Chloe Zao’s Oscar winning film Nomadland is a hybrid documentary about very many themes. That is its strength and its controversial nature. To reduce the film to one theme only, is to present it as unnecessarily reductive. Nomadland is not uncomplicated. It challenges the viewers’ expectations on every level.
First, one could certainly say that it is a piece about poverty. It features homeless people, mostly older ones, who travel around the United States in modest caravans.They have lost jobs, homes, families and when the retirement is not an option, they take to the road looking for odd jobs. Some reviewers, including our own DMovies one, see the film as an indictment against the capitalist system which strips older people of their home. It is clear that the film is that but it is not just that. It also quite curiously heralds Amazon as one of the best providers of these odd jobs. “The pay is great” say Fern. This makes all of us good left-wing intellectuals wince.
Second, the film is also about loss, the economic loss, but also about how one deals with grief, bereavement, losing the loved ones, and ultimately. with losing one’s health and yes, life.It is therefore also about how different people approach the inevitability of mortality. Some, including the main character, Fern, played by the incomparable Frances McDormand, who has won her third Oscar for the part, choose to embrace and enjoy the sense of freedom that the nomad life gives them.
Third, the film is then about an ability to find solace in most unexpected places, in nature but also in small gestures of kindness from fellow human beings. It is about an ability to take pleasure in the tiniest of moments, which one can develop and nurture. One can enjoy little events in life. It’s these small events that really matter once all material possessions have gone. But then – all of a sudden – the film contradicts itself: Fern’s male friend inadvertently breaks a plate she treasures, a souvenir from her father and so she gets very angry, and glues it together, painstakingly. This contradiction makes Nomadland so endlessly surprising and rich.
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At the coalface
And then finally, the most surprising revelation of all is to discover that Zhao’s film – which pretends to be a mainstream offering and as such is winning mainstream awards – is, in fact, an experimental documentary: McDormand, who is also one of the producers of the film, enters the actual physical world of the nomads and interviews them for the film. McDormand and Zhao are documentary filmmakers of sorts, documenting the lives of that community with McDormand as Fern interacting with the actual people who live this way. Does this present ethical issues? Yes, of course it does, also because the film’s final message is unrepentedly optimistic.
Nomadland is not a hard–hitting piece on poverty such as, for example, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016). Chloe Zhao’s second film offers a different vision, that of freedom, and that vision has been criticised by some as romanticised and sentimental. Fern chooses her old caravan and roaming around the deserts and the rocks of the shores of the ocean above family ties and domestic responsibilities. There is something attractive about this escape from domesticity, but I am sure that Frances McDormand (pictured below) taking a shit in a bucket next to her kitchen utensils is anything but sentimental.
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The voices of “the other”
Still – here the problem here is more complex as Zhao uses real people in real situations to tell an ultimately fictional story. There is an ethical problem of any (documentary) filmmaker using the voice of the other in one’s work. The celebrated American Asian filmmaker and scholar and Trinh T.Minh-ha brutally stated some 30 years ago that any situation in which one person tells stories of other lives necessarily involves an asymmetrical power relationship. She said about her own work: “A conversation of ‘us’ with ‘us’ about ‘them’ is a conversation in which ‘them’ is silenced. “
Historically, documentary filmmaking began as a colonial and deeply capitalist project carried out by white men often presenting strange people from far-flung cultures. The two fathers of the genre Robert Flaherty and John Grierson working in the ’20s and ’30s of the last century did their creative artistic work in the pay of the Shipyard Board (Grierson) and fur companies (Flaherty).Flaherty’s films, as we may recall, with the famous Nanook of the North (1922) were dramatic reconstructions and not attempts to capture the observable world. Flaherty made up scenes of “the exotic other” behaving in “authentic” ways in order to make his film more attractive and commercially viable.
It was not until Fatimah Tobing Rony’s book The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (1996) that Nanook’s position as an anthropological document was questioned openly, despite some earlier evidence presented forcefully previously (in a another documentary film in 1984). There is still reluctance to let go of the artist/explorer myth, however false it is from a factual viewpoint, never mind any ethical discussions.The list of celebrated films made by white men about “the exotic other”is endless: there is Jean Rouch’s work for example, there have been the works of Fred Wiseman, there is much later Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991) and the more recent works including the multi-award winning The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012).
What Zhao does in Nomadland is something quite extraordinary. It is almost like she is settling the old scores. She takes the documentary artist/explorer myth and turns it upside down. Robert Flaherty in his Nanook pretends to be making a documentary but in fact makes fiction that is disrespectful to the Inuk culture and was also a complete lie: the life he presented in his film never existed and was but his fantasy. On the other hand, Zhao made a film which can be perceived as fiction but in fact relies heavily on its documentary material, techniques and structure. Her cinema is respectful and reflective and attempts to find dignity in difficult circumstances.
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Boundless possibilities
The image of Chloe Zhao with the Oscar statuette (pictured above) should be juxtaposed with the images of the indigenous women from Nanook. What is striking that their ethnicity and looks are similar but the Nanook women hold children and food in their hands and Chloe Zhao holds the Oscar statuette, the Western world’s highest accolade for a filmmaker. We also do know now that these women were sexually exploited by Flaherty and his team, their agency as people and women nearly extinguished.
This Oscar-winning director, a non-white woman, working with another woman, who happens to be white, says something profound about these intersectional allegiances that the Audre Lourde encouraged in her ground-breaking discussion with Adrienne Rich. The film tells a story of the Western culture which has failed us. Nomadland is about the urgent need to re-think our materialistic Western aspirations, which devalue human relationships. These aspirations destroy nature – which we rely on for life itself – and offer an illusion of security and comfort but, in reality,might be taking us far away from where we need to be. But Nomadland is also more than a sum of its parts which is its undeniable strength: it is a hopeful testimony to the boundless possibilities of human spirit and human creativity, both in its narrative and in its creative provenance.
As with every July 12th, the Orange Marchers cornered the Queen’s avenues of Belfast with the zest of 1690 ringing through the 2019 buildings. It’s a march that symbolises the divisions that exist still in Ireland’s most northerly province. These divisions led to a war, starting in the 1960s, only the shared power-sharing handshakes of The Good Friday Agreement ceased a 30-year conflict. Chaos and conflict have narrative properties, a quality which has been showcased in several films. Though the most galling depictions of The Troubles were saved until the millennium, many fine reflections of conflated conflicted truths found their to the cutting room floors, some telling reflections of Her Majesty’s Government serialised in serial film.
And yet neither the Loyalist nor the Republican Movements acted with great compassion, the torment of war encased in the artillery on both sides. This list neither wags nor holds a finger at the disputatious activities which involved three nations. Rather it seeks to understand the artistry which reflected a war divided over monarchic loyalties, hibernal loyalties and a statement of Northern Irish identity. The impact of a Brexit Vote (which Northern Ireland voted against) may cause a future return to the struggles. For some, reunification seems paramount, for others, an affront to their proud identity. As it stands the first opens in an Ireland preparing, the last in Scotland finishing a war, while the eight impress the haunting conflicts of a residual, never ending battle.
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1. Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970):
The gun toting, bog smoking antics of the Republican movement matches the backdrop of David Lean’s cinematic portraiture, the Kerry landscape wistfully romantic in spirited woodlands. Soldiers and bullets enter the mountainous backdrop as a local married pub lady enters into a liaison with a soldier whose comrades kill her townsmen. David Lean’s pastoral, political spectacle carries a covert change cutting the myriad of masked freedom fighting memories in the backdrop of a Britain awaiting the toll of The Troubles.
Steely in appearance, Robert Mitchum strides as the apprised Charles Shaughnessy, a local teacher whose father in law informs the soldiers from the provincial puissant of his tavern and whose wife sleeps with one of the soldiers Shaughnessy personally and politically opposes. Often unfairly compared to the majesty of Lean’s earlier efforts, Ryan’s Daughter is a seismic work, understated in the historical backdrop Ireland and Britain still share. Gun smuggled capers echo the bordered insanities Irish men experienced in the 1970s, writhing to the efforts of an Empire uninterested and unimpressed with the isles it inhabits. The agrarian agricultural beauty envelopes the romance the fervent fancies Rosy (Sarah Miles) shares with an exhibit of soldiers, waiting to offer their flame fancied pistols.
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2. The Outsider (Tony Luraschi, 1980):
An American ascending from the American dream to a hibernal one, Craig Wesser acts convincingly in the dual role of actor and Vietnam veteran, violently entering the indolent Belfast hovels. Notorious on release, The Outsider suffered the ignominy of being dropped from a London festival after filming in Northern Ireland had proven unsustainable. And yet there’s a power to the film foolishly ignored by the festival goers, crept as it is in crepuscular imagery and masculine fragility. Behind the array of metallic weaponry comes a tale of generational fortitude. Wesser plays the torn-down American, eager to follow his Grandfather’s career in ridding Ireland of a British burden. Then there’s Sterling Hayden, the aged grandparent, burdened with a secret of British platitude.
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3. Maeve (Pat Murphy and John Davies, 1981):
The Irish Times called it “Ireland’s first bona fide feminist film”. If an oversimplification (I’d make a strong case that Ryan’s Daughter pipped it), the story at least understands the struggles of the everyday woman returning from the liberal London lounge-ways for a Belfast betrothed to gender politics. Maeve (Mary Jackson), scarf worn and headstrong, stands in front of a machine gun poking heavy, imbuing the Godardian French Wave milieu in her dress. Director Pat Murphy was a founder of the feminist film and video distribution network Circles, tellingly calling both England and Ireland for their questionable exemplars in gender representation at the turn of the 1980s.
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4. Cal (Pat O’Connor, 1984):
Orange Orders open lacerated words, as Loyalists lacerate young Cal (John Lynch) for his allegiances to the provisional Irish Republican Army. Amidst the towering bombs which batter the broken pebbles they walk comes one of the most deeply romantic movies of the last thirty-five years. Mark Knopfler, a thoughtful Glaswegian entranced in his six strings, soundtracks Helen Mirren, a widowed, willowy ingenue cascaded in her heart strings. Entranced in Marcella’s arms, Cal crosses the threshold of Catholic guilt, slain in his love for her posture, demonstrated in his killings of her slain husband. The leisured love stems from screenwriter’s Bernard MacLaverty’s liturgical prose, learned in the perspective Belfast prisons Cal must enter and Marcella must wade through a doleful dalliance as bested battleground breaks them down.
