Ideas on the Page

This was a curiously indigestible ICA talk, that turned out to be a progress report on the speaker's PhD thesis.

There was a dusty, mimeographed'n'stapled tone to the whole presentation, as the actual art reference points were almost entirely focused on East Coast American art of the late 60s; artists were realising that there was a vast newly constituted cultural space, only just beginning to be mediatised, which was almost completely naive as far as aesthetics went.

As as result, work was being made to 'infiltrate' the magazine and commercial publishing sectors which was either vacuous outside the fact of infiltration (Dan Graham), or reduced to arch and impenetrable game-playing within the micro-monde of the poetry journal (Vito Acconci). We would have been much more engaged with a critical analysis of the contribution of this work, and a less America-centric world-view, rather than a defensive account of how personal loyalties and old-boy-network got some of these artists space to publish in.

http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=31848

Urban Re-development

Two very different elements of the past come back to haunt the modern Korean urban present in these two movies. The Gingko Bed, which is eventually buried under the weight of its own CGI conceits, preposterous medical-establishment shenanigans and portentous acting, begins from the charming-enough premise that the spirits of two medieval forbidden-lovers are imprisoned in the wood of a bed made from a Gingko tree. The vengeful General Hwang, who pursues them through modern Seoul is strictly cartoon-time though.

Green Fish, on the other hand, has its audience more reflectively respectful and doubtful of the position of traditional, localised, family-centred Korean society, in the form of 막동의 (Mak Dong's) riotous, sometimes charmless, permanently struggling family in 일산 (Ilsan), while huge new apartment blocks begin to dominate the horizon of what was recently a market and farming town outside Seoul.

After his (never seen) break in the army, Mak Dong returns home and drifts inexorably and quickly away from his family toward the brutal big city nightclub'n'property underworld. The brilliantly and prosaically staged petty violences and resentments of this demimonde (including the wonderful 송 간호 (Song Kang-Ho) as a more natural but charmless gang lieutenant) never seem to convince him, and Mak Dong's traumatic attempted return to his family is a quietly devastating piece of cinema.

Speaking Up

This is a piece of pure, that is to say completely artificial and magical, cinema. It's a simple enough tale of silent movie star finding that technology and the studio system have discarded him, and his redemption at the hands of the young and hugely successful actress he'd given her first break.

What elevates it far and away above cutesy and 'lovingly made' is it's faith in its own material. Most of it is completely silent of dialogue, and time that facial expression and reflection need to deliver their message is ladled on in generous doses.

I think that the next time I see a film with talking in it, I'll be a little distracted.

No Sex Please, we're Addicts

It is a good thing that McQueen's visual sense is viscerally watchable, even when his set is a greyly minimal marketing agency office, or Fassbender's refrigerator of a high-spec apartment. It's also a very good thing that Fassbender is electrifying, even (or especially) in the most mundane elements of his compulsive masturbation.

The film needs both these elements quite badly, as it doesn't make a case for the central male character at all. He has a very highly paid job in what appears to be advertising, but never does anything remotely convincing. He has a colossal quantity of porn stashed on his PC at work, and seems surprised when he's caught. He compulsively watches porn on his laptop at home, and is an enthusiastic and loyal customer of many local prostitutes, but is introduced to us as a man with a supernaturally powerful sexual magnetism for attractive women. Toward the end of the film, we understand he is in a state of horrifying sexual need, but are expected to believe he would visit a gay club for a blow-job. Libidinally he's simply not believable, and the cliff-hanger of an is-he-redeemed-or-not finale, doesn't seem like the question the audience has been asked throughout.

Having said that, the genuinely disturbing expression on his face as he fucks the final in a sequences of prostitutes near the end of the film, like an athlete who's destroyed his metabolism with steroids just to keep competing, and is realising he's left it far too late to stop, is worth the psychological jigsaw-mix -up of his character.

Un-English Landscapes

The main ingredient in these pictures is actually the spaces in them. Not so as you would notice, what with all the lightning, Biblical downfalls, spectral and colossal architecture, weather patterns seen on no terrestrial satellite, dwarfed human figures minutely picked out but hopelessly lost in the Sturm Und Drang of the righteously erupting geology all about.

What actually held my attention was the almost vertigo-inducing sense of cold, uninhabitable air between the viewpoint and always hopelessly distant action.

Foreground and Background

I only found out about "Khamosh Pani" (or "Silent Waters") through a colleague of Dr Roshini Kempadoo's, who mentioned the film in passing, while talking about his PhD research into the memories of partition as expressed in those who lived through them, and the cultural artifacts informed by the traumatic end of British imperial rule in India and the newly constituted Pakistan in 1947.

It's a gloriously humane film, taking on explosive elements of political history but succeeding in keeping a local frame around the narrative, and our sympathies with the female characters from the town. It's no coincidence that while the male characters are very morally active and noisy, it is within Ayesha's story and gravity within the plot of the film, that the ethical questions are asked and dramatised.

It's never actually occurred to me that I should be careful in this blog not to give away the endings of films or books; or at least that I should post a 'spoiler alert' if I'm doing more than reviewing- which is what I have been assuming I was doing most of the time.

One of the elements within 'Silent Water' that keeps the political and religious posturing, and our own reactions to it, from overwhelming the very understated story-line (Sikh brother returns to home town in Pakistan, half-aware that his sister might have escaped the filicidal and uxoricidal end of his family when the town was annexed by newly arrived Muslims), is the very pungent and textual attention to local domestic detail, fingers wiping rice and chapati from plates, Ayesha's careful sifting of grain in a large dish whenever she is thinking events over, the sympathetic street-shots, and the un-dressy interiors of bed, mat, picture and bowl.

This, and some of the same gender economy, is what links a small town near Rawalpindi in Pakistan with Incheon, the port and airport satellite city of Seoul in South Korea, where "고야이를 부탁해" (or "Look After My Cat") is set. Here too, the domestic interiors, cafes, tube-line landscapes are left to speak for themselves for long intervals, in a movie whose 3 main characters are girls in their first year out of high school, variously finding the route into womanhood an uncertain one. The urban and sub-urban journey-ings of the characters through the film take a good part of the place of dialogue between them, giving the film a rather beautiful and elliptical rhythm.

The unforgiving economics of a rapidly post-industrializing South Korea are dramatised quietly in the responses of Tae Hee, Hae Joo abd Ji Young to the sudden gulfs between them once school is over, (By far the noisiest and liveliest moment of the film is the first one, in which the girls wildly celebrate then end of their final school day, on the docks at Incheon with a camera), just as the equally relentless politico-religious logic of the re-formation of Pakistan's identity becomes the fuel for the drama of 'Silent Water'.

Talking Heads

Helvetica suffers when seen soon before Urbanized, because of the distractions of sets in an endless parade of selfconsciously designed offices (of typeface and graphic designers), and the ever-present risk of nerdish obsessing over micro-detail. It's most successful interviewees are Erik Spiekermann, whose spiky and arch asides mark him out from the faintly childish miasma surrounding most of the designers (Paula Scher ludicrously attempts to align a comfily boho 60s New York cultural touchstone with opposition to the war in Iraq; David Carson talks like a shambolic surfer) and the relaxed yet rigorous commentaries of Dimitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs. They are the only interviewees who actually reach the point of saying what a few others hint at or do not have the language to say: You can only say what your typeface will let you say, or wants to say.

Urbanized repeats the structure of Hustwit's earlier film (talking head followed by scene-establishing or atmosphere-generating still camera shot) but draws its commentary from a much wider population, and never quite drifts into picture-postcardisms for it's cinematography. The sequence shot from the front of an over-ground train on a weekday in central Detroit, clearly and shockingly empty of people is as arresting as 'Day of the Triffids'. Each section (Bombay, Detroit, Stuttgart, Phoenix, Cape Town, Bogota) is a little too self-contained, and the final thought (city as an idea) might just as well have been a starting point (though for a very different documentary).