most of the cuts in ‘the shot -reaction shot sequences’ which typify the film’s stimulus response structure, are hard cut, either on the first phonome of the response or within a couple of frames of the reply. The film is typified by a lack of space, a lack of significance given to any other input other than the dialogue. The preponderance of hard cutting into the dialogue turns the players into robotic acting machines voicing out preprepared positions. At the start of the film this might work; but as the dynamics develop, there is a failure to introduce any other film scripting resource into the development of the situation. RP used to understand how to handle mood and silence, the resonance of image and the somatic physical traits of the actors. He seems to have forgotten. In Carnage there is little sign of RP’s filmic muscularity. RP seemed happy to let the whole project slide into soap opera, characterised by playing the material for cheaply won laughs. Where provocations such as the drowning the mobile phone, the hurling of the handbag to the floor might have brought to the surface undercurrents of a repressed psychosexual violence, in Carnage they simply come across as moments of theatre: theatrical parentheses of humour. The audience can cope with a bit of cheap theatre; it doesn’t disturb us.

Perhaps that’s RP’s point. America exists somehow to reassure not to frighten. But to get that message somewhere at some point in Carnage we need to feel or to see what is manifestly absent: fear.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Shame Steve McQueen (UK 2011) Michael Fassbender; Carey Mulligan

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 24/01/2012; Ticket price: £7.95

Shame about shame

My reading of the opening shot of Shame, is that it
was faked. We see Brandon (Michael Fassbender) lying on his bed. Brandon’s torso is naked his lower body
entwined in white sheets (Christ-like ?). Eyes open he lies completely still: still as death. At last the eyes tremble; he
moves. I think this is a shot faked in the editing, using the freeze frame tool
to control the immobility of the opening part of the shot. Why does Steve
McQueen start his movie with an image set up by the editing software? Is it a
structured statement about the film’s concerns; or a device used to create an
affect to make the shot appropriately dramatic; an unwitting
sign that this movie is be about image not substance.

Given
Steve McQueen’s (SM) reputation after his first movie Hunger, it is appropriate
to probe into the film’s form structure and content, and to conject as to purpose
and intention behind the project: to appraise the moral content of the
movie. By moral I am not referring
to a code of ethics or morality but to a consistency in internal logic, a
refusal to compromise a line of vision.

Hunger’s key
attribute was that it was locked into specific context: the death of Bobby
Sands in the Maze Prison. The
historical biographical context provided the basis for the three chapters,
which explored the realms of Body Mind and Spirit that SM incorporated into
Hunger. The situations in the film
developed out of these categorical loci. They were grounded in the real. They
were not metaphorical.

The first two
sections in Hunger were based about body and mind (dialogue) presented as
filmic installations. The images
proposed a series of oppositions that allowed the audience to see and make
their own interpretation of what was happening. Two shots, both scenes in themselves: the long
duration shot of the warder using a janitorial squeegee to sluice the piss down
the length of the prison corridor; the 17 minute dialogue between BS and the
priest on the morality of the hunger strike. The audience are put into the
position where they have to look and listen in order to understand. SM’s film did not manipulate the viewer
but open up for the viewer a process of understanding.

I thought the
first two chapters of Hunger much better than the third which sloped into
sentimentality. Nevertheless on
viewing, Hunger has a consistent moral line: the inexorable logic of oppositions in action. In exposition and discourse it
does not indulge either in emotive sub prime acting or the politics of
pre-formed and implied judgments.

There are perhaps
some specious similarities between Hunger and Shame. Hunger about a man imprisoned by external forces moving
inwards; Shame a man imprisoned by internal forces trying to move outwards.

Unlike Hunger,
Shame completely lacks context.
The film is set in New York but it is not a context, it’s a symbolic
backdrop for the events that take place in the film. In relation to subject matter the background to these
events might be anywhere: Clermont Ferrand, Birmingham or Boston. Shame might have benefited from a
lower profile background. But New
York it is; chosen for its symbolic resonance, its streets and skyscrapers
ready made code for contemporary alienation. It’s a city that Shame castes as a
metaphysical entity with a population of replicants and lost souls. There is even a performance of the
Sinatra hit ‘New York New York’ as
a set piece in the film: it’s deconstructed but sung for affect. (the piano accompaniment was great but
I didn’t catch who played it on the credits) SM exploits New York as a city that is already a cliché and
defaults in the film to shots of the city that simply reinforce this
image.

