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Posts by flares

I am a critic and researcher of sf, with interests in queer theory, postmodernism, psychoanalysis and other long words. I have various blogs.
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Fifty Shades of Hamearis lucina

The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014)

Towards the start of the opening credits of The Duke of Burgundy, I spotted the name of executive producer Ben Wheatley. He directed the genre bending Kill List (2011), the rather baffling A Field in England (2013), a couple of episodes of NuWho and he’s working on High-Rise. I couldn’t help but see that there was an uncanny film at work — a hidden film. On the one hand, there’s the Peter Greenaway version, which would need a Michael Nyman score, more camera tracking and an organisational system (by genus of butterfly?). On the other hand there’s the horror film,  possibly sf. Clearly the credits sequence is meant to invoke 1970s low budget movies, a sexploitation or two, maybe even a hint at Hammer. In a recurring scenario — this film is so about its repetition — the camera pans along a crowd watching a talk on butterflies and moths and, among all the woman, there are a couple of shop dummies. Autons? Cheaper than  extras? A nod toward the artificiality of it all? Or do we have a body snatchers scenario and they’re all insects? As  Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) locates and opens a body-sized chest in the house, I wondered what horror we were to find in it. Later, briefly, there was an answer (as well as a longer answer).

So Evelyn (there’s an echo of Angela Carter there) arrives at a house, knocks and is admitted, being told off by Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) for being late and for sitting down without invitation (I confess my first thought was she had not been given permission — a Pavlovian training from my own childhood).  Evelyn is set to work, cleaning the study — a space full of dead butterflies and larvae — and doing the laundry. When, as is inevitable, she fails to please her mistress, she is punished, behind a closed bathroom door, and possibly by a method that the British government recently criminalised on streaming video. If the acting seems a little off — well, think of the acting and dubbing in Dario Argento films if you haven’t (as I haven’t) seen Jess Franco films, and the fact that it is All More Complicated than you think it is.

It is obviously less explicit than that other film, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), for the most part at least, and we would do well to avoid falling into an old value judgement about pornography and erotica. Here’s Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian:

Peter Strickland’s new film, The Duke of Burgundy, is different: it is a labour of love, whereas Fifty Shades of Grey was a labour of money.

Whilst clearly a budget of some significance was thrown at the other film, it has made pots of money and the original texts were bestselling adaptations of bestselling novels, this rather begs a question about Sam Taylor-Johnson’s artistic intentions in making the film alongside all the other crew members and the cast. Strickland, presumably, didn’t get a fee? Srsly? Whilst clearly I wasn’t a fan of that better known film, it is very easy to be snide about materials that a large female audience has enjoyed.

Obviously there are ambiguities to navigate. I’m inclining to the sense that it’s an exaggeration of the kind of materialistic relationship that many straight women enter into in capitalist society and that it isn’t necessarily endorsing it. This is not quite the same as suggesting that it’s a dramatization of the kind of abusive relationship that too many women (read: any non-consenting abusive relationship) are in or that women have the freedom to choose their sexual activities even if these are masochistic in nature (and, indeed, that’s so none of my business). Whilst clearly we could say the words Internalised Misogyny, we have a novel by a female ur-writer transformed by a female novelist adapted by a female screen writer filmed by a female director. Compare, say, Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), where a male novelist is adapted by a male screenwriter is filmed by a male director. It’s not my place to label, but which one seems more likely to be feminist? One of them is a female vision of (some) female fantasies and the other is a male vision of (some) female fantasies. The fact that both characters are female makes a difference.

So, whilst it has to be noted that the entire cast of The Duke of Burgundy appears to be female, Peter Strickland, director and screenwriter, is a bloke. The BDSM scenario may be a representation of female empowerment, but it’s a male vision.  Clearly the film passes the Bechdel Test, but that’s no guarantee it’s feminist. (I note, again, I have no authority to issue such a label.) At points I found myself pondering whether entomology is part of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and the problem of a narrative in which the abuser has apparently been “seduced” by the victim. (“She made me do it.”)

I was particularly disturbed by the sequence when the camera zooms in on the darkened crotch of Cynthia and goes on an extended fantasy riff — in both the sexual and non-realist sense — before pulling back again. Is this, I wondered, a misogynist fear of what all those women get up to when men aren’t around? Perhaps not even women, but Insect Things? Where are all the men? Victims of preying mantises?

But the actors do what they do well, and it is beautifully shot and designed the hell out of — there’s a perfume credit, a long list of butterflies and very detailed annotations of the field recordings used in the film. It deserves to do well so that BFI and Film Four investment can be repaid. To say this is a better film than Fifty Shades, however, is probably not a useful judgement; I’m not even sure that I’d be more likely to rewatch it. I do want to seek out Katalin Varga (2006) and  Berberian Sound Studio  (2012) though.

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Caspar: The Ori Gersht

John Virtue: The Sea (Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, 17 January 2015-12 April 2015)

Ori Gersht: Don’t Look Back (Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, 7 February 2015-26 April 2015)

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

As an incomer to southron lands, I guess I should never speak ill of Kent, but Sussex has the edge over it in terms of galleries — Updown, Anthea Turner Contemporary, Mascall’s and Sidney Cooper weighed up against Pallant House, the De La Warr Pavilion, the Jedward and the Towner, not to mention Brighton. Against Chipperfield’s retread of his Wakefield Hepworth design in the (oh go on then) Turner Contemporary, they have a number of glorious modernist or modernist-style buildings and (oh go on then) the Jerwood. More to the point, alongside exhibitions there are collection strategies, but that’s another story.

Towner

That being said, as with the De La Warr, the Towner needs a lick of paint.

First to the top floor, and John Virtue’s monochromatic renderings of the sea. I went to see Maggie Hambling’s Walls of Water, in part because of the virtriolic review by Jonathan Jones,  and that works on a similar principle of abstract expressionist versions of naturalism. Whilst Hambling allows herself colour, Virtue barely gets to grey. Would the Blakeney Tourist Board be chuffed? I was a little disappointed by the paintings simply having numbers and dates (I like that kind of hermeneutic unpacking) and I wondered how some of them can take three years… And yet, that sizeable floor space of the Towner allows for distance and, once you stop, pause, focus, lose yourself, there is something powerful. I reckon you need Ralph Vaughan Williams’s symphony being played, but there is something going on here. Despite myself, I liked.

And then to Ori Gersht, on the second floor, and a photographer who teaches in Rochester.  Central to this show are two films — and I confess to a certain amount of impatience with art films (as opposed to film as art). All too often it’s poor cinematography and I’ve got the joke fairly quickly and how the hell can you view it properly in gallery conditions?

First here, though, a room of photographs, treescapes, mountainsides, a little blurred, a little resembling an album cover, something by Led Zeppelin?

Something, someone, at the back of my head — Caspar David Friedrich, the romantic artist of the mountain top?

Through to a second room — there’s a double, jarring, out of alignment photo of a tree, a silver birch? I have a memory of a painting, I think by Johan Christian Dahl, of a tree, that represented Norway.

And then a further memory, more recent, of someone who did this for Germany. The mind is blank.

Is Gersht in this tradition? [ETA: yes, well, of course… see below]

Onto the film Evaders (2009), a twin screen production which begins… well you watch it on a loop, so you come in partway through, and I’ve lost track, but we have a bearded man in a hotel room, and we have him walking in the dark, and we have wind, we have a storm, we have mountainsides. There is a voiceover, reading Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in relation to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, and Gersht is clearly making a link between Benjamin’s words and his fateful attempted walk to freedom in 1940 from Nazi occupied France across the Pyrenees to Spain. But emigration from Portbou was forbidden  and Benjamin, in ill-health, faced deportation back to a concentration camp. He chose to kill himself. Benjamin is played by Clive Russell (I knew I recognised him) and the music is by Scanner.

A number of the photographs shown near the tree were taken almost blindly out of a moving window, from a train Gersht travelled on between Krakow and Auschwitz — a route Jewish prisoners would have been taken on to the camps, but on windowless trains. There’s a problem with art “about” the holocaust, about aestheticizing atrocity — Adorno’s line “Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben”, normally paraphrased something like “no [lyric] poetry after Auschwitz”, springs to mind. But it must be engaged with. The moving camera gives an uncanny blurring; in the next room, Gersht is in Galicia, modern western Ukraine, home of his father and other ancestors. These are overexposed, tending to white out, again haunted. Friedrich is invoked in the notes, the romanticisation of the landscape.

This brings us to the second film, The Forest (2005), again on a loop, mostly of a forest and stillness, but with slow, dreadful, ear-splitting, felling of trees. The film slows into slow motion (he filmed at high speed?), again playing with the durée of the image. The loop means you lose the beginning and the end, until there’s a fade to and from black. Where does the work (of art in the age of mechincal reproduction) begin?

The words “The Clearing” allude to Martin Heidegger, and his sense of Being as standing out as in a clearing.

In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting… Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.

In the film, the labour is invisible,  missing, and I think from an ecological perspective, the clearing hear is ambivalent at back. Sustainable forestry? A century or two of growing over in an extend second of fall? And again, we are viewing this within the context of the mid-twentieth century atrocities of the Second World War. There is a sublimity at work here, but a terrible beauty was born.

ETA:

Der Einsame Baum

Caspar David Friedrich, Der Einsame Baum (The Lonely Tree, 1822, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin)

A little digging pointed me to Der einsame Baum (The lonely tree, 1822) by Caspar David Friedrich. I’m not entirely sure where I came across it — possibly in a book on Peder Baulke (who was Norwegian but active in Germany). The consensus is that this tree is an oak, and among the interpretations is that it represents the German people — although in 1822 it was still Prussia. The Riesengebirge/Krkonoše mountains in the background (if it is them) are now in the Czech republic but marked a division between Bohemia and Silesia. I’ve been unable to find a copy of Gersht’s photo, which looked to my untrained arboreal eye to be a silver birch. It’s a very different image from Friedrich’s, of course, but  it’s still within the context of German identity.

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Nor Any Drop To Drink

Canterbury’s Sidney Cooper Gallery is one I overlook all too often, unforgivably. It’s a single room – well, a single room with a small room with a screen, situated on the high street at the west station end of town. I guess because it is so close, and so small, I don’t make the same kind of effort as I have with, say, Mascall’s Gallery at a school in Paddock Wood.

 

Still, I’ve seen a number of interesting shows over the years there, and Louise Bourgeois is coming up. (Colour me sceptical though as I like her sculptures and her narratives, but her drawings are a little bit “I’m-art-because-I’m-drawn-by-an-artist”.)

 

The current exhibition, which ends Saturday, is Tania Kovats, whose work I saw either at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park or Jupiter Land. File under sculpture, the work I saw before was a number of glass bottles of water from rivers around Britain, in a boathouse Iver a lake. The work here is similar – several hundred bottles of water from all the seas of the world. Ther is a laminated list of the bottles, and it’s notable, having crowd sourced the collection, that some seas are more popular than others. There is clearly a row of North Sea samples – although the rackage prevents you from being clear which is which, short of a methological counting. On the face of it, sea water is sea water is sea water, although the is clearly some settlement in some of the containers. The Dead Sea didn’t stand out. The obsessive in me would like to se a chemical analysis of the water – salt concentration and trace elements….

 

Meanwhile le there are a number of sculptures of layers, dramatising the impact of pressure upon stratification and relations of basalt. Perhaps the most striking is a slack and White coicture that is abstract in nature, and I suspect the impact of salt water on something, but I didn’t note down what. There’s a short film, uncredited but I’m guessing the work of Ben Rowley.

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The Real Thing, Or: Love is Strangled

[I wrote this some time ago, but it didn’t seem to be published at the time]

 

Love is Strange (Ira Sachs, 2014)
Gay movies always seem to be about death. Well, maybe that’s an over statement but male gay narratives partake of a gothic that seems out of statistical probability. If it’s not HIV related, it’s suicide or a violent end. One reaches for the Kleenex far too often and not in a happy ending way. Living happily ever after is a fantasy too far, it often seems, although – I know, I know – for drama to happen bad things have to happen to good people. (But see Der Kreis)

File Love is Strange under bittersweet. Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) have lived together for thirty-nine years, one a talented if unsuccessful artist, the other a talented music teacher for a catholic school. But the marriage means that the school can no longer turn a blind eye to George’s sexuality and he is fired – meaning that they can’t afford the mortgage on their appointment. Whilst there is the option of moving to Poughkeepsie, the two stay in spare rooms (or spare bunkbeds/sofas) of friends and relatives whilst they sort themselves out.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Molina – he was Kenneth Halliwell in Prick Up Your Ears Stephen Frears, 1987), was a hoot as a habitual liar in Trust Me (Tony Dow, 1992) and is in the film of The Normal Heart (Ryan Murphy, 2014) – and Lithgow I first saw as transgendered Roberta in The World According to Garp (George Roy Hill, 1982). The relationship is absolutely beautiful, utterly credible, with a real sense of a shared history between them. The awkwardness of being put up – which rapidly turns in being put up with – is convincing, although I think Kate (Marisa Tomei) is given a bit of a thankless rôle as overly keen host and self-centered if put upon writer. The direction is leisurely, braving the chance to hold a shot for ten seconds longer than comfortable. It feels – not to be critical – that it wanted to be a theatre play. Unlike most New York comedy dramas or sitcoms this is a multiethnic New York.

At the same time as the leisurely pace we are left wanting to know more – one family crisis seems unresolved, George’s letter to the school parents is more political speechifying than plot development, a positive twist is too far in the fairy tale wish-fulfilment territory and the resolution mechanics seem unfocused. The epilogue is positive, a story arc pays off, diversity seems to thrive. But it is a sunset.

Meanwhile, I recognised John Corbett from Northern Exposure, and the face I knew but couldn’t name belongs to Ed (Darren E. Burrows) from the same programme. Game of Thrones gets a product placement, and I’m not sure I’ve seen a Dungeons and Dragons consultant credited before on a film.

All of this is certainly worth a look, although I noted this is another example of how every five years “Hollywood” notes that there is a mature audience as well as teenagers of all ages.

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Uranus Descending

Jupiter Ascending (The Wachowskis, 2015)

There is no tail.

Once upon a time, there was a suitcase full of money, which was in the wrong hands, and kept falling into the hands of two lesbian lovers – and it was gloriously of its kind and sui generis and said oddly interesting things for lesbianism for two male writers and directors and was ludicrously over designed. But once Bound (The Wachowskis, 1996) was released, the directors opened the suitcase and took the money and made The Matrix (1999) and it was of its kind and soi disant and was ludicrously over designed. It kind of worked as long as you didn’ttake its sexual politics too seriously and got het up over Trinity. And because the film left us wanting more, for once we got this and the conceit of storing humans for energy just fell apart. And so, after produced films and adaptations of manga Speed Racer (2008) and of novel Cloud Atlas (with Tom Twyker, 2012), they put their bid in for either a Star Wars sequel or Marvel adaptation with Jupiter Ascending.

What we have is a fabulously overblown Cinderella cross bed with Beauty and the Beast. Jupiter Jones’s dad (James D’Arcy) had a hilariously inadequate telescope in Russia and is killed in a random burglary before Jupiter (Mila Kunis) is born. Relocated to Chicago, she is forced to clean toilets and sell her eggs in order to buy a slightly less pathetic telescope. This brings her to the attention of the Brassica family – Tightass, Kale and Bok Chou – who own vast swathes of the galaxy and have seeded Earth as a source of anti-ageing cream. Jupiter, it turns out, has exactly the same DNA as the Brassica’s dead mother and thus owns Earth.

A Marvel-style diverse posse (Africa American with Mohawk, one-eyed cigar chewer (I may have imagined the cigar) and blue haired Japanese girl with poorly invisibility cloaked flying motorbike)) are after her, as is half-dog, half-man fallen angel Caine Wise (Channing Tatum). He’s there to protect her, sort of, but he’s being paid, and half of Chicago is temporarily destroyed although no one seems to notice (the humans can be reprogrammed, you see). They seek refuge with Chicago-based Sheffieldian bee keeper Stinger Apini (Sean “marked-for-betrayal-and/or-death” Bean), and before you know it, Jupiter is in the planet Jupiter, dealing with the threatening threesome who for some reason want Earth above all other planets, and can achieve this by marrying her, or something. Jupiter has to be rescued, repeatedly.

Eddie Redmayne has just won a BAFTA for being Stephen Hawking, and frankly his whispering simpers won’t trouble the academy for next year. I’m reminded of his curious performance in Savage Grace (Tom Kalin, 2007), a troubled bisexual teen who may or may not have sex with his own mother. The Freudian reading of that film writes itself, even down to a convenient dog collar of disavowal, and I guess in Jupiter Ascending we have an absent daddy to explain why the Brassica siblings are closer to barking than Caine ever is. As the Jupiter base, the scenery and the plot fall apart bit by bit, the jeopardy is both cranked up (we have a toilet cleaner trying to climb an endless ladder!) and reduced (have these get out of jail free cards). Beneath CGI and possibly the odd bit of latex we have a frustrating number of British accents and Torchwood refugees, who were presumably cheap to buy when the film was in the UK. We have an elephant as a pilot who appears to be called Ganesha, settings which would have John Martin received for his oil paints and a redressed Ely cathedral to Keep It Real.

So Jupiter is great because of her natural genes and Caine is great because of his spliced jeans and we have an sfnal family melodrama where meritocracy never comes into it. Earth as a means of recharging batteries makes as much sense as the Matrix set up, and would make an average episode of nu-Who.

I’m actually depressed to dislike this movie – it’s kind of obvious it’s going to be pants and I was genuinely hoping to be able to make a case for it as the next masterpiece. It’s a film with a female actor at its heart – although it gives short shrift to and forgets about the other women. The sisterhood of her family is under developed, as is the discourse about the sale of her eggs (and Redmayne’s speech about capitalism). I might even have been sold by the Groundhog Dayness of her daily grind, but frankly Shaun the Sheep Movie (Mark Burton and Richard Starzak, 2015) did it better.

ETA: I read this and this as they appeared, obviously, and both are clearly sound points of view. I didn’t reread them until after I wrote my piece. Unconsciously, I evidently channelled the punch line of the second blog. I regret not finding a Michael Caine joke (and since Caine is not a member of the Abrasax clan I was spared the need to find a vegetable joke riffing on his back catalogue) or being snide at the character being called “Wise”.

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Sub Text

Fifty Shades of Grey (Sam Taylor-Johnson, 2015)

“Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own beating.”

The curious thing about the film Fifty Shades of Grey is that it’s got this subtext of vampirism. I mean, you can read it two ways – in Marxist terms and in feminist terms. Not party politically, and not in that shock-horror women get horny too, or the somehow already all too lacking in agency somehow get turned on by giving up agency being all about reclaiming power … this is clearly no more a BDSM manual than it’s a guide to business management.

Our virginal hero, Anaesthesia Steel is substituted for the manflu suffering flat mate to interview communications guru Christian Grey for a student newspaper prior to graduation. Having bagged a parking space right outside the sky scraping phallus that is Grey Mansions, Anaphylactic trips and and falls at Grey’s feet as the first point in a ten sequence of cringe. For all that journalist seems to have become an acceptable job for a female character post-Lane, maybe sleeping with your subject is not smart (see also Iron Man and Superman, sorta). Grey turns the tables on Anatomy and asks her what first turned her on to literature – Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë or Thomas Hardy. She says hardy, and she’s already demonstrated her Tess pure woman wet blanket qualities whilst he is not yet Alec D’Urberville. He had figured on Austen, no doubt casting himself as Colin Firth/Mr Darcy; I suspect he really should be citing Emily as he’s more Heathcliff than Rochester.

Christian offers her all manner of beautiful things – accommodation, a car, flights in helicopters and gliders, alcohol whilst telling her to abstain, in fact an aspirant upper middle class married lifestyle. (The glider was maybe a little over the top – the footage reminding me of those videos shown in laser video jukeboxes in takeaways in the 1990s.) All she has to do in return is give up free will and sign here. It’s maybe more extreme than the standard terms of employment or the Book of Common Prayer marriage service but, still…* It’s mettafa. SKY TV, live football, telephone calls, broadband? Put up with Page 3.

The interesting sequences start when she plays hard to get – but I fear the tale of Little Orphan Christian and his redemption will take prominence. Anastasia will make her peace with him as with capitalism.

Dakota Johnson seems fair enough as Anastasia, although if you want real kink watch or rewatch her grandmother in Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964); the film is set on the wrong coast but it channels her mother’s Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988) although it lacks a Sigourney Weaver figure. Jamie Dornan is really the character from The Fall, hiding from Gillian Anderson and switching accents to put her off the scent.** (I fell off this series after episode one of season two, so obviously this isn’t a spoiler.) If this film really were radical – and dealing in subjects recently banned on streaming online video in the 2014 amendment to the Communications Act (2003) – we’d get Dornan full frontal, instead he is barely semi. He’s pretty enough and has a Firth look.

The sex could be a whole lot worse. It’s nowhere near as objectifying as usual Hollywood fare. I’m reminded of Alexander Walker’s line (regarding Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)) that he didn’t know it was possible to be bored and have an erection at the same time. Not that it was arousing. I note from the credits that the film has three editors. Perhaps this explains the antiseptic feel?

Nearly twenty years ago I taught with Mike Sanders, Xavier Mendik and Charlie Blake a popular culture module that included Mills and Boon and Black Lace novels. It’s clear from the reception of such books – all too easily dismissed as formulaic in part because of their audience – that there is a complex connoisseurship and a nuanced set of uses and gratifications for the texts, ranging from erotica to comic relief. I’m pretty sure that Sam Taylor-Johnson – Turner Prize nominated – doesn’t want us to avoid ironised readings. But, having read one Mills and Boon novel that was meta fictive in scope, this needn’t be because a Proper Artist filmed it. But I do suspect it’d be less dull if Grey really were a vampire.

ETA: further thoughts on this film and a British film with a faintly similar theme,   The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014).

* Compare Helen and Rob in The Archers.

** I’m told the way to get through The Fall is to imagine it as a French and Saunders parody, with Jennifer Saunders as Anderson and Dawn French as Dornan. Curiously the same casting works as Steel and Grey.

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If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War (Pallant House, Chichester) 

One of my favourite art spaces is the Pallant Gallery in Chichester, in theory three hours away by train (although Southern/South Eastern buggeration made this three and a half) – via something from the market and a coffee first and then a pint post charity shops. There’s a twenty-first century extension, which either filled a gap or replaced some indifferent building, and the Georgian era gallery complete with squeaky floor boards. The Pallant collection specialises in twentieth century art, mainly British, with London and Sussex artists well represented, plus smart local collecting. That the nearby cathedral was and is sympathetic helps.

imageI think I’ll have more to say about Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War, which closes on 15 February 2015 but moves to the Laing Gallery, Newcastle from March. I only know the barest outlines of the war, I’m afraid, a bloody struggle between Nationalists (supported by the Nazis) and Republicans (supported by Russians), in effect extending the Second World War back to 1936. It became a rallying cause for the Left in Britain, with poets, writers and artists heading off to fight or drive ambulances, largely on the Republican side. One atrocity led to Picasso’s astounding Guernica, shown in Britain at the Whitechapel, among other venues. A tapestry version was at the UN for many years, and was covered up when Colin Powell and John Negroponte spoke in front of it in 2003 during the lead up to the conflict in Iraq. The tapestry was moved to be shown at the Whitechapel – it was astounding when I saw it – and apparently is now in San Antonio. The Nationalists won and Spain became an authoritarian society until the death of General Franco in 1975.

Aside from participating in the conflict, there were a variety of responses from British artists. Partly there were various posters and portfolios, raising money or drawing attention to the suffering, starvation and refugees, clearly propaganda but bipartisan as the fund raising drew no distinction between Nationalist and Republican. Most artists were pro-Republican, seeking for Neville Chamberlain to change his neutral stance at the point that he was also appeasing Hitler. Roger Penrose and three other artists spirited Chamberlain masks at a May Day protest. (Burra was ambivalent, distressed apparently by the destruction of churches – a number of cartoons in the exhibition critique the Catholic church; one artist whose name I forget was pro-Nationalist, Wyndham Lewis was also broadly pro-Franco). A number of British artists had visited Spain in the 1930s, perhaps drawn by the light, and so there was the sense of a familiar landscape being destroyed. John Armstrong painted isolated ruins against blue skies – in devastating pictures that recall the surreal cities of Max Ernst. Of course, many of these artists were inspired by surrealism and were part of a British surrealist movement, linked to Picasso via Penrose. The Spanish Civil War seems to be the unconscious to their art – and also the work of Moore and Hepworth. The nightmares of the sleep of reason can also be found in Goya’s incredibly disturbing prints The Disasters of War, inspired by the Spanish Peninsula Wars (1808-14), which I first saw at the Whitworth, and which were shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1938 and provided a language for a response to such atrocities.

There are all kinds of striking works – Burra’s watercolours, Walter Nessler’s Premonition (1937) of an apocalyptic London  and Clive Branson’s (faux?) naïve socialist realism of Daily Worker selling on the streets. Oddly one of the pieces here – Picasso’s “strip cartoon” The Dream and Lie of Franco I – is also on show at the Rubens exhibition at the RAA.

I’m so glad I saw this before it closed — if you can see it in Newcastle do so.

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Too Long a Season

I’d somehow missed out on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’d seen the crossover movie Star Trek: Generations (David Carson, 1994) and even taught Star Trek: First Contact (Jonathan Frakes, 1996) and I’d seen odd episodes, but not the in-depth, episode to episode viewing of a TV-run. Was it on SKY? I didn’t and still don’t have that, but more to the point, aside from a brief period in 1991, I didn’t have regular access to TV between 1988 and 1992. I suppose I knew enough people with boxsets or off-air recordings, but I didn’t care enough.

I came to it partly with a curiosity about the 44 minute story arc. Most American drama has this pattern and for crime it seems to work ok – soapish preamble, crime committed, work the streets, red herring, nab the suspect, interrogation and wry afterword. Firefly also seemed to pull it off, as did Buffy and Angel before it. Doctor Who, on the other hand, doesn’t, although perhaps I’m brainwashed by the sitcom-in-clusters-of-four format of the original run. The alien society is barely established – although the inclination is to be Earth-bound and it cranks the jeopardy up to eleven very fast. Then the Doctor rewrites someone’s DNA or reverses the polarity of the neutron flow and everything is hunky dory timey wimey.

Someone, I forget who, suggested that Firefly (and by extension ST: TNG) works because of a bigger cast. We end up with three parallel narratives that dovetail together. Doctor Who probably bifurcates into the Doctor’s narrative and his companion’s, the companion getting into trouble and needing to be rescued. We get insufficient parallax on the nova. I did recently wonder whether the Doctor, as virtual superhero is so resourceful and fixed that he doesn’t offer the scope for a character arc, the writers instead focusing on the companion’s experiences, taking audience identification too far. We end up with The Amy Pond Adventures or Clara Who? But then the character arcs of virtually all continuing dramas are keyed much more to restoration than the transformation of the feature film.

To be honest, I don’t recall if the original Star Trek was closer in satisfaction to Firefly than nu-Who. It’s decades since I saw more than the odd episode and my tastes are perhaps more sniping. I’d seen and actually quite enjoyed bits of Enterprise, where the missions were a bit rougher around the edges. But the OS crew were my crew and so here we have their replacements. Picard is the new Kirk, clearly an authority figure, less likely to go on dangerous missions, and keeping it more in his trousers than Kirk ever did. The romantic lead duties are passed onto his Number One (stop sniggering) Riker, waved of hair and hairy of chest, and Picard’s BFF rather too quickly. Spock had been the deputy, and science officer, so here we have an android, Data, who is learning to be human (“Call me Pinocchio”) and thus doesn’t have appropriate emotions in his logic. My favourite character of the old series was Bones, but here we have Dr Beverly Crusher, seeming to be an old flame of Picard’s and widow of an officer killed on his watch. Crusher has her son with her, Wesley, presumably an identification figure for the child audience. Deanna Troi is a counsellor, who gets to state the bleeding obvious. Then there’s Geordie, whose accent is as convincing as Scottie’s and who wears a hair band over his eyes. Then there’s Worf, a grumpy Klingon, and Tasha Yar, who seems to be some kind of bouncer for the Enterprise.

So, having made it to the end of the first series, what do I think? The original series was famed for its diversity – it had a woman of colour on the crew as a receptionist. Baby steps. Twenty years later and in the regular cast we have three women – a doctor, a counsellor and Tasha Yar. Being a doctor is arguably above being a nurse (the other female rôle in TOS, aside from love interest), but it is a caring, nurturing profession in theory and she is also a mother. Troi as empath is meant to be all touchy feely and is able to say that she thinks the strangers they meet are hiding things because she doesn’t realise she’s in a drama that depends on such things. Yar, meanwhile, also gets to be suspicious of strangers because that’s her job as bouncer. Although sometimes she gets to operate the transporters. She’s clearly under used and one can only imagine how frustrated the actor was.

We have two actors of colour on the bridge – most obviously Geordie (and there’s an episode when we see a grown up Wesley and he’s pretty impressed by what he sees – could he also tick the diversity box that broadens ST’s notorious heteronormativity?). Then there’s Worf – and whilst there’s no reason that actors of colour shouldn’t play aliens, there’s an allegorical minefield in which seeing aliens as people of colour feeds into seeing people of colour as aliens (see also under: racism and monkeys). As a Klingon he’s presumably stereotyped as a military man (although you should try his delicious angel cakes) but surely Yar is the military officer? Or are there two military officers on this much-vaunted we-come-in-peace (for certain cohorts of mankind) mission?

Not all the regular cast are in each episode, and I get the feeling that the writers didn’t quite know what to do with half of the crew. Of course, you could argue that at any one time a third of the crew ought to be tucked up in bed and so this is to be expected, but we don’t see that kind of daily life. I think the dramatis personae were assembled with issues in mind, but the writers haven’t quite got there. Ah, young Wesley has discovered something but he’s a kid so let’s not believe him. Again.

Let’s take “Angel One” (25 January 1988) as the archetypal episode. The Enterprise arrives at an alien matriarchy in search of survivors from a crashed ship, Odin, and interacts with the local women, although it turns out that all they really needed was a real man such as Riker – because, presumably, a matriarchy is not true equality.

Except it turns out that this was an allegory for the situation in South Africa in the Apartheid era. Excuse me. So are the women Whites and the men Blacks and Coloureds? Or vice versa? How does that work then? Meanwhile, note that with the away team constituted the way it is in this episode, an African American gets to sit in the captain’s chair. Progress, only he comes down with the manflu that is the b-plot of the episode. I’m not at all clear what the episode has to say about Apartheid. “Why can’t we all just get along?”? Star Fleet has this non-intervention policy (which is obviously as consistent as that of Gallifrey in Pertwee-era Who) that is ironic in Reagan’s America and enables the crew to debate Moral Rightness with a not always unbearable smugness.

The final two episodes threaten to rip Star Fleet apart and introduce new aliens, the Romulans. Clearly this is the point when they think they’ve got their mojo. Having carefully established that when space missions last years, crew want their families with them, in “Conspiracy” (9 May 1988) the Enterprise pops back to Earth to investigate a conspiracy. The scheme seems to include worm eating. The Enterprise and Picard turn out to be top dogs in Star Fleet. The following week, in “The Neutral Zone” (16 May 1988), they pick up an abandoned spaceship and defrost from inside it three people from old Earth of a couple of centuries ago. The job of the episode is to demonstrate how far human civilisation has come: a woman is concerned with her children and her children’s descendants, one of whom has her husband’s name (because these things never alter); a man who wants to check his stock market portfolio but not his privilege (and Picard talks about how civilisation is beyond things like money now like he’s some kind of commie) and a man who wants to hit the bars and pick up some ladies (although Riker would be a better wingman than Data, frankly). These are the values the 24th century have left behind. Supposedly. They’ve also left behind incurable diseases and Wesley’s manflu from the plot device holodeck shows how little immunity the crew have to such things.

The Enterprise heads off into the unknown, or Season Two.

by flares

Oh, Cysp

Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980)
Most years I show Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) as an example of a slasher film, but this year I noticed the likely date for a screening and it was only appropriate to show Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980).

Er, Friday the 13th.

Already the mould has become solidified – a range of teens, largely played by unknowns, are picked off one by one, leaving the final girl to fight back. On the one hand, this figure is a feminist rôle model as figure of identification, as active rather than passive, as complicating standard gender archetypes. On the other hand, she’s infantilised as a girl and her fight back extends the duration of the sadism directed at her.

The prologue here is the murder of a couple of teen fornicators at Camp Crystal Lake in 1958 by an unseen assailant, although the real fall is a drowned child from 1957. Two decades later – June 1979 or July 1980, although neither date is a full moon – Annie (Robbi Morgan) is hitchhiking her way to the reopening camp. This can’t end well, although there’s a neat bit when she misgenders a dog.

The real final girl is Alice, non-gendered at a push (Alice Cooper?), first seen chopping wood and doing DIY and resisting the advances of the slightly creepy Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer). Her fellow camp counsellors are killed off one-by-one, the women as spectacles-in-dying, the men more spectacles-as-corpses. Nobody sees nothing. But all the others had sex or drank or smoked – a young Kevin Bacon doing all three.

Should I be coy four decades on? Whereas in proto-slasher Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), the protagonist channels his mother, here the repetition-with-difference of popular culture sees the pattern reversed. Whereas in Halloween we see Michael Myers and see him seeing, here the slasher is kept offscreen. The film does not play fair – we neither have the thrill of deducing the villain and eliminating red herrings nor of watching a Columbo figure get their man. Is Christy a nod to Christie, she of Marple and Poirot and much more?

The opening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) references Richard Nixon in the soundtrack – a news broadcast – here a character describes someone as having the worst run of luck since Richard Nixon. Did Nixon have bad luck though? I think he was largely the architect of his own downfall.

by flares

Keep the Wensleydale Flying

Shaun the Sheep Movie (Mark Burton and Richard Starzak, 2015)

“But just at that moment, as though at a signal, all the sheep burst out into a tremendous bleating.”

I guess there are spoilers here.

Deep into the end credits of this film, the producers acknowledge their appropriation of Silence of the Lambs – not the property of Thomas Harris or even Jonathan Demme, but of MGM. The pastiche itself – which should fall under the fair use provision for purposes of parody – came at precisely the point that it occurred to me that this was a much thinner film than Chicken Run (Pete Lord and Nick Park, 2000) or Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were Rabbit (Nick Park and Steve Box, 2005). Both of those were stuffed full with movie references, whereas this is more cautious in its appropriations. Ownership is respected.

It’s a familiar enough reactionary fable: on the farm the sheep are alienated from the product of their labours, the days ticking by in Sisyphean toil. A dog, lackey of the system, helps the farmer in his exploitation, blind to the ways in which he too is a cog in the system. The very name of the farm – Mossy Bottom – shows its position within society and the stasis of such society.

Come the day of the revolution – masterminded by Shaun – the dog is restrained by a turncoat dog and the farmer is driven into exile. The sheep briefly take over the farmhouse and briefly enjoy the fruits, but the opportunist pigs rapidly take their place in the second part of the June Revolution. Unable to function without a master, the sheep face starvation and follow the similarly interpellated dog into the Big City. In perhaps the most interesting ideological move of the film, the wider system becomes apparent – the dog substitutes for a surgeon and the farmer for a barber. Note how the farmer/barber receives but a fraction of the payment for his work, his excess labour swelling the surplus value of the salon. In a sneaky use of a dual time frame, the farmer becomes gains the status of a commodity whilst the animals remain in Aristotelian time. Meanwhile there is social satire in a restaurant worthy of Buñuel.

As a parable for children, however, the urge is for restoration. Dorothy may get out of Kansas, but she knows there’s no place like home. The Bakhtinian carnival of the central section of the film is but licensed escape and the Animal Containment officer’s encagement of the sheep as strays in the city disguises the cage of Mossy Bottom farm in an appropriately Foucauldian manner. The gate must be kept shut at all times. We prefer it that way.