Jarman the icon. Jarman the experimentalist. Jarman the punk. Jarman the queer. Derek Jarman’s adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II was made three years prior to his death from an AIDS-related illness. It is not only his most politically outspoken film, it is also the film that brings together the various strands of his career : It is a radical interpretation of an Elizabethan play, It is shot with all of the stylised pomp and careful staging of a 1980s music video and it speaks directly to the gay community’s history of oppression at the hands of self-righteous British establishment.
Category / GLBT
REVIEW – High Art (1995)
A new month and a new batch of reviews from VideoVista. Here is my review of Lisa Cholodenko’s really rather spiffing High Art.
A comparison that occurs to me just now is that High Art is, in some ways, like an art house version of The Devil Wears Prada (2006) or How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008) except that rather than presenting the desire to prostitute oneself in order to get ahead in journalism as something a) natural and b) easily walked away from with few consequences, High Art presents it as profoundly soul destroying and incredibly costly.
I’m also pretty sure that a lot of other critics took this to be a fairly straight-forward tragic LGBT love story.
Demonlover (2002) – Back from the Primitive
I recently re-read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) for the first time since taking up criticism as an activity. I originally read the novella as a very straight-forward conceptual breakthrough story in which a Victorian comes to realise the literally horrifying nature of existence. However, upon further reflection it strikes me that, while sticking to this interpretation of the novella, there are three possible insights to take away from the book :
- Firstly, that existence outside of the confines of civilisation is horrific. Under this interpretation, the desiccated world of doilies, influential aunts and ancient men we see in the opening section of the novella are a price we have to pay in order to protect ourselves and escape from the Horror of the Hobbesian state of nature.
- Secondly, that existence is whatever humanity makes of it. Rather than building a new world or exporting the values of the European elites, colonialism has in fact opened the way for the rapaciously greedy to create a sort of hell on Earth. A hell in which a man’s capacity to kill elephants and enslave the local population makes him a great man. When Kurtz dies, he groans not for the horror in the world, but the horror he and his imitators have unleashed.
- Thirdly, that Kurtz’s groans are a moment of conceptual break-through. Under this view, humanity is trapped between the anguish and misery of being and the terrifying nothingness of non-being. Whether a Dutch merchant or a Congolese fisherman, the dilemma is the same even if we do not necessarily realise it. Kurtz, by venturing far outside the confines of his native culture, has realised the truth about existence. A truth that horrifies him even as he dies.
These three different interpretations represent different solutions to the question of why existence is so horrifying : Is existence tainted by our actions? Is it something that is present in the world but escaped from thanks to civilisation? Or is it something that permeates all of existence, but which we only catch a glimpse of from time to time when we are paying attention?
Critically panned at the time of its release, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002) is an attempt to provide an answer to this question by considering not only the ways in which humans treat each other but also the ways in which human civilisation deals with the savage nature of existence through its media and its institutions.
Don’t Let The Wrong One In : Re-inventing the Femme Fatale
*Please Note – This Piece is Full of Spoilers*
There are ideas that seem to be of a certain place and time. Call them icons, if you will. One of the most powerful icons of the early to mid twentieth century is the femme fatale. Born of a cultural climate where gender was not divorced from sex and where women were expected to be virginal and submissive, femme fatales rejected this essentialist vision of gender by being sexually aggressive, socially independent and more than willing to use their sexual wiles to render men subservient to their own desires and goals. Decades after the arrival of the contraceptive pill and miles down the road towards sexual equality, you could be forgiven for thinking that a society such as ours has outgrown the need for bold cinematic challenges to our understandings of gender. Indeed, nowadays the femme fatale seems like little more than an anachronism; as out of place in the modern world as a cockney spiv might be in pre-Credit Crunch London. However, even the most liberal of societies falls into lazy thought patterns, habits of conception that need to be re-examined lest they go stale, rot and become oppressive dogma. Swedish Vampire film Let The Right One In (2008) is a film that rides out not only against popular theories of gender, but also against the commonly held belief that children are innocent, pliable creatures who need to be protected from adults. It does so by rejuvenating and reinventing that most iconoclastic of icons, the femme fatale.
REVIEW : Socket (2007)
Videovista has my review of Sean Abley’s Socket. A film that is not only a work of indie SF, but also of indie gay cinema.
The film itself is not particularly interesting or worthy of note (much like Rocco DeVilliers Pure Race [1995], which I also reviewed) except when you consider how close the film came to being genuinely interesting and how spectacularly it failed. I am only linking to the review as I think that the failures in Socket point to a rather intriguing cultural battle going on at the heart of gay cinema at the moment. If you doubt this, bear in mind that Brockas’ last film Boy Culture (2006) was shown at the 2008 London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Which is a piece of programming on a par with screening Confessions of a Shopaholic at Cannes.
See also my recent review of Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie for a real piece of gay filmmaking.
REVIEW : Before I Forget (2007)
It is difficult for me to articulate quite why it is that I adore Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie (2007), or Before I Forget as it is known to English speakers. Ostensibly your typical French drama about middle class angst, alienation and spiritual decay, the film deals with an ageing gay man who looks back over his life with considerable bitterness as he considers all the things he lost and all the things he failed to gain. However, while filled with negativity about his own past, the central character Pierre (played by Nolot) is gripped by terror when he thinks about the future as his health dwindles, his sex drive sputters and his days come to be consumed by talk of money, food and how he will most likely die alone. There are hundreds of films that deal in exactly this kind of bourgeois malaise and many of them leave me completely cold. What makes Nolot’s films so special is that, unlike many dramas that aim for the universality of human emotions while achieving only the generic, Nolot’s films are specific. They carry the specificity that comes only from the autobiographical and it is the candour with which Nolot describes his life that makes his films so uncomfortable and yet so utterly compelling.
Kokoro
Videovista have My Review of Kon Ichikawa’s Kokoro (1955)
This weekend, I went to see an amateur production of the opera La Sonnambula by Vicenzo Bellini. Unlike Kokoro, the opera was terrible. The singing was bad, the acting was wooden, the set was ugly, the staging unimaginative and the entire thing was incapable of inspiring any emotion at all other than possibly pity or amusement.
You know you’re in trouble when the romantic leading man steps on stage and you can’t help but think that he would be better off playing a duplicitous junkie pimp.
However, I mention the opera as it really made me think about the process of direction. In Kokoro, the film lays out this intricate web of negative emotions involving alienation, guilt, grief and resentment. It goes on for an hour and a half making it abundantly clear that the central character is a miserable sod and, through flashbacks, it allows us glimpses into the man’s youth showing us why he was so miserable. However, with about half an hour to go, it became obvious that the film was ‘treading water’. As a melodrama, the film was making the kind of moves that lead to a grand reveal but no reveal was forthcoming. In a film so obviously well written and directed, this struck me as profoundly bizarre and so I set about reading between the lines and working out that, actually, the film is all about homosexuality.
But why did Ichikawa not make that plain? was it the actors refusing to be physical? was it a reflection of the source material (which is apparently just as coy)? or was the director himself uncomfortable bringing those kinds of themes to light in what was a very mainstream production?
Auteur Theory paints the director as a supremely powerful creative first mover. He makes the decisions, his decisions shape the film. But how does this idea sit with the fact that some productions might well be hampered by factors external to the director’s decision-making process? In that case should the director walk out or rightly take the blame for the entire thing? If the director can’t be blamed for those kinds of problems, then to what extent is he responsible at all?
Ruthless Culture 