Film reviews

Notes from the LFF: I Wish (Kore-eda Hirokazu, Japan, 2011)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Japanese Cinema, Uncategorized

Kore-eda Hirokazu’s latest film looks set not to get distribution in the UK. Or at least does not have any at time of writing. For this reason, I wanted to see it at the 2011 London Film Festival.

Indeed, avoiding premières of films that I shall no doubt see in the fullness of time seems low down on my agenda of trying to see films at this year’s festival. Rather, I have tried to see films I am unlikely to see (on a big screen, at any rate) anywhere but here.

Kiseki/I Wish is a light-hearted tale of separated brothers, Koichi and Ryu, the former of whom lives with his grandparents and mother, the latter of whom lives with his dad, who is lead singer in a band.

Like Hirokazu’s previous Dare mo shiranai/Nobody Knows (Japan, 2004), this film is about family – in particular disrupted families that struggle to stay in touch in spite of the prevalence of mobile telecommunications technologies (which feature prominently in the film).

Furthermore, given I Wish’s interest in inter-generational relationships, the film also shares common ground with Aruitemo aruitemo/Still Walking (Japan, 2008), not least because this films shares Still Walking’s lighter tone, not least in its characters’ forging of friendships in spite of adversity, while Nobody Knows is comparatively gruelling in its vision of abandoned Japanese children.

Koichi is studying in Kagoshima under the shadow of a permanently smoking volcano, about which no one seems to be doing anything (like running away in case of eruption).

It becomes hard not to consider the threat of natural disaster as supremely ironic in the light of the recent Tōhoku earthquake. And yet, in spite of these parallels, the possibility of natural disaster seems to function more metaphorically here.

That is, Koichi takes the volcano himself as a symbol for his frustration at being separated from his brother, and at his parents’ separation in general.

He and Ryu – and friends – decide to meet up to wish for a miracle, a miracle that will come to pass if they are at the spot where two Shinkansen/bullet trains cross paths on the line between Kagoshima and Fukuoka, the town where Ryu lives with his dad.

The Shinkansen functions as a symbol of hope: perhaps humans and their astounding ability for technological progress will sidestep the dangers that living in/with nature seems to entail.

However, more fitting – for me – would be a recognised synthesis of man and nature. That is, the volcano and the bullet train both can share the same world, a world that Koichi eventually, if ambiguously, wishes for instead of the reunion of his parents.

Ryu, who is all of eight years of age (Koichi is perhaps ten or eleven), upbraids his father – as his mother has done – for not being responsible enough towards his children as he pursues his dream of being a rock star. The father is not without success, but childhood neglect does seem to be a prevalent issue, both for Ryu and for Koichi, whose mother goes out with old school friends instead – arguably – of looking after her son.

Grandparents, both Ryu and Koichi’s real ones and an old couple with whom they stay on their Shinkansen pilgrimage, step in to help this young generation.

However, the film does not seem to offer an outright critique of the middle generation. Not only is the film relatively sympathetic towards them (there are no villains in this film), but they also seem to be prey to circumstances that are in part beyond their control.

Koichi and Ryu’s mother takes a job at a supermarket, a job about which she is ashamed given that most of her peers have better jobs and pay (or so she says). Their father, meanwhile, pursues his childhood dream, as mentioned.

One gets a sense of how one must choose between family and a career, be that a supposedly ‘infantile’ desire like becoming a rock star, or having a ‘better’ job than supermarket shift work.

To choose family seems to preclude great financial success. Furthermore, to pursue independence as an artist (the father’s music is described as ‘indy,’ which Koichi explains to Ryu as meaning that one ‘has to work harder at it’ than a mainstream success) seems also to get in the way of family.

Since the film does not judge the parents, the question becomes: what kind of a world is it that we live in such that the following choices become our only options: either you make money, or you pursue your dream, or you have a family?

There is no definite answer to this question, except perhaps that this simply is the world we live in, and perhaps it is better to have this world than no world at all – the ‘lesson’ that Koichi seems to learn as the film progresses.

There is a scent of the global financial crisis underwriting I Wish, which does the arguably clichéd trick of having children pronounce the most profound wisdom. But if it is a question of economics that has shaped the kind of world in which the above are the only available options, then perhaps the wilfully naïve thoughts of children can be recognised as a return to insightful simplicity in an era that preens itself like a misunderstood romantic on account of its own forced complexity.

The real complexity here is not forced; it is the natural emergence of a community regardless of what else the world (and humanity) throws in its (own) path.

The film is shot with Hirokazu’s characteristic handheld camera, allowing his performers to live on the screen, together with relatively common long shots that also ensure that his characters are contextualised in a world characterised by competing technologies and temporalities, dreams and desires.

Notes from CPH PIX: Xavier Dolan vs Andrzej Zulawski

Blogpost, Canadian cinema, cph pix 2011, European cinema, Film reviews, Uncategorized

I am writing this blog from CPH PIX, where my new film, Afterimages (William Brown, UK, 2010) will be playing on 22 April at 14h15 at the Dagmar and on 27 April at 22h30 at the Husets Biograf.

I include this information on the off-chance that anyone reading this blog is from or in Copenhagen – and that this mention might in turn boost the number of people attending. There is very little web presence for Afterimages at present – although this is understandable because not many people have seen it. And so I thought I ought to do some self-promotion. Apologies if this is too callous, particularly on the day that Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya.

Either way, while no doubt I shall blog a bit about the experience of being at CPH PIX as a festival, really I shall try to dedicate this blog to the films that I see here (and to promote my own, as mentioned above – although this is not strictly limited to Afterimages, since I also had a very small part – apparently on the cutting room floor – in Abdellatif Kechiche’s new film, Vénus Noire/Black Venus, France/Italy/Belgium, 2010, which also plays here during my stay).

So… The first film I saw today was Les Amours Imaginaires/Heartbeats (Xavier Dolan, Canada, 2010).

I had been told by one of the CPH programmers whom I met this morning that Heartbeats was a departure from the disgustingly young Dolan’s first film, J’ai tué ma mère/I Killed My Mother (Canada, 2009). The programmer did confess to not having seen Dolan’s first film, made when he was 19, and so I don’t feel too bad about contradicting him, for, if anyone has seen and liked J’ai tué ma mère, then you will in part know what to expect and should enjoy Heartbeats. For, like its predecessor, Dolan’s new film features arch framings, lots of slow motion shots of people walking and touching, an elliptical narrative style separated by black frames, some prolonged MTV-style sections, and a delight in leafy, autumnal forest scenes.

How it differs, perhaps, is the way in which Dolan seems to have swallowed some Pier Paolo Pasolini in the gap between the films. I say this because Heartbeats is somewhat redolent of Pasolini’s wonderful Teorema/Theorem (Italy, 1968) in that it features a mysterious young man (here, Niels Schneider, as opposed to Terence Stamp) who enters into the lives of a young couple (here Dolan himself and Monia Chokri, as opposed to a family environment), and he seduces pretty much everyone (although here he sleeps with no one, at least as far as we can tell). This may make the film in fact sound very different to Theorem, and it might be my over-reading of Dolan, like Pasolini, as a ‘queer’ filmmaker that links them (with François Ozon, who himself sort of remade Theorem with his own Sitcom (France, 1998), also playing a role in my thinking). But this is what struck me most throughout the film, not least because of the way that Dolan frames Schneider at several key moments – against a monochrome background, looking down and to the side, as if lost in whimsical thought.

(To continue the ‘queer’ links, there is also a strong reference to Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, USA/Netherlands, 2004), in that Dolan’s character, Francis, dreams of Schneider’s Nico at one point in a similar pose, but standing under a shower of marshmallows, which is similar to the shower of sugar-coated breakfast cereals that Araki’s paedophile movie pictures.)

Like Theorem, Heartbeats is about the violent effect that beauty can have on us – violent in the sense that we lose our sense of reason and carry out acts that normally we would never do simply for the sake of catching a greater glimpse of the subject of our admiration. But where Pasolini does go for the family, here Dolan simply goes for 20-something Québecois.

Obsession must involve an element of projection: to (believe that we) feel so strongly about someone we barely know must involve us creating a version of the person whom we crave that does not necessarily conform to how or who they really are. Dolan captures this well, not least through the When Harry Met Sally… (Rob Reiner, USA, 1989) style vox pops that other, otherwise uninvolved stalkers offer from time to time during the film.

However, while Nico is supposedly the reason that best friends Francis and Marie (Chokri) become so obsessed, they seem to get more access to him than we do. That is to say, Nico does tell them that he does seismological work from time to time (though this is probably a lie, because while he says that this pays him very well, his mum – a dancer played by Anne Dorval – still gives him an allowance every month), and he does tell them that he also studies literature at McGill, but beyond this we learn next to nothing about him. Whatever conversations and good times that the trio have – either as a trio or as Nico-Marie or Nico-Francis configurations within their triangle – we do not see them; instead, as mentioned, Dolan offers us slo-mo shots of hands conveying longing and frustration, of contemplative glances, and little actual conversation.

The superficial nature of the obsession from both Francis and Marie is signalled early on: Nico, supposedly a country bumpkin Adonis who has just arrived in Montreal, is sat at a table while they prepare food in a kitchen. At this dinner party, then, Nico is only ever already an image to both Marie and Francis, and penetrating beyond that not only does not happen, but also deliberately does not happen. In other words, it perhaps not supposed to happen.

I hesitate with where I want to go next in this review. I feel tempted to say that Dolan shows his age by allowing his characters to become so obsessed. Marie is 25, and so should in theory be beyond such infatuations, and so I don’t really credit this as a believable story. This is borne out by the end of the film: as is to be expected, not only might Nico be a liar, but he also strings along and then ‘brutally’ discards both Marie and Francis, only to disappear to Asia. Upon his return a year later, he throws a party, at which Marie and Francis both spurn him in public – with Francis letting out some strange cat hissing noise that signals that he does not want contact with Nico anymore. In other words, while I might conceivably not put obsession past someone over 25 years of age, this childish response a year after everything has fallen apart seems to me to be a cut caused by Nico that surely could not have been that deep since he, or we at least, never got to know him that well. And because, from this, we can only conclude that Nico is in fact a bit boring, if utterly beautiful.

Marie and Francis love images. Marie styles herself on Audrey Hepburn, not least because Nico says that she is his favourite, while Francis is a sucker for James Dean. Dolan’s stylised mise-en-scène would suggest that he loves images as well – and that he wants us to love them, too. As a cinephile, I can happily say that I also love images. But even if Dolan’s film is a reflection on what I shall nebulously call ‘soullessness,’ it becomes hard not to believe that his film is also a bit soulless.

Not only is this because the film is an exercise in good looks with little attention paid to character (even if there are pensive gazes aplenty), but also because of the ending of the film. I had caught myself thinking that Schneider bears more than a passing resemblance to French heart-throb Louis Garrel on several occasions during the film, and as the film ends, both Marie and Francis see none other than Louis Garrel at a party and, so the soundtrack – the recurring them of ‘Bang Bang’ by Dalida – suggests, the whole cycle starts again with them walking towards him in slow motion.

It is possible that we live in a universe in which self-involved humans are obsessed only with images and the surface of things, and in which humans never learn anything, but instead are condemned repeatedly to making the same mistakes. But I am not sure that I believe this; and I think that if I did believe this, I would love Dolan’s film. When the truth is that I really do not. Images are great, and the force and power of images are great. We live in a superficial, Barbie world, and whatever feelings we have for people are real enough, at least to us. But the power of feelings suggested in Heartbeats were not convincing for me. And while in J’ai tué ma mère, I got the sense of a wickedly detached sense of humour from time to time, there was not enough evidence here for me to think of this film as a critique. At a certain point in time, elliptical editing may well still challenge the norms of narrative cinema, but it also reduces films to moments that do not cohere – in terms of our understanding of character psychology at least – across time.

