Shame

Shame is about sex addiction- that's what you'd get from the opening credits, the crumpled sheets, you might have read reviews or seen the poster with a sultry Carey Mulligan by a microphone or even from the cast list- woman on subway train, hotel lover, cocktail waitress, livechat woman etc. So its a film about sex and you'd be right, that's what it is about- but it isn't so much that its about sex as its about connection. Sex in reality is a form of communication between people- it arises after other forms of communication, talking, dancing etc and its therefore a means to reach out to other people or close them off from you. The real issue about Shame as a film is that its not really about relationships but its definitely about sex. There are two relationships between men and women in the film: one is between a brother and sister, the other is a romantic relationship- but neither of them contain sex, sex is what happens in this film instead of talking rather than as a culmination of a relationship. Its not a means to communicate, its a means to not communicate- the sex addiction of the main character Brandon is not a means for him to talk to women, but a means for him to abstain from talking to women.

What I'm saying seems perverse. When you see the film you'll understand. As I walked out of the film I felt pity for Brandon not envy. In a sense the old Medieval Christian understandings of sex are reflected here in celluloid. Brandon is having sex and lots of it but he isn't talking to any woman with whom he has sex or rather he is talking to them, but not directly. He talks as a means to get a girl into bed- that's not talking, its seduction. Seduction in this film is a means of not communicating. Brandon's sister Sissy suffers from his inability to communicate: one of our first images in the film is of a phone ringing straight to answer phone. Its Sissy and she rings and rings and rings again and again and again. The film is divided into two parts by Sissy's attempts to communicate with Brandon. In part 1, she rings him, then she comes to stay with him, eventually she sleeps with his boss- but nothing will make him actually communicate with her, take her seriously as another human being. Part 2 one can see follow the same trajectory until its finale.

If Brandon has sex to stall communication, is all sex doomed. The film doesn't take that extreme Augustinian position. Brandon does have a putative relationship with a girl called Marie. He takes her out to dinner, they eat and speak to each other and then a couple of days later they go back to a room that he has hired and begin to have sex. The key thing about the relationship with Marie though is that its real- and Brandon is unable to actually follow through on sex with a real woman- not with an anonymous human animal who he [expletive deleted]. This difference between making love and sex is actually quite key to the way that the film represents human sexuality- Brandon can have sex but he cannot make love. He cannot use sex as a means of communicating affection and respect, rather than as a means of masturbation. By the end of the film he is willing to have oral sex from a man in a gay sex club: Brandon doesn't really care about men or being gay, but its the physical stimulus of having an erection and an orgasm that he craves. That darkest of dark places where sexuality becomes merely about the body itself and not a partner is the place which Brandon has reached.

This film is profoundly disturbing- its sad and bleak in equal measure. One of my favourite director in the French tradition is Eric Rohmer. Rohmer's films are all about the conversation between men and women- a conversation that may have a sexual component but doesn't need to have one. Shame is about what happens when that conversation stops: when we simply become the expression of our desires. It is significant that Brandon has no interests- reads no books. That his appartment is clean, covered in white paint and has all the conveniencies of boredom from the wide screen TV to the laptop computer. This is a world that has nothing of interest in it- he has no friends even to lighten the mood, his only 'friend' is his predatory boss who picks up girls with him, picks up his sister indeed. Shame doesn't offer redemption to us, it just offers the anodyne desire- like the Huxley's vision put on celluloid and visualised.

Alexandra

Films often remind me of other works of art- poetry, novels or paintings. Alexandra, a film by the Russian director Alexandr Sokurov, reminds me of nothing more than a painting, a still. An old woman visits her grandson fighting in the Second Chechen war. Her eyes become our eyes looking in on the life of the camp and on the relationship between grandmother and grandson. They enable us to understand the nature of what it is to be a soldier in the 21st Century in particular conflict. Like a painting, the film does not explore the 'before' or 'after', the tragic history of colonialism and terrorism that has brought Russia into Chechnya and Chechnya into Russia: rather like a painting it provides a still of what life has to offer for the soldier on the front line from the civilian perspective.

The first thing you notice about the film is the heat. Sitting in the British Film Institute, watching the film, all I could think about was how much I required a glass of water. Characters, especially our grandmother are continuously complaining about the heat. Beads of sweat run down the heads of the young soldiers. The dust is ever present and the barren land reinforces the image of heat. Within the camp, the world is sterile, metallic and dusty. Sand and fire are the materials of a particular type of nightmare: there are no trees here and I immediately thought of the science fiction horror of Visitor to a Museum as a natural counterpart. There is something of hell in every military barracks.

Alexandra comes into the barracks and meets the troops and her own grandson. Two things immediately strike you: the first is that this is a world of young men without any women- old or young. The young men behave as any young men do: but you can see they are bored. They are condemned to wait in the dust for whatever is coming next. Furthermore their boredom is bleak. Alexandra's grandson tells her that he will never marry: firstly because he knows that marriage in his own family has turned to disaster (a comment by Sokurov on Russian marriage as a whole) and secondly implicitly because he knows he will die in Chechnya. So he makes do with a succession of girlfriends from St Petersburg. The barracks has removed him and his fellows from the civilisation of their contemporaries- and plunged them into a strange half light, bored they wait for a bomb at the side of the road or to be ordered into committing an atrocity.

We follow Alexandra discussing with her grandson their own family and we glimpse the loss from the other direction. Having lost her own husband, living in loneliness and confronting her own mortality the old woman wants and requires companionship. As the light dims, she wants to see her family- war has taken this as it takes all other things away. As she departs on the train to the north, the viewer of the film knows both that this is the last time that grandson and grandmother will ever meet, and that this is a tragedy.

Sokurov never comments directly on the war itself- but affords us one last glimpse of the tragedy that it embodies. Alexandra leaves the camp and goes to a market one day: she meets there a Chechen woman and goes back with the Chechen woman to her house and has tea. The ties that bind are more powerful in this case than the division of war and nationality: so Alexandra relates to the Chechen woman who comes to bid her farewell at the station and her son whose political protests she treats with patient, stoic, grandmotherly practicality.

Sokurov never tells us that the war is unjust, never says that Russia should not be fighting it. He just shows us the cost of the war. A viewer inclined to optimism might say that the last exchanges show that war should never happen. A viewer inclined to pessimism might say that wars like the poor are things that we always have with us. The gods play dice and make us their sport- despite the cost to us all and there is nothing we can to stop the roll of the die. Sokurov allows us to understand the costs and pity the individuals who bear them: perhaps that is all that we can do.

Melancholia

Kirsten Dunst is said to be a candidate for an Oscar for her performance in Melancholia, the latest film from Danish director Lars von Trier. She deserves the accolade but it says something about the film that the first thing to admire, the first thing I felt when I left the cinema, was admiration and pity for the actress who played in what I had just seen. For Dunst is the vehicle with which Von Trier takes us on a journey right into the heart of a particularly desperate depression. Dunst's character is implicated in two narrative arcs, the second of which takes place days after the first. The first concerns her character- Justine's- wedding to Michael (played by Alexander Skarsgard). The second concerns Justine's relationship with Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg), her sister, and Claire's husband and son as a planet, Melancholia, heads towards the earth for a collision which will end everything. There are three interesting films at least here- one about depression, a second about a bourgeois wedding and the third about the day at which the world ends. The real issue that Von Trier faces throughout the film is how to draw these three films together. He does it, if he does it through the relationship between the conventional Claire and the depressed Justine.

That contrast runs through the film. It could be Trier wants us to understand Justine's predicament: I'm not sure that without understanding whether his portrait of depression is accurate, I can draw useful lessons about depression from the film. I am not a psychologist and therefore cannot really comment on how depression works in this scenario. What I think is more interesting is the set of questions that Justine's behaviour pose about our own conventional society. During the wedding her listless behaviour mocks the ceremony surrounding her. One of the comic master pieces in the film comes from Udo Kier, a wedding planner, who won't look at Justine because she has ruined his wedding! But there is a sense in the wedding scene that Kier's character is not alone. All these middle class sophisticated individuals are not demanding that Justine and Michael marry but that they satisfy their expectations of how you marry. The theatre of the wedding is important to them. Justine's behaviour turns those expectations on their head and you feel the embarrassment of the guests as she and her family manage to destroy their theatre. Nowhere is this frustration more evident than in John Claire's husband who like a stage director imagines the wedding as his production and is furious when Justine mangles her lines.

The second story line about the planet is equally a stage production and this time it is nature not a woman who fails. John has designed a scientific (it could be a theological, historical) explanation about why Melancholia won't hit the earth. Again he is trying to stage manage and control the world. Again he fails. His response is fatal. His wife's response is to retreat into anxiety. Justine though becomes calmer and calmer, more and more sublime, till at the end she creates a religious retreat- a golden cave- for her family. In this sense the conventional pieties cannot protect the other characters. Claire who has so much to lose- a husband, a son- cannot relinquish her ideals about life. Her very kindness acts against her- as she prepares to greet the end of the world with a glass of chardonnay. Two situations reveal the powerlessness of the bourgeois individual: in the first human artifice can be undermined, in the second natural forces twist the carefully created bourgeois world apart. Artifice hence becomes as Trier argues the centre of the world that we all believe in: the world of jobs and marriages is a world of human creation and due for inevitable destruction- the paths of glory lead but to the grave.

This is a nihilistic film. There is no hope for humanity post the apocalypse and all our creations- divine and scientific will fall before the end of the world. It did make me wonder, what it will be like billions of years hence when your and my children look out their windows to see the Sun expand in fire or die in silence. This is a beautiful film but its nihilism makes it incredibly hard to watch.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

One of the odder things about talking to people about politics today is the sharp generational divide. There are people who became politically aware before 1990, who remember the Soviet Union and there are those who became aware in the 1990s and 2000s. It seems almost amazing now, looking back through depression and terrorism, that in 1990 the world was transfixed by the fact that President Gorbachev had been kidnapped in his dacha and that the Soviet Union might be whirling back into disaster. The geopolitics of Brezhnev and of Stalin seem far off- shadows that have faded into the past and the haunting fear of the bomb has been replaced by the fear of the reemergence of the 30s. Keynes has replaced Kennan as the intellectual de jour. In that context, it appears strange that the political film of the year focusses not on tax and spend and the consequences of depression, but on intelligence and super power politics. John Le Carre's Tinker Tailor was dramatised brilliantly in the 1980s on the BBC of course- it returns to a very different world and its lessons are perhaps different.

The story of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was modelled on Le Carre's experiences as a British agent in Berlin in the 1950s when Kim Philby defected. Those shadowy events are transferred in the film to the 1970s and based around the character of George Smiley. Smiley the deputy to C, Head of the Secret Intelligence Services of the United Kingdom, is sacked with his master when an operation to find out the mole is botched. Years later, he is recalled to the Circus (the code name for MI6) to find out who the mole is. The story is convoluted and worth watching as a thriller. This is not a mindless film though. It leaves the viewer in no doubt what the cost of a double agent is: he spends not merely his treachery to his country but also his treachery to those he knows and loves the most. Matt Damon in another film dealing with the Philby episode said to the Philby equivalent that after betrayel he would always be alone. That truth is what Smilley and the others know about their double agent.

They also know it about themselves. This is a darker film than the original series. In that original series Alec Guiness fenced in the dark mentally with his Soviet opponent, Carla. In the film, Gary Oldman's Smilley does not fence intellectually: he sits like a Spider, like a Domitian in the centre of a vicious web of torture and broken images. There is no doubt in this film that Smiley is cruel. He lets people know that he knows their weaknesses- he reminds one not so much of a distinguished Oxford academic as of a deranged Strangelove. Gary Oldman's performance in this film is the supreme opposite of Guiness's performance: Guiness made Smilley a hero, Oldman makes him an anti-hero. Smilley has lost any sense of a private life and private redemption: we never see his estranged wife in the entire film, even Smilley's memories have cut her out- we see her back, we see her hair but never her face. Its significant because Smilley never shows himself to love or respect any other man or woman.

Loneliness is one feature of this adaptation but so is viciousness. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a post Guantanamo adaptation of the novel. The British agents in Soviet hands are tortured and we see it. A Soviet defector's guts spill into his bath- and the audience briefly sees his intestines flowing in the water. Smilley smiles as his friends cry. The mole maintains his sang froid as he sends his friends to hell of the Lubyanka and we are left in no doubt of what he has done. In that sense the film represents a time much more disposed to confront rather than endure its suffering- the rhythm of the 1980s was, for good or ill, different to that of the 2000s. Post Diana, Britain has changed: we are no longer a society in which it is axiomatic that agents are tortured and killed, but one that requires to see that torture, that death. This brutality reinforces the earlier theme: if Smilley must always think of darkness, then his character, smiling under its glasses becomes darker. Guiness's Smiley remained avuncular, Oldman's Smiley is vicious.

I think the medium of film suits this new darker Smiley. He is given fewer words to say, fewer things to understand. The social atmosphere of the series- the Oxbridge sophistication of the higher circus- has disappeared. Class is absent. Films cannot be as subtle or as drawn out as tv serieses but this leaves the characters within the film exposed, they can no longer talk to hide what they do. They have less time to give us excuses, to make us forget in the complexity of the character the simplicity of the role. Perhaps as well there is less time to develop the sense in Tinker Tailor of the ideology of the thirties- that low dishonest decade which created Philby and the rest was a profoundly serious decade. There isn't that sense of the disillusion with the West, of old men grown old who were once picked for their idealism and their youth but have now grown wrinkles over both the idealism and the youth. That's not there in the film and it darkens further the picture.

Aelita Queen of Mars

Aelita, Queen of Mars, is a Russian film made just on the hinge of the 1920s. It was made in 1924, the year that Stalin succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union. It was made three years after the end of the Russian civil war between the Whites and the Reds had torn through the country. It was made at the height of the New Economic policy, promulgated by Lenin to restore the Scoviet economy by restoring some measure of private enterprise. It is therefore a key historical artefact: reflecting a particular moment within Russian history. It also reflects a particular aesthetic- this was an attempt to make a film which could vie with Hollywood and German cinema in the 1920s- to expand the Soviet ethos throughout the world. It therefore has all the special effects and expensive actors and costumes that money could buy: it looks amazing and its not difficult to see how this film was the epitome of Soviet glamour. Those final words of my sentence conjur up I think the real message of the film because implicit within it is a kind of guilt about its own glamour.

The film concentrates on an engineer- Los- and his wife- Natasha- who live in Moscow. They are joined by two other couples- Ehrlich and his wife (unnamed) and Comrade Gussev and his wife Masha. Los has a friend Spiridinov who is eventually seduced by Ehrlich's wife and ends up leaving Russia as he could not leave the past behind. All these units are seduced by the past in different ways. Ehrlich and his wife are the unreformed Russians who profit from the NEP and want to live exactly as they did under Tsarism. They and their circle fantasize at one point about the luxuries and the order that they enjoyed under Tsarism, they could disregard the interests of the proletariate. Gussev and Masha are good communist citizens: he is a former soldier who has fought against the Whites and comes to the local hospital after the civil war where he falls in love with Masha. Los and Natasha lie between these two extremes: they both genuninely want the Soviet world to succeed (unlike Ehrlich) but both are seduced by the detail of the old life. Ehrlich tries to seduce Natasha by offering her balls and fine food: Los notices and though Natasha never ever succumbs, he becomes jealous and devotes himself instead to dreams of going to Mars.

We see Mars through Los's dreams. He dreams of a world which is ancient and totalitarian. Its a Tsarist set up with the workers imprisoned in the lower sections of the planet and with the upper classes lolling about in the top areas of Mars. In particular an aristocratic council of Elders led by Tuskub, ruler of Mars, dominates the planet as against the sexy and impotent Queen Aelita. Los dreams that Aelita sees him through a newly discovered telescope and longs to kiss him. He also dreams of going to Mars and finding her and kissing her. These dreams, I don't think are supposed to be taken for reality. They are symbolic. Los is dreaming of escaping his good proletarian marriage, fleeing to another woman who embodies luxury and wealth. Whenever you see Aelita, its hard not to think of Calypso or Circe. But the point about Aelita is that she remains a prisoner of the old world- she remains a master and as Gussev says to Los, she remains a master. No matter what Los's dreams of romantic unity with her, he has to compromise between his relationship with Aelita and his integrity as a Communist. Ultimately Los has to realise that it is Aelita he needs to kill, she is the bourgeoise part of him, the bourgeoise part of Natasha and after killing her in his mind, he is able to return to Natasha in the flesh and throw away his dreams and start to build Russia.

Some critics see Aelita as a non-communist film: its an attitude which has some legitimacy as many critics in the 1920s viewed the film as a bourgeoise film. My reading of the film though is that it is profoundly communist. This is a film in which the only basis for a good society and a good relationship is to be a good soviet citizen. The critics are right that Aelita may be more effective propaganda because it strives to implicate the entire structure of life- the relationships between men and women in particular into this vision of soviet citizenship. Ultimately the Ehrlich's marriage is a bourgeois thing of deceit based on materialism, the marriage of Gussev and Masha can only be disturbed by his desire to serve the community and Los's marriage to Natasha is threatened by evil capitalist forces. What Aelita represents is therefore the domestication of communism within Russia- its disassociation from feminist forces for example- but possibly it works better because it isn't just a political tract: it may be a fable about space travel to Mars and the creation of a Soviet Martian republic, but odd as it may sound its also a socially realistic fable!

A Separation

Often people look at divorce or break up and they see that one side or the other are to blame. They argue that somebody must accept moral culpability and I'm sure that in many cases there is a party that is to blame, there is someone who should be accountable. That is not the case in all cases. The Iranian film, A Separation, brings that home very powerfully. It concerns a couple living in Tehran. The woman wants to leave Iran, the man wants to stay to look after his senile father. Their daughter chooses to stay with the father rather than the wife. They separate- the wife lives with her parents for a while, the man in their flat. He employs someone, another woman, to come and look after his father for him. The conflicts that this creates- between the husband and wife and the woman who cleans for them- are the force which runs through the film. The conflict that arrises between the middle class couple and their cleaner is a conflict overlaid with Iranian politics and history, its about an accident which happens when the man in justifiable anger pushes the cleaner. As the crisis happens, the relationship between the husband and wife is put under hideous strain: they struggle with their different opinions, both justified, of what the best strategy is.

Some have seen in this story a political allegory. Nader the man is the Iranian reformists who try to confront the regime, his wife Simin represents Westerners fleeing the country, Nader's father stands for Iran herself- grand and helpless, the cleaner and her husband stand for the devout masses who have in their pain elevated the fanatics and thugs who currently rule. I can see the argument but find the point is too blunt. I think that actually the political point here is much more interesting and universal. This is a film that reaffirms that as humans we face moral dilemmas which are as true in Tehran and Isfahan as they are in Texas. The dilemmas in the case here exist whether you like it or not. The film investigates whether you are ever truly accountable for the acts you commit: how accountable should you be for the results of an action whose import you did not at that moment understand. If I kick a pregnant woman and she suffers a miscarriage- have I committed a murder and should I be tried for murder? The film leaves this question unanswered- but one can see the justice each way. Moral questions are not simply resolved into yes or no answers, they take thought and feeling. Equally we are confronted with the consequences of the law: what is the law- a system to punish bad behaviour or to create good social outcomes. What does punishment acheive if there was no intention and if it merely wrecks lives and leaves them destroyed without restoring anything of what was lost?

These questions run through the film but alongside them runs another one. We all face situations in our lives and have choices to make. We may call the placing of us in those situations providence or fate or fortune but it comes to the same thing: human beings cannot control the context for their actions, all they control is their response to that context. Nader and Simin therefore stand at opposite poles with respect to how they respond to their situation. He believes in right and wrong- he does not believe he pushed the pregnant woman and therefore killed her unborn child, he does not believe he should desert his father. She beleives in accomodating: even if he was not guilty, wouldn't it be easier to pay off the other family rather than accept the potential dangers of a trial. His father is ill- but then his father can barely recognise him and for the sake of their daughter wouldn't it be easier to leave Iran. These two responses are both valid responses to human events: the first set of responses needs no defence- the second set of responses are those of a pragmatist and therefore are reasonable in themselves (there is such a thing as selfish idealism- particularly when a child is involved). There is no way though of adjudicating between them- nor is there a way of arguing between them.

Ultimately this brings me to what I found most intriguing about the film. Because if we accept that the conflict running through it- between compromise and assertion- is a real conflict and an insoluble conflict then at last we can see the tragedy of Nader and Simin's marriage. They obviously love each other- obviously care for each other and they both tenderly care for their daughter. Yet in this situation these two human beings cannot share their lives- every time a strategic decision has to be made, their paths divert. The film's title is very apt- this is not a film about injustice or a response to injustice- it is a film about the pain of separation. The pain is worst for their daughter, played amazingly by a wonderful child actress, who captures the pain and courage of a precocious 12 year old facing these disasters. It is real pain though and one struggles to imagine how this relationship could not split apart. The film in that sense puts on screen something that I think is really important: it shows how sometimes relationships cannot survive, not because anyone is culpable, but just because these characters cannot find a way to compromise between their approaches to the world.

Strike

What is the worth of propaganda films to a modern critic or thinker? That thought occurred to me as I watched Sergei Eisenstein's Strike at the British Film Institute last week. Strike is a pretty straightforward propaganda film. Released in 1925, the film chronicles events in an unknown factory. A worker is unjustly accused of stealing a tool from the factory. The bosses believe he has done the deed and sack him but the worker has no other place to work and so commits suicide. His suicide becomes the spark which sets off a general conflagration, as his colleagues decide that their response to the suicide is to strike. The workers walk out of the factory and submit demands to the management for satisfactory hours and rates of pay and conditions. The managers laugh at their impertinence. Assisted by shareholders they gather the local cossacks who ride back into the mass of the workers, massacring those who resist and arresting the ring leaders. Eisentein leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to think about the film, as at the end one of the ringleaders turns to the camera, in handcuffs, and exhorts us to fight for proletarian freedom and remember the sufferings of the martyrs that went before us.

Eisenstein's film is most definitely propaganda. The bosses are routinely portrayed as fat, old and ugly. They and their spies spend most of the film laughing and grimacing (displaying crooked teeth). The spies who work for them are compared to animals- an owl, a monkey, a bulldog. These animalistic references visually indicate the bestiality of the spies. They use criminals to infiltrate the crowd: at one point the titles show us that one of the spies Monkey asks for anyone without scruples to join his mission to bring down the strike. These guys are bad and they are meant to be bad. Contrast this with the workers. They can do no wrong in Eisenstien's vision of the world. They are lean and muscled. They do not seem unjust or malicious in what they do and they defend their own with a fierce determination. Eisenstein's vision includes no greys only black and white. This makes the film a poor description of a real strike- but it makes it interesting for two other reasons: the first as a historical document and the second as a document within the history of cinema.

One of the things you will notice as a western viewer when you watch Strike is that there are no characters. There are no real defined individauls on the workers' side of the dispute. What Eisenstein is portraying is a social movement rather than individuals, what he is trying to show is the force of that movement as it opens up Russia to opportunity for all. Class power not individual charisma is the engine of history within the film. Its important to note though that class power is also what keeps the proletariate down- not the individuals. The individuals whether the bosses or the spies are repugnant but its their possession of agency, their ability to shape a response using force which allows them to express that repugnancy. So the bosses are compared in a stunning sequence of montage to farmers slaughtering cows- the relationship they envisage with the worker is the same as the relationship that the farmer envisages to his livestock. Others have argued that the scene in which the bosses recruit the lumpen-proletariate is a moment at which awkward aesthetical values shatter the propaganda of the film: I disagree. What Eisenstein shows us is that the bosses and the criminals have the same interests at heart: furthermore he establishes through their alliance the fundemental respectability of the proletariate. Its important to bear these conflicts in mind when analysing the film: Eisenstein is portrying both the brotherly love of the proletariate and the hatred by the Bourgeouise of their independence. Capitalism in this view reduces the proletariate to animals being gutted and creates the exploiters who do this to them.

However Eisenstein's film is also interesting in rejecting the notion of leadership- there are no leaders here. There is a bolshevik group- in the sense that there are workers who discover that striking is good before their fellows do and there is organisation, the workers reject the stagy criminals- but there is no leadership. When compared to his later films (Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible) there is much less stress on the role of the leader in leading his people to the promised land: that is interesting, not so much for indicating where the communist revolution was (Leninism was totalitarian and unpleasant) but for indicating that you could still think in these terms in 1925. The evolution from the earlier to the later films of Eisenstein is an evolution in his own thinking but also in the official thinking of the Soviet Union from the 20s to the 40s: an evolution which perhaps indicates the way in which the revolution changed. Eisenstein could still envisage the revolution as not needing protecting or guiding (eventually) by a leader or a party in 1925: by 1940 that vision of the revolution was impossible.

These are mere thoughts about the film and I have left out the technical innovations (particularly in montage) that the film made. I'd reccomend a much superior review of Eisentein's entire works here. What I do think that Strike shows us though is how interesting a propaganda film made by a vile regime can be for understanding the ideology of that regime. Strike has fantastic images which stay in the mind but ultimately its also a serious film making a point: there is no way that any of us will agree with that point, but its worth watching just to understand how the point was made.

Brother can you spare a dime

I just thought I'd draw everyone's attention to a radio program about one of the great songs of the thirties- Brother can you spare a Dime. First heard on Rudy Vallee's radio program in 1932 (two weeks before Roosevelt was elected), or at least first heard on broadcast there, it was performed by performer after performer- Ad Colson did one version which is on youtube and Bing Crosby's is on my ipod. It gets into the context of the song- that most of the men in the Great Depression had fought in the Great War. That generation was one of those generations that seem to be afflicted by all the slings and arrows that fortune might throw at them: in their twenties they fought in the Trenches, in their forties they were sacked from their jobs and in their fifties they watched their sons go off to war. Its a fantastic program which strays into discussing the difference between Vallee's version and Crosby's version- the music of the twenties and the thirties and also the opposition between that and other songs of the Depression, particularly the fantastic 1933 song from Golddiggers, 'We're in the Money'. The latter is worth appreciating in its youtube version.



Contrast that with Brother can you spare a Dime, written a year earlier and in a version which the radio program doesn't include.



And you can see quite how shocking the latter's sentiments were.

Alexander Nevsky: Reflections on a Russian Classic

Watch Alexander Nevsky and you can't stop noticing the fact that this is both a film and propaganda. Produced in 1938, it was swiftly removed from Soviet film theatres later that year when the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed. It returned to them in 1941 following the German invasion of Russia. The film concentrates on the story of Alexander Nevsky, a historical Prince of Vladimir, who fought the Teutonic Knights in the 1240s. The film deals with this subject by bringing together several battles into one great confrontation: on the one side is Nevsky, on the other the Knights. The first hour of the film constructs the confrontation between Nevsky and the Knights, the second half of the film reveals the battle between the two forces and the outcome of that battle- whose implications are quite clearly meant to reverbrate down the centuries to the atmosphere of 1941. This film attempts to make statements about the way that history works and the ways in which it intersects with class, nationality and religion: the way that events are shaped by those forces and by the force of the charisma of a single individual.

Writing a review of propaganda is not easy. This film is nationalistic, anti-religious, possibly anti-semitic, definitely prejudiced against the wealthy and jingoistic. It is a Stalinist production and relates to that period within the history of the Soviet Union when Communism became a nationalistic creed. One can admire the artistry. There are shots of genius in this film. There are shots of amazing beauty which still stun the eye today. Some of the photography across the icefields of Northern Russia is sublime. A shot of skulls in the snow after a great battle is stark but sums up in one image the desolation of death. All the way through the film you can see the way that it has influenced modern cinema. It is impossible to film snow or ice without thinking about Nevsky. It is impossible to film a battle sequence without (consciously or unconsciously) referring to the great battle with which this film culminates. Eisenstein made propaganda but he encased the Stalinist offal in chocolate: the film should come with a warning- dwell on the edge and taste the sweetness, bite too far in and rotten juices from the meat flow into your mouth.

The ideas of the film- the offal- is interesting because of what they tell us about Soviet communism. THe key moment in the film rhetorically is when Nevsky summons the Peasants from around Novgorod to defend Russia. When they arrive, they and the poor townsmen help defend Russia with an innate sense of Russianness and a wisdom based on proverbs about hares and foxed. Nevsky himself seems to operate best in this milieu. For Communism, an industrialising creed, this might seem strange but it testifies to the ways in which, as Orlando Figes and others have described, the Communist regime became nationalistic. Consequently although Catholicism is condemned and one of the 'traitors' is made to look Jewish, orthodoxy is not questioned. The film supports a project which says that at its core Russia is Russian and truth springs from the people of Russia, in particular the peasants of Russia. This reading of the film suggests that it is Stalinist but also that Stalinism can be seen as changing through the medium of its own propaganda.

It is difficult to review a film which does mask such dark ideas. I have not done Nevsky justice in these reflections nor have I found a real theme to hang this review upon. I think though it is a film worth seeing- mainly for its artistry and imagery. Its ideas are interesting but I found them too linked with the totalitarian regime that inspired the film to be satisfying. Ultimately they are the beast, the cinematography is the beauty.

Brighton Rock (2011)

Remakes are not easy for they are shadowed by the original. This is particularly true when the film remade is a classic- like the 1947 version of Brighton Rock. The viewer has an expectation both of difference and influence. Its something I've often wondered about. In classical music or theatre we are perfectly happy with the idea that a different performance can shape a piece or a script in a different way. The fact that McKellan did Lear a couple of years ago does not mean that Jacobi can't to it today. We are more resistant in cinema. The director and the writer have become fused, so remakes have an illegitimacy to them. Consider the word for a start. Noone says that the London Philarmonic remakes Mozart, but they do exactly what Rowan Joffe has done to Brighton Rock. They take the original piece, interpret it and play it to an audience. Would it be better if we could get a screening of the first ever performance of Mozart's orchestras, is their performance the best because its the earliest? Or is this obsession with remakes in cinema just an avatar of the genre's insecurity and its immaturity?

Brighton Rock is interesting in this regard. This story has now been told directly three times. Once in a novel by Graham Greene, secondly in a film in the 1940s and thirdly in this updated version. I have reviewed the novel and the earlier film elsewhere: this third film does add a different dimension though the story is basically the same. The basic elements of Brighton Rock are here. The anti-hero Pinkie Brown has committed a murder. A waitress at a local cafe is able to incriminate him because of what she has seen: he then attempts to woo her in order to stop her so doing. His gang gets nervous and Pinkie has to deal with the nerves. And against him is ranged a determined older woman- in the book and the 1940s film she is unconnected from the main action- in this Ida is the owner of the cafe in which Rose the girl works. The set up therefore and the denoument are the same as the book and the other film. The task for the director and actors is straightforward: they have to find something else in the material and convince you that its worth watching another version of the same story. I think they do.

The obvious difference between this film and Greene's book and the earlier dramatisation is the date. Greene's work is dated in the 1930s as Brighton emerged as a centre for race horse gangs. This film is dated in the 1960s, the era of the riots of mods and rockers. It is actually dated pretty precisely to 1964: this is significant because it is the last year in which hanging was available as a punishment for murder. The dress therefore and the style of the film are different from the older version. At one point, Andrea Riseborough, playing Rose, is able to acquire a sixties short skirt: there are echoes of sexual revolution in the air and suggestions of a different future to come. Although this film like the accounts of the sixties I have heard from my parents suggest that whatever was progressive intersected with a huge society that was conservative: radicalism, Beatlemania and Harold Wilson are all off stage in this film. They are important for they make Pinkie's idealisation of the way of the gang a conservative vision, almost a reactionary vision, but they are not central to the line of the story. Setting matters because it throws into relief the curious conservatism of the main characters: but it is not key.

The real change in this film as against the book and the previous film, is that it makes the relationship the centre of the drama. The film is laconic but it appeals to our emotions: it leaves you wondering whether Pinkie ever really did love Rose and whether Rose ever really did love Pinkie, rather than wondering about Catholicism. Catholicism is brought in: but the people I went with reacted to religion by discussing its impact on the relationship rather than the relationship's importance for religion. When Pinkie tells Rose that their marriage will produce only mortal sin, we empathise with the girl's instinctive horror that this moment of moments in her life has been ruined, rather than feeling his and her feelings of sin. Perhaps this is nowhere best symbolised than when Rose goes into a church: the camera follows her face, her features, her walk rather than following the images of Mary and Christ on the wall. This is Brighton Rock the individualistic drama about Catholicism rather than the Catholic fable about individuals. Its an important shift in tone.

So Brighton Rock 2011 achieves in producing a remake that is a version of the original rather than being a faximile of the original. The important performances here come from RIley and Riseborough. He generates an air of silent menace but also one of vulnerability. Riley's Pinkie has obviously no idea of how to seduce a girl and no idea at all of sex. Riseborough similarly has no idea of how to be seduced and captures wonderfully an air of innocence- almost of mental incapacity to recognise the world. She plays the part with an exemplary touch: making you believe in this incredibly vulnerable girl without a hint of street wiseness in her make up. Because of that they are a believable couple. What's interesting about them- as opposed to Attenborough and to the book- is that they are products of a cinema that has much less time for religion as a motivation. Constantly therefore we are looking for other motivations: is Rose a disturbed and abused child who has found a substitute father, is Pinkie really in love with Rose? They are questions that the film doesn't answer: but what it provides it problematises.

I'm not sure I have any answers surrounding those questions, but this third attempt at the story of Brighton Rock appears to me to be a more feminist text than the first two. Fundementally we are being asked to understand this relationship. How free are those that enter into this coercive and frankly terrifying ensemble: is Rose coerced by Pinkie's violence, is Pinkie by his situation. Furthermore is there a sense in which they are both escaping, Rose from her family, Pinkie from the gang. The ending of the film suggests both that human life and our answers to these questions are illusions, and that a life is leant meaning by its sequel. If Rose believes that Pinkie loved her, does it matter that he was a sadistic basterd who loved noone?

La Boulangere de Monceau

You don't need much time to say something important. A short film or a short book is often more powerful than a long one. (Sometimes this blogger needs to learn that with respect to blogposts!) Eric Rohmer's La Boulangere de Monceau fits into that pattern. The film is only 22 minutes long but it has interesting things to say about the ways that we view morality. Its a story about a lad who meets two girls, one an unnamed bakery assistant and the second Sylvie, a slim blonde on the street. The man meets Sylvie on the street. She walks through his route to university every day and he admires her from afar. Prompted by a friend, he engineers a meeting with the girl- and after a discussion, she agrees to go for a coffee with him the next time they meet. Then she vanishes. He searches for her round the district, in the markets and the streets. Eventually he ends up going regularly to a bakery where he flirts with the assistant and agrees to meet her in a cafe. However just before he does, he sees Sylvie again who broke her leg and therefore had vanished, he jilts the bakery girl and goes to dinner with Sylvie- he describes this as a moral decision.

There isn't much suspense in the film and therefore I feel no guilt about telling you the whole story. I think though what's really interesting about this is the way that our protagonist describes the whole story as a moral tale. His decision to go with Sylvie to dinner and not the bakery assistant is moral: why? There are two reasons for the decision to be moral: the first is that he is committed to Sylvie. We know however that they have only just met, there is no reason for him to be committed to her. Sure he may desire her more but that desire is not a moral judgement, its a preference. There is a second reason for the decision to be moral: the reason is retrospective. At the end of the short film, the man marries Sylvie. In retrospect, had he jilted her he would have jilted his wife. In retrospect therefore the decision is about morality when looked at from the point of view of the future. Two things are crucial in this perspective: the first being that Sylvie as opposed to the girl from the bakery is given a name by the narrator- she is an individual- the other is not. The second is that the film is narrated: the entire film is seen from the point of view of the future.

This spinning round of the moral order is important. We often see the moral moment as the moment of choice, whereas the film presents the moment which defines the morality of an action as the moment afterwards. Obviously morality is useful as a guide to how to behave. Rohmer's reminder is that morality is also a useful concept applied to the past: it is our way of understanding our history. The man here needs to rule out the alternative possibility- that he married the girl from the bakery- and he does so by creating an obligation to Sylvie. The road not taken could not be taken because it would have been immoral to have taken it. Psychologically Rohmer argues that we need to classify, to judge our pasts in order to explain and justify our presents and he only needs 22 minutes to say that.

Of Gods and Men

Film is a window onto the soul. It is a way of unpicking human beings, of seeing straight into their eyes. Perhaps it is no surprise that one of the most famous shots is the closeup. Peering into the character's eyes we can get a sense of their anguish, of the bends of that piece of the crooked timber of humanity. Nowhere is this truer than when filming takes on religion. Great film makers from Bresson to Bergman have seen in religion- in particular in European Catholicism and Protestantism a subject which continues the define the fate of the West and the fate of each individaul living in the world. God becomes a character within the cinema: whether it is his silence echoing through Bergman's Winter Light, the greatest film of Calvinist desolation ever made, or his stern adjunction in the films of Bresson, or his unreal presence in those of Rosselini, coming like Christ before the inquisitor. When we think of religion we can think of its departure from this world, a world that Bresson's L'Argent informs us is irredeemably corrupt. Surprisingly Of Gods and Men is a film about monks: it is a film about monks that argues for engagement with the world, for sympathy with it.

Of Gods and Men is a film that concerns itself with a unique situation. We begin and stay inside the monastery for most of the film. THis is a film about the monastery itself and its community. We only go outside that community to establish some central facts. The first fact is the context in which the monastery resides. The local community love the monks. One monk, Luc, functions as the local village's doctor. The other monks are also deeply embedded in this community. Their Christianity is not seen as an impediment for the Muslims around them are committed to toleration. The second context is the threat from outside. We see the murder of some Croats working out in the desert early on in the film and we are always aware that the Islamic Fundamentalist opposition to the government will at some point come and kill these monks. The dilemma becomes the issue of what the monk's duty is. If they go to seek their own safety, are they really cowardly. Is departure an indication that they are neglecting the community that they have helped to nurture: a woman tells them that the villagers are the birds sitting on a tree, the monks are the branch they reside on. But if they stay, is that just as egoist a decision: do they seek martyrdom where they do not need to? Are they spiritually arrogant?

I am not sure I can answer those questions: I have never sat in that position and have no idea, though have a fear, of how I would react. What I think is interesting is the way in which the monks come to their decision. Christian their leader begins by discussing with them as a group and there is rancour and discord. The discussion is closed off by prayer. As the film moves forward, each member of the group struggles to a greater or lesser extent with what the decision means. One monk almost goes mad in his cell, shouting about God having abandoned him in his hour of need. There is actual spiritual anguish here. There is also contemplation. The film is happy to stay with the monks as they make the decision, tracking Christian as he walks through a forest thinking in silence, or shooting another two monks having a trivial argument about the washing up. An argument that is really about less trivial things. You see that as the process of decision happens so the activity of the monastery continues: the men treat the sick, they pray, they talk to the local villagers (there is one touching exchange between a girl on the verge of her twenties and Luc for example). Activity we see is part of this decision: it is part of the prayer that leads them to take their decision.

It is also a coping mechanism. This is a decision but its also a worry. We can see the monks are driven by their need to decide whether to go or to stay, but they are also terrified by their situation. To decide to stay is to take a very brave decision. They are able to deal with this worry through their normal activities. You can see this in two moments. Both are moments of great tension but in both the monks survive because they don a clothing of Catholicism. Firstly when the Islamic Fundamentalists arrive at the monastery in the middle of night asking for medicine: Christian's response is to tell them that guns are not allowed in the monastery. He tells them that the monks will treat any fundamentalist, but they will not move their medicine around for them. He does two other things though: he quotes the Quran to the invaders about Christianity, about the particular kindness of priests and he informs them that the day they invaded is Christmas. Later they bring a wounded comrade to the monastery and Luc treats him. These moments of intersection are moments in which the monks use their monastic principles to quiet their anxiety. Secondly there is a moment in which a helicopter comes over the monastery: the monks fear for their lives, but instead of panicking they go inside the monastery and sing prayers to God. The prayers do not drive the helicopter away- why would they- but they provide a psychological release.

The danger is real. Throughout the film the Algerian government are shown warning the monks. The army arrives to protect them and the monks dismiss it because it interrupts their work. The army commander is keen to restate the dangers. The army take Christian to identify a terrorist leader's body, he does so but shakes his head. The soldier sniffs in contempt. This is not a film which unambiguously takes the side of the monks: the Algerians say at one point, that the reason that Algeria has its problems is its history of colonialism. The view of the monks appears to be that they are as much part of the history of Algeria as anyone else: or rather that they are now part of their monastery and cannot be decoupled from it. Throughout the film you get the sense of the affection between the monks and the land. Perhaps this makes sense in the context of France in Algeria in particular. Its also powerful because it gets to something else about the film: the monks are not aggressively anti-Muslim and neither is the film. We see Algeria through the eyes of the monks, rather than through our own eyes, and it looks to them as though it is a complex society riven by hatred. A complex society which has thrown up a gang of fools but also contains its fair share of saints.

This is a film ultimately about the monks. It is a difficult task as a non-Christian living in a society that forgot monasteries at the reformation to understand the role and function of monastic living. Whether you are a Christian or not, I think what this film does is explain the process of decision making under stress in that kind of a community and open to your eyes a world which dominated Western spirituality right up until the seventeenth century. Walking out of the cinema, one thought flashed into my head: Bergman and Bresson and Rosselini all deal with the role of Christianity in the modern world, after the death of God. This film does not deal with that modernity but another. It takes us to the frontiers of Christendom and positions its deepest questions around the roles of Christians on that frontier. If Bergman and Bresson and Rosselini are in dialogue with Dosteovsky and Vico: then Of Gods and Men speaks of missionaries, martyrdom and forgiveness. Its subject is older, but no less interesting.

Enemies of the People

We live our lives surrounded by the past. It envelops and confines us within patterns of behaviour. This functions at a personal and a political level. Thet Sambath's film, Enemies of the People, is a study of memory and the way that it has effected his life and the lives of others. Its an attempt to explain what happened in the 1970s in Cambodia, when Pol Pot seized power and millions were slaughtered. What Sambath does isn't to examine the details of Cambodian politics at that point: he does not approach the issue as a student of diplomacy or of political structures. What he does is approach the entire drama from a humanistic point of view. He looks at the individuals that performed the murders and asks them why they did what they did. Its important to realise after all that genocide cannot happen without perpetrators: within obedience is consent. Sambath's film takes the entire gamut of the perpetrators. He spent ten years making it. The ten years were well spent, he presents us with the killers themselves: the men and women in charge of the operation in the killing fields. He presents us also with Nuon Chea, Brother No 2, Pol Pot's deputy, who never sullied his hands with blood but who ordered the entire event.

Sambath's quest is given particular relevance by the fact that he himself is a victim. His father was killed by the Khmer Rouge. His brother vanished under their rule, probably killed too. His mother was forced to marry a Khmer cadre and died in child birth. Everything Sambath says about the Khmer regime is conditioned, we know from his narration, by these deaths. In that sense he represents the whole of Cambodia: roughly speaking a quarter of the population were murdered in those bloody years and therefore most Cambodians must like Sambath be directly effected through their relatives. The documentary becomes therefore not merely a medium in which the killers and the officials remember, it becomes a medium for Sambath to recover the meaning, the memory of the events which slaughtered his family. You get a hint of what this might mean when he discusses the members of his family who are now alive and remarks that his surviving sister and he can never speak: they can never speak because to speak reawakens the memories of the dead and the destroyed. The place of pain from which this documentary flows means that it is a particularly visceral act of memory: I challenge you to watch it and not to cry.

But there are two places of pain to remember these events from. The first is grief: Sambath's grief and his guilt. Guilt that the last words he spoke to his brother were those of disappointment about a fighting cock that his brother had forgotten to bring home: a reminder lest any were needed that even under totalitarianism people live normal lives and worry normal worries. The grief is more obvious. The other place of pain though is the pain of the perpetrator. At one point one of Sambath's interviewees, a devout Buddhist, speaks of the fact that in his belief system he will never come back as a human being. He tries to imagine what he might come back as but cannot imagine something bad enough as a punishment. Watching the faces of the perpetrators, you see both the impassivity of having seen too much and the pain of having done too much. They stutter, they deny what they did, their eyes flicker around the camera screen- never looking straight at us, knowing (possibly) that they never can. Sambath's impassive questions turn into a kind of torture: in a quiet tone he asks them what it felt like to kill, why they killed and how many, forcing them into the prison of the past.

The impassivity is important: although Sambath is deeply bound into these memories because he like us did not see the massacres, he like us is exiled from the direct memory of the massacre. So he can be our proxy. When the killers discuss drinking the gall bladders of their victims or when they show him how to slit a throat or where the bodies lie, he like us can feel shock. These are the kind of details that became normal for those who committed the crimes- but for us and for Sambath they are revelations of barbarism. You are not supposed to discuss whether gall bladders taste bitter or not: to discuss that isolates you from the rest of human kind. Murder like anything else can become a habit. Its crucial that Sambath is involved and yet not involved: that his business is not reawakening his own memories, but finding out what happened to those he loved. He like the audience has to relive the killings through the memories of those who committed them: he keeps an admirable objectivity in his reporting, asking for details and inspecting sites, but in his commentary following each interview, he gives us an emotional response that we can empathise with. The interviews with the perpetrators reveal the way that murder has cut them off from society: they have experiences, they have guilt that they can neither communicate nor expunge.

The perpetrators do not seek to justify what happened, save by arguing that they followed orders. They appear to be stunned by the events they have participated in. The exception here is Nuon Chea, Brother Number 2. Nuon Chea is the only participant who is certain about the justice of his memory of events. He is interviewed and sits looking into the camera, unflinchingly. His answers are measured and come without anguish. He knows what he knows and he knows that it is right. His view is that those who were murdered were Enemies of the People, Enemies who had to be slaughtered lest the party fail in its reforms of the country. Self righteously Chea remains in his certainty: seeking even to impart that to others, to excuse their sins. He feels no guilt and his words are a power of themselves, certainty is convincing. Nuon Chea is definitely a clever and thoughtful man and when he speaks you feel yourself for a moment being seduced. Sambath though mixes the interview with his interviews of the perpetrators on the ground, with his own discussion of the consequences of massacre: we are never allowed to divorce the snake from his trail of slime. For that reason Nuon Chea's rhetoric is undermined and turned against himself: we find the reason for the murders in his certainty and his charisma, but Sambath's filming means that we are not persuaded.

Memory is important. So many Cambodians in the seventies were killed and that memory will stay within that society for as long as anyone reading this blog is alive. Just as the atrocities of the twentieth century in Europe remain alive, facts within the politics of the twenty first century, so will the Khmer Rouge's work in Cambodia. Sambath's dispassionate eye and his camera allow us to navigate different memories: his own memory of his brother, mother and father and their grisly fates, the memories of those who performed the bloody work out on the killing fields and the memory of the one who ordered it. What it presents is a picture that is complicated and difficult: Sambath never says what he thinks about this and never expresses his anger. When you contrast that with the anger of Nuon Chea, willing to denounce those whose blood stains his hands, you can see a moral distinction which is as clear as can be.

The Postman always rings twice

Reading a book about a story that you have seen and enjoyed on the screen is very interesting. The book brings out facets that you never realised were there. Reading 'The Postman always rings twice' several things come out of the book that are not in the film: the book was far more sexually explicit than the film, take this passage

I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned slow so that they would slip out under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls.... She looked like the Great Grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night.

The thing though that is most noticable isn't the sex or the violence- both of which are more visible- but the story itself. Postman is about infidelity- Cora and Frank get together and then murder her husband and face the legal consequences of that. In the film this is represented as a blighted love story: in the novel things are different.

Two things are different. The first is the background of the characters. In the film they are a drifter and a wannabe star. In the book, the drifter has prison sentences in at least two if not three states. He is not so much a drifter- a happy go lucky hitcher- as a sinister petty criminal. The route from fights in bars and petty theft to murder isn't as shocking as the route from a good time boy to a killer. The girl in the book is idealist: in the novel, she was a waitress at a cheap resturant and spent 'two years of guys pinching your leg and leaving nickel tips and asking how about a little party tonight, I went on some of them parties'. Both of these characters live in the seedy margins of the law and exhibit attitudes to match: he never seems to want to work or understand what it is to work, their relationship is based on violence. Just as importantly their contempt for her husband is based on race. In the film this is never mentioned, in the novel it is explicit. Cora turns to Frank at one point and says about her having a kid with her husband 'I can't have no greasy Greek child'. This isn't the sole example of her prejudice, again the film shows nothing of this.

So what to conclude. The Postman always rings twice is a far nastier and grittier book than the film. What does this show? In my view it shows a couple of things: firstly of course how the Hays Code made Hollywood much more covert in its approach to sex and violence, Lana Turner's legs are no substitute for what the devil had Frank and Cora do that night. But also I think it shows how Hollywood at a particular point in time moved away from reality: Postman is not a realistic film and the choice to make it not realistic was conscious. The source material is realistic and gritty: racism, the seedy underworld, deception and anger are all present in ways that you do not find on the screen. The book is grounded in a reality, in a 1930s America, complete with slang, vocabulary and attitude: the film is a much more universal thing, it is less tied to a class or a place. One of the things that cinema with its universal aspiration has done through the blockbuster is create or try to create universal languages: when you watch Postman and read Postman you can see that process taking place.

The greatness of Roger Ebert

I have a lot of time for Roger Ebert. I was just reading an article he wrote recently about his new book, Great Movies. Two passages struck me as immortal. One is about one of my favourite film makers and a man whose vision I have grown to see as one of the key ones of the twentieth century: Ingmar Bergman. He talks of coming home from his sickness, and

Soon after I returned home I turned to Bergman, who is a filmmaker for thoughtful moods. His new Criterion discs have been restored to an astonishing black and white beauty, and I fell into them. It's conventional to write of "his great cinematographer, Sven Nykvist," but my God, he is great, and I found myself trying to describe the perfection of his lighting. I responded strongly to Bergman's passion about fundamental questions of life and death, guilt, mortality, and what he regards as the silence of God. I'd seen all these films on first release, but now, at an older age, having walked through the valley, I saw them quite differently. Norman Cousins famously found during an illness that comedy helped heal him. For me, it was Bergman.

Again at the end of the essay Ebert reaches a truth about literature, film and history. He says

I believe good movies are a civilizing force. They allow us to empathize with those whose lives are different than our own. I like to say they open windows in our box of space and time.

In Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis says at one point that we read to know we are not alone. Ebert makes the point as well but its a point we all do well to remember, to have repeated again and again. Lost in the prison of our own lonely consciousness, film and books, music and history are things which can reintroduce us to a world which we lose every time we close our eyes.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is notable for many reasons. It was the film in which Catherine Deneuve caught the cinematic camera and demanded its attention, an attention that neither the camera nor her audience have relaxed in during the succeeding fifty years. The start of a career of one of the great French film actresses- up there with Moreau- is something to witness. But the film is more important than that in its own respect. The director Jacques Demy was one half of France's great directorial couple- Agnes Varda, responsible for the restoration I saw today, was the other half and Demy knew what he was doing. The film is set in Cherbourg in the late 1950s and finishes in the early 1960s. It chronicles the life of two young people- Genevieve (played by Deneuve) a 16 year old (in 1957) girl who helps her mother manage an umbrella store in Cherbourg, and her lover Guy, a 20 year old car mechanic, who lives with his aunt and her nurse, Madelaine. The two are deeply in love as the film begins.

The first thing you notice about the film is not the direction or the story, but the colour. The film is suffused with primary colours, with blues and reds and yellows. Deneuve's dresses are amazing- her beauty is framed by wonderful patterns and tones. The town itself seems as though it has been put through a filter, every single stone has its own vibrancy, its own richness. The second thing you notice about the film is that everyone sings. They don't just sing the normal kinds of love songs and duets you would expect (though this for example became popular as one such song) but they sing everything. The first scene of the film takes place in a garage and the mechanic's sing to each other- sing single lines about changing the oil in a man's car or where they plan to go out that evening. Its the only film where I've seen an argument about whether dancing, theatre or cinema are better conducted by mechanics is expressed in perfect French song. At times lines are rhymed. The actor's voices were dubbed by proffessional singers. At first this irritated me, but its done on purpose. Demy wants you to take the colour, take the song and fuse it into something else. He wants you to imagine his world is the world of fairytale. When his characters say they love each other forever, they say it with the earnestness of sixteen year olds but the medium in which they sing, the colours behind them turn gaucherie into golden promises.

So much more impressive as all the promises are broken. Demy wants to present you with a picture you'll believe in, only to smash it. The iron laws of history grind over his lovers. War and pregnancy intervene. Parents urge and though no-one behaves badly or unfaithfully, love cannot be. In the world of the film, just as in Brief Encounter, tragedy is a product not of evil men or women but of evil choices. Deneuve's character becomes pregnant by Guy, he goes to Algeria, conscripted and whilst there she makes a pragmatic choice. She chooses to marry someone else: she knows Guy might not come back, she knows that her mother and her are almost destitute. Life is about pragmatism and survival not grand gestures in favour of principles that only look good drenched in song and colour. The film's position is avowedly cynical. Filmed in black and white, it would be a realist tale of disappointment and sadness: in colour and song it seems a celebration. Really it is a proclamation of pragmatism.

Ultimately as a proclamation of pragmatism, its incomplete. It leaves us watching the screen as it fades to black, the lovers are briefly reunited before obligation tears them apart. Just as in Brief Encounter, we know that they cannot be together but unlike in Lean's masterpiece where the characters wake from love, in this film they part with scorn. Guy resents Genevieve still. Genevieve's life after marriage is left to us as a blank: we can fill in the colours should we like. Pragmatism presents us with a world in which tragedy is inevitable, the product of neccessity but that it has costs. We know that one casualty is any chance of friendship between the lovers, another may be the marriage of Genevieve and her husband. We do not know and the film allows no commentary. As a statement it misses its final clause. We know the choices were rational: but the coda isn't present to tell us how they looked in retrospect.

Without retrospect we cannot ultimately judge.

My son, my son what have ye done?

There is a murder. A son has killed his mother. He has taken two hostages inside the family house and is holding them at gunpoint. Nobody knows who they are. Outside the police are gathered. They negotiate with him. That is the setup of the most recent Werner Herzog film. All of this is told to you in the first ten minutes of the film and from there on in, assisted by the protagonist's girlfriend and his friend, we observe the police detective in charge of the case being taken through the protagonist's psyche as he wound himself up to the murder. Herzog's film has his own touches- flamingos, ostriches and dwarfs on Shetland ponies chased by mutant giant chickens- but the storyline is not complicated, though it is suspenseful. At the centre of it is the murderer Brad and his psychology.

So what are we told about Brad? He went to Peru, came back and was according to his girlfriend never the same again. He was out cayacking with his friends and they came down a river and everyone died, save for Brad who inspired for some reason decided that he would not join them. His sense of that saving animates him throughout the rest of the film. Whatever God saved him, that God is what enthuses his every action: that voice in his head, the God of the box of Puritan Oats, instructs him in how to live and what to do. This peculiar notion is central to the film: we cannot say it definitely caused his mother's death, we can say it was this mindset that enthuses everything he does. Ultimately the instruction for his mother's death was received from this voice. We see him act bizarrely even scarily, he is unwilling to admit to any constraints imposed by society. He cannot see that the fact that a house is not for sale and that he has no money precludes him buying it. He cannot see that he sounds odd and strange, he has his belief and that belief is a truth that ultimately means more to him than anything else in the world. Wondrously Herzog manages to draw on both the sense of religion as the ultimate social impulse (what could be more social than another presence inside your brain) and also the ultimate lonely one.

Two things fit into this psychological perception. The first out of which the murder arrives is his relationship with his mother. She is overbearing and strange- a Lynchian confection (she reminded me instantly of the Eastern European woman from Inland Empire)- she is protective and irritating. She forcefeeds her son jelly, turns up without knocking inside his room whilst he is in there with his girlfriend and basically treats this thirty year old as though he were a kid. The second is that Brad, during this period, is an actor. His friend is his director. The play that he acts in is famous: its the Oresteia. This series of plays chronicles the return of Agamemnon from Troy to Mycenae. At his return, the Great King was murdered by his wife and her lover. His death is avenged by his son- Orestes- who murders his own mother and then is pursued by the furies to Athens where the case is judged by the Athenian citizens and Athena herself. The point of the Oresteia in this film is to do two things- to give Brad a text but also to suggest that violence lies behind somewhere in the shadows. The family of Orestes were known for their brutality: the House of Atreus included Tantalus who fed his own son to the Gods, Pelops who slew his father in law, Atreus who boiled his nephew and then Agamemnon. Violence lies at the heart of any comparison of a family to that of Atreus- what we wonder happened to Brad's father?

The Oresteia though is more than a parallel. It and his mother's behaviour and whatever happened prior to the film are texts which Brad then uses. He believes in these texts as surely as a fundamentalist believes in the Quran or the Bible. He takes these texts and asks them what do you tell me to do. The high rhetoric of the Greek play, the low ribaldry of his situation, the dark musing of his mind come together to a point of certainty and clarity. A point we might say of insanity. His insanity is of a peculiar kind. He sees the world in a particular way and fits his experiences, scarily, into that framework. The point about this is that it is mad but no more mad than anyone who believes in a truth which leads them to see the world askew. It is evil because of its consequences- murder- but also because of the disregard for others that Brad manifests. Brad does not check his religion with sympathy or empathy, for him God is God, truth is truth and that is all Brad wants to know. Brad's charisma draws others to him: it is why I suspect his girlfriend stays with him. More confused humans come towards his certainty. The sophisticated director sees its aesthetic possibilities but not its profound immorality, like Foucault before Khomeini, he sees that the structure is profound but not that it is murderous.

Always though in the film we come back to Brad, the murderer. He shows us that the world is infinitely plastic. That it can be shaped and deformed by a thousand new attitudes and stories. Everything we know about Brad we are told about him by unreliable narrators. Quite possibly he has no rational account of what he does, but what he does proceeds from an emotional take on the world- a take which is informed by Greek tragedy and his own emasculation. More importantly though its a take on the world which is born out of his sense of having been saved all those years ago, using that as a foundation, incorporating bits of mysticism and religious text, not to mention the text of the Oresteia and his own situation, he commits matricide. The film is less a comment on the unknown murder than on the psyche that preceded it. If Herzog dances along the line in film between sanity and insanity, then its to inform us about our own natures. We too can shape the world in wonderful and terrible ways that have nothing to do with reality, but the consequences can be dire.

Fantasia!

This is a wonderful setting of Gershwin. As an expression of the city, Raphsody in Blue is probably the closest music can get, to put it to a cartoon like this is pure genius.

Alamar

Alamar opens with two voices, it closes with a city. What fills the time in between is the dignity of cliche. Alamar is about a situation. A young man and woman meet abroad, they fall in love, marry, have a child and then fall out of love. He wishes to stay in his rural idyll. She wishes to return to her city. The child spends time with both his urban mother and his rural father. Alamar focusses upon the father. We see young Natan the son have a shower and pull on his t shirt and swiftly he heads out from Rome, where his mother lives, to the coast of Mexico where his father lives. What he finds there is enchanting. His father lives upon a house on stilts in the middle of the coral reefs. Every day he goes out fishing, diving into the coral reef and spearing lobster and crab and fish and bringing them up to the shore. His father and grandfather dive into the water, swimming underneath it into the reefs themselves (the excuse for some amazing photography). Alternately they sit upon the side of the boat reeling out lines to bait the fish, dragging them in and occasionally clubbing them on the head. This is a world in which a crocodile lives outside the front door and birds walk into the living room.

There is a point here- and its pretty obvious. It might be about male bonding and it might be about the importance of the country and sea over the City. Actually the point is a cliche- but the sea itself isn't. It is endlessly fascinating. Neither is the relationship between father and son. This is handled sensitively. The two bond on a physical level. They playfight. The father corrects the son for winding up the fishing line. The son is allowed to hawl in a fish with adult guidance. He is taught how to take his first tiny steps towards diving. He is cautioned from being eaten by a crocodile. He brings water with which the men wash the boat. Fathers and sons can bond over fishing in a way that they can't over accountancy or law. That point is obvious but the acting, the little touches are far from obvious and much more interesting than that broader point.

Ultimately a film does not have to be about much to be worthwhile. There are all sorts of other problems here: the equation of mother equals boring, father equals exciting, the idea of a community without women. It did not matter to me in the end as I was watching it. The camera loves the open spaces of the Mexican coast. It captures the sunlight shimmering across the sea. It captures the meticulous scraping of the scales off the fish carcasses, and the creation of fish stew which looks so good you can almost taste it from the back seat of the cinema (this like the famous prison dinner scene in Goodfellas is not a scene to watch when you feel hungry). We had a major debate afterwards in the party I went to if the stew was as delicious as the fried fish and tortillas which you also see being made. But its watching the stuff being catched which is extraordinary- these human bodies twisting and turning amidst shoals of fish, lobsters retreating into the coral. Ok its romanticised but still its beautiful and impressive.

I don't claim much for Alamar: apart from this that its a great vision of a life. Its about small touches between the boy and the man and the seascape around them. Its the only film I think summed up by Douglas Adams- so long Alamar and thanks for all the fish!

Tony Manero

Tony Manero opens with a queue. The queue to get into a talent show contest where Chilean TV in the 1970s will select the best Tony Manero impersonator- for those who don't know Tony Manero is the name of John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever. Our 'hero' Raul is one of the characters queueing to take the floor, but he has arrived a week too early having got the date wrong. He therefore has to return back to his squalid room and his own dance troup (consisting of himself, his girlfriend, his girlfriend's daughter and her boyfriend). The film focuses in on Raul- an unpleasant man who beats to death old women in order to acquire their TVs and who casually murders as a means to achieving his own desires. His desire is to be the best Tony Manero impersonator in Chile: therefore he murders his way to a set of glass bricks to insert on a stage above flashing lights, he murders a projectionist who switches from showing Saturday Night Fever to Grease, and he defecates on the white suit of a rival impersonator. This is man as a moral abyss: his focus is purely upon becoming the best Tony Manero impersonator there is.

The film is set in the Chile of General Pinochet. I make no comment on the accuracy of the film to this period of Chilean history, I do not know enough about it. Allende is but a memory and not mentioned in the film. Opposition whilst possible invites police attention and in the end brutal torture. There is an immediacy to life: none of the characters in the troup have a long term plan. They think about escaping their situation or Chile, but none of them move and all of them anchor such dreams on the unrealistic prospect that Raul cares more for them than he does for Tony. What we have here is a casualness about life and the world. Raul exemplifies it with his murderous tendencies, incidental to a Beejees song. The other characters share this though- they might strive against the regime but fundementally they live their lives for the moment. This derives in part from the fact that none of them have much to live for: the house is dirty, the dance troup shabby, Raul is a dictator and their lives are inching towards the grave. There is something Hogarthian about shabby sex in dirty rooms and feeble impersonations. The Chile of Pinochet is represented here as murky and mundane. Perhaps this is most evident in the streets strewn with stones where the police seem able to create fear but not safety: Manero murders with impunity, only opposition activists distributing newspapers are in danger.

This is fused with the world of celebrity and capitalism. This is a world in which character is driven by commodity. Raul wants to be Tony Manero. His world is impoverished, the culture of the dance troup is vitiated by the world of Hollywood. Raul neglects the Chilean and the interesting for the American and the banal. This tale has been told before in cinema from the 40s in Europe to the 2000s in Latin America, the tale of the American empire of culture that means that we are all truly Americans, is one that's been retold and retold again and again. But the truth is that we are all Americans of a certain type and Raul is not a countryman of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allan Poe: where America's culture runs from top to bottom, from thought to entertainment, Raul creates out of entertainment a philosophy where none exists. He models his life on what was supposed to be a diversion: mumbling in the dark the words of John Travolta he treats the amusement of an idle hour as though it were holy scripture. Empty and filled only with this aspiration, Raul is in truth the most boring of men and the most boring of characters. The fascination of the film lies in the fact that everyone else seems obsessed by this idiot.

Is this what dictatorship and celebrity do? Turn a world of interesting people into a city a boring ones: confine horizons, alter moral consciousness and change the world to make it smaller, drabber and dirtier. There is more here than a purely political comment: Raul thrives in Pinochet's Chile and maybe is an avatar of the dictator himself, but he would be a psychopath in any society. The difference maybe that it is only in dictatorships that he would survive. Like a bug, Raul thrives in the wet and the dark, and dictatorships are wet with blood and dark with censorship. The poverty and poverty of aspiration aids him. At the bottom though this is not a political study, but a study of a psychopath- a man for whom ends outweigh means. A man with a cult- a cult of celebrity- in this case Travolta but it might be a footballer or a Big Brother heroine- its just the same. Raul is a monster- and you feel dirty after watching this film, contaminated by its dankness- equally it is only in the nightstreets of Babylon that monsters can thrive!