by Jonathan M

REVIEW – King of the Hill (2007)

VideoVista has my review of King of The Hill (El Rey De La Montana).  Not the long-running animated comedy but rather a taught and atmospheric Spanish thriller directed by Gonzalo-Lopez Gallago.

King of the Hill, along with a number of other films I have reviewed in the last year, suggest that Europe is going through something of a genre boom at the moment.  Britain and France are churning out genre films like nobody’s business and places like Spain and Norway are following suit.  Sadly, while a lot of these films are very well directed indeed, not that many of them are well written and King of the Hill is further evidence of that observation’s validity.

by Jonathan M

Johnny Mad Dog (2008) – Random Acts of Narrative

Two books have recently been weighing quite heavily on my mind.

 

The first is J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a novel that is as striking in its imagery and ideas as it is in its formal innovation.  Rather than providing a coherent narrative, Ballard chops the book up into short paragraphs that are more or less conceptually and thematically related.  Themes, motifs and characters re-appear (sometimes with different names, sometimes filling spaces previously occupied by other characters) but between the disjointed writing style and the abstraction of Ballard’s ideas, it is clear to me that any story one projects upon the book is exactly that – a projection.  The haecceity of the book is not a matter of plots and characters and events.

 

The second is Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound – Enlightenment and Extinction (2007).  A work of surprisingly accessible wide-spectrum philosophy, Nihil Unbound opens with an important distinction between what he calls the scientific image of man – the best scientific model for human cognitive functioning – and the manifest image – the model we use when thinking about and describing others.  The manifest image is grounded in what is known as ‘folk psychology’ and it represents centuries-worth of little theories and assumptions about how humans think.  This image is made up of relatively complex ideas such as Freudian projection as well as more fundamental ideas such as the idea that there is such a thing as the self and it is that which works the controls of the body.  The problem is that the clearer the scientific image becomes, the more the manifest image comes to resemble a collection of empty and surprisingly brittle superstitions.

 

One of the things that I have taken away from these books is the artifice and ubiquity of the story and of the narrative form.

 

As humans, we are constantly trying to make sense of the world around us.  Our brains are optimised for pattern-recognition and, when confronted by a stream of random and unstructured data from our sense organs, our brain starts trying to make sense of it.  We see stories everywhere.  We even tell stories about ourselves, stitching causal histories composed of random fluctuations in hormone levels and neural pathway activation into neat little just-so tales about why we do the things we do.  We are addicted to the story…

 

We build religions around this need to tell stories, we construct therapeutic models encouraging us to piece together the stories of our selves and, when it comes time for us to depict the world around us through art, we happily continue the pursuit – Building characters out of our woefully inaccurate folk psychological notions and marching them through worlds far more ordered and simple than our own.  Sometimes we even confuse our understanding of the world with the world itself and write stories we claim to be ‘realistic’, ‘accurate’ or ‘authentic’.  But all too often, what we take to be the world is just another story… a simplified and conveniently understandable abstraction.  This poses a theoretical challenge to art : Can it ever capture the truth about the world, or is it necessarily a simplification of it?  If it is possible then the chances are that the results will resemble something like  Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog, a film about boy soldiers based upon the novel Johnny Chien Mechant by Emmanuel Dongala.

 

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

The Reckoning (2003) – Who Narrates The Narrators?

In the introduction to his The Function of Criticism (1984), Terry Eagleton writes :

“criticism today lacks all substantive social function.  It is either part of the public relations branch of the literary industry, or a matter wholly internal to the academies.”

The problem, according to Eagleton, is that criticism is only of social use when there is a robust public sphere.  A public sphere, according to Habermas, is an intellectual void in between the sphere of public authority (dominated by the state and the law) and the private sphere (dominated by the exchange of commodities and the market).  In the sphere of public authority, the government and ruling elite speak with authority, determining values and the prominence of some ideas at the expense of others.  By contrast, in the private sphere, this kind of ordering is done according to the demands of commerce.  Criticism, according to Eagleton, currently lacks a social function, as the private sphere has come to dominate those matters that were previously considered to be exempt from the marketplace.  The role of the critic still exists, but he has no constituency and no natural subject matter.  An example of this kind of modern-day criticism can be seen in R. J. Cutler’s documentary about Vogue magazine The September Issue (2009).  Anna Wintour is a private sphere Doctor Johnson : She takes it upon herself to decide what will be ‘fashionable’ in a particular season and the commercial interests that make up the fashion industry abide by her judgement.  The same process exists in the sphere of public authority.  When a problem affects the state, the ruling class make a decision and the apparatus of the state then enacts that judgement.  While the members of the ruling class may be determined by democratic or aristocratic means and members of that elite may be more or less open to public opinion, the process is the same.  The people no more get a say in the day to day realities of how the state is run than they do in determining whether purple or mauve will be the fashionable colour to be seen in this autumn.  The process is just as autocratic as it was during the heyday of the 18th Century critic.  As Eagleton quotes, the criticism of the time was characterised by :

“its partisan bias, the vituperation, the dogmatism, the juridical tone, the air of omniscience and finality”

Of course, the importance of the three spheres varies significantly over time.  As I suggested in my review of Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1972), the moral corruption of the state, the ruling classes and the church, mean that a form of moral public sphere has opened up.  One in which rabble-rousing journalists compete with traditional intellectuals and people equipped with social networking tools to impart some kind of moral sentiment upon a supposedly individualistic and relativistic general public.  Paul McGuigan’s The Reckoning, a cruelly over-looked adaptation of Barry Unsworth’s 1995 Booker-nominated novel Morality Play portrays a similar shift in spheres of debate : A moment in history in which the church and the state began to surrender their moral authority to a burgeoning public sphere.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

En la Ciudad de Sylvia (2007) – Distant Glimpses of Humanity

In “Big Red Son”, his essay on the porn equivalent of the Oscars, David Foster Wallace writes about a morally up-standing police detective who is drawn to pornography’s capacity for capturing moments of pure humanity.  This is an intriguing idea and it is certainly one that I agree with.  Most performances are based upon a degree of artifice : Someone pretending to be someone they or not or behaving in a way that they would not normally behave.  The people who appear in adult films usually buy into this notion of performance.  The men adopt a worldly misogyny while the women appear to revel in their transgressions of good taste and traditional gender roles.  What Foster Wallace refers to as the “Fuck me, I’m a nasty girl” persona.  However, because pornography is quite cheaply made and ultimately reliant upon the inviolability of certain basic biological rhythms, the performers sometimes forget the persona they are supposed to be inhabiting.  Sometimes these slippages reveal genuine attraction and sexual excitement, but other times there are flashes of irritation, disgust, boredom, amusement or fear.  These outpourings of human emotion are made al the more real by the grotesque theatricality of pornography and all the more pleasurable because of their illicit nature.  They are supposed to be having passionate sex, we are supposed to be getting off on watching them, and yet we see the actress’s irritation at her male colleague.  Score.

I remember when, after a number of years of failing eye-sight, I first got glasses and a world of detailed facial expression suddenly opened up to me.  I remember standing in Liverpool Street station and marvelling at the way in which emotions played across people’s faces.  How a friendly smile would die on someone’s lips the second the other person looked away or how a momentary flash of irritation would prompt a hard glare at a fried, a glare that would instantly disappear the second the friend turned to ask a question or make a remark.  Humans are creatures with rich emotional lives.  Lives they try to keep hidden from those around them, and yet those lives are betrayed broadcast to al who care to look by the infinite expressiveness of the human face.

José Luis Guerín’s In The City of Sylvia (2007) is a film that is all about those fleeting moments of humanity.  It even invites us to place these little moments in a wider context, but by doing so it raises the difficulties inherent in trying to work out what other people are thinking.

Continue reading →

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

The Offence (1972) – I am not your Godhead, I am just a Paedophile

I get the impression that for many, a trip to the cinema is a religious experience.  Note that I say ‘religious’ and not ‘mystical’. People commonly reach for transcendental terminology when groping for fresh panegyrics with which to adorn some film or another;  said film is not merely good, watching it is comparable to what a medieval peasant might have experienced upon visiting a cathedral or what a fakir might experience after twenty years crouching upon nails in the sub-continental wilderness.  This is not what I mean by religious experience.  What I mean instead is that people go to the cinema (or read a book) in order to have their moral compasses reset.  They go to see a romantic comedy in order to re-connect with what it is to be really in love.  They go to see Pixar’s Up (2009) in order to know what it means to grow old with someone.  They go to see a navel-gazing drama that deals in matters of identity and alienation in order to get some insight into who and what they are.  People use films in the same way as they once used the Sunday sermon : As a form of guidance.  Simple moral and psychological truths made accessible and easily digested along with pop-corn and diet Coke.  Is it then any wonder that we treat successful actors as living gods?  These people are not merely entertainers, they are the prophets of a secular age.  Our need to constantly tell stories about ourselves drives our desire to consume the stories of others.

Most films are happy to play their role in this relationship.  Modern romantic comedies have their relationship advice, Godard had his attempts at spreading Maoism and even nihilistic film-makers such as Noe are happy to sell their audiences on the horrors of existence, a belief which, in its own way, is no less consolatory than the more up-beat alternatives such as Sam Mendes’ bile-raising “sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it”.  However, some film-makers seem instinctively aware of their positions as moral teachers and reject the role.  Directors such as Hanneke and Von Trier assume accusatory and playfully obtuse attitudes towards their audience in order to avoid it.  Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, based upon the play This Story of Yours by John Hopkins is a film that seems to deconstruct this relationship, turning it into something unhealthy and disturbing.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Creation (2009) – The Burden of the Mundane

One of the great tragedies of the cult of the director as author is the extent to which it failed to take root in television.  Even now, if you listen to commentary tracks for BBC DVDs you will find people talking about writers and producers.  Never directors.  In the world of television, directors are still seen in the way that they were in the wider cinematic world prior to the rise of the French New Wave : As a cadre of technical and logistical professionals whose creative impact is actually minimal.  Even television programmes that are ostensibly visual are frequently associated more with their presenters than their directors.  David Attenborough, for example, has made a career out of taking credit for the images captured by others.  Another such injustice is Jon Amiel’s direction of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986).  As director, Amiel transformed Potter’s ontologically complex blend of memory, reality and fantasy into a television series that was not only coherent but a classic.  Sadly, the two and a bit decades since The Singing Detective have not been kind to Amiel with his time having been spent on a number of instantly forgettable television adaptations and second rate genre films.  However, Creation, the story of Charles Darwin’s struggle to write On the Origin of Species (1859), marks a real return to form.  It is just unfortunate that only half the film works.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

La Rupture (1970) – The Tragic Demise of a Picaroon

Chabrol is a director whose best work is done in the margins of broad moral argument.  The films of his so-called ‘Golden Period’ from the late 60s to the early 70s are a series of incendiary attacks upon an upper middle class morally corrupt enough to murder for the sake of social standing.  In films such as Les Noces Rouges (1973), La Femme Infidele (1969), Que La  Bete Meure (1969) and Juste Avant La Nuit (1971) wealthy people murder their way out of bad relationships and awkward situations.  They do this, more often than not, because they simply lack the imagination to solve their problems any other way.  And therein lies the strength of Chabrol’s vision.

Chabrol presents the bourgeoisie as morally corrupt but also deeply tragic figures.  For all of their wealth and privilege, they are trapped inside a system that forces them to care about the wrong things.  For example, in Les Noces Rouges, a couple find illicit love but when they are uncovered by the woman’s husband, they are shocked to discover that he does not mind their affair.  If anything, he sees it as a positive development as it will keep his wife happy and ensure her lover’s loyalty to him.  Incapable of understanding his cunning rejection and manipulation of bourgeois moral codes, the lovers murder him thereby sealing their fates.  Similarly, in Que La Bete Meure, a man tracks down the killer of his child only to discover that the man’s entire family want him dead.  They want him dead but they lack the courage to simply leave him or to denounce his many cruelties.  As cowardly and morally corrupt these characters might appear, they are also the tragic victims of a twisted social order.  An order that uses money and privilege to trap them in a situation whereby the characters are forced to deny their own feelings of unhappiness and claustrophobia.

La Rupture (a.k.a. the Break-up, based upon Charlotte Armstrong’s 1968 novel The Balloon Man) is, at first glance, not Chabrol’s most subtle film.  It summons up Chabrol’s typically louche and corrupt bourgeoisie but makes it appear all the more monstrous and deranged for the fact that it is attacking an almost saintly working class woman.  As horrors and injustices are melodramatically heaped upon her, it seems as though there can be no excusing or forgiving such behaviour.  But, once the film ends, you realise that the character responsible for all of these terrible crimes might have been different.  He might have been free.  La Rupture is a film about the breaking of a picaroon upon the wheel of modern capitalism.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Celia (1989) – Against the World of Men

Frequent visitors to this site will have noticed that, following my viewing of Pialat’s Passe Ton Bac D’Abord (1979) and L’Enfance Nue (1968), I have written quite a bit about cinematic depictions of childhood.  Pialat’s take on the matter was almost wilfully perverse.  He cast a load of kids, gave them parts to play and then stuck a camera on them as they improvised.  The resulting performances being supposedly ‘more real’ than films such as  Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) or Shane Meadows’ This is England (2007), which deal with childhood by projecting onto their child protagonists the fears, hopes and values of the film directors.  Ann Turner’s Celia embodies a third approach to the problem of depicting childhood in that it examines the ways in which children process and try to make sense of the values and actions of the adults that surround them.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Police (1985) – Two Faces, Neither of Them Real

Can art ever articulate the truth?  The films of Maurice Pialat display a grave ambivalence towards that question.  With his first film, L’Enfance Nue (1968) Pialat showed a real animosity towards not only traditional forms of cinematic story-telling, but the very conceit and artificiality of fiction itself.  Pialat is a director who wants to put the real world on the screen without the traditional intermediaries of editorial or narrative.  However, despite this hostility to the artificiality of artistic representation, Pialat never returned to his roots as a documentary film-maker.  Instead, he produced films such as Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble (1972) and La Gueule Ouverte (1974).  Films that presented themselves as traditional dramas, but which were in fact elaborately dramatised autobiographical meditations upon his own life.

Police is a film that continues Pialat’s tradition of ontological uncertainty.  It is a work of genre by a film-maker who loathed fiction and a character study by a man who seemed to believe that there was no such thing as the self.  Unsurprisingly, Police is a film that exists under a permanent ontological fog.

Continue reading →