Film Review

La Dolce Vita Frederico Fellini (1960 Italy) Marcello Mastroianni; Anita Ekburg

Viewed: Side Cinema, Newcastle 22 March 11 ticket price: £5.00

retro crit: Mirror Mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all? Sylvio Berlusconi

of course!

Filmed as a series of psychic fragments Fellini’s (FF) film is an oracular vision of the shape of things to come: the transformation of all areas of life into hallucinogenic spectacle with no distinction between the participant and onlooker. Spectacle fed into the amplification circuitry of the media who both feed off and feed into the images they produce. Fellini’s Dolce Vita is an initiation rite into a Western World driven and controlled by ‘image’ whose present dynamic takes the form of Berlusconni as a demonic hybrid apotheosis of the world of politics and media. As I watched Dolce Vita unfold I was awed by FF’s visionary clarity in relation to the convergence in shape and form of the control apparatus.

The opening sequence of the movie is a statement of intent. We see, flying low over Rome, a helicopter with a huge statue of Christ slung by ropes beneath its undercarriage. The apparition causes everyone to look up at this giant airborne caricature. La Dolce Vita (DV) introduces Christ as the clown of the skies, a cosmic Christ for our entertainment and amusement Ladies and Gentlemen…… The flying Christ merges publicity stunt with religion, marrying the two worlds in a spectacle that presages the movies underlying theme.

A thought: where did FF get this statue? It looks like it was made for the movie, for the brave new world of 1960. More interesting where/ how did he get the idea? Perhaps it was something he actually saw or heard about; anyway, ‘as idea’ it perfectly and succinctly predicates what follows.

In DV, FF uses the structurally broken filmic fragments of action as a mirror to catch Marcello’s reflection as he is transformed and bent into shape by the images and social forces that come to define his life. An early fragment of the film sees him, an inveterate womaniser, spend a night trying to seduce and bed the American film star Sylvia (Anita Ekburg who’s a shoo-in for Marilyn Monroe). In the mirror fragment we see clearly that narcissistic narcosis induced by publicity and media attention have totally absorbed this Diva. Marcello discovers (he takes a little time to get it) that Sylvia is not really of the flesh. She has a body, central to her image but an appendage to her life. She may seem present in the flesh but actually she lives inside an endlessly projected movie of herself.. She isn’t really present; sex with her can only be a two dimensional movie. Sylvia is machine for absorbing fantasy and projecting desire onto the white walls of life. For people like Sylvia life doesn’t flow; rather it takes the form of a sort of eternal recurrence: the same people sets and situations repeated time and time again. This recurrence is only broken by the momentary irruption within Sylvia of fleeting impulses that are for an instant totally insistent, but immediately fade. Time in her life doesn’t flow rather it is compressed into a crystallised everlasting and overwhelming present, bolted like the image of the flying Christ, to an unchanging image of herself.

Marcello has the chance to avoid being trapped in the recurring movie of his projection as an image in two dimensional photogenic space. He has a chance to chose to live through time as he is pulled by his girl friend to accept her love to share her carnality. But each glimpse in the DV mirror fragments shows him drawn further into the spectacle by the fascination of himself as an operating image. Through the shattered fragments of time Marcello develops the idea of himself as an increasingly self referential and narcissistic object. An increasingly emptied out self, refined through the rectifying forces of the media, into a being of pure surface. A centre of attraction and repulsion in the endless parade that he joins to replace the tedium of life.

The music as in all FF’s films complements in form the content of DV. It’s surging rich gorgeous encompassing. Parade music that is intended like the Pied Piper’s flute, to draw in everyone who hears it, to disarm resistance and allows the children to completely abandon themselves to the show. The music is an amalgam of mood feeling and thought swamping and bypassing the human mental faculties as FF fills out DV with sequences of extraordinary fluid shots that capture small and large crowd situations and scenes.

DV opens up worlds as spectacles that absorb, disarm and finally infiltrate the individual. The world of religion filmed as a hysterical fusion of media frenzy and religious hysteria. Catholicism experienced as a testing ground for experiments that would later be internalised and finally replicated by the profane secular order. Marcello cannot see the hilarious farcical religious and media circus caused by two young children claiming to have seen the Virgin. He is absorbed by it, and excited by the prospect of living and working outside time. He breaks (or rather the mirror fragments suggest that he does, for there is no convention of continuity in DV) with his girlfriend and joins the parade of partying which is the gateway to a sort of immortality. The movers and shakers the money and the power exist in a never ending spectacular that engulfs life and pulls everything along with it in a frenzied dance lived out in image and gesture, a saturated narcissism that ends in death. But of course death does not stop the show.

The final sequence on the beach shows the party goers descend onto the beach to gaze at the lifeless form of a huge dead fish. A young innocent girl, introduced earlier in the film as working in the beach café also looks on. Both exist outside the spectacle,

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Journal d’un curé de campagne R. Bresson (1951; Fr) Claude Laydu

Seen at Film Forum NYC Ticket price .50

Film blanc: grace as a circuit of amplification

At the end of Bresson’s film the witness to the curé’s death reports that just before he died the curé clasped the hand of the witness and cried out “ What does it matter? All is grace.” An utterance that brings Journal d’un curé de campagne (Journal) to a close and suggests a vision of the union of body and soul. If you have been ‘in’ the movie it is shattering moment, a striking moment that demands an attempt to understand the forces set in play by the movie and what they might mean. It requires thought. This is difficult.

Here are some thoughts.

In its primary structure Journal is based on the strong oppositional paradox of body and spirit. Much of the curé’s writing (though not all) concerns his sick body. The physical condition of the body is mediated through his thought. In contrast the appearance of the cure’s body in particular his face, shines out with the intensity of his spirit: face photographed so that he radiates a white burnt-in intensity. The inner state of the cure is mediated through his body. The mediated through thought. It is this oppositional structure that drives the film and makes it difficult to approach intellectually. It is understandable intuitively. At the end with his final statement of reconciliation in relation to ‘grace’ I was left speechless, trying to order the turmoil of my thoughts.

Viewed from this scratch end of the 21st century ‘Journal’ is an alien world, a filmscape without Desire. In today’s filmscapes such a thing is rare almost inconceivable.