I shall perhaps be able to express this better through a comparison to Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, France/West Germany, 1981), which also has an elliptical method of telling its story. But first I might also compare Heartbeats to another threesome film featuring the self-same Louis Garrel, namely The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, France/UK/Italy, 2003). In that film, not only do all three members of the love triangle have sex (and in that film, two of the three are brother and sister), but the film also has political resonance, since it is perhaps ultimately about the failure of the 1968 generation to create a meaningful alternative to ‘the system.’ Dolan’s film, alas, lacks this political bite, even if it is a film that has cynicism as a common ingredient. Perhaps Heartbeats is trying to suggest that a new 1968 is around the corner (as many dyed-in-the-wool – and potentially outmoded – Marxists like to think). But given the ‘no sex please’ attitude – particularly of Nico – who just turns out to be a bit boring – then Heartbeats – perhaps as a final recuperation of the film – becomes an account of the self-destructive libidinous forces of the ill-communicating, self-absorbed urban generation that is all trousers and no nudity. And which want affirmation in terms of sexual orientation by having the most beautiful not just fuck, but also (fail to) fall in love with you.

In comparison to Heartbeats, the mindfuck that is Zulawski’s Possession takes elliptical narration to a whole new level. Zulawski’s work is part of a retrospective here at CPH PIX and apparently I missed the director by about half an hour when I arrived in Copenhagen. A pity, but then again, I had not seen any of his films before Possession, so the real pity is not that I missed a director by whom I had not seen a film, but that I had not seen a film before I missed him.

Possession tells a 1980s-set Cold War story of a seeming spy, Mark (Sam Neill), who returns home after a prolonged absence to wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and son Bob (Michael Hogben). It quickly transpires that Mark and Anna have drifted apart during his absence and that she has taken up with new age transcendental sex explorer, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent). Except that in actual fact she has not. Instead, she has really taken up with a demonic creature whom she keeps in an apartment downtown, and who will be ‘complete’ once Anna has fed to him enough people, including a pair of homosexual private detectives that Mark hires to follow her.

The film ends up with Mark killing Heinrich and going round to his house to tell his mother (Johanna Hofer), with whom he still lives. She takes some drugs and kills herself. Anna, meanwhile, kills her best friend Margit (Margit Carstensen), or so we are led to believe, and shags the weird creature in her house. Mark, desperate to save Anna (perhaps), stops the police from finding her by shooting one of his former spy colleagues. They give chase, end up killing Mark as he tries to reach the top of a high rise. Anna arrives with the ‘complete’ creature, who looks just like Mark. Anna and Mark die – leaving the creature-Mark to go find Bob, who has been left in the care of his school teacher, Helen (also played by Isabelle Adjani). As the creature knocks on Helen’s door through a pane of frosted glass, Bob tells her not to open the door and goes to drown himself in a bath, while the sound of (presumably) nuclear bombs starts to fall. In part this might be because Mark, who had quit whatever spy forces he was working for to work on his family life, did not fulfil the contract with another, unnamed spy, who, refusing to ‘trade’ (or whatever was supposed to happen) now that Mark is no longer on the job, perhaps sets off the end of the world. Except that this other spy, who is known his pink socks, might also be one of Mark’s employers/colleagues, as we see at the end of the film when one of them (Maximilien Ruethlein) is seen wearing said socks in the chase sequence at the high rise.

Add to this the fact that the film is set in Berlin, with images of East German guards looking at Mark through binoculars from the other side of the Berlin Wall, and this is not only a confusing film, but one that lends itself deeply to a projection of Cold War paranoia.

Nowhere is this better marked out than in the mise-en-scène, where many of the sets are just empty apartments and empty streets; one would think Berlin almost deserted from this movie. And this, in turn, reflects perhaps the empty interior that Dolan, in another context, is trying to reach for. Except that Zulawski’s cinematography, although never as beautiful as Dolan’s (in fact, just plain ‘ugly’ at certain moments), is also significantly more thought out (as far as this viewer is concerned). For, while Dolan never really gives depth to his images, meaning that we concentrate almost at all times on what is at the surface, Zulawski is happy to film in long shot with a startling regularity, meaning that his characters become lost in the empty spaces through which they wander.

Furthermore, Zulawski puts his props into play with more powerful effect than Dolan does. Meat, knives, creatures, detritus, car wrecks, and other figures that occasionally make it into frame such as tramps (one weird scene has Anna sit down on a Berlin metro train in a fluster, only for the tramp next to her to take a bunch of bananas from her shopping bag, take one, peel it, eat it, while replacing the rest, all without any clue as to why this is happening or what this means) and disabled people in wheelchairs outside a church. Each of these seems deliberately placed and no doubt has a role to play in the overall effect of the film. But where Dolan’s beautiful use of filters (during love scenes that Francis and Marie have with anyone other than Nico) and framing of body parts are glorious to behold, their vacuity is disappointing in comparison to Zulawski’s objects and framings, which seem utterly pregnant with meaning.

The other thing to say about Possession is the emotional pitch at which it takes place. This is a nervous breakdown of a movie, that is hilarious and hysterical in equal measure from start to finish and with no let up. So powerful is this, then I really did find myself wondering why more films are not made like this.

CPH PIX has a strong emphasis on experimental cinema – the kind of stuff you will not see week-in, week-out at the local Odeon. Perhaps this is why my films have been allowed to play there (although this may not say anything special about my films). And watching Possession, one indeed wonders about the grip that narrative expectations have on mainstream film viewers. People walked out of both Possession and Heartbeats, so obviously they are not pleasing everyone – but this also is perhaps more fuel in the fire that cinema seems to have become enslaved by narrative. And in the same way that slavery dehumanises humans such that we only see their function as opposed to their humanity (a wider issue with capitalism?), so, too, does the hegemony of narrative encourage us to see films not as individuals who perhaps have the life of a human being in some respects, but as simply objects that should do certain things only – and we are not really that interested in the secret talents and the hidden aspects of cinema. But watching Zulawski, it makes it feel as though we should be…

I have no idea what the ‘meaning’ of Possession is – but it is fascinating in its desire to put humans into the most extreme emotional situations imaginable, and to let rip. One scene – almost unexplained except in that Anna is talking about a ‘twin’ part of her personality that has died – features Adjani in a metro tunnel literally screaming and shouting and shaking for, who knows?, three or four minutes, before she breaks her shopping bags against a wall, rolls around in milk and mashed up food for a bit more, before vomiting spunks and bleeding from her ears until she is truly covered in filth.

The film is, as I have said, pregnant with meaning. It seems to be ‘about’ lots of things (jealousy, love, marriage, the Cold War, paranoia and surveillance culture). But before this gets too vague, let’s just stick to pregnancy. Zulawski’s film is a monster of a movie that impregnates all who see it. Humans have a tendency to abandon that offspring – the disabled, the unlovely, the unbeautiful – that it can and does give birth to. Zulawski seems to want precisely to explore the possibility of having ugly children, of we viewers having foul and disgusting thoughts, while at the same time seeming to insist that this is not some separate and to-be-discarded aspect of humanity, something that is almost inhuman. Instead, the inhuman thing is not to consider those aspects of humanity, for they are still us and we should cherish or at the very least accept ourselves in all of our limitations, shortcomings, perhaps in short our evil, if we are to understand ourselves and to be able to live a life that involves anything but hypocrisy.

Dolan offers us a study of hypocrisy. One scene does (comically) features Francis masturbating with one of Nico’s pullovers over his head. But even with this ‘unlovely’ scene, the film seems to want to seduce us via its beauty. I don’t believe that this cliché is really true except as precisely a cliché, but we can use it here: beautiful is sometimes a bit boring, whereas an ‘ugly’ film like Possession can be something that we love so much more. I have childish tastes and am a sucker for ‘beauty,’ though putting Heartbeats into comparison with Possession makes me think that I should always be looking for something more, otherwise my life will not only be superficial, but empty and perhaps eschatological on the inside, too.

Brief thoughts around Iñárritu and Loach

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, Spanish film, Transnational Cinema

Both Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, Mexico/Spain, 2010) and Route Irish (Ken Loach, UK/France/Italy/Belgium/Spain, 2010) hinge upon moments of great unbelievability. Or at least, moments that don’t, to me, quite add up.

In Biutiful, the film reaches its apex when Barcelona-based fixer Uxbal (Javier Bardem) buys some cheapo gas heaters for the illegal Chinese workforce of a local associate. It turns out that the heaters are dodgy, and as a result the immigrants stuffed into the basement all suffocate and die.

Without wishing too sound inconsiderate, this sequence pushes belief. Having idiotically left on overnight a gas hob connected to the mains (as opposed to a gas limited to the contents of a single tank), and in a space significantly smaller than the basement in Biutiful, and having lived to tell the tale, I find it hard to believe that this would happen. Not least because the basement in Biutiful has windows and a door, and the place does not seem as though it would be devoid of drafts.

That is to say, whether for reasons of ill judgement or otherwise, I found/find myself incapable of believing this twist in the film’s plot. And yet, as is perhaps to be understood, the accidental deaths of the Chinese workforce, indirectly Uxbal’s own fault, are supposed to be a defining moment in the film.

Hereafter, we are given a ride into Uxbal’s feelings of guilt. And herein is the fundamental problem, or, for me, weakness of Iñárritu’s film. For, the death of the Chinese labour force seems to be an excuse for Uxbal to exercise his sense of redemption and to exorcise his demons as he heads towards his own death. This is arguably made most clear by the conceit that Uxbal can see the dead – and that he can guide them through limbo to Heaven. That is, by seeing the dead, Uxbal arguably needs dead people to live. Rather than the film considering the dead Chinese workers as people, then, Biutiful treats them as an excuse for the journey of one man towards his own death. The film, finally, is Uxbal’s fantasy, then, perhaps even his own Heaven in that he is already ‘dead’ – and he needs the dead bodies of others to find his own way to Heaven.

Similarly, Route Irish sees the plot hinge upon a voicemail message left on a landline that, given the prevalence of mobile phones in the film, really should have been left on a mobile. Harim (Talib Rasool), a singer and translator, leaves a message for Fergus (Mark Womack) on his landline. In it, he explains/translates the voicemails and text messages left on another mobile phone belonging to a now deceased Iraqi boy. This mobile phone was sent to Fergus from his also deceased best friend Frankie (comedian John Bishop), and it contains evidence, in the form of a video, that could potentially lead to the conviction of a private security contractor, Nelson (Trevor Williams), who killed the Iraqi boy and whom Fergus also suspects of killing Bishop to save himself from investigation.

The coincidence is that the voicemail is discovered by Nelson as he goes through Fergus’ stuff in a bid to stop the story going any further.

As such, it is not that the voicemail on the landline is beyond the realms of possibility, but it is overtly functioning in the film as a plot driver, and as such sees the intrusion of artifice – much like the deaths of the Chinese workers in Biutiful – in a film that, even more than Biutiful, tries to ground itself in realism.

That the film then leads to Fergus enacting a prolonged revenge for Frankie’s death – killing Nelson, his two bosses Walker (Jeff Bell) and Haynes (Jack Fortune), and their secretary (whose name I cannot find) – suggests that Route Irish is similarly set up as Fergus’ own revenge fantasy.

Unlike Biutiful, Route Irish does see Harim explain that he should have released on to the internet the video on the phone of the assassination of the phone’s owner, his friend, and a taxi driver carrying a family in his ride. In this sense, more than Biutiful, Route Irish does try to emphasise the loss of life that its key incident entails.

However, both films seem to use the death of innocents as a reason to justify a narrative centered upon Western characters to put right wrongs that they have done. That is, the films both to a certain extent demean loss of life for the sake of Westerners’ redemption for their own wrongs.

To be fair to Route Irish, this is not the film’s only ‘purpose’ as I see it. It does also take swipes at the cowboy status of independent security contractors in Iraq, in that they are a law unto themselves, while also bringing to the fore the complexity of their job, in that they are under fire from local militants who do often look like civilians, and who do also use devices such as mobile phones to set off bombs. That is, in Iraq – and especially on Route Irish, the road that leads from Baghdad Airport to the Green Zone – one can easily lose one’s own life if one does not act in an overly cautious, but perhaps too aggressively a cautious, fashion. In other words, Route Irish does point out the lucrative and exploitative nature of independent security contract work in places like Iraq, while at the same time grounding what work those contractors do in real-life circumstances of kill or be killed – with ‘collateral damage’ a reality of this.

