Shame. Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight.

In Shame, Steve McQueen transforms New York into a non-place. Marc Augé coined the term to refer to the anonymous and interchangeable zones of transit—retail parks, shopping malls, airports—which increasingly dominate contemporary culture. We learn that Shame’s lead character, sex addict Brandon (Michael Fassbender), was born in Ireland but grew up in New York, and his migration handily captures the transition between McQueen’s first feature, Hunger, which dealt with the 1981 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, and the new film. McQueen has pointedly left behind the heavily coded, multiply overwritten territory of Northern Ireland’s Troubles in the 1980s for the bland vistas of upscale New York in the twenty-first century. These are quite clearly high-end non-places—the apartment in which Brandon lives, the office where he works, and the hotel where he takes a co-worker for a failed liaison have the unobtrusive minimalism which still connotes expensive taste. But they remain non-places: it’s sometimes difficult to know whether we’re in Brandon’s apartment or the hotel room. Shame’s New York is as lacking in temporal as spatial signifiers. At points, the film’s soundtrack pointedly calls up an older moment, when music could capture a particular time and place. The disco of Chic and the post-punk of Tom Tom Club and Blondie that Brandon hears in clubs and bars were once rooted in a specific New York era, but they’re now as “classic” in their own way as the Bach that Brandon prefers to listen to as he jogs through the city.

Shame. Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight.

Apart from his sex addiction, practically everything about Brandon is generic, depersonalized. His job, never fully specified, seems to be something in advertising or branding. This vagueness profoundly irritated Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: “every scene ladled with big dollops of cinema’s most respectable cop-out: ambiguity … Shame wears its emptiness like a badge of honor; McQueen is trying for banal blankness, and though he succeeds in that respect, you kind of wish that a filmmaker (and one with a background as an artist at that) would aspire to do more than just say nothing.” But far from being something that you might expect an artist to refrain from, isn’t compulsory ambiguity precisely a signature of so much contemporary art, which regards “saying something” as an unpardonable vulgarity, and which would far rather “raise questions” than make any kind of determinate statement? When McQueen does try to say something, Vishnevetsky complains, it is staggeringly clichéd: “’sex can be both a dehumanizing and transcendent experience’ (you don’t say!), ‘addiction can take over a person’s life’ (really?), ‘people are often motivated by past trauma’ (well, I’ll be!), and ‘we live in a culture that nourishes emotional isolation.’” At its worst, Shame comes off like a standard melodrama remade with arthouse ellipses, complete with what Rob White called “conventional therapy-speak psychology that holds childhood responsible for adult compulsions.” At its best, however, Shame isn’t “saying nothing” so much as it is telling something about nothing, about the non- of the non-place.

Shame. Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight.

Brandon himself seems to have been projected from the non-places which he inhabits. He is to post-crash Manhattan what Patrick Bateman (in American Psycho) was to boomtime New York: the city’s psychopathology rendered no longer as perversely humorous extravagance but as dour furtiveness, its traces to be found not in a mutilated corpse but on a soiled hard drive. Superficial charm covers over a terrifying nullity, and you suspect that Brandon’s sex addiction covers over a deeper impulse to flee from that central nothingness. The film is called Shame but shame is conspicuously lacking from it emotional palette, which is as subdued as the architecture on which McQueen’s camera lingers. Shame is dominated by such an overwhelming sense of affectlessness that it could be about depression as much as sex addiction. Even when Brandon clears out his porn hoard, there’s a sense of utilitarian purposiveness about his actions rather than a purgative self-disgust. Just as the office is barely distinguishable from the hotel room, so there’s a grim continuity between Brandon’s (vaguely defined) work and his addiction–compulsion, which is as lacking in affect as labor. The affect that does occasionally flare up in Shame—for instance when Brandon returns home to find his sister Sissy having sex with his boss, or when he fails to perform in the scene with the co-worker—is a kind of inarticulate frustration.

Shame. Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight.

Shame is at its most powerful when it explores the bleak phenomenology of Brandon’s loneliness. Carey Mulligan is fine as Sissy, yet the whole dynamic which Sissy’s character brings to the film introduces some of Shame’s weakest elements. The arrival of Sissy, inevitably, brings Brandon’s carefully controlled libidinal economy into crisis. Her equally inevitable act of self-harm, as well as her therapeutic editorializing—“We aren’t bad people; we’re just from a bad place”—relieve us of the disturbingly anonymous automatism which elsewhere governs the film, and throw us back into the well-formed causality familiar from “conventional therapy-speak.” This same therapeutic causality is invoked in the scene with the co-worker, with Brandon’s impotence implicitly explained by his desire to “retain control,” something McQueen has underlined in interviews about the film. Shame is most convincing—and most unsettling—as a kind of post-traumatic cinema. It’s post-traumatic not in the usual sense that it explores the impact of a trauma, but in the sense that it implies a situation in which trauma no longer plays a decisive role in explaining either behavior or psychology. Throughout most of Shame—everywhere, in fact, apart from in Sissy’s remarks—the old psychoanalytic relation between trauma and compulsion has been disarticulated. What survives is a blind compulsion, radically illegible, incapable of giving any account of itself; and this depthless compulsion might be the psychopathology—or rather the psycho-non-pathology—of the non-place.

Melancholia. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

ROB WHITE: At the beginning and end of Melancholia two worlds collide: the unloosed rogue planet of the title crashes into Earth to the sound of Wagner’s prelude to Tristan und Isolde. In between two sisters, mercurial Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and fastidious Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), take it in turns to suffer psychic crisis. First Justine descends into near-catatonia after her marriage fails on the very night of the wedding; when she revives—buoyed, it seems, by the prospect of Armageddon—Claire is wracked by anxiety, terrified by Melancholia’s approach. (Her hitherto self-assured husband John, played by Kiefer Sutherland, swallows a bottle of pills rather than have to witness the apocalyptic denouement.) This is certainly no conventionally cheerful narrative and yet the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman reported that, upon leaving the Cannes screening, he “felt light, rejuvenated and unconscionably happy” (www.voicefilm.com, May 18, 2011). I know what he means: Von Trier’s latest isn’t melancholy in either the everyday sense (introverted, wistful) or the Freudian one (furiously, neurotically mournful).

Melancholia has been compared to The Celebration but Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 Dogme production gives us all the elements of Family Dysfunction (Oedipal angst, suicide, sexual trauma), which is just a negative image of the Happy Family. (At the end the patriarch is humiliated but the clan holds together.) Justine and Claire’s eccentric divorced parents—father (John Hurt) ostentatiously stealing spoons, mother (Charlotte Rampling) withholding even the most token display of good cheer (”give me a break with your fucking rituals”)—are, by contrast, amusingly detached and misbehaved. They impertinently treat the ceremony like a game of charades. It’s a good thing wealthy John is paying (as he insistently reminds Justine) and the wedding party seems to mean most to him and to the splendidly precious wedding planner (Udo Kier). Much of von Trier’s celebration sequence is sheer comedy.

Justine’s depression hits its nadir after the celebration turns into a fiasco and her husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) scurries off as fast as he can. An unspecified time later, Claire has to help her take a bath. Afterwards mouthfuls of food prompt her to simper, “It tastes like ashes.” Yet Justine certainly gets her appetite back when the threat of planetary annihilation looms; she ravenously eats jam right out of the jar. I find the change both odd and rather delightful. So I don’t recognize A. O. Scott’s earnest diagnosis in The New York Times: “acute anguish … paralyzing hollowness of depression … how disproportionate and all-consuming the internal, personal sorrow” (November 11, 2011). Even as she nears her crisis, she retains a hard-nosed intelligence and presence of mind. When she tells her boss at the party that he’s a “despicable, power-hungry little man,” she’s making perfect sense not losing her senses. I’m therefore disinclined to treat Melancholia as a baroque case history. Perhaps it’s better to think of it as a parable—a subversive parable. Its grand resort-hotel setting is a kind of enchanted castle, a magic island. (Shopping trips seem to prove the existence of a world beyond but Abraham the horse definitely can’t escape.) Von Trier’s presiding role is like that of a newly crowned Caliban, a totally anarchic guardian whose motto for indiscipline is: “Here you shall stay until everything is broken!” Do you find any reasons to be cheerful in Melancholia?

Melancholia. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. © Christian Geisnaes.

NINA POWER: I agree that Melancholia is not about depression understood in “merely” human terms, but I found it a good deal less light and comedic than you did. I understood the film as a competing set of epistemological claims—that’s to say, not only how do we know certain things, and what method do we used to know them, but also what we do with this knowledge once we have it. Von Trier is a well-documented sufferer of depression, but from a certain standpoint, depression does contain within it certain material truths; i.e., it isn’t merely pathological. So, for example, we know that the world will end, literally and physically (when Melancholia collides with the Earth it’s to all intents and purposes a “real” collision and not a merely symbolic or allegorical “end of the world”).

Seen from enough of an objective standpoint (sub specie aeternitatis as Spinoza would have it) we know that actually “eternity” isn’t forever. Sooner or later, the Earth and all around it will cease to exist. While the heat death of the universe will in fact come after our own individual death, and probably even that of the species as a whole, it’s interesting to speculate on what this horizon of thought means: what, seen from a certain angle, does anything matter at all? Justine has two modes of nihilism: aggressive and passive, in that order. The former sees her question the “usual” structures: marriage, work, family responsibility. The latter sees her reconciled (albeit with a snarl) to the imminent destruction of the planet. These nihilisms can be seen as models of knowledge far more apt than the neurotic position held by Claire, or the economic–rational mode represented by John (”you have to trust the scientists”). So in that sense I agree that Justine is far “saner” than the rest of her family. The stilted conversations, apart from this presumably being much like the way bourgeois people actually communicate with one another, operate as so many incompatible world views. The objective fact that forces them all to focus their relative outlooks is also the revelation that almost all of these outlooks possess no adequate way to deal with Melancholia’s imminent arrival.

I’m curious as to what you make of the destruction/critique of modernism as enacted by Justine in the first half when she swaps displayed art books depicting Malevich plates with ones containing Bruegel the Elder and Caravaggio: is Justine’s knowledge somehow resistant or opposed to modernity?

Melancholia. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. © Christian Geisnaes.

ROB WHITE: You only have to compare Melancholia with Contagion or Transformers: Dark of the Moon to notice von Trier’s subtraction of high-tech. The potential shock of imagining Armageddon is rendered banal by all the blockbusters’ screens and machines. (Malick’s The Tree of Life also imagines the end of the world but its palliative framework is Proustian-Darwinian flashback.) Melancholia is wonderfully minimalist by contrast: it shrinks Science to the pitiful little wire ring-on-a-stick that Claire uses to falsely reassure herself that the planet is veering away. There’s much less paraphernalia to distract from an actually shocking apocalypticism—a fiction (in this case) that truly can turn our world views upside-down. And I like your idea that Melancholia is mind-blowing in the manner of Spinoza.

It’s during the wedding that an undeniably upset and agitated Justine replaces book-plate reproductions of abstract twentieth-century paintings with Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565) and Caravaggio’s David and Goliath (1610)—and so with representatives of an artistic dark side that’s much more in tune with the witch etchings in Antichrist than with the avant-garde geometries that distress her. Von Trier’s sympathy for this nightmare aesthetic must be some kind of repudiation of modern outlooks. But let’s recall the first appearance of the Bruegel picture right at the beginning of Melancholia: it fills the screen and starts to burn (via CGI). Only then do we see the two planets on collision course. I think this old-master-in-flames relates to something Justine says later. Claire is planning an end-of-the-world soirée but Justine is contemptuous: “You want me to have a glass of wine on your terrace? … How about a song? Beethoven’s Ninth, something like that?” This surely evokes a famous statement in Mann’s Doctor Faustus: “I want to revoke the Ninth Symphony” (music also singled out in A Clockwork Orange). The notion is that Beethoven’s work comes out of the same barbarous “high culture” (and high Science) that produced industrial capitalism and industrial mass murder. What’s to be joyous about?

Herbert Marcuse picks up on Mann’s remark in his 1969 An Essay on Liberation during a discussion of countercultural black musicians: “They now oppose to the ‘music of the spheres’ … their own music, with all the defiance, and the hatred, and the joy of rebellious victims, defining their own humanity against the definitions of the masters.” You persuasively emphasize the element of critique—how Melancholia suggests the servility and uselessness of modern mindsets—and so perhaps of the film’s version of what Marcuse calls “elementary negation, the antithesis: position of the immediate denial.” Justine’s painting switchover is as much as to say: we’d do well to go back to pre-Enlightenment world views. But, elsewhere, isn’t von Trier also reaching for a new art that—in the form of a highly stylized cinema of digital effects—affirms as much as negates? Melancholia’s very first image is a big closeup of Justine with CGI birds falling in slow-motion behind her. And it’s an image of her waking up. Her eyes slowly open as Wagner’s overture plays. Doesn’t this bold, novel image-making suggest an element of affirmation alongside the negation?

Melancholia. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. Photo © Christian Geisnaes.

NINA POWER: When we discussed Antichrist before I wondered about von Trier’s indebtedness to video games; I had the same feeling here with the opening scenes (incidentally, the director of photography for Melancholia was recently awarded the European Cinematographer Award). Where most “apocalyptic” films reach for flimsy and overblown uses of CGI, von Trier opts for an aesthetic more akin to a cross between a Steven Meisel photoshoot (see lisaframe.tumblr.com) and a cut scene from some highly advanced videogame (the Antichrist video game Eden was sadly shelved this year). I like the idea of von Trier inaugurating a “new art,” especially if it’s one that links cinema with computer games and photoshoots—is it a coincidence that Justine’s final commission for the company she later savagely attacks is to come up with a tagline for a fashion shoot?

Your remarks on high culture and barbarism reminded me of a recollection in Lukács’s Lenin: Theoretician of Practice (1924): “Gorky recorded Lenin’s very characteristic words spoken after he listened to Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata: ‘I know the Appassionata inside out and yet I am willing to listen to it every day. It is wonderful, ethereal music. On hearing it I proudly, maybe somewhat naively, think: “See! People are able to produce such marvels!” He then winked, laughed and added sadly: “I’m often unable to listen to music, it gets on my nerves, I would like to stroke my fellow beings and whisper sweet nothings in their ears for being able to produce such beautiful things in spite of the abominable hell they are living in. However, today one shouldn’t caress anybody—for people will only bite off your hand; strike, without pity, although theoretically we are against any kind of violence. Umph, it is, in fact, an infernally difficult task!’” Lenin’s resistance to the humanizing qualities of Beethoven in the face of revolution perhaps have a nihilistic parallel in Justine’s refusal to exit the world aesthetically (sitting drinking wine and listening to music with Claire), even as one scene paints her as Millais’s Ophelia, drowning in her wedding dress and clutching the bouquet, and another has her lying lustfully on the riverbank, nakedly communing with the homicidal planet. Justine’s mother’s ironic exhortation at the wedding—“enjoy it while it lasts”—seems far truer of Justine’s own “dance of death” with Melancholia than it does of her own marriage, which, for all intents and purposes, is over in less than a day.

I want to briefly return to Justine’s “knowledge” which at times borders on the mystical. She knows that there are 678 beans in the wedding jar and she also apparently knows that: “The Earth is evil, we don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody would miss it.” The enclosed, kitschy bourgeois world inhabited by Justine, her sister, her husband, their son Leo (Cameron Spurr), and the horses that won’t go beyond the bridge is all there is: Claire is looking for perfection (with the wedding, with the chocolate she places on Justine’s pillow, with her desperate desire for order) but Justine knows it’s all for nothing. Perhaps tired of making other people’s lives a misery, she constructs a shelter for her nephew, her one true act of kindness in response to the only persistent desire that runs throughout the film, the child’s desire for his aunt to make him a “magic cave.”

Melancholia. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. Photo © Christian Geisnaes.

ROB WHITE: That hyperaestheticized Meisel Vogue shoot, which gives a gorgeous spin on the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, is fascinating and I think it’s highly relevant to Melancholia. The shoot and the film share two interlinked elements: a bold (even “bad taste”) glamorization of the kind of subject matter that’s usually met with sanctimoniousness; plus a mysterious female presence. Meisel’s model seems mythical, oracular: a beautiful zombie mermaid or gull woman basking in a toxic wasteland. Justine is like this too, especially in the remarkable riverbank image you mention of her naked, as if she were being recharged by the rampaging planet’s pale light—her expression content, complicit, sly. It’s one of a series of narrative-puncturing shots that also includes two images in the opening sequence that seem to me to be even more suggestive than the Millais spoof: Justine first standing on the golf course with little lightning bolts streaming from her fingers, then straining in her wedding dress against weblike tendrils that have ensnared her. They’re images of defiance and power. Pater’s description of the impression conveyed by the Mona Lisa—which the writer says is a masterpiece comparable only to Dürer’s Melancholia—of “strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions” could apply also to Justine in these strangely mythic tableaux.

Justine welcomes the end of the world. Is this nihilism (as you put it)? Is it melancholic, negative? It must depend on what’s meant by the terms. In films like Contagion and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the Earth is of course saved: life, nation, family are protected. There’s more to these films than that but they can still be enlisted to speak of a nihilism of the Happy Ending—an affirmation of normal life, the world as it is. This is a “nihilism” of nothing-else-but-this. Yet the unsentimental logic of the political notion of “another world is possible”—if this troublesome slogan actually means anything—surely is: “the old world must go.” All of it. This is what von Trier quite literally depicts. I’m not sure, in the light of what you’ve said, whether I can still hold to my starting point that Melancholia is playful and comic. But I still don’t think it’s a work of despair. The film invites us to rethink melancholy not as grief, guilt, mental paralysis but as something more like what the writer Dominic Fox calls in his 2009 book Cold World, “militant dysphoria.” Justine’s dejection encompasses her uncanny knowledge, her struggle against social conformity, her complex starlit joy. Her nihilism is the absolute repudiation (as you mentioned earlier) of the mindsets that prove so useless to Claire and John in the face of catastrophe. It’s a nihilism of anything-but-this.

1970s antipsychiatry came up in our Antichrist discussion and I’m reminded again here of that project to recuperate the categories of psychopathology and especially “schizo.” In a special 1978 “Schizo Culture” issue of the journal Semiotext(e), François Péraldi remarks: “Shall we say that schizophrenia is a process? … I’d venture to say that it appears to me as an affirmative process in the negative. Something like: ‘I am and I remain whatever you do not want me to be.’ Let’s understand it as an affirmation against.” Isn’t Justine a kind of schizo-melancholic whose affirming-against knowledge and passions are, in the final analysis, to be relished?

Melancholia. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

NINA POWER: Reading your last response I keep thinking of REM’s song title “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”: a resigned, upbeat kind of nihilism, an acceptance of the finality of all things. Certainly this state of mind could apply to Justine, who becomes increasingly serene as time goes on, stripped of all worldly baggage (no husband, no job, no children …). I don’t know if I’d call it “militant,” but it surely endears us to her more than Claire’s anxious patter does (von Trier has managed to make yet another film in which almost all the characters are highly unsympathetic, which makes the odd moments of grace all the more meaningful).

In the end, I think of Melancholia as an exploration of something I want to call “objective depression,” where the pathology is reflected in the world and the world in the pathology: the depressive’s feeling that nothing matters, that we’re all doomed anyway is turned into brute fact (and indeed, as I’ve said, we all know that the world will indeed end, eventually). Justine is able to turn her subjectivity inside out because she can relate far better to a destructive planet than she can her husband or family: is the “moral” of the film that the female depressive is a menace because she is unmoored and unstable, and resilient to the charms of the male universe? Casting Kirsten Dunst, a kind of cinematic American sweetheart, as the “objective depressive”, is inspired: Dunst’s face, so sweet when she’s being “good,” becomes so savage and so petulant when her mood turns sour. Gainsbourg’s role doesn’t quite reach the heights of her part in Antichrist (how could it?), but as a counterpoint to her sister, taking turns to be bossy, to care and to panic, she’s a perfect, stilted, foil, despite (or perhaps because of) their obvious lack of relation. The intense focus on two sisters, rather than on either of the two marriages (three, I suppose, if you include the failed marriage of the sisters’ parents) is something of a break for von Trier. While he constantly claims that his female characters merely reflect dimensions of his own, I wonder if with this film he goes beyond the cruelty he often exhibits towards his female leads: perhaps, with Melancholia, von Trier is toying with the world, albeit a dead and dying one—in favor of a new one?

Caetlin Benson-Allott

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)

Since Marey’s motion studies at the end of the nineteenth century, film has been a tool for providing visible evidence, a record of things seen. The development of digital imaging technology over the past twenty years has transformed that original empirical function. Advancements in CGI enable convincing depictions of things impossible to see in everyday life: dinosaurs, hobbits, viruses. It has become necessary to speak of “hypervisibility” to describe the way movies can realistically render such previously hard-to-envision phenomena. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion tries to contest this prevailing logic by insisting on the limits of visibility.

Contagion. © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Contagion begins with a black screen and a cough; someone somewhere is sick—and spreading it—but we cannot see who. Characters spend much of the rest of the film staring into monitors, feverishly studying colorful computer-generated models of the mysterious virus or digital video of its victims, but however hard they look, their screens reveal only biological explanations for the epidemic. They inevitably exclude macroeconomic and social forces, which are even harder to picture than the microscopic disease but causally every bit as important. To represent the limits of visual inquiry, Soderbergh’s movie keeps its computer-generated models on monitors and within frames. By separating digital visual aids from the rest of the characters’ environments, Contagion indicates that seeing the virus—or even the moment of its transmission—can never fully explain the catalysts behind the epidemic. Digital models may help halt the spread of an outbreak, but they cannot convey why the virus entered the population. Ironically, Soderbergh does try to show us the forces behind these images, but in so doing, he runs into the same explanatory limitations as his characters.

As a medical thriller, Contagion participates in the venerable filmic tradition of searching for visual pleasure on—and even within—the human body. Writing about Contagion‘s nineteenth-century precedents, Tom Gunning invokes “the gnostic (from gnosis, knowledge) mission of early cinema” that imbricated “new methods for investigating the visual world” with the joys of spectacle (“In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” Modernism/Modernity, winter 1997, 1, 3). In addition to Marey’s motion studies, “Fred Ott’s Sneeze” (1894) provides another important example of this early mixture of scientific inquiry and visual pleasure. A forty-eight-frame close-up of a lab assistant’s involuntary expulsion, the movie’s appeal comes from its framing. The close-up of the sneezing face captures the “microphysiologies” of facial musculature at work and turns the body’s compulsions into spectacle.

These edifying delights inspired subsequent filmmakers to imagine visual pleasures hiding beneath the body’s surfaces. By the mid-1960s, playful science-fiction films were using special effects to depict extraordinary internal environments. Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Innerspace (1987) employ spectacular sets and production designs to take us inside internal organs as foreign and mysterious as outer space. CGI continued this tendency to turn flesh into fantasy. However, the ease with which digital artists can peek beneath the skin has made flesh part of the story in a much wider variety of genres. Fight Club (1999) famously begins inside the brain of its protagonist; unpleasantly organic burblings and squelches introduce the camera’s zoom backwards along a neural path across the cerebrum, out a hair follicle, and up the barrel of a gun nestled in the protagonist’s mouth. More recently, 127 Hours (2011) travels inside its protagonist’s arm to underscore the difficulty of amputating a limb with a utility tool. Framed by reaction shots that convey the character’s suffering, the virtual camera shows the knife blade sliding through muscle to detach bone and tendon. Although a digital fiction, the effect is horribly believable: this must be what it really looks like to sever an arm. The sequence furthers our expectation of what computer animation can make visible. Blade: Trinity (2004) and the recent remake of The Thing (2011) similarly exploit CGI to portray viruses and aliens penetrating human cells. These movies teach viewers that computers can render truths our senses cannot, a proposition Contagion openly questions.

Contagion. © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

After its enigmatic black screen, Contagion begins by disclosing the identity of its anonymous cougher. Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) sits at an airport bar, eating nuts and unwittingly spreading a deadly disease. The film then cuts between ailing travelers on public transportation systems around the world: a young man on a ferry in Hong Kong, a businessman on a flight to Japan, a Ukrainian fashion model in a taxi in London. Each quickly sickens and dies, and it is up to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization to identify the virus and curtail its spread. For the most part, the film’s various epidemiologists undertake this pursuit as an exercise in visual inquiry. Dr. Ally Hextell (Jennifer Ehle) captures the first digital image of the virus with an electron microscope and generates additional computer models to illustrate her search for a vaccine. The vibrant colors of these models engage the viewer’s eye even as Hextell admits their limitations: they cannot show us where the virus came from or how it developed. Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) tries to track the virus’s route into the population by watching surveillance footage from the Macau casino where all of the aforementioned victims briefly came together. Yet each time Contagion seems to cut to this footage, mobile cameras and lurid colors reveal it to be a fantasy, an illusion rich with details security cameras cannot capture. Close-ups of Beth and her fellow revelers seem to reveal meaningful details about their demeanors and physical contact, but the security cameras do not have access to such intimate angles. What we are seeing is the video record Orantes wants, not the one she has.

These fake-surveillance sequences start to undermine the premise that the virus can be understood if it is just looked at hard enough. Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould) reaches a similar conclusion in one of the film’s eeriest and most effective scenes. Seated in a San Francisco café after a long day in the lab, Sussman stares at the objects around him—a counter, a cookie, a glass—and begins to comprehend them as fomites (the inanimate surfaces over which viruses travel). Sussman is not accessing any new visual information; rather he recognizes the insufficiency of computer-generated imagery to explain this medical disaster. Like the black prologue, the café sequence suggests that there may be more to an epidemic than meets the eye. This point is made in a different way when Beth’s husband Mitch (Matt Damon) finds a digital snapshot of the moment the virus entered the human population but fails to recognize its significance. CGI encourages us to believe we can see everything, from the cosmic to the atomic, but simply seeing the moment is not enough.

Having thus begun to expose the limits of hypervisibility, Contagion concludes by seeking to show us an alternative explanation for the epidemic, the moment when corporate forces set off the chain of events that created the contagion. This final Rube Goldberg-ian sequence, which retraces the virus’s path to its human hosts, starts with a bulldozer tearing down a Macau forest to make room for a new factory. A series of chance encounters between a forest bat, a banana, a pig, and a chef eventually deliver the virus to Beth in the casino, but along the way, Soderbergh’s visual details particularize the global forces they invoke, ironically rendering such forces invisible again. Because it must find a way to represent transnational capital, Soderbergh’s final sequence participates in a logic of visible evidence that only leads to certain kinds of culprits—those which can be seen and identified—such as Beth Emhoff’s company, AIMM Anderson. Trying to depict the destructive power of corporate globalization, Soderbergh shows us an AIMM Anderson bulldozer tearing down a forest in Macau. The shot offers us a better explanation for the epidemic, but it also runs the risk that upon seeing a simple answer, we may forget that looking has its limits.

Caetlin Benson-Allott teaches film history and theory at Georgetown University.

Paul Julian Smith

Back to Square One (Lionel Steketee , Fabrice Éboué, Thomas N’Gjol)
The Art of Seduction (Guy Mazarguil)
Corpo celeste (Alice Rohrwacher)
The Student (Santiago Mitre)

Summer in Paris and, so we are told, the city closes down. And indeed the excellent Cinémathèque, with its theater, museum, and archive, is shuttered for the whole of August. But my visit brings a chance to see those seasonal releases that never make it to Cannes (much less to foreign festivals), the genre movies to which locals flock, heedless of awards and international distribution.

Two commercial releases redefine French farce for newly troubled times. And they treat the twin themes of race and gender, central to current national narrative. With over half a million admissions in its first four weeks of release Case départ (whose title translates as Back to Square One) is the surprise hit of the summer. Starring Fabrice Éboué and Thomas N’Gjol, two black comedians who also take co-credits as first-time directors, its edgy premise is time travel with a twist: carefully contrasted half brothers from modern Paris (Joël, a radical wastrel from the banlieue, and Régis, an assimilated council worker with a nice home in the suburbs) are transported back in time to the eighteenth-century Antilles to be taught the (comic) truth about their ancestors’ enslavement.

Case départ. Photo: www.marsfilms.com.

The modern setup seems schematic. Defiantly dumb, unemployed Joël, who speaks ostentatious urban slang, loudly complains of racism when he is fined for traveling without a ticket on public transit (“It’s just because I’m black”). Overeducated Régis, on the other hand, meekly puts up with humiliation from his patronizing white boss and displays a conspicuous lack of social consciousness. Sent back in time after the death of their estranged father, at first the pair stays true to type. Set to grueling labor in the cane fields, Joël is whipped for laziness (complaining now with good reason: “It’s just because I’m black”). Granted the cushier position of “house negro,” Régis sucks up to his effete colonial masters, astonished at his ability to read the Bible or play the piano (in a nod to the most classic of French comedies the plantation owner here is named Monsieur Jourdain, after Molière’s pretentious “bourgeois gentilhomme”).

But while taking care to show some of the brutality of slavery (both men will be branded on the buttocks), Back to Square One also pushes unexpected buttons. The odd couple is helped to escape the plantation by a Jewish merchant (called “Sale Juif!” by M. Jourdain he responds under his breath with “Pauvre con!”—roughly “dumb jerk”). And black homophobia, loudly voiced by Joël, is (like anti-Semitism) taken to task: at one stressful moment, Joël tearfully admits that, banged up in prison, he enjoyed “just a little penetration” from a fellow inmate.

Back in the present, both have learned predictable life lessons. Work-shy Joël takes on a job at a building site to provide for his neglected daughter; meanwhile Régis stands up to his boss, refusing to go on playing the “house negro” in a French republic that claims to be color-blind. But if such character arcs are too pat, Back to Square One still boasts engaging performances from its novice stars, lush production values (the period sequences were shot on location in Cuba), and some telling sight gags. For example, in one early scene our sniveling antiheroes are sold at auction on the block with their fellow new arrivals, but unlike the latter they are still wearing their modern underwear with its familiar branding (HOM and DIM). Modern consumerism is thus no match for historical horror.

L’Art de séduire (The Art of Seduction) by first-time director Guy Mazarguil, with its familiarly French title, would seem to come from quite another country, set and shot as it is around Paris’s picturesque Canal Saint Martin, formerly industrial and now reassuringly trendy. And the premise would seem to be equally creaky. Heedless of professional ethics, diffident psychoanalyst Jean-François (Mathieu Demy, son of Jacques) has fallen for an attractive patient. Gaining an invitation to her home, he discovers to his surprise that she is obsessed with equestrian paintings, Wagner, and her tennis instructor, whom she has invited to drop by to spoil what Jean-François took to be a first date. Coached in the art of seduction by another patient after this disappointment, Jean-François is repeatedly rejected by the women he approaches on the street. (A typical exchange goes: “Une belle femme!” “Un pauvre con!”)

So far, so formulaic. But Jean-François is also beset by a surreal sight gag: fish flap through the air in his comfortable apartment, the image of his quietly flailing desperation. And (like the half brothers of Back to Square One) Jean-François is taught a life lesson from an unexpected source. After a passing affair with an apparently ditzy redhead (played by Valérie Donzelli, director–star of feted Cannes drama Declaration of War), whom he ditches in favor of the Wagner-lover, Jean-François discovers (she reveals in a lengthy final monologue) that it was she who had carefully crafted the scenario of their encounter. Even when the predatory male appears to score, then, it is only because a smart female has made all the running. Meanwhile Jean-François’s supposed master in the art of seduction reveals his life is desolate because he “has no friends.”

Clearly such a film, however playful, deserves to be reread in the light of the scandal that preceded its production but not its release. As is well known, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair has provoked a debate on relations between the sexes in France. Nebbishy Jean-François could not be further from the former head of the IMF, who could hardly be accused of lack of self-confidence. In spite of its traditionalist title, then, The Art of Seduction is a sex comedy for a newly nervous era that is PC (and PG) in tone. As ever, beautiful women abound on Parisian streets. But now, it would seem, they are immune to even the most strenuously self-improving of Latin Lotharios.

Back to Square One, likewise, offers an audience-friendly take on an even thornier issue, the burden of French colonial history and the tensions of current ethnic conflict. Recent French film is not known for the frequency of its engagement with the social realities of life for the Republic’s black citizens. But by shining a comic light on French ignorance of black history, Back to Square One attempts in its limited way to address what Pierre Bourdieu called “the weight of the world”: the lingering and problematic presence of the past in the present. Likewise, by replaying romantic comedy in a feminine key, The Art of Seduction presents audiences (albeit less provocatively) with evidence of the continuing psychic damage wrought by the battle of the sexes. Featherweight summer releases they may be, but in an oddly cool and cloudy Parisian August both films offer local spectators unexpected food for thought.

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Fall in New York and the festival (September 30-October 16) is larger than ever, in line with the handsomely expanded facilities of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. In the rich and extensive program, two debut features stand out, putting a new and subtle spin on the theme of adolescent apprenticeship with their protagonists taking their first steps in the twin, contested fields of religion and politics.

Corpo celeste. Courtesy of New York Film Festival.

Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo celeste begins with a troubling, disorientating shot. It is night and anonymous traffic roars over a viaduct. Below, lit only by flashlights, a procession makes it hesitant way over trash-strewed rocky ground, singing a hymn to the Virgin Mary. A single girl slowly emerges from the crowd: Marta (newcomer Yle Vianello), just thirteen, will be our focus. This opening scene reveals the complex and contradictory nature of the film’s setting. Marta’s family, we learn, have just returned from Switzerland to a southern Italy that could not be further from tourist stereotype. It is a place of uneven modernization and chilly alienation, where roaring highways cut brutally through ancient cities and the winter damp and drizzle make popular tradition look decidedly unpicturesque.

Holding the camera close (too close) to Marta’s face, her hair and eyes so pale that she seems to disappear into the background, her skin so transparent that you can see the feelings flicker over its surface, Rohrwacher draws us in delicately into her growing disaffection: the cruel sister, the family dinners to an accompaniment of TV and cellphones, and the little disappointments of domestic life (when Marta bakes a disastrous cake only her kindly mother will try a taste). It is in this context that the adolescent, mortified by budding breasts, wanders into catechism class. There is some gentle humor here. Well-meaning, tubby teacher Santa lectures the sullen blue-jeaned teenagers and obliges the long suffering priest Don Mario (Gomorrah’s Salvatore Cantalupo) to listen to the execrable pop song she has schooled them in (“I’m in tune with God”). This half-hearted attempt at modernity is echoed in a single telling image: the abstract crucifix of buzzing fluorescents in the church which the priest promises will be replaced by a “figurative” version in traditional style.

A rare trip by girl and priest to the countryside in search of that crucifix offers them (and us) some visual pleasure. Concrete blocks and stagnant canals give way to winding roads and pretty villages that cling to steep hillsides, worthy of touristic pilgrimage. A sun-drenched lunch in a restaurant overlooking the sea reminds us that this is the Mediterranean, even though Marta (who is getting her first period) refuses to eat. But the ancient village proves to be in ruins, peopled only by a crazy old priest who tells Marta that Christ was not benevolent but rather “angry.” And the figurative crucifix retrieved by young priest and girl will fall from the roof of their car and end up floating on the surface of the sea (surely a sly reference to the flying Christ statue that opens La Dolce Vita, another surreal symbol of Italy’s failed modernization). The final Confirmation ceremony, the girls now exquisite in their fancy gowns, will take place with an emblematically empty space on the wall behind the altar.

But, to her great credit, Rohrwacher avoids the easy option of anticlericalism. This may now be a secular society, but the Church (and most especially such devoted servants as Santa, pining hopelessly for the priest) seems to be the only source of sociability in a faded, rootless world. And, rejecting miserabilism, Rohrwacher suggests that this world, our world, is itself the “heavenly body,” a place where little miracles of kindness (between mother and daughter, priest and teenager) can still take place. Refusing the final ceremony, however, Marta, in her prim white dress, will descend into the black water of a muddy canal, a final act of rebellion that is hard indeed to interpret.

Santiago Mitre’s The Student also ends with an ambiguous moment of defiance: the eponymous antihero Roque (theater-trained Esteban Lamothe) will just say “no” to his mentor, a big professor who has his eyes on the prize of the university rectorship and the major league of national politics beyond. And Mitre’s grungy setting and pseudo-documentary camerawork (tight, buzzing close-ups once more) are all of a piece with Rohrwacher’s. Thus when Roque arrives at the huge public school of Buenos Aires we see through his eyes the endless graffiti-scarred corridors and ramshackle classrooms. Surely the Argentine capital, the socalled Paris of the South, has rarely looked so unattractive on screen. Hooking up and settling in, the provincial Roque, who shows no interest whatsoever in his studies, blunders into student militancy, just as Marta gets drawn into religion. Indeed Leftist catechism, with its endless recitation of class war and bourgeois exploitation, seems as empty as the Catholic ritual in Rohrwacher’s film. Mitre next follows a high-risk strategy: while we (and perhaps the protagonists) are allowed no knowledge of the real-world effects of political choices, we (and they) are caught up in the labyrinthine and Machiavellian intricacies of those same choices. Pure politics would thus seem to be its own justification.

The Student. Courtesy of New York Film Festival.

Yet Mitre, like Rohrwacher, rejects easy options. Roque discards his first modest girlfriend for a second, more glamorous teacher–activist, who is also the lover of that big professor. But there will be no grand scenes here of jealousy or infidelity. And if politics, like religion in Corpo celeste, may now have no transcendent meaning (one would-be militant student who disrupts his class is revealed to be wholly ignorant of indigenous struggles in Latin America), still it serves as a (perhaps the sole) basis of sociability in this vast and restless community. Hence while The Student’s youngsters may seem stuck in the 1960s (at one point the young radicals replay famous political speeches of that period), Mitre himself stated at the festival that he was heartened by what he saw as growing student activism around the world, even in the U.S.

This seems somewhat contradicted by the film itself. Roque is as indifferent to political policy as he is to academic study, clearly seeing earnest factionalism as a way into a gorgeous girl’s pants. And soon he will be hobnobbing with ministers and lunching in the lush dachas of old-time radicals. Moreover his new girlfriend’s lecture on the history of ethics (Roque, of course, barely pays attention) is pointedly contrasted with double or triple-dealing politicos who, given a chance at real power, will sacrifice their comrades at the drop of a hat. Yet, unlike in the U.S. or U.K., where university presidents or vice-chancellors are not elected by the academic body, the process of election of a Latin American rector (similar in Mexico’s National Autonomous University, even more massive in size than Argentina’s University of Buenos Aires) serves as an unforced metaphor for the state of the nation and, indeed, constitutes a political power base in real life.

It is hardly news that in what has now been a lengthy postmodern era the grand narratives of religion and politics, so different and yet so similar, should have lost the numinous potency that they once had. What Corpo celeste and The Student reveal, however, is that the plot device of adolescent apprenticeship, apparently equally clichéd, still has life in it yet: in these films a final refusal to submit holds out some hope, however qualified, for the disenchanted future of a new and unpredictable generation.

Paul Julian Smith is Distinguished Professor in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Joshua Clover

Fast Five (Justin Lin)
Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt)

Early in Fast Five, charismatic Han (Sung Kang) arrives in Rio de Janeiro, recruited Ocean’s Eleven-style to play a role in an elaborate heist. Though fans of the series will no doubt be delighted to see him, they may be perplexed when they recall that he met an unambiguous death in previous installment The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. His persistence is a mystery, like that of the generally heavy-handed and lead-footed franchise itself.

The Fast and the Furious series follows the exploits of a shifting crew of street racers, drivin’ cars and metin’ out informal justice. It has in some degree succeeded by tapping into the demographic niche of “tuner” culture: auto-modders proliferating in the fetishized endgame of Fordism. But the films, on occasion, have been better than they have any right to be—none more so than Tokyo Drift, with its sublime car choreography, more Astaire and Rogers than Petty and Allison. That the plot is set in Japan, where America’s Fordist revolution met its match, is suggestive enough; casting a fastback ’67 Mustang as the hero only deepens the historical melancholy illuminating the film.

Fast Five. © 2011 Universal Studios. DVD: Universal Pictures.

But Toyota-ization too reached its limits. “Tokyo drift” describes a style of street racing where the cars are made to slide almost frictionlessly through corners, with the low impact grace of a tap dancer in a sandbox. It might just as well be a rubric for the Japanese economy of the ongoing “lost decade”—having avoided a massive economic crash, it is still unable to get back on track or restore profitability, and drifts endlessly through the long turn of late capitalism.

A consultation with reference materials suggests that Tokyo Drift was meant to be out of series and out of time; Fast Five, a less nimble film, takes place earlier. Looks like the present. So Han, a ghost of the Lost Decade, walks into a garage in the emerging economy of Brazil to take his place in the team assembled by Dom (Vin Diesel), who looks like a muscle car with legs, and Brian (Paul Walker), former federal agent. Our heroic band’s admixture of criminal and lawman is matched by the villains: the caper involves a crime lord who is also a political boss. All parties meet at money, obviously. The boss has $100 million socked away in a police station vault. Being street racers, our crew proposes to prise the vault forth from the station cabled to a couple of their vehicles, then flee through downtown Rio. But first they lay hands on an identical vault: a salute to the (remade) Ocean’s Eleven, where the team acquires a replica of the casino vault so as to practice their mechanics.

Not only is it impossible to imagine the characters thinking this was a good or even plausible idea for getting the dough, it is also impossible to imagine the screenwriters thinking this would make for a good caper. The ten-minute sequence is finally a bit dull; absurdity does have a way of turning to boredom.

But what if we have been thinking of this all wrong, and the entire movie is just a pretext for something else altogether? It may be narrative idiocy of the first water—but it is, we must admit, the single best cinematic representation of the global financial crisis yet contrived, immeasurably better than Inside Job or Capitalism: A Love Story.

A weaponized concentration of capital seems to be dragged about by supermen; it is in fact dragging them around, laying waste to the world before it, destroying houses and urban centers and bodies as it races for safety—before recognizing that there is no safety and it should just turn violently on its pursuers in a festival of destruction.

In the textbook definition, capital is generally self-valorizing value; in a crisis it is inverted, and becomes self-annihilating value. The supermoney that seemed to run the world is revealed as “fictitious capital,” unrealized and finally unrealizable, but still in its auto-destruction capable of laying low the world around it. Which explains what would otherwise be the most intolerable plot device. In the end, it turns out that Dom and Brian have been hauling the fake vault through the city, while the actual box is spirited away, loot enclosed. As a scheme, it’s ludicrous. As a reading of crisis in the world system, it’s immaculate—as if Hollywood had come to an intimate knowledge of volume 3 of Capital without reading, simply by bathing in the current of world money—and should complete the contemporary genre. I am seriously considering renaming this column “The Marx and the Furious.”

Now that we no longer want for figurations of the financial crisis, we can turn to what comes next, if anything, and how one imagines the vectors and contexts of an adequate response. In this arena apocalyptic pictures continue to hold us captive. The signal version this season is Contagion—arriving as an updating of the 1970s disaster flick, and bearing with it some backdated ideas indeed.

Contagion. © 2011 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

It proceeds with Soderbergh’s usual cool bluish eloquence, the dry tones as ever standing in tension with the rising morbidity. We make our way with the knowledge that things have already gone terribly wrong and we are just waiting for the remaining characters to realize it and drop—as they are bound to do, because everyone is connected, in ways far more direct and determinate than they realize.

In Contagion this is literalized. The entangled libidinal liaisons of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and the lines of commerce and political debt of Traffic—these return as epidemiological vectors. The film is those plus Mike Davis’s book Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. But rather than worry the matter of factory farms and global trade much, Soderbergh spends a good deal of effort punishing Gwyneth Paltrow’s character for infidelity (also her fate in Country Strong). In this case her sex and lies lead directly to mass death, spinning off the first North American disease vector. For this she is killed shortly and brutally, to be pilloried further in flashbacks. This lends the story a curiously moralizing tone that infects Soderbergh’s otherwise nonhysterical disaster film.

But what is so retrograde about the film, finally, is the quiet persistence with which it solicits the audience’s sympathies for the authorities. This is a politics, with or without allegory. In a world gone catastrophically wrong, the only folks to be trusted are government officials, mostly aligned with the Center for Disease Control. I am certain that the CDC is filled with decent folks. But a movie that insists, with aplomb and steely commitment, that civilizational crisis is the time to trust the G-men and women—well, that’s a funny thing, now more than ever. An affirmation of the order of things, without apology or agon. Or perhaps an apology for Che. Both, we assume.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes offers a civilizational crisis of a different order. It’s a prequel, the dread metagenre which has produced little of note until now: while it is hard to gainsay the original Planet of the Apes, its most recent spinoff is an extraordinary film.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Photo: WETA. © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

This is true in a literal sense: it is precisely the exception which imagines an end to capitalism that is not the end of the world. It requires the existence of the original films in order to do so—only through them do we know that the world, and society, persists after the end of mankind’s rule. This provides the essence of the new film’s frisson: how often do we enter the cinema knowing that the humans are going to lose?

The original’s allegory is racialized: the white race (played by Charlton Heston, typecast again) is thrust into the role of the enslaved, the caged and shackled, the dehumanized. The machinations of plot churn toward inevitable recuperation: “ape” society too is riven with antagonisms and contradictions, and the real forces of solidarity fall along vaguely ethical lines. Released in early 1968, it’s a fitting story for the dying fall of civil-rights struggles, ending with an overcoming of difference based on compassion, mutual recognition, love even. If Rod Serling, one of the screenwriters, had read Frantz Fanon’s gloss on Hegel’s master–slave dialectic and the recognition scene, he kept it to himself.

This limns what really must be taken as a kind of heroism in the workings of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, particularly given the limits of Hollywood. Though trailers suggest one long melee between apes and men, the film’s seriousness unfolds patiently before this happens; for seventy five minutes, it is like a prequel for itself.

We open in the world as we know it, humans in charge and apes in cages. An experimental Alzheimer’s drug bestows upon Caesar, born in captivity, a burgeoning intelligence. Taken home as a pet, familiar, and friend of scientist Will (James Franco), he is granted an upstairs room, a limited freedom and respect, and play dates in the manicured wilds of Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge. Nonetheless, he ends up in a correctional facility for simians, where he is ill-used. Caesar pines for his charming San Francisco attic with its church window.

Via bribery and promises to preserve the order of things, Will eventually wins Caesar’s freedom. Will is coded in every regard as the good guy, in comparison both to his avaricious corporate boss and the brutal preserve master, played by Brian Cox, with his yellowed veneer of humanity. Will loves Caesar. Surely this is the moment—an hour in, already!—when good joins with good and the malefactors are given what for, in a rousing finale.

This is precisely what does not happen. His cage thrown open, Caesar spots the leash in Will’s hand and, seeming to reach out to him, he instead closes the door, locking himself in. No pretending that even the most enlightened bondage is more tolerable than an iron cage.

It is a heartbreaking moment: the sorrow of serious politics. To understand the real situation is to understand that the categories of good and evil, of humane and inhumane, of compassionate and cruel—the humanist bedtime tales—do not apply. There is an irreducible antagonism between one group and another, and no amount of moral or ethical grace can remedy it. Love cannot help with it. Working to change things from within cannot help with it. There is no yes that doesn’t come with a leash.

Lest we miss this, the film offers a second fulcrum, ten minutes later. Still in the preserve, Caesar tangles with the gamekeeper’s vile son. After being shocked several times, he manages to grab his tormentor’s arm. “Take your stinking paw off me, you damn dirty ape!” cries the human, reprising in reverse a line from the original. There is a pause, and for the first time Caesar speaks: “No!” He goes on to repeat the word several times as he drags the poor fellow away, sets free his fellow captives, cries havoc, and lets slip the apes of war. Wallace Stevens began one poem, “After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future world depends.” Rise sets that formula on its head, or perhaps its feet, with adamantine force.

The question of whether the irreducible antagonism is that of class, of the dispossessed and those who possess nice houses in San Francisco, remains in some regard open. Allegories are necessarily slippery that way. But we know that it is not an antagonism based on perceived differences, one that can be resolved by coming into a better knowledge each of the other. In that sense the allegory is dispositive: it is, at the least, material and structural. We know this much for certain. And we know that the only path out compels both the action and the language of negation, an absolute no said once and then again and again.

Joshua Clover is the author of 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About (University of California Press, 2010).

Rob White

The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 is a chronologically presented assemblage of re-edited documentary film from the archive of the Swedish National Broadcast Company. To this original material director Göran Hugo Olsson has added explanatory titles and a soundtrack that consists of original music by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Om’Mas Keith together with voiceover commentary by (among others) musicians Erykah Badu and Talib Kweli as well as professors Angela Davis, Robin Kelley, and Sonia Sanchez. Davis’s participation is noteworthy because The Black Power Mixtape includes an electrifying clip of her being interviewed in San Rafael County Prison in 1972 and rounding on the questioner, Bo Holmström: “you ask me whether I approve of violence,” she says, going on to recount the experience of seeing childhood friends of hers murdered in bomb attacks in Birmingham, Alabama, “limbs and heads strewn all over the place.” “When someone asks me about violence,” she adds, “what it means is the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea … what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

Though it has nine main segments, one for each year recorded, The Black Power Mixtape can be described as a kind of three-act tragedy. The first phase is one of radical eloquence and increasingly bold, militant organization. Stokely Carmichael is the star of the proceedings but we also see a grassroots Black Panther schoolroom in Oakland and hear Panther co-founder Bobby Seale declare that “we will defend ourselves, we will shoot … because we are bent on survival.” Crackdown occurs in the next phase: Eldridge Cleaver speaks unconvincingly from Algiers about “government-in-exile” but at home thousands of activists are imprisoned and scores killed. (When we see Davis after her release she is speaking from a platform that appears to be protected by bulletproof glass.) The final part of the film relies heavily on Lars Ulvestam’s documentary Harlem: Voices, Faces which dwells on the spreading blight of heroin. In one clip a young former prostitute and addict talks to camera about turning her life around, but it is arguably the discourse of self-betterment itself that contributes to an impression of isolation and vulnerability. The language of politics and the idea of a mass movement are no longer present. Although the voiceover commentators shortly afterwards discuss the lasting achievements of the struggle for black liberation in the 1960s and 70s, I could not shake a feeling of loss which emerged from the gulf between the defiant confidence of Davis’s jail-cell remarks and the suffering words of this lonely Harlem woman.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975. Photo: Tom Goetz. © Story AB. Courtesy of IFC Films / Sundance Selects.

The film’s relationship to history is ruminative. Because of the audio commentary The Black Power Mixtape stages a “moving conversation between past and present,” as B. Rich put it in her spring 2011 Film Quarterly Sundance report. The dialogic mode of presentation means that it would be hard to watch the film without reflecting on the question of viewpoint. The Swedish crews who filmed the source footage were visitors to the U.S., reporting from a country in crisis and at war, their sympathies evidently extended to such people as the Hallandale, Florida veteran who speaks near the start of The Black Power Mixtape about being “ridiculed, discriminated, treated as less than a man … the environment has a whole lot to do with keeping a man down.” But is there truly an outsider perspective on such a history? When Olsson includes 1973 footage of a tourist bus tour of Harlem, its Swedish guide talking up the danger of street crime, before cutting to a camera position inside a police car, the question no longer permits of an easy answer—and that is how it should be.

I met Göran Hugo Olsson in London on October 14, 2011, during the London Film Festival (October 12–27). Thanks to Faith Taylor and Varun Kanish for arranging the interview.

Rob White: What was your starting point for The Black Power Mixtape?
Göran Hugo Olsson: I was doing research on a film about Philadelphia soul music in the 1970s and I had decided that the film was going to be all nighttime footage. There was no index of night shots at that time in the Swedish National Broadcast Company archive so I had to look through everything that was shot in the U.S. from 1965 to 1980.

Then, on a single day, I happened to see both Stokely Carmichael’s speech made in Stockholm (where he talks about Dr. King and nonviolence) and also the Angela Davis interview from jail. I was blown away. I realized that this material really is a treasure and also that it wasn’t only my privilege to put it out to an audience, it was also my duty—in a librarian kind of way. This material couldn’t lay around forever; it had to be put out, and put out in a way that’s accessible for an audience in high school or university.

So I found those two cornerstones of the film and at the same time I identified a story. You have 1967 in black-and-white: great-looking suits, good-looking people, Stokely so charming and brilliant. Then 1972 in vivid color: Angela Davis is in the basement of this jail facing the death penalty for something no one believed she’d ever done.

I knew we had to contextualize the sources. So we used contemporary voices to react to the archival images, but also we worked with those images that take us from one year to another. What’s contextually so important is the war in Vietnam, but I didn’t want to have the usual images. There’s one shot from Vietnam—an American soldier kicking a Vietnamese boy—but that’s an Emile de Antonio film clip inside one of the source films. Then there’s the shot of a huge bomber taking off: a long shot that’s different from the usual images of fields being bombed and so on. I wanted to make points about the historical context, but I didn’t want to be too obvious about it. I also wanted a certain roughness. I wanted the audience to have kind of the same feeling as I had when I looked through the archive the first time—so it didn’t seem too prepared.

Another example of avoiding clichés was the use of onscreen graphics. I wanted to have very correct information, where it could be stated: the name and the place and the year.

I didn’t want to use anything like the typical blaxploitation graphics because this is a cool, collected, correct Swedish film.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975. Photo: Anders Ribbsjö. © Story AB. Courtesy of IFC Films / Sundance Selects.

Speaking of Swedishness, can you say something about the clip of the tourist bus in Harlem?
That clip fulfills several purposes. For a start it’s kind of funny and you need something funny. Also, what may not be clear is that middle-class (and older) people paid a lot of money to go to Harlem as tourists. They were curious, even if they weren’t totally sympathetic, and you can respect that. But then you have that safari thing too.

But that bus tour is a metaphor for the film, surely? The shot unsettles one’s own perspective: one can’t virtuously watch this material and be on the side of victims of injustice without considering the question of whether this involves real solidarity or just a spectacle.
Yes. And that’s a tricky question. I think maybe you have a little bit of both. Also it’s very easy to sympathize with people in history—the image of them back then. At the same time I did try to make it clear that we Swedes are looking into this. We are not a part of this. We don’t have the American experience. I don’t understand this situation at a deeper level. I state that at the beginning of the film. I didn’t make a film about the black power movement or underprivileged people in America, I made a film about the Swedish point of view on it. Because that’s what I could do; I couldn’t go to the Bronx now and make a film there. That time has passed, though it was right to do it then. The contemporary way of doing such a thing is totally different now that you have people in every community doing video and doing blogs. The awareness of media is totally different. Today you can’t visit anymore, dropping down and doing documentary films.

What about the mixtape concept and the voiceovers?
I didn’t want to take amazing archive footage and inspiring people and remix them into something new. I wanted to keep the feeling both of the persons on screen and the intentions of the filmmakers. Also the film breaks down into eleven chapters—equivalent to eleven songs. A mixtape is something you make for someone you like, someone you want to impress: here’s this song, but hold on the next one is even better, and there’s an arc, you want to tell something. I didn’t want to make this a hard-hitting issue film. I wanted to keep it more open, so you can do your own math. Or think of it this way: you have this material and you have options. You could make an online archive of it or something like that. Or you could make a bold documentary statement. Or you could do something in-between, which was my intention.

We worked hard to get voices talking over images, deepening the experience, making another layer of time and perspective and context, and then you have music too. I was also thinking of DVD commentary tracks. It’s actually easy as a viewer to handle those two sources of information—image and commentary—very smoothly, especially with older films.

In terms of recording the interviews, it was very organic. We built it as we went along. I would have one segment edited, I would show it to someone and they commented and then I edited the comments in, and then I thought about what else we needed. I was living in New York at this time. I interviewed Erykah Badu in a tiny dressing room at NBC Studios. Of course I had to travel; I even flew to Oxford to interview Robin Kelley. The last interview I did, just a couple of weeks before Sundance, was with John Forté, producer of The Fugees. He had been in prison, and I knew the Mixtape needed to get more into the prison issue in regard to the killing of George Jackson, the Attica uprising, the imprisonment of Angela Davis. In the case of Forté, I posted images online for him. Then he recorded himself in his own studio on an excellent microphone while we were talking on the phone. Afterwards he uploaded the recording.

The thing is that, no matter how good, how beautiful the archive material you have, it’s still very claustrophobic because you’re locked in to this space and time. I wanted to use voices to add oxygen into that container.

We’re going downward in the film and you could say we hit rock bottom with the interview with the prostitute. I showed that interview to many people and asked, “Is this too much? Can I show this?” And they all said, “Yes—because she’s so strong.” There’s something so strong in her. At the beginning of the process, some people did say: “You can’t have this tragic ending.” But I had no complaints by the end.

I really couldn’t do this film without putting the drugs issue on display because it was so important at the time. And, by the way, although you don’t see it so much anymore, it became almost a cliché at the time (in Sweden as well) with people speaking about their drug addiction on television. Yes, sure, it’s depressing, but it’s compensated for by things like Erykah Badu saying that there’s a happy ending with a lot of unhappy middles, and also that we have to produce our own histories and write our own books. I did try in the last chapter—in the last “song” of the last year—to get a survey of people reflecting on the legacy.

Editor’s Notebook: Interview with Göran Huge Olsson
Rob White

Marx and Coca-Cola: Fall and Rise
Joshua Clover

Screenings: Misfits
Paul Julian Smith

Platforming: Out of Sight
Caetlin Benson-Allott

Second Time Around: Chabarthes
D.A. Miller

Reconsideration: Lola Montès: A “Film Maudit”?
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

Reconsideration: Phantom of the Circus
Laura Mulvey

Reconsideration: Scarlet, No Empress
V.F. Perkins

Paris Notebook: Black Pearls
Evan Calder Williams

London Notebook: Fiendish
Rob White

Histories: Code Violations
Edward Buscombe

TALKING POINTS

Hope and Fear in The Interrupters
J.M. Tyree

The Smiley Factor
Mark Fisher

ENCOUNTERS
Heaven Down Here: Interview with Alice Rohrwacher
Megan Ratner

Disconnection Notices: Interview with Miranda July
Anna Backman Rogers

Perception as Transcendence: Interview with Pawel Wojtasik
Scott MacDonald

Counter-Media, Migration, Poetry: Interview with John Akomfrah
Nina Power

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: An Introduction and Interview
Rob White

BOOK REVIEWS

Cover photo: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011). Courtesy of Cinema Guild.

All the films presented in The West, 1898–1938 have some connection with the American West, but even so it’s an extremely heterogeneous collection. There are full-length feature films starring such major figures as Richard Dix and Clara Bow, early shorts by stalwarts of the Western genre such as Broncho Billy Anderson and Tom Mix, promotional films by public utilities and commercial companies, together with travelogues and documentaries and newsreels. Every film is of interest when seen within the context of the Western genre, even if the artistic quality is extremely variable.

Almost all the films date from the silent era, and some from the very earliest years. What’s fascinating is what they show about the nature of the genre itself. From our present-day perspective we tend to view the Western as a fairly coherent system, deploying a relatively small number of interlocking narrative structures, with instantly recognizable character types, decors, landscapes, and styles of speech; a world of its own, though one which has certain well-defined historical origins. But what is striking about the forty films in this collection is that, if all of them are in some sense Westerns, then the genre is a very loose and baggy form indeed.

Take, for example, The Tourists, a Biograph short from 1912, starring Mabel Normand and directed by Mack Sennett. In the early years of the last century, the Fred Harvey company in association with the Santa Fe railroad set up a string of hotels along the route through New Mexico (commemorated in the 1946 MGM musical The Harvey Girls). Travelers could stop off on their way to Los Angeles and take an “Indian detour” though the historic pueblos. They could also shop for souvenirs at the stores attached to the hotels, in which Indian craft workers—basket-makers, weavers, potters—plied their trade. It was a carefully cultivated image of the Indian as exotic, as picturesque, but one from which all threat had been removed. These Indians were not the bloodthirsty savages who peopled Western dramas, but living examples of the ancient cultural roots which Americans yearned to discover. (A 1926 documentary in this collection, The Indian-detour, sponsored by the Santa Fe railroad and the Harvey company, provides useful background to the comedy short.)

The perspective of The Tourists is, frankly, a demeaning one. The Indians, except for two leading roles, play themselves, but are the butt of a farce in which Mabel, shopping for artifacts, is mistakenly believed to have been throwing herself at the chief, thus incurring the wrath of the Indian women and chased around the village. No one comes out of it with any dignity.

Last of the Line (1914, 26 minutes). © 2011 National Film Preservation Foundation.

The near-contemporaneous Last of the Line (1914) is very different. Produced by Thomas Ince, it’s an excellent example of the Vanishing American theme so prominent in art and literature at the time the movies began. A consensus had emerged that, whether you were pro-Indian and wanted to see them integrated into American society, or were anti- and wanted Indians eliminated, the Indian’s distinct and separate identity was doomed. This engendered a kind of nostalgia for what was deemed irrevocably lost. Ince’s film is remarkably sympathetic to the Indians’ plight. The chief’s son (played by the Japanese American star Sessue Hayakawa) has been sent off to be educated at a white man’s school. He returns ruined, a vicious drunk. To save the honor of the tribe, the old chief (excellently played by John Goodboy, one of Ince’s troop of Oglala Lakota recruited from the Pine Ridge Indian reservation) is forced to kill his son, thus dooming his line to die out with him. The scenes in the Indian village are acted with energy and conviction by the Lakota, and the compositions are dynamic.

The most sheerly enjoyable of all the films on offer is Mantrap (1926), starring Clara Bow and directed by Victor Fleming. The underlying structure of the film is familiar in the genre, centering on a clash of cultures between east and west. Percy Marmont plays Ralph, a jaded divorce lawyer from the city who is persuaded that a trip out west will revive his spirits. Meanwhile Alverna (Bow), a girl in a city barbershop, wins the affection of the unsophisticated but good-natured Joe (Ernest Torrence), who takes her back to his cabin out west. There, the incurably flirtatious Averna soon grows bored with the wide open spaces and begins to practice her wiles on Ralph, who is staying nearby. Eventually Averna has to make a choice, as Western heroines usually do, between civilization and wilderness, and persuades Ralph to take her back to the city with him.

Mantrap (1926, 71 minutes). © 2011 National Film Preservation Foundation.

Directed by Fleming with wit and verve, and with Bow at her most irresistible, Mantrap is an excellent example of a theme that has been a mainstay of Western narratives, the contrast between the west, rough but virile, and the east, sophisticated but effete. Developed in the writing of Theodore Roosevelt at the end of the nineteenth century, the comic possibilities of the theme were to be explored in films as diverse as Douglas Fairbanks’s The Mollycoddle (1919) and later in Cowboy (1958), starring Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon. There are further examples in this collection. In Broncho Billy and the Schoolmistress (1912) the rough west and the cultivated east coincide with the conventional contrast between the masculine and the feminine. In this case the new schoolmistress proves unintimidated by Billy’s cowboy chums and faces them down. Billy himself is tamed.

In Womanhandled (1925) Richard Dix, who made a career from playing in such Westerns as The Vanishing American (1925) and Cimarron (1931), is a fashionable New Yorker who, smitten by Esther Ralston, pretends to be the kind of manly Westerner she admires. Hastily he adapts his uncle’s modern Texas ranch into something that corresponds to the myth of the west that Ralston has bought into, with comic results. The cowboys, accustomed to rounding up their cattle by automobile, have to be trained to ride horses, and the ranch-house made over with Western-style décor. Unfortunately the film does not survive in a complete print, but, directed by comedy specialist Gregory La Cava, enough is left to make this a valuable addition to the collection.

This theme, of the manliness of the west, even appears in documentary form, for example in We Can Take It (1935), one of the few sound films on offer. It’s about the work out west of the Civilian Conservation Corps, created by Franklin D. Roosevelt as a way of giving unemployed young men from the cities an experience of the outdoor life and the benefits of regimented but constructive work. Stripped to the waist, members of the corps smile happily for the camera.

Not all of these films are successful. The Western genre may have supplied coherent and vigorous narratives, but that was no guarantee of quality. In his valuable book The War, the West and the Wilderness, Kevin Brownlow makes much of The Lady of the Dugout (1918). The chief interest of the film is that the central role is taken by real-life bank robber Al Jennings, who plays himself in a story that purports to be based on fact, though Jennings is clearly one of a long line of Westerners with tall tales to tell, as the commentary provided by Bill Moore explains. It’s an artless, occasionally incoherent production, featuring Jennings as a sort of “good bad man” of the type established in dime novels about Jesse James and carried into the movies by Broncho Billy and William S. Hart.

Another film which features real-life Westerners playing themselves is Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaw (1915), in which famous lawman William Tilghman appears on the trail of notorious outlaw Bill Doolin. Tilghman had actually directed Jennings in an early two-reeler titled The Bank Robbery. This time he attempts to put himself center stage, but the film is unconvincing in its staging and the story difficult to follow, were it not for the helpful commentary, again provided by Bill Moore, from the Oklahoma Historical Society.

We are on surer ground with Over Silent Paths: A Story of the American Desert (1910), one of D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Westerns, photographed by Billy Bitzer. Mining is a common theme in the Western; almost invariably the lust for gold leads to crime. (The influential epic Western of the mid-1920s, The Covered Wagon, dramatizes the consequences of making a choice between mining and agriculture, seen as a more noble and productive calling, and this choice is reprised in Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River, from 1951.) In Over Silent Paths the daughter of a miner finds her father murdered and his gold stolen. Having fallen for the man who, unknown to her, committed the crime, she eventually unmasks him. Griffith makes excellent use of the flat and desolate landscape of the desert out west, as he did the following year in The Last Drop of Water.

A mining camp is also the setting of Salomy Jane (1914), a feature-length version of a Brett Harte short story. Harte was very popular with filmmakers in the silent period, being largely responsible for many of the stock characters who turn up in later Westerns; his story “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” was filmed by John Ford in 1917 and twice remade. Produced by the short-lived California Motion Picture Corporation, Salomy Jane has some impressive sequences among the redwood forests, and is the debut of Beatriz Michelena, whom the accompanying notes claim as the first American Latina movie star.

Much of the documentary material in this collection is in the form of travelogs, a mainstay of early film programs. We see tourists disporting themselves in scenic spots such as Yosemite and Yellowstone National Park. The popularity of the west was due in no small part to its vigorous promotion by those who had a direct interest in its development. In these charming little vignettes we see the west marketed as a playground, a land of spectacular scenery whose original inhabitants have been turned into picturesque accompaniments to the landscape, rendering them reassuringly safe. But when the west was viewed in the comfort of the cinema, far from the scenes depicted, the spectator could have the dangers delightfully reimagined, as for example in The Sergeant (1910), a Selig production which is the first surviving narrative film shot in Yosemite. An army sergeant and his commander’s daughter are marooned in Yosemite valley when a villainous Indian steals their horses. In the finale the cavalry ride to the rescue.

Many of the films in this collection have previously been thought lost, only to be rediscovered in far-flung archives in New Zealand and elsewhere. They have been lovingly preserved, presented with helpful commentaries, specially composed and appropriate music, and an accompanying book full of useful information. It’s an extremely worthwhile enterprise and amply repays the devotion and knowledge put into it.

EDWARD BUSCOMBE is the author of Injuns! Native Americans in the Movies (2006)

Much like his later adaptation of Michael Dobbs’s House of Cards, Andrew Davies’s A Very Peculiar Practice captures British society in a moment of transition. Where House of Cards caught the end-of-an era mood that accompanied Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power, A Very Peculiar Practice is set during the high pomp of Thatcherism. Centered on a fictional university medical practice, Davies based the series on his own experiences as a lecturer at Warwick University. That institution proved to be a laboratory for the new times; formerly associated with student radicalism, by the 1980s it famously became Thatcher’s favorite university. What Davies satirizes in A Very Peculiar Practice—especially the concerted attempts by unscrupulous administrators and ambitious academics to link research to corporate and military interests—is now taken for granted, and there’s a quaint charge about returning to a moment when such opportunism could be the object of mockery.

A Very Peculiar Practice. Courtesy of Network DVD.

It’s not only the presence of Graham Crowden (playing Jock McCannon, the booming voice of a defeated radicalism) that makes A Very Peculiar Practice feel as if it’s an updating of Lindsay Anderson’s 1982 film, Britannia Hospital. Both the film and the series take a medical institution as the symbol (or symptom) of wider Britain; both approach their subject matter with a grim surrealism. But where Anderson’s film was formed in the militant heat of late 1970s industrial action that culminated in the 1978–9 Winter of Discontent that ushered Thatcher into power, A Very Peculiar Practice is set in a time when militancy has all but disappeared. The series’ mood of profound resignation is startling. We are thrown into a world in which privatization—of the university and the medical profession—seems unstoppable. There is some resistance to the corporatiation of the university, and the two business-orientated adminstrators who preside over the university ultimately face defeat at the end of the first and second series, but their demises feel like a hasty wish-fulfillment, out of keeping with the mordant atmosphere that A Very Peculiar Practice creates, as if Davies suddenly remembered that this was supposed to be a comedy.

A Very Peculiar Practice. Courtesy of Network DVD.

When the series begins, the alcoholic McCannon is notionally the head of the practice, but it is clear that his time is over. The culture which shaped him—and notably the politicized psychotherapy of R. D. Laing—has long been in retreat. Whatever power McCannon once had is now faded: in an early episode, he pathetically misdiagnoses a severe case of appendicitis as homesickness. Narrating his book The Sick University into a Dictaphone, McCannon’s role becomes essentially choric (sometimes, as in the opening scenes of the second series in which he desolately trudges through a deserted, fogbound campus covered with trash, it is as if he has passed over into an expressionistic, mythic world). The two other doctors in the practice are Bob Buzzard (David Troughton) and Rose Marie (Barbara Flynn). Buzzard is the very epitome of the Thatcherite man, impatient with any concept of public service, hungry to transform the practice into private consultancy, and absolutely untroubled by any concerns about corporate influence. Rose Marie represents another kind of ascendant power. Polysexual, she refuses to use a patronym because to do so would be a concession to patriarchy. She is a manipulator who uses gender politics as a cover for an ambition every bit as ruthless as Buzzard’s. Yet for all their ambition, Buzzard and Rose Marie are inert figures, the energy of their Machiavellian scheming belied by their overwhelming cynicism.

A Very Peculiar Practice. Courtesy of Network DVD.

Even though it is pretty clear that Davies’s satire is aimed at the exploitation of feminism rather than feminism as such, the line between the two sometimes gets blurred and this is a weakness of the show. Gender anxieties in A Very Peculiar Practice are always seen from a male perspective. The young doctor who arrives at the beginning of season 1 to take up a job at the practice, the troubled yet affable Stephen Daker (Peter Davison)—a 1980s man who isn’t sure how a man ought to behave—is very much the character with whom we are expected to identify, and the women who surround him are almost always perceived as threatening and unpredictable. Daker enters the practice with all the naivety and trepidation of K at the beginning of Kafka’s The Castle. Much like K, Daker has an eagerness and an enthusiasm which the other characters treat as a malady from which he needs to be cured. Also like K, Daker initially finds himself struggling to establish that he belongs in the strange new world he has entered. The practice receptionist assumes he is a patient, while Buzzard makes it clear that the practice had wanted to employ a more highflying figure who turned down the offer.

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