by Jonathan M

REVIEW – La Grande Vadrouille (1966)

Videovista have my review of Gerard Oury’s seminal French Resistance comedy La Grande Vadrouille (also known as Don’t Look Now – We’re Being Shot At).

My review is as much an appraisal of the film as it is a discussion of the film’s place in French cultural history.  I remember growing up, my Swiss friends (who are at least partially French culturally speaking due to the presence of French TV channels in the French-speaking part of Switzerland) would speak warmly of this film and quote from it but, looking back at it now, I’m struck that it really isn’t anything more than a broad family action-comedy.  It’s certainly not the funniest thing that De Funes ever made.

by Jonathan M

Solomon Kane (2009) – There is No God but Man

John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982) is one of the most ferociously Godless films ever made.

In one early scene Conan discusses theology with his companion Subotei the archer.  Conan speaks fondly of his warrior god Crom, stressing his power and roundly mocking his friend’s simple-minded animism (“Crom laughs at your four winds. Laughs from his mountain”).  Subotei listens politely to Conan’s tirade and then points out that Conan’s god may well be powerful but in order to wield his power from his mountain he must walk beneath the sky, thereby making himself subject to Subotei’s divine winds and sky.  This suggestion that organised religion is arguably inferior to a pantheistic respect for nature sets the tone for a script that relentlessly takes pot-shots at the idea of a divinely ordered universe.

Indeed, the film’s main bad guys are the leaders of an aggressively expanding snake cult.  A cult that reveals itself to be little more than a retirement home for ageing barbarian raiders.  Raiders who have figured out that, rather than riding around the landscape threatening people into giving up their goods, it is much easier to simply set up a temple and wait for people to surrender their money of their own accord.  Not content with suggesting organised religion is nothing but a rogue’s retirement fund, Conan the Barbarian also goes out of its way to mock the icons of real world religions.  For example, we have the infamous scene in which Conan is crucified on the Tree of Woe.  But rather than allowing himself to die and for god to resurrect him like Jesus or Aslan, Conan refuses to accept his fate and so he eats a vulture and then gets his friends to make a pact with dark forces in order to bring him back from the dead.  Similarly, the ‘Riddle of Steel’ comes across as a mockery of a Zen koan as not only is there an answer but the answer is that the source of all power in the world is not steel or magic or the gods but humanity.

Even when Conan does pray to Crom he admits that he has no tongue for it and his prayer is less an act of supplication or veneration but a threat and an ultimatum : Grant me victory or to hell with you!  Of course, Conan is granted his revenge but Crom’s presence is conspicuously absent from the battle.  Crom, much like all non-existent deities, is evidently the kind of god who helps those who help themselves.

This sense of godlessness is arguably also present in the source material for Conan the Barbarian, the writings of Robert E. Howard and so it is delightful to see the same muscular atheism appear in a film featuring another of Howard’s creations : Solomon Kane.  Michael J. Bassett’s Solomon Kane addresses the issue of God’s apparent absence head-on by asking whether, in a world where God does not exist but the Devil clearly does, is it ever possible for humanity to achieve redemption?

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by Jonathan M

A Single Man (2009) – To Be or Not to Be?

You don’t understand me.  Nobody does.

When the dust has settled, the books have been closed and the time has come to write the intellectual history of the later stages of the twentieth Century, Historians will speak of two separate schools of thought.  Born on opposite sides of the world and yet joined at the hip.

From America, we have the cult of the individual, born of political ideology, carefully nurtured by a fledgling advertising industry and sanctified by a generation of psychologists, therapists, counsellors and psychoanalysts.  This school of thought stresses the importance and the potential of the individual in the face of endless pressure from the faceless masses.  Masses, of course, composed of equally heroic individuals.  In such a climate an act of individualisation, no matter how insignificant or trifling, is heroic.  What brand of coffee do you buy?  Are you a Mac or a PC?  Did you take in the BFI’s Ozu retrospective instead of going to see Avatar?  Under this world-view, the individual is not merely a building block of a larger society, he is an irreducible force.  A spiritual, political, moral and commercial monad.

From Europe, we have the phenomenology of self.  The Second World War swept away all certainties, even those of the Enlightenment.  There was a need to return to source.  To build again.  Where better to start than Descartes’ maxim?  The ultimate philosophical slogan : I think therefore I am.  We cannot trust old certainties, all that we know is that we are and that we think.  But where the Enlightenment used this as foundation stone for the construction of a new world of knowledge, the post-War philosophers took it as a boundary.  A limit.  An end.  And so emerged a need to fetishise the cogito.  To stress the importance of the subjective not only to philosophy but to our conceptions of self.  Under this school of thought, we are imprisoned within the walls of our own subjectivies.  Not only alone but utterly distant from those around us.  Our experiences and feelings suddenly so different to people of the same class, the same up-bringing and the same education that we might as well be speaking a different language.  Other people are utterly alien.  As Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation demonstrates, we can now sit in a crowded Japanese bar and be utterly alone.

So you see… nobody understands me.  Or you.  Not really.

Tom Ford’s mesmerising debut A Single Man – an adaptation of a 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood – is an examination of this school of thought.  Its title refers not only to the marital status of its protagonist, but also to the pervasive idea that our psychological states are somehow unique and that this uniqueness separates us from other people.  The reality, of course, could not be further from the truth.

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by Jonathan M

Ponyo (2008) – Soft Round Belly or Bloody Fangs?

Hayao Miyazaki is, by any reasonable definition of the term, an auteur.  He directs, he produces, he writes and his films not only share a certain look but a certain set of themes and visual motifs (airships, bustling port towns, young female protagonists).  One of the central themes of Miyazaki’s work since the founding of Studio Ghibli has been the relationship between the technological world of humanity and the magical realm of nature and in particular the encroachment by the former upon the latter.  However, while these broad themes pop up in pretty much all of Miyazaki’s films, they do not always possess the same degree of emotional spin.

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by Jonathan M

Russian Ark (2002) – Nostalgia is Always Beautiful… Tyranny isn’t.

Let us begin in the manner in which we intend to continue : By considering a point of medieval philosophy.  The 14th Century Logician William of Ockham once noted that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.  This venerable principle of ontological parsimony is most often wheeled out in order to see off the speculations of some of our more extravagantly theological or mystical co-humans.  Those who would wish into existence a vast metaphysical infrastructure where competing theories would make do with the smallest of particles and the most elementary of forces.  Given a set of facts, why would you not choose the explanation that accounted for those facts in the simplest manner?  In order to answer this question, we must first ascertain what constitutes simplicity.

The problem is that simplicity is one of those slippery terms that philosophers wheel out when an impasse is reached.  When discussing a philosophical theory, differing thinkers will first look for logical inconsistencies, then for factual incongruities, but eventually they will fall back upon a host of rather subjective and nebulous aesthetic principles : “It is counter-intuitive!” they will sniff.  “That solution is unclean when compared to the alternative” they will remark.  “It is insufficiently simple” they conclude.  Of course, this is a cynical and simplistic characterisation of the problem.  Theorists of Artificial Intelligence such as Ray Solomonoff and Marcus Hutter have made great strides in devising mathematical and statistical models of ontological parsimony fleshing out that which has, for far too long, been a refuge for intellectual scoundrels.  My assessment, however, does raise an interesting question.

Is simplicity culturally relative?  Following Ockham, we demand that extraordinary claims be supported by extraordinary amounts of evidence but what this often means is that unpopular and dissenting opinions have to work harder to gain traction.

Consider, for example, Zhang Yimou’s film Hero (2002).  At the end of the film, the protagonist refrains from killing the tyrant because he has seen the wisdom of a state where the value of political harmony and a single driving vision outweigh the benefits to be gained from the competition of differing opinions.  In other words, Zhang Yimou seemed to be suggesting that a one-party state such as modern China was preferable to the democratic states of the West.  When the film was released in the West it was met with howls of outrage.  Given that the film was partly funded by the Chinese government, many Western thinkers characterised it as propaganda.  But why is offering a different opinion seen as being tantamount to propaganda?  Hundreds of films every year express opinions in the same unrigorous manner as Hero without being labelled as such.  Is it just that when it comes to arguing against democracy, we set the bar higher?  Do we demand extraordinary evidence before we are willing to engage with contrary opinions?  Should we be more forgiving of dissenting opinions even when we see them as monstrous?

Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark is three things : Firstly, it is a love letter to the Winter Palace (now occupied by the Russian state Hermitage Museum).  Secondly, it is a technical exercise in so far as it is a film made up of one continuous 96 minute long take.  Thirdly, it is a wistful apologia for the Tsarist regime.

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by Jonathan M

Red Road (2006) – Exiting the Rear Window

At the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), the wheel-chair bound James Stewart finds himself confronted by the man he has been spying on all Summer long.  Briefly lit by flashbulbs, the murderer advances upon Stewart from out of the shadows before lunging at him.  In this scene, the voyeur gets his comeuppance.  Once so powerful in his capacity to observe his neighbours without being seen, Stewart is impotent to prevent one of them attacking him.  As an audience, our pulses race.  Not only because of the technical perfection of the scene, or because Stewart’s character is sympathetic, but because we are complicit in the character’s voyeurism.  The murderer is not just lunging at Stewart.  He is lunging at us.

Hitchcock’s teasing analogy between the cinema audience member and the voyeur is one that has continued to inspire film-makers.  However, while Rear Window was recently remade in the shape of Disturbia (2007) – a teen thriller starring Shia LeBoeuf – it is in its more oblique descendants that we find this central analogy best explored.  Indeed, many of the films of Michael Haneke express furious moral outrage at his audience’s passivity and prurience.  In Benny’s Video (1992) he suggests that watching violent films desensitises the audience.  In Funny Games (1997) he  has his characters break the fourth wall in order to make the audience complicit in their crimes.  In Hidden (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009) he follows genre guidelines in order to build tension but pointedly denies his audience the cathartic release of an answer to their questions or an unambiguous resolution.  Haneke and, to a certain extent, Lars von Trier are animated by a deep sense of suspicion about the power of the audience.  We sit in front of our TVs or our local cinema screens and we watch moments of heart-break, happiness, death and redemption.  We vicariously experience these emotions and yet we are safe.  We have risked nothing except boredom.  What have we done to earn these emotional experiences?

Some of the more intriguing attempts to answer the question posed by Hitchcock, Haneke and von Trier are found in the works of Charlie Kaufman.  In Being John Malkovitch (1999), Kaufman presented one of his characters with the opportunity to stop being a voyeur and to actually participate in the life of the character he was surreptitiously observing.  This allows the character to experience love and career success that would have been impossible to achieve on his own but the success ultimately turns to ashes as real love eludes the character who eventually winds up trapped inside someone else experiencing the love that he craves but will never receive.  Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (2008) further explores the emotional hollowness of the voyeur as the film’s central character, a stage director, attempts to adapt his life for the stage only to realise that, no matter how lavish the production and how much authorial control you have, real life is always outside of your control and always capable of messing you up.

Andrea Arnold’s debut film Red Road returns to  Hitchcock’s original set up but expands upon it not with Hitchcock’s amusement or Haneke’s anger, but rather Kaufman’s sense of sadness at the ultimate impotence voyeur.

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by Jonathan M

BG 24 – We Are All Sheep : Avatar, Bayonetta and the Hypnosis of Low-Brow culture

Futurismic have my twenty fourth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled We Are All Sheep : Avatar, Bayonetta and the Hypnosis of Low-Brow Culture.  The column draws partly on some of the thinking I did for my recent Ozu piece and partly on some of the things I said about the Hugo awards last summer.

The piece was motivated by the intense and viscerally negative reaction I had to Bayonetta.  I hated it.  I hated it more than any game I have played in recent memory.  In fact, I hated it more than any cultural artifact I have recently rubbed my brain up against.  I was going to put together a hatchet job but then I took a step back and realised that my reaction to Bayonetta was no different to the one film critics have had against Avatar, and that my tendency to explain away the opinions of people who enjoy games like Bayonetta is disingenuous.  So, instead of saying that Bayonetta is low-brow or stupid, I thought I would put forward a way of looking at the process through which opinions are formed in the first place.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The New Barbarians (1982)

Videovista have my review of Enzo G. Castellari’s The New Barbarians, a post-apocalyptic exploitation film made around the same time as his better known and arguably more entertaining Bronx Warriors.

Watching the film I was hit by a wave of raw nostalgia as most of my childhood summers were spent sitting in darkened rooms watching precisely these kinds of films.  If it had mutants, a tricked out car and loads of violence in it then chances are that pre-teen Jona would have hunted it down and happily watched it.  For all the recent talk of films like Avatar dumbing down cinema, watching The New Barbarians really brought home to me the fact that there was a time when science fiction cinema had teeth.  It was weird, surreal, violent and thoroughly disreputable.  I can’t help but feel that the mainstreaming of science fiction might well have cost us these kinds of films.  Even attempts to recapture the magic such as Neil Marshall’s Doomsday (2008) seem somehow more respectable and tame in comparison.

Also interesting is the film’s blatant homophobia.  You simply could not make a film nowadays in which the bad guys are a load of gay men.  Indeed, it occurred to me after writing the review that the film suggests that should the extinction of the human race ever become a genuine risk then homosexuality would not simply be a lifestyle, a preference, a predisposition or even a perversion.  It would be an act of outright nihilism.  But then, is humanity really worth saving?  The film’s baddies – the Templars – are effectively an armed wing of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement except rather than seeking to justify themselves using the language of ecology, the Templars speak of vengeance and a need to exact retribution for humanity’s crimes against itself.  Which makes little sense but there you go…

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – An Englishman in New York (2009)

Videovista have my review of Richard Laxton and Brian Fillis’ adaptation of the later Quentin Crisp memoirs An Englishman in New York.

It has an interesting subject (a camp gay man who lived out of the closet at a time when Homosexuality was still illegal) and is set during an interesting time (the first twitches of the shambling beast that is AIDS) but a lack of time, a lack of ambition and a regrettable desire to pay attention to the facts of Crisp’s life rather than the themes and patterns means that it only ever hints at the fascinating piece it could have been.  Fun enough though.

by Jonathan M

Beau Travail (1999) – Neither Validation Nor Transgression

All drama is a process of digestion.  The peristaltic processing of information and emotional states resulting in change.  It is an on-going process.  It never stops.  The best dramas are those that choose their moment carefully, setting up the cameras or lighting the stage just as the emotional bowels twitch or the psychological constipation ends.  For all of her tendencies towards hard-hitting topics and enigmatic story-telling techniques, Claire Denis is a genuinely world-class dramatist.  Films such as 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and The Intruder (2004) are heady examinations of sudden changes that come after long periods of emotional constipation.

In The Intruder, we see an old man who has lived life entirely upon his own terms – his past a catalogue of burned bridges, old enmities and shady deals – suddenly realising that he has to reconnect with his estranged son.  In 35 Shots of Rum we are introduced to a family that exists in perfect emotional balance.  The son and the daughter live together while the father’s old girlfriend and the upstairs neighbour orbit round the household in enigmatic patterns, part of the family and yet denied any clear role in it.  Both films deal with the inevitable change that must afflict these delicate psychological ecosystems.  A process of change that is, according to Denis at least, a mixed-blessing.

The ending to 35 Shots of Rum can be read as either a wedding or a funeral.  The father’s announcement that the time has come for him to drink the 35 shots can be seen as either a capitulation to unwanted forces or as a moment of spiritual rebirth.  Like the Death tarot card, the film marks the end of a period of stasis, it does not explain whether this stasis is broken by an ending or a new beginning.  Similarly, the ambiguous moral character of The Intruder’s protagonist cloaks his eventual death in dramaturgical vagueness.  Is it sad that he never got to know his son?  Or was his death deserved for the crimes he committed in order to artificially extend his own life?  For Denis, this process of emotional change can also be terrifying, as demonstrated in her take on the vampire film Trouble Every Day (2001).  In that film a doctor nails his wife up in her bedroom because she has changed into something Other while an American who harbours terrible violent fantasies stalks the world desperately trying to find a cure.  When the pair come together it is erotic and terrifying, natural and unnatural, to be applauded and avoided.

Denis’ Beau Travail, an adaptation of Melville’s unfinished novella Billy Budd (1924) set against the backdrop of the modern-day French Foreign Legion, continues Denis’ interest in the complexities and ambiguities of emotional change and emotional constipation, demonstrating them with her characteristic grace and lack of pity.

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