52 Tuesdays (Sophie Hyde, Australia, 2013)

Australian Cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

This is a brief blog post about 52 Tuesdays, which I am introducing this evening (18 August 2015) at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, London.

The film tells the story of Billie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), a gamine sixteen-year old who arrives home one day to find that her mum, Jane (Del Herbert-Jane), is about to undergo the process of gender reassignment, and to become a man, James.

Initially seeming to take the news in her stride, Billie moves in with her father, Tom (Beau Travis Williams), since Jane/James decides that he needs space in order for to concentrate on the sex change. She will see James every Tuesday. And so the film follows the story of Billie and her family over the course of a year, hence the film’s title.

However, as the year wears on, Billie, James and Tom all seem to experience various issues. For example, James’ testosterone treatment does not work as intended, and he suffers from various side effects of his treatment. Tom, meanwhile, falls from his motorbike (not for the first time).

Finally, Billie ends up playing truant at school as she falls in with Josh (Sam Althuizen) and Jasmine (Imogen Archer), two students with whom she begins to experiment sexually – initially in a backstage room near her school’s theatre, and then in a space looked after by Billie’s queer father-of-one uncle, Harry (Mario Späte), a freewheeling libertine who lives with James and who seems to be in a rock band.

Not only does Billie push the boundaries of her relationship with her friends and family, then, but she also begins quite compulsively to record many of her sexual encounters with Josh and Jasmine – something that eventually is discovered by their parents, and which might fall foul of the law since the participants in the sex tapes are underage.

Billie’s motivation for recording her experiences are not necessarily narcissistic, though. That is, while there are elements of (well captured and certainly well performed) teenage navel-gazing in her footage, especially in her to-camera video diary confessions, there are two other reasons as to why this is happening.

Firstly, as Billie explains, she is no different from James, who similarly is recording his own transition from woman to man for the sake of posterity. That is, the act of recording is a bid to help one to understand the changes that one experiences and also perhaps to record for posterity a life that is otherwise all too fleeting.

Secondly, though, Billie might be recording herself in a bid to make sense of the world more generally. As the film flips from Tuesday to Tuesday, we regularly see television news footage of what at the time of the film’s making were current affairs: for example, the indictment of Julian Assange, footage from the civil war in Syria and the sinking of the Costa Concordia.

It is not that these clips ground the film in some specific political reality. On the contrary, the footage flashes past us with the effect that it is often hard to recognise what is going on. In other words, the world is a confusing and constantly changing place – and it is easy to feel lost therein.

More than this: one of the reasons why the world is so confusing is because it is so highly mediated; we are bombarded by images from all over the world, and the images themselves do not make that much sense unless we construct a narrative out of them, for example by adding a voice over in order to explain the images away.

That is, our confusion regarding the world is partially increased by information overload and by the technologies that humans have in principle created not only to bring order to that world but also precisely to help us make sense of it.

What do we make of Billie’s (and James’) almost pathological desire to record her/their experiences? Well, as mentioned, it is in part in order to make sense of their lives as they struggle to understand who they are.

But in particular, it is also about struggling who one is in terms of desire: what one wants. And what is interesting here, then, is the fact that the technology itself becomes the object of our desires.

Steven Soderbergh saw this at the start of his career and at the dawn of the age of the digital camera, now exploded into the world of mobile phones and other recording devices, when he made sex, lies, and videotape (USA, 1989).

It is not so much the other person that we desire as a complex mix of the other and the technology itself. And given how strange this must be for a human – to realise that their sexuality extends beyond the human and into the technological realm – little wonder it is that humans feel compelled to record what happens.

That is, the technology produces the desire while at the same time offering the hope for an explanation of that desire. If I might proffer a controversial claim, the technology becomes like therapy: it clarifies the problems that it claims to solve in order to extend our own relationship with that very technology.

It is, in other words, as if the technology were alive – and as if it were acting like a parasite with us in order to assure its own existence. It is likely a logical consequence of the camera on the mobile phone, in conjunction with WhatsApp and SnapChat, that teenage images and videos of genitalia are almost certainly rife across most schools in the (Western) world.

The world is confusing. But more than that, the narratives that we used to use to make sense of the world are no longer tenable as technology allows for gender reassignment, as it allows for auto-recording, and as it allows for us permanently to be experimenting with who we are, removing a sense of stability from the world and replacing it with fragmentation and becoming.

What is true of the world that 52 Tuesdays depicts is true also of how it depicts it. This is not simply a case of the mix of media that we see – home videos, video messages, Skype conversations, video diaries, ‘normal’ footage – and the use of the footage from the news.

