cineosis

Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy | Germany | Switzerland, 2010)

2011-07-19T00:06:00.013+01:00

Le quattro volte has a long take as inspiring as the opening of Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) and Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), or the end (or near enough) of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). The shot is simpler than all of these, at least in terms of camera movement, panning this way and then that through 180 degrees. Yet in other ways the shot is more complex than any of the above: how did they get the dog to do that, just at the right moment? Yet the choreography of the elements in play is not the crucial aspect of this long take. Set as it is in the contemporary southern Italian countryside of Calabria, the appearance of Roman centurions in the back of a rusty old van throws out-of-joint the day-to-day linear time that has so far been experienced following the life of Fuda the goatherd. While these ancients are revealed as players in (what we now term the immersive experience of) a passion play, this does little to re-anchor the linear temporal flow. Rather, mythical time and cyclical time comes to the fore, the event and its re-inscription through yearly repetitions. Frammartino uses the real time of the long take to make us feel time, reveal the clamour of times…

Le quattro volte, the four times: linear time, cyclical time, mythical time and time out of joint. These times interweave each other, one moment rising to the surface, another moment, slipping beneath another. Yet ‘four times’ abound! Frammartino has said he was inspired by a mystical philosophy attributed to Pythagoras (an attribution that rather seems to come via the bricolage of theosophy, and can just as well be said to have provenance in Hinduism). The film is thus organised into four sections: the existence, and death, of the human, the animal, the vegetative and the mineral. We will, a little later, re-encounter this formulation via Aristotelian philosophy in an entirely different way. Yet, whatever the inspiration, I am interested in how these four series of time that interweave through the images of the film can be considered as four aspects of the affect…

Gilles Deleuze, in his Cinema books, describes a type of film that operates through the affection-image. The domain of affect is one of the four cinematic domains of the classical cinema, the movement-image, the others being perception, action and thought. First something must be perceived, only then can it be felt. This is the affect. Once there is affect, actions can result. Yet actions need not be instantaneous. In this way thought, thinking also influences affect. Affection-images, in the first instance, can be said to be close-ups of an expression on a character’s face. Expressions are the outward indications of internal intensities, they come after perception, before impulses or actions and embody thought as feelings. Yet it is not only the face that can express affect, so too can objects and backgrounds. This occurs through the expressive intensities of qualities and powers captured through affective cinematics (frame-shot-montage-colour-sound).

The signs of the affection-image trace these qualities and powers. The first sign of composition is the icon, which tends towards a distinct power or quality expressed through a face or object. The second sign of composition sees qualities and powers enter into complex relationships, this is the dividual. Faces and objects no longer differentiate out into either powers or qualities, things become opaque. This opaqueness is a factor of the background, which appears as having little or no spatio-temporal co-ordinates. It is here that we begin to encounter the genetic sign of the affection-image, as a pure background. In-itself this is the any-space-whatever: indeterminate space-time. Here the affect is encountered without the mediation of a character or object. Pure feeling. Pure emotion.

Any-space-whatevers belong to the movement-image, classical cinema. Thus they can be captured in the whole of the film, can be perceived, can be located in recognition through thought, can give on to actions. However, this mapping within the frame of the movement-image is fragile: in other conditions (set free from linkages to other movement-image signs) an any-space-whatever can become an opsign or sonsign, the condition for the time-image, which goes beyond thought as recognition to the unthought in thought: that which the film cannot represent.

And isn’t this exactly the trajectory of Le quattro volte? First section, the old goatherd, shot in close-up: icon. The second section, the lamb, amongst lambs, neither shot as an individual nor as a mass, but somewhere between these two poles: the dividual. The third section, the tree, but a tree in environments (forest, village): any-space-whatevers. The fourth section, in many ways the most intriguing, the charcoal burning, the element which, again, is an any-space-whatever, but one that leaves the movement-image, becomes time-image: due in part to its positioning at the beginning of the film, but also because of the sonsigns, the pure sound images, of the ‘pat pat pat’ that haunt the movie, permeate the optical signs throughout.

Why stress the dominance of affect and any-space-whatevers? Because this impacts the way the film thinks, or rather, the way two types of thought interweave: thinking as recognition, and thinking beyond recognition. These two types of thought have concerned Deleuze throughout his philosophical writings. Deleuze comments, in Difference and Repetition, that the book was an attempt at ‘putting into question the traditional image of thought’ (D&R: xiv-xv). By this Deleuze means thinking ‘according to a given method’ which ‘determines our goals’ (D&R: xv). The method is that of ‘the process of recognition’ where we ‘designate error,’ we ‘”want” the true’ and we ‘suppose that the true concerns solutions’ (D&R: xv). Deleuze thus proposes ‘a new image of thought – or rather, a liberation of thought’ from ‘those images which imprison it’ (D&R: xv). This new image of thought goes ‘beyond the propositional mode,’ involves ‘encounters which escape all recognition’ which ‘tears thought from its natural torpor… and forces us to think’ (D&R: xv).

In ‘Introduction: Rhizome’ in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari re-create this typology of thought as the ‘root-book’ and the ‘rhizome… system’ (1000P: 5-7). The root-book: ‘This is the classical book… The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature… The law of the book is the law of reflection… whenever we encounter this formula… what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought… Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree’ (1000P: 5). The root-book, then, creates what Deleuze and Guattari call an ‘arborescent’ type of thought. Thinking here is premised upon representation, upon the recognition of objects by a subject. However, for Deleuze and Guattari: ‘Nature doesn’t work that way: in nature, roots are tap roots with a more multiple, lateral, circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind nature’ (1000P: 5).

Thus rhizomatics: ‘The multiple must be made… in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety… A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms [yet]… any point on a rhizome can be connected to anything else’ (1000P:7). The rhizome, ‘simple’, ‘sober’… ‘multiple,’ ‘diverse’ yet ‘connected’ at every point to every other point… The crucial aspect, however, is that arborescent systems and rhizomatic systems are intertwined, fundamentally in embrace: ‘There are knots of arborescence on rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots… The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models’ (1000P: 22).

All of this talk of classical and new images of thought, arborescent and rhizomatic thinking, the movement-image and the time-image, are inspired by a turning away from the Aristotelian formula which underpins much European philosophy. In chapter four of ‘Categories’, Aristotle writes ‘of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being affected’ (Categories: 4). Ten categories. Yet ‘while “being” has all these senses… that which is primary is the “what,” which indicates the substance of a thing… it is in virtue of this category that each of the others is… that which is primary and is… must be substance’ (Metaphysics: 1623). Substance, then, is the fundamental category, ‘the other categories none can exist independently’ (Metaphysics: 1624).

Aristotle goes on to explore the way in which substance is. The most famous capture of this was created by Porphyry as a tree-diagram in the 3rd century, and has be redrawn a number of times throughout the history of philosophy. Here is one:

(Philosophy of Aristotle, University of Washington)

First, the structure is, on the whole, composed of a genus and species, a species emerging from the genus through difference. Thus, of the genus ‘body’, there are two different types, or species, ‘animate’ or ‘inanimate’, etc. Second, this ‘genus – difference – species’ structure constructs a hierarchy, a tree structure: at the top, substance as substance, the supreme genus; at the bottom – the most refined of the species – individual humans.

Le quattro volte, in this way, is like climbing Porphyry’s tree. The human passes away to animal, the animal passes away to plant, the plant passes away to mineral, mineral passes away… Yet, we must remember that while the substance or matter of the filmic images is the fundamental category, it is also the condition for the other categories, amongst them, affect. Affect, in this way, is the new image of thought to the classical image of thought. Against the arborescent hierarchical image of Porphyry’s tree, is the rhizome-ivy growing up through its branches… against the movement-images are time-images, and the any-space-whatever of the affection-image is a figure of their interweaving.

Once the human, animal, vegetative and mineral modes are erased we are left with spirit. As Deleuze writes with regards to the affect in the Cinema books, ‘space is no longer determined, it has become the any-space-whatever which is identical to the power of the spirit… which takes upon itself the linking of parts’ (C1: 117). And this is why we can see the film as radical atheism, for spirit is revealed as nothing but thought, as the clamour of times (linear, cyclical, mythical, out-of-joint), pure time in its most naked aspect, pure opsigns and sonsigns images, images which do not represent, images that are not based upon recognition, images that do not think for the spectator, but require the spectator to think, to think the connections between the modes of material life and the aspects of time...

A Screaming Man (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, France | Belgium | Chad, 2010)

2011-06-14T23:35:00.009+01:00

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s A Screaming Man seems beguiling simple. The framing is reserved, camera movement discreet, editing a necessity. Colour is natural and diegetic sound predominates. The acting is organic and the mise-en-scene authentic. These procedures give the film a subtle beauty. A night shot with a motorbike’s lights illuminating the white walls of an alleyway is breathtaking. Yet this simplicity dovetails with another procedure, one which transforms the simple into something far more complex. There are missing moments, crucial moments. These omissions are an essential function of the story, of the narration. Not in the sense that they are hidden so as to be recuperated, the narrative driven forward so as to reclaim the past as in a mystery. Rather, these omissions are formal. In the first place, a moment is withheld from the spectator in order to mirror what another character could not know. These missing moments may be obvious (a cut in the middle of an important scene) or obscure (we may only realise later that something has been withheld; we may perhaps not realise at all). In the second place – and this is crucial – the spectator can never really be sure that the character who is subject to such a missing moment knew themselves the full import of their actions, words, silence. Character motivations become ambiguous to others, to themselves and to the spectator. This means we are required to read the film, to think about human behaviour… and Haroun ensures these thoughts stay with us long after the film is finished, for the missing moments are never revealed.

Adam Ousmane works at a decent hotel in N'Djamena, capital of Chad. The hotel is cosmopolitan, guests from across Africa and the world frequent the place. Adam, in his mid-fifties, is head pool attendant. A past Olympic swimming competitor, he is known as Champ. And everyone knows and respects him. Much of his status is derived from his past, but as long as he is head pool attendant, there is a continuity between his past and the present. The pool, he says, is his life, is, in other words, his future. And indeed, now his twenty-something son, Abdel, works with him there.

Events, however, are about to trouble his perfect life. There is civil war raging in the east of the country, and the hotel has been bought out by a Chinese company. Images of war are on the TV in his front room, yet he and his wife, Miriam, feed each other slices of watermelon. The war may approach but it remains remote, background noise. It is the hotel takeover that concerns Adam, as an organisational rationalisation programme is underway. We follow Adam into his assessment interview, and we see the workings of banal managerial tyranny: not ‘there are too many people doing this job’, but phrased as a question ‘don’t you think there are too many people doing this job?’ Mme Wang does not make eye contact. And it is here that we encounter a missing moment. We do not hear the answer Adam gives. A cut. His son, Abdel, must have been in there too, must have been asked the same question. Yet we do not see this either. And when Adam badgers him about it, Abdel does not respond.
The next day Adam is reassigned to watch the front gate of the hotel (replacing another man, sacked), and Abdel is left to look after the pool on his own. What happened in those interviews? Whatever the case, tragedy ensues. Adam has to pay a public subscription towards the government war effort, yet he misses his deadline and Abdel is press ganged into the army. Did he miss the deadline deliberately? Another missing moment. Adam gets his job back, but too late, people are fleeing N'Djamena, there is just Mme Wang left. And Djénéba, Abdel’s pregnant girlfriend turns up at their door.

The affect of these missing moments is crucial. Did Adam attempt to shaft his son in the assessment interview? Did Abdel attempt to shaft his father? Or were they silent? Could Adam have paid his war effort dues to Le chef de quartier? How consciously complicit was he in the impressement of his son? Pressure increases: there is Djénéba’s presence, his wife pleading for the family to leave the city, his wounded son. Abdel forgives, yet is this the forgiveness of an innocent, or someone who acknowledges they had their own part to play in the tragic events? The missing moments of the film make all these motivations ambiguous, and in so doing invite the spectator to think about the film, about the relationships between the father and son, about love and betrayal, and about the banalities and fragilities of the safety and security in our everyday lives, our jobs, our homes, the people around us…
Gilles Deleuze, and the concepts in his books on cinema, can be used to explore such missing moments as constructed by Haroun. Take the concepts of the actual and the virtual. The actual are on-screen images. So, we are talking about the images that appear through framing – the selection of what is shown. The shot, framing in time. Montage, the selection of any image. Yet each of these components has a virtual side. For framing, it is the out-of-field, what lies beyond the frame. For the shot what was in frame can move out of frame, and so become virtual. Through montage, virtual images abound between each sequence. In realism, the paradox is that the virtual remains virtual, is not made actual in the mind of the spectator due to the expulsion of ambiguities. We don’t miss what is out-of-field, what moves out of frame, what lies between the edits. We are carried along by the flow of the film. Yet if those intervals are increased and what is out-of-field and the frame are made conscious, the virtual overwhelms the actual. The paradox here is that the image in-and-of-itself becomes more important (more important than the flow to the next image) which in turn means the spectator must produce their own connections between the images.

For Deleuze, this is the time-image: actual optical and sound images that open up the virtual. These opsigns and sonsigns can open up the virtual in a number of ways. As images in-themselves, they become hyalosigns; in narrative structures they become chronosigns; and in relation to the narration of bodies and environments they become noosigns. Together they form a noosphere, an image of thought that requires the spectator to read the image as a lectosign. Time-images, in other words, promote the virtual in a number of ways. And we must ask, which type of time-image predominates in A Screaming Man? It is clear the images of the film (hyalosigns) have strong virtual components, the camera will linger on an event to allow the full force of the image to be felt, the virtual subsits in the image. Chronosigns are complex, or alternatively, highly simplified temporal arrangements. And it is the beguiling simple we encounter in the film, with those wonderful missing moments. And it is here we see noosigns which operate at the level of narration (so in a sense turning back in upon themselves creating a noosphere) and tear thinking away from the domain of habitual thought.
How does a filmmaker of the time-image capture thought on-screen? To use mental images (symbols, flashbacks or dreams) would mean a return to the co-ordinates of representation (classical realist cinema, the movement-image). Therefore methods other than the representational must be found. For Deleuze, in the time-image, thought appears through the environments of the mise-en-scène (‘landscapes are mental states,’ thus the mise-en-scène is ‘the brain’) or through the body of the actor (Deleuze 2001: 188; 205). Deleuze sees the body as having two poles: those of ‘attitude’ and ‘gest’. Attitude describes a body that does not act, that is displayed in its everydayness. ‘Gest,’ a term taken from Brecht, describes the way in which an actor can foreground gesture and performance as a social act (Ibid). And to consider the full impact of noosigns we can do no better than turn to the three passive syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition.

Before the active synthesis of our psycho-organic selves, our consciousness, our remembrances, our understanding, there is the passive self, the self that is constituted in time that allows the active self to become. This passive synthesis has three aspects: the present, the past and the future. We can align the three passive syntheses with the sensations of the time-image, the present as hyalosigns, the past as chronosigns and the future as noosigns (Deleuze D&R:c2; Deamer 2011). And each passive synthesis has its own logic of the three dimensions of time, each is a way of constituting time. The present allows us to appear, we arrive for a moment, retaining the moment before (past of the present), expecting the moment to come (future of the present), it is our habit of being. The past is the memory, it shapes our destiny (present of the past) and our reminiscences (the future of the past). The future is open. And our experience (the past of the future) the key to metamorphosis (the present of the future).
Adam is locked into the habitual present (his job is his life) which in turn is founded upon the memory of his past (as an Olympic contender, a champion of Chad). The missing moments of the film constitute breaks, caesuras in the narration, gaps in the mise-en-scene. These moments allow Adam to change his present and escape his past. The film is a noosign, orientated towards the future, and constitutes a figure of the brain. A Screaming Man is a story of awakening, but not from a dream, but rather from life. Living is what happens when you leave life behind. It is, in this way, a kind of death.

Source Code (Duncan Jones, Canada | France | USA, 2011)

2011-04-21T20:45:00.011+01:00

One of the most crucial aspects of any film is its ending. It may be many films have to end where they do, and have the ending they do, due to expectations and (of course, as a nexus) economic factors. In other words, and for example, people expect – want / need – a happy conclusion. Now, this alone doesn’t mean an ending will be poor, but it does mean that the final moments are as they are due to convention, rather than an function of the film in-itself (though if the entire film follows conventions, then the ending can still be poor even though it is just such an extension!). Whatever the case, the point is this… as Rob Lapsley is oft to point out (after a screening): most films can’t find the right note to end on, or continue on past the point where they should have ended. A great film can be ruined by a poor ending. Ending the film is the most difficult task the filmmaker faces, and providing a great ending – to a great film – is the hallmark of a great filmmaker.

Now, take Source Code. I believe this film is acutely aware of this cinematic dilemma. Not only that, it plays with the dilemma exquisitely…

Towards the end of the film Goodwin switches off the life support machine that sustains the half-life of Colter Stevens. On the train, time freezes… the camera tracks back taking in the carriage… Stevens/Fentress and Christina are locked in what appears to be an eternal kiss… there is a cup spilling coffee, forever in suspended animation… the passengers on the train are caught in an unending silent laughter. Wonderful! A perfect ending. In its immediacy it seems to hit just the right note. Of course Stevens is dead, of course everyone else is dead… but this is just how it should be. Everyone dead, but somehow, despite all that, a thrill of joy runs through you… the sublime! The film managed not to betray itself by giving us some conventional happy-ever-after… credits roll…

Hang-on, but everything starts up again. There are no credits, not yet. On the train people unfreeze, eternity is done away with. We are returned to a prosaic filmic present. Somehow the moment continues past Colter Stevens death and his new world persists. Disappointment kicks in. That was my experience anyhow… or at least until the second, final ending began to reveal itself…

As the narrative progressed past the fake ending, it seemed to me that Duncan Jones was playing an astonishingly sophisticated game with our expectations. How so? We expected (we always do) that the film could end in one of two ways, conventionally or exceptionally. When the plug was pulled and the world froze, we celebrate the break with convention, tempered with the hope that the filmmaker will leave it at that. So when the film continues, we not only feel let down, but we feel an opportunity has been missed. Jones has let himself down too. Corporate proclivities have held sway. The dude wasn’t able to tough it out. Either that or he isn’t the filmmaker we thought he was… etc…

Yet is seems to me Duncan Jones was toying with us all along. In a wonderful double blind, he expected us to hope against hope that the film would end unconventionally. Giving us the fake ending, momentarily made us celebrate, and then he deliberately took that away. In other words, the exceptional ending was itself an expectation.

Yet – and here is the crucial point – the ending that Jones does go on to eventually provide is far more radical than either of the expected outcomes: the conventional or the exceptional… Indeed, Jones has broken the link between expectations and the either/or of the conventional and the exceptional. The default position, of course, is that the fake ending should not have been gone beyond. However, this exceptional ending, if it had been maintained, would still have given us closure, albeit more satisfying one than any conventional happy-ever-after. The point here, however, is not that a conventional happy ending is somehow more radical. Rather, it is that the actual ending of the film only appears to be a happy-ever-after. There is a slight of hand at play…

Continuing past the fake ending derails the filmic line, diverts the cinematic trajectory into a series of ambiguities which it cannot escape from. Is this world that Colter now lives in the same world? Another world, or parallel reality? A simulation? Was the quantum parabolic calculus time travel, an access to alternate realities or some kind of computer encoded domain? These ambiguities become active only by going beyond the resolution and closure of the exceptional fake ending. We cannot say what the situation is, and neither Colter nor Rutledge understands. More importantly still, if this was only an issue of narrative ambiguity, then the film would just be presenting a well choreographed trick. Source Code, however, goes on to foreground – at the centre of these ambiguities – a set of ethical impasses. Further, in so doing, the filmic narrative can be extended into the contemporary political environment. To explore why, we can do no better than turn to the cinematic semiotics of Gilles Deleuze.

For Deleuze, the cinema can be divided into two fundamental domains, the movement-image of classical cinema, and the time-image of modernist cinema. The former is dominated by the action-image, of which Source Code – an action film – can be seen quite clearly to belong. Deleuze does not say movement-images (and action-images) are somehow worse than time-images, simply that they operate differently, have different laws associated with them. Indeed, each domain has its own semiotic, its own series of signs. The action-image has a particularly complex set of components.

First, action-images are of two types. There is the large form, where situations engender character actions and these actions attempt to rectify the situation. These actions are usually played out through duels between characters. This aspect of the action-image can be seen in Source Code, the duels between the soldier and the bomber, but also between the soldier and his controller, and the controller and her superior. And the film tracks a character gradually becoming equal to the situation, and going on to rectify it. However, the film also seems to have elements of the other type of action-image. This is the small form, where character actions reveal rather than rectify the situation, operating through ellipses and vectors. Events on the train, for instance, reveal the situation in the real world. Additionally, each of these spaces and times is a vector, one a series of parallels, the other a sequential timeline. Indeed, this is a matrix which will be reversed after the fake ending, where the repetitions on the train end and are gone beyond, and where the sequential time-line will be sent back to the beginning to repeat in a different way… in the process this also re-orientates the outcome of duels under the semiotic logic of the large form.

This collapse of the large form and the small form towards each other, as well as the reversals, all points towards the film being of a very special type of action-image where the forms are reflected into, or transformed by, one another. Deleuze describes three types of reflection-image, and it is the first type, that of the attraction-image, that clearly provides the most satisfying way of reading the film. Deleuze describes two compositional forms. The first, the theatrical, is where a large form action-image has the small form injected into it. The second is when the small form is encompassed by the large. However, we can posit a third type where the origins of the small form and the large form are lost, where the two forms collapse into a kind of action-image mise-en-abyme.

Mise-en-abyme, here, does not signify a film-within-a-film. Deleuze accounts for this procedure already; in the movement-image as the theatrical (where the film-within-the film functions as a ruse situation) and within the time-image through hyalosigns (where the film-within-the-film and the film-in-itself become indistinguishable). Rather, with this suggested genetic sign of the attraction-image we see mise-en-abyme in its stricter and general sense, where each story frames the other, but where they remain in-and-of-themselves, where the reflected aspects retain their consistency, but rebound between each other.

In this way, the two domains of Source Code (be they two domains of homogenous multiple parallel universes or something else entirely) depend upon each other, but at the same time spiral into two independent series. While they are connected, it is the connection that remains, or rather (by going beyond the fake ending) becomes indecipherable. The film just doesn’t want to resolve these issues, as is made clear through the different explanations given by Rutledge: they are working on a number of hypotheses, there are promises that in a few months they can have six source code projects up and running, yet in the next breath, Rutledge says they may never find another subject suitable for the programme.

Crucially then, the happy ending attempts to paper over these cracks. It is thin paper, and deliberately so, for the avoidance of closure exposes a set of ethical impasses. This so called happy ending is based upon (what we must call) the murder of Fentress. In this world that now continues, Stevens is only there because of the erasure of another human being. If the film had ended with everyone dying, then the replacement of Fentress by Colter would have meant nothing, the guy was already dead. However, the real ending now changes the focus of the film entirely… and – in a restraint that is uncommon in action cinema – this very aspect of the film is left as background noise we may or may not pick up on… Duncan Jones is content to let the inevitable happen, to allow this noise, in some cases, to go unheard. It is a noise, after all, that Colter fails to hear…

Colter’s escape somehow leaves a bad taste in our mouth. The happy-ever-after somehow just doesn’t feel right. He has taken someone else’s life, their role, and he is happy to allow Christina to believe he is Fentress. He has murdered someone, and now plans to replace that person in a deception that he does not reveal. Colter’s sexual, inter-personal, politics are despicable. A very complex matrix of ethical problems surrounds this final ending.

Amongst these – and here we move into the overtly contemporary political environment – is that Source Code is a particularly interesting iteration of Philippa Foot’s famous trolley problem. The question is: would you sacrifice one person to save hundreds? The philosophical nature of the question intends to illustrate the basic utilitarian position, calculate the better good. Say ‘yes’ and you are a utilitarian… From Colter’s point of view, the death of one is right if it saves hundreds. This position is reificated by his controller and her superior… follow the mission, nothing else matters… do what you must do… Yet, at the same time, because of the mise-en-abyme the film itself asks us to question Colter’s final acceptance of this position. Crucially, can it be a co-incidence that the film ensures Colter is part of the Afghanistan project? A complex cinematic endeavour. A fantastic double ending that gives, takes away and gives back again. A great film. A great filmmaker.

True Grit (Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, USA, 2010)

2011-03-14T19:54:00.048Z

One moment emblematic of True Grit: Lucky Ned Pepper’s teeth. Dental calculus fused to crooked pegs, a fresh coating of furry biofilm the colour of English mustard set in a grimace of dried, cracked lips. Some real dirty realism. Take the voices: the almost subsonic, sometimes incompressible growl of Rooster Coburn; the transformation of LaBoeuf’s measured, dignified articulations to comic thwollen tongued thounds; the educated, erudite precision and farm-hand tenacity of young Mattie – all circumscribed by the style of the King James Bible. Wonderful. And the same goes for the situations traversed by the characters: Mattie and the pony salesman, Rooster getting drunk on his horse, LaBoeuf and his hissy-fits – all encompassed in a wintering wild west, the indifference of humanity and nature both sides of the river frontier: Fort Smith and the lands of the Choctaw. Realism, yet more-so. True Grit is a joy.

Yet the question has been asked, do we need True Grit? In the first place, it is an old style classic western. In the second place, it is a remake of old style classic western. ‘This True Grit,’ writes Will Self, ‘says nothing more substantive about the role of Manifest Destiny in American self-conception (which is what, in the final analysis, all serious westerns are about) than the last one did’. Self’s target is not simply True Grit, but the Coen brothers’ oeuvre. For Self ‘it was inevitable that, sooner or later, they would feel compelled to make – or rather, remake – a western.’ Why? Because the ‘central problem’ with the Coens’ is ‘their reflexivity as directors, making films of films rather than films tout court… this is why – even at their best – the Coens’ films have a feeling of being refracted rather than immediate experiences’ (‘Flirting with genre,’ Guardian: 12.02.01).

Is it enough to respond to Self by saying that True Grit is not a remake? That it is, instead, a ‘different version,’ a different take on the original novel by Charles Portis (Philip French, The Observer: 13.02.11). I think not. For Self it is the films of the Coens’ in general that perpetrate a refraction through other films, True Grit is simply the most obvious sign of such poverty.

Perhaps, by way of response, in order to affirm rather than negate the film, we should rather begin, at least initially, by agreeing with a certain aspect of Self’s diagnosis. We must say ‘yes’ True Grit is a remake. A remake of the 1969 version. Further, we should push on… surely Self does not go far enough? We are also tempted to say the film is a remake of The Wizard of Oz. As Krishna Stott, director-producer-writer at Bellyfeel, remarked after we saw the film, Mattie has something of the look of Judy Garland. But it goes beyond the look: a girl enters a world of dreams and nightmares. She is carried from one world to another, over the river by her horse, and – at the end of her adventure – back through the night by Rooster. The girl has adventures with a bullying coward, a man of tin and a drunken scarecrow. Or perhaps a remake of Tarkovsky’s Stalker? Which itself can be seen as a remake of The Wizard of Oz…

And of course True Grit, both films, are also interpretations of scripts, which were re-imaginings of a book. And the tone of the movie can be said to be a resituating of the literary atmosphere of a Cormac McCarthy novel, or even, in an entirely different way, the gaming environments of Red Dead Redemption. In other words, a whole nexus of remakes of remakes, including a remake of all the other films the Coens’ have made, which in turn remake other films. Is not every film a remake of other films, books, plays and paintings?

Yet we must not be hasty and claim that the problem is the exact opposite of the one posited by Self, that no film can be anything other than ‘refracted,’ that no film can reach ‘immediate experiences.’ Rather, we would like to say that the dichotomy is a false one, a false problem with a long history. Plato – in his the first version of the problem – describes a world of pure, ideal Forms that exist beyond our senses and the manifestations of those pure Forms on the Earth appear as particular objects. However, the artist, in this narrative, only makes a copy of the object, a copy of a copy, an imitation (Republic). In other words, all art is condemned as being a third degree away from the truth. Plato, will attack his own theory (Parmenades) and rework it, going on to describing two types of copy, the true and the false (Statesman; Sophist). This false copy is what will become known as the simulacrum, that which distorts. A few thousand years later Jean Baudrillard will describe the simulacrum as being a fourth remove from the truth. First comes a reflection of reality; second the distortion of reality; third the loss of reality; and finally the simulacrum, which ‘bears no relation to any reality whatsoever’ (Simulacra and Simulations). Self’s analysis is in this lineage.

It seems to us that these, and other, versions of the simulacrum partake of a fundamental negativity. Rather, we would like to suggest that every image has two sides: one true, one false; one faithful, one a simulacrum; one ‘refracted,’ one an ‘immediate experience’; one original, one a remake. Each image, each filmic composition of images, cannot but put these forces into play… the dynamics of any image, of any film, are thus the outcome of this play of forces…

Gilles Deleuze explores just such a play of forces in a number of ways throughout many of his books. For example, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze sees Plato’s negative-simulacrum as a lost opportunity. Rather than a distortion opposed to a faithful copy, the simulacrum can become an affirmative falsification, can indicate a circulation of images not a stratification of levels of truth. Deleuze will abandon the concept of the simulacrum in later work, replacing it with the rhizome, with deterritorialisation, with machinic assemblages and various other conceptual fragments. One trajectory is that of the cliché. And it here we can re-approach cinema.

As Philip French beautifully maintains, the way the courthouse is dressed and filmed in True Grit ‘evokes the paintings of Thomas Eakins, the Philadelphia recorder of emerging middle-class life, and represents the bourgeois world that's encroaching on the frontier’ (The Observer: 13.02.11). In his book on painting, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, Deleuze has this to say about the cliché:

‘It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface… If the painter were before a white surface, he – or she – could reproduce on it an external object functioning as a model. But such is not the case. The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface, but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it. He does not paint in order to reproduce on the canvas an object functioning as a model, he paints on images that are already there, in order to produce a canvas whose functioning will reverse the relations between model and copy’ (FB, 86).

We can clearly see here the Deleuzian take on the faithful reproduction and the simulacrum… and he goes on to restate this thus ‘clichés are always already on the canvas, and if the painter is content to transform the cliché, to deform or mutilate it, to manipulate it in every possible way, this reaction is still too intellectual, too abstract: it allows the cliché to rise again from its ashes, it leaves the painter within the milieu of the cliché, or else gives him or her no other consolation than parody’ (FB, 87). So, there needs to be a second moment, ‘it would be much better to abandon oneself to clichés, to collect them. Accumulate them, multiply them, as so many prepictorial givens’ (FB, 92). In this way, ‘only when one leaves them behind, through rejection, can the work begin’ (FB, 92). Yet the question remains ‘how do I proceed so that what I paint does not become a cliché?’ (FB, 93). There is, of course, no universal solution… ‘one can fight against cliché only with much guile, perseverance, and prudence: it is a task perpetually renewed with every painting, with every moment of every paining’ (FB, 96).

In other words, even though Self’s critique of the Coens’ is badly formed (the films are bad because they are copies, rather than, all images have to escape cliché), it is none-the-less a crucial one. The question becomes, do the Coens’ – through their filmic images and procedures – manage to escape cliché, and if so, how? What is the Coens’ way? In particular with True Grit, and in general across their oeuvre.

Deleuze’s returns to the problem of clichés in his cinema books. He describes two broad domains of cinema, the movement-image and the time-image. The former aligns, more or less, with classical cinematic codes, while the latter with modernist, arthouse and postmodernist strategies. The former flows from image to image, binding the spectator to the images so as to ensure they think with the film, the latter operates through different tactics, attempting to break the flow of images, and give the spectator the chance to read, rather than simple see, the film. It might be thought that the move from movement-image to time-image describes the path from cliché to an overturning of cliché… yet this is not the case: ‘there is no value-judgement here, because this new regime – no less than the old one – throws up its ready-made formulas, its set procedures, its laboured and empty applications, its failures, its conventional and ‘second-hand’ examples offered to us as masterpieces’ (C2: 132). In other words, the moving beyond cliché has nothing to do with the move beyond classical realism. So, how do we know if a film escapes cliché…? Only in the particular strategies it puts into play…

Let us return to Self’s coup de grâce for True Grit, that the film ‘says nothing more substantive about the role of Manifest Destiny in American self-conception (which is what, in the final analysis, all serious westerns are about) than the last one did’ (‘Flirting with genre,’ Guardian: 12.02.01). We may baulk at the idea that all westerns, all so-called serious westerns, must engage with the concept of Manifest Destiny, but let us leave this to one side. We may also not want to compare True Grit 1969 to True Grit 2010, we may prefer to think the film in and of itself, but by way of conversation, let’s allow ourselves to do so…

Mattie Ross, a precocious fourteen year old girl, turns up at Fort Smith to bring the killer of her father to justice. However, Tom Chaney, the killer, has crossed the river, disappearing into ‘Indian territory’. So Mattie hires Rooster Cogburn , a man who answers – she is told – her request for a bounty hunter with true grit. Trouble is, Cogburn is a fat old drunk, well past his prime. The scenario is thus set for revenge!

In the 1969 film Cogburn takes centre stage, in the 2010 film it is Mattie. And while in both films it is Mattie who kills Chaney, and in doing so is thrown backwards by the recoil of the rifle into a snake pit, in the 1969 film she recovers, while in the 2001 film she does not. This is made explicit in the coda, which reminds us that the film began with the voice over narration of an older Mattie, thus positioning the entire film as a flashback, as a memory, a narration of an older Mattie.

This leads us on to the most crucial differentiation between the films, which can be explored through the Deleuzian cineosis. While both films are of the movement-image, their component image differs. In True Grit 1969 the action-image dominates. Action-images explore the way in which situations are associated with character behaviours. However, as we have seen, True Grit 2010 is caught within a flashback. Flashbacks operate within the domain of thought, mental-images, which explore the way in which a film captures the thinking of characters. Flashbacks are recollection-images, powerful component of the domain of thought in that they attempt to depict on-screen the remembrances of a character or characters. For Deleuze flashbacks are the instrument of ‘psychological causality,’ a ‘closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present’ (C2:47; 49). When unambiguous this is a strong sense of destiny… it is the past which leads inexorably to the present and will dictate the future.

Mattie looses her arm, remains unmarried woman, appears severe. This is not what we expect. The trials in the lands of the Choctaw were not adventures that would drag the girl from a cloistered adolescence towards a fulfilled maturity. This is why the Coens’ went into such detail of Mattie’s character in Fort Smith. These adventures essentially ruined her. The film does not explore the glory of revenge, but rather explores the futility of revenge through loss. Many years later she attempts to find Rooster at the Rodeo, but he is gone, is dead. Absences permeate the film, her father, the disappeared killer, her arm, Rooster – and… so beautifully absent we barely notice it – the Choctaw. The people are missing…

The manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon colonizers is revealed for what it is, the annexation of territory after territory, betrayal upon betrayal, as we know so well through Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Rather than an allegorical Colombia, bringing civilisation and justice, these whites are whites doing what whites do. The Coens’ True Grit does indeed have something very different to say about manifest destiny… It is the colonizers' right, their ‘manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty,’ so wrote John O'Sullivan, democrat and New York editor of The Morning Post in 1845. And now the spirit of manifest destiny crosses oceans with democracy and oil. The Coens’ True Grit, in this way, enters into a machinic assemblage with 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq…

In a sense, you could say that the film has gone back to the book, is more true to the book than the original film. However, as we have already discovered, this is no way to designate the originality of a film, the escape from cliché. However, in the case of the Coens’ this could at least be said, in this specific instance, to be a clue, an indicator. This is a film that takes the conventions of the classic western seriously, deploys those conventions through the politics of the neo-western yet has the self-reflexive surface of the ‘post-modern’ western. The film manages to have its cake, eat it… and then throw it back up. True Grit is a return to the classic western made possible only by passing through the neo-western and the post-modern western. Which is to say, more classical than the classical, a reverence for the classical, not to copy or imitate it, but to return to the very beginning and re-invent it. To look again. And this, surely, is the procedure of the Coen’s in general, across all their films, to return to the beginning to look once more, to rediscover originality before the cliché. And this is why they are not simply content to make a western, but instead to remake a great western, one of the last great classical westerns. This is not a tribute, this is not nostalgia, this is an affirmation of cinema.

‘Sometimes,’ writes Self, ‘it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions – on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets – simply aren’t up to scratch. It’s a dirty, thankless task, but someone has to do it’ (‘Flirting with genre,’ Guardian: 12.02.01). The Nietzschean response – a response echoed in the very procedure of Deleuze’s cinema books, where he only discusses what he considers to be masterpieces – would be ‘let looking away be my only negation!’ (The Gay Science: 173).

Monsters (Gareth Edwards, UK, 2010)

2011-01-09T12:37:00.012Z

Monsters proliferates and disperses ambiguity. Take the discovery, at the end of the film, that the prologue acts retroactively as a coda. Triggered by a repetition of dialogue and the humming of the riff 'Ride of the Valkeries' - made famous (in the context of filmic gung-ho soldering) through Apocalypse Now - this re-evaluation is not uncertain in-itself. However, it introduces ambiguity into the film. Firstly, in the discrepancy of tonality between the narration (story) and the narrative (the way the story unfolds temporally on-screen). The status of the ending of the narrative (happy-ever-after) is at odds with the narration (after everything they have gone through, tragedy). Yet, secondly, the prologue is itself elliptical, what exactly happens is not clear, we don’t know if the characters live or die. In other words, is the prologue a tragedy? Or another treacherous event which the characters survive? Whatever the case, the crucial point is that these uncertainties are simply the most overt in a film which is ambiguous at every level…

Monsters is set in the very near future… six years previously, a NASA probe, sent to explore the possibility of extra-terrestrial life in our solar system, crash landed in Mexico. In so doing an alien species was transplanted on to Earth. Growing from wee fungus pods to one hundred metre tentacled squid-like beasts, a massive area of northern Mexico, bordering the US, is now known as the infected zone. Fenced off from the rest of Mexico, with a massive reinforced concrete wall on the US side, the area has been largely abandoned by humans, cities reclaimed by jungle. US planes trawl the skies above the zone, struggling to destroy the alien animals below, whose population is growing, and – with each year – attempting to migrate across the boundaries imposed by the humans. Into this situation comes Scoot, a documentary photographer, and Whitney, the daughter of the owner of Scoot’s US based newspaper. Their journey takes them from San Jose through the infected zone and into the Texas, at each step, threatened by the monsters.

However, the procedures of the film demand scrutiny. For instance, it is clear Edwards wants to ensure a mirroring between the humans and the aliens. Both are adrift in the zone, in an unfamiliar environment they are not naturally disposed to. Both must learn to live and negotiate the dangers. The aliens are under constant attack from the humans with their bombs and chemical weapons. The humans are essentially prey to the alien animals. The key scene comes towards the end of the film. Scoot and Whitney witness two aliens coming together, their tentacles enfolding tenderly, their bodies aflame with electricity, mating. And all this time Scoot and Whitney have been falling in love. They kiss. Unmistakable parallels. In this way the very title of the movie becomes ambiguous, the sign ‘monsters’ set free from any presupposed specific designation to the aliens. The aliens are killing humans, but the humans are killing aliens… both are trying to survive against the very real threat of the other, and both will go to any means to do so (the killing of human children, the gassing of alien pods).

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinematic forms, discusses just such ambiguity and mirroring with what he calls crystal-images, or hyalosigns. Hyalosigns are time-images, which emerge by overturning of the regime of the movement-image, classical cinematic organisations. First comes the creation of pure optical and pure sound situations: opsigns and sonsigns. In Monsters, these pure optical and sound situations can be seen in a number of ways. For instance, the film has a raw realism, which is as much to say a subversion of standard realist codes. If the oppositions are put into ambiguous relationships, so it the actual film itself. We might expect the heroes to be thrown into a milieu to vanquish or be vanquished (action-images). What we get, however, is a journey into the unknown, a voyage through the jungle, a trip into the heart of darkness (which after Conrad, is itself ambiguous, where lies the horror? In the world or in the heart?). Pure optical and sound images, experiences in-and-of-themselves. Opsigns and sonsigns also operate in the function of colour. The reds of the sunset Scoot and Whitney gaze upon as they travel the river, the reds of coursing body-electricity as the aliens encounter each other and mate… these images are presented as moments of beauty within their own narrative economy. As Deleuze puts it, ‘the actual [image] is cut off from its motor linkages,’ instead exploring ‘the coalescence of an actual image and its virtual image’ (C2:127). In short, Monsters is far from a generic action movie film…

Opsigns and sonsigns, however, are only the beginning. Hyalosigns are a cinematographic image with a virtual link back not only to itself, but also to the virtual elements of other actual images, images that have passed, as well as to actual images to come (this is the true power of the virtual). ‘What we see… in the crystal is time, in its double movement of making presents pass, replacing one by the next while going towards the future, but also preserving all the past, dropping it into an obscure depth’ (Deleuze, C2: 87). Hyalosigns, in this way, are complex image matrixes. In Monsters the actual on-screen images of the sunset and entwined aliens set up powerful virtual connections: the sky, the solar system, our Earth in that solar system, the indifference of the universe, the echo at the level of perception, colour and image between the sky and the aliens, aspects of the natural world…

Hyalosigns can be decomposed into three signs: ‘two mirrors face to face,’ ‘the limpid and the opaque’ and ‘the seed and the environment’ (C2:71). Each performs an exchange between the actual on-screen image in the present and its virtual connections off-screen (on the brain screen). With mirrors face to face 'the actual image and its virtual image… constitute the smallest internal circuit' within the same image (C2:70). However, 'when the virtual image becomes actual [and]… the actual image becomes virtual in its turn' we discover the second sign of hyalosigns, the limpid and the opaque (C2:70). The limpid and the opaque are thus the 'expression of [the] exchange' between the actual and the virtual (C2:70). Finally, the third sign of hyalosigns is the seed and the environment. Here the actual image is a seed illuminates a virtual becoming across the expanse of the film. Whatever the case ‘the crystal-image is, then, the point of indescernibility of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual’ no matter how they are composed (C2:82).

Monsters, it seems, organises itself through the limpid and opaque: the aliens and the humans. Take the death of the child. Previously Scoot has claimed he gets $50k for a photo of a child killed by aliens, nothing for a photo of a child laughing. Whitney: ‘Doesn't that bother you? That you need something bad to happen to profit?’ Scoot: ‘What? Like a doctor?’ His justification is both benign and monstrous. Yet when he has the chance to photograph a dead child killed by the aliens he simply covers the little corpse (the reaction is authentic, he does not know Whitney is watching). Comparatively, the Mexican people smugglers get Scoot and Whitney to sniff the air… the gas masks a protection, not against the aliens, but against the chemicals the US drops to wipe out the fungus pods. This is why the aliens attack, the sound of the planes brings the beasts out from the rivers to protect their young the humans are attempting to annihilate. Who are the monsters? The monstrousness of the aliens becomes limpid as the monstrousness of the humans becomes opaque, and the monstrousness of the humans becomes limpid as the monstrousness of the aliens becomes opaque… the exchange makes the sign ‘monster’ indeterminate.

The crucial point, for Deleuze, is that ‘indescernibility constitutes an objective illusion; it does not suppress the distinction between the two sides, but makes it unattributable, each side taking the other’s role in a relation which we must describe as reciprocal presupposition, or reversibility. In fact, there is no virtual which does not become actual in relation to the action: it is a place and its obverse which are totally reversible. These are “mutual images”’ (C2:69). And these mutual images are the source of ambiguity, an ambiguity that permeates the film.

This ambiguity is taken in two opposing directions, towards nature and towards civilisation. On the one hand, the aliens and human are simply caught up in the indifferent struggles of nature. Each to the other predator and prey, each to the other a virus to the body. But the aliens are interlopers? Yeah, dropped from the stars onto indigenous peoples (the humans)… yet all animal life forms are born of the stars… is temporal linear time an indicator of right to live and inhabit an environment? If so, surely the snake, the crocodile, the jellyfish takes precedence over humanity? On the other hand, it is clear that the environment in which the film is set is decisive. Mexico, the peoples there invaded, massacred and dominated by the Spanish. Edwards makes this point clear by allowing Scoot and Whitney (through a cheeky manipulation of geography) to stumble across an ancient Mayan temple. And the Mexican peoples themselves, whose history of Maya, Toltec, Aztec is a tapestry of migration, domination, war. One land, but many peoples. In this sense we see how one civilisation replaces another primarily through genocide.

And from here, finally, to the political. The infected zone a slice of land walled off and under constant attack: walled because of the very real fear of attack. Evoking a situation such of that of Israel/Gaza? We cannot but make this claim… no matter how farfetched it may seem. Two forces in conflict over territory. Can Monsters be seen as a cinematic sci-fi exploration akin to the scream of fury echoing from the Gazan youth? Surely in these very real political situations we find echoes in cinema?

And thus we return, full circle, to the uncertainty of the tonality that Monsters introduced by the coda placed as prologue. The aliens have breached the wall, a Katrinaesque force of nature unleashed on the US. Is it happy ever after for the humans, or tragedy? Will the humans win out over the aliens? These questions amount to saying, who will become the monsters… who will be codified as the monsters once they are extinct, once the genocide is complete? This, of course, is to consider the ambiguity as awaiting a conclusion. However, what if we consider the ambiguity as the solution itself? What if we consider Monsters as an attempt to see ambiguity as a philosophy rather than simply a neat cinematic trick? In ambiguity, in hyalosigns, in the limpid and opaque lies equilibrium… but can anyone but seers sustain such ambiguities, such uncertainties without the need for the ruse of the conclusive act?

Slackistan (Hammad Khan, Pakistan, 2009)

2011-01-01T13:45:00.015Z

A curious fold occurs in the final moments of Slackistan. Hasan is being driven to the airport. He is to leave Pakistan for the USA, something he has been thinking about during much of the film. However, during the trip he realises something… that everything he needs to begin his life as a filmmaker is in Islamabad. So, he returns home. And he turns the camera on his family’s servant, Sharif. This moment is a logical ‘resolution’ (or personal ‘revolution’) in the trajectory of the movie. On the one hand, Hasan has become dejected with and pessimistic about his – and his friends – slacker lifestyle. On the other, he has become increasingly aware of the polarities of the rich and poor, and his own parasitic social position.

The problem is that these ‘slackers’ are also essentially globalised cosmopolitan citizens. It is no doubt tempting for some to describe these ‘slackers’ as ‘Westernised,’ but such a naming is meaningless… Hammad Khan rather describes a milieu that is essentially liberal, inhabited by people that are part of a system that promotes open-mindedness, education for all, a secular public viewpoint, and, most significantly, an equality of gender. As in situ. Hasan, his friends and their families, embody a Pakistan that is modern. Slackistan not only refuses to align with the skewed international media representations of Pakistan as a hotbed of tribal leaders and suicide bombers, but also junks the more mundane ridiculous terrors of everyday religious fundamentalism. Hasan inhabits a progressive city, with all the problems of any progressive city anywhere in the world.

We thus, it would seem, encounter a fundamental paradox at the heart of Slackistan. The only subject worthy of being filmed is the situation of the Pakistani poor. Yet the film itself has been about five decent enough people in their early twenties, yet somehow positioned them as ‘slackers’. In other words, the film seems to ultimately reject its own subject matter. Not only that. If this ‘resolution’/‘revolution’ (rejection) becomes the reason for the film being made, not only is the film as it is rendered irrelevant, but also we are left with a void where the film that should have been made has only been hinted at.

The obvious way out of this paradox is to say that the Slackistan is a film that attempts to follow an individual becoming conscious of the situation of the rich and the poor, and their own place in that situation. However, this solution is false. It may justify the narrative trajectory, but it does not save the film. How then to escape this reading? How can we retain the film as it is without it rejecting itself?
Slackistan is a slacker flick set in Islamabad. It follows the lives of five middleclass friends in limbo after graduating university. There is Sherry… skating on thin ice, clocking up debts borrowing cash from a money lender (Mani) to sustain a lifestyle above his means: going out, flash car, the latest mobile. There is beautiful Saad… lost in a dream world, no aspirations, and seemingly OK with this. There is Aisha… looking for marriage to not only save her from doing nothing so she can continue doing nothing, but also to take her somewhere where she can do nothing in more style. Xara/Zara… mixed up, confused, rebellious…
At the centre and describing the circumference of the film, however, is Hasan. His story – as well as his voice-over narration commenting upon his life and the lives of his friends – provides not only the narrative cohesion of the film but also serves to interrogate their slackerness. In this sense the voice-over narration seems to be in the present looking back upon the past of the filmic images. The voice-over seems to be more aware of outcomes to come and thus in the tradition of the omniscient narrator. Whatever the case, the crucial point is that the on-screen Hasan knows what he wants; he just doesn’t know (yet) how to achieve it. He has to become worthy of his future. He wants to be a filmmaker. However, the lack of a cineaste culture is causing him problems… ‘how am I supposed to make movies without inspiration?’ He can’t get hold of the films he feels he should see… the shops which sell illegal copies only seem to copy the (modern Bollywood and Hollywood) films he has no interest in… and there are no cinemas in Islamabad… (true, apparently, as a friend has confirmed… you need to head out to the suburbs to track down a cinema).

We find here some crucial doublings. Slackistan is shot as if it is Hasan shooting the film. Or rather, a Hasan who has seen all the films he can’t get hold of and has integrated moments of them into the his movie. From the echoes of Apocalypse Now (a ceiling fan overdubbed with the sound of a helicopter) to the stroll and irrelevant dialogue of the opening scene which manages to evoke moments from both À bout de soufflé and Pulp Fiction. It is as if there is another Hasan shooting this film about Hasan (hence the status of the omniscient narrator). And the doubling of a reflexive filmic approach with on-the-ground reality: the handheld camera, digital, jumpcuts, freezeframes… title tags… a city that always sleeps… no-one knows what day it is (Tuesday or Wednesday?), ice cream and shisha in public. Private clubs for alcohol. Graffiti… no more American enslavement! Americanised English and Urdu interweave in spoken dialogue. The Taliban and their Pakistani comrades on the TV blowing up human flesh, in the never-ending tradition of expedient utopian revolution, for the glory of their god / the promotion of their politics / because they cannot comprehend they are just specks of dust in the universe…
And it is here we approach a way to look at Slackistan without it rejecting itself… Gilles Deleuze in his books on the cinema, suggests there is a type of film which deliberately sets out to create an ‘enfeeblement’ of cinematic conventions (C1:185). Enfeeblement is a sign of the inversion-image. The inversion-image describes the way in which film form is undermined by folding back upon itself, reversing the traditions of classical compositions… everyday characters (the quotidian), heroes as fools (the sublime) and zeros as heroes (enfeeblement). Slackistan seems to explore the inversion-image through the sign of enfeeblement where 'weaklings and idiots' are the purveyors of actions, the characters are reduced to 'tiny point[s] fleeing towards the horizon' (C1:185). However, in so doing these 'weaklings… have such tactile relationships with the world that they inflate and inspire the image itself' (C1:186).

Sherry, Saad, Aisha, Xara/Zara and Hasan… they all want something more, and all feel that the way to do this is to escape the situation in Pakistan, either by leaving or turning away. Which returns us to the conclusion of the film. Hasan is on his way to the airport, his car draws up alongside an open backed truck, he sees a ‘worker’, someone of a ‘lower’ ‘caste’ on his way to his job… doing what he can to survive… This moment dovetails with many others from the film. City planning in the 1960s, zones, grids, a walk through the slums, personal drivers, house servants… the scene where Hasan accuses Sharif of stealing his camera, and when the camera is discovered, Hasan blames the servant for moving it: neither can look in each other’s eyes. ‘What is people? There is no people?’: the englobing historical situation and class relations. Hasan suddenly understands and thus returns home and turns the camera on Sharif, to document the situation of the poor.
Yet this solution (Hasan becoming conscious) leads, as we have discussed, to a rejection of the film as it is. How then to escape this reading? How can we retain the film as it is without it rejecting itself? The answer, it seems to me, would not be in thinking of the film as an attempt to resolve the paradox that it creates: a rejection of modern, liberal Islamabad and Pakistan. But rather, in thinking of the film as a successful attempt to explore the paradox of modern, liberal Islamabad and Pakistan. Hammad Khan could have made the film Hasan will go on to make. Rather, he chose something far more complex, to make a film about a paradox. In its own way, Slackistan discovers the coils of the serpent Deleuze describes in his short essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / UK / France / Germany / Spain / Netherlands, 2010)

2010-12-23T22:59:00.010Z

If this film is strange and unsettling, maybe it is because of the temporal disturbances. The final scene in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, in this regard, is not exceptional, but rather symptomatic. Boonmee is dead. His family are in a hotel room after his funeral. A fundamental split in time occurs: they stay in the hotel room watching TV / they go to a bar to eat. Both events occur at the same moment. We must resist seeing this as simply some modernist trick, a ruse, a joke. Or at least, not only a trick, a ruse, a joke. For to think this moment in-and-of-itself apart from the film as a whole (and indeed, as we will see, Weerasethakul’s wider project of which Uncle Boonmee is just one element) is to miss something far more essential.

The movie tells the story of Boonmee who is dying from renal failure, acute kidney disease. Still living on the family farm near the village of Nabua in Nakhon Phanom (rural north east Thailand, near the border with Laos), his remaining family visit from the city. And from beyond the grave… his wife returns. Then there is his son, who mated with a monkey ghost and is now a red-eyed monster. Yet the days pass peacefully in the orchards. He dreams of the past – a princess visiting a secluded waterfall – and of the future – a militaristic authoritarian regime. Eventually, as Boonmee feels he is to pass away, he is taken to the cave where he believes his first life to have begun.

The title, in this way, is wonderfully disingenuous. To recall past lives (raleuk chat) immediately orientates the spectator towards a Buddhistic interpretation of the film. No doubt, if we were to seek out evidence to support such an interpretation, we could find it without too much trouble. Indeed, Weerasethakul claims the initial impetus for the film (and project) came from a book he was given by a priest from the temple in his hometown. The book was by a man called Boonmee, the title A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Yet the film does not explore reincarnation to any significant degree.

If Uncle Boonmee has a Buddhistic worldview, this is incidental. The recalling of past lives becomes something else entirely. For instance, there is one visual venture into the past. A princess, who ashamed of her ugliness, visits a waterfall. While there, she has a tryst with a particularly licentious catfish. Clearly, this is not simply a direct memory of one of Boonmee’s past lives, but an indirect memory that condenses tonalities, stories, reminisces: a mythical past in general. Then there is the dream of the future. The events are narrated in voice-over by Boonmee, but the images appear as photogrammes, and the images are contemporary: Thai soldiers with civilian(-clothed) prisoners. Crucially, these visual images return us to a moment earlier in the film when Boonmee told his sister about killing communist sympathisers for the Thai government during his youth.

In other words, the memories of the past and the dreams of the future are functions of Boonmee’s present, are dimensions of the present. This is seen most clearly at the beginning of the film. His family returning home from the city. The appearance of the ghost of his wife. His monstrous son emerging from the forest where he disappeared years before.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives explores the variable present. It is the final scene, the doubled sequence, that gives us the skeleton key to explore the film in this way… and in so doing spurns a pseudo-religious, theological interpretation towards the political, the philosophical. The present becomes the staging ground for the past and the future. Everything happens in the present.

In his cinema books, Gilles Deleuze names this kind of filmic organisation ‘peaks of the present,’ a film composed of chronosigns through which certain (inexhaustible) temporal strategies undo causality. Thus the question ‘can the present… stand for the whole of time?’ and the response ‘Yes, perhaps, if we manage to separate it from its own actual quality…’ (C2:100). In this type of film ‘there is no longer a future, present and past in succession, in accordance with the explicit passage of presents which we make out’ (C2:100). Rather, ‘there is a present of the future, a present of the present and a present of the past, all implicated in the event, rolled up in the event, and thus simultaneous and inexplicable’ (C2:100). Here ‘time is revealed inside the event, which is made from the simultaneity of these three implicated presents, from these de-actualised peaks of present’ (C2:100). ‘It is,’ concludes Deleuze, ‘the possibility of treating the world or life, or simply a life or an episode, as one single event which provides the basis of the implication of presents’ (C2:100).

In this sense, uncle Boonmee can recall his past lives within the life he has lived, that singularity which opens up onto the universal, which captures his deeds and misdeeds, stories told to him when young, cool (and not so cool) TV shows shot in 16mm, dreams and hallucinations. His hopes for the future beyond him. His very real lives within his very real life, where what is actual and what is virtual is indiscernable. Life is not, the film seems to say, a simple case of identity. I is not simply I: one thing after another from birth to death. There something more fundamental. We are in the present, but that present is a function of the universe… of a temporal infinity.

The last moments of the film – the doubling of the present – are then curious in another respect. For Boonmee is dead. The central point around which the film accumulated has disappeared, the circumference has been breached. The memories, the ghosts, the returns, the dreams, the hallucinations, necessarily evaporate. And yet the film continues… indeed, even when the film finishes, the undertaking continues. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives being just one element of Weerasethakul’s Primitive project. In this way the individual is also left behind. Weerasethakul has said that instead of filming the book given to him by the priest, he made a more personal film. But perhaps this film, this project, is genuinely impersonal… or depersonalised. The present itself is what is at stake. For the spectator. The way the past and future are implicated in the present we all inhabit. The way we can choose to remember, explore the past… the way we can choose the future... in the now...

Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2009)

2010-12-05T12:56:00.020Z

So ‘police’ as an adjective, a word that modifies a noun… yet with no noun to modify. Something is missing… but what? Which word does ‘police’ prefigure? It is tempting to specify immediately: ‘officer’. Perhaps we should, however, resist this temptation. What has the title deliberately done? In not specifying the noun, an indeterminacy is foregrounded, in the sense of an (in)finite delay… The title becomes, in this way, significant what it leaves unsignified… This is crucial for the film. Now, in the first place this can be seen as an indicator of the centrality that language will have. Words become politicised. This aspect of the film has been well commented upon (for example, see Philip French in The Observer). Second – and, I maintain, far more importantly – the missing noun becomes a structural device in the film’s form… and it is here, with the way the missing noun structures the images, that a far more radical political reading of Police, Adjective appears…

The transition between, or clarification of, these two politics takes place in the (now famous) penultimate scene of the film. Cristi has been called into Captain Anghelache’s office. The meeting is to review the case Cristi has (reluctantly) been working on.

A young plain clothes police officer, Cristi has been tasked with following Alex, a teenage student suspected of being a drug dealer. Cristi soon ascertains Alex just smokes a little weed with his mates. It is nothing. Porumboiu films these sequences in long takes, endless followings and waitings (the film form beautifully – and bravely – capturing the longueurs of the investigation). But Cristi comes under increasing pressure to arrest the kid, to get a result (as a more mainstream police procedural might put it). However, he feels this would not be in anyone’s interest, least of all for Alex, who would get a police record and ruin his chances in life. So Cristi tries to find out who is supplying the drugs. He gets nowhere. The trouble is, the more time he invests on the case, the more the demand for an arrest.

And we find ourselves in Captain Anghelache’s office. Cristi tries to get the case dropped, citing it would be bad for his conscience if Alex was arrested. So begins one of the most exceptional scenes in recent cinema. Captain Anghelache asks his secretary for a copy of the Romanian dictionary and looks up the words ‘conscience' then ‘morality,’ ‘law’, ‘state’, ‘police’. The crucial aspect of this line of flight through signifiers is in the resonance with an earlier scene. Cristi returns home, late from work, and while eating his tea his wife repeatedly listens to a track by a Romanian singer. For Cristi, the words in the song are just meaningless. His wife sees them as affective, intensive, words used as poetry. Their conversation then turns to the way in which words are ascribed official definitions by the Romanian Academy. Back to Captain Anghelache’s office. The concepts in play become the tools of the state, an ideological weapon to bring Cristi back in line. And just to make sure, Anghelache raises the stakes from the ideological to the repressive… if Cristi doesn’t capitulate, he will be fired.

Cut. The final scene is of a whiteboard with Cristi planning a stake-out to arrest Alex.

It would be tempting to see the film, ultimately, as a tragedy. A tragedy for justice and a tragedy for Cristi, his personal ethical code abandoned – or crushed – due to the pressure of the state. In this way we would be following a broadly Hegelian approach. Hegel, in Aesthetik, frames the conflict between ethics and the law as the dialectics of justice. His example is Sophocles’ Antigone. The play revolves around Antigone wishing to bury and honour her dead brother. However, King Creon has pronounced him a traitor, his body should be left to decay on the battlefield. Here we have divine law verses a human law, or an ethical code coming up against the state. In Antigone, it ends in tragedy… Antigone – and most everyone else – dead. It is at this point that Creon understands, finally, this conflict has been nowt but trouble… and so ushers in a new era for justice. Here, for Hegel, is the dialectic in action: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. There is resolution, not between good and evil, but between two contradictory positions.

It would seem, then, that Police, Adjective follows Antigone and the Hegelian dialectic. Porumboiu explores the way in which the individual is circumscribed in a battle between a personal ethics and the collective law. However, this reading of the film seems inadequate. For a start, the final sequence is not played for tragedy. From the ideological/repressive diktat of Captain Anghelache to Cristi’s submission: a simple cut. There are no scenes of Cristi in torment, agonising over what to do. There is no staring out over the sea/city with emotive music. Just a cut. And yet this is not the most significant point. Rather, in the final sequence, the planning of the stake-out, we do not see Cristi. The camera frames the whiteboard as plans are drawn up. It is as if Cristi has disappeared. It is as if Cristi has become the missing noun.

It is in this way that the film reconfigures its co-ordinates with regards to the political situation. In other words, the Hegelian reading of the film can be bypassed. Let us turn, to explore this, to Deleuze’s taxonomy of cinema, albeit via Deleuze’s collaboration with Félix Guattari in Kafka. They write ‘If justice doesn’t let itself be represented, this is because it is desire. Desire could never be on a stage where it would sometimes appear like a party opposed to another party (desire against the law), sometimes like the presence of the two sides under the effect of a superior law that would govern their distribution and their combination’ (Kafka:50). Rather, for Deleuze and Guattari the characters discover the ‘functioning of a polyvalent assemblage of which the solitary individual is only a part’ (Kafka:85). Rather than conflict ‘it is one and the same desire, one and the same assemblage, that presents itself as a machinic assemblage of content and as a collective assemblage of enunciation’ (Kafka:85).

In short, Cristi should not be treated as a hero who undergoes trials and is ultimately sacrificed at the altar of the state. Cristi is not Christ figure. Rather, the situation is the exact reverse. Cristi is already police. What we get is merely the appearance of an abandonment of a personal ethics for state law. Deleuze and Guattari: ‘The statement may be one of submission, or of protestation, or of revolt and so on; but it is always part of the machine’ (Kafka:82). And ‘The question is thus much more complicated than simply a question about two abstract desires, a desire to repress and a desire to be repressed… Repression, for both the represser and the repressed, flows from this or that assemblage of power-desire, from this or that state of the machine… in a connection more than in a hierarchy’ (Kafka:56). Cristi, in essence, simply aligns himself with Captain Anghelache, and in so doing, disappears.

If we have begun with Kafka, it is only because Deleuze and Guattari are exploring what they call a ‘minor literature,’ a plane of composition Deleuze will reconfigure as ‘minor cinema’ in the cinema books. The minor appears within the major, or classical, culture, distrupting it from within. In this was it is inherently political. And Deleuze writes with regards to ‘modern political cinema’ that it is as if it ‘were no longer constituted on the basis of a possibility of evolution and revolution, like the classical cinema, but on impossibilities, in the style of Kafka: the intolerable’ (C2:219). Then, quoting Jean-Luc Comolli, Deleuze clarifies, it is about: ‘the impossibility of escaping from the group and the impossibility of being satisfied with it’ (C2:219).

In this way Cristi’s disappearance is crucial in the context of minor cinema. Deleuze writes ‘In short, if there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet… the people are missing.’ (C2:216). What does this mean, the people are missing? Deleuze, on the one hand, seems to be refuting the idea that there can be an homogenous group of 'exploited' people (the working class, women, muslims, gays). ‘The death-knell for becoming conscious was precisely the consciousness that there were no people, but always several peoples, an infinity of peoples, who remained to be united, or should not be united, in order for the problem to change’ (C2:220). Yet elsewhere ‘This acknowledgement of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political cinema, but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded… art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of the people’ (C2:217).

So, does a film of minor cinema create a people where the people are missing? Deleuze is deliberately ambiguous because the results can never be seen in advance. Rock ‘n’ roll, punk, rave, rap… who could have foreseen the results of these cultural moments at the beginning? It was only in the midst of, or the end of, their time that the revolutionary results could be felt… and by then, the moment had passed, the problem had changed.

In Police, Adjective the people are missing. The noun is missing. Cristi is missing. In making Cristi disappear, snap, like that, Porumboiu resists giving the film a resolution. A resolution creates a people, embodied in the main character. In resisting this, the spectator is forced to think beyond (and not with) the film. For Deleuze, this is the task of modern political cinema which has as its time-image the noosign. Noosigns constitute a new image of thought, tear thinking away from the domain of thought (the already thought, the movement-image, classical cinema) and explore the unthought. The unthought: that what cannot (yet) be thought.

In Police, Adjective this unthought appears through the body as gest. ‘It is no longer a matter of following and trailing an everyday body, but of making it pass through a ceremony, of introducing it into a glass cage or a crystal, of imposing a carnival or a masquerade on it which makes it into a grotesque body… until at last the disappearance of the visible body is achieved’ (C2:190). Isn’t this just the trial that Cristi’s body undergoes? The everyday body that is seen in the first part of the film exists until the ceremony in Anghelache’s office, and thereafter, it disappears. This is Cristi’s body as gest. ‘The gest is necessarily social and political, following Brecht’s requirements, but it is necessarily something different as well… It is bio-vital, metaphysical and aesthetic’ (C2:194).

marxism today [prologue] / unnamed (Phil Collins, UK / Germany, 2010)

2010-11-27T16:17:00.031Z

Archive footage takes us back to the classroom… the lecturer has just finished drawing a diagram expressing one aspect of the Marxist theory of production. A pyramid structure, a hierarchy. At the apex, the company director, at the bottom, the foundation, the workforce. And from this pyramid, emerge commodities. Next to the diagram: ‘exploitation’ (but with a specific tonality in German… exploitation of the working classes). This is the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany), before die Wende, the turning point, before Deutsche Einheit, German (re-)unification. So, the lecturer asks… who thinks workers in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) are exploited? One student’s reply… my uncle [in the FRG] has a car, a washing machine, he earns a good wage… how is he exploited? The lecturer’s response? He adds a question mark (?) after ‘exploitation,’ turning a statement interrogative. Let us ask if your uncle is exploited…

At this point, a cut. A deferral… This is the strategy of marxism today (prologue). Phil Collins, rather than construct a paean to the ‘triumph’ of Capitalism over Socialism, ‘West’ over ‘East’, or a eulogy to the ‘end’ of the/a communist experiment, attempts something rather more provisional, indefinite, exploratory…

The film is composed of monologues and archive footage. Three Marxist-Leninist lecturers (Petra Mgoza-Zeckay, Andrea Ferber and Marianne Klotz) – and in a coda, a gymnast (the daughter of one of the women) – talk about life in the GDR and the transition to the FDR. Before: free university study; employment both inside and outside the party; an international scene with students from all over the world. Then transition. After: Mgoza-Zeckay becomes a social worker, the others go on to discover, or exploit, the possibilities of the free market.

Collins, through a well controlled mise-en-scene, attempts to negotiate a way of exploring Marxism in an historical context that does not rely upon triumphalist rhetoric or defeatist nostalgia. It is crucial to note, and the title makes this clear, the film is about the past. It is a prologue to another film on Marxism, or marxism, today (a film that may have already or may never appear). Collins, in this way, attempts to capture a specific moment along two axes: on the vertical axis are the forces of capitalism and socialism; on the horizontal axis are the forces of time, back to before the turning point and now, some twenty years after German unity. In other words, the film describes a specific historical situation, it is in the realist mode… however, it is a certain type of realism, a rare type of realism. Understanding the co-ordinates of this mode is crucial to the project of the film…

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, describes cinematic realism as the action-image (C1:141). Realism, or action-images in general, express the way in which situations and character behaviours inter-relate in specific ways. On the one hand, situations can spiral down to be embodied by characters that, through their actions, effect the situation. Alternatively, actions can gradually reveal a situation, each disclosure provoking new actions. The most distinctive, or familiar, sign of the action-image is the binomial. Here we encounter the duel. The duel-film proceeds by two dominant lines of force embodied in the characters. These duels may be violent or romantic, and it matters not which side of the binary emerges triumphant, whether the duel ends in victory or disappointment. Rather, it is the process that describes the action-image. This process is organised, again, in general, by alternate parallel montage that converges two lines of force emerging from the situation (S) towards a central, final and privileged duel (A).

The binomial, then, as a sign of the action-image, of realism, is very familiar to us. It is the mechanism of much popular cinema, from Hollywood to Bollywood to Nollywood. However, the binomial is a tendency that is presupposed, or presupposes, a situation. In other words the binomial emerges from a determinate space-time, the milieu. While the binomial is more interested in action-in-and-for, the milieu describes, as Deleuze puts it, ‘determinate, geographical, historical and social space-times’ (C1:141). It is the ‘Ambience or the Encompasser,’ it is the ‘situation’ (C1:141).

In essence, a film that explores a milieu would map the co-ordinates of a situation; it would place that situation into specific contexts: national, quasi-national, sub-national and international history, specific locations of longitude and latitude, cultural co-ordinates. Together these determinates would form a nexus: the situation, a conflict that will describe not simply the spatial aspect of the milieu (S) but also a temporal dimension S1→S2.

Is that not what we find in marxism today (prologue)? The vertical axis S and the horizontal axis S1→S2. Realism, or the action-image, where the situation encompasses forces but resists the very real urge to embody in characters, in the binomial of a duel. A stymied realism, the pure sign of a milieu. And in so doing the film achieves something rare, in the context of East verses West, Communism verses Capitalism, there are no heroes or villains, no good and evil. Marxism, rather, appears in a pure form, as a political, social and economic enquiry. This is not the Marx of the Communist Manifesto… but the Marx of Capital. This is not the teleological Marx, but the analytic Marx, a geology of history, capital and the people.

marxism today (prologue) is shown alongside another unnamed film. This annex depicts a lecture on Marx’s Capital, not from the historical past of the GDR, but in the now, to students in the FDR. The focus is upon the difference between a product and a commodity. The class is initially blind to this difference. The lecturer explains, a product is something which is produced and consumed directly by the worker that produces it. A commodity is something that is produced to sell on. This leads to the formation of the machines of commerce, where surplus value is generated by producing more commodities than a workforce can consume, more commodities than it takes to pay for the machines of commerce to operate. This profit, produced by the workforce, is then reinvested into the company (or paid to shareholders). The workers do the work, build the company, but receive little or none of the profit. The workers are, in this way, exploited.

Towards the end of this unnamed film, this lecture, the students ask a number of questions. Ryan Gallagher, in the Morning Star, states, ‘many of the students look baffled as their tutor outlines the tenets of Marxist economics, from use and exchange value to the role of the surplus.’ Yet, I maintain, this is not the case, and fundamentally missed the point of Collins’ film(s). The students are engaged. The annex is a direct echo of the archive footage of the GDR lecture shown in the main film. Exactly the same kind of questions are asked...

In other words, today, in a world where China, a so called communist state, has a more resilient model of capitalism than the USA… in a world where the aftermath – or the ongoing – crisis in global capitalism affects countries as diverse as the USA, UK, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Dubai… in a world where the so called ‘end of communism’ has given birth to a deregulated financial system built upon the selling of collateralised dept obligations where more risk produces more profit (for a time)… the question is, what can Marxism do? Not as an ideology. But as a way of awakening thought… as a way of thinking through where we are… as a way of conceiving exploitation… today.

marxism today (prologue) and its annex film are/were at the Manchester Cornerhouse during the autumn of 2010… these two films are the beginning of a project Phil Collins is currently working on. Collins, so it is said, will go on to re-enact the conditions of the annex film, the lecture on Marx’s Capital, at local schools and universities in Manchester (where Marx and Engels were based for some time). Just what this project will become, we cannot but await with interest…

Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, Spain, 2010)

2010-11-08T19:50:00.019Z

The first few minutes of the film take place in darkness. A black screen. Just breathing. Then shouting. Then screaming. This wonderful economy of the audio-visual field (no image, no articulate language) illustrates that cinema can still escape cliché, filmmakers can still be brave. 114 years: we can still be surprised, still wonder at what can be brought to the screen. Sometimes these wonders are extravagant: new worlds, unimagined creatures, disintegrating speeds, remarkable energies, sinister passions, unrivalled gore. Strange spatial arrangements, and complex temporal organisations. Sometimes these wonders are understated: a glance, a flash of beauty, the world we think we know illuminated in some way we have never seen, something delicate, the terror of a shadow, time suspended in a long take. Buried, by Rodrigo Cortés, is of this latter kind of wonder.

Paul Conroy, a truck driver in Iraq, comes to in what he soon discovers to be a makeshift coffin buried underground. He has a lighter, his mobile phone. Later he discovers a torch and another mobile hidden there by the insurgents who want to ransom him to the US government. And that is it. With these tools Conroy must design an escape. And Cortés must fashion a movie…

To do so Cortés instates an aesthetic imperative: we must never leave the coffin and we must remain with the Conroy at all times. In this way there is a reduction of both spatial and temporal fields. The mise-en-scene curtailed to a 2x2x6 wooden box. There is one character on screen. The film is shot in real time. Framing varies, in the most part, from close-up to extreme close-up… the heat, the sweat and the blood, dirty fingernails… what we get are abstract patterns in the light and dark… the qualities changing with the source, zippo, mobile phone, torch. Action happens out-of-field, off screen… his rescuers, the insurgents, his company, his family… all are voices at a distance...

A wonderful achievement. Because it works. Cortés: ‘From the very beginning, I received every kind of, um, let's call them “kind suggestions” to take the camera beyond the coffin. I was told it would bring some oxygen to the audience if we were to show the surface or to cut out to the other side of the [phone] line, for instance, or if we showed the other characters, like the leader of the hostage-taking group or his wife or the federal authorities. There was talk of doing flashbacks. All of this, I thought, was the perfect way to spoil everything and ruin the film’ (Los Angeles Times, 12.9.2010). The question is, of course, why do this? Beyond the minimalist aesthetic, why impose such a cinematic philosophy? Geoff Boucher, at the Los Angeles Times, provides a clue towards answering this question: ‘Cortés said his compass point for the film was pure Hitchcock — the real-time suspense of Rope, the confined quarters of Lifeboat and the paralyzed point of view in Rear Window (Los Angeles Times, 12.9.2010).

This Hitchcock parallel should be taken seriously – at least as a starting point – not simply for aesthetic imperative (setting the filmmaker a seemingly impossible task) and not simply for the precision in which that imperative plays out (is framed, shot and edited). Rather, we should look to what the Hitchcockian process announced and articulated for cinema in general, before going on to explore how Cortés, in his own way, takes up these procedures.

Gilles Deleuze, in his film books, writes ‘it was Hitchcock’s task to introduce the mental image into the cinema and to make it the completion of cinema, the perfection of all other images’ (C1:200). For Deleuze, classical cinema – or, the movement-image - operates through three constituent domains: perception, affection and action. A character in the world sees, feels and acts: perception-image, affection-image, action-image. Movement-image cinema uses all these components, but any film tends towards one, a melodrama is, for example, an affection-image film, an adventure movie an action-image film. Mental images take up these co-ordinates and reinscribe them within the domain of thought. Deleuze will go on to specify three broad types of mental images. There are recollection-images, which include flashbacks, and dream-images, which use dreams and hallucinations. Both of these reinscribe perceptions, affections and actions as thinking in another space/time.

What Deleuze is specifically discussing with Hitchcock, however, is perhaps one of the trickiest images in the cinema books, the relation-image. Here, thought, or mental images, underpin the very flow of the narrative in the now. Thus, in ‘inventing the… relation-image, Hitchcock makes use of it in order to close the set of action-images, and also of perception and affection-images… Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of cinema by pushing the movement-image to its limit’ (C1:204). (It is worth making clear that Deleuze here is discussing only the movement-image, which in its collapse, hastened by Hitchcock, will reinvent itself as the time-image, as the modernist cinema).

With relation-images, then, ‘the essential point… is that action, and also perception and affection, are framed in a fabric of relations. It is this chain of relations which constitutes the mental image, in opposition to the thread of actions, perceptions and affections’ (C1:200). At the most basic level, this is suspense. As Deleuze writes ‘What matters is not who did the action – what Hitchcock calls with contempt the whodunit – but neither is it the action itself: it is the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught’ (C1:200). There are, for Deleuze, two types of relations which play out through three types of sign. First, there are natural relations, which are signs of composition: marks and demarks. Second, there are abstract relations, genetic signs: symbols. With the mark 'we see a customary series such that each can be "interpreted" by the others' (C1:203). With the demark 'it is always possible for one of these terms to… appear in conditions which take it out of its series' (C1:203). Marks and demarks establish patterns (which takes three repetitions). With the symbol we find 'a concrete object which is the bearer of various relations or of variations of as single relation' (C1:204).

With Buried it is possible to see marks and demarks across the film. Everything occurs in threes: the lighter, the mobile phone, the torch. Three women – his wife, the wife’s friend, his colleague (or lover). And – most significantly – the external ‘forces’: company, army and insurgency. These habitual series form marks which position Conroy in various dimensions of his life. Yet there is also a demark. Conroy finds three things in the coffin. Some of his own possessions, stuff left by the insurgents, and the snake. Yet the snake breaks this series and becomes a demark, it has entered the coffin and will leave the coffin while the coffin remains underground. In becoming a demark, in detaching itself from a series it becomes an abstract relation, a symbol. This is crucial, for we cannot ask ‘what is the snake a symbol of?’ outside the context of filmic images. It is the promise of a way out. Just like the mobile phone signal before it. It sets up the possibility of a third escape… the character himself… And if the snake is a demark that becomes a symbol that hints at a mark (a possible habitual series)… in so doing, it also traverses the coffin. It is a vertical element crossing a horizontal plane.

In other words one of the achievements of the film, and we should not underestimate this, is not simply reducing the spatiality of the mise-en-scene, but rather reconfiguring the mise-en-scene from a situation (action-image) to a symbol (relation-image). The coffin itself becomes an image of thought, a symbol. But again we must ask, a symbol of what? One way this approach to the film might be explored is, once again, via Hitchcock. The McGuffin… the object that makes the plot tick, but is itself there only for the plot… As Hitchcock put it to Truffaut: ‘It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?", and the other answers "Oh that's a McGuffin". The first one asks "What's a McGuffin?". "Well", the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands". The first man says "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands", and the other one answers "Well, then that's no McGuffin!". So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all’ (Gottlieb, Framing Hitchcock: 48).

The McGuffin always has meaning within the film, it is just that it does not represent anything in itself. It has symbolic meaning. And that meaning changes from film to film. Yet in Buried we have an interesting inversion – and this is where Cortés comes into his own – it is as if the character himself has opened up the McGuffin and stepped inside. We must then ask, what is the plot beyond the McGuffin?

We can take another route, through Deleuze… with the relation-image, with Hitchcock, cinema ‘no longer conceives of the constitution of a film as a function of two terms – the director and the film to made – but as a function of three: the director, the film and the public, which must come into the film, or whose reactions must form an integrating part of the film (this is the explicit sense of suspense, since the spectator is the first to ‘know’ the relations)’ (C1:202). The spectator is brought into the film through affects and action by way of the aesthetic imperative. There is only the coffin. What we get here, then, is extreme filmic claustrophobia: the situation of the character becomes that of the spectator. Second, the spectator is caught up in events, but events happening off screen, the real action happening elsewhere, this must lead the spectator elsewhere...

Yet actions and affects are, we maintain, reinscribed through the relation-image, through the symbol. Put simply 'actions, affections, perceptions, all is interpretation, from beginning to end… the images are only the winding paths of a single reasoning process…' (C1:200). In this sense the coffin is not simply an aesthetic imperative, not simply a McGuffin, but – most significantly – a postulate. It all begins with the postulate, writes Deleuze, where ‘the film is developed with a mathematical or absolute necessity, despite the improbability of the plot and the action’ (C1:202). To designate a postulate is to establish a proposition that is simply a starting point in-and-of-itself. In this sense, there is nothing to deduce, or reveal about the postulate. It is a defining condition. It is that which proceeds from the postulate where the interest lies. It is the narrative which takes up the postulate, and plays it out. The film is in this way an 'interpretation' of the postulate (C1:203).

The coffin is buried in Iraq. Now.

It would be easy to think of Paul Conroy as an innocent. As being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As being the wrong man. A dupe. A victim. After all, that is how he thinks of himself. However, it seems everyone else knows he is the right man. The insurgents understand better than him why he is there, and why he must be taken. The army understand better than him why he is being held, and why it will be so difficult to retrieve him. The company understand better than him that their employees are at risk, and what they can do to mitigate that risk (for the company, that is). Paul Conroy is not, caught as he is between these factors, an innocent. He is part of the invasion, he is party to the fighting the war on terror, or maybe helping to rebuild a nation, involved in the exploitation of a nation’s resources.

As Deleuze writes, ‘Rohmer and Chabrol have analysed Hitchcock’s schema perfectly: the criminal has always done his crime for another, the true criminal has done his crime for the innocent man who, whether we like it or not, is innocent no longer. In short, the crime is inseparable from the operation by which the criminal has ‘exchanged’ his crime’ (C1:201).

The coffin is every soldier’s coffin, be they American, British, Iraqi. The coffin is a cell in Abu Ghraib, in Britain’s (as yet unnamed) facilities run by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team outside Basra. The coffin is a cell in Guantanamo, on the soil of some country at the end of an extraordinary rendition. The coffin is some safe house, some execution room, of the insurgency.

Self Made (Gillian Wearing, UK, 2010)

2010-10-31T21:31:00.013Z

‘Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian.’

Self Made is a paradox. It is the nature of the paradox that gives the film its power. Yet the paradox is subtle, almost an echo or a shadow of the actual images on screen. The paradox emerges as an indirect consequence of the two modes of narration which compose the film. First mode: the majority of screen-time is documentary, the participants – through their facilitator, Sam Rumbelow – explore the techniques of ‘the method,’ method acting, which will allow them to encounter themselves anew and so generate their own ‘self made’ film. In this way each participant goes on to star in their own short, which while encompassed by the film in-itself, appears as its own discreet narrative moment. So, second mode of narration: fiction. However, the paradox is not an outcome of the continuity between these two modes of narration, though this innovative procedure is indeed the foundation of the paradox.

There are thus three ways in which Self Made is not a paradox. First, the documentary section operates simply in that form, there are no tricks, no ruses, no actors playing real people (as in, for example, 24 City by Zhang Ke Jia). This documentary aspect tends to focus upon the feelings, the emotions. The thoughts of the participants, exploring their internal lives, drawing these feelings out, moving towards externalisation, action. Second, the short films are realist in the sense that the characters the participants go on to play are organic to the filmic world in which they appear, they tend towards a fulfilment of the externalisation of the feelings and emotions explored in the documentary sections. If we put aside the shift of form (from documentary to fiction as modes of narration) there is a correlation between the content of the two domains, the short films are an outcome of what came before, the rehearsals chart the process through which the short films will be made. There is, in other words, continuity at the level of content. This is the third way in which there is no paradox.
Lesley, James, David, Ash, Jerome and Lian sit in a bare warehouse on plastic chairs. Rumbelow asks them to immerse themselves in their inner worlds. The various exercises of the method are explored. He is, he says, taking them through a process, towards a deeper truth. It is an emotional experience for many of them. Some of the participants go on to reveal their fears: for Lian, abandonment; James, violence; Dave, suicide. Rumbelow sets up workshops to explore and narrativise these fears: action and creation, he reveals, results in truth.

Interspaced throughout these exercises and stagings are the short films that some of the participants go on to make. Lian plays in King Lear to an empty theatre; James is knifed outside his house by a gang of teenagers; Leslie has an 1940s encounter with a true gentleman; Dave becomes a strung up Mussolini; Ash… well… we will return to Ash…

Yet if documentary and fictions correlate in the dimension of content, due to the different modes of narration, the link between documentary and fiction at the level of form has both continuity and false continuity at one and the same time. In other words, despite the documentary sequences obeying the laws of classical cinema, and the fiction sequences obeying the laws of classical cinema, the film as a whole is modernist. This is the paradox. To explore this paradox more fully and reveal why it is so crucial to Wearing’s project, we can turn Gilles Deleuze and his theory of cinematographic concepts.

Deleuze describes how the cinema operates in two different semiotic systems: there are movement-images (the classical cinema) and there are time-images (modernist cinema). Movement-image films are organised through the sensory-motor schema. There are perception-images, affection-images, action-images and mental-images. Perception-images coalesce (though shot-reaction shot and/or flowing cameras) to create centres of indetermination, characters. These characters go on to be filmed in relation to the other images. Affection-images essentially explore feelings; action-images, reactions; and mental-images, thinking. These images are linked together, composing the continuity of the movement-image. In time-image films, however, these sensory-motor coordinates collapse. No longer can images be defined as perception-, affection-, action- and mental-images. Rather, pure optical and sound signs create virtual linkages above and beyond the actual images on screen, which themselves are linked by false continuity.
Self Made, in Deleuzian parlance, would seem initially to be of the movement-image. The documentary aspect is predominately of the affection-image. The realist short films predominately of the action-image. In this way these two types of movement-image would seem bound to create a homogenous link, should, logically, compose a movement-image film. Yet, because of the shift in form, the paradox emerges. Self Made organises movement-images through false continuities, creating, in toto, a time-image film. This is because false continuity becomes the dominant aspect of the film. Crucial to understand is the way in which dominance functions in the cinema books.

Deleuze on dominance in the movement-image: ‘A film is never made up of a single kind of image: thus we call the combination of the… varieties, montage. Montage (in one of its aspects [post shoot editing]) is an assemblage of movement-images… Nevertheless a film, at least in its most simple characteristics, always has one type of image which is dominant… each of these movement-images is a point of view on the whole film, a way of grasping the whole… in order to become itself a “reading” of the whole film’ (C1:70). Yet this does not simply occur with the movement-image. As Deleuze writes near the end of the second volume: ‘From classical to modern cinema, from the movement-image to the time-image… it is always possible to multiply the passages from one regime to the other, just as to accentuate their irreducible differences’ (C2:279). In other words, any film could be, indeed, to a certain extent must be, composed of a multiplicity of images, of movement-images, or of time-images, and, in some cases, both movement-images and time-images. Yet, and this is the crucial aspect, one image, one type of movement-image or one type of time-image will rise to dominance, ‘a point of view on the whole film, a way of grasping the whole’ (C1:70).

No one has gone further in Deleuze cinema studies in exploring the way in which a multiplicity of images interact and yet have a dominant aspect than David Martin-Jones. In two books (Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (2006) and Deleuze and World Cinemas (forthcoming, 2011)) Martin-Jones looks at the implications of what he has come to call ‘hybrid images’. This procedure is outlined in an essay called ‘Schizoanalysis, Spectacle and the Spaghetti Western’ in Buchanan and MacCormack’s Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of the Cinema (2008). This collection attempts, in a number of ways through a number of authors, to extend the arguments of the cinema books. As Ian Buchanan puts it in his opening salvo, ‘in order to engage with cinema as a whole we need to take Deleuze as a whole’ (DSC:4). Martin-Jones takes a series of concepts from the work Deleuze did with Félix Guattari (territorialisation → deterritorialisation → reterritorialisation) and uses them in consort with the cinema books for his schizoanalysis. ‘All films,’ writes Martin-Jones ‘belong to a complex assemblage, of industry, aesthetic, context and reception, a multi-faceted schizoanalysis of cinema depends on a number of external factors beyond the purely formal’ (DSC: 75). However, ‘it is the dynamic de- and reterritorialising interaction of the movement-image and the time-image that provides the conditions for a schizoanalysis’ (DSC: 76). According to Martin-Jones, movement-images territorialise, reinforce national identity, for example; while time-images deterritorialise, or undo, put into crisis, such formulations.

In this way, a film is – at the formal level – schizophrenic in the sense it is a composition different images, never more so than when these images are of the movement-image and the time-image. Yet, and here Martin-Jones follows Deleuze, one wins out, there is dominance. Sometimes the movement-images overpower (territorialise) time-images, sometimes the time-images overpower (deterritorialise) the movement-images. It is important to note that we are not saying the time-image is chaotic and the movement-image tames this chaos. Rather, movement-images and time-images organise chaos differently. As Deleuze and Guattari put in their last book together, What is Philosophy?, ‘Art… struggles with chaos, but it does so in order to bring forth a vision that illuminates it for an instant, a Sensation’ (WiP:205). A sensation: a dominant image. It is here that we return to Self Made.
The documentary aspect of the film, as we have previously indicated, operates through a dominance of affection-images, in particular, icons, a sign which individualises through expressions of emotion. The fictional aspects of the film operate through action-images, in particular, the imprint, a sign Deleuze specifically aligns with method acting, an accentuation of the realist form. At the level of content, we might be tempted to say that the way in which the documentary and the fiction inter-relate is governed by reflection-images, in particular the attraction-image, which has as a sign the theatrical: ‘the real situation does not immediately give rise to an action which corresponds to it, but is expressed in a fictitious action which will merely prefigure a project, or a real action to come’ (C1:182). However, it is clear the theatrical representation sets up a hierarchy between the main narrative and the interjected narrative, the interjected narrative operating to push forward the main narrative. In Self Made this is clearly not the case. The documentary and fictional episodes (despite their unequal on screen time) have equal import, they reflect each other. It is in realising this that finally allows us to designate the component of the time-image that the film aligns with, the hyalosign.

Hyalosigns, or crystal-images, are complex images composed of actual on screen images and powerful virtual connections. They can be decomposed into three signs: ‘two mirrors face to face,’ ‘the limpid and the opaque’ and ‘the seed and the environment’ (C2:71). Each performs an exchange between the actual on-screen image in the present and its virtual connections off-screen (on the brain screen) in relation to the present image, past images and images to come. With ‘two mirrors face to face’ the actual image describes a mirroring on-screen in such a way that what is actual and what is virtual is indeterminate: ‘oblique mirrors, concave and convex mirrors and Venetian mirrors,’ ‘two facing mirrors,’ and even a ‘palace of mirrors’ (C2:71;70). ‘When the virtual image becomes actual [and]… the actual image becomes virtual in its turn’ we discover the second sign of hyalosigns, the limpid and the opaque (C2:70). The limpid and the opaque are the ‘expression of [the] exchange’ between the actual and the virtual (C2:70). Finally, the third sign is the seed and the environment. The present is the seed, the future of the present an environment in relation to that seed, an expectation, an anticipation – though not as a sensory-motor extension (actual chronological succession) but rather as an indeterminate (virtual) illumination. The future is now: ‘as pure virtuality, it does not have to be actualised’ (C2:79).

In a paragraph particularly resonant to the current discussion, Deleuze writes that ‘the seed and the mirror are taken up yet again, the one in the work in process of being made, the other in the work reflected in the work. These two themes, which had run through all the other arts, had to affect cinema as well. Sometimes it is the film which is reflected in a theatre play, a show, a painting, or, better, a film within the film; sometimes it is the film which takes itself as its object in the process of its making or of its setbacks in being made. And sometimes the two themes are quite distinct… and… a pure crystal. With its transparent side, its opaque side and their exchange…’ (C2:75-6). We can see each of these aspects in Self Made. The documentary and fictional aspects mirror each other, yet when the fiction is limpid, the documentary becomes opaque. Further the explorations in the documentary are the seeds that will grow so as to encompass the whole mise-en-scene in each of the fictional segments. However, it is clear that what dominates is the exchange between the two modes of the film. And this is the limpid and the opaque.

Deleuze: ‘The actor is bracketed with his public role: he makes the virtual image of the role actual, so that the role becomes visible and luminous. The actor is a ‘monster,’ or rather monsters are born actors – Siamese twins, limbless men – because they find a role in the excess or shortcoming that affects them. But the more the virtual image of the role becomes actual and limpid, the more the actual image of the actor moves into the shadows and becomes opaque: there will be a private project of the actor, a dark vengeance, a strangely obscure criminal or justice-bringing activity. And this underground activity will detach itself and become visible in turn, as the interrupted role falls back into opacity. (C2:71-2).

In this sense, Self Made goes far beyond a simple exposé that we are all actors. We all know this already. We are actors in a mise-en-scene that we can only indirectly act upon, do very little to control. What happens in this film is something far more profound, both the actor and the mise-en-scene at one and the same time are exchanged for another mise-en-scene and actor. The role they play in their films is no more the real them than the role they play in their real lives. In other words, Self Made does not simply reveal that we are all actors, nor does it reveal the real behind the actor. Rather it reveals the participant and the actor are inextricably one and the same thing. ‘What we see… is not a reflection on the theatre or circus… but as double face of the actor, that only the cinema could capture by instituting its own circuit. The virtual image of the public role becomes actual, but in relation to the virtual image of the private crime, which becomes actual in turn and replaces the first image. We no longer know which is the role and which is the crime… the crystalline circuit of the actor, its transparent face and its opaque face, is travesty’ (C2:72). Self Made shows us the impasse of identity. When we think we are being truthful, that is the true fake, and when we think we are being fake, that is the real truth. The impasse is, of course, that this exchange happens at the same time. We are true/fake, fake/true: a heterogeneous whole.
And finally Ash. Ash is highly articulate, intelligent and aware of what he is getting himself into. Yet his self made film is brutal beyond belief, possibly one of the most fascinatingly vicious moments cinema has ever made. And here we reach the crucial aspect of this discussion, and the reason we have gone to such trouble, through such circuitous routes to articulate and stress the paradox through dominance. For if we conceive the film as movement image and the connections between documentary and film as movement-image, as pure continuity, the two aspects of Ash become a homogenous whole: the fiction reveals the truth. Yet if we conceive of the film as a time-image, as a hyalosign, as an instance of the limpid and the opaque, what we get is a heterogeneous whole. Ash becomes opaque and Ash becomes limpid. There is an exchange between actual-Ash and virtual-Ash. Where virtual becomes actual, actual virtual. Ash disappears to be replaced by Ash.

Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself and a fictional character… just don’t try to figure out which is which…

My thanks to JeanRZEJ, who, after a recent to-and-fro in the wake of my exploration of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, inspired the trajectory of this blog.

Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, UK, 2010)

2010-10-12T23:55:00.020+01:00

My mum is up for the weekend, so after I take her out for some lunch, we hit the Cornerhouse for Made in Dagenham. Not something I was planning on seeing (until I realised the visit from my mum coincided) nor indeed writing about (see the cineosis ‘i-faq’ and the blurb on my preconceptions). Anyway, I enjoyed it so much, I had to ask myself why I didn’t want to see this film (after all Mark Kermode loved it!). Let alone write about it. Why?

François Truffaut once quipped ‘the British cinema is made of dullness… film is a born loser just because it is English’ (May,1957. See jdcopp, My Gleanings, April 2008). I mention Truffaut not simply because his is a well known quote, but because it leads me in nicely to Cahiers du cinema – probably the most famous film zine ever. As recently as 2008 in its review of cinema, Cahiers was dismissive of British/English (er…hmm) cinema. Now, whilst I can’t agree (I think here of, off the top of my head, Withnail and I, Powell and Pressburger, Joseph Losey (if Hitchcock in the US is American, then Losey over here is British), Winterbottom, Loach, Boyle, Andrea Arnold, Greenaway) as Lights in the Dusk puts it in ‘The Other Side of the Underneath: Britain's "Hidden" Cinema’ UK cinema is seen as ‘not quite Hollywood/not quite European’. Not quite Japanese, not quite Korean. Made in Dagenham, I assumed, was the kind of film that is simply irrelevant cinematically, the kind of cinema that gives UK film its bad press in France!

Made in Dagenham tells the story – with, as we will see, some artistic license – of a strike at Ford’s Dagenham plant in 1968. One of many in the 1960s, what made it unique was it being a strike by women workers. It was caused by the women getting downgraded from semi-skilled to unskilled labourers, and in the process seeing a wage cut. However, during the strike the focus changed to addressing the rights of women in general, equal pay for the same jobs as men. The strike was successful as it resulted in a change in the law. And, as the film points out, this inspired similar laws across most industrialised nations.

I did not know about the strike, or its historical importance. It took attending the film to learn about it. I laughed, I cried (a little), I was horrified… In other words, I was attendant to all the pleasures that full-on cinematic realism can give us…

This, of course, is the perceived problem with regards to political discourse in the cinema, and it is here we return to Cahiers du cinema (post-Truffaut, who was fine with realism, as long as it wasn’t British/English (social?) realism). Recently, I have been reading A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma by Emilie Bickerton. A nicely researched book, beautifully written and an astute commentary upon a cinema magazine that still gets a generation of academics (before my time) nostalgic for the heady days of the rise of cinema theory. They were lucky enough to be there. This rise of theory came well after the auteur phase (1950s: ‘the yellow book, with Bazin as editor, Truffaut and Goddard as critics) in what is known, without much irony, as the Maoist phase (1970s: ‘the red years,’ Comolli and Narboni et al). Bickerton gives an account of how films such as Costas-Gravas Z were received…

‘Z was one of the biggest cinema hits of sixties France: by the end of 1969, 700,000 people had seen the film in Paris. It recounted the murder in 1963 of politician Gregoris Lambrakis, four years before Greece’s democratic government was overthrown by the military. Yves Montand and scriptwriter Jorge Semprún added to the film’s left-wing credentials. In L’Express, Claude Mauriac named Z the must-see film for “anyone who loves freedom and justice”; La Croix emphatically declared it the film that allows you to live through cinema: “it will teach you about the world and all of its difficult realities”.

‘Cahiers and Positif were the only publications to disagree with this broad consensus, and Jean Narboni’s critique in Cahiers in March 1969 was the start of a battle against what become known as the Série-Z phenomenon, which would continue into the next decade. Attacking Z, Narboni described the film as offering a brand of sterilised militancy… repackaged for thrills. Cahiers immediately shredded the film’s political credentials. Narboni argued that its petty-bourgeois ideology was at work “in the functioning of the film as much as its consumption,” because Z neglects “the concrete analysis of concrete situations, the objective study of social relations, the breakdown of political mechanisms.”… Spectators appeared to be seeking out a cinema that offered the piquancy of politics but that did not implicate or challenge their world view directly. With Z you had a film-maker who was addressing politics on the surface, but simultaneously banalizing it… it was intelligent and committed but never revolutionary, in either narrative content or aesthetic form’ (Bickerton, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma:64-5).

Bickerton starts by using quotes, but then slips seamlessly into a free indirect discourse, as if aligning herself with the position taken by the editor. Her take on the red years and Z remains ambiguous… and this ambiguity is rife throughout academia – there is something thrilling and masterful in taking a film to pieces, showing how while it might appear to work on the surface… underneath it falls to pieces. The Cahiers Maoist phase saw readership drop ‘from 14,000 issues bought in 1969 to 3,000 in 1973’ (Bickerton:81). Yet there is something wonderful in this will to expunge all cinema from a cinema magazine… film in itself, on the whole, not being worthy of the theory that it engendered. Central to this move was the famous Comolli and Narboni film classification and hierarchical system (ABCDE) which described the different ways in which film related to political ideology…

It is so easy to fall into this trap. This is why Deleuze is so important for cinema theory. He reminds us that the Série-Z type of film is fine. Deleuze manages to find a way to categorize film in such a way that it allows us to explore both the wonders of realism (the yellow years) and the wonders of (political) modernism (the red years). He does this by creating a doubled semiotic taxonomy: the movement-image and the time-image. The former, broadly speaking, realist, the latter, broadly speaking, modernist. Each semiotic has various components (lots of sub-types) yet – and this is crucial – Deleuze does not hierarchize the components, or, more importantly, the two-fold semiotic… ‘it cannot be said that one is more important than the other, whether more beautiful or profound. All that can be said is that the movement-image does not give us a time-image’ (C2: 270). As I put it in my 2008 essay ‘Cinema, chronos / cronos’: ‘you become an accomplice to the impasse of history if you make films of the movement-image or films of the time-image… the problems addressed by one cannot address the problems addressed by the other. What one can do, the other cannot. Or better, what one cannot do, the other can. This is the impasse’ (Deamer, ‘Cinema, chronos / cronos’ in Deleuze and History: 183).

Made in Dagenham, then, is at the centre of the movement-image, a (large form) action-image, a realist film par excellence, the most distinctive sign of which is the binomial. Here we encounter a filmic structure that proceeds by two dominant lines of force embodied in characters who relate to each other through duels. These duels may be violent, romantic or indeed political, and it matters not which side of the binary emerges triumphant, whether the duel ends in victory or disappointment for the hero. Rather, it is the process that is all. This process is organised by alternate parallel montage that converges two lines of force emerging from the situation (S→A) towards a central, final and privileged duel (A). While other duels may exist (a+a+a...) this polynomial aspect is in the service of the dominant binomial which organises and structures the film.

Thus we see the forces of feminist equality become embodied in a character, Rita O'Grady, who will take on factory management, union, community, husband and government, all of which embody patriarchy. The crucial point, however, is this: the action-image can be seen as ‘putting forward a strong and coherent conception of universal history’ (C1: 151). Deleuze, in citing ‘universal history’ is invoking Nietzsche’s three types of history in ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’: the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical. For Deleuze, with monumental history situations appear initially static but under threat. The threat thus constitutes the beginning of the monumental narration which will continue until the threat is either vanquished or triumphant. This passage is always described through the deeds of the hero – the passage from situation to restored situation is embodied in action. In this way there are two tendencies – first, that historical events chart the collision of two embodied forces (parallel montage finding resolution in convergence). Secondly, that this structure is repetitive: these forces clash continually, form peaks and describes homogenous phenomena. In Made in Dagenham the hero is Rita, the forces are feminism and patriarchy.

Antiquarian history selects events that – no matter how different – form a coherent mapping of a civilisation. These duels are the archival data of a nation that are essentialised as traditions. Antiquarian history, then, attempts to venerate the past to conserve it. Made in Dagenham, in this sense, describes a state of permanent patriarchy. This is not a film about then, but a film about now. Women still earn less then men for the same job in the UK, some 20% less, on average.

Lastly, for Deleuze ‘the monumental and antiquarian conceptions of history would not come together so well without the ethical image which measures and organises them both’ (C1: 150). The gap between situation and restored situation marks the very co-ordinates of the story being told. This is thus ‘a matter of Good and Evil,’ where ‘a strong ethical judgement must condemn the injustice of “things,” bring compassion, herald the new civilisation’ (C1: 151).

Mass culture, culture, needs realist cinema. It does its job. Yes, Made in Dagenham is problematic. We can see moments of sexual exploitation by the film, seemingly the very thing the film is fighting, but this is realism… and the very friction of these moments can open up the narrative. Yes, Made in Dagenham is historically inaccurate… the film never mentions that the women were not regraded back to skilled workers, skimming this fact. But this is realism. Realism doesn’t reflect. Realism doesn't represent. Realism creates…

As we step outside after the film and I light a cigarette, my mum tells me she was involved in strike action as young woman, they came out for a five day week. I never heard this story before. She had forgotten… Right on mum… Right on Made in Dagenham…

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, France | Germany | Italy, 2009)

2010-10-06T21:01:00.026+01:00

Enter the Void has some of the most potent cinematic images ever created… the sex scene anticipating Oscar’s rebirth, the love hotel sequence that collapses Tokyo into the UV model, the gliding, out-of-body experience expressing Oscar’s mind/spirit, the repetition and differences of the escapes into the past, the hallucinations of Oscar’s DMT trip… all rendered in long takes, blurrings, false continuities… the sonics a mishmash of whispers, blank voices, uterine soundscapes. The narration of Enter the Void is truly overwhelming.

In contrast, Gaspar Noé ensures, very early on, that the narrative (the story, the trajectory the film will take) holds little surprise. Oscar has been lent a copy of the Bardo Thödol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Alex. Still on the come down from a wee toot on some DMT, Oscar asks Alex what the book is about. As they descend the exo-staircase of Oscar’s apartment block, Alex tells him the book deals with what happens after death. First, you experience yourself leaving your body behind. Second, you explore moments from your past. Third, you search out and are drawn towards a new body to inhabit for reincarnation. It is clear that the book – or at least Alex’s synopsis of the book – will provide the narrative trace for Noé’s film. That Oscar will die, explore his past, and search for a new foetus body-husk. From the habitual present through the sheets of the past to the dark precursor of the future. End of film.

Yet we seemingly encounter a problem, the coda giving us a narrative surprise. The film travels beyond the moment of reincarnation. Oscar is reborn and experiences the first moments of unfocused new life, the cutting of the umbilical cord, the reconnection to the breast. Up until this point Noé has taken great care to ensure the film is with Oscar’s perceptions, his subjective point-of-view. It is essential that the ‘present’ sequence of the film is shot from Oscar’s optical perception, inspired, Noé tells us, by The Lady in the Lake, though the film itself has more in common with the more technically successful films Dark Passage and Mamoulian’s Jekyll and Hyde. This allows Noé to position the second section of the film, the exploration of the ‘past’, as being shot from the subjective point of view of Oscar’s mind/spirit, as it does the third part of the film, the precursor of the ‘future,’ his search for a new body. By this logic, the subjective viewpoint should have been snuffed out at the moment the sperm hit the egg, the bright light should have ended Oscar’s subjective viewpoint. At this point what was Oscar should have ceased to exist. Noé, however, allows the camera to go into the future, to experience the nine month gestation and the moments following birth.

In fact, this ‘beyond’ of Oscar is allowed in Buddhist theology and the reinscriptions in new age religions and pseudo-psychologies. Reincarnation comes from Latin, meaning ‘entering the flesh once again,’ and charts a transmigration of the soul, a metempsychosis. These religio-sciences are rife with remembrances of past lives, for example, the work of Ian Stevenson, who collected much ‘evidence’ from children between the ages of three to seven years … In other words, the coda is a false problem from the standpoint of a narrative based as it is on the Bardo Thödol. However, it is this coda that may allow us alternative readings of the film…

Taken together then, narrative and narration collapse Buddhist theology and druggy aesthetics into a pure optical and sonic cinematic happening. This collapse is explicit, when (during the first sequence of the film) Oscar inhales DMT he undergoes an out-of-body experience, very similar to the one that lasts from his death to moment of reincarnation. The camera/spirit only rejoining the body during the foetus/baby during gestation/birth/suckling. In this sense the film is composed of circles within circles. Is, then, the film using Buddhist theology to explore drug culture (the whole film an expression of a trip, coming down a kind of rebirth)? Is the film using drug culture to explore Buddhist theology (the drug experience as an expression of the religious experience)? Enter the Void leaves this indeterminate. Crucially, this may all be a ruse... What is clear, however, is that Noé is concerned with the relationship between the spirit/mind and the body. Enter the Void describes a body as a finite, spatial, temporal entity, while the spirit/mind is atemporal, non-spatial and infinite. Should we see this as a funky-orientalist religious dualism! Or, is there another way of reading the film?

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, describes what he calls a ‘cinema of the brain’ (Deleuze, 2001:205). This cinematic avatar belongs to the time-image. Some films tend to be organised around the sensory-motor schema: a character sees, feels, thinks, reacts and the act changes the world of the film. Deleuze calls this the cinema of the movement-image. The spectator, when encountering the movement-image, tends to be orientated into this cinematic flow. Time-images, however, collapse the co-ordinates of the movement-image. This results in the creation of pure optical and pure sound situations: opsigns and sonsigns. Opsigns and sonsigns go on to open up on to their virtual components, in other words, resist a flowing link to the next image to instead link back to itself, creating hyalosigns. Hyalosigns are combined into narratives resulting in the emergence of chronosigns, non-linear or serial narratives, which go on to constitute a new image of thought: noosigns. Noosigns operate at the level of the story and tear thinking away from the domain of habitual thought. In this way, time-images are also lectosigns, visual and auditory sensations that must be read rather than simply be seen.

While hyalosigns are images and chronosigns are narratives, noosigns are events that occur through the bodies and environments of the film: the mise-en-scène and actors. Thought, then, (our thought, the spectator’s thought) is not engendered as a consequence of a sensory-motor linkage between the character and the situation, and the concomitant identification of character to subject and filmic situation to real milieu, but rather through the absence of such relationships. In the absence of such a link, thought becomes us. Noosigns are thus events which ‘force… us to think,’ events which ‘force… us to think what is concealed from thought, life’ (C2:189).

Enter the Void is, without doubt, a time-image. It is composed of pure optical and sound situations, hyalosigns that open up to the virtual and chronosigns that re-arrange the temporal order. However, it seems to me that we can best explore the film as a noosign, in particular, as an instance of one of the elements of the noosign, ‘cinema of the brain’ (C2:205). This involves the mise-en-scène, the environment. In a sense Enter the Void is entirely mise-en-scène. It does not depend upon the physical presence of an actor, but bodies, backgrounds, lighting, colours and sounds. For Deleuze, certain films explore the ‘identity of the brain and world’ where ‘landscapes are mental states, just as mental states are cartographies’ and form a reciprocal ‘noosphere’ (C2:205). The noosphere is a zone that fractures the coordinates of the film. It is here, in this final aspect of the noosign, in this final aspect of the time-image, that cinema explores the future as terrifyingly dark, as an unending night… and conversely, as infinitely open. For the environment is immense, without horizon, without bounds.

It is in this sense that we can read the film very differently than simply a druggy trip or a depiction of Buddhist theology. Rather, these elements are the mode of expression. The crucial aspect of the film is rather in its relationship between the camera-mind and the body. While it might seem that the film is highly subjective, the coda (rebirth) subverts this subjectivity. The camera is not simply subjective, and nor is it objective. But rather it is semi-subjective. It is the coda that provides this twist in the tale. The camera is not there for Oscar, but there for the audience. The rebirth is the rebirth of the audience, the cinema. This also changes the nature of the film, rather than tragedy, it becomes a comedy. An epic comedy. Life is flexible, a rebirth can happen at any time. It is about the future and change. We are free. The present, the past and the future, the future is what we can become, we are not trapped in our past lives. Our fates are not irreversible…

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Iran, 2010)

2010-09-25T21:41:00.018+01:00

A man and a woman sojourn in an Italian town. Some years into their marriage, events somehow crack open years of silence… So, boredom, estrangement, conflict, disintegration… This is Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1954).

Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy can be seen, at least in part, as a simulacrum of Rosselini’s original film. This, of course, is just how Kiarostami wants it. Exploring the very idea of the original and the copy is Kiarostami's surface project. And, if the second half of the film ‘copies’ Rossellini’s, the first half is a series of meditations that open up what will come. It is here the notion of the original and the copy are explored in a number of ways… the writer’s lecture, conversations in the car, the revered painting revealed as fake. Isn’t a copy an original in a sense? Is a copy any less authentic than its original? Is there any such thing as an original? Such are the questions explored. It is in this way we enter in to the second part of the film and the failing marriage.

The film begins in a provincial Tuscany lecture hall. James Miller, a moderately famous English art historian, gives a lecture organised by the Italian translator of his book. In the audience is Elle. She attends with her son, but has to leave due to his disruptive behaviour. Before walking out, however, she gives her number to the translator and asks him to get the author to contact her. They go on a kind of a date. At first the talk is of his book, she gets him to sign some copies for friends. Later, when they go for a coffee, la patronne du café mistakes them for man and wife. James is out taking a call, and Elle, mischievously, plays along with la patronne. When James returns, Elle tells him what she has done…

From this point on they are husband and wife, fifteen years into a marriage. Their trip is recompense for the previous night. It was an anniversary; he fell asleep while she was making herself look good for him. Events somehow crack open years of silence… boredom, estrangement, conflict, disintegration…

So, the second part of the film is a playing out of the concepts explored in the first part of the film. And this is done through a reification of, or reflection upon, Rossellini’s film. Yet such a reading remains superficial. There is something far more essential at stake here. For instance – and a clue to what is essential – it would be entirely wrong to think of the second part of the film as an act, as James and Elle caught up in some kind of fantasy, some kind of game. Rather, Kiarostami performs a wonderful sleight of hand… he ensures that both the first part and the second part of the film have their own essential ‘truth’ in-and-of themselves. Or, to put this another way, from the position of the first part, the second part is ‘fake’; from the position of the second part, the first part is ‘fake’. Which is as much to say that each of the two aspects are indeterminate in relation to the other…

And there is a third aspect to the film, a third ‘truth’. Taken as a whole, the film compresses fifteen years of a relationship – from first date to fifteenth anniversary – into a day. ‘It is actually based,’ says Kiarostami, ‘on something that happened to me ten, 15, maybe even 20 years ago – I’ve no real sense of time. And I wonder whether the woman in question, if she sees the film, will recognise herself. Is it just a memory I myself kept from what happened? After all, we spent just one day together’ (The List, 'Profile: Abbas Kiarostami'). As we will see, it is this ‘sense of time,’ or maybe the ‘no real sense of time’ that is essential to Kiarostami’s film. However, first, we must ask what can account for this structure, for the three indeterminate aspects?

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, describes a type of film created from a particular chronosign he calls peaks of the present. As Deleuze puts it, chronosigns concern ‘narration,’ a narration of ‘false continuity’ which ‘extend crystalline description,’ the interactions between actual on-screen images and their virtual (brain-screen) components (C2:127). These false continuities take a number of forms, but the least common (at least as far as I have witnessed) are peaks of the present. ‘Points [or peaks] of the present’ explore the way in which any present moment is fundamentally divided between the present-in-itself, the present’s past and the present’s future (C2:100).

As Deleuze puts it, with peaks of the present ‘narration will consist of the distribution of different presents… so that each forms a combination that is plausible and possible in itself, but where all of them together are “incompossible”’ (C2:101). Not impossible, but each possibility is possible. This kind of film disrupts the order of time, ‘gives narration a new value, because it abstracts it from all successive action’ (C2:101). Rather, the narrative appears in the repetitions of the different presents. In this sense we can see the three aspects of Certified Copy as incompossible, each aspect a copy, or version of a situation. And each version the original. James and Elle’s first date to fifteenth anniversary is, in-itself, the present of the present. The first half of the film (the date) the past of the present; and the second half of the film (the disintegrating marriage) the future of the present.

Now we can apprehend what is essential in the film. It is not simply a meditation on the copy and the original, but what the copy and the original do to time. The copy puts time out of joint. The original and the copy would seem to have a temporal ordering. But admitting the copy is of equal value as the original, that there is no such thing as an original, that the copy is original in its own way, disrupts temporality, opens up onto what Henri Bergson calls duration. It gives a different reading to time. Time is no longer succession but simultaneity. In this sense the peaks of the present of Certified Copy are ‘setting time free’ (C2:102). And freedom is choice, the choice between ‘inextricable differences’ (C2:105). The last shot of the film: James takes a piss while Elle is in on the bed of the hotel room. Kiarostami allows James to leave and leaves an empty frame. What will they do? Which aspect of duration, which peak of the present will they choose?

Will we treat each day, each moment, as a recurrence of the day, the moment, before? Or as duration… as something in-and-of-itself, as the beginning of something new, as the end of something? These three incompossible aspects of duration make time ‘frightening and inexplicable’ (C2:101). For, on the one hand, the possibility of action is torn between living in the moment, reacting to the influences of the past and acting for the future. Yet, on the other hand, somehow these different repetitions of time overlay each other. And because of this we can discover there is always a choice, there is always choice… and choice is freedom…

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, USA / Germany, 2009)

2010-09-21T21:36:00.016+01:00

It seems a simple premise. A whacko holed up in a house with a shotgun. He’s got two hostages and has just run his mother through with a sword. A couple of cops arrive on the scene. What has happened is clear… why it has happened is another matter… Detective Hank Havenhurst, trying to extract the dude and save the hostages, interviews his girlfriend, his mentor and the neighbours who witnessed the slaying. Yep, a simple premise for a film, yet a formula which Werner Herzog takes in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, warps and sprinkles with a dash of madness. Wonderful, of course. But why? Why did the killer do what he did..? and what is Herzog doing in the film..?

The film operates predominately through flashbacks, which seems – at first – a straightforward enough way to contextualise and explicate the events happening in the present. The present of the film starts just after the murder of Mrs. McCullum. Detective Havenhurst and his new partner, Detective Vargas, turn up at the suburban street to find the body in a neighbour’s house. Brad, her son, did it; they are told… and is across the street. Havenhurst soons discovers Brad to be more than a little disorientated. He demands to be called Farooq, believes God talks to him, rolls a tube of bran down the drive… His fiancé turns up. Havenhurst, looking for a way to understand his opponent, interviews her. Essentially, it is the interviews with Ingrid that constitute the trips into the past through flashbacks, though not all of them are encountered first hand. For instance, Ingrid begins by relating a story about how Brad was the only survivor of an accident in Peru, when he came back he was changed.

Next to arrive on the scene is theatre director Lee Meyers. Meyers tells us how Brad is a wonderful if unpredictable actor. They had been working together on a production of The Oresteia by Aeschylus. The play, as Meyers explains, is about the murder of a mother by a son.

Yet it is exactly here we encounter a problem. These flashbacks are in excess of a causal explanation, are anecdotes and diversions … a meal with mum turns into a surreal exploration of jello… Uncle Ted’s plan for an advert where a midget riding a miniature pony is chased by one of his giant chickens round a massive tree… Brad showing Ingrid a packet of oats with the picture of a pilgrim on it… who Brad believes is god, and who has been talking to him since he was a little boy. In short, there is nothing that explains why Brad murdered his mum, which to say, there are too many possibilities and explanations. There is nothing for Havenhurst to use… and little for the spectator to understand Brad as a psychologically motivated character.

According to Gilles Deleuze, the flashback is a recollection-image and has 'two extreme poles,' on the one hand there is the flashback as 'an explanation, a causality or a linearity' (C2:49). This is destiny… the past which leads inexorably to the present. On the other hand there is the flashback as forking paths, 'a fragmentation of all linearity… [as] breaks in causality' (C2:49). This is marked by multiple flashbacks from multiple characters. Forking paths allow the dissolution of the movement-image, which for Deleuze is the way in which a film organises the perceptions, affects, thoughts and actions of a character within a specified setting. Forking paths, in this way, are the conditions for the emergence of time-images, films which create opsigns and sonsigns, pure optical and sound images, which stymie character actions, make affects opaque and do not allow a clear differentiation between objective and subjective perceptions. In short, rather than the spectator thinking with the film, the film demands thought from the spectator.

Thus, the forking paths of the recollection-image put cause and effect into crisis, are a condition for the very collapse of the recollection-image and the emergence of time-images. It is clear that My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done has this aspect to it. The flashbacks are all ‘about’ Brad, yet none of them emanate directly from the character of Brad. They have their source in the narratives of Ingrid, Meyers and the two neighbours. Both the present of the film (the events happening in the suburban street after the murder of Mrs. McCullum) and the past of the film (the events leading up to the murder of Mrs. McCullum) interweave in the most common of ways, and proceed with a certain linearity. Yet the actual events in the present and the past are illusive, allusive, fragmented, inexplicable, opaque, strange… In short, Herzog is operating at the very boundaries of the movement-image and the time-image… the structure is movement-image, the way in which they play out time-image: forking paths…

Interestingly, Herzog makes an appearance twice in Deleuze’s cinema books, once in respect to the movement-image, once in respect to the time-image. With regards to the movement-image, Herzog creates inversion-images… the quotidian, the sublime and the enfeebled… where the character is a visionary, ‘a man who is larger than life frequent[ing] a milieu which is itself larger than life,’ or the characters are ‘weaklings and idiots’ (C1:184-5). Or both at one and the same time. No doubt there is something of this in the film too. Brad is an opaque character, brooding, apocalyptic, grandiose… yet he lives in suburbia, he has no job, lives with his mother… has no aim or plan…

With regards to the time-image, Herzog creates ‘crystallised spaces’ (C2: 129). This is the crystal-image, or hyalosign, where Deleuze discusses Herzog in respect to what he calls the ‘seed and environment’ (C2:71). A warning from Deleuze ‘the virtual image [appears as] “pure recollection”, the better to distinguish it from mental images – recollection-images, dreams or dreaming – with which it might readily be confused. In fact, the latter are certainly virtual images, but actualised or in the course of actualisation in consciousnesses or psychological states’ (C2:79). With crystal-images things are different… for example… Meyer’s production of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides of The Oresteia… Brad is ousted despite being a wonderful actor, because of his unpredictability: his refusal to dress in Greek clothes (preferring his Peruvian poncho)… not using a Greek sword (preferring Uncle Ted’s cutlass)… on-the-spot editing of the text of the play in his own way. At the performance in Calgary he gatecrashes he performs from the audience… This is crucial in respect to the seed and the environment. Deleuze writes how in the crystal-image ‘the film is reflected in a theatre play, a show, a painting… a film’ (C2:75). With the seed and environment we encounter this specifically as ‘the film [or play, etc] which takes itself as its own object in the process of its making or of its setbacks in being made’ (C2:76). Thus in this instance the seed ‘never reaches completion’ and ‘we no longer know which is the role and which is the crime’ (C2:76;72).

What is a seed? What is an environment? How do the seed and environment inter-relate? Deleuze writes ‘the seed is on the one hand the virtual image which will crystallise an environment which is at present amorphous; but on the other hand the latter must have a structure which is virtually crystallisable, in relation to which the seed now plays the role of actual image’ (C2:74). Crucially ‘the actual and the virtual are exchanged in an indiscernibility which on each occasion allows distinction to survive’ (C2:74). We have the present, we have the past… but what do they give us? The ‘present’ and the ‘past’ use the flashback formula to undo what flashbacks do. Rather, the film presents a double aspect. In the present, Brad is effectively erased. A disembodied voice emanating from the house. A shadow at the door. A hand grabbing a pizza box or shoving out a tape recorder. In the past he only appears through the stories of other characters. Rather than progressively actualise Brad throughout the course of the film (inversion-images, the destiny of the recollection-image), the film uses flashbacks (forking paths of the recollection-image) to put the movement-image into crisis. In My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, we thus pass through and go beyond the movement-image. Herzog creates time-images, the indeterminate regime of the seed and the environment. In so doing Brad ‘appears’ as a virtual entity… an absent centre.

The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan José Campanella, Argentina | Spain, 2009)

2010-09-18T00:57:00.011+01:00

In order to escape the past, we must first understand it. This seems to be a unifying theme of Juan José Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes, which explores this theme through three interlacing narrative threads. Or perhaps we would better call them generic modes: the murder mystery, the romance and the political thriller.

The filmic space is Argentina, the temporal zones 1999 and 1974. In 1999 Benjamín Espósito has just retired from his post as a federal justice agent. In retirement, however, his thoughts return to 1974. It was then that he was assigned an investigation of a crime that would come to haunt him and would irrevocably change his life, the violent rape and murder of a young woman, Liliana Coloto. Yet it was not so much the actual crime in-itself that affected him, as we will see, this kind of thing was of the time. Rather, it was the stoic and moral reaction by the husband, Ricardo Morales. Morales does not forgive the killer, far from it. Yet when Espósito suggests Morales might want to do to the killer what he had done to his wife… Morales demurs. He believes in the justice that the law will bring, 25 years imprisonment. It is Morales that inspires Espósito to re-open the case, prematurely closed by his superiors, and eventually capture and prosecute Isidoro Gómez.

Juxtaposing the murder mystery, is the romance. At the same time Espósito is assigned to the case, a new department head is appointed, Irene Menéndez-Hastings. Menéndez-Hastings not only becomes his collaborator in the investigation, but they also fall in love.
However, before Espósito can find the courage to tell Irene of his passion, events intervene. Gómez is freed. It is here that the third narrative thread makes itself felt. Gómez provides information from inside prison to the military forces supporting the authoritarian government. He is rewarded not only with freedom, but given a role in the death squads, a position he abuses (if that is the right word) by going after Espósito. Espósito is transferred to another area of the country, where he works until his retirement.

Back in 1999, Espósito decides to novelise these events, though he is not entirely sure why. He first turns to Menéndez-Hastings, rekindling their love. Next, in an effort to track down Gómez, he locates Morales. And just as the mystery is reopened and romance restarted, so too the political dimension of the film is reactivated. For Gómez has been privately imprisoned by Morales for the last 25 years.

This twist might seem simply to justify the film being organised through flashbacks. However, it does far more than this. This private, moral, liberal justice, a justice that neither the country, nor Espósito could provide, is the key to the film. To understand why we can turn to Gilles Deleuze and his labyrinthine taxonomy of cinematic structures. Deleuze describes the flashback as a recollection-image. For Deleuze the recollection-image, in its most coherent form, is the instrument of 'psychological causality' (C2:47). The recollection-image uses the flashback as 'an explanation, a causality or a linearity,' as a 'closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present' (C2:49). Deleuze calls this destiny… and when unambiguous this is a sense of strong destiny… it is the past which leads inexorably to the present and will dictate the future. This destiny should not be mistaken for fate. Rather, destiny is a power, it is the process whereby something in the past inspires the future.

In this respect, Morales is essential to the project of the film. Not only does his love for his wife inspire Espósito’s love for Menéndez-Hastings, not only does Morales will to catch the killer inspire Espósito to reopen the case in 1974 and again in 1999, but Morales’ love of justice is ahead of its time.

In 1974 Perón returned to power in Argentina. Originally elected president in 1946, General Juan Perón led a militaristic fascist government that instigated a period of full on economic development for the country. Shifting the focus away from agrarian subsistence to industrialisation, Perónism also improved the conditions and wages of urban workers. However, by the late 1940s inflation had reached 50%. In order to keep control, Perón imprisoned and tortured political rivals, enacted tough censorship laws and built a personality cult around himself. He was deposed in a coup d'état in 1955 and spent the next twenty years in exile.

The following regime attempted to purge the politics of Argentina of Perónist influence, with little success. Elections in 1958 brought Arturo Frondizi to power, and in 1962 Arturo Illia. Yet Peronists and the military continually intervened and undermined these regimes, resulting in the military coup of 1966. Perón saw his chance, and from abroad organised student and labour protests. Free elections were called in 1973, and Perón returned from Spain, winning and taking power the following year. Yet Peron died a few months later and from mid-July 1974 his third wife and vice president, Isabel, took control.

Isabel Martínez de Perón is often seen as the instigator of a violent period of repression, beginning with ‘annihilation decrees’ against left wing guerrillas in 1975. In truth, right wing military violence against left wing rebels had been prevalent since the 1950s. However, it was in the wake of Juan Perón’s death that the violence reached fever pitch. The Dirty War, or in Spanish, Guerra Sucia, was a decade of state-sponsored abduction, torture and murder that lasted until around 1983. While the actual term Dirty War was coined by the previous military junta, the tactics were developed in consort with the CIA. The American government of the time had instigated Operation Condor, training the military leaders of South America in tactics such as torture, abduction and rape to instill fear in order to maintain the (right wing) social order. The targets were the trade unions, journalists, students and left wing rebel forces. It is estimated that anywhere between 9 and 30 thousand people were ‘disappeared’ during this time. In 2006 the tactics were described as ‘genocide’ by the Argentinean court of law.

In this way, Morales’ justice is against the times. How easy it would have been for him to kill Gómez. How much more with the times this would have been. Yet Morales creates a time out of joint. He has carried out the legal sentence that the state was unable and unwilling to provide. In this way, Morales anticipates the destiny of Argentina.

Mother (Joon-ho Bong, South Korea, 2009)

2010-09-08T23:10:00.025+01:00

The joy of a thriller is the twist. A number of conditions apply. The twist needs to be well hidden, everything remaining ambiguous before it is revealed. There is nothing worse than guessing the twist before it happens. There is a caveat here of course… the red herring. The red herring in-itself is not ambiguity (could it be him? could it be her?). Rather, it is misdirection. You think, with a mix of satisfaction (at your own cleverness) and disappointment (at the filmmaker giving too much away) that you have got it before the reveal… only to discover it was actually someone or something else entirely. Even subtler is when the red herring is signalled as possibly being a red herring… thus returning us once more to ambiguity, though one which has a self-reflective quality.

The twist also needs to be organic to the story. The conditions for the twist need to have been there all the time. The twist should not be imposed from the outside. A cheating twist. There is nothing worse (again!) than feeling that the twist was beyond our reach. Finally, the twist must, when it happens, appear as a necessity. It could only have been this, this was the right outcome… it was there all along in the themes of the film. Any other result would have been simply an answer to a question rather than a response to the themes. The perfect thriller does not simply reveal what happened, but through revealing what happened reveals the situation.

Mother, by Joon-ho Bong, is in this sense a perfect thriller. There are misdirections. It has a twist. You can’t see it coming. Yet it is not imposed from the outside, it appears organic and necessary. The twist is integral to the explicit themes of the film, making them vivid and urgent. However, Mother seems to go one step further. The film presents us with a beautiful excess. Yeah, the twist reinscribes the themes… but in the process reveals a crypto-theme, something that while there all along, can only be delineated retroactively post-twist. The excess of Mother has something to do with the very formal construction of the thriller, organised as it is around a search for the truth.

The story revolves, of course, around a crime. The set up is crucial here. Do-joon lives with his mother, a retailer of Chinese medicine and illegal practitioner of acupuncture. Do-joon himself is a little slow and suffers from an unspecified condition of memory loss. It is clear that events he passes through pass him by, though sometimes they re-emerge (days, months or years later) through traumas and dreams. A kind of overactive repression mechanism. Whatever the case, his mother loves him and does everything for him, including feeding him and letting him sleep with her. We can thus see that the overt themes of the film are there from the outset. On the one hand a classic Freudian oedipal relationship, on the other, the way in which memory structures our subjectivity. When the twist comes it allows these themes to dovetail nicely in that they both operate through repression. Beautiful. However, let’s back-track...

One day Do-joon is sideswiped by a car. He and his friend, Jin-Tae, track down the occupants of the car at the local golf-course. Do-joon collects golf balls while they wait for the perpetrators of the hit-and-run to appear. They are arrested in a fight. Later, Do-joon goes to the Manhattan bar to meet Jin-Tae, who never turns up… on the way home he sees a school girl, Moon Ah-jung, and follows her. To avoid him she hides in a deserted building. Calling to her, she chucks a big rock at him, he walks away. The next morning Ah-jung’s dead body is found. Do-joon is arrested for murder, he was seen following her and there is one of his golf balls at the crime scene. His mother believes him innocent, and so begins the search for the truth…

However, when the twist comes, what is revealed is not simply the truth she was searching for (reinscribing the oedipal and memory themes). Rather, Joon-ho Bong reflects back on the formal structure of the thriller, organised as it is around the search for truth, and in so doing says something about the very nature of such a search. This is achieved by extending the film beyond the twist to perform a reversal of the procedures inherent in the thriller.

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, describes this kind of film as the small form action-image. This kind of action-image operates by revealing a situation through the behaviours of characters. The situation is thus not a given, but uncovered. The film is ‘elliptical’ (C1:160). This happens predominately in two ways… ‘the [small form] action-image has signs as indices, which are both indices of lack – illustrated by brutal ellipses in the story – and indices of… equivocity – illustrated by the possibility and reality of sudden reversals of the situation’ (C1:168). Mother is a film of the second type, the gaps do not remain open (and so must be filled by reasoning) but are progressively filled from within the film. The final reveal, of course, is the twist, where the truth in its entirety is exposed and the equivocity of the situation is made decisive…

The mother discovers it was indeed Do-joon who killed the girl. It is at this point that the direction of the film performs a complete reversal. The mother sets about covering up her knowledge. Murdering the witness and framing another young man with learning difficulties. Finally she removes all knowledge of what she has done herself, from herself. She knows of an acupoint that can be triggered to remove a particularly traumatic event from someone’s memory.

In this way Mother reverses the procedure of equivocity, of making decisive the ellipses in the thriller. It becomes a film about constructing equivocities, of creating ellipses. It goes from uncovering information, to hiding information. As Deleuze puts it such a film sets about ‘fabricating false indices’ (C1:164).

Mother is not an anti-thriller. It does not attempt a negation of equivocity. Nor is it a meta-thriller. It does not attempt a self-reflexivity of the formal properties of cinematic equivocity. Rather, it is what might be called a de-thriller: reversing the very process of the thriller. However, let us put this clumsy playing with of neologisms aside. More importantly, something crucial is at stake as a consequence of Bong performing a reversal of the index of equivocity. Mother shows us that the truth is the very last thing we want… when it isn’t the truth we wanted.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, USA, 2010)

2010-09-04T13:27:00.015+01:00

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is pure cinematic ecstasy. You can’t but take pleasure in the movie… It is immediate, it has vitality. Everything happens at high-speed and the editing is as sharp as razor blades… The images are precise, vibrant, colourful. The soundtrack rocks. The dialogue wonderfully funny, delivered freeze dried by the characters… Magnificent. But is that all there is to the film?

Isn’t that enough..? what more do you want from an action movie?

Well, it seems to me that with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright pulls off a magnificent sleight of hand. The film may appear to be the epitome of an action movie… but something else is happening here, something far more radical.

Scott Pilgrim, dorky bass player in Sex Bob-omb, an unknown Toronto garage-punk band, has a new girlfriend. Trouble is – as he suspects and everyone keeps telling him – she is too young for him. Knives is 17 and Scott’s in his early twenties. But, the point is, he has a girlfriend! The year past he has been in mourning after being dumped by Natalie. And just to rub it in, Natalie is now Envy, vocalist in The Clash at Demonhead who have just hit the bigtime. But it’s OK… cos he’s got a girlfriend. Yikees! Then he meets roller-skating, purple-haired Ramona Flowers. And he is in love/lust. So, he stalks her… Now, – as he suspects and everyone keeps telling him – Scott is punching well above his weight here. Ramona is hot. And from New York. And she has a past (including dating a girl and Japanese-American twins). Yet, against these odds, Scott gets her to consent to a date…
And this is when the trouble starts… for Ramona’s past is coming back to haunt her. Or rather him. Enter the League of Evil Exes. All intent, it seems, on trying to bring to an end the nascent romance. If the narrative (or story) has its basis in a low-fi indy flick, the narration (the film itself) is influenced by its comic book origin, superhero movies/TV and – most consistently – computer games. Indeed, it is computer games that encompass the comic book and superhero elements. Scott has to battle each of the evil exes in order to progress to the next part of the film (and the next stage in the romance of Ramona). Each battle is more intense, until the ‘final’ showdown with Gideon Gordon Graves… the mastermind behind the league. As Scott defeats Matthew Patel, Lucas Lee, Todd Ingram, Roxie, Kyle and Ken Katayanagi, and Gideon Gordon Graves… their bodies disperse in a shower of coins and he is awarded points and new lives. Genius.

The disparity, or juxtaposition, of narrative and narration (story and filmic images) has led some reviewers to claim that the film is essentially a projection of Scott’s subjectivity. In other words, the film is filtered through Scott perception, feelings, thoughts and actions. As Chris Tookey comments ‘we're not talking social realism here. We see things through Scott's eyes, a distorting prism of video games and comic books.’ Tookey manages to be both astute as well as fundamentally underestimating the world of the film. On the one hand, the gap between narrative and narration does indeed transform social realism into an action movie, the indy flick into the blockbuster. We have a mundane situation made grandiose, dealing with the past life of a new partner, with all its psychological jealousies, self doubt and the inadequacies of youth transformed in a series of action duels in the outside world. Yet, it is not enough to say the film is ‘through Scott’s eyes’, that the narrative is ‘distorting’ cinema through video games and comic books.

Rather, the video game structure is inherent to the film. There is no distortion here, no disfigurement of a pure cinematic form. This is a film with the aesthetic of the video game. So, it is not really that the film is a subjective rendering of Scott’s view of the world. Rather, this is the world. Rather than Tookey’s view, James Hunt’s comment is exemplary when he says ‘what follows is, in Wright's terms, a musical, but with fighting instead of singing’ (Though I would have gone, by way of example, with Moulin Rouge rather than Mama Mia!).

Why stress the importance of such a distinction? Is there anything crucial in insisting that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is not a film which is coloured by the psychology of a character? We can turn to the cinematic theory of Gilles Deleuze here. In his coverage of dream-images he marks a distinction between what he calls dreams and a movement of world. In cinematic dreams (which properly speaking encompass hallucinations, day-dreams and nightmares) the dream is explicit. ‘The dream-image is subject to the condition of attributing the dream to the dreamer, and the awareness of the dream (the real) to the viewer’ (C2:58). In other words, an opposition between the imaginary and the real is essential, the film attempting to explore the differences and interactions, and resolve them.

Movement of world, on the other hand, transforms the dream-image entirely. In opposition to the ‘explicit dream,’ Deleuze counters (after Michel Devillers) with the ‘implied dream’ (C2:59). Here ‘it is no longer the character who reacts to the optical-sound situation, it is a movement of world which supplants the faltering movement of the character. There takes place a kind of worldizing or ‘societizing,’ a depersonalizing… the road is not slippery without sliding itself. The child faced with danger cannot run away, but the world sets about running away for him and takes him with it, as if on a conveyor belt’ (C2:59).

Deleuze’s examples include some early avant-garde silent cinema and – here we see a pre-echo of Hunt – musical comedy, the musical. ‘We move from narrative to the spectacular… [and] the spectacular to the spectacle’ (C2:62). In other words, we reach the ‘indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary,’ of ‘dream and of time’ (C2:64). We leave realism behind. Realism is not simply a like-for-like representation of the real world, but a powerful way of transforming the real, all the more powerful for being invisible. In films of movement of world we find another code of representation where the transformation of the real world in to the filmic world is made visible. This is not to say it is better than realism, or a better way of representing the world. Rather, it is simply one way of making visible the filmic process, one way of introducing a crisis into the action-image.

And it is here we approach what is crucial. We must finally ask what is the world that the movement of world depicts? In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, it is not that the real world has become distorted by video games, but that video games are a take on the world. This is of our time. The current regime in UK has a view on this. Liam Fox, the defence secretary, has come out to attack the game Medal of Honour, where you can take as your avatar not only a US soldier, but a Taliban soldier. ‘It’s shocking that someone would think it acceptable to recreate the acts of the Taliban,’ says Fox ‘I am disgusted and angry. It’s hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game’. (Mariana Hyde comments brilliantly on this statement, quoting a subtle response from the makers of the game. They say ‘most of us have been doing this since we were seven. Someone plays the cop, someone must be the robber. In Medal of Honour multiplayer, someone must be the Taliban.’ Though, I might add, that the Taliban are a potential market for the game, and there seems something in the notion that a real Taliban soldier would need to adopt a US soldier’s avatar in multiplayer mode). Fox, of course, is over-reacting. Medal of Honour is simply a realist representation of the war in Afghanistan.

However, what Edger Wright proposes is far more radical. The structure, codes, representational techniques of the computer game is a way of putting into crisis the representational realism of a film. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a perfectly adequate, perfectly right, perfectly of our time way to look at the world. It does not distort. It makes the distortions of any representation of the world visible.

The Human Centipede [First Sequence] (Tom Six, Netherlands, 2009)

2010-08-26T01:12:00.017+01:00

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is nasty. Nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty. Yet that may not be all there is to it. It is also funny, in a certain specific way, a way that takes it beyond the humour of nervousness and irony… and through this, opens up onto a politics. This politics has something to do with the genre it has already been sectioned under, torture porn (coined by critic David Edelstein in January 2006 in response to Hostel)… and indeed, may at last prove that this sobriquet may well be exactly the right term… a pornography of torture… though not as a slur…

The film, directed by Tom Six, involves the madcap desire of a retired surgeon. Formerly specialising in the surgical separation of Siamese twins (art images of which adorn his sparse modernist home), Dr. Heiter now wants to create! To this end he secures himself three victims. Jenny and Lindsey stumble across his house one evening after their car has broken down. The good doctor Rohypnols them up and straps them down. A little later he returns with Katsuro, a Japanese businessman he secured with a drugged dart gun. Now we can begin… in lecture mode (with a really nice tailored lab coat) he announces he is to produce ‘the human centipede.’ A wee powerpoint presentation later and the knives are out! Subject A (Katsuro) has his anus joined to the mouth of Subject B (Jenny) who has her anus joined to mouth of Subject C (Lindsey). The human gastrointestinal tract centipede first sequence. It lives (though what on earth a second sequence might entail is left, so to speak, open ended). However, landespolizei Det. Kranz and Det. Voller turn up at Dr. Heiter’s door…

We are not unfamiliar with laughter in response to horror movies. Especially in the darkness of the cinema, laughter seems to arise as a response to the unease the codes of horror engender or as a way to mitigating the depiction of gore. Nervous laughter, as it is somewhat misleadingly known. Then there are the laughs that occur due to the ironic self-reflection of films such as the Scream franchise… or comedy horrors, at which point we probably leave horror behind entirely. The Human Centipede, however, marshals laughter in other ways…

So, in the second instance, laughs are generated by the strict and unswerving adherence to the norms of the horror film. Two glam young American women are driving through the back woods when their car gets a flat. Soon they are walking through the woods (where did the road go?) in the pouring rain at night. A light! A house. Uh-oh… insane doctor opening the door. A grimacing, gurning, Germanic incarnation of evil. These characters and situations are not a parody or a pastiche. Rather, they operate to lull the viewer into complacency… they are original in the sense that they are not self-reflexive, nor a critique…

In the third instance… the mad doctor’s plan is ludicrous. When Katsuro first evacuates his bowls the audience howls with laughter… as Jenny gags and swallows… the laughter dies… Katsuro’s shame at doing something he cannot but do… Jenny’s tears, the way Lindsey reaches out to her… The laughs get stuck in your throat. The final shot of the film, when the Jenny is trapped in the most ridiculous situation had the audience roaring with laughter… at first. Yet, the camera stayed on her, her muffled screams and wails captured far too long to be entertaining… the laughter died away to an almost uncomfortable silence.

Linnie Blake, author of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, National Identity and Historical Trauma and the infamous ‘Jorg Buttgereit’s Nekromantiks: Things To Do in Germany With the Dead’ has a view here… over a coffee in my kitchen she said this was a way of breaking through the ‘third wall of irony’… Horror is once again horrific. By moving beyond nervous laughter, by moving beyond ironic laughter… we can once again experience true horror… but horror of what?

Perhaps a clue can found in Gilles Deleuze’s taxonomy of cinema. Deleuze describes a type of film called the impulse-image where impulses are extracted from the world to be embodied in the performance of characters and the depiction of certain privileged objects. There are three aspects to the impulse-image. First, there is the originary world, an archetypal background, one which both retains a formlessness while also being recognisable. In The Human Centipede the modernist architecture operates to place us in a purely functional modern environment. Then there is the fetish. These fetishes are fragments of the world which are encoded with primal, almost automatic meanings… they are ‘fetishes of Good and fetishes of Evil, holy fetishes and fetishes of crime and sexuality…’ (C1:130). This is the Katsuro-Jenny-Lindsey centipede itself.

Finally, there is the symptom. Impulses, while ‘not lacking in intelligence,’ are energies, impelling urges. As Deleuze writes: ‘fundamentally there is the impulse, which, by nature, is too strong for the character’ (C1:137). These acts of characters are thus symptoms of impulses which derive from the originary world and are embodied in the fetish. Symptoms are acted out by characters, and Deleuze describes these characters as being ‘like animals…not because they have their form or behaviour, but because their acts are prior to all differentiation between the human and the animal. These are human animals’ (C1:123-4). And while the symptom is ‘relatively simple – like the impulse of hunger, impulses to nourishment, sexual impulses…’ Deleuze will go on to say, they become ‘inseparable from the perverse mode of behaviour which they produce and animate: cannibalistic, sado-masochistic, necrophiliac, etc’ (C1:128). It is clear then that The Human Centipede is a film of the impulse-image, and one which, through the acts of Dr. Heiter, tends towards the symptom…

Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, ‘This government does not torture people,’ says Bush. Yet in 2005 US legal ‘opinion’ allows the use of, amongst other things, waterboarding. The Blair government’s advice to MI5 and MI6 operatives in the field is that whilst they must not ‘engage in any activity… that involves inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners’ if they find themselves in a situation where torture is being used ‘given that [the prisoners and torturers] are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene’.

It can surely be no coincidence that the torture porn genre arose at the same time as post-9/11 torture became acceptable as government policy. The Human Centipede is of our time. This film, these films, are not gratuitous, but symptomatic.

The Refuge (François Ozon, France, 2009)

2010-08-20T12:41:00.013+01:00

The Refuge is a kind of triptych, the central ‘panel’ the longest section, flanked by two much shorter parts. A refuge bookended by death and life. From tri ‘three,’ and ptychē ‘ fold,’ the cinematic structure of the narrative seems to enclose the characters. Or perhaps, more accurately, this enclosure is a function of the way in which François Ozon presents the characters. They do not act in the world so much as experience it. They are avoiding, enjoying, tired, vital, lost, nomadic, numb, sensitive. If there is movement in The Refuge, it is an exchange between these various poles of life, avoidance becomes enjoyment; tiredness becomes vitality, and so on. They do not yet know their place in the world… and this is liberating yet frightening, confusing but with moments of perfect clarity…

The central story, the refuge of The Refuge, revolves around the relationship between Mousse and Paul. Mousse is a pregnant heroin addict, in recovery with methadone; Paul is a rich boy, queer, setting himself adrift on an endless holiday. They are staying in a lovely cottage in the south of France, near the sea. During their short time together, Paul – agile, open, active – passes on some of his vitality to Mousse. In this way, it is Mousse who is the main focus of the film, in the sense that it is her pregnancy which is at the heart of things. They originally meet in the first part of the triptych. Mousse and her boyfriend overdose on heroin. He dies. She lives. Upon awaken from a coma she is told she is pregnant. Her boyfriend’s mother offers to pay for her to abort the foetus. Paul is the boyfriend’s brother. The final part of the triptych, also set in Paris, sees Mousse being visited by Paul in hospital after giving birth. If they are connected by death, they are now also connected by life… Mousse abandons the baby for Paul to look after.

Why does Mousse abandon her baby? Why does Paul visit Mousse in the refuge? Why do Paul and Mousse sleep with each other? Answers to these questions, and many others, remain opaque. This opacity is crucial. It is the nucleus of Ozon’s cinematic strategy in The Refuge. It is in this sense we can say that this film does not focus upon actions, emotions or thoughts, but on the body. Dead bodies, sleeping bodies, dancing bodies, tired bodies, bodies making love, tanned bodies… but – above all – pregnant bodies.

The Refuge is an encounter with the opacity of another’s body. This means we must confront the ambiguity of bodies that do not act, that do not express emotion, that do not – or cannot – express their thoughts. Yet this is not the purpose of the film… but rather the impetus, the beginning. And it is from these enclosures we approach the true power of The Refuge. To understand why, we can turn to the cinematic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Deleuze, in his great taxonomy of cinema, calls this type of film the time-image. The time-image operates, in the first instance, by creating opsigns and sonsigns, pure visual and audio images. In opposition to the cinema of the movement-image, which organises a narrative through the linkage of distinct moments (such as perception, affect, action and thought), opsigns and sonsigns resist this flow. Rather, these signs appear in-and-of-themselves. They do not link image to image, they link what is actual (on-screen) to the virtual (what is not on screen). In short, while the movement-image asks the spectator to think with the film, opsigns and sonsigns attempt to get the spectator to think for themselves in respect to what the film does not think. This is the unthought. The unthought of the film generating what would have remained unthinkable by the spectator. This is the power of The Refuge.

We can be more specific. Time-image opsigns and sonsigns can be organised in a number of ways, at the level of image (hyalosigns), narrative (chronosigns) and story (noosigns). Without doubt all these factors come to bear on a time-image film, however, any film of the time-image will tend to prioritise, or be organised around one of these aspects. It is clear that Ozon’s film produces hyalosigns, Mousse in the bath with her belly is a complex image in-and-of-itself, as is Mouuse in the mirror, or the couple at the piano while Paul sings the song ‘The Refuge’. At the level of narration, the triptych structure is a powerful chronosign, a simple linear organisation which places each ‘panel’ into its own temporal zone, a past, present and future. However, The Refuge is film which foregrounds the story of the characters above and beyond images and narration. This is the noosign. One of the signs of the noosign is what Deleuze calls the body of ‘attitude’, ‘the everyday body’ (C2:192;190).

Crucially, for Deleuze, ‘the body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life’ (C2:189). Mousse is numb from the tragedy of her own near death and the death of her boyfriend, is numb to the potential for life that is within her and her belly. Paul is the catalyst for her awakening, but in the devastating abandonment of her child, Mousse becomes a catalyst for Paul finding a place in the world, one that reflects his own origins (he was adopted). These are all events, generated through bodies. The point is they occur without reference to defined contexts, reasonings, explications, justifications. Why does Mousse abandon her baby? Why does Paul visit Mousse in the refuge? Why do Paul and Mousse sleep with each other?

The Refuge resists thinking these things for us. ‘It is through the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought’ (C2:189).

Inception (Christopher Nolan, USA | UK, 2010)

2010-08-13T19:34:00.011+01:00

The final moment of Inception may well become known as one of the most powerful in cinema. Not simply for the image itself, but because of the cut from that image to black. The image is of Cobb’s totem, his spinning top, gyrating on his kitchen table. The cut means we don’t know if it keeps on turning – endlessly – or if it is subject to entropy, and so will eventually topple and lie still. This is, of course (on the face of it) important. If the top were to keep spinning, we would know that Cobb is lost in a dream limbo. If the top were to fall, we would know Cobb had completed his mission successfully and has now returned to the real world. Everything seems to be dependent upon the state of the spinning top. This has divided the spectators of Inception. For some it is clear proof that Cobb is locked in the depths of his dreams. For others, the top has a certain lilt, is slightly non-vertical, the spin axis slowly undergoing precession… and this a clear sign the top will fall and reveal Cobb has returned home. From these clues evidence is compiled from the rest of the movie to endorse each argument.

There is something really essential at stake here, despite the seemingly inconsequentiality of this (sometimes vitriolic) debate (see the imdb Inception user comments). These spectators need closure and cannot abide the ambiguity the final cut seemingly imposes on the audience. However, this position is not as naïve as it may sound, after all, is this not exactly the situation Cobb finds himself in? This is why he has the top. He needs to know, throughout the film, exactly where he is, dream world or real world. The film places the spectator in exactly the same position, it generates the very crisis of knowledge that will be exploited by that cut. We have to know, one way or the other.

However, perhaps there is another way to look at this situation. Perhaps the ambiguity imposed by the final image and the cut to black can be looked at slightly differently. Perhaps what really is at stake in the film is something else entirely. To discover what this might be we can turn to the cinema books of Gilles Deleuze and his exploration of what he calls dream-images.

For Deleuze, dream-images ‘seem to have two poles, which may be distinguished according to their technical production. One proceeds by rich and overloaded means – dissolves, super-impositions, deframings, complex camera movements, special effects... The other, on the contrary, is very restrained, working by clear cuts or montage-cut, making progress simply through a perpetual unhinging which “looks like” dream, but between objects that remain concrete’ (C2:58). Inception, it would seem, has something of both of these poles of the dream-image. On the one hand, the transitions to and from the dream world (and indeed, between dream worlds) tend towards the restrained. However, inside the dream world the markers can be particularly rich: cliffs made of decaying buildings, mirrors re-constructing cityscapes, the curve of the earth folding back upon itself.

Whether rich or restrained, the crucial point about dream-images is that they go beyond the action-image. Action-image movies give a situation and extract lines of force that become embodied in characters who then go on to reconstitute the world. Dream-images, however, are characterised by two aspects: ‘a character finds… [they are] prey to visual and sound situations… which have lost their motor extension’ (C2:55). Second ‘these actual sensations and perceptions are… cut off from memory-based recognition’ (C2:55). In short, this is the domain of mental-images, images of thought which can have no effect in the real world.

Inception, however, seems to do something different with dream-images. The film tells the story of a gang of corporate thieves led by Cobb. This team specialise in entering the dreams of others to extract information that can be sold for vast profit. The game changer comes when they are employed to plant an idea in the mind of a subject. Hence ‘inception’. Cobb, despite the reservations of his partner, knows it is possible. Unfortunately this is extremely complex and dangerous. To make the inception work, they must create dreams within dreams within dreams, to trick their subject into believing the idea is his own. This Chinese box like dream structure has an interesting temporal effect. The time spent asleep in the real world may be a minute or so, but in the dream world it is far longer. Each level of dreaming increases the experienced time exponentially (50 years in level four is 2.5 years in level three, which is 1.5 months level two, which is 2.3 days in level one which is 3 hours in reality). Further, dying in an embedded dream means that the dreamer can become lost, enter a dream-limbo. In reality, they would be comatose while they experienced year upon year of their life in this mental elsewhere.

Thus, the whole point of the film, and it is there in the title, is to effect a change in the real world through what occurs in the dream world. To place an idea in the mind of a subject that will cause them to change their behaviour. It seems then that Deleuze’s dream-images , be they rich or restrained, cannot account for Inception. Further, the danger associated with this task means that if something goes wrong, people can become lost in limbo, their real world bodies rendered unconscious meat. This, as we have seen, is the crux of the final moment in Inception. For Deleuze, however ‘the dream-image is subject to the condition of attributing the dream to the dreamer, and the awareness of the dream (the real) to the viewer’ (C2:58). In other words, this dream-image ‘does not… guarantee the indescernability of the real and the imaginary’ (C2:58).

Yet… Deleuze goes on to say that there is a type of dream-image that goes beyond the rich and the restrained. This is ‘movement of world’ (C2:59). This is the ‘implied dream’ (C2:59). Here ‘every world and every dream, closes up around everything it contains, including the dreamer’ (C2:63). And ‘it is no longer the character who reacts to the optical-sound situation, it is a movement of world which supplants the faltering movement of character’ (C2:59). In other words, the real and dream worlds become ambiguous, the character cannot tell them apart, and neither can the spectator. Indeed, telling them apart is not really the essential thing.

And this is the crucial point with Inception. The status of the image of the spinning top and cut to black at the end of the film is ultimately a ruse. The spinning top originally belonged to Cobb’s wife Mal, who may or may not have existed, who may or may not have given it to Cobb in the real world or a dream world. Is the whole film a dream? Are parts of the film real? Again, spectators find that a consideration of the final moments of Inception irrevocably leads them back to these questions. Yet, being a movement of world dream-image film means that this also remains ambiguous.

What, then, accounts for the resistance to the ambiguity imposed by the cut on many of the spectators of Inception? Why must they know? Why can’t they let the ambiguity ride? Perhaps it is because the question is properly philosophical and extends beyond the film. Are we ourselves a dream of the planet, of the universe? Ultimately our actions count for nothing. Does it matter if we die? If global worming destroys us and the Earth, so what? That is the ultimate destiny anyway. Yet, and here is the paradox, when we are in this ‘dream’, these things matter to us. A lot. As Rob Lapsley, co-author of Film Theory: An Introduction, commented over coffee in a Café Nero yesterday, ‘you have to try to make sense of Inception, to find out that you can’t.’

24 City (Zhang Ke Jia, China | Hong Kong | Japan, 2008)

2010-08-09T22:19:00.010+01:00

Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province, is a city caught up in the country’s economic boom, the result of the ongoing transformation from a centrally planned to market economy. On what was once the outskirts of the city is Factory 420. Founded in the late 1950s to produce components for the aerospace industry in the wake of the Korean War, its purpose was a state secret. It was thus built to be a city-in-and-of-itself, apart from Chengdu, having its own schools, restaurants, cinemas, its workers brought in from all over the country. In the post-Cold War period Factory 420 was retooled for peacetime products, such as white goods. This, however, was the beginning of its end, a slow decline leading to the current events of the film. Factory 420 is to be demolished and its remaining workers laid off. In its place will rise 24 City, a premier development of state-of-the-art apartments, a complex for the middle classes in ascension.

The film itself consists predominately of face-to-cameras, static long takes of interviews with the workers and their families. The film begins with He Xing, an employee reminiscing about his time as an apprentice to master tooler Wang. Then there is Guan Fenijo, head of security at the time of Mao’s cultural revolution… Hou Linju, a woman who was made redundant several years previous… Hao Dali, an aging secretary permanently connected to a saline drip… Vei Dong, assistant to the General Manager and intimately involved in the selling of the factory land to the new developers. There is Little Flower, darling of the factory floor. There is Zhao Gang, a factory trainee who, after a wee taste of the life of a worker, escaped - as he sees it - to become a TV presenter. There is Su Na, a ‘shopper’ for the Chengdu elite, who dreams of an apartment in the new 24 City complex, but who remembers the life her mother had as a worker there too.

Zhang Ke Jia thus structures the film as a journey, from the past to the present. The film seamlessly transitions from workers steeped in the ideology of communist China to the young generation and their modern (Chinese version of) consumer capitalism with dreams of affluence. We cannot but feel impressed by the selfless dedication of the old generation to the betterment of the state… and horrified at the consequences of such an environment (the lost child abandoned at a port on the journey to Factory 420). We cannot but be impressed by the way the people have moved away from such conscious slavery… and horrified by the unconscious slavery and disdain for the past of the new generation. It is this kind of ambiguity that permeates the film. There is no nostalgia for the past, nor is there a celebration of the present. Or rather, nostalgia and hope for the future are beautifully balanced. What, then, is the point of the film? What, then, is Zhang Ke Jia’s political position? These things remain unclear. Indeed, it is this opacity that creates a certain power to the film…

A far more curious aspect: some of the interviews are fake. Fake in the sense that they are ‘acted’ by ‘actors’ speaking ‘lines’ composed out of interviews with ‘real’ people. But only some, some interviews are with ‘real life’ people. We could understand one approach or the other. But why this dual approach? For example, in a particularly interesting move, Little Flower’s story tells of how she was named such after a movie starring Joan Chen. Little Flower herself is played by that actress. Why such machinations? Reaction is polarised (see, for example, the imdb 24 City user comments). Zhang Ke Jia is been accused of undercutting realism, as if this was a crime... as if this was not his intention! However, we would like to claim this is exactly the point. This is why the two methods are present. We never quite know exactly when the ‘true’ transitions to the ‘fake’. This gives the spectator in a retroactive crisis. Towards the end of the film it is clear that some the interviews have been manipulated. But when did this begin? In other words, undermining the sense of ‘truth’ is exactly the point of the film. To understand this cinematic process more fully we can turn to Gilles Deleuze and his work on the cinema.

Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinemtic practices, describes a type of film that creates ‘powers of the false’ (C2: 131). In the cinema of realism, specifically, and the classical cinema in general, narration works by getting characters’ actions and situations to interrelate, events dovetail and there is resolution. As Deleuze puts it ‘This is truthful narration in the sense that it claims to be true, even in fiction’ (C2:`127). In the modern, modernist cinema, however ‘narration ceases to be truthful' (C2:131). This kind of film proceeds by the 'series', a serial form rather than a flowing form (C2: 133). Deleuze writes that here the ‘narration is constantly being completely modified, in each of its episodes… as a consequence of disconnected places and de-chronologised moments’ (C2:133). In short, ‘truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created. There is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence…’ (C2:146-7). What does this amount to? What we could call the untruth… a cinema that ‘will have destroyed every model of the true so as to become creator and producer of truth: this will not be a cinema of truth but the truth of cinema’ (C2:151). Powers of the false…

What does this mean? It means that rather than 24 City presenting the truth ('a truth' as the truth'), the film avoids such strategies. By deliberately presenting the ‘untruth’ (which is not the same as a lie, but simply the avoidance of ‘the truth’), we get to think for ourselves. But as Deleuze warns us, ‘the power of the false is delicate’ (C1:147). Just because it sets up the conditions for us to think the film, does not mean we will. 24 City is such an invitation.

Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani, Germany | Israel, 2009)

2010-08-08T10:42:00.019+01:00

Ajami, named after a district in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, is a film that attempts to dissect a location, and by extension, a state. Israel. Though predominately populated by Palestinians, the area is a ‘mixing pot,’ with Jews and Christians all living alongside each other, and sometimes getting in each other’s way. Ajami, then, is a microcosm of the current state of Israel. And Ajami uses this location, and its people, to explore that state. Indeed, the film employed non-professional actors from the area to play out the events of the film, which gives the movie a certain cinematic vérité. Stressing this Ajami-Ajami matrix is important as it makes the film’s structure necessary, and in turn, makes the theme organic.

Directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, the film operates by inter-threading a number of stories, each story based around a central character. There is Omar, a young Arab citizen of Israel, who, as head of his family, must sort out a spiralling situation resulting from his uncle’s attempt to resist a Bedouin protection racket. There is Malek, an ‘illegal’ from the Palestinian territories, trying to earn money in a restaurant to support his ill mother. There is Dando, a Jewish cop, searching for news of his younger brother who disappeared on his way back from his army posting. There is Binj, chef and all round party dude, an Arab dating a Jewish girl. There is Abu Elias, a respected community leader, restaurateur… and Christian… attempting to stop his daughter from marrying Omar.

These stories are organised into five chapters, each based around one of the five characters. Each story interpenetrates and comes to bear on the others, central characters in one are minor characters in another. Further, the events across the five stories are parallel, have a simultaneity. Ellipses in one are answered in another. This sophisticated narrative structure have become popular in the last fifteen years. It can be seen in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Death trilogy, could perhaps be said to have had its birth with Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and, most recently, it has been employed in Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah. This structure is a modern incarnation of what Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, calls the vector.

The vector is one of the components of Deleuze’s action-image. The action-image appears in two forms, the large and the small. The large form operates by describing a situation, and then extracting lines of force to become embodied by the characters. The small form (as in the case of Ajami) operates by gradually revealing the situation through an unfolding of elliptical events. This is achieved, according to Deleuze, in a number of ways.

First, through lack. Here ’an action… discloses a situation which is not given. The situation is thus deduced from the action, by immediate inference, or by relatively complex reasoning’ (C1:160). Second, through equivocity. Here ‘we are made to hesitate by a whole world of details… it is as if an action... concealed a slight difference, which was nevertheless sufficient to relate it to two quite distant situations, situations which are worlds apart’ (C1:161). Thus, the index of lack allows the situation to be figured out from the character’s actions. The index of equivocity reveals how the situation becomes ambiguous, not through missing information, but rather through indeterminacy or an overload of information.

The vector, however, goes beyond lack and equivocity… ‘The successive situations, each of which is already equivocal in itself, will form in turn with one another… a broken line whose path is unpredictable’ (C1:168). This is a highly complex organisation characterised by a multitude of characters and situations, each heterogeneous, separated through lack and each equivocal in-and-of-themselves. In other words, each action would be deducible and ambiguous, leading inexorably towards the conclusion each is not only possible, but manifest. The revealed situations are, in this way, ‘simultaneous’ (C1:168).

Thus, with vectors, we would expect to see a heterogeneous mix of situations and characters which, in the end, ‘add up’ to a homogenous theme. Ajami, does this – as does Pulp Fiction, the Death trilogy and Gomorrah, each in their own way. However, it is not enough to remain at the level of structure, but rather, we need to understand how each activates the power of the vector. In Ajami, this activation is particularly pure…

Yaron, in an interview with Amanda Palmer at Al Jazeera’s Fabulous Picture Show, explains ‘you have good people, who share the same human values, who fight each other because of the nature of segregation’. What this film achieves, then, is allowing the vector to become the theme itself. Vectors inspire the co-ordinates of the film… the stories, the ethnic backgrounds, the locales. And if the lines of narrative do dovetail, it is not in the form of a resolution, a rectified situation, a solution. Things in the story remain in ellipsis. There is no sense of anything being revealed, other than that Israel itself is structured in vectors: the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Bedouins… Muslims, Christians and Jews. Sharia law, state law, street law. Ajami, then, seems to have taken the vector to its logical conclusion… inspired by the vectors of Ajami itself. Of Israel.

Shed Your Tears and Walk Away (Jez Lewis, UK, 2009)

2010-07-29T20:02:00.011+01:00

In the documentary Shed Your Tears and Walk Away, Jez Lewis takes us by the hand and leads us through the streets and parks of Hebden Bridge… all in an attempt to discover why his friends are dying. At the beginning of the film he states his purpose: ‘I left my hometown of Hebden Bridge twenty years ago… but I’m coming back for yet another childhood friend’s funeral… this valley is paradise for some people, but purgatory for others… dozens of my old friends have died young… it’s as if the town’s lost its survival instinct’. The deaths are all due to drug and drink dependency, Lewis’s friends have all become junkies and alcoholics. During the film there are three more deaths. Overdoses, suicides, drink and drug related accidents… it is this that is taking his friends away… and their kids. As the graffiti has it on entry to the town… ‘Welcome to Hebden Bridge… the place for alcoholic children’. But why?

The film focuses predominately upon two former junkies, now die-hard alcoholics, Cass and Silly. Both are in their early forties, they spend their time in Hebden Park, drinking special brew and hanging out with a cast of younger binge drinkers and smack heads. Shed Your Tears operates through Lewis initiating conversations with his subjects from behind the camera. And the camera unflinchingly captures the lives and thoughts of Cass and Silly by focusing upon their faces. And it is the state of the faces that captures our attention: faces with enlarged capillaries, puffy faces, blotchy skin, red cheeks, bloodshot eyes. Shot on video, there is a rawness to these faces, marked as they are by alcohol, drugs, poor food… old before their time. This is a film of faces, of faces looking away from the camera, and faces crying…

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, describes this kind of film as an affection-image. Rather than concentrate upon a character’s actions, affection-image films are organised through close-ups of faces which express intensive forces: internal emotions. Close-ups express power and quality. Powers mark the way in which the face changes and negotiates a series of states (anger, confusion, resignation, etc) and qualities are faces immobile (caught in thought and so essentially unreadable). When organised in definite states, these powers and qualities are icons: they define moments of consciousness. In Shed Your Tears, however, it is as if we are watching while powers and qualities dissolve... the effects of drink and drugs, the affects of drink and drugs...

‘Ordinarily’, writes Deleuze ‘three roles of the face are recognisable: it is individuating (it distinguishes or characterises each person); it is socialising (it manifests a social role); it is relational or communicating (it ensures not only communication between two people, but also, in a single person, the internal agreement between his character and his role). Now, the face, which effectively presents these aspects in the cinema as elsewhere, loses all three in the case of the close-up’ (C1:99). In other words, the affection-image doesn’t simply present individuated subjects, but rather, intensities in-and-of-themselves, expressed through faces… the ‘face and its effacement’ (C1:100). In Shed Your Tears the faces are numb with drink and drugs, eyes hooded... What we discover is not only the person, but the entity of a disease.

Finally, it is by looking at the film through the affection-image that we encounter the central paradox of the film. Cass and Silly are alcoholics. Both are dying of liver disease, which will take them if they cannot change their lives. Alcoholism is a chronic disease, a nexus of social, genetic and psychological factors. And Lewis explores each in the film. Hebden as a 60s drug haven. Hebden as a place where the locals are being squeezed out by bourgeois newcomers. Hebden as a place where there is no work and nothing to do. Hebden simply as a place where people drink and take drugs. Then: the way in which parents drink, and so do their kids, and their kid's kids... And to forget: Cass his bullying stepfather, Silly his experiences as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion. It is this nexus of determining and retroactive causes which means they feel they have no choice.

This is crucial, affection-image films explore choice. For Deleuze, ‘there are choices that can only be made on condition that one persuades oneself that one has no choice’ (C1:114). This is the state of both Cass and Silly. However, this is a ruse, rather ‘there is a choice of choice or non-choice’ (C1:114). Thus ‘the alternative is not between terms but between modes of existence of the one who chooses’ (C1:114). In other words, we choose not to choose in having a choice. And we can choose to choose in having a choice.

While Cass and Silly believe they have no choice, strangely enough, it is with Lewis where we encounter choosing choice. The most startling aspect of this documentary is that the director comes out from behind the camera and enters the frame. It is in this sense ultimately overtly interventionist. He breaks the unwritten commandment of the documentary. He becomes involved. He helps Cass into rehabilitation in Hebden… and when that does not work takes him to London. He engages with Silly on the path he is taking. The title of the film Shed Your Tears and Walk Away comes from a line Silly delivers about the suicide of his brother. The title becomes exactly what Lewis cannot do. So, in the end, the original purpose of the documentary is abandoned. There may be answers to the ‘why’ (genetic, social, psychological). But none are definitive. The documentary thus gains another, far more powerful purpose. To intervene…

Skeletons (Nick Whitfield, UK, 2010)

2010-07-18T14:29:00.009+01:00

Arriving like the hit men from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (with a nice line in digressive, tangential conversation) the activities of Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are soon discovered to be both far more prosaic and – subsequently – outlandish. They are company men, representatives of an enterprise which specialises in disinterring the past. Their clients are middle class, heterosexual, countryside dwelling couples… seemingly caught up in a fad they only half believe in. After attempting to ensure their clients fully understand the process they are about to open themselves up to (through a number of forms and verbal statements which must be corroborated according to a strict series of rules) Mr Davis and Mr Bennett begin…

The film initially presents itself as a comedy, and the sparing between Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are no doubt in the comedic mode. But the film has a dark underbelly. It is somehow oddly disturbing. Set amongst the English countryside, in well presented bourgeois homes with chalk white walls, comfy sofas, and tea and cake… the film integrates elements of the gothic, or as Gail Ashurst has specified, the green Gothic. No doubt this is a function of the wonderful music which pervades the action… mystical English mediaeval chanting and non-synthetic instrumentation. Yet it is not this alone. Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are revealed to be esoteric practitioners, there to scratch the surface, to unearth secrets, treacheries, lies. Using an unspecified technological device that locates psychic energies, they identify a wardrobe (or closet… wait for it) then, through the use of two strange stones, explore the past lives of the couples. Hence the ‘skeletons’ of the title! Once discovered, they reveal all: her secrets to him, and his to her.

It is these trips back to moments of past lives that structure the film, give it power, make it uncanny and provide is central themes. Upon entering the wardrobe, Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are able to walk invisibly through the mise-en-scène of the past… to replace the characters they are investigating, to live out their actions, feel their feelings and think their thoughts. Crucially, these past events are already written, they cannot be changed, only experienced from either a subjective or objective viewpoint. As Mr Davis says, at one point, these past events are like ‘tape loops’.

And it is Mr Davis who feels the lure of the past himself… as senior partner he is custodian of the stones. During a week’s leave he spends his time in elicit ‘glow chasing’, reliving a moment from his boyhood, cuddled up on the sofa with his dad and mum, being told a particularly strange story, a fairytale. This event is accessed through an old photograph and on continual repeat. These repetitions become hypnotic, swamp like, and ultimately debilitating… but for all this, give him a sense of security…

It is in this way – between these two uses of the stones to revisit the past – that the film reveals its central themes. First, there is the positioning of the past as a secret place… second there is the need to have those secrets revealed… yet we can’t have it both ways. So, there is a fundamental resistance, a tension at play with regards to the past. It is this tension between secrecy and revelation that, according to Whitfield, we must overcome. For the tendency will be to keep secrets. And here the danger lies, for the future can become entrapped by the past. The past can bear down on the present, overwhelm it. It is a maze you can get lost in. The true power of memories is, in this way, malign, if taken in-and-of-themselves. Rather, memories should be overcome… the first step in this process is sharing them. In this way their destructive power is diminished, they become benign. As we have seen, the couples are having revealed secrets they already know, as they occurred in their own pasts. Thus the activities of Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are interventions into silences…

This theme is made explicit in the events that occur at the home of Jane. Mr Davis and Mr Bennett are informed they are up for promotion. To secure this advancement they are given a job in which the complexities far outstrip the domestic jobs they have so far been involved in. They must investigate what happened to a husband and father who disappeared some ten years previous. The mother Jane is locked in the past, digging up the woods around her house in search of his body… and her daughter Rebecca is physically locked in silence, having not spoken in a number of years. The arrival of Mr Davis and Mr Bennett will not only unlock the secrets behind the husband’s disappearance, but also Mr Davis’ own secrets. These unlockings occur, needless to say, through a number of trips back into the past, through a number of interventions which see Rebecca become involved in the use of the stones.

This idea of intervention becomes a skeleton key to the film through the way in which Whitfield constructs these journeys into the past. These excursions are essentially flashbacks. However, in that anyone can visit another’s past, these are flashbacks of a very strange kind. Someone can explore someone else’s past as flashback… and that person can not only observe the scene, but become that other person. These are, in other words, cinematic flashbacks.

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinematic images, describes films which operate through flashbacks as recollection-images. For Deleuze flashbacks are the instrument of ‘psychological causality,’ a ‘closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present’ (C2:47; 49). Deleuze calls this destiny, and when unambiguous is a strong destiny indeed… it is the past which leads inexorably to the present and will dictate our futures. This may, initially, sound as if Deleuze is saying that we cannot escape our pasts. Yet what Whitfield reveals is this, that in calling up a flashback this destiny with regards to the future is not fixed. The journey from the present to the past need not lead to endless future repetitions. Rather, the flashback can lead to us overcoming our pasts… this too can be our destiny and in no way contradicts the laws of psychological causality. For Whitfield, for this to happen, we need only let another in… and isn’t that the point of cinematic flashbacks? To share a subjective, psychological moment, to explain the past, and in sharing give the character strength to prepare for a different future, a future which can escape the lure and debilitating security of repetition.

White Material (Claire Denis, France | Cameroon, 2009)

2010-07-11T12:41:00.016+01:00

Denis walks dangerous ground in White Material… post-colonial Africa, economic stagnation, civil conflict, political violence, child soldiers: all the signs of the onset of a failed state. Dangerous ground for a European filmmaker, a French director. Yet Denis goes further, she focuses the narrative on the character of Maria Vial, a white plantation owner. Why focus on a white woman and her family? Why keep the black characters in the background? Surely Denis knows better than to remake a Zulu (white Europeans as well defined characters, Zulus as a marauding mass descending from the hills).

Perhaps the answer is very simple… White Material is a film about the exploiters as exploiters, and not the exploited as exploited.

A crucial moment comes when Maria shows her newly hired field workers their lodgings. It is night, a single torch is shone around bare concrete cells, dirty bedding on the floors. The workers look on in unsurprised disgust. Maria is oblivious, she points out the amenities (a water pump), then retires to her massive villa (still being built, the old house turned over to the family who are essentially house workers, complete with a mixed race son of unexplained origins). The structure of this society is not simply divided racially, essentially racist, but also has concomitant feudal and capitalist dimensions: land-owners and peasants, bourgeois and proletariat. In other words, the antagonisms have complex social, economic, political, historical and racial co-ordinates. But things are about to change…

White Material is organised so we feel the imminent nature of this change, the approaching paroxysm. The film’s ‘present’ finds Maria stranded on a dirt track and continues with a bus ride back to her plantation, but Denis uses a flashback structure to describe the events over the previous couple of days. In the final moments of the film Maria arrives back at Café Vial to find everyone but her father dead. It is at this point she suddenly realises, or more accurately, admits to herself there is no future for her kind here.

The flashback sequences reveal not only the events leading up to the paroxysm, but elements of history of the family and the (post-colonial French) West African nation they live in. It is clear the Vial family has been there for several generations, most probably pre-Independence. It is made clear in the film that white occupation of African land is not equivalent in any way to more recent economic African migration into Europe – African peasants are here nomads in their own country... and so a civil war is raging, government forces against rebels, the ‘rascals’. The rebels seem to be near defeat, and as the film starts we see gangs of youths taking up arms as civil society breaks down. Added to this mix are local militia hired as personal armies by the African elites. This has been going on some time, but as the film begins, it has reached crisis point…

In the middle of this situation, almost in splendid isolation, the Vials run a coffee plantation. Or to be more accurate, Maria runs the plantation. Her father-in-law is very ill, needing constant medication, her husband is a disengaged playboy, her son a layabout. In the first flashback sequence we encounter the French forces, which have been supporting the government, withdrawing. Maria is urged to leave too, but – as we will see – she can’t. But her workers can leave and so do. She employs some more, they leave. Finally the plantation is invaded by a rag-tag child army… her son goes psychotic and joins them…

Maria, during all this, cannot accept, doesn’t want to accept what is happening. An indicative moment in the film comes when she finds the bloody head of a ram, a warning of what will happen if they don’t leave. She tries to hide it, but of course it can’t be hidden. A sign of this is her carelessness in wiping away the blood on her hands. Just like the ram’s head, she can’t hide the blood of history that is on her hands…

This flashback structure is therefore crucial not only is constructing the count-down to the paroxysm, but in ensuring we understand how the past is in the present. The whole weight of history, racial, economic, colonial, post-colonial comes to bear on this moment, both pasts seen and unseen.

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, describes the flashback as a sign of what he calls the recollection-image, an image of thought. For Deleuze flashbacks ‘insert themselves between stimulation and response,’ are the instrument of ‘psychological causality’ (C2:47). However, the recollection-image has ‘two extreme poles,’ on the one hand there is the flashback as ‘an explanation, a causality or a linearity,’ as a ‘closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present’ (C2:49). This kind of flashback is marked in transition ‘it is like a sign with the words:”watch out! recollection”’ (C2:49). Deleuze calls this destiny… it is the past which leads inexorably to the present. On the other hand there is the flashback as ‘a fragmentation of all linearity… breaks in causality’ (C2:49). Deleuze names this forking paths, marked by multiple flashbacks from multiple characters.

However between the two there is what might be called weak destiny, which retains elements of the strong form (explanation, causality, linearity) but at the same time does not show all explanations, all the causes, all the lines. In designating it ‘weak’, it is by turn a more radical mode of flashback than 'strong' destiny in that it leaves gaps in the causes and explanations and lines, gaps which allow the narrative to open up to the unseen.

This is the flashback structure in White Material. The resistance to signalling transitions. The extremely limited time span, the framing as Maria’s memories but the willingness to fork away to moments involving her husband and son, the rebel leader, the rebel survivor. The flashbacks within flashbacks. It is in this way that while the film is dependent upon the psychology of the main character, it is not reduced to this, which allows Denis to implicitly say that while this film is about Maria, it is not with her. The film is willing to leave her. The film is not on her side of history. She may see herself, her family, her plantation as the heart of the community, the economy. But it is just white material. The mayor tells her how it is: blonde, blue eyed, they may belong here, but the country doesn’t want them.

Nor, it seems, does Denis. This is made clear in the dedication after the film has finished.

Brooklyn's Finest (Antoine Fuqua, USA, 2009)

2010-07-06T20:30:00.027+01:00

Brooklyn's Finest is a film of ruses. If we discover the title to be ironic, the events of the film do not operate in the ironic mode. Playing out some police clichés (the burn-out, the under-cover, the thief-murderer) each turns in upon itself to explore the cliché. However, the ruse par excellence is revealed in the final sequence. These final moments are beautifully controlled. From the very beginning, the film has followed the stories of three police in three situations… and it seems inevitable the three stories will somehow come together in some narrative pay-off. Indeed, the final events take place in one location, at an inner city tower block. Further, the three main protagonists cross paths, literally. However, this is a wonderful ruse. For the film goes on to play out each story individually. What, then, was the purpose of this feint? Fuqua wants to make sure we understand that while the stories all connect, it is not in the usual manner, a convergence of actions. Rather, it is a convergence in another sense, the heterogeneous elements remain heterogeneous, yet form a homogeneity in a very special way…

Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinema, describes this type of cineotic structure as the ‘extreme limit of the [small form] action-image’ (C1:195). To see how this mode of film operates – and so explore Fuqua’s final ruse – necessitates following these concepts downstream… from action-image in general, to the specifics of its small form, and then on to its extreme limit.

First, action-images. Here we see the way in which situation and action are interlinked. On the one hand, we have large form action-images. Here situations are described, forces extracted as duels for the actions of characters. The final duel attempts to rectify the situation. The small form action-image operates differently. Here the actions of characters gradually reveal the situation they are in. These reveals are performed through ellipses, which require an element of reasoning by the audience. We can see that Brooklyn’s Finest is of the small form action-image: each story focuses upon a character, and through the actions of the character their situation is gradually described, and as each action plays out, their situation redefined.

Second, small form action-images. Deleuze describes three varieties of ellipsis. The first is that of lack, where events have to be deduced. The second is that of equivocity, where actions are, and sometimes remain, ambiguous. Finally, there is the vector, where heterogeneous events are separated by lack and are equivocal in-and-of-themselves. Here the situation is neither deducible nor over determined, rather the nexus of situations becomes ‘simultaneous’ (C1:168). Brooklyn’s Finest tends towards the vector. There are three stories operating in the same time-frame, we must deduce the connections between the three stories, and each story follows a character whose actions are ultimately ambiguous, each will be led down a path they – and we – could not expect.

However, Deleuze says that the small form action-image can go beyond itself to explore ‘figures of thought,’ the discursive, or discourse-image (C1:190;218). It is here that the cliché turns in upon itself, to investigate itself. So, third, the limit of the small form action-image. Each element becomes a vector in-and-of-itself, is ‘the placing in parallel of different vectors’ (C1:194). Crucially, this ‘parallelism of vectors with different orientations… constitutes a connection of heterogeneous fragments of space giving a very special homogeneity to the space thus constituted’ (C1:194). More simply, ‘each of us has his own line of the universe to discover’ (C1:195).

Eddie has done twenty-plus years in the force, and is one week from retirement. He is burnt-out, suicidal and seen as a waste of space by his fellow officers. He just wants to get through his final five days but is assigned a couple of rookie cops. The first very quickly comes to see Eddie for what he is… and gets himself reassigned (only to be killed). His replacement goes on to accidentally kill a kid when Eddie leaves him in a situation beyond his capability.

Tango is deep undercover, posing as drug dealing gangster. His wife has left him and he is increasingly beginning to act and think like the very people he has been designated to destroy. Having, he feels, done his time, he wants promotion and a desk job. However, he is given one final task. To bring down the (just released from prison) Caz, the gang’s boss. Trouble is, Caz saved his life when Tango was being integrated into his cover. He has more respect for Caz than he does those he really works for.

Sal is married with five kids and has twins on the way. His house is crowded and falling to pieces, wood rot causing his wife breathing problems. He has a new house in his sights but just needs the deposit. This causes him to kill and steal, but each attempt to raise the deposit is never fully successful… meanwhile his wife is hospitalised due to her illness… and his own acts cause him to question his faith…

All are compromised. Eddie is sleeping with a prostitute, Sal is killing and stealing, Tango dealing in drugs. There is no good and evil, but a pervading greyness. Here is the homogeny. This extends to their mental states. All of them are desperate… and to be in despair, you have to feel you have no alternatives, no choice. For Deleuze, this ‘extreme limit of the [small form] action-image [is] where a world of misery undoes all the lines of the universe, allowing a reality to surge forth which is no longer anything but disorientated, disconnected’ (C1:195). And so to the final moments of the film. The path each has been following reaches an abrupt termination. It is here that, finally, each line is broken, and each is offered a choice… One dies pointlessly. One gets what he deserves. One redeems himself.

Greenberg (Noah Baumbach, USA, 2010)

2010-07-05T00:08:00.008+01:00

The first standard critical response to an encounter with Roger Greenberg is that he is ‘unlikable.’ This seems to indicate that an audience can’t identify with him. However, against this, what if we were to make the assertion that it is not that the audience can’t identify with him, but rather, the tendency is to resist identification? This question, of course, hits right at the heart of Hollywood. Isn’t identification supposed to be effortless? Aren’t the conditions for identification the work of the filmmaker, not the audience? Shouldn’t identification be an invisible process, allowing an easy coupling of character-spectator, creating a seamless integration of the audience into the film so actions can be experienced as a reasonable response to the situation (no matter how unreasonable the actions, no matter how unreasonable the situations)?

What if we were to allow ourselves, make an effort to identify with Roger Greenberg? What would we find? That we too, if we peel back the layers, are a little, a lot, like him? What exactly are those layers? For Noah Baumbach the answer is clear, the things that keep us ‘sane’ are, in no particular order: marriage, a nice house (preferably with a pool), a decent car, money coming in, a great job, family, children, friends. In short ‘to embrace the life you never expected’ when you were young. We need stuff and activity: the habitual keeps us sane, keeps us reasonable. Take this away, you are Greenberg.

Roger can’t see this. Florence Marr, however, can. Two crucial moments in the movie – playing with repetition and difference – centre on Florence. Twice, she is filmed in extreme close-up, predominately in profile, driving her car. The first time she mutters ‘let me in, let me in’ as she attempts to change lanes. This happens. However, later in the film the event repeats. ‘Let me in, let me in’. But the other driver won’t let her in. By the time of this second jump-cut sequence she has met Greenberg, and he just won’t let her in. She sees this. Florence operates within the film as a way to experience Roger Greenberg. If she can see something in him, why can’t the spectator?

However, Florence is not simply a cinematic trick to identification with Roger. Baumbach makes it clear this is as much a film about Florence, as it Greenberg. Or rather, she too is a Greenberg (just like us), she has a certain Greenbergness… she is awkward, does not have a house with a pool, has no real family, a few friends, yes, but she is younger… she is at the point in her life when she could either become a Greenberg or something else… the age difference, as we will see, is very important…

The two moments of Florence in extreme close-up in her car are crucial not only in orientating an approach towards Greenberg identification, but also in exploring the second critical response to the film, that it ‘has no plot.’ In his typology of the cinema, Gilles Deleuze describes a kind of film that focuses on affect. Rather than juxtaposing situations and characters then allowing those characters to act to resolve or reveal the situation (plot driven action-images), affection-images explore the feelings and emotions of characters. These films concentrate upon the face. Faces are expressive of intensive affects. Firstly, through what Deleuze calls qualities, reflecting the world in the face. Secondly, through powers, the movements of the face that communicate changes in emotion. In this way the reflecting face is orientated toward the world, while the intensive face is orientated towards the thoughts of a character. This is what Deleuze calls the icon and ‘every icon has these two poles…’ (C1:97).

In an affection-image film it is not simply that faces are shot in close-up, but that the close-up becomes the methodology of the film. The affection-image is ‘primarily a way of treating the medium shot and the full shot as close-ups’ (C1:107). In the close-up spatio-temporal co-ordinates becomes less important, the face expresses, bodies express, language express intensives forces. Determined situations are not necessary, worlds do not need to be described in order to be resolved or revealed through character actions. In short, it is not a plot that that affection-image film describes, but rather the feelings and emotions of people.

At the party held by Greenberg’s young step sister, Roger, as usual, feels distanced. The distance here is accentuated by age difference (he is early 40s, everyone else – as is Florence – early 20s). But someone offers him some coke and for the first time we see him open up. He begins to act… it is as if for this brief moment we have left the domain of affect for the domain of action… he leaps and jumps around the house, he puts forward his viewpoint with humour and engages others, rather than standing while others are sitting, he is in amongst them… sexy young women are interested in him, get close to him, and he does not flinch… he can banter with the guys, exchange violence-orientated dialogue. He can phone Florence and articulate his love for her… In other words, cocaine makes Greenberg active…

If Baumbach’s film proposes that sanity is the drowning of the self in habitual activity, then in turn habitual activity is aligned with drugs. And so, if the end of the film leaves it unclear if Roger and Florence can get it together, surely the signs are not promising… as it is clear that if drugs are not the answer for Baumbach then by extension neither is habitual activity. Florence can only experience Greenberg opening his heart via the recorded message on the answerphone from the night before.

Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, France | Italy, 2009)

2010-06-26T14:10:00.012+01:00

George Palet goes to the cinema to see a Hollywood Korean war movie The Bridges At Toko-Ri, directed by Mark Robson and staring William Holden. The film is about the heroic efforts of a pilot, ending with a suicide mission… relinquishing his woman, played by Grace Kelly. And then there is the famous last line ‘Where do we get such men?' We don’t go with George in to the cinema, rather, we remain outside, the camera focused upon the neon sign… over this visual image the omniscient (though far from reliable and increasingly absent) narrator breathlessly and at breakneck speed gives us the plot in a few short sentences.

The disjunction between the Hollywood take on the world, where heroes operate in clearly defined environments, and Resnais’ Wild Grass is thus manifest. It is on-screen for all to see. In this way the film is a film about film. Of course, this critique is nowt new for such self-reflexive cinema, and so here it is explored overtly in an ironic mode, a mode that both the French New Wave and post-New Waves do so well. Again, near the end of the film, the two ‘lovers’ embrace on a walkway at the aerodrome… Twentieth (Twenty-first?) Century Fox film music swells up and ‘Fin’ appears emblazoned across the characters… But this is just a tease… there is more to come…

Yet for all its overt ironic play, this film encompasses a darkness, and further, it explodes the procedures of Hollywood film in a far more subtle – and powerful – way… as we will see…

Wild Grass opens with Marguerite Muir having her bag stolen. George finds her purse, hands it in to the police, but becomes fixated with the woman he has helped. He starts stalking her, she spurns him, he slashes the tyres of her car. Marguerite reports him to the police, who visit George, telling him to lay off. He does. But for Marguerite the absence of George in her life proves too much for her… violent impulses arise, she begins to question the way she is living… and she sets out to win back his attentions. So, beneath the ironic froth lies a dark heart to the film.

The title, if not the key, is an important theme. Wild grass growing through pavement cracks and between brickwork. You can’t hold back feelings. Despite the attempt to concrete over desire, desires can break through, or rather, seed between the cracks. George is in the rut of a long marriage, Marguerite is immersed in work. Their dark collision will awaken them. In other words, this is a film about waking up. And about dangers of such awakenings. In his cinema books Deleuze says the organising principle of Ozu’s films is that ‘life is simple, and man never stops complicating it by “disturbing the water”’ (C2:15). In this way, both characters are on their own suicide mission from which they may not return… we find these men – and women – everywhere, seems to be Resnais’ riposte to The Bridges At Toko-Ri.

The twisting of the Hollywood romance does not stop here though. It is structural. For instance, the film proceeds by what initially seems to be parallel montage. The actions of Marguerite and George alternate on-screen and then dovetail. However, this seemingly conventional arrangement is far more complex than it first appears. In the action cinema the final explosive events must occur towards the end of the film. In Wild Grass, however, despite the alternating story lines, the organisation is qualitatively different. Crucially, the actions of the characters first dovetail at the middle film (the visit by the cops). At this point, there is the reversal. The stalker becomes the stalked. The first half is about George’s awakening, the second, Marguerite’s.

Gilles Deleuze, in his second book of cinema, discusses films constructed from what he calls hyalosigns. Here the actual on-screen optical and sound situations are composed not so much to link up with each other across the immediate flow of the film, but rather to reverberate across different parts of the film and link up virtually. So, Wild Grass is, in the first instance, a film of pure optical and pure sound situations. The autonomous camera, obtrusive music, the over determined narration. Resnais asks his actress to play stylistically: her shocked looks oppose George’s naturalism. There is the wonderful false continuity of the meal where George’s family come to diner. The camera flows around the open plan living and dining area. Without a cut three separate scenes are played out, the family relaxing, George cooking and the family eating. There is an echo of, and response to this in Marguerite’s story. We see her coming home three times, entering through the door, putting her keys down, sitting on her bed. Each repetition is enacted through difference.

It is in the echoing between these two sequences and in the reversal of the storylines that we go beyond pure optical and sound situations to hyalosigns. For Deleuze, hyalosigns can be composed in a number of ways, one of these is what he calls ‘two mirrors face to face’ (C2:71). Here the actual on-screen image mirrors a virtual counterpart, which may have already been on-screen, or has yet to be on-screen, in which case it will be the actual image of the virtual image that has passed. These mirrors are ‘distinct, but indiscernible… in continual exchange’ (C2:70). In this way the film is organised to mirror George and Marguerite, not to bring them together at the end of the film, as in the romance. George is the actual image whose virtual image is Marguerite, and Marguerite the actual image whose virtual image is George. As such, their desires can never meet… for each the other is never actual, they can only see the virtual image of the other. It is for this reason that the film travels beyond the second dovetail of the film, to open up the possible with impossibility. This final coda where the two ‘lovers’ are together is not only interrupted by the presence of George’s wife, but left enigmatic… a strange mix of comedy, doom and hope (George’s broken flies, the descent of the small plane, a graveyard and a young girl who asks ‘When I am a cat, will I be able to eat cat munchies?’). Cut. Black-screen. Fin.

(Of course she will, when she becomes a cat).

The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, USA, 2010)

2010-06-11T18:56:00.020+01:00

The Killer Inside Me is a wonderfully restrained, beautifully crafted film. This restraint and craft is due to a central ellipsis which functions to leave unclear both the originary motivation of the killer, as well as the reason for the extreme brutality directed at the two women in his life. The ellipsis stymies causality. In other words, the film resists justifying the initial violence, and so makes it appear all the more gratuitous. Indeed, it is exactly because the gratuitous violence is not required by the actual plot, that it is entirely necessary.

The film tells the story of deputy sheriff Lou Ford. On the surface he is the perfect West Texas gentleman (yes ma’am, no sir). Underneath, something else is going on… Set in a small town that recently underwent an oil boom, Lou is despatched by his boss, sheriff Bob Maples, to the home of Joyce Lakeland, a prostitute. Lou has been given the task in asking her to leave the town. Upon doing so, she attacks him… in the resulting struggle, Lou whips Joyce’s arse red-raw with his belt (an echo, through flashback, of the seemingly consensual sexual violence enacted by Lou’s now dead father on his dangerously young girlfriend). An affair begins. Lou, however, is already set up with Amy Stanton, who wants him to marry her.

After a few weeks, Lou is approached once again to get Joyce out of town. This time it is powerful construction millionaire Chester Conway. Chester wants Joyce gone as his son, Elmer, is also involved and in love with her. Around the same time Lou is called to the offices of union leader, and Conway antagonist, Joe Rothman. Joe brings up the death of Lou’s step brother some six years previous, saying it was suspicious and could have had something to do with the Conways. Lou is sceptical not only of the claim, but Joe’s reasons for such protracted silence. Additionally, it turns out that Lou’s brother was convicted of raping a five year old girl (though, again in flashback, it is revealed it was Lou who raped the girl, the older boy taking the blame).

Lou visits Joyce, they fuck and Lou beats her to a pulp. When Elmer arrives, he shoots him, placing the gun in Joyce’s hand. The perfect murder? Perhaps not, investigator Howard Hendricks suspects Lou, so does his boss and girlfriend… and Lou is forced into more murders in an attempt to stop people’s suspicions being proved, including killing Amy on the morning they are to elope.

The murders are deliberate and cold. While not everything goes according to plan, Lou manages to cover things up, or so he thinks. Winterbottom is brilliant in showing Lou in denial of the suspicions others have of him. It is in this sense that the film is from Lou’s point-of-view. While it is clear at the end of the film everyone knows Lou to be a serial killer, none of this seems to have gotten through to Lou until far too late. Winterbottom could have cranked up the paranoia here, but, yet again, his restrained direction does not allow this to happen. This is one of the ways in which Lou’s sociopathic behaviour is signalled by the film.

However, the crucial point is this. While there is logic for the killings that come after what has happened at Joyce’s house, the reasons for the initial violence are themselves unclear. It is this that remains elliptical. And it is this ellipsis that constructs Lou as psychotic. Further, it is this ellipsis that makes it necessary for the film to focus in such graphic horror upon violence against the female characters.

Gilles Deleuze, whose taxonomy of cinema attempts to explore the way different types of film are organised, describes this type of elliptical film as the small form of the action-image. For Deleuze, action-images describe cinematic realism, ‘milieux and modes of behaviour’ (C1:141). In essence, what we get is a situation in a determinate space-time, and characters that act within that space-time with regards to the situation. The large form of the action-image describes the way in which the milieu spirals down into characters who feel it necessary to act in response… here we see parallel alternating convergent montage in the form of duels. In the small form of the action-image, by contrast, a character’s actions gradually reveal the situation through a linear unfolding of events. For Deleuze, the way in which situations are revealed can occur in a number of ways, each a different sense of the ellipse.

First, through lack, ’an action… discloses a situation which is not given. The situation is thus deduced from the action, by immediate inference, or by relatively complex reasoning’ (C1:160). Second, through equivocity, a ‘more complex type of index… in these cases we are made to hesitate by a whole world of details… it is as if an action, a mode of behaviour, concealed a slight difference, which was nevertheless sufficient to relate it to two quite distant situations, situations which are worlds apart’ (C1:161). In the third instance, the ellipse functions through vectors. ‘The successive situations, each of which is already equivocal in itself, will form in turn with one another, and with critical instants which give rise to them, a broken line whose path is unpredictable, although necessary and rigorous. This is as true of locations as of events’ (C1:168).

With regards to The Killer Inside Me, we cannot, as we will see, clearly deduce Lou’s initial motivation. This film is not organised around the index of lack. Nor does the film persist with equivocity past the cause of the initial violence (except in the style of Amy’s murder, which in a very real sense – and again, as we will see – is a repetition of attack on Joyce). Rather, all the murders which follow on form a logical chain. Thus neither is the film organised through vectors. Clearly, it is the second of these types of ellipses, equivocity, to which The Killer Inside Me corresponds.

The function of equivocity is two-fold. First, it has to do with the reason for the murder of Elmer. Why does Lou murder him? Is it for the money (blackmail is discussed earlier in the film)? Is it Joe’s accusation that the Conways could have murdered Lou’s brother, the brother that took the heat for him all those years ago? Is it that Elmer is fucking his girlfriend, or worse, in love with her? Is she in some way in love with him? Is it a long standing animosity Lou feels for his childhood friend, the rich, spoilt, lazy Elmer?

The motivation for Elmer’s murder cannot be clearly deduced. This is equivocity. And it is this formal structure that gives the power to the portrayal of the killer. Without a justification, and a strong one, he is constructed by the film as psychotic.

However, just as the motivation for killing Elmer remains elliptical, so does the way in which it is carried out. This is the second function of ellipsis in the film, and one that is far more important. Why, to kill Elmer, must Lou do what he does to Joyce? Why the sickening, sustained violence? Violence that will be repeated with Amy. Crucially, neither women are assaulted in-and-for-themselves. Rather, in both instances it is for another, for a man (Elmer, then in Amy’s case the blackmailing bum). In both situations it would have been enough for Lou to kill the women straight out, yet he feels it necessary to beat on them. Why?

It might seem that the answer has been provided by the flashbacks. The consensual sexual violence of young girlfriend of his father, the way she invites the young Lou to whip her… this leads on to the rape of the five year old and a psychotic break. (Deleuze will discuss films that use the flashback as destiny. However, the use of flashbacks is very restrained, they do not dominate the film, rather the film is dominated by the equivocity of the small form of the action-image. In other words, the flashbacks are a function of a specific type of ellipsis). However, while this psychological profile could explain what Lou does to Joyce, and then Amy, it still leaves the question open as to why Elmer needed to be killed.

In other words, is the motivation for the initial violence an attack on Joyce or an attack in Elmer? Which one is the excuse for the other? It is this fundamental ellipsis that structures the film. As Deleuze writes, it is ‘as if two actions… referred to two opposable or opposing situations. The two situations may be such that one is real and the other apparent or illusory, but they may both be real and finally can interchange to such an extent that one becomes real and the other apparent, and vice versa’ (C1:162). Further ‘it matters little that one of these situations is contradicted or denied, for this happens only after its function has been exhausted, and never to such an extent that it eliminates the equivocity of the index and the distance between the situations which are evoked’ (C1:162).

And it is this ellipsis that explains why the violence against women is depicted so brutally, why the violence to the women in the film is essentially gratuitous. It is not a function of the plot. The violence is even more shocking because it has no clear motivation. It is as here that Winterbottom deliberately intervenes through the length of shots and the focus of the sequence. Look, he says, look again. Why did the women need to be beat up so badly? It is leaving this question open that gives the film its power. It is a function of equivocity.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (Werner Herzog, USA, 2009)

2010-06-08T10:34:00.020+01:00

‘Herzog is a metaphysician,’ according to Gilles Deleuze. ‘He is the most metaphysical of film directors…’ (C1:185). How, if true, is The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans a metaphysical film? Mark Kermode recently echoed Deleuze’s claim, yet went on to say that this particular film lacked a metaphysical dimension (though is, as I write, rethinking the film). On the face of it, both the assertion in general and Kermode’s exception seem accurate. Metaphysics, in essence, is a consideration of being beyond the realm of the physical world. In both his fictions and documentaries (which to a great extent blur the boundaries between fiction and documentary) Herzog digs beneath the perceptions, affections and actions of characters to explore how they understand and think about the world. Yet in The Bad Lieutenant Herzog appears content to focus upon the surface of Terence McDonagh, appears to make a black comedy out of the pain, drug addiction and corruption of the main character.

The film is a riot, and the humour is dark. For instance, McDonagh is promoted twice, once at the beginning of the film, once at the end. His first promotion to lieutenant comes from what is described, by a senior officer, as a heroic act. Yet, this is no heroic act, rather it was a bungled rescue, easily avoided. During the onset of hurricane Katrina, a drug addict looter is locked in a cell in the depths of a police station. McDonagh – after attempting to bet on the time he will drown –jumps carelessly into the rising water to unlock him. In the process he sustains an injury to his back that will take six months to heal and cause him pain for the rest of his life. This physical (not metaphysical) pain is to be offset by vicodin. But McDonagh self-medicates with coke, heroine, crack and a little weed now and then. This self-medication becomes drug addiction, which causes him to break the law himself in order to ensure a steady supply (wonderfully played by Cage, who moves around the screen like a broken dancer, a counterpoint to Kinski’s movements on the raft in Aguirre). At the end of the film, McDonagh is promoted once again, this time to captain. This promotion, like the first, is presented as a result of heroic acts. However, we know different.

A film then of cause and effects, though one that skews the effects: we expect tragedy, but get comedy. For instance, this is seen most clearly towards the end of the film when McDonagh returns to his office to find out the murder of three Italian gangsters he engineered has not only solved that immediate problem, but also caused the crime family to back off as well as have an internal investigation against him been dropped (‘phew’). Next, he finds out his gambling debts are sorted, despite his blackmailing of a baseball player not panning out. Finally, evidence he planted at the scene of the murder wraps up the case. The dovetailing of all these events that seemed to be moving inexorably towards tragedy are resolved in bathos – brilliantly so.

However, isn’t this just more proof of a lack of metaphysics in the film (which of course translates to The Bad Lieutenant being a lesser work of an aging director in the grip of the Hollywood studio system etc, etc)? Criticisms levelled at the film say this is no Aguirre, no Fitzcarraldo. Correct. However, this is not because it is a lesser film. Rather, Herzog continually veers between two types of film, the grandiose and the enfeebled. This distinction comes from Deleuze, who sees Herzog’s films as taking one of two paths. The first is that of the visionary ‘a man who is larger than life frequents a milieu which is itself larger than life, and dreams up an action as great as the milieu’ (C1:184). The second is that of ‘weaklings and idiots’ who are ‘reduced to an elementary sense of touch…and walk close to the earth, following an uncertain line’ (C1:184-5). The Bad Lieutenant has more in common with Nosferatu, Kasper Hauser…

The crucial point comes in a conversation McDonagh has with the gangsta at the heart of the murder investigation. McDonagh tells Big Fate he will take bribes to protect him. Big Fate asks so you don’t care about the killings anymore? McDonagh replies look at your face, now look at mine… I never did.

We later discover that McDonagh was setting up Big Fate. The impulse here would be to understand McDonagh’s words as a lie, as a way in to his gang and the entrapment. However, what if we resist this impulse? What if we stay on the surface and believe that McDonagh is telling the truth to Big Fate. He never cared about the killings. The metaphysics in The Bad Lieutenant turn on this idea. Getting Big Fate is not his fate. Rather, it simply requires ingenuity. His ingenuity is simply the ingenuity of the drug addict after the next fix.

Solving the case is no transcendent event. It is meaningless. As meaningless as hurricane Katrina, as meaningless as all the barbarity set in the post-apocalyptic landscape of New Orleans. As meaningless as the murders. It is a lizard-like metaphysics. It is the logic of Herzog’s Nosferatu ‘caught in uterine regression, a foetus reduced to its feeble body and to what it touches and sucks’ (C1:185). The logic of Herzog’s Woyseck ‘reduced to his own Passion’ (C1:185).

What lies beyond, beneath the physical world? Sometime Herzog explores this as a grandiose, ecstatic, crazy vision. Sometimes Herzog explores this as the feebleness of a body in a world at the edge of a cosmos where there is nothing approaching meaning. Herzog’s metaphysics is not simply the playing out of the grandiose, but rather, it is the way humanity is caught between something and nothing. Between the grandiose and the feeble... As Deleuze puts it ‘the albatross’ big feet and its great white wings are the same thing’ (C1:186). This is the metaphysics of the quotidian...

Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, USA, 2009)

2010-06-05T18:25:00.022+01:00

That Capitalism: A Love Story has been produced in the uber-capitalist nation-state par excellence is an achievement equalled only by its reception. It is being watched, and debated. The procedures of American capitalism are vividly dissected: kids in Pennsylvania sold to detention centres for profit… ‘dead peasant’ insurance taken out by corporations who can turn a tidy sum from the death of a worker… a coup d'état by the board of directors of Goldman Sachs at the US congress to bail out the banks in the wake of the economic crisis… home repossessions by the very banks the government has propped-up and the low-rent vulture-capitalists that sell on those homes for an instant return. The whole complex bloody machinery…

Yet nothing quite prepares you for the end of the film: ‘capitalism is an evil, and you can’t regulate evil. You have to eliminate it, and replace it with something that is good for all people.’ What needs to happen now for the United States of America, says director Michael Moore, is that capitalism needs to be replaced… with democracy.

On the one hand, a clear statement: capitalism is evil and must be replaced. On the other hand, what is to replace capitalism? Democracy? Wait a minute… hasn’t the USA always been democratic? That’s rather vague. Surely Moore wants to say – gulp – ‘socialism’? The alternatives explored in the film sound like socialism. The bit where he says ‘something that is good for all people’ sounds like socialism too. Yet Moore doesn’t come out and say it (and indeed, he is consistent in avoiding saying subsequently). Is this a failure of nerve? Many socialist reviewers, most of whom believe Moore to be one of the ‘good guys,’ think so. He is guilty of naïve tub thumping without clearly articulating the alternative; guilty of cowardice, of not being willing to speak out loud his socialist vision to the American people.

Perhaps, however, before jumping to these conclusions based upon what he has not said, we should explore what he does say? In order to do so, we can begin by thinking through the central problem of his concluding manifesto…

The central problem is this: capitalism is a political economic system while democracy is a political ideological system. Political ideology and political economy are linked, inextricably so in most cases, yet they remain different in kind. Thus the question arises… how can a political ideology replace a political economic model? Especially if the political system in question is already is in place and on the face of it the very condition of the existing economic model? Indeed, surely the economic system (capitalism) is one of the practical applications of the theoretical ideology (democracy)? Is Moore, in other words, guilty of ignoring the differences and interactions between political institutions (ideology and economics)… Let us first answer ‘yes’ and try and understand why this might be the strategy of the film.

Love stories, in American cinema, seem to require a series of assumptions. A man and woman meet, fall in love, pass through a series of trials and tribulations until the end of the film when the situation is resolved. This occurs through an invisible heterosexuality, the aspiration of a monogamous relationship, a bourgeois-esque setting and an overtly melodramatic realism. Most usually a happy ever after results… though, of course, that is the beauty of the end of the film, for while it resolves everything it does so by becoming timeless and unverifiable.

The crucial point about the love story of American cinema, however, is that it operates within a binary logic in order to describe the hopes and fears of the milieu. Gilles Deleuze, in his great cinematic taxonomy, offers us an insight into this kind of filmic organisation. He calls it the large form action-image and it obeys five laws. A general situation is established that will need to be resolved. The resolution of the situation can only occur through the actions of characters within the film. The action proceeds through a number of duels. These duels are a preparation, the limbering up of the characters to become equal to the situation they find themselves in. It is the final duel between the two main characters at the end of the film which resolves the situation.

In other words, this kind of action-image works through a formulaic simplification at the level of structure. Yet, it is this very procedure that gives the narrative its power. What is crucial is this: that while the focus is the great central duel between the lovers, there are lots of other duels ( with the rival, the mother-in-law, the job overseas, the play-station). However, all these duels are in the service of the great duel, which when it finally plays out resolves everything.

Is this not exactly what is happening in Capitalism: A Love Story? It is the 1980s. One of the lovers, the American people, is captivated by the promise of dosh by the delicious Regan (and – subsequently – the Bush double act). This rival will de defeated by Obama (as an embodiment of the constitution), who represents the true love of the American people… preceded by such figures as (a heavily revised) FDR.

Thus in suggesting the replacement of capitalism with democracy Moore is simplifying, obeying the tenants of the action-image. This kind of simplification is not a problem for Deleuze: ‘it is easy to make fun of Hollywood’s historical conceptions. It seems to us, on the contrary, that they bring together the most serious aspects of history as seen by the nineteenth century’ (C1:149). Don’t be fooled that this is a backhand compliment. It is not. Deleuze explores this claim through Nietzsche’s analysis of history. For Nietzsche there are three co-ordinates of what he calls universal history: the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical. The monumental looks at parallels between the present and the past, between civilisations, between great men (we see this in Moore’s comparisons of America with the USSR, Japan and Europe, as well as looking back to FDR). The antiquarian takes a past as hermetically sealed, creates origins which constitute the true traditions (here, for example, we return to the constitution). With the ethical conception of universal history, the monumental and antiquarian dovetail. As Deleuze puts it ‘the monumental and antiquarian conceptions of history would not come together so well without the ethical image which measures and organises them both’ (C1:150).

Quoting Cecil B. DeMille, Deleuze sees this as ‘a matter of Good and Evil’ (C1:151). Here ‘the… past must submit to trial, go to court, in order to disclose what it is that produces decadence and what it is that produces new life; what the ferments of decadence and the germ of new life are, the orgy and the sign of the cross, the omnipotence of the rich and the misery of the poor. A strong ethical judgement must condemn the injustice of ‘things,’ bring compassion, herald the new civilisation on the march, in short, constantly rediscover America…’ (C1:151). The battle must reduced to a binary of good and evil. Yet, in the final analysis, for Deleuze ‘the marvel is that, with all these limits… [the American cinema] has succeeded in putting forward a strong and coherent conception of universal history’ (C1:151).

However, while this analysis plays out, the central problem still remains. Moore is simplifying the situation and is ignoring the differences between a political ideology and a political economy. What then, if we approach Moore’s manifesto head-on, and ask the question, ‘what does he actually mean by replacing capitalism with democracy?’ What if he is not ignoring the differences between ideology and economics? Once again, we can turn to Deleuze. As well as describing the organisation of the large form action-image, he goes on to explore how it can extends itself, transforms itself. How it goes towards its limit and becomes a discourse-image, the very limit of the large form action-image. Here it is not simply that a situation is inexorably resolved by pre-determined actions. Rather, the situation is explored as ‘the givens of a question which is hidden in the situation, wrapped up in the situation’ (C1:189). In this way ‘the “response” therefore is not merely that of the action to the situation, but, more profoundly, a response to the question, or to the problem that the situation was not sufficient to disclose’ (C1:189). It is a ‘secret question’ that must be discovered, and once discovered it will change the obvious conclusions that were originally to be drawn (C1:189). The response would thus be a ‘considered response’ and only arrived at through the process of the exploration, ‘the dogged search for the question and its givens through the situations’ (C1:190).

In other words, rather than cowardice or simplifying the argument, Moore is doing something far more strategic. In arguing democracy needs to replace capitalism, he is claiming capitalism is undemocratic. What Moore has attempted to do, then, is this. First, break the ‘natural’ link between the ideology of democracy and economics of capitalism. Second, instead, link the economics of capitalism with an ideology of authoritarianism (or at least semiauthoritarianism, or quasi-democracy: democracy as a façade). Third and finally, reveal the economic system that true democracy inherently delivers: socialism. It seems that just as the ideology sustaining capitalism is left unspoken but illustrated on screen, so is the economic system behind democracy. The strategic silences of a mass-media realpolitik… Or in terms of the cineosis, the limit of the large form action-image which while going beyond the action-image, extending it, serves at the same time as a mask. As Deleuze writes in another context, on the face of it there is a ‘fairly mundane humanist message,’ but really there is ‘something quite different… putting something into circulation, as much as possible, however little it may be…’ (C1:192).

Four Lions (Christopher Morris, UK, 2010)

2010-05-23T11:16:00.001+01:00

They dream of being heroes for a cause they do not – cannot – understand. This is the very heart of Four Lions. It is what makes the film a comedy… the gags exposing this situation operating at the level of behaviour. Or to put it another way (as this is how the film plays) the nature of the gags gradually reveals the situation. The moment where Waj and Hassan deploy Barry’s anti-surveillance technique is exemplary. Responding to the machinery of the oppressor is a requirement. Yet given the scarcity of means at their disposal the response must be ridiculous… but nevertheless – and this is crucial – the response is effective, after a fashion.

The narrative involves the formation and actions of an islamic terrorist cell in a British northern provincial city. The cell initially consists of five members (one of them will die in an accident involving homemade explosives and a flock of sheep, leaving the four lions of the title). The film’s focus, however, is upon Omar and Barry. Omar is a bourgeois family man, supported in his death-jihad in the most matter-of-fact of way by his wife and son. Barry is a paranoid, outspoken convert to the faith who desperately wants to be at the centre of the revolution. One of the most interesting sequences of the film comes in the discussions over the bombing strategy the cell is to adopt. Barry wants to bomb a mosque in an attempt to wake up the muslim masses, to radicalise them and, we must suppose, engender the jihad to establish sharia law in Britain. Omar, meanwhile, wants the group to adopt a more direct and truthful approach killing christians/atheists to awaken them up to strength of feeling in the British muslim community against, we must suppose, the wars in Iraq and Afganistan.

Both strategies aim to wake up a mass of people. It would only be in their temporal playing out that a difference would occur. In the former, an awakened islamic minority would finally see the oppressive nature of the christian/atheist indigenous population. In the latter, the christian/atheist mass would be awakened to the islamic community’s potency. What is clear is that either way terror would beget more terror. Retribution would be required from both groups. This is because the actions of the cell would not be an origin: we are already in the middle of this. Or more precisely, every action of terror is both in the middle of the situation and reinscribed as an origin.

It is the genius of Four Lions, however, that it does not begin by exploring these two poles: an underground terrorist cell and a vigilant security operation. Such a filmic structure would require good and evil to be distributed across the two groups, would require alternating parallel montage to dovetail to a final action where the suicide bombing would either occur or not occur, where either good or evil would triumph (or indeed, a cut before the outcome to allow for the uncertainties of hope and resignation). This is not the aim of the film. The security forces come late to the movie, stumble upon the situation by accident, and are too ineffectual to avert the bombings. The important point being, of course, that the incompetency of the jihadists is equalled by the incompetency of homeland security. Indeed, the actions of the police seem destined to make the situation worse. Finally, there is the event which takes place after the end of the film, the detention (and inevitable torture) on quasi-Egyptian territory of an innocent man.

Nor, however, is it the aim of the film to resolve the motives of the terrorists. It avoids asking the question ‘why do muslims turn to terrorism in the UK’ and the story does its best to shun answering this unasked question. Omar has non-muslim friends, is a normal, balanced workaday guy, his violent jihadism is as natural as breathing. Waj is dragged along by friendship. Hassan is a joker who succumbs to peer group pressure. Barry is the more-radical-than-the-radical convert, trying to prove his faith. Other characters offer different explanations but the film remains deliberately vague as to motivations.

It is this aspect that is crucial, for the movie seems to both obey and attempt to avoid the consequences of the laws of the two great forms of popular realism. Gilles Deleuze, in his taxonomy of cinematic forms, describes these two basic types (of what he calls the action-image) in the following way. One the one hand, the large form of the action-image operates by parallel, alternating, convergent montage through various duals ultimately in the service of a milieu being rectified by a character that will become equal to the situation over the course of the film. The small form of the action-image, on the other hand, operates through a linear plot line, following the actions of a character or characters to gradually reveal the situation. This occurs through ellipses… and this can pan out in a number of ways. First, through a slow release of information premised upon lack; second, equivocity leaves the situation open to a limited number of interpretations; and finally, at its most extreme, a series of stories become vectors of a situation that is not in itself revealed.

It seems Four Lions manages to belong to both forms and neither at the same time. This is a highly delicate formal strategy, one in which Deleuze explores through what he calls a transformation of forms or reflection-images. For Deleuze, the large and small forms of the action-image can go beyond themselves in a number of ways, to integrate aspects of one in the other (through cinematic metaphors or allegories), to question the very form of the action-image (through discursive methodologies) or to collapse both into each other (through reversals and inversions). It is to this final form that Four Lions seems to adhere, and indeed, Deleuze sees this inversion-image as being the form par excellence of ‘burlesque parody’ (Deleuze, C1: 183). With the inversion-image we find a cinema of ‘weaklings and idiots,’ or a cinema where ‘the action, in effect, is not required by the situation, it is a crazy enterprise, born in the head of a visionary, which seems to be the only one capable of rivalling the milieu in its entirety’ (Deleuze, C1:184). Again, Four Lions seems to be able to walk the fine line between these two types of inversion-images, where ‘the albatross’ big feet and its great white wings are the same thing,’ to discover the heroics and frailty in being human, to balance the sublime and the enfeebled situation in something quotidian (Deleuze, C1:186).

We have seen this in the ridiculous but effective anti-surveillance techniques. But the quotidian structures the film. The jihadist cell is banal-evil, state oppression is banal-evil: ridiculous but at the same time effective. Indeed, the question of what to do in the face of terror (by the state or individuals) seems to remains elusive. State terror requires a response from the freedom fighter and the terrorist demands a response from the protective state. How can both perspectives be resolved? Perhaps a first step would be to do way with the view that there is a difference between state and group terror. Terror is the solider-civilians of one state against the solider-civilians of another. It just the conditions of the state vary (national, pan-national, extra-national, sub-national, quasi-national etc). Further, both depend upon each other. Terror can never rectify the situation. The problem is that terrorists of any kind are unable to understand this. This is comedy of Four Lions… brutal…

What then is the solution? What would be a way out of the reifications, the circularity of terror? In Hulme, Manchester they re-enacted Guantanamo, setting up camp X-ray on the fields next to an entry point to the city. This was an awakening without terror. It exposed terror. How effective? How effective is terror? Terrorism is an avoidance of the situation, it is the escalation of the situation, and it is the nourishment of the situation… reification and origin at the same time. We could imagine a sequel to Four Lions which takes as its starting point a bungling homeland security force torturing an innocent man… and a prequel, where a ridiculous but effective leader of a nation state instigates a war… and a prequel to the prequel and a sequel to the sequel…