Ema     Pablo Larrain (Chile; 2019) Mariana Di Girolamo, Santiago Cabrera.

Viewed Mubi Streaming 3 May 2020 during the Great Plague.

Sign of the times

Girl Power is the key note of Larrain’s movie ‘Ema’, which is set in his native Chile but like girl power movies in general involves a lot of shots of the protagonist Ema looking directly into or towards camera with an affect image, a sort of pout into which we might read anything, but into which we are likely to read a sense self rightiousness. Although set in Chile, Larrain’s movie could have been made in any country with a Western cultural background as it plays out its convoluted and sometimes tortuous scenario.

Confusion is characteristic Pablo Larrain’s film, confused state of minds, that in many respects reflects the times: gender/sex confusion, male-female role confusion; political confusion and climate anxiety. Larrain’s movie exploits confusion to create a series of dramatic images: ‘Ema’ has a little bit of everything: groovy modern dance, fire; lots of sex AC/DC; girls with fun earrings and cunilinctus; disputed child custody; targetted seduction and a claim by the hero, Ema, to be evil.

 

And this claim to be ‘evil’, made in an intimate exchange with her new lover, the fireman, epitomises the vacuous nature of Larrain’s movie. Ema says she is evil…. but she might as well be saying she is dyspeptic or Sagittarian for all the difference it makes. Her line is just a line, words in a script, a pose that is inconsequential and empty, an outward display.

‘Ema is a film that exploits image for effect and affect without shame. In this too ‘Ema’ is of course very much a film of its time. It has nothing to say and serves notice only of its desire for fame and fortune, at any cost to be noticed.

‘Ema’ opens with our eponymous hero having fun with a flame thrower. Standing in the middle of the street directing her stream of fire at the overhead intersection traffic lights. The traffic lights perhaps symbolise the male ordering of the world, a world where public life is regimented by cars and their control systems, a world she wants to destroy or simply impress her rage upon, by pissing fire on it. ‘Ema’ is regularly punctuated with Ema’s use of fire as destructive force. But I don’t think Ema’s use of fire endorses her claim to be evil, even in the movie’s own disoriented terms. In classic psychiatry fire razing often relates to some forms of sexual dysfunction, but classic psychiatry is not fashionable these days. More probably its symbolic use here implies the idea of destroying the past, the idea of taking control of life through elemental intervention.

However viewing ‘Ema’ these ideas don’t sit easily with the film.   They are not grounded in Ema herself or in the material of the movie; rather the use of fire seems simply played out as spectacle a gratuitous gimmick to sell the movie. Looks good on the poster; in the trailer.

The opening half of the movie is punctuated by elaborate dance numbers. The dances are played out and filmed as referents to energy, body power, freedom. These qualities resonate with Ema’s persona: funky woman, and uninhibited.  But trying to stretch a practice dance leotard over Ema’s varied intentions, the garment simply splits. The dance is simply another distraction, a spectacle.

There are attempts to integrate the dance into the scenario: Ema’s break up with the impotent choreographer with whom she has adopted a little boy – she rejects him as a lover and as an artistic director. But this narrative strand simply goes flaccid, there’s nothing left to dance out. It’s in competition with too much else – the pack of girl power digressions – the seduction of the fireman who is the new adopting father of the little boy. The scripted machinations multiply relentlessly, until at last Ema embraces a biological destiny of pregnancy and motherhood, finally taking her place amongst her enlarged family group of lovers and a lover’s wife and adopted child.

The last shot of Larrain’s film is particularly dishonest. We see a medium shot of Ema at a gas station filling up a gerrycan of gasoline, the fuel for her toy flame thrower. For all Ema’s primping and pouting Larrain’s script simply leads Ema into a dead end. But like Ema, Larrain wants to have it both ways: tight and loose. Rebelling against this dead end Larrain has decided to open up the finale to suggestion: that Ema is waiting for ‘Ema 2’ to be financed, or that he is available should Hollywood call. Larrain is saying he can rock and roll as good as LA.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

The Servant                 Joseph Losey (UK; 1963) Script: Harold Pinter. with Dirk Bogarde; James Fox; Sarah Miles; Wendy Craig

During lockdown I decided to re-watch some films that had made a considerable impression on me when I first saw them. One of these films was Joseph Losey’s 1963 movie ‘The Servant’, starring Dirk Bogarde James Fox and Sarah Miles, which I was able to access on streaming provider Mubi (Blu-ray and DVDs are readily available online). I was also able to view ‘Eva’ on the same platform, the film he made in Italy immediately before shooting the Servant. Both films evidence the effective devices that Losey employed to communicate his forebodings about the entangled nature of human relations. They are both films of ideas.

These movies were shot against ‘classical’ backgrounds, Venice and Rome in the case of Eva, and a Georgian London terrace for ‘The Servant’. Losey chose these settings and exploited their character so that they are not just backcloths, rather they underlie and are intrinsic to the stories that unfold.

‘The Servant’s’ opening shot is a stunning 360º pan. The film begins with a shot of a spaciously appointed Georgian London terrace, the location of the house where the action will unfold. At first the camera locks onto a gated neo-classical building, perhaps a church or a college, before panning anti clockwise across some nondescript buildings then up through leafless plane trees moving round to a busy London street where finding the huge shop front signage of Thomas Crapper, sanitary engineers, we see the eponymous servant (Hugo played by Dirk Bogarde) and follow him as he crosses the busy road, walks into the terrace and makes his way towards the grand classical structure seen at the top of the shot.

This shot introduces a specific thematic concerns that Losey weaves through his film: the passage of time and our reading of images .   The fine classical structure and the Georgian terrace that leads up to it, exude an image of timelessness.  But as the camera pans we see that these buildings, with their classical porticos and fine panelled doors, these discrete architectural expressions of wealth, are surrounded by recent upstart structures made up of all sorts of buildings in all sorts of styles. The initial image of an unchanging Georgian street is in fact misleading: if you look back the other way you see the vista is deeply compromised by its urban situation. But many people don’t turn round, they just see what they want to see.