It is also true of the way that the film shows us only what happens on Tuesdays. Interestingly, director Sophie Hyde and her crew also only shot the film on Tuesdays over the course of a year. As a result, the film itself has a fragmented feel, in which it is hard for us as viewers to construct a narrative – certainly more hard than it is most easy-to-follow films.

And yet, this fragmentation is a powerful tool for putting us the in the shoes of Billie and James, for we end up, like them, trying to make sense of what it is that we see.

Time rushes by, but time also can drag. As there is no fixed gender in the film (Billie is a boy’s name, Harry is effeminate, James obviously is changing sex), so there is no fixed rhythm to the film either, as it jerks then slows. The fragmentation of the world is not just spatial, it is also temporal/rhythmic.

While Tuesday is a typically masculine day (mardi, then French word for Tuesday, is named after the Roman god of war, Mars; the English name is also after the Norse god of war, Tiw), it is also a day on which we celebrate the carnival of gender reassignment, mardi gras.

And yet, while carnival sees the typical roles that we normally play reversed – men become women, the poor become rich – this is a controlled festival that ultimately helps to maintain the status quo.

What is perhaps interesting at the last, then, is that as carnival has within it a strong conservative streak, so, too, does 52 Tuesdays. For, ultimately after Jasmine and Josh fall by the wayside (before a final reconciliation), family does come through as a final lens through which to make sense of the world.

What is pleasurable about 52 Tuesdays is the fact that there is little to no sensationalising of Jane/James’ transition – perhaps in part as a result of Herbert-Jane’s remarkable performance and his own gender non-conformity in real life.

But also Cobham-Hervey’s central performance as Billie is especially affecting. At times archly scripted, nonetheless, 52 Tuesdays also captures the arch thinking to which adolescents sometimes can be prone.

An experimental feature that is engaged precisely with experimentation in relation to the sense-making process of narrative, 52 Tuesdays is a mature film, even if sometimes about immaturity – and if one were interested in a double bill, it would make a nice companion piece to Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, USA, 2015).

Plemya/The Tribe (Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, Ukraine/Netherlands, 2014)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Ukrainian Cinema

This is a brief review of The Tribe in order to accompany the introduction to the film that I made last night at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton, London.

I have been meaning to write about a number of the films I have introduced, but only now have had the chance.

The Tribe is Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy‘s first film, and it tells the story of a young deaf man (Grygoriy Fesenko) who arrives at a boarding school for deaf people in Kiev/Kyiv.

Soon he becomes embroiled in the students’ criminal activities, being chosen after the accidental death of one of his peers to pimp out girls from the school.

He falls in love with one of the girls (Yana Novikova), and then proceeds to defy the rule of King (Oleksandr Osadchyi), the lead gangster.

Developing on from Slaboshpytskiy’s Glukhota/Deafness (Ukraine, 2010) – which can be seen here – The Tribe contains almost no dialogue, with almost all discussion and conversation taking place in Ukrainan sign language. It also features no subtitles.

The Tribe is relatively easy to follow in terms of plot. Nonetheless, clearly the effect of the sign language (some, but few, viewers will be Ukrainian signers) is to alienate audience members somewhat from what they see.

Slaboshpytskiy also achieves this in part through his stylistic choices: The Tribe often features long takes, or sequence shots, which also are long shots – i.e. the camera maintains a relatively long distance from the events that we see onscreen.

That is, by refusing to ‘speak’ both in terms of dialogue (with traditional subtitles) and in terms of the usual language of cinema (close-ups explaining to us what we need to know, linked to shots that match the eyeline of the characters, such that we know who sees what and when), The Tribe, while easy to follow on some levels, is also a complex film to follow: what are we supposed to look at during each frame? What is going on?

In refusing to answer these questions, Slaboshpytskiy’s film clearly wants us instead to think. And in some respects to see the world anew. For, in being a film without dialogue, The Tribe clearly recalls the classic, silent cinema.

And as silent cinema, when it first arrived, helped audiences to see the world anew, through techniques such as slow motion, fast motion, reverse motion and freeze frames, so, too, might The Tribe achieve the same goal.

More than this: The Tribe might not only allow us to see the world anew, or as if for the first time (a process of estrangement/defamiliarisation from the world that Viktor Shklovsky called ostranenie), but might also allow us to see cinema as if for the first time.

Why would this be important?

It would be important because we live in a world in which cinema is the measure of reality. Why do I say that cinema is the measure of reality?

Well, obviously it is a provocative statement (though others, like Jonathan Beller, also argue as much) . Nonetheless, we live in an age in which we all try to force ourselves to look as much like movie stars as possible. This is not simply copying the fashions of the movies, but about creating an image of oneself that conforms to the lighting, make-up, image quality, variable focus and so on of cinema and photography. We detag ourselveis when we look ugly on Facebook. Because do not look cinematic – even if we look like ourselves. And as you are not really real if you not on Facebook, so if you do not conform to the widespread image standards do you not really get to exist in the same way as everyone else.

In other words, if we accept my prognosis that the world is cinematic (‘it was just like in a movie’ says everyone when something exciting happens to them, as if the rest of their lives, the uncinematic bits, were inferior, boring, not worth commenting upon, unreal), then to see the world anew is by definition today about seeing cinema anew, too.

One of the ways in which we can see cinema and the world both anew via The Tribe is through the film’s emphasis on gesture.

Benjamin Noys, drawing on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, suggests that cinema might not be about image, but in fact about gesture. And yet, we tend to think of cinema as being so much about image, rather than about gesture, and we tend to think of the world as being about image rather than about gesture, too. Thus, for The Tribe to foreground gesture – the gestures of Ukrainian sign – is for most audience members a way for them to rethink what cinema is and what the world is.

This needs greater explanation. Most of the time, when we watch movies, and indeed when we see people going about their daily lives, we see people carrying out movements, but not necessarily gestures.

What is the distinction between movement and gestures? Movement has an end: I go from A to B (in order to carry out X). Gesture, meanwhile, has no end.

More: the world under capital is about the control of the body, such that the body’s movements are productive, and thus function as a means for capitalists to profit.

This is the philosophy of the production line: the production lines enforces repetitive, mechanical movements that are the control of the body’s gestures, turning them from gestures to movements for the purposes of capital.

As an example, we are back to silent cinema, with Charles Chaplin as the filmmaker par excellence of the production line, especially in his Modern Times (USA, 1936).

We also know that capital is about the control of bodies, because we find so funny and liberating bodies that are out of control. Think, for example, of the Ministry of Funny Walks or David Brent’s dance in The Office.

(Of course, we also find out of control bodies disgusting at times, too: a general antipathy towards certain ‘unruly’ body types, or bodies that cannot maintain strict boundaries – we dislike bodies that ooze, for example, sweat, snot, piss, blood, sleep, and so on.)

Furthermore, in the contemporary age, so many YouTube videos are about not out-of-control dancing, but controlled dancing. Control of the body, especially then to turn controlled body into image, such that the image of the controlled body can then capture attention, which in turn helps that body to become monetised, since if we all always look at certain types of body (woman as the world’s biggest industry), then we can use that body to sell things (cinema as the base language of advertising; advertising as a clear expression of capital).

In contrast to controlling our bodies, we might otherwise work out what weird and strange things that our bodies, in the spirit of Baruch Spinoza, can do. That is, as we are all different, so do we all move differently and thus we ought to be concerned with individuality and not conformity in terms of how we move. In other words, we might progress from movement (controlled bodies under capital) to gesture (bodies doing unfamiliar things, bodies out of control).

The Tribe is a film that is quite consciously about what bodies can do (and, through its non-mainstream filmmaking techniques – the long shots and long takes – about what cinema can do) . Indeed, this is a film in which all of the characters not only express themselves linguistically (Ukrainian sign) through their bodies, but in which violence, prostitution and various other bodily movements and gestures become prominent for us to see.

Importantly, though, the film does not limit itself to showing to a hearing audience the unusual bodies of these deaf people – making of it a voyeuristic exercise in seeing different bodies, but fetishising them precisely for being different.

On the contrary, the film is also about the control of bodies, and about how the limits of Ukrainian sign (language also as a system of control?) are quickly reached, and bodies must as a result find new ways to express themselves.

It is entirely logical and appropriate, then, that The Tribe is also a difficult film to watch in the sense that it is full of violence, sex and, ultimately, a gesture carried out by the lead character (referred to as Serhiy) that is so terrifying that the film thoroughly deserves its 18-rating in the UK.

For, these are gestures that shock us out of our unthinking perceptions and movements, making us see the world anew. And we do not just gawp at deaf Ukrainians in watching The Tribe, but we also are moved by the gestures that we see, causing us to reflect upon what our bodies can do, and to think (with thinking being a journey into the unknown in which we do not so much repeat what we already know, but work out what it is that our brains can do, but following routes of thought that we have not yet discovered – what mental associations can I make; a journey by definition into the unpredictable).

This, then, is what makes Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe a great movie, and one that I think as many audiences should watch as possible. It is troubling, harrowing, alienating. But in forcing us out of our comfort zones, the film engages us in the ethical challenge of finding out not just who we are, but who we could be – with the result being that consciously we ourselves choose to become, perhaps, better, more ethically engaged human beings.

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

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

Starts:-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ends

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

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

The film sucks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are Many (Amir Amirani, UK, 2014)

Blogpost, British cinema, Documentary, Film reviews

I am only going to write a brief blog about We Are Many, Amir Amirani’s documentary about the 2003 anti-war march in London.

For, while there are two things that I personally did not enjoy so much about the film, it has at its core some truly extraordinary ideas that are worth pondering for a brief while (well, they’re worth pondering for a long while, but I shall only briefly ponder them here/today).

The film opens with a 20-minute or so introduction to the 2003 war in Iraq. The films countdown structure towards the war suggests that it was inevitable, no doubt as a result of the fact that we know now, in 2015, that the war has indeed been and gone. The events of 11 September 2001 of course play a key role in this countdown, and while in some senses it is necessary to mention this and other events as context for the war in Iraq, to me it felt like we have seen all of this many times before. Or rather, the film did not in this section add anything about this moment to what we do already know.

The second issue I have with the film is its reliance on celebrities to lend credibility to the story being told. I hate to sound like an arse – not least because I could just plain be wrong – but when we see and hear Richard Branson telling us that he was moments away from preventing the Iraq war as a result of a meeting that he set up and bankrolled between Saddam Hussein and Kofi Annan, and which oh-so-nearly took place, one just wants some critical scrutiny to emerge to check whether this is really true, nice guy though I am sure Richard Branson is and all that.

Indeed, the seemingly obligatory celebrity vox pops from the likes of Susan Sarandon, Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Mark Rylance, Danny Glover, Ken Loach and more can lend to the film a touch of the self-congratulation that is celebrity culture, and which stands in some respects in stark contrast to the extraordinary ideas mentioned above and which the film also contains.

For, one of the most extraordinary ideas in the film is its celebration of mass human gatherings, especially when carried out with/for political intent. Repeatedly the vox pops do emphasise that being in a massive crowd is moving, joyful and special.

More than that, though, is the crowd footage that Amirani uses in his film. If in asserting that ‘the people are missing’ from cinema, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze was referring to the way in which movies rely perhaps overly on the individual agent who will overcome the world, here we get a sense of the presence of the multitude, and of how, when gathering in huge numbers, an emergent, borg-like identity might well emerge from crowds, which do indeed challenge individual agency and the notion the individual as agent and the agent as individual full stop.

Joy, a term used repeatedly to describe the experience by crowd participants in the film, is, I wish to suggest, felt when humans realise that they are not alone, adrift in a solipsistic daze, but are thoroughly enworlded, and enworlded with other human beings. We do, at such moments, stand looking not just with our own eyes at events, but beside ourselves. And as to be beside oneself with laughter is joyful, so to be beside oneself and simply seeing that one is part of a huge, magnificent and shared existence is joyful because literally mind-expanding: we are forced to recognise both that we are tiny in the world, but that irrevocably we are with the world. Indeed, this sense of joyful withness, with the world and with our human conspecifics, is inherently comedic.

Comedy’s etymology is, according to this site

probably from komodios “actor or singer in the revels,” from komos “revel, carousal, merry-making, festival,” + aoidos “singer, poet,” from aeidein “to sing,” related to oide.

In other words, comedy is a sing-along, a festival of withness (‘com’), a revel and a revelation, in which our eyes are opened to see beyond/beside ourselves and to see that we are with the world.

That Amirani’s film suggests this via its treatment of crowds is, like I say, extraordinary, even if at odds with the celebration of individuality with the emphasis of celebrity that the film elsewhere conveys.

The second extraordinary thing about We Are Many is its insight into subsequent mass movements, especially in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in 2011. For, participants in that crowd suggest that coverage of the anti-war marches in Britain played a key role in inspiring Egyptians themselves to take to the streets several years later. This is extraordinary, because while we may sit pessimistically thinking that the crowds achieved nothing in the UK and elsewhere, and that the war with Iraq took place anyway, that it had a legacy elsewhere in the world suggests that we need not be so pessimistic. And whatever one makes of the consequences of the s0-called Arab Spring, the film thus brings about a sense of hope in collective expression and maybe even of collective change, or change that has as its principle interest not the benefit of the few, but the benefit of the many.

An independently produced film, We Are Many is an extraordinary achievement that, while not a film with the seeming restraint of, say, a Claude Lanzmann, nonetheless is a great rabble rowser, one that makes us question events both from our recent past and ongoing, and which gives us a sense at times that we are all part of the human comedy that is life.

Set Fire to the Stars (Andy Goddard, UK, 2014)

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews

If humanity can lay claim to any powers beyond those of the other species that swarm this frail planet, then it is the power to create. The Greeks referred to this process of creation as poiesis. In the contemporary world, we might refer to this process as poetry.

There are many things that humans can create, from technologies to buildings to works of art. And while perhaps all machines transform our world and thus help us to see not just the world anew, but to realise that the world is only ever progressing into the new as the machines themselves both emerge from the constituent matter with which our universe is built and reconfigure that matter by bringing the machines’ products into existence, perhaps art nonetheless has a special place in and with the world, since art does not just bring beautiful new objects into the world (so-called works of art), but art also makes us see that beauty lies everywhere in the world.

Set Fire to the Stars was shot in 18 days in early 2014 on a relatively small budget. It tells the story of Dylan Thomas (co-writer Celyn Jones) on the verge of his first American tour in 1950. However, rather than concentrate uniquely on Thomas, the story is also about would-be poet John Malcolm Brinnin (Elijah Wood), a New York poetry professor who has brought Thomas to the USA, and who struggles to keep a leash on his guest, who otherwise is raising alcohol-pumping hell.

At one point Thomas catches Brinnin correcting his students’ poems in the Connecticut retreat to which the latter has brought the former in a bid to dry him out. Thomas reads the poem – and with gusto. Why, Thomas asks, does Brinnin have to write all over this work? He is a professor, replies Brinnin, which only prompts Thomas to suggest, in so many words, that creation must be encouraged, not stifled. And we can imagine Thomas’ thoughts: that with only the courage to write, all of the respect for technique will follow, but if one only learns technique and no courage, then one’s poetry will be an empty exercise.

Set Fire to the Stars is a technically accomplished film; it has a nostalgic quality that is brought forth by the film’s black and white cinematography, suggesting a speakeasy States populated by hearts that pump blood and soar with spirit like anywhere else. Maybe the film could go further in exploring just what it is that a human can think, feel and do on this cold rock, in the sense that maybe there could be even more laying bare of the souls that we see in the film. But Set Fire to the Stars is, after all, a film with a lot of heart. A film with a lot of poetry.

For, few are the films that feel as though they had to have been made by its makers before they try and fail to outscream the screaming devil that is death. And yet, in Set Fire to the Stars, one gets a sense that Goddard and in particular Jones could not have led a life that did not at some point in time feature a version of this film. We are, after all, equally human and as such, we all have a duty to try to pocket the moon if that is what we wish to accomplish. That is, if we dream it, then we must have the courage to make it.

And this is what one feels watching Set Fire to the Stars: that everything has been put into this that the filmmakers could muster within and without themselves. To create is tread fearlessly into the world of crisis, where critics uphold themselves as the gatekeepers between what is supposedly good and bad. And yet to create takes courage and should thus be both encouraging and encouraged. Good and bad can drown themselves in jealous rivalry under the surface of Lake Film Reviews. What is great, alone, is that the film is done, and its courage is what shines through.

To confirm the poetry of the film, one happily is transported to America’s New England for its duration, even though the film is shot in and around Thomas’ native Swansea. What more affirmation of magic can there be than such alchemy of place, whereby we find America in Wales and, while at times we may notice, we do not really care? This is not to be hung up on rules and wherefores, but it is lead a life of play, make-believe and joy.

Maybe the film should be more angry, more ugly. But Set Fire to the Stars is nonetheless a defiant film that like all creations is born out of love. Being now in and with the world, there is no need to scrawl all over its margins, but instead simply to admire it, the Thomas that it give us, and to learn courage from it to lead a life of creation ourselves.

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2014)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, USA, 2014)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

There is a scene in John Cameron Mitchell’s somewhat overlooked Rabbit Hole (USA, 2010), in which mourning mother Becca (Nicole Kidman) talks with Jason (Miles Teller), the young man – a boy, really – responsible for the loss of Becca’s child.

In one scene, set on a park bench – just like the moment when Mark Ruffalo also did something extraordinary with the equally wonderful Laura Linney (whither Laura Linney, though?) in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me (USA, 2000) – Miles Teller became for me a real talent to watch.

A bunch of teen drinking movies later, and here he is playing Andrew in Whiplash, being given the hardest, probably unethical push by his jazz teacher, Fletcher (excellently played by J.K. Simmons – but the award nominations mean everyone already knows this), and then becoming the man, or realising the potential that he has had all along.

Spoilers: this film is really all about its stupendous, virtuoso climactic scene in which Andrew steps up and takes over from Fletcher in order to begin his own life.

That said, the film is entertaining throughout. Well paced, well acted, with an excellent script involving great put-downs from Fletcher, the film also contains some nicely conveyed moments of arrogance from Andrew (at a family dinner – maybe Thanksgiving), and, in a mildly original way, he does not get the girl because he has acted like a tool towards her earlier on in an equally arrogant way.

I came out of the film thinking that this was the first film among those that I have seen at the cinema in 2015 that I’d want to see again – mainly for that final scene, because I also feel that both Enemy (Denis Villeneuve, Canada/Spain, 2013) and National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman, France/USA/UK, 2014) are excellent (and I hope to blog about them when I get time).

And don’t get me wrong – Teller and Simmons are both fantastic, but that final scene is really about the drumming (apparently Teller himself, with some highly accomplished editing) and, for me, a reaction shot from Andrew’s father, Jim (Paul Reiser), when he sees/hears just how good his son really is.

People have been enthusing about Whiplash for a while, and not for any wrong reason. ‘It’s a music film shot as though it was a thriller,’ is what I remember hearing around the time it played at the London Film Festival (for reasons of ticket pricing and opportunity, I don’t go to see films at the festival that likely will have a major release at a later point in time).

But – here’s where we get to the meat of the blog – I am not particularly convinced about a student-teacher relationship as thriller being so original. I never really got what was that original about Låt den rätte komma in/Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden, 2008), either. So I could be an ignoramus. But this kind of hybridising of genres is for me inevitable – someone would have done it at some point in time. What it is not is that original – i.e. of a uniqueness that one can never look at anything the same way again.

Let me clarify: Whiplash is excellent, but it is also conventionally shot, cast and played. What is more, about 20 hours after seeing it, other questions and doubts about the film come to mind.

Charlie Parker is referenced a lot in the film, especially the (incorrectly recounted) story about how Jo Jones threw a cymbal at Parker’s head one time, inspiring Parker to go away, practice and to become the legend that is Bird.

Two things: Charlie Parker was black. And Charlie Parker was a jazz musician – a form of music originating in America, and which consists not uniquely of black musicians, but regularly, or most often. Indeed, it is sometimes referred to as a form of black music.

So major critique number one is the fact that a form of music that has race at its core, or in its blood, we might say, becomes here a struggle between two white men. Sure, white musicians play jazz, and it might well be that in the contemporary era white musicians have over-run jazz, thereby making Whiplash something of an insightful film about the state of jazz today. But while we get to see black faces in this film, they are supporting roles – i.e. barely a speaking part – as the story becomes in the end the thesis-antithesis-synthesis of two white dudes.

It makes me think that more people should watch Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler, USA, 2013), which is a truly extraordinary film, or, failing that, something like Finding Forrester (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2000).

(In Andrew’s rise to greatness, the film also tells us that women are unnecessary, perhaps even a plain hindrance, for men, but I shall leave that critique for someone else to make. Perhaps it is significant that Nicole, played by Melanie Benoist, works in a cinema, and that Andrew watches movies there with Jim. With a missing mother, he maybe realises that Nicole is a stand-in mother – a cinematic projection – and that he does not need her; men can raise each other, as Jim and now Fletcher have done with Andrew; women are evil wastes of time, anyway, and best seen as objects on a screen and not as autonomous human beings…)

And now beef number two is that this is a film about jazz. And I am just not sure that formally the film reflects its connection to jazz, being structured and paced much more like a mainstream film – even if a thriller while being about music school – rather than the slightly offbeat, somewhat hard to get into, sometimes downright oppositional mode that jazz historically has been.

Here we have again a racial dimension: the form of this film is about as white as we can get. But more than that… For me, given cinematic form, jazz looks something like the movies of John Cassavetes, who dealt directly with jazz in Shadows (USA, 1959), which with the central character of Ben (Ben Carruthers) explores precisely with the issue of race and to which places and rhythms of life the colour of one’s skin gives us access.

I’d also like to refer to other Cassavetes movies like Husbands (USA, 1970) and Gloria (USA, 1980), in which you don’t have any idea where these movies are going to go from one moment to the next. This inability to read these films, their dangerous, improvised quality, in which everything teeters on the brink of disaster and in taking us to the edge makes us find beauty of the most fragile sort, that is what cinematic jazz is and feels like for me.

It is perhaps problematic – for this argument – that Cassavetes himself was white. But one feels like he’s risked everything to make every single one of his films, and that the freedom and fear involved in this produce amazing work. We get a sense of this happening for Andrew in Whiplash, but not necessarily for its director, Damien Chazelle.

‘The road to greatness can take you to the edge,’ pronounces the UK poster for Whiplash. Damien Chazelle’s film demonstrates great talent – but in the spirit of Fletcher, perhaps one ought to say that it is controlled, scripted (even if the film involved ad-libbing) and basically a safe if excellent film. Its ‘safety’ is demonstrated in its whiteness. Maybe Chazelle will next time produce something truly extraordinary; I hope that he does. Maybe he will be able to do so by engaging more closely with gender and colour. Maybe I shan’t go to watch this at the kino again.

Cock Cock Cock Cock Cock (On the Oscar Nominations 2015)

American cinema, Blogpost

This is the unedited version of an article that otherwise appears on The Conversation.

Here goes:-

In order to suck one’s own cock, I guess one needs a cock in the first place. In some senses it is logical, then, that awards ceremonies, along with other systems of self-congratulation, have a touch of the priapic about them.

However, in the spirit of a recent essay on ‘masculinity in crisis‘ over at Souciant, Hollywood this year seems strongly to be about penises. Don’t get me wrong – penises can be beautiful things, even if often also the cause of much embarrassment to their owner (for being too small, for shrivelling up at the wrong moment, for arriving too early at a meeting with a vagina, an anus, a mouth, or whatever other orifice and/or implement it cares to encounter).

A good number of the films nominated at this year’s Academy Awards are pretty good films. Hell, technically, they’re all excellent. That is: yep, they’re penises, and they demonstrate that they work like penises do.

But it all seems like a lot of penis to me. Best Film nominees are about learning how to grow a penis (Boyhood, Whiplash), having a massive penis (American Sniper), trying to retumesce a flaccid penis (Birdman), having a vagina-liking penis that most people think is an anus-liking penis (The Grand Budapest Hotel), having an anus-liking penis that has to hide the fact that it likes anuses (The Imitation Game), having a fully working penis that most people think is a crippled penis (The Theory of Everything), and being a famously cocky civil rights campaigner (Selma).

All the fiction directors – including the ‘foreign’ ones and the ones working in animation – have penises. All the writers – original and adapted – have penises. All the cinematographers have penises. All of the composers have penises. All of the sound editors have penises. Five out of the six nominated editors have penises.

There is one documentary directed by someone with a vagina (CitizenFOUR), but it is about someone with a penis. There is also a documentary about someone with a vagina (Finding Vivian Maier), but it is directed by someone – two people, in fact – with a penis. What is more, this film is really about someone with a vagina who was too afraid to show their work or come out as an artist in their lifetime – perhaps in part because they did not have a penis (and therefore trying to become an artist was a bit fruitless; still, at least a penis is there to rehabilitate her now).

Of course, there are some vaginas nominated in the categories reserved for actors with vaginas. Among the Best Actress nominees, one is a murderous bitch (Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl), one has early onset Alzheimer’s (Julianne Moore in Still Alice), one is an antisocial loner (Reese Wetherspoon in Wild), one a woman who is rejected by most of the men she works with since they’d prefer a bonus to her having a job (Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night), and one is the foil to a genius whose own doctorate and motherhood duties play second fiddle to a man who ends up dumping her for a woman who’ll give him a handjob while looking at Penthouse magazine (Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything).

Compare to the men – and we have a hero (Bradley Cooper in American Sniper), two geniuses*** (Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game; Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything), a harmless madman who becomes hailed as a genius (Michael Keaton in Birdman, with this being a ‘woah! he’s still got a penis’ nom), and a bonkers rich recluse who eventually kills someone because his mum is a bitch (Steve Carell in Foxcatcher, with the ‘woah, he actually has a penis’ nom).

And the supporting actresses are nominated mainly in roles that are vaginas supporting penises (Keira Knightley in The Imitation Game, Emma Stone in Birdman, Patricia Arquette in Boyhood), with Meryl Streep as a witch (Into the Woods). Maybe only Laura Dern in Wild, playing Reese Witherspoon’s mother, manages to evade being the penis-crutch that most vaginas are expected to be. But, you know, the title alone suggests that independent women are ‘wild’ and dangerous and not to be trusted.

I saw Boyhood and thought that Patricia Arquette was the best thing in it and came out of the film thinking that instead of Boyhood the film should be called Motherhood (or at the very least Texas). But no – it got named after the penis and the vagina is overlooked again.

Even the nomination of Meryl Streep seems more obligatory than worthy – especially when someone like Octavia Spencer made me cry within three minutes of being on screen in the massively overlooked Fruitvale Station (which, admittedly, would not have qualified for these Oscars because it had a – limited – US release date in 2013, even if released in the UK only in June 2014).

But the point remains… The man from Hollywood, he say hail the cock. And fuck the cunt. This is our world.

*** I am intrigued about how these two nominations are about specifically scientific geniuses, and the reverence that scientific geniuses receive, which stands in some contrast to artistic geniuses, perhaps. If the universe is mathematical, then working out formulae that best describe it is inevitable over time – because one must find the formula for A.I. (Turing) and/or the big bang/black holes (Hawking). In other words, if not these men, then someone would have worked out how to do what they did – even if these men were in the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time to work it out. Contrast this to a work of art: if Picasso had not lived, his art works would not exist, while someone would have worked out what both Turing and Hawking worked out at some point in time because all they are doing is maths (no disparagement intended). Given the irreplaceable nature of Picasso, but given that logically Turing and Hawking are entirely replaceable, why do we celebrate scientific genius (this year, anyway) more than artistic genius?

Amalric

Blogpost, French Cinema

Curiosity and a lack of judgment. Those, Mathieu, are the two things that you bring to nigh every role I have seen you play.

Combined, these two things open up a world of joy, a world of passion, a world of love.

Only the curious will be ready to engage with whatever is placed within their path. Only the curious will, by engaging with it, constantly be changing, opening themselves into the realm of new experiences, new becomings, new ways of being.

And only those who are ready to look at whatever they find without judgment will discover in those things that they find a sense of what those things truly are, rather than what the uncurious person wants them to be (and in finding only what they want to find, thereby reaffirming their lack of genuine curiosity).

The curious looks. Those eyes, Mathieu, which caress and penetrate like all of the best lovers should, knowing when with those eyes to show anger and contempt at being shut out of the other’s life, knowing when to shine when the joy begins to happen – the joy that is the becoming of commune, of being with others and with the world around us. Those eyes, Mathieu, with their curved, slightly bulging openness – that is where it all starts.

You don’t love like a romantic, Mathieu. You don’t see in the women that you meet onscreen some idealised version of womanhood, even if some creatures are for you more beautiful in appearance than others – the cause of a besottedness that, being curious and without judgment, you will follow in order simply to see where it leads. You have to and responsibility can go hang because you only have one life and there is no option other than to lead it with all of the passion and folly that it merits.

Not like a romantic, you love without prejudice, Mathieu. You love and will not be afraid to call out – precisely because you do love – those aspects of your partners for which we reserve the lowest terms: bitch, cunt, salope.

And where the rest of the world uses these words as reasons not to look at people properly, at reasons to judge, you see these words as what they really are: a celebration of life to be led as it must and can only be, as opposed to how other people think it should be. These are not words with which to judge and thus conceal others; let us love bitchiness, let us love cuntitude and let us love saloperie, because along with sacrifice and warmth, these are equally real.

A whore, a doctoral candidate, someone else’s wife, and even when your relationship with the other person has turned to hatred and you are no longer together: you, Mathieu, still love the people that you are with and your eyes grow and shine with joy as you discover yet more about this person. When in their rancour they hiss at you, this is still the source of joy, because even though it clearly is often infuriating for others that you cannot but bring them to painful, restless life, you still bring them to painful, restless life.

And the same goes for yourself: you get high on finding a new bitterness to stutter out, a new connection – good or bad, it’s all the same, since this also is simply the joy of living: through a curiosity to learn, and without judgment fearlessly to become – this is how one lives.

We see this in the way your head tilts down at moments of joy: you look down and find the earth to be a chthonic as you inhale, raise that smoking hand in the air with an excited finger wag, and pace – pacing and prowling because the brain is fizzing over with ideas, and your body cannot contain it, and your sentences start with those stutters, because new sensations, new thoughts, new meanings must all start with stutters – because if they came out perfectly, whole, sedately and not in the throes of joy, then clearly these would not be moments of the new, of becoming.

No wonder yours is a screen life littered with doomed relationships. Who can put up with the intensity of constant, unprejudiced scrutiny and curiosity? Such charge cannot be endured for too long – and so perhaps works better in intense bursts and fits, the stuff of memory, fondness, the best experiences lived even at the moment as fit for memory, relegated from the present to the past straight away – we must separate and only have memories of each other – because it is just too exciting to be with you in the present. The impossibility of life: an overwhelming sense of reality must be killed in order to cope with it. But bring on that life again and again, compulsively, convulsively, because there is no tomorrow.

Maybe sporadically you must play cripples, then, Mathieu. A twin logic is at work: the handicap functions as a signal of how the life that you bring to the screen is just too much for the world of prejudice to be able to bear, but by God do you also show that a handicap is, like being a salope, not just something to celebrate, but a means to gain access to different, more intense joys than any able bodied person could achieve.

When I am with your spectral screen presence, Mathieu, I feel alive. Or rather, I feel obliged to write that I feel like I want to live. Which must mean somehow that I am not alive. Because I know that I hold myself back out of fear; I am curious, but I fear the judgment of others so do not have the courage you have. But I shall try always to follow your example and to try to have your courage – to put my body, my mind, my spirit into any and every situation that I can, and to find in there what patently, abundantly, and always is only ever there: life. And to offer to life the only thing that I have to give: all of the love that I can, wide-eyed, curious, judgment be dispelled, becoming and in looking at life and with life looking plainly back, thanks to you, Mathieu, and your example, I can begin to feel the joy.