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My Twentieth Century     Ildiko Enyedi (Hu;1988) Dorota Segda, Oleg Yankovskiy

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 2^nd Oct 2022; ticket £7

Film as Kaleidoscopic Quilt

Opening shot in Ildiko Enyedi’s ‘My Twentieth Century’ is an looped clip displayed within the classic silent movie framing element, the ‘iris’ matte. It shows a man with his head placed inside a huge cannon (like those used by human cannonballs in daredevil circus stunts). In his hand the man brandishes a flaming torch which he directs in the direction of the barrel’s touch hole. As a short clip we see it again and again as the opening credits roll, perhaps a visual metaphor for humankind’s repeated attempts in the twentieth century to self annihilate.  

Enyedi locates us at the turn of the last century, her twentieth century, where Edison and Tesla demonstrate the awesome possibilities of light and electro-magnetism; where telegrams communicate in minutes across the oceans of the world; where the night stars talk like angels in fanciful Hollywood movies; Pavlov’s dogs escape and a chimpanzee zoo specimen tells the tale of his capture. These sequences are spliced into the travels and travails of twin sisters Lily and Dora, born at the end of the nineteenth century and destined to experience life in the twentieth century. The experiences of the twins, separated as young girls, are rendered as pastiche ‘film noir’ as in their separate journeyings they travel across the socio-political landscape of Europe: Lily committed to a vague unspecified revolutionary anarchism, Dora a sybaritic feminist, very much her own woman.

Enyedi’s film is structured like a patchwork quilt. Her specific collection of impressions ideas and action stitched together as a psychic coverlet of images. She has assembled her twentieth century with artful caprice and gracious style. The film is shot to replicate some of the features of early movies: academy frame, filmed with high contrast black and white stock, with many of the transitions replicating the old ‘in camera’ iris dissolve. The characters are elegantly played out by her troupe of actors. Unlike some of their contemporaries, the caste all appear comfortable and relaxed in period costume working together as an ensemble to lend the film its substance, and the solidity cohesion and unity needed to deliver Enyedi’s diffuse scenario.

If there is a remarkable scene in Enyedi’s film, it is surely the ‘feminist lecture’, unexpectedly and subversively interpolated into the the flow of the film. It’s a scene that simultaneously flout’s both audiences’ (the actual and the virtual) expectations and pushes to the top of the agenda one particular aspect in the actual struggle of feminism – the inherent belief of men in their superiority. Dora is present as the male lecturer first introduces himself and his topic: female political emancipation. Quickly asserting his support for women’s emancipation, their right to vote – which elicits warm response from the all female audience – he quickly moves on first to emphasise that having this ‘right’ by no means equates with women being the moral and intellectual equals of men. The lecturer continues stating categorically that women are either whores or mothers. Nothing in between and ….turning to the blackboard behind him he draws in chalk the crude graffito image of an erect cock and balls and pointing directly to his depiction, continues …women’s problem is that they worship the phallus: as ugly and crude as the phallus may be that is the object of their desire.

Using episodic clips Enyedi cuts between the ‘journeys’ of Lily and Dora, to play out this aspect of her feminist proposition: that it is not so much particular rights or issues that constitute the problem for feminists, but the ingrained arrogance of male sensibility. Lily, is drawn into politics. But the politics in which she is involved is very much men’s ‘games’ on men’s ‘terms’. Mediated thorough male political organisation, Lily is treated by her political mentor as an object, a body to be used and dominated. As she travels across Europe, Dora is not seduced into or by the world of men. In possession of a complete sense of self, she dictates her life on her own terms. She initiates relationships with men and determines their outcome: she is the one who is in control confident of both her sexual power and superiority. She stays the course of the ‘emancipation’ lecture presumably because she is not threatened or belittled by it, but rather amused by the deluded bravura rantings of the little man.

Mediating the images and the sequences linking the lives the twins, is the formal device of the iris. Used both as a matte and as a transition, it was a favourite device of early silent films as it was usually composed in camera at the start or end of a shot. Use of a matte as a framing device suggests the idea that the viewer is a special privileged party to the unfolding events, they are in on the secret so to speak. As a transition the expanding or retracting iris emphasises an unhurried movement in the scenario, saying to the audience: meanwhile lets have a look at what is going on over here. In an era of film making characterised either by shots of brief duration or by scenarios dominated by long tracking or crane shots, the iris transition is rarely employed, but chosen by Enyedi to effect her transitions it evokes another sensibility a consciously deliberately stated means of moving through the scenes of her scenario.

‘My Twentieth Century’ Enyedi’s first feature film, has a structure that is analogous to the patchwork quilt, which is a particularly female form of expression: at once practical tactile and beautiful. Her film expresses a statement of artistic and political intent that the female perspective can be represented by forms that lie outside and represent experience in a way that is different from the structure and content of mainstream film that has in the main mostly been developed my male vision. It is another way of seeing of representing life – a non masculine statement of intent.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

The Forgiven               John McDonagh (2021; UK) Ralph Fiennes, Jessica Chastain, Ishmael Kanater

viewed Tyneside Cinema 6th Sept 2022; ticket £6

Let’s Party!

The current viewing ‘blockbusters’ are all of course to be found on TV in the form of multi-episode series. (I’m just watching one called ‘The Capture’ on BBC) They come in different flavours: fantasy, procedural/forensic, period/family, but they all share some common structural features. Their plots, with their multi faceted subplots, are based on a design analogous to circuit board diagrams where the current can be routed through different sections of the narrative; and also by way of the same analogy the critical function of the acting is to take on the roles of the sort of components found on printed circuit boards: resistors, capacitors, inductors, transistors etc the players thereby facilitating the connections between the different sections of the board, ie the subplots/digressions. The editing of these productions routes the action/the energy from one circuit to another, from plot to subplot and back again. In the completed final production of these episodic TV series the narrative line is driven by the editing device of cutting between a number of of parallel sequences built into the plotting. The effect of this ‘switchback’ editing is to create a product based on the dynamic of suspense. Each cut from one sequence to another leaves the outgoing situation with unfinished business, engendering suspense in the viewer. As the action switches continuously from setting to setting so the audience is manipulated into continuous states of suspension.

