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Beware a Holy Whore (Warnung vor einer heilige Nutte) R W Fassbinder (1971; FDR) Lou Castel, Hanna Schygulla, Eddie Constantine, R W Fassbinder.

viewed: BFI streaming 16 May 2021

An echo of Auschwitz

Fassbinder’s movie, ‘Beware a Holy Whore (BHW)’ was made in a year of frenzied film making. In 1971 five movies are credited to Fassbinder as writer/director, plus he had acting roles in four of them. And 1970 and 1972 were as busy as 1971. This is a director with something to say, but as in other films I’ve seen of his, his way of speaking is usually indirect. Contemporary film making is dominated by messaging movies, identity affirmation movies. They’re films targeted at audiences primed to hear particular messages or films designed to manipulate emotions in particular directions. Fassbinder doesn’t engage with this type of affirmationist intention.

Fassbinder’s films are grounded in that which is raw in human nature. Underneath the surface, whosoever you may be, whoever you are, whatever your sexuality, whatever your political/social beliefs, underneath are the raw drives of human nature. Bourgeois society, in particular German post war society, with its imperative need to cover up the monstrosities of the Fascist years, was a carefully manicured façade. An amnesiac society on autodrive contrived and designed if possible, to forget or at least cover up truth and replace it with a anodyne fantasial lie.  

Situation: Fassbinder often takes situations as the starting point for his scripts. Situations have a theatrical pedigree as places of beginnings where the writer can nurse the developmental vectors of ideas, giving the audience a route to follow into the scenario enabling the audience to start to think about things. In this Fassbinder carries within his scripts the dialectics of theatre of this time: Pinter, Durrenmatt, Sartre, Jellico . Create situations and let the psycho-social dynamic of the age play out. Allow the audience to assimilate the engine of the design and put their own readings on the material.

Fassbinder’s situation in ‘BHW’ is a film production, centred around the relations between the people involved in making a film on location in Spain. It is mostly set in the hotel where the caste and crew are holed up for the duration of the shoot. In many of Fassbinder’s films the presence of a Phantom Fuhrer seems integral to the manner in which he develops his scenarios. The old Diktator blew his brains out in the bunker of the Reich’s Chancellery. But for Fassbinder his spirit lives on in Germany, absorbing and permeating the social matrix. ‘BHW’ is divided in two parts: like the history of Germany from 1919 to 1945.   In the first section the film crew indulge in all manner of sybaritic indulgences, sensual, sexual, interpersonal, alcoholic. The film opens with a title card that reads: Pride comes before a Fall.   The motley crew are seen hanging around waiting for the director to turn up. They are aimless pursuing their own personal desire and need. The producer, Sasha (played by R W F) his ear screwed onto his phone tries to raise money for the enterprise. He keeps some sort of discipline but is mostly ineffectual. We are watching in analogy, a play out of the Weimar years, 1919 -1933.

But then the big Director Arrives.  Suddenly it’s 30^th January 1933: Hitler becomes Reich’s Chancellor. The time of dissolution and sybaritic play is gone. Everything changes, the phantom Fuhrer is come and filming must commence. And at once his acts of violence, his vicious assaults on his wife to be rid of her, and his hysterical energy become the focus of the scenario.   His will is centre stage. The Pride of the Crew is ‘fallen’; they are beholden to the one man. Even if he is a maniac, bent on the destruction of the world. The crew and caste adapt to the ways of the director, becoming by the the way casually racist, regarding the Spanish as non German speaking Untermensch. And the strange morbid drive of the director unravels as he reveals conceptual outlines of his film: Murder – you have to understand what a murder really means as a physical act – it is a film against the brutality of the state, what else would you make films about? – the title of the film is ‘Patria and Death.’

At last we move into: ‘Real Film Making’.

Fassbinder ends ‘BHW’ with a referential quote from Thomas Mann: “I am weary to death of depicting human nature without partaking of human nature.”   In ‘BHW’ Fassbinder delivers human nature on picture and on sound. Mordantly underplaying the film are the Songs of Leonard Cohen. Mostly drawn from the eponymous 1968 album and seemingly edited randomly onto the sound track (if there was a sequential logic I didn’t get it), Cohen classics such as: Sisters of Mercy, So Long Marian, Suzanne, Master Song. It was probably important to Fassbinder that Cohen was a Jewish singer/songwriter. It’s an essential part of Fassbinder’s filmic counterpoising to use the Cohen tracks, with their intense lyrical humanism, to sardonically, ironically, offset the brutality of the represented Germanic Hitler culture. The tender side of human nature smashed up by brutality.  The German and Jew playing out an old story. Although the Cohen tracks are diegetic, often selected by the caste and crew from the hotel lounge juke box, no one ever looks like they are listening to the music. Perhaps that is also something of Fassbinder’s insight: in Germany and by extension fascist capitalism: they play the music but they don’t listen to it.

The effect of Fassbinder’s opposition of image and sound, German and Jew, in ‘BHW’ is disturbing even painful. I found it difficult to hold the two together. In the face of the action I wanted to disattend the powerful songs of Cohen with their assertion of the primacy of the human spirit. In confronting this strange combination (perhaps it is the key element of the ‘BHW’) I recalled the Sunday afternoon concerts of classical music given by the inmates of Birkenau death camp for the pleasure and delight of the SS Commandant and his wife.

The film works as an affect through the medium of the acting. Fassbinder could call on an ensemble of actors with whom he had both developed and worked over a period of years. ‘BHW’ is an ensemble piece where all the players understand their roles and are disciplined in a quasi Brechtian mode of representation. The part is always understood as subservient to the whole. The acting does not involve internalising emotions and relations, rather externalising them and representing them.  The object is not manipulation of audience rather to enable the audience to see relations.

And Beware a Holy Whore, as a title is I think Fassbinder’s admonition to the audience to look in askance at all that attracts by promising to satiate desire – including movies – a holy whore.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi) Akira Kurosawa (1948; Japan) Takashi Shimura; Toshiro Mifune; Michiyo Koguro

viewed: BFI streaming; 3^rd May 2021

Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi) Akira Kurosawa (1948; Japan) Takashi Shimura; Toshiro Mifune; Michiyo Koguro

viewed: BFI streaming; 3^rd May 2021

Call for the Doctor

In deciding to view this early film of Kurosawa’s I was interested to see how and in what ways ‘Drunken Angel’ might represent Japan’s situation in 1948. A country that had experienced total war and total defeat; that had been ruled and led to war by a hereditary military caste but was now occupied by the Americans who were intent on imposing upon this particular society some of the norms that characterised their democracy and culture. How would these reflect on the surface of the film, how would the script register the overwhelming contradictions of post conflict Japanese society?

‘Drunken Angel’ is sometimes described as a ‘Noir’ movie. It’s not. It looks nothing like a ‘Noir’ product, nor does it evidence a ‘Noir’ sensibility.   Kurasawa’s cinematic design makes little use of shadow or chiascuro interplay, rather it is transparent, giving us things we can see, augmented by a panning shots that direct us to the relevant image. Likewise his Yakuza protagonist, has few elements that make up a ‘Noir’ character:he is simply doomed from the start. ‘Drunken Angel’ falls into a genre type not entirely absent from Hollywood out put, but an unusual one; it is forensic. Given the main character is a doctor ‘Drunken Angel’ is in its own fashion a diagnostic movie, using the crime and criminal activity as an allegorical artifice for considering Japan’s situation and predicament. The allegorical features of Kurosawa’s script are not over larded, rather they underlie the situations realised in the scenario.

