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Only the River Flows           Wei Shujun (2023; China) Zhu Yilong

viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 19 Aug 2024; ticket £12:25

It’s cold in China

It is a sign of the barrenness of Wei Shujun s ‘Only the River Flows’ (even his title feels pretentious and meaningless) that he has to fill out the music track with repeated renderings of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, the Pathétique. My feeling is that Wei has made such promiscuous use of this piece because he was looking to exploit its resonance and gravity in the hope of lending to his shallow scenario some form of emotional depth.

Only the River Flows (ORF) is a police procedural drama whose script (derived from a novel) is structured about a number of intersecting elements feeding into the life of his protagonist, detective Ma: his actual tec work, his personal mental state, the in-house police politics and his home life which incorporates his wife’s increasingly complicated and uncertain pregnancy and term.

Older style police or ‘tec procedural scripts fronted up with ‘process’ and left any socio/political/personal issues to take the form of background shading. Certainly in the best of these films, such as Lang’s ‘Big Heat’ and many of the adaptations of Chandler and Cain’s novels, this restrained intrusion of dark forces worked very effectively. As the narratives developed the contextual shadows often pressed in a little closer revealing to the audience the corruption darkness and emptiness within which the protagonists were enmeshed as they pursued their investigations.    

But fashions change with the times. And in times of transparency inclusiveness etc,  scripts now have to give the protagonists ‘rounded’ lives. A kind of obsessive literalism dominates the contemporary script rule book. Of course this works well in typical series which employ multiple episodes to string out their narratives, the which need multiple sub-plots to extend the material. Series scriptings have to feature lead characters who have partners (on whom they may cheat) difficult children/families, health and mental health problems, loads of red herrings etc to fill out the time. Whether this works effectively in feature films is a moot question, but certainly in this respect Wei flounders.

Intercutting between the political the procedural the personal and the intimate, Wei’s script is simply a device that switches from one thing to another, from one area of concern to another. In working so many elements into ORF none of the disparate parts have time to strike a relational chord with the audience. The relations depicted are expressed as series of mechanistic events designed to direct the audience’s attention not to engage them. The most obvious example in ORF is the suicide of Ma’s immediate buddy who jumps off the roof of the police station. This is depicted as a sudden unnerving event: the shocking crash of his body thumping onto the roof of a car next to Ma as he is leaving the police station. This suicide event is too extreme for the scenario to cope with, ORF’s narrative occupies a narrow emotive space and incorporating this drastic public suicide into the play out of the story is beyond Wei’s capacity. It has the feeling of being an event that is capricious, in the sense that it’s written into the scenario purely for its value as spectacle.

Likewise the script’s plotting of Ma and his wife coping with the news that her unborn child may well suffer from a genetic defect. The effect, the abort or not not abort positions, is to turn his home life into a piece of emotional soap opera a cheap way of giving Ma’s relationship with his partner any sort of heft or meaning.    

Perhaps these scripted events were designed as part of Wei’s vision of his film as a pallet of darkness, his intention to paint a picture of China as a twilight landscape. But the outcome is the feeling that instead of engaging the audience Wei tries to manipulate them by exploiting over determined stimuli. But the mechanistic nature of his script ultimately works against engagement because the characters and their situations are not developed in such a way that the audience is able to invest in any reason to care about them.

The procedural sections of the film are developed so that they become intertwined with Ma’s personal breakdown. Wei cuts away from Ma investigating/tracking down suspects to Ma’s hallucinatory nightmarish encounters with the serial killer. Horror sequences, employing mostly rather familiar tropes, are used to create an interplay of the real and the imagined which in contemporary film making has become the norm. The object filmically is familiar enough: to be adroit enough in the intersplicing of the real and the imagined so that the viewer is confused as to which is which, making the point that the subjective and objective can combine in the realm of personal experience. Scripted intelligently something of this nature can be effectively realised. Mostly however such intermingling comprises a one thing after another style of film making permitting lazy script writers to hammer the audience with a series of tricks, indulging in spectacle at the cost of meaning.

As Wei’s film moves flips through its multiple plots and subplots, it rains is heavily. Wei lets know this is dark China. Rain is introduced sort of as an idea in the first section of the film, and continues as a thematic throughout ORF. Rain is now an established metanym in the movie business: it’s everywhere (perhaps the cinematic rain making technology is easy and cheap now), but like a lot of visual tropes, overuse more or less as a repeated leitmotif, simply diminishes effect.

adrin neatour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fear Eats the Soul       Rainer Fassbinder (FDR; 1974) Brigitte Mira; El Hedi ben Salem

Viewed 29 July 2024 Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; ticket £7

 

it’s a fairy tale

 

Fassbinder’s ‘Fear Eats the Soul’ (FES) is a film that works in spite of the anomalous relationship that lies at the core of Fassbinder’s script. The film works because of Fassbinder’s decision to frame his story as a sort of fairy tale, an ironic inverted telling of a familiar narrative in which the forces of evil conspire to prevent a relationship between two people who love each other, a relationship that is defined as unacceptable on account of its mixed race nature: an Arab man and a European/German woman.

Script wise Fassbinder reworks the logic of traditional folk tales in terms of the anomalous attributes of the two main characters. The anomaly arises from the difference in age and physicality between Ali and Emmi: Ali young tall handsom Moroccan – Emmi a short dumpy woman in late middle age. To make this relationship plausible on screen Fassbinder employs a de-intensified theatrical structure to present the action, so that whilst off stage levels of physicality are suggested between the couple, the physical attraction shown between them is restrained and evokes the idea of mutual need rather than passion, affection rather than love. A Disneyesque touch perhaps but subverted by radical intent.

