by Jonathan M

Amer (2009) – Faceless Wordless Passion

In 1963, the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman concluded what has become known as the Trilogy of Faith.  Prior to this trilogy, many of Bergman’s films tended to revolve around questions of religion and faith as their characters struggled to find meaning in the meaningless void of life.  Paradoxically, the Trilogy of Faith marked a departure in Bergman’s filmmaking as it displayed an interest not in God but in people. In Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1962), Bergman explored the roots of religious faith and how that faith might be lost.  In The Silence (1963), Bergman examined a world characterised only by absence; absence of God, absence of faith and absence of speech.  As Bergman himself put it:

“These three films deal with reduction. Through a Glass Darkly – conquered certainty. Winter Light – penetrated certainty. The Silence – God’s silence – the negative imprint. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy.”

What Bergman found when he stripped away God and faith was a world of passion and turmoil, a world in which nobody speaks but everyone yearns.  The Silence is a remarkable film in that it manages to be both intensely psychological and almost entirely free of dialogue. Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Amer marks a return to Bergman’s silent realm of desire, passion, alienation and horror.

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by Jonathan M

Final Destination 5 (2011) – The Last Laugh is On Us

The literary critic Paul Bleton argues that the difference between genre and non-genre pieces is that genre pieces have a structure resembling that of a string of pearls.  What Bleton means is that genre (whether erotic, sensational or criminal) is all about big dramatic set pieces.  These dazzling moments of spectacle attract the eyes, stimulate the brain and distract you from the fact that the plots and characters they involve frequently serve no purpose other than to tie the set-pieces together into something broadly resembling a story.

Interesting though it may be, Bleton’s conception of genre is now seriously out of date.  Firstly, a generation of writers and directors with interests in character and subtext have worked at reclaiming genre devices so as to blur the distinction between pearl and string.  Secondly, a generation of directors including Michael Bay (Transformers), Gore Verbinsky (Pirates of the Caribbean), and Mark Neveldene and Brian Taylor (Crank) have stripped away the fig leaf of plot and character to produce films that are nothing more than series of set-pieces held together by implication and the fact that they are packaged and sold as a single artistic unit.

With the difference between genre and non-genre under continuous assault on multiple sides, there is something pure and elegant in a film that is unapologetic in its string of pearls-like structure.  The Final Destination series has never been anything other than a series of lavish set-pieces held together by weak plots and terrible characters but in that terrible predictability lies real profundity.

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by Jonathan M

Gone Walkin’

 

As of tomorrow I am spending seven days walking the length of Hadrian’s Wall…  Eighty four miles from Tynemouth to Bowness-on-Solway. I don’t think that I will be in email contact during that time and I’m pretty damn sure that I won’t be able to write about films.  So enjoy your break from my unbridled intellectual productivity and think of me marching through the Great Green Bleakness that is the British countryside. And yes… those are my feet.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Attenberg (2010)

FilmJuice have my review of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg.

Much like last year’s Dogtooth (whose director both produced and acted in this film), Attenberg is an account of young people struggling to escape the surreal worlds constructed by their parents. The parent in question is an unnamed engineer who produced factories and housing estates so soul-crushingly mundane, it is hardly surprising that he dragged his daughter into a weirdly skewed parallel world.  With the engineer now struggling against a terminal illness, his isolated only daughter is forced to grow up fast:

Much like Dogtooth, Attenberg is ultimately a film about the transfer of power from one generation to the next.  Both films present the post-War Baby Boomers as a generation of addle-brained fantasists and control freaks. Flattered by decades of economic growth into an all-consuming sense of entitlement, the Baby Boomers nurtured a vision of the world that bore very little resemblance to reality.  As the post-War generation grows older and their children reach adulthood and middle-age, the Baby Boomers try their best to protect their vision of the world despite the terrible economic and psychological consequences of their delusions.

I was somewhat conflicted over Dogtooth but Attenberg, it seems to me, hits all of the same notes in far more resonant a fashion.  Singular and utterly entrancing.

by Jonathan M

Humpday (2009) – No Pretty, No Mercy

While I am happy to join the chorus of disapproval surrounding the state of British universities, I cannot help but feel that there was something inevitable about the current wave of cuts and restructurings.  The problem is that, while there has been a massive expansion in higher and post-graduate education, much of this expansion was founded on a lie, the lie that you can teach someone to be insightful. Universities are brilliant at immersing you in a subject and teaching you to produce papers that look like the sort of things that academics should produce, but they cannot teach you to look at a phenomenon and say something truly original.  You cannot teach originality because you cannot teach creativity and you cannot teach creativity because you cannot teach insight.  Nowhere are the products of this lie more obvious than in contemporary film.

As Peter Biskind points out in the excellent Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), people seldom attended film school in the 1970s.  Film schools existed but they held no status, carried no cachet and (most importantly) provided no guarantee whatsoever that any of their students would ever get to sit behind a camera and shout ‘Action’. Forty years later and film schools not only provide universities with a welcome source of income, they also provide the creative industries with a steady supply of competent individuals who are more than ready to step behind a camera and produce adverts, music videos and films on demand. Film schools train aspiring directors by helping them to deconstruct and replicate the techniques that made great films what they are. Because film schools are so popular and because they are so well attended, contemporary film boasts levels of technical sophistication that would humble the filmmakers of previous generations. Unfortunately, while film schools do a brilliant job of teaching people how to make a film, they cannot teach them how to make good and insightful art.  Because of this, the explosion of film school students has lead not to a generation of great directors but to a generation of skilled imitators.

In Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), David Bordwell masterfully deconstructs the techniques used in what he calls ‘Art-Cinema Narration’.  This form of narration involves the use of extended silences, gaps in narration and expressionistic visual composition that shed light on the characters’ inner states.  While these techniques may once have been radical and ‘difficult’, they are now as familiar to cinema-going audiences as the strictures of any populist genre.  Because these techniques are familiar, they can be adopted in order to lend a work an ‘art house sensibility’.  The textbook example of this sort of affection is Matthew Weiner’s period TV drama Mad Men.  As Daniel Mendelsohn points out in his piece in the New York Review of Books, Mad Men is effectively a soap opera.  However, because the series adopts many of the narrative tropes and techniques common to art house film, we assume that it is as intelligent and insightful as the art house films that pioneered these sorts of narrative techniques.  Because Mad Men’s plotlines are never resolved, we think the series is as smart as L’Avventura. Because Don Draper’s internal state is only ever alluded to in an elliptical fashion, we think the series is as smart as Last Year in Marienbad.  Films such as Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon (2009) and Mike Mills’ Beginners are also excellent examples of works that look intellectually substantial but in fact have very little to say. Clearly, techniques developed in order to help filmmakers shed light on a new set of issues are now used to evade the responsibilities of coherent thought and genuine insight. What was shocking is now familiar.  What was revolutionary is now consolatory. When technical expertise carries more weight than genuine insight mere competence becomes downright heroic.  Mumblecore is a cinematic movement that finds virtue  and strength in technical mediocrity.

Mumblecore films such as Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha (2005) and Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather (2010) are made on ultra-low budgets with minimal production values, largely non-professional actors and scripts that allow for a good deal of on-set improvisation.  Stripped of complex camera movements, lighting effects and art-house narrative techniques, Mumblecore films stress relationships over plot in such a way that the emotional and psychological meat of the film has no place to hide.  Mumblecore films are all about character and relationships and their power derives from a complete commitment to exploring these things in forensic detail. No handwaving. No distractions. No bullshit.  Lynn Shelton’s Humpday is brilliant in its unflinching commitment to the weakness and complexity of its characters.

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by Jonathan M

Chew… Stripp’d

Gestalt Mash have my latest column on John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew.

The comic uses two different devices to pursue its themes.  The first is that, following an outbreak of avian flu, the US government has made it illegal to raise and eat chickens.  However, because people still crave the flesh of the bird, an underworld of poultry-based speakeasies has emerged forcing the government to crack down on civil liberties.  The second device the comic uses is that its primary protagonist has a rare psychic power that allows him to learn about things by eating them.  The comic uses these two genre elements to investigate our increasingly problematic relationship with food and how we simply do not want to know how stuff arrive on our plates:

The uneasiness we feel about food is such that many of us have turned to superstition as a means of making sense of it.  Our money flows into the pockets of charlatans and quacks who claim that all of our problems arise from spurious allergies and a failure to eat like a caveman, a pharaoh or a 17th Century Italian peasant. Many of us even go so far as to define ourselves in terms of our dietary problems, broadcasting them to the world as though they were sources of empowerment. Nascent ethnicities birthed in diarrhoea and unsightly rashes. Tomorrow’s politicians will take pride in the words “Ich habe ein lactose intolerance”.

Chew is still appearing in monthly form and has, thus far, been collected in three trade paperbacks with a fourth due out soon.  Weird, grotesque, smart and occasionally very very funny, Chew provides a fascinating insight into our love-hate relationship with food.

by Jonathan M

Robinson in Ruins (2010) – Mould on a Dystopian Corpse

Back in the 1990s, the filmmaker and architectural scholar Patrick Keiller made a pair of films about Britain. As much video essays as they were documentary films, London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997) were concerted attempts to find the true spirit of Britain that had been buried by a decade and a half of Thatcherite rule.  Sensing that the wheels were coming off the Tory juggernaut and that a fresh start would soon be required, Keiller used the eccentric academic Robinson and a wryly-comic unnamed narrator to sift the wreckage in search of gold.  Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Keiller’s intrepid explorers, the project was a political failure: Britain, much like its capital city, was a place devoid of any truth that could not be measured in pounds, euros, dollars or units of industrial measurement.  London and Robinson in Space are films about the defeat of the romantic spirit and the absolute victory of neoliberalism.

Over a decade later, Keiller returns with Robinson in Ruins, an unexpected addendum to the Robinson duology.  With the narrator dead and Robinson gone, the narration has fallen to an equally unnamed female public sector worker (voiced by Vanessa Redgrave) who discovers Robinson’s footage and notes in an old caravan on a site destined for re-development. Made at the height of the credit crunch, when the towers of Capitalism tottered and nearly fell, Robinson in Ruins is far less pessimistic than either London or Robinson in Space.  Eerily apocalyptic and as visually arresting as all of Keiller’s work, Robinson in Ruins suggests that humanity’s salvation may lie in communion with non-human intelligences.

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by Jonathan M

Ooku: The Inner Chambers – Volume 6

Gestalt Mash have my review of the sixth volume of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Eisner and Tiptree award-winning manga series Ooku: The Inner Chambers.

My review features something of a reassessment of the series as I realise that, rather than looking it as a Feminist thought-experiment about an alternate feudal Japan in which the male population has been reduced by 75%, the series is best seen as a historical epic.  The term ‘historial epic’ is somewhat misleading in that it tends to summon images of fat fantasy novels with intricate plots that unravel over hundreds of years.  While Ooku’s plot may cover a number of generations, the plot is very much anchored to the waxing and waning of historical forces.  There is no grand narrative at work here, just the ceaseless change of an aging ruling class and how the decisions they make change the country:

By stepping back from the lives of the individual characters and focusing instead upon the historical themes that emerge from the passage of the generations, we can see that Yoshinaga is suggesting that history is above all a product of human passions. Yoshinaga’s characters are the twisted and broken products of a twisted and broken society and while their exalted positions allow them the power to shape and reshape society as they wish, there is the growing sense that Yoshinaga’s characters repeat the mistakes of the past because they simply cannot help it.  In Yoshinaga’s history, change happens more by chance than by design.

Needless to say, I am still very much enjoying this particular series and I hope that Viz Media continue to show their commitment to the series by publishing volume 7.

My previous posts on the series can be found at the following locations though I have also collected them under a single heading in this site’s menu bar:

by Jonathan M

Some Thoughts On… Project Nim (2011)

Last year, the French documentarian Nicolas Philibert produced Nenette (2010), a film that used footage of an orang-utan and recordings taken in a zoo to demonstrate the human tendency to project human emotions onto animals. Nenette also demonstrated that human speculations about the inner lives of apes tend to tell us a lot more about the humans than they do about the apes. James Marsh’s latest documentary Project Nim ploughs much the same furrow by exploring the attempt by a group of 1970s scientists to teach a chimp to sign.

Project Nim focuses upon the story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was removed from his mother and brought up by humans in an attempt to see if treating a chimp like a human might encourage him to think and communicate like one.   Initially, Nim is entrusted to the care of a wealthy hippy family whose laid-back approach to parenting results in Nim effectively taking control of the house.  Concerned that the chimp is getting what he wants through social dominance rather than by acquiring language skills, the project director Herbert S. Terrace removes Nim from his surrogate family and places him in the care of a group of specialised teachers.  While these teachers manage to imbue Nim with an incredibly rich vocabulary, the older Nim becomes, the harder it is to control him. When Nim bites his teacher’s face, Terrace decides to end the project and place the chimp in a research facility where his life gets progressively worse.

The foreground of the documentary is devoted to a somewhat uneven engagement with the project’s ethical standards. Terrace is depicted as a shameless opportunist who uses both his students and Nim to build an academic career before cutting both adrift without a moment’s hesitation or regret.  While this foreground narrative produces a number of touching moments, it is fatally undermined by Marsh’s bizarre insistence upon reminding us that Nim is a wild animal who should not be thought of in human terms.  The result is a film that coaxes its audience into empathising with a chimp before slapping them down for doing precisely this.  Mercifully, the film’s background proves far more rewarding.

Stepping back from the details of Nim’s life, Project Nim does an absolutely brilliant job of conveying the weirdness of 1970s academic culture. For example, Nim’s original foster family included a woman who breast-fed Nim and then allowed the chimp to ‘explore her body’ as part of her informal personal research into the Oedipus complex. Predictably enough, once Nim is transferred to the care of a group of scientists, they follow the original foster mother in using Nim as a vehicle for their own desires and ambitions. One ambitious graduate student wrestled control of Nim’s education from the foster family as a means of acquiring Terrace’s attention, this lead to a brief affair that resulted in one dumped graduate student and one chimp deprived of a mother-figure. The more figures from Nim’s life the film introduces, the more obvious it becomes that while everyone was eager to do what was best for Nim, their assessments of what was ‘best’ usually depended upon what was convenient for them.  This is particularly obvious in the case of Terrace whose termination of the project results in Nim being sold for medical research.  His charge cast into the outer darkness, Terrace promptly produced a book in which he argues that Nim was nothing more than a hugely accomplished beggar who never really understood the language he was using. Unsurprisingly, the humans who come across as most sympathetic are the ones whose visions of Nim emphasise his human characteristics.  Particularly sympathetic is the Dead Head primate handler who treats Nim as just another pot-smoking fellow traveller.

The fact that our sympathies tend to lie with those who treat Nim like a person rather than an animal says a lot about our own empathic tendencies and the film’s capacity for inviting us to fall into the same trap as Nim’s original handlers.  However, as clever as this manipulation may be, the film’s refusal to engage with empathic projection head-on results in frustratingly lightweight fare. Yes, we extend empathy to a chimp because the chimp behaves like a human but so what? What does this say about us? What does it mean for our relationships to animals as a whole? Are we wrong to treat animals as humans or are those who treat chimps like animals unethical monsters? Project Nim tries to address some of these questions without getting bogged down in the sort of heavy philosophical speculation that might alienate audiences but by raising questions in such an oblique fashion and then failing to develop them in any meaningful way, Project Nim only manages to remind us of quite how much can be achieved with footage of an orang-utan and the sound of zoo visitors wildly projecting their own worries onto the indifferent figure of an ape.

by Jonathan M

BG42 – Infamous 2: Mindless Fun and the Basis for Aesthetic Judgement

Futurismic have my latest Blasphemous Geometries column.

This column is probably best seen as an exercise in consolidation as it tries to tie together some of my more recent critical obsessions.  I begin with not one but two reviews of the recent sandbox game Infamous 2 (2011).  One review praises the game’s thoughtfulness and its addictive qualities while the other uses that addictiveness as the basis for an accusation that the game is manipulative and dishonest.  My drilling down into the question of whether ‘manipulation’ and ‘addictiveness’ are necessarily bad things, I am trying to make sense both of the process of aesthetic judgement (i.e. how we decide what we like and what we hate) and the way in which our culture praises some forms of emotional manipulation whilst demonising others.  I’m not sure that I reach any firm conclusions and the column does revisit some ground I have already tended but it may well be of interest to the people who were horrified by my recent defence of Michael Bay:

Works that ground their appeal in quirks of human neural architecture challenge the view that humans are self-contained and perfectly rational beings. By playing on deep-seated fears and weird cognitive biases, these works cast doubts upon all of our thoughts and feelings. After all, if Michael Bay can manipulate our brains into caring about fictional giant robots, what does this say about the people we really do care about? Is love nothing but a squirt of chemicals? Is religious transcendence but an electrical fluke? The true crime of mindless fun is not that it is stupid or that it is politically reactionary, but that it reminds us that we are nothing more than an arrangement of neural circuits and chemical ejaculations that happen to produce this thing we call consciousness.

It seems to me that, a lot of the time, aesthetic judgements are nothing more than elaborate displays of identification.  When we proclaim our love for such-and-such an author and such-and-such a work we are not just expressing our opinions, we are also trying to identify ourselves with the values and social symbols that surround that particular author or work. “I love Glee!” also means “I wish to be seen and judged as a person who likes Glee!”