The key settings
of Shame are all metaphorical rather than real. They are all decontextualised, with substance extracted
leaving a sort of filmic shell within which the film’s events take place. The subway system with its sexually
charged rides is a metaphorical underworld of id; the office whose function we
never learn, is a little like the superego – a place where Brandon’s represses
his sexual needs (except in the toilet);
and his apartment, painted white like a Swiss sanitarium is where
Brandon is himself. Metaphorical
psychic zones rather than real spaces.

Shame comprises
metaphorical zones contained within a metaphysical city. It’s problem is that
within all these unreal spaces Brandon never seems real. His problems are never
real and he is never interesting from the point of view of giving the audience
something to contain. Had Von Treer
made such a movie he would have understood that the film needed an
uncompromising moral line to work. The film might have been about: becoming Cock. Brandon literally
overwhelmed by, flooded out both internally and externally by sexual desires
becomes: Cock. A epic line with the possibility of
deadly mordant humour that would overwhelm devastate and destroy Brandon and
all those he touches. With a
script that takes a line, the viewer is presented with a situation which they
have to confront.

Instead Brandon
wanders about the non-spaces of the movie becoming… a non entity. SM uses a sort of sub plot to try and
rescue the movie . This involves
Brandon’s sister, Cissie, who’s a singer (and a cutter) who has an affair with
his boss. The brother sister stories intertwine. (perhaps they are supposed to
intertwine as schizoid individuals?) But their relationship fails to energise
the movie. The extent of
their synergy in the film is to reveal, unsurprisingly, that they are both
trapped in infantile sexual circuitry; there again so is the whole
country. Brandon realizes in the
course of another coy subplot that he is unable to have a normal loving relationship. His response is an orgy of fucking.
This scene is particularly crude.
It looks like SM asked
Fassbender to overact, so that during the orgy with two whores we have to watch
as he pulls back his mouth in a rictus of pain and grimacing throughout the
whole fuck. The loaded emotive
gesturing kept this viewer bored but cued him as to what to think.

A significant
feature of addiction is tolerance. Alcohol drugs sex: for users all have the same equation of need, you always
need more of what you want to get the same effect. There is a core to sexual activity that is about
control. The sexual imposition of will can easily lead to
sadistic violence, and constitutes a line of action a line that is visible for
example, at Abu Ghraib. This is the
line, part of the becoming cock line, that Shame never takes that SM seems to
inhibited to explore.

Shame ends on
shots of the brother sister reunion/reconciliation. The which doesn’t seem to mean anything, but is presumably a
measure of SM’s desperation as to what to do with his material. Some of the dialogue, especially in the
public interstitial spaces captures the banality of the social strata of the
settings. But coming out of
familiar soap opera provenance
‘Oscar acceptance speech exchanges’ are parodies of parodies.

I found the use of
the Bach compositions interesting.
They related to nothing that I saw or experienced in Shame. Bach’s selection for the sound track
seemed an attempt to exploit the
music so that it would lend a sort of spiritual lamination to a film in
which spirit was otherwise honoured in its absence. I found its use more annoying than relevant

The film might have been made out of the cynical
motivation that sex sells. Any movie preceded by a clinical disclaimer about its
concern with sex addiction, yet featuring a measure of full on tits bums and
cock will make its money back. It
panders to the conceit of the art house crowd who like sex in films to be
presented with a veneer of mitigating intellectual legitimation. I think SM’s initial ambition may
have been to make a statement about how sex has become twisted and
depersonalized in strata of our society.
On the evidence SM didn’t have the artistic or intellectual flair to
make such a film. Instead he
produces Shame which comprises a jumble of images and sounds put together in
the hope that they might have the hoped for effect. They don’t.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Artist Michel Hazanavicius (France 2011) Jean Dujardin; Benernice Beja

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 10 01 2012 Ticket: £8.00

Soap without the verbals….

Of course Hitchcock knew what a MacGuffin was and made ever more intensive use of the idea to drive his psychosexual obsessions into the heart of the films. The plot to Michel Hazanavicius’ (MH) movie is a Macguffin with an empty centre. When you look for the driving force there’s nothing there. A meaningless plot encircled by vacuous framing devices that signify to the audience that this is a ‘take’ on the silent movie form. We have silence on the dialogue and the effects tracks, (most of the time) but not on the music track. There are intertitle cards for the dialogue, iris fades, other period wipes and vignetting (fuzzy or dark edges at corners of frame) for the picture These outer markers of form enclose a sort of voided centre where the main action consists of a series of old ideas raided from the history of Hollywood, which history has already been heavily quarried by other tomb robbers. The film is premised on the conceit ( accurate) that the fake form of the Artist is sufficient for the films commercial success.

You can fool some of the people all of the time….(Abe Lincoln: attributed)

The acting style in the Artist is not so much of the ‘silent ‘ era, but rather of today. This is not surprising. Contemporary audiences would have little patience with the etiolated expressive gesturing of silent movie acting. They are more comfortable with the exaggerated but cursive expressive gesturing of the TV soap opera: so it’s no surprise that this is what the producers give them. Soap without the verbals.

As regards plot the team behind the Artist decided against a plot line generated by an original idea: they chose to exploit plot as a feeble vehicle for retreading bits and bobs of Hollywood movie history. The decision is of course at one with the rationale behind the movie of playing to audience conceit. We have film as a: ‘spot the references/hommages game’. Film as quiz night. So we have a parade of movie ghosts: Fairbanks Jn, Chaplin (which ref gives Georges Valentin the unconvincing line: ‘I am an artist) Jack Warner, Gloria Swanson, Rin Tin Tin (a major Warner 20’s Star) Lubitsch, and of course Hitchcock.

MH ‘ borrows’ the sound track from Vertigo to try and locate the Artist in the psychotic key that is core to Vertigo’s impact. It’s significant of course that MH has to use the Vertigo sound track to try and point his audience towards the emotional zone he wants to suggest. The decision to recycle the Vertigo soundtrack might have been masterful but the film simply cannot live with it, or rather live it out. The point MH wants to locate in the material seems to be an inverse replication of the fetish sexual fixation that Scotty has with Madeliene. In the Artist we have Pappy and George, and it is the female who is driven to possess the male by her fetish, the magical means of possession through object relations. But the idea doesn’t work in the movie. There is no room for darkness in the relations, and the force of the fetish is only feeble expressed and alluded to in a flimsy sort of way before the mechanics of creaking plot drive the couple on to their last movie reference point: Ginger ‘n Fred.

The role of ‘the dog’ is interesting (real name Uggie – I didn’t notice any credit for his trainer).

The dog is accorded an ambivalent role in the film. He exists for his mechanics and his cuteness but is not allowed to make any other claims. Without these other claims his role becomes that of an automaton, not a personality. By claims I point to the fact that there is not a scene in the film where Georges relates to or engages with the dog. He never feeds it, we never see him talk to it (all pet owners talk to their animals), train it or reward it. George never worries about the animal or cares for it. It is simply an automaton that does as it is bid; aside from the Rin Tin Tin sequence when the dog fetches a cop to rescue his master from the flames. Of course audience love the dog. His performance (enhanced by CGI?) is wondrous, but his role is anomalous. Peppy never relates to him nor does the Chauffeur, and in the last Fred ‘n Ginger sequence he seems to have vanished. Has Peppy murdered the dog as part of her pact with her fetish? The dog in the Artist has a highly circumscribed role: as if the actors, aware of WC Fields dictum, had a contractual clause that limited the role of the mut: no emotional baggage allowed only trix.

The pacing of the Artist is dire. It is relieved by some structured wit as when the film breaks into sound, and the occasional amusing use of a intertitle. The pacing is leaden and accompanied by an original score that is monotonous in both rhythm and tempo. The sequences and scenes grind through the material, without tension or counterpoint. The grim mechanics of the plot, the progress from reference to homage to reference make this a dire filmic experience. It is the triumph of marketing over merit and personal judgement. Sales: it’s the old story: you tell them what they’re going to see; you show it to them….and then tell them they’ve seen it…

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

This is not a film Jafar Panahi,
Mojtaba Mirtamash (Iran 2011)

viewed IDFA 21 11 2011

Why is this is not a film….because it’s a life…

All the films I viewed at IDFA were mediated and or
laminated productions. Mediated
through cognitive design as products of
a particular nature, using specific filmic structure shooting schedules and
more or less planned shots to present a view point , an issue or to exercise a
polemic. Laminated with voice over
and editing techniques to ensure a multilayered moulding of the material to
present a cogent statement about a subject.

It seems perhaps impossible or very difficult as a conscious
being to make reflective statements either in prose, media, film whatever without some pre-idea of
form or putative statement, even if these are subject to continual flux. ‘This is not a film’ seems to be
that rare entity: an unwitting product, a production made without specific form
made almost as a documentary doodle. It does of course, and it was intended by
it’s prime movers Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtamesh (MM) to show a situation:
the situation of house arrest. A
film shot as strips of action;
filming that was carried out
in defiance of the conditions of Jafar Panahi’s bail. A film that is little more than the
tapes that comprise it, recorded without much planning and with only the most
nebulous idea of what it should be.
The editing looks to have been sparse, most of the shots are long
sequences, that have only been topped and tailed. Perhaps this material would be used naively sent out as
a diffuse statement about JP’s situation or incorporated into another more
clearly planned film. That’s the
way it appeared to me.

But one sequence filmed as the last long shot changed
everything. We have a situation: a
famous Iranian filmmaker, known for his opposition to the regime is at home
confined under house arrest. He is in the course of appealing against a 6 year
prison sentence and a 20 year ban on leaving the country and making films. He mooches round his apartment
recording himself on film: waiting.
Finally his friend Mojtaba Mirtamash arrives: more filming; unplanned,
undertaken almost as a means to relieve JP’s tedium of days. Underlying everything there is: the unsaid, the uncertain, the encircling and the threatening. Then without announcement quietly in
one shot the final shot of the film all these forces reveal themselves as
immanent and omnipresent.
‘This is not a film’ opens as a simple strip of actions. A series of events taking place in a
situation whose outline we only dimly appreciate, then in this one and final
shot we see that what first seemed inconsequential in this film actually
encapsulates all the tragedy of a life.

JP is not so much in a situation; rather he is the
situation, JP is in a state of
conditional being and the film is undifferentiated from this condition. Jafar
films himself, on the phone to his lawyer; MM arrives and films him in the
apartment as JP acts out an unrealised script; JP talks about film and shows a
couple of shots from his output; his daughters pet iguana majestically stalks
the living room. Then the time
comes for MM to part. It is fireworks
night in Tehran, and sporadically we have heard the crack of the
gunpowder. JP is left alone by MM
who leaves the camera running un the kitchen table.

As MM leaves he talks to the man outside the front door who
is a nephew of the concierge and says he’s standing in for him whilst the
concierge attends a wedding in
Esfahan. Camera still
turning over, JP invites him in and talks to him as he collects the trash. Perhaps bored JP accompanies the guy,
still filming same shot, to the lift as he collects the trash from different
floors in the building. And at
this point in the closeness intimacy and banality of the lift, there is a
terrible realisation of what is happening….no edits no tricks just states of
mind revealed in the transport of tape across the record head.

Everything in this shot is unseen, the thoughts unsaid. Slowly inexorably there is the
realisation that the stand-in concierge is a government spy. He is spying on JP
and will report everything back to his controllers. The net of fate about JP has tightened. JP has been seen filming in defiance of
the Court. He is doomed. The appeal, the one possible hope, slim anyway, is now
dashed. The shot has the
inexorable movement of destiny. There seems a point in the filming where JP
realises exactly what is happening.
His voice hesitates and his questions to the ‘concierge’ falter and
stop. As if his mouth is drying
up. It might be that JP realises from the top of the shot what is going on; but
the feel from the interplay in the shot is of a gradual

realisation by JP of the actual situation and its
consequences. It is a slow motion
awakening to the terrible nature of what is happening in the intimacy of the
elevator.

JP crammed in close physicality to his betrayer, close
enough to smell his breath falls into the silence of the damned, falls into the
abyss.

After making the film ( said to have been smuggled out of Iran in a cake) MM was arrested and is currently in prison. JP’s appeal failed and he is in prison serving a six year stretch.

So this is not a movie; it’s a life Jafar Pahani film and
life interchangeably burnt into image.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

IINTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL AMSTERDAM

NOV 17 TO NOV 27 2011

I attended IDFA and was able to view some 23 films in five
days.

