British cinema

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, UK/Ireland, 2012)

British cinema, Documentary, Film reviews

So, this blog post is not really a critique of Sophie Fiennes’ film, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, but more a critique of things that are said in it by its star and writer, pop philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

The film contains many delightful moments, with the usual interesting insight from Žižek, but ultimately I completely disagree with its core philosophy.

I think that this is summed up by Žižek towards the end of the film, when he says that each of us must realise that we are fundamentally and incontrovertibly alone in the universe.

Perhaps I take Žižek out of context slightly; he offers up our solitude as the logical consequence of there being no God.

However, I’d like to consider this matter from a slightly different angle: humans are not, to paraphrase John Donne, islands – and they cannot be so. And yet, Žižek would seem to suggest ultimately that we are all lost in our solipsistic little bubbles, with no real connection to anyone else ever happening.

While I recognise the emotion of solitude, and while I recognise the inevitability of perhaps never knowing any other human being, never being inside their head, never sharing entirely their life, I still shall argue that ultimately humans are not alone.

In effect, epistemologically speaking, humans might be alone – each knows only what each knows, and one cannot – necessarily – experience the world from without one’s own self/being (although more on this later); meanwhile, ontologically, we are not alone.

And if our ontological ‘withness’ can be accepted, then Žižek’s solipsistic worldview might be forced to crumble accordingly.

But we have to build towards this. And this is a blog post. So we shall do so as succinctly as we can and, alas, imperfectly.

How we are not alone

I lie in my bed. I feel my toes touching the end of the bed – a wooden frame. I cannot see the wooden frame, but I can feel it. I can only feel it because it is solid, and because it is supported by a floor, which itself is supported by a building, itself supported by the earth. I feel because I have a body, which itself functions as a result of blood flowing around me, which is possible in part as a result of my breathing oxygen on a planet whose atmosphere can support the life that has evolved to inhabit it. And while I may have great thoughts, even dreams, when I am on that bed, fundamentally I can only do so because I have a body, which exists on a planet whose atmosphere allows me to exist, and whose atmosphere is allowed thanks to planetary age and distance from the sun.

In other words, I am entirely embedded within a physical universe from which I cannot be separated. I am not alone.

That I speak language – any language, but in this instance English – and that I can recognise other human beings as such, as well as their emotions, is as a result of my having all my life interacted with other human beings.

A thought experiment: humans could be raised by machines, and thus human existence is not predicated upon the existence of other humans.

Indeed – it possibly true. We might run the argument of ‘who made those machines’ (although this points to the need for other humans). And we could follow the Bifo line of thought and say that humans are already raised predominantly by machines (mainly televisions) and that this machine-led life leads to humans being autistic (although this does not mean that those humans are not real humans).

But while the thought experiment is valid(-ish), the fact remains that I speak and think according to the conventions that have come about as a result of social living. I am not alone. This is what, for example, mirror neurons tell us: that humans are hard-wired to be social and sociable, to imitate and to learn from others. If Žižek did not believe this, he would not make a film to communicate with us.

Did Žižek make a film to communicate with us? (Becoming light)

I am not convinced that communication is really Žižek’s primary ambition in getting Sophie Fiennes to make this film (or in going along with Sophie Fiennes if it was she who proposed this and its predecessor, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (UK/Austria/Netherlands, 2006) to him).

This is not to say that Žižek does not communicate a plethora of interesting thoughts in his film. He does. But I think the chief rationale for Žižek to make this film is – facile though it may sound – self-promotion.

Žižek believes that we are all alone. To make a film in which he stars, and which basically features only him, would reaffirm as much. Let’s delve into this a bit more, though, because there is a nexus to be worked out that features something along the lines of cinema-neoliberalism-solipsism-Žižek, and all of which can be encapsulated under the concept of ‘becoming light.’

Becoming light is, simply put, the desire to make one’s life cinematic. It is recognisable in the highly visual culture of the contemporary world: people posting photos on Facebook, Tumblr or wherever, and which photos conform to a certain quality and style of image (often to do with warm lighting and a particular Hollywood-inspired aesthetic); people feeling alive at moments when their life conforms to moments in cinema that they have seen; people taking selfies so as to exist more as an image rather than as a flesh and blood human being – since our image is now considered the ‘real’ us ahead of the, er, real us; people desiring to transcend their real bodies to exist as light, as a star, on a silver screen; our fame and celebrity obsessed culture.

To become light, though, is also to divest oneself of a real body and to exist instead on an immaterial plane, or at least on a photonic plane – on a screen, projected to everyone.

If it is as a result of having a body that I realise that I cannot but be with the world and with other people, then it is in a desire to divest myself of my body and to become light that I dream of becoming cinematic, of existing on a plane without touch. This is falling in love with images of other people – masturbating over images of other people – as opposed to living with and being with other people (co-itus = going with other people).

The desire to live one’s life as if it were a film requires one to buy the sort of props that people in films have. This is about advertising, it is about stuff, and it is about what I shall broadly fit under the umbrella of neoliberalism: looking rich costs a lot of money, but if one does not look rich, one’s chances of becoming rich are slim – so one is forced to enter into the world of chasing material products in the pursuit of becoming rich, becoming immaterial, becoming light.

In this way, the desire to become cinema/to become light is tied to capitalism more generally, its neoliberal mode perhaps more specifically. For, if in becoming light I no longer touch anyone, I become a solipsist, living on my own.

But it is not just in becoming light that the solipsism starts. It is in the pursuit of becoming light. It is in ‘social Darwinism’ and ‘competition’ and the need to go further than anyone else to be the one who is noticed. It is a generalised need for exceptionalism. It is celebrity cult. It is the desire to be ‘famous’ at whatever cost – and better to be famous than a nobody, right?, because a nobody, paradoxically, only has their body, while a famous person has become light, has lost their body (even if dreams of sexual union with [images of] people is what drives the desire to become light).

We are all alone: this is the ethos of neoliberal capital. And it is the ethos that Slavoj Žižek also puts forward in an attempt to critique neoliberal capital. But, then again, Slavoj Žižek is saying this in a film about himself, starring himself. Of course Žižek says that we are alone at the moment when he becomes alone as a result of, finally, becoming cinema (inserting himself into movies, a kind of documented truth about set-jetting and the desire to ‘feel a bit of the magic of the movies’). Because not only is he alone, but he also sets himself apart from other people at this moment to become the celebrity that he wishes to be. Žižek wants to convince us that we are all ultimately alone because he is also at heart a stooly for the capitalist system that he otherwise proclaims to see through via his ideological critique.

Žižek’s nose

Žižek consistently touches his nose during A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (and probably in his real life). There is something a bit obscene about this; but really it is Žižek’s ‘tell’.

What he is telling us is that he is indeed a pervert, but the perversion is not based upon any desire for a true encounter with the other, the nature of which is so twisted (say he likes copraphilia, or something) that he dares not speak its name. Rather, Žižek’s darkest desire is his solipsism – that he prefers masturbation over sex with another human being.

Of course, I am not making libellous claims about the ‘real’ Slavoj Žižek. We are in the realm of a metaphorical Žižek here. But the nose in the film is of course Žižek’s (metaphorical) cock, and of course he wants us to see him touching it in public, but he does not want to put it anywhere – because he must indulge in that most solipsistic and cinema-inspired act of jizzing not in his sexual partner, but on his sexual partner, or preferably just out in the open more generally (pornography’s infamous money-shot; sex becomes display and power games rather than going with someone).

Because of course a solipsist who believes in their own exceptional nature also believes that they cannot have offspring that will match them for brilliance, and so they do not see the point in reproducing. Instead, they just masturbate in public – asking everyone to behold their priapic prowess, while in fact being, ultimately, a solipsistic wanker.

The Void

So… Here we are with Žižek now indulging himself and asking us to indulge him by watching him become light while we mortals continue to lead our bodily existence.

That we are alone, that there is at the heart of reality, the Real of the Void itself is for Žižek the ultimate truth.

But in fact there is no void. The thing that is intolerable for humans is not the emptiness of the world and our sense of underlying solitude; what humans really fear through the capitalist ideology that demands solipsism as the most successful means to gain ‘happiness’ is touch, it is others, it is withness.

In other words, the void is the invention of capitalism. The void is not what lies ‘beyond’ ideology; it is ideology itself.

What lies ‘beyond’ ideology is the Real – but it is a Real so mundane as to be beautiful. It is our bodies, usurping our intentions at every turn, it is us bumping into things, tripping up in public, knocking into each other, seeing each other, smiling when someone else smiles at us, getting angry when public transport does not bend to our will. It is the everyday experience of waking up and getting frustrated and contradicted by a world that is always more profound and complex than our mere imaginations can wonder.

Don’t get me wrong; this is not an apology for leading a dreary life. On the contrary, it is an exhortation to find life in even the most dreary moment, rather than conferring to fetishised and cinematic moments a sense of being ‘really alive’. Because alive is all that we are ever are (and when we are not alive, we are, quite literally, not).

Otherness, withness, being not alone: this is all that we ever are. And to remember and to become as conscious as possible of this is the ultimate critique that one can enact upon the capitalist ideology that has naturalised the sense of the void, that has naturalised a sense of solipsism, that has naturalised a sense of being alone in the world.

Epistemology and ontology

Of course, Žižek probably knows all of this already. And the contention will always be: but even if we are with other people, how can we know this if we cannot know other people? And if we cannot know other people, or that we are with other people, then can we really be with other people? Upon what can one base this claim? Surely one bases this claim upon, ultimately, a leap of faith. An act of faith. An act.

This is a great contention. Here’s my reply.

Firstly, there is perhaps inevitably an over-emphasis in a capitalist culture like ours on the visual: one must have visible evidence to prove the existence of an object – and without it, it is as good as non-existent.

Well, if this perspective is indeed a by-product of a capitalist ideology, it perhaps can be re-thought. That is, we can perhaps consider what constitutes evidence through an alternative framework. And that framework might be touch – we can feel that we are not alone.

Furthermore, to stick to the visible realm, it is a question of what I shall term ‘incessant excess’. Black holes: we by definition cannot see them, because light cannot escape from them. And yet we know that black holes exist. Why? Because we can see the effects that they have on all that surrounds them.

Even if we cannot see, or know, others, because they are the equivalent of an epistemological black hole, we can nonetheless feel the presence of others, we can see their effects. Perhaps we cannot see them directly, but this speaks only of a deficiency in our perceptual systems (in our ideology) more than it does in anything else.

In other words, even if others exceed our perception, and even if it is in an incessant fashion that they do this, nonetheless, the excess always allows for something to ‘inceed’ from outside – an effect, a sense, a touch – not us touching ourselves, but a touch from the other.

We are not alone.

InRealLife (Beeban Kidron, UK, 2013)

Blogpost, British cinema, Documentary, Film reviews

Beeban Kidron’s new film offers a treatise on the internet generation.

This is a generation of boys who prefer porn to real relationships, it is a generation of youths who will sell their bodies in order to get and/or keep a mobile phone, it is a generation addicted to video games, it is a generation with a short attention span, and it is a generation that is happy to give away all and any information about itself to profiling companies that store detailed records of what they have done online and when.

But it is not all downbeat. We also see that the internet can function as a tool for bringing people together, particularly two young gay gentlemen from opposite ends of the UK, and whose relationship would not have started without the electronic devices that dominate our time in the contemporary world.

Nonetheless, in spite of the upbeat nature of the film’s ending, InRealLife is as much as anything a bit of scare-mongering about the internet generation. It features informed vox pops from the likes of Nicholas Negroponte, Sherry Turkle, Norman Doidge and others who have written about the internet and its effects on behaviour, the construction of one’s own identity and the neuronal connections in the brain.

