"Is God in showbusiness too?"

Many thanks to Infinite Thought for linking to Fredric Jameson's (1974) article about Zardoz. Jameson's initial "literary" analysis of Zardoz, as a variation on the Enlightenment critique of religious mystification, might be supplemented by the suggestion that, less a "fable" as Jameson would have it, Boorman's film is a critique of religion which nonetheless takes the form of a religious foundation myth (c.f. Freud's Moses and Monotheism). Sean Connery's Zed first receives his awakening from the pages of a book (albeit Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz and not the holy books and religious scriptures of the Abrahamic religions) handed to him by God-the-Father ("I bred you. I led you."), this then leads him to kill this God-the-Father figure, before, ultimately, leading his people ("the chosen ones") to the promised land of the Vortex, a place of Edenic rural serenity, with the final assault of the 'brutals' against the Vortex dwellers a kind of return of the repressed on the part of this particular Utopia's own structural outside.

"I am the BOSS. I am all around you."

Dr Who - The Green Death

I remember distinctly seeing this episode as a repeat on BBC2 as an adolescent. I wonder what it was about this particular episode that stuck in my mind; was it the political conflict between environmentalists, coal miners, and a multi-national petro-chemical corporation, the combination of Dudley Simpson's eerie pitched percussion and Dick Mills's electronic screams, or was it the Cronenbergian body horror of the strange maggot creatures lurking down the mine that so piqued the interest of my pubescent mind?

This story, from what we might call the 'golden age' of Dr Who (roughly speaking, season six to season fifteen) is also notable for the use of the sonic screwdriver as a kind of sonic weapon to temporarily paralyse the maggots; a believable love story between Jo Grant and Professor Jones (not to mention more than a twinge of jealousy from the Doctor - albeit the resigned jealousy of an old rake who knows there will always be more fish in the sea); a computer that enjoys humming Beethoven and Wagner to itself and paraphrasing Oscar Wilde; and the Doctor's attempt to fox said computer with one of Douglas Hofstadter's 'Strange Loops':

"The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false."

In Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter uses these self-referential loops, common to both the drawings of M.C. Escher and the canons and fugues of J.S. Bach, to explain the emergence of self-consciousness in an apparently rigidly deterministic system such as the human brain, or that of a computer.

The other nice thing about this 'golden age' period is the gradual introduction of a whole host of semi-regular characters, beyond the Doctor's immediate assistant(s), who pop up from time to time: not just Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sergeant Benton, and Captain Mike Yates, but also The Master and the sinister High Council of the time lords.

"capitalism is like a dead herring in the moonlight - it shines, but it stinks."

Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961), concerns an American Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin (James Cagney), charged with looking after the boss's daughter for a few weeks while she holidays in Europe. The day before her parents are due to come and pick her up, Cagney discovers that the girl, Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin), has married a Communist Party member, Otto Piffl (Horst Bucholz) from East Berlin. Panic-stricken at the thought of her father's reaction, he plants a cuckoo clock that plays Yankee Doodle Dandy on the hour and a balloon with "Russki Go Home" emblazoned on it, on the boy's motorbike. On crossing the border back into East Berlin, Piffl is arrested by the East German police and tortured (by being forced, repeatedly, to listen to 'Itsy-Bitsy-Teeny-Weeny-Yellow-Polka-Dot Bikini', anticipating Guantanamo Bay by some forty years. The scene is played strictly for laughs, so, contra-Marx, it is the first time that is farce, and only its repetition that is truly tragic) into confessing to being an American spy. Satisfied that no more will be heard of Piffl, Cagney then discovers that Scarlet is in fact pregnant and is forced to bribe the authorities into releasing Piffl, concerned that a child with no father might be thought even worse than a child with a communist father. Cagney then sets about tranforming Piffl into a model son-in-law for his boss: ordering him expensive clothes, a suite at the Hilton, teaching him manners and eating habits, giving him a decent job (for Coca Cola, naturally), and even going so far as to have him adopted by a local count. 

The ultimate lesson to be learnt from this film is, of course, that Piffl was in fact guilty of betraying the East German state, and the police were right to torture a confession out of him. We have here an exemplary case of the "objective guilt" cited by Zizek, "While you can be an honest individual who acted with the most sincere intentions, you are nonetheless "objectively guilty," if your acts serve reactionary forces - and it is, of course, the party which has the direct access to what your acts "objectively mean."" (In Defense of Lost Causes) When Piffl is first stopped by the police, on account of the anti-Soviet balloon attached to his bike, it is during his stuttered attempt to explain that the 'Uncle Sam' cuckoo clock interrupts, like a parapraxis, by blurting out the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Similarly, the day after his (forced?) confession to being an American spy, Piffl has at first forgotten all about it. The incident has been repressed by his superego for coming too close to the unbearable truth at the core of his subjectivity. Despite Piffl's sincerity and subjective commitment to socialism, it is clear that the combination of Scarlet's naive, cosseted rich girl and Piffl's slavish devotion to her can only lead to him betraying his cause (as is proved by his scant protest to being transformed into an exploitative capitalist boss at the end of the film), either with or without Cagney's intervention (which merely speeds up the inevitable). And if not that girl, then another...

"The world doesn't exist."

Addio, fratello crudele (1971, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi)

A beautiful, painterly film, shrouded in mist and haze and dappled in soft light, with a Jodorowsky-like, hallucinatory mysticism. The Financial Times review justly referred the cinematography to Michelangelo and Titian, but one might also compare it to the sinewy richness of Caravaggio. Truly, Giovanni in the well is Christ on the cross. The only disappointment is Ennio Morricone's music, which for, most of the film, lacks the arresting strangeness of other contemporary scores of his, such as those for Chi l'ha vista morire? or Gli Occhi freddi della paura, and sounds closer to the bucolic classicism of later Hollywood films, such as The Mission. Until, that is, we reach almost the very end of the film, and one of the strangest, most poetic scenes in a very strange and poetic film. As a great black dog sniffs around a dining room full of corpses and splattered in blood, a delicately haunting solo flute melody starts up, twisting and turning around an absent tonal centre, reserved yet softly unsettling. The flute's limpid breathiness should not be mistaken for the beatific sigh of souls rising to heaven, but rather the quiet terror of an empty, godless universe.

"The secret of life is honesty and fair-dealing - if you can fake that you've got it made"

It is easy to be shocked by the stupidity and lack of understanding shown by much of the commentary on the current dispute between YouTube and PRS for Music over licence fees paid for music videos, but the problem lies in the way the situation has been framed, and by the way Google (YouTube's parent company) has been allowed, practically unquestioned, to set the terms of the debate. In the press release issued by YouTube at the time of their unilateral and entirely unprompted decision to remove 'premium content' music videos from their U.K site in the middle of ongoing negotiations with PRS, as well as in the first Guardian article to report on this P.R. statement, the issue is presented as a clash between, on the one hand, the 'old' exploitative music industry, and, on the other, the brave new world of Web 2.0, offering direct unmediated access between 'artists' and 'fans'. It is essential in these circumstances to problematise each of the terms in this debate - 'the music industry', 'artists', 'fans', and what might be seen as the increasingly invisible mediator between the three, the internet and the various hardware and software companies that have come to colonise its virtual highways - but first of all this opposition between 'the music industry' and 'web 2.0' must be dismissed as false, and perniciously so.

There can be no opposition between the internet's principal software developers and the major multinational record companies, they are joined by ties of common ownership (Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, for instance, owns both MySpace and several recording and music publishing interests; Time-Warner-AOL owns, of course, both AOL and the Warner Music Group, as well as holding considerable shares - to the tune of $1 billion - in Google, not to mention the fact that the present CEO of AOL is former sales director of Google) and have frequently colluded in deals, tied by non-disclosure agreements, to share their profits, to the exclusion, by and large, of any actual music producers. The move on the part of YouTube to present the debate in these terms then, lacking any positive content in reality, must be seen as purely tactical - a somewhat specious attempt on the part of a massive global corporation, with annual advertising revenue to the tune of $16.4 billion (in 2007) and close financial and personnel ties to an even bigger corporate behemoth (Time-Warner), to present itself as 'the little guy'.

Part of the problem lies with this idea of 'the music industry' and the ease with which it can be manipulated. There is a perception that there is this thing called 'the music industry' which intervenes in, and distorts, the relationship between two mythical entities called 'artists' (a term which elevates music's producers to the romantic status of geniuses starving in garrets, outside the social, and beyond the dirt and cynicism of circulation) and 'fans' (a term which reduces music's consumers to the hysteric victims of Beatlemania, blindly following the Pied Piper to their doom). Although there is of course a grain of truth in this, it is certainly no more true than it is of the fashion industry, the potato industry, the furniture industry, the software industry, or the telecommunications industry. The music industry is, in this respect at least, no different from any other under the capitalist mode of production - except for this romantic ideological spin which sees producers as 'artists' who are today inevitably compromised by their financial dealings and were at some mythical point in the past somehow unconstrained by such concerns. The debate must then be reframed in terms of a conflict between, on the one hand, the global corporations which control BOTH the production and distribution of recorded music offline AND the web applications used to distribute music online, and on the other hand, music's consumers and producers (with PRS - a not-for-profit organisation that collects licensing revenue from businesses and distributes it amongst songwriters, without the intervention of any kind of record label, and with a membership of which over 90% earns, in royalties, less than £5,000 a year - very clearly on the side of the producers and consumers).

The notion that the World Wide Web (or perhaps 'Web 2.0') offers the chance of unmediated, direct access between producers and consumers is, similarly, a myth that requires exploding. All web applications like MySpace, YouTube, etc. do is exchange one form of corporate mediation - that offered by a record company - for another - that offered by a telecommunications/software company. Yes, it is possible for a band to buy their own domain name, webhosting, and all the rest of it, set up their own website and distribute their music directly online - but scarcely more so than thirty years ago, when a band could, and frequently did, press their own records, print their own artwork, and take them direct to shops (like Rough Trade) and sell them at gigs. And the simple fact is that the network of websites and applications that have come to be brought under the umbrella term 'Web 2.0' does not increase the possibilities of this happening, but has, in fact, decreased them, as bands increasingly don't bother with their own websites, and audiences scarcely bother looking for them, when they get all they want for free on MySpace. If the idea of a 'bad' major record label is one which gives producers little control over their labour power and what happens to the products thereof, and pays them little or no reward for their work, then MySpace and YouTube and so forth should be seen as the 'bad' mediators par excellence.

There is, however, a third party in this debate, and that is the role played by the peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, from Bit Torrent to Pirate Bay. Although the people who set up these networks will undoubtedly overlap with the previously defined group of music consumers, and music producers have a tendency, seeing the file-sharing networks as a thorn in the side of 'the music business' and thinking in terms of 'my enemy's enemy must be my friend', to regard them with a kind of affectionate leniency, peer-to-peer software, no matter how good the intentions of its designers may be, has had three almost immediate material consequences, none of which are unambiguously positive. First of, file-sharing has helped sustain the growing feeling that music, as though it were some sort of naturally occurring resource like water or oxygen, should be free to all (thus inviting the question of whether there is room in society for any 'professional musicians' at all, and, if so, where their income is supposed to come from); secondly, the existence of file-sharing has in fact increased the leverage and bargaining power that major record labes have over their acts, and the more the media talks of a crisis, the more the major labels can give musicians the impression that any kind of deal is something of a miracle at the moment and that they should therefore immediately accept the most restrictive and financially unrewarding contracts, with the sharp rise in the "360 deal" (where labels control a stake, not just in a band's record sales but also in their merchandise sales, publishing rights, live revenue, and so forth) just one of the more prevalent and immediate consequences of this; thirdly, file-sharing networks have contributed greatly to a massive change in listening habits, due to the free and immediate availability of practically all the music ever recorded. Though some may wish to celebrate this last point as a marvel of the modern age, it comes with something of a mummy's curse attached, for it would seem that the more music there is available for us to consume, the less we really listen.

As a child, I would save up my pocket money to buy an album on cassette perhaps every three or four weeks and then listen to that tape over and over again until I knew it inside out. This kind of dedicated listening is, by now, practically unheard of, not to mention the fact that, with the ever-decreasing sound quality of music formats (from vinyl to tape to CD to minidisc to mp3 to mobile phone...), whenever we listen to music today, we are literally listening to less of it, i.e. to a greatly reduced band of that music's frequencies. So, though I am not necessily advocating the criminalisation of file-sharing networks and the people who use them, I still have a problem with their typical self-presentation as global Robin Hoods, robbing from the rich 'music industry' for the good of all. And when Limewire, for instance, is owned by a man, Mark Gorton, who also owns a hedge fund and a stock brokerage, and Bit Torrent has corporate partnerships with such companies as Fox, Warner Brothers and Paramount, one should maybe pause for thought before assigning them any oppositional position, or liberatory potential, whatsoever.

"Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea."

Almost immediately after posting that last missive, I started to think more about this idea of the flatness of the cinematic image and how this is either exploited or compensated for in the work of different directors. Experimental film, such as the work of Stan Brakhage, struck me as one area where, perhaps under the influence of Clement Greenberg's formalist aesthetics of painting, the flatness of the screen becomes the very object of the film. Sure enough, a post over at Tativille locates precisely this quality in the work of another avant-garde film-maker, Nathaniel Dorsky. Then, for perhaps the hundredth time, I watched Bananas. 

Woody Allen's third feature as director (his Duck Soup, right down to the farcical courtroom scene, displaying wonderfully, as Zizek says of the Marx Brothers' film, "the madness, the "fun," the cruel irony, which are already present in the totalitarian state.") features none of the traits of extensivity and intensivity identified in the previous post; the camera, and the characters, tend, almost universally, to move from side to side, never coming towards the lens or being chased away by it. Nothing leaps out at us, nor are we ever really invited in. 

Over the next few days, watching a few more of Allen's films, I came to regard this degree of pictorial flatness to be characteristic of his work as a whole. There are significant exceptions to this rule, and watching closely the working of the cinematic style when it deviates from this style can be potentially illuminating with regard to the film in question. 

Take The Money and Run, like many of Allen's earlier films, is essentially a generic pastiche, only whereas, say, Love and Death, parodies just one genre, Take the Money and Run runs the whole gamut, from thriller to romance, via western, biopic, documentary (with the documentary interview, a recurring trope in Allen's films, later to be replaced by the psychoanalyst's couch, and one of a series of devices he uses to palm off lengthy expository dialogue), western, slapstick, and prison break, with, perhaps appropriately, intensive movements on the purse about to be snatched, or the thief being chased by the camera down an alleyway, when we are in the 'thriller' mode, and an extensive leap out of the frame as the convicts rush to make their escape. 

By Interiors (another pastiche you might say, only this time not of a genre but a director - Bergman), we see lingering shots of all sorts of blank surfaces, characters tend to dress in the same colours as the matte interiors around them, almost fading into the walls behind them. Hannah and Her Sisters, likewise, is characterised by a growing concern with various types of screen, from windows and mirrors to, of course, the silver screen itself (with the only extensive moment in the film coming when the characters go to watch Duck Soup at the cinema and the Marx Brothers leap out at us, singing and dancing). The only moment where anyone really walks towards an unmoving camera, any sense of the image coming towards you is undercut by scores of joggers running in the opposite direction.

Though Crimes and Misdemeanors shares the earlier films' obsession with using screens and surfaces to frame the action, there is a certain camera move, on several, particularly emotive, moments in the film, moving in to a tighter shot of the subject(s), drawing the viewer right up to the neck of the character(s). This seems to be precisely in order to spite the manifesto for comedy espoused by the sitcom producer, Lester (Alan Alda), "Don't get too close to the pain... If it bends, it's funny. If it breaks, it ain't." In a sense, Allen is here giving us his own comic manifesto in negative, and many of his films from the 80's and 90's seem intent on proving, not always successfully, that you can get close to the pain and still be funny. In certain scenes in Crimes and Misdemeanors, we also start to see the first signs of the almost total neglect the camera seems at times to show towards the characters in several of Allen's films of the 90's, most notably Deconstructing Harry. 

By the time he gets to Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen has developed a directorial style so ambiguous and chaotic that it seems to prefigure the computer-generated 'Automavision' which Lars von Trier claims to have created for The Boss of it All. Shots jump about haphazardly, crossing the line and cutting off heads, whilst actors walk off-screen mid-speech leaving the camera facing a blank wall. This apparent cinematographic insouciance is belied, however, by a similar zoom in close to that in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the difference being that here the move is always into the face of Woody Allen's character, in order to tell us that the fractured directorial style is a reflection of the lead's fractured psyche.

The principal exceptions to Woody Allen's general tendency towards this kind of cinematic flatness are those films, such as Bullets Over Broadway or Celebrity, whose subject is the spectacle itself. In Celebrity, despite the tabloid frenzy of the plot, the camera remains, on the whole, at a slight dignified remove, as if to distance itself from its own content. But, of course, in a film where everyone is famous, the real 'stars', Nicole Oliver (Melanie Griffiths) and Brandon Darrow (Leonardo DiCaprio), still have the power to leap out of the frame towards us like the genuine cinematic spectacle they represent. Similarly, in Bullets Over Broadway, it is again generally the 'stars', Helen Sinclair (Diane Wiest) and Warner Purcell (Jim Broadbent), who leap out off the stage and out of the screen at us, but also the gangsters - for the very point of the film seems to be about the synchronic exchangeability of actors and gangsters, artists and murderers, the way each feeds off the other's reflected glamour. Perhaps the most notably extensive moment, however, comes in a scene with the camera placed low, a train comes towards us, practically running the camera over. We are reminded, of course, of cinema's origins in precisely this kind of extensivity - the Lumiere brothers' L'Arriveé d'un train à La Ciotat.

Looking In or Leaping Out

Watching Death in Venice again the other day, I was particularly struck by how often the camera is drawing you into the picture. Throughout the film, the gaze of Dirk Bogarde's Gustav von Aschenbach is redoubled by a roaming, searching lens, forever zooming in and moving towards some object or person in the middle distance. Nothing ever seems to come towards the camera of its own volition - the camera will always move out to meet it. The very next day I found myself watching the Marx Brothers' At the Circus, and found, this time, precisely the opposite effect - of things forever leaping out towards the camera, and by implication, beyond the screen and into my living room. Each performance of the circus itself is opened by an acrobat or an elephant looming straight towards the lens. At one point, Groucho turns straight to the camera, in the middle of a scene in which the money he is looking for is hidden in Eve Arden's brassiere, and says, "There must be some way of solving this without circumventing the Hayes code." Unlike some cinematic asides delivered straight to camera, Groucho is here clearly not inviting the audience into the picture, but rather himself leaping out of it so that he can comment on certain institutional factors governing its production. The few films I happen to have seen in the few days since this all tend to fit broadly in to one or other of these tendencies, drawing in or leaping out, that strike me as two different approaches to what might be seen as one of the fundamental problems of cinema - making a two-dimensional space into a three-dimensional space. So, of the latter tendency, what we might call extensive cinema, I have seen both At the Circus and All of Me, both characterised by things seemingly leaping out of the screen, or otherwise moving from the back of the shot towards the camera; and of the former, intensive cinema, since Death in Venice, I've watched Deep Red, and Who Saw Her Die, both of which feature a lot of point-of-view shots that sneak up on, and follow, various characters, lots of zooms and jump cuts into people and objects, bringing them into sometimes extreme close-ups. When George Lazenby is wandering the streets of Venice (in Who Saw Her Die), knocking on doors and windows in search of his daughter, when the door or window in question is opened, it is always the camera that enters the house, not Lazenby.

Obviously this is far from an exhaustive or even vaguely representative survey, nonetheless it may be worth remarking that both of my 'extensive' films concern performers (acrobats and singers in At the Circus, a lawyer and a musician in All of Me), whereas our 'intensive' trio are all about voyeurs and the act of looking, the testimone populare. From this we might expect other films which foreground cinema's voyeuristic mode, such as Rear Window or Peeping Tom, to fit into this tendency, and those films which foreground cinema's spectacular mode, disaster movies and musicals for example, to tend towards extensivity. Likewise, At the Circus and All of Me both have some sort of roots on the stage. Though At the Circus was written exclusively for the screen with no prior stage performance, its format and a great deal of the brothers' material comes from their Broadway years. Likewise, All of Me, though adapted from a novel, is, like The Jerk before it, still something of a showcase for material from Steve Martin's stand-up routines, such as his man who is not entirely in control of his own body, and of course his by then legendary catchphrase, "Well, excuuuuuuse me!" By contrast, those films I have labelled intensive all have some sort of literary origin. Death in Venice is adapted from Thomas Mann's novella, and our two gialli, though neither of them are adapted directly from novels, nonetheless pay a certain homage to the gialli filone's origins in the cheap detective thrillers published in Italy in the thirties and forties, bound in yellow covers (giallo in Italian means 'yellow'). In Deep Red, several buildings, even, at times, the sky itself, are a violent, bright yellow. Two of the film's characters are writers, one a journalist, the other the author of a book about urban myths which becomes itself a significant plot device and the object of a long big close-up during which David Hemmings's character opens the book and thumbs the pages as if to invite us into the very text itself. Who Saw Her Die is also not adapted directly from a book but does bear certain striking resemblances to Nicholas Roeg's (later) Don't Look Now which was adapted from a Daphne Du Maurier short story (having not read the Du Maurier I can't comment on whether the similarities between the two films are equally present in the short story, suggesting that it was a likely inspiration). Similarly to Deep Red, texts, albeit newspaper clippings, play a significant role in the plot of Who Saw Her Die, providing the vital clues that lead to the solution of the central mystery, and as Gary Needham argues it is characteristic of gialli in general to base their narrative structures on those of the literary genre that preceded them. Although, obviously, not all films are adapted from books or stage material, all films must in some way engage with the projection of three-dimensionality from a two-dimensional screen. In the current issue of Sight and Sound, for instance, during an article about the return of the 3D movie, that most, traditionally at least, extensive of cinematic novelties, a brief aside about Joe Dante's new film, The Hole, states, "3D movies traditionally poke the audience in the eye, " before citing Dante's wish for his new film to use the 3D imaging  to do precisely the reverse, "to make us reach instead of recoil." I wonder how many films will fit consistently into one or the other of these two tendencies, and whether there might be a third type, characterised by a certain flatness - I'm thinking for instance of the long, still takes of Stranger than Paradise, or the way in which Crash, despite being a literary adaptation and, in some ways, quite an 'interior' film, nonetheless has this rather forbidding metallic sheen to it that seems to forbid the audience from diving in and getting involved.