Trinity Film Review March 2011
The Red Issue
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Trinity Film Review Issue 4. Number. The Red Issue March 2011 6 Trinity College Dublin 2 www.trinityfilmreview.com editor@trinityfilmreview.com Trinity Film Feview is funded by a grant from the DU publications Committee. This publication claims no special rights or privileges. Serious complaints should be addressed to: The Editor, Trinity Film Review, 6 Trinity College, Dubin 2. Appeals may be addressed to the Press Council of Ireland. Trinity Film Review is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland and supports the Office of the Press Ombudsman. This scheme, in addition to defending the freedom of the press, offers readers a quick, fair and free method of dealing with complaints that they may have in relation to articles that appear on our pages. To contact the Office of the Press Ombudsman go to www.pressombudsman.ie.
A note from the editor
Cast and Crew
Hello and welcome to the Red Issue!
Editor: Ciara Barrett
When brainstorming this issue’s theme, we knew we wanted to do something a bit off the beaten track, unrestricted by time or context. We wanted something ambiguous enough to be interpreted loosely and creatively in multiple ways: a challenge to ourselves and our writers. So we settled on the Red Issue. What does the “Red Issue” mean? I’d say “red” stands for whatever you think “red” stands for...Red has various connotations, from heat/lust to anger and even to communism. In general it seems to represent the extreme. And if I had to pick a colour to represent cinema, I know I’d choose red. So in this issue we present a selection of different features all in some way inspired by the concept of “red” and what it means - we think - relative to cinema. As a side note, it seems our collective obsession with Black Swan and ballet films has been by no means satiated in the aftermath of Awards Season. In this issue, we take a look at this hot-button topic (a “red” issue, no?) from three different perspectives throughout. Only a few months out and we’re already deconstructing the film as avidly as Bazin on E.
Deputy Editors: Cathal Wogan Ines Novacic Design Peter Barry Layout Ciara Barrett Peter barry Website: Conor O’Kelly Ciara Barrett Contributors: Emma Keaveney Claire McGirr Hannah O’Brien Simone Cameron-Coen
Special thanks for this issue go to: Robert Kearns, Ed Barrett, Jennie Shields, Conway Media, and Trinity Publications - without whom TFR could not, would not exist. I hope you enjoy the issue! And don ‘t forget to check us out at trinityfilmreview.com for up-to-date reviews and posts. Drop us a comment and tell us what you think!
Cover Image
Ciara
From Pina (Wim Wenders, 2011)
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From Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002)
Back Cover Image
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News
Ines Novacic
...and FInally Holy Diver
Overrated/Underrated
Ines Novacic takes a pirouette back from Black Swan while Cathal Wogan gives it up for Synechoche, New York
Incendiary Cinema
Ciara Barrett on the enduring and inflammatory power of “the cinema” - whatever that is
Pornography is Dead - Long Live Pornography
Emma Keaveney looks at the mass mediation of porn and the pornographization of mass media
TFR’s Top Ten Moments in Rage
Hannah O’Brien takes names, makes lists
Bloody Awful Ballet
Claire McGirr and Simone Cameron-Coen delve into the emotionally, mentally and physically fraught mindfield between the classic ballet film The Red Shoes and this year’s hit Black Swan
Reviews
Wake Wood La Nuit Americaine Unknown Battle: Los Angeles
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Ines Novacic Oh No He Didn’t
3D Mania
Warner Bros-based financing and production company Alcon Entertainment are in final discussions to secure the rights to produce prequels and sequels to iconic 1982 sci-fi thriller Blade Runner. Negotiations are underway with producer-director Bud Yorkin, who has enjoyed non-stop critical acclaim for the film for almost 30 years. Blade Runner is the mother of modern sci-fi films. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, and selected for preservation by the U.S. National Film Registry in 1993. The Library of Congress has deemed it “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant”. Should Alcon really go there?
Several screenings at the Berlin Film Festival proved that 3D really is becoming better then “the real thing”. Michel Ocelot, French filmmaker and animator extraodinaire deserves mention for the merits of 3D mastery. But then it was Werner Herzog and his Cave of Forgotten Dreams, that really broke the mould of 3D. A technique thus far popularly attributable to animated films, and Avatar-esque live-action, Herzog proved that we have not pushed 3D to its limits, not by a long shot. Soon-to-be-released Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a documentary/meditation on the drawings inside the Chauvet caves of southern France. To make the film, Herzog got exclusive access, but he was unable to bring in a large crew or number of cameras. Consequently, his team fashioned a small hand-held 3D camera. It’s been compared to Grizzly Man insofar as Herzog listens to and records each contribution with respect and patience, and with his instantly recognisable accented voiceover adding wry comment to proceedings. The 3D camera follows the drawings around the curves of the walls on which they were painted, slowly giving the viewer time to absorb not only their detail, but also to get a sense of their sheer historicity. Discovered in 1994, and believed to be over 30,000 years old, the drawings, some of eight-legged creatures – early attempts to convey movement – provoke Herzog’s contemplation of the art of film itself as well as greater existential questions.
Man of Aran Robert Flaherty’s seminal Irish documentary Man of Aran is to be re-released at the IFI from March 11th-17th before being re-released on DVD in a restored version, with the extras including material provided by the IFI Irish Film Archive. The film focuses on a local family, depicting their struggle to survive in a precarious environment. Flaherty’s fusion of documentary and drama has led critics to question the veracity of the footage and the story, but nonethless the film still remains a cinematic masterpiece, with beautiful imagery. Check out www.ifi.ie for more details.
A Note On the Oscars The gowns may be getting better because they’re becoming more expensive, but did anyone else notice how the 2011 Oscars demonstrated that the exact opposite is the case with our current film culture? I couldn’t help but cringe that blockbuster entertainment such as The Social Network was actually up for “Best Film”. Is the story of Facebook really the best 2010 could have done? Or am I just cyncical and film-snobby in wishing for the days of Taxi Driver, One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest and Apocalyspe Now?
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Holy Diver The Oscars: The Movie
Joel and von Trier to collaborate
Awards season may have passed but The Oscars are still hanging around. Paramount has revealed that they are in post-production on their picture, The Oscars: The Movie. The film is a sprawling tale of fragmented narrative chunks based around important or famous people called Oscar. A taster trailer is due to be released over the coming weeks, revealing some of the Oscars to be depicted. Rumours suggest that the plot begins with Oscar Wilde, the first Oscar to do anything worthwhile, ever. After that, it is anyone’s guess; Paramount has remained tightlipped over the possibilities. However, an anonymous source within the production team has told Trinity Film Review that the picture will definitely end with a showdown, a steel cage wrestling match between famous pugilist Oscar “The Golden Boy” De La Hoya and Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch.
A press release from Lars von Trier’s Zentropa production company has revealed that he is currently working on a script with musician and singer Billy Joel. The respected art-house director contacted Joel several months ago with the idea of adapting the songwriter’s 1977 song, “She’s Always a Woman”. “I see in the words a veneration of the feminine powers,” says von Trier. “Some may misinterpret the lyrics, some may say that Billy is a misogynist, but I know that he is not. I have suffered similar accusations in the past, but I do not hate women. “So what I want to do is bring these lyrics to a feature film. I want to give visual life to the destruction wrought by the woman. But I will punish her. She is frequently kind, and she’s suddenly cruel… and I will punish her for that. I will punish her so fucking hard.”
Lil B to Produce Biopic Californian rapper Lil B is poised to make his directorial debut later this year. The picture will be called I’m God and the Devil, telling the story of his own life and early career. Making your own biopic may, on the surface, seem like a rather brash statement of self-value, but B is adamant that this is a legitimate creative endeavour. “This thang, I’m gonna expand my range with this thang. This gonna be art, so hard. We got my life, we got Nick Cage man, Nick Cage. This thang gonna be so damn hot. I got skills.” MTV Films, who are producing I’m God and the Devil, said the following when contacted by Trinity Film Review. “The speculation is correct. I’m God and the Devil, Lil B’s first film, is currently shooting. Nicolas Cage is starring as Lil B. The casting of Cage was a creative choice that B insisted upon when he approached us about the project. The movie will be based around B’s contact with Karl McDonald, an aspiring music journalist from Ireland, and their growing friendship. McDonald is to be played by B himself, another creative choice he was very insistent on. B is into meta-stuff.”
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Ines Novacic
B
eauty provides a perceptual experience of pleasure and meaning. Aronofsky’s Black Swan has been hailed as a cinematic masterpiece. While it evokes a disturbing kind of pleasure that compels you to keep watching, overall, it’s rather lacking on the “meaning” front. It has only achieved its status as “true art of cinema” by stealing the themes and the art belonging to the story of Swan Lake, the plot of which it paralles. The duality of the white and black swan is embodied by Natalie Portman’s character Nina, and supplemented by Mila Kunis. The “meanings” of sanity and art that the film explores are archetypal themes portrayed by many great works of art, and unfortunately Aronofsky never manipulates them to their full potential. The casting of beautiful, young females for the protagonists is too obviously beautiful, Vincent Cassell’s character is too obviously suspicious, and Nina’s mother, with all her drawings, is too obviously unhinged. Aronofsky has attempted to dress up his characters so that they parade their inner characteristics to the point of becoming banal. Such literal costumes should have been left to the ballet stage. Black Swan has been compared to The Wrestler, with both narratives “dedicated to an unappreciated form of art”. First of all, I’m still unconvinced that wrestling constitutes art, even if we go by the standards of postmodern culture, and secondly, ballet is hardly unappreciated! Under-appreciated, maybe, but having barely been able to secure seats to the Bolshoi production of Swan Lake that opened Grand Canal Dock Theatre last year, I can vouch for the fact that the allure of ballet is far from popularly dead. Like most Aronofsky films, the little gorey sounds and body horrors stand out in particular. The body horrors and nail clippings produce the same effect as Requiem for a Dream’s focus on the mother figure’s gobbling of
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grapefruits or chattering to the TV. Black Swan not only steals its themes from Swan Lake, but borrows from ballet’s signature preoccupation with the lead female dancer. The plot focuses on Nina to the point of exclusion of almost all else. Ultimately, this is one of the film’s winning feats, because Natalie Portman has shone in her role like very few actresses have shone in general. Black Swan deals with the idea of sacrifice in the name of art and beauty. Nina is not really under-appreciated; her worst critic is herself. Nina suffers because she understands the high standards that she has the task of rising to. She has always already compromised herself, because she has given her life to art. Her demise in the film is merely the last stage of this Faustian soul-selling. What makes a film great is its enduring quality, the things it makes an audience think about and feel after leaving the cinema. The film succeeds because it tackles ideas that really make us think, and these ideas only managed to be tackled because Natalie Portman has been able to translate them onto the big screen. Black Swan is beautiful thanks to her. This is evident in the fact that Portman walked away with an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and ten other film awards. Aronofsky won “best film” once, presented by the San Diego Film Critics Association.
“Aronofsky has attempted to dress up his characters...to the point of becoming banal.” 08/03/2011 20:09
Cathal Wogan
C
harlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008) seemed to pass everyone by without much ado. Having previously wielded the pen responsible for projects such as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche stands as Kaufman’s first experience of total creative control. It isn’t surprising that the friendly arms of the collective consciousness didn’t embrace Synecdoche. It is a mesh of intersecting layers that are distinct but simultaneously intangible as separate entities, the whole of which is focused on the inherent problems of a personal existence, the fatal and inescapable nature of being. This is not comfortable viewing for the punter with popcorn. Kaufman’s concept begins relatively simply. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theatre director from New York. He has a wife and a young daughter, and is venturing into the existential crisis of middle age. After being given a massive grant to create something artistically brilliant, Hoffman’s character embarks upon a journey into the depths of the common plight of all mankind, the unbearable human condition. “I will be dying, and so will you, and so will everyone here,” whimpers the mentally self-tortured Cotard. “That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive, each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t.” It feels like such a pathetic reaction, such a feeble response, to try to tell of how this piece of art unfurls. I could try to explain the constantly folding and unfolding meta-narrative, the interpersonal plays or the indefinable motifs of the simulacra of human life but it would just be so futile. There are boundaries to my own understanding, an inability to wield competent language. I wish I could transcend those problems just to be able to tell
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you what the film means. All I can do is try to say what Synecdoche did to me, describing the sheer emotional and intellectual molestation, but it just seems like such inadequate analysis. For days after seeing the film I could feel the stabbing desolation that it left in my chest. I knew that I had witnessed an awesome and consciously accepted failed attempt at encapsulating the suffering that is existence; because Charlie Kaufman recognizes that you can’t put a pretty picture frame around existence, you can’t communicate emotional pain and suffering like that. It took me a week to go back to confirm that what I felt was not just an awful honeymoon period. The second time hurt and inspired just as the first did. That night I made a cup of tea and stared into it for comfort and answers. Needless to say, I didn’t find what I was looking for. To say that any film is the greatest of all time is such an arbitrary exercise. What merit is there in the process? How can you measure applicable qualities? We seem to like forcing things into lists, boxes and genres. It is a control. In this instance there is no control. As long as there are people making lists, compromises and generalisations, Synecdoche will not be recognized as the greatest. However, when we wear out such ridiculous practices, when we come to see that greatness cannot be measured, only experienced, remember Synecdoche, New York.
“a mesh of intersecting layers that are distinct but simultaneously intangible as separate entities.” 08/03/2011 20:09
Ciara Barrett
C
inema historian Lee Grieveson has called cinema a “combustible” medium in both the literal and figurative sense. A century ago, public fears concerning the widespread and ever-growing popularity of cinema revolved almost as much around the actual, physical inflammability of fiilm stock and projection equipment as it did around the potentially inflammatory material, ideas and actions which the cinematic medium - and the very space of the cinema itself - might convey to, or elicit from, audiences. From its very beginnings in the late 1800s, cinema has been the most controversial, provocative, and indeed most incendiary medium of mass culture and arts worldwide. Cinema has spread like wildfire across the globe, its flames fanned by big business (see the Hollywood studio system), artists/auteurs (Stan Brackhage, Jean Renoir) and political propagandists (Leni Riefenstahl), all bent on reaching the largest possible audience with their films. Upon closer inspection, this great conflagration of cinema may be more effectively likened to three smaller fires burning brightly, but ever closely, together. They spark from the following issues: 1) Cinema as incendiary physical medium Thanks to technological advancements in film stock and equipment and improved building planning, cinemas are no longer the death traps they were 100 or so years ago.Yet the actual, physical medium of film is no less a controversial material than it was in 1900. The long and the short of it is that “film” is fast ceasing to be film, which angers some and worries many. Digital filmmaking, cheaper and more accessible than celluloid film stock, as well as digital exhibition and distribution - in theatres, on tv, and more and more via the internet - is revolutionizing the way we make, see and perceive “cinema”. This brings up a whole host of issues such as, “Who has the right to create cinema?” and “Who has the right to exhibit it? And how?”
