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Landscape Suicide   James Benning (USA; 1986) Rhonda Bell; Elion Sucher

viewed: YouTube 6 August 2020

find film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya9t5CUxnH4&mc_cid=b73ede1932&mc_eid=181c5a13e9 

Alt. Americana

The opening sequence of Benning’s ‘Landscape Suicide’ (LS) comprises a medium full body shot of a left handed tennis player practicing the tennis serve. The same shot is repeated multiple times but broken by brief interludes as the image fades to black, like the blink of an eye, before repeating. The object of Benning’s gaze is small town America: the sort of place that in the era of the ‘80’s was supposed to represent all that was best in the USA.

Perhaps Benning, who grew up in this kind of environment, feels that the game of tennis, with its service ritual requiring hours of practice to perfect, epitomises the milieu where nothing much happens, life repeats, obsessively.

I suppose that the ‘Nothing much happens around here’ descriptive trope set Benning to thinking on what actually did happen ‘around here’. And it wasn’t just tennis. Because these small rural townships were often the locations for homicide, the types of murder one might characterise as American gothic. The killings that happened in these places tended to differ from those of the big inner cities with their racial and economic strains and tensions, where gangs and desire left their mark in corpses and blood. No, these small town murders stemmed out of a particularly American psychic phenomenon; the playing out within the individual psyche of particular restless underlying disturbances, bringing to the surface in homicidal action those forbidden forces endemic in American life. Possession by the unnameable the unsayable. Assimilation by the Gothic. A weirding of life that is finely described by Sherwood Anderson in his 1930’s collection of short stories, “Winesberg’. Anderson’s stories describe a small town community in which people are trapped within themselves, goaded by a sense of restlessness and incompleteness. An American dilemma in which individuals were trapped, waiting for something to happen, waiting for the psychic trap to spring.

Of course today the Americanisation of life has spread a certain kind of disturbance of the individual psyche throughout the world.  But the USA with its waves of mass killings, facilitated by the gun laws, still stands out as the archetypal marker of the lone killer carrying death within them, the agitation of death.

Benning takes up Anderson’s theme and castes it onto post war America, an America in which Americans are now no longer just ‘ornery citizens, they are consumers, living in a society where they are entitled to buy into their dreams, to acquire whatever money can buy. A society where restlessness and identity are catered for by a carefully calibrated mass media. A society in which individuals, accustomed to getting what they want, are ever more prone to acting on their desires. The culture of dreams, frustrated unrealisable dreams that mutate into fantasy.

Benning’s ‘LS’ uses the Court and/or interview transcripts of forensic questioning of two murderers, to act out the testimony given by the perpetrators of their states of mind and their consequent actions. The murderers featured are a young girl who had killed another young female classmate; and a older man who murdered and butchered at least two women (somewhat in the manner of the movie the Silence of the Lambs) externalising his internalised twisted sexual promptings. The murders were quite different in nature but both murderers were characterised by an apparent distancing from their actions. What comes across from their own words was that they seem to have been disconnected from their selves. That both the culture and their own dislocated beings necessitated them directing feeling and actions outwards as a means of relieving an internalised pressure.

The restlessness and the insecurity of being described by Anderson have by the time Benning makes his movie become an epidemic in small town America. Something about this kind of milieu engenders isolation where individuals are easily detached from the community and retreat into themselves, desires and destructive imaginings pushing up beneath a surface of normality. And it is the surface also that attracts Benning’s intention.

Framed about the accounts of murder, and always interposed with the blink of the eye, the rhythmic fade to black, we see in their multifarious forms the backgrounds against which his two main subjects lived their lives.   As recorded by Capra, Spielberg and other Hollywood interlocutors with small town America we see the normal: the hardware stores, the churches, the main streets, the diners, the wooden houses, the gas stations, the parking lots. Benning always shows these images in their context: next to the road. The road and the sound of the road is omnipresent in the film, an endless streaming of automobiles going from one place to another. And this is what Bennings captures: linking all these images of small town life is the agitation of the highway, this restless unending movement from one place to another that mirrors the inner life of his subjects. There is no stillness. What you see looks like stillness but it’s not, it is an unsettling vibrating constant.

Benning’s title suggests a nation that is in the process of killing itself. In retrospect the film’s imagery, the film’s story is now from the perspective of the 2020’s something seen in the rear view mirror of time. The roads are of course the same, but the traffic, the passage of car and truck has intensified: Banning’s landscape has been left behind. We are now living in a world of particles, a virtual world where the constant agitation of endlessly forming and reforming of bits and pixels creates a new reality. America has moved into a world defined less by Gothic more by Sci-Fi, Star Wars fantasies where global suicide becomes possible where the individuals can fantasize and practice mass killings. A world where in King Vidor’s ‘the Fountainhead’ , scripted by Ayn Rand,   the protagonist, an Architect decides on moral grounds that it is better to destroy the World, than to have to exist within it in an ideological form he could not tolerate. Welcome to the USA.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

The Unforgiven           Clint Eastwood (1992; USA) Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman

viewed ITV film channel 26 July 2020

mirror mirror on the wall….

Clintwood’s ‘Unforgiven’ presents as a sort of reverse mirror image of the 1971 movie, ‘The Beguiled’ directed by Don Siegel and starring Eastwood and Geraldine Page.  Both films revolve about certain aspects of masculine identity and female response to male provocation.  It is the nature of these two films that they are both re-active, setting up women’s responses to men’s actions.

The films share a similar visual look.  Both are classed as ‘gothic’ which references their dark atmosphere and use made of the settings and lighting.  The movies use key lighting as an analogous representation of oil lanterns, casting into shadow and half shadow large swathes of their framing, suggesting ideas about hidden or repressed drives and feelings, those dark mythic psychic promptings.  Both films of course have Eastwood at their centre: an intruder into strange and dangerous land.

But the scripts of the two films diverge at the point of narrative, and the nature of their content. ‘The Beguiled’ , set during the American Civil War picks up its narrative at the entry of the seriously wounded McBurney (Eastwood) into a Confederate girls boarding school.  Even though he is pursued by the rebel army, the women agree not to betray but to tend him.  As he recovers he embarks on a campaign of serial seduction of the women.  His philandering is exposed and leads to an antagonistic response by the female psyche; he is assaulted by one of the angered women and suffers serious injury to his leg.

This wounding eventually leads to the women deciding to amputate one of his legs; to cut it off;  to save him to save his life.  The severing of McBurney’s limb of course strongly suggests ritual castration, a sacrificial dismemberment and disempowering of the male force which had broken into a sacred world.  It is at this point that the film recasts the action into a mythological realm: the women no longer of a school, but of a Temple, priestesses of Isis.  They are Sybil and guardians of hallowed ground and things which men are forbidden to see or know, and for which seeing or knowing, the penalty is death.  And in due course McBurney is killed; not violently, but gently without shedding blood, through poisoning by mushrooms that are fed to him.  The Gothic lighting, all flicker and dark rimmed, creates the closed down space of the forbidden zone into which Clintwood has entered.  The setting is the portal into a shadow world through which he must eventually understand that it was his fate enter and necessarily die.  

‘The Beguiled’ is Siegel’s slow mythic playing out of archetypal forces in response to an act of trespass into the forbidden.  The subject of ‘The Beguiled’ hinges about not only male trespass into the forbidden, but also the potential consequences of men trying to use their sexual power to control women. 

‘The Unforgiven’ although it uses much of the same play of light and shadow to conjure on film a quasi Gothic setting, by contrast does little more than set up a plot centred round the banality of revenge.   The content also disempowers the female. A tale of revenge in which although it is the town’s women prostitutes who are wronged, it is the men, in particular of course Eastwood as William Munney, (pun on Money?) who in the best Western tradition of chivalry takes up arms on behalf of the women.  Although the women offer the reward, they are essentially passive.  Unlike the women in ‘The Beguiled’ the are not agents, agency is a male prerogative, they are bit players, distanced and with no part in determining the outcome of events which is: man’s business.

In this respect ‘The Unforgiven’ holds up a reverse mirror image of ‘The Beguiled’ in which the latter places the women as central to the design of the action, as opposed to ‘The Unforgiven’ in which women are all but excluded.

Eastwood, as Director (and star actor) of ‘The Unforgiven’ wants, like Siegel, to say something about men and their sexuality.  But he doesn’t have much of interest to say

His scenario, having excluded woman from play out,  tries to link into the plot dynamic a certain take on the problematic nature of masculinity.  The narrative takes as its exciter the brutal disfigurement of a prostitute for laughing at the smallness of a cowboy customer’s penis.  Given that a whore’s business is to manage male ego and by extension their cocks, given that whores see a lot of cock, big small, mis-shapen, damaged, those that don’t work etc, and given that in small isolated Western towns some men could be very dangerous, whores (like whores the world over)  would take the money and get on with the job without expressing anything other than appropriate flattery.   But this is the movies, so allow this scripted ‘absurdity’ as a legitimate filmic given.

Eastwood wants his film to say something about maleness, so cocks it is and cock it is that triggers the plot.  The main plot driver is of course just a high key retread of Dirty Harry. Clint after a few ups and downs, all man all male intention, gets his man.  But there is a significant theme, a continual digressive return, built into the scripting of the plot which takes the form of a dialogue about the nature of a man’s relation with his cock.  Built into the dialogue throughout the film there is talk of men’s:  need for sexual release, hand jobs, masturbation and offers of sex for free from a grateful prostitute.  The base assumption being that to be a man, a man has to be sexually functioning, an assumption triumphantly disproved by Eastwood, who remains chaste and keeps his hands to himself. 

Eastwood as director seems to be saying that men are demonised by their sexual needs and fragility. But overall the presentation of this thesis comes across as only sentimental, supported in the script by the idea that the only one good woman can save a demonised man. It’s an apple pie sort of conclusion straight out of the top drawer of the Good Housekeeping Guide to how to reform men.

The impoverished nature of the script material, including rather flaccid dialogue, is overwritten by the Gothic atmospherics, in similar vein to ‘The Beguiled’ and the malicious crazed evil energy Gene Hackman brings to the film.  These two affects mask what is otherwise a leaden piece of filmmaking, that owes everything to the predictable mechanics of Dirty Harry and nothing to myth. 

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Indecision (Duvidha)  Mani Kaul (1973; India) Raisa Padamsee, Ravi Menon 

viewed 10 July 2020; Mubi Streaming during the great plague – it is also on youtube

Films are made from within the ambient influences in which the culture of any production is immersed. The influences of advertising, electronic games, the velocity of communications and high tempo resolutions all play significant roles in conforming the structure and content of contemporary Western films.   In ‘Indecision’ Mani Kaul has absorbed into the flow of his imagery, into his characterisation, sound, colourisation and story something of the traditions of the shadow puppet theatre of Rajasthan. It is a film grounded in the popular culture of its time.

The core to ‘Indecision’ is Kaul’s conceptual rigour and the discipline with which he has put together in film his rendering of an old folk tale. The film comprises a singular expression of this style of Indian story telling.   It retains the integrity of the tradition and creates something new enduring and magical. The imagery drawing on the interplay of startling bright sunlight and shadow is an expressive painted canvas against which the ideas implicit in the film play out.  

One of the key ideas played out in ‘Indecision’ is the notion of story. Today the idea of story is conceived as something personal that has particular role in the construction of individual identity. But there is an older literary tradition both oral and written, in which stories are a collective resource that challenge and open out developments of the psyche. Western film scripts have mostly latched onto modern usage, many scripts simply designed as accounts that justify the subjects action providing a rationale for outcomes. Fairy tales and stories such as told in ‘Indecision’ are in James Baldwin’s terms, real stories. There function is not so such to resolve particular situations or to provide answers to an individual dilemma. The point of these stories is to open the psyche up to questions that do not necessarily have answers, and both questions and the answers to these questions always lie somewhere within the insights of the self not the mechanics of the narrative.

It seemed to me that Kaul’s film owes something in form and structure to shadow puppet theatre. As in shadow puppetry the pacing of Kaul’s shots is slow and the movement smooth; every shot in the film is a carefully contrived statement as in shadow theatre; in shadow theatre as in folk tale, the characters are types rather than individuals; and lastly, as in Rajasthan shadow puppetry, there is a vibrant interplay between sound and picture. This latter relationship is key to the energising of the film. Kaul’s sound track breaks the deliberate visual pacing with upbeat intense rhythmic folk music or alternatively a cacophony of sounds from the natural world: mostly bird call but also insects. The dynamic between these irruptive sounds and the paced back shots is key conceptual idea underlying ‘Indecision’, and in Kaul’s hands this device is used to wonderful sparing effect and never overplayed.

The main setting of ‘Indecision’ is a huge white villa, a sort of house of bones and its presence looms through the film as a presence in itself. Its exterior walls and facets brilliantly reflect the sunlight, dazzling and disorienting, challenging the viewer’s perception.   This setting alternating with Kaul’s shot selection comprising densely coloured big close-up’s with unexpected overhead shots seems to be part of the design adopted by Kaul to keep the audience off balance, to break up their cognitive patterns and working through disruption of image to challenge perception and understanding.

‘Indecision’s’ narrative may in some respects be a simple folk tale but within Kaul’s telling there are multiple layers of meaning and alternative psychic perspectives demanding a flexibility of mind that is alien to the rigid psychic structures of many contemporary films that carry the banality of one message.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

The Wheel of Time     Werner Herzog (2003; USA; Doc)

viewed Mubi streaming 4th July 2020

where are the people?

Werner Herzog is a film making machine. It’s mostly docs these days but his output is somewhat variable and many of his movies are little more than formulaic exertions that sacrifice their subject to the eye of the camera, creating films that are little more than spectacle. What Herzog often produces is coffee table material that sits comfortably both in the schedules of American TV and within the liberal white ethos.

Herzog’s interest in the anomalous and crazed has led to movies like Little Dieter and Wings of Hope, revolving around idiosyncratic individuals and their stories, energised by both implicit and explicit meanings embedded in the material.  

But The Wheel of Time renders a huge Buddhist festival in India as spectacle, a series of images that exploit the exotic setting of Bodghaya to film the course of Kalachakra initiation. After seeing the film I felt I was no wiser as to what the Kalachakra initiation was than before. In the footage shot in India, I saw a lot of images and heard various replies to Herzog’s questions. I saw the Wheel of Time Sand Mandala being built, I saw the emotional intensity of the crowds who filed past it, I saw it broken up reduced back to the particles of sand from which it had been built and then tipped into flowing waters. I saw a series of symbolic actions. But they came across as no more than a number of gestures at which to point the camera. And likewise the other images captured through Herzog’s gaze: the pilgrims and acolytes practicing full devotional prostrations; the endless shots seeking out old men’s faces; the shots of food being prepared and eaten communally, acolytes rushing this way and that. What this Bodghaya material does convey is that this is a religion that is located within the people, Buddhism’s energy joy oneness and immanence comes out of the people. Which is why I found it disturbing that Herzog, in India continually turned the camera onto individuals, seeking out ‘faces’. As if ‘faces’ in themselves are anything other than the last recourse of a bankrupt imagination.  A vacant affect image.

It felt like Herzog going through a tick list of necessary requirements for the film to sell. To meet the National Geographic Channel requirements, you gotta have interesting ‘faces’ and landscape. And Herzog supplies landscape by breaking out of the Kalachakra material and cutting away to another event altogether: a Buddhist pilgrimage to the sacred mountain, Kailash. More spectacle in spectacular scenery. In his familiar voice over style Herzog informs us about centres and links the Mountain Kailash as a centre, to the centre of time symbolised in the Kalachakra Mandala. Given the Dalai Lama’s reply to Herzog’s question about centres, this is typical trite doc info, justifying the exploitation of exotica, the presentational syndrome that dominates Herzog’s movie.

When asking questions Herzog is reduced the crass formulas of American TV presenters. If this was intentional, perhaps as parody of form, then Herzog forgets that you can’t parody something that is already a parody. He asks the Dalai Lama if the centre of the Kalachakra Mandala is symbolic of the centre of consciousness; he asks him, what is, his ideal dream of an ideal world; he asks some devotional monk who has just finished lighting candles: if he is praying for us; if he has reached ‘Enlightenment’ – as if it were some kind of shopping destination. Herzog’s questions reflect the vacancy of the outsider looking in.

In one sense, the film works best because of the unforeseen postponement, due to the Dalai Lama’s ill health, of the Kalachakra Initiation the year Herzog filmed in Bodghaya. The postponed initiation ceremony was reconvened in Graz the following year. Graz in Austria, on the other side of the world, the flip side of reality. And it is the two discordant settings, the one India the other Europe that strike the real notes of interest in the film. The contrast between the gathering in Bodghaya and that in Graz is remarkable, as is the change in the filming style and type of shots used to document the event.

The event in India is a massed expression of faith, a chaos of desire and excitement that coalesces into sudden moments of serenity. The monks acolytes and believers taking part are characterised by energy, lack of material possessions, total belief and a familiarity with the collective life of communal bowls to prepare and eat food. In Bodghaya the event is individual devotion in the midst of collective tumult.

In Graz, the Kalachakra initiation event looked like a conference of middle ranking business executives. Whereas in Bodghaya all was noise lack of order and spontaneous impetuosity; in Graz all was quiet well ordered and polite. Buddhism in Graz was regular Europeanised.  In Graz everything was done by the book and the feeling generated was that in this manifestation of Buddhism something had been filtered out, there was a lacking in connection to the overflowing nature of life. In Bodghaya, tumult generated by the vast crowds characterised the initiation proceedings. In Bodghaya the people were present. In Graz they were absent.

As the ceremony moved to Graz, Herzog’s filming changed. The choice of shots became more respectful conforming to European sensibilities.  In Graz there were no shots of the assembled Buddhists eating, there were few close-up, in the face shots of people that so characterised the filming in India, there were no shots of people in awkward or unusual positions nor did he ask the people there the sort of crass questions he had asked of people in India.   The filming was distant, non intrusive. Europeans don’t like being filmed in this type of situation. They may be caught out! Perhaps this was an intentional structured comment on the part of Herzog; or perhaps he implicitly knew he could not get away with the liberties he took in filming in India.

Herzog’s ‘Wheel of Time’ was able to show these differing faces and experiences of Buddhism. The differences between the business managers and the Asian devotees. For the Europeans the people are absent from their practice, for the monks their practice takes place amongst the people. But Herzog didn’t seem to be very interested in pointing to these differences, nor at asking how these differences affected the way in which he shot his material and the ethical considerations put into play by comparative data collection in different cultures.  

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

La Dolce Vita   Frederico Fellini (1960 Italy) Marcello Mastroianni; Anita Ekburg

Viewed: Mubi streaming 29 June 2020

 Filmed as a series of psychic fragments Fellini’s (FF) film is an oracular vision of the shape of things to come: the transformation of all areas of life into hallucinogenic spectacle with no distinction between the participant and onlooker. Spectacle fed into the amplification circuitry of the media who both feed off and feed into the images they produce. Fellini’s Dolce Vita is an initiation rite into a Western World driven and controlled by ‘image’ whose present dynamic takes the form of Berlusconni as a demonic hybrid apotheosis of the world of politics and media. As I watched Dolce Vita unfold I was awed by FF’s visionary clarity in relation to the convergence in shape and form of the control apparatus.

The opening sequence of the movie is a statement of intent. We see, flying low over Rome, a helicopter with a huge statue of Christ slung by ropes beneath its undercarriage. The apparition causes everyone to look up at this giant airborne caricature. La Dolce Vita (DV) introduces Christ as the clown of the skies, a cosmic Christ for our entertainment and amusement Ladies and Gentlemen…… The flying Christ merges publicity stunt with religion, marrying the two worlds in a spectacle that presages the movies underlying theme.

A thought: where did FF get this statue? It looks like it was made for the movie, for the brave new world of 1960. More interesting where/ how did he get the idea?   Perhaps it was something he actually saw or heard about; anyway, ‘as idea’ it perfectly and succinctly predicates what follows.

In DV,  FF uses the structurally broken filmic fragments of action as a mirror to catch Marcello’s reflection as he is transformed and bent into shape by the images and social forces that come to define his life. An early fragment of the film sees him, an inveterate womaniser, spend a night trying to seduce and bed the American film star Sylvia (Anita Ekburg who’s a shoo-in for Marilyn Monroe). In the mirror fragment we see clearly that narcissistic narcosis induced by publicity and media attention have totally absorbed this Diva.   Marcello discovers (he takes a little time to get it) that Sylvia is not really of the flesh. She has a body, central to her image but an appendage to her life. She may seem present in the flesh but actually she lives inside an endlessly projected movie of herself.. She isn’t really present; sex with her can only be a two dimensional movie. Sylvia is machine for absorbing fantasy and projecting desire onto the white walls of life. For people like Sylvia life doesn’t flow; rather it takes the form of a sort of eternal recurrence: the same people sets and situations repeated time and time again. This recurrence is only broken by the momentary irruption within Sylvia of fleeting impulses that are for an instant totally insistent, but immediately fade. Time in her life doesn’t flow rather it is compressed into a crystallised everlasting and overwhelming present, bolted like the image of the flying Christ, to an unchanging image of herself.

Marcello has the chance to avoid being trapped in the recurring movie of his projection as an image in two dimensional photogenic space.   He has a chance to chose to live through time as he is pulled by his girl friend to accept her love to share her carnality. But each glimpse in the DV mirror fragments shows him drawn further into the spectacle by the fascination of himself as an operating image. Through the shattered fragments of time Marcello develops the idea of himself as an increasingly self referential and narcissistic object.   An increasingly emptied out self, refined through the rectifying forces of the media, into a being of pure surface. A centre of attraction and repulsion in the endless parade that he joins to replace the tedium of life.

The music as in all FF’s films complements in form the content of DV. It’s surging rich gorgeous encompassing. Parade music that is intended like the Pied Piper’s flute, to draw in everyone who hears it, to disarm resistance and allows the children to completely abandon themselves to the show.   The music is an amalgam of mood feeling and thought swamping and bypassing the human mental faculties as FF fills out DV with sequences of extraordinary fluid shots that capture small and large crowd situations and scenes.

DV opens up worlds as spectacles that absorb, disarm and finally infiltrate the individual.   The world of religion filmed as a hysterical fusion of media frenzy and religious hysteria. Catholicism experienced as a testing ground for experiments that would later be internalised and finally replicated by the profane secular order. Marcello cannot see the hilarious farcical religious and media circus caused by two young children claiming to have seen the Virgin.   He is absorbed by it, and excited by the prospect of living and working outside time. He breaks (or rather the mirror fragments suggest that he does, for there is no convention of continuity in DV) with his girlfriend and joins the parade of partying which is the gateway to a sort of immortality. The movers and shakers the money and the power exist in a never ending spectacular that engulfs life and pulls everything along with it in a frenzied dance lived out in image and gesture, a saturated narcissism that ends in death. But of course death does not stop the show.

The final sequence on the beach shows the party goers descend onto the beach to gaze at the lifeless form of a huge dead fish. A young innocent girl, introduced earlier in the film as working in the beach café also looks on. Both exist outside the spectacle,

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

The Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors   Sergei Parajanov (USSR 1965) Ivan Mykolaichuk, Larisa Kadochnikova, Tatyana Bestayeva

streamed by the Star and Shadow Cinema from YouTube 27 May 2020 during the great plague.

no me

Like the snow that covers the land in the opening sequences of ‘The Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’ (‘Shadows’), so Parajanov’s film overlays the consciousness of the viewer with the images of a symbolic journey.   The viewer travels not only through the territories of a remote culture but through a mythic soul-scape, on a journey from life to death. And the narrative, like the snow covers and alters the contours of what can be seen; to understand we have to look through the surface and see what lies hidden from our immediate vision.

Parajanov’s title, The Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors points to his intention in making his film: to reveal the shadows. Through music through image, Parajanov calls up the buried psyche of the Hutsul people, giving filmic form to the living ghosts of the past that were negated by a Soviet film industry that was hostage to history and the lifeless illusionary beings of an arid future.

Inspired by Tarkovsky’s ‘Ivan’s Childhood’, ‘Shadows’ is a personal political response to the dead hand of Socialist Realism which was supposed to guide Russian film makers of this era. Soviet film making was directed in principal by a materialist manifesto. The scripts scenarios context development and interpretation were judged and determined by Marxist dialectic in which ideologically correct time was travelling in one direction: towards the victory of the proletariat, the realisation of Marx’s prophecies. But filmed in a society in which a shamanistic culture remained intact under the outer garb of orthodox religion, ‘Shadows’ follows the another path another time line, the soul journey: Ivan’s movement towards consummation of love. A journey that is archetypal and as an archetype is located outside time. Parajanov’s invocation of archetypes runs counter to the dogmatic shibboleths underlying soviet scientific orthodoxy. ‘Shadows’ embraces the hallucinogenic and the ecstatic. It breathes rare pure mountain air that rises above the stale gasses trapped in the abyss of political dogma.  

Located in a Hutsul settlement in the mountains, the story told is that of the possession of Ivan’s soul by love. The love between Ivan and Marichka is born in extraordinary circumstances. They come together in blood, after the killing of Ivan’s father by Marichka’s father. Consequent to the killing the antagonistic tensions between the two families might endure for generations, but what happens is that love, as an exterior force occupies the souls of the two young people, overpowering them and fusing their destinies. They become as one, twinned souls in life and death, overtaken by the archetype of ‘the Lovers’ that transcends death, transcends time.

When Marichka dies in an accident, the separation for Ivan is a violation. After her death they exist in separate forms: he body; she spirit.   The shock of separation is the shock of losing part of himself, because fused in an archetypal form of love he and Marichka are not two but one. Parajanov does not depict Ivan’s loss as melodramatic pantomime in which he expresses the loss as an inconsolable emoting, a flooding out. Marichka’s death does not cause this type of emotional pain, rather another type of response, an imperative to tear away from life and start on the journey to rejoin her.  In the way Parajanov shows Ivan, he has no ‘me’, in the sense of responding as an individual, he is a type. With Marichka’s death Ivan is subsumed into a mythical realm in which there is only the necessity to become one with her again.

The effect of Marichka’s death is initially to weaken and loosen Ivan’s grip on life, as he experiences a pressure he perhaps does not understand but to which he bows. Acceding to her persuasion Ivan marries Palahna, a union that takes place in the human domain, and which crystallises for Ivan that after Marichka’s death, he no longer belongs to the world of men. Married and crushed by his new earthly bonds Ivan commences an accelerated race towards world of the the dead and re –unification Marichka.   His marriage to Palahna is barren and she desperate for a child that Ivan cannot give her, seeks out the local shaman, which relationship leads to Ivan being axed to death by the shaman in a similar fashion to his father. A death that in blood mimics that of his own father, but this time avows with his own blood Ivan’s tie to Marichka.  

So one sees things in Parayanov’s film, perhaps one sees nothing more than one’s own shadows.

The way the film is put together, the fusion of camera work music and mis-en-scene creates a maelstrom of hallucinogenic effects that transpose the action into an otherworldly dimension.  Parajanov’s camera, whether filming in the suffocation of the candle lit interiors or in the exposed raw exteriors, becomes a rhythmic instrument exulting in the intensities of collective and organic life. Most of the music is played by the people, pipes reeds horns jews harps digs deep into the fabric of the images calling up apparitions of daemons spirits and wraiths. And the settings: the compressed churches and wakes and the natural settings in particular the river sequence, become portals to a parallel dimensions of existence. In his fusion of these filmic elements Parajonov projects a vision of a world balanced on an edge between substance and shadow.

The Soviet film industry was mandated to produce films with narrative structures which could only be interpreted in one way: that is to say in support the state’s official ideology. Tarkovski and Parajanov (after 1965) were not interested in making films that led to one interpretation. Their films were diffuse, structured to exploit material and content that were intentionally malleable, designed to bring out into the light manifold inherent possibilities of human experience.   What viewers take away from their films depends on what they see in the shadows, what is brought into light by their own subjectivities.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

Une Femme est Une Femme  J-L Godard (Fr 1961) J-P Belmondo, J-C Brialy, A Karena

Mobi streamed – viewed 22 May 2020 during the great plague

retro-crit;

film as delerium

Godard’s movie, Une Femme est Une Femme (‘Une Femme’) of course begins at the beginning.  He uses the opening title sequence to not only to anticipate the themes of the film but to flaunt its wit, provenance, and his mastery in deconstructing cinematic form.   In the opening captions, we see written out in huge block caps across the Cinemascope screen and spaced over two shots, the formula that traditionally leads us into the fairy tale:  IL ETAIT /cut / UNE FOIS…(once upon/cut/ a time).  This opening is followed by a series of words (all in the same huge screen filling block caps a la Godard) that are invocations of the wild promises we see every week in the cinema interjected into the manic film trailers.  But instead of flashed excitor words such as: sizzling – hot – teenage sex – explosive – true story etc in ‘Une Femme’ we are hit with such as : LUBISCH – 14 JUILLET – GUILLMOT – COMEDIE – FRANCAIS – GODDARD – and many more..before…

 …off camera Anna Karena (AK) calls out: Lights! Camera! Action! (usually the director’s call), and the title Une Femme est Une Femme fades up over an interior shot of a Parisian café, a familiar setting used by Godard in this era, and picks up Angela  (sic.; AK ) as she swings through the door.   

So what is ‘Une Femme’ about?  It seems to me that it is about Godard as the playful lover, playful lover both of Cinema and lover of his star.  His movie is both an infatuation with AK and an infatuation with Cinema.   Une Femme est une Femme is a delirium of infatuation.

Using the American musical comedy as a tongue in cheek reference or ‘Homage’ Godard strips out the Hollywood film making bible and employs every trick in the counter-culture guerrilla cinema book to deconstruct the genre.  Yet, through script, colourisation, editing, wit and the performances – above all his camera’s love affair with AK – Godard maintains the energy vitality and innocence of his original model.

The narrative, such as it is, is written to give full weight to the woman’s perception of the situation.  As such the script moves well outside Hollywood’s comfort zone (certainly in 1961), with Angela’s insistence to Emile that she wants a baby.  Given Emile’s intransigence on this matter, Angela’s solution to go and make love with Alfred to effect conception, prioritises her biological imperative over romantic faithfulness.   This solution and  Emile’s relaxed response are both outcomes well outside ‘The Code’.    The acting style is ‘cool’, the actors don’t invest in emotive charge, and the interchanges even when not mediated by book titles, tend towards a logic in which the words are owned by the actors but not possessed by them.   The dialogue has its own dynamic, in turns ironic radical and left field, it creates its own tensions and resolutions, and is delivered with gestural self possession but without affected commitment.  

‘Une Femme’ is characterised by random breaks in the flow of the film’s soundtrack, discontinuities which then resume pick up and continue as if nothing had happened.  These edits break into the viewer’s cognitive processes, putting them on alert that they are the targets in a game of manipulation.  Take care! It’s just a movie, anything is possible.   The script also gives the caste a part to play in breaking through the hallowed conventions of Cinema.   With nods winks and little looks they cut through the screen and collude directly with the audience.  Seated in the dark (the traditional setting for ignorance) the audience know they are being guyed by the directors simple stunts – absurd undisguised spacial contractions –  stunts that point up their complicity in the illusion yet earns their intelligent indulgence and admiration for the director’s filmic delirium.   Because Godard loves Cinema as a way of thinking, as a way of life, as a way of saying something about the world. As a way of being: ‘In Love’.

The second delirium that makes up the substance of ‘Une Femme’ is that it is Godard’s ode to Ana Karina.  It is his portrait his sonnet his love affair with his muse.  He found her in the Cinema (interestingly the full name of AK’s part in Une Femme is: Angela Recame – Reclame is French for an advert and Godard was first smitten with AK in a Palmolive Soap Advert), and he will make her a star of the Cinema.   In ‘Une Femme’  AK, wrapped in ‘Minnelli’ red colourisation, is the subject of Godard’s delirium, a series of fantasias – housewife – stripper – child  – music comedy star (There is a Gigi sequence. But interestingly Minnelli, director of Gigi, is not one of the names seen either in the opening credits,  nor is he mentioned in the script – but Bob Fosse is) .  In Godard’s vision AK radiates through Une Femme.  Brialy and Belmondo both play out downbeat performances, wandering through most of the takes like clouds on a sunny day.  AK is the sunshine.

Bunuel  Parajonov, Tarksovski, Herzog  Rossellini Resnais are some directors who immediately spring to mind who have made films that constitute a state of delirium.     It is of course a subjective judgement.  I wonder how Godard came to view ‘Une Femme’ as he moved into a more cerebrally committed mode of film making?  In some respects ‘Une Femme’  appears as an indulgence, a film that verges on being self satisfied and over content with itself, but in the end I think its innocence overcomes, its playfulness overrides reservations.  Its thematic feminine line, its pricking of male pomposity wrapped up in the bubble of film making justify the final lines of the script, the terrible pun spoken by Angela in bed as a reposte to Emile: “Non une femme n’est pas infame, une femme est une femme”.  Much can be forgiven if much is attempted.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Germany Year Zero (Germania Anno Zero) Frederico Rossellini (It. 1948) Edmund Moeschke; Franz-Otto Kruger, Ingetraud Hinze

viewed YouTube 14 May 2020 during the Great Plague

Like Raqqah like Homs – what lies behind these ruins…the death of Patriarchy?

 The opening title section of Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (GYZ) is a series of establishing shots tracking through the smashed up streets of Berlin immediately after the war. The city’s face is shattered, its core reduced to rubble and the buildings, such as are standing, resemble broken teeth or gravestones. The images are overlaid by the rhythmic strident cacophony of the overture to Wagner’s Flying Dutchman as ironic counterpart to the desolate imagery.

The question is what is this sequence establishing?

I think it establishes that in GYZ Rossellini is looking at what is to live a life under the condition of total defeat. Conditions are situations that are all encompassing. They surround and press on us, as omnipresent as the air we breath.  Conditions are pressurised containers. Siege plague famine and total war create in extremis the conditions in which the human population tries to survive, at whatever the cost. The rules of survival permeate all behavioural responses, drilling down deeply into both the collective and individual psyches.

Rossellini’s plot centres about one family and their survival. Like everyone else they live in buildings that are bombsites, sharing space with other families and penned into their rooms like hollowed out caves. Life is clearing rubble, digging graves, prostitution, theft, selling, hiding. The women walk out with the occupying soldiers, the children steal, sell, pimp, men cowed and frightened, hide from the authorities who are everywhere. Life is focused on getting to tomorrow. Life and death are familiars, but what Rossellini’s film excavates in parallel to the physical ruins are the reverberating echoes of life lived in the ruins of a shattered ideology: Nazism.

These Berliners were the people who some five years earlier had cheered Hitler as the Fuehrer and embraced his fantasy that they the Germans were the superior race destined to bring the world under their heel. For Rossellini these Germans are a people psychologically adrift .   Scratch many of them, and just under the skin is National Socialism. Many still desire recourse to the old Nazi certainties but are unhinged by the evidence everyday life pushes into their faces, that they themselves are living proofs to the failure of these shibboleths of the Third Reich.

A twelve year old boy Edmund sits at the centre of the scenario.   He is a luminous being who increasingly comes to dominate Rossellini’s attention. Edmund is a beautiful child: a physical embodiment of the Aryan somatic fantasy, but also the repository of a strange purity that stands out against the images of desolation. And Rossellini’s script marks him out for a specific purpose.

Resourceful observant truthful Edmund plays a duel role in GYZ: one illustrative, the other mythic as the scenario plays out its sacrificial design.  

As an illustrative figure Rossellini follows Edmund as he walks through Berlin. There are moments experienced of the city’s strange residual beauty, but mostly we see the conditions of destruction and relations of total defeat: the double crossing, the bullying, the black market, the dog eat dog situation in which the kids like packs of urban dogs play prominent roles. Rossellini also uses Edward to point up the sexual undercurrents of Nazism and its male dominated fetishism, the paedophile corruption underlying its racial ideology. Organisations such as the Hitler Youth, based on a glorification and glamorisation of the male body were tacitly based upon a certain a sexual dynamic between older men and young boys. This kind of sexual relationship is strongly suggested but not actively played out in the relationship between Edmund and his friendship with his ex teacher, a resentful unreformed Nazi.

Edmund travels through all this with calmness of spirit aware of but not contaminated by the world in which he moves. And in this world Rossellini has reserved a particular mythic role for Edmund.  

GYZ’s plot revolves about the sick father of the family and its desire to keep him alive.   There is a key scene after the bedridden father returns from hospital and talks candidly to his children about the Nazi past and his own failure, like everyone else, to have opposed Hitler. The camera comes to rest on Edmund as the father concludes:

“We just have to acknowledge our own guilt…”  At some point in the development of the psychic and material strands of the film’s dynamic, Edmund comes to understand he will murder his father, he has been chosen as the agent of death.  

Of course the narrative formulates a rational basis for Edmund’s killing: his father expressing his wish to die, so as not to be a burden; the teacher’s suggestion that the weak such as his father should be allowed to go to the wall. Edmund himself after the murder, tries to blame the teacher for the own crime. But these rationalisations as scripted linkages are weak, little more than pretexts for Edmund’s act as if his act of murder derived from a sort of cost benefit decision. Edmund’s impulse draws on a deeper psychic wellspring, the imperative to enact a rite of purification which takes possession of the boy and itself carries out the deed. And this is the reason Rossellini went to Berlin and made his film.

Rossellini in creating his parricidal climax is pointing to mythic necessity as the way to expiation and hence the shot of Edmund over the father’s lines about the need to acknowledge guilt. Edmund is possessed by a force greater than and exterior to himself. The father must die by the hand of his progeny, his male offspring. Only this sacrifice will free people to move out of the patriarchal past and to come to terms with the terrible crimes that were committed in their name.

But this is no trite Freaudian Oedipal story, where the son murders daddy, replaces daddy and then marries mummy.   This is another type of myth: a spiritual myth of self sacrifice. As Rossellini understands it, this killing this ritual murder must be carried out by the agency of an innocent being but one who accepts the guilt for his action and in reconciliation kills himself. When the cycle of death closes in on itself, the saga ends. Only through mythic death is there the possibility of renewal.

In reaction to the still unfolding horrors of the Third Reich I think Rossellini in Germany Year Zero travels all the way to Berlin to make a film that will represent a rite of purification of behalf of Germany and its people.  It is film as liturgy and in the figure of Edmund he found his symbolic mediator for the necessary sacrifice. 

The last year zero before this one, was the year of Christ’s Birth, another symbolic sacrificial figure who accepted the guilt of our sins and died to save the world. And as one of the architypal images of Chirst’s death is the Pieta, the image of the dead crucified Christ attended by his mother Mary, so in the last shot of Germany Year Zero Rossellini composes his own version of the Pieta, as a woman prays beside the crumpled body of the dead Edmund. Another spiritual death before camera tilts upwards towards the ruins.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

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