Film Review

Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock (USA 1958) James Steward; Kim Novak

Viewed: 24 09 2011 Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; Ticket: £5.00

retrocrit: sex and the cripple…

Vertigo’s plot, its settings and locations are of course all typical macguffins. They are the elaborate devices and visual mechanics that only serve to frame Alfred Hitchcock’s (AH) core obsession in this movie: the ritual of the fetish. The slow build up of the film, its ramshackle flaky story line with its cod parapsychological exploitation of the idea of possession and its ring a roses visual rotation of San Francisco tourist attractions, delivers the pay off in its finale: the sexual completion of the cripple. This final section in which Scottie rebuilds Madeleine ( interesting choice of character name; it is the Madeleine cake that energies Proust’s erotic memory journey through time) is a pure erotic act of film. The audience (this male one anyway) shares the complicity of Scottie’s psychic fixation, feels the tumescent race of blood fill out his limp erogenous tissues. Of course we see nothing; we don’t have to. We are seeing with Scottie.

AH seems to have understood the consequences that the development of corporate man had for the psycho sexual functioning of the male. Both Rear Window and Vertigo explore aspects of this schizoid detached objectifying state.

The opening sequence offers a banal explanatory back story for Scottie, who at the starting point of the film’s narrative is immediately presented as a ‘crippled man’ (symbolised by acrophobia) racked by guilt, inadequacy compounded by a sense of personal and career failure. It is during the opening section at Midge’s apartment that AH lays out his key concerns. In a phallocentric culture, Scottie is a castrated impotent, incapable of sexual functioning and all too aware of it. The scenario presents Scottie and Midge (Barbara Del Geddes) as just ‘friends’. Reading the interaction between them I think it’s evident that this presentation of their relationship is an assured scripted feint, the old conjurer displaying his mastery of misdirection to distract the audience from what is actually happening. The couple are man and wife and they have problems with their sexual relationship. As a good wife Midge (small blood feeding mosquito = wife?) tries to help him. But he cannot be aroused by her; she doesn’t pump his blood, she sucks his blood; she has no power over him. He is a castrate in a phallic corporate regime which dictates the rules of the game for both of them. He denies her both physical intimacy, of which coitus is a most powerful sign, and fertility.

This opening sequence has I think another necessary input besides the establishment of the cripple: it also brokers the appearance of the fetish.

The sexual functioning (phallic arousal), of corporate man has been conditioned to respond not to the stimulus of the body; but to the stimulus of the object or body part as object. Of course this starts with his own cock as object. But the process of objectification in particular pervades most aspects of sexuality where shoes, lingerie, breasts, legs, arse etc are projected as potent signs of legitimate sexual arousal. In linking the idea of sexual functioning to objects such as, cigarettes (at least until recently in the West) cars, interiors, fragrance, leisure, commercial interests through advertising and other channels, detach sexuality from the body onto the object fetish. In the first exchange between Midge and Scottie, AH effects the extraordinary appearance of a cantilevered brassiere (pronounced by Midge as brazeer) mounted on a stand. In response to Scotties puzzled question about it, Midge explains this new invention; its purpose is to aggressively push the breasts up and forward, accentuating their prominence making them into object signs of sexual potency. Of course for Hollywood in the ‘50’s women’s breasts were the most powerfully exploited object sign of the female stars, Monroe, Russell, Dors etc. (the maternal function of the breasts was not advertised). With the cantilever bra (possibly invented by Hughes) breasts become fetish, detached from the body and released into an independent existence available for development exploitation and celebration by Hollywood and the fashion industry. But Scotty is not fixated on the breast fetish; Midge is unable to arouse him with her cantilevered brazeer. Scottie the cripple needs another sort of object sign to enable him to find his erection.

Who better than AH with his intimate knowledge of himself and Hollywood to understand this? Hollywood as a parallel world where sex is welded to and defined by image. Image mediates sexual desire through body shape, hair style and colour, breasts, facial make up. Hollywood with its consistently ambivalent contradictory message of the sexual fetish: a magical thing available to the gaze yet simultaneously distant and inaccessible. As sex detaches from body and attaches to image, sexual functioning undergoes a significant re-conditioning process.

Fetish in contemporary English has dual (and sort of related) meanings. Firstly it points to an object believed to have magical power regarded with superstitious reverence; secondly a fetish is an object or body part that is psychologically necessary to achieve sexual gratification: no fetish no sexual arousal.

In Vertigo AH combines both meanings of the word. As a fetish it is her assemblage as sex goddess that causes Scottie to worship Madeleine. He is like a man wanting his wife to dress and look like Marilyn Monroe. From the first time he sees her with her peroxide blond hair, her demure beige clothing and shoes, she is a vision, a fount of magical power. Madeleine is constituted as pure image. Much of the film is composed of sequences of shots in which Scottie watches her from a distance. Even when he rescues her from the sea, there is little he can say to his object of worship, who at the same time becomes his object of desire, a fetish image without whom he cannot connect his mind to his sexual awakening.

On losing Madeleine , Scottie changes from cripple to dead man. He is as one dead, and only restored to life by his recreation of the fetish as the psycho sexual salve. It is an astonishing filmic realisation as Scottie item by item detail by detail recreates Madeleine. Watched by the complicit eye of the audience, he moves with increasing assurance towards both the image of the goddess and the arousal of his own crippled sexual functioning through the fetish of the image. The final assemblage of the image of Madeleine has an orgasmic intensity.

Interestingly AH was not happy with either of his stars’ performances. Both players seem detached and uncomfortable with their roles. It may be that the implicit obsessions of AH in making Vertigo acted as an inhibitionary factor because the explicit message was so close to the film’s surface that both Stewart and Novak were uncomfortable with the forbidden areas of psycho sexual functioning that lay at the heart of the film and of which they were the key expressive realisators.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

King Kong Merian Cooper Earnest Shoedsack (USA 1933) Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema: 4 Sept 2011, ticket price £5.00

Retrocrit: From King to slave an American journey

King Kong (KK) is a spoof mythological epic that gave Hollywood and American culture this new synthetic genre. KK exploits some of the expressive elements of the literary myths of European culture and overlays them with a exteriorised detached cool stylistic gloss. KK is constructed in such a manner that engrossment in and detachment from the material are interspliced, a structure that allows the film to commit to and follow the lines of action and simultaneously step aside from and comment on the action with contemporary externalised parentheses.

What we see in KK is the present taking control of the past. After KK, contemporary American culture led by Hollywood, is no longer in awe of the traditional mythologies of the European forebears. The dynamic Hollywood entertainment industry took the heroic components of these ancient stories and fashioned them into statements of American cultural and social values: democracy, embracement of change, can do attitude. Transforming the elements of these myths through a stylised and structured filmic detachment enabled the viewers to laugh at and detach themselves from their historical origins. Becoming American: a synthesis of engrossment and detachment.

For KK is surely fashioned from mythologies such as Beowulf and Siegfried both in content and expressive style. In the second section of KK the boat approaches the island. But as in the Niebelungen the place of destiny is fog ridden, and the boat has to negotiate a path through a defensive mist. Once on the isle a barrier separates the terrified people from the monstrous past that is sealed off behind it, the mountain has the shape of a skull, and when Kong is tracked he is finally, like Grendel. traced to his lair in a cave. Without being specific these are all classic elements of hero myths. Kong isn’t one mythic entity but is synthesised out of the components of different mythic strands. Kong can be seen as a primal force, an ancient God, a monster. Mythically Kong is doomed because his time is over; a new race of dynamic people have arrived, unafraid and who want to capture his image.

Unlike Cortes and the old colonialists the new invading ‘heroes’ don’t seek conquest. They seek power through the image, the symbolic camera that they carry everywhere. They come to capture images in order to exploit them. For the new colonialists, the image is a critical aspect of their power, enabling their manipulations and control. In fact in the movie they capture Kong himself, at which point the film takes on another lamination. As captive, Kong elides into a different image, he becomes another deterritorialised other. Kong is transformed from a God into black slave.

The curtains open in the Broadway theatre to reveal captured Kong standing mid stage on a platform. As in the illustrations of the restraints and manacles used on Africans in the slave trade, Kong’s arms are pinioned back by chains to a metal bar across his shoulders. Kong becomes African slave. From a God in nature to black slave, an American journey. And his escape and flight is an old time Southern manhunt in which the escaped slave is hunted down and killed by white men, Of course the man hunt is a lamination as the affect of the killing, the expressive despair of the Kong model, is attenuated by the spoof nature of the action.

I think that the spoof form adapted in Kong is made possible by the ‘30’s technology that used ingenious models to animate Kong and his Jurassic pals. One element of spoof is for the expressive elements to take seriously what is self evidently flawed to the external viewer. The investment of emotion and intellectual analysis by players on phenomena that are clearly representations creates space for both the scenario and the players to adapt distancing mechanisms from their engagement and involvement in the action that is legitimised by this structured component of the form.

The players have to respond to the material by adapting an acting style that is dedicated to surface gestures and malleable allowing them to move through different keys of relationship and commitment to the script. Using CGI makes it far more difficult to spoof epic heroic genres, and has unleashed an endless output of ponderous forgettable movies that are trapped within their own rigid logic. Steven Spielberg obviously watched KK up close and in his Lost Ark techno archaeological epics brought the Kong ethos up to date.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Playtime Jacques Tati (Fr 1967) Jacques Tati

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle, 31 07 2011 Ticket:£5.00

… Yes it’s a film from another planet….

Francois Truffaut on seeing Playtime wrote: it was “… a film from another planet where they see things differently.”

Playtime is a film that is simply about seeing. Seeing what’s going on. There is no story. Playtime is not grounded in the passivity of ‘looking at’ or ‘watching’ images unfold. It’s a film that places the viewer in a position where either they’re actively with Tati’s creative movement through frame and time as ‘seers’; or they miss the movie.

The opening sequence is located in the sort of typical modernist architectural structure where the construction and organisation of space provides no statements about the building’s purpose. The space is expressively functional but not expressively purposeful. It’s an example of Deleauze’s, “anyspacewhatever”. In the opening shots we see: two nuns; a nurse appears briefly, and then we see a woman asking a man if he has got his pyjamas. Perhaps we’re in a hospital: in fact it’s an airport. Playtime starts to open up its logic. On Tati’s filmic plane, appearances, the things that we see on the surface are what he/we can play with. That’s all there is: surfaces; that’s all we can see, but it’s enough. Meaning in Playtime is extrinsic not intrinsic.

In the first sequence the airport comes to life. The frame fills with people and the audio track makes itself heard, takes on a life of its own independent of all the comings and goings of people bustling through frame. Groups gather round desks, airline personnel move sharply to their duties and the screen is animated by arrivals of large groups of tourists, who herd-like shuffle and trip through the space seemingly immune them from the surrounding world. As they crocodile out of the Arrivals Gate we see that they are simultaneously an amorphous and implacable force. Overlaying the optical spectacle the sound track creates another stratum of reality, employing heightened ambient sounds from the environment which are normally disattended: the roaring of the air conditioning, the call signs of the PA system, the public announcements for elusive individuals. These naturally occurring effects are an alternative channel through which apprehend the situation and which exert a specific contextual psychic grip on the space.

Playtime’s key concept is disassociation and its main structural element is the disassociative splitting of the optical and sound situations. This splitting must have been prompted by observations that Tati made in the 1960’s. Today the disassociation of the optical from sound situations is even more radical. But there’s no Tati around to find a form to express it.

Tati’s realisation of the inexpressive nature of contemporary spacial organisation and the concomitant radical separation of sound and visual perception are the core of the Playtime thesis which most vividly played out in the sequence that takes place in a large glass fronted office block. Contemporary life is seen as afflicted with a state of mind in which disassociation/disconnection/discontinuity are the prevalent and sometimes dominating characteristic of urban experience. Disconnections of ends and means: the massive modernist transparent glass structures of corporate capitalism are the places where fateful dark secret decisions are made. These structures are haunted by beings who struggle to remember why they are there and who lapse into discontinuities of being and intention as their purposes languish and are replaced by other needs. Spaces which you expect to be silent, which you think are silent, roar with the sound of the machinery that operates their microclimate. Tourists, deterritorialised gaggles of people wander through the space their agitation and continual motion disassociated from any initial intention, and left only with an occasional reflected glimpse or souvenir of the city they came to visit.

Instead of a plot, Playtime follows lines of intensity in establishing its core proposition and then testing to destruction its logical consequences. The script moves through a number of settings in which various situations are presented seen and allowed to evaporate rather than culminate. The ultimate locus of the movie’s circuit of intensity is the restaurant sequence which is the site of the complete disassociation of food from eating. Tati sees the restaurant is simply theatre where both the diners and the staff perform. The clients go the restaurant not to eat but to be seen, not to be seen eating but to be seen having ‘fun’. Dining becomes a spectacle where the waiters chefs and manager’s take on the ritualised role of priests facilitating and enabling appearances. As the scene intensifies the music, high energy jazz takes over as the driving force of the restaurant; the clients abandon all simulation of dining and as the restaurant’s façade falls apart about them they party hard whilst at the same time behaving as if nothing were happening. Psychic discontinuities proliferate: doormen open doors that don’t exist, people come and go, waiters adjust their clothing and the manager sports a mien of apparent insouciance.

Tati in his films is obviously fascinated by the way in which white middle class women walked in this era. In Mon Oncle and Playtime their walk is frequently centre frame. In the ‘50’s -‘60’s era middle class women were almost uniformly dressed in fairly tight skirts hanging just below the knee and wore shoes with high heels of about 2 inches. I think what attracted Tati’s attention was the biomechanical disassociation between women’s bodies and their clothes. To walk properly, from thigh to toe wasn’t possible for these women; they had to resort to a number of strange mechanical stratagems to pull the walking trick with feminine elegance. This is what Tati sees as strange fascinating and ultimately very funny as an everyday unremarked phenomenon.

In Playtime as in his other movies Tati’s uses the fullness of his frame to compose the organise filmic events. The action is not limited to centre frame but often dynamically dispersed to the edges. The frames are full of action but the action is not passively presented to us but demands that we search the frame in order to see what is happening. Frames become an assemblage of possibilities that Tati had the visual verve and confidence to exploit and manipulate in manner that demands the audience to be active.

In Playtime, Tati strolls though his script, appearing then disappearing in a series of discontinuities, allowing the logic of the energy that the scenario create to carry the film. Nothing he does ever demands the lime light. His presence is always self effacing and minimal, yet like the greatest minimalists, his less is always more. On screen, whilst never exuding dominance, he attracts the eye like an optical magnet. His presence like his films is full of grace.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Tree of Life Terrence Malick (USA 2011) Brad Pitt, Sean Penn; Jessica Chastain

Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne: 26 Jul7 2011; Ticket price: £3.50

Love as a sort of corporate blancmange (Opaque jelly of corn flour and milk, usually sweetened and flavoured)

At the start and end of Terrence Malick’s (TM) the Tree of Life (ToL) there is an image of shimmering moving filament, brightly llt against a dark background. It reminded me of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, JM Barry’s fable written for children in which his child characters are asked to close their eyes and say: “I believe in fairies!” Mallick’s ‘Tinkerbell’ moments upgrade this banality and pitch a similar message at adults, infantilised adults. ToL tries to persuade through the ponderous manipulation of motion picture imagery, that if we say (breathlessly like they do in the movie): “..the only way to live is love….” all will be well in Tinkerbell-land. aka USA.

I think that TM in many ways has taken on the mantel of Frank Capra. In Capra’s films it is the core American values of decency democracy and civic duty that underpin the actions and belief system of small town man, TM judges that these virtues have failed to sustain the suburbanite in corporate America. What the little man now requires in order to endure is cosmic consciousness. A complete melding with the one that is the universe: love.

The movie, filmed in Smithtown Texas, dramatises the upbringing of two brothers, and plays out the thesis that the male dominated ordering of life in this culture, is a failed project. The culture needs something more feminine more transcendent to balance out and to resolve its tensions and contradictions. The result is that ToL is not a movie rather an advert for the wild and wacky touchy feely new age belief system. An advert based on the old school Madison ploy of the before/ after script set-up. Before the O’Brien family is touched by new age consciousness they are trapped in old Hollywood stereotypes, trapped in linear time; consequently they are not very happy people. Once touched by this New Age stuff they are released into a new Hollywood script where they are free from the bonds and ties of tyrannical linear time, released into an ecstatic non linear everlasting present, where they can smile touch and kiss each other whenever they feel like it. That’s the message: get into new age or be sad and grumpy old men.

Some folk of left field persuasions will object to the naïve simplifications endemic in this message. I found objectionable the banality of the shots used by TM in his advert to demonstrate or suggest the intermeshing of cosmos and spirit. It felt to me like a master thief at work as I watched a series of familiar images drawn from the realms of geophysics ( mantles and volcanoes) biomorphics cosmologies etc, stuff we’ve seen on TV many many times, indiscriminately assembled into montages and juxtaposed with his suburban soap opera material. These pictures of natural processes are accompanied by highly emotive manipulative music (much of it religious and featuring large angelic choirs); and the even more manipulative dramatically whispered voice overs (usually female voice) making sure we associate the image with the product (just in case the music doesn’t make it clear enough). As when Mrs O’Brien whispers of the dead son she has been mourning: “I give him to you ; I give you my son” and we see images of a sand-scape with people dancing in ecstasy.

There is a commonplace observation about film music that whatever music track you lay behind a sequence, it looks OK. TM seems to subscribe to a similar view of film editing: that whatever images and sequences are juxtaposed it will work. On the basis of what I saw in ToL I don’t subscribe to this idea. Most of the radical edits that move the viewer from the drama to the cosmos are crude and despite trying very hard TM comes nowhere near to the making the sort of connection that Kubrick fashioned in his movie 2001 where one brief image montage links all the tools that mankind ever has or ever will use. BY comparison TM’s attempts to create links between different worlds are dull plodding and lack inspiration. A number of people walked out of the movie about an hour in perhaps unimpressed with TM’s attempts to link the everyday with the cosmos.

The version of the 50’s that TM creates in ToL is peculiarly sanitised. There is no TV, no music. No one drinks alcohol; no one smokes. In other respects the era (sets and cozzies) is replicated with the minutest attention to detail. So where is this place? Where has TM set his movie? It’s just a set, like the Truman show, which exists without real context, ( OK Mr O’Brien is located as a power plant manager but this is a gesture) where there is a lack of reality behind what seems real. Where are we? Inside TM’s head? Yes! inside his detached director’s bubble.! And what does he see from within the bubble? The answer beside the TV pictures, is affect images. This is a film of affect, located in the personal- to-the-director which TM externalises as his characters, filmed in a relentless gliding press of close ups that register only their reactive emotive and psychic states. The solutions to these states comes not from a working out from within of their destinies. Rather it comes from without, from the adverts which like soft drinks or beauty products make their promises of redemption. TM’s characters are deterritorialised individuals whom TM wishes to claim for his own blinkered cosmic vision. No drugs allowed just blancmange.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A Separation (Jodaeye Nader az Simir) Ashgar Farhadi (Iran 2011)

Peyman Moaadi; Leila Hatami; Saret Bayat

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 5 July 2011; ticket £7.95

Filmed from within the machine

Opening shots in a film can work in many different ways: to establish a geography, to set a mood and sometimes as is the case with a Separation (aS) to anticipate something about the substantive theme of the movie. A pre-emptive distillation of the thought processes that have moulded the expressive devices set in play.

Ashgar Faradis (AF), writer director of aS opens his film with a shot from the interior glass surface of a photocopier. Identity documents are being copied prior to the divorce hearing of Nader and Simir. We watch from within the closed lid of the machine and see their ID papers brilliantly illuminated for a moment before being caste into darkness and the top opened and another document inserted to replace the one that has been copied. We are in close contact with the process of replication: an imperfect business. AF in choosing to open with this shot, indicates this interior type of space is where his film will work: very personal intimate, close, constrained and focused on process. aS is a film concerned with processes particularly those used by the social machine to replicate itself and how replication both breaks up and breaks down. aS is a film from within the machine. It is a film not about image but about being, not about facts but about states of mind.

The situation – the thesis or proposition – created by AF is that the couple Nader and Simir want to divorce. She has an opportunity to leave Iran (the movie is interestingly vague about this) and wants to take her daughter with her. Nader her husband doesn’t want to go abroad as he says he has to stay to look after his elderly father who has Alzheimer’s. He prefers his daughter to stay with him. Simir and Nader have no wish to divorce other than their incompatible view of the future. Played and grounded in the present the actual, the film is directed towards the future. It is a discourse about what might be: the possible and the putative.

The film’s story develops round a hired woman helper who is paid to look after Nader’s father whilst he is at work. The story, strong as it is, is simply the basis for allegorical laminations that AF lays over the surface of his material. The presenting domestic situation is richly layered with embedded readings that give the situation significance beyond the mechanics of the script. The layers of meaning suggested by AF develop into a satiric moral critique of the Iranian social system in the Islamic republic. The power of AF’s satiric critique lies in the fact that it is not simplistic. The story’s matrix with its religious, social moral, gender and class elements allows AF to portray the complexity of Iranian society and all its uncertainties. But centred on Nader’s old father with Alzheimer’s, the allegorical core of the movie remains solid. The Alzheimer sufferer is reduced to being a body without a brain. As we watch the film and see the mechanisms of power in this society, the thought occurs that this society is also a body without a brain, or a brain that has long ceased to function. As we watch the father in his terrible condition, it is he around whom life, both real and psychic, revolves. He is the centre of the family. There is an interchange between wife and husband:

“He doesn’t know you’re his son.”

“I know he is my father!”

In Iran, no matter how dysfunctional and inadequate the power system may be, no matter how unfit it may be for a technologically based society, the people are in thrall to a brain dead patriarchy that holds onto and controls the relations of power. It is incapable of relinquishing power or hearing seeing and understanding real change in social relations. Power, and its replicants repeat traditional catch phrases and shibboleths to justify and enforce its decisions and to maintain its hold on life. The men are obedience mechanisms in thrall to the belief systems of their fathers. What is significant in the AF’s film is that his moral critique is not one sidedly directed at the men. The women too are implicated in the sustenance of a failed ideology, they too are nervous of change in the public realms. Unable to change, to take responsibility for a different and non-submissive role for women they too become dead. Men and women are in this society together. A heavy dead hand lies over this land.

Gender relations are at central to the film’s concerns, but by no means its only focus. Class plays a pivotal part in the narrative, and AF understands that there are two classes in Iran: the educated predominantly urban strata, and the uneducated rural and urban proletariat. The former committed to change, the latter resistant in part because they believe the current power relations protect them from the middle classes. The implication is that if the forces for change are to prevail they must also understand that they have take responsibility for just relations between the classes.

Although it starts with a situation, a proposition, aS is a film about process. All through the film, in the person of the daughter, Termeh, there is the idea of potentiality. In her presence there is process. There is movement towards the idea the thought, the possibility, of a different relationship between men and women, a different relation between classes people and their society, other than that governed by the strictures of an authoritarian religious tradition. AF recognises the breadth of social relations and incorporates class religion and state institutions into the script, satirising them but also acknowledging that through the mediation of individuals that they can bring something unique and of value to Iranian society. AF’s does not use a one colour palette; he understands and honours complexity, even when working in an allegorical language. As the film develops and deepens in its allegorical play it becomes clear that the central protagonist is Termeh because it is she who will be called on by the future to make choices. In her is potential and through her aS becomes a statement of positive intent.

aS is shot in an explicit stylised manner which gives filmic context to its allegorical form. The camera work creates another lamination laid over the story through which the allegorical heart of the film is transposed onto the visual look of the film. The shots, all hand held, are composed so that a world is created where there is no perspective, no depth of field no field of vision. It is a world of intersecting focused and of out of focus planes. A world which is like a thought experiment in which there are only near sighted people: no one has long vision. Through AF’s camera the world is realised as series of flattened surfaces. A world inhabited and occupied by figures moving at speed through intense domestic or institutional situations against the flattened plane of their existence. aS communicates optically a world of insistent endless agitation in which the business of living life or answering to life squeezes the energy out of people. The camera, the editing indicates that there is no time to stop or to be: there is only time to react to whatever it is a situation demands. The scenes at the family home, the corridors of power the hospital and the court are all filmed as a chaos of movement. In seeing this you understand that just to survive in this city (Tehran) is achievement.

But in as much as the filmic quality creates this world of relentless demands, the structure also allows for the possibility of stopping. In the case of Simir it is clear that, bound up in the contradictions of the culture, that she has stopped and she wants to get out. But to get out is to abrogate responsibility The daughter, witness and observer of the madness of domestic situation also slows down and starts to ask the questions that relate to being not doing. As she questions her father about the madness of the events that have overwhelmed him, you know that something has happened to her. She has stopped and begun to think. She has moved outside the agitation machine become a completely different type of possibility. And the last scene where we wait with her parents for her decision, the film becomes a complete opening up of her potential. For otherwise what would be the point?

Central to aS as an allegorically contextualised satire is the nature and quality of the acting. The acting takes its cue from the situation (s) not from the emotionally charged imputed feelings of individuals in their situations. In aS the actors’ first duty is to their situation in the Brechtian understanding of the demands of drama. The work of the actor is not to indulge emotive charges but to work through process. The intensity of the processes set in play by AF requires a disciplined approach to the material by the actors for the issues in the film to retain their clarity and dignity. Within this paradigm the performances are finely tuned to this end, filled out with situational intensity but not bloated and distorted by emotive overloading of affect.

AF is I think a film maker who in the form and concerns of his work carries forward the particular powerful voice of Iranian film.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Gigante (Giant) Adrian Biniez (Uruguay 2009) Horatio Comandelle; Leonor Svareas

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 9 June ’11; ticket £5

Love conquers all….

Gigante (G) won its director Adrian Biniez (AB) a Silver Bear at the Berlin FF 2009. An award that tends to confirm the abandonment by the German film industry of any semblance of maintaining or taking forward the particular expressive language developed by German film makers. Mainstream German film has embraced Hollywood as its model and exemplar of how to put image onto screen. G is a ‘cute’ film.

The final shot of G says everything about its underlying message. Final shots are sometimes irrelevant to a film’s actual purpose and impact. It’s often the case that final shots are grafted onto the body of a film as a formulaic means of gratifying an externalised power such as government censors, executive producers broadcasters etc. This is not the case with G whose final shot confirms it as a bourgeois apologia that fails to be consistent even in terms of its own script. The eponymous protagonist, G, finally makes contact the woman he has been stalking throughout the film. At the beach he approaches her from behind makes eye contact with her and sits down beside her. Cue: fade up music which comprises a sort of mushy latino pulp rhythm which sees out the shot and is laid over the end credits. But what we know about these two people is that they are both big heavy metal fans. The film’s logic points to a heavy metal soundtrack over the final romantic shot. But the film has sold out to a soft focus romantic closure. Heavy metal at this point might suggest other outcomes and ways in which their relationship might be defined. AB goes for the cute message.

The initial sequences of G establish the protagonist in locations and situations that are familiar yet ‘other’ in their potential. We see the world of the gigantic hypermarket at night with its phalanx of cleaners, bakers, stackers supervisors and security men. A world of the night, a hidden world, veiled from the sight of the consumers who shop there during its opening hours. A night time world with its own values and perspective. Contrasting the world of night is the night worker’s world of day, dominated by daytime TV through which portal streams a culture of undifferentiated babble of image sound and information.

These initial locations and situations are not developed expressively for their innate potential to form or suggest significance. They are simply devices. The Giant’s job is to monitor the screens of the cctv security system. Like Andrea Arnold’s similar protagonist in Red Row, cctv screens, acts of surveillance are just mechanisms exploited to put the plot into drive. In Red Row and Gigante surveillance has no filmic purpose. Unlike Coppola’s Conversation where the act of surveillance probes state of mind and forms a sheaf about the content.

On the evidence of Gigante AB shares Hollywood’s core values in relation to drama: it functions to normalise life and to absorb the other into the mainstream. The typical narrative framework involves a personal overcoming. It is all subjectivity.

AB in making G uses the mechanics of his plot to appropriate the ‘other’ and massage it into the mainstream schema of appearances and affects. The world of the alienated and marginal is neutralised and rendered comfortable. The core of the film is G’s obsessive pursuit of the cleaner, Julia or rather the image of the cleaner, because this story is about image not the actual. The cleaner is an image emptied of meaning, a figure from a poster who might step out of the billboard and walk the streets. Except of course she never loses her mono dimensionality.

G is obsessive not just about the cleaner but also about his fitness regime. A daily sweated work out and the image of a pin up girl: it’s like the guy’s in prison, And in significant ways he is, but Gigante ignores this layer of possibility opting to show that the way out is through a romantic relationship AB’s purpose is not to explore state of mind or context but simply to show that a force called love can transform situations and redeem. The world of alienation and marginality is annexed by Hollywood’s favourite mechanism: falling in love with a one dimensional being. In which state the smitten is endowed with the ability to overcome. It’s a fake proposal from a film that twists the reality it establishes into Hollywood fantasial tale.

Obsession with the image of another can never have a good ending: there is only the possibility of frustration disappointment disenchantment. Psychic investment along such a narrowed channel can only lead to an explosion of some sort, not necessarily externally violent, sometimes internally shattering. Gigante as a film grounded in obsession with image but content to ignore its implications, is a malevolent fabrication, a lie.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Audition Takashi Miike (Jap 2000) Rijo Ishibashi. Eihi Shiina

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 19 May 2011; ticket: £5.00

Cherry Blossom Time

“The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from the epoch’s judgements about itself. The surface-level expressions…provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things.” ( S.Kracauer, the Mass Ornament)

Takashi Miike’s (TM) Audition is a film stylishly but not particularly well made or shot that lacks even internal coherence. But it is remarkable in its unrelenting expression of one controlling idea that gives it shape force and relevance: the abandonment of history. Specifically the abandonment by the Japanese of their cultural legacy.

Item: in his wooing of Asami, Shigeharu dines her in the sort of high class anodyne restaurant that could be located anyplace in the world. As she responds to his personal questions what we are most acutely aware of is not so much her reply rather the crashing sound of the passing traffic outside. The pervasive white noise of the 21st century Japan threatens to drown even personal history.

From the film’s opening sequence in which Shigeharu’s wife dies in hospital hooked up to high technology, through all the establishing domestic and work locations we see a culture that looks and feels Anonymous/First World/American. Shigeharu’s home could be in suburban Boston: the offices, the streets, clothes shoes and food eaten are all replicated American forms. Japan as a culture has been obliterated: Japan is become transposed USA. The scored musical soundtrack is sometimes strange but although there are subtle hints of the pentatonic scale, it is characterised in the main by Western diatonic harmony. There is nothing in main establishing settings in which Audition is located that that even hints at cultural historical or eidetic memory. That is until Asami attends the audition.

In setting up the audition Shigeharu talks to his friend about Japan who comments that all Japan is lonely; Japan comprises only of lonely people. This society exists in aloneness. As Audition develops it seems that this comment probes deeper and beyond reference to the networks of lateral ties that interweave relationships and create couples families and groups. The deeper significance of the comment is that Japanese individuals have become detached from the culture that previously defined them and was part of their identity. They have become people without roots to anchor their individualities into the social matrix. They are lonely because they are incomplete: they have no past, only an eternally renewing present. Loneliness is a psychic state endemic in those without a past, knowledge and belief in which psychically validates both the present and the future. If there is no past who can have belief in the future which flows from the past, a time that itself was once itself the future of a preceding present. Without the past vital interconnections are severed in the social matrix conditioning a persistent and default state of anxiety about identity and neurotic existential loneliness.

Without a past there are no Japanese. There are mutated replicants condemned to live out an eternal present without meaning.

Audition’s idea is given expressive mediation through the opposition of Shigeharu and Asami: the male and the female who stand structurally opposed in their reactions to the dilemma of their deracinated culture.

Shigeharu’s solution to the problem of ’no wife situaion’ (loneliness) is to search for form without content. (a quest also undertaken by Western men and women who look to foreign cultures to find spouses) Shigeharu wants to be a tourist in his own country free to gaze upon images of the other without understanding. For an audience ballet is form without content but for the performer it is form with personal meaning: pain. Shigeharu solution to his loneliness is to create a two dimensional simulacrum of the traditional characteristic cultural traits and to locate a personal reality on this surface as if it had depth. Asami’s ideas are quite different.

Our first impression of Asami from her resume are that she embodies traditional Japanese traits and this impression is confirmed when we see her walk into the audition room as a physical statement of Japanese female ideal. A long white dress suggesting a kimono; immaculate long brushed black hair; submissive presence.

Asami of course does not have the resources to resurrect the culture from which she is cut adrift. She is aware that the surviving elements of her cultural legacy are only forms retained as a phantom acknowledgement of the past but without substance. Asami’s solution to this dilemma is different from Shigeharu’s: she does not want to denigrate the past by resurrecting it in the form of a cheap advertising image.

Asami’s idea is to relocate the past, the legacy of Japan, on and in the body. In actions of desperate psychic resonance she displaces the history of her society onto the body in the form of pain and mutilation. The logic that is at work is psychotic but it has a rationale. The past and images of the past cannot be bought and sold cheaply. There must be protection of these things and Asami is the gatekeeper. If Shigeharu desires contentless simulacrum of the past, it cannot be without a price. It can only be had at personal cost to him. He cannot have Asami and all her image represents except on her terms. He will have to pay with his body and perhaps his life. As he experiences fear pain and mutilation at her hands he will have to understand that his desires are being satisfied but in a manner he did not anticipate. The message from Asami is that these things are not to be played with like toys. They are real forces. Audition is ultimately about something real.

Audition looks like a typical Asian torture porn movie. But as Kracauer observes it is precisely in its surface level expressions that it expresses a deeper and more disturbing vision of contemporary Japan.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

How I ended this Summer Alexsei Popogrebski (2010 Rus) Grigory Dobrygin; Sergei Puskepalis

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 2 May 2011 Ticket price £7.70

Chekhov in No Man’s Land

How I ended this summer (HETS) is a film made by Alexei Popograbski (AP) that in its opening sections takes the manner and form of a Chekhov short story. Chekhov’s short stories (and his plays) are structured using the classical unities of time place and character. Chekhov writes with deceptive simplicity often introducing an event to create a dynamic interpolation in the situations and characters he has set up. The event provokes change, sometimes but not always remarked in the state of mind of a character; often this change, described as it takes place is externally imperceptible. An event in a Chekhov short story in induces reflection, both in the character and in the reader. In the Chekhov mode the short story shares some qualities with neo realist cinema in that events often have contrasting readings. Firstly by the characters involved and then as a powerful secondary dynamic is released, readings located only in the mind of the reader. The reader is left to consider those things that are unsaid and those things that may come to pass after Chekhov has closed the story.

HETS, like a Chekhov short story, is initially based on close careful observation of its situations and subjects: a chamber piece, set in an artic meteorological station, for two men and voice. Whilst it stays true to its form as situaTion and character piece it has coherence and tension within the terms of its own structure. But suddenly, AP betrays the intelligence of the set up, abandons reflection and state of mind and opts for the banality of narrative form as a means of rounding off the film. In the characteristic manner of many contemporary film makers AP betrays the traditions of his Russian roots, betrays his own historical cultural forms and allows Hollywood to dictate the style and nature of the second half of the film.

The critical weakness of HETS is that it subverts its own structure, for no gain, by introducing into the body of his film a lengthy chase section that is filled and tricked out with the clichés of this kind of cinema, using ambiguity of camera framing as a device to scare the audience. Initially AP sets in play a number of psychic forces: The old school meteorologist steeped in personal and collective history opposing the young tyro scientist fresh from college and living outside history in the virtual world of computer games.: the static decaying location of the weather station and the archaic radio system that has to be used for communication. These powerful resonant psychic assets are suddenly ditched as the films lurches into another zone: the section of the film where it suddenly deviates from its anchoring in character and situation into a cod horror chase sequence. The flight of the young man from the real or imagined fury of his colleague. The tone of the film changes; the unity of place and character are fractured. HETS becomes Hollywood gothic, with the older guy, as real or imagined pursuer, caste as the bogey man. HETS loses its key in the realm that it first establishes; the psychological interactions between the two guys are replaced by the crudity of the action. Chekhov is ditched by AP’s meaningless transposition of his material into an alien key. A change that leads nowhere in relation to the psycho-social realm that has been previously established. This psychic dead end has to be resolved by a dramaturgic revenge device that is practically meaningless in terms of the dynamics set in play in the establishing sections of the film.

The problem may lie in the calculation of the director that in order to justify the use of film as an expressive form he needed to produce a feature film length product . AP may have felt that without an action sequence HETS natural length would be somewhere about ±60 mins: short story, novella length. AP, to qualify for feature film status, may have felt his script should follow ‘the guidelines’. The rules for feature films taught by all those script writing courses (based on the Hollywood template) that have been peddled round Europe brainwashing people for the last 20 years. AP’s script conforms almost slavishly to the received wisdom of Schrader et al: the liminal phase, the change, the plateau the resolution the new situation. A formulaic product that ultimately is the negation of imagination and creativity in film. Initially the HETS held out the promise of a film of pure creative delight. By the time it had run its course HETS looked like a movie that conforms to the rules.

I was uncertain about the use made of time lapse photography in the film. It is a common feature of many of contemporary films that they contain long shots of landscapes. Where there is an enfolding of the scape into the reflective body of the film, this can work. But often these shots function as little more than travelogue style fill: the pretty sunset shot. Their insertion into films is simply as a time slug to help fill out the material to feature length. In HETS the location and nature of the oppositional characters provides a setting where time and place have meaning located in the relations between the two men and the social vistas that their separate and conjoined experience of life call into play. But the use of time lapse for many of the landscape shots seemed little more than another gimmick. The land – sky -sea scapes were remarkable in themselves and didn’t need tech make-overs to emprint their significance. Did AP use time lapse to try and suggest an analogous grounding for the relationship between the two guys and the passage of time? If so why? I don’t know and HETS slides into an exercise in banality….

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Circle (Dayereh) Jafar Panahi (Iran 2000) Nargess Mamizadeh; Fereshteh Orafely; Maryiam Almooni

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle, 21 April 2011 Ticket price: £5.00

Life in a concentration camp

In retrospect the Circle’s (C) last shot, a long circular pan is an ominous anticipatory journey, a portent of Jafar Panahi’s (JP) own chosen destiny. In the police cell, the camera pans off the disdainful supercilious look of the whore whose arrest we have seen and with whom we have ridden in the paddy wagon. The camera moves across the walls of the room. At first it appears the cell is empty. But as the camera continues its course it reveals the presence in the cell of all the women who have been in the film. Their faces stare out at us. The face of those who have lost the power to direct their own lives; the face of those upon whom the force and logic of power exercised. Faces whom power despises and punishes. A face that JP recognised even then as his own, ten years before he was handed a 6 year sentence of imprisonment for making propaganda against the regime.

I think the extraordinary feature of the Circle is that JP takes complete ownership of his film in the sense that the film allows only for one unequivocal reading of its meaning. As an expressive medium the Circle is shot using long takes in which the camera typically accompanies the women: as they watch as they hide as they flee as they walk as they wait. As the women move through the film JP’s camera is always with them to the extent that they no longer appear as objects of the camera lens. Rather the women are themselves the lens through which we can see the political system that they sustain through their degradation as in the extraordinary penultimate long shot where in a medium close shot we sit with the arrested whore as she is driven to the cells in the police bus. We partake both in her humiliation and her contemptuous response.

The Circle is an uncompromising attack on a country whose present political system bases its actual legitimacy on a systematic suppression of women. A political system that functions by the containment of women within the prison of the male psyche. Claiming a spurious religious provenance, the State has set up a repressive apparatus to encode and enforce the inferior status of women. This comprises a legislative code covering all aspects of their rights and behaviour in the public and private realms with specialised agencies tasked with duties of enforcement.

This system using a major group of a society as a ritual degraded scapegoat has a parallel reference in the use made of the Jews by the Nazis. It is different of course in context and intensity. I’m not saying that there are industrialised death camps in Iran. The points of similarity are in structured legally based and policed segregation. The similarity to which I point is located in the creation of apparatus of subjugation for some social groups. Twisted and distorted power systems can stabilise through demonisation processes. In Iran women are not quite seen as demons; but in their sexuality their emotional volatility their uncleanliness, they are seen always as potentially demonic entities. Women are projected threats to the pureness of the Male: Jews projected threat to the purity of the Aryan. The system at a stroke creates a self fulfilling psychic sense of superiority for the ‘pure group’ which has at the same time a given a stake in the social mechanism of vicious violent repression. This is what we see in the Circle.

With the Circle JP does not pull his punches; he makes no concessions in this respect to the sensibilities of Mahout Ahmedinejad and his psychotic cronies because there is no point: any more than there was any point to pander to sensibilities of Hitler and his henchmen. JP sends a message without compromise: Circle is an indictment of a political system and the cowardly forces mainly male, that sustain it. The system is rotten and criminal. As in Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes Iran operates, in particular by rewarding psychotic violent types of individuals with them secure and profitable employment as part of the apparatus whose purpose is the subjugation a particular social group. And in general Men are rewarded by giving them hegemony over women, giving them a sense of their right to an unalienable superiority.

Circle’s message is bleak and unforgiving of the ‘system’. But the Circle is no polemic because of the extraordinary way in which the film is shot and the complexity of the central metaphor, the circle, which is incorporated both in the narrative strips of action and in its style of the filmic composition. The circle is a female symbol and the narrative strips of action take the viewer from the long opening shot, with its wide parabolic pan, of the birth of a girl to the final cell shot already quoted. We go from the birth of a new being, a new soul within this system, that is immediately damned for being the wrong ’sex’, to death of spirit by crushing and pulping it through the repression apparatus. And yet, in the contemptuous demeanour of the whore as she rides in the bus there is a residual of hope.

The defining shots of the movie are all long, many of them huge circular 360 degree pans. These circular shots are in themselves composed as complete orbits of Iranian society, so that as we move through the circle we can see everything. The busy public agitation and movement of the men; the dead static shrouded nature of the women; the confidence of the male hunters the fear of the hunted women, the bride and the whore existing at different points of the same circle, the freedom of the men the imposition upon women to adhere to multiple legally sanctioned restrictions. We glimpse all of these fashioned into the slow interlocking circular shots, chains woven together that bind the women to the male social order.

Whilst not over stated sexuality lies at the core of the film. Repressive regimes that wish to operate like replicating machines are usually anxious to channel sexuality into approved forms. Sexuality as a strong individual subjective force resists. Such States usually operate dual standard morality based on appearances and disclosed or revealed infractions. Infraction is Ok as long as appearances can be maintained, (plausible deniability being the last line of defence) or if in the case of disclosed or revealed infraction, pleas for mitigation are sustainable. In Iran the woman as ‘ by her nature potential demon’ offers the male who ‘strays’ a solid stand-by excuse: he was corrupted by the insatiable sexual wantonness of womankind. At the same time women denied access to the employment market, or unmarriable perhaps because they are no longer virgins, are forced into marginal prostitution as a source of income. In seeking sex work, because of their marginalisation, they are caught in the double bind: the work towards which they are economically pushed has in this sexually repressed society many employment opportunities; at the same it makes them even more vulnerable to men, confirms their status as demons and legitimises the ideology of this society and its apparatus.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams W. Herzog (2010; Fr. USA) Camera: Peter Zeitlinger

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 31 March 2011; ticket price £8.50

Did Herzog forget something…?

At first as I watched The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it seemed to me a TV doc tricked out with 3D wow factor imagery to enable a pedestrian but worthy documentary to be screened theatrically and make some money. As it developed its theme it seemed to do no more than go through the regulation art archaeological genuflections, a routine sweep with music through the Chauvet cave complex with its ice age paintings. Destined to succeed as a cinema release because of its core subject matter, the paintings and because it came stamped with the Herzog imprimatur.

What is difficult to evaluate is the extent to which WH has structured into the Cave of Forgotten Dreams (CFG) a laminate structural parody which overlays WH’s sense of serious intention declared in the film by both his voice and the interviews he conducts with the scientists. To some extent most of his recent work seems to have an element of parody, taking standard filmic structures and then undermining them by use of expressive content that deconstructs the overt claims of the film to be about what it appears to be about. An overlaid parody is a type of fabrication, perpetrated first on the contributors and later on viewers (who may fail to get it). If WH has filmed CFD with a shadow parodic form overlaying its the primary structure, it looks like WH have given himself an intellectual fall back position. This is a stance acceptable where film is made under politically censorious conditions; but it’s a position which under other conditions may betray the lack the moral courage to say what it is that you have seen. Or of course WG may be on the level, and intended to make a film with one consistent level of meaning: the proto-reverential.

In heavily hushed tone, archly emphatic of wondrous nature of the Chauvet site, WH leads us on a tour of this complex. Intercut in the course of the tour, WG talks to scientists whose work is centred on the caves. In fact the caves are only open to the scientists: they alone have access to them, they alone have the key to open the massive steel door that leads inside the cave; they alone have access to the interior of the site which contains the beautiful paintings (and many other fragments and traces of ice age accretions). All who gain entry to this hallowed ground, including WH and his crew, are subject to strict rules governing all aspects of movement and behaviour, the which severely circumscribes the positioning of the cameras.

As the cave’s human and archaeological narrative is hypothetically unpacked by the scientists from the clues they have found, the possibility suggests itself that the cave was a place of Shamanistic ritual. The paintings are all found in the deepest and darkest recesses where no light would have penetrated, A sort of holy of holies, an inner sanctum which few were permitted to enter, where idle gaze was restricted: a place bound up with religious practices whose purpose and meaning is now lost.

And when we consider the present situation at Chauvet, not much has changed. What has happened is that the scientists have become the new priests, the new shamans and voodoo practitioners. As WG’s voice informs us only the scientists have access to this place; only the scientists may gaze upon the wonders of the cave, only the scientists may tread where no other foot may step. The scientists it is who explain and reveal to us the meaning of all this. With their monopolisation of access they alone caste the chicken bones and read significance into the patterns. Like the shamans and priests of old, they control the sources of the readings. Technology is technology: whether magical or scientific. And the success is to a large extent defined by the control of meaning. In CFD, WH’s scientists take on the de facto mantel of a religion. They have their technical apparatus and processes which reveal to them the hidden aspects of matter which legitimises the statements and assertions they make about the nature of what we are seeing, and by extension, our own nature. As we are taken through the CFD the overlaid lamination suggests that nothing structurally has changed here in 32,000 years except belief systems with scientists supplanting shamans. The ‘public’ is excluded by the series of rationales relating to the delicate state of the cave as previously they were perhaps excluded by a series of religious rationales related to profane violation of the mysteries of the sanctum. We are bound in an irony that ice age man and information age man operate parallel systems.

I think that in making CFD, WH is using the film to make the claim for himself to be an artist guide, a sort of light bearer into the cave of the collective human soul. Either that or he is playing the trickster spoof to the hilt. The film has a tone and style of conceited self importance. It is a feature of contemporary Western culture that religion, with its complex psychic technology and it’s interpretation of meaning for man has been superseded by the arts. Scientists may be the technical shamans, but in the West it’s the artist to whom we look to reveal meaning; whose function it is to tell us who we are or who directs our sensual and psychic engagement with the world. Art from being the servant of God, becomes the source in its own right of sustaining self belief, to the extent that some people will tell you that they ‘live’ for art or music etc in a manner in which they seem to believe these forms can be embraced without context or meaning.

In this sense the paintings in the Chauvet complex are presented in the film as a sort of Garden of Eden moment. Not in the sense of the Fall: in this story self awareness replaces sin as the defining moment; artistic activity is presented as being co-existent with a key development of human consciousness. There is perhaps the defining moment at the end of the film, when WH puts a ‘question’ to the wise old scientist: “Were these paintings the beginning of the human soul?” Of course it is a question that cannot have an answer. The scientist takes the bait and replies. His answer is little more than intellectual babble (I found it impossible to understand), but the emotional glow in his response tells it all. He believes in art: he is a believer. He looks for meaning and finds it.

The aura with which the film is shot, the hushed tone of enunciation, the music on the sound track all conspire to create a mood and tone of revelatory importance implied in the moment when ‘art’ was born. In particular the corny use made by WG of the sound of a ‘heart beat’ laid over the paintings was presumably intended to reinforce in the viewer the idea that the paintings were made at the cusp of life’s beginning, the birth of ‘art’ whose beat continues to pump the life blood of meaning through the social body for ‘liberal’ humankind in the 21st century.

There is a strange postscript which takes place in a large structure, containing a tropical environment that is heated by waste water from a nuclear power station. WH uses this short sequence to introduce strains of thought that are typically whimsical. WG films the crocodiles lazily basking in the warm waters, and using the shared time framework with the paintings, asks what the crocodiles might make of the cave? Then zooming in on the mutant albino crocodiles asks the rhetorical question: “Are we today’s crocodiles looking back in time when we see the paintings?” The stupidity of this po voiced question, asked raised the issue for me of WH’s purpose in making the film: one lamination or two? A straight documentary or a spoof? And who cares?

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk