by Jonathan M

La Nina Santa (2004) – Hotel or Hospital? Architecture as Sex

In the 1960s and 70s a revolution took place not only in the teaching of history but also the understanding of history.  Historians argued that, instead of being seen as a succession of battles, beheadings, royals and revolutions, history could also be examined through the lens of sociology, linguistics and cultural theory.  This shift of emphasis away from political elites and towards normal people allowed social historians to consider the role played in the development of society and culture by groups that had previously been invisible to historians.  Groups who were kept out of mainstream politics but who nevertheless had an impact upon society because they were a part of that society.  This not only opened up whole new areas of historical research, it also shed new light upon some old problems.  Problems such as determining who had power and why decisions were made.

Social history’s new perspectives on old problems lead to what may be referred to as a semantic thickening of traditional political concepts such as ‘authority’ and ‘power’ as, for example, a queen may be seen as powerless if one measures power in terms of constitutional legitimacy and military might but extremely powerful if it is revealed that her husband runs all of his ideas past her before discussing them with his ministers.

This semantic tension between different forms of political power is one that is central to the work of the Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel.  In her 2008 film La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman), Martel showed how a middle class woman can be robbed of all power and agency by male relatives acting in what they perceive to be accordance with her wishes and interests.  Martel’s previous film La Nina Santa (The Holy Girl) considers the same set of intra-sexual conflicts but in a much more oblique fashion.  In fact, if La Nina Santa presents the battle of the sexes as a competition for the soul of an old building.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Left Bank (2008)

Videovista have my review of Van Hees’ wonderfully unpleasant Horror film Left Bank.

Left Bank is reminiscent of films like Irreversible and Cruising in so far as it manages to engage with a set of unpalatable attitudes in a critical way despite embodying those attitudes in the cinematography of the film.  In Cruising, the attitude in question was homophobia, in Left Bank it is misogyny.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)

Videovista have my review of Dario Argento’s rather splendidly weird The Stendhal Syndrome.

Oddly enough, despite being a fan of Horror and a fan of world cinema, I had never really encountered the films of Dario Argento before seeing this film.  I have seen films inspired by his works and gialli that tried to copy it but I had never actually experienced proper Argento before.  Needless to say, I loved it: A psychological thriller about a descent into madness that brilliantly doubles as a scathing critique of Italian attitudes to women.  Great stuff.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

Videovista have my review of F. Gary Gray’s genuinely lamentable Law Abiding Citizen.

I hated this film.  I hated it not because it is intensely stupid – some stupid films can be great fun – but because it is an intensely stupid film that tries to pretend that it is insightful and politically engaged.  This is the cinematic equivalent of the Tea Party : Fascistic chest-pounding and bellowing masquerading as debate.

by Jonathan M

BG 27 – Fantasies of Mere Competence : Football Manager 2010

Futurismic have my latest Blasphemous Geometries column.

It is a development of some of the idea expressed in this column from a few months ago but rather than looking at Fantasy as an avenue for escapism, I decided to look at the more modest and mundane ways in which people aspire and escape.  A trend embodied in TV programmes like Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and games like Football Manager 2010.

I’ve also decided to take a slightly different approach with next month’s column.  Recently, I have been using games as springboards to look at wider issues.  This is partly a result of my own game-laying experience of late which has seen me bouncing out of new games and returning again and again to games I have already written about like GTA IV, Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age.  However, I think that it would be good for me to keep my feet on the ground with regards to writing about games so I have decided that next month at least will herald a return to a closer examination of one particular game.

by Jonathan M

The Father Of My Children (2009) – Shoulda Used A Montage…

If you were to cast your eyes over some of the writings of Stephen Jay Gould you would find him picking a fight with the concept of Phyletic Gradualism.  Gradualism is the idea that species adapt gradually to their environment and that this rate of change is so slow and even that it does not really make sense to speak of there being real differences between ancestral species and descendent species.  Under Phyletic Gradualism, different species reflect our knowledge of the fossil record and not the realities of evolutionary history.  Gould argues instead for a model known as Punctuated Equilibrium.  A theory that posits that most species do not change at all and that when evolution does occur, it occurs rapidly and locally.  Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins have responded to Gould’s arguments by pointing out that nobody, not even Darwin, has ever subscribed to the model of Phyletic Gradualism Gould attacks in his popular writings.

As we see from Dawkins’ memes, the process of evolution is a neat metaphor for other forms of change.  Indeed, some thinkers have used the theory of punctuated equilibrium to explain how institutions react to change.  But the model could also be applied to individuals as a means of understanding the process of psychological change : People develop understandings of themselves and their surroundings and, over time, these understandings cease to apply.  So people allow their ideas to evolve.  They adapt their images of themselves and their ideas about the world to suit the new environment.  They adapt.  They evolve.

One of my favourite things to do when watching a drama is try to work out whether the writer is an emotional Phyletic Gradualist or a Punctuated Equilibrist : Does the drama present emotional change as a slow and gradual process or does it suggest that we exist in a state of emotional and psychological stasis until the levee breaks and we have to evolve in a hurry.  However, as with biologists, the best writers are those who do not allow themselves to be trapped by artificial dichotomies.  They allow for the idea that people change at different rates and in response to different forms of pressure.  They do not distort their characters’ psychologies in order to slot them neatly into a narrative.  Mia Hansen-Løve’s Le Pere De Mes Enfants is an example of this kind of drama.  It is a film that deals with drastic and sudden emotional change but rather than seeking to pin the process of evolution down to a question of Big Events or Epic Journeys, it contents itself with showing us a few moments along a path travelled at different rates by different people.  It also calls into question the vocabulary used by film-makers to communicate these rates of emotional change.

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by Jonathan M

Double Take (2009) – Fear and Loathing in Geosynchronous Orbit

Dig through the history of Horror and you will find, buried beneath the Vampires and the Werewolves, a more enduring monster.  A monster that fits uneasily on the cinema screen because his depiction requires no make-up or special effects.  A monster that looks exactly like you.  A monster which, in fact, is you.

From Poe’s “William Wilson” (1838) to Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1846) through to Kurosawa’s Doppelganger (2003), it is clear that one of the greatest fears humanity has is to wind up face-to-face with itself.  Terror is dealing someone who knows all of your secrets, who knows all of your bullshit, who knows what you are capable of… and who can do it too.  The doppelganger is a reminder that as much as humanity fears the Other, it fears the Self just as much.  Perhaps there is a reason for this.  Perhaps what we hate about the Other is what we hate about ourselves.  Perhaps all hatred and fear is externalised and projected self-loathing?  This idea has a nicely psychoanalytical feel to it.  You can imagine Uncle Sigmund whispering it in your ear as you cough up his fee and prepare for the long slouch back home.  Maybe it’s not them.  Maybe it’s you.  How far can we take this insight into our fears and terrors?

Johan Grimonprez’s documentary essay Double Take attempts to answer this question by using the doppelganger as a device for examining not only the politics of the Cold War but also the relationship between television and cinema.

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by Jonathan M

Black Snow (1990) – Points of the Existential Compass

One of the themes I keep returning to in my writings about film and literature is the tension that exists within us between the individual and the collective : On one hand, we all want to be true to ourselves and to express ourselves to the fullest without giving in to external pressures or allowing other people to take advantage of us.  On the other, we are also deeply sociable creatures who yearn for human contact and the joys of sharing our successes and failures with friends and loved ones.  While these two sets of desires are not mutually exclusive, they can interfere with each other.  Resolving this interference pattern is not only central to our day-to-day existences, but also our political system.

Or is it?

It is extremely easy to fall into the pattern of seeing everything as a tension between two diametrically opposed extremes : Good and evil, capitalism and socialism, law and chaos, religion and atheism, nature and nurture, mysticism and rationalism, us and them.  However, the simple fact that this kind of pattern can be applied to pretty much anything does not necessarily entail that it is picking up on some profound fact about the world.  In fact, I would argue that it is a shallow and empty hermeneutic whose very shallowness explains its seemingly universal application.  This kind of shallow analytical framework does pose significant dangers.

Indeed, assuming that our original balancing act is not just an empty truism then how certain are we that it is a universal fact about human life?  While the desire to balance the needs of individual expression with those of social integration is one of the most common ways of thinking about life in the West in the 21st Century, it is by no means clear that this motif enjoys the same popularity elsewhere in the world.  Do members of isolated Amazonian tribes worry about hypocritically trying to ‘fit in’?  In his book Black Mass : Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), John Gray suggests that a tendency to assume that all political cultures are the same as ours is one of the regrettable short-comings of Western liberalism.  It is, he argues, the kind of unwarranted assumption about other people that leads to blood-shed as when we encounter people who are not like us, it is all too easy to move from incomprehension to hostility.

Fei Xie’s Black Snow (Ben Ming Nian) is an interesting test case for the applicability of our dichotomy : Made in China in the late 1980s, the film initially presents itself as a rather generic art house film in which an alienated and isolated individual battles to re-engage with a society he long-ago turned his back on.  However, Fei Xie’s approach to this challenge reveals a political culture with a very different set of attitudes to ours.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The First Day of the Rest of your Life (2008)

Videovista have my review of Remi Bezancon’s Le Premier Jour Du Reste De Ta Vie.

Well directed, the film also employs quite a neat structural trick of focusing only upon five key days in the lives of a middle-class French family.  However, despite the odd nice moment, The First Day of the Rest of your Life is an astoundingly unoriginal film dealing only in the boldest and most familiar of cinematic emotions.  Dreadful.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Box (2009)

Videovista have my review of Richard Kelly’s The Box.

From the director of Donnie Darko comes a weirdly iconoclastic film based upon a Richard Matheson short story.  Initially, the film structures itself around a moral thought experiment asking us to consider whether we would kill someone we do not know for $1,000,000.  However, then the film opens up into a science fiction conspiracy theory that is one part Alan J. Pakula to one part Arthur C. Clarke.  Not entirely convincing partly because the ideas it contains are so utterly weird, but I did enjoy the rather brutal satire of Christianity as a sinister alien conspiracy.