General

Arrival Denis Villeneuve (USA 2016) Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker

viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle: ticket £3.95

slush and mush

Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival comes across as a sort of displaced Ten Commandments. It’s a new age recasting of the yearnings of ordinary folk in troubled times for a second coming: some revelatory moment that we are not alone. That there are forces greater than us abroad in the cosmos. And as middle aged men with beards like Charlton Heston are so yesterday, enter Amy Adams the new age torch bearer, the female bright eyed and bushy tailed mediator with the force.

Given its new age ethos, from the opening shot, Villeneauve takes his lead from that master of intellectual cinematic vacuity Terrence Malick. The opening shot is of a textured surface of indeterminate colour which we struggle to understand. Our understanding is resolved as the shot tilts down to reveal that it is the ceiling of a spacious living area which is characterised by a drop dead picture window giving onto a panoramic view of a primordial lake. We know we are in a very classy abode, above the cut of the ordinary.

But why this teasing opening tryst with the movie? Why does the film begin with a shot designed to trick its audience? Villeneuve seems to be saying from the start that this is a clever film, nothing is as it appears and he is going to do some clever stuff. So watch out! As the shot develops a voice over fades in with words that might have been written by Terrance Malick. It is the voice our protagonist, Louise Banks who immediately in that sort of knowing inflection of voice, solemnly informs us: “I used to think we were bound by time… memory doesn’t work as I used to think it did…”

New age mumbo jumbo loves to imagine time is serious stuff but illusionary, a malleable entity. Enlightened new age beings recognise ‘linear’ time as an illusion, rigidly maintained (amongst others) by white Anglo-Saxons males. Enlightened new agers (often young women) realise time is non-linear. And of course it is easy on a non linear digital editing suite to (select clip; mark out; press key; shift clip; mark new in) to make mincemeat of time. Always remembering of course that mincemeat has many facets making it inherently prone to toxins. It is more difficult however to make mincemeat out of time as a logic. Arrival doesn’t even try to construct a temporal logic it prefers emotional logic as an easier more manipulative option. Villeneuve and his script writer go for the ‘big mac’ approach: digital mincemeat (lots of flashbacks/flashforewards whatever) served up in the mush of an emotional mayonnaise and tomato sauce in the person of Louise’s daughter, Hannah, who is the main chosen time referent. The script writer here gets so excited with himself for calling her Hannah, that he exploits this as if he were the first person to notice Hannah is a palindrome, and attaches to this awesome revelation, appropriate temporal significance (time like this palindrome Hannah goes back and forewords – get it!) .

So we have Malick style pompous verbosity matched up with emotionally charged new age take on time. Other than that there is not much else. This is a cold movie. Deterritorialised and sanitised. Its high gloss production values give its emotional and physical moments the authenticity of a perfume advert. The acting dutifully conforming to script is wooden with the dialogue delivered formulaically. Most of the film, realised of course with all the pizzazz of the digital compositors, is second hand stuff. From Louise’s hand gestures with the aliens and the shape and look of the aliens, though to the lighting and the use of TV news monitors to feed back images of a world in panic, we have seen it all before, often done better and more originally. Lacking humour, new age doesn’t do humour very often (I don’t count Woody Allan), Villeneuve steers a po faced course back and forth through its scenario, reaching a high point of banality with a weirdly embarrassing dialogue between a Chinese War Lord ( ? General of some sort, not the premier whom in China you might expect to talk charge. I mean China is a communist country; or, has time slipped again?) and Louise, who demurs to whatever it is he says. And in the background throughout the film the army and security people sort of shuffle about the sets like robots – as they do in this kind of farrago.

Villeneuve and script writer seem to have taken time to look at Tarkovsky’s Solaris as there are references in Arrival that echo elements of this film. The lake, the wateriness of the alien’s element and of course the theme of time. But time in Solaris, as well as having a personal also had a political signification. Tarkovsky’s concept of time was an opposition the Soviet progressive dialectic ideology. Except for the grab of a few ideas, Villeneuve seems not to have taken much from Solaris, content to make a lazy film packed out with effects to please an undemanding audience. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Paterson Jim Jarmusch (USA 2016) Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani viewed: Tyneside Cinema 7th Dec
2016: ticket £9.25

Kup Cake Land

Paterson is a New Jersey town, a half hour drive from New York City that was at the heart of the industrialisation of the USA. Important developments in mechanical looms, industrial lathes and guns were made here. The industrial legacy has been omitted from the film which focuses on how the baking of celebrity kup-cakes is replacing poetry by way of celebrating the existence of Paterson.

‘Paterson’, fronted by its eponymous lead character Paterson (Adam Driver), is Jamusch’s paean to William Carlos Williams, poet and doctor who lived and practiced in Paterson. Williams’ work, one book of which is called Paterson is often about Paterson. Williams maps out the contours of the ordinary and everyday in a manner that in part takes a lead from Japanese poetry, in particular the form of the haiku, short poetic pieces energised by surprise in antithesis.

Viewing Jarmusch’s ‘Paterson’ raises the question as to whether the verbal imagery and signage of poetry can be meaningfully transposed to the graphic image of film. Jarmusch seems to attempt this both in structure of the movie and in the composition of some of his shots. In relation to the latter, Jarmusch uses some shots to try and render something of the sort of casual intense observation characterising Williams’ work. As when the camera at the end of a shot or a sequence comes to rest at or points at a pile of black trash bags or looks down from the point of view of Paterson, into the glass of a half drunk beer. The issue with these shots is that they come across as arbitrary rather than meaningful, denoting a script that struggles to rise above formulaic cinematic translation.

