usher usher celluloid

Filmed on Sunday 23rd March after a surprisingly substantial snowfall (read: over three inches deep) had left Yorkshire unseasonably white. The musical accompaniment is courtesy of firstly, Deerhunter’s Tape Hiss Orchid from Cryptograms, and secondly, Stereolab’s The Seeming and the Meaning off of Peng!

The old boat is almost seaworthy again. The man has worked on her for a week and more, patching and caulking and painting. The name of the boat has faded on the stern. Now the man sits, freshening the name with white paint - SCALLOP.

The small hut above the beach has been attended to already. A new pane glitters in the seaward-facing window. A board has been renewed here and there to keep out rats and birds. There are stipplings of tar here and there. It’s plain, this restoration has not happened a day too soon…Another winter, and both boat and hut would be beyond repair.

From Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown

Last night I watched The Passion Of The Christ, Mel Gibson’s two-hour long interpretation of, well, The Passion Of The Christ. Kudos for a concise title that perfectly summarizes what happens during the film. More than that though the film was genuinely affecting on an emotional level. So much so that this very lapsed Catholic came closer than ever since lapsing to coming back to The Church. Admittedly that’s still an incredibly long way off (ie. it will never happen) but the power of the film to make me reconsider my world view, even if just for a moment, is not to be sniffed at.

The film is as far as I can tell very true to it’s source material (some of the four gospels, I can’t remember which ones document the passion, I think it may be Mark that goes into the greatest detail). What impressed me most was the film’s focus. Whilst it does remain true to The Bible’s accounts it doesn’t waste the average viewer’s time by showing us the more inconsequential, Christian train-spotterish things. This is to the great credit of Gibson and his team. He appears to have a good narrative sensibility insofar as the film trims the narrative fat found in the Bible and leaves us with a film focused solely on Christ’s final hours. This doesn’t mean perspective is lost. Judas’ treason and eventual suicide is shown early in the film, restrained flashbacks show the mother-son bond between Jesus and Mary. I would wager that a viewer not brought up in the Christian tradition would still be able to follow and understand the action.

The cast is pretty excellent too. Gibson put a lot of faith in many of them, most virtual unknowns. The script (co-written with Benedict Fitzgerlad, apparently he’s now suing Gibson) is often minimal. The power of the images is evidently Gibson’s primary concern yet these would be worthless without the excellent performances. Certainly Jim Caviezel isn’t stretched when it comes to dialogue but his unintrusive performance, together with Hristo Shopov as Pilate, raises the film considerably.

Passion, Dogma and Centuries-Old Christian Schisms

I saw most of the final part of a HBO/BBC mini-series of The Passion and it’s preceding days. The little I saw of this biblical adaptation didn’t impress me as much as the feature film. Whilst this version lasted several hours, eschewing the focused approach in favour of following a large ensemble cast it occurred to me that the marked differences of aesthetic and artistic choices were nothing new. The series preferred flat, naturalistic lighting and relied on it’s grounded, matter-of-fact presentation of Christ’s miraculous feats to affect the viewer. The film opted for a rich visual intensity and strives for a persuasive kind of poetry with it’s intense portrait’s of Christ’s suffering. Anglicanism versus Catholicism? An overly neat conclusion I know (I think Gibson is a member of an ultra-traditional branch of Catholicism that still holds Mass completely in Latin).

Additional: There is a reason why I stole the REM song for the post title. I heard them on the radio playing live at the Albert Hall. I’m already a massive fan, particularly of their earlier 80’s stuff. But I just realized that Electrolite is one of the best songs ever.

1000+ words of half-ideas and inarticulate reasoning on movies I’ve recently seen

Battle for Haditha (Nick Broomfield, 2007)

From the little I know of Broomfield’s work prior to Battle for Haditha I think it’s fair to say he isn’t aspiring to comfortable, Hollywoodesque movie-making. This was reinforced after watching BFH. His telling of this real-event was sober and simple, straight down- the - line in a manner that brilliantly cut through the layers of Visual Iraq Bomb Ephemera the Western Viewer has accumulated in her head. By ephemera I mean to say the countless stories of death and suffering the most casual Western observer of the war has seen in news reports for the past five years.

Broomfield seems acutely aware of the limitations and opportunities this macabre visual literacy grants him when it comes to the creation of a film about Iraq. As I see it, upon the film’s vague concept emerging in his head he grabbed the proverbial nettle and decided to exploit our familiarity with Iraq Bombings and present a focused film, shot in a condensed time frame. Add to this a camera that probes in a cinema verite style and a powerful film is to be expected.

What we get is the anticipated power, but on many different human levels. Broomfield moves beyond the shots of instant, painful suffering (be it from a gunshot or a bomb explosion) quickly. He acknowledges the unparalleled intensity of these pains but recognizes that the film must move beyond mimicry of the news reports. So the twenty four killings occur quickly. Only stooges of Bond villains die in such great numbers in such a short space of time; merely presenting these deaths on the screen is an admirable feat. Think of how easily the army death tolls in Iraq and mentioned yet how desperate the US government was to suppress photos of coffins covered in the Stars and Stripes.

An occasion that elevates the film and make it required viewing:

After the IED bomb explodes and kills one US Private, his comrades hunt for the men responsible. Their leader, Corporal Ramirez, has just killed innocent Iraqi bystanders in a fit of rage. In the nearby houses an Iraqi family has witnessed the explosion (but not the shooting) and are patiently waiting for their house to be searched by the soldiers. With nothing to hide (bar their understandable but fatal failure to report the IED being planted) they wait patiently. The US soldiers progress up towards their house, systematically killing all they encounter. They enter the family’s home and do the same.

Perhaps this is a stock trick (used in many horror, action films) : leave your characters aware of the peril they face yet confident they will survive said peril. Then kill them. What moves this above any cinematic trick is that the family’s deducing they are safe is totally rational and correct. What makes it wrong and why they are killed is that the rules of combat are disregarded by the soldiers who enter their house.

Broomfield captures the war’s most infamous moments with this sequence. People were humiliated in Abu Ghraib, left exposed after Iraq’s entire infrastructure was dismantled following the invasion, and effectively lied to regarding the justifications for the invasion in the first place. All these are linked in that systematic failures occurred and human incompetency took the bullet. Battle For Haditha doesn’t ignore the bottom line though, no matter what the system’s faliures it is individuals that carried out the crimes. Corporal Ramirez had requested to see a doctor to help with the nightmares he had been experiencing prior to the massacre yet was denied on the ground that this was only possible during leave. This implied link between the US army’s institutional failings and the massacre is as close as the film comes to drawing clumsy conclusions. Luckily the denial of access to a doctor is almost superfluous as Broomfield in every scene has built upon the troop’s daily hardships so that we view the massacre as inevitable. The point seems to be that whether this massacre happened in Haditha isn’t the point. The film presents a compelling case that it would have happened somewhere in Iraq, that the inadequacies of the US army, the inadequacies of daily life for many Iraqis, the inadequacies of a poisonous radical Islam made it inevitable.

Two Flaws

There aren’t any major flaws though there are enough to keep the film from soaring and perhaps reaching the numbers of people that it deserves:

The Score: haunting vocals combined with what I can only guess are instruments indigenous to the Middle East squashed together in a manner that might be quite moving if heard alone. It distracts more often than it accentuates the film’s most powerful moments. At times I felt it was quite instructive, telling me what to feel when I was already feeling the emotion of a scene. I know it’s a lot to ask but a complete absence of soundtrack would have been nice. If used inventively I think the sounds of urban Iraq could have made a more interesting accompaniment.

Slo-Mo: I’m not a fan at the best of times but when a director employs it with the apparent intention of somehow improving on already effective film of people being shot in cold blood it only really serves to make the shooting look even more gratuitous than it already is. More than anything it took me out of the film after it had so brilliantly drawn me in to that situation. When Broomfield gives a wide-angle bird’s eye-view of a woman running to her boyfriend’s dead body we are spared a slo-mo. We are shown her desperate, confused half-run to him in a real-time that is especially tragic since we already know he is dead.

Battle for Haditha isn’t a great film but I would struggle to think how a more elegant portrait of human suffering could be made out of a film on Iraq. I respect Michael Moore for his populism in spite of his flaws. For me however Nick Broomfield’s is the film so accessible and powerful that it deserves to be shown in every school.

A little short I shot a fortnight or so ago. The title is self explanatory apart from that the legend himself hasn’t come back from the dead, just his music. Uncertain bird flight and Monk’s piano playing are such a nice pairing.

I guy I used to work with thought that Monk’s first name was Felonious. He thought it was one of those nicknames that many Jazz greats have and therefore assumed he was well-known for being a serial law-breaker. He was young at the time.

Three shots shown in sequence towards the end of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude. Various paternalistic authority figures in 19 year-old Harold’s life are giving their two-cents on his relationship with 79 year-old Maude:

I won’t ruin the genius of these three shots by giving you the words these three each utter. Suffice to say they take Ashby’s perceptive (but, i’ll admit, stereotyped) views of their profession to new, horribly true, painfully funny depths.

I saw a video of Jonathan Demme introducing this film during which he said how Ashby had perfect control of his vision, of film’s formal qualities right here in only his second feature. He couldn’t have been more right, as this shot proves.

I love Ashes to Ashes, love the characters, visuals, jokes and the neat little comparisons between then and now. Problem is I think i’m beginning to like it in spite of the plot. I’m still OK with the whole Alex getting back to her daughter bit (even if its a a mere tweak on Sam Tyler’s situation) and the emerging love triangle thing with Alex, Gene and Alex’s Godfather’s younger self (should that be frowned upon?). The problem for me is the hour long episode.

Legendary Leeds Lad Chris Moyles with Ashes to Ashes stars.

The Hour - And why it’s not working:

Plenty of shows have probably worked in the hour long format. However it’s telling that many of my current favourite dramas haven’t. Mad Men and Damages both last around forty five minutes and Lost, a program I no longer watch but loved in its first two series, last around that same time. Ad breaks are perhaps good at more than selling stuff, they also help the writers keep a tight episode together, thus stopping the kind of ill-focused plot we saw last night.

Life on Mars suffered the same problem in its last few episodes. The plot was fuzzy and it became obvious that, as great as the show remained, the writers were killing time until the big finale. The problems of doing it the second time are that with a big finale that everybody expects we are more than ever involved in the episodes rather than the big arc (at least I am). Unless they think the formula’s so great that they can send a different guy or girl back to a random year forever (a la Dr Who) then the show needs to focus.

There’s too much flab in many of these episodes. Life on Mars (sorry to keep comparing but it’s inevitable) chose a great story and put everything into that story for the whole episode. It knew that we only needed a minute of Sam staring at the test screen or even a cleverly written line to remind us of his peril. Above all the story came first.

Last night’s biggest misstep for me was the time spent on Ray moaning about Chris spending too much time with Shaz. This took up part of several scenes and, although giving said characters more, well, character, gave us precious little else. I’m usually for TV and film portraying the minutiae of normal life as accurately as possible but the whole mate-gets-jealous-of-mate-spending-too-much-time-with-his-girlfriend-routine is just too mundane.

A Caveat: I still love Ashes to Ashes. It’s still the best thing on British TV. I just want it to reach the same heights as Life on Mars did.