Tag / British Film

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

44 Inch Chest (2009) – We are Legion… a Legion of Cunts

The 1990s were dark days for the British Film industry.  Yes, films were being made.  Yes, excellent films were being made : Reputations were formed, new territory was broken and new talent was uncovered.  But all of this was going on despite a frankly bizarre obsession with what can only be called ‘geezer films’ : These were cheaply produced and heavily hyped crime dramas littered with cockney accents and pointless violence intended to replicate Guy Ritchie’s success at cashing in on the rediscovery of the crime film in the wake of the rise of Quentin Tarantino.  At its best, the genre produced films like Paul McGuigan’s Gangster No. 1 (2000) and Mike Hodges’ Croupier (1997).  Intelligent and psychological films that harkened back to classic British crime films of yore such as John MacKenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980) and Mike Hodges’ Get Carter (1971).   At its worst, the genre gave us sweary, lairy films like Edward Thomas’ Rancid Aluminium (2000) and Kevin Allen’s Twin Town (1997).  Right smack bang in the middle of these two trends was Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000).  Sexy Beast is a film that attempts to explore the psychology of an old lag forced out of retirement by a criminal fraternity that sees him as little more than a skill-set.  It is also a film that found an audience thanks largely to its more accessible aspects such as Ben Kingsley swearing and Ray Winstone making a fool of himself in a tiny pair of red speedos.  44 Inch Chest marks the return of some of the creative talent behind Sexy Beast — most notably Ray Winstone and Ian McShane who practically reprise their roles from Sexy Beast — in a script penned by the same writing team of Louis Mellis and David Scinto.  The result is a film that shares all of Sexy Beast’s theatrical intensity and sculptured vulgarity but adds to it a psychologically fractured intelligence brought to bear on a single question : What would you do to the man who fucked your wife?

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Bargee (1964)

Videovista have my review of Duncan Wood’s The Bargee.

Given that the film stars Harry H. Corbett, Ronnie Barker and Eric Sykes you might expect this to be a knock-about 1960s British comedy and, to a certain extent, it is.  However, the writers of the film were Ray Galton and Alan Simpson who made their name with Steptoe and Son, a sitcom best remembered for its social realism and its confrontation of the British class system.  The Bargee is very much a film in this tradition as beneath the rather lightweight comedy lurks a drama about the final working months of the British canal network and the culture of canal workers and lock keepers that depended upon it.  Ultimately flawed, the film is still a fascinating look at a now extinct culture.

by Jonathan M

Cinematic Vocabulary – The Opening to Went the Day Well? (1942)

In my recent piece about Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog (2008) I discussed the difficulty of attaining genuine cinematic realism.  But this makes a number of largely unwarranted assumptions about realism as a concept.

It assumes that there is a difference between something being factually correct and something being realistic.  Johnny Mad Dog might well express true stories about what it is like to be a child-soldier but this does not necessarily mean that it is ‘realistic’.  In fact, in my piece, I chide Sauvaire for allowing an editorial tendency to creep into the film.  I reasoned that because the world does not contain neat little truths, any attempt to present a cinematic audience with neat truths is unrealistic.  This suggests that realism is an entirely different formal quality than factual accuracy.  It assumes that ‘realism’ also carries with it certain aesthetic demands and formal demands.  This is, to put it bluntly, an idiosyncratic view.  It presents realism as an aesthetic and moral ideal that can be aspired to but almost never achieved :  Art, being artificial, is necessarily in some sense false.

For this piece, I have decided to look at the issue of realism from an entirely different perspective.  To present it not as an ideal but rather as an affectation, a stylistic quirk.  A quality that has only a tangential relationship with factual truth and almost no relationship whatsoever with the moral imperative to speak the truth and present the world as it really is.

What better place to start then, than with propaganda?  Art that is conceived precisely not as a means of telling the truth, but rather as a means of convincing people that a false vision of the world is in fact correct.  One way in which propaganda can be made more believable is if it chimes in some sense with the world-view of the people it is aimed at.  Propaganda films are works that are false but have that ring of truth.  They rely upon that ring of truth to be effective.

One of the best examples of this kind of film-making (along with 1942’s In Which We Serve by Lean and Coward) is Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went The Day Well? An absurdly fantastical every-day tale of valiant little Englanders banding together to fight off a cohort of brutish Nazi paratroopers dressed as British soldiers.

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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.

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