Spring 2010

After many months of darkness, I'm delighted to announce a Spring Season of superb cinema. The films are all on Blu-Ray DVDs so the fine quality of the sound and images will match that of the films we are showing. Saturday April 17th: The Hurt Locker Saturday May 22nd: Let the Right One In Saturday 12th June: The White Ribbon Saturday April 17th: The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow 2008) The Hurt Locker employs the codes and conventions of the Hollywood Western to provide an exciting account of a tour of duty of an American bomb disposal unit in post-invasion Iraq. It then uses the genre to undermine the unit's success. A key to understanding the film's method is provided in an early scene in which we watch the defusing of an improvised explosive device. We see the arrival of the specialist unit with all the paraphernalia of modern warfare - complex protective clothing, powerful weaponry with telescopic aiming devices, tactical and practiced deployment of several personnel etc - and how it is rendered helpless by the sudden and unpredictable appearance of a mysterious, obscurely motivated and unarmed taxicab. The constantly moving camera doesn't manage - actually doesn't try - to get a view of the driver and the closest we get to him at the stage of the stand-off is an extreme close up of his eye. The driver doesn't flinch (he barely blinks) as shots are fired into the ground and he hardly moves when his windscreen is shot out. In reality he would, of course, be cut and blinded by the shattered glass, so the decision to leave him there unmoved by the assault is a directorial decision that carries important meaning. The confrontation set up in this scene is between a modern occidental efficient and effective war machine, in which are embedded all the advances of western industrialism, and the mysterious and incomprehensible behaviour of the Orient. It is a confrontation of America with its Other. The use of the Western genre reminds one of the numerous confrontations in Hollywood cinema of the 'White Man' with Native or Mexican Americans, equally Other, equally not understood and equally filmed to be personally invisible. But in this film there is a loss of confidence in the triumphalist American exceptionalism that characterises the classic Western. I think the film, and this scene in particular, recognises that the heroism of the squad, and by implication, of the whole Iraq adventure, is fruitless. One of the soldiers remarks that their efforts have created yet another insurgent. Occupying forces sow only dragons' teeth. It was ever thus.

BACK TO TOP Saturday May 22nd: Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson 2008) Something of a first for CinemaXanadu, a vampire film. Here are extracts from two reviews taken from the IMDB: 'From Sweden comes "Let the Right One In," a film of extraordinary mood and wildly inventive directorial potency. It's a hushed, gentle story of provisional friendship, the ordeal of adolescence, and the curse of vampiric immortality. A hypnotic motion picture from beginning to end, "Right One" is a marvel: an ingenious genre film that manages to terrify and endear in the same instant, deftly erecting one of the most persuasive, haunting film experiences of the year.' And: 'As a vampire film, Let the Right One In seems to owe little to previous cinematic representations of the nosferatu. There's little attempt made at presenting a mythology, no trendy Eurotrash vamps, or appeals to the long tradition of disfigured counts. Instead, through its mix of short, brutal violence and atmospheric cinematography, the film most reminds me of the vampiric oeuvre of Jean Rollin, with his dreamy atmospheric and taste for blood. This might be a somewhat problematic comparison because of all the sensuality dripping from Rollin's movies, but I think the tentative adolescent attraction between Oskar and Eli holds the seeds of sexuality. Naturally, Let the Right One In is quite a bit less sleazy than your average Rollin flick, but I think its dreamy atmosphere is one of its chief strengths. Leaving aside the vampire aspects of the film, we're left with a young boy coming to terms with his growing masculinity. He's attracted to a girl, trying to stand up to the local bullies, and obviously trying to improve himself physically. However, Let the Right One In seems to be about so much more. Ultimately, there's very little plot to the film, which gives the entire film a feeling of allegory. This feeling is aided by the fact that the film drops Eli's back story from the novel. Instead, both she and Oskar are like specters, only really alive once they've met each other. It's also hard not to read into the casting of the two leads (both of whom, by the way, give performances that would make actors three times their age jealous). Oskar is all blond hair and fine features, while Eli is the darker of the two, with broader features and an "ethnic" air about her. Their troubled friendship takes on historically relevant overtones, and parallels to twentieth century history are not hard to draw. The film is stunning for its fearless attention to cinematography. Let the Right One In is replete with extended shots, often long and medium length views of scenery and people which lend to the atmosphere. When the camera does come in for a close up, shallow depth of field is often used, throwing large parts of the screen out of focus, reinforcing some of the dreaminess of the narrative.'

BACK TO TOP Saturday 12th June: The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke 2009) Another masterpiece from Michael Haneke. The action of the film, beautifully shot in black and white, takes place in a German village in the fifteen months that precede World War I. An apparently placid rural life is interrupted by a series of unpleasant events, which are narrated by the village school teacher who tells us that he believes that what transpired that year may help us to understand subsequent developments in Germany. The story focuses on the teacher's tale of the children's repressive and abusive upbringing and the children's response to that upbringing. It is the immediate response that we are shown, it is the later response, that is how these children will behave when they become adults, that we are to deduce. In a series of books, but most notably in For Your Own Good (1980), Alice Miller developed the idea of a 'poisonous pedagogy,' which is to say, of how abusive parenting and schooling results in the development of unloving, unlovable, cruel, dispassionate adults who welcome demagogic leaders to replace missing parental figures. The central idea is that that it is real abuse, physical, psychological and sexual - all of which we see enacted in this unnamed German village - rather than the fantasised abuse of psychoanalytic theory, that causes mental breakdown and predisposes people to seduction by fascism. It is intriguing to find one of the many powerful scenes in the film comes straight out of a nineteenth century treatise on bringing up children that Miller extracts in For Your Own Good (1980). Another such treatise advises affixing black ribbons to girls' hair as a punishment. The film has Haneke's characteristic flourishes, puzzles and tableaux. In some ways, you might say that it is like a Bergman film but historically placed and with a purpose that extends well beyond the extremes of psychological understanding.

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