November 4, 2009
One of the joys of discovering other cultures is realising, in a somewhat Whiggish manner, where they stand on the public debates that fill the public sphere of one’s own country. What are their attitudes towards gay marriage? Do they still assume that everyone will get married and have kids? Do they have a similar intolerance for racism? More often than not, particularly in the West, this is simply a matter of chronology : Some places are ahead of ‘the times’ while others are ‘behind’ them. However, leave the gilded circle of what was once Christendom and you find cultures with attitudes so different to ours that they actually shed some light on the buried assumptions of our own debates.
One such culture is that of Thailand. Thailand’s attitude towards gay rights is genuinely fascinating. Since the military coup of 2006, Thai government has been edging closer to using a third gender for administrative purposes. A third gender designed to accommodate the Kathoey, a caste of Thai society that we tend to refer to either simplistically as transwomen or, with the teeth grinding that accompanies potential political incorrectness, ladyboys. In truth, “Kathoey” is a much broader category than male-to-female transsexual. Originally, it was coined to describe intersexuals but since the mid 20th Century onwards, it has come to designate everything from post-operative transsexuals to effeminate gay men. This category of person has existed for a long time in Thailand and, thanks to Buddha’s teaching of tolerance, they are not mocked or physically attacked in the way that TG people can be in the West. However, they are also victims of terrible discrimination and frequently find themselves working in the ‘entertainment’ industry because people refuse to hire them for other jobs. Even if they are university graduates. I mention the Kathoeys as, for a long time, the Kathoeys served to mask the existence of Thai homosexuality. In Thai culture, sexuality is defined largely in terms of gender and the idea of two masculine men having sex or a relationship simply did not figure. It was not a common mode of identity. Indeed, in the late 70s there were only ten gay entertainment venues in the Patpong area of Bangkok. A decade later, there were over a hundred such places spread out across the country. In a sense, homosexuality – as we in the west understand the word – only really appeared in Thailand in the 1970s and since then it has attracted more than its fair share of ill-treatment from officials who are more than happy to crack down on a new mode of being.
It is against this rather alien and seemingly conflicting set of cultural attitudes that Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes films such as Tropical Malady (a.k.a. Sud Pralad), a lusciously atmospheric film comprising a a beautifully chaste love story and a fable in which one of the young men turns into a tiger.
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November 4, 2009
THE ZONE has my review of Ross Shepherd’s no-budget psychological thriller Heathen.
It’s a very nicely directed little British film with an interestingly against-the-grain central performance but it is ultimately let down by a weak script that unravels in the final act. Still, it’s impressive quite how much can be accomplished for no money at all.
November 3, 2009
In my recent piece about Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog (2008) I discussed the difficulty of attaining genuine cinematic realism. But this makes a number of largely unwarranted assumptions about realism as a concept.
It assumes that there is a difference between something being factually correct and something being realistic. Johnny Mad Dog might well express true stories about what it is like to be a child-soldier but this does not necessarily mean that it is ‘realistic’. In fact, in my piece, I chide Sauvaire for allowing an editorial tendency to creep into the film. I reasoned that because the world does not contain neat little truths, any attempt to present a cinematic audience with neat truths is unrealistic. This suggests that realism is an entirely different formal quality than factual accuracy. It assumes that ‘realism’ also carries with it certain aesthetic demands and formal demands. This is, to put it bluntly, an idiosyncratic view. It presents realism as an aesthetic and moral ideal that can be aspired to but almost never achieved : Art, being artificial, is necessarily in some sense false.
For this piece, I have decided to look at the issue of realism from an entirely different perspective. To present it not as an ideal but rather as an affectation, a stylistic quirk. A quality that has only a tangential relationship with factual truth and almost no relationship whatsoever with the moral imperative to speak the truth and present the world as it really is.
What better place to start then, than with propaganda? Art that is conceived precisely not as a means of telling the truth, but rather as a means of convincing people that a false vision of the world is in fact correct. One way in which propaganda can be made more believable is if it chimes in some sense with the world-view of the people it is aimed at. Propaganda films are works that are false but have that ring of truth. They rely upon that ring of truth to be effective.
One of the best examples of this kind of film-making (along with 1942’s In Which We Serve by Lean and Coward) is Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went The Day Well? An absurdly fantastical every-day tale of valiant little Englanders banding together to fight off a cohort of brutish Nazi paratroopers dressed as British soldiers.
