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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

BG 20 – Images of Heroic Slavery

Futurismic have my 20th Blasphemous Geometries Column.

One of the reasons why my column has shifted to a more wide-angled approach is because, while I have played a number of games recently that I’ve enjoyed (NHL 10, for example, is superb, as is Patapon), none of them have really been meaty enough to support a column.  So, in search of greener critical pastures I’ve been playing more Big Action games than I normally would and I was struck by how utterly unsympathetic the characters all are.  This is something that also occurred to Charlie Brooker in his recent Gameswipe programme.  As a result, I decided to try and work out why it was that these characters were so profoundly unlikeable and I discovered certain similarities with the real world…

by Jonathan M

BG19 – Fear of a Transhuman Future : Zombies and Resident Evil

Futurismic have my nineteenth Blasphemous Geometries column.

It deals partly with the Resident Evil games but mostly with the evolution of the zombie genre.  Originally, I was planning a much more expansive piece that also took in the games Dead Space and Prototype – as they also have a rather reactionary attitude towards the shifting conceptions of identity found in transhumanism  – but I decided instead to focus my analysis a bit more.

by Jonathan M

BG 18 – The Iron Cage of Fantasy : World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Fable II

Futurismic have the 18th edition of my Blasphemous Geometries video game column.

It was an interesting column to write as it marks the first piece of sustained thinking I have done on the Fantasy genre in a little while.  I was pleased to note that while my politics seem to be drifting leftwards, my attitude towards escapism has mellowed hugely.  There was a time when I considered escapism to be a cowardly and childish retreat from the real world, but my views on it have changed markedly.

by Jonathan M

BG 17 – Red Faction : Guerilla

Futurismic have my Blasphemous Geometries column about Red Faction : Guerilla.

This piece was slightly wild.  I initially took as my inspiration Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces : A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), one of my favourite pieces of writing about music.  the first chapter of the book begins with a song-by-song and almost line-by-line examination of the music of the Sex Pistols and I was struck, as Marcus was, by the enduring power of the opening line of Anarchy in The UK : I am an Antichrist, I am an Anarchist.  That desire to destroy and reject everything struck me as central to a proper understanding of Red Faction : Guerilla.  But then I came up with the idea of the idea of a suicide bombing simulator and was amused by the similarities and I let that Idea simply carry me home.

by Jonathan M

Cinematic Vocabulary – Three Moments from Irma Vep (1996)

So far, Cinematic Vocabulary has focused upon isolated cinematic scenes.  The reason for this is that, while matters of style and technique impact upon entire films, it is frequently easier to isolate these aspects of a film by filtering out issues of narrative and characterisation that tend to function more on the level of entire films than on that of individual scenes.  However, as with atoms and tables, there is a point where the small things come together to form something recognisably large.  This column is about how a series of scenes can link up in order to form a part of a wider thematic arc.

A few months back, I wrote about Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002).  Intrigued by the cerebral and somewhat extreme piece of French film-making, I tracked down the best known of Assayas’ works, Irma Vep (1996).  Set behind the scenes of a fictional remake of Louis Feuillade’s silent era crime pulp Les Vampires (1915), Irma Vep casts Hong Kong martial arts veteran Maggie Cheung as herself playing the titular Irma Vep character.  Much like Truffaut’s Day for Night (1974), Irma Vep uses its film-within-a-film structure to comment upon the nature of film production in general and the health of the French film industry in particular.  The result is a hugely rewarding film filled both with touchingly funny moments of human frailty and insightful critiques of what French film has lost and where it should be heading.

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by Jonathan M

Cinematic Vocabulary – The Opening to This Man Must Die (1969)

As with most of the big names of the New Wave, Claude Chabrol began his cinematic career as a critic for the Cahiers du Cinema.  This critical career culminated with the release in 1957 of a book about the films of Alfred Hitchcock.  This attraction to Hitchcock’s style and subject matter followed Chabrol when he ‘crossed the aisle’ from criticism to film-making and his early output quickly earned him a reputation as the ‘French Hitchcock’ and the influences can also be seen in the film I am going to be writing about today.

Que La Bete Meure (1969) was adapted by a novel by the British poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis.  It is the story of a man who tries to avenge the death of his son by tracking down the man who ran him over.  After seducing the man’s sister-in-law and infiltrating himself into the killer’s family, the grieving father discovers that the family have no more love for the thuggish monster than he does.  The scene I want to talk about is the extraordinary opening sequence leading up to the death of the child and the father’s discovery of the body.

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by Jonathan M

BG 16 – Mirror’s Edge : The Emptiness of the Short-distance Runner

Futurismic have my 16th Blasphemous Geometries column.

As a piece, it is a lot closer in style to the kind of criticism I have been producing for this blog.  Hence the use of YouTube videos and a viewpoint that is a lot closer to the text of the game, rather than standing outside that text and using it to illustrate more abstract ideas.  I’m not sure if I’ll be sticking to this style for Blasphemous Geometries in future.  I’ve decided to focus on a game per column but quite how each game will take me is difficult to predict.

by Jonathan M

BG 15 – GTA IV : Exploring the Mundane

Futurismic have my fifteenth Blasphemous Geometries column.

It is not only the first of the columns to appear under the new direction the column has taken, it is also my first piece of video game criticism.  I had been looking forward to writing this piece for a little while and when I finally got round to writing it, I was surprised at how pleasant and natural an experience it was to play a game and think about it critically.  The more I played the more aware I became of where Grand Theft Auto IV fits into the history of game design.

Having filed the column it occured to me that I had left out one very obvious example of the mundane in video games… Shenmue.

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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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