Hedging your bets with bulletproof vests

I've just watched a film called Flandres by Bruno Dumont and aside from making me want to talk French with somebody it made me think of neo-realism and cinéma vérité. It feels very real in terms of lighting, sound and overall atmosphere. There is no music, and I mean no music even on the radio, and we can feel the weather by the light onscreen, the dull overcast grey day or the warmth of soft orange sunlight on a brick porch wall. It begins slowly showing the seemingly almost deserted farm where Demester works. The environment is illustrated with wide shots of him walking across the fields, a feeling of fertile yet empty space. This is embellished by close up details of activities, sharpening a stick to place a snare, washing a bowl in the sink; all this in intricately depicted surroundings, the piles of washing up and junk on the kitchen surfaces, the tools lying outside the farm on the cobbles. It seems like this isn't even set dressing, these are simply real locations as they are. A brief scene in a country pub with a vieillard tentatively playing a note or two on an accordion whilst fags are smoked and doused before going out into the frigid car park feels achingly true. It's also a key moment as it sets up the love triangle between Demester, Barbe and Blondel, a guy she meets in the pub then fucks in his car scant minutes later. In contrast the swift couplings between Demester and Barbe in the corners of fields of grey sticky mud and straw seem tender and loving, albeit without either being able to really express these feelings to each other or even themselves.
The film moves on as the two guys plus a third "friend" Mordacq join the army along with it seems most of the young male population of the area. After the portrayal of the place in which they live it seems almost understandable that they should be eager to escape to another environment. Though eager is perhaps too strong a word, apathy is what pervades the actions and interactions of the people here. Having grown up in the countryside, not as bleak as this however, I can well understand the behaviours of the characters. Barbe's sexual antics for instance are something different than the normal activities of others around, even if not conducted with much vigour. However once one begins a certain practice it is quite easy to fall into the habit of it and so it feels with Barbe, the potential escape has become a trap. Meanwhile the guys are in an unspecified desert conflict zone, Tunisia if you wait til the end credits, that's bleak and beautiful in a similar way to the landscape of Flanders back home, and are put through the wringer in a series of external and self inflicted horrific occurrences that begin almost arbitrarily but possess a definite causality that eventually leads us back to Flanders at the end of the film. As we follow the guys abroad and Barbe back home the cuts between the locations start off long and become quicker approaching the end.
To me the film seemed really to be about Flanders despite the desert combat scenes, this place was not so well realised and seemed to be a stage on which to make comment about arbitrary violence experienced by soldiers. Of course with French soldiers against Arabs there are echoes of Algiers and French colonialism as well as the more recent "war on rational thought" sorry "terror". But the film is shot in Bailleul which is where Dumont was born close the the French/Belgian border and it seems to me he is invoking memories of his childhood in bringing the place to life such is the feel of it as a viewer. However having mentioned neo-realism its worth remembering that its realism not reality. It feels very real but even de Sica made concessions to creating a film rather than a documentary. With this film though I think the pleasure lies not a well structured emotive screenplay but in the accurate evocation of a place that conceals its own beauty beneath a bleak and harsh exterior. The flicker of dying embers against a dusk sky, the flurry of birds in the hedgerow, the icy cold of winter giving way to the treacle sunlight of spring.

Forking Paths

Lately I find myself unexpectedly reading a brace of books about homosexuality and sexual experimentation. Both also have strands of unreality and dream imagery running through them. They are "Dorian AN IMITATION" by Will Self and "Lost Girls" a graphic novel by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. Dorian is a re-imagination of the Oscar Wilde story about a man who keeps his youth whilst a picture of him ages in his stead. It is set across the 80s and 90s as the gay sub culture blossoms and goes overground, across this backdrop the titular Dorian debauches his way whilst various friends and acquaintances discuss his increasingly nefarious activities. Meanwhile "Lost Girls" is a story of three famous fictional girls, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Wendy from Peter Pan and Alice from Alice in Wonderland, imagined as real women all affected by some traumatic sexual experience in their childhood meeting by chance in a grand European hotel and discovering their similarities and strange connection. It is beautifully illustrated in what looks like coloured pencil by Melinda Gebbie, the images are soft and delicate with a wonderful flowing texture allowing them to seem at times realistic but always allowing for them to flow seamlessly into representations of unreality through dreams, or drug induced states.

In fact dream and drugs play a large part in both these works, it's probably why I like them both so much given my fascination with blurring the boundaries between reality and unreality. Both stories have a certain ambiguity to them, (have events that are described happened, half happened?) in fact it's really about what the flow of events represent as metaphor. In the case of Dorian they create a selective and distorted catalogue of place and time, one gets a snapshot of certain 'scenes' associated with geographical and temporal locations. An example is the burgeoning UK gay scene in the early 80s with its initially innocent yet idolatrous perception of beauty hearkening back to those Classical conceptions of male beauty embodied by Baz Hallward's video installation featuring a nude Dorian, Cathode Narcissus. This period provides the starting point for a journey that describes the transition from an unsullied youth, admittedly self-obsessed as alluded to by the title of Hallward's installation (which also prefigures Dorian's cruelty to the infatuated Hallward and his many future sexual partners), into a character increasingly set free from the confines of conventional morality. Another example is the more physically vigorous, dangerous and experimental NY club scene, characterised in the novel by roughhousing and sadistic and masochistic practices in a memorable descent into the bowels of a lubricated, writhing warehouse club recalling Dante or Bosch and culminating in an ambiguous murder.

In Lost Girls the central location is the Himmelgarten hotel in Austria, as its name suggests it provides a sanctuary from the censure and restrictions of the wider world outside and a place in which Alice acts as a kind of tutor and mentor, first to Dorothy then with her help to Wendy, in sexual awakening which lies not only in the physical world but also that of the imagination. The story moves ahead punctuated by numerous fantastic sequences representing the release of those dreams and desires of the characters that have been suppressed by propriety or repressed by time and the conscious mind. Often these sequences are paralleled visually with events in the real world to illustrate the daydreams of the protagonists. A prime example are the exchanges between Wendy Potter and her dull engineer husband. Their 'conversations' take the form of Mr Potter expounding his views on the denizens of the hotel or bridge construction whilst Wendy tidies up or sits engaged in needlepoint. Visually though we see the imagined sex life of the couple that appears to have in reality gone unconsummated. At one point a rolled up sheaf of papers memorably becomes an erect member fully exploited to elicit pleasure from Wendy and for her husband too. Dorothy is introduced to opium by Alice and this precipitates a hallucinatory lesbian encounter between the two. There is also a trip to the theatre that results in a sexual encounter between the three women that may be part dream paralleling the scandalous performance on stage, a dance culminating in a virgin sacrifice on stage and a riot in the stalls.

Both books deal with a liberation from the rules of society, in the first the increasing hedonism of a sub cultural milieu provides a smokescreen for Dorian's even more extreme behaviour whilst the second feels more like a safe haven for the women to set themselves free from the societal straitjacket in which they had been placed. Dorian could to some degree be considered to be a metaphor for the spread of HIV and AIDs but I think this is too unsubtle to be a very important part of the character, especially since the association is mentioned several times by his friends. Having said this the disease does feature prominently in the novel, the topic couldn't really be avoided given the period and subject matter, and adds to the sense of slow and morbid decay. In a way the two books could be seen as opposites of one another, the sloughing off of conventions being a path to darkness and obsession in the first case and to a feeling of life, light and invigoration in the other. It must just be a coincidence that a cast of mainly men populate the dark side and women the light though surely? Also that I have just watched "Grizzly Man" this evening, a troubled man leaving behind society and getting eaten in the process?

The Art of Life

I have just watched "The Science of Sleep" by Michel Gondry. I really enjoyed it, it was funny and magical and ultimately quite sad. I think I empathised with the whole situation partly as a bit of a daydreamer/fantasist and also because it's really about the problems everyone has with relationships. Whether it's commitment or jealousy, high standards or over attachment there are always repeating behaviour patterns, the word pathology is mentioned in the film, that cause hang ups. Some people are very aware of these, others have little knowledge of their unconscious actions. Obvious or not those it's incredibly difficult to change these behavioural habits and time and again we keep falling into cycles. The same happens with family groups in just as intense a way. Yet there is hope, because some people do seem to manage a fairly healthy level of social interaction. But then again even such facades can be deceptive, the closest seeming of couples can appear from the outside to suddenly separate and divorce. Since one can only really know oneself things can get a little lonely, especially if it's hard to let others in to your trust and confidence.

Keep on keeping on

A scathing, cynical and condescending attitude prevents me from serious analysis of people's behaviour, activities and tastes. For example, laughing at the tackiness of football memorabilia (esp. SD dolls) ignores the fact that such tokens or talismans represent a substitution (no pun intended) of religious iconography where football in fact takes the place of organised religion in the lives of many modern people.
Following football requires certain ritualised practises: attending matches in the flesh or at least watching on TV, discussion with other believers, listening to pundits (sermons), wearing garments to show belonging such as team shirts, scarves, also enacting rituals oneself in groups by playing football recreationally. Each of these activities possesses its own set of rules and repeated behaviour patterns, modes of speech, physical gestures etc. This not only cements belonging feelings in practitioners but reinforces those feelings in others too.
Football is just one example, many pastimes have such associated behaviour patterns. The fundamental need to act out repeated behaviour patterns is borne out by the number of people with some kind of compulsive behaviour problem, repeated hand washing, door checking etc. Since the most basic lifeform must perform repeated actions to survive, such as seeking out light or proteins, we can see repeated activity is ancient indeed.
The point is when the urge comes to ridicule someone for their behaviours it would be wise to think about the origin and reason for these , a deeper understanding of individual and likely more general human behaviour will occur.

Where there's a will there's a way

The tradition of free speech and individuality is being eroded in this country by the legislation passed and political and social culture arising out of the activities of "New" Labour, in thrall as they are to wealth and wealth acquisition; keeping their activities hidden beneath a veil of rhetoric and simplistic 'big ideas'. I thought about this after listening to a programme about Karl Popper in which his idea of the open society was discussed. When the principles of this (primarily an openness to scrutiny and criticism of policy and continual adjustment of policy based on these criticisms) are compared with "New" Labour we see a consolidation of individual power and a seeming inability or at least unwillingness to learn from mistakes or rectify those already made. Instead the same paths are followed despite their problems and figures are massaged to make them appear effective. Examples of this are the use of PFIs to keep spiralling costs of building new hospitals, schools and other public buildings "off balance sheet", the limitations with regards cost and access imposed on the only recently introduced Freedom of Information Act and the awarding of more rail franchises to companies such as First Group that have already proven themselves to have a poor track record with their initially awarded contracts.