One of the issues highlighted for me at IDFA:

How to
transpose active relations into the life of a film?

There are various ways in which an idea or notion of reality
can be shaped and given substance
in a documentary film.

Among the films that I viewed in Amsterdam one form of
documentary film making in particular caught my attention. Films shot from within a process. This particular way of making a film
attracted positive responses from audiences perhaps because by their nature
these films demand a critical engagement and shape an interaction with the
material that tends to be more passive than active. These films elicit a need to respond to what has been
seen.

This particular group of films that interested me took their
form and salient characteristic from being shot (or in the case of 5 Broken
Cameras the significant defining material) by individuals strategically placed
in a dynamic and changing situation.
These were films shot from within an unfolding of relations and made
possible by lightweight cameras and simple but powerful editing systems that
enabled a lot of material to be shot using different systems and simply controlled.

Examples of the films situated within a matrix of relations
were two from the Middle East, one from Iran (This is not a Film by Jafar
Panahi which I will consider separately in another piece of writing) , and one
from Europe, Fredrik Gerrten’s Big
Boys Gone Bananas, a very strong example of a European film that is total
process, embedded in a context that is filmed as it develops and plays out.

The two Middle Eastern films that interested me were located
in Palestine. Five Broken Cameras
(co directed by Palestinian Emad
Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi) and
Marcus Vetter’s Cinema Jenin both articulated a process that was part of
a wider fateful working out of both individual and collective destiny.

Cinema Jenin was directed by Marcus Vetter who as well as
directing played the lead role in the eponymous project of renovating an
abandoned and dilapidated cinema in Jenin. Although credited with one director and one editor, Cinema
Jenin has the feel of a collective project in which individuals such as Ishmael
(a previous subject of Vetter’s work in Jenin) and other political and social
groupings in Jenin, are core to filmic making and unfolding. Film maker Vetter takes on the lead
role in the cinema project and locates himself at the heart of the complex
interplay of the social and political relations in Jenin which shape and mould
the process of both rebuilding the cinema and making the film. As film maker Vetter is committed to
the actual project and plays a key part in the process that engages the
resources and enters into the critical social and political relations that make
a successful outcome possible.
Marcus Vetter is in Jenin.
And that ‘being in’ has the effect of engaging with dynamic relations
that the camera not only captures but affects. There is a sense in which the camera itself becomes a
player. The camera in the continuous action of filming
creates a feedback loop. It becomes not just a point of reference, but also
part of the questioning and decision making processes. Perhaps in itself the camera becomes an
attitude/behaviour modifier at the individual level as an immediate source of
image feedback. The knowledge that everyone is ‘in’ the Jenin movie is a
fateful realisation, which turns the camera into a force that affects
individuals so that different realities attain a certain visibility
particularly in the political domain. During the editing of the film, Julliano one of those
in the process, in the intensely political dialogue which is a defining element
of relations in Jenin is shot dead, murdered outside the cinema. Was this part of the film or an event
that we can bracket outside the film?
I don’t know but I felt that the core questions that unfolded in the
process of filming were central to what was happening in both in Cinema Jenin
and 5 Broken Cameras.

Being in the situation and filming from within a process
creates films that pull on emotive cognitive and intellectual responses of
those within this unfolding. Participants
are confronted by themselves presented as image in film. They are accompanied by a constant
mirror image which crystalises their movement through time. In the recoding of the unfolding of relations
there is no hiding place either from the virtual audience of the self or from
the wider projected world of viewers. The unfolding of relations in the movie
creates situations of a completely different dynamic from the normal artificial
and controlled interview situation typical of most docs, where the interviewees
are easily able to present the facets of issues that suit their purposes. Seeing material from within process,
even allowing for the controlling aspect of editing presents a more
contradictory but more challenging picture for audiences to understand. Audience response indicates that this
is a challenge to which audiences respond very positively.

Burnat’s 5 Broken Cameras, each of which is smashed or
broken during his filming of the Israeli occupation, develop into more than
just tools that record the terrible and unsettling events that he films. His camera, as an invariable
presence recording the Israeli incursion, becomes part of the developing
dialogue within the Palestinian community in Bil’in. The core dialogue in Bil’in and amongst the Palestinians is
about how they can best resist the Israelis and what relations they should have
with sympathetic Israelis.
Burnat’s camera becomes part of the thinking about the situation. His
camera is part of the process of understanding what is happening to the village
and the effects of their response to events. Viewed by the villages Burnat’s footage becomes part of a
feed back loop, feeding into the villagers understanding and evaluation of
their actions as they oppose the Israelis, and effecting modifications and planning about actions they have
taken and will take in the future.
The camera as thought.

Both Jenin and 5 Broken Cameras seem to be part of a
re-evaluating by Palestinians of the means by which the Israelis can be
opposed. Confrontation with the
Israelis by force of arms is not the only means of fighting; in certain
situations such as those in Bil’in it may be counter productive and other
strategies using other tactics may be more effective. With the addition of
filming as a feed back loop, opposition using techniques of civil disobedience
and non violent protest become effective in affirming Palestinian self
belief and in achieving the goal
of forcing Israel to look at itself and even to make concessions. The actuality recorded by Burnat is
shocking; but the film ennobles
the Palestinian cause and strategy of non violence and communicates it not just
to the world wide audience but also to Israelis.

Filming to the extent that it is part of the thought
processes in the Palestinian discourse becomes a conduit for reaching out to
Israelis. Film as part of the way
of thinking about what is happening, can work to legitimise intra-Israeli
resistance to their own government and empower some Israelis to actively
support Palestinian resistance.
The act of filming in both 5 Cameras and Cinema Jenin, becomes reflection images that reach and penetrate into Israel. As a strategy it is controversial but
as a development it proposes another type of path towards Palestinian self
determination which has the possibility of breaking down the Israeli mind set
from within: a Palestinian Trojan Horse.

From the point of view of the audience these two films,
Jenin and 5 Broken Cameras demand a level of active engagement with the
material. They are not shot from a notional point of neutrality. There’s no
doubt about the point of view from which the film expresses itself. There is no
doubt about the partisan nature of film making. Because this is completely transparent the audience
know the grounds on which to base reservations or criticism and are also
sensitised to bias and fabrication.
They are put on the alert to evaluate what they are presented with. The are challenged to view the material
with critical tools of appraisal.

The viewers are exposed in these films to self believed
Palestinian utterances and discourses.
The viewers are in a position where neutrality or even indifference in
respect of the relations revealed is challenged. Relations of power, territoriality, hierarchy and politics
and social concerns. 5 Broken Cameras (5BC) through the continuous filming of
Burnat over 6 years, is part of the process of witnessing and resisting Israeli
development of illegal West bank settlements, occupation. land theft and wall
erection. The film and the
film makers are part of the forces of opposition by the villagers of Bil’in to
the mechanical forces of Israeli occupation. Burnat’s camera is not just a tool not only a means to
record. Through the medium of the footage the audience also becomes part of the
thinking about the process of resistance to what seems to be a superior
physical force.

To deny what the Burnat’s camera films, as some will do, you
have to think about the material in a specific manner. You have to believe either that 5
Broken Cameras is a perverse project, whose objective is distortion and
fabrication. Or that it is an unwitting project, in which a naïve subject
Burnat is exploited for his limited capacity to see and film only from one
limited perspective. The beauty of
the documentary film is that the evidence is in the film. However much these films may be edited,
the integrity of the process in which they are enfolded remains. All viewers are equal in viewing and
evaluating the relations with which they are presented. And it is this integrity to which
viewers respond.

adrin neatrour

December 2011

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Gun Crazy
Joseph H Lewis (USA 1950)
John Dall. Peggy Cummins

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle UK; ticket: £5

Need another fix…?

Gun Crazy (GC) opens in a small town with a sequence set in
torrential rain, a relentless
outbursting of water drowning the streets in a metaphoric flooding of despair. Amidst this emotional and aquatic
torrent Brandon lurks in the shadows
before smashing in the window of a store to steal a hand gun: a beautiful handgun. But the storm that made the crime
possible also betrays him; trying to get away, he slips in the treacherous
conditions and is caught.

Joseph Lewis (JL) uses the opening rain sequence to
introduce the main thematic concerns of his movie. The desperation of obsessive desire and the emotionally encompassing
conditions in which such desire has to be satisfied.

Viewing the tense superbly crafted film, the thought
occurred that JL was not concerned with a couple on a criminal rampage. Rather GC was a film about addiction.
All the way through this road movie probably inspired by the Barrow Gang, I
felt as if it was foreshadowing the tidal wave of heroin addiction that was 30
or so years later to overwhelm the vulnerable strata of blue collar
America. GC holds up the mirror to
a shadow America, holding in the present a crystal image of celluloid, that
portents the future awaiting realisation of a drug culture.

This is blue collar land, economically and accurately
sketched out by JL. Broken family,
narrow vistas of vision, no future: a wasteland. A world of vulnerable people.. Vulnerable to the apparition of a specific stimulus that
seems to fulfil all the criteria of an individual’s needs and desires in the
lost generations.

Brandon’s answer to the problem of identity is the gun. The gun is a means. Not an end. An implement, not a goal. It’s tough in the rush of affirmation of sexuality and power
to understand this. It
affirms a means to identity, maleness and endows the one who has the gun with
implied power in mastery of technique and willingness to exercise.

But Brandon hooked up to Laurie, is unable to disentangle
ends and means. He becomes implicated in her need for
gestural deliverance, for the implicit to become explicit and for the gun to
extend out of the confines of the demonstrable, into the real. For reality to become an ever
diminishing high voltage circuit linking gun and desire.

The movie’s script plays on the seductive role of Laurie’s
in leading Brandon onto the road of crime. GC invokes the tired old story of a good man led astray by a
bad lady. Although this causative
mechanism can be read into GC, I think it does less than justice to JL’s
movie. The opening sequence
establishes Brandon’s need for the gun

(obvious Freudian/ Jungian sex /power symbolism) He cannot resist the allure of the
fetish that he needs to resolve his identity. The logic of Brandon’s situation was that he was always
vulnerable TO THE WAY OF THE GUN (OR THE WAY OF THE NEEDLE) because he needs a
solution to the blue collar dilemma: emotional damage no hope a dead end society culture. For Brandon it was a natural
progression from gun prowess to gun use; from marihuana to heroine.

Brandon and Laurie’s progress the form of their criminal
career is drawn by JL in a very
different manner from Penn’s movie of Bonnie and Clyde. Penn emphasises the visual and
emotional allure of the life, it’s a caper. Penn uses his material to peddle a romantically alluring
aesthetic of death. Bonnie
and Clyde are canonised as symbolic rebels. JL
depicts Brandon and Laurie’s path towards their final destiny in the
swamp ias a vicious downward
spiral of addiction. Their
robberies and crimes are quickly seen not so much to have an economic rationale
but rather to satisfy psychic and
physical need. The robberies
yield very little money; what each of the crimes provide is the next fix. The rush and the high to which Laurie
and Brandon are addicted to get them through time, the unending presents in which they are
trapped.. Living in the
present, no past no future but living with the junkies dilemma of decreasing
returns from each fix of action.
The circuitry of gun and desire tightens round them like a noose and
finally they acknowledge their dilemma, which of course leads to the well
trodden road of the final idea: lets do one more heist and get out of the game
and put our lives back on track. They are of course so far off the tracks that their navigation systems have
taken them out of space time coordinates.

Much has been said about JL’s filmic rendering of the
script. It is highly economic in
construction, building scenes with attention to details rather than production
values, in particular the bank robbery scene filmed in one shot from outside
the car with the participants, Laurie, a little old lady and a small town cop
positioned and manipulated by JL with the precision of a chess grand master. I
thought his use of tracking shots was particularly strong, meeting Truffaut’s
dictum that the track should have moral purpose. The tracks in GC are not random mechanisms used to keep the
picture moving. When JL tracks
into he face of Brandon or Laurie the use of the movement powerfully evokes the
perception, state of mind of the character or the fragility of situation. One
track that was very powerful saw the camera pull back from Laurie and Brandon
as he draws a plan of the last robbery.
The camera movement from CU
to WS reveals the nature of Brandon’s
plan which he has drawn on
an old newspaper. The shot
implicates not only the poverty of their resources but the couple caught in
what we see in the fragile light caste from an ornate glass lampshade seems
foretell the mayhem that isp to come, again to cast the shadow of the present
into the future.
adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Melancholia Lars von Trier ( 2011 Den; Swe) Kirsten Dunst; Charlotte Gainsbourg

Viewed: 6 Oct 2011 Tyneside Cinema Ticket price: £7.99

What planet is Lars von Trier on?

When I tried to think what Melancholia was about, I arrived at the idea that it was about nothing. From its filmic form to its expressive content there is vacuity, a stylised vacuity, but still an emptiness that characterises this movie.

Melancholia (M) points to the metamorphosis of Lars von Trier (LvT) from film director into brand.

M has the look and feel of a photo installation. It’s a film that makes its statement through stylistic expression rather than content. A film that has apocalypse as a theme but is not about dieing; it’s about the look of dieing. Or perhaps just ‘the look’. A film for people for whom the important thing is always to look cool. A film for the sort of people who are always an advert for themselves, dieing or being, level or bipolar.

M, in particular it’s opening pretitle sequence, reminded me of the work of Bill Viola. The selling point is that hyper realistic images lock the viewer into the immanence of presence, a presence in which context and other determined social criteria are excess baggage. I think that this works because the hyper real rendition of image, in particular the face, determines that the focus of cognitive attention as an empathic imperative. As when we gaze at ourselves in the mirror our attention is transfixed to the surface. Some think that surface is all there is. That’s OK.

LvT’s M is a filmic installation structured on the idea of stylised juxtapositions divided up by title cards named after the two female roles: Justine: individual state of mind and set piece social ritual; Clair: cosmic disaster and family. The characteristic feature of the expressive elements is their overwhelming visual hyper presence and the abandonment of history and context. All that matters is the now and the watching of the performers go through the motions of projecting an image of the now.

The set piece reception is put through its formulaic paces: the bad behaviour of a dysfunctional family, the intimation of the corrupt business underlying the event, linked to a highly visible falling out between two of the occasion’s central parties, and a less visible falling out of the newly weds. Justine’s behaviour is erratic cool, alternatively accommodating and disruptive.. . of course whatever she does she continues to look drop-dead gorgeous. And the event continues to look sumptuous. Nothing really happens. Everything is cool. Perhaps this is LvT’s point. With everything anchored in the hyperreal we gaze on image. The beautiful people remain the beautiful people. Dead and unchanging. Beautiful people like it this way.

What’s in it for the audience ? Unless you’re one of the ‘cool set’, once the eye ceases to be bewitched by image, there is little else to attend to. Even the handheld camera work, which initially lends a stylised cinematic life to the sequences, becomes tedious. It offers only repetitive movements, with its sound led splicing overlaying too many shots composed in the same way: a whip pan off action onto a talking head. Again and again and again.

Without context to anchor events, M’s reliance on associative juxtaposition is similar in to TV advert for an anti-wrinkle cream. There’s a before and after structure (in M’s case inverse to the ad structure as the mood movement is from confidence to depression); and LvT’s cosmic physics is as wonky and suspect as the science behind anti wrinkle products.

A key element of the second section of M, intertitled Clair, is the house where the action takes place. Characteristically it has form without history, it’s is located nowhere without space time or social referents. It is (I think) the same house where the reception was held. It looks like a house in a hotel ad or a real estate brochure. A house in the middle of nowhere, occupied by people in the middle of nowhere; a situation in the middle of nowhere. And then! A planet from nowhere!

Justine’s precognition of the final catastrophe is very detached and melds imperceptibly with her utterances – the earth is evil (wow!) – and behaviour which indicate she is a very cool person in particular when she and LvT indulge in a little ‘Melancholic light’ naked bathing. She looks so good and ravishing, really cool thing to do that!

Of course in the past where societies were attuned to a religious cosmology and demonology there was typically a collective response to catastrophe: mass flagellation, mass gatherings. On planet Earth today in the West there is no collective belief to sustain life. Only denial or mute acceptance. Apocalypse now will be experienced as a family occasion like an advert for a family holiday in Florida. To this extent LvT makes a point, but it seems a secondary afterthought to his primal concern, the image.

LvT ensconced in the Zentropa may feel like his little pretend household at the end of the movie. They seek out the sanctuary of the child from cosmic disaster in a little birch frame wigwam. Is Zentropa LvT’s little magic cave? A bubble world from which he can look out and comment on the world. Insulated from the world remote from its concerns, he has little to say. It worked for him with Antichrist because of the psychic forces he set in motion were intertwined from a ruthlessly internalised re-mything of Freud. In Melancholia it is mere arrogant indulgence.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk