Sweden, 2013)

Blogpost, Uncategorized

I have been meaning to blog about all manner of films. Only Only God Forgives has made me feel compelled to do so of recent movies.

The film tells the story of Julian (Ryan Gosling), a muay thai trainer in Bangkok whose brother, Billy (Tom Burke), rapes and kills a 16-year old prostitute at the film’s outset.

A policeman, Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), tells the father of the victim that he can enact revenge on Billy – which he promptly does, smashing in his skull with a wooden baton that looks like a bed leg.

Chang is disappointed by this revenge murder, though, and so removes one of the father’s arms with a short sword that he improbably carries around – invisibly – on his back.

Julian finds the father and is about to kill him – but does not, because he discovers Billy’s crime. Julian thus understands the father’s revenge to be justified.

However, Billy and Julian’s mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), arrives from the USA and pays for the father of the murdered prostitute to be killed. What is more, since Chang was complicit in Billy’s murder, she also pays for an attempt on Chang’s life.

We’re getting into spoiler territory here, so be warned. But Chang survives the hit, kills Crystal’s accomplice, Gordon (Gordon Brown), has a fight with Julian, which he wins easily, kills Crystal, and then, at the film’s climax, either chops off Julian’s hands, which are outstretched or, as director Nicolas Winding Refn implied during the Q&A after the screening I attended at Brixton’s beautiful Ritzy cinema, beheads him. We do not in fact see – since the screen turns black to the sound of sword slicing through skin and bone, and the credits begin to roll. But it is not necessarily important.

What the above synopsis – replete with spoilers – will not convey is what the film is like.

Fans of Refn, in particular Drive (USA, 2011) and perhaps also Bronson (UK, 2008), will perhaps anticipate the slow tracking shots, the close ups of brooding individuals, especially Julian/Gosling, and various other things.

But what is important about this film is its play of light and darkness. Often, most of the screen is dark – such that we have what seem to be black holes in the frame. And yet things disappear into and emerge from these black holes, in particular images of Chang with his sword. These images do not seem to be narratively determined; otherwise Chang would be turning up in impossible places the whole time. Instead, they seem to be Julian’s imagination – or perhaps his sense that he will come face to face with Chang. Images, then, of his destiny. And since the future is otherwise invisible to us, it is perhaps visually appropriate that Refn would show these ‘future images’ as black holes, with Chang in a black suit emerging from them.

But the film is also about black holes in other senses. A black hole is the limit of the visible: no light can escape from it, and so we cannot technically see it. However, we can tell that it is there because of the effects that a black hole has on what surrounds it.

Being invisible, then, the black holes that are visually rendered as darkness on the screen are matched by the film’s interest in violence and sex. For, the urge to be violent and the urge to copulate – these are both black holes in the human, traces of our animality that the light cast through enlightenment is supposed to have removed from us. And yet they remain. And we can feel the effects of these urges in our behaviour.

Human insides are also invisible – and yet Refn glories in showing us humans split open, brains bashed out, necks rent asunder by Chang’s vengeful sword. In other words, Refn suggests that cinema can penetrate into the dark recesses of the human, and perhaps of the universe itself: we do not so much understand cinema now as light (photo-graphy = writing with light), but also as darkness. Cinema always shows us darkness as much as light – but we must open our eyes (or close them?) to see it.

(Refn’s film is, in spite of its violence, oddly chaste. We do see Julian eviscerate and then stick his hands into his mother’s corpse – his relationship with Crystal oozing with some weird sexual tension – dark desires again surfacing – but there is no actual sex. The closest that Julian comes to sex is imagining (or perhaps actually) seeing his pseudo-girlfriend and seeming prostitute Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) masturbate in front of him while he is tied – fully clothed – to a chair, and perhaps fingering her while she stands in the corner of a karaoke room (and this experience immediately leads to Julian beating up some locals). Not violence, but sex – as ever – remains the real black hole that cinema, at least commercial cinema, refuses to show.)

Refn’s film deliberately sets out to challenge the limits of the visible: this is made most clear when Chang tortures and kills Gordon, first slicing open his eyes – shades of Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, France, 1929), before then shoving a knife in his ear – because he will not listen, nor see, what is going on around him.

Here the film takes on a political aspect. For it is hard not to read Chang’s relentless revenge as that of the Third World on the First World. The Third World is also a black hole of sorts: it is invisible to Westerners, even those who tour there, and yet its effects can be felt everywhere, in particular (let’s go a bit Marxist) because the vast majority – if not all – First World wealth has been founded historically on the systematic and relentless exploitation of those parts of the world the veins of which the First World has opened up and bled dry (to borrow Eduardo Galeano‘s metaphor). That is, not just contemporary sweatshops, but the Third World as a whole is unrepresented and unrepresentable. Westerners do not see it, but all Western comfort, luxury and wealth is predicated upon it; they are its effects. And so that Chang emerges from that black hole and kills all those Westerners who come to Thailand to rape (or watch masturbating) their women and to sell drugs (the money-making trade of Crystal, Julian and Billy) seems almost entirely logical.

Since Chang and Julian both continue to appear in shots the reality-status of which is unclear to the viewer, it becomes hard to tell who is imagining the shots that we see. Is this Julian imagining Chang? Or Chang imagining Julian?

The answer is in fact unimportant in some respects; for, what our inability to tell ultimately suggests is the interconnected, entwined or entangled nature of Julian and Chang. The Third World is not some playground over there, to which Westerners can retire and visit to fuck ladyboys. The First World continues to be in and with the same world as the Third World. That is, the inability for us to tell whether we are seeing Chang or Julian’s thoughts suggests to us not many different worlds, but one world.

If Chang is certainly an exterminating angel, Refn went so far in the Q&A to describe him as God. This is made loosely clear during his fight with Julian; it is not that Julian never even comes close to hitting Chang (nor that Chang magically makes his sword appear, even though he is obviously not carrying it on his person). Rather, it is that Chang and a statue of a fighter are crosscut in such a manner to suggest a parallel between them.

That said, Julian also figures in a similar pose to the statue. So we now have two possible ways to read the film (or at least I am going to explore two now). Firstly, we might say that Julian aspires to be God. We get a sense of this as a result of his having killed his father – as Crystal says to Chang just prior to her death. In this sense, Julian might be guilty – according to Christian mythology – of some sort of unforgiveable sin – and in this sense God does not forgive him, even though potentially he could do.

Secondly, however – and my preferred reading – it could be that Julian does not aspire to be God, but to godliness. Julian forgives the man who killed Billy (Crystal alleges that this is for reasons of jealousy – Billy always had a bigger cock than Julian). Julian also saves Chang’s daughter from death by killing one of his Thai partners, Daeng (Charlie Ruedpokanon), who would have killed her at Crystal’s behest had he been given the chance. And although he does challenge Chang/God to a fight and loses, he then basically gives himself up and lets himself be taken away by God/Chang – either deprived of his arms or of his life.

The reason why I prefer this second reason is because it opens up space for us to critique Refn’s film, or rather to posit limitations in its would-be philosophical argument that we live in an entangled world where God/Chang is not some transcendental Being that sits outside the universe detachedly looking in, but that Chang/God is immanent – everywhere and everywhen, hence his ubiquity in the film. That God is in everyone and everything; we are all god particles, as it were. Darkness is not in some place, it is everywhere, it is the preceding condition that allows light to exist, the void that enables time, change and difference to come into becoming.

This would help us to make sense of the film’s use of human voices. While Julian perhaps aspires to be godly, Crystal maybe aspires to be God. This is signalled by her being the only character who talks a lot. For, what is the voice except for an attempt to get out from within us that which expresses – via sound – who we are. The voice, sound, is, of course, invisible. We cannot see it (synaesthetes aside). And so the voice is godly, with the gravitas of God (this is perhaps why in Judeo-Christian myths God is often only heard of as a voice – and the voice plays a key role in commanding humans, as Hitler and his wireless radio knew).

And yet, if through speaking Crystal aspires to be God, that which pours forth from her mouth is vitriolic bile – memorably calling Mai a ‘cumdumpster’ among other things. That is – and the film’s gender bias is not lost on me – Crystal is some sort of evil being who cannot be and is not forgiven by Chang.

(Mai, by contrast, comes off okay in the film, although that most females in the film are whores is definitely problematic. Mai refuses to accept a dress given to her by Julian, and so he makes her strip. She stands in black underwear – no doubt an object of the male gaze, but also almost invisible as a result of the blackness that envelops her. This does speak of the invisibility of women, perhaps, but maybe within Only God Forgives‘s formal schemata, it signals her refusal to be exploited. And arguably – though I am not wholly convinced – Julian’s refusal actually to sleep with her speaks of his desire not to exploit, with exploitation problematically woven together with sexual desire for the Oriental other.)

Back to voices: Julian barely speaks. But Chang, on the other hand, gets a series of somewhat surrealistic karaoke numbers. Not only does he have a voice, then, but it is a beautiful one. The voice reinforces his status as black hole: we can hear him even if we cannot see his voice.

So here is the critique of Refn, then.

For, while I like the philosophical implications of Refn’s film, provided I have understood it not necessarily correctly, but at least cogently, there are still issues. I like the way that the film explores darkness, acknowledging how there are invisible forces at work in us as humans, in the universe as a whole, and in our globalised society (capitalism hides labour rather than showing it). But Julian is of course still a Westerner. He may be a Westerner who aspires to be godly, who does not speak much, who refuses to sleep with Mai, and who acknowledges the ungodliness of his mother by splitting her open and sticking his hands inside her. But it is only a few Westerners who can achieve this position. Julian may have killed his Western father to become more ‘Eastern’ – but it is, in short, only rich Westerners who can afford the luxury of being ‘Eastern’. The film – through Crystal – acknowledges this: Julian is only getting by in Thailand as a result of drug dealing (and let us be clear, Julian does still kill at least two people in the film, and beats up various others). So his pretense at somehow deflating East-West or First-Third binarisms is in fact a very privileged (Western/First) manoeuvre to try and pull off.

In other words, even if Julian is named after a woman (unsubstantiated, but the female Julian of Norwich saw that humans had wrath, while God forgives humans for this), thereby making his character less heteronormative and, basically, from the rich world, he is nonetheless still from the rich world.

For all of the metaphysics, then, politics still comes back to haunt us – ideology perhaps being another black hole of sorts. For if First World wealth is predicated upon a history of pillage and slavery, then so is the professed kinship that characters like Julian seem to claim to have with Chang/God Himself.

What is true of the film’s story becomes true of Only God Forgives itself. In going – as per Thomas Clay – to Thailand to make a film (with many other Western filmmakers making films in other parts of the Third World), Refn may demonstrate kinship, but he also signals ongoing socioeconomic disparities.

Refn is not – at least not from me – under any obligation to make any particular sort of film. Nonetheless, for all of its intellectual pomp, Only God Forgives may still be an exploitative film, not just because it is about bodies and exploitation, nor because it features exploitatively explicit gore, but because to make a film about a Westerner who tries to become or to find kinship with an Easterner is a luxury that only a Westerner could afford.

The Life of an Academic Essay

Blogpost, Film education, Uncategorized

I am delighted to announce that Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind has just published my essay, ‘Violence in Extreme Cinema and the Ethics of Spectatorship‘.

This blog will reproduce the first version of that essay, which I wrote originally in 2006, although I have on my computer only a version saved on New Year’s Eve 2007. That is, it has taken roughly six years for the essay to be published.

My point is not to demonstrate how ‘slow’ academic publishing can be. Nor is it quite to say that this version is better than the published version. Much has changed in the interim – and the published version demonstrates more scholarship, a greater amount of thought, and probably a greater maturity in thought – such that, even if I had to excise from it various ideas that might have deepened the take on the ethics of spectatorship that the finally published essay presents, it is still nonetheless the best version of the essay available.

What I want to highlight, though, is how academic publishing can often involve the removal of various ideas because they are a bit more speculative or, specifically, because they involve word play and punning.

There are two ideas from the original essay that are not in the final essay, but both of which I like and so in order to get them across, I reproduce that original essay in full (complete with rows of ‘xxxx’ to indicate where I had forgotten something from the film and wanted to check it – I have not updated this error here).

Here it is:

Monsters Incorporated

In an essay on Dusan Makavejev and Ingmar Bergman, the philosopher Stanley Cavell evokes the notion of revulsion in connection to the cinema. Certain images, Cavell says, are revolting, but the revolting, the disgusting and revoltedness are linked to innocence, for (provided I have not misunderstood him) the fact that we feel revulsion proves that we are free of the poison that the non-innocent can stomach without gagging.

I thought about moments in films that I have found disgusting. Divine eating dogshit at the end of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos came to mind; the initial rape scene in Baise-Moi; the death by fire extinguisher in Irréversible; and, most recently, the sexual violence at the end of Thomas Clay’s The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. There is an array of reasons for finding these scenes disturbing, although foremost among them is my shock at the actors’ bravery and ability to perform these tasks. Divine actually ate the dogshit. The rapists in Baise-Moi actually were aroused and penetrated the actresses before them. But, I asked myself, did I feel revulsion when witnessing these moments? If, truly, I felt revulsion, then I would, as the word implies, have turned away. But I did not.

Is it the case, therefore, that I am not innocent, for I can stomach what these films show me? Not only can I stomach it, but I go looking for it. I have no fear of ‘extreme’ films (although I am not in a hurry to see any of the above films again); I am curious to watch all manner of the Mondo films that exist, the disturbing contents of which are not staged but real and accidentally or deliberately caught on film. I don’t always like what I see, but I do not flinch. I am not revolted. I am glued to the screen. If I am appalled by anything, it is by my very lack of appal at the images I see.

There is an important distinction to make here. Morally, I may find these images repugnant. I was, for example, greatly chastened by Robert Carmichael, and I am perturbed to think that some people watch Baise-Moi as porn. But regardless of what my conscious mind thinks, my body gazes on, my eyes exercising supreme authority over my brain, whose lack of power is perhaps what scares me most. My eyes may have seen many grim things, but the fact of their looking, ‘despite’ ‘myself’, has also shown me other truths that make me believe myself a bit cleverer.

Cavell says that the performance of ugly and indecent acts is in part a rejection of a disgusting world and, again, if I understand him correctly, that to accept the world in all of its hideousness is a sign of adulthood, of the end of innocence. By accepting these films in their entirety (rather than only partially watching them by turning away during the grim parts), I give consent to them to exist as they are. I am in this sense an ‘adult’ spectator who accepts these films ‘as they are’, even if they are not strictly to my taste. We do, however, but true to form, reach a paradox: if, say, Robert Carmichael is a rejection of the world as it is (and this would seem to suit the continual references to contemporary geopolitics in the film), then it is young and innocent, but it is a young and innocent film that will only be viewed and accepted by those that it is seeking to reject – namely, adults who accept this real world. Those who leave the cinema when watching Robert Carmichael are the film’s fellow innocents who, through their revulsion, reveal themselves as kindred spirits, albeit ones who express this fellowship by putting distance between themselves and the screen, young Adams who turn away from the forbidden fruit whilst we Eves gobble it right down.

By eating this fruit, we attain Enlightenment (with all of its Luciferean undertones), and with wisdom comes independence. The troubling ultra-violence of art porn might well be nourishing for us, even if it also involves the sad understanding that, whether God exists or not, we do not need Him (and He does not want us). (By accepting the world, or Gaia?, we reject God. We become Eves, we get Even, we exit the order of men.)

But if becoming a woman (thank you, Gilles and Félix) is to embrace nature in all of its ugliness, then there might be a further worry, and one that Cavell, in his seemingly boundless wisdom, also identifies: if we are not men, are we still humans? Or are we monsters? Are we acting according to our nature, according to Nature, or have we mutated into something we cannot recognise? Quoting Thoreau, Cavell implies somehow that the monstrous, in particular death, is proof of a surabundance of life, before Stanley caveats that if the monstrous be natural, nature has still spawned some unpretty horrible monsters, like the Marquis de Sade… I suppose the clincher is this: is it pre-human to be an innocent child, or is it post-human to accept reality in an adult fashion, that is to say, unadulterated?

I don’t know the answer to this question, and I’m not sure that anyone can know it, except perhaps by widening our definition of humanity and saying that both are, impossibly, human. That humanity is defined by the non-humanity (and inhumanity) not only without, but also within (inhumanity is in humanity, except normally we like to put a space between it and us). Regardless of these thoughts, however, the idea that we could be monsters is interesting, in particular on account of the performative etymology of monstrosity. To be a monster is, naturally, to put on a show (to de-monstr-ate, to enact a demonstration not against the world but as part of it).

In the enhancedly explicit sex and violence of the art porn film that the above examples, and many others, typify, we see the emergence (at a time of emergency, no doubt) of a monstrous cinema that is hell bent on showing to us everything that there is to be seen, no matter how monstrous it is. Being a monstrous cinema, it is seemingly an inhuman and inhumane cinema, a worldly, mundane cinema that demeans the mental (‘rational’) endeavours of humans, instead foregrounding us as bodies, as mere meat (as Vivian Sobchack might put it), as flesh to be eaten by an anthropophagous camera, and, significantly more significantly, by insatiably hungry cinemagoers.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that obesity rates and the consumption of audiovisual media have risen side by side over the past century. No wonder, too, that the disappearance of the kindness that we thought was inherent in humankind can be found distastefully demonstrated in a film that combines the natural monster of the Marquis de Sade and our willingness, literally, to consume shit. I am, of course, referring to Pasolini’s Salò, which qualifies itself as an innocent art porn film that rejects a fucked up world and which seeks not to be consumed. That I managed to mangiare Salò perhaps means that the film fails in its honourable quest to question the terrible nature of the world (terrifically, the French know that the earth [la terre] is inherently terrible): I ate and digested Salò, when it was asking for its viewers to gag and rush from the auditorium, hand over mouth in search of the Royal Doulton. But if I were to allow vanity to speak (i.e. if I were to be honest), I’d say that I ‘got’ Salò and therefore could eat it, whilst those who have left the cinema instead of watching it are the naïfs that could do with getting down and dirty and seeing how the real world works.

I also dare to say that it is no coincidence that the title character wanks whilst reading a dog-eared copy of de Sade’s book some halfway through The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, a film ‘meal’ that I found very difficult to digest, but the benefits of which I am beginning to understand, and which entitle it, in my mind, to the status of ‘an important film’. For whilst the film is indeed a savage attack on the alienating nature of human society (whereas the moments of peace in the film come when the characters are not in human-constructed matrices but in Nature herself), it is, I think, an important attack on the masculine nature of that society.

This attack goes something like this: man thinks that woman is an unfathomable monster who fuels and is the object of his violent tendencies, whilst the truth is that man is himself the monster and not because of women elsewhere, but because the monster is in the (in)(hu)man already. The film’s puckeringly bitter final quotation from XXXX (“xxxx”) might seem to endeavour to render the movie a profound statement. But it is the quotation’s banality that is most revealing: for all of mancruel’s desire for profundity, it is on the surface that all truth is written. The truth is, tautologically, that there is no truth. Humans want for there to be some meaning to humanity; we construct entire societies and systems of politics in order to create this meaning. And with these noble endeavours there can and must always be a concomitant inhumanity. It is not that the creation of meaning is pointless or not worthwhile; simply that the making of meaning is also its unmaking; every birth necessitates a death.

Robert Carmichael, for me, critiques the shortsightedness of those who project blame on to women, when the log is in our own eyes. We might feel tempted to bite on the line that suggests that society creates Robert Carmichaels, and, as observations go, there is some truth in this. As Robert and his psycho (sicko?) pals walk through the Garden of England in the film’s final shot, however, we see that Robert is part of nature. Robert simply exists.

Interestingly, in the film’s final shot, Robert Carmichael is walking away, his back to us, enacting precisely the motion that we should have done were we truly revolted by this would-be revolutionary. But instead, we are still in our seats watching, and this alone reveals the lie, through the wonderful paradox of an externally projected film, that Robert Carmichael is not a monster out there, in a disgusting world that we do not want to accept, but that Robert is already in here, in us. Our eyes may see what Robert does – and they may be appalled by it; but also, monstrously, our eyes show through the very act of looking that the monster is within, that we are both male and female at the same time, and that adulthood consists of accepting this wholeheartedly.

Ends

Now, in many respects the 2013 essay represents many of the same ideas as the 2006/2007 essay – but in different form, and certainly with more refinement. In particular, I have since crystalised more clearly (mainly as a result of shortcoming I found in a paper by Noël Carroll on how movies teach us morality) the idea that films do not teach us how to act necessarily, but that they show us how we ourselves could be these people that we see, and that as a result of this, we can come to lead not a moral life (following behavioural guidelines by rote), but an ethical life (we decide for ourselves what we do; we take responsibility for our actions, even if where ‘we’ begin and end is not wholly clear-cut).

But, as mentioned, two ideas disappear from the published essay that are in the primitive version of the essay. These are: the notion that that which is ‘inhuman’ is always already in humans (the space that separates the words ‘in humans’ signifies how we deny the fact that inhumanity is in[ ]humanity); and the idea of getting Even, a kind of female revenge that involves becoming woman, becoming Eves rather than Adams.

Both are puns – and as such there is little room for them in academic essays. They might offer up a thought, but they present nothing conclusive. So I understand why the editors asked me get rid of them, and I comply – so I see that the essay is probably improved as a result.

But this does signal a wider issue, which is that academic essays tend increasingly less to feature what I might call creative or experimental aspects – with puns here being creative and experimental, in that they take pre-existing words and concepts (inhumanity; Even) and tease out of them new meanings (regarding the space that separates in from humanity when inhumanity is written as in humanity; regarding how getting Even might be related to Eve).

I had an email exchange with the editor of this issue of Projections, saying that I was aspiring to write in something like a Cavellian style when I first wrote the essay. They said they don’t much care for Cavell, and could I adopt a drier tone. Fair enough – that’s in some respects fine by me. But it also defeats in small part what I would like for an essay to be: that is, something that precisely asks us to re-think words and meanings, to take us in the direction of new thoughts.

Now, don’t get me wrong: most, many, some essays do contain the seeds of new thoughts. But not often in the experimental style that I was trying to use in that first/second draft from 2006/2007. And for me something really is lost.

I have been asked numerous times in my (brief) experience in academic writing to remove puns and what I consider to be mind-stretching ideas (puns as mind-stretching, the measure being my own mind that is stretched). I can loosely understand why: most readers are not reading for puns and might be irritated by the primitive nature of my thoughts. More often, the feedback simply says that the reader does not follow what I am saying/doing.

I cannot claim to be a great wordsmith, but I have my heroes and I aspire to their methods. And so it is always sad when little ideas like this have to go.

In short, I wonder that there might be more experimental writing – but academic publishing is not the place for it. Like I say, I can understand this. But it is always with sadness that a little idea must fall by the wayside.

So in the six years that it can take for an essay to go from germ to publication, it may well grow up and become something more rounded. But it also loses something a bit more fun in the process. I always find this a bit sad – where can these ideas find a home?

Why, in the blogosphere, of course!

A Festival of Guerrilla Filmmaking

Blogpost, Film education

I run a module at my university called Guerrilla Filmmaking. It is a final year module, in which students are asked to make a series of films (a minimum of three, a maximum of five – they submit a portfolio of three at the end).

The rationale behind the module is to encourage students to make films at short notice – to prepare them for the short deadlines that they might face in later life, and to get them to think creatively about how to get around obstacles in their path.

Furthermore, the module is designed to get them to think about how to make films in spite of logistical and technical constraints.

Indeed, the module actively engages with technical constraints. Taking as our starting point Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier’s Five Obstructions (Denmark/Switzerland/Belgium/France, 2003), and being inspired by Fernando Birri’s assignment to film students in Argentina to make a film without a film camera, the students have to make films that respond to the following challenges:

1. Make a film that does not feature moving images and which responds to the question: what is the meaning of Europe?

2. Make a film that does not feature any synchronisation between image and sound, which does not feature any music, and which documents an issue of concern local to you.

3. Make an experimental, animated or found footage film that deals with recent political events, be those global or local.

4. Make a film about a human rights issue using only a mobile phone and/or other telecommunications technology (i.e. do not use a dedicated camera).

5. Make a silent film that consists only of one take, and which is about multiculturalism.

The fourth is intended to coincide with the Roehampton Human Rights Film Festival, to which students are encouraged to submit a film (and at which Guerrilla Filmmakers won all of the prizes this year – as they did last year, too).

Students can play a bit fast and loose with these challenges – and they do, as will be seen below.

Beyond The Five Obstructions, the module also involves watching a series of films that correspond in different ways to what guerrilla filmmaking is or might be.

The ‘guerrilla’ aspects of the films that we watch can be thematic or technical. In short, the films we watch and the texts that we read correspond to what we might term ‘minor’ cinema in various different ways. And they hopefully challenge any traditional hierarchy (particularly technical/technological hierarchies) concerning what constitutes a good or bad film. And of course to watch films from all over the globe.

Here is a list of the films we watch and the key readings that I ask students to look at (although I am not sure that many of the students do the reading):

Week 1 “Thou shalt be ready to do this module”

Screening: The Five Obstructions (Jørgen Leth/Lars von Trier, Denmark et al, 2003)

Key Reading: Mette Hjort, ‘Dogme 95: The Globalization of Denmark’s Response to Hollywood,’ Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 34-65.

Week 2 “Thou shalt embrace thy limitations”

Screening: Año Uña/Year of the Nail (Jonás Cuarón, Mexico, 2007)

Key Reading: Fernando Birri, ‘Cinema and Underdevelopment,’ in Michael Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997, pp. 86-94.

Julio García Espinosa, ‘Toward an Imperfect Cinema,’ Jump Cut, 20 (1979), pp. 24-26. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/ImperfectCinema.html.

Glauber Rocha, ‘An Esthetic of Hunger’ (trans. Randal Johnson and Burnes Hollyman), in Michael Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997, pp. 59-61.

Week 3 “Thou shalt make a virtue of poverty”

Screening: En Attendant Godard (William Brown, UK, 2009)

Key Reading: Mike Figgis, ‘Choosing Your Weapon, Learning to Love It,’ Digital Filmmaking, London: faber and faber, 2007, pp. 5-14.

Week 4 “Thou shalt keep it simple”

Screening: Lao ma ti hua/Disturbing the Peace (Ai Weiwei, China, 2009) [You can watch the whole film here.]

Key Reading: Valerie Jaffee, ‘Bringing the World to the Nation: Jia Zhangke and the Legitimation of Chinese Underground Film,’ Senses of Cinema, 32. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/feature-articles/chinese_underground_film/.

Jia Zhangke, ‘The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return’ (trans. Yuqian Yan), http://dgeneratefilms.com/academia/jia-zhangke-the-age-of-amateur-cinema-will-return/.

Wu Wenguang, ‘DV: Individual Filmmaking,’ Cinema Journal, 46:1 (2006), pp. 136-140.

Week 5“Thou shalt not flee but walk towards reality”

Screening: Kid Icarus (Carl Bird McLaughlin and Mike Ott, USA, 2008) [You can watch the whole film here.]

Key Reading: Ana Kronschnabl, ‘Plugin Manifesto,’ 2004. Available online at: http://manifestoindex.blogspot.com/2011/04/plugin-manifesto-by-ana-kronschnabl-web.html.

Rosa Menkman, ‘Glitch Studies Manifesto,’ 2010. http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/2010/02/glitch-studies-manifesto.html.

Neocinema, ‘Dogma 2001: New Rules for Internet Cinema,’ 2001. http://www.neocinema.com/.

Week 6 “Thou shalt find ingenious methods of production”

Screenings: Decasia (Bill Morrison, USA, 2002) and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, USA, 1988)

Key Reading: Henry Jenkins, ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry,’ Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press, 2006, pp. 131-168.

Week 7 “Thou shalt have a week off”

Week 8 “Thou shalt embrace that which is considered minor”

Screening:Go Fish (Rose Troche, USA, 1994)

Key Reading: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta), London: Continuum 2005, pp. 207-215.

Patricia White, ‘Lesbian minor cinema,’ Screen, 49:4 (2008), pp. 410-425.

Week 9“Thou shalt dare to make unconventional films”

Screening: Afterimages (William Brown, UK, 2010)

Key Reading: Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (trans. Gabriel Rockhill), London: Continuum.

Week 10“Thou shalt learn to develop and work in a team”

Screening: Ang pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros/The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, Philippines, 2005)

Key Reading: Khoo Gaik Cheng, ‘Just-Do-It-(Yourself): independent filmmaking in Malaysia,’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 8:2 (June 2007), pp. 227-247.

Alexis Tioseco, ‘Shifting Agendas: the Decay of the Mainstream and the Rise of the Independents in the Context of Philippine Cinema,’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 8:2 (June 2007), pp. 298-303.

Week 11“Thou shalt meet the deadline”

Screenings: SMS Sugarman (Aryan Kaganof, South Africa, 2008) [you can watch the film here] and Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, USA/UK/France, 2009)

Key Reading: Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing Amateur Cinema: Limitatons and Possibilities,’ The Moving Image, 8:2 (Fall 2008), pp. 37-60.

Week 12 “Thou shalt think about and reflect upon thy work”

Screening: In film nist/This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojatba Mirtahmasb, Iran, 2011)

Key Reading: Godfrey Cheshire, ‘Iran’s Cinematic Spring,’ Dissent, 59:2 (2012), pp. 76-80.

Shiva Rahbaran, ‘An Interview with Jafar Panahi,’ Wasafiri, 27:3 (2012), pp. 5-11.

So, overall, the rationale is also to get my students to un-learn what they believe ‘good’ filmmaking to be, and to realise that most constraints can also be considered opportunities for creative expression. It is also to get them to engage with the politics of filmmaking – and to try to understand how the methods used to make a film inform what the film can say and how it says it.

Some 60 or so short films were made this term by 18 students – most done single-handedly, but with some collaborations along the way (if students join up as a team – I only saw pairs this term – then they can only make one film with the same team).

So, with the above in mind, I’d like to use this blog as a means to ‘curate’ a mini, online festival of the most distinctive films that were made this term – with apologies and all due respect to those students who participated but who do not have more than one film in this festival (though at least one film by each student is present).

I shall embed the films from YouTube (you can watch all of the films on the Guerrilla Filmmaking channel). And I shall divide them up according to the five different challenges to which they respond.

1. Make a film that does not feature moving images and which responds to the question: what is the meaning of Europe?

What is the Meaning of Europe? by Charli Adamson and Alex Crowe

What is the Meaning of Europe? by Metin Bülent and Daniel Pakbonyan

My Europe by James Holliday

Europa by Alex Taylor

2. Make a film that does not feature any synchronisation between image and sound, which does not feature any music, and which documents an issue of concern local to you.

Local Concern by Jordan Steel

Sound Sync/Local Concern by Charli Adamson

Local Concern by Sam Taylor

– 30 + 30 = 0 by Oz Courtney

Silence of Night by Paulo Fernando de Sá Vieira

Alzheimer’s by Katie Willis

Oyster Users by Alex Crowe

Better than Sex by Danny Riches

3. Make an experimental, animated or found footage film that deals with recent political events, be those global or local.

Vote Romney by Millad Khonsorkh

Found Footage Film by Kine Tvedt

Pinheirinho by Paulo Fernando de Sá Vieira (Second Place, Roehampton Human Rights Film Festival)

ALL HAIL THE KING OF THE WEST! by Danny Riches

War on Women by Katie Willis

From An Outsider by Oz Courtney

4. Make a film about a human rights issue using only a mobile phone and/or other telecommunications technology (i.e. do not use a dedicated camera).

What are my Human Rights? by Eman Seidi

Bless Dale Cooper (Free Tibet) by Millad Khonsorkh

The Perfect Human’s Rights by Louise Dias di Benedetto and Sam Taylor (Winner, Roehampton Human Rights Film Festival)

Poverty at Your Doorstep by Cristiana Turcu (Third Place, Roehampton Human Rights Film Festival)

The Death Penalty by Charli Adamson (Third Place, Roehampton Human Rights Film Festival)

Arms Sales and Human Rights Don’t Mix by Dan T. Ngoy

5. Make a silent film that consists only of one take, and which is about multiculturalism.

Underground by Sam Taylor

Multiculturalism by Daniel Pakbonyan

Multiculturalism by Charli Adamson

Multiculturalism by Kine Tvedt

I hope you enjoy them. Most show wit, some are easier to watch than others, but all show ingenuity in getting around the challenges set…

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.

Smart people are stupid (in a good way) – and ‘stupid’ people are smart (in a bad way)

Blogpost, Film education

(A note of thanks to staff at the University of Reading, where I presented a paper that is loosely on a related topic to this post on 1 November 2012. In particular, discussion with Simone Knox, John Gibbs, Lisa Purse, James MacDowell and Ian Banks, allowed me to think critically about what I had discussed at Reading, such that this blog post might come into existence.)

I teach a module to first year film students called Reading Visual Aesthetics. The first exercise that we get students to do for that module is to describe what they see in a ten-shot sequence taken from a film.

When I first taught this module, I thought that the exercise might be a bit pointless; perhaps more time should be spent on analysing rather than describing. However, as time has gone on, the more I appreciate what a fantastic exercise this is to get students to undertake.

For, what is excellent about this exercise is how it reveals and/or exposes how we take for granted – or look unthinkingly – at many of the things and objects that surround us in everyday life, but which perhaps we should not take for granted.

This year, we showed a ten-shot sequence from the opening of The Opposite of Sex (Don Roos, USA, 1998) – and as happens every year, many of the students wrote their description pretty hastily and then sat in the classroom looking bored as the two-hour time limit that they have clocked down.

This in spite of my exhortations to check through work, to keep looking at the sequence (which we show 15 times over the course of the two hours – it becomes etched in your memory) and to keep writing down details that they see. I always insist that the exercise is harder than the students think, but nonetheless this does not stop many students from assuming that the exercise will be – in the parlance of our times – a piece of piss. And by and large those who believe this do most poorly on the exercise…

Which will lead me to the conclusion that I will make at the end of this blog and which is outlined in its title: smart people are stupid (in a good way) and ‘stupid’ people – by which I really mean lazy people – are smart – but in a bad way.

This blog is not about the poor spelling that I find in these descriptions, nor about the common errors that film students make with regard to film terminology (for example, barely any students correctly identified the opening sequence’s crane shots as crane shots, but instead called them pans or simply camera movements; this is not to mention how editing remains practically invisible to most students – and filmgoers more generally – with barely any students making mention of the dissolves that feature in this sequence).

The kinds of errors I have just mentioned are common, particularly to students just starting out in film – and they are common enough these days that I almost feel no point in commenting on them, especially – sadly enough – the spelling.

(Indeed, a quick comment: I had to read nine essays before finding one that spelt the word cigarette correctly. However, I should make clear that this is not a criticism of the students at my university in particular. I have come across poor spelling at all of the institutions at which I have taught film, which include Oxford, St Andrews and Roehampton. So anyone inclined to make any assumptions about the latter university and/or its students as a result of its not being so well known as the other two… well, desist immediately.)

Instead, what is interesting is the nature of the descriptions made. Or rather, how many things that are right before our eyes are often invisible to us, or do not seem worth commenting upon.

In the opening sequence of The Opposite of Sex, we see a firebrand Dede (Christina Ricci) trash her stepfather’s funeral and run away from home with the help of her quasi-boyfriend Randy (William Lee Scott) to Indiana, where she hopes to stay with her half-brother Bill (the wonderful Martin Donovan). There she meets Bill’s boyfriend, Matt (Ivan Sergei), whom we see towards the end of the self-same opening ten-shot sequence (he opens Bill’s front door in shot nine).

So, what sort of details from this sequence did barely anyone talk about?

Well, we can start with quite general things. Only one student mentioned that the characters speak in American accents, with no one making any reference to their race (all of the characters are white in this sequence).

Well, isn’t this obvious, you’ll perhaps say to yourself, since this is an American movie about white people? So obvious that it is not worth mentioning.

Well, yes. On a certain level it is obvious that we are dealing with white Americans – if you know anything about the film in advance – but that’s precisely my point. We should look at things precisely as if we knew nothing about the film in advance. For the minute that anything is obvious to us, we start regarding that thing as natural and we no longer question what surrounds us.

If, when asked to describe what you see in a film sequence depicting white Americans, you feel that someone being white is not worth mentioning, nor that someone is American (let alone from which part of America, what class their accent seems to betray, etc),then their whiteness is (after the venerable Richard Dyer) invisible, or naturalised.

Now you might say that you would not pass comment either if the characters were black and/or spoke with Russian accents. You – you will tell me in your best thinking or unthinking David Brent impression – are colour blind.

Well, aside from the fact that so-called colour blindness negates difference (something that we should do at our peril), and aside from the fact that I would probably not believe you (since I don’t think colour blindness exists – or if it does, it only speaks, as it does in the case of David Brent, of a condescending and predominantly white attitude towards racial difference), I think that we must describe what we see in the best and most appropriate language that we have.

And since we see someone’s skin colour, we should during a description exercise describe it.

Failing to do so implies that anyone who reads the description shares a similar white or white-centred outlook on the world, and the implicit assumption that the world is white. By virtue of this being an unthinking assumption, it also is only a few steps away from suggesting that the world should be white and/or white-centred.

Similarly, to feel that an American accent (even perhaps the fact that the characters are speaking English) is not worthy of comment also belies the belief that all movies are American, that America is somehow the natural home of cinema.

In other words, if it is considered ‘natural’ (well, naturally the film is about white Americans) that a film like The Opposite of Sex is about white Americans, then whiteness and Americanness are naturalised. By which I mean to say that they are normal, not necessary for comment, while all that deviates from this norm is, well, abnormal, deviant and somehow unnatural.

I can imagine some people having a hard time agreeing with, so I am going to bring forward three other examples that hopefully will make more clear what I mean.

During this sequence there are two night-time shots, one featuring Dede packing a bag in her bedroom, and one featuring her sneaking from her house, across a lawn and to Randy’s car. In the first shot, we see a bedside lamp and in the latter we can see lights from the house’s interior as well as a flash of Randy’s headlights.

What is interesting is that many of the sequence descriptions that I marked suggested that the lighting throughout the sequence is natural lighting.

That students put this in spite of repeated explanations in class that more often than not what looks like natural lighting is as a result of very powerful lamps is not the point that I wish to make. Rather, the point that I wish to make is that we know absolutely well that neither an electric bedside lamp nor a set of car headlights is natural lighting.

These are man-made phenomena. And yet they are so commonplace to us that they have become naturalised; we mistake as natural something that is man-made and, to a certain extent, artificial.

So if we end up mistaking manmade inventions like electric lighting for nature – perhaps a typical occurence for those humans who are surrounded everyday by such items – then perhaps we can see how this also becomes the case in terms of whiteness and Americanness. So commonplace are whiteness and Americanness in cinema that we take them as natural – when of course cinema could be very different.

Perhaps another way to think about this is that if electric lighting has become so commonplace as to be natural, then we should understand that nature is perhaps malleable and not absolute or fixed in nature. In this way, cinema need not predominantly depict whiteness and Americanness – but for some reason it does.

So we need to think about why this is the case – and we can perhaps then begin to construct a different cinema that is not so white-centred and Amerigocentric, but which instead is more ‘democratic’ and egalitarian.

The second of my three examples is the notion of costume. One student did very insightfully put that the costume in the film mimics the fashion of the late 1990s – or words to that effect.

We often unthinkingly assume that films should be about the contemporary age (and perhaps we do not even question the constructed nature of costumes in, precisely, costume dramas and period films).

And yet costumes in films – and costumes in general – are constructed and they tell us information about where and when they come from – even if most of the time we do not bother to analyse such things.

Finally, a couple of students noticed a yellow car in one shot that shows Dede approaching Bill’s front door (though none identified it as a Volkswagen, which surprised me; nor even as a hatchback, which disappointed me).

Only one student, however, said that this is a funny detail since we might typically associate a little yellow VW with a gay character – and Bill is a ‘real life homo’ as Dede tells us in her voice over during this sequence.

My point here is not to deconstruct why a yellow VW hatchback might be deemed gay – though such an argument no doubt deserves to be made elsewhere, since the link between the one thing (yellow VW hatchback) and the other thing (homosexuality) is certainly not natural, but a cultural construct.

Rather, it is to say that I am surprised no one commented on the car at all.

I have no empirical evidence for this, but I suspect that most students notice Bill’s yellow VW hatchback and that it conforms to Dede’s characterisation of him as gay in the voice over.

That is, while the visual joke that is made might well have been lost on some viewers (particularly those who precisely do not see the link as natural between a yellow VW hatchback and a gay owner), my guess is that most viewers ‘got it’ but did not feel the need to describe the car or the ‘appropriateness’ of the car’s colour – again because the point is supposedly too obvious.

This despite the fact that students have only been asked to make a description!

Now, here is where we send this blog in the direction of its title and conclusion – but we’ll do this by turning to what various scholars say in film studies about the experience of film viewing.

The great David Bordwell – and many cognitivist film scholars before and since – have long argued that the brain is working overtime during film viewing and that it really is a miracle of intelligence that people can work out that a shot of a woman at a desk after a shot of the outside of an office block means that the woman is (most likely) inside that office block and working at her desk.

This is no doubt true – and its truth pertains to the yellow car gag from The Opposite of Sex, too. It is a miracle of intelligence that people ‘get’ that the yellow car is a visual gag that reaffirms that Bill is gay (while at the same suggesting to us that what we are seeing is Dede’s version of events – as affirmed by her self-conscious voice over – and not necessarily, therefore, a trustworthy account of events. That is, in Dede’s head Bill of course has a yellow VW hatchback because he’s a complete flamer – but this is not necessarily the truth, nor how Bill would see things, nor necessarily as things are or were).

However, while it is a miracle of intelligence that we get the joke so quickly, automatically even – i.e. without having to think about it – it is also problematic precisely because we do not think about it.

Why do I say this?

I say this because the making-automatic or natural of associations and thoughts (manmade lighting = natural; contemporary clothing = natural; predominant whiteness and Americanness = natural; yellow VW hatchback = gay) has what I shall call a profoundly ideological aspect to it.

This is most clear in the “yellow VW hatchback = gay” idea. Yellow VW hatchbacks are of course not gay – but the association between a stereotype of homosexual American men as liking bright colours and small, relatively sporty and European cars has been made natural that not only did most people see the joke, not only did (I wager) most people get the joke, but when specifically asked, so natural did the joke seem that only one student even thought to comment on it.

We might say that finding a yellow VW hatchback to be gay is harmless. Ostensibly it is, and I do not think The Opposite of Sex a homophobic film – though it certainly deals with explicit homophobia as a theme. Nonetheless, we make these kinds of unthinking and automatic associations the whole time – and sometimes they really can be of a problematic nature (historical – unthinking? – shorthand would reach for World War Two Nazi propaganda here: it is unhealthy when a society starts to associate Jews with rats).

So you may not think that there is a particularly worrisome ideology about the yellow VW hatchback joke in The Opposite of Sex, but there is an ideology at play nonetheless.

(And it is Dede’s – problematic – homophobic ideology that is on display here, since it is she telling the story and she who would paint Bill as a typical flamer with a yellow VW hatchback – even if at play there is also the film’s own, non-homophobic ideology that creates some distance between us and Dede – we hear her voice over and so know that she might be manipulating events such that we see things her way and at the same time we learn not to trust her, meaning that we are not necessarily sharing her homophobic perspective but rather laughing at it as we see the yellow VW hatchback – making of The Opposite of Sex a very sophisticated film indeed.)

My argument is not that ideology = bad. I am of the view that one cannot escape ideology – but I am also of the view that ideology becomes dangerous when unthinkingly do we accept as natural, unchanging and as a given something/anything that is not natural, precisely because nature is malleable and susceptible to change (as opposed to being, precisely, unchanging).

Ideological perception – seeing the yellow VW hatchback as gay – needs to be thought about explicitly. In other words, we need to make un-automatic that which is automatic in our minds; we need to bring into thought precisely that which is otherwise unthinking. Because, as mentioned, otherwise we run the risk of some form of Nazism, or fascism.

Or, put less hysterically, if we just accept the world in an automatic or unthinking fashion, then we are not looking at the world for ourselves, but we are seeing it as others want us to see it. We are willing accomplices in our own subjugation to a version of reality that we could change if we wanted to.

(A sidenote – aimed mainly at film scholars: it is beginning slowly to be acknowledged – but the kind of automatic thought whereby yellow VW hatchback = gay means that we see films, and perhaps reality itself, as a system not of stand alone objects but as signs (yellow VW hatchback is not gay, but that we see it as such means that yellow VW hatchback has stopped being a yellow VW hatchback and has become instead a sign of homosexuality). In other words, that we see semiotically means that semiotics – and film as a language, language here being defined as a process, as the making-linguistic, the making-semiotic of cinema and of reality itself – might well rear its head back into film studies – even if it was precisely against such a semiotic approach to understanding cinema that David Bordwell and other cognitivists adopted the cognitive framework in the first place!)

If we are seeing the world not for ourselves but as others want us to see it, then perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in, of course, film viewing. That most students did not put into words the yellow VW, or the edits that of course they did see but to which they did not pay attention, makes this most clear: we see the film, but we do not see through the film. We see what the film shows us, but we do not see the film itself. We see the content and the story – but not its form, or how it is being told – even though this form, which exceeds our attention, is incessantly before us, right before our very eyes for us to see – if we had the eyes to do so.

When we have the eyes to see the invisible links, to rethink the associations that are otherwise automatic, then we begin to learn. Learning is the confrontation of the new – it is the rewiring of neurons in the brain, the making of new associations. The minute we stop learning, our brain will begin to atrophy – since only the same old clusters of neurons will fire as we begin to see the world in an automatic and unthinking fashion.

The minute we start thinking, or rewiring neurons, then we are no longer (as much) prey (be that willing or unwilling) to ideology; we move into changing ideology – we become political beings – as well as social, ecologically-embedded beings working on the construction of reality, of what is deemed natural, whether or not everyone agrees with the direction in which we want to change things. We bring into our conscious mind that which previously was unconscious – we become smarter – we develop the possibility to control our own destiny – we develop free will – we develop our capacity for freedom, both of thought and of deed.

So here’s where the title and conclusion of this blog post comes into play.

When our automatic perceptions rule our existence, in some ways we are functioning in a very smart fashion; we are efficient and do not need to waste energy consciously thinking about stuff since we can negotiate and navigate our way around reality in a smooth and energy-saving fashion.

But this is, after Daniel Kahnemann, also laziness. So ‘stupid’ – or what I really mean is lazy – people are smart. They are efficient and don’t have to, or don’t want to, think about things. But I see this, laziness, as being a bad thing. Why? Because it is not to get involved in the world, it is not to think and to re-think reality and what surrounds us, to fulfil one’s potential – to waste one’s life, in short.

(Note: a footballer gets so good at football that it becomes unthinking to them. My point is not that we should resist automation entirely – because sometimes being able to naturalise or automate skills, such as controlling and passing a football, are good things. But we should not rest on our laurels and we should always work at improving our game, on acquiring new skills. What is true of football is true of thought, even though thinking is frowned upon in British society and even though our government is prepared to take away much of the investment in education – sport for the brain – at the same time as pouring money into sport, even though sport by definition can employ or make employable far fewer people than can education as a whole. Scholars may not be as famous as David Beckham – but they are as good at what they do as Beckham is at what he does. A.J. Ayer is as big a man as Mike Tyson.)

Smart people, on the other hand, are a bit stupid, because they expend energy on analysing, rethinking, and asking questions. However, while intelligence is therefore not necessarily efficient (and therefore runs counter to the capitalist ethos and ideology that drives our society, if not our whole world, making the question of education and thought a deeply ideological one!), intelligence is the means to freedom, to thinking new things, to invention. It is by definition experimental; it is by definition somewhat speculative. But unless we create the conditions – for ourselves and for others – to realise our potential, then that potential is just going to be sat wasting away.

I imagine a film sequence description that one day will become obsessed with trying to take into account the particles of air that are in the frame of the camera, but which are too numerous to mention, and each quivering blade of grass in the wind – in addition to all of the large or human scale objects that we can see.

And while such a description might not get top marks (since in dedicating its energy to elements of the film that most people overlook), I will surely know that there is a keen, inquisitive and free intelligence at work – even if its intelligence is signalled in the very stupidity of its description (the description being stupid because mildly inappropriate). And I will expect future great things of that person.

Indeed, what importance are grades? Truly original work cannot really be graded at all – since it will at first seem entirely inappropriate and stupid to the person marking it. But university – perhaps education as a whole – is not and should not be about grades (which is to impose upon people a fixed – automatic and unthinking – system of thought that has its final goal, or telos, decided in advance, or a priori). That education and university are about grades is a direct manifestation of the capitalist and unthinking logic that is invading every last aspect of our world. So it is time to rethink such things…

So don’t worry about grades, but instead worry about thinking, about fulfilling potential, about working out what your brain and your body can do, what you can do in, with and for the world, about bootstrapping yourself into conscious thought, about being different, about becoming free.

(But please, dear students, don’t take this as an excuse not to make any effort, to be lazy. On the contrary, stupid intelligence of this sort cannot be lazy – but lazy intelligence is perhaps one of the most stupid things around.)

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.

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, UK, 2012)

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews

Berberian Sound Studio may well be this year’s fiction masterpiece (with the qualifier ‘fiction’ thrown in to acknowledge the crop of excellent documentaries and essay-films that have appeared this year, at least over the course of the summer).

It tells the story of sound designer/mixer Gilderoy (Toby Jones), who arrives from the homely North Downs in Italy to help elusive director Santini (Antonio Mancini) and manipulative producer Francesco (Cosimo Fusco) to complete their new film, Il Vortice Equestre/The Equestrian Vortex, an Argento/Bava-style giallo film that features much horrific violence, particularly against women.

At first, Gilderoy is shocked at the film: this is not the kind of sound design he is used to doing. What is more, it seems as though Francesco will not be in any hurry to pay him. And so what he had taken on as a nice job in Italy soon becomes something of a nightmare: bereft of natural light, he is stuck in the titular sound studio from start to finish (his bedroom adjoins it) until he eventually goes mad.

Gilderoy’s descent into madness is signalled by him seeing himself on the screen in the projection room, before spending the last quarter of the film speaking an Italian of which he knew not a word prior to that point. During this period, we cannot tell what is hallucination, imagination or what is real. And the film ends with Gilderoy contemplating a white light projected on to an otherwise dark screen.

Now, Berberian Sound Studio of course talks to various other films, including many gialli, and films that look into the nature of the photographic image and/or film sound. That is, Gilderoy finds himself caught up in a paranoid mystery that has at its root his own phobias much in the way that modernist classics such as Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni, UK/Italy/USA, 1966) and The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974) do. However, I wonder that one of the film’s most powerful intertexts is David Lynch’s conundrum film, Mulhollland Dr. (France/USA, 2001).

Why Mulholland Dr.? Well, in short, it because Lynch’s film culminates in a renowned scene in the Club de Silencio in which Rebekah del Río performs a mimed version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish (“Llorando”). Meanwhile, Strickland’s film insistently tilts up or down across the word Silenzio, emblazoned in red across the screen as sound effects and dubbing are recorded in the studio.

I shall return to impossibility of silence. But first let me elaborate why Mulholland Dr. is a good point of comparison for picking apart the mystery that is Berberian….

As both Elena del Río and Robert Sinnerbrink have argued in the last few years, Mulholland Dr. is a film about parallel worlds and, indeed, about the powers of performance and the false in pushing humans to the limits of knowledge. What does this mean? It means that it is only at the limits of knowledge, where what is known comes into contact with what is not known, that humans can think and learn. For if learning involved knowing what we already know, then there would be no learning. And yet humans cannot know what they do not know – this would be impossible. And so it is thought that must function as the bridge between the unknown and the known. And it is when we are in a situation, as film viewers, where we cannot tell what is real from what is not – where we cannot be sure that we know anything – that we are forced to think. It is not that there is a single, or singular, ‘thing’ to ‘know’ or ‘learn’ when watching Mulholland Dr.; more important, perhaps, is simply that it encourages us to think, to know not some fact that is ‘out there’ in the world, but to know something for ourselves, perhaps quite simply to know ourselves. As if the very concept of self rests upon the principle of knowledge. And when we do not know, we are not ourselves, we precisely do not know who we are.

This for me might encapsulate Gilderoy’s journey in Berberian…: he is pushed to the limits of knowing himself, such that he becomes unrecognisable to his own being. This is marked by Gilderoy suddenly speaking Italian; it is marked by his new-found propensity for cruelty (he tortures a voice over actress with white noise at one point); it is marked by his inability to distinguish waking from dream. In short, Gilderoy follows a similar journey to Betty/Diane in Mulholland Dr. Although he is not literally doubled (Betty is also Diane – two people in one), Gilderoy is more than just himself.

However, Berberian… perhaps does more than simply this.

In some respects, the film also provides some sort of metaphysical rationale for Gilderoy’s breakdown (signalled in part through the melting of the projection polyester on the sound stage screen in a manner directly reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (Sweden, 1966)). Like Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in the-aforementioned Conversation, Gilderoy seems to pursue perfection in his recordings – no matter how diabolical here the subject matter is. However, unlike Harry who is pursuing the perfect recording of a real situation, Gilderoy is pursuing the creation ex nihilo of a perfect soundscape.

The difference is slight, but important. In wanting to create the perfect recording of a conversation between a couple in San Francisco’s Union Square, Harry Caul attempts to rival God by achieving a position of omniscience. His descent into madness comes through his exasperation at the fact that the perfect recording is not possible. Unlike God, he cannot achieve a state of full knowledge, but his desire to do so – the unforgiveable sin – is the source of his guilt (Harry is a Catholic, after all), a guilt also manifested in his repeated inability to understand and/or to help the people whom he records.

Gilderoy, meanwhile, does not seek to capture reality in its entirety – to achieve a state of omniscience. Instead, he seeks to create an entire reality. In some ways no less sinful (from the Catholic perspective?), the utopian dream is also in many ways more understandable. Why not want to create a perfect world? But the important difference between Harry and Gilderoy is this: where Harry Caul (as I read the film) ends up in hell because he cannot achieve dinivity, Gilderoy ends up finding God in his private hell, precisely because he realises that reality is far more complex than he thought. Reality is too complex to create, Gilderoy comes to understand; while Harry remains adamant even at the last that he can know everything (although perhaps his resigned saxophone playing in his destroyed flat in the film’s final shot signals that Harry has ultimately given up the ghost?).

How can I reach such a bizarre conclusion – that Gilderoy ‘finds (a) God (of sorts)’ because he realises that reality is far more complex than a man with a set of recording machines can create?

Well, I shall argue that this is signalled in the film itself.

A major theme running through the film is its desire to make visible what is typically invisible. This works on various different levels. Firstly, Berberian Sound Studio is about sound. Sound is invisible. We cannot see sound, even if we can hear it and feel its vibrations against and within us. We do see Gilderoy’s extensive visualisations of the soundtrack to The Equestrian Vortex – but these are not the sounds themselves. We also see performers gesturing and gesticulating the sounds of goblins and witches; but nonetheless, I would argue that Strickland puts us deliberately in the paradoxical realm of film being able to show us what makes sound, but unable to show us sound itself – because sound cannot be seen.

Significantly, The Equestrian Vortex is about the persecution of women as witches. Santini, who is almost certainly a casuist (someone who uses logical-seeming rhetoric to argue for something that is not strictly logical), suggests that this history is real. In fact, of course, this history is real: women have been persecuted throughout the centuries, and yet it is a history typically occulted from the history books. History lessons tell us of men (and occasional women) fighting for power – but never or only rarely do history lessons and/or books explain to us that one of the reasons that people are fighting for power is precisely so that they can wield this power over their subjects, especially women. In short, then, Berberian… via The Equestrian Vortex engages with the hidden – invisible – history of the persecution of women, a theme that makes of Berberian… the work of the maker of Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, Romania/UK, 2009), which also deals with the plight of women (problematically in eastern Europe).

It is canny that Strickland chooses to make The Equestrian Vortex a giallo film. For, in the spirit of the work of David Martin-Jones on the spaghetti western, one might read the giallo as the expression not only of disempowerment in Italy in the face of globalisation (a feminised and ‘magical’ Italy is continually beset by the cruelties of the contemporary world), but also as the expression of Italy’s own fascist past, one that cannot be directly represented (not even, quite, by Pier Paolo Pasolini). Fascist Italy is an invisible presence in Italy; its spectre lingers in the world of Berberian…, not least when Francesco explains to Gilderoy that he gives orders and others must follow (a lesson in Fascism 101).

Furthermore, the film’s insistence upon showing us tapes running within sound and projection machines furthers this emphasis on making visible what is otherwise invisible: when we go to the movies, typically films do not – since the development of classical narrative, at least – demonstrate to us the machinations of either their own making, or of their own projection. These are invisible secrets that Berberian… seeks to show.

More invisible: Berberian…, in addition to its emphasis on machines and machinery, features many shots of fruit and vegetables. This lends to the film a strong sense of the still life: from Brueghel and Caravaggio through Goya and Delacroix to Cézanne and Gauguin, the still life has been a key aspect of art. Why the still life? Because the still life also renders visible what is typically invisible: the life that is inherent in fruit and vegetables, but which teeters on the precipice of death precisely because these objects are still. Their rotting – a topic also made clear in Berberian… – brings this home most forcefully: even supposedly inanimate/still objects rot or ‘die’ – which means that they must have been alive at some point – and yet we do not consider them to be alive, because their life typically is invisible to us. This is made clear within the frame of many still lifes, as it is within the still life-like images of fruit and vegetables in Berberian…: typically, the fruit and veg is excellently illuminated, while all around them is darkness – a sense of mystery inherent in these images thanks to the darkness, which subtends and reflects, perhaps even reinforces the mystery of that which is well lit in these images.

Two more invisibles with which Berberian… is concerned: the unconscious and the possible.

I have spoken of knowledge and I have spoken of learning: learning is the journey into the darkness of the unknown, and endeavouring to bring what one finds there into the known. The unconscious is the dark side of the human psyche; it is what we do not know about ourselves, it is what we may or may not learn, but it is what is there. It is what we do not understand about ourselves – our perverse desires, etc. And while there may be a history since Sigmund Freud of people who have tried to bring to light what it is that makes us tick, what is behind those unconscious drives, perhaps so, too, does Berberian… offers its own evidence for us to psychoanalyse Gilderoy. The man who lives at home, who works in his shed, who corresponds still with his mother, who is too shy to talk to the beautiful women that surround him: Gilderoy has some sort of Oedipus complex going on, it would seem, as his unconscious desires slowly begin to manifest themselves in the film via his dream sequences, his unconscious significantly not being easily separated from his conscious mind, because when both are equally visible, then how can or could one tell them apart?

Secondly, the film is also about the possible. This is rendered in the extreme close ups of objects: we see entire universes or brain patterns in the leaves of a cabbage; we pass past spooling tapes as if they were giant wheels. What from the human perspective is simply an object is for this film the possible container for an entire, otherwise invisible universe. This is made particularly clear for me in the film’s insistence upon regular shots that are out of focus. For, from a certain perspective, a shot that is out of focus is only out of focus if we insist that what is in focus must be an object that is easily recognisable. A shot that is supposedly ‘out of focus’ is of course also in focus – if what we believe to be in focus is not an object but the air that surrounds that object. In other words, we often think of space itself as invisible – precisely because we do not think of space itself at all. And so Berberian Sound Studio attempts to show us space itself by often refusing to give us a focused shot of the object that fills that space, but instead to make us linger on the empty space that surrounds that object.

If on each of these levels Berberian Sound Studio tries to make visible what is otherwise invisible, what is the point? For me there are several.

Firstly, the film is a contemplation of how in our real lives the invisible, which normally we do not see, influences us. For example, cinema influences how we see and understand the world. It might sound strange to say that cinema is invisible: patently it is visible, since I can see cinema when I go to watch a film. This is true enough; but I would contend that while we see films, we do not see cinema itself. Or rather, while we can see films, we cannot necessarily see the influence that they have on us. For, as soon as we start seeing the world in a cinematic fashion because we are under the influence of films, it is impossible for us to see cinema in a non-cinematic fashion; cinematic vision has become, paradoxically, invisible to us. And yet, some films, Berberian Sound Studio being one of them, try to show us precisely this, by depicting Gilderoy’s descent into madness as he ends up imagining that he is in a film of his own making. It is not that Gilderoy is exceptional; his madness is one that grips us all. But you cannot show this otherwise invisible madness in a ‘normal’ film; that would only reaffirm the madness. It is only by making a film that is a conundrum, that is possibly quite alienating for some viewers, that Strickland can manage to expose and bring to our attention this madness. For if we could dismiss Berberian… as an exercise in standard filmmaking (a trap into which the film arguably falls, as the list of intertexts and forebears makes clear; there is a generic mode of doing these things), then we would think no longer on it; by refusing genre (while working at the very heart of the giallo), and by refusing easy answers regarding what the hell is actually going on, Strickland points out how in our real lives we cannot be so sure about what is actually ‘real’ and what is simply fabricated by us because we see the world in a cinematic fashion.

There is nothing wrong with seeing the world in a cinematic fashion. Human perception is shaped by our desires and fantasies as much as it is by any accurate vision of reality. However, what Berberian… seems to stress as important is that we remember and consciously to try be in the world while understanding that this is the case. There is no absolute measure of knowledge, not least because it can only be acquired by coming into contact with the unknown. There is no light without darkness. And there is no reality without our inventive/creative input therein. A typical film might draw a hard and fast and binary distinction between the two: this is real and that is dream/fantasy. But a film with the insight of Berberian Sound Studio is more interested in showing that in reality there is no (easy) distinction between the two. Our actuality is already surrounded by virtual realities, and the two are codependent on each other.

And so the making indiscernible of reality and fantasy acts as a starting point for us viewers to reflect upon and better to understand ourselves, our world, and our relationship in/with it.

I argued earlier on that, in the course of the film, Gilderoy ‘finds God.’ What exactly did I mean by that?

If we are surrounded by the invisible, and if the invisible structures our being and our understanding of being in a way that is far more fundamental than our commonplace assumptions regarding reality (well, I am me, and this is real, and that’s that because it is visible and I can see it), then we are heading towards the realm of the spiritual. We do not see reality, but only images of reality, images that may not be, precisely, real. When we recognise that reality is invisible, that it is ‘beyond’ us, but that it structures our entire existence, then this is a confirmation of the spirit that lends itself to some sort of Godly definition.

Berberian Sound Studio ends with Gilderoy looking at a black screen in the eponymous studio. A machine that has started running without any human intervention projects on to the screen darkness and a small, dancing white light. Cinema is reduced to its most bare constituents: black and white projected on to a screen, and the impossibility of silence. The light that we can see, and the darkness that enables us to see. If we are only here because we are enabled to be here, then what do we call that which enables us? This is what we might call God, a God who abandons Harry Caul, but who comes to haunt Gilderoy, precisely because Gilderoy cannot create anything so complex as a universe like this one. Because for all of the sound that Gilderoy can emulate, mix and create, the one that he cannot is, precisely, silenzio.

Please forgive these late-night and half-incomprehensible rantings, but Berberian Sound Studio a magnificent film that contemplates upon the nature of desire, self, existence, cinema, the unconscious and the invisible. By not necessarily making us see the invisible (this would be impossible), but in letting us feel that it is there (God not as provable, but as something in which one has to have faith), we come one step closer to God.

The Last Projectionist (Tom Lawes, UK, 2011)

Blogpost, British cinema, Documentary, Film education, Film reviews, Uncategorized

Summer 2012 has been quite the summer of the documentary in terms of the number of documentary films given theatrical releases.

One that has quietly been touring the UK and gathering attention is Tom Lawes’ Last Projectionist, a self-financed, quasi-professional film by the owner of Birmingham’s Electric Cinema, which is apparently the oldest working cinema in the UK.

The film does a few things: it tells the story of that cinema, mapping its ups and downs, its rebrandings and reopenings against the backdrop of twentieth century history and a history of twentieth century cinemagoing; it tells of the decline of polyester-based cinema and of the conversion towards digital projection in cinemas, not least through the eyes of various Birmingham-based projectionists who gather to reminisce about old times; it elaborates the importance of the cinema as a specific venue in which to regard and to revere film; and it speaks of a love of cinema in all of its forms that is both touching and inspiring.

The film adopts an anecdotal approach to its various themes, but instead of this meaning that the film is unstructured (as were, for example, Tom Lawes’ anecdotes during the Q&A with him that I saw after a screening at the Curzon Soho), the film becomes all the more human and warm for this very reason.

For The Last Projectionist reminds us of several things that are very important, and yet which are easy for us to forget. All of the things about which the film reminds us are linked – and, oddly enough, they are linked in some respects by pertaining to the opposite of everything that mainstream cinema promotes.

What do I mean by this?

What I mean by this is that The Last Projectionist celebrates that which is often unseen and/or overlooked by mainstream cinema, because mainstream cinema would not deem such things worthy of its attention.

What are the examples of this?

Well, the examples of this are both in the film, but they also are the film itself, particularly if one casts aside the fact that the film does in part function as an advert for the Electric – as well as a celebration of cinemagoing more generally.

Examples in the film.

Well, the film is in part about projectionists. Projectionists are the invisible presence in cinemas – men (typically) whom we never see, but who are hidden away behind us in their booths showing films. In other words, The Last Projectionist reminds us of the important role that projectionists in particular and perhaps technicians in general play in the cinema experience.

Indeed, the assembled projectionists in Lawes’ film have mucked in in general at the cinemas where they have worked: dealing not just with reels of movies, but with the maintenance and upkeep of the cinema theatres in general.

Secondly, then, the film also reminds us of the importance of the theatrical venue itself. Lawes himself reminisces fondly about how the venue is as important as the film in terms of the cinema experience – something that Gabriele Pedullà has also written about recently, not least in the context of people watching more and more films on their laptops in anonymous and/or domestic spaces that are not dedicated to the film alone.

Thirdly, The Last Projectionist reminds us that cinema in the UK is not just about Soho and various studios in and around London. From the Brummie accents to the social history that the film offers (Lawes interviews his grandmother-in-law, who remembers the earliest film screenings in Birmingham, as well as various other details of life throughout the years), the film is as much a paean to Birmingham as it is to cinema. Perhaps an overlooked aspect of the film, nonetheless it is fantastic to see onscreen a major city that was at one time a chamber in the beating heart of England and which remains one of the most important cities in the contemporary UK.

Fourthly, a kind of combination of the last two points, The Last Projectionist show normal, working and middle class people, talking about normal, working and middle class life – a kind of democratic cinema that is interested in normal people and what they do, and which is all too rare in a mainstream cinema that is interested not in how everyone is remarkable but in demarcating how only certain people and things are remarkable.

(That said, while the film celebrates cinema owners who have created remarkable and comfortable spaces in which to watch films, and while it takes time to denigrate the cinema chains with their fast food approach to film viewing, The Last Projectionist does not take time to question whether the ‘bourgeoisification’ of cinemagoing at art house and repertory venues fundamentally excludes from art house cinema and from a sense of film history the working classes who traditionally supported cinema in a/the most widespread fashion – by going to watch films.)

What is more, The Last Projectionist fifthly and repeatedly reminds us that mainstream cinemas have through the ages often been propped up by the hidden undergrowth of film production, namely soft- and hard-core pornography. The Electric itself – in various of its incarnations – has screened skin flicks, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. The point is no less simple than to say that these supposedly seedier aspects of the film industry have in fact helped to keep theatrical venues afloat in the face of economic downturns, competition from home film viewing and television, and so on. We should remember that cinema as a whole is a complex ecosystem in which all parts have their role to play – and that to remove one aspect would disrupt the whole in a fundamental and perhaps detrimental way.

And, finally, the style of Lawes’ film itself reminds us that cinema in its most well-known, widely advertised, and economically rich manifestations relies precisely upon grassroots filmmaking at this level. Lawes may not be a twenty something hipster (he’s an early 40s hipster if his IMDb date of birth is accurate), but it is evident that he makes films not strictly for business purposes/industrial reasons, but because he loves cinema, he loves the venue of cinema, the experience of the theatre, and the many types of film that are on offer. Without this, all of your self-important Hollywood stars who – to generalise enormously and unjustly – believe that the world owes them their wealth because of their supreme talent (a mythology hard not to believe about oneself if one is surrounded always by flashing lights) – well, these Hollywood stars would be nothing. Their stardom is dependent on normal people in Birmingham, England (some 5,335 miles away) – as it is dependent on viewers in Sabang, Salta and Salalah.

Although not strictly amateur, then, the independence of The Last Projectionist makes it truly emblematic of the foundations upon which the most professional cinema relies.

As polyester-based film becomes a thing of the past, it disappears into darkness. In fact, the film strip itself was always invisible – the contents of its images occupying the attention of most viewers who gave – and perhaps still give – no thought to how the images get to the screen.

In a sense, then, The Last Projectionist is a celebration of darkness – of that darkness which upholds and creates the conditions for the beauty of the images on the screen. If the theatrical experience is more intense than watching films ‘in broad daylight’, it is because the room is in darkness – it is invisible. And so of all of the things that make of The Last Projectionist a total delight, what links them is darkness, the fact that they are normally overlooked. And this infuses the film on every level.

In many ways, any film lover should watch The Last Projectionist: it is a lesson in film history, as well as a testimony to the power of cinema. But it is also a democratic (enough) film that it reminds us that even stars need the surrounding darkness in order for their lustre to seem so bright.

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.