The consequence of this design is that these types of production are structurally grounded in ‘suspense’ mechanisms rather than ‘intensity’ of relations play out. Hence for the script to work the acting needs to be more or less mechanical rather than organic, as the purpose of the acting is to function as part of the ‘circuit board’ rather than to play out the expressive imperatives of emotionally internalised drives.  The acting in these dramas is about ‘role’ playing rather than internalised expressive character formation, which would not only be a waste of time, but would potentially interfere with the energy flow chart of the circuits.

Which brings me to John McDonagh’s ‘The Forgiven’. The film’s script/edit is structured on the TV series plot premise: continual intercutting strategy between the two parallel story lines. John McDonagh in using this script design flags his intention to aim no higher than small screen ambition, perhaps anticipating that TV is the audience for his movie. In theory the big screen format allows writers and directors to opportunity to explore and probe the limits of intensity ambiguity intention by the characters who stay with and within the flow of the relations established by the scripting. But John McDonagh has chosen to go with the logic of the circuit board.

‘The Forgiven’ is set in Morocco. The setting of one section of the film takes place at a week-end long party in the Saharan palace of a wealthy Western couple. As the party goers cavort in front of the omnipresent all-seeing Moroccan servants the filming of this event shows the shameless behaviour of these wealthy Westerners. The script calls out the revellers core racism, their hypocrisy, their amorality, their insensitivity, their ability buy anyone or anything in a society subjugated to the service economy.  In fact in itself, as a documented record without any pay off, the party’s laboured theme seems a mite overworked, saying the same things over and over again. But with a ‘bit of a fling’ scripted between David’s wife and a randy financial advisor, it’s all grist to mill of the lens and makes for a colourful if repetitive spectacle.

The heart of ‘The Forgiven’s’ script is the ‘relationship’ or perhaps ‘interaction’ is the better word between David and Abdellah, the father of Driss whom David has run over and killed on his way to the party party.   Within this relational context the themes exploited in the party section might well have been the better and the more appropriately distilled, expanded, exposed by a script that chose to focus on probing intensities. But McDonagh has chosen to bypass intensity preferring to exploit and manipulate suspense as a mechanism. ‘The Forgiven’ is structured as a series of intersplicings between the party party and David’s journey with Abdella, taking Driss’ corpse back to the desert home. ‘The Forgiven’ with the predictability of a metronome cuts back and forth between David and Abdellah and the party party back at the Palace. The timing of the intercuts between the two settings, reduces the David/Abdellah relationship to spectacle, in as much as instead of the script holding and developing the tension points between the two men at the moments of heightened expectation, we suddenly cut back to “party party, the ritzy dance music the champagne and the excited sexy girls enjoying themselves. By the time McDonagh eventually cuts back to David and Abdullah, they’re onto another track. No tension develops, and we’re left with a couple of actors who often look like they’re waiting for the director to say: “Cut!” The players reduced to functioning as the nodes on a circuit board, enablers of the plot’s direction. The two male players are particularly dead, fed the appropriately tagged lines and most of the time looking bored with the mono-expressive diktat issued to them.

A couple of more points:

The credits are a mess. Normally you get opening credits shot against some simple background: the money, the stars, production, direction. Then the opening shot. McDonagh slaps all the credits major and minor over his opening sequence without the sensitivity of how to effectively blend captions with or over shot. The result is the the film begins as a horrible visual mess in which the audience can see neither the shot or the credits as interposed they interfere with each other, neither image not text being ‘readable’.

‘The Forgiven’ sets great store by the externalised filmic authenticity of the production. The Moroccan music, the Arabic captions, the aphorisms, all built into the ‘The Forgiven’ as if it wants to give out signage that it formally distances itself and excuses itself honourably from its own critique of Western arrogance. The problem is that instead of introducing within the film the voice of a dissenting character which would lend the critique a degree of subjective intensity, the Moroccan ‘devices’ are simply subsumed into the structure of ‘The Forgiven’ and become just another facet of spectacle.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

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Paris Texas   Wim Wenders; script Sam Shepard (1984, USA) Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski

viewed Tyneside Cinema 8th Aug 2022; ticket £4.95

voice recognition technology

In structure Wenders’ ‘Paris Texas’ has much in common with Wenders’ ‘Alice in the Cities’. Both films develop as road movies featuring a child accompanied by an adult engaged in a quest. The quests in both movies have an absurd element at the heart of their structure, involving the tracking down a place or a person on the basis of a minimal amount of information, so that the basis of the pursuit is grounded in something of a joke. The difference between these two quest themed movies is that ‘Alice’ transmits a lightness of touch, a refreshing naivety of relations that does not take itself over seriously. ‘Paris Texas’ in contrast is self consciously primed as a heavy duty emotional rap trying through its self conscious Sam Shepherd script to say something about America in words, whereas for the most part Wender’s cinematic imagery is sufficient unto itself to relay its message about contemporary America.

Wenders opens ‘Paris Texas’ with a shot of Monument Valley. In this sequence we see the lone figure of protagonist Travis meandering at high noon through this symbolic landscape, location of so many Hollywood westerns. Monument Valley as a hostile natural environment is the default home of John Wayne, the all American rugged individualistic cowboy and his cinematic poet, John Ford. In contrast Travis is not at home in Monument Valley. He’s sick fatigued barely able to walk, finally he collapses and has to be rescued. He can’t make it; he’s unable to survive in this primal filmic environment.

Opening in big sky country, Wenders ends ‘Paris Texas’ with Travis’ night time flight from the claustrophobic interior of a maybe-whore house to the equally claustrophobic interior of his truck which he drives off down the containing parallel marked lanes of the highway. Both the cowboy and Travis are characterised by their movement and in their isolation: both are men set apart. The cowboy moves through an exteriority: horse, desert, mountain, river pool. Travis, the contemporary equivalent moves through an interiority: house, truck, motel, diner, highway. The American psyche has moved ‘home’, moved away from the natural environment into the artificial world of man made structures.

Initially like the Cowboy, Travis is a man of few words – an isolate – spending so much time alone talk has become unhabituated inhibited unnecessary. But Travis as Shepard’s script develops becomes more talkative and his increasing willingness to speak reflects Shepard’s background as playwright, his need to generate words for his lead player. But Shepard’s writing doesn’t work well as film dialogue. It tends to lean towards the theatrical or as in the penultimate scene, drives straight at the front row of the stalls. As ‘meaning’ rather than ‘situation’ drives utterance, line delivery becomes increasingly arch and the theatrically tempered dialogue induces the players into wooden and/or overemphasised phrasing.  

Starting from Monument Valley Wenders’ movie reaches its destination in the scenes set client meet-room of the maybe-whore house where Travis’s ex, Jane works. Travis is travelling with his seven year old son Hunter (named for another filmic reference to the pioneer days of the American West) whom after some four years of separation, he wants to re-unite with Jane his mother.

There are two scenes between Travis and Jane in the client-meet room of the maybe- whore house (it seems odd that no money seems to change hands in the maybe-whore house. After all ‘talk’ is expensive whether with a prostitute or a therapist (some whores claim to be therapists). ‘Time’ doesn’t seem to be ‘Money’ in this establishment which in ‘people’ business is unusual) The key feature of the room is that it is divided into two sections partitioned by a one way mirror set up. Both parties can speak to and hear each other; but only Travis can see Jane; she can’t see him. Wenders has designed this set so that it functions as a spacial analogy to characteristic psychological features of ‘cowboy’ or ‘male’ dominant marital relationships. The couple are isolated, each in their own ‘space’; they speak and hear across psychic dividers, they can’t touch and they can’t actually see each other as equals.

The Wenders/Shepard’s client meet-room device works effectively on Travis’ first visit to see Jane. The set works to concentrate certain features of Travis’ attempts to communicate to establish a relationship to Jane: hesitancy, inarticulacy, inadequacy, deference, confusion. All traits intrinsic to the male cowboy type.

If the film had ended at this point, it would have rendered an impressionist take on contemporary America, expressing qualities of diffuseness of intent, indeterminacy and dispersal. A feeling that cowboy Travis had attempted something beyond the capacity of his personal resources. An honourable failure. A failure in the traditional mode of the cowboy.

Instead Wenders /Shepard opt for a finale that’s a slam dunk piece de theatre. The client-meet room is turned into a Catholic truth-booth. The playwright gives his protagonist words of self explanation, self justification, as ‘Paris Texas’ transposes in form from film into declamatory theatre. Shepard kits out Travis with a long durational monologue, archly disguised as a story about someone else. This displaced confession amounts to an account of how his uncontrollable jealousy had pushed him to abuse the object of his ‘love’, tie her up not let her out of the house. Shepard’s writing at this point articulates an indulgent sentimentality. With Jane’s response and her sudden ‘realisation’ that she’s been talking to her ex-husband all this time, ‘Paris Texas’ has been shaped up so that Wenders can sign off with a banality, a genre conforming reconciliation and plot resolution. Hunter is re-united with his mum through the good offices of cowboy Travis, who drives off into the traditional distance.

Wenders choses an easylistening ending in a world where there are no longer easy endings. Today’s American cowboys have to live not with certainty and permanence but with indeterminacy and ambiguity. Wenders’ forensic shots of contemporary America, are a context within which we can see directly the shape America has taken: the shots of LA from the home of Travis’ brother contrast with the rugged masses of Monument Valley, the silence of the cowboy contrasts with the screaming of the man on the bridge over the freeway. The nature of the land leaves its mark on the people. Perhaps Wenders wanted to make a movie that was act of homage to Wayne and Ford, but mere imitation of their genre of film making is surely a lesser achievement than following the impulses instincts that define the current times.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

after thought….On viewing ‘Paris Texas’ it seemed strange that the central scene in Paris Texas, Travis’ storified confession to Jane, had to viewed with a particular suspension of belief!

I mean Jane had lived with Travis. according to the script for at least some 6 years – perhaps more. During that time he’d loved, fucked and abused her. His voice would have seared itself into her memory as he accused her, berated her humiliated her. You don’t forget the voice of your long time tormentor. Whilst people’s faces may change (and of course in the one way mirror set up Jane cannot see Travis) people’s voices remain very constant. I found I had to ‘suspend belief’ that in the course of two sessions with him at the maybe-whore house, Jane does not recognise his voice. Of course movies always demand suspension of belief from the audience, usually in relation to plot development – that’s part of the fun. But filmmakers are pushing their luck when it comes to suspending belief in relation to features that lie at the heart of emotional relationships.

 

Eric Ravilious – Drawn to War   Margy Kinmonth (UK; 2022; Doc) with Alan Bennett, Grayson Perry, Ai Weiwei

viewed Tyneside Cinema 7 Aug 2022; ticket: £4.95

graphic imagery

Kinmouth’s doc biopic chronicling the life of Eric Ravilious is the usual predictably structured and formulaic type of offering that we have come to expect from such exercises. Kinmonth’s film features a series of talking heads mostly pandering to the film’s line that Ravilious was a great and significant artist. To reinforce the message the film’s music track, like the music in adverts, is designed to engender and exploit an emotional connection to the Ravilious paintings as they are presented throughout the film.

But Kinmonth does pack in a couple of notable sequences, to the extent that these sections to some extent comprise a counter blast to the main thrust of the movie’s panegyric.

Kinwonth’s purpose is explicitly stated at the end of the film: to make the claim for Ravilious to be considered amongst the ranks of major British artists, to be regarded as one of ‘our’ great native water-colourists. The captions at the end of movie over images of his work are unequivocal in their demand for his work to be appraised in the light of this rhetoric. But the strength of her film is that enough material is presented for the viewer to be able to arrive at their own estimation of Ravilious.

What the film actually documents is that Ravilious was not so much a fine artist as a fine graphic artist. The film fails to establish that there was a compelling vision insight or idea driving his painting. What seems to have informed his work was his characteristic talent for abstracting from life, forms of patterned innocence. Perhaps in response to this obvious key feature in Ravilious’ work Grayson Perry points out that Ravilious’ landscapes sometimes feature barbed wire in the foreground, claiming for them the status of a realist element. My feeling looking at these ‘barbed wire’ paintings is that Ravillious’ barbed wire worked for him more as a framing device, a little like fairy lights round a tree in a suburban garden. It doesn’t look like real barbed wire – it’s tidied up to serve Ravilious’ purpose.

This quality of innocent abstraction that characterises his pre-war landscapes, without a pause for thought, is simply carried over into his military work when employed by the war office as an official war artist. Working in a completely different psychic reality, Ravilious doesn’t to change gear, doesn’t alter the way he sees the world. His war planes his ships his military subject matter are subject to the same interpretation, rendered with the quality of innocence. There is that quality in the way they are painted by Ravilious that makes them suitable as wallpaper patterns for the bedroom of a young middle class boy in the 1950’s. This is picked up by Ai Weiwei who when shown a Ravilious water colour of a Royal Navy destroyer, looks and comments somewhat diffidently about the innocence embedded in the image.

The thought arises that it was for this very reason that Ravilious was chosen for his post as war artist. Looking at the works of Nash, Sargeant and Nevinson war artists of the First World War, the sense of the terror of war punches through many of their works, but more than this they depict war as another state of mind another fatal and disturbing world. Ravilious’ works do the opposite. They ingratiate the images of war into an everyday normality. As if he were saying: there is nothing alien in war, its just a continuation of everyday life, these machines of death are simply new images in a familiar landscape. Ravilious reassures and comforts the viewer. His painting fosters a sort of cult of innocence, giving the War Office the images they could use to encourage a wilful ignorance in the population.

The other area that Kinmonth’s film probes is Eric Ravilious’ wife, Tirza. What is clear from the little Kinmonth shows is that Tirza was also a fine graphic artist, and that Ravilious certainly seems to have learnt and taken something from her skills and vision. That Tirza lead a difficult life of pain and fortitude is also evident. To some extent she seems pivotal to Ravilious’ life, but Kinmonth picks this up looks at it and skirts round rather than examines Terza’s contribution.

Ravilious’ paintings and life are certainly worth the probing nature of a forensic documentary. But Kinmonth whilst advancing up to the bounds of the socially forensic draws back and plays safe, sticks to the script and makes claims for his work that are simply not sustained by her own film.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Hit the Road   Panah Panahi              (Iran; 2021;) Pantea Panahiha; Hasan Majuni; Reyan Sarlak; Amin Simiar

 

to escape perchance to dream?

Panah Panahi’s ‘Hit the Road’ stayed with me, even staining my dreams which the night after seeing the film all revolved about anxious travel to strange places. Like some other films, ‘Hit the Road’ after seeing it, needs a process of sifting through consciousness to arrive at some resolution about what it is.

Iranian filmmakers, perhaps reflecting something about the close proximity in which many Iranians live, have a particular relationship with the automobile as a setting for films. Certainly Kairostami and Jafar Panahi both make regular use of car interiors as locations, usually set against the outside chaos of street and road which butts up against the driver’s sensory motor system. The car is a pod where the individual is alone, isolated from the environment enveloping him and his vehicle; a space for unspoken unarticulated self engrossment where the individual is answerable to no one. A sort of in between place.

With ‘Hit the Road’ Panah Panahi, like some of his father’s movies, also uses the interiority of the car as a central feature of his scenario. After an opening shot that comprises a white screen (blank canvas), the film cuts to a long pan of the interior of a stationary car. The camera in turn picks up three of the occupants, then pulls focus to the exterior of the car to find the final member of the party, the driver, who has got out to have a cigarette. As we first ‘see’ these people, they come across as ‘presences’. And even as the film develops they retain this quality of being particular psychic entities in a situation rather than being ‘characters’. The reason for this is that Panahi’s scenario is economic in both direct action and the transmission of information. We pick up the characters in the car on his terms. There is development neither in clarifying action nor in back story that might enable the audience to understand them as agents or in clear motivational terms. Ture we see what is happening – an escape – but the parameters are ill defined. Rather it is a sort of emotional or resonancecharge that suffuses the scenario.

The opening long durational shot pans first to the older man, the pater familias. The first thing we see of him is his leg which is broken and encased in a huge heavy plaster. But it’s the man who is broken He says he fell. The weight of the man’s situation pulls him down, there is no spirit left within him: he is defeated, he is dead. He comes across as representing a generation of men whose very being has been crushed by the oppression of the regime’s autocracy that is both characterised and justified by the rigid implementation of Islam in Iran. After lingering on the child (to whom I will return) the camera pans onto the woman. She’s mother; she is the one who copes. The spirit of survival that keeps her alive animates her. Unable to offer any direct resistance to the forces that have forced her to undertake this journey to smuggle her son out of the country, she is buoyed by process of coping and working out how to get by, day by day. Life is working with whatever materials are hand to survive, including her own acts of resistance, a manic karaoke as she mimes out risqué and possibly forbidden songs on the car radio.

The husband and wife experience life in different psychic domains, but in the private space of the automobile their relationship to one another is very much as equals, and each inhabits something of the troubled state of mind of the other. But nothing can be said.

The third adult is the older son who is escaping, getting out of Iran with the assistance of his parents, using people smugglers to cross over one of Iran’s borders. Emptiness defines his presence. As if in preparation for his leaving he has emptied himself of all emotional ties, of all memory, of all attachments, emptied of everything that might cause pain emptied of everything that might draw him back. Empty so that he can make a new start. But this emptiness of being is disturbing, he emanates a presence that is a hollowness which makes him strange insubstantial and alienated. A presence trapped in a line of escape, but perhaps a man doomed to never actually escaping.

In Hollywood movies, an escape form the clutches of a dictatorial regime would be a major accomplisment, cause for celebration and fist pumping. But this is an Iranian movie, and escape is an admittance of deteat and an acceptance of loss.   Of all the artists or creative people who have left Iran in order to get away from the oppression of the regime, film makers seem to have had most problems in orienting and encapsulating their concerns into the production of their films. Perhaps because films are so seemlessly welded into a social matrix, making films in exile poses difficulties.

It is making a films in a voided context. It’s true that Kairostami did continue to direct films that carried the weight of his concerns, but other filmmakers such as Asgar Fahadi, removed from the implicit richness of Iranian culture, have struggled. Asgar Fahadi’s one movie made outside Iran simply lacked the intensity and intention of the films he made on returning to Iran.

The final passenger of the four is the young son of the couple. Possibly 8-9 years old – maybe younger – he exists in opposition to every other presence in the car. Whereas to a greater or lesser extent the other three family members live out shadow existences, the young boy is larger than life: in yer face. He is loud and demands attention. And his presence is difficult to handle for the others in the car, because the dead find the living unbearable; the living pain the dead, reminding them what it is to possess the energy of life. And the energy emitted from the boy’s spirit and from his voice which is free to speak, has such a pitch of intensity that it bleeds out of the frame boundary of Panache’s film into the cinema dinning the audience with the the child’s claim on reality and life.

In as far as there is an allegorical slant to Panahi’s film, the child transmits a sort of hope. That the energy of this becoming generation may create pressure for change in the ossified socio-religious matrix. If the present generation young and old are shadow people, the boy is figured as a future ‘wild card’. Who knows?  Mediated through his Iranian identity, his being is part engendered by being linked into of an Americanised world culture. Nothing is certain – but there is hope, and Pahahi signs off with the boy mimicking his mother’s resistance as he sings an old Iranian pop song.

Hope seems to be in low supply for Panah’s father Jafar. After continuing to make extraordinary low budget films whilst under house arrest in Tehran, Jafar was suddenly re-arrested a couple of weeks back, and has just been sentanced to a six year prison sentence. At this point there is no escape for Jafar; he can’t hit the road, even if he wanted to.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Beguiled               Don Siegel (1971; USA) Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 24 July 2022; ticket: £7

Double sacrifice

‘The Beguiled’s American Civil War setting is extraneous to Siegel’s plot which is concentrated about the psycho-sexual play out of its Gothic theme: the sacrificial death of the male protagonist – Eastwood.

As when the bull enters the ring doomed to die on the sword of the matador, so is Eastwood’s fate sealed when he enters through the ornamental gates of the seminary for young ladies. When he leaves he will be wrapped in his shroud. The Beguiled is a play out of the ‘Frazer styled’ mythology of the King for a Day: the man chosen to reign for a limited time, whose fate is to suffer sacrificial death, as offering to the Gods who preside over fertility.

‘The Beguiled’ hangs on similar theme to the British movie ‘The Wickerman’. The Wickerman, like a baited lobster pot, is an exteriorised design in which both script and players indulge winks nudges and a contagious hilarity as they play out the mechanical externalities of the death trap situation. ‘The Beguiled’ is an exercise in contained opposition: quarry and prey. In mood and setting it owes much to Edgar Allan Poe as its expressive precursor in describing the unleashing of pent up internalised forces. With its setting amidst the barren empty wombs of a lady’s boarding school (given these are Southern ladies, destined to have their culture destroyed by the victory of the North, they are in a sense a decayed and decadent people), amidst the confused psychic intensities of incest, sexual repression and physical desire, the Man arrives.

The Man is injured and needs to be healed. But as part of his healing he quickly develops intent: to exploit his sexual allure to gain personal power and control the women. His will be done. Eastwood fails to understand that he is moving into a domain where ‘will’, female ‘will’, is the active agent governing of the school’s relationships. All the community from head mistress to acolyte are familiar with ‘…the mysteries of the will’, evidenced from the earliest point of the scenario inside the school where it is revealed that the Headmistress’ brother, to whom she was ‘very close’ has just ‘disappeared.’ Nothing is understood by the Man, who sets about his campaign of conquest by divide and rule.

When the Man’s intentions are uncovered (and but nothing can be kept secret in this school) unknowing he takes on the will of the headmistress. Her will be done. From that moment the sacrificial knife is picked up and clasped in her hand, the Man’s fate is sealed. Siegel’s scenario from this point follows the moral logic of the events that have been set in motion. There is no pull back, Eastwood is now ‘intended victim’. According to Wikipedia there was disagreement about the outcome of ‘The Beguiled’s script with the first draft version having the Man and the Teacher walking off together into the sunset happily ever after. Both Eastwood and Siegel together decided to dump the ‘happy ending’ and kept to the original story line (from the novel by Thomas Cullinan). Apparently they thought keeping to the original story would be: ‘a stronger anti-war statement.’ !

As said my feeling is that ‘The Beguiled’ has little to do with war, and everything to do with ‘the will’ and the heightened need in some situations of the ‘will’ to human sacrifice. If Siegel and Eastwood really believed their movie was about war then it is interesting to note how movies made at cross purposes can still register underlying significance in spite of themselves. This is probably a tribute to the strength of the original text. Siegel is also quoted as saying that the movie was based around: “…the basic desire of women to castrate men.” A statement that says more about Don Siegel than about ‘women’.   But it is a tribute to Siegel and Eastwood that they stayed true to the logic of death, even if they didn’t quite get it.

Universal, the studio backers of ‘The Beguiled’ were appalled by Siegel’s decision to kill off Eastwood. Eastwood was one of Universal’s ‘A’ listers, Alpha male box office. Eastwood was a ‘Winner’ an ‘all American Winner’. That was his image and as far as Universal were concerned they were not prepared to risk damage to his image which they regarded as their property and was the source of the income from his films. Consequently they were happy to sacrifice ‘The Beguiled’ and write if off as a loss. They refused to promote it or to encourage distributors or exhibitors to screen the film. The film died at the box office and cleared the way for Eastwood’s next movie: ‘Dirty Harry’ in which he plays the consummate rogue cop.

‘The Beguiled’ is a some ways rather clumsily made. Perhaps the two main drivers of the movie, Eastwood and Siegel were a little uncertain about the material; in some ways a little nervy about what they were doing in condemning Eastwood, that paragon of masculinity, to sacrificial death. But of course therein lies the charm and the attraction of the movie. However occasionally gauche Eastwood’s acting may be, however awkward the script may on occasion be, the film works at the level of witnessing. The occasion of Eastwood’s sacrificial pilgrimage is sufficient to bewitch the viewer.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Alien – A cinematic masterpiece

‘The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths….   had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.’

In 1974 Tobe Hooper would produce an exploitative nightmare, both on set and on screen that would change horror and cinema forever.  A film that was both frugal and visceral in its violence.  The audience was presented with the madness of its set design of the macabre and sound design that drove home the insanity that is to be the next 80 minutes of their lives.  ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (Every word of the title a story in itself.) is part of the permanent collection of New York City’s museum of modern art.

‘In space no one can hear you scream’.

In 1979, 2 years after ‘Star Wars’, another film that changed cinema forever and how the viewing public went to cinema, Ridley Scott gave us Alien.  Ridley Scott says from the beginning that ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ was a big influence on ‘Alien’ (As was ‘Star Wars’.).  ‘Alien’ is very visceral in its moments of violence which are few and far between and often only seen in part leaving the viewer to imagine there was more than they actually saw.  The set design is ground-breaking like ‘Texas..’ and part of the set design was skeleton like in form,  also like ‘Texas…’. 

I often hear ‘Alien’ described as ‘A haunted house story set in space’, which it is.  However to view ‘Alien’ as purely that, is to view ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as a romance set in Verona. 

‘Alien’ is a film about you and me…  Working stiffs.  Well you…  YOU, reading this may be a working stiff.  I’m a bum who views this review as one of my eight pieces of work a month to claim a healthy lifestyle.  They are miners and truckers transporting ‘20,000,000 tons of mineral ore’ through space.  Their job is to monitor and maintain the equipment to make profit for the company they work for.  The 6 human crew members are a company team with middle management and physical workers.  Discussing company procedure, arguing over pay and maintaining their class in the company structure.  They are not trained or prepared in any way to deal with the violence they are about to experience.   To the company they are just another resource, a human resource as part of attaining company profit.  This is why the company uses a contractor in the form of Ash, an android who may have malfunctioned to see if the Nostromo can pursue other avenues of profit.  Workers, the human resources often experience changes in what is expected of us and the crew of the Nostromo may have to add being food in their job description.  There is one thing I will never understand though, why does the Nostromo have a self-destruct…?   Space pirates?

‘Alien’ is a work of art.  When I say work of art I mean it transcends its genre.  It is not just a movie, not just science fiction and not just horror.  It could comfortably fit in whole, or in part in an art gallery.  The set design from the interior of the Nostromo, Mother, A CPU made of flashing lights, the cryo sleep chamber, that opens like the petals of a flower, a large cavernous room with water falling rain and the clink of chains hanging from an unseen ceiling.  To a gigantic alien vessel that looks like the carapace of a living creature, with a dead giant looking out through a giant machine and large underground space covered with egg shapes below a surface of lasers and smoke.  There are visual builds here that I would say to this day are untouched in their beauty and lavishness.  This fantastic workmanship is caressed with the camera work and lighting it so deserved. 

I would like to end this by comparing 2 elements of ‘Alien’ with its much loved sequel ‘Aliens’.  A film which is truly entertaining and has a climax that has rarely been matched but it does no transcend its genre.  Firstly the opening sequence of ‘Alien’, leading to the awakening of the crew from cryo sleep.  This takes over six and a half minutes and the viewer delights in every second.  This includes the title sequence where the title of the film appears in parts with space moving in the background.  The appearance of the Nostromo very, ‘Star Wars’ opening shot with the Star Destroyer.  Then we go to inside The Nostromo, with its gorgeous set design, where often the lighting is built in to the set itself.  There a little perpetual motion toy, paper blowing from a slight draft announcing things are coming to life.  A computer whirs to life and half the time we see what’s on the screen reflected in the visor of a space helmet.  We then move into the cryo sleep chamber where everything has soft edges and the crew are in pods in a circle which as I mentioned, open like the petals of a flower.  The crew awaken slowly and time is shown to pass through intermittent transitions of shots fading over each other.  Six and a half minutes during most of which the camera is in motion.

In Aliens the introduction of the Sulako and the waking of the crew from cryo sleep takes just over 2 minutes.  It has small shout outs to the original scene and its fine but it does not transcend its genre.  

The other element I would like to point to is how doors look.  In Alien they are these multi sided, more than 4 affairs that move in different directions.  When they are moving through the ducts of the ship there are these door like things that are circular leaf shutters like the kind you find on a camera lens or a high end cameras.  The scraping sound when they open and close is orgasmic.

In Aliens the doors are not memorable. 

And that’s it really.  My top 10 films is fluid based on how I feel in that moment but Alien is the one consistent film that remains in that list whatever.

Whakapai

Alien               Ridley Scott (USA; 1979;) Sigourney Weaver

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 14 July 2022; ticket £7

It’s all in the bun

Derived from Philip K Dick’s novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’, Ridley Scott produced a scenario for Blade Runner’ that scratched a little through his cinematically designed surface to suggest troubling ethical philosophical issues with otherness, in particular the idea of the replicated copies of ourselves.

But although contriving a sense of probing the idea of what it might be to be considered human, ‘Blade Runner’ is remembered and etched into the public consciousness for the externalities of its design. ‘Blade Runner’ is characterised by its lighting effects – squeezed piss yellows and lurid hues, and a design carapace that moves the characters between dystopian exteriors and high post modern gothic interiors, whilst stopping at various stripped down functional settings in between time.

With the production of ‘Alien’, which precedes ‘Blade Runner’ in his filmography, Scott successfully piloted his ad-man approach to filmmaking. Unlike ‘Blade Runner’ ‘Alien’ comprises a scenario in which most of the value of the film is in the sets and the creation and depiction of the ‘monster’. The fact that it is set in ‘outer space’ on the good ship Nostromo feels extraneous to the action which is simply a monster-from-another -world horror story in the tradition of H P Lovecraft. The horror trope dynamics of Scott’s script would work just as well in the sort of settings favoured by Lovecraft: large old house with extensive subterranean vaults and caves.

The plot consists of horror staples/stereotypes: an impregnating monster that like the pupa of some insects, implants itself in a convenient host out of whom the emerging/birthing creature has to eat its way. The creature also seems liable to change shape at one point exploding out of the belly of one of the crew looking like a psychotic vicious penis with teeth. But equally central to ‘Alien’ are the sets which on this spaceship flip between ‘2001’ type squeaky clean tech backgrounds and a proto Victorian industrial gothic look. There are moments when it looked like the good old ship ‘Nostromo’ was steam driven.   This wrought density of its patina allows for the familiar horror movie hide and seek games to take place against a menacing tangled background from which at any moment the wee beastie may erupt.

And that is about it. The characters are all mechanical contrivances selected to represent types including a ‘robot’ who fools everyone as to his android provenance. As most of the rest of the characters are robotically inclined it’s unsurprising none of the crew notices. The robot crew member seems to exist for the audience’s satisfaction of seeing it well duffed and truly mangled as part of the rather prolonged finale. The dialogue as befits the nature of the crew is either ‘arch’ or ‘action banal’ and the same may be said of the camera work, with its shot reverse shot and bolted in tracks and zooms exploiting the possibilities of ambiguity in lines of sight.

‘Alien’ has many of the attributes of junkfood. And like the ‘Big Mac’: it works. The industrially assembled hamburger has conquered the world with its mixture of sugar and salt glooped over a salad and pickle dressed paté packed into a sesame bun. It has fatal attraction. ‘Big Mac’ is of course a manipulation of our sugar and salt receptors which have developed over the course of natural selection to reward foods high in these contents, which for most of our history have often been scarce and hard to access. Food tech changed all this. Sugars and salt are now cheap and easy to make manufacture and sell: which is what MacDonalds do. The Big Mac crude mix of sugary and salt tastes and its yielding texture temporarily overwhelms the mouth’s sensory neural system, guiding the consumer into reward cycle loop as they return to seek the familiarised pleasure of ‘Big Mac’ gastro fix and taste supersaturation.

‘Alien’ is assembled using a similar recipe to the ‘Big Mac’, aiming to strategically overwhelm the emotional systems of the viewer. Scott, with his background in advertising, understands the basics of manipulation and association. His manipulative skill was ably demonstrated in his ‘Hovis’ advert, in which exploiting nostalgia, and Dvorak ‘New World Sympathy (re-arranged for brass), his ad sold tacky mass produced brown bread, by associating it the ‘real McCoy’ product made in a village bakery. ‘Alien’ instead of using taste sensors exploits our fear sensors. Scott activates and rewards them with contrived stimulae, manipulating them with a series of cinematic tricks: explosive sound and visual FX, series of intercuts between big close ups and indeterminate backgrounds, intercrew tension and monsters. The shock lies in the rapid activation of the audience’s fear sensors the which give out the usual signals of: wait and see/flee, but physically being seated simultaneously anchors and countervails the emotional fear charge.

Like the Big Mac, Alien is well assembled, with Scott’s adman flair for delivering and selling product. It’s success perhaps owes something to the fusion in Scott’s script of mythological beasts and our culture’s nascent insecurity about the gynaecological aspirations of micro-biologists to synthesize life. But for all the popularity of Alien, it’s surprising to see it deemed: “culturally historically aesthetically significant….” by the Library of Congress and ranked by Empire as 33^rd greatest film of all time. Selling product is obviously more important than making films to these people, though of course Scott did set in motion the profitable ‘Alien’ franchise of some 7 films.  So there is something to be said for it industry wise, though as cinema ‘Alien’ barely holds a candle to Don Siegel’s ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. And incidentally Siegel’s film was produced in 1956, the same year Ray Croc purchased the US franchise rights for McDonald’s and all its products from the McDonald brothers, and changed the world for ever.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

  

 

 

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn   Radu Jude (2021; Rom) Katia Pascariu

viewed: Star and Shadow, Losing the Plot Weekend, 18 June 2022; ticket £7

 

A fine state of affairs

Jude’s Bad Luck Banging (BLB) is a continuation of the series of remarkable films that have characterised Romanian New Cinema since the fall of Ceausescu. Significant directors contributing to this output include Porumboiu, Puiu, Mungui – as well as Jude.

I don’t consider myself especially knowledgeable about this wave of film makers, but what I have seen is that the films of these directors are characterised by their fluent appropriation of the possibilities of film language coupled to an intellectual rigour directing them towards social and political critique.

The question arises as to why Romania alone of the former Soviet satellite states should have produced such a creatively active film community. I think that film above all other media is in the business of the exploitation of images as signs. With the fall of Communism, Romanians experienced, as did other East European Societies, a sudden substitution of one set of imagery for another. Unlike the other Soviet satellite nations, Romania had played out this kind of switch before (documented by Jude in BLB) when in 1944 the country stopped supporting the losing coalition of the Nazi Axis changing sides to join the successful Allied Powers. Such an experience perhaps resulted in Romanians being adroit at reading the signs, seeing which way the winds blow. Perhaps it also accustomed them to radical signage and imagery changes causing a certain residual cynicism about the way in which they were being subjected to different regimes of manipulation.

The experience of a sudden substitution of the hammer and sickle by Coca Cola et al, the sudden destabilising collapse of Romanian notional ‘collective’ ownership and its replacement by actual ‘Corporate’ ownership, did not fool the people who could see that all that was happening was a group of people swopping round the images on the billboards. The captain of the ship of state had been assassinated. But the ship’s officers, kept their positions, re-rigged the vessel under the flag of private enterprise, gave a motivational pep talk to the crew, and held fast to the previous course of self serving aggrandisement. Ordinary Romanians found they had ended up with a shoddy deal: exchanging the admittedly grim certainties of a failed dictatorship for the tat of capitalism that was strong on promises of a better tomorrow but too corrupt to deliver. Many Romanians, amongst them film makers, read the signs of corruption,  which as people who were used to being misdirected by omissions lies and deceit, they were well equipped to read.

Jude’s BLB is scripted from a particular psychic space, a space of joyously seeing through the bullshit lies and hypocrisy in which their society is embedded. It is worth noting that the various ‘waves’ characterising epochs of national film making have all developed out of critical social insights and the determination of film makers to probe deeply into the psychic spaces thereby revealed. Italian Neo-Realism coming out of the need to depict the actual and the real after the devastation of war (actual both in the settings and also in emotional rendering); British new wave deriving from the perception of the malaise at the heart of British class society; French New Wave exploiting the philosophical possibilities Cinema itself as a mode of communication; German Cinema exploring psycho-political map of post war Europe. And now Romanian film makers moving through the hollowed out social space occupied by people suddenly dumped into the Capitalist dream.

Jude’s BLB divides into 5 parts, if you regard the trial and the verdict as separately conceived sections. It opens with the provocation: the full on ballsy home porno movie, uninhibited good fun sex in the flesh. Then follows Emi’s walk across Bucharest to reach the school where she teaches to explain to the parents and teachers how the private sex flick made by her and her husband ended up on a pulically accessible porn site. Jude orchestrates Emi’s walk through Bucharest as indictment. Emi, respectably dressed, walks through the streets of her city which as a setting bears witness to a sodomised culture. Her walk takes in a matrix of psychological toxicity: every where she turns she finds anger, people primed on emotional hair triggers waiting to explode at the slightest pretext. The city leeches cheap and clammy shop signs, advertising hoardings for sexless commercial sex that ubiquitously sell product. And, so it is asked: it is in the midst of all this she is being held to account?

Katia Pascariu’s walk through Bucharest reminded me of Jeanne Moreau’s midnight walk through Paris in Malle’s ‘Lift to the Scaffold’. Different walks but both characterised by intent and both expressing an oblique powerful emotional statement encapsulating something about the experience of life in the city.

Jude’s third section is a montage, comprising clips of film and information, directed as indictments of hypocrisy double standards and double binds that permeate our understanding of history, but also giving a wry commentary on the Corona pandemic and the stresses (also experienced by Emi on her walk) caused by the health regulations. Some clips work better than others, but they are in toto an effective call to the audience to engage with the play out of the issues taken up by Jude, in the final sections of the film: the ‘trial’ of Emi by the parent/ teacher association, followed by the verdict.

Jude’s trial called to mind other notable ‘film’ trial sequences: ‘M’’s trial in Lang’s M, and Joan’s trial in Dreyer’s ‘Passion of Joan of Arc’. In both these films, like Emi. the accused plead their own cause face to face with their accusers. In both these films the accused like Emi, were on trial in effect for qualities which were intrinsic to them, on trial for their moral character. The difference in BLB is that Emi’s trial is alternatively poignant and very funny, Jude’s script seamlessly moving through the gear changes relating to sex and hypocrisy.

Jude ends BLB on a verdict that finally leaves it up to the Gods of Cinema to intervene. In slapstick mode Emi turns into a Marvel super hero and with a giant phallus bludgeons everyone on set to death.

Jude shares with Goddard an elemental characteristic of film making: the pure joy in it. Neither uses the language of manipulation; they marshal the resources of cinema to create world that folds the audiecne into the possibilities of Cinema.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

Vagabond (Ni Toit ni Loi)   Agnes Varda (1985; Fr) Sandrine Bonnaire

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 12 June 22; ticket: £7

La France profonde

As at the end so it is at the beginning. Agnes Varda’s script for Vagabond starts with the death of ‘Mona’ her vagrant drifter, frozen to death in a ditch. The movie then re-calls fragments of her life and the episodes immediately leading up to her demise, the demise of a woman. As the picture of her life is assembled, the various characters she’s met comment straight to camera both on Mona and their impression of her, creating an effect that has both a reflective and judgemental quality.

Thinking about Varda’s choice of nomenclature for ‘Mona’. The name was surely chosen to stand in ironic counterpoise to the most famous ‘Mona’ of all, Mona Lisa.

This portrait is Da Vinci’s depiction of an eternalised perfect woman, who in her smile concentrates an essence of femininity. Varda’s ‘Mona’ is otherwise: her behaviour is in complete contrast to any traditional ideas of female behaviour and demeanour, she is smelly and dirty, her facial expression often characterised by an aggressive or dismissive scowl. She does not court either the approval or the adoration of the male.

As in ‘Happiness’, in which the sound track is the ‘critical’ part of the scenario, used to deconstruct/re-conceptualise Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in C, so in Vagabond, the name ‘Mona’ is used to oppose the symbolic female nature of Leonardo’s portrait. Varda having fun employing film to combat both film industry use of art as a sanitising device and Bourgeois appropriation of cultural interpretations and related imputed significations. The ‘Monas’ of the type portrayed in Vagabond, women hardened bull whipped and fucked by life are equally due representation as the standard idealisations.  

One question is why did Varda chose to end Mona’s career in death? Vagabond might have well have ended on a final shot of Mona hitching a ride, getting into a car and disappearing down the road becoming a dot on the horizon. But the idea of a finality is built into the script. Varda uses Mona’s boots as signage, as, through the final third of the film, they gradually fall apart exposing her to physical jeopardy. Varda in her scenario determined that her protagonist had to die. Her death as with her life indicating an existential freedom to live as herself on her own terms, as the new ‘Mona’.   For the new ‘Mona’ to take on responsibility for a transitory life means accepting violence rape death. The pact is total. It is a core trait of Varda’s thinking that if women want to move to free themselves from male dominance, it’s not easy work. It has to be work that takes on both life and death, work that Varda also probes in ‘Cléo 5-7’.

Mona is a construct of pure immanence. One of Varda’s themes seems to be that for people to develop, or rather to rebuild a ruptured or false self, they don’t need a new image, they need to live immanently, to occupy their lives in the present. Existence precedes essence. Homeless people, wanderers have to do this. They live without a home, without the law (ni toit ni loi) reliant on and needing to develop their own inner knowledge and resources rather than to be an object or the creation of social forces. Vagabond is a film of such an existence; a film of the movement towards essence, as Mona rejects the life of a female functionary in an office, and strips out all the outer vestiges of her previous way of life to take to the road.

Vagabond is sits in the saddle of rural France. Varda’s scenario is designed as a series of episodic sometimes linked vignettes comprising the different types of relationships that Mona enters into as she moves through and about the countryside. We see how people interact and then comment upon Mona. Everyone sees that Mona, as a lone woman vagabond is usual, and that challenges them in one way or another: they expose their different attitudes towards her: some judgemental, some sympathetic, some manipulative, some evincing a simple acceptance of her as a being. And the relationships she has with men she enters into as an equal: on her own terms in her own time for her own ends.

But throughout the myriad of incidents and events, some trivial some engaging, what stands out is the manner in which Varda has filmed the rural world’s response to and engagement with Mona. Varda worked with a mix of non-actors and professionals but there is more going on in the making of the film than Varda just working and filming with ordinary people. There is something in the manner of her ability as director to work with situations and people as they are, enfolding them into a scenario without compromising the key elements of their natural responses. The result is that ‘Vagabond’ has an authentic resonance unusual in film, as Varda opens up wide the lens of her camera to allow us a glimpse of this hidden rural environment: its industrialisation of production, its newcomers, its diseased underbelly, its people materially changing but yet still often locked into inheritance of their forbears and the new youth culture spawned about the small country towns and revolving about drug use.

In this ability to bring her films to ‘life’ she shares some of the same talents as Kairostami who often worked in a similar way and who must have enjoyed ‘Vagabond’. Kairostami’s work, like Varda’s also often employed in his dramas an admixed documentary style.

There are certainly those who find ‘Vagabond’ a depressing viewing experience. I don’t share this feeling, as I feel that Varda through her creating of Mona, ultimately honours the spirit. And ‘spirit’ does not die.

adrin neatrour 

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk