Brief thoughts on People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose (John Torres, Philippines, 2016)

In 1936, Joseph Cornell reworked footage of East of Borneo (George Melford, USA, 1931) in order to create Rose Hobart (USA, 1936), an experimental short in which the meaning of Rose Hobart is changed as a result of how Cornell re-edits the Melford flick.

Meanwhile, east of Borneo is the Philippines, where another Rose – Vietnam Rose – was supposed to bloom in the 1980s, but who never really saw the light of day.

That is, Philippine director Celso Advento Castillo, the so-called ‘Saviour of Filipino cinema,’ in the 1980s tried to complete a feature film called The Diary of Vietnam Rose with the 19-year-old film star Liz Alindogan.

Alas, however, the film was abandoned after running into logistical and financial issues – with Alindogan herself being so traumatised by the experience that she basically disappeared from cinema for several years, having also functioned as one of the film’s producers.

It was only 30 years later, then, that John Torres put together People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose, a film that combines footage from some 20 reels recovered from the production of that film with original material made to look like it was shot at the time, and with various experiments in sound also playing a part of the film’s fabric (at times we hear dialogue from the characters in the scenes, but at other times we also hear voices delivering inner monologues and other sounds).

Being shot in 1986, the film was also made at the time of the People Power Revolution that led to the toppling of the regime of Ferdinand Marcos. Also known as the Yellow Revolution as a result of the prominence of yellow ribbons during the non-violent anti-government protests, and as the EDSA Revolution (EDSA stands for Epifania de los Santos Avenue – a chief artery in Manila), the moment brought about the end of martial law and the reinstatement of democracy in the Philippines.

In some senses, then, Torres’ film and the People Power Revolution resonate with each other – although the political aspects of the film are not what I shall focus on here. Suffice to say that as The Diary of Vietnam Rose fell apart, so in some senses did the Marcos regime. But it is not that Castillo or Alindogan are necessarily the equivalent of Marcos, or even that the film’s troubled production – in various ways involving but perhaps also exploiting locals in the remote location where the film was made.

Rather, the fact that the film fell into ruins bespeaks the state of the Philippines in 1986, such that the revolution took place. And where cinema as a force for change found it hard to survive under the Marcos regime, perhaps it is only since that the Philippines has  been able to develop a cinema worthy of the name.

The last paragraph is an overstatement. One need only think of the likes of Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal to realise that oppositional cinema was in some senses doing well under the Marcos regime.

And one might suggest that much mainstream cinema in the Philippines today is pretty mediocre, melodramatic fare – suggesting that cinema as a force for change still struggles to eke out an existence in the Philippines, as it does in many other places around the world.

But what I mean by saying that the Philippines has since developed a cinema worthy of the name is that flowers do grow on the ruins of the Philippines, with People Power Bombshell being a literal case in point as Vietnam Rose blooms a new life – different to the one that Castillo and Alindogan had intended, but which nonetheless is alive, and which suggests future life for the country in spite of ongoing corruption and other controversies. And in breathing new life into the world, People Power Bombshell is thus exemplary of a cinema that can bring about social change.

What is most fascinating, then, is that new cinema, in the form of a rose (red, yellow, pink or blue – as per the blue tint that Joseph Cornell typically added to Rose Hobart by projecting the film through blue glass), flowers where old cinema is thought to have died – east of Borneo, in the Sulu Sea that separates Borneo from the Philippines.

This creates a kind of paradox: this is both cinema but also not cinema, a new cinema born from the old cinema, a cinema that is also a non-cinema – much as Adrian D Mendizabal suggests People Power Bombshell features non-images here.

Indeed, the film shows the original reels from 1986 converted to digital images, but which have not been cleaned up or restored, but which wear on their sleeves the rot and ravage of time. Akin to the work of Bill Morrison, then, Torres’ film sees glitches and imperfections in the aged image not as faults, but precisely as expressive forces in the film – which becomes visually arresting, hard to read, but truly beautiful as a result.

What is more, as flowers grow from the ruins of cinema, so do begin to think of the film as being like another plant form, the rush. For, being made up not so much of finished sequences as rushes, People Power Bombshell sees the rushes grow green, suggesting a sort of amphibian cinema that rises from the depths – again giving testimony to the power of life to continue in spite of the death of any individuals.

Yongchun Fu, Maria Elena Indelicato and Zitong Qiu refer to recent Chinese blockbusters that are aimed at global audiences and which sometimes even involve western stars, such as The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, USA/China/Hong Kong/Australia, Canada, 2016) as Huallywood – named after huaxia, or China, from the character 華, or hua.

However, perhaps we might make a semi-pun and suggest that this flowering cinema that blooms out of the ruins of the old cinema is also a different kind of Huallywood, but this time based on 花/hua, which is the Chinese for flower. Huallywood is cinema as a flower, which does not cut and shoot in the violent way that traditional (western) cinema does, but which produces new life from cuttings and shoots that grow upwards even amongst the ruins of the Third World.

In her recent Ex-Centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology, Janet Harbord suggests that cinema is less about movement and scenes in which people set out to achieve pre-established goals via recognised and recognisable means, but more about gestures and bodies that move in strange and peculiar ways, which themselves affect us in ways that we cannot predict.

In this way, cinema in its commodified, mainstream form is about controlling bodies. But a cinema that moves away from itself (an ‘ex-centric cinema,’ which is not far removed from what I have – including in relation to Philippine cinema – called ‘non-cinema‘), sees bodies set free, as new life is breathed into them and where like a flower they flow.

Being made up of sometimes indiscernible, sometimes random and sometimes striking images, People Power Bombshell becomes a cinema that, in Harbord’s language,

deactivate[s] the smooth flow of commodity images. Cut, removed, repositioned and replayed, the naturalised sequences of ideal bodies and lifestyles become jagged-edged, unruly, uncomfortable to watch… In contrast to the perfect surface of the commodity image as it is put into circulation, the cinematic image comes to bear the marks of its exhibition, or to put it a different way around, it loses the sheen of its status as fixed record and moves into a zone where recording and transmission become indiscernible… [This is] the exhibition of cinema’s materiality as it surfaces in celluloid, video tape and digital video discs. In the glitches, sparkle and crackle that pattern the images… the commodity is subjected to the registration of its history, to contingency, finitude and decay. (Harbord 2016: 102-103)

In other words, in its very imperfection, the image demonstrates that the cinematic image is not eternal, unchanging and fixed forever – an eternity that is part and parcel of its power, in that only gods can stop time and are eternal, and if cinema is a commodity that has no flaws, then cinema as a commodity becomes, or at least aspires to be, god. That is the world of commodities, the world of capitalism.

In showing us that cinema, like the world, changes, and that it even dies… we learn to understand that life goes on, that things need not and will not remain the same, and that other worlds are possible.

May seven billion more flowers bloom on the ruins of cinema-capital and in the realm of non-cinema.

Many thanks to Aperture Asia & Pacific Film Festival for screening the film at the Close-Up Film Centre in London.

The fidelity and treachery of images (thoughts inspired by Maryam Tafakory and John Torres)

What is a title?

In some senses, a title gives to things an authority, a name. Something that is titled is also entitled. To have a title, to be titled: these are things that connote importance.

A title can also sum up a work of art, or even a human being. Or rather, the title Lord Snodgrass not only sums up a human being, but it also covers up that human being. For, ‘Lord Snodgrass’ tells us little about a flesh and blood person who has weaknesses and foibles like everyone else. Instead, the title becomes inhuman, a symbol of power. If you don’t have a title, you are nothing.

There is naturally a tradition within pictorial art – but less so in other forms – for works not to carry titles (even if they carry signatures).

But in film, it is quite rare for a work to be untitled.

Nonetheless, titles clearly are important.

But if titles wield power and impose meaning upon a person, then they might also do the same for a work of art, including a film.

As ‘Lord Snodgrass’ takes us away from a flesh and blood human being, then, does a film title not in some senses take us away also from the film itself?

Perhaps it is for this reason that John Torres gives to one of his short films the improbable title of Wala kaming pakialam sa demokrasya. Ang gusto namin: pag-ibig, pag-asa at ang kamukha nito/We Don’t Care About Democracy. This Is What We Want: Love, Hope and Its Many Faces (Philippines, 2010).

In its very unwieldiness, the title gets us away from an imposed meaning, and instead perhaps reminds us of how titles impose meanings, thereby perhaps allowing the film to ‘speak for itself’ – without the title interfering.

Indeed, in giving to us an unrememberable and convoluted title, perhaps Torres asks us to get away from normal cinema, which is defined by titles, and into a new realm of cinema, perhaps even a non-cinema (as per the non-films that Torres’ Philippine compatriot Khavn de la Cruz creates – often using equally impossible titles), in which we see images not constricted by the meanings of words and titles, but images that speak for themselves as images. Strange, alien, perhaps undecipherable – the essence of cinema, but which by virtue of being unquantifiable and unsellable without titles, language and meaning, become non-cinema because not ripe for capitalist exploitation.

Except for the fact that Torres’ short film is all about titles, because as the action of the film unfolds – as actors Edgardo Maynar and Manilyn Glemer discuss their relationship on a bed – we get simultaneous English-language and Mandarin titles sprawling across the bottom and the right-hand side of the screen respectively.

Similarly, Maryam Tafakory’s I Have Sinned a Rapturous Sin (Iran/UK, 2018) also involves titles working their way into the fabric of her short film – be they written in white on a black cloth as she writes out the words of Forough Farrokhzad’s poem, ‘Sin‘ (from her collection The Wall), or as words from the poem appearing in various sizes across the frame of the images of her film.

It is widely proven that when viewers watch a film with subtitles, their eyes spend a long time looking at the subtitles in order to read them, meaning that their eyes cannot spend so long looking at the image itself. Especially if the film involves fast motion and a fast cutting rate, then this means that viewers watching a film with subtitles miss vast amounts of visual information presented to them – more than the already huge amounts of information to which they do not attend even when the film does not have subtitles.

It is notable that Torres’ film involves a discussion of fidelity, while Tafakory’s is also infused with exploring active female desire in the context of an Iran that seeks systematically to repress that desire, as is demonstrated in the film by the use of footage of imams and other figures of authority explaining how to prevent women from feeling desire (feeding them lettuce is put forward as a decent ploy).

The films do not quite use titles in the same way, but they do in some senses reflect upon the same issue, which might be as follows: to spend one’s time looking at the subtitles rather than the remaining contents of the image is thus in some senses to be unfaithful to the image.

Indeed, in I Have Sinned… one of the talking heads from the film’s found footage suggests that to look is at the root of desire, and that if one does not look then one might not fall into sin.

Perhaps it is true of films: titles (which perhaps erroneously are referred to most commonly as ‘subtitles,’ even though they dominate our attention) force us to look away from the film itself and to desire instead not the film as it is, but the film as it is controlled by the use of language.

More than this.

For if titles ascribe meaning to images that might otherwise remain free and ambiguous, titles in part do this, then, by imposing their own rhythm on the images, which in some senses is to impose a certain narrative on the images that might otherwise defy that narrative.

So in some senses, then, titles impose a temporality or a rhythm on images – they subject images to the time of translation and control – rather than allowing images to be free, to breathe at their own rate, to be themselves.

Titles, then, in some senses betray images – as René Magritte perhaps knew all too well in adding to his 1948 painting of a pipe the title Ceci n’est pas une pipe, or ‘this is not a pipe.’ And what is the official title of the painting? La trahison des images, or ‘the treachery of images.’ For the title betrays the image, just as the title also forces the viewer to betray the image by imposing on that image a meaning that curtails that image’s potential to mean so much more. (Khavn may yet have it right when he says of all of his movies that ‘this is not a film.’)

But there is yet more.

For as Torres’ film continues, the titles come to speak for the male character, suggesting his own thoughts of infidelity to his partner. That is, the titles do indeed come to signify infidelity – to the woman and perhaps to the cinematic medium, but reducing to literature something that is cinematic (just as cinema routinely is reduced to scripts by film industries that must pre-approve all movies in their literary form before they even have a chance to become movies at all).

For Tafakory, meanwhile, the whisper of her voiceover, the distributed nature of her titles (sometimes hiding in the frame, sometimes announcing themselve boldly) and the pictorial nature of the Farsi script all ask the viewer to indeed be unfaithful in some senses to the image, but in other ways the titles also ask our eyes to caress the image, to hunt for the titles, which themselves are incomplete.

That is, Tafakory’s use of titles means that titles work against themselves (even if in some respects it chimes with the increasing desire for film producers to create expressive titles that are embedded into the film’s mise-en-scène, including for those hard-of-hearing audience members that need the titles in order to follow the film’s action).

While Torres plays explicitly with infidelity and treachery in his titles, Tafakory induces a sensual relationship between text and image, as the female figure that we also see remains mysteriously hidden behind her hair – in a fashion not dissimilar to Mania Akbari under bath foam in her and Mark Cousins’ other homage to Forough Farrokhzad, Life May Be (UK/Iran, 2014), and in opposition to the speaking imams who are all given faces. It is as if language here is courted precisely in order to bring us to a ‘sinful’ relationship with the film – which wants to explore the poetry of sin and the sin of poetry rather than the straitjacket of prosaic desire.

(My memory is not working properly – but the use of the whisper also recalls the female whispers that are used extensively in I think Samira Makhmalbaf’s Sib/The Apple, Iran/France, 1998… but my brain not be remembering properly.)

In both cases, then, the ongoing and problematic relationship between language and images is intelligently and beguilingly explored, unsettling at all times our understanding that a film has a singular, controlled existence.

For, if we are not sure whether we fully understand everything, and if we are not sure which ‘version’ of the film is the correct one (with or wthout subtitles? even if with subtitles, which titles?), then in some senses the film remains mysterious, sensual, other and alive. We can have a loving relationship with such a film, rather than the sort of controlling relationship that patriarchal logocentrism claims is love, but really is a kind of imprisonment.

Torres and Tafakory thus paradoxically set cinema free. Long may they continue to do so.

*The screening of these short films was part of Day for Night’s Asia through the Aperture workshop held at the University of Westminster on Tuesday 18 September 2018, and which was jointly organised by the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), the University of Westminster, and Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival.

Diamond Island (Davy Chou, Cambodia/France/Germany/Qatar/Thailand, 2016)

I was fortunate enough to catch the UK premiere of Davy Chou’s Diamond Island at the Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival as organised by Day for Night at the Close-Up Film Centre on Monday 17 September 2018.

The film is a beautiful movie told largely in the neorealist tradition, using non-professional actors, being shot on location, and having as its primary concern the social mobility of two brothers, Bora (Sobon Nuon) and Solei (Cheanick Nov), in contemporary Phnom Penh.

For, Bora, having recently moved to the city to work on the building site for the luxury development from which the film takes its title, runs into his brother, Solei, after not having seen him for five years.

Bora has come to town to raise money to help his mother, who is ill, while Solei, having left home for unknown reasons, makes his way in the capital as a well-to-do student who is being sponsored by an American.

The brothers reconnect and Solei begins to help Bora financially, promising to take him abroad – and dragging him away not only from his friends on the building site, but also from Aza (Madeza Chhem), whom Bora fancies, but whom Solei tells him to leave behind.

What plays out is a film that is ponderous and yet visually arresting, with no real recourse to melodrama, although Chou does use both atmospheric musical sequences and the odd ‘experimental’ technique (e.g. split screens) in order to give to the film a visual and aural fabric that takes Diamond Island away from neorealism and into the realm of poetic realism.

In particular, the film’s lighting scheme adds an expressive element to the film’s mise-en-scène, and it is this that I would like to discuss here.

For, Diamond Island is defined regularly by a blue hue that emanates most often from neon lights, digital screens, moments that take place at dusk, the sky, the sky as reflected on occasion in the water that surrounds the titular island, and various objects in the mise-en-scène, including pallets, t-shirts and pipes.

However, it is in particular the blue neon lights upon which I’d like to concentrate.

For, consistently throughout the film, we see a cool neon blue light permeate the space of the film, particularly via the lights on the mopeds and smartphone screens that the richer kids in the film can afford, and which we see at various points being used by youths during Chou’s various montage sequences.

In other words, the blue light becomes associated with digital technology in the film – as per the blue light emitted by phone screens and which disrupts the production of melanin, and consequently disrupts sleep patterns, converting humans from entities that live in circadian rhythms into beings that live according to the permanent now of 24:7 capital and the attention economy.

Becoming blue, then, is akin to becoming economically successful – having a screen existence in which one peddles one’s own image rather than singing other people’s songs off a karaoke screen as per Bora’s poorer friends.

Soon after Bora’s arrival at the Diamond Island building site, Chou cuts to a 3D digital animation that offers us a simulated fly-through of the hotel and tourist site that is soon to appear on the island.

The moment is notable both for the digital nature of the images and for the sensation of flight through the space that the animation provokes. This compares significantly with the relatively static camera that follows Bora at pedestrian pace and level during the majority of the film.

Not long after Bora has re-found Solei, Solei takes him out on his moped – and now Chou uses a drone to follow Bora, Solei and his richer friends as they ride around the island and at one point also into Phnom Penh.

It is not that Solei introduces Bora to a world of increased mobility; it is that this mobility is also associated with elevation and the ability to rise above the ground and dirt that Bora normally works on the building site.

Humans under capitalism wish to head upwards – to disconnect themselves from the ground and to become airborne. That is, and as per ‘blue sky thinking,’ they want to head up into the blue. To become blue, then, is to become integrated into capitalism by virtue of becoming rich.

Indeed, it is perhaps coincidental but nonetheless telling that Bora’s transition out of the building site is achieved by taking a job managing the café that Solei’s friend Blue (Batham Oun) sets up in Phnom Penh.

In addition, Bora accompanies Solei and his friends to a party in an empty apartment, where Bora sleeps for a period on a lavish bed that has blue neon lights around its head. It is also in this space that the friends gather to look at some 3D holograms – the height of digital imaging technologies. Notably, one of the animations is of a blue jellyfish – as if the blue light of digital technology also took on a tentacular and Cthulhoid quality – as befits the work on digital technology and tentacled sea creatures that David H Fleming and I have been developing, and the first published iteration of which will soon appear in the journal Film-Philosophy.

The promise of the capitalist blue sky may in fact be the appearance ‘out of the blue’ of an alien, digital intelligence that is not the culmination of humanity, but its very replacement.

And if Cambodia is still marked by the history of the Khmer Rouge, as per Chou’s last film, the documentary Golden Slumbers (France/Cambodia, 2011), then, without wishing to make too crass a pun, then the toll on the new Cambodia that emerges along with global capital might be characterised as a Khmer bleu.

Or, to link this film’s fairground sequences to another ‘blue’ film that also uses the fairground as an important backdrop for its descent into greed, this might be Cambodia’s ‘blue ruin.’

The ultraviolet quality of some of this blue light also brings to mind the possibility of seeing in the dark and different colours on the light spectrum that typically remain invisible.

As Bora progresses into visibility, then, he is contrasted relatively strongly with the more telluric hues of the his construction worker friends, who continue at the film’s end to live on Diamond Island, eking out existences that may not have the mobility that Bora comes to enjoy, but which nonetheless have an enduring dignity that Chou’s film sensitively captures.

 

A brief note on The Predator (Shane Black, USA/Canada, 2018)

The Predator is old-school Shane Black with smart talk, back chat, banter and gags all amidst an ultra-violent tale of aliens invading Earth.

There are some zeitgeist references, including how the predators are preparing to come to Earth to inhabit it as the human species dies out according to climate change (we may last one, maybe two more generations, the film says).

But really the film is just about sniper daddy Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) learning to find a meaningful relationship with his autistic son Rory (Jacob Tremblay), whose autism is linked to an ability directly to understand the aliens, something that chimes with Steven Shaviro’s assertion that autism is not solipsism but a kind of democratic vision of the world – in that the autist prioritises no one piece of information over others, but instead sees the world in a flat (if affectless?) fashion.

In addition to being about fathers and sons, then, the film is also a reworking of The A-Team (Stephen J Cannell and Frank Lupo, USA, 1983-1987), except with a slightly larger squad, in that Quinn is Hannibal, Nebraska Williams (Trevante Rhodes) is BA, Coyle (Keegan-Michael Key) and Baxley (Thomas Jane) are combined Murdoch, except that it is Lynch (Alfie Allen) who is on hand to fly helicopters, and then with Quinn himself and Nettles (Augusto Aguilera) being a good and bad Faceman respectively. This then makes Olivia Munn’s expert biologist Casey Bracket the equivalent of Amy.

Indeed, thinking about it as I write, the set-up is also not wholly dissimilar to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Kevin Eastman et al, USA, 1987-1996).

With Munn’s role in #metoo in mind, in that she came forward to discuss harassment by director Brett Ratner in late 2017, one wonders that the film might make itself less blokey and perhaps have a more pronounced female presence, as men – both human and alien – beat their chests for the 107 minutes of the film’s duration.

But, all that said, I really only want to highlight one aspect of the film that I found interesting.

The predators bring with them this time some alien dogs. At one point Nebraska shoots one of the dogs in the head at point blank range. However, he fails to kill it – meaning that the alien dog thing recurs throughout the film – but this time as more or less Casey’s pet.

Indeed, it is suggested at one point that Nebraska did not kill, but rather simply lobotomised the beast.

What is interesting, though, is that when we first meet him, Nebraska and the rest of Group 2 are being transferred to a special installation precisely to be lobotomised – each for slightly different reasons, but with Quinn going because he has witnessed a predator in person.

Nebraska’s reason for going is that he shot his commanding officer in a fit of rebellion… only for us subsequently to reveal that he was his own CO, and that the person whom he shot was himself…. in the head. Only he missed.

In other words, not only is a link set up between Nebraska and the dog, in that he shoots both himself and the dog in the head – and yet fails to kill them. But also if Nebraska has already lobotomised himself by shooting himself in the head, then the fact that he is a kick-ass soldier who seems to feel no pain and who ultimately…

SPOILERS

… sacrifices himself by jumping into the jet engine of an alien spacecraft in order to bring it down, suggests that lobotomisations take place not to stop these men from being soldiers, but precisely in order to militarise them.

Indeed, that the Group 2 soldiers all suffer from PTSD, madness and more, The Predator would seem to suggest that these things are not the consequences of war, but the pre-requisites of war.

That the predators do not kill for survival but for sport is mentioned several times as grounds for the name being a misnomer: the predators are not predators but sports hunters.

Meanwhile, Quinn tells his son that he does not enjoy killing… before then confessing – as he kills two fellow American soldiers – that he does. That is, Quinn is a killing machine, while his son also has no qualms about having murdered a punk metal fan who hurls an object at him when he is out trick-or-treating.

Indeed, Rory explains that it is the weapons that do the killing of their own accord when the bearer of the weapons is attacked. Total fantasy of disconnect: I did not kill you, my weapon did.

But more than this.

For, at one point government agent Traeger (Sterling K Brown) describes a dead alien with the n-word, thereby creating a link between soldiers, animals, lobotomised creatures and black people.

Naturally, the film does not explore these associations any further (and it is worth noting that Traeger is himself black).

But if we add in to the mix that actor Rhodes is most famous for his part as homosexual gangster Black in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (USA, 2016), then there are yet further associations in the film with oppression, minorities, abuse and violence.

That everyone ultimately subordinates themselves for the reunion of the white father-son dyad… would suggest the sacrifice of these minorities for the purposes of protecting the planet from aliens is really to maintain the status quo of power and not to bring about any social change.

What seems a lost opportunity for an interesting ending, even if unlikely in the face of the film’s conservative heart, is that rather than having the predator-killing technology turn up as a gift from a rogue predator at the film’s climax, the predator should have delivered to Earth an alien as per AVP: Alien vs Predator (Paul WS Anderson, USA/UK/Czech Republic/Canada/Germany, 2004)… in order to unleash a whole new series of chaos that might indeed help defeat not only the predators, but also the dominant white men at the same time…

 

Towards a natural language of cinema: Island (Steven Eastwood, UK, 2017)

Steven Eastwood’s Island is a documentary about death and dying. It is set on the UK’s Isle of Wight, where we follow four main people, Alan, Jamie, Roy and Mary, as they suffer from terminal diseases.

The film is sensitive and beautiful, although surely it may not be for everyone given its subject matter and different people’s experiences of/with death and/or their attitudes towards it.

It is not that one can really give spoilers for a film that is about death and dying; the inevitable is bound to happen. And yet, I shall be discussing the last images of this film later on in this blog, so be warned that it does reveal in some respects how the film ends.

However, I would like to start with the opening image, which is of a ferry emerging from fog as it heads towards the Isle of Wight. For, what I wish to suggest in this blog is that cinema can offer us a natural language, not in the popular sense that everyone can more or less understand it, but in the sense that the world (nature) possesses a kind of language that is there for us to decipher if we so choose to. In this way, not only can cinema help paradoxically connect us to the natural world, but it can show us not just metaphors of the world, but a sense of its natural language. That is, cinema can be a system not just for symbols and meaning, but for a sort of folk or natural wisdom.

In order to take our first steps in this direction, let us consider the opening image. Fog is of course an indicator of mystery, and thus the arrival of the unknown, while the ferry signifies transition as one passes over the sea from one location to the next. Meanwhile, the sea itself suggests a realm that is more or less alien to the human. Yes, we can swim and we have invented submarines, but on the whole the depth of the ocean remains hard for humans to fathom. In this sense, the ocean represents a sort of alien presence, something along the surface of which we can drift, but down into which we cannot descend without often dying.

From its opening image, then, Island suggests the arrival of the unknown, almost invisible because shrouded in fog, and yet which is here perhaps to transport us into a new dimension.

We might say that the film therefore deals in metaphors, or at the very least that it offers us a specifically human perspective on matters (since fog is not necessarily mysterious to fog itself, just as the depths of the ocean are not alien to giant squids; that is, the meaning of fog is different to different species). Nonetheless, the film invites us to connect with the world presented in these images, and to read fog, the sea and a ferry not just in a literal sense, but in terms of what they mean… what they say to us about our own relationship with the world.

There is a discussion of fairies and then angels in the film. As the French philosopher Michel Serres might suggest, angels are evidence of and provide scope for us to perceive hidden dimensions within our world. It is not that we see cherubs with halos as per classical religious iconography. Rather, every encounter that we have and which allows us to see the world anew is in effect an encounter with an angel; marvelling over a gust of wind, overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers, seeing an animal up close. In other words, angels open up new angles of the world, showing us hidden dimensions that lie within plain sight, and yet which often we do not see. To see an otherwise hidden dimension, then, is not suddenly to find secret realities in the sense of popular science fiction film. Rather, it is to realise how limited my vision is of reality when I do not notice animals for what they are, when I do not consider the importance of the wind and when I do not expect strangers to be kind. To be reminded of those things reveals to us the limited nature of our own vision, allowing us to see reality with fresh eyes, renewing us thanks to this encounter with the alien angel that takes us out of our fixed selves and in the process reminds us precisely that we are not fixed, but always changing. In this sense, an encounter with an angel is to experience time, to be in what Alan in the film describes as the now – rather than perceiving reality only in terms of what we want to get out of it (projecting the future on to the present) or in terms of how we have seen it in the past (projecting the past on to the present). To be in the presence of angels is to feel presence.

These hidden dimensions, then, are not hidden from the world; they are simply hidden from us owing to the limitations of our vision, limitations that are not just biological but also shaped by culture. These dimensions are, like the character of Nothing in Boris ‘s In Praise of Nothing (Serbia/Croatia/France, 2017), which also is in cinemas at present and which makes for an interesting companion to Island, around us at all times.

Death itself, then, is also an alien and mysterious other that we typically do not see, and yet which is perhaps always only ever with us. Indeed, if time is change, or becoming, then that which is at any given moment in time must die, and that which was not comes into existence, or is born. Death is everywhere and everywhen – and Island helps us to understand that.

For, humanity may fetishise the dry land of life, but it is only an island surrounded by death. But more than this, as the road leads directly into the sea without a clear cut-off point between the two, so does life lead into death and vice versa.

Indeed, as John Donne famously said, no man is an island. Humans are all porous, consistently excreting liquids and gases via their major orifices and through their very skin. Humans try to close themselves off in many ways – including via the way in which they cocoon themselves away from death. And yet they never succeed, since humans are always being opened up.

To become an island, to separate life from death, to shut oneself off from others is to be closed. To be open, though, is to have open eyes, an open mouth, to cry, to scream, in short to feel and thus to live, to be alive. To be alive is to be open to death. And to live is to be open to others in terms of both giving and receiving, to be an angel to all those around us just as all those around us can be angels to us.

The Greeks described the highest form of love as ἀγάπη, or ‘agape,’ and which consisted of charity: to be open to or to be an angel to others in the form of giving. As Alan dies, his mouth also lies agape; he is open, including being open to death.

More than this. As Alan dies we hear director Steven Eastwood begin to snore as he has fallen asleep in the room with Alan. It is oddly as if as Alan lies agape and breathes his last, Eastwood’s mouth itself falls open and he begins to receive Alan’s breath – as if the latter were an angel opening up Eastwood and the viewer of Island to new dimensions, to seeing that death is normal and everywhere and not a strange, alien object that we relegate to another dimension.

Remarkably, as Alan dies a nurse enters the room and stands in front of the camera, thereby making the film’s frame turn black. Alan’s open mouth has already been a black hole, a void, an impenetrable presence within the film’s frame – and now the whole frame goes black.

The nurse says that Alan is dead – before curiously saying that another breath may yet be drawn. The boundary between life and death is perhaps, like the human, itself porous. And darkness is not what lies beyond the frame or which cinema destroys by shining a light on to it; rather, darkness is within the frame.

Even if only by chance, then Island allows us to see the darkness that is not just there at night (and which through electric lighting we try to relegate and banish from our world, meaning that we cannot see the stars), but which perhaps also is always with us, like the void that is Alan’s open mouth.

That Eastwood sleeps – and perhaps dreams at this moment – also suggests the presence of an alien presence – not just in the sense that we might all be dreaming our lives away, but in the sense that sleep allows the brain unconsciously to store memories and so on, with dream perhaps consciously registering some of this process. As humans who bodies run more or less entirely unconsciously, we have hidden dimensions within ourselves that we do not know, which are alien to us, and yet which dream – in all of dreams’ senselessness – can reveal to us (notably Alan also discusses dreams in the film).

Owls appear at various points in the film. Steven Eastwood suggested that they have no metaphorical function within the film. But not only are they quite literally winged creatures within the film, but they also bear other qualities that bespeak a kind of natural affinity with death which means that humans will perhaps ‘naturally’ become curious about them as death becomes us.

It is not simply that owls are supposedly wise creatures. But owls also are associated with the night and seeing (in) the dark. More than this, the owl in various languages is considered to have an onomatopoeic root (‘owl’ is supposed to be not far from the bird’s call), with that root being a kind of harder ‘boo’ sound in various languages (Greek βύᾱς, Latin būbō, Spanish buhó, French hibou). In other words, as per the idea of shouting ‘boo!’ at someone or the concept of a sonic boom, the owl signals the sudden irruption of a hidden dimension within the world – with owls belonging to the order of strigiformes, with this term itself being derived from στρίγξ, or ‘strinx,’ meaning a screecher (as well as from the Latin strix, meaning a furrow, a channel or a groove, as if the owl clawed out new dimensions in old dimensions). As the Giant (Carel Struycken) says to Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in Twin Peaks (David Lynch, USA, 1990), ‘the owls are not what they seem.’

In some senses, Island is a film about more or less unseen women preparing men for death. That is, the primarily women nurses on the Isle of Wight are angels helping men.

In this way, these angels who are open to death help to make men open to death – since it is the world of men that is the world most often closed off from death. The world of closure – man as separate from nature, man as separate from each other, man as wanting to expel darkness and death from existence in order to preserve itself forever rather than to become or to change – is thus also the world of patriarchy and capitalism. The nurses represent a different world, an open and caring world (that nonetheless increasingly in the UK is under attack as healthcare becomes increasingly privatised).

The film ends with shots of a television screen in which a documentary shows soil pushing forward fresh flowers, before the film cuts to Mary, before then ending.

Without necessarily even wanting to, then, Island suggests that with death comes rebirth and that this process is a female one. That openness to becoming is thus a more female process than it is a masculine one, even if men in death are helped by women to become open to what faces them.

(Notably, Mary had not died by the time that filming for Island had stopped.)

Thinking back to the owl, then, Island strictly (strix-ly) channels the reality that surrounds it. In this groove, we see a world in which the boundary between life and death becomes blurred, and in which a female perspective might help us to see through the patriarchal world of division and closure.

A couple of further thoughts remain.

Firstly, cotton plays a key role in the film as we see pyjamas, sheets and various other articles made of cotton covering much of the frame at various points.

What is more, we might reflect upon how if openness is in some senses a more ethical way of being with the world (being open to it, rather than shutting oneself off from it), then the film frame is always closed – a rectangular boundary separating what is in the frame from what is not in it. The frame of the cinematic image in some senses means that film only ever deals with metaphor.

Unless, that is, one breaks the frame – for example when Eastwood shares a cigarette with Alan, his hands coming into frame to hold it for him, or when we hear his voice. And of course when other figures come into frame, and when the participants in Eastwood’s documentary (perhaps including the owls) look directly at the camera and/or acknowledge the presence of their microphones.

What is more, the sheer duration of a good number of the shots – long, slow takes, with the film having only 140 or so shots in its 90-minute running time – also suggests a kind of out of the frame. Or at least an attempt to allow events to unfold at their own pace and not at that of the filmmaker. That is, reality determines the film rather than the film attempting to determine reality. By being open to this, the film does not simply offer us metaphors, but it allows the world to reveal itself and for us in some senses better to understand that world, since we see new and yet real dimensions within it, and thus come better to understand our relationship with it. If this is one of the major powers of cinema, then cinema can only do this by trying to get over or around the natural limit that is its frame – and to get us to think beyond the frame, just as Island wants us to see not just what is behind the fog, but the fog itself, and as it wants us to see not what the darkness conceals, but the darkness itself. A film that does this must be self-reflective or self-conscious, and this is truly the case with Island.

A final two thoughts.

Firstly, Isla is the name of Jamie’s daughter, whom we see singing songs from Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, USA, 2013). One wonders whether Isla, as a female representative of the future, is also a key aspect of the demonstrating that no man is an island, even if men try to make rocks and islands of themselves (as per ‘I Am A Rock’ by Simon and Garfunkel).

Steven Eastwood (centre, with his name projected on to his head), talks with Island producer Elhum Shakerifar (left) and Chris Harris of Picturehouse Central (right) as Jamie Gunnell looks back from the screen at a preview showing of Island on 10 September 2018.

Secondly, in response to a question at a Q&A screening of Island at the Picturehouse Central on Monday 10 September 2018 and in which a viewer asked why the film did not give intertitles during or at the end explaining to audiences not just who the people in the film are, but what happened to them , Eastwood remarked  that he did not consider markers regarding names, dates and so on as being important to his project. Indeed, dates do not, it would seem, help us to understand a life.

And yet, there is a set of dates that is given in the film right at the end of its credits – those of the late filmmaker Stuart Croft to whom Island is dedicated. Not in the film, one wonders nonetheless to what extent dates are an attempt for us to make sense of the alien nature of death when we have not had a chance to confront it (let us say, to grieve). When we are open to and live through death (when in some senses we expect it), then we can reach a state of presence and of time wherein we do not need dates at all. We can escape from death as a sudden and terrifying boom, instead looking it in the eye, normalising it and finding that mere numbers do no justice to death nor to the life with which it is entangled.