Jarmusch structures ‘Paterson’ in a manner that is sympathetic to the way in which Williams sees the world, building in repetitions of the everyday as a poetic motif. After the opening sequences Jarmusch establishes ‘Paterson’ as a diurnal structure, subtitles burning in the day of the week. The film takes us from one Monday morning through to the following Monday morning with the action taking place within the unfolding of everyday: the getting up, the eating breakfast, the walk to work, the work place, the bus driving.

I think that what a poet like William Carlos Williams sees is in a critical respect, under the surface of the image. His thought, a teasing attuned intelligence, uncovers aspects in life. What Jarmusch as the film maker sees, is on the surface. Williams mannered deliberated expression works as it fuses insight and image. Jarmusch’s mannered deliberate film making stays on the surface of life; unable to penetrate substance, ‘Paterson’ becomes an exercise in the stylised rendering of the material. A nod and genuflection in Williams’ direction.

I think this is exemplified by the first poem used in the film. The words are spoken and superimposed over the picture of it being written by Paterson as he waits to take his bus out of the depot. The first line is: “We have plenty of matches in our house…” The poem describes a brand of matches and connects them to the love of his life. The problem is that no one in the movie, certainly not Laura or Paterson, uses matches. For Willaim Carlos Williams they would have been part of the fabric of life. And, for this reason matches might have given him pause. In ‘Paterson’ no one smokes, no one lights candles, the hobs don’t need candles. No one uses matches. Matches are not part of life. They are consigned to a past. The suspicion is that they are subject of Paterson’s poetry because they have a ‘cute’ value as a stylistic appropriation.

The misfit between style and content becomes the more manifest as Jarmusch develops the character and role of Laura, who increasingly takes centre stage in the action. Laura, a character perhaps inspired by 1950’s TV sitcom, ‘I Love Lucy’, or a sort of updated Annie Hall type, increasingly dominates the movie, transforming ‘Paterson’ into an aesthetic stylised expression of suburban life. Introduced first on the conjugal bed in an overhead shot, as a sensually posed (Japanese style) composition of black flowing hair, patterned fabric and skin. From here, Laura slowly expands into ‘Paterson’. With her obsession for black and white motifs, her energy finally colonises the movie. By the time we arrive at the Kup Cake bake her stylised aesthetic has crowded out all the other strands of the movie. ‘Paterson’ recedes further into the grey as the world of the everyday is overwhelmed by Laura’s cult of can-do celebrity. The social forces retreat against the onslaught of unbridled individuality. William Carlos Williams is Kup-Caked. And in the kup-cakes, ‘Paterson’ becomes a celebration of pure contemporary Americana, a celebration of the vacuousness of individuation.

So Jarmusch’s ‘Paterson’ turns out as allegory of these times of Trump. Old style poetry and seeing the true fade out and the venal mendacity of reality TV increases its vice grip on the psyche of America. She who shouts loudest wins. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

American Honey Andrea
Arnold (UK 2016) Sasha Lane, Riley
Keough

viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle, 25 Oct 2016; ticket: £3.75

no opposition

Easy Rider was the first contemporary road movie I saw and I thought it was brilliant. It presented an America that was in a process of transformation; an America that was dark; an America that was being forged out of new socio economic relations; an America that could never return to the static 1950’s; an America investing in new restless consumption patterns. Driven by music that espoused a lyrical anarchism, Easy Rider took the viewer on a trip into an unfolding land where death and life were espoused in an eternal illusionary present of now.

Fuelled by sex and drugs Dennis Hopper’s 1969 movie foregrounded a country mired in the homicidal obscenity of Vietnam, where Nixon was the newly elected President. Politics of course didn’t play out in the movie, but Easy Rider felt like a response to the established order, a burst of automatic fire from a generation that was going to change America. Change not in any way necessarily for the better; but evenso, of necessity, change.

Easy Rider cruised through the projector gate in an easy 90 or so minutes. Easy Rider was of course a movie dominated by men. It was a man’s perspective, a man’s story, told from the back of the hog. The women were for leisure when the guys stepped off their bikes.

2016 sees Andrea Arnold’s American Honey. Fifty years later and a road movie shot from a woman director’s perspective with a female protagonist (Star). It’s another world: one that takes 163 minutes to view.

No where to nowhere. Star leaves a space which looks a little like the kind of nowhere depicted by Kimberley Pierce’s Boys Don’t Cry. A land of the forgotten, the subculture of bluecollar leisure. Trumpland almost certainly, a collection of clapboard homes close by the highway stop with a bar and motel. Star leaves this behind, in the best American tradition, to get on the bus. Whereas Kesey’s bus was going somewhere if only on a mashed up journey to travel to the limits of hallucinogenic experience, this bus goes nowhere, its destination is money making for Crystal, gang mistress who runs the show.

Arnold’s bus seems a little retro. Even with the hard edge soundtrack the bus seems caught in a 90’s bubble, with none of the kids on board (everyone is college age) being caught up in iPhone babble stream. The which today seems unlikely. Recruited onto the bus to be part of an fake student itinerant magazine selling racket, the kids party hard on and off the road. But partying is little more than high school jinx and capers. And American Honey is a lot tamer than many other American films featuring teenagers let loose on the world: the kids like alcohol (lots) tattoos drugs (lots) hard music hard cocks and plenty of sex. The point about the sex is that it is about status rather than sensuality or emotion, though in the American Honey script, Star is a little confused about this.

American Honey lacks oppositions. Or the oppositions in Arnold’s script are left hanging without development. Nothing really happens, except that Star gets a little wiser about life as she understands that Jake fucks just to notch up conquests. In this respect there are two mildly graphic sex scenes which though quite noisy are planted just to make this point. Star takes risks in going off alone with men, but nothing of consequence happens; she sells magazines using her innocent kid sex appeal rather than the brutality of deceptive blackmail employed by Jake. The bus is a peculiar world where nothing happens that means anything. Perhaps a little like the world of America.

And yet there were elements, oppositional elements that Arnold worked into the bus trip scripting that were surprising and powerful but never allowed developmental weight. Most strongly there is Arnold’s fascination with the power of fire and fireworks – explosive devices – that flicker to life in the movie, that are graphically suggestive of another agitated reality pushing up under the surface of life on the bus. There are three sequences where the bus kids coalesce as a group into playing out primitive deranged fire rituals. These moments impress as a sort a revisioning of Lord of the Flies, an archaic priapic energy takes over the group: against the fire the young kid powerfully swings his cock opening up the doors of a suppressed and denied vitality in life. But the potential and power of these sections never links into the thematic body of the film. They remain bracketed off from the body of the movie, lost off as curiosities.

I felt this raw primitivism should have been the force shaping Arnold’s film. Instead of a communal energy forging content, it is Star’s individual perception around which the material is moulded; and her character struggles to carry the film which after two hours is already overlong. Her default close up mode, of which there are many is a sort of pretty half smile, a mode which quickly becomes tiresome. She skirts the embrace of the group, gets taken by Jake and does a lot of observing. In particular retreating into her own world of insect vision, where Arnold’s camera lingers over various insect shots, the presumed point of view of Star. But these shots although announcing themselves as having some kind of importance are curiously removed from Star’s being. As is the last shot, in which Star wades thigh deep into the waters of a lake. So Arnold ends her film with a primeval ur-gesture from her protagonist. Star’s watery embrace of the natural world, a gesture of immersion into another reality, but by the end of the film, too late to be connected to what has gone before.

American Honey communicates as a anodyne experience. Without oppositions it drifts inconsequentially from one event to another, one situation to another, evincing a feeling that Arnold either has no control over what she is doing or that she is uncomfortable with developing the logic of the forces she sets in play; rather she sets out to compromise them. Arnold’s hand held camera, communicates a consuming agitation a mood of restlessness. But without content to match the shaky image, the camera work simply looks like a device for making the film easy to cut. It is possible that some contemporary women filmmakers feel constrained to work under an implicit ideological subtext of feminism. Feminism in this sense is a sort of fuzzy ideological nexus of ideas that embraces propositions such as the equality of genders, the endorsement of women’s power and a demand for respect for women. The problem is that film making that is ideologically driven is usually uninteresting and dull, in that nothing develops fully unless through ideologically appropriate means and ends. The danger of implicit ideologies in relation to creative work is that they engender (sic) an almost unconscious self censorship, so that certain thoughts, certain ideas are either not persued or if developed are appropriately constrained to conform in alignment with an ideological coherence. Film becomes a dynamic of justifiable logic rather than of truth content as the logic of ideologies frees the film maker from the messiness of life. For women directors today as for directors in the Soviet Union the issue is that their work is vulnerable to being affected by their own internally driven censorship mechanisms, so that certain types of ideas or propositions that may be an inherent part of their material, are denied or glossed over. I don’t know if Andrea Arnold’s work is built on a feminist substrate, but the hesitant and unconvincing nature of American Honey, felt as if she was working with an existential Other informing her perception. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

I Daniel Blake Ken
Loach (UK 2016) Dave Johns, Hayley
Squires

Viewed: Empire Cinema Newcastle 15 Nov 2016: ticket : £3.75

Locked in syndrome

The opening section of the film is a pointedly constructed scene that comprises a questionnaire administered verbally by a agent of the company subcontracted by the DWP to assess and award DLA payments. Much of the interview, before it cuts to picture is heard voice over the front credits and starts with the familiar ritual greeting from the female interviewer: “Good Morning Mr Blake.” There follows a series of questions of increasing irrelevant intensity regarding DB’s physical abilities, the interview ending on the image of his exasperation and her blanked out indifference.

Ken Loach’s film goes down hill from this point presenting as a series of dramatic sequences driven by the contrivence of ideological polemic culminating in DB’s death and funeral.

As the script moves from scored point to scored point the actors are marooned in a scenario that references only the one dimensionality of their characters. Dave Johns and Hayley Squires’ performances become increasingly lack lustre as the scenario works with unerring predictability to tie the noose around their necks; driving Katie into prostitution and Daniel to an early grave. Daniel Blake quickly becomes a stock stage Geordie character of the sort seen in many Tyneside performance venues. The Geordie ingénue abroad in a wicked world of devices and designs. A character locked somehow into the social realist dramas of the 1960’s and ‘70’s; a time familiar to the director if not to the viewers. Even as a carpenter supposedly working in 2016 Daniel Blake appears adrift in the 19th century. In his armoury of trade tools there is no sign of power tools jig saws and drivers. DB seems reliant on handtools. Rather than the complexity of a contemporary character Laverty and Loach found it easier from the point of view of their polemic agenda to create a character who is a time capsule construct. A character who barely knows how to use a mobile phone (despite working as a carpenter).

The detachment of Daniel Blake from the attributes of his society and his occupation, exercises a distancing effect over the film so that it fails to be the vehicle of communication and resistance desired by Laverty and Loach. Rather, I Daniel Blake, turns into parody that distances the audience from the issues presented. Loach and Laverty lack the filmic ability to transcend TV melodrama and transform the subject into a mythic vehicle that speaks to its audience at a level beyond the surface.

The mechanicality of the process chronicled by Ken Loach is what makes the film uninteresting. Both Daniel and Katie are good people who in the script are demeaned and killed by the system. The problem is that for all that Laverty and Loach’s sympathy is in the right place, their film simplifies where it should complicate. The scenario comprises sequences of events and situations that are a tick list of the bad things that happen when the system fails. It is the mechanicality that deprives the development of interest as we go from: Illness – assessment – stop of benefit – the double bind of seeking work – death. Set on a parallel course to Daniel, Katie with female variation has a similar voyage.

