Afterimages screens on British TV channel

Afterimages, Beg Steal Borrow News, En Attendant Godard, Screenings, Selfie

Hot on the heels of the UK premiere of En Attendant Godard on thelatest.tv, the channel has also screened Afterimages as part of their FilmFest at 8 season.

The screening took place on Freeview channel 8 or Virgin 159 in the Brighton area, as well as via livestreaming at thelatest.tv, on 7 December 2014.

Beg Steal Borrow Films is delighted that the film was selected for screening – and hopes that some people managed to catch it while it was on.

The logo for latest.tv, who screened Afterimages on 7 December 2014.

In other news, En Attendant Godard has also been selected for screening at two places so far in 2015. The film will enjoy its Italian premiere at the Associazione Kilab in Rome on 28 February, before then being screened at B-Film at the University of Birmingham on 13 March.

What is more, Selfie also enjoyed a preview screening at the University of Roehampton’s Film Society on 25 November 2014, where it was greeted with an enthusiastic reception.

With Beg Steal Borrow beginning to submit Selfie and other new films to festivals, and with a screening of at least one Beg Steal Borrow film at the University of Lancaster arranged for May, let’s hope that 2015 marks the possibility for many more Beg Steal Borrow screenings!

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2014)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, USA, 2014)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cock Cock Cock Cock Cock (On the Oscar Nominations 2015)

American cinema, Blogpost

This is the unedited version of an article that otherwise appears on The Conversation.

Here goes:-

In order to suck one’s own cock, I guess one needs a cock in the first place. In some senses it is logical, then, that awards ceremonies, along with other systems of self-congratulation, have a touch of the priapic about them.

However, in the spirit of a recent essay on ‘masculinity in crisis‘ over at Souciant, Hollywood this year seems strongly to be about penises. Don’t get me wrong – penises can be beautiful things, even if often also the cause of much embarrassment to their owner (for being too small, for shrivelling up at the wrong moment, for arriving too early at a meeting with a vagina, an anus, a mouth, or whatever other orifice and/or implement it cares to encounter).

A good number of the films nominated at this year’s Academy Awards are pretty good films. Hell, technically, they’re all excellent. That is: yep, they’re penises, and they demonstrate that they work like penises do.

But it all seems like a lot of penis to me. Best Film nominees are about learning how to grow a penis (Boyhood, Whiplash), having a massive penis (American Sniper), trying to retumesce a flaccid penis (Birdman), having a vagina-liking penis that most people think is an anus-liking penis (The Grand Budapest Hotel), having an anus-liking penis that has to hide the fact that it likes anuses (The Imitation Game), having a fully working penis that most people think is a crippled penis (The Theory of Everything), and being a famously cocky civil rights campaigner (Selma).

All the fiction directors – including the ‘foreign’ ones and the ones working in animation – have penises. All the writers – original and adapted – have penises. All the cinematographers have penises. All of the composers have penises. All of the sound editors have penises. Five out of the six nominated editors have penises.

There is one documentary directed by someone with a vagina (CitizenFOUR), but it is about someone with a penis. There is also a documentary about someone with a vagina (Finding Vivian Maier), but it is directed by someone – two people, in fact – with a penis. What is more, this film is really about someone with a vagina who was too afraid to show their work or come out as an artist in their lifetime – perhaps in part because they did not have a penis (and therefore trying to become an artist was a bit fruitless; still, at least a penis is there to rehabilitate her now).

Of course, there are some vaginas nominated in the categories reserved for actors with vaginas. Among the Best Actress nominees, one is a murderous bitch (Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl), one has early onset Alzheimer’s (Julianne Moore in Still Alice), one is an antisocial loner (Reese Wetherspoon in Wild), one a woman who is rejected by most of the men she works with since they’d prefer a bonus to her having a job (Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night), and one is the foil to a genius whose own doctorate and motherhood duties play second fiddle to a man who ends up dumping her for a woman who’ll give him a handjob while looking at Penthouse magazine (Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything).

Compare to the men – and we have a hero (Bradley Cooper in American Sniper), two geniuses*** (Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game; Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything), a harmless madman who becomes hailed as a genius (Michael Keaton in Birdman, with this being a ‘woah! he’s still got a penis’ nom), and a bonkers rich recluse who eventually kills someone because his mum is a bitch (Steve Carell in Foxcatcher, with the ‘woah, he actually has a penis’ nom).

And the supporting actresses are nominated mainly in roles that are vaginas supporting penises (Keira Knightley in The Imitation Game, Emma Stone in Birdman, Patricia Arquette in Boyhood), with Meryl Streep as a witch (Into the Woods). Maybe only Laura Dern in Wild, playing Reese Witherspoon’s mother, manages to evade being the penis-crutch that most vaginas are expected to be. But, you know, the title alone suggests that independent women are ‘wild’ and dangerous and not to be trusted.

I saw Boyhood and thought that Patricia Arquette was the best thing in it and came out of the film thinking that instead of Boyhood the film should be called Motherhood (or at the very least Texas). But no – it got named after the penis and the vagina is overlooked again.

Even the nomination of Meryl Streep seems more obligatory than worthy – especially when someone like Octavia Spencer made me cry within three minutes of being on screen in the massively overlooked Fruitvale Station (which, admittedly, would not have qualified for these Oscars because it had a – limited – US release date in 2013, even if released in the UK only in June 2014).

But the point remains… The man from Hollywood, he say hail the cock. And fuck the cunt. This is our world.

*** I am intrigued about how these two nominations are about specifically scientific geniuses, and the reverence that scientific geniuses receive, which stands in some contrast to artistic geniuses, perhaps. If the universe is mathematical, then working out formulae that best describe it is inevitable over time – because one must find the formula for A.I. (Turing) and/or the big bang/black holes (Hawking). In other words, if not these men, then someone would have worked out how to do what they did – even if these men were in the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time to work it out. Contrast this to a work of art: if Picasso had not lived, his art works would not exist, while someone would have worked out what both Turing and Hawking worked out at some point in time because all they are doing is maths (no disparagement intended). Given the irreplaceable nature of Picasso, but given that logically Turing and Hawking are entirely replaceable, why do we celebrate scientific genius (this year, anyway) more than artistic genius?

Amalric

Blogpost, French Cinema

Curiosity and a lack of judgment. Those, Mathieu, are the two things that you bring to nigh every role I have seen you play.

Combined, these two things open up a world of joy, a world of passion, a world of love.

Only the curious will be ready to engage with whatever is placed within their path. Only the curious will, by engaging with it, constantly be changing, opening themselves into the realm of new experiences, new becomings, new ways of being.

And only those who are ready to look at whatever they find without judgment will discover in those things that they find a sense of what those things truly are, rather than what the uncurious person wants them to be (and in finding only what they want to find, thereby reaffirming their lack of genuine curiosity).

The curious looks. Those eyes, Mathieu, which caress and penetrate like all of the best lovers should, knowing when with those eyes to show anger and contempt at being shut out of the other’s life, knowing when to shine when the joy begins to happen – the joy that is the becoming of commune, of being with others and with the world around us. Those eyes, Mathieu, with their curved, slightly bulging openness – that is where it all starts.

You don’t love like a romantic, Mathieu. You don’t see in the women that you meet onscreen some idealised version of womanhood, even if some creatures are for you more beautiful in appearance than others – the cause of a besottedness that, being curious and without judgment, you will follow in order simply to see where it leads. You have to and responsibility can go hang because you only have one life and there is no option other than to lead it with all of the passion and folly that it merits.

Not like a romantic, you love without prejudice, Mathieu. You love and will not be afraid to call out – precisely because you do love – those aspects of your partners for which we reserve the lowest terms: bitch, cunt, salope.

And where the rest of the world uses these words as reasons not to look at people properly, at reasons to judge, you see these words as what they really are: a celebration of life to be led as it must and can only be, as opposed to how other people think it should be. These are not words with which to judge and thus conceal others; let us love bitchiness, let us love cuntitude and let us love saloperie, because along with sacrifice and warmth, these are equally real.

A whore, a doctoral candidate, someone else’s wife, and even when your relationship with the other person has turned to hatred and you are no longer together: you, Mathieu, still love the people that you are with and your eyes grow and shine with joy as you discover yet more about this person. When in their rancour they hiss at you, this is still the source of joy, because even though it clearly is often infuriating for others that you cannot but bring them to painful, restless life, you still bring them to painful, restless life.

And the same goes for yourself: you get high on finding a new bitterness to stutter out, a new connection – good or bad, it’s all the same, since this also is simply the joy of living: through a curiosity to learn, and without judgment fearlessly to become – this is how one lives.

We see this in the way your head tilts down at moments of joy: you look down and find the earth to be a chthonic as you inhale, raise that smoking hand in the air with an excited finger wag, and pace – pacing and prowling because the brain is fizzing over with ideas, and your body cannot contain it, and your sentences start with those stutters, because new sensations, new thoughts, new meanings must all start with stutters – because if they came out perfectly, whole, sedately and not in the throes of joy, then clearly these would not be moments of the new, of becoming.

No wonder yours is a screen life littered with doomed relationships. Who can put up with the intensity of constant, unprejudiced scrutiny and curiosity? Such charge cannot be endured for too long – and so perhaps works better in intense bursts and fits, the stuff of memory, fondness, the best experiences lived even at the moment as fit for memory, relegated from the present to the past straight away – we must separate and only have memories of each other – because it is just too exciting to be with you in the present. The impossibility of life: an overwhelming sense of reality must be killed in order to cope with it. But bring on that life again and again, compulsively, convulsively, because there is no tomorrow.

Maybe sporadically you must play cripples, then, Mathieu. A twin logic is at work: the handicap functions as a signal of how the life that you bring to the screen is just too much for the world of prejudice to be able to bear, but by God do you also show that a handicap is, like being a salope, not just something to celebrate, but a means to gain access to different, more intense joys than any able bodied person could achieve.

When I am with your spectral screen presence, Mathieu, I feel alive. Or rather, I feel obliged to write that I feel like I want to live. Which must mean somehow that I am not alive. Because I know that I hold myself back out of fear; I am curious, but I fear the judgment of others so do not have the courage you have. But I shall try always to follow your example and to try to have your courage – to put my body, my mind, my spirit into any and every situation that I can, and to find in there what patently, abundantly, and always is only ever there: life. And to offer to life the only thing that I have to give: all of the love that I can, wide-eyed, curious, judgment be dispelled, becoming and in looking at life and with life looking plainly back, thanks to you, Mathieu, and your example, I can begin to feel the joy.

Palo Alto (Gia Coppola, USA, 2013)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

En Attendant Godard has UK premiere on Latest.tv

Beg Steal Borrow News, En Attendant Godard, Press and Blog Mentions, Reviews, Screenings

Beg Steal Borrow’s first film, En Attendant Godard, will this weekend screen on thelatest.tv as part of their FilmFest at 8 season.

The screening takes place on the evening of Sunday 19 October at 9pm. You can watch it on Freeview channel 8 or Virgin 159 in the Brighton area, or via livestreaming at thelatest.tv.

The logo for thelatest.tv, who will be screening En Attendant Godard on 19 October.

We are delighted that the film will screen – and for the first time in the UK since its very first screening at The Loft bar in Clapham in late 2009.

So do check out the film if you can – especially if you live in the Brighton area!

In addition, En Attendant Godard also recently enjoyed a review by great American experimental filmmaker and film theorist, Wheeler Winston Dixon, which can be read here.

New Beg Steal Borrow documentary completed

Beg Steal Borrow News, New projects, Selfie

Selfie, the new documentary/essay film from Beg Steal Borrow, has been completed.

The film, which is comprised almost uniquely of selfies, was shot predominantly in February and March 2014. It combines footage of its maker, William Brown, at home and at work during the shooting period, as well as in locations as diverse as Basel, Paris and Seattle.

The film is an investigation into selfie culture from the inside: it attempts to understand the selfie and selfie culture by taking selfies – rather than hypothesising about them from the outside. Or, as the narrator puts it in the film, the way to understand the selfie is to be like Seth Brundle in The Fly and to self-administer the treatment!

William Brown takes a selfie in his film of the same name.

Selfie features brief glimpses of various Beg Steal Borrow collaborators, including Kristina Gren (En Attendant Godard, Common Ground), Hannah Croft (En Attendant Godard), Grace Ker (The New Hope) and Annette Hartwell (The New Hope).

The film also features sequences involving filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman (Taskafa: Stories from the Street, Estate: A Reverie), Spanish actress Eulalia Ramón (Goya in Bordeaux) and more.

It also involves a voice over that considers the obsession with self-recording to be a virus. Perhaps the biggest epidemic of the contemporary world. Given that the word selfie enjoyed a 17,000 per cent increase in usage in 2013 alone, the film is certainly a timely meditation on a contemporary phenomenon.

The film will be submitted imminently to film festivals – as will Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableaux and The New Hope, the latter of which goes into post-production imminently. Look here for imminent screenings (or contact William Brown if you are interested in showing or seeing the film elsewhere).

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

Blogpost, Film reviews, French Cinema

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alceste à Bicyclette/Cycling with Molière (Philippe Le Guay, France, 2013)

Blogpost, Film education, French Cinema, Ritzy introductions

This blog post is basically a summary, or even a detailed version, of my introduction of Cycling with Molière at the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton, London, this evening (9 September 2014).

Cycling with Molière tells the story of an actor, Serge Tanneur (Fabrice Luchini), who has gone into self-imposed exile on the Île de Ré, near La Rochelle in France. A former colleague and successful television star, Gauthier Valence (Lambert Wilson), tracks him down in order to persuade him to take part in a new stage production of Molière’s Le Misanthrope – a play about a man, Alceste, who becomes disillusioned with the hypocrisy of French society and who decides to be entirely candid with everyone with whom he interacts. Naturally, Alceste’s ‘honesty’ leads him to become ever more alienated by society, a kind of alienation that Alceste perhaps even craves, as he tells people precisely what he thinks of them.

Le Guay’s film takes place over more or less a week, during which time the two leads rehearse and/or spar, swapping the roles of Alceste and his best friend, Philinte, who in Molière’s play is the raisonneur character, or voice of reason, who tries to convince Alceste that being more economical with ‘the truth’ can in fact lead to finding a comfortable place in the world and, perhaps, some sort of happiness.

During this period they also meet an Italian divorcee, Francesca (Maya Sansa), who is planning on leaving France; a young porn actress Zoé (Laurie Bourdesoules), who potentially aspires to become a stage actress; and a taxi driver (Stéphan Wojtowicz), whose mother has broken her femur and for whom Gauthier promises to find a doctor.

Broadly speaking, the film sees Serge as Alceste, the man who refuses to be a part of society, and Gauthier as Philinte – and it is these roles that the two for the most part adopt in their rehearsals of Le Misanthrope. However, the film explores how Serge equally has elements of Philinte about him, as Gauthier does Alceste, too. Serge, for example, can be entirely dishonest at times, as seen in some of the tricks that he plays on Gauthier (taking a phone call and loudly saying that he is not doing anything as he watches an episode of Gauthier’s House-style medical drama, Le docteur Morange, with Gauthier and Francesca). Meanwhile, it is Gauthier who at times expresses disappointment at the world of today – for example, gawping at house prices on the Île de Ré.

In other words, both characters have elements of both Philinte and Alceste about them. This is not to say that Molière’s characters are one-sided (and it is certainly not to say that the film is superior to Molière’s play), but it is to say that the film tries to bring Molière’s characters a new context – namely contemporary France.

Indeed, in addition to the character study that the film predominantly is, with two fantastic performances from two of France’s strongest actors, it is the asides on contemporary France that are perhaps a prime focus of the film.

As mentioned, property prices – together with discussions of money in general – loom large in the film, as does a disappointment with the ubiquitous nature of the mobile phone: Serge and Gauthier argue about the latter’s addiction to his phone, while Zoé seems more concerned with her phone than with watching Serge and Gauthier perform Molière’s play.

‘We live in an extraordinary age,’ says Serge at one point. And it seems as though this is a world in which good old-fashioned values have been lost. This becomes clear during a discussion of Molière himself: Gauthier wants to do a more up-to-date version of the text, while Serge insists that one must respect the original text, particularly its Alexandrine poetry (each line is composed of 12 syllables).

Serge wants to preserve the past, in effect, while Gauthier wants to move with the times (and arguably he is of the times as his prime motivation seems to be to make money – hence his work as Dr Morange – for €200,000 per episode). This is also signalled by the way in which Serge wants to ride a bicycle everywhere on the Île de Ré – the construction of a bridge to which Serge also laments.

Gauthier initially rides a bike and falls off. However, he soon is taken in by the charms of the bike, and by the end of the film, it is Serge who falls off his bike and into a canal. Tables turn in the film, such that by the end we somehow want both to resolve their seemingly irreconcilable differences, but are worried that somehow they won’t.

What we do have, though, is both characters kind of stuck in their ways – which is indeed a very Molière-like trope. In play after play, Molière presents to us a monomaniac: Alceste who believes he must always speak the truth, Dom Juan who must chase after women, Orgon in Le Tartuffe who insists that his family must obey him. And in play after play, the monomaniac is not quite cured by the end, but still somehow in search of what they want to find – Alceste goes off into the wilderness; Dom Juan refuses to repent; Orgon seems to suggest that while Tartuffe may have been outed, he still wants total control over his family.

And so it is in Alceste à bicyclette that we have neither Serge nor Gauthier as necessarily having learnt anything. Serge is on the Île de Ré as Gauthier realises that he still cannot get right a line from the first act of Le Misanthrope. ‘You wish an evil to befall humanity,’ says Philinte, to which Alceste normally replies: ‘Yes, I have conceived horrifying hatred for humanity.’ Except that Gauthier repeatedly says ‘Yes, I have conceived an unspeakable hatred for humanity.’

The difference between horrifying and unspeakable, effroyable and indicible, are important, says Serge. And it perhaps points to the way in which it is Philinte who is the real pessimist – believing that since humans cannot and will not change, then it is just worth playing along with the mores of a society in order to succeed. This means being insincere, as we see in Gauthier’s faux concern for the taxi driver’s mother, a concern that leads Gauthier to be in a fight at one point in the film.

It is Alceste, then, who is the optimist of the pair, because it is he who believes that humans can do better and who refuses to compromise in his bid for humans to be better, less conniving and more honest. Wayward as this quest may be (because it perhaps overlooks some of the benefits of dishonesty – a dishonesty that both Alceste and Serge at times share), it is in some ways admirable.

And in saying that his hatred for humanity is unspeakable, Gauthier in fact speaks precisely of his hatred for and cynicism concerning humanity – a fact also revealed subtly by his womanising, while Serge dreams of/idealises a more pure and innocent love, one that ultimately is not forthcoming (though we do not have Serge decry Francesca or the other female characters as Alceste decries Célimène in Molière’s play).

Serge plays at the idealist – but like the pipes in his garden, they cannot but burst at some point. While Gauthier plays at the realist, but whose underlying idealism is undermined when he comes into contact with reality – a jacuzzi that does not work, a fight with a cab driver. As such, Le Guay offers us a complex and thoughtful study of two characters, inspired by one of the great works of French and world literature.

‘On rît dans l’âme,’ said Molière of Le Misanthrope, though the phrase might apply to his plays more generally, since they are often described as comedies, but in the telling of which tragedy is never very far at all (indeed, when there is a comic/happy ending, as in Le Tartuffe, it normally happens via an unlikely deus ex machina device). We laugh in our souls, but not out loud. Alceste à bicyclette is a comedy, but not one full of belly laughs (though there are a couple of those). It is a comedy to provoke thought, some sort of nourishment for the soul, and for the mind. I hope that you enjoy it and get as much food for thought as I did.