Change Your Image
adrin-65078
Reviews
Lady Macbeth (2016)
vacuum packed
As in Chazelle's La La Land the defining shot in William Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth is a female faciality.
Oldroyd and Chazelle's through both the camera and the edit indulge long slavering shots of both Emma Stone and Florence Pugh. Both these young actresses are sat nicely preened, motionless on the set, posing for the audience with looks of self satisfied smugness as the lens laps up their faces in an act of optic devouring.
Both films are about desire, and today's directors, in particular but not exclusively male ones, seem spellbound by the images of the faces of their female protagonists as they play to realise the object of their desire. In the Public relations hand-outs this is called female empowerment. Katherine and Mia are caste as representatives of a rewritten 'desire' retro-history, and both heroines achieve the 21st century feminist dream of having it all. These movies might be understood as the consequence of the pact production companies and their directors make out with the juggernaut of pseudo-feminism orthodoxy that rolls over the global arts and political landscape. We are experiencing the implementation of a fake feminist canon of political correctness in which the female presentation, as image, vies with Bolshevik strictures concerning the historic correct destiny of workers and peasants, for the mantle of being the most deadening sterile social paradigm.
Lady Macbeth is adapted from Nikolai Leskov's Russian novel, Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District. Leskov's novel seems to have been completely corrupted in its film representation. Whereas the novel's actual back ground of serf culture with its underlying violence, serve Leskov's plot well and embed the action in a specific culture, Oldroyd's film is a decontextualized vehicle. Lady Macbeth is set in a narration black hole. The 'period look' setting reminded me of the final sequence of Kubrick's 2001 in which Bowman finds himself deposited in a neo classical apartment. Lady Macbeth seems likewise beamed up. But Katherine unlike Bowman has not been scripted to die, but rather like Schwarzenegger's Terminator, been sent to right the wrongs of history and restore a feminist gloss to literature and history. (Leskov's novel ends with Katherine and her serf lover guilty of murder and sentenced to exile in Siberia). Oldroyd's land Macbeth has as its final shot Katherine smirking into the camera.
There is an immobility in the sets which together with the acting style and the lines of dialogue, give to Lady Macbeth a theatrical aspect. Both Becket and Pinter as playwrights used decontextualized settings, mannered delivery of dialogue and non naturalistic dialogue to specific dramatic effect. These writers exploited lack of context and freedom from external constraints, to probe explore and evoke metaphysical and psycho-social tension in the characters. Oldroyd's script doesn't do metaphysics; it does mechanics, the mechanicality of Katherine's career of 'desire achieved'. There is nothing for the audience to see or to understand, other than the script progressing from one event to the other, from one success to another. From Katherine's romps with Sebastian to her final murder of the young heir. There is no 'out damn spot' moment, no moments of irony or self awareness. Only that one reiterated image: Katherine sat facing outwards looking towards camera like the cat that got the cream.
And a cat periodically appears throughout the film, as do landscape shots, both serving the film conceit of referencing nature as a transposed states of mind. Visual clichés that at this point have long out served any purpose other than pretension.
As there were no serfs in England, Leskov's underclass characters in Lady Macbeth are given over to be played by blacks. I think the idea will have been to migrate contemporary racial sensitivities back into a decontextualized 19th century thereby deepening the meanings underscoring social relations in the film. But race relations are always mediated by context, and the interposing of race simply deepens Lady Macbeth's ontological confusion. In an English setting, race and class issues imaged in lady Macbeth, only blur and confound. A more appropriate background for the film might have been in the Southern States.
By the time the end credits rolled Lady Macbeth had left me without a thought. The truth content of the movie was a void. The assembly of the movie pointed only to external relations of film making as an act of ideological purity. I did wonder if they had filmed a lesbian scene between Katherine and Anna, but wisely left it on the cutting room floor. This idle thought merely underscores the banality of a film that flaunts its credentials as an empowering medium, a piece of junk thought that underlines only that Lady Macbeth is a dishonest dis-empowering medium. adrin neatrour
I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
one voice
As I left the cinema with my companion Ana Marton, she turned to me and said: It's a labour of love! And I immediately understood what she was right because if there is one thing that stands out in Raoul Peck's 'I Am Not Your Negro , it is that there is love at the heart of his film.
'I Am Not Your Negro' feels like the film of a director who has read and reread James Baldwin many times, each time absorbing him the more deeply into his blood. Reaching the point, from all considerations, where a film, not made about but with Baldwin, was possible. A film in which not everything could be said, but in which much that was essential in the writer could be uttered.
Viewing 'I Am Not Your Negro' it feels like Raoul Peck (RP) has consciously minimised his own presence, almost disappeared from the film. Because this is Baldwin's film. And RP knows he has made Baldwin's film and no one should take the credit for Baldwin's film but Baldwin. His is the voice.
Of course 'I Am Not Your Negro' is a finely crafted film and in that respect it is Peck's seamless fusion of Baldwin's strong voice and the film material that almost renders his own presence invisible. RP writes himself out of the script allowing him to refine his task so as to actualise the life and writing of the poet and writer who has inspired and shaped the lives of those many born without the protective carapace of white skin.
Raoul Peck's intention in the film is to give total primacy to the writing. Nothing is more important. Baldwin's writing commands the screen, allowing his voice to ring clearly across the years since his death in 1987. Releasing Baldwin's words so that they might resonate today with acuity intelligence and insight into the heart of present day America.
An America that in Baldwin's terms is still a sick troubled society. Baldwin's predictions bear witness today to the primacy of Donald Trump; perhaps a sicker more troubled culture now than in the 1960's and 1970's epitomised in the continuing fate of its black population to be looked upon as a despised degenerate slave people. A fate made more urgent and cogent by the fact that the political discourse about 'blacks' is spoken in a euphemistic code of political correctness that overlays the deeply buried prejudice and discrimination.
Peck's script is largely based on Baldwin's 1975 work, 'No name in the street'. This is sometimes described as a group of essays. It is not. It is rather an autobiographical work that is structured in the manner of a stream of consciousness. It intermixes the personal memory, reflection and analysis of white culture and society, and interpolates into the text the significance and deaths of the the three great black American resistance figures of the 20th century, with all of whom, Baldwin had worked and fought. Medgar Evans, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King. Baldwin's utterance, voiced by the deep sonorous bass of Samuel Jackson, is the dominant affect in the movie, Baldwin's writing is the truth content, energising and organising the visual material, the affect that points to the significance of the visual imagery. What we see is images that are an extension of the voice's perception: images drawn from originary material of Baldwin himself such as his 1965 Cambridge debate; archive material of King Evans and Malcolm X; and movie clips from popular Hollywood film that range from the 1920's to the 1970's. In addition RP makes some use of present day coverage of race riots in Milwaukie and Ferguson to extend the scope of Baldwin's vision into the present day, and to give the lie to the endless stream of white faces appearing on televisions to tell the black people that they are: "Sorry!". Sorry for what?
And: 'I Am Not Your Negro' did not win a 2017 Oscar. No surprise. The boys and girls in the Hollywood back rooms were never going to give the gong to James Baldwin. I mean you have to take the film's title seriously. Baldwin's idea was to tell truth, his truth: not to entertain. Thanks RP. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
Nema-ye Nazdik (1990)
Abbas Kiarostami 1940-2016 – let there be life.
The two shots of a tin can rolling down a street in Kiarostami's Close-Up, epitomise something essential in the nature of his film. In the first shot the journalist Farazmand accidentally kicks a can sending it bouncing down the street. It might seem that this is an arbitrary event but Kiarostami's camera stays with the can as it clatters down the street before finally coming to rest. Later in the same sequence Farazmand again kicks the same can, this time deliberately, and it clatters further down the road, ending up nestled against the kerb. The film immediately cuts to a shot of newspapers rolling off the press with the story of Sabzian's impersonation of the director Makhmalbaf.
These 'tin can' shots reminded me of Sam Mendes film 'American Beauty' where we see a shot of a crumpled paper bag blowing about at the end an ally. It is blown about unable to escape its confines, watched by Lester the movie's protagonist. Like Kiarostami's 'tin can' shots it's of long duration, signifying that the director attended to the shot.
Mendes' shot struck me as a piece of pretentious symbolism, using this heavy handed visual metaphor to convey Lester's state of mind. It seemed a contrived psychic moment, an otiose signifier adding nothing to the film. Without a visible agent, the shot looked artificial, simulated either in production with a wind machine or in post-production.
Kiarostami's 'can shots' have a quite different quality. An agent kicks out and a tin can rolls noisily down the incline of a street. The 'can shots' has nothing to do with narrative or state of mind, they simply fit the structure of a film which is non narrative non linear and incorporates chance and inconsequentiality as part of life.
Close-Up is a mixture of documentary, cinema verite, dramatic reconstruction built on a premise in which the aspiration and practice of film making are a fundamental idea.
Into this subject with its multiple laminations built on the complexity of its human relations and the way people perceive one another, accident and material irrelevance are incorporated into the material, Kiarostami observes that these elements of life often intrude into the most fateful moments of existence. Kiarostami's tin cans don't mean anything beyond themselves, like his film and its players, the cans simply run their natural course. The viewer gets the idea: what a long way tin cans roll when kicked, almost forever; what a huge clattering sound they make, almost deafening. The tin cans exist as an object of the camera's lens for their own sake: no state of mind, no metaphor. Just cans. Like the protagonist Sabzian, he is just Sabzian.
Close-Up, at one level, is a satire on the egotistical banality of film making that puts the 'Director' at the centre of the process. Sabzian's impersonation of a director stems from his perception of the power relations he understands as being at the core of movie production. The Director can make demands: on actors, sets, scripts. Like little dictators they have license to make things happen according to whim or will. Sabzian's position in society as an unemployed printer, a powerless non-entity, lends huge allure to the idea of being a film director. One who calls the shots.
The difference between Sabzian and Western wannabees is that the latter are thinking 'career'. Sabzian in some confused manner, simply wants to tell of his suffering. His phantom film making, like Bergman's, is driven by an internal imperative.
But at another level Close- Up is an anti satirical statement about about a type of film directing in which ego takes a step back. A film making based on a certain kind of perception about what film is.
Kiarostami does not primarily use control and manipulation as the dynamic of his film making. The basis of his film making is to bring the idea to life. As a film maker he works by releasing ideas into situations and seeing to where they lead. Understanding where the idea takes the material is for Kiarostami more important than any scripted destination. And his understanding and choice of situation as the crucible for an idea is critical to his work. For Kairostami's case the situations often arise out of the power tensions endemic in the social matrix.
Close-Up like most of his films is set in Iran. The situation Kiarostami develops leads directly into cross sectional view of Iranian society. In the Law Court scenes, the family scenes, at the police station, we understand that Sabzian's actions don't take place in a vacuum: they occur within a complex interweaving of social relations: his mother, his wife, his children, his unemployment, his movie going. We see how the private, the personal, and the social interpenetrate. We see that these relations comprise a defining framework in relation to action that is separate from the subjective, but has its own weight. In contrast, American and increasingly Europeans make films which are increasingly concerned only with subjectivities. Individuals act as if in vacuo, as psychic agents of their own desires. Kiarostami's films are set firmly in the realm of the social.
In the final scene Sabzian is released from prison and at the gate he is met by Makhmalbaf. The film's pay off was to be the recording of the conversation between the two. But for some reason the radio mics fail. Though we see the two men meet, we hear nothing of their conversation, only static and bumps from the sound system. Accidents mistakes and failure are part of life, and Kiarostami films life. So he lets the shot with its no sound ride. A joke on him and on all who are would-be controllers. In an important sense it doesn't matter. What we see is enough, the idea of the meeting is enough to carry the shot through: we don't need to know more.
Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (1962)
I film therefore I am
See Adrin Neatrour crits at www.crinklecut.co.uk After the opening title sequence Godard's Vivre sa vie cuts to a long durational close shot in which the camera, tracks between a couple who are seated beside each other on bar stools at the counter of a café. They are talking about the nature of their relationship and its break up. As the camera tracks back and forth across the space between them, only one of them is ever in frame, and the shot set up is from behind, so that as they talk, we see only the back of a head.
The what is said by this shot is in itself both witty and analytic. It allows the camera to express the opening concepts of alienation, separation within a context of movement. The wit lies in emotionally de-saturating the dialogue from faciality as Nana and her ex talk about the failure of their relationship her beef about his attempts to control her and his economic angle as Nana's ex signs off with the observation that as a musician, Nana is leaving him because he is poor. The ultimate deficiency in a culture based on consumption rather than production.
With Anna K playing the role of Nana Godard's film is in content, a modernist rephrasing of Zola's eponymous novel charting the transformation of a young operetta star into a high class prostitute, whose allure and cold blooded exploitation of her sexuality destroy all the men who become infatuated with her.
The power of Nana's presence is described by Zola as a psychic emanation that irresistibly attracts male desire. Godard's transposes elements of the Zola story. But because this is now an image driven culture, his Nana in the form of Karina, exists as an object of desire for the camera. It is Godard's camera that loves her image embraces and devours her. When Nana leaves her job in the record shop and takes up prostitution, her male clients barely seem to notice her. Throughout the film the men are self absorbed, as if playing pinball or engaging in masturbation, they barely notice Nana. She is simply someone they pay. Unlike their wives or girlfriends they have to shell out coin.
The ethos of cool detachment pervades Vivre sa vie. The guys all wear coats turned up at the collar as they move through a world of artefacts, cafes, and automobiles. The women, immaculately coiffed and kitted out with couture outfits and shoes. It is a world without emotion, the world of advertising, where there are settings backdrops and product display.
But Godard fixes his movies with pure concept. To oppose Nana's image defined world he uses a number of cinematic devices, simply interpolated that he cuts into the body of the film. Like the chapter headings they comprise a breaking up of flow, an opening up different idea spectra about what we are seeing.
The inter cutting of a section of Dreyer's The Passion of Jean d'Arc. Godard uses a scene with Artaud, theoretician of the theatre of cruelty who plays the monk, Massieu questioning Falconetti's Jeanne. The Material grilling the Spiritual. A section of Edgar Allen Poe, the master of unnameable dread (uncool) is read on camera and later during one of Nana's assignations with a client, the results of the statistical survey of Parisian prostitution are intoned as voice over.
There are two more extraordinary interpolations inserted of the body of the film. The scene where a guy mimes the process of a little boy blowing up a balloon. As performance it is intense funny and suddenly in its intensity and power feels like a transposition of male ejaculation. A hyper parody of in-existent sexuality. In a nondescript section of a cafe, Nana and a Philosopher talk about life specifically focusing on 'love' (uncool) at the end of their discussion. Unlike the tracking two shot at the front of the movie, this is shot full face with and pans from Nana to the Philosopher, with the Philosopher finally concluding, in response to Nana's question that love is real "
on condition it is true." In a culture of image how to find what is true and be able to distinguish it from what is not true? In a world of mirrors
.
Eddie Constantine appears as a spectre throughout Vivre sa vie. His presence as an image inside Nana's head a constant source of reference. And it is almost as if he were in the film, and if you squint your eyes you may see him.
With Godard, film doesn't just think, it lives and breaths a world of unseen possibilities .
The Neon Demon (2016)
goodbye 'Nevernever Land' hello 'Whatever Land'
Nicolas Refn's the Neon Demon is a conceit of a very contemporary nature: form without content. Completely dedicated to the stylised image it could almost be an advert for some sort of Apple product. In one sequence model Jesse is positioned in front of a huge dazzling saturated white backdrop which almost seems to envelop her with its cold sensuality. As she poses in this setting, she is painted gold by the fashion photographer, I expected a gold Apple iPhone to somehow appear and transfix itself into the scene. The setting was perfect opportunity for product placement.
Neon Demon is very much the product of the Apple generation, a parallel cinematic form of the mediated reality that permeates and defines the iPhone life style in which life is not experienced directly but only indirectly through a screen which accesses image and information. Screen takes the place of life. Gazing becomes living.
The cool.
Refn wants to make a cool film. He only requires of his audience that they watch the screen with detached interest as he invents and shows a succession of locational architectural backdrops accessed by tracking shots down narrow runs walkways and corridors. He then fills the spaces with content. It doesn't matter what the content is. The only point of the content is as a product to attract the gaze. Colour, eye catching interiors, blond women from the parallel universe, violence, sex, blood, cannibalism etc. The more transgressive the image the less it affects. In fact there is an inverse relationship between the extremity of Refn's provocations and the intensity of audience reaction. Penetrative necrophilia, eyeball eating become "plaisirs des yeaux", bagatelles. The important thing about the content is that it should be and is vacuous, empty. The scenario develops situations, events, actions in which the audience cannot invest with meaning. 'Never never' land becomes 'Whateverland'.
Into this refined space, characterised often simply by colour and architectural form, Refn promotes Jesse, who is in many ways rather like an Apple product. Jesse is blond shimmering white and perfectly designed by nature. She does not attract empathy as she is a contextualised product. She tells that her parents are 'gone' but otherwise she is carefully screened to remove the personal. She is an object to be gazed at. Like the objects in the Apple universe, admired as image. Like a product, Jesse has little to say about or for herself. She lets other people do the talking. It is for others to fill her out with their projections.
For the most part Jesse is the subject of other people's observations and desires. Jesse has such beautiful skin hair nose. She is just so perfect. And desired. They want to suck her. (except her boyfriend) As heterosexual sex, except abusive rape (suggested but not realised in a dream sequence), wouldn't fit with the extreme product design, Refn and his writers, have gone for a baroque rendering of that old movie stand-by: Lesbian Cannibals from Outer Space. And the final sequence of the film plays out with a series of grotesque tableaux, like some kind of 18th century masque, of the hunting killing and eating of Jesse by a group of deranged other worldly blond coat hangers.
The Neon Demon, is not a horror film or anything like that. Refn has made film that is produced for the state of mind that is characteristic of certain patterns of contemporary consumption. A state of mind that finds significance in objects and products, and by engaging in life through the isolating filter of a screen that is detached but desirous of visual excitement through image. As Marshall McLuhan observed: the Medium is the Message. And how 'cool' is that?
Amy (2015)
beware films bearing: colons in their title
Film is one means of probing a truth content of a subject matter. Although documentary and drama framed movies (and there are hybrid types of doc/dramas) are different approaches are there particular characteristic features that distinguish them from each other?
Watching Amy and Janis, two feature docs, made me think about the differences between drama and doc as film expression. Documentaries seem to be a particular type of film expression that lays claim to the actual. But documentary films in relation to: subject matter, contents, structure and even form are often substantially the same as drama. So, what of a film like Kapadia's Amy whose content comprises only of actual documented footage and archive material without any externalities of input such as voice over or extraneous music. You might think that produced in this form using only originary primary material that Amy's expressive content makes it completely distinct from any drama based production.
However it might be possible to make a film, that used only actual material originating as documentary or archive recordings, whose purpose was to produce an intentional fabrication. You might call such a film a piece of propaganda (Riefenstahl's work for Hitler) or perhaps a fabricated documentary and the latter type of production would almost certainly borrow heavily from dramatic form to fabricate its story, and to that extent would present many of the markers of a drama in making its claim to present truth content.
In relation to Kapadia's 'Amy: the girl behind the name', this is the sort of claim that has been made by some of her family.
The overwhelming pressure on film makers from distributors producers commissioners is to have a strong story line. Narrative is king. So both drama and documentary types of film have to conform. To find the line through the material that best delivers a story. To disregard elements that don't fit the story, to draw out their characters in those expressive clips that clearly define their role in the story. This pressure is most strongly exerted on contemporary documentary makers, looking for theatrical release, whose editing of originatory material now has to comply with the rules of dramatic form.
Both Amy and Janis conform to the pre-packaged populist narrative of the tragedy of the flawed female performer. The message that female emotional frailty combined with isolation and inability to cope with the ravaging demands made by the image of success, lead on to recourse to drink drugs and death. Both films in their different ways package this story and present it as the primary truth content without too much complication or digression.
The music of Janis and Amy is folded into the warp of both films. Music which is intense and personal, expressive of states of mind embedded in the films, but not necessarily definitive of either singers' life.
It is perhaps in the expectations of the audience, rather than form, that documentary and dramatic material may be significantly different. Audiences for films presented as docs are more concerned with the truth content of the material. Audiences for drama, more concerned with dramatic effect.
Dramatic productions are subject I think to different criteria of appraisal by their audiences. In dramatic performances, actors are appraised for their bodies, their physiques, their voices, the delivery of their lines (sincere, authentic) and their mimicking abilities. In dramatic scripts the audience is happy to accept a large measure of dramatic license in the film scenario. Dramas are understood as fabrications. For the audience the issue is whether at some level the drama can be understood as sincere and authentic.
In a film presented as a documentary, the audience attends the material with a different subjectivity. In docs the makers and contributors are judged almost exclusively for their honesty. In the documentary film the audience to some extent play a forensic role, almost a type of jury, examining the film looking for signs confirming the veracity, the relatedness, the frankness, the repleteness and moral stature of interviewees and material as it is presented
Amy comprises an overwhelming intimacy. The film consists of home movie footage, archive and selfie material: a door, an opening into Amy's life. It presents as intrusion: like looking through someone's diary or going through their room. The mood created is one of privileged access to the private sphere, a construed invasion of privacy. The film, reinforced with Amy's self referential songs defines the mood of its expressive material shaping it into a tragedy, that entwined emotionally with her music, tells the story of the inevitable rise decline and death of Amy Whitehouse.
Berg's 'Janis
' also makes use of archive and personal footage. At the core of the film's narrative drive are the songs, interpreted and re-informed by extensive use made of interviews with those who knew and worked with her. The songs speak for themselves: the emotional authenticity of the story of 'Janis'. But the interviews seem to me less satisfactory. They all conform to the expected image of Janis, and come across as perspectives of the past seen through the filter of the present. A present where the hot issues of the past, its conflicts and antagonisms, have all comfortably melded. The interviews seem to reconstruct an idealised version of Janis that seems at odds with an actual Janis, a demanding out of control hurricane of life.
Both Amy and Janis are formulaic but each offers a quite difference experience of subjectivity to the viewer. Amy asks the viewer to conspire with the film makers conceit that their film allows them to understand the music by allowing them into the domain of the private. Janis, keeps the viewer on the outside of the material, asking them to understand the music by believing the word of a number of interviewees talking many years after the events they are remembering.
Green Room (2015)
empty room
empty room
Like the frozen yogurt and the noodle business, the industrial film thrives on playing out endless variations of the same plot. Green Room is no more than a video game movie in which a posh English actress with the gun and box cutter is allowed (scripted) to win.
Saulnier's Green Room works out with the format of teenage entrapment by forces of evil – bogie men. The bogie men in the cupboard decked out as proto white supremacist, but basically just plain old bogie men in the cupboard. Saulnier's movie lacks any idiosyncratic or cultist distinction: Chainsaw massacre it is not. Green Room lacks the imaginative stylisation and deep black comedic rituals of the cult slaughter movie.
It also lacks even the social cultural themes of the movie such Carpenter's Escape from New York or Scott Cooper's Out of the Furnace. The latter film which although violently formulaic and lurching into parody, nevertheless in its title and in its expressive characterisation calls up the dark forces worming through the flesh of United States of America, psychically legitimising the corruption of violence in the name of an enraged 'id'. Cooper's film crudely but effectively anticipates the politics of Donald Trump, both as parody and as expression of the infantilised rage that defines contemporary politics. Woody Harrelson's performance as Harlan is the film's psychopathic core. In the film's opening sequence, set in a drive-in movie theatre, Harrelson maps out the film's territory, as he defines and demonstrates his visceral understanding of human relations. In comparison, Patrick Steward's playing of Green Room's villain, Darcy, is something of a pussy cat. Darcy is motivated more by the banality of money than any deeper gloomier psychic intolerance. Harrelson and Steward both do the 'hard eye' thing, but Harrelson does it to the greater effect.
Set against the idea of a situation in which a touring punk band gets slammed up in a venue for seeing something they didn't ought to have seen, Saulnier as director/writer simply spins together some punk dialogue, some bad-ass backwoodsmen, guns machetes, couple of adorable bull terriers called Brownie and Grimm, and like a pot-pourri cocktale shakes them all about. The result is a movie without an idea or even the notion of an idea, a feeble attempt to pitch the forces of good and evil against each other. It is a structure without a concept that ends up as a mechanised combinational tryst that is not a movie but a video game.
High-Rise (2015)
What a carry-on.
J G Ballard's works are a grounded writing project of observation and analysis that is guided by metaphysical speculation. In Ballard's work it is his characters state of mind and speculative psychology that interpret structures and events generated by the built environment. The Ballard characters understand life as a rhizome of interconnected abstract forces that shape and mould their destinies. His work is a virtual dissection of modernism probing through the skin of contemporary life in order to expose a collective para-sympathetic nervous system as it responds and adapts to the provocations of the new order; a thought experiment that tests the careers of physical bodies and their prosthetic extensions into cars airplanes hermetically sealed structures and media. The novels record new connections and paradigms of psychic possibilities in response to the changing order of existence.
For Ballard it is not so much that the traditional drives governing human behaviour have changed. Rather that they are warped and distorted and cannibalised by the new parabolic connections and geometries of modern living. In the actual novel High Rise, Wilder speculates whilst he and one of the continuity girls from the studio are making love. He imagines that if they were interrupted, that on resumption of their enjoyment she would pick up perfectly from the place where they had left off, recalling every one of their gestures thrusts caresses and kisses that had proceeded the interruption. Or in Love and Napalm USA the character equates the bend of a elevated highway with the inner curve of Jackie Kennedy's thigh, linking them in a future of blood caked deaths.
Ballard doesn't do characters so much as types or occupations. In effect all his characters are introjected self imaginings of states of consciousness moulded by an outer function: the cost accountant, the orthodontist, the airline pilot.
None of this is easy starting point for film.
Film doesn't do metaphysics easily. Goddard and Tarkovsky have in different ways produced wondrous movies with a metaphysical core, as have Hitchcock and Mackendrick. But these film makers all knew what they were about, understood the types of statements they were making. In the hands of Ben Wheatley and his script writer Amy Jump, High Rise turns to metaphysical dust. Unable to transpose these projected abstractions onto the screen, Wheatley is left with a setting, a couple of familiar ideas, situations and characters. The resultant mix comes out situation and character dominated which lumps High Rise into a sort of sub-genre Ealing Comedy, driven by familiar British class oppositions intermixed with a dystopian Lord of the Flies play out.
High Rise's recreation of the high rise structure is the one element of the film that works visually to define the concrete mausoleum envisaged by Ballard. But the problem is what is happening inside this wonderfully conceived digital edifice? Orgies?
This unknowing of what it is that is happening inside the tower dogs High Rise. It is a potpourri of different inputs that are mixed together in increasing desperation. We have a couple of ideas, the symbolic acting out of class conflict in the maw of the tower, the idea of atavistic reversion, but the expression of these ideas is mediated through the expressive device of the British eccentric, the character actor expert at delivering the cameo role. Eccentricity replaces metaphysics as the film's conceptual resource. Besides the setting of the tower, there are significant subsettings within its carapace: individual apartments, corridors, lifts, the stairwell. Wheatley uses these subsettings for events, and the main type of event in High Rise is the orgy. The orgy is the dominant feature of the film, taking up a lot of its footage. Perhaps Wheatley felt orgies were metaphors for the idea of degeneration, perhaps he felt the audience would be titillated gazing at the sexual posturings of actors body doubles and extras. The duration of the orgy scenes points to directorial anxiety rather than directorial confidence, as the orgies in themselves only incoherently fill out the screen with the explicit rather than the implicit.
Ben Wheatley's High Rise seems to me to be the very worst sort of filmmaking. Buy a property and exploit it by filling it out with stuff you hope the audience will buy. If it's a British film you don't need to worry much about the reviewers, most of them, as part of the UK film industry, will fall in line. It's a Film making industrial culture encouraged by a financing system dominated by TV companies and private finance companies. It is interesting to note that in the film credits it is the money that comes first. Once it was the stars and actors, once it was the tech people, now the first front credits of most films are dominated by the production companies who have put up the finance. It seems to mean that any potential director has to meet multifarious and perhaps conflicting demands from all the 'interested' parties, before they can even begin to want to understand their material. adrin neatrour
Fuocoammare (2016)
knock knock who's there ? someone missing ?
Lampedusa as filmed by Gianfranco Rosi is a visual paean to oppositions: the empty /the full, the ordered/ the chaotic, the open/ the closed, internal / the external, within time/without time And more.
Oppositions organised in geographic proximity. Islanders and refugees both sharing space on this small Mediterranean island. But now you see them now you don't. On the island we see the islanders but we don't see the migrants, they are invisible, their new European identities as the 'unseen' already anticipated.
On Lampedusa the streets are empty, the escapees confined to their own enclaves.
The islanders lead out their traditional lives on Lampedusa, life ordered by a natural unfolding of time that divides into past present future. The refugees and migrants live outside the order of time, compressed into a chaotic hallucinogenic now.
The islanders are rooted on rock and lapped by the sea. The migrants travelling across water, crashing onto the rocks or scooped out of the Mediterranean are alive if they are lucky, dead if they are not. They are trapped in endless motions in which time has ceased to be a significant marker of life. For the migrants the imperative is 'escape' to not stop fleeing until they find something. When in due course, they leave Lampedusa they leave no imprint on the island other than on the statistical compilations of NGOs. More than 400,000 thousand passed through, ghosts rather than solid entities.
Without commentary and working though image simple, many of Rosi's shots comprise two great encompassers of Lampedusa: sea and sky. Images that Rossi exploits, but which conjure different associations for the islanders and migrants.
The sea before and sky overhead stretch out around and over, containing the sentience of all beings. For the islanders the surrounding waters are their environment, a living testament to their collective history, the source of their food and livelihood. For the arrivees, the migrants the sea is experienced otherwise: as barrier ordeal and death. The sky that hangs over Lampadusa hangs over all beings. For the islanders this sky with rolling clouds signifies the here and now, the intensity of the present, it mediates action, reflects back consciousness of life. For the arrivees it barely exists as a psychic immediacy. On Lampedusa the migrants are as if in a state of trance they are trapped in their own internal landscapes.
An island boy whittles wood to make his catapult; a Nigerian recounts as a liturgy in collective form the ordeal of his flight: "We crossed the dessert the dessert could not stop us, we crossed the mountains the mountains could not stop us, we ran to the sea, the sea could not stop us." The effect of his words echoes the power of the old testament, the cry of a people lost in the wilderness, a people possessed by the spirit.
Although the images are not juxtaposed in Rosi's edit, I somehow connected this liturgical listing of ordeals survived and overcome with the long duration shot of the grandmother making up her bed. The order the certainty represented in this act of meticulous physical geometry; the ecclesiastic lay out of her bedroom with its saints and sacred objects. A feeling of deadness in this bedroom, reflected and compounded in the images of dead migrants suffocated in the steerage hold of their boat, lying in filth and squalor, perhaps many of them without names. The dead are everywhere.
I understand that Rosi wanted to make a pure film. In which images manipulated and exploited would stand for any words that might or could be said. But the human voice is part of our world. Rosi's Fire at Sea felt like a piece of filmic surgery, a clinicians assemblage of images. As Rosi knocked on the door of Lampedusa it seemed as if he was not there. He had absented himself.
And perhaps this is OK. No voice. Rosi in avoiding the stories of refugees and migrants the staple of radio and TV, Rosi, abstracting his material reaches out into the reality of the the void of refugees and migrants. They are people stripped out of time, stripped out of history, a group of people living in a timevoid. A void which groups like Isis seek, in their own time to fill, by giving back to those lost in time the precious gift of time. This is a film about the medium of time. adrin neatrour