...Marble in place of clay by Drouth

Poem (2)

‘... marble in place of clay’ Mitchell Miller

AVENUES OF HORROR Jem Cohen’s Chain is as much a dissection as a film, the examination of a corpus, pore by pore, piece by piece. Its simple project, to examine and meditate on the ‘public’ spaces of consumer capitalism – malls, plazas, car-parks, hotels and airports – poses a multitude of questions. ‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ as Whitman said, and following his universalist logic, so too does the average mallrat.

American magazine described it. Gruen saw the chance to zone out the ‘vulgarity’ and ‘chaos’ of American suburbia (‘its avenues of horror’) and transpose Vienna’s Ringstrausse to America. Gruen had imagined an urban, even a civic environment growing up around his first mall; the schools, parks and apartments never came, but parked cars did – lots of them. Gruen’s dream is perhaps best summed up by the term for mall when they first opened here as ‘Shopping Centres’ – assuming a unifying role. ‘Globalisation’, the PC term now preferred for Americanisation, has seen it go gradually out of use. The capitalist cephalopods, of course, were the ones who added the cunning lighting, the ‘co-operative capitalism’ that maximises returns for businesses large and small, and the mall security and surveillance cameras that ensure complete control over the environment. Because the malls were non-public spaces, Cohen had to shoot much of his footage ‘on the sly’, and so the camerawork often resembles surveillance footage – catching shoppers and protagonists alike off their guard – slouching, sloping, mooching or just vacant. It is an effective conceit, encouraging a dissonance between the dispassionate, somewhat ruthless quality of the film stock (the lens seems to examine and scour every pock on Amanda’s face) and our growing sympathy for characters caught in what Cohen describes as a ‘slow calamity’.

The narrative of one mallrat Amanda (musician Mina Bilotte), homeless, adrift and almost literally living in a mall, contains numerous questions over the psychic and social effects of these pseudo-public spaces. Amanda is complemented by another character, Japanese corporate scout Tamiko (Miho Nikaido) who lives a non-life in hotels, airports and meeting rooms. Their stories emerge almost by stealth, from amid the long takes and close-ups on landscapes, objects and signs. These engrossing fabrications are a means of excavating what Cohen calls ‘submerged narratives’ gleaned from six years worth of location footage. The landscape and what it means matters here – for it, like they, like the intimate moments of Amanda and Tamiko, are a clever fabrication. For sure, the mall numbs the mind just as the food in the forecourt weighs down the stomach; but minds were at work to convince us that these spaces are indeed public. Surprisingly, these minds were not stationed in the noddles of scheming capitalists, fondling the latest maquette for a mall with their suckered tentacles, but a European socialist intent on rescuing Americans from creeping suburban horror. Victor Gruen recreated the town centre in Southdale with a ‘garden court’, fish and two tiers. A ‘pleasure dome with parking’ as one

The impression is that this director is determined not to let us easily ‘identify’ as we do in more mainstream films. Identification can take us to a point where our engagement in the narrative is limited to finding resolution for the characters – and in many respects, receiving the requisite emotional pay-offs from this process. Instead, Cohen invites a more broadly applied meditation on the human condition, on the environment that the characters help to form, rather than use as backdrop. Accordingly, Amanda gives us many ‘Where’s Wally?’ moments where she has blended into a crowd of shoppers, only to reappear in the corner of our eye as an individual presence. And although her screen time is considerable, once she relinquishes the immediacy conferred by her particular narrative device (a video camera) she will melt back into the shopping crowd, never to be seen again. Pleasuredomes and their somatic effects are a cinematic stalwart; Lang’s Metropolis depicted the ‘sons of the masters of metropolis’ in a lecherous, debauched Eden, while the workers trudged in vacant submission to work. How do we compare these highly staged scenes from 1927 with contemporary scenes – unselfconscious, documentary and naturalistic, of perpetual downtime in the mall, a seeming paradise that nevertheless seems to excite precisely the same

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submission as Lang’s proles? Chain seems premised on the belief that watching is a political act, an argument that is itself political in an age of increased interactivity and close-circuit surveillance – as Cohen related at our interview: ‘... one of the only places where I thought that video really came into its own was with the old black and white surveillance monitors – there is something like inherently sad and beautiful about it, and you see people on them at their most natural. It is kind of an unintended by-product of what is essentially just a means of control. But one of the things about surveillance as a means of control is that there are way too many surveillance monitors for anybody to look at anymore. That is one of the things that I think is so funny – the cracks in the edifice – you will have one little security guard trying to keep track of 30 or 40 monitors, and it is impossible. And so it is selfdefeating, because when everything is being watched, it is hard for anything to be watched that carefully.’ In his preamble to The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Brecht counsels us to ‘… learn how to see and not to gape’ and there are Brechtian overtones in Chain’s lush images and sparing, laconic deployment of words inviting us to fill in the mental and discursive space for ourselves. From the near silence of the image comes an endless stream of words – and perhaps (who knows?) actions. We perceive and then conceive of a meaning – somewhat more interactive than a computer game (now often developed in tandem with movies), where the freedom to move, act and affect is purely illusory and guided by the process-maps and flowcharts used by the programmers. When watching this film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, two lines from a poem by Robert Graves ran repeatedly through my mind: ‘He [Augustus] shall give Rome marble in place of clay And fetter her fast in unseen chains.’ This was a prophecy concocted by Graves to forebode the reign of the Caesars at the beginning of I Claudius. Obviously, I remembered the poem for all sorts of reasons, riffing on the connotations held in Cohen’s title. It seems a good place to start.

AN EMBLEM OF THE CITY (?) ‘… corporations want two-way mirror glass because its transparent – reflective on the outside, which means the corporation looks like the sky, and transparent

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inside, because light is flowing outside, so people from inside can see outside without being seen – it’s a kind of surveillance. So I try to deconstruct that. It’s an emblem of the city …’ Artist Dan Graham talks to Frieze magazine, December 2003

‘… all faith, all integrity, all religion. No quality does a prince need more to possess – in appearance – than this last one, because in general, men judge more with their eyes than with their hands, since everybody can see but few can perceive. Everybody sees what you appear to be; few perceive what you are, and those few dare not contradict the belief of the many, who have the majesty of the government to support them.’ Political Artiste Machiavelli talks to Lorenzo Medici, 1513 Can a stone be an object of affection? A fetish? Marble seems to excite those corporate captains whose global confraternity opt for it again and again. Is it the cold, glacial texture that so appeals? Is it the gleam of the stone itself, reflective yet unrevealing? Or the complex seams and veins that ripple and fork across it? Is it because shopping emporia and corporate HQs are the temples of these times, and any decent temple is marble-built? Is it because everyone else is doing it? Is it because it was the favoured material for banks, and the retailers want to masquerade as protectors of our money? Is it even a reference, overt or not, to the dignity of a certain western Empire? Are the corporate strategists more sensitive than we think and referencing the famous ‘blue marble’ photograph of the earth? Whatever the answer (and there may, in fact, be several ... ), marble is the stone of choice for the corporation that wishes to express the solidity of its enterprise. McDonalds uses marble or marble effect in its restaurants in designs that are reproduced, clinically and methodically, across the globe. Starbucks too, often because it occupies old banks, has a preference for this material, unlike many (but not all) of the smaller coffee shops. Since the days of Rome it has been a distinctly non-vernacular material, the bones and skin of temples and the signal of inclusion in the Imperial network. So what are the corporations up to? What can we see other than the heavens reflected in their mirrored glass? This perhaps stretches the resonance of the Graves couplet too far for my own ends, but Chain confronts us with a landscape dominated by such architecture – towering skyscrapers and squat false-marble stripmalls that look much the same whether in Tokyo or Berlin. It is a dispiriting, desolate yet seemingly

pristine landscape that under Cohen’s scrutiny reveals an unsettling beauty. Halogen-drenched car-parks, bland mall esplanades are revealed as alien, yet wonderful environments. A nocturnal shot that has Tamiko look down into a vast hotel lobby, a glance into Hades that reveals a complex steel and concrete collage of green light and shade, reminiscent of one of Picasso’s geometric canvases. It is as if the tricks and sleights used by the retailers are allowed, briefly to do their work – Cohen challenges us not to gape. And perhaps gaping is better than nothing – it suggests, if nothing else, response. The two female characters, in so many respect polar opposites, seem so numbed and acquiescent to this environment as to have merged with it. Tamiko works for a large Japanese conglomerate she refers to only as ‘The Company’. Her task is to research American amusement parks for her employers who are seeking to expand into this market and exploit as a means of pushing their goods. Amanda ran away from home after ‘maxing’ her mother’s credit cards, and now drifts between malls and shopping complexes in Middle America. Cohen splices her story – told mostly in drawling confessionals to a ‘found’ video camera – with recorded calls from card and loan companies promising instant solutions to debt problems. Outwardly then, these are two very different women who never meet and would have little reason to. Yet when we find Tamiko she is as rootless as Amanda, drifting from park to park in the search for ideas and potential business partners. Her situation is, arguably, as fragile and tenuous as Amanda’s squat – The Company tells her where her path lies, pays for her hotels and arranges her flights. It owns her ‘narrative’ almost entirely and when its fortunes turn to the bad and force it to curb its ambitions, Tamiko loses all meaning. She ends the film stranded in a hotel, unable to admit to herself that she no longer forms a part of The Company’s plans. In the background, Cohen has a radio play a programme about Japanese soldiers in the Pacific who refused to admit the war was over.

Point A to B through a series of excitements and releases … these things are mapped out in this incredibly cold blooded way … they make theme parks that way, they make malls that way and they make movies that way – it is no accident because it is often the same corporations doing all three.’ In one episode, Tamiko visits the Edmonton Theme Park in Canada, which incorporates the largest shopping mall in the world. Here consumerism nests within the diversions and pleasures offered by a selfcontained park, an inviting, playful outward face that draws revellers into becoming shoppers. We have long ceased to see such things as strange, which is why Cohen seems determined to make us look again, free from the interference of a standard, redemptive narrative. If Cohen’s narrative does not redeem the mall, then it also avoids outright condemnation, or the sloganeering common to the ‘global left’. There is a cinematic tradition of satirising and subverting American society through the mall. George Romero famously infested Monroeville’s retail outlets with walking dead, while the under-rated Series 7 – The Contenders had its fugitives slaughter each other to a soundtrack of mall muzak. Chain debuts in an environment where numerous documentaries and pseudo-documentaries – OutFoxed!, Surplus and even Super Size Me – have attacked different aspects of the edifice through traditional documentary formats, while Czech Dreams, which had its debut at the London Film Festival, follows two pranksters as they satirise the promotional machinery for ‘hyper-markets’. In most of these cases, however, there is a target – some handy sovereign to behead or redress in a Fool’s Motley

But ultimately, we ask – where are they? What sense of place do these women possess? We assume that Tamiko is travelling from city to city – but the hotels she stays in show no sign of the existence of such an entity – it itself has been sidelined. The town square and the park, both emblems of cityscape, have discarded the municipal entity which created them, and set up shop on their own.

marble ‘The average American mall has annual sales of around three hundred and forty dollars per square foot.’ New Yorker Article

‘… when they build a shopping mall or an amusement park ride … [they talk about] generating tension and resolution, and how you are going to get people from

(such as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, whose rabid pep rallies are the most entertaining part of Surplus). Chain is distinguished from these journalistic, fictional or polemical by its refusal to pander to such a heroic – some might say exciting – game of ‘goodies and baddies’. We are confronted and left with the predicament in itself. Taking the long view, it seems the culmination of a gradual, perhaps terminal, coup to see the amusement park surround and encompass the marketplace, and stranger that both phenomena have increasingly eschewed the town, village or common space they once negotiated access to, creating their own locale. The fairground booths and ghost shows, the

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menageries and often rather lurid peepshows that grew out of their medieval context of commedia de l’arte, mummery and strollers, precursors to the amusement park/malls Cohen describes. They too exercised a commercially motivated (if somewhat cruder) psycho-social premeditation of their customer’s desires, attempting to direct their path into the tent or alongside the trinkets. Excitement and release was a way of life and a living for a bizarre human strata that jangled bells, beat drums and ‘cricked’ children to make them supple and acrobatic. From paintwork to the positioning of mirrors, village greens and town squares would be reconfigured to provide these distractions, the principle aim being economic. The first modern carousels were designed by a committee of experienced fairground travellers, who understood the rules of centrifugal attraction. And, in collusion with the clowns and tumblers were the traders, pedlars, craftsmen and hirers, who maximised the distracting, enchanting atmosphere created to grease the wheels. But, over time, the centrifuge of industrialisation separated out tumbler from merchant.

cinematographs and other early instruments of the form. He had my Great Grandfather recount the tale as they exhibited slides, accompanied by bloodcurdling sound effects.

Yet in Chain, it is suggested, there is a reconvergence. Fun is not as harmless as it appears. But then, was it ever?

The questions or extrapolations! are legion. We might do better to first consider what Cohen offers in opposition to this stream of chilled blood. The six years of footage have been distilled into a counternarrative thoroughly grounded in a process of studious documentation. Having his camera ever at the ready, this is a constant, contingent and expressive scrutiny of his surroundings. This cumulative methodology, this reliance on archived footage shot without initial purpose in itself, questions the ‘traditional’ notion of the ‘discrete’ nature of most film production. This is a project, or even progress, rather than a product. As Cohen explained: ‘I shot for years before I was really aware of my narrative intentions … a lot [is] just drawn from looking very carefully at the footage and realising that there are submerged narratives that already exist.’

The Agricultural and Charter fairs of Europe combined essential economic functions with the temporary suspension of social norms and the rowdy, anarchic elements of theatre, performance, contortion and menagerie. Entertainers and sellers combined to make the entity of the fairground, and each fed off the other. The ancient fair – such as the now vanished Bartholomew Fair – was a warren of Machiavellian attractions, distractions and, inbetween, transactions. The markets were pitched, erected and to an extent, plotted to intersperse coconut shies with cloth merchants, straw-stuffed Aunt Sallies with the hiring stalls – places where human beings were effectively bought and sold. Just as the mall uses larger, ‘anchor’ retailers to brings in business sucked up by smaller concerns, so too did the competitive town marketplace allow a sort of ‘co-operative capitalism’ to function. And if it is convergence one seeks, then cinema can be easily accommodated (Chain’s Edinburgh Festival screening was, appropriately enough, in a multiplexcum-mall at Fountainbridge). Before the form was able to find a solid purchase in everyday life and grow the often-monstrous industry that now accompanies it, it was a cottage industry exhibited by showmen on fairs across Europe and the US, who usually made the films themselves. The most cold-blooded and enterprising would be canny enough to link their films into local events, especially local disasters. My own Great Great Grandfather, who I am told was really a lovely man, exploited the St Enoch’s Train disaster of 1903 in his Bioscope, a direct ancestor of

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A quaint tangent perhaps, bit it lays open the possibility that the designers of malls/amusement centres – entities which are seldom loved – tap into a very ancient form of mass-manipulation, and that the links now established through subsidiarity in these large companies have been re-forged rather than created. Indeed, with their encompassing superstructures, mass appeal and occurrence almost everywhere on the globe, it is tempting to wonder whether we have not returned to a more pre-industrial – even medieval way of conducting business. Is capitalism not the messianic religion of our age? Does this not explain the universalism – or ubiquity – of these spaces? Might this resurgence of medieval values explain why our political leaders are either brutes or the henchmen of brutes, and philistinism is seen as the ultimate expression of ‘the common touch’?

The disinternment of the submerged narrative is accompanied by a parallel trajectory for Cohen – into near anonymity. ‘I was interested in erasing the presence of myself as a camera person and trying to get away from a “visual style”, which is what a lot of filmmakers are really interested in, having noticeable or groovy camera moves where you go “wow, what a camera move”, and I really wanted to avoid that – I wanted to erase my own presence as a filmmaker.’ Cohen goes a long way to disconnecting himself from the industrial model of filmmaking of cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment. This is routinely associated with Hollywood but has also come to affect, or perhaps one could say ‘infect’, so-called ‘independent’ cinema, the most telling model being Weinstein’s Miramax – more of a rogue trader of the standard Hollywood wares than a genuine alternative. The absence of camera flourishes makes the film a

more substantial challenge (to watch as well as interpret) than others, but Cohen himself does not vanish altogether for, whatever his shooting style, the editing clearly shows his mark. If the mall can be seen as the physical realisation of the Hollywood model – cold blooded and predicated on a controlled, ordered, anthropic cosmos – an inducement to acquiescence in a society ordered on might = right, it also provides a sense of resolution and safe, amniotic containment in a ‘story-world’ conforming to the requirements of ‘satisfying’ narrative laid down since the days of DW Griffith. All action must lead to eventual resolution, all excitement progresses that resolution. Resolution promises reassurance, and reassurance promises reinforcement, and reinforcement promises repetition (or whatever chain of ‘r’s you wish to construct). Both the movie and the mall take a ‘plot’ and develop it into a determinist superstructure that works through a welloiled and effective system. And throughout, there are the thrusting protagonists who literally carve out the world to their own desires. We either buy their story or not; our only opportunity to shape it is in the ‘fixed game’ of the focus group. We are used, of course, to the concept of the Social Contract and the various trade-offs and agreements necessary to make it function. Looking at the spread of the malls and the centrality of the Hollywood narrative, are we not confronted with a competitor to that paradigm: the Consumer Contract? The consumer is promised something conducive to their well-being, happiness and comfort – they wed themselves to this through their money. It works as a unifying narrative that is literally bought into by the public, and the resolution, of course, is the continuance of the whole system. As Koolhaas said: ‘Comfort is the new justice.’ Emotional pay-off is the prime mover – stockbroker Vic Traynor says at the beginning of Chain ‘... you are effectively buying a promise’. Yet ‘the system’ – while kept very visible in those places where it must be fed – the shopfronts and cash registers – is unseen in others. Furthermore, the power of conglomeration and subsidiarity – of families of companies and sub-companies – allows. In this context, Chain’s deliberate focus on the ignored, invisible and ‘framed out’ could be regarded as a form of investigative journalism into the power of this consumer narrative; ‘Narrative films will take a pause in the story and do a little montage of locations … and sometimes I am just disappointed when they get back to the story …’ But get back they must, for to function properly the system must be subliminal and even banal. ‘There is a term that they use in the film business – ‘B Camera’ – there is the real story then there is the B Cam. And I start from the point of view that it’s all ‘A’ camera; a shot of a façade of a building or an office tower can be just as important as anything else.’ Of course, for Machiavelli there was nothing more essential than the creation of plausible narratives for general consumption – ones that could outperform and out-convince all others. Majesty of course, was the ally of the Prince, and it seems to be a force very

much at work in Hollywood. Lyotard called it ‘The grand narrative’ and we supposedly live in an age where it no longer exists; the Soviet Union has fallen, the war has been won, history is now relegated to the chronology of objects or commodities, such as Mark Kurlansky’s Cod. But of course, the ‘grand narrative’ has merely been privatised. Just as the corporation, in its striving for success, foregrounds itself and relegates its environment to the backdrop spaces of motorway verges and car-parks, Hollywood has sold the idea of the protagonist – perfected, made-up and larger than he or she appears, who curls the rest of existence around their concerns – much like the consumer. Chance, timing, probability exists to drive a narrative in which the hero’s dilemma is resolved – it is a powerful and essential idea made all the more so because of cinema’s unique gift: that of realisation. Excitement, release, ultimately – captivation. Of course, realisation also has an economic meaning – to convert assets into money.

place ‘Developersdevelopersdevelopersdeverlopers ... Developersdevelopersdeverlopers developersdevelopers ... (Audience reach crescendo) Developersdevelopersdevelopers dev(voicecracking)elopersdevelopers...’ Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speaks at a Microsoft Pep rally. (From Erik Gandini’s Surplus) In a bibliography included in the end credits Cohen recommends Humphrey Jenning’s Pandaemonium and the coming of the machine. The writings that Jennings collaged over time, the critique of culture through artistic expression and his debt to ‘Mass Observation’ in which ‘ordinary people’ were studied to almost surreal extremes, identify Pandaemonium as Chain’s spiritual prelude. Cohen’s earlier films, such as Lost Book Found and Benjamin Smoke owe the same debt; in the latter, music, portraiture, art, critique and reflection essay – nearly a decade of footage. A similar finesse is achieved in Chain; like his Lost Book, a film about landscape, like Smoke, a work long in gestation, like Pandaemonium, a form of expression through documentation. The part poetic, part critical ‘narrative’ is accompanied by a dissonant, minimal soundtrack from God Speed You! Black Emperor that draws on American regional and devotional music. As Cohen says ‘… the God Speed music has the feel of barrelling towards some sort of calamity that never comes … you can put music on any image and people will feel what you want them to feel – you can just guide them … build certain kinds of tension, create a certain kind of expectation or emotion … [But] I am trying to encourage people to feel something on their own and

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on their own terms, rather than on mine.’ Through foregrounding what is generally relegated to a ‘link’, or a ‘backdrop’, Cohen seems to suggest that we mistake for mere context what may in fact, be the calamity. The persuasiveness of these commercial spaces makes us blind to the threat they pose. Foucault speaks of the importance of ‘the physical sovereign’ to preindustrial societies. While no doubt encouraging personality cults, it also gave the people a visible and tangible scapegoat or target. But if the real problem is not so much the tyrant as the land itself … ? Who to decapitate? Is this why Hollywood is so careful to give us physical threats to be impaled, beheaded, crushed, blown up or any other of hundreds of Bond-style ‘dispatches’? We might also remember The Blob, that most unsubtle yet satisfying of anti-Communist propaganda films. Lately however, a string of films, such as the recent The Day After Tomorrow, have featured a vengeful, unsympathetic nature as ‘the threat’. It is way too “out there” to suggest that this fear of nature is an intended justification for paving it all over, but we might remember the proverb tiled into New York’s Bryant Street Subway – ‘nature must not win the game’ and wonder. Yet this is mere catastrophism; sudden, drastic events that are unstoppable and, by extension, do not implicate anyone in power – except perhaps God. Far more dangerous is to suggest that ‘the menace’ is insidious, gradualist, unseen, manmade ... But the very fabric of Chain questions the notion of the market as individualist liberator. The location photography was collected in seven different countries, not all of them western, and at times it is impossible to tell the difference. In Europe, and in American cities such as New York, the mall (albeit for very different reasons to the out of town model) has slotted into an urban environment. These are not as ‘pure’ as the malls found on the outskirts, but can have similar ‘street values’.Glasgow’s Princes Square is nested among the façade that runs along Buchanan street, while at the top of the same street, Buchanan Galleries grows out of the Royal Concert Hall. Edinburgh’s first town centre mall, called then a ‘shopping centre’, referenced the past history of the site by calling itself Waverley Market. The subterranean emporium has since renamed itself Princes

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Mall, a name with little meaning or connection to its setting. In such weary and cynical times, this is hardly shocking, but is instructive as to what is different about the manipulations and sleights of hands in the old marketplace and those of today. For one thing, fairground shysters realised that their occupation of the space was temporary, negotiated and that certain aspects of the environment were simply beyond their control – the weather, for one. Go even to one of the modern fairgrounds and one gets a sense of the constant process of negotiation, argument, dealing and accommodation in carving up the showground space between families of sellers and amusers. Neither are any two fairgrounds quite the same in shape or makeup – each time a grouping arrives at a town, decisions have to be made as to how the stalls and rides can be fitted into the local landscape. It is true, that for a while, the market makes common space its own, and in the name of commerce, constricts and reshapes it. Revelry – like commerce – was an intrusion upon the social order, and both were tolerated as if they were antibodies. These were the moments of release bound into the social fabric that prevented fatal disease, malaise or haemorrhage. But it was always a temporary pact, in which it was implicit that the space be returned to the community. Smoke, mirrors and cynically devised amusements are viscerally healthy in short doses but are not (or so the wisdom went) a way to have society run all the time. The players really must stroll on. This has changed. Malls, multiplexes and their formal relatives represent a situation where that commercial space is permanently owned and controlled by the “amusement caterers”, rather than “tolerated” by the town. Yet the growth of malls would, on the face of it, seem to be a response to consumer demand – that is, if we are, like Tamiko, left wandering in a desert of grass verges and lethal freeways, then ‘we asked for it’. But is this necessarily the case? As is perfectly clear from even the most cursory economic history of mallbuilding, ‘catalytic’ rather than civic processes have governed the spread of malls. Market dynamics, rather than community service has dictated the pace. Malls were created on the land with the highest returns; on the fringes of cities and towns, in a world of their own. From an integrative European town fair or market, tolerated by the authorities because of a communal need to trade, to a homogenous

development built for the sake of itself. Nebulous, insubstantial and divorced from an actual product, retail and entertainment are mass markets sustained entropically. And yet these have achieved a solidity in America unthinkable anywhere else. America is unique in so many ways – not least its embracing of suburban culture, but what it really has which Gruen’s Europe did not is space. Homogenous developments – such as amusement or theme parks like Coney Island, the Chicago World’s Fair and of course, Disneyland – ushered in new concepts in entertaining and selling that worked because the consumer was transported to a space removed from the distractions and complications of a civic surround. What was once flaky, transient and seasonal was now controlled, permanent– there was no need for the developers of the market to negotiate with the town authority. They had achieved the semblance of bedrock. ‘He [Augustus] shall give Rome marble in place of clay ...’

clay ‘… One does not, for example, go to bed with the running dogs of imperialism. I thought: But who will care for and solace the running dogs of imperialism? Who will bring them their dog food, who will tuck their covers tight as they dream their imperialistic dreams?’ From The Film, by Donald Barthelme Hollywood has served well enough as a snug, downstuffed puffy coverall for the dreamers of the New American era, also miscalled ‘the global market’. It is miscalled, because as Chain makes too clear, the asphalt plains and contrasting extremes of groundhugging warehouses and surging phalluses are American ideas of land-use globally exported. This is a pax Americana, solidified in the mall parking lot just as the Pax Romana struck its paths through building roads. At the time of writing, Mexican pressure groups were defeated by Wal-Mart, who gained permission to build a mall just outside of the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan, a planned city whose sacred purpose, while not entirely clear, was certainly antithetical to the plans of grocers. It is important, perhaps, to recognise America other than the corporate or the consumer model, and likewise, more than just the genius of Hollywood to be found in American cinema. Cohen himself gives short shrift to the idea that American films such as Chain, that sit so visibly apart from the mass of American cinema, need assume a debt to European sensibilities. ‘I had this slightly odd childhood – my parents are American but I was born in Afghanistan. I was only there for a year, I moved around a lot as a kid. I don’t feel entirely comfortable in any one place in America, but I am totally American.’ Cohen instead argues that Chain forms part of an American counter-tradition embodied in Whitman and Thoreau. Like Thoreau, Cohen’s acute social critique

is realised through constant observation of the environment. But while Thoreau feared the dominance of the American government and saw ‘the commons’ as its natural opponent, Cohen must work in a situation where the latter no longer exists: ‘One of the things that the movie is concerned with is the degree of control over space … [as] maintained by surveillance is so extreme that public space is really being diminished to an unbelievable extent, and any kind of notions of what it is and what the commons is (if such a thing can still exist) – are being eroded.’ Does this erosion also work at the people themselves? Bilotte and Nikaido are the nexus for the existential questions Chain raises, and true to Whitman, ‘contain multitudes’ of their own; if everything is so predetermined, so decided and cold blooded, what room is there for personal agency? What sort of freedom is this? Cohen’s ‘anti-dramatic’ approach aims, in part, at the ‘provision of stories’ but is there not also a statement here of the existential consequences of focus groups planning every aspect and detail of the environment? Where, in a world designed so that sightlines automatically happen upon the shopfront, is the possibility for self-determination or an unmanipulated emotional resonance outside what mall-supremo Taubman calls ‘the flow’ – for both designer/director and consumer/citizen alike? The tragedy may lie in the answer to that question. The success of ‘the system’, if such a monolith can be identified, is in its low maintenance – non-resistance to it is the grist to its mill (that and selective military interventions ... ). Are we to be stuck, like Amanda, with a series of banal indignities that continue without any crisis or cathartic moment to punctuate or even derail them (as would at least happen in any good Hollywood flick … )? We watch her aimlessly ride the mall escalator from one purgatorial level to another – and back again. Accordingly, we leave her in the uniform of a mall functionary, and she delivers her final testimony to a ‘third person’ camera, making a significant shift from her own observations to ones, it is implied, appropriated from her by forces unseen. Were we heartless or self-righteous enough to sneer, we might wait first to consider the real-life basis of the inner life she describes: ‘We drew some of it directly out of their own lives … [Bilotte] has never acted before. She had a far from privileged upbringing, so sometimes in the movie I am just asking her about shitty jobs she has had and it goes directly into narration without any modification at all.’ Bilotte’s autistic, fragile, screen persona utterly convinces, with all the force and integrity of Bruno S in Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. The confessionals she offers to a ‘found’ video camera are laden with a sense of existential defeat and tragedy that are discomfortingly authentic. ‘… my process tends to work backwards, so that rather than envisioning a situation or a set or a

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location, I will start with a real place or a moment and then draw it out or make it work as a sort of trigger. And to me, a lot of it frankly just comes out of the fact that I make do with what I have.’ And then, there is Tamiko’s entirely third person narrative, possible a subtle comment on ‘The Company’s’ domination of her every horizon. Her robotic English has been learned so as to better articulate its corporate aphorisms; at its behest, she lives in a string of clinically grim hotel rooms, and when she attempts to take a walk in the hotel ‘grounds’ she finds there are none, only a freeway and a grass verge. As a Japanese American said, history has ended and there’s no other possible destination. Given the codice of film to commercial space, is there hope to be found on the screen? The sense of a war on the verge of being lost (or won ... ) has been palpable in much recent independent American cinema, and the re-election of Bush surely signals yet another Dunkirk. This year’s Resfest (a global digital film festival originating in America) contained a ‘Bushwhacked’ section of shorts made by filmmakers and ‘media-jammers’ assembled as a prelude to the elections. Some of the submissions were extraordinary and memorable, such as a pointed and articulate take on the Sesame Street educational cartoons, but many more seemed repetitive and on the verge of desperate. Particularly so was Michael Moore’s effort (Boom!) that, failing to find a witty response to Bushes’ impending re-election battle, resorted to somewhat facetious and deceptive tubthumping. At a more abstracted polarity one finds Jake Mahaffy’s War (see last issue), whose subtitle ‘This is the world after the end of a world … /acre by acre, fence by fence, the war was lost’ evokes a deeper sense of social and spiritual loss in a (rural) American landscape. Shot on a hand-cranked film camera, its flickering, richly toned black and white sequences confront us with an apocalypse that is in process, where humanity is on tenuous ground; a ground that is hard and punishing. Jacob Jenkins, one of the four male protagonists, fights a losing battle against a hard earth that freezes his gateposts out of their roots and sucks at his workboots, and finds escapism, in the form of suicide, to be little use. The Preacher, thoughts voiced by another actor, fears the rapture has happened without him while out on the road and sups grain liquor on the sly. The sense of disconnection, guilt and a landscape haunted by unfulfilled promise is almost too much, and there is more than a whiff of satire in the wheezing, paranoid rants of the evangelist, the only programme available on the radio. Mahaffy has a young boy smash it, and the audience are immediately uplifted. As for Cohen, his constant process of filming the macro and the micro of consumerist architecture, landscape and cityscape produces some wonderfully funny examples of why this ethos perhaps cannot, whatever its ambitions, be permanent. Marble may indeed replace clay, and the surfaces of the malls and hotels his two acquiescent protagonists drift through shine, but signs of deterioration show through nevertheless. Signs that

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promise earthly delights are dented, rusted, chipped or broken. A memorable later sequence recalled by one character, Amanda, takes us through a defunct shopping precinct; windows boarded up, or left black and gaping, rubbish strewn across once pristine plazas, and bizarre yet fascinating forms, such as a large, cast iron ‘wheel-like’ structure we can barely identify. Whither progress – or rather, THIS form of progress? Cohen’s opening wide shot of a skyscraper, ringed by cranes and scaffolds, subliminally exposes the hubris ‘… I thought it was the big, new, ugly insurance centre, but it turns out that it is three years old and already falling apart, so they are covering it with scaffolding to try to patch it back together. To me, it is very typical.’ It is over this image that Raynor’s voiceover chimes in, on the importance of promises to the whole set-up – clear to anyone, of course, who reads a five pound note. Machiavelli counselled his princes to always keep a promise – or, at least, cover up when he breaks them. And there, surely, is the Shakespearean rub – for when these cannot be redeemed, what then? Worry is justified but despair? Last issue, Chris Harvie reminded us of the bizarre link between Wal-Mart and Mohammed Atta’s recourse to terrorism. A student of Town Planning, he centred his thesis on the encroachment of Wal-Mart on the Arab marketplaces – crucial to his culture and heritage. He is said to have concluded that nothing could stop the stale-aired mall paving over the organic chaos of Egypt’s town markets. Here perhaps is a more mature realisation, courtesy of Cohen’s surveillance: that acquiescence to some notion of ‘the end of history’ is somewhat premature.