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

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

Starts:-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ends

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

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

The film sucks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are Many (Amir Amirani, UK, 2014)

Blogpost, British cinema, Documentary, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comedy’s etymology is, according to this site

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2014)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, USA, 2014)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Palo Alto (Gia Coppola, USA, 2013)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

I had been hoping to blog about a number of films – but the basic 24:7 drag that is term time means that I basically have space for nothing other than the nose to the grindstone. Imagine that – last year I managed to blog about a number of films at the London Film Festival – and this year I barely saw as many, let alone had a chance to write about them.

Either way, this is a brief blog that summarises things that I shall say this evening at a Discover Tuesday screening of Palo Alto at the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton this evening (Tuesday 18 November 2014).

The film is an adaptation of various of James Franco’s collection of short stories, Palo Alto: Stories (2010). It tells the story of a young virgin, April (Emma Roberts), who begins to have an affair with her football coach, Mr B (James Franco). April has a crush on Teddy (Jack Kilmer), who has to do community service after crashing a car while drunk – and mainly as a result of the bad influence of his friend, Fred (Nat Wolff). Meanwhile, Fred has a relatively disastrous relationship with Emily (Zoe Levin), the class slut whom he repeatedly treats poorly.

Perhaps predictably, the film is set in Palo Alto, a town of about 65,000 people in mid- to northern California. If the town has landmarks, they are hidden from view as the action of the film plays out in school classrooms, playing fields, in picket fence-style houses and in skater parks, the likes of which we have seen in countless explorations of small town Americana.

Indeed, although director Coppola hails – as her name suggests – from a family of prestigious filmmakers, this film feels less like her grandfather’s explorations of teen life, as per Rumble Fish (USA, 1983) and The Outsiders (USA, 1983), and more like something that we might expect from Richard Linklater or perhaps a slightly less experimental Gus van Sant. Oh, okay, we can also see shades of Gia’s aunt, Sofia Coppola in this movie – a kind of anti-Bling Ring (USA/UK/France/Germany/Japan, 2013).

For, if in The Bling Ring we see the way in which poor little rich kids avoid boredom by breaking into the houses and disrupting the lives of celebrities in the big city, Los Angeles, here we see how poor, more middle class kids avoid boredom by doing whatever they can in the small town: crashing a car on purpose, getting trashed at a house party, drink driving, taking drugs, having affairs, and so on.

Perhaps in this way the casting of numerous children of well known actors makes some sense beyond seeming like plain old nepotism. Gia Coppola is, as mentioned, the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola, but she is joined by Emma Roberts, the daughter of Eric and the niece of Julia, and Jack Kilmer, the son of Val (who also features briefly in the film as a stoner writer). Coppola’s mother also has a role, with, as mentioned Franco turning up to act in his own adaptation – with Atlanta Decadenet-Taylor, the daughter of former actress Amanda De Cadenet and Duran Duran bassist John Taylor, appearing in a party sequence for good measure. Oh, and the music is by Robert Schwartzman, daughter of Talia Shire, brother of Jason Schwartzman, and nephew of Francis Ford Coppola.

The nearly-properly-famous status of all of the kids – and even the adults – suggests a sense of their waiting for life to begin. It is as if their personal connections give a sense of how each of the characters is close to the action – Palo Alto is not that far from Los Angeles – but somehow they are also so far from it. Hence the self-destructive behaviour. Where Sofia Coppola might offer us a scathing critique of self-entitlement – we find it hard to like these people because of their belief that they must be indulged and/or entertained at all times – niece Gia nonetheless goes in a different and interesting direction.

Perhaps one way to convey what is stylistically interesting about this film is the weather, and thus of the film’s lighting scheme and colour palette. Rain never seems far away in the film; moisture seems to hang in the air; and the sky is not a luminous blue, but more often a slightly dull, mist-filled grey. As a result of these weather conditions, one is often in a sense – somewhere deep down – of uncertainty. Will it rain, won’t it rain? Will the weather actually decide what to do? And this uncertainty, suggested in the weather, transfers on to the characters themselves. And it is in the characterisation that the film shows its greatest strength.

James Franco is having a Marmite kind of moment. Some people love him, I guess, while many online commentators deride him for being pretentious, as one minute he writes a novel, the next he directs a film, and then he acts, writes poems, posts selfies on Twitter and so on. Nonetheless, between him and Coppola, there is a real sense here of uncertainty in the characters, as there is in the weather – and this is the film’s real charm. It is the uncertainty in April as she begins to have an affair but is not sure how to do it. She is kind of adult – able to see through lies, dealing with seemingly disinterested parents – but she also has no experience. She sits in a locker: a kind of quirky individualism, but also a desire for protection from the world.

It is the uncertainty in Teddy, who can come out of his shell when helping and drawing old people in a home or working in a library with kids, but who also knows that he has a wild side and who thus succumbs to the outrageous libidinous adventurism of Fred.

It is the uncertainty in Fred, perhaps, who makes out that he knows what he is doing, but who really is just driving the wrong way down a one way street.

It is the uncertainty in Emily, who is looking to be loved, who is happy to make out with guys and who does not understand the judgement that is imposed upon her. Even Mr B does not really know what he is doing, as seen in his dithering confusion about whom he wants to be with, where he is in his life and, indeed, his retreat into paternalistic clichés when his uncertainty is exposed.

In other words, what Coppola and Franco grasp well is a human sense of not knowing the future, not knowing what will happen in life, and capturing how that anxiety works itself out in a variety of touching, if sometimes self-destructive ways that therefore are agonising for the viewer.

Here perhaps the characters of Fred and Emily come into their own. Played respectively by Nat Wolff, who has relatively famous parents (but not in the league of the others mentioned) and by Zoe Levin (who does not, as far as I am aware, have any famous relatives), these two characters also seem most fragile – hence their being perhaps the most unpredictable behaviour.

Fred in particular seems to launch a one-person assault on a world that does seem so assured in its future, such that he perhaps commits the most (self-)destructive acts of the film.

Emily, too, though, seems deep down most afraid. No one knows what the future holds.

It is paradoxical, then, that the future is relatively clearly written for many of these actors, for the director and perhaps for other personnel involved in the film: their success is imminent.

Nonetheless, with this her first film, Gia Coppola (with input from Franco) has captured a moment of uncertainty, a kind of cinematic celebration of drizzle, which as a result is in its own way a fascinating piece of work. A film in a minor key, no doubt, but that is fleetingly beautiful nonetheless.

Grand Central (Rebecca Zlotowski, Austria/France, 2013)

Blogpost, Film reviews, French Cinema

This blog posting serves as a written form for what I shall say by way of an introduction to Grand Central at Brixton’s Ritzy Picture house on Tuesday 16 September 2014 at 6.30pm.

The film tells the story of Gary (Tahar Rahim), a young man who has dropped out of formal education and who takes on a job with two friends, Tcherno (Johan Libéreau) and Isaac (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), at a nuclear power plant in the Rhône-Alpes region of France.

In part the movie is a work of social realism, as is arguably made clear by the choice of Olivier Gourmet to play Gilles, the man who takes Gary and friends under his wing and who trains them in the job at hand: the maintenance of the plant and the disposal of radioactive waste. For, Gourmet is a stalwart of films by the Dardenne brothers; indeed, an eagle eye might have spotted him in the similar (if less pleasant) foreman role in their latest film, Deux jours, une nuit/Two Days, One Night (Belgium/France/Italy, 2014).

The social realism is also in evidence via the use of locations, the mumbling acting styles, and the film’s concern with outlining the dangers of working in a nuclear power plant. Getting the so-called radioactive ‘dose’ is not simply something that could happen as part of this job; it is something that inevitably will happen at some point. Furthermore, Zlotowski takes care to detail the petty corruptions that take place almost daily: cheating one’s radiation exposure measurements, stealing equipment from the plant, turning a blind eye to ‘malpractice.’

However, while it is a fascinating insight into the life inside a nuclear power plant (Homer Simpson this is not), the film also takes on a poetic, as opposed to social realist, dimension, both through its love story and, as I shall discuss below, through its imagery.

Gary falls for Karole (Léa Seydoux), who is engaged to be married to Gilles’ friend, colleague and neighbour, Toni (Denis Ménochet). However, while Karole and Toni’s relationship has little wrong with it, she cannot but be attracted – somewhat animalistically – to Gary. An affair begins and, avoiding spoilers, they are on a timeline towards disaster – even if the Karole/Toni relationship is signalled as ‘unnatural’ in some respects both by Toni’s inability to have children – an inability brought on by his job at the nuclear plant – and, in a more meta-cinematic fashion, by the casting of Ménochet as Toni. For Ménochet played Seydoux’s father in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, USA/Germany, 2009). To play now her fiancé seems a step towards the unnatural.

As an itinerant worker, Gary seems to be updated version of a different Toni – the one played by Charles Blavette in Jean Renoir’s early social realist classic, Toni (France, 1935). Indeed, where Renoir is concerned not just with realism but also with poetry via symbolism, so, too, is director Zlotowski in this her second feature film. Perhaps this is also implied by the fact that Zlotowski’s film ends with a shot of Toni (and not of Gary or Karole), a shot that I shall discuss below.

At present, however, let me explain what I mean by the film’s symbolism via what seems to be another – at least implicit – reference point to Zlotowski, namely the work of nineteenth century French naturalist novelist, Émile Zola. In a letter to fellow writer Henri Céard, Zola writes:

Nous mentons tous plus ou moins, mais quelle est la mécanique et la mentalité de notre mensonge ? Or – c’est ici que je m’abuse peut-être – je crois encore que je mens pour mon compte dans le sens de la vérité. J’ai l’hypertrophie du détail vrai, le saut dans les étoiles sur le tremplin de l’observation exacte. La vérité monte d’un coup d’aile jusqu’au symbole.

A (relatively loose) translation of this might read as follows:

Basically, we [writers] all lie at some point, but what are the mechanisms and the mentality behind this lying? Now, perhaps I am exaggerating here, but I still think that I personally lie in order to achieve a sense of truth. I gorge on true detail, and I leap to the stars on the trampoline that is exact observation. The truth suddenly takes wing and flies up into the realm of the symbol.

What more evidence need we have of Zola’s use of symbolism than the ending of his great novel, Germinal (1885)? This book, which details at length the lives of French miners, ends with the image of grass growing, pushing up from underground – a symbolic insistence, then, that the miners will themselves emerge from the ground and become once again a part of nature.

And it is in particular in her juxtaposition of nature and the man-made that Zlotowski’s film, like Zola’s novel, becomes most poetic, most symbolic, in spite of its otherwise naturalistic/social realist approach. This is of course signalled in that most Zola-esque of fashions, in the afore-mentioned animal attraction that takes place between Karole and Gary. However, it is also there in the imagery that we see.

Water, for example, plays a key role in the film. Gary demonstrates great thirst early on when he drinks all of Gilles’ water (this is a man who is ‘thirsty’ for success, who has large appetites and so on), while Gary is also associated with the lake next to which the characters live in their trailers. Water is what is used to hose down the characters when they have been exposed too much to radiation; here we see it explicitly take on a ‘cleansing’ role in opposition to the unnatural life in the nuclear power plant. Finally, torrential rain will of course also play a key role in conveying to us the ‘natural’ attraction that exists between Karole and Gary.

At one point early on, Karole compares the sudden loss of vision and the sense of confusion that is raw desire to the exposure to radiation that is what the characters call a ‘dose.’ Desire, it seems, is similar to radiation – but one is healthy and (re)productive, while the other is noxious and damaging.

The greenery of the countryside – the fields where Karole and Gary repeatedly walk and make love – is also juxtaposed with the grey of the cooling towers that we see looming almost consistently in the background. In the framing and the colour scheme, then, we have a clear comparison between nature and modernity – an almost painterly eye that sees (for want of better examples) the rurality of Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851-1852) combined with the industrial urban landscape of The Pond (1950) by L.S. Lowry – with the human remaining also a key component to both images, and to Zlotowski’s.

The soundscape also ‘symbolises’ the possibility of the plant’s threatening nature: its ominous siren calls tell us if someone has had an accident in the plant – with the obligatory and ‘unnatural’ loss of hair that this inevitably entails. What is more, the haunting score by Rob (Robin Coudert) also plays an important part in the film, itself signalling a leap into the heavens as it creates a sense of foreboding throughout.

Finally, there is also a strong emphasis on shoes in the film: Gary carries his shoes around early on in a bar scene, while changing shoes takes place every day at work as the crew steps into the zone where they must wear their protective uniforms.

I am not certain of the ‘meaning’ of this – but it perhaps signals the constraint of the human in clothing. This may seem a bit far-fetched, but the French for shoe is chaussure, which comes from the Latin calx (foot) and calcāre (to tread, but also to crush). Not only does the shoe itself tread and crush, but the shoe might also do this to the foot. The word inculcate, meaning to tread down/stamp in/force upon, comes from the same root: Gary will not be downtrodden.

I have only offered a brief sketch here of Zlotowski’s film, but it is a rich and engaging film, featuring performances from a handful of French cinema’s finest talents, telling a fascinating story not just about the perils of nuclear power, but also about the impossibility for human nature to be extinguished. Nonsensical desire will always dictate our lives more than empirical science can possibly hope to achieve.

As mentioned, the film ends with a fascinating double exposure of Toni, of all characters, on an electronic rodeo bull – the same bull that we have seen Gary ride and defeat near the start of the film. Mysterious and beautiful, it suggests that perhaps even impotent Toni will not be vanquished. It is not that he conquers desire – in the form of a bull; it is that he conquers the mechanisation of desire – in the form of a mechanical bull. The doubling of his image through the double exposure/superimposition suggests multiplication, too, as he is set out twice against a black background: not only will Toni not go away, but there will be of him, more people like him.

Like a ray of light in the darkness, Toni has become the star in the heavens – into which the film has leapt via precise observation. Perhaps if Zola were alive to make films today, this would be the sort of movie that he’d produce.

Obvious Child (Gillian Robespierre, USA, 2014)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

It’s perhaps the effect of the ‘new sincerity’ – its evident conclusion. And that is to be up front about the life selfish – and to feel okay about it.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not a Bible bashing anti-abortionist, though I have my reservations about abortion in that I do not believe it should be entered into lightly – and (full disclosure) kind of do consider it to be a form of life ending (because, quite simply, it is). That said, and the disclosure remains full, I reserve this view to myself and cannot and will not impose it upon anyone who chooses otherwise (and it is quite possible that I have no children at this point in my life precisely because of abortions – though if this is the case, I am not aware of it and would be somewhat surprised were it so).

Bringing you up to speed: Obvious Child is about a young woman, Donna, played superbly by Jenny Slate, who, among other things, becomes pregnant after a seeming one-night stand with Max, played equally well by Jake Lacy, and who decides to have an abortion.

Back to the chase: I have seen the photos of aborted fœtuses. They touch me deeply. But if a human is not ready to have a child, then a human is not ready to have a child. Maybe they should ‘become ready’ and simply commit to what they’re doing/what has happened to them. Quite possibly. But I think that Obvious Child works well in bringing us to the point of not judging Donna for her decisions. Instead we have a lot of empathy with her, and like her – not because of her decision, but ‘in spite of’ her decision (it is hard to condemn her, even if we disapprove of her actions). Narrative cinema is perhaps best at this: allowing us to understand other people.

I have 24 minutes to finish writing this blog, since I have to get up very soon to go and shoot my new film, The New Hope, a zero-budget adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. But I have been thinking a lot about Obvious Child since I saw it at the BFI on Thursday 21 August 2014, and feel compelled to write this. I won’t do justice to my thoughts in 24 minutes.

What do I mean by invoking above something called ‘the life selfish’? Hold this thought.

In an interview, director Gillian (pronounced with a hard g, apparently) Robespierre says about the Paul Simon song from which the film takes its name and which features in the film:

It felt perfect, because it had a sort of ambiguity to how people were going to see that title. Is Donna an obvious child? Is it just the song in the movie? It’s one of those things where I hate to overanalyze it, but people seem to love to overanalyze it, and I really like that.

And so here’s my over-analysis. Aside from being a wonderful song that, in moving through three (arguably four) different phases takes on a kind of ‘the continuity of life’ quality, ‘The Obvious Child’ also brings to mind two things. Firstly, in its lyrics regarding how the narrator in the song is ‘accustomed to a smooth ride’ and who then has Sonny, who in turn grows up, the film speaks of class – those who, although not necessarily where they want to be in life, benefit from choice. That is, choice – including choice surrounding abortion – is arguably one that is accorded only to a privileged few (and although in Robespierre’s film there is a financial dimension to the abortion in that it costs US$500, and Donna is not sure where to get that money from, we infer from her parents and friends that this sort of money is not going to be hard for her to find).

[The film sits well with Joe Swanberg’s Marriage Material (USA, 2012), which features a conversation about how having children in fact costs nothing in the USA. And yet a couple decides, without an abortion, that they don’t really want a child. The films make interesting bedfellows.]

The class thing we’ll come back to – because it connects to ‘sincerity’ (and its apparent novelty, such that sincerity is allegedly ‘new’ these days). The second thing that the title ‘obvious child’ brings to mind is its etymology.

Obvious is derived from the Latin preposition ob-, meaning various things, but it is to do with impeding movement and direction (a sense of ‘againstness’ – as in obstruction and obstacle), and from viam, meaning ‘way’ – such that ‘obvious’ means ‘in the way’. In some senses, this ob-servation is in itself ‘obvious’ – but the ‘obvious’, that which is right before our eyes, is also tied to a sense of being in the way. But in the way of what? What does it block us from? Well, it blocks us from the future. But what future is that?

This is going to be precisely my central question. But we still have a word to look at: ‘child’.

Here’s what the Online Etymology Dictionary says about the origins of the term ‘child’ (forgive me if it is inaccurate):

Old English cild “fetus, infant, unborn or newly born person,” from Proto-Germanic *kiltham (cognates: Gothic kilþei “womb,” inkilþo “pregnant;” Danishkuld “children of the same marriage;” Old Swedish kulder “litter;” Old English cildhama “womb,” lit. “child-home”); no certain cognates outside Germanic. “App[arently] originally always used in relation to the mother as the ‘fruit of the womb'” [Buck]. Also in late Old English, “a youth of gentle birth” (archaic, usually written childe). In 16c.-17c. especially “girl child.”

So in effect, we have, as Robespierre herself ob-serves, both a sense in which the fœtus is ‘in the way’ (‘child’ as ‘pregnant woman’). But maybe Donna is also ‘in the way’, being a ‘girl child’ rather than perhaps a ‘woman’.

This is not a criticism of Donna along the lines of ‘ooh, she should grow up and stop being a child and become a woman.’ But it is about the territory that the film explores.

I’ve got about three minutes left, so now having done my set-up, I type for my life.

How can a child be ‘in the way’? Well, literally, when a woman is pregnant a child emerges on the road/way of life. But we think about things being ‘in the way’ as an ob-stacle a lot of the time, and it’s that sense of the term that I want to run with. What world is this where a child is ‘in the way’? A strange one, but it is one about futures.

We look at our lives and we all (perhaps as a result of the media – but that is not the topic today) project forwards to a hypothetical life that we wish to lead. We live so much of our lives now in the future: where we want to go. As a result, we do not particularly live in the present. Paradoxically, by trying to write in advance our futures, we also (try to) deny the futurity of the future: our lives are not uncertain (the future has ‘futurity’ because it is ‘open’, or unknown), but instead our lives are already written (we know what will happen if those ambitions are realised).

(Maybe a potential child feels to many people as precisely a ‘writing’ of the future, such that we would be chained to parenthood and not able to pursue anymore our ambitions, but I query this. Kids or not, you can still lead your own life – but maybe this is a man talking, because motherhood arguably is completely different from fatherhood and does entail more of a sacrifice of one’s open future. In this sense, maybe Donna is completely justified in the abortion since she has ambitions to pursue.)

But I think that this is the strange sensation that the film captures so well: that we are all unsure about the life that we are leading. Are we in the right place? Are we with the right person? And we do not decide a lot of the time (‘we’ being, here, a middle class human likely from the ‘global north’), because we dither over what it is that we are supposed to do; what is ‘best’ for us, drowning in our ignorance because how (the fuck) can anyone know what is their future? But we struggle with the present, because we are worried that what is ‘in our way’ is going to stop us from realising future ambitions (in Donna’s case, being a successful comedian, hopefully at some point – it would seem – on the television and/or in the movies).

This is a terrible anxiety – because we do not know if our futures are going to be the ones ‘we wanted’. In short, choice is a privilege, but it is also an unbearably light (light in the sense of being something only certain people can afford) privilege, almost intolerable. And while Donna makes a decision, and while we admire for her decision, that sense of ‘am I making the right decision?’ pervades the film in an unspoken fashion.

This is the life selfish: deciding what is ‘right’ for oneself. Robespierre makes a film that, while funny, arresting and charming (and the comedy of the film, the fact that the film is a comedy, merits some analysis, too, in that comedy is a com-munal experience that allows us to be ‘beside ourselves’ with laughter – i.e. looking at ourselves as if from the outside), explores this in the most serious terms possible – by making this about the life of an obvious child.

Is one right to think for oneself? We can never know, we just have to decide. And while choice is surely a privilege for those who have a ‘smooth ride’ – those who have choice still must choose. Having chosen, we can always stand by people’s choices. But the film captures that moment when one is stuck, struggling, tormented: projecting into the future, such that what is glaringly before us (a child!) seems ‘in the way’.

I’m still thinking about this film – but wanted to get this down. I am permanently worried that I make the wrong choices, that I just ‘drift’ and if only I’d done x or y then maybe I’d be closer to ‘where I want to be’ (because somehow the life I have is always not quite the one I want, it is ‘obvious’ – right before me, but also somehow in the way, blocking me from the life I feel that I somehow want, perhaps even ought, to be leading).

Maybe others have similar feelings – that is why I’ve tried to write this down (hastily, for which apologies). If no one else does have such feelings, then at least this posting can function as something like therapy for myself.

Now – The New Hope awaits…

A Story of Children and Film (Mark Cousins, UK, 2013)

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

This blog post is written ahead of introducing A Story of Children and Film at the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton, London, at 6.30pm on Tuesday 27 May 2014.

A Story of Children and Film explores the way in which cinema has dealt with children over the course of its florid history. Mark Cousins, most famously responsible for The Story of Film (UK, 2011), makes a movie that involves clips from some 50 plus movies from all periods of film history and from all over the world.

Analysing clips from films as diverse as E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1982), Beed-o baad/Willow and Wind (Mohammed-Ali Talebi, Iran/Japan, 2000) and La petite vendeuse de soleil/The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal/France/Switzerland/Germany, 1999), Cousins suggests that children bring to cinema an energy, a vitality and perhaps even an innocence that is not always present in mainstream, adult-centred fictional cinema.

Indeed, remarkably Cousins brings into the film his own niece and nephew, who themselves are by turns timid and performative as he trains his camera on them.

It is an entirely everyday scene, with Cousins and his young wards dressed in pyjamas playing with toys on his living room floor. Nonetheless, there are several things to highlight here.

Firstly, the very everydayness of the situation is important. For, in presenting to us a scene of everyday life, rather than a specific and rehearsed performance of children singing, for example, Cousins brings to his film precisely what he admires in those of other filmmakers, namely life.

This is in part Cousins’ documentary spirit at work, but with the child, it ties in with the sense of energy that children can and do bring to a film, and which Cousins describes in an interview. For, even when acting in a fiction film, there is a sense in which the child is not acting (even if they are acting up), but rather are performing themselves, performing as themselves, and thus revealing to us something more genuine than a studied performance.

In effect, in not being an adult, the child brings to cinema something unadulterated – and this sense of the genuine, of the unadulterated, is perhaps the most exciting thing that cinema can offer – not a projection of our fantasies, but a mirror that shows back to us our world, replete as it is with fantasies of being or becoming cinematic (kids can be and often are, after all, very aware of the camera).

As their moods range from timid to performative, we see in Cousins’ nephew and niece another of cinema’s chief powers, namely its ability to capture change. Cinema is perhaps unique among artforms in this sense, since it alone allows change to be made visible. Where painting and sculpture can show us the static, cinema shows change – and children help to bring both change itself and the possibility for change to the fore, since children are always on the cusp of change, always changing from day to the next, changing from minute to minute. Children are perhaps, then, inherently cinematic – and this is something that Cousins draws out in spades.

The ability for cinema to depict time means that cinema is also not just about depicting things and objects, but the relations between them. What I mean by this is that cinema is not necessarily about one moment and then the next – even if most mainstream films are structured in such a way as to suggest that cinema is precisely this.

Instead, cinema can and often does show us how we get from one minute to the next – the in-between moments that painting perhaps can never depict (although there is a whole history of painters that do try to do this). In showing us how we get from one moment to the next, cinema is interested in the relations between one moment and the next.

This ties in with what I am calling Cousins’ documentary spirit, or instinct: for, as children make clear to us a sense of the unadulterated, a sense of change and a sense therefore of relations, then cinema at its most powerful for Cousins is a cinema that shows a child struggling against elements in transporting a sheet of glass to his school (as happens in Willow and Wind).

That is, even if this is a scripted scene, it is a scene that takes place in the real world, and which takes time – or which is ‘slow’ from the perspective of mainstream cinema – because mainstream cinema often shows to us what needs to be done and then the thing done, with no sense of the work gone into it.

Cinema with more of an eye for documentary, cinema with more of an eye for what cinema, as a time-based medium can do, thus embraces the slow, it embraces work, it embraces effort, it embraces change, it embraces relations and how we fit into the world. Perhaps it is only apt that Cousins (no pun intended) would include his own relations in the film.

And perhaps it is only apt that he, too, should be such a prominent figure in the film – not least as a result of his voiceover – because he is not an abstracted observer of the world, but, too, is participant in, in relation to, the world – just as films exist in relation to us, influencing and changing us as we change in and with the world ourselves.

So cinema is about relations. And the breadth of Cousins’ choices, from America to Senegal to Iran, helps to demonstrate that all films, just like all humans, themselves exist in relation. Thinking of both cinema and the world ecologically, we come to the conclusion that Senegal is as important as America, even if from the commercial and/or economic perspective it is easy to overlook.

In effect, Cousins adopts a child’s perspective on the world – and finds fascination and takes delight in the so-called ‘small’ film as much as in the big-budget expensive film, because he, like a child, has not yet been trained to take notice only of what is big and loud, but he can be fascinated, too, by the small and the quiet.

In effect, Cousins is, like a child, undiscriminating in his tastes; he takes his cinema pure, unadulterated, not filtered for him by the mechanisms that typically make us view only the fast and the furious (which being full of sound and fury surely signifies little to nothing), but open-eyed and whole.

Cousins says in another interview that his films are all about the richness of looking. This is indeed true. His films are not about the solipsistic world in which, as we grow up, we are encouraged only to look out for ourselves, to think only of Number One, but in looking we also realise that we are in relation to other humans.

In private correspondence, Cousins has told me that he works on budgets for his films that are very similar in size to the budgets that I use to work on mine (which puts me to shame given how good his films are).

This, too, is important: he has made a small film here, about small humans. It encourages us not to look over that which is small, and he encourages not to be fooled by surface appearances. Like a child, we can instead look for and find joy in internal richness

We can find joy in the world as cinema presents it to us: perhaps a bit slow, but unadulterated and full of energy and life.