Film reviews

Notes from the LFF: Electro Chaabi/Electro Shaabi (Hind Meddeb, Egypt/France, 2013)

Blogpost, Egyptian Cinema, Film reviews, London Film Festival 2013

Hind Meddeb’s documentary is about a group of Cairo-based musicians who have pioneered and cornered as their own the genre of ‘electro shaabi’ – a fusion of hip hop, electronic music, protest songs and Middle Eastern and Indian sounds.

Over the course of the film, the extended group begins to splinter, in particular as two of their number, Oka and Ortega, gain commercial success and begin to appear on television, in films, and elsewhere. Of course, they drop their long-standing collaborators like a stone – as per the story of commercial success from indy roots that has been told so often.

The film, however, remains with Wiza, Figo and others, especially MC Sadat, who continue to eke out an existence on the streets as performers at birthday parties, weddings and the like. Their music is often pirated (they tell a story of being ripped off by one of Egypt’s biggest film stars); and they rarely/barely see a penny for their creative endeavours. But, Oka and Ortega perhaps aside, making money is not what motivates them; telling their story is their raison d’être.

This seems also to be Meddeb’s rationale for making this film; the film has an evidently low budget, features much ‘crude’ handheld camera work, and yet captures the vibrancy of the Cairo streets.

The film culminates in MC Sadat and friends observing a march against Mohamed Morsi. It is not my place to judge these actions; Morsi may have been the first democratically elected President of Egypt, and to have had him deposed by the military may seem to an outside observer a worrying sign of anything but democracy – but however odd such events may seem to the outsider, those on the march evidently are against Morsi. And the reason that I raise this is because on the march, MC Sadat explains that those marching are ‘the people’ – and he asks how can the people be considered enemies of the nation. And yet protestors are (often) considered enemies of the nation because they do not conform to the image of that nation that someone else – typically in power – is trying to impose.

The reason that I mention this sequence is because an interesting distinction seems to be drawn here by MC Sadat, one that is perhaps enlightening beyond Electro Shaabi, and which is arguably ‘philosophical’ in nature. By in effect saying that the people and the nation are separate entities/phenomena, we gain a sense of how the people perhaps always eludes the nation.

That is, the nation is a top-down concept that is imposed upon various humans who, for whatever reason, happen to live within certain geographical boundaries during a certain period of history. The people, meanwhile, cuts across those temporal and spatial boundaries – in a fashion that cannot entirely be defined.

For so long, thinkers and politicians have tried to characterise the people according to nationality; the concept of the nation was a means to contain the rebellious libido of the people. And yet now we seem to have a sense – from MC Sadat’s interpretation of contemporary Egypt at least – that the people cannot be contained, and that the nation might well be a concept that needs refining and redefining, even if MC Sadat is referring (paradoxically) to a uniquely Egyptian situation when he raises his question about the people and the nation.

Nonetheless, what we can glean from MC Sadat in Electro Shaabi might have significance elsewhere: the people always exceeds (perhaps even disappoints) the nation, or those who seek to apply a rigid definition to what constitutes a (particular) nation at any rate. It is this excess that is their power, their source of hope, that potential for change. Long may it elude definition…

A final aside: the film definitely embraces the utopian potential of digital technology, with musicians using free software to make their music, and online video sites to share their music. Although the story of Egypt is far from finished, there remains hope when we know that people like MC Sadat are still out there, and that they will not (they say) be nullified by the bright possibility of becoming light, of becoming cinema, as happens to Oka and Ortega.

Instead, MC Sadat and friends elude the ‘cinematic’ in the sense of glossy, beautiful/beatified images, and instead belong to that other aesthetic that is ‘cinema’s’ necessary but neglected twin, the non-cinema that is low grade images, low grade sound, but all the more real because achieved in a guerrilla fashion. An intriguing film.

Notes from the LFF: Taşkafa: Stories from the Street (Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Turkey, 2013)

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

Taşkafa: Stories from the Street is ostensibly a film about street dogs in Istanbul. It consists of interviews with residents of the city – who talk about the role and meaning that the street dogs play in their lives – as well as the reading by John Berger of extracts from his novel, King, which, in Zimmerman’s own words, is ‘a story of hope, dreams, love and resistance, told from the perspective of a dog belonging to a community facing disappearance, even erasure.’

Made for a tiny budget, Taşkafa is a wonderful example of what we might call democratic filmmaking. That is, the film seeks to explore the ways in which human society – in this case the city of Istanbul – often seeks to exclude from its reality – here, dogs – that in fact are a core part of that society’s ecosystem.

That the dogs form a core part of Istanbul’s ecosystem is made clear by the testimonies of many of the city’s dwellers. And yet, as we hear from numerous Istanbulites, we get the impression that these humans, too, might be on the verge of exclusion. In other words, what is true of dogs and other animals – that some humans seek to exclude them from their lives for the sake of a ‘sanitised’ (bourgeois?) existence – seems also to be true of people.

In other words, while ostensibly about street dogs, then, Taşkafa is really about the drive to exclude certain ‘undesired’ aspects of society from our spaces – and all in the name of ‘progress’.

As such, the film is a passionate defence of what we might term ‘the people’ – but with people here extended into the realm of people and their confederate animals, with whom we share our existence.

Given its emphasis on people and a desire to include that which is otherwise excluded, it is important that Zimmerman’s film gives voice to people – and gives screen time to dogs – who can tell their own story or show their existence.

Zimmerman has written about how films should be collaborative and communal – a perspective I tend to share. This means that her work is not far from Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of ‘modern political cinema’ – a cinema comprised of ‘intercessors’ – people who come in and tell their own story, with or without embellishment and/or exaggeration, and who thus shape the film with, perhaps even instead of, the so-called auteur.

And thus, since time is the focus of Deleuze’s study of modern political and other ‘time-image’ cinemas, we can understand that Taşkafa is also really about time. It is about the need for the world to allow people to live at their own pace, and not to be coerced into leading their lives following the beat of a particular (for want of a better generalisation, capitalist) drum.

A film made under the dictates of profit and production value is always already taking part in this ‘capitalist’ process of homogeneising time, of making all humans march to the same rhythm (this militaristic image is intentional). And so it is also important that Zimmerman is working outside of the confines of the film industry qua industry.

There are nonetheless some issues. These centre around the question of ‘where do we stop?’ By which I mean to say: one of the Istanbulites in the film says that we should do no harm to plants or ants – in addition to dogs. Or rather (for my memory is not exact), if we cannot but occasionally do harm to plants and ants, then we should at least recognise their part in our ecosystem, the importance that even these overlooked elements play in our lives.

And yet Taşkafa seems to stop at dogs (and cats) – and we are not asked (not specifically, at least) to reflect on the provenance of the meat that we see some people offer to the dogs. Is to eat meat to be harmful? Or is it that – beyond good and evil – we can eat meat, but we should be respectful of where it comes from? That is, we should give thanks to life – in all of its forms – meaning that we are now on ground similar, in the smallest type of film, to the ‘lesson’ offered in James Cameron’s Avatar (USA, 2009), the biggest type of film.

(Perhaps it is okay to like Avatar, but the issue is whether you can get beyond its insistent fast pace and its high production values and learn also to love Taşkafa, for the latter forms an equally important part of the mental, cinematic and perhaps material ecosystem that is our world. And if you cannot love Taşkafa, too, then you are potentially lost.)

And if we opened up our inclusive love for the world to ants and plants, then surely we must also to air, that which helps sustain and constitute us, and also then to mere matter for it is that from which we are composed, and thus also to antimatter, for antimatter is also real, simply it ‘exists’ at a different rhythm to matter itself. We need to push as far as we can go – this is my argument in Supercinema – in order to lead an ethical existence based on what we might call ‘withness.’

Finally, given his own views on the cruelty and indifference of nature, I wonder what Werner Herzog, to whom Zimmerman makes reference in her essay on Open Democracy, would make of Taşkafa? Does it romanticise its canine brethren (too much)? I’d like to think not, but I am interested nonetheless.

Taşkafa is a beautiful film – about much more than street dogs, as this blog post has hoped to suggest (and this is without going into the specificities of its being a film made and set in Istanbul, for which oversight on my part, apologies). It is wonderful that the LFF chose to programme it. It would be great to see more films like it…

The Repairman (Paolo Mitton, Italy/UK, 2013)

Blogpost, European cinema, Film reviews, Italian Cinema, Raindance Film Festival 2013, Uncategorized

Nominated for best debut feature at this year’s other London film festival, Raindance, The Repairman tells the story of Scanio (Daniele Savoca), a man who ekes out a living fixing machines for an absentee boss, and whose fate in life it is to be perennially criticised by his friends.

Scanio meets and enters into a relationship with Helena (Hannah Croft), but, ultimately, their relationship falters because Scanio cannot show much passion for her – obsessed instead as he is with his job, or at least with trying to maintain his job.

If the above synopsis seems brief, this is because not that much really happens in The Repairman. But instead of being a film about plot, The Repairman is, rather, a film about a certain mood or mode of living.

Put most succinctly, the mood or mode of the film is that shared by the main character, Scanio: a sort of strange, naïve but upbeat melancholy. ‘Upbeat melancholy’ probably sounds like a contradiction in terms. Well, perhaps does not so much sound like one as it actually is one. But this is because the terms are not quite sufficient to convey the mood/mode of the film – and the difficulty that one has with conveying the mood/mode of the film is in fact what makes the film particularly unique and worthy of a brief blog on a Raindance film amid what I hope will be a few posts about films from the ‘bigger’ London Film Festival.

One could potentially characterise The Repairman as bittersweet, but this is a term one might use for a Mike Leigh film or some such – and while there is humour in Mike Leigh, his films are not (often) as overtly comic as is The Repairman. The film features scene after scene of slow charm – wry observations of dinner party conversation, quirks of habit, the refusal to conform – mixed in with very un-Mike Leigh-like quasi-fantasy elements.

Put in terms of cinematic precedents, The Repairman might be defined as a mix of Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain/Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France/Germany, 2001) and the works of cineastes like Nanni Moretti and Jacques Tati.

The Amélie elements are suggested by the interest in technology shown by the film and the way in which these are interspersed with romantic elements. It is a staple of Jeunet’s work, especially his collaborations with Marc Caro (particularly Delicatessen, France, 1991 and La cité des enfants perdus/The City of Lost Children, France/Germany/Spain, 1995) for his characters to be working on machines – and this is of course one of Scanio’s main pastimes, creating/inventing new and better machines from older, neglected and/or broken ones.

The repurposing of older machines means that The Repairman oddly has vague elements of steampunk, though it is far from being a steampunk film; this is because, as per Jeunet’s films, there seems to be a sort of nostalgia for times past. But here Mitton’s film diverges from Jeunet’s work, because while Jeunet incorporates high end digital special effects to (re)create a mythical past, Mitton’s film on the whole eschews high end special effects.

And this is not simply for budgetary reasons. Indeed, Mitton’s career has seen him work as part of the digital visual effects team on a number of big budget productions, including Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, USA/Malta/UK, 2004) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton, USA/UK, 2005).

Indeed, The Repairman features at its outset a significant digital special effect in the form of a duck that is flying over the fields of northern Italy as Scanio and one of his friends drive through the countryside. However, the duck soon hits a overhead electricity wire and falls to the ground, lifeless.

No doubt this image can be read in multiple different ways – including as a metaphor for Scanio’s spiritual development. However, it also seems to encapsulate the film’s nostalgia: unlike Jeunet’s work, here is a film that wants to achieve its effects in an old-fashioned, ‘lo-fi’ fashion – and the choice is a deliberate one because digital special effects are kept to an absolute minimum.

As a result of the divergence, then, between The Repairman and Amélie – in spite of the resemblance between them that is also useful to convey the experience of watching the film – the film moves more into the realm of the likes of Nanni Moretti and Jacques Tati.

Like Jeunet, Moretti and Tati are also well known for their nostalgia – Moretti for a time when films were simple, Tati for a less technologised and impersonal world. The Repairman shows an appreciation of technology – but its appreciation is what we might call ‘holistic’ in the sense that Scanio is all about resuscitating old, broken machines, rather than following the (capitalist) logic of casting out the old through the creation of both the new and the obsolescent. That is, Scanio loves all machines, not just the new ones that contemporary fetishists of technology seem uniquely and exclusively to endorse.

Here the film’s slow pace, together with its unhappy-happy ending (spoilers – but the guy does not get the girl), become important aspects of the film, even if both likely make it a harder film to ‘sell’ to audiences. For, the system that drives technology to be a celebration only of the new at the expense of the old is the same system that demands constant and rapid bursts of excitement, grand spectacles, and the myth that everything is always only ever improving.

By deliberately eschewing spectacle – the CGI duck is removed from the film in the first scene (although it does return) – Mitton seems also to celebrate slowness, to find a loving humour in slowness, which makes the film a sort of ‘slow comedy’ – with comedy not often being linked to other manifestations of what we might term ‘slow cinema’ – which refers to a cinema that explicitly rejects the ethos of the technology-driven and rapid-paced crash bang wallop mainstream (Hollywood and its imitators).

The myth of the happy ending – perhaps even the myth of the heterosexual couple – is also challenged for similar reasons: that technology only gets better and that the old stuff can be discarded suggests that happiness increases as the world is always ending. Mitton, however, rejects this, as Helena ultimately rejects Scanio. Scanio’s ability to see beauty in obsolete machines – and his ability to recycle them in unique and original ways – suggests a different time, a different rhythm of life – one grounded in technology and the contemporary world, but with a different approach to it.

In short, why not be unhappy? Perhaps one can derive greater happiness from being oneself – a fetishist of old machines? – than one can from trying to conform to society’s norms (settling into a heterosexual union).

Here we have shades of Tati and shades of Moretti. In Caro Diario/Dear Diary (Moretti, Italy/France, 1993), Nanni (playing himself) comes across Jennifer Beales (playing herself) in Rome. A discussion arises (as far as I recall – it has been a long time since I saw the film) over the term sciemo – a term applied to Nanni and which is translated as ‘whimsical’. This is perhaps a term for The Repairman as well. For, as per Moretti’s film, The Repairman also has an idiosyncratic slowness, an insistence that life will – can – only be lived at one’s own pace. For life lived to the beat of someone else’s drum is not life at all.

The same is often the case with Tati: in Play Time (France/Italy, 1967), we see clearly how the rhythms of modern life are crazy in comparison to that of the famous Monsieur Hulot (played by Tati himself). And while the same Hulot in fact, like Scanio, is involved in the creation of ingenious vehicles in Trafic (Italy/France, 1971), the film is also a celebration of slowness, learning to love breakdowns, and living with the consequences of that.

For, as Hulot is fired at the end of Trafic (all of Tati’s films have ‘bittersweet’ endings), so, too does Scanio not find happiness as per mainstream movies at the end of The Repairman. Although Hulot may seemingly walk away with the girl in Trafic, and although Scanio does not walk away with the girl in The Repairman, nonetheless, Tati and Mitton seem to share a love for slowness and a celebration of what others might deem to be failure – since this is also a part of life, and if we are to know and to love living, then we must acknowledge, accept and even love this part of life, too.

Tati himself plays Hulot – and Moretti plays a screen version of himself in Dear Diary (among other films). Although Mitton is not in his own film, nonetheless The Repairman declares at its opening that this is a true story – or that this happened to ‘me’, anyway. Who ‘me’ is, is unclear; it could be Scanio already talking, or it could be Mitton from ‘beyond’ the diegesis of the film.

Either way, one gets the impression of a deeply personal film having been made. Quirky, slightly hard to understand, but valuable for those very attributes, for its determination to go at its own rhythm, its determination not necessarily to have a happy resolution, and yet its determination to find warmth, humanity and humour in (spite of) the situations presented to us, makes of The Repairman a unique and precious film.

Brief Thoughts on The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2012)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

Thoughts on The Master can perhaps only be ill-formed, since the film is so complex that it any writing on it will only reduce its richness into too-easy sense (?). Nonetheless, here are some brief thoughts on PTA’s latest masterwork.

The film is a great love story between Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as signalled – spoilers – by the end of the film where Freddie finally finds a girl called Winn Manchester (Jennifer Neala Page): Lancaster/Manchester and Quell are finally united in acceptable form as Freddie performs the same psychiatric-type session on Winn as Dodd performed on him earlier in the film.

And what drives this love affair is the opposite nature of the two characters: Dodd seems to want to eliminate the id from humanity such that humans can return to their perfect, soulful state, while Freddie is a man driven by the id and, while still with ego, seemingly without superego to censor his actions. As such, Freddie becomes the object of Dodd’s obsession as much as vice versa – and we have a true exploration of master-servant relationships such that both are inseparable (master needs servant as servant needs master) – on the scale and in the league of Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître and Molière’s Tartuffe.

The mutual obsession is signalled through otherness: one can never tell in Anderson’s unnerving film whether violence will erupt and the two will kill each other or embrace each other. They go hunting in the desert for a lost manuscript with guns – bringing back Dodd’s second book, Split Saber, from the wilderness like Moses with the Ten Commandments. Will they kill each other? Will either fall off their motorbike and die as they drive that – meaningfully again in the desert…? Will Dodd kill Freddie when they part – or will he erupt into song…? Time and again we are kept on tenterhooks as we simply cannot predict what will happen. Being unable to predict the actions of others reaffirms their otherness – and since we cannot understand them as a result of this otherness, we are compelled to analyse, scrutinise, look for me: can we make sense of them?

This tension is achieved by Anderson’s insistence upon long takes (not always, but often and relentlessly). It is also achieved by his use of long shots and masterful mise-en-scène in such a way that all too often we find ourselves seeing at the last minute characters, such as Dodd’s wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), staring offscreen at Freddie – her gaze having otherwise eluded our attention because of other movements and areas of focus in the frame.

The result is that our relationship with The Master is like Lancaster’s relationship with Quell. Those moments where we see something in the frame after several seconds of looking and scrutinising induce in the viewer a moment of panic: did I miss something? What else was going on that I did not see?

Not only does this make of Anderson’s film a film to be scrutinised and studied – perhaps endlessly – but it also lends to the film a sense of its own otherness: there is always something more to see, or rather the sense that there are depths that we do not and cannot see (even though they are there before our very eyes, incessantly excessive, demonstrating the limits of human perception in that we simply cannot take in all that the universe has to offer – not consciously at least, even if, like the camera, we record everything as Peggy says early on in the film, including everything that happened to the molecules from which we are constituted right back to the dawn of time).

There is also an unpredictability in Anderson’s script. Dodd’s son, Val (Jesse Plemons), tells Freddie that Dodd makes it up as he goes along. He is probably correct – as Dodd contradicts himself the whole time, cannot take being questioned in public (and perhaps not in private), as he himself must deal with his id, as Freddie also struggles with his ego. Suddenly Dodd will speak of the importance of laughter, or get Freddie to touch a wall. The film is so bizarre in this way that we are kept on our toes.

Compare to the finely crafted prose of many of the great writers (Shakespeare comes to mind): in Shakespeare we have repeated motifs and themes, such that each play is a masterpiece of tight construction – while Anderson’s characters are imbued with a sense of liveness, of spontaneity in the dialogue – we can never tell what they are going to say.

Again, the effect is disconcerting, but it is also profound. As Shakespeare lived in an era in which a clockwork universe and the motions of the spheres suggested tight construction that would naturally be reflected in the drama of its time, Anderson’s film is haunted by the chaos of the nuclear age – with World War Two and the spectre of Japan haunting the film through Freddie’s wartime experiences, the tail-end of which we see in the film’s opening scenes. In short, Anderson’s universe may well have patterns, but it is also full of randomness, chaos, the unpredictability of thought and the strange associations that the improvising human mind can make up (this within a tightly constructed film that suggests not a chaos or a cosmos, but a chaosmos of sorts).

Finally, though, there is of course something to Dodd’s method, even though charlatan he be. For what is wrong with improvisation? In a chaotic universe, perhaps playful improvisation is the best we can hope for – hence Dodd’s explosions of anger and frustration when Helen Sullivan (Laura Dern) suggests confusion that Dodd might have changed the emphasis in his works from memory to the imagination. Helen seeks too much order, whereas Dodd is only interested in endless experiment and the freedom that can come with simply seeing where thought can lead you. With working out what a brain can do. And Freddie working out what a body can do (and what it can consume – with his endless poison concoctions). There are pitfalls to experimentation and play – madness perhaps lies down this road. But so, too, is there madness in self-willed imprisonment.

So maybe we can only play with The Master and see where it leads us, with Anderson also seeing where filmmaking can lead him (and his actors going on a similar journey).

There is much more to say about this film – on so many levels. But for the time being, these are my brief, inept thoughts on the film. Another great piece of cinema from one of the best in the American business.

Looper (Rian Johnson, USA/China, 2012) (In Memoriam Chris Marker 2)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Uncategorized

(This blog contains spoilers – pretty much all of them – so it is basically for people who have seen the film or who realise that spoilers do not in fact spoil a film. Indeed, knowing what happens plot-wise allows you to tell if the film is actually any good, because a good film will keep you interested in spite of knowing the twists, while a mediocre film relies on the twists and not on how they are revealed to entertain audiences.)

I like Rian Johnson’s films. Brick (USA, 2005) is a quirky high school noir that has very dark edges around its comic exterior, while The Brothers Bloom (USA, 2008) is under-watched and a bit under-rated – Johnson can do the con film as well as any.

In some respects, I like Looper, but I am also a bit disappointed by it – and my disappointment springs from a different outlook on the world to the one that Johnson’s film seems to me to present, and which I shall elaborate below.

Looper tells the story of Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who kills men sent back in time from 2074 to 2044, when he lives. One day, an older version of himself (Bruce Willis) is sent back in time and Joe fails to kill him. Instead, he must go on the hunt for him – along with all of the crooks who are disappointed that young Joe has failed to ‘close his loop’ – i.e. to kill his older self, a standard practice for loopers who then have thirty years of happy retirement.

Old Joe does not want to die because, although he has spent many years as a violent killer both in Kansas, the film’s principle setting, and in Shanghai, which features during a brief section that summarises Joe’s ‘retirement’, he latterly learns to be good thanks to a woman (Summer Qing/Qing Xu), whom we never hear speak and who basically looks lovingly at Old Joe in the bits in which she features.

We sort of understand Old Joe not wanting to die – who does want to die? – but he’s not exactly a saint, either. In order to stop himself from dying, he decides to use his obligation to travel back in time in order to kill the childhood version of a future supervillain called the Rainmaker, who is ordering the closing of all the loops, i.e. the deaths of all of the loopers – including Joe himself.

If you’re not sure what this means, let’s put it another way: yes, the Rainmaker’s future crime will be – as far as the film is concerned – cleaning up the streets of heartless hitmen.

The problem is that this heartless hitman, Old Joe, now has a heart – and it’s been broken, since the men who took Joe also killed his seemingly mute wife – and so revenge must be his.

Only Old Joe does not know who the Rainmaker is – no one does. All Old Joe knows is that it’s one of three kids born on a certain day and living, as if by coincidence, in the very same county that he worked in (as a looper) in his youth.

And Old Joe happily kills at least one of the kids – and shoots another in the face, this other kid turning out to be the future Rainmaker.

Regular Joe decides to to stop Old Joe from killing the Rainmaker, his motivation being that by virtue of meeting Old Joe the chances of Old Joe’s life becoming the life that regular Joe leads – or vice versa – are greatly diminished, leaving regular Joe free to grow up into a different Old Joe who won’t have the same regrets as Old Joe does. That and because regular Joe believes that his future self should not want to live any longer than the deal is for loopers – the mandatory 30 years – because obviously there is honour among murdering thieves.

Or rather, there is no honour here. Regular Joe is an anti-hero if nothing else: he sells out his best friend Seth (Paul Dano), who is mutilated before being killed, and he wants to kill his older self so as to avoid a life on the run. In other words, regular Joe thinks only about himself and his glamorous lifestyle.

In trying to prevent Old Joe from killing the kid who would be Rainmaker, however, regular Joe meets and falls partially in love with Sara (Emily Blunt), the mother of the Rainmaker-to-be and whom regular Joe is protecting.

It is not that regular Joe learns a sense of moral responsibility. His’love’ for Sara is superficial at best. Furthermore, the kid who will or might become the Rainmaker, Cid (Pierce Gagnon), is, or at least can be, a mean, telekinetic (“teleki-what?“) little shit – with shades of We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, UK/USA, 2011) characterising their mother-son relationship.

It is only because Sara promises to raise Cid to be a good kid, to not become the Rainmaker, that the future might be averted. And Joe believes that Sara can do this, in spite of seeing Cid violently kill a man with the power of thought. For this reason, regular Joe decides to stop Old Joe from acting out his selfish love fantasy in the future.

Now, I do quite like Looper, even if the above synopsis makes it sound a bit dumb. The film has plenty of scenes that feature the quirky dialogue and narrative elements that Johnson is well known for: Sara describing how she found Cid after her sister, who was also Cid’s foster mother, had been killed (she was wearing a party dress and felt stupid); the frog beeper warning system that Sara forgets as soon as she is given it; the inept gunplay from useless henchman Kid Blue (Noah Segan).

These quirks lend to the film something human and touching, as do Johnson’s indulgences towards his actors (Jeff Daniels as crime boss Abe, who has been sent back from 2074 to oversee the loopers, in particular gets to showboat a nice amount in this film: “Trust me, I’m from the future. You want to go to China.”).

That said, Looper also has some daft elements. Foremost among these is the fact that it takes Old Joe several days to find and to kill the kids that could become the Rainmaker – even though he has their addresses and the local city seems pretty small. Furthermore, Old Joe also decides to risk his life by killing Abe and his many henchmen rather than getting on with killing Cid (and in spite of using loads of machine guns and grenades to do the former, he decides only to take a relatively small handgun to carry out the latter).

Furthermore, as the reduction of Old Joe’s wife to pure, unspeaking image suggests, Johnson does not care much for his female characters. Sara is, like Old Joe, something of a reformed character; a former party girl in the city, she now realises that raising Cid well is all that is important – but she does not really feature too strongly in the narrative (as mentioned, her love with/for regular Joe is superficial at best). Stripper Suzie (Piper Perabo), coincidentally the mother of the second could-be-Rainmaker child whose death we never see (because it never happens?), seems to be a woman that regular Joe wants to protect, meaning that regular Joe views Suzie not as a person but as an image to possess. In Suzie’s favour, she knocks regular Joe back, saying that she is quite happy being a stripper, since she has her independence, an independence that is rendered in the film as a cruel rejection of Joe such that she both basically disappears from the film and so that Old Joe must of course kill her son (whether he achieves this or not) to punish her for not wanting him.

However, in spite of these good and bad aspects of the film, none is quite what I want specifically to discuss.

What I want to discuss is the role of possible worlds in the film.

This isn’t about describing quantum physics and the like. Rather, we can stick to Looper and the other films that it talks to, rather than half-digested and half-developed theories from science, to explain what I mean.

Looper has various reference points. Foremost among these is the relationship between America and France. Joe is learning French (slowly) in the hope of moving to France upon closing his loop (something he never does, since he moves to China in the version of events that we see).

This desire to learn French expresses a desire to be in the old world – a desire for some old world sophistication, compared to the new world flash, glitz and shallow relationships and violence.

Joe’s desire to be French is mirrored in part by Johnson’s film itself. There are a couple of nods to Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle/2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (France, 1967), for example: twice in Looper we see cream clouding in a coffee cup in a manner reminiscent of Godard’s cosmos in a coffee cup sequence from that film.

The somewhat crummy and still-industrial city also partly suggests Godard’s sci-fi classic, Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution/Alphaville (France/Italy, 1965) – although the Kansas setting cannot help but also evoke The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, USA, 1939), which arguably makes of the film a Depression-era escapist fantasy, making it an interesting bedfellow with the also-quirky Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik, USA, 2012).

Furthermore, beyond the chaotic semi-references to Godard, any time travel film that involves a doubling of the self naturally recalls the great and late Chris Marker’s La Jetée (France, 1962). Indeed, here the casting of Bruce Willis becomes important, because Willis has of course played the role of the time-travelling anti-hero before – in Terry Gilliam’s remake of La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys (USA, 1995).

In other words, Johnson seems to express some sort of kinship with France. However, this kinship is for me superficial – in the same way that Twelve Monkeys does not match La Jetée in a lot of ways.

For, I am not sure that Johnson ‘gets’ much of the politics of the French New Wave. Godard may have spoken of making films that feature just images, but he also wanted to make films featuring images that are just. And this is perhaps what is lacking in Johnson’s film.

Maybe this can be expressed inadvertently through the film’s other casting: Piper Perabo, who plays Suzie, also played Geneviève Le Plouff in Melanie Mayron’s somewhat dim-witted Slap Her, She’s French! (Germany/USA/UK, 2002). As Joe wants Suzie/Perabo, so do Johnson and Joe seemingly want to be French, without realising that the object of their desire is in fact not French at all, but an actress pretending to be French, a superficial understanding of what it is or might be to be French. As Suzie is reduced simply to a symbol in the film, so, too, is France and the French films to which Johnson seems to wish to speak.

Not only is Looper a bit superficial, then, but it also seems to fail to understand the lessons learned from La Jetée and from other time travel loop films such as Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, USA, 2001), which seems a much more appropriate point of comparison for this film than is, say, The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA, 1999), to which the film has otherwise and to my mind erroneously been compared.

In La Jetée, the man (Davos Hanich) is sent back in time – to various different points in time – in order to try to save the world from the fate that awaits it after World War Three: no food, a life underground, no medicine, etc. Like Joe in Looper, he is haunted by the woman that he loves, as well as by an image of a man being shot at Orly airport in his childhood. At the film’s climax, the man realises that he saw his own death as a kid.

While La Jetée suggests that even if we could travel in time we cannot escape our own fate, Looper tries to be more upbeat. It says that maybe we can change the future, that perhaps we are only always ever changing the future – since every interaction between regular Joe and Old Joe causes Old Joe’s memories to change.

In some ways, Johnson’s film has here a sophisticated understanding of what time travel might be like and the parallel universes that are opened up by it. Furthermore, the way in which Old Joe and regular Joe basically completely disagree with each other suggests that Johnson understands humans as ultimately multiple – we could become many different people in our lives – and Cid could end up not being the Rainmaker – a source of hope perhaps in that we are not doomed from the off to a pre-ordained destiny to which we personally do not have access.

However, while I like all of this in terms of its understanding of the multiverse and of the multiple personalities that exist as potential within us as individuals, it seems to miss something.

Perhaps a closer comparison with Donnie Darko can bring this out. In Richard Kelly’s film, Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) realises that in the 28 days since he was supposed to have died, all of his fantasies come true: he gets the girl, he’s a hero at school, a period of total wish fulfilment made clear by Donnie’s line to Gretchen (Jena Malone): “how do you know I’m not [a superhero]?”

However, Donnie learns that having all that he desires is not all it is cracked up to be. For living beyond his own death and having his fantasies fulfilled also causes Gretchen to die at the hands of Frank (James Duval), who is in turn shot dead by Donnie.

In other words, while one can know that there are many parallel universes and many parallel lives for us to lead, I wonder that the moral choice that one should make is to accept the life that one has – since one never knows what will be the consequences of one’s selfish desires, of fulfilling one’s own fantasies.

If this is what Donnie Darko seems to tell us – Donnie goes back to the moment of his death at the hands of a falling jet engine so that Gretchen can live – this is not what Looper seems to suggest. Looper instead seems to suggest that we should fight to change our fates.

This might seem counterintuitive to argue. For, at the film’s climax regular Joe kills himself in order to prevent Old Joe from trying to kill Cid, an act that most likely will make him become precisely the Rainmaker that Old Joe is hoping to eradicate.

(And if Old Joe succeeded in killing Cid, what then?)

And yet, in killing himself regular Joe consigns Old Joe to being a deluded weirdo who is preparing to kill kids in order to spend some more time with his wife and in order maybe to have kids of his own.

Maybe this is fair enough: that Joe, Old Joe, is irreconcilably nasty – in spite of believing himself not to be – and self-interested, that regular Joe, who learns how to be nice, must kill him off by killing himself off.

But it seems disappointing on a certain level for Old Joe not to realise the error of his ways and to let Cid go – and in such a way that in doing this Cid might also not become the Rainmaker that he is otherwise supposedly destined to become.

We are told by Abe that coming back from the future addles one’s brain – and maybe this is plainly what happens to Old Joe. Nothing too complex, in spite of the gimmickry around time travel: just a guy going mental because he’s ended up 30 years in the past with a younger version of himself.

Indeed, how many people do die without learning moral lessons? How is this not like the rage of a drunken brawler who will not see reason – and why should I cling to and endeavour to judge Johnson’s film by a romantic notion that reason will ‘out’ and that we would choose to accept our fates. We know full well that some people are just not like that – and they will take all that they can regardless of the cost to others.

So in some senses, Johnson’s film is insightful: some people – ourselves, even – will not and never will see reason, and so must be killed.

But if Johnson’s film claims to offer hope – the Rainmaker may not grow up to be an evil telekinetic tyrant – it does so by being hopeless about Old Joe’s capacity to change. In other words, there is bad faith in Old Joe (he must be killed), such that the supposed ‘good faith’ in Cid/the Rainmaker (he might grow up to be good) seems unfounded. If there were good faith, the Joes would work out some way around the conundrum.

Abe and regular Joe discuss the latter’s propensity to wear ties. Abe mocks Joe for trying to affect a twentieth century look taken from the movies. Johnson’s film may be self-conscious about the role of affectation and the appropriation of styles – but this does not prevent Johnson’s film from precisely affecting to offer us something that ultimately it does not match, since it is only an affectation without the conviction of the original.

Perhaps this is why the film’s most experimental opening half hour, with formally interesting upside down sequences, stretched images, and more, disappear from the film when the prerogative demanding at least some action kicks in and Johnson must respond to the need for his film to make some money.

This was La Jetée‘s total genius – making me miss Chris Marker even more: his film is composed almost entirely of still images. That is, not only does Marker not resort to regular action as Johnson does in Looper, but he makes a film that is almost entirely devoid of action in the conventional sense of the word (moving people, moving images).

Johnson’s film reflects a world without conviction – and as such is fascinating and surely well made – just like the films of Christopher Nolan, to whom no doubt some/many will compare Looper, if not his other films. But this world without conviction seems to wear a mask of conviction (as Joseph Gordon-Levitt wears a mask throughout the film to make him look a bit more like Bruce Willis – at least, I assume this to be the case), but never shows its true face. A great film always allows its true face to emerge; it accepts its fate, rather than aspiring to be cinematic on someone else’s terms. Rather than having it all, it accepts its limitations and realises that it is those limitations that perhaps set us most free.

The We and the I (Michel Gondry, UK/USA/France, 2012)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, French Cinema, Transnational Cinema

There is a moment in Michel Gondry’s The We and the I when the kids on the bus that is journeying across New York all seem to stop what they are doing and to look in awe at a beautiful white girl cycling on the sidewalk in a floral summer dress.

The film switches determinedly to slow motion as we see the girl cycling, heads turning, and one kid, Jacobchen (Jacob Carrasco), leaping up from his seat to fix a closer look at her.

This will perhaps sound odd, but at this moment what I shall call the cinematic manifests itself in full force. This no doubt sounds odd because The We and the I is, of course, a film. That is, the whole film is cinematic – and so it is strange to say that this moment is particularly cinematic, because it implies somehow that the rest of the film is not.

The point that I wish to make here is not that the rest of The We and the I is uncinematic; but it is interesting that a technique as cinematic as slow motion manifests itself at a moment when these kids – otherwise stars of their own movie(s), as I shall discuss below – become spectators in another movie, the movie of the beautiful white girl on the bike.

Not only does this moment powerfully suggest that New York is a cinematic city, but also that it has more stories to tell than the one, or the many, that are being told on the bus that takes these kids towards their homes on the last day of school.

But this moment also suggests the way in which these kids aspire to be cinematic; the straight boys, the gay boys, and the straight and arguably gay girls, all seem to look with desire at the white girl – wishing, it would seem, to have her life, to be able to move in slow motion, carefree and easy, rather than cooped up on this bus with its interminable journey through a New York that passes from sunny to rainy and from day to night.

It is perhaps important that Jacobchen shouts out to the girl a derogatory remark along the lines of ‘great tits, gorgeous’ (forgive me, I cannot remember the exact line). For, Jacobchen perhaps subverts the notion that he is in love with this girl as an image to behold, but that he is also rebelliously determined to possess this girl.

It would then also be important that Jacobchen gets into a quasi-fight with Jonathan (Jonathan Ortiz), who also has clamped eyes on and lays spurious claim to the girl: they both want her.

However, forasmuch as their objectification of the girl on the bike and their dispute over her might seem to undermine their aspirations to have her – in that they are acting out the impossibility of having her – the slow motion moment nonetheless seems to suggest that all of the kids want her and/or her lifestyle, even if their way of expressing it is coarse and futile (the bus drives on; the girl is perhaps never even aware that she has been regarded in this way).

Even when Messiah-like Kon (Konchen Carrasco) upbraids his brother Jacobchen for speaking to the girl in this derogatory fashion, he also corrects him and says that she did not have big tits. In other words, even if Kon demands better behaviour from Jacobchen, he also still saw and watched the girl intently.

The reason that I wish to talk about this moment in the film is because it raises the intertwined issues of race and class that run throughout the film. In short, the kids on the bus are all of black, Asian or Hispanic origin – or a mix of these. And they all seem to come from working class families – kids who look after their mothers, what the rest of the world might term a broken home, etc.

For the film to suggest that they all aspire to middle class values, or even wealthy values – as signalled by their collective adoration of the girl on the bike – is where the film becomes interesting.

It is not a young person’s fault to aspire to the images of success and beauty that surround us day in and day out from birth. But The We and the I also suggests that while these kids seem to want to live in the white, middle class world, it is somehow closed to them.

This is most forcefully signalled by the way in which the film’s numerous flashbacks and fantasy sequences are not the ‘cinematic’ slow motion of the girl on the bike, but predominantly on mobile phones.

Take Kenny’s (Kenneth Quinones) elaborate fantasy about striding into cool bars, being told what great taste he has, and hanging out with Donald Trump: this mobile phone section undermines the splendour of Kenny’s fantasy by lending to it a grain and pictorial dirtiness that is the opposite of the slow motion sequence with the girl. That is, the mobile phone footage actually is, almost, uncinematic. These kids can dream, but their dreams are banal (as perhaps most kids’ dreams are) – and they are not the full-on brightly lit slomo of the girl on the bike.

In other words, the film seems to suggest that ‘real cinema’ is impossible for these kids: their fantasies are minor fantasies played out on minor, smaller screens, and recorded with minor, smaller filmmaking devices. And by ‘real cinema,’ we are really talking about social mobility: what are the prospects for these kids? How will they get to be, or to be with, or to have what the girl on the bike has?

However, while we might be moving towards an assertion along the lines of “The We and the I not only reflects upon the lack of social mobility for young ethnic Americans, but it also arguably reinforces it – by beatifying the girl on the bike so much, only to deny such beauty when we see their more sordid, grimy fantasies and memories played out on mobile phones” – I’d also suggest that this is can only tentatively be the case.

Let’s work this through a bit.

For, while the bus contains bullies, introverts, drama queens and, well, just teenage kids, they on the whole seem okay. Even the bullies seem not really to be too bad, or to be taken too seriously. That is, their boisterous insults and supposed nastiness carry with them a sense of fun, or at the very least liveliness, that in itself is empowering thanks to its expression of libido. That is, the energy of the kids is a sign of potency, of potential power, be that in the kids who are smart mouths, the kids who can play music, or the kids who can draw.

In short, Gondry seems to cut his kids enough slack that we do not dislike them as much as all that, even if they are part-time bullies and even if they do some gleefully irresponsible things on this bus journey.

Since Gondry cuts the kids this slack, the modesty of their ambitions – rendered in modest mobile phone footage – suggests in some sense a sort of dignity. In other words, there is tension between the film making out that mobile phone ambitions will never be fully cinematic and the other approach to this issue, which is that mobile phone images are equally if differently cinematic – and for these kids more powerfully so, because it is the mobile phone that allows them to express themselves most forcefully.

Nonetheless, we are still faced with the notion that these kids are aspiring to be white. This is also figured in Teresa’s (Teresa Lynn) blonde wig. Teresa has been bunking school after drunkenly molesting one of peers, Laidychen (Laidychen Carrasco), who is also on the bus. In a bid to make herself over, she wears a blonde wig. Immediately she is harrangued about it: appearing, or aspiring to appear, white is in some respects selling out on who she and the rest of these kids really are. But even if the kids – Teresa, too – accept that she is not white and should be proud of who she actually is, this ambition still remains.

Importantly, the kids continually repeat watching and send to each other a video of Elijah (Elijah Canada), a kid not on the bus, who may or may not be one of the Chen clan, and who – *spoilers* – is announced as having been stabbed dead near the film’s climax.

We can contrast this with the footage and images of Teresa molesting Laidychen taken by Michael (Michael Brodie) and Big T (Jonathan Scott Worrell). Here, Michael has erased all images and footage (even though the film itself shows this to us – Gondry able to pass into deleted territory that the kids no longer can).

If Elijah’s fate as the ‘star’ of a viral video (it features him falling on his ass as he slips up on butter placed on a kitchen floor) is to be killed, while Teresa is allowed to live on thanks to the suppression of the footage that shows her at her worst, then The We and the I might suggest that it is by precisely avoiding becoming cinematic – by not falling into the trap of wanting to be white? – that one can survive in this world. Seeking and wanting one’s own fantasies, one’s own secrets, perhaps, is to retain and/or develop independence, while to aspire to the dreams fed to us by the white and middle class-dominated media is to not be independent at all.

And yet, the fact remains that Gondry can still show to us the images of Teresa and Laidychen, even if the other kids on the bus do not see it. That is, Gondry as white, middle class filmmaker has access to all areas; his films pass across all of the registers, from the supposedly cinematic to the supposedly uncinematic, as if he were fluent in everyone’s fantasies. That is, it is the privilege of the middle class to imagine the fantasies of the working class, to be able to hang with the non-white kids – while at the same time being able easily to swing back by into the white, middle class world and to reflect upon what one has seen.

Although Gondry would seem to express solidarity for his characters – perhaps, romantically put, he has a love for a common humanity – he still is demonstrating his ability to speak to and with all peoples, a skill that the subjects in his film do not and perhaps cannot possess.

Gondry’s fantasies of being able to cut across all divisions are marked by his trademark shots of simultaneous moments in different locations being played out on the screen at the same time: a swish pan takes us from inside the bus to a different location as if they were in fact the same space; kids in a pizza parlour can be seen in the bus window, even though they are not physically visible to the people on the bus.

These surely are visually arresting moments – and they are part of the package that has quickly singled out Gondry as a filmmaker with a notable, auteurist style.

But they also reinforce the fact that Gondry’s romanticism is a middle class fantasy.

It is not, at the last, that Gondry is at fault somehow for being limited in the kind of film that he can make. And perhaps I am misguided in effectively arguing that East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet, when in fact humans do share common ground and a common humanity that links us all.

But when biology – our common humanity – is married with culture – by which I mean the social and ethnic divisions that are the offshoot of a capitalist society – are put together, the tensions between the two come strongly to the fore (even if culture and biology are more intimately linked than we would like to think).

We might all aspire to become light or to become cinema – to be, to be with, or to have the girl on the bike. And we might all bar the very exceptional few fail in this and only have mobile phone fantasies. And we should be proud of our mobile phone fantasies, even if they are gritty and ugly to those who have been indoctrinated by the so-called ‘cinematic’ (only white girls on bikes are beautiful; the rest is somehow sordid). We should be proud of our mobile phone fantasies, because they are ours and not the expression of us pandering to be something we are not.

But can Michel Gondry be the person to tell us this?

My only answer is that I wish that the kids themselves had made the film. Correction: the kids themselves do make this film. But I wish they’d been credited more clearly for it. But then that is just me hoping in my white,  class way to find an ‘authentic’ expression of ethnic, working class America – something that probably does not exist.

There is no way out of this conundrum. I cannot offer any answers. But without any answers, maybe we can begin properly to think about this matter (if I am in a position to make such a declaration, to assert in any way whatsoever what thinking is).

Amazing how a moment in a film – a girl on a bike – can trigger a reading of that film that sends ripples throughout the rest of its fabric.

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, UK, 2012)

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, Berberian… perhaps does more than simply this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Projectionist (Tom Lawes, UK, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do I mean by this?

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

What are the examples of this?

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

Examples in the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killer Joe (William Friedkin, USA, 2011)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Neurocinematics

Killer Joe tells the story of trailer trash Texan family the Smiths. Son Chris (Emile Hirsch) owes money to some local gangsters and so hatches the plot to kill his mother, Adele (Julia Adams), in order to take home her savings via an inheritance.

To do this, he hires a local cop-cum-hitman, the titular Joe (Matthew McConnaughey), as well as roping in his dad Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), his stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) and his little sister Dottie (Juno Temple) – with whom he’ll split the money four ways. The reason he has to involve the rest of his family is because Adele savings are apparently all to be left in her will to Dottie.

Since the money is going to come only after the hit, Chris and co offer Dottie as ‘collateral’ to Killer Joe. And Joe takes Dottie – presumably depriving her of her virginity in the process.

The film is blackly comic – with some amusing deadpan humour, plain funny sight gags, trailer park gawping, and unsettling violence – which is often sexualised.

The film is, as a former colleague of mine has pointed out to me, pretty harsh on its women: Adele barely features, Sharla is a conniving slut, and Dottie, having been deflowered by Joe, seems to fall for him pretty bad.

It’s not that the male folk fare better: most people in the film are copper nanotubes (Google it), the men included. But the women don’t really get a look in, being sexual objects, somewhat fatales, pretty incapable of autonomous action, and something of a backdrop for the men to be men together.

However, aside from these shortcomings, and no doubt some interesting things that could be discussed in terms of neo-noir and other films of its ilk – The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, USA/Sweden/UK/Canada, 2010) and U-Turn (Oliver Stone, France/USA, 1997) came to mind while watching it – the film is interesting for a couple of things that I’d like to discuss now and both of which, in short order, suggest that the film is reflecting on the cinematic experience.

I am in the midst of reading Gabriele Padullà’s In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema. The book basically tries to explain what the cinema experience is like – and while I have not finished it to know Padullà’s argument exactly, it seems as though he basically wants to account for how filmgoers watch movies because they enjoy them.

This requires a bit of explanation, since Padullà’s argument will seem obvious (duh, of course we watch movies because we enjoy them). How it is interesting, though, is the way in Padullà dismisses earlier interpretations of the film viewing experience.

For example, early film theorists often compared cinema to Plato’s Cave. The philosopher for Plato is the person who realises the most humans unthinkingly are sat in a cave watching the projected shadows of reality, but not reality itself. Cinema is a bit like sitting in such a cave and watching projected shadows of reality. Ergo, cinema might be a bit like Plato’s cave.

Except, for reasons practical if for no other, then cinema makes ‘philosophers’ of us all (but does it really?), since we all know that reality does not conform to the movies (but do we?). Now, the Plato model perhaps was employed for the political reason that to compare a mass medium like cinema to a great like Plato helps to legitimise cinema as an authentic art form. Indeed, that cinema can and perhaps does make philosophers of us (something I argue in my own published work – but not quite in this fashion/for these purposes) also no doubt helps to legitimise cinema as a ‘meaningful’ form – when most people view it as crash, bang, wallop blood-splattering fun.

However, the Plato analogy cannot stand up when it is clear that we choose to watch movies that we know are just illusions. Furthermore, since we now view films not in a darkened room but, as Padullà puts it, in broad daylight, further means that the Plato analogy is outdated.

Furthermore, Padullà rejects the idea that cinema is a mirror or something like a dream screen for the same reason: we can and do get up during film viewing, we talk, check our phones (my example, not Padullà’s) and the images are far more precise than a dream image.

So, given that these models of what the cinematic experience is or is supposed to be, Padullà’s suggestion (so far) that we watch films because we want to and because we enjoy them takes on some ‘revolutionary’ force.

Why this sidetrack into Padullà?

Because I wonder Killer Joe seems to reflect directly on viewing practices in the contemporary era – and I shall give what I consider to be two clear-cut examples. And I’ll give them in reverse order (in that the one I discuss first happens later in the film than the one I discuss second).

Minor spoiler: as Joe explains to Sharla and Ansel how he is going to deal with Chris following the (expected) botching of the plot to win Adele’s money, Ansel’s attention is drawn to a television depicting monster trucks.

Joe reacts poorly, heading over to the TV and destroying it.

Why this is important to me is because Ansel’s attention cannot but be drawn towards the monster truck screen – in spite of the fact that Joe is talking to him.

While Ansel no doubt likes shows with monster trucks in them, this also signals how the screens that fill our contemporary world are designed – even in broad daylight – to capture our attention. That is, even though we are supposed to be concentrating on something else (here, Joe talking), we find that we look at the screen not because we want to, but because we have no choice but to.

I know that Padullà addresses what we might call the attention economy in a section beyond where I am right now in In Broad Daylight, so apologies to him if I guess incorrectly the nature of his eventual argument.

Nonetheless, I wonder to what extent we are prey to the moving images on the ubiquitous screens that surround us the whole time (which is not to mention the loud sounds that we hear everywhere, too). Indeed, various essays that I have written argue that cutting rates and various other techniques, that colour, that the depiction of human emotions, and (this one’s not published – yet) that the beauty of film stars, are all designed – advertently or otherwise – to attract our attention, whether or not we actually like or enjoy a film. To this extent, cinema – and other screen media – draw upon our attention naturally, meaning that our minds are spent considering neither our natural environment (inasmuch as we might consider screens to be ‘unnatural’) nor attending to what we choose to.

No doubt the cognitive pleasures in having our attention aroused (we feel ‘alive’ when we are searching for prey, predator or mate – apparently) have caused a situation of feedback: that is, we go looking for rapid image fixes rather than attend to what we ought to – as my students looking at their iPhones during film screenings in class attests.

Nevertheless, not only would this seem to suggest that we do not strictly look at screens because we enjoy it (we can and do enjoy it, but how much choice we have in looking is up for grabs – anyone who has tried to hold down a conversation in a pub showing even the most banal television perhaps knows this feeling), but it also suggests that we might (wilfully!) be heading into Plato’s Cave – whereby we look at screens, at the play of illusions, rather than at reality, even though we know reality is out there.

In this sense, while Padullà’s critique of the Plato analogy is powerful, he might conceivably overlook the way in which the Plato analogy might also be prophetic.

(And note: when we do not look at what we want to, or when we cannot but hear the sounds of screens that surround us, then to an extent, these sounds and images are doing violence to us. I think of it thus: when I have been trying to sleep and I hear a television, I find the jolts from light sleep caused by the television to be truly jarring and disturbing, violent even. Perhaps you have had a similar experience…? Okay, so it is good for us to be alert and ready for violence – as the Darwinians would have us believe – but cinema and the other screen media would also have us believe that we were made to live in a hyperstimulated state, when a world without screens would have some – real – violence, but nothing like the constant barrage that we have now…)

The second moment, which comes earlier in the film, is when Joe ‘seduces’ Dottie for the first time. During this scene, Dottie undresses for Joe, who turns his back on her and then gives her orders as he undresses himself.

Okay – we the audience members see Dottie, and so there is a complex interplay going on here between our own voyeurism (heterosexual males if no others are drawn to Dottie’s figure for ‘natural’ reasons) and Joe’s projections.

What I mean by this is that in not looking at Dottie, but instead getting her to approach him from behind, he gets to imagine what she looks like – preferring his imagination to actually seeing or looking at her.

In other words, while Joe is pissed off at Ansel for looking at the TV and not at him, Joe himself has a strange relationship with reality, such that he prefers to create projected fantasy worlds rather than to engage in what is actually in front of him.

As much is borne out later when Joe gets Sharla to simulate fellatio on a piece of K Fried C that he holds over his crotch. Joe does not want real contact with Sharla, it seems, but gets off on simulated contact. In other words, it seems that Joe is also as addicted to images as Ansel, and that he prefers images to reality.

Now, since we do see Dottie undress, we might say that Joe has his own foibles, but that we as viewers prefer actually to look. Except, of course, that we are watching a film and not reality. In other words, director Friedkin seems to be bringing to our attention the way in which he, too, is constructing (male) fantasies that we see played out, and which perhaps we prefer to ‘reality’.

The fake BJ scene is most telling in this respect: Joe has just smashed in Sharla’s face when he forces her to suck the chicken leg. If Joe is somehow an ersatz viewer, then Friedkin seems in some respects to be throwing back into our (male) faces the fantasies of sexualised violence that Joe enacts. Indeed, Friedkin ramps this up by seeming to have the seem play out in a titillating fashion (even though the scene is shot from a combination of long, medium and low angle shots; the arch lighting might also enhance this effect).

Joe even suggests with Dottie that he and she are 12 years old as they enact their fantasy sex – an ironic comment, it seems, on the regressive powers of cinema for making us engage not with the real world, or with real people, but with fantasy images of people instead.

Again, then, it seems that Padullà might have been premature (though, again, he might twist back on himself in the book – we shall see) in dismissing both the notion of the mirror and the notion of Plato’s cave as analogies for the film experience.

For, the predominance of screens in the contemporary world – and their power to hold our attention ahead of the reality – seems to suggest that we might be moving willingly into something like Plato’s Cave. And the way in which film can muck about with our sexual fantasies, which of course are based on mental images as much as on reality, suggests that we cannot only watch films because we enjoy them (even though this is a primary motivating factor). But it can be for more perverse and deep-seated reasons than that, ones that cognitive psychology can do little to answer for, and which still need something along the lines of psychoanalysis (with warnings/provisos) to at least begin to contemplate.

Killer Joe is not necessarily a great film, nor the best by Friedkin. Nonetheless, Friedkin belongs to a generation of directors that Padullà says were obsessed with cinema as it was: busy, bustling, loud auditoria, not the museum culture of silence and worship that we have today. As such, it seems unsurprising that his film – in so many ways a throwback to an older generation of noir – would seem nostalgic for former film viewing experiences. Ones where we not endlessly distracted by other, smaller, faster moving screens. And ones where our own fantasies helped to fill in the gaps left by the film world – rather than seeing everything because the cinema shows everything…

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Timur Bekmambetov, USA, 2012)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

Why this film to blog about?

Well, I only really want to make a simple point.

But before the point, a rant: while I have of late missed stuff that only shows on one screen and at only one time that I really would rather not have missed, the local multiplex showed this and it was on at a time I could go to and is not the other side of town. It is a pity that basic pragmatics dictate what we watch, but there we go.

Now, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is by no means the best film I’ve seen recently – but it is not the worst either. I’ll save my mini-comments about the other movies for another time.

But otherwise down to business. What is the point I want to make about AL:VH?

At several moments in the film, toys morph into real figures, evil vampire Adam (Rufus Sewell) morphs into an animated version of the story about himself that he is telling, moving shots of maps turn into fly-overs over supposedly real battlefields, and more.

It is this kind of shot that I want to discuss – the kind of shot where the map morphs into the terrain, such that the map is no longer separate from the terrain, but on a continuum with it – inseparable.

But this just sounds like a classic ‘postmodern’ argument, right? That is, in the postmodern era we are no longer aware of what is real and what is not.

This is not to say that we believe a film like AL:VH to be a documentary of some sort. Only a fuckwit believes that.

But it is to say that we live in an era when we can doubt and not believe whatever we wish to – since everything can be disproved, or rather since no one really believes in proof at all these days.

Since nothing can be proven or disproved, people believe what they want (and people refuse to discuss matters with people who do not share their opinion – perhaps the single most damaging human trait one can have, a kind of solipsistic closed-mindedness – meaning that the closed-minded person does not discuss at all, does not learn, and shrouds themselves in a discourse about rights whereby they declare their right to be a moron).

I can’t promise to argue that AL:VH suggests anything more profound than this in the kinds of shots mentioned above and which feature prominently in the film’s running time.

Nonetheless, I want to consider them in some detail, for the context of the film is also interesting.

That is, AL:VH is no normal vampire movie. It is claiming that the 16th President of the United States of America was a vampire hunter.

Again, no one believes this to be true (no one I would call sane, anyway). But what this means is that the film engages directly with history, which is something of a rarety for the vampire movie (as far as I am aware, and even though some prominent vampire films are also period costume dramas).

However, it is in keeping with the fluid shots of the film, in which model morphs into reality, that AL:VH should falsify history as it does. Here is a film in which there is no need to respect history – because it is all a bit of a joke and falsifiable anyway. So why not blatantly falsify it? This is in keeping with the spirit of the times we are living in, after all…

Perhaps only a post-Soviet filmmaker like Bekmambetov could do this. This is a generalisation – and as such in itself false – but without a god to fall back on, with the official history desecrated, the only rule left to follow is that there are no rules – and Abe Lincoln can be an axe-wielding ruthless vampire killer. Former Soviets know this; Westerners are beginning to know it better and better…

In the film, the vamps are made to stand in for the American South and for the benefits of slavery, in that Adam and his cronies live on a huge plantation down south and are implied as being slave owners and slave eaters.

However, the film here kind of mixes its messages. Okay – so slavery is indeed all about the consumption of humans, and so it stands to reason that the filmmakers would align slaveholders with vampires. But vampires are also people who wear black, who cannot come out in the day (a myth about vampires debunked in this film, as is the notion that it is only a stake through the heart that will kill them; plain silver does it), and who only function at night.

To me, this sounds at least in part similar to something trendy philosopher Slavoj Žižek says, when he discusses an

old European fairy-tale motif of diligent dwarfs (usually controlled by an evil magician) who, during the night, while people are asleep, emerge from their hiding-place and accomplish their work (set the house in order, cook the meals), so that when, in the morning, people awaken, they find their work magically done.

(For the full text, read here.)

I hope this is sufficiently clear – but what I am suggesting is that while vampires obviously consume human flesh, their behaviour is also like that of the slave already. While vampires are not going to set your house in order, their very invisibility (famously they have no mirror image) means that vampires are like slaves, too, together with all of the racial inequality that slavery has helped to produce.

In short, then, the film seems to argue that slavery is the invisible evil – both in terms of slaves (which in the USA has a distinct overlap with the country’s black population) and slave drivers (here, vampires).

But let us go further…

In another text, Žižek argues that batshit novelist Ayn Rand had one profound insight (and no more): that when money ceases to be in circulation, humans will begin to trade in flesh, using other humans as currency.

The reason that I mention this is because while AL:VH is set in the 1830s and onwards, it of course has been made in the early 2010s. And what is happening in the early 2010s is an economic meltdown that may yet prove to be the biggest since 1929, which in turn played a significant role in the development of world events between 1939 and 1945.

In other words, the shit might yet hit the fan as a result of this global economic crisis. And one of the ways in which that might happen is because without money, humans will trade in other humans. And perhaps even a film like AL:VH can imply something meaningful, then, in terms of how slavery remains an issue even today – and it is not something that is relegated uniquely to the past.

(This is, by the way, an issue – slavery, not vampire movies – that I have written about at greater length here.)

In this way, the ‘postmodern’ stuff – whereby we do not know truth from falseness – perhaps suits this film. It speaks both of how the invisible issue of slavery, believed eradicated, is in fact still with us today, and perhaps in more insidious (virtual?) fashions.

And, perhaps more importantly, it speaks of how in an age in which slavery is denied as existing, but which is also an age in which no one knows what is true anymore, then indeed there is perhaps only one logical truth that humans can accept – and that is their own experience.

What I mean to say by this is that people only know truth through their own bodies. It is not something to be read in a book or seen in a film. It is something to be experienced – with even thinking being (something like a) physical experience, even if a thought has no material reality for itself (you cannot touch a thought, though a thought can perhaps touch you).

If our truth is what is inscribed upon us, in that it is what physically marks us, it is our physical existence – then perhaps we already live in an age that is ripe for slavery and violence. For, bereft of any other marker, and cognizant of the fact that others are only ‘mere’ bodies, we perhaps decide to screw other people over – to trade in/with their bodies – before we choose to live a social existence.

In effect: there is no god and there is no law (Lincoln, played by Benjamin Walker, is studying the law, but basically sacks it off because the only law that slaveholders/vampires understand is the contents of a can of silver-tinted whoop-ass – i.e. learning the lesson that slavery is bad not in an abstract sense but through their bodies/experiences).

Since there is no god and no law, what is my incentive to be and/or do good by/with/to others? I have none. And since I live in a time in which only my own experience counts – in which, in effect, I cannot or perhaps will not learn from others, including the media and books, because those others are not telling me ‘the truth’ but are instead trying to ‘control’ me (even to enslave me and my precious tiny mind, I can kid myself!), then I have no reason to believe anyone who claims to lay down laws or hear from god.

How ironic, though, that it is the absence of ‘slavery’ (I lead my own life and no one else gets in my way) leads, within the context of a world also governed by economics, to, precisely, literal, real, physical, violent and nasty slavery.

A further irony: vampires function in films as proof of God, in that they are condemned to walk the earth forever as a result of their evil ways. In effect, the human propensity to be a slave driver, to be nasty to other humans, cannot be held in check by God. Even with God, even with the law, we make other humans suffer.

(Indeed, without God, or those who seeks to become powerful by claiming to be His representatives on Earth, Western slavery might never have taken the form that ultimately it did.)

So what emerges from a film as cynical as AL:VH is this morality: only violence solves problems, even though violence is also – more problematically – also the source of our problems. Do we solve our problems by addressing the problems, or by addressing the causes of the problems? AL:VH‘s AL decides not to use the law, to use thought and thinking, to encourage humans to think themselves ethically into a moral existence, but instead to use an axe.

He does not do what, ahem, university lecturers and some filmmakers try to do – and that is to try to encourage people to become better than what/who they are. Instead, he takes it as read that humans are bad and so just gets badder to get rid of the problem.

Indeed, as much is revealed in the person of Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper), who is Lincoln’s mentor and, lo, also a vampire. Sturgess is a ‘good’ vampire. I place ‘good’ in inverted commas, because while he helps Abe and does do some ass-kicking of his own, Sturgess nonetheless does kill people to live. Indeed, we and Lincoln see Sturgess kill a drunk. Lincoln is not so upright a human that he decides to do something about this (like dob Sturgess in), but instead takes mercy on him because of his lost girlfriend sob story – which he naïvely believes.

That Sturgess is a vampire but also ‘good’ functions not to suggest that not all vampires are bad; quite the opposite, it has a vampire tell us precisely that all vampires are bad and must be killed. In effect, Sturgess is the self-loathing Jew or black man who justifies the white man’s racism – thereby legitimating slavery, the Holocaust and other atrocities.

In some respects, AL:VH‘s seeming belief that we are simply our bodies (though we must remember that our bodies only exist in relation – with other bodies, with all that surrounds us), does not excuse AL:VH from the rather odd decision only to have one prominent black character, Will Johnson (Anthony Mackie) in a film not just about vampires, but also about emancipation from slavery.

For, if we do wear our truth on our person, then the absence of prominent black characters in the film suggests something like a denial of slavery (that truth remains invisible in the body of the film, a secret hidden in darkness and travelling the roads only at night, when the film’s blacks are harder for the audience to see anyway; that is, we can pretend they’re not there).

It suggests that slavery was created to provide the conditions for white men to establish themselves as heroes and villains – to destroy an ethical life whereby we think about how we relate to others, and to create a moral life in which we blindly follow moral rules by rote. I would suggest that, contrary to an ethical life, such a moral life takes no real account of human life. Instead, other humans – as blacks do in this film – function as an excuse for white humans to feel good about themselves.

Indeed, by making slave owners out to be vampires – i.e. precisely not human – the film places ‘over there’ (beyond the human) an issue that is really right here, which is not carried out by literal bloodsuckers, but which is put into motion by regular people like you and me. A human issue.

In order to defeat the vampire scourge, Lincoln commandeers all of America’s silver. How he manages to convince people that collecting silver is a legitimate war effort is not entirely known, but we do know this: Lincoln cannot really tell people that this is all about vampires, because they would just be too scared or not believe him. In other words, AL:VH suggests that people should just do as they’re told (Lincoln as tyrant) because they wouldn’t be able to handle the truth – the real truth being, of course, that there is no truth, there are no vampires, but that people need to believe in something in order to keep them in order and there’s money to be made from convincing them that this is so, so why no tax the shit out of silver, claim to send it down South in a big anti-vampire bomb – without letting on about the anti-vampire bit – and instead keep all of the silver for oneself, like any good corrupt politician would do. Lincoln’s memory takes a shoeing in this film!

People pool their silver in AL:VH – for vampires fear it as it reminds them of Judas betraying Christ. As if Christ could have become Christ without Judas and without the marking on his body of all of the hatred that mankind bears towards those who come peddling unwanted truths.

This pooling of resources might seem to point to the possibility of a common wealth: we can all just share everything and thus overcome our problems.

Except that sharing is a phantom, suggested to the people by Lincoln who, as mentioned, does not use the silver for the purposes suggested at all (killing vampires). Does he in fact run off with the silver? Either way, there is no sharing, as the presence of Sturgess in the White House at film’s end suggests. As Sturgess offers to make Lincoln immortal, and as Lincoln goes to the theatre to die (he will be shot by pro-vampire conspiracist John Wilkes Booth), we get the sense that the vampires are here and will never go away. That the desire to share is not genuine; it is the desire to give away one’s silver in order to feel slighted by one’s government. To attest to one’s own powerlessness. To feel disenfranchised and misunderstood. To feel as though one cannot trust anyone. To feel as though one only has one’s own body. To be a closed minded solipsist who reinforces the system of consumption and waste that AL:VH claims to be defeating.

Vampires believe in God, but they are condemned for their bad faith. To believe nothing and no one, to be a solipsist who only relies on their self, that is also to have bad faith. To have no faith in anyone else. Perhaps not even in one’s self. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter suggests that we are all vampires now.