Category / British Film

by Jonathan M

Cinematic Vocabulary – The Opening to Went the Day Well? (1942)

In my recent piece about Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog (2008) I discussed the difficulty of attaining genuine cinematic realism.  But this makes a number of largely unwarranted assumptions about realism as a concept.

It assumes that there is a difference between something being factually correct and something being realistic.  Johnny Mad Dog might well express true stories about what it is like to be a child-soldier but this does not necessarily mean that it is ‘realistic’.  In fact, in my piece, I chide Sauvaire for allowing an editorial tendency to creep into the film.  I reasoned that because the world does not contain neat little truths, any attempt to present a cinematic audience with neat truths is unrealistic.  This suggests that realism is an entirely different formal quality than factual accuracy.  It assumes that ‘realism’ also carries with it certain aesthetic demands and formal demands.  This is, to put it bluntly, an idiosyncratic view.  It presents realism as an aesthetic and moral ideal that can be aspired to but almost never achieved :  Art, being artificial, is necessarily in some sense false.

For this piece, I have decided to look at the issue of realism from an entirely different perspective.  To present it not as an ideal but rather as an affectation, a stylistic quirk.  A quality that has only a tangential relationship with factual truth and almost no relationship whatsoever with the moral imperative to speak the truth and present the world as it really is.

What better place to start then, than with propaganda?  Art that is conceived precisely not as a means of telling the truth, but rather as a means of convincing people that a false vision of the world is in fact correct.  One way in which propaganda can be made more believable is if it chimes in some sense with the world-view of the people it is aimed at.  Propaganda films are works that are false but have that ring of truth.  They rely upon that ring of truth to be effective.

One of the best examples of this kind of film-making (along with 1942’s In Which We Serve by Lean and Coward) is Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went The Day Well? An absurdly fantastical every-day tale of valiant little Englanders banding together to fight off a cohort of brutish Nazi paratroopers dressed as British soldiers.

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by Jonathan M

The Reckoning (2003) – Who Narrates The Narrators?

In the introduction to his The Function of Criticism (1984), Terry Eagleton writes :

“criticism today lacks all substantive social function.  It is either part of the public relations branch of the literary industry, or a matter wholly internal to the academies.”

The problem, according to Eagleton, is that criticism is only of social use when there is a robust public sphere.  A public sphere, according to Habermas, is an intellectual void in between the sphere of public authority (dominated by the state and the law) and the private sphere (dominated by the exchange of commodities and the market).  In the sphere of public authority, the government and ruling elite speak with authority, determining values and the prominence of some ideas at the expense of others.  By contrast, in the private sphere, this kind of ordering is done according to the demands of commerce.  Criticism, according to Eagleton, currently lacks a social function, as the private sphere has come to dominate those matters that were previously considered to be exempt from the marketplace.  The role of the critic still exists, but he has no constituency and no natural subject matter.  An example of this kind of modern-day criticism can be seen in R. J. Cutler’s documentary about Vogue magazine The September Issue (2009).  Anna Wintour is a private sphere Doctor Johnson : She takes it upon herself to decide what will be ‘fashionable’ in a particular season and the commercial interests that make up the fashion industry abide by her judgement.  The same process exists in the sphere of public authority.  When a problem affects the state, the ruling class make a decision and the apparatus of the state then enacts that judgement.  While the members of the ruling class may be determined by democratic or aristocratic means and members of that elite may be more or less open to public opinion, the process is the same.  The people no more get a say in the day to day realities of how the state is run than they do in determining whether purple or mauve will be the fashionable colour to be seen in this autumn.  The process is just as autocratic as it was during the heyday of the 18th Century critic.  As Eagleton quotes, the criticism of the time was characterised by :

“its partisan bias, the vituperation, the dogmatism, the juridical tone, the air of omniscience and finality”

Of course, the importance of the three spheres varies significantly over time.  As I suggested in my review of Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1972), the moral corruption of the state, the ruling classes and the church, mean that a form of moral public sphere has opened up.  One in which rabble-rousing journalists compete with traditional intellectuals and people equipped with social networking tools to impart some kind of moral sentiment upon a supposedly individualistic and relativistic general public.  Paul McGuigan’s The Reckoning, a cruelly over-looked adaptation of Barry Unsworth’s 1995 Booker-nominated novel Morality Play portrays a similar shift in spheres of debate : A moment in history in which the church and the state began to surrender their moral authority to a burgeoning public sphere.

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by Jonathan M

The Offence (1972) – I am not your Godhead, I am just a Paedophile

I get the impression that for many, a trip to the cinema is a religious experience.  Note that I say ‘religious’ and not ‘mystical’. People commonly reach for transcendental terminology when groping for fresh panegyrics with which to adorn some film or another;  said film is not merely good, watching it is comparable to what a medieval peasant might have experienced upon visiting a cathedral or what a fakir might experience after twenty years crouching upon nails in the sub-continental wilderness.  This is not what I mean by religious experience.  What I mean instead is that people go to the cinema (or read a book) in order to have their moral compasses reset.  They go to see a romantic comedy in order to re-connect with what it is to be really in love.  They go to see Pixar’s Up (2009) in order to know what it means to grow old with someone.  They go to see a navel-gazing drama that deals in matters of identity and alienation in order to get some insight into who and what they are.  People use films in the same way as they once used the Sunday sermon : As a form of guidance.  Simple moral and psychological truths made accessible and easily digested along with pop-corn and diet Coke.  Is it then any wonder that we treat successful actors as living gods?  These people are not merely entertainers, they are the prophets of a secular age.  Our need to constantly tell stories about ourselves drives our desire to consume the stories of others.

Most films are happy to play their role in this relationship.  Modern romantic comedies have their relationship advice, Godard had his attempts at spreading Maoism and even nihilistic film-makers such as Noe are happy to sell their audiences on the horrors of existence, a belief which, in its own way, is no less consolatory than the more up-beat alternatives such as Sam Mendes’ bile-raising “sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it”.  However, some film-makers seem instinctively aware of their positions as moral teachers and reject the role.  Directors such as Hanneke and Von Trier assume accusatory and playfully obtuse attitudes towards their audience in order to avoid it.  Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, based upon the play This Story of Yours by John Hopkins is a film that seems to deconstruct this relationship, turning it into something unhealthy and disturbing.

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by Jonathan M

Creation (2009) – The Burden of the Mundane

One of the great tragedies of the cult of the director as author is the extent to which it failed to take root in television.  Even now, if you listen to commentary tracks for BBC DVDs you will find people talking about writers and producers.  Never directors.  In the world of television, directors are still seen in the way that they were in the wider cinematic world prior to the rise of the French New Wave : As a cadre of technical and logistical professionals whose creative impact is actually minimal.  Even television programmes that are ostensibly visual are frequently associated more with their presenters than their directors.  David Attenborough, for example, has made a career out of taking credit for the images captured by others.  Another such injustice is Jon Amiel’s direction of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986).  As director, Amiel transformed Potter’s ontologically complex blend of memory, reality and fantasy into a television series that was not only coherent but a classic.  Sadly, the two and a bit decades since The Singing Detective have not been kind to Amiel with his time having been spent on a number of instantly forgettable television adaptations and second rate genre films.  However, Creation, the story of Charles Darwin’s struggle to write On the Origin of Species (1859), marks a real return to form.  It is just unfortunate that only half the film works.

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by Jonathan M

Ballard before Cokliss, Cokliss before Ballard, Ballard before Cronenberg

I am currently researching a piece on the films of J. G. Ballard and I came across what appears to be a rather interesting cinematic feedback loop.  In 1996, David Cronenberg adapted Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash.  Crash was an expansion of the ideas contained in “Crash!”, one of the sections of Ballard’s splendidly disjointed modernist collection of condensed novels The Atrocity Exhibition (1969).

However, the line between “Crash!” (1969) and Crash (1996) is not that typical of most literary adaptations.  Traditionally, the progress of forms is from short story to novel and from novel to film.  However, in this case, the line is broken by a cinematic interloper.  In between the publication of The Atrocity Exhibition and the publication of Crash (1973), Ballard’s ideas found their way into a short film by Harley Cokliss.  Not only starring but also written and narrated by Ballard himself, Crash! (1971) is somewhere between a televised essay, a work of audiovisual art and a traditional short film.  It is also quite a distinctive work when compared to its literary precursor and successor.  Indeed, by looking at the changes between the different Crash pieces, it is possible to gain an insight into Ballard’s methodologies.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Red Riding : 1983 (2009)

The first two adaptations of David Peace’s novels have been characterised by a stylistic dualism.  Their foregrounds are both occupied by more of less convincing Crime tropes.  Searches for murderers, attempts to ferret out corrupt cops, investigations of conspiracies and doomed love stories.  However, the meat of these two films lay not in the foreground, but in the background.  Red Riding : 1974 and 1980 were films whose visuals spoke of an encroaching and slowly expanding evil.  An evil that slowly becomes systemic before taking on almost mythological proportions.  Visually the films gave us an image of the North as a Garden of Eden fallen into the worst kind of sin.  Red Riding : 1983 undoes a lot of that work by using words to fill in beautiful cracks and gaps left by powerful images.  Its obsession with salvation seems naïve and very much like a cop out.  However, the sheer banality of 1983’s evil has a power of its own.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Red Riding : 1980 (2009)

On the 8th of March, the West Yorkshire Police Force received a letter purporting to be from the Yorkshire Ripper :

Dear Sir

I am sorry I cannot give my name for obvious reasons. I am the Ripper. I’ve been dubbed a maniac by the Press but not by you, you call me clever and I am. You and your mates haven’t a clue that photo in the paper gave me fits and that bit about killing myself, no chance. I’ve got things to do. My purpose to rid the streets of them sluts. My one regret is that young lassie McDonald, did not know cause changed routine that night. Up to number 8 now you say 7 but remember Preston ’75, get about you know. You were right I travel a bit. You probably look for me in Sunderland, don’t bother, I am not daft, just posted letter there on one of my trips. Not a bad place compared with Chapeltown and Manningham and other places. Warn whores to keep off streets cause I feel it coming on again.

Sorry about young lassie.

Yours respectfully

Jack the Ripper

Might write again later I not sure last one really deserved it. Whores getting younger each time. Old slut next time I hope. Huddersfield never again, too small close call last one.

The letters and tapes that followed were a hoax that sent the struggling West Yorkshire investigation into a tailspin, convincing several senior police officers that the Ripper was from Sunderland.  One particular way in which the letter hindered the investigation was by claiming responsibility for a murder in Preston in 1975.  A murder, it turned out, the Yorkshire Ripper was not actually responsible for.  James Marsh’s Red Riding : 1980, based on a novel by David Peace, considers what might have happened if certainly nefarious elements within the West Yorkshire Police Force had put Wearside Jack’s error to use for their own ends.

If Red Riding : 1974 is a film about the first bite at the apple of original sin then Red Riding : 1980 is the ensuing gag reflex.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Red Riding : 1974 (2009)

When the Red Riding trilogy was screened on Channel Four earlier this year it came very close to making me regret an action I have come to think of as the great cultural emancipation.  Five years ago, I unplugged the aerial from my TV, I cut the wire at the wall and forever freed myself from the great cognitive heat sink that is television.  It was a close run thing.  I was this close to buying a set-top aerial.  A few months later with the DVD version now safely in my hands, I am still sure that I made the right decision as Red Riding : 1974 is a film that demands revisiting.

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by Jonathan M

The Trap, The Wire and The Loop : Individualism as a Political Force

Over the past week, I have been thinking about two particular works.  The first, is Armando Iannucci’s spectacular In The Loop (2009) and the most recent of Adam Curtis’ documentary series The Trap (2007).  Both works examine the social and political fall-out from Tony Blair and New Labour’s decade or so in power.  Both present us with a post-modern political landscape in which facts and values are not only seen as open to manipulation by people in power, but where facts and values are seen solely as expressions of personal preference.  Far from being a hyperbolic and polemical accusation or a satirical construct, this understanding of human cognition is shared by people on the left and the right and has come to dominate the political and conceptual landscape to the extent that it is almost impossible to think of an alternative to it.  However, some films, such as those of Paolo Sorrentino present a radically different vision of human cognition.  One in which rational self-interest serves as a mask for much deeper and darker passions.

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by Jonathan M

Polanski Week

While I try to move outside of my comfort zone in the films I choose to watch, sometimes I find myself in a place where only a certain kind of film will satisfy me.  At the moment, that type of film is the psychological thriller.  One of the masters of this particular genre is the Polish-French director Roman Polanski.  Holocaust survivor, husband to Sharon Tate (who was murdered by Charles Manson and his ‘Family’) and fugitive from justice, Polanski has made many powerful and disturbing films though perhaps none as disturbing as his Apartment Trilogy.

  • Repulsion (1965)
  • Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
  • The Tenant (1976)

In order to pay appropriate hommage to my current obsession, I have decided to turn Ruthless Culture over to the study of Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy for a period not exceeding one week.