Category: VOLUME 14: PORTALS OF THE PAST

VOLUME 14: PORTALS OF THE PAST

July 25, 2023 ·

The Portals of the Past exist in physical form as a marble archway in San Francisco, now a monument to the 1906 earthquake which destroyed much of the historic city. It is all that remains of a mansion owned by wealthy Gilded Age tycoon Alban Towne, and takes its name from Arnold Genthe’s photograph of said archway, which framed the ruined city through its pillars. Genthe’s image, captured through the rubble littering the arch, is one of a past viewed from the brutally abrupt present. The archway’s consolidation as a memorial supposedly symbolises our capacity to emerge from disaster with a desire to rebuild. In this issue, taking inspiration from the Portals of the Past as they feature in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), we take stock of the cinematic past through the dilapidation of the present.

Under an archway of crumpled, disappointing movie stars, it is clearer that the entertainment industry and its fans have long been guilty of rehabilitating and enabling their abhorrence. In January 1991 Oliver Reed agreed to appear on an episode of the late-night chat show After Dark (1987 – 1991) to discuss the topic ‘Do Men Have to be Violent?’ a week after he’d successfully won a libel case against The Sun newspaper for calling him a ‘wife-beater’. In May 2023, after his own libel case against The Sun for the very same reason (plus a trial of oversaturating publicity in Virginia), Johnny Depp is giving a vaguely coherent press conference at Cannes Film Festival after the premiere of his most recent film Jeanne du Barry (2023). The two men dominate the discussion space they are afforded, not only due to their contextual notoriety, but also the acquired mystique of their celebrity. Both have had their Elysian days being counted among the biggest movie stars of their day, and this in conjunction with the tumult of their personal lives represents an irresistible exploit to media of all stripes. These discussions, happening 32 years apart, indicate that society (as shepherded by the press but also the memetics of social media) very much still leans towards validating the inclusion of violent, unstable abusers in public life for the sake of discourse, especially if they just so happen to be magnetic, eccentric figures.

Society has an irrepressible urge to view progress in a linear context. It’s why a title like ‘The Dark Ages’ indicates to most a period of ignorance and baseness, when it is actually a historiographical title alluding to a lack of material resources. Likewise, while we may presume that the era in which Oliver Reed’s erratic and at times dangerous behaviour allowed him to flourish rather than face consequences, there is more to indicate a rejection of his personage back in 1991 than there is for Johnny Depp in 2023. The After Dark episode is one of British television infamy – Reed groped, kissed and used misogynistic slurs against the feminist author Kate Millett, to the extent that the other guests insist he leave the studio. When it became clear the other guests were sick of him, his bravado burst and he slunk away, reduced to an embarrassed schoolboy by his own behaviour. He faced consternation by friends and family in its aftermath, including his brother David, who was also his manager. All of them made it clear they were not prepared to put up with or support him much longer. He also faced a lawsuit by his longtime friend and stuntman Reg Prince in 1993. While he was not cancelled in the modern sense of the word, his admonishment by those closest to him, alongside a noted decline in his cinematic output, was a sign of the world tiring of him.

The world of today does not seem to have tired much of Johnny Depp, despite the diminution of his box office appeal and performance standard. Rather, in the hypersaturation of online news and media, where legions of unhinged online fans can easily swamp any discussion of his character or actions, we are left to observe him through a haze of normalisation. During his Cannes press conference Depp extrapolated on his experience at Cannes in the present day compared to when he first visited, in 1992: “It was absolutely a circus like nothing I’d ever seen. It remains the same.” As he searches to expand on the point, in sentences dotted with indulgent pauses, the camera slowly zooms out from the faces of Depp’s female co-stars India Hair and Suzanne de Baecque and their thousand-yard stares, with director-star Maïwenn appearing in shot, lastly Depp appears who is by now talking about the press’s relationship with the truth, and an individualistic belief in truth. The meditative search of the camera coupled with Depp’s tonic drawl creates a suspension, a lull in which the emphatic controversy surrounding this man and his actions is dulled. Move to the Youtube comments and there lies a fathomless scroll of supportive words and parasocial sycophancy. It has become depressingly clear that the way the Depp v. Heard trial was broadcast to the world and the accompanying social media vivisection means there will likely never be ramifications for Depp. Similarly, with the premiere of The Flash (2023) happening the week in which I started writing this, a multitude took to social media to acknowledge the surreality of its star Ezra Miller arriving at the red carpet with the full knowledge that they have committed multiple assaults and allegedly kidnapped a vulnerable child. It falls into an uncanny valley of human behaviour – everyone knows that this premiere absolutely should not be happening, that we should not be welcoming this person to a congratulatory event, and yet – it’s happening.

If time is indeed a dragon eating its own tail – ouroboros has through coincidence become this issue’s recurring subtheme – then we ride on its back sempiternally sheltered under the marble archway. Cinema Year Zero was founded on the edge of history, and in this issue each piece takes stock of everything which has come from our position in the Now. Delightfully four writers are making their Cinema Year Zero debut in this issue.

Wilde Davis examines the use of late 20th century amateur porn in Kalil Haddad’s new archive-driven short as a means of resisting the rising commodification of queer culture and politics.

Dylan Adamson relays how the heliotropic camerawork of Franco Piavoli lends itself to a world governed by nature rather than the human concept of time.

Anand Sudha analyses the intersection between antiquated spirituality and the modern in Rossellini’s Europe ‘51.

James Brice considers Music, Angela Schalenec’s most recent contribution to the Berlin School, and its position in the shadow of German reunification.

Cathy Brennan evokes productive power in relation to internet video clips of violence against trans women.

Finally, Ben Flanagan brings us a round-up of the triumphant Mamoulian programme at the most historiographical of festivals, Il Cinema Ritrovato.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

THE TAKING OF JORDAN (ALL AMERICAN BOY)

July 25, 2023 ·

Death Ritual

Wilde Davis

Kalil Haddad’s latest short, The Taking of Jordan (All American Boy) (2022), treats amateur porn as documentary. It begins with recall. We are introduced to Jordan, named after the amateur Broke Straight Boys star featured prominently throughout. On first introduction, he’s tied up on a bed, eyes digitally covered with red bars. He could be any boy. His impending death is foretold across the bottom of the screen through subtitles which tick alongside the drum of hospital monitors. He has lived many past lives, all of which met violent ends.

Gay porn is the de facto raw material for many queer filmmakers working with found footage. By repurposing history, artists like Luther Price and Elizabeth Purcell have built narratives that invoke the past as a means of uncovering a revolutionary present. Kalil Haddad is a queer filmmaker and video artist from Toronto who distorts lo-fi footage to flesh out new conversations around historical realities. His work blends experimental, documentary, and narrative elements in a uniquely contemporary way, adding to a wave of experimental queer filmmakers who are using the cinematic archive to inspire new meditations on genre, politics, and art.

After a pulse of hospital bells rings out, an oppressive industrial noise track initiates the destruction of Jordan. The film drops into an underworld abyss, shifting from still image to rapid video montage. There, hungry boys looking for their big break get off five times a day for blank cameramen who never show face. Their voices become the narration of a reckoning. The moving image of a young actor having rough sex is rapidly spliced with stills of red. This beat is pounded into the brain by an industrial noise mix that defines much of Jordan’s soundscape. In a film that’s constantly delving further underground, the music is the anchor that sinks the spirit into the underworld. Remixing music by Vatican Shadow and Prurient, Haddad employs punk prowess in the service of Situationist symbol. The blood drained to feed the entertainment machine, to suck the life force from Ganymede. From then on, the image morphs, reminiscent of VHS oddities yet distinctly digital. Wrapped in a scuzzy layer, the analog material is stripped bare and rendered anew via Haddad’s digital distortion.

Jordan is the embodiment of every hustler who’s taken on a new name to escape himself and service the trade. Selling the asset of youth becomes their only way out of material oppression and eternal damnation. At one point, the viewer is acquainted with hung vintage porn star Steve York. Like the other iterations of Jordan, he is an archetype. Despite having escaped the fate himself, he stands in for his many contemporaries murdered in the AIDS genocide. “A long time ago,” the subtitles read, but this bloody ritual stumbles on. Jordan represents all the working class boys dying for the viewer’s pleasure, the commodification of capitalist culture’s obsession with whiteness and violence. They embody what this culture deems sexy: white, muscular men with big dicks and a toothy grin. Haddad’s choice to display white actors who convey what homonormative culture has deemed attractive is intentional. It reveals the way in which liberated desire in a capitalist context does nothing but reinforce white supremacy and dissociative individualism. Like something from Salò, the labor of sex workers is manipulated for the pleasure of individuals in private bourgeois spaces. Midway through the film, an elated Jordan finds out he will be getting 200 bucks for the video he just shot. Pennies compared to the boss’s millions.

Working and remaking image, layering graphic porn shots and distorting them with lo-fi efficiency, these reimaginings themselves narrated by mothers who are the final vestiges of these dead boys, Haddad makes clear the destructive nature of these interactions. This smut is merely snuff film reincarnated by the profit motive. It thrusts the technical distortion of commercialized gay sex out into the open. While claiming to liberate desire, capital merely allows for it to be channeled into a new money making scheme. Queer sex remains proletarian and thus retains a radical potential as it refuses to reproduce this violence and threatens to displace the capitalist heterospectacle.

Haddad imagines the context unfurling around these amateur sets. Bosses linger over cameras like priests in confession: have you ever done this before? The footage is earnest. Amateur porn taps at something below the surface of sterilized commercial porn. It’s proletarian, the cheap aesthetics keeping the means of production within grasp. When the camcorder switches off, the taking of Jordan unfolds, leaving the studio to enter a mirage of Haddad’s own making. Drawing from vintage and amateur porn, a new narrative emerges to reclaim history as a portal for unlocking revolutionary desire.

While liberal aesthetics, such as a certain queer culture vulture (and literal bad actor) being cast as a closeted gay cop, try to sterilize queerness and make it clean, Haddad ensures it stays dirty. He is uninterested in fantasy. Through his editing, he discovers the reality that lies behind these images. In doing so, a new queer politic emerges. He is a part of an increasingly loud and radical queer left that is revolting against assimilationist identity politics. Over the course of the last decade, identity politics has become a tool for neoliberal capitalism to box, sell, and profit off queer culture and queer labor by boiling it down to a list of slogans and plastic celebrities. In doing so, it seeks to incorporate a sliver of queers into a delusional middle-class mainstream. The queers and trans folks who make up a significant portion of the working class are then cast out of Queer Culture and forced to dive underground.

Seeking history as a ruin of resources, these artists, workers, and writers are unveiling materialist truths concerning the connection between sexuality, gender, race, and class exploitation. Contemporary art practices allow for the making and remaking of archival text. Technology’s progression has created the conditions for the rapid sharing, interpretation, breaking down, and reintroduction of information to the public. Haddad’s filmmaking becomes a tool for building class consciousness as it pulls images from a radical queer history and reinterprets them in a new generational context. Sex workers have always been at the front line of the queer vanguard. Centering his story alongside broke fags, Haddad makes a remarkable statement about the political potential of experimental cinema.

This film is not an indictment of porn nor a moralistic venture. Haddad finds comfort in the amateur, which seems to retain some level of humanity in comparison to the polished 4K of contemporary gay pornography. The Taking of Jordan is dialectical retribution, rather. It’s a middle finger to the bosses who recklessly allow their workers to meet such violent ends. These young boys live out tragedies for mass consumptive pleasure. As the 7 minute film reaches climax, Haddad rapidly intertwines the various iterations of Jordan. We’re left staring into his eyes, listening to a mother’s voice narrating the queer performance of death.

Haddad is making gritty experimental art for the people. He revels in the radical possibilities of grainy schlock and lifts an untold story from the apocalyptic depravity of amateur porn. He rejects capitalist commodification and in doing so lends voice to the forever silence of exploited youth.