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It is no longer a given that the movie we watch today in the cinema is in fact a film(-on-film). just as it is no longer a given that the “film” we watch tomorrow will be seen in the cinema. Which brings us to... 2) Cinema as incendiary physical space Cheap and accessible entertainment, cinema has always been popular with the working classes. By no coincidence, the upper classes and the educated elite have been slower to accept it as an “art.” The cinema-theatre necessarily packs people together into a small, dark space. The thinking goes that when people are thus concentrated, they are more likely to think, react and act as a unit in response to whatever stimuli they are exposed to....And when people act as a unit, they are generally effective at getting what they want...And when these people are tof the working class, they usually want. what the upper classes already have. (Also, people are assumed to get friskier in small, dark spaces than they do in bright, open spaces. Which brings us to...) 3) Cinema as incendiary ideological apparatus Nobody has ever successfully proven that moving audiovisual images, when played back and projected on a screen for an audience, are more likely to incite those people to think and act in a certain way than other media, such as books, plays are music, might do. But seeing is believing (or so we are led to believe), and it has similarly been the fear of the upper classes and the educated elite that cinema has the power to change minds and morals - specifically, sexual morals and morals pertaining to the exercising of violent or otherwise antisocial impulses. Cinema is popular - indeed it is made by the people, is usually about people, and is always made for the people. But can it destroy people as well? It is debatable, and purely speculative, whether in another hundred years’ time we will be talking about “cinema”
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“Cinema has spread like wildfire across the globe, its flames fanned by big business, art and politics.”
at all. The word “film” may easily have slipped from our lexicon, whatever that lexicon may be. But what is certain is that we - this society: irish, Western, and/or globalized - will be watching moving, audio-visual
images on some sort of screen or through some sort of medium. And we’ll be worried about how it’s affecting us...maybe even real burned up about it.
Still from Man With A Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
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A Bout de Souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) Nuit et Brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1955)
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971)
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933) Ecstasy (Gustav Machaty, 1933)
Empire of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1974
Tetsuo, The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto. 1989)
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915))
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Rocky Road to Dublin (Peter Lennon, 1968) I Am Curious (Yellow) (Vilgot Sjorman, 1967)
Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972)
Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Un Chant d’Amour (Jean Genet, 1950) Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)
Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004)
The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004)
Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) The Jazz Singer (Richard Fleischer, 1927)
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“As the pornographic realm becomes increasingly simulated, boring and less likely to confront any genuine societal taboos, reallife sex becomes an ever-more tantalising prospect.�
D E R O S
N E C
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Emma Keaveney
I
watch porn. Not every day or even every week. But every now and then a nagging curiosity provokes me to type something filthy into Google. I’m a comfortably middle class, Masters-educated, white girl and last night I watched a man ejaculate on a plate before feeding the white sticky mess to the bosomy blonde grovelling at his ankles. And I laughed.
sick fantasy and bodily functions are acted out. Porn is an important and necessary outlet, one which finds its genesis in the beginnings of humankind: you can be sure that at the dawn of civilisation, there was a caveman with his hands down his trousers reacting to the social morays of the day by masturbating to a crudely drawn stone etching of a booby lady.
It’s a common reaction on my part. With the proliferation of pornographic images making them a commonplace in Western culture, porn seems to have lost its edge, its frisson, its “raison d’etre”. Porn is no longer pornographic, and instead has become a bit…well, boring. We live in an internet-generated candyland of sex; most of us are exposed to soft-porn on a daily basis. But, thanks to the everyday presence of porn in our lives, the most common reaction this candyland now inspires in us is “meh”.
For centuries before it became something we could watch, the pornographic was represented on paper. The quality varied from the sadistic erotica of The Marquis de Sade to crude and cheap underground novels. In the Victorian era, the pornographic paperback was a huge seller – often accompanied by guides to the best areas for prostitution in large cities – much like the travel guides of today. Yet, despite it’s popularity, it was still underground, still something naughty to be whispered about. Porn was provoking and volatile, almost political: a way of giving two fingers to the establishment. It is this element that has been lost in the multibillion-dollar globalised markets of twentieth century porn.
In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart of the American Supreme Court attempted a definition of hard-core pornography. He didn’t get very far, instead admitting that he wasn’t sure what it was but “I know it when I see it.” Attempting a definition of porn is a slippery business. “It’s something you can masturbate to” said one friend of mine. But I’ve heard of people masturbating to anything from Facebook photos to episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch – and both of these are certainly filed under “nonporn”. It doesn’t even necessarily have to show sex. “2 girls 1 cup’”was a pornographic film showing girls defecating and vomiting on one another. Its status as porn was never questioned – despite the fact that there is no sex (in the traditional sense) in the video. Porn does, however, have to be for erotic, or bodily, pleasure – at it’s most basic level, the “pornographic’”realm is seen as inciting a pleasurable reaction through words or images. It taps into a very basic fascination with the way our bodies work and react. In another very crucial way, the “pornographic” is meant to excite and to provoke, acting as a politically and socially corrupt zone where
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Thanks to cinema first and followed by the internet, today porn is moving further towards mainstream acceptance. Granted, it is not yet acceptable dinner conversation when your Nan has come round for tea. But it is no longer underground: instead it’s Nailin’ Palin and Jenna Jameson. As the pornographic realm becomes increasingly simulated, increasingly boring and less likely to confront any genuine societal taboos, real-life sex becomes an ever-more tantalising prospect. The weirdest thing jaded audiences can hear in a porno is “I love you” – the endearment hinting at an intimacy we, as voyeurs, shouldn’t be witnessing. We need to be shocked: maybe it reminds us that we’re human and we’re alive. But when real sex is taboo and the pornpgraphic is everyday, you’ve got to wonder whether porn is satisfying our need for a necessary provocative outlet.
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Hannah O’Brien
W
e all know what it is to feel angry. Unsurprisingly, this eseential human emotion has been represented and translated onto film and into actors’ performances since cinema began. But how is anger defined onscreen, what is its iconography, and what are its representational tropes? In attempts to sort it out, I have chosen ten film characters that have moved me with passionate, harrowing and varied interpretations of rage. For the most part, these are representations of anger depicted through physical violence or visceral means – physically manifested anger is outwardly affecting, thus more likely to shock audience, and therefore most heavily in film to show anger on film. This physical manifestation of anger is rage.
8. Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) Many would say that anger is a common trait in De Niro’s performances. Here he is Jake LaMotta, a talented boxer who falls short of being anything but a fist-swinging brute. From overturning a kitchen table because his pregnant wife overcooks his steak, to threatening to eat his neighbour’s dog for lunch, to asking his brother to punch him in the face to reaffirm his masculinity, to randomly slapping his wife around the place, and finally, to the iconic scene in which he nearly kills his beloved brother for supposedly sleeping with his wife, this man is an unlovable ogre. Pugilistic rage.
10. Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002) He ain’t called the “Butcher” for no reason. He stabs his card partner in the hand only to pat him on the head a few seconds later, decalring, “You learn a lot butchering meat”. He also describes Leonardo Di Caprio as “fresh meat” that needs to be tenderised and says he’s “going to paint paradise square with his blood. Two coats. I’ll festoon my bed-chamber with his guts.” Bigoted rage.
9. Richard Harris as Bull McCabe The Field (Jim Sheridan, 1990) In between attempting to manipulate his claim on a patch of land and pressurizing his son to the point of lunacy, he manages to literally bash to a pulp the head of the unfortunate Yank who’s dared buy the infamous field. There’s a touch of pathos to his rage, in that the field has been a child he nourished when everybody else abandoned it. Proud rage.
7. Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2008) Three words: Drainage, milkshake and bowling. Plainview’s thirst for oil is nothing compared to his thirst for blood. Among his most horrific actions is the manner in which he redefines how the game of bowling should be played: knocking over an enemy with the bowling balls and beating him to death with the pegs, afterwards plonking on the floor like a contented puppy to say, “I’m finished!” This is one of those rare moments in cinema where the violence is so extreme and bizarre that you honestly don’t know whether to be amused or terrified. Greedy rage
6. Sean Penn as Jimmy in Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003) Jimmy’s anger and consequent violent actions are driven from the deepest chasms of despair: a father’s grief for his murdered child. From the beginning, we are
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compelled to side with Jimmy, a happily married father of three who attends church regularly. The scene in which he discovers her body is one of the most emotionally wrenching scenes onscreen. This is a revenge narrative, therefore we feel that Jimmy’s rage and violence is justified. But this does not prepare us for his merciless brutality towards the end of the film where he slowly and coldly murders his friend for supposedly murdering his daughter. The tension is tangible and death inevitable. Our hero has gone from grieving father to malevolent villain. Vengeful rage.
watch, he is another example of when the lines between insanity and rage become blurred. He is undoubtedly one of the most unpredictable characters to grace the screen, one moment cracking jokes, the next exploding with rage. Unpredictable rage.
2. John Malkovich as Osbourne Cox in Burn After Reading (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2008)
5. Angelina Jolie as Lisa in Girl, Interrupted (1999) Women do get angry, but seemingly not on the same violent scale as men (at least in films). We seem to have either hysterical weeping fits or extreme moments of shizophrenic rage. But then there is Ms. Jolie, infamous for her powerhouse capacity for portraying troubled individuals; her Lisa is no exception. She is a patient in a female psychic institution, both friend and foil to Winona Ryder’s Bambi-eyed schitzophrenic heroine. A character whose emotions seem to overlap between loveable and dangerous, she displays a range of emotions in the terrifying scene in which she bursts into a room, cornering the speechless Ryder and demanding to know where her dead roommate is. This raises my question: where do we draw the line between madness and rage? Psychotic rage.
4. Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather II (Francis Ford Coppolla, 1974) Here are some ways to get on with the Don. Don’t lie, don’t side against the family, don’t be his brother Fredo, don’t diss Sicilians and above all, don’t ever admit to aborting his child – especially not a son – or indeed describe your whole marriage as an “abortion, something that’s unholy”. Or the Don will smack you in the face. Power-made rage.
From shrieking “This is a crucifixion – who’s ass didn’t I kiss?” at his boss, to boxing an unassuming and marvellously dim-witted Brad Pitt in the nose, to hammering down the front door after his wife locks him out, to running after an intruder in his nightgown and eventually hacking him to pieces with a hatchet, Malkovich is the king of violent anger. Violent rage.
1. Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) I thought it apt to end with the character whom most of the above have striven to emulate. This is Brando at his best, oozing a visceral intensity and animalistic primitiveness that shocked the sensitivity of the Production Code censors. He dominates the screen, using his skilfully honed Method to literally spit contempt at everyone around him, including the audience. It’s difficult to like Brando, as he leers and treats women like prey and embodies a profound violence that had never been seen in films before. While Brando’s inescapable charm and physicality cannot escape our notice, we cannot excuse his alleged rape of his unstable sister in law towards the end of the play. It can be said that Brando did for drama what Chaplin did for comedy, as he revolutionized the manner in which violence, sexuality, primitiveness and rage could be captured onscreen in the same instant. Complex rage.
3. Joe Pesci as Tommy De Vito in Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) This little fellow simultaneously kisses his friends and pulverises their insides. Fascinating and terrifying to
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Claire McGirr draws parallels between Black Swan and 1948’s The Red Shoes while Simone Cameron-Coen contrasts their approaches to representing emotional and physical violence onscreen
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ominated for four and winning two Academy Awards, The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948) was celebrated for its cinematic depiction of ballet. It seems history is repeating itself as sixty years later Black Swan enthralls today’s audiences. In both these films, directors reinterpret renowned ballets through cinematic realism. Black Swan and The Red Shoes mirror each other in many aspects; their comparison is, therefore, critically indispensible. Their heorines, Nina (Natalie Portman in Black Swan) and Victoria (Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes), are ballerinas and equally “women in distress”. Their narratives parallel each other in that Nina and Victoria become so engrossed in their parts that the fairytales they dance become their tragic actuality. The Red Shoes is loosely based on a Hans Christian Anderson story called The Red Shoes, while Black Swan is based on the ballet Swan Lake, whose origins lie in Russian folklore. After years of practice and dedication Nina is awarded the role(s) of Swan Queen/Black Swan in Swan Lake but takes her part past physical commitment to such a degree that eventually she cannot distinguish between reality and her part/personality as the characters in the ballet. She winds up killing herself (unwittingly) in parallel with the Swan Queen’s suicide. Victoria, on the other hand, is forced to relive the ballet of The Red Shoes as, from the moment she is torn between her lover and her love for dance, the red ballet shoes she is wearing take control of her feet. Eventually they force her to throw herself from a balcony. This dilemma ultimately causes the film to cross a barrier of realism: the red shoes ensure her suicide in real life as they do in the ballet itself. In both films, the ballets the women perform become subplots to their lives. Swan Lake and The Red Shoes transcend fantasy to infiltrate the real, daily lives of the ballerinas who dance these roles. The Svengali figure is also key to each film. Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrrok) and Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) assume the parts of caring mentors, focused on training their novices to fulfill their potential. However, in both Black Swan and The Red Shoes, these mentors have ulterior motives, a wish to capitalise on the talents of the
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ballerinas, whatever the cost. Although Boris and Thomas both manipulate their protégées to achieve their ends, they approach their goals differently. Thomas in Black Swan pushes Nina to let go of her “perfect idealism” of ballet and become the Black Swan, all to create the greatest production of Swan Lake ever to have graced the stage. He cares little for her welfare as he seduces and manipulates her to assume a role which is psychologically unnatural for the virginal ballerina. Thomas forces Nina out of her comfort zone with little regard for her happiness and safety. The result is her psychosis. Nina will now go to any lengths to accomplish what she believes will be the perfect manifestation of the Swan Queen, regardless of any emotional and psychological trauma. Consequently, Nina becomes infatuated with her mentor, confusing her emotions and her instincts, leading to her fall from grace. In The Red Shoes, on the other hand, Boris enforces his logical ideals onto Victoria, ensuring that she is aware that in his company one cannot be sidetracked by love or marriage. Here we can see a different approach to the Svensgali figure. Thomas in Black Swan makes Nina forget her rulebook approach to ballet and assume the nature of the role, whereas Boris in The Red Shoes dictates rigid, orthodox methods. Boris’s means of ensuring a spectacular ballet production becomes problematic when her realizes that he himself has fallen in love with the ballerina. His infatuation with Victoria actually echoes the role of the black swan as he tries to engulf and dominate her. Once again we can see a parallel between the two films. The comparison of Boris and the Black Swan can be most prominently viewed in the scene where he learns of Victoria and Julian Craster’s (Marius Goring) marriage.
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His thoughts are now wholly occupied with Victoria, which is portrayed through his manic facial expressions and the smashing of a mirror. Similarly, in Black Swan, Nina becomes so obsessed with her role and her mentor that she also smashes her mirror in an internal battle for identity. It would seem that in both The Red Shoes and Black Swan, the point of no return psychologically for Nina and Boris
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here is a terrible beauty inherent to ballet and to films about ballet, by extension. The visceral physicality of the art, combined with its intense competitiveness, has been compelling to watch from The Red Shoes (1948) to Black Swan (2010). Has the ballet film evolved in that time? Perhaps it has, taking Aronofsky’s latest film as exemplary, but only to the extent that it has made the violent physicality/physical violence of ballet more insistently visible, if not more visceral, onscreen. Compared to The Red Shoes, Black Swan is only different in the level of torture the central characters endure before their downfalls. The grueling physical exercises these dancers suffer, exacerbating/exacerbated by extreme mental pressures, is highlighted in the film in two instances. The company’s unbalanced prima ballerina Beth (Winona Ryder) storms out of her dressing room after being told she is to be demoted, and is later severely injured in a car accident, which leaves her literally and figuratively impotent. The camera lingers on her gored legs: once powerful, now destroyed. Whereas once she commanded her own body into motion, now it is objectified by our pitying gaze. Beth is thus emotionally and narratively destroyed. Our heroine Nina Sayers’s (Nathalie Portman) destruction follows a similar, if more drawnout, arc. Early on in the film, Nina breaks a toenail while practicing a difficult succession of fouette turns. We hear it before we see it, and our morbid curiosity, hungry for visual satisfaction, is thus piqued. Underneath her pretty pink slippers is a shattered and bloody nail. Henceforth, any mastery of physical/ artistic technique is matched by some failing or punishment of her body and/or mind. As Nina struggles with the pressure of being promoted to prima ballerina after Beth, physical signs of her troubled mind begin to manifest themselves. Sometimes these signs appear to her and her mother – a rash on her shoulder for example. But often these deformities and flaws are a figment of Nina’s imagination, a hangnail that, when pulled, tears the flesh off an entire finger. These are horrific and violent images with which Aronofsky plays on our love/fear of abject physicality: nails, skin, feet, all parts of
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is represented in the destruction of their reflections, a manifestation of a rejection of self. Just as the Black Swan leads Nina to her untimely death, Boris places Victoria in an impossible situation: to choose between love and dance. The decision is too much for Victoria to bear, and the tragedy of The Red Shoes strikes again, claiming the life of another misguided ballerina. - CMcG
our bodies which we try to make clean/pretty/perfect to cover up their inherent association with violence/ dirtiness/the profane. As Nina explores her sexuality – first with herself, then with her mentor and finally with another dancer – and as her emotions become less contained, she experiences more and more physical change. Nina strives to push the boundaries of her own physical/sexual repression to become a fully sexual being. Thus she experiences conflict between her own sexual subjectivity/agency, her desire to be desired/objectified by others, and her narcissistic desire for herself. Between such subjective and objective states, between sanity and insanity – and between Natalie Portman’s subjective interpretation of the character and the audience’s objective interpretation of her performance and sexualized body – Nina exists fully in limbo in an abject realm. Nina’s essential abjectivity is highlighted by the smothering co-dependent relationship she has with her mother. The more Nina expresses an individualist ambition to play the part of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, the more concerned and neurotic her mother becomes. Each step towards independence and success is countered by painful, emotional interventionism by her mother – and counter-countered by the physical rebellion in/from Nina’s body. Her rash develops strange bumps, from which she plucks a barbed feather. She slams a door on her mother’s hand with an uncharachteristic outwardsdirected violence. This all culminates in a triumphant, metamorphic performance in which Nina actually turns into a black swan (at least in her own mind) in front of an audience including her mother. The beauty she creates is a negotiation between subjective and objective points of view, a fully abject state, which is unsustainable – except in death. Nina finally splits from the controlled Nina/Odette who answers to her mother into the ambitious and emotional Nina/Odile who is physically/sexually in charge of herself, but in so doing she has to kill off her white swan self/physical being. Nina’s most powerful moment as a dancer, the peak of her ambition and success, is the crescendo of her mental breakdown and death. She must die, and the movie must end. Black Swan is a more visceral and physically detailed investigation of a troubled mind than is its parent film, The Red Shoes. Narratively and even formally similar, to some degree, as Clare McGirr has shown, it is in the gratuitousness of their physical realism that these films diverge. And in that divergence, a terrible beauty is born. - SCC
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Wake Wood
Battle: Los Angeles
Laura McKenna
Barbaire Holmes
ately, horror has been lacking in watchable films. Amidst terrible remakes and even worse storylines, Wake Wood, the latest in the Hammer Horror line, makes a refreshing change and brings some life back into this tired genre.
ith its colossal metallic space ships, Michelle Rodriguez behind the controls of a helicopter and panicked live news reports, Jonathan Liebesman’s Battle: Los Angles doesn’t stray too far from Hollywood convention. The film does, however, deliver a highoctane punch of spectacular special effects and fastpaced action.
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Although Wake Wood incorporates some of your expected cheap thrills such as sudden jumps, sinister characters and classic clichés, Wake Wood reintroduces concepts that have been forgotten over the years in horror: fine character development, realistic gore scenes and an actual plot. In the opening scene, we are introduced to Patrick, Louise and their little girl Alice. Within five minutes of the classic Hammer style opening credits, Alice is brutally slaughtered by a dog. Her parents are devastated and move to the quiet town of Wake Wood. It’s in this strange place that they learn of a peculiar talent that the locals possess – they can bring the deceased back to life for three days. The sinister leader of the town (played exceptionally well by Timothy Spall) agrees to bring Alice back to life. However, once Alice is back, the locals are terrified that something is not quite right about her and beg her parents to send her back to where she came from. Cue successful undead child madness. Wake Wood succeeds in exploring concepts of loss, denial and hope. These ideas are explored deeply throughout the film, heightening the realism – and thus the horrific potential – of its characters and situations. Wake Wood really makes you wonder: how far would you go to see a loved one one last time? Wake Wood opens 25 March.
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The film opens with twenty major cities under attack from alien forces hell bent on colonising planet earth. As their might cuts through civilian populations and military defences, a small band of marines are sent into Santa Monica to save stranded civilians. Led by permanently sweaty ubermarine Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), who effortlessly shoots off grenades and rousing pep talks, the group navigates the dusty destroyed streets of LA. In the mean time, the scrambling of the US military and the arrival of the alien armies provide set pieces to show off the films sizable visual effects budget. Eventually we come face to face with the “hostile force”: towering, unstoppable bionic creatures. Instead of the usual grandiose obliteration of national monuments, the film focuses on street level action. We navigate a labyrinth of streets, the constant sound of bullets and helicopters is reminiscent of video game streetscapes. The cinematic reproduction of this can at times be disorientating, especially as the viewpoint jumps from character to character as they are blown back and forth. Ultimately, it doesn’t really hold the film back from providing what it aims to- a classic strength-in-theface-of-adversity war movie with enough explosions to atone for any over-sentimentality. Battle: Los Angeles opens 11 March.
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La Nuit Americaine
Unknown
Ciara Barrett
Hannah O’Brien
a Nuit Americaine, or as it is better known in English, Day For Night, is one of two masterpieces by French New Wave director Francois Truffaut being re-released this month at the IFI, along his La Peau Douce, or Silken Skin.
nknown is another tribute to the versatile skills of the ever-loveable Liam Neeson. Part of the largely derivative thriller genre, Unknown brings glitter, style and intelligence to fights, lovely ladies and cars going boom.
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In 1959, Truffaut helped usher in the New Wave, or Nouvelle Vague, with the release of 400 Blows. In that film, Truffaut famously left audiences with the jarring final freeze frame of his boy protagonist, suspended forever between narrative resolution and indeterminacy. Like many of the New Wave films, it was a commentary-cumchallenge to the staid conventions of generic (that is, largely Hollywood) cinema. But with La Nuit Americaine, we see more clearly Truffaut and his compatriots’ real love for Hollywood filmmaking coming through. The title is a nod to the French term used for shooting nighttime scenes in broad daylight before adding a blue-tinged fliter to the footage to make it seem nocturnal (a technique originating in Hollywood cinema for fiscal practicality). This in itself is simultaneously an ironic and unabashed nod in appreciation for the clever deceptiveness that is inherent to filmmaking and exemplified by Hollywood filmmaking in particular. La Nuit Americaine is meta-cinema, art about the creation of art. Thusly, it is not only narrative but a running commentary about its own narrative and the machinations of filmmaking. It is simultaneously cerebral and silly - the former aspect being the stereotypical hallmark of French/foreign film, and the latter being the stereotypical hallmark of Hollywood/generic cinema. Truffaut’s film, like the best of the French New Wave, exists somewhere between the two. La Nuit Americaine screens at the IFI on 14 March.
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Neeson’s brains aren’t in his biceps; he is classy, suave, dignified and deep, building upon the edgy, desperado persona he dabbled with in Taken (2008). Most of the film depicts Neeson’s character’s attempt to prove his identity after a traumatic car crash, evade mysterious assassins and discover that he may not be as innocent as he once thought. Unknown is a bit more cerebral than most action movies. While it does not have the most original of plots, it attempts to break from its muscular, mechanical and spectacle-driven kin with a smart and resourceful hero not unlike Jason Bourne. It may hit certain generic clichés with cars going ‘boom’ a lot, but the film offers some memorable scenes driven by the charismatic Neeson and Kruger, who is more Angelina Jolie-spy than insipid Bond girl. She gets to kick some real ass. And the platonic relationship between Neeson and Kruger provides a nice deviation from sexually-bound dynamics. They are two lost souls trying to help each other or, as Kruger states, “discover who they are and who they want to become.” Ultimately, Unknown is an enjoyable film which shirks predictability with some jolting twists, and stands as another example of Neeson’s versatility. Perhaps, with his return to leading man status, Neeson might secure more of the powerful roles he so effectively dominates. Unknown is now playing at cinemas in Dublin.
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