Dissecting the surgeon of misery

Until I got out of the cinema, I hated every minute of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, the infamous Austrian filmmaker’s new feature, which concerns the troublesome population of a North German protestant village in the months leading up to WW1 . I found the film overbearing, heavy-handed and hostile. Yet, I was surprised how quickly its 144-minute length flew by. And how much I thought about the movie on the walk back from the cinema.

Perhaps these thoughts were born out of the film's rather melodramatic content. There is a lot of shock and awe punctuating the story, the plot is a veritable catalogue of suffering; there’s the torture of a disabled child, excessive cruelty to animals (and people), suicide, murder, arson and implied sexual abuse of children (some of it incestual). If taking the film on face value, it seems unfeasible that all this could happen in such a small village in such a short space of time. These scenes are invariably short and cut with harsh, jagged and unsentimental edits. Haneke’s technique leaves no room for breath or elegant segues into other scenes. Several of the juxtapositions this creates are truly shocking. The fact that a lot of this happens off-camera, and an especially effective use of implication through soundtrack, knowing glances and, indeed, editing is hard to stomach. It also doesn’t help that the film is devoid of any context, political or otherwise.

Only after the film did the themes click. Firstly, Haneke is looking at the Second World War from its very origins (the society which gave birth to these individuals). Secondly, he is asking questions of nature and nurture, which can be attached or separated from any political context. And also he is interested in the idea of evil begetting evil (again, something that may or may not have anything to do with the origins of WW2). He has fashioned a tale which develops these ideas and asks many questions relating to them all. Proceedings have to be extreme, and a little contrived, for this discussion to work. Haneke strips away all politics and focuses exclusively on the human angle. It’s a bold move.

It’s a film of complication and ambiguity. Although the viewer leaves the cinema on an elegiac note (the narrator telling us that the village’s inhabitants would never all be together in the same place again, to the sound of a choir singing), it is clearly not a rose-tinted view of an ‘innocent’ pre-war Germany. The implication in the film is that there is little innocence in this place, that even the children are not beyond suspicion concerning the heinous acts portrayed.

If I still had a complaint, I would say Haneke can be a little glib. Two reasons; his refusal to discuss politics makes this an incomplete argument (it’s like giving you the recipe to something, and failing to tell you how long and how hot to cook it) and, secondly, his detached vitriol invites harsh judgements at the role of the church, the misogyny of the depicted men and the dated education system which are all condemned rather than explained. These are subjects ripe for discussion and criticism, but he is quick to pour scorn and accuse, and slower to provide answers and understanding. It’s this artfully precise, but icily detached, approach which frustrates and alienates.

Could the events of The White Ribbon happen at any time, or just in this society, in these conditions? Haneke does everything but answer the question. Which is both the film's chief pleasure and its chief frustration.

Big is beautiful

Anish Kapoor, at the Royal Academy, is big. Firstly, because it’s the first retrospective the institution has put on for a current, living, artist. And, secondly, until they install a new Tardis-esque wing, the featured work is some of the largest scale stuff the academy will ever be likely to show.

Indeed, the exhibition opens with a massive steel-supported wooden structure, which looks like something out of a Jules Verne novel. It’s a vision of the future from an antiquarian perspective. Yet it’s also something far more ominous. The side facing the entrance is like a massive abyss. The depth tapers off as it progresses further back. It’s a sexual connotation on a big scale. By its very shape, it draws you in as much as it confronts.

It doesn’t matter which direction you, take; spectacle awaits in every room. One minute, you are in the company of a red and white serpentine sculptural scribble (which, again, towers above the spectator), the next minute you watch as a massive block of red wax crawls along a track, moving at an almost imperceptibly slow speed through several of the building’s rooms, and a little later you encounter a scattering of strange, concrete sculptures conceived by Kapoor, but executed by a computer (and displayed in incredibly close proximity, on industrial palettes). There is a room of mirrors. And, most spectacular of all, a canon which fires wax at a wall. It’s certainly ‘look at me’ art.

However, thankfully, it’s spectacle with a point. Kapoor, probably amongst other things, is interested in the interaction of his art with the environment it’s put in. The red block of wax leaves a smeared trail in the gallery, as it forces its way through archways. Bits fall of the tracks, and the block itself, and lay dropped, limp and lifeless around the piece. The wax fired from the canon builds up on the academy’s walls, ceilings and floors. The wax’s colour, akin to human viscera, makes a sharp contrast against the tasteful off-white walls.

It’s this interaction, the incredibly visual nature of this ever-changing exhibition, which has made this show as popular as it has been. It’s modern art for the people, stripped away from intellectualisation and inaccessible explanation. Yet, it’s completely without compromises. It’s outrageous, grandiose and unique yet incredibly evocative visually, emotionally and, probably, intellectually.

X Marks the Spot

The XX’s debut album is the soundtrack to a rainy day, but in a good way. It’s an understated, but disarmingly mellow, forty minutes of early 20-something indie-pop, in which most of the fun exists between the hand claps, the breathy vocals and the minor chords, in the unsung and the unplayed. Forget that nagging outstanding piece of DIY and lie on your bed with this on your stereo, and let the rain do the rest of the work.

Feel free to do a bit of shimmying, though. ‘Islands’ is a low-key butt shaker, which will allow you to move your hips without breaking into a sweat. ‘Heart Skipped a Beat’ is the sound of coming home (and coming down) from the best night of your life. It’s twinkly guitar, and male/female harmonies are slinky and sexy. Best of all is ‘Crystalised’, the epitome of quiet intensity. Its unassuming sound almost betrays its passive aggression and menace.

Once you’ve done your butt-shaking, fall into the ambient arms of ‘Fantasy’. It is surely the missing link between Pink Floyd and Massive Attack. It’s lilting guitars and sinister, yet seductive bassline, care not for genre or influence.

Its this song which sums up the album’s strength. Influences are felt strongly thoughout (it is a debut album, after all), however they are so mixed in origin, the overall impression is of something you haven’t heard before. All that can be discerned is that proceedings are thoroughly modern. It makes me break into synesthesia; it has a just-baked-bread freshness, and is every bit as delicious.

Control yourself, man...

Jim Jarmusch’s new film The Limits of Control is an adulterated director’s film and, subsequently, a curate’s egg. But, by God, it’s a beautiful egg. One wonders, in fact, how the hell the movie would have turned out if the director of photography wasn’t the acclaimed Christopher Doyle.

The film is as tricksy and meandering as anything Jarmusch has ever done. Isaach De Bankolé plays the otherwise unnamed ‘Lone Man’, a walking enigma on a mission in modern-day Spain. It’s not clear what his mission is, or what exactly his meetings (in various locations, including Madrid, Seville, on a train and in the countryside) actually mean. The attendees are invariably starry, such as Tilda Swinton, John Hurt and Gael Garcia Bernal, all in various stages of ‘kookiness’. A typical rendezvous consists of swapping matchboxes, which tend to contain small notes inscribed with hand written messages. All messages are written in a mysterious code, made up of letters, numbers and symbols. During the journey he is tempted by sex, guns and mobile phones, but refuses all, in order to complete his job. His only indulgence is his repeated visits to an art gallery. It’s all very mysterious.

So mysterious, that for a pretty bulky film (it runs at a shade under two hours), there’s not a lot in it. There are repetitions, inversions, echoes and motifs which stretch across its length (much-repeated phrases and actions, the unfathomable use of the same incidental music numerous times). Its episodic narrative is akin to something from a Kakfa novel (where nothing is explicitly explained, it just happens, with these off-kilter ‘happenings’ straddling the line between the wry and the uncomfortable). The star names appear for only a couple of minutes each. Tilda Swinton probably makes the biggest impression, not least because of her unusual attire and character’s rather vocal penchant for old films.

And due to all this self-consciousness and repetition, it’s a slow, difficult watch. Even Jarmusch’s most ardent fans will probably find longeurs. The pill is considerably sweetened by the cinematography, which is crisp, colourful and precise. There’s some lovely images throughout, edited together beautifully. The use of cutting between objects and places featuring opposing geometric images is fun and playful; and also akin to something from an Eisenstein movie. This is one of the points where the lack of character development or a traditional narrative works wonders; the film’s intrinsic bagginess allows extended moments of this visual riffing. That said, the movie is still far too long.

That just leaves the question of what the film is actually about. Is it just an exercise in style and form? Or is the journey metaphor in the film (it begins in an airport, involves lots of waiting and ends with a trip in a car) of any significance? Certainly, the film begins with a philosophical quotation and continues in a chin-stroking vein, with much cod-intellectualizing throughout. Unfortunately Jarmusch’s wry crown does slip several times, and the movie falters and stalls into juvenile, ‘far-out’ existential discussions. All this leads you to wander indeed what, if anything, he is trying to say and, to some extent, what the point of it is.

The Limits of Control is a cool, glacial film full of intrigue and visual beauty. Ultimately it’s too detached and self-conscious to be anything else than an interesting experiment, and it’s certainly not a piece that stands up to Jarmusch’s best work.

Strike the pose

In the news last week: Tate Modern’s new exhibition, Pop Life: Art in a Material World, has run into trouble over one of the items on display: a nude photograph of Brooke Shields. Veteran Gary Gross took the picture when Shields was ten years old, and the work is presented as the basis of a room by Richard Prince. It is the first time Prince’s room has been displayed in the UK. And although the Tate insists they consulted with lawyers before deciding on the piece, the gallery has now decided to close the room, prompted by a visit from the Metropolitan police.

Naturally, this raises all kinds of questions involving censorship, decency and legality, but a more specific question is the treatment of the image in the confines of the exhibition. How we see something is at least partly decided by its context.

On the surface, and judging by its title, Pop Life: Art in a Material World is an exhibition concerned with the relationship between art and commerce in a society post-mechanical reproduction. We have Warhol wallpaper, a Keith Harring shop, Takashi Murakami as polymath pop-art producer.

However, really, the show is about both extremity and exploitation. There is exploitation of the artist as a self-made brand (Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Keith Harring), the artist exploiting the boundary between personal and private (Tracey Emin, Andrea Arnold) or the artist crawling along the borderline of taste (the Prince piece, or the photos of actors portraying Nazis). It’s about audacity and pushing boundaries, as well as being about the triumph of money over taste, and about the recycling of images for different means. The product is not as important as the image it projects. It’s the idea that matters, that sells.

In another exhibition, Prince’s work might be placed asuch so it would be judged on aesthetic value. Would this make much of a difference? In this exhibition it appears as an example of the treatment of celebrity, of how an artist treats, how he recycles, a pre-existing image. Is this its only merit as an artwork? Does this count it as cheap, shocking? Possibly not, if the image is strong and effective enough.

Ultimately, it’s one of those lines of questioning that is more important than any answers that will be delivered (which will almost probably be less than definitive). It asks how far it is acceptable to go. You can say all you want about censorship, taste and the law, but what is most interesting is that we are still discussing this issue in what is, according to the exhibition, a world where anything (be it Koon's erection, Emin's troubling childhood or images of actors as Nazis) can be bought, sold, changed, used and exploited.

Camerana

There have been many pretenders to the throne, but in District 9, director Neill Blomkamp becomes the new James Cameron.

Along with Lucas and Spielberg, Cameron led the blockbuster vanguard in the eighties, producing both highly commercial and highly individual films. The writer/director wedded trashy boys’ stories (aliens, robots, sea monsters and spies) to forward-thinking themes that just enhanced his brash, entertaining chutzpah style (the strong female leads of Aliens and Terminator 2, the threat of nuclear war in The Terminator, through to the technological sea exploration of Titanic and The Abyss).

Although this highbrow-meets-lowbrow style influence can still be felt by fanboy directors such as the Wachowskis (The Matrix movies: CGI versus Eastern mysticism) and J.J Abrams (Lost: an island adventure versus existentialism), nobody has seemed to create this same unpretentious, tongue in cheek work since Cameron. Lost’s engimatic schtick has grown tired quite quickly, with Abrams turning to work on remakes and sequels, whilst the Wachowski’s have failed to live up to their promise.

In District 9, an alien spaceship comes to stand above ‘80s Johannesburg. After disembarking, the aliens are reluctantly herded into the segregated ‘District 9’. Cut to the modern day, and District 9 is a hotbed of corruption and crime, complete with gang culture and inter-species prostitution. The government decide to turf the aliens out and start again, in ‘District 10’. Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is in charge of this operation, however when down in the district, he gets infected by a mysterious fluid, and begins to transform into one of the aliens.

District 9 is a film made by someone steeped in a certain tradition; it’s as dedicated to it as Cameron was dedicated to his pulp fiction (the robots, sea monsters etc), his b-movies (he did, after all, start his career on the set of Piranha 2) and his love of the spectacular ‘70s disaster movies which helped inform the overblown set pieces of later efforts Titanic and True Lies. District 9 is clearly filmed by someone who grew up watching James Cameron movies, and other classic sci-fi of the late ‘70s and ‘80s. There are many of these reference points; there is David Cronenberg-like body horror as Wikus begins his transformation (most specifically, The Fly), a cutesy alien child (E.T.) and the examination of the relationship between humans and aliens (V., Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

It only falters when Blomkamp strays from this; as a successor to Cloverfield (its most stylistically similar contemporary). The film begins in faux-documentary style-- talking heads, direct addresses to the audience, emphasis on following its subjects around-- however, as soon as the action starts this approach is abandoned. Although this means proceeds are more audience friendly than Cloverfield, which at times induced motion sickness, the consequence is that the tone is inconsistent, albeit uncluttered.

Thankfully, like a Cameron film on speed, the material is rich in compensation. Commentators have already commented on the Apartheid similarities, such as segregation and forced removals. If anything, Apartheid is used as a jumping-off point; although images from the alien ghetto are reminiscent of this, District 9 equally brings to mind the early days of the Holocaust and the escalating pogroms of the Jewish ghetto. There are clear parallels between the human experimentation on the aliens to that of Joseph Mengeles.

Ultimately, the film is concerned with human selfishness and defensiveness, something typified by the central character. Throughout, Wikius makes self-serving decisions that backfire or fail. There’s a crucial one in the second half, in which his self-serving thought process is astounding. Yet these decisions are entirely in keeping with this defensive, suspicious society that denies these aliens equal rights.

District 9 also possesses plenty of offbeat humour, similar to Cameron’s back catalogue. There are some gung-ho (yet also quite blackly comic) laughs from exploding aliens; humour that could have come out of Aliens. However, there are also more uncomfortable laughs present; the central character’s bumbling, awkward incompetence produces Gervais-like cringe comic moments. Uncomfortable or not, all of this humour goes with deflating an otherwise potentially portentous atmosphere.

The uncomfortable nature is one of the differences from a Cameron film. The movie presents quite a misanthropic vision, and, in this way, another contrast to JC. In Cameron’s world, evil comes from an Icarus complex; Titanic sinks because it is too ambitious a project, and the machines take over in the Terminator films because people have created too much too soon. In Blomkamp’s world it comes from people themselves; the aliens seem to be the (mostly) innocent party.

However, as with JC’s The Terminator, Blomkamp has given us a low-budget spectacle which is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Funny, scary, sad, original, exciting and spectacular: who needs Avatar?

Laid Bare

When I think of Werner Herzog, I think of his gas mask wearing, blues-listening maniac father role in the film Julien Donkey-Boy. Whatever you think of Harmony Korine’s day-glo nightmare of a movie, the casting of Herzog was inspired. Werner is inherently idiosyncratic, a singularly demented force of nature, and left-field weirdo cinema would be much less fun without him.

It’s hard to think of someone who would make Grizzly Man with the same degree of empathy as this guy. The documentary follows bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell. Another singular character, Treadwell regularly travelled to Alaska to observe grizzly bears. He films his every interaction with the beasts. In the last few years of his life, he made trips with his girlfriend Amie. They both got killed in October 2003 there, by one of the more unruly of the animals he was following.

The key to the movie is the way Herzog approaches his material. He does not condescend his subject, or raises an eyebrow in bemusement at Tim’s audacious tracking and interactions of his curiousity. Herzog plays it straight, acting as an only occasional narrator and interviewer, barely appearing on the camera (we only see the back of his head, his back and his arms). Subsequentally, the few direct character judgements come from the people who knew Treadwell, in disarmingly frank interviews. Herzog sifts through Treadwell’s self-shot footage and probes the man’s nearest and dearest, but he also believes a man has got to do what he has got to do.

The director also seems to identify with Treadwell as a filmmaker. It’s clear that Treadwell has a complex relationship with the camera; it’s hard to say how much is performed persona for the camera. This is a question which underscores most documentaries, but is brought to the fore here. The backbone of the movie is composed of this filming; Treadwell on Treadwell; the man in his own words. Throughout, not only do we ask ourselves why he, Treadwell, is shooting the footage (is it, as Herzog suggests ‘a tool to get his message across’, or is it one giant home move? There is some pretty bald, confessional material here) but why we are watching proceedings. Are we waiting for footage of the mauling?

Naturally it’s not just Herzog behind the film; it helps that Treadwell filmed interactions with the bears. It is footage that speaks for itself. There are several uncomfortably close encounters shown from the outset. It’s heart-in-your-mouth stuff. There is one scene of bears fighting which is time-stopping, and rivals the output of the BBC’s Bristol nature unit. There’s also some affecting, unusual film of the man’s relationship with tame foxes. Everything is awash with tragedy, not only because we know that Treadwell eventually succumbs to the wildness of his bears, but because his girlfriend is also a victim, and because this guy is clearly desperate and deeply damaged.

As the film enters its second half; the apparency that this man’s tragedy was there from the start really begins to hurt. Treadwell's troubled past is gradually revealed; as suspected, his independence is portrayed as borne out of darkness, pain and sadness, of weakness, rather than strength. As we learn more about him, the continuing footage displayed, gains extra effect with every new piece of information. The film is cemented as something beyond a curiosity; it has real, excoriating resonance.

Herzog’s central characters are usually on the edge of society, dancing with madness, and strongly independent. Indeed, he is currently touting his re-imagining of Abel Ferara’s Bad Lieutenant around the festival circuit. But it’s with Grizzly Bear he has gained the most attention, the most plaudits and the most awards. It’s an extraordinary film; a combination of two unique, extraordinary individuals. It’s frightening, fascinating and deeply sad. It’s pretty fucking different.