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November 2, 2009
Strange Horizons has my review of Stephen Baxter’s Ark.
Ark is the second book in a series that started back in 2008 with Flood. My review of it can be found over at the SF Site.
There are some similarities between the reviews as I kind of built my Ark review out of the trains of thought that slowly chuffed their way out of the station when reviewing Flood. All in all, I much preferred Ark to Flood as, while the books speak to many of the same themes and ideas, Ark is not saddled to the constraints of the ecological catastrophe sub-genre. A sub-genre I think Baxter struggled with. By contrast, Ark’s characters and narrative are much better tailored to the ideas that the book is getting at.
November 2, 2009
Videovista has my review of Die Finanzen Des Grossherzogs. A silent black and white comedy made during the years of the Weimar Republic and directed by F. W. Murnau, the director who brought us such classics as Nosferatu (1922), The Last Laugh (1924) and Faust (1926).
It’s being sold as part of a Masters of Cinema set along with his proto-psychological thriller Phantom (1922) and while the film itself is something of a lightweight romp, I nonetheless found it quite an enjoyable one.
November 2, 2009
VideoVista has my review of King of The Hill (El Rey De La Montana). Not the long-running animated comedy but rather a taught and atmospheric Spanish thriller directed by Gonzalo-Lopez Gallago.
King of the Hill, along with a number of other films I have reviewed in the last year, suggest that Europe is going through something of a genre boom at the moment. Britain and France are churning out genre films like nobody’s business and places like Spain and Norway are following suit. Sadly, while a lot of these films are very well directed indeed, not that many of them are well written and King of the Hill is further evidence of that observation’s validity.
November 1, 2009
Two books have recently been weighing quite heavily on my mind.
The first is J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a novel that is as striking in its imagery and ideas as it is in its formal innovation. Rather than providing a coherent narrative, Ballard chops the book up into short paragraphs that are more or less conceptually and thematically related. Themes, motifs and characters re-appear (sometimes with different names, sometimes filling spaces previously occupied by other characters) but between the disjointed writing style and the abstraction of Ballard’s ideas, it is clear to me that any story one projects upon the book is exactly that – a projection. The haecceity of the book is not a matter of plots and characters and events.
The second is Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound – Enlightenment and Extinction (2007). A work of surprisingly accessible wide-spectrum philosophy, Nihil Unbound opens with an important distinction between what he calls the scientific image of man – the best scientific model for human cognitive functioning – and the manifest image – the model we use when thinking about and describing others. The manifest image is grounded in what is known as ‘folk psychology’ and it represents centuries-worth of little theories and assumptions about how humans think. This image is made up of relatively complex ideas such as Freudian projection as well as more fundamental ideas such as the idea that there is such a thing as the self and it is that which works the controls of the body. The problem is that the clearer the scientific image becomes, the more the manifest image comes to resemble a collection of empty and surprisingly brittle superstitions.
One of the things that I have taken away from these books is the artifice and ubiquity of the story and of the narrative form.
As humans, we are constantly trying to make sense of the world around us. Our brains are optimised for pattern-recognition and, when confronted by a stream of random and unstructured data from our sense organs, our brain starts trying to make sense of it. We see stories everywhere. We even tell stories about ourselves, stitching causal histories composed of random fluctuations in hormone levels and neural pathway activation into neat little just-so tales about why we do the things we do. We are addicted to the story…
We build religions around this need to tell stories, we construct therapeutic models encouraging us to piece together the stories of our selves and, when it comes time for us to depict the world around us through art, we happily continue the pursuit – Building characters out of our woefully inaccurate folk psychological notions and marching them through worlds far more ordered and simple than our own. Sometimes we even confuse our understanding of the world with the world itself and write stories we claim to be ‘realistic’, ‘accurate’ or ‘authentic’. But all too often, what we take to be the world is just another story… a simplified and conveniently understandable abstraction. This poses a theoretical challenge to art : Can it ever capture the truth about the world, or is it necessarily a simplification of it? If it is possible then the chances are that the results will resemble something like Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog, a film about boy soldiers based upon the novel Johnny Chien Mechant by Emmanuel Dongala.
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October 20, 2009
In the introduction to his The Function of Criticism (1984), Terry Eagleton writes :
“criticism today lacks all substantive social function. It is either part of the public relations branch of the literary industry, or a matter wholly internal to the academies.”
The problem, according to Eagleton, is that criticism is only of social use when there is a robust public sphere. A public sphere, according to Habermas, is an intellectual void in between the sphere of public authority (dominated by the state and the law) and the private sphere (dominated by the exchange of commodities and the market). In the sphere of public authority, the government and ruling elite speak with authority, determining values and the prominence of some ideas at the expense of others. By contrast, in the private sphere, this kind of ordering is done according to the demands of commerce. Criticism, according to Eagleton, currently lacks a social function, as the private sphere has come to dominate those matters that were previously considered to be exempt from the marketplace. The role of the critic still exists, but he has no constituency and no natural subject matter. An example of this kind of modern-day criticism can be seen in R. J. Cutler’s documentary about Vogue magazine The September Issue (2009). Anna Wintour is a private sphere Doctor Johnson : She takes it upon herself to decide what will be ‘fashionable’ in a particular season and the commercial interests that make up the fashion industry abide by her judgement. The same process exists in the sphere of public authority. When a problem affects the state, the ruling class make a decision and the apparatus of the state then enacts that judgement. While the members of the ruling class may be determined by democratic or aristocratic means and members of that elite may be more or less open to public opinion, the process is the same. The people no more get a say in the day to day realities of how the state is run than they do in determining whether purple or mauve will be the fashionable colour to be seen in this autumn. The process is just as autocratic as it was during the heyday of the 18th Century critic. As Eagleton quotes, the criticism of the time was characterised by :
“its partisan bias, the vituperation, the dogmatism, the juridical tone, the air of omniscience and finality”
Of course, the importance of the three spheres varies significantly over time. As I suggested in my review of Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1972), the moral corruption of the state, the ruling classes and the church, mean that a form of moral public sphere has opened up. One in which rabble-rousing journalists compete with traditional intellectuals and people equipped with social networking tools to impart some kind of moral sentiment upon a supposedly individualistic and relativistic general public. Paul McGuigan’s The Reckoning, a cruelly over-looked adaptation of Barry Unsworth’s 1995 Booker-nominated novel Morality Play portrays a similar shift in spheres of debate : A moment in history in which the church and the state began to surrender their moral authority to a burgeoning public sphere.
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Filed under British Film, Film
Tags: British Film, Church, criticism, Eagleton, film criticism, Habermas, Morality Play, Politics, Public Sphere, State, The Reckoning, Theatre
October 15, 2009
In “Big Red Son”, his essay on the porn equivalent of the Oscars, David Foster Wallace writes about a morally up-standing police detective who is drawn to pornography’s capacity for capturing moments of pure humanity. This is an intriguing idea and it is certainly one that I agree with. Most performances are based upon a degree of artifice : Someone pretending to be someone they or not or behaving in a way that they would not normally behave. The people who appear in adult films usually buy into this notion of performance. The men adopt a worldly misogyny while the women appear to revel in their transgressions of good taste and traditional gender roles. What Foster Wallace refers to as the “Fuck me, I’m a nasty girl” persona. However, because pornography is quite cheaply made and ultimately reliant upon the inviolability of certain basic biological rhythms, the performers sometimes forget the persona they are supposed to be inhabiting. Sometimes these slippages reveal genuine attraction and sexual excitement, but other times there are flashes of irritation, disgust, boredom, amusement or fear. These outpourings of human emotion are made al the more real by the grotesque theatricality of pornography and all the more pleasurable because of their illicit nature. They are supposed to be having passionate sex, we are supposed to be getting off on watching them, and yet we see the actress’s irritation at her male colleague. Score.
I remember when, after a number of years of failing eye-sight, I first got glasses and a world of detailed facial expression suddenly opened up to me. I remember standing in Liverpool Street station and marvelling at the way in which emotions played across people’s faces. How a friendly smile would die on someone’s lips the second the other person looked away or how a momentary flash of irritation would prompt a hard glare at a fried, a glare that would instantly disappear the second the friend turned to ask a question or make a remark. Humans are creatures with rich emotional lives. Lives they try to keep hidden from those around them, and yet those lives are betrayed broadcast to al who care to look by the infinite expressiveness of the human face.
José Luis Guerín’s In The City of Sylvia (2007) is a film that is all about those fleeting moments of humanity. It even invites us to place these little moments in a wider context, but by doing so it raises the difficulties inherent in trying to work out what other people are thinking.
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