In the course of ‘The Servant’ Losey returns to this opening shot, the exterior of the Terrace, a number of times. Using it with ironic effect to intercut and break up both the action and the emotional charge of the film.  In its repeated use, the shot implies a number of interrelated ideas and purposes: ideas about the entrapment of time, the predilection to look only at the image presented, not to turn over to the other side of the postcard; as the emotional intensity builds between the protagonists these cool white painted regular exterior forms contrast with the dark destructive forces within; and intercut this terrace shot suggests that behind the surface of an unblemished exterior, corruption can spread through the interior of a body eating away at its flesh.

Losey’s interest in time is evidenced in both ‘Eva’ and ‘The Servant’ where he uses shots such as ticking clocks and dripping taps as blatant references to its passage, time that hastens away with the quick leaving the dead behind. More subtle is the director’s use of mirror shots throughout ‘The Servant’ calling attention both to time and its reading. These mirror shots, often of long duration, split the subjective reading of time into two discrete sections: first to what is seen indirectly through the mirror, then as the camera pans off the mirror, to that which is seen directly. The shots move from the virtual to the actual.

For the viewers, the mirror shots cause a momentary disorientation, a need to reframe what they are watching.  At some point in the camera movement the audience understand that initially they have mis-read the scene: “Ahhh! I see it’s a mirror shot!” Having to reframe what you are looking at, breaks the integrity of the shot sensitising the viewer both to the issue of accepting the images presented on trust and to the idea of time as a subjective dimension.  Losey’s use of long durational choreographed mirror scenes where the action flows out of the reflected into the actual splits the shots into two temporal sections, before realisation and after realisation. The cognitive fissures caused by the mirror shots are quickly assimilated; the effect is perhaps confounding but rarely disruptive.  But movement through or across a mirror causes a subtle re-orientation in the seer to the manner in which time and space have been experienced.

Crudely in the ticking clocks, subtly through mirror image manipulation, time is a basic building block for Losey in ‘The Servant’. Events are running on fast in ‘The Servant’. Society, the pampered elite living off inherited wealth who live in the expensive houses, are running out of time so fast they can’t see what is happening. Admiring themselves in the mirror they don’t see the camera has panned round. They live as if they were insulated from change but are actually complicit with the forces which will inevitably destroy them.

‘The Servant’ is Losey’s morality tale; a contemporary allegory. Losey’s vision is pessimistic, perhaps cynical. Not for him the righteous outcome of the servants and the dispossessed inheriting the earth in a bloody but glorious revolution. In Western society Losey sees that traditional class oppositions  have been fatally compromised and undermined by emulative consumerism. The servant, intelligent clever and adaptive, doesn’t want to overthrow the toff, he just wants to turn the tables on him, and experience for himself the life of a leisured aristo. The servant’s intention is to use his increasing position of power to garner for himself the life style of the other.

In ‘The Servant’ Losey and his script writer Harold Pinter suggest that those in close contact with the system of inequality will never overturn that system but simply enter the more deeply into collusive relations.

Losey’s script for ‘The Servant’ charts a process of role inversion between master and servant. The script is a psychic machine ripping Tony (James Fox) apart finally consuming him and spitting him out as the spent husk of a retarded child. But it is the atmospherics of the film’s scenario registering the dynamics of the homoerotic relationship between Tony and Hugo, that charges the film with its intensity. The rising emotional tensions as the women, in particular Susan (Sarah Miles), are emotionally squeezed out, demeaned, barred from this dyadic male world. The sexual tensions are all the more potent for being implicit in the action, and given the script is by Pinter, in the pauses between the action; they are not made explicit in the flesh.   Less is more. Were the film re-made today the script would almost certainly include a full on sex scene between Tony and Hugo, and perhaps between Vera (Wendy Craig) and Tony. In Losey and Pinter’s work this type of roly-poly would simply have reduced the relational complexities to a banality.

Ultimately ‘The Servant’ reads as Losey’s allegory for the the country in which it was made: Britain. A country sliding into psychic melt down: corrupted by the wealth of Empire, married to privilege and unable to change. Some of the things seen in 1963 by this ‘Un-American’ director and Pinter, that in 2020, still ring true.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

L’Age d’Or     Luis Bunuel (1930; Fr) Gaston Modot, Lya Lys.

Viewed Star and Shadow shared screening 12 April 2020 during the plague.

Download from YouTube.

Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or were both privately financed, and like Un Chien Andalou, L’Age d’Or was originally meant to be a collaboration between Dali and Bunuel. But some time along the way they fell out, and Bunuel went solo, though I am sure I spotted the ghost of Dali lurking between the sprockets.

What impresses me with Bunuel’s scripting and direction is his certainty and confidence as he assembles juxtaposes incorporates the disparate and extraordinary chain of images that make up the film.

 Bunuel’s produces his effects of psychic dislocation both by using editing and montage techniques, and also employing devices or actions built into the flow of particular scenes.  In the latter case scenes are sabotaged by strategic interpolations that bring things to a stop, challenging the viewer’s framing of what they are watching. But before the brain has completely adjusted frame,  the scene moves on or shifts as if nothing has happened. In L’Age d’Or  a large cow is discovered in the bed, a little dog is kicked out of frame, a ox cart travels across a drawing room party.   These acts of ‘framing’ sabotage are witty disruptive but ultimately swallowed whole, like Desperate Dan and his Cow Pies.   This type of scene sabotage was certainly a feature of silent comedy, Max Sennett et al and also would feature in the cameo’s of TV shows such as Monty Python.   Comedy’s golden age in Hollywood specialised in short vignettes in which the whole purpose of an absurd intrusion is to get a laugh.   Something more happens in Bunuel’s scenario, as indeed it does in the Monte Python series.  Bunuel’s surreal interposed images of course have wit and invention but the interpolations with which Bunuel blocks out L’Age d’Or are an integral part of the film, if not the whole point of the film:  that we live in the world in a state of psychic suppression. And this state is under continuous threat of being overwhelmed by the raging and sometimes murderous forces of the psyche. L’Age d’Or is a state of mind.    

As per montage,  L’Age d’Or is bookended by two completely contrasting and dis-associative sequences. An introductory section comprising a brief documentary about scorpions; a final sequence, shot on a set representing the exterior of the Chateau de Silling (the fictional  location de Sade’s 100 Days of Sodom) with a Christ like figure in attendance.  L’Age d’Or as a thing itself absorbs the invasion of rogue elements erupting into film. Montage is of course the perfect filmic device to enable scorpions, bishops, bourgeois gatherings, mass urban riots and Christ to become a part of the flow of consciousness. 

Bunuel’s cornerstone is  of course frustrated desire.  Natural desire frustrated by the artifice of society. In this case it the desire of lovers wonderfully played by Modot and Lya Lys, to make compulsive all encompasing love.   The theme of frustration, of the particular frustration generated by Bourgeois hypocrisy and false propriety, is a recurring concern of Bunuel’s.  It is evident in his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire as well as other films such as The Exterminating Angel and the Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz.

In L’Age d’Or as well of these other films, Bunuel is able to employ his mordent uncompromising humour against the lifeless dead people that he observes around him. Dressed up in their ridiculous constumes sustained by obscene belief systems they present themselves as: ‘society’.   ‘Society’ that has abandoned life for safety in sartorial conformity and the stifling postures of conventional behaviour. 

Of course today the herd conformity of Bunuel’s age dictated to by social conventions, has been superseded by the dictates of self image.   But there are few film makers around of Bunuel’s ability to point with effect to the absurdity of enslavement of the self by the self. 

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

Bakurau       Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles (2019; Brazil; Fr.)  Sonia Bárbara, Udo Kier, Barbara Colen, Thomas Aquino

Viewed 4th April 2020; collective Star and Shadow viewing on MUBI

SPLAT the rat movie

Filho and Dornelles ‘Bakurau’ is made with a sense of urgency. They are saying what is happening in Bakurau is happening now in Brazil: people are being murdered.  But we can do something, together we can fight the forces that would kill us.

In the penultimate sequence of the film the good folk of Bakurau watch as the murderous scumbag mayor, Tony, is led away.  He is naked, bound and tied backwards on a mule which will carry him into the cactus dominated scrubland where he will die.   This one’s for you Bolsonaro must have been the thought of the millions of Brazilians who flocked to see Bakurau which is a thinly disguised allegory of the state of affairs in the largest South American country.  

Filho and Dornelles have made their film as a direct political statement as to what is happening in this land.   A polemic pointing the way in which Brazilians can take on and oppose the forces ripping up their society and their county: only by being together.

Brazilians are being butchered.  Butchered for private profit.  The activities of the mining companies killing thousands; the pollution they cause poisoning millions.   The Amazon is being felled at a rate that is destroying the life of the people who live there and will hasten the process of catastrophic global warming.  Whereas it is Brazilians themselves who often seem to be overseeing the destruction, it is the unseen forces from the US and Europe who are the real instigators, spilling the blood of Brazil, the disregarded collateral damage of their private gain. 

Two factors make Bakurau work.  Firstly its allegorical content neatly enfolds the different layers of exploitation at work in this neo-colonial rentier economy.   The mayor, Tony, the Bolsonaro shoo-in, is paid off to do the metafixing.  He provides the conditions for the sting:   squaring off the people with false assurances,  cutting off their water supply, interrupting the communication networks so that the victims either cannot be heard, or better still, seem no longer to exist, become non-people.  Once Tony has sold out to the exploitation powers, these managers of death can move in for the kill. Literally as scripted by Filho and Dornelles, the Americans can walk into Bakurau and enjoy the pure pleasure of distraction, shoot and kill the people there.  In actuality what happens is that the outsiders come and  pollute the water, build unsafe damns, strip forests, control the highways and rivers, kill people who get in the way.   But it amounts to the same thing: death.

And there is no one to protect them – except the people themselves.  Everyone else is bought.  For  besides the big cheeses such as Tony, there are a multitude of local middle managers who are needed to organise the day to day operations of exploitation.  These necessary peons are held in contempt by their paylords but besides doing the useful dirty work they are also expendable nobodies who can be fed to the crocodiles at the first sign of trouble.   They are no help.  It is only the people, the oppressed who can stand up and fight.

In Hollywood and now increasingly European films, the people are mostly absent.  People do not exist as an active force.  In our movies the Western individuated ethos dominates to the exclusion of all other themes.  Cinema tells the stories of individual protagonists, the scripts relate: overcomings, reconciliation, transformations, conversions etc.  But accounts of socio-political relational networks forming the basis of change and oppositions,  accounts of shared common struggles, are not told.  The people as a category exist only as objects and data, consumers to be manipulated, divided up into categories processed by algorhythms to be the raw material for political and commercial collation and manipulation:  a process called consumer choice. 

Of course arguing against the above depiction of their industry film producers might say that their scripts and scenarios simply mirror what society has become.   There is little left of the old collectivities.  There are no communities no proletariats no Unionised workers in large monolithic industries.  There are no people for the film industry to represent, only isolated functionaries locked into systems from which they can either try to escape or within which they can redeem themselves.

The reply to this is that of course the Cinema Industry itself is part of the same system and employs a late digital capitalist development strategy.   Cinema is a huge industry, dominated by multi-national corporations that itself utilises the same population control devices as governments.  Cinema’s commercial strategy has been to produce films that target specific demographics.  Movies that stratify and strategically divide up its audiences into marketing categories predicted by age gender status and known proclivities.  Cinema itself has become one of the socio-industrial elements dividing us.   

But in ‘Bakurau’ Fihlo and Donnelles have made a film in which Cinema unites people – the people are present.  It is the victims as the people, who finally understand what is happening to them and that there is no alternative to active resistance.  Bakurau is touted in the publicity as a Western, but if the supposed model Western is a movie like the Magnificent Seven, this is a misrepresentation.  Bakurau has nothing in common with this movie in which the people cower in their houses whilst Bronson McQueen and Brenner get on with the action.  In Bakurau the people do call in the help of the local village bandito, but it is the villagers who  decide to take on the outsiders and collectively defend themselves.  In the end they kill them all, mostly Americans, symbolically entombing the last survivor in a deep pit built in the middle of main street.  Lest they forget.

During Corvid 19 plague we in the industrialised economies are going to be pushed back into a deeper individuation, becoming for government and industry atomised units at the end of a telephone number.  The experience of Hong Kong does show that this does not have to be defining situation for the people, that the tools used to control them can also provide the means for organising and defining opposition.  Filho and Dornelles’ ‘Bakurau’ points to us that the moment to resist must be taken or lost forever and that resistance by people has to be defined by the resolve to see it through.    

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Grizzly Man   Werner Herzog (including original footage shot by: Timothy Treadwell; USA; 2005; doc) subject: Timothy Treadwell

viewed at home in Newcastle upon Tyne on DVD; 2nd April 2020 during the plague

Now here’s a cute little fella….

Grizzly Man is Werner Herzog’s movie about Timothy Treadwell (TT), the Grizzly Man, self appointed guardian of the wild bears in an Alaskan wild life sanctuary.  

Herzog splices together the material comprising his own interviews with relevant parties, with footage shot by TT in the last three years of his life, before he and his girlfriend were mauled to death and eaten by a bear. Herzog presents TT as the phenomenon that he was; in his cautionary commentary voice Herzog disagrees with some of the ideas expressed by TT; and at the end of the movie offers a line of explanation in relation to TT’s death.

Seeing Herzog’s movie, I came to a quite different conclusion about the reasons for TT’s death than the director. Herzog talks about TT’s increasing alienation from the World of Man. This alienation, call it a line of retreat, pushes him deeper into the world of the bears with the direct physical dangers this entailed.   My own reading of ‘Grizzly Man’ was that TT’s death was mediated by the forces at work both in US society and in American media that shape and conform the ways and means by which we form and use images of ourselves in the world.

As Werner Herzog edits clips from Treadwell’s footage into his movie, Timothy Treadwell like a Jack-in–the–Box pops up regularly in Grizzly Man. Treadwell is a prepossessing and insistent character, both in his immediate physical presence on screen and in his psychic make-up. But who is Timothy Treadwell? There is something in his look and presence that said to me, this is: Peter Pan.

Perhaps like me, Treadwell saw Disney’s Peter Pan at an impressionable age. An age when ‘girls’ were remote creatures and the simple male bonded life of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys seemed perfect. But it was Peter Pan’s refusal to grow up that struck the most responsive chord. A chord in harmony with the Disney belief that we are all really eternal children free to lead carefree lives following our dreams.  This infantilisation of life has become an endemic part of US culture. And of course some guys never do grow up.

TT’s physical presence is dominated by his shock of blond hair, an unruly ungroomed outgrowth either flopping straight over his forehead down across his eyes or like straw thatch protruding out through his headgear. His face sometimes shielded by sun shades, has a youthful ageless quality. As TT darts through frame in multiple takes and retakes, I realised that I was watching an embodiment of Peter Pan. Treadwell was the little boy who never wanted to grow up. The man-child and hero of Disney’s cartoon, who had left La La Land and come to Alaska, to create his own Neverland.

Treadwell’s Peter Pan ‘look’ was matched by his performance. On camera he communicates the breathless excitement of an adolescent. In word and gesture we feel his uncompromising passion for the bears, the intensity of his self questioning, his self justification and his rage against the world that opposes him. TT in his being has caste himself as Peter Pan. He presides over a domain not of Lost Boys but of wild bears, surveying his kingdom with the innocent righteousness of the child determined to save them from the Captain Hooks of this world.

This merging by Treadwell of himself into a recast image of Peter Pan is not accidental. It is a result both of forces at work in his own nature and of course the psycho-social forces working through US culture, in general the Hollywood film and TV industry and in particular the Disney Corporation.

TT had a significant history in relation to La La Land. He quit college to go to Hollywood with the purpose of breaking into the movies. With an agent and auditions he is ultimately unsuccessful, failing (albeit narrowly) to land a prize part. What he will have learnt through all the photo-shoots and interviews is that in the movies, you are selling your image. He will have understood you need to be absorbed by your own image, to become the projection of an assemblage of adapted signs that signify the self. At its most extreme this is a process of demonic possession, and after his rejection there follows the death wish. Treadwell ends up in extremis, almost totalling himself on drink and drugs.

He survives but finds himself with a residual problem. He has spent years creating an image for Hollywood. This hadn’t been successful but with an undeveloped sense of self, his need for an image lives on. The Hollywood Treadwell is a battered and wounded, but to survive he will create another persona, continuing the process he had begun of arresting the development of himself as an actual person and the concomitant relations the define actuality.

Treadwell’s image is built around his physical presence: that mop of blond hair, the ageless face. Leaving La La Land, TT drifts back to his childhood connection with animals, and in the wild vistas of Alaska he finds the bears, the grizzly bears.   Here with them, there is time and space to develop a new persona. Alaska becomes Neverland; TT becomes Peter Pan.   In Neverland there are no agents no auditions no judgement.  Wrapped up in the protective carapace of a Pater Pan image, nothing can touch him. He will stay forever young. Treadwell, as Peter Pan, will turn his Alaska experience into a Disney movie. And he will be the star.

When I was about ten years old I was taken to the cinema with my best friend Andrew to see Disney’s movie ‘The Living Desert’. This was Disney’s first nature film, his first feature film that was not an animation.    I remember only one fragment: a rat scuttles out of its hole and the voice over exclaims: “Now here’s a cute little fella!” . What I retain from seeing the ‘The Living Desert’ is Disney’s seductive idea that the world of wild creatures is in some respects no different from that of man. This of course was the working assumption of the Disney cartoon output: that the human and the animal worlds co-merge through the interaction of their similar emotional responses.     But in ‘The Living Desert’ this sentimental affiliation was extended to actual filmed images of animals and their behaviour. It was a significant development in a way legitimising Walt Disney’s commercially driven ‘ideology’ that animals and humans share similar feelings. Through Disney’s sentimental education we can understand each other.

Walt Disney’s ‘belief system’ underwrites the construction of his huge media empire, the Disney Corporation. For Americans and many others world wide it is the Disney Corporation’s product range with its particular anthropomorphic image of the animal world that mediates understanding of nature.  

Along with his Peter Pan persona Timothy Treadwell seems to have shared the Walt Disney Corporation’s view of animals. Living close to the bears (and other animals such as foxes) he projects onto their behaviour and relationships an exclusively anthropomorphic understanding. Through his eyes they are seen as creatures from the Jungle Book, with human personalities traits and desires. Treadwell spends thirteen years in Alaska, increasingly cocooned in his own private world. After 10 years there he starts filming and the video camera allows him to to take measure of his own performance. The image becomes a real projection.

And then along comes Wendy.

No Peter Pan without Wendy. And of course Wendy is the outside force that has the power to break through the shell of Neverland. To crack open the enclosed male world and threaten it with castration.

Wendy is the new girl friend, Amy Huguenard. 

The problem for TT is that the moment at which Amy becomes important, is the point at which Peter Pan the image and the bear movie have become seamlessly fused.   The bears are Disnified and Peter Pan’s forever young. But it is difficult for images to love; they only love themselves. It is difficult for images to have personal relations; they only relate to themselves.   Amy starts to become important to TT, he starts to feel for her, feelings that sound alarm bells that ring out the alarm at the inflexibility of the image. TT starts to feel an intimation of another type of development, intimations of a pressure to let Peter Pan go.

But this pressure immediately puts TT into a dilemma. He thinks Amy loves the image! Wendy loves Peter Pan! And Wendy is with him all the time. Peter Pan is the object of her gaze and if she should see that he is not really Peter Pan, she will abandon him. Under the existential threat from a schizo discrepancy between the virtual and the actual Treadwell, his imaged self responded by radical self affirmation

TT is trapped in his own image. In order to keep Amy he thinks he has to overplay Peter Pan; he has to live out the image of Grizzly Man, providing her with ever more extreme proofs that he is what he appears to be. A Disney character in a Disney world, he will push himself further into actions that conform to the image. To acquit himself he will be attracted into ever greater risky behaviour with the bears. Amy’s close proximity triggers a schizo crisis for TT. And this existential crisis precipitates both his and her deaths.So perhaps the explanation is that the image that shaped Timothy Treadwell also killed him. To live by the image; to die by the image; this is the story of Grizzly Man.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Portrait of a Woman on Fire   Celine Sciamma (Fr; 2020) Noemie Merlant; Adele Haenel

viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 3^rd March 2020; ticket £10.75

slow burner

Celine Scammer’s feminist panegyric, Portrait of a Woman on Fire, comes with heavyweight literary precursors.  Its title and ambiance surely reference the Henry James novel, Portrait of a Lady, and Sciamma’s characters, Heloise and Marianne symbolise eponymous resonant female progenitors.

Heloise was a Medieval epistemologist, scholar, wife of Abelard, whose belles lettres are regarded as the first of the French female literary voices.   Nun mother and wife, she is strongly associated with Isles off Brittany where celebrated in song and dance, memory of her presence has elided into that of a shaman. Marianne is of course the personification of post revolutionary France, emblem of a certain faded modernity, ready to be reinvigorated as a feminist icon.

Henry James’ novel Portrait of a Lady, follows its protagonist Isabel Archer’s determination to persue her own destiny. She is not betoken to the influences and manipulations of convention status or class. Isabel is of course not successful in avoiding the social machinations set to trap her, but she retains her complete independence of spirit. Life is lived on her terms. Likewise Sciamma’s Heloise is an intellectual imbued with a pride in her own independence; she is also the object of a relentless manipulation, to which she succumbs. But even in her succumbing she retains the spirit of her selfhood, a spirit captured by Sciamma in a shot, repeated three times, in which Marianne sees Heloise resplendent in her white ‘wedding’ gown, triumphant as ‘bride’. A shot which is emblematic not of her earthly fate but of her spiritual fate, a personal overcoming of the social fabric.

The whole movie is shot in a manner that flaunts its impeccable literary credentials. It is a camera of detached painterly observation. Some shots in particular of the servant girl, called to mind Vermeer (Portrait of a Girl with a Pearl Earing sic.), and Marianne’s ‘vision of Heloise’ has a  pre-Raphaelite quality. The camera tracks pans tilts through colour and form, comes to rest in composition.   In her framing Sciamma suggests a world of surfaces a world only seen through the images presented, a world of Gainsborough portraits.

But if Sciamma’s intention is to work against surface she creates, to crack it open and reveal what lies beneath, forbidden passion, pain, then she underestimates the strength and resilience of the way in which she has chosen to actually film her scenario. All the scripted elements seem contained by the physical surface tensions of the movie. The passion between Marianne and Heloise, the background feminist elements of menstruation and the abortion by the maid, all feel de-intensified artifices somehow alien to the studied observational design of the film. With its deliberately modulated cinematography, the emotions unleashed by the situations all blend together, merge into the cameras detached beautifully colourised imagery. Everything defaults to the tasteful keying of the painterly lens. Outside of Marianne’s vision of a transfigured Heloise, there are no moments of rupture or when the film stops. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an homogenous experience, ultimately the uniformity of construction becomes monotony, the film subsumed in blandness. This is a quality not characteristic of the James novel.

The Henry James novels are on the surface in narrative terms, chaste. But the underlying intensity of James’ prose creates situations densely packed with erotic charge, all the stronger for never being discharged. A literary almost unbearable coitus interruptus characterises scenes in James’ novellas such Inside the Cage and A Turn of the Screw.    Sciamma is a product of a literalist age in which we have to see people pissing menstruating in case we didn’t know about or understand these things.

Restraint is a a rarely exercised artistic choice in contemporary films, in particular when writers directors feel the need to make statements of their credentials, so of course Sciamma choses to have her love affair consummated for the camera. But if you consider a classic film with a similar plot mechanism, Michael Curtiz’ Casablanca, it works with effect because Bogart and Bergman don’t make out physically. The tensions of erotic interplay in Casablanca, as in James novels, are the forces that define and deliver.

By delivering Marianne and Heloise into the physical realm, Sciamma makes a politically correct statement, but works against the grain of her own material. Her film that is not so much Portrait of a Lady on Fire, as Portrait of a Lady who gets Everything. In tune with the times.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Midnight Family     Luke Lorentzen (Doc; USA: 2019)

viewed: Tyneside Cinema Newcastle; 24 Feb 2020; ticket:£10.75

one man band

Life with the Ochoa family’s privately run Mexico City ambulance service caught on camera.

The problem with the Ochoa ambulance service is that when they come to scoop you up off the street and whisk you off to the hospital of their choice, can you trust them? A difficult question in what is certainly a difficult situation for any unfortunate victim of an accident or act of violence.  

But the same question arises in my mind in relation to Luke Lorentzen. Can I trust him as a film maker? Is he just another ambulance chaser wanting to make a quick buck turning over a film based on sharp practice? Lorentzen, modestly claims multiple credits for direction, writing, editing and camera. But the question arises who/or what is keeping Lorentzen on track?  In claiming total control without the moderation of any key production personnel this is one man taking all the key decisions in relation to narrative form and structure of his film without the discipline of professional dialogue or editorial discourse.

If Lorentzen made ‘Midnight Family’ without the moderating influence of professional discourse, did he adopt some imperative or at least a moral compass to guide his decision making? If so were these ethical outriggers at least apparent, allowing the viewer some help in evaluating and understanding his film?

In this sense the film pivots about Lorentzen as much as the Ochea family. But of course whereas we are allowed see something of the Ocheas, we have no basis for evaluating the grounds on which Lorentzen either shot or selected his footage in the edit.  We see something of the family Ochea but we see nothing of the director writer editor cameraman. Lorentzen who is making all the decisions is hidden from us. He is absent; but his presence and manipulations are everywhere. Without some insight into intention, Lorentzen’s movie is morally vacuous.

Lorentzen’s response might be along the lines that he has no need of collaborators to balance and affect his decision making, that the film he has shot tells the story of a failed and failing emergency intervention service.

The question arises: is it enough for Lorentzen to shoot a lot of raw looking digital footage, structure and shape the material then edit it and then make any sort of claim for the film.  What sort of claim? Well no claims are specifically made. Perhaps Lorentzen believes it is enough just to cobble together his material as a spectacle and put it out on the fashionable international doc circuit as a sort of Kantian Thing in Itself, exploiting a certain market appetite for salacious shocking situations.   In Midnight Family things are revealed such as the inadequacy of Mexico City’s emergency ambulance service (which seems unlikely to come as a surprise to the people of that City); the equivocal nature of the Ochea family in relation to their enterprise, sandwiched between saving lives and saving themselves from poverty.

 

Midnight family purports to show the surface of the Mexico City Private Ambulance business. But it is difficult to take on trust the surface when we are barred from seeing the underlying forces that give shape to what we see. And of course these underlying forces comprise mainly the socio-economic situation in Mexico but also the decisions made by Lorentzen.   Was all his footage actual or was some specifically shot to be edited into the final cut? In the film’s penultimate sequence, was the woman in the front seat of the ambulance the mother of the victim who was dying in the back of the vehicle? What sort of relationship did the Ocheas have with the director/ writer?  What was the nature of the agreement made with the Ocheas by the director? Without indications of what is going on my feeling is that this is a film corrupted by absence of information.

Lorentzen’s film follows the hallowed path of many a doc feature: there is material only to sustain a 60 minute movie; so it has to be stretched to get close to the 90 min feature mark. The stretching involves repetition and regurgitation of the same material in slightly different contexts. Midnight Family is seriously over long as well as short on justification.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

Parasite       Bong Joon-ho (2019; S.Korea) Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, and Jang Hye-jin

 

Subterranean home sick blues

Bong’s Parasite (Parasites – plural in the original Korean title) reminded me of Lanthimos’ Killing of a Sacred Deer in as much as both movies bring buried psychic forces into play in contemporary settings. Both films are scripted as black comedies working irony as a leaven for the humour; both films summon chthonic agency to wreak disaster on the arrogance those who enjoy privilege but are blind to the primal forces that surround them in the social matrix; both films use space in a very particular way.   The spaces in both films exploit the idea that within themselves they contain the tensions of different opposing worlds: on the surface we see a conventional room; superimposed over what we see is its hidden fate, to be the place of a necessary playing out of myth.

Both films create spaces in which the veneer of order will be destroyed and caste back into primordial chaos.   Space is treated as an intrinsic part of design where all those who are marked out for death, die.    

In Lanthimos’ movie the key settings were: the hospital, presented as a cool arena for the practice of industrialised medicine; and, the expensive comfortable suburban house, home to the doctor and his family. This house, a statement of status, comfortably and expensively arrayed. But it is a house that is turned inwards on itself. From the windows there are no views out into the exterior world, in this culture there are only interiorities; in this culture no one is interested in what is outside; what is outside is mediated via the TV and the phone.  Lanthimos’ scenario plays out in an interior.

In Parasite, Bong’s settings also comprise two main two interiors. But both these interiors are strongly linked to an exteriorality in the views afforded by the dwellings. The main area of the open plan house of the rich family looks out onto a garden; the semi basement home of the poor family, has a sunken window from which they can look up onto a rundown urban street environment. The one is an extension of the dream; the other an extension of the real.

The rich family’s house and its garden are part of the same plan. The house is open plan designed to replicate the American living experience. It is an American house in Korea, and the garden is also designed as an American suburban experience: backed by a mountain the garden is dominated by its neatly maintained lawn. There are a few shrubs: the experience is one of ‘grass’, nature manicured and controlled. The executive house and its garden represent alienated territory that has been taken over and claimed by an occupying power.

‘Parasite’ is sold on the billboards as a movie about inequality and class. But this is not the core idea of the film. The core idea of Gong’s movie is the claim on life, made by dispossessed forces, those vanquished primal forces representing the elements of the Korean earth and the unconscious mind. The family who take possession of the house are as earth spirits, earth daemons, agents summoned from an underworld of submerged psyches, activated to re-possess that which has been sequestrated.

There is a class/inequality dimension in Bong’s scenario. But this overlays his energising perception that his protagonists are executing a kind of shamanistic repossession. An idea that in another form grounded his film ‘Mother’. Gong’s perception sees into the consequences of industrialisation for Koreans. They are a people torn up from their roots, their psyche’s grafted onto the industrial engine of capitalist business interests.

Early in the film, the son of the de-territorialised family comes into possession of a large stone torn out of the ground whose possession is said to bring prosperity.  The idea of something buried, inanimate, arising out of the earth, that has an animating property, exerts its influence over the film’s parallel subterranean presences. For under the house there is a trapped subterranean spirit-being. Atrapped living man who exists to haunt and finally destroy the life of the occupants. And in one sense ‘Parasite’ is a account of how one subterranean spirit is replaced by another as a sort of domestic earth bound incubus.

The occupying family are agents of chaos. They are let loose to avenge negligence and destroy the corruption of wealth. For one moment in time to overturn the occupying power and reclaim what is theirs turning the placid grass of the lawn into a sacrificial killing ground. What is theirs is theirs. The final act reminiscent of the opening of Fraser’s Golden Bough, sees that one underground presence is replaced by another, one priest of Nemi replaced by another.

The film’s construction, comprising long held takes comprising many medium and long shots mainly from a mounted camera allows the viewer to see into the frame and absorb the elements of the picture.  The viewer has to read into the frame. In this respect Gong’s film is characterised by restraint understatement and humour. This is not in yer face bucolic high jinx with the ancient ones, as represented by over-the-top films such as Midsommar and some British box office offerings. His settings and his playing out of the characters are all held in low key, allowing the dramatic crescendo to build up and climax in the final blood bath.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Jojo Rabbit   Taike Waititi (USA; 2019) Roman Davis, Scarlette Johanson, Thomasin McKenzie

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 29 Jan 2020; ticket: £10.75

Mock Hitler Soup

Taike Waititi’s Jojo rabbit re-imagines Nazi German as an idyll set in a Californian suburb. Even the corpses we see hanging from the gibbet in the town’s market square ( one of which is Jojo’s mother) look decorously pendant as if they were waiting for a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Like Spielberg before him Waititi confirms the ability of the suburban imagination to absorb anything the world might throw at it.

Spielberg’s films are all consuming monsters that can swallow up any genre or situation and regurgitate them in a form that fits into the straight tree lined streets, the manicured lawns, screen doors and mild eccentricities of American suburbia, a la Fernando Valley.

With ET one of the biggest grossing movies of the 20^th century, Spielberg expanded the ambition of the suburban ethos so that it swallowed up the sci fi genre. Cute, boxed and branded like a breakfast cereal, ET neutralised the critical and disturbing aspects of its sci-fi heritage.   The idea of developing the genre to serve as either a warning to or a critical perception of the American way of life was inverted in ET. The sci-fi genre in Spielberg’s hands becomes a validation of middle American values, of individualism in particular. He does for ‘80’s America what Frank Capra had done with his 30’s and 40’s movies: legitimising American values despite the evidence that in many ways they were no more than a chimera.

And, Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit does for the Nazi’s what ET did for Sci-fi. His film like some strange acid dissolves the Nazis in the comfort bath of the suburban ethos. It uses one of Spielberg’s favourite notions, the imaginary friend, to present a substantiation of Hitler in a mock humorous key. Like ET, Hitler has his otherness neutered and assumed into the middle America psyche.   If burlesque mimicry is the cheapest form of humour, then this stage Hitler parody, amounts to a marked down comic stock.  

And the audiences: ‘like’. Cheap degraded laughs like cheap degraded food is easy to swallow. Iannucci’s ‘Death of Stalin’ pulled off a similar stunt. Both Hitler and Nazism with its obsessive mandatory rituals, are remote from the experience of most consumers of media; hence both are safe easy targets to exploit as a send up. Most of today’s viewers have only a vague awareness of the events in Europe in the middle of the last century; for the most part, unless you are Jewish or Roma, familiarity is almost at the level of a folk story, a de-intensified memory of history. People have little knowledge and no experience of the actual situation in Germany of the 30’s and 40’s. So both Hitler and Nazism can be targets of an eidetic parody in which their murderous brutality as content can be extracted and separated out from their visual image, leaving behind an empty form that can be played out as a comic device comprising gags, mild eccentricity manic behaviour and of course, innocence.  

The aggressive fervour with which Waititi’s scenario plays with anachronistic effects, such as the sound track’s use of a range of pop music (the Beetles) heavy metal and jazz, lends a contemporary allure to some of the sequences, all that is missing is a home delivery company called Ubermensch.   And when the Hitler Jugend engage in a bit of book burning, it looks like it might be a fun thing to do. At this point you might pause to wonder if the film is suggesting its theme might be an analogy for Trump’s America. But there is not enough parellism of effect to extrapolate this purpose fromWaititi’s direction.   The anachronism’s, the ‘cool’ language the contemporary jokes are all part of a calculated affect: to soak the material for maximum laughs and extract a sentimental politically correct morality tale out of the situation. It would have been a film made with a different intent if Jojo had had Donald Trump as his imaginary friend.

At the core of Waititi’s script there is something rotten and dishonest. The death of Rosie Jojo’s mother has an abstracted exploitative quality which is unsurprising given that the parodic goof-ball form of ‘Jojo Rabbit’ generates relationships based on the scripted directions to actors, not on the creation and exhibition of affect. There is a moment when in front of Gestapo police, Klenzendorf (the buffoon character) discovers that Elsa ( the Jewish hideaway) is not Jojo’s sister. Instead of denouncing her he conceals this knowledge from the Gestapo goons.  The script renders Klenzendorf ‘s behaviour as that of a friendly eccentric Californian suburbanite; but members of the Wehrmacht weren’t like eccentric suburban neighbours. This scripted response of Klenzendorf is simply part of the normalisation the film promotes: sadists are really in their hearts just nice guys.

Iannucci’s Death of Stalin and Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit are both exercises in transposing.  Iannucci’s movie transposes the machinations of Stalin’s court to the setting of luvable London gangsters. Waititi, transposes Hitler’s Germany to the American Suburbs.

This shifting of time and space works as a device for exploiting humour and cheap laughs, extending the Mel Brook’s Springtime for Hitler routine into a whole feature. The question is how long before Mao Zedong becomes the next subject for a Whacky Commie Movie? 

And anyone for al-Baghdadi the wicked caliph?

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

The Red Shoes   Powell and Pressburger (UK; 1948) Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema   16 Jan 2020; ticket: £7

What is this thing called ‘Dance’…?

Powell and Pressburger made a series of films, ‘Black Narcissus’, ‘I know where I am going’ and ‘The Red Shoes’, in which the key characters are all women. The governing concept of all these films was the absorption of the principal female characters into a mythic type structure. Powell and Pressburger’s protagonists are set into situations where their individual purposes and desires are overwhelmed, they have understand how to live with the unleashed judgement of cosmic forces over which they have no control.

What is radical in their female protagonists is that they are protagonists: the characters are not stereotypical women’s parts made up of types: wife, betrayed woman, mother, revengeful lover etc.   They are women abroad in the world on their own terms.

And the worlds into which they’re released, are outside the genre conventions of Hollywood. They are arcane worlds created by Powell and Pressburger, worlds without rules in which the women have to seek out their own destinies, where as the protagonists they must understand and come to terms with the forces set against them and determine their own fates.

The nuns in ‘Black Narcissus’ with their sense of order and duty, are overwhelmed by the latent sensuality of their new home embedded in and expressed by the films powerful colourisation of the world they have come to help.   Understanding they are unequal to this psychic challenge they retreat. Joan, the protagonist in ‘I know where I am going’, prevented by the sea from crossing the narrow strip of water to the island where her wealthy husband-to-be waits to marry her, experiences the limits to her individuated will. The sea, the rocky promontories and the wisdom of the islanders finally permeate her psychic response; she understands that she must take on a new way of seeing her situation which incorporates the historical and mythical elements that shape the people and their environment. In ‘The Red Shoes’, Moira Shearer, as Vicky, with her flaming red hair, embraces dance as possession; she embraces the mythic death that has already been mapped out for her as she dances her role in the eponymous ballet piece for which she becomes famous. Her death, is her choosing of dance as an intensity beyond the claims made upon her by men. It is a fable of the power and danger of possession; but it is also an affirmation of a life, of a possibility of a realm beyond life which can be realised in dance. The dance dream sequence of the Red Shoes ballet is not just a spectacle it is an affirmation of a shamanistic belief in the capacity of dance to carry the dancer beyond herself.  

Although dance fantasy sequences, in particular those directed by Busby Berkeley, were staple Hollywood fare in the 1930’s, these were normally presented as erotically charged assemblages using a mass of dancers, mostly women, to create a mechanical expressive machine, responding to and giving visual pulse to the score. Astaire and Rogers personalised dance, making their own unique claim on cinematic movement but the presentation of their dance remained located in ‘the world’ set up in the script, however surreal that world might me, such as the wings of an aircraft. Notable also is that these big number dance sequences of 1930’s vintage were all placed at the end of the movie, so that the films are ultimately defined dance in terms of spectacle.

What is interesting about The Red Shoes’ dance sequence is that it comes more or less in the middle of the film.  There is a reason for this. The sequence is an intrinsic part of the film’s plot and is so placed as a critical juncture in Vicky’s life. It represents Vicky’s psychic absorption into the dance. Her dance is spectacular but it also represents her experience as a dancer possessed, an experience that lives on in her and is a vision that carries her through the rest of the film. In this sense this outstandingly choreographed dance sequence has a psychic reality: it is not a fantasia. The sections after this sequence show Vicky’s integration of her dance into her being.

Powell and Pressburger in the Red Shoes (with the sublime help of of Jack Cardiff’s cinematography) turn Vicky’s dance into her complete freedom to move through worlds. Dance is passage from one world to another; ‘dance’ as a kind of worm hole, connecting distant worlds. The dancer becomes shaman, in one movement able to span universes in hallucinogenic flight. Moira Shearer in ‘The Red Shoes’ sequence, traverses multiple experiential situations that close in around her like a dream before the impulse and impetus of the dance enable her to cut through each successive dream barrier onwards finally reaching her own final death sequence. “Dance is no longer simply movement of world, but passage from one world to another, entry into another world, breaking in and exploring”. (Deleuze – Cinema 2 p.63). Dance becomes for Vicky a magico-religious rite, an opening of the doors of perception; such a rite of course incorporates death into its realisations.

Minnelli and Kelly must have looked carefully at ‘The Red Shoes’ structure before creating the scenario of ‘ An American in Paris’ . But these directors adopted Hollywood’s imperative of ‘spectacle’ before meaning, and so placed the ravishing Gershwin scored choreography at the end of the movie. The dance is beautiful but not transcendental, rather it is a full stop, leading us no further towards an internality of vision. It not the charged psychic resonator that carries Vicky foreword into life into death.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk