We Are Many (Amir Amirani, UK, 2014)

I am only going to write a brief blog about We Are Many, Amir Amirani’s documentary about the 2003 anti-war march in London.

For, while there are two things that I personally did not enjoy so much about the film, it has at its core some truly extraordinary ideas that are worth pondering for a brief while (well, they’re worth pondering for a long while, but I shall only briefly ponder them here/today).

The film opens with a 20-minute or so introduction to the 2003 war in Iraq. The films countdown structure towards the war suggests that it was inevitable, no doubt as a result of the fact that we know now, in 2015, that the war has indeed been and gone. The events of 11 September 2001 of course play a key role in this countdown, and while in some senses it is necessary to mention this and other events as context for the war in Iraq, to me it felt like we have seen all of this many times before. Or rather, the film did not in this section add anything about this moment to what we do already know.

The second issue I have with the film is its reliance on celebrities to lend credibility to the story being told. I hate to sound like an arse – not least because I could just plain be wrong – but when we see and hear Richard Branson telling us that he was moments away from preventing the Iraq war as a result of a meeting that he set up and bankrolled between Saddam Hussein and Kofi Annan, and which oh-so-nearly took place, one just wants some critical scrutiny to emerge to check whether this is really true, nice guy though I am sure Richard Branson is and all that.

Indeed, the seemingly obligatory celebrity vox pops from the likes of Susan Sarandon, Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Mark Rylance, Danny Glover, Ken Loach and more can lend to the film a touch of the self-congratulation that is celebrity culture, and which stands in some respects in stark contrast to the extraordinary ideas mentioned above and which the film also contains.

For, one of the most extraordinary ideas in the film is its celebration of mass human gatherings, especially when carried out with/for political intent. Repeatedly the vox pops do emphasise that being in a massive crowd is moving, joyful and special.

More than that, though, is the crowd footage that Amirani uses in his film. If in asserting that ‘the people are missing’ from cinema, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze was referring to the way in which movies rely perhaps overly on the individual agent who will overcome the world, here we get a sense of the presence of the multitude, and of how, when gathering in huge numbers, an emergent, borg-like identity might well emerge from crowds, which do indeed challenge individual agency and the notion the individual as agent and the agent as individual full stop.

Joy, a term used repeatedly to describe the experience by crowd participants in the film, is, I wish to suggest, felt when humans realise that they are not alone, adrift in a solipsistic daze, but are thoroughly enworlded, and enworlded with other human beings. We do, at such moments, stand looking not just with our own eyes at events, but beside ourselves. And as to be beside oneself with laughter is joyful, so to be beside oneself and simply seeing that one is part of a huge, magnificent and shared existence is joyful because literally mind-expanding: we are forced to recognise both that we are tiny in the world, but that irrevocably we are with the world. Indeed, this sense of joyful withness, with the world and with our human conspecifics, is inherently comedic.

Comedy’s etymology is, according to this site

probably from komodios “actor or singer in the revels,” from komos “revel, carousal, merry-making, festival,” + aoidos “singer, poet,” from aeidein “to sing,” related to oide.

In other words, comedy is a sing-along, a festival of withness (‘com’), a revel and a revelation, in which our eyes are opened to see beyond/beside ourselves and to see that we are with the world.

That Amirani’s film suggests this via its treatment of crowds is, like I say, extraordinary, even if at odds with the celebration of individuality with the emphasis of celebrity that the film elsewhere conveys.

The second extraordinary thing about We Are Many is its insight into subsequent mass movements, especially in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in 2011. For, participants in that crowd suggest that coverage of the anti-war marches in Britain played a key role in inspiring Egyptians themselves to take to the streets several years later. This is extraordinary, because while we may sit pessimistically thinking that the crowds achieved nothing in the UK and elsewhere, and that the war with Iraq took place anyway, that it had a legacy elsewhere in the world suggests that we need not be so pessimistic. And whatever one makes of the consequences of the s0-called Arab Spring, the film thus brings about a sense of hope in collective expression and maybe even of collective change, or change that has as its principle interest not the benefit of the few, but the benefit of the many.

An independently produced film, We Are Many is an extraordinary achievement that, while not a film with the seeming restraint of, say, a Claude Lanzmann, nonetheless is a great rabble rowser, one that makes us question events both from our recent past and ongoing, and which gives us a sense at times that we are all part of the human comedy that is life.

Set Fire to the Stars (Andy Goddard, UK, 2014)

If humanity can lay claim to any powers beyond those of the other species that swarm this frail planet, then it is the power to create. The Greeks referred to this process of creation as poiesis. In the contemporary world, we might refer to this process as poetry.

There are many things that humans can create, from technologies to buildings to works of art. And while perhaps all machines transform our world and thus help us to see not just the world anew, but to realise that the world is only ever progressing into the new as the machines themselves both emerge from the constituent matter with which our universe is built and reconfigure that matter by bringing the machines’ products into existence, perhaps art nonetheless has a special place in and with the world, since art does not just bring beautiful new objects into the world (so-called works of art), but art also makes us see that beauty lies everywhere in the world.

Set Fire to the Stars was shot in 18 days in early 2014 on a relatively small budget. It tells the story of Dylan Thomas (co-writer Celyn Jones) on the verge of his first American tour in 1950. However, rather than concentrate uniquely on Thomas, the story is also about would-be poet John Malcolm Brinnin (Elijah Wood), a New York poetry professor who has brought Thomas to the USA, and who struggles to keep a leash on his guest, who otherwise is raising alcohol-pumping hell.

At one point Thomas catches Brinnin correcting his students’ poems in the Connecticut retreat to which the latter has brought the former in a bid to dry him out. Thomas reads the poem – and with gusto. Why, Thomas asks, does Brinnin have to write all over this work? He is a professor, replies Brinnin, which only prompts Thomas to suggest, in so many words, that creation must be encouraged, not stifled. And we can imagine Thomas’ thoughts: that with only the courage to write, all of the respect for technique will follow, but if one only learns technique and no courage, then one’s poetry will be an empty exercise.

Set Fire to the Stars is a technically accomplished film; it has a nostalgic quality that is brought forth by the film’s black and white cinematography, suggesting a speakeasy States populated by hearts that pump blood and soar with spirit like anywhere else. Maybe the film could go further in exploring just what it is that a human can think, feel and do on this cold rock, in the sense that maybe there could be even more laying bare of the souls that we see in the film. But Set Fire to the Stars is, after all, a film with a lot of heart. A film with a lot of poetry.

For, few are the films that feel as though they had to have been made by its makers before they try and fail to outscream the screaming devil that is death. And yet, in Set Fire to the Stars, one gets a sense that Goddard and in particular Jones could not have led a life that did not at some point in time feature a version of this film. We are, after all, equally human and as such, we all have a duty to try to pocket the moon if that is what we wish to accomplish. That is, if we dream it, then we must have the courage to make it.

And this is what one feels watching Set Fire to the Stars: that everything has been put into this that the filmmakers could muster within and without themselves. To create is tread fearlessly into the world of crisis, where critics uphold themselves as the gatekeepers between what is supposedly good and bad. And yet to create takes courage and should thus be both encouraging and encouraged. Good and bad can drown themselves in jealous rivalry under the surface of Lake Film Reviews. What is great, alone, is that the film is done, and its courage is what shines through.

To confirm the poetry of the film, one happily is transported to America’s New England for its duration, even though the film is shot in and around Thomas’ native Swansea. What more affirmation of magic can there be than such alchemy of place, whereby we find America in Wales and, while at times we may notice, we do not really care? This is not to be hung up on rules and wherefores, but it is lead a life of play, make-believe and joy.

Maybe the film should be more angry, more ugly. But Set Fire to the Stars is nonetheless a defiant film that like all creations is born out of love. Being now in and with the world, there is no need to scrawl all over its margins, but instead simply to admire it, the Thomas that it give us, and to learn courage from it to lead a life of creation ourselves.