From the start Kurosawa depicts the reality of things as they are in 1948: a Tokyo that has been firebombed razed and puddled by the US Air force. In his opening shot we see a huge fetid squalid pool of water, mosquito infected stagnant, but with people still drinking from it. This is the great city of Tokyo. And the stagnet pool is the recurring image in the film, returned to time and again. Hybrid Japanese-American music overlays the opening puddle shot: Japanese scales meshed with jazz rhythm, music indicating Japan’s new schizo cultural accommodation. This is perhaps the situation as Kurosawa sees it; a smashed people living in a schizo culture.   In ‘Drunken Angel’ his solution is: call for the doctor. We need to understand what’s going on.

The play out of the script revolves round Sanada’s (the Doctor) relationship with Matsunaga the gangster, which relationship hinges on Sanada’s diagnosis of Matsunaga’s TB. TB is the hidden disease.   From the outside there is nothing to see, everything looks OK.   But within the cavity of the body, the lungs waste away.   Sanada makes his diagnosis from a physical examination, which then needs to be confirmed by an Xray, the photographic eye that can penetrate the flesh.  The problem is not so much that Matsunaga doesn’t recognise that he has the disease but that he needs to deny it. He denies it because it is an insult to his self image as a Yakuza; to even suggest that he may have a weakness is a threat to which he responds by attacking the messenger, Sanada. When the Xray confirms his condition, when he is spitting coughing up blood and can no longer deny having TB, he adopts the belief that he can somehow overcome the disease by carrying on his life as usual, by aggressively and assertively ignoring the Doctor’s advice. When finally almost completely incapacitated he ceases to claim he can defy TB with his own will, rather he boasts to the Sanada that the Yakuza brotherhood will take care of him: it is Yakuza honour and their loyalty to each other that will save him. His last self deception, delusion.

Sanada observes Matsunaga’s inevitable decline as each stage of the illness takes its course.   Sanada stance towards his patient is of a quasi-Bhuddist compassion: he is detached, he has no emotional involvement. But Sanada’s compassion, his desire to minister to his truculent patient, accepts no bounds. Matsunaga assaults him, rejects him, abuses him, ignores him, but Sanada remains his doctor and will do all that can be done for him, even though Matsunaga knows ultimately only one law: the law of self destruction.

As an allegorical rendering of Japan’s condition, this is bleak. But Kurosawa’s humanistic design directs the film in a positive direction. The script’s central character is the doctor.  Sanada is the pivot of the movie: the one who sees. Kurosawa’s ‘seer’ is quite different from the ‘priest’ type in Hollywood gangster movies. In these the gangster is always at the centre of the script. In movies such as ‘Public Enemy’, ‘the priest’ acts as an externalised (societal or religious) voice of individual conscience, and as such often determines the outcome of plot. As ‘seer’ Sanada is unable to influence Matsunaga’s behaviour. But the point is his seeing: the seeing that there is a problem, that the people (ie Japanese society/culture) once they understand there is a problem can harness their own resources to come to terms with their past and take responsibility and control of their future. The essence of Sanada’s course of treatment for TB is discipline through time: understand the nature of the disease and the effect it has on the body; instigate life style changes to maximise the chances of the medication working; and understand that the healing process takes time, nothing will happen quickly. If all this is well understood, the cure will be slow but sure. And the film ends with one of his patients, who has followed Sanada’s recovery regime, presenting him with her X-rays that show she is clear of TB: a perfect set of lungs with which to live and breath. Hope.

Kurosawa’s movie is centred in the compassion of Sanada, but as a figure this doctor is no insufferable perfect being, a guy on a pedestal. No! Sanada is deeply flawed, an alcoholic bum, prisoner to his own resentments and insecurities which only the bottle can deaden. Mired in his own course of self destructive behaviour, his compassion is of a particularly human order. It flows into the world out of the realisation of his own problems. We are not listening to or trying to understand a saint, but an imperfect human being.

The feeling from Drunken Angel is not that it is anti-American. The gangster world has adopted Americanisation of life with its jazz, clothes and stylistic statements. But Kurasawa depicts these for what they are: diversions that people take up because they are enjoyable. But the Americanisation of life is a distraction, not even a quick fix. The rebuilding of Japan as a psychic entity will need a deeper more substantive shift, perhaps through a generation. But first the problems of Japan need to be seen and understood. And ‘Drunken Angel’ is Kurasawa’s means of stepping forward into the ruins and thinking about how new foundations might be built. Later his Sumurai movies would affirm again his belief that Japan contains within her own culture, the resources to develop its own form of modernism that had moved beyond its past.

adrin neatrour   adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Call for the Doctor

In deciding to view this early film of Kurosawa’s I was interested to see how and in what ways ‘Drunken Angel’ might represent Japan’s situation in 1948. A country that had experienced total war and total defeat; that had been ruled and led to war by a hereditary military caste but was now occupied by the Americans who were intent on imposing upon this particular society some of the norms that characterised their democracy and culture. How would these reflect on the surface of the film, how would the script register the overwhelming contradictions of post conflict Japanese society?

‘Drunken Angel’ is sometimes described as a ‘Noir’ movie. It’s not. It looks nothing like a ‘Noir’ product, nor does it evidence a ‘Noir’ sensibility.   Kurasawa’s cinematic design makes little use of shadow or chiascuro interplay, rather it is transparent, giving us things we can see, augmented by a panning shots that direct us to the relevant image. Likewise his Yakuza protagonist, has few elements that make up a ‘Noir’ character:he is simply doomed from the start. ‘Drunken Angel’ falls into a genre type not entirely absent from Hollywood out put, but an unusual one; it is forensic. Given the main character is a doctor ‘Drunken Angel’ is in its own fashion a diagnostic movie, using the crime and criminal activity as an allegorical artifice for considering Japan’s situation and predicament. The allegorical features of Kurosawa’s script are not over larded, rather they underlie the situations realised in the scenario.

From the start Kurosawa depicts the reality of things as they are in 1948: a Tokyo that has been firebombed razed and puddled by the US Air force. In his opening shot we see a huge fetid squalid pool of water, mosquito infected stagnant, but with people still drinking from it. This is the great city of Tokyo. Hybrid Japanese-American music overlays the puddle shot: Japanese scales meshed with jazz rhythm, music indicating Japan’s new schizo cultural accommodation. This is perhaps the situation as Kurosawa sees it; a smashed people living in a schizo culture.   In ‘Drunken Angel’ his solution is: call for the doctor. We need to understand what’s going on.

The play out of the script revolves round Sanada’s (the Doctor) relationship with Matsunaga the gangster, which relationship hinges on Sanada’s diagnosis of Matsunaga’s TB. TB is the hidden disease.   From the outside there is nothing to see, everything looks OK.   But within the cavity of the body, the lungs waste away.   Sanada makes his diagnosis from a physical examination, which then needs to be confirmed by an Xray, the photographic eye that can penetrate the flesh.  The problem is not so much that Matsunaga doesn’t recognise that he has the disease but that he needs to deny it. He denies it because it is an insult to his self image as a Yakuza; to even suggest that he may have a weakness is a threat to which he responds by attacking the messenger, Sanada. When the Xray confirms his condition, when he is spitting coughing up blood and can no longer deny having TB, he adopts the belief that he can somehow overcome the disease by carrying on his life as usual, by aggressively and assertively ignoring the Doctor’s advice. When finally almost completely incapacitated he ceases to claim he can defy TB with his own will, rather he boasts to the Sanada that the Yakuza brotherhood will take care of him: it is Yakuza honour and their loyalty to each other that will save him. His last self deception, delusion.

Sanada observes Matsunaga’s inevitable decline as each stage of the illness takes its course.   Sanada stance towards his patient is of a quasi-Bhuddist compassion: he is detached, he has no emotional involvement. But Sanada’s compassion, his desire to minister to his truculent patient, accepts no bounds. Matsunaga assaults him, rejects him, abuses him, ignores him, but Sanada remains his doctor and will do all that can be done for him, even though Matsunaga knows ultimately only one law: the law of self destruction.

As an allegorical rendering of Japan’s condition, this is bleak. But Kurosawa’s humanistic design directs the film in a positive direction. The script’s central character is the doctor.  Sanada is the pivot of the movie: the one who sees. Kurosawa’s ‘seer’ is quite different from the ‘priest’ type in Hollywood gangster movies. In these the gangster is always at the centre of the script. In movies such as ‘Public Enemy’, ‘the priest’ acts as an externalised (societal or religious) voice of individual conscience, and as such often determines the outcome of plot. As ‘seer’ Sanada is unable to influence Matsunaga’s behaviour. But the point is his seeing: the seeing that there is a problem, that the people (ie Japanese society/culture) once they understand there is a problem can harness their own resources to come to terms with their past and take responsibility and control of their future. The essence of Sanada’s course of treatment for TB is discipline through time: understand the nature of the disease and the effect it has on the body; instigate life style changes to maximise the chances of the medication working; and understand that the healing process takes time, nothing will happen quickly. If all this is well understood, the cure will be slow but sure. And the film ends with one of his patients, who has followed Sanada’s recovery regime, presenting him with her X-rays that show she is clear of TB: a perfect set of lungs with which to live and breath. Hope.

Kurosawa’s movie is centred in the compassion of Sanada, but as a figure this doctor is no insufferable perfect being, a guy on a pedestal. No! Sanada is deeply flawed, an alcoholic bum, prisoner to his own resentments and insecurities which only the bottle can deaden. Mired in his own course of self destructive behaviour, his compassion is of a particularly human order. It flows into the world out of the realisation of his own problems. We are not listening to or trying to understand a saint, but an imperfect human being.

The feeling from Drunken Angel is not that it is anti-American. The gangster world has adopted Americanisation of life with its jazz, clothes and stylistic statements. But Kurasawa depicts these for what they are: diversions that people take up because they are enjoyable. But the Americanisation of life is a distraction, not even a quick fix. The rebuilding of Japan as a psychic entity will need a deeper more substantive shift, perhaps through a generation. But first the problems of Japan need to be seen and understood. And ‘Drunken Angel’ is Kurasawa’s means of stepping forward into the ruins and thinking about how new foundations might be built. Later his Sumurai movies would affirm again his belief that Japan contains within her own culture, the resources to develop its own form of modernism that had moved beyond its past.

adrin neatrour   adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The American Friend  (Der amerikanishe Freund)     Wim Wenders (FDR; 1977) Bruno Ganz, Denis Hopper, Lisa Kreuzer, Sam Fuller

Viewed BFI streaming 18 April 2021

Boys just want to have fun

The outstanding characteristic of Wenders’ movie, was that it felt like everyone making it was having fun, enjoying the caper in the knowledge they’re riding the crest of a wave of a different type of film making. Probably they knew like all surfers that the ride doesn’t go on forever. This wave, like all waves, would soon lap into the sands.

In this respect ‘American Friend’ reminded me of those early movies by Godard: ‘Pierrot le Fou’, ‘A Bout de Soufle’, ‘Vivre sa Vie’ and in particular ‘Alphaville’.

The overwhelming vibes from these films was that everyone was having a good time. These films of Godard were parties; the viewers were simply invited to join in and exit the cinema having had a good time. Godard set up these films as enjoyable spoofs. In themselves they were satires on ‘serious’ film making as practiced by the ‘film industry’ where the bottom line was the most important reading for the producers.

Of course the content of Godard’s movies included felicitously directed and often barbed observations of the social situations and character types that made up most of the products of the film business. The characters in Godard’s scenarios played themselves. The point of their performances was to remain true to the tone of the films: detached, cool, but very direct, to camera if required. Godard made these movies with a spontaneity and élan that situated them within the tide modernism that was enveloping European societies. A tide that almost without being noticed was effortlessly transforming these societies at a pace that was outrunning most peoples capacity to understand.   They saw and consumed the tokens: the Coca Cola, the Marlborough cigarettes, the Automobiles, without knowing what they meant. In the cities, space and time were being redefined recasting the parameters of the possible and allowable interactions between people.

In ‘American Friend’ Wenders sort of picks up where Godard left off.   Making a film in ‘play’ mode in the knowledge that ‘play’ has an specific political dimension. Wenders’ movie reminded me of ‘Alphaville’. Both are parodies of the ‘Noir’ genre, consciously imitating the form without any intention of taking it seriously, to exploit its potential for saying or observing something about social relations. In best ‘Noir’ tradition the plots of both movies are grounded in arcane far fetched propositions that are devices that permit exploration of social types and of contemporary spaces, and their interaction.  ‘The American Friend’ is a movie of pure surface without any pretence at depth (emotional, spiritual etc) and in this respect ‘American Friends’ design probes and exploits the social and spacial organisation of modernity.

The ‘types’ Wenders puts in play are straight out of the top drawer of Brechtian analysis of Capitalism’s social strata. There are exploiters and exploited, the privileged and the victims. There is no appeal from exploitation, only death.  Criminality and gangsterism are necessary concomitants of a system that spawns caricatures of itself to control those areas of the social matrix that are beyond Capitalism’s immediate control. The caste deliver the mechanics of their lines with declamatory intonation as the plot delivers its neo-Brechtian design with appropriate filmic panache.

What is interesting in Wenders’ scenario is the interrelating of narrative character and space.

Traditionally large spaces such a churches palaces courts of law have been structured so as to overawe the individual. The vastness of these buildings with their concomitant symbolism, is designed to strip those entering of their individuation,   reducing them to objects of a metaphysical apparatus. As souls, petitioners, subjects, people are reduced to being adjuncts of these spaces. Many contemporary settings are also constructed on a monumental scale: subway systems, train stations, airports, atria, auditoriums, stadia, all built to serve functional purposes but designed as environments containing a meta-text to project the power of the institutions that own and run them.

‘American Friend’ points to a simple stratagem by which the individual can subvert or evade being subject to the meta-messages of alienated power to which you’re exposed on entering these domains. The individual can simply psychically re-purpose their response, assimilate these places into their own fantasy for the purpose of ‘play’. Seen in the spirit of ‘play’ the subways, the stations the atria the airports are transformed into huge playgrounds where individuals can pick up the energies of childhood in endless relayed adventures of hide and seek, spacemen and aliens, goodies and baddies, love and loss.  ‘Playing’ in and with space simply cuts through the power games of modernity; its structures and representations can no longer transmit their implied hierarchic meaning; we are free to create and act out our own desires, detached from the encompassing environment. Vast subway transportation systems become stalking grounds for assassinations, airport lounges sites of illicit assignation, underground walkways perilous passages of hell death and fear to be transitioned as quick as possible. Older ‘Noir’ movies had always realised this aspect of modernity, hence the appropriation of trains as locations of murderous action, and of course there is a classic killing scene in ‘American Friend’. But Wenders movie completes this aspect of Noir logic, and extends an ideology of play out into the systems of post modernist control logic.

‘The American Friend’ is a movie which is inclusive of its audience.  It envelopes those who watch. Wenders askes his audience to be part of the fun, to see what is happening in life as a playful provocation. It’s not made to exploit or manipulate emotions sentiments or beliefs. The characters are two dimensional and have no development or realisations, yet it is a subversive film that projects ‘play’ as transformative force capable of undermining the bleak physical and psychic structural messages of modernism.

And certainly the caste look like they’ve enjoyed themselves. Hopper, Fuller, Wenders and Ganz all had reputations for raising hell big time, drink drugs everything. Of course some may have found it insufferable. In 1978 a year after ‘The American Friend’ was made Lisa Kreuzer divorced Wim Wenders.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Minari         Lee Issac Chung (US: 2020) Steven Yeun; Han Ye-re,Youn Yuh-jung

Viewed: 28 March 21 BFI streamed

metaphysics of overcoming

Set in the early 1980’s Chung’s bucolic ramble is a feelgood type of product that documents the theme of overcoming. Unlike most movies these days it represents affirms and endorses the American Dream. This ‘Dream’ is the ideal that whatever your birth status, whatever your ethnicity, if you believe in yourself and your ambition, if you work hard and tirelessly to achieve it, America makes it possible for you to overcome all obstacles and succeed.

I presume the movie is called Minari to encapsulate the immigrant success story theme. It’s a metaphor for the success of transplanted life forms. Minari is a Korean watercress type plant. Grandma carried some specimens of this plant from Korea which she plants by a creek on the Yi plot to see if it will grow. And Lo! After the fire that has destroyed Jacob Yi’s first years crop, Jacob wanders down to the creek and finds the Minari has taken root and flourished, it has gone forth and multiplied, sending out a message of hope and perseverance to the whole family enterprise. At this point it is best not to dwell on the invasive problems that can arise with imported species but that’s another story, a downbeat rather than an upbeat one.

Despite its subplot of their young son having a heart condition, which plays out on the ‘cute’ factor, the script is worthy, correct but predictable in its direction of development. The attempts to build tension into the proceedings are addressed in two ways: the introduction of variegated unconventional characters and the relations between the Yi’s.

The unconventional characters are drawn from the Hollywood stockpot of film drama stereotypes. We have in Minari, the straight-talking abrasive granny from back home untrammelled by the fears and inhibitions of the assimilating family; and there is introduction of a couple of full on Americana characters drawn from the substrate of weirdness in Cohn Brothers scripts. One of whose role, with his mangling of religious fundamentalism and the soil, is not to be dangerous but to attest to the tolerance of the Yi’s in their dealing with the local people. Perhaps as Koreans the Yi’s are all too familiar with the outer wild fringes of the Christian religion. But these American characters are kept well under control by Chung’s script, and the employment of these character tropes plays out as little more than baubles decorating the film’s structure.

The other source of tension in Chung’s script, is the relationship between the Yi’s. Monica is never convinced by the move from California to rural Arkansas. The self sufficient farming life is Jacob’s dream project. Nevertheless she goes along with it, only to become increasingly disenchanted by the realities of both farming and the isolated nature of rural life itself. But their marital discord on this point never feels convincing rather it plays out like a carefully plotted script line. There is a managed deliberation in the manner in which their separate realities provoke Monica and Jacob to want to make different life choices.  What is lacking is an organic, psychic emotional strata at the core of their conflict. The mechanical aspect of their marriage is seen in the ‘Conversion of Monica’   This takes place at the end of the film in the resolved ‘happy ending’ to Minari. After the disaster of losing the harvest to fire, Monica sees that staying put, being resilient and believing in Jacob’s dream is the way forward. She is suddenly ‘happy’ in Arkansas. She is converted and so Minari ends on a high note of integration.

In the name of ‘authenticity’ much of the film’s dialogue is in Korean. We know the Yi’s are first generation immigrants but in ‘Minari’ language functions as a token sign of the ‘otherness’ of the Yi’s, allowing the scenario to otherwise evidence their conformity and integration into American way of life. When we see Scorsese’s Italian families in New York, they speak English, but their life styles, their attitudes are Italian. They are Italians and they don’t have to speak Italian for us to understand this. The Yi’s on the other hand seem to have come right out of some Los Angeles suburb, to the extent that it is their suburban nature rather than their Korean nature that they have to adapt and bend to rural life.   Minari is a suburban epic rather than an immigrant odyssey.

Chung’s film feels like a contemporary equivilent of the Soviet or Chinese propaganda films featuring young couples venturing forth into the hinterlands to till the soil. They come to the land; there is much is strange and unfamiliar, there are many obstacles to overcome and they have to get to know the local people. But with the correct ideology, the dream, they overcome all obstacles.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Time for Drunken Horses (Dema hespên serxweş) Bahman Ghobadi (Iran;2000) Ayoub Ahmadi, Rojin Younessi; Amaneh Ekhtiar-dini

Viewed Mubi 18 March 2021

beware the pain of the child

There is an overwhelming feel of shock from Ghobadi’s film of seeing what we do not normally see.   The shock of being exposed to a life that in the harshness of its conditions the rawness of its everyday experience shames the viewer seated in the comfort of his chair. What we see in ‘A Time for Drunken Horses’ may or may not be re-enactments, but it is evident what we see is real.

‘A Time for Drunken Horses’ (TDH) is Ghobadi’s first feature film. It is notable that he worked with Kairostami on ‘The Wind will Carry Us’ a year before directing this movie, the which will have given him much food for thought.

Kairostami’s movies always start from an embedding a grounding in the fabric of life, and from within this fabric perspectives emerge which align the viewer to the images. There is often a sense of playfulness in Kairostami’s films, a sense of the absurd as part of the grain of existence.

In Ghobadi’s ‘TDH’ there no gradated movement into the action, everything is immediately totally clear. The viewer is dropped straight into the cold stark reality of the lives of his protagonists, children in general but in particular the children of a Kurdish family living on the Iran-Iraq border, existing precariously through the business of smuggling and child labour.

From the privileged European perspective, the scene of ruthless employment of child labour that opens the film is graphic. Of course Western economy is driven by child labour: textiles electronics the recycling of our discarded matter, all take advantage of the poverty of other countries in order to exploit child labour, because child labour costs little more than the price of feeding them, so there is a high return on the surplus value their work creates. A situation that in some respects resembles the Nazis use of forced labour. But for the most part, we the viewers are far removed from the reality of the work conditions that underlie the things we consume so avidly. So here is the reality into which Ghobadi plunges us like a bath of icy water. Ghobadi is making films in the situation, from within the people, so that he can show these things. Not as anything extraordinary but as the day to day ordinary life of these children, an actuality that is all that they know.

Ghobadi’s film for the most part keeps a sense of balance in its depiction of the child subjects. There is an admix of the social and the personal, the use of the wide shot and the close up. There is of course no one line that divides these two zones rather they intermerge overlapping tapering into one another. It seems important that in the making of ‘TDH’ that Ghobadi avoid shots that in themselves exploit the vulnerability of children, that there is an integrity in the manner and style in which he films, an implicit contract with the viewers that Ghobadi avoids joining the ranks of the exploiters.  But there are moments when his choice of shot transgresses this contract. In particular a couple of shots of the stunted manchild who is the centre of attentive love at the heart of the family. The depiction of this manchild is central to the movie, the selflessness of the caring, the determination of the children never to let him go.   Mostly Ghobadi films the sequences with the manchild with economy and respect. But there are shots he uses that seem to be miscalculations. The manchild as part of the treatment for his condition, is on a course of painful intramuscular injections. For some reason Ghobadi decides to shoot him having these injections in close-up, so that we see his whole face and tiny body screaming trembling in pain. This close-up is surely unnecessary, a wide shot or even a cut away to one of the children watching whilst we hear his pain would have equally well if not better communicated the horror of the injection. But the shot as it is, a big close up of a manchild in pain, makes no sense and calls into question, even if momentarily, the integrity of the director. Why use this shot? You feel Kairostami would never shoot such a scene in this manner. The pain shot is overshadowed by the psychic pain embedded in the script of the rejection of the manchild by this society. Twice in the film he is cruelly rejected sent back home to die, by people who view him only as another burden. This is the sad reality realised in the script, that the love of the children in the family will not be enough to save the manchild from rejection. “Send him back! He’s another mouth to feed!” And given the harshness of the conditions experienced by this mountain society, this rejection is all too understandable.

Shot in a mountainous border zone in Winter, the film is breathtaking in its depictions of the snowbound environment. An environment in which the people engage in a daily struggle to survive and to earn their bread. But for all that we wonder at the resilience and fortitude of these people, there is also the feeling that Ghobadi has embedded deep into the grain of the film his own sense of the absurd as a cosmic condition of life. The absurd as an existential condition. Even after these people have struggled against the pitiless nature of their snowbound environment, just at that point when they think they have overcome the obstacles of nature, they are then faced with the malicious antagonism of a human agency intent on destroying them.   Bandits or border patrols ambush them rendering their labours futile. Are these people not experiencing an absurd Sisyphean condition of life: that whatever you do however much you suffer, the outcome will be to throw you back where you started.

The latent absurdity in TDH finally erupts intruding into the body of the film when the horses used to carry the contraband collapse to the ground unable to flee an ambush.    On these journey’s over the snowy mountains the horses’ water is normally doped with alcohol to help them combat the cold. On this journey they’d been overdosed with hooch and instead of being able to flee when the party is ambushed, inebriated and unsteady of their legs they are only able to collapse in a drunken stupour. In consequence instead of at least being able to escape with their goods, the smugglers lose everything. It’s a moment of pure farce conjured up by Ghobadi’s script, an absurdity that can be found only in extremis.

There is a brittle quality to TDH.   Perhaps it is in the nature of the scenario: children coming to terms with taking on the impossible machinations of a complex and hard adult world, are doomed to fail. To his credit Ghobani doesn’t flinch from the logic of the cruelty that he presents to us.

Ghobadi made his film 21 years ago, before the invasion of Iraq. Now everything will have changed but certainly life will still be as hard and brutal.

adrin neatrour  

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

The Small Town (Kasaba) Nuri Ceylan (Turk; 1997;) Cihat Butun, Emin Ceylan; Mehmet Toprak

 

viewed on Mubi 4^th March 2021

As light as a feather

There are four things I remember about Ceylan’s ‘The Small Town’: the feather, the tortoise, the long night and the final shot in which Asiya’s tentatively lowers the fingers of her hand into the waters of the stream.

What I finally understood about the film is that it is styled as a gentle satire, a satire that is as light as the feather that mesmerises the children in the classroom, and as captivating. Ceylan’s film satirises the state’s use of education as an opportunity for institutional indoctrination; satirises the family’s role in the inevitable victory of the adult over the child and its inability to stop the replication of the cycles of judgement through its generations. But although the satire is gentle the substance of the film centres on an inner psychic structure of emotional ambiguities and conflict, innocence and cruelty that describes within an 80 minute scenario a cycle of time that connects childhood to old age and death.

Ceylan’s film observes interactions observes relations between both people and people and their environment.   ‘The Small Town’ is shot in a particular place and time, provincial Turkey in the late ‘1960s’.   But it uncovers something of what is universal in the experience of people, highlighted in the discontinuities and intensities of immanent life which is concentrated in its black and white photography that in particular during the long night sequence draws out the expressive qualities of the individual faces which are stamped like etchings on the film stock. Ceylan choosing to exploit the feature of texture rather than colourisation.

The opening sequence establishes a theme that runs through the “The Small Town’ like a thread running through human nature: cruelty. The cruelty of the world of the child and the cruelty of the world of adults.   The cruelty of the child stems out of innocence, a disconnection between action and pain. In the opening shots, laughing and enjoying the spectacle of his discomfort, children cause the town’s simpleton to fall in the snow; later in the film, Ali hearing from his sister Asiya, that tortoises are helpless and die if turned and left upside down, does precisely this to the little creature they have been looking at. The act haunts him, as it haunted me after viewing the film. Ali is innocent in his actions in the sense that he has not yet come to realise how precious life is. There is no such excuse for adults. Nor do they seem to want any.

The long sequence in which the family gather together during the night around the fire in a small grove gives voice to both individual cruelties and those endemic in the world that have shaped these people. This scene shot amidst the trees around the fire, closes in about the viewer evoking a feeling of intimacy and awareness with the participants. The camera draws in on not just the individual’s present, but also on the fire which claims a presence of its own, as do the immediate surround of tree and field. The family gathering with its hesitancies lacuna and discontinuities, is presented as a dialogue of men; but the women have presence. At critical moments it is the women who assert a dominance controling the ebb and flow of the talk, the what ‘can’ and the what ‘cannot’ be said. As the men talk the cruelty of war is related both as personal experience by grandad and then triumphantly glossed as a glorified history by his son brushing off the questioning of his nephew, Safet, as to the vainglory of it all.

After the war talk, the conversation becomes more personal.   The life of Safet from the failed side of the family, becomes the focus of the family’s barbs of disappointment. Safet whose prematurely dead father was also the black sheep of the family suffers the cruelty of judgement. There is nothing good to say about either Safet or his dead father. Not that his father’s loss wasn’t deeply felt, but both father and son are cast as lost causes.  Cutting away from this night talk one of the memorable shots in the film sees Safet leaving home to join the army. Waved off by his grandmother he walks up a long road. The shot observes his progress away from everything he knows. He looks back once. It is a lonely shot that captures the lost boy nature of his spirit.

Ceylan’s ability to conjure satire out of thin air is marked in the school and classroom sequence. At assembly the children listen to the reciting of the catechism of Turkish nationalism. Dismissed to the classroom they are subjected to more of the same as they are tasked by their teacher to read aloud in rote the solemn justifications for enforcing the rules of social and family solidarity. But as these rules of the game are intoned there is a feather at large in the room. A feather that has possibility. A feather that becomes an amusing entertaining game as the children by deft and targeted blowing attempt to keep it up in the air as long as possible.  Light as a feather it defeats single handed the didactic weight of the Turking state.

The last shot stayed with me. It seems to be part of a dream sequence in which Asiya, standing by a stream sees the body of her grandfather lieing on the ground; she also spies Safet, close by, bare bodied without his shirt. The which shirt in the next shot she holds up wet and like a shroud, before kneeling down to tentatively dip her fingers into the flow of the stream where the film ends on a freeze frame of her hand in the waters. It is hesitant nature of her action that holds attention. I can’t say I know its significance, but it feels like a premonition of death foreseen.  The boyish vulnerability of the actor who played Safet caught my eye.   Later I looked up the career of Mehmet Toprak who played him and see he was killed in an automobile accident in Turkey 2002, just after completing Uzak, his second film for Ceylan.

This was Ceylan’s first feature film. Watching it is an extraordinary experience.   ‘The Small Town’ is a film that opens up vistas on life and living, enveloping the viewer in an immediacy of seeing. Ceylan implies questions but supplies no slick outcomes or answers, just the opportunity to reflect. The film has nothing to do with the one thing after another mechanics of script or technicalities of film making as such.   The Small Town is simply an understanding of time and space, and how to communicate them.

Caylan happens to be a film maker; at this stage of his career he is also a poet.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Bloodlands (episode 1)     Pete Travis (BBC Prod,2021 ) James Nesbitt, Charleen McKenna

viewed as broadcast, 21 Feb 2021

mechanical dulls

‘Bloodlands’ is the most recent example of that kind of ‘Who done it’ ( and why?) series that comprises a drama told over many episodes, wrapped round some kind of ‘police’ investigation. In the guise of ‘Bloodlands’ the genre starts to look more tired than ever. The appearance of this genre on TV screens, first announced itself some years back with the ‘Scandi Noir’ TV series re-purposing and transposing Agatha Christie type designs and devices into the mood of the current zeitgeist. These types of TV series may be well or badly made, served by lesser or better scripts and casts, but they all draw on the same implanted script mechanics.   They all comprise the same ingredients that can be shaken and stirred in infinite variation: the motivation puzzle, the false trails and red herrings, the usual suspect, the skeleton in the cupboard, the stooge, the patsy etc. But as readers of Agatha Christie discover in the end these plot designs tend to become outworn, the gears ground down through overuse.

‘Bloodlands’ judging from its first episode, looks like it’s come to the very end of the line: it’s hit the buffers. Even the title, ‘Bloodlands’ points up a level of desperation in marketing.   Its direct titular somatic reference looks to attract an immediate prurient interest. This is a gimmick more confident series haven’t needed: The Bridge, Line of Duty etc. The problem with this type of title is that is quickly leads to a sort of semantic inflation, producers feeling the title of their series has to ‘top’ that of any rival in attracting sales interest.

The salient feature of all these types of cop/tec dramas is that their scripts define their form. They are a mechanical apparatus. The scenatios are built on a design that shares analogous properties to the maze: dead ends, circuitous paths that double back on themselves, false leads, the illusion of progress and the engendering of false hope of success. The popular appeal, as per Agatha Christie, is the posing of a certain type of problem whose solution is in theory possible through the application of logical reasoning and a ‘common sense’ understanding of psychology and motivation. Shake into the mix the fiery condiments of murder, corpses and kinked sex and you have the perfect distraction machine.

These shows are Heath Robinson type artificial contraptions, but some certainly have successfully plumbed into other other areas of psychic resonance. ‘The Bridge’ characterised by its dark tenebrous setting, felt it was set in the Viking underworld of the dead, with the eponymous bridge as a sort of symbolic lifeline out of Hel. This may not have had much to do with the convolutions of the script but it provided quasi-mythical undertow to the drama.

Nothing as interesting as this was evident in ‘Bloodlands’. Everything about ‘Bloodlands’ came across as a collection of tired clichés and repetitive tropes. The opening sequence was a series of night shots of Tom Brannick driving through Belfast. They were all very familiar types of images: the confusion of lights, the confection of refraction and reflection through the car windows, all intercut with Tom’s face and eyes, a montage assembled to express the man confronting the anarchic dangerous energy and dynamic impersonality of the big city.  But the opening section delivered nothing more than a visual cliché. The which opening was followed up with familiar story tropes: Tom, the tec with the murdered wife, the in-house police dysfunctional tensions, the suspicion of the local community, an act of sudden unexpected violence in the petrol bombing of a police car. Each card was played out by the script writers was a familiar contrivance, underscored by a dull script and workaday cinematography that occasionally resorted to drone shots to leaven the visual monotony.

You might say that these crime series have good actors. But only if in saying that you mean that these actors are good at doing what they are told to do.  Because that looks like what they’re doing. Most of the directors of these pieces are instructed to keep a high level of control over the productions which are made with a view to being sold across the world. With this is mind the actor’s face must be rigorously disciplined to exude only appropriate expression: in practice this requires the actor hold back on the emoting. Their expressive palate is usually restricted to small number of face masks: the po face – hard eye/mouth muscles non reactive; the doe face – soft eye/mouth musculature, reactive; the gloat of trimph/self satisfaction, reactive. There are others, but not so many. The permitted expressions dominate because they are safe and easy to constrict within the undulating frantic plot and sub-plot lines. In relation to this ‘Bloodlands’ in its corralling of the expressive faces of its actors, in particular of course, Nesbitt and McKenna, goes to extremes, an indication perhaps of the world wide sales ambitions of its producers. By the end of episode 1, all we had seen of James was an invariant po face, sometimes hard eyes and sometimes harder eyes, there were some doe eyes from his daughter and some gloat face from McKenna as she made a cock joke. That was it. A kind of Europudding one dimensional playing that could either turn Europe on or turn the audience off, depending on who can be bothered to watch the expressive monotony of the next episodes.

The scripting of ‘Bloodlands’ comes across as compromised. In particular in relation to its setting in contemporary Belfast with ‘The Troubles’ as backstory.   The main use of the setting and back story in this first episode was the justificatory phrase that was repeated again and again was: that at the time of the Good Friday peace accord nothing could be done about these suspicions as any action might have put it in jeopardy. This was repeated so often that I started to feel I might join in.  

‘Bloodlands’ looks like a cynical attempt to exploit its Belfast setting but it offers little else to its chosen format or genre. Dull acting, plodding dialogue, unconvincing script, predictible camera work.  The emphasis is to play safe. The Northern Ireland situation is not taken on, as represented it is nothing more than an interesting backcloth against which to play out the standard tec fare. Ironic at a time of course when post Brexit, that Irish question again looms large on the geo-political horizon. Across the water from the BBC’s England events are moving that might make ‘Bloodlands’ look more like history than it already is.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne de l’Arc) C T Dreyer (Fr. 1928; 1:34) Renee Jeanne Falconetti.

viewed: MUBI 4^th Feb 2021

Machinery of the Law

When I saw ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ (‘The Passion’) for the first time some years ago. I watched it in a cinema on a big screen; seeing it again at home, Dreyer’s film again took my breath away.   The first shot proper in the film, after the archive montage (which tells us where we are and what is happening) is a track of the Great Hall in which the ecclesiastical Court has been convened.   It’s a long tracking shot that travels quite slowly, moving behind the assembled clerics filming them from the rear or in profile as they sit and wait: some craning for a view, some rub their face, some look bored, some exchange gossip remarks and meaningful looks.

These men are gathered for a purpose. As one by one we pass them they all present as domed forms: all of them have pronounced domed heads either tonsured or capped, introducing these men (and they are all men) as representatives of religion and also allowing us a premonition of their religious idea of mercy: severe. They look like men of severity. The shot is animated and given depth and vitality in that there are three separate planes of action recorded by the camera as it tracks: in front of the row of monks and prelates there is a line of soldiers, setting up laughing joking relaxing but in their uniforms, threatening. Interspersed is a third plane occupied by yet more priests some still and some walking, engrossed in meditation or prayer, looking absented from this gathering. This is Dreyer’s set up in the moments before before Joan’s entrance.

This shot is remarkable in the associations it establishes between the images it brings together. Condensed in this one shot, the dome headed priests, the soldiers and the praying monks, is the presentation of huge judgement machine that has come togather togather to crush its victim.

In next shot we see the intended victim of this huge machine: Joan.   She is small, hair cropped, dressed in a simple jerkin. She looks like a boy.  Her ankles are shackled in chains as she enters the hall. Her interrogation begins: after some hesitancy she tells the court she is 19 years old.   This is a shock! This mighty judicial show has gathered itself in this huge hall to crush a creature who is little more than a child? Joan shows no fear. She is not afraid in this place. She is herself. Before this Court, with its unbearable contempt and malice towards her as an insignificant unclean woman who sins by dressing as a man, who has mistaken ideas about her station sex and status, Joan is only herself.   And this is ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ and this is her trial before the Pharisees.

Like the New Testament Jesus, Joan stands alone in front of her accusers. Dreyer’s ‘Joan’ is a Christ transposed as a woman, a Christ become woman. These high and mighty prelates are Pharisees, stooges of a secular arm whose only one use for her is as a dead heretic. In her ordeal her ‘Passion’ like Christ’s will show her voluntary renunciation of life itself, her self sacrifice in the name of the one who is ‘truth’ the one who is ‘higher’: God.  Joan will assume her ‘Passion’.

Like Christ in front of Pilate, Joan’s simplicity and extraordinary vision of God shine through during her interrogation. She cannot be trapped into self incrimination because she is at one with with her own truth.   Like Christ, duplicity cunning evasion are unknown to her as she responds to those who would try to trick or trap her into a heretical reply to their questions. Her spirit takes on her accusers and reveals them for the vile bodies that they are.

Against the background of Dreyer’s extraordinary set, it is the close-ups that dominate and concentrate the scenario. Much of the scripted exchanges between Joan and her accusers guards and wardens is shot using big close ups in classic montage style: shot – reaction –shot, cutting between the faces of Joan and her adversaries. Dreyer’s set is a white plastered simulacrum of Rouen Castle. In its abstraction it mimics Mediaeval form and critically it allows an even pale luminescence to fall across Joan’s face which heightens her screen presence. The pauses, the silences between question and response engender the cross questioning as a series of intensities as we look into Joan’s face trying to read her emotions. As the trial progresses, the huge male ancient harrowed faces of her judges, mocking and contemptuous, bear down on Joan. They are the same religious judicial machine that destroyed Christ and they will destroy her.  As Dreyer films her very close in long loving shots we see that Joan is psychically indestructible. She is an immovable object. Through Dreyer’s mode of presentation of Joan, he makes the demand that we look at her without flinching and as she fills the screen understand who she is. She is a Christ figure, a re-incarnation of the Word.    

Dreyer’s script moves through the major episodes of a ‘Passion’. In her cell she is tormented reviled threatened with rape by her captors who mock her by giving her a crude Crown of interwoven willow that can only suggest the crown of thorns worn by Christ. Joan is led to the torture chamber (though she is not actually put to the Question) and beguiled by trickery before finally in full acceptance of her fate she is led out, tied to the stake and in public executed by being put to the fire.

Although Dreyer’s film most strongly suggests a female iconographic recasting of Joan, Dreyer’s film also points up another sensibility: that of the coming era of the Show Trial. Dreyer will have been well aware of the Allies policy during the First World War of shooting both ‘deserters’ and ‘cowards’ after going through the motions of trial by military tribunal. These military trials with their brutal summary executions look as if they have fed into his scenario; they are present in Dreyer’s images of the British Soldiery, the Tommies, menacing and omnipresent, ready to see that the will of the Armed Forces be done. Dreyer’s ‘Passion’ also seems a presentment of the terrifying aspect of judgement machines that were yet to come, the judicial squalor of Stalin and Hitler as they liquidated their enemies by due process.

My feeling is the size of screen surely plays a part in estimation of ‘The Passion’. Some criticism of the film points to the lengthy duration of Dreyer’s close-ups, in particular those of Joan. But is this criticism an affect of scale? When a still image is scaled down to fit on a small screen, the information stream is impoversihed, less data to hold the gaze and invite the eye to explore. The smaller image quickly exhausts the visual potential of a picture leaving the mind impatient for the next image to replace it.   Hence modern directors dictum to keep the image moving, keep the picture moving: that’s the way to tell the story: movement.  

But when an image fills out the line of sight, the fact of little or no movement is not necessarily a problem; on the contrary it is potential. Stillness is an opportunity for the eye to engage with what is before it, to read into an image. The slowed or stilled image, in particular when it’s a face (and this is mostly the case in ‘The Passion’) becomes an affect image an invitation for the viewer to project meaning onto the the flow of events. As the eye has time to range across the screen, we may look, examine without flinching, at Joan and her tormentors. I think this was Dreyer’s intention: to make us look at Joan and see her. The design implicit in ‘The Passion’ is Dreyer’s refusal to compromise on this point. We are not allowed to forget Joan, whether she is before the Court, in her cell, in the torture chamber or tied to the stake where she will be burnt alive. She is herself, she is a simple human being, a women who has more spirit and soul than any of her judges guards torturers or executioners and is killed because she is a threat to them to the male world of judgementation.

Dreyer’s film comes to end in spectacle. All public execution is by definition spectacle, whether it be crucifixion or burning at the stake. And of course this is always the final episode of the Passion, the public destruction of the body, the final most painful test of the spirit: “My God my God why hast thou forsaken me?’

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

L’Avventura   (The Adventure) Michaelangelo Antonioni (It. 1959, 2hrs 23min) Monica Vitti, Gabrielle Ferzetti; Lea Massari

viewed Mubi 26 Jan 2021

I love you

I was thinking about Antonioni’s title for his film ‘L’Avventura’. What does the idea of ‘The Adventure’ point to? The final sequence of his movie suggests one answer. In this final section, after a number of close shots, the last image in the film, is a long shot of Claudia standing behind Sandro. He is sitting slumped on a bench overlooking an ocean vista with a mountainous island away in the distance. Claudia’s hand mechanically combs through his hair. They are not young people any more. They look like an elderly defeated married couple who are incapable of movement.  Antonioni’s title is perhaps mordant sardonic.   In a narrow sense ‘The Adventure’ that Antonioni points to, is that of women escaping ‘marriage’; the wider sense ‘The Adventure’ is that of women escaping men and the consequences of them not being able to do so.  

In ‘L’Avventure’s’ scenario Anna gets away from men, escapes both her father her boyfriend, escapes from them radically permanently mysteriously. But Claudia for all her hesitation her doubts and uncertainty in that last shot denotes that she cannot escape, perhaps cannot even quite see there is a problem, she has become a adjunct of the male.  

‘L’Avventura’ is a woman’s film. Antonioni’s script concerns itself with and focuses on women.   To do this he uses ‘situation’. His female characters are trapped in the world of men, their souls snuffed out. This is not addressed directly by the female protagonists. The women simply don’t have the voice to confront what is happening to them, which is of course Antonioni’s point. Their entrapment is something he shows us, that we see directly on the screen. Through Anna and Claudia’s situation we see that something is terribly wrong in their world.

The opening title sequence is underscored by a piece of contemporary jazz (repeated over the final shot and end credit). The music is driven by rhythmic guitar, it’s a dissonant nerve jangling track that might have been composed for a mystery murder movie. The music sets up the psychic state of the female protagonists (who are in effect being murdered). The music has edge; the women are edgy. They are suffocated. They are aware that they have no air but still they must breath. And it is this disturbance in the women’s psyche between the in-breath and the out-breath that interpenetrates ‘L’ Avventura’. As the camera focises on the faces of Anna and Claudia, the affect image we read in their expression is that of derangement. Their clothes are perfectly arranged but beneath the outer garments, under the skin, a derangement of body and mind.  

Anna the fiancé, caught between Papa and Sandro, dives off the yacht and swimming out in the Mediterranean cries out: “Shark!” …there’s a shark in the water.   However she’s crying ‘wolf’ though no one realises it; this time she is playing a game, her next scream will be silent, next time she will not be heard because she has no voice with which to scream out: ‘Me!”. Another later scene: Claudia and Sandro are together in the country locked in a charade of intimacy. He looks across the landscape, remarks: “Look there’s the town!” Claudia replies: “That’s not a town, it’s a cemetery.” Sandro mistakes life for death, As he forcefully takes possession of Claudia, she has no defence against him, her face increasingly assumes an expression internal panic; the look of a wild bird in the hunter’s hand. Until that final shot when she appears to have resigned herself to entrapment in Sandro’s cage.

