Category / British Film

by Jonathan M

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2009) – Aaah… but is it art?

Walking around your town, prison yard or agricultural commune, you may have noticed strange stickers clinging to lampposts or the sides of buildings.  You may have noticed them in several places and then been surprised when you kept seeing them again.  These strange images  – like Shepard Fairey’s “Andre The Giant Has A Posse” sticker campaign and Invader’s Space Invader-inspired “Invader” mosaics – are examples of Street Art.  An underground art movement whose chief accomplishment seems to have been to prompt millions of bemused passers by to snort dismissively and ask ‘what’s the point of that then?’  But of course, this is an entirely legitimate question.

At a time when artists garner more critical attention by cutting up dead animals and sticking elephant dung to canvases, questions surrounding the purpose of art and the dividing line between the artistic and the non-artistic have never been more pressing : Is it supposed to be decorative?  Is it supposed to make us think?  Is it supposed to shock us?  Are traditional art forms more useful than these modern forms?  Is it supposed to make us ask questions like these?

The problem in part is that there is no clear frame of reference that allows us to begin answering these questions and even if there were, artists would go out of their way to deconstruct it : Art is decorative.  Art is inspiring.  Art is beautiful.  Art is meaningful :  Fail.  Fail.  Fail.  Fail.

Street Art’s reliance upon mass production and recycled imagery makes it particularly prone to these kinds of questions.  In fact, these kinds of questions seem to be the motivating force behind Banksy’s documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop (2009), but as we shall see it is not only stickers on walls that invite these kinds of questions as once you start asking them, it is difficult to stop.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Exhibit A (2007)

Videovista have my review of Dom Rotheroe’s British family drama Exhibit A.

Exhibit A is the kind of film that, at a stroke, entirely justifies all the hours I have spent watching and reviewing straight-to-DVD releases.  It is an intensely real and emotionally harrowing exploration of a family in crisis with some lovely performances and a script that is tighter than a duck’s arse.  However, what really makes Exhibit A and exceptional film is the fact that it uses the increasingly elderly saw of pretending to be found footage shot using a camcorder, but applies it to mundane events rather than supernatural ones.  If a bit of jerky camera-work and a few glitches are enough to make a crushingly formulaic monster film like Cloverfield appear special, imagine the effect those quirks might have on a well constructed family drama.  A joy.

by Jonathan M

Solomon Kane (2009) – There is No God but Man

John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982) is one of the most ferociously Godless films ever made.

In one early scene Conan discusses theology with his companion Subotei the archer.  Conan speaks fondly of his warrior god Crom, stressing his power and roundly mocking his friend’s simple-minded animism (“Crom laughs at your four winds. Laughs from his mountain”).  Subotei listens politely to Conan’s tirade and then points out that Conan’s god may well be powerful but in order to wield his power from his mountain he must walk beneath the sky, thereby making himself subject to Subotei’s divine winds and sky.  This suggestion that organised religion is arguably inferior to a pantheistic respect for nature sets the tone for a script that relentlessly takes pot-shots at the idea of a divinely ordered universe.

Indeed, the film’s main bad guys are the leaders of an aggressively expanding snake cult.  A cult that reveals itself to be little more than a retirement home for ageing barbarian raiders.  Raiders who have figured out that, rather than riding around the landscape threatening people into giving up their goods, it is much easier to simply set up a temple and wait for people to surrender their money of their own accord.  Not content with suggesting organised religion is nothing but a rogue’s retirement fund, Conan the Barbarian also goes out of its way to mock the icons of real world religions.  For example, we have the infamous scene in which Conan is crucified on the Tree of Woe.  But rather than allowing himself to die and for god to resurrect him like Jesus or Aslan, Conan refuses to accept his fate and so he eats a vulture and then gets his friends to make a pact with dark forces in order to bring him back from the dead.  Similarly, the ‘Riddle of Steel’ comes across as a mockery of a Zen koan as not only is there an answer but the answer is that the source of all power in the world is not steel or magic or the gods but humanity.

Even when Conan does pray to Crom he admits that he has no tongue for it and his prayer is less an act of supplication or veneration but a threat and an ultimatum : Grant me victory or to hell with you!  Of course, Conan is granted his revenge but Crom’s presence is conspicuously absent from the battle.  Crom, much like all non-existent deities, is evidently the kind of god who helps those who help themselves.

This sense of godlessness is arguably also present in the source material for Conan the Barbarian, the writings of Robert E. Howard and so it is delightful to see the same muscular atheism appear in a film featuring another of Howard’s creations : Solomon Kane.  Michael J. Bassett’s Solomon Kane addresses the issue of God’s apparent absence head-on by asking whether, in a world where God does not exist but the Devil clearly does, is it ever possible for humanity to achieve redemption?

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by Jonathan M

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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by Jonathan M

Fish Tank (2009) – The Ambiguities of Age

Art is a conceit and cinema doubly so.   For all the demands for greater realism and protestations that one is producing cinema verite, the director can never hope to capture reality itself on film.  If a director is holding up a mirror to the real world with the help of actors, camera crews and sound technicians then the distortions are so great that, in a sense, the director might as well be making a super hero film for all the truth that he has managed to capture on film.  The very artificiality of artistic endeavour means that it is forever on an ontologically slippery slope.  Indeed, consider the evolution of forms of story-telling such as the three act structure or the buildungsroman.  These evolved in order to communicate certain kinds of truths but all too often the demands of the form come to dominate to desire to communicate truth.  Real life seldom fits into a three act structure.  What started off as abstraction from reality quickly becomes obfuscation of it as the cinema begins to create its own fictional worlds.  Simplified parodies of the real world.  Childish facsimiles in which the good guys always win and the cute couple always wind up together.  These forms can then solidify into genres, traditions of stories that follow the same rules or which evolve with the rules in mind.  The original truths behind the rules and the forms long since ignored and abandoned.

Because of this tendency to confuse the cause with the effect, discerning audiences have come to value ambiguity in their stories.  Ambiguity that fills a space normally reserved for boldly fraudulent declarations of how the world works.  Ferocious defences of the natural order of purely literary universes.  This deliberate ambiguity is seen as a sign of intelligence as it is a reminder that there is a universe outside of the artistic, the traditional and the conceptual.  A universe more complex and more intriguing than could ever be captured by a single piece of art.

Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank is a film that has internalised this understanding of the nature of art.  Ostensibly a formulaic coming-of-age/loss-of-innocence story, its strength comes from a willingness to explore not only the ambiguities within the characters, but also within our perceptions of those characters.

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by Jonathan M

Films of the Year : Not Quite the 2009 Edition

I have decided to split my favourite films into two distinct groups.  The first group is a list of the films that I have particularly enjoyed this year but which were not made or released this year.  It is a longer list than the other and because it is more a reflection of what I have seen than anything else, it will have a touch less impact.  However, for those interested, here are some of my favourite films of the year.

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by Jonathan M

Rage (2009) – The Future of Reality is Reality TV

Cinema tends to ask only a narrow spectrum of questions.  Questions inspired mostly by writers who themselves are concerned only with asking a narrow spectrum of questions : Who are we?  What is happiness?  What is freedom?  But comparatively few films seek to answer the question of how we (as a species, as a culture and/or as individuals) should deal with the future.  Even works of cinematic science fiction tend to shy away from these kinds of questions.

One book that has attempted to answer this question only to produce an intriguingly ambiguous answer is Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular (2007).  The book deals with humanity’s attempts to come to terms with not one but three separate Singularites.  The Singularity that dominates the bulk of the text allows all humans to not only communicate with all other humans, but also to see what they see.  For some, this has resulted in fame and fortune as their lives are interesting enough to result in corporate sponsorship and syndication.  Rucker presents the technology as incredibly cool and almost spiritual in its capacity for breaking down the barriers between human consciousnesses.  But this does not mean that he shies away from the down-side to this degree of interactivity and access.  For example, when a couple are attempting to consumate the physical attraction that has been brewing between them, they suddenly find themselves aware of their friends watching them.  This instantly places them on a different footing.  They are not merely living their lives, they are performing for an audience.  In Rucker’s world, everyone is potentially in the public eye and most people act accordingly.  In effect, humanity is plunged into a state of what Sartre called Being-For-Others.

But this is all science fiction right?  Couldn’t really happen.

Sally Potter’s Rage suggests that this is happening already.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Shank (2009)

Videovista have my review of Simon Pearce’s Shank, a gay indie film that attempts to challenge the tendency of these films to be all about smug middle class people.  The film makes some interesting moves and has some rather strange sexual politics floating about in it but none of these possibilities ever materialise into anything concrete, leaving a lot of potential and very little substance.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Heathen (2009)

THE ZONE has my review of Ross Shepherd’s no-budget psychological thriller Heathen.

It’s a very nicely directed little British film with an interestingly against-the-grain central performance but it is ultimately let down by a weak script that unravels in the final act.  Still, it’s impressive quite how much can be accomplished for no money at all.