Year / 2010

by Jonathan M

The Red and The Black (1830) – Forever Tumbling Upwards

The politics of sympathy and social advancement is always a tricky question.

Many stories feature characters with humble origins overcoming set-backs and challenges in order to rise to positions of prominence traditionally unthinkable for people from their social class.  Consider, for example, d’Artagnan from Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers novels; who would have thought that that nearly penniless member of the provincial nobility who crept into Paris on a sandy-coloured horse would wind up, thirty years later, as Marshal of France?  Stories in which sympathetic characters rise to the top of their societies serve to redeem those societies.  Indeed, the message to be taken away from the Three Musketeers is what while Louis XIII may have been a weak and easily-manipulated King who was cuckolded by the Prime Minister of his nation’s greatest military rival, he did at least preside over a society in which the cream could rise to the top.  Cardinal Richelieu is a sinister and ruthless presence but he can recognise talent when he sees it and this capacity for well-deserved social advancement means that Louis XIII’s France, much like its King, deserves a reputation for being ‘Just’.  If only a little bit.  The flip side of this depiction of heroic cream rising to the top is to be found in the genre known as the Picaresque novel.  Characterised by such works as the autobiography of Bienvenuto Cellini and William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), the Picaresque novel frequently features a roguish and frequently unsympathetic character achieving wealth and status through under-handed means.  The implication being that if Barry Lyndon achieved wealth and position by being a scoundrel, it is probably safe to assume that the same is true of anyone in that society who possesses either wealth or status.

The difference between works such as The d’Artagnan Romances and The Luck of Barry Lyndon demonstrate that by adopting a different stance towards their protagonists, authors can adopt entirely different attitudes towards the societies they are describing.  A sympathetic character who rises to the top redeems his society by his accomplishment while an unsympathetic character damns his.

Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir walks a fine line between these two approaches to social advancement.  Stendhal tries hard to make his protagonist Julien Sorel appear sympathetic but despite being intelligent, ambitious, capable, romantic and democratic in sentiment, Sorrel’s rise to the top of French society constitutes one of the most vicious and wide-ranging social satires imaginable.  Stendhal’s book leaves the period of the post-Napoleonic Bourbon Restoration looking hysterical, preposterous and profoundly unjust.

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by Jonathan M

Enter the Void (2009) – A Void of Creativity

The French Nouvelle Vague stands as a blazing historical vindication of the critical vocation.  Every time an over-rated artist seeks to rebuff a negative review by calling into question the motives and talents of a critic, critics can respond simply by mentioning the names of great critics who became great film directors.  Directors like Truffaut, Chabrol, Godard, Rohmer and Rivette.  However, as brilliant as the Cahiers du Cinema directors undeniably were, there is an element of Year Zero about their fame.  Was French cinema really in crisis in the late 1950s?  Was Bazin correct to point to a tendency to the overly theatrical?  Quite possibly but the Nouvelle Vague’s desire to relaunch French film was not without its casualties.

One of the most note-worthy casualties of the French Nouvelle Vague was Henri-Georges Clouzot.  Clouzot was arguably the most talented of the French film directors who continued working throughout the German occupation.  To this day, no film so perfectly captures the France’s deep and loathesome ambivalence towards the Nazis as his story of poison pen letters Le Corbeau (1943).  Because of his association with the Nazi run film studio Continental Films, Clouzot was banned from directing by the French government and while he did return to direct such classics as Quai des Orfevres (1947), The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955), his reputation among French critics never completely recovered.

It is in this context that Clouzot secured an unlimited budget with which to make his film Inferno.  Ostensibly a psychological thriller starring Romy Schneider, Inferno was a profoundly experimental film whose disastrously abandoned production process was littered with all kinds of new and experimental techniques designed to revitalise Clouzot’s reputation and place him at the very forefront of the newly revitalised French Cinema.   As Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea revealed in their documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (2009), Clouzot used strange lenses, dyed entire lakes and daubed actresses with strange make-up in order to create a myriad of weird and wonderful visual effects.  He also shot hour upon hour of bizarre objects and visual illusions dreamt up by a team of artists.  However, what is most fascinating about Medrea and Bromberg’s documentary itself is that, while we know that Clouzot had a script and that this script was later made into one of Claude Chabrol’s more successful later films (1994’s Hell), we really get very little information as to what it was that Inferno was supposed to be about.  Indeed, by focusing primarily upon the production process, Bromberg and Medrea manage to separate the technical aspects of Inferno from its more human and semantic aspects giving us images without context and effects without plot.

This filleted version of Clouzot’s unfinished film is eerily similar to the latest film by Irreversible director Gaspar Noe.  Enter the Void is just as much a work of vulgar spectacle as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) or Avatar (2009).  At times technically stunning, the film shows the hallmarks of a profoundly experimental production process hindered by an equally profound disregard for the human and semantic elements of the artistic process.  Elements such as a compelling plot, believable characters, evocative themes and thought provoking sub-text.  Elements almost entirely absent from Enter the Void.

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by Jonathan M

Certified Copy (2010) – Truth through Fakery

“The secret power of novels: they look like mirrors held up to the world, but what they are is machines that secrete spurious meaning into the world and so muddy the waters of genuine understanding of the human condition”

So says Gabriel Josipovici on page 70 of his book Whatever Happened to Modernism? (2010).  Josipovici tries to isolate the spirit of Modernism not in any formal development or stylistic quirk, but in a particular philosophical stance with regards not only to the world but also to the act of producing art.  This stance finds its origins in what Weber and Schiller called the Disenchantment of the World, an event — associated either with the Renaissance or the French Revolution — that saw the dismantling of the certainties of the old medieval conceptual order and their replacement with a more sceptical, tentative and detached worldview born of the scientific revolution and a humanist tradition stretching back to antiquity.  The word became disenchanted not because old comforting falsehoods were replaced by harsh new truths but because it suddenly became clear that the world was a place free of certainties and that absolutely everything was open to questioning.  This sense of disenchantment provoked what the philosopher Kierkegaard called ‘the dizziness of freedom’, a feeling that everything could be said but because there were no longer any fixed rules or structures to press against that nothing that could be said would have any meaning.  The essence of Modernism, according to Josipovici, is art that embraces this lack of certainty and manages to press forward because of it.

Abbas Kiarostami’s previous film Shirin (2008) seemed to embody this artistic self-awareness perfectly.  Set in an Iranian cinema, the film is composed of nothing but a series of close-ups on the faces of Iranian women as they watch a film based upon a work of epic Persian romantic poetry.  We never see the film itself, but in reading about the making of Shirin we learn anecdotes about the poem, the production process and the somewhat jarring presence of the actress Juliette Binoche amongst a sea of unrecognisable faces.  Shirin is a film that invites us to think not about the images upon the screen but upon the selection of those images and the relationship between those images and the (unseen) story that is producing them.  In short, Shirin is very much a work of Modernist cinema as Josipovici would understand the term… it is a film about the author’s lack of authority and the lack of authenticity inherent in any artistic text regardless of how ‘realistic’ the images on screen purport to be.

However…

While Shirin is undeniably a beautiful and powerful film, it is also a film that smacks of cleverness more than authenticity.  There is do doubting the reality of the women’s responses to the unseen film but the framing of these images is so philosophically complex and ontologically ‘clever’ that Shirin seems less like a work of art and more like a critical essay on the impossibility of creating authentic art.  To borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes, it lacks the trembling of existence.  It lacks that smack of the real.  It does not feel like an authentic slice of reality, let alone a reliable reproduction of the world.  Copie Conforme, Kiarostami’s follow-up film, can be seen as an attempt to correct the mistakes made by Shirin.  It is a film that engages and struggles with the unsurmountable difficulty of achieving artistic authenticity, but it does so from within the context of a story that feels both horribly and beautifully real.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Lebanon (2009)

Videovista have my review of Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon.

While I thought the film very fine to look at, I was intensely annoyed not only by the under-written and overly pretentious script.  To frame contemporary warfare as a theatre for psychological self-destruction is not only a terrible cliche (one thoughtlessly repeated by the thoughtless Hurt Locker) it is also politically suspect.  My reason for this sentiment is beautifully expounded in a paper that appears in the Summer 2010 issue of Foundation.

In “Hollywood and the Imperial Gothic”, Johan Hoglund draws upon the concept of ‘Imperial Gothic’ first laid out by Paul Brantlinger in his book The Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988).  The idea behind the Imperial Gothic is that narratives that deal with the end of an imperial civilisation do not actively weaken or subvert that civilisation.  Instead, they serve to bolster it by creating in the public’s mind further reasons for ‘cracking down’ or ‘surging’ against enemies either real or imagined.  Works like Maoz’s Lebanon and Folman’s Waltz with Bashir are essentially works of Israeli Imperial Gothic.

Indeed, by suggesting that Israel’s wars with Lebanon are places where young IDF soldiers go to lose their minds, films such as Folman and Maoz’s are lending credence to the idea that Israel must be tough in its dealings with Lebanon.  For if war with Lebanon is such a terrifying prospect then it follows that any anti-Israeli activity originating in Lebanon must be met with massive retaliatory force, preferably in the shape of air strikes.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Wetherby (1985)

Videovista have my review of David Hare’s Wetherby.

I am a big fan of David Hare.  I think that his Via Dolorosa is fantastic piece of thinking on the Israel-Palestine question and I thought that his screenplay for Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (2008) was a lot more subtle than people gave it credit for (psst… it’s about collective guilt… not the redemptive power of reading).  As a result, it was an absolute pleasure to immerse myself in this DVD release of his 1985 film Wetherby.  Wetherby is visually and thematically very similar to the work done for TV by Dennis Potter at around the same time but it is nowhere near as accessible.  Which is really saying something given the complexity of works like The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Raging Sun, Raging Sky (2009)

Videovista have my review of Julian Hernandez’s beautifully shot but frankly quite demented three hour-long Rabioso Sol, Rabioso Ciel0.

While I think that Raging Sun, Raging Sky is a problematic film, I am struck by the way in which it has been treated (no cinema release, shoved out by a gay indie distribution company) and the way that other equally problematic films in the same vein have been treated.  Indeed, when Luca Guadagnino’s equally beautifully shot and equally non-prolix I Am Love (2009) –an admittedly much better film — was released earlier this year, the acclaim it received was almost universal.  Even those critics who did not enjoy the film treated it as a serious work of cinematic art.  However, Raging Sun, Raging Sky has received hardly any critical attention and what critical attention it has had has been decidedly mixed.  This begs the question: Is it because it is about a bunch of poofs?

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – 7 Days (2009)

Videovista have my review of Daniel Grou’s Quebecois Thriller Les 7 Jours du Talion.

The film was written by the same person who wrote the novel upon which it is based.  However, somewhat unusually, the film adaptation manages to completely miss the point of the novel.  The original book is all about a man who kidnaps his daughter’s murderer and announces to the media that he will torture the killer to death and then turn himself in to the police.  When the torture begins it is clear that the man is not psychologically equipped for the task and that in order to exact revenge the man must change.  He must effectively kill the person he once was and become someone much closer to his daughter’s killer, someone who can torture and murder another human being.  What makes the novel so interesting is the fact that the arguments for and against the man carrying out his threat are played out in real time through the media.  So, in effect, the man externalises his conscience.

Bizarrely, the film downplays this act of externalisation leaving only a somewhat dull and repetitive series of torture set-pieces.

by Jonathan M

Police, Adjective (2009) – Nobody wants Realism. Not Really.

In his excellent extended essay What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010), Gabriel Josipovici provides a spirited reading of Cevantes’ Don Quixote.  Quixote, argues Josipovici, is not merely the first modern novel, it is also the first post-modern novel as within the novel’s various framing devices lies the recognition that there is something profoundly false about the form of the novel.  A falseness that can never quite be expunged, regardless of  how full-throated an author’s commitment to realism might be :

“Don Quixote’s madness dramatises for us the hidden madness in every realist novel, the fact that the hero of every such novel is given a name merely in order to persuade us of his reality, and that he has giants created for him to do battle with and Dulcineas for him to fall in love with simply to satisfy the demands of the narrative.  And it dramatises the way we are readers collude in this game because we want, for the duration of our reading, to be part of a realised world, a world full of meaning and adventure, an enchanted world” [p. 34]

No genre has so proudly worn its commitment to realism as the police procedural.  From TV series such as The Wire through to books such as Izzo’s Total Kheops (1995), McBain’s 87th Precinct series and Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels.  The police procedural does not merely seek to entertain by providing us with a mystery that the protagonists can gamely unravel, it also seeks to reflect the reality not only of the books’ settings but also of the job of solving crimes and being a policeman.  However, as Josipovici wisely points out, there is a tension here.  David Simon’s The Wire beautifully captured the political realities of contemporary America, but is it not just a little bit handy that one of the police officers should have chosen to go and get a job teaching thereby allowing the series to devote an entire series to the problems of America’s schooling?  Similarly, Izzo’s Total Kheops does a wonderful job of communicating the texture and character of the town of Marseilles, but is it not convenient that the book’s protagonist listens to cutting-edge hip hop while drinking local wines and eating immaculately cooked locally-sourced produce rather than humming along to Johnny Halliday whilst enjoying a burger and a coke?

Clearly, the police procedural’s commitment to realism is in desperate need of being challenged and deconstructed.  Corneliu Porumboiu’s Poliţist, Adjectiv scratches that itch.  With long and delicately manicured finger nails.

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by Jonathan M

Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 3 – The Great Game

The excellent Gestalt Mash have my third TV Mystery column Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 3 – The Great Game.

This time, the column considers not only Holmes’ Christ-like desire to impose order upon the world but also what might happen if God’s motives were not Lovecraftian in their impenetrable Otherness.