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5. Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989):
A dawn rises. A car passes. A man turns to his urinal. He’s bulleted into the toiletry fluids, pouring his own bodily blood over his bodily fluid. Alan Clarke’s uncompromising, punchy work works without dialogue, the camera acting out the variety of killings which haunt Northern Ireland on a daily basis. The naturalistic handheld manner of this short film won Clarke plaudits; his producer, Danny Boyle, would direct serial zombie thriller 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) with a very similar setup. Shooting the shootings that come unresolved to the world, Clarke’s observational style called back to Yoko Ono’s late 1960s’ commentary Rape, shocking audiences with a style less glamorous than scurrilous. It’s largely silent, though take warning. Some of the killings are deafening in their protrusion.
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6. In The Name Of The Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993):
Daniel Day Lewis won three Oscars, one as a paraplegic writer, one as a Western Oil Baron, one as America’s liberator of slavery. Yet Day Lewis never gave as fiery a performance as he did incarcerating the incarcerated emotions he endeavoured through Gerry Conlon’s real life trajectory. Arrested as one of The Guilford Four, Conlon was jailed in 1975, wrongfully sentenced for fifteen years as a supposed Provisional IRA bomber. Sinewy in appearance, leathery in hair, Day Lewis walks with rock assurance during the film’s telling climax, the pathway to a journalist rimmed front door a small solace after fifteen years a wronged convict. Emma Thompson works remarkably in her appearance as Conlon’s trusted lawyer, while Pete Postlethwaite wades in his cell as the dejected Giuseppe Conlon. Where Day Lewis gives his best, so does Postlethwaite, two brilliant English actors with impeccable Northern Irish diction. Fittingly, Postlethwaite’s final performance came as Fergus Colm, the callous Irish crime lord in Ben Affleck’s excellent The Town.
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7. The Informant (Jim McBride, 1997):
Before Harvey Weinstein shocked the world with professed lechery, he shocked the film world when the lightweight Shakespeare In Love (John Madden) championed the astonishing Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg) for the 1998 Best Picture Award. In the midst came an unvarnished showtime movie, dedicated to showcasing the trichotomy of male perspective. The capricious Gingy (Anthony Brophy) must stand against his IRA compeers to work with, beside and for the will of an English Lieutenant (Cary Elwes) and a proud Protestant detective (the hoary Timothy Dalton) in a war none will ultimately win.
“The movie is important, because it exposes the complete abdication of morality that happens when two nations go to war” the two-time Bond recalled. “Most people believe, in a war, that one side’s bad and one side’s good. But the minute you go to war, the rules go out the window and both sides become bad.”
In a Dublin licked up to explore the battle beaten Belfast, Jim McBride’s exploration into the human spirit examines the why’s, how’s and who’s of the conflict, relegated to television at a time when no major distributor would have promoted the film. And yet there’s a telling humanity to the proceedings, not least when Maria Lennon’s Roísín berates Dalton’s DCI Rennie for recruiting Catholic women for sexual pleasure.
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8. Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002):
Audiences who knew James Nesbitt as the unflappable lead from the comic Cold Feet could scarcely imagine the depth, nuance, stealth and steel he’d bring as the real life Ivan Cooper. A proud Presbyterian unaware of the circumstances behind Bloody Sunday, Nesbitt took to reading the script while filming another project in Manchester. It moved him as effectively as he moved his audiences in what’s arguably the performance of his life. Detailing the real life tragedy of a peaceful protest, the paramilitary killings outraged many in Britain. Vanessa Redgrave marched for resolution, Paul McCartney issued a musical statement, U2 commemorated the song in one of their more potent pieces. Fittingly, Bono’s voice closes the film with gravitas.
“I’ve seen the film six times now,” the real life Cooper revealed “And my first thoughts were that it was an emotional experience. I’m able to say with confidence that it was made with great integrity.”
Helmed by director Paul Greengrass, the film’s naturalistic style of filming added a padding of telling realism, driving viewers into the middle of the senseless 1972 killings. Hollywood took notice of his skill: Greengrass earned his place as Jason Bourne (2016) director largely on the strength of Bloody Sunday.
Bloody Sunday is also pictured at the top of this article.
9. Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008):
One take. A 17-minute, unending, uncompromising take. The priest talks of God, the prisoner talks of country. Steve McQueen’s first, finest and most harrowing work came from the true life horror stories from the HM Prison Maze, innocent by-standing men stripped by their dignities by a Government shadowed overseas. Just as it took an English director to paint the atrocities of Bloody Sunday, another brilliantly ambitious English man saw the truth in the sullied cells which starved the intellect of its prisoners as harshly as they starved their bodies. We could write an entire article on why this film should be remembered, but instead I’ll focus on sinewy dialogue, Michael Fassbender’s Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham’s Father Dominic Moran exchanging sharp words, cutting in their veneer, tense in their timing. Involving, issue non resolving, the scene sits in solemn penance, one long take with few of the pyrotechnics employed throughout Birdman. Staggering.
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10. The Journey (Nick Hamm, 2016):
It started with the barbed shot, it ended with the barbed retort. The Journey chronicles the voyage Republicanism and Unionism joined, fittingly embodied in a taxi driven by an impartial driver. Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall star as Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley, two political combatants who worked in close collaboration to steer their shared country through the devolution of power in the region. Brilliant and bathetically, the claustrophobic taxi’s engine mirrors the distressed sounds a battle ground surrounded these two men. The furnished Scottish woodlands echoes the planted fears these men share. As a reverend, McGuinness sees Paisley’s position as more polemic than parochial. As a former member of the Irish Republican Army, Paisley sees McGuinness’s political convictions with criminal conviction. Meaney paid tribute to McGuinness in a 2017 Guardian, a man whose demise followed the real life Paisley’s. And yet the film attributes and pays tribute to the figureheads, whose shared journey lead to a safer home neither of them experienced.
People often speak of the “pursuit of happiness”, but what about catharsis? That feeling of relief that washes over you may bring some of life’s greatest satisfaction, even if it is comparatively fleeting. This is because the release of catharsis is often preceded by intense, repressed anguish that has built and built and built. The films in this short list are of different tones and contexts, but they all contain moments of cathartic violence, moments where force is used, for better or worse, to darkly satisfying ends. The films are listed chronologically
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1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975):
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a quintessential example of the term ‘required viewing’. Most would corroborate this by saying it’s a classic of the New Hollywood period, features Jack Nicholson’s finest performance, and is one of only three films to win the five major Academy Awards.
All valid reasons, granted – but none are the reason. The real reason One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is ‘required viewing’ is its ability to reveal the nature of your nearest and dearest; for if a friend, relative or significant other does not loathe Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) within the first half hour, you need to reconsider the relationship.
Ratched exemplified the term ‘resting bitch face’ some 45 years before its coinage, yet that term actually does her a disservice for Ratched’s malice never ‘rests’. She is a petty tyrant to her core with no ability or inclination to help her patients. Rather, she delights in getting under their skin with her hateful passive aggression and, when that doesn’t work, outright bullying.
Her despicable compulsion to control hits fever pitch when she catches Billy – a stuttering, nervous wreck who’s a threat to precisely no one – in bed with a girl who McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) playfully smuggles into the hospital. When Ratched threatens to tell Billy’s equally tyrannical mother, he commits suicide.
It is a sickening moment. As she wrestles past the distraught crowd to reach his fresh corpse demanding that they “Let me through! Let me through!” I defy anyone not to be overcome with a dangerous kind of anger. McMurphy certainly sees the red mist as he throws her to the ground by her neck, putting every pound of body weight into the grip around her trachea.
Now strangling a woman doesn’t tend to be a good look but the toxic, fleeting catharsis of this moment is almost impossible to deny. Your allegiance will lie with McMurphy. Nicholson’s performance is charged with a palpable anger that mirrors your own and you just can’t help but shift in your seat, willing him to do some serious damage.
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2. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975):
We all know the scene – Hooper’s missing, Quint’s dead and the Orca is sinking. All Chief Brody has to defend himself with is an M1 Garand, harpoon and scuba diving tank, which he desperately throws in the shark’s mouth as the cabin floods with water.
What follows is one of the most electrifying climaxes in cinema history and a deft creative decision by Spielberg. In the novel, the shark succumbs to several harpoon wounds as it lurches towards Brody in open water, but this was not the ‘big rousing ending’ that Spielberg envisaged. Author Peter Benchley resisted this change initially but the final cut persuaded him, which was so explosively ‘rousing’ that it had audiences whooping and cheering.
It’s doubtful whether contemporary audiences would share this reaction, but there is no denying the scene’s immense sense of release. And End Titles, the blissful final piece of John Williams’s iconic score, is the pure sonofication of catharsis.
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3. Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978):
The cathartic act of violence in Midnight Express is a sweet reversal of fortune. In fact, the final confrontation between Billy Hayes (Brad Davis) and the bestial prison warden Hamidou (Paul L. Smith) is the sweetest revenge of any film on this list.
Hayes, sentenced to 30 years in a Turkish prison for smuggling hashish, leads a sub-human existence by the film’s end. He has been beaten and raped to the point of psychosis and despite the promise made by its title (Midnight Express is prison slang for escape), Hayes’ situation seems utterly hopeless.
So when Hayes is faced with yet another episode of sexual violence at the hands of Hamidou, he musters all the strength he has left to throw his gaunt, battered body into the guard’s immense bulk, causing him to impale the nape of his neck on a coat hanger. It is a jaw dropping moment and the massively welcomed demise of an underrated villain.
Midnight Express is also pictured at the top of this article!
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4. Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992):
Tarantino has become so noted for his cine-literate style, loquacious dialogue and extravagant bloodshed that one can forget just how nasty his debut really is. Now Reservoir Dogs makes an impression with its style and dialogue, too, but the violence is not ‘extravagant’ – it’s the most callous, painful and sadistic of Tarantino’s career.
After all, this is a film where the focal character – Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) – spends 90 minutes bleeding to death from a bullet to the gut. Despite his terrible injury, however, he finds the strength to bring catharsis and relief to a moment where Tarantino seems set on pushing Mr. Blonde’s (Michael Madsen) cruelty to an intolerable extreme.
After severing the police officer’s ear and dousing him with petrol, this sadistic crescendo appears to heading for a monstrous climax. Yet just as Mr. Blonde flicks his Zippo, he his hit by a volley of fire from Mr. Orange’s handgun, killing the abject psychopath several times over. It provides a sigh of relief after seven and a half minutes of masterfully unpleasant filmmaking – a mixture of diegetic sound, fluid camera movement, and fine performances from Michael Madsen and Kirk Baltz.
Well, that notion doesn’t apply here, not even slightly. Indeed, Eastwood was rather milquetoast back in 1992 because sometimes you’ve just got to kick ass – a lot of it – without a moment’s reflection. This is something that John Rambo understands in Rambo, by far the most violent instalment in the series.
Of course, the plot is utterly incidental. In fact, its mayhem has a context rather than a plot, and that context is the military dictatorship of Burma, in which Rambo naturally becomes mired once a group of missionaries are abducted by Major Pa Tee Tint and his army, who commit several massacres that are genuinely graphic and nasty.
The catharsis comes in the film’s climax, when the missionaries and mercenaries sent to save them are moments from death by firing squad. Just as the troops assume their positions, Rambo rises behind a grunt manning a Jeep-mounted M2 Machine Gun, cutting his head off with one heavy swoop of his machete. He then commanders the weapon and directs a burst of .50 cal fire into the driver’s head, turning him into pulpy splat.
With the weapon’s guard covered in gore and his mouth slanted with fury, Rambo proceeds to batter the army below with relentless gunfire – popping heads, blowing holes and breaking all kinds of bones. The violence is so high-impact – so very lumpy – that it satisfies whatever warped bloodlust the viewer may (probably) have.
Gambling movies tend to fall into a few different categories. Some revolve around the glitz and glamor most people associate with Las Vegas. Others show the seedy underbelly of the industry. Some are high-octane fuelled adventures, and some are funny buddy movies.
It doesn’t matter; they all have one thing in common – they’re exciting and teach us a lesson. In this post, I’ll go over my favourite gambling movies and what fun life lessons they can teach us.
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1. Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006):
The lesson learned here is that it’s always possible to remake yourself. Up until that point, the Bond franchise had become a little stale. It was the same formula over and over again:
Super-villain versus super-spy – no points for guessing who always won;
Weird, wonderful gadgetry that was just way too convenient.
It worked brilliantly back in the 1960s, and I still find those movies fun to watch. But box office statistics showed that Bond needed a makeover. It was a big departure from the previous movies and something of a gamble itself.
This is one of those movies that show the more sordid side of gambling. It’s all high-stakes and entirely illegal gambling. Malkovitch, as usual, delivers a gritty performance as the villain of the piece. That said, it is also quite humorous at times.
The life lesson learned? Never give up and don’t believe what you see on the big screen. This movie makes a gambling addiction seem like nothing serious when, in fact, it can be just as devastating as alcoholism.
This movie is an example of what good acting and directing are all about. Production cost $25 million, but the box office takings were $345.8 million. It’s about a hustler played by Tom Cruise with an autistic brother who’s great at gambling.
The classic life lessons are that you can never judge someone entirely from what you see outside, and that family is important. (Especially, in this case, when being estranged from your father loses you your share of $3 million).
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4. Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001):
The lessons in this movie were simple:
No one gets hurt;
Only steal from the bad guys; and
Go all in.
George Clooney played the lead role as a recently paroled ex-con working a heist. It’s extremely entertaining thanks to the complexity of the plan. It epitomises the idea “go big or go home”.
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5. Maverick (Richard Donner, 1994):
Okay; so this is a pretty ancient movie by modern standards. That doesn’t make it any less fun to watch. It’s a gambling movie set in the wild west, so what’s not to love? Maverick is a clever poker player who meets his match in the feisty Annabelle.
The movie is fun, and the message is clear – sticking to the straight and narrow is good, but sometimes being a bit of a cheat is fun too.
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That concludes the roundup. Are these the life lessons that you learned from the movies? If not, why not let us know what you thought the lessons were?
From The Counterfeiters (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007) and Bent (Sean Mathias, 1998) to Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1994) and Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015), cinema has approached the Holocaust from almost all of its ghastly facets. This list collates a selection of the relative few that consider not the immediate act of genocide but its pernicious spectre. Some concern the overwhelming emotional impact on survivors, such as Sophie’s Choice (Alan J Pakula, 1992) and The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1966), while others, like Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta, 2012), Labyrinth of Lies (Giulio Ricciarelli, 2014) and Denial (Mick Jackson, 2016), concern comparative outsiders’ attempts to quantify the event and, in some cases, enact hard-nosed justice.
Below is the full list. The films are listed in chronological order.
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1. The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1966):
An oft-neglected entry in Sidney Lumet’s remarkable career, The Pawnbroker is a sombre performance piece led by Rod Steiger as Sol Nazerman, the titular pawnbroker. Nazerman is a learned man who, before the soldiers came, had a fulfilling life of family and intellectual curiosity. He managed to survive and flee to the United States, but the murder of his family has reduced his psyche to a barren, nihilist wasteland devoid of joy and personality. The burden of his terrible suffering has ground him down until he just cannot function emotionally, so he treats everyone and everything with a distant contempt. It is only when well-intentioned locals impose themselves on him that he is fired up, albeit with the purpose of trenchantly castigating their ingenuous, pedestrian lives.
The arrival of the warm, empathetic Geraldine, a neighborhood social worker, poses a test to the complexities of Nazerman’s granite exterior, but the film provides no easy answers to his trauma or the crime and hardship of the Manhattan slum in which he exists.
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2. Sophie’s Choice (Alan J Pakula, 1982):
Sophie’s Choice may appear to have that stale ‘prestige drama’ aura that The Reader has, but the titular ‘choice’ of this unusual film is far ghastlier than one can imagine. I entered with foreknowledge of her ‘choice’, but it is preferable that one does not, so it will not be repeated here.
The novel thing about Sophie’s Choice, for better or worse, is how we are told Sophie’s story through the perspective of Stingo, a soft southern writer. Some may make ideologically charged claims of the ‘male gaze’ when discussing Stingo, but he is better described as simply a distraction, an unnecessary narrative device. After all, Sophie’s desperate struggle and Streep’s virtuosic performance are more than enough to steer the narrative.
A justification for Stingo’s character, however, is that he serves as an amiable, grounded perspective in the utterly maniacal relationship between Sophie and Nathan (Kevin Kline), her psychotic partner. We join Stingo in observing the tempestuous dynamic that Nathan steers, which can range from displays of passionate affection to theatrically nasty arguments over the course of just one day.
Kline is excellent, genuinely unhinged; it is a performance that you remember. He takes second place, though, to Meryl Streep, who, with a pitch-perfect accent and masterful dramatic range, utterly becomes the tragic figure of Sophie Zawistowski.
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3. The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008):
The Reader has been described by several critics as ‘middle-brow’, a term that can smack of snobbery yet is appropriately leveled here. Stephen Daldry’s film concerns a whirlwind affair between Michael (David Kross), a bright young man with a flair for reading, and Hannah (Kate Winslet), an intense, aloof woman in her thirties who, in a rather contrived fashion, is revealed to have been a guard at Auschwitz and a separate, smaller camp.
Now the best thing about this somewhat middling film is the erotic candidness of their relationship. Their strange dynamic has real intimacy and a mystique that’s warped and unnerving. More pertinent to this list, though, is how the film depicts Germany’s reaction to the unique ghastliness of their recent history. During Hannah’s trial, there is a strong sense of unwillingness amongst the jury and the gallery to consider the abhorrent details of the Holocaust. They do not want justice, they want catharsis, so they will just convict whoever is accused in an attempt to reach it. This mob-thinking attitude is evident in both the jury and Michael’s university classmate Dieter (Volker Bruch), whose emotionally driven rants are unbecoming of a law student. However, these themes of collective memory and shame are better explored in other entries in this list.
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4. Sarah’s Key (Gilles Paquet-Brenner, 2011):
The title of this French drama echoes that of Sophie’s Choice and its significance is similarly hateful. The film opens by thrusting the viewer into a cramped apartment in Nazi-occupied Paris; in it is a family of four, gripped with fear as the authorities bang at their door. For thousands of Jews across France, this was the beginning of the end. French complicity in the Holocaust killed some 77,000 people, and Sarah’s Key depicts the frenzy and maddening injustice of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup and beyond with visceral energy.
These moments are relayed to us through flashbacks, for the bulk of the film concerns Julia (Kristen Scott Thomas), an American journalist living in Paris. Having written about the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup in the past, she becomes deeply curious when her French husband inherits a Parisian flat that his grandparents moved into in August 1942. Convinced that Jews had been evicted the property, she doggedly investigates until the ghastly truth is unraveled for all concerned.
It is an absorbing film, no doubt, and Thomas’s performance has a subtle and affecting emotional range despite her default frostiness. However, the contrast in intensity between the flashbacks and the contemporary story causes one to wonder if Sarah’s Key would have been better if it was solely a period piece, a feeling that is somewhat reinforced by lashings of melodrama towards the end.
And yet, despite the distractions of the narrative’s toing and froing, Sarah’s Key manages to thoroughly absorb, intrigue and invest you.
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5. Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta, 2012):
When the capture of Adolf Eichmann stirred up the collective memory of the Holocaust in 1960, the reaction was one of disgust and incredulity, even amongst the learned circles that Hannah Arendt belonged to. Eichmann was caricatured as an evil monster that was to be confronted with his crimes in a dramatic show trial and then sent to his death once some sort of catharsis had been achieved.
Such emotionally driven responses were understandable but most often crass and unhelpful. Arendt had no time for such simplistic, knee-jerk thinking and instead sought to understand and explain Eichmann’s reasoning and ideology. Her conclusion was the now famous ‘banality of evil’, which posited that Eichmann was not a psychopath but a mere bureaucrat – a normal person with petty careerist aspirations. This thesis alone was a cause for concern amongst friends and colleagues in academic and media circles, but it was her claim that some Jewish leaders acted in a quasi-complicit manner during the Holocaust that triggered a vicious backlash. Arendt became the target of character assassination from the press, her peers and the public, who inundated the New Yorker with angry phone calls and threatening, abusive letters that made the risibly stupid accusation that Arendt was somehow a Nazi sympathiser. Hit pieces were also published in the New York Times and her faculty ‘recommended’ that she resign. It was a despicable act of feeble group think that is all too familiar in our age of no-platforming and safe spaces.
