by Jonathan M

The Hollow Men – Negative Space and Characterisation in Existentialist Fiction

There are times when our critical vocabulary is all too shallow.  There are times when our critical vocabulary becomes so deep as to be impenetrable.  There are also times when our critical vocabulary is reduced to the status of the mantra; sentences and judgments, once meaningful, loose their potency through endless repetition.  First they move from insight to cliché and then they move from cliché to mantra.  Endlessly repeated.  Endlessly meaningless.

One such mantra is the assessment that a writer is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at characterisation.  These sorts of evaluations pop up in all forms of criticism and yet they are seldom unpacked.  What makes a good character?  What makes a bad character?  When does a writer cross from one category to another?  What takes place when a writer fails to engage in ‘good’ characterisation?  Literary theory is frustratingly evasive on this question, all too often ‘good characterisation’ is defined in terms that offer little penetration and little insight beyond the obvious synonyms.  Consider, for example, the famous distinction drawn by E. M. Forster in his collection of lectures Aspects of the Novel (1927) :

The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it—life within the pages of a book.

So a ‘round’ character is convincing while a ‘flat’ character is not.  This advances us precious little.  What makes some characters more convincing than others?  Which techniques reliably produce rounded characters?

One place to find inspiration is the visual arts.  One of the most important concepts to the analysis of visual composition is the idea of negative space.  Negative space can be described as the space that exists around the foregrounded object, but it can also be quite a bit more.  Indeed, when an untrained photographer takes a picture of something, they tend to see everything that is not a part of that something as mere background.  However, by focussing solely on the object itself, unskilled artists will frequently produce a picture that seems somehow wrong.  Aesthetically imbalanced.  Strangely ugly.  Frequently, this is because of a lack of attention to the space surrounding the foregrounded object.  Indeed, in order to force their students to take negative space into account, composition teachers will frequently ask them to draw not the object itself but the space surrounding that object.  It is only by balancing the use of positive space with the use of negative space that elegant composition can be achieved.

This principle also applies to characterisation.

 

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by Jonathan M

A Different Style of Criticism

Erudition is conformity.  It is to read the ‘right books’ and write in the ‘correct manner’.  It is to be a good citizen.  It is to bend the knee in order to be anointed with the kiss of acceptance.

I write the way I write and I think the way I think because of the books I read, the films I watch, the podcasts I listen to and the people I look up to.  I am a part of a set of traditions; Cahiers du Cinema meets Science Fiction fandom meets analytical philosophy meets critical theory.  Because I am a part of these various traditions, I measure my improvement in terms of my asymptotic approach to their styles and values.  In this I am no different to anyone else whether you are seeking to publish short stories, climb the corporate ladder or find love.  We all bend the knee.

This is one reason why it is always a pleasure to encounter something that is both undeniably brilliant and completely detached from the intellectual traditions to which you aspire and belong.

 

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by Jonathan M

Mugabe and the White African (2009) – How to Poison Your Own Well

In the 1880s a man named Cecil Rhodes established the British South Africa Company. Created along the lines of the somewhat more famous British East India Company and backed by a private mercenary army known as the British South Africa Police, the BSAC cut a swathe through Southern Africa waging wars, acquiring land and playing various local kingdoms and principalities off against each other.  By the end of the 1880s, the BSAC had received a royal charter and their lands lost their original political identities in favour of the name of Rhodesia.  For over seventy years, the British South Africa company oversaw the economic exploitation and development of the lands through a collection of White land and business owners.  Eventually, in 1965, Southern Rhodesia declared its independence.  This, as far as many white Zimbabwean land-owners are concerned, is when the rot set in.

Mike Campbell purchased the Mount Carmel estate in 1974.  He did so under the white-minority government of Ian Smith but when Smith’s regime collapsed and the country changed its name to Zimbabwe Rhodesia under a black government.  While many white land-owners left the country, either for Apartheid-era South Africa or ‘Home’ to Britain, Campbell stayed to work his land.  He had no problems with the government.  No problems until 2000 when the government of Robert Mugabe launched a programme of land seizures whereby the land of Zimbabwe would be returned to Black Zimbabweans who had long been disenfranchised first by the colonial rule of the BSAC, then by the rule of Ian Smith’s White-minority government and then by the inequalities of a capitalist system which, despite de-colonisation, left much of Zimbabwe in the hands of a few rich land owners.

Like many of the White land-owners who stayed on after de-colonisation, Mike Campbell was the victim of government intimidation and violence as one by one the old land-owners were forced off their land and the land was turned over to government cronies whose lack of interest in running the farms at all let alone for the common good has resulted in wide-spread famine and the economic collapse of what was once one of Africa’s most prosperous countries.  Where other land-owners sold below market rates and ran, Mike Campbell stood his ground.  He stood his ground by taking his case to the Zimbabwean supreme court and when that failed he took it to a South African Development Community tribunal in the hope of forcing the Mugabe government to respect his property rights over the Mount Carmel estate.

 

There is a fascinating political documentary to be made out of this struggle.  What is so fascinating about Campbell’s case is that it seems to serve as a microcosm for many of the moral and political issues surrounding the West’s relationship with its former colonies.  Indeed, should a government ignore property rights in order to redress an old economic injustice?  When that old injustice was motivated largely by a racist mindset, is it acceptable for a government to adopt a similarly racist mindset in order to redress the moral balance and undo the harms of the past?  If this sort of redressing of the moral and economic balance is morally acceptable, then can a government’s ends justify their means and are they compelled to obey bodies of international law when those laws protect the status quo?  Many political questions can be asked of Mike Campbell’s court case but Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson’s documentary Mugabe and the White African is not interested in asking them.

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – We Are What We Are (2010)

THE ZONE have my review of Jorge Michel Grau’s recent art house cannibal film We Are What We Are (a.k.a. Somos Lo Que Hay).

Though undeniably atmospheric and full of potential, the film never quite manages to get its ducks in a row.  Instead of developing a coherent line of thought, the film flirts with various ideas.  Cannibalism as a relationship with one’s family.  Cannibalism as living a GLBT lifestyle.  Cannibalism as living in a state with a corrupt police force.  All of these ideas drift through the script and the film’s imagery but none of them are ever fleshed out or pursued.

Watching the film I was reminded of the post-’68 vendetta waged by the Cahiers du Cinema against Costa-Gavras’ film Z (1969).  In her flawed but punchy history of the Cahiers, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema(2010), Emilie Bickerton characterises the Cahiers reaction to the Serie-Z as :

With Z you had a film-maker who was addressing politics on the surface, but simultaneously banalizing it.  Costa-Gavras was thus perfectly attuned to the changes in public demand: he offered a film that was shot with panache, a lively score, a hint of experimentation (…) it was intelligent and committed but never revolutionary, in either narrative content or aesthetic form. — pp. 65

I think a similar failing can be identified in We Are What We Are.  It is a film that relies quite heavily upon an audience’s familiarity with genre tropes.  To make sense of the film, you have to be aware of serial killer narratives, zombie narratives and crime narratives.  It presents itself as a film that has taken on the ideas and imagery of genre only to project them forward into a more ‘grown up’ cinematic milieu and so it appeals to people who, though familiar with genre tropes, are wanting more from their cinematic experiences than explosions and special effects.  However, despite promising a deeper level of intellectual engagement than your average genre piece, We Are What We Are is empty and insubstantial.

This is a growing problem.

by Jonathan M

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) – The Tragic Decay of Language into Mere Words

Much has been written, not least by me, about the best way to approach the films of the Thai New Wave director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.  Most responses seem to fall into one of three categories :

 

The first is made up of rejectionist accusations of wilful obscurantism.  The second is composed of equally ill-judged, but somewhat more charitable, suggestions that his films contain a profound political and/or spiritual message that we are unable to decode because we lack a sufficient knowledge of Thai culture.  Both of these views are attempts to articulate a sense of frustration with the fact that, despite his obvious technical and artistic skill, Weerasethakul is somehow failing to communicate his ideas in a way that makes them accessible to anyone who is not him.  This sense of frustration has also resulted in the emergence of a rather more drastic category of reaction.

The third category is best summed up by the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s assertion that we suffer from “a lack of analytical context in which to place this material”.  Indeed, my own reaction to Weerasethakul’s work is that his films are both so obviously brilliant and so utterly incomprehensible that we need to develop an entirely new critical language in which to discuss his work.  A language focused not upon ‘narrative’ and ‘character’ but upon mood and atmosphere, the careful layering of images, colours and sounds to evoke emotional responses.  Under this view, Weerasethakul is effectively bypassing our traditional analytical tools and the tricks of cognition we use to make sense of cinema (and the world) in order to plug directly into our brains.

 

Weerasethakul’s latest film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (a.k.a. Loong Boonmee Raleuk Chat) constitutes a serious challenge to this third approach to the director’s work.  It is a film that revisits many of the director’s favoured themes and images but places them into a much more traditionally cinematic framework.  Far from operating on the level of pure sensation, unadorned by critical analysis, Uncle Boonmee is a film littered with genre tropes and familiar ideas.  Ideas that not only make the work much easier to understand, but actually prompt us to revisit many of the director’s earlier works and ask whether — despite this year’s Palme D’Or at Cannes — something has not been lost along the way.  Something beautiful and mysterious.

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Death of a Son (1989)

Do you remember the days before reality TV?  Do you remember the days before make-over shows?  Do you remember the days when British terrestrial TV used to commission one-off plays?

I bet you don’t.  Not really.

Ross Devenish’s Death of a Son is a powerful reminder of why it is that all of those British TV drama strands gradually died off.  It features one well-known actress (Lynn Redgrave) and a script that combines bone-crunching worthiness with grinding sentimentality and a complete lack of intelligence.  It is awful.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Gymnast (2006)

Does a ‘beautiful’ film necessarily have to have amazing cinematography?

Despite really rather pedestrian lensing, Ned Farr’s The Gymnast is beautiful film.  Filled with well-thought out visual motifs and built around a series of stunning pieces of aerial performance art, the film not only calls into question traditional conceptions of beauty but also traditional models of self-actualisation.  Is being honest with yourself and the people around you really all that is needed in order to be happy?  This film about a lesbian coming out of the closet late in life suggests that some outings are more equal than others.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Fallen Sparrow (1943)

“To shoot people, sweetheart!”

And with those words… my heart soared with joy.

Richard Wallace’s The Fallen Sparrow is very much an overlooked gem.  One of a series of novels by Dorothy B. Hughes that were adapted for the screen during the hey-day of the film noir, The Fallen Sparrow is a demented psychological thriller in which a tortured veteran of the Spanish Civil War cuts a swathe through New York high society as he attempts to solve the (possible) murder of the man who helped him escape the clutches of the Gestapo.  As the veteran moves from reconnecting with his old friends and into a world of sinister academics and crusading noblemen, the lines between reality and delusion blur and then finally disappear.  Boasting a fantastic script and some rather surprising performances, The Fallen Sparrow deserves its place in cinema history.

Videovista have my review.

by Jonathan M

Robinson in Space (1997) – Ghosts of Albion plc

The ending of Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) saw the fictional academic Robinson and his loyal but un-named narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) drowning in a sea of absence.  Having criss-crossed the city of London in a desperate search for its hidden nature, the pair eventually collapse.  Exhausted, deflated and defeated.  London, they announce, is a city without essence.  Devoid of any underlying meaning or fundamental essence, Britain’s capital is a hermeneutic desert.  A space in which no meaning can grow and into which visitors are forced to carry any truths they may need in order to keep themselves alive.

Robinson in Space marks the return of London’s intrepid duo.  This time the pair are hired by an un-named international advertising agency to produce a similar report on the unspecified ‘problem of England’.  However, despite travelling further and further across the country, Robinson’s initial romanticism about England proves to be just as deluded as his romanticism about London.  Indeed, neither an enchanted kingdom full of art and fellowship nor a gothic landscape full of dread and oppression, England reveals itself as a land of facts.  Tedious, maddening, preposterous facts.

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by Jonathan M

London (1994) – Squabbling Hegemonies

It is difficult enough to try and capture the meaning of a book or a film, but how about attempting to distill the essence of a particular time or a particular place?  How about an entire city?  Travel writing is an attempt to do exactly this.  To take the experience of a particular place at a particular time and distill it down into the collection of sounds and symbols that make up the written word.  Thought of in these terms, the task seems onerous. After all… books are creatures of words.  Even films are beings of language once you bear in mind their scripts, their budget meetings and the attempts by directors to tell actors and technicians alike exactly what they want from a particular scene.  To write about the meaning of words is one thing but to write about something bigger than language is another.  Something like the city of London.

Patrick Keiller’s London is a combination of documentary film and extended essay.  Its un-named narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) tells of his cross-London walks and expeditions in the company of a quixotic academic known only as Robinson.  Robinson has a very particular vision of London.  A vision he desperately wants to be true, and if it cannot be true then it must be about to come true.  But as the pair cross and re-cross the city of London along with its suburbs, financial districts, parks and run-down estates, it soon becomes clear that London will not conform to any single vision and that this refusal to conform is the very essence of the Mother of All Cities.

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