Fassbinder’s scenario draws on Brecht’s theatrical ideas which centre about what should constitute effective drama. For Brecht it was the representation of ideas that was critical. In theatre it was essential to avoid the simplistic emotional manipulations that characterise Bourgeois entertainment. The purpose of the characters is to represent expressive ideas in relation to their situations. This doesn’t banish emotions, far from it, but understanding and reflecting the characters’ position (in particular social positions and their contradictions) in wider relational terms should be the paramount purpose of the writer and director.

Built on the structure of the fairy tale, Fassbinder’s script employs a mechanics of social relations. His script works because the societal relations he draws on to drive and shape the narrative are real, even if anti-architypal. (in Sleeping Beauty it is the male who is the active agent; in FES it is Emmi who is instigator) The relationship between Ali and Emmi enable us to see the social reactions it provokes. Fassbinder’s filming is stage oriented in that the unfolding scenes are contrived and composed so as to allow the viewer to see what is happening, but always implanted in the wider social perspective. Through the lens of the camera, the viewer is allocated the role of the privileged observer. There are no point of view shots, the personal reactions of Ali and Emmi are not (until late in the film) the issue. At key moments in the scenario the camera tracks in close or wide or moves to reveal a situation, but always so that we may better see/ understand the forces at work on Ali and Emmi.

As they move in together and commit as a couple by marrying, we see how the net of the surrounding condemnatory interactive social forces draws in to isolate and reject them.  Both the neighbours and her grown up children punish Emmi for forming a relationship outside her racial group. The family scene when Emmi gathers her children togaether to tell them she has married Ali, takes the form of the classic moment of revelation (such as when a family all gather in the lawyer’s office to hear the reading of a will). Emmi’s revelation is the most emotionally charged sequence in FES, as one of her sons kicks in her TV unable to supress his rage at what he sees as his mother’s racial betrayal. This incident is immediately defused by Emmi’s refusal to react, her impassivity, her acceptance of her son’s action.

The first part of FES documents the winding up of the mechanics of racial discrimination to leave Emmi completely isolated from the social matrix; the second part of the film scripts the somewhat humerous unwinding of these same dramatic mechanics, as the self interest of the various parties, both neighbours and family proceeds to temper their rejection of Emmi and Ali, engendering in them at least a superficial acceptance of the relationship. This ‘unwinding’ of socially prejudicial racism happens purely at the individual level: as Fassbinder makes clear in a late scene comprising a conversation between Emmi and her follow cleaners, the social forces generating xenophobia and race hate with their underlying negative stereotypical justifications don’t go away. They lie dormant waiting an appropriate pretext or moment to reassert themselves. Ali as an Arab may be tolerated, may be awarded a sort of status as an honorary German, but all the underlying prejudices remain in play, ready to re-assert themselves given a justificatory excuse.

‘Fear Eats the Soul’ is Fassbinder’s representation of racism at work in Western culture. Laying bare the mechanics of racism through ingrained stereotypes expressing themselves through direct aggressive discrimination. Fassbinder makes his point to a nation where these same forces manifested themselves in the final solution of Nazism.

But there is also strange logic of the fairytale that makes up the substrate of the film, underlying the scenario and shaping the viewer’s response to the material. The logic is of course centred on Emmi and Ali, but it is Ali who really stands out by reason of his physicality, his body. There is an intrinsic nobility about El Hedi’s person: his dignity his presence his magnanimity his beauty. He has the characteristics of a ‘fairy tale prince’, an ideal type rather than a regular guy. Towards the end of the film when angered or perhaps slighted by Emmi’s casual possessive behaviour towards him he leaves her and briefly resumes a relationship with the young woman who runs the bar where some Moroccans gather to socialise. But when Emmi shows up in the bar, heart broken by his leaving her, his innate nobility asserts itself and he tells her he will return to her, remaining true to his marriage vow. It is an ending that is pure fairy tale, a sort of ‘…and they lived happily every after….’ Not the usual ending associated with Fassbinder.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Naked                          Mike Leigh (UK; 1993;) David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 25 July 2024; ticket £7

Made in those times before actors had to whiten their teeth to get work

The opening shot of Leigh’s ‘Naked’ is a night time tracking shot down a dark barely lit dirty back ally, which shot develops into a hand held sequence in the ally in which we see a man screwing a woman – it looks like rape. The woman pushes him off and the man, who turns out to be protagonist Johnny runs off, gets in a car and drives to London. In many ways the film fails to develop anything beyond the this initial scene, except for Leigh’s script to present Johnny’s thinking as a range of scatter gun cosmic ideas delivered to his hearers as combative aggressive monologues. Johnny doesn’t do dialogue any more than he lets anything get in the way of his sexual proclivities.

Leigh is one of a group of UK film makers in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s who were grounding their scenarios in what was becoming a post industrial society, with traditional male employment closing down and employment seen by a disenchanted post punk working class generation as a degrading scam designed to suppress and kill them.

The core of the script is Leigh’s representation of his two male characters, Johnny and the ‘Landlord’, as living in a ‘male fuckosphere’.

Outside of Johnny’s cosmic rap, sex and sexual exploitation are the focus of the script. The portrayal of sexual relations between women and men is bleak in its unremitting repetition of the tropes of male fantasy. In the scenario every time a woman looks at one of the men, it’s interpreted as being a ‘come on’, an excuse for the ‘Landlord’ to rape and for Johnny to use his aggressively honed ideas to manipulate the situation between himself and his female target. Leigh’s world in ‘Naked’ is centred around sex as death. Johnny at one point asks Sophie: “Do you think women enjoy being raped?” Sophie is not scripted with a reply, which just about sums up the film, in which Leigh gives full expression to a male obsession that women exist to serve and service men. ‘Naked’ communicates itself as a precursor of the Andrew Tait’s blogs as one woman after another is victim to either Johnny or the ‘Landlord’s’ intents and desires.

It’s difficult to make sense of the ‘Landlord’ character who in Leigh’s scenario is a psychopathic serial rapist. What’s he doing in the film? Is he a purely symbolic entity who’s role is to symbolise the amorality of the male British ruling class, who own most of the land? If so his behaviour including rapes are the symptomatic actions of an engrained masculine historic entitlement. But if this sort of arch symbolism was intended by Leigh, it doesn’t sit easily with either his use of everyday settings or his directorial naturalist acting style. Perhaps symbolic gender personation of class wasn’t the purpose of the character, who otherwise can only be understood as a representation of evil in the world, a bad ass presence who’s proclivities are exploited by a script that feeds him a series of suitable women incapable of resistance. In fact given the prominence of the ‘Landlord’ in the film and the violent nature of his role, Leigh’s scripting and direction fail to make any sense of the purpose for the inclusion of this character in the film, besides arbitrary sensationalism or a particular need to express hateful violence towards women on the part of Leigh.

Johnny has two facets to his persona in ‘Naked’. The compulsive womaniser who exploits his penchant for quick acidic repartee to try to beat down or cajole women into bending to his will. Again this type of patter has been elaborated as a softening up technique adumbrated by the current generation of misogynists. Johnny’s style of repartee is generally a sort of assault on the woman victim aimed at asserting male dominance having the last word and breaking resistance.

Johnny’s intellectual/philosophical interests are expressed in ‘Naked’ in the form of long dull monologues. This is most tediously evidenced in the long scene at night in the empty building with the security guard. Johnny’s ideas are drawn from sources such as Vonnegut Boroughs and Ken Campbell’s Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool to name only sources that come immediately to mind: there were many other sources skimming about the alt world of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. It is difficult to get monologues to work well in film.   Leigh obviously has no idea how to do it. In particular Johnny’s rapid fire delivery of his chains of thought quickly loses off audience interest leaving little for them to do except, much like listening out the pub bore, waiting for the torture of being talked at, to end.

Looking at ‘Naked’ it presents a picture of a film maker who has come to a dead end. In thought and word and deed. ‘Naked’ feels like a man in crisis using film and the power it gave him as a director/writer to work out and through his inner hidden ambivalences towards women. ‘Naked’ looks like nothing more than the expression of Leigh’s need for some sort of personal catharsis, exploiting his actors for his own purposes.   ‘Naked’ has nothing to say, except to actors who should: beware Film Makers bearing gifts.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

Kinds of Kindness     Yorgos Lanthimos; screenplay – Efthimis Filipou (2024; USA) Emma Stone, Jesse Plemens, Willem Dafoe

viewed Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 2^nd July 24; ticket £12.25

little ideas on the widescreen

Lanthimos’ ‘Kinds of Kindness’ (KoK) comprises three short films. All the stories have similar and familiar all-American settings, they are all filled out with the same players, but each revolves about a different situation. The three separate scenarios sort of pick up on the ideas realm suggested by the lyrics of Eurythmics number ‘Sweet Dreams’ referencing abuse and manipulation. This rollocking pre-title track is laid over the opening image of a typical aspirational American suburban house/home, complete with its mock classical white portico.

According to Wikipedia, Lanthimos’s original title for the film was ‘RMF’. Which title Lanthimos has said is meaningless in itself and not in reference to anything. Anything, that is, other than empty meaninglessness of such referent signs where multifarious initials (initialism) and acronyms have insinuated themselves into our consciousness as a daily part of our language, effecting even the way we think, or perhaps even the way we are able to think. These semantic ‘shortcuts’ often replace full nomenclature, allowing in a sense a sort of bypassing of the actual or, a dislocation between what is said and what is represented. Any way these shortcuts are very much part of the way we communicate, and each of Lanthimos’ shorts is preceded by the use of the initials RMF as part of the title, each of which titles incorporates the absurd ethos.

So far so good; obscure but witty titles wrapped around a perception. The same cannot be said of the rest of the movie which fails to lead us further into any of the places that Lanthimos and Filipou haven’t already explored, and doesn’t even approach the calibre of ideation expressed in either ‘Lobster’ or ‘Killing of the Sacred Deer’. To the extent that by the time (a rather long time given the length of the movie) Lanthimos presents the last story the impression is of a dull mono–paced experience.

A short intercalcatory note: Lanthimos and Filipou as Greeks have a certain fascination with America in relation to the Founding Fathers huge admiration for classical Greek political and philosophical thought which they incorporated into their constitution. They wrought a constitution based on rationality and democracy and prided themselves, contumaciously, on founding a nation where these attributes would become governing virtues. Of course, the Greeks saw no essential conflict between slavery and these central features of their political culture which of course suited the writers of the American Constitution who were in a similar position and like the Greeks could well rationalise the contradiction. The Greek love affair was further affirmed in American architecture. But what seems to interest Lanthimos and Filipou is the selective nature of the American espousal of Hellenic culture. The Greeks were committed to reason as a principle but the obverse side of their culture was the myth and extent to which mythology and the power of Myth was also embedded in the Greek culture and psyche, a state attested to by Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus and Euripides. In myth there is no reason; simply surrender to fate. The Americans were never able to come to terms with myth as the Greek twin shadow of reason. But it is a necessary shadow.