To her credit, Arendt remained absolutely steadfast, skewering her hysterical critics with considered argument and barbed wit. Barbara Sukowa’s performance captures Arendt’s conviction brilliantly, both her intellectual conviction as well as the intimate love she has for her husband Heinrich, which is keenly reciprocated. Of course, Arendt was not beyond reproach, no intellectual is, but the controversy depicted in Hannah Arendt was not a sensible dialogue but mob-thinking outrage. The ultimate message of this story is that the bulwark of reason, logic and dialogue should always be upheld, even when faced with the most horrendous circumstances.
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6. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2013):
Ida (also pictured at the top of this article) is firmly within the Eastern European tradition of harsh realism; its brooding tone and stark aesthetic having much in common with films like A Short Film About Killing (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1988) Import/Export (Ulrich Seidl, 2007) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2008). Where Ida differs is its overwhelming reliance on mood to tell it story. It is reserved, perhaps to a fault, but the glumness of the characters, their situation and their surroundings go some way in capturing the zeitgeist of post-war Poland, which had survived the apocalyptic brutality of one enemy only to be occupied by another for four and half decades.
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7. Everything is Illuminated (Liev Schreiber, 2014):
Adapted from Jonathon Safran Fore’s precocious autobiographical debut novel, Everything is Illuminated is by some measure the most offbeat and unconventional film in this list. It has more than a whiff of Wes Anderson in the visual way it depicts the protagonist’s obsession with mementoes as well as the quirky characters that assist him in his Ukrainian odyssey. Despite this, it avoids poor taste for it eschews sentimentality and does not overbear you with its idiosyncrasies.
Some critics have noted the loss of substance in the transition from page to screen, and it is, to be frank, one of the more frivolous entries in this list, more so than Remember. While ‘frivolous’ is not a word many would like to be associated with this subject, Everything is Illuminated has enough offbeat charm and striking cinematography to find an audience.
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8. Denial (Mick Jackson, 2014):
In 2016 British director Mick Jackson returned to form with Denial, which depicts the Irving vs Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt trial, a landmark event in postwar Holocaust denial. Early in the film, a student of Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) asks a question regarding Holocaust denial to which Lipstadt replies that she does not debate Holocaust deniers. This sentiment would be acceptable for your average Holocaust denier or troll, but David Irving, an historian whose early work has been praised by the likes of John Keegan and Hugh Trevor Roper, wasn’t and isn’t that.
This is a problem, for the best way to defeat a warped, dishonest argument is with a reasoned, factual one – not indignant dismissal. Weisz’s Lipstadt displays this righteous indignation on several occasions and it is rather unbecoming of a professional historian, Jewish or not. The veracity of Weisz’s performance is unclear, but it felt as if these moments of emotional anger – especially during heated exchanges with her legal team – were written for the purpose of conflict and drama. It would have been better if these passages were replaced with wider dissections of Holocaust denial, chiefly the Leuchter Report. Despite the brevity of the trial scenes and Denial’s rather televisual style, though, it remains a robust drama that captures the stress and weight of the courtroom and serves as a stimulating gateway to the subject of Holocaust denial.
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9. Labyrinth of Lies (Giulio Ricciarelli, 2014):
Labyrinth of Lies is not an emotionally involving film, but as a dramatisation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials it is well considered and illuminating. It follows Johann Radmann, a young, quixotic lawyer whose righteous indignation sees him launch a pointed investigation into those who collaborated with the concentration camp system.
He points out that just 150 people were convicted at Nuremberg, yet this figure seems to be sufficient for the average citizen of Frankfurt, for the knowledge of what happened in the camps was seemingly too much to bear. Indeed, the film’s depiction of the Germans’ wilfull ignorance of their immediate history is shocking as it is compelling. It reflects the paradigm shift that occurred in Allied foreign policy, which sought to transform their former enemy into a bulwark against the new Red Threat. Once the immediate denazification process was complete, seeking justice for the Holocaust was not a key interest or indeed an interest at all amongst much of the German and Nato establishment. It is in this contentious atmosphere that Radmann pursues the almost insurmountable task of bringing the collaborators to justice, and we see both the nobility and toxic alienation that comes with hardnosed perseverance against the maddeningly blinkered status quo.
The best exchanges are between Radmann, his journalist ally Thomas Gnielka and Auschwitz survivor Simon Kirsch, who develop some degree of comradeship. Again, though, Labyrinth of Lies does not leave an impression on an emotional level. It focuses instead on period detail, both aesthetically and politically, illustrating the willful amnesia and eventual reckoning in the formative years of the German Republic.
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10. Remember (Atom Egoyan, 2015):
The premise of Remember stretches credibility to its limits, beyond it in some cases, yet Atom Egoyan’s film is compulsive viewing thanks to its energetic plotting and Christopher Plummer’s superb central performance as Zev Guttman, an elderly Auschwitz survivor, Alzheimer’s sufferer and recent widow who resides in an American nursing home.
Zev’s Alzheimer’s manifests itself in sudden bouts that can attack at any moment, yet fellow resident and Holocaust survivor Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau) reminds Zev of what he promised to do when his wife died. In a haze of confusion, Zev agrees to honour his promise, which is to hunt and kill Otto Wallisch, the SS Blockfuhrer who murdered their families before immigrating to America under the name of Rudy Kurlander.
