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The Wind Will Carry Us    Abbas Kairostami (Iran; 1999) Behzad Dorani

viewed dvd

mirror mirror on the wall…

Kairostami’s opening sequence of “The Wind will Carry Us’ (The Wind) establishes  ‘an arriving’ and a moral proposition.  

A car speeds along a road through the mountains.  There’s an emptiness, a majestic emptiness of man that defines the landscape.  The driver of the car talks to the passengers, whose outline we can only dimly make out.  We realise that they are a film crew who’re on their way to a remote Kurd village to document the unusual death rituals of the villagers. The information is that an old lady’s on her death bed so her funeral will be an opportunity to film.   The driver, who’s ‘The Director’, tells the crew that he doesn’t want the reason for their visit to be known by the villagers.  Perhaps he’s thinking in terms of the immediate filming task that such knowledge might lead to some distortions in their relations with the villagers (perhaps he’s worried they might want payment).   He tells the crew that if asked about the purpose of their visit, they’re to say they’re looking for ‘treasure’.  But perhaps the reflex to deceive goes deeper than any immediate rationale.  Perhaps deception is an ingrained habit of film makers, a defensive paranoia to which they resort by default as a means of exerting control over the world in which they operate, control they see as necessary to their work but which also becomes part of them.    

We are not just in a film but in an ethically compromised play out. 

Kairostami’s opening sequence doesn’t just set up the situation that its scenario will play out, it establishes a moral thematic that defines and surreptitiously dominates his movie.   The underlying moral issue is: deception. More specifically the normalisation of deception how the incorporation of normalised deception into the warp of life progressively corrupts and distorts the experience of life, in particular its grounded imminence. 

The villagers of course are grounded in the very soil in which they live.  You could call it: ‘Truth’.  In the film the villagers are simply themselves, true to themselves and their way of life.  The only professional actor involved is Behead Doran who plays:  ‘The Director’.  

‘The Wind..’ is not a story;  it’s about storytelling, the relations that are needed for a story to be told.   The main person with whom ‘The Director’ interacts is the young boy who befriends him. As their relationship grows, the boy brings ‘The Director’ news as to what is happening to the old woman.  But the boy also takes on another role, the role of a mirror. The boy in his openness frankness honesty becomes an obverse mirror reflecting back to ‘The Director’ the image of his own dishonesty and world weary deception, to the point where as the relationship becomes almost too painful to bear, ‘The Director’ reveals the truth about the purpose of his stay in the village. 

Kairostami’s script spoofs the structural elements involved in the business of making a film.  When you watch a movie you see a homogeneity of form in which all the relevant shots are combined in the edit to form a seamless experience which is visually characterised by the players.  But of course this experience is defined by what we don’t see, the unseen members of the production crew.  Kairostami’s script, like the obverse mirror,  plays on reversing this relationship.  In ‘The Wind..’ it is the key characters whom we don’t see:  the dying old woman, the ditch digger, ‘The Director’s’ producer, the other members of his crew; conversely it’s the most important of the unseen crew, ‘The Director’, whom we see the most.   It’s a knock-about parody, given energy by the slap-stick scripting device of ‘The Director’s’ phone, which not working properly in the village forces him to charge off in his car to the top of a near-by hill in order to find reception good enough to speak to his increasingly irate producer.

The other unseen element of a film is the purpose for which it is made. With some films such as unalloyed propaganda movies, the intent is obvious, to reinforce an ideology or belief system. In many films the ‘why’ is not apparent; include in this Hollywood output.  Films from Hollywood are intended to make money (that is one primary purpose) but wrapped up in Hollywood’s various dramas and melodramas are powerful subtexts in relation to American values and  the American way of life.  These messages are not necessarily understood by non American audiences but the values and images are absorbed from the screen and become part of an unarticulated but engrained world view.   

With ‘The Wind….’ Kairostami is very clear that he is making a film about film making: its absurdity its corruption its deception and its detachment from the everyday.  None of this means that filmmaking is in itself an unredeemed human activity, but by virtue of power it exercises we need to keep balanced view of its nature.  Films communicate inspire amuse educate give insight provide needed distraction; there are also dark forces mostly unseen that congregate behind the picture.  

 Kairostami incorporates one dark sequence into his scenario, its meaning unclear.  ‘The Director’ looking to buy milk (life’s first food) is sent to the basement of a house in the village where in the dim half light a young girl (perhaps aged between 12 and 16) is milking a cow. ‘The Director’ stands waiting in the darkness behind her.  As she milks he suddenly launches into a full recitation of Forough Farrokhzhad’s poem ‘The Wind will Carry us” (from which of course comes the title).  The words of the poetess sound through the dark enclosed space which like the poem has a timeless quality.

Forough Farrokhzhad was viewed negatively by the Islamic revolution who banned her work for many years in an attempt to suppress her proto-feminist voice.

Farrokhzhad’s imagery conjures up features of the natural world – wind moon trees clouds – with a range of emotions – and the visitation of a phantom love.   It’s not clear if the milkmaid understands the poem – perhaps she only speaks Kurdish – but this scene suddenly charges the film with a heightened tension that coming out of nowhere shocks us, jolts the spine.  The poem, its insinuations spoken out loud infiltrate the space, an intrusion of the sensual into a the world of the manual. It’s almost a violation but the words, suggestive as they might be, are those of a woman and ‘The Director’ appears to have no ulterior or corrupting motive.  There are no clues as to what’s going on; what Kairostami intends.  We viewers have to figure it out. We have perhaps to accept the scene on its own strange terms as a collision of forces, where picture and sound, in dissonance excite two enduring expressions of the feminine: the one producing milk the other producing beautiful words, the traditional  the modern.

There are many films that take their form and structure from the idea of making a film, but Kairostami knows how to get maximum return from the idea of not being able to make a film.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

   

Women in Love  Ken Russell (1970, UK)  Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, Jennie Linden,  Oliver Reed

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 19 Feb 2026; ticket: £7

“Make me a sandwich…”

There’s a defining moment early in Russell’s film:  sisters Gudrun and Ursula are talking by the lake close to the boathouse.  Suddenly a vibrant piercing cry shatters the peace; turning round the sisters see the naked Gerald charge out the boat house run full tilt down the ramp dive into the water and swim powerfully away from them.   A moment defining the expression of male energy to the female; a moment that Russell’s film following on Lawrence’s writing will develop into an intuitive probing of the interdependence of the male and the female: in love in mistrust in rejection. 

I came away from Ken Russel’s realisation of D H Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’ feeling that it was an expression of pure energy, like the women in the film it danced energy: male female animal physical psychic energy charging itself on the forces of life.  Ken Russell and his players effectively transpose Lawrence’s novel onto the screen understanding that to live is about the dynamics of relations with the natural world, with the opposing forces of sex and death.

Russel’s movie cuts to the quick of Lawrence’s writing and the quick for Lawrence revolves about the male and the female, their relations respective natures emotionalities and physicalities.   

Perhaps it’s a cavil but Lawrences book in some senses might be better titled: Men in Love.  The book and the film seem the more complete in interogating the male; but certainly the female is substantially represented.  And the crux of Lawrence’s concern is through his characters to penetrate into the essence of the male and female at all levels: as cosmic archetypes of the natural world as social beings as individuals, and through their relations to explore their creative and the destructive possibilites. Lawrence’s writing condensed into Kramer and Russell’s script and scenario is a physio/mystical vision of how women and men understand both themselves and each other.

One of the defining elements in Russell’s movie is the actuality of the ‘male presence’.  Bates and Reid bring to their respective roles the heft of masculinity.  They’re not the pretty boys who pervade many contemporary romantic movies about relationships.  In body and language Gerald and Rupert are unmistakably ‘man’.   Hollywood movies such as Westerns or similar action genres are of course full of ‘men’ big men – big in presence in body in attitude. But most of these Hollywood movies in their male characterisations are little more than homilies to those Anglo-Saxon projections of virility and patriarchy that derive from the muscular Christianity ethos of 18^th and 19^th century Britain.  Like this latter ethos, Hollywood ‘Men’ pivot about a ritualised rejection of the female.  They evince a distrust of sex both as polluting and weakening; to be a real man it is necessary to reject the female and all she represents.   Women are to be pushed away irrelevant to the self enclosed realm of ‘maledom’.  John Wayne – Clink Eastwood – Randolph Scott –  women exist to be written out of the scripts.  In ‘Women in Love’ Bates and Reid celebrate the centrality of the male to the female.

These stylised Hollywood filmic representations of ‘maledom’ have today come off the screen and embedded themselves with increased toxicity on social media – persuant on what is called ‘the male identity crisis’ ( Lawrence would of course find it inconceivable that a male identity crisis could exist without it being mirrored by a female identity crisis).  Influencers such as Tait have developed and sold a prepacked projection of ‘male identity’ that reduces women to the status of sex and domestic slaves: “Make me a Sandwich…”.  Tait and his ilk embrace a pseudo philosophy that excludes or would exclude women from whole areas of life.  Women are defined as inferior beings whose purpose is to serve the needs of the male.  Tait’s customers comprise young men who feel that they are failures with women.  Tait teaches that they need to understand that men are completely independent from women but to succeed with women they have to give them what they really want: subjugation.  

Tait has made a lot of money peddling this quasi-ideology to young mostly unformed males.  My feeling is that following Tait’s advice on the nature of manhood has probably led most of his customers up the dead end of a blind nihilistic alley, where resort to violence becomes the only solution to identity frustration.  And in the USA where ‘Gun Law’ rules and every punk has access to a firearm, the recourse to the bullet becomes for some the go-to neurotic insecure assertion of masculinity.  That the male exists to kill becomes the absurdist logical outcome of Tait’s sort of teaching.  Bring on Hegseth.

‘Women in Love’ stands as the antithesis of these poisonous ideas.

‘Women in Love’ both novel and Russell’s film express the fundamental difference and the equality of the male and the female.  In the novel ( and other writing) Lawrence developes his belief that the opposing dualities of male and female are inextricably entwined. When relations between the sexes become distorted to the degree seen in Western civilisations in relation to the primacy of the male, the result is disaster: the creation of cultures predicated on violence doomed to self destruction – much as we’ve witnessed for the last few centuries and experience today in the intensity of unending war.  This socio-cultural male imbalance has a feedback loop.  Oursociety society becomes more male twisted as women in their turn seek to imitate the male.  The overall consequence of unconstrained unbalanced maledom has led to the increasing lethality of our weaponry outstripping our psycho-emotional ability to control our emotions and to prevent our own annihilation.   

‘Women in Love’ is no girl meets boy romance.  ‘Women in Love’ presents the complexities of the duad of relations represented by Ursula/Rupert, Gudrun /Gerald.  It’s a vision that has mystical resonance of an ideal type.  The coming togather of Ursula and Rupert is to establish a fusion of relations that moves beyond the body the mind beyond love into an interlocking of the male and female separate yet fused, and so endowed with a particular balanced being in the world.  It is easy to mock Lawrence’s vision, but faced with the disaster of Western History, he is reaching out for some marriage of forces that at least suggest the possibility of another kind of development for us outside of male domination. Perhaps Russell’s film makes of Ursula, Rupert’s Wife in their marriage beyond marriage a weaker more infatuated being than she is in the novel, but nevertheless the relationship as recrafted by Kramer’s script takes the characters far beyond the usual on screen love banalities as depicted in recent movies such as Sean Baker’s  ‘Anora’.  

The Gerald/Gudrun explores another sort of outcome in the male/female duad as the course of the relationship runs to breakdown not fusion.  The relationship is defined from its outset by inequality.  Gerald’s life hangs over a meaningless void: he has status wealth and good looks but none of this can counter balance the emptiness he feels.  An emptiness he believes can only be filled with completion of his being by the female. Gudrun although willing to accept Gerald does so on her own terms.  She refuses to be pressurised by Gerald into a long term relationship which is driven by his need not hers.  The imposition of the man upon the woman.  The balance is wrong.  In the setting of the Swiss Alpes Gudron decides its time to leave Gerald to take up with another man.   Geralds response to being jilted isn’t  a refusal to let Gudrun go or violence.  He follows with s  Lawrencian logic.  Gerald takes the path of the lost and damned male, walking out into the snow and exposing himself to death. 