Whilst there are a couple of scenes that work dramatically, notably DB resisting the system in scrawling a graffito on the Job Centre wall, the ending of the film is a particular piece of barren reductionism as Kate reads out Daniel’s last testament in which his life is encapsulated as a polemic. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Sacrifice Andrei
Tarkovsky (1986; Swe.) Erland Josephson,
Susan Fleetwood

viewed Tyneside Cinema 16 Oct 2016; ticket £8.25

time slips by

If Nostalgia seemed to be Tarkovsky’s attempt to recreate himself in the West as Tarkovsky, the Sacrifice communicates as an attempt to recreate himself as Bergman type visionary. Both in Nostalgia and in the Sacrifice the defining truth content is spiritual angst. Whereas Nostalgia is centred about a vacuity of gesture, the Sacrifice centres about an intensity of gesture. Both gestures are prime subjectivities and point to the emptinesses filling out contemporary life. In themselves neither film is successful in expressing vision. Both films in their manner come across as re-active rather than proactive in response to the tyrannical shibboleths of Western middle class priviledged society.

Bergman as filmmaker is motivated by an internalised self flailing that compels him to utter truth about life and relationships. Occasionally funny, but mostly hard honesty is the warp of his films which are often characterised by sparse barren psychically charged backgrounds against which Bergman, from a series of actors, conjured performances of ingrained honesty. The films could only work to the extent that his performers put their personal integrity in front of the camera. Performances were matched by scenarios that generally avoided shooting tricks and scripts that leaned towards the spare.

Employing Bergman’s regular cameraman Nykvist and one of Bergman’s repertory players, Josephson in lead role, with the Swedish shore setting, and its note of spiritual angst, the Sacrifice has the look of a Bergman film. But Tarkovsky fails to use these elements in such a way as to own them himself. Despite the hall mark dazzling imagery and the complex choreographed shots the film is pulled back into sub-prime Bergman territory by a leaden script and lacklustre and uncommitted performances. The Sacrifice registers as nothing more than a simulation.

Of course watching the Sacrifice with subtitles can make performance evaluation difficult – not so with Bergman’s films – but I felt the performances, in particular the female roles ( the male roles were not much better), were wooden and lacking sincerity. This feeling of detachment in the cast was compounded by the interior setting of the house and the costumes. The female attire, dresses, and in particular those of Adelaide, her daughter (but also the maids) conveyed a nineteenth century atmosphere to the extent the film sometimes felt as if it were in a Chekhov setting and situation. Perhaps it was Tarkovsky’s idea to meld social realist Chekhov with Bergman style psychic acuity?

If so it doesn’t work. The Chekhovian elements, the isolation the domestic setting the stories told by the characters, lack Chekhov’s relational genius for tieing together family and social tension. The characters in the Sacrifice, are isolated entities with isolating stories. Alexander’s claim about his love for his son, little man, is something said rather than seen. Filmically if he loved ‘little man’ then perhaps little man should have died in the final holocaust. Perverse spiritual logic perhaps, but still a logic whose possibilities might have attracted a director/writer such as von Trier.

And the Bergman elements fail at the first level of authenticity in performance. Perhaps it is language, directing his players in a foreign language (English probably); perhaps directing emotion in micro settings is not something that Tarkovsky was good at, perhaps happier in directing in epic works. The acting is stale and stays emotionally tethered in theatricality rather than cinema. Also the scripting and its realisation is critically lame. In particular there is the ‘witch’ sequence, where a conveniently incoherent Otto persuades Alexander to visit and screw Maria, the maid, whom claims Otto, is a white witch. The whole scripting is a dog’s dinner of implausibility, and that would be fine if the consequent action carried conviction. Again the feeling is that Bergman or von Trier as scenaricists would have contrived strong central scene between Alexander and Maria. Tarkovsky’s solution climaxes in a magico-realist shot of the two making love. Whether this shot is understood as dream or actual, the shot of the couple rising into mid-air and revolving round in space, seems meaningless, a desperately wrong solution. And for a film that is trying to combine Chekhov and Bergman there is no room for getting central imagery wrong..

I think it is not enough to be a film maker. To make films outside the grounding of a society or culture is difficult. Images are not enough. Very few film makers are able to work outside their native milieus. Lang and other German émigrés were successful in Hollywood as was Hitchcock, but they were successful because they understood and accepted that to be American directors they had to learn how to be one part of the movie making studio machines rather than be auteurs. Recently the late Abbas Kairostami made at least one successful film as an émigré, Like Some one in Love, but his concerns were often in micro observation of individuals in situations, a focus easier perhaps to carry into exile.

In his exile my feeling is that Andrei Tarkovsky never found voice, and remained just a fabricator of extraordinary film images that lacked clear unifying thematic purpose. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Nostalgia Andrei Tarkovsky (Ussr; It. 1983)
Oleg Yankovsky, Domiziana Giordano

viewed Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle 9 Oct 2016; ticket £8.75

no pushing against

Nostalgia was the first film made by Andrei Tarkovsky outside the Soviet Union. Having seen the complete set of recently remastered Soviet produced films, it is evident that Nostalgia is very different in quality from these films that preceded it.

Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia is the film of a lost film maker, a film maker who has lost his energising force. In Nostalgia he is now creating images out of an unopposed subjectivity rather than making films that had an opposing subjectivity. Those films made in the Soviet Union have the quality of a pushing against the wall of a rigid ideology; Tarkovsky’s cinematic visionary language probing water as a psychic element, surface as an hallucination and time as an instability cohere as images directed as opposing concepts/metaphores. In Nostalgia’s scenario, there is no pushing against; rather there is an attraction, a pull towards visionary utterance that is detached from the gravitational pull of the social matrix. Tarkovsky’s cinematic language loses its coherence and becomes a scattered atomised set of images that inceasingly reflect the subjectivity of exile.

Seeing Stalker Mirror and Solaris what is striking is that they are all films that have an intensely political dimension in so far as they comprise a sustained creative assault on the official Soviet ideological take on cosmology: that time moves foreword as a progressive dialectic and that there is only one correct way to understand history whether it be personal or social, and that is through the materialist philosophy. These rigid ideas are difficult to understand or comprehend today – though Islamic State have their own contemporary version of a preordained cosmology – but these ideas were the key underlying principles of the legitimacy of the Soviet state. These philosophical propositions underpinned, in so far as they justified and legitimised, the existence of the state and all actions of the state from the gulags to the development of nuclear weapons. The dialectical progress of history, one dimensional time.

Tarkovsky’s movies blew a hole in this monolithic thinking and for that reason were allowed very limited distribution in the USSR. Tarkovsky’s heterodoxy is exemplified by the opening sequence in Mirror: Ignat turns on the TV, which is an exemplar of progressive forces and after the screen’s initial static and white noise the image resolves and we see a healing session where a middle aged woman medium cures a young boy of his stutter. The objective technology of the medium, TV, relays a message which is a subjectivity.

Both Solaris and Mirror view time as a element that overwhelms us: objective time is a delusionary concept for the history books and Marxist philosophers. For Tarkovsky’s time is a non linear medium that haunts shapes us and confounds us: mothers elide into wives, men merge with the identity of their own fathers. We re-live and re-experience time as a force that guides the dead as well as the living. The dialectic is soul death; for Tarkovsky time is soul full. The cogency of Mirror and Solaris with their complex structures derives from Tarkovsky’s certainty about what he wanted to say. His marriage of compelling imagery, often composed as long in-camera takes, and temporal instabilities was possible because he was guided by an underlying implicit form that gave him certainty about what is was opposing with his subjectivity: a barren materialist ideological system.

And this barrenness was acutely expressed in Stalker with its metaphorical journey through a toxic land towards a room where a wish would be granted – perhaps the final realisation of proletarian state. Stalker is a primed satire on the poisoned nature of the Soviet Union and its prime victim, individual vision. Most of the distinctively voiced film makers such as Bergman, Goddard, Bresson have one explosive idea that animates what they do. However brilliant their images, they are not just image makers: their images serve the greater idea. However wondrously shot and imaged, Nostalgia never attains anything more that a subjectivity in image. Through self exile with the loss of both his sustaining culture and his oppositional situation in the USSR, Nostalgia seems a lament to the pain of exile; beautiful personal but ultimately an indulgence.

Many of the devices that characterise Nostalgia, in particular on the sound tracks, seem consciously borrowed from his earlier movies. The unending rhythmic footsteps that accompany everyone, the incessant water sounds creating an aqueous overwhelming water effect recall Stalker, as do the strange distant quasi industrial sounds that appear in many scenes (as in the shot in the narrow street with the mirrored wardrobe). Nostalgia seems also to share a large number of visual devices with Stalker: the camera’s love of patina texture and surface, the observation of water in all its multifarious still and moving forms (an enduring feature of Tarkovky’s vision) and the tracking shots. However in Stalker, the significant tracks were often shots that moved through or moved towards the object of search: forewards pushing shots. In Nostalgia the significant tracks tended to be sideways movements. One of the last sequences of Nostalgia comprises a long sideways epic tracking shot of the Andei fulfilling his promise to cross the pool with a lighted candle. After initial failure he succeeds, and immediately collapses. My feeling is that Tarkovsky as a filmmaker highly sensitised to his own state of mind, reflected in his use of lateral movement, his own self perception as a film maker in exile. He was no longer an artist going foreword he was an artist at this point deflecting to the side.

In Nostalgia there is no opposing rather a lateral movement to those forces sidelined by society the holy fools the mad visionaries. But finding alliances in those declarations of universal love and brotherhood or in obscure subjective self imposed tasks lacks the imperative stricture of the previous opposing filmic statements. In making films for Gosfilm if Tarkovsky allied himself with the mad and the visionaries he would also by default oppose the determining ideology. Making such a film in the West falls into a vacuum at best, and at worst a vacuum contained by platitudes.

In one dialogue Andrei is talking about St Catherine and her meeting with God who tells her: “You are she who is not.” A pointing of state of mind that seems to underlie the majestic final shot of Andrei by a pool that starts as a close up and pulls back to a huge wide shot that reveals him is a tiny figure in the ruins of an enormous arched cathedral. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Andrei Rublev Andrei
Tarkovsky (USSR 1966 + general consideration of Solaris, Mirror, Stalker)
Anatoly Solonitsyn

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 18 Sept 2016; ticket: £9:25

bell ring

A talk with my friend Ana Marton helped to clarify my understanding of what was central to Tarkovsky’s thinking in making Rublev. The key to understanding is surely the relation between the allegorical opening sequence of Andrei Rublev and the main body of the film which although dressed up as an historical drama set in fourteenth century Russia presents a striking analogy of the turbulent destructive forces released by the 1917 revolution that convulsed and tore up the country. The Soviet authorities were sufficiently alarmed by the analogous parallels suggested in Andre Rublev to effectively censor the film in the USSR where it was allowed very few screenings.

The opening sequence, a sort of filmic preface, comprises an attempt made by a man (an individual never identified, a type perhaps) to fly, to be released like a bird in the air. This man uses a sort of balloon technology, and despite the attempt of an alarmed mob to prevent him taking off, succeeds in launching himself from the tower and becoming airborne. “ O my God I’m flying!” he calls out. The flight does not last long, and he quickly crashes back down to the earth.

The man’s flight through the air can be understood, like Daedalus and Icarus’ flights, as an individuated action, a man claiming the power of birds and gods: act of hubris. The idea of flight has always had a strong spiritual connotation. Tarkovsky seems to be pointing out that ‘flight’ in this context is an individual solution to spiritual problems, employing a leap of faith to claim a domain that cannot be sustained, reliant on technology not on human attributes.

Spiritual life is about acts of faith not leaps of faith.

In contrast Andrei Rublev follows a long tortuous path through social upheaval and war that almost destroys his spirit, before finding his faith in action. Following the preface, the main body of the film, divided into 8 chapters, chronicles Andrei Rublev’s path through history. Unlike flight, with its sudden ecstatic moment Andrei’s journey is in effect a passion ( the film in Russian was also called ‘The passion according to Andrei), in the Christian sense of the word. A series of experiences that challenge his spiritual being, a process of suffering that is a total test of faith. Andrei Rublev’s faith is broken by living in an world characterised by cruelty, violence, bodily afflictions and betrayals. He is reduced to being mute, spiritually exhausted, unable to paint, his faith a hollow kernel without a seed. He is without voice retreating into isolation.

And then comes the bell. The voice of the Bell. The bell has been ordered by a Count. But the wars exterminations epidemics famines have killed or scattered those who knew how to caste bells. The knowledge of how to fashion bells out of the matter found in the earth is lost. But a young boy, son of a dead master bell founder, reveals that his father had taught him the secret of bell making. With this secret knowledge the bell can be made. The whole community come together as one to realise the huge undertaking of casting the bell: retrieving ‘lost’ knowledge, working with energy joy common purpose, sacrificing their individuality to the collective good. The bell becomes a collective statement of spiritual purpose. The bell is fashioned. Together the people have made a bell whose note will sound out across the land. Together they have made it under the direction of young boy who is barely more than a child. The child as he walks away with Rublev suddenly admits to Rublev that his father had never told him the secrets of bell making; his father had died before he could share his knowledge. His claim to have the secret had been an act of faith. Faith in the forces of life.

At this revelation Andrei Rublev finds the path to the deeper understanding that will enable him to start painting again. He understands faith for him is about allowing his gift to find expression in the world. His refusal to paint had become an indulgence of his subjective need, the break through was to see others needs, to allow his painting to flow out. Faith is realised and put to the proof through action.

Andrei Rublev with its analogous historical referents and its allegorical opening sequence is a spectacle. As film it adds nothing to cinema in itself, a series of images that the viewer watches and may or may not read meaning into. Superbly shot and directed, Andrei Rublev is an epic movie made in the fashion of D W Griffith rather than Sergei Eisenstein. A periodically sequenced realisation of a historic period of Russian history and its people interspersed with the constants of earth water and fire that evoke the underlying perception of a land of faith. This epic quality which points directly to image also characterises Ivan’s Childhood; and it’s a quality that distinguishes Tarkovsky’s two early films from his later productions.

In the three later films produced and shot in the USSR, the difference is in the position in which the viewers find themselves. Ivan and Andrei are linear movies. We are watchers. We watch the progress of the protagonists, reading into the development of the symbolic moving images that deepen our understanding of what is depicted. In Solaris Mirror and Stalker we are ‘see-ers’. The films work by absorbing the viewer in to worlds that are at variance from everyday logic, films that are founded in cinema logic. The films can only be seen if the viewer enters into the psychic world suggested by the form structure and content of each of these films.

Solaris Mirror Stalker demand of the viewer that they recalibrate state of mind as they move into the world of the film. The pacing of the films, allows for mediation of this process which works dynamically with the audience who have to engage by defining and understanding for themselves the aqueous world in which they are submerged. Aqueous because in all of Tarkovsky’s movies water/fluid is a key medium whether it be: still stagnant down pouring flowing renewing reflecting refracting. Water/fluid is ubiquitous, both in picture and sound, omnipresent like time which also is a focal concern of Tarkovsky’s. Time always a mirror reflecting back image. Time also an idea which in these three last films made in Russia was the basis for Tarkovsky’s personal political critique of dialectical materialism as a dead-end Soviet theory that insisted on ‘history’ as a didactic linear time scale. Tarkovsky’s explores time as a fluid experience, an envelope of Einsteinian space/time which wraps traps zaps us in waves and vectors of psycho/spiritual entanglement. Time as human dimension not a mechanism.

Mirror with its layered time structure probing personal history and a Nietschian eternal recurrence. Solaris with its temporal instabilities inducing the past to return to the present. Stalker with its zone containing spacio/temporal distortion and room of desire. Tarkovsky creates worlds that have to entered by specific psychological portals an entering that involves a surrender to the logic of the film.

It is Tarkovsky’s achievement as producer/director that he had the courage of his personal and political vision to refuse compromise with Goskino and instead to produce a series of films completely radical in their use of the medium to do what cinema rarely does: create a new concept of what is possible. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Ivan’s Childhood
(Ivanovo detstvo) Andei
Tarkovsky (USSR 1962) Nikoli Burlyayev, Valentin Zubkov

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 10 Sept 16; Ticket £8.25

embrace over the abyss

Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, is a film made on two distinct tracks: the audio track and the visual track. The audio track carries the ethical stream of the movie with its opposing concerns: the subjectivity of Ivan’s determination to fight the Nazis and revenge the death of his parents; and the objectivity of the Soviet officers that Ivan must be sent away from the danger of the front to military school. Ivan’s youthful adolescent obduracy of purpose and self justifying ordinance overwhelms the protective instincts of these hardened soldiers. Of course the dialogue/audio ‘track’ of the film is superbly filmed by Tarkovsky’s camera, moving between Ivan and the officers, capturing Ivan’s defiant energy and the lesser conviction of the officers. The space between child and man. An ineffable unbridgeable space.

In the visuals however Tarkovsky explores and probes expressively the more deeply hidden more poetically evocative layers of the film, that comprise a metaphysics of death and destruction. Tarkovsky’s ability to create and educe symbolic ideas purely in the realm of the visual becomes his keynote and defines all his subsequent productions.

One shot in Ivan’s Childhood points directly to Tarkovsky’s vision of war. The Nazi’s as an example to the Soviet fighters of the fate of those who spy and scout, display the corpses of two hanged Russians. Paul Virilio writes, such displays of sacrificial victims are “ an act of internal war, a throw back to war’s psychotropic origins in sympathetic magic, the riveting spectacle of immolation and death agony, the world of ancient religions and tribal gatherings.” The insight in this quote explains something of Ivan’s immersion into the war, expressed solely as picture. An immersion that takes him beyond the purpose of retribution. Destitute and alone after the murder of his family, entering into the theatre of war releases Ivan from the purely personal, lifting him into a primordial originary collective world. Ivan becomes party to the delirium of war; war captivates him as he surrenders to the same forces that made the first primitive cave paintings. He gives himself over to the workings of fate, even so that fate has marked him out for sacrifice.

Tarkovsky’s exteriors shot over the front line of Russia’s rivers marshes forests capture war as a magical spectacle. An hallucination, war as a fusion of exploding light reflected and refracted in nature, inducing an altered state of mind both at one with the spirit of life and with death, ecstasy and self destruction.

And right from the beginning of the movie Tarkovsky captures in Ivan this possibility of sacrifice. Dressed only in shorts naked from the waist up the first shot captures Ivan in a pristine landscape. We hear the cuckoo, we see the spider’s web, we see the land. At one with the land, merging with it. The lean white skinned boy imprints on the viewer’s mind an androgynous physicality: walking running drinking straight from the bucket of water his mother has drawn from the well. He has animal soul, animal energy, this boy. A vision of something pure, unsullied by calculation. The fate of his beauty is not to be tamed; not to be schooled; not to disciplined by life in the soviet union in agricultural college or a mechanics institute. The fate of his beauty is to be sacrificed, to be offered up to the war. Ivan is white virgin beautiful and in the maelstrom of war embraces his fate. Perhaps the soldiers also understand something of this as they cease to oppose his will and collude with the Ivan’s act of oblation.

Of course this is metaphysics not history, but strangely as the late Michael Herr also notes in Dispatches, metaphysics has its place on the battlefield. But not in history. History doesn’t do delirium. As a counterweight to Ivan’s delirium, the penultimate section of the movie is a series of shots depicting the capture of the Reich Chancellery by the Red Army. We see Goebbels’ dead children and Goebbels and his wife, their heads burnt to charred stumps, laid out on the ground for the Soviet photographers. The arch Nazi mythologist reduced to an all too real dead lump of matter. And inside the Reich Chancellery officers who had known Ivan find his file, and the prosaic fact that he had been captured and hanged by the Nazis. We see his picture. He is just another victim.

There is one famous shot in Ivan’s Childhood, a shot that is not apparently connected with Ivan. In a sort of subplot, an officer aggressively pursues Masha, a medical officer. In the disorienting setting of a birch forest, after an almost ritual chase he catches hold of her tightly round the waist pressing her hard into his body. The camera changes position and we see that he is straddling a deep ditch and that she, with her legs danlging in mid-air, is trapped between intimacy and the danger of a high fall. The shot works on its own narrative terms: the desire of men for women. But more strongly it stands as an analogy for the nature of war as experienced by those who fight: a mixture of forced intimacy and terror. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Close-Up Abbas
Kiarostami (Iran 1990) Hossain
Sabzian

viewed
ICA Cinema London 6 Aug 2016; ticket
£8.00

Abbas Kiarostami 1940-2016 – let there be life.

The two shots of a tin can rolling down a street in Kiarostami’s Close-Up, epitomise something essential in the nature of his film. In the first shot the journalist Farazmand accidently kicks a can sending it bouncing down the street. It might seem that this is an arbitrary event but Kiarostami’s camera stays with the can as it clatters down the street before finally coming to rest. Later in the same sequence Farazmand again kicks the same can, this time deliberately, and it clatters further down the road, ending up nestled against the kerb. The film immediately cuts to a shot of newspapers rolling off the press with the story of Sabzian’s impersonation of the director Makhmalbaf.

These ‘tin can’ shots reminded me of Sam Mendes film ‘American Beauty’ where we see a shot of a crumpled plastic bag blowing about at the end of an ally. It is blown about unable to escape its confines, watched by Lester the movie’s protagonist. Like Kiarostami’s ‘tin can’ shots it’s of long duration, signifying that the director attended to the shot.

Mendes’ shot struck me as a piece of pretentious symbolism, using this heavy handed visual metaphore to convey Lester’s state of mind. It seemed a contrived psychic moment, an otiose signifier adding nothing to the film. Without a visible agent, the shot looked artificial, simulated either in production with a wind machine or in post-production.

Kiarostami’s ‘can shots’ have a quite different quality. An agent kicks out and a tin can rolls noisily down the incline of a street. The ‘can shots’ has nothing to do with narrative or state of mind, they simply fit the structure of a film which is non narrative non linear and incorporates chance and inconsequentiality as part of life.

Close-Up is a mixture of documentary, cinema verite, dramatic reconstruction built on a premise in which the aspiration and practice of film making are a fundamental idea.

Into this subject with its multiple laminations built on the complexity of its human relations and the way people perceive one another, accident and material irrelevance are incorporated into the material, Kiarostami observes that these elements of life often intrude into the most fateful moments of existence. Kiarostami’s tin cans don’t mean anything beyond themselves, like his film and its players, the cans simply run their natural course. The viewer gets the idea: what a long way tin cans roll when kicked, almost forever; what a huge clattering sound they make, almost deafening. The tin cans exist as an object of the camera’s lens for their own sake: no state of mind, no metaphor. Just cans. Like the protagonist Sabzian, he is just Sabzian.

