Mutual Admiration Society

Great Aspectations

Mutual Admiration Society
2014 UK
Directed by James Devereaux & Rouzbeh Rashidi

When actor/director James Devereaux asked me to look at Rouzbeh Rashidi’s latest film, I hadn’t twigged it was directed by the both of them. Of course, I’ve reviewed work by both of these directors before and, sometimes, Devereaux stars in Rashidi’s movies... but I didn’t wake up to the collaborative nature of the project until after I’d seen it. I saw the fingerprints of both these artists within the film, of course, but it’s taken me this long to figure out that they are both moving in similar directions in the way they make their art, at the moment, and so I’m guessing that’s why their mutual alliance felt more focussed to me in its intent than I would expect from certain other cinematic partnerships over the years.

The film is presented in black and white and opens with a bearded Devereaux, the only character in the entire film, looking around him. As can be expected with an actor of Devereaux’s calibre, the performance, mostly improvised, is something that is always watchable and interesting. The aspect ratio is similar to that you would get from a mobile phone, which then expands to a wider ratio to see Devereaux in context and interacting with his environment, before switching back to the previous ratio.

In fact, the aspect ratio keeps switching it's location within the bounding frame (composed of white space) throughout the course of the movie.

The shapes used within the space, within the frame, are not to indicate different narrative or chronological points in the story (story is not necessarily what you would call a present element in a film made by either of these directors, to be honest). I suspect, they’re more presented that way to challenge one’s notions of a static ratio as the best way to frame a shot when a different one would specifically serve a different shot. A way of freeing the cinematic space and the constant switching between various planes of that space, very quickly trains the audience to adapt to this kind of acceptance of the art on its own terms.

We also, of course, get into multiple, smaller ratios showing different aspects of the same character in the same space and, because we're already used to the changing visual interface, by this point, we accept this in a less jarring and intrusive manner than we might if, say, it was someone like Brian DePalma suddenly switching to a split screen mode.

Later on, when Devereaux is clearly distressed, his mind in chaos, the ratio is tilted within the overall binding white space of the film frame to further enhance the jangled internal communication of the character within certain shots. The directors experiment with different ways of showing this kind of expression of being bound by the space. For instance, at one point, the ratio of the frame is opened out but Devereaux's head is jammed at the corner intersection of three walls within the bottom right hand corner of the screen. This instantly creates a dialogue between the space captured within the camera as an expression of the boundaries of both the physical form and the human spirit… and the way the stock itself, be it actual film stock or digital pixels, can be retooled to fit a similar embodiment of the same goals and tests the effectiveness and limits of each one as a set of co-existing, artistic techniques. To further push this exploration, the directors even use a strobing effect at one point.

Another key thing to that approach, of course, whether it’s an intentional construct or a serendipitous momentum created by the realisation of the art itself, is that you have the human body as an extension of the mind, exploring the limits of its physical space but, also, within an arena wherein the director (as God) controls the limits of that exploration at a place where the unaware and unnamed protagonist in a film can't know how he (or she) is being manipulated within their alternate reality.

Asides from the dialogue between the way space is used both internally and externally to the content of a shot, there are some really nice moments in the film which make it all worth the watch.

For instance, the contradiction inherent in Devereaux’s stern faced contemplation of his situation (whatever that actually is) and the external expression of the seriousness of his intent...  pitched against the absurdist action of taking a fully clothed shower while drinking a cup of tea. That’s a pretty nice moment right there.

His character, with a gammy leg, dragging himself up a hill just to have a quick look around, then coming down again, is probably a metaphor for something I'm not smart enough to pick up on but it did remind me of Greek tragedy somewhat, and the concept of a daily struggle, perhaps by way of Philip K. Dick's concept of the pseudo-religion of Mercerism in the novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? It seems to be, intentionally or not, a visual representation of a certain human attitude, or perhaps need or drive, which is a basic subconscious component of our species.

The struggle between the tortured mind, the physical confinement of such  and the sacrifice involved within such struggle, seems to be a constant concern of the movie, in fact.

What you have here, as you let the images wash over you, is a definite sense of fragments of a central narrative in a simultaneously existing before/after state. The gun, the limp which appears and disappears from shot to shot can be seen, if you choose to read the images this way, as two states on either side of a central event. Once again, Rashidi and Devereaux are inviting us to bring our own, unique narrative element to the film. For me this was a haunted, recovery period of a hit man after something went wrong on a job, followed by preparation for the next job… or is it the other way around. Of course, the beauty of these kind of visual stimulations is that everybody is going to see their own thing within it… which pushes and supports an idea I've had for a while, actually, that people's reaction to a movie is based purely on their own personal baggage that they bring to the experience with them, and how well that same personal agenda is reflected back at them. The almost inevitable refusal to show the actual event which creates the material for this structure is, I think, typical of the work of both these directors.

And all this is judiciously, but effectively, spotted with Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso n.1, per due violino, clavicembalo, pianoforte preparato e orchestra d'archi... the music used in a more traditional way to create emotion and unease at certain moments in the film and add a certain weight to some of the sequences. It’s been a couple of decades, at least, since I last listened to this composer’s work so I’m pleased to be reminded of him and I really ought to catch up with his work again sometime soon.

Devereaux’s own blog about the way this film was made can be found here and I’d say it’s well worth a read and, obviously, well worth a watch if you’re into the art of making movies. You can follow both directors on twitter on the links given below and, if you give them a shout, maybe they’ll give you a link to the movie for a free watch.

Rouzbeh Rashidi 
https://twitter.com/rouzbehrashidi

James Deveraux
https://twitter.com/eJamesDevereaux

Noirish Project

Truth Paste

Noirish Project
Directed by James Devereaux
Private screener

Clarification Disclaimer: Please note that, while I freely gave my time and costs to Noirish Project, I produced three campaigns (60s UK/US, Italian 70s and modern) and a couple of early teaser pieces only... comprising around 30 finished designs (and generating hundreds of files). I also designed one set of title cards and a “video on demand” header. Since my work on the project, other factors have come into play and, as far as  know, my artwork is now not being used. I don’t know whether my title cards are still in the film but I would guess/hope not since that would, obviously, further dilute the brand strength of the movie in relation to the poster campaigns. I am clarifying this here, not so much as to distance myself from the project but to firmly establish to any future collaborators who require my expertise in design matters that some of the stuff surrounding the project has not been produced by me and therefore the quality and consistency of the layout and typography on certain pieces should not be mistaken for my own. I actually have a degree in graphic design and over a quarter of a century in the field, so I’m not in the habit of making any typographic mistakes or poor judgemental decisions within the realm of my work unless insisted on by a client. So please don’t judge me by some of the  stuff you may have seen surrounding this project as I may well not be guilty. I wish James Devereaux every success with this and future projects and, as always, I hope you enjoy his unique spin in his work.

Noirish Project is a movie by actor/writer/director James Devereaux which you might have been hearing about on the internet for a while. It was a project I first got caught up in last year when I was invited to produce a poster campaign for it, which kinda snowballed into three (see here) and also got me on board with designing the static title cards for the film itself. So I was pleased to, just recently, be able to see an internet preview of the movie and to see how the film lived up to my expectations of it.

I’d have to say, it’s a pretty good watch...

Following two credit cards, the film starts off with a long, static establishing, almost panoramic shot of the city of London with a train pulling in from left of shot to right and slowing down to make way for another coming in from the opposite direction before travelling on its way. Knowing the director’s concerns and previous history in the arena of short films, somewhat, even before the shot had finished, I immediately took this as a metaphor for the way people approach each other, fail to communicate and then pass each other by. So, yeah, that first opening shot is kinda representative of the whole movie in a way.