‘The Lobster’ at least its first half, revolved about the strange representation of distinctly separate areas of the social matrix being compressed into one expressive module. The key idea is that formulaic conformist coupledom (that underlies the moral strictures of suburban USA) is made subject to a regulatory corporate ethos, which in itself is characterised by a absurdist consequential framework reminiscent of Lewis Carroll. Failure to graduate with a partner is ‘punished’ by being transformed into a creature of one’s choice. Hence the title. The second half of ‘The Lobster’ moves into a different narrative prescription, but the first half set within the walls of the shadowy corporate organisation charged with implementing this tortuous partnering regime, is a superb parody and play out of core satirical ideas, wonderfully marshalled by the deadpan acting style.

‘The Killing of the Sacred Deer’ comprises a skilfully contrived scenario in which the main character, heart surgeon Steven Murphy, finds himself being subsumed into myth. In the heart land of the American Dream, the land of the brave and the free, the symbolic home of individuality, the protagonist finds himself drawn down the same ineluctable path that saw Agamemnon kill Iphigenia at Aulis as punishment for killing a deer sacred to Artemis. We in the West have the illusion we are free; but our destiny is to be folded into mythology and variously and in different ways live out the old archetypal responses to life. Myth is not just a story. It is a psychic reality; Lanthimos and Filipou transpose this perception to the sweetly manicured lawns of mid-America.

The short stories that comprise KoK have nothing of the depths of insight of these two earlier movies from the same team. They are light weight re-visitings of similar thematics that all have a derivative element of content. The first story is a parody of Corporate Power – it reprises the core proposition of ‘Lobster’ namely the intertwining of the personal and the corporate in a skein of warped power relations. There are the now familiar absurdist trappings bolted into the scenario but the whole plays out as one dimensional thesis with the acting, locked into functional representation of an idea spectrum, eventually loses conviction, a tendency that pervades all of the three stories.

The second of the three stories like ‘Sacred Deer’ has a mythic resonance.  But in contrast to ‘Sacred Deer’ it is a garbled ramble through its material which is set in the broken life of a cop as he experiences complete mental disintegration. Through its tangled imagery it presents as a potpourri of different fairy tale like themes such as the idea of the double (the form shifting witch) and the allure of human flesh; divine hunger as a compulsive act of either restoration or revenge. It calls to mind old tales such as The Juniper Tree or Hansel and Gretel.

The third story titled ‘RMF Eats a Sandwich’ comes across as merely confused. The action follows the obscure meanderings of two members of a religious cult intent on finding a particular woman who has (unbeknownst to herself) the power to resurrect the dead. The effect intended is parody, which works up to a point, the point being that cults are already parodies of belief systems, and the oppositional humour starts to lose its edge. Otherwise the story struggles to find the conceptual unity that usually underpins the short form and the scenario flails about desperately seeking ‘Susan’, so to speak. At thispoint, the film and in particular the acting, with its use of the same cast who are all locked into representation mode, starts to pale and Lanthimos’ short film tryst looks more a more like a series of little ideas fleshed out beyond their own value.

KoK is to an extent carried by Lanthimos’ understanding of way in which the vistas setting and architecture that characterise suburban America, psychologically mould their populations. Lanthimos’ camera films the main settings, the office suites, the medical and suburban zones as dis-connected from the human characteristics that should define them. The interiors record the flat nature of the interfaces and surfaces: the long corridors the vast interiors have the effect of deflating the personal and inflating the impersonal. The opening shot over which the Eurythmics track is played sees a suburban exterior a house of the American dream, vast with a white columned portico. This is a house of myth, not the house individual achievement.

 Lanthimos fails to match his acute optical perception of American with a script of equal insight.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

The Dead Don’t Hurt                         Viggo Mortensen (USA; 2023) Viggo Mortensen, Vicky Krieps

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema as part of BFI sponsored ‘Escapes’ screenings, 3^rd June 2024; £0 free ticket

The dead may not… but the living do…

Viggo Mortensen’s ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ comes with a five star Guardian Review. This often doesn’t mean it’s a good movie rather one that scores high on the Guardian’s scale of values. Of course reviews are simply outpourings that play an important endemic role in the Film Industry – part of the publicity and marketing apparatus needed to put bums on cinema seats.

DDH might be described as a ‘slow western’. It is full of long slow shots and long big close ups of glowering eyes and the studied probing facial looks which actors seems to specialise in these days of the 10 hour box set. As if long duration in itself means anything outside the delusions of the director. In this Mortensen’s DDH takes after Jane Campion’s 2021 movie ‘The Power of the Dog’ with which it shares a number of attributes and perhaps a particular purpose: namely to re-cast the Western as a psychological relational genre outside of its normal action and buddy conventions. An act of deliberated reclamation.

But as an act of reclamation the ambition of both these films never really extends beyond transposing contemporary mores and usages into the traditional historical settings and locations of the genre. And certainly in the case of DDH this involves a script that nonchalantly skips over the context of the Western setting as a guide rail to the scenario.

In his book about film ‘The Devil Finds Work’ James Baldwin ridicules Jewison’s vehicle for Sidney Poitier, ‘In the Heat of the Night’ for its foundational scripting premise: namely that a black Northern street-wise cop in the 1960’s would ever ever let themselves be in a situation where they changed trains in the middle of the night at a station in a small town in the deep south. No way. No. Likewise significant areas of Mortensen’s scripting of DDH come across as laughable conceits that go beyond the artistic demand of the audience for the suspension of belief. In his scenario Mortenson subjects his viewers to a special pleading to indulge his absurd plot machinations. But when a film pivots about a certain realist setting, the repeated claim by Mortensen on the audience’s patience to go along with his blatant abuse of context, passes a point of no return. Vivienne trots out from her remote home into town to get a job in the local bar, as if she were a young student in San Francisco seeking work as a waitress in a coffee shop. This is a hard swallow, swallowing made all the harder when Olsen her husband airily pops off to war for 5 glossed over years, leaving her in this obviously total vulnerable situation. Likewise Vivienne dying of syphilis after she’s been raped and made pregnant? First up: Syphilis takes 15 – 30 years to slowly kill you. In its final stages it leaves the body and face hammered with open pustules and sores, and the brain demented. Vivienne looks like she’s dying from some fashionable tubercular condition; she’s all wan pale, a beautiful specimen in her dying. Syphilis it ain’t and syphilis is highly infectious. It’s most likely she would have infected both her child and Olsen her partner. But filmwise they escape scot free.

Syphilis aside, Mortensen prefers to get on with the business of soft focus cinematography and leave the hard stuff out of the script. Except for making the point about the issue of of rape and syphilis, it is difficult to see why Mortensen chose syphilis as the cause of Vivienne’s death. As Oscar Wilde quipped: good intentions make bad art.

DDH is is a dull overlong film with a desperately contrived plot, clumsy dialogue mediocre playing and tracked with the inevitable electonic go-on-forever drone type music. Like its precursor ‘The Power of the Dog’ its emotional machinations leave the actors having to invest the characterisation of their roles with a sort of fake intensity, a played out fake intensity that the audience has to sit with for two hours plus. The dead may not hurt whatever banality of the title that points to, but what about the viewer?

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

Targets                Peter Bogdanovitch (USA; 1968)   Boris Karloff; Tim O’Kelly

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 26th May 2024; ticket £7

 

Ironic play out of the cool.

 

The year before Bogdanovitch made ‘Targets’ there occurred the first mass killing by a shooter in post war USA. It was carried out in 1966 by Charles Whitman who went to the top of the University of Texas Tower Building from where he shot and killed 15 people, wounding 31 others. He was eventually shot dead by the cops some 90 minutes after first opening fire.

It’s obvious that Bogdanovitch made ‘Targets’ as a response to this event. Like Charles Whitman, Bobby, Bogdanovitch’s fictional killer in ‘Targets’, murders both his wife and mother prior to his killing spree. But what Bogdanovitch took from the Tower murders was not the bemusement horror or moral outrage provoked by the murders or even the sensational reporting of what happened. What Bogdanovitch sees is that killing in this particular way has become an expression of the ‘cool’; an extension of a certain stylistic mode out into an extreme behavioural zone.

Post Whitman mass murder has become an expressive statement, a ‘life’ or rather ‘death’ style consumer choice. Using pump action rifle with telescopic sights the killings by Bobby, patterned on Charles Whitman’s actions can be understood as a particular behavioural geste not dissimilar to sunglasses a leather jacket a tattoo, a sports car or use of a particular fashionable word or sign.

‘The Cool’ in this respect denotes on the part of the individual a level of expressive calm disassociation in relation to their manifestations and actions. ‘Whatever.’  

The radiation of the Cool Ethos through the American social matrix may be connected to the alienation of people’s lives from a root culture.   In ‘Targets’ Bogdanovitch depicts a domestic world dominated by the output of TV, where time is on hold and rhythms of life are shaped by the blandishments of the mass entertainment industry. The culture of the ‘cool’ develops out of this suburban world of psychic containment and disassociation. The gun is cool because it represents a force that reduces people to ‘thingdom’. The TV kills minds the gun kills bodies. The gun’s cool because like TV it is also has a detached mechanism, the trigger; and through the rifle sights the victims are unreal, like the figures on a TV screen. When the trigger’s pulled there’s nothing personal, no involvement no messy blood. The targets just roll over: dead. That’s cool. As if it could be contained.

But Bogdanovich’s achievement in writing and directing ‘Targets’ was to give a particular ironic form to the film, exploiting the actual process of casting to imbue the scenario with wit and lightness of touch. Counterbalancing Tim O’Kelly’s rendering of Bobby as a methodical killer gunman is the performance of Boris Karloff as the imposing figure of Horror Movie star Byron Orlok.

On every metric Bobby is a little man, petty, inconsequential in demeanour. Bobby the little man driven by a certain feeling of insignificance for which the culture has no redress, is ironically offset in the scenario by Byron Orloc, a giant gracious Gothic presence both in life and on screen. The irony is that the future belongs to the little man and all his countless imitators; the big man, the giant is a dinosaur the purveyor of old phantom horrors that no longer count for anything consequential. Bobby heralds the dread that will characterise the time to come when a legion of anonymous men will turn their guns and shoot anyone – men – women – children, anyplace – church – mosque – school – mall – carving their mark deeply into the flesh of the social body. Byron the King of Horror movies has now been relegated into the world of the fairytail, a faded eidolon, symbolic of stories that might once have have stirred up fear but are now relegated to the nursery. Realising this Byron Orloc has decided to retire with immediate effect; he knows he is out of time that in the world of fear he has been superseded by a new generation of intense psychic anxieties.

‘Targets’ is structured about the intercut ironic counterpoise between the coming inarticulate actual manifestation of horror and the receding old school theatrics of gothic fright. Bogdanovitch climaxes ‘Targets’ with a scene wittily modelled on the denouement of Welles’ ‘Lady from Shanghai’ where the two protagonists face off in the shoot out in a hall of mirrors, image be-lying image, the actual and the virtual inseparably intertwined. In ‘Targets’ Bobby tries to escape from his snipers nest behind the drive-in screen where the last movie of Byron Orlok is being projected (amidst all the carnage). As Bobby moves to escape the actual Byron sees him and sets off in pursuit; simultaneously Byron’s on screen presence is also engaged in a chase. A he looks about Bobby melts down into a state of panic, brain sent haywire by the two schizo images of the same man coming after him. Finally overwhelmed by image he is reduced to a state of psychic paralysis, cornered and disarmed by Orloc.

Unlike Charles Whitman, Bobby is captured alive and led away by the police. In the last shot as Bobby is strong-armed to the prowl car he turns to one of the cops and quips: “I hardly missed a shot…didn’t I?” How cool is that.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Twelve Angry Men     Sidney Lumet (USA; 1957)   Henry Fonda’ Lee J Cobb

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 2^nd May 2024; ticket £7.00

we’re on count down

Strange thing about Lumet’s title is that there are not twelve angry men in the film’s script. The jury is twelve men but only three of its members might be called angry. Taken as a whole the jury as individuals may be formed by some of the prejudices of their class race ethnicity and sex, but in the film only a minority are driven by their own particular narrow perceptions of society.

Films as social products can mark significant shifts in the political and economic mood of a country, working as signifiers of the values working through the social matrix. America is no exception to this. Films made there are sometimes intentionally produced as ideological statements, and Twelve Angry Men falls into this category, but most of the production output sees Hollywood simply on auto-pilot replicating reaffirming and sustaining core America values.

‘Twelve Angry Men’ feels like its made as a riposte to Ayn Rand’s script of ‘The Fountainhead’ (1949). Rand’s script developed from her novel of the same name was made with the contractual obligation that none of her dialogue could be altered or cut in the production of the film without her permission. ‘The Fountainhead’ directed by King Vidor and starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, was a densely packed philosophical affirmation of individualism, advocating the primacy of the individual over the collective – think Thatcher’s: “There is no such thing as Society.”

Rand’s protagonist was Howard Roark an architect with a personal artistic vision governing his work that stood in opposition to the establishment, comprising the mindless crowd that follow conventional ideas of the herd. Rand’s script depicts the struggle between individualism and collectivism, drawing a conscious parallel between communism and freedom in the rapidly escalating cold war between the West and the Soviet Union. Anti communism was at the root of Rand’s belief system and her work is the expression of her detestation of its societal ethos. The characteristic mood of ‘The Fountainhead’ is anger. It’s an angry film in which Roark, prefers labouring jobs to working on commissions in which he’d have to compromise his individuality and vision either to placate clients or to work with colleagues. The cumulative effect on Roark is frustration at his powerlessness and a contempt towards those forces that conspire against him. Certainly Rand’s political writing has been revisited and reworked by the current generation of right wing populists to direct feelings of anger frustration and hate against the notional deep state of collective governance.

‘The Fountainhead’ centres about an apocalyptic event. Roark, working through the auspices of another architect, finally gets a commission for a huge housing project. But to Roark’s fury during construction the client decides to change some of his design. Demented by rage and anger Roark burns down the newly built edifice razing it to the ground. Having handed himself in, he represents himself at court. In his closing speech he justifies his act on the philosophical grounds that the rights of the individual are primary values that justify violence and destruction when not recognised and betrayed. His long and sometimes tedious speechifying is pure Rand, intoxicated with her own libertarian rhetoric.

The court finds Roark not guilty of all charges: the individual is exonerated and recognised as having a special status in society that raises them above the constraints that apply to the crowd. The verdict suggests that it is better to destroy and/or be destroyed than to compromise individuality. A particularly hard core message at a time when the the Soviet Union was developing Atomic weaponry and the Cold War was intensifying. “Better dead than red..” a message that a nuclear war with the USSR was worth fighting to maintain American values.

‘Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’ with its fundamentalist justification of rabid individualism worked within the political atmosphere in which the Committee of Un-American Activities was hunting out and perusing vendettas against alleged communists and socialists. Lumet’s ‘Twelve Angry Men’ is surely a riposte to Rand’s ideology at a time in the mid ‘50’s when there was a significant pull back from the paranoid atmosphere of the 1940’s. It can be no accident that the main protagonist Davis, played by Henry Fonda, is like Roark, an architect. Davis is certainly a strong individual; he is prepared to stand out against the initial pressure of the whole group to find the accused boy guilty. But Davis as an individual sees that there is in the collective a depth of knowledge insight and wisdom that can be brought to bare on issues that is greater than the resources possessed by any one individual. It is the remit of society to understand how to harness this collective energy – a process that Lumet expresses through the agency of his architect, Davis. Through dialogue and discourse the jury starts to question and examine its understanding of the evidence arriving at a verdict opposed to the one suggested by their initial prejudices.

‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Twelve Angry Men’ are myths pitched to spin out redemptive ideological themes. ‘The Fountainhead’ ends with a mythic image: Roark, at the top of his new building, completed without compromise, stands with his arms raised in triumph. Like an Olympian God, he is master of all he surveys, beholden to no man, free of the crowd, a winner on his own terms. ‘Twelve Angry Men’ ends low key with a series of exterior shots of Davis and another jury member leaving the Court House. The shots are prosaic, ordinary, as befits the fact that nothing out of the ordinary has happened. A group of men have met on jury service. They have done their collective civic duty as instructed, following the directions of the judge in weighing up the evidence, they have found a man: ‘Not Guilty’ of first degree murder. As perhaps in Ancient Greece the collective wisdom of the polis has been consulted and decisions reached through debate. There is nothing to remark: the mythic model of justice has prevailed.

Both films are of course as much fairy tales as myths. The neo-Nietzchian new man becomes monster and the prejudices of juries often decide trials.

As myths both movies have a deep grounding in the psychodrama of the times. The films with their opposing belief systems evidence the schizo culture of the USA where the conflicting pulls of individualism and collectivism have played out since the nineteenth century with more or less vehemence. In this US election year of 2024, Trump versus Biden, Roark versus Davis, the gravitational counter force of these two myths threatens to pull the country apart.

adrin neatrour   adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

La Chimera      Alice Rohrwacher  (It; 2023)  Josh O’Connor

viewed Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle 10th May 2024; ticket: £11:25

empty tombs 

Rohrwacher’s ‘La Chimera’ comes across as a distressed imitation of the type of scenario that Fellini made his own.  Fellini’s films comprise the revelation of life lived out as immanent spectacle.   Fellini’s scripting and direction produced films that opened out to the audience joyously inviting them to be part of what was happening on screen.  Rohrwacher’s film has the ostensible look of Fellini but plays as a series of token gestures lacking the spirit which runs through and permeates films like Clowns, 8 1/2 or Julietta.   Rohrwacher film take in the expressive faces of the sisters and the gang, the processions and the parties, but these elements all have a distant disconnected feel as the portal into the action, her protagonist Arthur, is a closed being.

Arthur the lead character in ‘La Chimera’ is designed as an enigmatic.  He comes across as shut off even to himself.  The core thematic is designed about his pursuit of the chimera of his dead lover and the tombs of the Etruscans. There is a divide between his chimerical ‘world’ and the spectacle that revolves about him.  But it’s a divide that rather than heightening the film in oppositional intensity, acts as a deintensifier and finally leads to indifference.    

It may be that the script  following a precept of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen demands O’Connor do too many contradictory things at the same time: he is the Chimerist in pursuit of both the recent and the long time dead, the archaeologist, the squatter, one of the gang, the lover of beautiful things, the flirter, the ex-prisoner, the dowser.   Arthur is in fact simply a construct, not even a male lead.  He’s an artificial device designed to fit into the chicanery of Rohrwacher’s plot.  The character has to jump through so many multiple personality hoops that in the end it looks like he gives up and adopts a default face characterised by an adopted immobility.  O’Connor looks over directed with Rohrwacher calling the shots on his performance asking him to pull back on any overtly expressive responses as a means of trying to keep the script under her control.  Either that or O’Connor abandoned by Rohrwacher adopted his default face and body to an inexpressive mode as the only way out of the conflicting aspects of the construct of script.  Either way, as the film describes its circuits of intensity around the character of Arthur, it quickly runs out of energy and comes to a stop – a dead end.

The problem with many current film makers is that they feel they have to incorporate a wide range of issues and themes into their scripting in an effort to make their work   relevant to contemporary life. They do this either as some form of justification or as a means of exemplifying or highlighting aspects of their belief systems.  The result is often dilution confusion and loss of focus to the point where the intention underlying the film simply collapses. Rohrwacher’s  ‘La Chimera’ seems a case in point as her scenario bounces about between feminism, lice, Arthur’s fits when dousing, aesthetics, exploitation, aging, the antiquities racket, industrialisation etc, death and entombment finally ending up as an incoherence. An incoherence which is mirrored in the music track which like the script seems to want to cover all bases from Baroque to Italian folk and popular music, the which seems to evidence Rohrwacher’s polytonal anxieties as much as anything. 

  

Five starred by ‘The Guardian’  Alice Rohrwacher’s ‘La Chimera’ is the sort of drama that functions by featuring one thing after another. Many contemporary directors perhaps taking note of the influence of iPhones and advertising  on attention span, punctuate their scenario’s with abrupt changes of focus to maintain audience connection.   ‘La Chimera’ is a film in which ideas are replaced by a pot pourri of affects and gimmicks cobbled together and presented as a film. 

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

       

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant   Rainer Fassbinder(1974; FDR) Margit Castensen, Hanna Schygula

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 14 April 2024; ticket £7

 

as it is from above so from below

 

Fassbinder’s movies divide into dialogues with two of his principle underlying concerns:

the socio-political aspects of fascism that continue to feed into and shape Germany

and the psycho-social effects of the burgeoning consumer society shaping

contemporary relationships.  moat of his films, Bitter Tears…included take on a satirical

form.

 

‘Bitter Tears …’ an atactile sumptuous melodrama that revolves about a

group of women who Fassbinder depicts as Goddesses rather than mortals. Shot in

1974 his characters are not costumed in the fashion styles of the era: short skirts and

tights, flared pants, dresses with waist belts, tartan or strong patterned material etc.

His principle women Petra and Karin are rigged out in resplendent gowns draping

over their bodies reaching down to their ankles. They look like they might

have stepped out a painting by Poussin, a huge enlargement of one of which

dominates Petra’s bedroom where most of the action takes place. But of course Greek

Gods and Goddesses, in their foibles their love life their ambitions and jealousies,

were human all to human.

 

Fassbinder saw clearly that consumer society developing out of the 50’s and 60’s by the 1970’s had created a new set of Gods and Goddesses from the worlds of fashion and music. They were more or less conjoined with Hollywood stars in the firmament of the public’s imagination. Like their Greek forebears but in a different culture, these new titans were living out in exaggerated form the new possibilities presented by capitalist culture, and in a sense the characters of Petra and Karin are ironically depicted in ‘Bitter Tears’ as larger than life facsimiles of ourselves. Bodiless beings real in image.

 

There is a contradictory force running throughout ‘Bitter Tears’. The interplay of image and body. The characters have an incorporeal nature. Petra’s infatuation with Karin is for her image not herself or her body; Petra who designs clothes to cover the body also wants to drape the soul so that all that is seen of the woman is form. Fassbinder’s method of filming promotes the idea of disassociation. On a number of occasions when editing from a long shot to a close up, he often crosses the line, disrupting continuity by introducing an angle of view that breaks the audience’s expectations of scene unity – inducing a momentary disassociation with character. The filming of ‘Bitter Tears’ is also marked by the camera’s movements both about and through the set and also in the filming of his characters, in particular Marlene and Petra.

 

The set comprises one more or less unified space which is dominated by the huge double bed and the large Poussin repro. Aside from the Poussin mural it’s a bleached out space. The double bed all white linen, the room dominated by whiteness with dark recesses, background areas occupied by Marlene her helper. As the camera tracks about and through the space it creates the effect of being in a timeless domain. This effect is compounded by the use of mirrors as a key component in Fassbinder’s shot culture as the camera pans off and through mirrors from reflection to action creating effects that intermingle past and present time, intermingle the real and the virtual: a world where nothing is quite as it appears to be. A world based on an existential fragility, shared by Goddesses and mortals.

 

Broken down into chapters Fassbinder’s focus is the successful fashion designer Petra and her psycho-social state of mind as she moves from rationalisation to infatuation, from control to despair recrimination and reconciliation and finally loss. The agitation of life captured not just in Petra’s dialogues where she moves from cynicism to desperate need rejection and judgement. Fassbinder’s dialogues for Petra work to trap her in an dense web of self involvement that is ultimately unseeing. The more she wants to understand the less she understands.

 

This inability to understand what is happening is concentrated in her relationship with Marlene whose precise role is unclear.   She acts as a personal assistant come dogs body come collaborator. Whether working in the shadows or ordered about by Petra she is put upon abused treated with the contempt reserved for minions. What passes by Petra’s attention is that Marlene loves her; but it is not an unconditional love. It is a particular form of love premised on Marlene’s need for her love to remain unrecognised unreturned. In a sense it is the religious love of an acolyte for a goddess, which demands only the opportunity to suffer in return for the right to worship. Petra doesn’t understand this so when her infatuation with Karin is rejected her emotionally aroused state requires another object. With few candidates she lights upon Marlene and suddenly announces to her that she loves her. At which point Marlene’s love dissolves drains out of her, setting up the ironic and humorous last shot in which we see in mid frame an open suitcase on the floor of Petra’s bedroom.     Dropping her clothes and belongings Marlene passes to and fro in front of it, finally closing it, picking it up and without a word leaves Petra.

 

Goddesses have to understand there are consequences for playing human games.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

Late night with the Devil – 2024

Directed and written by Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes

Company logos seen at the beginning – IFC Films, Shudder, Image Nation Abu Dhabi, VicScreen, AGC Studios, Good Fiend Films, Future Pictures, Spooky Pictures, Cinetic Media….  I think I got them all.

On walking in to the film, I spoke about the film we were going to see with the woman at the box office.  She said she hasn’t seen it yet but imagines it to be something like 1992s ‘Ghostwatch’.  That wasn’t something I saw until a couple of years ago.  At the time I was too busy robbing, running and getting high to watch TV.  I understand it has cultural significance for many but with my general dislike of the cheesiness of British chat shows and having been exposed to decades of many great additions to the found footage genre, I find it cheap and obvious.  I also find Ghost Watch to be a complete failure in the area of being scary.  Saying that, ‘Late night with the devil’ isn’t scary eitherand I loved it.

‘Ghostwatch’ is fictional TV pretending it is reality.  ‘Late night with the devil’ is fiction emulating reality and there is a difference.  With late night with the devil you don’t have to buy in to the premise you are watching real TV.  It starts with the most number of studio and production company logos I’ve seen before any film, ever.  I’m amazed it turned out as well as it did with so many companies behind it.  It starts with quite a long narrated introduction to the history of the show and its presenter, which is a bit annoying as it is tell rather than show but it is expedient to get to the night of the show in question.  The night is Halloween 1977.  It is the 6^th year of the late night talk show, ‘Night Owls’ and the show host is ‘Jack Delroy’.  It’s also sweeps and ‘Night Owls’ is losing traction in it TV slot, ‘Jack Delroy’s’ contract is nearly up and the show is on the edge of cancellation.  Something drastic is needed to drive up ratings and attract sponsorship.  The audience is full of folk in Halloween garb, there’s a guest who’s a psychic and another who is a sceptic.  The sceptic is really annoying.  Which is a shame because I’m a sceptic and the character put’s us in a bad light.  After these 2 characters are introduced to us there is another of those tell rather than show segments about a devil worshipping, suicide cult with one survivor, a little girl named ‘Lilly’. Again I forgive it for expediency and the film does roll by at a brisk 93 minutes.  The ‘Lilly’ is now a young woman and is taken in by a parapsychologist.  Both these characters come on to the show to ramp up the weirdness.  Lilly, the girl who survives the cult is really interesting to watch.  She is always looking directly at the camera and talks to Jack in way that she knows everything about him. She often has this smile that says I have been waiting for this and it’s going to be so much fun.  Not for everyone else on set but definitely for ‘Lilly’.

The real star of the show though, is the show.  The film captures the period and style of a 70s late night talk show and exaggerates it.  The magnificent brightly coloured set design.  The warm up/side kick character who introduces and supports Jack and is somewhat put upon.  The sleazy show runner bullying everyone who wasn’t Jack.  The show’s in house band.  Playing just the right numbers before each guest is introduced and between ad breaks.  Also all the on-set and in studio smoking of cigarettes and cigars.  Also ‘Jack’s’ wife died of lung cancer but she didn’t smoke.  All in all the person I saw it with and me had a hoot watching this.  The style and the caricatures of the late night cast were so much fun to watch.  A thumbs up from me.

Whakapai