Established 2005
Manchester / London
Manchester / London
'Film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand.'
Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (1991)
Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (1991)
INDEX
2024
2023
'Iceland: Beyond Sigur Rós' (Dir. Brett Gregory, 2010)
now available for free via the Radical Film Network
now available for free via the Radical Film Network
Interview
Prof. Mike Wayne
(Brunel University)
discusses 'Marxism Goes to the Movies'
Prof. Mike Wayne
(Brunel University)
discusses 'Marxism Goes to the Movies'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
August 16th 2024
by Brett Gregory
August 16th 2024
Transcript
BG: Hi, my name’s Brett Gregory, and I’m the chief editor for the UK academia, culture, and politics website, Serious Feather. In the following interview with the esteemed academic author of Marxism Goes to the Movies, published by Routledge in 2020, we explore, amongst other things, Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark’s ‘immense accumulation of commodities’; Hollywood’s 90 year embargo against ordinary working people appearing on the silver screen; and the future of the UK’s film and media industries under Keir Starmer’s new Labour government.
Hi. What’s your name, where do you lecture, and what are your research specialisms?
MW: My name is Mike Wayne, and I am a Professor in Film and Media Studies at Brunel University. My disciplinary and research background is in film and media studies, but as an extension of Marxism, which is inherently interdisciplinary, I also research in Marxist philosophy and political theory. I am, for example, currently writing a book called Gramsci and the Struggle for Democratic Communism.
BG: You’ve already published Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends in 2003, and co-authored Considering Class: Theory, Culture and the Media in the 21st Century with Deirdre O’Neill in 2017. So, in what specific ways is Marxism Goes to the Movies an extension of these works?
MW: Well, the book was actually a commission – Routledge approached me to write a book on Marxism for their ‘Goes to the Movies’ series – so the title, Marxism Goes To The Movies wrote itself. That said, the book continues the emphasis which Marxism and Media Studies had on placing film within a broader media ecology and, in turn, placing that media ecology within a social and historical context, as understood through the optic of Marxism. There has been a criticism that media studies has been very ‘media centric’; that is, isolating discussion of the media from those wider contexts, and this is also true of film studies which has been shaped by arts disciplines such as literature and philosophy, neither of which have historically been very attuned to social, economic, political questions in the ways that the social sciences have been, for example.
BG: That’s very true. Although I studied literature and literary theory at university, I magically found myself teaching film studies and, eventually, becoming a filmmaker. Anyway, in your book you discuss Marx’s argument that the 'immense accumulation of commodities' in Western capitalist societies conceal social and economic power relations. In turn, you quote Guy Debord's observation that we live in a society of 'bewitching spectacles'. Of all things, this reminded me of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, with Bruce Wayne as Batman who, similar to Tony Stark as Iron Man in 2008, is comprehensively a capitalist superhero with an immense accumulation of wealth, technology, weaponry, commodities, and power. From a Marxist perspective, how would you interpret this North American cycle of superhero genre movies?
MW: Well, what I think I would say is that the Marxist study of film has to critically assimilate the innovations that there have been in reading texts, especially from the 1960s onwards. And these tools can be combined with the absolutely key Marxist principle of contradiction. That has to be carried into our understanding of films and genres. So the superhero genre is quite contradictory. Our analysis has to be granular. There are differences between franchises, and differences between one film and another. Iron Man/Tony Stark is a rather more uncomplicated capitalist entrepreneur than Bruce Wayne/Batman in The Dark Knight Trilogy with its vision of a highly unequal Gotham City. There’s a great scene, which would never happen in Tony Stark’s world, in The Dark Knight Rises where Selina/Catwoman and Bruce Wayne are dancing at the ball – all the rich people are there of Gotham City – and after a bit of back and forth, she tells him that there is ‘a storm coming and that it is going to take down the gilded rich’. And the context in which she says these words, they’re clearly meant to carry some weight. So the genre has also developed an explicitly critical take on the whole concept of American superheroes from The Watchmen to The Boys. You know, The Watchmen with its critique of Cold War anti-communism, and American foreign policy in Vietnam and so on. The Boys looks at what would happen to the superhero in the context of corporate capitalism. Now, I wouldn’t want to oversell these films as strongly oppositional, but there are contradictions and critical currents which Marxism has to be alive to.
BG: Well, yeah, Christopher Nolan has mentioned a few times in interviews that The Dark Knight Rises is a retelling of Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities, which is set before and during the French Revolution. However, most of the early ‘uncomplicated’ superhero movies seem to explicitly avoid the so-called ‘crisis in capitalism’ which took place near the beginning of this century. That is to say, the economic banking crash in 2008, the subsequent austerity measures, the widespread redundancies, the increase in energy prices, the cost-of-living crisis, the increase in homelessness etc. Only three mainstream US movies come to my mind which deal with this very real topic directly: Chandor’s Margin Call in 2011, Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street in 2014, and McKay’s The Big Short in 2015. None of these releases however had the political impact of anti-establishment films from the past such as Pakula’s All The President’s Men in 1976, or Stone’s JFK in 1991. If anything, the antagonists in these movies are portrayed sympathetically and, of course, were welcomed by the mainstream media as simply entertaining excursions into the glossy world of finance.
MW: There’s another example of a film explicitly addressing what finance capital did to people, and that is Assault on Wall Street, which I mention in the book. The critics didn’t like that film at all because they found its vision of a man gunning down city slickers distasteful; but, for popular audiences, this revenge fantasy was rather appreciated, judging by responses on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, you may be right that the number of films dealing directly with the crash was rather small but many, many films were touched by the anti-finance capital feelings unleashed by the crash. I do think that the Left has to be much more alive to these currents within popular culture, because it is a good way of diagnosing what is going on within popular consciousness. There is anyway a very long tradition within Hollywood of suspicion about corporate America and, after the crash, that came to surface in many films. I analyse the contradictory limits of such films, as in the case of Money Monster in some detail in the book. One of my favourite films from this period is the heist movie/western Hell or High Water, a film absolutely brimming with class conflict and resentment against the banks. We do need to give audiences the credit to read films allegorically. That’s to say, they understand that this or that individual story is actually telling a larger parable about exploitation in contemporary society.
BG: You have great faith in humanity, Mike. What’s your view on the argument that Hollywood’s dominant mode of address allows a handful of mavericks who ‘make strange’ in Russian Formalist terms – like David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier, or Yorgos Lanthimos – slip into the mainstream only to keep the left-wing intelligentsia subdued?
MW: I actually don’t think it makes sense to operate with such a dichotomy: Hollywood as a homogeneous blob of ideological pap and a few auteurs keeping the intelligentsia satisfied. If we have a look at the industrial organisation of ownership and you will see some interesting tensions. Hollywood was one of the first industries to undergo changes that were later called ‘post-Fordism’. The vertically integrated ownership structures were partially broken up by anti-trust law and cultural trends. So there was a proliferation of production outfits, on the one hand, while monopoly capital consolidated itself around the distribution and exhibition structures. Some of these production outfits are owned outright by the studios, others partially so or have deals with them. But this proliferation represents the fact that capital has been dependent on the ideas of the creative talent, while the creative talent, directors, stars, scriptwriters, but also set and costume designers, cinematographers, and so forth are dependent on capital for investment decisions. There are all sorts of struggles and tensions for control going on, and this happens on an international basis as US monopoly capital plugs into national cultures all around the world using this post-Fordist structure. Now set that industrial structure in the context of crises and the need to speak to popular culture, popular concerns, and you have a situation where what is actually produced cannot simply be read off as the ‘expression’ of the needs and interests of monopoly capital. A film like Detroit cannot be understood in that model, or a film like Dark Waters. I could produce a very long list of such films.
BG: I’ve seen Dark Waters with Mark Ruffalo. It reminded me a lot of Erin Brockovich with Julia Roberts, which is also based on a true story. And in these movies both DuPont and Pacific Gas and Electric Company have to pay out relatively large financial settlements for their pollutive crimes but, ultimately, they get away with corporate manslaughter. I mean, both companies are still at large today in the real world. Which, I suppose, brings us to the little people, the perennial victims of such crimes: the working-class, the farm workers, the precariats. I found it extremely interesting in Marxism Goes to the Movies when you highlight that, five years after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, ‘the plebeian, proletarian image’ – its narratives, its suffering and even its very existence – was banished from the silver screen. I quote: ‘[M]arginalised, controlled and policed by an elaborate and comprehensive censorship system that corporate Hollywood applied to itself in order to stop attacks by conservative Catholic organisations on movie ‘immorality’’ by way of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934. Has a similar censorship process been in operation in mainstream cinema over the first quarter of the 21st century? Have the working-class, their representation and voices, been effectively banned?
MW: Yes, the social portraiture of Hollywood films in general has been historically anything but proletarian. In fact, the documentary filmmaker, John Grierson, was quoting a study done on Hollywood films back in the 1940s about how there were hardly any people in this sample of over 100 films who did ordinary jobs. There were high society types, or criminals, or people doing personal services for the rich. That’s why Grierson pioneered the British documentary film, in order to show the important role of the working class in keeping society ticking over. There’s no comparable censorship to the Motion Picture Production Code today – the skews in how Hollywood looks at the world and what the world looks like are more the outcome of economic, class, cultural and political pressures. So, on the one hand, we have to view what dominant cinema produces as complex and contradictory with a degree of differentiation. On the other hand, we have to appreciate a negative: what dominant cinema does not produce (or the occasional political films which it fails to distribute properly), and what a different political economy that would produce – an entirely different cultural landscape, populated by different people, different issues, different perspectives, a cinema with different goals, different historical stories etc. Instead of having one solitary British filmmaker charting the history of the working class, Ken Loach, this burden of representation would fall on the shoulders of dozens of filmmakers with many different approaches.
BG: I wholeheartedly agree. British working-classness has become so multi-faceted and contradictory over the past quarter of a century, particularly with regards to online behaviour and mediated self-representation, for example. We should support original filmmakers who are able to confidently dramatise and explore these new developments, these new differences, from new perspectives. Of course, while Ken Loach is quite rightly celebrated as our foremost director of the working-class, his films don’t represent the British working-class in its entirety. Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth, for instance, was pretty spot on when portraying the type of council estate I grew up in over the 1970s and 1980s. In relation to this, you’d imagine Marxist film theorists and critics would focus more on low- or no-budget working-class British cinema rather than always being so drawn to analysing multi-million dollar North American blockbusters whose marketing budgets often far exceed their production budgets.
MW: It’s very important that we look at, study and promote film practices outside the dominant cinema. As a documentary filmmaker myself, I know how hard it is to get your films out there. I think there are academics who are doing that kind of work – the Radical Film Network, for example, is evidence of academic interest in other cinemas. But, yes, I take your point, academics generally are often absorbed in the pleasures of popular culture to the detriment of alternatives. We certainly need academics engaging in policy debates and making the case for public investment in arts and culture, including the public funding of film. I have been on the London East and South East Culture and Leisure Industry Committee for the TUC for many years, and a small sub-group from there co-authored a policy discussion document called Making Culture Ours. This made the case for public funding to be increased, and for cultural production and consumption to be democratised. There’s a lot of work like that going on within the trade union movement, some of it supported by academic research. Ultimately though we need a political context more receptive to these arguments than we currently have.
BG: Precisely. Myself and Jon Baldwin from London Metropolitan University were invited by Mike Quille at Culture Matters to put together a response to the then Labour Party’s ‘Plan for the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries’ which was published in March 2024. It wasn’t as extensive as ‘Making Culture Ours’, of course, but a number of our critical observations and demands are similar. Bearing this ‘un-democratised’ structure of the film and media industries in mind, you cite Marx’s argument that ‘[t]he bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society'.
Isn't this exactly what’s occurring with the AI generated material which is swarming all over us right now? In turn, aren’t great swathes of creatives going to become redundant, marginalised, and probably forgotten, as a consequence?
MW: I spoke before about capital having dependency on creative talent for ideas, but it may be that with AI capital can finally rid itself of this troubling problem. That would be a historic defeat for both cultural workers and humanity. I mean, think about it: to have our storytelling controlled by plagiarising software that is a non-living, non-sensuous thing. Certainly AI will, if not carefully regulated, destroy many middle class jobs that have hitherto been protected from mechanisation. The Screenwriters Guild went on strike for five months in 2023 and the question of protecting themselves from AI was part of that. They in fact won a good victory – a reminder of what the good old fashion strike weapon can do. But I suspect the Hollywood studios will try again to weaken the protections against AI in due course. Capital never sleeps.
BG: Finally, since Marxism could be described as ‘philosophy in action’, do you believe that the Labour government’s newly installed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy, will, in both political and practical terms, aim to rectify the London-centric, middle-class bias in the UK’s film and media industries, improving working-class access and employment progression as a consequence, particularly in the north of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales?
MW: I co-directed with Deirdre O’Neill a documentary film on this very topic called The Acting Class. Talking to young and established working class actors the film explores the issues you have highlighted. The short answer to your question is, I think, ‘No’. Starmer’s Labour is Blairism 2.0, but now operating in a context where the neoliberal economic model they are wedded to is completely broke – never having recovered from the 2008 crash. Let’s face it the UK is pretty much shattered. I think the way the corporate water companies pump shit into our rivers and seas is the perfect metaphor for what rule under corporate power looks like. All our multiple and interconnected problems derive from a project that is distributing wealth upwards. We can only address those problems, including wresting the British acting industry from the grip of a privileged privately educated elite, if that project is reversed. In the interregnum, I’m afraid all we are going to get is a continuation of the managed decline policy of UK elites while extractive capitalism continues on its not so merry way.
BG: And here I was thinking you had great faith in humanity! Well, to end of a more positive note: there are a lot of young adult filmmakers I know in Manchester in the UK who are fully aware that the system’s rigged, that our leaders are incompetent, corrupt or both, and that the future looks extremely bleak; however, they’re still finding elaborate ways to assemble a crew, secure equipment, source actors, and shoot films anyway. Maybe this is because the human spirit never sleeps either.
Many thanks for your time, insights and patience, Mike. This has been a very thought-provoking interview.
Marxism Goes to the Movies, available now on the Routledge website, is a fantastic read and extremely stirring, especially with regards to its expansive and detailed approach to historical developments in Marxist politics, theory and practice. It is highly recommended.
I’ve been Brett Gregory, chief editor for the UK academia, culture, and politics website, Serious Feather. We’re always looking for new academic writers to collaborate with and promote, so if you like what you hear and read then please get in touch.
Cheers.
BG: Hi, my name’s Brett Gregory, and I’m the chief editor for the UK academia, culture, and politics website, Serious Feather. In the following interview with the esteemed academic author of Marxism Goes to the Movies, published by Routledge in 2020, we explore, amongst other things, Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark’s ‘immense accumulation of commodities’; Hollywood’s 90 year embargo against ordinary working people appearing on the silver screen; and the future of the UK’s film and media industries under Keir Starmer’s new Labour government.
Hi. What’s your name, where do you lecture, and what are your research specialisms?
MW: My name is Mike Wayne, and I am a Professor in Film and Media Studies at Brunel University. My disciplinary and research background is in film and media studies, but as an extension of Marxism, which is inherently interdisciplinary, I also research in Marxist philosophy and political theory. I am, for example, currently writing a book called Gramsci and the Struggle for Democratic Communism.
BG: You’ve already published Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends in 2003, and co-authored Considering Class: Theory, Culture and the Media in the 21st Century with Deirdre O’Neill in 2017. So, in what specific ways is Marxism Goes to the Movies an extension of these works?
MW: Well, the book was actually a commission – Routledge approached me to write a book on Marxism for their ‘Goes to the Movies’ series – so the title, Marxism Goes To The Movies wrote itself. That said, the book continues the emphasis which Marxism and Media Studies had on placing film within a broader media ecology and, in turn, placing that media ecology within a social and historical context, as understood through the optic of Marxism. There has been a criticism that media studies has been very ‘media centric’; that is, isolating discussion of the media from those wider contexts, and this is also true of film studies which has been shaped by arts disciplines such as literature and philosophy, neither of which have historically been very attuned to social, economic, political questions in the ways that the social sciences have been, for example.
BG: That’s very true. Although I studied literature and literary theory at university, I magically found myself teaching film studies and, eventually, becoming a filmmaker. Anyway, in your book you discuss Marx’s argument that the 'immense accumulation of commodities' in Western capitalist societies conceal social and economic power relations. In turn, you quote Guy Debord's observation that we live in a society of 'bewitching spectacles'. Of all things, this reminded me of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, with Bruce Wayne as Batman who, similar to Tony Stark as Iron Man in 2008, is comprehensively a capitalist superhero with an immense accumulation of wealth, technology, weaponry, commodities, and power. From a Marxist perspective, how would you interpret this North American cycle of superhero genre movies?
MW: Well, what I think I would say is that the Marxist study of film has to critically assimilate the innovations that there have been in reading texts, especially from the 1960s onwards. And these tools can be combined with the absolutely key Marxist principle of contradiction. That has to be carried into our understanding of films and genres. So the superhero genre is quite contradictory. Our analysis has to be granular. There are differences between franchises, and differences between one film and another. Iron Man/Tony Stark is a rather more uncomplicated capitalist entrepreneur than Bruce Wayne/Batman in The Dark Knight Trilogy with its vision of a highly unequal Gotham City. There’s a great scene, which would never happen in Tony Stark’s world, in The Dark Knight Rises where Selina/Catwoman and Bruce Wayne are dancing at the ball – all the rich people are there of Gotham City – and after a bit of back and forth, she tells him that there is ‘a storm coming and that it is going to take down the gilded rich’. And the context in which she says these words, they’re clearly meant to carry some weight. So the genre has also developed an explicitly critical take on the whole concept of American superheroes from The Watchmen to The Boys. You know, The Watchmen with its critique of Cold War anti-communism, and American foreign policy in Vietnam and so on. The Boys looks at what would happen to the superhero in the context of corporate capitalism. Now, I wouldn’t want to oversell these films as strongly oppositional, but there are contradictions and critical currents which Marxism has to be alive to.
BG: Well, yeah, Christopher Nolan has mentioned a few times in interviews that The Dark Knight Rises is a retelling of Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities, which is set before and during the French Revolution. However, most of the early ‘uncomplicated’ superhero movies seem to explicitly avoid the so-called ‘crisis in capitalism’ which took place near the beginning of this century. That is to say, the economic banking crash in 2008, the subsequent austerity measures, the widespread redundancies, the increase in energy prices, the cost-of-living crisis, the increase in homelessness etc. Only three mainstream US movies come to my mind which deal with this very real topic directly: Chandor’s Margin Call in 2011, Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street in 2014, and McKay’s The Big Short in 2015. None of these releases however had the political impact of anti-establishment films from the past such as Pakula’s All The President’s Men in 1976, or Stone’s JFK in 1991. If anything, the antagonists in these movies are portrayed sympathetically and, of course, were welcomed by the mainstream media as simply entertaining excursions into the glossy world of finance.
MW: There’s another example of a film explicitly addressing what finance capital did to people, and that is Assault on Wall Street, which I mention in the book. The critics didn’t like that film at all because they found its vision of a man gunning down city slickers distasteful; but, for popular audiences, this revenge fantasy was rather appreciated, judging by responses on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, you may be right that the number of films dealing directly with the crash was rather small but many, many films were touched by the anti-finance capital feelings unleashed by the crash. I do think that the Left has to be much more alive to these currents within popular culture, because it is a good way of diagnosing what is going on within popular consciousness. There is anyway a very long tradition within Hollywood of suspicion about corporate America and, after the crash, that came to surface in many films. I analyse the contradictory limits of such films, as in the case of Money Monster in some detail in the book. One of my favourite films from this period is the heist movie/western Hell or High Water, a film absolutely brimming with class conflict and resentment against the banks. We do need to give audiences the credit to read films allegorically. That’s to say, they understand that this or that individual story is actually telling a larger parable about exploitation in contemporary society.
BG: You have great faith in humanity, Mike. What’s your view on the argument that Hollywood’s dominant mode of address allows a handful of mavericks who ‘make strange’ in Russian Formalist terms – like David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier, or Yorgos Lanthimos – slip into the mainstream only to keep the left-wing intelligentsia subdued?
MW: I actually don’t think it makes sense to operate with such a dichotomy: Hollywood as a homogeneous blob of ideological pap and a few auteurs keeping the intelligentsia satisfied. If we have a look at the industrial organisation of ownership and you will see some interesting tensions. Hollywood was one of the first industries to undergo changes that were later called ‘post-Fordism’. The vertically integrated ownership structures were partially broken up by anti-trust law and cultural trends. So there was a proliferation of production outfits, on the one hand, while monopoly capital consolidated itself around the distribution and exhibition structures. Some of these production outfits are owned outright by the studios, others partially so or have deals with them. But this proliferation represents the fact that capital has been dependent on the ideas of the creative talent, while the creative talent, directors, stars, scriptwriters, but also set and costume designers, cinematographers, and so forth are dependent on capital for investment decisions. There are all sorts of struggles and tensions for control going on, and this happens on an international basis as US monopoly capital plugs into national cultures all around the world using this post-Fordist structure. Now set that industrial structure in the context of crises and the need to speak to popular culture, popular concerns, and you have a situation where what is actually produced cannot simply be read off as the ‘expression’ of the needs and interests of monopoly capital. A film like Detroit cannot be understood in that model, or a film like Dark Waters. I could produce a very long list of such films.
BG: I’ve seen Dark Waters with Mark Ruffalo. It reminded me a lot of Erin Brockovich with Julia Roberts, which is also based on a true story. And in these movies both DuPont and Pacific Gas and Electric Company have to pay out relatively large financial settlements for their pollutive crimes but, ultimately, they get away with corporate manslaughter. I mean, both companies are still at large today in the real world. Which, I suppose, brings us to the little people, the perennial victims of such crimes: the working-class, the farm workers, the precariats. I found it extremely interesting in Marxism Goes to the Movies when you highlight that, five years after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, ‘the plebeian, proletarian image’ – its narratives, its suffering and even its very existence – was banished from the silver screen. I quote: ‘[M]arginalised, controlled and policed by an elaborate and comprehensive censorship system that corporate Hollywood applied to itself in order to stop attacks by conservative Catholic organisations on movie ‘immorality’’ by way of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934. Has a similar censorship process been in operation in mainstream cinema over the first quarter of the 21st century? Have the working-class, their representation and voices, been effectively banned?
MW: Yes, the social portraiture of Hollywood films in general has been historically anything but proletarian. In fact, the documentary filmmaker, John Grierson, was quoting a study done on Hollywood films back in the 1940s about how there were hardly any people in this sample of over 100 films who did ordinary jobs. There were high society types, or criminals, or people doing personal services for the rich. That’s why Grierson pioneered the British documentary film, in order to show the important role of the working class in keeping society ticking over. There’s no comparable censorship to the Motion Picture Production Code today – the skews in how Hollywood looks at the world and what the world looks like are more the outcome of economic, class, cultural and political pressures. So, on the one hand, we have to view what dominant cinema produces as complex and contradictory with a degree of differentiation. On the other hand, we have to appreciate a negative: what dominant cinema does not produce (or the occasional political films which it fails to distribute properly), and what a different political economy that would produce – an entirely different cultural landscape, populated by different people, different issues, different perspectives, a cinema with different goals, different historical stories etc. Instead of having one solitary British filmmaker charting the history of the working class, Ken Loach, this burden of representation would fall on the shoulders of dozens of filmmakers with many different approaches.
BG: I wholeheartedly agree. British working-classness has become so multi-faceted and contradictory over the past quarter of a century, particularly with regards to online behaviour and mediated self-representation, for example. We should support original filmmakers who are able to confidently dramatise and explore these new developments, these new differences, from new perspectives. Of course, while Ken Loach is quite rightly celebrated as our foremost director of the working-class, his films don’t represent the British working-class in its entirety. Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth, for instance, was pretty spot on when portraying the type of council estate I grew up in over the 1970s and 1980s. In relation to this, you’d imagine Marxist film theorists and critics would focus more on low- or no-budget working-class British cinema rather than always being so drawn to analysing multi-million dollar North American blockbusters whose marketing budgets often far exceed their production budgets.
MW: It’s very important that we look at, study and promote film practices outside the dominant cinema. As a documentary filmmaker myself, I know how hard it is to get your films out there. I think there are academics who are doing that kind of work – the Radical Film Network, for example, is evidence of academic interest in other cinemas. But, yes, I take your point, academics generally are often absorbed in the pleasures of popular culture to the detriment of alternatives. We certainly need academics engaging in policy debates and making the case for public investment in arts and culture, including the public funding of film. I have been on the London East and South East Culture and Leisure Industry Committee for the TUC for many years, and a small sub-group from there co-authored a policy discussion document called Making Culture Ours. This made the case for public funding to be increased, and for cultural production and consumption to be democratised. There’s a lot of work like that going on within the trade union movement, some of it supported by academic research. Ultimately though we need a political context more receptive to these arguments than we currently have.
BG: Precisely. Myself and Jon Baldwin from London Metropolitan University were invited by Mike Quille at Culture Matters to put together a response to the then Labour Party’s ‘Plan for the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries’ which was published in March 2024. It wasn’t as extensive as ‘Making Culture Ours’, of course, but a number of our critical observations and demands are similar. Bearing this ‘un-democratised’ structure of the film and media industries in mind, you cite Marx’s argument that ‘[t]he bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society'.
Isn't this exactly what’s occurring with the AI generated material which is swarming all over us right now? In turn, aren’t great swathes of creatives going to become redundant, marginalised, and probably forgotten, as a consequence?
MW: I spoke before about capital having dependency on creative talent for ideas, but it may be that with AI capital can finally rid itself of this troubling problem. That would be a historic defeat for both cultural workers and humanity. I mean, think about it: to have our storytelling controlled by plagiarising software that is a non-living, non-sensuous thing. Certainly AI will, if not carefully regulated, destroy many middle class jobs that have hitherto been protected from mechanisation. The Screenwriters Guild went on strike for five months in 2023 and the question of protecting themselves from AI was part of that. They in fact won a good victory – a reminder of what the good old fashion strike weapon can do. But I suspect the Hollywood studios will try again to weaken the protections against AI in due course. Capital never sleeps.
BG: Finally, since Marxism could be described as ‘philosophy in action’, do you believe that the Labour government’s newly installed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy, will, in both political and practical terms, aim to rectify the London-centric, middle-class bias in the UK’s film and media industries, improving working-class access and employment progression as a consequence, particularly in the north of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales?
MW: I co-directed with Deirdre O’Neill a documentary film on this very topic called The Acting Class. Talking to young and established working class actors the film explores the issues you have highlighted. The short answer to your question is, I think, ‘No’. Starmer’s Labour is Blairism 2.0, but now operating in a context where the neoliberal economic model they are wedded to is completely broke – never having recovered from the 2008 crash. Let’s face it the UK is pretty much shattered. I think the way the corporate water companies pump shit into our rivers and seas is the perfect metaphor for what rule under corporate power looks like. All our multiple and interconnected problems derive from a project that is distributing wealth upwards. We can only address those problems, including wresting the British acting industry from the grip of a privileged privately educated elite, if that project is reversed. In the interregnum, I’m afraid all we are going to get is a continuation of the managed decline policy of UK elites while extractive capitalism continues on its not so merry way.
BG: And here I was thinking you had great faith in humanity! Well, to end of a more positive note: there are a lot of young adult filmmakers I know in Manchester in the UK who are fully aware that the system’s rigged, that our leaders are incompetent, corrupt or both, and that the future looks extremely bleak; however, they’re still finding elaborate ways to assemble a crew, secure equipment, source actors, and shoot films anyway. Maybe this is because the human spirit never sleeps either.
Many thanks for your time, insights and patience, Mike. This has been a very thought-provoking interview.
Marxism Goes to the Movies, available now on the Routledge website, is a fantastic read and extremely stirring, especially with regards to its expansive and detailed approach to historical developments in Marxist politics, theory and practice. It is highly recommended.
I’ve been Brett Gregory, chief editor for the UK academia, culture, and politics website, Serious Feather. We’re always looking for new academic writers to collaborate with and promote, so if you like what you hear and read then please get in touch.
Cheers.
Importance and Impotence:
Drone Warfare, Masculinity, and Posthumanism in Good Kill (Niccol, 2015)
Drone Warfare, Masculinity, and Posthumanism in Good Kill (Niccol, 2015)
Written
by Jon Baldwin
August 12th 2024
by Jon Baldwin
August 12th 2024
‘Every fifth round a tracer, it burned ordnance so fiercely that it produced spectacular red cones of fire reaching from air to ground. Death from above. Poor bastards down there in the windows never knew what hit them … My first ten minutes at the controls of the MQ-1, otherwise aptly known as Predator, and I had already been in on a kill. Then I remembered that Trish had asked me to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home. You see, I wasn’t in Iraq. Not yet. I was at Nellis Air Force Base, in Nevada, 7,500 miles from Baghdad, flying an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) from a ground control station (GCS).’ Predator: The Remote-Control Air War Over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot’s Story (2010).
This account of operating a military drone, killing from thousands of miles away, and then undertaking everyday chores can be seen to be part of both the ‘Nintendo Generation,’ and ‘the first generation of soldiers working with robots to wage war’. Martin claims that operating a drone was something straight out of ‘a sci-fi novel’ and indistinguishable from ‘simulated combat, like the computer game ‘Civilization’. The ability to kill people from such distance, ‘widened the gap between the reality of war and our perception of it. It was almost like watching an NFL game on TV with its tiny figures on the screen.’ Further, ‘It could even be mildly entertaining.’
Indeed, as Dorrain continues in Drone Semiosis: Weaponry and Witnessing (2014): ‘The post-human morphology of the drone – a strange extra-terrestrial-looking grey airplane without a cockpit or windows – brings it into proximity with popular cultural depictions of the alien as manifested in science fiction and horror films, which so clearly underpin the conception of menace held by the military and their weapons-industry contractors.’
Drones are differentiated according to certain factors such as function, size, payload, geographical range, flight endurance, and altitude. Prior to 1980, drone warfare was largely the province of ‘science fiction such as Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Issac Asimov’s Robot series, according to Kaag and Kreps in Drone Warfare: War and Conflict in the Modern World (2014). In Pakistan from 2002-13 there were 381 drone strikes, killing between 2537 and 3616 people, including between 416 and 951 civilians, and between 168 and 200 children. More recently drones have been the weapon of choice in Ukraine and Gaza and on April 14, 2024: the world's largest drone attack in history took place in the middle of the conflict caused by the developments of the Israeli war on Gaza, with a mass and simultaneous attack of more than 185 Iranian drones in less than a few hours against targets across Israel. Kaag and Kreps continue that drones are ‘qualitatively different than previous military technologies: they allow lethal action at virtually no risk to the perpetrator.’ The anticipated rise of autonomous drones and other robot ‘warriors’ heralds the rendering of ‘both war and the ethics of war as posthuman in the sense that the human element therein is removed,’ observes Enemark in Armed Drones and the Ethics of War: Military Virtue in a Post-Heroic Age (2013). Indeed, in the planned shift from remote-control to autonomy for armed drones, the US military ‘sees value in overcoming the physical and mental limitations of human participants in high-technology war,’ Enemark argues. In military slang a drone kill is inelegantly referred to as a ‘bug splat’ insofar as the sense of size and power, and viewing the carnage afflicted on a human through grainy video, apparently gives the sense of an insect being crushed. A collaboration of artists challenged this ‘insensitivity as well as raise awareness of civilian casualties’ by installing a huge portrait facing upwards in the heavily bombed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan. As can be seen on the website, Not A Bug Splat, when viewed by a drone camera what an operator ‘sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face.’
Andrew Niccol’s war drama Good Kill (2014) likewise explores the situation whereby a U.S. drone pilot could ‘commute to work in rush-hour traffic, slip into a seat in front of a bank of computers, ‘fly’ a warplane to shoot missiles at an enemy thousands of miles away, and then pick up the kids from school or a gallon of milk at the grocery store on his way home for dinner.’ The film opens by inviting the viewer to assume they are seeing a real bombing mission only to track back and reveal a scene reminiscent of a 1990s internet café. The film utilises actual footage of drone strikes obtained from Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. Chamayou has suggested in Drone Theory (2015) that the ‘best definition’ of drones is ‘flying, high-resolution video cameras armed with missiles. This can be considered a movie camera without a man and affords the possibilities of the ‘camera’ being freed from the limitations of the human ‘camera-man,’ producing ‘non-anthropocentric spaces and times’, according to Brown in Supercinema: Film Philosophy for the Digital Age (2013). The drone is a McLuhaninian extension of man’s fist and eye: ‘Their history is that of an eye turned into a weapon,’ comments Chamayou.
The lead character of Good Kill, Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke), lives and works in Las Vegas whilst killing and maiming in Afghanistan. Mediated technologies might liberate him from certain constraints of space and time but they also confine him to a screen and non-place. He experiences becoming a posthuman prosthesis to military technology, and this militarised (and masculine) posthuman cyborg warrior is in contrast with the optimistic possibilities of the posthuman cyborg enthused by Haraway. Egan is a former traditional pilot who, on a ‘nonvoluntary basis,’ has become a drone pilot. He laments how the U.S. Air Force has become the ‘U.S. Chair Force’. Indeed, by 2012, the US Air Force was training, via computer simulations, more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined. Whilst downing vodka, Egan begins to question this posthuman condition and the ethics and effectiveness of the drone.
As Chamayou highlights: ‘A Pakistani Taliban Leader is reported to have said, ‘I spent three months trying to recruit and only got 10 – 15 persons. One U.S. drone attack and I got 150 volunteers.’ Far from making the world a safe place, the drone shifts the ‘burden of risk’ from a ‘casualty-averse military force’ and onto the unprotected civilian populace.’
Egan thus sinks into indifference, depression, and fatigue. The major dilemma, posed in the film by this virtual war, is signalled in the advertising strapline to the film: ‘If you never face your enemy how can you face yourself?’ This makes apparent that the protagonist’s distress is deemed to come from mediated digitised screen relations rather than disruptive face-to-face relations. Egan is a veteran of six tours in a fighter jet and wants to return to the actual ‘theatre of operation’. His hardened commander declares that, ‘War is now a first-person shooter.’ ‘I am a pilot and I’m not flying,’ Egan bemoans. ‘Every day I feel like a coward taking a pot-shot at someone half way around the world.’ The drama he both creates and suffers in his home life – he becomes impotent – allows inclusion of the film into the genre identified by Wiegman in Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War (1994) as ‘missiles and melodrama’. We might also read into Egan’s dilemma a mourning of the lost phallic potential of the drone, whereby mastery of mediated technology replaces immediate military dominance in the field.
The film’s atmosphere, like the Las Vegas military cube, is airless and banal. The viewer is likely to become as bored and indifferent as Egan as they repeatedly view grainy shots of tiny figures scuttling followed by explosion and dust. The drone operators staring at multiple screens are analogous to the financial traders described by Tom Wolfe in ‘Where Did All Our Power Go?’ (2013) as ‘trying to monitor six screens at once, six screens that fan out three over three, obscuring any connection we have to the real world.’ Indeed, it could be argued that the drone operator and the financial trader are emblematic figures of the posthuman condition. Both are cut off from the ‘real world’ effects of their operations and this mediation desensitises them from their actions. The drone missile kills or injures in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs. Likewise, as I contend in The Financial Crash and Hyper-Real Economy (2013), financial operations in the hyper-real economy remove the trader from the effects their virtual labour such as precarious employment, exploitation, austerity, inequality, environmental damage, hardship, poverty, and so forth. If for the Afghans, ‘[t]he buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death,’ as Chamayou suggests, then for many in the West it is debt that functions as a drone in terms of the constant reminder of the psychic imprisonment of permanent surveillance and financial obedience.
In mediated war the alleged enemy now apparently resides in ‘compounds’ rather than ‘homes.’ They turn from being seen as real flesh and are instead rendered posthuman and deemed to be a legitimate target, or not based on adherence or deviation from simulation models. These are ‘pattern of life’ indicators, Chamayou points out, and there is a reliance on ‘quantitative data’ to determine the possibility of a ‘signature strike.’ This is algorithmic regulation of behaviour: deviate from your normal pattern of everyday life, deviate from the simulation model, and you will be a suspect. Should one show ‘suspicious’ behaviour, and the supposed ‘signature’ of a terrorist, or merely be near someone who does, then one will be defined as a terrorist and targeted. The definition of the terrorist precedes the war act and hence produces the alleged ‘clean’ nature of drone strikes and supposed lack of collateral damage and civilian causalities. This is how, in virtual war, the model precedes and dictates the real. This loss of the human is precisely the threat that virtual posthuman war poses. As put forward by Lauren Wilcox in Bodies of Violence (2015), the digital dimension of the drone must be emphasised: ‘The precision bomber as ‘posthuman’ suggests that both bomber and the people on his or her screen are flows of information on a screen – existing as texts or codes.’ The production of certain subjects through their integration in informational frameworks constituted by the practices of precision warfare suggests, ‘that a greater emphasis on ‘seeing’ the victims of warfare is not an adequate critique: it is the ‘coding’ of such people that matters.’
Returning to Good Kill, Egan’s war has no face, no place, and no time. Or rather this is posthuman anonymous war, infinite war, and global war against ‘terror.’ Egan’s nostalgic Levinasian appeal to face-to-face relations reveal how vacuous virtual mediated war (and peace) has become. The virtual feedback he receives damages relations with his wife and children. Yet Egan’s remedy – to return to the ‘theatre of operation’ – is in bad faith and disingenuous. The ‘real’ war that Egan wants to return to – presumably Iraq 2004 – was, as Baudrillard has suggested of the Gulf War 1991, always already virtual. Baudrillard, notoriously for some, had suggested in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995) that the Gulf War differed from, and altered the traditional ontology of war. The war was not a real contest but a virtual war – a mediated demonstration of the West’s technological and political dominance, and the globalisation of its commercial interests. War turns into ‘war-processing’ and drifts into rationalisation and technicalisation. Like the drone seeking deviation from simulation models of ‘normal’ behaviour, force is not directed against real adversaries, but against abstract operations and definitions. Warfare has been supplanted for the model of warfare. As James Der Derian has suggested in Virtuous War (2009), the virtual revolution in war ‘is driven more by software than hardware, and enabled by networks rather than agents.’ There are digital ‘warriors’ in films and video game simulations on the one hand, and real-time broadcasting and TV images of ‘real war’ suffering on the other. Both are mediated directly into the living room, and condition and reconcile us to the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment complex. The Gulf War was not a war, it was ‘war stripped of its passions, it violence, by its technicians, and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics,’ according to Baudrillard. And, in turn, this virtual war revised the notion that ‘war is born of an antagonistic, destructive but dual relation between two adversaries.’ The Gulf War was conducted in part as a media spectacle. It is this unilateral, virtual war, which Egan paradoxically mourns and regards as a real war, with dual relations, which would restore his actuality, masculinity, power, and presence.
In principle the drone, like much posthuman technology, can be employed progressively. However, whilst countless military drones have killed countless people, and its commercial potential is being exploited, the drone as a humanitarian tool delivering medical supplies, for instance, remains a fiction or, as Rothstein observes in Drone (Object Lessons) (2015), only an ‘optimistically rendered Photoshop image’. In turn, military drones are what Braidotti would term in The Posthuman (2013) a ‘necro-technology’ operated by ‘tele-thanatological warriors.’; and, furthermore, ‘[c]ontemporary death-technologies are posthuman because of the intense technological mediation within which they operate.’
Good Kill poses the possibilities that Judith Butler has remarked upon in Frames of War (2010). Intuitively we may think that persons wage war, not the instruments they deploy: ‘But what happens if the instruments acquire their own agency, such that persons become extensions of those instruments?’ This is the posthuman reversal of man becoming a prosthesis to technology. Butler adds, ‘persons use technological instruments, but instruments surely also use persons (position them, endow them with perspective, and establish the trajectory of their actions).’ This then, is the inhuman possibility of posthuman (military) technology reinforcing and producing the posthuman. The concern is clear for Francis Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future (2006), contemporary technology ‘will alter human nature and thereby move us into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history.’
And what does Fukuyama do after his 1990s widely publicised endorsement of liberal democracy and subsequent announcement of the end of history? ‘In his leisure hours, he puts together little drones in his garage and then proudly exhibits them on his blog,’ observes Chamayou.
This account of operating a military drone, killing from thousands of miles away, and then undertaking everyday chores can be seen to be part of both the ‘Nintendo Generation,’ and ‘the first generation of soldiers working with robots to wage war’. Martin claims that operating a drone was something straight out of ‘a sci-fi novel’ and indistinguishable from ‘simulated combat, like the computer game ‘Civilization’. The ability to kill people from such distance, ‘widened the gap between the reality of war and our perception of it. It was almost like watching an NFL game on TV with its tiny figures on the screen.’ Further, ‘It could even be mildly entertaining.’
Indeed, as Dorrain continues in Drone Semiosis: Weaponry and Witnessing (2014): ‘The post-human morphology of the drone – a strange extra-terrestrial-looking grey airplane without a cockpit or windows – brings it into proximity with popular cultural depictions of the alien as manifested in science fiction and horror films, which so clearly underpin the conception of menace held by the military and their weapons-industry contractors.’
Drones are differentiated according to certain factors such as function, size, payload, geographical range, flight endurance, and altitude. Prior to 1980, drone warfare was largely the province of ‘science fiction such as Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Issac Asimov’s Robot series, according to Kaag and Kreps in Drone Warfare: War and Conflict in the Modern World (2014). In Pakistan from 2002-13 there were 381 drone strikes, killing between 2537 and 3616 people, including between 416 and 951 civilians, and between 168 and 200 children. More recently drones have been the weapon of choice in Ukraine and Gaza and on April 14, 2024: the world's largest drone attack in history took place in the middle of the conflict caused by the developments of the Israeli war on Gaza, with a mass and simultaneous attack of more than 185 Iranian drones in less than a few hours against targets across Israel. Kaag and Kreps continue that drones are ‘qualitatively different than previous military technologies: they allow lethal action at virtually no risk to the perpetrator.’ The anticipated rise of autonomous drones and other robot ‘warriors’ heralds the rendering of ‘both war and the ethics of war as posthuman in the sense that the human element therein is removed,’ observes Enemark in Armed Drones and the Ethics of War: Military Virtue in a Post-Heroic Age (2013). Indeed, in the planned shift from remote-control to autonomy for armed drones, the US military ‘sees value in overcoming the physical and mental limitations of human participants in high-technology war,’ Enemark argues. In military slang a drone kill is inelegantly referred to as a ‘bug splat’ insofar as the sense of size and power, and viewing the carnage afflicted on a human through grainy video, apparently gives the sense of an insect being crushed. A collaboration of artists challenged this ‘insensitivity as well as raise awareness of civilian casualties’ by installing a huge portrait facing upwards in the heavily bombed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan. As can be seen on the website, Not A Bug Splat, when viewed by a drone camera what an operator ‘sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face.’
Andrew Niccol’s war drama Good Kill (2014) likewise explores the situation whereby a U.S. drone pilot could ‘commute to work in rush-hour traffic, slip into a seat in front of a bank of computers, ‘fly’ a warplane to shoot missiles at an enemy thousands of miles away, and then pick up the kids from school or a gallon of milk at the grocery store on his way home for dinner.’ The film opens by inviting the viewer to assume they are seeing a real bombing mission only to track back and reveal a scene reminiscent of a 1990s internet café. The film utilises actual footage of drone strikes obtained from Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. Chamayou has suggested in Drone Theory (2015) that the ‘best definition’ of drones is ‘flying, high-resolution video cameras armed with missiles. This can be considered a movie camera without a man and affords the possibilities of the ‘camera’ being freed from the limitations of the human ‘camera-man,’ producing ‘non-anthropocentric spaces and times’, according to Brown in Supercinema: Film Philosophy for the Digital Age (2013). The drone is a McLuhaninian extension of man’s fist and eye: ‘Their history is that of an eye turned into a weapon,’ comments Chamayou.
The lead character of Good Kill, Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke), lives and works in Las Vegas whilst killing and maiming in Afghanistan. Mediated technologies might liberate him from certain constraints of space and time but they also confine him to a screen and non-place. He experiences becoming a posthuman prosthesis to military technology, and this militarised (and masculine) posthuman cyborg warrior is in contrast with the optimistic possibilities of the posthuman cyborg enthused by Haraway. Egan is a former traditional pilot who, on a ‘nonvoluntary basis,’ has become a drone pilot. He laments how the U.S. Air Force has become the ‘U.S. Chair Force’. Indeed, by 2012, the US Air Force was training, via computer simulations, more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined. Whilst downing vodka, Egan begins to question this posthuman condition and the ethics and effectiveness of the drone.
As Chamayou highlights: ‘A Pakistani Taliban Leader is reported to have said, ‘I spent three months trying to recruit and only got 10 – 15 persons. One U.S. drone attack and I got 150 volunteers.’ Far from making the world a safe place, the drone shifts the ‘burden of risk’ from a ‘casualty-averse military force’ and onto the unprotected civilian populace.’
Egan thus sinks into indifference, depression, and fatigue. The major dilemma, posed in the film by this virtual war, is signalled in the advertising strapline to the film: ‘If you never face your enemy how can you face yourself?’ This makes apparent that the protagonist’s distress is deemed to come from mediated digitised screen relations rather than disruptive face-to-face relations. Egan is a veteran of six tours in a fighter jet and wants to return to the actual ‘theatre of operation’. His hardened commander declares that, ‘War is now a first-person shooter.’ ‘I am a pilot and I’m not flying,’ Egan bemoans. ‘Every day I feel like a coward taking a pot-shot at someone half way around the world.’ The drama he both creates and suffers in his home life – he becomes impotent – allows inclusion of the film into the genre identified by Wiegman in Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War (1994) as ‘missiles and melodrama’. We might also read into Egan’s dilemma a mourning of the lost phallic potential of the drone, whereby mastery of mediated technology replaces immediate military dominance in the field.
The film’s atmosphere, like the Las Vegas military cube, is airless and banal. The viewer is likely to become as bored and indifferent as Egan as they repeatedly view grainy shots of tiny figures scuttling followed by explosion and dust. The drone operators staring at multiple screens are analogous to the financial traders described by Tom Wolfe in ‘Where Did All Our Power Go?’ (2013) as ‘trying to monitor six screens at once, six screens that fan out three over three, obscuring any connection we have to the real world.’ Indeed, it could be argued that the drone operator and the financial trader are emblematic figures of the posthuman condition. Both are cut off from the ‘real world’ effects of their operations and this mediation desensitises them from their actions. The drone missile kills or injures in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs. Likewise, as I contend in The Financial Crash and Hyper-Real Economy (2013), financial operations in the hyper-real economy remove the trader from the effects their virtual labour such as precarious employment, exploitation, austerity, inequality, environmental damage, hardship, poverty, and so forth. If for the Afghans, ‘[t]he buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death,’ as Chamayou suggests, then for many in the West it is debt that functions as a drone in terms of the constant reminder of the psychic imprisonment of permanent surveillance and financial obedience.
In mediated war the alleged enemy now apparently resides in ‘compounds’ rather than ‘homes.’ They turn from being seen as real flesh and are instead rendered posthuman and deemed to be a legitimate target, or not based on adherence or deviation from simulation models. These are ‘pattern of life’ indicators, Chamayou points out, and there is a reliance on ‘quantitative data’ to determine the possibility of a ‘signature strike.’ This is algorithmic regulation of behaviour: deviate from your normal pattern of everyday life, deviate from the simulation model, and you will be a suspect. Should one show ‘suspicious’ behaviour, and the supposed ‘signature’ of a terrorist, or merely be near someone who does, then one will be defined as a terrorist and targeted. The definition of the terrorist precedes the war act and hence produces the alleged ‘clean’ nature of drone strikes and supposed lack of collateral damage and civilian causalities. This is how, in virtual war, the model precedes and dictates the real. This loss of the human is precisely the threat that virtual posthuman war poses. As put forward by Lauren Wilcox in Bodies of Violence (2015), the digital dimension of the drone must be emphasised: ‘The precision bomber as ‘posthuman’ suggests that both bomber and the people on his or her screen are flows of information on a screen – existing as texts or codes.’ The production of certain subjects through their integration in informational frameworks constituted by the practices of precision warfare suggests, ‘that a greater emphasis on ‘seeing’ the victims of warfare is not an adequate critique: it is the ‘coding’ of such people that matters.’
Returning to Good Kill, Egan’s war has no face, no place, and no time. Or rather this is posthuman anonymous war, infinite war, and global war against ‘terror.’ Egan’s nostalgic Levinasian appeal to face-to-face relations reveal how vacuous virtual mediated war (and peace) has become. The virtual feedback he receives damages relations with his wife and children. Yet Egan’s remedy – to return to the ‘theatre of operation’ – is in bad faith and disingenuous. The ‘real’ war that Egan wants to return to – presumably Iraq 2004 – was, as Baudrillard has suggested of the Gulf War 1991, always already virtual. Baudrillard, notoriously for some, had suggested in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995) that the Gulf War differed from, and altered the traditional ontology of war. The war was not a real contest but a virtual war – a mediated demonstration of the West’s technological and political dominance, and the globalisation of its commercial interests. War turns into ‘war-processing’ and drifts into rationalisation and technicalisation. Like the drone seeking deviation from simulation models of ‘normal’ behaviour, force is not directed against real adversaries, but against abstract operations and definitions. Warfare has been supplanted for the model of warfare. As James Der Derian has suggested in Virtuous War (2009), the virtual revolution in war ‘is driven more by software than hardware, and enabled by networks rather than agents.’ There are digital ‘warriors’ in films and video game simulations on the one hand, and real-time broadcasting and TV images of ‘real war’ suffering on the other. Both are mediated directly into the living room, and condition and reconcile us to the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment complex. The Gulf War was not a war, it was ‘war stripped of its passions, it violence, by its technicians, and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics,’ according to Baudrillard. And, in turn, this virtual war revised the notion that ‘war is born of an antagonistic, destructive but dual relation between two adversaries.’ The Gulf War was conducted in part as a media spectacle. It is this unilateral, virtual war, which Egan paradoxically mourns and regards as a real war, with dual relations, which would restore his actuality, masculinity, power, and presence.
In principle the drone, like much posthuman technology, can be employed progressively. However, whilst countless military drones have killed countless people, and its commercial potential is being exploited, the drone as a humanitarian tool delivering medical supplies, for instance, remains a fiction or, as Rothstein observes in Drone (Object Lessons) (2015), only an ‘optimistically rendered Photoshop image’. In turn, military drones are what Braidotti would term in The Posthuman (2013) a ‘necro-technology’ operated by ‘tele-thanatological warriors.’; and, furthermore, ‘[c]ontemporary death-technologies are posthuman because of the intense technological mediation within which they operate.’
Good Kill poses the possibilities that Judith Butler has remarked upon in Frames of War (2010). Intuitively we may think that persons wage war, not the instruments they deploy: ‘But what happens if the instruments acquire their own agency, such that persons become extensions of those instruments?’ This is the posthuman reversal of man becoming a prosthesis to technology. Butler adds, ‘persons use technological instruments, but instruments surely also use persons (position them, endow them with perspective, and establish the trajectory of their actions).’ This then, is the inhuman possibility of posthuman (military) technology reinforcing and producing the posthuman. The concern is clear for Francis Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future (2006), contemporary technology ‘will alter human nature and thereby move us into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history.’
And what does Fukuyama do after his 1990s widely publicised endorsement of liberal democracy and subsequent announcement of the end of history? ‘In his leisure hours, he puts together little drones in his garage and then proudly exhibits them on his blog,’ observes Chamayou.
Interview
Dr. Paula Murphy
(Dublin City University)
discusses 'AI in the Movies'
Dr. Paula Murphy
(Dublin City University)
discusses 'AI in the Movies'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
July 8th 2024
by Brett Gregory
July 8th 2024
Transcript
Hi, my name is Brett Gregory, and this is a podcast interview for the UK academic, arts and politics website, Serious Feather.
What follows is an extremely interesting discussion with the author of a new book called, ‘AI in the Movies’, which has been published by Edinburgh University Press.
Brett: Hello, and welcome. Please, introduce yourself.
Paula: Hello, my name is Dr. Paula Murphy. I lecture in the School of English in Dublin City University, Ireland, and I specialise in Modern Irish Literature and Film, and popular film, especially film representations of artificial intelligence, which is the topic of my book ‘AI in the Movies’.
Brett: And what specifically inspired you to begin writing this particular book, Paula?
Paula: I first started thinking about AI, and how it is represented in film, when I saw the film ‘Her’ in 2013, and it fascinated me. It’s a film directed by Spike Jonze, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore Twombly. It’s about a lonely man who has separated from his wife, and finds love with an artificially intelligent operating system called Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He uploads the operating system on his phone, and when Samantha begins to communicate, he is startled by how human she is. She’s clever and witty, she’s supportive and encouraging. And as soon as she comes into being, she begins to change and develop, to have aspirations and longings, an emotional and sexual life. She goes on a journey of coming to terms with herself, her abilities and her limitations, that leads to her finally leaving Theodore. In fact, ultimately, leaving the human, material world, entirely.
Brett: Yeah, I’ve seen it. Very involving, resonant. A key film for understanding the first quarter of the 21st century, I’d argue.
Paula: At one level, it’s a very human story. If I described the trajectory of that romance to you without mentioning that Samantha was an AI, it sounds entirely plausible. But, at another level, there are ominous notes in the film about human relationships with AI. Theodore thinks of her as human: it is her humanness that he falls in love with, but he understands at the end of the film, that she was only showing him a part of herself. He tries and fails to keep up with her intellectually. The speed at which she processes knowledge is far beyond his capability, even his understanding. Human thought and communication are soon frustratingly slow to her, and she excuses herself at one point in the film to communicate ‘post-verbally’ to a dead philosopher whose brain she and other AIs have artificially reconstructed.
Theodore’s humanising of her means that he is genuinely bereft when he discovers that she is having relationships with multiple humans and AIs, many of whom she is romantically involved with. He so easily adapts to her lack of physical presence – her lack of a body – as do his friends. That casting aside of the material world, which is the world that we as humans are irrevocably tethered to, struck me as dangerous. And he happily ignores the access he has given her, or not given her, to his personal data, such that, without his knowledge, she puts together a book comprised of letters he has written and sends it to a publisher, posing as him. So there were lots of aspects of the film ‘Her’ that got me thinking, and it motivated me to start looking at other films where AI had been represented and, eventually, to try and watch and analyse them all, and try to trace the recurring themes and patterns, narrative and visual, across the decades.
Brett: Excellent. Right, now, many people, ill-informed by the mainstream media as usual, generally perceive AI to be this single definitive category which encompasses absolutely everything computer-related and/or computer-generated. But this isn’t the case, is it? For example, in your book you introduce us to ‘affective AI’.
Paula: Affective AI can identify human emotion through, for example, facial expression, gestures, or voice intonation. In the real world, affective AI is used by companies in things like market research, customer service, and the automotive industry, to gauge customers’ emotional reactions. Unlike the real world, in the films analysed in this book, the AIs are usually self-aware, and emotionally complex, capable of not only identifying human emotion, but reciprocating it.
Brett: And what about ‘ambient intelligence’?
Paula: Ambient intelligence is AI that lives in our environment with us; it is there is the background in the form of a smartwatch, a digital assistant, or a robotic vacuum cleaner. Films imagine this type of AI too becoming self-aware and autonomous, like the smart home assistant ‘Tau’ in the Netflix film of the same name.
Brett: I haven’t watched ‘Tau’, but it’s now on the list.
Paula: Humanoid AI robots can be robots that are shaped like humans in the sense that they have a torso, a head, arms and legs. In film these range from utilitarian police droids, like ‘Chappie’, to robots that are indistinguishable from humans, like Rachael in ‘Blade Runner’, for example. In the real world humanoid robots take in a similarly broad range of types, from Boston Dynamic’s Atlas robot to the robots produced by Hanson robotics with an uncanny similarity to humans.
Brett: And there are ‘digital AIs’ as well?
Paula: Digital AIs are AIs that do not have a robot body of any kind. In films they can be housed in a computer, like Edgar in the 1980s movie ‘Electric Dreams’, or on a spaceship, like HAL 9000 in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, or they can exist online, like the Puppet Master in ‘Ghost in the Shell’. We are familiar with digital AIs in the real world too: the voices that speak to us in customer service chatbots, or digital assistants. The important difference between real-world AIs and the ones discussed in the book, is that all the AIs in the book are film representations of strong or human level AI: they are autonomous individuals with their own sense of self, their own desires, ambitions and moral code, and we don’t have that in the real world, not yet anyway.
Brett: Erm, fingers crossed. And what about ‘hybridity’?
Paula: Hybridity is a really interesting feature of artificial intelligence representations in film. This describes entities that are made up part human, part AI components. I don’t think there are real world comparisons to the type of hybridisation we see in film. For example, in ‘Terminator: Salvation’, the character of Marcus is a hybrid figure. He is a human who is selected by the artificial intelligence Skynet for ‘modification’, and is given a cybernetic heart and a machine brain that syncs with Skynet. For me, these hybridised characters are among the most interesting in artificial intelligence film, because they illustrate how complex and entangled the relationship between humans and AI can be.
Brett: Now, couldn’t it be argued that the use of AI technology as a storyline, character or trope is just another Hollywood show business tool used to draw in and spook the audience. For example, aren’t sci-fi thrillers such as ‘Westworld’ from 1973 or ‘Demon Seed’ from 1977 just simply B-Movie ‘creature features’ like ‘Frankenstein’ from 1931 or ‘The Thing from Another World’ from 1951?
Paula: It is absolutely true that film has always harnessed technological innovation to bring its viewers films that are more realistic or entertaining or exciting. In the films analysed in this book, artificial intelligence hasn’t been particularly evident as a technological innovation, like sound, or CGI. But it is there as a trope, in storylines and in characters, and certainly, in the main, it is there as something to be afraid of, something that we don’t fully understand, that is potentially more powerful than us, and which frightens us.
In this sense, many AI films, particularly the older ones from the 50s, 60s and 70s that you’ve mentioned, have a lot in common with B-Movie ‘creature features’. The AIs, like the monsters, are presented as aberrations, and the characteristics that they share with humans makes them more terrifying, not less terrifying, dredging up the horror of the uncanny. Most AI films are anthropocentric: they put the human at the centre. Because of this, the AI often functions as a mirror to distasteful human attributes and emotions: ambition, jealousy, revenge. Just like the B-Movie monsters, AI can represent those parts of human nature that we might wish to remain hidden. AIs share another characteristic with B-Movie monsters, and it is an interest in where the dividing line is between ‘them and us’. A key question that is asked about ‘The Thing from Another World’ is: ‘is it human or inhuman?’ That same question is asked about AIs over and over again in the history of AI film.
Brett: Of course, it could be argued also that using AI to interfere with the physical condition of human beings, or even raising them from the dead, is unnerving, unnatural and unholy, like necromancy or zombification.
For instance, movies like ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ from 1973, ‘Robocop’ from 1987 and ‘Upgrade’ from 2018 portray a semi-posthumous protagonist enhanced by an exoskeleton, and they are healthy, empowered, death-defying, and immortal as a consequence.
Paula: Well, ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ and ‘Robocop’ wouldn’t fall into the category of an AI movie in terms of the parameters of this study. Those characters are more cyborgs than artificial intelligences.
Brett: I see.
Paula: In terms of ‘Upgrade’, yes, there is an AI there called STEM who inhabits the body of the paralysed man. ‘Upgrade’ is similar to films like ‘Transcendence’ and ‘Chappie’ in which a strong AI is used to extend or augment human life. But you’re perfectly correct about all of the films that you mention presenting technology as a panacea to ill-health, injury and even mortality, and there certainly is something deeply unsettling about that idea.
Brett: Excellent. I’m generally on the right lines then.
Paula: On the flip side of that, there are AI films that present AI immortality as a problematic obstacle to the humanness that the AIs desire. A great example of that is ‘Bicentennial Man’, starring Robin Williams. At the beginning of the film, Robin Williams’ character, Andrew, is a robot, but by the end, he has aesthetically and biologically transformed into a human being. His immortality is the final obstacle to him being legally recognised as human, and this recognition finally comes as he dies; perhaps his death could even be considered the price of humanness that he willingly pays. For the child AI David in Spielberg’s film ‘AI: Artificial Intelligence’, his immortality is also a curse bestowed on him by his human makers, which means that he must outlive his mother, the person he loves more than anyone else, and eventually the entire human race. He spends an agonising 2000 years under the sea childishly waiting and hoping for the Blue Fairy to grant his wish to be a real boy, before finally being found by aliens.
So in AI film AI characters who can transcend human morality are sometimes to be envied, but sometimes they are to be pitied.
Brett: Envy. I’ve been thinking about that a lot just lately. In a similar way that the old envy the young – their health, their energy, their future – do human beings envy their AI creations?
Paula: Looking back over the history of AI film, AI film tends to present ‘us vs. them’ scenarios: the AIs are the ones that are rapidly evolving and extending their abilities and powers, and the humans are generally quite static in terms of their ability to radically change or evolve. Certainly there are lots of films that try to build bridges between human and AI by making reference to a human who contains some kind of artificiality. For example, in ‘I, Robot’, Spooner has had his arm and shoulder reconstructed after injury, and has a cybernetic arm and lung. The film makes use of the irony that the robot-hating Spooner is himself part machine, while demonstrating the robot Sonny’s human characteristics, like his dreaming, his desire for freedom. In ‘Terminator 2’, Sarah Connor has become a ruthless, unemotional killing machine, like the Terminators themselves.
Brett: I’m thinking here of that famous transhumanist scene in ‘The Matrix’ where training manuals are being instantaneously uploaded into Neo’s brain, and he suddenly awakes to announce: ‘I know kung fu.’
Paula: In terms of transhumanist augmentation – using AI to make humans live longer, be stronger, be smarter – there are only a few AI films that deal with that, such as ‘The Machine’, ‘Transcendence’, ‘Chappie’, and ‘Upgrade’, which have appeared in the last ten years. These films are beginning to explore AI being harnessed for transhumanist ends. Maybe this is becoming a trend in AI film; it’s probably a little too soon to tell for sure.
Brett: And what are the dangers involved in terms of, say, morality and ethics?
Paula: So the attitudes of these films towards using AI to achieve human augmentation are mixed. For example, ‘The Machine’ is about a scientist who has a daughter with Rett Syndrome. She is going to die, and to save her he uploads her consciousness and hides it within the brain of an artificially intelligent robot: the machine of the film’s title. While on the surface, this seems to present a positive alternative to the death of a daughter, at the end of the film the scientist father finds himself completely side-lined: his daughter, now a digital consciousness, prefers to interact with her ‘mother’, the AI, and the father is left standing literally and figuratively alone. It’s a troubling ending that certainly does not celebrate the transhumanist possibilities of AI.
There is also the question of whether his daughter is the same person at all, now that she is a digital consciousness rather than a biological human being. Post-humanist philosophers like N. Katherine Hayles would argue that, of course, she isn’t, because we are materially embodied as humans and that mind is not separate from the body, or the wider environment.
Brett: Generally speaking, what kind of future is represented in movies which feature AI as their subject matter? Is it a stronger future than now, a darker future, a fairer future?
Paula: When I was researching this book I expected that AI film, being so future-facing, would be inclusive in its representations, but that is absolutely not the case. In terms of race, for example, it is not until 2001 in Steven Spielberg’s ‘AI’ that the first black AI robot appears in film, and then only briefly before he is killed in the Flesh Fair. The first black AI protagonist in a film doesn’t occur until 2021 in ‘Outside the Wire’, which in fact falls outside the timeframe of this book, which goes up to 2020. There have been a few others since then, just as the AI Casca in ‘Atlas’, but there are remarkably few.
In terms of gender, there are fewer female AIs in film than male, and when they appear, they are sexualised and objectified in a way that their male counterparts are not, such as Eva from ‘Ex Machina’, or the replicants from ‘Blade Runner’, Zhora, Pris and Rachael.
There is an opportunity for AI film to present a ‘fairer future’ as you put it. In fact, we can see that opportunity being enacted with one of the first AI characters in a Hollywood film: Robby the Robot. He acts outside of conventional gender norms being a ‘mother figure’ to Altaira in ‘Forbidden Planet’, taking care of her, making her dresses, listening to her. And in ‘The Invisible Boy’ when he appears again, he is a disruptor of patriarchal ideology, intervening in the relationship between the boy Timmy and his disciplinarian father, to stop his father from beating him. That opportunity for AI to act as a positively disruptive force in society, that we see with Robby the Robot in the 1950s, has not been pursued in AI film as it could have been, but there is still time.
Brett: We’re currently living in an age like no other, a truly technological age where smartphones, AI assistants and even AI decision-makers are shaping our everyday domestic and economic lives. And now we have ChatGPT, Dall-E 2 and Deep AI, for example, beginning to shape our imaginary lives also, our music, our literature, our cinema. What’s next? Our love lives?
Paula: There’s certainly a sense of utopianism depicted in some relationships with artificial intelligences, particularly those that concern AI as a romantic partner. Let’s go back to ‘Her’, the film that started all this for me, and the final film in the book. Theodore Twombly finds in Samantha, the AI operating system, a partner who he thinks is ideal: she is caring, kind, funny, and she is always there for him, at any time of the day or night. And yet, the film undercuts that relationship as a fantasy. It is not the special unique connection that he thinks. He discovers that when she is with him, she is also communicating with, and even in love with, countless others.
Brett: Well, I never.
Paula: His ex-wife in the film, Catherine, confronts him about dating Samantha because he is afraid of the messiness and pain of a relationship with a human. It’s true: he is still wounded after their separation from his wife, and has retreated to this place of comfort with Samantha. But Samantha shows him in the end that they are incompatible: she evolves far beyond his intellectual capability, and in the end she becomes an entity that he cannot comprehend. Something post-material, no longer tied to the ‘stuff’ of matter, but transcending that in a way that perhaps depicts ‘The Singularity’.
Brett: I read about ‘The Singularity’. It refers to accelerated technological progress wherein the limits of humanity are transcended by AI networks, interfaces, robotics, augmentation and such like.
Paula: Every film depicts this differently, but certainly in ‘Her’, the relationship with Samantha is a place for Theodore to hide, to lick his wounds, but it is also a place of learning, about himself and about what it means to be in a relationship. What makes the film ‘Her’ so intriguing is that its messaging is ambiguous. In a way the ending might seem to suggest that his relationship with Samantha was never a ‘real’ relationship, and that he was deluding himself all along. On the other hand, there are parallels between his relationship to his ex-wife Catherine and Samantha: both relationships break down because Theodore’s partners have grown away from him, and that comparison may imply that there was plenty that was ‘real’ about his relationship with Samantha after all.
Brett: Narrative parallelism, I think that’s called, and it reminds me of what you mentioned earlier about AI often functioning as an anthropocentric mirror.
Anyway, let’s return to ‘The Singularity’. I’m amazed. We’re actually building and programming artificial entities that will surpass us in all areas as human beings, way beyond our understanding and control, thus making us ultimately ineffectual and obsolete. Is this some sort of long-winded global suicide mission? Like a shared cultural death wish or something?
Paula: Lots of AI films depict this moment of great change – which some call ‘The Singularity’ – whereby artificial intelligences become dominant and humans are marginalised, oppressed, or threatened with extinction. The Netflix movie ‘Atlas’ starring Jennifer Lopez depicts just such a situation with an AI, Harlan, that wants to destroy most of the human race and start again, with a select few who will live under the control of artificial intelligences. You could argue that there is a death wish being presented here in these depictions, but if it is there, it’s something very abstract, because such scenarios are usually met with strong human resistance that overcomes the AI threat, at least temporarily, if not permanently. What we are starting to see is that characters are using AI technology in order to fight AI. To go back to the ‘Atlas’ example, the Lopez character, Atlas, reluctantly agrees to sync with a mecha-suit in order to fight the rogue AI, Harlan. So there is a distinction that emerges between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ AI, and an acceptance that AI technology cannot be rejected entirely, but overall, in AI films, the life instinct rather than the death instinct, I think, is the dominant one.
Brett: Hmm … I’m certain that when Skynet became self-aware at 2:14 a.m. on August 29, 1997, it swiftly wiped out almost the entire human race with coordinated nuclear attacks.
Paula: AI film presents many possibilities for what the future of our relationship with AI might look like, from situations in which we live in harmony with AI to situations where we are engaged in an all-out battle against them. But I think what AI film can tell us about the real world is probably limited by the bias that it has towards humans: AI films tend to put humans, and human-like AIs at the forefront of their stories. It is fascinated with AIs that are our likenesses, that demonstrate human-like emotion, morality, desires and fears. That emphasis anthropocentrism, putting humans at the centre, probably blinkers us to an AI future in which AIs have little in common with us, and we struggle to navigate our human-AI relationship. I think that’s a more likely scenario, but it’s also the reason why fictional accounts of artificial intelligences are culturally important: they are a way of working through the possibilities, and they act as prompts for important conversations about the way things might be, will be or should be when it comes to our relationship with artificial intelligence.
Brett: Well, I certainly agree with that, Paula, and I really hope that we’ve had one of those important conversations today. Many thanks for your insights, your time, and your patience.
‘AI in the Movies’ by Dr. Paula Murphy is available now via the Edinburgh University Press website.
This has been a podcast interview for the UK academic, arts and politics website, Serious Feather, and I’ve been your host, Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
Hi, my name is Brett Gregory, and this is a podcast interview for the UK academic, arts and politics website, Serious Feather.
What follows is an extremely interesting discussion with the author of a new book called, ‘AI in the Movies’, which has been published by Edinburgh University Press.
Brett: Hello, and welcome. Please, introduce yourself.
Paula: Hello, my name is Dr. Paula Murphy. I lecture in the School of English in Dublin City University, Ireland, and I specialise in Modern Irish Literature and Film, and popular film, especially film representations of artificial intelligence, which is the topic of my book ‘AI in the Movies’.
Brett: And what specifically inspired you to begin writing this particular book, Paula?
Paula: I first started thinking about AI, and how it is represented in film, when I saw the film ‘Her’ in 2013, and it fascinated me. It’s a film directed by Spike Jonze, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore Twombly. It’s about a lonely man who has separated from his wife, and finds love with an artificially intelligent operating system called Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He uploads the operating system on his phone, and when Samantha begins to communicate, he is startled by how human she is. She’s clever and witty, she’s supportive and encouraging. And as soon as she comes into being, she begins to change and develop, to have aspirations and longings, an emotional and sexual life. She goes on a journey of coming to terms with herself, her abilities and her limitations, that leads to her finally leaving Theodore. In fact, ultimately, leaving the human, material world, entirely.
Brett: Yeah, I’ve seen it. Very involving, resonant. A key film for understanding the first quarter of the 21st century, I’d argue.
Paula: At one level, it’s a very human story. If I described the trajectory of that romance to you without mentioning that Samantha was an AI, it sounds entirely plausible. But, at another level, there are ominous notes in the film about human relationships with AI. Theodore thinks of her as human: it is her humanness that he falls in love with, but he understands at the end of the film, that she was only showing him a part of herself. He tries and fails to keep up with her intellectually. The speed at which she processes knowledge is far beyond his capability, even his understanding. Human thought and communication are soon frustratingly slow to her, and she excuses herself at one point in the film to communicate ‘post-verbally’ to a dead philosopher whose brain she and other AIs have artificially reconstructed.
Theodore’s humanising of her means that he is genuinely bereft when he discovers that she is having relationships with multiple humans and AIs, many of whom she is romantically involved with. He so easily adapts to her lack of physical presence – her lack of a body – as do his friends. That casting aside of the material world, which is the world that we as humans are irrevocably tethered to, struck me as dangerous. And he happily ignores the access he has given her, or not given her, to his personal data, such that, without his knowledge, she puts together a book comprised of letters he has written and sends it to a publisher, posing as him. So there were lots of aspects of the film ‘Her’ that got me thinking, and it motivated me to start looking at other films where AI had been represented and, eventually, to try and watch and analyse them all, and try to trace the recurring themes and patterns, narrative and visual, across the decades.
Brett: Excellent. Right, now, many people, ill-informed by the mainstream media as usual, generally perceive AI to be this single definitive category which encompasses absolutely everything computer-related and/or computer-generated. But this isn’t the case, is it? For example, in your book you introduce us to ‘affective AI’.
Paula: Affective AI can identify human emotion through, for example, facial expression, gestures, or voice intonation. In the real world, affective AI is used by companies in things like market research, customer service, and the automotive industry, to gauge customers’ emotional reactions. Unlike the real world, in the films analysed in this book, the AIs are usually self-aware, and emotionally complex, capable of not only identifying human emotion, but reciprocating it.
Brett: And what about ‘ambient intelligence’?
Paula: Ambient intelligence is AI that lives in our environment with us; it is there is the background in the form of a smartwatch, a digital assistant, or a robotic vacuum cleaner. Films imagine this type of AI too becoming self-aware and autonomous, like the smart home assistant ‘Tau’ in the Netflix film of the same name.
Brett: I haven’t watched ‘Tau’, but it’s now on the list.
Paula: Humanoid AI robots can be robots that are shaped like humans in the sense that they have a torso, a head, arms and legs. In film these range from utilitarian police droids, like ‘Chappie’, to robots that are indistinguishable from humans, like Rachael in ‘Blade Runner’, for example. In the real world humanoid robots take in a similarly broad range of types, from Boston Dynamic’s Atlas robot to the robots produced by Hanson robotics with an uncanny similarity to humans.
Brett: And there are ‘digital AIs’ as well?
Paula: Digital AIs are AIs that do not have a robot body of any kind. In films they can be housed in a computer, like Edgar in the 1980s movie ‘Electric Dreams’, or on a spaceship, like HAL 9000 in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, or they can exist online, like the Puppet Master in ‘Ghost in the Shell’. We are familiar with digital AIs in the real world too: the voices that speak to us in customer service chatbots, or digital assistants. The important difference between real-world AIs and the ones discussed in the book, is that all the AIs in the book are film representations of strong or human level AI: they are autonomous individuals with their own sense of self, their own desires, ambitions and moral code, and we don’t have that in the real world, not yet anyway.
Brett: Erm, fingers crossed. And what about ‘hybridity’?
Paula: Hybridity is a really interesting feature of artificial intelligence representations in film. This describes entities that are made up part human, part AI components. I don’t think there are real world comparisons to the type of hybridisation we see in film. For example, in ‘Terminator: Salvation’, the character of Marcus is a hybrid figure. He is a human who is selected by the artificial intelligence Skynet for ‘modification’, and is given a cybernetic heart and a machine brain that syncs with Skynet. For me, these hybridised characters are among the most interesting in artificial intelligence film, because they illustrate how complex and entangled the relationship between humans and AI can be.
Brett: Now, couldn’t it be argued that the use of AI technology as a storyline, character or trope is just another Hollywood show business tool used to draw in and spook the audience. For example, aren’t sci-fi thrillers such as ‘Westworld’ from 1973 or ‘Demon Seed’ from 1977 just simply B-Movie ‘creature features’ like ‘Frankenstein’ from 1931 or ‘The Thing from Another World’ from 1951?
Paula: It is absolutely true that film has always harnessed technological innovation to bring its viewers films that are more realistic or entertaining or exciting. In the films analysed in this book, artificial intelligence hasn’t been particularly evident as a technological innovation, like sound, or CGI. But it is there as a trope, in storylines and in characters, and certainly, in the main, it is there as something to be afraid of, something that we don’t fully understand, that is potentially more powerful than us, and which frightens us.
In this sense, many AI films, particularly the older ones from the 50s, 60s and 70s that you’ve mentioned, have a lot in common with B-Movie ‘creature features’. The AIs, like the monsters, are presented as aberrations, and the characteristics that they share with humans makes them more terrifying, not less terrifying, dredging up the horror of the uncanny. Most AI films are anthropocentric: they put the human at the centre. Because of this, the AI often functions as a mirror to distasteful human attributes and emotions: ambition, jealousy, revenge. Just like the B-Movie monsters, AI can represent those parts of human nature that we might wish to remain hidden. AIs share another characteristic with B-Movie monsters, and it is an interest in where the dividing line is between ‘them and us’. A key question that is asked about ‘The Thing from Another World’ is: ‘is it human or inhuman?’ That same question is asked about AIs over and over again in the history of AI film.
Brett: Of course, it could be argued also that using AI to interfere with the physical condition of human beings, or even raising them from the dead, is unnerving, unnatural and unholy, like necromancy or zombification.
For instance, movies like ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ from 1973, ‘Robocop’ from 1987 and ‘Upgrade’ from 2018 portray a semi-posthumous protagonist enhanced by an exoskeleton, and they are healthy, empowered, death-defying, and immortal as a consequence.
Paula: Well, ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ and ‘Robocop’ wouldn’t fall into the category of an AI movie in terms of the parameters of this study. Those characters are more cyborgs than artificial intelligences.
Brett: I see.
Paula: In terms of ‘Upgrade’, yes, there is an AI there called STEM who inhabits the body of the paralysed man. ‘Upgrade’ is similar to films like ‘Transcendence’ and ‘Chappie’ in which a strong AI is used to extend or augment human life. But you’re perfectly correct about all of the films that you mention presenting technology as a panacea to ill-health, injury and even mortality, and there certainly is something deeply unsettling about that idea.
Brett: Excellent. I’m generally on the right lines then.
Paula: On the flip side of that, there are AI films that present AI immortality as a problematic obstacle to the humanness that the AIs desire. A great example of that is ‘Bicentennial Man’, starring Robin Williams. At the beginning of the film, Robin Williams’ character, Andrew, is a robot, but by the end, he has aesthetically and biologically transformed into a human being. His immortality is the final obstacle to him being legally recognised as human, and this recognition finally comes as he dies; perhaps his death could even be considered the price of humanness that he willingly pays. For the child AI David in Spielberg’s film ‘AI: Artificial Intelligence’, his immortality is also a curse bestowed on him by his human makers, which means that he must outlive his mother, the person he loves more than anyone else, and eventually the entire human race. He spends an agonising 2000 years under the sea childishly waiting and hoping for the Blue Fairy to grant his wish to be a real boy, before finally being found by aliens.
So in AI film AI characters who can transcend human morality are sometimes to be envied, but sometimes they are to be pitied.
Brett: Envy. I’ve been thinking about that a lot just lately. In a similar way that the old envy the young – their health, their energy, their future – do human beings envy their AI creations?
Paula: Looking back over the history of AI film, AI film tends to present ‘us vs. them’ scenarios: the AIs are the ones that are rapidly evolving and extending their abilities and powers, and the humans are generally quite static in terms of their ability to radically change or evolve. Certainly there are lots of films that try to build bridges between human and AI by making reference to a human who contains some kind of artificiality. For example, in ‘I, Robot’, Spooner has had his arm and shoulder reconstructed after injury, and has a cybernetic arm and lung. The film makes use of the irony that the robot-hating Spooner is himself part machine, while demonstrating the robot Sonny’s human characteristics, like his dreaming, his desire for freedom. In ‘Terminator 2’, Sarah Connor has become a ruthless, unemotional killing machine, like the Terminators themselves.
Brett: I’m thinking here of that famous transhumanist scene in ‘The Matrix’ where training manuals are being instantaneously uploaded into Neo’s brain, and he suddenly awakes to announce: ‘I know kung fu.’
Paula: In terms of transhumanist augmentation – using AI to make humans live longer, be stronger, be smarter – there are only a few AI films that deal with that, such as ‘The Machine’, ‘Transcendence’, ‘Chappie’, and ‘Upgrade’, which have appeared in the last ten years. These films are beginning to explore AI being harnessed for transhumanist ends. Maybe this is becoming a trend in AI film; it’s probably a little too soon to tell for sure.
Brett: And what are the dangers involved in terms of, say, morality and ethics?
Paula: So the attitudes of these films towards using AI to achieve human augmentation are mixed. For example, ‘The Machine’ is about a scientist who has a daughter with Rett Syndrome. She is going to die, and to save her he uploads her consciousness and hides it within the brain of an artificially intelligent robot: the machine of the film’s title. While on the surface, this seems to present a positive alternative to the death of a daughter, at the end of the film the scientist father finds himself completely side-lined: his daughter, now a digital consciousness, prefers to interact with her ‘mother’, the AI, and the father is left standing literally and figuratively alone. It’s a troubling ending that certainly does not celebrate the transhumanist possibilities of AI.
There is also the question of whether his daughter is the same person at all, now that she is a digital consciousness rather than a biological human being. Post-humanist philosophers like N. Katherine Hayles would argue that, of course, she isn’t, because we are materially embodied as humans and that mind is not separate from the body, or the wider environment.
Brett: Generally speaking, what kind of future is represented in movies which feature AI as their subject matter? Is it a stronger future than now, a darker future, a fairer future?
Paula: When I was researching this book I expected that AI film, being so future-facing, would be inclusive in its representations, but that is absolutely not the case. In terms of race, for example, it is not until 2001 in Steven Spielberg’s ‘AI’ that the first black AI robot appears in film, and then only briefly before he is killed in the Flesh Fair. The first black AI protagonist in a film doesn’t occur until 2021 in ‘Outside the Wire’, which in fact falls outside the timeframe of this book, which goes up to 2020. There have been a few others since then, just as the AI Casca in ‘Atlas’, but there are remarkably few.
In terms of gender, there are fewer female AIs in film than male, and when they appear, they are sexualised and objectified in a way that their male counterparts are not, such as Eva from ‘Ex Machina’, or the replicants from ‘Blade Runner’, Zhora, Pris and Rachael.
There is an opportunity for AI film to present a ‘fairer future’ as you put it. In fact, we can see that opportunity being enacted with one of the first AI characters in a Hollywood film: Robby the Robot. He acts outside of conventional gender norms being a ‘mother figure’ to Altaira in ‘Forbidden Planet’, taking care of her, making her dresses, listening to her. And in ‘The Invisible Boy’ when he appears again, he is a disruptor of patriarchal ideology, intervening in the relationship between the boy Timmy and his disciplinarian father, to stop his father from beating him. That opportunity for AI to act as a positively disruptive force in society, that we see with Robby the Robot in the 1950s, has not been pursued in AI film as it could have been, but there is still time.
Brett: We’re currently living in an age like no other, a truly technological age where smartphones, AI assistants and even AI decision-makers are shaping our everyday domestic and economic lives. And now we have ChatGPT, Dall-E 2 and Deep AI, for example, beginning to shape our imaginary lives also, our music, our literature, our cinema. What’s next? Our love lives?
Paula: There’s certainly a sense of utopianism depicted in some relationships with artificial intelligences, particularly those that concern AI as a romantic partner. Let’s go back to ‘Her’, the film that started all this for me, and the final film in the book. Theodore Twombly finds in Samantha, the AI operating system, a partner who he thinks is ideal: she is caring, kind, funny, and she is always there for him, at any time of the day or night. And yet, the film undercuts that relationship as a fantasy. It is not the special unique connection that he thinks. He discovers that when she is with him, she is also communicating with, and even in love with, countless others.
Brett: Well, I never.
Paula: His ex-wife in the film, Catherine, confronts him about dating Samantha because he is afraid of the messiness and pain of a relationship with a human. It’s true: he is still wounded after their separation from his wife, and has retreated to this place of comfort with Samantha. But Samantha shows him in the end that they are incompatible: she evolves far beyond his intellectual capability, and in the end she becomes an entity that he cannot comprehend. Something post-material, no longer tied to the ‘stuff’ of matter, but transcending that in a way that perhaps depicts ‘The Singularity’.
Brett: I read about ‘The Singularity’. It refers to accelerated technological progress wherein the limits of humanity are transcended by AI networks, interfaces, robotics, augmentation and such like.
Paula: Every film depicts this differently, but certainly in ‘Her’, the relationship with Samantha is a place for Theodore to hide, to lick his wounds, but it is also a place of learning, about himself and about what it means to be in a relationship. What makes the film ‘Her’ so intriguing is that its messaging is ambiguous. In a way the ending might seem to suggest that his relationship with Samantha was never a ‘real’ relationship, and that he was deluding himself all along. On the other hand, there are parallels between his relationship to his ex-wife Catherine and Samantha: both relationships break down because Theodore’s partners have grown away from him, and that comparison may imply that there was plenty that was ‘real’ about his relationship with Samantha after all.
Brett: Narrative parallelism, I think that’s called, and it reminds me of what you mentioned earlier about AI often functioning as an anthropocentric mirror.
Anyway, let’s return to ‘The Singularity’. I’m amazed. We’re actually building and programming artificial entities that will surpass us in all areas as human beings, way beyond our understanding and control, thus making us ultimately ineffectual and obsolete. Is this some sort of long-winded global suicide mission? Like a shared cultural death wish or something?
Paula: Lots of AI films depict this moment of great change – which some call ‘The Singularity’ – whereby artificial intelligences become dominant and humans are marginalised, oppressed, or threatened with extinction. The Netflix movie ‘Atlas’ starring Jennifer Lopez depicts just such a situation with an AI, Harlan, that wants to destroy most of the human race and start again, with a select few who will live under the control of artificial intelligences. You could argue that there is a death wish being presented here in these depictions, but if it is there, it’s something very abstract, because such scenarios are usually met with strong human resistance that overcomes the AI threat, at least temporarily, if not permanently. What we are starting to see is that characters are using AI technology in order to fight AI. To go back to the ‘Atlas’ example, the Lopez character, Atlas, reluctantly agrees to sync with a mecha-suit in order to fight the rogue AI, Harlan. So there is a distinction that emerges between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ AI, and an acceptance that AI technology cannot be rejected entirely, but overall, in AI films, the life instinct rather than the death instinct, I think, is the dominant one.
Brett: Hmm … I’m certain that when Skynet became self-aware at 2:14 a.m. on August 29, 1997, it swiftly wiped out almost the entire human race with coordinated nuclear attacks.
Paula: AI film presents many possibilities for what the future of our relationship with AI might look like, from situations in which we live in harmony with AI to situations where we are engaged in an all-out battle against them. But I think what AI film can tell us about the real world is probably limited by the bias that it has towards humans: AI films tend to put humans, and human-like AIs at the forefront of their stories. It is fascinated with AIs that are our likenesses, that demonstrate human-like emotion, morality, desires and fears. That emphasis anthropocentrism, putting humans at the centre, probably blinkers us to an AI future in which AIs have little in common with us, and we struggle to navigate our human-AI relationship. I think that’s a more likely scenario, but it’s also the reason why fictional accounts of artificial intelligences are culturally important: they are a way of working through the possibilities, and they act as prompts for important conversations about the way things might be, will be or should be when it comes to our relationship with artificial intelligence.
Brett: Well, I certainly agree with that, Paula, and I really hope that we’ve had one of those important conversations today. Many thanks for your insights, your time, and your patience.
‘AI in the Movies’ by Dr. Paula Murphy is available now via the Edinburgh University Press website.
This has been a podcast interview for the UK academic, arts and politics website, Serious Feather, and I’ve been your host, Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
Zoom Interview
Director Muayad Alayan
discusses his new film 'A House in Jerusalem' (2024)
Director Muayad Alayan
discusses his new film 'A House in Jerusalem' (2024)
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
June 2nd 2024
by Brett Gregory
June 2nd 2024
Transcript
BG: So where are you right now?
MA: I'm in Jerusalem.
BG: So obviously people in the UK would like to know what's civilian life like in Jerusalem at the moment? What's the atmosphere like? Because we're just getting mainstream news here a lot of the time.
MA: Of course. Jerusalem has always been tense, Jerusalem has always been a place where you're always on edge, you're always … like something could go wrong any minute any second anywhere. You know I think we have been living in the last few months some of the most tense and stressful, you know, circumstances that I've ever experienced myself as a Jerusalemite and as somebody who grew up here. I think it has been, yeah, some of the most tense. The divide in the city across the eastern side which is dominantly Palestinian and the western side which is dominantly Israeli has never been as, you know, as segregated let's say.
BG: Right, and so what's your view of the future or the near future or the far future?
MA: I mean honestly the situation in Jerusalem and the West Bank for us Palestinians is horrible but we don't dare even complain or even you know talk about it, even though there's hundreds of people who have been killed in the last eight months. Thousands of people have been arrested because of what we're seeing in Gaza and what we witnessing in Gaza. So we cannot we're like … we don't dare complain, you know, because of the massacres we’re witnessing, so we are kind of just praying for an end to all of this.
BG: So I mean it's off topic … are you personally at risk as a filmmaker in terms of … because obviously you communicate to the wider world outside of the region, and obviously from different … forces that would consider to be I don't know whatever … So I don't know are you or are you just considered as another civilian?
MA: I mean since the beginning of the war there has been a lot of arrests among artists, intellectuals, creatives … Even not only for Palestinians who live inside Israel, also for Israelis who are on the kind of left-wing, progressive side you know? There has been a lot of arrests for people who have just denounced the killings that are happening in Gaza or just expressed their opinions or social media or something. There has been house arrests and physical arrests and several other things, so it's yeah it's … Everybody's careful, let's say. It's becoming like a Big Brother kind of police rule you know?
BG: Well, that's never reported on in terms of Israeli resistance to Israeli aggression I suppose …
MA: Yeah, there was a demonstration yesterday in Jerusalem a small one, of course, because the left in Israel shrank significantly over the last 20 years, right, but they were crushed, they were arrested and they were dragged and, you know … Yeah, there was a demonstration by Israeli leftists in Jerusalem demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza, and they were crushed and dragged into police cars.
BG: Right, okay, well that's set the scene. So moving on to the film: in what ways does your latest film ‘A House in Jerusalem’ have semi-autobiographical origins?
MA: I mean it is the most personal story of … The most personal film I've made so far. It's not a one-to-one true events kind of, you know, inspired by our house but it is definitely a story that is inspired by the trauma and the survival of my parents and my grandmother who all became refugees and were forced out of their homes and their territory and their land in 1948 during the Nakba when Israel was established, and they were never allowed to go back to their homes: the Israeli law just simply did not allow it, although they were among the very few lucky Palestinians who became refugees within historic Palestine and did not become refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or what have you … So it is inspired by their stories, it is inspired by their survival and how they coped with this trauma you know? The seeds go back to our childhood and the oral history and all the stories that they used to narrate. My father used to deliver meat on his bike from my grandfather's butcher store which was in West Jerusalem before 1948, and he basically knew all these neighbourhoods so well, and when we were growing up he used to drive us through these neighbourhoods on our way to school, and he would narrate stories about these neighbourhoods that look completely different today, you know? To him he used to see these ancient Palestinians houses, institutions, football clubs, and to us what we saw as the young generation it was the new McDonalds and Starbucks like cafes and this other kind westernised reality that Israel has established in these neighbourhoods, you know? So to me and to my brother Rami, who co-wrote this with me, we with my father's story, my grandmother's story and my mother's stories, you know, we felt that they were living with a part of them stuck in the past, stuck in these times and in these places, and this is what drove us to kind of come up with the concept of the ghost of the living as opposed to the ghost of the dead, you know? Because we believe that they were living with these ghosts of themselves, stuck in time, in these traumas that they went through.
BG: Yeah, I was thinking actually about do you relate the idea of memory to the notion of haunting? You know, are we haunted, is that are our memories are our ghosts, and also when they say like an older generation walking down a street and in their memories they see a different street but that because they're present that memory is present and the past is now, do you see what I mean?
MA: I think it is a presence that is so powerful that you could touch it even, you know what I mean? It is that powerful on your soul and in your spirit and, unfortunately, a lot of us go through our lives unaware of these ghosts that we've left behind with people that we love or traumas that we went through places that we are attached to, you know?
BG: As a Palestinian director why did you decide to frame the narrative from the perspective of a Jewish settler or the settlers like the father and the daughter?
MA: I chose to narrate the story from the perspective of a child, you know? It just so happens that these houses in West Jerusalem that used to be Palestinian houses are in the particular neighbours that I'm talking about that I my family used to live in and the neighbours that I know so well, most of the immigrants who live in these places are Jewish families who recently moved from the US, the UK ,France or other parts and they like the neighbourhoods, they kind of appreciate the nice architecture of the old Arab house architectures, and the nice greenery around the houses you know? Basically, if you go to any cafe around these neighbourhoods you'll hear all kinds of languages: you know, French, British American and British accents of English, and you know you will hear so many people who come there and who have either recently moved there or their ancestors moved and then they joined them and made Aliyah or whatever. So to me I wanted to make a story about a young girl a child who does this move, who's forced to do this move, and she experiences this place first-hand, she has what she's being told, you know, and there is what she's finding out and what I wanted to do is … I was hoping that the innocence of children both of them, the both lead actors, the both lead characters, the innocence of children gives us the room to raise questions in the face of the adult world that we usually adults don't dare ask, and don't dare confront among ourselves even within the same kind of group, you know what I mean? And I think that the innocence of the children gives them this courage to put a mirror in the face of us the adults with all the corruption of, you know, the politics and all the, you know, ideological baggage that we carry around, children just don't have that, they are not corrupted yet so they can they dare ask the questions, that's what I wanted to do.
BG: Yeah, that was successful in that way. I mean I might be wrong on this but when I was watching the film are there references to the dybbuk from Jewish mythology. You know the doll and the dolls because I was reading up about this and like because the father accused her of like, you know, she like sort of needs therapy, she's not well and that and the dybbuk in Jewish mythology is rumoured to be associated with female hysteria and I'm they going this belief in the doll as a connection to the past …
MA: I have to admit I had no idea. It was purely these dolls were very common in pre-1948 Palestine still. I mean more and more they're vanishing, but these handmade dolls were things that mothers and their daughters used to make, they used to make them for their daughters and then the daughters would learn a little bit of embroidery and that they would do Palestinian embroidery for their dolls …
BG: So it’s a female cultural practice then?
MA: It is. During the research I looked at so many images from an archive; it's also on Facebook: it's called British Mandate Jerusalemites Photo Library. And if you go to that resource you will find so many pictures of families, Palestinian families from West Jerusalem pre-1948 and in the majority of these pictures you will see that the girls made sure that they take their dolls with them to whatever studio or wherever they were taking the family pictures; this depending if it was on Christmas or Easter or whatever it was they made sure they took their dolls with them. So during the research for the film this was where that came from, that's kind of element of the girls from that era.
BG: Right, yeah, well there is this thing obviously about cultural objects that we own and possess. I mean, because I used to be a lecturer and so with stones you find on the beach and you pick up the stone and walk with the stone, but by the end of the walk the stone is warm and it's your stone it's not just a stone it's your stone. And that's the things with the dolls and the fact is it owned by the Palestinian girl and then it's got human qualities have been invested in it and that's what's communicate that's and obviously that's either a positive or a negative dependent on the person in receipt of the thing. Anyway, moving on: I'm going to be a bit geeky now in terms of film references in the film so this is what I noticed and I don't know how conscious you were these creative decisions. So previous horror stories and ghost stories and films such as ‘The Exorcist’ I don't know was that in your mind. Not at all? Like the concept of a young girl sort of transitioning sort of thing and then these … Right, okay, I mean a lot of these 70s films I don't know about it's like ‘The Omen’ I had in there and it's about like child possession these film cycles went around in the 70s but then also ‘Don't Look Now’ the British film it was set in Venice there was I'm sure ‘The Sixth Sense’…
MA: I drop ‘Let The Right One In’ and I can explain why … I we never wanted to make a horror film. it was never a horror film for us but we definitely realised there were horror elements in there that we also wanted to capitalize on and we we're aware that there's this room for this use and this cross over to the genre elements in there you know? What I liked about ‘Let The Right One In’ is that you know you start off with this fear of the unknown you know of the vampires and what they could do and then you end with how evil the average people could be, you know, and the evil that is in the everyday man and child and whatever that for sure was something that I can admit was an inspiration to me, you know? What I mean that concept and ‘Let The Right One In’.
BG: Yeah, right, well I mean it wasn't really a horror film there was I mean the thing is there's some kind of peace in terms of narratives with children and ghosts. For instance, I mean there's a film from 1972 called ‘The Amazing Mr Blunden’ by Lionel Jeffries which is about Victorian children haunting 1970s children and there's a connection and I was watching – you need to watch this film – and then you'll see it and you'll go oh there are similarities but of trying to connect and what they're trying to do is save the ghosts from dying. They die in a fire but they want to go back in time to save these children. It got remade just about 5/10 years ago but the original from the 1970s Lionel Jeffries is the director who was a famous British actor. But like I did get those vibes and I was watching it's that sense of … it's an opportunity for children to be heroes outside of an adult world, and I think that's the same with your film you know to actually have agency and autonomy and make decisions and then we can see and we're encouraged when watching the film to perceive the child's point of view and not the father who's meant to be an authority figure and sensible and you know using medical support. And then we see that this is all disconnected from being human, you know, it's that like she you know that that the people's experiences are just as valid. Anyway related to the father which I'm personally interested in, here in the UK many of us vividly remember Johnny Harris' performance in Paul Andrew Williams’ ‘London to Brighton’ from 2006. So have you seen that film? I mean he's excellent at merging and communicating masculinity with vulnerability. I mean … you can see he's got very good eyes for that very sadness.
MA: He does the broken man, it is very scary. You know it was amazing. I mean the process with Johnny was like I learned a lot from Johnny honestly and I really think that not only in portraying Michael and really bringing this ability to portray the complexity of the loving father, the broken man and the will to move on, you know, this kind of anger and will to move on just like find a shortcut and move on you know that was causing him this frustration, and his belief that this could be the solution for both of us, you know, why don't you just accept. And, you know, this conflict he really brought amazing things to the screen for me and at the same time because of the nature of the story and the sensitivity of the trauma and, you know, the grief working around children is not easy and that was another thing with Johnny because he was so sensitive and so careful as well, no matter how heavy these scenes were you know emotionally for him and for Miley he was really very sensitive and very supportive and that was that was a blessing honestly.
BG: Yeah, I'm a filmmaker I've worked with children as well, and yeah adults can get a bit twitchy like something's gonna go wrong but actually the children are all right. They're all like ‘What are you about? Let's get on with it.’ So ‘A House in Jerusalem’ was shot on location. What was this experience like? I'm thinking of the checkpoint actually and this idea of surveillance, and also the plot point with the police just being allowed to confiscate the phone and just the scan it and stuff, and I'm there going ‘All right this is like a police state’, that you know that's what the feeling, you know, from my British perspective so what was the experience like? I mean obviously you filmed there before …
MA: Yeah, that's so many questions in one but I'll try give it my best. No worries. Filming on location here is always challenging, it's always a nightmare seriously, especially for a Palestinian production or a Palestinian co-production. No matter if you're a UK or a European co-production so usually that really affects how the design of the production, its shape and it affects so many things. I'll give a few example so we shot in Jerusalem east and west and we shot in Bethlehem inside the camp and near the checkpoint, the main checkpoint that leads to Bethlehem right for the Bethlehem part I can tell you the interior is not the real interior of the checkpoint, of course, … there was no chance they would give us permission to film there. We filmed outside and the inside was a garage that was turned into the interior by of a checkpoint by our production design team which you know as a Palestinian production design team checkpoint is something you're forced to unfortunately go through a lot but also build a lot for films so we had to build that on the inside of Aida Camp, was real Aida Camp. We filmed in the camp with the help of so many artists and friends and filmmakers from the camp. It's a condensed camp, it's one of three refugee camps in Bethlehem that is packed with people and it's a ghetto and we were so lucky and we were welcomed by the people there the minute they know it's a Palestinian film, a co-production, it's a story you know they people open in their houses and their hearts. On the Jerusalem side we had to come up with a plan that basically on one hand we struggled to find a house in West Jerusalem that first the Israeli owners would give us to use, you know, given this is a Palestinian film, you know, all right the other thing is most of these houses these old Palestinian houses in West Jerusalem that are now inhabited by Israelis, they no longer have this massive house structure with a garden outside, they all were turned into duplexes and apartments and the gardens were unfortunately butchered by new villas and what have you, so our only choice was to try to locate similar houses from the same era on the eastern side of the city so the Palestinian part of town and we found two houses and we really had to beg the owners of these houses to let us film there and it was COVID so people were extra kind of sensitive and careful around people coming anywhere around them or into their house. But we really had no choice: it was one of these two houses that really resembled the houses from this era and finally we succeeded in getting this house that is 120+ years old and we had to film the house and the garden in the eastern part of the city. The minute we step outside we're in the western part of the city so we filmed in the relocations in West Jerusalem outside and inside the house and the garden we in East Jerusalem. And because of this sensitivity of, you know, how do you film in West Jerusalem, you know, on a Palestinian film set and we had to super-micro, we had to look like a documentary crew almost on the western part of the town, we had to scatter, we could not block streets, we could not block any pavements, we had to scatter our base into, you know, part in a nearby hotel and another part, you know, in a restaurant and some of the group the catering in a park nearby. And you know there was only around eight or ten people at each given time where we were filming in the streets and the neighbourhood in West Jerusalem. Yeah, so that was that and then added to all this mess because of COVID we had to deal with different kinds of, at the time, this feels like ages ago but it was just like a couple years ago where we had to deal with different regulations based on what the UK and the EU had, the Palestinian territories and Israel on their lists, you know, some moment it was amber and other moments it was green, and then we would have to move company because the last 10 days of your production you need to be in a green country otherwise you will have to quarantine the way back up. So that COVID bit was a nightmare that usually when you talk about producing a Palestinian film, you know, we talk about the roadblocks, the checkpoints, the harassment, the occupation but with COVID that was an added layer of kind of complexity.
BG: We were shooting my sort of debut feature in Manchester in northern England during COVID and the whole city was shut down, and then so – I mean have you seen like ‘28 Days Later’? You know, the zombie Danny Boyle film and they shot at London, you know, desolate sort like 5a.m. or something so when no everyone was in bed. But when we were shooting to obviously say about the end of the century or beginning of this century it's all dark, the city was completely empty and all the lights were off in terms of all the office blocks yeah … and there was no police, there was no there was there was some homeless people but we got we actually had the whole city as a set and we just wandered around and filmed what we wanted and there's no one there ruining the shots. I know it’s never going to happen again, we got a lot of yeah I know we got lots of actors because they were just sitting at … for free because they were just sitting at home doing nothing. A weird period when like contacted these actors again to about doing another projects and go ‘No, no, no. We're busy now. Anyway, moving on so how is the current context of war in Gaza affected ‘A House in Jerusalem’ and its ongoing promotion?
MA: I never imagined that this film will be made or released during any kind of time where the story of displacement of Palestinians is this relevant, you know? In our worst nightmares did we ever think that, but I think it's sadly more relevant than ever, you know? I mean, yeah, what's happening in Gaza makes what's what happened in 1948 sound like in terms of numbers at least, you know, it's unbelievable. And I think like you said I can say that we definitely being a Palestinian co-production being a Palestinian film during such times you immediately get some sensitivities of you know is this another Palestinian film you know is this another propaganda film or whatever, and then you at the same time you gain a lot of interest from a lot of people who are really curious and want to know what's going on there, and what's the history of this whole thing. I mean technically this is a fact: 70% of the population of Gaza are refugees, I don't know if you knew that? Yeah, so 70% of the people in Gaza are registered refugees recognized by the United Nations as refugees who were expelled from their homes and their houses and their territories and their lands just like the house in Jerusalem, and they were pushed away into refugee camps in Gaza and basically Gaza which was at the time in 1948 I think not official numbers … I think Gaza had 200,000 population and then 300,000 refugees went to Gaza and this half million population grew into this 2.2 million population so Gaza is dominantly refugees. So it is the story of a house in Jerusalem is very relevant but sadly these refugees are now being made refugees for the second and third and they're being tossed around and moved around you know. It's like they're being asked to go to the sea or to the beach and then they start new tents near the border and then they bump them and they ask them to go back to the centre and this collective trauma of us, the Palestinians, does not seem to ever be ending. And I think it like yeah to me I'm just so happy that the film is being released. I'm so happy that the film is being shown because I really hope that people would walk out from the screenings with, you know, feeling and a couple of questions about this whole thing, you know, and to take things beyond, you know, even for those who were tracking the news in the last seven months you know people need to see the bigger picture. I think people need to see.
BG: Yeah, yeah, I think it's good with in terms of to me like young adults which I used to teach you know like in their late teens/early 20s and it's sort of a good counterpoint because on the mainstream news, and particularly on social media, it's just layers of horror and horror and, you know, its runs a risk of you know sort of making them inured, sort of dampening their emotions because they just overwhelmed and say this is something that's impossible to tackle but that said this generation of young adults, particularly the universities, there's a lot of protests, you know, in the UK universities and obviously in the US and obviously in different states where some of them are bringing in riot police and then others are having negotiations. So the thing is there is some sort of I believe which is completely different to say to the conflict in between Russia and Ukraine where there seems to be a passion and a connection with the Palestinian situation and history and the thing is like and obviously because of my age in the 90s when I was at university the concept of Zionism was pretty simple. I'm saying ‘Oh well, this is this is sort of like, you know, this compressed sort of Israeli ideology, you know, this aggressive and also they've got access to nuclear weapons and military stuff and obviously they're bullying the Palestinian people. This is when we were like, you know, I was a teenager, you know what I mean, and this was normal but then some propaganda machine has kicked in during the expansion of the internet around 2000 of this equating Zionism with anti-Semitism. Where did that come from?
MA: That was strategic … it was in the open. Like there was I remember reading about it in Israeli media and it was a plan to do that, to counter what was going on with the younger generation that is being becoming more and more aware about the occupation and what's going on in Palestine and they tried, and they are still trying to play this card to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and this is complete nonsense, you know, it's complete nonsense.
BG: Orwellian. It's an Orwellian sort of collapse of language to create thought, but what the worrying thing is there's obviously because I was born in the 70s so I've got a different historical perspective than those say born at the end of the 90s or the beginning of 2000s. That have not experienced anything different and they go, ‘Oh well is this the cultural reality and you go ‘no’.’ Anyway, so ‘A House in Jerusalem’ is on release in the UK from Friday 31st of May. Now if you were to write and shoot this film now in 2024, in what ways would it be different? For example, would there be more anger, accusation, demand for justice in the film? Would it be more obviously with what's happened, you know, like how would you have approached this film with what you know now and what the world knows?
MA: Now, honestly I see your question, I see your point, I see where I see the idea behind the question, but honestly to me this film and this story is very personal. I am the son of a mother and a father who are both refugees who were expelled from their homes and they lived their lives longing for that place and that time and in both of my family from both sides they've lost family members in 1948 and in 1967, and they've lost family members and right now when I'm talking to you if I point one kilometre that way out of the window is my family house. I have no right to ask for it under any part of this, it's there I cannot demand it, I cannot claim, it even if I have the legal in Israel it that I don't exist, you know. So I for this film I wouldn't do anything differently. I would still tell the story of these two girls who are hurt, broken and they found a way to heal together and who raise big questions about personal trauma and collective trauma as well. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians now are facing the same kind of reality from back in 1948 again now in Gaza, so there is a connection for sure but I wouldn't have done this film differently I would have just narrated my story because I'm pretty sure there will be so many Palestinian filmmakers from Gaza who will tell their stories of trauma and of grief as well. I mean, if I go into the details of certain things in the film there are so many things like that, for example, I'll give you a very quick example so that boy with the bicycle when Rebecca is walking in that street that's called ‘The Valley of the Ghosts’ right now in Hebrew, it's called ‘Valley of the Ghosts’ I read that, yeah, so that that store was my grandfather's store right, and that lady with the hat that she sees coming out – that mysterious lady, ambiguous lady that comes out of those two villas – this lady this actress, these are actually her uncle's houses that she cannot go back to, you know. The place where Rebecca has her nightmare and she chases her mother that's the destroyed village of Lifta who hundreds of people were expelled from and became refugees, you know, where you see the cactus trees and where she runs between these ruins, yeah, and where she encounters the wells in this country and this part of the world, these wells where she goes on the tour with the kids in the summer camp. That's the village of Imwas. Imwas is a village that was destroyed in 1967 not even in 48 in 1967; they destroyed this village and expelled all the population to Ramallah because they wanted a clean highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; they didn't want Arab towns on the way, right, so there's that village so Simon the dog that Rasha is talking about in that scene, my grandmother's dog was Simon, and when she came from her house to the family house she ran away during the war during the war she went back to check on her house and she found her house was bombed and Simon was shot. It is a very personal film to me, it's extremely personal everything in the film, in the mosaic of the film is so personal and I wouldn't have done anything differently. But I can tell you that there will be many other stories maybe from other filmmakers from Gaza that unfortunately talk about displacement and grief and trauma and our ghosts that, you know?
BG: So as a Palestinian filmmaker/artist, let's say, are you compelled to create stories about the region, the people, its history and its future? Is this your duty as an artist? Do you feel this is this your destiny do you feel?
MA: I decided to be a filmmaker because I wanted to tell stories and because I wanted to touch people's hearts and challenge people's minds, and part of that goal is coming from the fact that I'm Palestinian and I come from this heritage particularly with the fact that historically we have been crushed in mainstream media and our narrative has been, you know, censored, blocked, you name it. We grew up with this feeling that we know we're aware that the powerful media in the world is against us and the media in the world does not allow us to, you know, narrate. So becoming a filmmaker partly was due to that the like very early days and, yeah, I mean, I think we have something to say, I mean, in the beginnings, you know, we all go through this naive period where you think if I narrate what's going on, if I tell our perspective to the world, the world is going to change, and this suffering is going to end, then you realise that the world doesn't work this way, you know. You sometimes think that you just need people to know, you know, and then some but actually the problem is not just knowing, you know, there are powers there, there are so many things that are capitalized in this world to keep us in this situation.
BG: Yeah, exactly. I mean the thing is what changes – I mean this is me being hopeful – is you don't change the world, you change your perception of the world so your process of making this film has changed the world as you see it, you're a different man.
MA: Absolutely. And I know as well that in every screening, in every Q&A, I can see, of course, I see people who walked in, you know, who are fans and followers of art house cinema, and because of that they have watched so many Palestinian films and they have been exposed to Palestinian cinema but I also see people who have never seen a Palestinian film before and they are, you know, encountering this narrative for the first time and I feel blessed and I feel that it means something, you know? What I mean, yeah, and I see people who walk out you know in tears out of the screenings and I'm sad sorry but I feel happy that it works and you know they're going back home with this kind of fireworks of emotions that I'm sure they will tell their friends, their grandkids, so that's what kind of drives me right now, you know?
BG: Do you see yourself then as a film director or a Palestinian film director? Because I, for example, I'm from a working-class background, poor background and I pursued academia and that is how I ended up making films, you know? It's just through education not money, no connections but because of that then I'm associated with the social realism genre and like working-class, everyday people and saying, ‘Oh well, because that's your background that's the films you're meant to make,’ and I'm there going ‘No’. So now I'm in production on a short adaptation of a Franz Kafka short film, as far away from working classness as possible to prove that I can work in different genres and I'm not imprisoned by my background my, you know, and that's the same question I'm asking you: do you feel that you're tied? I mean, it might be a good thing that you're tied I mean like Scorsese says he's very happy about his Italian-American heritage and doing the films over and over again about that, but there's others that go, ‘Well, I don't want to be doomed by my or trapped by my ethnicity or my economic social status. I want to be creative and expressive so there you go.
MA: It's a very good question. I'm often asked this question in variations of, you know, approaches but I like how you, I mean, I'll try to make it short. But so on one hand in the recent years apart from ‘A House in Jerusalem’ most of my films have focused on Palestinian anti-heroes particularly in Jerusalem who are confronted with situations that are bigger than themselves and that they are not heroes or they were not built to handle, yet they have to figure out a way how to handle them. I in … like the stories that attract me and that get me writing notes on the side for the day when I'm going to write a treatment and a script about, it's the average anti-hero, who's a hero to me in other ways than the expected on the average, you know, the heroes of just simply being able to survive or provide for your family. I'm biased towards these people who do not make it of to the news, you know?
BG: Underdogs. The underdogs.
MA: Yeah, so a house in Jerusalem is an exception in that fact because it was a personal film, it's a personal project and it's something I wanted to make and, yeah. So do I see myself as only making … There was a saying I can't remember who said it but it's basically ‘if you want me to write poetry about the birds you need to turn off the fighter jets and the tanks so I can hear them’, you know what I mean? And this is my answer also about cinema. I cannot remember, I think it was a Palestinian poet who said that now – I've had fever for three days so yeah I'll dig the name if you want – but I think I always like that quote because it was so true. In our case even if we make like a two character story locked in a house, you know, like a one location story. The occupation will be right there out of the window, you know, there's no way you can it is the thing that has left the biggest mark on our lives and we would be, you know …
BG: Blind to ignore.
MA: You know, yeah so it's it does not make … I wish we can make cinema without having to deal with this but if we try to do that right now it's … I don't know what kind of mutant.
BG: I know it reminds me of, you know, Jan Švankmajer, the Czech animator, like clay, and he was working under, you know, communism in the 70s and all his films were interpreted as anti-communist even when it wasn't. Oh, this is obviously about being the claustrophobia, you know, and then I the world events in that context end up defining your individual creativity even if you're not engaged directly with it and then I'm just interested about that because then the idea of creativity that is associated with freedom but then is there any freedom because then you say, ‘Well, I'm going to be because … I'm Palestinian I'm going to be interpreted in this way at this time in history’, and then, you know, so if you went and did a like a rom-com musical in Chicago and then people will go, ‘Yeah, but what's the Palestinian angle?’
MA: Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, it get to some point where sometimes I mean … Even in some of my previous films, you know, certain audiences around the world, unfortunately, they are okay let me be careful with this answer … I think there has been a lot of films that have been made with that are good films important films but the main aim was to counter the Israeli propaganda in Western media … and I think that's important, I think that's crucial, I think we need to do that because Western media is biased period. So we need to counter that with art, with documentaries, with social media, with every tool we have. But not every film, I think, has to have that kind of one kind of solid goal. I think we should have Palestinian love stories, horror stories, detective stories, Westerns, I don't know, we need to have Palestinian culture and literature on all platforms possible around the world because as much as it is important to counter the propaganda narrative of the Israeli occupation, I think it's more important to prove, I mean, we don't need to prove to the world but we need to show it, we need to make sure it's there that we are much more than a nation under occupation. Not simply, you know? So that's why sometimes there are certain expectations of a Palestinian film – ‘Oh, where are the checkpoints?’ – you know it doesn't fall into that kind of activist category, you know what I mean?
BG: Well, yeah, but also it's the sort of dominant narratives that then will … the dominant forces are setting the narrative and then you've got a Palestinian narrative that's a reactionary narrative so that means the dominant force is already then controlling the cultural dialogue so then the Palestinian filmmakers in this case are then drawn into an argument and making films to say, well, I want … I wanted to do a science fiction film but I can't. Now I've got to do, you know, a sort of political film, do you know again sort of thing? So, yeah, I know, I understand, I mean it's just the demands of the wider world or demands of the audience or those in in the industry and it's just fascinating about how things are sort of, yeah, interpreted. It's like that's what I'm saying about with you say like that's the question about the semi-autobiographical angle where people won't see that because it's a female girl who's the lead and it's the ghost girl, and where do you come in who's playing your role, do you know what I mean? As a witness I think it's a witness to the … I see your character in the old lady, I think.
MA: You know I think the old lady is my grandma, but I'll tell you a story, it also goes back to your previous question of Palestinian filmmaker or filmmaker that's Palestinian, and I think being Palestinian is what led me to this path because I have two memories of how I became a filmmaker. There is one when I was a teenager and digital technology was on the rise and we got our hands onto digital cameras and editing software and we thought okay this is our time to tell our stories to the world and, you know, film documentaries about the occupation and what they're doing to us, and you would walk down the old city in Jerusalem and the minute they see you with a camera the first thing people would tell you. ‘Show them. Show them film. Show them.’ This is the first word you will hear around from everybody in the streets, the sellers, the passers-by, show them the world, you know? So this is one experience as a teenager, the other experience as a child was when we bought the very first video camera in, you know, the early 90s and the first thing that came to mind for the family was to go and visit my grandmother’s destroyed house which is now part of an Israeli kibbutz and we're not allowed to go there, redeem it or ask for it or whatever, and my grandma refused to go, it has been ages she didn't go at the time, you know, she hasn't been there since the 40s, you know? She just lives a couple of kilometres away but it was so heavy for her she could not do it. In the end they convinced her, let's do it, my uncle who was a wedding videographer operated the camera, my older sister was dragging me and my brother Rami, the kids around, you know, and my grandma just was giving us this tour of this place, you know, the destroyed house, the leftover of a part it looks like a window and she was pointing out this was the bedroom your mom was born here, that brick is my brick oven I used to you know prepare the bread and whatever, and I used to keep the chicken and the cow in this … you know, and you see me going around and throwing rocks into the well, you know, in the video and then we came back home and this video tape, this VHS tape was the thing the family was talking about for months. Everybody who would visit us they would show them the video, they were so proud of this video and for me as a four or five year old kid I was like. ‘Wow, this video thing, this moving image thing, is so powerful’. Like you look at the faces of … the silence in our living room when they were watching the TV, you know, and it was so impressive to me, you know, because as kids we always want attention and this was taking all the attention in the world, you know, and I realised that for them later on, of course, I realised that for them that videotape was getting their life back, it was getting a part of the house back and they cherished that videotape so much that it was so powerful, it was so important to everybody in the family. So for me, yes, this is what brought me to filmmaking; I think this power of image, like they really believe that this VHS tape got them back some of their spirit of this life that they've lost, and it was there saved on this little, you know, video tape.
BG: Right then, okay, I'll let you go. So thanks for your time.
MA: Thank you so much, thank you, appreciate it.
BG: Take care, man.
BG: So where are you right now?
MA: I'm in Jerusalem.
BG: So obviously people in the UK would like to know what's civilian life like in Jerusalem at the moment? What's the atmosphere like? Because we're just getting mainstream news here a lot of the time.
MA: Of course. Jerusalem has always been tense, Jerusalem has always been a place where you're always on edge, you're always … like something could go wrong any minute any second anywhere. You know I think we have been living in the last few months some of the most tense and stressful, you know, circumstances that I've ever experienced myself as a Jerusalemite and as somebody who grew up here. I think it has been, yeah, some of the most tense. The divide in the city across the eastern side which is dominantly Palestinian and the western side which is dominantly Israeli has never been as, you know, as segregated let's say.
BG: Right, and so what's your view of the future or the near future or the far future?
MA: I mean honestly the situation in Jerusalem and the West Bank for us Palestinians is horrible but we don't dare even complain or even you know talk about it, even though there's hundreds of people who have been killed in the last eight months. Thousands of people have been arrested because of what we're seeing in Gaza and what we witnessing in Gaza. So we cannot we're like … we don't dare complain, you know, because of the massacres we’re witnessing, so we are kind of just praying for an end to all of this.
BG: So I mean it's off topic … are you personally at risk as a filmmaker in terms of … because obviously you communicate to the wider world outside of the region, and obviously from different … forces that would consider to be I don't know whatever … So I don't know are you or are you just considered as another civilian?
MA: I mean since the beginning of the war there has been a lot of arrests among artists, intellectuals, creatives … Even not only for Palestinians who live inside Israel, also for Israelis who are on the kind of left-wing, progressive side you know? There has been a lot of arrests for people who have just denounced the killings that are happening in Gaza or just expressed their opinions or social media or something. There has been house arrests and physical arrests and several other things, so it's yeah it's … Everybody's careful, let's say. It's becoming like a Big Brother kind of police rule you know?
BG: Well, that's never reported on in terms of Israeli resistance to Israeli aggression I suppose …
MA: Yeah, there was a demonstration yesterday in Jerusalem a small one, of course, because the left in Israel shrank significantly over the last 20 years, right, but they were crushed, they were arrested and they were dragged and, you know … Yeah, there was a demonstration by Israeli leftists in Jerusalem demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza, and they were crushed and dragged into police cars.
BG: Right, okay, well that's set the scene. So moving on to the film: in what ways does your latest film ‘A House in Jerusalem’ have semi-autobiographical origins?
MA: I mean it is the most personal story of … The most personal film I've made so far. It's not a one-to-one true events kind of, you know, inspired by our house but it is definitely a story that is inspired by the trauma and the survival of my parents and my grandmother who all became refugees and were forced out of their homes and their territory and their land in 1948 during the Nakba when Israel was established, and they were never allowed to go back to their homes: the Israeli law just simply did not allow it, although they were among the very few lucky Palestinians who became refugees within historic Palestine and did not become refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or what have you … So it is inspired by their stories, it is inspired by their survival and how they coped with this trauma you know? The seeds go back to our childhood and the oral history and all the stories that they used to narrate. My father used to deliver meat on his bike from my grandfather's butcher store which was in West Jerusalem before 1948, and he basically knew all these neighbourhoods so well, and when we were growing up he used to drive us through these neighbourhoods on our way to school, and he would narrate stories about these neighbourhoods that look completely different today, you know? To him he used to see these ancient Palestinians houses, institutions, football clubs, and to us what we saw as the young generation it was the new McDonalds and Starbucks like cafes and this other kind westernised reality that Israel has established in these neighbourhoods, you know? So to me and to my brother Rami, who co-wrote this with me, we with my father's story, my grandmother's story and my mother's stories, you know, we felt that they were living with a part of them stuck in the past, stuck in these times and in these places, and this is what drove us to kind of come up with the concept of the ghost of the living as opposed to the ghost of the dead, you know? Because we believe that they were living with these ghosts of themselves, stuck in time, in these traumas that they went through.
BG: Yeah, I was thinking actually about do you relate the idea of memory to the notion of haunting? You know, are we haunted, is that are our memories are our ghosts, and also when they say like an older generation walking down a street and in their memories they see a different street but that because they're present that memory is present and the past is now, do you see what I mean?
MA: I think it is a presence that is so powerful that you could touch it even, you know what I mean? It is that powerful on your soul and in your spirit and, unfortunately, a lot of us go through our lives unaware of these ghosts that we've left behind with people that we love or traumas that we went through places that we are attached to, you know?
BG: As a Palestinian director why did you decide to frame the narrative from the perspective of a Jewish settler or the settlers like the father and the daughter?
MA: I chose to narrate the story from the perspective of a child, you know? It just so happens that these houses in West Jerusalem that used to be Palestinian houses are in the particular neighbours that I'm talking about that I my family used to live in and the neighbours that I know so well, most of the immigrants who live in these places are Jewish families who recently moved from the US, the UK ,France or other parts and they like the neighbourhoods, they kind of appreciate the nice architecture of the old Arab house architectures, and the nice greenery around the houses you know? Basically, if you go to any cafe around these neighbourhoods you'll hear all kinds of languages: you know, French, British American and British accents of English, and you know you will hear so many people who come there and who have either recently moved there or their ancestors moved and then they joined them and made Aliyah or whatever. So to me I wanted to make a story about a young girl a child who does this move, who's forced to do this move, and she experiences this place first-hand, she has what she's being told, you know, and there is what she's finding out and what I wanted to do is … I was hoping that the innocence of children both of them, the both lead actors, the both lead characters, the innocence of children gives us the room to raise questions in the face of the adult world that we usually adults don't dare ask, and don't dare confront among ourselves even within the same kind of group, you know what I mean? And I think that the innocence of the children gives them this courage to put a mirror in the face of us the adults with all the corruption of, you know, the politics and all the, you know, ideological baggage that we carry around, children just don't have that, they are not corrupted yet so they can they dare ask the questions, that's what I wanted to do.
BG: Yeah, that was successful in that way. I mean I might be wrong on this but when I was watching the film are there references to the dybbuk from Jewish mythology. You know the doll and the dolls because I was reading up about this and like because the father accused her of like, you know, she like sort of needs therapy, she's not well and that and the dybbuk in Jewish mythology is rumoured to be associated with female hysteria and I'm they going this belief in the doll as a connection to the past …
MA: I have to admit I had no idea. It was purely these dolls were very common in pre-1948 Palestine still. I mean more and more they're vanishing, but these handmade dolls were things that mothers and their daughters used to make, they used to make them for their daughters and then the daughters would learn a little bit of embroidery and that they would do Palestinian embroidery for their dolls …
BG: So it’s a female cultural practice then?
MA: It is. During the research I looked at so many images from an archive; it's also on Facebook: it's called British Mandate Jerusalemites Photo Library. And if you go to that resource you will find so many pictures of families, Palestinian families from West Jerusalem pre-1948 and in the majority of these pictures you will see that the girls made sure that they take their dolls with them to whatever studio or wherever they were taking the family pictures; this depending if it was on Christmas or Easter or whatever it was they made sure they took their dolls with them. So during the research for the film this was where that came from, that's kind of element of the girls from that era.
BG: Right, yeah, well there is this thing obviously about cultural objects that we own and possess. I mean, because I used to be a lecturer and so with stones you find on the beach and you pick up the stone and walk with the stone, but by the end of the walk the stone is warm and it's your stone it's not just a stone it's your stone. And that's the things with the dolls and the fact is it owned by the Palestinian girl and then it's got human qualities have been invested in it and that's what's communicate that's and obviously that's either a positive or a negative dependent on the person in receipt of the thing. Anyway, moving on: I'm going to be a bit geeky now in terms of film references in the film so this is what I noticed and I don't know how conscious you were these creative decisions. So previous horror stories and ghost stories and films such as ‘The Exorcist’ I don't know was that in your mind. Not at all? Like the concept of a young girl sort of transitioning sort of thing and then these … Right, okay, I mean a lot of these 70s films I don't know about it's like ‘The Omen’ I had in there and it's about like child possession these film cycles went around in the 70s but then also ‘Don't Look Now’ the British film it was set in Venice there was I'm sure ‘The Sixth Sense’…
MA: I drop ‘Let The Right One In’ and I can explain why … I we never wanted to make a horror film. it was never a horror film for us but we definitely realised there were horror elements in there that we also wanted to capitalize on and we we're aware that there's this room for this use and this cross over to the genre elements in there you know? What I liked about ‘Let The Right One In’ is that you know you start off with this fear of the unknown you know of the vampires and what they could do and then you end with how evil the average people could be, you know, and the evil that is in the everyday man and child and whatever that for sure was something that I can admit was an inspiration to me, you know? What I mean that concept and ‘Let The Right One In’.
BG: Yeah, right, well I mean it wasn't really a horror film there was I mean the thing is there's some kind of peace in terms of narratives with children and ghosts. For instance, I mean there's a film from 1972 called ‘The Amazing Mr Blunden’ by Lionel Jeffries which is about Victorian children haunting 1970s children and there's a connection and I was watching – you need to watch this film – and then you'll see it and you'll go oh there are similarities but of trying to connect and what they're trying to do is save the ghosts from dying. They die in a fire but they want to go back in time to save these children. It got remade just about 5/10 years ago but the original from the 1970s Lionel Jeffries is the director who was a famous British actor. But like I did get those vibes and I was watching it's that sense of … it's an opportunity for children to be heroes outside of an adult world, and I think that's the same with your film you know to actually have agency and autonomy and make decisions and then we can see and we're encouraged when watching the film to perceive the child's point of view and not the father who's meant to be an authority figure and sensible and you know using medical support. And then we see that this is all disconnected from being human, you know, it's that like she you know that that the people's experiences are just as valid. Anyway related to the father which I'm personally interested in, here in the UK many of us vividly remember Johnny Harris' performance in Paul Andrew Williams’ ‘London to Brighton’ from 2006. So have you seen that film? I mean he's excellent at merging and communicating masculinity with vulnerability. I mean … you can see he's got very good eyes for that very sadness.
MA: He does the broken man, it is very scary. You know it was amazing. I mean the process with Johnny was like I learned a lot from Johnny honestly and I really think that not only in portraying Michael and really bringing this ability to portray the complexity of the loving father, the broken man and the will to move on, you know, this kind of anger and will to move on just like find a shortcut and move on you know that was causing him this frustration, and his belief that this could be the solution for both of us, you know, why don't you just accept. And, you know, this conflict he really brought amazing things to the screen for me and at the same time because of the nature of the story and the sensitivity of the trauma and, you know, the grief working around children is not easy and that was another thing with Johnny because he was so sensitive and so careful as well, no matter how heavy these scenes were you know emotionally for him and for Miley he was really very sensitive and very supportive and that was that was a blessing honestly.
BG: Yeah, I'm a filmmaker I've worked with children as well, and yeah adults can get a bit twitchy like something's gonna go wrong but actually the children are all right. They're all like ‘What are you about? Let's get on with it.’ So ‘A House in Jerusalem’ was shot on location. What was this experience like? I'm thinking of the checkpoint actually and this idea of surveillance, and also the plot point with the police just being allowed to confiscate the phone and just the scan it and stuff, and I'm there going ‘All right this is like a police state’, that you know that's what the feeling, you know, from my British perspective so what was the experience like? I mean obviously you filmed there before …
MA: Yeah, that's so many questions in one but I'll try give it my best. No worries. Filming on location here is always challenging, it's always a nightmare seriously, especially for a Palestinian production or a Palestinian co-production. No matter if you're a UK or a European co-production so usually that really affects how the design of the production, its shape and it affects so many things. I'll give a few example so we shot in Jerusalem east and west and we shot in Bethlehem inside the camp and near the checkpoint, the main checkpoint that leads to Bethlehem right for the Bethlehem part I can tell you the interior is not the real interior of the checkpoint, of course, … there was no chance they would give us permission to film there. We filmed outside and the inside was a garage that was turned into the interior by of a checkpoint by our production design team which you know as a Palestinian production design team checkpoint is something you're forced to unfortunately go through a lot but also build a lot for films so we had to build that on the inside of Aida Camp, was real Aida Camp. We filmed in the camp with the help of so many artists and friends and filmmakers from the camp. It's a condensed camp, it's one of three refugee camps in Bethlehem that is packed with people and it's a ghetto and we were so lucky and we were welcomed by the people there the minute they know it's a Palestinian film, a co-production, it's a story you know they people open in their houses and their hearts. On the Jerusalem side we had to come up with a plan that basically on one hand we struggled to find a house in West Jerusalem that first the Israeli owners would give us to use, you know, given this is a Palestinian film, you know, all right the other thing is most of these houses these old Palestinian houses in West Jerusalem that are now inhabited by Israelis, they no longer have this massive house structure with a garden outside, they all were turned into duplexes and apartments and the gardens were unfortunately butchered by new villas and what have you, so our only choice was to try to locate similar houses from the same era on the eastern side of the city so the Palestinian part of town and we found two houses and we really had to beg the owners of these houses to let us film there and it was COVID so people were extra kind of sensitive and careful around people coming anywhere around them or into their house. But we really had no choice: it was one of these two houses that really resembled the houses from this era and finally we succeeded in getting this house that is 120+ years old and we had to film the house and the garden in the eastern part of the city. The minute we step outside we're in the western part of the city so we filmed in the relocations in West Jerusalem outside and inside the house and the garden we in East Jerusalem. And because of this sensitivity of, you know, how do you film in West Jerusalem, you know, on a Palestinian film set and we had to super-micro, we had to look like a documentary crew almost on the western part of the town, we had to scatter, we could not block streets, we could not block any pavements, we had to scatter our base into, you know, part in a nearby hotel and another part, you know, in a restaurant and some of the group the catering in a park nearby. And you know there was only around eight or ten people at each given time where we were filming in the streets and the neighbourhood in West Jerusalem. Yeah, so that was that and then added to all this mess because of COVID we had to deal with different kinds of, at the time, this feels like ages ago but it was just like a couple years ago where we had to deal with different regulations based on what the UK and the EU had, the Palestinian territories and Israel on their lists, you know, some moment it was amber and other moments it was green, and then we would have to move company because the last 10 days of your production you need to be in a green country otherwise you will have to quarantine the way back up. So that COVID bit was a nightmare that usually when you talk about producing a Palestinian film, you know, we talk about the roadblocks, the checkpoints, the harassment, the occupation but with COVID that was an added layer of kind of complexity.
BG: We were shooting my sort of debut feature in Manchester in northern England during COVID and the whole city was shut down, and then so – I mean have you seen like ‘28 Days Later’? You know, the zombie Danny Boyle film and they shot at London, you know, desolate sort like 5a.m. or something so when no everyone was in bed. But when we were shooting to obviously say about the end of the century or beginning of this century it's all dark, the city was completely empty and all the lights were off in terms of all the office blocks yeah … and there was no police, there was no there was there was some homeless people but we got we actually had the whole city as a set and we just wandered around and filmed what we wanted and there's no one there ruining the shots. I know it’s never going to happen again, we got a lot of yeah I know we got lots of actors because they were just sitting at … for free because they were just sitting at home doing nothing. A weird period when like contacted these actors again to about doing another projects and go ‘No, no, no. We're busy now. Anyway, moving on so how is the current context of war in Gaza affected ‘A House in Jerusalem’ and its ongoing promotion?
MA: I never imagined that this film will be made or released during any kind of time where the story of displacement of Palestinians is this relevant, you know? In our worst nightmares did we ever think that, but I think it's sadly more relevant than ever, you know? I mean, yeah, what's happening in Gaza makes what's what happened in 1948 sound like in terms of numbers at least, you know, it's unbelievable. And I think like you said I can say that we definitely being a Palestinian co-production being a Palestinian film during such times you immediately get some sensitivities of you know is this another Palestinian film you know is this another propaganda film or whatever, and then you at the same time you gain a lot of interest from a lot of people who are really curious and want to know what's going on there, and what's the history of this whole thing. I mean technically this is a fact: 70% of the population of Gaza are refugees, I don't know if you knew that? Yeah, so 70% of the people in Gaza are registered refugees recognized by the United Nations as refugees who were expelled from their homes and their houses and their territories and their lands just like the house in Jerusalem, and they were pushed away into refugee camps in Gaza and basically Gaza which was at the time in 1948 I think not official numbers … I think Gaza had 200,000 population and then 300,000 refugees went to Gaza and this half million population grew into this 2.2 million population so Gaza is dominantly refugees. So it is the story of a house in Jerusalem is very relevant but sadly these refugees are now being made refugees for the second and third and they're being tossed around and moved around you know. It's like they're being asked to go to the sea or to the beach and then they start new tents near the border and then they bump them and they ask them to go back to the centre and this collective trauma of us, the Palestinians, does not seem to ever be ending. And I think it like yeah to me I'm just so happy that the film is being released. I'm so happy that the film is being shown because I really hope that people would walk out from the screenings with, you know, feeling and a couple of questions about this whole thing, you know, and to take things beyond, you know, even for those who were tracking the news in the last seven months you know people need to see the bigger picture. I think people need to see.
BG: Yeah, yeah, I think it's good with in terms of to me like young adults which I used to teach you know like in their late teens/early 20s and it's sort of a good counterpoint because on the mainstream news, and particularly on social media, it's just layers of horror and horror and, you know, its runs a risk of you know sort of making them inured, sort of dampening their emotions because they just overwhelmed and say this is something that's impossible to tackle but that said this generation of young adults, particularly the universities, there's a lot of protests, you know, in the UK universities and obviously in the US and obviously in different states where some of them are bringing in riot police and then others are having negotiations. So the thing is there is some sort of I believe which is completely different to say to the conflict in between Russia and Ukraine where there seems to be a passion and a connection with the Palestinian situation and history and the thing is like and obviously because of my age in the 90s when I was at university the concept of Zionism was pretty simple. I'm saying ‘Oh well, this is this is sort of like, you know, this compressed sort of Israeli ideology, you know, this aggressive and also they've got access to nuclear weapons and military stuff and obviously they're bullying the Palestinian people. This is when we were like, you know, I was a teenager, you know what I mean, and this was normal but then some propaganda machine has kicked in during the expansion of the internet around 2000 of this equating Zionism with anti-Semitism. Where did that come from?
MA: That was strategic … it was in the open. Like there was I remember reading about it in Israeli media and it was a plan to do that, to counter what was going on with the younger generation that is being becoming more and more aware about the occupation and what's going on in Palestine and they tried, and they are still trying to play this card to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and this is complete nonsense, you know, it's complete nonsense.
BG: Orwellian. It's an Orwellian sort of collapse of language to create thought, but what the worrying thing is there's obviously because I was born in the 70s so I've got a different historical perspective than those say born at the end of the 90s or the beginning of 2000s. That have not experienced anything different and they go, ‘Oh well is this the cultural reality and you go ‘no’.’ Anyway, so ‘A House in Jerusalem’ is on release in the UK from Friday 31st of May. Now if you were to write and shoot this film now in 2024, in what ways would it be different? For example, would there be more anger, accusation, demand for justice in the film? Would it be more obviously with what's happened, you know, like how would you have approached this film with what you know now and what the world knows?
MA: Now, honestly I see your question, I see your point, I see where I see the idea behind the question, but honestly to me this film and this story is very personal. I am the son of a mother and a father who are both refugees who were expelled from their homes and they lived their lives longing for that place and that time and in both of my family from both sides they've lost family members in 1948 and in 1967, and they've lost family members and right now when I'm talking to you if I point one kilometre that way out of the window is my family house. I have no right to ask for it under any part of this, it's there I cannot demand it, I cannot claim, it even if I have the legal in Israel it that I don't exist, you know. So I for this film I wouldn't do anything differently. I would still tell the story of these two girls who are hurt, broken and they found a way to heal together and who raise big questions about personal trauma and collective trauma as well. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians now are facing the same kind of reality from back in 1948 again now in Gaza, so there is a connection for sure but I wouldn't have done this film differently I would have just narrated my story because I'm pretty sure there will be so many Palestinian filmmakers from Gaza who will tell their stories of trauma and of grief as well. I mean, if I go into the details of certain things in the film there are so many things like that, for example, I'll give you a very quick example so that boy with the bicycle when Rebecca is walking in that street that's called ‘The Valley of the Ghosts’ right now in Hebrew, it's called ‘Valley of the Ghosts’ I read that, yeah, so that that store was my grandfather's store right, and that lady with the hat that she sees coming out – that mysterious lady, ambiguous lady that comes out of those two villas – this lady this actress, these are actually her uncle's houses that she cannot go back to, you know. The place where Rebecca has her nightmare and she chases her mother that's the destroyed village of Lifta who hundreds of people were expelled from and became refugees, you know, where you see the cactus trees and where she runs between these ruins, yeah, and where she encounters the wells in this country and this part of the world, these wells where she goes on the tour with the kids in the summer camp. That's the village of Imwas. Imwas is a village that was destroyed in 1967 not even in 48 in 1967; they destroyed this village and expelled all the population to Ramallah because they wanted a clean highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; they didn't want Arab towns on the way, right, so there's that village so Simon the dog that Rasha is talking about in that scene, my grandmother's dog was Simon, and when she came from her house to the family house she ran away during the war during the war she went back to check on her house and she found her house was bombed and Simon was shot. It is a very personal film to me, it's extremely personal everything in the film, in the mosaic of the film is so personal and I wouldn't have done anything differently. But I can tell you that there will be many other stories maybe from other filmmakers from Gaza that unfortunately talk about displacement and grief and trauma and our ghosts that, you know?
BG: So as a Palestinian filmmaker/artist, let's say, are you compelled to create stories about the region, the people, its history and its future? Is this your duty as an artist? Do you feel this is this your destiny do you feel?
MA: I decided to be a filmmaker because I wanted to tell stories and because I wanted to touch people's hearts and challenge people's minds, and part of that goal is coming from the fact that I'm Palestinian and I come from this heritage particularly with the fact that historically we have been crushed in mainstream media and our narrative has been, you know, censored, blocked, you name it. We grew up with this feeling that we know we're aware that the powerful media in the world is against us and the media in the world does not allow us to, you know, narrate. So becoming a filmmaker partly was due to that the like very early days and, yeah, I mean, I think we have something to say, I mean, in the beginnings, you know, we all go through this naive period where you think if I narrate what's going on, if I tell our perspective to the world, the world is going to change, and this suffering is going to end, then you realise that the world doesn't work this way, you know. You sometimes think that you just need people to know, you know, and then some but actually the problem is not just knowing, you know, there are powers there, there are so many things that are capitalized in this world to keep us in this situation.
BG: Yeah, exactly. I mean the thing is what changes – I mean this is me being hopeful – is you don't change the world, you change your perception of the world so your process of making this film has changed the world as you see it, you're a different man.
MA: Absolutely. And I know as well that in every screening, in every Q&A, I can see, of course, I see people who walked in, you know, who are fans and followers of art house cinema, and because of that they have watched so many Palestinian films and they have been exposed to Palestinian cinema but I also see people who have never seen a Palestinian film before and they are, you know, encountering this narrative for the first time and I feel blessed and I feel that it means something, you know? What I mean, yeah, and I see people who walk out you know in tears out of the screenings and I'm sad sorry but I feel happy that it works and you know they're going back home with this kind of fireworks of emotions that I'm sure they will tell their friends, their grandkids, so that's what kind of drives me right now, you know?
BG: Do you see yourself then as a film director or a Palestinian film director? Because I, for example, I'm from a working-class background, poor background and I pursued academia and that is how I ended up making films, you know? It's just through education not money, no connections but because of that then I'm associated with the social realism genre and like working-class, everyday people and saying, ‘Oh well, because that's your background that's the films you're meant to make,’ and I'm there going ‘No’. So now I'm in production on a short adaptation of a Franz Kafka short film, as far away from working classness as possible to prove that I can work in different genres and I'm not imprisoned by my background my, you know, and that's the same question I'm asking you: do you feel that you're tied? I mean, it might be a good thing that you're tied I mean like Scorsese says he's very happy about his Italian-American heritage and doing the films over and over again about that, but there's others that go, ‘Well, I don't want to be doomed by my or trapped by my ethnicity or my economic social status. I want to be creative and expressive so there you go.
MA: It's a very good question. I'm often asked this question in variations of, you know, approaches but I like how you, I mean, I'll try to make it short. But so on one hand in the recent years apart from ‘A House in Jerusalem’ most of my films have focused on Palestinian anti-heroes particularly in Jerusalem who are confronted with situations that are bigger than themselves and that they are not heroes or they were not built to handle, yet they have to figure out a way how to handle them. I in … like the stories that attract me and that get me writing notes on the side for the day when I'm going to write a treatment and a script about, it's the average anti-hero, who's a hero to me in other ways than the expected on the average, you know, the heroes of just simply being able to survive or provide for your family. I'm biased towards these people who do not make it of to the news, you know?
BG: Underdogs. The underdogs.
MA: Yeah, so a house in Jerusalem is an exception in that fact because it was a personal film, it's a personal project and it's something I wanted to make and, yeah. So do I see myself as only making … There was a saying I can't remember who said it but it's basically ‘if you want me to write poetry about the birds you need to turn off the fighter jets and the tanks so I can hear them’, you know what I mean? And this is my answer also about cinema. I cannot remember, I think it was a Palestinian poet who said that now – I've had fever for three days so yeah I'll dig the name if you want – but I think I always like that quote because it was so true. In our case even if we make like a two character story locked in a house, you know, like a one location story. The occupation will be right there out of the window, you know, there's no way you can it is the thing that has left the biggest mark on our lives and we would be, you know …
BG: Blind to ignore.
MA: You know, yeah so it's it does not make … I wish we can make cinema without having to deal with this but if we try to do that right now it's … I don't know what kind of mutant.
BG: I know it reminds me of, you know, Jan Švankmajer, the Czech animator, like clay, and he was working under, you know, communism in the 70s and all his films were interpreted as anti-communist even when it wasn't. Oh, this is obviously about being the claustrophobia, you know, and then I the world events in that context end up defining your individual creativity even if you're not engaged directly with it and then I'm just interested about that because then the idea of creativity that is associated with freedom but then is there any freedom because then you say, ‘Well, I'm going to be because … I'm Palestinian I'm going to be interpreted in this way at this time in history’, and then, you know, so if you went and did a like a rom-com musical in Chicago and then people will go, ‘Yeah, but what's the Palestinian angle?’
MA: Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, it get to some point where sometimes I mean … Even in some of my previous films, you know, certain audiences around the world, unfortunately, they are okay let me be careful with this answer … I think there has been a lot of films that have been made with that are good films important films but the main aim was to counter the Israeli propaganda in Western media … and I think that's important, I think that's crucial, I think we need to do that because Western media is biased period. So we need to counter that with art, with documentaries, with social media, with every tool we have. But not every film, I think, has to have that kind of one kind of solid goal. I think we should have Palestinian love stories, horror stories, detective stories, Westerns, I don't know, we need to have Palestinian culture and literature on all platforms possible around the world because as much as it is important to counter the propaganda narrative of the Israeli occupation, I think it's more important to prove, I mean, we don't need to prove to the world but we need to show it, we need to make sure it's there that we are much more than a nation under occupation. Not simply, you know? So that's why sometimes there are certain expectations of a Palestinian film – ‘Oh, where are the checkpoints?’ – you know it doesn't fall into that kind of activist category, you know what I mean?
BG: Well, yeah, but also it's the sort of dominant narratives that then will … the dominant forces are setting the narrative and then you've got a Palestinian narrative that's a reactionary narrative so that means the dominant force is already then controlling the cultural dialogue so then the Palestinian filmmakers in this case are then drawn into an argument and making films to say, well, I want … I wanted to do a science fiction film but I can't. Now I've got to do, you know, a sort of political film, do you know again sort of thing? So, yeah, I know, I understand, I mean it's just the demands of the wider world or demands of the audience or those in in the industry and it's just fascinating about how things are sort of, yeah, interpreted. It's like that's what I'm saying about with you say like that's the question about the semi-autobiographical angle where people won't see that because it's a female girl who's the lead and it's the ghost girl, and where do you come in who's playing your role, do you know what I mean? As a witness I think it's a witness to the … I see your character in the old lady, I think.
MA: You know I think the old lady is my grandma, but I'll tell you a story, it also goes back to your previous question of Palestinian filmmaker or filmmaker that's Palestinian, and I think being Palestinian is what led me to this path because I have two memories of how I became a filmmaker. There is one when I was a teenager and digital technology was on the rise and we got our hands onto digital cameras and editing software and we thought okay this is our time to tell our stories to the world and, you know, film documentaries about the occupation and what they're doing to us, and you would walk down the old city in Jerusalem and the minute they see you with a camera the first thing people would tell you. ‘Show them. Show them film. Show them.’ This is the first word you will hear around from everybody in the streets, the sellers, the passers-by, show them the world, you know? So this is one experience as a teenager, the other experience as a child was when we bought the very first video camera in, you know, the early 90s and the first thing that came to mind for the family was to go and visit my grandmother’s destroyed house which is now part of an Israeli kibbutz and we're not allowed to go there, redeem it or ask for it or whatever, and my grandma refused to go, it has been ages she didn't go at the time, you know, she hasn't been there since the 40s, you know? She just lives a couple of kilometres away but it was so heavy for her she could not do it. In the end they convinced her, let's do it, my uncle who was a wedding videographer operated the camera, my older sister was dragging me and my brother Rami, the kids around, you know, and my grandma just was giving us this tour of this place, you know, the destroyed house, the leftover of a part it looks like a window and she was pointing out this was the bedroom your mom was born here, that brick is my brick oven I used to you know prepare the bread and whatever, and I used to keep the chicken and the cow in this … you know, and you see me going around and throwing rocks into the well, you know, in the video and then we came back home and this video tape, this VHS tape was the thing the family was talking about for months. Everybody who would visit us they would show them the video, they were so proud of this video and for me as a four or five year old kid I was like. ‘Wow, this video thing, this moving image thing, is so powerful’. Like you look at the faces of … the silence in our living room when they were watching the TV, you know, and it was so impressive to me, you know, because as kids we always want attention and this was taking all the attention in the world, you know, and I realised that for them later on, of course, I realised that for them that videotape was getting their life back, it was getting a part of the house back and they cherished that videotape so much that it was so powerful, it was so important to everybody in the family. So for me, yes, this is what brought me to filmmaking; I think this power of image, like they really believe that this VHS tape got them back some of their spirit of this life that they've lost, and it was there saved on this little, you know, video tape.
BG: Right then, okay, I'll let you go. So thanks for your time.
MA: Thank you so much, thank you, appreciate it.
BG: Take care, man.
Book Review
Agnieszka Rasmus
‘Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films'
(Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
Agnieszka Rasmus
‘Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films'
(Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
Written
by Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
May 20th 2024
by Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
May 20th 2024
‘I can always take it to the Americans. They're people who recognize young talent, give it a chance, they are.'
- Charlie Croker, The Italian Job (1969)
Agnieszka Rasmus makes a excellent contribution to the study of the Hollywood remake with the first book-length study devoted to a select cycle of Hollywood remakes of British cinema classics: Alfie (Gilbert, 1966; Shyer, 2004), Bedazzled (Donen, 1967; Ramis, 2000), The Italian Job (Collinson, 1969; Gray, 2003), Get Carter (Hodges, 1971; Kay, 2000) and The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973; LaBute, 2006).
As is common knowledge, the Hollywood ‘Dream Factory’ insatiably hunts down, consumes and reconstitutes ideas and narratives from all over the place, and the remaking of films from the past, and from other countries, first began in the US with Siegmund Lubin’s ‘The Great Train Robbery’ in 1904. The process offers the chance to capitalise on the familiarity and riches of the original production and, to varying degrees of success, an opportunity to update characters, dialogue, iconography and themes etc. for a contemporary younger audience. In the 21st century new screen technologies, particularly developments in special effects, CGI and AI, have also prompted a succession of remakes that are strategically marketed as ‘enhanced’. For example, the most economically prosperous remake of all time is the photorealistic version of The Lion King (Favreau, 2019), which generated $1,646,106,779 worldwide.
In ‘Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films: Class, Gender and Stardom’, the turn-of-the-century remakes Rasmus explores were nearly all originally produced during London’s ‘Swinging Sixties’. This cycle of movies, which also included Darling (Schlesinger, 1965), The Knack . . . and How to Get It (Lester, 1965), and Blow-Up (Antonioni, 1966), replaced the sober realism and earnest social commentary of British New Wave films such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Richardson, 1962) and This Sporting Life (Anderson, 1963). Due to their hedonistic indulgence in sex and swagger, glamour and glitter, ambition and amorality, they were popular with mainstream audiences, but not particularly with the critics.
In turn, most of their remakes were produced amidst the ideologically-assembled afterglow of ‘Cool Britannia’ in the 1990s: Tony Blair’s New Labour, Britpop’s Oasis versus Blur, Euro ’96, Hugh Grant, Austin Powers, The Spice Girls, Alexander McQueen’s fashion, Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists etc. For instance, the cover of Vanity Fair's March 1997 edition featured Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit lying scantily clad on a Union Jack bedspread with the headline ‘London Swings Again!’ Thus, it can be seen, in line with the continuous capitalist campaign to profit from mediated reproduction, rather than originality, there is nothing as brand new as nostalgia.
Interestingly, these remakes were also released when DVDs were becoming a commodious alternative to VHS and, in turn, Web 2.0 had hit the market. User-generated content, connectivity and collaboration created huge communities of cinephiles – similar to today’s Letterboxd – and they freely voiced their opinions, exchanging knowledge and information. Moreover, the Hollywood remakes of Alfie et al encouraged the re-release of the original productions in DVD format and, as a consequence, both versions fed off each other in a symbiotic, compare and contrast, retail relationship which, for a short time, distracted the contemporary media marketplace.
Indeed, ‘Cool Britannia’ heralded a ‘New Lad’ subculture which attempted to ‘ironically’ portray old-school masculinity in direct contrast with the more sexually ambivalent ‘New Man’ of the 1980s. The magazines of the time – Loaded, FHM and Maxim – objectified women and celebrated male cinematic ‘rogues’ such as Gary Oldman and Oliver Reed, and posters of Michael Caine’s psychopathic London gangster from Get Carter began to adorn young men’s bedrooms and their online profiles; his hyper-masculinity, blokey-nature, and overt sexism steering and salving their emerging machismo.
In the Hollywood remakes of The Italian Job and Get Carter Mark Wahlberg and Sylvester Stallone re-appropriate Michael Caine’s working-class gangsters respectively. As a consequence, the movies morph into star vehicles, and the narrative and genre are shifted to accommodate this predictable Hollywood trope. That is, both remakes endorse heteronormative relations, and any subversive elements present in the originals are ushered into the background.
While Sylvester Stallone’s ‘nice guy’ portrayal in Get Carter can be seen to be a failed attempt to reboot his declining screen image by way of his spectacular physique – The New York Times deemed the film to be ‘pointless’ – it could be argued that the remake of The Italian Job is more interesting. This is mainly because it presents a more balanced approach to gender representation than the inherent misogyny of its 1960s progenitor. This is achieved by activating and elevating the role of its female lead, Stella Bridger (Charlize Theron), in reaction to the original passive portrayal of Lorna (Maggie Blye) as a ‘dolly bird’. That is, Stella is a professional safecracker whose skills are essential for the narrative’s heist and, as a result, she wins over the all-male criminal gang. As Rasmus qualifies however, ‘Stella is a progressive young woman, yet she remains visually objectified’ and, ultimately, the plot is reduced to a heteronormative action/love story. For instance, the classic cliff-hanger which concludes the original – ‘Hang on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea…’ – is made redundant by Wahlberg and Theron travelling to Venice with their loot to ‘live happily ever after’.
In turn, Wahlberg’s Charlie Croker offers a version of Hollywood masculinity that is somewhat unthreatening since he uses his brains, rather than his muscles, to solve problems. Moreover, his democratic leadership stands in contrast to the original’s class divisions; a corporate gangster culture with an officious and bureaucratic hierarchy is replaced with scenes and themes of bonhomie and camaraderie.
Rasmus reminds us that remakes are like any other form of adaptation in that they involve an acknowledged transposition of a recognisable work, and are both a creative and interpretive act of appropriation. Like the genre film, remakes produce pleasure in terms of repetition with variation, recognition, remembrance, and change. Therefore, they welcome comparison as they implicitly and explicitly acknowledge their predecessors. If sequels and prequels are about ‘never wanting a story to end’, then remakes are about ‘wanting to retell the same story over and over in different ways.’
Each chapter in the book considers each of the five pairs of films by recalling their production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Significantly, it identifies that such films can provide, inadvertently or not, a commentary on wider socio-cultural changes and developments as they illuminate anxieties at the heart of their original. For example, aristocracy and authority figures no longer dominate British cinema like they did in the 1960s and 1970s, and are now frequently mocked and undermined instead.
Overall Rasmus’ book could be considered to be far more successful than the cycle of remakes she focuses upon. Different cultures, socio-historical periods, audience expectations, genre conventions, directorial styles, aesthetic orientations, identity politics, and industry practices are interrogated appropriately, and it is well worth a read as a result.
- Charlie Croker, The Italian Job (1969)
Agnieszka Rasmus makes a excellent contribution to the study of the Hollywood remake with the first book-length study devoted to a select cycle of Hollywood remakes of British cinema classics: Alfie (Gilbert, 1966; Shyer, 2004), Bedazzled (Donen, 1967; Ramis, 2000), The Italian Job (Collinson, 1969; Gray, 2003), Get Carter (Hodges, 1971; Kay, 2000) and The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973; LaBute, 2006).
As is common knowledge, the Hollywood ‘Dream Factory’ insatiably hunts down, consumes and reconstitutes ideas and narratives from all over the place, and the remaking of films from the past, and from other countries, first began in the US with Siegmund Lubin’s ‘The Great Train Robbery’ in 1904. The process offers the chance to capitalise on the familiarity and riches of the original production and, to varying degrees of success, an opportunity to update characters, dialogue, iconography and themes etc. for a contemporary younger audience. In the 21st century new screen technologies, particularly developments in special effects, CGI and AI, have also prompted a succession of remakes that are strategically marketed as ‘enhanced’. For example, the most economically prosperous remake of all time is the photorealistic version of The Lion King (Favreau, 2019), which generated $1,646,106,779 worldwide.
In ‘Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films: Class, Gender and Stardom’, the turn-of-the-century remakes Rasmus explores were nearly all originally produced during London’s ‘Swinging Sixties’. This cycle of movies, which also included Darling (Schlesinger, 1965), The Knack . . . and How to Get It (Lester, 1965), and Blow-Up (Antonioni, 1966), replaced the sober realism and earnest social commentary of British New Wave films such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Richardson, 1962) and This Sporting Life (Anderson, 1963). Due to their hedonistic indulgence in sex and swagger, glamour and glitter, ambition and amorality, they were popular with mainstream audiences, but not particularly with the critics.
In turn, most of their remakes were produced amidst the ideologically-assembled afterglow of ‘Cool Britannia’ in the 1990s: Tony Blair’s New Labour, Britpop’s Oasis versus Blur, Euro ’96, Hugh Grant, Austin Powers, The Spice Girls, Alexander McQueen’s fashion, Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists etc. For instance, the cover of Vanity Fair's March 1997 edition featured Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit lying scantily clad on a Union Jack bedspread with the headline ‘London Swings Again!’ Thus, it can be seen, in line with the continuous capitalist campaign to profit from mediated reproduction, rather than originality, there is nothing as brand new as nostalgia.
Interestingly, these remakes were also released when DVDs were becoming a commodious alternative to VHS and, in turn, Web 2.0 had hit the market. User-generated content, connectivity and collaboration created huge communities of cinephiles – similar to today’s Letterboxd – and they freely voiced their opinions, exchanging knowledge and information. Moreover, the Hollywood remakes of Alfie et al encouraged the re-release of the original productions in DVD format and, as a consequence, both versions fed off each other in a symbiotic, compare and contrast, retail relationship which, for a short time, distracted the contemporary media marketplace.
Indeed, ‘Cool Britannia’ heralded a ‘New Lad’ subculture which attempted to ‘ironically’ portray old-school masculinity in direct contrast with the more sexually ambivalent ‘New Man’ of the 1980s. The magazines of the time – Loaded, FHM and Maxim – objectified women and celebrated male cinematic ‘rogues’ such as Gary Oldman and Oliver Reed, and posters of Michael Caine’s psychopathic London gangster from Get Carter began to adorn young men’s bedrooms and their online profiles; his hyper-masculinity, blokey-nature, and overt sexism steering and salving their emerging machismo.
In the Hollywood remakes of The Italian Job and Get Carter Mark Wahlberg and Sylvester Stallone re-appropriate Michael Caine’s working-class gangsters respectively. As a consequence, the movies morph into star vehicles, and the narrative and genre are shifted to accommodate this predictable Hollywood trope. That is, both remakes endorse heteronormative relations, and any subversive elements present in the originals are ushered into the background.
While Sylvester Stallone’s ‘nice guy’ portrayal in Get Carter can be seen to be a failed attempt to reboot his declining screen image by way of his spectacular physique – The New York Times deemed the film to be ‘pointless’ – it could be argued that the remake of The Italian Job is more interesting. This is mainly because it presents a more balanced approach to gender representation than the inherent misogyny of its 1960s progenitor. This is achieved by activating and elevating the role of its female lead, Stella Bridger (Charlize Theron), in reaction to the original passive portrayal of Lorna (Maggie Blye) as a ‘dolly bird’. That is, Stella is a professional safecracker whose skills are essential for the narrative’s heist and, as a result, she wins over the all-male criminal gang. As Rasmus qualifies however, ‘Stella is a progressive young woman, yet she remains visually objectified’ and, ultimately, the plot is reduced to a heteronormative action/love story. For instance, the classic cliff-hanger which concludes the original – ‘Hang on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea…’ – is made redundant by Wahlberg and Theron travelling to Venice with their loot to ‘live happily ever after’.
In turn, Wahlberg’s Charlie Croker offers a version of Hollywood masculinity that is somewhat unthreatening since he uses his brains, rather than his muscles, to solve problems. Moreover, his democratic leadership stands in contrast to the original’s class divisions; a corporate gangster culture with an officious and bureaucratic hierarchy is replaced with scenes and themes of bonhomie and camaraderie.
Rasmus reminds us that remakes are like any other form of adaptation in that they involve an acknowledged transposition of a recognisable work, and are both a creative and interpretive act of appropriation. Like the genre film, remakes produce pleasure in terms of repetition with variation, recognition, remembrance, and change. Therefore, they welcome comparison as they implicitly and explicitly acknowledge their predecessors. If sequels and prequels are about ‘never wanting a story to end’, then remakes are about ‘wanting to retell the same story over and over in different ways.’
Each chapter in the book considers each of the five pairs of films by recalling their production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Significantly, it identifies that such films can provide, inadvertently or not, a commentary on wider socio-cultural changes and developments as they illuminate anxieties at the heart of their original. For example, aristocracy and authority figures no longer dominate British cinema like they did in the 1960s and 1970s, and are now frequently mocked and undermined instead.
Overall Rasmus’ book could be considered to be far more successful than the cycle of remakes she focuses upon. Different cultures, socio-historical periods, audience expectations, genre conventions, directorial styles, aesthetic orientations, identity politics, and industry practices are interrogated appropriately, and it is well worth a read as a result.
Article
From Salford to Saltburn:
Class, Privilege and the Screen Industries
From Salford to Saltburn:
Class, Privilege and the Screen Industries
Written
by Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
March 5th 2024
by Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
March 5th 2024
'Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist' (dir. Brett Gregory, 2022) and 'Saltburn' (dir. Emerald Fennell 2023) were released within a year of each other. Both, in their own way, offer a gothic twist on contemporary matters of British class and economic relations. They are refreshing and innovative, lyrical and sumptuous. Both are from under-represented film-directors, i.e. neither is an affluent white male.
Both directors extract remarkable scenes from their actors, in particular a ten-minute single take of Reuben Clarke by Gregory. Both have the classic locations found in British cinema, the gritty streets (of Salford) or the sprawling manor house (of Saltburn). But the journey to screen and subsequent destination of these films could hardly be more different. I make a comparison here, not to denigrate one or the other of the filmmakers, but to try to shed light on class, privilege, and the screen industries.
Brett Gregory is a working-class filmmaker and would no doubt have encountered the obstacles identified by Carey et al, 2021, in 'Screened out: Tackling class inequality in the UK’s screen industries'. Working-class entrants face at least twelve challenges to work in the screen industries. In early life they face unequal access to cultural experiences, disparity in cultural education, participation and achievement, and lack of role models. In post-16 education, they have unequal access to higher education, are offered flawed technical education pathways, and disadvantaged by a lack of resources to undertake work placements.
When making the transition to work there are the obstacles of informal recruitment practices, and cultural matching and unconscious bias, perpetuating ‘jobs for the boys’ which alternatively smooths the access of the privileged who can often count on the ‘bank of mum and dad’ to sustain their entries into the profession and rely on the old boy network.
Finally, in-work progression and advancement is often challenged by organisational culture and ‘fit’: that is, mastering the upper/middle class behavioural codes that are vital in ‘getting on.’
The underlying causes of these issues lies in disparity in the financial, social, and cultural capital of those of different class origin and not in notions of meritocracy, intelligence, talent, or hard work. The upshot is a disastrous lack and silencing of working-class voices, narratives, content, considerations, and concerns in the industry and production.
Emerald Fennell is an affluent well-connected filmmaker and would not have encountered the obstacles detailed above or associated issues around funding, production, exhibition, and distribution. This is not to say that she has not transcended other obstacles in her path or that she is any less resilient or talented a filmmaker. But her education, family, economic support, networking, and privilege must have greased her development in a way counter to the grit placed in front of Gregory’s wheels.
In a piece for Variety, K.J. Yossman sheds light on Fennell’s background and education. Fennell is the daughter of society jeweller – ‘king of bling’ - and old Etonian, Theo Fennell. She attended Marlborough (£15,665 per term) where she found herself a year or two either side of Princess Eugenie and Kate Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge. State-educated Yossman attended Oxford in 2006 at the same time as Fennell. It is claimed that Fennell was part of a rarefied social set whose family names were recognized from the gossip columns and history books. Yossman describes how she was once introduced to a contemporary whose last name was Roosevelt-Morgan, with the whisper that: “She’s that Morgan but not that Roosevelt” — which Yossman interpreted to mean she was descended from the banking dynasty but not the U.S. president.
In a telling anecdote revealing the aforementioned privilege of having the ‘bank of mum and dad’ and ‘old boys’ network’, Yossman recalls that she and Fennell were involved in a charity fashion show. Yossman’s contribution was to persuade make-up artists to lend their services for free; Fennell however got her father to donate some jewellery for the accompanying raffle. As the show drew nearer, Yossman says, ‘select students received silver-embossed invitations in their pigeonholes. The rest were NFI — not fucking invited.’ You don’t have to guess who got the silver and who was NFI. In micro, this is contemporary class relations in macro and the workings of the screen industries today: the working classes can try but they are NFI. There is nothing simpler than a problem you can toss jewels at.
Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist is an independent arthouse film, which is to say, it is not small budget, or even micro-budget, it is a debt-producing feature film. Gregory used a redundancy package and maxed-out credit cards and relied on the good will of crew over six years.
Despite this, there are captivating monologues that focus on Manchester, austerity, and the effects of the erosion of the welfare state over the decades. The protagonist, shown through distinct stages of life, is appropriately angry and often confused at their socio-economic position (and how this plays out in family dynamics) but also resilient. There is dark humour with exclamations that ‘no one in the whole wide world would miss me, except for Barclaycard and the Student Loans Company.’ As well as a school head’s quizzical, ‘And all this nonsense about following your heart and chasing your dreams…what would OFSTED say?’
There is a sharp edge and truth to this humour – in neoliberalism many only count as a financial entity or quantity to be measured, compared, governed, and controlled. There is the capitulation to hegemony enunciated further by a higher education lead: ‘Now what this former staff member failed to understand is that our students and their families, they just want to get on with their lives; they don’t want any drama, they don’t want surprises, they don’t want anything to change. They just want jobs.’
Miller suggests the film ‘stands as proof that the pioneering spirit of independent British cinema is very much alive and well.’ The Ozu-esque transition sequences in the film are particularly poignant and effective – time-lapse photography of a derelict pub at night with faded Morrissey posters on the boarded-up windows, or a burial of broken dolls, a viaduct with a John Cooper Clarke stencil, the glitzy financial hub of contemporary Manchester at night, network of canals, elements of rurality in the Manchester environs and so on. These aspects, as well as the medieval musical score, add a lyrical tone. They immune the film from accusations aimed at working-class films, often based in the ‘social realist’ tradition, of ‘miserabilism.’ Or, on the other hand exploitative, ‘poverty porn.’ Arguably it is Saltburn that offers the porn.
In Saltburn, Oxford scholarship kid Oliver is desirous of upper-class Felix, and slowly we discover he is somewhat of a con-artist. His mark, his love, is the blue-blooded Felix, accurately described by Yossman as ‘kind-hearted and guileless, a cross between Princess Diana and Harry Enfield’s comic creation Tim Nice But Dim.’ Oliver desires Felix but we cannot guarantee at times whether this is due to his beauty or wealth. Felix invites Oliver to his manor house, Saltburn. The viewer is invited to share Oliver’s desire for the beauty, wealth and luxury associated with and embodied by Felix.
At one point Oliver spies Felix masturbating in the bath. Later he lustfully drinks the semen-laced drained bathwater. Capital often tries to legitimate itself along the lines that wealth trickles down and is therefore good for all. It was probably not intended in such a way but lower/middle-class Oliver lapping up the upper-class spoilt ejaculate in the bath water is a marvellous rendering of the reality of such trickle-down economics and distorted class relations today.
There is some significant satire in Saltburn. The emotional dysfunction of the family, as well as the sheer banality, emptiness, and boredom of these people, is epitomised by the collective term for associated sex-pest clone-like friends – ‘The Henrys.’ This is the burn-out of wealth and conspicuous consumption with nothing left to buy, except people. Only Oliver, later revealed to be an emotionless sociopathic murderer, could find anything to desire here.
Dullness hangs in the air like dust mites in the empty rooms and spaces of the manor house. Just breakfast, lunch, or better, dinner with wine, or something new like a lower/middle-class house guest, a neurotic friend, or a piece of spiteful gossip, can stir the dust off these lives already asleep. This is the depressive hedonia, described by Mark Fisher, as not an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a real sense that ‘something is missing.’ But also with no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. That is, beyond consumption, beyond luxury, beyond wealth.
Oh, for the luxury of time to be bored for protagonist Jack in Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist. In Jack’s life, like it or not, one is an agent. One must be active merely to survive. From this notion of agency and autonomy the working class has the opportunity to recognise and become conscious of itself, and change its material condition and relations to production. Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist hints at the possibility of growth, change, and progress. Saltburn demonstrates the pathos of stasis and inertia.
Famously, at the end of chapter one of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels suggest that modern industry has inadvertently produced a potential assembly of proletarians. Hence, ‘What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’
Alas, things are not quite so simple. The burgeoning middle class will go on to buffer class antagonism, and the repressive and ideological state apparatus will secure hegemony with any means necessary. But the classic gothic imagery of the grave from the time of Marx and Engels also features in the two films under discussion. In Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist there is a mesmerising time-lapse sequence from a freshly dug grave, a snail circulating, leaves flickering fast on the gravestones. A meditation on time, perhaps the time necessary for progress.
In Saltburn, in a scene which the TikTok generation has sent viral, Oliver strips naked before Felix’s freshly dug grave. He makes a hole and fucks the grave. The only act of intimacy he is afforded with affluence, the closest he gets to social mobility, is of a necrophiliac nature. Instead of digging the graves of the bourgeoisie, he is fucking them.
Gregory’s stated aim is to ‘represent the Northern working class on screen with intelligence, authenticity, and dignity, in direct opposition to the demeaning stereotypes and caricatures regularly churned out by the corporate mainstream media.’ Saltburn, alternatively, relishes in the antique absurdity of the upper classes (and the muddled middle class, in awe of such lifestyle). But as Yossman argues, Saltburn ultimately whitewashes their uglier and exploitative side: ‘maybe it’s because she herself [Fennell] is one of them.’ (Yossman 2023)
Gregory is certainly not one of them, and he is NFI. If we require from the popular arts that they at least say something meaningful about their times and economic relations, then it is clear that Gregory’s work is of significance here. It is likely however that Saltburn will continue to attract commentary, viral parodies, and online chatter in the millions. Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist will be discussed in the small circulation, left-leaning, small presses, and websites like Culture Matters. It’s not how it should be, but it is how it is.
The distinction between these films reveal inequality from top to bottom. Working-class cultural artefacts and ‘rare utterances’ are an endangered species. They need wider support in this current neoliberalist tech-feudal socio-political climate that we're all enduring.
Both directors extract remarkable scenes from their actors, in particular a ten-minute single take of Reuben Clarke by Gregory. Both have the classic locations found in British cinema, the gritty streets (of Salford) or the sprawling manor house (of Saltburn). But the journey to screen and subsequent destination of these films could hardly be more different. I make a comparison here, not to denigrate one or the other of the filmmakers, but to try to shed light on class, privilege, and the screen industries.
Brett Gregory is a working-class filmmaker and would no doubt have encountered the obstacles identified by Carey et al, 2021, in 'Screened out: Tackling class inequality in the UK’s screen industries'. Working-class entrants face at least twelve challenges to work in the screen industries. In early life they face unequal access to cultural experiences, disparity in cultural education, participation and achievement, and lack of role models. In post-16 education, they have unequal access to higher education, are offered flawed technical education pathways, and disadvantaged by a lack of resources to undertake work placements.
When making the transition to work there are the obstacles of informal recruitment practices, and cultural matching and unconscious bias, perpetuating ‘jobs for the boys’ which alternatively smooths the access of the privileged who can often count on the ‘bank of mum and dad’ to sustain their entries into the profession and rely on the old boy network.
Finally, in-work progression and advancement is often challenged by organisational culture and ‘fit’: that is, mastering the upper/middle class behavioural codes that are vital in ‘getting on.’
The underlying causes of these issues lies in disparity in the financial, social, and cultural capital of those of different class origin and not in notions of meritocracy, intelligence, talent, or hard work. The upshot is a disastrous lack and silencing of working-class voices, narratives, content, considerations, and concerns in the industry and production.
Emerald Fennell is an affluent well-connected filmmaker and would not have encountered the obstacles detailed above or associated issues around funding, production, exhibition, and distribution. This is not to say that she has not transcended other obstacles in her path or that she is any less resilient or talented a filmmaker. But her education, family, economic support, networking, and privilege must have greased her development in a way counter to the grit placed in front of Gregory’s wheels.
In a piece for Variety, K.J. Yossman sheds light on Fennell’s background and education. Fennell is the daughter of society jeweller – ‘king of bling’ - and old Etonian, Theo Fennell. She attended Marlborough (£15,665 per term) where she found herself a year or two either side of Princess Eugenie and Kate Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge. State-educated Yossman attended Oxford in 2006 at the same time as Fennell. It is claimed that Fennell was part of a rarefied social set whose family names were recognized from the gossip columns and history books. Yossman describes how she was once introduced to a contemporary whose last name was Roosevelt-Morgan, with the whisper that: “She’s that Morgan but not that Roosevelt” — which Yossman interpreted to mean she was descended from the banking dynasty but not the U.S. president.
In a telling anecdote revealing the aforementioned privilege of having the ‘bank of mum and dad’ and ‘old boys’ network’, Yossman recalls that she and Fennell were involved in a charity fashion show. Yossman’s contribution was to persuade make-up artists to lend their services for free; Fennell however got her father to donate some jewellery for the accompanying raffle. As the show drew nearer, Yossman says, ‘select students received silver-embossed invitations in their pigeonholes. The rest were NFI — not fucking invited.’ You don’t have to guess who got the silver and who was NFI. In micro, this is contemporary class relations in macro and the workings of the screen industries today: the working classes can try but they are NFI. There is nothing simpler than a problem you can toss jewels at.
Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist is an independent arthouse film, which is to say, it is not small budget, or even micro-budget, it is a debt-producing feature film. Gregory used a redundancy package and maxed-out credit cards and relied on the good will of crew over six years.
Despite this, there are captivating monologues that focus on Manchester, austerity, and the effects of the erosion of the welfare state over the decades. The protagonist, shown through distinct stages of life, is appropriately angry and often confused at their socio-economic position (and how this plays out in family dynamics) but also resilient. There is dark humour with exclamations that ‘no one in the whole wide world would miss me, except for Barclaycard and the Student Loans Company.’ As well as a school head’s quizzical, ‘And all this nonsense about following your heart and chasing your dreams…what would OFSTED say?’
There is a sharp edge and truth to this humour – in neoliberalism many only count as a financial entity or quantity to be measured, compared, governed, and controlled. There is the capitulation to hegemony enunciated further by a higher education lead: ‘Now what this former staff member failed to understand is that our students and their families, they just want to get on with their lives; they don’t want any drama, they don’t want surprises, they don’t want anything to change. They just want jobs.’
Miller suggests the film ‘stands as proof that the pioneering spirit of independent British cinema is very much alive and well.’ The Ozu-esque transition sequences in the film are particularly poignant and effective – time-lapse photography of a derelict pub at night with faded Morrissey posters on the boarded-up windows, or a burial of broken dolls, a viaduct with a John Cooper Clarke stencil, the glitzy financial hub of contemporary Manchester at night, network of canals, elements of rurality in the Manchester environs and so on. These aspects, as well as the medieval musical score, add a lyrical tone. They immune the film from accusations aimed at working-class films, often based in the ‘social realist’ tradition, of ‘miserabilism.’ Or, on the other hand exploitative, ‘poverty porn.’ Arguably it is Saltburn that offers the porn.
In Saltburn, Oxford scholarship kid Oliver is desirous of upper-class Felix, and slowly we discover he is somewhat of a con-artist. His mark, his love, is the blue-blooded Felix, accurately described by Yossman as ‘kind-hearted and guileless, a cross between Princess Diana and Harry Enfield’s comic creation Tim Nice But Dim.’ Oliver desires Felix but we cannot guarantee at times whether this is due to his beauty or wealth. Felix invites Oliver to his manor house, Saltburn. The viewer is invited to share Oliver’s desire for the beauty, wealth and luxury associated with and embodied by Felix.
At one point Oliver spies Felix masturbating in the bath. Later he lustfully drinks the semen-laced drained bathwater. Capital often tries to legitimate itself along the lines that wealth trickles down and is therefore good for all. It was probably not intended in such a way but lower/middle-class Oliver lapping up the upper-class spoilt ejaculate in the bath water is a marvellous rendering of the reality of such trickle-down economics and distorted class relations today.
There is some significant satire in Saltburn. The emotional dysfunction of the family, as well as the sheer banality, emptiness, and boredom of these people, is epitomised by the collective term for associated sex-pest clone-like friends – ‘The Henrys.’ This is the burn-out of wealth and conspicuous consumption with nothing left to buy, except people. Only Oliver, later revealed to be an emotionless sociopathic murderer, could find anything to desire here.
Dullness hangs in the air like dust mites in the empty rooms and spaces of the manor house. Just breakfast, lunch, or better, dinner with wine, or something new like a lower/middle-class house guest, a neurotic friend, or a piece of spiteful gossip, can stir the dust off these lives already asleep. This is the depressive hedonia, described by Mark Fisher, as not an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a real sense that ‘something is missing.’ But also with no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. That is, beyond consumption, beyond luxury, beyond wealth.
Oh, for the luxury of time to be bored for protagonist Jack in Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist. In Jack’s life, like it or not, one is an agent. One must be active merely to survive. From this notion of agency and autonomy the working class has the opportunity to recognise and become conscious of itself, and change its material condition and relations to production. Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist hints at the possibility of growth, change, and progress. Saltburn demonstrates the pathos of stasis and inertia.
Famously, at the end of chapter one of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels suggest that modern industry has inadvertently produced a potential assembly of proletarians. Hence, ‘What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’
Alas, things are not quite so simple. The burgeoning middle class will go on to buffer class antagonism, and the repressive and ideological state apparatus will secure hegemony with any means necessary. But the classic gothic imagery of the grave from the time of Marx and Engels also features in the two films under discussion. In Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist there is a mesmerising time-lapse sequence from a freshly dug grave, a snail circulating, leaves flickering fast on the gravestones. A meditation on time, perhaps the time necessary for progress.
In Saltburn, in a scene which the TikTok generation has sent viral, Oliver strips naked before Felix’s freshly dug grave. He makes a hole and fucks the grave. The only act of intimacy he is afforded with affluence, the closest he gets to social mobility, is of a necrophiliac nature. Instead of digging the graves of the bourgeoisie, he is fucking them.
Gregory’s stated aim is to ‘represent the Northern working class on screen with intelligence, authenticity, and dignity, in direct opposition to the demeaning stereotypes and caricatures regularly churned out by the corporate mainstream media.’ Saltburn, alternatively, relishes in the antique absurdity of the upper classes (and the muddled middle class, in awe of such lifestyle). But as Yossman argues, Saltburn ultimately whitewashes their uglier and exploitative side: ‘maybe it’s because she herself [Fennell] is one of them.’ (Yossman 2023)
Gregory is certainly not one of them, and he is NFI. If we require from the popular arts that they at least say something meaningful about their times and economic relations, then it is clear that Gregory’s work is of significance here. It is likely however that Saltburn will continue to attract commentary, viral parodies, and online chatter in the millions. Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist will be discussed in the small circulation, left-leaning, small presses, and websites like Culture Matters. It’s not how it should be, but it is how it is.
The distinction between these films reveal inequality from top to bottom. Working-class cultural artefacts and ‘rare utterances’ are an endangered species. They need wider support in this current neoliberalist tech-feudal socio-political climate that we're all enduring.
Film Review
Americonned (Claffey, 2023)
Americonned (Claffey, 2023)
Written and Narrated
by Brett Gregory
March 5th 2024
by Brett Gregory
March 5th 2024
Transcript
Throughout the 20th century Hollywood often hypnotised us with its mirages of the United States which were altogether beautiful, beguiling and bountiful, its diverse and dramatic population constantly reinventing itself as it seemingly surged as one towards the comfort and glory of the American Dream.
Sean Claffey’s documentary, ‘Americonned’, bluntly announces that that dream is now over as it charges us through an economic war set in the first quarter of 21st century North America.
Human casualties who look exactly like you and me litter the hideous housing projects in Florida, the basement apartments buried in New Jersey and the forgotten farms of Iowa, instantly reminding us of our own crumbling council estates in Newcastle, the boarded up shops in Bolton and the bankruptcy of Birmingham City Council.
Ana (Florida): I'm looking for storage units. Next door yesterday they put my friend out, my neighbour, and they had what I thought was a legal document, you know, to help them, you know, stay. But unfortunately the sheriffs nor the management company would accept the paperwork and they, you know, kicked them out, and I don't want that to happen to me.
Elaine (Boston): With this job I'm not making enough. I have tried to apply for a loan through the SBA. That's a nightmare. I tried to apply for the PPP. They denied me for that because it was not the accurate information. I really want to give up because I'm just so tired. I don't know. I don't sleep much at night, so I just lay there and I think and I think and I think and I think, and I can't figure a way out. And I've always been able to figure a way out, and I can't. My kids literally hate me because I can't fix the problems of the world.
J. D. Scholten (Iowa): When I decided to move home several years ago I looked in my hometown paper for a job for about a month, and the best job I could get is 15 bucks an hour and no benefits. Whether it's a McDonald's or Dollar General or whatever they hire people for 10 / 12 bucks an hour and the profits go out of the district. That's not benefiting our society, that's not benefiting our communities. The economy isn't working for here. It benefits these multinational corporations.
Like a military dossier detailing the bombing of Dresden by Allied forces during World War II, this film manages its moral outrage with dark data that refutes the false flag of fiscal progress which is waved mechanically, and maniacally, by the mainstream media across our syndicated smart screens.
In line with the rise of workers’ productivity since the 1960s, for instance, the minimum wage should be at least $20 an hour in the US, but it isn’t, is it? Instead, it’s a sickening $7.25 an hour.
For the record, and according to the Trade Union Congress, the minimum wage in the UK should be £15 an hour, but instead its £11.54.
In turn, 70% of all adults who work full-time in North America have to suffer the humiliation of receiving government aid, while in the UK over 6.4 million people, including myself, are claiming Universal Credit.
Moreover, although the long term average unemployment figures across the United States are around 5.7%, Marty Walsh, former Mayor of Boston, observes that the 6.1% unemployment rate for the black community and the 9.7% rate for the Latino community will never ever improve.
So, where did all the money go? And what about all that hope?
Well, coincidentally, in 1987 there were 47 billionaires in the United States with a total net worth of $186 billion. In 2024 however we now have 759 billionaires with a combined wealth of – wait for it – $4.48 trillion.
Such figures, to any rational mind, are absolutely ridiculous.
It’s as if we’re playing a game of Monopoly in a locked room against Charles Manson, a machete in his right hand, a litre of tequila in his left.
But such a subhuman socio-economic state of affairs didn’t happen by accident, now did it?
Amongst other things Machiavellian men and women with incalculable capital, connections and control desired for it to be this way, they conspired for it to be this way, and they contrived for it to be this way.
But who was the original Svengali, the David Koresh, the Colonel Kurtz that first let this Wall Street savagery loose upon the streets and suburbs of California, Texas, Washington, Britain and the rest of the world?
According to Kurt Andersen, author of ‘Evil Geniuses’, and venture capitalist, Nick Hanauer, …
Kurt Andersen (Author): Milton Friedman was an incredibly important figure. He was at the University of Chicago where he was at the centre of this group of libertarian economists and they were really outside the mainstream.
Milton Friedman (Economist): Personally, of course I would get rid of social security. I've always said it was one of the great miracles of Madison Avenue packaging.
TV Interviewer: Would you do about the minimum wage law if you could?
Milton Friedman (Economist): I would abolish it.
Kurt Andersen (Author): Then in 1970 the New York Times magazine invited him to essentially summarise his beliefs in an article that they called ‘A Friedman Doctrine’.
Television Talk Show Host: Please welcome the Nobel Laureate in Economics, Milton Friedman.
Kurt Andersen (Author): He was making the case that for businesses nothing mattered but profits. Not the well-being of your employees, not the well-being of your communities, not the well-being of the larger society. All that matters was your profits period.
Nick Hanauer (Venture Capitalist): He was making a claim about how human economies worked. That the more selfish business executives were the better it would be for everyone, and that's what people bought. The trick of trickle down economics is not believing that when the rich get richer that's good for the economy; the evil part is the belief that when the poor get richer that will harm the economy. And that has been the basic message of our nation's economic system for the last 40 years.
But surely there are robust constitutional and legal mechanisms in place which have been historically drawn up to prevent such wanton ransacking of the social contract between employers and their employees, citizens and their government?
Well, unfortunately, ‘Americonned’ is quick to alert us that in the United States of America, the land of free enterprise and brave opportunism, even democracy is up for sale.
Kurt Andersen (Author): So how do you change things permanently? Well, you change law, you change the way the judiciary interpret what is constitutional or not. A big way that change is made is by billionaire right-wingers giving 50 million or 100 million each to all the best law schools. And, oh, by the way, let's also start this fraternity, mafia, whatever you want to call it.
CBSN Host: So what exactly is the Federalist Society?
Eric Lipton (Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist): The Federalist Society got started through law schools and it's grown into an organisation that has incredible influence in the United States.
MSNBC Host: Getting conservative judges on the bench has been a project for multiple decades.
Kurt Andersen (Author): Once you get both the law and Washington lawmakers, you could make sure that those laws were going to be declared constitutional or not by judges you have essentially bred in your laboratory through the Federalist Society.
Keith Olbermann (Countdown News Host): Today the Supreme Court of Chief Justice, John Roberts, declared that corporations had all the rights of people.
Bernie Sanders (US Politician): What you have right now is the undermining of American democracy as we know it.
Keith Olbermann (Countdown News Host): There are now no checks on the ability of corporations to decide our elections. None.
Although there are many heart-breaking and humanising speeches and scenarios in ‘Americonned’ that any level-headed left-winger or progressive would be engaged and enraged by, the documentary is not without its faults.
For the sake of audience inclusion and narrative drive, for instance, Jeff Bezos is crudely cast as an obscene online Ozymandias while his Amazon workforce are portrayed as his eternally suffering Egyptian slaves.
However, this basic binary, good versus evil approach overlooks the depth and breadth of the neoliberal tech-feudalist system which now operates above, below and within all supposed civilised societies, not just the United States, and which, it could be argued, accidentally engineers egregious entities like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
We’re talking here about a supremely organised interconnected network of institutions whose hourly purpose is to maintain absolute power by generating trillions of dollars via the day-to-day exploitation of the world’s 8 billion citizens.
Indeed, this global complex of control is of such incomprehensible scope and strength it would take centuries of round-the-clock resistance from millions of focused, educated, dedicated and resourced activists to even begin to attempt to dismantle it, let alone hold it to account.
Yep, we’re talking here about actual international governments, their presidents, senators, prime ministers and members of parliament; non-governmental organisations like the Clinton Global Initiative and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change; think tanks like The Center for Strategic and International Studies in the US and Chatham House in the UK; elite universities like Yale, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge; global 2000 companies like JPMorgan Chase, Saudi Aramco and China Construction Bank; pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk that make our medicines; energy companies like ExxonMobil and Shell that drive our cars; chemical companies like BASF and Sinopec that clean our floors; media companies like Disney and Comcast that entertain us; tech companies like Apple and Alphabet that detain us; arms manufacturers; the military; the CIA, MI5, FBI; the police, the prison service ... all protecting their – not our – trillions upon trillions of dollars.
‘Americonned’ is currently available via Amazon Prime Video (!!!)
Throughout the 20th century Hollywood often hypnotised us with its mirages of the United States which were altogether beautiful, beguiling and bountiful, its diverse and dramatic population constantly reinventing itself as it seemingly surged as one towards the comfort and glory of the American Dream.
Sean Claffey’s documentary, ‘Americonned’, bluntly announces that that dream is now over as it charges us through an economic war set in the first quarter of 21st century North America.
Human casualties who look exactly like you and me litter the hideous housing projects in Florida, the basement apartments buried in New Jersey and the forgotten farms of Iowa, instantly reminding us of our own crumbling council estates in Newcastle, the boarded up shops in Bolton and the bankruptcy of Birmingham City Council.
Ana (Florida): I'm looking for storage units. Next door yesterday they put my friend out, my neighbour, and they had what I thought was a legal document, you know, to help them, you know, stay. But unfortunately the sheriffs nor the management company would accept the paperwork and they, you know, kicked them out, and I don't want that to happen to me.
Elaine (Boston): With this job I'm not making enough. I have tried to apply for a loan through the SBA. That's a nightmare. I tried to apply for the PPP. They denied me for that because it was not the accurate information. I really want to give up because I'm just so tired. I don't know. I don't sleep much at night, so I just lay there and I think and I think and I think and I think, and I can't figure a way out. And I've always been able to figure a way out, and I can't. My kids literally hate me because I can't fix the problems of the world.
J. D. Scholten (Iowa): When I decided to move home several years ago I looked in my hometown paper for a job for about a month, and the best job I could get is 15 bucks an hour and no benefits. Whether it's a McDonald's or Dollar General or whatever they hire people for 10 / 12 bucks an hour and the profits go out of the district. That's not benefiting our society, that's not benefiting our communities. The economy isn't working for here. It benefits these multinational corporations.
Like a military dossier detailing the bombing of Dresden by Allied forces during World War II, this film manages its moral outrage with dark data that refutes the false flag of fiscal progress which is waved mechanically, and maniacally, by the mainstream media across our syndicated smart screens.
In line with the rise of workers’ productivity since the 1960s, for instance, the minimum wage should be at least $20 an hour in the US, but it isn’t, is it? Instead, it’s a sickening $7.25 an hour.
For the record, and according to the Trade Union Congress, the minimum wage in the UK should be £15 an hour, but instead its £11.54.
In turn, 70% of all adults who work full-time in North America have to suffer the humiliation of receiving government aid, while in the UK over 6.4 million people, including myself, are claiming Universal Credit.
Moreover, although the long term average unemployment figures across the United States are around 5.7%, Marty Walsh, former Mayor of Boston, observes that the 6.1% unemployment rate for the black community and the 9.7% rate for the Latino community will never ever improve.
So, where did all the money go? And what about all that hope?
Well, coincidentally, in 1987 there were 47 billionaires in the United States with a total net worth of $186 billion. In 2024 however we now have 759 billionaires with a combined wealth of – wait for it – $4.48 trillion.
Such figures, to any rational mind, are absolutely ridiculous.
It’s as if we’re playing a game of Monopoly in a locked room against Charles Manson, a machete in his right hand, a litre of tequila in his left.
But such a subhuman socio-economic state of affairs didn’t happen by accident, now did it?
Amongst other things Machiavellian men and women with incalculable capital, connections and control desired for it to be this way, they conspired for it to be this way, and they contrived for it to be this way.
But who was the original Svengali, the David Koresh, the Colonel Kurtz that first let this Wall Street savagery loose upon the streets and suburbs of California, Texas, Washington, Britain and the rest of the world?
According to Kurt Andersen, author of ‘Evil Geniuses’, and venture capitalist, Nick Hanauer, …
Kurt Andersen (Author): Milton Friedman was an incredibly important figure. He was at the University of Chicago where he was at the centre of this group of libertarian economists and they were really outside the mainstream.
Milton Friedman (Economist): Personally, of course I would get rid of social security. I've always said it was one of the great miracles of Madison Avenue packaging.
TV Interviewer: Would you do about the minimum wage law if you could?
Milton Friedman (Economist): I would abolish it.
Kurt Andersen (Author): Then in 1970 the New York Times magazine invited him to essentially summarise his beliefs in an article that they called ‘A Friedman Doctrine’.
Television Talk Show Host: Please welcome the Nobel Laureate in Economics, Milton Friedman.
Kurt Andersen (Author): He was making the case that for businesses nothing mattered but profits. Not the well-being of your employees, not the well-being of your communities, not the well-being of the larger society. All that matters was your profits period.
Nick Hanauer (Venture Capitalist): He was making a claim about how human economies worked. That the more selfish business executives were the better it would be for everyone, and that's what people bought. The trick of trickle down economics is not believing that when the rich get richer that's good for the economy; the evil part is the belief that when the poor get richer that will harm the economy. And that has been the basic message of our nation's economic system for the last 40 years.
But surely there are robust constitutional and legal mechanisms in place which have been historically drawn up to prevent such wanton ransacking of the social contract between employers and their employees, citizens and their government?
Well, unfortunately, ‘Americonned’ is quick to alert us that in the United States of America, the land of free enterprise and brave opportunism, even democracy is up for sale.
Kurt Andersen (Author): So how do you change things permanently? Well, you change law, you change the way the judiciary interpret what is constitutional or not. A big way that change is made is by billionaire right-wingers giving 50 million or 100 million each to all the best law schools. And, oh, by the way, let's also start this fraternity, mafia, whatever you want to call it.
CBSN Host: So what exactly is the Federalist Society?
Eric Lipton (Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist): The Federalist Society got started through law schools and it's grown into an organisation that has incredible influence in the United States.
MSNBC Host: Getting conservative judges on the bench has been a project for multiple decades.
Kurt Andersen (Author): Once you get both the law and Washington lawmakers, you could make sure that those laws were going to be declared constitutional or not by judges you have essentially bred in your laboratory through the Federalist Society.
Keith Olbermann (Countdown News Host): Today the Supreme Court of Chief Justice, John Roberts, declared that corporations had all the rights of people.
Bernie Sanders (US Politician): What you have right now is the undermining of American democracy as we know it.
Keith Olbermann (Countdown News Host): There are now no checks on the ability of corporations to decide our elections. None.
Although there are many heart-breaking and humanising speeches and scenarios in ‘Americonned’ that any level-headed left-winger or progressive would be engaged and enraged by, the documentary is not without its faults.
For the sake of audience inclusion and narrative drive, for instance, Jeff Bezos is crudely cast as an obscene online Ozymandias while his Amazon workforce are portrayed as his eternally suffering Egyptian slaves.
However, this basic binary, good versus evil approach overlooks the depth and breadth of the neoliberal tech-feudalist system which now operates above, below and within all supposed civilised societies, not just the United States, and which, it could be argued, accidentally engineers egregious entities like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
We’re talking here about a supremely organised interconnected network of institutions whose hourly purpose is to maintain absolute power by generating trillions of dollars via the day-to-day exploitation of the world’s 8 billion citizens.
Indeed, this global complex of control is of such incomprehensible scope and strength it would take centuries of round-the-clock resistance from millions of focused, educated, dedicated and resourced activists to even begin to attempt to dismantle it, let alone hold it to account.
Yep, we’re talking here about actual international governments, their presidents, senators, prime ministers and members of parliament; non-governmental organisations like the Clinton Global Initiative and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change; think tanks like The Center for Strategic and International Studies in the US and Chatham House in the UK; elite universities like Yale, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge; global 2000 companies like JPMorgan Chase, Saudi Aramco and China Construction Bank; pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk that make our medicines; energy companies like ExxonMobil and Shell that drive our cars; chemical companies like BASF and Sinopec that clean our floors; media companies like Disney and Comcast that entertain us; tech companies like Apple and Alphabet that detain us; arms manufacturers; the military; the CIA, MI5, FBI; the police, the prison service ... all protecting their – not our – trillions upon trillions of dollars.
‘Americonned’ is currently available via Amazon Prime Video (!!!)
Film Review
Tish (Paul Sng, 2023)
Tish (Paul Sng, 2023)
Written and Narrated
by Brett Gregory
January 17th 2024
by Brett Gregory
January 17th 2024
Transcript
'My use of photography and the approach to it is based on the conviction that the fundamental value of the medium is its capacity to provide direct, accurate and vital records of the conditions, events and experiences that shape our lives.'
This is a quote from one of Patricia ‘Tish’ Murtha’s essays as narrated by Maxine Peake in Paul Sng’s observational and performative documentary, ‘Tish’, from 2023. In turn, it can be understood to be at the core of her socialist agenda as a working-class photographer and social realist documentarian.
As a 52 year old working-class filmmaker myself, it’s depressing to see that the desolate council estate where she was raised in Elswick, Newcastle, was very similar in style and content to the miserable maze of treacherous terraced houses where I grew up in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. Places where poverty, illiteracy, alcoholism, drugs, child abuse, domestic violence, vandalism and boredom were the main attractions.
While the working-class residents of Elswick were ravaged by the descent and dismantling of the steel and shipbuilding industries during the latter part of the 20th century, Mansfield, a mining community, was decimated and deformed by the Thatcher-led pit closures in the early to mid-1980s.
This mining community had been composed almost entirely of regional migrants, particularly from Scotland, Wales and, coincidentally, Tyneside. Indeed, the older lads I sometimes hung around with outside the local shops during my mid-teens – Carl, JJ, Biddy, Kev and Mozz – were all Geordies.
In the summer of 1985 I remember that JJ saved up enough money to get a tattoo of his beloved Newcastle United on his arm, but when he peeled the scab off after a few days it read ‘Newcastle Uniten’ instead. It seemed that even the tattoo artist in town was illiterate.
Anyway, we all laughed and poked fun at him, and he told us to ‘Ga'an away or a'll boot the shite oot ya!’ before storming off home. A week later and he then triumphantly reappeared outside of the shops, pulled up his sleeve and revealed to us that ‘Uniten’ was no more, had never even happened, for it had now been replaced by a new tattoo of a big red rose.
I asked him what the ‘Newcastle Rose’ stood for, but he said, ‘It divvn't matter, like. It looks canny. The lasses will gan mad for it.’
Around this time the accent, dialect and earthy humour of the North East had also begun to pervade wider popular culture in the UK. There was the highly successful television series, ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Pet’, the widely read ‘Viz’ comic, the volcanic rise of the footballer, Paul Gascoigne, and, of course, the ubiquitous and inimitable Newcastle Brown Ale.
The lads told me, stony-faced, that there was actually a wing in Newcastle General Hospital where men who were addicted to ‘Newkie Brown’ received treatment, and I believed them.
They never told me about Tish Murtha from Elswick though.
If she wasn’t on the telly with Terry Wogan, or in a band on Top of the Pops, or running the 1500 metres at the Olympics, how would they have known about her? How would they have known that she was a photographer, or that her work mattered, or that she was even alive? How would they have known that, in blazing black and white, she was documenting and dignifying dead-end lives like ours on a council estate which was just as dark and derelict as this one?
Flats with their windows all boarded up; the bus stop smashed to smithereens; the burnt out car at the back of Spar; the drunk uncle who staggered home from the social club on a Sunday afternoon; the stepdad who combed margarine into his hair because he couldn’t afford Brylcreem; the kids on the bottom estate who set fires in the park and danced in the ashes; the majorettes who twirled their maces and tossed them up higher than houses; the girls who pushed prams down the road as if they were ploughing a field; the mum of three who answered the door wearing sunglasses because she had two black eyes.
Sng’s documentary highlights that the main reason why people knew nothing about Tish Murtha and her photography was because she never received any financial support from the dead-eyed decision-makers who work for oblique organisations like the Arts Council.
Why would she?
This country’s establishment doesn’t understand, doesn’t respect and doesn’t care about working-class culture, its narratives, artefacts, experiences or its history. It never has and it never will. Working-class creatives are regarded as unsophisticated, untrustworthy, unruly and, much more importantly, unconnected. Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers gripping on to cheap, borrowed or stolen pens, paints and plectrums.
‘Many thanks for your recent application for funding. We regret to inform you that your project proposal has been unsuccessful on this occasion. If you would like more specific feedback …’
And so you either fund yourself or you just give up.
Twenty years ago I was able to choose the former because I’d secured a job as a lecturer in film and cultural studies at a college in Manchester. Out of my salary I self-funded, self-distributed and self-promoted numerous campaign and charity promos, music videos for struggling acts, an international short documentary and two documentary features. All of which received absolutely no financial assistance, exhibition or promotional support from publicly-funded entities like the British Film Institute, Film Hub North or HOME cinema.
In turn, my debut working-class feature film, ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’, was part-funded by my redundancy money between 2016 and 2022, and the rest was paid for by loans, credit cards and an overdraft which I couldn’t afford.
Each year students used to ask me, ‘How do you find the time to make all these films when you’re teaching us as well?’ And I’d reply, ‘It’s easy: never get married, never have kids, never get a mortgage, never own a car and never go on holiday. See? There’s plenty of time.’
‘That’s well sad, Brett. Why won’t the government fund you? Or the council?’
‘Because they don’t fund people like me, and I haven’t got the time to play their silly games.’
And you don’t have to take my word on this either.
Following her time at the influential Side Gallery in Newcastle, Tish Murtha wrote a letter to Dennis Birkwood, her college tutor at Newcastle College of Arts and Technology, which Maxine Peake also narrates in the documentary:
‘Dear Dennis
I left the Side Gallery for a number of reasons, but mainly because of their peculiar attitude to me and my work – they wanted to manipulate it to fit their group philosophy … And the Boss’ girlfriend was getting really spiteful and bitchy towards us, damaging expensive photographic work … ‘accidentally on purpose’. So, as they obviously thought it was all a big joke, and I should be grateful for any situation they offered, I told them all where to stick their job and what an offensive, incestuous little clique they were.’
In 2013 an exhausted Tish Murtha had to die from a brain aneurysm while on the dole for her photography to be finally recognised by national and international cultural commentators as the work of a major 20th century artist.
Her gloriously grim visions of broken buildings, broken people and broken Britain were ignored by the mainstream during her lifetime because they revealed truths about this country that simply made the authorities uneasy, but not ashamed: the inequality, the hypocrisy and the cruelty.
Of course, the self-entitled and self-serving right-wing establishment which the UK is cursed with relies upon, and revels in, keeping working-class culture in its place, down in its oubliette, year after year, decade after decade. At the very least it reminds the rest of the population of what to expect if they too decide to step out of line and speak up. What is more chilling however is that, while protected and empowered by the ideological and repressive state apparatus surrounding them, this establishment’s key historical figures have the experience, resources, personnel and desire to continue this war of attrition until the very end of time.
It is their country after all.
For example, only just this week the official portrait of King Charles III was unveiled and, in turn, an £8 million scheme was announced by the Tory Cabinet Office to permit schools, police stations, hospitals and councils to request a free A3-size, oak-framed copy to hang wherever they see fit.
£8 million.
Following her death, aged 57, Tish Murtha received a £100 rebate from her energy company.
She wasn’t a working-class photographer. She was a war photographer.
For those of you out there who wish to learn more about Tish Murtha and her exceptional working-class photography, you can visit www.tishmurtha.co.uk, the official website which is run by her daughter, Ella.
'My use of photography and the approach to it is based on the conviction that the fundamental value of the medium is its capacity to provide direct, accurate and vital records of the conditions, events and experiences that shape our lives.'
This is a quote from one of Patricia ‘Tish’ Murtha’s essays as narrated by Maxine Peake in Paul Sng’s observational and performative documentary, ‘Tish’, from 2023. In turn, it can be understood to be at the core of her socialist agenda as a working-class photographer and social realist documentarian.
As a 52 year old working-class filmmaker myself, it’s depressing to see that the desolate council estate where she was raised in Elswick, Newcastle, was very similar in style and content to the miserable maze of treacherous terraced houses where I grew up in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. Places where poverty, illiteracy, alcoholism, drugs, child abuse, domestic violence, vandalism and boredom were the main attractions.
While the working-class residents of Elswick were ravaged by the descent and dismantling of the steel and shipbuilding industries during the latter part of the 20th century, Mansfield, a mining community, was decimated and deformed by the Thatcher-led pit closures in the early to mid-1980s.
This mining community had been composed almost entirely of regional migrants, particularly from Scotland, Wales and, coincidentally, Tyneside. Indeed, the older lads I sometimes hung around with outside the local shops during my mid-teens – Carl, JJ, Biddy, Kev and Mozz – were all Geordies.
In the summer of 1985 I remember that JJ saved up enough money to get a tattoo of his beloved Newcastle United on his arm, but when he peeled the scab off after a few days it read ‘Newcastle Uniten’ instead. It seemed that even the tattoo artist in town was illiterate.
Anyway, we all laughed and poked fun at him, and he told us to ‘Ga'an away or a'll boot the shite oot ya!’ before storming off home. A week later and he then triumphantly reappeared outside of the shops, pulled up his sleeve and revealed to us that ‘Uniten’ was no more, had never even happened, for it had now been replaced by a new tattoo of a big red rose.
I asked him what the ‘Newcastle Rose’ stood for, but he said, ‘It divvn't matter, like. It looks canny. The lasses will gan mad for it.’
Around this time the accent, dialect and earthy humour of the North East had also begun to pervade wider popular culture in the UK. There was the highly successful television series, ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Pet’, the widely read ‘Viz’ comic, the volcanic rise of the footballer, Paul Gascoigne, and, of course, the ubiquitous and inimitable Newcastle Brown Ale.
The lads told me, stony-faced, that there was actually a wing in Newcastle General Hospital where men who were addicted to ‘Newkie Brown’ received treatment, and I believed them.
They never told me about Tish Murtha from Elswick though.
If she wasn’t on the telly with Terry Wogan, or in a band on Top of the Pops, or running the 1500 metres at the Olympics, how would they have known about her? How would they have known that she was a photographer, or that her work mattered, or that she was even alive? How would they have known that, in blazing black and white, she was documenting and dignifying dead-end lives like ours on a council estate which was just as dark and derelict as this one?
Flats with their windows all boarded up; the bus stop smashed to smithereens; the burnt out car at the back of Spar; the drunk uncle who staggered home from the social club on a Sunday afternoon; the stepdad who combed margarine into his hair because he couldn’t afford Brylcreem; the kids on the bottom estate who set fires in the park and danced in the ashes; the majorettes who twirled their maces and tossed them up higher than houses; the girls who pushed prams down the road as if they were ploughing a field; the mum of three who answered the door wearing sunglasses because she had two black eyes.
Sng’s documentary highlights that the main reason why people knew nothing about Tish Murtha and her photography was because she never received any financial support from the dead-eyed decision-makers who work for oblique organisations like the Arts Council.
Why would she?
This country’s establishment doesn’t understand, doesn’t respect and doesn’t care about working-class culture, its narratives, artefacts, experiences or its history. It never has and it never will. Working-class creatives are regarded as unsophisticated, untrustworthy, unruly and, much more importantly, unconnected. Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers gripping on to cheap, borrowed or stolen pens, paints and plectrums.
‘Many thanks for your recent application for funding. We regret to inform you that your project proposal has been unsuccessful on this occasion. If you would like more specific feedback …’
And so you either fund yourself or you just give up.
Twenty years ago I was able to choose the former because I’d secured a job as a lecturer in film and cultural studies at a college in Manchester. Out of my salary I self-funded, self-distributed and self-promoted numerous campaign and charity promos, music videos for struggling acts, an international short documentary and two documentary features. All of which received absolutely no financial assistance, exhibition or promotional support from publicly-funded entities like the British Film Institute, Film Hub North or HOME cinema.
In turn, my debut working-class feature film, ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’, was part-funded by my redundancy money between 2016 and 2022, and the rest was paid for by loans, credit cards and an overdraft which I couldn’t afford.
Each year students used to ask me, ‘How do you find the time to make all these films when you’re teaching us as well?’ And I’d reply, ‘It’s easy: never get married, never have kids, never get a mortgage, never own a car and never go on holiday. See? There’s plenty of time.’
‘That’s well sad, Brett. Why won’t the government fund you? Or the council?’
‘Because they don’t fund people like me, and I haven’t got the time to play their silly games.’
And you don’t have to take my word on this either.
Following her time at the influential Side Gallery in Newcastle, Tish Murtha wrote a letter to Dennis Birkwood, her college tutor at Newcastle College of Arts and Technology, which Maxine Peake also narrates in the documentary:
‘Dear Dennis
I left the Side Gallery for a number of reasons, but mainly because of their peculiar attitude to me and my work – they wanted to manipulate it to fit their group philosophy … And the Boss’ girlfriend was getting really spiteful and bitchy towards us, damaging expensive photographic work … ‘accidentally on purpose’. So, as they obviously thought it was all a big joke, and I should be grateful for any situation they offered, I told them all where to stick their job and what an offensive, incestuous little clique they were.’
In 2013 an exhausted Tish Murtha had to die from a brain aneurysm while on the dole for her photography to be finally recognised by national and international cultural commentators as the work of a major 20th century artist.
Her gloriously grim visions of broken buildings, broken people and broken Britain were ignored by the mainstream during her lifetime because they revealed truths about this country that simply made the authorities uneasy, but not ashamed: the inequality, the hypocrisy and the cruelty.
Of course, the self-entitled and self-serving right-wing establishment which the UK is cursed with relies upon, and revels in, keeping working-class culture in its place, down in its oubliette, year after year, decade after decade. At the very least it reminds the rest of the population of what to expect if they too decide to step out of line and speak up. What is more chilling however is that, while protected and empowered by the ideological and repressive state apparatus surrounding them, this establishment’s key historical figures have the experience, resources, personnel and desire to continue this war of attrition until the very end of time.
It is their country after all.
For example, only just this week the official portrait of King Charles III was unveiled and, in turn, an £8 million scheme was announced by the Tory Cabinet Office to permit schools, police stations, hospitals and councils to request a free A3-size, oak-framed copy to hang wherever they see fit.
£8 million.
Following her death, aged 57, Tish Murtha received a £100 rebate from her energy company.
She wasn’t a working-class photographer. She was a war photographer.
For those of you out there who wish to learn more about Tish Murtha and her exceptional working-class photography, you can visit www.tishmurtha.co.uk, the official website which is run by her daughter, Ella.
Interview
Dr. Tom Fallows
(American Film Institute)
discusses 'The Independent Cinema of George A. Romero'
Dr. Tom Fallows
(American Film Institute)
discusses 'The Independent Cinema of George A. Romero'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
December 6th 2023
by Brett Gregory
December 6th 2023
Transcript
BG: Victor Halperin's movie ‘White Zombie’ from 1932, Jacques Tourneur’s ‘I Walked with a Zombie’ from 1943, Gordon Douglas' 'Zombies on Broadway’ from 1945 … All early warning signs which were ignored by the great and the good alike until …
TF: Hi, Brett, my name is Tom Fallows. I work for the American Film Institute and I'm the author of ‘George A. Romero’s Independent Cinema: Horror, Industry, Economics’ published by Edinburgh University Press.
BG: Welcome, Tom. So, born in the Bronx in New York in 1940, who was George A. Romero?
TF: George Romero is an American independent filmmaker best known for his series of zombie films which spanned from 1968 to 2009. Beginning with ‘Night of the Living Dead’ Romero and his collaborators essentially invented the modern idea of the zombie.
BG: What do you mean by ‘the modern idea of the zombie’?
TF: Traditionally, zombies had their roots in Haitian folklore where they were basically dead bodies bought back to life as slaves through magic. Romero removed this magical component and reimagined the zombie as a mindless ghoul hungry for human flesh. In the process he also transformed them into something more immediate. He embedded his creation into the heart of America where for US audiences they were no longer some kind of existential other: they were deceased friends, neighbours and family members.
BG: Romero's ‘Night of the Living Dead’ in 1968 was much more than a horror film, now wasn't it?
TF: ‘Night …’ was famous for being one of the first US films to have an African-American hero where his race is never mentioned. Romero insists that lead actor Duane Jones was only cast because he was the best actor among his friends, but race is crucial to the film. Jones's hero ‘Ben’ is fiercely intelligent and capable, and ends up hiding from the zombie hordes in a farmhouse where he's trapped with a white patriarchal father who undercuts Ben's agency at every turn, and the film ends in kind of the starkest way possible with Ben surviving the zombies but killed by a white posse that had supposedly come to the rescue.
As other critics have pointed out, the images in this black and white horror film were evocative of a harrowing real world violence at the time where bloody attacks and assassinations on civil rights leaders and protesters frequently played out in the streets and on the evening news. In that sense there are moments in ‘Night …’ with its gritty low-budget aesthetic that feel almost like a documentary, and demonstrated Romero, whether he admitted it then or not, as a socially conscious counterculture filmmaker with his finger on the pulse of what was going on in America.
BG: So how would you describe Romero's view on people, on humanity?
TF: A main theme of his film is really communities, and how people interact with each other. When its dystopic such as in his zombie films it's about the impossibility for humans to function collaboratively, and how this failure often results in our destruction. The human survivors of the zombie apocalypse can never work together and this failure ultimately leads to catastrophe. This is a threat that I think is very, very current in 2024.
BG: People not helping one another during difficult times, motivated only by self-interest? I'm … I'm … shocked! So what role does Romero's use of explicit imagery play in all this? You know, the violence, the gore, the consumption of self-centred human beings?
TF: The key aesthetic in Romero's films is obviously the violence. It's the gore: his films often revel in scenes of carnage and zombies devouring human flesh in extreme close-up. While the violence in these films has been controversial, often resulting in X ratings or getting the films banned, it never feels gratuitous, it's never violence for violence sake. To me the gore is crucial to Romero's politics: it gives an edge to the satire, it presents his rhetoric as something fierce and exceptionally angry and urgent. In that way these films are almost like the best punk music in that they are confrontational, anarchic and disdainful of the status quo.
BG: You mentioned ‘these films’. Tell us a little about his follow-up feature ‘Dawn of the Dead’.
TF: So after ‘Night’s …’ critique of race and racism, the sequel ‘Dawn of the Dead’ in 1978 turned to issues of consumerism in a very pointed manner. It's set in a shopping mall where it's almost impossible to see the difference between the zombies and contemporary American shoppers. ‘They are us!’ is a key line in the film and a key line in Romero's zombie cinema. The survivors in ‘Dawn …’ meanwhile use the mall as a refuge and the comfort they get from its wares allows them to ignore what's happening in the outside world. Again, this is an overt plainly-stated satire on the direction Romero felt America was headed in the 1970s. Ultimately, the film's not about consumerist greed as some critics have stated, but it's about ignoring the problems we collectively face as a society.
BG: Now what I find very interesting is that not only were ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Dawn of the Dead’ both shot in Pittsburgh, Romero's production company, Laurel Entertainment, was also situated in Pittsburgh rather than say Hollywood.
TF: Pittsburgh was crucial. As an independent filmmaker it gave him the freedom to tell the stories that he wanted to tell, largely without the interference of Hollywood or corporate decision-making. To begin with he was working with low budgets and drawing upon the local business community for financing which really allowed him to fly under the radar and produce the kinds of bold politically radical films that we've been talking about. It also gave him space to experiment with alternative working practices and, at the start of his career, his films were much more collaborative or egalitarian than traditional modes of filmmaking allow. Romero and collaborators, such as John Russo and Russ Streiner, were really striving for a democratic process of filmmaking. ‘Night of the Living Dead’ particularly was made in this uniquely collaborative style where, although Romero was credited as the director, all the key decision-making was done collectively by a core team from editing to shot selection to production design to core aspects of the screenplay.
BG: It sounds like a socialist cinematic utopia. What could have possibly gone wrong?
TF: Although it started as a grassroots organisation, the international success of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ – which earned over $55 million at the box office – really changed the shape of their operations. After ‘Dawn of the Dead’ the firm went public and it became beholden to shareholders and committee meetings, just the kind of bureaucracy that Romero tried to avoid and that ultimately pushed him away from the company in the mid-1980s.
BG: Capitalism crushes creative collaboration. Stop The Press! This said however, Romero, Laurel Entertainment and their horde of zombies actually did bring some genuine prosperity to Pittsburgh in more ways than one, didn't they?
TF: Although this experiment in egalitarian film production didn't last, Romero always valued the creative input of collaborators, and his company nurtured a base of film workers that ultimately helped transform Pittsburgh more widely. This base of trained professionals fed into Pittsburgh and transformed it into a leading film centre. It remains a leading film centre to this day with Hollywood productions such as ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ using that talent base in Pittsburgh to create these big budget films.
BG: And, of course, Romero's cinematic influence spread much farther than Pennsylvania.
TF: In terms of Romero's impact on independent cinema more widely this can be seen most evidently in horror. ‘Night of the Living Dead’ awakened filmmakers such as Tobe Hooper with ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and Wes Craven with ‘Last House on the Left’ to not only the socio-political potential of the genre but also its affordability, demonstrating filmmaking as something that could be achieved outside of Hollywood, and even outside of New York, without compromising on their artistic vision or political ideology. ‘Halloween’ director, John Carpenter, famously once said if any independent filmmaker tells you that they weren't influenced by Romero and ‘Night of the Living Dead’, they're lying.
BG: And what about the young pretenders who have followed in his wake? Sprightly socialist transgressives, or lethargic capitalist copycats?
TF: Romero’s idea of the zombie has become dominant and it’s something we now see in everything from the AMC TV show, ‘The Walking Dead’, to Zac Snyder’s recent Netflix film, ‘Army of the Dead’. But what these recent films and TV shows tends to leave out is, as you say, the transgressive political address that has defined Romero's critical reputation.
BG: Finally, George A. Romero died in 2017. How will you remember him, Tom?
TF: Romero ended his career in Toronto, once again producing low-budget zombie films that were at once fiercely critical of American capitalism and deeply humanist in their approach to characters. I think the best thing that you can say about Romero is that he was always true to his countercultural roots and never stopped believing in the prospect of something better for America.
BG: Great to have had you on the show, man. Many thanks for your time and your insights.
TF: Thanks, Brett, it's been a pleasure to talk to you.
Interview
Dr. Louis Bayman
(University of Southampton)
discusses 'British Folk Horror on Film'
Dr. Louis Bayman
(University of Southampton)
discusses 'British Folk Horror on Film'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
November 21st 2023
by Brett Gregory
November 21st 2023
Transcript
BG: Even before the suicidal insanity of Brexit the UK has always been regarded by the wider world as a very posh, very violent and very strange country: out of place and out of time, lost in its own history, locked inside one of its own dungeons.
Indeed, to acquire some sort of insight into the oddity of our people, our customs and our belief systems, one only needs to watch four films: ‘The Witchfinder General’ from 1968, the unsung classic ‘Cry of the Banshee’ from 1970, ‘Blood on Satan's Claw’ from 1971 and, of course, ‘The Wicker Man’ from 1973.
LB: Hi there, Brett. It's really nice to be here and thanks very much for inviting me to speak to your listeners at Arts Express. My name is Louis Bayman and I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Southampton here in the UK.
BG: Many thanks for lending us your time, Louis. So, folk horror.
LB: British cinema and, in fact, television in the late 1960s and 1970s contributed many of what's now recognised as being the classics of folk horror. The folk horror scholar, Dawn Keetley, in fact points out that most horror can in some way find its traces back in tales around the campfire, in folk lore, in myths and legends that were particularly popular back in the earlier kinds of periods which folk horror often represents.
BG: And what about its cultural history?
LB: There had been an interest in folklore and the folkloric past at least since Victorian times. James Fraser and ‘The Golden Bough’, actually not a really particularly scholarly reliable compendium of supposed pagan practices, but nevertheless one that was enormously influential on popular modern understandings of what might have existed before modernity in Britain. We're interested in looking back at the societies that we feel that we've supplanted as well, of course, as looking forward to the society that we may wish to become in the future.
BG: Fascinating. Unlike most other film genres folk horror is very much seated in British history, its internal conflicts and its desire for self-destruction.
LB: Folk horror stages times of social crisis. So ‘Witchfinder General’ is set in the 1640s during the English Revolution, ‘Blood on Satan's Claw’ is set in the very early 18th century, again in England, and there's frequent reference made to the Jacobite rebellions which were ongoing at the time. And then there's also a film called ‘Cry on the Banshee’ from 1970 which was set in Elizabethan England.
LB: These are films that are squarely about Britain itself and British history, and can't simply be solved by a group of peasants with pitchforks chasing after Frankenstein's monster. There's an important class element here as well because the gothic tends to be set in the castles of barons and counts; there's a whole other history about how the gothic is a product of a modern England which is going through the Industrial Revolution / capitalist liberalism but looking anxiously back on the aristocratic past that it hasn't entirely left behind. However, what you get with folk horror is much more of a concentration on the peasantry which, of course, made up the vast bulk of the population.
BG: What's distinctive about folk horror though? What separates it and, in my opinion, elevates it beyond other horror sub-genres?
LB: Whereas in the traditional gothic you might have vampires, werewolves, other kinds of ghouls that threaten the community from outside, in folk horror what's distinctive is that it is the community itself that is the source of violence, of anguish and fear. In folk horror it's civilisation itself which is the problem: its belief systems, systems of ritual, systems of punishment and justice which are actually particularly threatening. So it's not a fear of savagery but actually of customs, of lifestyles, of arable agricultural land – rather than the wilderness that we might associate with the sublime of the gothic – and it's a fear of a particular form of education and social development; fears of how what is totemic for one society could be taboo for another.
BG: I remember sitting in the living room in the 1980s and watching ‘Psychomania’ on the television, hypnotised by its premise that with a little bit of witchcraft and self-belief suicide and death were just the beginning. However, these topics of teenage interest in our current happy-clappy corporate culture are now seemingly verboten.
LG: What I think is most radical is that folk horror removes any sense of there being a stable set of values at all, or any normative social order; both traditional society, pagan or cult worship and modernity are all shown to be equally mad. In ‘The Wicker Man’ Howie’s Christianity is just one form of ritual fanaticism which removed from the social structures that give it meaning and give it force seems perhaps to be just as ridiculous as the veneration of the old gods of the pagan community that he finds himself among.
So I think that folk horror, actually what's most disturbing about it, is the way that it points to how some societies and belief systems actively engage in ritual sacrifice. Other forms of social organisation might engage in corporisation, in the enclosures of the land, in persecution of heresy. And our adherence to one or another of those belief systems is not based on their fundamental rightness, but is based simply on accidents of history: the things that we find right and proper are considered by people from other cultures as horrific and vice versa.
BG: And, symbolically, we see such sacrifices played out over and over again when, for example, a prime minister is voted out of office. The right-wing mass media leading us to believe that this is some sort of ceremonial blood transfusion, but it isn't: as a country, as a collection of countries, we're actually dying, rotting on a throne like a Francis Bacon painting.
LB: There's a sense that maybe a certain vitality or a certain form of British pre-eminence is now slipping away and in that all sorts of other alternative forms of social organisation could come to the fore. And as well as this I think decolonisation is extremely important. No longer is weirdness and foreignness located in far-flung places across the rest of the world but actually within the British Isles itself, perhaps we're actually forced to look at ourselves now that we're no longer an imperial power.
This is the same kind of time that E. P. Thompson was talking about the rise of the English working class, a book which, in particular, is about the decline of handicraft, artisanal trades and ways of life, the very things that folk horror is particularly interested. Tom Nairn was writing about the breakup of Britain, and one of the articles, one of the chapters in the book that we've just co-edited, by Beth Carroll is about the uncomfortable position that Celtic cultures play within a broader understanding of Britain, and it draws attention to how many folk horrors are set, for example, in Wales, in Cornwall and in Scotland. So while Tom Nairn was writing at the end of the 1970s about a future breakup of Britain, in some ways we can see folk horror already in the decade prior to that kind of anticipating this notion.
John Berger, the Marxist art critic, had caused a scandal with his television show from 1972, ‘Ways of Seeing’, where he de-mythologises landscape painting by showing the ways that it actually asserts the dominance of a landholding class as being beautiful and as being part of nature, rather than the actual violent social process of enclosures and corporisation that it really was.
So there's a very similar demythologising impulse there in the films of folk horror which, as I say, on the one hand can be related to the counterculture of the late 1960s or a sense that society in general is perhaps falling apart or disintegrating, there's a great deal of disorder, and maybe folk horror is a fear of that sort of disorder; but underlying it even further a more relativized place and understanding Britain's own place within history, a recognition of the violence that formed British history and perhaps also a certain insecurity about what exactly Britain's future might be.
BG: It's such an all-encompassing and deeply involving film genre. For those who wish to investigate further, as well as your book, what would you recommend?
LB: Any of your listeners who are fans of the genre might have seen the recent documentary, ‘Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched’, which is a three-hour long documentary that sprawls across a hundred years of film history from one part of the globe to another, and seems to pretty much cover everything that it possibly can do with any kind of sense of strangeness that might be attached to prior or rural beliefs and ways of life.
BG: And in conclusion, Louis, how would you personally sum up British folk horror?
LB: So I would say ultimately it speaks to a certain confusion about who we are as a society and where we're going. I don't think that there's the same kind of faith in progress that there was in the Victorian era or in the middle of the 20th century, and so folk horror speaks to a certain fear and an anxiety about social change, but without progress where are we going as a nation, as a people, as a class? What is there left for us to believe in?
BG: I couldn't have put it better myself, Louis. It's been an absolute pleasure.
BG: Even before the suicidal insanity of Brexit the UK has always been regarded by the wider world as a very posh, very violent and very strange country: out of place and out of time, lost in its own history, locked inside one of its own dungeons.
Indeed, to acquire some sort of insight into the oddity of our people, our customs and our belief systems, one only needs to watch four films: ‘The Witchfinder General’ from 1968, the unsung classic ‘Cry of the Banshee’ from 1970, ‘Blood on Satan's Claw’ from 1971 and, of course, ‘The Wicker Man’ from 1973.
LB: Hi there, Brett. It's really nice to be here and thanks very much for inviting me to speak to your listeners at Arts Express. My name is Louis Bayman and I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Southampton here in the UK.
BG: Many thanks for lending us your time, Louis. So, folk horror.
LB: British cinema and, in fact, television in the late 1960s and 1970s contributed many of what's now recognised as being the classics of folk horror. The folk horror scholar, Dawn Keetley, in fact points out that most horror can in some way find its traces back in tales around the campfire, in folk lore, in myths and legends that were particularly popular back in the earlier kinds of periods which folk horror often represents.
BG: And what about its cultural history?
LB: There had been an interest in folklore and the folkloric past at least since Victorian times. James Fraser and ‘The Golden Bough’, actually not a really particularly scholarly reliable compendium of supposed pagan practices, but nevertheless one that was enormously influential on popular modern understandings of what might have existed before modernity in Britain. We're interested in looking back at the societies that we feel that we've supplanted as well, of course, as looking forward to the society that we may wish to become in the future.
BG: Fascinating. Unlike most other film genres folk horror is very much seated in British history, its internal conflicts and its desire for self-destruction.
LB: Folk horror stages times of social crisis. So ‘Witchfinder General’ is set in the 1640s during the English Revolution, ‘Blood on Satan's Claw’ is set in the very early 18th century, again in England, and there's frequent reference made to the Jacobite rebellions which were ongoing at the time. And then there's also a film called ‘Cry on the Banshee’ from 1970 which was set in Elizabethan England.
LB: These are films that are squarely about Britain itself and British history, and can't simply be solved by a group of peasants with pitchforks chasing after Frankenstein's monster. There's an important class element here as well because the gothic tends to be set in the castles of barons and counts; there's a whole other history about how the gothic is a product of a modern England which is going through the Industrial Revolution / capitalist liberalism but looking anxiously back on the aristocratic past that it hasn't entirely left behind. However, what you get with folk horror is much more of a concentration on the peasantry which, of course, made up the vast bulk of the population.
BG: What's distinctive about folk horror though? What separates it and, in my opinion, elevates it beyond other horror sub-genres?
LB: Whereas in the traditional gothic you might have vampires, werewolves, other kinds of ghouls that threaten the community from outside, in folk horror what's distinctive is that it is the community itself that is the source of violence, of anguish and fear. In folk horror it's civilisation itself which is the problem: its belief systems, systems of ritual, systems of punishment and justice which are actually particularly threatening. So it's not a fear of savagery but actually of customs, of lifestyles, of arable agricultural land – rather than the wilderness that we might associate with the sublime of the gothic – and it's a fear of a particular form of education and social development; fears of how what is totemic for one society could be taboo for another.
BG: I remember sitting in the living room in the 1980s and watching ‘Psychomania’ on the television, hypnotised by its premise that with a little bit of witchcraft and self-belief suicide and death were just the beginning. However, these topics of teenage interest in our current happy-clappy corporate culture are now seemingly verboten.
LG: What I think is most radical is that folk horror removes any sense of there being a stable set of values at all, or any normative social order; both traditional society, pagan or cult worship and modernity are all shown to be equally mad. In ‘The Wicker Man’ Howie’s Christianity is just one form of ritual fanaticism which removed from the social structures that give it meaning and give it force seems perhaps to be just as ridiculous as the veneration of the old gods of the pagan community that he finds himself among.
So I think that folk horror, actually what's most disturbing about it, is the way that it points to how some societies and belief systems actively engage in ritual sacrifice. Other forms of social organisation might engage in corporisation, in the enclosures of the land, in persecution of heresy. And our adherence to one or another of those belief systems is not based on their fundamental rightness, but is based simply on accidents of history: the things that we find right and proper are considered by people from other cultures as horrific and vice versa.
BG: And, symbolically, we see such sacrifices played out over and over again when, for example, a prime minister is voted out of office. The right-wing mass media leading us to believe that this is some sort of ceremonial blood transfusion, but it isn't: as a country, as a collection of countries, we're actually dying, rotting on a throne like a Francis Bacon painting.
LB: There's a sense that maybe a certain vitality or a certain form of British pre-eminence is now slipping away and in that all sorts of other alternative forms of social organisation could come to the fore. And as well as this I think decolonisation is extremely important. No longer is weirdness and foreignness located in far-flung places across the rest of the world but actually within the British Isles itself, perhaps we're actually forced to look at ourselves now that we're no longer an imperial power.
This is the same kind of time that E. P. Thompson was talking about the rise of the English working class, a book which, in particular, is about the decline of handicraft, artisanal trades and ways of life, the very things that folk horror is particularly interested. Tom Nairn was writing about the breakup of Britain, and one of the articles, one of the chapters in the book that we've just co-edited, by Beth Carroll is about the uncomfortable position that Celtic cultures play within a broader understanding of Britain, and it draws attention to how many folk horrors are set, for example, in Wales, in Cornwall and in Scotland. So while Tom Nairn was writing at the end of the 1970s about a future breakup of Britain, in some ways we can see folk horror already in the decade prior to that kind of anticipating this notion.
John Berger, the Marxist art critic, had caused a scandal with his television show from 1972, ‘Ways of Seeing’, where he de-mythologises landscape painting by showing the ways that it actually asserts the dominance of a landholding class as being beautiful and as being part of nature, rather than the actual violent social process of enclosures and corporisation that it really was.
So there's a very similar demythologising impulse there in the films of folk horror which, as I say, on the one hand can be related to the counterculture of the late 1960s or a sense that society in general is perhaps falling apart or disintegrating, there's a great deal of disorder, and maybe folk horror is a fear of that sort of disorder; but underlying it even further a more relativized place and understanding Britain's own place within history, a recognition of the violence that formed British history and perhaps also a certain insecurity about what exactly Britain's future might be.
BG: It's such an all-encompassing and deeply involving film genre. For those who wish to investigate further, as well as your book, what would you recommend?
LB: Any of your listeners who are fans of the genre might have seen the recent documentary, ‘Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched’, which is a three-hour long documentary that sprawls across a hundred years of film history from one part of the globe to another, and seems to pretty much cover everything that it possibly can do with any kind of sense of strangeness that might be attached to prior or rural beliefs and ways of life.
BG: And in conclusion, Louis, how would you personally sum up British folk horror?
LB: So I would say ultimately it speaks to a certain confusion about who we are as a society and where we're going. I don't think that there's the same kind of faith in progress that there was in the Victorian era or in the middle of the 20th century, and so folk horror speaks to a certain fear and an anxiety about social change, but without progress where are we going as a nation, as a people, as a class? What is there left for us to believe in?
BG: I couldn't have put it better myself, Louis. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Interview
Dr. Matt Alford
(University of Bath)
discusses 'Theaters of War'
Dr. Matt Alford
(University of Bath)
discusses 'Theaters of War'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
November 14th 2023
by Brett Gregory
November 14th 2023
Transcript
BG: The French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, outlines for us how our values, desires, attitudes and tastes are shaped by wider capitalist-consumer society and culture on a daily basis. He calls this network of influence the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ and it includes the ‘soft power’ of, for instance, the media, education, religion and the family. In turn, Althusser also identifies how this societal framework of influence is enforced by the ‘Repressive State Apparatus’. That is to say, the ‘hard power’ of, for example, the military, the police, the judiciary and the prison system. On this evening's show we're going to be discussing a 2022 independent documentary called ‘Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and the CIA took Hollywood’, an incendiary exposé which reveals how Althusser’s ideas have been combined to produce propagandist entertainment products like Paramount Pictures ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, Amazon Prime's ‘Jack Ryan’ series and Activision's ‘Call of Duty’. But first let's listen to the trailer.
MA: Hi, Brett, my name is Matt Alford. I teach at the University of Bath in the UK and I specialise in the politicisation of media, especially film, and particularly as it relates to British and American foreign policies.
BG: Nice one, Matt. So please tell us, as ordinary citizens and consumers, what are we up against?
MA: The Department of Defense has got a budget of $800 billion. It's an obscene amount of money to waste and, you know, there have been all these stories for decades about, you know, the Pentagon spending $640 on a toilet seat and a $1,000 on nacho cheese warmer and things like that. It's a hugely wasteful organisation. It’s not that it's just wasteful and splurging money around but actually that it really quite actively and desperately needs to spend a lot of money on PR, and that's not just to attract personnel but, I think, that it needs to con the whole world and the American public of course, most importantly, into thinking that the American national security state is a force for global stability and it isn't, it just isn't; it hardly ever is. The United States is very commonly a destabilising force in many conflicts.
BG: And what would motivate a powerful governmental entity like the Department of Defense to carry out such a sustained PR assault on us? Haven't they got actual wars to fight and real spies to catch?
MA: I think this need for PR was perhaps most clear in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, and the whole National Security State started pouring money into PR because at that point there was even less rationale for these heavily State subsidised taxpayer systems of domination to exist because there was no enemy. It seems a little bit different now because we're in a multi-polar world and have been since 2012, maybe 2017, but in the 1990s there was a real opportunity to have developed and forged peaceful alternatives. I mean, there still is but it was extremely clear at that point and I always think it's such a great tragedy and it's, you know, looking at international relations over the past thirty years has just been like watching a slow motion car crash.
BG: And what motivated you personally to pursue this research topic, to co-author your 2017 book ‘National Security Cinema’ with Tom Secker and to co-produce Roger Stahl’s ‘Theaters of War’ documentary?
MA: About twenty years ago I began a lengthy private correspondence with Noam Chomsky, the world's most celebrated anarchist and philosopher, so it was really that experience which drove my research but, that said, there were definitely some politically distinct films around that time, right at the start of my research process. So, for example, ‘Behind Enemy Lines’ which was set in Bosnia, ‘Munich’ which was about Israel-Palestine and ‘Hotel Rwanda’; and these were all received as moderate, uncontroversial mainstream movies. It was only really when I took a more forensic look at them that I could see that they were actually consistent with much more dubious government policies, and they actually had imperialist ideas quite subtly baked into them. So, take an example like ‘Three Kings’, this anti-war comedy set in Iraq; it starred Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney, really good. But as good as it was the underlying message of the film was that the United States had been morally inconsistent in the first Gulf War of 1991 and, by implication, this left open the idea that a full scale American invasion or Allied invasion that advanced all the way to Baghdad would have been better than what they actually did in the real world. And so that meant that when the film's director met George W. Bush in 1999, way before 9/11, he said to Bush, ‘Look, my film is going to challenge your father's legacy on Iraq’, a young George W. Bush was able to shoot back, ‘Well, I'm going to have to finish the job then aren't I?
BG: Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 documentary ‘Triumph of the Will’ is often cited as fetishizing Nazism. Is Hollywood fetishizing US cultural imperialism?
MA: In a hundred years time I doubt that cultural historians will be discussing ‘Triumph of the Will’ in the same breath as ‘Transformers 12’. I mean, the Nazis were systematically and deliberately glorifying a particular man, a totalitarian system, so I do think there is a bit of a difference there. To be fair though ‘Top Gun 2’ really does have stronger echoes of genuine fascism. I'd say in my country the two most well-known film journalists are Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo. Now they talked about ‘Top Gun 2’ and they loved it and, in fact, they scornfully dismissed any political concerns about it. They said ‘it's a fictional country in a fictional story and it doesn't matter. It's a cartoon, it exists in a cartoony world’ and then they put on these sort of silly voices to mock people like me who read the film politically. I think it's legitimate to enjoy a film on its own merits but I don't think it's good to ignore constantly the systematic application of military PR across thousands of film and TV products and also, I think, particularly in the case of ‘Top Gun 2’ … I mean State involvement in that film was so in your face I think that it's kind of weird to ignore or dismiss it.
BG: Surely if the military are at it then so also are, for example, the police. I mean people love their crime dramas.
MA: Absolutely, Brett. Yeah, I completely agree. I think it's reasonable to include the FBI and major police forces like the LAPD and the NYPD in our definition of a ‘Securitized State’. If we include the police the numbers of productions supported by the security state does zip up a little bit and it takes us well past 10,000.
BG: Is it just movies and TV shows? What about video games which are played for hours on end by teenagers in the supposed safety and security of their bedrooms?
MA: Yeah, there are other entertainment products targeted and integrated into the National Security State. There is reliable evidence to indicate that the US and UK militaries have supported … so ‘Doom’, for example. ‘America's Army’ was the most downloaded game for a long time in the early 2000s. ‘Rainbow 6’, ‘Homefront’, ‘Call of Duty’, ‘Medal of Honor’. There was a game called ‘Mercenaries 2: World in Flames’ which requires the gamer to take part in an invasion of Venezuela because this Hugo Chavez socialist-type leader has used nuclear weapons on the Allies. Now the company that made that had previously developed training aids for the US Army but claims it didn't cooperate with the Government on that particular product. You know, that kind of idea Venezuela nuking someone – even having nuclear weapons – it's just ridiculous and it's actually a plot device that was used in the Amazon Prime show ‘Jack Ryan’, that hugely popular series [and] insane threat inflation.
BG: But isn't it just entertainment? Aren't we all grown adults free to make up our own minds? Or does history tell us different?
MA: Entertainment can really exert a pivotal impact on society. There's a historian called John H Franklin and he said that without ‘Birth of a Nation’ from 1915 – the explicitly racist movie – he said that without that film the Ku Klux Klan would not have been reborn. If we talk about the US military in particular, I'd say that if these systems weren't in place, I'd say that within a few years I think the US would probably lose all legitimacy and wouldn't be able to use its force overseas. Which is not far off really what happened for a few years in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War.
BG: Surely the US is not the only guilty nation? Surely the UK, for instance, also has its fat fingers stuck in such political pies?
MA: Well, I have looked at other national cinematic systems a little bit and in the UK the Ministry of Defence we now know has worked on hundreds of entertainment productions including films like ‘Kingsman’, ‘KickAss’, various James Bond movies and we are examining the British case now systematically which is being led by a PhD researcher. What I'd say though is that while it is obviously a good idea to pick apart and generally oppose all propaganda I mean, by any measure, and that's military size, film industry size, foreign policy ambitions, global cultural influence, the United States just dwarfs everybody.
BG: So how can concerned citizens and their families actually watch your documentary ‘Theaters of War’?
MA: Well, contact me on Facebook or on YouTube. I'm on Dr Matt Alford ‘War, Laughs and Lies’. That's if you've got any problems trying to acquire the film, and if you're a student you should be able to find it for free through your library on the system called Kanopy.
BG: Great stuff, Matt. Powerful subject matter. Let's hope people will now think twice about what they pay to entertain themselves.
MA: Thanks very much, Brett. Great talking to you.
BG: The French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, outlines for us how our values, desires, attitudes and tastes are shaped by wider capitalist-consumer society and culture on a daily basis. He calls this network of influence the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ and it includes the ‘soft power’ of, for instance, the media, education, religion and the family. In turn, Althusser also identifies how this societal framework of influence is enforced by the ‘Repressive State Apparatus’. That is to say, the ‘hard power’ of, for example, the military, the police, the judiciary and the prison system. On this evening's show we're going to be discussing a 2022 independent documentary called ‘Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and the CIA took Hollywood’, an incendiary exposé which reveals how Althusser’s ideas have been combined to produce propagandist entertainment products like Paramount Pictures ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, Amazon Prime's ‘Jack Ryan’ series and Activision's ‘Call of Duty’. But first let's listen to the trailer.
MA: Hi, Brett, my name is Matt Alford. I teach at the University of Bath in the UK and I specialise in the politicisation of media, especially film, and particularly as it relates to British and American foreign policies.
BG: Nice one, Matt. So please tell us, as ordinary citizens and consumers, what are we up against?
MA: The Department of Defense has got a budget of $800 billion. It's an obscene amount of money to waste and, you know, there have been all these stories for decades about, you know, the Pentagon spending $640 on a toilet seat and a $1,000 on nacho cheese warmer and things like that. It's a hugely wasteful organisation. It’s not that it's just wasteful and splurging money around but actually that it really quite actively and desperately needs to spend a lot of money on PR, and that's not just to attract personnel but, I think, that it needs to con the whole world and the American public of course, most importantly, into thinking that the American national security state is a force for global stability and it isn't, it just isn't; it hardly ever is. The United States is very commonly a destabilising force in many conflicts.
BG: And what would motivate a powerful governmental entity like the Department of Defense to carry out such a sustained PR assault on us? Haven't they got actual wars to fight and real spies to catch?
MA: I think this need for PR was perhaps most clear in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, and the whole National Security State started pouring money into PR because at that point there was even less rationale for these heavily State subsidised taxpayer systems of domination to exist because there was no enemy. It seems a little bit different now because we're in a multi-polar world and have been since 2012, maybe 2017, but in the 1990s there was a real opportunity to have developed and forged peaceful alternatives. I mean, there still is but it was extremely clear at that point and I always think it's such a great tragedy and it's, you know, looking at international relations over the past thirty years has just been like watching a slow motion car crash.
BG: And what motivated you personally to pursue this research topic, to co-author your 2017 book ‘National Security Cinema’ with Tom Secker and to co-produce Roger Stahl’s ‘Theaters of War’ documentary?
MA: About twenty years ago I began a lengthy private correspondence with Noam Chomsky, the world's most celebrated anarchist and philosopher, so it was really that experience which drove my research but, that said, there were definitely some politically distinct films around that time, right at the start of my research process. So, for example, ‘Behind Enemy Lines’ which was set in Bosnia, ‘Munich’ which was about Israel-Palestine and ‘Hotel Rwanda’; and these were all received as moderate, uncontroversial mainstream movies. It was only really when I took a more forensic look at them that I could see that they were actually consistent with much more dubious government policies, and they actually had imperialist ideas quite subtly baked into them. So, take an example like ‘Three Kings’, this anti-war comedy set in Iraq; it starred Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney, really good. But as good as it was the underlying message of the film was that the United States had been morally inconsistent in the first Gulf War of 1991 and, by implication, this left open the idea that a full scale American invasion or Allied invasion that advanced all the way to Baghdad would have been better than what they actually did in the real world. And so that meant that when the film's director met George W. Bush in 1999, way before 9/11, he said to Bush, ‘Look, my film is going to challenge your father's legacy on Iraq’, a young George W. Bush was able to shoot back, ‘Well, I'm going to have to finish the job then aren't I?
BG: Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 documentary ‘Triumph of the Will’ is often cited as fetishizing Nazism. Is Hollywood fetishizing US cultural imperialism?
MA: In a hundred years time I doubt that cultural historians will be discussing ‘Triumph of the Will’ in the same breath as ‘Transformers 12’. I mean, the Nazis were systematically and deliberately glorifying a particular man, a totalitarian system, so I do think there is a bit of a difference there. To be fair though ‘Top Gun 2’ really does have stronger echoes of genuine fascism. I'd say in my country the two most well-known film journalists are Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo. Now they talked about ‘Top Gun 2’ and they loved it and, in fact, they scornfully dismissed any political concerns about it. They said ‘it's a fictional country in a fictional story and it doesn't matter. It's a cartoon, it exists in a cartoony world’ and then they put on these sort of silly voices to mock people like me who read the film politically. I think it's legitimate to enjoy a film on its own merits but I don't think it's good to ignore constantly the systematic application of military PR across thousands of film and TV products and also, I think, particularly in the case of ‘Top Gun 2’ … I mean State involvement in that film was so in your face I think that it's kind of weird to ignore or dismiss it.
BG: Surely if the military are at it then so also are, for example, the police. I mean people love their crime dramas.
MA: Absolutely, Brett. Yeah, I completely agree. I think it's reasonable to include the FBI and major police forces like the LAPD and the NYPD in our definition of a ‘Securitized State’. If we include the police the numbers of productions supported by the security state does zip up a little bit and it takes us well past 10,000.
BG: Is it just movies and TV shows? What about video games which are played for hours on end by teenagers in the supposed safety and security of their bedrooms?
MA: Yeah, there are other entertainment products targeted and integrated into the National Security State. There is reliable evidence to indicate that the US and UK militaries have supported … so ‘Doom’, for example. ‘America's Army’ was the most downloaded game for a long time in the early 2000s. ‘Rainbow 6’, ‘Homefront’, ‘Call of Duty’, ‘Medal of Honor’. There was a game called ‘Mercenaries 2: World in Flames’ which requires the gamer to take part in an invasion of Venezuela because this Hugo Chavez socialist-type leader has used nuclear weapons on the Allies. Now the company that made that had previously developed training aids for the US Army but claims it didn't cooperate with the Government on that particular product. You know, that kind of idea Venezuela nuking someone – even having nuclear weapons – it's just ridiculous and it's actually a plot device that was used in the Amazon Prime show ‘Jack Ryan’, that hugely popular series [and] insane threat inflation.
BG: But isn't it just entertainment? Aren't we all grown adults free to make up our own minds? Or does history tell us different?
MA: Entertainment can really exert a pivotal impact on society. There's a historian called John H Franklin and he said that without ‘Birth of a Nation’ from 1915 – the explicitly racist movie – he said that without that film the Ku Klux Klan would not have been reborn. If we talk about the US military in particular, I'd say that if these systems weren't in place, I'd say that within a few years I think the US would probably lose all legitimacy and wouldn't be able to use its force overseas. Which is not far off really what happened for a few years in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War.
BG: Surely the US is not the only guilty nation? Surely the UK, for instance, also has its fat fingers stuck in such political pies?
MA: Well, I have looked at other national cinematic systems a little bit and in the UK the Ministry of Defence we now know has worked on hundreds of entertainment productions including films like ‘Kingsman’, ‘KickAss’, various James Bond movies and we are examining the British case now systematically which is being led by a PhD researcher. What I'd say though is that while it is obviously a good idea to pick apart and generally oppose all propaganda I mean, by any measure, and that's military size, film industry size, foreign policy ambitions, global cultural influence, the United States just dwarfs everybody.
BG: So how can concerned citizens and their families actually watch your documentary ‘Theaters of War’?
MA: Well, contact me on Facebook or on YouTube. I'm on Dr Matt Alford ‘War, Laughs and Lies’. That's if you've got any problems trying to acquire the film, and if you're a student you should be able to find it for free through your library on the system called Kanopy.
BG: Great stuff, Matt. Powerful subject matter. Let's hope people will now think twice about what they pay to entertain themselves.
MA: Thanks very much, Brett. Great talking to you.
Film Review
'Godard Cinema'
(Leuthy, 2023)
'Godard Cinema'
(Leuthy, 2023)
Written and Narrated
by Brett Gregory
November 1st 2023
by Brett Gregory
November 1st 2023
Transcript
Cyril Leuthy composes his posthumous portrait of one of cinema’s great enigmas by entwining, with painstaking precision, original and archived interviews, film clips, newsreels, epistolary recitations and scripted voice-overs. The conclusive narrative is totally and memorably Godard, running at 24 frames per second with a clear beginning, middle and end, in that order.
The narrator reminds us that the late Jean-Luc Godard produced over 140 feature films, documentaries and shorts in his lifetime as a part of his absolute quest for cinema, to capture its purity, its humanity, its incredulity, and that he sacrificed his psychological, emotional and spiritual wellbeing at the altar of the seventh art as a consequence.
As Godard himself comments ‘As a boy I was already in mourning for myself, my one and only companion’ and, later in life, ‘Does the fact that I make images instead of having children prevent me from being a human being?’
Born into privilege in Paris in 1930 his father, Paul, was a doctor and his mother, Odile, worked for a bank. The family was ‘fairly intellectual’ but, as his father observes, Jean-Luc ‘always wanted to be apart. He wanted to follow his thought, only his thought’.
In 1946 he went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris and, through his family’s connections, mixed with members of the cultural elite. He failed his baccalaureate exam first time around in 1948, but then passed in 1949. He subsequently registered to study anthropology at the prestigious Sorbonne University but, unsurprisingly, never attended.
‘When I was at the Sorbonne,’ Godard explains in Leuthy’s film, ‘little by little I became interested by cinema. I discovered film clubs and the Cinémathèque Française, and I met guys like Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol …’
By 1952 he was writing criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma, the famous French film journal which fathered the now infamous auteur theory. Here he praised the gloomy romanticism of North American directors such as Nicolas Ray and Howard Hawks as opposed to the formalistic artfulness of Orson Welles and William Wyler.
His mother then died in an accident in 1954 but his family didn’t wish for him to attend her funeral. As his sister, Veronique, explains, ‘Making films was not considered in the family line, where you study, you become this or that. But he was considered as a so-called artist …’
Godard’s creative response to such an opprobrious body blow was to knock the wind out of everybody else in sight with his debut feature film, ‘Breathless’, in 1960. A cool and casual iconoclastic collage of pop culture, jump cuts and discontinuity, the French New Wave film starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and introduced the subject of Godard’s cinema as cinema itself and, naturally, cinema adored him in return.
‘Will Godard soon be more popular than the Pope,’ opined Francois Truffaut, his friend and fellow director, ‘that is to say just a little less than The Beatles?’
Fame and adoration were simply not enough for the impish Godard however. ‘I have a taste for paradox and a spirit of contradiction,’ he wrote. ‘The new wave is criticised for only showing people in bed, so I’m going to show people who are in politics and don’t have time to go to bed.’
Thus, he shot and released, ‘The Little Soldier’, also in 1960. Starring his new wife and onscreen icon of the French New Wave, Anna Karina, the film explored the use of torture during the Algerian War of Independence and, consequently, it was banned in France until 1963.
Although his commercial successes continued with, for instance, ‘Contempt’, starring Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance, a large bright aperture had opened itself up within Godard and through it he could see that his immediate future lay not simply in the aesthetics of moviemaking, but also in its politics: that is to say, in Marxist critiques of the middle class, capitalism, consumerism and, following the invasion of Vietnam in 1965, North American cultural imperialism.
As the actor and historian, Christophe Bourseiller, recalls ‘[Godard] arrived one day with a crate of [Mao Zedong’s] ‘Little Red Book’ which he had picked up from the Chinese Embassy in Paris.’
David Faroult, author of ‘Godard: Inventions of Political Cinema’, continues that the director wished to document the political climate in contemporary France by focusing on the radical ‘… Union of Communist, Marxist and Leninist Youth, a new pro- … Maoist group very much influenced by the philosopher Louis Althusser.’
The resultant feature film, ‘The Chinese’, loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s novel, ‘Demons’, was released in 1967, wherein an isolated group of politicised students are portrayed as ‘[The Swiss Family Robinson] of Marxism-Leninism’ in Godard’s attempt to ‘confront vague ideas with clear images’ as one social class sets about overthrowing another.
The Chinese Embassy detested the film however, describing it as the work of ‘a reactionary moron’. In turn, they said if they had the power then they would forbid it from even being called ‘The Chinese’. Godard was disappointed of course, but he wasn’t dissuaded.
At the outset of the now legendary student protests and industrial strikes across de Gualle’s France in May 1968, Godard, Truffaut and others famously travelled to the Cannes Film Festival to demand the event be delayed ‘for the film industry to show solidarity … I’m talking about solidarity with the students and workers, and you’re talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups!’
From 1970 to 1971 Godard marched alongside the Dziga Vertov Group, a political filmmaking collective which, ironically, sought to erase the notion and influence of the auteur by way of Marxist content and Brechtian forms.
Godard was involved in a serious motorcycle accident in Paris in June 1971 however, and spent a week in a coma. Leuthy’s narrator comments that, not only did this serve as a metaphor for the director’s political failings, but also for his rebirth: he met the famed multimedia artist, Anne-Marie Miéville, in 1973 and they were married in 1978.
The middle-aged director then entered into a period of exile and experimentation, building the Sonimage studio in his house in Grenoble where he explored and invented new filmic approaches with the latest videography equipment to ‘satisfy his fantasy of making movies all by himself.’
As Henri Langlois, one of the original founders of the Cinémathèque Française in 1936, aptly observes: ‘The last person who made cinema language evolve was Godard … With access to video technology he would become the new Griffith of cinema.’
Of course, there is much more for audiences to uncover, experience and learn for themselves from Cyril Leuthy’s thoughtful and disciplined documentary about one of the key figures in the history of the moving image.
Cyril Leuthy composes his posthumous portrait of one of cinema’s great enigmas by entwining, with painstaking precision, original and archived interviews, film clips, newsreels, epistolary recitations and scripted voice-overs. The conclusive narrative is totally and memorably Godard, running at 24 frames per second with a clear beginning, middle and end, in that order.
The narrator reminds us that the late Jean-Luc Godard produced over 140 feature films, documentaries and shorts in his lifetime as a part of his absolute quest for cinema, to capture its purity, its humanity, its incredulity, and that he sacrificed his psychological, emotional and spiritual wellbeing at the altar of the seventh art as a consequence.
As Godard himself comments ‘As a boy I was already in mourning for myself, my one and only companion’ and, later in life, ‘Does the fact that I make images instead of having children prevent me from being a human being?’
Born into privilege in Paris in 1930 his father, Paul, was a doctor and his mother, Odile, worked for a bank. The family was ‘fairly intellectual’ but, as his father observes, Jean-Luc ‘always wanted to be apart. He wanted to follow his thought, only his thought’.
In 1946 he went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris and, through his family’s connections, mixed with members of the cultural elite. He failed his baccalaureate exam first time around in 1948, but then passed in 1949. He subsequently registered to study anthropology at the prestigious Sorbonne University but, unsurprisingly, never attended.
‘When I was at the Sorbonne,’ Godard explains in Leuthy’s film, ‘little by little I became interested by cinema. I discovered film clubs and the Cinémathèque Française, and I met guys like Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol …’
By 1952 he was writing criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma, the famous French film journal which fathered the now infamous auteur theory. Here he praised the gloomy romanticism of North American directors such as Nicolas Ray and Howard Hawks as opposed to the formalistic artfulness of Orson Welles and William Wyler.
His mother then died in an accident in 1954 but his family didn’t wish for him to attend her funeral. As his sister, Veronique, explains, ‘Making films was not considered in the family line, where you study, you become this or that. But he was considered as a so-called artist …’
Godard’s creative response to such an opprobrious body blow was to knock the wind out of everybody else in sight with his debut feature film, ‘Breathless’, in 1960. A cool and casual iconoclastic collage of pop culture, jump cuts and discontinuity, the French New Wave film starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and introduced the subject of Godard’s cinema as cinema itself and, naturally, cinema adored him in return.
‘Will Godard soon be more popular than the Pope,’ opined Francois Truffaut, his friend and fellow director, ‘that is to say just a little less than The Beatles?’
Fame and adoration were simply not enough for the impish Godard however. ‘I have a taste for paradox and a spirit of contradiction,’ he wrote. ‘The new wave is criticised for only showing people in bed, so I’m going to show people who are in politics and don’t have time to go to bed.’
Thus, he shot and released, ‘The Little Soldier’, also in 1960. Starring his new wife and onscreen icon of the French New Wave, Anna Karina, the film explored the use of torture during the Algerian War of Independence and, consequently, it was banned in France until 1963.
Although his commercial successes continued with, for instance, ‘Contempt’, starring Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance, a large bright aperture had opened itself up within Godard and through it he could see that his immediate future lay not simply in the aesthetics of moviemaking, but also in its politics: that is to say, in Marxist critiques of the middle class, capitalism, consumerism and, following the invasion of Vietnam in 1965, North American cultural imperialism.
As the actor and historian, Christophe Bourseiller, recalls ‘[Godard] arrived one day with a crate of [Mao Zedong’s] ‘Little Red Book’ which he had picked up from the Chinese Embassy in Paris.’
David Faroult, author of ‘Godard: Inventions of Political Cinema’, continues that the director wished to document the political climate in contemporary France by focusing on the radical ‘… Union of Communist, Marxist and Leninist Youth, a new pro- … Maoist group very much influenced by the philosopher Louis Althusser.’
The resultant feature film, ‘The Chinese’, loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s novel, ‘Demons’, was released in 1967, wherein an isolated group of politicised students are portrayed as ‘[The Swiss Family Robinson] of Marxism-Leninism’ in Godard’s attempt to ‘confront vague ideas with clear images’ as one social class sets about overthrowing another.
The Chinese Embassy detested the film however, describing it as the work of ‘a reactionary moron’. In turn, they said if they had the power then they would forbid it from even being called ‘The Chinese’. Godard was disappointed of course, but he wasn’t dissuaded.
At the outset of the now legendary student protests and industrial strikes across de Gualle’s France in May 1968, Godard, Truffaut and others famously travelled to the Cannes Film Festival to demand the event be delayed ‘for the film industry to show solidarity … I’m talking about solidarity with the students and workers, and you’re talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups!’
From 1970 to 1971 Godard marched alongside the Dziga Vertov Group, a political filmmaking collective which, ironically, sought to erase the notion and influence of the auteur by way of Marxist content and Brechtian forms.
Godard was involved in a serious motorcycle accident in Paris in June 1971 however, and spent a week in a coma. Leuthy’s narrator comments that, not only did this serve as a metaphor for the director’s political failings, but also for his rebirth: he met the famed multimedia artist, Anne-Marie Miéville, in 1973 and they were married in 1978.
The middle-aged director then entered into a period of exile and experimentation, building the Sonimage studio in his house in Grenoble where he explored and invented new filmic approaches with the latest videography equipment to ‘satisfy his fantasy of making movies all by himself.’
As Henri Langlois, one of the original founders of the Cinémathèque Française in 1936, aptly observes: ‘The last person who made cinema language evolve was Godard … With access to video technology he would become the new Griffith of cinema.’
Of course, there is much more for audiences to uncover, experience and learn for themselves from Cyril Leuthy’s thoughtful and disciplined documentary about one of the key figures in the history of the moving image.
Film Review
'Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer'
(von Steinaecker, 2023)
'Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer'
(von Steinaecker, 2023)
Written and Narrated
by Brett Gregory
October 4th 2023
by Brett Gregory
October 4th 2023
Transcript
Over the past sixty years Werner Herzog’s extensive and elaborate filmography has explored both the grand and garish extremes of human experience, astonishing audiences all over the world with his breath-taking insight, innovation and industriousness.
Suitably then, Thomas von Steinaecker’s latest documentary, ‘Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer’, is an intimate, informative and involving tribute to an auteur of the highest order, an individual who transcended his origins in the New German Cinema Movement in the 1960s to become the internationally recognised director, screenwriter, documentarian, author, actor and cultural icon that he is today.
Indeed, as Wim Wenders, the esteemed German director of such classics as The American Friend, Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, observes: ‘Herzog is a mythological character. A lonesome rider’.
Both his fictional and factual works frequently pursue protagonists who are driven by destiny, whatever the cost to themselves or to those around them, often along an uncertain or even irrational timeline, as well as almost always against a backdrop of Nature’s savage indifference.
His overarching narrative mission as a storyteller is not necessarily to reach a specific goal or resolution however; rather it is to witness and capture images along the way which human beings like you and me may never have encountered before. In turn, over the duration of a film or maybe even over the duration of a lifetime, these visions will eventually cohere with our perceptions, reflections and imaginations to form an unforgettable ecstasy of illumination.
The trail of conquistadors and tribal slaves snaking down a Peruvian mountainside at the beginning of Aguirre, Wrath of God from 1972; the 320 ton steamboat literally being dragged across dry land by way of primitive levers and pulleys during the production of Fitzcarraldo in 1981; the solitary penguin who is compelled to abandon its colony in Antarctica and wander 5000 miles to certain death in Encounters at the End of The World from 2007.
As the late US film critic, Roger Ebert, reminded us, Werner Herzog ‘has never created a single film that is compromised … or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular’.
While von Steinaecker’s documentary is peppered with A-list personalities such as Christian Bale, Nicole Kidman and Robert Pattinson proffering their praises, accompanied by various clips from previous documentaries such as Burden of Dreams from 1982 and My Best Fiend from 1999 to provide historical context, it is the up close and personal biographical contributions which make you lean forward. Original interviews with Herzog himself as well as with his brothers, Tilbert and Lucki, together with his former wife, Martje Grohmann, and his current wife, Lena, are fresh, genuine and quite thrilling cinephilic moments.
Abandoned by their father, we learn of the Bavarian village of Sachrang where Herzog and his brothers grew up in poverty during the 1950s and early 60s, their highly educated mother only able to afford a single loaf of bread between the four of them each week.
In turn, we follow them as they eventually move to find employment opportunities in the city of Munich and here, Tilbert tell us, Herzog first worked as a welder at a steel factory, investing his wages in producing short films such as Last Words and Precautions Against Fanatics.
Winning 10,000 German marks in a screenplay competition however was what truly set Herzog on his way since, in 1968, it provided him at the age of 25 with the financial means to write, direct and release his first feature, Signs of Life.
The film, shot by his long-standing cinematographer, Thomas Mauch, centres on three German soldiers who lose their minds on the Greek island of Kos during World War II. It caught the attention of the influential German film historian, Lotte Eisner, who, after informing her close friend, Fritz Lang, of its significance, introduced it to an array of prominent film critics in France. As a result, Signs of Life went on to win the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 18th Berlin International Film Festival.
Arguably, Werner Herzog’s subsequent fictional work enjoyed its vertex over the 1970s and 80s with a succession of five films which forced Hollywood, and the international cultural intelligentsia at large, to critically countenance previously unthinkable levels of moviemaking which were altogether historic, operatic, raw and real. Furthermore, such a death-defying approach to cinema’s mechanics and aesthetics was also illumined incredibly, as well as overshadowed deeply, by Herzog’s singular collaboration with the incendiary German film and theatre actor, Klaus Kinski.
The star of Aguirre, Wrath of God, Woyzeck, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde was diagnosed with an anti-social personality disorder in 1950, and he attempted suicide twice in 1955. It is of little surprise then that, during lengthy soul-sapping shoots in the punishing jungles of Peru, Ghana, Brazil and Columbia, Kinski would often explode with preternatural fury, physically destroying set designs, verbally abusing crew members, threatening their livelihoods while also promising, in the same breath, to murder his director.
As Thomas Mauch comments, Kinski, who died of a sudden heart attack in 1991 at the age of 65, ‘was only interested in himself. He only cared about creating as much turmoil as he could. He did that to make every gesture seem god-like.’
Herzog finally turned his back on Germany in 1996 and moved to Los Angeles. His brother, Lucki, who is also his producer, informs us that this was because not only were his sibling’s films no longer being funded but ‘he was done with the whole system, with all the bureaucracy behind it, with all the smug narrow-mindedness.’
Fortunately, taking flight in such a manner carried the filmmaker to a continent which coursed with creativity, collaboration and conviction and, as a result, his filmmaking career became revitalised as his work ethic and productivity increased at a staggering rate.
That is to say, over the last 27 years Werner Herzog has directed eight original feature films, including Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans with Nicolas Cage; seventeen documentary features, such as Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams; an eight episode mini-series about Death Row; and, if this wasn’t enough, he has also acted in a number of high-profile feature films and television shows like Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy, Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, The Simpsons and, more recently, The Mandalorian.
And, let us not forget, that he has magically found the time, energy, focus and finance to direct nineteen operas as well.
Ultimately, Werner Herzog is a polymathic phenomenon, a quasi-religious visionary borne out of the 20th century who sings and sweats cinema, literature, theatre and opera and who, at 81 years of age, is still showing no signs of stopping.
Consequently, the only real criticism one can direct towards von Steinaecker’s superbly orchestrated documentary is that, with a running time of 90 minutes, it simply isn’t long enough.
‘Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer’ will be available to rent or purchase on a multitude of digital platforms in the US and Canada from December 5th 2023, and in the UK from January 19th 2024.
Over the past sixty years Werner Herzog’s extensive and elaborate filmography has explored both the grand and garish extremes of human experience, astonishing audiences all over the world with his breath-taking insight, innovation and industriousness.
Suitably then, Thomas von Steinaecker’s latest documentary, ‘Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer’, is an intimate, informative and involving tribute to an auteur of the highest order, an individual who transcended his origins in the New German Cinema Movement in the 1960s to become the internationally recognised director, screenwriter, documentarian, author, actor and cultural icon that he is today.
Indeed, as Wim Wenders, the esteemed German director of such classics as The American Friend, Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, observes: ‘Herzog is a mythological character. A lonesome rider’.
Both his fictional and factual works frequently pursue protagonists who are driven by destiny, whatever the cost to themselves or to those around them, often along an uncertain or even irrational timeline, as well as almost always against a backdrop of Nature’s savage indifference.
His overarching narrative mission as a storyteller is not necessarily to reach a specific goal or resolution however; rather it is to witness and capture images along the way which human beings like you and me may never have encountered before. In turn, over the duration of a film or maybe even over the duration of a lifetime, these visions will eventually cohere with our perceptions, reflections and imaginations to form an unforgettable ecstasy of illumination.
The trail of conquistadors and tribal slaves snaking down a Peruvian mountainside at the beginning of Aguirre, Wrath of God from 1972; the 320 ton steamboat literally being dragged across dry land by way of primitive levers and pulleys during the production of Fitzcarraldo in 1981; the solitary penguin who is compelled to abandon its colony in Antarctica and wander 5000 miles to certain death in Encounters at the End of The World from 2007.
As the late US film critic, Roger Ebert, reminded us, Werner Herzog ‘has never created a single film that is compromised … or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular’.
While von Steinaecker’s documentary is peppered with A-list personalities such as Christian Bale, Nicole Kidman and Robert Pattinson proffering their praises, accompanied by various clips from previous documentaries such as Burden of Dreams from 1982 and My Best Fiend from 1999 to provide historical context, it is the up close and personal biographical contributions which make you lean forward. Original interviews with Herzog himself as well as with his brothers, Tilbert and Lucki, together with his former wife, Martje Grohmann, and his current wife, Lena, are fresh, genuine and quite thrilling cinephilic moments.
Abandoned by their father, we learn of the Bavarian village of Sachrang where Herzog and his brothers grew up in poverty during the 1950s and early 60s, their highly educated mother only able to afford a single loaf of bread between the four of them each week.
In turn, we follow them as they eventually move to find employment opportunities in the city of Munich and here, Tilbert tell us, Herzog first worked as a welder at a steel factory, investing his wages in producing short films such as Last Words and Precautions Against Fanatics.
Winning 10,000 German marks in a screenplay competition however was what truly set Herzog on his way since, in 1968, it provided him at the age of 25 with the financial means to write, direct and release his first feature, Signs of Life.
The film, shot by his long-standing cinematographer, Thomas Mauch, centres on three German soldiers who lose their minds on the Greek island of Kos during World War II. It caught the attention of the influential German film historian, Lotte Eisner, who, after informing her close friend, Fritz Lang, of its significance, introduced it to an array of prominent film critics in France. As a result, Signs of Life went on to win the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 18th Berlin International Film Festival.
Arguably, Werner Herzog’s subsequent fictional work enjoyed its vertex over the 1970s and 80s with a succession of five films which forced Hollywood, and the international cultural intelligentsia at large, to critically countenance previously unthinkable levels of moviemaking which were altogether historic, operatic, raw and real. Furthermore, such a death-defying approach to cinema’s mechanics and aesthetics was also illumined incredibly, as well as overshadowed deeply, by Herzog’s singular collaboration with the incendiary German film and theatre actor, Klaus Kinski.
The star of Aguirre, Wrath of God, Woyzeck, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde was diagnosed with an anti-social personality disorder in 1950, and he attempted suicide twice in 1955. It is of little surprise then that, during lengthy soul-sapping shoots in the punishing jungles of Peru, Ghana, Brazil and Columbia, Kinski would often explode with preternatural fury, physically destroying set designs, verbally abusing crew members, threatening their livelihoods while also promising, in the same breath, to murder his director.
As Thomas Mauch comments, Kinski, who died of a sudden heart attack in 1991 at the age of 65, ‘was only interested in himself. He only cared about creating as much turmoil as he could. He did that to make every gesture seem god-like.’
Herzog finally turned his back on Germany in 1996 and moved to Los Angeles. His brother, Lucki, who is also his producer, informs us that this was because not only were his sibling’s films no longer being funded but ‘he was done with the whole system, with all the bureaucracy behind it, with all the smug narrow-mindedness.’
Fortunately, taking flight in such a manner carried the filmmaker to a continent which coursed with creativity, collaboration and conviction and, as a result, his filmmaking career became revitalised as his work ethic and productivity increased at a staggering rate.
That is to say, over the last 27 years Werner Herzog has directed eight original feature films, including Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans with Nicolas Cage; seventeen documentary features, such as Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams; an eight episode mini-series about Death Row; and, if this wasn’t enough, he has also acted in a number of high-profile feature films and television shows like Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy, Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, The Simpsons and, more recently, The Mandalorian.
And, let us not forget, that he has magically found the time, energy, focus and finance to direct nineteen operas as well.
Ultimately, Werner Herzog is a polymathic phenomenon, a quasi-religious visionary borne out of the 20th century who sings and sweats cinema, literature, theatre and opera and who, at 81 years of age, is still showing no signs of stopping.
Consequently, the only real criticism one can direct towards von Steinaecker’s superbly orchestrated documentary is that, with a running time of 90 minutes, it simply isn’t long enough.
‘Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer’ will be available to rent or purchase on a multitude of digital platforms in the US and Canada from December 5th 2023, and in the UK from January 19th 2024.
Interview
Prof. Ian Scott
(University of Manchester)
discusses Hollywood Politics and Oliver Stone
Prof. Ian Scott
(University of Manchester)
discusses Hollywood Politics and Oliver Stone
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
September 20th 2023
by Brett Gregory
September 20th 2023
Transcript
BG: This evening we're going to explore Hollywood's up and down relationship with party politics over the years while also focusing on one of the industry's great creative firebrands, Oliver Stone.
IS: Hello, my name is Ian Scott and I'm Professor of American Film and History at Manchester University in the UK. My research specialisms are in Hollywood movies, the relationship between cinema and American political culture more widely, and the social, cultural and political history of California.
BG: So what was the catalyst that got you first into Hollywood and politics?
IS: The relationship of politics to movies has always intrigued me, and my own taste had gravitated towards what were broadly termed political films a long while ago. Movies like ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’, ‘All the President's Men’ and ‘JFK’. But really it all came together when I was a grad student studying California politics; I was interested in why people who'd never stood for office before would try to win election races at a very high level first time out, principally getting elected to congress in other words.
The political scientist David Canon wrote a really influential book for me and for my research at the time, and it was called ‘Actors, Athletes and Astronauts’, and in it Canon claimed there was mounting evidence that these were the routes to high office. In other words, people from the entertainment industry, sports stars or people who'd done heroic acts of derring-do. I applied Canon's theory to my own research looking at candidates in California during the 1970s, 80s and early 90s who wanted to run for the House of Representatives, the federal House of Representatives, and before I knew it I was implicitly predicting the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governorship of California.
BG: And this relationship between party politics and Hollywood, when did it first take hold really?
IS: I suppose I'd make the claim that politics and the movies have always been inextricably linked, but really it was the 1930s, The Depression, that put that relationship into sharp relief. The Hollywood studios, as they were growing in stature and influence through the 20s, were always perceived as conservative at least at the top among the moguls, and those moguls who came west were interested in developing an archetypal American persona.
So, many were Republicans and they imposed a pretty rigid conservative line in the studios, and remember at this time studio workers were beginning to unionize as we start to get into the 1930s. The moguls thought these were all going to make Hollywood a hotbed of left-wing politics and agitation, and that did happen: it's often forgotten that the 30s really were a period of deep unrest in and around the film industry; quite a lot of strikes, quite a lot of agitation going on and, to some degree, it made the moguls even more conservative.
The difference really was the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. That began to change things. First of all, Roosevelt was a Democrat and there hadn't been one of those in the White House for 12 years, so really that was going back to the beginning of Hollywood's infancy really, so they weren't quite the force on the national stage they were by the early 1930s. And second, FDR understood that from the off if he wanted to communicate his new deal policies to the wider population he had to be both a broadcasting star himself – so he created his famous fireside chats, as you know, his weekly radio broadcast to the nation – and he needed to cultivate a relationship with Hollywood that would sell, however implicitly, the idea of economic and social regeneration in America.
BG: And how did World War II affect Hollywood's output?
IS: The war maintained that political connection and, of course, Hollywood was deeply involved in propaganda for the military by way of organizations like the Office of War Information. After the war the Cold War provided impetus for topics and at the same time the prevalence of film noir as a genre provided an aesthetic base for Hollywood to continue to make films with a social and cultural agenda to them, if not an outright political ideology.
So you've got post-war movies like ‘The Best Years Of Our Lives’ that contemplated the nation's priorities after the war; films like Frank Capra's largely underrated ‘State of the Union’ with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn; Robert Rossen’s ‘All the King's Men’; and then a little bit later ‘A Face in the Crowd’ directed by Elia Kazan. All of these made an impression in the late 40s and at the turn of the 50s but, of course, the coming and growing anti-communist force during that era distracted Hollywood as well, and it scared off filmmakers and the studios from much further inquiry and investigation.
BG: Fascinating. And what followed in the 60s and 70s?
IS: So by the time we get to the 1960s and 1970s you have a different kind of force at work, different kind of agenda is emerging. Conspiracy and paranoia thrillers like the classic ‘Manchurian Candidate’ from 1962 and then in the later decade ‘The Parallax View’ with Warren Beatty and ‘Three Days of the Condor’ with Robert Redford all suggested an American political landscape dominated by shady cabals and big corporations unaccountable to anyone. And these films began to tap into the mood of disillusionment with politics that had finally come to fruition with the Watergate scandal in the midst of the Nixon administration in the early 1970s.
BG: Indeed. I literally forced Jack Clark, who I work with, who's 25, to watch ‘All The President's Men’ last night so he was aware of 70's paranoia. Anyway, please continue.
IS: Hollywood generally was always suspicious enough of someone like Ronald Reagan – who was an insider, of course – not to trust him entirely. Reagan had previously been a New Deal Democrat who turned over to the Republican party and became governor of California in the 1960s before he became President.
The Clinton era followed a pattern established by John F. Kennedy that Hollywood was to be cultivated and money should be sought, endorsements gathered, that kind of thing, and it was very successful for Clinton during the 1990s.
By the time of the George Bush administration in the 2000s, Bush largely eschewed Hollywood: he didn't feel it was the kind of community that was very sympathetic, probably rightly, to some of his politics. Although in the immediate post-9/11 era there was an unlikely alliance between the administration and the Hollywood studios and some of the unions like the Screenwriters’ Guild that tacitly supported The War On Terror in the backdrop to 9/11.
The Obama years brought in endorsements even from those who resisted political involvement. So big celebrities, musical stars like Bruce Springsteen who'd been very loathe to support and come out publicly for candidates in the past, came forward for somebody like Obama, who it was thought was really going to change not just American politics but really the whole of American life, American society at that time.
The Trump years followed, of course, and that was quite some reaction as you know, and in many ways the Trump years have been a masterclass in someone saying how much their personally loved and how they're admired only for such communities – and Hollywood has been most particularly vocal in this – only for communities to refute that claim entirely about Trump in many ways.
BG: And in what ways have films affected government policy rather than a vice versa?
IS: The wider political landscape has seen the exposure of things like American nuclear policy, for example, in a movie like ‘The China Syndrome’ in the late 1970s starring Jane Fonda, a film that appeared around the time at the near nuclear meltdown disaster a 3 Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
But perhaps one of the most obvious examples of influence is, of course, Oliver Stone's ‘JFK’ from 1991. A film that had such traction beyond the pages of review sections of the magazines and newspapers that it eventually resulted in the U.S Congress passing what is known as the Assassination Records Collection Act which set up a review board that over the past 30 years or so has released millions of pages of previously redacted material. JFK caused such a storm over the official story of Kennedy's assassination in 1963 that the American Congress quietly realised it was actually the custodian of a history that frankly few accepted anymore, if they ever had; and Stone, who gave testimony to Congress himself, was well aware of the impact that his film was having and the influence it was having over people's public perception that the Warren Commission Report of 1964, intimating that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin who had killed Kennedy, was simply not believed by the wider American populace.
BG: And you interviewed Oliver Stone. That must have been something?
IS: I did find Stone absolutely fascinating to interview, and subsequently I began to learn a lot more about what motivated him, and understand the years after I'd interviewed him – which was around about 2012/2013 – I began to understand a great deal more about what it was he was telling me at the time, particularly when I reviewed his first book of memoirs a couple of years ago, ‘Chasing The Light’.
In a way Stone encapsulates some of those contradictory impulses in Hollywood. He very much wanted to tell his own stories when he came to Hollywood and it just so happened that those stories and the history that he was a part of, and growing up in, during the 1960s and 1970s was really a time of fraction and disjuncture and a very kind of conflictual time for the United States and for American history more generally.
Stone understood the great opportunities and principles that are at the heart of the American ideal, but he also understood well the terrible costs that were paid for some of those principles. Notably in Vietnam where Stone served with distinction and then made later three very different films about the conflict. But at the same time you know he's kind of an establishment figure: he understands Hollywood's an industry and he works within its confines for good and for ill … I'll tell you when I asked who he most admired in American cinema – thinking that I had a list in my head of the kind of names he would go to – he straightaway said Steven Spielberg, not the filmmaker you might automatically assume to be somebody Stone would think of as a real inspiration. But the point was that Stone admired Spielberg's freedom within the system, the ability to make films on his terms. Stone might not have made a film like ‘Lincoln’ the way Spielberg did, or ‘The Post’, or ‘Bridge of Spies’ or more subject matter you could see Stone being attracted to, but I think he just admires Spielberg's craft and his determination not to be swayed by fads and taste to do what he wants. That, for so many for so many political filmmakers indeed, is an enormous attraction: the freedom to be able to dictate your own projects and mould them to your vision, however collaborative that vision might seem. So I think Stone would tell you he managed longevity and he managed to kind of mould his political vision because he made films on time and to budget, and certainly he delivered a run of movies from ‘Salvador’ in the mid-1980s, all the way he's through to probably ‘Natural Born Killers’ a decade later, that were commercial but were also critically challenging movies that audiences wanted to see, and which in Stone's case tapped into a zeitgeist that few filmmakers can ever achieve. But with movies like ‘Platoon’, ‘Born on the Fourth of July’, ‘The Doors’, ‘JFK’ and even ‘Nixon’, as well as ‘Natural Born Killers’, Stone had a run of films that did all of that and more. He understood about maintaining relations with the studios – even though he didn't always agree with them by any means – but that's why he's managed to mould such a long-standing career for himself.
BG: A compelling character indeed. Many thanks for your time, Ian. It's been great.
IS: Thanks very much for having me. Thank you.
BG: This evening we're going to explore Hollywood's up and down relationship with party politics over the years while also focusing on one of the industry's great creative firebrands, Oliver Stone.
IS: Hello, my name is Ian Scott and I'm Professor of American Film and History at Manchester University in the UK. My research specialisms are in Hollywood movies, the relationship between cinema and American political culture more widely, and the social, cultural and political history of California.
BG: So what was the catalyst that got you first into Hollywood and politics?
IS: The relationship of politics to movies has always intrigued me, and my own taste had gravitated towards what were broadly termed political films a long while ago. Movies like ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’, ‘All the President's Men’ and ‘JFK’. But really it all came together when I was a grad student studying California politics; I was interested in why people who'd never stood for office before would try to win election races at a very high level first time out, principally getting elected to congress in other words.
The political scientist David Canon wrote a really influential book for me and for my research at the time, and it was called ‘Actors, Athletes and Astronauts’, and in it Canon claimed there was mounting evidence that these were the routes to high office. In other words, people from the entertainment industry, sports stars or people who'd done heroic acts of derring-do. I applied Canon's theory to my own research looking at candidates in California during the 1970s, 80s and early 90s who wanted to run for the House of Representatives, the federal House of Representatives, and before I knew it I was implicitly predicting the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governorship of California.
BG: And this relationship between party politics and Hollywood, when did it first take hold really?
IS: I suppose I'd make the claim that politics and the movies have always been inextricably linked, but really it was the 1930s, The Depression, that put that relationship into sharp relief. The Hollywood studios, as they were growing in stature and influence through the 20s, were always perceived as conservative at least at the top among the moguls, and those moguls who came west were interested in developing an archetypal American persona.
So, many were Republicans and they imposed a pretty rigid conservative line in the studios, and remember at this time studio workers were beginning to unionize as we start to get into the 1930s. The moguls thought these were all going to make Hollywood a hotbed of left-wing politics and agitation, and that did happen: it's often forgotten that the 30s really were a period of deep unrest in and around the film industry; quite a lot of strikes, quite a lot of agitation going on and, to some degree, it made the moguls even more conservative.
The difference really was the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. That began to change things. First of all, Roosevelt was a Democrat and there hadn't been one of those in the White House for 12 years, so really that was going back to the beginning of Hollywood's infancy really, so they weren't quite the force on the national stage they were by the early 1930s. And second, FDR understood that from the off if he wanted to communicate his new deal policies to the wider population he had to be both a broadcasting star himself – so he created his famous fireside chats, as you know, his weekly radio broadcast to the nation – and he needed to cultivate a relationship with Hollywood that would sell, however implicitly, the idea of economic and social regeneration in America.
BG: And how did World War II affect Hollywood's output?
IS: The war maintained that political connection and, of course, Hollywood was deeply involved in propaganda for the military by way of organizations like the Office of War Information. After the war the Cold War provided impetus for topics and at the same time the prevalence of film noir as a genre provided an aesthetic base for Hollywood to continue to make films with a social and cultural agenda to them, if not an outright political ideology.
So you've got post-war movies like ‘The Best Years Of Our Lives’ that contemplated the nation's priorities after the war; films like Frank Capra's largely underrated ‘State of the Union’ with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn; Robert Rossen’s ‘All the King's Men’; and then a little bit later ‘A Face in the Crowd’ directed by Elia Kazan. All of these made an impression in the late 40s and at the turn of the 50s but, of course, the coming and growing anti-communist force during that era distracted Hollywood as well, and it scared off filmmakers and the studios from much further inquiry and investigation.
BG: Fascinating. And what followed in the 60s and 70s?
IS: So by the time we get to the 1960s and 1970s you have a different kind of force at work, different kind of agenda is emerging. Conspiracy and paranoia thrillers like the classic ‘Manchurian Candidate’ from 1962 and then in the later decade ‘The Parallax View’ with Warren Beatty and ‘Three Days of the Condor’ with Robert Redford all suggested an American political landscape dominated by shady cabals and big corporations unaccountable to anyone. And these films began to tap into the mood of disillusionment with politics that had finally come to fruition with the Watergate scandal in the midst of the Nixon administration in the early 1970s.
BG: Indeed. I literally forced Jack Clark, who I work with, who's 25, to watch ‘All The President's Men’ last night so he was aware of 70's paranoia. Anyway, please continue.
IS: Hollywood generally was always suspicious enough of someone like Ronald Reagan – who was an insider, of course – not to trust him entirely. Reagan had previously been a New Deal Democrat who turned over to the Republican party and became governor of California in the 1960s before he became President.
The Clinton era followed a pattern established by John F. Kennedy that Hollywood was to be cultivated and money should be sought, endorsements gathered, that kind of thing, and it was very successful for Clinton during the 1990s.
By the time of the George Bush administration in the 2000s, Bush largely eschewed Hollywood: he didn't feel it was the kind of community that was very sympathetic, probably rightly, to some of his politics. Although in the immediate post-9/11 era there was an unlikely alliance between the administration and the Hollywood studios and some of the unions like the Screenwriters’ Guild that tacitly supported The War On Terror in the backdrop to 9/11.
The Obama years brought in endorsements even from those who resisted political involvement. So big celebrities, musical stars like Bruce Springsteen who'd been very loathe to support and come out publicly for candidates in the past, came forward for somebody like Obama, who it was thought was really going to change not just American politics but really the whole of American life, American society at that time.
The Trump years followed, of course, and that was quite some reaction as you know, and in many ways the Trump years have been a masterclass in someone saying how much their personally loved and how they're admired only for such communities – and Hollywood has been most particularly vocal in this – only for communities to refute that claim entirely about Trump in many ways.
BG: And in what ways have films affected government policy rather than a vice versa?
IS: The wider political landscape has seen the exposure of things like American nuclear policy, for example, in a movie like ‘The China Syndrome’ in the late 1970s starring Jane Fonda, a film that appeared around the time at the near nuclear meltdown disaster a 3 Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
But perhaps one of the most obvious examples of influence is, of course, Oliver Stone's ‘JFK’ from 1991. A film that had such traction beyond the pages of review sections of the magazines and newspapers that it eventually resulted in the U.S Congress passing what is known as the Assassination Records Collection Act which set up a review board that over the past 30 years or so has released millions of pages of previously redacted material. JFK caused such a storm over the official story of Kennedy's assassination in 1963 that the American Congress quietly realised it was actually the custodian of a history that frankly few accepted anymore, if they ever had; and Stone, who gave testimony to Congress himself, was well aware of the impact that his film was having and the influence it was having over people's public perception that the Warren Commission Report of 1964, intimating that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin who had killed Kennedy, was simply not believed by the wider American populace.
BG: And you interviewed Oliver Stone. That must have been something?
IS: I did find Stone absolutely fascinating to interview, and subsequently I began to learn a lot more about what motivated him, and understand the years after I'd interviewed him – which was around about 2012/2013 – I began to understand a great deal more about what it was he was telling me at the time, particularly when I reviewed his first book of memoirs a couple of years ago, ‘Chasing The Light’.
In a way Stone encapsulates some of those contradictory impulses in Hollywood. He very much wanted to tell his own stories when he came to Hollywood and it just so happened that those stories and the history that he was a part of, and growing up in, during the 1960s and 1970s was really a time of fraction and disjuncture and a very kind of conflictual time for the United States and for American history more generally.
Stone understood the great opportunities and principles that are at the heart of the American ideal, but he also understood well the terrible costs that were paid for some of those principles. Notably in Vietnam where Stone served with distinction and then made later three very different films about the conflict. But at the same time you know he's kind of an establishment figure: he understands Hollywood's an industry and he works within its confines for good and for ill … I'll tell you when I asked who he most admired in American cinema – thinking that I had a list in my head of the kind of names he would go to – he straightaway said Steven Spielberg, not the filmmaker you might automatically assume to be somebody Stone would think of as a real inspiration. But the point was that Stone admired Spielberg's freedom within the system, the ability to make films on his terms. Stone might not have made a film like ‘Lincoln’ the way Spielberg did, or ‘The Post’, or ‘Bridge of Spies’ or more subject matter you could see Stone being attracted to, but I think he just admires Spielberg's craft and his determination not to be swayed by fads and taste to do what he wants. That, for so many for so many political filmmakers indeed, is an enormous attraction: the freedom to be able to dictate your own projects and mould them to your vision, however collaborative that vision might seem. So I think Stone would tell you he managed longevity and he managed to kind of mould his political vision because he made films on time and to budget, and certainly he delivered a run of movies from ‘Salvador’ in the mid-1980s, all the way he's through to probably ‘Natural Born Killers’ a decade later, that were commercial but were also critically challenging movies that audiences wanted to see, and which in Stone's case tapped into a zeitgeist that few filmmakers can ever achieve. But with movies like ‘Platoon’, ‘Born on the Fourth of July’, ‘The Doors’, ‘JFK’ and even ‘Nixon’, as well as ‘Natural Born Killers’, Stone had a run of films that did all of that and more. He understood about maintaining relations with the studios – even though he didn't always agree with them by any means – but that's why he's managed to mould such a long-standing career for himself.
BG: A compelling character indeed. Many thanks for your time, Ian. It's been great.
IS: Thanks very much for having me. Thank you.
Interview
Dr. Guy Barefoot
(University of Leicester)
discusses The 1950s Drive-in Cinema
Dr. Guy Barefoot
(University of Leicester)
discusses The 1950s Drive-in Cinema
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
September 6th 2023
by Brett Gregory
September 6th 2023
Transcript
BG: This evening, we're going to be travelling back in time to explore the origins and development of a special place which lies at the very heart of vintage Americana—the drive-in cinema. Our guide on this unique journey will be an honorary visiting fellow from the University of Leicester in the UK and author of a new book called ‘The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination.’
GB: Hi, my name is Guy Barefoot. I'm a historian of American cinema, mainly of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and that has increasingly meant looking at the film program, where films were shown, who watched them, and sometimes what else audiences did at the cinema.
BG: What originally attracted you to the subject of the drive-in cinema?
GB: I started the search for my book, which should be out in December, around five years ago. I was initially interested in the origin of the drive-in's reputation as a passion pit. What soon became clear was that there were two dominant, occasionally overlapping but largely contradictory views of the drive-in. For some, drive-ins and drive-in movies meant audiences in their teens or just after and exploitation films—that is films with sensationalist material or marketing. In the 1950s, from the recollection of fans to overviews of film exhibition associated with family visits to the cinema, and tended to say less about the films than that. For instance, there were drive-ins where people got their laundry done while the movie played.
BG: Their laundry? I can't think of a more rebellious act.
GB: Interesting though that was, I wanted to know more about where these cinemas were in relation to urban centres, who went to them, what films they showed, or whether it was true that, as the most substantial book on the topic claimed, no one in the '50s or '60s went to the drive-in to see the movie.
BG: I can imagine. So, when did the first drive-in open in North America, and who were the enterprising architects behind it?
GB: The generally accepted starting date of the drive-in was June 6th, 1933, when Richard Hollingshead Junior opened his drive-in just outside Camden, New Jersey. There had been outdoor screenings before that date, notably what were called ‘Air domes.’ There were even occasions when people may have watched films while sitting in their cars. But Hollingshead and his business partner, Willie Warren Spez, were distinctive in taking out a patent for showing films outdoors in front of a series of ramps designed to give the occupants of parked cars an unobstructed view of the screen. Hollingshead argued that that turned the car into a private theatre box, allowing people to talk, eat, smoke, or bring on their noisy children without disrupting others, and that it brought films to people who might not go to an indoor cinema.
BG: Genius. What could possibly go wrong?
GB: Drive-ins, at least those from the 1950s or earlier, tend to be associated with films that were old, shown in poor-quality prints, low budget, or not from the Hollywood major studios.
BG: Oh.
GB: The films that they did show were not screened or heard in the best conditions. Sound was a particular problem and only partly improved after the Second World War when drive-ins introduced individual speakers attached to car windows. Surrounding lights in the sky or neighbouring buildings did not help the clarity of the screen image. It didn't help either if it was raining, and mosquitoes were another problem.
BG: Mosquitoes, I see. And what else?
GB: Drive-ins were limited by the fact that they could not show films while it was daylight and, outside the South, by the fact that for much of the year, it was too cold to show films at all. The growth in the number of drive-ins in the late 1940s and the 1950s meant that there were summer periods when more people in the US were watching films outdoors and indoors. While some treated the drive-in business as a gimmick before the Second World War, it became too big to be dismissed as that after the war.
BG: The resilience of popular culture, and the tickets must have been much cheaper than those for indoor cinemas.
GB: The admission charge did tend to be relatively low, and many drive-ins let children in for free to the annoyance of distributors who made their money from taking a percentage of the box office take. In comparison with indoor cinemas, a higher proportion of drive-in takings tended to come from food and drink sales. In the 1950s, most drive-ins also had a children's playground, sometimes elaborate facilities with, for example, a miniature train. In effect, some drive-ins were amusement parks.
BG: Fascinating. And what were the types of films screened at these drive-ins in the 1950s?
GB: The drive-in experience, looked at from the 1950s, tended to have programs that were similar to neighbouring indoor cinemas. That is, they showed a lot of Westerns and a lot of action films, but also films that had won the Oscars that year—Disney films, other Hollywood films, and non-Hollywood films with exploitation potential, including the occasional film from overseas. My examination of 1958 box office records for three drive-ins in Little Rock, Arkansas, revealed that the Brigitte Bardot film ‘And God Created Woman’ took the most money, narrowly beating the biblical epic ‘The Ten Commandments.’ However, Hollinshead's drive-in tended to show films from poverty row studios, that is studios that specialised in low-budget drama films and the odd British film. In some areas, there were drive-ins that showed Spanish-language films. The overall point is that the drive-in program was broader than has generally been assumed, and while they did not compete with downtown first-run cinemas, overtime more drive-ins showed films at the same time as other cinemas.
BG: Interesting. Do you have a specific example?
GB: One of the drive-ins I looked at in Phoenix, Arizona, started out in 1951 as the Twin Open Air, with one screen showing Westerns and other action films and what they called a variety program on the other screen. It was then split into two drive-ins. One was renamed ‘Acres of Fun,’ and by the end of the 1950s, it was screening double bills, such as ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf’ and ‘Invasion of the Saucer Men,’ as well as films from ‘Bambi’ to ‘Some Like It Hot.’ The other was renamed "The Peso," and it showed Spanish-language films, mainly Mexican films.
BG: Were there any complaints from local people when these drive-in cinemas suddenly started springing up in their area?
GB: The relationship between drive-ins and local communities also varied. If you look at local newspapers, you will certainly come across reports of objections to a proposed drive-in and complaints about the behaviour at the drive-in or what was being shown at the drive-in. Exhibitors, however, often did their best to integrate their business into the local community, whether by organising children's events or becoming involved in the community in other ways.
BG: These days, most people associate 1950s drive-in cinemas with rude and rowdy teenagers, but in historical terms, this isn't strictly true, is it?
GB: Throughout the 1950s, exhibitors insisted that their main audience was the family, which generally meant couples with young children. Overall, at least before the 1960s, teenagers formed a minority of the cinema audience and did not necessarily prefer outdoor to indoor moviegoing. However, they were going into a significant minority, and exhibitors who emphasised the family audience were, in part, attempting to downplay the reputation the drive-in had from the beginning as a dating venue or passion pit. So yes, teenagers who had access to a car did go to the drive-in, and in the second half of the 1950s, films aimed at teenagers were shown at drive-ins as well as indoor cinemas, though they made up a relatively small part of the program.
BG: And what other types of audience did the exhibitors accommodate?
GB: As well as emphasising the family audience, some exhibitors and commentators wrote about the drive-in as a place where different generations and income groups could mix. Even the drive-ins were more welcoming to black audiences than other cinemas, if that was true in some places, it was not elsewhere. Into the 1960s, there were drive-ins that segregated black and white audiences, others that excluded black audiences, and a small number of drive-ins for black audiences. There were ways in which drive-ins were different, but they were part of a nation in which segregation was widespread, to the extent that it did not generally need to be explicitly stated.
BG: Sobering thoughts. Anyway, what about the representation of drive-in cinemas in wider culture, particularly on screen?
GB: The drive-in has played a role in Hollywood films ever since the 1949 film ‘White Heat,’ when James Cagney's Cody Jarrett evaded the law by turning into Burbank's Sunvale Drive-in. It's also evoked in numerous song lyrics, various novels, and photographs, from Robert Frank's mid-1950s drive-in movie ‘Detroit’ to later images of abandoned drive-ins. What's fascinating about these is their differences. Almost from the start, drive-ins had a disruptive or, at least, disreputable reputation. They've increasingly been viewed with nostalgia, but even that nostalgia has different sides. It can be for an imagined 1950s innocence. Drive-in scenes in films such as ‘The Lords of Flatbush‘ and ‘Grease’ were part of a 1970s trend that looked back to the 1950s teenagers in different ways, and in the 1970s and 1980s, the drive-in was also becoming increasingly associated with horror and other forms of exploitation cinema. As others noted, the subsequent circulation of such films as driving movies on DVD or other formats has itself been a form of nostalgia. Drive-in films set in the past also lend themselves to coming-of-age narratives, whether that means children in the 1996 film ‘Frankenstein and Me’ sneaking into a driving screening of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ or teenagers meeting at a Cape Cod drive-in in the summer of 1991 in the 2017 film ‘Hot Summer Nights.’ Drive-ins also feature on-screen as part of contemporary Roadside America, the sort of place a car might drive in 1949 in ‘White Heat’ or in, say, ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ in 1974.
BG: ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ is a great film. I thoroughly enjoyed that when I was a kid.
GB: I guess the fact that they've been part of the actual landscape of roadside America and part of the experience of growing up for many people explains their screen presence, though that can vary from the opening shot of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ which shows the blank screen of an almost empty Texas drive-in in daylight, to the crane shot of the neon-lit drive-in sign in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.’
BG: I fear the beginning of the end is about to arrive.
GB: Published figures suggest that drive-in capacity and takings fluctuated but overall were increasing into the 1970s, even though the number of drive-ins had decreased. Drive-ins closed more rapidly in the 1980s. In part, that was because owners of drive-ins built out of town on what were, in the 1940s, or the late 1940s, or the 1950s, relatively low-cost land could get a quicker return from selling to a late 20th-century property developer. Particularly when urban expansion meant that the surrounding area was no longer open country. Beyond that, an increasing emphasis on, in some instance, X-rated films was accompanied by a decline in family audiences. While, over time, indoor multiplexes and different video formats for home viewing attracted more of the youth market. It may also be that there were more potential dating venues after the 1950s. While smaller cars with bucket seats did not help those who wanted the drive-in to live up to its passion pit reputation.
BG: Such a shame, the rise of capitalism at the expense of the community. Anyway, thank you so much, Guy, for taking us on such an enlightening journey into the past. I'm sure you've conjured up a lot of strong cinematic memories for many of our listeners.
GB: Thank you.
BG: And good luck with your book, ‘The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination.’ published by Bloomsbury, it says here in December 2023.
BG: This evening, we're going to be travelling back in time to explore the origins and development of a special place which lies at the very heart of vintage Americana—the drive-in cinema. Our guide on this unique journey will be an honorary visiting fellow from the University of Leicester in the UK and author of a new book called ‘The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination.’
GB: Hi, my name is Guy Barefoot. I'm a historian of American cinema, mainly of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and that has increasingly meant looking at the film program, where films were shown, who watched them, and sometimes what else audiences did at the cinema.
BG: What originally attracted you to the subject of the drive-in cinema?
GB: I started the search for my book, which should be out in December, around five years ago. I was initially interested in the origin of the drive-in's reputation as a passion pit. What soon became clear was that there were two dominant, occasionally overlapping but largely contradictory views of the drive-in. For some, drive-ins and drive-in movies meant audiences in their teens or just after and exploitation films—that is films with sensationalist material or marketing. In the 1950s, from the recollection of fans to overviews of film exhibition associated with family visits to the cinema, and tended to say less about the films than that. For instance, there were drive-ins where people got their laundry done while the movie played.
BG: Their laundry? I can't think of a more rebellious act.
GB: Interesting though that was, I wanted to know more about where these cinemas were in relation to urban centres, who went to them, what films they showed, or whether it was true that, as the most substantial book on the topic claimed, no one in the '50s or '60s went to the drive-in to see the movie.
BG: I can imagine. So, when did the first drive-in open in North America, and who were the enterprising architects behind it?
GB: The generally accepted starting date of the drive-in was June 6th, 1933, when Richard Hollingshead Junior opened his drive-in just outside Camden, New Jersey. There had been outdoor screenings before that date, notably what were called ‘Air domes.’ There were even occasions when people may have watched films while sitting in their cars. But Hollingshead and his business partner, Willie Warren Spez, were distinctive in taking out a patent for showing films outdoors in front of a series of ramps designed to give the occupants of parked cars an unobstructed view of the screen. Hollingshead argued that that turned the car into a private theatre box, allowing people to talk, eat, smoke, or bring on their noisy children without disrupting others, and that it brought films to people who might not go to an indoor cinema.
BG: Genius. What could possibly go wrong?
GB: Drive-ins, at least those from the 1950s or earlier, tend to be associated with films that were old, shown in poor-quality prints, low budget, or not from the Hollywood major studios.
BG: Oh.
GB: The films that they did show were not screened or heard in the best conditions. Sound was a particular problem and only partly improved after the Second World War when drive-ins introduced individual speakers attached to car windows. Surrounding lights in the sky or neighbouring buildings did not help the clarity of the screen image. It didn't help either if it was raining, and mosquitoes were another problem.
BG: Mosquitoes, I see. And what else?
GB: Drive-ins were limited by the fact that they could not show films while it was daylight and, outside the South, by the fact that for much of the year, it was too cold to show films at all. The growth in the number of drive-ins in the late 1940s and the 1950s meant that there were summer periods when more people in the US were watching films outdoors and indoors. While some treated the drive-in business as a gimmick before the Second World War, it became too big to be dismissed as that after the war.
BG: The resilience of popular culture, and the tickets must have been much cheaper than those for indoor cinemas.
GB: The admission charge did tend to be relatively low, and many drive-ins let children in for free to the annoyance of distributors who made their money from taking a percentage of the box office take. In comparison with indoor cinemas, a higher proportion of drive-in takings tended to come from food and drink sales. In the 1950s, most drive-ins also had a children's playground, sometimes elaborate facilities with, for example, a miniature train. In effect, some drive-ins were amusement parks.
BG: Fascinating. And what were the types of films screened at these drive-ins in the 1950s?
GB: The drive-in experience, looked at from the 1950s, tended to have programs that were similar to neighbouring indoor cinemas. That is, they showed a lot of Westerns and a lot of action films, but also films that had won the Oscars that year—Disney films, other Hollywood films, and non-Hollywood films with exploitation potential, including the occasional film from overseas. My examination of 1958 box office records for three drive-ins in Little Rock, Arkansas, revealed that the Brigitte Bardot film ‘And God Created Woman’ took the most money, narrowly beating the biblical epic ‘The Ten Commandments.’ However, Hollinshead's drive-in tended to show films from poverty row studios, that is studios that specialised in low-budget drama films and the odd British film. In some areas, there were drive-ins that showed Spanish-language films. The overall point is that the drive-in program was broader than has generally been assumed, and while they did not compete with downtown first-run cinemas, overtime more drive-ins showed films at the same time as other cinemas.
BG: Interesting. Do you have a specific example?
GB: One of the drive-ins I looked at in Phoenix, Arizona, started out in 1951 as the Twin Open Air, with one screen showing Westerns and other action films and what they called a variety program on the other screen. It was then split into two drive-ins. One was renamed ‘Acres of Fun,’ and by the end of the 1950s, it was screening double bills, such as ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf’ and ‘Invasion of the Saucer Men,’ as well as films from ‘Bambi’ to ‘Some Like It Hot.’ The other was renamed "The Peso," and it showed Spanish-language films, mainly Mexican films.
BG: Were there any complaints from local people when these drive-in cinemas suddenly started springing up in their area?
GB: The relationship between drive-ins and local communities also varied. If you look at local newspapers, you will certainly come across reports of objections to a proposed drive-in and complaints about the behaviour at the drive-in or what was being shown at the drive-in. Exhibitors, however, often did their best to integrate their business into the local community, whether by organising children's events or becoming involved in the community in other ways.
BG: These days, most people associate 1950s drive-in cinemas with rude and rowdy teenagers, but in historical terms, this isn't strictly true, is it?
GB: Throughout the 1950s, exhibitors insisted that their main audience was the family, which generally meant couples with young children. Overall, at least before the 1960s, teenagers formed a minority of the cinema audience and did not necessarily prefer outdoor to indoor moviegoing. However, they were going into a significant minority, and exhibitors who emphasised the family audience were, in part, attempting to downplay the reputation the drive-in had from the beginning as a dating venue or passion pit. So yes, teenagers who had access to a car did go to the drive-in, and in the second half of the 1950s, films aimed at teenagers were shown at drive-ins as well as indoor cinemas, though they made up a relatively small part of the program.
BG: And what other types of audience did the exhibitors accommodate?
GB: As well as emphasising the family audience, some exhibitors and commentators wrote about the drive-in as a place where different generations and income groups could mix. Even the drive-ins were more welcoming to black audiences than other cinemas, if that was true in some places, it was not elsewhere. Into the 1960s, there were drive-ins that segregated black and white audiences, others that excluded black audiences, and a small number of drive-ins for black audiences. There were ways in which drive-ins were different, but they were part of a nation in which segregation was widespread, to the extent that it did not generally need to be explicitly stated.
BG: Sobering thoughts. Anyway, what about the representation of drive-in cinemas in wider culture, particularly on screen?
GB: The drive-in has played a role in Hollywood films ever since the 1949 film ‘White Heat,’ when James Cagney's Cody Jarrett evaded the law by turning into Burbank's Sunvale Drive-in. It's also evoked in numerous song lyrics, various novels, and photographs, from Robert Frank's mid-1950s drive-in movie ‘Detroit’ to later images of abandoned drive-ins. What's fascinating about these is their differences. Almost from the start, drive-ins had a disruptive or, at least, disreputable reputation. They've increasingly been viewed with nostalgia, but even that nostalgia has different sides. It can be for an imagined 1950s innocence. Drive-in scenes in films such as ‘The Lords of Flatbush‘ and ‘Grease’ were part of a 1970s trend that looked back to the 1950s teenagers in different ways, and in the 1970s and 1980s, the drive-in was also becoming increasingly associated with horror and other forms of exploitation cinema. As others noted, the subsequent circulation of such films as driving movies on DVD or other formats has itself been a form of nostalgia. Drive-in films set in the past also lend themselves to coming-of-age narratives, whether that means children in the 1996 film ‘Frankenstein and Me’ sneaking into a driving screening of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ or teenagers meeting at a Cape Cod drive-in in the summer of 1991 in the 2017 film ‘Hot Summer Nights.’ Drive-ins also feature on-screen as part of contemporary Roadside America, the sort of place a car might drive in 1949 in ‘White Heat’ or in, say, ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ in 1974.
BG: ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ is a great film. I thoroughly enjoyed that when I was a kid.
GB: I guess the fact that they've been part of the actual landscape of roadside America and part of the experience of growing up for many people explains their screen presence, though that can vary from the opening shot of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ which shows the blank screen of an almost empty Texas drive-in in daylight, to the crane shot of the neon-lit drive-in sign in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.’
BG: I fear the beginning of the end is about to arrive.
GB: Published figures suggest that drive-in capacity and takings fluctuated but overall were increasing into the 1970s, even though the number of drive-ins had decreased. Drive-ins closed more rapidly in the 1980s. In part, that was because owners of drive-ins built out of town on what were, in the 1940s, or the late 1940s, or the 1950s, relatively low-cost land could get a quicker return from selling to a late 20th-century property developer. Particularly when urban expansion meant that the surrounding area was no longer open country. Beyond that, an increasing emphasis on, in some instance, X-rated films was accompanied by a decline in family audiences. While, over time, indoor multiplexes and different video formats for home viewing attracted more of the youth market. It may also be that there were more potential dating venues after the 1950s. While smaller cars with bucket seats did not help those who wanted the drive-in to live up to its passion pit reputation.
BG: Such a shame, the rise of capitalism at the expense of the community. Anyway, thank you so much, Guy, for taking us on such an enlightening journey into the past. I'm sure you've conjured up a lot of strong cinematic memories for many of our listeners.
GB: Thank you.
BG: And good luck with your book, ‘The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination.’ published by Bloomsbury, it says here in December 2023.
Interview
Dr. Darren Elliott-Smith
(University of Stirling)
discusses Queer Horror and Hollywood
Dr. Darren Elliott-Smith
(University of Stirling)
discusses Queer Horror and Hollywood
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
August 31st 2023
by Brett Gregory
August 31st 2023
Transcript
BG: Over recent weeks, we've been exploring cinema, not only as a playground for entertainment, escapism, and egos but also as an economic, political, and ideological battleground for social class, gender, ethnicity, technology, and, as we're going to discover in this evening's episode, sexuality.
DES: Hi, my name is Darren Elliott-Smith. I'm a senior lecturer in film and gender, and I teach at the University of Stirling in Scotland in the UK. My research specialisms are in the representation of LGBTQ people in the horror genre, and I'm arguing that it's more recently that this has moved out from the shadowy realms of implicit and symbolic representation of yesteryear.
BG: So how are we to understand queer theory as a critical approach to cinema and its relationship to, say, Marxism?
DES: I suppose it depends on your understanding of queer as a theory and how the term and the ideology have altered in recent years. For me, it's often kind of obvious that there are at least two strands to queer theory. One being around identity politics and attempting to offer what Harry Benchoff describes as an oxymoronic community of difference. So this is a kind of paradox, I suppose, in itself that captures the problematic existence within queer culture and queer theory. But queer, as a word and as an ideology, in my understanding, also still disturbs some people, depending on your social persuasion, or your generation or background, in lots of different ways. And in terms of where this fits with Marxism, queer activism all drew upon socialist rhetoric that called for change, a change whereby the queer collective were being marginalised, crushed, and effectively killed by capitalist, imperialist, middle-class, white CIS hetero patriarchy. And Pride, though far removed from the activist origins of Pride marches in the 1970s, 1980s, still retains some of that need for change to look after the collective and therefore the individual as they exist within the mass, free from the oppression of that ruling elite.
BG: And how does this inform a queer understanding of the horror genre in particular?
DES: Interestingly, many of the works of early horror film theorists in the 1970s, particularly the definitive work of queer film scholar Robin Wood, utilised both a lesbian and gay approach with a socialist and Marxist approach as well. So he argued that, using a little bit of psychoanalysis merged with Marxism, that those ideals and energies that don't fit the bourgeois capitalist, imperialist, and white patriarchal culture of production and reproduction are cast out as other across this imaginary border, which then sets up the binary of us versus them. The problem is that actually within horror and within a lot of Gothic narratives, the ‘them’ or ‘they’ sometimes come back. The fact that they always come back, repression and oppression eventually is shown to fail in the horror narrative, causing this monster, creature, killer, or infection, whatever it is, to come back and threaten that pure individual that's meant to represent the US.
BG: Can you give us a specific film example where the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary becomes blurred?
DES: in kind of focusing on this theory. He collapsed the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary, and we see this most critically skewered in films like George Romero's ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ whereby the undead, the zombie, the returned, kind of reanimated corpse who once was human, once was us, become a ‘them’ figure, and then they return to assimilate everybody else into this undead horde, where children eat parents, and the Soul Survivor, which in this case is Ben, black male, is gunned down by white vigilantes at the end of the film, who stake him for one of them, even though he's not zombified; he's actually still human and very much alive. And Romero's point is that the gun-toting white male doesn't see any difference; actually, all exist in an othered state.
BG: So what is the scope of horror films and television shows which is under consideration here?
DES: Queer horror, although I'd argue that all horror is queer in that it seems to represent the odd, the strange, the non-normative, and as a genre, it seeks to distress, to upset and to challenge, and to scare. It's for me a set of films and TV shows that are made, normally by LGBTQ creatives, that foreground queerness as an element of representation in some way, but this subgenre also includes historical considerations as influences upon these newer out contemporary horror films and shows. So, in order to do that, we have to look at what a lot of academics and myself call closeted texts like, Interview with a Vampire, The Hunger, Psycho, Bride of Frankenstein, all these films that kind of clearly have LGBTQ themes running through them but never really explicitly kind of outwardly state that they are. So they involve some kind of symbolic interpretation or reading.
BG: From a historical perspective. The Hays Code, which was introduced in the 1930s, clearly had a resounding effect on cinema's representations, narratives, and themes. Could you tell us a little bit more about this?
DES: So, the Hays Code was set up after a series of scandals rocked Hollywood, and people were worried about the deplored world of filmmaking as one that might infect supposedly decent heteronormative family life. One particular case that's often cited is the star Fatty Arbuckle being accused of raping a young starlet in the early 1920s. So, Will Hays set up a production code that would monitor the content of all film productions and those that were released in US cinemas, preventing certain elements and themes and narratives that they deemed would seek to poison US ideology. It's Vito Russo's documentary and book ‘The Celluloid Closet’ outlines this really well in terms of the impact on LGBTQ+ folks. The rule that existed within the Hays Code strictly prohibited any depiction of what was called "sex perversion," impacting any explicit representation of any non-normative sexuality or romance. So, Some films had to get around this by using symbolism, inference, suggestion so as to ensure that their true audience were being represented in and seen in films. Some directors, queer-affiliated directors, were kind of doing this deliberately, coding their films in a way.
BG: For example?
DES: The Universal franchise of horror films from the '30s and the '40s were actually playing with the limitations of the code as well. It's been kind of recently introduced so the suggestion here becomes quite pointed at times, and there's a practice of rebellion in a small way, and this was more pushed, I suppose, by the makers of these films. So if we can kind of go to certain auteurs, film directors like Todd Browning, whose sexuality was often kind of questioned but never fully defined, he made the pre-code film ‘Freaks,’ which is problematic but also really interesting kind of queer film in its representation of non-normative body types. There's also James Whale, who is a gay British director who ramped up the suggestion in his version of ‘Frankenstein,’ that he directed and even more so in the kind of more comedic and kind of almost parodic ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ where we have this homo-erotic triangle literally exploding off the screen between Frankenstein the creature and Dr Pretorius as well.
BG: And once again Social Class is at play in such horror films as well isn’t it?
DES: Class definitely comes into it again, drawing on those early Marxist readings from Franco Moretti on the nature of the capitalist blood-sucking vampire configured more recently as a corporate CEO or landed gentry or an aristocrat versus the underclass working class proletariat of the zombie or a mindless slave. And we see a kind of a literal version of this in the depiction of Haitian voodoo in early RKO texts like ‘I Walked with a Zombie.’ But the queerness present in the upper classes, something I suppose that's reflected on as a consideration of effete queer men, idiosyncratic in their taste, often overindulged with an emphasis on the pursuit of overwhelmed senses, and that kind of stereotypical depiction of upper-class queerness is existent in early Gothic texts like ‘Jekyll and Hyde' and ‘Dorian Gray,’ where the upper classes are seen to wallow in debauchery that's propped up by generations of wealth, them having the time, the money, the power to indulge in seemingly perverse desires.
BG: And queer horror is still disrupting and destabilising popular conservative sensibility today as well, isn't it?
DES: Well, the recent remake of Hellraiser wasn't received so well by so-called purist horror fans. Um, they took against this more explicit queer content and they rejected in particular the idea of trans actor Jamie Clayton as the new Pinhead. I mean, not realizing that this film was written by a gay male author, directed by the same man, Clive Barker, and inspired by his experiences of BDSM queer practices that he saw in Berlin nightclubs. And it's quite clear that it's queer from the get-go.
BG: And your academic work presents is exploring the relationship between queer horror, trauma, and mental health, is that correct?
DES: So my recent work looks at the impact of neoconservative, neoliberal ideologies upon LGBTQ individuals' mental health and how horror and Gothic are often the go-to genre for the representation of this. So recently, we've seen a few films that foreground this, utilising horror tropes. ‘Hypochondriac’ from 2022 focuses on this young man who fears that he's inherited his mother's mental illness but sees himself split into two versions of himself: one is a wolf man, the other is this kind of non-normative, seemingly kind of normal queer individual. Other films like ‘Thelma’ from 2018, which is a Swedish supernatural film about a girl with Carrie-like powers who comes to terms with her own lesbianism that has been repressed by her staunch religious parents. And even the recent series of ‘American Horror Story: NYC’ tends to come to terms with personal and cultural trauma that's affected the queer community and also across the world, but particularly in New York. Via various, albeit from my perspective, they're quite clunky allegories and explicit narratives around the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
BG: And we must never forget that with the current rise in right-wing attitudes in both the US and the UK, there are real lives at stake here.
DES: So it seems that in the past few years, things have become even more obvious that being different, being LGBTQ in today's world can be scary. Our rights are being taken away one by one, these hard-won equalities that have been rolled back, and our existence as legally equal is increasingly becoming very precarious. So it's a really interesting time, I think, for theorists to And also from filmmakers to kind of think about the ways in which we can start to kind of think about how cultural theory that once oppressed and stigmatised queer people is now being reinterpreted, re expressed, and represented to allow queer filmmakers and theorists to take up that mode of address that can offer critiques of the establishment and of also our own subcultures and of those that still oppress us.
BG: Fantastic Darren, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Your cinematic observations have been both illuminating and important.
BG: Over recent weeks, we've been exploring cinema, not only as a playground for entertainment, escapism, and egos but also as an economic, political, and ideological battleground for social class, gender, ethnicity, technology, and, as we're going to discover in this evening's episode, sexuality.
DES: Hi, my name is Darren Elliott-Smith. I'm a senior lecturer in film and gender, and I teach at the University of Stirling in Scotland in the UK. My research specialisms are in the representation of LGBTQ people in the horror genre, and I'm arguing that it's more recently that this has moved out from the shadowy realms of implicit and symbolic representation of yesteryear.
BG: So how are we to understand queer theory as a critical approach to cinema and its relationship to, say, Marxism?
DES: I suppose it depends on your understanding of queer as a theory and how the term and the ideology have altered in recent years. For me, it's often kind of obvious that there are at least two strands to queer theory. One being around identity politics and attempting to offer what Harry Benchoff describes as an oxymoronic community of difference. So this is a kind of paradox, I suppose, in itself that captures the problematic existence within queer culture and queer theory. But queer, as a word and as an ideology, in my understanding, also still disturbs some people, depending on your social persuasion, or your generation or background, in lots of different ways. And in terms of where this fits with Marxism, queer activism all drew upon socialist rhetoric that called for change, a change whereby the queer collective were being marginalised, crushed, and effectively killed by capitalist, imperialist, middle-class, white CIS hetero patriarchy. And Pride, though far removed from the activist origins of Pride marches in the 1970s, 1980s, still retains some of that need for change to look after the collective and therefore the individual as they exist within the mass, free from the oppression of that ruling elite.
BG: And how does this inform a queer understanding of the horror genre in particular?
DES: Interestingly, many of the works of early horror film theorists in the 1970s, particularly the definitive work of queer film scholar Robin Wood, utilised both a lesbian and gay approach with a socialist and Marxist approach as well. So he argued that, using a little bit of psychoanalysis merged with Marxism, that those ideals and energies that don't fit the bourgeois capitalist, imperialist, and white patriarchal culture of production and reproduction are cast out as other across this imaginary border, which then sets up the binary of us versus them. The problem is that actually within horror and within a lot of Gothic narratives, the ‘them’ or ‘they’ sometimes come back. The fact that they always come back, repression and oppression eventually is shown to fail in the horror narrative, causing this monster, creature, killer, or infection, whatever it is, to come back and threaten that pure individual that's meant to represent the US.
BG: Can you give us a specific film example where the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary becomes blurred?
DES: in kind of focusing on this theory. He collapsed the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary, and we see this most critically skewered in films like George Romero's ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ whereby the undead, the zombie, the returned, kind of reanimated corpse who once was human, once was us, become a ‘them’ figure, and then they return to assimilate everybody else into this undead horde, where children eat parents, and the Soul Survivor, which in this case is Ben, black male, is gunned down by white vigilantes at the end of the film, who stake him for one of them, even though he's not zombified; he's actually still human and very much alive. And Romero's point is that the gun-toting white male doesn't see any difference; actually, all exist in an othered state.
BG: So what is the scope of horror films and television shows which is under consideration here?
DES: Queer horror, although I'd argue that all horror is queer in that it seems to represent the odd, the strange, the non-normative, and as a genre, it seeks to distress, to upset and to challenge, and to scare. It's for me a set of films and TV shows that are made, normally by LGBTQ creatives, that foreground queerness as an element of representation in some way, but this subgenre also includes historical considerations as influences upon these newer out contemporary horror films and shows. So, in order to do that, we have to look at what a lot of academics and myself call closeted texts like, Interview with a Vampire, The Hunger, Psycho, Bride of Frankenstein, all these films that kind of clearly have LGBTQ themes running through them but never really explicitly kind of outwardly state that they are. So they involve some kind of symbolic interpretation or reading.
BG: From a historical perspective. The Hays Code, which was introduced in the 1930s, clearly had a resounding effect on cinema's representations, narratives, and themes. Could you tell us a little bit more about this?
DES: So, the Hays Code was set up after a series of scandals rocked Hollywood, and people were worried about the deplored world of filmmaking as one that might infect supposedly decent heteronormative family life. One particular case that's often cited is the star Fatty Arbuckle being accused of raping a young starlet in the early 1920s. So, Will Hays set up a production code that would monitor the content of all film productions and those that were released in US cinemas, preventing certain elements and themes and narratives that they deemed would seek to poison US ideology. It's Vito Russo's documentary and book ‘The Celluloid Closet’ outlines this really well in terms of the impact on LGBTQ+ folks. The rule that existed within the Hays Code strictly prohibited any depiction of what was called "sex perversion," impacting any explicit representation of any non-normative sexuality or romance. So, Some films had to get around this by using symbolism, inference, suggestion so as to ensure that their true audience were being represented in and seen in films. Some directors, queer-affiliated directors, were kind of doing this deliberately, coding their films in a way.
BG: For example?
DES: The Universal franchise of horror films from the '30s and the '40s were actually playing with the limitations of the code as well. It's been kind of recently introduced so the suggestion here becomes quite pointed at times, and there's a practice of rebellion in a small way, and this was more pushed, I suppose, by the makers of these films. So if we can kind of go to certain auteurs, film directors like Todd Browning, whose sexuality was often kind of questioned but never fully defined, he made the pre-code film ‘Freaks,’ which is problematic but also really interesting kind of queer film in its representation of non-normative body types. There's also James Whale, who is a gay British director who ramped up the suggestion in his version of ‘Frankenstein,’ that he directed and even more so in the kind of more comedic and kind of almost parodic ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ where we have this homo-erotic triangle literally exploding off the screen between Frankenstein the creature and Dr Pretorius as well.
BG: And once again Social Class is at play in such horror films as well isn’t it?
DES: Class definitely comes into it again, drawing on those early Marxist readings from Franco Moretti on the nature of the capitalist blood-sucking vampire configured more recently as a corporate CEO or landed gentry or an aristocrat versus the underclass working class proletariat of the zombie or a mindless slave. And we see a kind of a literal version of this in the depiction of Haitian voodoo in early RKO texts like ‘I Walked with a Zombie.’ But the queerness present in the upper classes, something I suppose that's reflected on as a consideration of effete queer men, idiosyncratic in their taste, often overindulged with an emphasis on the pursuit of overwhelmed senses, and that kind of stereotypical depiction of upper-class queerness is existent in early Gothic texts like ‘Jekyll and Hyde' and ‘Dorian Gray,’ where the upper classes are seen to wallow in debauchery that's propped up by generations of wealth, them having the time, the money, the power to indulge in seemingly perverse desires.
BG: And queer horror is still disrupting and destabilising popular conservative sensibility today as well, isn't it?
DES: Well, the recent remake of Hellraiser wasn't received so well by so-called purist horror fans. Um, they took against this more explicit queer content and they rejected in particular the idea of trans actor Jamie Clayton as the new Pinhead. I mean, not realizing that this film was written by a gay male author, directed by the same man, Clive Barker, and inspired by his experiences of BDSM queer practices that he saw in Berlin nightclubs. And it's quite clear that it's queer from the get-go.
BG: And your academic work presents is exploring the relationship between queer horror, trauma, and mental health, is that correct?
DES: So my recent work looks at the impact of neoconservative, neoliberal ideologies upon LGBTQ individuals' mental health and how horror and Gothic are often the go-to genre for the representation of this. So recently, we've seen a few films that foreground this, utilising horror tropes. ‘Hypochondriac’ from 2022 focuses on this young man who fears that he's inherited his mother's mental illness but sees himself split into two versions of himself: one is a wolf man, the other is this kind of non-normative, seemingly kind of normal queer individual. Other films like ‘Thelma’ from 2018, which is a Swedish supernatural film about a girl with Carrie-like powers who comes to terms with her own lesbianism that has been repressed by her staunch religious parents. And even the recent series of ‘American Horror Story: NYC’ tends to come to terms with personal and cultural trauma that's affected the queer community and also across the world, but particularly in New York. Via various, albeit from my perspective, they're quite clunky allegories and explicit narratives around the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
BG: And we must never forget that with the current rise in right-wing attitudes in both the US and the UK, there are real lives at stake here.
DES: So it seems that in the past few years, things have become even more obvious that being different, being LGBTQ in today's world can be scary. Our rights are being taken away one by one, these hard-won equalities that have been rolled back, and our existence as legally equal is increasingly becoming very precarious. So it's a really interesting time, I think, for theorists to And also from filmmakers to kind of think about the ways in which we can start to kind of think about how cultural theory that once oppressed and stigmatised queer people is now being reinterpreted, re expressed, and represented to allow queer filmmakers and theorists to take up that mode of address that can offer critiques of the establishment and of also our own subcultures and of those that still oppress us.
BG: Fantastic Darren, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Your cinematic observations have been both illuminating and important.
Interview
Prof. Andy Willis
(University of Salford)
discusses 'The Hollywood Renaissance' and 'The Blacklist'
Prof. Andy Willis
(University of Salford)
discusses 'The Hollywood Renaissance' and 'The Blacklist'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
August 24th 2023
by Brett Gregory
August 24th 2023
Transcript
BG: My guest this evening is the curator of a unique season of controversial yet compelling Hollywood movies from the 1960s and 70s. In collaboration with National Film Festival organisers Cinema Rediscovered, global distribution company Park Circus, and the esteemed British Film Institute, will be touring cinemas in the UK and the Republic of Ireland over the next two weeks.
AW: Hi Brett, thanks for having me on the show. My name is Andy Willis. I'm a professor of film studies at the University of Salford in the UK. Alongside that, I'm also a senior visiting curator for film at HOME, which is a multi-arts centre in the middle of Manchester in the North West of England.
BG: And what is this curated film program, this creative project, about exactly?
AW: So, this project is on the Hollywood blacklist, but particularly on how those people who were involved in the Hollywood blacklist ended up going back into the American film industry in the 1960s. It's particularly focused on those who contributed in the broader sense to what's now known as the Hollywood Renaissance. It went really from the early stirrings of the Hollywood blacklist, which began at the end of the Second World War. In the trade papers within the film industry, such as The Hollywood Reporter, articles began to appear accusing people who worked in the Hollywood film industry of having communist sympathies. This is quite ironic, seeing as when the Soviet Union was an ally, many people were encouraged to make pro-Soviet films. But after the war, when they were now the enemy, suddenly those films were held against people when they were accused of being communists or communist sympathisers. This came to a peak in October 1947 when The House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee, often known as HUAC, subpoenaed 19 people to appear before them to be questioned about their loyalty and communist sympathies.
BG: Reds under the bed. So initially, you say 19?
AW: They actually called only 11 people, and one of those people was the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who did talk to the committee. But then, realising that the writing was on the wall, very soon after, he got a plane to East Germany and had one of the most legendary careers in European theatre. The 10 who were left were all held in contempt of the committee and were eventually sent to prison for a year. They became known as the Hollywood 10, which included mostly writers, but also a couple of directors and writer-producers. I think that reflects how influential and important writers were seen at the time within the Hollywood film industry. It was the writers who could put ideas within the films.
BG: And then what happened?
AW: Things got worse just after that. In 1947, there was a statement made by key people in the Hollywood film industry, known as the Waldorf Statement. They met at the Waldorf Hotel. People like Louis B. Mayer from Metro Golden Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Harry Cohn from Columbia Pictures were in attendance. They all came together and said that if they had anyone working for them under contract who was seen to be a communist sympathiser or a Communist Party member and didn't renounce that, then they would terminate their contract. That started the Hollywood blacklist.
BG: All very sinister. And there was some sort of in-your-face propaganda campaign going on as well, wasn't there?
AW: Very shortly afterwards, in June 1950, there was the publication of a pamphlet by Counterattack called 'Red Channels.' 'Red Channels' really stuck the boot in even more to progressive practitioners within the Hollywood film industry. It named 151 actors, writers, musicians, as well as broadcast journalists and other people working in the media. After they were named, they were effectively blacklisted and unable to work.
BG: And how long did this reign of terror go on for?
AW: It lasted for a good 10 to 15, for some people coming up to 20 years, where they were unable to work. They were unable to have their names on films or television programs they wrote. It's a very dark period for Hollywood and caused great rifts that lasted for decades after, with people not being happy with those who had named names. One of the things people may know is that as part of the HUAC trials, people would be invited to name names of Hollywood's communists or communist sympathisers. Famous people like Elia Kazan, the theatre and film director, did name names, which caused great disruption in their working relationships. For example, Kazan worked a lot with Arthur Miller, and after he named names, Miller refused to work with Kazan again. When Elia Kazan was given a lifetime achievement Oscar, people like Ed Harris and Nick Nolte were sitting on their hands, not clapping and looking stony-faced. Outside, people like Abraham Polonsky, the writer-director, and Walter Bernstein, the writer, were protesting about giving a lifetime achievement Oscar to someone who had named names and destroyed the careers of many of their friends and work associates.
BG: Yeah, I watched that ceremony with Ed Harris and Nick Nolte on YouTube years ago. Totally awkward. Anyway, let's move on to the films you selected for the program.
AW: One of the key films we chose for the season was 'Serpico' from 1973. It's directed by Sidney Lumet, with a stellar performance by Al Pacino. But what people may not know is that the first early drafts of the screenplay were written by Waldo Salt, who had been blacklisted. Another film we selected was 'Midnight Cowboy' from 1969. It's really the film that brought Waldo Salt back into focus. He had made a couple of other films after his blacklist, notably 'Taras Bulba' from 1962. But he was unhappy with those kinds of adventure films and wanted to do something more weighty. When John Schlesinger and Jerome Hellman were looking for someone to adapt the novel, it was Waldo Salt who found a way to do that.
BG: Midnight Cowboy is a great film, but why is it a key film for this program?
AW: It is still the first X-rated film to win the Best Film Oscar. Waldo Salt was also rewarded with an Oscar for his work on the film. This seemed to be an important film, emblematic of the new Hollywood and its challenging ideas. I wanted to highlight that Waldo Salt, who suffered from the blacklist era, was able to contribute to the progressive politics of a film like 'Midnight Cowboy.'
BG: Tell us more about the movie 'Uptight'. I've never heard of it.
AW: 'Uptight' is an interesting example among the films in the season. It's much lesser known than 'Serpico' or 'Midnight Cowboy.' It's directed by Jules Dassin, who was also blacklisted in the early 1950s. He moved to Europe and rebuilt his career there, known for 'Rififi'. 'Uptight' was the first film he made back in America. It's an adaptation of the same novel that John Ford adapted for 'The Informer' in the 1930s. Jules Dassin, who suffered from the blacklist, I think was interested in this idea of the guilt at the core of this film.
BG: And there were political shenanigans going on behind the scenes, is that right?
AW: It's a fascinating film, but the making of the film is also really interesting. Shot in Cleveland, there was so much tension among the extras that they had to take the production back to Los Angeles. The FBI reportedly tried to get people working on the film to inform them about the politics of the film. Jules Dassin takes the setting from Ireland and the IRA of the original novel and places it into the Black Power movement in Cleveland in the late 1960s. It's a fascinating film.
BG: Black Power, the IRA. What else do you have lined up?
AW: Yes, another film that focused on the Black experience in America and had a contribution from someone blacklisted is 'Claudine'. It's a much smaller, quieter film set in Harlem around a single mother played by Diahann Carroll. She meets a well-meaning garbage man played by James Earl Jones, and they try to make a go of things in 1974. The film is directed by John Berry, who had been blacklisted and went on to work on this film. It's an important historical film, I think, and has been a little forgotten.
BG: A film that hasn't been forgotten, though, is Robert Altman's 'M*A*S*H'.
AW: 'M*A*S*H' is another familiar film in the season. It's remembered for breaking Robert Altman and introducing his filmmaking style, with sound and image combining in a unique way. For this season, 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist,' I wanted to focus on the screenwriter of 'M*A*S*H,’ Ring Lardner Jr. He had been one of the Hollywood 10, one of the first victims of the blacklist.
BG: Why is Ring Lardner Jr.'s work on 'M*A*S*H’ so important?
AW: Ring Lardner Jr.'s contribution was vital to 'M*A*S*H.’ He brings progressive politics and attempts to portray the horrors of war. It also looks forward to the cynicism of the 1970s. 'M*A*S*H’ is one of the great anti-war movies. America was still in the thrall of Vietnam in 1970, and I don't think anybody needed any pushing to relate the film to the Vietnam reality that many Americans were experiencing.
BG: And you focus on a particular female actor in your program as well, don't you?
AW: Yes, I didn't want to focus only on writers. I included Hal Ashby's 1975 film 'Shampoo'. which is set in the late 1960s and is about the excesses and vanity of America during that period. It features a standout performance by Lee Grant, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Lee Grant had been an actor who, in the 1950s, was on the cusp of real fame but was blacklisted. She reappeared in the 1960s in films like 'The Heat of the Night' and was nominated for an Oscar for 'The Landlord'. Lee Grant is a great example of how an actor can come back from the blacklist and re-establish themselves at the centre of the Hollywood film industry during the Hollywood Renaissance.
BG: Hollywood, the dream factory with nightmare working conditions.
AW: The Hollywood film industry sees itself as the dream factory, offering a particular version of society as the aspirational one we should seek out. The Hollywood blacklist era shows that when people were writing other versions of potential future societies or contemporary societies that weren't supported by the capitalist studios, they were quick to act and marginalise those people. Let's hope there are writers, directors, actors, and musicians willing to offer alternatives and challenge the status quo.
BG: Great stuff, Andy. It's always healthy to end with a clenched fist in the air. It's been a pleasure having you on the show, and I wish you the best of luck with 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist.'
BG: My guest this evening is the curator of a unique season of controversial yet compelling Hollywood movies from the 1960s and 70s. In collaboration with National Film Festival organisers Cinema Rediscovered, global distribution company Park Circus, and the esteemed British Film Institute, will be touring cinemas in the UK and the Republic of Ireland over the next two weeks.
AW: Hi Brett, thanks for having me on the show. My name is Andy Willis. I'm a professor of film studies at the University of Salford in the UK. Alongside that, I'm also a senior visiting curator for film at HOME, which is a multi-arts centre in the middle of Manchester in the North West of England.
BG: And what is this curated film program, this creative project, about exactly?
AW: So, this project is on the Hollywood blacklist, but particularly on how those people who were involved in the Hollywood blacklist ended up going back into the American film industry in the 1960s. It's particularly focused on those who contributed in the broader sense to what's now known as the Hollywood Renaissance. It went really from the early stirrings of the Hollywood blacklist, which began at the end of the Second World War. In the trade papers within the film industry, such as The Hollywood Reporter, articles began to appear accusing people who worked in the Hollywood film industry of having communist sympathies. This is quite ironic, seeing as when the Soviet Union was an ally, many people were encouraged to make pro-Soviet films. But after the war, when they were now the enemy, suddenly those films were held against people when they were accused of being communists or communist sympathisers. This came to a peak in October 1947 when The House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee, often known as HUAC, subpoenaed 19 people to appear before them to be questioned about their loyalty and communist sympathies.
BG: Reds under the bed. So initially, you say 19?
AW: They actually called only 11 people, and one of those people was the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who did talk to the committee. But then, realising that the writing was on the wall, very soon after, he got a plane to East Germany and had one of the most legendary careers in European theatre. The 10 who were left were all held in contempt of the committee and were eventually sent to prison for a year. They became known as the Hollywood 10, which included mostly writers, but also a couple of directors and writer-producers. I think that reflects how influential and important writers were seen at the time within the Hollywood film industry. It was the writers who could put ideas within the films.
BG: And then what happened?
AW: Things got worse just after that. In 1947, there was a statement made by key people in the Hollywood film industry, known as the Waldorf Statement. They met at the Waldorf Hotel. People like Louis B. Mayer from Metro Golden Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Harry Cohn from Columbia Pictures were in attendance. They all came together and said that if they had anyone working for them under contract who was seen to be a communist sympathiser or a Communist Party member and didn't renounce that, then they would terminate their contract. That started the Hollywood blacklist.
BG: All very sinister. And there was some sort of in-your-face propaganda campaign going on as well, wasn't there?
AW: Very shortly afterwards, in June 1950, there was the publication of a pamphlet by Counterattack called 'Red Channels.' 'Red Channels' really stuck the boot in even more to progressive practitioners within the Hollywood film industry. It named 151 actors, writers, musicians, as well as broadcast journalists and other people working in the media. After they were named, they were effectively blacklisted and unable to work.
BG: And how long did this reign of terror go on for?
AW: It lasted for a good 10 to 15, for some people coming up to 20 years, where they were unable to work. They were unable to have their names on films or television programs they wrote. It's a very dark period for Hollywood and caused great rifts that lasted for decades after, with people not being happy with those who had named names. One of the things people may know is that as part of the HUAC trials, people would be invited to name names of Hollywood's communists or communist sympathisers. Famous people like Elia Kazan, the theatre and film director, did name names, which caused great disruption in their working relationships. For example, Kazan worked a lot with Arthur Miller, and after he named names, Miller refused to work with Kazan again. When Elia Kazan was given a lifetime achievement Oscar, people like Ed Harris and Nick Nolte were sitting on their hands, not clapping and looking stony-faced. Outside, people like Abraham Polonsky, the writer-director, and Walter Bernstein, the writer, were protesting about giving a lifetime achievement Oscar to someone who had named names and destroyed the careers of many of their friends and work associates.
BG: Yeah, I watched that ceremony with Ed Harris and Nick Nolte on YouTube years ago. Totally awkward. Anyway, let's move on to the films you selected for the program.
AW: One of the key films we chose for the season was 'Serpico' from 1973. It's directed by Sidney Lumet, with a stellar performance by Al Pacino. But what people may not know is that the first early drafts of the screenplay were written by Waldo Salt, who had been blacklisted. Another film we selected was 'Midnight Cowboy' from 1969. It's really the film that brought Waldo Salt back into focus. He had made a couple of other films after his blacklist, notably 'Taras Bulba' from 1962. But he was unhappy with those kinds of adventure films and wanted to do something more weighty. When John Schlesinger and Jerome Hellman were looking for someone to adapt the novel, it was Waldo Salt who found a way to do that.
BG: Midnight Cowboy is a great film, but why is it a key film for this program?
AW: It is still the first X-rated film to win the Best Film Oscar. Waldo Salt was also rewarded with an Oscar for his work on the film. This seemed to be an important film, emblematic of the new Hollywood and its challenging ideas. I wanted to highlight that Waldo Salt, who suffered from the blacklist era, was able to contribute to the progressive politics of a film like 'Midnight Cowboy.'
BG: Tell us more about the movie 'Uptight'. I've never heard of it.
AW: 'Uptight' is an interesting example among the films in the season. It's much lesser known than 'Serpico' or 'Midnight Cowboy.' It's directed by Jules Dassin, who was also blacklisted in the early 1950s. He moved to Europe and rebuilt his career there, known for 'Rififi'. 'Uptight' was the first film he made back in America. It's an adaptation of the same novel that John Ford adapted for 'The Informer' in the 1930s. Jules Dassin, who suffered from the blacklist, I think was interested in this idea of the guilt at the core of this film.
BG: And there were political shenanigans going on behind the scenes, is that right?
AW: It's a fascinating film, but the making of the film is also really interesting. Shot in Cleveland, there was so much tension among the extras that they had to take the production back to Los Angeles. The FBI reportedly tried to get people working on the film to inform them about the politics of the film. Jules Dassin takes the setting from Ireland and the IRA of the original novel and places it into the Black Power movement in Cleveland in the late 1960s. It's a fascinating film.
BG: Black Power, the IRA. What else do you have lined up?
AW: Yes, another film that focused on the Black experience in America and had a contribution from someone blacklisted is 'Claudine'. It's a much smaller, quieter film set in Harlem around a single mother played by Diahann Carroll. She meets a well-meaning garbage man played by James Earl Jones, and they try to make a go of things in 1974. The film is directed by John Berry, who had been blacklisted and went on to work on this film. It's an important historical film, I think, and has been a little forgotten.
BG: A film that hasn't been forgotten, though, is Robert Altman's 'M*A*S*H'.
AW: 'M*A*S*H' is another familiar film in the season. It's remembered for breaking Robert Altman and introducing his filmmaking style, with sound and image combining in a unique way. For this season, 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist,' I wanted to focus on the screenwriter of 'M*A*S*H,’ Ring Lardner Jr. He had been one of the Hollywood 10, one of the first victims of the blacklist.
BG: Why is Ring Lardner Jr.'s work on 'M*A*S*H’ so important?
AW: Ring Lardner Jr.'s contribution was vital to 'M*A*S*H.’ He brings progressive politics and attempts to portray the horrors of war. It also looks forward to the cynicism of the 1970s. 'M*A*S*H’ is one of the great anti-war movies. America was still in the thrall of Vietnam in 1970, and I don't think anybody needed any pushing to relate the film to the Vietnam reality that many Americans were experiencing.
BG: And you focus on a particular female actor in your program as well, don't you?
AW: Yes, I didn't want to focus only on writers. I included Hal Ashby's 1975 film 'Shampoo'. which is set in the late 1960s and is about the excesses and vanity of America during that period. It features a standout performance by Lee Grant, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Lee Grant had been an actor who, in the 1950s, was on the cusp of real fame but was blacklisted. She reappeared in the 1960s in films like 'The Heat of the Night' and was nominated for an Oscar for 'The Landlord'. Lee Grant is a great example of how an actor can come back from the blacklist and re-establish themselves at the centre of the Hollywood film industry during the Hollywood Renaissance.
BG: Hollywood, the dream factory with nightmare working conditions.
AW: The Hollywood film industry sees itself as the dream factory, offering a particular version of society as the aspirational one we should seek out. The Hollywood blacklist era shows that when people were writing other versions of potential future societies or contemporary societies that weren't supported by the capitalist studios, they were quick to act and marginalise those people. Let's hope there are writers, directors, actors, and musicians willing to offer alternatives and challenge the status quo.
BG: Great stuff, Andy. It's always healthy to end with a clenched fist in the air. It's been a pleasure having you on the show, and I wish you the best of luck with 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist.'
Book Review
Claire Mortimer
‘Spinsters, Widows and Chars'
(Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
Claire Mortimer
‘Spinsters, Widows and Chars'
(Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
Written and Narrated
by Brett Gregory
August 9th 2023
by Brett Gregory
August 9th 2023
Transcript
Claire Mortimer’s meritorious academic monograph explores the various incarnations of female ageing which emerged out of British cinema between the 1940s and the 1970s, such as the spinster, the bluestocking, the battleaxe, the widow and the witch. Moreover, by way of her unique eye for detail, far-reaching research and excellent prose, the author investigates how such representations of womanhood and femininity have simultaneously reflected and informed the norms and values, hopes and fears, anxieties and expectations of wider British society and culture all the way into the 21st century.
Traditionally, folk culture and popular culture have both propagated the pernicious supposition that an older woman who is beyond childbearing age is an unwelcome guest: undesirable and uninteresting, marginalised and stigmatised, fated to a half-life of isolation, suffering and bitterness as an old biddy, an old crone or an old hag.
Indeed, in her book Out of Time from 2013 Lynne Segal highlights that ‘as far back as the writings of both Euripides and Aristophanes the elderly were portrayed as stock figures of ridicule, [with] old women [regarded] ‘as helpless and pitiable, if not ridiculous’’. In turn, Sigmund Freud somewhat demonised middle-aged women in 1913 by stating that they often ‘alter strangely in character after they have abandoned their genital function … [and] become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy’. Additionally, the author cites Simone de Beauvoir’s ground-breaking work from 1949, The Second Sex, wherein it is observed bleakly that menopause is a ‘‘mutilation’ … [and] the loss of fertility [removes] a woman’s ‘justification for her existence and her opportunity for happiness’’.
Against this backdrop of mortality, misery and misrepresentation it is refreshing that, in response, Mortimer chooses to swing her critical spotlight into a corner of British light entertainment where such epochal prejudices would probably be met with either a frantic flutter of an oversized folding fan or a raucous rendition of ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’.
The historical roots of the supporting comedy actress in British cinema are intertwined with the immediacy, physicality and vicariousness of the theatre and the music hall, and it is here where a great number of middle- and working-class performers first found their feet before famously leaping, or barging, their way on to the silver screen: Joyce Grenfell, Irene Handl, Hattie Jacques, Peggy Mount, Beryl Reid and Margaret Rutherford to name but a few.
As the author explains, ‘[t]he mature actress tends to have already established their performing career elsewhere … as was the case with many comedy actresses in the mid twentieth century. [These] established actresses were often cast in supporting roles, playing character parts under less experienced, younger stars, lending a sense of quality to the production.’
Significantly, Judith Roof suggests in All About Thelma and Eve from 2002 that, if one pays close attention, such seemingly minor characters can be seen to perform a radical narrative function that is ‘akin to that of the Shakespearian fool’ by way of their inappropriate behaviour and humour. That is, as potential agents of chaos they have the capabilities to temporarily overwhelm the patriarchal status quo and breathe life into age, womanhood and ‘Otherness’.
For example, as Mortimer scrutinises both major and minor British films released during World War II, she marks how the unruly and working-class Elsie and Doris Waters (49 and 43 years old respectively) care little about men, the military or mortality in Gert and Daisy’s Weekend in 1942. Instead the singing sisters transgress established codes of conduct by capitalising on ‘the mythology of cockney wartime resilience’, entertaining those sheltering from the Blitz with spirited comedy routines and underdog ditties while dressed in ‘scruffy, ill-fitting garb’.
Moreover, in the Laurence Olivier star vehicle, This Demi-Paradise from 1943, the ebullient eccentricities of the battleaxe Mrs Flannel (played by 40 year old Evelyn Gregg), the benevolent Rowena Ventor (played by 51 year old Margaret Rutherford) and the bubbly Sybil Paulson (played by 33 year old Joyce Grenfell) are presented, the author argues, as ‘the essence of the spirit of England, binding the community together, [and] making it stronger to face its enemies’.
This tradition of women being adopted by society, culture and politics to ‘embody the nation’ during wartime is exemplified by George Orwell’s striking description of the middle-class spinster as an old maid cycling ‘to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning’ in his 1941 essay, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. Although this image may seem on the surface somewhat pleasant and even humorous, billowing beneath it are quintessential nationalistic notions such as social class, civility, duty, order and potential.
For example, in the propaganda film, Went the Day Well? from 1942, German paratroopers, disguised as British Royal Engineers, occupy an idyllic rural village in England called Bramley End. At first the wealthy widow of the manor, Mrs Fraser, played by 52 year old Marie Lohr, welcomes the invaders with open arms, inviting them to dinner and blithely ignoring the suspicions of her fellow villagers. By the end of the film however, during a battle between the German aggressors and British soldiers, Mrs Fraser martyrs herself by grappling with a grenade which was intended for a group of children who were in her charge.
The subtext here is clear. While the widow or spinster may be unable to fulfil her biological destiny and have children herself, she can at least serve and save the children of others instead in the interests of the local community and the nation at large.
Without doubt however this post-war ideation of a childless spinster or widow giving her all to rescue Britain from foreign or domestic threats peaked in 1955 when the 76 year old Katie Johnson was cast as the unforgettable Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers. In many ways her role in this Gothic comedy is reminiscent of a fairy godmother in that her otherworldly, old-fashioned house and habits, her reticence and resolve, are preternaturally impervious to the malevolent machinations of Alec Guinness’ gang of criminal patriarchs. In turn, her stiff upper lip can be seen to be a life-affirming antithesis to, say, Martita Hunt’s sneering and acerbic performance nine years earlier as the jilted witch, Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations.
Moving on and we learn that, from its origins in the mid-18th century, ‘bluestocking’ was a term used to describe independent middle- or upper-class women who pursued intellectual and literary interests. This moniker was not proffered as a compliment however, particularly from within male social circles, but instead was employed to deride such women as eccentric, unsexed and unnatural.
Nevertheless, as Virginia Nicholson notes in Singled Out from 2008, ‘one consequence of the casualty rate of the First World War … was that there was a greater need for middle-class women to establish ‘a professional identity as an alternative to marriage’. Thus, there was ‘a steady increase in the number of women entering higher education in the interwar period’ with academia offering ‘a haven for the ambitious and educated spinster’.
In turn, alongside nursing, Mortimer draws our attention to the fact that, over these decades, the conventional career path for a middle-class spinster was the teaching profession. This said however, the proposition of an independent, educated and aspirational single woman being in direct competition with her male counterparts for financial and cultural capital did not sit comfortably in the popular imagination at the time and, as a result, it was regarded with suspicion and distrust.
Indeed, Alison Oram’s PhD research in 1996 into the portrayal of unmarried female teachers between 1900 and 1939 discovered that they were generally regarded as either ‘an unfulfilled celibate’, ‘a predatory lesbian’ or as ‘a militant feminist [man-hater]’. Consequently, the spinster teacher began to be misreported in post-war British cinema ‘as a dysfunctional and ineffective figure, whose school is dangerously cut off from the rest of the world.’
This is most apparent in the first two of the St.Trinian’s series of films – The Belles of St. Trinian’s from 1954 and Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s from 1957 – wherein an hysterical and hedonistic free-for-all at an all girls’ boarding school comically confirms the fears and anxieties of the British Establishment. To make matters radically worse – or radically better, depending on your point of view – the pupils’ illicit exploits are instigated by the quizzical queerness displayed by the school’s frumpy headmistress, Miss Fritton, played with aplomb by the fifty-something Alistair Sim in drag.
The author reminds us that ‘[f]ears about … progressive society and the need to protect the morals of the young’ continued apace during the Swinging Sixties when, amongst many other indelible events, obscenity trials were launched against, for example, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, the art exhibition Lovers and Romances by Stass Paraskos in 1966, and the infamous schoolkids issue of Oz magazine in 1971.
It should be noted here however that fifteen of the highly popular Carry On films were also produced and released throughout this decade; their salacious schoolboy scenarios, prurient end-of-the-pier punchlines and general run-of-the-mill misogyny barely registering on the Richter scale of national scandal.
Nevertheless, according to the tabloid press, the UK as a whole seemed to be on the edge of a nervous breakdown on a weekly basis during the 1960s, constantly wrestling with its own moral indignation while a new immoral world order began to rise up and head towards the future. Indeed, it was from out of this swirling socio-political climate that probably the most significant spinster teacher of them all stepped forward.
Maggie Smith played the lead role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969 at the age of 34, and went on to win the Oscar for Best Actress. Her incendiary portrayal as an ideal career woman bristling with intellect, articulation and confidence captivated not only her pupils but also her male colleagues. In turn, what surprised and excited the modern audience at the time was that she appeared to offer up a credible alternative to the somewhat mummified representations of many female protagonists from the past. That is, a genuine feminist role model who was ambitious and in control of her own destiny.
Tragically, 1969 was still too soon for such a character arc to ascend however when, in the final quarter of the film, it is revealed that Miss Brodie is, in truth, a self-centred arch-manipulator with fascist sympathies, an enemy of the people. It would thus take mainstream British cinema another 14 years before it was mature enough to finally put forward a progressive representation of a ‘bluestocking’ which the public could unanimously support when, aged 33 years old, Julie Walters memorably stumbled through Michael Caine’s door in Educating Rita.
Claire Mortimer’s Spinsters, Widows and Chars: The Ageing Woman in British Film is a truly wonderful book which delivers so much more than this review can articulate within the space and time allowed. In many ways it can be understood as ‘pure academia’ in that it critically yet accessibly addresses a sorely neglected area of research with such diligence and dedication the reader cannot help but become more aware of, and interconnected with, the history, society and culture which surrounds and flows through them. As a consequence, it is an invaluable contribution to not only feminist screen studies in particular and cinema studies in general, but to the study of Britain and Britishness as a whole.
Claire Mortimer’s meritorious academic monograph explores the various incarnations of female ageing which emerged out of British cinema between the 1940s and the 1970s, such as the spinster, the bluestocking, the battleaxe, the widow and the witch. Moreover, by way of her unique eye for detail, far-reaching research and excellent prose, the author investigates how such representations of womanhood and femininity have simultaneously reflected and informed the norms and values, hopes and fears, anxieties and expectations of wider British society and culture all the way into the 21st century.
Traditionally, folk culture and popular culture have both propagated the pernicious supposition that an older woman who is beyond childbearing age is an unwelcome guest: undesirable and uninteresting, marginalised and stigmatised, fated to a half-life of isolation, suffering and bitterness as an old biddy, an old crone or an old hag.
Indeed, in her book Out of Time from 2013 Lynne Segal highlights that ‘as far back as the writings of both Euripides and Aristophanes the elderly were portrayed as stock figures of ridicule, [with] old women [regarded] ‘as helpless and pitiable, if not ridiculous’’. In turn, Sigmund Freud somewhat demonised middle-aged women in 1913 by stating that they often ‘alter strangely in character after they have abandoned their genital function … [and] become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy’. Additionally, the author cites Simone de Beauvoir’s ground-breaking work from 1949, The Second Sex, wherein it is observed bleakly that menopause is a ‘‘mutilation’ … [and] the loss of fertility [removes] a woman’s ‘justification for her existence and her opportunity for happiness’’.
Against this backdrop of mortality, misery and misrepresentation it is refreshing that, in response, Mortimer chooses to swing her critical spotlight into a corner of British light entertainment where such epochal prejudices would probably be met with either a frantic flutter of an oversized folding fan or a raucous rendition of ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’.
The historical roots of the supporting comedy actress in British cinema are intertwined with the immediacy, physicality and vicariousness of the theatre and the music hall, and it is here where a great number of middle- and working-class performers first found their feet before famously leaping, or barging, their way on to the silver screen: Joyce Grenfell, Irene Handl, Hattie Jacques, Peggy Mount, Beryl Reid and Margaret Rutherford to name but a few.
As the author explains, ‘[t]he mature actress tends to have already established their performing career elsewhere … as was the case with many comedy actresses in the mid twentieth century. [These] established actresses were often cast in supporting roles, playing character parts under less experienced, younger stars, lending a sense of quality to the production.’
Significantly, Judith Roof suggests in All About Thelma and Eve from 2002 that, if one pays close attention, such seemingly minor characters can be seen to perform a radical narrative function that is ‘akin to that of the Shakespearian fool’ by way of their inappropriate behaviour and humour. That is, as potential agents of chaos they have the capabilities to temporarily overwhelm the patriarchal status quo and breathe life into age, womanhood and ‘Otherness’.
For example, as Mortimer scrutinises both major and minor British films released during World War II, she marks how the unruly and working-class Elsie and Doris Waters (49 and 43 years old respectively) care little about men, the military or mortality in Gert and Daisy’s Weekend in 1942. Instead the singing sisters transgress established codes of conduct by capitalising on ‘the mythology of cockney wartime resilience’, entertaining those sheltering from the Blitz with spirited comedy routines and underdog ditties while dressed in ‘scruffy, ill-fitting garb’.
Moreover, in the Laurence Olivier star vehicle, This Demi-Paradise from 1943, the ebullient eccentricities of the battleaxe Mrs Flannel (played by 40 year old Evelyn Gregg), the benevolent Rowena Ventor (played by 51 year old Margaret Rutherford) and the bubbly Sybil Paulson (played by 33 year old Joyce Grenfell) are presented, the author argues, as ‘the essence of the spirit of England, binding the community together, [and] making it stronger to face its enemies’.
This tradition of women being adopted by society, culture and politics to ‘embody the nation’ during wartime is exemplified by George Orwell’s striking description of the middle-class spinster as an old maid cycling ‘to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning’ in his 1941 essay, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. Although this image may seem on the surface somewhat pleasant and even humorous, billowing beneath it are quintessential nationalistic notions such as social class, civility, duty, order and potential.
For example, in the propaganda film, Went the Day Well? from 1942, German paratroopers, disguised as British Royal Engineers, occupy an idyllic rural village in England called Bramley End. At first the wealthy widow of the manor, Mrs Fraser, played by 52 year old Marie Lohr, welcomes the invaders with open arms, inviting them to dinner and blithely ignoring the suspicions of her fellow villagers. By the end of the film however, during a battle between the German aggressors and British soldiers, Mrs Fraser martyrs herself by grappling with a grenade which was intended for a group of children who were in her charge.
The subtext here is clear. While the widow or spinster may be unable to fulfil her biological destiny and have children herself, she can at least serve and save the children of others instead in the interests of the local community and the nation at large.
Without doubt however this post-war ideation of a childless spinster or widow giving her all to rescue Britain from foreign or domestic threats peaked in 1955 when the 76 year old Katie Johnson was cast as the unforgettable Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers. In many ways her role in this Gothic comedy is reminiscent of a fairy godmother in that her otherworldly, old-fashioned house and habits, her reticence and resolve, are preternaturally impervious to the malevolent machinations of Alec Guinness’ gang of criminal patriarchs. In turn, her stiff upper lip can be seen to be a life-affirming antithesis to, say, Martita Hunt’s sneering and acerbic performance nine years earlier as the jilted witch, Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations.
Moving on and we learn that, from its origins in the mid-18th century, ‘bluestocking’ was a term used to describe independent middle- or upper-class women who pursued intellectual and literary interests. This moniker was not proffered as a compliment however, particularly from within male social circles, but instead was employed to deride such women as eccentric, unsexed and unnatural.
Nevertheless, as Virginia Nicholson notes in Singled Out from 2008, ‘one consequence of the casualty rate of the First World War … was that there was a greater need for middle-class women to establish ‘a professional identity as an alternative to marriage’. Thus, there was ‘a steady increase in the number of women entering higher education in the interwar period’ with academia offering ‘a haven for the ambitious and educated spinster’.
In turn, alongside nursing, Mortimer draws our attention to the fact that, over these decades, the conventional career path for a middle-class spinster was the teaching profession. This said however, the proposition of an independent, educated and aspirational single woman being in direct competition with her male counterparts for financial and cultural capital did not sit comfortably in the popular imagination at the time and, as a result, it was regarded with suspicion and distrust.
Indeed, Alison Oram’s PhD research in 1996 into the portrayal of unmarried female teachers between 1900 and 1939 discovered that they were generally regarded as either ‘an unfulfilled celibate’, ‘a predatory lesbian’ or as ‘a militant feminist [man-hater]’. Consequently, the spinster teacher began to be misreported in post-war British cinema ‘as a dysfunctional and ineffective figure, whose school is dangerously cut off from the rest of the world.’
This is most apparent in the first two of the St.Trinian’s series of films – The Belles of St. Trinian’s from 1954 and Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s from 1957 – wherein an hysterical and hedonistic free-for-all at an all girls’ boarding school comically confirms the fears and anxieties of the British Establishment. To make matters radically worse – or radically better, depending on your point of view – the pupils’ illicit exploits are instigated by the quizzical queerness displayed by the school’s frumpy headmistress, Miss Fritton, played with aplomb by the fifty-something Alistair Sim in drag.
The author reminds us that ‘[f]ears about … progressive society and the need to protect the morals of the young’ continued apace during the Swinging Sixties when, amongst many other indelible events, obscenity trials were launched against, for example, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, the art exhibition Lovers and Romances by Stass Paraskos in 1966, and the infamous schoolkids issue of Oz magazine in 1971.
It should be noted here however that fifteen of the highly popular Carry On films were also produced and released throughout this decade; their salacious schoolboy scenarios, prurient end-of-the-pier punchlines and general run-of-the-mill misogyny barely registering on the Richter scale of national scandal.
Nevertheless, according to the tabloid press, the UK as a whole seemed to be on the edge of a nervous breakdown on a weekly basis during the 1960s, constantly wrestling with its own moral indignation while a new immoral world order began to rise up and head towards the future. Indeed, it was from out of this swirling socio-political climate that probably the most significant spinster teacher of them all stepped forward.
Maggie Smith played the lead role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969 at the age of 34, and went on to win the Oscar for Best Actress. Her incendiary portrayal as an ideal career woman bristling with intellect, articulation and confidence captivated not only her pupils but also her male colleagues. In turn, what surprised and excited the modern audience at the time was that she appeared to offer up a credible alternative to the somewhat mummified representations of many female protagonists from the past. That is, a genuine feminist role model who was ambitious and in control of her own destiny.
Tragically, 1969 was still too soon for such a character arc to ascend however when, in the final quarter of the film, it is revealed that Miss Brodie is, in truth, a self-centred arch-manipulator with fascist sympathies, an enemy of the people. It would thus take mainstream British cinema another 14 years before it was mature enough to finally put forward a progressive representation of a ‘bluestocking’ which the public could unanimously support when, aged 33 years old, Julie Walters memorably stumbled through Michael Caine’s door in Educating Rita.
Claire Mortimer’s Spinsters, Widows and Chars: The Ageing Woman in British Film is a truly wonderful book which delivers so much more than this review can articulate within the space and time allowed. In many ways it can be understood as ‘pure academia’ in that it critically yet accessibly addresses a sorely neglected area of research with such diligence and dedication the reader cannot help but become more aware of, and interconnected with, the history, society and culture which surrounds and flows through them. As a consequence, it is an invaluable contribution to not only feminist screen studies in particular and cinema studies in general, but to the study of Britain and Britishness as a whole.
Interview
Dr. Chris Nunn
(University of Birmingham)
discusses his new documentary about 'Children of The Wicker Man'
Dr. Chris Nunn
(University of Birmingham)
discusses his new documentary about 'Children of The Wicker Man'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
August 2nd 2023
by Brett Gregory
August 2nd 2023
Transcript
The Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodwood, Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland, was released in 1973. It was directed by Robin Hardy, written by Anthony Shaffer and produced by Peter Snell. A seemingly simple story about a police officer searching for a missing schoolgirl on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, it is one of the most important films in the history of British cinema. A mystical, multi-layered microcosm of Britishness itself: its past, its present and its people; its conservatism, its paganism and its radicalism; its habits, its hopes and its horrors.
CN: So, my name is Chris Nunn. I am an assistant professor of film at the University of Birmingham, and I am the producer of an upcoming feature documentary currently called Wickermania. It follows two half-brothers who are the sons of the original director of The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy. So we follow Justin and Dominic as they try to understand their father – who they both had a slightly problematic relationship with – through his cult film and actually end up, perhaps, finding each other instead.
BG: That's a totally unique angle. So why now?
CN: The 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man is why we started this project. It's taken on its own characteristics and has moved quite organically in the direction that it has, but it's still very much tied to the fact that we're still talking about this film 50 years later.
BG: In your role as producer on this particular project, what's your approach?
CN: My main duties in that role are quite interesting, really, in this context, because I keep calling myself a sort of creative producer as opposed to the producer who sort of finds money and schedules everything. I have found some money, which has been mildly useful, but I have not really done schedules and, you know, spreadsheets and other things. It's been much more about having an overview of what the film is; an overview of how it might come to fruition, etc., etc.
BG: And it's still a work in progress at the moment. What's the footage like?
CN: The film is working best when the brothers are literally standing where their father stood. We have some wonderful footage in Scotland of the brothers at this at the remaining stumps of the Wicker Man, and footage of Robin Hardy in the same place, and it resonates.
BG: So the production is starting to take its own course?
CN: Originally, when we started the project, I would have said that it was targeted at people who are fans of The Wicker Man. The longer we go on the more I think it's actually a very personal documentary, an almost therapy film, which is for anyone, really, who has a family.
BG: Related to that, what's this I hear about family heirlooms being hidden in the attic?
CN: We are using some newly discovered original sources, which are papers from Robin Hardy's study during the production of The Wicker Man, and the years preceding it and about a year afterwards. So, letters, photographs … and they tell a very interesting story. They tell the story from Hardy's perspective, which I don't think we've particularly had. Alan Brown's book on The Wicker Man sort of seemed to privilege Anthony Shaffer, the screenwriter's perspective. So, it's quite nice, really, to be looking through these documents and going, ‘Ah, right, so there were all these people saying Hardy was a terrible director, but what were his experiences?’ And there are a few letters in there that give us a sort of insight into that.
BG: So history is being rewritten? Sounds like there's much more to this, though.
CN: From my best understanding, unfortunately, when The Wicker Man bombed at the box office, Robin Hardy left his family, which is a key moment in our film, and left his then-wife Caroline, Justin's mother, with a huge amount of debts, in excess we think of kind of £600,000 in today's money. So, they had to sell their house. They moved, and I think it's the house they moved to, is where the materials were just put in the loft and clearly left in the loft and had sat there fairly authentically for about the last 50 years until someone wrote to Justin saying, I found all the stuff. Do you want it, or shall I burn it?’ [LAUGHS] And as Justin recounts every time we do an interview about this, he very nearly said, ‘Well, burn it. I don't want anything to do with this.’ And, indeed, when you see the film you will start to understand why.
BG: Total drama. You gotta tell us a bit more, Chris.
CN: So they don't know each other very well as brothers, I guess. They didn't grow up together, and they've come together to be academics again. Justin is a lecturer at University College, London, and Dominic is at the University of Quebec, Montreal, as a professor of Art History. And, of course, I'm an academic too, so this is a very academic lead film, which is appreciating the value of having new primary sources to base a narrative around and, I suppose, the brothers have discovered through those primary sources just what an impact The Wicker Man had on their family, on Robin Hardy's health, on Robin Hardy's finances, but really by extension on the finances of the Hardy household, and particularly Justin's mother, Caroline. And I would be lying if I said that hasn't been a very painful process for them. That again, I suppose my role on this film is to be as objective as possible, given the subjectivity that arises when the brothers interact with each other and get talking. So there are some emotional, very emotional moments in the film.
BG: Sounds like it. Pretty heavy. So what role is the University of Birmingham playing in all this?
CN: Justin and I had worked originally together at the University of Greenwich in London, and when I moved to the University of Birmingham, there was a sense that we could – as many universities can these days – actually pull together a feature doc using the resources that we have, using, you know, whatever kit that the university possesses and, indeed, whatever talent the university possesses. And this is how we've been able to put this film together on a very small amount of money. Again, down the track, we hope to sell it, make some money, and indeed pay all the fabulous people who've worked with us.
BG: Is that the end goal, or is there more?
CN: The end goal is tricky, really, it's bigger than the film. The film feels like a catalyst for further discussions, part of which is the legacy of The Wicker Man, but part of which is also looking at that kind of independent filmmaking landscape. You know, kind of appreciating The Wicker Man as a radical text, Robin Hardy, in his cult film here, as a radical first-time feature director. At the time when The Wicker Man was reviewed in 1973 it was really well-received by critics, saying this is what British film needs to be, and here we are 50 years later wondering if we need to be having more creative conversations about what British film can be. Moreover, Justin and I have long-term ambitions, we're both academics, we're both in education, we have long-term ambitions to set up some kind of film education, filmmaking education school up in the area where The Wicker Man was shot. We might call it the ‘Cult Film School’ or something, a space for young emerging filmmakers who want to come and want to workshop ideas that are gonna push boundaries. That is what we're really hoping we're able to achieve from this.
BG: That's a fantastic idea, and essential.
CN: This is a sort of low to no-budget film. We don't really have any resources. We did just have a successful Kickstarter, which was fantastic, but we're keeping that money aside to clear archive, particularly The Wicker Man footage.
BG: So you need investment?
CN: We're more than happy to have conversations with anyone who's happy to invest, noting, of course, here in the UK, particularly at the moment, there is a cost of living crisis, so we don't really expect people to be able to bankroll quirky documentaries. But if anyone's listening and they are thinking, ‘Yes, actually, I could bankroll your quirky documentary,’ then we would love to hear from you. You can find us on social media, on Twitter @Wickermania, on Instagram @Wicker_mania, any contact through there will come straight to me, and we hope to share this film with you later in the year.
BG: Amazing, Chris, sounds like you're on a proper filmmaking journey. It's a fantastic project and deserves support. Anyway, nice one.
CN: Thanks very much again for having me.
The Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodwood, Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland, was released in 1973. It was directed by Robin Hardy, written by Anthony Shaffer and produced by Peter Snell. A seemingly simple story about a police officer searching for a missing schoolgirl on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, it is one of the most important films in the history of British cinema. A mystical, multi-layered microcosm of Britishness itself: its past, its present and its people; its conservatism, its paganism and its radicalism; its habits, its hopes and its horrors.
CN: So, my name is Chris Nunn. I am an assistant professor of film at the University of Birmingham, and I am the producer of an upcoming feature documentary currently called Wickermania. It follows two half-brothers who are the sons of the original director of The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy. So we follow Justin and Dominic as they try to understand their father – who they both had a slightly problematic relationship with – through his cult film and actually end up, perhaps, finding each other instead.
BG: That's a totally unique angle. So why now?
CN: The 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man is why we started this project. It's taken on its own characteristics and has moved quite organically in the direction that it has, but it's still very much tied to the fact that we're still talking about this film 50 years later.
BG: In your role as producer on this particular project, what's your approach?
CN: My main duties in that role are quite interesting, really, in this context, because I keep calling myself a sort of creative producer as opposed to the producer who sort of finds money and schedules everything. I have found some money, which has been mildly useful, but I have not really done schedules and, you know, spreadsheets and other things. It's been much more about having an overview of what the film is; an overview of how it might come to fruition, etc., etc.
BG: And it's still a work in progress at the moment. What's the footage like?
CN: The film is working best when the brothers are literally standing where their father stood. We have some wonderful footage in Scotland of the brothers at this at the remaining stumps of the Wicker Man, and footage of Robin Hardy in the same place, and it resonates.
BG: So the production is starting to take its own course?
CN: Originally, when we started the project, I would have said that it was targeted at people who are fans of The Wicker Man. The longer we go on the more I think it's actually a very personal documentary, an almost therapy film, which is for anyone, really, who has a family.
BG: Related to that, what's this I hear about family heirlooms being hidden in the attic?
CN: We are using some newly discovered original sources, which are papers from Robin Hardy's study during the production of The Wicker Man, and the years preceding it and about a year afterwards. So, letters, photographs … and they tell a very interesting story. They tell the story from Hardy's perspective, which I don't think we've particularly had. Alan Brown's book on The Wicker Man sort of seemed to privilege Anthony Shaffer, the screenwriter's perspective. So, it's quite nice, really, to be looking through these documents and going, ‘Ah, right, so there were all these people saying Hardy was a terrible director, but what were his experiences?’ And there are a few letters in there that give us a sort of insight into that.
BG: So history is being rewritten? Sounds like there's much more to this, though.
CN: From my best understanding, unfortunately, when The Wicker Man bombed at the box office, Robin Hardy left his family, which is a key moment in our film, and left his then-wife Caroline, Justin's mother, with a huge amount of debts, in excess we think of kind of £600,000 in today's money. So, they had to sell their house. They moved, and I think it's the house they moved to, is where the materials were just put in the loft and clearly left in the loft and had sat there fairly authentically for about the last 50 years until someone wrote to Justin saying, I found all the stuff. Do you want it, or shall I burn it?’ [LAUGHS] And as Justin recounts every time we do an interview about this, he very nearly said, ‘Well, burn it. I don't want anything to do with this.’ And, indeed, when you see the film you will start to understand why.
BG: Total drama. You gotta tell us a bit more, Chris.
CN: So they don't know each other very well as brothers, I guess. They didn't grow up together, and they've come together to be academics again. Justin is a lecturer at University College, London, and Dominic is at the University of Quebec, Montreal, as a professor of Art History. And, of course, I'm an academic too, so this is a very academic lead film, which is appreciating the value of having new primary sources to base a narrative around and, I suppose, the brothers have discovered through those primary sources just what an impact The Wicker Man had on their family, on Robin Hardy's health, on Robin Hardy's finances, but really by extension on the finances of the Hardy household, and particularly Justin's mother, Caroline. And I would be lying if I said that hasn't been a very painful process for them. That again, I suppose my role on this film is to be as objective as possible, given the subjectivity that arises when the brothers interact with each other and get talking. So there are some emotional, very emotional moments in the film.
BG: Sounds like it. Pretty heavy. So what role is the University of Birmingham playing in all this?
CN: Justin and I had worked originally together at the University of Greenwich in London, and when I moved to the University of Birmingham, there was a sense that we could – as many universities can these days – actually pull together a feature doc using the resources that we have, using, you know, whatever kit that the university possesses and, indeed, whatever talent the university possesses. And this is how we've been able to put this film together on a very small amount of money. Again, down the track, we hope to sell it, make some money, and indeed pay all the fabulous people who've worked with us.
BG: Is that the end goal, or is there more?
CN: The end goal is tricky, really, it's bigger than the film. The film feels like a catalyst for further discussions, part of which is the legacy of The Wicker Man, but part of which is also looking at that kind of independent filmmaking landscape. You know, kind of appreciating The Wicker Man as a radical text, Robin Hardy, in his cult film here, as a radical first-time feature director. At the time when The Wicker Man was reviewed in 1973 it was really well-received by critics, saying this is what British film needs to be, and here we are 50 years later wondering if we need to be having more creative conversations about what British film can be. Moreover, Justin and I have long-term ambitions, we're both academics, we're both in education, we have long-term ambitions to set up some kind of film education, filmmaking education school up in the area where The Wicker Man was shot. We might call it the ‘Cult Film School’ or something, a space for young emerging filmmakers who want to come and want to workshop ideas that are gonna push boundaries. That is what we're really hoping we're able to achieve from this.
BG: That's a fantastic idea, and essential.
CN: This is a sort of low to no-budget film. We don't really have any resources. We did just have a successful Kickstarter, which was fantastic, but we're keeping that money aside to clear archive, particularly The Wicker Man footage.
BG: So you need investment?
CN: We're more than happy to have conversations with anyone who's happy to invest, noting, of course, here in the UK, particularly at the moment, there is a cost of living crisis, so we don't really expect people to be able to bankroll quirky documentaries. But if anyone's listening and they are thinking, ‘Yes, actually, I could bankroll your quirky documentary,’ then we would love to hear from you. You can find us on social media, on Twitter @Wickermania, on Instagram @Wicker_mania, any contact through there will come straight to me, and we hope to share this film with you later in the year.
BG: Amazing, Chris, sounds like you're on a proper filmmaking journey. It's a fantastic project and deserves support. Anyway, nice one.
CN: Thanks very much again for having me.
Book Review
Jeremy Carr
(Arizona State University)
‘Kubrick and Control’
(Liverpool University Press, 2023)
Jeremy Carr
(Arizona State University)
‘Kubrick and Control’
(Liverpool University Press, 2023)
Written and Narrated
by Brett Gregory
July 26th 2023
by Brett Gregory
July 26th 2023
Transcript
Like many eager teenagers who found themselves sleepless and cinephilic during the Gilded Age of VHS in the 1980s, you genuinely felt the presence of the director of The Shining at your shoulder as you sat alone in the living room and watched his vision of the unfamiliar, the unnerving and the uncanny ominously unfold.
The absolute exactness of everything on screen, in concert with the hypnotic electronic orchestration by Wendy Carlos, drenched with such doom and dread, overwhelmed and compelled you to return to its psychopathy again and again until, without knowing it, you had soon learned the dialogue verbatim as if it was a lyric from some obscure prog-rock album entitled ‘Grand Guignol’.
Jeremy Carr’s comprehensive hagiography of Stanley Kubrick’s career of creative compulsions and authorial control conjures up many, many youthful memories such as this and, as a consequence, it is a must-read for anyone who pines for the serious aesthetics of mainstream cinema to return.
Kubrick first began to learn to ‘direct his subjects, to control light and shade, to understand lenses, composition, exposure, and balance within the frame’ as a precocious 17 year old staff photographer working for Look magazine in New York between 1946 and 1950. According to Dr James Fenwick, ‘[he] seems to have wanted to push the limits of the creative freedom he was offered at the magazine … [attempting] to broaden his autonomy … [and] invest his own personality into his work.’
Onwards and this competitive attitude and approach to producing cinema with distinct authority was helped and honed throughout the 1950s by way of the chess matches he played against the regulars in Washington Square in the shade or under street lamps; a meticulous métier which he would introduce to the cast and crew on the movie sets he was later to govern. As the director himself explains in John Baxter’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (1998), if chess had any relationship to filmmaking ‘it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.’
Day of the Fight became Kubrick’s first motion picture at the age of 23, a 16 minute black-and-white documentary which follows Irish-American middleweight boxer, Walter Cartier, as he prepares to fight Bobby James on April 17, 1950. Here, in between the staging and the spit, the uppercuts and the close-ups, Carr identifies the shadow of a leitmotif which would eventually loom over the director’s entire oeuvre: the driven man.
In The Killing in 1956, for instance, his first proper studio picture for United Artists, veteran ex-con, Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), strides across the screen as he confidently describes to his fiancée the herd of hoodlums he is about to corral with the sole purpose of pulling off a daring $2 million robbery at the racetrack.
In turn, in 1957 Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) can be seen in Paths of Glory to be a character cut from the same thick cloth, single-minded in his lofty and loquacious attempts to hold the French military command to account as he defends three soldiers who have been arbitrarily accused of cowardice during World War I.
Crucially, this incipient interpretation of the masculine desire to confront, combat and conquer – against the odds, against authority, against nature, against destiny – famously evolved into Kirk Douglas’ portrayal of the titular militant messiah in Universal Pictures’ Spartacus in 1960. This sword and sandal saga about a humble gladiator rising up to lead the largest ever slave revolt against the imperious Roman Republic was the most expensive and prestigious film production Kubrick had helmed. Furthermore, its subsequent commercial and cultural success helped to solidify his own personal and professional ambitions to be recognised as a leading figure within the industry, a true American auteur.
As Carr explains:
He was at the mercy of an egotistical group of actors (heavyweights Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton bickering with each other and questioning the authority of this young filmmaker), an equally obsessive producer/lead performer (Kirk Douglas), and the constraints dictated by a film of this size and scope.
This said, as Peter Kramer continues:
[Spartacus] established him as an important player in Hollywood … [enabling] him to negotiate with financiers and distributors from a position of strength so that from then on he could produce medium- to big-budget films … yet made without much interference from them.
The male drive to succeed however is not enough in itself. Such a raw and potentially ruinous emotion needs discipline, direction and order if it is to achieve its aims effectively, reach its destination intact and claim its prize. As a consequence, iconographic tropes such as maps, plans and/or schematics, either handmade or technological, often feature prominently in Kubrick’s mise-en-scène as a visual connotation of the characters’ need for organisation, method and control.
In his first production shot in colour, for example, the 30 minute promotional documentary The Seafarers from 1953, he explores how the Seafarers International Union in Maryland recruits and regulates its mariners, fishermen and boatmen before they work the oceans. To illustrate the scope and influence of this huge endeavour Kubrick pans across a large world map as the narrator asserts: ‘Antwerp, Cape Town, London, Marseilles, Singapore … You name it: picking his destination is the right of every Seafarer.’
More memorably of course is the mesmeric overhead push-in on the scale model of the hedge maze in The Shining in 1980. Restless in the reception hall of the Overlook Hotel Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) leans over and into it like a disturbed divisional general surveying his battle plans for the next day as his wife and son appear superimposed like mere insects, happily oblivious that they are wandering through a metaphor for their patriarch’s decaying mind.
Indeed, Carr reiterates this recurring Kubrickian conceit in his epilogue when he cites the screenplay for Napoleon, the unrealised biographical epic which many critics agree would have proved to have been the director’s raison d'être, the totality of his cinematic aesthetic:
Scene 31: INT—NAPOLEON’S PARIS HQ—DAY
Pencil between his teeth, dividers in one hand, [Napoleon] creeps around on hands and knees on top of a very large map of Italy, laid out from wall to wall. Other large maps cover the table, the couch and any other available space.
In line with his increased production budgets, abilities and aspirations Kubrick advanced his ruminations on order, control and power considerably with Dr. Strangelove in 1964, 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and A Clockwork Orange in 1971. On the one hand these three films can be seen to mirror the theoretical work carried out by one of his 1960s contemporaries, Marshall McLuhan, in terms of technology serving as an extension of man: his physicality, his consciousness, his ethics and his will. And, on the other, it could be argued that they also echo Karl Marx’s position in the 19th century with regards to technological determinism and the hegemonic role this plays in the socio-economic relations and cultural practices of wider society.
For example, the cockpit of the B-52 in Dr. Strangelove is heaving with ‘a smorgasbord of lights, switches, maps, gauges, radars, and guides’ as it transports a hydrogen bomb to its intended Soviet target. The message from the military to the body politic is very loud and clear: Everything is under control. We have the technology. God bless America.
With the incomparable 2001: A Space Odyssey the audience, and cinema itself, are invited to take a giant leap forwards as Kubrick propels us from the prehistoric broken bones of homicidal Hominids and into the nervous system of the spacecraft Discovery: its intricate network of hibernation pods and plasma pipes, scanners and closed-circuit cameras all interconnected and centralised within the mainframe brain of HAL, the supercomputer whose sole duty is to transport the crew to Jupiter to investigate an alien radio signal. We can only assume that, hypothetically, if this fully-funded, interplanetary mission is successful then it would surely herald the expansion of American political, economic and cultural imperialism out of this world and throughout the cosmos.
Returning to earth with A Clockwork Orange Kubrick explicitly intertwines technology and hegemony by way of the Ludovico Technique, a state-sponsored behavioural aversion procedure which is tested on one desperate experimental subject: the untamed, ultra-violent rapist droog, Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell). Here scientific research, knowledge and needles are employed by the British Ministry of the Interior to physically inculcate self-control and conclusively cure him of his own destructive free will. The treatment leaves working-class Alex meek and defenceless and, against our better judgement, we are encouraged to feel sympathy for him. Prof. Philip Kuberski argues however that the film’s narrative should not be regarded as a defence of free will at all but instead as a reminder to the audience that we are also ‘conditioned in some way or another’ and the day-to-day freedoms we think we enjoy are just an ‘illusion’.
With this in mind we can thus posit that Kubrick’s driven men, whether they know it or not, are also suffering from a similar existential crisis. That is, their desire to confront, combat and conquer is just that, a desire, and not a logical decision which they are able to make. As a result, their attempts to control and direct their impulses with plans, maps or technology are ultimately unsustainable due to the impermanence and vicissitudes of the wider world, the people within it and the forces in between. Thus, their turbulent and tragic character arcs can only lead their sense of purpose, and their sense of self, to overexposure, disorder and defeat.
In Lolita in 1962, for instance, the upstanding university lecturer Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is ultimately undone by his illicit infatuation with the 14 year old Dolores Haze, deliriously dissolving into ‘a mere shell of himself, totally out of control and forcibly subdued by … hospital staff’.
Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), the self-serving 18th century Irish scoundrel and gambler in Barry Lyndon in 1975, swears that he will never ‘fall from the rank of a gentleman’ but, inevitably, he comes tumbling down the social ladder following a messy duel against his stepson where he loses his leg and is banished from England forever.
Then there is Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) who, in Full Metal Jacket in 1986, humiliates and belittles his squad of new recruits, stripping them, one by one, of their egos and their dignity in order to transform them into marines, into killing machines who are ‘ready to eat their own guts and ask for seconds’. It is ironic that this brutal training regime proves to be more successful than anyone could of imagined when, during one sleepy evening, the maligned and malfunctioning Private Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) executes Hartman, his nemesis, with a bullet to the chest.
As can be seen nearly all of the male protagonists mentioned are leaders and/or patriarchs who, while memorably constructed and beautifully performed, are also narcissistic, naïve, deluded and alone. Consequently, one critical lesson we can learn from Stanley Kubrick’s exceptional oeuvre, as well as from Jeremy Carr’s fine book, it is that as audience members and as mindful citizens we should always be extremely careful about the kind of men we choose to bestow authority, control and power upon in political, corporate and cultural life.
Like many eager teenagers who found themselves sleepless and cinephilic during the Gilded Age of VHS in the 1980s, you genuinely felt the presence of the director of The Shining at your shoulder as you sat alone in the living room and watched his vision of the unfamiliar, the unnerving and the uncanny ominously unfold.
The absolute exactness of everything on screen, in concert with the hypnotic electronic orchestration by Wendy Carlos, drenched with such doom and dread, overwhelmed and compelled you to return to its psychopathy again and again until, without knowing it, you had soon learned the dialogue verbatim as if it was a lyric from some obscure prog-rock album entitled ‘Grand Guignol’.
Jeremy Carr’s comprehensive hagiography of Stanley Kubrick’s career of creative compulsions and authorial control conjures up many, many youthful memories such as this and, as a consequence, it is a must-read for anyone who pines for the serious aesthetics of mainstream cinema to return.
Kubrick first began to learn to ‘direct his subjects, to control light and shade, to understand lenses, composition, exposure, and balance within the frame’ as a precocious 17 year old staff photographer working for Look magazine in New York between 1946 and 1950. According to Dr James Fenwick, ‘[he] seems to have wanted to push the limits of the creative freedom he was offered at the magazine … [attempting] to broaden his autonomy … [and] invest his own personality into his work.’
Onwards and this competitive attitude and approach to producing cinema with distinct authority was helped and honed throughout the 1950s by way of the chess matches he played against the regulars in Washington Square in the shade or under street lamps; a meticulous métier which he would introduce to the cast and crew on the movie sets he was later to govern. As the director himself explains in John Baxter’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (1998), if chess had any relationship to filmmaking ‘it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.’
Day of the Fight became Kubrick’s first motion picture at the age of 23, a 16 minute black-and-white documentary which follows Irish-American middleweight boxer, Walter Cartier, as he prepares to fight Bobby James on April 17, 1950. Here, in between the staging and the spit, the uppercuts and the close-ups, Carr identifies the shadow of a leitmotif which would eventually loom over the director’s entire oeuvre: the driven man.
In The Killing in 1956, for instance, his first proper studio picture for United Artists, veteran ex-con, Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), strides across the screen as he confidently describes to his fiancée the herd of hoodlums he is about to corral with the sole purpose of pulling off a daring $2 million robbery at the racetrack.
In turn, in 1957 Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) can be seen in Paths of Glory to be a character cut from the same thick cloth, single-minded in his lofty and loquacious attempts to hold the French military command to account as he defends three soldiers who have been arbitrarily accused of cowardice during World War I.
Crucially, this incipient interpretation of the masculine desire to confront, combat and conquer – against the odds, against authority, against nature, against destiny – famously evolved into Kirk Douglas’ portrayal of the titular militant messiah in Universal Pictures’ Spartacus in 1960. This sword and sandal saga about a humble gladiator rising up to lead the largest ever slave revolt against the imperious Roman Republic was the most expensive and prestigious film production Kubrick had helmed. Furthermore, its subsequent commercial and cultural success helped to solidify his own personal and professional ambitions to be recognised as a leading figure within the industry, a true American auteur.
As Carr explains:
He was at the mercy of an egotistical group of actors (heavyweights Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton bickering with each other and questioning the authority of this young filmmaker), an equally obsessive producer/lead performer (Kirk Douglas), and the constraints dictated by a film of this size and scope.
This said, as Peter Kramer continues:
[Spartacus] established him as an important player in Hollywood … [enabling] him to negotiate with financiers and distributors from a position of strength so that from then on he could produce medium- to big-budget films … yet made without much interference from them.
The male drive to succeed however is not enough in itself. Such a raw and potentially ruinous emotion needs discipline, direction and order if it is to achieve its aims effectively, reach its destination intact and claim its prize. As a consequence, iconographic tropes such as maps, plans and/or schematics, either handmade or technological, often feature prominently in Kubrick’s mise-en-scène as a visual connotation of the characters’ need for organisation, method and control.
In his first production shot in colour, for example, the 30 minute promotional documentary The Seafarers from 1953, he explores how the Seafarers International Union in Maryland recruits and regulates its mariners, fishermen and boatmen before they work the oceans. To illustrate the scope and influence of this huge endeavour Kubrick pans across a large world map as the narrator asserts: ‘Antwerp, Cape Town, London, Marseilles, Singapore … You name it: picking his destination is the right of every Seafarer.’
More memorably of course is the mesmeric overhead push-in on the scale model of the hedge maze in The Shining in 1980. Restless in the reception hall of the Overlook Hotel Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) leans over and into it like a disturbed divisional general surveying his battle plans for the next day as his wife and son appear superimposed like mere insects, happily oblivious that they are wandering through a metaphor for their patriarch’s decaying mind.
Indeed, Carr reiterates this recurring Kubrickian conceit in his epilogue when he cites the screenplay for Napoleon, the unrealised biographical epic which many critics agree would have proved to have been the director’s raison d'être, the totality of his cinematic aesthetic:
Scene 31: INT—NAPOLEON’S PARIS HQ—DAY
Pencil between his teeth, dividers in one hand, [Napoleon] creeps around on hands and knees on top of a very large map of Italy, laid out from wall to wall. Other large maps cover the table, the couch and any other available space.
In line with his increased production budgets, abilities and aspirations Kubrick advanced his ruminations on order, control and power considerably with Dr. Strangelove in 1964, 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and A Clockwork Orange in 1971. On the one hand these three films can be seen to mirror the theoretical work carried out by one of his 1960s contemporaries, Marshall McLuhan, in terms of technology serving as an extension of man: his physicality, his consciousness, his ethics and his will. And, on the other, it could be argued that they also echo Karl Marx’s position in the 19th century with regards to technological determinism and the hegemonic role this plays in the socio-economic relations and cultural practices of wider society.
For example, the cockpit of the B-52 in Dr. Strangelove is heaving with ‘a smorgasbord of lights, switches, maps, gauges, radars, and guides’ as it transports a hydrogen bomb to its intended Soviet target. The message from the military to the body politic is very loud and clear: Everything is under control. We have the technology. God bless America.
With the incomparable 2001: A Space Odyssey the audience, and cinema itself, are invited to take a giant leap forwards as Kubrick propels us from the prehistoric broken bones of homicidal Hominids and into the nervous system of the spacecraft Discovery: its intricate network of hibernation pods and plasma pipes, scanners and closed-circuit cameras all interconnected and centralised within the mainframe brain of HAL, the supercomputer whose sole duty is to transport the crew to Jupiter to investigate an alien radio signal. We can only assume that, hypothetically, if this fully-funded, interplanetary mission is successful then it would surely herald the expansion of American political, economic and cultural imperialism out of this world and throughout the cosmos.
Returning to earth with A Clockwork Orange Kubrick explicitly intertwines technology and hegemony by way of the Ludovico Technique, a state-sponsored behavioural aversion procedure which is tested on one desperate experimental subject: the untamed, ultra-violent rapist droog, Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell). Here scientific research, knowledge and needles are employed by the British Ministry of the Interior to physically inculcate self-control and conclusively cure him of his own destructive free will. The treatment leaves working-class Alex meek and defenceless and, against our better judgement, we are encouraged to feel sympathy for him. Prof. Philip Kuberski argues however that the film’s narrative should not be regarded as a defence of free will at all but instead as a reminder to the audience that we are also ‘conditioned in some way or another’ and the day-to-day freedoms we think we enjoy are just an ‘illusion’.
With this in mind we can thus posit that Kubrick’s driven men, whether they know it or not, are also suffering from a similar existential crisis. That is, their desire to confront, combat and conquer is just that, a desire, and not a logical decision which they are able to make. As a result, their attempts to control and direct their impulses with plans, maps or technology are ultimately unsustainable due to the impermanence and vicissitudes of the wider world, the people within it and the forces in between. Thus, their turbulent and tragic character arcs can only lead their sense of purpose, and their sense of self, to overexposure, disorder and defeat.
In Lolita in 1962, for instance, the upstanding university lecturer Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is ultimately undone by his illicit infatuation with the 14 year old Dolores Haze, deliriously dissolving into ‘a mere shell of himself, totally out of control and forcibly subdued by … hospital staff’.
Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), the self-serving 18th century Irish scoundrel and gambler in Barry Lyndon in 1975, swears that he will never ‘fall from the rank of a gentleman’ but, inevitably, he comes tumbling down the social ladder following a messy duel against his stepson where he loses his leg and is banished from England forever.
Then there is Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) who, in Full Metal Jacket in 1986, humiliates and belittles his squad of new recruits, stripping them, one by one, of their egos and their dignity in order to transform them into marines, into killing machines who are ‘ready to eat their own guts and ask for seconds’. It is ironic that this brutal training regime proves to be more successful than anyone could of imagined when, during one sleepy evening, the maligned and malfunctioning Private Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) executes Hartman, his nemesis, with a bullet to the chest.
As can be seen nearly all of the male protagonists mentioned are leaders and/or patriarchs who, while memorably constructed and beautifully performed, are also narcissistic, naïve, deluded and alone. Consequently, one critical lesson we can learn from Stanley Kubrick’s exceptional oeuvre, as well as from Jeremy Carr’s fine book, it is that as audience members and as mindful citizens we should always be extremely careful about the kind of men we choose to bestow authority, control and power upon in political, corporate and cultural life.
Book Review
John White
‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’
(Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
John White
‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’
(Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
Written and Narrated
by Brett Gregory
July 10th 2023
by Brett Gregory
July 10th 2023
Transcript
One of the joys of this academic monograph is that it reminds us that the field of cinema studies, through the macro lens of research, theory and perspective, can introduce us to narratives of knowledge, understanding and experience which stretch far beyond the edges of the screen.
Here John White unfurls an ambitious tapestry of five hundred years of history, politics, economics and culture as related to us by a selection of 21st century British feature films. Moreover, interweaving itself through their tall and terrible tales of wealth, poverty, love and war is a myth which millions of us still believe in today; a quaint oxymoron which tens of thousands are still prepared to die for.
The United Kingdom is ‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy’ wrote Disraeli about the ruling class and the working class in his novel Sybil in 1845.
One hundred years later, between 1945 and the late 1970s, Professor Pat Thane argues that, following three successful decades of the Welfare State and its free provision of healthcare, education, housing, living allowances and state pensions, the chasm of quality and quantity of life between the rich and poor actually began to narrow.
This truly egalitarian post-war relationship between the nation and its citizens – a social contract intrinsically binding one another to a shared sense of security, belonging and liberty – turned out to be, tragically, just a fleeting dalliance however when in 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power, a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s, The Constitution of Liberty, tucked away in her handbag.
Most memorably, under the direction of her Conservative government, the British state –the police, the judiciary and the right-wing press – launched a vicious, vindictive and ultimately victorious assault upon what they perceived to be their biggest obstacle to socio-economic progress: the democratic entitlements of the National Union of Mineworkers during the Miners’ Strike in 1984-85. In turn, by way of the newly formulated Trade Union Act in 1984, every member of every other trade union up and down the country shuddered.
This once-in-a-lifetime lightning war left mining communities decimated across the North of England in particular. Furthermore, the fuse of ‘fast-burn capitalism’ had been lit and an unceasing bonfire of workers’ rights and protections began to rage. As cherished public services such as British Gas and British Telecom were packaged and privatised throughout the 1980s, the neoliberalist deforestation of the British way of life commenced.
Now in the first quarter of the 21st century the UK workforce, unable to hear itself speak above the incessant beat of global competitiveness, productivity, efficiency and convenience, has been gifted one of the postmodern wonders of the world: the gig economy.
As White explores in Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You from 2019, Orwellian cyber-Squealers would have us believe that this new-fangled way of working is going to make entrepreneurs of us all, liberating us from silly distractions such as time-keeping, lunch breaks and rest, as well as stupid administrative chores like sick pay, holiday pay, redundancy pay and a pension. Moreover, we are reassured that it isn’t just delivery drivers, warehouse operatives and online strippers who can benefit from this cornucopia of late stage capitalism: lecturers, journalists and registered nurses, to name but a few, are all invited to the party as well.
These days many Britons, particularly the young adults I used to teach, reluctantly accept that we no longer live in a society at all but instead precariously function, hand-to-mouth, on the outskirts of a network of simulated marketplaces where absolutely everything is a commodity to buy or sell, manage or service: our labour, our time, our bodies, our dreams. According to the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, what we are experiencing here is called ‘the direct commodification of experience itself’.
While the mainstream British media continues to gawk at the peacocking of North American bazillionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, as if their vanity, gluttony and hubris are something to aspire to, White cites Shoshana Zuboff’s solemn observation that around the world there are ‘concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history’.
Indeed, according to the International Monetary Fund, the United Kingdom is the 5th richest nation in the world with $2.6 trillion in its coffers, but if this ranking is accurate then why in 2014 did Oxfam declare the five richest families in the country to be wealthier than the bottom 20 per cent of the entire population, i.e. 12.6 million people? Furthermore, why in 2020 was it reported by Health Equity in England that in some regions more than one child in two is growing up in poverty? Crucially, the academic broadcasters Lansley and Mack ask: why is Great Britain ‘one of the most unequal and socially fragile countries in the world today?’
Believe it or not, the official rationale behind these stark socio-economic inequalities was actually submitted to the British public on May 6th 2023 in the form of a £100 million multi-venue theatre production called ‘The Coronation of King Charles III’. The mise-en-scene for this historic live performance featured the full artillery of ancient and modern regalia, including the Diamond Jubilee State Coach at £3.2 million, St. Edward’s Crown at £45 million and, famously, the Sword of State at £500,000. In turn, an original signature soundtrack was composed by Lord Lloyd-Webber, a commemorative poem was scripted by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage CBE, and coronation costumes were designed by Bruce Oldfield OBE. Moreover, as good fortune would have it, the entire British Establishment was able to make itself available to serve as the supporting cast: prince and princesses, lords and ladies, political leaders, military leaders, religious leaders, all proudly draped in the nation’s traditional liveries of hereditary, exceptionalism and pomposity.
As stated in the title of John White’s rigorous and thought-provoking book, it is deep-seated divisions reinforced by institutions like the Royal Family which have defined the United Kingdom’s psyche, character, outlook and actions throughout the ages. Whether it is in terms of wealth, power or nationalism, social class, regionalism or education, gender, ethnicity or sexuality, there has always been an obsessive and oppressive belief in binary oppositions: ‘Here and There’, ‘Then and Now’, ‘Us and Them’, ‘Self and Other’.
Mike Leigh’s Peterloo from 2018 dramatises one of the most despicable events in the country’s political history. In 1819 over 60,000 working men, women and children gathered in Manchester at midday to demand parliamentary reform and an extension of voting rights. By 2pm however they had been ruthlessly cut down by the sabres of the mounted 15th Hussars at the behest of wealthy landowner, factory owner and magistrate, William Hulton. 18 protestors were slain and 700 were maimed.
In the immediate aftermath of this massacre the British government, haunted by the ideological alternatives thrown up by the French Revolution 25 years earlier, was quick to enforce its sovereignty and suppress any further political dissent from the public. Draconian Acts of Parliament were hurried through in a manner which would cause our current Home Secretary and Tory ultra, Suella Braverman, to positively swoon. Attendance numbers at parish political meetings, for instance, were restricted; the judicial powers of magistrates trying the cases of reformers were expanded; and the taxes imposed on newspapers were increased so they became too expensive for ordinary people to buy.
Significantly however, strategies for surveillance and espionage were also endorsed by the authorities and pursued by a network of spies, informants and agent provocateurs in an effort to deny, or at least to undermine, the ability of the country’s citizenry to express, discuss or even understand their freedom to protest.
This may seem like some dusty cloak-and-dagger yarn from the distant past but, in order to illustrate how little the British State has evolved as a democratic entity over the last 200 years, White draws our attention to the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry which began in 2015. That is, quite incredibly, it has been revealed that serving Metropolitan police officers such as Mark Kennedy (also known as Mark Stone and/or Mark Flash) were instructed by their superiors between 2003 and 2010 to pose as political activists in order to infiltrate and surveil environmental campaign networks such as Climate Camp. In turn, with their superiors’ knowledge, a number of these police officers entered sexual relationships with female activists as a part of their undercover duties, even fathering children with them, before suddenly skulking back into the shadowy system from whence they came.
As Mike Leigh himself writes in the foreword to Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre in 2018: ‘Despite the spread of universal suffrage across larger parts of the globe poverty, inequality, suppression of press freedom, indiscriminate surveillance and attacks on legitimate protest by brutal regimes are all on the rise.’
The scope of John White’s meticulous research and diligent critical application can only be lightly brushed by the fingertips of this overeager review.
For example, in the 16th century we are led along the schism between women and men under patriarchy and Protestantism in Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). In the 20th century we revisit the genocide which defined the partitioning of India and Pakistan under Mountbatten’s rule in 1947 in Viceroy’s House (Chadha, 2017). And, in the 21st century, we are urged to heed the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of globalised industrial farming that churn up our country’s ‘green and pleasant land’ in The Levelling (Leach, 2017) and Dark River (Barnard, 2017).
In conclusion, the United Kingdom can be seen to be a nation which stands divided upon an historical legacy of conflict, violence and oppression, fuelled by a fear of the masses, of the ‘Other’, of what they might think and of what they could do.
Following 13 years of Tory-led austerity cuts, the bigotry and bloodshed of Brexit, the crimes committed in the name of COVID and the current crippling cost-of-living crisis, thoughts about political reform and even revolt have begun to creep into the minds of ordinary, exhausted citizens, especially those who work in the public sector. It is hoped, at the very least, and in this particular context, that the commercialised conservatism which generally characterises the British film industry can be circumvented so more original feature films are able to harness and frame the real world hopes and fears of the country.
John White’s ‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’ makes you feel strangely patriotic, that through passion, persistence and protest there is still something worth fighting for. As a result, it is highly recommended.
One of the joys of this academic monograph is that it reminds us that the field of cinema studies, through the macro lens of research, theory and perspective, can introduce us to narratives of knowledge, understanding and experience which stretch far beyond the edges of the screen.
Here John White unfurls an ambitious tapestry of five hundred years of history, politics, economics and culture as related to us by a selection of 21st century British feature films. Moreover, interweaving itself through their tall and terrible tales of wealth, poverty, love and war is a myth which millions of us still believe in today; a quaint oxymoron which tens of thousands are still prepared to die for.
The United Kingdom is ‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy’ wrote Disraeli about the ruling class and the working class in his novel Sybil in 1845.
One hundred years later, between 1945 and the late 1970s, Professor Pat Thane argues that, following three successful decades of the Welfare State and its free provision of healthcare, education, housing, living allowances and state pensions, the chasm of quality and quantity of life between the rich and poor actually began to narrow.
This truly egalitarian post-war relationship between the nation and its citizens – a social contract intrinsically binding one another to a shared sense of security, belonging and liberty – turned out to be, tragically, just a fleeting dalliance however when in 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power, a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s, The Constitution of Liberty, tucked away in her handbag.
Most memorably, under the direction of her Conservative government, the British state –the police, the judiciary and the right-wing press – launched a vicious, vindictive and ultimately victorious assault upon what they perceived to be their biggest obstacle to socio-economic progress: the democratic entitlements of the National Union of Mineworkers during the Miners’ Strike in 1984-85. In turn, by way of the newly formulated Trade Union Act in 1984, every member of every other trade union up and down the country shuddered.
This once-in-a-lifetime lightning war left mining communities decimated across the North of England in particular. Furthermore, the fuse of ‘fast-burn capitalism’ had been lit and an unceasing bonfire of workers’ rights and protections began to rage. As cherished public services such as British Gas and British Telecom were packaged and privatised throughout the 1980s, the neoliberalist deforestation of the British way of life commenced.
Now in the first quarter of the 21st century the UK workforce, unable to hear itself speak above the incessant beat of global competitiveness, productivity, efficiency and convenience, has been gifted one of the postmodern wonders of the world: the gig economy.
As White explores in Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You from 2019, Orwellian cyber-Squealers would have us believe that this new-fangled way of working is going to make entrepreneurs of us all, liberating us from silly distractions such as time-keeping, lunch breaks and rest, as well as stupid administrative chores like sick pay, holiday pay, redundancy pay and a pension. Moreover, we are reassured that it isn’t just delivery drivers, warehouse operatives and online strippers who can benefit from this cornucopia of late stage capitalism: lecturers, journalists and registered nurses, to name but a few, are all invited to the party as well.
These days many Britons, particularly the young adults I used to teach, reluctantly accept that we no longer live in a society at all but instead precariously function, hand-to-mouth, on the outskirts of a network of simulated marketplaces where absolutely everything is a commodity to buy or sell, manage or service: our labour, our time, our bodies, our dreams. According to the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, what we are experiencing here is called ‘the direct commodification of experience itself’.
While the mainstream British media continues to gawk at the peacocking of North American bazillionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, as if their vanity, gluttony and hubris are something to aspire to, White cites Shoshana Zuboff’s solemn observation that around the world there are ‘concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history’.
Indeed, according to the International Monetary Fund, the United Kingdom is the 5th richest nation in the world with $2.6 trillion in its coffers, but if this ranking is accurate then why in 2014 did Oxfam declare the five richest families in the country to be wealthier than the bottom 20 per cent of the entire population, i.e. 12.6 million people? Furthermore, why in 2020 was it reported by Health Equity in England that in some regions more than one child in two is growing up in poverty? Crucially, the academic broadcasters Lansley and Mack ask: why is Great Britain ‘one of the most unequal and socially fragile countries in the world today?’
Believe it or not, the official rationale behind these stark socio-economic inequalities was actually submitted to the British public on May 6th 2023 in the form of a £100 million multi-venue theatre production called ‘The Coronation of King Charles III’. The mise-en-scene for this historic live performance featured the full artillery of ancient and modern regalia, including the Diamond Jubilee State Coach at £3.2 million, St. Edward’s Crown at £45 million and, famously, the Sword of State at £500,000. In turn, an original signature soundtrack was composed by Lord Lloyd-Webber, a commemorative poem was scripted by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage CBE, and coronation costumes were designed by Bruce Oldfield OBE. Moreover, as good fortune would have it, the entire British Establishment was able to make itself available to serve as the supporting cast: prince and princesses, lords and ladies, political leaders, military leaders, religious leaders, all proudly draped in the nation’s traditional liveries of hereditary, exceptionalism and pomposity.
As stated in the title of John White’s rigorous and thought-provoking book, it is deep-seated divisions reinforced by institutions like the Royal Family which have defined the United Kingdom’s psyche, character, outlook and actions throughout the ages. Whether it is in terms of wealth, power or nationalism, social class, regionalism or education, gender, ethnicity or sexuality, there has always been an obsessive and oppressive belief in binary oppositions: ‘Here and There’, ‘Then and Now’, ‘Us and Them’, ‘Self and Other’.
Mike Leigh’s Peterloo from 2018 dramatises one of the most despicable events in the country’s political history. In 1819 over 60,000 working men, women and children gathered in Manchester at midday to demand parliamentary reform and an extension of voting rights. By 2pm however they had been ruthlessly cut down by the sabres of the mounted 15th Hussars at the behest of wealthy landowner, factory owner and magistrate, William Hulton. 18 protestors were slain and 700 were maimed.
In the immediate aftermath of this massacre the British government, haunted by the ideological alternatives thrown up by the French Revolution 25 years earlier, was quick to enforce its sovereignty and suppress any further political dissent from the public. Draconian Acts of Parliament were hurried through in a manner which would cause our current Home Secretary and Tory ultra, Suella Braverman, to positively swoon. Attendance numbers at parish political meetings, for instance, were restricted; the judicial powers of magistrates trying the cases of reformers were expanded; and the taxes imposed on newspapers were increased so they became too expensive for ordinary people to buy.
Significantly however, strategies for surveillance and espionage were also endorsed by the authorities and pursued by a network of spies, informants and agent provocateurs in an effort to deny, or at least to undermine, the ability of the country’s citizenry to express, discuss or even understand their freedom to protest.
This may seem like some dusty cloak-and-dagger yarn from the distant past but, in order to illustrate how little the British State has evolved as a democratic entity over the last 200 years, White draws our attention to the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry which began in 2015. That is, quite incredibly, it has been revealed that serving Metropolitan police officers such as Mark Kennedy (also known as Mark Stone and/or Mark Flash) were instructed by their superiors between 2003 and 2010 to pose as political activists in order to infiltrate and surveil environmental campaign networks such as Climate Camp. In turn, with their superiors’ knowledge, a number of these police officers entered sexual relationships with female activists as a part of their undercover duties, even fathering children with them, before suddenly skulking back into the shadowy system from whence they came.
As Mike Leigh himself writes in the foreword to Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre in 2018: ‘Despite the spread of universal suffrage across larger parts of the globe poverty, inequality, suppression of press freedom, indiscriminate surveillance and attacks on legitimate protest by brutal regimes are all on the rise.’
The scope of John White’s meticulous research and diligent critical application can only be lightly brushed by the fingertips of this overeager review.
For example, in the 16th century we are led along the schism between women and men under patriarchy and Protestantism in Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). In the 20th century we revisit the genocide which defined the partitioning of India and Pakistan under Mountbatten’s rule in 1947 in Viceroy’s House (Chadha, 2017). And, in the 21st century, we are urged to heed the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of globalised industrial farming that churn up our country’s ‘green and pleasant land’ in The Levelling (Leach, 2017) and Dark River (Barnard, 2017).
In conclusion, the United Kingdom can be seen to be a nation which stands divided upon an historical legacy of conflict, violence and oppression, fuelled by a fear of the masses, of the ‘Other’, of what they might think and of what they could do.
Following 13 years of Tory-led austerity cuts, the bigotry and bloodshed of Brexit, the crimes committed in the name of COVID and the current crippling cost-of-living crisis, thoughts about political reform and even revolt have begun to creep into the minds of ordinary, exhausted citizens, especially those who work in the public sector. It is hoped, at the very least, and in this particular context, that the commercialised conservatism which generally characterises the British film industry can be circumvented so more original feature films are able to harness and frame the real world hopes and fears of the country.
John White’s ‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’ makes you feel strangely patriotic, that through passion, persistence and protest there is still something worth fighting for. As a result, it is highly recommended.
Book Review
David Archibald
'Tracking Loach'
(Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
David Archibald
'Tracking Loach'
(Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
Written and Narrated
by Brett Gregory
April 16th 2023
by Brett Gregory
April 16th 2023
Transcript
David Archibald’s book, ‘Tracking Loach’, is an academic celebration of Ken Loach’s 60 year career in socialist filmmaking and political activism.
It is also an extremely timely publication in that Loach’s latest film, ‘The Old Oak’, will be receiving its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023.
The author’s unique approach is to prioritise the contextual mechanics of film production studies over the theoretical speculation of critical screen studies, arguing that the reflective observation of the methodologies and logistics involved in preparing, shooting and exhibiting a feature film should elicit a complementary understanding of a filmmaker’s aesthetic.
This reminds me of a television interview with David Niven from the 1970s where he asks something along the lines of: ‘How can a critic write a decent review if he’s never actually made a movie himself?’
During Archibald’s ethnographic pursuit of Loach’s poetic and political process his primary sources of data are the annotations, interviews, shooting documents, digital footage and photographs he accrues while being physically present during the production and exhibition of Loach’s working-class comedy-drama set in Glasgow, ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
It should be noted that to be granted access to such a complex and sensitive creative environment and its extremely busy and anxious workforce – its technicians and performers – and, in turn, to enjoy the company and trust of its leaders who have the weight of a major production bearing down on them – Ken Loach (Director), Paul Laverty (Screenwriter) and Rebecca O’Brien (Producer) – is a memorable achievement in itself.
To accompany him on his journey the author also draws on a wide variety of historical and theoretical secondary sources, including the BFI’s Ken Loach Archive, and I personally found a number of his scholarly citations to be just as illuminating as his on set observations.
For example, when working alongside his early screenwriting partner, Jim Allen, Archibald highlights that Loach’s television productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s were influenced by the political ideas of Leon Trotsky in that the UK’s established democratic system was seen to be inadequate with regards to the economic interests of the proletariat.
Following on from this it is argued that Loach’s films generally aim to reveal to the audience, either explicitly or implicitly, the harsh realities, exploitation and despair of working-class experience and, in turn, that capitalism is not a natural, normal or inevitable way of ordering or governing society.
With this in mind the socialist concerns of Loach’s oeuvre have generally transitioned from addressing issues such as organised labour in ‘The Big Flame’ (1969) and ‘The Rank and File’ (1971), to unorganised labour in ‘Riff Raff’ (1991) and ‘The Navigators’ (2001), and then on to unemployed labour in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) and ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (2016).
While such films could be viewed as a war artist’s mournful depiction of socio-economic casualties lying strewn across a neoliberalist battlefield, Archibald posits with reference to the Italian historian, Enzo Traverso, that they can also be understood as evidential ‘open wounds’ which the Left need to nurse so the embers of possibility can once again be reignited.
Aware of Raymond Williams’ contention that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’, the author proceeds to cite Newland and Hoyle’s view that in some ways Loach’s creative output in the 21st century has begun to move away from the wholly melancholic art cinema of, say, ‘My Name Is Joe’ (1998), and on towards the Ealing comedy tradition with films like ‘Looking for Eric’ (2009) and ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
Indeed, as Loach himself states in a footnote, ‘not every film has to end with a fist clenched in the air.’
Loach is a social realist director with the eye of a sympathetic documentarian, influenced by, amongst other things, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, the Free Cinema Movement and the 20th century current affairs programme, ‘World in Action’.
Moreover, similar to the generic conventions exhibited in films from the Italian neo-realist movement such as ‘Rome, Open City’ (1945) and ‘Bicycle Thieves’ (1948), Archibald frequently underscores Loach’s overarching quest to, paradoxically, recreate spontaneity, authenticity and ‘truth’ in his fictional work by employing predominantly naturalistic filmmaking techniques.
By shooting on a ‘real’ location instead of within an ‘artificial’ studio Loach’s objective is to not only encourage the actors to respond to their surrounding environment like recognisable, everyday human beings, but to also display the historical power relations which are inscribed into, for example, the municipal buildings which overshadow them.
Echoing John Grierson’s principle of ‘actuality’, Loach tends to shoot static medium long shots with the filming apparatus and its crew as far away from the ‘action’ as possible, a tactical attempt to motivate the audience to decide what is important and what to focus on, as if they themselves are simply observing matters from across the street.
In turn, this sense of things ‘really happening’ is often reinforced by natural lighting during a shoot via the sky for exteriors or windows for interiors, and by way of continuity editing in post-production so as not to ‘interfere’ with the actors’ on screen performances and the linear story they are striving to tell.
Of course, to achieve ‘the illusion of the first time’ casting is crucial, and Loach’s production team frequently enlist non-professional or amateur actors as a consequence. David Bradley as Billy Casper in ‘Kes’ (1969), Crissy Rock as Maggie Conlan in ‘Ladybird, Ladybird’ (1994) and Martin Compston as Liam in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) are just three notable examples.
As well as providing a real world opportunity for a filmmaker to collaborate, explore and develop a character more or less from scratch, Jennifer Beth Spiegel points out that casting non-professional or amateur actors is also good for marketing in that it draws the attention of the popular press by way of the presumption that these ordinary individuals are pure and unsullied by the elbow grease of the film industry and the ego of show business.
An important factor in this process is, unlike most other independent British production companies, Ken Loach and Rebecca O’Brien’s ‘Sixteen Films’ has become well financed and self-sufficient over the decades and so, as a result, they have the time to carry out lengthy scouting missions in order to locate and secure the right actor for the right role.
That is, to achieve a sense of verisimilitude on screen and in the minds of the audience, Loach et al seek out and cast performers who, besides their physical appearance, not only share similar personality traits with the characters they are pencilled in to play, but who also originate from similar socio-economic backgrounds or circumstances.
This approach is exemplified by the casting of Paul Brannigan as Gareth O’Connor in ‘The Angel’s Share’ in that the film’s screenwriter, Paul Laverty, first encountered him while conducting research at Strathclyde Police’s Violence Reduction Unit. As Archibald relates, in line with his on screen character, Brannigan, born in Glasgow’s East End, had been imprisoned for violent crimes and gangland feuding, but was also ‘attempting to go straight’.
Of course, critics will argue that the casting of non-professional actors undermines the history and craft of acting, the experience involved, the knowledge accumulated, the techniques learned, the talent nurtured. For example, in an interview with the author, the actor Roger Allam points out that amateur actors ‘would be at a loss in a Molière play’.
While this may be true, a reasonable response would be: what other practical routes are there available in the UK for the working-class to climb up on to the silver screen and represent their identities, communities and histories fairly?
In an industry predominantly based in London and owned, run and populated by the middle class and their superiors, the costs involved to train as an actor are astronomical to an ordinary person and the distance to travel, particularly for those in the North, preposterous.
Indeed, the few British working-class actors who are lucky enough to enjoy a public platform have consistently highlighted this socio-cultural system of privilege, prejudice and exclusion over recent years.
While Christopher Eccleston asserts that the ‘working-class … are not wanted in the arts anymore’, James McAvoy argues that the dominance of privately educated British actors in the 21st century is ‘damaging for society’. In turn, Gary Oldman has stated that he is unable to direct a follow-up to his incendiary ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) because ‘They don’t want another one. They want ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’’.
In light of these socio-economic and ideological realities, Loach’s casting of non-professional and amateur actors – together with the working-class stories he tells and the working-class worlds he creates – should be regarded not simply as an aesthetic choice or even socialist posturing. That is, under the stifling, reductive right-wing administration we are all currently enduring in the UK, enabled on a day-to-day basis by numerous obsequious and self-serving cultural institutions and organisations, it could be reasonably argued that such an approach is, in truth, a revolutionary act.
In his epilogue Archibald includes an apposite quote from the Spanish filmmaker, Luis Buñuel:
‘A writer or painter cannot change the world but they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts.’
In ‘Tracking Loach’ there is so much more to discover and learn from its unique, rigorous and genuinely heartfelt exploration of one of the maestros of modern British cinema and modern British politics, Ken Loach.
It is highly recommended.
David Archibald’s book, ‘Tracking Loach’, is an academic celebration of Ken Loach’s 60 year career in socialist filmmaking and political activism.
It is also an extremely timely publication in that Loach’s latest film, ‘The Old Oak’, will be receiving its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023.
The author’s unique approach is to prioritise the contextual mechanics of film production studies over the theoretical speculation of critical screen studies, arguing that the reflective observation of the methodologies and logistics involved in preparing, shooting and exhibiting a feature film should elicit a complementary understanding of a filmmaker’s aesthetic.
This reminds me of a television interview with David Niven from the 1970s where he asks something along the lines of: ‘How can a critic write a decent review if he’s never actually made a movie himself?’
During Archibald’s ethnographic pursuit of Loach’s poetic and political process his primary sources of data are the annotations, interviews, shooting documents, digital footage and photographs he accrues while being physically present during the production and exhibition of Loach’s working-class comedy-drama set in Glasgow, ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
It should be noted that to be granted access to such a complex and sensitive creative environment and its extremely busy and anxious workforce – its technicians and performers – and, in turn, to enjoy the company and trust of its leaders who have the weight of a major production bearing down on them – Ken Loach (Director), Paul Laverty (Screenwriter) and Rebecca O’Brien (Producer) – is a memorable achievement in itself.
To accompany him on his journey the author also draws on a wide variety of historical and theoretical secondary sources, including the BFI’s Ken Loach Archive, and I personally found a number of his scholarly citations to be just as illuminating as his on set observations.
For example, when working alongside his early screenwriting partner, Jim Allen, Archibald highlights that Loach’s television productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s were influenced by the political ideas of Leon Trotsky in that the UK’s established democratic system was seen to be inadequate with regards to the economic interests of the proletariat.
Following on from this it is argued that Loach’s films generally aim to reveal to the audience, either explicitly or implicitly, the harsh realities, exploitation and despair of working-class experience and, in turn, that capitalism is not a natural, normal or inevitable way of ordering or governing society.
With this in mind the socialist concerns of Loach’s oeuvre have generally transitioned from addressing issues such as organised labour in ‘The Big Flame’ (1969) and ‘The Rank and File’ (1971), to unorganised labour in ‘Riff Raff’ (1991) and ‘The Navigators’ (2001), and then on to unemployed labour in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) and ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (2016).
While such films could be viewed as a war artist’s mournful depiction of socio-economic casualties lying strewn across a neoliberalist battlefield, Archibald posits with reference to the Italian historian, Enzo Traverso, that they can also be understood as evidential ‘open wounds’ which the Left need to nurse so the embers of possibility can once again be reignited.
Aware of Raymond Williams’ contention that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’, the author proceeds to cite Newland and Hoyle’s view that in some ways Loach’s creative output in the 21st century has begun to move away from the wholly melancholic art cinema of, say, ‘My Name Is Joe’ (1998), and on towards the Ealing comedy tradition with films like ‘Looking for Eric’ (2009) and ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
Indeed, as Loach himself states in a footnote, ‘not every film has to end with a fist clenched in the air.’
Loach is a social realist director with the eye of a sympathetic documentarian, influenced by, amongst other things, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, the Free Cinema Movement and the 20th century current affairs programme, ‘World in Action’.
Moreover, similar to the generic conventions exhibited in films from the Italian neo-realist movement such as ‘Rome, Open City’ (1945) and ‘Bicycle Thieves’ (1948), Archibald frequently underscores Loach’s overarching quest to, paradoxically, recreate spontaneity, authenticity and ‘truth’ in his fictional work by employing predominantly naturalistic filmmaking techniques.
By shooting on a ‘real’ location instead of within an ‘artificial’ studio Loach’s objective is to not only encourage the actors to respond to their surrounding environment like recognisable, everyday human beings, but to also display the historical power relations which are inscribed into, for example, the municipal buildings which overshadow them.
Echoing John Grierson’s principle of ‘actuality’, Loach tends to shoot static medium long shots with the filming apparatus and its crew as far away from the ‘action’ as possible, a tactical attempt to motivate the audience to decide what is important and what to focus on, as if they themselves are simply observing matters from across the street.
In turn, this sense of things ‘really happening’ is often reinforced by natural lighting during a shoot via the sky for exteriors or windows for interiors, and by way of continuity editing in post-production so as not to ‘interfere’ with the actors’ on screen performances and the linear story they are striving to tell.
Of course, to achieve ‘the illusion of the first time’ casting is crucial, and Loach’s production team frequently enlist non-professional or amateur actors as a consequence. David Bradley as Billy Casper in ‘Kes’ (1969), Crissy Rock as Maggie Conlan in ‘Ladybird, Ladybird’ (1994) and Martin Compston as Liam in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) are just three notable examples.
As well as providing a real world opportunity for a filmmaker to collaborate, explore and develop a character more or less from scratch, Jennifer Beth Spiegel points out that casting non-professional or amateur actors is also good for marketing in that it draws the attention of the popular press by way of the presumption that these ordinary individuals are pure and unsullied by the elbow grease of the film industry and the ego of show business.
An important factor in this process is, unlike most other independent British production companies, Ken Loach and Rebecca O’Brien’s ‘Sixteen Films’ has become well financed and self-sufficient over the decades and so, as a result, they have the time to carry out lengthy scouting missions in order to locate and secure the right actor for the right role.
That is, to achieve a sense of verisimilitude on screen and in the minds of the audience, Loach et al seek out and cast performers who, besides their physical appearance, not only share similar personality traits with the characters they are pencilled in to play, but who also originate from similar socio-economic backgrounds or circumstances.
This approach is exemplified by the casting of Paul Brannigan as Gareth O’Connor in ‘The Angel’s Share’ in that the film’s screenwriter, Paul Laverty, first encountered him while conducting research at Strathclyde Police’s Violence Reduction Unit. As Archibald relates, in line with his on screen character, Brannigan, born in Glasgow’s East End, had been imprisoned for violent crimes and gangland feuding, but was also ‘attempting to go straight’.
Of course, critics will argue that the casting of non-professional actors undermines the history and craft of acting, the experience involved, the knowledge accumulated, the techniques learned, the talent nurtured. For example, in an interview with the author, the actor Roger Allam points out that amateur actors ‘would be at a loss in a Molière play’.
While this may be true, a reasonable response would be: what other practical routes are there available in the UK for the working-class to climb up on to the silver screen and represent their identities, communities and histories fairly?
In an industry predominantly based in London and owned, run and populated by the middle class and their superiors, the costs involved to train as an actor are astronomical to an ordinary person and the distance to travel, particularly for those in the North, preposterous.
Indeed, the few British working-class actors who are lucky enough to enjoy a public platform have consistently highlighted this socio-cultural system of privilege, prejudice and exclusion over recent years.
While Christopher Eccleston asserts that the ‘working-class … are not wanted in the arts anymore’, James McAvoy argues that the dominance of privately educated British actors in the 21st century is ‘damaging for society’. In turn, Gary Oldman has stated that he is unable to direct a follow-up to his incendiary ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) because ‘They don’t want another one. They want ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’’.
In light of these socio-economic and ideological realities, Loach’s casting of non-professional and amateur actors – together with the working-class stories he tells and the working-class worlds he creates – should be regarded not simply as an aesthetic choice or even socialist posturing. That is, under the stifling, reductive right-wing administration we are all currently enduring in the UK, enabled on a day-to-day basis by numerous obsequious and self-serving cultural institutions and organisations, it could be reasonably argued that such an approach is, in truth, a revolutionary act.
In his epilogue Archibald includes an apposite quote from the Spanish filmmaker, Luis Buñuel:
‘A writer or painter cannot change the world but they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts.’
In ‘Tracking Loach’ there is so much more to discover and learn from its unique, rigorous and genuinely heartfelt exploration of one of the maestros of modern British cinema and modern British politics, Ken Loach.
It is highly recommended.