Indeed, to see so many academics – most of whom are associated with MIT – is pleasing, although also a bit frustrating, in that the film offers us soundbites of their work, rather than any of their work. That is, the film does not allow us to get into depth about the issue at hand.

To this end, the film arguably suffers from the very same things that it seeks to criticise. And this is mainly because the film does not seem to acknowledge its own status as a film – and that cinema surely has a major part to play in the acceleration of the contemporary world, the need for endless visual distraction, and the shortening of attention that seems to accompany these things.

There are several examples of this. Firstly, we see this in the film’s overall structure. We go from the porn kids to the girl, Page, who was raped to retrieve her Blackberry, to interviews with various specialists, to dysfunctional gamers, to the gay gents, to others. In other words, the film does not want actually to engage in depth with any one of these figures, but instead offers them up for easy consumption, gets bored, and then moves on.

This is exacerbated by the film’s parallel editing; we move from one storyline to another, back to the first, start a third, back to the second, back to the third, back to the first, and so on. Again, we have before us evidence that it is pleasing for humans to take on multiple pieces of information via story strands in parallel, but Kidron does not even wonder whether this acceleration – following three stories in rather shallow fashion, as opposed to seeing any one story through to the deepest point one can go – is in fact on the same continuum as the intensified version of this that is the screen-filled culture of today.

Cinema, it seems, is exempt from a role in the shortening of attention spans, while the internet, games consoles and mobile phones are the chief culprits. And yet surely this cannot be the case.

The same problem is manifest in the film’s insistent use of the zoom in order to hone in on its subjects. Obviously the image in long or medium shot is too boring for viewers, and so instead we must move in on a particular detail in order to give the image more focus. Heaven forbid that viewers might apply concentration to watching a film image and visually search it; no, instead it is easier for the filmmaker to tell us where to look. And since we are deprived of choice regarding where in the visual field we might look, and since we are via the cuts and parallel story lines, given more information at once than we would have in the ‘real’ world, then naturally the ‘slower’ and real world seems a bit, well, slow, and thus boring in comparison.

It is not, then, that Kidron is necessarily wrong in the points that she seems to make regarding the negative effects that growing up with the internet might have on society, perhaps even on humans as a species.

It is more that in its own way InRealLife contributes to the very problem that it seeks to expose – and it should acknowledge this more clearly (it does not acknowledge this at all).

When I teach Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, USA, 1941) and students sit through it looking at their mobile phone, it is not simply that they cannot sit through 119 minutes of a film with a slow cutting rate that worries me (the cutting rate is important; they can sit through 201 minutes of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, USA/New Zealand, 2003) – in part perhaps because the film has a much higher cutting rate).

What concerns me is the possibility – unproven – that people today – adults and youths – cannot sit in the real world and engage with it. To concentrate on the world that surrounds us, and to think about it via concentration, this is the skill that is lacking. The Citizen Kane thing is simply a symptom, and teaching students to engage in film is really an attempt to encourage them to think about reality, to think about all things.

One has to put in effort in order to get anything out of anything – and if one is in a state of permanent distraction, with visual onsets coming repeatedly to us via our engagement with ubiquitous screens, then we shall not necessarily put effort in to find anything of interest. Like the cut, like the zoom, the screens do it for us.

Kidron’s film is relatively interesting, but I think she misses the need for auto-critique as a filmmaker before she casts her stones.

Notes from the LFF: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, USA/UK, 2013)

American cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, London Film Festival 2013, Transnational Cinema

If I linger on aspects of 12 Years a Slave that I feel do not work, it is because a very moving film might have been – in my humble opinion – an even better film.

I shall take it as read that overall I praise the movie in this blog (because it has things worthy of praise, things that will get mentioned), but the things that grated with this film are three in number: the casting, the use of music and, on a slightly different note, the film’s credits.

With regard to the casting, I can understand that any film can and will use big stars in order to become more commercially appealing. And I can also understand that, when there is a film in production about an historically important topic such as slavery, lots of actors will want to work on that project because it boosts the amount of prestige that they have as actors.

Nonetheless, having avoided reading much about the film before watching it (increasingly my preferred way to see films – as ‘blind’ to pre-hype as possible), to see a procession of fine anglophone acting talent work its way through the film in larger and smaller roles – Scoot McNairy, Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt – in fact detracts from the narrative.

For, my experience of the film was along these lines: I am enjoying this film, but now I am faced with Brad Pitt, giving a decent performance as usual (because I think him a good actor), but since he is Brad Pitt (and since his character gets to speechify about the iniquities of slavery) I cannot but think that the he and the film are pushing the ‘worthy’ button a little bit too much.

To be clear: slavery as an historical – and, it cannot be emphasised enough, a contemporary – evil are undoubtedly topics worthy of filmmaking, because filmmaking can and does do all manner of things to raise awareness of slavery, as this film festival in part testifies. As such, the film being ‘worthy’ is not the problem (though a film might want to avoid being too moralising or sentimental in its depiction of slavery – but that is a different issue).

The problem is that one keeps on thinking ‘isn’t Brad Pitt very worthy?’, such that one thinks less about 12 Years a Slave, and more about how morally righteous those people are who made it. Again, this does not make Brad Pitt or anyone a bad person (of course it does not; although the way in which white actors accrue prestige for playing ‘difficult’ and, specifically, racist roles is slightly problematic for me: the white actor’s difficulty in playing a racist potentially occults/keeps out of view both the victims of real slavery and the (again, potential) assumption that black actors playing slaves is somehow ‘easier’).

In conclusion, then, the film can be as worthy as it wants, but the more I am thinking about the making of the film and its actors, the less I am thinking about the film. And slavery should be a topic that is important enough that the film could have no stars in it, and I’d still want to watch it because it should, in effect, speak for itself. The stars stop the film, to my mind, from speaking for itself.

(Furthermore, if the white stars also function to sell the film, then this points to the ongoing issues of race in relation to Hollywood casting. Chiwetel Ejiofor – who gives a fine performance – is relatively famous, but obviously the filmmakers did not want to give this role to Will Smith or various other, more famous black actors because… because he may be too famous for the ‘issue’ of slavery with which the film deals. But it’s fine for Brad Pitt to crop up towards the film’s end, because… I am not sure why (aside from his involvement as a producer in the film). Are these not double standards? And is using white stars to ‘sell’ slavery in cinematic form not also problematic – as if the topic did not speak for itself as important, but instead is only worth thinking long and hard about because a bunch of white actors are involved in the project. In effect, if business comes ahead of morality – stars will bring in the audience, and this is more important than the ‘issue’ that the film portrays – then the film surely is open to criticism.)

My second beef with the film is its use of music. This is not just moments where Hans Zimmer’s score lays down industrial gong sounds to convey the fact that SOMETHING BAD IS HAPPENING. Rather, it is that Hans Zimmer recycles a piece of music in 12 Years a Slave that he used for the magnificent Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, USA, 1998) fifteen years ago.

Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mar the film somewhat. The piece of music the (forgive my lack of knowledge regarding musical terminology) chord progression of which is largely repeated in 12 Years a Slave from The Thin Red Line is called ‘Journey to the Line’ – and it is a beautiful, epic piece of music. However, knowing that McQueen’s film is borrowing from Malick’s film in this way is also slightly jarring.

I could believe that McQueen, being a ‘clever’ artist and all, is pointing to the impossibility to depicting slavery without the use of cliché (with cliché here meaning saying things through terms that other people have used, i.e. repeating someone else’s words or, in this case, music).

Nonetheless, what the Zimmer score does is to give the impression that McQueen aspires to make a Malick film. To do for slavery what Malick does for war in The Thin Red Line, namely to offer a metaphysical treatise on the nature thereof.

But where Malick uses James Jones’ novel to discuss war on a relatively abstract level, McQueen is using a true story potentially to do the same. And true stories do not lend themselves to the abstract in quite the same way: what is slavery? How do some men seemingly desire to be masters and others slaves? (What is this war in the heart of nature? being Malick’s seeming guiding question with The Thin Red Line.) So, again for me, this does not quite work.

Don’t get me wrong; there are moments in 12 Years a Slave when we wonder that Solomon Northup (Ejiofor), a free man cast into slavery by a pair of scheming entertainers, could escape, especially early on when he and the other captives outnumber their captors (although they have all taken a significant beating by this time). And so the film treads that fine line in asking whether men in part desire the conditions that they face, but this is not the same as offering a piece of Malickiana.

The aspirations to Malick perhaps also explain the procession of stars that appear in the film. But, again, one ends up thinking: but Terrence Malick is Terrence Malick and Steve McQueen is Steve McQueen, so why does McQueen piggy-back on Malick? One cannot ‘do’ Terrence Malick (not without comic results). One can only be Terrence Malick. And the Malickiana here – signalled especially through Zimmer’s score – again seem slightly to undermine the film.

Again to be clear: McQueen’s film does have moments that McQueen is famous for, namely scenes that linger and are long in duration, including a powerful moment when Northup is left hanging by the neck from a tree branch, his toes touching the ground and keeping him alive. This protracted sequence – akin in part to the epic confrontation between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a Priest (Rory Mullen) in Hunger (UK/Ireland, 2008) – is very powerful, as is a whipping administered on a slave in part by Northup and in part by Epps. But where McQueen and his desire to linger on certain moments is very strong, this strength is hindered at moments when it feels like the director wants to step into someone else’s shoes.

Finally, it is for me a mistake in the final credits of the film to put the name of Lupita Nyong’o a long way down the credit list – and after many of the white stars who have significantly smaller, and certainly less important, roles than she does.

For, Nyong’o plays Patsey, a slave on the estate of Edwin Epps (Fassbender), who is a legendary cotton picker and who also becomes the target of Epps’ amorous advances.

And Patsey is, to my mind, the beating heart of this film. It is she who is whipped by Northup and it is she who, importantly, makes clear that what for Northup is a temporary experience, for others is a lifelong experience.

Don’t get me wrong: 12 years as a slave is a massive amount of time and it is not that anyone should go through a single instant of slavery in their lives. But since we are watching a film called 12 Years a Slave, the clue is in the title that there will be a ‘happy ending’ (forgive the inadequacy of these film terms) for the main protagonist.

And while there is a ‘happy ending’ for American slavery – in that in principle it was abolished in 1865 – this does not make up for c250 years of slavery on what is now known as the North American continent. That is, and no disrespect to Northup, but 12 years pales in comparison to the enormity of North American slavery. And so it is important that the film conveys as best it can how Northup’s experiences are temporary in relation to those of innumerable others.

And this is done through Patsey, in particular the moment when Northup is rescued (*spoiler*?), for she must of course stay behind (the law does not allow her to leave). The moment is deeply moving, and Nyong’o’s performance here, as throughout the film, is remarkable. And so, given the centrality of her part, in that she stands in for that which it is impossible to depict (the size and scale of slavery in the USA in its entirety), it is disappointing that her name disappears at the end until after all of the white stars.

All this in mind, 12 Years a Slave is nonetheless a powerful film, with great performances, as mentioned, from Ejiofor and Nyong’o, and with some excellent McQueenian touches (scenes that linger for longer than most other directors would have them). It is no mean task to try to depict something that is perhaps beyond the bounds of cinema and which can only be suggested rather than shown. On the whole McQueen does an excellent job, but one wonders that a film with fewer stars, less Malickiana, and a desire to recognise upfront the performers involved, might have raised its bar even higher.

Notes from the LFF: Exhibition (Joanna Hogg, UK, 2013)

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, London Film Festival 2013

The two most disappointing films that I saw at the London Film Festival were both British – namely Blackwood (Adam Wimpenny, UK, 2013) and Love Me Till Monday (Justin Hardy, UK, 2013).

(The former is a workaday, unremarkable horror – and sadly not, as one wag wittily put it upon leaving the film, a biopic of Richard Blackwood; the latter an extended episode of Hollyoaks. However, the former did make me want to see more of Sophia Myles, the latter more of Tim Plester, who played the only character with whom I might actually enjoy a conversation.)

It is fortunate, then, that there were The Selfish Giant (Clio Barnard, UK, 2013) and Exhibition to make things more interesting – even if, as per my earlier blog on it, I have some ‘philosophical’ reservations about The Selfish Giant.

(I am sad that I did not get to see films by the likes of Ben Rivers at this London Film Festival – but I hope to catch some interesting British cinema at a theatre like the ICA before long.)

To business: Exhibition is never going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but it continues Joanna Hogg’s unabashed efforts to lay bare the foibles of the British upper middle classes, as witnessed in both Unrelated (UK, 2007) – a major inspiration behind, ahem, my own latest film, Ur: The End of Civilisation in 90 Tableaux (UK/France, 2013) – and Archipelago (UK, 2010), the two films that gave to the world Tom Hiddelston, who returns here in a small role as a smarmy, unnamed estate agent.

Exhibition is about a couple, D (singer/songwriter Viv Albertine) and H (conceptual artist Liam Gillick), who live in a beautiful, somewhat art deco style house in an unidentified area of London. And the film is about property as much as anything else. D and H are planning on moving out of this house, because, one gets the sense, that while owning property is upheld as the very raison d’être/telos of working life, the property that we own (so the platitude goes) ends up owning us.

(Not that I am anywhere near getting on to the [London] property ladder, I should hasten to add. The rise in property prices since the late 1970s/early 1980s means that a generation of people have become – at least on paper – incredibly wealthy without effort, while those who have grown up since and who do not have property in their family face never owning property at all. One at times feels tempted to say that those pesky 1960s and 1970s lot, with all their free love nostalgia and ban the bomb bollocks ended up being the most greedy generation of them all.)

The house-owning-the-inhabitants motif is made most clear by the fact that H and D are grieving the loss of a child, or so it is obliquely suggested to us via fragments of dialogue, which means that neither, but D in particular, wants to or can leave the property.

Indeed, one wonders that the ‘lost child’ is a metaphor for a generation that will not have the property that these two have enjoyed – even if they are frustrated in their current digs and feel the need to sell up – hence the presence of the estate agents.

Not only are H and D trapped inside their own home, then, but they are also trapped inside their own rooms within that home. Their most common means of communication is via an intercom – and their exchanges are often terse, with D dreaming of sexual liaisons perhaps with H, but often on her own, and H calling down to chance his arm for the odd BJ and/or shag, should D be in the mood.

Their relationships become less with each other and more with their computers. In this way, Hogg works into her film the role that technology also plays in cordoning off films within their domestic space; first came the television to trap families in their home, then a television in every bedroom; now a computer in every room; an electronic device in every hand; and no one need ever speak directly to each other anymore; mediation is the only relationship that we have. It is a dysfunctional world at best.

The sense of self-willed enclosure is also class-based. In one hilarious scene, H tells a man who is awaiting a delivery and who has parked in their driveway that he ought to put a fence up in front of his parking spot, together with a big sign saying “Fuck Off”, to keep people like him out – the implication being that he is a ‘working class oik’ who does not belong on the hallowed ground of the upper middle classes.

And this is all reaffirmed by Hogg’s masterful use of the soundtrack, which uses echoes, alarms, rumbles and general sounds from the streets and from the rest of the house to convey a sense of claustrophobia and fear of the outside world.

This technique is reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, USA, 1968), and one gets the sense, somehow, that issues of diabolical insemination, lost children, hellish homes and the like are all equally at work here, in this observational piece about the British bourgeoisie as they are in Polanski’s critique of 1960s New Yorkers.

And yet, for all of the enclosure, this is a film that is, finally, about ‘exhibition’. Perhaps the exhibition of enclosure, of closed mindedness. But the dream to get out into the open – perhaps via art? D is an artist, after all – all that is otherwise contained in our repressive and repressed society.

(Perhaps this makes Hogg’s film somehow anti-cinematic – because maybe cinema itself is paradoxical in the fact that its predominant mode of exhibition is to have viewers hide away in a little dark cube.)

One final observation: I only gleaned this from the end credits, but the family that we see move into the D/H house at the end is, from the names of the actors, Asian in origin. A nod to the way in which much new housing in London is being bought up at great rates by Asian, specifically rich Chinese, buyers.

There is no xenophobia intended (nor, hopefully, taken) here. Simply perhaps that the castle that is the British home is now not sturdy enough, and those Britons that do fear contact with, and contamination from, others (with H and D among their number?) are going to have to hide elsewhere, further afield, in order to avoid this fate.

A restrained, elliptical film. Hogg remains one of the most distinctive voices in British cinema. (And, given the film’s 5.9 rating on IMDb, the most interesting work on that website continues to score between 5.5 and 6.8.)

Notes from the LFF: The Selfish Giant (Clio Barnard, UK, 2013)

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, London Film Festival 2013

Clio Barnard’s new film, a loose adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s short story of the same name, tells the story of Arbor (Conner Chapman) and Swifty (Shaun Thomas), two kids from Bradford who, when Arbor finds himself excluded from school as a result of his poor behaviour for which he takes pills, decide to make money for themselves gathering up scrap for recycling, and in particular finding, even stealing, copper, a very valuable resource.

As has been mentioned, The Selfish Giant is a film strongly in the tradition of Ken Loach’s Kes (UK, 1969): young boys wandering the countryside that surrounds a northern town/city, from impoverished/broken homes. There are also some visual nods to Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (UK/Netherlands, 2009), primarily as a result of the presence of horses in both films, with horses taking the place of the kestrel that Billy looks after in Loach’s film. Here, Swifty in particular is good with horses and hopes to take part in unofficial/illegal horse-and-cart races along the local A roads at some point.

(One might also mention Pawel Pawlikowski’s Twockers (UK, 1998) as a precursor to The Selfish Giant, not least because Pawlikowski won Best Film at this year’s London Film Festival with his film, Ida (Poland/Denmark, 2013).)

Overall, then, there is a sense that nature is good for children – a thesis that seems to be the moral of Wilde’s story as well. For, in Wilde’s story  a giant is deemed selfish for not letting children play in his otherwise walled garden.

In Wilde’s story, the giant finds redemption when he eventually opens up his garden to the children – although this is motivated by the fact that his garden is permanently in winter.

Wilde writes:

But the Spring never came, nor the Summer. The Autumn gave golden fruit to every garden, but to the Giant’s garden she gave none. ‘He is too selfish,’ she said. So it was always Winter there, and the North Wind, and the Hail, and the Frost, and the Snow danced about through the trees.

The giant of Barnard’s film is, presumably, Kitten (Sean Gilder), the owner of the local scrapyard, who employs Arbor and Swifty, but who also is constantly ripping them off.

In Wilde’s story, the giant eventually finds redemption, in particular for having spoken to and embraced a little boy who still is enshrouded in winter, even though spring has arrived elsewhere after the opening up of his garden.

This does transpose on to the film when Kitten, ultimately/*spoiler* (of sorts) takes the rap for a misdemeanour involving Arbor and Swifty. But Kitten’s ‘redemption’ is prison; and while Arbor may learn from this experience, Swifty will not.

In other words, while we can try to fit Wilde and Barnard neatly together, ultimately we cannot. And the main reason for this is that Barnard, in the tradition of British social realism, does not attribute the metaphorical winter (i.e. poverty) of her characters to the selfishness of Kitten, even though Kitten is a ‘selfish’ character (because struggling financially, it would seem; his is not the life of Beemers and Cristal).

Rather, Barnard wishes to address systemic failures that lead to poverty, the need for children to work in order to help their family makes ends meet, a failure for schools to look after children like Arbor, and how economic desperation will drive people to take desperate, ill-advised measures.

Perhaps one way in which Barnard’s film does not quite match Loach’s is the way in which Loach analyses the education system in some depth. Repeatedly we see Billy Casper (David Bradley) in classes, with teachers overlooking him and so on. In The Selfish Giant, moving as it is, it is hard to get a sense of where Arbor and Swifty’s exclusion from society comes – except the oblique reference to the fact that Arbor has psychological problems and is from a broken family. In other words, Barnard does seem to suggest that the family is at fault for Arbor’s behaviour, while Kes suggests that the education system as a whole lets down good kids, including Billy Casper.

This slight shift in emphasis perhaps reflects different times; but it also seems to suggest that responsibility lies perhaps more with individuals than with institutions in terms of people leading ‘better’ (i.e. more economically secure) lives. Perhaps this is also a result of using Wilde as the guiding text; Wilde squarely places the long-standing winter on the giant’s shoulders. The claim might be: who in the contemporary world of economic hardship cannot afford not to be selfish? But a) this potentially reaffirms the ideology of selfishness; and b) it does not get to grips with the causes of selfishness – which are only alluded to, almost namedropped here, rather than explored in detail.

Stepping away from Wilde, The Selfish Giant is also a treatise on electricity. We notice early on that the electricity in Swifty’s house has been cut off and that the family is eating cold beans on bread.

This is a family that is not hooked up to the grid, that is not connected to society. And as Arbor and Swifty seek copper – that most conductive element of electricity – we get a sense that they are also thereby seeking inclusion in society. And, ultimately, it is electricity that will be their downfall, that will cast out and permanently exclude Swifty and Arbor, be it not for Kitten’s decision to ‘save’ Arbor from his own fate.

There is a muted hope, then, in Barnard’s new film. But one that is tempered as a result of us never really knowing where the suffering of these characters comes from (is it a given that people are excluded for no reason?), meaning that we cannot know how to help this suffering (apart from via blythe sayings like ‘we need to redistribute wealth’ – against which I have no objections, but for which concrete plans need to be made). If Loach pointed to shortcomings in education in particular in Kes, I am not sure what we can take from The Selfish Giant – except a bleak vision of a bleak part of the UK.

We should be reminded that the UK is not a garden shrouded permanently in spring and sunshine and that there are many excluded people here about whom we should collectively be doing something. But  a film that points this out only achieves half of what film might achieve; the other, harder half of proactively addressing the issue of ongoing poverty and desperation in our society, seems to remain invisible here – as if Barnard herself had no hope. Muted hope, then, verging on hopelessness. A moving, but for me a ‘philosophically’ difficult film.

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.

The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah, Ghana/UK, 2010)

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, London Film Festival 2010

Shown at the 2010 London Film Festival, but denied even a brief and minimal release until now, The Nine Muses is one of the best films that Jean-Luc Godard never made.

Boring stuff: the film combines archive footage and images of faceless men staring at ganzfeld-like Alaskan snowscapes (think J.M.W. Turner’s later paintings that are more or less depictions of fog in Italian cities) with spoken and written quotations from Joyce, Beckett, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and others, and music by Godardian composers like Arvo Pärt, David Darling and Hans Otte, to develop a poetic collage of ideas that combine to form a meditation diaspora and black (British) history.

The above is ‘boring’ because that’s the brass tacks of the film.

The interesting stuff (to me) is something like the following:

The poet does not necessarily know history, but the poet certainly feels history. The Nine Muses includes a prominent quotation from Zelda Fitzgerald that “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” And yet, even if this were true, John Akomfrah as poet is sensitive to (he ‘feels’) the pain that weighs down on migrant peoples as a result of their travels.

That is, not everyone who is from a migrant family knows or understands the past that their ancestors have endured. Indeed, as someone like Ariane Sherine has recently written, the question ‘where are you from?‘ is a boring one.

No disrespect to Sherine, who can make any claim she wants about the implicit (and certainly real, if ‘well intentioned’) racism that such a question entails. I’m not saying that she is in denial of her roots, but her argument runs the risk of saying ‘[personal] history is boring and unwelcome burden.’

And, sure, her roots are in the UK. I’m not trying to imply that she or anyone else whose family immigrated to the UK long ago – and certainly before she was born – is not ‘British.’

But, again, if we don’t pay attention to history, then we might find ourselves repeating it.

Which is to say that we don’t all need to have a full genealogy mapped out such that we can say that we are descended from Spanish gypsy immigrants (as, according to my cousin, I am). Nor do we need wear badges that make clear our family origins.

But we must understand that the long and troubled history of immigration did happen, and we must perhaps try to get a sense of what global relocation means.

And this is what Akomfrah’s masterful cine-poem seems to be about. It reworks Homer to say that African, Caribbean and Asian immigrants to the UK are wandering souls, and that, as Basho has said, the journey/the wandering is perhaps itself our home.

And yet, wandering is a difficult home to inhabit; it is cold, arduous, and it puts humans on the limits of all that they know, there where humanity itself is forged (for humanity is only a measure of the limits of humanity; anything easily within its limits is almost inhuman, perhaps it is even death).

The enormity and difficult nature of this journey – this is what Akomfrah suggests, and his reworking of footage of immigrants now either grown old or lost to the world, such that literally their beautiful holograms haunt the screen as we see them reanimated – a cinematic punctum of the highest order – is what we should not forget.

We should not forget that the most famous rapist of all time, Zeus, begot the muses with Mnemosyne, the incarnation of memory. That is, memory is the mother of all art. If we forget, then, pace Sherine, art like this will be lost.

The answer to the question ‘where are you from?’ is not, then, some mythical ‘Africa’ or ‘Barbados’ or ‘India’ – but that we are from here, the place in which we currently reside, and which is perhaps always changing. It is not the condemnation to death of the past by declaring the past to be, precisely, finished; it is the declaration of the continued existence of the past in the present.

The poet, then, carries history not as history – but as the fundament upon which is based the present. This is what I mean by ‘feeling’ the past rather than necessarily knowing it (being ‘good at history’ in terms of dates and events, important though that also is).

In a week when the government published its findings on and hopes for the British film industry, it strikes me that a film like Akomfrah’s is all the more important to champion.

The document published – which admittedly I have only glossed – talks a good game of supporting diversity in British independent cinema. And many of the films cited – usual suspects including not just The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, UK, 2010), but also people like Terence Davies – would arguably make us think that this diversity extends beyond the popular appeal of the former and into the ‘art house’ realm of the latter.

But… One gets the jittery feeling reading the document that it really does mean supporting more mainstream cinema – The Inbetweeners Movies (Ben Palmer, UK, 2011) was a commercial hit, don’t you know? So why not make more films like it? – with not so much regard for art cinema of the kind that Akomfrah has made here, and which does not have much/any of the commercial appeal of British comedies and heritage films.

Given the year and a half turnaround on The Nine Muses between the London Film Festival and its current cinema release (showing only at the glorious ICA at present), one worries for films like Akomfrah’s: it must take a lot of persuading for someone finally to agree to stump up cash to take on the risk of even a one-week run at a single screen in London. Sure, DVD sales will be reasonable, but even with the plaudits on the poster (testimony to the failing power of journalists to convince anyone other than the pre-converted to step out of the multiplex?; there were 9 (nine) people at the beginning and 7 (seven) at the end of the screening I attended), The Nine Muses is still obviously struggling. And with the government paper’s emphasis on the profitability of films, one cannot see labours of love like Akomfrah’s being anything other than lost in the future.

And yet, this is the kind of film precisely to support as vociferously and as eloquently as possible. It is a poem that deserves to be seen repeatedly, and even if it is ‘lost’ on some people (those who walked out of the screening I attended?), its feeling for, or sense of, history – and not in the sense of the ‘great man’ myth peddled by The King’s Speech, but, rather, in the way that human lives in a collective sense prop up and enable any great man (or woman) to exist at all – is what makes it worth promoting.

I know I’ll carry on making movies for nothing – and I more or less expect never to get funding for my films. Sad though this makes me (if I allow my vanity to speak), a superior talent like Akomfrah should be supported at every level: by funders and by audiences.

See The Nine Muses, then, before it is too late.

Notes from the LFF: Hors Satan/Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont, France, 2011)

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, French Cinema, Uncategorized

Are we living in the end times?

Personally, I don’t think so.

But, then again, while I will be sad to die (this is a lie – I won’t be anything except dead), and while I’ll be sad (and pretty excited) to see some other planet crash into Earth, or whatever fate awaits humanity and the rock we float on, this will not be the end of things.

I view it pretty simply: molecules, matter, light, and all of that ‘primary’ stuff that goes to make up the universe will still be around. They will never not be around. Perhaps they cannot not to be around. So an absolute end to all things? No, I don’t think so.

Hors Satan is one of a small bunch of recent art house movies that features a miracle (more than one in this film, in fact).

Miracles are relatively common place in the mainstream – impossible things happen the whole time, whether or not these are given a religious context and whether or not they are recognised as being miraculous.

Given that the mainstream peddles in impossible/miraculous illusion on a day-to-day basis, miracles there are not as interesting as when they appear in art house cinema.

Why? Because art house cinema is ‘for’ and ‘by’ ‘intellectuals’ – which stereotypically might have overlap with what I shall call agnosticism. Here, I don’t quite mean agnosticism in the sense of ‘I am not sure what or whether I believe in God or not,’ although it’s linked – hence my choice to use this word.

What I mean by agnosticism is a certain suspicion with regard to miracles: people do not get up from the dead and walk in everyday life (not without the help of defibrillators, anyway). Or if they do, there might well be a ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ explanation, to which we do not necessarily have access.

Now, just to be clear, I think that you can believe in God and still be agnostic if we accept this definition. And note that this agnosticism is not meant to rule out miracles – it’s just to want thoroughly to question the evidence for them.

This in and of itself might place too great an emphasis on ‘science’ – but my point is not that such a ‘scientific’ view is without potential flaws. It is simply that, according to this view, miracles would push the bounds of credibility.

A second – linked – reason why miracles in art house cinema are more remarkable (and push the bounds of credibility) is that art house cinema – a very problematic generalisation, I confess – often (but not exclusively) is made in what we have come to accept as a ‘realistic’ style. That is, few elements are obtrusive, be that the acting, the mise-en-scène, the cinematography, the editing, or the soundtrack.

Instead, everything plays in seemingly real – and not stylised – locations, with the camera retaining some distance from events, not moving in an ostentatious fashion, and with edits taking place when they perhaps ‘need’ to, rather than ‘for the sake of it’. Since these films try to look like everyday life, and since miracles do not take place in everyday life, it is intriguing – and all the more surprising – that art house films would choose to portray miracles in this style.

Art house films might be weird as far as their status as a film is concerned. To give an example, Hors Satan itself has long takes, in which little happens and in which there is little dialogue as the unnamed lead character, played by David Dewaele, walks around the countryside of the north of France, seemingly praying to the countryside, and taking away and giving life as he sees fit.

But, even though we seem increasingly to find our real lives intolerable if they are filled with silence and little movement, such silence and stillness in a film might yet be thought of as realistic – because reality is not the crash bang wallop of the mainstream movies.

That is, as far as films go, Hors Satan is ‘weird’ because it does not conform to the norms of mainstream filmmaking – which bring with them an implicit contract whereby the audience ‘expects’ miracles to happen. But this ‘weirdness’ for a film might still be termed realistic, because life itself is slow and often quiet. And so when a miracle happens in a ‘weird’ and slow and supposedly ‘realistic’ film, it seems as though something even more weird must be going on.

Along with Stellet licht/Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2007) and Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, Austria/France/Germany, 2009), then, Hors Satan is one of a handful of high profile and recent art house ‘miracle movies.’

Why is the story of a miracle, as happens in Hors Satan, linked to the ‘end times’ I evoked at the outset of this blog?

My proposed – and admittedly general – answer would be that we live in times when it is hard to find something to believe in. Almost any religious belief is – especially beliefs held so strongly that one would want to share that belief with others and perhaps even try to persuade them of the truth of those beliefs – quickly derided as ‘fundamentalism,’ as is the seemingly irrational and rabid refusal to believe in capitalism.

In other words, ‘realists’ are supposedly atheists, as the religion bashers such as Richard Dawkins aim to make clear. Being realists, there would be little space for miracles in films made for ‘intelligent’ and ‘realistic’ people, and also made by ‘intelligent’ filmmakers who shoot using the technical and formal conventions of ‘realism’ (realism as a style of filmmaking).

In the postmodern era, in which the so-called ‘grand narratives’ that previously could explain the world and our position therewith have been overthrown but not replaced, it would appear that there is nothing to believe in anymore.

And yet with mankind’s fragility ever more thrust in our own faces, it is perhaps natural that humans would turn back to religion – or at least the belief in some power/force/energy/design/divinity – in order to have some rationale behind the human project, and perhaps also to convince us that we do not need to be out there in the streets murdering and stealing simply because we know that no punishment – either Earthly or divine – awaits us.

(I am intrigued by the fact that the day on which the human population on Earth reached seven billion in number, the news seems to mourn our demise – not enough food, not enough warmth, not enough oxygen to keep us going. That is, the human race is numerically at its strongest, and yet the discourse seems overwhelmingly to emphasise that we are at our weakest.)

Now, I personally think that none of Silent Light, Lourdes or Hors Satan actually believes in the miracles that they depict – and also believe that none of them is a ‘Christian’ film attempting to woo its viewers back to the church because if we don’t pray now, then, Pascal-like, we might lose our bet with God.

The reference to Pascal is perhaps apt. For Pascal himself argues – in the same section (233) of his Pensées in which the wager appears – that we cannot have access to the infinite, or to God, because we are finite – and the infinite is not just a ‘big number’; rather, the infinite is without number.

That is to say, Pascal is talking about a faith without proof – precisely, a faith. Ostensibly, then, a miracle – as ‘proof’ of God – eliminates the wager; once you’ve seen a miracle, you just believe because you have seen God and don’t need to, nay cannot, doubt anymore.

Here is where what I perceive to be the failure of these three films to believe in their own miracles perhaps becomes interesting. For the miracles in each film function for me not as proof of God, but as evidence of our need for beliefs as a whole.

There is nothing stopping anyone from reading these films – perhaps Lourdes especially – as being literal accounts of miracles. However, for me these films are about the need to fill a void that has been created by the drive to render the world scientifically comprehensible (even though science itself remains full of mysteries, with the Higgs-Boson itself sometimes even referred to – even if jokingly – as the ‘God particle’).

In other words, Gödel notwithstanding, our comprehension of the universe is incomplete – and this is in part perhaps because of the lack of anything to believe in. Belief, then, might yet (even if not forever) remain a vital need for humans, a meme of such power that we cannot ignore it.

Although I have not discussed Hors Satan or any of the films mentioned in much depth, I just wanted to get across these brief thoughts.

And as a brief add-on, I found it interesting that We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, UK/USA, 2011) dared to look precisely at our belief-less, postmodern society from the perspective of a mother whose love for her son is only ambivalent (and vice versa) at absolute best.

Not only does this for me confirm Ramsay’s status as one of the leading lights of British cinema (my top quartet typically would be Winterbottom, Meadows, Arnold and Ramsay), but it also stands in stark contrast to the ‘king’ of postmodern pop, Quentin Tarantino.

In a very informative book about film and ethics, Lisa Downing writes that Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 (USA, 2003-2004) ultimately offer up the myth of motherhood as, for Tarantino, a final ideological barrier that for him is absolute – and not a social/cultural convention that is contingent (i.e. need not necessarily be true or real under different circumstances).

Kevin is prepared to take a step in that direction and to question even this myth.

Dumont’s film has a set of concerns entirely separate from Ramsay’s – and perhaps from all of the films mentioned here.

But if nothing else it is an interesting – and beautiful – meditation on what the times are such that they might be ending.