Don’t Look Now: A Film Beyond Measure

I was recently invited to write an essay on “Don’t Look Now” for a catalog to accompany a recent exhibition of work by Martin Erik Andersen at Holstebro Art Museum in Denmark.

Always one to be persuaded by flattery, I naturally accepted, and subsequently spent a fair amount of time conducting research, watching and thinking about the film, and then writing this essay.

Alas, however, the below essay was not what they said that they were looking for – in that does not provide a ‘mathematical’ analysis of the film. Rather than waste the c30 hours of work that went into this, though, I figured I would post it here.

Don’t Look Now: A Film Beyond Measure

Spoilers.

“Don’t Look Now” seems to have it in for wizened old dwarf women, since the one who features in Nicolas Roeg’s film turns out to be a murderer who ultimately slays John Baxter, played by Donald Sutherland, and who is the central protagonist of the movie.

We have to start with a spoiler, though, because it is only by getting to the end of the film that we can begin in certain respects to make sense of it. For, as we shall see, “Don’t Look Now” offers up a conception of space and time that suggests that in many respects we are always already dead – and that it is simply an anthropocentric conceit to organise, or indeed to contain, space and time into measurable units, or indeed to measure space and time at all.

I should refine my last sentence and say that it is not simply an anthropocentric conceit to measure space and time (to divide space and time into measurements). Rather, it is quite specifically a tendency or a trope of what we might term capitalist man to do this (with the gender implications of the term ‘man’ being allowed to remain, with whiteness and western-ness also being qualities that remain consistent with such hegemonic practices, or practices of domination). In short, capitalist white man (who could almost certainly be specified via further adjectives) seeks to dominate nature by subjugating nature to measurement. By making our world finite and ordered. To bring order to chaos.

Why does man seek to do this? Because he wishes to halt time, not to die, to live forever, and to escape from the perceived cruelty of nature, which cruelty amounts basically to taking it as an insult that he does not live forever in the first place. That is, man seeks to do this out of narcissism. To prove that he is above the animals and ‘better’ than nature.

But what does this have to do with “Don’t Look Now”?

It has everything to do with “Don’t Look Now”, because (capitalist western white) man’s wrangles with the chaotic universe become the very fabric of Roeg’s movie, both as a documentary and as a self-consciously composed (fiction) film

What on earth do I mean when I describe the film as a documentary?

Well, what in particular I mean is that humans don’t have to go very far with a camera in order to find signs of humanity’s attempts to dominate nature/the world/chaos via what I am terming measurement. As it turns out, Venice is an excellent venue for this because it is a space where the straight lines and measurements that humanity imposes on the world (including the delimitation and naming of space that is calling this particular place ‘Venice’) come in direct contact with—and are reflected in—the chaotic waters on top of which that city is built (and into which it is slowly sinking, about which, more imminently).

But even if Venice provides an excellent visualisation of how a certain kind of humanity (patriarchal white society, with the Christianity business at its core) tries specifically to build itself upon water in order to subjugate that water, you could basically point a camera anywhere these days and what you would film would include the straight lines and geometric patterns applied to and/or covering over nature by humans, as well as signs of that nature itself in the form of tendrils, vines, blades of grass, trees, rain, clouds, and anything else that is not manmade. In this sense, pretty much all films document the ways in which humans try to, but in many ways cannot, pave over nature and create a measured and measurable world of order, and of which we can make easy sense. We simplify nature, making order of chaos, and in so doing we mark our separation from chaos, giving to ourselves a sense of our own specialness within the universe.

Except, of course, that this endeavour is all vanity—and Venice will indeed sink into the quagmire as churches will fall into disrepair, humans will die, and so on. At least, this will happen until humans do discover the elixir of eternal life (and preferably eternal youth rather than ageing forever but not dying). That is, humans will do this until they do finally become gods—a pursuit that even today many believe possible thanks to the powers of ‘science,’ i.e. thanks to the powers of measurement itself. We seek the bottles or other containers that will bring about eternal life, be those augmented bodies, computer avatars, elixirs that we can drink, space ships to take us to the stars and many more ideas, as often faddish as foolish.

Cinema and photography, as technologies that can in some senses preserve human life, including beyond what we typically refer to as death, are part and parcel of this endeavour. And yet, cinema can also, like many humans, be at war with this embalming impulse and it can also open itself up to and find regeneration in chaos. Rather than being a tool for eternal life, cinema can also let chaos and death into its system.

And so if “Don’t Look Now” documents man’s vanity as he attempts to cheat death (just look at Venice; such vanity is the very architecture of the place), it also consciously explores this contradiction, and thus it emerges as a work of art that actively works with chaos rather than trying to pour concrete over it.

Indeed, the opening shots announce as much: rain and the shuddering water of a pond—accompanied by a zoom that creates a pattern of almost televisual static. We dissolve to patterns of light on a black background, as light filters through cracks in a blind. The blind may keep out the light, but as the film will tell us, the blind can also see, and in seeing, show us aspects of our world that we otherwise miss.

After these opening seconds, we will repeatedly have flowers, vines and tendrils creeping into the frame. Indeed, in cutaway after cutaway, Roeg deliberately speaks the iconographic language of the still life, where the straight lines of the human world are juxtaposed with the sinewy mess of nature. Furthermore, pigeons will repeatedly emerge into frame to disrupt the geometry of the city, while cats meow from behind metal grates (which is not to mention dogs barking and children crying offscreen throughout the film).

Even when we do find ourselves in relatively geometric spaces, the human itself emerges as a force of chaos rather than one of control. We can picture John and Laura, framed by drawing tubes and hotel room furniture, and yet they themselves both have curly, barely controlled hair, spiralling out of their heads (and out of John’s lip)—a sort of cinematic Kandinsky consisting of monochromatic straight lines coming up against inconsistent spheres.

John is at the centre of this tension between order and chaos. If the blind seer Heather can tell that John also has visions, John tries as best he can to deny them. Even as he knows that he is restoring a fake church, something that he admits to Laura over dinner, he still is invested in the project of halting time and bringing about the restoration and eternal youth of this floating city.

Indeed, the tension that John feels is clearly reflected in his consideration of space. For, John has written a book called Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space, which we see next to Laura on the sofa of their English home at the film’s start. We are not given access to the book’s contents, but from its title we might surmise that John can indeed see beyond space as geometric, that is, beyond space as being made of fixed and measured/measurable coordinates.

Let us dwell a while on this idea. For, the Greek term for measurement is metron, which for Reza Negarestani is

found etymologically encrypted in English words such as Dimension (from dimetiri: measure out), meter, etc. Keeping well in mind the famous doctrine of Pythagoras, ‘Man is the metron of everything’ (pantōn chrēmatōn metron anthrōpos), metron can be translated as scale, measure, standard, and value. According to Sextus Empiricus, metron expresses criterion (scale, measure) but Heraclitus and Sophocles saw it as certifying dominance, a domination over something. Therefore, metron indicates that both measures and dimensions inter-connect with power, judgement and reasoning. The critique of metron explains how dimensions (namely metron) bring power into effect, mobilizing and propagating it. (Negarestani 2008: 233)

In other words, metron is humanity’s attempt to control an otherwise dimension-defying reality and to become a god by measuring it out, by applying to it a fixed number of dimensions, and thus by dominating/subjugating/simplifying it. No wonder it is that we see a bust of Socrates’ note-taker, Plato, as John inspects a slide also at the film’s start. For, via his engagement with ancient Greek thought, John understands that measurement is nothing more than man’s attempt to control nature, and that it must therefore be fragile. What, however, lies ‘beyond’ this fragile geometry of space…?

Beyond the fragile dimensions that humans construct via walls, pavements and other straight, hard surfaces, which all eventually will crumble into the sea, man is lost—as John and Laura experience even within Venice as they wander its alleyways at night. Without illumination and thus without the visible markers or measures of space that man has created in order to navigate it, space is simply a labyrinth, and space simply swallows up man and demonstrates that his meaning and order, his straight lines and his religious myths, are mere consolations against the impermanence and complexity of the world. Even a frozen lake is not flat/straight, as Laura explains. And so the human world tries to be permanent and thus is carved in solid materials like stone, but even these become covered by moss and broken down, and even these give way to mud and water, which in turn drown humans and bring them back to the ever-shifting earth.

If “Don’t Look Now” pits an ordered solidity against chaotic liquid, then clearly humans contain within them the tension between these two states. For, humans are of course themselves mostly liquid, as is made most clear when blood flows forth from humans in injury and death—and monthly in the female human for as long as she might biologically generate new life. Humans thus create bottles for liquids in order to contain their chaotic power, much as humans bottle themselves up in order to keep the same chaos at bay (unsurprisingly, then, John is aghast when he vomits, which he claims not to have done in 10 years, since he prides himself on keeping everything inside).

And yet, if humans create and become bottles, glass nonetheless smashes on several occasions in the film: Laura and John’s son, Johnny, cycles over glass just before Christine drowns in the pond, while glass smashes as Laura faints in the restaurant, and John is covered in broken glass as he nearly falls from inspecting the mural in the Church of St Niccolò dei Mendicoli. Meanwhile, blood spills from John and Johnny at the moment of Christine’s death—and the water beneath Venice is always there to remind us that chaos can only be bottled briefly, if at all.

But still (western) humans persist in shutting themselves off from the outside and in seeking eternal, bottled and contained life. Indeed, “Don’t Look Now” anticipates, or at the very least positions itself as being part of a cultural logic of computation when little Johnny’s headmaster at Porton School is revealed as being called Babbage. Clearly an allusion to Charles Babbage, the progenitor of digital culture, his role as an educator clearly suggests that the logic of mankind as exempt from nature (with digital technology having since the film become the talismanic technology that will make this aspiration come true) is one that is inculcated in western humans from an early age, such that they go on to internalise this logic of separation-from-reality, and assume it to be real.

What is more, humans resist the outside world not just by building walls (even as doors fly open by themselves/at the power of the wind), but also by covering themselves with clothes—with “Don’t Look Now”being especially a treatise on gloves. It is as if humans want to avoid direct contact with as much of the world as possible, including with each other. In addition, humans cross their legs (John) in order not to let out the yonic energies that emanate from their genitals, and humans try to maintain sure and still postures. (Notably, Laura is told to uncross her legs when Heather tries to get in touch with Christine from beyond the grave.)

The awkwardness of Donald Sutherland running towards the pond where Christine drowns is one of the most important images in “Don’t Look Now”, since it conveys the imperfection of human movement—while at the same time working within the film to suggest that humans try otherwise to move as little as possible, to turn themselves into perfect statues and thus to live forever (in photographs?). This stillness involves a suppression of desire that is at odds with the openness to other dimensions that Heather experiences, shuddering and juddering as she communes orgasmically with the beyond… and which orgasmic shudder has clear echoes with the film’s ‘controversial’ (or at least for many people memorable) sex scene, in which John and Heather remain (alas, all too tastefully?) nude for what seems like a prolonged period.

To shudder and to quake is to be in touch with the infinite and to generate new life, much as the mud and the water generate new life and the continued evolution and change of life on earth. John Izod sees the brooch worn by Heather’s sister Wendy as a symbol of fertility (Izod 1992: 108), and in some senses he is not wrong; but when we get a close up view of it as Laura inspects the brooch while visiting the sisters in their hotel room, we see more clearly that it depicts a mermaid—as if these women were indeed from a chaotic water element, and thus also outside of the geometric world of masculinist stone.

In identifying the film as western, as well as by quoting an Islamic scholar in relation to measurement above, we perhaps have wandered far from the film’s intended/suitable critical framework. And yet, the film also contains seeds of such a ‘dewesternising’ critique. ‘The deeper we get, the more Byzantine it gets,’ says John to Laura just before he confesses to restoring not a real church but a fake. Not only is the western world in some senses fake as a whole because of its fundamental and wilfully illusory separation from nature/reality, but it also is one built upon a history of theft and a subsequent denial of that theft (with western man seeking no depth whatsoever, since to enter the murky depths, to enter murkiness as depth, is indeed the remit of the Byzantine/other; no wonder western man tries to surround himself with mirrors, which surfaces “Don’t Look Now” also consults repeatedly).

At one point, John comes face to face with a grotesque bust on the side of the church that he is restoring. Not only does this suggest that John himself is grotesque, but it also brings to mind the way in which the grotesque is itself a marginal form that is perhaps marginal precisely because it regularly blurs the boundary between the human and other species/the rest of the world, with grotesques (and its explicitly non-western cousin, the arabesque) regularly seeing the figure merge with the textual in the form of a flourishing vine. In other words, the grotesque reminds us not of the separation of man from world, but precisely of the interconnection between man, animal, plant and the rest of the material world (see also Marks 2010: 96-98). In the Islamic pictorial tradition, the grotesque and the arabesque both also bring to mind the autonomous life of the line; that is, as the line is freed from the burden of representation but instead becomes its own expressive force (flowing as it wishes and not because it must outline, say, a face), so does it move beyond the realm of the visual (this is a picture of a face) and into the realm of the haptic (you can feel the force of the line). It is not through vision that we can understand the world, but through touch, even as western humans put on gloves to avoid it.

But as the line comes alive in the grotesque and the arabesque, so might we also understand how colour, in particular through a Venetian history of art, also connotes hapticity. Laura U Marks can help to illuminate once again why Venice is such an apt venue for “Don’t Look Now”:

of course line and color are interdependent, as in the labile quality of the contour and the mercurial technique of chiaroscuro. It is notable that the Venetians, and their coloristic heir in the nineteenth century, Delacroix, were influenced by Oriental contact. Haptic space began to push to the surface of their paintings, while the linearists were still keeping the abstract line in check… Artisans began to emphasize flow over form. The tendril decoration inherited from Greek and Roman art quickly lost its naturalism and became what we call the arabesque. (Marks 2010: 54)

And so with its emphasis on red, “Don’t Look Now” similarly enacts an attempt to divorce colour from form, to give to colour a life of its own, as is made especially clear by the blood that floods the image during the climax of the opening death sequence. This haptic aspect of the film thus helps viewers to get beyond simply what is represented (here is a person in a red coat) and to access other dimensions hidden within these normal/normative ways of seeing (but of course the bearer of the red coat turns out to be a grotesque, old, murderous woman, since the grotesque, the old and the female are all antithetical to the myth of eternal youth that patriarchy seeks, promises, and narcissistically fools itself into believing it can realise; the woman does not bottle up life, keeping it for herself, but instead she bleeds and gives life).

If “Don’t Look Now” in some senses consciously places itself within artistic, pictorial and/or painterly traditions, then it is also knowingly a film. If for Mary Shelley the Promethean endeavour to establish eternal life led to the creation of Frankenstein’s monster, then Christine’s death clearly evokes the moment in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) when the monster throws a little girl, Maria, into a pond, causing her also to drown. Indeed, perhaps this allusion makes clear how John himself is a creating a monster in trying to resurrect a fake. Or rather, in trying to be Prometheus, John already is Frankenstein’s monster himself.

Meanwhile, “Don’t Look Now” of course follows hot on the heels of Luchino Visconti’s Thomas Mann adaptation, Death in Venice (1971), which itself tells the tale of how human desire cannot be kept straight, and how man will indeed only ever fail in his attempts to prolong his life. Finally, the moment when a dead body is fished from the water recalls a similar moment in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962), in which a car is similarly fished out from the Tiber—as if that tale of human alienation were in some senses continued here. A poster of Charlie Chaplin further clarifies the film’s lineage: the tramp equally is alienated from the machinic world of capital.

But much as “Don’t Look Now” revels in its status as a film, it is and must also be in rebellion against that very same status. For if cinema is anything, it is perhaps, as mentioned, a technology for preserving human life beyond death. In this way, it is part of the Promethean project, while the very and inevitable existence of the frame means that cinema only ever ‘bottles’ or ‘boxes’ space, offering us the Euclidean coordinates of a framed reality. Cinema is like Venice in that if the latter is, as Heather suggests, a ‘city in aspic,’ then cinema likewise puts the human body in aspic, preserving us in polyester.

If this is so, then it is against the frame of cinema itself that Roeg will consistently reframe, zoom and blur the images that we see. As with the performances, in which lines are mumbled, and the sound recording, in which sometimes the dialogue is hard to follow, Roeg thus deliberately makes a technically ‘dirty’ film, reminding us regularly that we are watching a film, a fake, a story that is not necessarily to be believed. Indeed, the use of quotation marks in the very title of the film (“Don’t Look Now”) suggest a second-hand rather than an original story.* And it is a story that at times we literally cannot see very clearly; one that on occasion leaves us baffled as to what exactly is happening.

What is more, Roeg’s radical editing, in which we can jump from different times to different spaces and back again within what we would traditionally refer to as a ‘scene’ ties in with the film’s use of cinema not to affix time but to demonstrate its interconnected nature. That is, as the dimensions of space are attributes that we affix to ‘raw’ space so as to conquer it (and so as not to get lost), so do we do the same with time.

Clocks and watches abound within “Don’t Look Now”, with these technologies themselves being ways for humans to regulate and thus in some senses to control time. And yet time itself is not linear, as the love-making scene itself exemplifies; we jump back and forth between John and Laura engaging in coitus and the two of them getting dressed/covering themselves back up for dinner. What was formless and naked becomes formal once again—but the edit mixes the chronology up suggesting that the past, the present and the future all co-exist simultaneously. This is why John can see his own funeral, why Heather can foresee the future and why John is in some respects (always) already dead: as space is deeply, or fundamentally, dimensionless, so, too, is time.

(To “look now” is thus perhaps not to see; one cannot look now, or at least the film encourages not only to look at the now, but to see how the now/the present is intertwined with the past and the future. If we truly could see the “now” we would not see it isolated from other moments in time, but entangled with them.**)

If it is the destiny of all humans to fall, as John imagines at one point that he does in the church amidst a shower of broken glass, then gravity will bring all humans to the grave. And in that muddly hole, worms will devour us and vines will emerge from that mud in a new sprouting of life. In the mud, space is dimensionless, but, so, too, is time, with Roeg’s cinema travelling through edit ‘wormholes’ to connect up what would be different spaces and times as if they were all connected. Not extended geometrically into a manageable pattern—but all together all at once. The vanity of man is to live forever; the reality of the universe is that we do live forever, but we also die forever, too. The vain and Promethean endeavour of man is to separate life definitively from death; the destiny of the human is to realise that life is inseparable from death—even as this leads to life defying gravity and emerging from the grave. It is at La Fenice where the sisters are staying by the film’s end; they are thus like phoenixes, transcending the distinction between life and death via their embrace of immanence and rebirth, as John canters (awkwardly again) towards his own death in Venice (Fenice?) because he will not accept a world without measure.

When the corpse, which bears a remarkable similarity to Heather, is retrieved from the Venetian canal, we see the open-eyed actor playing that part suddenly blink. No doubt an ‘error,’ the moment nonetheless demonstrates that the world of life without death is a world of impossible unblinkingness, one of permanent light in which paradoxically we cannot see. It is only when we blink, or when, like Wendy, we have something in our eyes (including mud, which perhaps explains why John begins to drink—here’s mud in your eye!) that we actually do see. True reality is marked by invisible dimensions that perhaps we can feel through senses other than vision; to be limited only to unblinking vision is to close oneself off to those alternative dimensions, spaces and times that we might dismiss as fantasies, dreams or hallucinations, but which in fact are real.

But what is it that we actually are not seeing? Perhaps of particular note is that “Don’t Look Now” features a second book in addition to Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space, and that is Rolf Hochhuth’s stage play, Der Stellvertreter (1963), which regularly is translated as The Deputy. Der Stellvertreter explores the way in which Pope Pius XII failed to speak out or take action against the Holocaust. What remains invisible, then, is the way in which National Socialism and the Catholic church both—in their attempts to control the world—lead to genocide, both within Europe and further afield. This blood, more than the Venetian lagoon, is the true chaotic liquid that has been spilt for the purposes of creating the western and patriarchal world of walls. And it is a blood that cannot be shown, but only alluded to, much as a black hole cannot directly be seen, but which can only be felt as a result of its gravitational and grave effects (everything falls towards it).

It is quite typical of 1970s art house movies to offer up many different signs, and yet which on the whole remain hard to decipher. “Don’t Look Now” is no exception, and there remain numerous details that I have not been able to mention, including the role of the police (‘The skill of the police artist is to make the living appear dead’); the way in which the camera always lingers on Signor Alexander, the owner of the hotel at which the Baxters are staying, after the other characters have finished talking to him; the way in which Laura is referred to as Mrs Baster at the airport, as if the family might be bastards; a poster about Boris Godunov; the prominence of a pair of neon glasses and a sign for an ottica, or optician’s, as John and Laura emerge from the darkness and back into familiar and lit alleyways in the Venetian night.

But of course if “Don’t Look Now” made total, coherent sense, then it would too much have subjugated its details to meaning; it would too much have made order out of chaos. In part, “Don’t Look Now” must remain chaotic on purpose, full of details that elude interpretation, and thus coming alive like the line and colour of the arabesque and/or the grotesque. In this way, it suggests an infinity beyond the finite world of walls and stone. An invisible world of blood unleashed. But also a world of life beyond death, of life in death, of dimensions beyond the measure of western capitalist man. Maybe the measure of a man, and the measure of this film, is that it seeks to go beyond measure, and to put is in touch with that infinite. Such an infinite reality can never be spoiled—except by the greed of men who seek to live forever.

* I overheard British Film Institute librarian Sarah Currant making this point during an induction session for students in the BFI Library. My thanks to her and my apologies for purloining the observation.

** This point was suggested to me by Mila Zuo. My thanks also to her for her help with this.

References

Izod, John (1992) The Films of Nicolas Roeg: Myth and Mind, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Marks, Laura U. (2010) Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Negarestani, Reza (2008) Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Melbourne: re.press.

Yesterday (Danny Boyle, UK/Russia/China, 2019)

Imagine there’s no smoking. It’s easy if you try.

Obviously I could have started this blog with ‘imagine there’s no Beatles,’ as a number of journalists have done in their write-ups about Danny Boyle’s Richard Curtis-scripted Yesterday.

However, I want to start with the smoking because at one point in the film, lead character Jack (Himesh Patel) says that he’s dying for a cigarette only for his best friend Rocky (Joel Fry) to ask what cigarettes are – with Google (which along with Apple of course does exist) then confirming that in the alternative world where Jack has woken up, cigarettes do not indeed exist, alongside the Beatles, Oasis (the band), Coca Cola (the drink) and Harry Potter.

There are several things to pick apart here – beyond the obvious fact that bands like Coldplay (namechecked) would also not exist had the Beatles not existed.

For more specifically, without the tobacco industry, firstly the USA would quite possibly not have enjoyed the global economic dominance that it enjoyed in the twentieth century (and periods around it).

Secondly, slavery was a key component of the American tobacco industry, and so to imagine a world without smoking is, for better or for worse, to imagine an America without slavery.

Furthermore, the Indian tobacco industry is one of the world’s largest, and it historically commenced with the introduction of tobacco to Goa by the Portuguese, before the British then created a tobacco industry during their colonial rule of the country.

I wish simply to suggest, then, that to imagine a world without tobacco is in some senses to imagine a world without slavery and a world without colonialism.

Oh to imagine such a world.

And yet, to imagine such a world is in some senses to deny such a world.

That is, Yesterday asks us in part to imagine that slavery and colonialism never took place – even though Jack Malik’s British-Asian family has found its way to Lowestoft in order to live there, and even though there has, even without the Beatles, still been a history of music that includes many African-American sounds (Stevie Wonder is namechecked, among other indicators, including Ed Sheeran’s rapping).

Indeed, in Boyle’s film it is early confirmed that the Rolling Stones continue to exist, meaning that these arch-appropriators of African-American sounds have indeed continued to be successful, even though the grounds for their success – the African-American music from which they ‘borrowed’ so many licks and beats – ought not to have existed since there was no tobacco trade and thus not slavery in the same fashion.

Jack, bless him, feels bad for appropriating the Beatles’ music, even though John Lennon (Robert Carlyle) appears in the film to confirm that basically he has not written his songs (he is not a frustrated musician, but a happy widower living on a beach, seemingly only a taxi ride from Lowestoft, blissfully unaware of pop music and the media).

And yet, if in effect appropriation has gone on (the Stones are still around), and if in effect the supposed non-existence of a history of slavery and colonialism has still resulted in more or less the same world as we have now – except without the Beatles and without Coke – then the principle of the film is that theft and the occultation of theft through the rewriting of history is absolutely fine.

Let us imagine basically the same world as we have now – except that there was no slavery and no colonialism.

So basically the film is a denial of at least two of the most pernicious moments in western history, including the gigantic theft that led to the very creation and dominance of the west that the film affirms.

More fool Jack, then, for confessing – even if it allows him to get the girl (Lily James). For, in doing so he basically demonstrates that he is a dupe for a set of values (upheld in typical Curtis fashion as implicitly ‘English’) that he has been fed and yet which no one else believes in.

Indeed, Jack’s gesture might have a touch of the Mr Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, USA, 1939) about it, but I am not sure what the panic from record producer Debra Hammer, played by Kate McKinnon, is about.

For while Rocky uploads all of the Beatles songs at the end of the film to the internet for people to download for free, the production and recording rights would still belong to her record company, and so Rocky/Jack will spend their whole life in penury, if not in prison, as a result of their unprovable story and their breach of contract (how to prove the existence of a band that never existed?) – all the while the record company owns rights to the songs, regardless of whether people have downloaded them for free.

Indeed, pretty much every song in the world is already easily available online on a host of websites, and it has not led to the collapse of the music industry – even if bands like Radiohead (whose poster for In Rainbows adorns Jack’s door) have attempted to give away their music.

(Besides, the record label would just get a better set of musicians and singers to sell better versions of the songs to the world, thereby making more money.)

So, Jack/Rocky’s ‘revolutionary’ gesture is in other words just business as usual in the contemporary record industry.

What is perhaps of greater import, though, is that the denial of history is also business as usual in the contemporary world.

Perhaps it is not by accident that Jack first ‘breaks through’ internationally while playing a gig in Moscow as Ed Sheeran’s warm-up – with the sequence of course involving a cover of ‘Back in the USSR.’

For if there is a country that knows about how to manipulate history, then it is surely Russia. And the manipulation does not stop at history; it also includes the present, as the victory of Vladimir Putin in the 2016 American Presidential elections makes clear.

What is more, it is notable that Jack also relies solely on Google for his verification or otherwise of the existence of the Beatles.

Not only does Yesterday thus affirm that it is only by existing on the internet that one can be validated as real, but it also implies – in a celebratory, product-placement fashion – that companies like Google shape our reality, determining what is real or not.

In other words, Yesterday plays out as comedy what is perhaps one of the most tragic aspects of the digital, ‘post-truth’ age: that what we consider to be real is highly manipulable, is indeed manipulated, but here is something to be celebrated as we deny slavery and deny colonialism as we live in a world without history and smoking.

Facetiously one might suggest that Yesterday could just as easily be called ‘Cambridge Analytica Saves The World.’

And yet in this facetious comment lies a sense in which Yesterday plays fast and loose with history as it offers up an extended Google advert, even as Google surely does shape our perceptions of reality thanks to its manipulable algorithms, data mining, listings of people and events, and so on.

If ‘Imagine’ were indeed a song about imagining ‘no countries,’ ‘peace,’ and more, it perhaps is a song about a world that beats to the unified drum of a single military-industrial-entertainment complex. That is, ‘Imagine’ is as much a bitter indictment of world history as it is an attempt to dream that humanity’s bloody, planet-destroying history did not take place.

A denial of a reality in which borders are being continuously reaffirmed on both sides of the Pond. A denial of a reality in which exploitation has created this world of huge injustice… Yesterday is in some senses, then, simply a reimagined version of today: the world is falling apart but no one wants to believe it and everyone just denies it. And so the entropy of the world will just go on happening…

In the face of trying to build of a new tomorrow, Boyle and Curtis instead waste their time dreaming of an alternative yesterday. Where that will get us… no one knows.

Kid Icarus (Mike Ott and Carl Bird McLaughlin, USA, 2008)

I recently heard that Mike Ott and Carl Bird McLaughlin’s Kid Icarus will soon be available on VOD.

This blog post is a kind of reflective piece written to celebrate its release – and to encourage readers to watch the film.

And so I begin…

Only yesterday, I read another feed on Twitter in which a.n. minor celebrity spoke of how a teacher had told them at school that they would amount to nothing – and that now the minor celebrity was taking great pleasure in effectively getting ‘revenge’ on their teacher by telling them, and the world, how much money they had made in their lives.

Aside from the way in which this narrative reaffirms the idea that all teachers are always already failures for not going into a more lucrative career (because the minor celebrity is affirming success via the fact that they have made a lot of money, while their teacher is wallowing in the decidedly unlucrative career of teaching – because money is the only thing that validates humanity?), my personal response to reading such online discussions involves two queries.

Firstly, I wonder if perhaps it was the very ‘insult’ given by the teacher that inspired the pupil/student to ‘make something’ of themselves – since some people perhaps respond better to what we might proverbially term a ‘kick up the arse’ (or at the very least to constructive criticism) than they do always to being told at all points in time how brilliant they are. Indeed, since the minor celebrity is taking the time to recount this ‘revenge’ story, it seems to stand to reason that the ‘insult’ did indeed function as a spur to them to ‘make something of themselves.’ By this token, the student should probably not be so annoyed with their former teacher, but grateful to them for motivating their achievements, even if that motivation was ‘negative’ (i.e. done as an act of revenge rather than as a positive act done for oneself).

(Not that such a student – that is, the sort that might ‘benefit’ from the so-called ‘kick up the arse’ – would offer thanks to the teacher, especially if they did not really want their newfound minor celebrity and wealth, preferring instead to be able to go back in time and simply to have had a different teacher who did not inspire them to become a minor celebrity.)

Secondly, I query what the student was like at school, and/or whether they had the self-awareness to know what effect their behaviour had on their teachers (which is not to say their peers).

Don’t get me wrong. There are probably some terrible teachers out there, and perhaps some undeserving students have been offered insults by those nasty teachers before going on to achieve fame and fortune, while other excellent and praised students have achieved ‘nothing’ (whatever that means), while others received negative feedback at school and went on as predicted to ‘amount to nothing’ (which I guess means not making much money and/or not being mildly or massively famous). Meanwhile, yet others always were and continue to be ‘high achievers,’ while many more just middled through school and life, and still others fluctuated gently between positions over time.

I am sad for anyone who has been insulted by their teachers and taken it so much to heart that they have constructed a life narrative of revenge around it. I am also sad that any teacher would educate their students – positively or negatively – to believe that money and fame is what makes a life valid.

Furthermore, I am sensitive to how many humans have difficulties learning and/or concentrating in a classroom setting – and who thus may find the experience problematic, if not traumatic. School is certainly imperfect – and working at one entails precisely this: always working towards doing a better job, even as this might be exhausting (if not all-consuming).

I do not want to negate this diversity. Nonetheless, I might suggest from experience that some students have the sad effect of coming across to their teachers and peers alike as arrogant. Now, I have not (to the best of my knowledge) ever told any of my students that they will never amount to anything (because I do not really know what this means, let alone am I capable of knowing someone else’s future – and I have a policy to try only to say things that I know to my students).

Be that as it may, some students can, as mentioned, be perplexing and taxing in their arrogance, capable as they are of insulting their teachers – advertently or otherwise – through their comments, their attitudes and their actions.

What is more, they may be completely unreceptive to their teachers and/or perhaps not so good at listening – such that they might hear an accusation that they will ‘amount to nothing’ when really they are being told that **if** they want to achieve their ambitions, then perhaps they ought to make more of an effort to be more receptive to others, more humble in their attitude, more thoughtful in their comportment.

Indeed, in my own experience (which has involved about as much time studying as it has involved time teaching), the psychological trouble that problematic students can cause to teachers is far more taxing than any of the trouble that teachers caused me as a student.

(Not that this will apply to everyone, not least because most people do not go on to teach; that said, statistically my point stands to reason, since a teacher will encounter 1000s of students over their career, while students might only encounter 10s of teachers; let us not broach the role that peers play in the lives of students.)

All this pre-amble is to say that just this past semester, two students sat right in front of me playing chess with each other during a lecture that I was delivering.

When I then asked them whether they thought that their behaviour was rude – being absorbed in a chess game rather than my class – they denied as much and said that it was doing no harm to anyone. When I asked them if their behaviour was reminiscent of Leigh Harkrider, the main protagonist of Kid Icarus, they said no.

For, perhaps the biggest irony of this chess experience is that I had just shown to my students Mike Ott and Carl Bird McLaughlin’s documentary about students trying to make a film at the College of the Canyons community college in Santa Clarita, California.

For, even though they had just seen that film’s main subject, film student Leigh Harkrider, repeatedly ignoring the advice of his film instructors as he proceeds to make a mistake-ridden movie as part of his film class, they could not see that they might share some of Leigh’s arrogance. That is, their behaviour was, like Leigh in Kid Icarus, completely self-unaware – perhaps convinced, like Leigh, of their brilliance, and thus not in need of anything so boring as a lecture on filmmaking (let alone a lecture on filmmaking as filtered through Kid Icarus).

Sometimes I wonder that this sort of arrogance is especially acute in film classes, since we live in a world where everyone assumes that they are an expert on cinema, and yet where few people realise how much time and effort has to go into making movies, fooling themselves that their capacity to enjoy films will automatically be matched by a capacity to make films.

Perhaps this tendency is indeed especially acute in film classes because we live in a world dominated by movies – whether we watch them in theatres or not. For, we are surrounded by screens that show us content designed to capture and to maintain our attention as much and for as long as possible (i.e. screens that feature content made using the techniques developed over the course of the history of cinema).

To succeed in life – to be rich and famous – only works if you can be seen as rich and famous; that is, it only works if there are images of you in circulation that demonstrate your wealth and fortune. In other words, success is linked in contemporary society to the cinematic, or at the very least to the mediated.

If success is about appearance, then, small wonder it is that people don’t just want to get on with being successful, but they want to mediate their success. In other words, the values of our culture breed arrogance – in the form of people who lord their success over others by making it as visible as possible, and which breeds the values of revenge, whereby people publicly flip the bird at anyone who stood in their path to success.

Luckily for Leigh Harkrider, Mike Ott and Carl Bird McLaughlin are not themselves interested in ‘revenge,’ even if there might be moments when Kid Icarus seems like an exploitation of student arrogance for the purposes of making a movie – that is, for the purposes of using another person’s lack of cinematicity to reaffirm one’s own cinematicity, with cinematicity (or appearing cinematic) being a measure of success.

For while Kid Icarus does gently expose Leigh Harkrider’s arrogance as he believes that he can create a cinematic masterpiece without a clue and, more importantly, without putting in any effort, the film is also sympathetic towards him – not that he necessarily deserves it.

The film follows Leigh as he tries haplessly to make his student project, Enslavence, at the afore-mentioned College of the Canyons, where Mike Ott was working as a film professor at the time of shooting.

Kid Icarus is a catalogue of what not to do when making a film. Leigh alienates his friends (potentially stealing a script idea, getting rid of his most faithful crew member, Cory Rubin, and getting everyone to sign endless contracts handing all rights over to him), while also demonstrating little idea of how to create a story – even as he aspires witlessly to be Steven Spielberg and David Fincher.

And yet, Kid Icarus is more than just the humiliation of a student who does a fine job of making an arse of himself (such that he at times might just deserve a kick up it). For, while the film does show us the chaos on set of the student and/or amateur film production – making of Kid Icarus a wonderful companion piece to Christopher Smith’s 1999 masterpiece, American Movie – it also shows us the conditions of Leigh’s life.

Leigh has a Superman cap, he has a Superman check book, his favourite show is Smallville, and he discusses Superman at various points in the film. And yet he is also a guy who lives with someone else’s family, who works at The Home Depot, and who generally seems quite alienated and lonely.

And so while Leigh might dream of being or becoming the Man of Steel, Kid Icarus takes the time to show that this desire is born from its complete opposite, a sense of powerlessness, which itself is tied to one thing that perhaps Leigh Harkrider does share with Kal-El, namely an inner solitude (Superman as an orphan).

Furthermore, while the Enslavence shoot is an at-times hilarious disaster, making of Leigh something of what James Franco might call a ‘disaster artist,’ in the making of his film, Leigh does make friends with all manner of people, as is made clear at the film’s end when he is surrounded by cast and crew come to celebrate at the wrap party.

In other words, Kid Icarus gives Leigh rope enough to hang himself as far as his pretensions of being a great filmmaker are concerned – with Leigh at one point even failing to impress Jay Keitel, whom he courts to be his cinematographer (and who has since gone on to lens episodes of Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz’s Steven Soderbergh-inspired show, The Girlfriend Experience).

But at the same time, Kid Icarus also demonstrates how film brings people together and how filmmaking does create friendships that help to stave off that loneliness. If community college teaches anything, it is perhaps a sense of community.

And this sense of community functions as a counter-example, then, to the self-serving values of wealth and fame that I described at the outset of this post. There is no need for revenge when we treat people with dignity, and there is no need for hatred if we can learn to love, with Ott and McLaughlin clearly loving the subjects of their film even as Leigh in particular is infuriating.

Not only is this a testament, then, to Ott’s patience and qualities as a teacher, in that he does not succumb to telling Leigh he will amount to nothing, even if he gets him to query whether he is a more committed viewer than maker of Smallville. (That is, Ott gets his students to question themselves, their values and their ideas; that is, he inspires in them the desire to learn.)

It also is a testament to Ott’s commitment to community, a commitment that he has continued to explore in his subsequent films as he sticks primarily to the Antelope Valley region of California and as he explores the lives of those who have often been overlooked by a society that values only visibility and wealth.

If visibility and wealth are cinematic, then Ott creates something of an anti-cinema, or what Robert Campbell refers to in his study of Ott’s films as a non-cinema (see Campbell 2018). Or what Ott himself might call ‘small form films.’

But more than this, it is a human cinema, with people defined by their humanity and not by the amount of money or celebrity that they have. And it is a cinema committed in many respects to reality – to showing how real people are more wonderful and complex than any fiction film can imagine, even as fiction films shape our sense of who we are and whom we aspire to be.

With this in mind, step forward Cory Zacharia, who progresses from a friend incidentally on location during a visit with Leigh to The Home Depot, to the prime focus of much of Kid Icarus, where Cory explores who he is on camera, to the main actor with whom Ott has worked in various subsequent film and video projects.

Repeated work with Cory Zacharia not only makes Ott’s relationship with him akin to that of François Truffaut with Jean-Pierre Léaud, but it also demonstrates Ott’s care for and concern with not just Cory, but many other of his collaborators.

Leigh may lack a visible family in the film, but in making Enslavence, a new, substitute family is born. And in making Kid Icarus, a new family is born for Ott and with which he will work on numerous subsequent projects, including Littlerock (2010), Pearblossom Hwy (2012), Lake Los Angeles (2014), Lancaster, CA (2015), California Dreams (2017) and the online movie criticism show Cinema Club (2018-2019).

Bringing humans together and making meaningful and creative bonds: this is the true power of cinema, far more than the wealth and fortune that its most visible makers achieve.

But does it work? That is, if my students could not see how they might have some of Leigh’s arrogance (if they could see it, then they would not have disrespected the class by ignoring it and playing chess), then can Kid Icarus create communities among those who watch the film?

Well, for starters, I can only say that after showing Kid Icarus to students for many years now, it continues to be a film that inspires both laughter and tender responses – as well as being a film with which the vast majority of film students can identify.

But also the very fact that the film is becoming available means that it is a film that can continue to inspire learning. Held up for many years in a distribution gridlock, the film now is becoming available at least in part because of its value as a learning experience for all involved, including Leigh, with whose blessing Kid Icarus can find new audiences.

Perhaps there is hope, then, for not just my own students but perhaps for us all to learn equally to learn, and to continue learning to learn as life goes on. Ott’s films and Ott himself do this, being thus akin to the very best teachers – of the sort that I myself aspire to become: not interested in petty glories or insults, but rather in simply learning for the sake of learning, making films not to achieve fame and fortune, but out of love.

The gift of love and learning to love: no wealth and fame can buy those things at all. That is why they are precisely gifts, offered to us by gifted filmmakers. For those who can now watch Kid Icarus for the first time (or for a second or third time), you are about to receive something wonderful.

Long Shot (Jonathan Levine, USA, 2019)

Since at least The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1941), Hollywood cinema has regularly staged the fantasy that politics would be better off with politicians who just came across like normal human beings – rather than the performances of confidence and authority that people with aphasia find funny because they can tell that politicians are lying.

The Great Dictator shows us a simple barber (Chaplin himself) taking on the role of Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator (also played by Chaplin), and bringing to a halt the end of the Second World War through his final message of love and peace. Indeed, Chaplin’s speech is a veritable YouTube meme, so powerful and articulate does the otherwise word shy barber becomes once put in front of a microphone.

Perhaps the medium – here, radio – brings out of the barber this performance. And in bringing out a performance from him, does the barber not become more similar to Hynkel than we might otherwise think – regardless of his message of peace and love?

Indeed, what is perhaps of particular interest about The Great Dictator is the (almost certainly apocryphal) suggestions that Adolf Hitler modelled himself upon Chaplin – the tramp with a heart of gold. For even if apocryphal, this would suggest that when Chaplin impersonates Hitler, he is in certain respects impersonating himself.

In other words, as The Great Dictator promises to show us how politics might be better if it were populated by regular, straight-talking people… it does not realise that Hitler was precisely a regular, straight-talking person, who managed to whip up bloodlust and hatred in a people thanks to the banality of his speeches as much as through any grandiloquence.

Indeed, as Erika Mann (daughter of Thomas) described it in 1938:

he is no scholar… Hitler’s use of language is the worst immaginable, and it will remain at that level… Those who care for the German language may be anxious for its future when they see its deterioration during the five years of Hiter’s rule; newspapers, magazines, schoolbooks – the entire official literature – have fallen into the florid yet brutal, military and vulgar forms of expression that are typical of the Führer himself. (Erika Mann, School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis, New York: Dover, 1938, p. 68.)

Long Shot implicitly makes a link with The Great Dictator by opening with journalist Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) infiltrating a group of Neo Nazis in his native New York. He is exposed as a Jewish journalist and manages to escape by jumping out of a window – crashing into a car… a moment to which I shall return below.

In other words, Long Shot wants to situate itself within a world of political extremism – and one that is specifically threatening to Jews, even if one could hardly call it a revelation to demonstrate that there are Nazis in the contemporary USA (and thus not exactly a telling exposé in the way that the film wants us to believe).

More important, perhaps, is what is driving Flarsky to infiltrate an antisemitic group in the first place. For it seems clear that the film wants also to demonstrate, for better or for worse, that Flarsky has an attraction for certain types of power – even as he disavows such an attraction.

This attraction is made most clear when he meets up with his former babysitter, Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron), who is now Secretary of State. Because she is hot, and because she also gave him an embarrassing boner when he was a kid, we get a sense of how Flarsky’s attraction to power is about as subtle as a porn film (and we’ll get some of that later in the film, too).

So, Flarsky has a boner for power… even as he feels oppositional to it. His writing is considered to be powerful thanks to headlines along the lines of ‘fuck you, climate change deniers’ and so on.

You know, really powerful and sophisticated stuff. Because unsophisticated times call for unsophisticated language. Now is not the time to think and/or contemplate; now is the time to swear and judge.

And thanks to his powers of language, Flarsky becomes Field’s speechwriter (basically writing down what she says so that she can read it back to an audience), which in turn means that he gets to make good on that boner and start a relationship with Field.

Furthermore, because of the ‘humanity’ of Flarsky’s speechwriting, Field’s popularity increases immensely meaning that she is likely set to become the next President thanks to the decision of the current one (Bob Odenkirk) to stand down in a bid to pursue a career in movies (more on this shortly, too).

In effect, the film tells us that people like their politicians ‘human’ – and if only Hillary Clinton had not had that pole stuck up her ass then she might well have had a shot at winning the presidency that Donald J Trump instead won two years and 119 days ago.

But what is this fantasy of ‘honest’ politicians? For is not Trump precisely the ‘honest’ and straight-talking politician that Long Shot wants to uphold as a forward-thinking approach to contemporary American politics?

In other words, as the film attempts to critique the political right by making Field a democrat and Flarsky staunchly anti-republican, its fantasy version of politics is in fact an endorsement of precisely the status quo that we have now.

At one point, Field asks Flarsky in a bedroom scene to take her from behind, spank her and perhaps also gently to choke her (or something along these lines). Finally! Some candour about female desire in the bedroom and how it might well involve aspects that some might consider to be masochistic.

And yet, a fear that runs through my head given the context of this film is that such ‘progressiveness’ could be taken as implying that Trump is justified in his self-professed technique of ‘grabbing women by the pussy.’ After all, such twisted logic would go, this is what they really want…

No wonder it is, then, that Flarsky has eventually to face up to the fact that his best friend, Lance (O’Shea Jackson Jr), is a Republican. Not only is Lance a quasi-Magical Negro…

… but he also speaks of how his Republican values have enabled him to achieve success in the business realm (such that he can take a day off to get drunk with Flarsky and give his whole team the day off, too).

Lance explains that he tones down his Republicanism around Flarsky because he knows that Fred will just moan on at him if he does so… a bit like those people that moan on against Trump when he is just getting on with leading the nation in his own particular style.

Surely it is good for a film to offer us a vision of the African-American right, especially when it involves the son of a rapper who once proclaimed that it was right to ‘fuck the police’ (however eloquent or otherwise we find this particular use of language).

For not only does this give us a sense of the diversity of political viewpoints in America (Trump has his African-American supporters), but it also allows the film to simplify its Republican credentials while at the same using diversity as a shield to protect it from criticism (‘affirmative action’ is, if you will, turned against itself as you run the risk of being racist if you criticise this quasi-Magical Negro’s Republican views).

The film sees Flarsky fall heavily twice. The first is when he jumps out of the Nazi gathering at a New York warehouse, as mentioned above. And the second is when he falls down some stairs upon re-acquainting Field, prompting one of the singers from Boyz II Men, who are performing at whatever fundraiser they are attending, to offer one of the film’s funniest lines (‘cracker down’).

Both falls are basically impossible to survive – and so the film is no doubt suggesting that this is not realistic and that we should not take the film seriously – just as Chaplin gets bashed in the head by a frying pan in The Great Dictator.

Nonetheless, these two falls might suggest that the film is Flarsky’s fantasy; that is, Flarsky gets to be reactionary while at the same time purporting to be progressive; he gets to be neoliberal while purporting simply to be liberal.

The same idea is carried by the tattoo that is half-completed on Flarsky at the opening Nazi meeting. To prove that he is part of the gang, Fred agrees to have a Swastika tattooed on his arm – and he is going through with it when some timely internet research by one of the Nazis reveals who he really is.

Later we see the same tattoo as having been converted into a sort of funny stick man, while it makes a final appearance at the end of the film after Fred and Charlotte have moved into the White House.

So while the Swastika gets regenerated to become a stick man gag, it nonetheless also serves as a reminder of Fred’s attraction towards power.

The President wants to quit politics to become a movie star – hoping that the Presidency will project him into film stardom after a career prior to his Presidency in television (where, of course, he was most famous for playing the American President).

A sort of Democrat Trump, in that the latter was also a (reality) TV star before becoming President, the suggestion is that the Presidency will not make him a movie star – since, as Fred at one point says, starring in movies does not make you a movie star.

Not only does the film try to create a hierarchy of media here, then, but it also suggests in some senses that movies are more powerful than politics.

In some senses, this may well be true. But if it is the case, then as Donald J Trump’s suitability as president needs to be critiqued at every turn (a self-confessed abuser of women; a denier of climate change; a colluder with foreign powers), so must cinema such as this be critiqued at every turn, even if that is to spoil the ‘fun’ of a knockabout movie that just wants not to be taken too seriously.

And perhaps it is worth saying that it is quite easy to recognise the fun of the film: as a viewer, I found myself not only at times enjoying the film and laughing at its charming leads, but I also found myself indulging in fantasies of empowerment either in politics and/or in movies, perhaps especially the latter.

In other words, if there is to be critique, then it is a critique that must also be levelled at myself, or oneself more generally. We must be questioning our own propensity to be suck(er)ed in by movies like Long Shot.

For, indeed, when a seeming long shot comes about, as per Trump’s victory in the last US elections, then we do need to question how well we know our social and political realities, and how well we know ourselves if we assumed that the realisation of that long shot was previously unthinkable.

In this way, Long Shot‘s depiction of Fred as being attracted to power (even as it wants to tell us that power is attracted to him) is indeed honest – and a level of critical reflection might help us collectively to address the seduction that power offers.

The problem is that Long Shot is dishonest about its honesty, since it involves little to no critical self-reflection, even as it claims to with its PoMo television star President and its gags about TV stars not making it in the movies.

Instead, like Fred, the film just offers us a masturbatory fantasy about being ‘chosen’ by the powerful, offering up to us as progressive the idea that a guy with jizz on his face would make for a loveable First Man.

As webcam blackmailing, or ‘sextortion‘, grows rapidly, it is indeed perhaps a fantasy that such online behaviour might be empowering. But the truth is that it empowers only a global criminal network.

Perhaps being involved in a global criminal network is precisely how we should begin to consider the current American president.

Philosophical Screens: A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1971)

This post is a written version of the thoughts that I gave about A Clockwork Orange at the British Film Institute on Tuesday 16 April 2019. The talk was the latest in the Philosophical Screens series.

On this occasion my fellow speakers were Lucy Bolton of Queen Mary, University of London, and John Ó Maoilearca of Kingston University. Where my thoughts as written here were shaped by the thoughts offered by my co-speakers at the BFI, I shall try to offer up credit.

In short, I suggested that A Clockwork Orange is a film about control, and as such it remains relevant to our world today.

For, at the centre of Kubrick’s film is the so-called Ludovico technique that chief protagonist Alex (Malcolm McDowell) undergoes after being arrested for murder. The Ludovico technique consists of Alex’s eyes being forced open and then kept moist by the administration of eye-drops as he is shown a prolonged series of films featuring what Alex would refer to as ultraviolence, including what in the film are supposed to be documentary images of groups of ‘droogs’ committing rape and murder, as well as genuine documentary images – both of Nazi gatherings during World War 2 (which we see – including footage from Triumph des Willens/Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl, Germany, 1935), and of concentration camp atrocities (which we do not see, but which Alex describes).

I shall return to the role played by these documentary images in what is otherwise a fiction film at a later point in time. But for the time being, the important thing to explain is that these images are so horrific to Alex that they, in conjunction with a drug that is injected into him, induce a disgust response, such that he begins to gag whenever he sees or even thinks about doing some of the violent and/or sexual acts that otherwise give him so much pleasure.

It is not that we are forced to watch horrific deeds on cinema screens in the contemporary age. Nonetheless, the idea that we cannot but watch moving images is relevant when we begin to consider the proliferation of screens in the contemporary world, and from which moving images and sounds emanate – perhaps especially ones that are advertisements specifically or advertisarial more generally.

(What I mean by ‘advertisarial’ is that these images may not sell specific products to us, but they sell to us lifestyles, as well as being designed for us to stare at them, i.e. they sell themselves.)

This advertisarial logic of contemporary screen culture is of course capitalist in nature, while its would-be permanence also relates to the development of what has been termed 24:7 culture, or the ends of sleep. That is, permanent illumination and screen culture lead to us always being awake, always being online, always being connected… such that metaphorically our eyes are always open as buzzes and flashes wake us up in the night and stop us from sleeping, our eyes always forced open by the machines of cinema.

We might think that there is a key difference between the world that I am describing (24:7 connection and the ends of sleep) and that of A Clockwork Orange. For, in the latter, Alex watches these images in order not to commit violent acts, while in our world, we are encouraged always to look at these images – in order to undergo our own Ludovico technique.

Except that as the Ludovico technique is introduced in order to control the behaviour of an otherwise unruly Alex, so is 24:7 culture and the ends of sleep designed to control the behaviour of citizens in today’s world. For, it interpellates them permanently into capitalist culture.

More than this, while Alex watches images of violence, what the contemporary ‘Ludovico technique’ of permanent screen culture involves is violence done to us, those who experience it.

Furthermore, what we ultimately learn is not that Alex is violent in spite of the world of control that the Ludovico technique reveals, but that his violence is the logical extension of that world. And that violence is the logic of our world of permanent illumination – violence to the world, violence to us, violence to each other. The cinematic ethos of our times reveals not just violence in cinema (torture porn, etc, to which we shall return later). But violence as cinema/cinema as violence.

If this notion of control in A Clockwork Orange needed further evidence, then the film’s very title offers us a clue. For, Anthony Burgess, upon whose novel the film is based, gave his book the title A Clockwork Orange for a couple of interlinked reasons. The first is his interest in the phrase ‘queer as a clockwork orange,’ which suggests the way in which humans often do not fit into the roles that society tries to impose upon them. And the second is his sense of intrigue at how orang in Malaya (where Burgess was based for a time) means ‘human’ (as per orang-utan, which means ‘human of the forest’).

In other words, ‘a clockwork orang’ is a clockwork human – a human rendered predictable and controlled, as their eyes are glued wide shut by the permanent onslaught of lights, images and sounds that prevent them from seeing their own subjugation to systems of control.

In the term ‘clockwork’ we also have an initial sense of how violence is the logical consequence of, rather than the exception to, a society of control. For by reducing the human to set actions and reactions, time is rendered not a measure of change and becoming, but a measure of repetition, with repetition being a measure of controlled bodies doing repetitive actions (‘work’) for the purposes of capital. Clock-work humans are humans that work; humans that are subject to the time of capital rather than their own time.

Let us further this argument about violence taking place not in spite of the control society, but rather as its logical extension.

‘I would not be controlled,’ sing Alex and various other inmates in a chapel service at HMP Wandsworth before the former undergoes the Ludovico – suggesting that prison and religion both are ways of bringing ‘sheep back into the fold.’

But more specifically, once he does undergo the Ludovico, Alex complains about how he ‘began to feel really sick. But I could not shut my glazzies,’ he continues, ‘and even if I tried to move my glazballs about I still could not get out of the line of fire of this picture.’

In using the Russian term glaz to refer to his eyes, Alex also brings to mind how Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov referred to his cinematic project as a kino-glaz, or a cine-eye, in which cinema would create a new media-determined perception of reality.

That is, cinema is part of (a tool for) a system of discipline and indoctrination, or what I am here terming (in reference to French philosopher Gilles Deleuze) a society of control.

But cinema is already controlling Alex even before he undergoes the Ludovico technique. As much is made clear when we understand that ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ is Alex’s own ultraviolence theme tune (with that song also taking place in the 1952 American film of the same name at a moment when Don Lockwood, played by Gene Kelly, is a bit unruly towards a police officer).

In addition, we are offered flashes into Alex’s fantasies as he dreams of ultraviolence at home – and during these moments Alex sees himself as a cinematic Nosferatu figure.

In other words, cinema has inspired Alex’s violent fantasies. Cinema will not cure him of violence. Violence is the logic of cinema.

What is key, however, is that Stanley Kubrick seems to be aware of this – as is made clear by various of the formal choices that he makes in the film.

As successively we hear Gioachino Rossini’s ‘La gazza ladra/Thieving Magpie’ and the overture from William Tell during scenes of violence, A Clockwork Orange takes on dimensions of not being about realism but rather being about choreography. The film becomes balletic as bodies fly through the air, as bodies move in slow motion, or as bodies (during a ménage-à-trois that Alex has with two women he picks up at a record store) move in fast motion.

Furthermore, the colour scheme of A Clockwork Orange also shifts the film away from realism and into a highly stylised realm that equally suggests self-consciousness/falsity. Indeed, the film opens with a red and then a blue colour card, while upon being beaten in police custody, Alex seems not to bleed blood so much as red.

Indeed, the very whiteness of A Clockwork Orange (various interiors, walls, props, milk, characters) would seem to fit its vision of a society of control. For, in presenting a primarily white world, the film would suggest a world without diversity and difference, but one of homogeneity/sameness.

(There are five black bodies in A Clockwork Orange; one in the Korova Moloko bar that Alex and his ‘droog’ friends attend, and four in Wandsworth prison. It is a white world that we see; violence is necessary to remove colour from the world and to make it and its values primarily white.)

Finally, when we see Alex and his droogs driving at speed down a country lane after stealing a Durango-95, A Clockwork Orange so clearly involves rear projection that again the film wants to highlight its own falsity.

This is not to mention the regularly stylised performances, which take on comic book dimensions through their grotesqueness and exaggerated nature.

So the question becomes: why does Kubrick adopt such a ‘comic book’ aesthetic – especially when he is dealing with such difficult topics as violence and sexual violence?

My suggestion would be that Kubrick adopts a deliberately false aesthetic in order to implicate his viewer into the film, to create a sense of self-consciousness about our act of film viewing (rather than the film viewer hiding unobserved in a darkened room). This implication is deliberately revealed to us on numerous occasions.

When Alex is being held in custody prior to his conviction, his parole officer Deltoid (Aubrey Morris) leans forward to speak to Alex, who is on the floor after taking a beating: ‘You are now a murderer, little Alex. A murderer, yes.’

These words are accompanied by a point of view shot, whereby Deltoid talks directly to us, just as Alex regularly addresses the audience, referring to them (in deliberately gendered terms?) as his ‘brothers.’

What is more, Kubrick regularly uses a 9.8mm lens on his camera, which creates a kind of fish-eye perspective that in turn seems stylised/false. This was a technique developed in conjunction with cinematographer John Alcott – and notably when Alex is first checked into hospital where he will undergo the Ludovico treatment, he is greeted by a Dr Alcott (Barrie Cookson).

In other words, it is as if Kubrick and Alcott were consciously suggesting that their film is a kind of Ludovico treatment.

However, theirs is not a Ludovico treatment achieved through the realism of the images, as per what Alex experiences within the film. Theirs is, rather, an anti-Ludovico treatment that is achieved through revealing the falsity of its images.

‘It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen,’ says Alex in voiceover when undergoing the Ludovico. And because this is the case, so Kubrick does not show us ‘the colours of the real world’ – so that we do not mistake what we see as reality.

And yet, this creates another seeming contradiction. For if in the film it is documentary images that stop Alex from becoming violent, it seems to be Kubrick’s hope that fiction images will have that effect – that his self-consciously false images might highlight to us the violence of our world. In other words, unlike Alex’s view of the documentary images, Kubrick’s images are not supposed to be taken as real at all.

Here we can return to the use of documentary footage that I mentioned earlier. For, where Alex initially enjoys what he sees, it is the documentary footage of Nazi Germany that begins to change his mind about violence.

And yet, in our real world (as opposed to in the fictional world of A Clockwork Orange), it is the work of people like Riefenstahl, i.e. it is documentary images, together with fiction films that try to pass themselves off as realistic, that help to mobilise nations into committing atrocities as per the Holocaust.

Oddly, when we do see the documentary images interpolated into A Clockwork Orange, their status as images of the real world (as opposed to images of the diegetic fictional world) does help them to bring home (at least for me) the true horror of the Second World War.

Furthermore, Kubrick does not show us the concentration camp footage that Alex describes – not least because it would be unethical to do so (using the suffering of others for political purposes, which is exactly what Nazi propaganda was doing itself).

But what is important here is that it is in its very invisibility – the fact that it cannot be seen – that the Holocaust becomes unbearably real.

That is, it is in not seeing the footage of it that we are sickened by the violence of history.

We might say that Kubrick does not believe in the Ludovico technique, therefore, or else he might show us that footage in order to prevent humans from ever committing such atrocities again.

However, Kubrick specifically uses fake images in order, I shall suggest, to disgust his viewers, rather than using images of the real world. Kubrick uses the comic book style that I have described not in order to show us the real world, but to show us a nightmare version of it.

Put differently, if the Ludovico technique, and cinema more generally, breeds violence, then Kubrick must try to expose this process. He does not use the Ludovico technique so much as try to suggest that it is at work on all of us.

But how can one expose this process without repeating this process?

Just as Alex was really already just carrying out the violent deeds inspired by cinema, so is he co-opted by the film’s end into the seemingly totalitatarian state that is being created in the film’s dystopian UK. Furthermore, Alex’s two droogs, Dim (Warren Clarke) and Georgie (James Marcus), end up being cops. Violence is not only encouraged but also useful for the state in order to control its population.

As Ludovico inventor Dr Brodsky (Carl Duering) explains:

the drug will cause the subject to experience a death-like paralysis together with deep feelings of terror and helplessness. One of our earlier test subjects described it as being like death, a sense of stifling and drowning, and it is during this period we have found the subject will make his most rewarding associations between his catastrophic experience and environment and the violence he sees.

Perhaps the drug is cinema itself. And Kubrick wants to wake us from our deathly eyes-open slumber (including by making reference to his own films as Alex passes a copy of the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey, UK/USA, 1968, in the afore-mentioned record store) rather than have us continue somnambulating through the world .

And yet, while Kubrick seems deliberately to adopt comic book techniques in order to shake us out of our deathly slumber, A Clockwork Orange arguably fails in this attempt.

For, perhaps A Clockwork Orange historically achieved (and continues to achieve?) the opposite – namely the creation of a new generation of state-endorsed violence.

Burgess’ story was inspired by the rape of his wife by four American deserters in 1944. Meanwhile, Kubrick famously withdrew his film from cinemas after real-world crimes were reported as being influenced by the film.

In this way, the film did the opposite of what it seemed to set out to achieve.

Furthermore, Kubrick perhaps was already aware of this possibility, even before he had it withdrawn from British cinemas in 1973 – as also signalled at various points in the film.

For example, when Alex and his droogs attack writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee) and his wife (Adrienne Corri), Alex at first cuts holes in the latter’s costume such that her breasts are exposed.

In 1964, performance artist Yoko Ono created Cut Piece, in which visitors to her exhibition were invited to interact with her as she sat on stage dressed in a suit and with a pair of scissors before her. Some visitors eventually removed her clothes in a fashion similar to Alex here.

The moment in A Clockwork Orange is not just a reference to Cut Piece, which functions as an attempt, perhaps, to critique men’s treatment of women in the patriarchal system of discipline and control.

Rather, it is a comment on how work that is designed to be critical of the values of white, patriarchal society becomes co-opted perversely by the very society that it critiques: Alex re-enacts Cut Piece precisely to rape Mrs Alexander, just as Ono tried to get visitors to reflect upon their own propensity for (sexual and gendered) violence.

This process of critique going wrong is even made clear within the film when in the house of a fitness instructor referred to as the Catlady (Miriam Karlin), we see on her wall a painting of a woman with her own breast revealed by a hole in her dress: the painting echoes Alex’s crime but suggests that art becomes violence when in the hands of someone like him.

Indeed, Alex murders the Catlady with a white ceramic penis sculpture – literally turning art into tools for white, male violence.

And perhaps most tellingly, Burgess wrote his novel using ‘Nadsat,’ the language that Alex uses and which basically involves a liberal sprinkling of Russian words (like the afore-mentioned ‘glazzies’) into the English that people otherwise speak here.

In other words, Burgess was perhaps aware about how the language of revolution and the creation of a new world that would live outside of the strictures of capital (the USSR) inevitably becomes co-opted itself into yet more, and more strict, systems of control.

Not only do we see this logic of co-option going on within the film, but perhaps it has also taken place through and around the film.

Not only do we live in a world where Nadsat sounds uncannily like the faux Dickensian patter of someone like celebrity shagger Russell Brand, but we also live in a world of the afore-mentioned torture porn and cruel violence appearing regularly on our screens, which is not to mention the circulation of atrocity videos online (even if taken down soon after being put up).

Notably, in the lobby of Alex’s run-down apartment block, the phrase ‘suck it and see’ has also been graffitied on to a faux classical mural, on to which numerous cocks have also been drawn. Of course, and to evoke the title of another film currently in theatres, ‘suck ’em and see’ was soon co-opted into the language of advertising for Fishermen’s Friends (as John Ó Maoilearca reminded us during the BFI event), as well as being the title of an album by the Arctic Monkeys. Capital takes all oppositional protests and turns then into new markets.

At the BFI event, Lucy Bolton contended that A Clockwork Orange is still shocking, in particular in terms of the treatment that women receive in the film. I agree with her, and think that Kubrick also struggles with replicating violence towards women rather than offering a comment on or critique of it in this film.

But if I also suggested during our discussion of the film that shocking images have become normal within the context of our contemporary sleepless society, it is not that they do not shock us anymore – but that shock itself becomes normal, as we experience shock after shock after shock, such that shock becomes the norm and we accept right-wing politics because we have no energy left to fight against it.

Is cinema not also part, therefore, of the ‘shock doctrine‘? (This reminds me of a very old blog post I once wrote.) In this way, cinema plays its role in establishing the logic of violence in contemporary society.

We are never entirely certain as to why the Ludovico technique fails and Alex retrieves his excitement in relation to sex and violence.

In part this may be a result of the shock experienced after a failed suicide attempt (he jumps from the window of Frank Alexander’s house after a second chance encounter with him).

But it may also be because of Ludwig Van Beethoven. For, during his Ludovico sessions, Alex complains bitterly that Beethoven is used as the score for the films that he sees. (‘He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.’)

Brodsky speculates that this might help with the treatment, but it also reveals that a certain amount of contingency is at work here; Alex is not controlled by the Ludovico technique, which wears off – and perhaps it does so because of Beethoven, whose music ultimately prevents it from working rather than helping it, thanks to its previous pleasurable association with ultraviolence.

Sound is thus key to A Clockwork Orange, which features some amazing use of Foleyed footsteps and the violent sound in Alexander’s house of a glass bottle clanking on a glass table.

But one sound that features regularly in the film and which I should like to highlight is the sound of belching. It is with an analysis of belching that I should like to draw this blog post to a close.

Eugenie Brinkema has written about eructions in philosophy and cinema, charting in particular how the hiccups and belches of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium perhaps chart how the body always rebels against attempts to control it, and that such gurgles and belches are meaningless in the face of philosophy’s attempts to chart and/or to create meaning.

More than this, the belch also functions as a challenge to the perceived hierarchy that knowledge is primarily a visual phenemenon (Brinkema establishes this hierarchy through an analysis of the work of Sigmund Freud). There are other, ‘lower’ ways of engaging with the world – and cinema uses them, even though we tend to think of it as a visual medium.

Not only does A Clockwork Orange sound, then, but perhaps it also tastes and smells, and what it tastes and smells might be a bit disgusting (dis-gust = ‘bad taste’) – and deliberately so, as made clear by the emphasis on belching, eating, open mouths and porous bodies that seep, and Alex who revels in ooze.

Indeed, when Alex is beaten while in custody, he positively smiles when spat upon by Detective Constable Tom (Steven Berkoff), while it is also here that he burps in the latter’s face.

In addition to this belch, the inmates also burp and fart during the afore-mentioned service in the prison.

Finally, Alex also belches and retches when exposed to the desire to commit acts of violence, including sex, after the Ludovico treatment.

Where belching was oppositional to power (belching at Tom, belching at the prison chaplain, played by Godfrey Quigley), now it has become an expression of subjugation to power. This in turn suggests again that perhaps the belch always was part of the society of consumerism and consumption. That it, like violence, is the logical expression of the contemporary world, and not really oppositional at all.

Nonetheless, Kubrick does, as mentioned, seem once again to be determined to show us this world in all of its disgustingness – even as his film is highly stylised and comic-like.

‘Shut your filthy hole, you scum!’ screams the Chief Guard (Michael Bates) while Alex is in Wandsworth.

And yet, this is precisely what Alex does not do, with his mouth remaining agape at the film’s end as he is fed hospital food by a government minister (Anthony Sharp).

Note that Alex gets fed a lot during the film, while his anger is most carefully aroused – and conveyed – after returning home from prison, by the sound of toast munching by Joe, played by Clive Francis, who has moved into his room.

In that same scene, Alex’s father (Philip Stone) gawps at Alex with his mouth almost permanently open, while the Chief Guard’s own ‘filthy hole’ also often remains wide open, especially when staring at a woman (Virginia Wetherell) trying to tempt Alex into arousal during a demonstration of the success of the Ludovico technique.

That is, humans belch, drop their jaws, and generally are imperfect. We eat and consume, including consuming cinema (we ‘binge’ on movies, with edit also being the third person singular for eating in Latin)… perhaps to the point of being sated, or beyond such a point, to the extent that we feel nauseous and vomit. Perhaps that is the point of satire: over-consumption to the point of gaseous and/or liquid eruction.

In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch is defined as a character who celebrates ‘contagious breath,’ while also being interested in food and wine (‘With drinking healths to my niece: I’ll drink to / her as long as there is a passage in my throat’).

A bawd, then, Belch is the opposite of the relatively effete Orsino, who famously pines that ‘if music be the food of love, play on.’

Rather than being the food of romantic love, though, music in A Clockwork Orange is for Alex – and for us viewers – the food of violence. Furthermore, food provokes belching, and so belching is almost certainly the music of food, and perhaps even the true music of love (a love that is, like an open mouth, agape?).

If belching be the music of ultraviolence and the ‘old in out,’ then Alex will play on. And the ‘in out’ extends beyond sex and sexual violence, and into the language of the institutions that the film portrays: ‘What’s it going to be then? Is it going to be in and out of institutions like this?’ asks the prison chaplain (emphasis added).

Not only are institutions thus ways to discipline the body to be violent, and to desire violence especially towards women, but so might cinema – as Kubrick, with Alcott, tries potentially to establish by having his camera so regularly itself zoom and/or track in and out (the three opening scenes all start with an outward zoom, with the camera thus performing the ‘in and out,’ as if the film, too, were in some senses violating us).

‘Violence is a very horrible thing. That’s what you’re learning now. Your body is learning it,’ declares Brodsky’s colleague, Dr Branom (Madge Ryan).

Perhaps Kubrick wants us to feel in our bodies a sense of disgust, a bad taste, as we are reminded that the control of our bodies is perhaps a denial of our bodies, and that we must celebrate our body’s unruliness, we must feel our bodies rebel against us and feel unpleasant, rather than be programmed via taking pleasure in cinematic violence into the ways of violent society.

If A Clockwork Orange tries to show the mechanisms at work in the establishment of a white, patriarchal and violent society, then perhaps the film’s black humour, twinned quite deliberately with disgusting violence, can be or become a belch, making it a belch of a film that through its own imperfections reminds us of our own imperfections, suggesting directly that we are Alex’s brothers and that we are the murderers as we are interpellated into its male-dominated society.

Conceivably this message is lost, not least as audiences often recall only the first half of the film with its ultraviolence – as one audience member also pointed out at the BFI. Or perhaps we simply now live in an era of shamelessness as opposed to being ashamed at sensing our own propensity for violence.

But I think that there is evidence that Kubrick is trying (and perhaps inevitably failing) to do something more critical than replicating a society of ultraviolence – perhaps even implicating Burgess himself in this failure as the director changes Alex’s name from Alexander DeLarge (which he announces upon arrival in prison) to Alexander Burgess (as the press call him when he becomes a political pawn as a result of the suffering he has undergone during the Ludovico treatment).

If not a glorious, maybe A Clockwork Orange is nonetheless an ignominious failure. But in failing, it reminds us all too much that humans burp, and that the orang perhaps cannot be clockwork.

Maybe the film’s shocks are dated and outmoded since they have become doctrine.

But Kubrick tries to get us to think about this world – to get us not just to gawp unthinkingly at violence ourselves, but to consume it to the point of belching, choking, perhaps even vomiting.

As a testament to this positive spin on the film, I wagered at the BFI event that c100 people attended the Philosophical Screens discussion in the BFI’s Green Room, which sits directly under Waterloo Bridge. Such strong attendance would suggest that plenty of cinema goers want not just unthinkingly to consume cinema, but also to turn it into a philosophical experience – and one that includes not just abstracted thought, but thinking through the body.

And where the Green Room normally hums with the vibrations of traffic passing overhead, on 16 April 2019 it was virtually silent as traffic was suspended thanks to the Extinction Rebellion protests and protestors not 10 feet above us.

In a world of shocks and violence, peaceful and thoughtful protest, much like thoughtfulness itself (a love of knowledge and a knowledge of love), might yet prove to be transformative forces.

Philosophical Screens: Professione: Reporter/The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/Spain/France, 1975)

This is a written version of sorts of the analysis that I gave on 17 January 2019 after a screening of The Passenger, a film featuring as part of the British Film Institute‘s Michelangelo Antonioni season, and which analysis was part of their ongoing Philosophical Screens series.

The discussion involved contributions from John Ó Maoilearca from Kingston University, and Lucy Bolton from Queen Mary, University of London, as well as from many audience members.

I shall try to stick only to what I said, even if this means foregoing some of the wonderful comments and ideas expressed by those other participants, including a brief if fruitful discussion of the relationship between the philosopher John Locke and the film’s lead character, David Locke (Jack Nicholson).

For, if the former represents something like a dualistic world view, then the latter comes to represent something of a progression away from that, not least as Locke leaves behind his identity as Locke and assumes the identity of David Robertson.

For, The Passenger tells the story of a journalist, Locke, who encounters Robertson (Chuck Mulvehill) at a tiny hotel in a small town in an anonymous African country, where they get drunk – in spite of the doctor’s advice for the latter not to.

After a relatively fruitless day of looking for rebels whom he can include in his documentary, and after getting his Land Rover stuck in the desert, Locke returns home to find Robertson dead – apparently from a heart attack.

Seizing his opportunity (not least because he looks a bit like Robertson and the locals will not be able to tell them apart), Locke assumes Robertson’s identity and says that it is Locke who has died.

Former colleague Knight (Ian Hendry) and estranged wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre) mourn Locke back in London, where the latter goes to pick up some stuff from his home and to check out Robertson’s world.

Indeed, before going to his Notting Hill home, Locke visits the Brunswick Centre, where he passes a girl (Maria Schneider) whom he will again encounter in Barcelona.

But Locke will not get to Barcelona before using Robertson’s ticket to head to Munich, where he discovers that Robertson was/is an arms dealer, and who was/is involved in supplying arms to the rebels in the nameless African country where the opening sequences of The Passenger took place (and which generally are thought to be based on Chad, about which more later).

As implied above, this is the first of several scheduled encounters between Robertson and the rebels, who are led by a man called Achebe (Ambroise Bia). However, after Achebe is abducted by presidential agents in Barcelona, that meeting does not take place.

Nor do the subsequent meetings that Robertson was supposed to have – at least according to the schedule in Robertson’s diary – in a (fictional) place called San Ferdinando and then at the Hotel de la Gloria in Osuna.

For, and here are some SPOILERS, after discovering that Robertson was with Locke the night before the latter supposedly died, Knight and Rachel both decide to try to track Robertson down.

As a result, when Knight nearly discovers in Barcelona that Robertson is in fact Locke, Locke has to go on the run – and where better to go than to the meetings that Robertson had scheduled, not least because they have led to him receiving a substantial sum of money from the African rebels?

What is more, Locke does this with the girl from the Brunswick Centre, who by seeming coincidence also happens to be in Barcelona when he is – supposedly looking at architecture as part of her studies.

Indeed, it is at what appears to be Antoni Gaudí’s Palau Guëll that Locke encounters the girl for the first time in Barcelona, before then catching up with her again at La Pedrera after spotting Knight on the Ramblas near his hotel.

Locke has chased the girl down to ask her to get his stuff from the hotel. This she does, and after the girl has evaded Knight, the pair travel on south towards Osuna via San Ferdinando.

Hearing that Robertson is being evasive, a curious Rachel also goes to Spain – but not after visiting the embassy of the African country in which Locke and Robertson were both working.

Knowing that Robertson is a gun runner for the rebels, the ambassador has his men follow Rachel, which ultimately results in the government forces finding Locke at the Hotel de la Gloria, where they assassinate him before Rachel can arrive with the local police.

Faced with Locke’s body, Rachel says that she does not know this man, while the girl identifies him as Robertson – and the film closes.

But beyond this synopsis of the film, what is also crucial is the film’s style, which I hope to explore in more detail in what follows – not least by picking up on numerous details that Antonioni features in his mise-en-scène.

My basic suggestion is that – however problematically – Locke has a primordial encounter in Africa, and this means that he can no longer remain who he was, in particular a dispassionate image-maker and reporter who is not directly with, but who rather observes the world. As Knight says of him in a televised discussion of Locke’s work: he had ‘a kind of detachment.’

The reason why this encounter is problematic is because it runs the risk of mythologising Africa, a mythologisation that might be as much my invention as I read it as being Antonioni’s.

That said, I hope that the evidence I present will suggest that this is at least as much Antonioni’s as it is my invention, while at the same time not necessarily being wholly unjust from a political perspective.

Twice in the film, Locke is asked whether he finds the landscape beautiful – once towards the start of the movie when Robertson asks him about the desert landscape by the small-town hotel, and once towards the end of the movie when Locke’s hire car has broken down and he looks at the desert landscape with the girl.

Notably, Locke’s answer changes in the interim between these two questions. For, the first time that he is asked, Locke shows little interest, suggesting that he prefers men to landscapes, to which Robertson replies: ‘There are men who live in the desert.’

The second time, meanwhile, the girl asks Locke whether he finds the landscape beautiful, to which Locke responds: ‘Yes, it’s very beautiful.’

In other words, Locke’s attitude towards the landscape has changed. What has happened?

Well, for one thing, anyone who has lived in, or even visited, a desert knows that sand gets everywhere (indeed, as I suggested at the BFI, Locke’s stuff is remarkably clean when it is returned to Rachel by the ambassador).

That is, the sand of the desert demonstrates that humans are incapable of controlling the space in which they live. For, try as they might to keep things like sand and dirt out, it always creeps in.

Now, architecture plays a prominent part in The Passenger, as the prominence of spaces like the Brunswick Centre and the Gaudí buildings makes clear.

Architecture is thus in some senses an attempt by humans to control space – to create a space that is free from the ravages of the desert, and of nature more generally.

Certainly, the London architecture of the Brunswick Centre would suggest this… while in Africa and in Spain, The Passenger is full of what I would call ‘porous’ architecture.

I call it porous architecture because repeatedly we see open windows and doors, and/or we see through open windows and doors, which themselves suggest not a shutting off of the outside, but a continuity between inside and outside (or, thinking of the reference to the philosopher Locke above, not a duality but a singularity of space).

Furthermore, in Africa in particular we see people wander into and out of frame from strange angles – appearing where we thought there might previously be nothing, as if the frame of the film is itself porous, and open to unexpected intrusions. Such unexpected intrusions might be called chaos.

And chaos can interrupt anywhere: for example, a pink rose extends largely into frame as Locke stands outside his own London home – as if nature cannot help but extend into the supposedly controlled world of men.

Furthermore, when Locke discover Robertson’s body, the fans in the room causes his hair to move, just as the towels that hang from pegs on the wall also twitch under the power of the breeze.

This is a universe of constant movement – one that is beyond our control as even humans move about after death.

And yet, men try to control the world – as can be seen by the inclusion in one shot of a speed limit sign in the desert. What is the point of a speed limit sign in a place where there are no roads? The asphalt may not have been laid down yet, but in order to stop the desert constantly from shifting shape and eluding control, the speed limit sign suggests that it will be coming.

It seems that Locke has, or at one point certainly had, a propensity for chaos, or for breaking down barriers and losing control, as is suggested during a flashback when we see him burning tree branches in his Notting Hill garden, an action that prompts Rachel to call him crazy – a moment to which I shall also return.

But somewhere along the line, Locke also lost this propensity for chaos – with Rachel subsequently suggesting to Knight that ‘David really wasn’t so different’ to other people, and that ‘he accepted too much’ – in particular referring to an interview with the African president, in which Locke did not challenge him about his policies, especially his treatment of the rebels.

Indeed, while an adventurer of sorts Locke seems to have become a human who has bought into the world of control – and yet who may still come back to accepting and understanding the world of chaos.

(This transition from control to chaos is the Jack Nicholson persona par excellence, from Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper, USA, 1969, to Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson, USA, 1970, to Chinatown, Roman Polanski, USA, 1974, to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Milos Forman, USA, 1975, to The Shining, Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1980, to Batman, Tim Burton, USA/UK, 1989, to A Few Good Men, Rob Reiner, USA, 1992, to As Good as It Gets, James L Brooks, USA, 1997, to About Schmidt, Alexander Payne, USA, 2002.)

As the Land Rover gets stuck in the desert, Locke starts to whack it with a shovel, breaking down in tears as he can no longer cross space in the way that he wants to.

In other words, he has lost control – and this infuriates him. Locke cannot cope with entropy; he cannot, if you will, cope with the idea of his own death. To quote another famous Achebe, he hates it when and cannot stand the fact that things fall apart.

And yet, Locke changes, or at the very least reconnects with his propensity for chaos, and after finding Robertson he decides to embrace chaos and to become someone else.

For, even to have a name (David Locke) is in some senses to seek to control one’s identity, and/or to be controlled. By becoming someone else, Locke enters into a world of becoming rather than a world of being, a world that goes with the flow, allows things to fall apart, is okay with entropy, allows in a little death (perhaps this is even an orgasmic existence, as petite mort, or little death, comes to mean orgasm in French).

But it is not just finding Robertson’s body that produces this change.

There are two sequences interpolated into The Passenger that bear discussion. The first is an interview that Locke shot with a man referred to typically as the Witch Doctor (played by an uncredited James Campbell).

Since the Witch Doctor has been educated in France and Yugoslavia, Locke is surprised that he has not abandoned his superstitious beliefs and instead adopted a more ‘western’ or ‘rational’ perspective on the world: ‘Has that changed your attitude toward certain tribal customs? Don’t they strike you as false now and wrong, perhaps, for the tribe?’

The response: ‘Mr. Locke, there are perfectly satisfactory answers to all your questions. But I don’t think you understand how little you can learn from them. Your questions are much more revealing about yourself than my answer would be about me.’

That is, Locke here demonstrates that he projects on to the world a western perspective that is closed-minded, much as westerns try to close the outside world off from their architecture, and much as many filmmakers try to close their frame off from any unexpected intrusions.

Notably, though, the Witch Doctor soon takes the camera from Locke and starts to film him.

In other words, there is a transition from Locke as ‘detached’ (as per Knight’s reckoning) to Locke as implicated – not someone beyond the frame, but someone as part of the frame.

What is more, at a later point in time we see footage, supposedly real, of a man being shot by a firing squad.

Knight, who is looking at this footage, responds in a blasé fashion – as if he had seen such images a hundred times before, while Rachel is appalled.

This suggests – perhaps again problematically – that a ‘female’ perspective is more implicated than a ‘male’ perspective, even if the latter is the one that is associated with image production and power, as per Knight’s job as a television producer.

But more than this, one can imagine that Locke, who recorded this footage, was himself so shocked by it that it ended his ability to be detached.

For, in presenting to us footage that supposedly is real – rather than being staged for the film – Antonioni provides us with an encounter with something real, much as Locke, too, encountered real death.

There are a couple of issues to pick apart here. For, we are still seeing a recording of death and not death itself when we watch The Passenger, and within the fiction of The Passenger, we are led to assume that Locke still recorded this moment in addition simply to observing it.

To say that the moment involves an encounter with what psychoanalysts might refer to as the Real, then, is problematic; the real life taken here is still reduced to an image.

And yet the documentary nature of this footage does in some senses mean that the fiction of The Passenger comes face-to-face with reality.

But is this not still then to render aesthetic something that is supposed to elude the aesthetic and to be instead real – a real encounter that leads Locke to give up on a life of detachment and to embrace chaos, such that ultimately he embraces death?

So the question now becomes: can film picture the real, or will it always only render or reduce the real to an image?

Perhaps film cannot, but the documentary image at least points to the real – to a beyond the frame that is in accord with Antonioni’s desire for his frame also to be ‘open’ to outside encounters via his filmmaking style as discussed above and as I shall explore in more detail below.

In this way, we might charge Antonioni with being unethical by interpolating into The Passenger a seeming snuff movie the provenance of which remains unknown, its participants anonymous?

For, by not telling us where this sequence comes from, Antonioni runs the risk of simply saying something problematic like ‘violence like this happens in Africa’ – a generalised Africa that is essentially violent and not riddled with violence as a result of specific histories and concrete circumstances?

And yet one might also contend that Antonioni, knowing that this footage exists, cannot not show it, since that might be more ‘unethical’ yet (to know that such things happen and not to acknowledge as much).

More than this, to ‘reduce’ issues such as African contemporaneity (corruption, postcolonialism, violence) to specific concrete histories would potentially be to make them manageable. Indeed, they might as a result lose their power as the Real – because like Locke himself, it would give an anthropocentric identity to a reality that has no name and is entirely chaotic.

And even if Antonioni cannot name or explain the footage, since it is, like reality itself, inexplicable (to explain it would be to conquer it, to control the uncontrollable), there are nonetheless hints as to the political reality to which Antonioni alludes.

For, we see that Robertson is reading, for example, a book about or by Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, while the film was shot in a Chad undergoing political turmoil in the mid-1970s as well.

What is more, the film takes us beyond Africa when we read in Robertson’s diary that he has a meeting with ‘Daisy’ (presumed by Locke to be a codename for Achebe or other rebels/guerrillas) at the Hotel de la Gloria in Osuna on 11 September 1973.

This is of course the date on which General Augusto Pinochet bombed La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, in the process killing president Salvador Allende.

In other words, The Passenger potentially links to not just an African but to a global repression of independence movements that are not in thrall to the colonial powers from which they were trying to liberate themselves.

Indeed, Locke/Robertson dies on this day, with The Passenger thus potentially suggesting on the one level a pessimism with regard to liberation movements, while at the same time Locke learns to embrace chaos and to let himself die.

Is there any other way out of this labyrinth? Or are humans condemned to fail in their bid to work with rather than against chaos, in that this always leads to death – perhaps especially at the hands of those who seek only to control?

Perhaps this is Locke’s tragedy. He can escape Locke; but he is still restrained by/as Robertson. Or, as Locke himself puts it, ‘it stays so difficult to get away from your own habits.’ And: ‘I’ve run out of everything. My wife. The house. An adopted child. A successful job. Everything except a few bad habits I couldn’t get rid of.’

Those habits might include the need for an identity, even if not ‘his own.’ This is his tragedy, perhaps the tragedy of western man… but perhaps western man must understand that a future is coming in which he does not play the starring role – even if Antonioni cannot make that film since that is not who he is. He, also, is the dying western man and not the (post)human of the future.

Perhaps the best that such a man can hope for is an angel who turns up in the form of Maria Schneider (who may well be Daisy?), who will guide him towards death.

Or perhaps the best that humanity can hope for is that they will be replaced by a new intelligence, one that may indeed be a human who is a bit more like cinema.

This is a curious assertion, so let me work it through. By this, I do not mean cinema as it most commonly manifests itself, with its strict demarcations between characters and actions, but a cinema that is itself far more like, or in tune with, or even a manifestation of the chaotic flow of the universe.

Instead, this is a cinema that refuses to recognise boundaries and which does not necessarily prioritise human action over anything else, instead locating the human as simply another part of space and time.

In Barcelona, we see Locke walk past a cinema called Cine Eden as he flees from Knight. Cinema might indeed present to us a new Eden. And we can see how this is so in Antonioni’s film in various ways.

Gaudí’s curving, chaotic and African-inspired architecture seems to announce Locke’s transition, a shift away from the rigid and into the flow, much as the journey south that is the film’s road trip also signals a motion towards a different reality beyond the hard lines of the global north.

The camera drifts away from Locke and focuses on a fan. It wanders up some electric wires and looks at some insects. Some cars drive past Locke and the girl, and the camera pans right, then left, and then right again – dancing with the passing cars rather than focusing on the film’s protagonists.

Famously, the camera pans around Locke’s hotel room and suddenly we see Robertson alive again, talking to Locke at an earlier point in time, even though there has not been a cut.

So not only do we see insects, cars and other machines take on a life of their own, as even the hair on a dead body can dance in Antonioni’s film, but time itself dances around, with the past co-existing alongside the present, and perhaps with an imagined future if in fact Locke is the one who died, but it takes him until 11 September 1973 and with the help of angel to realise as much.

Maria Schneider may (problematically) herself come also to signify such a cinema. She can turn up in Barcelona having been in London – as if by magic. She can anticipate Locke’s arrival at the Hotel de la Gloria by signing in ahead of him as Mrs Robertson. She can be a Daisy, a flow-er that many disregard as a weed, a force for chaotic revolution, as Věra Chytilová knew.

Indeed, as is made clear in Torremolinos 73 (Pablo Berger, Spain/Denmark, 2003), Spaniards would flee the repressive, controlling regime of Francisco Franco and head to France in order to see Schneider in Ultimo tango a Parigi/Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, France/Spain, 1972), surely a problematic film, but one that nonetheless signalled a desire to flow with cinematic desire rather than repress it.

As mentioned, Rachel calls Locke crazy for starting a fire in his Notting Hill garden. What is also worth pointing out here is that this is not Locke’s memory, as per the earlier sequence shots that see involving Robertson, but Rachel’s memory.

That is, the film has transitioned without signalling it from Locke’s memory to Rachel’s, out of his brain/mind and into hers as if cinema knew no identity, no boundaries, but is only a force for chaotic flow and becoming.

And then of course we have the film’s famous final shot, a seven-minute sequence in which we see Locke lying on his bed before we see various cars arrive through the open window beyond.

The camera tracks slowly, slowly forward before then passing through the grille that otherwise blocks the window, circling around the dusty yard outside.

Locke is killed – notably offscreen – during this sequence, before the camera slowly, slowly returns to show us, now through the grille, Rachel, the girl, the hotel owner and some police officers standing over Locke’s body.

In other words, the camera – and by extension cinema – can pass through borders. It is a porous medium that embraces chaos and which flows; it is a flow-er, which takes us out of this world and into Eden, or a world without, beyond, and after humanity.

(At a push, I might provocatively add that the recent documentary, Nae pasarán, Felipe Bustos Sierra, UK, 2018, which tells the story of Scottish Rolls Royce workers who refused to do repairs on the engines of Pinochet’s Hawker Harrier jets in 1970s, also suggests that humans are at their best when they, too, defy borders and control. That is, cinema and socialism alike point to the flowers that humans can become, and as which we might bloom.)

It is perhaps only a series of chaotic coincidences that sets in motion the plot of The Passenger: Robertson dies in Locke’s hotel, the girl is in London and Barcelona, Rachel leads the government agents to Locke.

‘You work with words, images, fragile things,’ says Robertson to Locke back in the hotel. Images are fragile things, and they are not the concrete things that Robertson claims ‘people understand’ (and what he sells).

The world of hardness and borders is a world of war. Perhaps cinema is a world of love, even if it is a world of death,  a world of loving death, which loving is to deprive death of its fear-inducing power.

Westerners may condescendingly characterise Africa as being a continent stuck in the past. But Antonioni’s film perhaps also shows us that, in knowing that all things fall apart, it inevitably is also an image of our future. Cinema may show us images of the past (by definition, since what we see when we watch a film must be something that has already happened). But in what lies beyond the human, and what lies beyond the frame, perhaps this is where we find once again a future without humans, our future, cinema itself. Death itself. Flowering.

La villa/The House by the Sea (Robert Guédiguian, France, 2017)

I have enjoyed the films of Robert Guédiguian for 20+ years now, with Marius et Jeanette (France, 1997) being at the time of its release a singularly pedestrian pleasure – not pedestrian in the sense of inferior, but in the sense of how Guédiguian seems to make gentle films that progress pleasantly at their own pace, as the French title to The Last Mitterand/Le promeneur du Champ de Mars (France, 2005) would suggest (since it literally means ‘The Walker of the Champ de Mars,’ the latter being a park near the Eiffel Tower in Paris).

It is not that I have seen all of Guédiguian’s films, a good number of which do not get released in the UK, and the back catalogue of which stretches much further than Marius et Jeanette, as La villa itself testifies – since in a wonderful ‘flashback’ moment, the film features footage of three of its leads (Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Gérard Meylan) in his earlier Ki Lo Sa? (France, 1986).

As such, I am not a Guédiguian ‘expert’ (I have seen six or seven of his 21 films, with my brain not being certain as to whether I have seen Au fil d’Ariane/Ariane’s Thread, France, 2014).

But it does seem clear that Guédiguian almost always makes films about socialists living in and around his native Marseilles, and almost always featuring the same ensemble of actors, with La villa being no different, as the footage from Ki Lo Sa? also testifies, in that 31 years later, here are Ascaride, Darroussin and Meylan in another film set in exactly the same location, namely the Calanque de Méjean, a small inlet that lies across the bay from Marseilles.

La villa is not a sequel to that film (which at this point in time I have not seen, but which naturally I am curious to), with the three actors playing different characters. Nonetheless, La villa is about the passage of time between those eras, and in particular how the world has changed – and left more or less destitute small communities like Méjean, with its tiny restaurant, the Mange-Tout, being not just a business run by Armand (Meylan) in the film, but also a genuine restaurant to be found in that location.

The film tells the story of three siblings: Armand, Joseph (Darroussin) and Angèle (Ascaride) who return to Méjean following news that their father, Maurice Barberini (Fred Ulysse), has had a stroke. Leftist intellectual Joseph comes with his much-younger fiancée, Bérangère (Anaïs Demoustier), while Angèle is a successful stage and television actress who remains the crush of much-younger local fisherman Benjamin (Robinson Stévenin), who when a youngster saw her on stage in a version of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan and never forgot her.

Armand, meanwhile, has remained all of his life in Méjean, running the Mange-Tout with his father and living opposite Maurice’s old friends, Martin (Jacques Boudet) and his wife Suzanne (Geneviève Mnich), whose son Yvan (Yann Trégouët) is a successful doctor about to move to London to open a new lab.

***Semi-spoilers***

What ensues are in some senses the usual confrontations with the past that are to be expected from the family return film. Angèle is mad at her father for allowing her daughter Blanche (Esther Seignon) to drown while in his charge, while Joseph realises that he is losing Bérangère to Yvan – much as Angèle must struggle with being the fantasy of Benjamin.

Armand must work with the idea that Méjean has increasingly empty houses, inhabited only on occasion by rich holidaymakers and not by permanent residents who live and make a community there. Indeed, Martin and Suzanne are being priced out of Méjean by landlords that will make far more money from schemes like AirBnB (not named in the film) than they will from permanent and long-standing tenants.

The film repeatedly shows the viaduct over the calanque, and which carries the Transport express régional (TER) trains that bypass Méjean, taking commuters and tourists instead to other coastal resorts in and around Marseilles.

In other words, while very beautiful, Méjean has kind of been left behind by progress – at least for the time being. For, we see tourist prospectors visiting the small harbour in a motorboat as the film progresses, while Bérangère, who seems to work in PR, also can see great things happening in the village.

Such get-rich schemes, however, run counter to the ethos of Armand, Joseph and also their father, who set up the Mange-Tout in order to offer cheap but good food to honest, working French people – and not exclusive restaurants and resorts for only the rich.

Indeed, Martin discusses at length how the Barberini family home, the villa from which the film takes its title, was built collectively by the whole village, including its impressive balcony that overlooks the bay and on to which Armand and Joseph daily move their father so that he can observe its happenings in his quasi-catatonic, post-stroke state.

In this way, the film offers up the usual pedestrian Guédiguian fare, as we see the characters walk around the bay and up in the surrounding hills, leading an ‘honest’ and socialist life in the face of the trains, cars, motorbikes and other modes of transport that we see people use to get in and out of the village, or simply to pass it by.

However, where the film gets particularly interesting for me is a sequence in which Angèle dips her foot into a rockpool, holding it there deliberately so as eventually to lure out…

… an octopus, which clings to Angèle’s leg and which later the family will eat at a dinner between the three siblings, Bérangère and Benjamin.

Now, I have written recently in my blog concerning Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico/USA, 2018) about how David H Fleming and I are writing a book about cephalopods and cinema (cephalopods being octopuses, squids, cuttlefish and nautiluses).

We have provisionally called our book Kinoteuthis Infernalis: The Emergence of Chthulumedia. ‘Kinoteuthis infernalis’ means ‘squid cinema from hell,’ not least because we are looking at films, often horror and science fiction movies, that feature cephalopods and/or other tentacular aliens/monsters that come to destroy (human life on) Earth – or at least this is what the protagonists of the films suspect.

‘Chthulumedia,’ meanwhile, means media in/as the chthulucene, an era that Donna J Haraway theorises as replacing the anthropocene. If the anthropocene is the era in which humans have basically altered their planet such that they have brought about mass extinction and the creation of conditions that might well see humanity’s own demise, then the chthulucene is a ‘posthuman’ era in which humans may not necessarily go extinct, but in which certainly we shrink in population, learn to live more harmoniously with our planet, or perhaps go extinct and/or evolve into (or with) new/other life forms.

Cephalopods and the chthulucene are connected because HP Lovecraft famously called his world-ending monster Cthulhu, with that creature being tentacular and octopus-like. And so while Haraway does not much like Lovecraft, the connection between cephalopods and the similarly-named chthulucene remains.

More than this, though, is the fact that cephalopods are often considered to be ‘intelligent aliens,’ a lifeform so different from humans and yet with which we share our planet, that it challenges our anthropocentric belief that we are the be-all-and-end-all of intelligent life (although if we do consider ourselves the only really existing lifeforms [we are all that be], then we probably will bring about the destruction of the planet [we will end all]).

Furthermore, the cephalopod is a key metaphor for the tentacular reach of capitalism in the era of digital technology and globalisation. Much like the octopus, which does not so much have separate organs as have its whole body perform all possible functions at once (apart from ingest and egest), everything in the contemporary era is connected.

In other words, our globalised planet sees techno capital itself emerge as a kind of intelligent alien (the birth, if you will, of the singularity/artificial, digital intelligence) that may well replace humans, or at least play a part in our evolution, while perhaps also literally signalling the destruction, or at least a resetting of the planet, as the oceans quite literally rise (as Cthulhu rises from the ocean) to drown humans and to replace us with other lifeforms.

Perhaps the main issue raised by the chthulucene, then, is whether we as humans are willing to let ourselves go – be that by evolving into new lifeforms or by simply allowing ourselves to die – or whether we will take our whole planet with us as we seek not to die but to live forever.

In this way, cinema in the chthulucene is often about children and childbirth, as I have mentioned in several other blogs (including the one on Roma), since it is about whether we want to have offspring, which by definition are different from us, or whether we want ourselves to remain as we are forever.

With this brief description of the theories that David and I try to develop in mind, hopefully it is clear how La villa might similarly be reflecting on such themes as capitalist development, globalisation and childbirth – even if it is nothing like a big budget spectacle along the lines of Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, USA, 2016), about which David and I have written already, and which functions as a film also about tentacles, aliens and childbirth.

But where are the aliens in La villa, you might be thinking?

Well, crucially, La villa also has as one of its central premises the intrusion into the Barberini’s restaurant of some soldiers who are on the lookout for illegal immigrants whom they suspect as having arrived on the shores of France after discovering a wrecked boat in the vicinity of Méjean.

Joseph in particular is frosty towards the soldiers, and before long he and Armand discover three Arab children (played by Haylana Bechir, Ayoub Ouaed and Giani Roux) hiding up in the hills around the village.

They take in the three children, crucially clothing them in garments still in the Barberinis’ possession following the death of Blanche.

In other words, and as is fitting for a socialist like Guédiguian, the trio are invested in welcoming aliens, or what Haraway would call ‘making kin’ with others. Indeed, the Barberinis treat these aliens as they would any human, i.e. as they would treat themselves, which in turn leads us to understand how all-too-often humans treat each other not as kin, but as precisely aliens, monsters, or lifeforms about which we do not have to care or for whom we do not have to take care.

Guédiguian’s film is in some ways straightforward: Angèle becomes a kind of angel who will help these children, while the father figure (Maurice/God) can only look on silently and without intervening as his children learn to live according to his socialist principles.

In other ways, the film is complex, in that the lead soldier is played by Diouc Koma, an actor born in Mali and whose character Joseph berates for not appreciating the work that he did as an old socialist – presumably in helping to push the postcolonial message and to establish the equality of French citizens from its former colonies (an ongoing problem in French politics and daily life).

That said, the soldier does seem to express some shame at the treatment of refugees, especially children, once they have been found – telling Armand over a coffee that they are either sent home or put into orphanages, a fate that in either case is sub-optimal at best. That is, while he has a job to do, his politics may not align wholly with the results that his job achieves.

It is not simply a case of ‘oh, there’s an octopus in this film and therefore it must be about globalisation, the death of the local, the arrival of aliens, the future of humanity, childbirth, the relationship between the land and the sea, and learning perhaps to accept death’ – even though this is true of La villa, especially as Martin and Suzanne end up committing joint suicide for reasons that I shall discuss below.

Rather, the octopus arrives precisely at a time when Angèle and her brothers ruminate on their father’s legacy, with the soldiers first arriving at their house during the octopus meal, during which we also hear Benjamin sing Angèle’s praises for her performance in the Brecht play, and explain how theatre allowed him to understand that the world need not be only as it is, but that new worlds can be created.

In other words, the octopus appears at the moment when the characters express an openness towards a new world – that of making kin with aliens and the way in which theatre (and by extension cinema and art more generally) is itself a kind of alien that expands our horizons and perhaps even helps us to evolve… which stands in distinct contrast to those who would try to keep our world as it is by reaffirming borders and not letting aliens enter to change it.

Even though Benjamin has lived all of his life in Méjean, and even though he fishes and fixes nets for what must be a pretty meagre living (even if he is in harmony with the sea?), he nonetheless is open to change.

This is perhaps why he desires Angèle, who is much older than he is. For, at least as far as Guédiguian might push it, this desire for the older woman is ‘queer’ enough for La villa to suggest that making kin is also to love against the grain – to love what the law forbids, if the law also is about maintaining fixed and strict boundaries.

Joseph’s love for Bérangère would express something different, but as he learns that he must return to writing in order to create another world with ink, so must he let go of Bérangère and allow her to go with Yvan, who himself will meet her in London (i.e. on alien terrain).

Notably, Yvan rides a fast motorcycle that Bérangère takes for a spin early on in the film – during an initial dinner in which it is clearly signalled that the two younger adults have an attraction for each other. Bérangère, meanwhile, is often making work calls on Skype or equivalent on her laptop. That is, both Bérangère and Yvan are equated with new technology.

But Guédiguian does not dismiss these ‘millennial’ behaviours outright – much as the suicide of Martin and Suzanne is not necessarily a case of ‘learning to die,’ not least because part of what spurs them on is their impending homelessness and their refusal to let Yvan take care of them financially (although mainly this would seem to be because they want him to lead his own life, and do not want to live forever, even if in some senses they are also destroyed by a cruel and relentless capitalist system).*

Change is coming and as a new world emerges, an older one dies. Guédiguian’s use of footage from Ki Lo Sa? suggests his personal nostalgia for that older world, even as he hopes that many of its (romanticised) principles will remain in the new one (evolution is not complete abandonment, after all).

That new world may be heartless and cruel in its bid for money and the separation of the luxury-filled rich from the poor, who are excluded increasingly from those luxurious places (Méjean as increasingly a holiday resort and not a local community, whose beauty becomes privatised, implicitly by the cost of access if not explicitly by putting up a wall around it, as opposed to being a commons that is open to all).

However, that new world could also be generous and kind towards aliens, and open to those who come to our shores seeking help as a result of war and trouble in their own land.

By remembering the better lessons that the older generation can teach us, we may yet be able to cultivate the latter, even as new technologies that promise connection in some ways also hasten division.

As Maurice’s children and the refugee children shout their names under the viaduct and create echoes, La villa shows us the father sat watching the harbour, and turning his head towards the sound as the camera pans up to the sky.

To be childlike and to find wonder in echoes, subverting the viaduct by enjoying its sounds rather than it being simply a tool for loudly carrying the moneyed over Méjean, bypassing it for the sake of speed and convenience. Perhaps this is how to create a commons, even if under threat as capital comes to fill in the gaps that this calanque at present remains. And perhaps that lesson will echo for a long time to come, being a sound that we can all hear and from which we can all learn.**

* A plot hole that is never explored is the consequence of Martin and Suzanne’s suicide. Assuming an autopsy, it would be clear that they die from an overdose. It would then not be too much of a step to work out where they got their drugs from, that being Yvan, their doctor son. Even if inadvertently, one wonders, then, that Yvan might be struck off and/or have his career destroyed for assisting in the death of his parents (although I am not sure how this would work under French law).

** I am still troubled by the way in which the protagonists of the film eat the octopus. That is, they lure the alien in only to kill and to consume it, even as the film wants to be about welcoming aliens (the children are not similarly consumed, e.g. by selling them into slavery). The octopus totally fits the film and turns it into an example of what David and I call ‘chthulucinema.’ But at the same time, the film’s carnivorousness does mitigate somewhat some of the kin-making that I have tried to suggest above and which the film otherwise embraces – including at least land-based animals as Armand sets up a post that delivers grain and water for rabbits and birds to consume, and at which he finds the eldest refugee, as if refugees were indeed not human but animals – at least in the eyes of the law. Notably, Armand is also invested in protecting the environment from fire, giving to the film a sense of ecological care, too (even if Armand achieves this by creating pathways that divide the land).

 

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (Ben Wheatley, UK, 2018)

In 2018, I published an essay called ‘From Down Terrace to High-Rise: The “Unreal Estate” Cinema of Ben Wheatley’ in James Harvey’s edited collection, Nationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema.

What is more, I am due to give a talk about this essay at the British Film Institute on Monday 14 January (if you are reading this ahead of the event, then tickets are available here!).

However, given that Ben Wheatley’s new film is currently available on the BBC iPlayer (and until 28 January 2019), I wonder that I might talk about that film – not least because it chimes with much of what I have to say about Wheatley’s cinema.

And so this blog can in some senses function as a written version of that talk, in which I shall suggest (or will have suggested) that Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is not so much a step backwards for Wheatley (who ‘returns’ to the UK after Free Fire, UK, 2016, which although British-backed was set in Boston and featured a host of international stars, including Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, Brie Larsen and Cillian Murphy), but rather something of a summation of his work to date.

For, as I suggest in my essay, Wheatley’s films return relatively obsessively to the concept of real estate and the home – as things that in principle should be markers of a stable territory, and thus points of certitude, but which in Wheatley’s anarchic cinema are often revealed to be unstable and thus in some senses unreal.

More than this, Wheatley is basically sensitive to how claims to own land are claims to shape reality; that is, the ‘real’ of real estate is a term used to convince people that the ownership of land and property is legitimate – even if historically the ownership of all land is based on exploitation and theft.

For, no one actually owns any land at all – unless you can convince people that this otherwise free Earth that we can cross in any direction we please is in fact divided up into territories that you may or may not be able to enter, depending on whether you have the right kind of pass or credentials.

If you do believe that these bounded territories are real, then ‘real estate’ has done its ideological trick, since it has not only made you believe, but it also has made you modify your behaviour and actions based upon this belief. That is, estates are made real because you have swallowed and embodied the notion of ownership.

This is not necessarily for the bad. For, in believing in the ownership of space, you may then also make a home – and believe that this space is yours and yours alone (every Englishman’s home is his castle)… and be happy with that space, even as others grab vast terrains of land and claim it as their own, and only lease to you your land for 99 years.

However, given that Wheatley’s cinema repeatedly sees people violate private spaces and begin to see that estate is in fact unreal, this also means beginning to see that the world is carved up by powerful agents who need you to believe in their legitimacy – otherwise they will no longer have any claim to exploit that land, together with your brain and body as you allow them to do so because you accept that the estate is real and walk around it or do not enter it because it is theirs and not yours, even though the land belongs to no one, as mentioned.

Working through Down Terrace (UK, 2009), Kill List (UK, 2011), Sightseers (UK, 2012), A Field in England (UK, 2013) and High-Rise (UK/Belgium/Ireland, 2015), I suggest that Wheatley’s cinema is somehow meaningful in the era of Brexit and Grenfell Tower, given that Brexit has for many British people a core sense of reclaiming land for themselves from Europe, with the Grenfell disaster seeing many people homeless even though numerous apartments and houses lie empty in the very same area of London (North Kensington) – owned, but not occupied, and not occupy-able because owned.

In other words, Wheatley’s cinema has something to teach us at a time when we seemingly continue to believe and thus to accept as real claims to national territory and private property. As per the title of James Harvey’s edited collection, this then means that Wheatley does chart the ongoing notion of nationalism within the contemporary UK.

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is about property and homes – especially as they relate to family. The very first image that we see is of a house, out of which Colin (Neil Maskell) then appears with a cup of tea and a Vape (we see him exhale smoke in slow motion).

Colin has arranged a New Year’s Eve party for his family at Penn Castle on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, the choice of which location I shall explore more in detail below.

Travelling mainly down from Brighton or thereabouts, Colin is joined by his wife, Val (Sura Dohnke), and their daughter Fran (Nicole Nettleingham), as well as his parents, Sandy (Doon  Mackichan) and Gordon (Bill Paterson), and his sister Gini (Hayley Squires) and her partner Warren (Mark Monero).

Also present are Sandy’s friends, Maya (Sudha Bhuchar) and Nikhil (Vincent Ebrahim), together with their ne’er-do-well son, Sham (Asim Chaudhry), Jimmy (Peter Ferdinando) and Ed (Joe Cole), who seem to be cousins of some sort, and cross-dressing Uncle Bertie (Charles Dance).

Finally, the group is rounded off by Paula (Sarah Baxendale), who is the ex-wife of David (Sam Riley), Colin’s estranged brother and the black sheep of the family, who turns up at Gini’s request with his German girlfriend Hannah (Alexandra Maria Lara).

What is more, the castle is run by Lord Richard (Richard Glover) and one of Colin’s exes, Lainey (Sinead Matthews), who also has had a relationship with Sham, who basically crashes the party in a bid to get back together with her.

***Spoilers***

As hopefully is clear, then, the scene is set for a total clusterfuck of a party as Gordon tries unsuccessfully to tap Colin for some money to save him from losing his house, and as Val finds out about Colin’s past with Lainey.

What is more, Bertie is dying, Sham has lost his job, Gini and Warren bicker about the latter’s inability to do anything, and David has slept with at least three people at the party, including Paula (with whom he has a child), Hannah, and, a late revelation to the audience, Val.

Colin has, nonetheless, managed to steady and maintain his relationship with Val, with whom he has had a second child, Baby Jamie (Marvin Maskell). But this does not stop him from eventually having to walk away from his family.

Indeed, as David comes through at the last to help Gordon, it would seem that he (at the behest of Hannah, perhaps) has a stronger sense of family than Colin, whose final words he shouts to the sea: fuck them!

In other words, while David clearly does not necessarily respect boundaries when it comes to women, he nonetheless does after five years want to re-become and to remain part of his family, especially as his mother Sandy also seems to have had a tough year, perhaps struggling with illness.

That said, there does remain some interesting ambiguity around Colin’s relationship with Lainey, for example, through whom he hires the castle and who acts as caterer for the party… apparently he has done this to help her out, but perhaps there is more to that relationship than meets the eye… meaning that Colin may not only stray himself, but also that he, too, does not believe in the fixity of family.

Indeed, while our sympathies waver in terms of how we feel about all of the characters, ultimately the film opens up the possibility that, as per Down Terrace, a loving relationship can in fact supersede a sense of family. In other words, there are no rules and nothing is fixed or guaranteed – not the love of a family and certainly not the reality of home.

And so it is to the film’s take on property that I should like to turn. For, Penn Castle is clearly impressive and a much bigger home than those typically inhabited by all of the characters in the film, including, as we subsequently discover, Lord Richard.

First sight of the castle prompts comments from various characters, with Sandy managing somehow to trip up on the small step that leads up to its doorway, meaning that she subsequently spends a portion of the film in a wheelchair found in a shed.

Indeed, this ‘accident’ (which Colin amusingly finds tiresome and all-too-predictable) would suggest that Sandy does not feel at home in this space, instead somehow intimidated by it – in thrall to the way in which architecture is often designed in order to elicit precisely such a response. For, if one is made to feel uncomfortable (or even comfortable) in lavish spaces, then one is halfway towards believing that estates are real.

The castle similarly evokes an aggressive response from Jimmy, who later tries to intimidate Lord Richard by claiming that he has been to the castle before – for a rave, at which he bought a dud pill, supposedly from Richard.

What is more, this use of space to intimidate people is felt by Gini, who believes that Colin has given her and Warren the smallest bedroom precisely to put her in her place.

In other words, there is tension in the film between how the organisation of space is trying and in some ways succeeding in making us feel (that estates are real, that the social order is timeless and unchangeable), and how people want to feel (that they can be and do anything and go anywhere).

Indeed, a rave is precisely an event that reappropriates private property and uses it for a semi-public purpose (even though many raves are ticketed and guarded, which in some senses and paradoxically defeats what I would take to be one of their primary purposes: to disrespect property rules and the notion of private space).

Not even Richard, however, is lord of this manor. He is, as he confesses at one point to Lainey, a ‘piss poor’ (but genuine) Lord who lives in significantly smaller digs abutting the castle, and who has started to host events like this as a means to stay afloat.

In other words, Lords are no longer the rulers that they used to be – but this is not as a result of the abolition of systems of ownership and power. Rather, Richard has simply been superseded by the company/corporation that now runs the castle, selling to families like the Bursteads the carnivalesque illusion that they, too, can be lords – even if only for a day.

It seems only to be David who feels no intimidation, with Hannah describing him at one points as being like a puppy shitting on the carpet – since he knows no boundaries and observes no rules, except at the last the rule of filiality, as he comes through for his father.

David is also associated with a space that is the opposite of a private house, namely the public house that he goes to for a drink after his first confrontation with Colin. Indeed, as he later invites all of the pub-goers, including a local band, to come back to the party at the castle, we get a sense that David endorses a kind of spatial free-for-all – a rave, if you will, that perhaps also extends to his thinking about money. That is, perhaps David supports his father not so much out of a sense of filial duty, but also because money is meaningless rather than a necessary possession to him (although this latter point might be a bit of an overstatement based on the evidence that Wheatley presents to us).

Richard at one point makes the obvious joke that Burstead sounds a bit like bastard, calling the Bursteads a bunch of bastards as he shows Lainey his modest living quarters.

But beyond a joke, the pun is also telling in that a bastard is of course an illegitimate child who challenges the notion of family, suggesting a far more complex and real world, in which there are no real rules, even if we all act as if there were. The Bursteads may well be bastards, then, in the sense that they do feel in some senses outsiders and alone in the world, perhaps with only each other for support (and Colin perhaps with less than that come the film’s end).

This profound sense of loneliness (we are all ultimately on our own and have no one to help us) chimes with what I would call Wheatley’s ‘atheism,’ by which I mean to say that his cinema does not respect the gods who claim that estates are real, and who in some senses – as an autodidactic filmmaker – does not respect the gods of cinema.

Perhaps the film’s form can therefore be understood as reinforcing this lack of rules. There clearly seems to have been a lot of improvisation in the film – with the actors being credited at the end for having provided additional material on top of Wheatley’s own script.

Not only does improv suggest a refusal to stick to the script, which gives to cinema a life that is ruleless (anything could happen), but this also means that Wheatley almost by definition has to edit the film rapidly (in a fashion that for some might be ‘excessively choppy’), and that cinematographer Laurie Rose also has almost by definition to film handheld so that he can respond to and find the details in the performances that are taking place.

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is clearly redolent of Thomas Vinterberg’s dogme ’95 classic, Festen/The Celebration (Denmark/Sweden, 1998), not only in its tale of family disharmony at a special gathering, but also in its use of handheld cameras and naturalistic performances. Although Wheatley is not a ‘dogmatic’ filmmaker, Happy New Year… does in some senses share with Vinterberg and the other founders of the famous Danish film movement an irreverence towards the cinematic establishment, with the film moving so fast at times that it becomes hard to follow (for example, I am still not sure why Jimmy and Ed are at the party, nor really why Maya and Nikhil got invited, even though my family also has ‘members’ who are not related by blood at all and yet who come along to every gathering that we have – and they are thus family members).

Indeed, if Happy New Year, Colin Burstead recalls a Danish film, it clearly also is exploring a relationship between the UK and Europe, as is made clear by David’s relationship with Hannah, as well, in a more muted fashion, Colin’s relationship with Val, in that Sura Dohnke is Belgian, which creates a strange resonance with Kill List, in which Neil Maskell’s wife is played by Swedish actress, MyAnna Buring, in an equally understated fashion.

Indeed, perhaps the film would wish to suggest that who is British and who is European is indeed almost impossible at times to tell – with the Asian heritage of Maya, Nikhil and Sham also suggesting a Britain that has no pure or precise characteristics, with Mark Monero’s presence and Charles Dance’s turn as a transvestite also troubling any idea that Britain is a nation of straight white people.

In a truly touching and climactic moment, David sits at a piano and sings a song that he has written for Sandy – with shades of Sam Riley’s turn as Ian Curtis in Anton Corbijn’s Control (UK/USA/Australia/Japan/France, 2007) coming through. After he has finished, Hannah sings ‘Die Gedanken sind frei,’ a German traditional, the title of which translates as ‘thoughts are free.’

Hannah sings the first three verses:-

Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten,
sie fliegen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten.
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger sie schießen
mit Pulver und Blei: Die Gedanken sind frei!

Ich denke was ich will und was mich beglücket,
doch alles in der Still’, und wie es sich schicket.
Mein Wunsch und Begehren kann niemand verwehren,
es bleibet dabei: Die Gedanken sind frei!

Und sperrt man mich ein im finsteren Kerker,
das alles sind rein vergebliche Werke.
Denn meine Gedanken zerreißen die Schranken
und Mauern entzwei: Die Gedanken sind frei!

… which translate as follows…

Thoughts are free, who can guess them?
They fly by like nocturnal shadows.
No person can know them, no hunter can shoot them
with powder and lead: Thoughts are free!

I think what I want, and what delights me,
still always reticent, and as it is suitable.
My wish and desire, no one can deny me
and so it will always be: Thoughts are free!

And if I am thrown into the darkest dungeon,
all these are futile works,
because my thoughts tear all gates
and walls apart: Thoughts are free!

The last lines are in particular resonant for my argument here: Wheatley believes that thoughts can tear gates and walls apart, even as walls and gates are put up, kept and thus in some senses are real – as Bertie goes on to affirm immediately afterwards by saying how much he loves his family, which then leads into the New Year’s countdown, a rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the year ends as a new door opens (January being derived from the Latin ianua, meaning door).

There are several references to Brexit in the film, with Colin calling Gini a ‘remoaner’ and Fran suggesting a lack of interest in politics by saying ‘fuck Labour and fuck the Tories.’ What is more, while this political context does form the backdrop for the film, there are some very and specifically British touches/references in the film – for example, Colin’s invocation of 1970s stand-up comedian Norman Collier, whose ‘broken microphone’ routine he re-enacts to pretend that the phone line is not working clearly.

(Indeed, it is a relatively common trait throughout the film for Colin not to listen. He puts on earphones at the film’s start, before shutting Val in a larder once they reach the castle; he avoids David for as long as he can, enlisting Sham to help him… and so while I wish to come back positively to Colin, in some senses he perhaps does epitomise Brexit Britain, right down to the hypocrisy of having a Belgian partner.)

Happy New Year… also involves Wheatley’s trademark use of British folk music on the soundtrack (which also was composed by Clint Mansell), with the film ending with that staple title card from British sitcoms ‘You have been watching…’

In other words, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is as British as the BBC, which produced the film, and yet it also suggests something non- or post-British as it analyses how walls and gates delimit our thinking and create an island mentality, while at the same time pushing for more open, free and ‘European’ thinking.

I suggest in my essay on Wheatley that the use of folk music in A Field in England in particular takes us back to pre-monarchic times – which is apt for a film set during the English civil war. Perhaps here they do something similar, while the setting at Penn Castle and on Portland Bill does something similar, which I shall turn to now, as promised.

For, Penn Castle is the former home of John Penn, whose family founded and colonised Pennsylvania – before being turfed out following America’s own civil war. This in and of itself suggests a history of colonialism, land-grabbing as the foundation of the British Empire, and also revolution against such tactics.

But more than this, the island setting and the presence of the sea, at which Colin shouts at the film’s end, suggests a different world that is not defined by solid walls, but which instead is liquid, always shifting and, like thought, oceanic.

Dorset, meanwhile, takes its name from the county town of Dorchester, which not only is the name of a posh London hotel into which only moneyed elites can go, but it is also the modern version of Durnovaria, from the Romano-British duro-, meaning ‘walled town.’

That is, Dorset is a place of walls, while Portland Bill is a kind of exception to that. More than this, Dorset also recalls the idea of the dorsal, the backbone and thus of the vertebrate; perhaps’s humanity’s bone structure is itself part and parcel of how and why we think in terms of walls and fixity, property and privacy, turning and returning (our time is structured like our space: with barriers and divisions, rather than waves of time lapping and washing over us).

To think in an invertebrate fashion, away from the hard land and instead in the fathoms of the sea, is perhaps to think in a different, ‘improper’ way (to think improperly is perhaps necessary to think outwith and to outwit the concept of property), with Colin (whose name is also French for hake, even as it is a diminutive of Nicolas) rejecting the vertebrate notion of family and instead trying to rework his identity, even as this perhaps tragically leaves him isolated and alone.

He stands on Portland Bill’s Chesil Beach on England’s Jurassic Coast, shouting at the English channel. Where Ian McEwan’s novel and the subsequent film, On Chesil Beach (Dominic Cooke, UK, 2017), tell a story of a couple refusing to have sex, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead tells a story of bastards who are fucking irrespective of the law – in language and in deed.

Where McEwan/Cooke create a typical British heritage film that is white and virginal, clean and pretty, even as it includes McEwan’s weirdly prudish leaking of desire, Wheatley’s is a coarser but in many ways far more honest and embodied cinema that shows and acts upon desire, rather than dying tragically without having done anything about it. In this sense, Wheatley’s cinema is vibrant and alive, whilst Cooke’s cinéma de papa is tired and dying.

The Jurassic Beach also recalls a history much longer than simply the presence of humans on Earth (the so-called anthropocene), fitting Wheatley’s fictional world into a universe where there are no boundaries and not even the human race is permanent (and in this sense, Colin’s presence on the beach at the end might well help in getting us to see that there are no rules – not of space, not of time, not of family, not of species).

Working with regulars Peter Ferdinando, Richard Glover, Neil Maskell, Mark Monero and Sam Riley, together with Laurie Rose on the camera as usual, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead does nonetheless involve some new directions for Wheatley, including writing the script without his partner Amy Jump (who produced) and with no part in the film for Michael Smiley.

(Small wonder that Wheatley is slated to direct a remake of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, another tale of real estate as Manderlay dominates the lives of the de Winters. Hopefully his version will be less heritage than most other literary adaptations!)

All the same, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead also functions as a summation in many ways of various of the anarchic and ‘atheistic’ ideas that circulate throughout his œuvre. Channeling other recent films like Archipelago (Joanna Hogg, UK, 2010) and The Party (Sally Potter, UK, 2017), as well as the ongoing work of Mike Leigh (whose influence was especially recognised with Sightseers), Wheatley remains one of the most interesting and innovative voices in British filmmaking (even if watching a film on iPlayer shows some irreverence towards what we used to call cinema).

Given the shit that we are about to face as we leave the European Union (the storming of the Houses of Parliament notwithstanding), Wheatley’s is perhaps the most important cinematic voice to be talking at the moment. Happy New Year. Let’s hope some walls come crumbling down and that some doors and gates get opened – otherwise 2019 might well be a year to forget. Die Gedanken sind frei!

Films of 2018

I saw roughly 406 films for the first time in 2018.

I say ‘roughly’ because this figure is not entirely accurate, since there are a couple of films that I went to watch only to realise that I had seen them before, or at the very least to suspect that I had seen them before (In Praise of Nothing being a case in point).

What is more, there are some films that I saw at the Strange Days exhibition at London’s 180 Strand, but which are not listed here (Pipilotti Rist’s 4th Floor to Mildness functions as a stand-in for all of the ones that I did see).

On that topic, there are two gallery/installation films that I enjoyed a lot, but which I did not get to see in full, those being Christian Marclay’s The Clock at Tate Modern and Ragnar Kjartansson’s A Lot of Sorrow at the Strange Days exhibition. Of the former, I managed to see from 10:02 through to about 18:00 – although there is one final all-night session in January 2019 that may allow me to see the film in its entirety provided that I go and that I stay awake for it. And of the latter, I only managed about half an hour, but it was hypnotising and I would like to see more (it is available on YouTube, but I have not had a chance to see it).

Beyond that, I saw 220 films at the cinema this year, making it the most common venue for my film viewing. This was followed by 144 films that I saw online, 22 films that I saw on DVD, VHS or from a file, 11 films that I saw on an aeroplane, 7 listed here that I saw at galleries, and two that I saw on television.

This includes various short(er) films.

The distinction between cinema and online continues to be eroded, in that many films are readily available online at the same time that they are in theatres. I would say that when I see a film like Bird Box, and I can see the image blur as the internet connection wavers, or when I see a film like Mudbound and I can see streaks of grey (as well as my own reflection) in the black of a nocturnal scene as my laptop cannot handle the tonality of darkness… then I feel that the theatre is still the best venue for watching films.

I fell asleep during a relatively large number of films this year, but I did not keep a record. That said, I did sense that I was beginning to fall asleep on occasion during mainstream films, which previously was only a very rare occurrence. Perhaps I need more sleep, or to change my lifestyle in numerous ways (drink less, stop smoking, do more exercise, watch fewer films, not work so hard, learn to be an adult, and so on). All the same, though, maybe blockbusters are having less of an effect on grabbing my attention than they used to.

I also noted that I would check and answer messages on my phone more regularly during film screenings. I am not sure how to stop the endless tide of messages or the insistent compulsion to answer them. In part this may be because watching films can sometimes still feel like skiving.

There are a few filmmakers by whom I saw several films this year, and these include Ingmar Bergman (as part of the retrospective of his work at the British Film Institute), Alia Syed and Kamran Shirdel (as part of events organised through the Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image), and then Philippe Garrel, Krzysztof Zanussi, Mark Cousins, Angela Schanelec, Rick Alverson, Kevin Jerome Everson, Barbara Hammer, Annemarie Jacir, John Torres, Lou Ye, Gérard Courant, John Carpenter, Douglas Sirk, James Marsh and Christoph Schlingensief. These latter are mainly as a result of retrospectives on MUBI, although some are also a result of me wanting to catch various of their films out of a sense of failure at not having seen them already (Carpenter), or simply because they seem to have been productive (Mark Cousins and James Marsh, who, via The Mercy and King of Thieves, seemed this year to begin a trend of Brit-film mediocrity that I hope does not last too long).

Of these, the work of Jacir and Everson was in particular a pleasant discovery, while my engagement with Torres was more a case of finally reaching a destination that I had been meaning to visit for a few years. I enjoy but continue not to be blown away by Garrel, while Schlingensief is (or rather was) perhaps one of the most interesting and subversive European filmmakers of the contemporary era. Indeed, without wishing to sound too much like an arrogant c-unit, Schlingensief and Torres would in particular make excellent case studies of what I term ‘non-cinema,’ and about which I published a book this year.

On this note, I also saw a handful of South African films this year (Love The One You Love, The Wound, We Are Thankful, Revenge, Girl from Nowhere, as well as a couple of experimental shorts not listed below by Jyoti Mistry and Nobunye Levin), some that I preferred more than others… but of which Love The One You Love and We Are Thankful struck me as really strong low-budget pieces of work (and which thus might qualify as what I term ‘non-cinema’). In particular I’d in the future look out for work by Jenna Bass, the director of the former, as well as further work by Mistry and Levin.

Other films that I saw (but which might not necessarily be new), and which might qualify as good examples of ‘non-cinema’ (and which for me were memorable viewing experiences) include Joséphine Ndagnou’s Paris à tout prix, Eric Eason’s Manito, Li Ning’s Tape, Khoa Do’s The Finished People and Josh Appignanesi’s Female Human Animal.

What was also interesting for me was to think about my conceptualisation of non-cinema in relation to the work of Kevin Jerome Everson mentioned above. Briefly put, non-cinema is a way of thinking about low-budget, anti-hegemonic filmmaking (read, work that critiques or offers alternatives to white, heteronormative patriarchy), and which at times is wilfully (but not necessarily) anti-commercial. In particular the argument tries to work productively with the idea that the digital is in some senses not cinema anymore in terms of production (celluloid) and distribution (theatres). And so if for various reasons it is ‘not cinema,’ then maybe we can positively say that it is ‘non-cinema.’

Should anyone ever read the book, one of the issues that they might have with it is that I want or insist that filmmakers who do not belong to white, heteronormative patriarchy somehow should or must produce ‘non-cinema,’ meaning that the wonders of cinema remain the preserve of the powerful.

This is not the intention behind my argument at all and I do try in the book to make clear that ‘non-cinema’ is still (or at least can still be) ‘cinematic’ (whatever that means), while also (perhaps without articulating it in so many words) wishing to encourage film viewers to consider that various of the things that they might consider to be ‘bad’ or ‘not even’ cinema are not necessarily a result of inferior filmmaking abilities (which is to create hierarchies of power), but that they might be positive choices, expressions of difference, perhaps especially expressions of a lack of access to power (especially money-as-power since many filmmakers simply cannot afford to make films that are as pristine as a Hollywood production), and thus aesthetically innovative should we have the eyes and ears to think about them in that way.

In other words, non-cinema is a tool to try to level the playing field of film aesthetics, which in turn might help to level the playing field of our political world, not least because aesthetics play such a central role in our political thinking (the political message is perhaps not as important as how it is presented, i.e. its aesthetic dimension; in cinema, he who makes the most noise and who has the flashiest colour palette is often/in many popular quarters considered to be the winner).

From this, it hopefully would be clear that one can make ‘cinema’ and still be anti-hegemonic (nothing necessarily precludes this, although the closer one gets to cinema there may well yet be a tendency to have to make films that try to make money simply because of how much it costs to make a film). Indeed, to make cinema can still be subversive, and this to me is the power of Everson’s films.

For, by regularly using polyester film stock to portray the everyday lives of working African Americans, Everson surely does ask viewers to consider his subjects to be equally as cinematic/as worthy of cinema as the figures that we see in mainstream, commercial cinema. This gesture is profound and powerful, and I would hope that it works in tandem with filmmakers who embrace non-cinema (low budget digital filmmaking) in order equally to level the playing field. Both are, I hope, working towards creating a more just and democratic world.

Perhaps it does not merit mention in the year after Get Out that African American filmmaking appears to be especially strong, with Black Panther being a necessary film to mention given its status as the first ‘black’ superhero movie (even if I personally had some issues with the film, as I have issues with superhero fantasies more generally, and even if I feel that the Saturday Night Live episode of ‘Black Jeopardy’ with Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa was not only one of the most enjoyable audiovisual experiences that I had in 2018, but also politically one of the most astute and powerful).

Nonetheless, one thing that struck me about the films that I saw in 2018 concerning the African American experience (if I can put it that way) is the legacy of Spike Lee. This is not to disregard other figures in the rich history of African American filmmaking, nor is it to disregard Boots Riley’s criticism of Lee concerning the latter’s BlacKkKlansman. But films like Riley’s Sorry to Bother You and Carlos López Estrada’s Blindspotting seem to carry strong traces of Lee’s influence, with Lee’s work itself remaining relevant and which, when considered as a whole, is relentlessly brave, even if personally I can sometimes find it derivative and testing. One thing is for sure: he continues to experiment and to push himself as a filmmaker, and in this respect he is nothing less than admirable (if that is not too condescending a thing to say).

Lee’s influence can also be seen in films like Justin Chon’s Gook, which tells the tale of American Korean Angelinos, and the turn to which also helps us to consider how currently there is equally a growing visibility of Asian Americans in contemporary cinema – with John Cho being a central figure in this growth as he begins to hold together films as varied as internet rescue film Searching and architecture essay-film Columbus.

(Can one summarise 2018 without mentioning Crazy Rich Asians…? Maybe this single mention is enough.)

I did also see two films by Steven Spielberg in 2018, those being The Post and Ready Player One, the latter of which was my first 4DX experience, and which ideologically annoyed me quite a lot – but so be it. I was also mildly disappointed by some of the Netflix films that did not get (much in the way of) theatrical releases in the UK, including Alex Garland’s Annihilation and Julius Onah’s The Cloverfield Paradox.

But rather than linger on disappointments, perhaps one might instead celebrate achievements, and in this sense 2018 saw a fair amount of what I would consider to be strong American films coming out. Among these I might include I, Tonya (a hangover from 2017), the afore-mentioned Blindspotting, BlacKkKlansman and Sorry to Bother You, Columbus, Leave No Trace, American Animals, Mid90s, Tully, Lucky, The Old Man and the Gun, Ralph Breaks the Internet and Assassination Nation (which nearly sustained its headfuck aesthetic until the end).

Indeed, while I shall list below my ‘proper’ favourites of the year (these ones that I am discussing currently being points of interest and ever-so-nearly my favourites), I was worried that American filmmaking might run away with it this year, not least because a whole bunch of films by big-name world auteurs (including by non-Americans) were fine, but did not quite do it for me in the way that some of their earlier work has done. By this I mean that while I saw films by the likes of Jia Zhangke (Ash is Purest White), Lars von Trier (The House that Jack Built), Kore-eda Hirokazu (The Third Murder and Shoplifters), Pawel Pawlikowsi (Cold War), Steve McQueen (Widows), Fatih Akin (In the Fade), Corneliu Porumboiu (Infinite Football), Lucrecia Martel (Zama), Ruben Östlund (The Square), Jafar Panahi (3 Faces), Andrei Zvyagintsev (Loveless) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread), these did not quite do it for me (even though I liked a good number of these films a lot).

A list of films that really came quite close to doing it for me include Jacir’s Wajib, Mohammad Rasoulof’s A Man of Integrity, Naomi Kawase’s Radiance, Robin Campillo’s 120BPM, Jonas Carpignano’s A Ciambra, Frederick Wiseman’s Ex-Libris: The New York Public Library and Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still. I liked Paul King’s Paddington 2. Both Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite are great films that really have at their core magnificent performances by female leads (respectively Yalitza Aparicio and Olivia Colman, although Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz from the latter are worth mentioning, too – with Weisz having also shone alongside Rachel McAdams and the under-rated Alessandro Nivola in Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience).

I might also say that The Favourite made me think that Peter Greenaway’s legacy remains strong, as well as leading me to believe that the film is perhaps the best Grexit-Brexit comment to have been made in the recent past – not least in the face of much ongoing and conservative British cinema (although Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country is also a beautiful investigation into Anglo-European relations up in Yorkshire).

In a year that also saw The Greatest Showman and Mary Poppins Returns saturate our big screens, the legacy of Baz Luhrmann also seemed to loom large, making me wonder what he is up to and why he seems not have any projects along the lines of his best work (William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!) on the go. Hopefully these would be more enjoyable than the two musicals mentioned above – even if my niece insisted on dancing repeatedly to ‘A Million Dreams’ and ‘Never Enough’ from the former throughout the Christmas period.

Returning to the UK in the era of Brexit, William English’s It’s My Own Invention, which I caught randomly at the Close-Up Centre one night early in 2018, has really stuck with me as a kind of bizarre insight into insanity as it charts the life of Hugh de la Cruz, who claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine. It perhaps chastened me with regard to my own propensity for insanity.

Although a couple of years old, I might mention Jenni Olson’s The Royal Road as one of the best essay-films that I saw for the first time in 2018, with Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson and Evan Johnson’s The Green Fog being a beautiful and very funny video-essay on San Francisco as depicted in cinema (and which thus shares a lot of ground with my forthcoming video-essay on the Golden Gate Bridge).

Finally, out of retrospective films that I saw at the cinema in 2018, I might make mention of Youssef Chahine’s 1969 film The Land, which was beautifully restored and screened at the Ciné Lumière as part of the SAFAR Film Festival 2018.

And so now we can come to my personal favourites of 2018, which number 9 in total and which appear below in no particular order:-

Between Fences by Avi Mograbi, a film (actually from 2016 and which I saw online, but what the heck) about acting workshops with African refugees in a camp in the Negev desert. This made me want to make films like it, while also leading me to read Augusto Boal, who is an influence on theatre director Chen Alon, who with Mograbi ran the workshops.

The Nothing Factory by Pedro Pinho, which is a weird micro-budget musical about workers on strike at a lift factory in Lisbon.

You Were Never Really Here by Lynne Ramsay, which has at its core a towering performance by Joaquin Phoenix, an incredible score by Jonny Greenwood and some of the most taut directing from Lynne Ramsay at the absolute peak of her powers.

A Deal with the Universe by Jason Barker. This no-budget diary film is about a man transitioning from being a woman, but who delays said transition in order to have a child. Tender and beautiful.

First Reformed by Paul Schrader. After The Canyons (which I secretly admire but do not particularly like), this came from nowhere – and is about as impassioned a film about environmental disaster as one can hope to see.

Summer 1993 by Carla Simón. A heartbreaking film about an orphan girl taken in by her aunt and uncle and which left me sobbing.

The Rider by Chloé Zhao, which uses non-professional actors from the world of rodeo to tell the story of the decline of the American west – and which also left me devastated and hiding in the cinema until the credits had finished so that I could have a good cry and time to dry my eyes unseen.

The Flower by Mariano Llinás. A kind of compendium of six separate feature films in one and all starring the same cast, this 14-and-a-half-hour long film becomes completely hypnotic and is a wonderful example of infinite storytelling, of the sort that Llinás’s fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges would endorse, and which keeps alive the Scheherazadean tradition of storytelling as life (it also made me love Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights even more for doing something similar).

The Wild Pear Tree by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, which is for me his strongest film. Ceylan continues to edit across different takes in such a way that one gets a sense of not a single story world, but parallel universes that all talk to each other. This film features perhaps the most beautiful scene of love that I can remember, as ne’er-do-well Sinan talks to his old crush Hatice by a tree. Furthermore, I felt chastised by the film for sharing many of Sinan’s faults, such that I really want to change my life and endeavour to be a better person… even if now in the fog outside of the cinema, I continue to feel lost and unsure of what it is that I am supposed to do with existence.

Although the next film is not really among my favourites, this talk of changing my life does lead me to my final thoughts, various of which concern Weeks in the West End, a no-budget independent feature made by Ian Mantgani and which I saw as a result of an invitation from a friend (Hind Mezaina) at the Prince Charles Cinema on the eve of the London Film Festival.

It is a personal story about the filmmaker’s relationship with cinema and the way in which the London Film Festival annually brings about a strange set of rituals as one endures long days of film-viewing and long nights of partying and film discussion.

It is also in some senses a kind of love letter to the filmmaker’s then-partner, as well as an account of the disintegration of their relationship.

What is curious about the film is that I once asked out the filmmaker’s partner for a drink (at around the time that they got together if my understanding of their timeline is correct). However, the filmmaker’s ex turned me down, and so Weeks in the West End became this odd experience of feeling slightly sorry for myself (a sense of inferiority at not being as attractive as the filmmaker, at least in the eyes of his ex; a wonder at how my life could have turned out so differently).

But more than this, the film also became an exercise in seeing how the filmmaker’s obsession with cinema perhaps got in the way of his relationship, maybe even ending it.

Weeks in the West End might work as a piece of non-cinema in many respects, not least because so low budget, even if shot in a wilfully quirky fashion on film. However, the movie is also beholden to cinema, especially as it goes off on numerous tangents that aim to showcase Mantgani’s beautiful turns of phrase as he reviews films that he has seen at the festival.

Two thoughts.

Firstly, we do not see those films that are described, but just the title and what is written about them in the London Film Festival catalogue from 2017. Weeks in the West End seems desperately somehow to want to be cinema, and this desire to be cinema seems ultimately to be destructive of human relationships. Perhaps we should never love cinema more than we love people. Perhaps I also watch too many films, even if I try to hate and in some senses to destroy cinema in my filmmaking and in my writing about film and coming up with notions like ‘non-cinema,’ which various of my friends would tell me are worthy of Pseuds’ Corner. I must learn to be a better human being and to value others ahead of my stupid fantasies, which I must also try to shed in order to see other humans for themselves and not filtered through my idiocy (I must stop being an idle romantic dreaming of other worlds rather than helping to improve this one).

Secondly, Mantgani is a beautiful writer. The Wild Pear Tree is a contemplation of literature, while The Flower also feels very literary/novelistic in terms of how it is constructed and how long it takes to get through it (the same applies to An Elephant Sitting Still, which is based on Hu Bo’s own novel, to name but one more among various others mentioned above and below).

One of the most important conversations I had this year was about how many of the great filmmakers are also great readers – and about the ongoing and perhaps necessary relationship between literature and cinema (or between text and film more generally).

If indeed we are drifting into a world where people do not have the time or the patience for novels (especially ‘difficult’ novels), then this also will lead to the impoverishment of cinema (and perhaps by extension to the impoverishment of human relationships).

Let us continue to read and write in order to make and to understand films as best as we can.

Some people hate him, but Jean-Luc Godard perhaps still has it and is on point with his latest film, The Image Book, which in some ways is a consideration of the relationship between cinema and language/literature/text, between images and books, and which is also a proxime accessit film for me this year: I loved it, but only as much as other work of his and not as if I had seen something anew (hence not in my favourite favourite list).

But most of all this: if we love cinema and/or literature, then let us also see if we can learn to love each other.

Appendix
(featuring all of the films I saw in 2018)

[Blank = cinema; * = online; ^ = DVD/VHS/file; > = gallery/installation; // = television]

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (Paul McGuigan)

Menashe (Joshua Z. Weinstein)

Battle of the Sexes (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris)

Youth (Feng Xiaogang)

Brad’s Status (Mike White)

Paddington 2 (Paul King)

Marius (Marcel Pagnol)

Jupiter’s Moon (Kornél Mondruczó)

Rey (Niles Attalah)

Glory (Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov)

Molly’s Game (Aaron Sorkin)

Field Niggas (Khalik Allah)

Darkest Hour (Joe Wright)

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonough)

Tempestad (Tatiana Huezo)

Swan (Alia Syed)

Unfolding (Alia Syed)

Syntax (Martha Haslanger)

Light Reading (Lis Rhodes)

Fatima’s Letter (Alia Syed)

Three Paces (Alia Syed)

Red Shift (Gunvor Nelson)

The Post (Steven Spielberg)

Attraction (Fyodor Bondarchuk)

Hex (George Popov and Jonathan Russell)

The Greatest Showman (Michael Gracey)

Barbara (Mathieu Amalric)

A Man of Integrity (Mohammad Rasoulof)

Radiance (Naomi Kawase)

Hannah (Andrea Pallaoro)

120 battements par minute (Robin Campillo)

A Fábrica de Nada (Pedro Pinho)

Downsizing (Alexander Payne)

Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Room for Let (Yuzo Kawashima)

The Serpent’s Egg (Ingmar Bergman)

Makala (Emmanuel Gras)

Shame (Ingmar Bergman)

Loveless (Andrei Zvyagintsev)

The Mercy (James Marsh)

Black Panther (Ryan Coogler)

It’s My Own Invention (William English)

It Rains on Our Love (Ingmar Bergman)

The Song of Cotton (Yuancheng Zhu)

The Worldly Cave (Zhou Tao)

From the Life of the Marionettes (Ingmar Bergman)

I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie)

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)

Dark River (Clio Barnard)

The Devil’s Eye (Ingmar Bergman)

La vendedora de fósforos (Alejo Moguillansky)

Vers la mer (Annik Leroy)

Rewind and Forget (Andrea Luka Zimmerman)

The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)

Red Sparrow (Francis Lawrence)

You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay)

Gringo (Nash Edgerton)

Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton)

The Nile Hilton Incident (Tarik Saleh)

Women’s Prison (Kamran Shirdel)

Tehran is the Capital of Iran (Kamran Shirdel)

Women’s Quarter (Kamran Shirdel)

The Night It Rained, Or The Epic of a Gorgan Village Boy (Kamran Shirdel)

Gook (Justin Chon)

Tomb Raider (Roar Uthaug)

Unsane (Steven Soderbergh)

Tomorrow Never Knows (Adam Sekuler)

Luz Obscura (Susana de Sousa Dias)

Gholam (Mitra Tabrizian)

A Deal with the Universe (Jason Barker)

Have a Nice Day (Liu Jian)

The Third Murder (Kore-eda Hirokazu)

The Square (Ruben Östlund)

Peter Rabbit (Will Gluck)

Martyr (Mazen Khaled)

God’s Own Country (Francis Lee)

Ready Player One 4DX (Steven Spielberg)

Journeyman (Paddy Considine)

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski)

Ghost Stories (Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson)

The Camera: Je, or La Caméra: I (Babette Mangolte)

Pacific Rim: Uprising (Steven S. DeKnight)

The Finished People (Khoa Do)

The Sun Island (Thomas Elsaesser)

Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown)

Un beau soleil intérieur (Claire Denis)

The Wound (John Trengove)

Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony and Joe Russo)

Something Wild (Jonathan Demme)

Beast (Michael Pearce)

Journey to the South (Jill Daniels)

Revenge (Coralie Fargeat)

Tully (Jason Reitman)

Shadow World (Johan Grimonprez)

Funny Cow (Adrian Shergold)

Le redoubtable (Michel Hazanavicius)

Deadpool 2 (David Leitch)

Jeune femme (Léonor Serraille)

Zama (Lucrecia Martel)

Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard)

Entebbe (José Padilha)

Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson)

L’amant double (François Ozon)

3 Faces (Jafar Panahi)

Frontières (Apolline Traoré)

Infinite Football (Corneliu Porumboiu)

Plaire, aimer et courir vite (Christophe Honoré)

Una questione privata (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani)

Morocco (Josef von Sternberg)

Absolute Rest (Abdolreza Kahani)

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (JA Bayona)

Veere di Wedding (Shashanka Ghosh)

Mobile Homes (Vladimir de Fontenay)

A Ciambra (Jonas Carpignano)

In The Fade (Fatih Akin)

Leave No Trace (Debra Granik)

Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Stefano Sollima)

The Women Weavers of Assam (Aparna Sharma)

Clem (William Brown)

Ocean’s Eight (Gary Ross)

Hereditary (Ari Aster)

Bao (Domee Shi)

Incredibles 2 (Brad Bird)

First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

Pin Cushion (Deborah Haywood)

Estiú 1993 (Carla Simón)

The Receptionist (Jenny Lu)

Generation Wealth (Lauren Greenfield)

Extinction (Salomé Lamas)

Apostasy (Daniel Kokotajlo)

Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman)

Mogambo (John Ford)

El Mar La Mar (Joshua Bonnetta and JP Sniadecki)

Cocote (Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias)

Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed)

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (Ol Parker)

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie)

The Escape (Dominic Savage)

Las herederas (Marcelo Martinessi)

No Date, No Signature (Vahid Jalilvand)

The Eyes of Orson Welles (Mark Cousins)

BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)

Christopher Robin (Marc Forster)

The King (Eugene Jarecki)

Under the Tree (Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson)

Searching (Aneesh Chaganty)

Robot Jox (Stuart Gordon)

Yardie (Idris Elba)

Baronesa (Juliana Antunes)

Cold War (Paweł Pawlikowski)

The End of Fear (Barbara Visser)

American Animals (Bart Layton)

Home of the Resistance (Ivan Ramljak)

Uppland (Edward Lawrenson)

(In Praise of Nothing (Boris Mitić))

(Island (Steven Eastwood))

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan)

The Predator (Shane Black)

The Search (Hossam El Din Moustafa)

Stories of Passers Through (Koutaiba Al-Janabi)

Poisonous Roses (Ahmed Fawzi Saleh)

Scheherazade’s Diary (Zeina Daccache)

The Film of Kyiv (Oleksiy Radynski)

Lucky (John Carroll Lynch)

Diamond Island (Davy Chou)

We Don’t Care About Democracy. This Is What We Want: Love, Hope and Its Many Faces (John Torres)

I Have Sinned a Rapturous Sin (Maryam Tafakory)

The Land (Youssef Chahine)

Wajib (Annemarie Jacir)

Nervous Translation (Shireen Seno)

Marvin (Anne Fontaine)

The Rider (Chloé Zhao)

People Power Bombshell (John Torres)

MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A. (Steve Loveridge)

Climax (Gaspar Noé)

El reino (Rodrigo Sorogoyen)

Venom (Ruben Fleischer)

Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada)

Weeks in the West End (Ian Mantgani)

Skate Kitchen (Crystal Moselle)

Wild Relatives (Jumana Manna)

Columbus (Kogonada)

aKasha (hajooj kuka)

Mandy (Panos Cosmatos)

Kusama – Infinity (Heather Lenz)

The Wife (Björn Runge)

Bad Times at the El Royale (Drew Goddard)

La flor parte 1 (Mariano Llinás)

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema (Mark Cousins)

La flor parte 2 (Mariano Llinás)

La flor parte 3 (Mariano Llinás)

Halloween (David Gordon Green)

Fahrenheit 11/9 (Michael Moore)

Dogman (Mateo Garrone)

First Man (Damien Chazelle)

The Old Man and the Gun (David Lowery)

Beautiful Boy (Felix Van Groeningen)

The Man with the Iron Fists (RZA)

Mid90s (Jonah Hill)

Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke)

Wildlife (Paul Dano)

The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Fede Álvarez)

Widows (Steve McQueen)

Nae Pasarán (Felipe Bustos Sierra)

Assassination Nation (Sam Levinson)

Shoplifters (Kore-eda Hirokazu)

Bohemian Rhapsody (Bryan Singer)

The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier)

Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley)

Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)

An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo)

Disobedience (Sebastián Lelio)

Le livre d’image (Jean-Luc Godard)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Peter Ramsey, Robert Persichetti Jr., Rodney Rothman)

The Green Fog (Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson, Evan Johnson)

Mary Poppins Returns (Rob Marshall)

The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Aquaman (James Wan)

The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Ralph Breaks the Internet (Rich Moore and Phil Johnston)

Happy Christmas (Joe Swanberg)*

Unexpected (Kris Swanberg)*

Daphne (Peter Mackie Burns)*

I am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni)*

Marjorie Prime (Michael Almereyda)*

Monsters: Dark Continent (Tom Green)*

Tentacles (Ovidio G. Assonitis)*

On the Road (Michael Winterbottom)*

The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper)*

Mega-Shark versus Giant Octopus (Ace Hannah)*

The Protagonists (Luca Guadagnino)*

Ender’s Game (Gavin Hood)*

A Spectre Is Haunting Europe? (Julian Radlmaier)*

Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer)*

The Dunwich Horror (Daniel Haller)*

It Came From Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon)*

The Crimson Kimono (Samuel Fuller)*

Superdyke Meets Madame X (Barbara Hammer)*

Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard)*

The Structure of Crystal (Krzysztof Zanussi)*

(20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Richard Fleischer)*)

It Came From Outer Space (Jack Arnold)*

Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce)*

Hokusai Manga (Kaneto Shindo)*

L’amant d’un jour (Philippe Garrel)*

Untitled (Michael Glawogger and Monika Willi)*

The Constant Factor (Krzysztof Zanussi)*

Las Plantas (Roberto Doveris)*

Mirror World (Abigail Child)*

Life is a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease (Krzysztof Zanussi)*

Wùlu (Daouda Coulibaly)*

Clash of the Titans (Louis Leterrier)*

The Gorgon (Terence Fisher)*

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief (Chris Columbus)*

On Body and Soul (Ildikó Enyedi)*

In The Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter)*

Annihilation (Alex Garland)*

The Cloverfield Paradox (Julius Onah)*

The Bridge (Eric Steel)*

Paris à tout prix (Joséphine Ndagnou)*

The Year My Voice Broke (John Duigan)*

Spotswood (Mark Joffe)*

La Jalousie (Philippe Garrel)*

L’ombre des femmes (Philippe Garrel)*

Why Him? (John Hamburg)*

Kékszakállú (Gastón Solnicki)*

Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (Thom Andersen)*

Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman)*

Lean on Pete (Andrew Haigh)*

Shanty Tramp (José Prieto)*

Afternoon (Angela Schanelec)*

Audition (Milos Forman)*

Orly (Angela Schanelec)*

There’s Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk)*

Night Tide (Curtis Harrington)*

No intenso agora (João Moreira Salles)*

The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec)*

The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk)*

Allende mi abuelo Allende (Marcia Tambutti)*

Ma Loute (Bruno Dumont)*

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Nagisa Oshima)*

(La petite vendeuse de soleil (Djibril Diop Mambéty)*)

Refugiado (Diego Lerman)*

New Jerusalem (R. Alverson)*

The Comedy (Rick Alverson)*

Lek and the Dogs (Andrew Kötting)*

The Tingler (William Castle)*

Matinee (Joe Dante)*

Casa Roshell (Camila José Donoso)*

Daddy Longlegs (Josh and Ben Safdie)*

Polytechnique (Denis Villeneuve)*

Human Desire (Fritz Lang)*

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky)*

Agilem (Ilkka Levä)*

Manito (Eric Eason)*

Separado! (Dylan Goch and Gruff Rhys)*

Adiós entusiasmo (Vladimir Durán)*

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Jake Kasdan)*

Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (Fabrizio Terranova)*

Central Intelligence (Rawson Marshall Thurber)*

Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant)*

Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember (Khavn de la Cruz)*

Aditya (Gérard Courant)*

4:44 Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara)*

Rubber (Quentin Dupieux)*

Je meurs de soif, j’étouffe, je ne puis crier… (Gérard Courant)*

They Live (John Carpenter)*

Inkheart (Iain Softley)*

Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies)*

Evolution (Ivan Reitman)*

Jesús (Fernando Guzzoni)*

Fausto (Andrea Bussmann)*

Gamer (Oleg Sentsov)*

Mr Kaplan (Álvaro Brechner)*

We Are Thankful (Joshua Magor)*

Revenge (Coenie Dippenaar)*

Meteors (Gürcan Keltek)*

Temporada (André Novais Oliveira)*

Between Fences (Avi Mograbi)*

Djon África (Filipa Reis and João Guerra Miller)*

Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden)*

El apóstata (Federico Veiroj)*

Todo Todo Teros (John Torres)*

The Andromeda Strain (Robert Wise)*

Spring Fever (Lou Ye)*

Blind Massage (Lou Ye)*

The Supplement (Krzysztof Zanussi)*

Bonsái (Alex Andonie)*

The Last of Us (Ala Eddine Slim)*

120 Days of Bottrop (Christoph Schlingensief)*

When I Saw You (Annemarie Jacir)*

Terror 2000 (Christoph Schlingensief)*

All You Can Eat Bouddha (Ian Lagarde)*

100 Years of Adolf Hitler (Christoph Schlingensief)*

Tonsler Park (Kevin Jerome Everson)*

Quality Control (Kevin Jerome Everson)*

Teatro de Guerra (Lola Arías)*

Cinnamon (Kevin Jerome Everson)*

1428 (Du Haibin)*

Three Quarters (Kevin Jerome Everson)*

Una corriente salvaje (Nuria Ibáñez Castañeda)*

Wild Plants (Nicolas Humbert)*

A morir a los desiertos (Marta Ferrer)*

Giuseppe Makes a Movie (Adam Rifkin)*

Tape (Li Ning)*

Years When I Was a Child Outside (John Torres)*

‘Til Madness Do Us Part (Wang Bing)*

Trees Down Here (Ben Rivers)*

Spice Bush (Kevin Jerome Everson)*

L’Apparition (Xavier Giannoli)*

Season of the Devil (Lav Diaz)*

Girl from Nowhere (Mark Jackson)*

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Ethan and Joel Coen)*

L’année des méduses (Christopher Frank)*

Alba (Ana Cristina Barragán)*

Mañana a esta hora (Lina Rodríguez)*

L’affaire des divisions Morituri (FJ Ossang)*

Female Human Animal (Josh Appignanesi)*

Bird Box (Susanne Bier)*

Li Shuangshuang (Lu Ren)*

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (Noah Baumbach)*

A Star is Born (William A Wellman)*

Mudbound (Dee Rees)*

Mon Souffle (Jihane Chouaib)*

Octopussy (John Glen)^

Cathy Come Home (Kenneth Loach)^

Les amours de la pieuvre (Jean Painlevé)^

A Lesson in Love (Ingmar Bergman)^

Waiting Women (Ingmar Bergman)^

Sleep Has Her House (Scott Barley)^

Io Sono Li (Andrea Segre)^

The Royal Road (Jenni Olson)^

Freakstars 3000 (Christoph Schlingensief)^

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas)^

By Night With Torch and Spear (Joseph Cornell)^

Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold)^

Disorient Express (Ken Jacobs)^

The Trail of the Octopus (Duke Worne)^

I Love You (Marco Ferreri)^

Love The One You Love (Jenna Bass)^

Cefalópodo (Rubén Imaz)^

The Draughtsman’s Contract (Peter Greenaway)^

L’uomo in più (Paolo Sorrentino)^

Cabaret (Bob Fosse)^

Web Junkie (Hilla Medalia and Shosh Shlam)^

Mare Nostrum (Rex Ingram)^

Live By Night (Ben Affleck)+

Eat Pray Love (Ryan Murphy)+

Goodbye Christopher Robin (Simon Curtis)+

A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan)+

Epic (Chris Wedge)+

Alpha (Albert Hughes)+

Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M Chu)+

King of Thieves (James Marsh)+

Isoken (Jadesola Osiberu)+

Hearts Beat Loud (Brett Haley)+

The Meg (Jon Turteltaub)+

4th Floor to Mildness (Pipilotti Rist)>

Purple (John Akomfrah)>

Joan Jonas (Joan Jonas)>

Despair (Alex Prager)>

La Petite Mort (Alex Prager)>

Face in the Crowd (Alex Prager)>

La Grande Sortie (Alex Prager)>

About A Boy (Paul and Chris Weitz)//

Bros: After the Screaming Stops (Joe Pearlman and David Soutar)//

 

Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico/USA, 2018)

A few brief thoughts (involving spoilers) on Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, mainly in relation to a concept that David H. Fleming and I have been developing, and about which we recently published an essay in the journal, Film-Philosophy.

In that essay, which is on Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, USA, 2016), we posit the notion of chthulucinema, which is a term that can be used to describe movies that chime with Donna J Haraway’s notion of the chthulucene, an era that follows the so-called anthropocene and which sees the importance of humans wane on planet Earth, if not seeing humans disappear from the planet altogether.

We connect chthulucinema also with the eschatological writing of HP Lovecraft, whose Cthulhu equally signals a threat to humanity, and which is given expression in Arrival by the tentacled heptapods (which arrive not to destroy humanity per se, but which are here to announce an evolution in the human understanding of space, time and, ahem, evolution itself).

This is because the heptapods let humans know that there is other intelligent life out there in the universe (space) and that they have a completely different understanding of chronology (time). What is more, they have arrived because their species and our species are mutually dependent – with all of the drama of the film also being connected to the issue of whether linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) keeps her baby daughter, even if she knows that it will not live long (evolution).

This is about evolution because to reproduce is to evolve: children are not copies of their parents, even as we live in a world in which we seek to live forever, to stay young forever, and never to change through processes such as cloning, cosmetic surgery, and the preservation of the self in data (including the digital data of computer files and the analogue and digital data of images).

If children are not copies of their parents and if to become a parent is to let go of living forever and instead to let a child live – even if it is ‘imperfect’ and itself does not survive past childhood (the premise of Arrival) – then evolution here is also about learning to die and learning to accept death as a necessary part of (cosmic) evolution.

So… if this does not sound too barmy, then the issue becomes: what on Earth does cosmic evolution and the like have to do with Roma?

Well, we can start by suggesting that Cuarón has form in terms of dealing with such issues. To take perhaps his two most famous examples, Children of Men (USA/UK/Japan, 2006) and Gravity (UK/USA, 2013) both deal with the issue of childbirth, in that the former is about a world where children are no longer born and the latter is about an astronaut attempting to recover from the loss of her child.

[Notably, First Man (Damien Chazelle, USA/Japan, 2018) also feels compelled to talk about the conquest of space in relation to the trauma suffered at the loss of a child… as if space travel were the quest for immortality in the face of, and perhaps in a bid to deny, the truth of mortality. As Chazelle whitened jazz in both Whiplash (USA, 2014) and La La Land (USA/Hong Kong, 2016), here, in an era in which cinema tries to explore stories such as the one told in Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, USA, 2016), he also makes space travel white and male – as per the film’s title – as he celebrates the immortality of conquest in contradistinction to the mortality of becoming.]

To return to Cuarón, Roma is indeed at times quite consciously referential to the director’s earlier work – notably during a long sequence shot during riots in Mexico City in 1971, recalling the main sequence shot in the Bexhill riot zone in Children of Men, and during a cinema visit during which Cleo (the astounding Yalitza Aparicio) watches Marooned (John Sturges, USA, 1969), a film from the pre-CGI era that bears a strong similarity in its premise to Gravity.

But if Roma is something of a summation of Cuarón’s work to date (the story of servants also brings with it shades of A Little Princess (USA, 1995) and Great Expectations (USA, 1998), while the portrait of class tension in Mexico equally recalls Y tu Mamá también (Mexico, 2001)), how does it connect with the chthulucene and related issues?

Well, about three quarters of the way through the film, well-to-do Distrito Federal mother Sofía (Marina de Tavira) takes her children and their housemaid Cleo to the seaside.

I say well-to-do, but really Sofía is struggling: she has been abandoned by her husband (Fernando Grediaga) and money is getting tight. Nonetheless, she still runs a household with four kids and two housemaids, including Cleo, who has just lost a child at birth.

Sympathising with Cleo’s loss, Sofía promises Cleo a break on the beaches of Tuxpan, where she will not be asked to carry out any of her normal tasks of servitude.

As the group arrives at a coastal resort, they pass a large image on a wall of an octopus, before then being in a seaside diner where octopus also appears on the menu.

I am not saying that Cuarón included these details because he consciously believes what follows. But from the perspective of chthulucinema, which is a cinema of tentacles and thinking about the world from a non-human, more invertebrate perspective, the presence of these octopus references is telling.

For – and no more than this – they simply are reminders of alternative lifeforms, but whose biology and anatomy is so vastly different from ours that to ponder them does give pause to our everyday assumptions about time, space and evolution… and which does ask us to consider how an intelligent alien (which is how octopuses are often described) might perceive the world in a fashion that is completely different from the human.

(Octopuses and octopus-like creatures are common in Mexican cinema, as Fleming and I discuss in what we hope to be the book-version argument of our Arrival essay, nominally called Kinoteuthis Infernalis: The Emergence of Chthulumedia, which title means with a doff of the cap to Vilém Flusser ‘the squid cinema from hell,’ and which takes in other films like Cefalópodo/Cephalopod (Rubén Imaz, Mexico, 2010), La región salvage/The Untamed (Amat Escalante, Mexico/Denmark/France/Germany/Norway/Switzerland, 2016) and Una corriente salvaje (Nuria Ibañez, Mexico, 2018). I might mention here how Roma also seems indebted at least a little bit to Güeros (Alonso Ruizpalacios, Mexico, 2014), with its long sequence shots and images of civil unrest.)

However, while the presence of the octopus in Roma simply helps us to think about ‘intelligent aliens’ that are not us and which perhaps stand alongside and might help to evolve the contemporary human world, which we might otherwise describe as a patriarchy, it does also tie in with a narrative that is about children/childbirth, and which involves fantasies of transcending the planet (Marooned), changing the current structure of society (civil unrest) and perhaps even creating a matriarchy (Sofía and Cleo bonding) instead of a patriarchy.

It is not that Roma is obvious or mawkish. Indeed, problems remain as at the last Cleo returns to her position of servitude, and the loss of her child is not really mitigated by a weekend in the sun (where she ends up nearly drowning as she tries to save Sofía’s children from getting swept away by tidal currents).

Nonetheless, Cuarón is clearly investigating issues surrounding what another world might look like or be – as perhaps is befitting of someone who shares a culture with one of the great childbirth novels, namely Carlos Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato/Christopher Unborn (1987). He does this by studying a period of transition within a family as a nation also undergoes transition. And he does this by exploring what it means to reproduce – or not.

With the heartbreaking loss of Cleo’s child, Cuarón would seem to paint a bleak picture of a world where change may be hard to achieve, and where the poor really are sacrificed for the ongoing benefit (‘eternal life’) of the rich.

But as the octopus’ presence suggests, and as Cleo herself emerges from the sea with Sofía’s children, and as the unrest continues in the streets, if change may not have happened yet, it nonetheless is on the way – and we shall experience new worlds that currently are alien to us.

And this is because while Cleo suffers, she is also indestructible. Not in the sense that she is immortal, but in the sense that – and I am not sure I can overstate the magnificence of Aparicio’s performance here – she cannot be destroyed by hardship, even as she undergoes terrible hardship after terrible hardship. Cleo (and Apricio’s performance) are so strong. They are strength. And even if not now, they are the vision of a more just world.

Or something like that.