Close-Up, at one level, is a satire on the egotistical banality of film making that puts the ‘Director’ at the centre of the process. Sabzian’s impersonation of a director stems from his perception of the power relations he understands as being at the core of movie production. The Director can make demands: on actors, sets, scripts. Like little dictators they have license to make things happen according to whim or will. Sabzian’s position in society as an unemployed printer, a powerless non-entity, lends huge allure to the idea of being a film director. One who calls the shots.

The difference between Sabzian and Western wannabees is that the latter are thinking ‘career’. Sabzian in some confused manner, simply wants to tell of his suffering. His phantom film making, like Bergman’s, is driven by an internal imperative.

But at another level Close- Up is an anti satirical statement about about a type of film directing in which ego takes a step back. A film making based on a certain kind of perception about what film is.

Kiarostami does not primarily use control and manipulation as the dynamic of his film making. The basis of his film making is to bring the idea to life. As a film maker he works by releasing ideas into situations and seeing to where they lead. Understanding where the idea takes the material is for Kiarostami more important than any scripted destination. And his understanding and choice of situation as the crucible for an idea is critical to his work. For Kairostami’s case the situations often arise out of the power tensions endemic in the social matrix.

Close-Up like most of his films is set in Iran. The situation Kiarostami develops leads directly into cross sectional view of Iranian society. In the Law Court scenes, the family scenes, at the police station, we understand that Sabzian’s actions don’t take place in a vacuum: they occur within a complex interweaving of social relations: his mother, his wife, his children, his unemployment, his movie going. We see how the private, the personal, and the social interpenetrate. We see that these relations comprise a defining framework in relation to action that is separate from the subjective, but has its own weight. In contrast, American and increasingly Europeans make films which are increasingly concerned only with subjectivities. Individuals act as if in vacuo, as psychic agents of their own desires. Kiarostami’s films are set firmly in the realm of the social.

In the final scene Sabzian is released from prison and at the gate he is met by Makhmalbaf. The film’s pay off was to be the recording of the conversation between the two. But for some reason the radio mics fail. Though we see the two men meet, we hear nothing of their conversation, only static and bumps from the sound system. Accidents mistakes and failure are part of life, and Kiarostami films life. So he lets the shot with its no sound ride. A joke on him and on all who are would-be controllers. In an important sense it doesn’t matter. What we see is enough, the idea of the meeting is enough to carry the shot through: the real faker and the would-be faker have met and exchanged…whatever…we don’t need to know more. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Neon Demon Nicholas Winding Refn (2016 Fr, Dk, USA) Elle Fanning, Christina
Hendricks, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves

Viewed
Tyneside Cinema 25 July 2016; ticket: £9.15

goodbye ‘Nevernever Land’ hello ‘Whatever Land’

Nicolas Refn’s the Neon Demon is a conceit of a very contemporary nature: form without content. Completely dedicated to the stylised image it could almost be an advert for some sort of Apple product. In one sequence model Jesse is positioned in front of a huge dazzling saturated white backdrop which almost seems to envelop her with its cold sensuality. As she poses in this setting, she is painted gold by the fashion photographer, I expected a gold Apple iPhone to somehow appear and transfix itself into the scene. The setting was perfect opportunity for product placement.

Neon Demon is very much the product of the Apple generation, a parallel cinematic form of the mediated reality that permeates and defines the iPhone life style in which life is not experienced directly but only indirectly through a screen which accesses image and information. Screen takes the place of life. Gazing becomes living.

The cool.

Refn wants to make a cool film. He only requires of his audience that they watch the screen with detached interest as he invents and shows a succession of locational architectural backdrops accessed by tracking shots down narrow runs walkways and corridors. He then fills the spaces with content. It doesn’t matter what the content is. The only point of the content is as a product to attract the gaze. Colour, eye catching interiors, blond women from the parallel universe, violence, sex, blood, cannibalism etc. The more transgressive the image the less it affects. In fact there is an inverse relationship between the extremity of Refn’s provocations and the intensity of audience reaction. Penetrative necrophilia, eyeball eating become “plaisirs des yeaux”, bagatelles. The important thing about the content is that it should be and is vacuous, empty. The scenario develops situations, events, actions in which the audience cannot invest with meaning. ‘Never never’ land becomes ‘Whateverland’.

Into this refined space, characterised often simply by colour and architectural form, Refn promotes Jesse, who is in many ways rather like an Apple product. Jesse is blond shimmering white and perfectly designed by nature. She does not attract empathy as she is a decontextualised product. She tells that her parents are ‘gone’ but otherwise she is carefuly screened to remove the personal. She is an object to be gazed at. Like the objects in the Apple universe, admired as image. Like a product, Jesse has little to say about or for herself. She lets other people do the talking. It is for others to fill her out with their projections.

For the most part Jesse is the subject of other people’s observations and desires. Jesse has such beautiful skin hair nose. She is just so perfect. And desired. They want to suck her. (except her boyfriend) As heterosexual sex, except abusive rape (suggested but not realised in a dream sequence), wouldn’t fit with the extreme product design, Refn and his writers, have gone for a baroque rendering of that old movie stand-by: Lesbian Cannibals from Outer Space. And the final sequence of the film plays out with a series of grotesque tableaux, like some kind of 18th century masque, of the hunting killing and eating of Jesse by a group of deranged other worldly blond coat hangers.

The Neon Demon, is not a horror film or anything like that. Refn has made film that is produced for the state of mind that is characteristic of certain patterns of contemporary consumption. A state of mind that finds significance in objects and products, and by engaging in life through the isolating filter of a screen that is detached but desirous of visual excitement through image. As Marshall McLuhan observed: the Medium is the Message. And how ‘cool’ is that? Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk