A Fábrica de Nada/The Nothing Factory (Pedro Pinho, Portugal, 2017)

A Fábrica de Nada de Pedro Pinho é o premeiro grande filme do meu 2018/Pedro Pinho’s Nothing Factory is my first great film of 2018.

 

Thoughts provoked by the film with which I am struggling:-

 

Can capitalism exist without capitalists? This seems to be the central question. Capitalism without capital. Ecology without nature. Humanity without humans. Cinema without films.

 

If capital requires bodies in order to produce value, then two things:-

 

1. The bodies that are humans are sacrificed to capital in the form of debt and unemployment; they are rendered in the zone of something like the homo sacer.

 

2. In order for capital to continue to create value via machines, it makes sense that we confer humanity on to machines – so that value continues to be produced. The recognition of machines as human, then, would also be to allow machines to unionise, strike, refuse to work, and to rebel – not just against their human overlords, but against the system that exploits them.

 

But more…

 

Capital demands bodies for two linked but paradoxical-seeming reasons.

 

1. It demands bodies for food. Bodies must be sacrificed to capital so that capital can live by consuming humans.

 

2. In consuming human bodies (or the bodies of machines that now are considered human), capital can continue without a body – existing not in the physical realm of the tangible human, but as an ethereal, bodiless form that through not having a body exists in the realm of the god.

 

But capital is not god. The trick that it plays in order to be or to become a god is in making us think it does not have a body and thus is eternal and unchanging, in making us think that it does not age, grow old or die.

 

To speak of capitalists without speaking of capital might seem simply to deny the existence of capital, as to speak of films without cinema would be to deny the existence of cinema. But in that denial – in that denial that capital and cinema have bodies – it continues on the ethereal, godly realm, intangible, virtual, unreal. The singularity of an embodied A.I. (machines as humans) only allows the real A.I. to continue in its godly dimension.

 

So to prove that capital is not god, we must do one or both of two inter-linked things.

 

1. Either we must recognise that there are only humans (and that machines and animals and everything are humans, consisting only ever of the same stuff or force). In such a world without boundaries, we can perhaps get around the generalisation of boundaries and borders that in the contemporary age are not just physical but also intangible – with that very intangibility being what empowers them, being what allows power to exist as such. This is a world not of nature, but of natures, a world not of capital but capitals, a world not of a world, but of worlds. All is alive – both the virtual and the actual, such that all can also change, become and even die. No eternity, just immanence. Nothing out of time, just time. Total democratic difference, with all that is godly being rendered human. Total humanity – a humane world in which that which is human is not confined within a controlled border, but generalised (humanity without humans; or only humans without humanity).

 

2. And/or we must give to capital a body; we must show that it has a body, and thus that it, too, ages, crumbles, withers, dies, disperses into the chaosmos and becomes other. Rather than humans aspiring to capital (to live forever via remaining forever young, stopping time, becoming eternal, an endeavour that really involves us sacrificing ourselves to capital, which does continue to exist, invisible and eternal), we must show that capital is human.

 

But how to do this, especially the latter? We must show that there are no gods, we must refuse to sacrifice ourselves, we must age, and thus we must die – or understand that there is not really death, just continuous becomings and that the I is simply a temporary form. Infinite becoming rather than the vain pursuit of stasis-as-eternity/eternity-as-stasis. We must show that capital is human by giving to it a body, by giving to it ageing, by giving to it becoming, by giving to it change, and thus by creating a world in which capital – like all of us – perishes. We must create a new world. We must create. We must lead lives defined by poiesis; we must lead poetic lives.

 

But how does a man survive on poetry? Perhaps the aim is not to sur-vive but just to ‘vive’/to live, and in this we realise that all life is survival, and that the surreal exists with the real. And in the meantime, we commiserate and share our bread (companionship).

A Review of Cinema in 2017

In an essay for Frames Cinema Journal, I once suggested that Sean Baker’s Tangerine (USA, 2015) was as important as, if not more important than, Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs (UK/USA, 2015). My reasoning was that in its use of the iPhone to make a film about transsexual sex workers in Los Angeles, Tangerine did something more interesting both thematically and formally than Boyle’s fantastically smart biopic enshrining the Great Man behind Apple.

In a year that ends with Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, USA, 2017) marching rapidly and in very little time towards being the highest grossing movie to be released in 2017 (with much of its gross yet to come in 2018), it would seem that in The Florida Project (USA, 2017), Sean Baker has again made a timely film that offers a critical corrective to the mainstream.

For, as Tangerine uses the iPhone to open up new vistas not offered by the conservative Steve Jobs, so does The Florida Project give us insight into America’s underside, as it tells the story of kids living in motels not far from Orlando, of course the home of Disney World.

Indeed, Baker’s film ends with a fantasy escape by two of its child protagonists (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince and Valeria Cotto) away from the police and care workers who will separate one of them from her mother and towards Disney World, which the kids approach as the film cuts to black and ends.

In this image, Baker surely acknowledges the power of Disney in offering escape from and perhaps solace for real world problems, such as negligent parents, poverty and so on. But Baker also reminds us that what we see in The Florida Project is the kind of reality that rarely features in Disney films… and even if it does, it is one from which escape is typically completed rather than left suspended in mid-flight, as here.

In this sense, The Florida Project challenges the approaching monopoly of Disney on the realm of audiovisual entertainment by reminding us that cinema need not be the colonisation of the imagination via escapism, but that it can find beauty in all manner of things, including six-year old kids spitting on a car, trashing an abandoned house and more.

Indeed, The Florida Project is regularly reminiscent of François Truffaut’s classic The 400 Blows (France, 1959), even if Baker’s protagonists are significantly younger than was Jean-Pierre Léaud when he starred in Truffaut’s French New Wave flagship. And as Truffaut breathed new life into cinema by showing the life of children and their refusal to conform to papa and papa’s old-fashioned cinema, so might Baker also breathe new life into cinema by showing the life of children and their refusal to buy into the fake plastic world of toys and the toyification of life.

My stupid Disney conspiracy theory
But if The Florida Project is going to achieve a rejuvenation of cinema, it certainly has its work cut out. For, if we look at the list below of the highest grossing movies of 2017, we see that half of them are Disney movies, with Universal managing two on the list, and then one apiece for Sony, United Entertainment and Warner Bros (with the Sony property, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Jon Watts, USA, 2017, being a Marvel adaptation, meaning that this franchise might at some point return to Marvel Studios and thus to Disney, as happened recently with X-Men after the acquisition by Disney of Fox).

1	Beauty and the Beast	Disney	$1,263,521,126
2	The Fate of the Furious	Universal	$1,235,761,498
3	Star Wars: The Last Jedi	Disney	$1,056,389,228
4	Despicable Me 3	Universal	$1,033,508,147
5	Spider-Man: Homecoming	Sony Pictures	$880,166,924
6	Wolf Warrior 2	United Entertainment	$870,325,439
7	Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2	Disney	$863,732,512
8	Thor: Ragnarok		$848,084,810
9	Wonder Woman	Warner Bros.	$821,847,012
10	Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales	Disney	$794,861,794

Now owning Fox, Marvel, the Star Wars universe, Pixar and of course its own back catalogue (Beauty and the Beast, Bill Condon, USA, 2017, is a remake of a 1991 animation), Disney’s stranglehold on contemporary cinema looks set to increase – not least because there can be endless spin-offs and spinouts and reboots and what have you of the Marvel and the Star Wars universes, exploring the everyday life of ewoks on Endor in a bid to get us watching only Disney and to Disneyfy the planet.

It is noteworthy that as per 2016, the highest grossing films are all sequels or remakes or part of a franchise and that basically all of them feature talking animals and/or flying humans. Some of these might have female, foreign and/or quasi-indie directors (Patty Jenkins, Taika Waititi, James Gunn, Rian Johnson), but they nonetheless all peddle fantasy, violence and escapism, as well as an emphasis on hyper-mobility and speed.

Soon after the invention of the lantern, writes Wolfgang Schivelbusch, light was weaponised, in the sense that it was used as a tool for policing behaviour, while also being used to blind enemies while the wielder of the light remains in darkness. In the era of the atomic bomb, the weaponisation of light becomes clear. And it becomes clearer still in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, when light speed is used to tear apart the destroyers of the Empire (or whatever it is now called).

Cinema also uses light in order to attract/distract attention, and thus in some senses is equally a mechanism of control and thus is put to military use. Some of the highest grossing movies gesture towards being politically progressive (postcolonial elements in Thor: Ragnarok and feminist elements in Wonder Woman), but one wonders that they reflect how cinema through its weaponised light is really the militarisation of all aspects of contemporary life, including political engagement (the militarisation of the postcolonial and woman, as opposed to militant postcolonialism and feminism).

But this mention of Wonder Woman allows me to get to my silly Disney conspiracy theory mentioned above. As Warner Bros owns the DC comic adaptations and as Disney owns Marvel, the studios are like the comic book publishers in competition with each other.

With the exception of Wonder Woman, though, all new Warner Bros films get critically panned, while all Disney films get praised to the heavens – perhaps especially the thoroughly mediocre Last Jedi. The opposition is made most clear when we look at how Captain America: Civil War (Anthony and Joe Russo, USA/Germany, 2016) was celebrated while Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, USA, 2016) was derided, even though the two are basically the same film (one superhero mistakes another superhero for his enemy, when in fact they could work better together). Justice League (Zack Snyder, USA/UK/Canada, 2017) also received a critical drubbing, even though this viewer thought that it distinctly bore the hallmarks of Joss Whedon, the film’s writer and who does no wrong when he is writing scripts for Disney (e.g. Whedon’s Avengers movies).

Dissing Warner Bros films and praising Disney films – even though to this viewer they are all as good/bad as each other – leads me to this thought: no one knows what a good film is – and it is debatable that the criticisms of the Warners films truly dents their commercial appeal, since even if they are not as high on the list as the Disney films, they still make good money. But the perception of what a good film is becomes as stage-managed as cinema itself.

In other words, I sometimes wonder that somewhere behind the scenes, Disney is simply employing bots to tweet negative reviews of Warner Bros films in order to diminish their standing, while tweeting rave reviews of Disney films in order to improve their rating. Faced with the pressure of having to conform with what the kidz on the internets are saying (even though these accounts are as real as the influential accounts set up by the Russians during the recent American elections), flesh world critics end up agreeing with these perceptions (Warners bad, Disney good) in order to continue to look like they know what people like and thus to attract a wider readership. And so what is really going on is a hidden battle for ratings that in turn may or may not help takings played out across the digital media landscape.

I wish just to emphasise that this is a dumb conspiracy theory and not true. But part of me would not be too surprised if parts of it were true. It is cheap and easy to set up fake accounts and also easy to gain good reviews by paying off genuine online influencers. We know that the practice of buying good reviews has been long-standing in print journalism (just look at the Metro newspaper in London, and you will often see a three-star blockbuster given a full-page spread as Film of the Week, while a four-star documentary gets maybe half a paragraph on the next page – even though by definition the four-star film should be Film of the Week over the three-star film). So it would even be surprising if this did not happen to some extent in the twittersphere.

Performances of 2017
Having mentioned Wonder Woman, I might also suggest that Una mujer fantástica/A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, Chile/Germany/Spain/USA, 2017) was paradoxically a much more empowered film, even if it is a film about a transexual, and thus someone whom certain people might claim is not therefore a ‘real’ woman. (Although given that she is immortal and that her body achieves blows that far surpass her shape and bone structure, I would find any claims that Wonder Woman as played by Gal Gadot is a ‘real woman’ highly curious, too.) In the year of Weinstein and so on, I would not want to suggest that it is a man (Lelio) who has made a more progressively feminist film than a woman (Jenkins). But since the films bear similar titles, it becomes hard not to compare them, and Una mujer fantástica is much more in alignment with my personal sensibilities than Wonder Woman – although I was sad to miss and hope soon to catch Mrs Marston and the Wonder Women (Angela Robinson, USA, 2017), which may well be the best of the three.

In starring Rebecca Hall, Mrs Marston and the Wonder Women reminds me of her turn in Christine (Antonio Campos, UK/USA, 2016), which I saw in 2017, and which likely remains an easy winner for the best performance that I saw in a film this year. Daniela Vega’s performance in Una mujer fantástica follows.

And then other standout performances would for me include the afore-mentioned Brooklynn Kimberly Prince in The Florida Project, Michelle Williams in Manchester by the Sea (who in a fraction of the time made me want to watch the film about her character and not Casey Affleck’s character), Mahershala Ali in Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, USA, 2016), Pyotr Skvortsov in The Student (Kirill Serebrennikov, Russia, 2016), Ruth Negga in Loving (Jeff Nichols, UK/USA, 2016), Sonia Braga in Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil/France, 2016), Ethymis Papadimitriou in Suntan (Argyris Papadimitropoulos, Greece/Germany, 2016), Ellie Kendrick in The Levelling (Hope Dickson Leach, UK, 2016), Jack Lowden in England is Mine (Mark Gill, UK, 2017), Nuno Lopes in São Jorge (Marco Martins, Portugal/France, 2016), Colin Farrell in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, UK/Ireland/USA, 2017) and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, Italy/France/Brazil/USA, 2017).

I want also to say how much I enjoyed specifically seeing Ewen Bremner return and evolve the character of Spud in the otherwise somewhat mediocre T2: Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, UK, 2017), while I continue to harbour soft spots for Keanu Reeves (in John Wick 2, Chad Stahelski, USA/Hong Kong, 2017), Dwayne Johnson (in Baywatch, Seth Gordon, UK/China/USA, 2017) and Tom Cruise (in American Made, Doug Liman, USA, 2017).

Finally, what with Assassin’s Creed (Justin Kurzel, USA/France/UK/Hong Kong/Taiwan/Malta, 2017), The Snowman (Tomas Alfredson, UK/USA/Sweden, 2017), Song to Song (Terrence Malick, USA, 2017) and, to a lesser extent, Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott, USA/UK, 2017), it would appear that Michael Fassbender continues to choose complete codswallop. Were it not for his remarkable turn in the equally remarkable Trespass Against Us (Adam Smith, UK, 2016), I’d be worried about chalking Fassbender up as a lost cause. (Trespass Against Us also featured good turns from the ever-reliable Brendan Gleeson, while Barry Keoghan also got about between this film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, UK/Netherlands/France/USA, 2017.)

Movie watching in 2017
Listed at the bottom of this blog are 387 films that I saw in 2017. The absolute vast majority of these are films that I saw for the first time.

That said, while normally I do not list the relatively significant number of films that I watch not for the first time, be that because of teaching or research (the total likely would be around 450 if these were included), a couple are listed below – and for slightly different reasons (maybe because I gave a talk about a specific film and so seeing it was tied to a specific event, which is the case with Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese, USA, 1990; or maybe because I went to the cinema to watch the film before realising that I had seen it before, which is the case with All This Panic, Jenny Gage, USA, 2016; or maybe because I am still not sure whether I have seen the film before or not, which is the case for The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi, Afghanistan/France/Germany/UK, 2012), which seemed familiar throughout, but I just cannot remember when I first saw it if indeed I had seen it before).

Typically I do not include short films on my end of year list, but I have in fact begun to list short films quite regularly, especially when they are work by ‘artist filmmakers’ and whose œuvre gets showcased on MUBI (e.g. Jay Rosenblatt).

Anyway, of these 387 films, I saw 183 at the cinema, with a further 150 online – mainly on MUBI, although I was beginning for my sins to watch an increasing number of films on Amazon’s rental and buying service. I had rented but did not quite find time to see a few films that I really wanted to watch in 2017, but which I shall now have to watch in 2018, including Marjorie Prime (Michael Almereyda, USA, 2017) and I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni, UK/France/Germany, 2017).

In addition to these two main sources of film viewing, I saw 34 films on DVD, 18 on an aeroplane and two on television, while I also include on the list Homecoming, Richard Mosse’s video installation at the Barbican, both because much of it was quite remarkable audiovisual work, and because it really is worth seeing if you have not and get the chance.

Clearly, therefore, I have not seen all of the films released in 2017, and thus am not in a particularly strong position of authority to make pronouncements about the best films of the year, etc.

Nonetheless, I shall describe below a few more of my experiences before highlighting the five films that really stood out for me this year, as well as some thoughts on end of year film lists in general.

Particularly pleasurable this year was to see various of the films by Philippine slow cinema auteur Lav Diaz. Thanks to a series of screenings up at the University of Westminster’s campus in Harrow, combined with a season of his films on MUBI, I was able to sit through some c40 hours of Diaz’s work – leaving me I think with a tick against every feature film that he has made.

Following his death in 2016, it was also a great pleasure to be able to see various films by the late Julio García Espinosa at Birkbeck, University of London, where Professor Michael Chanan curated a retrospective of JGE’s work, including the brilliant Son o no son (Cuba, 1980).

MUBI also offered introductions to various other filmmakers whose work I am glad to have come to know, including Sergei Loznitsa, Pia Marais and Oliver Laxe. MUBI also provided an entry into a whole slew of films by El Pampero Cine, a group of filmmakers including Mariano Llinás, Alejo Moguillansky, Verónica Llinás and Laura Citarella, who make very intelligent work out in the Argentine countryside.

A remarkable film that I saw on MUBI, but which would not be in my films of the year because it is too old is Até ver a luz/After the Night (Basil da Cunha, Switzerland, 2013), which together with the above-mentioned São Jorge shows real depth to contemporary Portuguese cinema, beyond the likes of Miguel Gomes, Pedro Costa and João Pedro Rodrigues.

MUBI also allowed me to further my knowledge of the work of Raoul Ruiz (four films), while YouTube provided me with an opportunity to see four films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (and which I really should have seen beforehand). Furthermore, the double bill of Pere Portabella’s Informe general sobre unas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública (Spain, 1977) and Informe general II: el nou rapte d’Europa/General Report II: The New Abduction of Europe (Spain, 2015) also felt very timely as a result of Brexit and the recent unrest in Catalonia.

With regard to online film viewing, I am also glad to have encountered the work of Fabrizio Federico, whose Pregnant (UK, 2015) is one of the most remarkable punk and experimental films that I have seen.

The year also started very well with regard to experimental cinema, as in the same week I saw 55 Years on the Infinite Plain by Tony Conrad at Tate Modern, before then also seeing La région centrale (Michael Snow, Canada, 1971) at the Serpentine Gallery. I also got to see some audiovisual work live by Phill Niblock at Tate Modern also relatively early on in 2017.

Before I go on to discuss the films that I thought were strong, I was in particular sad to miss a couple of films, especially Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami (Sophie Fiennes, Ireland/UK, 2017) and God’s Own Country (Francis Lee, UK, 2017), which I suspect would have joined The Levelling, Trespass Against Us and England is Mine as strong British movies of 2017, with three of these notably taking place outside of the cities and instead in the countryside. I also wanted very much to watch Bar Bahar/In Between (Maysaloun Hamoud, Israel/France, 2016).

Films of the Year
So, in addition to various of the films mentioned above (perhaps especially The Florida Project, Una mujer fantástica, The Levelling, Moonlight and Aquarius), I’d add these films as pretty good and thus as proxime accessunt to a relatively arbitrary bar, but the measure of which is a film that makes me rethink my understanding of something, including life, the universe and cinema itself.

These films include: Get Out (Jordan Peele, Japan/USA, 2017), Neruda (Pablo Larraín, Chile/Argentina/France/Spain/USA, 2016), Grave/Raw (Julia Ducournau, France/Belgium/Italy, 2016), Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2016), Twentieth Century Women (Mike Mills, USA, 2016), Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson, USA, 2016), The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, USA, 2015), Prevenge (Alice Lowe, UK, 2016), Homo sapiens (Niklaus Geyrhalter, Switzerland/Germany/Austria, 2016), Miss Sloane (John Madden, France/USA, 2016), Kedi (Ceyda Torun, Turkey/USA, 2016), City of Ghosts (Matthew Heineman, USA, 2017), Step (Amanda Lipitz, USA, 2017), A Ghost Story (David Lowery, USA, 2017), Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2017), Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler, USA, 2017), Patti Cake$ (Geremy Jasper, USA, 2017) and El auge humano/The Human Surge (Eduardo Williams, Argentina/Brazil/Portugal, 2016).

The latter of these films came closest to being on the list of five below.

That said, the list below is not five because of any reason other than that these films really did kind of ‘blow me away,’ in the sense mentioned above of making me rethink the world/life/the universe. I personally don’t see the point of naming 10 films or 20 or any number for the sake of it. To do so is arbitrary and it leads to adding in and ruling out movies for very imprecise reasons – albeit that these can have real effects (with regard to my own filmmaking, the number of screenings that my films get relates very directly to the number of mentions that they have in various different media; getting a friend even to Tweet or mention one of my films in a blog seems like the biggest task in the world, in that rarely will anyone do me that favour [perhaps because they think that my films are rubbish]; that said, where normally I list my own films in my annual round-up, since technically I have seen them… this year I have not, though I could mention The Benefit of Doubt, UK, 2017, Circle/Line, UK, 2017, Sculptures of London, UK, 2017, and #randomaccessmemory, UK, 2017, all of which I completed this year).

Thinking about end of year lists also makes me think that 1 January is a weird date to start the year. That is, from a UK perspective, why start it 10 days after a solstice and seven days after a major religious festival (Christmas)? Why not start the year on the solstice, such that the year aligns with the sun? (But, then, whose solstice? But, then again, why this solstice?)

Either way, the entire thing seems irrational and so to mark an irrational transition with a list seems… irrational, even if organisationally sensible, I guess.

What also seems irrational is that any year will be better or worse than another.

But finally I’d just like to say that if my list is of films that really opened my mind, then in some senses that list runs the risk of only getting smaller as I get older, experience more and come across fewer novel approaches to the world… This does not necessarily follow (why is there not just an endless stream of new visions from different people and people who become different by virtue of themselves changing?), but it is a risk.

What I want to suggest, though, is that when one sees a film and says ‘yeah, that’s fine,’ but someone else sees that film and goes ‘wow, that blew me away,’ then one simultaneously wonders what they have or have not experienced and one wonders what one must have missed in order for them to find that film so good that you only found fine.

The same can happen with end of year lists, then, but on a grander scale, as one wonders how many films other people must have seen and/or how closely they or I watched the ones that did or did not make it on to their lists such that they get or got named there.

When the lists themselves become predictable (like the selection of films at Cannes, for example), then the films on the list – as well as lists more generally – can looked tired, formulaic, uninspired and uninspiring.

These five films, though, really did inspire me in my thinking, and so I include them not for the purposes of choosing films that are more obscure than thou, but to see if they also can inspire other people – who might otherwise look at me and ask what it is that I have experienced to like these films most from 2017.

This… together with a sense of increasingly liking only films that try to break cinema as I find cinema technologically, industrially, aesthetically and institutionally a problematic medium, and which at times therefore I think should be disbanded…

Here goes:-

Island (Steven Eastwood, UK, 2017)
An incredible documentary about people dying at a hospital on the Isle of Wight. Philosophically very profound.

La región salvaje/The Untamed (Amat Escalante, Mexico/Denmark/France/Germany/Norway/Switzerland, 2016)
A brilliant study of life on Earth and perversion.

Félicité (Alain Gomis, France/Belgium/Senegal/Germany/Lebanon, 2017)
Gomis basically has no fear of making a raw film about life in contemporary Kinshasa.

Work in Progress (Adam Sekuler, USA, 2017)
Had I seen Homo sapiens before this, the two might have swapped places – but this one got there first, even though they are in various respects similar. Nonetheless a brilliant and contemplative documentary that looks at the role of work in the contemporary world.

Good Time (Josh and Ben Safdie, USA, 2017)
The film I feel most uneasy about including because others have included it widely on their lists. I am late to the Safdies (this was my first film by them), but this has much to commend it, including two great performances from Robert Pattinson and Benny Safdie.

As I look at all of these films, I am ashamed at the eurocentrism of my tastes, and in particular by the lack of films from Asia that I have seen/included this year.

But there we go. Hopefully I can do better in 2018.

‘Full’ List of Films Seen in 2017

 

Key:-
Film Title (Director’s Name)

No marker – seen in cinema
* = seen online (specifically streaming)
^ = seen on DVD or file
+ = seen on aeroplane
” = seen on television
> = seen in a gallery

When see you the entry surrounded by parentheses – as follows: (Film Title (Director’s Name)) – it means that I had already seen the film, or at least I think I may well have seen the film before.

Silence (Martin Scorsese)
A Letter to Elia (Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones)
Hud (Martin Ritt)*
Médecin de Campagne (Thomas Lilti)
Duelle (Jacques Rivette)^
55 Years on the Infinite Plain (Tony Conrad)
La région centrale (Michael Snow)
Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)
(Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese))
La femme du boulanger (Marcel Pagnol)
Railroad Tigers (Ding Sheng)
La La Land (Damien Chazelle)
Dangal (Nitesh Tiwari)
Elegy to a Visitor from the Revolution (Lav Diaz)*
The Train Stop (Sergei Loznitsa)*
Assassin’s Creed (Justin Kurzel)
A Monster Calls (J.A. Bayona)
Le fils de Joseph (Eugène Green)*
Work In Progress (Adam Sekuler)*
America America (Elia Kazan)
The Big Country (William Wyler)
The Settlement (Sergei Loznitsa)*
Jackie (Pablo Larraín)
Lion (Garth Davis)
Split (M Night Shyamalan)
The Nights of Zayandeh-rood (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)
Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood)*
10+4 (Mania Akbari)
Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine)^
Christine (Antonio Campos)
Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson)
Triple Agent (Eric Rohmer)*
Victoria (Justine Triet)
T2: Trainspotting (Danny Boyle)
Buddies in India (Wang Baoqiang)
Chinese Roulette (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)*
Hacksaw Ridge (Mel Gibson)
Zero Day (Alex Gibney)*
Loving (Jeff Nichols)
Marguérite et Julien (Valérie Donzelli)*
Baraka (Ron Fricke)
Samsara (Ron Fricke)
(Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade))
Twentieth Century Women (Mike Mills)
(Heremakono (Abderrahmane Sissako)^)
Moka (Frédéric Mermoud)*
Portrait (Sergei Loznitsa)*
Death in the Land of Encantos (Lav Diaz)
Factory (Sergei Loznitsa)*
Zootropolis (Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush)^
Ten Meter Tower (Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson)*
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ang Lee)
Prevenge (Alice Lowe)
Tiya’s Dream (Abderrahmane Sissako)*
Lovetrue (Alma Har’el)
Fences (Denzel Washington)
Batang West Side (Lav Diaz)
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (Lav Diaz)
Ruined Heart: Another Love Story Between a Criminal and a Whore (Khavn de la Cruz)^
An Investigation on the Night that Won’t Forget (Lav Diaz)*
The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou)
Patriots Day (Peter Berg)
Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi)
Blockade (Sergei Loznitsa)*
Logan (James Mangold)
Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger)*
Letter (Sergei Loznitsa)*
The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz)
Trespass Against Us (Adam Smith)
Thumbsucker (Mike Mills)*
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)
The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer)*
Kong: Skull Island (Jordan Vogt-Roberts)
Le parc (Damien Manivel)*
Rostov-Luanda (Abderrahmane Sissako)^
(La vie sur terre (Abderrahmane Sissako)^)
The Student (Kirill Serebrennikov)
Elle (Paul Verhoeven)
Le jeu (Abderrahmane Sissako)*
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Tim Burton)*
Le roi de l’évasion (Alain Guiraudie)*
Microbe et Gasoil (Michel Gondry)*
The Love Witch (Anna Biller)*
Domitilla (Zeb Ejiro)*
Sexto aniversario (Julio García Espinosa)^
Dancer (Steven Cantor)
Viceroy’s House (Gurinder Chadha)
Aventuras de Juan Quinquin (Julio García Espinosa)
Son o no son (Julia García Espinosa)
In memoriam (Paul Leduc)
Les aventures d’Arsène Lupin (Jacques Becker)
La región salvaje (Amat Escalante)
Get Out (Jordan Peele)
(All This Panic (Jenny Gage))
My Old Lady (Israel Horowitz)*
100 Mile Radius (Environment III) (Phill Niblock)
T H I R (aka Ten Hundred Inch Radii) (Environments IV) (Phill Niblock)
The Age of Shadows (Kim Jee-Woon)
Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Life (Daniel Espinosa)
The Lost City of Z (James Grey)
Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders)
Filmfarsi (Ehsan Khoshbakht)
Lettre de Beyrouth (Jocelyne Saab)
Beyrouth, jamais plus (Jocelyne Saab)
Beyrouth, ma ville (Jocelyne Saab)
Free Fire (Ben Wheatley)
Viva (Anna Biller)*
Demain on déménage (Chantal Akerman)*
Grave (Julia Ducournau)
For Ellen (So Yong Kim)*
I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck)
The Merchant of Four Seasons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)*
Graduation (Cristian Mungiu)
Florentina Hubaldo CTE (Lav Diaz)*
Neruda (Pablo Larraín)
The Sense of an Ending (Ritesh Batra)
Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks)*
incoming (Richard Mosse)>
The Trip to Spain (Michael Winterbottom)”
Los colores de la montaña (Carlos César Arbeláez)
Los cuerpos dóciles (Diego Gachassin and Matías Scarvaci)
El futuro perfecto (Nele Wohlatz)
Na sua companhia (Marcelo Caetano)*
Beauty and the Beast (Bill Condon)
The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (Juho Kuosmanen)
The Transfiguration (Michael O’Shea)
Their Finest (Lone Scherfig)
Clash (Mohamed Diab)
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 (James Gunn)
Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd)
Suntan (Argyris Papadimitropoulos)
Effi Briest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)*
Young Love Lost (Xiang Guoqiang)
Mr Donkey (Liu Lu and Zhou Shen)
Nights and Weekends (Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg)*
Pleasure Love (Huang Yao)
Félicité (Alain Gomis)
The Road to Mandalay (Midi Z)
Re:Orientations (Richard Fung)
Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)*
Mindhorn (Sean Foley)
The Promise (Terry George)
Honor and Glory (Godfrey Ho)*
Homo Sapiens (Nikolaus Geyrhalter)
Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise (Mark Cousins)*
Harmonium (Koji Fukada)
The Levelling (Hope Dickson Leach)
Frantz (François Ozon)
(Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky))
The Queen of Katwe (Mira Nair)+
City of Tiny Lights (Pete Travis)+
Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott)
Maman(s) (Maïmouna Ducouré)+
Dear Zindagi (Gauri Shinde)+
Homme au bain (Christophe Honoré)*
Baywatch (Seth Gordon)
The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki)
The Red Turtle (Michaël Dudok de Wit)
Miss Sloane (John Madden)
Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins)
A Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz)*
Les hautes solitudes (Philippe Garrel)*
Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut)^
The Mummy (Alex Kurtzman)
Tom of Finland (Dome Karukoski)
The Road Movie (Dimitrii Kalashnikov)
Island (Steven Eastwood)
El rey tuerto (Marc Crehuet)
Plato’s Phaedrus (dn rodowick)
Kedi (Ceyda Torun)
Les gouffres (Antoine Barriaud)*
Song to Song (Terrence Malick)
A Man Called Ove (Hannes Holm)
The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola)
Edith Walks (Andrew Kötting)*
Baby Driver (Edgar Wright)
Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan)
City of Ghosts (Matthew Heineman)
I Am Not Madame Bovary (Feng Xiaogang)
Una mujer fantástica (Sebastián Lelio)
Détour (Michel Gondry)*
Today (Reza Mirkarimi)
Portrait of Madame Yuki (Kenji Mizoguchi)
Kóblic (Sebastián Borensztein)
Voyage of Time (Terrence Malick)
Inversion (Behnam Behzadi)
Visages Villages (Agnès Varda & JR)
Anarchy in the UK (Jett Hollywood)*
Transformers: The Last Knight (Michael Bay)
The Big Sick (Michael Showalter)
War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves)
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Luc Besson)
England is Mine (Mark Gill)
Pregnant (Fabrizio Federico)*
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)^
The ABCs of Death (Various directors)^
Atomic Blonde (David Leitch)
Step (Amanda Lipitz)
Maudie (Aisling Walsh)
A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk)
Eldorado XXI (Salomé Lamas)*
The Italian (Andrei Kravchuk)^
Whisky (Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella)^
From Greece (Peter Nestler)*
Arunoday (Partho Sen-Gupta)+
Crosscurrent (Chao Yang)+
Gbomo Gbomo Express (Walter ‘Waltbanger’ Taylaur)+
Vers Mathilde (Claire Denis)*
Rhine River (Peter Nestler)*
Death and Devil (Peter Nestler)*
The Event (Sergei Loznitsa)*
The Ferry (Attia Amin)+
Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan)+
Night Train to Lisbon (Bille August)+
Sisterhood (Tracy Choi)+
Nieve negra (Martín Hodara)+
Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh)
Detroit (Kathryn Bigelow)
Dilwale (Rohit Shetty)+
The Young Karl Marx (Raoul Peck)+
Kingsman: The Secret Service (Matthew Vaughn)+
The LEGO Batman Movie (Christian McKay)+
Balnearios (Mariano Llinás)*
Away With Me (Oliver Mason)*
Souvenirs d’un montreur de seins (Bertrand Mandico)*
Historias extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás)*
La impresión de una guerra (Camilo Restrepo)*
Underground Fragrance (Song Pengfei)*
Kontra Madiaga (Khavn de la Cruz)*
It (Andy Muschietti)
American Made (Doug Liman)
El auge del humano (Eduardo Williams)*
Description d’un combat (Chris Marker)*
Castro (Alejo Moguillansky)*
Vive la baleine (Mario Ruspoli and Chris Marker)*
Y a-t-il une vierge encore vivante? (Bertrand Mandico)*
El loro y el cisne (Alejo Moguillansky)*
Maelström (Denis Villeneuve)^
Dev.D (Anurag Kashyap)^
El escarabajo de oro (Alejo Moguillansky and Fia-Stina Sandlund)*
The Hitman’s Bodyguard (Patrick Hughes)
Volta à Terra (João Pedro Plácido)*
Soul Food Stories (Tonislav Hristov)
A Run for Money (Reha Erdem)*
Ostende (Laura Citarella)*
La mujer de los perros (Laura Citarella and Verónica Llinás)*
Notre Dame des Hormones (Bertrand Mandico)*
Miséricorde (Fulvio Bernasconi)*
Stronger (David Gordon Green)
Kingsman: The Golden Circle (Matthew Vaughn)
Yenish Sounds (Karoline Arn and Martina Rieder)*
Juana a los 12 (Martín Shanly)*
Damiana Kryygi (Alejandro Fernández Mouján)*
Depressive Cop (Bertrand Mandico)*
A Respectable Family (Massoud Bakshi)*
Regeneration (Raoul Walsh)*
Europe, She Loves (Jan Gassmann)*
La León (Santiago Otheguy)*
Flatliners (Niels Arden Oplev)
Pueblo en vilo (Patricio Guzmán)*
Victoria and Abdul (Stephen Frears)
La ville des pirates (Raúl Ruiz)*
Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House (Peter Landesman)
Risk (Laura Poitras)^
Le bonheur (Agnès Varda)*
Point de fuite (Raúl Ruiz)*
The Foreigner (Martin Campbell)
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve)
Agua fría de mar (Paz Fábrega)*
Blade Runner Black Out 2022 (Shinichiro Watanabe)*
Blade Runner 2036: Nexus Dawn (Luke Scott)*
Blade Runner 2048: Nowhere to Run (Luke Scott)*
The Law in these Parts (Ra’anan Alexandrowicz)^
Scialla! (Francesco Bruni)
Santouri – The Music Man (Dariush Mehrjui)^
Project X (Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras)*
Le concours (Claire Simon)*
You Are All Captains (Oliver Laxe)*
Napolislam (Ernesto Pagano)
The State I Am In (Christian Petzold)*
Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman)
The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Nagisa Oshima)^
The Snowman (Tomas Alfredson)
Blessed Benefit (Mahmoud Al Massad)
Porcile (Pier Paolo Pasolini)^
Paraísos artificiales (Yulene Olaizola)*
The Great Wall (Tadhg O’Sullivan)*
A Simple Event (Sohrab Shahid-Saless)*
Trois vies et une seule mort (Raúl Ruiz)*
The Traveler (Abbas Kiarostami)^
mother! (Darren Aronofsky)
Human Flow (Ai Weiwei)
Geostorm (Dean Devlin)
Eva no duerme (Pablo Agüero)*
Naissance des pieuvres (Céline Sciamma)*
Ce jour-là (Raúl Ruiz)*
Into a Dream (Sion Sono)*
Burn! (Gillo Pontecorvo)^
N’oublie pas que tu vas mourir (Xavier Beauvois)*
El vendedor de orquídeas (Lorenzo Vigas)*
Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (Bahman Farmanara)^
El mar (Agustí Villaronga)*
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)
La sirga (William Vega)*
Only the Brave (Joseph Kosinski)
Suburbicon (George Clooney)
Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi)
Impolex (Alex Ross Perry)*
Spring (Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead)*
Kapò (Gillo Pontecorvo)^
No sucumbió la eternidad (Daniela Rea Gómez)*
At Ellen’s Age (Pia Marais)*
When Monaliza Smiled (Fadi Haddad)
Layla Fourie (Pia Marais)*
Informe general sobre unas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública (Pere Portabella)*
General Report II: The New Abduction of Europe (Pere Portabella)*
Villegas (Gonzalo Tobal)*
Tem Gringo No Morro (Marjorie Niele and Bruno Graziano)*
The Void (Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski)*
Mafioso (Alberto Lattuada)
The Pornographers (Shohei Imamura)^
The Dresser (Peter Yates)*
White Ant (Chu Hsien-che)*
Restricted (Jay Rosenblatt)*
Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh)
Justice League (Zack Snyder)
The Living Corpse (Khwaja Sarfaraz)^
Até ver a luz (Basil da Cunha)*
Las horas muertas (Aarón Fernández)*
Bye Bye Brazil (Carlos Diegues)^
Sérail (Eduardo De Gregorio)*
Worm (Jay Rosenblatt and Caveh Zahedi)*
Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani)^
São Jorge (Marco Martins)*
Okja (Joon-ho Bong)*
Sight (Eran May-Raz and Daniel Lazo)*
Waves ’98 (Ely Dagher)*
La pesca (Pablo Alvarez-Mesa and Fernando López Escriva)*
Camp de Thiaroye (Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow)^
Cidade Cinza (Guilherme Valiengo and Marcelo Mesquita)*
The Conspiracy (Christopher MacBride)*
Wonder (Stephen Chbosky)
Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes)
The Mountain Between Us (Hany Abu-Assad)
A Viagem de Yoani (Pepe Siffredi and Raphael Bottino)*
Good Time (Josh and Ben Safdie)
[The Silence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)^]
Xenos (Mahdi Fleifel)
A Man Returned (Mahdi Fleifel)
A Drowning Man (Mahdi Fleifel)
La cuerda floja (Nuria Ibáñez)*
Sharp Tools (Nujoom Al-Ghanem)
Mary Shelley (Haifaa al-Mansour)
Under Electric Clouds (Aleksei German Jr)*
L’illusion comique (Mathieu Amalric)*
Into the Arms of Strangers (Mark Jonathan Harris)*
Sofía y el terco (Andrés Burgos)*
Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette)^
Beats of the Antonov (hajooj kuka)*
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson)
Nine Lives (The Eternal Moment of Now) (Jay Rosenblatt)*
[The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi)*?]
Prayer (Jay Rosenblatt)*
Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina)
I Used to be a Filmmaker (Jay Rosenblatt)*
Comet (Sam Esmail)^
Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry)*
Hanna (Joe Wright)*
Uncle Kent 2 (Todd Rohal)*
The Twilight (Mohammad Rasoulof)^
The Killing of a Sacred Dear (Yorgos Lanthimos)
The Sheik and I (Caveh Zahedi)*
Patti Cake$ (Geremy Jasper)+
The Other Land (Ali Idrees)+
Whitney: Can I Be Me (Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal)*
Assistance mortelle (Raoul Peck)*
Heaven Knows What (Josh and Ben Safdie)*
Brave (Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman and Steve Purcell)^
John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski)”
The Disaster Artist (James Franco)
Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci)
Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)
The Florida Project (Sean Baker)
Happy End (Michael Haneke)
White Christmas (Michael Curtiz)

Impressions of cinema in the UAE

In The Sheik and I (USA/UAE, 2012), Caveh Zahedi is invited to make a movie for an exhibition organised by the Sharjah Art Foundation, exploring the theme of subversion.

Zahedi finds it ironic that even though he is told repeatedly that he has open rein to make whatever movie he wants, he is also given a series of quite strict guidelines, perhaps especially the idea that he cannot critique the titular Sheik, who is funding his film, and Islam.

What ensues, then, is Zahedi making a film in which, among other things, he critiques employment practices in the UAE, creating a fantasy in which the Sheik himself decides to allow guest workers in the country to be able to achieve Emirati citizenship, and thus a civil status that is on a par with the historically local population (whatever that is or might be, and which Zahedi never quite specifies). Religion also plays a key part in the film, but I shall not be touching upon that here.

Rather, I open this post with reference to The Sheik and I because towards the end of his film, Zahedi explains how so many of the people whom he meets in the UAE are, in his own terms, ‘cool.’ That is, they get his sense of humour, and they are not offended by his jokes with regard to religion and employment, since they recognise both his concern for human beings regardless of race, religion, nationality and so on (Zahedi as humanist), and that his film is not to be taken too seriously.

However, Zahedi then suggests that the people whom he meets, perhaps most especially those at the Sharjah Art Foundation that is funding his film, are ‘not cool,’ because ultimately they pull the plug on his film, meaning that he does not make the film that he wanted and instead makes The Sheik and I, a film about not being able to make a film (and thus in some senses a non-film).

Here I personally part ways with Zahedi in terms of his opinion of his collaborators in the UAE. Where he sees them as ultimately ‘not cool’ for not going with him all the way in his subversion, I see them still very much as ‘cool.’ And that they do not ‘betray’ Zahedi so much as find themselves confronted with contradictions that they already know very well and concerning which Zahedi refuses to give any quarter.

What are these contradictions? In short, they are the fact that Zahedi’s collaborators in the UAE are by no means blind to the shortcomings of their society, but they cannot go about addressing them in the way that Zahedi does – while Zahedi’s charge that they are ‘not cool’ would seem to suggest that Zahedi thinks that they refuse to address these shortcomings. If they refused to address these shortcomings, Zahedi would not even be there, and so in some senses while his film is very funny and touching, in other ways it lacks subtlety – confronting head-on issues that might otherwise be addressed in more nuanced fashion.

I open with this reference to Zahedi, then, because it strikes me that for all of the clear and necessary criticisms that could be levelled at the UAE as a nation in terms of its structure and organisation, it is important to remember that the UAE is very much a cool place with some very cool minds that are as sharp as the minds anywhere, and which share a similarly ‘liberal’ sensibility – even if that sensibility, for reasons that I cannot fully explore here (for the sake of space more than anything else), is expressed in different ways.

It is important to remember that the UAE is ‘cool,’ because it can be very easy to lose sight of this fact – as perhaps is suggested in what follows.

Should anyone care to read it, I argue in a different essay that ‘cool’ drives much of the contemporary world. That is, the contemporary world is driven by appearances, with image therefore becoming as important as, if not more important than, reality. To take images for reality, to believe in images is in some senses to worship images – in the sense of attributing worth/value to them. In some senses, then, cool is associated with the superficial – the belief in surfaces and the visible as opposed to depth and that which might elude the sense organ of the human eye (which is sensitive only to about 5 per cent of the light spectrum).

In this post, though, I use the term ‘cool’ to mean something quite different, perhaps even the opposite of the definition used in that essay. Here, to be cool does not refer to appearances and a capitulation to the society of the spectacle, whereby flashiness is used to empower the self. Rather, ‘cool’ here refers to seeing through the surface of things and understanding that certain aspects of reality lie beyond the surface – and that if we accept only the surface as real, then we have a very incomplete understanding of reality.

So when I say that people in the UAE are cool, what I mean to say is that there are as many people in the UAE who are – to use a fashionable term – ‘woke’ as there are in any other part of the world that I have visited (if I am in a position to be a judge of coolness or wokeness). Indeed, I would say that the proportion of people who are ‘woke’ and/or ‘cool’ (by my imperfect reckoning) is about the same as anywhere.

What for me is the shortcoming of Zahedi’s film, then, is that he only goes by what is visible, endlessly creating scenes that in principle give us a ‘behind the scenes’ look at what happens in the making of a/his film, but in reality never going ‘behind the scenes,’ because that which is ‘behind’ the scene can by definition not feature in a film, since films can only be made up of scenes. Zahedi insists upon making a scene and upon only scenes being real rather than accepting the reality of that which is behind the scenes.

In other words, it might be possible to say that cinema as a tool is not capable of going behind the scenes – even if many films gesture at doing this by being self-conscious, reflexive and so on. That is, cinema is (very often) superficial.

What lies behind the scenes is not all good stuff. Indeed, we use the phrase ‘behind the scenes’ to describe intrigues and conspiracies, precisely the abuse of appearances and more. The desire to expose, to make a scene out of and thus to make seen, such ‘behind the scenes’ practices is valid and in some senses necessary.

But to insist that that which is behind the scenes is necessarily ‘bad’ (as Zahedi might seem to) is to accept only the seen/the scene as real, while it is also to have ‘bad faith,’ in the sense that the invisible (that which one cannot see and in which one therefore must have faith) is bad. Is it possible for us to construct a world in which we have good faith, and in which we trust that behind the scenes some good things might be going on? Zahedi would seem not to think this possible of the UAE. But I wish to suggest here that it is, and that there is reason for good faith in and about the UAE.

The UAE is not a cinematic society, in that few are the films that have been made there and the history of cinema in the UAE is not particularly long (fewer than 25 feature films in the last 12 years). That said, as cinema begins and grows in the UAE, it is becoming increasingly cinematic.

That the increasingly cinematic nature of the UAE is tied to a burgeoning belief in images might be clarified by the link between movie theatres and shopping malls there. The vast majority of cinema screens are inside multiplex cinemas that sit inside shopping malls, where people by fashionable products in order to demonstrate through their appearance (i.e. via their projected self-image) about how valuable they are/how much they are worth/how much they should be worshipped. In other words, having been uncool, the UAE is becoming increasingly cool in the negative sense defined above: a society that invests increasing amount of money and time in appearances, including the industry of appearances that is cinema.

But this does not mean that there is not quite a lot of cool stuff going on ‘behind the scenes’ and thus cool in the positive sense that I wish to use here, and which is related to cinema in various ways.

In what follows, then, I wish to relay some of my experiences of cinema in the UAE over the course of the four months that I was working there between late August and late December 2017 – for the simple purpose of sharing my imperfect and surely problematic (superficial?!) understanding of cinema in that place with other curious/interested parties (should they exist).

Over the course of the 17 weeks that I was in the UAE, I went to the cinema 42 times (I went twice to the cinema in the USA during this period during a brief work trip there soon after my arrival in the UAE). This averages at just over twice a week. Should you care to know, the full list of films I saw there is as follows:-

It (Andy Muschietti, USA/Canada, 2017); American Made (Doug Liman, USA, 2017); The Hitman’s Bodyguard (Patrick Hughes, Netherlands/China/Bulgaria/USA, 2017); Soul Food Stories (Tonislav Hristov, Bulgaria/Finland, 2013); Stronger (David Gordon Green, USA, 2017); Kingsman: The Golden Circle (Matthew Vaughn, UK/USA, 2017); Flatliners (Niels Arden Oplev, USA/Canada, 2017); Victoria and Abdul (Stephen Frears, UK/USA, 2017); Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House (Peter Landesman, USA, 2017); The Foreigner (Martin Campbell, UK/China/USA, 2017); Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, USA/UK/Hungary/Canada, 2017); Scialla! (Francesco Bruni, Italy, 2011); Napolislam (Ernesto Pagano, Italy, 2015); Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, UK/Poland, 2017); The Snowman (Tomas Alfredson, UK/USA/Sweden, 2017(; Blessed Benefit (Mahmoud Al Massad, Germany/Jordan/Netherlands, 2016); mother! (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2017); Human Flow (Ai Weiwei, Germany, 2017); Geostorm (Dean Devlin, USA, 2017); Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler, USA, 2017); Only the Brave (Joseph Kosinski, USA, 2017); Suburbicon (George Clooney, UK/USA, 2017); Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, USA, 2017); When Monaliza Smiled (Fadi Haddad, Jordan, 2012); Mafioso (Alberto Lattuada, Italy, 1962); Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, USA/UK/Malta/Canada, 2017); Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1953); Justice League (Zack Snyder, USA/UK/Canada, 2017); Wonder (Stephen Chbosky, USA/Hong Kong, 2017); Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes, USA, 2017); Tabiib (Jim Savio, USA/UAE, 2017); The Mountain Between Us (Hany Abu-Assad, USA, 2017); Good Time (Josh and Ben Safdie, USA, 2017); Xenos (Mahdi Fleifel, UK/Greece/Denmark, 2014); A Man Returned (Mahdi Fleifel, UK/Denmark/Netherlands/Lebanon, 2016); A Drowning Man (Mahdi Fleifel, Denmark/UK/Greece, 2017); Sharp Tools (Nujoom Al-Ghanem, UAE, 2017); Mary Shelley (Haifaa al-Mansour, USA/UK/Luxembourg, 2017); Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, USA, 2017); Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, USA, 2017); White Christmas (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1954); and The Killing of a Sacred Dear (Yorgos Lanthimos, UK/Ireland/USA, 2017).

This list does not include a programme of 8 short films that I watched at an event celebrating cultural exchange between the UAE and the UK, and which included four films from the UK and four films from the Gulf region (mainly the UAE) – an event to which I shall return shortly.

A brief glance at the above list will suggest that the majority of films that I saw are American films or transnational co-productions that include American talent and/or money. However, it should be worth emphasising immediately that there is a wide of range of films from India consistently playing at the cinemas in the UAE (I had in particular wanted to see Qarib Qarib Singlle, Tanuja Chandra, India, 2017 – mainly because I really like Irrfan Khan, who stars in it), as well as the occasional Philippine film, some Egyptian films (I was in particular sad not to be able to make it to see Sheikh Jackson, Amr Salama, Egypt, 2017) – and more.

That said, American blockbusters do basically dominate the market – and in this respect movie theatres in the UAE are very ‘cool’ in the superficial sense – since a good number of the blockbusters mentioned above (for example, Geostorm) look good and have lots of loud crashes, bangs and wallops, but they do not have much depth. (Remember that this is the list of films that I saw, not the list of films that were showing.)

However, even within that list, there is clearly an appetite for work by relatively well regarded filmmakers, including Todd Haynes, Darren Aronofsky, George Clooney, Ai Weiwei, Yorgos Lanthimos and David Gordon Green. Furthermore, ‘sleeper’ films like Brawl in Cell Block 99 played, as did the Safdie brothers’ excellent Good Time, as well as experimental animation Loving Vincent. In other words, there might as anywhere be some shallow movies playing, but there is also some cool stuff – even at multiplexes in shopping malls.

If there is a distinction to be made between the films I saw and the films that showed, there is also a distinction to be made, meanwhile, between the films screening and how many people went to see them. This is anecdotal evidence, but I should highlight how on a semi-regular basis (on four or five occasions), I was the only audience member in the cinema, with audiences rarely exceeding ten – with even mega-blockbusters like Justice League, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Thor: Ragnarok seeming to have relatively slim crowds when I went to see them.

What we might infer from this, then, is that the movies show and that no one is particularly interested in them. This would confirm that idea that there is no cinema in the UAE, and this is a position that seemed to be held also by a spokesman for Image Nation Abu Dhabi at the UAE-UK cultural exchange mentioned above, and which was supported in part by the British Council.

During an exchange at the event, someone asked why local films were not supported by the cinema chains in the UAE, with the response being along the lines that there is no appetite for them for the twin reason of people not being interested in movies and the perception that local films are not of a high enough quality in the sense that they do not match the production values of a Hollywood feature film.

However, to counter the first point, I would like to bring in a couple of bits of evidence. For while I did spend a fair amount of time sitting in relatively empty movie theatres while watching American blockbusters and auteur films in the UAE, I did also sit with very busy communities of filmgoers at more or less every film that I saw which was not an American blockbuster or the work of someone like Haynes and Aronofsky.

There is a film club called Cinema Space that meets three or four times a week at the Manarat al Saadiyat on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, and at which I saw a handful of films, typically foreign and/or classic (Soul Food Stories, Scialla!, Mafioso, Ugetsu Monogatari, White Christmas). While the average audience size in the mall multiplexes was less than 10, at Cinema Space the average audience size was about 50. And with their comprehensive and varied programme, Cinema Space is about as close to a cinematheque that Abu Dhabi has – and there clearly is an appetite (more of an appetite!) for art house over mainstream work.

Further evidence for the appetite for non-mainstream work would include the occasional film screenings held at Warehouse 421 in the Mina Zayed (port) area, and The Scene Club in Dubai, which also programmes independent work. I might also mention that I curated a series of 27 films based upon the theme of mavericks (maverick actors and maverick/cult-ish films), and which took the name of DXB Experiments Presents: The Cinema. With the screenings taking place in Le Royal Méridien Beach and Spa resort, this was like the other film clubs mentioned above an example of not-quite-theatrical film exhibition. And while the 27 films were relatively mainstream, the reported average audience again of about 50 far surpasses my experience of the multiplexes in terms of audience size.

With the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, in which there was a tiny amount of moving image work on display (mainly a film about land art), together with small amounts of moving image work also on display at the Abu Dhabi Art Fair (held like Cinema Space at the Manarat al Saadiyat), and with a Guggenheim and other museums promised in the future, hopefully the appetite for artistic and/or experimental cinema will also continue to grow.

That said, a seemingly greater appetite for classic, independent and/or art house cinema than for mainstream work does not translate into an audience for local films. However, here I may suggest that an enterprise like CinemaNA, which is a joint venture between New York University Abu Dhabi and Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, would again suggest the opposite. It is through CinemaNA that I saw Blessed Benefit to an audience of over 70 at the Sorbonne and When Monaliza Smiled to a full-house at NYUAD. Being Jordanian, we may say that these films are not strictly local, but nonetheless they suggest an appetite for films in Arabic.

Furthermore, I also attended a screening of Jim Savio’s locally-shot Tabiib at NYUAD, which similarly enjoyed a full house, while a triple-bill of short films by Mahdi Fleifel, the director of the excellent documentary, A World Not Ours (UK/Denmark/Lebanon/UAE, 2012), had over 30 people in attendance.

In other words, and in particular contrary to the Image Nation Abu Dhabi spokesman, it would seem that there is an appetite not just for classic, independent and art house cinema, but also for Arab and perhaps even more specifically Emirati cinema – with audiences going to watch these latter films not necessarily in spite of their low budget, but perhaps very much because of that low budget.

For, as many humans wear their wealth cosmetically as a means to demonstrate their worth/as a means to be worshipped, so, too, do movies. And so in some senses it is the more humble, less opulent film that stands a greater chance of taking us beyond appearances and which can give us a sense of what happens ‘behind the scenes,’ lending depth to the world that we see being depicted in the film. The truly cool, then, is not necessarily that which shares the values of a superficial world (that is only superficially to be cool), but that which sees through/beyond the surface and which perhaps demonstrates to us that there is a beyond the surface.

If cinema is only about surfaces, then perhaps films that go beyond and/or which demonstrate that cinema is superficial are not really cinema. Maybe, then, such films are non-cinema – even if they are still cinematic (in that they are still films). In this sense, the spokesman of Image Nation Abu Dhabi was perhaps right in suggesting that there is no cinema in the UAE. But he also did not appreciate how there positively is non-cinema in the UAE, the status of which as non-cinema is also reinforced by the non-theatrical venues in which many of the above clubs are held.

Here we reach the issue of production values. At the UAE-UK cultural exchange event, it seemed that speakers both British, American and Emirati insisted that all films have a certain (high) level of production values, and without which Emirati cinema will never get off the ground – before the speakers then (inexplicably) slamming today’s youth (millennials!) for not having the commitment (at university age) to learn the full range of skills involved in filmmaking.

Indeed, to return to the Image Nation Abu Dhabi spokesman, he invoked in his talk Woody Allen in order to suggest that the business dimension of show business is absolutely necessary – and that anyone who thinks that they can make films without also being a businessman is misguided.

The reference to Woody Allen is linked to the discussion of production values, because in order to achieve high production values, one needs money, which means that one must understand the cinema is a business. That is, cinema is inherently a capitalist enterprise, in which looking good (and thus qualifying as cinema) depends upon money. This means that young filmmakers must respect those who have money if they want to make films, since without that money, the films will not be funded. Again, cinema becomes a means for worshipping superficial values, in that the greater material worth of the rich person is deemed to be a more real worth than the measurement of humans according to a non-materialistic criterion.

It is not the UAE is a poor country. Far from it. But young people typically do not have access to money in the way that working adults do – and the UAE-UK cultural exchange event was aimed at discussing the future of film in the UAE, while also being attended by would-be future filmmakers in the UAE. To suggest that cinema requires money and that in some respects cinema is inherently conservative (since access to money is achieved by respecting one’s elders and their ethos of business) is not to encourage young filmmakers by telling them that it is possible, but to put up barriers to entry into the world of film – even though the desire to make films is clearly there given the presence of young filmmakers at the event.

The criticism of millennials by various of the speakers only clarifies further a split that the cultural exchange event drew out: that the established filmmakers and the established ways of making films do not feel enough respected, and perhaps that the young filmmakers and would-be filmmakers in the audience do not share the same conservative values as the established filmmakers.

Two examples of those conservative values might be explained. In her discussion of her career, Nayla Al Khaja somewhat jokingly explained how when she made her first short film, Arabana (UAE, 2006), she ended up with far too much money to make the film because so many people were enthusiastic to support her – and that in the end, she spent not very much money on her film but a huge sum of money on promoting her film, including by hiring a cinema and insisting upon a VIP guest list at her premiere.

Al Khaja’s entrepreneurial spirit is to be admired, and she clearly is a supporter of independent cinema in that it is she who organises The Scene Club in Dubai. But similarly this story not of making a great film but of channeling money into promotion suggests a capitulation in advance not to substance but to appearance (even if Arabana is a film about child neglect). Al Khaja is not necessarily wrong to play a superficial world at its own game, but she also implicitly accepts rather than challenges that world.

Meanwhile, the second example is the Image Nation Abu Dhabi spokesman’s reference to Woody Allen. For, as was suggested at the time, evoking Woody Allen in late 2017 as a shining light to be followed in the global film industry seems somewhat strange. That is, Allen may well acknowledge the business side of the film industry, but Allen also stands at this present time for an abusive patriarchy that objectifies women, rendering women as superficial images rather than as flesh and blood human beings with depth. The reference to Allen does not just suggest that cinema is inherently conservative, but it also suggests that cinema is inherently patriarchal.

That the Image Nation Abu Dhabi spokesman invoked Allen as a means to dismiss as naïve a question about youth filmmaking movements suggests not only that he does not understand the history of cinema (which since at least the nouvelle vague is a history defined by youth and/or by the most important filmmakers making work for very little by finding alternative ways to make films, or to make non-films if those alternative ways are not considered legitimately to be cinema), but it also suggests his own patriarchal perspective.

Given that in the audience of his talk was a group of c40 young female Emirati film students who had travelled to Abu Dhabi from a higher technical college (HTC) in Fujairah (a journey of about three hours by road), the reference to Allen also seemed especially inappropriate. But more than this, it confirmed the future of Emirati non-cinema, in the sense that if cinema is conservative and patriarchal, and if millennials do not respect cinema, and if the future generation of filmmakers (those same millennials) are mainly women… then the future of cinema is a non-superficial, non-patriarchal non-cinema – just as developments in cinema traditionally have been driven not by those who conservatively uphold its values, but by those who innovate by finding new ways to make – and to see films.

In this sense, if it is not in multiplexes but rather in clubs and in particular university spaces that alternative films get seen, then the UAE in the 2010s is not so dissimilar to the USA in the 1960s, where campuses were one of the main spaces in which young future filmmakers would see work by the likes of Ingmar Bergman – since you could not see these at the mainstream cinema, of which the younger generation had become tired, since the mainstream did not reflect their values or outlook on life. It is exposure on university campuses to European art house cinema (exemplified here by Bergman) that led to the reinvigoration of American cinema via the so-called Movie Brats that included Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich and more. Again, the history of cinema is driven not by old men, but by brats – and in the UAE perhaps by female brats (with Al Khaja functioning as a kind of godmother figure, even if her emphasis on the superficial might also not quite chime with the younger generation).

What is true of exhibition is hopefully also true of production. In the era of digital media, in which ‘everyone can make a film,’ it seems clear that not only can everyone make a film, but that in some senses everyone does make films – just in formats that are not recognised by those who ‘officially’ define what cinema is.

Indeed, during my time in the UAE, I had the opportunity to speak at an event for Young Arab Media Leaders (YAML), which was attended by over 100 young media users from all over the Arab world (with the exception of Qatar). Indeed, you can see me images of me delivering my talk in the video below, and which was created after the YAML event, and which was posted by Shamma Al Mazrui, to whom I shall return imminently.

قدمت جامعة نيويورك ورشات عمل متعددة حول تاريخ الإعلام ومستقبله، حول المناظرة، وحول الحوار… برنامج القيادات_الإعلامية_العربية_الشابة يقدّم للشباب العربي فرصة اكتساب المهارات وتطويرها، وفرصة الربط بين الدراسات الأكاديمية، والتطبيق المهني @NYUAbuDhabi pic.twitter.com/M5CRdbn6oI

— شما سهيل المزروعي (@shamma) November 27, 2017

My aim is not to discuss the aesthetics/production values of this video, which may seem superficially cool with its use of slow motion, triumphant music and so on. Rather, I wish to say how, in particular during discussions after my talk, it seemed clear to me that there are young media users, including filmmakers, who are developing new ways to create and to show their work – and if cinema does not acknowledge the legitimacy of this work, then it is only cinema that will be left behind, and not the millennial generation.

Or rather: perhaps this millennial generation does not care for cinema with its inherently superficial and/or patriarchal set of values, but is instead developing non-cinema in order to create a different, better world.

In the old days, you did need vast amounts of money to make a film, which meant having contacts and so on. But nowadays, perhaps (by definition?) the most vibrant work is made without money. Or at the very least it is created with minimal budgets raised via crowdsourcing sites and by young, female voices with something to say – including, for example, Amal Al Agroobi, whose Under the Hat (Qatar/UAE, 2016) is a sweet tale of precisely old and new worlds colliding, and who is crowdsourcing money for a feature film about Philippine domestic workers in the UAE – a subject that is not a million miles from that of Caveh Zahedi’s The Sheik and I.

It is telling, then, that the YAML event was organised by Shamma Al Mazrui, the UAE’s first Rhodes Scholar and who at 22 was the youngest government minister in the world. Known for her engagement with media, Al Mazrui represents a female future of media leaders who perhaps move beyond the conservative/superficial/patriarchal values of cinema, and who instead create a different, deeper, more ‘feminine’ (non-)cinema, and/or society that moves beyond the superficial and cinematic values that define much of the world under globalised neoliberal capital.

Spending a few months in the UAE, I met many local cinephiles, whose knowledge and enthusiasm for cinema impressed me enormously, including Hind Mezaina, whose Culturist blog is one of the essential sites for discovering what goes on under the surface (‘behind the scenes’?) in the UAE.

It was lamented several times (including by some of its former organisers) that the Abu Dhabi Film Festival is no more, even if the day that I spent at the Dubai International Film Festival would suggest a vibrant capacity for cinema in the UAE. Indeed, the screening that I attended of Sharp Tools, a documentary about the late Hassan Sharif, the UAE’s best known conceptual artist, would give hope that people might support not only local films, but also local documentaries (i.e. non-mainstream films) about local artists who themselves were seeking consistently to push the envelope in terms of making art that raised consistently the question ‘what is art?’

As Sharif asked through his work ‘what is art?’, so might tomorrow’s Emirati filmmakers not simply accept the definition of cinema that is handed down to them, but instead they might continually be re-posing the question ‘what is cinema?’ in order to push the boundaries in terms of working out what it is that cinema can do. In this sense, art and filmmaking are not dissimilar to the human project of getting better to know ourselves and pursuing the ethical development of working out what it is that humans can do and learn. With bad faith, we will assume the worst and suspect that humans can realise great evil and that the quest to find out what it is that humans can do will lead only to violence. But with good faith, we might well learn that humans are capable of the most amazing and generous things.

This is not to deny the human capacity for evil, which is clearly documented even if regularly occulted because a) people do not want necessarily to see evil and b) because those who commit evil deeds do not necessarily want to be seen (evil takes place behind the scenes). But this does not mean that good can only take place in scenes (that good can only be staged). For this would be a world not necessarily of good, but of performed good – a world in which appearances of goodness would come to count for more than actual goodness, a slippage that would take us away from goodness itself.

If the UAE currently has no cinema (in a metaphorical if not in quite a literal sense), then I have faith that it will produce good if not excellent cinema before long – and that it might be all the better if that cinema includes a healthy dose of non-cinema. Indeed, the health of a nation might better be gauged not by its cinema, but by its non-cinema. In this respect, it may not at present be perfect, but the signs for the UAE are good.