February 9, 2010

Russian Ark (2002) – Nostalgia is Always Beautiful… Tyranny isn’t.

Let us begin in the manner in which we intend to continue : By considering a point of medieval philosophy.  The 14th Century Logician William of Ockham once noted that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.  This venerable principle of ontological parsimony is most often wheeled out in order to see off the speculations of some of our more extravagantly theological or mystical co-humans.  Those who would wish into existence a vast metaphysical infrastructure where competing theories would make do with the smallest of particles and the most elementary of forces.  Given a set of facts, why would you not choose the explanation that accounted for those facts in the simplest manner?  In order to answer this question, we must first ascertain what constitutes simplicity.

The problem is that simplicity is one of those slippery terms that philosophers wheel out when an impasse is reached.  When discussing a philosophical theory, differing thinkers will first look for logical inconsistencies, then for factual incongruities, but eventually they will fall back upon a host of rather subjective and nebulous aesthetic principles : “It is counter-intuitive!” they will sniff.  “That solution is unclean when compared to the alternative” they will remark.  “It is insufficiently simple” they conclude.  Of course, this is a cynical and simplistic characterisation of the problem.  Theorists of Artificial Intelligence such as Ray Solomonoff and Marcus Hutter have made great strides in devising mathematical and statistical models of ontological parsimony fleshing out that which has, for far too long, been a refuge for intellectual scoundrels.  My assessment, however, does raise an interesting question.

Is simplicity culturally relative?  Following Ockham, we demand that extraordinary claims be supported by extraordinary amounts of evidence but what this often means is that unpopular and dissenting opinions have to work harder to gain traction.

Consider, for example, Zhang Yimou’s film Hero (2002).  At the end of the film, the protagonist refrains from killing the tyrant because he has seen the wisdom of a state where the value of political harmony and a single driving vision outweigh the benefits to be gained from the competition of differing opinions.  In other words, Zhang Yimou seemed to be suggesting that a one-party state such as modern China was preferable to the democratic states of the West.  When the film was released in the West it was met with howls of outrage.  Given that the film was partly funded by the Chinese government, many Western thinkers characterised it as propaganda.  But why is offering a different opinion seen as being tantamount to propaganda?  Hundreds of films every year express opinions in the same unrigorous manner as Hero without being labelled as such.  Is it just that when it comes to arguing against democracy, we set the bar higher?  Do we demand extraordinary evidence before we are willing to engage with contrary opinions?  Should we be more forgiving of dissenting opinions even when we see them as monstrous?

Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark is three things : Firstly, it is a love letter to the Winter Palace (now occupied by the Russian state Hermitage Museum).  Secondly, it is a technical exercise in so far as it is a film made up of one continuous 96 minute long take.  Thirdly, it is a wistful apologia for the Tsarist regime.

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February 4, 2010

Red Road (2006) – Exiting the Rear Window

At the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), the wheel-chair bound James Stewart finds himself confronted by the man he has been spying on all Summer long.  Briefly lit by flashbulbs, the murderer advances upon Stewart from out of the shadows before lunging at him.  In this scene, the voyeur gets his comeuppance.  Once so powerful in his capacity to observe his neighbours without being seen, Stewart is impotent to prevent one of them attacking him.  As an audience, our pulses race.  Not only because of the technical perfection of the scene, or because Stewart’s character is sympathetic, but because we are complicit in the character’s voyeurism.  The murderer is not just lunging at Stewart.  He is lunging at us.

Hitchcock’s teasing analogy between the cinema audience member and the voyeur is one that has continued to inspire film-makers.  However, while Rear Window was recently remade in the shape of Disturbia (2007) – a teen thriller starring Shia LeBoeuf – it is in its more oblique descendants that we find this central analogy best explored.  Indeed, many of the films of Michael Haneke express furious moral outrage at his audience’s passivity and prurience.  In Benny’s Video (1992) he suggests that watching violent films desensitises the audience.  In Funny Games (1997) he  has his characters break the fourth wall in order to make the audience complicit in their crimes.  In Hidden (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009) he follows genre guidelines in order to build tension but pointedly denies his audience the cathartic release of an answer to their questions or an unambiguous resolution.  Haneke and, to a certain extent, Lars von Trier are animated by a deep sense of suspicion about the power of the audience.  We sit in front of our TVs or our local cinema screens and we watch moments of heart-break, happiness, death and redemption.  We vicariously experience these emotions and yet we are safe.  We have risked nothing except boredom.  What have we done to earn these emotional experiences?

Some of the more intriguing attempts to answer the question posed by Hitchcock, Haneke and von Trier are found in the works of Charlie Kaufman.  In Being John Malkovitch (1999), Kaufman presented one of his characters with the opportunity to stop being a voyeur and to actually participate in the life of the character he was surreptitiously observing.  This allows the character to experience love and career success that would have been impossible to achieve on his own but the success ultimately turns to ashes as real love eludes the character who eventually winds up trapped inside someone else experiencing the love that he craves but will never receive.  Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (2008) further explores the emotional hollowness of the voyeur as the film’s central character, a stage director, attempts to adapt his life for the stage only to realise that, no matter how lavish the production and how much authorial control you have, real life is always outside of your control and always capable of messing you up.

Andrea Arnold’s debut film Red Road returns to  Hitchcock’s original set up but expands upon it not with Hitchcock’s amusement or Haneke’s anger, but rather Kaufman’s sense of sadness at the ultimate impotence voyeur.

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February 3, 2010

BG 24 – We Are All Sheep : Avatar, Bayonetta and the Hypnosis of Low-Brow culture

Futurismic have my twenty fourth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled We Are All Sheep : Avatar, Bayonetta and the Hypnosis of Low-Brow Culture.  The column draws partly on some of the thinking I did for my recent Ozu piece and partly on some of the things I said about the Hugo awards last summer.

The piece was motivated by the intense and viscerally negative reaction I had to Bayonetta.  I hated it.  I hated it more than any game I have played in recent memory.  In fact, I hated it more than any cultural artifact I have recently rubbed my brain up against.  I was going to put together a hatchet job but then I took a step back and realised that my reaction to Bayonetta was no different to the one film critics have had against Avatar, and that my tendency to explain away the opinions of people who enjoy games like Bayonetta is disingenuous.  So, instead of saying that Bayonetta is low-brow or stupid, I thought I would put forward a way of looking at the process through which opinions are formed in the first place.

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February 2, 2010

REVIEW – The New Barbarians (1982)

Videovista have my review of Enzo G. Castellari’s The New Barbarians, a post-apocalyptic exploitation film made around the same time as his better known and arguably more entertaining Bronx Warriors.

Watching the film I was hit by a wave of raw nostalgia as most of my childhood summers were spent sitting in darkened rooms watching precisely these kinds of films.  If it had mutants, a tricked out car and loads of violence in it then chances are that pre-teen Jona would have hunted it down and happily watched it.  For all the recent talk of films like Avatar dumbing down cinema, watching The New Barbarians really brought home to me the fact that there was a time when science fiction cinema had teeth.  It was weird, surreal, violent and thoroughly disreputable.  I can’t help but feel that the mainstreaming of science fiction might well have cost us these kinds of films.  Even attempts to recapture the magic such as Neil Marshall’s Doomsday (2008) seem somehow more respectable and tame in comparison.

Also interesting is the film’s blatant homophobia.  You simply could not make a film nowadays in which the bad guys are a load of gay men.  Indeed, it occurred to me after writing the review that the film suggests that should the extinction of the human race ever become a genuine risk then homosexuality would not simply be a lifestyle, a preference, a predisposition or even a perversion.  It would be an act of outright nihilism.  But then, is humanity really worth saving?  The film’s baddies – the Templars – are effectively an armed wing of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement except rather than seeking to justify themselves using the language of ecology, the Templars speak of vengeance and a need to exact retribution for humanity’s crimes against itself.  Which makes little sense but there you go…

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February 2, 2010

REVIEW – An Englishman in New York (2009)

Videovista have my review of Richard Laxton and Brian Fillis’ adaptation of the later Quentin Crisp memoirs An Englishman in New York.

It has an interesting subject (a camp gay man who lived out of the closet at a time when Homosexuality was still illegal) and is set during an interesting time (the first twitches of the shambling beast that is AIDS) but a lack of time, a lack of ambition and a regrettable desire to pay attention to the facts of Crisp’s life rather than the themes and patterns means that it only ever hints at the fascinating piece it could have been.  Fun enough though.

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February 1, 2010

Beau Travail (1999) – Neither Validation Nor Transgression

All drama is a process of digestion.  The peristaltic processing of information and emotional states resulting in change.  It is an on-going process.  It never stops.  The best dramas are those that choose their moment carefully, setting up the cameras or lighting the stage just as the emotional bowels twitch or the psychological constipation ends.  For all of her tendencies towards hard-hitting topics and enigmatic story-telling techniques, Claire Denis is a genuinely world-class dramatist.  Films such as 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and The Intruder (2004) are heady examinations of sudden changes that come after long periods of emotional constipation.

In The Intruder, we see an old man who has lived life entirely upon his own terms – his past a catalogue of burned bridges, old enmities and shady deals – suddenly realising that he has to reconnect with his estranged son.  In 35 Shots of Rum we are introduced to a family that exists in perfect emotional balance.  The son and the daughter live together while the father’s old girlfriend and the upstairs neighbour orbit round the household in enigmatic patterns, part of the family and yet denied any clear role in it.  Both films deal with the inevitable change that must afflict these delicate psychological ecosystems.  A process of change that is, according to Denis at least, a mixed-blessing.

The ending to 35 Shots of Rum can be read as either a wedding or a funeral.  The father’s announcement that the time has come for him to drink the 35 shots can be seen as either a capitulation to unwanted forces or as a moment of spiritual rebirth.  Like the Death tarot card, the film marks the end of a period of stasis, it does not explain whether this stasis is broken by an ending or a new beginning.  Similarly, the ambiguous moral character of The Intruder’s protagonist cloaks his eventual death in dramaturgical vagueness.  Is it sad that he never got to know his son?  Or was his death deserved for the crimes he committed in order to artificially extend his own life?  For Denis, this process of emotional change can also be terrifying, as demonstrated in her take on the vampire film Trouble Every Day (2001).  In that film a doctor nails his wife up in her bedroom because she has changed into something Other while an American who harbours terrible violent fantasies stalks the world desperately trying to find a cure.  When the pair come together it is erotic and terrifying, natural and unnatural, to be applauded and avoided.

Denis’ Beau Travail, an adaptation of Melville’s unfinished novella Billy Budd (1924) set against the backdrop of the modern-day French Foreign Legion, continues Denis’ interest in the complexities and ambiguities of emotional change and emotional constipation, demonstrating them with her characteristic grace and lack of pity.

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January 26, 2010

The Girl Cut In Two (2007) – False Dichotomies

Morality takes as many forms as there are cultures to manifest it.  For some people, it is a question of commandments.  For others it is a question of ideals.  For other groups it is a question of economics, minutely calibrated cost-benefit analyses.  But for all of these systems and all of these cultures, morality always boils down to a series of dichotomies : Should I do X or should I do Y?  Simple binaries that make the world.  Works such as Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) encourage us to see our relationships in similar terms.  Do we want a love filled with the peaks and valleys of passion,  or do we want a pleasingly mild existence, an emotional even keel?

Claude Chabrol’s 2007 film La Fille Coupee En Deux seems to attack this vision of human relations.  We expect to have to make a trade-off in our personal lives, but what happens if both of our options are bad ones?  Chabrol hints at an answer.  An answer which, like Chabrol’s great films of the late 60s and early 70s, depends upon a viciously cynical vision of the class system that continues to corrupt French life.  But is this vision perhaps too cynical for its own good?

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January 24, 2010

Blissfully Yours (2002) – Now Rather Than Later

The last time I wrote about the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, I suggested that his films constituted a challenge to the critic.  A reminder, if you will, that as cinematic expression evolves, so too must the tools of the critic.  Indeed, most of the critical reaction to the Thai-film-maker’s work has tended to emphasise either the biographical (Weerasethakul is gay and his parents are doctors, facts that have clearly inspired his film-making) or a form of woolly mysticism that attempts to alight upon his films with the same softness and the aloofness that Weerasethakul uses in examining different topics in his films.  In other words, Weerasehakul is not a forensic film-maker and so it is okay to speak of his films in non-forensic terms.  For my part, the jury is still out on this approach.  Especially when you consider that Weerasethakul’s earlier films seem to be quite accessible to standard critical readings.

Indeed, Blissfully Yours (Sud Sanaeha) could easily have been made by a European art house director.  It is, after all, a fairly straightforward exploration of the temptation to ignore one’s problems in order to take pleasure in the present.  While the film does share many of the images that Weerasethakul would deploy so forcefully in films like Syndromes and a Century and Tropical Malady, it is also a much darker film.  A film that seems strangely at odds with the warm-hearted mysticism of Weerasethakul’s later films and the critical reaction to them.

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January 22, 2010

Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) – Ozu for Beginners

There have been some interesting rumblings recently over on the Guardian Film blog.

The Guardian’s film-related output tends to be dominated by the work of Peter Bradshaw.  Reportedly one of the few British film critics whose reviews still have the power to make a film.  However, despite Bradshaw’s prominence, I have never warned to him as a writer.  His reviews generally lack either theoretical or historical foundation, they are seldom funny and they are generally pedestrian enough to be predictable.  I also think that he gets it wrong a lot of the time.  Especially when it comes to films that cause a stir.  Anyway, beneath Bradshaw’s prominence, there are a number of other film writers whose work I do have a lot more time for.  Indeed, while I tend to ignore the Guardian’s reviews, I almost always read its film-related op-eds.  Which brings us to the inspiration for this particular piece.

Since the beginning of January, it has become de rigueur for Guardian film writers to reference the works of Yasujiro Ozu.  Indeed, back on the 9th of January we had a piece about Ozu’s work itself by Ian Buruma entitled “An Artist of the Unhurried World”.  Then, on the 15th of January David Thomson produced “Ozu vs Avatar”, an impassioned piece that framed Ozu’s work as a natural antithesis to mindless effects-driven films such as District 9 and Avatar.  Then, on the 16th of January, John Patterson gave us “John Woo, Ang Lee, Jet Li, enough of the Hollywood Kung fu movies”, a piece that ends with a plaintive :

“I’m all through with this genre, thanks. I’m heading back to Ozu and Mizoguchi”

There are two good reasons for Ozu being present in the minds of these film writers.  The first is that Ozu’s masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953) has been re-released at the cinema.  The second is that the first great film to emerge this year at British cinemas is Hirokazu Koreeda’s Still Walking (2008), an extended homage to and updating of the family drama genre that Ozu made his own.  While I broadly agree with the sentiments animating these pieces, I was struck by the extent to which they go out of their way to Other the works of Ozu.

For example, in his article, Buruma states :

“Ozu’s style would surely strike action-loving westerners as boring and slow”

and

“To young Japanese brought up on lurid comic books and animated science fiction, Ozu’s world looks as alien as it might to uninformed westerners”

and

“Surely, foreigners preferred to see more exotic creatures, rushing about with drawn swords, wearing colourful kimonos”

Meanwhile, Patterson and particularly Thomson’s pieces set up the idea that over here you have mindless action films and over there you have works such as those of Ozu.  My problem with these articles is that I do not think that this distinction exists.  There is only one meaningful spectrum along which works of art can be placed and that is one of quality.  Ozu’s films are not qualitatively different to District 9 or A Quantum of Solace, they are simply better made, better written, better thought out, better acted and better shot.  Ozu made great films, it is as simple as that.

The idea that there is some other kind of film is one that draws its strength chiefly from the dialectics of marketing.  Kevin Smith once said of Jersey Girl (2004) that it was “not for critics” and most of the people who have been defending Avatar from its high-minded detractors have taken the line that it is simply mindless fun.  But why should fun be mindless?  How can fun actually be mindless?  People in marketing are fond of the idea that we live inordinately hectic lives.  Lives lived at break-neck pace.  Lives spent wading through dense data-schoals that leave us exhausted at the end of the day.  If you buy into this vision of your life than a) I suggest you think about the people currently trying to survive in Haiti and b) maybe you’d like to spend just a little bit more on dinner?  Maybe you’d like some gourmet chocolate?  Don’t you deserve a 50” 3D TV?  You work hard, why shouldn’t you have it?  There is no such thing as mindless entertainment, but there are rubbish films that people get tricked into going to see.

So it is in this spirit that I have decided to visit one of Yasujiro Ozu’s more accessible and instantly lovable films – Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) in order to demonstrate why it is that appreciating Ozu should come naturally to everyone, even those people who cannot help but spend money on Hollywood blockbusters.

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January 17, 2010

Memoirs Found In A Bathtub (1961) – The End of Meaning

Why do the workers not rise up and smash the chains of their oppressors?  This is a question that challenges every revolutionary thinker.  It vexed Marx and now it vexes Islamist thinkers.  Why do the workers not ruse up and smash the chains of their oppressors?  For Marx as for contemporary Islamist thinkers, the answer was that the workers were in a state of false consciousness.  A state where they believed that they were happy but in fact they were miserable.  How to free people from this state of false consciousness was central to the writings and revolutionary activities of Guy Debord, one of the more influential intellectuals operating around the time of the May ‘68 strikes in France.

In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord argues that capitalistic society is kept on its feet by the construction of The Spectacle by the media-industrial complex.  The Spectacle is not merely a form of popular culture that keeps the proletariat mindlessly entertained and ignorant.  Instead, it is a cultural product that sculpts reality itself.  As Debord himself writes :

“It is a world vision which has become objectified”

The world is constructed by our perceptions of it and because our perceptions are managed, our world is too.  There is no separation between the world and The Spectacle of it.  We live in the world described by The Spectacle and so it is made real.  This is why simply telling people the truth has no effect upon them.  They exist within The Spectacle and language from outside The Spectacle makes no sense.  Dismantling The Spectacle would require a different approach.  The Situationists practised what was then known as Detournement.  Detournement can be seen as the appropriation of Spectacle-friendly images and signs and their re-deployment to serve revolutionary ends.  These stunts included dressing as a monk in order to mount a cathedral pulpit during Easter mass in order to deliver a sermon decrying the tyranny of God and the Church.  These stunts, of course, follow upon the heels of artistic stunts such as the Bloomsbury Group’s Dreadnought Hoax in 1910 and they prefigure the modern fondness for satirical culture jamming.

However, what strikes me as I read about all of these various events is how basic they are to the daily functioning of politics.  What difference is there between a Leftist pretending to be a monk in order to deliver a critique of God and the British Fascist leader Nick Griffin casting off the traditional trappings of Fascism in order to appear on question time looking like a normal politician who speaks not of rivers of blood and racial purity but of a form of underdog nationalism?

We exist in a universe of signs because our brains are lazy fuckers.  Rather than engaging with objective reality, our brains are all too eager to take a short cut and lump together things that look similar or sound similar.  All too often we think by association and by assumption.  We navigate not the real world but a semantic network that serves us in stead of the real world.  However, what would the world be like if we did not live under the aegis of Debord’s Spectacle?  Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found In A Bathtub presents us with a social reality called The Building.  It is a reality that makes The Spectacle appear positively utopian.

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