The film then starts proper with what I can only describe as a “slow chase” or trail sequence which sets the tone for the movie quite accurately, as it’s kind of like watching a muffled urban road movie punctuated by the odd, sobering contrasts of absurdist humour stabbing out from the dialogue’s inescapable bursts of human non-connection as played by the two skillful lead actors of the piece - Alfie Black as Billy and James Devereaux himself as Jimmy. This non-communication is aggravated or exasperated by the fact that it’s fairly obvious from the start, and made implicit by the end of the movie, that one character is "playing" the other throughout the course of the film.

However, the intent and inherent contradiction of one of the characters at the basic level of story, serves the bigger picture in this case. Devereaux’s films are not about story. Story is, for the most part in his works, at least the ones I’ve seen so far, a necessary evil which needs to be served at ground zero in order to get you to see the real movie and what it’s about. In this particular case, the strong humour and plot device of the recovery of some paste pearls are the window dressing and the shelving for a study of two people who are dislocated from each other, basically pointing out the alienation which is part and parcel of everyday living in the 21st century.

For example, that slow trail sequence at the opening of the film, which dislocates you a little in its construction, followed by a shot where the old 180 degree rule is nicely broken in such a way that you are left on a shot of two park benches with James and Alfie entering from screen right (instead of left, where you'd expect to see them coming from), serves to re-enforce this sense of disengagement by disorienting the viewer somewhat in the way the movie is decoded.

Many of the shots in this movie are very well designed but even they serve to back up this overview of general disruption. A shot of Billy and Jimmy standing against a wall with windows, for example, is well chosen since Jimmy’s shoulders are precisely aligned with where the texture of the wall ends and the windows begin. This leaves the head of his character and, to a lesser extent but certainly in contrast to this, that of Billy, existing in split sections of the frame, sectioning off the characters in multiple planes within the same space.

Yet another shot, splits planes horizontally towards the camera as a character walks towards a pub in the background and we suddenly realise there are cars going past him between us and the camera and, again, more in front of him. This sudden chopping up of the perceived reality of the situation by displacing the casual viewer in space seems to be a constant theme throughout the movie, and this is aided immensely by both the writing and the performance, as the rightly suspicious Billy is bamboozled throughout the film’s running length.

Other examples of the visual fractures would be a long sequence where everything is slightly out of focus or the fact that a close up or series of close-ups will appear before any kind of establishing shots in certain sequences, a psychological trick I first saw used in a 1960s movie in an effort to prime the audience for a certain mindset but which is used more overtly here as a way of transitioning with a kind of jagged and brisk cut. This transition of contrast is something which occurs again and again throughout the movie and is equally reenforced by the different sound designs for each section, rubbing against each other in the mix.

The film incudes a minimum of characters but the appearances of Gerald Davidson and The Doctor and the always lovely Liane Rose-Bunce as Miss Haverford West in a scene which plays out in terms of indifference, aggression and ultimately absurd and over the top humour, is a welcome one and helps propel the story, such as it is, back into the realm of the two hander and into the true interests of the writer.

That’s probably as much as I want to say about this project at this point. One, because I don’t want to spoil it for you and, two, because I’m possibly too close to the project to want to get too involved with it as a reviewer. What I can say, though, is that the film continues to see the development of Devereaux as a writer/director who seems to be developing his unique visual language in a progressive fashion with each project I see him complete. If you get the chance to see this film then I would urge you to go take a look as it captures the essence of British zero budget film-making as it is at present in an interesting and, more importantly, endearing way. For more details, see the Norish Project web site here... http://noirishproject.wordpress.com/

Noirish Project: Fotobusta and Locandina

Fotobusta and Locandina

Clarification Disclaimer: Please note that, while I freely gave my time and costs to Noirish Project, I produced three campaigns (60s UK/US, Italian 70s and modern) and a couple of early teaser pieces only... comprising around 30 finished designs (and generating hundreds of files). I also designed one set of title cards and a “video on demand” header. Since my work on the project, other factors have come into play and, as far as  know, my artwork is now not being used. I don’t know whether my title cards are still in the film but I would guess/hope not since that would, obviously, further dilute the brand strength of the movie in relation to the poster campaigns. I am clarifying this here, not so much as to distance myself from the project but to firmly establish to any future collaborators who require my expertise in design matters that some of the stuff surrounding the project has not been produced by me and therefore the quality and consistency of the layout and typography on certain pieces should not be mistaken for my own. I actually have a degree in graphic design and over a quarter of a century in the field, so I’m not in the habit of making any typographic mistakes or poor judgemental decisions within the realm of my work unless insisted on by a client. So please don’t judge me by some of the  stuff you may have seen surrounding this project as I may well not be guilty. I wish James Devereaux every success with this and future projects and, as always, I hope you enjoy his unique spin in his work.

Hi there,

Thought you might like to see the suite of fotobusta and the locandina I designed for the 1970s Italian advertising strand for James Devereaux's new upcoming movie Noirish Project.

Details on how they came to be can be found here. 

Hope you like them.

More on Noirish Project soon.

Noirish Project Design Process

Noirish Campaign 

Clarification Disclaimer: Please note that, while I freely gave my time and costs to Noirish Project, I produced three campaigns (60s UK/US, Italian 70s and modern) and a couple of early teaser pieces only... comprising around 30 finished designs (and generating hundreds of files). I also designed one set of title cards and a “video on demand” header. Since my work on the project, other factors have come into play and, as far as  know, my artwork is now not being used. I don’t know whether my title cards are still in the film but I would guess/hope not since that would, obviously, further dilute the brand strength of the movie in relation to the poster campaigns. I am clarifying this here, not so much as to distance myself from the project but to firmly establish to any future collaborators who require my expertise in design matters that some of the stuff surrounding the project has not been produced by me and therefore the quality and consistency of the layout and typography on certain pieces should not be mistaken for my own. I actually have a degree in graphic design and over a quarter of a century in the field, so I’m not in the habit of making any typographic mistakes or poor judgemental decisions within the realm of my work unless insisted on by a client. So please don’t judge me by some of the  stuff you may have seen surrounding this project as I may well not be guilty. I wish James Devereaux every success with this and future projects and, as always, I hope you enjoy his unique spin in his work.   

When actor/writer/director James Devereaux contacted me privately to find out what was the best software to acquire to tag stills from his debut feature Noirish Project as “a bit of fun”, I was pretty up front that I thought his work was better than for him to just tag the odd photo with a snippet of type as a promo. I talked to him about the idea of letting me work on a full campaign for the film and he liked the idea so, after a little while, I volunteered my services and was ‘in’.

Now as a graphic designer for over 20 years, my normal approach to doing something like this would be to ask James a lot of questions regarding details about the film and maybe badger him to see the script... and that’s what I almost got into with him. But something held me back. I remembered a couple of things which made me think that, maybe for this one project, the results I produced might be better off if I went in a little more blind on this one. I know, for example, that James welcomes improvisation and the opportunity for serendipity in his work... so a locked in script might be only a guide as to what really gets up on the screen in the final cut of the movie anyway. Added to that was the fact that the window between completion of the final version and the release probably wouldn’t have been enough time for me to come up with anything useful anyway... not with my regular day job hogging all my time and with film reviews to write most evenings.

Also, I know that some of the best campaigns, especially from one of my design heroes in the fifties and sixties, were much more effective by not selling the actual content of the film but by selling the “idea” of the event and attraction of the film. This was something I wanted to try but, keeping with James’ idea that whatever I did, it had to be fun for me to do (a work ethic I gather he instills, or at least expects, from all his collaborators), I also suggested something which, frankly, meant a lot more work for me but which I thought would be ultimately more rewarding for the audience, for James and for myself.

So I suggested that I made not one but three campaigns for the movie... campaigns that would be, like Billy Pilgrim, the main protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, “unstuck in time.” With this in mind I suggested I work on the following...

1. A set of black and white (as the movie is shot in monochrome) lobby cards in the style of something you might see in the UK in the 70s and then topped off with a colour, 1970s style montage poster.

2. A set of Italian fotobusta, in the style of something from the 1950s/60s with bright, hand coloured looking shots combined in a dynamic layout and then followed up with a locandina of some sort.

3. A modern character teaser campaign depicting primary characters and followed by a poster or two as the film might be advertised today (which is fair enough, it is after all, a contemporary film). This actually ended up as two sets but I’ll get to that later.

4.  I also threw in some quick teasers which were not aligned to the other campaigns as a fast response to some other things James was doing, but I won’t cover those here.

James liked the idea so I ran with it quick, before he changed his mind. I asked him for the credits, the four main character names, and a choice of quotes from the movie that each character says so I could build the character teasers around the phrases... as well as loads of high resolution stills from the shoots. As many as he could get me.  But first things first, the project needed a logo...


The Logo
Saul Bass is my design hero so I asked myself what Saul would have done for this.

James produced the first of what ended up as two short ‘preludes’ to his film and, like a few of his other shorts, I noticed the prominence of a phone conversation as a catalyst to get things moving. Everything always starts with a phone call so I figured I would use that as an icon to encapsulate that everything in the narrative has that starting point. I knew (or hope I know) that James will be screening both of his preludes with the main feature, so it kinda made sense. I came up with something very fifties and Saul-like and which, despite appearances, gave me a few problems to wrestle with but eventually got to something which looked defined enough and didn’t camouflage itself in various coloured backgrounds too badly.


The 70s Campaign
The lobby cards were the easy bit, once I’d discovered the more common sizes and ratios used. In the end, for the sake of memory size and storage space, the final poster was just done as an A size to make printing easier, if that’s required... but the lobby cards and fotobusta are all in the correct aspect ratios.

The lobby cards are just the black and white stills where I’ve fiddled about with the levels and contrasts etc and then just applied into a template. Pretty much as the ones I was looking at when I was researching these things.

The poster was a montage of elements I’d cut out from the stills... which I then heavily filtered the f**** out of to make it resemble one of those very impressionistic poster artworks you would sometimes see back then. I remembered as a kid realising that some of the people in the backgrounds of these posters were just a head and an odd squiggle for a feature or two and that’s the kind of distancing I was going for with what I did here.


Fotobustas and Locandina
This is where I really had fun. My initial mock up visual to James was something where I’d converted the colour still he gave me to a black and white image, removed all the white and then coloured up the background layers with a paintbrush tool behind the blacks of the main image. It was okay and James liked it but I wasn’t completely satisfied with it so I tried to do something else. I experimented and in the end came up with something which gave me just the look I was trying so hard to match for this kind of material.

What I did in the end was take each shot and make a duplicate version of it on two separate layers. The bottom layer retained the colour and I increased the saturation to absolutely outrageous levels, something which would make anyone looking at it recoil at the vibrance of it but not to the extent that the original hues were completely lost (although definitely getting near that territory, for sure). This was then covered with a top layer of the shot in exactly the same place, which I then turned into a mono image. Then I played around with the levels a little bit before posterising the mono image to just two channels... like a sixties photographer might do for a screen print. This meant that all the whites to mid greys and just above were turned into white space, and all the mid to dark greys and above were turned into black. So far so good...

Then I started playing with the opacity of the top layer and quickly saw my idea had worked. The oversaturated colours from the layer below shone through the white in a muted state which brought them down to something which mirrored the real, brightly hand coloured locandina of the 50s and 60s very well. The bonus, of course, was that the dark areas over the blacks already in the bottom layer were also magnified, but in the other direction... they became darker in certain tonal areas and helped define the shapes of the people in the photos even more.

This all looked pretty "dead on" to me and, after redesigning the logo into an Italian version with a longer top leading in, I created a template I could drop the flattened versions of these new “alternate” shots into and was very pleased with the results.

For the locandina, I tried to pick elements which I thought the Italians would use to sell the film in their own country. These would not necessarily be important elements of the film, of course... just the bits they would expect their target audience to latch on to. I used a similar (although not quite the same) process as the earlier seventies poster to assemble the final locandina and was pretty pleased with this one.


The Modern Campaign
For the modern campaign I used isolated shots of the characters and played around with colour level saturation before sharpening up the shot and just posterising certain parts of the features. I wanted something stark but colourful and I then used the phrases I chose from the ones I’d been given and cut them up into little chunks to emphasise them and make them something more as isolated features than they would probably be when experienced as lines in the main film. This was okay though, that’s what advertising is all about... trickery and persuasion.

I wanted a background that was colourful, ragged and textural to contrast the things going over the top of it. In the end I took a shot of the palm of my hand and did all kinds of things to it (including multilayering in different positions) to get to the state you see in the teasers and final posters. I really liked what I achieved here. I also did versions where the actual characters were in mono and, since neither James or myself could figure out which ones we liked best, we used both as the US and UK equivalents of the same campaign (I’m pretty sure I’ve actually seen this done before but can’t remember which films did this with the colour in the US version and the black and white in the UK versions).

The final posters were an amalgamation of the four character posters and the added element of Alfie holding his sign. I did both portrait and landscape versions and got something I was pleased with in the end. I used the elements from this campaign when James asked me to come up with some opening title cards for the film... but I pushed them all in a slightly different way because of their context.

And that’s an insight, as James has asked, into my approach for the multiple campaigns for Noirish Project. Now, like you, I’m just waiting to see what he came up with in his final movie... so no pressure James!

HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind

Terror Firmer

HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind
2013 Ireland
Directed by Rouzbeh Rashidi
Limited release at venues when announced.

Every now and then, the director Rouzbeh Rashidi contacts me and asks me if I want to see whichever film he’s been working on at the time. It’s always a double edged sword because I find Rashidi’s work (previously reviewed here, here, here and here) to be really great stuff but it’s also very challenging and I often question myself as to whether I can do artistic justice to his work in reviewing one of his pieces. But I always want to see what he’s been up to and I always bite the bullet and review it after... although I never know just where to start when trying to get down something which tries so hard to capture a glimpse of these specific works. Works which are both simple and vastly complex pieces all at the same time.

HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind is a film which, at first glance, seems to be a bit of a departure for Rashidi in terms of image content and the way that content is treated within the context of the movie. However, as you start getting into it, you realise that, actually, yes it’s very much a part of the “Rashidi Universe” and the concerns and level of what is revealed and concealed is certainly keeping in spirit with the films I’ve seen by him before. It just took me a little longer to adjust because this one seems to have a much more accessible (at some levels) story arc in some ways than the director’s previous films. That is to say, in as much as parts of the plethora of connected images are easy to corral into a rough narrative framework than they maybe are in others of his works.

The film starts off with a sinister face mask in silhouette in varying shades of focus while seaside wurlitzer style organ music, that I most associate with David Lynch’s Eraserhead, washes over the soundtrack. The aspect ratio changes to something approximating 4:3 as the mask seemingly changes form until eventually vanishing from the screen to usher in the title of the movie.

After the title, a man paces backwards and forwards in front of a garishly lit neon cinema before we cut to a shot of a ceiling fan rotating at various speeds in rhythm, which strobes us back to the previous shot at increasing speed. We then cut to an arial shot of clouds in orange and then to a blue tinted cemetery where James Devereaux slowly walks towards the camera to a piece of Philippe D’ Aram’s score to Jean Rollin’s Fascination. And here is one of the few slightly negative criticisms I’m going to make about this movie. Excuse me here while I have a musical interlude...

Quentin Tarantino, amongst others, is the master of the needle-drop soundtrack. And when I say needle drop, I mean he uses bits of his favourite film scores and sews them altogether to create the soundtracks to his films. The problems with this, though, is that even half cine-literate audiences are going to pop right out of the movie experience and start playing guessing games as to what movie the music originally came from. And this is exactly what happened when I first saw this shot of Devereaux underscored to this specific cue. Instead of watching the film my mind drifted off into... “What is that? A violin and a musical saw maybe? I know that music. I have it somewhere... oh, hold up... it’s Fascination.”

Now this may not be a problem for the film maker in question, it’s true. Godard would often want to deliberately jump the audience out of his movies and musical approaches were just one of the ways he did this. Now this may be what Rashidi wanted, I can kind of see this modus operandi working with other scenes in this film and also in some of his other films... but I suspect that wasn’t what was required here, although the musical association is certainly a non-verbal indication which supports the films end credits, which include attribution to the work of the famous French lesbian-vampire-surrealist director Jean Rollin. Certainly the film could stand roughly on the same side of the coin as some of Rollin’s early work like Le Viol Du Vampire... and could probably cause similar riots as this early Rollin work created back in the 60s if this was shown to a packed house around my local too, I suspect (that’s a compliment, by the way, if you are in any doubt). So it’s quite possible that we are supposed to make that association with the famous French director’s work from early on and certainly the sight of James Devereaux wearing a mask like some Diabolik or Fantomas or SuperArgo in many of the scenes creates an equally sinister feel as the ones worn in something like, say, Rollin’s La Vampire Nue (reviewed here). So maybe that was Rashidi’s intention after all?

We then cut to James Devereaux sitting on a park bench in two angles, split screen with, again, heavy filtering as he goes into a monologue on the left hand of the screen while on the right hand side of the screen he experiments with the mask from the opening titles. He then wears the mask evoking, as I said before, a typical masked hero/villain/ vigilante style character from early 1900s to late 1960s cinema.

This is a leap for my experience of this director's work because the unreality is hitting you at all angles as both the sound design and shot design are stretched like a piece of fabric with the kind of artifice which is just not that present in the earlier works I've seen from Rashidi. And, at this stage of his career, I can only assume it’s a progressive leap or, if not, then something which will be useful to him in the pursuit of his, very well polished, approach to his art.

In the very next sequence, Devereaux does a startling thing, and you begin to understand the title of the movie a little more (which is probably also a first for me in regards to this director, actually). The Devereaux character is seen fighting invisible demons who may... or may not be... there. I’ll get back to that later.

Things get spookier as scenes and then clusters of shots are pitched against each other in terms of colour tint washed over a changeable level of saturation. This is all good stuff and, as the masked Devereaux goes about his business, mostly dialogue free, concepts are introduced to the viewer’s minds eye due to the introduction of weird props and landscapes which Devereaux interacts with… seemingly almost shamanistically in certain sequences.

Pretty soon, other elements and scenarios are presented in an abstract manner. A lady in blue. James at his apartment waiting the arrival of something, by the looks of his body language... perhaps awaiting a psychic attack if one wants to look at the movie on a purely material level. A guy sifting through objects in the sand. People clambering down perilous, rocky terrain… looking like a mountain expedition washed up on Mars.

More seemingly random elements are introduced.

A gentleman... walking through a deserted alley in the snow. We cut back to the girl… are we watching three parallel timelines or are we, as I suspect, meant to inform the picture with our own sense of time and story within the piece? Mixed up footage inhabiting the same space and treated in a way that gives a sense of the past is also included. Are these flashbacks to one of our characters memories and, if so... which character. The girl on the bridge who leads into the possible flashback or Devereaux’s sinister, masked cypher... who possibly leads us back out of them from a different “mind space”?

And this is where things get interesting and I’ll talk about those invisible demons now.

When I was a kid I had (and probably still do have, I am sure) a paperback sized reprint of the first 12 or so comic strip stories of the Marvel Comics character Doctor Strange. Now this guy was interesting to me because in these stories, he often used to leave the physical plane of the earth (leaving his body slumbering) and fight his enemies, often Gods or demons, on a spiritual plane of existence of which mortal man is unaware. And this informs my response to this picture, in as much as I choose to take the “terrors of the mind” of the title as a specific attack on Devereaux from another character glimpsed in the movie. It’s not specifically spelled out and I really don’t think the director wants to lock us into a specific interpretation of the events and footage we see on screen. I do, however, think that Rashidi wants us to bring our own baggage into the screening room with us. These are not, I think, supposed to be passive movie experiences. I’ve said this and underlined it in magic marker before about this director’s work but, seriously, I think he rubs together little bits of incidents of something which he has the coda for, to give it the semblance of a linear structure in certain scenes, but I think he’s much more interested in stimulating the brain of the audience into bringing their own meaning and level to his work. I’m pretty dumb so I tend to take a lot of this at face value... which is why HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind is very much an exercise in surrealist science fiction for me (the HSP stands for Homo Sapiens Project, by the way). At least... I hope they’re not supposed to be passive experiences, at any rate, otherwise I’ve missed the point completely.

As we watch some of the sequences, the images are filtered, interfered with and deteriorated so much that we begin to imagine our own shapes and visions within the cinematic canvass in front of us. Much like a person staring at a piece of wallpaper with a particular pattern might begin to imagine they can make out faces in the surface detail after a while (this phenomenon is, of course, brilliantly demonstrated in Robert Wise’s original 1963 version of The Haunting). Some bizarre goings on with a camel (behavioural mind control?) is added to the mix and pretty soon your brain is really beginning to look at a lot of the footage (if not all of it) as metaphor or symbolistic in essence. But, as I said, with a lot of that kind of stuff... it’s very much open to interpretation.

Like a lot of Rashidi’s films, this one seems to be, very much, a celebration of a character’s internal struggle... the thoughts and moods they have made manifest in a half dream state and then emblazoned across the screen and pumped directly into your cerebral cortex. This kind of basic human state is something that is apparently frowned upon in Hollywood these days, as being something un-showabble. It’s not true though... cinema is fantastic at this kind of mood work. But also, in this one, you get a sense of shared or combined contemplation. You get a sense from some of the imagery that some of the... again, I’ll call them characters, or possibly cyphers, are two different aspects of the same person existing in two different planes of existence and overlapping with each other... a spiritual realm and a more (or less) realistic dimension happening simultaneously... like two different aspects of the old Moorcockian multiverse concept... but also with a sense that there are spiritual invaders trying to take possession of a persons actions. It’s a very interesting, science fiction style concept... and it really begins to get under your skin after a while.

When director/actor Max Le Cain comes in towards the end of the film to meet with Devereaux’s character, you almost feel that he’s a kind of Van Helsing or Carnacki character, here to help rid Devereaux of what ails him and to arm him with the magic bullet he so obviously needs to help him rid himself of the... well.. the terrors of the mind.  The last five minutes or so of the movie are definitely climactic, noisy and certainly feel like an end game before the epilogue. An epilogue which could be interpreted a couple of ways and, again, helps give you a finish to the “story”... if one chooses to look at it this way.

Now, this movie is really good and, if you struggle with it in the way I think is intended, then you’ll be rewarded with a certain state of mind which bypasses clarification in favour of a sense of shared wisdom. It’s not going to be an easy film for someone unprepared for this directors work, I suspect, but it’s certainly a very good one. I can’t imagine it playing in any lengthy cinema runs but, and I know I’ve said this before, this should find a home at least in an art gallery (it’s certainly deserving of finding a good home) and I hope the director plans to submit it to any festivals and screening opportunities he can find. I’m pretty sure the unfortunate exclusivity of an art gallery venue would not be on the directors most ideal list of locations and if he can see a way of getting this into local communities and stimulating thought and discussion on the nature of film and exhibition then all the better for it.

It's interesting because, although it seems to be a bit of a departure for Rashidi… well, as I said before, once you're invested in the film, there's no way you could mistake this piece of work for anybody else's art but, also, I think that this is one of this directors most engaging and accessible works... even while stretching the boundaries of the way footage is treated (or should that be mistreated) and the way we decode the images and sounds we are presented with.

What I do know is that HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind is a considerably mature work from a confident director who seems to be progressing from one phase or period of his work and into something else altogether. That may be a wild claim to make, perhaps, and in 5 or 6 feature films time we’ll get a better sense of the truth or lack of truth of that, I think. But for now, the artist is very much on top of his game and I would urge you to give this movie a go if you get the opportunity to see it at some point. If not, it might track you down and come looking for your cinematic eye on its own terms.

There is no escape!

The 7x7 Award

The Magnificent 7x7

I must confess I’d never heard of the 7x7 Award before.

Not until last night when a fellow blogger Raghavmodi tweeted me to let me know I was one of his seven recipients of this honour.

As soon as I saw it took the form of a chain, passed on in a widening circle, my back was up because... well, we’ve all seen those silly chain letters and emails. But then I realised I was kinda missing the point on this one because... well it actually is a great honour if you think about it. A fellow blogger has thought my stuff good enough to receive this kind of attention. The award may well spread the same way as a virus but it’s actually a really nice thing...

It’s an antidote to all the cynicism that you see around you and have to wade through on a daily basis both in the real and virtual worlds. Something which says your fellow bloggers are taking notice and giving you a pat on the back and so, it’s in that spirit, that I now accept the award and will do my best to point you in the direction of the seven people who I will do the same favour for.

So big thanks to Raghavmodi for thinking of me in this manner. Please check out his blog at http://tickertalksfilm.blogspot.co.uk/ which is one of his many blogs on a range of subjects. This is the one of his I go to the most, obviously, because it’s about movies... my "not so secret" passion.

So, from what I can make out, there are three rules which I have to obey to be able to retain and pass on this beacon of illumination to another seven recipients.

Rule 1. Tell everyone something that nobody else knows about yourself. 
That’s the scary one I guess.

Rule 2. Post a link to one of my posts that I think best fits the following categories:
a. Most Beautiful Piece.
b. Most Helpful Piece.
c. Most Popular Piece.
d. Most Controversial Piece.
e. Most Surprisingly Successful Piece.
f. Most Underrated Piece.
g. Most Pride-Worthy Piece.

Rule 3.  Pass this award on to seven other bloggers.
Again, not so easy to do as I’d first thought.

Okay then. So here goes... I’ll do my bit with thanks.

Rule 1: Tell everyone something that nobody else knows about yourself.
Okay... when I eat dessert or cereal, I prefer to use the big metal spoon with a little teddy bear etched on to it which I’ve been using since I was a toddler... presumably a toddler with a big mouth... or I’ve got a stupidly small mouth now! One of the two.

Rule 2: Post a link to one of the posts that I think best fits the following categories:

a. Most Beautiful Piece
Hmmm... not sure I’ve written anything truly beautiful and the one I might have put in here would probably have to go in Most Pride-Worthy Piece... so instead, I’m linking to My 100th Blog Post because it was created in memory of the late, great Harvey Pekar (who had just died very recently at the time) and I at least used a lot of colours in it. I’m naked in it and that’s not particularly beautiful... but not in all the panels...

http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/my-100th-blog-click-to-embiggen.html

You used to be able to make this comic page much bigger but the blogger interface seems to have changed and removed this option... so just copy it into another piece of software if you want to read the panels comfortably, I guess. Like Photoshop maybe?


b. Most Helpful Piece.
Well, although it’s already fairly out of date, my most helpful post to film novices would have been my DVD Couture post here....

http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/dvd-couture-remixed-multi-region-in.html

It could really do with updating at some point to reflect the fact that labels like Encore, who did some fantastic Jean Rollin boxes, no longer seem to be players in the market and to reflect more recent great labels like Arrow Films and Sazuma.


c. Most Popular Piece
Hmmm... well I don’t know why but this review of the not too terrible remake of 13 Assassins is visited a number of times a day from people all around the world doing google searches. It’s a very rare day indeed that it doesn’t get read at least once... but it’s not one of my favourites. You can read it here...

http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/assassin-8-plus-5-13-assassins-japanuk.html


d. Most Controversial Piece.
Blimey. I dunno. Controversy implies a difference of opinion... so I suppose that means a post where most people would disagree with me? I haven’t had too many disagreeable comments, thankfully, but I did quite like, despite the obvious problems of bad decisions at the adaptation stage, the new movie version of John Carter. and I know a lot of critics and viewers were a lot less impressed with this movie than I was. So maybe I’ll pick that one. Read it here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/john-carter.html


e. Most Surprisingly Successful Piece.
Well... technically my most popular post was also my most surprising but, to be fair, I was surprised that my January 2011 review of TinTin And The Golden Fleece, the first of the live-action TinTin movies, has had as many reads as it has. Take a look if you’re into the adventures of the boy reporter... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/fleecing-herge.html


f. Most Underrated Piece.
Well... I hate to trash movies, to be sure, and I don’t do it that often if I can help it. I usually can find at least some redeeming features in it. But there was one particular film called The Haunting Of Winchester House 3D that was just so awful and incompetent that I couldn’t help but poke fun at it just in order to preserve my sanity. I don’t wish any of the cast and crew on this any hurt and it was probably wrong of me to let rip quite so badly... but I also think it’s one of my more entertaining reviews and, for better or worse, here it is... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/rifling-secrets-of-winchester.html

g. Most Pride-Worthy Piece.
Actually, My 300th Blog Post - Faces Of Caroline Munro is also one of my most popular postings... but let me tell you why it’s also the one I’m most proud of. The minifigure drawings I did to celebrate my fondness for Caroline Munro were actually spotted by Caroline herself and for a while I had a shout out on her website saying how much she liked them. Then, earlier this year, I had a canvass print made of them and gave it to Caroline when she was doing a signing at the Westminster Film Fair. She seemed to really love it and that made me very happy, I can tell you. So here’s the link to that one... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/my-300th-blog-post.html


Rule 3.  Pass this award on to seven other bloggers 
Okay... so here comes the really difficult bit. I have to reciprocate and highlight seven other bloggers to take receipt of this award. I thought this was going to be really easy until I realised there were 10 or 12 people who I actually wanted to include. It wasn’t easy to narrow it down to seven... this was not something I wanted to do, to be honest. But then I realised... hey, at least a couple of those seven are as likely to include the people in their recipient’s list that I haven’t been able to in mine. So I figured... time to make some ruthless decisions. Here then are my final selections for the 7x7 Award.

Alex Kittle - Filmforager
Alex Kittle’s brilliant creation Filmforager is easily the greatest and most consistently diverse batch of film reviews on the internet. And she also does some great artwork based on her viewings, some of which you can purchase in her etsy shop. If you haven’t even seen her site yet and you're a fan of movies, please take a look as soon as possible here... http://www.filmforager.com/

Pipisnips - Blogging My Dead Dad
This is a blog which isn’t updated as often as I’d like (yeah, I’m greedy for good writing) but Blogging My Dead Dad is, bar none, the most moving set of blog posts I’ve ever read. And it’s bloody well written and intense in its honesty too. You should definitely check Pipisnips blog out if you’re a fan of being alive. Catch it here... http://bloggingmydeaddad.blogspot.co.uk/

Jim Moon aka Hypnogoria - The Moon Lens
If you like fiction and film based on horror and fantasy then Hypnogoria’s blog is absolutely up your street. I’ve never known such a thoroughly researched blogger and his articles are always immensely entertaining and well written. He also regularly records and deposits a lot of quite lengthy podcasts on here, which you can also subscribe to via itunes. If I want an opinion on something to do with ghosts, ghouls, vampires, werewolves, zombies and goodness knows what else... Jim Moon’s The Moon Lens is your best stop off point... http://hypnogoria.blogspot.co.uk/

Buckocowboyland - Cowboylands blog
Before I started reading Buckocowboyland’s compelling Cowboylands blog posts, I’d forgotten that I’d quite liked westerns. But the enthusiasm of the cowboy lifestyle coming across from every post made me a regular reader and reminded me that I love Westerns too. If you want to be able to tell your Gene Autrey from your Roy Rogers and your Tom Mix from your William S. Hart, I suggest you saddle up and head over to Bucko’s blog at a gallop here... http://cowboylands.net/

James Devereaux - The Great Acting Blog
You know that old Hitchcock quote that actors should be treated like cattle? Well I kinda half used to believe that the actors role is a severely diminished one compared to what it actually is. The sincerity, blinding logic and devotion to the craft by actor James Devereaux put me straight on that rubbish. I now, because of this guy, remember to really consider the performances of everything I watch, whereas before I’d just thought of actors as moving furniture. The performances are a very key component in all performing art and it’s this guy and his weekly posts that made me wake up and smell the Kafka! Check him out here... http://thegreatactingblog.posterous.com/

Daniel Martin Eckhart - Write, Write, Write
Sometimes we forget that these compelling and much talked about screen entertainments we constantly consume have hard working writers behind them. People like screenwriter Daniel Martin Eckhart who has a blog called Write Write Write which is worth its weight in gold for anybody who is wanting to get into screenwriting and, frankly, anybody who is writing period. I’m just a blogger but even I found a tip of his about leaving off a long project in the middle of a sentence immensely helpful. You should seriously check this guy out... http://www.danielmartineckhart.com/

Amanda Norman - Gothic and Horror Photography
Last, but by no means least, is the weird and wonderful world of Amanda Norman. She has an excellent eye for taking some very atmospheric and eerie photographs, inspired by the kind of environments you find in old ghost stories and 1930s/40s horror movies. She sells these plus also uses some of her shots in her homemade gothic jewellery which she sells on her website, where you can also find her blog here... http://www.amandanorman.com/

So that’s it then. My seven recipients for the 7x7 Award. I hope that you give them all a good look and I hope that they each find seven worthy bloggers to pass the baton to, so to speak.

Again, thanks to Raghavmodi for making me one of his recipients. And thanks to all you readers who look at my posts from time to time. I really do appreciate it. All the best!

HE

Mastering Visual Ostinato

HE Ireland 2012

Directed by Rouzbeh Rashidi

Experimental Film Society

I’ve been kind of looking forward to seeing HE because it’s the second feature length collaboration between two people I follow on twitter, director Rouzbeh Rashidi and the actor James Devereaux. I know I’ve reviewed films by the prolific and mercurial Rouzbeh Rashidi before on here (as I have Devereaux’s) but I’m beginning to get more of a handle on his creative signature now, I think (not that he’d neccessarily want a creative signature).

HE has a really strong opening... especially for people of my age and maybe just a little older. A man who may or may not be Devereaux, wearing some kind of white environment suit, is exploring an abandoned and run down office corridor in long shot with film colouring somewhat reminiscent of sepia tone. There is a grating, scratching sound causing tension on the audio track and visual cycling on the picture indicates that we might be watching a surveillance recording, as the man makes his way slowly, over the course of a few minutes, to the front of the shot, armed with his torch, carefully exploring the debris he finds on the way.

It’s a really, really strong opening and most of the films I’ve seen by Rashidi so far have a knack of opening with a really arresting sequence. This one, for me, had a very obvious early to late 70s Hollywood science-fiction vibe to it. The white environment suit giving the visuals a definitive and provocative sense of the sinister and unknown. The sound design is fantastically effective and reflects this sense of unease... coupled with this one long take of a shot, it contributes to a tonal pitch of almost fear and paranoia. Was really impressed with this opening again.

This is followed with a bit of a mood changer as Devereaux delivers a monologue in black and white, intercut with initially sepia footage of him exploring the odd contents of what looks like the same abandoned building (in terms of budgetary influences, I’m guessing it’s the same place anyway). In these sequences, however, the environment suit is not present... which puts this footage in another timeframe, if you want to stick with a conventional reading of a less than conventional film maker.

The actual monologue is very starkly shot but not to the point that any excessive tonal contrast pops out at you immediately. In this sequence the acting tour-de-force that is Devereaux, details his dissatisfaction with a recent lover, Mary, with whom he's presumably broken up. Devereaux's pacing is deliberately slow, like a man trying to find the words he wants to say... and having an inkling of how Rashidi does things, this may be a very accurate description because it might even all be improvised on the spot. Even so, this is not to suggest that Devereaux is making his character up as he goes along... more that he’s already in the character (to the extent that you can be to create that illusion for an audience), and that character is exploring his words with a sense of slow precision, because they are important to him.

As Devereaux continues what is the first in a series of extremely long, one take scenes and the first of two, quite lengthy, monologues... the shot starts cutting backwards and forwards between the footage of him exploring the building. Sometimes the two bits of footage are cut to a very fast rhythm of roughly a second as shot. Setting up an almost hypnotic sense of pacing, as the fast cuts set up a new mood in your brain. Things settle down a bit then and the cuts to and from the juxtaposed footage come slower as new layers are added to what are presumably memories... which is what the human brain will pick up from the language of cinema as the correct interpretation of the same person being cut against footage of himself (whether this is a correct interpretation or not). Rashedi knows this and exploits that basic self-taught human response to his own uses... I was very much expecting him to pull the rug from under me in this sequence to be honest.

After a while, the director/editor sets up another intense sequence of similar rhythmic cutting within the same monologue. So what we now have is a secondary layer of different rhythms creating a larger, slower rhythm which is being received directly into the mind as a fast series of rhythmic cuts... when what is actually happening at a deeper, and probably subconscious level for the majority of the audience, is that a larger and more serene rhythmic response is being set up... much like the way the music of Philip Glass can play out in the ear as speedy repeat phrases when they are actually piecing together a slower melody inside your head. So what we have is a very striking and initially grating visual ostinato making up a slower piece, which owes as much to Dennis Hopper’s similar cross-cutting effects in his directorial debut Easy Rider as it does to anything else.

The quality of the intercut footage starts to get more colourful and dreamlike in some places and then knocks back down to a state of distress in others. In this second tier of footage, Devereaux continues to wander a rundown building interior, randomly exploring and interacting (passively at first) with his immediate environment on a purely physical level. After a good long while he picks up a load of big Garrick Glen bottles of still water (product placement in a Rashidi movie?) and places them on a ramshackle table he finds. This is a red herring that something pivotal is about to happen because, after undoing the tops of each one and sniffing them in turn before putting the tops back on, he knocks them off the table with a walking stick he's been carrying and carries on exploring his environment. As I write these words now and revisit the movie in my head... I suddenly realise I’ve got a very strong idea of what he is looking for, but to reveal that here would possibly spoil things a little for potential viewers.

Towards the end of this first monologue section, Devereaux’s HE reveals that he is recording his monologue to send to Mary, because he is going to kill himself. It's an audio suicide note.

We then have a scene change with a more colourful and sharper picture, as we cut to what can only be Mary herself. She is talking with someone (possibly her latest lover) in a room as they both gaze out of large windows. We cannot hear the actual conversation they are having, however.

At first Mary is occupying the same basic space to the left of the screen that Devereaux was visually filling during his monologue... so this scene cuts very naturally into this segment before quickly cutting to a long shot of Mary and the other guy in profile... Mary still occupying the left of screen so this is already not nearly as jarring as the sequence with Devereaux in it... until the intercut footage of Devereaux wandering the building continues to be intercut into this sequence, enabling a more intense rhythm mixed with a more aggressive, almost musical sound design... we are now entering the realms of pure visual poetry, ladies and gentlemen, which makes Rashidi something akin to a direct descendant, mutant love child of the cinematic poetry of Andrei Tarkovsky cross pollinated with late 50s beat generation writing (somebody needs to give this guy a big budget and see if he can handle it without losing creative impetus... come on all you slap dash producers!).

We cut to a single shot of the guy which holds for a longer time, like the first shot in this section of the female lead and, yes, he's occupying the opposite space within the frame of the shot to what she and Devereaux did. Is this sequence a mirror image of itself developed through the rhythm of the shots? Well yeah and that’s obviously the intent but it’s almost here as a visual bookend to bring us into a second monologue while still retaining continuity of the cross-cut footage, because as this shot sequence ends we cut to a new scene of Deveraux in a standard colour shot with a new monologue delivery... but intercut with more footage of Deveraux wandering the building, this time (at first) without any deterioration to the quality of the film stock... perhaps symbolic of less mental deterioration as this monologue seems a little faster and more confident... it being another recording, this time to the parents of the character.

The intercut footage grows more angry and destructive and is perhaps a visual echo of the anger that the central character feels to his parents. The content of these shots calms down for a while but the monologue drops out with aggressive audio phase shifting (or some such technique) in what seems like a key place, to deliberately restrict the viewer from being spoonfed certain information and to instead fire the potent imagination, I would imagine... before dropping back into the natural sound of the monologue. It could also, of course, be a way of cutting out material which didn’t, in the final analysis, gel with the tone of the piece... but if so it’s a valid and creative solution to that particular kind of problem and so not to be seen as an invalidation of a piece of work. I suspect half of what happens on a film set is accidental anyway (even with Hitchcock, but I’m not going to try to defend that statement here).

This monologue also becomes an aggressive diatribe against the evils of television and the lack of a role model in the character’s parents which is actually quite heartfelt and somewhat amusing (I can really identify with certain parts of this stuff and believe I’ve said similar about the evils of daytime television to various friends over the years).

We then have another break from the format after a while and various experimental techniques are applied to crosscut footage intertwining with contemplative shots of other characters. Devereaux continues his explorations and antics within the building, this time back in the environmental suit, while sound and atonal music dictates the intensity that these shots are informed by... or at least a retrofitted sense of the informed, if such a thing is possible (and of course it is in cinema).

A sequence intercut to this with the couple from earlier in bed with the guy not being in any way responsive to the world about him, even when aggressively shaken, is cut against a new and hard to digest rhythm.

This is followed by a sequence where Devereaux’s character discusses his impending suicide with a friend, which is a great sequence of two really masterful actors who seem to work pretty well together, juxtaposed against footage featuring a character played by director Maximilian Le Cain, who meets with Devereaux as he assists him by providing him with the means to take his suicide objective a step closer. Le Cain isn’t in it much but adds a little more intensity in his static performance. I once wrote of him in my blog review here that he seems like someone who would “be chasing me down a street brandishing a big board with a nail in it” but in these short scenes he seems somehow less physically aggressive... perhaps more like someone who would be “paying and organising subordinates” to be chasing me down a street brandishing a big board with a nail in it, instead. Either way he has an intensity in this that’s hard to ignore.

Devereaux and his friend explore the motivation and reasoning behind his decision to kill himself and it’s a very rational and almost calm conversation, one that perhaps contradicts the inherent struggle of Devereaux’s first monologue and naked aggression of his second. This gives a sense of depth to the character because it’s clear that he is not telling his friend everything... or at least that’s the way I interpreted it and I’m really not going to say anymore about the content of the film because I think this seemingly inherent but unhighlighted contradiction pretty much sums up Rashidi’s directorial style, which I touched upon somewhat in my review of his movie Bipedality.

That is to say...

In terms of visual aesthetic, this is very much a film which pits beautifully framed, static and crisp shots against more downgraded and less palatable textures and moving camera work. But no answers are provided and visual touchstones are deliberately (I believe) set up to create a “story space” to make up your own ways of reading and interpreting the text. Is the environment suit needed, for instance, because the building is radioactive and Devereaux’s character didn’t know and now he has cancer? Is that the reason why he’s decided to take this course and reexamine his life? Or is he a ghost from the future in a post apocalyptic time period. I don’t know and neither, do I think, am I supposed to.

Rashidi doesn’t tell stories, he sets them up and then leaves them absolutely to the audience's own struggle to provide a shape to house the visual and aural ideas prevalent in his movies. He doesn’t leave it completely without structure and, as we have seen, there is plenty of structure and rhythm within the editing of his sequences... but he does provide a rough guide to an exploration of the narrative and not the key to a fixed narrative conclusion itself. This is the strength of this director’s films and, I suspect, one of the reasons why they have interest independent of their obvious visual beauty. I won’t say more on this because I don’t want to over think this guys working method but I will say that, while some audiences for this kind of, almost challenging but certainly not passively consumed, cinematic dish may find this kind of meal less palatable than others, I would have to say that I quite enjoyed HE and think it’s an another fine example of a director who is making really unique films which unfold on the director’s own terms and which don’t cowtow to commercial pressures. Seek this one out, if you can, if you are into watching a purer (I hesitate to say rawer given the obvious craftsmanship which goes into these kinds of films) and more demanding form of cinema.

For more information on Rashidi and Devereaux, go here and then follow the links... http://rashididevereauxcinema.tumblr.com/

Closure of Catharsis

Catharsis Ray Tube

I’d been wanting to see Rouzbeh Rashidi's feature length experimental movie Closure of Catharsis for a while now for two reasons... One, I had mixed but positive reactions to some (though not all) of the director’s shorts and I find his work compelling... almost raw, where the artifice of film allows for that. Secondly, it stars one of my Twitterati v-friends James Devereaux... an actor who has made me re-appreciate, precisely because of his blog and his presence on Twitter, the art of acting as an important part of the filming process. I’d kinda grown into the habit of seeing actors as merely cardboard cyphers who would say their lines and do their best not to knock over the scenery and hit their marks. Sloppy thinking on my part... convenient, but sloppy. Devereaux has made me remember that it’s the actors that you look at first on screen and that their performance is what often allows the film to breath and turn a fair to middling piece of entertainment into a film with some really great or memorable moments.

Now I knew before I even started watching this movie (on my laptop, the film is not available through any of the usual distribution routes) that this may well be a tough one to negotiate and get my head around, if the director’s shorts were anything to go by. Actually it wasn’t that hard a watch but, at the same time, I don’t think we’ll ever be seeing stuff like this in a cinema anytime soon... but I’ll get back to that later.

99% of this film consists of one of a few tight shots of Devereaux, who is sitting on a park bench, improvising and talking to the camera... his head in tight close up, framed by two craggy trees with branches reaching towards his head and threatening to grab him if the illusion of perspective fails. Devereaux then engages the audience for the majority of the next hour and 40 minutes with a slow and thoughtful series of monologues, some of them connected, others less so. Objects and notes are passed to him off camera to inspire or provoke his mental process and his outward projection of this is fascinating to watch (actually, the director is another star of this movie, turning up in the background several times and also as a reflection in a train carriage window... Devereaux even references him a few times). But there’s also a sense of tension within the movie which only gets little moments of relief and... this is why...

Pardon me while I go into a little riff on Arthur Penn’s best remembered movie here... if you’ve heard me saying this stuff before, skip the next couple of paragraphs.

Rouzbeh Rashidi's Closure of Catharsis is a movie which reminded me a lot of Bonnie and Clyde... and I bet if I said that to Rashidi he’d be really surprised and have no idea of what I’m talking about... but there’s a definite connection with the technique that both Arthur Penn and Rouzbeh Rashidi have taken to create (and in Penn’s movie, “release”) tension... they both do it in the same way.

To briefly explain... Bonnie and Clyde is a film which starts off with the entire first ten minutes or so in either tight shots or medium shots of the two characters... without any kind of traditional establishing shot which allows the audience to gain a “scene setting”, I-know-where-I-am-and-what’s-happening sense of comfort from the action. This is pretty much why the “establishing shot” was invented in the first place... or at least, if it wasn’t, then it’s become firmly entrenched in our collective way of decoding a film that it’s generally needed to help set up in our minds just where we are with the beginning of a sequence of moving image. The long shot is a much needed crutch with which we can get a little lift up into the world of the movie... without it we’re struggling. Now Penn knows this and so he keeps the tension going until Bonnie and Clyde commit their first robbery and then he hits us with his first long shot... thus the audience receives tension release and with that collective audience sigh of alleviation, even though we’re watching two felons commit a crime, we come to sympathise with them because the syntax of the shot flow allows us some sense of relief which we now come to associate with Bonnie and Clyde committing crimes. Kind of a Pavlovian way of working but isn't that what cinema does best?

Rashidi does the same thing with his movie but you never, ever, get the act of tension release within the frame. The shots, and these are done in very long takes, when they cut... just keep on getting tighter (and sometimes blurrier, this guy wants you to feel challenged and uncomfortable and reacting to his movie) and tighter until the movie finishes... without the closure promised by its title. There are respites of other footage edited in and I’ll get into that in a moment but it’s almost like Rashidi is feeling the audience is getting used to the intensity of the shot... and then he moves in closer again. I don’t know if that last thing is a deliberate act but... something’s going on there and my guess is he wants that unrelenting closeness to the main character to ratchet up every now and again.

Now about those little vignettes that Rashidi keeps inserting... the first one appears after half an hour and is a group of drunks at a bus stop... this is easy to decode since Devereaux has just mentioned that the park is full of alcoholics. As we go on, other footage of a young man and a couple of “parents” (two sets) are introduced and what Rashidi makes use of now is the “space” or “understanding” of conventional cinema narrative to create meaning from footage as applied to a very unconventional movie...

And so, by way of demonstration of just what I’m talking about... I’m going to evoke Pleasantville (a movie which you should all check out if you can just get past the first twenty minutes which gives it the appearance of being just another Hollywoodland teen comedy). By way of demonstration, I’m going to show how the director of Pleasantville is able to play with our narrative assumptions to best explain how Rashidi uses those same narrative assumptions to help shape his movie in your brain... and then make it harder for us.

Pleasantville opens up with a series of close up shots of two characters, a boy and a girl, talking to each other. First the camera focuses on the boy as he says something. Then the camera focuses on the girl as she continues the conversation. Then the camera goes back to the boy and so on... then the director pulls the rug from under us and shows a long shot where it’s clear that the girl is actually talking to her group of friends and the boy is just rehearsing what he’d like to say to the girl... from quite some distance away. This “joke” wouldn’t work without the audience assuming that, because we’re seeing two characters individually talking and pointing towards different directions, these two characters are having a conversation. It’s deeply ingrained from when we first watch movies and we subconsciously pick up on the visual language of cinema... we can’t help it. There’s a space in our head which decodes those kinds of sequences of shots and arranges them like that in our mind’s eye and this is continually maintained and spoon fed to us in this way on a daily basis in all forms of visual media. Advertising, for example, absolutely relies on the quick understanding of what is going on... a thirty second spot is a thirty second spot. Time is money. They need to sell us on the idea of their problems quick... nobody’s going to be rocking the boat too much when it comes to our rich inheritance of the language of visual narrative.

And this is what Rashidi does when he inserts footage which really wouldn’t seem like it has anything to do with the narrative. He relies, at first, on the audience building up the idea that we are seeing visual representations of this character’s memories of his youth and also the visual representation of his parents when Devereaux starts telling stories like the hierarchy of his childhood household being symbolised by... no television, black and white television and then colour television... before drifting into some quite heart-rending ponderings with which he creates a tension which comes close to the catharsis of the title but... then concludes with the understanding that the lack of conclusion can be the necessary ingredient of a better conclusion later on (much later on... after the movie has finished!).

Rashidi doesn’t however, probably out of sheer bloody mindedness that he’s not going to give the audience such an easy time (I suspect), make all of those “flashbacks” so easy to decode. There are things going on which are left entirely with the onus on the viewer to make some kind of connection to the inserted footage with the ever tightening close ups on Devereaux’s character... which kind of reaches “Blur-gio Leone” proportions towards the end. :-) This does generate a certain kind of Godardian concentration from the audience and I’m sure this is probably why Rashidi does it... unless he’s just re-using old shot footage and best making use of it where he can... but I prefer my first assumption because it’s more glamorous. This stuff isn’t always that easy to assimilate into the main dialectic of the, for want of a better term when it comes to this movie, “narrative”.

This is not the kind of film that could ever play at your local multiplex or get a DVD issue, and this means that the majority of people will never get the opportunity to see it and this is sad because I can’t ever imagine the pendulum swinging back to this more challenging and vital cinema anywhere in our lifetimes.

That’s not to say that this kind of movie-making is in any way unimportant or to be ignored. Truth be told, I really enjoyed the experience of watching this movie and will possibly watch it again at some point in the future. Where I think this kind of film would really prosper and flourish, I suspect, is as an installation in an art gallery setting (not that I’m admitting to such a phenomena as arthouse cinema, you understand). I could just see this movie being projected in a continuous all-day loop at somewhere like the Tate Gallery because, if you come in half way through and are not necessarily picking up on the way the shots get closer on the central character as the film progresses, I reckon it would be hard to determine where this movie starts and ends. That’s not intended as a slight to the director, I think this is a strength of the movie... I think it can stand multiple back-to-back viewings without anyone getting bored as I found the whole experience rather entertaining too.

If you can find a way to see it, check out Closure of Catharsis at some point. It’s something you don’t get to see that often.

James own blogs on his experience with Closure of Catharsis can be found here and here.

Another of my reviews of Rashidi and his contemporaries can be found here, should you be so inclined.