Hell, Germans, Libertines and Shakespeare

It feels like I've spent most of my time watching films lately, which obviously isn't a bad thing when you're a fan of films. I went to the cinema last week to see Drag Me To Hell, a review of which can be found on Paul's blog. It was certainly enjoyable enough, and we managed to make it through the rain in time to catch the England game in the AJ.

Since then I've watched two Fassbinders I haven't seen before. Mother Kusters' Trip To Heaven (1975) is a TV movie about a widow who unwillingly participates in distortions of her late husband's memory. Pulled between communists and anarchists, both of whom wish to make her a symbol in their cause, and systematically abandonded or ignored by her family, Brigitte Mira's character is put through the director's usual cruel ringer until the endings. Strangely, Fassbinder wrote two finales to this tragicomic tale, one astonishingly more violent and nasty than the one he settled upon. I much prefer the latter, where she manages to move on and maybe find love, to the original, where she dies of an anarchist's bullet wound in the arms of her feckless son. The real star of this is Ingird Caven, who is delightful as the worn, ambitious singer and daughter of the protagonist, who uses her father's death to cynically advance her lovelife and career. Her sparring with sister-in-law Irm Hermann is fantastic, too.

Substantially superior and more complete was Fear of Fear, a completely forgotten item from the same year (I don't think it even has its own Wikipedia page). This tells the story of Margot, a severly depressed housewife. Margot's battle with her anxiety following giving birth to her second child goes through the appropriate cycle: Leonard Cohen albums, valium, affairs, alcohol, until the conclusion. This allows Fassbinder to make his commentary upon the value and lack of understanding of these addictions, but the real villain here is the oppressive society of the Economic Miracle that shuns or judges Margot, from the dismissive doctors to the vile inlaws. "We're the normal ones!" screeches Irm Hermann, reprising her role from Mother Kusters'. The implication is unavoidable: Margot, whose world literally disintegrates around her, is the sane one, whilst the respectable in-laws, who chastise Margot for almost everything she does, are the repressed psychotic majority. In this sense, Fassbinder predicts both the medicated society and the religious democratic tyranny of numbers-make-right.

A word must be said for Margit Carstensen, who plays, or rather becomes, Margot. Her acting is comprised of quietly confused facials, which are equal parts brilliantly expressive and controlled. She allows Fassbinder to place ambiguity into his close-ups, such as the final shot of her where it is almost impossible to know for sure her reaction to her neighbour's death. We are left with the disturbing possibility she is happy about it, or is at least gratefully accepting of his self-sacrifice to the demons that haunted them both so that she might live. Or did he merely represent the last traces of her psychosis? The wobbly camera effect, that acted as avatar for her bouts of anxiety, accompanies the credits and works in tandem to split our interpretations. There's such control and economy with Fassbinder that his style is the perfect environment for this story to take hold.

Then The Libertine (2005) was on television the other night. I hadn't seen it since it was first out at the cinema, and having formally studied Wilmot since then was eager to see it again. I was disappointed: it's not as good as I remembered. Not that there's anything seriously wrong with it. It tells a solid story and doesn't shy away from the grotesque and bawdy elements of Rochester's life. Depp gives one of his better performances, though it is still not free from his compulsive false-eccentricity, and John Malkovich is solid as Charles II. There's even a very good piece of shooting in the first theatre scene. But for most part the camera doesn't know where to put itself, too often forcing us into unwarranted intimacy with the characters. There are also some truly outlandish elements, even for the source material. The script seems determined to equate Rochester with a modern rock star, which is not so much unwarranted as it is predictable and cliche, and we are all meant to be aghast at this story of unfulfilled potential without giving us any reason to consider the real Rochester's talent. Admittedly, it would have been difficult to dramatically convey a poem as lengthy as, say, A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, but surely a poet as good as Rochester deserves better than to be remembered as a bit of a lad and a good acting coach.

I also finally managed to see Chimes At Midnight from start to finish and uninterrupted. On paper, it sounds like it should be the greatest film ever: script by Shakespeare, editing and direction by Orson Welles, cast that includes such talent as John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford and Welles himself. There's a temptation to say the general high regard for this film is more influenced by its potential and rarity than by its quality, that those who praise it do so in the knowledge few are likely to call them on it. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This is not quite so much the Holy Grail of Welles' canon (that would be the existing shards of his Don Quixote), nor is it another great but interferred-with show of potential like the Magnificent Ambersons. It is a realised vision, a complete and wonderful film, a culmination both of Welles' unparalleled cinematic skill and his admiration for Shakespeare.

Yes, there are a few problems with the sound, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with a half-hearted restoration. What really struck me about this film was how much Welles, ever the magician, had done with just a little money, cardboard and glue. We are transported to a medieval England of thatched wooden buildings and stone castles, thanks largely to the film's utterly fantastic lighting. Comforting, harrowing and portentious, the shadows themselves are a character. The technical pinnacle of this film comes in the famous Battle of Shrewsbury sequence, a seminal moment in film fight scenes.

The script is fantastic, too. Adapted from Welles' travesty of a play, Five Kings, it seamlessly blends dialogue from five (at my count) Shakespeare plays: the Henriad and The Merry Wives of Windsor. It gives us a sentimental version of Falstaff, more funny and playful than damagingly apathetic and cowardly, but he is none the worse for it. Welles puts in what might be his best performance, giving Falstaff a nuanced depth that is so often missing in other portrayals of the clownish character. In truth there isn't a performance in the film that isn't more than adequate, but this is about Welles, and about Falstaff as his avatar, and they are to be applauded. We learn more about Welles from this film, the way he speaks another man's words, than we do from a thousand biographies or interviews.

Roadside Ponderings

Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) is often hailed as a moving and frightening film, a thinking man's sci-fi to rival 2001. The comparisons with Kubrick's film are more deserved here than those often attributed to Tarkovsky's other venture into science fiction, Solyaris (1972), which I have always considered an interesting but ultimately self-parodying film (laborious shots combined with a pseudo-philosophical script), but again somewhat unusual. Whereas Space Odyssey certainly shares a technical competency and spirtual evolution angle with Stalker, that's where the similarities end. Kubrick's film is cold and impassive, even in moments of glory, underlining the director's understanding of tone and mood. Stalker, at its most pessimistic, is rich in human mystery and pondering on the theme of transcendence.

Watching Tarkovsky's Stalker uncovers the potential of cinema as a medium. We are never sure whether we are watching an artist or a magician; the truth is, the director is both, often simultaneously. Immediately we are struck by the aesthetics: the lighting is perfection, the control and patience of the shots chosen unmatched; furthermore, Tarkovsky is one of the cinema's great portraiters as well as a commendable landscape photographer. I fell in love with Alexander Kaidanovsky's head about twenty minutes in and the sympathy I felt for his character never left me.

Truthfully there are literally tens of shots in the film that suggest the director's genius, some of them, true to form, lasting for minutes on end. Our early shepherding into and out of the doorway into the bedroom, the continuous take on Monkey's progress down a slope as it is slowly revealed she is being carried rather than walking, the iconoclastic drift over images of the gods of our modern collective consciousness. (Jesus in prayer, money, a gun.) Perhaps the best example of the artist/magician duality is the final scene that at least deserves to be famous, in which Monkey moves a glass across a table with her mind. Or does she? Is she merely observing it's being progressed by the vibrations of a passing train? Our willingness to believe the unbelieveable, though, is a testament not to Tarkovsky's skill with a camera, but his understanding of psychology.

This scene follows what has been as much a psychoanalytical journey as a theological one. It is impossible not to pick up on the clumsy Id, Ego and Superego dynamic provided by the three (male) leads, but the Wittgensteinian undertones are far more subtle. The Zone, where our three heroes journey, is a metaphor for the functional world, a world of prepositions and language traps, where markers must be lain down to navigate in chaos. Just as we require illogical spatial recognitions to stay sane - Home, School, Work, Local Shop, Abroad, etc. - so does Stalker throw nuts to mark their progress before they've made it. Space is relative in this linguistic realm, and Stalker, who tries to impose his own rules on it, must thus lose the most at the pilgrimage's conclusion, in which it is revealed the Holy Grail of the story is a somewhere between a placebo and a subconscious manipulation of the universe (one theory posits that Monkey is born out of Porcupine's wish for his brother's return and is hence a reincarnation via subatomic reasoning). What is interesting is that it is Professor, ostensibly the broken, castrated Superego, who attempts to destroy Room in the Zone, where wishes are meant to be granted. His rejection of the oxymoronic scientific supernatural represents the ultimate failure of the Symbolic Circuit in Leary's model, and perhaps the culmination of a cinematic thesis extension of Lacan's Symbolic order.

More mythological is the introduction of a black dog that follows the trio. Undoubtedly Anubis, it consumes whilst Stalker talks of hearts, attaches itself to Stalker in his own words, and whines at Monkey's Osiric annointment by Beethoven. In other scenes it lingers, a curious reminder that in the Zone, just as in life, death (and judgement?) is around every corner. Whilst not quite Tarkovsky's masterpiece (that is undoubtedly Zerkalo (1975)), Stalker is a fascinating film whichever way you look at it and a worthy addition to his oeuvre.

Political life is a Cabaret, old chum

I think the main reason I like Cabaret (1972, Bob Fosse) so much is it's one of the few mainstream films that really seems to "get" fascism. Aside from that, of course, it's a fantastically choreographed film, with some inspired shooting; take, for instance, the scene in Max's blue room, where Max, from our perspective stealing Sally away with consumate ease, and Brian, seething with repressed emotion, are seperated only by an elaborate clock. Or the event of the old man's beating, interspersed with the entertainment being offered inside the Kit Kat Klub. Heavy handed as it may be, it forces us to confront whether enjoying escapism, however satiric, is ever justified in times of such political turmoil. The Nazis don't march into the film, they seep in, scene by scene, and by the time of the wonderful closing shot, we're almost wondering how it happened.

Which leads me back to my original point. In 1935 Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction wrote: "Fascism leads logically to an aestheticization of political life." Off the top of my head I can think of no better representative scene than that in the beer garden. A young boy, beautiful, with blonde hair and blue eyes, leads a chorus of the uplifting lyrical song "Tomorrow Belongs To Me." The camera slowly allows us to discover his Nazi uniform, immediately distasteful to us with the benefit of hindsight but completely innocent within the context of the other singers. Only Brian, Max and an old man who has seen it all before refrain from partaking.

"NOOOO! Don't tarnish us with politics, too! Please!!"

I can't help but think that old man should be unnecessary today in our culture of immediate information access. But really, all one has to do is take a piece of right-wing literature and to replace "Muslim" with "Jew" and "terrorist" with "banker/communist" and you're well on your way to being back in the late Weimar Republic. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Indeed, the word "terrorist" has undergone an interesting etymological change in recent years (it would be fairly clumsy to say since 9/11). Whereas it once meant, more or less, the process of intimidating a population or government by attacking non-combatants, it has now become almost exclusively a term for guerrilla warfare undertaken by Muslims. I have too often heard the term "Islamists" on television to attribute it to a mere Freudian slip for those who mean "Islamofascists;" it has now become an acceptable synonym in some sections of the media for Middle Eastern terrorists/insurgents. Among (I think it was) Wafa Sultan's claims were that Muslim/Christian violence and Muslim/Buddhist violence are both one-way streets, with the Muslims being the aggressors. This kind of wilful ignorance, that seems to have no knowledge of the Muslims who are beheaded in Indonesia or mutilated by the Lord's Resistance Army or who go missing every year whilst "in custody" in Burma, seems pervasive. I suppose all those Muslims in Srebrenica shot themselves to make the Christians look bad, too.

"Praise Jesus," said Ochola John, after being treated so nicely by the Christians.

Perhaps I am simply attacking easy targets. But it took what would in any other circumstances be called a war crime for many people to stop sympathising purely with Israel in the recent Gaza fighting. Even Gordon Brown called the deployment of white phosphorus on a UN humanitarian aid centre to be "indefensible." In my ongoing quest to be outraged, I am eager to read the response from Fox News. But whatever the swing in opinion, I doubt anything will be done. The aestheticization of politics was once done by uplifting music and patriotic propaganda, now it actively feeds stupidity with slogans and pervades the language like the virus once attempted by William S. Burroughs. According to Benjamin, the response from the left will be to politicise art. Expect my first book to be filled with subtexual vitriol.

Life in Salo

A casual glance at my previous blog entries reveals a disdain for the capitalist machine, the "liberal democracy," we find ourselves cogs in, so if I'm treading old ground forgive me. It has occurred to me again and again that perhaps the most distasteful operation of this mechanism is the system's pretence of arguing with itself. The difference between this and "totalitarian" states, it seems, is that in totalitarian states, the lack of democratic choice was blatantly transparent (and perhaps the fact our leaders have moved from the Kremlin to Wall Street). They never thought to set up something as insultingly partisan as Prime Minister's Questions to convince the public there were other options, for instance, but instead preferred childish scapegoatism of figures like Trotsky (famously parodied in George Orwell's Animal Farm) or Jews that were both bankers and communists. We have managed to convince ourselves that totalitarianism died and the liberal democracy triumphed at the end of the Cold War rather than seeing we are, as ever, living in the result of a non-impartial dialectic, the product of a patriarchal marriage. This reverse-nostalgia is potentially more damaging than it first appears.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's last film before his brutal murder, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, has been the subject of much discussion, debate, criticism, controversy and denouncement since its release in 1975. However, it has also long been hailed as a must-see film, and it absolutely is for any fan of film or philosophy (Roland Barthes, incidentally, collaborated on the screenplay, I believe). It is ostensibly an attack on fascism, specifically Mussolini's Republic of Salo, but we are led to believe it was banned (it was only compartively recently made available in the UK) for its obscenity rather than the fact it hits too close to home.

You may think that, by praising this film as I am about to do, I am being hypocritical. I did of course acrimoniously throw V For Vendetta's credentials as anti-establishment cinema out of the window because of how dated the establishment it was critiquing was. It is not a brave knight who thrusts his lance through the heart of a dead dragon. However, what sets Salo apart is that it's attack on Mussolini's dictatorship is actually a thinly veiled attack on what came afterwards in Italy: an embrace of capitalism. This is evidenced clearly by the shit-eating scenes, which Pasolini maintained was a metaphor for the consumer society's insatiable hunger for junk food. If the success of McDonald's has taught us anything, it's that if an authority tells you eating shit is a special treat, you will willingly buy and ingest massive amounts of it. The storytelling each evening by the three women, meant to titilate the captors and catives, seems obviously reminiscent of television (a medium which, unlike film, has never lived up to its potential and has utterly failed to retain artistic integrity, but that's a rant for another time). Also extremely relevant is the marriage scene, in which a boy and a girl are chosen for each other, wed and forced to copulate in front of the eyes of their libertine captors. When it is decided they are doing it wrong, the leaders forcibly insert themselves into the marriage bed. A more graphic summation of the recent Proposition 8 controversy in California could not be imagined.

The film then moves from clear fascism at the start (uniforms, marches, expulsion of religion) into the capitalist liberal democracy. The guards, who at the start were necessary to keep order, are seen in fewer and fewer number. Religion worms its way back in. The prisoners are praised, rewarded, allocated quantums of power. Just as we in the real world are encouraged to inform the government of benefit cheats, the captives save themselves from the wrath of the captors by snitching on each other's rulebreaking. The critic Geoff Andrew denigrated Salo and claimed it offered no insight into power or fascism because the captives willingly went along with whatever the libertines tried to force them to do; to me there could not be a more contradictory statement. What exactly do we do when reductions of our freedoms are proposed? We go out and vote for them. As Pasolini himself put it: "Fascism . . . had not been capable of even scratching the soul of the Italian people; this new fascism, armed with new means of communication and information . . . has not only scratched the soul of the Italian people but has lacerated, raped, and besmirched it forever.”

Life in Salo becomes easier and easier for the victims. By the time they're brutalised in the torture yard at the film's completion, there has not been a physical resistance to the system since a young girl desperately tried to break through a window at the film's start. Towards the end, the captives are willingly sleeping with the captors. They eat their own shit and joke about it. Any rebellion is quashed not because of the overwhelming physical presence of their captors, but because they turn against each other to cowardly re-establish the status quo. Physically, the libertines are weak, almost impotent and in smaller and smaller number. But now the guards are psychological ones and cannot be overcome, nor do the captives seem to wish to. If I believed in a fascist term like "human spirit," I would say that at this point it has been quashed as the human beings slip into servitude, little more than machines themselves. One is reminded of Baudrillard and Fukyama's passive embrace of "The End of History," (though I will say Baudrillard never seemed as fetishistic about this phenomena as Fukyama does) final stop to rebellions, idelogical clashes and revolutionary propositions of new world orders. If pigs could talk, like in Animal Farm, they'd be singing the praises of the farmer on the way to the slaughterhouse. We, it seems, are no different.

Beatrix Kiddo vs the Female Ubermensch

When Kill Bill was released in 2004, it was denigrated for lot of reasons. Some claimed it was too violent, others that it was a case of style of substance, yet more disliked the genre-splicing. Of course, it had its fans (I suppose I am one of them). The stylistic action and dialogue notwithstanding, many seem to agree with Tarantino himself when he described the project as a “feminist statement” and claimed it was all about “girl power.”

We’ve heard this shit before, of course. The Charlie’s Angels films too claimed to be about female empowerment regardless of the transparent appeal to adolescent boys. But unlike these degrading exercises in titillation dressed up as “feminist” films, the Kill Bill experience contains few if any instances of scantily-dressed females.

However, Kill Bill is still a deeply sexist film that reveals a lot about Tarantino’s mindset, beyond the usual blatantly obvious cult film geekery and foot fetish. The theme of male dominance in this film is absolutely overwhelming to the point where it’s almost impossible to believe any claim he made to the contrary. Yes, perhaps, on the surface, The Bride is physically dominant, able to dispatch hordes of male combatants with relative ease and is only in trouble in the first volume when she comes across another woman. However, she is only tough and empowered so long as she conforms to the male action hero archetype: a revenge-seeking, one-liner-dropping, martially-skilled, decisive, composed, pain-tolerant assassin. She first wears a yellow jump suit in order to be reminiscent of male action star Bruce Lee, and later adopts jeans, cowboy boots and a t-shirt.

Her other overwhelming character trait is an obsession with a man. It quite simply could not have been an accident that the centre of the film, the sun around which all the violent female planets revolve, is the eponymous Bill. Bill is the leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, the Bride’s targets and former peers, and it was he who selected their dangerous missions and presumably portioned out payment for. That he is perfectly analogous to a pimp is difficult to get around: women are (forcibly in the case of O’Ren Ishi, another supposedly “empowered” woman) indebted to him whilst he retains an air of cool, again archetypal with cultural depictions of pimps. Not, might I add, the first time Tarantino has stuck his oar into stereotypic black culture.

Tellingly, Bill's father figure, Esteban, actually is a pimp. Even more tellingly is that if the Bride is Uma Thurman's screen persona (that Thurman and Tarantino came up with the character together is suggested as much in interviews) then the supercool, comic-book referencing director-of-all-events Bill is so obviously Tarantino's. Where the power lies is never in doubt.

The film does not even continue its idea of only women being a threat to the Bride into the second volume. She is outsmarted and defeated in a humiliating manner by Bud, Bill’s slow-witted hick brother, before reminiscing about her defeat, humiliation and tutelage by her male mentor, Pai Mei (described indifferently as her “master,” ostensibly a reference to classic samurai/martial art revenge movies but functionally degrading). If the Deadly Vipers are the assassination equivalent of a brothel, Pai Mei is the captain of the ship the prostitutes are smuggled into the country on, and it is under him they learn how to please their predominantly male world. Pai Mei is utterly unbeatable in fair combat, and can only be overcome by the female treachery of Elle Driver, who poisons him. By the time we come to the climax, a thinly-veiled lament for father’s rights, the Bride is just about permitted to defeat a drunken, elderly and washed up Bill, and all pretences of feminism are in tatters. Her life, having up to now been defined entirely by Bill's actions, is now dedicated to raising Bill's child whilst Bill fades with Pai Mei into martial arts legend.

Kill Bill is not, though, an uncommon phenomenon in today’s society. At feminism’s start, it was required to define itself by male dominance in order to oppose it. But as we move closer and closer to a world of equal gender rights within the liberal democracy, the feminist movement has still not yet begun to define women by anything else than their male oppressors. There has, plainly speaking, never been a female Nietzsche. Nietzsche, you may remember, became famous for the statement “God is dead,” which was an avatar for the ubermensch, the next stage in man’s spiritual evolution. The ubermensch, as Nietzsche describes him in the seminal Thus Spoke Zarathustra (my first and still favourite work of philosophy), has overcome nihilism and is able to put together his own moral code completely undefined by any that had gone before or exists around him, specifically religion within the context. General cultural feminism cannot get to that stage of independent introversion and still clings to these male-defined female heroines such as the Bride. Most damning is the fact I hear a lot of women saying they came out of Kill Bill feeling strong and empowered and wanting to take up karate.

This may just be another case of Tarantino being a snake-oil salesman. But it may also be an intrinsic fault in the diamond that is feminist theory, a fault already noted by Third-Wave feminists or post-feminists who have been powerless to do anything about it. Even the attempted reclaiming of words like “bitch” and “whore” suggested by the likes of Inga Muscio has its origins in a male-defined worldview. Like in Kill Bill, women are still victims desperately trying to reassert control over their world, rather than true adventurers for whom the world is their birthright. Perhaps the first novel to concentrate on the plight of women was Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the eponymous heroine of which is born not under a male thumb but in Newgate prison, the closest thing 18th century England had to limbo. Whilst her career is then based around the exploitation of men through sexual pragmatism and ethical survivalism, it’s worth remembering her voidesque starting point is somewhere she desperately doesn’t want to visit again, and thus being back at the beginning is the most she has to lose. There’s an attitude there that should be considered. Women should not consider themselves to be born from the head of Zeus but anywhere they damn please.

The rise and fall and rise and fall of Liverpool

British cinema has never been known for paying due respect to its home grown talent in the manner of, say, its French counterpart, but the extent to which Terence Davies has been maligned and forgotten about is more than just a little bit shocking. After testing the waters with his fondly thought of Robert Tucker trilogy in the seventies and early eighties, Davies exploded onto a nearly non-existent independent British scene with Distant Voices, Still Lives, a film that would be all but consigned to the dustbin of history were it not for the recently revived British Film Institute. Critical acclaim followed, the cheques didn’t, and soon the former dried up, too: The House of Mirth and The Neon Bible, Davies’ attempted comebacks, were met with derision and indifference.

Now Davies returns once more, to cinema and to his early themes of regional identity and homosexuality, with Of Time And The City. Functionally, Of Time and the City is a collection of documentary and news footage about Liverpool through the ages book-ended by a few cityscopes Davies has recently shot himself, a obvious departure from his narrative films. It’s fascinating that Davies, who has covered Liverpool so often in his works, would choose this as a format to pay tribute to his home town, and a cynic might read it as an admission that Davies no longer believes he possesses the deep filmic understanding and masterful cinematic hand required to live up to his previous opera. However, this is no easy way out (or easy way back in) Davies has attempted, no cobbling together of old newsreels set to self-congratulatory narration and snobbish music. Somehow, he has managed to assemble the clips into a portrait of his vision of an evolving and self-renewing place, in the documentary style of Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain. We follow the development of Davies and Liverpool through the desperation of the 40s and 50s, the hopeful innocence of the 60s, the working class nightmare of the 70s and 80s to the revitalised city of today, and you feel nothing has been left unsaid. This is a work that speaks for generations, and yet seems deeply personal.

If it is a visual poem, it is Larkinesque, and an angry one at times. Davies unsurprisingly turns his witty vitriol (witriol? One to remember) on the Catholic Church ("Pope Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and Clitoris the Umpteenth"), the monarchy ("the Betty Windsor Show") and the Thatcherite boot delivered to the working classes, but also attacks more unconventional targets. He speaks disparagingly about the rise of The Beatles, which to him represented the death of subtle songwriting (here I agree with him), and even admits he feels nostalgic for the Liverpool prior to its renovation. The illogic of this pining for times gone by is rendered impotent by a director so adept at capturing and reviving ephemera as Davies is, and we feel his opinions as though they are our own. His non-partisan integrity on these issues in the midst of the self-congratulatory Capital of Culture celebrations is nothing short of admirable. We have Sibelius, Bruckner, Mahler and The Hollies in place of John, Paul, George and Ringo, and instead of Patten, Henri and McGough, Davies quotes Marlowe, Houseman, Raleigh, Joyce, Shelley and Eliot. In a city that has long been so insular, defining itself by itself, this knitting of Scouse values and memories with universal writers and artists is deliciously refreshing.

At the tail end of a year where Liverpool has looked towards the future whilst Britain teeters on the precipice, this film was sorely needed, not just to document times that would have been more forgotten than Davies himself had become (perhaps this is why he feels such an affinity with pasttimes like going to New Brighton for a fun afternoon), but to reiterate the warning whispered by Distant Voices: the good times don’t last. But at least in the 80s, Liverpool was in no danger of forgetting itself. Can we still say that today? Hopefully, if this is Davies’ foot in the door rather than his career eulogy, yes. Technically brilliant, emotionally moving, Of Time and the City is required viewing for Liverpudlians, historians, political theorists, poets, philosophers and film fans alike.

Every Stone Left Unturned

I have been able to take time out of my lazy schedule to go to the cinema recently, which is just as well considering the amount of films that have been vying for my attention. Alexandra, Burn After Reading, Quantum of Solace... all three of these heavyweights were barely pushed aside by W., but were all massacred by Of Time And The City, the two I elected to see.

W. is empty, lazy entertainment. It has its strengths, most notably the performances of almost every actor in the film, most notably Toby Jones (Karl Rove), Jeffrey Wright (Colin Powell) and Brolin himself, but Oliver Stone permits nobody to rise above the level of caricature. Thandie Newton is certainly ugly enough to be Condoleeza Rice, but instead plays Bush’s PA, curiously going by the same name, and she might as well not be there. Ellen Burstyn is completely wasted on Barbara Bush. Richard Dreyfuss (Dick Cheney) and Scott Glenn (Donald Rumsfeld) are devious pantomime villains. And Ioan Gruffudd’s 20 second cameo as Tony Blair is borderline insulting. Whereas in real life, Blair was publically calling for “a long-overdue appointment” with Saddam Hussein as early as 1998 following the Nato-assisted fall of Slobodan Milosevic, in Stone’s world he is a weak English stereotype swiftly bullied into going along with the 2003 invasion (contrasted with the heroic refusals of Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin, the latter being made reference to in a scatological joke by the childish, tantrum throwing Bush) presumably after a brief stint playing quarterback for the London Silly Nannies. Truly, the only characters that escape with any dignity intact are Laura Welch (an uninspired Elizabeth banks) and Powell, although since both are defecated upon by their peers this may seem a contentious statement.

And what of Dubya himself? As noted by several other reviewers, here Stone has taken the easy way out. Instead of portraying him as a complex, intelligent individual who made the wrong choices for good or for bad, Stone has him pencilled in as the redneck buffoon he played in public. As hard as Brolin has worked to overcome his lack of immediate similarity with the President, all Stone’s graft has already been done by the real life Bush. This biopic is fun, but it is neither insightful nor realistic. Some vague idea that it was Bush’s Congressional District defeat to Kent Hance that inflamed his desire to not be “out-Christianed and out-Texaned” again may seem like a revelation to some, but this was a paraphrasing of the real-life Bush anyway. And that’s really where the film finds itself: educating to people who don’t follow politics, unimportant to those that do, and uninspiring for film aficionados. There are genuinely funny moments (“Wait, guys, I think we’ve missed the side road,” says Bush to his cabinet as they walk around the grounds to the Robin Hood theme, preparing for war) but this is a subject that needs to be tackled by a serious director, not the lazy, confused one Stone is.

A review of Of Time And The City is pending.

Distant Voices, Still Lives

It's wonderful when you discover a cult classic for the first time. You ache for its undeserved low-profile, yet revel in the fact it feels so much more personal and intimate for it. Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1986) is one of those films I loved so much I had to show it to my friends; others, like Demoni (Lamberto Bava, 1985) or Salome's Last Dance (Ken Russell, 1988) I had to more or less keep to myself (anyone who's seen the latter particularly will probably know why).

I am unsure under which category Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davis, 1988) falls. Even compared to some other examples of cult films I've given on this blog, this is one that really fell off the face of the earth. For years I couldn't even acquire a second hand copy on VHS; really, "golddust" doesn't quite cover it. Thankfully, those lovely appreciative people at the British Film Institute have finally brought the film to DVD, complete with a booklet, interviews with the director, a theatrical trailer and so forth. The grauniad, of course, jumped on the bandwagon and now the film is finally getting some recogntion after years wandering movie wilderness, perhaps occasionally bumping into Hurlements en faveur de Sade or French Dressing.

But is it any good?

Yes, absolutely. In fact, I cannot think of a better film to come from these so humble Isles.

Distant Voices, Still Lives ostensibly chronicles personal memories of Davies' own working class family through the '40s and '50s, but truly this is a universal film. From the very first shot we know our perspective is in the hands of an extremely competent director, and the content of the film does not disappoint the formalism. Though like Angela's Ashes (Alan Parker, 1999) it portrays a class defecated upon by circumstances beyond their control, it isn't interested in whining, nor shocking the upper classes into action or shaming a government through propaganda like countless other films I could mention, but instead deals in facts presented naked, with a brutal honesty that sends up the chosen microcosm as just as faulted morally as their situation.

It isn't simply a film about class, but also gender. The women in the film are truly fascinating. Note the silence of the mother, the wavering sentimentality of the daughters, the headstrong bravado of the friend: all crumbling rocks against which the domineering men crash, (The males are, with a few exceptions, bastards) from Pete Postlethwaite's chilling and abusive patriarch to Michael Starke's (Sinbad~!) slothful waster of a husband.

And that's the most frightening thing about the film. This isn't simply a generation experiencing hard times, but a self-renewing purgatory to test Sisyphus. As children the women can't understand why their loving mother has married such a bullying scumbag, as adults they marry into the same breed. And they know it, too. The charcters' only release is song, which they crave like junkies seek heroin, singing to release themselves from the threat of complete mental breakdown. It is in this way that the film is the purest of musicals, using song not merely to entertain or as a stylistic choice, but to uncover truths about the world.














Of course, the stifling and claustrophobic social boundaries that families like the Davises suffered would have been broken down somewhat by the 60s and the advent of free love, social rebellion, and The Beatles, but this is still ten years away for the film's characters and seems like so much longer. And as Davis, having made the film in the 1980s, realises, it would be his hellish conservative vision of Liverpool that returned in a new form. If this makes the film sound like a depressing experience, fear not. Between the intelligent, often beautiful camerawork, urban-poetic characterisation, music and several key performances (Debi Jones as Mickie is an absolute treat), this film is wholly enjoyable. It also benefits hugely from an intellectual deep focus: the director is as conscious of the physical context of his film as he is the political and emotional, and therefore several presents in store for anyone who knows anything about the era of 40s and 50s Liverpool, including cameos from long forgotten favourite drinks from a wartime pub and The Futurist.

It's rare you get a film that makes you laugh through tears it's induced, but this is one of them, a brave, honest, intelligent, thoroughly interesting masterpiece from almost every angle.

The best film of the 2000s is a David Lynch film

...And it isn't Mulholland Drive.

As I alluded to in my last entry, people rarely like being taken out of their comfort zones. In a rather unfortunate twist of fate, there are few things I enjoy more, but it rarely happens. I've not seen nearly enough films to be desensitised, of course, but the films that are accepted into the general zeitgeist as "great films" are hardly ever brave enough. I'm not merely talking about the general Oscar fodder, like Crash, Brokeback Mountain, There Will Be Blood, the latest Clint Eastwood film, etc., but even the also-rans that come up when the surface is scratched. The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford is currently being held up by a small but loud minority as an all-time classic Western, and even, I've heard, a deep and philosophical masterpiece that was simply too ambitious to be mentioned in the Academy Awards. Yes, a Brad Pitt film is apparently too cult-y for the status quo. It's like Fight Club all over again.

This isn't snobbery. I was, after all, a big fan of No Country For Old Men. I'm not going to pretend, however, it was particularly groundbreaking. The problem is that even the aforementioned reactionaries still pull for films that have standard (albeit wandering) narratives and beautiful cinematography. Occasionally there might be a "great" Hollywood performance to buck up its chances. The main mistake is defining a film by the Oscars it did or didn't win.

I don't think even David Lynch, the supposed king of cult, understands this. He after all campaigned two years ago for Laura Dern's Academy credentials, recalling to mind Robert Rodriguez' championing of Frank Miller and acrimonious departure from the Director's Guild. Although I have never been a huge fan of Lynch, I would be sad to see him fall into the Tarantino Club for sidelined directors who appeal to teenagers angry at an unseen, disembodied force tentatively labelled as "the Establishment." (if he hasn't already.)

Lynch's film Mulholland Drive is not quite in the Assassination of Jesse James... category, owing to the fact it is a vastly superior work, but the murmurings of discontent still bubbled to the surface when Lynch failed to win Best Director and had to settle for a round of Golden Globes. You've heard most of the acclaim, I'm sure: it's the best film of the 2000s, it's the film Lynch has been working towards his whole life, etc. Even Roger Ebert, who was a vehement critic of the director's earlier efforts, praised it for being a Lynch film that didn't "shatter the test tubes."

For me, the fact it didn't is why it isn't Lynch's crowning achievement. Like Blue Velvet, a work that seems to be unanimously accepted as Lynch's other masterwork, it is fascinating in parts and cherishable, but doesn't push the envelope as much as I have now been convinced Lynch can.

By contrast, no test tube could ever hope to contain Inland Empire. The film is in parts beautiful, thought-provoking, embracing, alienating, funny and genuinely terrifying. It never limits itself to anyone else's philosophy, never sells itself short through references. One is reminded of Felini's 8½, another film that refused to compromise or bend to what had gone before, but with respect to the Italian master, even that comparison does not do justice to how far Lynch has allowed himself to go. All conventions are shunned, all pretentions of coherent storytelling are cruelly torn down to make way for a psychological rollercoaster.

The character listed in the credits as The Phantom is perhaps the epitome of this. He haunts the film (truly I would love to draw lines between Dern's character's world, her subconsciousness and the film-within-the-film just to organise my thoughts, but this would be doing a disservice to Lynch's anarchaic blending that has rendered such concepts as metafiction irrelevant until they adapt to the film and begin to take on new meanings), silently, without introduction or narrative explanation. The theme, and the reactions of the characters, are the only elements that acknowledge him as a threat, and therefore so do we. His final appearance is the pinnacle of shocks in cinema, too unconscious and unreasonable a fright to be made sense of by a mammal reliant on his reasoning and functioning frontal lobe.

I want to tell you more, but truly this is the most Brechtian and Lynchian of films in the sense that it requires you to bring more of yourself to the table than any of its predecessors. It's one of about three films that has ever taken me outside of my comfort zone, and the first while I've been an adult. It is only the second film (after Tarkovsky's The Mirror) that I have felt deserves to share György Lukács "criticism" of Joyce's Ulysses as an ultimate example of borgeois decadence.

Unfortunately, it's seemingly been shunned in every which way. A book I own, called The 1001 Films To See Before You Die, offers Little Miss Sunshine, The Prestige, Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men, The Last King of Scotland, Borat, Babel, The Queen, Apocalypto and The Departed as better uses of your time from the same year. One cannot help but wonder, though, whether Vertigo would have been listed had the book been compiled in 1958. The truth is that whatever popular opinion change now, it is guaranteed to change in the future, and there is perhaps no more fickle area of criticism than film (does anyone remember when There Will Be Blood was being offered up not only as the film of the year, but a classic superior even to Citizen Kane or The Godfather?). I am confident that in 20 years Inland Empire will be accepted as the cinematic landmark it so deserves to be, rather than the brave folly it is perceived as now. Hey, maybe even Tarr's Satantango is only 10 years short of that particular club membership.

29/11/08 revision: A Freudian slip on my part, as I misattributed a criticism of Ulysses to Terry Eagleton rather than György Lukács

V For Vendetta and The Establishment

Recently I was involved in a discussion about anti-establishment films, and which films sought to subvert the order in the most admirably artistic way. Admittedly, there were some great suggestions. Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971) was brought up. If... (Lindsey Anderson, 1968). Guy Debord's films, too. Perhaps the most obscure was a Turkish film called Yol (Yılmaz Güney and Şerif Gören, 1982), a cruel indictment of the post-1980 coup Turkish prison system written by Güney whilst he himself was jailed (an "assimilated Kurd," he later escaped and finished the film in Switzerland). I had never heard of the film before, but as a supporter of a united Kurdistan, it definitely appeals.

There were, too, some ridiculous suggestions. Yes, V For Vendetta was brought up. I'm treading old ground here, but bear with me. It's vaguely terrifying that a film made by a major studio can today be seen as anti-establishment, but actually terrifying that it is in this case one so pro-establishment as this, a capitalist parable in which social liberation is withheld by a tangible political force and won, not by violence, but by docile submission. I need not remind you of what the revolting proles do when they amass in London, but I will anyway: they stand quietly transfixed by fireworks. Ironic, because this is exactly what the audience do, before going away contented by what they have seen rather than outraged at the real life government.

This is typical of a society that has been Prozaced to the point where "Orwellian" is a cliche term that clatters, useless and hollow on the ground, when someone spies a speed camera coming off the motorway. It seems that the imagination of the average cinema-goer only stretches as far as to see the symbols of V For Vendetta (the raised fists in the rain, victims dragged away in the night, the shaved heads of the prisoners, the giant red-and-black icons of fascism) as genuine subversive social criticism rather than cardboard cut-out relics of an early 20th century fear that can no longer hurt us. True irony rang unknowingly in the voices of the film's defenders as they criticised us for being elitist.

Perhaps this mirrors the political apathy in Britain, which can be laid square at the door of New Labour. Some in the 1970s and 80s, outraged at how far the UK could be privatised by Thatcher's Conservatives, foresaw political revolution. Surely this strike at the membrane of the welfare state could only result in a vicious recoil?

These people were hopelessly optimistic, and the government was allowed to continue castrating the unions and placing basic human needs such as gas in the hands of cynical corporations until, quite simply, nobody cared any more. When the Tories could no longer be controversial idealogically, they slipped into sleaze and irrelevance, to be replaced in the 90s by a cleaner, rebranded version of themselves: the Labour Party. Once a bastion of the British left-wing, Labour simply kept privitised Britain ticking over the way Thatcherites had intended. Again, I recall celebration by naive old socialists eleven years ago: if the Tories had not been overthrown, at least they had been replaced by a new, sensible centralist party. But what have been their most controversial and newsworthy policies? Tony Blair's legacy is to be found far from home, all the way in the Middle East, whilst a bill to reduce freedom of speech was not just a sideline issue but actually supported by hordes of university students who campaigned outside the Old Bailey for Nick Griffin to be imprisoned for speaking his mind more or less in private.

The irony is that the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, have become so indistinguishable that the battle between them is no longer fought on ideology but on image. Just as Labour defeated Tory in 1997 due to the latter's sleazy image, David Cameron's party is poised to take over from Labour because of clever rebranding. No Conservative voter I have talked to has been able to name ten polices of theirs that differ from Labour's. After the credit crunch, the fall of the housing market, the loss of personal data and several other high-profile cock-ups by Labour, the general consensus among political commentators is that the Tories are going to win not on their own merits but simply because they aren't Labour. This is seen as the pinnacle of political stagnation. The truth is far more horrfying: the truth is that they are going to win because they are Labour, a new, shiner Labour, just as Blair's Labour was a new, shiny Conservative Party. The same fortnight tired Gordon Brown unwisely compared himself to Heathcliffe, David Cameron began his campaign against fat and poor people and a Tory front bencher used the word "nigger" in the House of Lords, and, a month or two later, one of Cameron's favourite think tanks came to the conclusion that Northern English cities such as Newcastle and Liverpool, which have successfully undergone major refurbishment in the past few years, were beyond hope and should be abandoned altogether. But which of these four stories made the front pages? Yep, the Heathcliffe comparison.

There is an opportunity for change, however. The fastest growing party in the UK resembles neither of the Big Two. It is the British National Party, once a stalwart of the National Front of the 1980s that believed Thatcher's Conservatives had the right idea but weren't nearly right-wing enough. To give you an insight into what they stand for, in Stoke, one of their high-ranking bullies has become a martyr for their cause after pushing his Muslim next door neighbour too far (reports indicate a campaign of racial abuse years long, including Mr Khan's son being beaten into unconsciousness) and being stabbed in response.

A return to Gladstonian liberalism now seems impossible. We've become so anaethetised politically and artistically that borderline fascism is now waiting in the wings to strike. This is the ultimate sad irony that escapes those that champion partisan wankery like V For Vendetta as a defender of our right to be subversive and to think and live outside the box.