Furthermore, the film is also a critique of Fergus, a former soldier who saw a get-rich-quick opportunity in joining an independent security contractor firm, in that he cannot easily adjust back to normal life, is haunted by his own demons, and who cannot seemingly escape from the cycle of violence that going to Iraq commences. He is not ‘right’ in enacting his revenge, either, for he also kills the secretary, who is more or less marked as ‘collateral damage’ in the film beyond the ‘bad guys’ Haynes and Walker.

As it is, then, there are no easy answers offered by Route Irish. Even though Fergus talks about the poor behaviour of Americans in Iraq, the video track in the film sees him in flashbacks beating up Iraqi families, suggesting that he is at best being economical with the truth in his spoken account of events there. Fergus, then, is not beyond criticism.

However, the fact remains that both Biutiful and Route Irish take on heavy topics – contemporary migration and the war in Iraq respectively – and offer a predominantly ‘Eurocentric’ take on such matters. As such, the films are open to critique, for by being fantasies of redemption for their Western protagonists, they do not necessarily get to grips with the effects of the protagonists’ actions, and particularly those of others around them. Migration and Iraq, then, remain relatively unexplored in these films, which prefer instead to confer a central place to the paranoia and instability of their central characters.

This does not make the films ‘bad’ – and offering such a judgment is not necessarily the point of this blog. But it does perhaps point to the difficulty that filmmakers can have in offering up a truly balanced portrayal of contemporary events and concerns.

Recent documentary clichés

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Facebook, On The Social Network (David Fincher, USA, 2010)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

I’m not entirely sure I have that much to say about The Social Network that has not already been said.

Zadie Smith has written an excellent article on the film in the New York Review of Books, and countless others have chimed in with, predominantly, praise for Fincher’s film, some critiques of Aaron Sorkin’s rather too stylised dialogue and the possible sexism in the film aside.

As for Smith’s article, it seems strange that she had not yet come across ‘software studies’ before writing it, but this is perhaps only my own small-world view; given that I research the role of digital technology in cinema, among other things, software studies entered somewhere into my feeble brain a couple of years ago – and I just assumed that I was as usual late in thinking about software.

But either way, Smith is correct in thinking about how the choices given to us when using software are not necessarily liberating. Perhaps we should all learn how to write code in order to be able to write our own software that can allow us to express ourselves as opposed to having software (arguably) always compromising what it is that we want to say. Software, in other words, is as ideologically constructed, consciously or not, than is a film.

Facebook is, as Smith also points out, certainly a simplification of life, as is a business card, as is a biography, as is everyone else’s opinion of us, as Jerry Thompson has so memorably found out. As is a sled, for that matter.

Shopping malls and the likes of Tesco are successful, because they save us the bother of having to go to lots of different shops, or at least lots of different shops in different places. Everything is brought to one place – and life is made easier. And while buying everything in one mall/megastore is easier than traveling around town or further afield for the things one wants or needs, buying tout court is easier than having to source raw materials and make and/or grow everything one’s self.

You bet that Tesco has transformed, say, the book market because it offers to readers a small selection of choice titles that satisfy the need for books in most people. As a result, Tesco, HMV, and the Oprah Winfrey/Richard & Judy book clubs ostracise the majority of authors from the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Chris Anderson has argued that Amazon reverses, to some degree, the ‘Tesco’ trend (as I am terming it), since Jeff Bezos‘ baby allows buyers to find the books that they want – because they have a larger choice online than in, say, even the wonderful and massive Foyles on Charing Cross Road in London.

And yet even Amazon comes at a price. Even though the Amazon marketplace does help many booksellers to work with and not against Amazon, its sell-everything approach and its tight grip on the online book sales market has put paid to many individual booksellers in the flesh and cyber worlds.

Smith points out at the end of her essay that audience members laughed when the characters of The Social Network discussed the primitive predecessors to Facebook, such as LiveJournal. Strangely, I do not find myself laughing in a similarly superior fashion when I think about what would otherwise translate into the ‘ineptitude’ of the independent second- and first-hand booksellers that Amazon has put out of business. I find myself saddened in some respects. Some types of obsolescence, it seems, we can cruelly laugh at; others will always make us feel sad (especially when it is our own turn to go on the old scrap heap).

What is linking Tesco, Amazon and Facebook, then, is the fact that each unifies in a single place a bunch of things that might otherwise be dispersed and hard to find. As such, they are simplifications, of course, and saddening ones in certain respects. But their success is based upon the fact that they save humans from having to learn a computer language, hire some web space, and put themselves online – as seemingly we all should do (a position that is replete with its own ideological assumptions concerning the ‘superiority’ of a technical and mediatised presence).

In other words, Facebook is the internet redux before it is life redux; the internet, the bigger version of what Facebook is, is life redux, such that we have an order of largesse: Life > Internet > Facebook. In the same way that shops saved us from growing our own, so, too, does Facebook save us from making our own websites. Facebook is the fast food of the internet, its prefab apartments; if you want a mansion or even a nice house, you have to pay someone more dearly to build it for you, or you learn the skills to build it for yourself.

Now, there is a difference between Tesco and Amazon and Facebook. Facebook is about people, while the former two stores sell stuff. Beyond truisms and urban myths about how family members have discovered the copraphilia of relatives, etc (if you’ve seen that fake, viral Facebook page), and the odd gaffe that most people do not notice (because most of us don’t have time to read other people’s Facebook profiles all day long – as most people don’t read these blogs – a pet hate: people who assume that you have kept up with their life because they report on it via Facebook), and beyond UK murders based upon slurs made on Facebook (revealing that we really do believe erroneously that everyone is looking at us and – more particularly – judging us?; as per one of Smith’s commentators, Facebook allows us all to be famous in our own postcodes; perhaps there is an element of ‘becoming light’ attached to Facebook that does appeal to the appeal of being mediatised, turned into an image, made into a star), Facebook is not really the be-all and end-all of our lives. Indeed, it is only when we confuse Facebook with the internet that we begin to think this way, while my ‘identity’ online consists of numerous email addresses, membership of various sites, some obsolete stuff, comments left in hundreds of forums (to which I never return), and so on. I don’t think anyone takes Facebook to be real life, in the same way that there has been a now-long-standing backlash against the ideological critique of films, because audiences are not dumbly passive to the questionable messages being peddled at them in movies. Facebook alone might constitute something of an implosion of the self, a shrinkage as Smith puts it; but the internet as a whole, especially when considered alongside that even greater medium for (compromised and intersubjective?) self-expression, reality itself, constitutes what Sean Cubitt once described (perhaps rather hyperbolically) as a ‘big bang of the self,’ so many ‘identities’ (or aspects of a single identity) can and do we have floating around in cyberspace.

Jean-Paul Sartre has said that looking at a dice in real life/in existence is a richer experience than imagining one. He says that while in our heads/imaginations we can see all six sides of the dice at once, in real life we can only see at best three or four (unless the dice is in suspension and we have mirrors, although this is my own cheeky contention, not Sartre’s). As such, existence trumps the imagination, hence Sartre as an existentialist who feels that it is better to engage in reality than to disappear into self-invented worlds.

Now, the internets as a whole might be self-invented worlds (though there is grounds to defend them, not least from a postmodern perspective). My invocation of Sartre, however, is not to call people to reject Facebook (as Smith has done), but to suggest that when we look at Facebook, we are only seeing two or three of the many sides of the people we are regarding. Reality is always more rich than Facebook; we know Facebook is a simplification, in the same way that we know a hammer makes simpler the task of making some shelves. Sometimes we would be fools to bloody our hands for the sake of not using simplifying tools to insert some nails in the construction of our lives.

By this rationale, The Social Network is a simplification of the story of Facebook, and this is not surprising given how stylised the film is, with its signature Fincher shady interiors, its dialogue that normal people can only think of after the opportunity, and other flourishes, including, as Smith has also explained, a memorable sequence in Henley, which, as Smith fails to mention, borrows the tilt shift technique made remarkable recently by Keith Loutit, and a good example of which, Mardi Gras (Australia, 2008), can be seen below.

I’m not sure how to interpret Fincher’s tilt shift sequence, except perhaps that, by rendering human endeavour into a cartoonish, or better a stop-motion-like and seemingly toyish form, Fincher is directly commenting upon how his film involves a simplification of a reality, a toyification of the raw material from which he ‘sculpts’ his work.

(It might also suggest that Fincher is uncomfortable shooting outside of the USA. Considered in the light of other of his films, especially The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [USA, 2008], it might also suggest that Fincher is offering a prolonged consideration in his work of the effects of cartoons/simplifications on the human psyche – though in some respects this is no profound thought.)

Even though my last paragraph has dealt with the use of tilt shift in The Social Network, it is time to say that, quite a ways into this blog, we finally are talking about the film as opposed to its subject matter. Smith makes no claims to be talking solely about the film in her essay, so this is not something to hold against her, but it is worth pointing out that no one – myself included – seems capable of talking or writing about the film without using it as a platform for talking or writing about the Book of Face itself.

So Facebook has us in its grips – but we really did not need a film to tell us that. Even several years after joining, I still use it regularly, still ‘stalk’ pretty regularly, and still feel that it is the best self-updating address book I have ever owned (and feel that the rest is fun when I want it to be, and annoying when I don’t). But it’s not as if Facebook is not working alongside various other bits of hard- and software in changing our worlds: mobile phones, the internets themselves, iPhones, iPods, iPads, YouTube, Bit Torrents, and more. Facebook is only a small component of this. We have quickly become habituated to them, so one wonders whether The Social Network might one day be the You’ve Got M@il (Nora Ephron, USA, 1998) of a slightly younger – but still Radiohead-listening – generation.

More important, then, than Facebook, is, after Sartre, reality and people. What does The Social Network have to say about society, about ‘the soul’ and things that Facebook no doubt slightly influences but which more importantly it simply allows to be expressed, whether or not what it expresses is only the Harvard sophomore in all of us?

Rather than being a rewriting of what has been written, and certainly rather than being the final word on The Social Network (which is a superior film by a superior filmmaker, but not necessarily his best), this blog, then, is only supposed to bring out an element of the film that seems to be overlooked by most commentators.

The element that I wish to discuss is the grouped idea of class, private property and commons in the film.

One thing that Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) wants is to be recognised as the author of Facebook. The fact that Facebook for a long time in real life contained the legend ‘A Mark Zuckerberg Production’ on every page has been pointed out. This implies that the internet, like television before it, aspires to the movies in order to be considered legitimate, but it also implies that Zuckerberg is interested in authoring something that is supposedly a collective enterprise. “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook,” says the fictional Zuckerberg, before he allows all of his collaborators to get screwed over. Zadie Smith reads this Zuckerberg as someone who wants to be liked, but he is also one of those odd types, whom I can see sometimes in myself, who will screw over his close friends, precisely, perhaps, because Groucho Marx-style, he disrespects anyone who actually does like him, because they must have lousy judgment in human beings.

I have no interest in the real Zuckerberg, but the fictional one at least is a self-absorbed but complex chap who wants to give to the world something ‘free,’ but who, megalomaniacally, also craves recognition for the same. And this is the real paradox in the Zuckerberg character presented here, which does make it perhaps a 2.0 Person created by a 1.0 Person, as Smith says, but which also hints at the 1.0 that holds back the 2.0 in all of us: he talks of an open and free society, but he walks in a privatised world of intellectual property. Zuckerberg’s real genius is not having written Facebook. Contra the ‘great man’ of history (or at least computer programming) that Zuckerberg self-servingly espouses (much like Steve Jobs has done recently on the similarly self-important TED), Zuckerberg’s real genius is in winning his legal battles. Someone else most certainly would have designed Facebook or something like it (indeed, we know this, because various other people are working on this idea in the film), in the same way that someone else would have come up with the fonts for word processing software that Jobs claims as making him/his computers so special. That it was this Zuckerberg – in the film – is simply a twist of fate, a moment of hazardous (inevitable?) chance. But getting the world to recognise that he was the author of this phenomenon – this was the greatest coup. And yet this recognition relies solely on the notion of being a 1.0 person – someone whose ideas are shaped by the rights of private and intellectual property – while claiming to be a 2.0 person – someone who believes in the common, the free, and the abolition of intellectual property. Someone who pretends to be a team player but, whether he ‘actually’ stole from the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer) or not, is anything but a team player, as Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) finds out.

In this way, Fincher/Sorkin’s Mark Zuckerberg is not the face of the future, but the Janus face of the past in the present as it comes head to head with the future. Is Zuckerberg a breed that is dying out, however, as thousands of anonymous programmers work for minimal money or for free on open source software around the globe and around the clock in a real self-organising commons of soft wares? Or is he the lingering face of capitalist greed, regardless of whether the real Zuckerberg has pledged to give away a large proportion of his wealth during his lifetime?

The Social Network is not about Zuckerberg, then, but about a world that is on the brink of potentially undergoing huge social change, upon the brink of becoming, or at the very least welcoming into its fold a generation that is, a network society not of homogeneised kids putting their mindlessness down in their live feeds, but of heterogeneous and collaborating humans who will pool information and resources in such a way that private property, both intellectual and material, is replaced by a sense of a common wealth. A society in which, pace Fincher/Sorkin’s Zuckerberg, emphasis is not on the individual, but, after Hardt and Negri (whom I am quoting a lot at the moment – apologies!), on the multiple singularities that we are both collectively and ‘individually.’ A generation that recognises its own participation in a reality that is far too complex and ‘existential’ than any single film or piece of software might be able to convey.

Zadie Smith should know well that Judith Butler has, among others, argued that gender is, or at the very least can be, a performance. And while Smith might decry Facebook as a reduced or impoverished life, I would contend that we must think about the performative aspects of Facebook, and understand that few are the people who take it for real. In fact, the performative aspects of Facebook are what make it a liberating tool. A tool for prevarication, perhaps, but also a tool that perhaps also makes a political statement out of prevarication; like the Goldman Sachs employee who preferred networking to making money.

To perform is to perform for others; it is fundamentally an act of communication. As such, performance is fundamentally a means of building relationships with others. Rather than isolating us, Facebook, and the internets more generally, can be considered as a means of bringing us towards a multitude.

To be circumspect, this is unlikely to happen with Facebook as it currently stands. Facebook is indeed too homogeneous/homogeneising, too simple, simplistic and simplified. But given how creative people are and can be with Facebook even now, when we all come to be contributing to an even more complex site at even more complex levels of creativity, and without laughing at Facebook as we would not laugh for poor, defunct booksellers, then perhaps we can see the creative impulses of Fincher/Sorkin’s Zuckerberg as a step in the right direction, a 2.0 wish, that was stymied by 1.0 desires.

As a meditation on authorship and private property, it is intriguing that The Social Network has Fincher and Sorkin stamped so clearly over it. Perhaps this film remains too steeped in the mythology of cinema as the work of a single auteur. On the other hand, Smith has attributed to Fincher a genius for casting in her article. In some senses, we need not attribute this to Fincher; certainly, we need not attribute the great acting solely to Fincher. For even if some elements and the general high standards of the film suggest the presence of his genius, it is not the only one, and actors, editors, cinematographers, writers, directors, and others all deserve credit for what they have achieved here.

Cinema, in spite of a(n understandable – and still in some ways rightly influential) detour into auteur theory as the main means of understanding it, has always been a collaborative process. Even for productions the goal of which is to make the maximum amount of money for the least amount of effort, many people contribute such that cinema is often a work of a/the multitude. Indeed, when one lets one’s collaborators do their own work, such that they are not just actors or crew members but what Gilles Deleuze might term intercessors, or people who truly bring their own genius to the pot, then something great can be born. Filmmaking is no doubt about teamwork, even if great teams also have great managers, trainers and captains.

Paradoxically, then, Smith might have it all wrong: cinema was always already (at its best? anyway?) the 2.0 endeavour, while the younger media, including the internet, are still stuck – as per the people versus Mark Zuckerberg court cases brought here – at the 1.0 copyright level. In some respects, Thomas Edison‘s insistence upon claiming copyright for his cinematographic invention stymied early cinema production, even though Edison shamelessly copied Georges Méliès’ Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (France, 1902). In other respects, by going away from Edison to the West Coast, and by in effect shamelessly pirating his hardware, the film industry got going.

Even though it is easy to decry Hollywood for its overriding power and seemingly (but unfairly) homogeneous products, sometimes perhaps we can interpret it in a different way. Whatever it has become, the film industry in the USA might well have been founded upon a collaborative, multitudinous principle. And software, or the internet, is still in its Edison stage, with Zuckerberg as the (counter-?)Edison of his time. Even if the movies have had to evolve, as Dudley Andrew contends (rather self-evidently) in his latest book, sometimes cinema has evolved in beautiful directions, perhaps because through its multitudinous and emergent means of production it is flexible enough to change. As software, similarly, evolves, hopefully it, too, will have some beautiful iterations that allow the multitude to realise itself.

The Hunter (Rafi Pitts, Iran/Germany, 2010)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Iranian cinema

The Hunter is about Ali (Rafi Pitts), a former convict-turned-factory worker who tries to support his wife and child. Ali returns home one day to discover that his wife and daughter have gone missing. After hours at the police station, he discovers that his wife has been killed during a demonstration – and that his daughter is still missing. When the daughter is also discovered to be dead, Ali goes on a rampage, killing two police officers before being hunted down in a wood north of Tehran.

The Hunter sounds like a thriller, and in many ways it is one, but the film is also very slow paced in comparison to your average thriller from Hollywood, such as the recent Unstoppable (Tony Scott, USA, 2010). For example, the film is filled with prolonged scenes of Ali driving, particularly in and through tunnels, as he wanders around Tehran in his pastel green sedan. The film features a car chase, as Ali tries to elude a police car along mist-covered and winding hill roads. This scene is surprisingly effective, because, unlike Unstoppable with the numerous close ups of its star vehicle runaway train and its rapid cutting, the chase in The Hunter is filmed mainly in long shot and with takes that last a good few seconds.

In other words, if The Hunter is a thriller, its slow pace makes it a very unusual one, while the painterly composition of the film’s images, which director Pitts retains from It’s Winter (Iran/France, 2006) similarly draws our attention away from simply the action. While beautiful from start to finish, this painterly quality of The Hunter suggests that it wants us to understand not just what happens in the film, but why it has been filmed in the way that it has. Indeed, how the police manage so easily to track down Ali after his crime is never explained; they just seem to find him immediately, and the film does not seem to care especially for showing us how this came to be.

As a result, The Hunter seems to ask us to think about its formal properties, or how it is put together, and here the colour of the film comes to the fore. Ali’s sedan is the most striking example, but the colour green features prominently throughout the film. Green is an important colour in Iran, because the so-called Green Movement has since 2009 used green to symbolise its struggle against the fraudulent election result that saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regain power. to read some background from WikiLeaks, read here.

In this way, the slowness of the film becomes not a fault but a symbol of the difficulty to move freely in contemporary Iran, as reinforced by the tunnel sequences. The police’s immediate discovery of Ali also suggests a repressive state surveillance system, while the death of Ali’s wife and daughter might reflect indirectly upon the social incarceration of women under the present Iranian regime (thereby perhaps making a link between this film and Zamani Esmati’s Orion (Iran, 2010), which refers to Orion as a hunter constellation in its critique of a phsyicist’s irresponsible treatment of its main character, Elham, played by Nasim Kiani).

As a result of its pace, The Hunter is a film that many might dismiss as dull and slow. However, these supposedly ‘negative’ elements of the film really reveal the call for freedom in Iran – and in a way that is seemingly novel for Iranian cinema.

For, by giving us a thriller/non-thriller, Pitts’ film marks a shift towards at least some acknowledgement of mainstream film audiences as a potential target for his political/artistic ambitions (even if distribution companies subsequently crush this by marketing the film in ways that do not reflect what or how the film is).

It is not that Iran does not have a mainstream cinema. However, rarely does this mainstream cinema from Iran receive large audiences in the West (except, perhaps, in Los Angeles and other areas with large diasporic Iranian communities). It is generally ignored by the commercial cinemas and not given much of a chance in film festivals. In part, this prejudice against Iranian mainstream cinema is propagated by Iranian scholars in the West, particularly Hamid Dabashi, who rarely has a good word to say about it. And in part this prejudice is also unjustified.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, for example, is widely feted (not least by Dabashi) as one of Iran’s greatest art house filmmakers. However, his early film Baykot/Boycott (Iran, 1985), which Dabashi does mark as being Makhamalbaf’s first ‘mature’ film (and he says that the films prior to this one can go into the trashcan), is most certainly a political action film, with shootouts and chases galore. In comparison to his better known Nun va Goldoon/A Moment of Innocence (Iran/France, 1996), Gabbeh (Iran/France, 1996), and Safar e Ghandehar/Kandahar (Iran/France, 2001), Boycott is rarely discussed. It is as if this more commercial film somehow did not count (and as if many people had drawn the line in a slightly different place from Dabashi and consigned this one to the trashcan, too).

Furthermore, I have been trying to publish work for some time now on Tahmineh Milani, exploring her work as a similar example of a woman who makes mainstream and popular films that are not only not bad, but in fact are good and, regardless of their ‘quality,’ are certainly worthy of scholarly attention (my would-be article, which is supposed at some point to come out in this journal, or one of its affiliates, is about Milani’s film Atash bas/Cease Fire (Iran, 2006) a comedy about divorce that was the highest grossing film in Iran of all time).

Somewhat akin to Darbareye Elly/About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, Iran, 2009), which is currently showing as part of the first London Iranian Film Festival, which I saw last year in Paris, and which is also something of a thriller about a child who goes missing, The Hunter seems to want actively to move towards these mainstream and ‘genre’ films – and not away from them as has seemingly been the trend for some time in the areas of Iranian cinema that are most successful internationally, that is, its art house or ‘festival’ films (made by the likes of Makhamalbaf and his family, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, and so on).

Again, not that The Hunter, About Elly, or, for that matter, Kasi az gorbehaye irani khabar nadareh/No One Knows About Persian Cats (Bahman Ghobadi, Iran, 2009), which in its use of a hip hop and indy soundtrack at least makes moves towards a more ‘commercial’ and MTV-influenced aesthetic, are fully commercial films, but they are signalling a shift towards more commercially-minded endeavours.

What might the reasoning be behind this? Well, firstly, since Makhmalbaf and family have fled to Afghanistan, and since Kiarostami has fled to Europe, and since Panahi was placed under house arrest by the Iranian government, perhaps filmmakers need now to occult even more their opposition to the powers that be. And while some, Ghobadi and Esmati included, have gone ‘underground’ to make their films, others – in a manner somewhat akin to André Breton, who in his Second Surrealist Manifesto suggested that surrealism also needed to hide in more commercial ventures if it was to retain its political power – have moved closer to the mainstream, because there is no point only making festival films that reach a small, if willing, audience that is already ready to hear what the film has to say (via its mise-en-scene, as seems the case in The Hunter).

If film is to be part of the effort to bring about change in Iran, against whose repressive regime The Hunter seems indirectly to be something of a call to arms, perhaps appealing not just to the international cinerati of the festival circuit, but (can I speculate?) a hopefully wider audience at home, is the most likely way of making this happen.

There is a scene in The Hunter where Ali drives on to the hillside outside of Tehran, perhaps to the very same spot that Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) goes to die in Ta’m e guilass/Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France, 1997), the film that won its director the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and arguably which launched or cemented the trend for Iranian ‘festival’ films around the world.

Not so much a critique per se of Kiarostami, whose Certified Copy (France/Italy/Iran, 2010) feels like something of a ‘cop out’ as the director decides not to engage with Iran in order to make wordy films about high art (can we really blame Kiarostami, though?), the moment in The Hunter, which bears a striking resemblance to the setting in Taste of Cherry, does seem to link this film to that film’s sense of hopelessness and the feeling of oppression (no one knows why Badii wants to die, or if they do, I can’t remember), but, given the violence of The Hunter, Badii’s resignation is implicitly criticised in the face of Ali’s desire to take up (maniacal) arms.

The Hunter, then, may yet signal/be part of a new evolution in Iranian cinema, the ‘mainstream’-seeming but deeply political cinema that accompanies the ‘underground’ movement signalled by Ghobadi and Esmati. In comparison, Kiarostami’s Certified Copy does seem somewhat irrelevant, a generic art house film in one of the worst senses of the word, but this is not to rule Kiarostami out, since who knows where he will go next, and we could argue that the mythical epic that his female audience watches in Shirin (Iran, 2008) also signals the increasing need for a mainstream presence in Iran’s art house cinema/the need for Iran’s art house cinema to hide itself a bit more in ‘mainstream’-seeming/’generic’ films. As Iran’s cinema evolves, however (with Kiarostami’s move to Europe perhaps a very important personal evolution, even if it is somewhat lost on me), we are certainly witnessing a cinema that has life in its bones yet. For all of the problems that Ahmadinejad’s Iran seems to impose on its citizens, and for the damnation that faces me for saying it, perversely this makes for exciting and dynamic times in Iranian cinema (cue Graham Greene and Orson Welles on Italy, the Borgias, art, Switzerland, and the cuckoo clock).

Becoming Light (on Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Thai cinema, Uncategorized

For Einstein, light was the absolute limit of the universe. In his view, provided I have understood it correctly, nothing can move faster than light.

Without light we cannot see. This does not mean per se that we cannot sense without light, but even non-seeing species have skin that is sensitive to light and also to the warmth that light brings. Plants, for example, convert light into growth and life – as per photosynthesis. Perhaps human vision is simply the very long and slow development of photosensitivity (sensitivity to light) as a means of survival.

Human perception seems to be based on the ability to see different objects. Different objects are visible as a result of the simultaneous existence of light and, as far as the human eye is concerned, the ability of organised and solid matter to reflect and to absorb certain frequencies of the light spectrum.

If there was no light, there would only be darkness. Without any light to see, then, we might be able blindly to bump into things, but our ability to divide the world into different objects, surfaces and so on and so forth might be heavily compromised.

Similarly, if objects all absorbed and reflected the same frequencies of light, then we would not be able to see depth or different objects; all would be monotonous as we fumbled blindly in a ganzfeld.

We have light, then, and we have matter.

It is only as light travels into ’empty’ space that it illuminates things for us to see them. Without that light, that section of the universe is as good as non-existent; it is only when/that we can see it that it can be said to exist. In this sense, space is only as big as the area into which light can/has fallen.

We know how old the universe is because of how big the universe is. It is because light has an absolute speed that we can put a time value on the distance value; in fact, we cannot really measure distance without measuring time. In some senses, then, speed (namely, light speed) is the known measure of the universe. Time and space are inseparable; one is the measure of the other.

This part of the argument is somewhat harder to follow: if light allows us to see different objects in space, then perhaps light is also useful in allowing us to perceive different moments in time. If without light all objects in space would not so much cease to exist but collapse into one, inseparable chaos, then so, too, might this happen with time. An absence of light would not necessarily lead to the cessation of change (over time), but it would lead to an inability to perceive difference over time. That is, radioactive material might still decay at a predictable rate, but we’d not be able to measure this.

If light is what enables time and space, because it enables the perception of both spatial and temporal difference (and I would take these arguments further, since they are somewhat incomplete here, if sufficient for the hypothetical argument I wish to make in this blog), then light also enables history and memory. History is the process of change itself – the ongoing creation of differences that is perhaps the stuff of all life. And memory is the imprint of that change; it is perhaps, after a fashion, its own form of photosynthesis – an intake of light that is stored in the body, but converted into something else, something that allows us to grow by allowing us to retain information and to learn. It is, like a plant photosynthesising light, not a direct storage procedure, but a transformation, a turning of light into some form of energy, here called memory.

In this sense, memory is a form of photosensitivity (and here I can expand a little outwards from the ‘limited’ argument confessed to above: by ‘light’ I suppose I am talking about waves in the widest sense of the word – we may only see 5 per cent of the light spectrum; I am talking about all frequencies of eletromagnetic radiation; I might even say that I am talking about all that touches us – sounds and matter included, but this is a much bigger argument I cannot get into here, but it seems vaguely plausible provided I have not misunderstood the occasionally derided theory of superstrings, whereby all – everything – may consist of base ‘particles’ that vary in mode as opposed to kind).

If memory is considered as a form of photosensitivity, then it is important to remember that memory needs matter, it needs a body for storage purposes.

The problem with matter is that it changes over time. Or rather, part of this change, as far as the temporary units of organised matter that are called human beings are concerned, is death – and death does pose a problem to those who are particularly attached to their bodies (as we all can but be, whether we ‘like’ our bodies or not).

I occasionally take the radical point of view that there is no death, per se; the matter of which I consist will travel onwards and be involved in ever more intricate/basic (self-)designs, regardless of my involvement as ‘me’ in the process. Even though I say so myself, this is radical, because I do not draw a hard and fast line between life and death; I see life as a process of organisation, as the process of organisation. The principle requirement for organisation is matter. That is, all matter has the potential for life; I just happen to be a clump of matter that is more intensely or complexly organised (and by virtue of my relative complexity, I would hazard that I am a relatively inefficient organisation of matter, if the KISS rule of Keeping It Simply, Stupid applies here as it does in most places). And since I measure that potential as being real, I conclude – like I say, occasionally – that everything is alive, that there is only life.

By ‘only life’ I don’t necessarily mean only life; I’ll get on to that in a sec. But first: why only occasionally? Because I am of course scared of dying when on occasion I feel the vanity of not knowing what it would be like without my body. And second: light is a wave and a particle; light is life as much as the more recognisable objects around us (‘matter’) are life, according to my slightly wacky proposition.

If it is our bodies that set the limit to memory storage – if our bodies expire, and basically we humans are bound to die – then one means of trying to survive beyond our physical deaths would be to outsource as much of existence as possible from our bodies.

If memory is the incorporation of light in its widest form (if it is ‘experience’ felt in the body), then we reach something of a cul-de-sac: how can we do without our bodies, when every attempt at outsourcing experience (i.e. technology, including cinema) requires our bodies in order to exist? In fact, technology perhaps constitutes that (admittedly changing) boundaries of our bodies as much as we constitute the boundaries of technology (though whether we can actually pin a boundary down regarding where I begin and it ends is not something I would like to try to do with any accuracy at all).

One way might be to change the nature of that body; that is, to have a body that is dispersed across space and time in such a way that it is always alive, if that makes sense. To be omnipresent in terms of time and space. There is a substance that is the limit of time and space, and which therefore might a convenient tool both for memory storage, but also for the embodiment of our continued selves that, through this new ubiquitous and everlasting ‘body’, would ‘live forever.’ That is, if one could become light, then perhaps one could live forever.

Cinematography means writing with movement; but cinema is dependent on light in order to exist – both in terms of its construction and in terms of its reception. To become light, therefore, might involve some element of becoming cinema. Or rather, to become cinema feeds into the idea of immortality, via becoming light.

The title character of Loong Boonmee raleuk chat/Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Spain/Netherlands, 2010) explains a dream he has had. In this dream, ‘future people’ exist as images, or so Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) seems to suggest. ‘Past people’ are not welcome in this world, and when they are discovered, they find themselves projected in such a way that, for this viewer (me), they are brought into ‘the future.’ This involves, presumably, leaving their bodies behind.

This obviously has geopolitical resonance. In a film that, like others of director ‘Joe’ Weerasethakul, pits modernity, particularly in the form of medicine, against ‘tradition’ – in the form of superstition, religion and, most of all, nature as manifested in the jungle, there is a sense in which Uncle Boonmee is about that which is not – that which perhaps cannot – be made into a film. That which cannot or is not allowed to become cinema. This is geopolitical, because within the (admittedly and alas quite specialised) realm of cinema, there are the stars (those which have become light, as stars are) of mainstream cinema – and then there are the forgotten whose existence onscreen is only ever as a minority – if they exist onscreen at all.

Cinema has a tendency, then, of leaving out ‘past people,’ and/or if it spots them, it projects them, too, on to a wall such that they also become light. But that which is apparently ‘worthy’ of cinema – that which attracts the most attention in terms of audiences (who are inculcated only to ‘like’ certain types of cinema) – is only that which is glamorous and spectacular. The slow, the obscure, the unpretty, the old: these are things that for most people are not ‘worthy’ of cinema. And yet this is precisely what cinema, if it were democratic, can and should bring to light. And, within the rarefied field of ‘film festival films,’ perhaps it does.

But this is not without its paradoxes. For, to lose one’s body and to become light, to become a spectacle that is/has only a spectral/unbearably light existence is to forego life; it is to become a spectre, or ghost. To become immortal, one must perhaps die in the most profound sense of the word: one renounces the possibility of change, the possibility ever of becoming something different again, instead being fixed forever in a limited form by the images that become our constitution.

Perhaps it is for this reason that Boonmee seems to fear the contents of his dream. For as he knows too well thanks to his ailing kidney, he is his body. And if immortality requires the giving up of the body, then the immortality that is becoming light, that is becoming cinema, is fundamentally to give up what he is.

In other words, cinema can never truly depict that which it seeks to; it can never truly have a body in the material sense that humans have bodies, even if the human body is a constituent, perhaps the key component of the cinematic experience. Or rather, if light is matter, it is not the same matter as human life is at present.

What is the difference between the matter of light and the matter of a human (or other) body?

I shall answer this question shortly, but first I shall try to reconstitute the above in a different fashion, one that is far too JudeoChristian/Western for Uncle Boonmee (as a Thai film), but which seems relevant. It is ironic that so much Christian thought relies upon the renunciation of the body, based as it is upon the purging of sins committed by the flesh, since to be made up of flesh seems an originary sin without which none of us is. For if to be without a material body is to be light, then to be ‘en-light-ened’ (the ‘civilising’ drive of the West as it brings the rest of the world into the age of Empire) is also to be prey to Lucifer, whose name means ‘bearer of light.’ In other words, there is potentially a satanic element to becoming light.

This must be worked through a little bit more, as per the question above. Light is a form of matter, just a form that is different from the organised body that we inhabit if we have eyes, brain or internet voice software to read or hear this blog. So if I am talking about becoming light as a means of constituting a different form of body, what is it that I mean?

Principally, it is this: as humans made up of matter, we are not simply made up of light, even if the ‘particles’ that in string theory potentially constitute everything are the same ‘in’ light as they are ‘in’ me and other ‘solid’ forms of matter. What particles we are made from are in a different mode (or oscillating at a different frequency) to light itself (which must be the case, since if we oscillated at the same frequency as light, we would not be able to tell it apart from ourselves; it is the different speed, or temporality, of our oscillations that individuate not just us as human beings, but all different bits of matter; different temporalities articulate difference itself; in short, every thing has a different tempo).

In fact, humans are not made uniquely from light; we are also made of what I shall term darkness.

I term it darkness because this is as good a term as any to think of that which is ‘not light.’

It is also useful because we know that we need darkness in order to see. Blinking in the human’s way of periodically assuring that we continue to see. Not only does this protect our photosensitive eyes from too much light – which would blind us – but it also moistens our eyes so that the heat from the light does not dry them out, thereby similarly saving us from blindness (it does not matter what ‘colour’ blindness is; simply that blindness means an impaired or void capacity to see difference).

These seemingly imperceptible periods of darkness help us to see. However, there is more darkness to us. Our brains are permanently in darkness, as are most of our insides, unless we happen for some sad reason to be ripped open. Our skin is the barrier that separates us from but also connects us to the world, and our skin is photosensitive, as we know from its fluctuating pigmentation under sunlight (and sunbeds). We do feel things beneath our skin, from vibrations in our viscera, to memory in our muscles. But these things are for the sake of present circumstances invisible; they are in darkness – and they are as constitutive of who we are as any interaction we have with the light of this dimly lit universe. If we became wholly en-light-ened, these invisible parts of ourselves would be fundamentally destroyed; by being brought into the light, they would cease to be.

In other words, it seems that our bodies are darkness. We can reason that we die anyway, so if we became light, this death would only be a different form of death, perhaps less unpleasant, than the physical decay that our bodies will inevitably undergo. Indeed, if we are destined to evolve, then perhaps becoming light is the next step of evolution, so maybe all of this is a ‘good thing.’ Why the long face about the end of darkness, then?

Perhaps what I am terming geopolitics can once again step in to help us think about this: if humans are destined to evolve in this fashion, then so be it. But perhaps there is no need to impose this process on everyone. If ‘darkness’ is all that one has, then perhaps some people do not want to or would feel unhappy about the prospect of having even that taken away from them under the presumption that other people know what’s best. Perhaps some people do not want to live forever. Why force it on them?

Alongside economic and military warfare, perhaps cinema is the imperialistic tool par excellence – and by cinema I mean here cinema in its most expanded form, to include maybe all audiovisual media, but certainly the mainstream ones. It is arguably a force for homogeneisation – the rendering similar/same of all things, the production of a cultural ganzfeld in which difference is lost.

If this ‘ganzfeld‘ is created by making everything visible, then within the geopolitical realm of cinematic production and distribution (and reception?), there resides an enormous paradox: maybe some filmmakers need to resist the ‘monstrous’ drive of cinema to show any and everything (‘monstrous’ because montrage, from the French montrer, to show, wants to show us everything; the word also implies the economic imperative of exploiting all things for profit by showing/making a spectacle out of them; as Jean-Luc Nancy has pointed out, moneo, implying a warning, is also the root of money; perhaps showing (etymological) roots are the money of all evil).

If some filmmakers take up the challenge of hiding things, of working with the invisible, of working with and in darkness, then Thai cinema emerges as particularly relevant – though I could not be sure as to why. For one of the most important moments in recent cinema, a moment that brings us to the black hole of cinema, can be seen at the climax of Weerasethakul’s Sang sattawat/Syndromes and a Century (Thailand/France/Austria, 2006), in which the camera tracks calmly around an empty room before honing in slowly on the black hole that is the end of a ventilation shaft/extractor fan.

All that we can see is supported by all that we cannot (consciously) see. To emphasise, as cognitive film studies perhaps tends to do, the purely visible elements of cinema is to miss half the story (not least because of the darkness that lies between every cinematic frame). That which exceeds our vision is always inherently in the image: the excess incessantly ‘inceeds’ the image, even if it exceeds our vision.

A final paradox: perhaps light itself is invisible, too. We can see the objects illuminated by light because they absorb some frequencies and reflect others. What it is harder for us to see is the light itself. As if each photon were only visible because it comes into contact with matter in another mode, contact which switches it from invisible to visible. As if vision itself were vision of vision; that is, the photon is invisible until it touches matter in another mode, which switches it from invisible to visible, meaning that we cannot see, but can only see that we can see. As if within light itself there were its opposite, or darkness.

The blind leading the blind.

I need to sign off, and so beg forgiveness for these ill-considered thoughts. If at all they merit interest, there will be more to come, but not within the time and word limits my body has set for myself tonight.

Certainly there is a great mystery afoot, a black hole the effects of which we can see even though we cannot see it itself, and which lies at the core of our understanding of cinema, perhaps ourselves, and perhaps the universe we inhabit (which is a too bold proclamation to make by far, no doubt).

If it cannot be seen, then perhaps it cannot be shown, even if we can see its effects and claim at times to feel it. Perhaps it is the God particle that is also made up of fragments of soul. Time must also be considered more thoroughly to get into this conundrum.

This blog cannot do so tonight and perhaps will never do so as much as watching Uncle Boonmee, together with Syndromes and a Century, can do. But these are – I wonder, I vainly hope – the absolute limits of… something. Lame last sentence: no wonder the Cannes jury felt that it was worthy of this year’s top honours.

Notes from the LFF: Neds (Peter Mullan, UK/France/Italy, 2010)

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

For those who do not know, NED stands for Non-Educated Delinquent, although it typically is a term bandied about north of Hadrian’s Wall by the bourgeoisie when it wishes to describe people whom those south of the border would call chavs (or Kevs, depending on your generation).

Despite the fact that the term refers to what one class calls another, however, Peter Mullan’s latest film, Neds, does not really deal too much with class difference. John McGill (Conor McCarron) is a bright young thing from a working class family who makes friends with a posh kid, Julian (Martin Bell), at one point, and after Julian’s mother tells John that she does not want him around her house anymore, John comes back and throws some fireworks through their window, shouting: “If you want a Ned, I’ll give you a Ned.”

Aside from this (and a brief moment in which John sees Julian on a bus some time later, before having to flee from the police), the issue of class difference does not surface too much. Instead, the film spends most of its time showing how John, like another John (Reece Dinsdale) from British cinema, becomes seduced by and ends up embracing more than any of his peers, the world of (in Neds, 1970s Glasgow) gang violence.

When John does tell Julian’s family that he’ll give them a Ned if that’s what they want, however, there is of course a sense of ‘Neddishness’ as a performance. Given that John has been rejected by the upper middle class, he decides fully, it seems, to become that which that self-same class loathes and fears: a violent Weegie who’ll chib ya for looking at him the wrong way.

It is not that the rejection of Julian’s mother is the sole factor that turns John from class swot destined for university to the Ned that he becomes. His family is a broken one, with his father (Peter Mullan) habitually beating/raping his mother, while his brother is also the hard man about town. What is more, when he makes friends with the rest of Car-D, the gang that he joins, he seems genuinely to make friends. Why not hang around with these guys if Julian is going to be so two-faced?

However, if Neddishness is something of a performance, then what lies beneath? Well, John the swot remains; even though by the end of the film John has been placed in a class for kids who cannot/will not perform academically, he continues to be a bookworm – and one gets a sense that he will ‘rehabilitate’ himself/that the clever and timid boy we saw at the beginning of the film is still there.

While this may be so, John remains someone who in the course of the film is responsible for holding up a bus at knife point (and the driver remembers him, hence John’s need to flee from the police when he encounters Julian on the bus later on in the film), for giving a kid permanent brain damage by dropping a gravestone on his head, and for knifing a rival from another local gang. It is not that we end up disliking John for these things (personally, I did, but many viewers may not); it is more that all of this must catch up with him one day – not least because the driver and rival gang members recognise him.

In other words, if being a Ned is a ‘performance,’ it is a performance that John takes so far that it becomes hard, if not impossible, for him to turn back to the ‘real’ John at the end of the film, even though to an extent this is what we are led to believe.

The film ends with John leading the boy whom he has given brain damage across a safari park. The moment is surreal, in that John and the boy (whose name escapes me – and IMDb has minimal information, so my apologies) hold hands and walk past a (digitally inserted) pride of lions. It is not clear what this moment ‘means,’ but it does suggest that John will be haunted forever by the crimes that he has committed, and also that the animal/lion in him is never going to go away. But it also suggests that somehow he has come to terms with himself after all of the experiences that he has had – and that, therefore, he is somewhat at peace (the lions do not attack the boys). This is fair enough, but how John will escape revenge from the other gang, or arrest when randomly the bus driver spots him again, or why indeed he does not hand himself in for all of the above, is unclear. Or rather: it is not unclear so much as troubling. We should bear in mind that Peter Mullan’s film does not have to avoid being troubling, but I did feel resistance to the forgiveness that it seemed to want me to give John.

Perhaps this means that Neds exposes my bourgeois values: I cannot get my head round someone who does not make real the ‘moral’ lesson that they have learned by facing up to what they have done. I feel this because I am a victim of luxury, a hypocritical sense of my own innocence, and, most likely, a lingering sense of morality bestowed upon me by my Christian upbringing (chapel every day at school, etc).

John, meanwhile, has been betrayed by Julian, the film’s bourgeois representative; he has experienced the thrill of gang violence that I am too cowardly to face (though I like the idea of it); and he has – in a dream/hallucination sequence that takes place when John is high from sniffing glue – literally been knifed by Jesus. So why would John care for my moral values and want to act in a way that I feel is appropriate to him? In some respects, he may ‘want’ to do this; but then again, he’s a Ned, so why not behave like a Ned and not do what I want him to do?

That John ends up in a safari park is perhaps significant. There is a scene in La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, France, 1995), in which the main characters (Vincent Cassel, Saïd Taghmaoui, Hubert Koundé) tell a news reporter investigating the banlieues to go forth and multiply, explaining that ‘this is not Thoiry.’ Thoiry is a safari park near Paris – the implication being that the media should not wander into housing estates with their cameras and look curiously at and record for amusement the lives of others that they thus in part consider to be animals put out for show. (Oh, the problems of shanty town and favela tourism – or poorism as sometimes I think of it.)

One wonders whether Peter Mullan is making a similar point with regard to Neds. We cannot make of the working classes (or the past, since Neds is set in the 1970s) a theme or safari park through which we wander, flirting with ‘danger’ and ‘excitement’ without ever experiencing either. Neds therefore self-consciously raises the issue of whether the film itself is not an exoticisation of working class Glasgow life. Whether the film itself is not something of a performance of Neddishness, beneath which is… a creative spirit as bourgeois as those with which the film otherwise denies kinship?

In some of the great British New Wave films, such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, UK, 1962) and Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, UK, 1963), there is a real sense in which the anti-hero, in these films respectively Colin and Billy, who are both played by Tom Courtenay, refuses at the last to take the opportunity to escape from his ‘depressing’ and working class life. Colin refuses to win the race that might help him to improve his lot in borstal, while Billy refuses to get on the train that might lead him to a different and supposedly ‘better’ life. The failure of performance becomes here a performance of failure, which in turn hides something of a success. Why should Colin run just to please other people? Why should Billy get on the train in order to find a ‘kind of living/loving‘ that is not necessarily his own? One may want more money, more freedom to move, and so on – but the Mephistophelian contract of class mobility demands that if you want wealth and, most of all, to be ‘accepted’ by those people that have brandished you as chavs or Neds, then you have to turn your back on and give up everything that you have ever known.

Where Cemetery Junction (Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, UK, 2010) sees Freddie (Christian Cooke) successfully run away by train in the end (albeit an hour late), the British New Wave films’ characters do not want to turn their back on everything they have known in order to have a ‘better’ life. Perhaps this is because, at the last, they are prey to the very ideological beliefs that imprison people – psychologically as much as physically – in economic penury. John in Neds cannot at the last kill his father, in spite of his father’s wish for him to do so, and in spite of the vicious beating that John gives to him with a saucepan or frying pan earlier in the film. While this shows that John finally loves his roots, no matter how ‘terrible,’ violent or traumatic they are both for him and for we audience members who judge it, as is expressed by his tearful embrace of his father, it might also be one set of beliefs that John cannot throw off – namely that you love your family through thick and thin.

Let us think about this: if we (or I, certainly) feel cold towards John at the end for not, say, handing himself in, it is because I am trying to impose upon him a set of moral values that are middle class but which present themselves as being natural and universal. I similarly feel saddened that John has not embraced/realised his academic potential and gotten out of Glasgow as he ‘should’ do. However, if getting out of Glasgow and the working class means turning one’s back on everything that one is or from which one comes, then in some respects, John would have figuratively if not literally to kill his father in order to achieve this/to do so. And yet, John does not kill his father when he has the opportunity to do so. My hypocrisy resides here: I in fact think John should have killed his father, or done the equivalent thereof by leaving Glasgow and never returning (something that John’s brother apparently does by moving to Spain, though this is also to avoid the heat that he has coming, too), but at the same time I frown upon John for all of the other acts of violence that he has perpetrated. I want John to believe in something, while at the same time asking him to believe in nothing. John may be a ‘fool’ of sorts at the end for not realising his potential, but in other respects, by keeping his potential as, precisely, unrealised potential, John may frustrate my expectations of him, but he also remains somehow pure potential, a member of a coming community or a people to come.

(In this sense, Neds does fit the model of cinema that has already been applied to Peter Mullan’s previous Orphans (UK, 1997) – as has been discussed here.)

John walking through the safari park, then, perhaps signals that John, unlike his brother, will not run away; instead of traveling to Spain or to Africa, the journeys he will make will be inner journeys, perhaps imaginary ones – and if he is caught for previous crimes committed, then he will face up to them, as opposed to going to Spain to escape them like his brother. In other words, John finally does show profound moral responsibility for what he has done – even if he is not in a hurry to hand himself in. Furthermore, he fails to perform/performs failure, and does not turn his back on his family life – which gives him a sense of integrity greater than that of the audience members/me who are egging John on to realise his academic potential, to go to university, and… what? Get a humdrum job like everyone else, watch TV every night over dinner, and congratulate himself on the fact that he feels nothing, believes in nothing, and has no trouble with anything…?

Upon first leaving the cinema after watching Neds at the London Film Festival, I felt somewhat disappointed in the film, as did my two Scottish companions who watched the film with me. Maybe the film felt like a bit of ‘poorism,’ without the overt community values that would have turned the film from Neds into This is Scotland. It was a performance of Neddishness, underneath which lies, as per Shane Meadows’ film, a sweet heart that wants the love of the middle classes that it so happily titillates throughout its duration.

Furthermore, the film was a performance of ‘shite Scotland’ that so pleases English and other communities: a ‘you’re only happy when you’ve escaped Glasgow’ kind of narrative that allows the English to feel safe in their condescending sense of superiority over their neighbours.

In these ways, Neds was disappointing – but that John chooses not to leave Glasgow also made the film interestingly troubling: we don’t like narratives that falsify how shite Glasgow/Scotland is, but we are perplexed that John does not want to escape it. We want to eat our cake and have it. But such reactions also perhaps do not give the film credit for what it is, since they try to judge it against an imaginary film that Neds is not – although if that film did exist, it might be a mix of Small Faces (Gillies Mackinnon, UK, 1996) and

Notes from the LFF: Orion (Zamani Esmati, Iran, 2010)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Iranian cinema

Orion sees established Iranian filmmaker and one-time Abbas Kiarostami protégé Jafar Panahi work as an editing consultant.

It is not that Panahi’s stamp is all over Zamani Esmati’s second film. But it is that Orion shares with one of Panahi’s best known works, Dayereh/The Circle (Iran/Italy/Switzerland, 2000), the name of one of its lead characters.

In Panahi’s film, Elham (Elham Saboktakin) is a nurse who is now married to a doctor, but who has a prison record that she tries to hide. She refuses to help Pari (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy), a woman who is pregnant with a husband who has since been executed, and who herself has just come out of prison and is in danger of being killed (it seems) by her family.

In Esmati’s film, Elham (Nasim Kiani) is either pregnant out of wedlock and in need of an abortion (the common assumption that one might make) or, as one of my students suggested followed an educational screening of Orion at the London Film Festival, she is a girl who has lost her virginity out of wedlock, and who is seeking surgery to have her hymen replaced.

Elham may be a relatively common name in Iran and the fact that each film features a major character called Elham may simply be a coincidence, but it does point to the similar features of both films, even if in Panahi’s Circle, Elham is the only woman to walk free (by refusing to help her fellow women), while in Esmati’s Orion, Elham ends up incarcerated.

Both films deal with the impossible plight of women in a society dominated by patriarchal Shi’ite values. Both films also deal with the quietly repressive police regime in Iran: although Orion is set in Yazd, as opposed to Tehran, both feature police forces that are in many respects ruthless, but also very human.

In Orion in particular, we see the police arrive at the house/studio of a would-be filmmaker (Hamed Baraghani), walk in, and arrest everyone, including Elham (eventually), her boyfriend Amir (Mehrdad Sheykhi), and his doctor friend who has come to perform the operation (Mohammad Reza Farzad). There is no shouting, no aggressive questioning, no busting down the doors. The police officers enter, talk calmly, and ensnare their suspects through persistent question that is reminiscent in part of Kafka or Arthur Koestler. The police then swap mobile phone gags with their suspects, provide water and pills for their inmates, and generally seem to let people come and go – but very few people do go, perhaps because they know that there is nowhere that they can go.

In other words, it is not that the police here (and in The Circle) is evil in any obvious or ostensible fashion, but it is banal in a way that does recall Hannah Arendt‘s most famous phrase. (If it is not banal to say that evil is banal.)

However, perhaps this banality in part relates to the fact that the men are not really in any danger of being imprisoned. Rather, it is only Elham who runs the risk of prison and shame. For, the supposed sins of the couple – sleeping together outside of wedlock – are transposed uniquely on to the woman, Elham: Amir will and does walk free for deflowering Elham, while Elham goes to prison, presumably having been branded a whore.

Men get away with everything and anything, complains Elham’s mother to Amir in front of the courtroom. And this seems to be the case: twice in the film, we see Elham trying to run away from the police – first when she sneaks out of the back door of the filmmaker’s house, and second when she runs from the courtroom where she will be arrested. Both times, we know that she is being pursued, but we have little or no access to the pursuer, be it from Elham’s or the pursuer’s point of view. That is, these are not depicted as chases. Instead, each is depicted more or less from Elham’s perspective, as we follow behind her. She tries to open doors, she tries to climb over walls, and so on. And each time, she finds only a dead end at which – eventually but with total inevitability – a police officer finally arrives. The second time, she hits the police officer and continues her would-be escape, only for the film to cut to her leaving prison, presumably several days/weeks/months later.

Rather than showing us a chase, then, both scenes are reminiscent of nightmares in which one runs away from an unseen force, only to suffer from one or a combination of the following: one’s legs suddenly becoming frictionless, meaning that one is running, but going nowhere; or one’s legs suddenly being only able to move as if through syrup; or, worse, running into a random house for protection, only to find that it is the house of the person pursuing you. For Elham, her efforts to escape are futile – as indicated by the lack of hurry in pursuing her. This sense of imprisonment makes the film powerfully unbearable (for me).

Akin to Bahman Ghobadi’s recent Kasi az gorbehaye irani khabar nadareh/No One Knows About Persian Cats (Iran, 2009), Esmati’s film was shot on a micro-budget with digital cameras and without a permit, meaning that the film is ‘underground’ in Iran but obviously something of interest to film festivals. Matthew Holtmeier has perceptively written about how that film is reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s (and Félix Guattari’s) notion of a ‘people to come.’ Since Deleuze and Guattari came up with the notion in relation to Kafka, and since this film is reminiscent (to me) of Kafka, then one feels tempted to say the same of Orion. But in some respects, the film is not as defiant as Ghobadi’s; it is singularly more pessimistic and as a result, one does not sense much in the way of ‘futurity’ or hope.

The film ends with Elham being dragged from the back seat of her father’s car and into the desert, where he may or may not stab her with a screwdriver. Elham’s mother pleads with him to stop, and as a gale blows up and a sandstorm blows from right to left across the screen, all three are framed from the open car door on their knees, howling to God and to each other. The shot of the desert is a powerful one, bringing to mind the hopelessness of Elham’s situation – one cannot fight these natural and, more pointedly, naturalised forces such as desire (which, sadly, got her in trouble in the first place) and the (here, Iranian Islamic) Law (which is not natural, but has become naturalised/made to be thought of as natural).

However, for all that Orion is pessimistic, we should be careful not to read it as a documentary that tells it like it is (in every case, even if stuff like this does happen). That is, we should not generalise from this film that everyone’s experiences in Iran are the same. The reasons for this are not to say that the film is inaccurate, or wrong. But just that non-Iranian viewers might feel compelled to ‘condemn’ all Iranians for being in some sense ‘bigots,’ the problem being that this is perchance a bigoted attitude to have in the first place (and provided that this is not a bigoted attitude to have against bigots and bigotry as a whole).

While I was inclined to argue that Brillante Mendoza’s Lola/Grandmother (France/Philippines, 2009) is more realistic than John Sayles’ Amigo (USA, 2010) on account of its budget in a recent post (my argument being that a lower budget means less control when shooting on the streets, which means more ‘reality’ creeps in), here I should make clear that no film is absolutely realistic (particularly when representing history, as Sayles’ film purports to). So – yes, Orion was shot ‘underground’ (i.e. without permission from the authorities), and it was funded by Esmati himself for a very small amount of money, and it is shot with handheld digital cameras that suggests realism, but this does not make what the film shows us as real or even wholly realistic.

In some respects, the film knows this: many of the film’s framings are arch, in the sense that they are knowingly ‘meaningful’: shots of the main characters from behind bars, or an inserted moment where a child’s kite gets stuck on the roof of the filmmaker’s house all attest to the lack of freedom that the characters endure not just from the authorities/the Law, but also from the story that the filmmaker imposes upon them. Furthermore, in that same house, posters for films and, in particular, film stock are seen hanging from the walls. An image of Al Pacino is on its side: Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, USA, 1975) this is not. But that we see images that are framed by strips of celluloid also brings to mind that we are watching not reality itself, but a fabricated reality (even if one that takes in real locations).

Perhaps this is most noticeable in a long scene in the filmmaker’s editing ‘suite,’ in which Esmati/his editor/Panahi (as editing advisor) has inserted multiple ‘jump cuts’ in which perhaps (as few as) one, two or three frames have been removed from the image track, while the sound track seems to remain constant. The effect of this scene is to make the viewer not only aware that they are watching a film, but it is also to suggest that the male characters in this scene, who discuss the relative freedom of their lives, and who complain about women, somehow elude the camera. Or that they have a freedom of mobility that the camera cannot quite capture, while Elham struggles to run away (from the camera as much as from the police officers that we do not see chasing her), but never can. Perhaps this explains why we do not see Elham in prison at all; the camera does not need to imprison her there; its only function is to imprison her while not in prison, the camera serving as a panopticon machine.

If Orion is not necessarily to be considered as realistic, then, perhaps we can draw something out of its status as a festival film. If the lack of a permit means that the economic potential of this film in Iran is nil (even though, as a recent book on Iranian cinema makes clear, those who grant filmmaking permits in Iran can often spot and even turn a blind eye to/implicitly encourage subversive material), its aspirations for life lie in both the pirate market and its strange bedfellow, the film festival circuit.

The festival circuit and piracy are arguably two sides of the same coin regarding what they can offer a film in terms of life and audiences. By taking images without authorisation, Esmati is something of a pirate (he takes his camera into the street while other pirates take their cameras into the cinema), who is in turn supported by the festival circuit. Aside from making this parallel, it is important to note that Esmati might well have made this film knowing that it would get on to the festival circuit, not least because Iran is a hot topic now that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is threatening to go nuclear (how could a country so medieval in its treatment of women dare to become a power so modern as to have nuclear?).

That is to say: non-Iranian viewers of film festival films (i.e. the relatively wealthy and specialised audiences that get to and can afford film festival films, which, in London at least, typically cost more than a normal cinema ticket) arguably like seeing images of ‘backwardness’ in Iran, because it conforms to the media image of Iran/Ahmadinejad as a cruel tyrant keeping a desert-strewn country in the Dark Ages.

This is not to say that Iran is not unstable as a country, nor to say that Ahmadinejad is not an election-stealing tyrant. That is not my opinion to give. But it is to question the motives of festival goers and programmers for going to and putting into film festivals films that are critical of Iran, and by extension Islam (since the country is an Islamic Republic) – especially its/the religion’s treatment of women.

Given the overwhelming youth of Iran’s population, one wonders how taboo extra-marital sex really is (that is, on the – or under the – ground), even if sex is supposed not to be depicted in/on film (though I am sure that pornography proliferates in Iran, whether or not there is a specifically Iranian porn industry). Furthermore, when we compare this film to recent work by, say, Tahmineh Milani, one wonders to what extent this is a stylised portrayal of middle class life as much as her films are but in the opposite direction (if very different to her earlier films, Atash bas/Cease Fire, Iran, 2006, is a comedy about affluent middle class Iranians, featuring a very strong female lead).

No doubt there are problems in Iran and perhaps with Islam in general with regard to the imbalance between the sexes, even if prominent women like Shirin Ebadi might suggest otherwise. But for whatever Orion shows us that is troubling and problematic, we should not, as Western/festival audiences, trust that it is true without at least some questioning of the film. Indeed, given the self-conscious moments in the film (in particular the framing and the jump cuts in the editing suite), Orion itself seems to want us to know that it is presenting us not with reality itself, but with, as per the moments when Elham tries to run away but cannot, a nightmare version of reality.

Amir is an astrophysicist who is expecting to escape to the West – although this may not happen for him if he is forced to stay and marry Elham. The constellation Orion is mentioned in the film as the constellation of the hunter. This might make of Orion an interesting companion to Rafi Pitts’ new film, The Hunter (Iran/Germany, 2010), which is due out shortly in the UK. But for this film, it seems that Amir, as a man, hunts women/has freedom (to exert his power) over them. In one particularly cruel scene, he barefacedly lies to a judge that he has not had an affair with Elham – Amir not thus being found guilty of perjury, but instead Elham being convicted more forcefully for his crime. He perhaps aspires to a god-like status (not least because he will escape Iran), while Elham and presumably other women are treated as mere humans, perhaps even as less than human.

While we do not see Elham’s incarceration, we do see the overnight stay that Amir and his friends make in a cell. They drink alcohol (supposedly against the law) and banter: apparently being arrested does not particularly fluster them. Elham, meanwhile, is isolated, silent and barely gets to speak throughout the film. Because the film challenges the typical understanding of prison (guards telling men to shut up, rattling the prison bars, etc), it seems rather to suggest that the prison is as much a mental one as a physical one – not least because Amir’s physician friend gets his assistant to bring them food and ethanol (what poor security that prison has!).

As such, the film becomes not so much a realistic portrayal of life in Iran, as opposed to an allegory about freedom, perchance a more specific allegory about the freedom of women in the Islamic Republic. This might put us back in the territory of Fredric Jameson who relatively problematically has suggested that all ‘Third World’ texts (including films?) are necessarily read in the West as allegories of the nation. But in some respects, I wonder that the ‘allegorical’ reading is paradoxically more accurate than extrapolating from the film that Iran is a terrible society full of evil men and victimised women. I’ve no doubt that Iran has its share of these as do all corners of the planet, and perhaps Iran is unfortunate in having such people (the men, anyway) actually in positions of power.

But if nothing else, and as Hamid Dabashi has argued, Iran is a complex and multicultural society that has rich intellectual, artistic, cultural, social and scientific traditions. To look upon it in simplistic terms, not as Orion does, but as Orion‘s audience might feel tempted to do, is look upon it with veiled eyes.

Notes from the LFF: Amigo (John Sayles, USA, 2010)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

Filipino cinema has seemingly had a bit of a renaissance recently – although why I say this will need to be put in context.

From what I understand, the Philippines did have a thriving local film industry in the 1930s, with plenty of domestic stars that mitigated the unrelenting presence of Hollywood products. The country’s art house peak, meanwhile, is perhaps exemplified by the work of Lino Brocka, who was a prominent figure on the film festival circuit in the 1970s and 1980s.

But of late a ‘new wave’ (whatever this term means these days) has been spearheaded by Brillante Mendoza, by whom I have only seen Lola/Grandmother (France/Philippines, 2009), which was excellent and which makes me want to see more. In other words, it seems as though the Philippines has its own fair crop of talented filmmakers and that Filipinos are more than capable of telling their own stories – as perhaps has been clearly exemplified in the realm of literature by the work of José Rizal, whose novel Noli Me Tangere (1887) forms a core part of Benedict Anderson‘s analysis of nations as ‘imagined communities.’

Rizal perhaps inevitably gets a mention both in this blog (as the only Filipino some of whose work I have read) as well as in John Sayles’ latest film, Amigo, in which a character declares that the Philippines will be saved one day by Jesus Christ and José Rizal riding into town. The moment raised a laugh in the audience, perhaps by people who had heard of Rizal in a bid to vocalise the fact that they recognised the name, but more likely because a fair number of London’s Filipino community seemed to be in attendance at this London Film Festival screening.

And while the mention got something of an approbatory laugh – suggesting that the desire for Filipino economic independence may still make of the the Philippines something of a ‘people to come‘ – it also got me to thinking: why is this film being made by John Sayles?

Don’t get me wrong: I find John Sayles a most intriguing filmmaker. His stilted, even belaboured dialogue can be heard a mile away (not least because it is often spoken, as in this film, with the voice of Chris Cooper). And yet his films, didactic though they can be, are still committed in their righteousness concerning the effort to revivify/sustain America’s ever-dwindling left. That and the fact that Sayles started as a writer on films like Piranha (Joe Dante, USA, 1978), Alligator (Lewis Teague, USA, 1980), and The Howling (Joe Dante, USA, 1981).

Furthermore, Sayles has been a filmmaker committed to making films about issues that are not necessarily connected to him. By which I mean to say, that from his treatment of lesbianism in Lianna (USA, 1983), to his treatment of race in The Brother from Another Planet (USA, 1984), TexMex relations in Lone Star (USA, 1996 – and my favourite Sayles film to date), and Mexican life in Men With Guns (USA, 1997), we might argue that Sayles has taken up ’causes’ with which he may well share all levels of kinship, but which sometimes are the kinds of stories that those involved in these situations must tell for themselves. In other words, Sayles is neither a lesbian, nor black, nor Mexican.

Nor is he Filipino. And yet here is directing a film in part about Philippine independence. For Amigo tells the story of a village chief, Rafael (Joel Torre), who must deal with an invading US garrison at the turn of the last century, which has helped to relieve the Philippines of Spain’s colonial presence, only to decide to take the country for itself/as its own.

As in any Sayles film, we get a plethora of viewpoints on what is happening in the film, including that of many of the American soldiers posted in the baryo, a bunch of the locals, a Spanish priest (Yul Vazquez) who is lingering to retain control of his flock, and even some Chinese workers whom the Americans employ (and who soon into the film are slaughtered by Filipino rebels living out in the wilds).

In other words, Sayles is ‘fair’ as a filmmaker in at the very least trying to give as many of the myriad possible viewpoints there could have been and perhaps were of/at this particular moment in world history. Interestingly, the war depicted here has apparently been referred to by Sayles as a ‘forgotten war.’ But this does beg the question: forgotten by whom? I have no idea whether this was is a monumental war for Filipinos, but it seems most likely that this is a war ‘forgotten’ by Americans.

But if this is the case, then why have no Filipino filmmakers (whose work is at all available outside of the Philippines) addressed this moment in Philippine history? Perhaps because it is forgotten in the Philippines. But this still cannot prevent the film from seeming at times like a lesson in other people’s history. More ironic: the film implicitly is a critique of American imperialism (Rafael, who is perhaps an impossibly/infallibly good guy in the film, ends up being pointlessly executed after a ceasefire), and yet for an American to tell Filipino history is potentially to mirror on a cultural level the economic/political/military ‘imperialism’ carried out by the USA 100+ years ago.

As mentioned, the film is ‘fair’: there are good and bad American soldiers, those who make an effort to get on with the locals (including the obligatory young GI who falls in love with a girl with whom he cannot verbally communicate – the stuff of a true, loving relationship, for sure), and those who remain somewhat ignorant/racist. There is one particularly bad local (Nenong, played by John Arcilla) who is looking to find a way to depose Rafael, and some rebels who are not so much bad as constrained to carry out an attempted murder on Rafael because they recognise that he may be perceived as helping the Americans (when in fact he just trying to keep the peace). But on the whole, everyone is likeable(-ish). It is not that the film should have villains that are readily identifiable; but the film does have a couple of these, and it also has a couple of readily identifiable ‘hero’ types, not least Rafael himself. The problem arises, then, in that by idealising Rafael the versimilitude and the veracity of the film seem compromised…

Sayles should not and does not maintain mere gringo-bashing as his sole agenda, however. In fact, the baryo successfully takes on and uses their new access to democracy to vote in Rafael over Nenong at one point; the imposition of democracy might even be a laudable thing in several respects. But whatever problematising that the film makes of the various issues at play (maybe imposing democracy on people who do not have it is sometimes an okay thing to do), applies to the film itself (telling other people’s histories for them can sometimes be okay, but we should be wary that it is a complex and thorny issue, out of which Sayles wishes to take something of an easy way out, it seems, because, speaking frankly, the film is not particularly self-conscious about its role as a representation of history, even if the acting sometimes has a touch of the Brecht about it).

If we compare Amigo to Lola, then arguably we can see something of a difference to be highlighted. Bearing in mind that I may be prey to believing Lola as a ‘true’ portrayal of contemporary Manila, because its handheld, digital shooting style is of course designed to induce credulity in me/the audience, not least because that and associated techniques have historically been linked to movements involving the word ‘realism,’ Lola does at least have an ‘imperfect’ or ‘raw’ look to it. This suggests that Mendoza works with a very small budget and outside of even the Philippine mainstream (let alone outside of Hollywood), which probabilistically if not de facto means that Mendoza can make a film that must respect/allow to creep into its being reality itself – because the filmmakers do not have the budget to shoot the whole film in a perfectly controlled manner.

Sayles is well known as an independent filmmaker, who uses script editing as a means to finance his films – i.e. he has limited funds, too, and makes films his own way. His latest film is set over 100 years ago, and so shooting on location (which he did) becomes hard to achieve without some falsification, such as the construction of the baryo in which most of the film takes place. But as an American filmmaker who makes plenty of cash from script rewrites in Hollywood, his level of ‘independence’ – regardless of whether chosen or enforced – is far greater than that of Mendoza, in the sense that he does (likely) have greater control over what happens on set, which means that fewer extraneous or, as I am arguing here, ‘true’ elements can or will find their way into the film.

It is not really about the story that is told in either film, then (FYI: Lola sees two grandmothers enter into each other’s lives, one as she tries to raise money for her grandson’s funeral, the other trying to raise money for the bail of her grandson, the murderer of the first grandson). Rather, it is about where the films are made and how much reality is allowed into them.

To malign Sayles on this level is in some respects unfair to him, since little or no reality from the past will make its way into any film, let alone his (in spite of the detailed and I would expect accurate mise-en-scène that his film does offer). But it is to say that Filipinos can and perhaps should tell their own stories – even if, as already mentioned, Sayles’ film is relatively ‘fair’ – in all senses of the word.

But while a Filipino audience might watch a Filipino film about independence from Spain and, subsequently, from the USA, would an American, British, or any non-Filipino audience go to watch that film? Do subtitles really make that much of a difference (there are subtitles in Amigo, but we (anglophone viewers) also get guidance from the American characters)? Do subtitles put audiences off films so much that they could not care to watch them? Given that few relatively few people will see Amigo, can we surmise that most audiences want to ‘forget’ (i.e. would prefer never to know) about the Filipino independence movement and America’s war over there? Given that fewer still will watch Lola, can we surmise that most (Western?) audiences want to ‘forget’ (i.e. would prefer never to know) about Filipino life at all? Given that relatively few people in the Philippines watch Mendoza’s films (which therefore might be considered ‘festival films’), can we surmise that few Filipinos want to watch films about their own country (or at least would prefer escapist fare to neorealist-influenced, art house fare? Can we surmise that few people want to watch art house films full stop?

If, as seemed the case with the elements of the audience in London that I took to be Filipino/interested in the Philippines, Filipinos are grateful to Sayles for telling this story, is this because he is bringing to the attention of the non-Philippine/anglophone world a moment in history that should be remembered? In other words, does the film function as a way of bringing attention to the Philippines full stop? (Film as a tool for tourism?) Or are they grateful that the film has at least interested someone because neither Filipinos nor anyone else is/seems interested in making a film about Filipino independence? And if this is the case, why is this so? Because we have fatigue from information overload and few are those who are prepared to grit their cerebral teeth and keep on taking in information? Or because the globalising processes that have in part helped to bring about information overload are truly ‘eurocentric’ processes that privilege the global rich over the global poor – hence my own personal anger and attempts to swallow my frustration every time I hear a student tell me straight-faced that they don’t like art house (especially politically-minded art house) cinema because it is ‘boring’?

An interview with Sayles is to be found here for your consideration.