My latest Blasphemous Geometries column went up at Futurismic today.
It deals with the idea of including critical essays in re-published works of SF to serve as a kind of ‘DVD extra’ for science fiction. It suggests that publishers look to the Criterion Collection as an example of how to brand and re-sell older works.
My review of Marcel L’Herbier’s excellent silent film L’Argent has gone up over at Videovista.
One thing that occurs to me looking back at the review (aside from the fact that I needed to do another pass through it in order to tidy up the prose… oops) is that I think that in the film version of the story, Saccard is supposed to be Jewish. In the original novel by Zola, Saccard is presented as an anti-Semite who manipulates the market in order to ‘put one over’ on the Jewish bankers represented by Gunderman. However, in the film, Gunderman is not Jewish but, if anything, Aryan; a blond-haired man with a Germanic name.
Looking at the cover of the DVD, Saccard certainly seems to be presented in a pose reminiscent of anti-Semitic caricatures as a greasy, swarthy looking man grubbing a huge pile of gold.
My review of Robert Parigi’s Love Object has gone up over at THE ZONE.
I admired some of the things that the film had to say about male sexuality but I thought that, ultimately, Parigi wrote himself into a corner that he lacked the iagination and maturity to work his way out of, hence the decision to reach for OTT spectacle.
“I pressured the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring, O love! O love! many times” — Joyce, The Dubliners
Not known for being particularly political as an artist, Steve McQueen remains true to form with his debut film Hunger by seeking to express a balanced view about the no wash protests and Bobby Sands’ hunger strike. Every time we see a police beating, we see a policeman crying. Every time we see a no wash protester smearing his own shit up the walls, we see a warden having to clean it up. Every time we see Sands being helped by a sympathetic trusty, we are shown that the system can also be sadistic by replacing said trusty with a member of the UDA. However, despite McQueen’s desire to be balanced and realistic in his portrayal of the no wash and hunger strikes, he cannot help but allow his film to be dominated by the same sentimental narratives that dominate all films about Irish independence.
My latest Blasphemous Geometries column went up at Futurismic.
It deals with the question of whether there can be such a thing as a “correct” interpretation of a work of fiction and the benefits of interpreting a work in terms of what is known about its author.
All Conflict is Drama.
All Drama is Artifice.
The first film by Philippe Claudel, a French novelist turned screenwriter, turned writer-director, I’ve Love You so Long is a masterclass in emotional manipulation. Far from the cerebral complexity of Ingmar Bergman or even the constructed pseudo-realism of Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008), Claudel reveals himself to be a dramaturgical martinet, a man whose skill as a story-teller allows him to effortlessly control the flow of information to the audience while using music, acting and camera-work to impose a precise emotional state upon them. I’ve Loved You So Long is a film that is experienced and not merely watched. However, as purposeful as Claudel’s story-telling may be, the film does beg one serious question: does the ending undermine the rest of the film?
When I first arrived on the internet, one of the first people I exchanged e-mails with was a man who turned out to be a rather ardent supporter of the Italian political party Lega Nord. Now an integral part of Italy’s ruling coalition, the Lega Nord’s tendency towards populism and racism has fuelled fears of an Italian relapse into Fascism. The Lega’s supporter I corresponded with once complained “why should I pay for those brown-skinned bastards singing in the sun?”. The ‘bastards’ in question were not gypsies or asylum seekers or any of the other traditional scapegoats of the European right but Italians who happened to be from the south. Arriving ten years too late for a witty riposte, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah — based upon a critically-acclaimed work of investigative journalism by Roberto Saviano — suggests that the answer to the Nordista’s question is that, clearly, nobody has been paying for the people of southern Italy as Garrone’s Naples is a decaying. almost post-apocalyptic wasteland passed over by globalisation, abandoned by governments and ignored by the Church.
A success at the British box office thanks, in no small part, to some heavy advertising playing up the film’s non-existent thriller aspects, Gomorrah is not an entertaining film. It is not a film that you will be quoting to your friends on the way home, nor is it a moving ‘emotional roller-coaster’ full of ‘compelling characters’ and spectacle. It is a film that asks questions of its audience while giving them very little to hold onto. In fact, it is so defiantly inhospitable that it seems to have been put together with the explicit goal of avoiding ‘entertaining’ its audience. However, scratch the surface and think a little bit about what is going on and the rewards are astonishing as Gomorrah does not only take a hatchet to the conventional crime film, it also lands a number of very well-aimed jabs at the nature of capitalism itself.
Ruthless Culture 