France, 2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s work this through a bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, UK, 2012)

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, Berberian… perhaps does more than simply this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Projectionist (Tom Lawes, UK, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do I mean by this?

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

What are the examples of this?

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

Examples in the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming Light: on recent documentary film (In Memoriam Chris Marker)

American cinema, Blogpost, British cinema, Documentary, European cinema, Latin American cinema, Transnational Cinema, Uncategorized

I rewatched Sans Soleil/Sunless (Chris Marker, France, 1983) today in honour of the passing of Chris Marker. It was as, if not more, beautiful than the first time I saw it.

Nonetheless, I want to write about four other things today: Madame Tussaud’s in London, and the films Nostalgia de la luz/Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán, France/Germany/Chile/Spain/USA, 2010), Swandown (Andrew Kötting, UK, 2012) and Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul, Sweden/UK, 2012). But while this post is not explicitly about Marker, I hope that his spirit infuses it somehow.

Time – the single most under-considered element of reality – will hopefully allow me one day to write the book, Becoming Light, that will draw upon what loosely I here wish to talk about. But in order to explain what this curious phrase, becoming light, means, I shall start today by considering Madame Tussaud’s.

There is plenty to say about Madame Tussaud’s, one of the most enduringly popular museums in London. For example, it is extortionately expensive (£30 entry). What is more, it also features a 4D cinema experience made in association with Marvel/Disney, which I may well mention at this blog’s conclusion.

One might also analyse the role – made prominent in the exhibition itself – played by waxworks in bringing an element of visuality to what we might call the news. That is, when old Mme Tussaud made waxworks of prominent people, the curious could finally get a sense of what the faces of those famous and infamous names looked like.

Umberto Eco, in Travels in Hyperreality (recently redubbed Faith in Fakes) has intelligently analysed the way in which waxworks played a role in constituting the age of simulation in which we now live. That is, for Eco, viewers of waxworks ended up mistaking the map/the simulation for reality, such that when the real was actually seen, it was somehow disappointing, or less than real.

This analysis is pertinent to what I want to say about Madame Tussaud’s (henceforth MT). For, when one enters the museum, one is taken via a lift up to the top floor, where one exits to the sound of flashing bulbs and paparazzo-style invitations to pose for the camera.

That is, MT opens up with glamour: one walks into a room filled with waxworks of, inter alia, Bruce Willis, the Twilight boys, Kate Winslet, Colin Firth, Helen Mirren, John Travolta, Johnny Depp, Daniel Radcliffe, Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman, Russell Brand, Cheryl Cole and so on. Not all film stars, but predominantly so.

It is a deeply unsettling experience. Sure, some people perform humourous poses with, say, J Lo, by pretending to bone her from behind. But on the whole people walk up to the waxwork, put their arm around it, and pose for a photo taken by a friend as if with a real person for a normal photo: maybe a victory sign, maybe a thumb up, but basically just a smile.

Being a snob, I naturally refrained from posing in any photo. I want to discuss my snobbery. But first I want to think about what the posing by other people means.

I use the phrase becoming light to signify what I believe humans most deeply desire: to divest ourselves of our bodies in order to exist in a state whereby we occupy all places at once and whereby we move with total speed. To become light, then, is to exist purely as an image.

When I say we want to divest ourselves of our bodies, I need to clarify what I mean. We want paradoxically not to have our bodies, but we also want physically to experience the becoming of light, the being pure image. That is, to have no body but also bodily to know what this feels like.

This will only be possible when humans work out how to use light as a system of memory storage. From what I understand, humans are actually working on this process. I am more specifically referring to the creation of computers that use light as a system of memory (this is what humans are working on), but one might also read cinema as a whole as a system of preserving/outsourcing memory through the storage of the physical as an image via means of light and shadow. That is, cinema already is this external memory machine.

The reason that we need to know how to use light to store memory in order to become light is because memory is embodied: it is the system whereby we use our physical/embodied experiences in the world in order to understand reality and/or predict with as great accuracy as we can what probabilistically will happen in the future. Memory is a result uniquely of the physical nature of our existence – and if we can find a way of preserving memory as a process via light and without requiring a physical body to do so, then perhaps we will be able truly to divest ourselves of our crude skinbags.

What does this have to do with MT?

The desire to pose alongside waxworks of stars for me speaks of the desire to become light. One could read posing alongside waxworks of stars as consolation for the fact that the people who stand with them will never meet the real star. This is their brush with fame and glory. This is as good as it gets.

This is not wrong. But it also overlooks an important aspect of the desire to become light. For it is not that the waxworks can equal flesh and blood human beings. Rather it is that the flesh and blood human beings are already waxworks; they are already disembodied light. And what people want to become is not a film star who works or anything like that. The connection is much more metaphysical than that: it is the desire to become simply an image.

There are grounds to argue that the desire to become light reaches something like epidemic status when we consider that people are so in love with images that they prefer images to real people. Perhaps it is for this reason that the daughter of the family that I visited MT with actually blushed when she put her arm round the inanimate waxwork of Johnny Depp and placed her head on its shoulders for a photograph. So heavily do we invest our desire in images that their grip on us is more powerful than reality. Were the real Johnny Depp there, no doubt reality would have censured the girl from being so forward as to put an arm around him. Instead, the blush comes from the total honesty that is involved in showing publicly that one loves not a person but an image of a person. We are in the age of hyperreality indeed.

Now, the reason I did not want to pose with the stars is probably because I would also blush but do not wish to be exposed as investing more in images than I do in people. I know that as I looked at Kate Winslet and Cheryl Cole, I could feel desire. Not uniquely sexual desire – these waxworks did not arouse me, though this does not mean that they could not. But an intense, brain-burning desire to have the image look at me, to return my gaze, to render me also an image.

To thus feel in effect that my life is not complete because my body is not capable of transcending itself and of becoming light speaks of how powerful the desire to become light is. For it destroys the possibility to be happy with whom we actually are. To lead our lives in a bodily fulfilled fashion, rather than to feel shame, to blush, precisely when our bodies expose their very corporal nature before powerful images.

This discomfort at the waxworks in MT was alleviated as soon as one passed into the sports section – I do not invest in Sachin Tendulkar and Johnny Wilkinson with the same level of desire as I do film stars – only to resurface somewhat before Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé Knowles and others in the music section – because music stars are in videos. That is, they are also images.

(This feeling finally died away again in the politics section where, bizarrely, Mohamed Fayed had a waxwork – probably the only person, I speculated to myself, who paid to be featured as a waxwork, so desperate is he to become light.)

Now, the desire to become light – the illness/addiction that cinema and other moving image technologies has induced in human beings such as myself – is problematic because it is based upon exceptionalism.

This is to do with speed. Those who can afford to move quickly, they are closer to becoming light. They are closer to becoming images. And when your image travels around the world faster than your body ever could, then you have become light. (This is why people are addicted to Facebook.) And what enables speed – is wealth. And wealth is the remit of the few, the seldom few, not of the many.

Furthermore, the issue with overemphasising light is that it means that all that is not brought to light is overlooked. It is forgotten, since memory has become conflated with light and the testimony of those who physically bear the scars of history are counted for nil if those wounds cannot be exposed as easy-to-consume images.

In some senses, this strikes me as the theme of the masterful Patricio Guzmán’s wonderful Nostalgia for the Light. For, this film is about precisely the role that light plays in memory.

Let us work through this. To suggest that we can have nostalgia for the light suggests that the light is no longer with us. And this is in part Guzmán’s thesis. Both much of the universe and those who were disappeared in Chile under General Pinochet remain shrouded in darkness: invisible and therefore forgotten. And we should not ignore the darkness. Indeed, at one point Guzmán asks us to look beyond the light – paradoxically to see into the darkness, to see all of reality. In my own words, to concentrate solely on the light means to lead a Luciferean existence whereby only the lit is important. God, however, is in darkness. We must remember the crucial role that darkness plays in the universe. And while we might suspect that even the darkest secret will eventually come to light (because some enlightenment takes a long time, it must wade through darkness before any actual enlightenment could ever take place), the fact remains that some things will never really come to light, some mysteries will remain – unless we start to believe in that which we cannot see. And even though the slaughter of thousands of Chileans was and perhaps always will be invisible, meaning that we must feel nostalgia for the light because of its absence, we must also learn to appreciate darkness, to believe in things – perhaps God himself – even though/precisely because there is no evidence of or light to prove him.

When we look only at the light, when we mistake the map for the terrain, then we are in the realm of the hyperreal. And yet sometimes we must travel the terrain, not at light speed, but slowly – because this is the only way in which we will ever really know the world in which we live, when we experience it physically and not as an image travelling through it in an ethereal fashion/when we only travel through ether.

This seems to be the theme of Swandown, in which director Andrew Kötting and writer Iain Sinclair travel from Hastings to Hackney via swan-shaped pedalo. To go slowly, to see all of the dark, off-the-map bits of space in between the light, the emphasised areas of the map.

It is perhaps the film’s only pity that it involves celebrity interludes from the likes of Stewart Lee, Alan Moore and others. These are not bad per se, but nor are they particularly enthralling. It is nice to see how ‘normal’ they are as people – their ‘banter’ is mildly amusing, but not electric. Nonetheless, part of the brilliance of, say, Gallivant (Andrew Kötting, UK, 1997) is that it finds magic in countless regular people up and down the land as the director travels with his mother and daughter in search of authentic British people.

Finally – and apologies for being so circumspect/suggestive/imprecise on this blog – part of the brilliance of Searching for Sugar Man is the example that the film makes of forgotten folk singer Rodriguez. Not only does the film suggest the role that music can play in bringing about social change, but it also has Rodriguez adhere (with some economy of truth, no doubt) to a principle whereby becoming light, becoming an image, is not what he chooses for himself (even though this happens simply by virtue of his being in a film and/or being a music star).

As Rodriguez’s family make beautiful statements about the fact that class cannot make a human or their hopes and dreams more beautiful (that is, they criticise the common assumption that wealth is not simply an index of itself – i.e. wealth simply demonstrates material value – but also an index of human value – i.e. rich people are better people), and as Rodriguez refuses properly to become a star/an image/light (we are told he gives away his money to charity, friends and family, preferring simply to live in his modest Detroit apartment), so we have an object lesson – set against a deprived Detroit background – of a man who refuses to become light – or whose decision to come into the light is tempered by an acknowledgement of the benefits of darkness. This is not only signalled by Rodriguez’s career trajectory (although the film glosses over tours to Australia that the performer did in the late 1970s/early 1980s – long before his South Africa comeback but also long after his early 1970s flirtation with fame), but also by the first shot we see of the man – lingering at length in shadow behind a closed window, Rodriguez is at first pure image, before finally he steps forward, opens the window, and is seen in the cold-ish Detroit light of day.

In Sans Soleil, Marker repeatedly shows us shots of people. They are just images of people but, to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, to show images of people is also just. That is, Marker creates something like a democratic cinema, not based upon the individual, not one that reaffirms the desire to become light, but which instead looks at people who live in a world without light.

People here are not stars; we may see their images, but they are not stars, not images of people whose image is already moving at light speed, ubiquitous, disembodied, individualised, privileged.

Swandown asks us to move slowly, to appreciate the terrain itself (despite being a film that of course elides terrain in order to become a map/film of sorts). Its use of (admittedly minor) stars is problematic, in that it creates tension between Kötting’s otherwise democratic cinema and his film that, through collaborator Sinclair, seems to want to protest the London 2012 Olympics for precisely bringing light to a Hackney area that by definition casts into shadow those who are not Olympian heroes (even if I do not personally invest in sports stars as I do in film stars, as my MT experiences told me).

Nostalgia for the Light, meanwhile, also shows the importance of darkness in the contemporary world – and its insistent and beautiful shots of night skies and swirling galaxies demonstrate this: while we tend to fixate on the stars, they only stand out in such a beautiful fashion because of the darkness that surrounds them. Read socially, the 1 per cent needs the 99 per cent, even if it believes somehow that it can do without them.

Indeed,I am anticipating finding The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2012) problematic in what seems from the trailer to be a defence of the 1 per cent against the 99 per cent, but the jury is out since I am yet to see it.

But perhaps giving attention to Nolan’s film also runs counter to the way in which this blog tries to being attention to three far less glamourous and widely covered documentaries, all of which are worth watching, not necessarily instead of Batman (I can’t stop people from wanting to see a movie as hyped as this one), but certainly in addition to Batman (don’t forget the 99 per cent of movies).

Although it is slickly made and has some nicely visceral effects (as well as some uncomfortable ones, such as a rod being shoved into your back and some 3D shots that force you to look at eye-splitting flying objects), Marvel Super Heroes 4D (Joshua Wexler, USA, 2010) takes place in what at MT used to be a planetarium.

It would seem, therefore, that the museum – and its myriad visitors – prefer not to edify us about mysteries of the universe, the universe being so mysterious because so much of it is in darkness, but rather to transport into the fully lit world of Marvel’s superheroes, where whatever darkness there is, is simply dismissed in a Manichaean fashion as ‘bad.’

The love of cinema is not just based upon the light that shines on the screen, but also the darkness of the room that accompanies it, the darkness of the leader, the darkness of the frames between frames that are onscreen for 50 per cent of our viewing time, the darkness of our blinks, the darkness that the phi effect covers over as we saccade.

Darkness is key to life, or certainly key to the kind of dignified life that Rodriguez exemplifies/is made to exemplify in Searching for Sugar Man. The Luciferean enlightenment project is not necessarily entirely beneficial, accelerating us in general as it does towards an individualistic world in which only the chosen few get to be stars, while the abandoned rest are left to flounder in poverty.

We dream of becoming stars – this dream itself being a major obstacle in liberating us, because the dream of stardom promises to free us from poverty, when freedom will only arrive when we liberate ourselves from the dream of stardom. Indeed, the dream of stardom is what imprisons us in a world in which we are in fact already free, since all humans are born free, but they place themselves in chains, seeking to divest themselves of their bodies and to become light because we are force fed images, brought up on them, addicted and dependent on them, from the very earliest age.

It is paradoxical that Nostalgia for the Light, Swandown (which Kötting describes at one point as an anti-narrative – read mainstream – film in a world dominated by narrative/mainstream cinema), and Searching for Sugar Man are, of course, films that show light and darkness.

But they are films that each – in their own way – seek to emphasise the importance of darkness and not the surimportance of light. With this perhaps they share something that Chris Marker understood.

Chris Marker the alien is perhaps now only in darkness, a mystery we will no more see express himself. Nonetheless, as far as his films are concerned, with Sans Soleil standing in here as their figurehead, he was a truly dignified ambassador for making us remember darkness.

Now it is up to all of us to try to remember that we do not need to become light.

Leading the embodied life that we have to the best of our abilities, moving at whatever speed we want or need to, existing in our own time and not in the uniform speed of light – this is what we can learn from recent documentary film read in the shadow of Marker’s most sad passing.

Killer Joe (William Friedkin, USA, 2011)

American cinema, Blogpost, Film reviews, Neurocinematics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this sidetrack into Padullà?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this film to blog about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(For the full text, read here.)

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

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

But let us go further…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Café de Flore (Jean-Marc Vallée, Canada/France, 2011)

Blogpost, Canadian cinema, Film reviews

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged and plenty have I seen in the last few months about which I could have blogged. But time being what it is, I’ve not had chance.

Maybe Café de Flore is not the best film I have seen in the last few months, but it has provoked my thoughts in such a fashion that I feel compelled to put something online about it.

Given that there is plenty to say, I’ll try to limit myself to only 2,000 words. This will make things more palatable for readers, too.

I must confess being behind on Vallée’s films; I know of them, but I’ve not seen them, so this won’t be an analysis of his wider work, just what is on offer in this film.

Nonetheless, Café de Flore tells the story of a deejay, Antoine (Kevin Parent), who is in a relationship in contemporary Montreal with the love of his life, Carole (Hélène Florent), with whom he has two beautiful daughters. All is well until Antoine meets and falls in love with Rose (Evelyne Brochu), seemingly a younger, blonder model than Carole.

At the same time, we are also presented with the story of Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis) and her Down syndrome son, Laurent (Marin Perrier), who live in Paris in 1969 and on into the 1970s.

The two stories intercut each other, but we are not sure what the link is between them until relatively late on in the film. Here are some spoilers (because I don’t see how I can write a cogent analysis of this or any film without discussing fully what happens): it turns out that Antoine and Rose are the reincarnation of Laurent and the love of his life, fellow Down sufferer Véronique (Alice Dubois). Furthermore, Carole, who discovers this past through a medium (Emmanuelle Beaugrand-Champagne), is the reincarnation of Jacqueline, who killed herself, Laurent and Véronique in a car crash because she could not stand the thought of her son loving someone else more than her (or so it would seem, anyway).

Having learnt of this past, Carole finally decides to ‘get over’ Antoine and to accept his relationship with Rose. Indeed, having given them her blessing, she endorses their marriage and everything seems to return to normal. Until, right at the film’s climax, an aeroplane flying high in the sky – and presumably carrying Antoine whom we see regularly flying around the world to go deejay in London, Barcelona, etc – explodes.

In view of these spoilers, one might be drawn to one or both of two conclusions. The first is that the film plays out as a boy’s fantasy: basically, the plot conspires to tell the man that dumping his wife of 20 years and the mother of his children is fine and that going after the sassier blonde chick is justified and justifiable. This is not meant as a defense of old-fashioned death do us part values; it just means that men can take the women they want and women will forgive them.

The second reading might be that the film is hokum; reincarnation and the like makes of this film something akin to an artsy version of The Lake House (Alejandro Agresti, USA/Australia, 2006). Indeed, the latter reading might in particular explain the relatively luke warm reception that the film has received.

However, I think that even though these readings are valid, Café de Flore has some more interesting things to say than these, particularly about cinema itself and, I shall tentatively suggest, about Québec today.

Café de Flore is choc full of photographs. We see many of them in detail and at one point, Antoine tells his psychiatrist (Michel Laperrière) that he has spotted consistent themes in them. In many there are bottles of gin, which remind him of his father. And in others there is Carole. Indeed, in so many photos is Carole that even Rose comments that she finds it uncomfortable being in the house of Antoine’s parents, because Carole is everywhere to be seen there, too.

I’m going to argue that Café de Flore presents an eloquent contemplation of the way in which images, both still and moving, play a key role in identity formation and memory. What do I mean by this? I mean that it is impossible today to remember whether that photo we know of ourselves when young was something one truly remembers, or whether we really only remember the photograph. Photographs (and home movies) thus function as tools for outsourcing memory from the human brain; we do not actually need to remember events, since the images are there for us to store memories outwith our brain itself. As such, if our memories might actually be photographs of events that we really have forgotten, then photographs shape our memory, a process that in turn shapes our sense of self, our sense of personal experience, our sense of memory, our sense of identity.

In and of itself, this is not necessarily any great revelation. But what is excellent is the way in which Vallée interweaves images with sounds, too. As a deejay, Antoine is emblematic of today. Music triggers memories in a less direct way than photographs. I see a photo of me, I remember something about myself that is embodied within the photograph by my physical presence. I listen to a song and invest music with my memories, then something different is happening; I am not ‘in’ the song as I am in the photograph, but the song feels as much me as any photograph ever could (hence Antoine describing the music of – I think – Sigur Ros as expressing him perfectly).

Let us pause for a second on Antoine as deejay, then. With no disrespect intended to the great levels of creativity that go into deejaying (I used to deejay, relatively poorly, as a student entz rep and in the odd nightclub and wedding type thing, so I know that there is a fair amount of skill to it), I would nonetheless contend that a deejay is not the creator of music. Rather, as Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan) points out in Michael Winterbottom’s magnificent 24 Hour Party People (UK, 2002), the deejay is a medium. The deejay channels music by other people and reworks it in such a way that what emerges is not just a list of work by other people but something that is by and of the deejay him/herself.

In other words, the deejay makes music his or her ‘own’ in the same way that we perhaps all make music our own because the intense meaningfulness that songs can have personally to us means that they, like photographs, play a key role in helping us to construct our sense of identity.

(It is for this reason that I maintain that Inception (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2010) is a stylish but ultimately silly film, because it refuses to acknowledge that inception – the planting of others’ ideas in our heads – is not just an everyday occurence, but that perhaps there is no sense of self at all without such processes taking place the whole time. If willingly I hear a song and appropriate it as if it expressed my life, then I don’t see why all the fuss – except for the benefit of making a (logically inconsistent) action film – about putting an idea in someone’s head…)

What is true of music, then, is also true of films. That is, many humans feel as though they have achieved something not when they have a unique moment in their life, but precisely when their life conforms most to a film, an image or a song that they have seen. Check out any number of Facebook profile photos, including my own, and you will see great testimony to this: we present ourselves as we wish to be seen, not as we are. And how we wish to be seen is somehow as cinematic. We want, in this sense, to become light. Everything is a performance, of sorts. We are intensely aware of mediation, then. For the medium is the message.

Café de Flore weaves together a rich soundtrack of Sigur Ros, Pink Floyd, the Cure, various versions of the song from which the film takes its title, and much more. If the film mixes and remixes music, when it comes to images it is not that the movie consciously drops in visual references to other films. Such references may be there, but I did not spot them, and Vallée seems not to do cap-doffing homages as does, per exemplum, Quentin Tarantino.

However, Café de Flore does seem to suggest that film, like music, plays a role in the construction of self – and this is most visible in the Paris subplot involving the Down children.

While the use of a medium to reveal the characters’ past lives might be hokum – if you believe the story as one hundred per cent true – it is nonetheless canny and knowing. Not only does this film offer an intense awareness of media of all sorts (including the psychic medium here), but it also explains to what sense our lives are constructed around fantasy versions of ourselves, moments in music, cinematic moments of becoming light and so on. A logical extension of this is perhaps the way in which Carole uses the story of Jacqueline, Laurent and Véronique to make sense of her own life. In other words, the fantasy might be ‘false’ if we feel that we must cling to some strict binary opposition between true and false. But it is true enough for Carole, since it helps her to live in the contemporary world. And Vallée’s understanding of that contemporary world is that we are as much constructs of our fantasies and of music and fiction as we are products of a fleshworld that has a material (and thereby empirically more convincing?) existence.

That the images set in 1960s and 1970s Paris are shot as if filmed at the time, the grain of which stands in contrast to the cleanness of the contemporary images of Montreal, London, Barcelona, etc – suggests this to be true. That is, Paris is made not to look like Paris in the 1960s, or not uniquely like Paris in the 1960s. Rather, it is made to look like images of Paris from the 1960s. That Paris, then, is not necessarily real. It could be a constructed fantasy. Indeed, before we definitively do dismiss this strand of the plot as hokum, we should make clear that the medium tells Carole’s sceptical friend Amélie (Evelyne de la Chenelière) that she cannot tell Carole the whole of Jacqueline’s story because she (Carole) will not let her. That is, the medium seems to say here that she only tells Carole what she wants/needs to hear, that she only really reflects back to Carole what it is that Carole is herself saying. As such, the Paris episode could be a pure fantasy, but it makes no difference: in a world where we use and need fantasies in order to exist, the previously accepted dividing line between fantasy and reality is definitively eroded.

In this way, the medium is the parallel of Antoine’s own shrink: he is a sounding board for Antoine to express all that is within him, a similar medium of sorts who can help Antoine to rework his fantasies and experiences in such a way that they make sense. As if the act of making sense of the world required fantastical elements. As if, like the family that gathers at New Year’s parties and offers a prayer to God despite never going to Mass or even believing in God (as Antoine tells us is the case), we need fantasies just to give everything a sense, or a semblance, of order.

What really is most interesting about Café de Flore, though, is the way in which it works this conception of the blend of fantasy and reality into the form of the film itself. This is not just a question of digital retouching of images, such that a contemporary film can be made to look like an old 16mm so successfully that we cannot tell a ‘real’ old film from a fake one. Rather, this is the way in which the film jumps back and forth across time frames; unannounced Café de Flore will move back and forth in space and time, linked by a visual or aural motif that suggests not causality between past and present, but correspondence.

Furthermore, we will often see something like an image of Antoine, then cut to an image of his youth, only to then realise or at the very least ask whether this is Carole’s memory of events, not Antoine’s, because we then cut to her and not back to Antoine.

This latter type of jump not only across time but also between people remembering happens regularly. What is more, various flashback scenes feature snippets of conversation – between parents, between children – that none of the main characters (whom we otherwise would assume to be the person remembering these events) could possibly have remembered, since they were not there. Not only does this suggest the way in which we misremember perhaps precisely in order to remember (memory is predicated on an inability to remember correctly, should there even be such a thing as ‘correctness’ when it comes to memory, and perhaps even when it comes to direct perception itself). But it also suggests our interlinked nature.

That is, if I am made up of music by Robert “The Cure” Smith (especially, tellingly, the song ‘Pictures of You’), and I am also made up of photographs and of films, then perhaps I am also made up of others’ testimonies and experiences. Indeed, who has not, be that out of intention to pass them off as one’s own, or simply for the sake of convenience as one realises that the memory recalled is not in fact one’s own, passed off other people’s stories and memories as if they were their own? Similarly, who has not told themselves that they are so good at lying because what they do is actually to believe their lies such that they are not lies anymore? As such, I am not entirely separable from other people; I am not the island-like individual that sometimes we try to pretend we are (capitalism prides itself on the socialisation (natch) of the myth of the impenetrable individual – hence the hokum of Inception). Instead, I am and perhaps can only exist in relation. I would not even have a sense of self were it not for others. So in some senses, how much hokum is a myth of reincarnation? If in fact I only exist in relation, then in some senses I am only an incarnation of others, as if incarnation itself required others (which it does through the fact of parents, but I also mean this on a more abstract level).

As such, riffing from one person’s memory to another’s as if there were no difference between the two is perhaps not just confusing for a viewer to watch (and something that drives Café de Flore in the direction of ‘artsiness’ alluded to above). But it also reflects a particular and perhaps true conception of identity itself: that it is shared, as are memories, and that perhaps not only do memories evolve through interactions and exchanges with others, but that in the same process so do our very identities change, evolve and become. Expressive editing thus becomes a form of realism.

What is best about Café de Flore, though, is its insistence on tiny details and what I shall call feedback. As I watched the film, I began to see gin bottles cropping up around the place (and not just in the still images where Antoine points them out), as well as passers by in the film’s present that I think, or at least wondered, were played by the actors from the film’s past (although in a world in which we cannot easily tell each other apart, perhaps nor can we easily tell different moments in time apart, because the past influences the present, and the present influences our understanding of the past, even if to propose that the present directly influences the past itself might overstep the mark for many because it is utterly unprovable – unless we contend that there is no past, only our malleable understandings thereof, which only ever exist in the present).

The film makes this most clear by the pentagrams that begin to crop up repeatedly – in tattoos, on the floor at the bottom of Jacqueline’s staircase, etc. It is not that pentagrams are important per se (maybe they are, but I don’t think they have to be). Rather, what is important is that the elements of the visual field that we typically think of as unimportant in fact play a key role in shaping our understanding of the world. That is, we privilege many elements of our visual field in terms of what consciously we perceive; we tend to concentrate on human figures, movement, and other elements that might be prey, predator or mate. But in fact the details uphold this perception, perhaps even shape it, such that we see most when we see as ‘holistically’ as possible.

This is what I mean by feedback: we do not just act upon our environment, but our environment also acts upon us.

Café de Flore ends with a slow track and zoom into a photo of Carole and Antoine in front of a photo of Paris, in which we finally see the blurred figures of Jacqueline, Laurent and Véronique, whom we see waving at Paris’ bateaux mouches at a couple of points in the film (replete with heavy flash bulbs from cameras, as if this were their ‘becoming light’ – in the city of lights). They are a detail taken in a photo by Antoine’s parents on a trip to Paris in their youth.

And yet this tiny detail, out of focus and so easy to miss, is intimately connected with the present. That Jacqueline, Laurent and Véronique are ‘in’ the photo therefore suggests a different form of feedback. Not only do photographs function as an externalisation of our sense of self. But the contents of those photographs also speak, or feed, back to us; they come from ‘out of’ the photograph and modify how it is that we understand ourselves and the world. Photographs are not ‘dead’ things, but they have a persistence, a strange life of their own, one that we may not even see consciously, unless a further medium allows us to bring that consciously to mind.

Ultimately, Café de Flore might be Antoine’s fantasy of redemption in the face of his guilt over leaving Carole, a fantasy acted out in his dying moments before his plane explodes. Inspired by the Down syndrome kids who have the pentagram tattoos and whom he sees while walking to his plane at the airport, they inform his desire for Carole to forgive him as he faces death. Maybe, then, Antoine needs the story of reincarnation as much as Carole does to survive, or rather in Antoine’s case, to face death. Antoine imagines himself as the reincarnation of Laurent in order to be given a paradoxical sense of identity at the moment of the end of his identity, that is at the moment of death. This fantasy allows Antoine to make the literal returning to the universe – the dispersal of one’s constituent atoms over the Earth’s entire terrain – bearable, a positive experience justified by an understanding that we are all already interlinked and ‘one’ anyway, something we would understand better if we were not so inceived with this myth of individuality…

As such, filming the plane’s destruction in vast long shot is telling. Not only does its movement towards a huge and burning sun suggest the desire to become light (and an Icarean sense of doom in attempting to become light?), but it also means that Antoine is at the last a tiny speck in a massive universe. He is, indeed, simply part of the universe’s mega-mechanics. And it is as if the film’s ecological philosophy – whereby we are interconnected, inseparable, and ‘one’ – were the latest myth that humanity is inventing in order to justify its own extinction. The myth that will allow us to go gently into that good night, because we will realise ultimately that there are greater forces at work than human will.

Café de Flore, then, seems something of a philosophical film, no matter how lightly one takes its storyline, which could indeed be construed as daft if you so wished to view the film that way. That philosophy could be a political philosophy. By this I mean to say that Café de Flore could also be read as an allegory of the relationship between Québec and France, as Québec’s present, in Antoine and Rose, faces its French past, perhaps embodied in Carole, but certainly in Jacqueline (that French identity being as real to these Québecois as a song, as if Vanessa Paradis’ history as a singer were not just accidental casting). In this reading, which is imprecise and tentative (apologies), Québec functions as some sort of strange, monstrous offspring (problematically rendered in the figure of the Down child), but whose love is pure and who is reincarnated in the present and who must be forgiven in order to continue, even if this means a rejection of the old. Perhaps I should pause there; the film seems pregnant with some sort of allegorical meaning, but perhaps I am not the person to deliver it.

On a final note, though, I’ll briefly say that Café de Flore is an odd bedfellow with another film out in the UK now, Jeff, Who Lives at Home (Jay and Mark Duplass, USA, 2011). Without going into details and at the risk of referring to the film in such a way that I alienate those who have not seen it, the new Duplass movie has a similar fascination with the notions of fate and destiny, and to a lesser extent with identity. The idea that there might be patterns in the world that we do not immediately recognise, but which we can if we are attentive enough. I was struck in particular how Café de Flore features a prominent Kevin in the cast (Kevin Parent as Antoine), since in Jeff…, Jeff himself (Jason Segel) follows anyone and everyone called Kevin having believed that he received a sign (significantly from the medium of the television) earlier in the day on which the film’s story takes place.

Maybe seeing Jeff… led me cosmically to see Café de Flore… Because everything is connected. Because this is how we understand the world to work if we try to see whole. To see holy.

Before I take this blog in the direction of too much hokum, though, I should call it a day. While Jeff… shows the usual Duplass charm and involves some pretty amusing moments, it is Café de Flore that seems the more sophisticated of the two.

Brief thoughts on Q.I.: XL (broadcast 6 April 2012) – or why educated British people despise thinking, working class people

Blogpost, Film education, Television

For those who do not know, Q.I. is a television celebrity panel quiz show in the UK hosted by Stephen Fry. It involves Fry asking questions about all manner of topics, the answers to which often seem obvious – because mythology offers us falsehoods as truths – but which always are not.

So Fry will ask something like “What was Gandhi’s first name?” and if one of the panelists (typically a man called Alan Davies) say “Mahatma” (in a specific episode, Alan Davies in fact proposes “Randy” as Gandhi’s first name), then he is docked some points (there may be a formula for how many, but it is not important; Davies was docked 150 points for saying “Randy”). Fry then corrects Davies and the others, and explains that “Mohandas” was Gandhi’s first name (depending on which Gandhi you wish to talk about, of course), and that “Mahatma” is the Sanskrit term for “Great soul”.

In this way, a popular error (that reveals specifically British ignorance, perhaps) is revealed and an educational element is delivered in comic form, because Q.I. typically features several of a group of British comedians that endlessly wander from one celebrity panel show to the next (Bill Bailey, Sean Lock, Dara Ó Briain, Jimmy Carr, Sandi Toksvig, John Sessions, Jo Brand, Phill Jupitus, Rich Hall, Rob Brydon, Clive Anderson, David Mitchell, Danny Baker, etc). It has two permanent cast members: Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, the former as MC, the latter as the sightly buffoonish one who always gets the questions wrong, but in a charming amd mildly amusing fashion.

Now, last night, Fry and Davies hosted Sandi Toksvig, Jimmy Carr and Lee Mack. At one point, Fry posed a question along the lines of “how is it that the Mona Lisa’s eyes follow you around the room when you see it in the Louvre?” This we can oppose to the way in which a human’s eyes do not follow the observer of that human around the room – if the human continues to look at the same spot while the observer moves…

For whatever reason, it fell to Lee Mack to answer this question – and whether right or wrong, answer it he did with some ingenuity. Mack proposed that the reason the Mona Lisa’s eyes always follow us around the room is because we are never looking at the woman in the Mona Lisa painting, but at Leonardo’s vision of her. Since in the painting she is looking directly at the painter, and since we can only see the painter’s perspective of her (she is not a sculpture around which we can walk – although Mack did also sharply say that the Mona Lisa’s eyes do not follow you if you walk behind her), then it stands to reason that from any/all angles, it will seem as though she, the Mona Lisa, is looking at the painting’s spectator.

There is something ingenious about Mack’s explanation – which Fry himself was beginning to praise at one point, before Jimmy Carr and Sandi Toksvig basically railroaded Mack’s explanation into the ground as rubbish and irrelevant.

Q.I. is a funny show and so I am ‘killing’ the comedy a bit here, for which apologies. But something important seemed to happen at this moment that I think merits comment.

Lee Mack’s comedy persona is more or less “northern” humour, which translates in the UK into “working class” humour – although of a sophistication significantly greater than the “classic” (code for racist) “northern humour” that is associated with the likes of Bernard Manning.

Alan Davies, meanwhile, plays the show as a charming and well spoken buffoon. He is the “ninny” of the series, but a relatively middle to upper middle class ninny – not quite the same as, but somewhere approximate to the kind of well-meaning toff/quasi-toff that Harry Enfield satirised at length with his Tim Nice-but-Dim character, and which more recently has been revitalised by Matt Lacey with his viral Orlando character (“And then I chundered… everywhaaah…”).

This leaves Fry, Toksvig and Carr. It is perhaps not so well known that Carr is highly educated, because his humour tends to be cruel and scatological – while Fry and Toksvig are, latterly at least, known for their sophistication, not least linguistically. Nonetheless, all three of Fry, Toksvig and Carr received their higher education at the University of Cambridge, attending Queen’s, Girton and Gonville and Caius respectively (the show’s creator, John Lloyd, also attended Cambridge, going to Trinity College).

Now, let’s be clear. Lee Mack is very well educated, too. He attended Brunel University, while Alan Davies was at the University of Kent. But Mack’s persona is much more mainstream than this would belie (as, arguably, is Jimmy Carr’s, but with significantly less warmth than Mack’s).

However, when we see two Cambridge graduates dismissing Mack’s inventive response to Fry’s question, with Fry later in the episode also joining in by calling Mack “stupid” (even though in a charming and friendly manner), one cannot help but feel that something else is going on beyond simply a display of knowledge.

For, Mack’s explanation is – whether right or wrong – both clear and ingenious. It may well be a piece of typical Q.I. logic. That is, Mack’s explanation for why the Mona Lisa’s eyes follow you around the room might well be spurious if logical-seeming – although he does not stand corrected in the episode (as far as I recall, the show moves on, leaving one with the impression that Mack might have been right – he is not corrected; but that on the whole he is wrong – everyone derides him).

In offering a clear and ingenious answer to the question, Mack has shown not necessarily knowledge, but he has shown intelligence and an ability to think on his feet. What is odd, then, is how intelligence of this kind is here punished by the existing intelligentsia with their Cambridge degrees and their ability to reel off facts as if knowledge were superior to understanding and intelligence.

One cannot help but wonder whether the issue really is about class and/or regionality (which, to generalise, is often and erroneously bound up with class by relatively “posh” “southerners” [Toksvig’s Danish provenance complicating this matter somewhat, except for the fact that her English accent is as Queen’s as one could hope for]), whose poshness and southernness passes for normality and which certainly is imbued with symbolic if not actual power when its disapproval of northern intelligence is implied as/taken as being the definitive framework through which to understand Mack.

One cannot help but recall one of Britain’s favourite comedy sketches – the so-called “Class Sketch” from The Frost Report in 1966, featuring (Cambridge-educated) John Cleese “looking down on” Ronnie Barker (no higher education, but from the relatively prosperous city of Oxford), who in turn “looks down on” Ronnie Corbett (no higher education).

That is, comedy and class seem thoroughly intertwined in the UK, with one’s type of humour playing a role in one’s class consciousness. But where the “Class Sketch” pokes fun at the British class system (personally I don’t find the sketch funny so much as plain scathing), yesterday’s episode of Q.I. seems to reveal the persistence of knowledge and the power of holding knowledge as the preserve of the educated, middle and upper classes (read Oxbrige-educated), while intelligence and the ability to question authority through actual thinking (Lee Mack coming up with an ingenious answer all on his own) being branded as subversive, threatening and to be quashed.

In a sense the entire ideology of Q.I. is herein revealed: the show takes “popular wisdom” (people who think that Gandhi’s first name is Mahatma) and exemplifies that it is often “wrong,” while demonstrating that “real” knowledge – and thus power – lies in the hands of the enlightened few.

There is more to say about the show’s audience and the projection of intelligence and wit that makes it for many viewers a pleasurable and aspirational experience – not least because it all looks so easy for these performers.

(Indeed, in this episode, Mack is also the only comic made to look as though they are working on/at their comedy, when he bungles a “ye olde Second World War” joke, that again he must explain – “brilliantly” according to Fry – as being a failed improvisation; the others would never have to do so much as working – because they are not, by implication, working class, while Lee Mack (in fact highly educated) is.)

If you who is reading this knows me, you might be thinking “pot-kettle-black”, in that I am also highly educated (three degrees from the University of Oxford). But my point here is not simply to cast stones at the Cambridge “toffs” that dominate Q.I., which is a show I enjoy immensely (otherwise why would I watch it from time to time?).

Rather, it is to demonstrate the way in which even highly educated people can – as this episode of Q.I. seems to reveal – succumb to the logic that having answers and holding power are the most important things to possess in life – and that threats to them (Lee Mack’s display of intelligence, so much more threatening than Alan Davies’ otherwise well-meaning ninniness) must be extinguished. It is Mack, in showing thought/intelligence, and in showing that he works and can sometimes fail at his comedy, who demonstrates something beyond power here – thought, intelligence, doubt, and in some respects true comedy in the face of the scientific imperative towards “true” knowledge. It is a pity that the others – supposedly highly educated – dismiss him so quickly – even if in a comic fashion and on nominally friendly terms.

For a short while, UK residents can catch the show on the BBC’s iPlayer here.

The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah, Ghana/UK, 2010)

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

Shown at the 2010 London Film Festival, but denied even a brief and minimal release until now, The Nine Muses is one of the best films that Jean-Luc Godard never made.

Boring stuff: the film combines archive footage and images of faceless men staring at ganzfeld-like Alaskan snowscapes (think J.M.W. Turner’s later paintings that are more or less depictions of fog in Italian cities) with spoken and written quotations from Joyce, Beckett, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and others, and music by Godardian composers like Arvo Pärt, David Darling and Hans Otte, to develop a poetic collage of ideas that combine to form a meditation diaspora and black (British) history.

The above is ‘boring’ because that’s the brass tacks of the film.

The interesting stuff (to me) is something like the following:

The poet does not necessarily know history, but the poet certainly feels history. The Nine Muses includes a prominent quotation from Zelda Fitzgerald that “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” And yet, even if this were true, John Akomfrah as poet is sensitive to (he ‘feels’) the pain that weighs down on migrant peoples as a result of their travels.

That is, not everyone who is from a migrant family knows or understands the past that their ancestors have endured. Indeed, as someone like Ariane Sherine has recently written, the question ‘where are you from?‘ is a boring one.

No disrespect to Sherine, who can make any claim she wants about the implicit (and certainly real, if ‘well intentioned’) racism that such a question entails. I’m not saying that she is in denial of her roots, but her argument runs the risk of saying ‘[personal] history is boring and unwelcome burden.’

And, sure, her roots are in the UK. I’m not trying to imply that she or anyone else whose family immigrated to the UK long ago – and certainly before she was born – is not ‘British.’

But, again, if we don’t pay attention to history, then we might find ourselves repeating it.

Which is to say that we don’t all need to have a full genealogy mapped out such that we can say that we are descended from Spanish gypsy immigrants (as, according to my cousin, I am). Nor do we need wear badges that make clear our family origins.

But we must understand that the long and troubled history of immigration did happen, and we must perhaps try to get a sense of what global relocation means.

And this is what Akomfrah’s masterful cine-poem seems to be about. It reworks Homer to say that African, Caribbean and Asian immigrants to the UK are wandering souls, and that, as Basho has said, the journey/the wandering is perhaps itself our home.

And yet, wandering is a difficult home to inhabit; it is cold, arduous, and it puts humans on the limits of all that they know, there where humanity itself is forged (for humanity is only a measure of the limits of humanity; anything easily within its limits is almost inhuman, perhaps it is even death).

The enormity and difficult nature of this journey – this is what Akomfrah suggests, and his reworking of footage of immigrants now either grown old or lost to the world, such that literally their beautiful holograms haunt the screen as we see them reanimated – a cinematic punctum of the highest order – is what we should not forget.

We should not forget that the most famous rapist of all time, Zeus, begot the muses with Mnemosyne, the incarnation of memory. That is, memory is the mother of all art. If we forget, then, pace Sherine, art like this will be lost.

The answer to the question ‘where are you from?’ is not, then, some mythical ‘Africa’ or ‘Barbados’ or ‘India’ – but that we are from here, the place in which we currently reside, and which is perhaps always changing. It is not the condemnation to death of the past by declaring the past to be, precisely, finished; it is the declaration of the continued existence of the past in the present.

The poet, then, carries history not as history – but as the fundament upon which is based the present. This is what I mean by ‘feeling’ the past rather than necessarily knowing it (being ‘good at history’ in terms of dates and events, important though that also is).

In a week when the government published its findings on and hopes for the British film industry, it strikes me that a film like Akomfrah’s is all the more important to champion.

The document published – which admittedly I have only glossed – talks a good game of supporting diversity in British independent cinema. And many of the films cited – usual suspects including not just The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, UK, 2010), but also people like Terence Davies – would arguably make us think that this diversity extends beyond the popular appeal of the former and into the ‘art house’ realm of the latter.

But… One gets the jittery feeling reading the document that it really does mean supporting more mainstream cinema – The Inbetweeners Movies (Ben Palmer, UK, 2011) was a commercial hit, don’t you know? So why not make more films like it? – with not so much regard for art cinema of the kind that Akomfrah has made here, and which does not have much/any of the commercial appeal of British comedies and heritage films.

Given the year and a half turnaround on The Nine Muses between the London Film Festival and its current cinema release (showing only at the glorious ICA at present), one worries for films like Akomfrah’s: it must take a lot of persuading for someone finally to agree to stump up cash to take on the risk of even a one-week run at a single screen in London. Sure, DVD sales will be reasonable, but even with the plaudits on the poster (testimony to the failing power of journalists to convince anyone other than the pre-converted to step out of the multiplex?; there were 9 (nine) people at the beginning and 7 (seven) at the end of the screening I attended), The Nine Muses is still obviously struggling. And with the government paper’s emphasis on the profitability of films, one cannot see labours of love like Akomfrah’s being anything other than lost in the future.

And yet, this is the kind of film precisely to support as vociferously and as eloquently as possible. It is a poem that deserves to be seen repeatedly, and even if it is ‘lost’ on some people (those who walked out of the screening I attended?), its feeling for, or sense of, history – and not in the sense of the ‘great man’ myth peddled by The King’s Speech, but, rather, in the way that human lives in a collective sense prop up and enable any great man (or woman) to exist at all – is what makes it worth promoting.

I know I’ll carry on making movies for nothing – and I more or less expect never to get funding for my films. Sad though this makes me (if I allow my vanity to speak), a superior talent like Akomfrah should be supported at every level: by funders and by audiences.

See The Nine Muses, then, before it is too late.

Notes from the LFF: Hors Satan/Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont, France, 2011)

Blogpost, British cinema, Film reviews, French Cinema, Uncategorized

Are we living in the end times?

Personally, I don’t think so.

But, then again, while I will be sad to die (this is a lie – I won’t be anything except dead), and while I’ll be sad (and pretty excited) to see some other planet crash into Earth, or whatever fate awaits humanity and the rock we float on, this will not be the end of things.

I view it pretty simply: molecules, matter, light, and all of that ‘primary’ stuff that goes to make up the universe will still be around. They will never not be around. Perhaps they cannot not to be around. So an absolute end to all things? No, I don’t think so.

Hors Satan is one of a small bunch of recent art house movies that features a miracle (more than one in this film, in fact).

Miracles are relatively common place in the mainstream – impossible things happen the whole time, whether or not these are given a religious context and whether or not they are recognised as being miraculous.

Given that the mainstream peddles in impossible/miraculous illusion on a day-to-day basis, miracles there are not as interesting as when they appear in art house cinema.

Why? Because art house cinema is ‘for’ and ‘by’ ‘intellectuals’ – which stereotypically might have overlap with what I shall call agnosticism. Here, I don’t quite mean agnosticism in the sense of ‘I am not sure what or whether I believe in God or not,’ although it’s linked – hence my choice to use this word.

What I mean by agnosticism is a certain suspicion with regard to miracles: people do not get up from the dead and walk in everyday life (not without the help of defibrillators, anyway). Or if they do, there might well be a ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ explanation, to which we do not necessarily have access.

Now, just to be clear, I think that you can believe in God and still be agnostic if we accept this definition. And note that this agnosticism is not meant to rule out miracles – it’s just to want thoroughly to question the evidence for them.

This in and of itself might place too great an emphasis on ‘science’ – but my point is not that such a ‘scientific’ view is without potential flaws. It is simply that, according to this view, miracles would push the bounds of credibility.

A second – linked – reason why miracles in art house cinema are more remarkable (and push the bounds of credibility) is that art house cinema – a very problematic generalisation, I confess – often (but not exclusively) is made in what we have come to accept as a ‘realistic’ style. That is, few elements are obtrusive, be that the acting, the mise-en-scène, the cinematography, the editing, or the soundtrack.

Instead, everything plays in seemingly real – and not stylised – locations, with the camera retaining some distance from events, not moving in an ostentatious fashion, and with edits taking place when they perhaps ‘need’ to, rather than ‘for the sake of it’. Since these films try to look like everyday life, and since miracles do not take place in everyday life, it is intriguing – and all the more surprising – that art house films would choose to portray miracles in this style.

Art house films might be weird as far as their status as a film is concerned. To give an example, Hors Satan itself has long takes, in which little happens and in which there is little dialogue as the unnamed lead character, played by David Dewaele, walks around the countryside of the north of France, seemingly praying to the countryside, and taking away and giving life as he sees fit.

But, even though we seem increasingly to find our real lives intolerable if they are filled with silence and little movement, such silence and stillness in a film might yet be thought of as realistic – because reality is not the crash bang wallop of the mainstream movies.

That is, as far as films go, Hors Satan is ‘weird’ because it does not conform to the norms of mainstream filmmaking – which bring with them an implicit contract whereby the audience ‘expects’ miracles to happen. But this ‘weirdness’ for a film might still be termed realistic, because life itself is slow and often quiet. And so when a miracle happens in a ‘weird’ and slow and supposedly ‘realistic’ film, it seems as though something even more weird must be going on.

Along with Stellet licht/Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2007) and Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, Austria/France/Germany, 2009), then, Hors Satan is one of a handful of high profile and recent art house ‘miracle movies.’

Why is the story of a miracle, as happens in Hors Satan, linked to the ‘end times’ I evoked at the outset of this blog?

My proposed – and admittedly general – answer would be that we live in times when it is hard to find something to believe in. Almost any religious belief is – especially beliefs held so strongly that one would want to share that belief with others and perhaps even try to persuade them of the truth of those beliefs – quickly derided as ‘fundamentalism,’ as is the seemingly irrational and rabid refusal to believe in capitalism.

In other words, ‘realists’ are supposedly atheists, as the religion bashers such as Richard Dawkins aim to make clear. Being realists, there would be little space for miracles in films made for ‘intelligent’ and ‘realistic’ people, and also made by ‘intelligent’ filmmakers who shoot using the technical and formal conventions of ‘realism’ (realism as a style of filmmaking).

In the postmodern era, in which the so-called ‘grand narratives’ that previously could explain the world and our position therewith have been overthrown but not replaced, it would appear that there is nothing to believe in anymore.

And yet with mankind’s fragility ever more thrust in our own faces, it is perhaps natural that humans would turn back to religion – or at least the belief in some power/force/energy/design/divinity – in order to have some rationale behind the human project, and perhaps also to convince us that we do not need to be out there in the streets murdering and stealing simply because we know that no punishment – either Earthly or divine – awaits us.

(I am intrigued by the fact that the day on which the human population on Earth reached seven billion in number, the news seems to mourn our demise – not enough food, not enough warmth, not enough oxygen to keep us going. That is, the human race is numerically at its strongest, and yet the discourse seems overwhelmingly to emphasise that we are at our weakest.)

Now, I personally think that none of Silent Light, Lourdes or Hors Satan actually believes in the miracles that they depict – and also believe that none of them is a ‘Christian’ film attempting to woo its viewers back to the church because if we don’t pray now, then, Pascal-like, we might lose our bet with God.

The reference to Pascal is perhaps apt. For Pascal himself argues – in the same section (233) of his Pensées in which the wager appears – that we cannot have access to the infinite, or to God, because we are finite – and the infinite is not just a ‘big number’; rather, the infinite is without number.

That is to say, Pascal is talking about a faith without proof – precisely, a faith. Ostensibly, then, a miracle – as ‘proof’ of God – eliminates the wager; once you’ve seen a miracle, you just believe because you have seen God and don’t need to, nay cannot, doubt anymore.

Here is where what I perceive to be the failure of these three films to believe in their own miracles perhaps becomes interesting. For the miracles in each film function for me not as proof of God, but as evidence of our need for beliefs as a whole.

There is nothing stopping anyone from reading these films – perhaps Lourdes especially – as being literal accounts of miracles. However, for me these films are about the need to fill a void that has been created by the drive to render the world scientifically comprehensible (even though science itself remains full of mysteries, with the Higgs-Boson itself sometimes even referred to – even if jokingly – as the ‘God particle’).

In other words, Gödel notwithstanding, our comprehension of the universe is incomplete – and this is in part perhaps because of the lack of anything to believe in. Belief, then, might yet (even if not forever) remain a vital need for humans, a meme of such power that we cannot ignore it.

Although I have not discussed Hors Satan or any of the films mentioned in much depth, I just wanted to get across these brief thoughts.

And as a brief add-on, I found it interesting that We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, UK/USA, 2011) dared to look precisely at our belief-less, postmodern society from the perspective of a mother whose love for her son is only ambivalent (and vice versa) at absolute best.

Not only does this for me confirm Ramsay’s status as one of the leading lights of British cinema (my top quartet typically would be Winterbottom, Meadows, Arnold and Ramsay), but it also stands in stark contrast to the ‘king’ of postmodern pop, Quentin Tarantino.

In a very informative book about film and ethics, Lisa Downing writes that Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 (USA, 2003-2004) ultimately offer up the myth of motherhood as, for Tarantino, a final ideological barrier that for him is absolute – and not a social/cultural convention that is contingent (i.e. need not necessarily be true or real under different circumstances).

Kevin is prepared to take a step in that direction and to question even this myth.

Dumont’s film has a set of concerns entirely separate from Ramsay’s – and perhaps from all of the films mentioned here.

But if nothing else it is an interesting – and beautiful – meditation on what the times are such that they might be ending.