Friday 15 February 2013

The Glums

Out of sheer curiosity and in pursuit of critical integrity I did go to see Les Mis.  

And I was very impressed - by the acting - I think Ann Hathaway deserved her BAFTA, and Hugh Jackman ought to be a strong contender for the Acting Oscar,  working so hard and heroically.  Of course DDL as Lincoln must be a shoo-in, but....- by the directing, production design, photography and sound.

Unfortunately the sound reproduced the music, and as I expected I hated just about every bar of it.  I have nothing against musicals, and enjoy some of them enormously,  especially if Stephen Sondheim has been involved, but the music in Les Mis seems to me to be stridently sentimental, banal and so so lazy.    Are there more than 5 tunes in the whole thing?   It seems they were endlessly, meanly  recycled, with occasional attempts at trios and even an abandoned attempt at a sung quartet.    And did any of the tunes have more than seven notes?     I know that many people are deeply moved by the score, but if you are one of them can you imagine what it is like for those of us who are not?  

Thank God for Sasha Baron-Cohen  and Helena Bonham-Carter, the only light in the heaviness.







Hero, again.


Hero.

The Rainbow revisited.

Zhang Yimou's 2002 film Hero is set 2300 years ago in China, when the tyrannical King of Qin (who later became China's first emperor) is bloodily conquering neighbouring provinces.      Three skilled assassins, two men and a woman, intend to kill this tyrant, but they are thwarted by a country Marshall, who claims to have killed all three.  He is presented to the King, who wants to know how he managed this remarkable feat.  

The Marshall tells him how love, betrayal, jealousy and revenge undid the assassin’s  conspiracy.     The King  does not believe him, and offers another explanation.  The Marshall admits that his story is not true, but only because he did not think the king would accept the truth.   So he tells him another version.   Each of these stories is filmed in a different dominant and emblematic colour.   This is perhaps the most beautiful film I have ever seen.  The bold use of colour to separate the different plot lines, and give each  of them a useful visual mnemonic, also  illustrates  the differing view of humanity implicit in each segment.  

Wuxia?
Hero  presents itself as a Chinese martial arts, or xuwia movie, building on the cinematic tradition of the Run-Run Shaw Studios in Hong Kong and ancient Chinese quasi-historical folk tales.  Hero found a world-wide audience thanks, in  part,  to the success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon  (2000).     But, unlike Crouching Tiger, Hero is not a homage to the genre,  but profoundly subverts it. 

Let me put this in context, firsty by saying that Chinese and Japanese martial arts movies are not at all the same.  The Japanese genre, exemplified by the Yojimbo and Zatoichi franchises,  are based round the Samurai codes, and are overtly influenced by the American Western. (Kurosawa idolized John Ford movies, and Hollywood repaid him by filming his Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven).   In Japanese and American films the lone hero sides arrives in town, with the victims of injustice and engages in explicitly bloody fights, lopping off limbs and heads with his sword or shooting them down.    He then moves on.   These films appeal to the Quentin Tarantino of  Kill Bill and Django Unchained.    The Chinese films also echo the themes of honour and vengeance that shape many classic Samurai and Western movies, but they are very different.  

Unlike the Japanese films, violence in classic  wuxia films is not bloody and explicit (in Hero there are many deadly duels, but hardly any blood)  though of course some recent directors have pandered profitably to the Western taste for gore.   In true wuxia the fights are choreographed like ballets, and the acrobatic wire-work that allows the actors to fly and complete complex aerial maneuvers illustrates the spiritual nature of the conflict.    This is good versus evil, part of an ongoing cosmic and supernatural battle.  Success in wuxia battle depends, therefore, less on muscle than on purity of intent.  That is why women can compete on equal terms.

Heroines
Most of Zimou’s films have women at their centre.    His original star and muse was the actress Gong Li.    Hero stars Maggie Cheung, and the dancer Zhang Ziyi, who later played the female lead in the House of Flying Daggers, Banquet and Memoirs of a Geisha.    Despite a recent Japanese remake of Zatoichi with a female protagonist (Ichi, the Blind Swordswoman),  women in Samurai movies are almost always victims, the equivalent of the helpless screaming blonde rescued by the granite jawed hero in (too) many European and American westerns and thrillers.  
The Chinese heroine, on the other hand,  is often the daughter of a dead General, betrayed by his Emperor or fellow officers.   The daughter then trains herself to wreak honourable and necessary revenge, often leading a faithful gang.   Sometimes the women are simply independent gang leaders.   Whatever, they do not whimper.

From Banned to Beijing.
Zimou’s films have always been subversive.  His early movies were banned by the Chinese Government for being critical of the patriarchal Confucian tradition (Raise the Red Lantern), the uncaring Communist state (Qiu Ju), or for portraying powerful female sexuality (Red Sorghum, and Shanghai Triad).       In Hero he takes on the tradition of vengeance being honourable, and turns it upside down.   I will not say how here, but only that this is a movie arguing for peace, not war, in a complex essay in light, love and morality.

Eventually the Chinese authorities recognized Zimou’s talent and invited him to direct the opening of the Beijing Olympics ceremony.    (Maybe the UK Olympic Committee learnt from that when they invited our leading film director Danny Boyle to direct ours.) 

Zhang Yimou originally trained as a cinematographer, and has always used colour with great bravura.     Hero is shot by the Hong Kong based Australian  Christopher Doyle, who also shot Ang Lee’s  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon  and the worked on the exquisite Wong Kar-Wai  film In The Mood For Love (see below).  

Much as I enjoyed Ang Lee's film, Hero impresses and moves me more profoundly.
This film is, in my opinion,  concerned with what it means to be human, and part of my deep enjoyment comes from finding within it values and themes close to my Christian heart.  

Hero also stars Jet Li, Tony Leung and Donnie Yen. 
 

*In The Mood For Love  also stars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, but in radically different roles.   It is set in 1960’s Hong Kong, and tells of two people, Su and Chou,  who move into neighbouring flats.   Each has a spouse who works long hours.   Each of them nurses suspicions about their own spouse's fidelity, and when they meet they come to the conclusion that their partners have been seeing each other.   In their isolation they are drawn closer together.  
In November 2009 Time Out New York ranked this film as the fifth-best of the decade, calling it the "consummate unconsummated love story of the new millennium."    
In the 2012 British Film Institute’s  Sight and Sound critics poll,  In the Mood for Love appeared at number 24, making it the highest ranked film from the 2000s and one of only two films from the 2000s to be listed in the top 50 films of all time.  
It also competes with Hero for its visual beauty, a testament to Chris Doyle’s  ability to work with different emotional and narrative palates.

Zero Dark Thirty.


Let the film speak.

  With regard to Zero Dark Thirty  Kathryn Bigelow has written that    “Those of us who work in the arts know that  depiction  is not endorsement”.


Slavoj Zizek writing in The Guardian on Saturday 26th January responded  that   ‘torturing a human being is in itself something so shattering that to depict it neutrally is already a kind of endorsement.”  

“Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way.  Such a film would either embody a deep immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in its spectators.  Where is Bigelow here? ……. Without a doubt she is on the side of the normalization of torture.”

May I say in Ms Bigelow and Mark Boal's defense that their film is not in any way  disinterested.   Why would any one spend years investigating the facts, forming them into a coherent narrative and filming that narrative with enormous care, commitment and craft unless they did so either for overtly propaganda purposes, which is obviously not the case here, or to confront the audience with the truth. 

 Can the truth can be told with  passion and commitment without it being overtly emotive?    Indeed if you trust the truth you don’t have to ‘over egg the pudding.’   I wonder if Mr. Zizek has seen the documentary films made when the Concentration Camps were liberated, or those showing the effect of the bombing of Hiroshima.     These films did not need ‘effect’, or comment.   The film makers simply pointed their cameras and let the plain and simple images do the work. These films did not ‘normalize’ either Holocaust.


Mr. Zizek is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and a widely published political philosopher.   He is deeply moved by this film.    Anyone who is not moved may be less than fully alive.    But it seems that his humanitarian feelings have overcome his capacity for thought. “With torture one should not “think”,” he writes.   Really?   So is this subject beyond the scope of moral philosophy?   We know the Adorno line that ‘after the Holocaust there could be no more art’, but no more thought?    Surely the point of philosophy is that it helps us to think about the 'unthinkable'?

This film demands that we think, hard, about what we see, and commentators on it ought at least to be well informed.        

He writes “Much more ominous (than Maya, the main protagonist)  is the young, bearded  CIA agent who masters perfectly the art of passing glibly from torture to friendliness once the victim is broken.”

And 

“There is something deeply disturbing in  how, later, he changes from a torturer in jeans to a well-dressed Washington bureaucrat.”

I am not sure what value the beard or jeans signify here, but  firstly, the CIA agent does not ‘change from a torturer in jeans to a well-dressed Washington bureaucrat’,  he simply finished this posting and went back to Langley to work there in another role, probably as an analyst or  section head.    Did we miss that he is Doctor Daniel? 

Secondly, this is exactly how skilled interrogators work.   In military interrogation the police procedural Good Cop/Bad Cop personas are often invested in the same person,  the only person the victim has to believe can save him.    Skilled Interrogators know that torture does not provide reliable results, but there are other ways to break a person than by physical pain.    The Bad Cop will exhaust, humiliate and disorient their victim, break down their self-image and feelings of self-worth  to the point where the only way the victims can find salvation is in the eyes of the Good Cop, who is the same person as the Bad Cop.    This is not a dramatic  invention.  This is how it works.

Mr. Zizek asks “If torture was always going on, why are those in power now telling us openly about it?   There is only one answer; to normalize it, to lower our ethical standards. ”

Do we really think that those in power have been telling us ‘openly’?  After years of semantic and legal sleight of hand and denial,  of inadmissible evidence and closed courts, of denying rendition and the use of operators employed by foreign powers to torture, of keeping the prisoners in US bases silent as long as possible, of punishing lower ranking soldiers as if they had not been obeying orders from above?  Watch Taxi To The Dark Side for a quick primer on that last.    The US and British governments have fought tooth and nail to keep the facts away from their populations.   Even now the Americans are investigating how Mark Boal got so much accurate information.  

But maybe they need not have bothered to hide these truths.    The TV program  24  was popular and much awarded.      Its star, Kieffer Sutherland,  played Jack Bauer  of the American Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU).    This show premiered on  November 6, 2001, two months after 9/11, and ran for  192 episodes, winning many awards.  Its message was clear.   There are no means that cannot and should not be used if they are necessary to save us from disaster.   It is therefore justifiable to torture anyone, even to death, if the information gained will  save the lives of thousands.     

This stance was admired and adopted by the Bush Administration and, it seems, by many members of the US military and intelligence operatives.      It must be said, however, that I know of no occasion in modern history when this justification has been proven necessary.      As someone has remarked; if they say we need  to break eggs to make an omelet, I say ‘show me the omelet.’.   If there was such an omelet it would surely have been on public display to prove the case.   But the popularity of 24 suggests  that the public bought  the  argument.   And of course it lowered their anxiety.  If there are people out there who are prepared to do anything, literally any thing, to protect us,  then surely we are safe, or at least safer than we would be it they were not prepared to break eggs.   

Professional interrogators know that torture does not provide reliable evidence.    Anyone who has read up on the ‘intelligence’ that triggered the 2nd invasion of Iraq knows that it was offered up by a prisoner who,  after being repeatedly waterboarded,   decided to tell his interrogators what they wanted  to  hear;  that Saddam Hussein did indeed have WMD, rather than continue to tell them the truth,  which was that Hussein did not have WMD.    Most people being interrogated eventually work out what their captors want to know.   
  
 Coming back to Zero Dark Thirty, Jason Clarke, who plays the CIA interrogator seen waterboarding at the start of the film, has said ‘It’s all on the screen….let the film speak.  I think the film does an amazing job of speaking, if you want to listen.’  (The Guardian Guide 19th January p 18).

Zero Dark Thirty is the most accurate depiction I have ever seen on the screen of the Intelligence gathering and collating process.   This takes time, gathers more than it can process, produces blind leads,  is open to abuse – and betrayal.    Short cuts lead to false conclusions.   And means can be used that are deeply immoral, especially where there is pressure from above to achieve results, and these means either corrupt or deeply trouble those who undertake them.     Or both.       I do not think that this film tries to  justify – or heroify – the actions of those taking part in these activities.    It simply presents them to our gaze.

Mr. Zizek thinks that “the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty.”   Well I am a liberal, and I found this film profoundly and properly disturbing.   Liberal Hollywood, it seems, has difficulty with it too, and the film and its makers have sometimes been shunned and booed.      

I wonder why the lack of overt political point-making in this film has not received the same applause and award nomination as The Hurt Locker, the last film researched and written by Mark Boal and directed by Kathryn Bigelow?    If that film is judged by Mr. Zizek’s standards then should it have denounced the horrors of the Invasion of Iraq, and the hundred’s of thousands of casualties?   Or is the torture of one man on screen more morally offensive than the deaths of thousands of women and children of screen?

Mr. Zizek’s final argument is that we live in a moral vacuum because we could not imagine a major Hollywood studio film depicting torture in a similar way 20 years ago.

No, we cannot, because as far we know such torture was not being used by our Governments then. 
And just how ‘moral’  was the movie industry in 1992?     The films that made most money that year were Aladdin, The Bodyguard, Home Alone 2, Basic Instinct, Lethal Weapon 3, Sister Act, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Wayne’s World.     I wonder what moral values we can see in these.   The only film that was in any way critical of the establishment, and made money,  was A Few Good Men, but with Nicholson, Cruise and Moore in it how could it fail?   The only films I can recall that addressed    ethical issues in any way  were Hoffa, Love Field, Malcolm X, and Manufacturing Consent: Naom Chomsky and the Media.     The only truly politically critical  film was Zhang Zimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju.  That was banned, of course, in China, where it was made.  

 Of course modern horror movies are often appalling, and do, I am sure, tend to desensitize viewers.      But Zero Dark Thirty is not part of this carnography.

So please, Mr. Zizek, go the movies,  take your trained mind with you and distinguish between art and propaganda, between the disinterested and the passionatly objective.  Take your humanitarian heart with you and be outraged when films tell outrageous truths, but please don’t blame the film-makers for telling them.   Most of all please don’t accuse them of endorsing these outrages when they present the facts as neutrally –  honestly – as they can.    

‘It’s all on the screen….let the film speak.  I think the film does an amazing job of speaking