Antonioni doesn’t confine himself to the private sphere of his female protagonists interpersonal relations. L’Avventura’s script extends out into the vulnerability of women in the public arena. This is the domain men have claimed for themselves, in which unaccompanied females are the subject not only to the male gaze but surrender their right to body space. They are prey to be hunted. In the scenes in Palermo and the small Sicilian town, Antonioni’s scenario unleashes scenes of the savage depraved nature of male desire unleashed by the appearance of the lone woman target. The scenes are a reminder of the reason for the disturbance underscoring Claudia’s derangement, that detached and out by herself on her own she is subjected to the hostility of men and their implied punishment of gang rape.   Without a voice she is defenceless.    

‘L’Avventura’ is set in the wealthy high bourgeois strata of Italian society. This a world of privilege where the men are judged by the degree of ownership and control they exert on others through their possessions: their cars their yachts and their women. It is a world where the women are trophies.   Their looks their couture and culture simply reflect back onto the glory of their consorts. The women have little actual significance, they are appendages, ultimately replicants, spare parts. If one goes wrong, vanishes or gets old, they can be replaced. Hollowed out and colonised by the male all that is left to them is an assemblage of deranged psychic responses. As Sandro moves with intent to replace vanished Anna with present Claudia, the interlinking theme of ‘L’Avventura’ is woman as a disposable entity; the one is as good as another. And of course the deal cuts both ways, as in one scene Claudia blurts out to Sandro: “You look like some one else.”   In times when we are increasingly defined by our consumption and leisure, people can start to look like some one else.

The island setting used by Antonioni for his scripted ‘coup’ of Anna’s anti-climatic disappearance, is reminiscent of Rossellini’s film ‘Stomboli’ which is set on the eponymous Aeolian island.   Rossellini’s protagonist Karen is ravaged by malignant hostile social forces but in the final sequence the volcanic physicality of the island in itself overwhelms her being. She submits to the force of nature. It is certain Antonioni saw this film and that it’s powerful climax fed into his script for ‘L’Avventura.’  The raw power of the natural environment frees Anna from the chains of a world conformed to men’s authority. The island sets her free. Perhaps as with Karen, it becomes clear to Anna that she must answer to the logic of the island not men.

Outside of the island section of ‘L’Avventura’, built structures dominate the locations. These buildings feed both Antonioni’s aesthetic and also the film’s subtext about the expression of power. The modernist construction of Sandro’s apartment, the new buildings in Sicily are the backdrops against which a new and more defined visible sort of power can be expressed: the coming of man the consumer giving clear and unambiguous unornamented expression to the world. The older buildings with their rococo interiors and exteriors signify a world where power is more concealed less brutally announced, more hidden, but nevertheless real.

Seen today after 70 years after ‘L”Avventura’ was made, Antonioni’s film shocks as a reminder of the debasement of women’s role in this era.  There have certainly been critical changes since 1960 in the status of women. Feminist sensibility has primed both women and men to challenge the whole range of their social and economic relations. But Antonioni through his film still has something to say; something to show us. It has to do with being possessed or dominated by an externality, something that that you are not able to oppose with a voice. The consequence of this is aderangement, self obliteration. Also Antonioni shows himself to be a film maker, a director who uses film to that we may see. He doesn’t use polemic, he doesn’t preach through his characters, he simply shows us things, perhaps obliquely, giving us the space to think through what we have seen for ourselves. One piece of dialogue stays in my mind:

“I feel like I don’t know you.’

“I want what you want.”

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

Ratcatcher   Lynne Ramsey (UK; 1999) William Eadie, Tommy Flanagan, Mandy Matthews

viewed Mubi 14 Jan 2021

After image

‘Ratcatcher’s’ opening shot is a slow motion long duration close up of a young lad as he twines and twists a net curtain around his head, surrendering to the immediacy of the moment. Seeing his visage through the delicate tracery of the lace, the boy’s image calls to mind the experience of an archaeologist who on removing the last bandages from a mummified corpse, catches a momentary glimpse of its face last seen thousands of years back, which then almost immediately turns to dust.

Lynne Ramsey’s ‘Ratcatcher’ sets its stall out from the beginning as a quasi mythical recasting, a re-representation of life in the slums of Glasgow. The poverty, the trampled lives, the daily struggle are all represented in this milieu. But they are not her central focus. Her concern is to express this place not so much for what makes it particular but rather for the universal psychic qualities it shares with human experience  No matter that this is neither Ancient Greece nor ancestral Alba. But look, here in the Glaswegian tenements there’s a primordial landscape in which archetypal characters play out myriad variations of mythic themes.

Running at the back of the old tenement blocks is a living river. Its spirits have coursed through the lives of all who have ever lived here. It’s a stream that in particular attracts and holds the young in its traces. These waters are an ever present motif coursing through the film which is set in the 1970’s. A time when the long strike of the rubbish men causes huge piles of black bags to pile up in the tenements and from the river comes the visitation of a plague of rats upon the people.  

‘Ratcatcher’s’ scenario is set in an unstable in-between time. A time between heaven and earth, between movement out of the old slum built by the river into the new arcadian housing development built by fields of barley. A drama is played out in the opposition between the old river gods of the slum and the coming gods of the new estate, a citadel of hope built close to the fruits of the earth.   Abandoned, the old river gods demand a human life and claim as their victim, Ryan the young boy seen in the first shot already shrouded as if preparing for his own sacrifice, his drowning in the waters.

Ramsey’s script is a patchwork of themes and mythical strips that interlink to provide a mosaic like depiction of her subject.   She doesn’t use narrative. ‘Ratcatcher’ is an impressionistic imprint of evanescent experiences which nevertheless like the face of the mummy suddenly exposed to air, leave an indelible psychic scar. Her guide over and beyond the Styx is Jamie. In the script Jamie is fitted out with a full family but from way in which he moves through the scenario, Jamie is an orphan archetype whose fate is not linked to the past but is determined by other cosmic forces.   Jamie in the Celtic tradition is accorded the status of seer, one who is guided by visions and dreams. Ramsey occasionally uses point of view shots, but mainly we watch Jamie, the object of the camera, as he moves through space and time entering into relations of life and death.

Scouring the land, patrolling the river are the Glaswegian gangs. Violent unpredictible hunters re-incarnates of the Fenians bands or Tuartha, but with nothing to hunt, they vent their warrior frustration on whatever crosses their path. The central female character is the young post-pubescent girl who takes on the opposing roles of sacred prostitute and virgin bride. Whore to the Fenians but sacred virgin to the chaste James who like Finn macCoul relates to seeing as much as to being. As Jamie’s dad becomes a ‘hero’, the river yields life in the form of fish insects and rats, so Jamie sees the escape to the newly constructed housing estate on the edge of town, surrounded by fields of gold. But as we see images of the gorgeous wind swept barley, and the last image of the film sees the family running through it, the thought occurs that the mythic cannot be avoided by simple re-location. In the midst of the fields although they have escaped the river gods ands spirits, John Barleycorn lies in wait.

There will be those who watch this film and be troubled by Ramsey’s assembly of mythic types in the slums of Glasgow. In particular her depiction of the young girl, whore and virgin.  However it seems to be a core premise of her movie that she is not setting ‘Ratcatcher’ up as a judgement machine. ‘Ratcatcher’ sets itself to catch something else, physic reverberations. Ramsey is looking at reflections in the mirror of life and understanding these as archetypal images not ideals: violent gangs as deterritorialised Fenians, child whores, boy seers. All existing in this microcosm of a Glaswegian slum in phantom archaic form that stand apart from political correctness or conventional values.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk