American cinema

Brief Thoughts on The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2012)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

Thoughts on The Master can perhaps only be ill-formed, since the film is so complex that it any writing on it will only reduce its richness into too-easy sense (?). Nonetheless, here are some brief thoughts on PTA’s latest masterwork.

The film is a great love story between Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as signalled – spoilers – by the end of the film where Freddie finally finds a girl called Winn Manchester (Jennifer Neala Page): Lancaster/Manchester and Quell are finally united in acceptable form as Freddie performs the same psychiatric-type session on Winn as Dodd performed on him earlier in the film.

And what drives this love affair is the opposite nature of the two characters: Dodd seems to want to eliminate the id from humanity such that humans can return to their perfect, soulful state, while Freddie is a man driven by the id and, while still with ego, seemingly without superego to censor his actions. As such, Freddie becomes the object of Dodd’s obsession as much as vice versa – and we have a true exploration of master-servant relationships such that both are inseparable (master needs servant as servant needs master) – on the scale and in the league of Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître and Molière’s Tartuffe.

The mutual obsession is signalled through otherness: one can never tell in Anderson’s unnerving film whether violence will erupt and the two will kill each other or embrace each other. They go hunting in the desert for a lost manuscript with guns – bringing back Dodd’s second book, Split Saber, from the wilderness like Moses with the Ten Commandments. Will they kill each other? Will either fall off their motorbike and die as they drive that – meaningfully again in the desert…? Will Dodd kill Freddie when they part – or will he erupt into song…? Time and again we are kept on tenterhooks as we simply cannot predict what will happen. Being unable to predict the actions of others reaffirms their otherness – and since we cannot understand them as a result of this otherness, we are compelled to analyse, scrutinise, look for me: can we make sense of them?

This tension is achieved by Anderson’s insistence upon long takes (not always, but often and relentlessly). It is also achieved by his use of long shots and masterful mise-en-scène in such a way that all too often we find ourselves seeing at the last minute characters, such as Dodd’s wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), staring offscreen at Freddie – her gaze having otherwise eluded our attention because of other movements and areas of focus in the frame.

The result is that our relationship with The Master is like Lancaster’s relationship with Quell. Those moments where we see something in the frame after several seconds of looking and scrutinising induce in the viewer a moment of panic: did I miss something? What else was going on that I did not see?

Not only does this make of Anderson’s film a film to be scrutinised and studied – perhaps endlessly – but it also lends to the film a sense of its own otherness: there is always something more to see, or rather the sense that there are depths that we do not and cannot see (even though they are there before our very eyes, incessantly excessive, demonstrating the limits of human perception in that we simply cannot take in all that the universe has to offer – not consciously at least, even if, like the camera, we record everything as Peggy says early on in the film, including everything that happened to the molecules from which we are constituted right back to the dawn of time).

There is also an unpredictability in Anderson’s script. Dodd’s son, Val (Jesse Plemons), tells Freddie that Dodd makes it up as he goes along. He is probably correct – as Dodd contradicts himself the whole time, cannot take being questioned in public (and perhaps not in private), as he himself must deal with his id, as Freddie also struggles with his ego. Suddenly Dodd will speak of the importance of laughter, or get Freddie to touch a wall. The film is so bizarre in this way that we are kept on our toes.

Compare to the finely crafted prose of many of the great writers (Shakespeare comes to mind): in Shakespeare we have repeated motifs and themes, such that each play is a masterpiece of tight construction – while Anderson’s characters are imbued with a sense of liveness, of spontaneity in the dialogue – we can never tell what they are going to say.

Again, the effect is disconcerting, but it is also profound. As Shakespeare lived in an era in which a clockwork universe and the motions of the spheres suggested tight construction that would naturally be reflected in the drama of its time, Anderson’s film is haunted by the chaos of the nuclear age – with World War Two and the spectre of Japan haunting the film through Freddie’s wartime experiences, the tail-end of which we see in the film’s opening scenes. In short, Anderson’s universe may well have patterns, but it is also full of randomness, chaos, the unpredictability of thought and the strange associations that the improvising human mind can make up (this within a tightly constructed film that suggests not a chaos or a cosmos, but a chaosmos of sorts).

Finally, though, there is of course something to Dodd’s method, even though charlatan he be. For what is wrong with improvisation? In a chaotic universe, perhaps playful improvisation is the best we can hope for – hence Dodd’s explosions of anger and frustration when Helen Sullivan (Laura Dern) suggests confusion that Dodd might have changed the emphasis in his works from memory to the imagination. Helen seeks too much order, whereas Dodd is only interested in endless experiment and the freedom that can come with simply seeing where thought can lead you. With working out what a brain can do. And Freddie working out what a body can do (and what it can consume – with his endless poison concoctions). There are pitfalls to experimentation and play – madness perhaps lies down this road. But so, too, is there madness in self-willed imprisonment.

So maybe we can only play with The Master and see where it leads us, with Anderson also seeing where filmmaking can lead him (and his actors going on a similar journey).

There is much more to say about this film – on so many levels. But for the time being, these are my brief, inept thoughts on the film. Another great piece of cinema from one of the best in the American business.

Looper (Rian Johnson, USA/China, 2012) (In Memoriam Chris Marker 2)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Uncategorized

(This blog contains spoilers – pretty much all of them – so it is basically for people who have seen the film or who realise that spoilers do not in fact spoil a film. Indeed, knowing what happens plot-wise allows you to tell if the film is actually any good, because a good film will keep you interested in spite of knowing the twists, while a mediocre film relies on the twists and not on how they are revealed to entertain audiences.)

I like Rian Johnson’s films. Brick (USA, 2005) is a quirky high school noir that has very dark edges around its comic exterior, while The Brothers Bloom (USA, 2008) is under-watched and a bit under-rated – Johnson can do the con film as well as any.

In some respects, I like Looper, but I am also a bit disappointed by it – and my disappointment springs from a different outlook on the world to the one that Johnson’s film seems to me to present, and which I shall elaborate below.

Looper tells the story of Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who kills men sent back in time from 2074 to 2044, when he lives. One day, an older version of himself (Bruce Willis) is sent back in time and Joe fails to kill him. Instead, he must go on the hunt for him – along with all of the crooks who are disappointed that young Joe has failed to ‘close his loop’ – i.e. to kill his older self, a standard practice for loopers who then have thirty years of happy retirement.

Old Joe does not want to die because, although he has spent many years as a violent killer both in Kansas, the film’s principle setting, and in Shanghai, which features during a brief section that summarises Joe’s ‘retirement’, he latterly learns to be good thanks to a woman (Summer Qing/Qing Xu), whom we never hear speak and who basically looks lovingly at Old Joe in the bits in which she features.

We sort of understand Old Joe not wanting to die – who does want to die? – but he’s not exactly a saint, either. In order to stop himself from dying, he decides to use his obligation to travel back in time in order to kill the childhood version of a future supervillain called the Rainmaker, who is ordering the closing of all the loops, i.e. the deaths of all of the loopers – including Joe himself.

If you’re not sure what this means, let’s put it another way: yes, the Rainmaker’s future crime will be – as far as the film is concerned – cleaning up the streets of heartless hitmen.

The problem is that this heartless hitman, Old Joe, now has a heart – and it’s been broken, since the men who took Joe also killed his seemingly mute wife – and so revenge must be his.

Only Old Joe does not know who the Rainmaker is – no one does. All Old Joe knows is that it’s one of three kids born on a certain day and living, as if by coincidence, in the very same county that he worked in (as a looper) in his youth.

And Old Joe happily kills at least one of the kids – and shoots another in the face, this other kid turning out to be the future Rainmaker.

Regular Joe decides to to stop Old Joe from killing the Rainmaker, his motivation being that by virtue of meeting Old Joe the chances of Old Joe’s life becoming the life that regular Joe leads – or vice versa – are greatly diminished, leaving regular Joe free to grow up into a different Old Joe who won’t have the same regrets as Old Joe does. That and because regular Joe believes that his future self should not want to live any longer than the deal is for loopers – the mandatory 30 years – because obviously there is honour among murdering thieves.

Or rather, there is no honour here. Regular Joe is an anti-hero if nothing else: he sells out his best friend Seth (Paul Dano), who is mutilated before being killed, and he wants to kill his older self so as to avoid a life on the run. In other words, regular Joe thinks only about himself and his glamorous lifestyle.

In trying to prevent Old Joe from killing the kid who would be Rainmaker, however, regular Joe meets and falls partially in love with Sara (Emily Blunt), the mother of the Rainmaker-to-be and whom regular Joe is protecting.

It is not that regular Joe learns a sense of moral responsibility. His’love’ for Sara is superficial at best. Furthermore, the kid who will or might become the Rainmaker, Cid (Pierce Gagnon), is, or at least can be, a mean, telekinetic (“teleki-what?“) little shit – with shades of We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, UK/USA, 2011) characterising their mother-son relationship.

It is only because Sara promises to raise Cid to be a good kid, to not become the Rainmaker, that the future might be averted. And Joe believes that Sara can do this, in spite of seeing Cid violently kill a man with the power of thought. For this reason, regular Joe decides to stop Old Joe from acting out his selfish love fantasy in the future.

Now, I do quite like Looper, even if the above synopsis makes it sound a bit dumb. The film has plenty of scenes that feature the quirky dialogue and narrative elements that Johnson is well known for: Sara describing how she found Cid after her sister, who was also Cid’s foster mother, had been killed (she was wearing a party dress and felt stupid); the frog beeper warning system that Sara forgets as soon as she is given it; the inept gunplay from useless henchman Kid Blue (Noah Segan).

These quirks lend to the film something human and touching, as do Johnson’s indulgences towards his actors (Jeff Daniels as crime boss Abe, who has been sent back from 2074 to oversee the loopers, in particular gets to showboat a nice amount in this film: “Trust me, I’m from the future. You want to go to China.”).

That said, Looper also has some daft elements. Foremost among these is the fact that it takes Old Joe several days to find and to kill the kids that could become the Rainmaker – even though he has their addresses and the local city seems pretty small. Furthermore, Old Joe also decides to risk his life by killing Abe and his many henchmen rather than getting on with killing Cid (and in spite of using loads of machine guns and grenades to do the former, he decides only to take a relatively small handgun to carry out the latter).

Furthermore, as the reduction of Old Joe’s wife to pure, unspeaking image suggests, Johnson does not care much for his female characters. Sara is, like Old Joe, something of a reformed character; a former party girl in the city, she now realises that raising Cid well is all that is important – but she does not really feature too strongly in the narrative (as mentioned, her love with/for regular Joe is superficial at best). Stripper Suzie (Piper Perabo), coincidentally the mother of the second could-be-Rainmaker child whose death we never see (because it never happens?), seems to be a woman that regular Joe wants to protect, meaning that regular Joe views Suzie not as a person but as an image to possess. In Suzie’s favour, she knocks regular Joe back, saying that she is quite happy being a stripper, since she has her independence, an independence that is rendered in the film as a cruel rejection of Joe such that she both basically disappears from the film and so that Old Joe must of course kill her son (whether he achieves this or not) to punish her for not wanting him.

However, in spite of these good and bad aspects of the film, none is quite what I want specifically to discuss.

What I want to discuss is the role of possible worlds in the film.

This isn’t about describing quantum physics and the like. Rather, we can stick to Looper and the other films that it talks to, rather than half-digested and half-developed theories from science, to explain what I mean.

Looper has various reference points. Foremost among these is the relationship between America and France. Joe is learning French (slowly) in the hope of moving to France upon closing his loop (something he never does, since he moves to China in the version of events that we see).

This desire to learn French expresses a desire to be in the old world – a desire for some old world sophistication, compared to the new world flash, glitz and shallow relationships and violence.

Joe’s desire to be French is mirrored in part by Johnson’s film itself. There are a couple of nods to Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle/2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (France, 1967), for example: twice in Looper we see cream clouding in a coffee cup in a manner reminiscent of Godard’s cosmos in a coffee cup sequence from that film.

The somewhat crummy and still-industrial city also partly suggests Godard’s sci-fi classic, Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution/Alphaville (France/Italy, 1965) – although the Kansas setting cannot help but also evoke The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, USA, 1939), which arguably makes of the film a Depression-era escapist fantasy, making it an interesting bedfellow with the also-quirky Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik, USA, 2012).

Furthermore, beyond the chaotic semi-references to Godard, any time travel film that involves a doubling of the self naturally recalls the great and late Chris Marker’s La Jetée (France, 1962). Indeed, here the casting of Bruce Willis becomes important, because Willis has of course played the role of the time-travelling anti-hero before – in Terry Gilliam’s remake of La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys (USA, 1995).

In other words, Johnson seems to express some sort of kinship with France. However, this kinship is for me superficial – in the same way that Twelve Monkeys does not match La Jetée in a lot of ways.

For, I am not sure that Johnson ‘gets’ much of the politics of the French New Wave. Godard may have spoken of making films that feature just images, but he also wanted to make films featuring images that are just. And this is perhaps what is lacking in Johnson’s film.

Maybe this can be expressed inadvertently through the film’s other casting: Piper Perabo, who plays Suzie, also played Geneviève Le Plouff in Melanie Mayron’s somewhat dim-witted Slap Her, She’s French! (Germany/USA/UK, 2002). As Joe wants Suzie/Perabo, so do Johnson and Joe seemingly want to be French, without realising that the object of their desire is in fact not French at all, but an actress pretending to be French, a superficial understanding of what it is or might be to be French. As Suzie is reduced simply to a symbol in the film, so, too, is France and the French films to which Johnson seems to wish to speak.

Not only is Looper a bit superficial, then, but it also seems to fail to understand the lessons learned from La Jetée and from other time travel loop films such as Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, USA, 2001), which seems a much more appropriate point of comparison for this film than is, say, The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA, 1999), to which the film has otherwise and to my mind erroneously been compared.

In La Jetée, the man (Davos Hanich) is sent back in time – to various different points in time – in order to try to save the world from the fate that awaits it after World War Three: no food, a life underground, no medicine, etc. Like Joe in Looper, he is haunted by the woman that he loves, as well as by an image of a man being shot at Orly airport in his childhood. At the film’s climax, the man realises that he saw his own death as a kid.

While La Jetée suggests that even if we could travel in time we cannot escape our own fate, Looper tries to be more upbeat. It says that maybe we can change the future, that perhaps we are only always ever changing the future – since every interaction between regular Joe and Old Joe causes Old Joe’s memories to change.

In some ways, Johnson’s film has here a sophisticated understanding of what time travel might be like and the parallel universes that are opened up by it. Furthermore, the way in which Old Joe and regular Joe basically completely disagree with each other suggests that Johnson understands humans as ultimately multiple – we could become many different people in our lives – and Cid could end up not being the Rainmaker – a source of hope perhaps in that we are not doomed from the off to a pre-ordained destiny to which we personally do not have access.

However, while I like all of this in terms of its understanding of the multiverse and of the multiple personalities that exist as potential within us as individuals, it seems to miss something.

Perhaps a closer comparison with Donnie Darko can bring this out. In Richard Kelly’s film, Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) realises that in the 28 days since he was supposed to have died, all of his fantasies come true: he gets the girl, he’s a hero at school, a period of total wish fulfilment made clear by Donnie’s line to Gretchen (Jena Malone): “how do you know I’m not [a superhero]?”

However, Donnie learns that having all that he desires is not all it is cracked up to be. For living beyond his own death and having his fantasies fulfilled also causes Gretchen to die at the hands of Frank (James Duval), who is in turn shot dead by Donnie.

In other words, while one can know that there are many parallel universes and many parallel lives for us to lead, I wonder that the moral choice that one should make is to accept the life that one has – since one never knows what will be the consequences of one’s selfish desires, of fulfilling one’s own fantasies.

If this is what Donnie Darko seems to tell us – Donnie goes back to the moment of his death at the hands of a falling jet engine so that Gretchen can live – this is not what Looper seems to suggest. Looper instead seems to suggest that we should fight to change our fates.

This might seem counterintuitive to argue. For, at the film’s climax regular Joe kills himself in order to prevent Old Joe from trying to kill Cid, an act that most likely will make him become precisely the Rainmaker that Old Joe is hoping to eradicate.

(And if Old Joe succeeded in killing Cid, what then?)

And yet, in killing himself regular Joe consigns Old Joe to being a deluded weirdo who is preparing to kill kids in order to spend some more time with his wife and in order maybe to have kids of his own.

Maybe this is fair enough: that Joe, Old Joe, is irreconcilably nasty – in spite of believing himself not to be – and self-interested, that regular Joe, who learns how to be nice, must kill him off by killing himself off.

But it seems disappointing on a certain level for Old Joe not to realise the error of his ways and to let Cid go – and in such a way that in doing this Cid might also not become the Rainmaker that he is otherwise supposedly destined to become.

We are told by Abe that coming back from the future addles one’s brain – and maybe this is plainly what happens to Old Joe. Nothing too complex, in spite of the gimmickry around time travel: just a guy going mental because he’s ended up 30 years in the past with a younger version of himself.

Indeed, how many people do die without learning moral lessons? How is this not like the rage of a drunken brawler who will not see reason – and why should I cling to and endeavour to judge Johnson’s film by a romantic notion that reason will ‘out’ and that we would choose to accept our fates. We know full well that some people are just not like that – and they will take all that they can regardless of the cost to others.

So in some senses, Johnson’s film is insightful: some people – ourselves, even – will not and never will see reason, and so must be killed.

But if Johnson’s film claims to offer hope – the Rainmaker may not grow up to be an evil telekinetic tyrant – it does so by being hopeless about Old Joe’s capacity to change. In other words, there is bad faith in Old Joe (he must be killed), such that the supposed ‘good faith’ in Cid/the Rainmaker (he might grow up to be good) seems unfounded. If there were good faith, the Joes would work out some way around the conundrum.

Abe and regular Joe discuss the latter’s propensity to wear ties. Abe mocks Joe for trying to affect a twentieth century look taken from the movies. Johnson’s film may be self-conscious about the role of affectation and the appropriation of styles – but this does not prevent Johnson’s film from precisely affecting to offer us something that ultimately it does not match, since it is only an affectation without the conviction of the original.

Perhaps this is why the film’s most experimental opening half hour, with formally interesting upside down sequences, stretched images, and more, disappear from the film when the prerogative demanding at least some action kicks in and Johnson must respond to the need for his film to make some money.

This was La Jetée‘s total genius – making me miss Chris Marker even more: his film is composed almost entirely of still images. That is, not only does Marker not resort to regular action as Johnson does in Looper, but he makes a film that is almost entirely devoid of action in the conventional sense of the word (moving people, moving images).

Johnson’s film reflects a world without conviction – and as such is fascinating and surely well made – just like the films of Christopher Nolan, to whom no doubt some/many will compare Looper, if not his other films. But this world without conviction seems to wear a mask of conviction (as Joseph Gordon-Levitt wears a mask throughout the film to make him look a bit more like Bruce Willis – at least, I assume this to be the case), but never shows its true face. A great film always allows its true face to emerge; it accepts its fate, rather than aspiring to be cinematic on someone else’s terms. Rather than having it all, it accepts its limitations and realises that it is those limitations that perhaps set us most free.

The We and the I (Michel Gondry, UK/USA/France, 2012)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, French Cinema, Transnational Cinema

There is a moment in Michel Gondry’s The We and the I when the kids on the bus that is journeying across New York all seem to stop what they are doing and to look in awe at a beautiful white girl cycling on the sidewalk in a floral summer dress.

The film switches determinedly to slow motion as we see the girl cycling, heads turning, and one kid, Jacobchen (Jacob Carrasco), leaping up from his seat to fix a closer look at her.

This will perhaps sound odd, but at this moment what I shall call the cinematic manifests itself in full force. This no doubt sounds odd because The We and the I is, of course, a film. That is, the whole film is cinematic – and so it is strange to say that this moment is particularly cinematic, because it implies somehow that the rest of the film is not.

The point that I wish to make here is not that the rest of The We and the I is uncinematic; but it is interesting that a technique as cinematic as slow motion manifests itself at a moment when these kids – otherwise stars of their own movie(s), as I shall discuss below – become spectators in another movie, the movie of the beautiful white girl on the bike.

Not only does this moment powerfully suggest that New York is a cinematic city, but also that it has more stories to tell than the one, or the many, that are being told on the bus that takes these kids towards their homes on the last day of school.

But this moment also suggests the way in which these kids aspire to be cinematic; the straight boys, the gay boys, and the straight and arguably gay girls, all seem to look with desire at the white girl – wishing, it would seem, to have her life, to be able to move in slow motion, carefree and easy, rather than cooped up on this bus with its interminable journey through a New York that passes from sunny to rainy and from day to night.

It is perhaps important that Jacobchen shouts out to the girl a derogatory remark along the lines of ‘great tits, gorgeous’ (forgive me, I cannot remember the exact line). For, Jacobchen perhaps subverts the notion that he is in love with this girl as an image to behold, but that he is also rebelliously determined to possess this girl.

It would then also be important that Jacobchen gets into a quasi-fight with Jonathan (Jonathan Ortiz), who also has clamped eyes on and lays spurious claim to the girl: they both want her.

However, forasmuch as their objectification of the girl on the bike and their dispute over her might seem to undermine their aspirations to have her – in that they are acting out the impossibility of having her – the slow motion moment nonetheless seems to suggest that all of the kids want her and/or her lifestyle, even if their way of expressing it is coarse and futile (the bus drives on; the girl is perhaps never even aware that she has been regarded in this way).

Even when Messiah-like Kon (Konchen Carrasco) upbraids his brother Jacobchen for speaking to the girl in this derogatory fashion, he also corrects him and says that she did not have big tits. In other words, even if Kon demands better behaviour from Jacobchen, he also still saw and watched the girl intently.

The reason that I wish to talk about this moment in the film is because it raises the intertwined issues of race and class that run throughout the film. In short, the kids on the bus are all of black, Asian or Hispanic origin – or a mix of these. And they all seem to come from working class families – kids who look after their mothers, what the rest of the world might term a broken home, etc.

For the film to suggest that they all aspire to middle class values, or even wealthy values – as signalled by their collective adoration of the girl on the bike – is where the film becomes interesting.

It is not a young person’s fault to aspire to the images of success and beauty that surround us day in and day out from birth. But The We and the I also suggests that while these kids seem to want to live in the white, middle class world, it is somehow closed to them.

This is most forcefully signalled by the way in which the film’s numerous flashbacks and fantasy sequences are not the ‘cinematic’ slow motion of the girl on the bike, but predominantly on mobile phones.

Take Kenny’s (Kenneth Quinones) elaborate fantasy about striding into cool bars, being told what great taste he has, and hanging out with Donald Trump: this mobile phone section undermines the splendour of Kenny’s fantasy by lending to it a grain and pictorial dirtiness that is the opposite of the slow motion sequence with the girl. That is, the mobile phone footage actually is, almost, uncinematic. These kids can dream, but their dreams are banal (as perhaps most kids’ dreams are) – and they are not the full-on brightly lit slomo of the girl on the bike.

In other words, the film seems to suggest that ‘real cinema’ is impossible for these kids: their fantasies are minor fantasies played out on minor, smaller screens, and recorded with minor, smaller filmmaking devices. And by ‘real cinema,’ we are really talking about social mobility: what are the prospects for these kids? How will they get to be, or to be with, or to have what the girl on the bike has?

However, while we might be moving towards an assertion along the lines of “The We and the I not only reflects upon the lack of social mobility for young ethnic Americans, but it also arguably reinforces it – by beatifying the girl on the bike so much, only to deny such beauty when we see their more sordid, grimy fantasies and memories played out on mobile phones” – I’d also suggest that this is can only tentatively be the case.

Let’s work this through a bit.

For, while the bus contains bullies, introverts, drama queens and, well, just teenage kids, they on the whole seem okay. Even the bullies seem not really to be too bad, or to be taken too seriously. That is, their boisterous insults and supposed nastiness carry with them a sense of fun, or at the very least liveliness, that in itself is empowering thanks to its expression of libido. That is, the energy of the kids is a sign of potency, of potential power, be that in the kids who are smart mouths, the kids who can play music, or the kids who can draw.

In short, Gondry seems to cut his kids enough slack that we do not dislike them as much as all that, even if they are part-time bullies and even if they do some gleefully irresponsible things on this bus journey.

Since Gondry cuts the kids this slack, the modesty of their ambitions – rendered in modest mobile phone footage – suggests in some sense a sort of dignity. In other words, there is tension between the film making out that mobile phone ambitions will never be fully cinematic and the other approach to this issue, which is that mobile phone images are equally if differently cinematic – and for these kids more powerfully so, because it is the mobile phone that allows them to express themselves most forcefully.

Nonetheless, we are still faced with the notion that these kids are aspiring to be white. This is also figured in Teresa’s (Teresa Lynn) blonde wig. Teresa has been bunking school after drunkenly molesting one of peers, Laidychen (Laidychen Carrasco), who is also on the bus. In a bid to make herself over, she wears a blonde wig. Immediately she is harrangued about it: appearing, or aspiring to appear, white is in some respects selling out on who she and the rest of these kids really are. But even if the kids – Teresa, too – accept that she is not white and should be proud of who she actually is, this ambition still remains.

Importantly, the kids continually repeat watching and send to each other a video of Elijah (Elijah Canada), a kid not on the bus, who may or may not be one of the Chen clan, and who – *spoilers* – is announced as having been stabbed dead near the film’s climax.

We can contrast this with the footage and images of Teresa molesting Laidychen taken by Michael (Michael Brodie) and Big T (Jonathan Scott Worrell). Here, Michael has erased all images and footage (even though the film itself shows this to us – Gondry able to pass into deleted territory that the kids no longer can).

If Elijah’s fate as the ‘star’ of a viral video (it features him falling on his ass as he slips up on butter placed on a kitchen floor) is to be killed, while Teresa is allowed to live on thanks to the suppression of the footage that shows her at her worst, then The We and the I might suggest that it is by precisely avoiding becoming cinematic – by not falling into the trap of wanting to be white? – that one can survive in this world. Seeking and wanting one’s own fantasies, one’s own secrets, perhaps, is to retain and/or develop independence, while to aspire to the dreams fed to us by the white and middle class-dominated media is to not be independent at all.

And yet, the fact remains that Gondry can still show to us the images of Teresa and Laidychen, even if the other kids on the bus do not see it. That is, Gondry as white, middle class filmmaker has access to all areas; his films pass across all of the registers, from the supposedly cinematic to the supposedly uncinematic, as if he were fluent in everyone’s fantasies. That is, it is the privilege of the middle class to imagine the fantasies of the working class, to be able to hang with the non-white kids – while at the same time being able easily to swing back by into the white, middle class world and to reflect upon what one has seen.

Although Gondry would seem to express solidarity for his characters – perhaps, romantically put, he has a love for a common humanity – he still is demonstrating his ability to speak to and with all peoples, a skill that the subjects in his film do not and perhaps cannot possess.

Gondry’s fantasies of being able to cut across all divisions are marked by his trademark shots of simultaneous moments in different locations being played out on the screen at the same time: a swish pan takes us from inside the bus to a different location as if they were in fact the same space; kids in a pizza parlour can be seen in the bus window, even though they are not physically visible to the people on the bus.

These surely are visually arresting moments – and they are part of the package that has quickly singled out Gondry as a filmmaker with a notable, auteurist style.

But they also reinforce the fact that Gondry’s romanticism is a middle class fantasy.

It is not, at the last, that Gondry is at fault somehow for being limited in the kind of film that he can make. And perhaps I am misguided in effectively arguing that East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet, when in fact humans do share common ground and a common humanity that links us all.

But when biology – our common humanity – is married with culture – by which I mean the social and ethnic divisions that are the offshoot of a capitalist society – are put together, the tensions between the two come strongly to the fore (even if culture and biology are more intimately linked than we would like to think).

We might all aspire to become light or to become cinema – to be, to be with, or to have the girl on the bike. And we might all bar the very exceptional few fail in this and only have mobile phone fantasies. And we should be proud of our mobile phone fantasies, even if they are gritty and ugly to those who have been indoctrinated by the so-called ‘cinematic’ (only white girls on bikes are beautiful; the rest is somehow sordid). We should be proud of our mobile phone fantasies, because they are ours and not the expression of us pandering to be something we are not.

But can Michel Gondry be the person to tell us this?

My only answer is that I wish that the kids themselves had made the film. Correction: the kids themselves do make this film. But I wish they’d been credited more clearly for it. But then that is just me hoping in my white,  class way to find an ‘authentic’ expression of ethnic, working class America – something that probably does not exist.

There is no way out of this conundrum. I cannot offer any answers. But without any answers, maybe we can begin properly to think about this matter (if I am in a position to make such a declaration, to assert in any way whatsoever what thinking is).

Amazing how a moment in a film – a girl on a bike – can trigger a reading of that film that sends ripples throughout the rest of its fabric.

Becoming Light: on recent documentary film (In Memoriam Chris Marker)

American cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Documentary, European cinema, Latin American cinema, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

I rewatched Sans Soleil/Sunless (Chris Marker, France, 1983) today in honour of the passing of Chris Marker. It was as, if not more, beautiful than the first time I saw it.

Nonetheless, I want to write about four other things today: Madame Tussaud’s in London, and the films Nostalgia de la luz/Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán, France/Germany/Chile/Spain/USA, 2010), Swandown (Andrew Kötting, UK, 2012) and Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul, Sweden/UK, 2012). But while this post is not explicitly about Marker, I hope that his spirit infuses it somehow.

Time – the single most under-considered element of reality – will hopefully allow me one day to write the book, Becoming Light, that will draw upon what loosely I here wish to talk about. But in order to explain what this curious phrase, becoming light, means, I shall start today by considering Madame Tussaud’s.

There is plenty to say about Madame Tussaud’s, one of the most enduringly popular museums in London. For example, it is extortionately expensive (£30 entry). What is more, it also features a 4D cinema experience made in association with Marvel/Disney, which I may well mention at this blog’s conclusion.

One might also analyse the role – made prominent in the exhibition itself – played by waxworks in bringing an element of visuality to what we might call the news. That is, when old Mme Tussaud made waxworks of prominent people, the curious could finally get a sense of what the faces of those famous and infamous names looked like.

Umberto Eco, in Travels in Hyperreality (recently redubbed Faith in Fakes) has intelligently analysed the way in which waxworks played a role in constituting the age of simulation in which we now live. That is, for Eco, viewers of waxworks ended up mistaking the map/the simulation for reality, such that when the real was actually seen, it was somehow disappointing, or less than real.

This analysis is pertinent to what I want to say about Madame Tussaud’s (henceforth MT). For, when one enters the museum, one is taken via a lift up to the top floor, where one exits to the sound of flashing bulbs and paparazzo-style invitations to pose for the camera.

That is, MT opens up with glamour: one walks into a room filled with waxworks of, inter alia, Bruce Willis, the Twilight boys, Kate Winslet, Colin Firth, Helen Mirren, John Travolta, Johnny Depp, Daniel Radcliffe, Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman, Russell Brand, Cheryl Cole and so on. Not all film stars, but predominantly so.

It is a deeply unsettling experience. Sure, some people perform humourous poses with, say, J Lo, by pretending to bone her from behind. But on the whole people walk up to the waxwork, put their arm around it, and pose for a photo taken by a friend as if with a real person for a normal photo: maybe a victory sign, maybe a thumb up, but basically just a smile.

Being a snob, I naturally refrained from posing in any photo. I want to discuss my snobbery. But first I want to think about what the posing by other people means.

I use the phrase becoming light to signify what I believe humans most deeply desire: to divest ourselves of our bodies in order to exist in a state whereby we occupy all places at once and whereby we move with total speed. To become light, then, is to exist purely as an image.

When I say we want to divest ourselves of our bodies, I need to clarify what I mean. We want paradoxically not to have our bodies, but we also want physically to experience the becoming of light, the being pure image. That is, to have no body but also bodily to know what this feels like.

This will only be possible when humans work out how to use light as a system of memory storage. From what I understand, humans are actually working on this process. I am more specifically referring to the creation of computers that use light as a system of memory (this is what humans are working on), but one might also read cinema as a whole as a system of preserving/outsourcing memory through the storage of the physical as an image via means of light and shadow. That is, cinema already is this external memory machine.

The reason that we need to know how to use light to store memory in order to become light is because memory is embodied: it is the system whereby we use our physical/embodied experiences in the world in order to understand reality and/or predict with as great accuracy as we can what probabilistically will happen in the future. Memory is a result uniquely of the physical nature of our existence – and if we can find a way of preserving memory as a process via light and without requiring a physical body to do so, then perhaps we will be able truly to divest ourselves of our crude skinbags.

What does this have to do with MT?

The desire to pose alongside waxworks of stars for me speaks of the desire to become light. One could read posing alongside waxworks of stars as consolation for the fact that the people who stand with them will never meet the real star. This is their brush with fame and glory. This is as good as it gets.

This is not wrong. But it also overlooks an important aspect of the desire to become light. For it is not that the waxworks can equal flesh and blood human beings. Rather it is that the flesh and blood human beings are already waxworks; they are already disembodied light. And what people want to become is not a film star who works or anything like that. The connection is much more metaphysical than that: it is the desire to become simply an image.

There are grounds to argue that the desire to become light reaches something like epidemic status when we consider that people are so in love with images that they prefer images to real people. Perhaps it is for this reason that the daughter of the family that I visited MT with actually blushed when she put her arm round the inanimate waxwork of Johnny Depp and placed her head on its shoulders for a photograph. So heavily do we invest our desire in images that their grip on us is more powerful than reality. Were the real Johnny Depp there, no doubt reality would have censured the girl from being so forward as to put an arm around him. Instead, the blush comes from the total honesty that is involved in showing publicly that one loves not a person but an image of a person. We are in the age of hyperreality indeed.

Now, the reason I did not want to pose with the stars is probably because I would also blush but do not wish to be exposed as investing more in images than I do in people. I know that as I looked at Kate Winslet and Cheryl Cole, I could feel desire. Not uniquely sexual desire – these waxworks did not arouse me, though this does not mean that they could not. But an intense, brain-burning desire to have the image look at me, to return my gaze, to render me also an image.

To thus feel in effect that my life is not complete because my body is not capable of transcending itself and of becoming light speaks of how powerful the desire to become light is. For it destroys the possibility to be happy with whom we actually are. To lead our lives in a bodily fulfilled fashion, rather than to feel shame, to blush, precisely when our bodies expose their very corporal nature before powerful images.

This discomfort at the waxworks in MT was alleviated as soon as one passed into the sports section – I do not invest in Sachin Tendulkar and Johnny Wilkinson with the same level of desire as I do film stars – only to resurface somewhat before Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé Knowles and others in the music section – because music stars are in videos. That is, they are also images.

(This feeling finally died away again in the politics section where, bizarrely, Mohamed Fayed had a waxwork – probably the only person, I speculated to myself, who paid to be featured as a waxwork, so desperate is he to become light.)

Now, the desire to become light – the illness/addiction that cinema and other moving image technologies has induced in human beings such as myself – is problematic because it is based upon exceptionalism.

This is to do with speed. Those who can afford to move quickly, they are closer to becoming light. They are closer to becoming images. And when your image travels around the world faster than your body ever could, then you have become light. (This is why people are addicted to Facebook.) And what enables speed – is wealth. And wealth is the remit of the few, the seldom few, not of the many.

Furthermore, the issue with overemphasising light is that it means that all that is not brought to light is overlooked. It is forgotten, since memory has become conflated with light and the testimony of those who physically bear the scars of history are counted for nil if those wounds cannot be exposed as easy-to-consume images.

In some senses, this strikes me as the theme of the masterful Patricio Guzmán’s wonderful Nostalgia for the Light. For, this film is about precisely the role that light plays in memory.

Let us work through this. To suggest that we can have nostalgia for the light suggests that the light is no longer with us. And this is in part Guzmán’s thesis. Both much of the universe and those who were disappeared in Chile under General Pinochet remain shrouded in darkness: invisible and therefore forgotten. And we should not ignore the darkness. Indeed, at one point Guzmán asks us to look beyond the light – paradoxically to see into the darkness, to see all of reality. In my own words, to concentrate solely on the light means to lead a Luciferean existence whereby only the lit is important. God, however, is in darkness. We must remember the crucial role that darkness plays in the universe. And while we might suspect that even the darkest secret will eventually come to light (because some enlightenment takes a long time, it must wade through darkness before any actual enlightenment could ever take place), the fact remains that some things will never really come to light, some mysteries will remain – unless we start to believe in that which we cannot see. And even though the slaughter of thousands of Chileans was and perhaps always will be invisible, meaning that we must feel nostalgia for the light because of its absence, we must also learn to appreciate darkness, to believe in things – perhaps God himself – even though/precisely because there is no evidence of or light to prove him.

When we look only at the light, when we mistake the map for the terrain, then we are in the realm of the hyperreal. And yet sometimes we must travel the terrain, not at light speed, but slowly – because this is the only way in which we will ever really know the world in which we live, when we experience it physically and not as an image travelling through it in an ethereal fashion/when we only travel through ether.

This seems to be the theme of Swandown, in which director Andrew Kötting and writer Iain Sinclair travel from Hastings to Hackney via swan-shaped pedalo. To go slowly, to see all of the dark, off-the-map bits of space in between the light, the emphasised areas of the map.

It is perhaps the film’s only pity that it involves celebrity interludes from the likes of Stewart Lee, Alan Moore and others. These are not bad per se, but nor are they particularly enthralling. It is nice to see how ‘normal’ they are as people – their ‘banter’ is mildly amusing, but not electric. Nonetheless, part of the brilliance of, say, Gallivant (Andrew Kötting, UK, 1997) is that it finds magic in countless regular people up and down the land as the director travels with his mother and daughter in search of authentic British people.

Finally – and apologies for being so circumspect/suggestive/imprecise on this blog – part of the brilliance of Searching for Sugar Man is the example that the film makes of forgotten folk singer Rodriguez. Not only does the film suggest the role that music can play in bringing about social change, but it also has Rodriguez adhere (with some economy of truth, no doubt) to a principle whereby becoming light, becoming an image, is not what he chooses for himself (even though this happens simply by virtue of his being in a film and/or being a music star).

As Rodriguez’s family make beautiful statements about the fact that class cannot make a human or their hopes and dreams more beautiful (that is, they criticise the common assumption that wealth is not simply an index of itself – i.e. wealth simply demonstrates material value – but also an index of human value – i.e. rich people are better people), and as Rodriguez refuses properly to become a star/an image/light (we are told he gives away his money to charity, friends and family, preferring simply to live in his modest Detroit apartment), so we have an object lesson – set against a deprived Detroit background – of a man who refuses to become light – or whose decision to come into the light is tempered by an acknowledgement of the benefits of darkness. This is not only signalled by Rodriguez’s career trajectory (although the film glosses over tours to Australia that the performer did in the late 1970s/early 1980s – long before his South Africa comeback but also long after his early 1970s flirtation with fame), but also by the first shot we see of the man – lingering at length in shadow behind a closed window, Rodriguez is at first pure image, before finally he steps forward, opens the window, and is seen in the cold-ish Detroit light of day.

In Sans Soleil, Marker repeatedly shows us shots of people. They are just images of people but, to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, to show images of people is also just. That is, Marker creates something like a democratic cinema, not based upon the individual, not one that reaffirms the desire to become light, but which instead looks at people who live in a world without light.

People here are not stars; we may see their images, but they are not stars, not images of people whose image is already moving at light speed, ubiquitous, disembodied, individualised, privileged.

Swandown asks us to move slowly, to appreciate the terrain itself (despite being a film that of course elides terrain in order to become a map/film of sorts). Its use of (admittedly minor) stars is problematic, in that it creates tension between Kötting’s otherwise democratic cinema and his film that, through collaborator Sinclair, seems to want to protest the London 2012 Olympics for precisely bringing light to a Hackney area that by definition casts into shadow those who are not Olympian heroes (even if I do not personally invest in sports stars as I do in film stars, as my MT experiences told me).

Nostalgia for the Light, meanwhile, also shows the importance of darkness in the contemporary world – and its insistent and beautiful shots of night skies and swirling galaxies demonstrate this: while we tend to fixate on the stars, they only stand out in such a beautiful fashion because of the darkness that surrounds them. Read socially, the 1 per cent needs the 99 per cent, even if it believes somehow that it can do without them.

Indeed,I am anticipating finding The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2012) problematic in what seems from the trailer to be a defence of the 1 per cent against the 99 per cent, but the jury is out since I am yet to see it.

But perhaps giving attention to Nolan’s film also runs counter to the way in which this blog tries to being attention to three far less glamourous and widely covered documentaries, all of which are worth watching, not necessarily instead of Batman (I can’t stop people from wanting to see a movie as hyped as this one), but certainly in addition to Batman (don’t forget the 99 per cent of movies).

Although it is slickly made and has some nicely visceral effects (as well as some uncomfortable ones, such as a rod being shoved into your back and some 3D shots that force you to look at eye-splitting flying objects), Marvel Super Heroes 4D (Joshua Wexler, USA, 2010) takes place in what at MT used to be a planetarium.

It would seem, therefore, that the museum – and its myriad visitors – prefer not to edify us about mysteries of the universe, the universe being so mysterious because so much of it is in darkness, but rather to transport into the fully lit world of Marvel’s superheroes, where whatever darkness there is, is simply dismissed in a Manichaean fashion as ‘bad.’

The love of cinema is not just based upon the light that shines on the screen, but also the darkness of the room that accompanies it, the darkness of the leader, the darkness of the frames between frames that are onscreen for 50 per cent of our viewing time, the darkness of our blinks, the darkness that the phi effect covers over as we saccade.

Darkness is key to life, or certainly key to the kind of dignified life that Rodriguez exemplifies/is made to exemplify in Searching for Sugar Man. The Luciferean enlightenment project is not necessarily entirely beneficial, accelerating us in general as it does towards an individualistic world in which only the chosen few get to be stars, while the abandoned rest are left to flounder in poverty.

We dream of becoming stars – this dream itself being a major obstacle in liberating us, because the dream of stardom promises to free us from poverty, when freedom will only arrive when we liberate ourselves from the dream of stardom. Indeed, the dream of stardom is what imprisons us in a world in which we are in fact already free, since all humans are born free, but they place themselves in chains, seeking to divest themselves of their bodies and to become light because we are force fed images, brought up on them, addicted and dependent on them, from the very earliest age.

It is paradoxical that Nostalgia for the Light, Swandown (which Kötting describes at one point as an anti-narrative – read mainstream – film in a world dominated by narrative/mainstream cinema), and Searching for Sugar Man are, of course, films that show light and darkness.

But they are films that each – in their own way – seek to emphasise the importance of darkness and not the surimportance of light. With this perhaps they share something that Chris Marker understood.

Chris Marker the alien is perhaps now only in darkness, a mystery we will no more see express himself. Nonetheless, as far as his films are concerned, with Sans Soleil standing in here as their figurehead, he was a truly dignified ambassador for making us remember darkness.

Now it is up to all of us to try to remember that we do not need to become light.

Leading the embodied life that we have to the best of our abilities, moving at whatever speed we want or need to, existing in our own time and not in the uniform speed of light – this is what we can learn from recent documentary film read in the shadow of Marker’s most sad passing.

Killer Joe (William Friedkin, USA, 2011)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Neurocinematics

Killer Joe tells the story of trailer trash Texan family the Smiths. Son Chris (Emile Hirsch) owes money to some local gangsters and so hatches the plot to kill his mother, Adele (Julia Adams), in order to take home her savings via an inheritance.

To do this, he hires a local cop-cum-hitman, the titular Joe (Matthew McConnaughey), as well as roping in his dad Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), his stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) and his little sister Dottie (Juno Temple) – with whom he’ll split the money four ways. The reason he has to involve the rest of his family is because Adele savings are apparently all to be left in her will to Dottie.

Since the money is going to come only after the hit, Chris and co offer Dottie as ‘collateral’ to Killer Joe. And Joe takes Dottie – presumably depriving her of her virginity in the process.

The film is blackly comic – with some amusing deadpan humour, plain funny sight gags, trailer park gawping, and unsettling violence – which is often sexualised.

The film is, as a former colleague of mine has pointed out to me, pretty harsh on its women: Adele barely features, Sharla is a conniving slut, and Dottie, having been deflowered by Joe, seems to fall for him pretty bad.

It’s not that the male folk fare better: most people in the film are copper nanotubes (Google it), the men included. But the women don’t really get a look in, being sexual objects, somewhat fatales, pretty incapable of autonomous action, and something of a backdrop for the men to be men together.

However, aside from these shortcomings, and no doubt some interesting things that could be discussed in terms of neo-noir and other films of its ilk – The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, USA/Sweden/UK/Canada, 2010) and U-Turn (Oliver Stone, France/USA, 1997) came to mind while watching it – the film is interesting for a couple of things that I’d like to discuss now and both of which, in short order, suggest that the film is reflecting on the cinematic experience.

I am in the midst of reading Gabriele Padullà’s In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema. The book basically tries to explain what the cinema experience is like – and while I have not finished it to know Padullà’s argument exactly, it seems as though he basically wants to account for how filmgoers watch movies because they enjoy them.

This requires a bit of explanation, since Padullà’s argument will seem obvious (duh, of course we watch movies because we enjoy them). How it is interesting, though, is the way in Padullà dismisses earlier interpretations of the film viewing experience.

For example, early film theorists often compared cinema to Plato’s Cave. The philosopher for Plato is the person who realises the most humans unthinkingly are sat in a cave watching the projected shadows of reality, but not reality itself. Cinema is a bit like sitting in such a cave and watching projected shadows of reality. Ergo, cinema might be a bit like Plato’s cave.

Except, for reasons practical if for no other, then cinema makes ‘philosophers’ of us all (but does it really?), since we all know that reality does not conform to the movies (but do we?). Now, the Plato model perhaps was employed for the political reason that to compare a mass medium like cinema to a great like Plato helps to legitimise cinema as an authentic art form. Indeed, that cinema can and perhaps does make philosophers of us (something I argue in my own published work – but not quite in this fashion/for these purposes) also no doubt helps to legitimise cinema as a ‘meaningful’ form – when most people view it as crash, bang, wallop blood-splattering fun.

However, the Plato analogy cannot stand up when it is clear that we choose to watch movies that we know are just illusions. Furthermore, since we now view films not in a darkened room but, as Padullà puts it, in broad daylight, further means that the Plato analogy is outdated.

Furthermore, Padullà rejects the idea that cinema is a mirror or something like a dream screen for the same reason: we can and do get up during film viewing, we talk, check our phones (my example, not Padullà’s) and the images are far more precise than a dream image.

So, given that these models of what the cinematic experience is or is supposed to be, Padullà’s suggestion (so far) that we watch films because we want to and because we enjoy them takes on some ‘revolutionary’ force.

Why this sidetrack into Padullà?

Because I wonder Killer Joe seems to reflect directly on viewing practices in the contemporary era – and I shall give what I consider to be two clear-cut examples. And I’ll give them in reverse order (in that the one I discuss first happens later in the film than the one I discuss second).

Minor spoiler: as Joe explains to Sharla and Ansel how he is going to deal with Chris following the (expected) botching of the plot to win Adele’s money, Ansel’s attention is drawn to a television depicting monster trucks.

Joe reacts poorly, heading over to the TV and destroying it.

Why this is important to me is because Ansel’s attention cannot but be drawn towards the monster truck screen – in spite of the fact that Joe is talking to him.

While Ansel no doubt likes shows with monster trucks in them, this also signals how the screens that fill our contemporary world are designed – even in broad daylight – to capture our attention. That is, even though we are supposed to be concentrating on something else (here, Joe talking), we find that we look at the screen not because we want to, but because we have no choice but to.

I know that Padullà addresses what we might call the attention economy in a section beyond where I am right now in In Broad Daylight, so apologies to him if I guess incorrectly the nature of his eventual argument.

Nonetheless, I wonder to what extent we are prey to the moving images on the ubiquitous screens that surround us the whole time (which is not to mention the loud sounds that we hear everywhere, too). Indeed, various essays that I have written argue that cutting rates and various other techniques, that colour, that the depiction of human emotions, and (this one’s not published – yet) that the beauty of film stars, are all designed – advertently or otherwise – to attract our attention, whether or not we actually like or enjoy a film. To this extent, cinema – and other screen media – draw upon our attention naturally, meaning that our minds are spent considering neither our natural environment (inasmuch as we might consider screens to be ‘unnatural’) nor attending to what we choose to.

No doubt the cognitive pleasures in having our attention aroused (we feel ‘alive’ when we are searching for prey, predator or mate – apparently) have caused a situation of feedback: that is, we go looking for rapid image fixes rather than attend to what we ought to – as my students looking at their iPhones during film screenings in class attests.

Nevertheless, not only would this seem to suggest that we do not strictly look at screens because we enjoy it (we can and do enjoy it, but how much choice we have in looking is up for grabs – anyone who has tried to hold down a conversation in a pub showing even the most banal television perhaps knows this feeling), but it also suggests that we might (wilfully!) be heading into Plato’s Cave – whereby we look at screens, at the play of illusions, rather than at reality, even though we know reality is out there.

In this sense, while Padullà’s critique of the Plato analogy is powerful, he might conceivably overlook the way in which the Plato analogy might also be prophetic.

(And note: when we do not look at what we want to, or when we cannot but hear the sounds of screens that surround us, then to an extent, these sounds and images are doing violence to us. I think of it thus: when I have been trying to sleep and I hear a television, I find the jolts from light sleep caused by the television to be truly jarring and disturbing, violent even. Perhaps you have had a similar experience…? Okay, so it is good for us to be alert and ready for violence – as the Darwinians would have us believe – but cinema and the other screen media would also have us believe that we were made to live in a hyperstimulated state, when a world without screens would have some – real – violence, but nothing like the constant barrage that we have now…)

The second moment, which comes earlier in the film, is when Joe ‘seduces’ Dottie for the first time. During this scene, Dottie undresses for Joe, who turns his back on her and then gives her orders as he undresses himself.

Okay – we the audience members see Dottie, and so there is a complex interplay going on here between our own voyeurism (heterosexual males if no others are drawn to Dottie’s figure for ‘natural’ reasons) and Joe’s projections.

What I mean by this is that in not looking at Dottie, but instead getting her to approach him from behind, he gets to imagine what she looks like – preferring his imagination to actually seeing or looking at her.

In other words, while Joe is pissed off at Ansel for looking at the TV and not at him, Joe himself has a strange relationship with reality, such that he prefers to create projected fantasy worlds rather than to engage in what is actually in front of him.

As much is borne out later when Joe gets Sharla to simulate fellatio on a piece of K Fried C that he holds over his crotch. Joe does not want real contact with Sharla, it seems, but gets off on simulated contact. In other words, it seems that Joe is also as addicted to images as Ansel, and that he prefers images to reality.

Now, since we do see Dottie undress, we might say that Joe has his own foibles, but that we as viewers prefer actually to look. Except, of course, that we are watching a film and not reality. In other words, director Friedkin seems to be bringing to our attention the way in which he, too, is constructing (male) fantasies that we see played out, and which perhaps we prefer to ‘reality’.

The fake BJ scene is most telling in this respect: Joe has just smashed in Sharla’s face when he forces her to suck the chicken leg. If Joe is somehow an ersatz viewer, then Friedkin seems in some respects to be throwing back into our (male) faces the fantasies of sexualised violence that Joe enacts. Indeed, Friedkin ramps this up by seeming to have the seem play out in a titillating fashion (even though the scene is shot from a combination of long, medium and low angle shots; the arch lighting might also enhance this effect).

Joe even suggests with Dottie that he and she are 12 years old as they enact their fantasy sex – an ironic comment, it seems, on the regressive powers of cinema for making us engage not with the real world, or with real people, but with fantasy images of people instead.

Again, then, it seems that Padullà might have been premature (though, again, he might twist back on himself in the book – we shall see) in dismissing both the notion of the mirror and the notion of Plato’s cave as analogies for the film experience.

For, the predominance of screens in the contemporary world – and their power to hold our attention ahead of the reality – seems to suggest that we might be moving willingly into something like Plato’s Cave. And the way in which film can muck about with our sexual fantasies, which of course are based on mental images as much as on reality, suggests that we cannot only watch films because we enjoy them (even though this is a primary motivating factor). But it can be for more perverse and deep-seated reasons than that, ones that cognitive psychology can do little to answer for, and which still need something along the lines of psychoanalysis (with warnings/provisos) to at least begin to contemplate.

Killer Joe is not necessarily a great film, nor the best by Friedkin. Nonetheless, Friedkin belongs to a generation of directors that Padullà says were obsessed with cinema as it was: busy, bustling, loud auditoria, not the museum culture of silence and worship that we have today. As such, it seems unsurprising that his film – in so many ways a throwback to an older generation of noir – would seem nostalgic for former film viewing experiences. Ones where we not endlessly distracted by other, smaller, faster moving screens. And ones where our own fantasies helped to fill in the gaps left by the film world – rather than seeing everything because the cinema shows everything…

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Timur Bekmambetov, USA, 2012)

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

Why this film to blog about?

Well, I only really want to make a simple point.

But before the point, a rant: while I have of late missed stuff that only shows on one screen and at only one time that I really would rather not have missed, the local multiplex showed this and it was on at a time I could go to and is not the other side of town. It is a pity that basic pragmatics dictate what we watch, but there we go.

Now, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is by no means the best film I’ve seen recently – but it is not the worst either. I’ll save my mini-comments about the other movies for another time.

But otherwise down to business. What is the point I want to make about AL:VH?

At several moments in the film, toys morph into real figures, evil vampire Adam (Rufus Sewell) morphs into an animated version of the story about himself that he is telling, moving shots of maps turn into fly-overs over supposedly real battlefields, and more.

It is this kind of shot that I want to discuss – the kind of shot where the map morphs into the terrain, such that the map is no longer separate from the terrain, but on a continuum with it – inseparable.

But this just sounds like a classic ‘postmodern’ argument, right? That is, in the postmodern era we are no longer aware of what is real and what is not.

This is not to say that we believe a film like AL:VH to be a documentary of some sort. Only a fuckwit believes that.

But it is to say that we live in an era when we can doubt and not believe whatever we wish to – since everything can be disproved, or rather since no one really believes in proof at all these days.

Since nothing can be proven or disproved, people believe what they want (and people refuse to discuss matters with people who do not share their opinion – perhaps the single most damaging human trait one can have, a kind of solipsistic closed-mindedness – meaning that the closed-minded person does not discuss at all, does not learn, and shrouds themselves in a discourse about rights whereby they declare their right to be a moron).

I can’t promise to argue that AL:VH suggests anything more profound than this in the kinds of shots mentioned above and which feature prominently in the film’s running time.

Nonetheless, I want to consider them in some detail, for the context of the film is also interesting.

That is, AL:VH is no normal vampire movie. It is claiming that the 16th President of the United States of America was a vampire hunter.

Again, no one believes this to be true (no one I would call sane, anyway). But what this means is that the film engages directly with history, which is something of a rarety for the vampire movie (as far as I am aware, and even though some prominent vampire films are also period costume dramas).

However, it is in keeping with the fluid shots of the film, in which model morphs into reality, that AL:VH should falsify history as it does. Here is a film in which there is no need to respect history – because it is all a bit of a joke and falsifiable anyway. So why not blatantly falsify it? This is in keeping with the spirit of the times we are living in, after all…

Perhaps only a post-Soviet filmmaker like Bekmambetov could do this. This is a generalisation – and as such in itself false – but without a god to fall back on, with the official history desecrated, the only rule left to follow is that there are no rules – and Abe Lincoln can be an axe-wielding ruthless vampire killer. Former Soviets know this; Westerners are beginning to know it better and better…

In the film, the vamps are made to stand in for the American South and for the benefits of slavery, in that Adam and his cronies live on a huge plantation down south and are implied as being slave owners and slave eaters.

However, the film here kind of mixes its messages. Okay – so slavery is indeed all about the consumption of humans, and so it stands to reason that the filmmakers would align slaveholders with vampires. But vampires are also people who wear black, who cannot come out in the day (a myth about vampires debunked in this film, as is the notion that it is only a stake through the heart that will kill them; plain silver does it), and who only function at night.

To me, this sounds at least in part similar to something trendy philosopher Slavoj Žižek says, when he discusses an

old European fairy-tale motif of diligent dwarfs (usually controlled by an evil magician) who, during the night, while people are asleep, emerge from their hiding-place and accomplish their work (set the house in order, cook the meals), so that when, in the morning, people awaken, they find their work magically done.

(For the full text, read here.)

I hope this is sufficiently clear – but what I am suggesting is that while vampires obviously consume human flesh, their behaviour is also like that of the slave already. While vampires are not going to set your house in order, their very invisibility (famously they have no mirror image) means that vampires are like slaves, too, together with all of the racial inequality that slavery has helped to produce.

In short, then, the film seems to argue that slavery is the invisible evil – both in terms of slaves (which in the USA has a distinct overlap with the country’s black population) and slave drivers (here, vampires).

But let us go further…

In another text, Žižek argues that batshit novelist Ayn Rand had one profound insight (and no more): that when money ceases to be in circulation, humans will begin to trade in flesh, using other humans as currency.

The reason that I mention this is because while AL:VH is set in the 1830s and onwards, it of course has been made in the early 2010s. And what is happening in the early 2010s is an economic meltdown that may yet prove to be the biggest since 1929, which in turn played a significant role in the development of world events between 1939 and 1945.

In other words, the shit might yet hit the fan as a result of this global economic crisis. And one of the ways in which that might happen is because without money, humans will trade in other humans. And perhaps even a film like AL:VH can imply something meaningful, then, in terms of how slavery remains an issue even today – and it is not something that is relegated uniquely to the past.

(This is, by the way, an issue – slavery, not vampire movies – that I have written about at greater length here.)

In this way, the ‘postmodern’ stuff – whereby we do not know truth from falseness – perhaps suits this film. It speaks both of how the invisible issue of slavery, believed eradicated, is in fact still with us today, and perhaps in more insidious (virtual?) fashions.

And, perhaps more importantly, it speaks of how in an age in which slavery is denied as existing, but which is also an age in which no one knows what is true anymore, then indeed there is perhaps only one logical truth that humans can accept – and that is their own experience.

What I mean to say by this is that people only know truth through their own bodies. It is not something to be read in a book or seen in a film. It is something to be experienced – with even thinking being (something like a) physical experience, even if a thought has no material reality for itself (you cannot touch a thought, though a thought can perhaps touch you).

If our truth is what is inscribed upon us, in that it is what physically marks us, it is our physical existence – then perhaps we already live in an age that is ripe for slavery and violence. For, bereft of any other marker, and cognizant of the fact that others are only ‘mere’ bodies, we perhaps decide to screw other people over – to trade in/with their bodies – before we choose to live a social existence.

In effect: there is no god and there is no law (Lincoln, played by Benjamin Walker, is studying the law, but basically sacks it off because the only law that slaveholders/vampires understand is the contents of a can of silver-tinted whoop-ass – i.e. learning the lesson that slavery is bad not in an abstract sense but through their bodies/experiences).

Since there is no god and no law, what is my incentive to be and/or do good by/with/to others? I have none. And since I live in a time in which only my own experience counts – in which, in effect, I cannot or perhaps will not learn from others, including the media and books, because those others are not telling me ‘the truth’ but are instead trying to ‘control’ me (even to enslave me and my precious tiny mind, I can kid myself!), then I have no reason to believe anyone who claims to lay down laws or hear from god.

How ironic, though, that it is the absence of ‘slavery’ (I lead my own life and no one else gets in my way) leads, within the context of a world also governed by economics, to, precisely, literal, real, physical, violent and nasty slavery.

A further irony: vampires function in films as proof of God, in that they are condemned to walk the earth forever as a result of their evil ways. In effect, the human propensity to be a slave driver, to be nasty to other humans, cannot be held in check by God. Even with God, even with the law, we make other humans suffer.

(Indeed, without God, or those who seeks to become powerful by claiming to be His representatives on Earth, Western slavery might never have taken the form that ultimately it did.)

So what emerges from a film as cynical as AL:VH is this morality: only violence solves problems, even though violence is also – more problematically – also the source of our problems. Do we solve our problems by addressing the problems, or by addressing the causes of the problems? AL:VH‘s AL decides not to use the law, to use thought and thinking, to encourage humans to think themselves ethically into a moral existence, but instead to use an axe.

He does not do what, ahem, university lecturers and some filmmakers try to do – and that is to try to encourage people to become better than what/who they are. Instead, he takes it as read that humans are bad and so just gets badder to get rid of the problem.

Indeed, as much is revealed in the person of Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper), who is Lincoln’s mentor and, lo, also a vampire. Sturgess is a ‘good’ vampire. I place ‘good’ in inverted commas, because while he helps Abe and does do some ass-kicking of his own, Sturgess nonetheless does kill people to live. Indeed, we and Lincoln see Sturgess kill a drunk. Lincoln is not so upright a human that he decides to do something about this (like dob Sturgess in), but instead takes mercy on him because of his lost girlfriend sob story – which he naïvely believes.

That Sturgess is a vampire but also ‘good’ functions not to suggest that not all vampires are bad; quite the opposite, it has a vampire tell us precisely that all vampires are bad and must be killed. In effect, Sturgess is the self-loathing Jew or black man who justifies the white man’s racism – thereby legitimating slavery, the Holocaust and other atrocities.

In some respects, AL:VH‘s seeming belief that we are simply our bodies (though we must remember that our bodies only exist in relation – with other bodies, with all that surrounds us), does not excuse AL:VH from the rather odd decision only to have one prominent black character, Will Johnson (Anthony Mackie) in a film not just about vampires, but also about emancipation from slavery.

For, if we do wear our truth on our person, then the absence of prominent black characters in the film suggests something like a denial of slavery (that truth remains invisible in the body of the film, a secret hidden in darkness and travelling the roads only at night, when the film’s blacks are harder for the audience to see anyway; that is, we can pretend they’re not there).

It suggests that slavery was created to provide the conditions for white men to establish themselves as heroes and villains – to destroy an ethical life whereby we think about how we relate to others, and to create a moral life in which we blindly follow moral rules by rote. I would suggest that, contrary to an ethical life, such a moral life takes no real account of human life. Instead, other humans – as blacks do in this film – function as an excuse for white humans to feel good about themselves.

Indeed, by making slave owners out to be vampires – i.e. precisely not human – the film places ‘over there’ (beyond the human) an issue that is really right here, which is not carried out by literal bloodsuckers, but which is put into motion by regular people like you and me. A human issue.

In order to defeat the vampire scourge, Lincoln commandeers all of America’s silver. How he manages to convince people that collecting silver is a legitimate war effort is not entirely known, but we do know this: Lincoln cannot really tell people that this is all about vampires, because they would just be too scared or not believe him. In other words, AL:VH suggests that people should just do as they’re told (Lincoln as tyrant) because they wouldn’t be able to handle the truth – the real truth being, of course, that there is no truth, there are no vampires, but that people need to believe in something in order to keep them in order and there’s money to be made from convincing them that this is so, so why no tax the shit out of silver, claim to send it down South in a big anti-vampire bomb – without letting on about the anti-vampire bit – and instead keep all of the silver for oneself, like any good corrupt politician would do. Lincoln’s memory takes a shoeing in this film!

People pool their silver in AL:VH – for vampires fear it as it reminds them of Judas betraying Christ. As if Christ could have become Christ without Judas and without the marking on his body of all of the hatred that mankind bears towards those who come peddling unwanted truths.

This pooling of resources might seem to point to the possibility of a common wealth: we can all just share everything and thus overcome our problems.

Except that sharing is a phantom, suggested to the people by Lincoln who, as mentioned, does not use the silver for the purposes suggested at all (killing vampires). Does he in fact run off with the silver? Either way, there is no sharing, as the presence of Sturgess in the White House at film’s end suggests. As Sturgess offers to make Lincoln immortal, and as Lincoln goes to the theatre to die (he will be shot by pro-vampire conspiracist John Wilkes Booth), we get the sense that the vampires are here and will never go away. That the desire to share is not genuine; it is the desire to give away one’s silver in order to feel slighted by one’s government. To attest to one’s own powerlessness. To feel disenfranchised and misunderstood. To feel as though one cannot trust anyone. To feel as though one only has one’s own body. To be a closed minded solipsist who reinforces the system of consumption and waste that AL:VH claims to be defeating.

Vampires believe in God, but they are condemned for their bad faith. To believe nothing and no one, to be a solipsist who only relies on their self, that is also to have bad faith. To have no faith in anyone else. Perhaps not even in one’s self. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter suggests that we are all vampires now.

POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (Morgan Spurlock, USA, 2011)

American cinema, Blogpost, Documentary, Film education, Film reviews, Neurocinematics

There is not necessarily that much to say about POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, in that the premise of the film is pretty simple.

That is, Morgan Spurlock, he of Supersize Me (USA, 2004) fame, has made a film that exposes to what degree product placement – or what we might call just plain advertising – is a common practice in the film, television and new media industries.

I hope that such people do not exist (because they’d have to be what I might uncharitably term morons), but we can hypothesise that not everyone already knows this. And if not everyone already knows this, then bravo Morgan Spurlock for bringing it to our/their attention.

Beyond that, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is not necessarily as brilliant as all that. And I’d perhaps even go so far as to say that it is disingenuous.

The Review Bit (in which – enviously? – I reproach Morgan Spurlock for thinking that a wink and a smile mitigates the trick he is playing on me)
The film is smart and ironic, sure – but its disingenuous nature comes through when Spurlock takes (seeming) swipes at bizarre North American corporate practices, such as the weird psychoanalytic branding exercise that he goes through early on in the film.

We see Morgan subjected to countless questions that seem to go on for hours – and after being grilled in this intense manner he is told – entirely anticlimactically – that he/his brand is a combination of intelligent and witty (I can’t remember the exact phrase – but it was cheesey).

My point is that if Morgan expects us (as at least I seem to think that he does) to laugh, somewhat bitterly, at how people can make money selling transparent clothes to the Emperor (psychoanalytic branding that tells anyone with a modicum of self-awareness what they probably know about themselves already), then why does he not expect us already to know precisely the other ‘insights’ that his documentary reveals – namely, that advertising is everywhere?

In this way, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is not really about advertising, but about Morgan Spurlock – and his access to the beautiful classes (even if he has not in fact ‘made it’ in ‘real life’).

The film claims that he is not selling out but buying in. To be honest, I think that both of these terms pertain to the same logic of capital-as-justification-of-one’s-existence that Spurlock might not necessarily critique, but the critique of which is surely a strong part of his No Logo-reading target audience.

Spurlock might aim for ‘transparency’ – but this in itself is problematic. As pointed out to me in the past by an astute former colleague, if something is transparent, it is invisible. While Spurlock might make apparent something that advertisers themselves have for a long time been wanting to make as apparent as possible – namely their brand – Spurlock also seeks to make transparent – i.e. invisible – his very conformity with the practices that his film might otherwise seek to critique.

Irony and humour are aplenty in the film, as Spurlock seeks to make a doc-buster that is corporate sponsored in its entirety while being about the prevalence of corporate sponsorship. There seems no room in this world for gifts or sacrifices, or any of those things that might otherwise suggest a spirit and sense of community beyond the quest for material profit. And for all of Spurlock’s success (and his failures) in getting money from the brand dynasties, it does seem to lack, how do I put it?, soul.

The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman, USA, 2007) opens with Homer shouting from an onscreen audience that the Simpsons Movie within the Simpsons Movie that he is watching is no better than the TV show, and a rip-off. Similarly, Wayne’s World (Penelope Spheeris, USA, 1992) has a protracted sketch in which Wayne (Mike Myers) explains how he will not sell out to corporate sponsorship while simultaneously advertising a host of products from pizzas from trainers.

In other words, Hollywood has been pretty up-front about the fact that it has been peddling advertisements to us/short-changing us in the form of films for a long time. Hell – although I am here shifting slightly into the realm of the online viral, but some ‘advertainments’ – such as Zack Galafianakis’ wonderful Vodka Movie – are pretty good.

In this way, Spurlock does not take his film to the level of, say, the Yes Men in their critique of contemporary corporate practices. In their far-too-little-seen The Yes Men Fix The World (Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno and Kurt Engfehr, France/UK/USA, 2009), there is a scene in which the titular Yes Men try to convince a gathering of corporate bigwigs that they could make a shitload of money by, literally, repackaging shit back to consumers (that’s vaguely how I remember it, anyway – perhaps someone can correct me if I’m wrong). Hollywood also does this – but given that shit stinks and causes disease if not carefully disposed of, sometimes it’s good to rub it back in the noses of those who deposit it, as per the Yes Men. In comparison, Spurlock just seems to enjoy wading through shit to get to the silver screen a little too much.

Anyway, now to…

The Real Blog – not about but inspired by the so-branded Greatest Movie Ever Sold
At one point in Spurlock’s film, he talks to Martin Lindstrom of Buyology, which is also the name of a book about marketing and its effects on the brain.

Lindstrom shows to Spurlock images of his brain while watching a Coke commercial.

Lindstrom explains that at a certain moment in the commercial (it is not made particularly clear which moment, since Spurlock – like many neuro-whatever evangelists – tries to blind us with ‘science’ rather than a precise explanation), Spurlock’s brain releases dopamine, which suggests an addiction of sorts – inspired by the commercial. That is, or so the film seems to suggest, Spurlock underwent the same effects of a ‘Coke high’ thinking about Coke – which in turn suggested his avowed desire for a Coke at the time of watching the advert – as involved in actually drinking a Coke.

What is not clear from this is whether Spurlock’s ‘addiction’ is to Coke, or at the very least to its effects, or rather to images that can spur desire through their very presence for that which they depict.

My critique of the lack of clarity offered by Spurlock and which I extended to neuro-evangelists is not because, Raymond Tallis-style, I wish to dismiss ‘neuromania.’ Indeed, I personally think that neuroscience has enormous amounts of insight to offer us.

But I am not sure that the right questions are being asked of neuroscience at present in order for us fully to understand the implication of its results.

I have written a few papers, published and forthcoming, on what neuroscience might mean for film studies, particularly in the realm of images attracting our attentions through fast cutting rates, through the exaggerated use of colour, and through various acting techniques (associated predominantly with Stanislavski’s ‘system‘ and Strasberg’s ‘method‘ – which are of course different things, but I group them together because the former spawned its offshoot, the latter). And it is this area of studying film that I wish to pursue further – and on a level of seriousness far greater than that more playfully adopted for a previous posting on sleeping in the cinema.

This will sound quite outlandish – particularly to academic readers – because it is a crazy, Burroughs-esque proposal. But I think that a neuroscientific approach to cinema will help bring us closer to answering one question, which I formulate thus: can there be such a thing as image addiction?

Why is this an important question to ask/answer – and what does neuroscience have to do with it?

It is an important question – at least in my eyes – for the following reason: there is a long line in film studies history of people who argue for and against (predominantly against) the possibility that humans can or do mistake cinematic images for reality. This question, however, is all wrong – even if slightly more interesting than it seems easy to dismiss.

Far more important is the following: it is not that humans mistake films for reality (or if they do, this is not as significant as what follows), it is that humans commonly mistake reality for cinema.

What do I mean by this? I mean every time we feel disappointed that we are not in a film. I mean humanity’s obsession with watching moving images on screens at every possible opportunity such that life – and even ‘slow’ films – become boring and intolerable to people who must have their fix instead of bright colour and fast action. I mean the widespread aspiration to be on film, or at the very least to become an image (what I like to refer to as ‘becoming light’) on a screen (the final abandonment of the body and the ability to be – as an image – in all places at once [travelling at ‘light speed’]). I mean our inability to look interlocutors in the eye because we are too transfixed by the TV screen glowing in the corner of the pub. I mean – and I know this sensation intensely – the sense of immersion and loss of self that I feel when I watch films.

This is what I call image addiction.

But why neuroscience?

Because neuroscience might be able to help show to what extent – be it through conspiracy or otherwise – moving images and their accompanying sounds literally wire our brains in a certain fashion, such that we do all (come closer to) thinking in exactly the same way, repeating the same bullshit mantras to each other, dreaming only minor variations of the same things, etc.

Don’t get me wrong. If we adopted a psychoanalytic – instead of a neuroscientific – discourse – we might realise that the literal wiring of our brains is heavily influenced – and perhaps even relies/historically has relied upon – ‘fantasy’ of other kinds beyond the cinematic, and which we might even more broadly label the ‘culture’ in which we live.

But a neuroscientific demonstration of how this is so (if, indeed, it is so – this is only my hunch at the moment) might then open up debate on every philosophical level: ontologically, to what extent is reality determined by fiction? Ethically, how many images, of what kind, and using what styles, can or should we see if we want to retain some sense of a mythological self that – impossibly in my eyes – is ‘untouched’ by the world (be that by cinema in the world or the world itself that contains cinema) and belongs ‘purely’ to us? Indeed, this might open up debate not only about which ontology and which ethics, but regarding the entire issue of both ontology and ethics – and how historically they have been framed…

For those interested in what academic researchers do, I am trying at present to create a network of scholars interested in ‘neurocinematics’ (which is not to deny that various scholars are already working on these issues in their own ways). I am sceptical that I will be successful in attracting funding, not because the idea is not ‘sexy’ but because I am not sure, at present, whether I know enough neuroscientists to work with, and I also figure I might be too much of a no-mark academic to land a plum grant from a funding institution that has never heard of me. But I shall try nonetheless.

In conclusion, then, Lindstrom’s comment to Spurlock is unclear, but it raises the issue that I think is at the heart of where I want my academic research to go (even if I want to retain strong interests in other academic areas, predominantly film studies, and even if I might ditch all of this to write and/or direct films if anyone ever gave me the money to do so beyond my breaking my bank account every time I put light to lens – my filmmaking being my own desire to become light): is Spurlock addicted to what is in the image, or to the image itself? Can we separate them? Does looking at Coke can yield the same effect as looking at the stylised Coke can in the image (i.e. it is the properties not strictly of the can, but of the can in the image) that trigger the response of which Lindstrom speaks…

I suspect that both the advertising and movie industries are funding this kind of research as we speak. If the corporate giants can go straight to your brain, they will do. Inception (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2010), then, becomes no lie (not that inception/influence of some sort has not always been in existence – as I argue here). In some sense, then, such research is morally indispensable; what I mean by this is that if corporate giants discover and protect methods of accessing the brain directly, then it is up to academics to let humans know how this happens, to make them aware of ‘inception,’ to bring people back to that most unfashionable of approaches to studying film, ideological critique.

In some senses, then, this is simply the rehashing under new paradigms the same old questions that have been banging around since cinema’s, ahem, inception, and even before. Only the stakes are now higher.

Might I say that a full neurocinematic programme might simply prove according to some scientific paradigm what many of us have known all along?

Wait a second, isn’t this also what I accuse Morgan Spurlock of doing with The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, accusing him of being a self-serving hypocrite for doing something that I myself seem to want to do?

Maybe Spurlock’s film is better than I thought, then. Maybe it is important and ingenious, because of its invisible transparency, not in spite of it.

There probably is no academic study that is devoid of corporate sponsorship somewhere along the line these days. There certainly will be even less if the politicians do not open their ears at some point and listen to what people are beginning literally to scream at them with regard to higher education and other issues. That is, that is must be as free of outside interests as possible, even if the quest for true objectivity is impossible to achieve.

Indeed, if we are talking about the possibility of corporate – or even gubernatorial – brain control (which is not the same as mind control, I hasten to add, though one could lead to the other), then we need to know whether it is possible, how it might happen, and what we can do about it. Before our bodies are all snatched away by the light (note: even now I cannot escape movie references) of the screen and before we are all turned into dependent image junkies who need the images just to feel alive – the over-dependent equivalent of the good, small dose that a movie like Perfect Sense (David Mackenzie, UK/Denmark, 2011) seems to offer – as written about here.

Notes from LFF: Dragonslayer (Tristan Patterson, USA, 2011)

American cinema, Blogpost, Documentary, Film reviews, London Film Festival 2011, Uncategorized

If I Wish (Kore-eda Hirokazu, Japan, 2011) only obliquely situates itself within the context of the current global economic downturn, Dragonslayer does so in a much more overt fashion.

Or rather, hearing director Tristan Patterson discussing the project, the very first thing that he said was that his subject, bum-like, nearing middle-age skater dude Joshua ‘Skreech’ Sandoval, was an amazingly intriguing character given that he just skates through the world as around him everyone’s lives – in the USA at least – are turned upside down thanks to the post-crisis fallout and its effects on the man in the street.

Like the would-be rock star father in I Wish, Sandoval gets by doing what he can: he works as little as possible, he gets – seemingly minimal – sponsorship for his skating, he smokes (a lot) of weed, he drinks, he is friendly to all and sundry, and he travels (in whatever capacity he can).

Sandoval emerges as a figurehead of the not-so-much angry generation as the don’t-give-a-fuck generation. Let me be clear about what this ‘generation’ (if it is one) does not give a fuck. This generation seemingly does give a fuck about the world, as Sandoval’s insistent trips into nature to go camping and fishing suggest.

That about which Sandoval and others do not give a fuck is the current organisation of the human world. That is, questions of economics, perhaps also of politics, interest Sandoval, and presumably many more like him, so little, that he is just happy getting by in his own way as he can.

This position has a romanticism of its own: a middle-class viewer like me truly fears for Sandoval, as perhaps does he himself, when, come the film’s end, it is documented that he is now working (at least part-time) serving beer in a bowling alley. How can he survive, not least since he has a young infant in tow, on the bare minimum that he currently has?

But perhaps how is the wrong question, and a real reason to admire Sandoval. How is not important. The only important thing is that he will survive – no matter how hard the world is made for him as a result of the choices he has made so far (economic imprisonment based upon ‘economic crimes’ that are not illegal at all, but which will keep Sandoval from material wealth for as long as he lives unless either he changes or he breaks – miraculously – into Hollywood or some such).

Beyond Sandoval and some unanswered questions regarding his relationship to the film (his – perhaps unlikely and younger – girlfriend, Leslie Brown, starts going out with him during filming – and whether the presence of the cameras has anything to do with this is not explored; similarly, given his economic situation, one wonders whether the filmmakers had any performance money to give to Sandoval), the film is well shot.

Patterson and his cinemtographer, Eric Koretz, said that they did not want the film to look like a skater movie. Only it is hard not to look like a skater movie given the light qualities of southern California that play such an important part in skater culture (and which has been co-opted by Coke, etc).

It is furthermore hard not to look like a skater movie when the film features so many obligatory emptied swimming pools.

And yet, Koretz and Patterson are not using mobile fish-eyes (although they do use the indy rock soundtrack), and they are capturing blades of grass, fluffy toys hanging from rear view mirrors and the like.

In short, then, Dragonslayer cannot but be a skater film – but it also is, as implied by the discussion of Sandoval’s seeming ethos/philosophy above, an activist – or perhaps better, a comtemporary beat – film.

Beyond the cinematography, this is evoked most formally in the editing. The film has a schizoid feel thanks to its insistence on (Godard-style) cutting short musical segments before they can become the obligatory music video, and the often chaotic juxtaposition of impressionistic images. This all caged by an 11-chapter structure that runs from 10 down to 0 over the course of the film. 0.

L’œuf, the egg, or what tennis umpires call love.

Sandoval’s dream is to be the only person moving on a planet stilled in time. He can empty pools and skate, raid fridges, drive other people’s cars. Just go wherever he wants to (there is a strong emphasis in the film on Sandoval jumping over fences – the wilful making-common of an otherwise increasingly privatised terrain).

While Sandoval does say that in this fantasy world he’d make some people wake up to hang out with him (how would he choose?), his vision does sound more like a desire for solipsism, or to be the One in a planet full of otherwise disposable human beings.

But 1 always needs 0 (hence the digital image’s democratic possibility for 1+0). And it is pleasing that the film takes us to 0. Not because it favours annihilation over anything/everything. Not because this is a negative choice in comparison to the possibility of an additive world in which the numbers just get bigger and bigger.

But perhaps because 0 is the only way to get back to the ground and to extend a sophophily of love. Not the love of wisdom, but the wisdom of loving.

Sandoval is perhaps an anti-hero of our times. But in others he is just a plain hero. Even with his bowling alley job, the Quixotic elements seem to remain as he takes a hit from the bong on the way to work.

We don’t all need to be dope smoking stoner skater dudes. That surely cannot be the message here. But the message clearly is: we must have the courage, the love of ourselves and of others, to go forward into the world in a fearless fashion. To be ourselves.

The self is a performance, no doubt about it. But it is a performance into which one injects one’s heart and soul, hence its courageous nature. Nothing disingenuous here.

Indeed, one of Sandoval’s friends, a total stoner who seems barely coherent, speaks of reading Spinoza’s Ethics. Spinoza here emerges as a great reference point for the film. For Spinoza argues (in my reading of him at least) that if truly we become ourselves, we cannot but love others and the world that surrounds us.

You can Occupy wherever you like. But the success of this movement can only begin with the occupying of oneself with oneself, filling oneself up with one’s own understanding and vision of the world, such that it can only spill over into the commons with love and respect.

Notes from CPH PIX: Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman, USA, 2010)

American cinema, Blogpost, cph pix 2011, Uncategorized

Having just waxed lyrical about the joys of seeing unexpected films at any point in time, but perhaps at film festivals in particular, it might sound contrary to now write a blog that in part is about disappointment – although the two feelings go somewhat hand in hand.

Monte Hellman is something of a cult figure, and someone about whom I certainly have read more than I have seen. That is, I have seen Two-Lane Blacktop (USA, 1971), which some feel is perhaps the finest ‘underground’ American film of all time – and I did like it, not least for its pure obsession with cars and engineering and to hell really with plot.

But as far as seeing Hellman’s other output goes, that is it. I have not seen – though I do really want to see – Cockfighter (USA, 1974), for example, if for no other reason than to see the film the (apocryphal) tagline of which is ‘He came into town with his cock in hand, and what he did with it was illegal in 49 states.’

For a career that now spans 50+ years, for which the first feature was Beast from Haunted Cave (USA, 1959), Hellman has not made that much in the way of feature length films. Alongside the few already mentioned, there are some 1960s westerns, including Ride the Whirlwind (USA, 1965) and The Shooting (USA, 1968), and then Iguana (Italy/Spain/Switzerland/USA, 1988), the last feature that he made.

A Roger Corman protégé, Monte Hellman has in fact been relatively unproductive, given that films from Corman and his acolytes was intense, particularly in the late 1960s period (when Hellman was, admittedly, most active, it seems).

Anyway, given that this is his first feature in 22 years, given that I have only seen one of his films before, given that I liked it (though not as much as some people), and given that he has a magnificent reputation, I was expecting great things from Road to Nowhere.

Disappointment is a sensation one can often have at the movies. In fact, since a lot of my research is on digital technology and cinema, I often find myself in front of special effects rubbish that really I ought to have known better than to watch – especially at this stage in life – and which – as is to be expected – was not the film I hoped it would be. If I get the chance to blog about it, perhaps I can elaborate on this feeling with regard to the recent Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder, USA/Canada, 2011), which not only disappointed me (though to be expected from Zack Snyder), but in fact also appalled me in certain respects (though perhaps to be expected from Zack Snyder).

Don’t get me wrong: there could be a perverse satisfaction in being disappointed – I am fully prepared to admit it. But whether I go looking for disappointment or not, this does not mean that I do not feel it.

Strangely, disappointment is about the most negative feeling I feel towards any film, or at least I don’t feel much worse about a film for very long. Sucker Punch might have appalled me at moments, but I don’t really hate it; I am just… disappointed. Since I cannot pinpoint with more finesse my feelings, perhaps this feeling is unclear to some. But I suppose it is like wishing the best out of one’s team members, only to find that they are cynical players who either do not care or, worse, will cheat to win.

That said, there are grades of disappointment. Sucker Punch can disappointment because Zack Snyder has not suddenly grown up and decided to use his talents for creating striking images in (what I would deem to be) a mature manner. And Road to Nowhere can disappoint because sometimes one expects so much – too much – from a filmmaker like Hellman, an expectation in part built up out of hype and reputation and not necessarily out of personal experience of the filmmaker’s films – that it is perhaps almost inevitable that the film will not live up to it.

To be honest, I am not sure how – or even if – I was disappointed by Road to Nowhere. Sometimes one is overwhelmed by a film (Zulawski’s Possession, for example). And sometimes one is underwhelmed by a film (Sucker Punch). Sometimes, however, one is simply whelmed – neither over nor under, though there is always a sense that a whelming film is ever so slightly an underwhelming film, but one sticks with whelming to convey the neutrality, or better the indifference, of one’s feelings and thoughts.

There is much to commend Road to Nowhere:

– It is slow – but in a challenging fashion that makes one want to think about the reasons why ’empty’ moments are not in mainstream films more often, or even at all, as opposed simply to finding it a ‘slow’ and boring film. It is also a Hollywood ‘insider’ movie in that it is a film about filmmaking (I’ll give the plot – as best as I can explain it – below).

– It is a film featuring much mise-en-abyme, which is to say that the film is a film about a film, and one never quite knows whether one is watching simply ‘the film’ (after a fashion, one is always only watching ‘the film’), or whether one is watching ‘the film within the film.’

– Furthermore, Hellman, according to a review in Cinema Scope, shot the film on Canon 5D Mark II cameras – that is, cameras that are predominantly used for still images – and this has a very interesting effect on the look of the film. For, while much of the film seems to take place in sunny locations, at every moment there seems to be a quasi-visible filter of darkness between us and the ‘image.’ I don’t know if this was achieved with the Canons, but I’d not seen this sort of view quite so insistently before and so attribute it to the unusual cameras used to make the film. Of course, this strange grain of darkness is not between us and the image; it is in the image, even if the effect is that somehow we cannot quite see clearly what is going on in the film. Interesting, and appropriate for a film that has noir-ish elements like this one.

Plot
Okay. So the film starts with a DVD being inserted into a laptop. On the laptop screen a film starts playing and the camera closes in on the laptop screen until it feels the entire cinema screen that we are watching (unless we are watching the film on our own laptops). We never know from this point on whether what we are watching is still the camera recording the screen of a laptop in one single and unbroken take, or whether we are seeing a or the ‘real’ film.

The film that we see on the laptop screen is called Road to Nowhere and it is directed by Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan – cinema’s doppelgänger of Matthew Holtmeier). It tells the story of Velma Duran, a seeming seductress of sorts, or perhaps just the patsy of a corrupt politician, who ran away/was framed for running away – or so we are led to believe – with US$100 million of North Carolina state money. Duran is played by Laurel Graham (Shannyn Sossamon), although it transpires that Laurel Graham is in fact a false identity developed by none other than… Velma Duran, in order to cover up the fact that she is not dead. Except that this may not be true – since it may be a pre-arranged identity swap carried out by Laurel Graham with her co-actors.

In short, then, Road to Nowhere is a good old puzzle film in which it is hard – if not impossible – for us to discern ‘truth’ (whatever that is) from ‘fiction.’ There is breaking the fourth wall a-plenty in this film, including in the climactic moments of the film when Haven kills Bruno (Waylon Payne), who has killed Laurel/Velma. Like a crazy film director who can only filter things through the lens of a camera, he starts to film the victims (on his Canon 5D Mark II), before his camera looks directly into ‘our’ camera and we are offered a reverse shot, which shows the entire crew working and watching the scene. Nonetheless, there is no ‘cut’ this time (as there are at other moments in the film) and the cops turn up and arrest him.

We are then perhaps taken back to the beginning of the film and the DVD in the laptop. Haven is in prison being shown the film by Natalie Post (Dominique Swain), a local investigative blogger who had been helpful to Haven in filming his Road to Nowhere movie by giving him insight and facts. The conversation between the two of them ends as a guard takes Post out of the cell – and the film ends.

In other words, and in a manner that for many audiences will be frustrating, the film goes nowhere and, like Two-Lane Blacktop which never reaches its destination, the film challenges the whole myth of teleology, or reaching a fixed goal, as a whole.

This is not the disappointing, or whelming, thing about Road to Nowhere. This, in fact, is perhaps the most pleasing thing about the film. An unresolved conundrum is here very pleasing, and much more so than the ‘ooh, is it still an illusion?’ malarkey that is the end of Inception (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2010).

What is whelming, for me, about Road to Nowhere is that I have been to nowhere so many times now that I feel quite familiar in it. Perhaps this is hubris on my part; but there comes to be something very predictable about the film that has no easy resolution. Perhaps this is in part the point: life is banal and certainly it has not set goal that we can foresee at all – and we, like the film, always end up other than where we expected, in a place that is a strange mix of what we expected (our fantasies) and a contradiction of that (‘reality’). But some films can take you to weird places and still leave you lost.

Hellman’s nowhere just seemed to feel a bit too familiar, then. This I can compare to Andrzej Zulawski’s Szamanka (Poland/France/Switzerland, 1996), which I also saw at CPH PIX, and which is so weird (like Possession about which I blogged yesterday) that I do not know what to make of it at all. For all its ‘faults,’ I am rather just fascinated by its strangeness. And so the familiarity of Nowhere‘s nowhere seemed to let it down.

Road to Nowhere is better than 50, maybe even 100 Sucker Punches. (By how much it is better is a silly thing to quantify. It is just better by virtue of being more interesting, even if Sucker Punch, too, wants to try to get you to think about ‘is it real or not?’) But one wonders whether the illusion/reality question needs to be posed in new ways for something truly startling to come out of it. The question is still a good one – but there are perhaps other, more penetrating questions, lying somewhere in wait.

Recent documentary clichés

American cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Documentary, Film reviews

In his new film, The War You Don’t See (UK?, 2010), Australian journalist John Pilger explains that ’embedded’ journalists are often ‘in bed with’ those whose story they are trying to get/represent.

That is to say, journalists are less likely to be impartial when embedded with soldiers in a military conflict zone, a practice that dates back to the First World War, and which in terms of specifically film journalism has happened at least since 1912 when Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa had films made about him from the front line of his rebellion against Victoriano Huerta and others in the burgeoning Mexican democracy.

The reason provided is that one is given access to only that which the unit with which one is embedded wants the journalist to see. Furthermore, Pilger documents as best (?) as he can how journalism in the present day and age is a question of back-scratching. That is, if journalists ‘play ball with’ (i.e. do not criticise or seek to investigate the veracity or otherwise of what is told them by) governmental sources, then they get exclusive interviews with leading politicians, etc. Given that newspapers need to sell stories, stories that are often spun in a patriotic and nationalistic way, it is often (seemingly) in the interests of the news companies and journalists not to question what they are told. That and the fact that investigative journalists are systematically denied access to information and, according to a WikiLeaks document, are a worse threat to contemporary government than spies and terrorists.

Pilger’s film is a critique of journalism in the contemporary age; why did journalists go along with stories concerning non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when even at the time there was some evidence for and people willing to speak about how there were no WMDs. It is also an attack on journalists who privilege only the ‘official’ story – be that in Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq or anywhere. Although as much is denied by some of Pilger’s interviewees, journalists live in fear for their lives – not simply as a result of being in dangerous places, but because they will actively be targeted, like the Al Jazeera offices in Kabul, if they report on events in a way that does not please those who are trying already to write the history of events.

I shall return (briefly) to The War You Don’t See later, but in many ways the critique of embedded journalists that Pilger’s film offers does bring into question the potentially one-sided nature of the otherwise remarkable Restrepo (Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, USA, 2010).

Restrepo follows a year in the life of a unit of American soldiers in the Korangal valley, and who under the leadership of Captain Dan Kearney manage to secure an outpost that overlooks the valley and which is named after Juan Restrepo, a private and member of the unit who dies in combat.

The outpost comes constantly under fire from an invisible enemy, upon whom the soldiers fire back, although again we barely see their targets. One could easily criticise not the film for what it shows, which on the whole is an extraordinary display of endurance and bonding, but some of the behaviour that is shown. That is, one could easily take the film to be a critique of American attitudes towards locals in Afghanistan when Kearney and his men resort to the kind of foul-mouthed swaggering we expect from the movies when talks break down at one of the regular powwows he organises with the local leaders. One might also be suspicious of the soldiers who claim that they had to put the cow of one of the locals down after it got caught on barbed wire – for it seems that they enjoyed eating the cow as much as they carried out this slaughter for ‘humanitarian’ purposes. Either way, when inevitably that cliché about winning ‘hearts and minds‘ is bandied around by one of the soldiers, it is spoken in such a way that one does not know whether anyone believes in this perhaps meaningless motto anymore. In other words, the film does show us these soldiers not so much in a negative light, but realistically: we see their flaws as well as their admirable coping strategies for being in such a remote and (as the reviews repeatedly tell us) desolate place.

(To butt into the discourse surrounding the Korangal: most mountainous valleys, particularly in that region, are not exactly oases. However, obviously vegetation grows and locals get by – and the region does have a relatively successful timber industry. I appreciate that this is not exactly Beverly Hills and the world of Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, USA, 2010), but it’s not the middle of the Atacama, either.)

In the light of, and in some respects against, Pilger’s documentary, then, Hetherington and Junger’s film does not necessarily come across as too one-sided. We do not get translated (or even untranslated) interviews with the local population without the presence of the soldiers, in which – perhaps? conceivably? impossibly? – they would speak their mind about the American presence in the valley. Nor do we have investigations into how the Taliban that are in the area – we know this since they shoot at the Americans more or less relentlessly – are supported (but – in a manner akin to Des hommes et des dieux/Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois, France, 2010), one wonders that the locals must see the ‘terrorists’ from time to time, since they will need to come to the village for supplies and medicine, even if the locals do not outright support the Taliban). We do not get too much access to the other side of the story, then, but the story that we do see has many sides itself, and by showing the behaviour of the Americans, the film implicitly involves at times its own critique/we see their bad as well as their good points – and if lingering on the bad is what one wants to do with the film, then one can happily do that.

Rather than an embedded reportage of any great victories, then, Restrepo gives us what seems to be a pretty even-sided take on its topic (although how we would ever know if truly it was even is impossible – since, as per another truth turned cliché developed during the Vietnam War, ‘we weren’t there’).

However, while I want to be clear in articulating the strengths of Restrepo, I also do want to criticise the film for perhaps the major scene around which the film is based. And this is a scene in which the soldiers come under heavy fire and are engaged in close combat.

This is the film’s ‘million dollar footage,’ and in some ways I understand how and why the filmmakers need to showcase this material in order for their film to have maximum impact. Besides which, they were not fooling around and this is not Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, USA, 2001), which, although based on a true story, is, after all, a realistic mock-up of events – but not footage from those events themselves.

I also understand how and why the filmmakers would want to build tension prior to this scene – giving us emotional testimony shot after the fact from soldiers including Misha Pemble-Belkin and Brendan O’Byrne. As they come to tears, however, then to ‘drop us’ into the combat situation seems, to someone of my frail sensibility, pornographic.

That is, I am grateful to see the effects of war on the soldiers who have been touched by it; this is knowledge that rationally I can use to understand the world in a better way. I am grateful perhaps to see combat footage for the same reason – to make me understand the true horror of war. But the way in which the testimony is deployed in this film before the combat footage seems exploitative.

We know that this is a manipulation: Hetherington and Junger conducted their interviews with the troops after they had returned home – and so we could easily have seen the footage and then gauged their reactions to what happened in order to understand it. But instead their emotional responses/recall of events is given to us first so as to lead us into understanding these events in the way that the filmmakers think that we should – and not necessarily in a realistic way at all (and by realistic, I hypothesise – admittedly, hypothesising is all I can do – that events happen and we do not understand them at the time, let alone in advance – and it is only in the act of remembering that we can make sense of them, which is the opposite of what Hetherington and Junger do to us here). Junger and Hetherington can hide behind the respect that they are showing to their subjects in privileging their understanding of events, as opposed simply to showing the events themselves. But this would be disingenuous in certain respects – for Junger and Hetherington, without giving us their reactions to events (and it is they who are also they and they who are also filming), show us the combat scenes anyway. If this was about the soldiers’ memories and their attempts to deal with what happened, then we might have seen their reactions after the combat sequences, or not even seen the combat sequences at all.

Where Werner Herzog decides not to play for us the noises of Timothy Treadwell being eaten alive by bears in Grizzly Man (USA, 2005), here we do see the combat sequences. (This is not to overlook Herzog’s strange decision to listen to the noises of Treadwell’s death and then to tell us and his mother that we should not hear them, but the implications of that choice will be left for another time.)

In other words, Restrepo verges on the exploitative and is a poorer film for it. Not only does this ‘objective’ film – which does not engage with the wider politics of the war in Afghanistan, as Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom have in part done in their recent Shock Doctrine (UK, 2009) – thereby reveal something of its allegiances (meaning that in part the film does, perhaps naturally and both for better and for worse, become complicit with the unit with which the filmmakers have been embedded), but it also proves that it is prey to the logic of sensationalism that drives the audiovisual media industry.

Whereas we might criticise The War You Don’t See and Shock Doctrine for being sensational and manipulative in quite obvious ways, since both are making large claims that it is hard to justify without being a bit knowingly one-sided, Restrepo is more subtly sensational perhaps, but sensational it is.

If hearts and minds are truly the object of war – that is, if wars truly are about ideologies, whereby people over there must be convinced of the truth and righteousness of the way of life over here, such that they adopt our ways – then not only does this reveal that war today is absolutely religious (in the sense that it is about convincing people of correct beliefs and codes of conduct), but it also means that cinema is a key ingredient to war. For cinema affects humans in two conjoined and inseparable ways: it makes us think (affecting our minds), and it makes us feel (affecting our hearts). One might say that there is not so much a battle between types of cinema, although this battle has surely been waged, as we have seen through Nazi and Soviet as opposed to Western/American propaganda, but also between those nations that are cinematic and those that are not.

By this I mean to say that it is not so much which cinematic images you believe in that is the root of today’s ideological conflicts (although of course this is the case), but it is whether you believe in cinematic images. In some ways, what I am saying does an enormous dis-service to a massively long history of icons and iconography – that is, the use of pre-cinematic images in order to convey ideas and feelings, in order to exert power, to impose fear, and to indoctrinate. But in other ways, the coincidence of modernity (and now postmodernity) with the advent (and proliferation) of cinema means that this technology, the cinematograph, be it analogue or digital, is the tool through which as much ‘shooting’ has taken place as has been carried out by humans wielding guns.

By making itself suddenly and at the last cinematic, and however perverse this might be in a culture in which that which is ‘cinematic’ is indeed esteemed worthy of the highest praise, Restrepo does itself a dis-service. And my reasons for arguing this will hopefully become clear in my consideration of another recent documentary, which has nothing to do with the contemporary system of warfare that governs the planet, Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, USA, 2010).

Catfish tells the story of New York photographer Nev Schulman, who receives in the post one day a painting of one of his pictures. The painting is allegedly by an eight-year old girl, Abby, who lives in Michigan. Nev likes the painting and so writes back to Abby – and soon becomes Facebook friends with Abby, her mother Angela, and her sister Megan. In particular, Nev and Megan start to talk online and then on the telephone. The photos of her on Facebook show a hot 19-year old whom Nev obviously fancies, and so they begin something of a long distance relationship.

One night, while photographing/filming some ballet in Colorado, Nev and the two filmmakers, Ariel and Henry, discover that a song posted online by Megan is not – contrary to her claims – by her, but is in fact a sound file taken from a video on YouTube. Nev investigates a bit further: not only are other of Megan and Angela’s songs in fact sound files of performances by other people, but the building that supposedly Angela had bought as a gallery for artist prodigy Abby is in fact a former JC Penney that is still on the market.

As a result of these incongruencies, Nev, Henry and Ariel decide to go to Michigan to investigate – and there [SPOILERS] they discover that Megan does not exist (or at least is estranged from Angela and her family), that Angela looks nothing like the photos she puts of herself online, that Abby does not even know how to draw, let alone paint, and that as many as 14 characters had been invented by Angela to flesh out the world of her Facebook avatars.

As has been said, at a time when The Social Network (David Fincher, USA, 2010) seems to be dominating end of year polls, this is perhaps the ‘real’ Facebook film. But generally positive reviews aside, I want to discuss a key scene from Catfish by way of comparison to Restrepo.

Nev, Ariel and Henry arrive late at night at a farm that is supposed to belong to Megan. They have the address and they have seen the photos of this place – so they recognise it when they arrive. Nev decides that, late though it is, they will drive up to the farmhouse and take a peak at what is there. Naturally, the farmhouse is empty and no one is there.

Trying to describe the creepiness of this moment is difficult, but both I and the friend with whom I saw Catfish discussed afterwards how tense this film made us feel, particularly this moment. And for me, the reason why this moment was so tense was because suddenly, having thought that this was a documentary, I found myself questioning whether I had been the victim of some profound hoax – as if somehow this film was going to become [Rec.] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, Spain, 2007), and be in fact a fiction film that had strung out its documentary appearance for over 45 minutes. That is, I literally wondered whether suddenly a crazy zombie was going to ambush these three from the bushes. Certainly, a 3am arrival at an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of the American countryside is the right setting for such a film.

Interestingly, it felt as if Nev, Ariel and Henry were also prey to this kind of logic. Not only is there a terrifying shot where Ariel (I think) approaches a dark window to see if, as per Megan’s reports, there are some horses within the barn, which is terrifying almost in a metaphysical way, since with the camera we approach the darkness and it is the sheer lack of knowing what we will see that scares us, but also when they go round to Angela’s house the next day, the filmmakers are worried that they are going to meet a bunch of psychopaths who will murder them.

In other words, both Nev, Ariel, Henry and I all felt scared when something that I/we had considered to be real life suddenly become uncanny, something that we did not easily recognise, and what was driving our fear/tension was not our ability for remain calmly rooted in reality, but the invasion into our thoughts of, precisely, images from movies – the psychopathic family of in-breeds that has some weird cult that lures in New Yorkers to feed their vampire children.

In and of itself, this is interesting, but I want to take this further. For while I criticise Restrepo for resorting to ‘cinematic’ tactics, Catfish holds off on the ‘cinema.’ Had zombies or in-breds actually attacked Nev et al, this would have been a jump-making moment to rival any we have seen in cinema, and we might normally have called this a ‘cinematic’ moment. But it is for me the fact that Catfish does not – indeed, it cannot – deliver this ‘punchline’ (because it is a documentary of a world in which zombies do not necessarily exist), that the film takes on its real power.

Angela, it turns out, is not a psycho; nor even, really, a pathological liar. She lies compulsively, yes, but she knows that she is doing so, and the truth, or most of it, does eventually come out. In fact, rather than being a liar, she seems a sweet woman who is far more creative than her lifestyle gives her opportunity to be, and so she paints, creates a kind of Facebook novel (which involves Nev), and more in order to occupy herself apart from looking after her husband’s two retarded and self-abusive children (from another marriage), her husband and, of course, Abby. In fact, Angela turns out to be, in many respects, lovely.

In other words, whereas zombies would have terrified initially, such an ending would, in comparison to the endlessly complex and brilliant weirdness of humanity/Angela, have been ultimately unsatisfactory. The ‘cinematic’ would have, as it does in Restrepo, cheapened the film. Paradoxically, by avoiding the ‘cinematic,’ a better film is made as a result.

And here I can talk about why Restrepo, The War You Don’t See, Shock Doctrine and even (as I shall explain) Catfish disappoint in some respects. And this is because all resort to clichés, by which I mean that they adopt the techniques of other films, the likes of which we have seen over and over again. They give us what we expect them to deliver – and as a result, they do not overwhelm us the way in which reality can and does overwhelm us by never conforming to that which we expect, but instead they deliver precisely what we (are supposed to) expect.

Of course, any fule know that documentary cannot grasp reality in its entirety, and any documentary is always a manipulation of reality. But how that manipulation is put together can be done in a brilliant and original fashion. And while so much of what Restrepo shows us is never before seen and fascinating, the ‘pornographic’ exploitation of the battle seems too hackneyed a device to give it its full power. The War You Don’t See in particular involves too many well-composed talking head shots, complete with non-continuous reverse shots of Pilger, typically nodding in approval of what is being said (why? do we need his approval? for whom does Pilger take himself?), while Shock Doctrine involves that image of napalm being dropped in Vietnam (as well as some dodgy inserts of its own, particularly around Naomi Klein, whose words are definitely manipulated via inserts, such that we cannot be one hundred per cent sure of what she is saying). When Pilger interviews Cynthia McKinney, the camera, sensing that she might well up as she discusses how disappointed she is in Barack Obama’s presidency, begins to close in. And this, too, is the cliché that Catfish finally falls foul of, too: the film does not rest until Angela has had her cry on camera, even though such a ‘redemption’ is entirely unnecessary.

Yes – so the shedding of these tears happened, what we see is ‘real,’ and we have no reason to believe that these are crocodile tears in any of these documentaries (even if they are tears shed with full knowledge of the presence of the cameras). But it is the hackneyed, exploitative and cynical way in which, like a shark closing in on its prey, the camera zooms on McKinney in Pilger’s film even though she does not cry, the way in which Catfish hangs around Angela until she cries, the way in which Restrepo builds the tension up via testimony before its violent ‘money shot,’ that gets me. In other words, it is not the ‘truth’ of the subjects that is disappointing here, but they way in which that truth is captured, edited, actively sought out that is disappointing.

This is what I am calling cliché – the need to simplify through symbols the larger-than-cinema reality that is rendered merely cinematic. I call these symbols, because rather than combat being hard to understand, rather than Angela being unfathomable, rather than McKinney being angry, the filmmakers reduce what they record to what they what it to mean, as opposed to letting tears fall onscreen for what they are. Tears are made symbols of; and given that these are tears from a human, to render them symbols is to demean the complex being from which they came.

Paradoxically, then, the ‘truly’ cinematic – that which exceeds our expectations, that which defies simple understanding because we have seen it all before – is that which avoids conforming to, precisely, the pre-existing cinematic clichés.

In the case of the Pilger and Whitecross/Winterbottom films, we might say that these filmmakers need to use shorthand because they have a bigger story to tell, an argument to put across – and peddling in images and types of images with which we already familiar is an easy way of doing this. But my point would be: why? What are the demands that mean that a film must take short cuts in order to make its point?

Recently, and by way of a final comparison, I was lucky enough recently to see Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker’s Town Bloody Hall (USA, 1979). This is not a ‘real time’ film, but in some ways it almost could be, because it is a document of a debate in New York involving novelist Norman Mailer, feminist scholar Germaine Greer, writer Jill Johnston, literary critic Diana Trilling, activist Jacqueline Ceballos, and various members of the crowd that attended the event (including the likes of Susan Sontag).

The debate is about the fate of feminism, and the film lasts 85 minutes – while the debate in real life itself probably lasted nearer two hours, maybe more. Given the discrepancy, there are omissions for certain in this film, and Town Bloody Hall is almost certainly manipulative in its own way, not just by shortening the debate to 85 minutes, but by choosing certain shots and angles that pick up on details during the debate that did not necessarily happen at quite the time that the film makes us think that they did.

But what is interesting about Town Bloody Hall, in comparison to Pilger and Whitecross/Winterbottom’s films, is that it is modest in ambition. It depicts a single event that took place and does not try to make an argument concerning an entire generation of foreign policy or journalistic practice. There is perhaps some ‘judgement’ in the film, but it is hard to discern. But in 85 minutes, we run through the philosophical, the political, the emotional, and, in short, the human, without any recourse to the cheap(er) trickery these other filmmakers feel obliged to deliver. No tears, no beautifully staged and lit interviews and slow zooms in when the tears start to flow; Town Bloody Hall is (deliberately) messy in terms of the cinematography. But in some ways this means that the cameras feel less like a trap waiting for a specific and money-making response to come out, and more like something that will emerge as unexpected and human. And in a single debate, rather than a year in the trenches, something remarkable comes out of it.

If we wait long enough or look hard enough, we can find evidence to confirm whatever beliefs we happen to hold. That life is messy, that humans are complex, that reality can be overwhelming are perhaps all the beliefs that I have and I wait patiently for the films (and moments in life) that can deliver confirmation of those things. Town Bloody Hall, meanwhile, despite being 30 years old (because 30 years old?) avoids the clichés that have become the norm of recent documentary practice, and which would have made Restrepo and Catfish the truly remarkable films that for so much of their running time I was convinced that they could be.