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JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE,1080 BRUXELLE Chantel Ackerman         (1975; Fr)  Delphine Seyrig 

Dec 2022 voted best film by Sight and Sound poll

Hommage to observation

This film drills.  ‘Drills’ in both senses of the word. I watch the housewife-sergeant Jeanne Dielman ‘drill’ herself as the consummate performer of the same perfected acts and motions in an series of endless repetitions.  Drills in the other sense of the word because most of her actions takes place in real time and are captured by one prime fixed 50mm lens that takes up only two angles – at 90 or 180 degrees – in respect of its subject. The physical effect of this in itself ‘drills’ what is happening into consciousness as you watch.  The audience in this respect are more than just the usual privileged observer; Ackerman’s creative decision to restrict filming to two angles (representing the natural point of view of an observer who is present) give the viewer the feel of being ‘with’ the action.

The title of the film itself suggests a military ethos: the soldier when asked who he is gives his name rank and number.  That’s all the information you need to know about him.  Jeanne Dielman is given her name and address as her identity.  That’s all that you need to know. She is simply defined by these externalized parameters of her civic personage.   

It is Winter and the mornings are dark. In kitchen hall bedroom living room bathroom the housewife carries out her chores (the drill of the the dead soul).  Chantel Ackerman’s film, title role played by Delphine Seyrig, manifests as a rhythmic tattoo of light and sound, in which the housewife machine paces out patrols and controls with obsessive military precision the space she occupies in her world.

Because the film as a consciousness drill that is similar to the parade ground, the sound track is as important as images.  The sound effects operate as an independent syncopated accompaniment to the image.  My impressions of the film are as much acoustic as visual.   When I recall this film I hear: the pacing feet between the rooms – bathroom bedroom sitting room kitchen hall – each space distinguished by a different beat as each of Jeanne’s migratory passages through her apartment has its own sound key determined by the need to open and close doors, switch on switch off the light.  Jeanne’s progress is a percussive orchestration of  foot beats, light switch clicks, sprung catches, door closures and other intermittent domestic adjustments.  Each room has its own characteristic sound: bathroom bedroom kitchen etc. are respectively associated with splashings, smoothings, rubbings and scrapings.  Each room has its own slightly demented offbeat visual style with movement through the rooms given edge by the brutal sudden interplay of light and dark as Jeanne obsessively and meticulously switches the lights on and off as she travels through the bowels of her apartment.

The soundtrack has obviously been carefully designed to heighten the ideas of the mechanical,  the machine and the dissonnant .  In contrast the dialogue, such as there is, is indistinct and fuzzy.  In fact there are no human sounds (until that is Jeanne’s break down when we hear her gasp as she services a client with her body).  In Jeanne’s meal time scenes with her son, the sound of the spoons on the plates rings out, and the other table sounds, picking up and replacing things, are distinct.  But the sound of eating, which locates eating as human, such as sucking of soup, is absent.  

Jeanne Dielman is not located in the land of the living.  It is located in the underworld. 

Everything in the film has a feeling of being dead.  The film is a report from the land of the dead.  Each space in the house has a mythological resonance culled from Hades. In this body there is not one sign of life.  Delphine Seyrig plays ‘the housewife machine to perfection. As housewife she smooths folds cooks cleans washes fucks.  A machine in which  the thought processes that created each of these ritual tasks and their solutions has long ceased. All that is left is for a zombie psyche to carry out these chores as an outer simulation of something that once had meaning. 

Although often represented as a feminist film my thinking is that Ackerman’s representations in Jeanne Delmann have wide significance not limited to a particular group.  Ackerman wants to show what happens when people become deadened by ideology and repetitions ingrained in the life process itself.   In these conditions people become dead, they die to life and to love. Just like the soldier on the parade ground they are stripped of the ability to think and feel.  They become deadened – and ultimately ready to kill or be killed.  Ackerman was aware that something of this nature happened in Nazi Germany with its cult of the Mutter –  Kinder Kuche Kirche and the Soldier – Ein Fuhrer.

In  the course of its two and half hours the film shows what happens when dead machines break down. They become dysfunctional and stop working.  We are now in the era of the computer and the smart phone, where mechanicality has now insinuated itself into the very processes of thinking and feeling.  Today ( and for a long time before) in our cars and with our destructive consumption, our world has become dysfunctional and attuned only to self destruction as like the Dielman Zombie, we sleepwalk towards environmental disaster.    

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Touch of Evil     Orson Wells (USA;1958) Charlton Heston, Orson Wells, Janet Leigh

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 20 Nov 2022; ticket: £7

voodoo cops

Wells set ‘Touch of Evil’ on the border between USA and Mexico. For him it was a political statement. In retrospect the setting comes across as less political rather more a psychic divide: a voodoo border where sanity and madness, derangement and clarity, dark priests and spirits merge inseparably…. an hallucinogenic zone triggered by the car bomb which detonates at the end of the opening shot pitching all the players into a maelstrom of chaos.

The story line, the prized narrative flow that bedraggles and condemns to insipid mediocrity so many contemporary films is ditched in favour of attributes that film language expresses superlatively well; presence, atmospherics and settings (Film Noir directors such Dmitryk Hawkes Huston all in own way prioritised mood over plot). In these respects Wells is masterful: it’s the effect that matters and on leaving the cinema the audience is left with an abiding sense of experiencing being ‘touched’ by evil.

The film’s dominating presence is Wells as detective Quinian. His vast bulked out body fills the screen with menace and malice, a presence that seems to suck the light out of the picture casting us all into darkness. A corrupt and corrupting influence in the border area, he stalks the streets like an out of control venomous soul called up out of some primal cosmic soup by the towns resident priestess, Tana. Wells’ vision of Quinian is expansive: his engrained corruption and his unremitting service to the forces of evil are depicted as the characteristic traits underpinning the agencies of law enforcement in the USA, in particular the FBI. It is possible that Wells’ development of Quinian’s character was primarily based on J Edgar Hoover. Hoover was first director of the FBI, whose embrace of voodoo law enforcement shifting it away from criminals to his political opponents, employed cynical use of all the dirty arts to frame and neutralise targeted individuals. Like Quinian, Hoover was a self appointed amoral upholder of a personalised agenda, whose objective was primarily to extend and protect his own power over life and death. Wells surrounds Quinian with a posse of men in suits – again similar to the FBI look – all the agents in ill fitting suits, shirt tie and black shoes. A respectable gang of ‘yes’ men and time serving courtiers lending Quinian a sort of specious plausibility and legitimacy.

In Citizen Kane Wells established his reputation as a director who could use the cinematic camera language of film to to define the register of his scenario. Likewise in ‘Touch of Evil’ it is the movement vision and lighting design adopted by the camera that comprises the quick of ‘Touch of Evil’. The long crane tracking shots with deep focus unify the disparate elements in the first shot, and continue throughout the film to sustain the tension between the characters and their location. The lighting through use the obtuse angles and vignetting about Quinian, renders the settings as simulacrums of hellish antechambers.

The interiors though a little sparse, perhaps reflecting a pared down budget, work because they are replete with the presence of men or of victim Janet Leigh. But the exteriors, the town streets and above all the fantastical ending shot against the industrial background of Venice (California) signs off the film against a claustrophobic nightmarish setting. In best film tradition the sign off setting was not part of the original scenario, but taken up by Wells late in production when he came across it. It has some of the qualities of Tarkovsky’s Stalker setting.

adrin neatour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Banshees of Inisherin   Martin McDonagh (UK; 2022) Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson

viewed Tyneside Cinema 1^st Nov 2022; ticket £5

finger licking

Martin McDonagh’s Banshees of Inisherin is a psychodrama in which the wills of two men are pitched against each other.   It’s a common enough film thematic and well represented in English movies such as the Losey’s ‘The Servant’ and Jenkin’s ‘Bait’. Another recent example is John McDonagh’s ‘The Forgiven’ which in contrast to Losey and Jenkins’ films is a weak and unconvincing play out of its protagonists’ opposition.

The scripts of ‘The Servant’ and ‘Bait’ both engendered high levels of intensity.

Inherent in the relations established by these films were the countervailing influences of class and family and their respective scenarios were developed so as to probe and exploit the inherent and endemic tensions in the situations. ‘The Forgiven’ whilst establishing an initially strong dynamic between perpetrator and victim delivered a flat flaccid experience as its script shied away from exposing the deep personal and socio-cultural chasm that divided the protagonists, relying on a parallel editing structure to deliver fake suspense rather than the tension of physical proximity.

Set on an Irish island location of the kind beloved by Hollywood, Martin McDonagh’s ‘Banshees’ pits Paidraic against Colm in a psychodramic test of ‘will’.

The proposition is as follows: from being ‘close friends’ Colm has suddenly and pre-emptively shut Paidraic completely out of his life; a decision Paidraic cannot accept. The immediate problem is that we the audience are dropped into McDonagh’s script at the point of crisis, without insight or perspective on how things had been previously between the two men; our only source of information about the background to the event – life on a small Irish island – is drawn not from experience but in the main from the film industry. Contrast this with ‘The Servant’ or ‘Bait’; we also enter into the flow of these films at a certain point in the story. But firstly the respective back stories of ‘class history’ and ‘family history’ are introduced so that the viewer has a strong and specific understanding of these types of relations. In addition audiences have personal background experience of both ‘class’ and ‘family feuds’ so that they can use their own experiences in reading the development of these films.

In ‘Banshees’ we are simply presented with the fact that Colm has made a particular decision. Statement of this fact is continually re-enforced by the script in which every character repeats the same fact: Colm and Paidraic used to be ‘great inseparable friends’. A pall of deadness from the beginning seeps over scenario as the script closes off personal history by repetitive dialogue about a backstory that has to stand in for the scenes we never see. We never see the originary scenes presumably because McDonagh was unable to figure how to carry off such back clip dialogue. Colm’s decision is particular to Paidraic. Although he says he doesn’t want any more distraction in his life, Colm doesn’t retreat into a cocoon of silence. At the pub he’s happy to engage the local policeman in the art of conversation. Which seems strange as the policeman doesn’t seem any more interesting than Paidraic.

In short the opposition of the two men takes place in a psychic vacuum.

Because the script lacks a natural engine of opposition to drive the conflict, the scenario has to resort to invented spectacle as a device to fuel the engine of the narrative.  The device is the threat by Colm to self mutilate by cutting off a finger on his left hand each time, if and when Paidraic tries to speak to him. The script itself runs out of patience with this device and shortcircuits the process of de-digitalisation by having Colm, after cutting off one of his fingers at Paidraic’s first infraction, suddenly cutting off his four remaining ones, as response to Paidraic’s second misdemeanour. As if Colm too had got bored with the prospect of a long drawn out scripted process of finger mutilation.  McDonagh’s writing was unable to develop a working scenario that could economically crank up tension in his film, finger by finger. So like one of those washing powder ads, his script skipped the in-between bits. All he wanted was to get to the final spectacle of the fully bloodied cropped hand.

‘Banshees’ fails to develop the characters in a decisive manner that engages the audience. With the the men stepping into the screen out of a narrarive void it needs some deft scripting to fill out the omitted relational significations. Both Colm and Paidraic are dull characters and dull characters make for dull films. In both ‘The Servant’ and ‘Bait’, the characters develop out of a back story, expanding as individual types to fill out the screen with their personas. To fill out Colm, McDonagh relies on the physical presence and close up affection images of Gleeson, which asks the audience to read into his state of mind. Paidraic’s sudden change in character feels overdetermined, ie those scenes representing his development scripted into the end of the film meet the need of the film for spectacle; rather than being events that develop out of the internal logic of the scenario. Paidraic burns down Colm’s house, claiming to be a changed man; he is not ‘nice’ any more. But despite his actions and his words, he doesn’t feel any different; he seems to be going through a series of false claims and motions to satisfy the commercial priority of delivering the product to the market.

Shot with crowd pleasing beautiful landscapes, in a clichéd Irish vernacular setting, this is a film that deals in tokens. Token characters, token Irishness and token Banshees. The Banshee flaunted in the title is represented in the film by the occasional appearance of an old looking woman whose face is slapped over with white foundation (very original). She utters stuff about immanent deaths. She has little centrality or indeed only makes an unconvincing sparse contribution to the film. But the service rendered is to the title, because it is a good title for a movie. The ‘Money’ liked that.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Close-Up        Abbas Kiarostami (1990; Iran) with Hossain Sabzian; Hossain Farazmand, Mohsen Makhmalbaf; the family Ahankhah; Abbas Kiarostami

viewed home dvd 21^st Oct 2022;

metaphysics of existence: everyone should play themselves including the director.

Post viewing of Kiarostami’s ‘Close-Up’ I was left with a feeling of mental exhaustion: so many countervailing forces packed into a film, wrapped up as a cosmic joke and played out as a humanist statement.

There is a moment early in the film when the cabbie waiting for reporter Farazmand, gently sets in motion a discarded empty aerosol can. As the can rolls downhill it rattles loudly creating jagged percussive effect until lodging against the side of the kerb, it comes to a halt.

‘Close –Up’ is in part an observation on media culture. Kairostami’s ‘can’ shot suggests itself as an allegory on the general curve governing the shape of media attention: events are blown up out of proportion, make a racket for a short period of time then collapse back into forgetful silence, as if they had never existed.   But Kiarostami in ‘Close-Up’ is not going to play the game according to the media rule book. He has other purposes.

‘Close-Up’ is a documentary, re-enacted in part as a drama in which everyone gets to play themselves, including of course the director, Kiarostami.

The narrative centres about Hossain Sabzian’s impersonation of Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Pretending to be the filmmaker he fraudulently gains entry to the middle class home of the Ahankhah family, claiming that he is going to film their house and the younger son in his next movie. Alerted by the suspicions of the pater familias, the journalist Farazmand, in search of a scoop, goes to the house with two policeman, who arrest Sabzian. The journalist gets his story which rolls off the press as a news headline, waiting to disappear in the next day’s events. The object of the newspaper industry is to squeeze maximum salacious coverage for the shortest amount of time. Events are compressed and the individuals simply pawns in the media play out.

The film’s title is ‘Close-Up’ which is a precise description of the manner in which Kiarostami (K) approaches his subject Hossain Sabzian. ‘Close-Up’ describes not just a type of shot of the subject (though there are plenty of these) but effectively the relationship K establishes with his subject. K’s role as film maker is a necessary but not sufficient description of how he relates to Sabzian. K is not just film maker, an exploiter of certain situations, but also questioner, affirmer, enabler. K’s role is never to exploit judge or manipulate Sabzian; rather to understand why he behaved as he did, to honour him for his responses, to respect him in the process of making the film. K doesn’t throw Sabzian aside at the end of the trial, but enables him to enter further into the ‘actual’ of film direction, by meeting and doubling up with Mohsen Makhmalbaf the film director whom Sabzian had impersonated. ‘Close-Up’ is about the ‘why of filming’, the underlying intentions of picking up a camera, rather than about ‘form’ ‘structure’ or ‘content’. ‘Close-Up’ is K’s take on Cinema Verité, the fundamental truth of what cinema ‘is’.

At the core of ‘Close-Up’ is K’s belief that film making is a way of mediating with the world. It doesn’t matter whether the pertinent relations are subjects of documentary or actors in dramas. There are always concerns and purposes to be explained, ideas to be negotiated. The mediation is founded on dialogue honesty and equal exchange between all involved on both sides of camera. K’s approach is humanistic grounded in an existential philosophy which makes his filming stand out in stark contrast to the controlling ethos of exploitation that characterises most of the media industry.

Overlaying the humanistic ethos of ‘Close-Up’ is K’s existential probing of the effects of media media on identity. The issue of ‘being’ probably attracted K to the idea of making a film about and with Sabzian. The film seems to be shot partially as actual real time filming and partially in re-construction, but the core content is Sabzian’s obsession of wanting to be a film director. Sartre observes generic Parisian waiters going about their work. He says they play out their roles in an exaggerated manner as a quasi- theatrical way of making a claim on being. They become waiters by absorbing the outer modes of being waiter.

With the huge expansion of media, societal attention became focused not only on the traditional loci of power, politics, high status, wealth, business, but on the creative industries feeding off the news. Film stars, film directors, singers, musicians, designers, architects, models etc. Individuals in these creative industries were accorded high status. Their lives seemingly opened up by publicists and their photographs widely published, the images of this new elite penetrated deeply into the collective public consciousness. Deracinated urban working people were particularly prone to merging their identities with these projected images from the media. The pop stars, the film stars could all be assimilated into the ‘being’ of those without history without ‘substance’ of social belonging.

Sabzian is an unemployed man, normally working in the printing trade. Divorced from his wife who regards him as a failure, he lives at home with his mother and one of his children. As he describes it his life is closed down. He has no past and no prospects. But his being is suffused with the idea of being a film director. From his knowledge of film he has come to understand the role of the director in production. He sees the film director as possessing all the attributes and capacities that are missing from his own life. The director has high status, the director commands both his crew and his cast, they do what he says, the director gets respect from people who listen to what he has to say. Sabzian has built up within his being an alternative persona, the phantom director. Which identity looks thinks and acts like a film maker. But his being director is always held back by the mundane claims made on him by the life of Sabzian. Like a psychic Houdini he yearns to burst free from the chains that bind him to a meaningless life. When a chance encounter presents him with opportunity, he takes it like a seasoned pro, moving in on the Ahankhah family as director in residence. (They of course in a different way and to a lesser extent also live under the spell of world of film).

And all the time in his filmic re-telling of the impersonation event, K questions and coaxes Sabzian into responding from his heart. Without judgement K accepts him as a film director, not as a charlatan or a fraud, but as an honourable man.

At the end of ‘Close-Up’ we come out of the cinema understanding something of the extraordinary nature of Kiarostami and the way in which he takes up the world in order to film.   The film elaborates and opens up multiple realities all folded into Kiarostami’s mediation, but through the course of the complex interweaving of these strands there emerges an emotional coherence relating to the fragility of human endeavour.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.ukv

Where is the Friend’s House?   Abbas Kiarostami ( 1987; Iran) Babak Ahmadpour

viewed 16 Oct 2022 Star and Shadow Cinema; ticket £7

Where is the friend’s house?.…an existential question?

The first shot in Kiarostami’s ‘Where is the Friend’s House?’ is a long duration shot of a section of a nondescript door over which the opening credits are burnt in. The door’s paint is a worn cream sort of colour and you can see screwed onto one side of its frame a little retaining hook. It looks like a cleaning cupboard door; behind it the soundtrack comprises a high pitched racket. When the door finally opens, it reveals the interior of a classroom full of young boys revelling in high spirits. It is the teacher who has just entered, his presence bringing the immediate control of silence.

This opening shot introduces Kiarostami’s thematic: childhood – as a stage in life – defined by an undifferentiated anonymity with adult presence that is only a door away.

Kiarostami is filming in a remote rural area of Northern Iran. His film location is a mud built village called Koker where he observes a series of child/adult social relations that are particular to their situation but whose governing dynamics are universal their in their general relevance.

The universal dimension is the extent to which children are in essence a function of the phenomenological constructs of the adult world. This is to say that relations with children are viewed by the controlling adult world as a series of prescriptive ‘oughts’. Children ‘ought’ to do as they are told, children ‘ought’ to do their homework children ‘ought to’ help’ look after siblings, children ‘ought’ to pay attention; or alternatively children ‘ought to be free to do what they want, children’s opinions ought to have the same weight as adults;. Of course the obverse applies to the adults in their relations with children. Adults have their ‘oughts’ as well as ‘ought not to’s’: adults ‘ought’ to bring their children up to be obedient, adults ‘ought to’ take responsibility for their children’s development, adults ought to listen to children.

In this sense children have an existential problem: they only exist as extended projections of the adult mind. They don’t exist in their own right; and Kiarostami’s script maps out, in a prescriptive environment the line of a particular child’s development.

In the world of Koker Kiarostami’s scenario observes the relations between adults and children. In Koker as perhaps in many other cultures, in a sense the children are almost invisible to the adult eye, do not exist except in relation to adult need. The scripting begins with the school teacher’s non negotiable demand that each boy possess a notebook. The notebook has a symbolic importance. It is defined by the teacher as a sign of the pupil’s commitment to the both the state’s and the school’s values; Ahmed’s mother makes a series of demands on Ahmed: that he fetch carry help do his homework; Ahmad’s grandfather demands that Ahmed obey the first time; the old carpenter demands that Ahmad listen. But even as Ahmad child revolves about the nucleus of his actual inexistence to adults, something at the core of his being is at work. An act of witnessing a classroom incident and a moment of carelessness on his part, creates a situation for the inception of an operational consciousness. His spirit shifts enabling him to escape from the gravitational pull of his inexistent orbit around the adult body.

Ahmad learns to say: “No!” I do what I think I should do because I know that I have to help my friend – whatever.”

Ahmad decides to go and look for his friend, to find where he lives so that he can give the friend back his notebook which Ahmad has accidently picked up. Failing in this quest, he takes remedial action. In the said notebook Ahmad forges the friend’s homework for him, thereby achieving his moral purpose: to keep his friend out of trouble by defying the prescripts and percepts of the adults. The point is that his behaviour is not reactive, it is a conscious move on his part to do what he does. It is an existential move into being.

Ahmad reaches a point in his life where he is asked to make a decision on his own that will entail a step away from being a phenomenological captive of others, to become an active being. Although Kiarostami’s observations derive from a society ideologically far removed from Western belief systems, the psychic shift in Ahmad’s consciousness seems no less relevant in those societies that pride themselves in addressing an understanding of child development, where the child is regarded not as inexistent but rather the centre of the socialisation process. These are also societies in which gang culture, drugs and somatic dysfunction may be playing out in their own way re-active functions rather than existential development.

There is something in the manner in which Kiarostami shot his film that reminded me of Kafka’s ‘The Castle’. The dark compressed look of the village, with its interminable maze of streets alleyways and passages, the circuitous nature of the search and its ultimate failure. The meetings with strangers who at first seem to offer hope but it’s hope that turns out to be illusionary. And ultimately the determination of the seeker, whether it be ‘K’ or Ahmed not to concede to disappointment but to continue with the task however difficult.

Kairostami’s titular question: ‘Where is the Friend’s House’, points not so much to a literal quest or question, but to an interrogation about a state of being.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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