‘Good Morning, Night’ is a brilliant film. I saw it over a year ago and my memory of it is too dim to base a review on, but vivid enough for the fact it’s been slept on to get to me. Perhaps it’s one of those ‘You don’t have to have read Mandel’s “From Stalinism to Eurocommunism” to enjoy this film but it helps’ kinds of movie. But I know shamefully little about Italy in the ’70s and found this compelling in an old-fashioned ‘moral problem’ type way. If you adopt a certain revolutionary perspective, killing Aldo Moro is both important and insignificant: politically important and humanly insignificant. But how can you be sure that the masses you claim to represent, who you claim to be ‘waking up’ with your violent acts, will agree? Will in fact the human act have political consequences? And is it even possible that one should consider human consequences first? I think these are important questions, and deserve better than Peter Bradshaw, who complains that ‘the action is disappointingly bloodless and muted’ before remarking that the film ‘fastidiously and even evasively turns away from the horrible fact of Moro’s grisly slaying,’ both missing the point and perhaps illustrating it. ‘Rope done right’ is my esoteric poster quote.

‘Good Morning, Night’ is a brilliant film. I saw it over a year ago and my memory of it is too dim to base a review on, but vivid enough for the fact it’s been slept on to get to me. Perhaps it’s one of those ‘You don’t have to have read Mandel’s “From Stalinism to Eurocommunism” to enjoy this film but it helps’ kinds of movie. But I know shamefully little about Italy in the ’70s and found this compelling in an old-fashioned ‘moral problem’ type way. If you adopt a certain revolutionary perspective, killing Aldo Moro is both important and insignificant: politically important and humanly insignificant. But how can you be sure that the masses you claim to represent, who you claim to be ‘waking up’ with your violent acts, will agree? Will in fact the human act have political consequences? And is it even possible that one should consider human consequences first? I think these are important questions, and deserve better than Peter Bradshaw, who complains that ‘the action is disappointingly bloodless and muted’ before remarking that the film ‘fastidiously and even evasively turns away from the horrible fact of Moro’s grisly slaying,’ both missing the point and perhaps illustrating it. ‘Rope done right’ is my esoteric poster quote.

Fear of voice-over: what is it about documentaries and talking heads? Why do we need to see people say what they are saying. Given that most docs are edited so’s to make a coherent argument, using talking much as essay-writers use quotations from secondary sources (ie selectively), why bother with interviewees at all? ‘The Corporation’ is well worth seeing, but none of the theatrically released films in this ‘year of the documentary’ live up to Adam Curtis’ TV ‘The Power of Nightmares’. ‘Capturing the Friedmans’ comes closest: there the talking head format makes sense because all the talking heads contradict each other, and you have to fall back on primeval codes of body language to figure out what the hell’s going on. Julio Medem’s ‘Basque Ball’ is interesting because it makes clearest how much the director is manipulating interview footage by using copious and obvious jump-cuts; for example one interviewee is framed in front of the ocean, the jagged rhythm of the incoming waves emphasizing how much is being left out. You have to wonder ‘to what end?’ To non-Spanish non-wonks it’s imposssible to keep track of who is saying what (flash subtitles tell us exactly *which* socialist nonviolent etc Basque sect is represented in each interview), so you wonder why Medem didn’t just go for a direct argument film in his own voice, rather than rely on the spurious authenticity of citation.

Fear of voice-over: what is it about documentaries and talking heads? Why do we need to see people say what they are saying. Given that most docs are edited so’s to make a coherent argument, using talking much as essay-writers use quotations from secondary sources (ie selectively), why bother with interviewees at all? ‘The Corporation’ is well worth seeing, but none of the theatrically released films in this ‘year of the documentary’ live up to Adam Curtis’ TV ‘The Power of Nightmares’.
‘Capturing the Friedmans’ comes closest: there the talking head format makes sense because all the talking heads contradict each other, and you have to fall back on primeval codes of body language to figure out what the hell’s going on.
Julio Medem’s ‘Basque Ball’ is interesting because it makes clearest how much the director is manipulating interview footage by using copious and obvious jump-cuts; for example one interviewee is framed in front of the ocean, the jagged rhythm of the incoming waves emphasizing how much is being left out.
You have to wonder ‘to what end?’ To non-Spanish non-wonks it’s imposssible to keep track of who is saying what (flash subtitles tell us exactly *which* socialist nonviolent etc Basque sect is represented in each interview), so you wonder why Medem didn’t just go for a direct argument film in his own voice, rather than rely on the spurious authenticity of citation.

There’s a weird gag in ‘Bridget Jones 2′…

There’s a weird gag in ‘Bridget Jones 2′: two people sitting next each other on a plane to Thailand both get out ‘The Beach’ as holiday reading. Now, the book, published in 2000, is set in about 1997, so the joke makes sense. But the film is set in the now, so it doesn’t. And the best gag in the book, Bridge’s interview with Colin Firth, doesn’t appear for boringly ‘obvious’ reasons. Quite clearly the really clever thing would have been to have her interview Matthew McFadden. Despite expectations, though: much better than the first film.

Biographers of film directors

Biographers of film directors tend not to follow the example of their literary cousins in that intense examination of inner life is usual eschewed in favour of discussion of the director’s work itself. This makes perfect sense inasmuch as film is clearly a collective effort at every step, whereas writing — at the moment of writing — is a solitary activity. Martin Amis (wrongly) says that writers are just a bunch of guys in rooms; and the upshot is that the film biography tends to work better as a ‘portrait of the age’ than of the individual creating mind. In other words, they should have much broader appeal: personally I can’t be bothered with the childhood and old age sections of any biography, and prefer ‘group biographies’ to books devoted to individuals. But other people don’t seem to.

Which is a shame, because Kevin Jackson’s biography of Humphrey Jennings is likely to be overshadowed by whatever Bloomsbury blockbuster is tipped for Xmas fame this season as a result. Jennings isn’t simply a film director, so Jackson manages to weave in a some lovely sketches of, among other things, the foundation of Cambridge English in the ’20s, the Grierson documentary movement, British Surrealism, and Mass-Observation. IF you buy two film books this month, make Jackson’s the other one.

Am I alone in finding David Starkey repellant? He’s history’s Carol Vorderman. “I’ve tried to eliminate the really crass errors but I’ve no doubt that I’ve made huge numbers of mistakes. That’s the name of the game when you’re looking at the big picture,” he tells today’s Guardian. Not a sentiment you’d get from, oh, any remotely serious historian: the mystery is that Starkey is regarded as a a better fit for TV and stardom over anyone else. Maybe you have to really *want* it: get the agent, work the old contacts, I don’t know, otherwise I’d be doing it myself. Whatever, Starkey’s ideas would have seem antediluvian in Namier’s day, and teh Guardian’s l4ym0r inverse snobbery line — “He’s not some rent-a-gob pundit straight out of Oxbridge. Like them or hate them, his views are founded in academic rigour [unlike aanyone from Oxbridge...]” — is merely a symptom of the real dumbing-down both it and Starkey claim to deplore. The ‘trickle-down effect’ into TV from the serious historiography of the past 70 years (basically from the French ‘Annales’ school via the British Marxist group) would appear to have been decisively halted — whether this is or is not itself a result of ‘trickle-down’ from the corporatizing of publishing — which, of course, has made history so hot right now — I don’t know. Rockist? 4 life, beeyotch.

Am I alone in finding David Starkey repellant? He’s history’s Carol Vorderman. “I’ve tried to eliminate the really crass errors but I’ve no doubt that I’ve made huge numbers of mistakes. That’s the name of the game when you’re looking at the big picture,” he tells today’s Guardian. Not a sentiment you’d get from, oh, any remotely serious historian: the mystery is that Starkey is regarded as a a better fit for TV and stardom over anyone else. Maybe you have to really *want* it: get the agent, work the old contacts, I don’t know, otherwise I’d be doing it myself. Whatever, Starkey’s ideas would have seem antediluvian in Namier’s day, and teh Guardian’s l4ym0r inverse snobbery line — “He’s not some rent-a-gob pundit straight out of Oxbridge. Like them or hate them, his views are founded in academic rigour [unlike aanyone from Oxbridge...]” — is merely a symptom of the real dumbing-down both it and Starkey claim to deplore. The ‘trickle-down effect’ into TV from the serious historiography of the past 70 years (basically from the French ‘Annales’ school via the British Marxist group) would appear to have been decisively halted — whether this is or is not itself a result of ‘trickle-down’ from the corporatizing of publishing — which, of course, has made history so hot right now — I don’t know. Rockist? 4 life, beeyotch.

I think ‘Mean Girls’ is my favourite American film of the year

I think ‘Mean Girls’ is my favourite American film of the year, and one of my favourite ever teen movies. Like ‘Cruel Intentions’ it has an 18th century feel which I probably why I also relate it to Eric Rohmer, whose latest, ‘Triple Agent’, is an absolute hoot. Rohmer made his name by co-authoring with Claude Chabrol the first serious study of Hitchcock’s films; but while Chabrol’s suspense films clearly owe much to the big man, Rohmer’s, which, like CC’s, sort of fell into a somewhat cosy pattern circa 1969 (CC: bourgeois families not as stable as they look! ER: this is why they gave cupid wings, see!), belong more to the tradition of Laclos. ‘Triple Agent’ takes the typical Rohmer set-up (’photographs of people talking’) and scandalously substitutes discussions of international power politics for the usual discourse on the meandering ways of the heart.
The time is 1936-7, the place Paris, and the Popular Front is falling apart on the issue of intervention in Spain, threatened from within and without by the Nazis and their Cagoulard avant-garde. Our White Russian protag has to ratiocinate his way out of being killed by Stalin’s agents — the film could as easily have been made as ‘Sabotage’ by Hitchcock. But there are no bombs on buses: it’s all talk.
The film is funny partly in itself: it’s about the little ironies, like the preference of Whites and Russian Stalinists alike for non-modern representational art, as against the French Stalinist Left. No doubt it’s also funny because Rohmer doing a spy film is a funny idea (S&S front page ‘License to Talk’ nails it). But the film is also the most intelligent political film of the year: politics-as-motivation has always been weak in the cinema, with right-wing directors unable to think outside the individualist box, but with the concept of allegiance to causes on the left remaining a somewhat romantic concern rarely made convincing. Here the way politics is mediated through other loyalties is captured acutely. Never falling prey to psychologism, only the absense of Lindsay Lohan keeps it from minor masterpiece status.

‘The applause of the French in Cannes for Michael Moore’s 9/11 was the sound of the cement drying over the corpse of Kerry’s chances of carrying the Midwest.’

‘The applause of the French in Cannes for Michael Moore’s 9/11 was the sound of the cement drying over the corpse of Kerry’s chances of carrying the Midwest.’ — Counterpunch.

But Counterpunch also says that the dread scenario confronting us is a rightward shift by the Dems to take the Midwest next time around: are they advocating cynical politicking or aren’t they? If the Midwest middle-class doesn’t like gay rights, science, or Michael Moore, then obviously the progressive party will have to find another constituency among the 80m-odd non-voters. But it’s trivial to bring individual movies into this. What’s been brought into focus, from a movie perspective, is just how little you learn about countries from their films — or perhaps about the US in particular. And this is new: the Old Testament world of Westerns provides the best kind of map, I think, for this election, not in the obvious ‘Dubya as cowboy’ sense, but in terms of the antimonies of ownership and exploitation produced by puritan morality. The seeming contradiction between ‘natural rights’-based hostility to abortion and the denial of said rights inherent [sorry am writing like a drain, can't think why] in the assumption that the earth is there to be manipulated and exploited is at the heart of many six-gun epic. I don’t mean to suggest that ’social comment’ entails Loach-like observational realism, far from it, and I, like most of the world’s cinemagoers, am unenthralled by modern westerns. It’s natural that young filmmakers should be happy to have escaped the interior for LA, and that they should regard it with contempt (as in Solondz) but I suppose that where directors like Sam Fuller had *some* life-experience (he as a reporter in the South during the Depression) feeding into their dramas, the socio-cultural background of most directors now is that much more narrow.

London Film Festival

London Film Festival: the hot news is, fuck the London Film Festival. It’s a kind of test case for reception theory: I used to think, sponsors be damned, here is an opportunity to watch lots of skill films. But such is the intensity of branding and general Murdoch fannydangle that my old position is no longer tenable. I’m not going to play the viral game and say what the ‘hot’ films are. I saw some good films and some bad, but I would have seen them eventually, in my own time, and without pressure at some point anyway. No film is ‘discovered’ at the London Film Festival: most of them have been bought for distribution already. This is true of the Cambridge Film Festival, which I boosted here. But that had charm, and an enthusiastic audience: this has awful non-fans. Last night I overheard a conversation along the lines of ‘I kind of got confused between [Faye Wong] and [Gong Li]‘ — from someeone who had seen ‘2046′ already at Cannes, ie who was likely High Up in the film world. Possibly I like going for days out (ie to Cambridge) more than to films. I dunno. Martin Luther was right.

A magazine editor once gave me a very severe look…

A magazine editor once gave me a very severe look when I told him ‘Century of the Self’ was better than any movie in 2002. I don’t think he owned a TV. I like what I’ve seen of Adam Curtis’ newie ‘Century of PH34R’ or something, which isn’t much ‘cos Tescos home delivery have been messing me about. But do I score for recognizing his nice use of, um, score? Morricone’s ‘Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion’. Subliminal, man.

David Thomson says

David Thomson says it might be a fault of his that he can’t find too much enthusiasm for Ken Loach, despite his obvious merits, and the same no doubt extends to the Great British public at large, or certainly to me. In a certain pessimistic perspective Loach shares all the problems of the British left at large: empiricism, moralism, humanism — or so the antagonists in this fascinating interview from the greatest interweb film resource of all time seem to think.

This exchange between two seminal members of the filmmaking leftgeoisie on Loach’s Family Life (1971) contains the root of the hostile relations between theory and filmmaking that obtain even now. In terms of historical materialism, it’s possible that Loach really has the edge here: isn’t Wollen making the neo-Platonist argument that individual lives are mere ‘instances’ of a greater truth, named capitalism?

Peter Wollen: ‘By making it these particular people, and by making it so perfectly realistic, in the end it either becomes just those particular people, and you lose sight of the general, theoretical points which were what you started with.’
Ken Loach: ‘I tend to see it as the inverse of what you’re saying. It’s possible from observing individuals reacting on one another to make some generalized statement, and that in fact you’re looking through the other end of the telescope.’

Afterthought: In theory, Wollen should prefer Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose left-inflected tales of petit-bourgeois woe make an interesting ‘Brechtian’ counterpart to Ken Loach’s work: Ae Fond Kiss and RWF’s Fear Eats the Soul will almost certainly appear as a double-bill somewhere in the course of time. But it seems to me that, if Fassbinder ever did acheive that elusive ‘alienation effect’ in his films, it’s absent now, and his work is just as affecting, in the contentious ‘humanist’ sense, as Loach’s best.