Lawrence’s ideas on sexual identity and relationships as expressed by Russell’s movie are given full rein.  Audiences unused to the levels of intensity in the relationships are catapulted through the scenario by Russell’s unremitting energised forces and images.  The animal sequences the running the dancing the ground thewater and the air are all packed in around the ideas to give them urgency cogency and actuallity.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

    

 

      

 

Green Room   Jeremy Saulnier (USA 2015) Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Steward, Brownie and Grimm

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 25 Feb 2026: ticket £7

the room is empty

Like the frozen yoghurt and the noodle business, the industrial film thrives on playing out endless variations of the same plot.   Green Room is no more than a video game escape movie in which a posh English actress with the gun and box cutter is scripted to win.

Saulnier’s Green Room is a cinematic work out with a theme of teenage entrapment by forces of evil – bogie men.  The bogie men in this case are decked out as proto white supremacists, but basically they’re just plain old bogie men in the cupboard.    Saulnier’s movie lacks any idiosyncratic or cultish distinction; Green Room lacks the imaginative stylisation and deep black comedic rituals of the cult slaughter movie.  It’s a technical work out.

It lacks even the socio-cultural thematics of the movie such Carpenter’s Escape from New York or Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace (2013; USA)  The latter film which although violently formulaic and lurching into parody, nevertheless in its expressive characterisation calls up the dark forces worming through the flesh of the United States of America, psychically legitimising the sociopathic corruption in the name of an enraged ‘id’.  Cooper’s film crudely but effectively pre-empts the politics of  Donald Trump, both as parody and as expression of the infantilised rage that defines contemporary politics.  In ‘Out of the Furnace’ Woody Harrelson’s performance as Harlan is the film’s psychopathic core.   In the film’s opening sequence, set in a drive-in movie theatre, Harrelson maps out the film’s territory as he defines and demonstrates his visceral understanding of human relations.  In comparison, Darcy “Green Room’s’ villain (played by Patrick Steward), is something of a pussy cat.

 Darcy is motivated by the banality of money rather than any deeper darker forces that penetrate the souls of deranged Americans.  Harrelson and Steward both do the ‘hard eye’ thing:  Harrelson does it to chilling effect.

  

Set against the idea of a situation in which a touring punk band gets slammed up in a venue for seeing something they didn’t ought to have seen, Saulnier as director/writer  simply mixes together a lukewarm cocktail of ingredients comprising: some punk attitude/dialogue, some bad-ass backwoodsmen with guns and machetes, couple of adorable bull terriers called Brownie and Grimm, and shakes the resultant liquid over the screen in the hope it will all come together.  The result is that ‘Green Room’ is a movie without an idea or even the notion of an idea that goes beyond the escape proposition which fails in its  feeble attempt to actualise the setting of the forces of good and evil against each other.   It is  a structure without an overriding psychic concept that ends up as a mechanised combinational tryst that is not a movie but an imitation video game. .  

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

My Father’s Shadow      Akinola Davies Jr (UK/Nig; 2025)   Sope Dirisu

viewed Tyneside Cinema 15 Feb 2026; ticket £13.49

a moment of truth

I saw Akinola Davies’ ‘My Fathers Shadow’ with my adult daughter.  In the course of the film Aki and Remi young brothers are led round Lagos by Folani their father.  He’s not only showing them the town but he also needs to conduct the urgent business of trying to get the backpay owed to him by the factory where he works. Towards the end of the day as they take refreshment in a bar, there’s a moment of emotional truth.  A moment in which details evident but dispersed within the action of scenario, suddenly come together with unhappy clarity to expose what has been going on with Folani.  But the day is not over. As day turns into night Davies connects all the different strands of his film allowing a complete and brutal picture of the social personal and political forces scattered throughout to be seen understood assimilated.   

 

Sitting next to my daughter Davies’ film made me think of my own role as a father (and would have done even if I had not been sitting next to my daughter).  ‘Shadow’ is in part a moral statement about the temporal nature of being a father.  The film is not moral in the sense of it being judgemental of Fulani.  It’s moral lies in the sense of pointing to fatherdom as being subject to the imperative of time and to life as a process.  We are all answerable in and to time.  Fathers at some stage of the unravelling of life and death may have to reckon with the consequences of their behaviour.  Even when it is too late for reconciliation. 

Sitting next to her in the Cinema listening to Folani talk to his sons, I was aware acutely aware of the failings the shortcomings in my fathering.  Perhaps that was why I’d chosen to go to this film with her, because although I didn’t know anything about it (except the setting) its very title ‘My Father’s Shadow’ held out the prospect of some examination of ‘this role’ which is a rare enough cinematic theme, especially as much of it is shot from the point of view of the child.   

 

This is a movie that I could see with my daughter after which we could look each other in the eye and talk through some of the bad daddy times and issues that still resonate through our relationship. Of course Davies’ movie is not made as a therapeutic vehicle; most people will not be seeing the film in this light or in my circumstances.  But in terms of relations ‘Shadow’ hits a vein of emotional intensity and temporal veracity that is grounded in the knowledge of messy familial worlds characterised by betrayal manipulation and love – the psychic blood that courses through the veins of life.

“Life is hard in Nigeria.”  Folani explains to his sons as he takes them through Lagos.

Davies’ film works all the more effectively because it is set in the socio-political contexts that shape Folani and give depth to his experience and his being in the world.  And Folani’s world is that of living in a neo-colonialist system.  The hand-over of power from the British to ‘Nigerians’ happened in 1960. There was no significant liberation movement and the hand over of power was relatively seamless.  Meaning that the capitalist economic system and the political social structures were fundamentally unchanged.  Besides the use of hereditary chiefs to rule local areas, the main structure erected by the British for controlling and defining Nigeria was its Army.  When the British ‘left’ the Nigerian army was the only national institution that effectively had reach throughout Nigeria.  Lip service was paid to democracy and fashioning responsive structures, but in effect the army simply continued to administer and exploit the systems the British had instigated for their own purposes, with added layers of corruption relating to individual officers tribal and family affiliations.    Folani and the millions of others like him became neo-colonialist subjects: without power without voice without significance:  as inconsequential as insects  

As night falls on Lagos it becomes certain that Folani will not get the back pay he desperately needs. He’s a nobody, beaten down in body and soul by a system that exploits his labour to create wealth for the factory owner but who is powerless to claim what is his due.  “Life is hard in Nigeria”.  The day Folani and his sons walk through Lagos is the day of days when the results of the national elections for a civilian government are to be announced.  The town is electric with excitement at the prospect of a civilian government that the people themselves will have elected.  But as Folani and his sons walked the town during the day the omnipresence of the military was all too evident: large numbers of soldiers circulating and in the air sinister rumours of military atrocities.  As night falls the TV in the bar where Folani and his sons are sitting explodes with the reality of betrayal. Even as the people are celebrating the picture on the screen cuts to the large bedecked figure of a general in military fatigues.  He announces the end of hope: due to suspected irregularities at the polling stations the elections have been declared void and the military will now take over the government.  The people, Folani, they all know they have been cheated.  They also know that it was inevitable that the dirty deed would be done, without shame without appeal; any attempt at mass or even individual protest to be met with murderous force.  You will be shot.  They have the guns; the people only have their bodies;  neo-colonial drift wood, expendable.  

Davies’ final sequence in ’Shadow’ is magnificent and humbling.  We see that for the neo-colonialist insect what is denied in life is granted by death.   The Rituals of Death bestow the honour dignity and worth never attainable in life.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  

 

No Other Choice     Park Chan Wook (Kor; 2025) Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin

viewed 27 Jan 2026 Tyneside Cinema; ticket £13.49

it all ends happily ever after

The most interesting sequences in Park’s ‘No Other Choice’ bookend his movie.  The establishment of Man Su and his family in their suburban paradise ending with Man Su’s exclamation: “I got it all!”; and the final shots of the the complete automation of the paper industry from the felling of trees through to the manufacturing process. The film in effect takes two hours and ten minutes to link them with the tale of ‘an overcoming.’   

This is a story of suburban folk, their trial and tribulations in an age of angst.

Thinking about another Korean director Bong Joon Ho, the strength of his early work lay in its interpenetration of contemporary Korea by the folk memories of an earlier archaic period dominated by ghosts and spirits.  ‘No Other Choice’ finds Korea in clear water, the past has completely vanished from the rear view mirror. The country is in full embrace of the American way of life: BBQ land.  No spooks.  But in fact the eventual form taken by Park’s film does invoke ideas from another realm.    

Man Su has wife kids with music lessons, dogs, lifestyle, works for a paper company that enables him to keep up the life style and the mortgage payments to the bank.  It all depends on the job.  But in a sequence that is parody of the process of corporate downsizing, we see Man Su given the order of the boot and then becoming the object of compensatory therapeutic counselling provided by the company to help him ‘move on’ with his life and get another job.  At which point we come to the core of the movie: his embrace of ‘overcoming’, a favourite Hollywood motif in which individuals take on the world which has put them down and win out; daring to dream daring to realise the dream: they ‘overcome.’  Life as an obstacle course.  A fairy tale.

Man Su’s situation is that like the protagonist is a fairy tale he needs to find a way out of his dilemma.  There is: no other choice. 

As automation (and we await the tranche of films dealing with those poor souls ditched for Al) takes over the paper making business, work is thin on the ground.  But the redundant Man Su realises he needs work in this, the one business he knows.  His wife’s part time work as a dental hygienist and his job stacking shelves will not make the money needed to keep dogs in chow or stop the re-po guys from taking his house back.  Man Su has some serious stuff to ‘overcome’. He lights on the idea of a little serial killing.  The idea is to kill off the competitors vying with him for the one and only good job that’s has been advertised in the paper making trade.

Park’s movie is intended as a satirical response to the ruthless nature of corporate capitalism, in particular in economies undergoing rapid change.  Exemplifying how the cut throat redundancy practices of firms have a contaminatory effect on individuals, causing them in turn to become ruthless in pursuit of their own interests, whatever the cost to others. 

But it’s a satire that’s wrapped up in the tissue paper of the trials and tribulations of the petit bourgeois life style.  As Man Su sets about his killing spree the film digresses, developing subplots involving both his family life and the life of one of his victims.  These are effectively little stories centering about the usual stuff consuming the emotional energy of the suburbs: marital infidelity and anti social children.  These little digressions all end as anti-climaxes but, and here’s the but, everything always turns out well.

As Park’s film develops it becomes apparent that it changes key.  The script that begins as a satire transforms into a fairy tale.  As Man Su embarks upon the first of the three traditional tests set the hero in a typical story by the brothers Grimm, the satire dissolves out of the scenario, replaced by Man Su embarking on three mythic tasks. As in fairyland what’s critical is that the accomplishment of each of these tasks advances the prospects of the hero. There are no adverse consequences.  Ma Su murders and everything continues as normal; the killings are simply tests of his worthiness to reclaim his estate.  In fairy tale terms   they take place in a parallel psychic space; in dramatic terms they have an anticlimactic quality.

 Once Man Su has completed his three tasks he can reclaim his kingdom. 

As in a fairy tale it all ends happily ever after.  Man Su gets the job he wants with the paper company.  He manages a production process that is totally automated.  He is the only human employed on new era shop floor.  No ghosts or spirits haunt either the Company or Man Su.  The dogs return; the mortgage payments are made, Man Su’s little girl, a musical genius, plays cello for them for the first time.  Disney! Cry your eyes out.

Park’s ‘No Other Choice’  starting out as a satire transforms into a Disney cartoon.  And the more it conforms to the norms of Disney the more the satiric elements of the film diminish.  But the cost of becoming a Hollywood fairy tale is that that as the satirical intent in the movie is lost, the film becomes increasingly predicable in its play out. ‘No Other Choice’ as a satire had potential to sparkle; as a fairy tale it’s overlong dull and lacking sparkle.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

 

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The Duke of Burgundy  Peter Strickland (UK;  2014)   Sidse Babett Knudson; Monica Swinn        

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 29 Jan 2026; Ticket: £7.00

Insecti=cide…the bugs have the excuse of being dead

My feeling after viewing Strickland’s ‘Duke of Burgundy’ was that I had viewed a sub-standard piece of formulaic erotica directed by a director seduced by his own amour propre. The film dominated by Strickland’s input as writer director, feels like a love note to himself, an exercise in a particular sort of contemporary narcissism.

The title is taken from the name of a type of highly patterned butterfly of which we see many in the course of the film, mostly dead, like the film itself.

The Duke of Burgundy is an indulgent movie lacking tensions and ideas that reveals Strickland as a film monger, who in this movie manipulates form and structure to engender the illusion that his films have some sort of  substance. 

In ‘Katalin Varga’ Strickland made extensive use of landscape to extend out the emotional mood of his revenge narrative; in ‘Berberian Sound Studio’ he made similar use of his sound track to feed and extend the layered narrative threads.  In both these movies the form and structure of the material fed directly into the film’s themes and subject matter: revenge in the case of ‘Katalin’ and in ‘Berberian’ the idea of evil as a pervasive overflowing overwhelming psychic force.   

Intercut visual imagery and sound fx as filmic devices can work as signifiers pointing to something in the nature of the film. The use of landscape or skyscape shots cut into the flow of a drama implies that the audience should make some sort of cognitive or emotional link (or perhaps make an absurdist non-link) implicit in the juxtaposition of the two different sources of  imagery.  Likewise the use of suggestive emotive or violent sound superimposed on images out of the visual context is a signifier or a manipulator that radically changes the viewers’ state of mind and understanding of what they are seeing on screen. 

 

 ‘Katalin Varga’ justifies its cut-aways to scenic imagery by suggesting the linking of the idea of revenge with the forces of nature; ‘Berberian Sound Studio’s’ demonic sound fx work effectively for the first half of the scenario before collapsing in on themselves, overused and unable to sustain the weight of its soundscaped and infested netherworlds.  In ‘The Duke of Burgundy’ there’s a lack of underlying idea.  Strickland’s filmic devices register as tricks, spurious effects used to fill out his soft porn scenario,  to leaven footage  that is otherwise drearily monotonous.  For all the SM baggage the seamed stockings, high heeled boots, bodices, encasement, bondage and SM persiflage eventally come across as rather silly but not particularly interesting.  

‘The Duke of Burgindy’ locks into the mistress/servant game that  Cynthia and Evelyn are playing (a game that sometimes breaks down).  The relationship is characterised  by long mannered invariant looks that pass between the two players and Strickland’s dialogue.  I know that most of the dialogue takes place ‘within the game’ but delivered in dead-pan deliberation the actual lines are at the level of a subpar Monty Pythan spoof.

 

The Duke of Burgundy script, without a driving idea or perception, lacking in tensions has no where to go and ends up going nowhere.  To the relationship between Evelyn and Cynthia Strickland adds the trees the bugs and bug talk asking the viewer to buy into spliced manipulation rather than significance.   Strickland’s film traps the audience on the surface of life but it’s a flat dull surface.   

If you really identify with flat surface, then this is the movie for you.  So perhaps it’s an identity thing.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

The Producers           Mel Brooks (USA; 1967) Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God    Werner Herzog (FDR; Peru; Mex; 1972) Klaus Kinski

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema new Year Jan 2026

new lamps for old

Mel Brooks’ ‘The Producers’ is a one joke movie (it’s a good joke) built around the proposition of making money out of a scam by spoofing Hitler.  Werner Herzog’s ‘Aguirre’ set during the period of the Spanish conquest of South American is a visceral recreation of the the insanity of colonialism.

Look up into the firmament of socio-political history and gaze at the stars.  From our time anchored perspective some are rising, some falling.   Star Churchill is definitely on the wane.  Star Hitler by way of contrast is on the rise.  Re-appraisal of Winston’s colonial record has caused him to slip in the heavens.  Hitler who was below the horizon for most of the 20^th century has in the last twenty years become well visible particularly on dark nights.

The last fifty years have witnessed the unabashed rise in genocides and radical ethnic cleansing.  World wide there have been attempts to intimidate and if necessary to drive or wipe out civilian populations whose diverse ethnicity is seen as a challenge to a dominant racial or nationalist grouping.  As these politically inspired  racial or socioreligious murderous campaign have increased – the Bosnians, Rohingya, African Sudanese, and most visibly the Palestinians – so have apologias for Hitler started to counter balance his pariah status.  In targeting diverse civilian populations either as a political ploy of distraction or as an easy means of state/individual enrichment through plunder, Hitler’s light starts to shine through. Typically from the hard core right there is the usual formulaic acknowledgment that he went too far (too far being a euphemism standing in for multiple genocides and homicidal wars); all told he did much that was right.  What interests the apologists most is Hitler’s strap line: ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer’.  Hitler’s creation of a state consolidated by one regimented political party disciplined by terror unified by the creation of a common racial enemy: the Jews.  

As advertising agencies know one means of familiarising a brand is to relate it to a friendly human face – hence the use of smiling celebrities to front out sales messages.  Foibles and imperfections are ok, they can all help the consumer associate with a product.  This type of thought makes ‘The Producers’ more problematic viewing today than when it was originally released.  Brooks depicts the Hitler regime as an all singing all dancing spectacle; not the hard assed reality of the grim faced Nuremberg rallies (no one smiles in Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens) that were the hallmark of Nazism.   Of course `The Producers’ is a spoof, intended to be outrageously silly.  But in today’s environment of the normalisation of mass slaughter, perhaps it backfires.  The representation of Hitler as a dotty ‘camp’ figure with a friendly smiling face, who inspires the gushing sung out acclamation: ‘Springtime for Hitler and Germany, Winter for Poland and France, Deutschland is happy and Gay,…Look out here comes the Master Race’ – is exactly on message for the current crop of authoritarian despots.  Hitler as a progenitor of MAGA: a silly boy who did some bad things but overall was on the right path.  Brooks’ movie may have been made to exploit Hitler for laughs.  At first they laughed at Trump: fewer people are laughing today.  Now ‘The Producers’ feels like it could be incorporated into the rehabilitative wave set on justifying Hitler as part of the broader campaign to legitimise the murderous policies and genocide practices of today’s despots.   

Although most people viewing Brooks’ film will enjoy and laugh at the cleverly extended joke (delivered by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) the passage of time has fundamentally altered the film’s premise. What was seen as a bit of harmless fun in 1967 has in the 60 odd years since it was made taken on a more disturbing dimension. We see Hitler transformed from a mass murderer into the innocent happy  acceptable face of power, on the way to becoming a poster boy for the current crop of ruthless dictators.  It would be difficult to remake this film in these times.

They seek Gold.

Re-seeing Herzog’s ‘Aguirre’ it felt like the core themes underlying the film had intensified in relevance since it was made.  More than ever the insanity of greed and desire sing through the depiction of Aguirre’s colonial project, as if the whole history of colonialism up to Trump had been condensed into the Herzog’s idea.   It’s a quest movie in which nothing gets in the way of the pursuit of wealth and glory. The Spanish came seeking gold the gold of their dreams; they ended up both with precious metals and ruling the vast lands of S America.  This is also the story of much of colonial history India, Indonesia, China, West Africa: they who came to extract ended up as rulers over vast lands.

Through the character of Aguirre (played on the edge of madness by Klaus Kinski) we see that the story of conquest is the story possession: being possessed by demons.  Blinded by the dream of gold and conquest, whatever the cost, Aguirre’s demons drive him.  Rooted in his psyche they equate power with terror and violence.  To attain his goal of emulating Pizarro nothing’s allowed to stand in the way. He forces his company through impassable terrain, raging waters; he kills, put his company at risk, to follow righteousness of his path.

What gives the film immediacy and authenticity is its visceral quality.  Shot on location on and about tributaries of the Amazon, the viewer sees that the players (and by extension also the crew) are facing many of the same hardships experienced by the conquistadores.   No studio sets, no trick shots or ‘green backgrounds’ Herzog’s scenario is grounded in the actual. And it’s through this actuality that the audience gain measure of the nature of these conquistadores at this time with the resources available to them.  Their main resource was that of the insanity of will.  The colonial project, the film project, Aguirre Herzog Pizarro were driven by the forces of maniacal megalomania.  South America, Middle East, the Indies, then Africa, Vietnam Afghanistan, Iraq all destined to suffer the violence of White Man’s demons and his greed to possess what is not his.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Apartment    Billy Wilder (1960; USA)  Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine;   Fred MacMurray

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 31^st Dec 2025; ticket: £7

the coming of the ID

I saw Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’ when it first came out as young boy about 12 years old.  I remembered three things about it: Jack Lemmon’s performance (as C C Baxter), the wit of the script and thirdly the images of the office of Consolidated Insurance where Lemmon worked:  a vast hall, a cathedral of commerce and capitalism.  It was filled with hundreds of desks in serried rows stretching out horizontally and laterally forever into the distance. An incredible sight.  It seemed to me impossible that such a huge array of workers could exist, impossible to imagine what all these people were doing (perhaps it didn’t matter whether they did anything; so deployed, like ceremonial parades of soldiers marching past the great leader, they were simply a symbol of the power to compel such orderings): impossible not to feel that this space did anything else but crush the soul of those chained to their desks in a grid iron of overwhelming banality. 

I remembered nothing of the role of Shirley MacLaine, of which more later.

Wilder opens ‘The Apartment’ with a  montage of New York City.  From above we see the great city, we see its monumental buildings, moving in we track the workers on their way to labour in these huge structures. The final shot in the sequence establishes CC working at his desk, behind him we see the vastness of the office space on the 29^th floor. On this second viewing it immediately occurred to me that I’d seen almost the same shot in King Vidor’s 1928 movie ‘The Crowd’.  ‘The Crowd’ follows the life and career of an ordinary American John Sims who ends up as another expendable clerical donkey working for a large corporation in another vast office space that expands to look even larger than ‘The Apartment’ space and contains thousands of workers all bent over their desks, heads bowed in existential submission.

‘The Crowd’ is a ‘silent movie, a melodrama but Vidor’s use of symbolic imagery takes the viewer outside of the binding clinch of the plot.  Vidor’s realisation of the office is to make the space resemble hell.  This world of work is a creation of the devil.  The vast space filled out with bent-over clerks arranged in lines stretching back to infinity tells that the individuals here are lost and helpless. Trapped: there is no way out of this world.  Vidor’s movie is a moral statement.

Vidor is pointing to the death of America as land of opportunity. All that’s left is empty rhetoric and the mesmeric quasi religious repetition that anyone in America can make it.  John Sims’s father drills into him that through hard work and ambition anyone can move from Log House to White House.  It’s become a chimerical lie.  In reality the large corporations have taken over the country with the consequence that achievement in America is restricted by oligarchy and nepotism.  ‘The Crowd’ chronicles the consequences for those cheated by the promise of ‘The Dream’. A life of endless drudgery and insecurity as a rent and wage slave.  Promised the world but rewarded only with the distraction of entertainment.  ‘The Crowd’ is an indictment that refuses to conclude on a note of hope.

Move on 30 years 1960 and ‘The Apartment’.  It a different ballgame.  We have the same setting, the huge dehumanised office space, the desks occupied by those condemned to labour in such places.  But Wilder’s perception is quite different.  The office space is not seen from its evident surface as a symptom of oppression; the focus has shifted to what lies beneath the surface.  Wilder strips away the surface and represents the office space not as hell but as a rhizome of sexual desires. Underneath each of those desks lurks an activated ID, desirous of freedom.  Escape from the reality of work lies not in collective solidarity, rather through individualised fantasy pivoting about the needs and desires of the body.  There is of course gender differentiation: for the men sex is both power and physical satisfaction, for the women the body for all its pleasures is a means to desired security.  And as represented by Wilder the corporate office is a sort of executive’s harem, a privilege that goes along with the key to the executive locker room.   ‘The Apartment’ signifies that by 1960’s the representation of the work situation has shifted from above the belt to below the belt; from the representation of oppression to the satisfaction of and indulgence of individuated fantasy. 

And C C Baxter?  He’s a below the belt operator.  Whereas in the hard assed world of the office workers in ‘The Crowd’ the division between workers and executives had the structural elements of the Indian caste system: no way across the surface, everyone stays put.  However with the development of the rhizome of desire the possibility opens up for individuals like CC to tunnel through the system and  working from beneath the surface, able to corrupt it for their own purposes.  Wilder thereby in ‘The Apartment’ acknowledges that other elemental factor that destroys what’s left of the American dream: corruption – and corruption’s handmaiden, cynicism.

‘The Apartment’ is a sitcom in the ‘Whitehall Farce’ mode animated by mistimed assignations. Wilder’s shrewd scripting locates it at the core of the social and political relations that were starting to characterise American society. 

I remembered Jack Lemmon’s playing even years later because his performance reminded me of Buster Keaton.  Lemmon at his best has the stoic deadpan facial reactions that were BK’s trademark.  Of course Lemmon smiles in the film, but then ‘The Apartment’ is a talkie.  It’s much more difficult to avoid smiling in the talking pictures and BK never really came good after the end of the Silent Era.

But I had no memory of Shirley McLain (plays Fran).  Perhaps it has to do with agency? Fran like the other women characters in the film has no agency.  For all that he is put upon Wilder’s script assigns CC Baxter with choice.  MacLaine is just a puppet of the script, a pawn in the game of plot machination, having to duck dive bob and weave to enable the narrative to come to its rather staid conclusion. But the cost to MacLaine is the destroying of any semblance of the integrity of her character.  The low point comes when the the script demands she declare her infatuation with the bossman Jeff.   MacLaine tries hard with these lines.  She can’t make ‘em stick: it is simply unbelievable that anyone could love this croaking reptilian sleezeball.  At this point, Fran’s credibility disolves like silk in acid, leaving the audience indifferent to her fate.

Overall ‘The Apartment’ represents a low point in Hollywood’s depiction of women though reflecting accurately the status of women in America in the 1950’s.  Although Jeff’s wife kicks him out, in general the female parts are demeaning. Women are represented as beings without agency as little more than second rate citizens and objects for male sexual exploitation.  As a specimen cultural product of the era Wilder’s movie is a sure indicator that the gender imbalance in power of the times had reached criticality and was in dire need of radical correction.  Interesting to note 1960’s saw the dynamic manifestation of contemporary feminism start to make some inroads into the patriarchal hegemony.   “The Apartment’ is an amusing comedy, but with women the butt of much of the humour the thought occurs as the extent to which it may have caused female viewers to look at the film from a another particular angle and draw their own conclusions.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

It was just an Accident     Jamal Panahi  (2025; Iran Fr Lux)  Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afsari

viewed Tyneside Cinema 9^th Dec 2025; ticket £13.25

no accident

The core of Panahi’s film is the simple question of what it is to be human under extreme circumstances.

The opening sequence of ‘It was just an Accident’ is  a compressed expression of some of Panahi’s main concerns.  A car, man driving his wife beside him, travels through the night. Loud music playing and his excitable child in the back distract.  Suddenly there’s a thud.  The man gets out and finds that he has run over a dog, injured it, so he kills it.  As he drives on his wife remarks in response to the child’s upset question:  “It was just an accident…” She goes on to peddle some justificatory religious cant about it being God’s will, the dog’s death part of God’s design.  

The driver as it turns out is the prison torturer who’s later taken hostage by one of his victims, the which provides the fulcrum for the film’s plot.

In ‘Taxi Tehran’ Panahi is asked by his niece how films start? Panahi tells her films start with a perception.  A perception. Of course it depends on what sort of perception.  Hollywood’s driving perception is that a film project will hit big at the box-office.  Panahi’s ‘perception’ relates to a state of seeing, seeing something that warrants attention, that warrants a film. 

Prior to making ‘It was just an Accident’ (JA) Panahi had spent some seven months in prison for subversive anti-Islamic State of Iran activities. This was not his first stretch inside Iran’s prison system where torture and maltreatment are routine concomitants of incarceration.  But perhaps this last visit sharpened his insight into the differences between the victims of cruelty and its perpetrators.  The difference  between the corrupted and the innocent, the justified and the unjustified.  A perception.

At the heart of the perception is a fundamental psychic contradiction between the prison officers and their helpless victims.  

The former murder torture mutilate torment and subject their victims to psychological terror such as fake preparation for execution.  They carry out their acts of violence on a daily routine basis, often in an arbitrary whimsical manner, without compunction.  They wear the uniform that distinguishes them, marks them off, and which gives them the right to abuse the prisoners both for punishment and for extracting information.  Their cruelty is mediated and condoned by the ideological corrosion of religion that declaims the implementation of a regime of death and torture as the immutable will of God.  The God from whom they claim this dispensation is simply a hideous projection of the Islamic state’s desire to eradicate anyone who at any level opposes it.   The prison officers have the basic attributes of a shared humanity stripped out of them unable to relate to the pain of others.  

And the victims?  

As Panahi observes. they suffer not just pain but horror of an enforced intimacy with those who inflict the pain both on themselves and others.  In the closeness to their guards they become familiar with the face the body the voice of the tormentors as they torture and kill.   The sufferer is released into a world of the imagination by their ordeal. How will they be able to get out of this darkness; to eat properly; to be with those tbey love; to take revenge on the killers and torturers who have smashed up their body and mind.  The fantasy of having the tormenters in your grasp to do unto them as they did unto you.  You’d kill them like a rabid dog.  Wouldn’t you? 

Black humour.

But as to ‘revenge’ Panahi charts its course as something like a black comedy.  Vahid kidnaps Eghbal (his prison torturer, nicknamed Pegleg) with the intention of taking his revenge by killing him.   But as Vahid is in the process of burying Eghbal alive, Eghbal denies being Eghbal.  Vahid, ‘suddenly’ doubtful, desists and having rendered Eghbal unconscious and stuffed him in a box, then proceeds to a round of visitations to other political prisoners tortured by Pegleg.  My thinking is that as the round of attempted identification proceeds it becomes clear that although the victims want revenge they cannot carry through with it.  Their individual suffering at the hands of Pegleg has perhaps deepened their feeling of what it is to be human of their gratitude for life.  They cannot kill. They cannot torture.  More than this their arroused compassion even extends farcically to saving the life of Pegleg’s wife.  When finally Pegleg is trussed up like a turkey around the bole of a tree, with Vahid’s knife ready, he flings it down, Vahid cannot kill.  What he and  Shiva actually do is confront and challenge Pegleg passionately and verbally, to his face.  They cannot harm him but they can shame him, confront him with what he is and what he has done to them.  This is the time for truth.   Truth is spoken as catharsis and vindication of the human spirit.  And it breaks Pegleg open he understands and is overwhelmed by his own tears.  He is released.

But Panahi’s instincts as a film maker leave him unable to end his film on anything other than a note of black humour.  In the course of JA we have heard how Pegleg could always be recognised by the sound he made as he walked: a shuffle then the thud of his wooden leg as it came down of the floor. A sound and a rhythm. In the final scene Vahid is in his workspace leaning over a bench. Behind him approaching he hears the familiar rhythmic sound of a shuffle followed by a thud.  It is the Panahi’s final dark joke.  Always haunted the victim forgives but never forgets….

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 

 

  

Nouvelle Vague      Richard Linklater  (Fr; 2025)  Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch

viewed Tyneside Cinema 8^th Nov 2025; ticket £13.75

old Macdonald had a farm…

Godard’s movies are always about truth; but Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague peddles the false. 

Godard’s films may express his truth; but Godard’s truth is always grounded in the path of  struggle.   Linklater likes the way to be easy going.  Don’t think just recreate and replicate.      ‘Nouvelle Vague’ takes ‘A Bout de Souffle’ (BdS) and degrades it into a period costume dramas with  a  scenario  that panders to a time line filled out with emotive pouting and dialogue lines that exploit best quotes from J-L G.  Linklater’s film is act of manipulation, the false tricked out to represent the real.

I suppose you either like Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’ perhaps finding it has something to novel say about the process of film making – scripts actors directing; or you find it an empty vessel that under the pretext of honouring Godard’s making of ‘A Bout de Souffle’ (Breathless) simply exploits enlarges distorts manipulates certain aspects of the production to churn out cinematic convenience food fit for Netflix.  A MacFilm.

‘Nouvelle Vague’ is presented as a more or less simple replication of the process of making BdS from pre-pre-production to the post production.  Structured chronologically it leads us through Godard’s insistant selling of himself as director, through to his casting and crewing, the shoot and the edit.  Guillaume Marbeck plays J-L G; Zoey Deutch plays Jean Seberg.

The film structures BdS as taking place in constant time a mechanical passage in which only the aspects of the story deemed screen worthy get  on screen.  So we have plenty of time with Godard’s push to direct, his casting of Seburg and then certain scenes in HdS.  The scenes that make it into the scenario are mainly the crowd pleasing exteriors. But it is the scenes in the hotel room, riveting in their intensity  that define Godard’s film.  Viewing  Linklater’s reset you wouldn’t know this.   Linklater likewise skits over the editing.  According to Godard’s DP Raoul Coutard, the film’s expressive vitality (in part due to Godard’s use of jump-cuts) was created in the editing room where Godard had an intuitive feel for how to manipulate his footage.  But the business of splicing film is not sexy, so the cutting room is cut  reduced to one short scene, difficult to comprehend where the editors seem to be initially shocked by Godard’s idea of breaking up and thereby exposing the filmic fabrication of continuity. 

But of course Godard’s cutting through the shiboleths of film construction is honoured in absence by Linklater.   ‘Nouvelle Vague’s ’ script is devoid of Godard’s wit particularly characterised by his use of graphics.  With some filmic wit Linklater could have made a film that played fast with some of Godard’s ideas, including his politics.  Less time with the dullness of replication more time having playing with Godard.  Instead we have to turn our gaze upon on Marbeck and Deutch, doing their imitations going thorough the motion of walking in dead man/woman’s shoes.

Linklater’s final graphic at the end of ‘Nouvelle Vague’  reveals the extent to which he seems to hold Godard, the man the film maker the thinker, in contempt.  It might be that he is unaware of Godard’s legacy or that his anxiety to draw down the money on offer from the French Government, led him to avoid making any political statements in ‘Nouvelle Vague’.  The graphic, white on black, the last image of the film says that Jean Seburg made some 34 films after ‘A Bout de Souffle’….the implication being how beneficial her role in the movie had been to her career.  Let’s all clap hands, nice one J-L G. 

The salient fact about Jean Seberg, that surely must have drawn Godard’s attention was that at the age of 40 she committed suicide in Paris by overdosing on barbituates.  There were however graphic reasons for her death.

Because of Seberg’s support for Black Panthers and other radical organisations in the 1960’s,  Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to use a programme of techniques to harass intimidate defame and discredit her.  As part of this campaign the FBI created the false story that the pregnant Seberg’s child was not fathered by Romain Gary, her husband, but by Raymond Hewitt a Black Panther.  The child died in her womb; its death haunted her for the rest of her life.  Hoover also made sure she was was black listed in Hollywood and pursued her relentlessly for 10 years.  After her death Gary called a press conference in which he blamed the FBI’s campaign against her for her deteriorated mental state. 

This feels more like the story that Linklater should have filmed or somehow referenced in ‘A Bout de Souffle’.  Jean Seberg ended up dead.   Breathless;   Out of breath;  ‘A Bout de Souffle’ literally.   Whacked by the FBI.  As Godard said towards the end of his life:  ‘Cinema is dead.’  Linklater’s film shows that Godard as usual knew what he was talking about.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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