Café de Flore (Jean-Marc Vallée, Canada/France, 2011)

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged and plenty have I seen in the last few months about which I could have blogged. But time being what it is, I’ve not had chance.

Maybe Café de Flore is not the best film I have seen in the last few months, but it has provoked my thoughts in such a fashion that I feel compelled to put something online about it.

Given that there is plenty to say, I’ll try to limit myself to only 2,000 words. This will make things more palatable for readers, too.

I must confess being behind on Vallée’s films; I know of them, but I’ve not seen them, so this won’t be an analysis of his wider work, just what is on offer in this film.

Nonetheless, Café de Flore tells the story of a deejay, Antoine (Kevin Parent), who is in a relationship in contemporary Montreal with the love of his life, Carole (Hélène Florent), with whom he has two beautiful daughters. All is well until Antoine meets and falls in love with Rose (Evelyne Brochu), seemingly a younger, blonder model than Carole.

At the same time, we are also presented with the story of Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis) and her Down syndrome son, Laurent (Marin Perrier), who live in Paris in 1969 and on into the 1970s.

The two stories intercut each other, but we are not sure what the link is between them until relatively late on in the film. Here are some spoilers (because I don’t see how I can write a cogent analysis of this or any film without discussing fully what happens): it turns out that Antoine and Rose are the reincarnation of Laurent and the love of his life, fellow Down sufferer Véronique (Alice Dubois). Furthermore, Carole, who discovers this past through a medium (Emmanuelle Beaugrand-Champagne), is the reincarnation of Jacqueline, who killed herself, Laurent and Véronique in a car crash because she could not stand the thought of her son loving someone else more than her (or so it would seem, anyway).

Having learnt of this past, Carole finally decides to ‘get over’ Antoine and to accept his relationship with Rose. Indeed, having given them her blessing, she endorses their marriage and everything seems to return to normal. Until, right at the film’s climax, an aeroplane flying high in the sky – and presumably carrying Antoine whom we see regularly flying around the world to go deejay in London, Barcelona, etc – explodes.

In view of these spoilers, one might be drawn to one or both of two conclusions. The first is that the film plays out as a boy’s fantasy: basically, the plot conspires to tell the man that dumping his wife of 20 years and the mother of his children is fine and that going after the sassier blonde chick is justified and justifiable. This is not meant as a defense of old-fashioned death do us part values; it just means that men can take the women they want and women will forgive them.

The second reading might be that the film is hokum; reincarnation and the like makes of this film something akin to an artsy version of The Lake House (Alejandro Agresti, USA/Australia, 2006). Indeed, the latter reading might in particular explain the relatively luke warm reception that the film has received.

However, I think that even though these readings are valid, Café de Flore has some more interesting things to say than these, particularly about cinema itself and, I shall tentatively suggest, about Québec today.

Café de Flore is choc full of photographs. We see many of them in detail and at one point, Antoine tells his psychiatrist (Michel Laperrière) that he has spotted consistent themes in them. In many there are bottles of gin, which remind him of his father. And in others there is Carole. Indeed, in so many photos is Carole that even Rose comments that she finds it uncomfortable being in the house of Antoine’s parents, because Carole is everywhere to be seen there, too.

I’m going to argue that Café de Flore presents an eloquent contemplation of the way in which images, both still and moving, play a key role in identity formation and memory. What do I mean by this? I mean that it is impossible today to remember whether that photo we know of ourselves when young was something one truly remembers, or whether we really only remember the photograph. Photographs (and home movies) thus function as tools for outsourcing memory from the human brain; we do not actually need to remember events, since the images are there for us to store memories outwith our brain itself. As such, if our memories might actually be photographs of events that we really have forgotten, then photographs shape our memory, a process that in turn shapes our sense of self, our sense of personal experience, our sense of memory, our sense of identity.

In and of itself, this is not necessarily any great revelation. But what is excellent is the way in which Vallée interweaves images with sounds, too. As a deejay, Antoine is emblematic of today. Music triggers memories in a less direct way than photographs. I see a photo of me, I remember something about myself that is embodied within the photograph by my physical presence. I listen to a song and invest music with my memories, then something different is happening; I am not ‘in’ the song as I am in the photograph, but the song feels as much me as any photograph ever could (hence Antoine describing the music of – I think – Sigur Ros as expressing him perfectly).

Let us pause for a second on Antoine as deejay, then. With no disrespect intended to the great levels of creativity that go into deejaying (I used to deejay, relatively poorly, as a student entz rep and in the odd nightclub and wedding type thing, so I know that there is a fair amount of skill to it), I would nonetheless contend that a deejay is not the creator of music. Rather, as Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan) points out in Michael Winterbottom’s magnificent 24 Hour Party People (UK, 2002), the deejay is a medium. The deejay channels music by other people and reworks it in such a way that what emerges is not just a list of work by other people but something that is by and of the deejay him/herself.

In other words, the deejay makes music his or her ‘own’ in the same way that we perhaps all make music our own because the intense meaningfulness that songs can have personally to us means that they, like photographs, play a key role in helping us to construct our sense of identity.

(It is for this reason that I maintain that Inception (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2010) is a stylish but ultimately silly film, because it refuses to acknowledge that inception – the planting of others’ ideas in our heads – is not just an everyday occurence, but that perhaps there is no sense of self at all without such processes taking place the whole time. If willingly I hear a song and appropriate it as if it expressed my life, then I don’t see why all the fuss – except for the benefit of making a (logically inconsistent) action film – about putting an idea in someone’s head…)

What is true of music, then, is also true of films. That is, many humans feel as though they have achieved something not when they have a unique moment in their life, but precisely when their life conforms most to a film, an image or a song that they have seen. Check out any number of Facebook profile photos, including my own, and you will see great testimony to this: we present ourselves as we wish to be seen, not as we are. And how we wish to be seen is somehow as cinematic. We want, in this sense, to become light. Everything is a performance, of sorts. We are intensely aware of mediation, then. For the medium is the message.

Café de Flore weaves together a rich soundtrack of Sigur Ros, Pink Floyd, the Cure, various versions of the song from which the film takes its title, and much more. If the film mixes and remixes music, when it comes to images it is not that the movie consciously drops in visual references to other films. Such references may be there, but I did not spot them, and Vallée seems not to do cap-doffing homages as does, per exemplum, Quentin Tarantino.

However, Café de Flore does seem to suggest that film, like music, plays a role in the construction of self – and this is most visible in the Paris subplot involving the Down children.

While the use of a medium to reveal the characters’ past lives might be hokum – if you believe the story as one hundred per cent true – it is nonetheless canny and knowing. Not only does this film offer an intense awareness of media of all sorts (including the psychic medium here), but it also explains to what sense our lives are constructed around fantasy versions of ourselves, moments in music, cinematic moments of becoming light and so on. A logical extension of this is perhaps the way in which Carole uses the story of Jacqueline, Laurent and Véronique to make sense of her own life. In other words, the fantasy might be ‘false’ if we feel that we must cling to some strict binary opposition between true and false. But it is true enough for Carole, since it helps her to live in the contemporary world. And Vallée’s understanding of that contemporary world is that we are as much constructs of our fantasies and of music and fiction as we are products of a fleshworld that has a material (and thereby empirically more convincing?) existence.

That the images set in 1960s and 1970s Paris are shot as if filmed at the time, the grain of which stands in contrast to the cleanness of the contemporary images of Montreal, London, Barcelona, etc – suggests this to be true. That is, Paris is made not to look like Paris in the 1960s, or not uniquely like Paris in the 1960s. Rather, it is made to look like images of Paris from the 1960s. That Paris, then, is not necessarily real. It could be a constructed fantasy. Indeed, before we definitively do dismiss this strand of the plot as hokum, we should make clear that the medium tells Carole’s sceptical friend Amélie (Evelyne de la Chenelière) that she cannot tell Carole the whole of Jacqueline’s story because she (Carole) will not let her. That is, the medium seems to say here that she only tells Carole what she wants/needs to hear, that she only really reflects back to Carole what it is that Carole is herself saying. As such, the Paris episode could be a pure fantasy, but it makes no difference: in a world where we use and need fantasies in order to exist, the previously accepted dividing line between fantasy and reality is definitively eroded.

In this way, the medium is the parallel of Antoine’s own shrink: he is a sounding board for Antoine to express all that is within him, a similar medium of sorts who can help Antoine to rework his fantasies and experiences in such a way that they make sense. As if the act of making sense of the world required fantastical elements. As if, like the family that gathers at New Year’s parties and offers a prayer to God despite never going to Mass or even believing in God (as Antoine tells us is the case), we need fantasies just to give everything a sense, or a semblance, of order.

What really is most interesting about Café de Flore, though, is the way in which it works this conception of the blend of fantasy and reality into the form of the film itself. This is not just a question of digital retouching of images, such that a contemporary film can be made to look like an old 16mm so successfully that we cannot tell a ‘real’ old film from a fake one. Rather, this is the way in which the film jumps back and forth across time frames; unannounced Café de Flore will move back and forth in space and time, linked by a visual or aural motif that suggests not causality between past and present, but correspondence.

Furthermore, we will often see something like an image of Antoine, then cut to an image of his youth, only to then realise or at the very least ask whether this is Carole’s memory of events, not Antoine’s, because we then cut to her and not back to Antoine.

This latter type of jump not only across time but also between people remembering happens regularly. What is more, various flashback scenes feature snippets of conversation – between parents, between children – that none of the main characters (whom we otherwise would assume to be the person remembering these events) could possibly have remembered, since they were not there. Not only does this suggest the way in which we misremember perhaps precisely in order to remember (memory is predicated on an inability to remember correctly, should there even be such a thing as ‘correctness’ when it comes to memory, and perhaps even when it comes to direct perception itself). But it also suggests our interlinked nature.

That is, if I am made up of music by Robert “The Cure” Smith (especially, tellingly, the song ‘Pictures of You’), and I am also made up of photographs and of films, then perhaps I am also made up of others’ testimonies and experiences. Indeed, who has not, be that out of intention to pass them off as one’s own, or simply for the sake of convenience as one realises that the memory recalled is not in fact one’s own, passed off other people’s stories and memories as if they were their own? Similarly, who has not told themselves that they are so good at lying because what they do is actually to believe their lies such that they are not lies anymore? As such, I am not entirely separable from other people; I am not the island-like individual that sometimes we try to pretend we are (capitalism prides itself on the socialisation (natch) of the myth of the impenetrable individual – hence the hokum of Inception). Instead, I am and perhaps can only exist in relation. I would not even have a sense of self were it not for others. So in some senses, how much hokum is a myth of reincarnation? If in fact I only exist in relation, then in some senses I am only an incarnation of others, as if incarnation itself required others (which it does through the fact of parents, but I also mean this on a more abstract level).

As such, riffing from one person’s memory to another’s as if there were no difference between the two is perhaps not just confusing for a viewer to watch (and something that drives Café de Flore in the direction of ‘artsiness’ alluded to above). But it also reflects a particular and perhaps true conception of identity itself: that it is shared, as are memories, and that perhaps not only do memories evolve through interactions and exchanges with others, but that in the same process so do our very identities change, evolve and become. Expressive editing thus becomes a form of realism.

What is best about Café de Flore, though, is its insistence on tiny details and what I shall call feedback. As I watched the film, I began to see gin bottles cropping up around the place (and not just in the still images where Antoine points them out), as well as passers by in the film’s present that I think, or at least wondered, were played by the actors from the film’s past (although in a world in which we cannot easily tell each other apart, perhaps nor can we easily tell different moments in time apart, because the past influences the present, and the present influences our understanding of the past, even if to propose that the present directly influences the past itself might overstep the mark for many because it is utterly unprovable – unless we contend that there is no past, only our malleable understandings thereof, which only ever exist in the present).

The film makes this most clear by the pentagrams that begin to crop up repeatedly – in tattoos, on the floor at the bottom of Jacqueline’s staircase, etc. It is not that pentagrams are important per se (maybe they are, but I don’t think they have to be). Rather, what is important is that the elements of the visual field that we typically think of as unimportant in fact play a key role in shaping our understanding of the world. That is, we privilege many elements of our visual field in terms of what consciously we perceive; we tend to concentrate on human figures, movement, and other elements that might be prey, predator or mate. But in fact the details uphold this perception, perhaps even shape it, such that we see most when we see as ‘holistically’ as possible.

This is what I mean by feedback: we do not just act upon our environment, but our environment also acts upon us.

Café de Flore ends with a slow track and zoom into a photo of Carole and Antoine in front of a photo of Paris, in which we finally see the blurred figures of Jacqueline, Laurent and Véronique, whom we see waving at Paris’ bateaux mouches at a couple of points in the film (replete with heavy flash bulbs from cameras, as if this were their ‘becoming light’ – in the city of lights). They are a detail taken in a photo by Antoine’s parents on a trip to Paris in their youth.

And yet this tiny detail, out of focus and so easy to miss, is intimately connected with the present. That Jacqueline, Laurent and Véronique are ‘in’ the photo therefore suggests a different form of feedback. Not only do photographs function as an externalisation of our sense of self. But the contents of those photographs also speak, or feed, back to us; they come from ‘out of’ the photograph and modify how it is that we understand ourselves and the world. Photographs are not ‘dead’ things, but they have a persistence, a strange life of their own, one that we may not even see consciously, unless a further medium allows us to bring that consciously to mind.

Ultimately, Café de Flore might be Antoine’s fantasy of redemption in the face of his guilt over leaving Carole, a fantasy acted out in his dying moments before his plane explodes. Inspired by the Down syndrome kids who have the pentagram tattoos and whom he sees while walking to his plane at the airport, they inform his desire for Carole to forgive him as he faces death. Maybe, then, Antoine needs the story of reincarnation as much as Carole does to survive, or rather in Antoine’s case, to face death. Antoine imagines himself as the reincarnation of Laurent in order to be given a paradoxical sense of identity at the moment of the end of his identity, that is at the moment of death. This fantasy allows Antoine to make the literal returning to the universe – the dispersal of one’s constituent atoms over the Earth’s entire terrain – bearable, a positive experience justified by an understanding that we are all already interlinked and ‘one’ anyway, something we would understand better if we were not so inceived with this myth of individuality…

As such, filming the plane’s destruction in vast long shot is telling. Not only does its movement towards a huge and burning sun suggest the desire to become light (and an Icarean sense of doom in attempting to become light?), but it also means that Antoine is at the last a tiny speck in a massive universe. He is, indeed, simply part of the universe’s mega-mechanics. And it is as if the film’s ecological philosophy – whereby we are interconnected, inseparable, and ‘one’ – were the latest myth that humanity is inventing in order to justify its own extinction. The myth that will allow us to go gently into that good night, because we will realise ultimately that there are greater forces at work than human will.

Café de Flore, then, seems something of a philosophical film, no matter how lightly one takes its storyline, which could indeed be construed as daft if you so wished to view the film that way. That philosophy could be a political philosophy. By this I mean to say that Café de Flore could also be read as an allegory of the relationship between Québec and France, as Québec’s present, in Antoine and Rose, faces its French past, perhaps embodied in Carole, but certainly in Jacqueline (that French identity being as real to these Québecois as a song, as if Vanessa Paradis’ history as a singer were not just accidental casting). In this reading, which is imprecise and tentative (apologies), Québec functions as some sort of strange, monstrous offspring (problematically rendered in the figure of the Down child), but whose love is pure and who is reincarnated in the present and who must be forgiven in order to continue, even if this means a rejection of the old. Perhaps I should pause there; the film seems pregnant with some sort of allegorical meaning, but perhaps I am not the person to deliver it.

On a final note, though, I’ll briefly say that Café de Flore is an odd bedfellow with another film out in the UK now, Jeff, Who Lives at Home (Jay and Mark Duplass, USA, 2011). Without going into details and at the risk of referring to the film in such a way that I alienate those who have not seen it, the new Duplass movie has a similar fascination with the notions of fate and destiny, and to a lesser extent with identity. The idea that there might be patterns in the world that we do not immediately recognise, but which we can if we are attentive enough. I was struck in particular how Café de Flore features a prominent Kevin in the cast (Kevin Parent as Antoine), since in Jeff…, Jeff himself (Jason Segel) follows anyone and everyone called Kevin having believed that he received a sign (significantly from the medium of the television) earlier in the day on which the film’s story takes place.

Maybe seeing Jeff… led me cosmically to see Café de Flore… Because everything is connected. Because this is how we understand the world to work if we try to see whole. To see holy.

Before I take this blog in the direction of too much hokum, though, I should call it a day. While Jeff… shows the usual Duplass charm and involves some pretty amusing moments, it is Café de Flore that seems the more sophisticated of the two.

Brief thoughts on Q.I.: XL (broadcast 6 April 2012) – or why educated British people despise thinking, working class people

For those who do not know, Q.I. is a television celebrity panel quiz show in the UK hosted by Stephen Fry. It involves Fry asking questions about all manner of topics, the answers to which often seem obvious – because mythology offers us falsehoods as truths – but which always are not.

So Fry will ask something like “What was Gandhi’s first name?” and if one of the panelists (typically a man called Alan Davies) say “Mahatma” (in a specific episode, Alan Davies in fact proposes “Randy” as Gandhi’s first name), then he is docked some points (there may be a formula for how many, but it is not important; Davies was docked 150 points for saying “Randy”). Fry then corrects Davies and the others, and explains that “Mohandas” was Gandhi’s first name (depending on which Gandhi you wish to talk about, of course), and that “Mahatma” is the Sanskrit term for “Great soul”.

In this way, a popular error (that reveals specifically British ignorance, perhaps) is revealed and an educational element is delivered in comic form, because Q.I. typically features several of a group of British comedians that endlessly wander from one celebrity panel show to the next (Bill Bailey, Sean Lock, Dara Ó Briain, Jimmy Carr, Sandi Toksvig, John Sessions, Jo Brand, Phill Jupitus, Rich Hall, Rob Brydon, Clive Anderson, David Mitchell, Danny Baker, etc). It has two permanent cast members: Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, the former as MC, the latter as the sightly buffoonish one who always gets the questions wrong, but in a charming amd mildly amusing fashion.

Now, last night, Fry and Davies hosted Sandi Toksvig, Jimmy Carr and Lee Mack. At one point, Fry posed a question along the lines of “how is it that the Mona Lisa’s eyes follow you around the room when you see it in the Louvre?” This we can oppose to the way in which a human’s eyes do not follow the observer of that human around the room – if the human continues to look at the same spot while the observer moves…

For whatever reason, it fell to Lee Mack to answer this question – and whether right or wrong, answer it he did with some ingenuity. Mack proposed that the reason the Mona Lisa’s eyes always follow us around the room is because we are never looking at the woman in the Mona Lisa painting, but at Leonardo’s vision of her. Since in the painting she is looking directly at the painter, and since we can only see the painter’s perspective of her (she is not a sculpture around which we can walk – although Mack did also sharply say that the Mona Lisa’s eyes do not follow you if you walk behind her), then it stands to reason that from any/all angles, it will seem as though she, the Mona Lisa, is looking at the painting’s spectator.

There is something ingenious about Mack’s explanation – which Fry himself was beginning to praise at one point, before Jimmy Carr and Sandi Toksvig basically railroaded Mack’s explanation into the ground as rubbish and irrelevant.

Q.I. is a funny show and so I am ‘killing’ the comedy a bit here, for which apologies. But something important seemed to happen at this moment that I think merits comment.

Lee Mack’s comedy persona is more or less “northern” humour, which translates in the UK into “working class” humour – although of a sophistication significantly greater than the “classic” (code for racist) “northern humour” that is associated with the likes of Bernard Manning.

Alan Davies, meanwhile, plays the show as a charming and well spoken buffoon. He is the “ninny” of the series, but a relatively middle to upper middle class ninny – not quite the same as, but somewhere approximate to the kind of well-meaning toff/quasi-toff that Harry Enfield satirised at length with his Tim Nice-but-Dim character, and which more recently has been revitalised by Matt Lacey with his viral Orlando character (“And then I chundered… everywhaaah…”).

This leaves Fry, Toksvig and Carr. It is perhaps not so well known that Carr is highly educated, because his humour tends to be cruel and scatological – while Fry and Toksvig are, latterly at least, known for their sophistication, not least linguistically. Nonetheless, all three of Fry, Toksvig and Carr received their higher education at the University of Cambridge, attending Queen’s, Girton and Gonville and Caius respectively (the show’s creator, John Lloyd, also attended Cambridge, going to Trinity College).

Now, let’s be clear. Lee Mack is very well educated, too. He attended Brunel University, while Alan Davies was at the University of Kent. But Mack’s persona is much more mainstream than this would belie (as, arguably, is Jimmy Carr’s, but with significantly less warmth than Mack’s).

However, when we see two Cambridge graduates dismissing Mack’s inventive response to Fry’s question, with Fry later in the episode also joining in by calling Mack “stupid” (even though in a charming and friendly manner), one cannot help but feel that something else is going on beyond simply a display of knowledge.

For, Mack’s explanation is – whether right or wrong – both clear and ingenious. It may well be a piece of typical Q.I. logic. That is, Mack’s explanation for why the Mona Lisa’s eyes follow you around the room might well be spurious if logical-seeming – although he does not stand corrected in the episode (as far as I recall, the show moves on, leaving one with the impression that Mack might have been right – he is not corrected; but that on the whole he is wrong – everyone derides him).

In offering a clear and ingenious answer to the question, Mack has shown not necessarily knowledge, but he has shown intelligence and an ability to think on his feet. What is odd, then, is how intelligence of this kind is here punished by the existing intelligentsia with their Cambridge degrees and their ability to reel off facts as if knowledge were superior to understanding and intelligence.

One cannot help but wonder whether the issue really is about class and/or regionality (which, to generalise, is often and erroneously bound up with class by relatively “posh” “southerners” [Toksvig's Danish provenance complicating this matter somewhat, except for the fact that her English accent is as Queen's as one could hope for]), whose poshness and southernness passes for normality and which certainly is imbued with symbolic if not actual power when its disapproval of northern intelligence is implied as/taken as being the definitive framework through which to understand Mack.

One cannot help but recall one of Britain’s favourite comedy sketches – the so-called “Class Sketch” from The Frost Report in 1966, featuring (Cambridge-educated) John Cleese “looking down on” Ronnie Barker (no higher education, but from the relatively prosperous city of Oxford), who in turn “looks down on” Ronnie Corbett (no higher education).

That is, comedy and class seem thoroughly intertwined in the UK, with one’s type of humour playing a role in one’s class consciousness. But where the “Class Sketch” pokes fun at the British class system (personally I don’t find the sketch funny so much as plain scathing), yesterday’s episode of Q.I. seems to reveal the persistence of knowledge and the power of holding knowledge as the preserve of the educated, middle and upper classes (read Oxbrige-educated), while intelligence and the ability to question authority through actual thinking (Lee Mack coming up with an ingenious answer all on his own) being branded as subversive, threatening and to be quashed.

In a sense the entire ideology of Q.I. is herein revealed: the show takes “popular wisdom” (people who think that Gandhi’s first name is Mahatma) and exemplifies that it is often “wrong,” while demonstrating that “real” knowledge – and thus power – lies in the hands of the enlightened few.

There is more to say about the show’s audience and the projection of intelligence and wit that makes it for many viewers a pleasurable and aspirational experience – not least because it all looks so easy for these performers.

(Indeed, in this episode, Mack is also the only comic made to look as though they are working on/at their comedy, when he bungles a “ye olde Second World War” joke, that again he must explain – “brilliantly” according to Fry – as being a failed improvisation; the others would never have to do so much as working – because they are not, by implication, working class, while Lee Mack (in fact highly educated) is.)

If you who is reading this knows me, you might be thinking “pot-kettle-black”, in that I am also highly educated (three degrees from the University of Oxford). But my point here is not simply to cast stones at the Cambridge “toffs” that dominate Q.I., which is a show I enjoy immensely (otherwise why would I watch it from time to time?).

Rather, it is to demonstrate the way in which even highly educated people can – as this episode of Q.I. seems to reveal – succumb to the logic that having answers and holding power are the most important things to possess in life – and that threats to them (Lee Mack’s display of intelligence, so much more threatening than Alan Davies’ otherwise well-meaning ninniness) must be extinguished. It is Mack, in showing thought/intelligence, and in showing that he works and can sometimes fail at his comedy, who demonstrates something beyond power here – thought, intelligence, doubt, and in some respects true comedy in the face of the scientific imperative towards “true” knowledge. It is a pity that the others – supposedly highly educated – dismiss him so quickly – even if in a comic fashion and on nominally friendly terms.

For a short while, UK residents can catch the show on the BBC’s iPlayer here.

The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah, Ghana/UK, 2010)

Shown at the 2010 London Film Festival, but denied even a brief and minimal release until now, The Nine Muses is one of the best films that Jean-Luc Godard never made.

Boring stuff: the film combines archive footage and images of faceless men staring at ganzfeld-like Alaskan snowscapes (think J.M.W. Turner’s later paintings that are more or less depictions of fog in Italian cities) with spoken and written quotations from Joyce, Beckett, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and others, and music by Godardian composers like Arvo Pärt, David Darling and Hans Otte, to develop a poetic collage of ideas that combine to form a meditation diaspora and black (British) history.

The above is ‘boring’ because that’s the brass tacks of the film.

The interesting stuff (to me) is something like the following:

The poet does not necessarily know history, but the poet certainly feels history. The Nine Muses includes a prominent quotation from Zelda Fitzgerald that “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” And yet, even if this were true, John Akomfrah as poet is sensitive to (he ‘feels’) the pain that weighs down on migrant peoples as a result of their travels.

That is, not everyone who is from a migrant family knows or understands the past that their ancestors have endured. Indeed, as someone like Ariane Sherine has recently written, the question ‘where are you from?‘ is a boring one.

No disrespect to Sherine, who can make any claim she wants about the implicit (and certainly real, if ‘well intentioned’) racism that such a question entails. I’m not saying that she is in denial of her roots, but her argument runs the risk of saying ‘[personal] history is boring and unwelcome burden.’

And, sure, her roots are in the UK. I’m not trying to imply that she or anyone else whose family immigrated to the UK long ago – and certainly before she was born – is not ‘British.’

But, again, if we don’t pay attention to history, then we might find ourselves repeating it.

Which is to say that we don’t all need to have a full genealogy mapped out such that we can say that we are descended from Spanish gypsy immigrants (as, according to my cousin, I am). Nor do we need wear badges that make clear our family origins.

But we must understand that the long and troubled history of immigration did happen, and we must perhaps try to get a sense of what global relocation means.

And this is what Akomfrah’s masterful cine-poem seems to be about. It reworks Homer to say that African, Caribbean and Asian immigrants to the UK are wandering souls, and that, as Basho has said, the journey/the wandering is perhaps itself our home.

And yet, wandering is a difficult home to inhabit; it is cold, arduous, and it puts humans on the limits of all that they know, there where humanity itself is forged (for humanity is only a measure of the limits of humanity; anything easily within its limits is almost inhuman, perhaps it is even death).

The enormity and difficult nature of this journey – this is what Akomfrah suggests, and his reworking of footage of immigrants now either grown old or lost to the world, such that literally their beautiful holograms haunt the screen as we see them reanimated – a cinematic punctum of the highest order – is what we should not forget.

We should not forget that the most famous rapist of all time, Zeus, begot the muses with Mnemosyne, the incarnation of memory. That is, memory is the mother of all art. If we forget, then, pace Sherine, art like this will be lost.

The answer to the question ‘where are you from?’ is not, then, some mythical ‘Africa’ or ‘Barbados’ or ‘India’ – but that we are from here, the place in which we currently reside, and which is perhaps always changing. It is not the condemnation to death of the past by declaring the past to be, precisely, finished; it is the declaration of the continued existence of the past in the present.

The poet, then, carries history not as history – but as the fundament upon which is based the present. This is what I mean by ‘feeling’ the past rather than necessarily knowing it (being ‘good at history’ in terms of dates and events, important though that also is).

In a week when the government published its findings on and hopes for the British film industry, it strikes me that a film like Akomfrah’s is all the more important to champion.

The document published – which admittedly I have only glossed – talks a good game of supporting diversity in British independent cinema. And many of the films cited – usual suspects including not just The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, UK, 2010), but also people like Terence Davies – would arguably make us think that this diversity extends beyond the popular appeal of the former and into the ‘art house’ realm of the latter.

But… One gets the jittery feeling reading the document that it really does mean supporting more mainstream cinema – The Inbetweeners Movies (Ben Palmer, UK, 2011) was a commercial hit, don’t you know? So why not make more films like it? – with not so much regard for art cinema of the kind that Akomfrah has made here, and which does not have much/any of the commercial appeal of British comedies and heritage films.

Given the year and a half turnaround on The Nine Muses between the London Film Festival and its current cinema release (showing only at the glorious ICA at present), one worries for films like Akomfrah’s: it must take a lot of persuading for someone finally to agree to stump up cash to take on the risk of even a one-week run at a single screen in London. Sure, DVD sales will be reasonable, but even with the plaudits on the poster (testimony to the failing power of journalists to convince anyone other than the pre-converted to step out of the multiplex?; there were 9 (nine) people at the beginning and 7 (seven) at the end of the screening I attended), The Nine Muses is still obviously struggling. And with the government paper’s emphasis on the profitability of films, one cannot see labours of love like Akomfrah’s being anything other than lost in the future.

And yet, this is the kind of film precisely to support as vociferously and as eloquently as possible. It is a poem that deserves to be seen repeatedly, and even if it is ‘lost’ on some people (those who walked out of the screening I attended?), its feeling for, or sense of, history – and not in the sense of the ‘great man’ myth peddled by The King’s Speech, but, rather, in the way that human lives in a collective sense prop up and enable any great man (or woman) to exist at all – is what makes it worth promoting.

I know I’ll carry on making movies for nothing – and I more or less expect never to get funding for my films. Sad though this makes me (if I allow my vanity to speak), a superior talent like Akomfrah should be supported at every level: by funders and by audiences.

See The Nine Muses, then, before it is too late.

Notes from the LFF: Hors Satan/Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont, France, 2011)

Are we living in the end times?

Personally, I don’t think so.

But, then again, while I will be sad to die (this is a lie – I won’t be anything except dead), and while I’ll be sad (and pretty excited) to see some other planet crash into Earth, or whatever fate awaits humanity and the rock we float on, this will not be the end of things.

I view it pretty simply: molecules, matter, light, and all of that ‘primary’ stuff that goes to make up the universe will still be around. They will never not be around. Perhaps they cannot not to be around. So an absolute end to all things? No, I don’t think so.

Hors Satan is one of a small bunch of recent art house movies that features a miracle (more than one in this film, in fact).

Miracles are relatively common place in the mainstream – impossible things happen the whole time, whether or not these are given a religious context and whether or not they are recognised as being miraculous.

Given that the mainstream peddles in impossible/miraculous illusion on a day-to-day basis, miracles there are not as interesting as when they appear in art house cinema.

Why? Because art house cinema is ‘for’ and ‘by’ ‘intellectuals’ – which stereotypically might have overlap with what I shall call agnosticism. Here, I don’t quite mean agnosticism in the sense of ‘I am not sure what or whether I believe in God or not,’ although it’s linked – hence my choice to use this word.

What I mean by agnosticism is a certain suspicion with regard to miracles: people do not get up from the dead and walk in everyday life (not without the help of defibrillators, anyway). Or if they do, there might well be a ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ explanation, to which we do not necessarily have access.

Now, just to be clear, I think that you can believe in God and still be agnostic if we accept this definition. And note that this agnosticism is not meant to rule out miracles – it’s just to want thoroughly to question the evidence for them.

This in and of itself might place too great an emphasis on ‘science’ – but my point is not that such a ‘scientific’ view is without potential flaws. It is simply that, according to this view, miracles would push the bounds of credibility.

A second – linked – reason why miracles in art house cinema are more remarkable (and push the bounds of credibility) is that art house cinema – a very problematic generalisation, I confess – often (but not exclusively) is made in what we have come to accept as a ‘realistic’ style. That is, few elements are obtrusive, be that the acting, the mise-en-scène, the cinematography, the editing, or the soundtrack.

Instead, everything plays in seemingly real – and not stylised – locations, with the camera retaining some distance from events, not moving in an ostentatious fashion, and with edits taking place when they perhaps ‘need’ to, rather than ‘for the sake of it’. Since these films try to look like everyday life, and since miracles do not take place in everyday life, it is intriguing – and all the more surprising – that art house films would choose to portray miracles in this style.

Art house films might be weird as far as their status as a film is concerned. To give an example, Hors Satan itself has long takes, in which little happens and in which there is little dialogue as the unnamed lead character, played by David Dewaele, walks around the countryside of the north of France, seemingly praying to the countryside, and taking away and giving life as he sees fit.

But, even though we seem increasingly to find our real lives intolerable if they are filled with silence and little movement, such silence and stillness in a film might yet be thought of as realistic – because reality is not the crash bang wallop of the mainstream movies.

That is, as far as films go, Hors Satan is ‘weird’ because it does not conform to the norms of mainstream filmmaking – which bring with them an implicit contract whereby the audience ‘expects’ miracles to happen. But this ‘weirdness’ for a film might still be termed realistic, because life itself is slow and often quiet. And so when a miracle happens in a ‘weird’ and slow and supposedly ‘realistic’ film, it seems as though something even more weird must be going on.

Along with Stellet licht/Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2007) and Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, Austria/France/Germany, 2009), then, Hors Satan is one of a handful of high profile and recent art house ‘miracle movies.’

Why is the story of a miracle, as happens in Hors Satan, linked to the ‘end times’ I evoked at the outset of this blog?

My proposed – and admittedly general – answer would be that we live in times when it is hard to find something to believe in. Almost any religious belief is – especially beliefs held so strongly that one would want to share that belief with others and perhaps even try to persuade them of the truth of those beliefs – quickly derided as ‘fundamentalism,’ as is the seemingly irrational and rabid refusal to believe in capitalism.

In other words, ‘realists’ are supposedly atheists, as the religion bashers such as Richard Dawkins aim to make clear. Being realists, there would be little space for miracles in films made for ‘intelligent’ and ‘realistic’ people, and also made by ‘intelligent’ filmmakers who shoot using the technical and formal conventions of ‘realism’ (realism as a style of filmmaking).

In the postmodern era, in which the so-called ‘grand narratives’ that previously could explain the world and our position therewith have been overthrown but not replaced, it would appear that there is nothing to believe in anymore.

And yet with mankind’s fragility ever more thrust in our own faces, it is perhaps natural that humans would turn back to religion – or at least the belief in some power/force/energy/design/divinity – in order to have some rationale behind the human project, and perhaps also to convince us that we do not need to be out there in the streets murdering and stealing simply because we know that no punishment – either Earthly or divine – awaits us.

(I am intrigued by the fact that the day on which the human population on Earth reached seven billion in number, the news seems to mourn our demise – not enough food, not enough warmth, not enough oxygen to keep us going. That is, the human race is numerically at its strongest, and yet the discourse seems overwhelmingly to emphasise that we are at our weakest.)

Now, I personally think that none of Silent Light, Lourdes or Hors Satan actually believes in the miracles that they depict – and also believe that none of them is a ‘Christian’ film attempting to woo its viewers back to the church because if we don’t pray now, then, Pascal-like, we might lose our bet with God.

The reference to Pascal is perhaps apt. For Pascal himself argues – in the same section (233) of his Pensées in which the wager appears – that we cannot have access to the infinite, or to God, because we are finite – and the infinite is not just a ‘big number’; rather, the infinite is without number.

That is to say, Pascal is talking about a faith without proof – precisely, a faith. Ostensibly, then, a miracle – as ‘proof’ of God – eliminates the wager; once you’ve seen a miracle, you just believe because you have seen God and don’t need to, nay cannot, doubt anymore.

Here is where what I perceive to be the failure of these three films to believe in their own miracles perhaps becomes interesting. For the miracles in each film function for me not as proof of God, but as evidence of our need for beliefs as a whole.

There is nothing stopping anyone from reading these films – perhaps Lourdes especially – as being literal accounts of miracles. However, for me these films are about the need to fill a void that has been created by the drive to render the world scientifically comprehensible (even though science itself remains full of mysteries, with the Higgs-Boson itself sometimes even referred to – even if jokingly – as the ‘God particle’).

In other words, Gödel notwithstanding, our comprehension of the universe is incomplete – and this is in part perhaps because of the lack of anything to believe in. Belief, then, might yet (even if not forever) remain a vital need for humans, a meme of such power that we cannot ignore it.

Although I have not discussed Hors Satan or any of the films mentioned in much depth, I just wanted to get across these brief thoughts.

And as a brief add-on, I found it interesting that We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, UK/USA, 2011) dared to look precisely at our belief-less, postmodern society from the perspective of a mother whose love for her son is only ambivalent (and vice versa) at absolute best.

Not only does this for me confirm Ramsay’s status as one of the leading lights of British cinema (my top quartet typically would be Winterbottom, Meadows, Arnold and Ramsay), but it also stands in stark contrast to the ‘king’ of postmodern pop, Quentin Tarantino.

In a very informative book about film and ethics, Lisa Downing writes that Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 (USA, 2003-2004) ultimately offer up the myth of motherhood as, for Tarantino, a final ideological barrier that for him is absolute – and not a social/cultural convention that is contingent (i.e. need not necessarily be true or real under different circumstances).

Kevin is prepared to take a step in that direction and to question even this myth.

Dumont’s film has a set of concerns entirely separate from Ramsay’s – and perhaps from all of the films mentioned here.

But if nothing else it is an interesting – and beautiful – meditation on what the times are such that they might be ending.

Confessions from the LFF: Ha-shoter/Policeman (Nadav Lapid, Israel, 2011)

Without wishing to over-generalise, the French philosopher of cinema, Gilles Deleuze argues that thought begins when action ends. Or, more specifically, when we are no longer capable of action.

He says this because actions typically are defined as being things that we do automatically. We might decide to do something, even in a split second. But the action itself is automatic. What happens between actions is thought; and the more intense one’s thoughts are, perhaps the less action one will carry out.

In Tropa de Elite/Elite Squad (José Padilha, Brazil/Netherlands/USA/Argentina, 2007), Deleuze’s name is specifically crossed out on a blackboard at the beginning of a scene in which one of the young cops who will become a key part of the Elite Squad, Matias (André Ramiro), chooses which contemporary theorist/philosopher he and his classmates will do projects on.

The moment is perhaps coincidental, perhaps a tongue-in-cheek visual gag – probably missed by most viewers – made at the expense of film theorists. Namely, those who sit around thinking about film rather than actually going out there and making films.

Nonetheless, if Padilha and his collaborators want to rub one in the eye of film theorists and others whose ‘sitting around thinking’ is perceived as useless to society, this raises some interesting questions.

For, in not being a theorist but in going out there and making a film instead, Padilha becomes a man of action. And this act of filmmaking is suitable for a film that, seemingly, endorses, or at the very least explores, the call for, precisely, action in response to the critical condition of society.

That is, Trope de Elite – as well as its sequel Trope de Elite 2 – O Enemigo Agora É Outro/Elite Squad 2 (José Padilha, Brazil, 2010) – seems to support the efforts of Capitão Nascimento (Wagner Moura) not to sit back and think but to take action. And by ‘taking action,’ I mean enact a zero tolerance policy on drugs and gang violence in the favelas (and elsewhere) of Rio de Janeiro.

There is also a moment at the end of Mahamet-Saleh Haroun’s Un homme qui crie/A Screaming Man (France/Belgium/Chad, 2010) in which a title card appears saying words to the effect that he who sits around refusing to act is doomed, both physically and spiritually. That is, the film, which features a father, Champion (Youssouf Djaoro), who does nothing while Chad and his family fall apart, suggests that ethically, perhaps even morally, the time to act is nigh – and that, again, sitting around thinking has done nothing to stem the tide of exploitation (Champion looks after a swimming pool in a Western-style hotel) and inequality that continues to sweep our planet.

While Tropa de Elite verges on the reactionary in its condemnation of Rio gangs and its support for the misunderstood nature of the militaristic squad that it depicts (that is, the film seemingly endorses state violence towards its transgressive citizens), Un homme qui crie seems to call for the awakening of a more revolutionary spirit that will not take state-authorised exploitation sitting, or lying, down.

However, while Tropa de Elite (and its sequel) and Un homme qui crie seem to espouse slightly different political outlooks, both seem to present a call to arms.

And, as we have seen from global south to global north, from student movements in Chile and the UK to the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, both film(maker)s – from Brazil and Chad – seem to have their finger on the global pulse. That is, now people are starting to act – be they oppositional or reactionary forces endeavouring through violence to put down whatever insurrections they encounter.

Although the world is perhaps calling out for a (quite general) definition of what precisely constitutes violence in order to get a better legal handle on what is going on, if nothing else, my point here is slightly different.

My point is that I have not decided how to act yet – and I may never do. I am still thinking about all of this – and, indeed, finding it ever harder to think about the ‘state of the world’ precisely because it is so complex (and brought to me by global media networks). I may know where my allegiances lie in principle, but I am still a coward, scared that I will do ‘the wrong’ thing (because I am still waylaid by notions of right and wrong, even though I think beyond good and evil).

On 24 June 1963, John F Kennedy misattributed his words to Dante when he said in Bonn that ‘the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who retain their neutrality in times of moral crisis’ (Dante said in canto 3 of the Inferno that those who were neither for nor against God were in a special region near the mouth of hell; Kennedy was on a roll at the time, though, since two days later he told West Berliners that he was a donut).

But while I fear that there is some truth in Kennedy’s words, and that – impossibly – we will perhaps endure the return of some absolute standard of good and/or evil against which the decision not to fight will make us more lousy than those who fight for it, I also feel that I want to remain partisan regarding my neutrality. Even when I act, my actions are my own; my neutrality is my action, whatever hatred it might elicit from others (should it last forever; who knows when I shall reach my crisis point and emerge, grenade in hand, to man the barricades).

This scares me; I suffer anxiety that I am not ‘occupying’ – and on the whole can only see reasons not to join either side.

Anyway, the reason why I am ‘confessing’ the above is because in some respects Policeman at the London Film Festival this year helped me to relax some of these issues.

On the surface, the film might fit into the ‘reactionary’ camp of Tropa de Elite in that the film examines with some sympathy (by which I mean, ironically enough, neutrality) the life of Yaron (Yiftach Klein), himself an über-macho member of an Israeli ‘elite squad’ that deals with Palestinian terrorists.

Yaron struts around with his shades on, consistently doing push ups, pull ups and finding any excuse to exert his alpha status, even over his fellow squad members, whom he high fives and hugs in a fashion that, to avoid the ‘on steroids’ cliché of crap film journalism, is like Top Gun (Tony Scott, USA, 1986) injected with the super-juice that they pump into the much-more-interesting-when-scrawny Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) in Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, USA, 2011).

Yaron is a seemingly loving husband, but he is also under investigation for killing a Palestinian child and old man during a raid (something that the team decides to blame on a guy in their squad who has a brain tumor and who is likely therefore to die, or arouse sympathy), and he may possibly fool around with, and most certainly flirts with, a 15-year old waitress in a bar.

Yaron eventually comes up against a group of young terrorists – not from Palestine, however, but from Israel. These terrorists, whom director Lapid said at the Film Festival were inspired by his reading about the Baader Meinhof group, believe that the rich are too rich and that the poor are too poor – and that ‘it’s time for the poor to get rich and for the rich to get dying.’

As a result, they take hostage two billionaires, together with the wife and daughter of one of them. In what is perhaps the most naïve and inept piece of terrorism ever seen on film (though surely not in real life), the group of upper middle class Israeli revolutionaries take their hostages to the basement of the hotel where the kidnapping took place. There, they allow men purporting to be ‘press photographers’ into the room, even though they never asked for these men to come (of course, they are police photographers after intel). And – behold/spoilers – the anti-terrorist squad arrives and does its job.

In some senses, the utter naïveté of the ‘terrorists’ is astounding, heartbreaking and disturbing. In other senses, so is their conviction – their conviction that calling to the elite police squad outside that they too are being exploited will lead them to put down their weapons and demand for social justice themselves.

But their folly is not what consoles me in my neutrality. Rather, it is Yaron who – sort of – consoles me. Yaron shows nerves during this mission in a way that presumably is very uncharacteristic of him. Nonetheless, he enters into the room (another idiotic aspect of holding hostages in a basement: the counter-terrorist unit will turn out the lights and use night vision goggles, making you as terrorist utterly defenceless), and carries out his mission.

In doing so, he kills Shira (Yaara Pelzig), a young and in some respects ‘lost’ poor little rich girl, who gives Jane Fonda a run for her money in believing with conviction in her righteous quest to adjust the fact that Israel is dominated by hoarding rich while the poor work for less than minimum wage (Palestine is deliberately not even broached as a topic).

Looking down at her body, we see that Yaron is, perhaps, beginning to ‘crack’ – that his transition from action man to thinker is beginning to take place.

Don’t get me wrong: the price for Yaron’s ‘conversion’ is terrible and I am not saying that the lives of others is a worthy price for one person’s decision – after years of action – to pause for thought. However, while it seems as though the world is demanding an escalating level of action, Policeman in its own way seems to be suggesting a pause for thought.

And not just by Yaron, but perhaps also by the kids who wind up dead for their stupidity. Some more forethought, some more thought, on both sides, might possibly have avoided the bloodshed.

If Tropa de Elite seems to endorse the use of force to take out insurrectional elements of society, and if Un homme qui crie suggests that you are foolish not to take up arms in times of trouble, then Policeman perhaps suggests that trouble might be avoided if we all thought a bit more. If we looked and saw – saw deeply – rather than acted based upon superficial evidence.

Notes from the LFF: Hello! Shu Xian Sheng/Mr Tree (Han Jie, China, 2011)

It is opportune that I saw Mr Tree in the same week that I taught about Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke in two separate classes.

For, Jia acts as producer of Mr Tree, and Han Jie’s film, while by no means a Jia Zhangke ‘rip-off,’ definitely contains themes that are also of close concern to Jia, especially the effects of modernisation on rural life.

I shall deal more with Mr Tree below. But I’d like to reflect a little bit on teaching Jia Zhangke, not so that I can write about Jia specifically, but so that I can deal with the reception of Chinese cinema – and art house cinema more generally – in the West, and also to illustrate to those who might be interested what studying cinema at university can involve.

This week I used two different Jia films for two different modules that I am teaching this term. The first film is Shijie/The World (China/Japan/France, 2004) for a module that I am teaching on Digital Cinema. The reason behind this choice was to explore the ways in which digital cameras have reinvigorated the possibility for filmmakers to create ambitious projects on relatively low budgets, and which offer up an alternative view of the world to that which seems increasingly to be replicated not just in mainstream Hollywood cinema, but across all mainstreams worldwide. In other words, The World serves as a means to explore how/whether digital technology enables independent and artistic world cinema.

And the second film is Jia’s first feature, Xiao Wu/Pickpocket (Hong Kong/China, 1998) for a module that I am teaching called Guerrilla Filmmaking. The aim of this module is, in the spirit of De fem benspænd/The Five Obstructions (Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier, Denmark/Switzerland/Belgium/France, 2003), to set my students regular and short film projects on certain topics and involving certain formal constraints. As well as making the films, the students are invited to reflect critically on their projects – explaining what they have learnt, from the practical to the political to the philosophical. The students are also invited to talk about how they get their films seen once they are in existence.

The reason for showing Xiao Wu was/is not because this is a film made on a micro-budget, as per other films that I show my students as part of the module, including my colleague’s activist film, Chronicle of Protest (Michael Chanan, UK, 2011), as well as my own two features, En Attendant Godard (UK, 2009) and Afterimages (UK, 2010).

The reason for choosing the film is because Xiao Wu was made without a permit. Jia just went into the streets and filmed – and this is noticeable from the variable sound quality, from the inconsistent lighting, and especially from the way in which ‘extras’ – in fact just people in the street – often turn and look directly at the camera, while the actors – all non-professionals – carry on regardless. In other words, Xiao Wu serves as a means to explore the possibility of simply going out into the street and filming, guerrilla-style.

A phrase that seems to get repeated a lot at the moment is ‘go big or go home.’ In some senses, my Guerrilla Filmmaking module is precisely not about going big – but about working out how to use the means at one’s disposal to say what one wants to say. Not to make a film for the purpose solely of trying to please others. But about using film as an expressive (and supremely malleable) medium to convey one’s own thoughts and ideas. The module is intended to encourage students precisely to think and to have ideas, then, and to endeavour to put these into audiovisual form.

Anyway, with regard to my classes, I introduced Jia, the director of both films, as belonging to the so-called sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers – the previous five generations taking Chinese cinema from its early origins to the 1930s (first), through to China’s 1940s cinematic heyday (second), Chinese cinema under Communism (third), the (lack of) cinema of the Cultural Revolution (fourth), and the rise of the fifth generation in the 1980s and 1990s, the fifth generation including filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.

Obviously, the latter two are still making films, as anyone who has seen Ying xiong/Hero (Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong/China, 2002), Shi mian mai fu/House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou, China/Hong Kong, 2004) and Wu ji/The Promise (Chen Kaige, China/USA/South Korea, 2005) will know.

Now, while Chen and Zhang have both moved into blockbuster filmmaking, as the above examples demonstrate, they still plough the same thematic fields that they explored in their early, career-making films. That is, they make historical films, often featuring strong heroines, exploring China’s past to reflect – often critically – on the present, in particular the myth of nation-building and unification (even if their films can be read in a reactionary way, as Hero perhaps most clearly exemplifies in its decision to have a rebellious asssassin not kill a tyrannical leader because the latter’s work in unifying China, even if achieved by the sword, is finally understood by the assassin to be a ‘good thing’).

By contrast, the sixth generation, with Jia as one of its figureheads, concentrates more upon the contemporary, taking in issues of forced migration within China – particularly for the purposes of modernisation, urbanisation, and the alienating side-effects of globalisation.

Many sixth generation films were made without permits – such as Xiao Wu (The World, by contrast, was Jia’s first film to be made with a permit; more on the film can be read here). As such, they are often defined as ‘underground’ films, although this title can be misleading in that ‘underground’ can function as much as a brand as it does a qualification for unauthorised – and therefore supposedly ‘authentic’ – portraits of the nation’s contemporaneity.

Now, Jia’s films are ‘slow’ – consisting of ponderous long takes in which minimal action takes place; the emphasis often seems to be less on characters and more on the spaces and places in which the ‘action’ (or lack thereof) takes place.

For this reason it perhaps came as no surprise that my students – all bar one – said of The World that it is ‘boring’ – and, more controversially, that the filmmaker has a ‘duty’ (I can’t recall if this was the exact term used) to make ‘interesting’ and ‘entertaining’ films.

This prompted a diatribe from their lecturer (me) about the attention economy in which we live, and the foundations of which are built upon computers (i.e. digital technology) in their various guises (including iPhones, iPods, iPads, and the like – cheers, Steve Jobs). That is, that boredom is intolerable in the contemporary age, and that everything must happen at the accelerated pace of the entertainment industries, with what David Bordwell has defined as ‘intensified continuity‘ and which Steven Shaviro more recently has called a ‘post-continuity‘ culture at its core.

In contrast to this, there are – on a general level – filmmakers who feel the need to represent the fact that for all of the attention(-deficient) economy that bombards the bourgeoisie, and for all of the ease of movement that the global rich enjoy – both actual and virtual, there are many people who are left behind. Whose lives are slow. Who cannot and/or who do not want, perhaps, to lead their life at the speed of light.

Do these kinds of lives, I put to my students, not merit depiction? Who decides what is ‘cinematic’ and what is not? And would making an ‘exciting’ (i.e. ‘fast’) film about lives that many people might deem ‘unexciting’ (and ‘slow’) not be an inappropriate if one were trying to remain faithful to one’s subject matter and/or one’s own ideas thereupon?

Without wishing to overlook the specifically Chinese provenance of Jia’s films, or indeed the very constructed nature of his fictions (we cannot read them as entirely accurate representations of Chinese reality, even if he uses devices that typically we associate with that ethos), my argument in class also proposed that there is no consensus on what constitutes ‘entertaining’ with regard to film – and that perhaps there should not be such a consensus, otherwise all films would look and feel the same.

Now, I am not sure how convincing my diatribe was. One of my students – the most vocal critic of The World (Xiao Wu was ‘better’ because it had something of a plot – and, perhaps crucially, is 50 minutes shorter) – has blogged in spite of my defence of Jia that he (and I paraphrase) should not make this kind of film, since alienating audiences (there is no specification of what kind of audience is being considered here, the assumption being that all audiences are the same) is one of the worst sins of filmmaking.

I would link to the student’s blog – because I do not want to deprive them of their input in the dialogue I am creating. Alas, the blog is on a site closed to all outside of my university (and even then you need to be registered on the software, Mahara, that hosts it). So, apologies for those who wish to but cannot read the blog – perhaps especially to those who would agree with the student’s outlook on filmmaking in general and this film in particular.

Now, I want to try to avoid coming across as high-minded and condescending to my student(s) – for they are entitled to their thoughts, even if I also find it mildly frustrating to make a case for art cinema that is duly and adamantly cast aside for the sake of imposing a pre-existing set of criteria regarding what constitutes ‘good’ cinema (i.e. I probably am both high-minded and condescending at the last).

I also am wary about ‘picking on’ one or any of my students, not least because this one is certainly engaged and a keen participant in my classes. That is, I greatly appreciate what this person contributes to my classes, even if I do not agree with them, and even if I feel the need to encourage in them a more critical perspective.

(Interestingly, when it was established prior to showing it that Xiao Wu is, in the words of another student, ‘what we would call a “festival film,”‘ this also brought about a greater level of (perceived) engagement – as if one cannot watch films ‘properly’ without being given the correct prompt/lens through which to view them.)

This blogospheric excursion into teaching the cinema of Jia Zhangke may have exposed my limitations as a teacher, in that I failed to convince my students about the validity of The World, and to a lesser extent that of Xiao Wu, the ‘boringness’ of which – apparently – outweighed any interest in what Jia was trying to do; i.e. I could not get my students to consider what The World is, since they preferred instead to talk about what the film is not.

Furthermore, this excursion into teaching Jia Zhangke might also have exposed the limitations of top-down teaching as a whole; others involved in education, at any level, may share my sadness when I see value judgements made repeatedly in spite of insistent attempts to foster not simple judgement but critical engagement.

However, I mention all this as a preface to discussing Mr Tree, which, as mentioned, was produced by Jia and which shares with his films a similar set of concerns, because the issue of pace and boredom lies at the heart of what in different ways I have elsewhere defined as the war of/for our cinema screens and the political, perhaps even ethical, dilemmas facing filmmakers when making films about certain subjects.

Han Jie’s film is, like Jia’s films more generally, contemplative. Shu (whose name means ‘tree’ and who is played by Baoqiang Wang) is a drifter-type, who is a little bit crazy, a little bit weird.

He has a job as a car mechanic that he soon loses after inflicting upon himself an accident: he uses a blowtorch without the face mask and temporarily blinds himself, prompting his boss to let him go. He falls in love with a local deaf mute, Xiaomei (Zhuo Tan), and endeavours to woo her without much success – at least initially.

The local kids kind of ridicule Shu, although he seems well connected, hanging out with the local businessmen (who are trying to oust his mother from their family home for the sake of developing the land for business purposes; there is a coal mine in the area). He drinks, has the odd fight, wanders around his town, goes to the big city in Jilin, the northern province where he lives, and spends a bit of team cleaning up the school that a friend from his hometown runs, and he finally gets married to Xiaomei.

Except that on his wedding day, Shu is miserable. This is mainly because he has begun to see the ghost of his dead brother – a brother who apparently was hanged by his father from the tree in which Shu sometimes hides – and who is thoroughly ‘modern’ in his corduroys, hipster haircut, cool girlfriend and jacket.

Xiaomei makes love to him, but then leaves Shu, because he does not care for her. Shu then predicts accurately that the local mining industry – which has also already claimed the life of one his other local friends – will cause the water in the area to stop flowing.

Something of a prophet, it would seem, Shu then seemingly becomes rich by advising the mining company how correctly to bring to an end the malpractice that thus far has characterised it.

However, Shu’s ostensible success is revealed latterly as a fantasy, as is his reunion with a pregnant Xiaomei. In other words, Shu becomes mad, not least because his life is marked by the death of his brother and his friend. His descent into incoherence, however, seems to reflect the insistent modernisation that the village/town is undergoing through the mining company and other forces: people are moved out of their homes, and the ‘traditional’ ways seem to be disappearing as people are offered TVs and other mod cons to accept the questionable business plans for the area.

Even though Shu seemingly goes mad, he is still a character that seems to be able to see. As mentioned, he is temporarily blinded at the start of the film, but there is a strong emphasis on vision and visuality in the film, more often than not associated with Shu. He may be a living anachronism, incapable or unwilling to go along with the times, while his former friends get increasingly rich, but perhaps that is because he realises more than anyone else the confusion and chaos that is descending upon Jilin and the industrialisation of one of China’s most beautiful provinces (it is one of the ‘four major natural wonders of China’ – along with the Three Gorges Valley, the Rimmed Trees that also are in Jilin, and the Stone Forest of Yunnan).

Indeed, Shu seems to have these changes inscribed physically on his body: he moves in a twisted and awkward fashion (a great performance from Baoqiang), and often bears cuts, bruises and scars.

Furthermore, not only through his name, but also physically do we see Shu in connected with nature: as mentioned, he hides up a tree, but he also walks and runs most places – and he certainly does not have easy access to the good cars that his local friends seem to have. Even Shu’s brother drives a taxi, suggesting that he is moving along with the times, rather than being left behind as Shu is.

As such, Mr Tree is an interesting film that implicitly critiques what can be interpreted as the modernisation of China, which in turn leads to the disappearance of traditional ways of life – embodied here by Shu.

The film’s eventual descent into fantasy makes of Mr Tree a film that is only questionably realistic (although this critique – bizarrely – never seems to be made against, say, Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan (Vittorio de Sica, Italy, 1951), a core film of the influential Italian neorealist movement, from which both this and Jia’s films seem to take inspiration, and which itself has an entire fantasy ending featuring, as implied by the title, a miracle made only more bitter by the fact that it is fantastic and impossible).

Nonetheless, as per much sixth generation filmmaking (if the term still applies – how long can a generation last before becoming a new one?), the film is a politicised glimpse into contemporary Chinese life.

It is only fitting that the film adopts the ‘slow’ pace that it does, filming predominantly in long shot to ground Shu and the other characters in the space/place that they inhabit rather than to have us view the film as simply a character portrait.

Again, this is not to overlook the complex roots of the film in Chinese culture – my reading might seem to ground the film uniquely in a genealogy of films and style of filmmaking – but it is to suggest that aesthetic strategies (how one shapes the look, feel, pace, and intensity of a film) are strongly tied to the political.

Hero this film neither is nor could be, interesting though Zhang’s most accessible work is in and of itself. For my part, then, I can only continue to reiterate, perhaps narcissistically (if I can never convince anyone who thinks otherwise), that judging films according to criteria of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (with good being fast and exciting, bad being slow and ‘boring’) is pointless. It is better, rather, for us to think about what the film seems to be saying.

Not just to watch the film as entertainment, but to read, or to think about the film – perhaps even to find about the cinematic, industrial, and cultural contexts – among others – in which the film was made.

This is what I try to do as a lecturer in film. Sometimes I feel very strongly about it; the attention economy has us in its grips, and we will overlook many important – nay, vital – things if we do not pay enough respect to that which surrounds us. Some films try to do this by being deliberately slow. This is not bad; it is a strategy for trying to induce thought and thoughtfulness.

While I personally think that there are ‘problems’ with this ‘strategy’ (it is too teleological, it perhaps stratifies film into entertainment vs art house modes that rarely meet, and whose audiences rarely meet, and I am certain that one can think critically about Hollywood or any other mainstream style of cinema), it remains an important one.

If my choice of films and my teaching style run the risk of boring my students, a ‘problem’ that I might be called into account for when I have to proactively to address the feedback that my students eventually will give me for my teaching methods and choices, then this is just an issue that I/they will have to face together.

While I like fast films, too, I want to emphasise here how I am in praise of slow films – and why. I hope that this blog might help to convince someone – anyone – that slow films (all films?!) are important and not to be overlooked…

Notes from the LFF: In film nist/This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran, 2011)

On 20 December 2010, filmmaker Jafar Panahi was arrested in Iran and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment and banned from making films for 20 years.

He is not alone: plenty of other filmmakers and artists have been placed under arrest in the last 12 months and more in Iran – including this film’s co-director, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, who was arrested since the completion of this project.

Before seeing This is Not a Film at this year’s London Film Festival, organiser Sandra Hebron read aloud a letter signed by various Iranian filmmakers in exile, including the whole of the Makhmalbaf family (Mohsen, Samira, Hana, and Mohsen’s wife, Marzieh Meshkini), calling for people worldwide to put pressure on the Iranian government in whatever way they can in order to release Panahi.

His crime? Being critical of the current Iranian regime, which – as per my previous post on Mourning (Morteza Farshbaf, Iran, 2011) – seemed illegitimately to install itself in power after the 2009 general election.

Being a filmmaker, not least a filmmaker with a global standing, Panahi is a dangerous man: he has the power to influence people, to rouse a sense of injustice in the (already-roused) masses of Iran who are in search of a more democratic society than the one currently on offer. He can also rouse anti-government support beyond Iran’s borders.

Given Panahi’s global standing, and given Iran’s refusal wholly to endorse films that – even if only ambivalently or allegorically – critique Iran’s status quo, it is no surprise that Panahi’s films – like those of many of his fellow filmmakers in Iran – have sought funding from outside of the country, principally Europe (and principally within Europe from France, Germany and the UK).

I am surely not the first to argue this point, but I must say that even if undertaken innocently, there is little to no true innocence with regard to the politics of who funds what films and for what reason. Representation is an awesome and persuasive tool. That is, all films have – or at least one can read into all films – an element of propaganda: incapable as we are of perceiving the whole of reality, consigned as we are only to partial truths, no film will present things as they are. But this does not stop a filmmaker from portraying events/the world as he sees them/it.

For this reason, to stand accused – as Panahi does, according to the letter that Hebron read out – of being an agent for French and British power in Iran seems to overstep the mark as far as his filmmaking is concerned. Panahi is a filmmaker trying to find the means to make the films that mean the most to him; if his funding comes from the UK or France or anywhere, and if that funding comes with few or no conditions with regard to the kind of film that he is supposed to deliver, then Panahi is, or should be free, to work with those funders.

In light of the seemingly stolen election, in light of the evident lack of freedom of speech or filmmaking in Iran, and in light of the documented and murderous brutality of the present Iranian regime towards dissident elements within contemporary Iranian society, it seems that any filmmaker concerned with anything but the most reactionary escapism must give room for elements that are critical of the contemporary regime.

This does not necessarily make Panahi an agent of British or French interests in Iran – even if as a filmmaker his outlook and approach finds favour with foreign (predominantly educated, middle class – i.e. festival) audiences as much if not more than it does with domestic audiences.

Nonetheless, to be denied the right to critique the country in which one lives and which with much probability one loves is a betrayal on the part of that country.

And this is what Panahi has suffered: a betrayal.

If we are to get all up in arms about Jafar Panahi and other filmmakers, we should not limit ourselves simply to their plight. Others have suffered terribly under the current regime, including, for example, Neda Agha Soltan, whose death can be seen on YouTube (but to which I shall not link here). And beyond Neda Agha Soltan, there are many more people who have suffered at the hands of the current Iranian regime. In other words, this is not just about filmmakers. This is about the fate of an entire nation, perhaps even the entire world.

Even if Panahi himself is only one of a multitude of Iranians adversely affected by the current government in Iran, Panahi is still very much to be admired.

For what he has done is to produce a film – playfully, perhaps rightfully, termed a non-film – in spite of the ban that has been imposed upon his creative output. Furthermore, in total defiance he has had that ‘non-film’ distributed globally, including at this year’s London Film Festival.

How did he achieve this? Remarkably, by hiding the film on a Flash drive in a birthday cake – which then found its way out of his apartment block, out of Iran and – first of all – to the Cannes Film Festival, before making its way – among other locations – to London.

Panahi’s non-film is what we might term minimalist in execution: Panahi is under house arrest – pending an appeal on his sentence – in his flat/apartment block in Tehran, and so the majority of the film takes place in the few rooms to which he is (was – is he still?) confined, and it features for its greatest part only Panahi and Mirtahmasb.

The non-film starts with Panahi taking breakfast, talking on his mobile phone, and then missing a family phone call while he is in his bathroom. These moments are comprised of two static shots in which Panahi refuses to recognise the camera.

In other words, the non-film starts almost as though it might be a fiction film as opposed to a documentary – Panahi is acting rather than ‘being himself.’

This fictional feel is broken, however, when Panahi picks up the camera that has been left rolling in his bedroom and carries it through his house: the refusal to recognise the camera’s presence is immediately broken.

Nonetheless, once Mirtahmasb arrives and takes over the filming, Panahi prepares tea and feeds his iguana, Igi, as if the camera were not there.

However, it is when he receives a phone call from his lawyer, Mrs Gheyrat, that Panahi definitively casts off the illusion that this is a film in the conventional sense of the word, thereby taking us into the realm of the non-film.

Gheyrat explains that the ban on filmmaking might well be rescinded by the courts, but that Panahi surely will face some prison time. She then affirms passionately that the ruling against Panahi is not legal, but political. That is, the judiciary is not in charge anymore; Panahi is a plaything of the political powers that be. As such, Iran is no longer a country in which all are equal in the eyes of the law, but a country in which the law is changed according to the whims of politicians.

(Britons: take note. One should not call for ‘special punishments’ for the perpetrators of crimes, for example looting during riots. The crimes committed – damage to property and theft – should be punished according to the law and not, to use Gheyrat’s words, according to ‘current social conditions.’)

This phone call is enough for Panahi to say to Mirtahmasb that he cannot act anymore. Referring to a moment in his own film, Ayneh/The Mirror (Iran, 1997), Panahi does what his child actor, Mina Mohammad Khani, did in that film – and refuses to act. This he calls ‘throwing off the cast’ in reference to how Mina in Mirror refused after a while to wear the cast she had been given and stepped off the bus on which they were filming.

Of course, Mirtahmasb keeps the camera rolling even though Panahi says he is not acting anymore. If this is no longer acting, but if the camera is still recording, what is it that we are seeing now? As per the greatest of Iranian films, and as identified by a host of scholars of Iranian cinema, the line between fiction and reality becomes definitively blurred here – in a fashion that befits the more ‘art house’ branch of Iranian film.

(The argument that Iranian films blur the boundary between fact and fiction has been used persuasively to argue that we should not take Iranian films to be immediate representations of Iranian life. That is, we should not believe everything that we see in Iranian films as being real. In fact, it is an Iranian artistic tradition to blur this boundary. Even though Panahi has made not a film but a non-film, then, its artistic credentials are high, perhaps even beyond question.)

This ambiguity between fiction and reality is only heightened when Panahi tells Mirtahmasb to cut – only for Mirtahmasb to refuse, because Panahi is not entitled to make films and so therefore cannot direct the very film in which he currently is featuring.

(Humour, perhaps surprisingly, but also in a very human fashion, features prominently in This is Not a Film, as hopefully this blog will make clear.)

Not only is the non-film only ambiguously a documentary and/or a fiction, then, but the question concerning whose film/non-film this is also becomes ambiguous. That is, who is the filmmaker here? Panahi or Mirtahmasb? This ambiguity is further heightened during moments in which the camera is simply left rolling with no operator, as happens towards the film’s climax. No one is making this film at such moments; as such, this cannot be a film, since a film needs a maker, no?

Further to complicate matters is Panahi’s ingenious use of mise-en-scène. As Panahi shows to Mirtahmasb on his TV the sequence from The Mirror that Gheyrat’s phone call brought to mind, we have a mise-en-abyme effect whereby there is a film within the non-film that we are watching: if This is Not a Film is not a film, perhaps it is so because films like The Mirror lie within it and not necessarily beyond it. In this way, This is Not a Film is not a film because it has its own reality – such that it contains even other films.

Panahi pauses The Mirror, and Mirtahmasb pans over to him, stood as he is next to a shelf that houses a variety of DVDs. Most of the DVD sleeves are illegible – at least to this viewer – but prominent among those that are legible (to me) is the DVD of Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, Spain/USA/France, 2010).

Buried is about an American truck driver in Iraq, Paul (Ryan Reynolds), who wakes up to find himself buried alive in a coffin. Practically the whole of Buried is set within the confines of the coffin. To have the DVD of Buried so prominent in the frame, then, is to suggest a parallel between that film and this non-film: Panahi’s house arrest is also akin to some sort of artistic death, as if he, too, were buried alive.

What is more, the way in which Buried functions for some viewers as a film that raises awareness of the complexity of contemporary Iraq and, by extension, the Middle East in general (including Iran), makes of it a truly canny choice. It is contemporary, relatively fresh in the minds of those who have seen it, and politically relevant. Without wishing to over-read what could, after all, be a random detail, the prominent placement of the Buried DVD also suggests Panahi’s desire to send out coded messages about his imprisonment specifically to Western viewers, knowing full well that it is most likely only Western – or at the very least non-Iranian – viewers that will be able to see his film.

If the reader thinks that the above is the over-reading of what is arguably a random detail, then I would respond thus: in fact it does not matter whether the DVD of Buried was prominently placed in frame on purpose or by accident. What is important is that this non-film makes us question this very issue. It is when we are not – and perhaps cannot – be sure about the fabricated nature or otherwise of the images that we are seeing that Panahi’s film works best: is this a film or not?

Panahi then speaks to fellow filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-E’temad, who tells him that she is trying to rally support for his cause. Panahi discourages her from doing so, repeating the advice of his lawyer, Mrs Gheyrat, that it is perhaps better for him to court the support of foreign artists and Iranian artists in exile than for domestic artists to risk trouble of their own by speaking out against the government’s persecution of Panahi in particular and Iranian filmmakers more generally.

Bani-E’temad replies by saying that too many artists in Iran are living in fear of the present regime and that they must be more defiant. This truly is a bold act of defiance on her part to go on record as saying this.

(Even if Panahi cannot leave his home, his trusty iPhone keeps him in touch with well-wishing supporters. If anyone thought Iran were a backward country – if anyone took a Kiarostami film to be a ‘transparent’ depiction of life in Iran, then they should remember that the protests against the stolen election in 2009 were not for nothing known for their innovative use of Twitter and other social networking tools for their organisation.)

Panahi then decides that he will not make a film, but instead will read a screenplay of a film that he wanted to make before he was placed under house arrest (although, Panahi tells us, the Ministry for Culture and Islamic Guidance, the government agency responsible for approving films at script and edit stage in Iran, did not approve this script when he sent it to them).

This script tells the story of Maryam, a young woman from Isfahan who wants to study the arts in Tehran. Her parents, however, refuse to let her go to study and so instead lock her in her room – such that she has little to no contact with the outside world – a kind of young adult version of the two girls in Samira Makhmalbaf’s beautifully poetic Sib/The Apple (Iran/France, 1998), who also are confined to their house and who pass messages over their courtyard wall in order to communicate with the world beyond.

In the style of Dogville (Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/UK/France/Germany/Netherlands/Norway/Finland, 2003), Panahi lays tape down on the carpet in his living room (which also houses a beautiful old Lumière-style cinematograph) in order to show us the borders of the set that he had created for his film about Maryam.

He then talks us through the story. It is as if Panahi here has become Scheherazade, who must make up stories in order to stay alive. That is, like storytelling for Scheherazade, filmmaking is for Panahi not a money-making pastime, but something that he feels compelled to do, something that he must do because he has no option (and on a level that is above and beyond all those who in the blush of youth claim to feel the same about filmmaking – “I don’t think I can lead my life without making films” – and yet who never do it – a chiding I give to myself more or less everyday). Without filmmaking Panahi might as well be buried…

Even without the ideal tools (sets, actors, lights, etc) to make a film, Panahi nonetheless films; he will make a non-film if he cannot make a film. The important thing is to make, to create. This is the gift of the filmmaker and other poets and artists: it is not uniquely the gift of skill in art-making that they have, but the compulsion to give that skill to the world, the inability to stop that need to create from bursting forth. A gift to and a gift from the artist.

At one point, Panahi (a gmail user) checks what is perhaps his own website, or at the very least a website featuring news about him. It is pure propaganda, with the website supposedly reporting that Panahi has turned to political filmmaking recently (by which is meant a turn to pro-government films), as well as stating that he ‘directed’ the recent Berlin Film Festival – even though in reality he was not allowed to travel for it – in February 2011 as in 2010.

This manipulation of the truth, then, may in its own way make artists of the Iranian government in their participation in the falsification of websites such that we cannot tell fact from fiction anymore. But whereas Panahi is intelligent and playful, in this case we can tell that the website in question is spreading downright lies.

What sound like gunshots outside begin to become increasingly common on the soundtrack. Panahi receives a phone call from a friend who offers to pick up his wife and daughter – since many people are taking to the streets, since traffic is heavy, and since the police are beginning to turn out in force.

Whether this is a staged phone call or simply a fictional device weaved into the film, the caller hangs up – saying that he is being pulled over by the police. Minutes later he calls again – safe, but saying that the police had spotted a camera on the passenger seat of his car and had pulled him over to ask him what he was doing with it.

In spite of being asked in my own experience to stop filming by the police on various occasions in public spaces and for a variety of reasons – most of which have seemed to me unreasonable – there is something sinister about the police pulling someone over simply for owning a camera and not for using it.

But as the non-film goes on, we begin to realise that those are not violent protests in the streets, but rather fireworks being set off for Chaharshanbe Suri, or Fireworks Wednesday, which typically takes place in Iran on the Tuesday night before ‘Red Wednesday.’ This takes place on the last Wednesday before Nouruz, which is the Persian New Year.

(This means that – if it were filmed in one day, which in fact seems unlikely – This is Not a Film was filmed on 15 March 2011, which partly tallies with the coverage that we see on television of the Tōhoku earthquake, which took place on 11 March 2011. That said, Panahi seems to react to the earthquake news as if it were brand new to him, which surely it could not have been had four days elapsed since the earthquake. This renders ambiguous the true timeline of this non-film’s making – made only worse when the IMDb credits the film to 2010 – while at the same time showing that even in his confinement, Panahi is once again in touch with the outside world – most of which simply cannot be faked – thanks to the media.)

As is explained in the film, Fireworks Wednesday (which, coincidentally, is the name of a film by the excellent Iranian filmmaker, Asghar Farhadi – he also responsible for the recent Darbareye Elly/About Elly (Iran, 2009) and Jodaeiye Nader az Simin/Nader and Simin, A Separation (Iran, 2011)) has been ‘called off’ by the government, and yet people go out and do it anyway – including Panahi’s downstairs neighbour, Shima, who at one point tries to leave with him her yapping dog, Mickey. Amusingly, Panahi ejects Mickey swiftly when it turns out that he and Igi do not get along.

Therefore, the soundtrack to the film sounds something like a war zone, while at the same time being charged with political resistance, as people light fireworks and street fires to celebrate the coming of a new – dare one hope for a better? – year.

This is Not a Film reaches its climax when Panahi starts to film Mirtahmasb on his mobile phone as Mirtahmasb films Panahi with the professional camera. Mirtahmasb quips amusingly – one of various moments of genuine humour in this otherwise anxiety-ridden film – that they are like hairdressers, in that when they run out of people whose hair to cut, they start to cut each other’s.

(Panahi also recounts an amusing story about how he and Bani-E’temad dream of starting up an Idle Filmmakers’ Mobile Kitchen during the periods when they are not making films – simply so that they can meet people.)

Mirtahmasb then says that he needs to leave. He leaves the camera rolling on the kitchen table, explaining to Panahi that ‘it matters that the cameras are ON’ (the upper case ‘ON’ appearing in the subtitles) – perhaps one of the clearest declarations in the film that filming whatever one can will help to make clear the would-be criminal nature of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government.

And as Panahi goes with Mirtahmasb to the door, there appears a good-looking young man who calls himself Hassan, and who claims that he is filling in for Akbar in emptying the bins, and that he is the brother of Nasrin, Akbar’s pregnant wife.

A strange encounter ensues: Hassan recognises Panahi, even though Panahi does not recognise Hassan. Mirtahmasb leaves, while Panahi questions Hassan about his life.

Oddly, though, Hassan becomes nervous, seemingly evading Panahi’s questions about his jobs (he has various) and his studies – only ever answering in the vaguest of terms: he’s studying the arts, but he provides no details that might make this response plausible.

To a westerner/to me (if not to everyone), there is something strange in this exchange. Hassan’s evasiveness in answering Panahi’s questions leads one to suspect that he is a spy of some sort, sent by the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security, which is often referred to as MOIS or VEVAK. And that, seeing Panahi with a camera in his hand, he is about to do Panahi’s appeal case no favours whatsoever.

Furthermore, the sequence is immensely tense in that Panahi, filming Hassan at first with his iPhone and then with the camera that Mirtahmasb has left running in the kitchen, goes with Hassan in the lift. Here the conversation changes to half-charming, half-sinister, in that the now-greater levels of confinement in the lift only add to the claustrophobia of the film.

In addition, Hassan has told Panahi that he was working in the building on the night that the police raided the apartment building to arrest him, his wife, his daughter, and 15 others including filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mehdi Pourmoussa, who was assistant director of Bahman Ghobadi’s underground film, Kasi az gorbehaye irani khabar nadareh/No One Knows About Persian Cats (Iran, 2009).

Why was Hassan there when the police raided Panahi’s place – in a fashion seemingly reminiscent of the party raid that occurs in Talayae sorkh/Crimson Gold (Iran, 2003)? Why does he specifically bring it up now, nearly a year later? The answer to these and other questions is repeatedly forestalled as Hassan takes the lift down level by level – from the 9th floor (Panahi’s) to the basement – stopping at each to check if there is rubbish to pick up.

Perhaps it is nerves on Hassan’s part – being stuck in a lift with a great director who is also filming him (Hassan does amusingly say that he is not looking good enough to be filmed). But there is something sinister about the way Hassan continually begins to explain his version of events on the night of the raid and arrest (which, incidentally, was 1 March 2010) – only to stop, leave the lift to check for rubbish, and then to start again when he returns.

What is more, it is only when Panahi prompts him to ring the neighbours’ doorbells that Hassan begins to do so to check for rubbish. Otherwise, Hassan explains, everyone seems to have forgotten to leave their rubbish out.

When Hassan does begin to ring doorbells, barely anyone answers. Hassan assumes that this must be because everyone is out at Fireworks Wednesday, but the viewer is nonetheless unsure – and this lack of security, which runs throughout this non-film but which is here redefined through the lens of the spy thriller, which – outrageously (at least for me) – seems to have surfaced from nowhere within Panahi’s film, only adds to the tension.

Further elements increase the anxiety: Hassan often steps out on to pitch dark landings that we cannot see – our inability to see enhancing our sense of uncertainty; one floor – the seventh – has raging party music thumping from its door, meaning that the non-film’s soundscape also creates tension.

Hassan and Panahi then reach the second floor, prior to arriving at which Hassan speculates that there will be lots of empty pizza boxes outside the inhabitants’ door. Once again, Hassan reminds us of Hussein (Hossein Emadeddin) of Crimson Gold, who himself is a pizza delivery man and whose sense of dissatisfaction with the world might be similar to Panahi’s in his current predicament.

However, comedy is unpredictably injected here into this prolonged lift sequence, when the door is answered not by pizza-guzzling neighbours but by Shima, whose voice once again we hear (we never see her) as she tries to fob Mickey off on to Hassan for a few hours so that she also can go out to Fireworks Wednesday.

(Hassan accepts – but he will look after Mickey in the lobby after the film has finished.)

The intrusion of comedy does not allow for a release in pressure, however; it in fact only renders us (or perhaps only me) further incapable of working out quite what is going on. Is Hassan a spy of sorts? Is this film – in spite of its ‘ramshackle’/improvised appearance – so well organised that it is only fooling with our expectations? Is this a comedy?

Bizarrely, Hassan tells Shima to try giving the dog to Panahi up on the ninth floor. She says that she has already tried, but that Mickey only survived two seconds up there. Suddenly what could well be a truly innocent conversation becomes once again sinister because the subject of the conversation, Panahi, is recording it. Panahi has now turned spy instead of Hassan. Perhaps Panahi as non-filmmaker is the intrusive one, documenting the strangeness of other people’s lives.

Nonetheless, down the lift goes – further into the darkness of the basement. All the while remaining immensely polite, Hassan then carries the rubbish he has accumulated through the underground car park (if I remember correctly – it is dark, after all) and towards the exit.

If Panahi has been playing with our emotions – is this real? is this staged? is Panahi in danger of being caught filming by a government that surely would use any excuse further to punish him? – then the unease only (impossibly!) increases as the film comes to its final moments.

Panahi steps outside of his apartment block and towards the gates of his building. Hassan turns and tells him that he must not be seen here – a gesture that seems to confirm, finally, that Hassan is not a ‘bad guy’ – but which only suggests, after so much claustrophobia upstairs on the 9th floor, a sense of liberation. This sense of liberation in stepping outside of the apartment further reinforces one’s sense of Panahi’s frustration and enclosure. That he might get spotted simultaneously reinforces one’s sense of paranoia – ‘they’ are, or at least, might be watching.

And as the film draws to its close, Panahi films a street fire taking place right by the gate to his apartment block and around which shadowy figures gather and dance. What had for a while seemed a generic film now becomes once again political: the fires are an act of defiance, suggesting the passion of the people, their desire for change in an Iran in which Panahi has been imprisoned for, it seems, nothing more than making a film. A beacon in the darkness.

But this final political charge does not resolve the question – defined as it is by uncertainty and anxiety – concerning whether we have just watched an elaborate hoax, or whether Panahi has managed to make a film that portrays a reality the weird and wonderful nature of which is more inscrutable and fascinating than any fictional world could be.

In creating a film that plays with our expectations in this manner, Panahi exposes the way in which cinema has ingrained itself in our thought patterns. An innocent man, Hassan, could be a spy, we/I fear. Paranoia perhaps characterises our times, but this paranoia is also linked to our secret belief that somehow we might be in a filmic reality in which people are spying on us.

Except that we know that Panahi is under house arrest; that ‘they’ probably are spying on him – regardless of whether or not he has managed to make a non-film and to have it distributed (how have the powers that be in Iran responded to this? is this all part of an even bigger hoax in which – crazily – Iran creates myths about its filmmakers in order to enhance their international reputation?).

It is not that we should take the content of these questions seriously (or should we?). It is that the suspicion that we could possibly be in a film, or what I shall call ‘cinematic thinking,’ suggests that cinema is our measure of reality – and not that reality is our measure of cinema.

This is not intended as disrespect to anyone who has suffered recently or ever at the hands of this or any political regime, but it seems as though repressive regimes (which I shall label as fascist, whether the regimes in question identify themselves with this term or not) themselves function cinematically. That is, fascism and cinema are inherently linked, in that the cultivation of fear that allows one to control the people is achieved not strictly in films, but in making people suspect that they might be in a (genre) film.

If we find the roots of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime back in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, during which cinemas were burnt down (with people in them), and during which the late Ayatollah Khomeini critiqued the cinema as a dangerous, but potentially useful, tool for controlling the people, then we could conceivably argue that Ahmadinejad has taken Khomeini’s lesson to heart. He has done so not by rejecting cinema, but by allowing cinematic thinking to penetrate the minds of his people, such that they live in fear. Such that they think that their lives could turn into a film, like Panahi’s life here, and that they, too, could be buried alive or worse…

If – paradoxically – the current Iranian regime asserts its power through the propagation of cinematic thinking, then, Panahi’s anti-regime film must by definition be non-cinematic. As he and Mirtahmasb themselves declare through their title, if it is Iran itself that has become a movie of sorts, then this film is not – and cannot be – a film.

What is true of Iran here becomes true of cinema as a whole – meaning that Panahi – whose films up until this point have always left me only lukewarm in comparison to some of the other Iranian filmmakers whose works I love – has made not just his masterpiece, but a true masterpiece of all cinema and – remarkably – under the most strenuous and minimal conditions.

This ‘truth’ is that ‘cinematic thinking’ infiltrates all of us – and the more we feel that we are living in a film, the more (potentially) we are prey to the logic of fascism, whether or not control is the deliberate or merely the unconscious aim of anyone anywhere.

That is, the more we prefer cinema to life, the more we wish our lives were cinematic, the more we will into existence the repressive/fascistic regimes that are required to bring this about. In a fashion akin to (of course) Gilles Deleuze, Hollywood and Hitler go hand in hand – such that cinema and fascism are inextricably bound the one to the other.

If this is the case, then Panahi’s non-film strikes a blow to fascism everywhere. But how is this so?

This is so because the non-film is not cinematic in the recognisable and generic sense defined above, hence its status as a ‘non-film.’ This non-film explores paranoia, but where mainstream cinema might make that paranoia real, not least by centering the film on an individual protagonist or on a small group of individual protagonists, here Panahi’s film leaves us to query whether the paranoia is real, or whether it is just us reading it into the film.

By raising the question that we are reading this paranoia into the film, Panahi exposes to us our susceptibility to cinematic thinking (rather than simply reinforcing it). Panahi, himself a political and not a legal prisoner, as Mrs Gheyrat argues (and if we are to believe her); in other words, Panahi himself precisely the person to say that the paranoia is justified because he has been placed under house arrest for his thoughts and for his creative endeavours, as if either could ever be crimes. If Panahi, then, exposes our susceptibility to cinematic thinking despite being entirely qualified to think it himself, then truly we must take note.

If Panahi – together with Bani-E’temad – refuses to live in fear, then none of us, be we from Iran or anywhere, should live in fear. By creating a film that in some senses destroys cinema, then Panahi’s film is justifiably ‘not a film.’ Panahi is superficially the centre of his film – we see plenty of him in frame throughout its duration. But his encounters with others, hopefully innocent as they seemingly turn out to be, remind us that we are not the centre of things and that we should not in an individualistic/paranoid sense believe that we are. There are always others; we are always with others; we do not – and cannot – exist without others.

And yet cinema has – in its more popular iterations, anyway – perpetuated the myth of the individual, written wider as mancruel against, and not with, nature. In this way, This is Not a Film is not the becoming cinema, or the becoming light, that most humans dream of. Rather it is Panahi’s unbecoming cinema that, paradoxically, lends to the film its great depth and power.

If cinema were not linked inextricably to fascism (again, defined here not as a single historical movement or moment, but as the repressive (and often self-willed) control of the people in all places and at all times – perhaps even in pre-cinematic times), then non-films like Panahi’s would not be necessary. They would have no existence, no meaning.

Perhaps the paradoxically mainstream nature of individualistic/paranoid thought justifies the artist, who tries to remind the world that we are with each other and with the world. That is, perhaps fascism has a mass psychology that is difficult for we humans to accept, even though we disavow our desire for fascism on an almost daily basis.

This is one conundrum I am not in a position to resolve – not during this [non-?]blog at any rate.

Nevertheless, in unbecoming cinema, Panahi exposes the cinema that has filtered repressively through Iran to allow Ahmadinejad to steal an election and to continue to impose his will on a people waking up to the realisation that this is not what they want, and that they need not live in fear.

As Panahi steps outside, he sees others who are also already outside. The example can spread beyond Iran: perhaps it is time for us all to step outside. To live not in fear. But to embrace reality and all that it contains. To think not just individually, but through a sense of withness. To reject fascism, to realise the extent to which we think cinematically – perhaps even to realise the extent to which thinking cinematically means that we think in clichés, and to realise that thinking in clichés means that we probably do not think at all.

If these are not in themselves clichés (and they could be), it is time, perhaps, to think – and perhaps to act by stepping outside, by exposing ourselves to encounters with others, by recognising that we are only ever with others and with the world. Not to have answers, but questions. Not to be certain but – as per Panahi’s film – to be asking about the truth-status of all that we see.

Perhaps there is no reality without cinema, no cinema without reality. Answering this question is not important. Or rather, not answering this question is very important. Buried in Iran, where paranoia/cinema is perhaps most justified as a mode of thought, Panahi refuses to answer this question. Again, for this reason his non-film is not a film in the conventional sense of the word.

But it is for certain a work of art that dances on the edge of cinema and non-cinema, of thought and non-thought, asking questions, inducing thought, living not in fear, even if the film also explores – consciously or otherwise – the politics of fear, making us aware that fear is not imposed from without but something with which we are all complicit.

Strangely, if we are complicit in our belief in the individual and the concomitant rise of fascism-enabling paranoia, then a paradox emerges in that individualism/paranoia/fascism is reliant on complicity/withness, while at the same time occulting that very withness that enables it; the job here is to bring withness back to visibility such that rampant individualism, paranoia and thus fascism might evaporate.

Since we are all together, we must all recognise this and each other. When we recognise each other – even when, like Panahi, we live confined to only a few rooms – then we can begin to live in a democracy, both in Iran and around the world.