The Taking of Jordan (All American Boy) won a Jury Prize for Best of the Festival at Onion City Experimental Film Festival in Chicago. Four of Haddad’s films are available through The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. See more at kalilhaddad.com.

IL PIANETA AZZURRO

July 25, 2023 ·

Alien View

Dylan Adamson

At any moment in a Franco Piavoli film, within a few degrees, one is always conscious of the precise position of the sun in the sky. A dozen little narratives pepper his films, and life brims from each element of his mise-en-scène. But one overarching story remains in focus: The daily, annual, and eternal cycles of the sun’s arc across the sky, and the earth’s revolution around the sun. All that unfolds on the ground is a cyclical expression of this greater unity.

In 1933, Piavoli was born in the small Brescian village of Pozzolengo, allegedly named for the Italian world for “cistern” (pozzo) due to its situation in a wetland, and consistently inhabited since the Bronze Age. He’s rarely departed from this landscape in his filmmaking career: the shallow valleys, creeks, and vineyards of Lombardy ground Piavoli’s work while affording him a glimpse of the eternal. Piavoli studied law at the University of Pavia outside of Milan, and shot his first 8mm short, Ambulatorio in 1954. He worked as a lawyer and a high school teacher, and aside from his experimental filmmaking which has been praised by the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Stan Brakhage, he has practiced painting and photography. Across 90 years, he’s directed fourteen shorts and six features, the most recent of which, Feast, debuted at Locarno in 2016. In a not-so-infrequent phenomenon, among the re-usable calendars for 2023 is 1933’s, meaning Piavoli’s ninetieth birthday, on June 21, fell on the same day he was born, a Wednesday.

1982’s Il Pianeta Azzurro, his first feature, opens with a quote from Lucretius: “Birth spreads itself through one to another, and life is nobody’s property but at everybody’s disposal.” Until the closing credits, it’s the film’s only subtitle, and the only one necessary. The film is a series of shots of natural and occasionally manmade sights in and around Brescia. Filmed over the course of three years after the birth of Piavoli’s first son, Il Pianeta Azzurro tells the story of a day, a year, and the ever-expanding history of the world. The snow melts in the morning, April showers bring the promised May flowers before midday, and leaves fall as the sun sets. From birth, to death, to rebirth, Piavoli’s camera finds life spreading through many things, all of them beautiful. Unlike, say, Planet Earth (2006) or any of the other David Attenborough naturesploitation documentaries (The Blue Planet (2001), for one), Piavoli’s visions of natural life are liberated from patronising human sentimentality. Pond algae, catfish, slugs, and snails float, swim, and slither through the frame in close and long shots, needing to signify nothing other than their own aliveness. His visual accomplishments—using only an Arriflex lent to him by fellow director Silvano Agosti—are every bit as spectacular as the most labour-intensive drone shots from Our Planet (2019), but the artistry seems to belong not to the auteur himself, but rather to the natural world. We feel beckoned not to watch behind-the-scenes footage, but rather to step outside and ‘touch grass,’ in modern parlance. The author is the sun striking the rushing water. Through a cloudless sky before noon, Piavoli spies frenetic hieroglyphs refracting from a hitch in the stream, holding the frame for so long as to almost urge us to read them. The film’s script could just as easily be inscribed on these rolling currents, in a language arcane but legible to anyone ready to see it.

The film’s formal strategy can seem super- or post-human, but Piavoli never seeks to exempt humanity from this grand narrative. In high summer, a pair of snails copulating in fantastic closeup is followed at once by a human couple rolling in the high grass. A transference occurs in the montage: the haptic sensation of the wet snails rolling over one another is seamlessly paired with a close up of goose pimples forming on the girl’s arm, snail eroticizing human and vice-versa, with the ultimate effect being the return of reproduction to a worldly process. Piavoli holds on a shot of the deflated grass where the sex occurred as the sunset turns the scene to amber, and the following scene shows a wheat thresher churning over that year’s crop. The industrial images don’t seem an interruption of the natural procession, but rather a continuation of these annual cycles, sowing and reaping, with no more or less beauty than anything else. To the New York Times critic Nathan Lee, who, in 2008, wrote of Il Pianeta Azzurro: “The movie doesn’t move; it’s a slideshow, lacking intelligent image-rhyme, counterpoint or melodic progression from shot to shot,” I would urge him to not miss the forest for the trees, the grass, the little shadows cast by each blade, and the sunlight reflecting off the morning dew. The narrative is so simple as to be almost obscure. Piavoli’s perspective is lofty, but not alien. His incorporation of human life into these eternal cycles is all the more powerful in its strangeness. Before night falls, he employs a rare shot/reverse shot to strangely heartbreaking effect, showing a heretofore unseen woman in close-up, bathed in orange, and the sun completing its daily arc.

The horizon line is scarcely visible on the misty seascape that begins 1989’s Nostos: Il Ritorno, Piavoli’s subsequent film, and when the protagonist looks at the sun on the waves, he sees through to a bed of corpses underneath. If Il Pianeta Azzurro began with perennial cycles and sought to demonstrate humanity’s involvement, Nostos moves in the opposite direction, beginning with a quintessentially human story and seeking to elevate it to the arc of the sun. Nostos is a loose adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. The bones of the narrative remain somewhat intact: at different points Odysseus (Luigi Mezzanotte) is trapped in a cave, separated from his men, or staying on an island with a mysterious woman. He is possessed with recurrent visions of the atrocities committed in Troy and his boyhood in Ithaca. These are conveyed as sense memories, more attentive to light and sound than action, but they nonetheless convey a rare amount of plot information for a Piavoli film. Piavoli’s adaptation seeks to return the source text to the earth. How many of Odysseus’ ten years wandering were spent gazing at the sun on the waves? As in Il Pianeta Azzurro, the substance of the narrative is natural imagery, possessed of inexhaustible signifying power. It is enough, in Piavoli’s film, at the conclusion of his stay with Calypso, to simply show Odysseus looking out on a glittering sea at sunrise, to then show Calypso watching him look out, to then abruptly cut to Odysseus floating on a makeshift raft, having resumed his journey home. The logical leap seems a moot point. Odysseus’ voyage, Piavoli seems to suggest, is the same as the sun’s daily crossing from one horizon to the other. The light on the waves is both cause and effect.

Odysseus’ recurrent memory of Ithaca shows a young version of himself spinning a hoop down a hill on a sunny day. Piavoli, in an interview accompanying Nostos’ DVD release, describes the scene as “his discovering of the world.” When Odysseus finally arrives in Ithaca, he discovers a girl spinning the same hoop. The titular return is not misplaced nostalgia, it is entirely possible. Nostos thus reminded me of the riverboat scene in Night of the Hunter (1955), when the pressing narrative concerns are waylaid by the sight of a starry night overhead, and a suddenly foregrounded bullfrog chirping from the riverbank. The girl sings from the boat: “Two pretty children flew away, flew away, into the sky, into the moon.” With the croak of a frog, the particular ascends into the universal and eternal. Leaving Calypso’s island, Odysseus’ raft disassembles in the water. As the day slips away, the water shifting from gold to a menacing navy blue, Piavoli double exposes the full moon over the dark waves, and we see a naked Odysseus, from bird’s eye view, swimming into the moon. Piavoli expands on the visual in the same interview: “He is almost like a sperm trying to reach the egg, as though trying to return to the embryonic stage. This is the profound journey that I try to express with my work.” The power and beauty of the image is undeniable, but it bears traces of human effort in a way that is absent from Il Pianeta Azzurro. Nevertheless, Nostos’ many returns are expressed as one—the deliverance of all things to the natural world. Odysseus is swimming metaphorically to the egg, but also, literally, to the moon. The story of Nostos is thus the story of Il Pianeta Azzurro, the human epic an expression of natural cycles, the impossible journey simply a matter of watching the sun set, or the moon rise.

If Il Pianeta Azzurro was so simply observed to be mistaken for mindless, the double exposed return in Nostos is unmistakably intentional. Voce Nel Tempo (1996), Piavoli’s next film, resolves the tension, but I find myself preferring the two poles, or horizons, manifest in his first two features. Voce Nel Tempo, shot entirely in the village of Castellaro Lagusello, only about a five minute drive from Pozzolengo, proceeds with much the same strategy as Il Pianeta Azzurro, observing the changing days and seasons, but the human narrative is better woven into the cloth. I was reminded, watching this film, of the novelist W.G. Sebald, and the manner in which everything that passes through his literary glance reduces to dust. “On every new thing,” he writes in The Rings of Saturn (1995), “lies already the shadow of annihilation.” At the moment something appears to Sebald or Piavoli, it is reconciled with a greater unity. Sebald stresses death, Piavoli life. For myself, connecting the momentary to the eternal is not simply a matter of seeing it. A sunset is often just a sunset, a bullfrog on a riverbank can be just that, and returning to the world can be a journey of years.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

MUSIC

July 25, 2023 ·

James Brice

January, 2023. A conversation that may one day be seen as one of the more important dialogues on the Berlin School takes place between the movement’s most ardent American scholar, Marco Abel, and its most unfairly obscure filmmaker and godfather, Dominik Graf. The two men are adamant that the reunification of Germany in 1990 under then-West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl (who became de facto Chancellor of all Germany in the aftermath) was an act of neo-colonialism. The official understanding is that two Germanies merged to form one. It is more accurate, in Abel, Graf, and this writer’s view, that the bullish capitalist German Federal Republic (FRG) ate its neighbour alive.

A subaltern East Germany. Even by the standards of scholars less empathetic about the plight of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), it’s not out of the question. Take Oxford creative writing teacher and rare fiction and non-bestseller James Hawes. His vile little book The Shortest History of Germany (2017) posits the Eastern part of the country as untameable, supposedly too tainted by a Slavic barbarism stretching back to the times of the Holy Roman Empire to fit into the Western liberal project. “The East birthed the Prussian Junkers and the Stasi! How could its people ever be trusted again?!” wails Hawes in protest over the noise of Karat or The Puhdys, betraying the nastiness of Oxbridge social democracy when it comes to foreign affairs.

It would, of course, deeply undermine the entire modern liberal philosophy to suggest that, maybe, a people under a nation-state, especially one as already schizophrenic as a post-Nazi Soviet satellite like the GDR, would have a more complex relationship to their masters. Katja Hoyer notes in her far more balanced and convincing account of East Germany, Beyond the Wall (2023), that the human toll of reunification is often subsumed into both the national – i.e. Western – history of Germany and the history of the nation-state in itself. Workers had to watch as their workplaces were torn down by West German firms; two completely different sets of habitus had to suddenly coexist; the only country some of its younger citizens had ever known disappeared overnight. This was a climate of globalisation at the end of history: Chancellor Kohl was a Reaganite, and continued the West German policy of NATO deference and aggressive capitalism. Out of this, an alienated strain of festival cinema, a neo-realist style for the chilly, industrial-inflected seriousness of the German character, was born.

Graf’s latest film, Melting Ink (2023), squares with his feelings on reunification by reaching back beyond it. It is a documentary on the German literary world’s response to the Third Reich, including sections on such writers as the exiled anti-Nazi Thomas Mann and rural author Hans Fallada, who publicly praised and derided the Reich in equal measure. Graf composes his film almost entirely of Ken Burns-style still zooms, Windows Moviemaker dissolves, and talking heads. The latter are often shown as a split-screen between two sets of coverage, one in profile close-up, the other a frontal medium-wide. Every interviewee – scholars, writers, people who were there – is already fractured in the image. The consciousness is split. Nazism poses this tough historiographical problem, of the Žižekian relationship between the apparatus and the individual, the Ones that make up the Multitude, and the Multitude that affects the inner life of the One.

For Graf, the firsthand always betrays the whole; the whole always betrays the firsthand. Fallada was One among the Nazi Multitude, an unassailable antinomy until escaped by self-exiled resistors like Mann and Bertolt Brecht. This problem informs a spiritual Berlin School descendant of Graf’s, Christian Petzold, across the latter’s filmography. It is most evident in his brilliant early film Ghosts (2005) about 20-something Berlin wastrel Nina and recently released mental hospital patient Françoise, who recognises Nina as her daughter Marie. Nina, torn between a mother she has never met and a fellow castaway Toni, enters a crisis of identity.

Uncharacteristic of Petzold’s recent and more precise works of fabulism and magic, Ghosts uses a handheld style adopted from the Dardennes’ school of European festival cinema realism. But realism, per Mark Fisher’s dictum, only serves to “mask the Real”, the true ideological and metaphysical structure of life. For East Germans, the realist narrative was that they got on with their lives. They were all Germans, were they not? They lived in the same houses as before, did they not? Aside from the Berlin Wall, what physical borders actually demarcated their lives as East from West? But the Real tells us something different: that a way of life developed independently across generations, however flawed and branded in the political by a rigid and paranoid Sovietism, was wiped out and driven underground by the officialdom of West German culture.

The Real inflicts violence because it reveals the split between the phenomenal object and the object as it is – a split always already there. Plundering this allegory, Petzold takes up the aesthetic issue of realism as a tool, in which Nina’s trauma of suddenly coming face to face with her absent mother is made ambiguous by the impressionism of the film’s style. It redoubles the Lacanian drama of a lost Germany in its formal attributes, a drama that the film suggests is irresolvable from the start. Nina is mistaken in the film’s first scene for Toni, who has herself just committed some light thievery. The self is split immediately, never to be made whole. Petzold’s camera is agitated; something is missing, all the time. As High School Musical’s Troy Bolton famously sang, “Why am I feeling so wrong?!”

The possible, but never confirmed, reunion of Françoise with her daughter is thus a source of cosmic affliction for both her and Nina. The ghost of a lost past returns; but the historical crevasse implied by this return can never be crossed. Thus the terror of the Real suddenly coming face-to-face with Nina can only come as disappointment, as implied by the film’s deflationary ending: Nina watches Françoise taken away as a mental patient, unsure if their mother-daughter bond is real. If it is, she has lost her real mother a second time. If not, her mother was never there in the first place.

Is this anti-climax always determined though? For this, we turn to the Berlin School’s strangest member, Angela Schanelec. If Petzold transposed the horror of the German Real onto narrative, Schanelec’s films produce this feeling as viewing experiences. They are elliptical and austere, their quietude and rigidity often compared to the films of Robert Bresson. But, though Schanelec herself notes the monastic Frenchman as an influence, it is an influence that she sheds through her career. Between Au Hasard Balthasar’s (1966) reduction of consciousness to the animal view of cruelty and the self-fulfilling ouroboros of 1956’s A Man Escaped (the ending determines the title! He escapes!) Bresson’s narratives, filled with detail and philosophical intrigue, are nonetheless simple and straightforward.

Schanelec’s cinema is somewhere else entirely: in her best films, mainly her most recent trifecta of The Dreamed Path (2016), I Was At Home But… (2019) and another Berlinale 2023 entry Music, she operates in a realm of constant disjuncture and confusion. A shot does not imply a reverse shot; image A + image B does not = a stable image C. So oblique is Music that the film’s inspiration from the Oedipus myth, obvious in retrospect, was completely unclear to this writer whilst actually watching it. Such things make synopsising rather useless. A murder; a series of family tableaux; a set of musical performances.

Even the clarification of the original Greek tragedy underlying the whole affair blindsides whatever interpretation might have come before it, and obscures the film further. Every cut, every theme, seemingly negates the last until there is a total emptiness. Extrapolation of a Schanelec film, even one with a roadmap like Music, seems nigh impossible. In this case, the best one can do is try and grab at details, any port in a storm. I hastily scribbled notes whilst watching the film, which was a folly, really: Schanelec paces it so deliberately, yet so jaggedly, that giving its bones flesh whilst they are still moving will see them slipping away. Thus, my scrawlings have the distinct sense of desperation, or perhaps genuine awe:

Washing hands closed, then open

The father has a fall and the church bells start ringing

He walks into traffic as if possessed

Another word for mirror – ‘dream’

Clouds! Obscurance! THUNDER!!!

‘A foreign object who stayed open for love’

The boat on the lake is empty

Images and lines in Music are like broken nodes for the transmission of half-remembered symbols. The Oedipus myth appears broken, yet as if new. A death in the family or a summer holiday, those most relatable of things, are made alien in the clutches of imagery and tableaux. Without neural pathways from cut to cut, these images become static, empty objects.

But the fear of this emptiness, which often manifests in festival walkouts and some hostility toward Schanelec’s films, is in fact the theme that threads much of her work together, how this terror can come so suddenly, yet without explanation. Thus, her great skill is to obfuscate and deny catharsis so much that it clears away the dust and grime of personhood, nationalism, and commodity to stare emptiness in the face with true clarity, and to clear the ground of German identity so completely that the possibility of something new seems that much closer. Schanelec, of course, denies all of this.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

UNLIVABLE LIVES

July 25, 2023 ·

Cathy Brennan

“My heart is swollen

With love and anguish”

— Swollen//Martyr, Gender Warfare

On May 24^th this year a video was shot in Milan of a Brazilian trans woman being beaten by three police officers. She’s on the floor, her hands raised to show complete submission, and yet the police continue to assault her. Voices are rendered inaudible by the blaring of sirens, but the transformation of thought into action is recorded with complete clarity as one of the officers raises his baton, pauses for a moment and deliberates before striking the woman on the head. As is the custom, this video circulated on the internet.

I cut my online teeth in pre-Gamergate gaming forums as a teenager. In the early 2010s I was transitioning from gamer kid to movie brat. The possibility that I was a trans girl hadn’t even entered my head because I had no knowledge of trans people beyond Hayley Cropper on Coronation Street, a portrayal of trans womanhood that was unthreatening to older cis viewers. In 2011 I saw a thread in one of these gaming forums discussing another video of a trans woman named Chrissy Lee Polis being assaulted in a McDonalds just outside of Baltimore. The video starts outside the toilets where two teenage girls are kicking Polis’ head as she cowers on the floor and ends with her having a seizure by the restaurant entrance. The guy filming encourages the perpetrators to run away because the police are coming. With the exception of one older woman, none of the bystanders in the video meaningfully attempt to stop the attack.

The responses in the thread started with immediate outrage over the assault. Because the perpetrators were Black and the victim white there was depressingly predictable racism in several of the comments. However, when the posters picked up on some throwaway lines by the person filming the video like “that’s a man” and “he’s bleeding out” the tenor of the discussion gradually changed. Speculation abounded and rationalisations were concocted about the girls being startled on seeing a penis in the women’s toilets. According to Polis in an interview with the Baltimore Sun, she was attacked because the boyfriend of one of the perpetrators tried to flirt with her on her way to the toilet. I remember constantly refreshing the page and watching in bafflement as sympathy shifted from the victim to the perpetrators. It was the first time I encountered transmisogyny.

The Milan video was also subject to speculation. Twitter’s relatively new Community Notes function – ostensibly brought in under Elon Musk’s leadership to combat misinformation – was utilised to attach links to far-right news sources claiming the trans woman had exposed herself to children outside a primary school. One such site is Reduxx, a publication which advertises itself as a feminist platform but is completely devoted to articles that demonise trans women. The narrative that the woman posed a sexual threat to children has been traced back to the local police union. However, according to the Italian news publication L’Espresso, that account was denied by the Milan prosecutor’s office, which states that officers had responded to reports of the woman making noises. This would seem to suggest that she was experiencing some sort of mental health crisis.

The details of this case are still vague and filtered from Italian language news sources, so it is not my place to speculate further. What alarms me is the eagerness displayed by far-right Anglophone sources to paint this woman as a sexual predator. That informal prejudice towards a trans victim of violence I saw back in 2011 has since transformed into a machine-like response, characterised by its rapidity and sophistication.

In their 2020 book, Unlivable Lives: Violence and Identity in Transgender Activism, sociologist Laurel Westbrook utilises a theoretical framework in which violence is viewed as a form of productive power, drawing on Foucault’s conception of power as something that is exercised rather than held. For Westbrook, “violence produces subject positions and constructs identity categories, such as sexual identities.” They go on to say that “violence shapes ideas about some identities being especially vulnerable to, as well as appropriate targets for, violence and other identities as being likely, and proper, perpetrators of violence.” The power of such online videos of violence is derived from the discourses they produce.

The responses to the Chrissy Lee Polis video demonstrate how arbitrary such discourses can be. At first the commenters were able to reproduce racist notions of Black girls as “proper” perpetrators of violence against a fragile white woman. Yet when it became apparent that Polis was trans, a new discourse emerged to justify the violence. In 2018, when I had been out for several years, I read a Mumsnet thread discussing a story where a trans teenager was assaulted by a classmate in the girls’ changing room. The immediate consensus was that the trans girl had to have done something wrong to be stamped on the head, or that the perpetrator had to have been abused or traumatised, because no cis girl could ever commit such violence otherwise. These supposedly feminist commenters (this thread was on the forum’s infamous Feminism section) were unable to comprehend that they were engaging in the kind of victim-blaming that characterises dominant patriarchal responses to misogynist violence.

There is significant overlap in these videos of violence towards trans women and the more prevalent, farther-reaching viral videos showing Black people being killed by the police. The virality of these videos as driven by algorithmic engagement on social media prompt questions about their supposed function and their effects on both a societal and psychological level. Academic Tiera Tanksley conducted a study in 2020 interviewing nearly 20 college-age Black girls about their responses to “digitally mediated traumas” such as the video of George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin. Tanksley found that the most common phrases used by her participants were “‘traumatizing,’ ‘exhausting’ and ‘PTSD’”. The virality of these videos on social media then function as a form of racialised necropolitics, producing the idea that this is how certain people are meant to die.

Sometimes the video itself does not show violence, yet its productive power encroaches onto these images and irrevocably transforms their meaning. I remember becoming overwhelmed by that same smiling photo of Brianna Ghey being endlessly reposted in news articles and on social media, ossifying this image of a happy child into a grim monument to her murder. Ghey had been active on TikTok, and even though her account was deleted shortly after her death, some clips she had produced were captured and used by grieving users to create video tributes. I don’t doubt the sincerity of this, but the shadow of the algorithm always hangs over them. In the context of why these clips are shared, we don’t see a happy girl in those clips, but a victim forever in stasis.

Ghey was the “ideal victim” of anti-trans violence. She was a white child. When I spoke with another white trans woman a few weeks after Ghey’s death, she told me that she had never heard of Naomi Hersi, a 36 year old Black British trans woman who was murdered in 2018. Hersi’s race, her age, the fact she had done drugs and had casual sex with her killer meant that the loss of her life was not viewed as grievable in the way Ghey’s would later be. In a desperate attempt to exert productive power, her killer Jesse McDonald falsely claimed that Hersi had raped him. Thankfully, this defence was rejected by the judge, but the racist and transphobic assumptions that McDonald had sought to exploit continue to be used as a justification for violence.

Westbrook is critical of identity-based anti-violence activism in their analysis of transgender activism, in part because placing such emphasis on identity can obscure other causal factors in that violence, but also because it can produce unnecessary fear and distress in people who find themselves in that identity category. However, as I wrote earlier, violence has a way of seeping its way into the images that precede it. D Smith’s documentary Kokomo City (2023) interviewed Black trans sex workers, achieving an unparalleled intimacy with its subjects that showed them as real people rather than as statistics or symbols of hardship. It’s a film that, when I watched it, engendered an affection for the women, a quality I value highly when watching films about other trans women. When interviewed in January after the film’s rapturous world premiere at Sundance, Smith said the following: “I really want people to understand how magical trans women are. We don’t get the opportunity to really show that natural aspect of us as true trans people because we’re so busy defending ourselves throughout the day and protecting ourselves and looking over our shoulders.” In April, one of the women featured in the film, Rasheeda Williams, also known as Koko Da Doll was murdered. As of writing I haven’t had the chance to see Kokomo City since Williams’ death, and I find myself wondering what effect it will have upon rewatching the film, how the productive power of violence will alter what I found so marvellous the first time I saw it.

By the time this piece is published, it will have been eight years since I realised I was trans. I have spent most of my twenties as an out trans woman, and the violence we face has never been far from my mind. I am unable to forget the footage of Chrissy Lee Polis writhing on the floor of a McDonalds in 2011, captured by an unsympathetic camera, held by an unsympathetic hand. If my emotional response to these videos of violence has come across as vague, then it is because after all these years I am still unsure how to describe those feelings. Writing this piece was a failed attempt at working that out. For years I have absorbed countless stories of trans women across the world being assaulted and killed. It has damaged me forever. And yet, if I shut myself off from these stories for my own health, if I don’t learn the names of these women or see their humanity, then am I not also contributing to the system that has taken their lives? I know that I have built up large stores of anger over the deteriorating political situation for trans people and expressing that anger as a trans woman has earned me threats of violence, some of them extreme. This in turn has had a significant impact on my day-to-day life. The productive power of violence is indeed far-reaching.

As a film critic, my job is to look beyond the images I see onscreen and search for something that others may not otherwise see. Whether I intend to or not, what I find says as much about me as it does about the image. When I look beyond a cowering woman in a fast-food restaurant, or another woman raising her hands in submission to a towering police officer, I see rows of people who have developed a long-simmering hatred of trans women into a political and money-making machine. There are the washed-up academics who turn their prejudice into lucrative careers as public intellectuals. There are the right-wing grifters looking to make easy money by nurturing the worst impulses of a reactionary public. There’s the billionaire whose own trans child can’t bear to be in his life. There’s the multi-millionaire author unable to tolerate a world in which she is not universally adored. I see all these people, and more, lined up against a wall and I wonder: when will it be our turn to use that productive power?

The artwork for this piece was designed by Bug (she/they/it) is an illustrator, animator, and tattoo artist based in SE England. Drawing and narrative are at the core of her practices as she lives for a good tale or embellishment. Find her work on Instagram at @bugbites0.0 or @bugspikes, or email her at bugshepherdbarron@gmail.com.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

BLOOD AND SAND

July 25, 2023 ·

Rouben Mamoulian at Il Cinema Ritrovato and Film on Film 2023

Ben Flanagan

Word is that Il Cinema Ritrovato has reached its bursting point. The festival of cinema’s history, which takes place at the end of every June on Bologna’s smooth, covered streets, showcases restored, rediscovered, and curiosity titles from the first 100 or so years of cinema’s lifespan. A rumoured 5000 accreditations were handed out, which may boggle the mind when you consider that the biggest indoor screen, Arlecchino, seats roughly 500 people. Traditionally, overspill would sit on the steps along the aisles, or stand in a crowd at the back as though at The Globe’s pit. Covid-19 pandemonium and online ticketing systems put paid to that.

Regardless, there is a romance to Il Cinema Ritrovato, from outdoor screenings of silent films to a packed crowd of sozzled cinephiles, to the casual manner in which you might be sat next to Thierry Frémaux and Thelma Schoonmaker at a screening of this or that forgotten gem. The individual titles matter less than being there, in a place where film exhibition seems to matter, fetishising the location or the beautiful presentations or the quick chats before the next screening, an ouroboros of cinephilia that relies on a shared dream to work. Has the dream swelled too large? I’m sure the old guard would say so, I’m sure they would complain about the queues. But Jonathan Rosenbaum is still showing up, so let him be our beacon.

It’s only within such a space that a programme like Rouben Mamoulian: A Touch of Desire can inspire cultish levels of feverish excitement. Mamoulomania, as the hordes scream in delight at the opening credits of Rings on Her Fingers (1942). The Armenian-born director landed in Hollywood via theatre work across Europe, and became a great technical innovator of the early Sound era. A slippery fellow, director of no single classic or masterpiece, but almost each of his films is unforgettable in that way where one cannot imagine cinema without them. Uniformly, they are delightful and richly delivered entertainments, populated with crowd scenes which seem formless at first but often spin into a precise movement in which the characters are visible. Just take his first film, Applause (1929), where wide shots of backstage chaos seem populated by ants, dancers and technicians rushing past, as womanly silhouettes change costume behind a curtain. Shadows on the wall of a bar where our doomed starlet sits imply scale beyond the frame.

American films of this time are known for being stilted and stagey, sound not yet integrated with image. But Mamoulian experiments. One dialogue scene finds the camera following action only via two pairs of feet, beginning the director’s near-constant obsession with legs. We’ll see this exact strategy repeated in Silk Stockings (1957), moving left on that occasion rather than right, a camera captivated by the potential for movement on screen.

The appearance of any such lower limbs signal The Mamoulian Moment. Applause reaches its peak showbiz sleaze through a cigar-chomping manager leaning back into a chair with two anonymous pairs of pins in the foreground.

Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1931) uses this strategy of dislocation to intensely place the viewer within its dual-protagionist’s POV. Opening with the classic Dracula music is jarring, but then the camera moves to a pair of hands on the keys, revealing us to be stuck within a monstrous first-person view. Early Mamoulian is a stylist and an innovator, controlling the haunting atmosphere with the merest of gestures. Hyde, when we see him, looks suspiciously like Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor (1963). But he looks like the nerdy Julius Kelp, rather than the id-first Buddy Love. It illuminates Lewis’ reversal. This OG doubling act is bettered in City Streets (1931). A generic but nonetheless skillful gangster picture, Gary Cooper is wrong for the part, but that wrongness highlights his character’s hesitancy.

Likewise, Gene Tierney isn’t everyone’s cup of tea in Rings On Her Fingers, in the role of a shopgirl turned high society con artist, but she’s unvarnished and enthusiastic in a way which matches Henry Fonda’s own shy comic style. As the wool gets pulled over this low-level Wall Street guy’s eyes again and again, you really believe he’s that stupid! But the film belongs to character actor Laird Cregar, as the scheming mastermind behind this makeshift family of con artists. ‘Well well, the old Walrus himself,’ says Henry Stephenson to Cregar, who doesn’t skip a beat ‘With a pain in both tusks, thanks to you!’ Cregar tragically died aged 31 from a heart attack as the result of a crash diet intended to make him more palatable for leading man roles. He is a magnetic giant, who paved the way for Chris Farley, Mike Mitchell, and all the other hulking comics who would follow.

Cregar’s magnificence is fitting. Mamoulian’s are all films of iconography, of figures who are aware of their place in history and come right up against the decision of whether to live up to it. They are stuck between one kind of life, and another. Through that lens, Queen Christina (1933) is perhaps the urtext. Here the Queen of Sweden, Greta Garbo, plays the 17th century monarch, crowned as a child and leading the nation through the Thirty Years’ War. For her reputation as a stone face, Garbo drops zingers left and right, leaving herself emotionally unguarded as the Spanish Antonio (John Gilbert) swoops in to befuddle her entire conception of life’s purpose. He is that worst of things, a Roman Catholic. Each scene of ceremony, from coronation to abdication, is given a plainspoken and painterly detail. The weight of history itself cascades upon the final frames of the film, the sea wind billowing on Garbo’s face as Christina heads offscreen to some unknown fate.

You’ll see the wrong side of this historical certainty, and of Garbo’s iconic turn as Ninotchka (1939), in Silk Stockings. Made at the tail-end of the Freed Unit’s dominance on the MGM lot, this musical reimagining of the Lubitsch masterpiece puts Cyd Charisse in the centre, alongside (who else?) a rapidly pickling Fred Astaire to duke it out over the pros and cons of capitalism vs communism via some of Cole Porter’s most desperate lyrics: ‘Paris loves lovers for lovers know that love is everything.’ Charisse’s ballet with her stockings is a fetishist moment for leg-loving Mamoulian, who gives up on making his star do much more than twirl. Most entertaining are Peter Lorre, Jules Munshin, and Joseph Buloff as KGB defectors whose minds are freed by western ideals like ‘department stores’ and ‘prostitution’. It’s funny to think that 6 decades later, a film like Tetris (2023) will still be peddling the same myths about life behind the Iron Curtain as robotic and emotionless.

It’s funnier still to work out how a musical like Love Me Tonight (1932) winds up as Mamoulian’s most acclaimed film – Bologna’s monarch Jonathan Rosenbaum took to Letterboxd to declare it the director’s masterpiece – because it is superficially class-conscious, and applies his technical wizardry to Lubitsch affectations. The best number is the finale, ‘The Son of a Gun is Nothing But a Tailor’ which inventively cuts across the characters from all of the film’s locations with perfect spatial geography, complimenting the song’s rhythm. Regulars of the ‘touch’ Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier take the leads, while the film was supposedly a failed Lubistch project scooped up by Mamoulian. These few details aside, I find comparison between the pair to be overstated – even the ‘touch’ in the strand’s title is loaded – which makes this a film for those who subscribe to that certain doctrine.

I find the real Mamoulian resides in The Mark of Zorro (1940). An update of the Douglas Fairbanks silents, this swashbuckler made a star of Tyrone Power, and has a few extremely convincing sequences. His sword fight with a sneering Basil Rathbone, playing out in extended wide shots, is sheer bliss, while J. Edward Bromberg’s ratty performance as the wicked alcalde Don Vega has such simple good and evil stakes that each moment of the film stands alone as cinematic perfection. Like his best films, it deals with myth, with changing times, and with the theatrics of the everyday.

Much like Mamoulin, the BFI often feels like it’s on the verge of some historical precipice. As the guardian of not only the UK’s cinema history, but its production, these famine years for British exhibition have been alarming. June’s Film on Film Festival, however, felt quite limitless in its first incarnation.

Bolstered, no doubt, by the taste for novelty and one-off screenings in London, as well as the continued success of Bristol’s Cinema Rediscovered, Film On Film is a bite-size Il Cinema Ritrovato, all of which took place on BFI screens with enlightening introductions and some of the most genuinely wholesome vibes I think anyone with a membership can remember. Like Il Cinema Ritrovato, corporate sponsorship is present but imperceptible (ubiquitous Lloyds advert accepted), while the foyer was decorated with a queue for a free drop-in film handling workshop.

With a day of 3D, then a day of Nitrate screenings, all on pristine archive prints, one felt spoiled, but also mournful that this felt like such a special occasion, even within London’s expansive film scene. Casting my eye over the summer’s offerings at the institute, for example, it’s notable that such an ambitious weekender is followed up with a two-month long Disney season. If this is what pays for the archivists to have a weekend-gone-wild, then so be it. The enthusiasts were in Bologna anyway.

Though there was no avoiding the fact that this felt like a warm-up for the week in Northern Italy, Film on Film did perform one coup, with their screening of Blood and Sand (1941). From Nitrate (a feat that even the Italians couldn’t pull off) this was quite simply one of the most awe-inspiring screenings I can remember. Based on Vicente Blasco Ibanez’s 1908 novel Sangre y arena, This melodrama finds Mamoulian re-teaming with Tyrone Power to tell the rise and fall of a matador.

After a prologue in which he leads a gang of children to Madrid for matador academy, Mamoulian explodes Power’s entrance by cutting to the others on the train home, much older, worrying how to get over a bad review. The camera pulls back to reveal a figure reading a newspaper upside down. It’s Power, beaming! He can’t read, so all press is good press. The broad strokes which follow are the stuff of generic dramas and award-season also-rans, but Mamoulian uses technicolour as an incredible instrument of contrasts, pulling the elements into a swirling palate that references Goya and Velázquez with all the subtlety of Campbell’s Soup. The bulls are liquid, the blood is paint. In this high drama atmosphere, with a packed audience, even the corniest joke or most obvious mugging from Rita Hayworth (the temptress who pulls Power away from his Christian wife) gets the crowd going. It’s in Cregar’s flinch, Power’s grin, Mamoulian’s broad shots of chaos in a packed bar. When it’s over, NFT1 is on its feet. Was the film good, or were the vibes just right? That’s what cinema programmers must ask themselves if they are to rescue our holy ouroboros.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!