Category / Directors

by Jonathan M

White Material (2009) – deColonisation / reOccupation

One of the most troubling things about colonialism is its language. Colonisation implies a degree of tentativeness and impermanence as though colonies are fragile attempts to implant humans into a landscape that has yet to support them.  Colonisation assumes unoccupied space just as discovery assumes that the thing being discovered has never been found before. Jyotsna G. Singh addresses this semiotic baggage in the introduction to her book Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues (1996):

Since the early modern period, this discovery motif has frequently emerged in the language of colonization, enabling European travellers/writers to represent the newly “discovered” lands as an empty space, a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their linguistic, cultural, and later territorial claims. – Pp. 1

What is offensive about the notions of discovery and colonisation is the fact that most of the lands discovered and colonised by European settlers were actually inhabited.  How can one discover land that is already well known and colonise places that are already inhabited?  Easy… by making the people who were there first disappear. As a result, one should perhaps speak not of lands being ‘colonised’ but of their being ‘occupied’.

A different way of looking at this question is to point out that ‘colonisation’ remains a useful term precisely because of the moral and conceptual absurdity of its connotations.  If one speaks of lands being occupied rather than colonised by the British Empire then one allows for the fact that all human inhabitation is morally neutral because nobody has a natural right to the ownership of the land they inhabit.  We all occupy the land and time brings with it no legitimacy.  The crime of colonialism was not that the Europeans laid claim to land that was not theirs, it was that they laid claim to territory and then used those claims to justify the exploitation of the people who were occupying the land when they first got there.  Colonialism is not a crime against the land; it is a crime against people.  All land is occupied.  From the perspective of the land, we are all colonists.

Claire Denis’s White Material examines the process of decolonisation without the assumption that there is such a thing as legitimate ownership of the land.  Denis’s film presents Africa as both perpetual virgin territory and eternally dried-out, exploited and ancient wasteland.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Lost Patrol (1934)

One of the more depressing cinematic experiences I had last year was going to see Matt Reeves’ timid remake of Tomas Alfredson’s superlative Let The Right One In.  I was lured into the cinema on the promise that the American version teased certain elements out of the original text that Alfredson’s film missed but what I got was pretty much a shot-for-shot remake.  Pointless hack-work aimed at culturally insular Americans.  Some might say that this was inevitable and that there is no point in remakes, but I do not think that this is necessarily true.  Some films positively overflow with great ideas but somehow manage to fuck up the implementation.

As my review of John Ford’s largely overlooked The Lost Patrol makes, clear, I think that it is a film that is absolutely ripe for a re-make.  Set in the Mesopotamian desert during the first world war, the film tells of a group of British soldiers who lose their officer and their way in the middle of the desert.  Under attack from unseen assailants, the soldiers hole-up in an abandoned mosque and slowly go mad.  Boasting Boris Karloff, the film is rushed and has too many characters to ever settle down into the psychological register the subject requires but there are some lovely ideas hidden in this film.  They just need someone to unleash them.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Deep Red (1975)

Another month and another batch of new reviews up at Videovista.

Experience has taught me and I have learned my lessons well.  My natural film-viewing habits tend to be very director-based.  If I see a film I enjoy then my first reaction is generally to seek out that director’s other work.  Similarly, I will not go to see a film in order to see a particular actor, or to see the work of a particular writer.  But I will go out of my way to see a film by a particular director even if the subject matter does not initially speak to me.  This relationship is one of trust.  I trust certain directors to take me to certain places.

I do not trust Dario Argento.

Partly this is a reflection of the fact that he has had a very long career filled with many ups and downs but it is also due to the fact that I need to be in a quite specific frame of mind to tolerate the ostentatious silliness that characterises Argento’s style.  As my review of Profondo Rosso suggests, I was in the right frame of mind to watch a stylishly directed and fiendishly well composed whodunit.  Excellent job on the extras by Arrow too, who really are one of the best distributors out there when it comes to putting out old exploitation films.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Deadly Outlaw Rekka (2002)

Back around the turn of the millennium, Takashi Miike was the poster-boy for a new brand of cinephilia.  A cinephilia that used DVDs to traverse cultural boundaries in search of more sex, more violence and more extreme imagery.  Since then, Miike and his film seem to have fallen into relative obscurity, victims of a maturing DVD market and the director’s own refusal to abide by traditional genre boundaries.  However, as my Videovista review of Deadly Outlaw Rekka shows, there’s life in the old dog yet.

Deadly Outlaw Rekka is about a culture clash within the Yakuza.  A culture clash between the gangsters who see themselves as business men and the gangsters who cling to the old ways.  Ways of honour and blood.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Carlos The Jackal (2010)

As you may recall, I am quite a fan of the work of Olivier Assayas.  Once a critic for Cahiers du Cinema, Assayas has gone on to become one of the most under-rated directors working in France today.  His films generally fall into one of two streams — either they are mercilessly cold tales of espionage set against a corporate background (much like Demonlover) or they are much warmer mainstream dramas about the difficulties people face trying to connect with each other (much like Irma Vep).  As ostensibly different as these the two streams of his directorial career, both share the same unifying vision of human nature.  A vision that is painted in the brightest and most spectacular strokes in his latest film Carlos.

As my Videovista review suggests, Carlos is essentially a human tragedy about one man’s attempt to find a place for himself in a world full of principles and politics but very little human warmth.

by Jonathan M

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) – The Tragic Decay of Language into Mere Words

Much has been written, not least by me, about the best way to approach the films of the Thai New Wave director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.  Most responses seem to fall into one of three categories :

 

The first is made up of rejectionist accusations of wilful obscurantism.  The second is composed of equally ill-judged, but somewhat more charitable, suggestions that his films contain a profound political and/or spiritual message that we are unable to decode because we lack a sufficient knowledge of Thai culture.  Both of these views are attempts to articulate a sense of frustration with the fact that, despite his obvious technical and artistic skill, Weerasethakul is somehow failing to communicate his ideas in a way that makes them accessible to anyone who is not him.  This sense of frustration has also resulted in the emergence of a rather more drastic category of reaction.

The third category is best summed up by the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s assertion that we suffer from “a lack of analytical context in which to place this material”.  Indeed, my own reaction to Weerasethakul’s work is that his films are both so obviously brilliant and so utterly incomprehensible that we need to develop an entirely new critical language in which to discuss his work.  A language focused not upon ‘narrative’ and ‘character’ but upon mood and atmosphere, the careful layering of images, colours and sounds to evoke emotional responses.  Under this view, Weerasethakul is effectively bypassing our traditional analytical tools and the tricks of cognition we use to make sense of cinema (and the world) in order to plug directly into our brains.

 

Weerasethakul’s latest film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (a.k.a. Loong Boonmee Raleuk Chat) constitutes a serious challenge to this third approach to the director’s work.  It is a film that revisits many of the director’s favoured themes and images but places them into a much more traditionally cinematic framework.  Far from operating on the level of pure sensation, unadorned by critical analysis, Uncle Boonmee is a film littered with genre tropes and familiar ideas.  Ideas that not only make the work much easier to understand, but actually prompt us to revisit many of the director’s earlier works and ask whether — despite this year’s Palme D’Or at Cannes — something has not been lost along the way.  Something beautiful and mysterious.

 

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by Jonathan M

Robinson in Space (1997) – Ghosts of Albion plc

The ending of Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) saw the fictional academic Robinson and his loyal but un-named narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) drowning in a sea of absence.  Having criss-crossed the city of London in a desperate search for its hidden nature, the pair eventually collapse.  Exhausted, deflated and defeated.  London, they announce, is a city without essence.  Devoid of any underlying meaning or fundamental essence, Britain’s capital is a hermeneutic desert.  A space in which no meaning can grow and into which visitors are forced to carry any truths they may need in order to keep themselves alive.

Robinson in Space marks the return of London’s intrepid duo.  This time the pair are hired by an un-named international advertising agency to produce a similar report on the unspecified ‘problem of England’.  However, despite travelling further and further across the country, Robinson’s initial romanticism about England proves to be just as deluded as his romanticism about London.  Indeed, neither an enchanted kingdom full of art and fellowship nor a gothic landscape full of dread and oppression, England reveals itself as a land of facts.  Tedious, maddening, preposterous facts.

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by Jonathan M

London (1994) – Squabbling Hegemonies

It is difficult enough to try and capture the meaning of a book or a film, but how about attempting to distill the essence of a particular time or a particular place?  How about an entire city?  Travel writing is an attempt to do exactly this.  To take the experience of a particular place at a particular time and distill it down into the collection of sounds and symbols that make up the written word.  Thought of in these terms, the task seems onerous. After all… books are creatures of words.  Even films are beings of language once you bear in mind their scripts, their budget meetings and the attempts by directors to tell actors and technicians alike exactly what they want from a particular scene.  To write about the meaning of words is one thing but to write about something bigger than language is another.  Something like the city of London.

Patrick Keiller’s London is a combination of documentary film and extended essay.  Its un-named narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) tells of his cross-London walks and expeditions in the company of a quixotic academic known only as Robinson.  Robinson has a very particular vision of London.  A vision he desperately wants to be true, and if it cannot be true then it must be about to come true.  But as the pair cross and re-cross the city of London along with its suburbs, financial districts, parks and run-down estates, it soon becomes clear that London will not conform to any single vision and that this refusal to conform is the very essence of the Mother of All Cities.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Valhalla Rising (2009)

Videovista have my review of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising.

Valhalla Rising is a beautifully shot and darkly existentialist riff on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which, in the grand tradition of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), moves the action from colonial Africa to the age of Vikings.

It is a densely symbolic and beautifully shot film and… it bored the shit out of me.  My main problem with the film is similar to the problem exposed by Emmanuel Carrere’s La Moustache (2005) and demonstrated by Thomas Clay’s Soi Cowboy (2008).

I’ll expand my thoughts n the problem in the post linking to the review of Soi Cowboy but the three posts kind of interlink.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Two Evil Eyes (1990)

THE ZONE has my piece on the Dario Argento and George A. Romero Poe anthology film Due Occhi Diabolici.

I have written about Poe anthologies before… once for Strange Horizons and another time as a part of a longer piece about great French Horror films.

The DVD made for an interesting review as it opens with a film that left no doubt in my mind that George Romero is one of the most over-rated and talentless directors ever to pick up a camera but closes with a film that really brought home to me how much I adore the work of Dario Argento and how much I need to see more of his films.  So a mixed bag really…