Trump cinema

American cinema, Blogpost, Film education, Uncategorized

Some people suggest that Donald Trump’s victory in the American election is as a result of his television personality.

In some senses, I do not doubt it. More than this, though, I wonder about the role that television (and other media) played in ensuring only a 58 per cent turnout of the electorate at the polls. (This is by no means unique to the USA.)

“People don’t care,” Trump repeatedly has said about his avoidance of paying tax – as this article reminds us. Perhaps it has always been so… But perhaps the numbing effects of the media and their anaesthetics is equally turning many people off politics – and this truly is something we should worry about.

As I look to the right hand-side of my Facebook page, I see that 440,000 people are talking about the forthcoming Beauty and the Beast film release. And that 120,000 people are talking about Jason Isaacs and Tom Felton meeting up in Orlando.

Frankly, who gives a shit?

Now, I am a film scholar – and so a lot of my work is about studying the media. What is more, I am heavily into cinema – and so I know that I can post things on my Facebook wall that are ‘trending’ and/or which are about ‘fluff’ like movie releases and performers.

I did, after all, post something about how much I admired Rebecca Hall’s performance in the film Christine (Antonio Campos, UK/USA, 2016) last night – even if my admiration for her exceptional performance is also mixed with sympathy for a film that portrays the rejection of intellectual thought for the purposes of promoting sensationalist news reporting (a kind of Nightcrawler-from-the-other-side).

That is, I think that the film is an intelligent and critical piece of work as opposed to yet another loud, meaningless spectacle.

Am I a hypocrite – in that I seemingly care more about cinema than about politics?

My hope is that I care about the politics of cinema and try to talk about cinema as politics – and that this is linked to our political realities, as is made clear by the election of Trump as a media politician and by the role that the media might have played in turning enough people off politics such that Trump wins, albeit with a clear minority of the vote.

(Even if media-induced apathy is hard to substantiate, we can and must take seriously this question because of media-created-Trump.)

I more or less got upbraided the other night by two friends of mine for not making entertaining films, who equally felt that my analysis of film as political was unfair – because, for example, Tom Ford is an artist and therefore Nocturnal Animals should not be charged with carrying any political weight. Perhaps this refusal to mix politics and entertainment – and to prefer entertainment to politics – is something like my point.

On what feels to be a related point: I paid £16 to watch Christine last night at the Curzon Bloomsbury cinema in London.

I vowed never to return to a Curzon cinema on an evening or a weekend, since I basically am priced out of watching films there, meaning in turn that I am basically priced out now of watching art house cinema in London (I can of course watch it at a later point on DVD and/or online).

I pay £19.99 a month to watch as many films as I want at Odeon cinemas – and nearly the same to watch a single film at a Curzon. As I shall demonstrate below, this is not an advert for Odeon.

But, as the adverts played in the Curzon, their own ident ended with something like the words ‘the home of people who love cinema’ – and I found myself shouting out at the screen a correction: ‘for rich people who love cinema.’

Something struck me, which I have known for a long time and yet the weight of which I felt as if for the first time: we do not talk in cinemas – myself included. We have been cowed into silence before our screens – listening, obeying, but never answering back (and yet with so many people desperate to get on to or behind those screens so as to make themselves feel empowered).

I thought about some of the rot that I have seen in the last few months – nigh every blockbuster and a good number of Oscar films as over-hyped rubbish. That Odeon membership allows me mainly to see bollocks. (I told you that this was not an advert.)

Now, I understand that many, perhaps most people, do not consume films at the cinema. But they do consume films, which increasingly become ‘universes’ comprised of constellations of films.

Furthermore, they also consume ‘smart’ television that is made up of hours and hours of episodes (the person next to me on the Tube last night was watching Breaking Bad on their phone, I think).

Might it be that ‘smart’ television leads to a dumb populace as we spend more and more time following a show than we do taking part in political life – just as universes of Marvel and Star Wars (i.e. Disney) films keep us watching rot about flying humans and talking animals?

Dumb – not necessarily in the sense of stupid. I assume that most people are pretty smart. But dumb in the sense that they do or say nothing about what is happening, not even voting, and thus being voiceless.

I ended up really liking Christine, and felt that this critical film restored a faith in cinema after my outburst at the screen. It is, as mentioned, a film about the rejection of intellectuals and intelligence in the age of sensationalism-for-ratings. In other words, a film that is on point, relevant, and says something about our world today (especially its gender politics and an insight into how we might better understand and deal with mental health issues).

But here it is playing in a Curzon cinema at £16 a pop, meaning that barely anyone can watch it – while detritus like La La Land, which involves little to no political engagement, is effectively on for free for anyone who wishes to pay a similar amount to go to an Odeon whenever they wish.

(This is not to mention the way in which La La Land has received 14 Oscar nominations, thereby meaning that its fluffy nothingness is validated by the entertainment complex more than a film like Christine, which has received none – not even for Hall whose performance is leagues better than anything else I have seen in the past year.)

I shouted at the screen and fortunately for me, last night, the screen answered back with a complex, meaningful film. But who will watch Christine as it plays on two screens in London and at an exorbitant price?

It should be playing there where it will reach a wider audience. Because in the Odeon, not only do people not shout at the screen, but the screen also does not offer anything nearly so thought-provoking, instead cowing its audience into dumb silence as they behold loud spectacle after loud spectacle.

Getting beyond spectacle. Answering back to the media. Getting used to answering back. Developing media savviness and political awareness. These might be tools that we need to develop in order to come up with an answer to Trump (and of course our own, related issues in the UK).

Lion (Garth Davis, Australia/USA/UK, 2016)

American cinema, Australian Cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

There is a sequence in Lion where Saroo (Dev Patel) and his soon-to-be girlfriend Lucy (Rooney Mara) walk to a party on opposite sides of the street.

Lucy does a wee dance, and Saroo then copies her – the pair thus doing some cute romance as they swap dance moves from across the road that separates them.

The moment is an uncredited homage to Spike Jonze’s short film, How They Get There (USA, 1997), which you can see in full below (for as long as it remains on YouTube).

Given that Lion is a film about a young boy who by accident becomes separated from his family and who ends up being adopted by Australians, and given that the film is based upon a true story, it seems strange to have this extended reference to Jonze’s film included.

For, while Jonze’s is a playful and witty short, Lion seems to be in the business of taking itself very seriously – as perhaps it should do given that it is a film about a topic as weighty as transnational identity, and which is seeking to pick up various awards during this year’s season. The homage, therefore, shifts the film tonally from serious to playful in a way that jars with the what the film otherwise seems to set out to achieve.

So let us say that Saroo and Lucy had seen How They Get There (these characters do supposedly live in the real world, after all, meaning that they may well have done). Surely the inclusion in the film is therefore justified – a kind of audiovisual exchange that could just as easily be the characters bonding via conversation over, say, their love of Aravind Adiga or Powderfinger (also real world figures)?

Well, maybe. But since Lion so clearly adopts this scene from Jonze, it simply feels tired, unimaginative and unoriginal – as if the filmmakers could not themselves come up with anything better than nicking someone else’s idea in order to convey romance. One’s confidence in the rest of the film is undermined: how much more of this film is entirely derivative?

More than this. There is a cinema in the world where such shifts in tone are in fact commonplace, such that they become perhaps even the defining feature of that cinema.

I am of course talking in quite a general sense about Indian cinema, with the Mumbai-based industry known as Bollywood generally functioning as its metonymic figurehead.

Lion is a transnational co-production, as the stated involvement of Australian, American and British monies makes clear above. And yet the film is also largely set in India, with locations including Kolkata and Khandwa, which lies close to Saroo’s home town of Ganesh Talai. What is more, the film also features numerous performances by Indian actors. So, one asks oneself, where is the Indian economic involvement in the film?

Or does the tonal shift marked by the adoption of Jonze’s idea also mark the adoption of ideas (tonal shifts themselves) from Indian cinema, which in turn marks the adoption of Indian cinematic resources for this film – which is a film about the adoption of Indian boys by white Australians?

There are plenty more things to say about Lion, but I would like to limit myself to three things – the first of which relates to How They Get There.

For, in Jonze’s film, things end badly as the male dancer gets run over, with the driver of the car perhaps also dying – and the male dancer’s shoe ending up in a gutter by the side of the road.

Does the reference to this film in Lion, therefore, signal a similar pessimism with regard to Saroo? While the film clearly is about ‘How They Get There,’ are we to believe that Saroo is, as it were, a shoe in a gutter – looking up at the stars that might help him in the developed world? There seems to be no clear analogy, but any way that one looks at it is never far from offensive.

Indeed – to move on to my second point – there is another strange sequence in the film where Saroo’s adoptive mother, Sue (Nicole Kidman), explains that when she was 12 she had a vision whereby she saw herself with a ‘brown boy’ – and that this is what drove her not to want to have birth children, but to want to adopt kids herself.

The daughter of an alcoholic, Sue in some senses seems to declare here that Saroo is partially an object that helps her to get over her own traumatic childhood. Which I guess is fair enough, except that this again reduces Saroo to simply a brown boy who may not want to be, but who is indeed the plaything of sorts of white Australians. No wonder that Saroo’s adopted brother, Mantosh (Divian Ladwa), is himself so troubled.

In this way, it seems oddly fitting that Saroo is not, in fact, Saroo’s real name. His infantile tongue could not properly pronounce his name (nor the name of his home town), and so Saroo is the result of the boy (played by Sunny Pawar) trying to say Sheru (meaning lion), and Ganestalay his attempt to say Ganesh Talai – a town that no one could find as a result of this difference.

What a thin thread possibly prevented Saroo from being able to find his way home. Nonetheless, the erasure of his Hindi roots through this ‘error’ does, as mentioned, seem oddly apt through its occultation of Saroo’s origins.

Of course, Saroo is haunted by his past and he does finally discover his origins – so at least we see that he cares for truth and is haunted by his privilege knowing that his mother is a labourer who carries rocks for a living while he enjoys boats and aeroplanes (and visions of his past from a drone – with his discovery of his past enabled in large part by the surveillance technology of Google Earth).

In other words, Lion clearly is a film about worlds separated by technology and in particular transport as a means of defining humans according to their different abilities to travel/move (even if true, it is oddly apt, then, that Saroo’s destiny is changed by his inadvertently being on the wrong train – the great distance that it covers from Khandwa to Kolkata signalling his destiny to be catapulted into a new, more mobile world).

And we are glad that Saroo is saved from this world, even if we see him running and laughing and loving his family in Ganesh Talai. For it is also a world defined by manual labour, paedophilia, child abuse and uncaring authorities. Saroo really is better off, it would seem, in Australia – and his rescue is thus in some senses justified, even if his adoptive mother has dimensions of the would-be White Saviour.

Dev Patel gives an excellent performance as Saroo. The film as a whole is powerful. But as the film ultimately endorses the fast pace of modernity at the expense of the slow pace of those pedestrian labourers who function as the very props upon which this modernity is based (it is the labour of his birth mother that brought Sheru into the world, even if Sue takes credit for raising Saroo), so, too, is the film constructed according to the fast pace of western films.

That is, the film has rapid scenes, often cutting into action and getting the viewer to infer what has happened – rather than allowing the viewer to see events unfold for themselves.

In this sense, we regularly see Saroo/Patel at points of high emotion – but the film in this regard does not show us ‘how they get there.’ That is, we do not see the onset of emotion, the change that takes place – we just see the emotion itself, with the emotion itself thus becoming symbolic, a symbol of emotion, rather than an emotion grounded in the real world of change and becoming.

The film’s decision to rush emotions in this way – to be too busy/in the business of business to want to take us through the complexity of emotion – reflects the privileged speed of the highly technologised First World, where emotions become empty because of their own speed, rather than real because slow and enworlded.

In its form, then, the film undermines what it otherwise would seemingly want to achieve: we want to connect with people across boundaries, but really what we are seeing are power games and the use of other people and their real lives for the purposes of our own entertainment, edification and comfort. This makes for troubling viewing, even if I also was swept up personally in the story that I was seeing.

While Patel seems excellent as Saroo, then, it also seems a shame that he is edited in such a way that we do not really get to see him act. Or rather, his performance is reduced to acting as a result of the editing: here is Saroo unhappy, here is Saroo sad, and so on. To get beyond acting exposed as acting, to get to acting as an embodied performance, we need to see the transitions; we need to see how they get there.

Oddly, such a transition is shown in the film – but by Sheru’s mother, Kamla, when they are reunited. I believe that this moment is performed by Priyanka Bose (she plays Saroo’s mother when he is young; it is unclear whether it is still her but aged via make-up when they finally meet again).

In a few brief moments of screen time, we see Bose carry out an extraordinary performance of recognition and then emotion as she recognises her boy. And yet what plaudits for Bose in the celebration of the film at awards season?

Furthermore, in a few brief instants we here sense a story that we never otherwise got to see – the story of an illiterate labourer whose son has been taken from her in rural India. How much more interesting might that film have been, rather than the troubles that a boy had in discovering his hometown through the use of Google Earth?

That we see a film that privileges the privileged masculine perspective is perhaps profoundly western. If, we wanted to watch a film featuring the female perspective, then we likely have to discover a different cinema – perhaps even the cinema of a place like India, where a masterpiece like Mother India (Mehboob Khan, India, 1957) dares to tell precisely the story of a female labourer struggling to bring up her children in the Indian countryside.

(Much as I tend to enjoy the performances of Casey Affleck, the performance from Bose in Lion reminds me of how Michelle Williams acts Affleck off the screen in Manchester by the Sea, Kenneth Lonergan, USA, 2016, even though she has minimal screen time and even though her big scene is scripted basically to suggest that she still is in love with the man who is largely responsible for the death of her children – i.e. it is a male fantasy-fulfilment.)

(This in turn reminds me that both Lion and Manchester by the Sea continue the trend of films about dead, lost, and otherwise problematised babies and children – as I have written about elsewhere. It is the preoccupying theme of contemporary western cinema.)

Forasmuch as it is well made and enjoyable, then, Lion seems to have adopted various things from various other places not in order to present us with any changed vision of the world, but to replicate the vision of a superior western, technologised, cinematic world – even if this world is built upon the labour of people like Kamla, whose plight remains invisible.

How we got here – to such a world that seemingly is made up of different worlds – is hidden.

And yet it might be the most important (hi)story for us all to learn.

Philosophical Screens: Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, USA, 1990)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film education, Philosophical Screens, Uncategorized

This post is a written version of the thoughts that I shall be giving/gave about Goodfellas on Monday 23 January 2017 as part of the London Graduate School‘s Philosophical Screens series, and part of the ongoing Martin Scorsese retrospective being run by the British Film Institute.

Goodfellas tells the story of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), who has always dreamt of being a gangster. As he rises up through the ranks of New York’s Italian mafia, however, his life begins to unravel in two ways. Firstly, as a half-Irish/half-Italian, he is not 100 per cent Italian and so cannot Get Made to a full fledged mafia boss. Secondly, against the advice of his boss, Paulie (Paul Sorvino), Henry goes into the drug business.

When Henry’s operations thus come unstuck with the law, it would appear that he cannot turn to his mafia family in order to rescue him; more likely is that they will kill him. And so he breaks both golden rules of being in the mafia, and he rats on and betrays people that might otherwise be his friends.

Henry’s situation is not helped by the fact that he is in cahoots with Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), both of whom are loose canons, with the latter being particularly psychotic – taking pleasure in murdering various minor hoods with whom he happens to cross paths, and one major hood, Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), whose murder will eventually bring about Tommy’s own undoing also.

The film is famous for various lines, scenes and sequences, including when Henry takes his wife-to-be, Karen (Lorraine Bracco) on a date to the Copacabana club, entering via the delivery basement entrance and touring her around the kitchen before entering the club where a table and drinks are laid on as the owners and other clients seek to impress the unassumingly powerful Henry with gifts and gimmes.

Other examples include Tommy grilling Henry about how he is funny (‘Funny like I’m a clown? I amuse you?’), and a confrontation between Henry and Jimmy in a diner involving a celebrated dolly zoom (whereby the camera tracks backwards and zooms in at the same time, thus giving a vertigo effect) as Henry realises that Jimmy is setting him up for death.

However, a detail in the film upon which I’d like to focus and which will form the starting point of my analysis of the film is Morrie’s wig.

Morrie (Chuck Low) is a small-time hood who runs a wig shop. When we first meet him, we see a television advert of Morrie explaining how good his wigs are as he jumps into a swimming pool and as he is surrounded by women who kiss him on the cheek.

The advert is deliberately cheesy, and after seeing it, the camera pulls back to reveal that we have been watching the image of Morrie on a television screen that loops his advert. The camera turns to Jimmy, who watches the advert, and then back through Morrie’s shop to Henry, who talks to Morrie in person out back.

Morrie is refusing to pay Jimmy the interest on some money that he owes – which leads Jimmy to start to strangle Morrie with rope as Henry receives a phone call from Karen. As Jimmy strangles Morrie, his wig comes off – demonstrating that he is a small-time hood who clearly lies, since his advert declares that his wigs can withstand hurricanes (or words to that effect).

The moment is – like much of Goodfellas – amusing, even if violent. (Jimmy lets Morrie go – on this occasion.)

The aim here is not to discuss the comedy of Goodfellas, and perhaps of Scorsese’s work more generally, not least because this is something that John Ó Maoilearca will discuss/did discuss in greater detail at the Philosophical Screens event. That said, I shall end by making reference to the comedy of his work.

Rather, Morrie’s wig allows us to think about the ethos of Goodfellas as being one based upon excess. For, not only is a wig that is obviously a wig funny (especially when it falls off), but it also demonstrates the way in which humans use things that exceed their natural abilities/possessions in order to demonstrate (in Morrie’s case) a kind of youth, strength, virility – and thus power.

In this particular instance, Morrie’s pretensions to power are ironic given that he is about the most camp character in Goodfellas (although he is married) and also deeply insecure (hence his constant talking whenever he is onscreen).

The fact that we see Morrie’s wig at first on a television screen also plays into this. Jimmy himself says that Morrie should not have wasted money on the advert given that he could have used the money to pay him back. That is, the advert is excessive. Furthermore, the advert itself functions as a kind of ‘bad wig’ – in the sense that it is intended to show mastery of the image, but in fact comes across as cheap.

With both the wig and the advert, then, we get a sense of Morrie aspiring to power, but not being able to attain it – in part because the workmanship of both is too poor. Morrie aspires to excess – just as his fellow hoods do – but in some respects he is not excessive enough to be a successful gangster.

However, while Morrie might be a figure of fun (who ultimately gets killed by Tommy for being a probable liability after the crew steals US$6 million from a Lufthansa flight), Morrie in some senses unlocks the whole of Scorsese’s film and the philosophy of excess that it sees as key to the (attractions of) gangster life – even if at times this excess is disavowed.

For, while the film equally shows Jimmy criticising Johnny Roastbeef (Johnny Williams) and Frankie Carbone (Frank Sivero) for spending the Lufthansa money on pink cadillacs and mink coats – i.e. for being excessive – it is precisely this excess that Henry desires and which Karen, too, also finds seductive. Indeed, just after Jimmy has bust Frankie and Johnny’s balls for their profligate spending, we see Henry arrive home at Christmas saying that he bought the most expensive tree they had: Henry likes extravagance.

As we see the Hill family Christmas, Scorsese’s camera tracks in towards a bauble that hangs from Henry’s all-white Christmas tree. Why is this shot here? What does the bauble signify? The fact of the matter is that it is hard to tell. But the bauble is shiny and comes to fill the screen. That is, the shot itself is ‘excessive’ in the sense that it is unnecessary. In this way, Scorsese with his film does not simply show us excess, but he also takes us via his camera movements into the mindset of finding excess attractive. His film itself is excessive, full of ‘unnecessary’ shots and moments, which themselves come to be a chief pleasure of the film beyond simply the telling of a story.

(What is a bauble if not an excessive feature that is part of the festival of excess that Christmas under consumerism has become? These fragile balls that hang from trees for no reason, and yet which we pack away carefully each year, scared that they might break, too thin to hold in hand for fear of crushing them… The bauble perhaps is total excess.*)

With excess in mind, the Copacabana shot comes into its own. As Henry leads Karen around the kitchen, we can – if we pay close attention – see that Henry basically does a lap of the kitchen by ignoring the fact that he can go straight through into the restaurant. The lap of the kitchen is pure excess: he is showing off to Karen.

But more than this. In having a single, unbroken tracking shot that also takes us around the kitchen and into the restaurant, Scorsese is also showboating, showing off to us, showing us a film that also is excessive, and which certainly exceeds the perceived necessity of ‘economic storytelling’ considered to be so dear to the American film industry (the ethos of getting rid of everything superfluous, not least because time is money and it costs a lot of money to put it in there; Scorsese’s film, like the gangsters themselves, dishes out in spades ‘fuck you money’ in terms of superfluous shots).

What emerges from this showboating/showing off, though, is that Scorsese does not show us something that exceeds cinema. Rather, through the excess of Goodfellas, we come to realise that cinema is perhaps excess itself – especially when it lampoons the smaller television screen for aspiring to excess but failing miserably à la Morrie’s wig.

In other words, what Henry aspires to be or to become is cinematic, to lead a life of excess. And this becomes clear as we see how Scorsese’s film is rammed full of never-ending camera movements, which are punctuated not so much by static images as more specifically freeze frames, of which there are numerous throughout the film. In other words, even when Scorsese stops his frenetic camera, it also is done in the ‘excessive’ fashion of halting the narrative entirely for Henry to announce some insight, thereby also showing his mastery since it is as if he can control the film.

Soon after Karen has joined the mafia family, we see her at a wives’ gathering, where the women are described in her voice over as wearing too much make-up. However, when we look closely at the gathered women, it becomes clear (if not over-stated) that at least two of the wives are wearing make-up in order to cover up bruises and cuts that likely have been caused by beatings from their spouses.

In other words, we might consider make-up to be a form of excess, but really that ‘excess’ is here used as a way of masking damage in the form of bruising. What this in turn suggests to us is that the other excesses of the film – from the bling to the bravado camera movements – are also trying to hide over some form of damage or bruising, as Morrie tries to cover his otherwise bald pate.

But what is this damage/bruising?

In Tommy’s case, his excessive violence seems to be a standard little-man syndrome, as even he seems to suggest at one point during the story that leads to the ‘funny’ sequence (with Tommy’s storytelling and ‘funniness’ itself being a way of covering over his psychosis – and the film’s comedy as a whole being a way of covering over the psychosis of mafia life more generally). But Tommy’s little-man syndrome here also explains to us something that all of the other characters tend to carry, too: a refusal to be a ‘nobody’ but instead the desire to be a ‘somebody.’

In other words, it is the fact of having been born as a nobody that is the bruise that these gangsters wish to cover over.

There is more to it than this. When Henry betrays his ‘friends’ at the film’s end, he explains that only a Birth Certificate and a record of his previous imprisonment are what the government has on record about his existence. Earlier, when Henry begins to ditch school as a young hood, he says that he does not want to pledge allegiance to the flag or profess any ‘good government bullshit.’

In other words, it would seem that the damage that Henry wants to cover over is not simply being born a nobody, but being born a subject in America, which in turn is to be born a subject under capitalism, with the nation functioning as the structuring principle of the system.

A paradox: governments give to their subjects a name. Indeed, they give you a subjectivity. However, far from turning you into somebody, this assigned name confirms you as a nobody, since really the name functions as a form of what Louis Althusser would call ‘interpellation.’ That is, when the government calls your name, you respond, thereby affirming not your power, but the power of the government as you answer its call and respect its rules. Those with real power have no name (as Paulie perhaps understands in the film – always carrying out his business in secret). To be somebody, then, is paradoxically to have no name.

In this sense, excess – and the desire to show one’s wealth – is always the gangster’s undoing and why gangster films are always films about social climbers, or those who defy the power of the state and/or those in power – while power is really consolidated in hidden areas (even if Paulie does in the end die in jail). We do not know the names of the powerful.

(Read in this sense, Donald Trump is a gangster upstart – and we might even admire him for taking on the invisible corridors of power [represented by the Clintons?], were it not for the fact that Trump clearly does not seem invested in doing anything for anyone other than himself and his cronies. But like all gangsters, he is likely to come undone.)

Bearing in mind Henry’s avoidance of taxes and refusal to pledge allegiance to the flag, we can understand that the mafia (any mafia) functions as an alternative form of government. As Henry says, the mafia was simply protection – at least prior to its entry into the narcotics racket.

More than this, though, we can understand that the protection offered by a government, with taxes functioning as protection money, and with the government giving to its subjects a name (a birth certificate) and keeping tabs on them (police records) is really nothing other than a mafia. Governments are mafias; governments are the institutionalisation of gangsterism – as the Trump election perhaps clarifies.

Viewed in this light – that any national subject is really just a nobody paying protection money to a government that has convinced its subjects via interpellation that it is ‘good’ – it seems obvious that in order to become somebody, Henry will paradoxically go against his government, not pay his taxes, and in effect form his own republic.

More than this: as someone who will never quite be accepted into the mafia family on account of not being 100 per cent Italian, Henry will inevitably betray that family, too, since ultimately he works out that he is not really anything to them, either (they will kill him the minute he begins to get in their way).

It is a further paradox in the film that Henry must lose his identity as Henry Hill by entering into the witness protection programme. Ultimately, the government does get him – and his anonymous identity under witness protection confirms that the government does not care about its subjects, but it definitely wants to bury the competition by having the mafia bosses put away – as happens to Paulie and Jimmy.

And so Goodfellas shows us a world in which one is born a ‘nobody’ via being given a regular name. It then shows how to become somebody, one must rival government. In this process, though, one typically enters a world of excess – the need to show one’s power off and/or to cover over the bruises of being nobody. This allure of excess is one’s undoing, since it identifies one as a threat to all and every other person aspiring to power. Violence and comedy both ensue (as does violence as comedy), since rival powers will feel compelled to fight as long as power is perceived as unevenly distributed (the system of power is the institutionalisation of uneven distribution), and comedy will function as a way of covering over the bruises that cause the hunt for power and which also are caused by the lack of power.

Scorsese’s film does not just tell this story; it also embodies it with its own excesses – specifically trying to demonstrate that cinema is superior to/more powerful than television, with cinema thus being revealed as itself a key tool in the institutionalisation of power via consumerism (advertising and those who profit from it), the power of the media/cinema industry itself, and the sense that if you are not in a movie, then you are nobody.

(Even if the really powerful in the film industry are not the people whom we see – the stars – although these stars make bids for power on many occasions, but rather the unnamed people whom we never see. No wonder that at least one oppositional force has worked out that a potential way to rival governmental power is to be Anonymous. No wonder that show-offs with money in the UK are looked down upon by the quietly powerful as nouveau and gauche. No wonder that the storing of all data by government takes place as a means of precisely identifying who you are as a subject, in order that you continue to respect the power of government – cybernetics as, precisely, a form not of liberation but of government [both government and cybernetics have the same etymological roots])

There are many more things to discuss about Goodfellas, including its specifically masculine world – where women are in some senses part and parcel of the cinematic and excessive existence that these men desire (they want women, but not a woman who talks back/who tries to assert her power – with Henry’s demise being mapped from the start by his attraction to Karen when she upbraids him for standing her up, i.e. Henry is ‘weak’, a demise also signalled regularly by Henry’s lack of appetite for violence and so on).

There is also a racial dimension to the film, with the music equally playing an important role (perhaps it is telling that it is the second, piano-driven ‘movement’ of Derek and the Dominos’ ‘Layla’ that forms the film’s final theme – for this section of the song is also ‘excessive’ after the otherwise famous Eric Clapton guitar riff and singing that forms its first ‘movement’; notably the music also plays as we see Johnny Roastbeef and his girlfriend excessively murdered in the afore-mentioned pink cadillac, with the repetition of the song itself constituting some sort of ‘excessive’ use).

While a more complete reading of the film would look closely at these topics, however, I should like to end with two observations.

The first is that the name Goodfellas in some senses implies capitalist relationships, since the term ‘fellow’ means “one who puts down money with another in a joint venture.” That is, good fellows are ones who work with each other for money, and not for friendship.

(The film’s title differs from that of Nicholas Pileggi’s book from which the film is adapted, Wiseguys. The word ‘guy’ is derived from the same word as ‘guide’ – and by extension the Spanish term for a film script, guión. Wiseguys ‘see’ – whereas goodfellas invest. Perhaps the cinematic excess/cinema as excess of Scorsese’s film suggests how it, too, is trying to carve out an existence under the capitalist regime of filmmaking – getting away from the written form/script/guide/guión and into something different, a cinema of pure excess. Scorsese as gangster upstart filmmaker – with the arts clearly tolerating upstarts as a controlled form of excess, i.e. Scorsese is not really a threat to anyone, being much like a clown, the person who can speak truth to power and not get killed for it – obviously Tommy does not want to be a clown, since he does not want to speak truth to power; he wants power…)

Secondly, watching Goodfellas today, it is clear how closely Scorsese’s subsequent Wolf of Wall Street (USA, 2013) follows it as a guide – including various flourishes such as the lead character turning to camera and discussing what is going on. Indeed, it is almost as if The Wolf of Wall Street is a remake of Goodfellas transposed from the mafia and into the world of banking.

Two subsequent things can be observed from this parallel between Goodfellas and The Wolf…. Firstly, the rise of the mafia is more or less concurrent with the rise of investment banks in the 1970s and into the 1980s, a parallel that potentially alludes to the mafia-esque nature of banks (to which governments are beholden and not the other way around, as post-crisis bailouts would seem to suggest).

More than this: both the rise of the mafia and the rise of the banks are linked to the rise of the drug trade – as well as to media and the excesses of gambling. Gangsterism, banking, cinema, drugs, media: all are excesses, suggesting that the rise of neoliberal capital is precisely the rise of a world of excess in which to be a nobody is a humiliating failure and all will humiliate themselves in order to be a somebody. This striving for excess is ultimately a control mechanism to keep everyone consuming, thereby maintaining the power of those ‘invisible people’ who already hold it.

Goodfellas uses comedy to critique this world, with Scorsese emerging perhaps as the ‘King of Comedy’ through his ability to laugh at even the most sick violence. The comedy is done through Scorsese using excess against itself.

An ambivalence arises between critiquing and indulging cinema’s tendency towards excess, and this ambivalence is a rich vein that Scorsese has long since mined. May he continue to do so – even if this means that he is perhaps more complicit with capital than critical of it… Unless like Henry, Scorsese, too, is getting to the heart of capital in order ultimately to betray it and to put it behind bars.

* Note added 17 January 2019: it strikes me that when the camera tracks in on the Christmas tree and the bauble, the shot is in fact a reference by Scorsese to Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig (Italy/France/West Germany, 1973), which thanks to MUBI I saw early in 2019. Visconti’s film, which tells the tale of the excessive life of ‘mad’ King Ludwig of Bavaria (Helmut Berger), is equally excessive in style (lavish décors) and duration (just shy of four hours). And it also features a shot that cranes in on a Christmas tree that is decorated also by baubles, etc. In Visconti’s film, excess is equated with madness. Perhaps Scorsese also is suggesting that the propensity for excess is a sort of American madness. (Liotta as Henry seems to deliver a performance that at times, in its effeteness, seems not too far from that of Berger as Ludwig.)

The comedy of experimental cinema

American cinema, Blogpost, Canadian cinema, Experimental Cinema, Film reviews, Uncategorized

I can only say what I saw and heard (and felt and thought).

Over the last two evenings, I have attended two experimental film events. The first was a screening of Michael Snow’s La région centrale (Canada, 1971) at the Serpentine Gallery, which screened alongside the opening credits of Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1958) – with both being chosen by artist Lucy Raven, whose solo exhibition, Edge of Tomorrow, is currently on there. The second was a performance at Tate Modern of Tony Conrad’s 55 Years on the Infinite Plain (originally called 10 Years on the Infinite Plain when first performed in New York, USA, in 1972, and which has been growing in age ever since – now beyond Conrad’s death last year).

For those unfamiliar with either of these works, the former is a three-hour film shot on the top of a mountain in Québec, and which features images captured remotely by Snow using a robotic arm, to which Snow’s camera was attached, and which rotates in a long series of different directions. The latter is a 90-minute piece featuring ‘drone’ music and black and white strips that flicker on a screen from four projectors simultaneously.

Both experiences involve a fair amount of discomfort, not least because traditional cinema seats were not provided, with the viewer instead having to sit on a wooden stand (La région centrale) or on the floor (55 Years…). Standing is an option. But either way, one really feels the presence of one’s body as one tries to find comfort during the screenings (and live musical performance in the case of 55 Years…).

I am not an expert on experimental cinema. I have seen a fair amount, read a fair amount of literature about it, and also think about it (and occasionally write about experimental aspects of cinema that is otherwise not so overtly non-narrative as these two films).

I am driven to write about these back-to-back experiences, though, not simply to expose my ignorance of the subject (I can’t imagine that I shall say much that others have not written – or certainly thought – in relation to these films), but to convey some thoughts that I had while watching the films. Perhaps that is, after all, one of the things that a blog can do.

To get to my thoughts, though, we must describe what happens in the films. As I have already hinted, ‘not much happens’ from the perspective of someone looking for a film that tells a story. La région centrale features images captured by the camera as it moves round and round, back and forth, spinning upside down, moving in circles in all sorts of directions and more.

55 Years…, meanwhile, features a deep electric bass line (performed on this occasion by Dominic Lash), accompanied by violin (Angharad Davies) and long string drone (Rhys Chatham). At first one projector, then two, then three, then four fill the wide screen with the flickering lines, before all four projectors slowly begin to converge, their images overlapping, and then are turned off one by one, until only one flickering image remains.

Probably sounds pointless, maybe even dull, right – especially if one lasts 180 minutes and the other 90?

I do not think so. Indeed, quite the opposite.

The Snow experience induced in me so many different thoughts, which perhaps have at their core a sense of seeing the Earth as if through the eyes of an alien. Initially surveying the ground, the camera then begins to rotate in such ways that we are consistently being given new perspectives on our world – toying with it, twisting it, turning it, experimenting with it.

As María Palacios Cruz explained in her introduction, Snow deliberately tried to find a spot in his native Canada where no visible trace of human life could be seen (something that might recall my earlier post about the ‘American eye’ in relation to Le corbeau). In other words, he absolutely wants us to see the world from an inhuman perspective; to see the world ‘for itself.’

In the process, we begin to understand how as humans we often do not see the world ‘for itself’ but how it is ‘for us’ (and this is not necessarily a bad thing; we are driven to live and survive by our selfish genes, after all). By getting us to see the world ‘for itself,’ the world itself is made ‘alien’ to us, or we see the world as if through alien eyes. The film becomes a panoply of different ways to look at the world through the insistent movement of the camera – with the non-stop nature of that camera movement also bringing to mind the way in which our relatively static perspective of the world is perhaps key in bringing about our inability to see the world ‘for itself.’

For, the world is also movement – but generally we do not have eyes to see it. The rhythms of the world are perhaps too slow for us to detect. What Snow’s film does, then, is to bring to mind those rhythms. Not just Snow’s film, but by extension cinema as a whole is thus in part a machine to present to us something like ‘deep time’ – the long, slow rhythms of the world that extend further back than we can remember and further into the future than we can imagine (in other words, a world without humans). Perhaps this is why a narrative classic like Vertigo is also chosen to play in part alongside Snow’s film.

If Snow’s film takes us into the realm of planetary time, Conrad’s film takes us (or me, at least) into the realm of universal time.

Using black and whites strips alone, Conrad takes us into a realm whereby I am confronted not just with a world that exists far beyond the human realm, but with the way in which the world – the universe itself – comes into and out of being. If the world pre-existed humans by billions of years, and if it will outlive humans by billions of years (La région centrale), then Conrad’s film tells us that the universe pre-existed the world by trillions of years, and will continue to exist after the world has gone by trillions of years. (It exists beyond time itself, and beyond measure. Again, language becomes meaningless.)

More than this… 55 Years on the Infinite Plain tells us – in its flickering of white, or being, and black, or nothing – that existence itself comes into and out of being. That there is a beyond existence; that there is a beyond being; that there is a beyond ‘is’ – such that one cannot even express what we are describing since to say that ‘there is a beyond “is”‘ is clearly a contradiction in terms (how can not-is and is co-exist?)!

If language cannot suffice for the task of explaining what we see, then we enter into the realm of experience and of a new, different kind of thought (that also cannot be defined simply by what we ‘see,’ since it must be experienced, too).

What is the universe? But simply a flicker of light in an otherwise infinite blackness.

If 55 Years… takes us somehow beyond the universe, then it takes us into a realm not of a singular reality (a uni-verse), but into the realm of multiple realities. An alien perspective, or what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and physicist Aurélien Barrau might suggest is the necessary understanding that there is no world, but only multiple, infinite worlds.

As per the translation of their book on the matter: what is these worlds coming to? What these worlds is coming to (note the grammatical error; again, language does not quite suffice) is the co-existence of existence and non-existence. To invoke a different philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, being and nothingness at the same time.

Am I being pretentious? Possibly. I mean, people walked out of both screenings – and so clearly not everyone goes with these films. But at the end of 55 Years… the remaining audience members (perhaps as many as 100 people) sat in silence and darkness for about a minute. Finally, some applause – enthusiastic applause, some whoops of joy. Clearly they needed a moment to catch their thoughts, because this film had taken them somewhere different, somewhere special.

In other words, if to someone who was not there this all sounds like wank, to the majority of people who were there, this meant something – even if expressing it is and perhaps remains difficult. “That was absolutely fucking amazing,” said the woman sat next to me. I felt like dancing (and did nearly throughout 55 Years… – although I refrained from doing so).

Elsewhere I have written about how Hollywood presents to us narrative films that, even if they contain ‘puzzles’ for us to work out (my example is Inception, Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2010), they are still designed to be easy to consume and, by extension, not particularly challenging. I then suggest that films that do not involve narratives (my example is Five Dedicated to Ozu, Iran/Japan/France, 2003, by the late Abbas Kiarostami) can be quite challenging, even if there is no specific puzzle to work out – as we just see images of waves lapping the shore, or ducks walking along a beach, or a pond at night.

My argument in that essay is that common responses to Five… might include either ‘I got it after two minutes, so I do not know why I had to sit through that’ or ‘I did not get it’ – while people might easily say that they ‘got’ Inception (even though it is more than twice the length of Five…).

I suggest that there is not so much anything to ‘get’ with Five… (or Inception, or Vertigo – as its inclusion by Lucy Raven in her programme makes clear), but that one might ‘get into’ that sort of film by working at being an attentive audience member and beginning to marvel at what a wave lapping against the shore is and might mean (is it not a miracle that this happens?) as opposed only to marvelling at special effects and ‘mind-bending ideas’ (even though the leaders of the two largest energy companies in the world sit next to each other on an aeroplane and do not recognise each other).

(Besides which, whenever one says that one ‘got’ such a film after two minutes, they clearly do not ‘get’ it since part of getting it must involve experiencing the film in its entire duration, including the sense of slowness, and the different time or tempo of the piece. To demand that it be shorter is not to respect this otherness, but to apply one’s own rhythm to it, to curtail it, perhaps even to kill it.)

(Speaking of marvelling, I also found myself marvelling during 55 Years… about the fact that I can rotate my head. How is it possible that a human evolved from the mud of a planet that itself was a rock spewed from a star, such that it has a head that can rotate on a joint that sits atop a backbone and which contains eyes that can see and ears that can hear?)

To return from these loco parentheses: I make reference to my own essay not simply to continue to explain to a(n imagined?) ‘viewer-on-the-street’ that these non-narrative films might do something for us (and that thus people who might otherwise never go to watch such films might do worse than to give them a try), but also to correct what I wrote in that essay.

In that essay, I wrote that we might ‘get into’ films like Five Dedicated to Ozu by putting in some effort ourselves (rather than having nigh everything served up to us on a plate, as per Inception). However, now I think it would be better to suggest that we do not ‘get into’ but that we ‘get with’ such films (which is not necessarily to the exclusion of ‘getting with’ mainstream films; I believe that we can get with cinema as a whole – but don’t think that we should only get with the mainstream at the expense of the weird and the wonderful).

Why do I now want to say that we should ‘get with’ as opposed to ‘get into’ these films?

Well, in part this is to explain that getting a bit ‘pretentious’ (talking about cosmic things like a world without humans and a multiverse that exists and does not) is to get with what these films are doing, or at the very least what these films can do with us (it might also be an act of love if we were to say that we ‘go with’ these films – since coitus itself means to go with [co-itus] – as I have suggested here).

Furthermore, the preposition ‘with’ (a favourite of Jean-Luc Nancy) suggests not quite a disconnection from the world (seeing it through alien eyes), but also a connection with the world (seeing it ‘for itself’ – or from the perspective of a world that has seen so much more than humans and a multiverse that has seen so much more than our world).

Seeing through the eyes of the other, a kind of forgetting oneself, is also to commune with another – and in this case not just another human, but a whole other timescale (the entirety of existence) and space scale (a planet, a universe – as well, in the case of La région centrale when it shows us the land beneath the camera in close up, a rock, a patch of earth, a blade of grass). ‘With’ is to go beyond the self, to open the self up not only to the other human, but in the cases of La région centrale and 55 Years on the Infinite Plain, the inhuman.

Furthermore, ‘with’ always implies plurality, or a multiplicity of things and perspectives. For, one cannot be with anything or anyone if there is no thing or one beyond the self with which to be. With, therefore, suggests that we live in a multiverse, and that what these worlds is coming to is perhaps us, our understanding of the multiverse, and our place with it.

(The Conrad also suggests with in other ways – particularly the way in which my eyes when they move from left to right can make the flickers seem as though moving in that direction – before then moving in the other direction as my eyes move from right to left… That is, I am with the film in the sense that I co-create what I see; I see not just a different perspective, but a different perspective with my own eyes; I am entangled with the multiverse. This might seem to contradict the idea that I get beyond myself – but what perhaps really is exposed is not just the world beyond the self, but also the relationship between that world beyond self, and the self itself. What is exposed or revealed is our withness – and how the otherness of that with which we are is necessary for me even to exist and to have my sense of self/my perspective in the first place.)

I wish to end, then, by suggesting that these films do not just put us with the universe or multiverse. They put us with the medium of cinema, too, which opens us up to these new perspectives. I hear the 16mm projector rattle along during La région centrale, and I turn to see the projectors during 55 Years…. The experience of these two films is, then, to be with media, to be co-media, to be comedy.

What we can experience during these films is thus the comedy of the multiverse. When we find such films frustrating, we are perhaps taking them far too seriously (I personally found myself laughing regularly during both films as I marvelled at the possibility of anything existing at all). When we are serious, it is because we are rigid in our ways, in our thinking, and we are resistant to change. We do not become, we are not coming to, we are not with (perhaps we are solipsistically dreaming, a state of unconsciousness from which we can recover only by ‘coming to’).

To be less serious, to enjoy the comedy: this is not only a route to laughter and thus by extension happiness – it is perhaps also a route via with to wisdom (to be ‘other-wise’).

Long live experimental cinema. When screenings like these come along, I can only recommend one thing: get with it.

Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, USA, 2016)

American cinema, Blogpost, Uncategorized

Only some brief notes, including **spoilers**, owing to a lack of time…

Arrival tells the story of linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) who, with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), is charged with establishing contact with aliens who have arrived on Earth.

Banks opens the film by asking a question to her class about Portuguese – why is it so strangely spoken given the location of that country? In Portuguese, it is common to refer to another human being as a cara, which literally means ‘face,’ although it also has a sense of ‘dear’. In other words, all humans have a face, and all humans are dear – no matter where they come from, who they are, or how long they live.

When Banks et al approach the aliens, spatial orientation is warped: sideways is upside down is the right way up. The aliens appear from behind a giant white screen, clearly of the dimensions of the contemporary widescreen cinema screen. That Banks and Donnelly are really talking to cinema is made clear by the fact that Donnelly dubs the two aliens whom they encounter Abbott and Costello: they are really just cinema talking back to humans.

The language of the aliens demonstrates a nonlinear conception of time: the aliens (shades of the Tralfamadorians from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five) perceive all time at once. It is perceiving all of time at once that Banks will learn is the key to understanding the aliens who, as per Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2014), are basically here to help us.

The aliens are here to help us by giving to us their language, or rather their understanding of time.

In a world in which linear time becomes ‘meaningless,’ the distinction between life and death also becomes meaningless. That is, we know that we will die – and in the case of Banks, this means knowing that her future daughter will die of a rare disease and that she can do nothing about it.

Nonetheless, what Banks learns is to embrace this destiny and to give life to her daughter (although this will lead to a split between her and the daughter’s father, who will be Donnelly). Why? Because while we might fear death, it is worse that we should fear life, no matter how transient.

However, there are further extrapolations to make here.

When the spaceships leave, they in effect disappear, or dematerialise.

It is as if the aliens simply flip into the dimension of reality with which humans are most familiar, only to flip out again.

What this tells us, beyond the life that is Banks’ daughter, is that all matter – perhaps including all antimatter (that which exists, but not in the human dimension) is alive, or has the potential for life. All matter has a face. All matter is a cara. All matter is dear.

There is confusion in the film regarding the use of the word weapon. Might it really mean tool? Might it mean something else?

It is disclosed that the weapon that the aliens give to humans is their language, their nonlinear conception of time, which, in allowing humans to see life everywhere in principle brings about world peace.

Why does it do this?

It does this because in recognising that all matter is alive, in recognising that everything is dear, or has value, then it becomes the role of humans all to become woman, or more pertinently to become mother. A literal mother in Banks’ case. But a mother to all matter. To nurture the world and the universe by extension. To take care/cara of the world.

Where humanity has gone wrong is precisely in the concept of the weapon. For, while the give to us a language, it might be that this language is a weapon. However, what this ‘weapon’ really is, is a gift.

This is important for Banks. Because while we hear about/see the traumatic (future) loss of her daughter, she is also working through the fact that some Farsi translations that she did for the US government led to the deaths of various people – as she off-handedly remarks to Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) at her point of recruitment.

In other words (not unlike Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman, who is working through the deaths of various people whose schemes he exposed in The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974), Banks is dealing with the trauma of having used language as a weapon and not as a gift. Or, put differently, of using information as a weapon, rather than realising information as a gift.

When information is a weapon, then only some things are dear/cara/have a face, and the rest is discardable, expendable, can be killed. When information is understood as a gift, then we can come to see not that some things are dear, but that all things are dear – that value is evenly spread across the universe and across time, including the virtual time of when matter spins out into antimatter/different dimensions, before spinning back into the material world of the human dimension. Everything has a face.

So… if the aliens are really cinema, then what Arrival suggests is that cinema’s chief gift is to show us universal life and universal time, even the time of the virtual (that which does not exist, parallel dimensions and so on). Cinema is alien. Cinema is intelligent. Cinema is alive. Linear time is an illusion. Is is an illusion. The becoming of the universe is life.

Adventures in Cinema 2015

African cinema, American cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Canadian cinema, Chinese cinema, Documentary, European cinema, Film education, Film reviews, French Cinema, Iranian cinema, Italian Cinema, Japanese Cinema, Latin American cinema, Philippine cinema, Ritzy introductions, Transnational Cinema, Ukrainian Cinema, Uncategorized

There’ll be some stories below, so this is not just dry analysis of films I saw this year. But it is that, too. Sorry if this is boring. But you can go by the section headings to see if any of this post is of interest to you.

The Basics
In 2015, I saw 336 films for the first time. There is a complete list at the bottom of this blog. Some might provoke surprise, begging for example how I had not seen those films (in their entirety) before – Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, France/UK, 1985) being perhaps the main case in point. But there we go. One sees films (in their entirety – I’d seen bits of Shoah before) when and as one can…

Of the 336 films, I saw:-

181 in the cinema (6 in 3D)

98 online (mainly on MUBI, with some on YouTube, DAFilms and other sites)

36 on DVD/file

20 on aeroplanes

1 on TV

Films I liked
I am going to mention here new films, mainly those seen at the cinema – but some of which I saw online for various reasons (e.g. when sent an online screener for the purposes of reviewing or doing an introduction to that film, generally at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton, London).

And then I’ll mention some old films that I enjoyed – but this time only at the cinema.

Here’s my Top 11 (vaguely in order)

Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, France/Germany/Switzerland, 2014)
El Botón de nácar/The Pearl Button (Patricio Guzmán, France/Spain/Chile/Switzerland, 2015)
Eisenstein in Guanajuato (Peter Greenaway, Netherlands/Mexico/Finland/Belgium/France, 2015)
Bande de filles/Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, France, 2014)
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, France/Mauritania, 2014)
Saul fia/Son of Saul (László Nemes, Hungary, 2015)
45 Years (Andrew Haigh, UK, 2015)
Force majeure/Turist (Ruben Östlund, Sweden/France/Norway/Denmark, 2014)
The Thoughts Once We Had (Thom Andersen, USA, 2015)
Phoenix (Christian Petzold, Germany/Poland, 2014)
Mommy (Xavier Dolan, Canada, 2014)

And here are some proxime accessunt (in no particular order):-

Enemy (Denis Villeneuve, Canada/Spain/France, 2013); Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, USA, 2014); Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2014); Jupiter Ascending (Andy and Lana Wachowski, USA/Australia, 2015); The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, UK/Hungary, 2014); Catch Me Daddy (Daniel Wolfe, UK, 2014); White God/Fehér isten (Kornél Mundruczó, Hungary/Germany/Sweden, 2014); Dear White People (Justin Simien, USA, 2014); The Falling (Carol Morley, UK, 2014); The Tribe/Plemya (Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, Ukraine/Netherlands, 2014); Set Fire to the Stars (Andy Goddard, UK, 2014); Spy (Paul Feig, USA, 2015); Black Coal, Thin Ice/Bai ri yan huo (Yiao Dinan, China, 2014); Listen Up, Philip (Alex Ross Perry, USA/Greece, 2014); Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs, USA, 2015); The New Hope (William Brown, UK, 2015); The Overnight (Patrick Brice, USA, 2015); Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse/My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2015); Manglehorn (David Gordon Green, USA, 2014); Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, USA, 2015); Hard to be a God/Trudno byt bogom (Aleksey German, Russia, 2013); Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, USA, 2015); Trainwreck (Judd Apatow, USA, 2015); Mistress America (Noah Baumbach, USA/Brazil, 2015); While We’re Young (Noah Baumbach, USA, 2014); Marfa Girl (Larry Clark, USA, 2012); La Sapienza (Eugène Green, France/Italy, 2014); La última película (Raya Martin and Mark Peranson, Mexico/Denmark/Canada/Philippines/Greece, 2013); Lake Los Angeles (Mike Ott, USA/Greece, 2014); Pasolini (Abel Ferrara, France/Belgium/Italy, 2014); Taxi Tehran/Taxi (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2015); No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 2015); Dope (Rick Famuyiwa, USA, 2015); Umimachi Diary/Our Little Sister (Kore-eda Hirokazu, Japan, 2015); Tangerine (Sean Baker, USA, 2015); Carol (Todd Haynes, UK/USA, 2015); Joy (David O. Russell, USA, 2015); PK (Rajkumar Hirani, India, 2014); Eastern Boys (Robin Campillo, France, 2013); Selma (Ava DuVernay, UK/USA, 2014); The Dark Horse (James Napier Robertson, New Zealand, 2014); Hippocrate/Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor (Thomas Lilti, France, 2014); 99 Homes (Ramin Bahrani, USA, 2014).

Note that there are some quite big films in the above; I think the latest Mission: Impossible topped James Bond and the other franchises in 2015 – maybe because McQuarrie is such a gifted writer. Spy was for me a very funny film. I am still reeling from Cliff Curtis’ performance in The Dark Horse. Most people likely will think Jupiter Ascending crap; I think the Wachowskis continue to have a ‘queer’ sensibility that makes their work always pretty interesting. And yes, I did put one of my own films in that list. The New Hope is the best Star Wars-themed film to have come out in 2015 – although I did enjoy the J.J. Abrams film quite a lot (but have not listed it above since it’s had enough attention).

Without wishing intentionally to separate them off from the fiction films, nonetheless here are some documentaries/essay-films that I similarly enjoyed at the cinema this year:-

The Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, USA, 2015); National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman, France/USA/UK, 2014); Life May Be (Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari, UK/Iran, 2014); Detropia (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, USA, 2012); Storm Children: Book One/Mga anak ng unos (Lav Diaz, Philippines, 2014); We Are Many (Amir Amirani, UK, 2014); The Salt of the Earth (Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, France/Brazil/Italy, 2014).

And here are my highlights of old films that I managed to catch at the cinema and loved immensely:-

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis/Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini (Vittorio de Sica, Italy/West Germany, 1970); Il Gattopardo/The Leopard (Lucchino Visconti, Italy/France, 1963); Images of the World and the Inscriptions of War/Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Harun Farocki, West Germany, 1989); A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, USA, 1974).

With two films, Michael Fassbender does not fare too well in the below list – although that most of them are British makes me suspect that the films named feature because I have a more vested stake in them, hence my greater sense of disappointment. So, here are a few films that got some hoo-ha from critics and in the media and which I ‘just didn’t get’ (which is not far from saying that I did not particularly like them):-

La Giovinezza/Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy/France/Switzerland/UK, 2015), Sunset Song (Terence Davies, UK/Luxembourg, 2015); Macbeth (Justin Kurzel, UK/France/USA, 2015); Love & Mercy (Bill Pohlad, USA, 2014); Slow West (John Maclean, UK/New Zealand, 2015); Tale of Tales/Il racconto dei racconti (Matteo Garrone, Italy/France/UK, 2015); Amy (Asif Kapadia, UK/USA, 2015).

And even though many of these feature actors that I really like, and a few are made by directors whom I generally like, here are some films that in 2015 I kind of actively disliked (which I never really like admitting):-

Hinterland (Harry Macqueen, UK, 2015); Fantastic Four (Josh Trank, USA/Germany/UK/Canada, 2015); Pixels (Chris Columbus, USA/China/Canada, 2015); Irrational Man (Woody Allen, USA, 2015); Aloha (Cameron Crowe, USA, 2015); Point Break 3D (Ericson Core, Germany/China/USA, 2015); American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2014); Every Thing Will Be Fine 3D (Wim Wenders, Germany/Canada/France/Sweden/Norway, 2015).

Every Thing Will Be Fine struck me as the most pointless 3D film I have yet seen – even though I think Wenders uses the form excellently when in documentary mode. The Point Break remake, meanwhile, did indeed break the point of its own making, rendering it a pointless break (and this in spite of liking Édgar Ramírez).

Where I saw the films
This bit isn’t going to be a list of cinemas where I saw films. Rather, I want simply to say that clearly my consumption of films online is increasing – with the absolute vast majority of these seen on subscription/payment websites (MUBI, DAFilms, YouTube). So really I just want to write a note about MUBI.

MUBI was great a couple of years ago; you could watch anything in their catalogue when you wanted to. Then they switched to showing only 30 films at a time, each for 30 days. And for the first year or so of this, the choice of films was a bit rubbish, in that it’d be stuff like Battleship Potemkin/Bronenosets Potemkin (Sergei M Eisenstein, USSR, 1925). Nothing against Potemkin; it’s a classic that everyone should watch. But it’s also a kind of ‘entry level’ movie for cinephiles, and, well, I’ve already seen it loads of times, and so while I continued to subscribe, MUBI sort of lost my interest.

However, this year I think that they have really picked up. They’ve regularly been showing stuff by Peter Tscherkassky, for example, while it is through MUBI that I have gotten to know the work of American artist Eric Baudelaire (his Letters to Max, France, 2014, is in particular worth seeing). Indeed, it is through Baudelaire that I also have come to discover more about Japanese revolutionary filmmaker Masao Adachi, also the subject of the Philippe Grandrieux film listed at the bottom and which I saw on DAFilms.

MUBI has even managed to get some premieres, screening London Film Festival choices like Parabellum (Lukas Valenta Rinner, Argentina/Austria/Uruguay, 2015) at the same time as the festival and before a theatrical release anywhere else, while also commissioning its own work, such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s documentary Junun (USA, 2015). It also is the only place to screen festival-winning films like Història de la meva mort/Story of my Death (Albert Serra, Spain/France/Romania, 2013) – which speaks as much of the sad state of UK theatrical distribution/exhibition (not enough people are interested in the film that won at the Locarno Film Festival for any distributors/exhibitors to touch it) as it does of how the online world is becoming a viable and real alternative distribution/exhibition venue. Getting films like these is making MUBI increasingly the best online site for art house movies.

That said, I have benefitted from travelling a lot this year and have seen what the MUBI selections are like in places as diverse as France, Italy, Hungary, Mexico, China, Canada and the USA. And I can quite happily say that the choice of films on MUBI in the UK is easily the worst out of every single one of these countries. Right now, for example, the majority of the films are pretty mainstream stuff that most film fans will have seen (not even obscure work by Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Jean-Luc Godard, Fritz Lang, Terry Gilliam, Robert Zemeckis, Frank Capra, Guy Ritchie, Steven Spielberg, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Wes Anderson). Indeed, these are all readily available on DVD. More unusual films like Foreign Parts (Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki, USA/France, 2010) are for me definitely the way for MUBI to go – even in a country that generally seems as unadventurous in its filmgoing as this one (the UK).

I’ve written in La Furia Umana about the changing landscape of London’s cinemas; no need to repeat myself (even though that essay is not available online, for which apologies). But I would like to say that while I have not been very good traditionally in going to Indian movies (which regularly get screened at VUE cinemas, for example), I have enjoyed how the Odeon Panton Street now regularly screens mainstream Chinese films. For this reason, I’ve seen relatively interesting fare such as Mr Six/Lao pao er (Hu Guan, China, 2015). In fact, the latter was the last film that I saw in 2015, and I watched it with maybe 100 Chinese audience members in the heart of London; that experience – when and how they laughed, the comings and goings, the chatter, the use of phones during the film – was as, if not more, interesting as/than the film itself.

Patterns
This bit is probably only a list of people whose work I have consistently seen this year, leading on from the Tscherkassky and Baudelaire mentions above. As per 2015, I continue to try to watch movies by Khavn de la Cruz and Giuseppe Andrews with some regularity – and the ones that I have caught in 2015 have caused as much enjoyment as their work did in 2014.

I was enchanted especially by the writing in Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up, Philip, and then I also managed to see Ross Perry acting in La última película, where he has a leading role with Gabino Rodríguez. This led me to Ross Perry’s earlier Color Wheel (USA, 2011), which is also well worth watching.

As for Rodríguez, he is also the star of the two Nicolás Pereda films that I managed to catch online this year, namely ¿Dónde están sus historias?/Where are their Stories? (Mexico/Canada, 2007) and Juntos/Together (Mexico/Canada, 2009). I am looking forward to seeing more Rodríguez and Pereda when I can.

To return to Listen Up, Philip, it does also feature a powerhouse performance from Jason Schwartzman, who also was very funny in 2015 in The Overnight. More Schwartzman, please.

Noah Baumbach is also getting things out regularly, and I like Adam Driver. I think also that the ongoing and hopefully permanent trend of female-led comedies continues to yield immense pleasures (I am thinking of Spy, Mistress America, Trainwreck, as well as films like Appropriate Behaviour, Desiree Akhavan, UK, 2014, to lead on from last year’s Obvious Child, Gillian Robespierre, USA, 2014; I hope shortly to make good on having missed Sisters, Jason Moore, USA, 2015).

I don’t know if it’s just my perception, but films like Selma, Dear White People, Dope and more also seem to suggest a welcome and hopefully permanent increase in films dealing with issues of race in engaging and smart ways. It’s a shame that Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (USA, 2015) may take some time to get over here. I am intrigued by Creed (Ryan Coogler, USA, 2015). I was disappointed that Top Five (Chris Rock, USA, 2014) only got a really limited UK release, too. Another one that I missed and would like to have seen.

Matt Damon is the rich man’s Jesse Plemons.

Finally, I’ve been managing to watch more and more of Agnès Varda and the late Chantal Akerman’s back catalogues. And they are both magical. I also watched a few Eric Rohmer and Yasujiro Ozu films this year, the former at the BFI Rohmer season in early 2015, the latter on YouTube (where the older films can roam copyright free).

Michael Kohler
During a visit to Hartlepool in 2015 to see my good friend Jenni Yuill, she handed me a letter that she had found in a first edition of a Christopher Isherwood novel. She had given the novel to a friend, but kept the letter. The letter was written by someone called Michael and to a woman who clearly had been some kind of mentor to him.

In the letter, Michael described some filmmaking that he had done. And from the description – large scale props and the like – this did not seem to be a zero-budget film of the kind that I make, but rather an expensive film.

After some online research, I discovered that the filmmaker in question was/is British experimental filmmaker Michael Kohler, some of whose films screened at the London Film Festival and other places in the 1970s through the early 1990s.

I tracked Michael down to his home in Scotland – and since then we have spoken on the phone, met in person a couple of times, and he has graciously sent me copies of two of his feature films, Cabiri and The Experiencer (neither of which has IMDb listings).

Both are extraordinary and fascinating works, clearly influenced by psychoanalytic and esoteric ideas, with strange rituals, dances, symbolism, connections with the elements and so on.

Furthermore, Michael Kohler is an exceedingly decent man, who made Cabiri over the course of living with the Samburu people in Kenya for a decade or so (he also made theatre in the communes of Berlin in the 1960s, if my recall is good). He continues to spend roughly half of his time with the Samburu in Kenya.

He is perhaps a subject worthy of a portrait film himself. Maybe one day I shall get to make it.

And beyond cinema
I just want briefly to say how one of the most affecting things that I think I saw this year was a photograph of Pier Paolo Pasolini playing football – placed on Facebook by Girish Shambu or someone of that ilk (a real cinephile who makes me feel like an impostor).

Here’s the photo:

I mention this simply because I see in the image some real joy on PPP’s part. I often feel bad for being who I am, and believe that my frailties, which are deep and many, simply anger people. (By frailties, I perhaps more meaningfully could say tendencies that run contrary to mainstream thinking and behaviours – not that I am a massive rebel or anything.) And because these tendencies run contrary to mainstream thinking and behaviours, I tend to feel bad about myself, worried that others will dislike me.

(What is more, my job does not help. I often feel that the academic industry is not so much about the exchange of ideas as an excuse for people to bully each other, or at least to make them feel bad for not being good enough as a human being as we get rated on absolutely everything that we do – in the name of a self-proclaimed and fallacious appeal to an absence of partiality.)

I can’t quite put it in words. But – with Ferrara’s Pasolini film and my thoughts of his life and work also in my mind alongside this image – this photo kind of makes me feel that it’s okay for me to be myself. Pasolini met a terrible fate, but he lived as he did and played football with joy. And people remember him fondly now. And so if I cannot be as good a cinephile or scholar as Girish Shambu and if no one wants to hear my thoughts or watch my films, and if who I am angers some people, we can still take pleasure in taking part, in playing – like Pasolini playing football. And – narcissistic thought though this is – maybe people will smile when thinking about me when I’m dead. Even writing this (I think about the possibility of people remembering me after I am dead; I compare myself to the great Pier Paolo Pasolini) doesn’t make me seem that good a person (I am vain, narcissistic, delusional); but I try to be honest.

And, finally, I’d like to note that while I do include in the list below some short films, I do not include in this list some very real films that have brought me immense joy over the past year, in particular ones from friends: videos from a wedding by Andrew Slater, David H. Fleming cycling around Ningbo in China, videos of my niece Ariadne by my sister Alexandra Bullen.

In a lot of ways, these, too, are among my films of the year, only they don’t have a name, their authors are not well known, and they circulate to single-figure audiences on WhatsApp, or perhaps a few more on Facebook. And yet for me such films (like the cat films of which I also am fond – including ones of kitties like Mia and Mieke, who own Anna Backman Rogers and Leshu Torchin respectively) are very much equally a part of my/the contemporary cinema ecology. I’d like to find a way more officially to recognise this – to put Mira Fleming testing out the tuktuk with Phaedra and Dave and Annette Encounters a Cat on Chelverton Road on the list alongside Clouds of Sils Maria. This would explode list-making entirely. But that also sounds like a lot of fun.

Here’s to a wonderful 2016!

COMPLETE LIST OF FILMS I SAW FOR THE FIRST TIME 2015

KEY: no marking = saw at cinema; ^ = saw on DVD/file; * = saw online/streaming; + = saw on an aeroplane; ” = saw on TV.

Paddington
The Theory of Everything
Le signe du lion (Rohmer)
Exodus: Gods and Kings
Enemy
Au bonheur des dames (Duvivier)
Il Gattopardo
Daybreak/Aurora (Adolfo Alix Jr)^
Eastern Boys
The Masseur (Brillante Mendoza)^
Stations of the Cross
Foxcatcher
National Gallery
Whiplash
American Sniper
Minoes
Fay Grim^
Tak3n
Tokyo Chorus (Ozu)*
Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza)^
Wild (Jean-Marc Vallée)
La prochaine fois je viserai le coeur
Pressure (Horace Ové)
La Maison de la Radio
L’amour, l’après-midi (Rohmer)
The Boxtrolls^
A Most Violent Year
The Middle Mystery of Kristo Negro (Khavn)*
Ex Machina
Die Marquise von O… (Rohmer)
An Inn in Tokyo (Ozu)*
Big Hero 6
Images of the World and The Inscriptions of War (Farocki)
Corta (Felipe Guerrero)*
Le bel indifférent (Demy)*
Passing Fancy (Ozu)*
Inherent Vice
Mommy (Dolan)
Quality Street (George Stevens)
Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune (Rohmer)
Jupiter Ascending
Amour Fou (Hausner)
Selma
Shoah*
Fuck Cinema^
Bitter Lake (Adam Curtis)*
Broken Circle Breakdown^
We Are Many
Duke of Burgundy
Love is Strange
Chuquiago (Antonio Eguino)*
The American Friend*
Set Fire to the Stars
Catch Me Daddy
Blackhat
Hinterland
Two Rode Together
Patas Arriba
Relatos salvajes
Clouds of Sils Maria
Still Alice
The Experiencer (Michael Kohler)^
Cabiri (Michael Kohler)^
CHAPPiE
White Bird in a Blizzard*
Hockney”
Love and Bruises (Lou Ye)*
Coal Money (Wang Bing)*
Kommander Kulas (Khavn)*
The Tales of Hoffmann
Entreatos (João Moreira Salles)^
White God
Insiang (Lino Brocka)*
5000 Feet is Best (Omer Fast)*
Bona (Lino Brocka)*
Difret
Aimer, boire et chanter
May I Kill U?^
Bande de filles
Appropriate Behavior
The Golden Era (Ann Hui)+
Gemma Bovery+
A Hard Day’s Night+
The Divergent Series: Insurgent
De Mayerling à Sarajevo (Max Ophüls)
Marfa Girl
When We’re Young
Timbuktu (Sissako)
La Sapienza (Eugène Green)
Enthiran^
Serena (Susanne Bier)+
22 Jump Street+
Undertow (David Gordon Green)*
Delirious (DiCillo)*
Face of an Angel
Cobain: Montage of Heck
Wolfsburg (Petzold)
The Thoughts Once We Had
El Bruto (Buñuel)*
Marriage Italian-Style (de Sica)*
Force majeure
Workingman’s Death*
The Salvation (Levring)
Glassland
The Emperor’s New Clothes (Winterbottom)
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Life May Be (Cousins/Akbari)
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
The Falling (Carol Morley)
Far From the Madding Crowd (Vinterberg)
Cutie and the Boxer^
Samba (Toledano and Nakache)
Mondomanila, Or How I Fixed My Hair After Rather A Long Journey*^
Phoenix (Petzold)
Cut out the Eyes (Xu Tong)
Producing Criticizing Xu Tong (Wu Haohao)
Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa)^
Accidental Love (David O Russell)*
The Tribe
Unveil the Truth II: State Apparatus
Mad Max: Fury Road 3D
Abcinema (Giuseppe Bertucelli)
Tale of Tales (Garrone)
Tomorrowland: A World Beyond
Coming Attractions (Tscherrkassky)*
Les dites cariatides (Varda)*
Une amie nouvelle (Ozon)
Ashes (Weerasethakul)*
Jeunesse dorée (Ghorab-Volta)^
La French
Inch’allah Dimanche (Benguigui)
San Andreas
Regarding Susan Sontag
Pelo Malo*
The Second Game (Porumboiu)^
Dear White People*
Spy (Paul Feig)
L’anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi et 27 années sans images*
Punishment Park*
Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto (Miguel Gomes)*
Black Coal, Thin Ice
Listen Up, Philip
Future, My Love*
Lions Love… and Lies (Varda)*
De l’autre côté (Akerman)
Les Combattants
London Road
West (Christian Schwochow)
Don Jon*
Mr Holmes
The Dark Horse*
Slow West
El coraje del pueblo (Sanjinés)^
Scénario du Film ‘Passion’ (Godard)*
Filming ‘Othello’ (Welles)*
Here Be Dragons (Cousins)*
Lake Los Angeles (Ott)*
Amy (Kapadia)
Magic Mike XXL
Hippocrate
It’s All True
I Clowns*
The New Hope
The Overnight
Sur un air de Charleston (Renoir)*
Le sang des bêtes (Franju)*
Chop Shop (Bahrani)*
Plastic Bag (Bahrani)*
Love & Mercy
Terminator Genisys 3D
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
The Salt of the Earth (Wenders/Salgado)
Mondo Trasho*
Le Meraviglie
True Story
Eden (Hansen-Love)
A Woman Under the Influence
River of No Return (Preminger)
Love (Noé)
Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse
Ant-Man 3D
Today and Tomorrow (Huilong Yang)
Inside Out
Pixels
Fantastic Four
99 Homes
Iris (Albert Maysles)
52 Tuesdays*
La isla mínima
Manglehorn
Diary of a Teenage Girl
Sciuscià (Ragazzi)
Hard to be a God
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Trainwreck
Mistress America
Precinct Seven Five
Theeb
The Wolfpack
The President (Makhmalbaf)
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
45 Years
Straight Outta Compton
Osuofia in London*
Osuofia in London 2*
Idol (Khavn)*
Diary (Giuseppe Andrews)^
American Ultra*
La última película (Martin/Peranson)*
Pasolini (Ferrara)*
Les Chants de Mandrin^
Odete (João Pedro Rodrigues)*
Hermanas (Julia Solomonoff)*
Taxi Tehran (Panahi)*
Mystery (Lou Ye)^
Lecciones para Zafirah*
Ulysse (Varda)*
Excitement Class: Love Techniques (Noboru Tanaka)*
Speak (Jessica Sharzer)*
Image of a Bound Girl (Masaru Konuma)*
The Color Wheel*
Jimmy’s Hall*
Shotgun Stories*
El color de los olivos*
Discopathe*
Fando y Lis*
La Giovinezza
Aloha+
The Lego Movie+
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone+
Ruby Sparks+
Eadweard
Detropia
Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (Johnnie To)+
La loi du marché+
OSS117: Rio ne répond plus+
Self/Less+
Irrational Man
Junun*
Une heure de tranquillité (Patrice Leconte)
Sicario
The Lobster
Macbeth
Goodbye, Mr Loser
Fac(t)s of Life^
No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
Legend (Brian Helgeland)
Mia Madre (Moretti)
Mississippi Grind
Sangue del mio sangue (Bellocchio)
Botón de nácar (Guzmán)
Storm Children, Book 1 (Lav Diaz)
Dope
Umimachi Diary (Hirokazu)
Dheepan
Lamb (Ethiopia)
Saul fia
Ceremony of Splendours
Parabellum*
[sic] (Eric Baudelaire)*
The Makes (Eric Baudelaire)*
The Martian
Everest
Anime Nere
Suffragette
Crimson Peak
The Lady in the Van
Steve Jobs
Tangerine
Manufraktur (Tscherrkasky)*
Lancaster, CA (Mike Ott)*
The Ugly One (Eric Baudelaire)*
The Program (Stephen Frears)
Everything Will Be Fine 3D
Agha Yousef
The OBS – A Singapore Story
Eisenstein in Guanajuato
Letters to Max (Eric Baudelaire)*
SPECTRE
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2
My Lucky Stars (Sammo Hung)+
Dragons Forever (Sammo Hung and Corey Yuen)+
The Crossing: Part One (John Woo)+
John Wick^
Junkopia (Chris Marker)*
The Reluctant Revolutionary*
How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?*
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga^
The Shaft (Chi Zhang)^
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974*
Um lugar ao sol (Gabriel Mascaro)*
The Story of My Death (Albert Serra)*
Juntos (Nicolás Pereda)*
¿Dónde están sus historias? (Nicolás Pereda)*
Golden Embers (Giuseppe Andrews)^
Cartel Land^
Outer Space (Tscherkassky)*
L’Arrivée (Tscherkassky)*
It Follows*
At Sundance (Michael Almereyda)^
Aliens (Michael Almereyda)^
Woman on Fire Looks for Water*
Fantasma (Lisandro Alonso)*
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation*
Coraline^
Adela (Adolfo Alix Jr)*
Point Break 3D
Another Girl Another Planet (Michael Almereyda)^
The Rocking Horse Winner (Michael Almereyda)^
Foreign Parts (Paravel and Sniadecki)*
Star Wars Uncut*
Warrior (Gavin O’Connor)*
Evolution of a Filipino Family^
Lumumba: La mort du Prophète^
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner^
PK+
L’échappée belle+
Legend of the Dragon (Danny Lee/Lik-Chi Lee)+
Magnificent Scoundrels (Lik-Chi Lee)+
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens 3D
Devil’s Knot (Egoyan)^
Anatomy of a Murder*
Two Lovers^
Elsa la rose (Varda)*
My Winnipeg*
Carol
Joy
Surprise: Journey to the West
Grandma
Mur Murs (Varda)*
In the Heart of the Sea
Sunset Song
Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution: Masao Adachi (Grandrieux)*
Black Mass
Mr Six

Spectre (Sam Mendes, UK/USA, 2015)

American cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, Uncategorized

Spoilers. And it’s long. Sorry.

The plot of Spectre is that James Bond (Daniel Craig) uncovers a secret society, Spectre, which is basically in charge of all world crime and terrorism, and which also has at its core a plot to develop a total surveillance society.

In some senses, the film is about information and quantification, against which it pitches memory and emotions.

For, if quantification is about measuring and thus giving to everything an extension/measurement, then memory is about quality and the irreplaceable intensity of experience (intensity, not extension).

The film is a fantasy, as marked in several moments in the film. It is also in some senses the last James Bond film, though Bond will almost certainly ‘return’ – as the end credits habitually announce.

Starting with the more mundane fantasy aspects, we can then build up to what I consider to be the more meaningful ones. We have:-

1. In the opening sequence, Bond attacks a helicopter pilot, who might well be an accomplice to the escaping Marco Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona), but who at this point in the film is – as far as audience members are concerned – just a helicopter pilot. He does later attack Bond. But since he is in the helicopter above a massive crowd of Mexicans celebrating the Day of the Dead, clearly Bond is not particularly concerned about innocent lives.

2. After inadvertently blowing up a building by shooting a bomb, Bond finds himself in a crumbling building. He slides down a collapsed floor, and then leaps on to a ledge – the remains of an already collapsed storey. The ledge collapses and Bond lands… on a sofa. The moment is funny, but also nonsensical; what happened to the collapsed ledge? why is the sofa not covered in the concrete that fell before Bond?

Perhaps correctly, one might already be thinking: this guy is taking this film too seriously. But these are already early signs that the whole of Spectre might be Bond’s fantasy. This is also signalled by the fact that helicopters, a collapsing building, and the motif of falling through a collapsing building all recur at the film’s climax. That is, the circular structure of the film not only signals ‘good storytelling,’ but its ‘neatness’ also potentially signals that ‘none of this is real.’ Or certainly, not realistic; who can have this sort of luck – both bad (the same things happen over and over again; the same things return) and good (the sofa, the final safety net).

Onwards…

3. Bond is involved in a car chase in Rome. At one point he finds himself stuck in a narrow alleyway behind an old guy in a small car past which he cannot drive. This gives evil henchman Mr Hinx (Dave Bautista) a chance to catch him up, but ingenious as ever Bond simply uses his Aston Martin DB10 to push the old guy out of the way. But don’t worry – the old guy safely manages to come to a halt, only lightly boffing a bollard before his airbag punches him in the face.

A funny moment, except for two things, one of which we shall return to. Firstly, while stuck behind and/or pushing the old man’s car, we see Bond drive past at least two crossroads, down which he easily could have turned in order more successfully to flee Hinx. In other words, logic be damned for the sake of a good spectacle. Or rather, this is still all Bond’s fantasy.

Secondly, the film takes care to emphasise the fact that this old white Italian man survives Bond’s antics. Not so the no doubt various Mexicans who perished in the destroyed building in Mexico, and various other collateral victims of Bond’s antics throughout the rest of the film. The film, which as Bond’s fantasy also means Bond himself, believes a white European to be worth saving. Not so much anyone from the Third World.

4. Bond goes to find old rival Mr White (Jesper Christensen). He finds him in the basement of a house in Austria, where he is sat watching various television screens featuring… news coverage of disasters. This is straight out of South Park, and simply goes to signal that White is ‘evil.’ Given that this is a film that takes care to show us Ernst Stavros Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) in espadrilles without socks and kissing a cat, why isn’t White making a cup of tea or something? Because this is a fantasy.

5. Personally, I also found ridiculous the white tie costume that Bond puts on for the dinner he has on a train with Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux). Why dress up this way for a train dinner seems ridiculous to me. As does Hinx’s arrival. A fight ensues, and Hinx, who wears a weirdly flammable suit that goes up in flames after having a candle thrown at it, dies, in part through Madeleine’s help (she shoots him in the arm). After Hinx’s death, she asks – a line that telegraphs the next shot with such clarity that one wonders why there is no interception/unusual cutting: “What do we do now?” Cut to a sex scene (well, some rather prudish kissing anyway). The entire scenario is silly, especially since on the back of this one brief sexual encounter, Madeleine will shortly declare to Bond that she loves him. If knowing someone for about 48 hours and killing a third party is the recipe for love… then surely we are in a fantasy land.

6. The same goes for Bond’s seduction of Sciarra’s widow, Lucia (Monica Bellucci). Bond kills two henchmen by shooting them in the back just before they finish her off (the reason for her necessary death not being too clear, except perhaps that she ‘knows too much’ – and apparently did not love her husband, or so Bond tells us anyway). And then he seduces her. Just like that. Because that’s what happens in real life.

7. Bond has injected into him some nanotechnology that means not only that Bond’s location can be known at all times (a phone can achieve this), but also his physical condition (the film never really explores this aspect of the tech). At first Bond convinces Q (Ben Whishaw) to lie about the information provided by the tech, before M (Ralph Fiennes) tells Q to destroy the files. Which is fine, if one wants to hide where Bond has been. The tech is still in his blood, though, and so finding where Bond is will be very easy for the film’s villains, since they can just track him using this tech. Which is perhaps the case, since Bond is found with ease at all times. But this does then beg the question why M would tell Q to destroy the records at all. (The film does not tell us that the baddies know where Bond is because of this tech.)

8. Bond is taken prisoner by Blofeld somewhere in the Sahara. Blofeld – dressed, as mentioned, in an oddly realistic way and rolling around on an executive (‘wheely’) chair – carries out some unnecessary dentistry on Bond before inserting a drill into what he says is Bond’s fusiform gyrus, the area of the brain in which humans stores memories for faces. Apparently Blofeld is not successful, since Bond remembers Madeleine instants later. Maybe Blofeld just missed. But this suggests something more strange…

9. The film climaxes in the old MI6 building, to which Bond is abducted by more Blofeld henchmen (who also die).

(Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), Tanner (Rory Kinnear) and Q are in a car behind M, who is heading to the new building for joint security agency, CMS. Cue the most redundant line in the film – from Moneypenny: “They’ve seen us, reverse,” she says before the henchmen shoot at the car, apparently grazing Q, though this is never confirmed to us. A real ‘no shit, Sherlock’ moment.)

Anyway, back to the MI6 building: Blofeld has had installed into it some weird ropes, suggesting something like a maze, as well as a bullet-proof screen, and a bomb. Just in case you didn’t know there was a bomb that might go off, the bomb conveniently produces a sort of ‘countdown’ sound, meaning that Blofeld also wired the ruined building with speakers just to remind Bond of the fact that he has a deadline: to find Madeleine before the building explodes.

Not only do we have pointless dialogue (Moneypenny), and a somewhat improbable scenario (rigging the building with speakers, for example), but the fact that Blofeld sets all of this up simply so that he can torment Bond suggests that the plot to obtain world domination is just persiflage, and that all of this really is about Bond himself. That is, it is Bond’s fantasy about being the centre of the world.

I insist that this is Bond’s fantasy precisely because I am not that concerned with making judgments along the lines of ‘the film is full of plot holes.’ It’s only a Bond film would be the obvious and correct response if that were my only intended task; of course the film is full of plot holes, since this is indeed ‘only’ a Bond film.

But while I have used the above ‘plot holes’ to begin my demonstration of the film as Bond’s fantasy, we can go a step further and show how the film seems not just to feature improbable moments of action that we can simply excuse by saying ‘but of course the film is a fantasy’ but which also seem to suggest that the film is not only a fantasy, but specifically James Bond’s fantasy. To wit:-

1. When Bond arrives at a Spectre board meeting, Hinx announces himself by gouging the eyes out of a rival, before Blofeld addresses Bond – suggesting that the entire meeting has been set up for Bond, and not really for the purposes of discussing evil and world domination.

2. When Blofeld shows Bond around his desert lair, he takes him and Madeleine into a room of henchmen at computers. (As if by magic, they catch on CCTV at that exact moment M discussing the closing of MI6 in London, with MI6 being subsumed under CMS, which is headed up by C (Andrew Scott) and who happens to be a Blofeld lackey as well as, we are told, old school friends with the Home Secretary.) At a certain point, the lights go off and everyone stands up and turns towards Bond. Some amazing choreography, which must have been practised beforehand (that is, in the fictional world Blofeld must have issued orders along the lines of ‘well, what’s gonna happen, guys, is that I’ll bring Bond to this point in the room, and then Brian, you hit the lights, and everyone turns towards Bond and stands up. It’ll really shit him up. Okay, shall we practice? Go… Keith, for Christ’s sake, no! I said turn towards Bond, not the wall. Someone take Keith and feed him to the sharks…). Failing such a moment having happened in the fictional world of the film, the moment again suggests that this all could be in Bond’s head.

3. “It was all me,” Blofeld soon confesses, in saying that all of his recent misdemeanours have been – in spite of words to the contrary – about Bond. Indeed, it turns out that after Bond’s parents died, it was Blofeld’s father who adopted Bond – with Bond surpassing Blofeld in winning the admiration of his father. That is, world domination really comes down to rivalry over daddy love between two kids, one British, one German.

4. Once Bond has been lobotomised, it is hard to tell whether anything is reliable anymore. Perhaps he has no memory for faces. Perhaps he has no memory. Perhaps this is all just a fantasy.

So, if you buy what I have said thus far, not only do the plot holes, but also some far more deliberate moments in the film seem to suggest that this all is or could be Bond’s fantasy. That saving the world in fact plays out in the troubled mind of the middle class British boy – described as being ‘blue eyed’ by Blofeld in a way that naturally recalls the features that in popular memory were the preserve of Aryans under National Socialism in Germany.

The question becomes not ‘is the film good or bad as a result of this?’, but ‘why does the film do this?’ Or rather: what is the film telling us by doing this?

So here we arrive at memory and intensity, which also relate in the film to issues of history, race, sex, the Bond mythology itself, and the medium in which the Bond franchise most powerfully exists, cinema (together with other audiovisual media).

When Bond comes around in Blofeld’s lobotomy chair, Blofeld is explaining to Madeleine about the moment Hinx took out the eyes of Guerra (Benito Sagredo) in the Spectre meeting that was not necessarily a real meeting, but which might in fact have simply been set up for Bond/been Bond’s fantasy.

It is not entirely clear what Blofeld says – we hear things from Bond’s perspective, a little bit unclear since he is still coming round. But basically Blofeld seems to be explaining to Madeleine that the mind exists separately from the body, and that when Guerra’s eyes were removed, he did not function properly as a human being anymore (so if you’re blind, you’re basically not human).

This separation of mind and body that Blofeld seems to be discussing is important (and contradictory, as I’ll explain below). It’s important because if the mind exists apart from the body, then everything might well be a fantasy, something in Bond’s head and which he is not really experiencing. Furthermore, if there is a mind that exists separately from the body, then this dualism suggests a reality in which we humans can see the world as separate from us (i.e. ‘objectively’). If our mind were entirely part of our bodies, and since our bodies are in the world, then this would suggest that our minds are a product of the world. A separate mind suggests the autonomy of humanity, which has conquered the mere body and thus conquered the material world, and which exists independent from the world.

I do not think that such a view of the the mind separate from the body is sustainable, although Spectre has an ambivalent relationship with this concept. I am strongly of the view that the mind is linked to the body, and that what the mind comes up with is linked thus to the world.

However, with regard to Spectre, the separation of mind and body is important, because the film also invokes the idea of voyeurism at times. Voyeurism is liking to watch things, but also liking to watch things as if separate from them, unaffected, disconnected.

Bond accuses Blofeld of being a voyeur, while voyeurism looms large in M’s dislike of C’s plan to instil the perfect surveillance system (the workings of which are never really explained). That is, the film characterises as bad those who are voyeuristic, those who believe in separation of mind from body, and those who believe, therefore, that they are or can be separate from the world.

“I said turn it off!” shouts Bond, somewhat redundantly, to Blofeld as the latter shows to Madeleine footage of her father’s suicide (Madeleine is Mr White’s daughter). He then tells Madeleine not to watch the footage and instead to look at Bond.

At this moment, we get a sense in which Bond does not want Madeleine to be a voyeur, someone who watches but who is not seen (because/thus suffering from the illusion of being separate from the world). Instead, she and he should share eye contact (the basis of their love?). Which happens as Madeleine does not watch the footage.

Similarly, M describes to C the process of killing a human being while looking them in the eye. Surveillance and drone culture supposedly involve separation and not connection. And with separation and not connection, one does not see the rest of the world, including humans, as connected to us, but as disconnected from us, and thus as something that one can treat as an object. In other words, Blofeld and C’s voyeurism is part and parcel of a dualistic view of the human, which feeds into a system of exploitation and inequality. Bond might kill people, but he does so knowingly, taking on responsibility for his actions… supposedly.

Except for the fact that, contrary to M’s argument, Bond does not take responsibility for his actions (unless being a heavy drinker is supposed to signify guilt and thus deserving absolution). As mentioned, Bond kills henchmen and likely also is involved in killing Mexicans without much of a care (he shoots Lucia’s would-be killers in the back). This is not someone who is connected with the world (looking his victims in the eye), but someone who believes it to be his playground, mechanically and uncaringly dispatching those who are in his way.

In other words, as a fantasy, the film is the expression of the privileged white, middle class and male European belief that one is separate from and superior to the world, which one can indeed treat as one wishes. Blowing up a Mexican building, nearly crashing a helicopter and so on: this is fine, especially when the older Italian driver is not killed, thus salving our conscience since those Mexicans and henchmen are not really real to us (Bond is a psychopath). Hence, in a similar vein, Bond’s treatment of women as playthings.

Perhaps this is made most clear when Bond says of his own life: “I don’t stop to think.” What Bond seems to be saying here is that Bond does not consider the consequences of his actions – he does not consider himself to be part of the world – but he considers himself to be separate from the world, and he has no need to think about what he does, since from his perspective it will always be correct. That is, Bond is a solipsist, someone who is selfish, and who does not consider the consequences of his actions, because he does not believe that his actions have consequences (he does not think he is part of the world) and because this may indeed all be in his head (a fantasy).

And yet, Spectre perhaps enacts the way in which the repressed – the reality from which Bond believes himself to be separate – in fact returns (‘returns’ will be a phrase to pick apart with some finesse).

Firstly, if Blofeld does believe in the dualism of mind and body (with the concomitant voyeurism and ability to exploit others that this entails), then he also cannot sustain such a belief in the face of the fact that he also lobotomises Bond. That is, it is by changing Bond’s material body that he changes Bond’s material mind.

Except for the fact that the lobotomy does not work. Does the fact that the lobotomy does not work suggest that, at the last, the mind is separate from the body, since Blofeld changes Bond’s body, but his mind survives, and he still remembers Madeleine even though he should not?

(In some senses, the forgetting of faces is important for fans of James Bond. That is, we forget that Daniel Craig is not Pierce Brosnan, is not Timothy Dalton, is not Roger Moore, is not George Lazenby, is not Sean Connery. We remember that we forget this, since everyone is always arguing over who their ‘favourite’/’the best’ James Bond is. And yet, we also properly forget the differences between these faces, since we go to watch the films regardless and believe that we are watching James Bond – even though the change of appearance would suggest that at least one of these Bonds is an impostor. In other words, cinema is a kind of lobotomy. A lobotomy that makes us believe that mind is separate from body – this is still James Bond even though that is a new face he has – which in turn makes of us voyeurs, separate from the world, forgetful, returning to the cinema, complicit with exploitation, happy for the trafficking of humans and contemporary slavery to happen… since without them the comfortable world in which we live would not exist.)

Back to whether the failed lobotomy suggests a separation of mind and body.

Well, I shall argue for something slightly different and paradoxical. And this is that the lobotomy does not work because Bond is indeed a solipsist and this is his fantasy, but that the lobotomy also signals the beginning of Bond’s return to reality – perhaps.

Why does the lobotomy not work? Not because Blofeld just gets his procedure a bit wrong. But because Blofeld is not carrying out the procedure; this is just Bond’s fantasy, with Blofeld a figment of Bond’s imagination.

This is signalled by the unlikelihood of Blofeld’s organising his entire criminal corporation around Bond – and visually by the way the two face each other through the glass wall, with Blofeld even (at one point) describing them as ‘brothers.’

As a figment of Bond’s imagination, Blofeld does suggest that Bond is a solipsist with a mind separate from his body. However, this solipsism is not sustainable, with Madeleine in fact signalling Bond’s re-entry into reality, a re-connection with the real world.

How is this so?

Madeleine Swann is a name clearly inspired by Marcel Proust, whose Remembrance of Things Past is a novel about the nature of memory. Swann is the name of the novel’s main protagonist, while it is the smell of a madeleine (a kind of French cake) dipped in tea that induces in Swann many of the memories that are the novel’s contents.

A high brow reference for a Bond film, no doubt. Nonetheless, Proust suggests the importance of memory, with memory being embodied, since smell – i.e. the influence of the real world – is what allows him to remember. That is, for Proust the mind is not separate from the body, with the human not being separate from the world; instead, the two are intimately interlinked.

Prior to the lobotomy, Blofeld explains that Bond will have no way to remember all of the women that he has seduced in his life, and that Madeleine will be just another woman. However, since Bond is a solipsist, what Blofeld is really pointing to is the fact that Bond doesn’t remember apart his conquests as it is (with characters like Vesper Lynd, played by Eva Green in Casino Royale, Martin Campbell, UK/etc, 2006, supposedly providing the odd exception). Women are, for Bond, simply objects (he views them ‘objectively’).

(Here the name Madeleine takes on a renewed resonance – this time with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (USA, 1958), in which Scottie (James Stewart) falls in love with a woman who does not exist called Madeleine, before forcing the woman who played the part of Madeleine, Judy (Kim Novak), to become not like Judy, but like Madeleine. That is, Scottie treats Judy as an object, with Madeleine being that object. In this way, Bond’s love for Madeleine might also signal that she is still just another woman, interchangeable with others, and not real, since Madeleine in Vertigo is equally a fantasy and not real.)

Interestingly, it is because Spectre begins to be involved in the trafficking of women and children that Mr White refuses to take part in the organisation, prompting Blofeld to poison him, hence his decision to kill himself with Bond’s gun when the two meet.

In other words, Mr White is signalled as a voyeur (watching the spectacle of terrorism on his television screen, with terrorism reduced to a spectacle on a screen and not involving real people; i.e. it is something over there, not part of a world with which we are entangled), but really he cannot go on in a world in which women and children are treated like objects.

(A Spectre henchwoman, Dr Vogel (Brigitte Miller), with shades of Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya), describes in the Spectre board meeting that 160,000 women have successfully been placed in the ‘leisure industry’ – suggesting the trade of faceless women, a trade that is in part engendered by the likes of Bond who do not see women as individuals with whom to interact, but as objects to fuck. Indeed, M and C have an exchange in which C tells M that M stands for moron, to which M responds that C stands for… careless, because M has removed the bullets from C’s too-obviously-hidden gun. Of course, mature audience members will be thinking that C stands for cunt, because C is a bad character who believes in total surveillance, voyeurism and drone violence. That is, C embodies – paradoxically – the belief that women are just cunts to be fucked as opposed to real human beings, because C also stands for separation, objectification, exploitation, detachment, solipsism, Eurocentrism.)

As the daughter of Mr White, then, and as associated with Proust and Vertigo, Madeleine is the revival of memory within Bond – a revival that takes place at precisely the moment that Blofeld thinks he destroys Bond’s memory. Bond now remembers, is now enworlded, and is now capable (once again?) of love. Or so he says…

If we don’t remember anything, we won’t learn from our mistakes, and we just repeat ourselves. Things get repetitive as we forget what came before and do not change (although we may not be aware that there is repetition, precisely because we do not remember).

For Bond to treat women like objects is associated with amnesia, forgetting, not remembering. For him to learn to love, both by getting together with Madeleine and by not killing Blofeld, as happens at the film’s end, suggests that Bond starts to remember.

And yet what does Bond remember?

For, Madeleine Swann seems to be such a contrived character – she ‘loves’ Bond after a brief encounter – and Blofeld is Bond’s imagined evil twin. That is, Bond loves a fantasy woman who is not real (Vertigo strikes), while he keeps alive his evil other half. Meaning that there will be more Bond films as Bond wants to, but cannot quite change (he cannot really love, except to love a fantasy).

Perhaps this is why Spectre is a film that rehashes many tropes from previous Bond films, including a somewhat redundant series of references to octopuses that surely evokes Octopussy (John Glen, UK/USA, 1983). The octopus is oddly the symbol of Spectre (why not call it ‘octopus’?), while also featuring prominently in the opening credits. And then it does not really to reappear. Meaning that it is an empty reminder of former Bonds rather than a meaningful image/symbol (I am happy to stand corrected if someone has a good explanation for it).

I shan’t list all of the other Bond self-references. There are many.

But the point that I wish to make is this. Obviously, as viewers, it is because we have a memory of other Bond films that we can recognise these references. That said, on the part of the filmmakers it paradoxically also suggests a lack of memory, and a compulsion to repeat, since rather than doing anything different, the film recycles things that the series has already done time and again. Memory should be a tool to allow for difference, rather than a way of repeating oneself.

And yet, in not killing the baddie and in falling in love, does Spectre not learn and offer us something different? Well, yes. On a certain level. But if this is still just solipsism (Madeleine and Blofeld are part of Bond’s imagination), then Spectre suggests as a whole the haunting of the Bond series by the other, earlier Bond films, and its inability to move on from the past, in spite of its attempts to do so.

This inability to move on from the past, it is in some senses capitalism. Capitalism is defined by returns, for example box office returns. Things change under capitalism – we get new Bond films – but things remain the same, as we basically repeat. If we repeat, we forget. If we forget, it is because we do not carry memory with us. Memory requires us being in or with the world, and so forgetting is separation from the world. Separation from the world is what enables us to treat others as objects. Treating others as objects is at the core of capitalism, since it involves exploitation (the creation of hierarchies of human beings based upon socioeconomics, as opposed to equality among humans based upon the fact of sharing and being sustained by the same planet). The repetition of Bond tropes – even if we can recognise it – is thus capitalist; and Bond will return, then, even though Spectre threatens a new Bond who does not kill his enemy, who does no longer treat women as objects, but now who instead professes to love. This lesson will be forgotten – and so while Spectre threatens to be the end of Bond, it in all likelihood will not be.

C suggests in Spectre that information is the most important asset/resource, and that to have (access to) it is to have power. Indeed, information is the production of the very system of power and hierarchisation. For, information as computer data and quantification is extension, repetition, the compulsive fucking of women, the cynical killing of Mexicans (even if an old Italian guy is saved). Bond learns through memory not the extent of fucking (a list of women he has bedded), but the intensity of love. Which will be perhaps quantified itself – ‘another Bond film in which he falls in love’ – as opposed to Bond learning to love and going into retirement and there never being another Bond film again.

Bond forgets the women he has bedded. He forgets the Mexicans he has killed, as well as the henchmen. And the whole film comes down to being a dispute between rival boys, with Bond as the perfect Aryan.

Is it perhaps the case, then, that as Bond forgets these things, so Spectre similarly forgets, but cannot help itself from giving expression to, the hidden history of the world that has allowed Europe to become so self-absorbed and solipsistic that it makes films about boys squabbling and letting many others die in the process.

The Mexican opening. The Day of the Dead. The African desert. The considerably longer world history evoked by the presence in the film of a meteorite, suggesting that the world itself is not isolated but part of a bigger universe. The film cannot but point to a history of colonialism and the exploitation/theft that enabled Europe to become the centre that thought itself so powerful that it could treat others as objects. And this within a world in which it is likely because of interventions from outer space, in the form of meteorites, that the conditions were created for humans to emerge as a dominant species in the first place.

(Léa Seydoux and Christoph Waltz have met before, of course, in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, USA/Germany, 2009. This and the film’s Aryan politics might even suggest the return of the Holocaust as a repressed point in history. Furthermore, the constant references to ‘shit’ in the film also suggest the return of a repressed body in what otherwise might all be taking place in James Bond’s mind.)

In other words, Spectre seems to encourage us to forget world/planetary history, but it also cannot help but suggest it. As the film posits a dualist identity (signalled in the Bond-Blofeld and the Bond-Madeleine dyads), it also suggests a much more ‘schizophrenic’ enworldment.

Commercial cinema itself might be part of a compulsion to repeat/a compulsion to forget, since it also often involves a sense of voyeurism/separation (looking without being seen).

As much perhaps is demonstrated in that we are happy for Bond to be involved in the needless deaths of Mexican civilians and henchmen who, while not ‘innocent,’ are also contracted to work for evil. That we carry these views forward into the real world (we allow the deaths of many civilians in the name of combatting evil, while at the same time finding abominable the victimisation of our own people even though they might be considered, like a henchman, accomplices to the hierarchisation, separation and solipsism that is capital) perhaps indicates that the logic of cinema, voyeurism, separation from others and exploitation is not just shown within the film but also applies to Spectre itself.

Spectre is a film that consciously deals with these issues. I think ultimately it cannot help but be a product of the capitalist system from which it springs. But at the same time, since there is the world, it cannot help but show the world.

A smart and complex film (it is knowing about its issues), Spectre suggests that the whole film is Bond’s solipsistic fantasy while at the same time showing that the solipsistic fantasy of overcoming solipsism is the expression of the privileged white, straight and European male. Bond learns, but we suspect that he will return, that he is the real spectre. Who knows, though…? Perhaps the series will end and by remembering, we will learn to create something completely different…

Sorry for the rant. Bond as usual in many respects. But also a more self-conscious and knowing (‘post-modern’?) Bond than usual. Which in turn highlights precisely how the postmodern world is a western fantasy of globalisation (via exploitation, fantasies of tourism, the ability to kill poor people) that has at its core a mind-body dualism. Which in turn reminds us how untenable this dualism is in a world with which we are in fact always already entangled.

Accidental Love (David O Russell, USA/UK, 2015)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

I wrote this review for The Conversation. They spiked it because they needed the piece to be shorter than it is, but did not see how to make it shorter and to get across the point that I am trying to make with it.

Why a website cannot be flexible with regard to word length beats me. Especially one that caters primarily to an academic audience. But there we go. The spike allows me to post it here, and at least without The Conversation‘s usual unmaginative headline – of the sort that makes you think Rabelais was correct about the Agelastes.

Also, editing out a reference to Karl Marx/Slavoj Žižek (which happened between drafts) seems strange to me, again given the academic readership of the publication. Some identity uncertainty seems to be in place: for whom is The Conversation? (With whom does it want to converse? On this occasion, apparently because I speak for too long and namedrop philosophers, not me!) Perhaps we see here an up-front/a priori (unthinking) capitulation to (unthinkingness and) academic research as only useful when of identifiable use (and preferably surplus) value.

Anyway, such speculation aside, here goes the review, which of course may be incomprehensible, as per the view of my editors. If this is so, and I am living alone in a land of blindness and stupidity, then I apologise…

Starts:-

The premise is utterly ridiculous. On the night that small town Indiana cop Scott (James Marsden) proposes to roller skate waitress Alice (Jessica Biel), a nail is driven through her skull during a DIY accident in a local restaurant.

Alice has no insurance, and so the hospital doctors refuse to operate (eating burgers instead). Basing his decision on the probability that the nail will cause Alice’s behaviour to become erratic, resulting eventually in death, Scott dumps her.

This prompts Alice to endeavour to win him back by going to Washington DC to see Congressman Howard Birdwell (Jake Gyllenhaal), who will help her to put through a healthcare bill that will allow those without insurance to receive medicare when necessary.

In Washington, Alice finds herself embroiled in a plot that involves Machiavellian intrigue as Birdwell bows to Representative Pam Hendrickson (Catherine Keener), who wishes to put into action her plan to build a military base on the moon – all in the name of defence.

What follows is a farce along the lines of the Marx Brothers meets Capra, something like Groucho Goes to Washington, except with more references to sex and to race.

The film’s ‘lunatic’ story involves Alice sleeping with Congressman Birdwell as a result of uncontrollable urges brought on by the presence of the nail in her brain. Everything nearly goes wrong, but after a dose of _deus ex machina_, the film ends with a wedding and everyone’s happy — even if the wider issue of healthcare remains unresolved (because who could resolve that issue without alienating a large chunk of the American audience?).

So … after giving you such a synopsis, you may well ask why I’m writing about this film, not least because it has been almost universally panned. Well, I’m interested because the film’s director, ‘Stephen Greene,’ is in fact a pseudonym for David O Russell, the successful director of such illustrious fare as Three Kings (1998), I Heart Huckabees (2004), The Fighter (2010), Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013). His second film, Flirting with Disaster (1996), demonstrated that he is perfectly capable of this kind of farcical comedy.

Why the change of name, then? Mainly because Accidental Love, which for a long time was to be called Nailed, is a film that went into production nearly ten years ago. However, owing to financial difficulties – on some occasions the crew wasn’t paid, while on others the cast quit for the same reason – it allegedly got shut down 14 times.

In 2010, Russell quit the film, which he had co-written with Al Gore’s daughter, Kristin Gore. The remaining scenes were supposedly shot without him. So the film, like Alice, was in effect lobotomised. Fast forward through five years of limbo, and Accidental Love gets released on all of the contemporary platforms (VOD, DVD, etc), including a small theatrical release in the USA – with test screenings apparently taking place unbeknownst to Russell and the stars in the interim.

Now, just because Russell at least partially directed it does not make Accidental Love particularly interesting (or particularly good). But what is interesting is what its troubled history reveals about contemporary Hollywood.

That a woman’s libido expresses itself only as a result of a nail in the brain (Alice’s lobotomy) is of course problematic. It suggests that female sexual desire is somehow abnormal, the result of a brain gone wrong. This in turn suggests that Hollywood cannot tolerate an active female sexuality.

(See how ScarJo in The Avengers films has to end up single because her agency, even if she can deflate the Hulk – male-eating Black Widow as causing loss of erection.)

But this plot device suggests to us that the film as a whole, like a nail in Hollywood’s head, also gives expression to things that the American film industry otherwise tries to deny. The film is a repeat of the kind of farcical films that today seem anachronistic and unfashionable – as made clear by the presence of supporting actors from another time in Paul ‘Pee Wee Herman’ Reubens and Kirstie Alley.

If Hollywood does anything, it repeats itself, returns over and again to the same things: sequels, remakes and ‘reboots.’ But if, in the spirit of Karl Marx and, more recently, Slavoj Žižek, what happens once is tragic and what repeats is farce, then the industry denies that this endless repetition is farcical. Rather than an admission of being forever out of ideas, we are told that this is perfectly controlled filmmaking.

Hollywood has sought to get rid of Accidental Love as quickly and as unnoticeably as it can (the film grossed a meagre US$4,500 at the American box office). And yet, that the film has resurfaced at all suggests the return of the repressed, namely the fact that the processes of repetition and return themselves reveal the film industry’s inability to know what it is doing and why.

You may have heard of a man called Phineas Gage. In 1848, he had a bar driven through his skull when at work – and yet he lived for many years while supposedly undergoing something of a complete overhaul of his personality (he was ‘no longer Gage’ say contemporaneous reports – although the validity of these has been doubted).

Accidental Love is something of a cinematic Phineas Gage – a film that got nailed in production and which continues to be nailed by the critical community.

And yet, in this accidentally lobotomised film, we might find much to learn about the ‘normal’ functioning of Hollywood’s film industry, just as Gage is the exception that allows us better to understand the brain’s role in ‘normal’ human behaviour.

Better put, in an era when industry, including the film industry, demands rationalisation and when risk is removed as much as possible (and one removes risk by sticking to what one knows, i.e. by repeating), Accidental Love helps us to understand that Hollywood, perhaps industry as a whole, is in fact deep down irrational, and that its compulsion to repeat and to return is a sign not of a reduction of risk, but really of its overall lack of control.

It is a sign that Hollywood, maybe even capital as a whole, is not superhuman and beyond question or doubt, but wonderfully, farcically, profoundly human – and thus wholly open to question and to doubt. With regard to Accidental Love, then, even if the film is no great shakes, sometimes there’s nothing so interesting as a complete failure.

Ends

The Rock Face, or The End of Capitalism (Inspired partially by San Andreas, Brad Peyton, USA/Australia, 2015)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

The film sucks.

Except for the fact that the Rock still somehow manages to be appealing when wooden. But maybe this is the point.

I thought that I would have to save for another time a piece about how the Rock seems to symbolise the potential for true goodness that lies at the heart of America, as his retriever/labrador eyes speak of a simplistic desire more than anything else to be loved, a sense of kindness that means even when he tries to do hard-assed heroism it comes off as ironic – because he’s just more pup than pop in spite of his gargantuan muscles.

Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised if off the screen the Rock was a demented fuck machine with a thousand roid-induced sexualities to share around the self-same people whom he wants to love him, because that desire for love – and for what the Rock might call putting his strudel in some poontang pie, especially when simplistic, is also redolent of extreme narcissism.

But regardless of what happens off the screen, on the screen, and especially as his eyes get older around the edges, the Rock is the manifestation of the American soul as it wants to be seen: too much experience credibly to be that dumb, too wide and assuming to be that smart. He is a labrador/retriever – smart, but too afraid to be independent.

Looking back, we might say that Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, France/Germany/USA, 2006) was the moment, now forgotten if ever seen at all by most people, when this genius of the labrador/retriever Rock was revealed (Southland Tales is also about the end of capitalism).

It is also there in Nina Davenport’s masterly documentary, Operation Filmmaker (USA, 2007), in which Dwayne Johnson plays the Rock as he works with Iraqi refugee Muthana Mohmed on the set of his latest blockbuster.

The Rock also achieves a wonderful sense of this labrador/retriever star persona in the opening moments of The Other Guys (Adam McKay, USA, 2010), especially when he suicidally throws himself from a building in the name of work.

But perhaps Pain & Gain (Michael Bay, USA, 2013) is the most exact expression of this, since the film hints at the protein-guzzling winky-shrinkage roid machine while showing that you can program the innocent Rock to do anything. It is perhaps apposite that in that film, the Rock’s co-star should be Marky Mark, since Marky Mark has a very similar labrador/retriever quality. Note that Marky Mark also takes over the case from the Rock in The Other Guys.

Indeed, one wonders whether it has something to do with people who become famous under one guise, and then become actors under a different name. The use of the ‘real’ name (Dwayne Johnson, Mark Wahlberg) reveals that we are in fact only ever seeing an act. Life is the ongoing invention of self that is work.

Now, there are loads of films I’ve been wanting to blog about of late. But I have not. So why this film?

Well, aside from the usual sense of feeling at times quite overwhelmed by the spectacle of the film-as-Hollywood-blockbuster – when I cried whilst watching the equally demented Battleship (Peter Berg, USA, 2012) I realised that Hollywood has found a way to affect me regardless of my intellectual defences against the film – I spent the whole film thinking that this is a movie about the end of capitalism.

And this is why it will not be in another, but in fact in this piece of writing that I deal with the face and demeanour of the labrador/retriever Rock, since it has much to do with this.

Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, Mark Fisher. All have questioned at some point why it is easier for humans to imagine the end of the world than it is for humans to imagine the end of capitalism.

And yet, with San Andreas, one wonders that we have achieved what previously we thought was impossible – and that the film really is about the end of capitalism.

Why would I make such a claim, especially when it goes against the nihilichic of the above thinkers, and especially when San Andreas is about as capitalist a film as one can get?

It has to do with the family. For of course the film is about the restitution of the family, in that Ray (the/The Rock) wins back ex-wife Emma (Carla Gugino) by in effect showing that he loves his daughter, Blake (played by Tits McGee, er, I mean, sorry, the paternally-monikered Alexandra Daddario), more than the other guy (one day Ioan Gruffudd will be recognised properly for his excellence as an actor).

But while the restitution of the family would suggest ongoing hope for capitalism (‘we rebuild’ says Ray at the film’s end, as if in these two words were the aleph of philosophy), the fact is that we just don’t believe that shit anymore. San Francisco might be rebuilt, but not in the way that it was before; instead, the entire system must change. We wanted the disaster, we got it; and now spectacle is over. It’s time for something else.

Why do I make this quaint, if not downright silly comment about this quaint, silly and otherwise potentially dangerous film? Mainly because the labrador/retriever Rock, precisely because he is a labrador/retriever, doesn’t convince anyone.

It’s not his woodenness per se, which, as mentioned, is a completely amiable part of his amiable persona. It’s the fact that the Rock comes across as a dog trained to do the part. He retrieves his daughter like a lovely pop-pup, and he is the labrador/labourer who will never give up.

Except, oddly, that the very casting of the Rock lends to San Andreas something weirdly Brechtian – because it makes clear the labour that goes into its making. We either see the Rock trying too hard to act, or we see clearly that he is doing what the leash holder (Brad Peyton, I guess) tells him. In effect, the face of the Rock takes us to the Rock Face.

And the Rock Face, like the California of San Andreas, is about to collapse. Indeed, if capitalism is in some respects synonymous with cinema, in that it is about devising ways of capturing, maintaining and then monetising human attention, as Jonathan Beller might put it, then the end of California – the home of cinema – is the end of capital.

But why does the fact that with the Rock there are no illusions – we can see the Rock Face – equate to the end of capitalism?

It does this because capitalism hides work, even though work is the very Rock upon which capitalism is itself built. Capitalism hides work because if we knew really that all we ever did was work (phones always on, ready for the text/call/email, with screens everywhere, cramming every second of our time with immaterial and affective labour that uses where we point our eyeballs as a means for advertising companies to make money), then maybe we’d stop. And if we stopped, then like a shark ceasing to swim, capitalism would sink.

Or rather, we all know this already, but don’t do anything about it as long as it we collectively pretend that this is not the case. Once it is exposed, in the face of the Rock and in a film as tired and derivative as San Andreas, then we cannot lie to ourselves anymore.

San Andreas seems to demonstrate a Hollywood that is buckling under its own weight, with the Rock being its odd, likeable visage. The film is tired. So tired that it must stop and go to sleep. And as soon as it sleeps, maybe it will dream. And with that dream will come the thought of something different. A new day.

I realise why I love the Rock, then. Because he cannot hide the work that goes into his own making, and into his performances. He looks a bit tired, too. Sure, we love him because despite being tired, he fights on, giving it his all – like a true American hero. But the collapse is inevitable. In the Rock Face, like the collapse of California in San Andreas, we can begin to see the end of capitalism.

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2014)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

Thirty five feature films in 44 years means that Clint Eastwood is one of the most prolific filmmakers working in/around Hollywood today.

Violence, including violence during wartime, is an issue that is never too far from Eastwood’s mind, with titles like Unforgiven (USA, 1992), Flags of Our Fathers (USA, 2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (USA, 2006) most clearly demonstrating this.

American Sniper, then, is Eastwood’s first take on the recent conflicts in the Middle East, specifically in this case Iraq. It tells the story of a former rodeo cowboy, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who, appalled at the news of attacks on American embassies by Islamic fundamentalists, enlists and, at the age of 30, joins the Navy SEALs.

After 11 September 2001, Chris then does four tours of Iraq, during which time he becomes known as The Legend as a result of 160 confirmed kills (with an estimated further 95 unconfirmed).

In the film, Chris’ tours are motivated both by his desire to save Americans from the murderous Iraqis that we see (as he repeatedly asserts), but also to put an end to the evil work of two people, The Butcher (Mido Hamada) and a Syrian sniper working for the Iraqi insurgents, Mustafa (Sammy Sheik).

This he eventually does, but even having achieved his goal, Chris seems to be – in Eastwood’s film – somewhat ill-at-ease at home with his wife Taya (Sienna Miller) and his children.

I don’t particularly care to comment on certain aspects of this film. Briefly, though, the movie gives a lot of opportunity for Americans to describe Iraqis as evil and Iraq as a nasty place. Chris’ first kill in the film is of a child and then a woman who are trying to throw a Russian hand grenade at advancing soldiers. ‘Good job,’ he is told. These people are evil; even the women and children are bred simply to hate Americans.

That said, just as Chris pulls the trigger on the child, the film cuts to a flashback of him killing his first deer with his father. Is this suggesting that war is sport? (Or that war is sport for Chris? That the real reason he is out in Iraq is because he likes killing people? Or that he kills to please his ‘father’/the USA?) It is hard to tell – but there is something troubling in this cut – but something that I am not sure will trouble many viewers, who simply see a hero doing his job.

Furthermore, while the juxtaposition of family life and conflict in Iraq is possibly intended to suggest that Chris is over there saving his family from being killed eventually by Iraqis – ‘eventually’ because they’d have to travel 6,000 miles from Baghdad to Washington DC (or further into the USA) in order to do so in the way that Chris at one points describes them as wanting to do it, namely, in person – it also seems to suggest that family gets in the way of war.

Chris no doubt is traumatised by the war, as Eastwood suggests by his paranoia when a truck follows him too closely, when he reacts confusedly to car alarms going off in the background, and when a dog gets too feisty at a children’s birthday party.

And Chris seems to be uncomfortable with the adulation that he receives as a result of being The Legend – modest chap as he is.

In short, then, Chris is not simplistic, Cooper’s performance is nuanced, and Chris Kyle surely was a war hero, especially in the eyes of many Americans (and perhaps others).

But a day before I am teaching a class on Caché/Hidden (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy/USA, 2005), to see American Sniper reminds of a line that Majid (Maurice Bénachou) says in Haneke’s film to Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil): ‘Kicking my ass won’t leave you any wiser about me.’

All that said, I only really want to comment on two moments from Eastwood’s film, both of which are in the film’s second half.

The first is when Chris is home shortly after the birth of his second child, daughter McKenna. Both Chris and Taya hold McKenna at various points in this scene – during which it becomes apparent that the baby is not a real baby, but a doll with perhaps some computer generated imagery (CGI) added to give it some dynamic movement.

Whether intentionally or not, the veracity of this moment is destroyed as a result of the fakery of the baby. It is not that Chris Kyle in real life did not have a daughter McKenna, but Eastwood’s film here troubles our understanding of Chris’ family life; is his family in fact a simulation, a fake, something in which he does not really believe?

The second moment comes later on when Chris is sat in front of a TV – from which we hear emanate sounds from moments of conflict in which Chris has earlier been involved. However, as Eastwood’s camera slowly moves around Chris, it transpires that the TV screen is blank – and that Chris is probably just remembering these sounds.

This latter is a complex moment. In terms of images like it from other films, it naturally recalls the famous moment in All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, USA, 1955), in which widowed mother Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) has been offered a television by her son Ned (William Reynolds) – as some sort of replacement relationship figure for gardener Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), with whom Ned does not want his mother to be – mainly because as a gardener Ron is from lower stock than Ned.

(This creates another intertext, oddly enough, with Caché: on a visit to see his mother (Anne Girardot), Georges asks her whether she is lonely stuck out in her remote family home, to which she replies: ‘Are you less lonely because you can sit in the garden? Do you feel less lonely in the Métro than at home? [Georges shakes his head.] Well then. Anyway, I have my family friend… with remote control [i.e. the television].)

To return: as we see Cary reflected in the television screen in All That Heaven Allows, so do we see Chris reflected in the television screen in American Sniper. In the former film, the image seems to suggest that Cary’s domestic life is a void without other people; television is no replacement for physical human contact. In the latter film, however, we get the sense that Chris’ life is a void, despite being surrounded by other people. What is more, even though the television screen is blank, that the sounds of war emanate from it suggests that the screen actually does help fill the void that is life.

All That Heaven Allows is a melodrama and American Sniper is a war film. Nonetheless, the comparison to me seems apt. What is more, in the 50 years that have elapsed between the release of the two films, much has changed in terms of how we understand the role that television plays in everyday life.

That is, while Sirk might in 1955 have seen already that television is a trap for keeping women on their own and away from anything real, Eastwood in 2014/2015 sees that television has perhaps replaced reality, meaning that Chris cannot engage with reality at all – but instead must engage with reality via the medium of the screen.

Perhaps his role as a sniper here is interesting; his is not direct combat, but combat that more often than not – in the film – is mediated by the lens of the rifle. (The television is also prominent in various other scenes set on American soil, but – mea culpa – I was not paying close enough attention to get to grips with how.)

Either way, in an age when the Gulf war apparently did not take place, the difference between Sirk and Eastwood is also timely.

No one has said that the Gulf War did not actually take place. However, what Jean Baudrillard argues in his essays on this topic is that the Gulf War was not really a war but an atrocity, and that the war was as much a media spectacle – with television at its core – as it was a real war. That is, war was presented as (quite probably an atrocious form of) entertainment, and not as war.

American Sniper, then, suggests in the television scene described above that the war paradoxically was real – as Kyle’s traumatic recollection and inability to forget it would suggest. What is more, Eastwood seems to suggest, in a shot of a blank television, that much of the blame for the evil wrought as a result of this war – in terms of casualties, but also in terms of psychological trauma inflicted on veterans – is not simply as a result of the ‘evil’ of Iraqi rebels, but as a result of the media circus that wanted and perpetuated this conflict.

As we continue to militarise our lives as much as possible – driving around in vehicles that shield us from the outside world rather than connecting us to it; bombarded by violent war-like noises all day every day in our urban environments – American Sniper perhaps even suggests this: the real trauma provoked by war is that war does indeed replace reality, and life is entirely militarised, suggesting that even a baby seems fake, composed of CGI, while we cannot get out of our heads the images of violence that we have seen via our screens and our gunsights.

In other words, it is not war that is the simulation to keep us domesticated and at home; the domestic has become the simulation in order to keep us in a state of perpetual war.

I think, ultimately, that Eastwood’s film both suffers and benefits from the suggestive power of these two – perhaps isolated – moments of his film.

It benefits, because in its ambiguity, the film encourages us to give pause to think.

It suffers, however, because in its ambiguous ambiguity, the film can be seen as (perhaps because it is) flag-waving propaganda that cannot tell the ideological war from the real war, because repeatedly we are told that all Iraqis are evil, and that the west was justified in what at times is literally presented as a crusade to eradicate them.

In short, then: does Eastwood share the belief that war is the true reality, and that domesticity is simulation, or does he point out how this is the case? On this score, the jury is perhaps still out. Either way, may the real Chris Kyle and all those who died as a result of the conflicts in Iraq rest in peace.