In relation to Desire, the curé seems to me to be a sort of ‘priest clown’. In the same way that the clown’s whitened face glows out in the circus spotlight, so the lighting set ups give the curé a similar allure. The nature of the clown that is pertinent to the identity of the curé is his primal innocence. The core quality of the clown’s innocence is lack of Desire a want of extrinsic motivation in relation to others. The clown doesn’t manipulate, or scheme or preach. All the cloen does is show what he is, reveal his identity and accept his destiny. The clown is pure being. As we see the curé move through the world we realise that his destiny is not linked to systems of belief or social apparatus: his destiny like that of the true clown belongs to himself. Only he can find and accept what is to come. If others are touched transformed or made to laugh along the way, then so be it. But that was never the point. I think this is different from fatalism; destiny has to be consciously embraced.

The opening shot of ‘Journal’ shows the newly appointed priest of Ambricourt starting his diary and declaring in voice over, his intention of keeping a record of his thoughts as he goes about his work. A daily confessional. The filmic form Bresson adopts for the ‘Journal’ the world as if in a pure optical or sound situation: the images and sounds exist almost as separate entities mirroring the body spirit opposition which is embedded in the structure of the film.

‘Journal’ is a film about what cannot be seen. Bresson shows the physical context of the film: the village, locations events and situations. Everything else has to be surmised, the significant movements take place in another realm: the trials of the body the workings of the spirit. We have some access to the unseen through the curé’s diary: his struggle with his failing body, his doubt and lack of worth. But the curé’s reading of his diary is in many ways oblique; or where it is clear leaves open the issue of interpretation and of integration of what has been said with what has been seen. ‘Journal’ is full of sounds, the indicators of worlds that lie just beyond what is visible: hunters, dogs, gardeners, who announce their presence. Grace and spirit haunt the screen in the image of the priest, their unseen presence felt but often met with spite. Everywhere in Journal the curé meets with fences gates and doors, people who avert their eyes, symbolic obstacles that seem to resist his presence, his showing of himself. The cure is unlike the other country priests whose role is to gently police the community, demand conformity to dogma but practice and preach a relatively uncensorious forgiving faith and bless the people with reassuring homilies. The cure is an intense experience: given to prayer, initially torn by doubt and racked by illness, finally, at death, overwhelmed by inner psychic certainty.

Journal is not about systems. It is about the destiny of an individual who is filled with a force that overflows out of him. This force within the curé does not emanate either from the Catholic Church or its teaching. The Church may have provided an expressive form for some of the curé’s outer psychic emanations; but the power that drove him came from a deeper inner light. That Bresson’s subject is a catholic curé is an accidental: he might be a protestant pastor or even a heroic soviet proselytizer.

I think that what streams forth from curé’s presence is an inner intensity that is powered by his connection to an immanent absolute purity. This he calls ‘God’. There are other names. Whether he is wrestling with doubt about his connection to the Absolute or in union with it, the effect is to distance him from other mortals except those in a similar extreme though perhaps temporary state of receptivity, such as the Contessa..

The dialogue between the curé and the Countess focusing on her hatred for God is central to the film’s moral core. Her final acceptance of the death of her son followed by her sudden death are Bresson’s statement of a moral imperative, and perhaps one of the reasons he chose to film Bernanos’ novel . There are no cheap solutions to the problem of our separation from the absolute. In principle, no miracles. What is of the earth will not save us, it will probably mock us. The world of the flesh and the spirit, the world of hate and love, are separate spheres each operating according to their own light, their own logic. The two worlds never meet in the outcome of events. Where they do meet it is through the medium of the individual who at the point of contact experiences a shattering of individuality which never leaves them even when the experience is subject to the processes of doubt and questioning.

Journal was shot by French cinematographer LH Burel. Burel was Gance’s cinematographer on Napoleon (1929) and went on to work with Bresson on another three films. Burel films the image of the curé so that his face appears almost transfigured, his face burns out an intense inner light. Yet although Burel must have used an assortment of filters and high key lighting set-ups, the film seems to have few strong shadows. Visually the film is shot using the lighting set ups to create light as an affirmation of being, and to avoid the caste of shadow with their metaphorical symbolism of encroaching darkness. A symbolism that is traditional high key lighting genres such as film noir. But this is film blanc.

adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

We Need to Talk about Kevin Lynne Ramsey (2011; UK) Tilda Swinton
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 25 Oct 2011; Ticket: £7.95

Kevin seems like a Christmas tree. Instead of being decorated with baubles and lights, he is festooned with the markers of his otherness.

In Lynne Ramsay’s (LR) film We Need to Talk about Kevin (NTK) the past isn’t so much a foreign country as a place we visit by using Eva’s press button text message service. I think the manner in which the past is accessed by Eva indicates that NTK uses time, in the form of the flashback, as a purely mechanical device triggered by image and gesture. LR focuses on the mechanics of the recollection image. The sentient organic field of meaning, and the search for meaning is not probed. The situation, the otherness of Kevin who is characterized as a Daemon, is presented through the eye of the director and Tilda Swinton as something that has to be coped with: not as something which has to be understood. LR’s flashback structure is designed to be exempletive of the difficulty Kevin presents to Eva but it’s too crude to engage with strata of ideas and possibilities that lie under the surface of the situation. By the end of the film its mechanicality exerts a deadening effect on consciousness. Closed off and characterized by its temporal mechanism. NTK has nowhere to go. In evading the realm of understanding LR has little to say about the situation it brings to the viewer’s attention except the banality that is is hard being Kevin’s mum. Nothing is revealed.

Kevin is conceived as a Daemon a soul born with ‘destiny’. Born to be a mass murderer. Born to have a mechanical path through life. There are hints that Eva is knowledgeable about Eastern religions (the early sequence that looks like it might be a Hindu ceremony) but the film is oblique about this as a context as it is about everything else governing the film’s placement in time and space. As NTK doesn’t engage with Eva at the level of understanding, which is an organic process, she is reduced to a series of affect images, looks that the viewer is expected to read that point to her distressed state. The affect images are presented both as expositions and explanations of her mechanical trauma.

The temporal relations in the film, its flash back structure, are used to manipulate rather than to open out the time space of the situation. The film flicks back and forth like demented text messages between Eva’s post massacre situation and the times before Kevin’s rampage. These time flicks are mediated by the affect images of Eva, ‘her look’, as some event or action engages her recollection images of: Kevin’s birth, his childhood and his adolescence.

As the movie develops the mechanicality of this recollection device becomes evident; the predictability of the connection produces diminishing returns. It becomes apparent that Eva is a memory machine. Eva sees something hears something – looks: cut to – Kevin’s birth – Kevin learning – Kevin something or other. The film is overdetermined in its structure, unable to negotiate Eva’s state of mind as part of the film’s structure. The audience are relegated to the status of one who gazes rather than one who sees. If this was a typical Hollywood action movie, fine, it’d be appropriate to the ambitions of the genre. In a film with NTK subject matter, it’s disappointing that LR betrays and throws out the European line of filmic sensibility for a crassly Hollywood solution to the problem of what film to make. It feels like a sell out to the money, another calling card movie.

This Hollywood style of film making through image manipulation deadens the film’s energy which LR trys to revive with a groovey sound track. The viewer engaged only in gaze, is treated by LR as a passive agent to be toyed with in the classic action movie manner: exploitation of the edit point. Cutting back and forth through time in the editing, works in NTK as means to catch the viewer off guard. LR’s uses the flashback edit points as shock devices to short circuit the audience’s critical faculties. The incoming edit is often fashioned to disturb, to have immediate visual or sound impact. LR presses a button, audience get a shocking image. The reaction triggered in the audience is: “Woah this is weird!” rather than “What is happening in this situation?”

Lack of any contexts is a logical consequence of need to keep the material contained and controlled. NTK which exploits temporal relations to suppress wider timeline context (in this respect similar to Malick’s Tree of Life) . Temporal context is not important for films that engage with the forces of interiority. But in NTK there are only exteriorities. Experiencing only filmic temporal self referencing in NTK’s actions and images, the viewer is left hanging aimlessly in time unable to relate the fictive events on the screen to other contexts. Are we before or after 9/11, before or after Colombine? NTK takes place in a carefully contrived time vacuum, a bubble world where the filmic design carefully expunges the actual world.

With the exception of the suburban setting and the implied values of the American home, LR barely develops the social and cultural matrices which contain the events. The massacre is an event not just without a chronology but also without a social context. The school the community his father’s job have no place in the film. Kevin and Eva are deterritorialised characters, without interiority or exteriorities, persona onto whom anything can be hung. Kevin seems like a Christmas tree. Instead of being decorated with baubles and lights, he is festooned with the markers of his otherness.

There are a number of films, where ‘WEIRD’ in itself is central to the movie as a conceptual device. NTK is replete with ‘the weird’: fingernails, gloopy sandwiches, little balls of matter. In some American films (there is almost what one might call a WHIRD genre) weird plays a pivotal cognitive role as a signifier of the discontinuous incongruous relation between individuals and their culture, between the conformist culture and the outsider. Image driven food. personal habits, odd remarks made, all serve to give off signs in their own right. of an individuals fundamental psychic disengagement and detachment from the core. In NTK ‘the weird’ in particular weidness food, plays a key role as a signifier that there is something visibly disconcerting about Kevin. The problem is that Weird is a signifier without significance. Kevin is treated in the film a bit like a Christmas tree. Instead of being decorated with baubles and lights, he is festooned with the markers of his otherness.

In comparison with Gus Van Sant’s 2003 movie Elephant, also about a high school massacre, NTK’s seems conceptually and structurally impoverished. Elephant taking its cue from the Columbine killings set up a psychogeography of space, a situational analysis of the event. The film characterized by long takes in the physical environment of the school, used the filmic possibilities of the camera rather than scripted dialogue to contrive a parallel resemblance between the design of the school and the design of video games. The school had many of the special characteristics of a video game: long corridors, 90 degree turns, series of rooms and spaces that were all the same. The killing sequence was carried through with the same detached quality that players bring to the video game, dispassionate killing in order to score. Elephant builds up slowly and inexorably, makes the situation visible to the audience, allowing them to see. In contract NTK is characterized by a heavy handed determination which shows us little and leads us nowhere.
adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Black Swan Darren Aronofski (USA 2010) Natalie Portman

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 1st Feb 2011; ticket: £7.85

Adrin Neatrour writes: the view from inside the bedroom

The cinema was full, ok it was the small screening theatre, but full of 18 to 23 year old women. This was their movie and anticipation was palpable. I wondered what had they come to see?

They had come to see Desire.

The triumph of Desire

Fixated on the close up of the face (mask?) as the key index shot, Aronofski’s (DA) movie Black Swan (BS) takes its form from Madison Avenue’s key understanding about how to sell: adverts link personal success to product. Aronofski’s film replicates (BS can also be seen as parody) the key elements of this advertising form in Nina’s (Natalie Portman) quest for success and perfection in her journey from home via the subway to work. As in soap opera these spaces are linked through the face which is realised as an expressive mask. This mask is the medium, an emoting plastic object through which the audience participates in the movements and cross currents of desire. We see Nina’s face travel not just through space, from home subway work, but also through a series of trials by ordeal as her desire is tested in a series of inner conflicts before her final assertive triumph.

In the Madision Avenue version, the use of the right product leads to the object of desire: success. We follow the face of an actress (or actor – but women’s hair is a particularly strong visual fetish of success) as she is transformed from being unremarked to being remarked: some attribute of the body attains an expressive public perfection, allowing self to attain completion.

DA takes the advertising premise of an outer transformation leading to success and inverts it. Success comes through a series of symbolic inner ordeals ( many of them fashionable) which create a psychic justification for the narcissism which is the pivot of flaunted contemporary lifestyles. The self centred world is validated on its own terms.

Nina the protagonist the Black Swan, instead of having something simple like a zit cream to thank, is symbolically loaded with an incoherent jumbly rattle bag of psychic states which somehow (thanks to the wondrous filmic possibilities of shot juxtaposition and editing) simultaneously inhibit, amplify and contribute to the final perfection of her Desire. Borrowing heavily from better film makers such as Polanski Powell Russell, using the visual tricks and clichés from schlock horror school of filmmaking, DA symbolically attaches to Nina every intra personal affliction in the book. The Vampire mum, hallucinations triggered by predictable objects (mirrors!) and situations, altered physical states, paranoia, self mutilation, cutting, bulimia, anorexia and a few more I shouldn’t wonder. Heavy handed editing and shameless homage ( lets be kind) make anything possible as DA loads these ‘states’ onto Nina as casually as Dietrich drops a hint.

These tribulations do not deflect or inhibit the Desire. They are part of the truth of the desire because the Desire only has internal referents. There are no external referents in the movie. It takes place in the solipsist world of the adolescent girl’s bedroom. Ballet functions as a site of the projection, a useful one because of the costumes, the haircuts, the masks etc which generate image, but the site of projection might be any world: sport, music biz, fashion, opera etc. The backdrop’ selected is just a site onto which project the fantasies reflected back from the bedroom mirror.

As intimated BS is crudely shot mostly shot reverse shot and acted out as a soap experience. This is no more than was either necessary or demanded as we are watching a crude narcissistic fantasy, different in content but not in form from run of the mill pornography. The desire reflected in the mirror of solipsism is the desire of the crippled mind to retain it’s crippled nature, secluded in its crippled world and yet able somehow to achieve the dream. The desire that the bedroom door never be opened, that the world outside the door not exist yet everything outside the door be possible.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Blood on the Moon Robert Wise (USA 1948) Robert Mitcham; Barbara Bel Geddes

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 13 01 2011; Ticket price £4

Never got why this movie is titled Blood on the Moon? Either a silly title or perhaps some obscure menstrual metaphor is implied.

Blood on the Moon (BM) opens with a series of shots of Robert Mitcham (RM) making his way across a ridge in a downpour of rain, an atmospherically pre-emptive opening that anticipates the dark opening sequences which set the scene for a series of complex plot developments.

It’s a long time since I’ve watched a Western, and Blood on the Moon delivered with varying degrees of success, some typical attributes associated with the genre: the lone gunman, the encompassing role of nature; and typical oppositions: different social groupings and gender. Under Robert Wise’s (RW) direction BM handled some of these elements better than others.

The structural core of BM is the performance of RM as ‘gun for hire’. Unlike the toilers of the land, the hired status gives him the freedom to move on and to make his own judgments and RM’s laconic presence and babyface ultimately hold the uneven scenario together. RM’s performance as Jim Garry is detached and amused, cool, like gumshoes in Chandler and Cheyney stories. No matter what is going on, or who is employing him, the Man for Hire imposes his style on situations; he sees what is happening and in action plays out his moral code. In movies characterised by fast moving action scripts, the affect image of the gun for hire/gumshoe face is unchanging: the constant source of reference. No expression of emotion; only the expression of ‘a knowing’. Whoever supplies him with an excuse or explanation or account, whatever the outcome of action or information, the world view of the man for hire remains the same: tired cynical but knowing, prepared to do what is necessary by the light of the code. For this reason we keep coming back to the face: the referent. In BM, RM’s small baby face is an expressive medium that we can read and against which we can measure our own reactions to what has happened. In Hollywood movies featuring the detached male the face is the constant: Mitcham’s, Wayne’s. Bogart’s. The scenario, the backgrounds, the characters may change at ferocious pace but that look the look of wry detached amusement becomes our talisman the movie incubus that directs our perception: some one knows what is happening and can do something about it. The detachment and coolness expressing the code, assure us that it is power without arrogance; power that will not by its nature be abused. RM’s performance in BM is a low key deterritorialised statement of power in a complex world where we are often powerless to act. it ispart of a cinema of benign vicarious resolutions.

BM is noted for its high key noir cinematography. It’s a filming style that certainly characterises the opening half of the movie and that works to create a mood of prevailing conspiracy. Whilst the ‘noir’ sequences are establishing a psychological atmosphere in the town, they stand in opposition to the exterior establishing shots. It has to be said that in BM these are a little formulaic often comprising stock shots of Monument Valley. Still they establish the idea of another world, of nature, of land as a domain that is a force in its own right. Even if that force is never actualised in the movie. In gumshoe movies, shots of the city are often effectively used to establish a suggestive context for the action. shots of the city by night depicting a chaotic multitude of lights automobiles and people. These kinds of city shots provide context for complex narrative and even suggest an evaluative framework that story can be seen against the idea that it is part of this slippery shifting ever changing world. The background, the natural shots in Westerns serve a similar function but have a different meaning. The encompassing sky, the great stacks of Monument valley dwarf the affairs of men setting man and his machinations against the passing of aeons. They also remind that whereas man can take on man it is quite another matter to take on nature, as in the end she always endures whilst we pass away.

The point at which BM starts to lose tension is where the romantic interest starts to irrupt into the structure of the film, changing the opposition on which the movie pivots about from the good evil axis to a male female axis. The good evil axis continues but is severely handicapped by the romantic angle. In BM, RW never integrates these two defining psychic forces. It is as if there are from a given point in BM two different scenarios at work.

The best gumshoe movies integrate the good evil and male female axes by merging the oppositions so that the male female axis was also opposed on the good evil axis, thereby sustaining tensions. The best Westerns probably don’t introduce a male female axis, preferring to rely on the tensions of good and evil in the context of nature.

Many Westerns though do introduce male female romantic notion; it usually leads to a downbeat reduction in dramatic tension. The reason for this is the usual (there are exceptions) casting of the female ‘role’ as a suburban housewife. In Westerns the female role often has to epitomise the mission of civilise the male. The men and the women come from different worlds: the male from the world of primal action set against the natural order; the female from the interior world of the Readers Digest. Producers and directors obviously had difficulty with the real women of the West. They were probably often too similar to the men. What was needed for the film industry, at a basic ideological level, was womankind who embodied the idealised values of America that were not found in the men. Individuality had to be opposed by family values, directness by respect for feelings, risk taking by carefulness, action by leisure (church). The core here is family values. Hollywood post Hay was highly committed to establishing the family as the key pillar of American society and values. The tendency was to build the family into nearly all productions, in particular those story lines located in primary male worlds, as an ideological statement of intent. BM is an obvious example of this ideology at work, and the crude way the female role is built into the movie gradually undermines it until at the end all its tensions have collapsed into pottage of romantic sentimentality, about which not even RM’s glassy eyed demeanour can do anything.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Catfish Henry Joost Ariel Schulman (USA 2010) Janiv Schulman

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle; 19 Dec 2010; Ticket: £7.50

city slickers or reel seekers…

Catfish (C ) presents itself as being an exercise in actual film making. A documentary embedded in the process of uncovering a situation and shot as events and reactions to events that were filmed, unfold. It looked and felt more like a retro construct (you take an underwater camera on a doc shoot?) in which directors Joost and Schulman (JS) were able to bring coherence and a certain moral conviction to their material as part of a filmic act of containment.

Moral debate lies at the core of C as a project. The directors, JS and subject Niv, who is S’s brother, are anxious to present their film not as an exploitation flick of a sad woman in a sad situation, but rather as a commentary on the problematic nature of evaluating claims made to identity in contemporary web based personal communications. They also want to anticipate objections to the movie on the basis of exploitation of its naïve subject, Angela by claiming that Angela as the naïve subject was the better, in a psychological and moral sense, for having her web based fabrication exposed and that she would benefit from the recognition she gained for her paintings through their exposure in C.

In documentary film making there is the moral issue of process which of course often relates to the moral issues of content. At the core of any documentary film is the issue as to what is going on here? Dramas based on fiction don’t usually have the issue of process as problematic: what is happening is the realisation of a scripted doing by actors. The process of filming documentaries raises fundamental issues as to whether what the viewer experiences are scripted or unscripted doings; and the extent to which the film makers allow these layers and laminations of film to be visible. A documentary of course may be scripted in the sense that there is a coherent schedule of events the director plans to record: interviews and action. The nature of the interviews and actions as responses may be highly predictable as is often evident from docs. But predictability of content is different from content being scripted by the film maker. The use of scripted interview responses acted out as if spontaneous and faked footage presented as actual, breeches the tacit pact of trust between film maker and viewer, that each shares the same understanding as to what is happening. In docs where the filmed material is in some way faked or scripted but not transparent as such, the viewer misframes the material, and is contained in this misconstruing by the film maker(s). The viewer is placed in a situation where they may think one thing is happening, when in fact something entirely different is going on.

In documentary films there are often blurred lines in recorded interviews and action that make the question as to whether the index material breeches endemic trust, difficult to assess. This appraisal is made more problematic by biases and fabrications that can be perpetrated at the editing stage, in which mistakes, failures, anomalous statements, judgements and opinions contrary to the approved line, can all be cut from the film to present a homogenous ideologically succinct product that misrepresents the world that it claims to depict. Again where this type of presentation is systematically effected, the audience is contained: what is actually taking place is containment.

C claims to be a film process recorded sequentially by the filmmakers, in which they uncover a series of fabricated claims sourced from the pages of Facebook. The story starts with Niv receiving an attached painting that is claimed to be the work of a young child called Abby. The film follows up clues and leads, about the child and her family through detective work on the Web and Facebook until the story unravels as a series of false claims in relation to identity made by a middle aged woman called Angela. Angela is married to a man who has two severely disabled older sons from a previous relationship and she spends much of her time caring for them and yearning to escape.

The uncovering process which is the core of the film’s structure and its basis for making a moral claim upon its audience as a true record, looks on close analysis to be a retro-construct. A construct about which we are given no information as C is presented as being actual when, some parts are not. Documentaries used to label scenes that were filmed retrospectively to provide the viewer with an image of events that had taken place as: reconstruction of actual event. This allowed the audience to interpret what it saw correctly to trust the material in that they were not being contained by fabrications of the makers.

JS in making C seem to have followed the adage never to allow truth to ruin a great story. Or perhaps they opt for belief in a post modernist philosophical mantra that all reality is a construct and their only duty is to plurality of the construct. But I think that this understanding of truth as being many sided and of multiple perspective conveniently omits the situation of the viewer who is contained by the one perspective of the film.

JS in making C decided to present as a continuous process a whole series of what appear to be different inputs: rehearsed events, scripted events, re-enacted events and perhaps spontaneous actual events, with no way of discriminating between these different kinds of material. The film in effect collapses material of different ontological status and presents them as a seamless stream of actuality filming.

The area in which the film is vulnerable to questioning is the degree to which it documents a bunch of young media savvy city slickers manipulating simple unsophisticated people in sad situations for the sake of making their mark with a movie. The suspicion is that by adroitly mixing their material from different sources they were the better able to control readings made by the audience as to what was happening. Source material of different but undisclosed status together with control of the editing process, gave the film makers maximum leverage in the film to present themselves sympathetically and to minimise chances of their film being read as a piece of cynical opportunism. The film could be read sympathetically as a fable of the media age – which is the way most reviewers covered C – rather than as a cautionary take on city slick film making.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Monsters Gareth Edwards (2010; UK) Scoot McNairy; Whitney Able

Viewed: 5 Dec 2010 Tyneside Cinema; ticket price £7.50

Octopussies assoap opera

Monsters( M) is billed as a horror movie, tagged as made on a low budget, tagged as an allegorical commentary on American paranoia, tagged as the creative output of the director Gareth Edwards (GE) who as well as directing, wrote, did camera and CGI work.

The overall result is a badly written, badly acted, badly directed and shot movie, lacking in tension and intensity, a movie that has found favour with the usual British reviewers who lap up any UK film with a low budget price tag.

I found myself thinking about other low budget horror movies: Blair Witch Project and Dan Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Blair Witch although ultimately one dimensional had a grunge stylised look that gave it a verve that almost carried the day. It also took care to keep the camera as an edgy ambiguous recorder with shifting perspective, and, not to allow the viewer to see the scary things: glimpses perhaps but no more. ‘Invasion’ is a triumph of it’s ‘noir style’ camera work and central plot idea, in which we see ‘the aliens’ all the time but they are indistinguishable from humans, which makes you think. Also ‘Invasion’s’ multi layered dimensionality relating to human I.D. and its effortless allegoric referencing of US society, produces a powerful schizo-political statement, that still has resonance.

M’s film style is reminiscent of low budget soap operas. Filmically GE’s camera does no more than frame its objects adequately. It makes no use of camera frame to suggest different perspectives or as an entity introducing an edgy point of view. This is box brownie stuff not cinematography. M’s look is HD soap: a hard edged look lacking luminescence, presenting a flat ‘you see what you get’ image.

The sets and settings are dominated by a small palette of ideas that through overuse ultimately lack conviction. Big signage is the principle means used to give us information about the locations, Everywhere large public notices have been slapped into place relating to the INFECTED ZONE. There is nothing wrong in itself with this dressing, except that repeated use throughout the film, calls attention to them as an increasingly desperate device.

The signage is the main source of coherent information during the film which sets up its backstory with a couple prefatory intertitle cards. Besides the signage M has two other conduits of visual information: the ruined blasted buildings and the omnipresence of military hardware that frets throughout the film: planes, tanks ‘copters either zipping through the settings, or zapped dead hulks part of the conflict torn warscape. The problem is that these affects function as signs without signification. Neither the weapons nor the military paraphernalia mean anything. They present as affect without purpose; likewise the warscapes of shattered and ruined structures. They don’t signify at any level. They have neither an absurdist reading nor purposive meaning. They are banal locations, empty sets, characterised by formulaic apocalyptic imagery and the desire to convey, in a kind of visual shorthand, an atmosphere of apocalyptic conflict.

The ‘monsters’ element of M, is increasingly relegated to being an incoherent background story against which the main event, the love story between Sam (fiancee’d heiress and she of the mysterious injured hand) and Calder (photo journalist) plays out. All that can be said about this romantic narrative core is that it is laboured and uninspired in its development. The acting is pure ‘played out preppy style’ soap, lacking filmic sensibility. The terrible acting is handicapped by leaden dialogue that leads the two characters by the nose. In particular the scene where the two protagonists barter for a ferry ticket is memorably bad, as are Calder’s little lecture to Sam about dolphins, a telegraphed message that Calder is really an OK type of guy.

Unless a film is pure SFX, putting monsters on screen is difficult to realise effectively. M is a case in point, where the appearance of the Monsters falls far short of anything we might imagine. When seen in the film, they look just like many other movie creations: big octopussies full of tentacles. GE lets them loose in the film with full Jurassic Park sound effects, just as image (except in the final section they have no other role in M other than as image). As image simple, they generate neither intensity nor tension. They are nothing more than a necessary gesture used by GE to complete his film. In the final sequence, set at an abandoned gas station (every cliché in the book in this movie) we watch with the protagonists as two of the Monsters have a Brando moment and light up each other with fairy lights. In the context of the movie, the performance seems nothing more than GE’s genuflection to political correctness, suggesting that Monsters have feelings too! Or perhaps setting up a sequel told from the monsters point of view.

There have been a number of movies, sort of installations, built on the idea of movement through an apocalypse scenario: blasted landscapes blasted dangerous people. In this ‘apocalypse’ genre either pure incoherence of affect has to totally characterise the scenario, or the film has to take on some signifier built into quest orthe relations in which the final days setting also has to have meaning. Incoherence in itself does not equate with apocalypse as GE seems to think.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

I know where I’m going Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger (UK1945) Wendy Hiller, Roger Liversey

Viewed: Side Cinema ( Newcastle) 30 Dec 10; ticket price £5.00

What’s a nice middle class girl like you doing being absorbed into myth…?

Pressburger and Powell’s (PnP) film can be read at many levels, but, ‘I know where I‘m going’ (IKWIG) creates a filmic rite de passage for its protagonist Joan whereby she moves from a world ruled by individualistic desires into a mythic realm governed by necessity. PnP’s scenario guides Joan’s movement between these worlds, negotiating her progress with gentle wit. They also demonstrate their understanding of the self sufficient role of the female psyche which is never patronised degraded or sold short to assuage male pride, but allowed to develop through its own mistakes and recognition of its own power to transform itself

The thought occurs that in writing their script, PnP will have been conscious of a certain analogous parallel path between Joan’s career and that of Britain at war with Germany. To survive and win the war Britain had had to disinvest itself of its self serving individualistic class obsessed apparel and take on the mantel of myth. Investiture in mythic identity permitted the political forging of a unified national spirit necessary for victory. This mythic cloth was woven by many hands and interest groups. PnP as film makers and propagandists were actively involved in the process, fashioning films out of the historical rattle bag British institutions literature and music, the equally valued diverse nationalistic identities of the Union, and of course the idea and core value of ‘decency’ ( a loose conceptual shorthand for tolerance and democracy). But this level of allusion is marginal to understanding and enjoying the material PnP brought together to fashion material for their film.

IKWIG delivers something of a running cosmic joke, the mythic bride who tries but fails to get to the church for her wedding. A wedding that never takes place. Powell certainly seems obsessed with the Bluebeard story. Both Red Shoes and Peeping Tom play on the idea of the betrothed lured to the castle of male fear, not for her wedding but as blood sacrifice.

Joan’s personal enterprise is to move up the social scale, from middle class, to upper middle class, through marriage. She is successful as her wealthy boss, old enough to be her father, proposes to her and asks her to travel to Killoran a remote Scottish island where he has taken up residence. But the Gods conspire against this arrangement. The elements, forces of nature, prevent the little ferry that carries people over to Killoran from sailing. First fog then storm delay her passage. As she waits she is confronted with the social world of Scottish islanders, a provocation to her individualist subjectivity. A world where collective identity and solidarity govern being and desire. A world which opposes her will to reach the island at any cost.

As she waits for the weather, she is also confronted by McNeil the true owner of Killoran. Not just a product of the collective ethos but a figure conforming to a mythic imperative. Joan struggles to resist being overcome by the collective will and the mythic web into which she has fallen. She struggles in the fear that what she understands as Joan the individual self, will die if she yields to these forces. In panic she seeks to avoid ‘death’ and mythic ‘rebirth’. In desperation she makes one last doomed effort to assert her will and sail to Killoran. and. in the extraordinary sequence in a small boat, she is hurled back by the cosmic fury of the elements that she has raised against her by attempting to escape her fate.

Her fate is not be a sacrificial victim on Bluebeard’s altar, but to raise a curse laid on the house of McNeil, for an ancestor’s terrible act of bloody revenge. The significance of events is finally understood by Joan after her epic attempts to resist and she allows herself to be absorbed into the necessity of myth. Dieing as a middle class aspirational English woman; reborn as a woman who understands her role in the weaving of fate.

I don’t know exactly how PnP worked together and divided the tasks and responsibilities of film making. I feel, that the expressionistic high key look of some of their films might have been Pressburger’s input, typified in IKWIG by the overnight train montage. Inspired surely by Jenning’s Night Mail, it is funny inventive and a slick reworking of the visual and audio ideas. The core scripting I imagine to be Powell’s. His understanding of island communities evident from the Edge of the World; his fascination of women and myth, driven by the deep seated anxiety triggered by the female. Anxiety that in films such as Canterbury Tale Red Shoes and Peeping Tom, drives Powell the evolve script ideas based round disembodying and disempowering women through real or symbolic death. Castration anxiety or what? With IKWIG Powell seems to have mastered the need to feed his inner demons a sacrificial victim and contrived (with Pressburger) a scripted resolution that is mythic and affirming of the female.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Kino Bambino met up with Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio at the Rotterdam International Film Festival (January 2010). He was super nice and friendly and very generous with his time. We totally loved him and are now big fans!

Here are the results:

KB: I’d like to start with the fact that you’re from Mexico, just because I don’t know much about Mexican or Latin American cinema. I want to know whether you think that you as a film maker are part of something that’s happening in Mexico at the moment. Do you consider yourself part of a movement or a current, and if so then what does that mean to you?

PGR: I wouldn’t consider myself part of any movement, any Mexican movement. Sometimes they say ‘New Mexican Cinema’ but they’ve been saying that for 50 years. So I think the films I like to make are personal films. I don’t follow any trends. I just film what I like to film and do, and what I see around me. Aesthetically my films are not very Mexican, I base my compositions more on Oriental cinema. I really like Korean and Vietnamese films.

KB: Even though you don’t see yourself as part of a mexican movement do you think that your films are informed by any changes that are taking place in cinema at the moment as a whole? For example, could your films have been made 10-20 years ago?

PGR: No, I think that the arrival of good, affordable technology, like HDV cameras, has made it possible for the quality to be better and better through time. But we also see a film like Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine’s latest film) that’s like an 80s VHS quality that still has a certain look to it. But I like that the affordable cameras are getting closer and closer to what you can do with film. That way anybody can shoot a film that looks nice. Content and stylewise this film could have been made for many years. We see Robert Flaherty with his films. There’s Godard, for example, who filmed Breathless with very little resources. He was the first one to employ the hand-held camera in very small places, using the fishtank light pointed at the ceiling to illuminate everything. Independent film-making of this kind has existed for a long time.

KB: And if you had larger resources would you choose to make more expensive films? For this film you had only yourself and a soundguy, and for the underwater scenes you used two different cameramen.

PRG: I don’t know, I hope not. I hope I can still have the same way of working on my next film because it has allowed me to be really intimate with my characters and to pay attention to the surroundings. Otherwise, had I had a bigger crew I would have been distracted by other elements which would prevent me from being in the moment and being part of the story. In a way the camera is part of the story, and even though you don’t notice the camera it is very close and attached to what’s happening around.

KB: That’s why it’s nice when Natan draws the camera as one of the things he’s seen it’s a lovely moment that highlights your relationship and that it’s so tight for all of you.

PGR: Exactly. Also the way that Blanquita isn’t conscious of the camera even though I’m standing very close to her. She’s just conscious of the fact that a body is close to her. But if that body represented a menace she would have flown away. But it wasn’t a menace because she was close to our characters.

KB: How did you meet Jorge and Natan and what was it about them that made you want to use them?

PGR: I think I discover different elements at different moments. First I discovered the location, then I met Jorge. It was going to be about a man going back to his roots, he’s dying and has to go back and spend his last few days there. Then I met Natan and found out that his mother’s from Rome, and the story began to change to what you see in the end. Once I had a structure everything was added to that backbone. Blanquita, and everything else you see, is added to that backbone to make it a richer experience.

KB: How did you go about develpoing your relationship with them? And were they involved in any decision making regarding what the story was going to be about?

PGR: No, not at all. It was my decision, but also respecting a lot the situation and their personas, what they are in real life. But I would tell them what I wanted to do that day or the following they and they would resolve it themselves. I wouldn’t impose any position or behaviour on them. I’d say ‘let’s construct a window’ and once we’re doing that I’d be trying to find the best way to portray the moment.

KB: You say you looked for the location before you found Jorge. What did that location mean to you? Why was it so important to the film?

PGR: My first impression was a very strong attraction to the landscape of Banco Chinchorro and the fact that they still live a very pure lifestyle and an environment that’s almost intact. The wildlife there is unspoilt and for me it was a pure fascination with this very simple, ancient place and ancient activities such as fishing.

KB: You’ve also said before you almost wish the camera wasn’t there because it almost distorts what’s happening in a way, so there seems to be a big element in your work of trying to keep things natural or real, or keeping things authentic. What do you think of the word authenticity and is it important to you in creativity?

PGR: But at the same time having a fiction that’s deconstructing something, and a camera that’s recording that instead of a pen. I really admire writers because writing is a much purer form of expression than cinema to me. In cinema you can invent worlds and make the spectator experience and see things that they wouldn’t have imagined and discover things that are really here in our time and space that maybe a novel wouldn’t be able to do, but I still think that writing is more pure.

But yes, authenticity is totally important. It means having a personal point of view, to be honest with what you’re saying and having something to tell that people can relate to and understand even though they haven’t lived the exact same situation. There’s a point of connection because you’re talking with the truth. That’s why I hate publicity and commercials, because the main purpose is to sell something and to me that’s not authentic, they’re deceptive. It can be original and striking but it’s not authentic. Authentic is the truth.

KB: In that case how do you feel about distributors trying to promote your film even if it’s in a way that’s true to what you’re trying to make? Every film needs to be advertised to a degree in order to get distribution – are you ok with that? Is it just manipulative advertising that you object to?

PGR: I don’t know what to think about that. The way they might publicise the film is not in my hands and it’s not what I did. I’m talking about what I do as a creator, as a director or even a carpenter or painter, but it’s not a product. A film is not a product and shouldn’t be seen as one. I think if you’re advertising a film or a painting or a book it’s not a product, as long as in the trailer or poster you can feel what it’s about, but it will never be the work – it’s a tool.

KB: Just going back to that location. After watching El Calambre the other day the director (Matias Meyer) did a Q&A in which he quoted Agnes Vards as saying that if the location of the film means something personal to the director then this will be conveyed in the movie. In that respect, do you think that this film could have been made at another location? Could this father-son relationship have worked the same way had the film been made elsewhere?

PGR: No, not at all. Actually, specifically in this film the only way that the father can focus on the last moment with his son is by taking him away somewhere that isn’t urbanised and has no people around. It places them in an almost sacred place, surrounded by water, in order for the love to flourish. If I’d done this at a tourist spot it would have spoilt the story, so the location definitely has a dreamlike, unique quality that allowes the characters to be themselves and the relationship to have a certain aspect.

KB: How does your lifestyle compare with this? Do you live in big city?

PGR: Yes. That why we had to be catapulted in there. There’s a scene where the father and son are holding hands just before getting into the boat to take them to Banco Chinchorro and they’re standing on trash, waiting to leave the the Mexican mainland. That’s what I think about where I live. We’re standing on trash because of what we’ve made of this place. We’ve destroyed paradise; we all want a piece of paradise, but by trying to achieve it we destroy it. But I can’t live in Chinchorro. I wouldn’t be able to live there because I have a different destiny. I need to keep searching for other places.

KB: Your film seems to have elements of disintegration and things coming to an end. For example, maybe this wasn’t intended but as I was watching the film I started thinking a lot about my own personal experiences and what it was like to be a kid, how sometimes you think about how one day you’re not going to be a kid anymore and life isn’t going to be so easy, even though you push that to the back of your mind. There’s always this feeling in the film’s background that the child is going to have to go back to his mother. Even the marriage between the parents, who loved each other very much, could never really have lasted.

PGR: Yes, there’s a feeling of impermanence from the very beginning of the film. Everything’s changing and transforming. Like the soap bubble in the end. It’s very light and transparent, like the aura of a child or ourselves as children. But when you try to hold on to that state it just breaks and you’re an adult, and you don’t have this same sense of discovery anymore.

KB: How did you get into film making in the first place? What do you make films? Do you hope to achieve something by making them?

PGR: I do it because it’s the only way I can communicate and portray what I see around me and what I have to say. If I could do it through music I’d be a musician. I really like music. With music you can be anywhere and be listening to Bob Dylan, whereas with film you can only think about what you saw. The connection between musician and audience is also much more special. But for me film making is the best way I have to communicate.

KB: You said you think writing is the most pure way of communicating. Did you ever try to be a writer? Are you interested in that at all?

PGR: No. I would like to, a musician as well, but… Bob Dylan is a great musician and poet, but I think a lot of us would like to be able to express in such a way. But we each have our own medium of expression, and for me it’s filmmaking. Sometimes the process is a bit uncomfortable because of the camera. I feel sometimes that its presence is strange because of the way it affects reality and the relation to the surroundings.

KB: Have you ever been infront of the camera? Because I also have this thing where I think I do what do because I feel much more comfortable being behind the camera than infront of it, which is a very different sort of relationship, even though what I originally wanted to do was be involved in things that meant talking infront of the camera. Would you ever put yourself infront of a camera?

PGR: I don’t know. I’m a bit shy as well, so for the moment I don’t think so.

KB: I was going to ask whether this story had any significance to you personally, but you’ve already said it doesn’t…

PGR: It’s a more universal story. At the end it talks about sensations and emotions during childhood. In that way I can relate to it, but not only me. Other people can too. So in that way there’s a connection, but it’s not exactly autobiographical.

Hiroshima Pablo Stoll (2009 Uruguay) Noelia Burle

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 18 Nov 2010; ticket £4.00

Peregrinations in a voiceless landscape

I was fortunate the week before viewing Hiroshima (H) to have seen Buster Keaton’s 1923 movie The Three Ages. It alerted me to some of the latent ideas that Pablo Stoll (PS) puts into play in his structurally contrived and motivated film.

H is structured as a ‘silent’ movie meaning that dialogue is mediated through intertitles. The rest of the sound track is filled out with music, of course deafening mind battering music, and fx. Some of the fx are also registered through ‘intertitles’. H is a latter day take on the silent movie which uses this form as a means of structuring comment about the nature of the contemporary world which is flooded out with communications.

Thinking about the comic ‘silent movies’ in particular Keaton’s, they often take the form of a walkthrough script. The character starts at one place and in the course of the movie walks through a number of different settings that present and develop situations which allow for various visual gags before the character moves on. The settings are usually rich both in background and in the persons that occupy them. Detailed sets and larger than life characters in the films of the ‘silent’ age reflect the richness of the era with its classically monumental buildings and structures, and its bewiskered and finely apparelled citizens.

Juan is the comic figure in H. Like Keaton he is po faced, keeping a solid inexpressive mien in response to all he experiences and those he encounters. A reflective surface feeding back the reflection of his world. In H the viewer accompanies Juan in his series of peregrinations from one place to another. In contrast to the fullness of the sets and settings of the silent comedies, Juan experiences the impoverished milieu of the suburbs. Depopulated empty zones that are devoid of outer life; inner zones occupied by the absent. Instead of spaces that teem with life as in the ‘silent’ days, the contemporary world feeds back an impoverished experience. Engagement with this world causes contraction not expansion of consciousness, de-amplification of intensity. The hurley burly and anarchy of bar scenes with their stereotyped drunks in the ‘silents’ , is replaced by the solitary ritual of the smoking of the ‘joint’, internalised movement replaces externalised experience.

The joke is that the ‘silent’ era reached out to the human voice for completion. The age of person to person communication, the mobile reaches out for silence. With all the means of communication and technologies of extension of voice there is nothing to say.

As Juan meanders through his day we hear what he hears: the chaotic cacophony of the sound that he feeds into his head through his set. A music that simultaneously eradicates the world and is ignored.

H is a one joke and one dimension film, but the dimension explored by PS is broad and filled out in space and time so that as viewer you are directed into the movie. In H (as in the apartment shots in Rear Window) your observations and your understanding of what you see is as much your experience as it is Juan’s. The opening shot is a long follow track accompanying Juan from his work place in a bakery to his home. The real time movement as we walk along pedestrian paths and across suburban streets factors into our consciousness: we experience the walk as our own. We experience the lifeless ordinariness of the setting for ourselves, without intermediary.

H is a movie where the content is built into its ‘silent’ structure. The gags the jokes as in ‘silent’ movies built into ‘seeing it’. Each setting generates a situation and each situation calls forth a joke which is structured into the situation. In its final pay off, the movie exploits the silent structure of the film in a manner which is predictable but very funny. It relies on the old adage about how to make ‘em laugh: tell them they are going to laugh; make ‘em laugh; then tell them they’ve laughed. Anticipation is the fulcrum of slapstick and perhaps also of cerebral humour, as is the ability to be really laughing at yourself. PS I think understands this.

H was screened at Rotterdam 10 film festival but hasn’t found a distributor. This is a pity as it is an unusual clever and engrossing film. It was fortunate that Star and Shadow members had seen the film at the festival and screened it at our cinema.

What I don’t understand is why PS has called his movie Hiroshima? Is it because the atomic age has left us as mute shadows? Or am I way of target….somewhere?

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk