A Very Public Sociologist: Films

Showing newest posts with label Films. Show older posts

Wednesday, 28 July 2010

Economic Vandalism and the UK Film Council

When the Tories said they were building a bonfire of the quangos they weren't kidding. That a number of health-related bodies were axed in Monday's cull was disappointing but not surprising. In their ideologically-driven cuts agenda if you haven't got a (narrowly-defined) economic value then you're fair game, regardless of the social value you possess.

Which makes the abolition of the UK Film Council an even more curious decision. This particular move will save the treasury a whopping £15m/year, and was probably chosen because "it's the arts" and apart from liberal/luvvie-types, no one will give a toss. But this is a stupid decision from the standpoint of building on the economic recovery AND securing tax receipts.

Since the UK Film Council was set up in 2000, some £160m of government money has been invested in film production. This money has been unevenly spread across approximately 900 pictures, which, according to the UKFC has generated £700m in worldwide box office receipts.

Of course, the total number of receipts cannot be considered the return on the government's outlay. The UKFC oversees the distribution of lottery money too, and it is very rare to find a film funded solely by this and tax monies. To borrow a phrase from other areas of government, UKFC-funded films are public/private partnerships to varying degrees.

So permit me this small *unscientific* exercise to illustrate the kinds of damage the coalition government's short sightedness is about to inflict.

Suppose all 900 films received an equal slice of public money. Of the £160m, each receives approximately £177,778 as a subsidy. If we treat this as capital, from the state's point of view profit is defined by the increased tax returns over and above the initial outlay.

The table below lists a dozen well-known films that have received UKFC financial backing of some sort, with their budgets, worldwide box office takings, and gross profits:

This yields a total gross of £185.87m

Calculating the tax payable on this is a difficult business. The government taxes the companies that own the films, not the individual pictures themselves. Cinemas take a slice on ticket sales too. But for illustrative reasons I will suppose each film is equivalent to a discrete firm taxable at the 28% Corporation Tax rate.

Applying that rate to total gross profits gives us £52.04m that goes to the treasury. That works out as an average of £4.34m per film, or a return of £24 for every pound of taxpayers' money the UKFC invested (assuming the subsidy is constant).

There's more. Let us estimate the wage bill of these films account for 70% of their budget. Their total budget was £57.02m, of which £39.91m was expended as wages. Assuming all staff were basic income tax rate payers (which, of course they're not, but some actors and production staff are foreign nationals and/or not domiciled in Britain, they do not pay tax on earnings here - it serves as a rough equaliser), a further £7.98m makes its way back to the treasury.

That's £60m tax off just 12 films. And that's without counting the multiplier effects all this economic activity has had in terms of supply chain, VAT take, cast and crew's spending, etc.

Nor does it account for future multipliers. Take Keira Knightley, for example. Bend it Like Beckham catapulted her into the A-List and helped her become a big box office draw. Not only does the treasury benefit from the large fees she's able to command, but also the cut it gets from the stardust she's sprinkled on monsters like Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, and Love Actually. Her case shows the return on the UKFC's initial Bend It investment will pay dividends for as long as Keira makes films, and beyond. The same is true of other actors, directors, crews and studios whose pictures have received tax payers' assistance, whether they meet the short-term criteria of returning a profit to the treasury or not. As their reputations are built, so is their bankable value and with it their taxable pay. And returning to the short term, even if all the other 888 UKFC-funded films were commercial failures they too had their multiplier effects by virtue of their economic activity.

This may be an unscientific experiment, but it illustrates how the government's decision to scrap the UKFC is not just an act of artistic philistinism. It's a case of economic vandalism too.

NB All figures are taken from Box Office Mojo and individual wikipedia pages. Where the only available figures have been given in dollars, they were converted to sterling using the exchange rate pertaining at the time.

Tuesday, 27 July 2010

Violence Against Women in Sin City

Always one to move with the times, I've recently got round to watching 2005's big screen adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City. There's little point recapitulating the plot(s) of the six vignettes that make up the film, seeing as Wikipedia's already done it. But there are a few things I'd like to say about the violence.

Um, there's lots of it. The movie is stunning to look at, even when heads explode, limbs are hacked off, and a particularly vicious serial killer is castrated. As this hostile review points out, the violence is as copious as it is sadistic. One is tempted to say it's supposed to be. Frank Miller's graphic novels are a roid rage homage to 30s and 40s pulp crime fiction. It is a ménage à trois of redemptive violence, 1940s hyperreality, and a misogynistic/reductive view of women. Robert Rodriguez excuses his utterly faithful portrayal out of a desire to remain true to Miller's originals. For him Sin City was not so much an adaptation, more a translation. In other words, the artistic equivalent of "I wus only following orders, Guv".

And, as you might expect, the gendering of Sin City's violence is deeply problematic. You might argue it doesn't matter, that the film is a blow for equal opportunities as men and women alike are threatened, tortured and butchered. But the misogynistic devil's in the detail. Not only does the film begin and end with the murders of women, all the violence directed at them during the two hours inbetween is tied to sexuality.

Exhibit A: Goldie (Jaime King) shares a night of passion with Marv (Mickey Rourke). There are breast shots aplenty. Marv wakes up to find she's been murdered in a bid to fit him up.

Exhibit B: After escaping the police, Marv hooks up with his probation officer, Lucille (Carla Gugino). Not only does she parade around her flat in her knickers, we are told she's gay. Later Marv winds up in a serial killer's dungeon with a naked Lucille, and shortly after she gets machine gunned.

Exhibit C: It's revealed the serial killer, Kevin (Elijah Wood!), and his mentor, Cardinal Roark (Rutger Hauer), ate the remains of the prostitutes Kevin had killed.

Exhibit D: An evening with Dwight (Clive Owen) (where it is strongly implied they had sex) sees Shellie (Brittany Murphy) getting a post-coital slapping by her ex-boyfriend Jackie Boy (Benicio del Toro).

Exhibit E: Leader of the prostitute-controlled Old Town, Gail (Rosario Dawson) is captured and tortured by the Mob, who want to clear the women's co-op out and return it to the bad old days of pimps and violence. For good measure Dwight gives his on-off lover a slap too.

Exhibit F: Nancy (Jessica Alba) who was saved by Hartigan (Bruce Willis) in the second vignette from the clutches of a serial killer grows up to be an erotic dancer. Her would-be rapist tracks her down and starts torturing her before Hartigan saves the day again.

The linkage between sex and violence toward women is reinforced when you consider the three female characters who do not suffer physical attack. The 11 year old Nancy is abducted and threatened, but is saved. Miho (Devon Aoki) is one of the few prostitutes who wears clothes, and serves as their samurai enforcer in several slick but bloody scenes (of course, a Japanese woman must be proficient in martial arts). And lastly, Becky, the youngest and most child-like of the prostitutes (who, again, wears clothes) turns her back on her sisters and betrays Old Town to the Mob. She escapes the ensuing shoot out and having left prostitution behind, the final scene sees her share a lift with the assassin from the first scene. In contrast to the overt violence of the rest of the film, his method of killing has already been established as gentle, almost romantic.

The portrayal of women in this film doesn't send the most empowering of messages: if you're a woman and you have sex, male violence is sure to follow.

In a decade stamped by neoliberalism, big advances in biological/genetic sciences, and the mainstreaming of pornographic aesthetics, tropes and "world views", the body in culture has been objectified and reified an order of magnitude greater than the exploitation flicks of the 70s and 80s. This is a dehumanised body that's managed and dissected. It's a body for public displays of graphic sex and violence. And it's the sort of hegemonic body likely to remain at the heart of our culture for quite some time to come.

Therefore, Sin City might be zeitgeisty. It may swim with the cultural stream. And the box office takings (plus imminent sequel) suggest there's a ready audience for it. But none of this excuses its positioning of female sexuality as the source of male violence. Sin City's neither edgy or clever. It's a misogynist's wet dream.

Friday, 25 September 2009

Branch Meeting: Early Soviet Cinema

At last night's branch meeting of Stoke Socialist Party, Brother R debuted with a look at Soviet cinema and how it developed from its early revolutionary period into the conservative "socialist realist" productions under Stalin. This is a slightly re-edited version of his lead off.

Soviet cinema could be said to have begun in 1919 when Lenin signed the Council for People's Commisars decree, which transferred film and photographic enterprises into state ownership. This was the culmination of the struggle for power in film. In 1917 film workers combined into three professional organisations, all of whom participated in nationalising parts of the film industry prior to Lenin's decree.

In this early phase only large companies were subject to nationalisation, so during the dawning of Soviet cinema state and smaller private companies coexisted. The organisation of film workers helped continue to shape the situation. In 1924 a group of filmmakers led by Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov came together in Moscow to form the Association of Revolutionary Cinematography. The objective of ARC (whose members came to include Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov) was to reinfirce ideological control over the creative process. Branches were formed in practically every studio, and the organisation had its own publications, including the weekly newspaper Kino. In 1929 the organisation adopted a new name with the objective of pursuing "100% proletarian ideological film" as part of the new cultural revolution sweeping through the arts.

It was not long before the aim of concentrating and centralising film production in order to bring the cinema under social and state control led to the idea of establishing a single national film industry. The first step in this direction came with the creation of the film enterprise Goskino in 1922, which was given a monopoly over film distribution, which was taken away by the 13th party congress in 1924. Congress also resolved to reinforce ideological monitoring in filmmaking and did this by appointing 'tested communists' to senior positions in the industry. Sovkino, and similar operations in the republics hadf a full monopoly of distribution, the import and export of films, and gradually took over production functions as well. Although it managed to lose a lot of money in its early years, the Sovkino system survived to the end of the decade without significant alteration and provided the infrastructure for the great Societ films of the late silent period.

Following Lenin's dictum that film was "the most important art", Marxist filmmakers and film theorists of the period rallied to promote communism and revolution through film. The young soviet filmmakers were zealots for that revolution. Idealistic, energetic and committed they struggle to provide filmic solutions for political problems. The two leading filmmakers of this period were Eisenstein and Vertov.

With a background in theatre and design, Eistenstein attempted to translate the lessons of Marx into a singular audience experience. The basic idea informing his theory was conflict. He considered conflict to be the mental and artistic reflection of dialectical materialism, and fashioned his films to reflect this. He developed a theory of montage in which the fashioning of each shot and the joining of shots in editing evoked opposition, contradiction and collision. His belief in the ontological truth of dialectical materialism led him to believe he could forge a revolutionary mentality in his audiences.

Eisenstein mounted his shots and joined them along various formal and thematic conflicting parameters - straight shots juxtaposed to diagonal ones, light/dark shots, and conflicts in the direction and rhythm of motion (right-to-left to left-to-right), camera distance conflicts (long shots to close-ups, etc). Through these juxtapositions of brief shots, which had a physiological effect on viewers, Eisenstein forged emotions and ideas. For him the illusion of continuity and the focus upon individual heroes encourage an anti-revolutionary false consciousness.

His most comprehensive and effective use of the conflict montage can be found in the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin.The scene consists of a dazzling series of conflicting shots and editing that powerfully convey the horror caused by Tsarist troops walking in formation down the Odessa steps while shooting and dispersing a crowd of protesters. Such cinematic attractions over thematic concerns lead the spectator in the direction desired by the director.

Throughout the silent era Eisenstein assumed his aesthetic experimentation could be harmonised with the propaganda dictates of the state. Each of his silent films begins with an epigraph from Lenin and each film depicts a key moment in the myth of Bolshevik ascension.

Eisenstein was a cerebral filmmaker. Many of his later critics in the USSR believed he was too academic and his respect for ideas would supersede his respect for Soviet realism, that his politics were too aesthetic and they were too individualistic.

Vertov's oeuvre was different. He believed only documentary shots of real-life situtations in revolutionary societies can the truth be revealed. He tried to follow Marx and Engels who wrote "the turning of history into world history is not indeed a mere abstract art on the part of the self-consciousness, the world spirit or of any other metaphysical spectre, but a quiet material, empirically verifiable act." For Vertov "we hold the ability to show and elucidate life as it is, considerably higher than the occasionally diverting doll games that people call theatre. Vertov constantly compared the fiction film to witchcraft and drugs since for him fiction was nothing but a reflection of ideologies whose function was to turn the spectator away from his awareness of the real processes of production and from truth. He therefore disliked Eisenstein's fictional recreation of events, and called for the allocation of funds to documentary rather than fictional films. In shooting, Vertov preferred the use of candid cameras in places where his presence would go unnoticed. Only in such a manner can the filmmaker make "the invisible visible, the unclear clear ...; making falsehood into truth."

For Vertov the film apparatus was almost an extension of the cognitive and revelatory power of the human senses. He accepted Marx's argument that following the development of communism the alienated relation between humans and machines would change into a productive and creative interaction in which the human senses are freed and enhanced (hence his habit of superimposing a human eye over camera lenses).

His seminal Man with a Movie Camera aimed to show how Soviet society, despite the persistance of some elements of the old order, was harmoniously and collectively building a new future.

Vertov's objection to working from scripts made it difficult for him to make films after Lenin's death. Vertov's fears of the fictionalisation of social life came to fruition with the rise of officially sanctioned socialist realism under Stalin. The party demanded artists offer didactic, easily understood and optimistic picture of the revolution.

The advent of sound in cinema marked a sea change in Soviet film. The cultural commissars saw the propaganda potential for talking pictures. Silent film in the USSR reached its zenith in 1929 and thereafter yielded its place to its successor.

Although this early silent cinema was greatly admired, party bosses were dissatisfied because they did not meet the requirements of the emerging bureaucratised order. During the 1930s cinema had become part of everyday life, and as the heavy hand of party censorship and interference became felt, variety declined and with it so did audiences. Small wonder - socialist realist films followed a simple formulaic plot. Typically the hero, under the tutelage of a positive character (a party leader) overcomes obstacles, unmasks the villain (who was often a reactionary with an irrational hatred of socialism) and becomes a better (i.e. more class conscious) person.

Unsurprisingly this was a very suspect form of realism. By replacing the genuine cinematic realism of Vertov socialist realism impeded the contemplation of the human condition and exploration/critique of social issues. It was arguably middle brow, formulaic arrt that excluded irony, ambiguity and experimentation.

Within socialist realism a number of genres grew up. Historical spectacles became frequent in the second half of the 1930s as the regime paid increasing attention to rekindling patriotism by appealing to myths of national glory. Films based on the revolution were still produced and each republic had a studio that made at least one film on the establishment of soviet power. The majority of other films produced were set in the present with an overall theme of struggle against saboteurs and traitors, coinciding with the bureaucracy's appetite for denunciations, fake trials and elaborate plots. This changed with the outbreak of war. The internal enemies disappeared from cinema screens and were replaced by foreigners and their agents.

Films about the Great Patriotic War became a stable of the film industry post-1945. It reflects the deep wound the Nazi invasion inflicted on Soviet society, and one which still scars the memories of elderly residents of the former USSR. But it was a trauma the regime was able to skilfully exploit in its propaganda to heighten public anxiety over Western militarism and rally them around the party. The result was WWII films were as ubiquitous in the USSR as Westerns were in the US.

The death of Stalin 1953 was followed by a revival of Soviet film. Many of the old restrictions were lifted and output grew impressively. Directors who had done interesting work in the past returned to experimentation. In a system that politicised every aspect of everyday life, any film depicting the world more or less realistically had subversive potential. Although Soviet cinema never regained the worldwide prestige it enjoyed in the late 20s, film once again provided a positive contribution to cultural life.

Wednesday, 27 May 2009

No2EU Election Broadcast

Featuring Tony Benn!

Not bad at all - certainly head and shoulders above many other election broadcasts I've seen!

Also more No2EU related videos here, here, here, here, and here.

Sunday, 22 February 2009

An Audience with Ken Loach

I don't know what the the advantages of awarding honorary degrees, but I'm glad Keele granted one to radical film maker Ken Loach on Friday because it meant he did an open Q&A afterwards. And luckily I was there with notebook and pen at the ready.

As you can imagine he spent an hour answering pretty much everything that could be asked, so these are very much the edited highlights. The first questioner asked about his approach to casting and whether using "normal" people as opposed to professionals ever caused him problems? Loach replied that the bottom line has to be credibility - actors must be convincing in a particular role. As far as he was concerned if this is your aim you cannot have a working class woman played by the likes of Julia Roberts. This means a very long casting process as Loach typically sees people seven or eight times before making a decision. But by the end of it they have been "professionalised" by the process and are no greater risk than any other actor.

The next question moved to his famous forum scenes, such as the debates in Land and Freedom and The Wind that Shook the Barley. Loach set out to bring the critical issues of the Spanish civil war out into the open, particularly the struggle between the Stalinists and mainstream republicans who wanted to prioritise the military struggle against Franco and leave the social revolution until afterwards versus the position of other lefts that saw the revolution and the war against the fascists as interrelated processes. A similar intent lay behind the production of Wind, which is an interpretation of the Irish struggle for independence as a revolution. Here for Loach the movement was particularly difficult for the British ruling class because in their eyes Ireland was a home nation, a core component of the Empire, and not a colony. Loach confessed to stretching history "a bit" to include discussion of Connolly's republican socialism, and also showed how imperialism can accommodate an independence movement. In his opinion the struggle more or less changed the flag because it fell under bourgeois hegemony and so, post-independence, it was business as usual as far as British capitalism was then concerned.

Turning to the state of cinema Loach said it could be the same as any other medium and should be as varied as imagination. But it is thoroughly commodified and exclusionary. Because of Hollywood's dominance, US films and US-funded films are produced with the American market in mind. As a result its output tends to resemble more a store full of airport novels than a public library. To illustrate this dominance in the UK, Loach's previous film, It's a Free World sold around 40 copies to British cinemas. But across the channel where Hollywood's grip is far less secure, French cinemas purchased 370 copies.

Loach also gave us a quick preview of Looking for Eric, which is due out this summer. It follows the descent into depression by Eric, a Man Utd-obsessed postman. Then one night he smokes a spliff and Eric Cantona appears and starts giving him advice. Kitchen sink meets magical realism?

Lastly it wouldn't be complete if Loach wasn't asked about his politics. Given the current situation, he was asked if he thought revolution was back on the agenda. His answer took us back to the late 60s. Then, Loach said, it felt as though it was around the corner or a couple of years away at the most. But now, while that hope is gone our situation is approaching something of an end game. Not because capitalism looks like it's about to be swept away, but due to the environmental crisis. In his opinion the planet cannot sustain a system premised on endless, reckless economic growth, and the idea 'the beast' could behave responsibly defies belief. So what happens next? His answer to the mainly young audience was simply "over to you".

Tuesday, 12 August 2008

WALL-E

When you can sit enraptured through the first half hour of a film without any dialogue, you know you're watching something a bit special. And WALL-E is certainly that. The quality of the animation is simply superb, containing some of the best computer-generated imagery yet seen in a movie (perhaps the Beijing Olympics organising committee ought to have enlisted Pixar's services).

In the 22nd century, one single corporate entity, Buy n Large, completely dominates the globe. But it is a company that presides over a world drowning in trash. As a quick fix BnL hatches a plan to evacuate humans to the Axiom, BnL's flagship luxury resort/starship. It pledges its robots left behind on Earth to clean up the mess within five years, allowing enough time for the biosphere recovers from the toxic shock.

Go forward 700 years and all that is left is WALL-E, a robot whose activity consists of compressing trash and stacking it in towers that loom over abandoned office blocks. This is a desolate world of flickering BnL adverts, dust storms, and decaying cities. Life consists of WALL-E's cockroach friend and a single plant he finds when he's out trash compacting. Centuries of isolation has allowed WALL-E to break his programming and become sentient. He occasionally finds interesting trinkets among the mountains of rubbish, which he takes back to his home. Among his most treasured possessions is a tape of Hello, Dolly!, which teaches him emotion, body language and social skills.

The one day when he is out foraging a spaceship lands, disgorging a new robot, EVE. Both are initially wary of the other but very soon they develop a close bond. But EVE is a probe sent from the Axiom to determine if the biosphere has recovered. When she scans a plant discovered earlier by WALL-E she stores it and deactivates until her mother ship returns. WALL-E is all alone again. He tries various means of reactivating her but to no avail, and slowly, sadly, he returns to his old routines. Then one day while compacting trash he realises her ship is back. He makes a mad dash back and reaches it just in time to see the ship's robotic arms retrieve EVE. He jumps on to the ship and hangs on for dear life as it blasts off. And so the adventure proper begins.

There's very little point recapping the entire plot - those who want to know the ins and outs can read an overview here.

WALL-E is a lovely film for all ages. But unsurprisingly, as a Disney production it spins a conservative tale. The message WALL-E ends up pushing, despite the intentions of its creators, is more than a gentle green warning. I would argue the film is a meditation on the human condition in industrial (not capitalist) society. In WALL-E's future the total corporate dominance of BnL has resulted in the smoothing out of all contradictions Marxists associates with capitalism. Society has evolved into an advanced communist system. Its human members have entered a permanent state of recline. They spend their days floating about on loungers. They communicate with others via holographic interfaces that hover just in front of their faces. And they are all obese. 700 years of BnL's benevolent direction has rendered them incapable of walking and pretty much doing anything for themselves. Robots have completely taken over the running of society, eliminating the need for human labour. Even the most high-ranking human, the Axiom's captain, is little more than a glorified tannoy announcer.

Basically, the human race has gone soft. Their complete dependence on machines for virtutally everything has infantilised them. Life on a lilo is inauthentic. It is only WALL-E and EVE's struggles against the Axiom's autopilot's attempt to suppress evidence of the plant that sets the human race back on to the path of authenticity. When they return to Earth their first steps on the home world are literally their first steps as functioning human beings. They plant WALL-E's sapling and set about reclaiming the Earth from its polluted state. The credits continue the story through a set of "drawings". We see humans and robots working together to plant seeds, rear crops and animals, drill wells and reconstructing buildings. Gradually the humans in these scenes start losing weight. And the Axiom itself, the symbol of BnL's hypermodernity, comes to be overtaken by vines and creepers as it is left to go derelict, symbolising the turning of humanity's back on its high tech past. People have found themselves again, through the simplicity of going back to the land.

This doesn't prevent WALL-E from being an enjoyable film. But a critical eye is required to see past the soft environmentalism.

Tuesday, 5 August 2008

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

As American culture settled down to the country's role as international arbiter in the decade-long interregnum between the final collapse of the Soviet Union and the attacks of September 11th, it was a culture coming to terms with having had a key principle of its fixity knocked away. The world could no longer simply be divided into black and white. The evil empire had lost and the free world had won. With the passing of the USSR and the emergence of a world order dominated by American power, the paranoia once directed against a clear identifiable enemy turned in and against itself. America knew something out there was going to get it, but what would it be? Could its friends possibly its enemies? And what motives could possibly drive their hostility? Are they misguided or do they have a firm agenda?

This anxiety was reflected time and again in the leading science fiction cult shows of the period. On the surface Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were traditional-style conflicts of goodies vs baddies, but picking through the shows' narratives reveals a more complex picture. The Shadows of Babylon 5 were not interested in conquest and domination. They were extreme social Darwinists, believing that war and conflict between alien races wheedled the weak out from the strong and boosted the quality of the galaxy's biological stock. Deep Space Nine eventually got a story arc going about subversion, invasion and war between the Federation and its allies and the shape-shifting Dominion. But the latter weren't in the game for a simple power grab. Theirs was a "defensive" offensive war against "the solids" they believed would persecute them. Both shows had bucket loads of subterfuge, enemy agents, shifting alliances and a dose of paranoia. The space stations they drew their titles from were the rocks of the shows. The waves of great events broke against them but they remained eternal and unchanging. No matter what happened they would win through in the end, just like Uncle Sam.

Warning: Spoilers

In this regard The X-Files is the archetypal 1990s cult show. FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigate a bizarre world of unexplained Forteana and alien-related conspiranoia. Adversaries come and go, switching allegiances, disappearing and reappearing. Conspiracies are found to have conspiracies within them. There are no fixed points in the X-Files universe, apart from the bond Mulder and Scully establish between themselves.

It is perhaps because The X-Files cuts against the grain of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist that explains the relatively poor box office receipts for the new film, The X-Files: I Want To Believe. That, and it not being a particularly fantastic picture. Unlike the previous film, which indulged the show's black oil/little grey aliens conspiracy, this is a stand alone addition to the X-Files canon akin to the monster-of-the-week staple of the series.

Scully, now working as a medical doctor at a Catholic hospital is approached by the FBI desperate to get back in touch with Mulder. The agent in charge of the investigation, Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet), requires his "expertise" in solving what would have been classed as an x file. One of their agents has gone missing from her home, and the only lead they have are the visions of a convicted paedophile priest, Father Joseph (Billy Connolly, himself a survivor of child abuse). His visions lead the FBI to a severed arm in the snow and he tells them the agent is still alive. True to form, Mulder embraces Joseph as evidence of psychic powers whereas Scully is far more sceptical (as well as being repulsed by his crimes). Very shortly another woman is abducted and Father Joseph experiences more visions. He leads them to a grisly burial ground of severed limbs from multiple victims. Analysis of the remains gives them a lead to Janke Dacyshyn (Callum Keith Rennie) of an organ courier firm. They learn his civil partner, Franz Tomczeszyn, was one of the boys abused by Father Joseph.

The agents move in to arrest Dacyshyn at his company's offices, but manages to escape, killing agent Whitney in the process. He also leaves behind a grisly package - the frozen severed head of the abducted FBI agent. But the trail picks up again thanks to the animal tranquiliser found in the body parts. Mulder is able to trace it to a store in small town, Virginia and goes along to check the lead. By coincidence, as Mulder is questioning the proprietor Dacyshyn rolls up. Mulder is able to follow him back to his compound (after a brush with Dacyshyn's snow plough, being bulldozed off a rocky outcrop and hypothermia) where he discovers this macabre scheme: Tomczeszyn is dying from lung cancer. Dacyshyn and a team of Russian Doctor Frankensteins are attempting to "cure" this by transplanting Tomczeszyn's head to a succession of (female) bodies. Mulder is overpowered and taken outside to be chopped up, but is rescued by Scully and his old boss at the FBI, Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi). It all ends rather abruptly as the scene moves back to Mulder's house, where he tells Scully that if she were to check the medical records, Father Joseph succumbed to his cancer at the very same moment the blood supply was cut off to Tomczeszyn's disembodied head.

One of the formulas that made The X-Files interesting was Mulder's belief in any old lizard theory that came his way, whereas Scully was always more critical. The irony was Scully's scientific rationality was always tempered by her devout Catholicism, while Mulder was seemingly uninterested in religion, beyond his supernatural peccadilloes. In this film, the subtitle, 'I Want to Believe' is not about Mulder's relationship to the paranormal, it is about Scully's faith. While he does the action Scully gets the character scenes. Her sub-plot sees her as the lead doctor for Christian, a young boy diagnosed with the degenerative and difficult-to-treat brain illness, Sandhoff disease. Despite being a Catholic hospital, the chief administrator, Father Ybarra, believes Christian is beyond help and should be transferred to a hospice. Scully argues there is hope in new complex stem cell-based techniques, but which would be very uncomfortable and may not work. Scully is plagued with indecision. Should she fight for the treatment, even if God (in the shape of Ybarra) has given up on the boy? She puts aside her scepticism and revulsion for Father Joseph and repeatedly asks him for guidance. He blurts out 'don't give up' during one of his psychic trances. She takes this advice and obtains consent from Christian's parents, and the film ends as his final operation is to begin. Scully wants to believe she's doing the right thing but cannot find enough confirmation in her faith. It takes a bland utterance of seemingly supernatural origin for her to continue.

I try not to end on a low note, but some things cannot be passed over without comment. The X-Files comes with some pretty reactionary baggage. To begin with, Scully comes across as the more complex and satisfying character in this story because she is the foil for the conflicts, irresolutions and self-doubts that afflict us all throughout our lives. But is it entirely coincidental that she - a woman - is the one who is tortured by indecision? Especially when Mulder, a man, has no hesitation pursuing his x-file quarry? Her dilemma is only resolved when she turns to Father Joseph, another man. There is also the relationship between Mulder, agent Whitney, and Whitney's partner. As lead investigator Whitney cannot function effectively without being supervised by a man. Her partner, agent Mosley Drummy (Xzibit) is very sceptical of Father Joseph's psychic abilities and would like to see the investigation unfold conventionally. However, it takes Mulder to prevent Whitney being led astray by this black man to put the search for the missing agent on its proper footing.

But by far the worst is the treatment of the homosexual villains at the heart of the plot. If the implication that Father Joseph's sexual abuse was what turned the young Tomczeszyn gay wasn't bad enough, Dacyshyn is committing unspeakable and morally repugnant acts to his partner. I'm sure that is entirely coincidental, of course. But then why are they committed to procuring female bodies to graft Tomczeszyn's head on to? Was Dacyshyn questioning his sexuality? Were the script writers trying to "heterosexualise" their relationship? Or worse, is this a nod toward 19th and 20th century discourses that positioned gay men as women in male bodies? Whatever, this kind of juvenile homophobic rubbish has no place in the cinema of 2008.

Sunday, 27 July 2008

War of the Worlds

I really should declare an interest. HG Wells' War of the Worlds is one of my favourite books ever. Jeff Wayne's musical interpretation remains one of the finest albums I've ever listened to (yes, I know, I should get out more). And the 1953 flick is one of the better cold war-inspired B-movies to have emerged from Hollywood during that period. And then there is the Tom Cruise/Steven Spielberg adaptation, which was shown on the BBC earlier this evening.

It is by no means a bad film, in fact I rather enjoyed it when I saw it in the cinema shortly after its release. And it is still watchable second time round. Plot-wise there isn't much to tell. Aliens turn up, wipe out loads of people, the military proves ineffective against them and the aliens then catch a cold and die. The struggle to survive while making a perilous journey from New York to Boston provides the eyes through which we see the rout of civilisation, the massacre of mankind (sorry, couldn't resist).

There are some things I find incredibly annoying about this film. First is the unashamed gung-ho American fuck-yeah! The invaders may have always been here (beneath our very feet! But more about that in a moment) and may tap into the recurring American anxiety around the enemy within/sneak attacks, but even though it was bacteria that stopped the aliens in their tracks we just have to see the American military take down a sickly tripod who'd left its shields off. We are informed earlier in the movie that "the Japs" had taken down a few tripods in Osaka - we can't have anyone else outdoing Uncle Sam can we?

And yes, the war machines. I've mentioned before how I like my science fiction to be a little bit plausible when it comes to the biology, technology and sociology of alien civilisations, but here WOTW falls down on two counts. First, there is the invasion. Characters speculate the aliens' tripods had long been buried beneath the surface of the earth at least prior to the human colonisation of North America. They are reactivated when their pilots "ride" lightning bolts down into their cockpits. Hold on just a minute. If you happened to be planning an invasion of Earth for whatever reason, why take the trouble of burying fighting machines to reactivate them thousands of years later, when nomadic bands take a good deal less effort to subdue than industrial societies? Makes very little sense to me. And secondly, if you happen to be an advanced alien race of warmongers wouldn't you have the nous to develop inoculations against the nasty bugs swimming around in the Earth's atmosphere? If the US and UK make sure their troops get their jabs before being shipped off, why didn't the aliens have the same sense too? (And that leaves out entirely the ability of Earth-bound bacteria to infect and kill biological systems evolved under very different circumstances. I digress).

I was also left wondering how Tom Cruise would have squared alien invasion with his potty Scientology belief system? As I understand it Xenu of the ancient Galactic Confederacy dropped the bodies of 75 million aliens in the volcanoes of prehistoric Earth, and then blew them up with nuclear weapons. The souls of the aliens were then forced to wander the earth and then attached themselves to the newly evolving humans. These traumatised "body thetans" pour their negativity into humans and are therefore responsible for all the nasty things the human race has done. But if this explains all the bad in the world, what excuse does Tom and Scientology have for the genocidal aliens in WOTW? Were they too seeded with the frozen corpses of confederate citizens in prehistory? Could their invasion have been warded off with a free personality audit?

Wednesday, 4 June 2008

Sex and the City

When a film has something like 'every woman in her twenties coming to New York is looking for two Ls: Labels and Love' as the opening line, you know you're going to be in for a pretty vacuous two hours 20 minutes. And so it is with Sex and the City's big screen adaptation. When a film's this heavy on handbags, who gives a shit about the lack of Kierkegaardian themes?

So the plot, such as it exists, is all about those two Ls. Fans and casual viewers of the show all know it looked like Carrie Bradshaw (SJP) had finally found her happy ever after at the end of the series' six-year run. The on-off relationship with Big (Chris Noth) was definitely on the last time we saw them. And this is how the film opens. A blissfully happy Carrie and Big go apartment hunting and settle on a place you certainly won't get a shared ownership deal on. Being an attentive boyfriend, Big gifts Carrie a closet the size of my street. But beneath the happiness is a tingle of unease. The serpent in this romantic idyll is Big's aversion to marriage. And what does Carrie go and do when he tentatively suggests they tie the knot? Arrange a gaudy Hello-style marriage with ostentatious Vogue photo shoots, absurd Vivienne Westwood dress and a guest list including all of Park Avenue. It's a wonder she didn't ask the Pope to officiate.

It's a set up just begging to go wrong. Big doesn't turn up and the wedding doesn't take place. The girls - Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) accompany Carrie on her pre-booked honeymoon to Mexico to comfort her. And in a mini-adventure involving sunsets, pubic hair and a very public bathroom malfunction, Carrie begins to make a slow recovery.

As was the case with Sex and the City on TV, Carrie's troubles are reflected in the sub-plots of her friends. Samantha's discontented about her life with Smith (Jason Lewis). His long hours and her isolation in Los Angeles constantly tempt her to stray, but she manages to remain faithful by turning to food. Charlotte - who is something of a waste of space in the movie - falls pregnant. And Miranda separates from Steve (David Eigenberg) after he admits to a one nighter with another woman. As the film grinds itself toward the inevitable Hollywood ending, a new character is introduced when Carrie takes on Louise (Jennifer Hudson) as her personal assistant. She helps Carrie reorganise her life while Carrie sees her as a representative of the new generation of New York women. Cue many a moment when she gives Louise the benefit of her accumulated wisdom.

By the end everything has come good again ... until the inevitable sequel that is. It is a formulaic piece, the jokes are rather flat, the sex is neither titillating or risque and the last four years haven't been kind to the format. But when it is all said and done, you have a movie that the fans will adore and something far more entertaining than the Indiana Jones travesty.

Sex and the City has been critiqued as a celebration of post-feminism. That is the notion feminism is no longer relevant to women's lives because structural gender inequalities have largely withered away. The same choices and privileges long enjoyed by men are now available to women. Whether one pursues a traditional feminine trajectory (Charlotte) or seeks meaning and happiness independently of heterosexual monogamy (Samantha), it is simply a matter of choice, and it is a choice open to all women. This is the essence of Sex and the City. The characters are all free to pursue their projects of self though an endless merry go round of fashion shows, restaurants, bars, shops and exclusive parties. What makes their post-feminist orgy of consumption possible is their freedom from (economic) necessity. Because all four occupy privileged class locations it makes it possible for them to erase any presentation of that position.

This is nothing new. The culture of the ruling class has long eschewed references to the crude business of how one makes money. Take Jane Austen, for example. Most of her characters effortlessly make their ways through life on the back of inherited fortunes, allowing them to devote themselves to finding a husband, match-making and attending balls. The same is true of Sex and the City. Carrie is a writer and we often see her tapping a few lines into her lap top without any real degree of effort. Samantha was into PR and became Smith's manager as his acting career took off. Charlotte appears to do nothing, securing her living from her wealthy lawyer husband. In fact the only one who ever moans about work is Miranda, who is also a lawyer, but a lawyer whose work is completely invisible and never intrudes into the Sex and the City universe. Theirs is a life where identity is defined by consumption.

This erasing of class through the ostentatious display of class privilege has historically set the tone for formations of femininity. Through their privileged access to economic and cultural capital, the experience of bourgeois women defines what it is to be feminine for all women of all classes. Their experience is the norm. It is therefore unsurprising their lifestyles are marketed as the aspirational ideal. Carrie's singling out of labels and love is significant because they are the foundation of this world. It is the dialectical interplay of the two on which femininity hangs - femininity is performed through the consumption of trendy labels and services. The better one is able to strategically deploy this style, the more desirable one is to (bourgeois) men, the more one's femininity is affirmed and the greater the chance of landing a wealthy partner. In turn the rich boyfriend/husband provides an effortless income enabling a richer cultivation of femininity. That at least is the aspiration.

For working class women who aspire to this dominant mode of femininity, a number of strategies are available. The only working class character in the movie is Louise. She is black, hails from St Louis, has recently graduated with a degree in computer science and hasn't got two pennies to rub together (it is interesting that as the only black character of any note to have ever appeared in Sex and the City, Louise is cast in a servile and subordinate position). But she is a woman who buys into the lifestyle Carrie leads. They may be a different class, the relationship between them is a power relation in which Carrie holds all the cards, but their shared femininity successfully obscures the true character of the relationship for both women. Like Carrie, Louise came to New York in search of those two Ls. Louise has had her heart broken by a man she still loves as well, so there is shared pain. Despite having no money Louise manages to keep up feminine appearances by renting the latest handbags, much to Carrie's approval. And as Carrie's PA, Louise is able to feminise her computer science knowledge by operating a website and creating a secret folder of emails from a penitent Big in the hope Carrie will stumble across them and give the relationship yet another chance. So by pleasing this bourgeois woman, Louise paradoxically confirms her working class location by acting in such a way that suppresses it, and it is a behaviour Carrie is all too keen to encourage.

Discussing the film on Newsnight Review, Paul Morley suggested Sex and the City is the last swan song for a gilded age that is now passing from the scene. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Cable and digital channels are packed with "reality" shows chronicling privileged lives that make Carrie and the girls look like Calvinists. Despite the increasing social distance between those featured in such programmes and their audiences, there will be a greater demand for shows and films that offer an escape from the grinding class-bounded realities of most women, and this will particularly be the case as the credit crunch and economic slow down start to bite.

So it looks as though Sex and the City will be with us for a bit longer, and could be returning to the big screen fairly soon.

Monday, 26 May 2008

Indiana Jones and the Sub-Cold War Hogwash

This could have been a good idea. I haven't got a problem in principle with the resurrection of the Indiana Jones franchise. But I do have a very big issue with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. You see, there is a world of difference between the original trilogy and this. They were good. This is rubbish.

On the face of it, the plot doesn't sound too much of a departure from previous Indy movies. The Russians, led by the evil Rosa Clebb-alike Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) kidnap Indy and force him at gunpoint to help them steal the corpse of a Roswell alien, recovered from the site of the 1947 UFO crash. There follows a chase through the warehouse, an adventure with an atom bomb test, another chase at Indy's university. The action moves to Peru in the search of his former friend, Harold Oxley (John Hurt), who's gone missing searching for the fabled crystal skull. To cut a convoluted story short, Indy finds the skull, the Russians find Indy, he finds the lost city of Akator, the Russians find Indy again, the crystal skull is returned to its owner - who turns out to be a transdimensional alien being - everything starts falling to pieces, the baddies are sucked into a portal, the city is destroyed, a giant flying saucer rises from the rubble ... and Indy marries his long lost love, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). The end.

The main problem with Indy IV is this: it's tedious and dull. The first three movies were utterly absurd but nevertheless entertaining. This one looks as if Steven Spielberg sat down with George Lucas and came up with the daftest excuse they could find to marry whip-crack away adventuring with Spielberg's little grey alien obsessions and Lucas's CGI fetish. The result is a total mess. Chase sequences, of which there seem to be several dozen, are overlong and pointless. The relationship between Indy and his soviet nemesis goes from warm cooperation to hostility to cooperation again. And worst of all, it insults the viewer by frequently flying off into incredulity.

For example, the opening scene has a US army convoy travelling across the Nevada desert to a military installation. Surprise, surprise, this turns out to be a KGB operation ... with soliders who couldn't look more Slavic if they had 'My Name is Sergei' painted on their foreheads. And what's more, only one of them could speak English (that would be Spalko) ... and that's with a thick Russian accent. Yet we are expected to believe they could easily infiltrate the USA at the height of Cold War paranoia! And then there's the atom bomb scene. Indy escapes the Russian's clutches and makes it to a nearby town, except this town is a mock up for the purposes of nuclear testing. Too late Indy realises he's got a few tens of seconds to find shelter or he's cooked. He frantically tears around the house, and with seconds to spare clambers into a fridge - conveniently lead-lined. The bomb goes off, the town is blown away and the blast wave hurls the fridge into the air at great speed, before crashing down multiple times and coming to a rest. Against the backdrop of an impressively rendered mushroom cloud, Indy staggers out ... completely unscathed. Finally, in Peru, Indy's gang end up going down the river where they meet not one but three waterfalls. They go over each one, including the awesome Iguazu Falls ... without a single scratch! Okay, the first three movies bend the rules a bit, after all it's not everyday Nazi's faces melt off or peoples' hearts can be removed by one's bare hands. But at least they were done well so disbelief could be suspended. Here, it just makes the movie look ridiculous.

Some hay has been made of the Cold War backdrop to the film. The so-called Communist Party of the Russsian Federation are not too pleased. An open letter to Harrison Ford from the party's St Petersburg branch said "in 1957 the USSR was not sending terrorists to America but sending the Sputnik satellite into space!” There have also been ravings about Spielberg wanting to start a new Cold War, or some such nonsense, and some calls for it to be banned in Russia. This is certainly over-egging the pudding, but there is a trace of anti-communist polemic mixed up in the proceedings.

One of the major plot devices is that thanks to his association with Mac (Ray Winstone)- an undercover soviet agent and fellow adventurer, Indy comes under suspicion from a McCarthyite FBI and is forced to leave his professorial post, which sets the sojourn to Peru in motion. Once he's there, as if to prove what a good American he is, Indy faces challenges from a succession of communists - primitive, contemporary and advanced. It is not enough that he and his merry band of rugged individualists (his fiery ex Mary, Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), his James Dean clone of a son, Mac, and the deranged Oxley) do battle with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of faceless soviet soldiers, he manages to avoid the regimented swarms of millions of killer army ants (which, alas, a couple of henchmen fall prey to), runs from hordes of faceless Andeans, whose tribe protects the lost city, before finally meeting the aliens who, we're told, possess a hive mind. So we have four distinct groups of communists - the ants eat the Russians, the Russians machine gun the tribe, and finally, the aliens destroy the Russians. At the climax the aliens offer Indy's group and the soviets a "gift" - Spalko's too enamoured with these advanced communists from another dimension to decline, while Indy's individualist suspicion smells a rat and he and his party get away, just before the place starts collapsing and Spalko is vaporised by the knowledge the aliens burn directly into her brain.

The moral of the story? Collectivism is dangerous. It is out to get you. It will use you, consume you, and burn you out before it destroys you and itself.

I enjoy reactionary sub-texts and cod anti-communism as much as the next movie goer. But if Spielberg and Lucas want to use Indiana Jones again for polemical purposes, let's hope it will at least be entertaining.

Friday, 28 March 2008

The Chance of a Lifetime

Last week, I was sitting in my flat trying to get motivated to mark some essays. As usual, the TV was on as I desperately sought a distraction. There was an old black-and-white movie being shown on Film Four. For the first ten minutes I took little notice of it as I psyched myself up for the grim task that lay ahead of me. Then I paid more attention when I realised a good old-fashioned British Leyland-style car park meeting was being played out. The scene was a plough factory in some rural idyll in 1950, and the managing director was telling his petulant workforce a few home truths. He told them that he worked 12 or 14 hours a day, seven days a week (the concept of work-life balance wasn’t yet in vogue) and that if any of the workers wanted his job, they could have it. This was only an act of bravado, but the workers took him up on his offer and rented the company off him. A workers’ co-operative had been born and my interest in The Chance of a Lifetime had been awakened.

Two of the workers now formed the new board of directors. But both suppliers and the bank were wary of this Brave New World and the firm was soon hit by a ‘credit-crunch’. It looked as if it was going under, but the workers had a whip-round to save the day, prompting the headline ‘Workers pledge assets to save the factory’ in the Daily Worker. Then the firm got a lucky break in the form of a huge order from the Zanatobian Trade Delegation, who all looked very dodgy to me with their black hats and Trotsky-like beards. The works-engineer, Adams played by a young Kenneth Moore talking in his trademark Douglas Bader staccato, announced that the firm would have to ‘retool’, concentrate just on the Zanatobia order and ditch its existing customers. This was too much for one of the worker directors who quit and returned to the shopfloor.

Adams now embarked on introducing Fordist mass-production techniques. As a result of such Taylorism, piece-rates were lowered and the workers found themselves losing 12 bob a week. This led to an unofficial strike although this was attributed to four agitators (one of whom was Irish, lol) as we all know that strikes are usually caused by red troublemakers! Full-time union officials were called in and they naturally advised moderation telling the workers ‘you are striking against yourselves’. Does it sound familiar? Everyone throws coins into the Irishman’s tea mug to make up his twelve bob, a stray coin lodges in a busty woman’s cleavage (that of Hattie Jacques of Carry On fame) causing much mirth, and everyone has a laugh and goes back to work.

But there is another crisis to contend with. The Zanatobian government cancels all import orders citing currency difficulties (I told you they looked dodgy!). It looks as if all is lost until the old managing director, Mr. Dickenson, comes to the rescue. He has given 30 years of damned hard work building up the business and his father 40 years before him. He is not going to let it all go down the plughole without a fight. He looks up some old international contacts, gets some new orders and the business, after Stakhanovite contributions all round, not only survives but looks all set to flourish. Mr. Dickenson returns to the Board as is joined by the Fordist engineer. The surviving worker director, knowing his place, returns to the shopfloor announcing that ‘he would rather work for a living’. Hard-headed capitalism had triumphed over naive idealism.

On the face it of it was just another quaint, endearingly silly and typically British old film. But I think that if you locate it in its time with the Atlee administration that some people must have regarded as positively Bolshevik and the growing fear of the ‘red menaces’ of the Soviet Union and China, there was a definite political message. Anyway, it was also good fun and I got my marking done eventually.

Tuesday, 11 March 2008

The Other Black Gold

Can the market be used to overcome the negative effects of the market? An affirmative answer is implied throughout Black Gold, the 2007 documentary looking at exploitation in the Ethiopian coffee industry.

Coffee is very big business indeed. After oil, it is the second most actively traded commodity in the world. Global sales have climbed from 1990's $30 billion a year to today's $80 billion. The industry is dominated by four multinationals - Kraft, Nestlé, Proctor and Gamble, and Sara Lee. And despite coffee's growing popularity, the prices beans command are at a 30 year low.

Ethiopia is the largest coffee producer in Africa. 15 million of its 27 million-strong labour force depend on the bean for their livelihoods, and it accounts for 67% of the country's export revenue. Like many countries overly dependent on the export of one commodity, it is particularly sensitive to the fluctuations of its market price. Black Gold shows the effects the low price has on Ethiopian farmers through the eyes of Tadesse Meskela, the manager of a 75,000 member coffee-producing cooperative. It documents his quest to get a better price for coffee growers. To illustrate the disparity, he shows a group of workers how a cup costing the equivalent of 12 cents in most villages retails at $2.90 in the USA. Typically farmers get 23 cents per kilo. The cooperative usually gets a better price but for individual farmers outside of the union, they can receive as little as eight cents.

One reason for the huge mark up between the point of production and the point of sale in the West is the supply chain. The beans are brought to auction and are purchased by processors. These in turn sell the coffee to another set of buyers who export it and sell it on to roasters in the West. The roasters in turn sell it on to the retailer, whereby it's sold to the customer. Tadesse's cooperative aims to repatriate profits lost to the supply chain by assuming as much of the Ethiopian side of the business as it can, with a target of removing 60% of the middlemen.

But even so many workers are aware of how coffee dependence stunts community development. Low prices means schools are not adequately funded (there is no state support for schools), clothing is of very poor quality, housing is extremely substandard and overcrowded, and food is in short supply. Generalised across Ethiopia's vast agricultural sector (farming accounts for 80% of employment) this means millions are susceptible to famine. Seven million people are dependent on food aid given by the USA and EU. We are shown how because if the price, one farmer cuts down part of his coffee crop so he can produce Khat - a drug banned in the West but one that nevertheless commands a greater price on the market. Compared with coffee's 23 cents a kilo, Khat can sell for four dollars per bushel of 20 branches. However, this is an act of desperation because coffee is a medium term investment for farmers - it takes five years for a coffee plant to mature and begin producing beans.

In sharp contrast to the poverty we are shown snapshots of Western coffee culture, taking in coffee houses, plush boardrooms, coffee tasting, the World Barista Championships, and the coffee house tour of Seattle. We are introduced to the present manager of the very first Starbucks to open in 1971, a woman who's obviously had an implant fitted. It was as if her personality had merged with that projected by the business. She waxed lyrical about the excitement of being part of Starbucks and "the lives we are touching".

As far as Black Gold was concerned, the main blame for this disparity lies with the World Trade Organisation and the subsidies the US and EU channel into their agriculture (this is particularly galling as many African nations subject to IMF "structural adjustments" cannot subsidise their farmers). The camera whisks us away to sunny Cancun for the fifth ministerial conference of the WTO in 2003. The G20 group of developing countries entered the talks aiming to change the rules of global trade. Their chief target was the US/EU agricultural subsidy and the tariffs that prevent them from competing in Western markets on more of an even keel. As was widely reported at the time, the talks collapsed on the fifth day. For all their neoliberal cant the West were unwilling to budge on agriculture, tariffs and intellectual property rights. But in an act of breathtaking hypocrisy they still demanded the G20 economies and other southern states opened up to more Western capital. They were singularly uninterested in poverty and development.

Tadesse was asked about what can be done to help his members. He said change was dependent upon raising the awareness of Western consumers. They need to be aware of the poverty that lurks at the bottom of their coffee cups and demand more fair trade products as a whole. On one level it is difficult to argue against. Time and again the farmers stated a rise of a few cents per bag would be enough to transform their lives and communities. The Black Gold website itself follows in a similar vein - those wanting to take action are requested to show the film, ask multinationals to pay a fairer price, write to your MP, and join one (or all) of the many worthy developmental NGOs. Western consumption is the cause of the problem, and it is Western consumption that will find the solutions.

The problem with this is despite the combustible material on show here Black Gold is a politics-free zone. Tories, Blairites/Brownites, and Orange Book LibDems would come away without any of their basic politics challenged. All that's needed is an opportunity for the poor nations to trade their way out of poverty. But all this is rather naive - it assumes the US and EU would consent to ceding their strangleholds on markets out of charity. Just supposing they did, multinational corporations will step in where states have stepped out and ensure global markets remain rigged in their favour. In other words, trade isn't the solution to the problem, it is the problem.

As long as production is subordinate to the market, as long as workers are not paid the full value of their labour power, superexploitation and one-sided development/underdevelopment will remain the lot of Africa. And no amount of consumption with a conscience will change that.

Monday, 3 March 2008

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

The idea of a psychotic computer in the future sending cyborg assassins back in time to pick off its enemies may be a silly scenario, but $700 million worldwide box office receipts for the Terminator movies show it is a compelling one. The sequel, Judgment Day, is an excellent action romp, and the third film - The Rise of the Machines - isn't as bad as some critics suggest. But neither are a patch on The Terminator. Not only is the action and suspense unremitting, it was released at just the right time when a series of pathological tropes were working their way through popular culture. 1984, the year of The Terminator's release was haunted by the threat of nuclear conflict, and computers were increasingly an unavoidable reality of everyday life. Leaving aside the time travel, the idea of a sentient supercomputer subjecting the human race to nuclear genocide did not appear too implausible. The new cold war of the 80s may have avoided the McCarthyite excesses of the 50s, but like the B-movies that came before it, it found a fantastic expression in enemies that were invisible or indistinguishable from ourselves. The Terminator was able to tap into an undercurrent of apocalyptic paranoia and uncertainty, a tendency uneasily co-existing with popular cultural outpourings of strength, confidence, machismo, and power.

American science fiction in the 90s made a bit of a move away from this territory. True, the X-Files dealt with themes of infiltration, but most of the time Mulder and Scully eschewed violence for plain old fashioned sleuthing. The second wave of Star Trek franchises - The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager - spanned the decade with its tales of space faring humanitarians and liberals . Captains Picard, Sisko, and Janeway much preferred jaw-jaw to war-war. The much darker Babylon 5 combined corny humour with a foreboding sense of looming war and conflict, but it never did glorify violence. All of its characters were morally ambivalent to a greater or lesser extent.

But in the post-9/11 world, the 80s came back in muted form. Militarism, shorn of its boys own glamour, infected the ill-fated Star Trek: Enterprise series. The re-made Battlestar Galactica is a plain allegory for the war on terror, where the remnants of human society are left reeling by a massive sneak attack and forever watchful for Cylon infiltrators indistinguishable from humans. The post-apocalyptic Jericho, set after a massive terrorist nuclear attack on the US, works through not dissimilar themes. This seemed a precipitous conjuncture in which to launch a Terminator spin-off series on the world.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles are set five years after the events of T2. Having seen off the shape-shifting T1000 at the end of the film, Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) and her messiah-to-be son, John (Thomas Dekker), spend the intervening time skipping from town to town, swapping identities along the way. The artifacts out of which the Skynet computer system was developed - the CPU and arm of the original Terminator - may have been melted down and the original date for Judgment Day (August 29th 1997) came and went, but best drop off the radar of official society, just to be sure.

The pilot of the episode sets up the plot lines for the nine episode run. Upon attending class at a new school, John is assailed by a muscle-bound terminator. By happy coincidence it turns out his classmate, Cameron Phillips (Summer Glau), is a terminator sent from the future to protect him. She puts herself between John and the terminator, and they are able to escape. Meeting up with mum they decide that rather than avoiding their nemesis they're going to attempt to stop Skynet before it goes online. Cameron leads them to a vault constructed by a resistance fighter sent back to the 1960s, and in a final showdown with the terminator it is seemingly destroyed as the trio leap forward eight years to 2007. And so the hunt for Skynet begins.

The following episode establishes that the future war against the machines is being projected back in time. Both Skynet and the resistance send forces into the past to secure various objectives and to fight one another. No doubt these will become key plot devices as the season wears on.

Overall The Sarah Connor Chronicles have got off to a good start. The first two episodes managed to pull off the creeping tension of the movies, the special effects were up to standard and the actors are well cast. Importantly for the fans, the feel is faithful to the franchise (though some will be miffed that events taking place in the series timeline stands in contradiction to the unfolding of Judgment Day in the third film). However, viewers looking for an antidote to post-9/11 will not find it here.

Wednesday, 20 February 2008

The Radical Cinema of Peter Watkins

Keele MCC heard from John Cook of Glasgow Caledonian University this evening. He spoke on the little-known work of the radical film maker, Peter Watkins. Watkins was part of the amateur film movement that grew up in the mid-late 1950s and found himself taken on at the BBC on the strength of his short film on the Hungary uprising, The Forgotten Faces. Released in 1961 it was, contrary to popular belief, among the very first films - if not the first - to pioneer the documentary-drama style. Rather than being a straight apologia of either side, it showed how revolutions are necessarily very messy, how circumstances can transform the downtrodden and oppressed into people fired by murderous rage. In one key scene, we are shown crowds coming under fire from uniformed snipers. When they surrender the people wreak bloody vengeance by crushing them beneath their heels and boots. As a tribute to Watkins style, when Forgotten Faces was shown to the founding chairman of Granada, Sidney Bernstein, he quipped "if we showed that film, no one would believe our documentaries anymore".

Having secured a position at the BBC he became the centre of controversy in 1965 with The War Game. This film imagined the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Kent and its aftermath. Immediately it was banned and remained so for 20 years. Watkins was convinced this decision was taken on political grounds, and was so disgusted by the experience that he left Britain in 1968, and hasn't worked here since. But the hallmarks of his film making had been established. The docudrama style (also seen in his earlier film, Culloden, which involved scenes where participants of the famous 1746 battle were interviewed by filmmakers), his preference for hand held camera work, and the casting of "ordinary" people, not professional actors, have continued to mark out his oeuvre from the mainstream.

Post-BBC Watkins has continued to make films outside of the conventional production process and on very tight budgets. Typical of this is 1971's Punishment Park. Inspired by the trial of the Chicago Seven, it is set in a future where subversives and hippies jailed for political offences get the chance to have their sentences commuted if they complete a desert wilderness course. All the while they're being pursued by law enforcement as part of their training in tracking, shooting, and apprehending suspects. The clip shown this evening's audience is taken from the trial scene. The defendants are arrayed before a tribunal and time after time the presiding judge disallows pleas and defences guaranteed under the US constitution. Contemporary criticism attacked Watkins for exaggerating the violation of basic democratic rights, but post-Guantanamo these seem rather quaint objections. The film itself was on general release in the states for four days until it was mysteriously dropped, so obviously somewhere the film spoke an uncomfortable truth to power.

Watkins' last major film is La Commune (Paris 1871). Filmed in 1999 the 200-strong cast was populated almost entirely by non-professional actors, and casting was done to type. The roles of the communards were taken by leftists and students, and the counterrevolutionary forces recruited from adverts placed in Le Figaro. Like previous work, in the battle scenes the film crew interview 'communards', who would alternate between acting as a participant and commenting on current affairs. Furthermore Watkins filmed La Commune chronologically so the actors knew what was coming and helped simulate a more authentic feel, albeit one anachronistically juxtaposed to interventions by modern media.

Throughout his presentation Cook compared Watkins to Ken Loach, arguing of the two the former was a more radical film maker. Though Loach is famed for the controversial nature of his subject matter how he makes and presents his work is far more conventional. Furthermore Loach's films are very clearly of the left. However, Watkins is a bit more problematic. He describes himself as a leftist, and a superficial acquaintance with the above films seems to reinforce that. But for Cook, Watkins' work is a comment on polarisation and the politics of hate. In Punishment Park for example, there are multiple scenes of the radicals and agents of the state attacking one another verbally and physically. There is a certain even handedness in their portrayal as reaction gets just as much time to put its case against subversion. The same is the case in La Commune - there are scenes capturing the Versailles troops berating and polemicising against the communards and leftism. In both Watkins manages to make visible the polarisation between the two - to take sides and start shouting (as he does in his role as a cameraman in Punishment Park) is to become seduced by hate. What is needed is some middle ground, a space for dialogue between the two antagonistic camps. Only then can real progress be made.

What to make of this? I don't think Watkins has retreated into the wishy-washy liberalism/populism that tries to be all things to all people. Instead it is a call to the left to realise the views of our opponents are as convincing to them as our politics are to us, that we should not forever hector or starkly oppose our views to theirs but rather take the time to address their concerns and win them over through persuasion. As he puts it, "the ideological left is as flawed as the right - any politics that doesn't take on the views of ordinary people is playing at politics".