Thailand, 2016)

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

I was fortunate enough to catch the UK premiere of Davy Chou’s Diamond Island at the Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival as organised by Day for Night at the Close-Up Film Centre on Monday 17 September 2018.

The film is a beautiful movie told largely in the neorealist tradition, using non-professional actors, being shot on location, and having as its primary concern the social mobility of two brothers, Bora (Sobon Nuon) and Solei (Cheanick Nov), in contemporary Phnom Penh.

For, Bora, having recently moved to the city to work on the building site for the luxury development from which the film takes its title, runs into his brother, Solei, after not having seen him for five years.

Bora has come to town to raise money to help his mother, who is ill, while Solei, having left home for unknown reasons, makes his way in the capital as a well-to-do student who is being sponsored by an American.

The brothers reconnect and Solei begins to help Bora financially, promising to take him abroad – and dragging him away not only from his friends on the building site, but also from Aza (Madeza Chhem), whom Bora fancies, but whom Solei tells him to leave behind.

What plays out is a film that is ponderous and yet visually arresting, with no real recourse to melodrama, although Chou does use both atmospheric musical sequences and the odd ‘experimental’ technique (e.g. split screens) in order to give to the film a visual and aural fabric that takes Diamond Island away from neorealism and into the realm of poetic realism.

In particular, the film’s lighting scheme adds an expressive element to the film’s mise-en-scène, and it is this that I would like to discuss here.

For, Diamond Island is defined regularly by a blue hue that emanates most often from neon lights, digital screens, moments that take place at dusk, the sky, the sky as reflected on occasion in the water that surrounds the titular island, and various objects in the mise-en-scène, including pallets, t-shirts and pipes.

However, it is in particular the blue neon lights upon which I’d like to concentrate.

For, consistently throughout the film, we see a cool neon blue light permeate the space of the film, particularly via the lights on the mopeds and smartphone screens that the richer kids in the film can afford, and which we see at various points being used by youths during Chou’s various montage sequences.

In other words, the blue light becomes associated with digital technology in the film – as per the blue light emitted by phone screens and which disrupts the production of melanin, and consequently disrupts sleep patterns, converting humans from entities that live in circadian rhythms into beings that live according to the permanent now of 24:7 capital and the attention economy.

Becoming blue, then, is akin to becoming economically successful – having a screen existence in which one peddles one’s own image rather than singing other people’s songs off a karaoke screen as per Bora’s poorer friends.

Soon after Bora’s arrival at the Diamond Island building site, Chou cuts to a 3D digital animation that offers us a simulated fly-through of the hotel and tourist site that is soon to appear on the island.

The moment is notable both for the digital nature of the images and for the sensation of flight through the space that the animation provokes. This compares significantly with the relatively static camera that follows Bora at pedestrian pace and level during the majority of the film.

Not long after Bora has re-found Solei, Solei takes him out on his moped – and now Chou uses a drone to follow Bora, Solei and his richer friends as they ride around the island and at one point also into Phnom Penh.

It is not that Solei introduces Bora to a world of increased mobility; it is that this mobility is also associated with elevation and the ability to rise above the ground and dirt that Bora normally works on the building site.

Humans under capitalism wish to head upwards – to disconnect themselves from the ground and to become airborne. That is, and as per ‘blue sky thinking,’ they want to head up into the blue. To become blue, then, is to become integrated into capitalism by virtue of becoming rich.

Indeed, it is perhaps coincidental but nonetheless telling that Bora’s transition out of the building site is achieved by taking a job managing the café that Solei’s friend Blue (Batham Oun) sets up in Phnom Penh.

In addition, Bora accompanies Solei and his friends to a party in an empty apartment, where Bora sleeps for a period on a lavish bed that has blue neon lights around its head. It is also in this space that the friends gather to look at some 3D holograms – the height of digital imaging technologies. Notably, one of the animations is of a blue jellyfish – as if the blue light of digital technology also took on a tentacular and Cthulhoid quality – as befits the work on digital technology and tentacled sea creatures that David H Fleming and I have been developing, and the first published iteration of which will soon appear in the journal Film-Philosophy.

The promise of the capitalist blue sky may in fact be the appearance ‘out of the blue’ of an alien, digital intelligence that is not the culmination of humanity, but its very replacement.

And if Cambodia is still marked by the history of the Khmer Rouge, as per Chou’s last film, the documentary Golden Slumbers (France/Cambodia, 2011), then, without wishing to make too crass a pun, then the toll on the new Cambodia that emerges along with global capital might be characterised as a Khmer bleu.

Or, to link this film’s fairground sequences to another ‘blue’ film that also uses the fairground as an important backdrop for its descent into greed, this might be Cambodia’s ‘blue ruin.’

The ultraviolet quality of some of this blue light also brings to mind the possibility of seeing in the dark and different colours on the light spectrum that typically remain invisible.

As Bora progresses into visibility, then, he is contrasted relatively strongly with the more telluric hues of the his construction worker friends, who continue at the film’s end to live on Diamond Island, eking out existences that may not have the mobility that Bora comes to enjoy, but which nonetheless have an enduring dignity that Chou’s film sensitively captures.

Orfeu branco: You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay, UK/France/USA, 2017)

American cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

If The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, USA, 2017) recently won the Oscars for Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Score (for Alexandre Desplat), then clearly the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is completely incapable of discerning what makes a good film. Or rather, its concerns seem very far removed from mine, and its definition of cinema is vastly different from mine.

The Shape of Water is perfectly competent, and it has a few nice ideas. But it is nothing like the total masterclass in filmmaking that is You Were Never Really Here, which sees three of the finest filmmakers in the world (Lynne Ramsay, Joaquin Phoenix and Jonny Greenwood) at the absolute top of their game (which is not to mention the film’s excellence in cinematography, editing, general sound design and more).

Oscar has deemed fit to reward You Were Never Really Here with zero nominations, suggesting that it is not interested in what I would call mature storytelling, but rather the infantile fantasies that we see peddled in The Shape of Water.

(Although, if Oscar is going to reward kids’ movies, then why it has not honoured the superior Paddington 2, Paul King, UK/France/USA, 2017, seems incomprehensible to me.)

Anyway, a gripe about how the Oscars seem to revel in a kind of puerile conservatism aside (the recognition of Jordan Peele and Sebastián Lelio’s work notwithstanding), this blog just wants to offer up a few thoughts about Lynne Ramsay’s masterpiece, which seems unlikely to be topped for me between now and the end of the year.

Firstly, Lynne Ramsay seems to have seen and to have taken notice of the growing body of work by the Safdie brothers, with its moody, claustrophobic cinematography and Greenwood’s dark retro synth score bringing to mind the recent Good Time (Ben and Josh Safdie, USA, 2017), with which You Were Never Really Here is in many ways comparable, given its emphasis on New York by night, New York on the move, and the interiors of lower middle and working class domestic spaces.

The other recent film that You Were Never Really Here resembles is S. Craig Zahler’s equally moody Brawl in Cell Block 99 (USA, 2017) – with ‘moody’ here clearly being a by-word for an emphasis on darkness, confined spaces, and an ambulatory approach to violence that is physical, intimate and gory.

For, You Were Never Really Here and Brawl in Cell Block 99 are both re-tellings of the myth of Orpheus, who must descend into the underworld in order to rescue Eurydice. But unlike Marcel Camus’ Orfeu negro/Black Orpheus (Brazil/France/Italy, 1959), which casts the myth alongside carnival and the slums of Rio de Janeiro, thereby giving a sense in which poverty is hell, in both Ramsay and Zahler’s films, hell is entering into the dark corridors of power – be that of the state’s penitentiary system in the latter, or the kiddy dungeons of the rich in the former.

The motif of ‘descent’ is clear as on at least two occasions, we see Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe drop into frame from above – giving a literal sense of downwardness to his journey.

But in addition to being about downwardness, the film is also about absence – as the title of the film makes clear.

Joe is a military veteran whose hulking frame carries numerous scars, and who seems to have been shot, or witnessed a shooting, by a kid in a vaguely Middle Eastern-seeming location during his service. Now home, he rescues missing children from sex traffickers, while also living with his mother (Judith Roberts), whose health is clearly not great. Both his mother and Joe suffered at the hands of an abusive husband/father, with both Joe’s childhood and his military experiences being given to us in flashbacks that are haunting both for their brevity and for their beauty.

Ramsay’s film time and again marries the brutal with the tender, with an especial emphasis being articulated time and again on human touch and the feel of objects (hands on windows, hands on hands, hands on feet, and so on). Culture also is able to bring humans together, as characters sing songs (including an astounding sequence that sees two characters sing along to Charlene’s ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’).

What is more, Joe and his mother bond over Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1960), a film that is most famous for achieving maximum shock value while also showing next to nothing.

And in this intertext we get a sense of Ramsay’s mastery. It is not just that a good amount of the violence in You Were Never Really Here takes place offscreen, as per Psycho. It is that the film repeatedly stages Joe leaving the frame, with the picture then simply showing the spaces of the film’s action, rather than the action itself. This includes the film’s utterly absorbing final image, in which we see nothing more than a table at a diner where human figures earlier sat.

(Apologies for the vagueness in not saying who those figures are. But where normally I do not care about giving away spoilers, here I think it works to give as little of the film away as possible.)

With its emphasis on ’empty space,’ the space within the film becomes a ‘character.’ But more than this, we get a sense that space shapes character and behaviour more than human agents shape space.

That is, You Were Never Really Here suggests that humans are in effect utterly mindless in their belief that they are in control of their destiny and their choice of action, with the film seeking to make us mindful of how it is the environments that we create that shape our actions. New York lends itself to violence and to the trafficking of children for sex – even if any reasonable person would say that it is humans who are responsible for their depravity. It is not that humans are not responsible for their depravity; but we build environments where depravity is encouraged, and so it inevitably will grow.

Perhaps we can get a sense of this through the film’s final sequence, in which Joe attempts a second rescue in the house of wealthy businessman and state Governor Williams (Alessandro Nivola). The camera emphasises in particular a black statue of a woman, and a painting of a semi-nude woman at the end of a corridor.

We are surrounded by depictions in our contemporary world of women as objects. We divide our contemporary world into small capsules (houses, rooms in houses) that we divide for the purposes of ‘privacy,’ and increasingly we remove common spaces for the purpose of developing property (the city as a pit of property development).

In each of these processes, there is an ideology of separation – of separating humans from each other and from the world that surrounds them through the erection of walls, and through the reduction of humans to objects (statues, paintings). If humans do not view each other as humans but as objects, then it is clear that humans will enact on each other things that are not humane, but which instead reinforce separation and objecthood.

For this reason, I say that sex trafficking is almost a logical consequence of the city.

But in making a film, is Ramsay not herself creating objects? Clearly, this is a risk that she runs. But it is perhaps for this reason that the characters in her film regularly elude the camera’s gaze – Joe leaves the frame, or is obscured from view – such that his life (and the lives of other characters) is paradoxically conveyed to us through its absence (Joe cannot be captured), rather than through its presence (which would be to reduce life by rendering the person an object; life must necessarily be other – otherwise it is not alive; and if it is other, it must necessarily elude us, since in eluding us, we get a sense that it has a life of its own, rather than being something that is there for us to/that we can control).

Through Joe regularly being absent from the frame (in never really being here), You Were Never Really Here suggests how in order to get a sense of ourselves, we have in some senses to question our own reality, rather than simply unthinkingly accepting it and its values.

What I mean by this is that if I am a product of my environment as much as I am an autonomous agent, and if life consists in an otherness that by definition eludes us, then ‘I’ am not what I think I am. In seeing that ‘I’ am not an ‘I’ that is separate from, but rather which is entangled with, my environment, I realise that ‘I’ is not really here. Indeed, I realise that ‘I’ is both here and there. And that to say ‘here’ is to presume a fixed and autonomous ‘I.’ Properly to discover myself, I have to realise that I was never really here. You were never really here.

If you go with this perhaps necessarily obscure point (it is obscure in the sense that it is hard to see and, like Ramsay’s film, shrouded in darkness; we need to understand the importance of darkness and how to shine a light on darkness does not help us to understand it, but rather destroys it), then perhaps we can ask what cinema is.

For what cinema is, or what cinema can do, is to remind us that there is a world beyond us, and that we are thus not autonomous beings, but entangled beings.

How does cinema do this? Cinema does this by showing us other worlds.

Most films, however, show us other worlds as if they were objects for us to do with what we please. Like the statue and the painting, most films objectify the world that we see, and in the process they make us forget that we are watching a film (as the child molester forgets that he is molesting a human being). They do this through light and speed: there is nothing that eludes that mainstream film, but all is visible (darkness is destroyed), and everything moves so fast that it we do not have time to look at it for long enough to get a sense of its otherness.

In the film’s slowness and in Joe’s lumbering slowness, meanwhile, as well as in its emphasis on sheer physicality, we get a sense in You Were Not Really Here of how the film is other, moving at its own pace and not at the pace that we demand from it like slave drivers torturing their object-slaves into evermore accelerated productivity. Absent and slow, You Were Never Really Here runs the risk of alienating its audience (which is why Oscar does not and cannot acknowledge the film).

But through these very qualities, it takes on a life and shows us another world, reminding us not that we are immersed in a story-object as if we were there, but that we as viewers are seeing something other, and that we as viewers were never really here in the world where the story of You Were Never Really Here unfolds.

That is, the film in its title tells us to our faces that we are watching a film and that while this is a fiction, the power of its falseness lies in telling us that we are not autonomous beings, but that other people exist and that there are other ways of seeing the world beyond simply our own (paradoxically mass-produced) vision.

Not only were we never really here, but we’ve also never really been to me.

In 2010, Joaquin Phoenix returned to cinema after a hiatus with I’m Still Here (Casey Affleck, USA, 2010). In casting Phoenix (as well as in its references to Psycho), Ramsay seems once again to be making a film that self-consciously is a film – and one that approaches the critique of solipsism that we also find in Affleck’s film.

For, in Affleck’s mockumentary, Phoenix plays a would-be rapper called Joaquin Phoenix who is so out of touch with reality that he has absolutely no understanding of himself, so corrupted has he become by celebrity and self-absorption.

With Ramsay, Phoenix seems perhaps to be the only person who can see others as human beings and not as objects – the only person who is not solipsistic (and who rejects suicide on multiple occasions in spite of the pull towards it as an expression of how he regularly is made to feel alone in the world; perhaps it is noteworthy that his sense of otherness is experienced as a trauma undertaken both at home and at war, as if the family were as much a tool for war as military service itself).

What is more, Phoenix embodies arch solipsism in another film where he has to learn that he was never really Her (Spike Jonze, USA, 2013). That is, Theodore in that film must come to understand that the AI called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) eludes him, even though she/it should be an object that he can control.

We are all connected. But we are connected by difference, and not by an ability to control each other. To reduce each other and our world to objects is to destroy the life of that world and those people, much like shining a light on darkness destroys it. Its otherness is a marker of its life.

Lynne Ramsay’s latest film is from start to finish a masterpiece, filled with pregnant images that promise great meaning. Greenwood’s score and Phoenix’s performance are as good as they get.

As Oscar struggles forever to get to grips with otherness (issues of gender, issues of race in the American film industry), it seems a shame that a masterpiece like this one should get overlooked. Perhaps Hollywood cannot recognise otherness when it sees it (and when it does, perhaps it seeks to control it, perhaps even by giving an award to it). In this way, perhaps You Were Never Really Here is better off outside of the Oscars. But I for one feel that my world has improved by having seen it.

F for Fake: Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, Malta/USA, 2017)

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

One of the key scenes in Murder on the Orient Express involves Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) exposing Gerhard Hardman (Willem Dafoe) as a fake Austrian scientist as a result of his failure correctly to pronounce Turin. Hardman – if that is his real name – pronounces it TURin, whereas a genuine Austrian, as Poirot reminds us, would have pronounced it TurIN.

Given the importance that the film places upon pronunciation as a sign of authenticity, it is notable that on two occasions we hear the Belgian sleuth incorrectly pronounce the plural of the French word for eggs. The singular, œuf, involves the pronunciation of the f: ‘urf.’ However, when said in the plural, French speakers drop the f sound and say ‘uh’: des œufs (‘des uh’). Poirot, however, on both occasions persists incorrectly with the f and says ‘urfs.’

If it is an incorrect pronunciation that exposes Hardman’s act, then by the same token Poirot’s incorrect pronunciation exposes his own act. That is, if it is because he cannot correctly pronounce words that Hardman is revealed as not Hardman, then because he cannot correctly pronounce words, Poirot is similarly revealed as not Poirot. In other words, it is because of an f that the Poirot of Murder on the Orient Express is revealed as a fake.

What are we to make of this?

On a primary level, we can simply say that it is an error that any actor (here, Kenneth Branagh) might make when saying words in a language that is not his own. That is, the slip is meaningless – the sort of slip that should not be the basis of an entire argument about the film.

But, given that the film itself involves sleuthing based upon such slips, then by the film’s own standards, we can mount a case against the film as a result of its linguistic inaccuracies. If Hardman’s slip is deliberate, in the sense that it provides a clue as to the real nature of what it is that we are witnessing, then so must we read Branagh/Poirot‘s slip as deliberate.

[SPOILERS.]

Hercule Poirot finds himself on a train where 12 people have gathered ritually to murder a man (Edward Ratchett/John Cassetti, played by Johnny Depp) who himself abducted and killed a child in the USA some time prior to the titular train journey taking place. Each has a link to the victim and the victim’s family – and each is sufficiently devastated by the original murder that they are willing to take part in the murder from which the novel – and subsequently the film – takes its name.

The film presents to us as if it is by chance that Poirot happens to be on the titular train. Indeed, the murderers would have gotten away with it, too, were it not for the pesky Poirot’s presence – and an avalanche that happens to keep the train stuck for a day or more near Brod, in what at the time of the film’s setting (1934) was the recently formed Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and which today finds itself in the Muslim-majority country of Kosovo.

But what are the odds that all of these people with a connection to Cassetti happen to be on the same train – at precisely the same time that the world’s greatest detective happens to be there, too?

As the odds are extremely slim that so many people with connections to Cassetti can be on the same train as him by chance, so, too, are the odds slim that Poirot would be on the same train as all of these people and as Cassetti by chance.

Indeed, as it is not by chance that all of these same people are on the same train as Cassetti (they are here specifically to murder him), so might it also not be by chance that Poirot is on the same train. For, as Hardman is not Hardman, so is this Poirot not Hercule Poirot.

Instead, as indicated by his fake f, this Poirot is in fact an actor playing the part of Hercule Poirot – the world’s greatest detective – precisely so that he can uncover the crime and then use his credentials as a great moral arbitrator in order to excuse those who commit the murder of Cassetti.

That is, this Poirot is not on the train by chance, but, like all of the 12 perpetrators, he is equally on the train as a result of engineering. This Poirot is there not just to uncover the murder, but to justify the murder. He is part of the plot to allow murder to happen justifiably. For if the world believes that even Hercule Poirot allows these people to get away with murder, then everyone will allow these people to get away with murder. It is necessary to fake Poirot’s presence in order to justify murder.

But why do this?

On one level, this must be done in order to keep the train’s owner, Bouc (Tom Bateman), at bay. Where Bouc might otherwise blow a whistle about the murder, thanks to Poirot’s presence and his condonement of the killing, Bouc will keep quiet and let the killing happen ‘in peace.’ Bouc thus is a kind of bouc émissaire, or scapegoat, for the murder – not because Bouc literally takes the rap for what happens, but because Bouc’s naïve belief in the fake Poirot reconfirms (the fake) Poirot’s (fake) verdict that the killers are justified in their actions.

Except that Bouc specifically invites Poirot to take the train when Poirot is called to London to investigate the Kassner case. That is, Bouc is necessary in order to corroborate that this curious man whom we see is Hercule Poirot, while at the same time providing the necessary setting for the murder to take place. Bouc is in on it, too.

It is not simply that Poirot is part of the plot to murder Cassetti, then. It may even be that Poirot – this fake Poirot – is the mastermind behind the plot, a man playing the role of the Belgian detective in order to allow a murder to happen that he himself will expose and then condone precisely so that it takes place without consequence.

What evidence do we really have that Ratchett is Cassetti? None. That is, we have 12 liars who insist that this man is Cassetti, a child murderer who was never caught and the evidence for whose crime is never revealed to us. And then we have the word of a fake Poirot, whose explanations of the crime may be ingenious – but they explain to us neither who has been killed nor why.

Murder in Yugoslavia, or more specifically Kosovo, is therefore justified by the word of a fake authority. Indeed, because of the authority of a fake Belgian who justifies it, it becomes the perfect murder. Collective murder is perfect.

At the outset of the film, we see Poirot asking for the eggs that are the centre of this argument. Four minutes, he says, which presumably means that Poirot likes his eggs with a bit of unboiled snot in them given that five minutes is in my experience the best time to achieve a soft-boiled egg – give or take 30 seconds depending on the size of the egg.

(Furthermore, the boiling point of water falls with decreasing atmospheric pressure, and so it takes longer to cook an egg when one is at a higher altitude, since the boiling water there is not as hot and thus not as speedy a cooking medium as it would be at sea level.)

Having received two eggs that simply by appearance he does not like, the fake Poirot dismisses them and demands two more, which duly arrive.

Poirot (the fake Poirot) then takes out a ruler and measures the eggs, even though the eggs are visibly not the same size.

What is more, having dismissed the initial pair of eggs, he now accepts the second set of eggs, even though they are visibly disparate – and even though measuring them will not help him to know whether they have been boiled for the four required minutes.

In other words, first the insistence, then the refusal and then the nonsensical measurements are carried out in order to convince those around him (and we viewers) that this man is Hercule Poirot, the sort of man who would do such nitpicking. But of course, this is simply a performance by an impostor.

When Poirot makes it on to the Orient Express, he is served two much more equally-sized eggs for breakfast by the train steward Pierre Michel (Marwan Kenzari). How Michel knows to prepare the eggs this way is not revealed to us – and this is Poirot’s first experience on the titular train. In other words, Michel would seem already somehow to know Poirot. And Michel will eventually be revealed as yet another part of the plot to kill Ratchett, whom the murderers also claim to be Cassetti.

What is more, when Ratchett endeavours to employ Poirot to protect him from what he senses is imminent danger, Poirot (the fake Poirot) refuses – in part because he does not like Ratchett’s face.

In other words, not only would it seem that Poirot (the fake Poirot) is known in advance to at least one – but perhaps more – of the criminals who murder Ratchett. But it would also seem that Poirot himself has something against Ratchett. Perhaps it is for this reason that this detective who jumps up and who leaves his berth upon the slightest sound also somehow manages to sleep through 12 humans piling into a berth, stabbing a man and leaving again… because he also was a part of it.

But then who is this fake Poirot?

When the fake Poirot arrives at Istanbul train station with Bouc, he is told that there is no room left on the train – and that he therefore cannot travel in spite of his friend Bouc’s promise that he can.

At the last minute, however, someone suggests that an Englishman named Harris has not made it on time to catch the train. Passengers must arrive 30 minutes before departure, otherwise they forfeit their right to travel – and Harris has not arrived before departure and therefore cannot travel.

What has happened to Harris? Harris may have forgotten or missed his train. Or, given that Harris was otherwise booked on to a train where all of the passengers and even some of the staff members know each other, as an outsider he has been conveniently forced to miss the train – so as not to disrupt the murder that is about to take place (Harris is the victim of a second, earlier murder?).

Or, more simply, Harris does take the train. For the man who claims to be Hercule Poirot is really an Englishman called Harris, hence his inability correctly to pronounce the plural for eggs in French (des œufs/des ‘uh’).

Perhaps it is for this reason that MacQueen (Josh Gad) initially expresses surprise at seeing Harris/Poirot – for he does not recognise his friend in disguise, prompting Harris/Poirot to express his own dismay at MacQueen’s appearance. That is, Harris is indirectly expressing his own disappointment at having to look like Hercule Poirot.

Everything that follows is persiflage, pure show, or simply noise like the whistle of a train (per-siffle-age), including a somewhat nonsensical ‘action’ sequence in which Poirot chases MacQueen along a wooden bridge.

Indeed, this would explain the highly theatrical opening of the film, too, in which the fake Poirot supposedly solves the case of a missing treasure of which a rabbi (Elliot Levey), a priest (David Annen) and an imam (Joseph Long) are accused of stealing.

The fake Poirot himself points out that this is almost a joke scenario to the assembled crowd, who for some reason accept that a trial can or should take place in the open air and under the authority of a fake detective hired by the British government. That is, the trial is indeed a joke.

For, it becomes immediately obvious that there are not just the three religious men involved in this case, since the fake Poirot quickly explains to us that the last person to see the triumvirate was the British Police Chief Inspector (Michael Rouse).

We are told that Poirot (the fake Poirot) solves this crime as a result of a mark left by a shoe on a painting that lines the wall beneath the treasure. But far more simple a solution is to include among the suspects the very man who has known to accuse these three religious figures in the first place.

In other words, the ‘trial’ at the film’s opening is a pure show, a sham that is also put on in order to convince the assembled crowd and we viewers that this fake Poirot is the real Poirot.

The Chief Inspector supposedly steals the treasure, but it seems more logical to this viewer that the crime itself is a set-up so that the trial can be staged and so that the fake Poirot can be inserted into the story world.

That is, the fake Poirot is really engineered by the British – not to sort out who is responsible for the looting of valuables in Jerusalem (where the film opens), but in order to justify the British looting of valuables from Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Empire.

Supposedly called to London for the Kassner case, the British have in fact set Harris up as Poirot so that he can go on to the Orient Express to mastermind and then to justify the murder of Ratchett.

Why do this? Because Ratchett, too, is involved in the business of buying and selling antiques, including fake ones. That is, Ratchett wants to get involved in the very same racket that the British are operating throughout their Empire: stealing antiquities and replacing them with fakes that are sold at high cost.

As an upstart possible competitor, Ratchett must naturally be neutralised – otherwise the claims to power of the British will be exposed as fake. The Empire will be exposed as fake, its pretences to power merely an illusion staged to fool the assembled crowds that its figures of authority (the so-called Poirot) are in fact more powerful than their religious authorities (the rabbi, the priest and the imam).

Only two people will know the identity of the murderer, says the fake Poirot: God and Hercule Poirot. But if Hercule Poirot does not exist, then God may not exist. Or if Hercule Poirot is fake, then God may also be fake. That is, all who claim to be authorities on this Earth are fake, actors in a spectacle that is put on in order to create the illusion of power and in order to convince the spectators to believe in that illusory power.

(It is by this token important that the fake Poirot exposes corruption among the occupying British forces – the supposedly criminal Chief Inspector. In doing so, the fake Poirot would claim to show that the British bring their own people to justice – in the process covering over how the system of Empire will itself never be brought to justice. That is, the small crime is used as a mask for the massive crime that is taking place in broad daylight: the undermining and replacement of the local figures of authority for the purposes of ransacking the territory that the forces of Empire are infiltrating.)

Given the presence among the perpetrators on the train of three to five further Americans – MacQueen, the fake Hardman, Dr Arbuthnot (Leslie Odom Jr), the fake Countess Elena Andrenyi (Lucy Boynton) and the fake Caroline Hubbard (Michelle Pfeiffer) – it would appear that the British are not alone in ransacking the rest of the world.

Let us not also forget the Russians, including Princess Dragomiroff (Judi Dench) and Count Rudolph Andrenyi (Sergei Polunin), who seems expressly to take pleasure in the murder (as well as being prone to violence in general).

The group is rounded out by naturalised Americans Biniamino Marquez (Manuel García-Rulfo) and Pilar Estravados (Penélope Cruz), as well as British citizens with strong American ties, including Mary Debenham (Daisy Ridley) and Edward Masterman (Derek Jacobi), as well as Jewish émigrée Hildegarde Schmidt (Olivia Colman).

In other words, the major world powers are all united in a front to frame and to justify the murder of a man, Ratchett, whose crime is to seek to get involved in their game. Whose crime is to seek also to be a criminal. And who for his effrontery is branded a child abductor and murderer such that his assassination for theft and the peddling of fakes becomes morally justified.

—

When the fake Poirot performs his charade of egg inspection before a young boy (Yasine Zeroual), the fake Poirot explains that the disparity in size is not the fault of the eggs, but of the chicken. Or rather, that it is an inexplicable mystery.

To what end this prologue, which does not appear in the novel?

Perhaps Branagh is trying to tell us that as no two eggs are the same, so are a film and a novel not the same. That is, one can never get the original to match the copy. And so Branagh is suggesting from the very beginning that this is a fake version of Agatha Christie’s story that we are watching – and that it would be pointless to try to get the one to match the other.

Similarly, the film’s opening by the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem does not happen in the novel, which rather opens in Aleppo, and which sees Poirot travel by train (on the Taurus Express) to Istanbul, rather than by boat (as happens in this film).

We have already established how the film’s opening takes place simply for show – in the sense that it is a show designed to convince the world that this fake Poirot is the real Poirot and that the British are thus justified in their dominion over Jerusalem (which of course the British celebrate as being theirs whenever they patriotically sing the hymn ‘Jerusalem,’ as written by William Blake, to whom we shall return shortly).

But here the opening, with its overhead shots and its supposedly reliable flashbacks to the dispute between the rabbi, the imam and the priest, are all designed to convince us not just of the authority of the fake Poirot, but of the authority of the film.

This is especially clear in the fake Poirot’s illusory ability to predict the movements of the Chief Inspector. Firstly, he sends a guard to stand at the south gate in advance of denouncing the supposedly corrupt policeman, while also placing in the wall his walking stick, which eventually the fleeing Police Inspector will run into.

But this miraculous ability to predict the future is not so much magic as simply stage management: it is easy to seem to predict the future when it has been prearranged in advance for the policeman to go to the south gate and then to run into the walking stick.

In other words, the film wants us to believe in the power and authority of the film, when all of this is really staged, a fake that is a far cry from Christie’s novel. This is not Murder on the Orient Express that we are watching, but a fake film created by an impostor.

Put differently, cinema as a whole is an illusion machine that is used to give authority to those who peddle it. Like Ratchett, of whom the fake Poirot and his friends must get rid, cinema passes off fakes as if real, making handsome profits in the process while also stealing real local treasures via Empire, and as rendered here through the use in this film of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall.

Which of course is not the real Wailing Wall, but a fake filmed in Malta.

More than this. As the fake Poirot is put into motion in order to justify the murder of Ratchett, so is cinema put into motion in order to justify murder more generally. As the disappearance of Ratchett is a conspiracy between the British, the Russians, the Americans and various naturalized Americans, so is the disappearance of Aleppo, for example, a conspiracy that is made to look like a struggle between the major world powers.

The point that I wish to make is not specifically about Aleppo, nor Palestine which was the nation in which Jerusalem resided at the time in which the film is set.

Rather, I am using Aleppo and Palestine here as examples of Empire and the role that cinema plays in the continuation of Empire. In bringing this fake magic trick to the world, the power of those who create cinema is justified.

The film regularly features extended sequences filmed from the exterior of the train, such that the train itself becomes a ‘character’ in the film. We might venture further yet, though, and suggest that it is not simply as if the train itself were a key player in the events that are unfolding, but as if the train demanded these events.

That is, the train is like cinema a tool for the creation of modernity. And what is modernity? Modernity is the creation of a system of power whereby some use the trickery of technology in order to demonstrate their power over others, whom they then ransack in order to consolidate their power – a perfect feedback loop of empowerment.

But this empowerment of some over others also involves the disempowerment of others for the benefit of some. This disempowerment is in effect murder. As a human seeking to become god kills others in order to use their life force and blood in order to prolong, increase and perhaps render permanent their own, so does modernity involve the sacrifice of many to sate the claims to divinity that a few are trying to make.

Naturally, anyone who sees through this fakery and who aims to achieve their own power must be removed – hence the murder of Ratchett. Revolution, or not to believe the proclaimed divinity of those who would have power, and to seek to establish via the same means one’s own power, similarly requires suppression, or else power will not be consolidated but distributed.

(It would seem all too human for humans to seek to become gods.)

In order for power to take on magic qualities that reinforce its power (power as appearance), power also seeks to hide its origin. As the projector from which images originate is hidden in the cinema, so is the provenance of power generally hidden. Power comes as if from nowhere, via sleight of hand. It is magical. And thus its authority is not to denied since it is beyond the ken of other, uninformed humans.

The status of Murder on the Orient Express as a Maltese-American co-production, then, functions as a means to hide the film’s own source of power (and that of cinema more generally). This is a film that comes from a ‘small’ place (Malta), but which really just reaffirms the big interests of cinema (Hollywood) – with Malta itself a screen enabled by the tax breaks that drew the production to it in the first place, and which tax breaks function as an invitation to under-pay local, Maltese workers, thereby justifying under-payment and exploitation as a whole.

What is more, as Malta functions as the home of an infamous Masonic order, and as small islands generally function as tax havens, or what the recent leak of documents would confirm to be ‘paradises’ on Earth (or what Nicholas Shaxson further defines as islands of [stolen] treasure), so does the presence of Malta in this production function as a means of burying treasure, turning theft into an illusion – something the reality of which cannot be proven, and which therefore is both godly and not real. To believe in it is to be an insane conspiracist. To be part of it is never to be discovered.

This is how Empire functions: power is nominally regulated through the creation of taxation systems, with the powerful then placing themselves outside of the jurisdiction of such regulation. Regular humans who are too stupid to be crooks are punished for their honesty (their money is stolen from them, and they receive next to nothing in return), while the so-called gods are never punished for breaking the rules that they impose upon other people.

(Europe/the West must be defended from Islam by the Knights Templar of the Order of Malta, a specifically Christian group that aims to put down the revolutionary religion of Mohammad, who is not divine but human, and so who threatens to undermine the claims to divinity of other humans. Murder in Kosovo is justified.)

And what of William Blake? The fake Poirot is called to London for the Kassner case. To what might this refer? Perhaps it refers to the work of author Rudolf Kassner, the man who translated Blake into German and who also was influenced by Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy is a novel in which fabulation becomes impossible to tell apart from truth as we are presented with illusion after illusion.

(Tristram Shandy as a deconstruction of power, and as a deconstruction of cinema avant la lettre/avant la caméra. In famously featuring a black page, Tristram Shandy renders itself antithetical to cinema, which relies upon darkness, but which cannot make darkness visible since this would be to bring to light and to humanise its otherwise invisible and would-be divine workings.)

(And so the ‘Jerusalem’ of Empire is not the real Jerusalem; it is a fake, builded elsewhere in England. But in building that fake Christian as opposed to that multi-faith Jerusalem, so are the dark Satanic mills of Empire put into motion.)

It is a kind of Blakean demonic energy that Ron Rosenbaum attributes to Adolf Hitler in a bid to explain his ascent to power – as if Hitler were the ultimate revolutionary little man born to rob power back from the gods in which he did not believe, and who thus provoked global war as the gods naturally demanded his blood to prove that Hitler was human as Hitler demanded blood to transcend his humanity and to become a god. With their nuclear light, the winners of the war demonstrated that they verily were gods.

The fake Poirot is perhaps, then, called to investigate the rise of Hitler and the role that literature, translation and perhaps even cinema played in that rise. Hitler is one more upstart, like Ratchett, whom the fake Poirot and his British, American and Russian friends must help to put down in order to perpetuate the balance of power as is. America, Britain and Russia may squabble over who has most power between them, but these squabbles merely cover over the bigger question of why they have power at all. They are a cinematic show that plays out so that people believe in their divinity as they rob the world of its treasures, selling back fakes to make yet more money and to consolidate all power in their own hands.

So for the sake of an f, Murder on the Orient Express is revealed as fake.

Or perhaps a simple show of ignorance on the part of Kenneth Branagh (he does not know how to pronounce his œufs) sets in chain a conspiracy theory that nonetheless reveals the very humanity and not the divinity of the world’s systems of power – and the role that cinema plays in creating and maintaining them.

Or perhaps this is just idle conspiracy theoretical fabulation, patterns where there only is chaos, and to be disproved in an ongoing apocalypse of false idols.

Chaosmopolitan Cinema: Cinema, Globalisation, Holocaust

American cinema, Blogpost, European cinema, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

Yesterday (22 February 2017), the excellent scholar Celestino Deleyto gave a talk at the Centre for Research into Film and Audiovisual Cultures at the University of Roehampton, London.

In the talk, Deleyto outlined an argument that has also appeared in a recent article in Transnational Cinemas, where he discusses the way in which cosmopolitanism can function as a framework through which to understand contemporary cinema, which today is thoroughly transnational and thus cannot be properly understood according to old-fashioned nationalist paradigms (film history as a history of national film movements, with American cinema – Hollywood – perhaps as its defining centre).

In elaborating this argument, Deleyto engages with two films, Io Sono Li/Shun Li and the Poet (Andrea Segre, Italy/France, 2011) and Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, USA, 2011). The first is a clearly transnational film, in that it is a film with a multinational cast about an immigrant Chinese labourer who befriends a man from the former Yugoslavia now living in Chioggia, a town close to Venice, Italy, where the locals speak a mixture of Italian and Venetian.

Deleyto outlined how the phenomenon of acqua alta, where seawater rises up above the banks of the city and into the buildings of Chioggia, functions as a metaphor for the film’s own engagement with border crossings and transnationalism of a different sort: that of the characters in the film, who find themselves in Chioggia having made various crossings of their own. There are literal borders that define the nations of the world, but these borders are porous while also moving: Li and the poet can get to Chioggia, but they cannot necessarily integrate into Italian society, even if the locals are happy enough with water seeping up into their buildings from the sea below.

It is through the lens of cosmopolitanism, then, that we can understand what the film is doing. That is, if cosmopolitanism is broadly defined as an openness to otherness, then we can see how the film is about openness – exploring the crossing of borders in various different ways – even if Io Sono Li ultimately has a pessimistic outlook towards the openness to others/cosmopolitanism of the Venetians who occupy the Chioggia of the film (they do not so readily accept the migrants, especially when they begin to form some sort of solidarity between themselves).

Margaret far less clearly is a transnational film in its story of a self-absorbed teenager, Lisa (Anna Paquin), living in New York. But it is about openness to otherness/cosmopolitanism in various ways. For, while New Yorkers might be believing themselves the most cosmopolitan people on Earth, as they sip Cosmopolitans while reading Cosmopolitan magazine, Lonergan’s film in fact skewers the small-mindedness of its characters in New York post-11 September 2001.

The film does this in various ways, with Deleyto using two scenes to highlight something important about the film. The first is during a restaurant scene in which Lisa, her mother, Joan (J. Smith Cameron), a friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin) and her mother’s boyfriend, Ramon (Jean Reno), discuss politics over dinner.

As the conversation continues, Ramon in particular discusses authoritarianism, which he then equates to Israel and criticizes Emily for being a typical Jew in not being able to take criticism about Israel. During this conversation, the scene cuts to wider shots of the dinner guests, during which we see other diners enjoying their meals.

More significantly, the soundtrack of the film features the conversation of Lisa et al going quiet as we hear also snippets of conversations from those other diners. The technique in effect reminds us of the otherness that surrounds us everywhere, and yet to which we generally remain closed/unaware. Even though the film critiques the self-absorption of its New York characters – including people whose families come originally from Europe (Lisa, Joan and Emily are all Jewish) and Latin America (Ramon is Colombian, but lived a long time in France) and who talk consciously about borders and control – the film itself takes on a cosmopolitan form by opening itself to otherness, as Io Sono Li opens its fictional world to the real world phenomenon of the acqua alta.

Cosmopolitanism is not just a thematic concern, then, but it is also a set of stylistic/formal traits: having the soundtrack open up to other conversations, having the mise-en-scène feature real-world phenomena. Whether or not any given film is transnational or about border crossings, cosmopolitanism becomes a framework through which we can understand all cinema: to what extent is it in its form and content both about and in and of itself open to otherness?

In the era of globalization that has brought with it Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, the Syrian refugee crisis and so on, the question becomes a pressing one – making Deleyto’s work both (un)timely and important.

To return to Margaret, Deleyto ended his talk by showing and analyzing the final scene of the film. At the Lincoln Center, Lisa and Joan watch a production of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, particularly a sequence featuring ‘Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour,’ a piece of music often referred to as the ‘Barcarolle.’

During this scene, Lisa begins to cry; Joan notices this and begins to cry herself; and the two embrace.

In other words, Lonergan’s film is cosmopolitan enough to give some sort of redemption to Lisa, who has actively sought to reject otherness throughout the rest of the film. That is, the scene shows that there is hope for Lisa as she opens up to the otherness of Offenbach’s opera, such that she has an affective encounter (she cries) – even if this is a muted hope at best, since even though art affects her, the opera remains a very classed and safe space that perhaps indicates a ‘false hope’ (we have no real evidence that Lisa will continue to be anything other than an unpleasant, self-absorbed human being).

Here is where we depart from Deleyto’s wonderful presentation and essay in order to push the argument further – and we shall start by considering the production history of Margaret and then ‘Barcarolle.’

As Deleyto made clear, Lonergan filmed Margaret years before it finally got a (minimal) release in 2011. The reason for it being stuck in ‘post-production hell’ is that Lonergan refused to budge on producing a cut of the film under three hours in length. Eventually, Martin Scorsese stepped in and finally the movie got released – albeit in few theatres, meaning that the film has widely been overlooked.

In addition to being unwieldy in its length, Margaret is also difficult to watch (or at least, this was my experience of the film – not least because Lisa is such an unpleasant character). However, too long for commercial release, difficult to watch, barely having been seen: somehow these elements also add to the way in which Lonergan’s film asks us to think about openness.

For, if his film is about openness in a transnational, globalized world, thus affirming that the national is no longer a suitable frame through which to consider cinema, then perhaps cinema, too, is no longer a suitable frame through which to consider… cinema itself!

My intention is not to sound crazy here. How can cinema no longer be a useful concept for understanding cinema? Well, my reasoning goes as follows: if there is one thing that a film involves, then it is precisely a frame – a border that surrounds every image that we see. And if a film is going to be cosmopolitan and to be open to things that are beyond our normal borders, then cinema must look beyond its own frame, i.e. beyond cinema.

We can see this in Margaret through the use of sound, which helps us to think outside of the frame – to think about spaces that lie beyond our usual purview. But we can also see this in the way in which Margaret does not fit into cinemas: it is too long, it is hard to watch. Even though a film, the film itself somehow eludes cinema.

This makes Margaret a film that is truly of its age. Digital technologies have created a world in which cinema is indeed no longer cinema, with stereoscopic cinema even taking images off the screen and out into the audience (what in my forthcoming book, Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude, I call ‘cinema unframed’).

However, what we get in this digital age is not openness to otherness, but more and more of the same: screens everywhere, each featuring the same old things, a kind of ubiquitisation of cinema through the digital, a homogeneisation of space that sees everyone seeing the same things everywhere at the same time.

Margaret is of its age, then, but it is not just a reinforcement of the dominant values of its age: it is a harsh critique of its age, which gives it the impression of being precisely not of its age, since had it been of its age, producers would have let it exist in its elongated version and more people would have seen it.

In being of its age but in seeming not of its age, Margaret is thus untimely. It is both a film, but also somehow not fit for cinema.

Being untimely, being non-cinema, we can reach here a way not quite of critiquing the cosmopolitan framework through which to understand film (it is a good framework!), but perhaps of expanding upon it creatively.

For, if cosmopolitanism is about borders, then there remains an overwhelming emphasis in it upon space.

This is not a bad thing, but (as Caroline Bainbridge also suggested during Deleyto’s talk) it comes at the cost of thinking about the role of time in these processes. If globalization (and the digital era) brings with it the homogeneisation of space – the same shops everywhere, with the local often suffering – then it also brings with it a homogeneisation of time. We can understand this through those ubiquitous digital screens that each show fast-paced movies that match our fast-paced lives, in which we have no time for reflection and no time for imagination. We have no time for Margaret, which is too long.

Time, then, becomes a question in part of rhythm, or tempo: under globalization, we all lead our lives at the same rhythm, which is the rhythm of commerce, whereby I am always looking at screens, checking my emails, being in bed with my phone, always working if not always at work. The temporality of the globalized era is the temporality of work, of business, and thus of capital, whereby everyone is always busy, always working and not open to different times (slow things and people annoy the hell out of us).

And yet, time is more than just rhythm or tempo, even if under globalization the rhythm/tempo of the world is becoming homogeneised, just as space is becoming homogeneised. For time also is change: and if change is anything – if change can happen – then it must involve being open to otherness.

Being open to otherness in terms of time means being open to different rhythms and tempo, not everyone moving at the same speed. In this sense, the very length and slowness of Margaret is part of the cosmopolitanism of the film.

But more than this, if we have to be open to otherness and thus to change, we must in some senses live in a world that is not ordered (a cosmos) and strictly urban (a polis, where space is controlled through walls and roads and wires and other lines), but a world that also is chaotic. In other words, not a cosmos, nor necessarily a chaos, but something that is a mix of the two, or what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might, after James Joyce, call a chaosmos.

Chaosmopolitanism, then, is perhaps the framework that allows us to think about both the spatial and the temporal dimensions of being open to otherness, and to think about not just borders in a spatial sense (where they lie) but also in a temporal sense (how they change).

Deleyto demonstrated that the space of New York in Margaret is very hemmed in, enclosed. In enclosed spaces, our world literally shrinks; we become closed-minded and self-absorbed. And in the contemporary, digital world, we close ourselves off from others in many ways, not least by only looking at our screens, headphones in our ears. And as the space of our world shrinks, so does the time, as mentioned: we become constantly on our screens, always working, bored – perhaps even offended – by times/rhythms that are not fast-paced and do not bear the stamp of modernity.

To be slowed down, to slow down: this demonstrates an openness to otherness in a temporal sense, a kind of change that sees rhythms multiply rather than reduce everywhere to one. Chaosmopolitanism is openness to other spaces and to other times.

A chaosmopolitan cinema, then, not only points beyond cinema and its typical frame, but it must also point beyond the fast-paced rhythm/tempo that defines contemporary cinema and much of the other images that we see on the ubiquitious screens that show audiovisual material, and which also must be fast-paced in order for us not to hate and to reject them. I may not like Margaret, but in some senses I must learn to like it, to acquire a taste for its time/rhythm/space in order to become open to its otherness.

But now let’s really take this analysis into its most important realm by returning to ‘Barcarolle.’

There are various things that we can note about the piece. Firstly, the song is about love and about the night – and thus in some senses it is about darkness.

If in a globalized world, it is to be the same time everywhere (instant telecommunications), and if in a world in which screens have brought about this singular rhythm/tempo (what we might call nuncocentrism – only the now of work exists), then in some senses this is to destroy the circular flow of day and night that is the constant movement/rhythm of the natural universe and to bring light to everywhere – for it always to be everywhere daytime, as we are illuminated via the light of the screens and never in darkness (not to be seen, not to be visible, and thus not to be lit, is not to exist). Making such light is, of course, the work of Lucifer.

To celebrate darkness, then, is to celebrate a world of difference, a world in which some things remain hidden, invisible, unspoken, unsayable. Only felt. Only thought. To celebrate darkness is perhaps itself then an act of openness to otherness that we might call love itself: to love not only what we see, but also what we do not and perhaps cannot see. To have a sort of faith: love is best in the dark, even if pornography wants to tell us that love is best in broad daylight.

In being about night and love, then, ‘Barcarolle’ also contains a chaosmopolitan dimension.

Oddly enough, given that the form of the ‘barcarolle’ comes from the boatsmen who pilot gondolas in Venice, Margaret also ends by taking us to Venice, the city that stands on the water and the straight lines of which (cosmos) are interrupted by the lunar, tidal cycles of the night (the chaos of water).

Furthermore, ‘Barcarolle’ is the piece of music that Guido (Roberto Benigni) plays in the concentration camp in order to tell his wife Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) that he is still there in La vita é bella/Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, Italy, 1997).

As the music plays, Benigni’s camera drifts across the camp – from the window at the Nazi party where he is working as a waiter – through the mist and to the dorm where Dora listens.

This is a very cosmopolitan camera movement that breaks down the barriers that have been set up between the Jewish inmates and the Nazi soldiers – a barrier that is broken through music – which like film is a temporal art form. The moment is thus also chaosmopolitan, as it allows Guido and Dora both to remember the past (their love for each other) and to dream of a different future (life outside of the camp). That is, the music allows them to feel/experience a different time beyond the time of the now.

Is it that Lisa is thinking of Life is Beautiful when she hears ‘Barcarolle’ in Margaret – and that she cries as she remembers the suffering of her Jewish ancestors during the Holocaust?

But we have further to go.

Giorgio Agamben argues that we live in a ‘concentrationary universe’ in which the concentration camp becomes the model of the contemporary world under globalization: closed off, not open, controlled, not chaotic, a permanently lit panopticon, that must of course use the techniques of cinema (lighting in order to surveil) in order to function.

If in the camp there is only the now of survival, then the contemporary world that features only the now of work is also a camp of sorts. As Deleyto discussed in his talk, the border can constitute an improvised camp (think of refugee camps near Calais). And so in the globalized world of now and the immanentisation of the camp (it is everywhere), then this is also the immanentisation of the border (the border is everywhere, and every infraction into it – into my personal space – is an offense and a justification of violence as I do not accept or tolerate otherness, to which I am not open, but from which I have instead closed myself off).

In such a world, where cinema has been a key purveyor of the values of the now, of the camp, of the border, a chaosmopolitan cinema must go beyond cinema – beyond the frame and beyond its typical tempos/rhythms. It must involve darkness and entirely different rhythms.

For, without such chaosmopolitan openness to otherness, to change and to difference, then we only have a cinema of light, a cinema of a single rhythm and a cinema of now (timely, not untimely, thereby not being quite of its age so much as destroying the concept of age itself, as nothing ever ages/changes – the capitalist quest for eternal youth).

Such a cinema may seem to make everything visible – but in fact it brings with it an occult crime that is beyond visibility, and which can never be figured on a screen, namely the unholy horror that is the Holocaust itself. If we do not embrace a little darkness everyday, if we do not reject cinema and its capitalist logic, then we lose our memory and we lose our imagination, and we allow for another Holocaust to take place.

But more than this. For if there is one other thing that cinema cannot capture in addition to the Holocaust, then it is globalization itself. Cinema can allude to it, but never really show it, for while globalization involves making everything visible (the permanent working daytime of the screen), globalization is, like cinema itself, invisible. Chaosmopolitan cinema must be self-conscious in order to show itself, it must be self-reflexive, and it must perhaps therefore alienate its viewers.

But yet more. If the Holocaust and globalization are not visible, and yet they are the inevitable consequence of a world that is only about the now of the screens and thus of visibility, then this is because globalization is a sort of Holocaust. In trying to destroy the night, in trying to wipe out darkness, faith and love, then murder becomes a perverted measure of ‘love,’ a jealous destruction of the other for their very difference/invisibility that is a love turned to hate.

The logic is something like this: if you will not show me your total self, if you will remain partially invisible to me, then I shall make you permanently invisible via death, because that is what you seem to be wanting. In this perversion, evil is most truly evil because those who commit it think that they are doing someone else a favour, even though the other did not ask for death. Instead, they just asked to be allowed a little space of their own, a little time of their own, something not controlled, in short some freedom.

As we move into a world of permanent light, permanent work, without sleep, and thus with no dreams, with no space of our own, no time of our own, and no memory, then the border becomes everywhere, and we create a new concentration camp (the camp is created through concentration, i.e. the shrinking of both space and time), a new Holocaust. Cinema plays a large part in that process. A chaosmopolitan cinema must take us beyond that, beyond the light of cinema, into different rhythms, and perhaps beyond cinema and the logic of the screens themselves, and into non-cinema, the non-cinema of night and love, where the water caresses the hard land as it feels the pull of the dreamy moon. A little bit of lunacy. If we don’t love each other, we’ll end up killing each other.

Lion (Garth Davis, Australia/USA/UK, 2016)

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

There is a sequence in Lion where Saroo (Dev Patel) and his soon-to-be girlfriend Lucy (Rooney Mara) walk to a party on opposite sides of the street.

Lucy does a wee dance, and Saroo then copies her – the pair thus doing some cute romance as they swap dance moves from across the road that separates them.

The moment is an uncredited homage to Spike Jonze’s short film, How They Get There (USA, 1997), which you can see in full below (for as long as it remains on YouTube).

Given that Lion is a film about a young boy who by accident becomes separated from his family and who ends up being adopted by Australians, and given that the film is based upon a true story, it seems strange to have this extended reference to Jonze’s film included.

For, while Jonze’s is a playful and witty short, Lion seems to be in the business of taking itself very seriously – as perhaps it should do given that it is a film about a topic as weighty as transnational identity, and which is seeking to pick up various awards during this year’s season. The homage, therefore, shifts the film tonally from serious to playful in a way that jars with the what the film otherwise seems to set out to achieve.

So let us say that Saroo and Lucy had seen How They Get There (these characters do supposedly live in the real world, after all, meaning that they may well have done). Surely the inclusion in the film is therefore justified – a kind of audiovisual exchange that could just as easily be the characters bonding via conversation over, say, their love of Aravind Adiga or Powderfinger (also real world figures)?

Well, maybe. But since Lion so clearly adopts this scene from Jonze, it simply feels tired, unimaginative and unoriginal – as if the filmmakers could not themselves come up with anything better than nicking someone else’s idea in order to convey romance. One’s confidence in the rest of the film is undermined: how much more of this film is entirely derivative?

More than this. There is a cinema in the world where such shifts in tone are in fact commonplace, such that they become perhaps even the defining feature of that cinema.

I am of course talking in quite a general sense about Indian cinema, with the Mumbai-based industry known as Bollywood generally functioning as its metonymic figurehead.

Lion is a transnational co-production, as the stated involvement of Australian, American and British monies makes clear above. And yet the film is also largely set in India, with locations including Kolkata and Khandwa, which lies close to Saroo’s home town of Ganesh Talai. What is more, the film also features numerous performances by Indian actors. So, one asks oneself, where is the Indian economic involvement in the film?

Or does the tonal shift marked by the adoption of Jonze’s idea also mark the adoption of ideas (tonal shifts themselves) from Indian cinema, which in turn marks the adoption of Indian cinematic resources for this film – which is a film about the adoption of Indian boys by white Australians?

There are plenty more things to say about Lion, but I would like to limit myself to three things – the first of which relates to How They Get There.

For, in Jonze’s film, things end badly as the male dancer gets run over, with the driver of the car perhaps also dying – and the male dancer’s shoe ending up in a gutter by the side of the road.

Does the reference to this film in Lion, therefore, signal a similar pessimism with regard to Saroo? While the film clearly is about ‘How They Get There,’ are we to believe that Saroo is, as it were, a shoe in a gutter – looking up at the stars that might help him in the developed world? There seems to be no clear analogy, but any way that one looks at it is never far from offensive.

Indeed – to move on to my second point – there is another strange sequence in the film where Saroo’s adoptive mother, Sue (Nicole Kidman), explains that when she was 12 she had a vision whereby she saw herself with a ‘brown boy’ – and that this is what drove her not to want to have birth children, but to want to adopt kids herself.

The daughter of an alcoholic, Sue in some senses seems to declare here that Saroo is partially an object that helps her to get over her own traumatic childhood. Which I guess is fair enough, except that this again reduces Saroo to simply a brown boy who may not want to be, but who is indeed the plaything of sorts of white Australians. No wonder that Saroo’s adopted brother, Mantosh (Divian Ladwa), is himself so troubled.

In this way, it seems oddly fitting that Saroo is not, in fact, Saroo’s real name. His infantile tongue could not properly pronounce his name (nor the name of his home town), and so Saroo is the result of the boy (played by Sunny Pawar) trying to say Sheru (meaning lion), and Ganestalay his attempt to say Ganesh Talai – a town that no one could find as a result of this difference.

What a thin thread possibly prevented Saroo from being able to find his way home. Nonetheless, the erasure of his Hindi roots through this ‘error’ does, as mentioned, seem oddly apt through its occultation of Saroo’s origins.

Of course, Saroo is haunted by his past and he does finally discover his origins – so at least we see that he cares for truth and is haunted by his privilege knowing that his mother is a labourer who carries rocks for a living while he enjoys boats and aeroplanes (and visions of his past from a drone – with his discovery of his past enabled in large part by the surveillance technology of Google Earth).

In other words, Lion clearly is a film about worlds separated by technology and in particular transport as a means of defining humans according to their different abilities to travel/move (even if true, it is oddly apt, then, that Saroo’s destiny is changed by his inadvertently being on the wrong train – the great distance that it covers from Khandwa to Kolkata signalling his destiny to be catapulted into a new, more mobile world).

And we are glad that Saroo is saved from this world, even if we see him running and laughing and loving his family in Ganesh Talai. For it is also a world defined by manual labour, paedophilia, child abuse and uncaring authorities. Saroo really is better off, it would seem, in Australia – and his rescue is thus in some senses justified, even if his adoptive mother has dimensions of the would-be White Saviour.

Dev Patel gives an excellent performance as Saroo. The film as a whole is powerful. But as the film ultimately endorses the fast pace of modernity at the expense of the slow pace of those pedestrian labourers who function as the very props upon which this modernity is based (it is the labour of his birth mother that brought Sheru into the world, even if Sue takes credit for raising Saroo), so, too, is the film constructed according to the fast pace of western films.

That is, the film has rapid scenes, often cutting into action and getting the viewer to infer what has happened – rather than allowing the viewer to see events unfold for themselves.

In this sense, we regularly see Saroo/Patel at points of high emotion – but the film in this regard does not show us ‘how they get there.’ That is, we do not see the onset of emotion, the change that takes place – we just see the emotion itself, with the emotion itself thus becoming symbolic, a symbol of emotion, rather than an emotion grounded in the real world of change and becoming.

The film’s decision to rush emotions in this way – to be too busy/in the business of business to want to take us through the complexity of emotion – reflects the privileged speed of the highly technologised First World, where emotions become empty because of their own speed, rather than real because slow and enworlded.

In its form, then, the film undermines what it otherwise would seemingly want to achieve: we want to connect with people across boundaries, but really what we are seeing are power games and the use of other people and their real lives for the purposes of our own entertainment, edification and comfort. This makes for troubling viewing, even if I also was swept up personally in the story that I was seeing.

While Patel seems excellent as Saroo, then, it also seems a shame that he is edited in such a way that we do not really get to see him act. Or rather, his performance is reduced to acting as a result of the editing: here is Saroo unhappy, here is Saroo sad, and so on. To get beyond acting exposed as acting, to get to acting as an embodied performance, we need to see the transitions; we need to see how they get there.

Oddly, such a transition is shown in the film – but by Sheru’s mother, Kamla, when they are reunited. I believe that this moment is performed by Priyanka Bose (she plays Saroo’s mother when he is young; it is unclear whether it is still her but aged via make-up when they finally meet again).

In a few brief moments of screen time, we see Bose carry out an extraordinary performance of recognition and then emotion as she recognises her boy. And yet what plaudits for Bose in the celebration of the film at awards season?

Furthermore, in a few brief instants we here sense a story that we never otherwise got to see – the story of an illiterate labourer whose son has been taken from her in rural India. How much more interesting might that film have been, rather than the troubles that a boy had in discovering his hometown through the use of Google Earth?

That we see a film that privileges the privileged masculine perspective is perhaps profoundly western. If, we wanted to watch a film featuring the female perspective, then we likely have to discover a different cinema – perhaps even the cinema of a place like India, where a masterpiece like Mother India (Mehboob Khan, India, 1957) dares to tell precisely the story of a female labourer struggling to bring up her children in the Indian countryside.

(Much as I tend to enjoy the performances of Casey Affleck, the performance from Bose in Lion reminds me of how Michelle Williams acts Affleck off the screen in Manchester by the Sea, Kenneth Lonergan, USA, 2016, even though she has minimal screen time and even though her big scene is scripted basically to suggest that she still is in love with the man who is largely responsible for the death of her children – i.e. it is a male fantasy-fulfilment.)

(This in turn reminds me that both Lion and Manchester by the Sea continue the trend of films about dead, lost, and otherwise problematised babies and children – as I have written about elsewhere. It is the preoccupying theme of contemporary western cinema.)

Forasmuch as it is well made and enjoyable, then, Lion seems to have adopted various things from various other places not in order to present us with any changed vision of the world, but to replicate the vision of a superior western, technologised, cinematic world – even if this world is built upon the labour of people like Kamla, whose plight remains invisible.

How we got here – to such a world that seemingly is made up of different worlds – is hidden.

And yet it might be the most important (hi)story for us all to learn.

I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, UK/France/Belgium, 2016)

Blogpost, British cinema, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

A brief thought about I, Daniel Blake, including **spoilers** (for which apologies).

The film is about the title character (Dave Johns), who has recently had a heart attack. Although his doctors advise that he does not return to work, the company contracted by Blake’s local employment bureau in Newcastle deems him fit for work.

As a result, Daniel must go in search of work – at least nominally – in order to get benefits and thus economically to survive.

One day in the employment bureau, Daniel meets Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother relocated to Newcastle from London by the housing association, who misses her first meeting at the bureau, and so who thus does not receive benefits.

The two strike up an unlikely friendship, with Daniel helping to keep Katie’s home warm, helping her out with food and more.

In some senses, I, Daniel Blake is a large-format, narrative version of the famous ‘Computer says no’ sketch repeated in various ways on Little Britain (Matt Lucas and David Walliams, 2003-2006): it is about the inflexibility of systems that are dominated by information technology.

It is not that information technology is necessarily bad. It is the internet and a direct link to a show manufacturer in China that gives Daniel’s neighbour, China (Kema Sikazwe), a chance of getting out of his own employment misery.

But, through Daniel’s unfamiliarity with computers, it does speak of a generation of humans who are being left behind by the insistent computerisation of all aspects of life. If one does not know how to use or speak to the computer, then the computer will inevitably say no.

As per Ken Loach’s Kes (UK, 1969), Daniel’s answer is frustratingly right before his (and our) eyes, and yet he does not act upon it. In Kes, Billy Casper (David Bradley) demonstrates at length that he is excellent with animals. And yet at no point do any of his teachers or the employment office suggest that Billy might make a good zookeeper, say, with Billy himself also fairly resigned to working down in the Barnsley pit.

Likewise, carpenter Daniel fabricates beautiful wooden mobiles – suggesting in some senses that he might also simply endeavour to work at a pace that is not stressful or necessarily detrimental to his precarious health, and to sell his wares at least to supplement his benefits lifestyle. At one point, Daniel even turns down an offer to buy some of his work from a man (Stephen Halliday) who otherwise buys up all of his furniture.

Something of a tangent: when Lewis Mumford writes in The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development that the surplus labour force provided by slaves in the USA basically led to a stagnation in technological development (no need to create machines to do work that humans will do for free), he also would seem to suggest that it was only when machines were created that could outperform slaves that slavery was abolished.

It is a controversial claim, but one might even say that the American Civil War was in some senses brought about for economic reasons: advances in technology and thus the ability to make profit without slaves is what made some people comfortable with the idea of abolishing slavery – while those who did not have the same technology (the South) were forced to accept the ‘privileged’ perspective that slaves were (now) deemed to be a Bad Thing… and ended up going to war over this.

And so it might be with computerisation: the privileged, technologically advanced people can force their technologies on to everyone else, thereby consigning to misery those who cannot really afford or get access to them.

(Read in terms of a technologised elite imposing its privileged perspective on the masses, one can in some senses account for both Brexit and the election of Donald J Trump as a negative reaction against precisely such a process – however ‘misguided’ or otherwise one might consider both Brexit and/or Trump’s election to be.)

There has been a lot of hoo ha in the reactionary press about I, Daniel Blake being contrived (I think of reviews by the likes of Toby Young). And yet, its contrivances are what make I, Daniel Blake most powerful.

For, there is a sense in Loach’s film of making absolutely clear at all stages that this is a film: the ‘naturalness’ of the acting (which can sometimes seem ‘amateur’), the somewhat forced nature of the script. It would seem that Loach is not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes that this is a film.

This is also made palpable as a result of Daniel’s death at the film’s end: Daniel cannot deliver the speech that he has written about his experiences and how he has been handled, which instead Katie reads out at his funeral. If Daniel lived and delivered the speech himself, then the contrivances of the film would be hidden. Instead Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty place them front and centre. Daniel Blake must die.

This is not to say that we should dismiss I, Daniel Blake simply on the grounds of being manipulative. What else do you think that cinema is if it is not manipulative? Acknowledging its own manipulations, the film nonetheless brings its viewers into a position of having to think about why the film is doing this – not simply for the sake of fooling viewers. On the contrary, it is so that we might take seriously what the film has to say.

The final confirmation of this is when Daniel and Katie enter at first into Daniel’s hearing (if I remember correctly). Looking directly at the camera – for the first time in the film – both speak not to the assembled assessors, but also directly to us.

I, Daniel Blake contains warmth and nightmarish visions of life on benefits in equal measure, with Katie’s display of hunger at a food bank (where she opens and begins to eat directly from a tin of cold baked beans) being in particular harrowing.

We are all implicated in this world. We all should take on the collective responsibility for our fellow citizens. Through the false, Ken Loach encourages us to confront the real.

Adventures in Cinema 2015

African cinema, American cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Canadian cinema, Chinese cinema, Documentary, European cinema, Film education, Film reviews, French Cinema, Iranian cinema, Italian Cinema, Japanese Cinema, Latin American cinema, Philippine cinema, Ritzy introductions, Transnational Cinema, Ukrainian Cinema, Uncategorized

There’ll be some stories below, so this is not just dry analysis of films I saw this year. But it is that, too. Sorry if this is boring. But you can go by the section headings to see if any of this post is of interest to you.

The Basics
In 2015, I saw 336 films for the first time. There is a complete list at the bottom of this blog. Some might provoke surprise, begging for example how I had not seen those films (in their entirety) before – Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, France/UK, 1985) being perhaps the main case in point. But there we go. One sees films (in their entirety – I’d seen bits of Shoah before) when and as one can…

Of the 336 films, I saw:-

181 in the cinema (6 in 3D)

98 online (mainly on MUBI, with some on YouTube, DAFilms and other sites)

36 on DVD/file

20 on aeroplanes

1 on TV

Films I liked
I am going to mention here new films, mainly those seen at the cinema – but some of which I saw online for various reasons (e.g. when sent an online screener for the purposes of reviewing or doing an introduction to that film, generally at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton, London).

And then I’ll mention some old films that I enjoyed – but this time only at the cinema.

Here’s my Top 11 (vaguely in order)

Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, France/Germany/Switzerland, 2014)
El Botón de nácar/The Pearl Button (Patricio Guzmán, France/Spain/Chile/Switzerland, 2015)
Eisenstein in Guanajuato (Peter Greenaway, Netherlands/Mexico/Finland/Belgium/France, 2015)
Bande de filles/Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, France, 2014)
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, France/Mauritania, 2014)
Saul fia/Son of Saul (László Nemes, Hungary, 2015)
45 Years (Andrew Haigh, UK, 2015)
Force majeure/Turist (Ruben Östlund, Sweden/France/Norway/Denmark, 2014)
The Thoughts Once We Had (Thom Andersen, USA, 2015)
Phoenix (Christian Petzold, Germany/Poland, 2014)
Mommy (Xavier Dolan, Canada, 2014)

And here are some proxime accessunt (in no particular order):-

Enemy (Denis Villeneuve, Canada/Spain/France, 2013); Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, USA, 2014); Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2014); Jupiter Ascending (Andy and Lana Wachowski, USA/Australia, 2015); The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, UK/Hungary, 2014); Catch Me Daddy (Daniel Wolfe, UK, 2014); White God/Fehér isten (Kornél Mundruczó, Hungary/Germany/Sweden, 2014); Dear White People (Justin Simien, USA, 2014); The Falling (Carol Morley, UK, 2014); The Tribe/Plemya (Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, Ukraine/Netherlands, 2014); Set Fire to the Stars (Andy Goddard, UK, 2014); Spy (Paul Feig, USA, 2015); Black Coal, Thin Ice/Bai ri yan huo (Yiao Dinan, China, 2014); Listen Up, Philip (Alex Ross Perry, USA/Greece, 2014); Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs, USA, 2015); The New Hope (William Brown, UK, 2015); The Overnight (Patrick Brice, USA, 2015); Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse/My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2015); Manglehorn (David Gordon Green, USA, 2014); Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, USA, 2015); Hard to be a God/Trudno byt bogom (Aleksey German, Russia, 2013); Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, USA, 2015); Trainwreck (Judd Apatow, USA, 2015); Mistress America (Noah Baumbach, USA/Brazil, 2015); While We’re Young (Noah Baumbach, USA, 2014); Marfa Girl (Larry Clark, USA, 2012); La Sapienza (Eugène Green, France/Italy, 2014); La última película (Raya Martin and Mark Peranson, Mexico/Denmark/Canada/Philippines/Greece, 2013); Lake Los Angeles (Mike Ott, USA/Greece, 2014); Pasolini (Abel Ferrara, France/Belgium/Italy, 2014); Taxi Tehran/Taxi (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2015); No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 2015); Dope (Rick Famuyiwa, USA, 2015); Umimachi Diary/Our Little Sister (Kore-eda Hirokazu, Japan, 2015); Tangerine (Sean Baker, USA, 2015); Carol (Todd Haynes, UK/USA, 2015); Joy (David O. Russell, USA, 2015); PK (Rajkumar Hirani, India, 2014); Eastern Boys (Robin Campillo, France, 2013); Selma (Ava DuVernay, UK/USA, 2014); The Dark Horse (James Napier Robertson, New Zealand, 2014); Hippocrate/Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor (Thomas Lilti, France, 2014); 99 Homes (Ramin Bahrani, USA, 2014).

Note that there are some quite big films in the above; I think the latest Mission: Impossible topped James Bond and the other franchises in 2015 – maybe because McQuarrie is such a gifted writer. Spy was for me a very funny film. I am still reeling from Cliff Curtis’ performance in The Dark Horse. Most people likely will think Jupiter Ascending crap; I think the Wachowskis continue to have a ‘queer’ sensibility that makes their work always pretty interesting. And yes, I did put one of my own films in that list. The New Hope is the best Star Wars-themed film to have come out in 2015 – although I did enjoy the J.J. Abrams film quite a lot (but have not listed it above since it’s had enough attention).

Without wishing intentionally to separate them off from the fiction films, nonetheless here are some documentaries/essay-films that I similarly enjoyed at the cinema this year:-

The Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, USA, 2015); National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman, France/USA/UK, 2014); Life May Be (Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari, UK/Iran, 2014); Detropia (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, USA, 2012); Storm Children: Book One/Mga anak ng unos (Lav Diaz, Philippines, 2014); We Are Many (Amir Amirani, UK, 2014); The Salt of the Earth (Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, France/Brazil/Italy, 2014).

And here are my highlights of old films that I managed to catch at the cinema and loved immensely:-

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis/Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini (Vittorio de Sica, Italy/West Germany, 1970); Il Gattopardo/The Leopard (Lucchino Visconti, Italy/France, 1963); Images of the World and the Inscriptions of War/Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Harun Farocki, West Germany, 1989); A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, USA, 1974).

With two films, Michael Fassbender does not fare too well in the below list – although that most of them are British makes me suspect that the films named feature because I have a more vested stake in them, hence my greater sense of disappointment. So, here are a few films that got some hoo-ha from critics and in the media and which I ‘just didn’t get’ (which is not far from saying that I did not particularly like them):-

La Giovinezza/Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy/France/Switzerland/UK, 2015), Sunset Song (Terence Davies, UK/Luxembourg, 2015); Macbeth (Justin Kurzel, UK/France/USA, 2015); Love & Mercy (Bill Pohlad, USA, 2014); Slow West (John Maclean, UK/New Zealand, 2015); Tale of Tales/Il racconto dei racconti (Matteo Garrone, Italy/France/UK, 2015); Amy (Asif Kapadia, UK/USA, 2015).

And even though many of these feature actors that I really like, and a few are made by directors whom I generally like, here are some films that in 2015 I kind of actively disliked (which I never really like admitting):-

Hinterland (Harry Macqueen, UK, 2015); Fantastic Four (Josh Trank, USA/Germany/UK/Canada, 2015); Pixels (Chris Columbus, USA/China/Canada, 2015); Irrational Man (Woody Allen, USA, 2015); Aloha (Cameron Crowe, USA, 2015); Point Break 3D (Ericson Core, Germany/China/USA, 2015); American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2014); Every Thing Will Be Fine 3D (Wim Wenders, Germany/Canada/France/Sweden/Norway, 2015).

Every Thing Will Be Fine struck me as the most pointless 3D film I have yet seen – even though I think Wenders uses the form excellently when in documentary mode. The Point Break remake, meanwhile, did indeed break the point of its own making, rendering it a pointless break (and this in spite of liking Édgar Ramírez).

Where I saw the films
This bit isn’t going to be a list of cinemas where I saw films. Rather, I want simply to say that clearly my consumption of films online is increasing – with the absolute vast majority of these seen on subscription/payment websites (MUBI, DAFilms, YouTube). So really I just want to write a note about MUBI.

MUBI was great a couple of years ago; you could watch anything in their catalogue when you wanted to. Then they switched to showing only 30 films at a time, each for 30 days. And for the first year or so of this, the choice of films was a bit rubbish, in that it’d be stuff like Battleship Potemkin/Bronenosets Potemkin (Sergei M Eisenstein, USSR, 1925). Nothing against Potemkin; it’s a classic that everyone should watch. But it’s also a kind of ‘entry level’ movie for cinephiles, and, well, I’ve already seen it loads of times, and so while I continued to subscribe, MUBI sort of lost my interest.

However, this year I think that they have really picked up. They’ve regularly been showing stuff by Peter Tscherkassky, for example, while it is through MUBI that I have gotten to know the work of American artist Eric Baudelaire (his Letters to Max, France, 2014, is in particular worth seeing). Indeed, it is through Baudelaire that I also have come to discover more about Japanese revolutionary filmmaker Masao Adachi, also the subject of the Philippe Grandrieux film listed at the bottom and which I saw on DAFilms.

MUBI has even managed to get some premieres, screening London Film Festival choices like Parabellum (Lukas Valenta Rinner, Argentina/Austria/Uruguay, 2015) at the same time as the festival and before a theatrical release anywhere else, while also commissioning its own work, such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s documentary Junun (USA, 2015). It also is the only place to screen festival-winning films like Història de la meva mort/Story of my Death (Albert Serra, Spain/France/Romania, 2013) – which speaks as much of the sad state of UK theatrical distribution/exhibition (not enough people are interested in the film that won at the Locarno Film Festival for any distributors/exhibitors to touch it) as it does of how the online world is becoming a viable and real alternative distribution/exhibition venue. Getting films like these is making MUBI increasingly the best online site for art house movies.

That said, I have benefitted from travelling a lot this year and have seen what the MUBI selections are like in places as diverse as France, Italy, Hungary, Mexico, China, Canada and the USA. And I can quite happily say that the choice of films on MUBI in the UK is easily the worst out of every single one of these countries. Right now, for example, the majority of the films are pretty mainstream stuff that most film fans will have seen (not even obscure work by Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Jean-Luc Godard, Fritz Lang, Terry Gilliam, Robert Zemeckis, Frank Capra, Guy Ritchie, Steven Spielberg, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Wes Anderson). Indeed, these are all readily available on DVD. More unusual films like Foreign Parts (Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki, USA/France, 2010) are for me definitely the way for MUBI to go – even in a country that generally seems as unadventurous in its filmgoing as this one (the UK).

I’ve written in La Furia Umana about the changing landscape of London’s cinemas; no need to repeat myself (even though that essay is not available online, for which apologies). But I would like to say that while I have not been very good traditionally in going to Indian movies (which regularly get screened at VUE cinemas, for example), I have enjoyed how the Odeon Panton Street now regularly screens mainstream Chinese films. For this reason, I’ve seen relatively interesting fare such as Mr Six/Lao pao er (Hu Guan, China, 2015). In fact, the latter was the last film that I saw in 2015, and I watched it with maybe 100 Chinese audience members in the heart of London; that experience – when and how they laughed, the comings and goings, the chatter, the use of phones during the film – was as, if not more, interesting as/than the film itself.

Patterns
This bit is probably only a list of people whose work I have consistently seen this year, leading on from the Tscherkassky and Baudelaire mentions above. As per 2015, I continue to try to watch movies by Khavn de la Cruz and Giuseppe Andrews with some regularity – and the ones that I have caught in 2015 have caused as much enjoyment as their work did in 2014.

I was enchanted especially by the writing in Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up, Philip, and then I also managed to see Ross Perry acting in La última película, where he has a leading role with Gabino Rodríguez. This led me to Ross Perry’s earlier Color Wheel (USA, 2011), which is also well worth watching.

As for Rodríguez, he is also the star of the two Nicolás Pereda films that I managed to catch online this year, namely ¿Dónde están sus historias?/Where are their Stories? (Mexico/Canada, 2007) and Juntos/Together (Mexico/Canada, 2009). I am looking forward to seeing more Rodríguez and Pereda when I can.

To return to Listen Up, Philip, it does also feature a powerhouse performance from Jason Schwartzman, who also was very funny in 2015 in The Overnight. More Schwartzman, please.

Noah Baumbach is also getting things out regularly, and I like Adam Driver. I think also that the ongoing and hopefully permanent trend of female-led comedies continues to yield immense pleasures (I am thinking of Spy, Mistress America, Trainwreck, as well as films like Appropriate Behaviour, Desiree Akhavan, UK, 2014, to lead on from last year’s Obvious Child, Gillian Robespierre, USA, 2014; I hope shortly to make good on having missed Sisters, Jason Moore, USA, 2015).

I don’t know if it’s just my perception, but films like Selma, Dear White People, Dope and more also seem to suggest a welcome and hopefully permanent increase in films dealing with issues of race in engaging and smart ways. It’s a shame that Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (USA, 2015) may take some time to get over here. I am intrigued by Creed (Ryan Coogler, USA, 2015). I was disappointed that Top Five (Chris Rock, USA, 2014) only got a really limited UK release, too. Another one that I missed and would like to have seen.

Matt Damon is the rich man’s Jesse Plemons.

Finally, I’ve been managing to watch more and more of Agnès Varda and the late Chantal Akerman’s back catalogues. And they are both magical. I also watched a few Eric Rohmer and Yasujiro Ozu films this year, the former at the BFI Rohmer season in early 2015, the latter on YouTube (where the older films can roam copyright free).

Michael Kohler
During a visit to Hartlepool in 2015 to see my good friend Jenni Yuill, she handed me a letter that she had found in a first edition of a Christopher Isherwood novel. She had given the novel to a friend, but kept the letter. The letter was written by someone called Michael and to a woman who clearly had been some kind of mentor to him.

In the letter, Michael described some filmmaking that he had done. And from the description – large scale props and the like – this did not seem to be a zero-budget film of the kind that I make, but rather an expensive film.

After some online research, I discovered that the filmmaker in question was/is British experimental filmmaker Michael Kohler, some of whose films screened at the London Film Festival and other places in the 1970s through the early 1990s.

I tracked Michael down to his home in Scotland – and since then we have spoken on the phone, met in person a couple of times, and he has graciously sent me copies of two of his feature films, Cabiri and The Experiencer (neither of which has IMDb listings).

Both are extraordinary and fascinating works, clearly influenced by psychoanalytic and esoteric ideas, with strange rituals, dances, symbolism, connections with the elements and so on.

Furthermore, Michael Kohler is an exceedingly decent man, who made Cabiri over the course of living with the Samburu people in Kenya for a decade or so (he also made theatre in the communes of Berlin in the 1960s, if my recall is good). He continues to spend roughly half of his time with the Samburu in Kenya.

He is perhaps a subject worthy of a portrait film himself. Maybe one day I shall get to make it.

And beyond cinema
I just want briefly to say how one of the most affecting things that I think I saw this year was a photograph of Pier Paolo Pasolini playing football – placed on Facebook by Girish Shambu or someone of that ilk (a real cinephile who makes me feel like an impostor).

Here’s the photo:

I mention this simply because I see in the image some real joy on PPP’s part. I often feel bad for being who I am, and believe that my frailties, which are deep and many, simply anger people. (By frailties, I perhaps more meaningfully could say tendencies that run contrary to mainstream thinking and behaviours – not that I am a massive rebel or anything.) And because these tendencies run contrary to mainstream thinking and behaviours, I tend to feel bad about myself, worried that others will dislike me.

(What is more, my job does not help. I often feel that the academic industry is not so much about the exchange of ideas as an excuse for people to bully each other, or at least to make them feel bad for not being good enough as a human being as we get rated on absolutely everything that we do – in the name of a self-proclaimed and fallacious appeal to an absence of partiality.)

I can’t quite put it in words. But – with Ferrara’s Pasolini film and my thoughts of his life and work also in my mind alongside this image – this photo kind of makes me feel that it’s okay for me to be myself. Pasolini met a terrible fate, but he lived as he did and played football with joy. And people remember him fondly now. And so if I cannot be as good a cinephile or scholar as Girish Shambu and if no one wants to hear my thoughts or watch my films, and if who I am angers some people, we can still take pleasure in taking part, in playing – like Pasolini playing football. And – narcissistic thought though this is – maybe people will smile when thinking about me when I’m dead. Even writing this (I think about the possibility of people remembering me after I am dead; I compare myself to the great Pier Paolo Pasolini) doesn’t make me seem that good a person (I am vain, narcissistic, delusional); but I try to be honest.

And, finally, I’d like to note that while I do include in the list below some short films, I do not include in this list some very real films that have brought me immense joy over the past year, in particular ones from friends: videos from a wedding by Andrew Slater, David H. Fleming cycling around Ningbo in China, videos of my niece Ariadne by my sister Alexandra Bullen.

In a lot of ways, these, too, are among my films of the year, only they don’t have a name, their authors are not well known, and they circulate to single-figure audiences on WhatsApp, or perhaps a few more on Facebook. And yet for me such films (like the cat films of which I also am fond – including ones of kitties like Mia and Mieke, who own Anna Backman Rogers and Leshu Torchin respectively) are very much equally a part of my/the contemporary cinema ecology. I’d like to find a way more officially to recognise this – to put Mira Fleming testing out the tuktuk with Phaedra and Dave and Annette Encounters a Cat on Chelverton Road on the list alongside Clouds of Sils Maria. This would explode list-making entirely. But that also sounds like a lot of fun.

Here’s to a wonderful 2016!

COMPLETE LIST OF FILMS I SAW FOR THE FIRST TIME 2015

KEY: no marking = saw at cinema; ^ = saw on DVD/file; * = saw online/streaming; + = saw on an aeroplane; ” = saw on TV.

Paddington
The Theory of Everything
Le signe du lion (Rohmer)
Exodus: Gods and Kings
Enemy
Au bonheur des dames (Duvivier)
Il Gattopardo
Daybreak/Aurora (Adolfo Alix Jr)^
Eastern Boys
The Masseur (Brillante Mendoza)^
Stations of the Cross
Foxcatcher
National Gallery
Whiplash
American Sniper
Minoes
Fay Grim^
Tak3n
Tokyo Chorus (Ozu)*
Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza)^
Wild (Jean-Marc Vallée)
La prochaine fois je viserai le coeur
Pressure (Horace Ové)
La Maison de la Radio
L’amour, l’après-midi (Rohmer)
The Boxtrolls^
A Most Violent Year
The Middle Mystery of Kristo Negro (Khavn)*
Ex Machina
Die Marquise von O… (Rohmer)
An Inn in Tokyo (Ozu)*
Big Hero 6
Images of the World and The Inscriptions of War (Farocki)
Corta (Felipe Guerrero)*
Le bel indifférent (Demy)*
Passing Fancy (Ozu)*
Inherent Vice
Mommy (Dolan)
Quality Street (George Stevens)
Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune (Rohmer)
Jupiter Ascending
Amour Fou (Hausner)
Selma
Shoah*
Fuck Cinema^
Bitter Lake (Adam Curtis)*
Broken Circle Breakdown^
We Are Many
Duke of Burgundy
Love is Strange
Chuquiago (Antonio Eguino)*
The American Friend*
Set Fire to the Stars
Catch Me Daddy
Blackhat
Hinterland
Two Rode Together
Patas Arriba
Relatos salvajes
Clouds of Sils Maria
Still Alice
The Experiencer (Michael Kohler)^
Cabiri (Michael Kohler)^
CHAPPiE
White Bird in a Blizzard*
Hockney”
Love and Bruises (Lou Ye)*
Coal Money (Wang Bing)*
Kommander Kulas (Khavn)*
The Tales of Hoffmann
Entreatos (João Moreira Salles)^
White God
Insiang (Lino Brocka)*
5000 Feet is Best (Omer Fast)*
Bona (Lino Brocka)*
Difret
Aimer, boire et chanter
May I Kill U?^
Bande de filles
Appropriate Behavior
The Golden Era (Ann Hui)+
Gemma Bovery+
A Hard Day’s Night+
The Divergent Series: Insurgent
De Mayerling à Sarajevo (Max Ophüls)
Marfa Girl
When We’re Young
Timbuktu (Sissako)
La Sapienza (Eugène Green)
Enthiran^
Serena (Susanne Bier)+
22 Jump Street+
Undertow (David Gordon Green)*
Delirious (DiCillo)*
Face of an Angel
Cobain: Montage of Heck
Wolfsburg (Petzold)
The Thoughts Once We Had
El Bruto (Buñuel)*
Marriage Italian-Style (de Sica)*
Force majeure
Workingman’s Death*
The Salvation (Levring)
Glassland
The Emperor’s New Clothes (Winterbottom)
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Life May Be (Cousins/Akbari)
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
The Falling (Carol Morley)
Far From the Madding Crowd (Vinterberg)
Cutie and the Boxer^
Samba (Toledano and Nakache)
Mondomanila, Or How I Fixed My Hair After Rather A Long Journey*^
Phoenix (Petzold)
Cut out the Eyes (Xu Tong)
Producing Criticizing Xu Tong (Wu Haohao)
Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa)^
Accidental Love (David O Russell)*
The Tribe
Unveil the Truth II: State Apparatus
Mad Max: Fury Road 3D
Abcinema (Giuseppe Bertucelli)
Tale of Tales (Garrone)
Tomorrowland: A World Beyond
Coming Attractions (Tscherrkassky)*
Les dites cariatides (Varda)*
Une amie nouvelle (Ozon)
Ashes (Weerasethakul)*
Jeunesse dorée (Ghorab-Volta)^
La French
Inch’allah Dimanche (Benguigui)
San Andreas
Regarding Susan Sontag
Pelo Malo*
The Second Game (Porumboiu)^
Dear White People*
Spy (Paul Feig)
L’anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi et 27 années sans images*
Punishment Park*
Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto (Miguel Gomes)*
Black Coal, Thin Ice
Listen Up, Philip
Future, My Love*
Lions Love… and Lies (Varda)*
De l’autre côté (Akerman)
Les Combattants
London Road
West (Christian Schwochow)
Don Jon*
Mr Holmes
The Dark Horse*
Slow West
El coraje del pueblo (Sanjinés)^
Scénario du Film ‘Passion’ (Godard)*
Filming ‘Othello’ (Welles)*
Here Be Dragons (Cousins)*
Lake Los Angeles (Ott)*
Amy (Kapadia)
Magic Mike XXL
Hippocrate
It’s All True
I Clowns*
The New Hope
The Overnight
Sur un air de Charleston (Renoir)*
Le sang des bêtes (Franju)*
Chop Shop (Bahrani)*
Plastic Bag (Bahrani)*
Love & Mercy
Terminator Genisys 3D
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
The Salt of the Earth (Wenders/Salgado)
Mondo Trasho*
Le Meraviglie
True Story
Eden (Hansen-Love)
A Woman Under the Influence
River of No Return (Preminger)
Love (Noé)
Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse
Ant-Man 3D
Today and Tomorrow (Huilong Yang)
Inside Out
Pixels
Fantastic Four
99 Homes
Iris (Albert Maysles)
52 Tuesdays*
La isla mínima
Manglehorn
Diary of a Teenage Girl
Sciuscià (Ragazzi)
Hard to be a God
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Trainwreck
Mistress America
Precinct Seven Five
Theeb
The Wolfpack
The President (Makhmalbaf)
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
45 Years
Straight Outta Compton
Osuofia in London*
Osuofia in London 2*
Idol (Khavn)*
Diary (Giuseppe Andrews)^
American Ultra*
La última película (Martin/Peranson)*
Pasolini (Ferrara)*
Les Chants de Mandrin^
Odete (João Pedro Rodrigues)*
Hermanas (Julia Solomonoff)*
Taxi Tehran (Panahi)*
Mystery (Lou Ye)^
Lecciones para Zafirah*
Ulysse (Varda)*
Excitement Class: Love Techniques (Noboru Tanaka)*
Speak (Jessica Sharzer)*
Image of a Bound Girl (Masaru Konuma)*
The Color Wheel*
Jimmy’s Hall*
Shotgun Stories*
El color de los olivos*
Discopathe*
Fando y Lis*
La Giovinezza
Aloha+
The Lego Movie+
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone+
Ruby Sparks+
Eadweard
Detropia
Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (Johnnie To)+
La loi du marché+
OSS117: Rio ne répond plus+
Self/Less+
Irrational Man
Junun*
Une heure de tranquillité (Patrice Leconte)
Sicario
The Lobster
Macbeth
Goodbye, Mr Loser
Fac(t)s of Life^
No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
Legend (Brian Helgeland)
Mia Madre (Moretti)
Mississippi Grind
Sangue del mio sangue (Bellocchio)
Botón de nácar (Guzmán)
Storm Children, Book 1 (Lav Diaz)
Dope
Umimachi Diary (Hirokazu)
Dheepan
Lamb (Ethiopia)
Saul fia
Ceremony of Splendours
Parabellum*
[sic] (Eric Baudelaire)*
The Makes (Eric Baudelaire)*
The Martian
Everest
Anime Nere
Suffragette
Crimson Peak
The Lady in the Van
Steve Jobs
Tangerine
Manufraktur (Tscherrkasky)*
Lancaster, CA (Mike Ott)*
The Ugly One (Eric Baudelaire)*
The Program (Stephen Frears)
Everything Will Be Fine 3D
Agha Yousef
The OBS – A Singapore Story
Eisenstein in Guanajuato
Letters to Max (Eric Baudelaire)*
SPECTRE
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2
My Lucky Stars (Sammo Hung)+
Dragons Forever (Sammo Hung and Corey Yuen)+
The Crossing: Part One (John Woo)+
John Wick^
Junkopia (Chris Marker)*
The Reluctant Revolutionary*
How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?*
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga^
The Shaft (Chi Zhang)^
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974*
Um lugar ao sol (Gabriel Mascaro)*
The Story of My Death (Albert Serra)*
Juntos (Nicolás Pereda)*
¿Dónde están sus historias? (Nicolás Pereda)*
Golden Embers (Giuseppe Andrews)^
Cartel Land^
Outer Space (Tscherkassky)*
L’Arrivée (Tscherkassky)*
It Follows*
At Sundance (Michael Almereyda)^
Aliens (Michael Almereyda)^
Woman on Fire Looks for Water*
Fantasma (Lisandro Alonso)*
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation*
Coraline^
Adela (Adolfo Alix Jr)*
Point Break 3D
Another Girl Another Planet (Michael Almereyda)^
The Rocking Horse Winner (Michael Almereyda)^
Foreign Parts (Paravel and Sniadecki)*
Star Wars Uncut*
Warrior (Gavin O’Connor)*
Evolution of a Filipino Family^
Lumumba: La mort du Prophète^
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner^
PK+
L’échappée belle+
Legend of the Dragon (Danny Lee/Lik-Chi Lee)+
Magnificent Scoundrels (Lik-Chi Lee)+
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens 3D
Devil’s Knot (Egoyan)^
Anatomy of a Murder*
Two Lovers^
Elsa la rose (Varda)*
My Winnipeg*
Carol
Joy
Surprise: Journey to the West
Grandma
Mur Murs (Varda)*
In the Heart of the Sea
Sunset Song
Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution: Masao Adachi (Grandrieux)*
Black Mass
Mr Six

Salvo (Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, Italy/France, 2013)

Blogpost, European cinema, Film education, Film reviews, Italian Cinema, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

The below is a written version of an introduction that I shall make for Salvo at the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton this evening (Tuesday 29 April 2014). Come along if you can – though you may also have to suffer me putting in a gratuitous plug for my film, Common Ground (William Brown, UK, 2012), which plays at the American Online Film Awards Spring Showcase from 1 May 2014)!

And so…

Salvo is the debut feature of screenwriters Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza. It tells the story of a hitman, the titular Salvo (Saleh Bakri), who starts out getting into a gunfight. He chases down his assailants and then goes to the house of Enzo Puleo (Luigi Lo Cascio), the man who organised the hit. There he meets Rita (Sara Serraiocco), a blind woman and Enzo’s sister, who suddenly can see at the moment of her encounter with Salvo.

Subsequent to this encounter, Salvo and Rita go on the run – and must evade the mob, which surely will hunt them down in a quest to find out what has happened to them.

In certain respects, then, the film tells the story of a miracle. But rather than being a miracle couched in a sense of religiosity, we have the miracle functioning in Salvo as something of an allegory.

For, the encounter between Salvo and Rita becomes some sort of primordial event, a transitional moment after which nothing is the same – and this event is based upon the encounter between two people who mutually change.

In short, then, the film is about how love can open our eyes – it can take away our blindness – and it can put us in touch with other people. Indeed, if Jean-Paul Sartre once said that hell is other people, Grassadonia and Piazza might counter this by saying that love, too, is other people, constituted in and by a recognition of other people.

Thus Rita’s literal blindness is accompanied by what the directors call Salvo’s ‘moral blindness’. Indeed, in an interview, Grassadonia explains it thus:

The topic of blindness is important. We come from Sicily, we grew up there, and our experience is that you live surrounded by voluntarily blind people. We told this story, this meeting by two characters affected by two different kinds of blindness: the moral blindness of the mafia killer, who is nothing more than a killing machine at the beginning, and this blind girl, physically blind, but not innocent. She knows exactly her role in that kind of world.

It is in encountering Rita that Salvo can see – and the film works hard stylistically to convey the encounter to us, mainly as a result of its absence of close ups and its absence of faces for the first section of the film, the section that culminates in the miracle.

For, we do not see Salvo’s face until the miracle – if anything we see only disembodied eyes surrounded by darkness. We can surmise two things from this.

Firstly, we can surmise that in a world without faces, people do not exist as humans but as objects that can be killed and discarded without a moral sense of guilt.

Secondly, we can surmise that in having no empathy, it is not that Salvo sees no faces, it is that he himself is also faceless. In encountering Rita, Salvo not only sees her face, but she also sees his, and thus he begins to take on a face.

In other words, identity – Salvo as a recognisable human being – is not something born solipsistically in a body and mind detached from the rest of the world; identity is something that exists only in relation to the world, only with the world. We exist only with other people. Subjectivity is intersubjective.

If the film makes this point, the point does not exist in a bubble. That is, while it it may simply just be that humans can only exist as subjects if there is intersubjectivity, nonetheless the film suggests that we live in a world that lacks recognition of others, a world that lacks empathy, and which is thus a world that encourages what I shall term solipsistic.

So when I say that the point does not exist in a bubble, what I am really asking is: what is this world in which we are encouraged to be solipsistic, blind to each other, rather than with each other?

In interviews, Grassadonia and Piazza talks extensively about how they made the film in their native Sicily, Palermo more specifically. Indeed, in the quotation above, they talk about ‘voluntarily blind people’ there – who in effect turn a blind eye to the mafia, thus accepting its way of life, even if they are not directly involved in it.

In one interview with the ICA, the directors state this clearly:

We are both from Palermo and we naturally chose to set our story in our home town. Palermo is a world where freedom is hazardous. A world that feels the need for a tyrant, an oppressor, is a totally unacceptable state of affairs but somehow understandable. What’s more mysterious is the presence of a silent majority that wishes to be oppressed, that needs to live in a “state of exception”, a state of constant emergency, where violence and oppression are the only laws. A situation where an unencumbered meeting between two human beings is inconceivable.

What is noteworthy here is the use of the term ‘state of exception’ – a concept developed and used at length by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

For Agamben, the ‘state of exception’ is the generalised totalitarianism of the present age. That is, during exceptional times, a state might give itself increased power in order to keep everyone safe. However, what we increasingly have these days is the way in which all times are presented to us as somehow ‘exceptional’ – and so we live under greater levels of control at all times, under a generalised ‘state of exception’ (a key example for Agamben is the War on Terror in the aftermath of the plane crashes of 11 September 2001).

In suggesting that Salvo reflects upon the ‘state of exception’ that is the mafioso rule of Palermo, Grassadonia and Piazza in fact spread the relevance of their film, such that it might well be speaking not just of Sicily, but perhaps of an Italy that has recently been under the control of a media-magnate. Perhaps even to a world in general, in which political and economic crisis are presented to us as the master narratives that keep us all in our place – and scared in our homes – trusting of no one else, in competition with everyone else.

Not seeing each other as human beings, as subjects, but as threats, opportunities and objects.

This wider relevance of the film is signalled aesthetically, too. It is hard not to read the opening sequences, full of bloodshed, and in which we follow Salvo as he chases down his would-be assassins, as borrowing from computer games, in particular the behind-the-head shot familiar from shooter games (and complete with the odd silences that moving through space can involve in computer games).

In other words, the film suggests via this reference to computer games that its message is relevant to the whole of the contemporary, media-saturated and digital world. That we no longer look at each other – but instead pursue a faceless world characterised by affectless, or unemotional, violence.

Salvo does not just make references to a computer game, however. It also makes reference to other films and/or genres. The filmmakers themselves discuss how their film pays homage to the likes of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, and that it also draws inspiration from Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic, Le Samouraï (France/Italy, 1967) – while its use of a miracle, its sparse dialogue and its interest in procedure also seem to recall the cinema of Robert Bresson (for me at least).

In other words, while the film is about how we are with each other in the world, even at a time when we are encouraged to feel that we not together, that to create a bond with another person is ‘inconceivable’, the film itself is also making bonds with other films; films only exist in an inter-cinematic way, too, it would seem.

And yet, for all of Salvo‘s precursors and reference points, the film had a hard time getting made.

After writing the 2004 comedy Ogni volta che ne te vai/Every Time You Go (Davide Cocchi, Italy, 2004) and the TV movie, Gli Occhi dell’amore/The Eyes of Love (Giulio Base, Italy, 2005), the latter of which suggests an ongoing interest in eyes and looking, Grassadonia and Piazza wrote and directed Rita (Italy, 2009), a short film that in some respects is the basis for Salvo (it is about a blind woman).

It then took them four years to get Salvo off the ground, making the film the product of a five-year process. Piazza recounts his experience thus:

Basically if you’re a first time director and you don’t arrive with the conventional comedy made for television, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to finance a film. In our case, the Italian press was talking about the film because of the support of French television but not the support of the Italian television

In other words, the aesthetics of Salvo, a cinephile’s film that is in part about films, reflects the production history of the film, in that a film about two characters who come to understand the existence of themselves through finally seeing others, is a film that was only made because of a transnational coproduction (with the French) – most Italian producers being too risk-averse, too caught up in the solipsism of contemporary capital, to want to tell a story that reaches out in the way that this one does.

The generalised ‘state of exception,’ then, is also present in the risk-averse nature of the film industry – and it is only in collaborating with strangers, perhaps, that films of this kind can get made. Perhaps it was a concession to commercial interests that the film features prominently on its soundtrack the number one Italian chart hit, ‘Arriverà‘, by Modà, featuring Emma Marrone.

Perhaps this even helps to account for the casting of the film. Salvo is played by Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri, the star of Elia Suleiman’s film The Time That Remains (UK/Italy/Belgium/France, 2009), while a couple of well-known actors have cameons, including Luigi Lo Cascio as Rita’s brother, Enzo. Lo Cascio won a Best Actor Donatello (Italian Oscar) in 2001 for I Cento Passi/One Hundred Steps (Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy, 2000), was nominated for the same award two years later for La meglio gioventù/The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy, 2003), and was nominated for Best Director in 2013 for La città ideale/The Ideal City (Italy, 2012).

Leading actress Sara Serraiocco, meanwhile, stars in only her first movie. Perhaps this is emblematic of her character, that she is revealed to the world as the world is revealed to her. But then her character is perhaps a bit more canny than this – she is counting mafia money when we first meet her. That is, while Salvo may romanticise her, the film arguably does not, with the ‘miracle’ potentially being in Salvo’s head – it is an allegory, not necessarily a miracle to be believed in a literal sense – with the cheesiness of ‘Arriverà’ as the central musical motif also suggesting as much.

The directors quote great Italian writer Italo Calvino in relation to the film:

In the inferno of the living, where we live every day, that we form by being together, there are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

One can argue that the film is not without complications; Salvo and Rita do not necessarily escape the cycle of violence and it is perhaps only by perpetuating it that they stand a chance of surviving. Indeed, as Salvo’s name suggests, not only might he ‘save’ Rita, but he might also be a force for the state of exception, in that ‘salvo’ also means ‘except’ (in the sense of ‘save for’ – as in, ‘I would have been killed, save for a hitman coming to my rescue’).

Nonetheless, as a film Salvo is not inferno – and so we must give it space and thus help it to endure in a world of rapidly recycled and endlessly forgettable films.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes from the LFF: La jaula de oro/The Golden Dream (Diego Quemada-Díez, Mexico, 2013)

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

In a Q&A session after the screening of The Golden Dream, director Diego Quemada-Díez compared his film to a western.

The film follows the journey of four youngsters travelling from Guatemala towards Los Angeles across Mexico – in a bid to have a better life in the north of America. They include Juan (Brandon López), Sara (Karen Martínez), Samuel (Carlos Chajon) and an Indian boy, Chauk (Rodolfo Domínguez).

During their arduous and unforgiving journey (not all them make it to the United States), we see Juan pose for a photo session dressed as a cowboy, while Chauk is dressed as an Indian.

Although the analogy is neither perfect (Juan is not necessarily a Yankee, even though he is both most determined and most successful in his bid to get to the USA) nor subtle (to have Chauk pose as a ‘Red Indian’ is something of an ‘obvious’ image), we sense nonetheless that Quemada-Díez is suggesting that the migration of Latin American peoples (here, from Guatemala) to the USA is a direct result of the settling in what was to become the USA of white Europeans.

That is, The Golden Dream seems to suggest that it is American/US history, replete as it is with imperial/economic expansion into the rest of the continent, alongside a longer history of European colonialism, that has caused the economic imbalances that lead to people wishing to travel north to places like Los Angeles in order not to live in a slum (Juan), and in order not to work on a garbage tip (Samuel).

However, where (in broad terms) the western is about the taming and ‘civilisation’ of nature, in particular via the suppression of the savage ‘Indian’, here nature is the dog-eat-dog world of the railways and stopovers that span the length of Mexico – and its conquest ultimately, for Juan, at least, is (*spoiler*) to eke out a similarly ‘bare’ life working in a meat factory north of the border.

That is, the ‘golden’/American dream is severely compromised – as in fact ‘civilisation’ has resulted in huge economic imbalances that in turn bring about a morality that is far removed from that of Ransom Stoddard and Will Kane. Indeed, The Golden Dream does not pull its punches in terms of showing how fraught life is for those on the margins of the USA and who are hopeful of ‘getting in’ (as one apparently ‘gets in’ to ‘the industry’ that is cinema – without any need to qualify ‘the industry’ as ‘the film industry’, since for many people the manufacture of images is the only industry that really counts).

Quemada-Díez also mentioned Eduardo Galeano’s blistering text, The Open Veins of Latin America, in his Q&A. In other words, he (Quemada-Díez) seems determined to locate his film within a history of exploitation that is indeed made most clear at the film’s climax in the meat factory: necessary labour is taken on without papers and job security, such that the USA is now importing from countries south of its border the single resource that is perhaps Latin America’s strongest, its human workforce.

The Golden Dream has an excellent bedfellow the similarly-themed and disturbing film, Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga, Mexico/USA, 2009), while also offering a similar structure to Michael Winterbottom’s masterful migration tale, In This World (UK, 2002).

Indeed, Winterbottom – among many other filmmaking luminaries, including Fernando Meirelles, Gillo Pontecorvo and others – is thanked in the film’s end credits. As are some 600 real-life migrants/would-be migrants whom the filmmakers encountered and filmed along the way during the film’s making.

Diego Quemada-Díez gives a Q&A at the London Film Festival 2013.

Although staged, then, The Golden Dream is a strong film that has many documentary elements – not least real-life participants in such fraught journeys (Sara’s fate, in particular, is too horrific to recount here).

Nonetheless, The Golden Dream also features many poetic elements. Quemada-Díez has a fascination with trains – a key component of the journey, as well as using spaces that are former buildings now reclaimed by nature. It is as if we have, then, something like an anti-western – the return of the ‘wild’, the ‘savage’ to haunt the USA, because it is upon the wilderness and the ‘savage’ that the USA relies – much as the tradition of Thanksgiving is founded upon European settlers in America receiving aid from native Americans, who (broadly speaking) were then summarily exterminated in recognition of their help.

Particularly of interest is the way in which ‘dream’ images of snow, initially linked to Chauk, who has never seen snow, become the reality of Juan. It is problematic that the Indian boy must be sacrificed for Juan’s ‘dream’ to come true; but the truth is far from being as beautiful as a dream, and snow certainly is nothing like gold. One dreams of comfort, and instead one has cold.

One does wonder why Chauk’s native dialogue is not subtitled; while it conveys the way in which Juan, Sara and Samuel do not understand what he is saying, it also runs the risk of having Chauk appear an incomprehensible ‘other’, a fetishised ‘body’ who in fact cannot speak, because no one understands him. That is, while we in fact are given access to Chauk’s dreams (of snow) and visions (of Sara, after she has been separated from the boys), we are at risk of having no ‘real’ access to him, because we (Western viewers) are not privy to his words. The decision is as problematic, then, as it is pointed.

But Quemada-Díez has made a superior film about the issue of economic migration/would-be migration – and his ability to mix the documentary with the poetic, potentially problematic in that he might mythologise too much what is a real world issue, in fact seems sensitively handled and makes for harrowing viewing.