Armed with a Glock handgun hidden in his wash bag, Zev’s mission takes him across North America in what film critic Richard Roeper described as a ‘mash-up of The Terminator, Marathon Man and Memento’. Roeper’s summary makes it seem more ludicrous than it is, though, because the immediate and overarching concern is not the confrontations Zev has to make but the jeopardy of his advanced age, which coils you with unease as he navigates a world that he can barely operate in. Indeed, Plummer succeeds in distracting you from the implausibilities of the narrative by imbuing his performance with vulnerability and grandfatherly benevolence that causes you to invest in his character and his story.
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HONOURABLE MENTION – Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961):
Much like Labyrinth of Lies would do 50 years later, Judgment at Nuremberg depicts the messy, overwhelming task of holding to account the bureaucrats and middle managers of the Nazi regime. Like all good legal dramas there are scathing zingers fired between the prosecution and the defence, but the film’s three-hour commitment to educating its audience despite being merely inspired by the Nuremberg Trials causes one to wish they were watching an actual documentary account of the event rather than a semi-fictional one.
In response to the ongoing recovery following the 2008 financial crisis, which saw Britain enter a period of austerity, former Prime Minister David Cameron’s message was that we were all in this together. Just shy of a decade later, Theresa May in her Brexit speech to the House of Commons in March of 2017 said, “…when I sit around the negotiating table in the months ahead, I will represent every person in the United Kingdom – young and old, rich and poor, city, town, country and all the villages and hamlets in between.”
What we hear in these disingenuous words are patriotic pandering to the masses. These are words chosen for effect, with the specific intent of convincing us that they are our champions or representatives. Yet of concern is how to the political elite, the diverse life experiences are an abstract concept, and their words or political spiel becomes a disingenuous version of the American Dream, better termed the “aspirational society”. And it is here that James Gardner’s feature debut Jellyfish is a scathing social and political indictment, bursting their proverbial bubble of a utopian dream of British unity.
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A stinging piece of filmmaking
Set in Margate, Jellyfish centres around 15-year old Sarah Taylor, who between struggling to get along with her school classmates and dealing with her overbearing boss at the amusement arcade, is forced to look after her unstable mother and two younger siblings. One day her drama teacher challenges her volatility, suggesting she look to devise a stand-up comedy routine for the graduation showcase.
From city bankers and financiers to Margate’s 15-year old vulnerable adolescent. From a former PM claiming we were all in it together, who owned shares in an off-shore investment fund, and May’s own financial interests secured in blind trusts, to a vulnerable young person giving hand jobs out the back of the amusement arcade to top up her part time wage, even conning men on the prowl late at night. While rich and poor, like so many words or phrases are abstract terms in political spiel, they have a real meaning for those they describe. Gardner’s film is a piece of socially conscious filmmaking, with its finger on the pulse of our contemporary society, that pierces the disingenuous.
So, is Jellyfish a fictional dystopia, or is it the truth beneath the lies of a disingenuous political system – one motivated by personal agenda and ideology?
Yes, Sarah is a fictional character played by an actress, but a film does not exist in a vacuum, especially cinema that leans towards social realist cinema. Similarly to the cinema of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, it captures a snapshot of genuine experiences of the impoverished in our society. What this hopefully achieves is to create a greater empathy for individuals whose lives are blighted by such struggles as Sarah’s, using visual storytelling in order to create a visceral emotional understanding.
With its finger on the pulse, Jellyfish is in a unique position to humanise what the mainstream news media struggles to – the latter prone to evoking shock and anger. However, by taking us inside of the experiences of the impoverished, Gardner allows genuine empathy to flourish. Sarah is not only a victim of her situation and an ineffective social infrastructure, she is also a human being that can empower herself if supported by her society, and her rousing performance at the graduation show, of teacher and student empowering one another, is a testament of this.
Brexit has become the proverbial blame game for Britain’s inadequacies, echoing U.S President Donald Trump’s pulling out of storage Ronald Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Ironically, it was Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that would play a significant role in deregulating the financial sector, that led to the 2008 crisis. If history has taught us a lesson, it is that a nation’s pursuit of greatness or prosperity leads to a greater division between the rich and the poor. The pursuit of British independence from the European Union has created what is effectively a smokescreen for the Tory government to install the Universal Credit system, criticised heavily for its ineffectiveness. Taylor’s sexual activities echoes recent concerns raised in the tabloids of March this year, reports of “survival sex”, of women on Universal Credit forced to turn to prostitution in order to survive.
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Very Brexit problems
Gardner’s films shows a dystopian truth beneath the disingenuous political system – of a PM who on the one hand asserts she is champion of the poor, yet compounds their poverty by supporting a withdrawal from the EU’ that has seen Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn unable to fully challenge the failings of the Universal Credit system.
In one scene, the camera pulls back and leaves Sarah her in the managers office, where she is sexually assaulted. A character leads us on the journey through a story, and this is important to consider in looking at Jellyfish as a political critique. Gardner has delivered a genuine message of a Britain fractured, and while as a nation or a union of four nations we are a part of the Brexit narrative, sub-plots divide the life experiences of a diverse population. The abandonment of Sarah should act as a reminder of how connections are a matter of convenience or necessity, and just as she is necessary to the story, and May and Cameron had to appeal to the country, this connection can be terminated at any point by the person or persons who hold the power in the relationship.
Gardner through his decision to abandon Sarah becomes a metaphor of the British government, echoing the manipulative political machinations, specifically how Brexit juxtaposed with Universal Credit, the current political Tory elite are uninterested in uniting the country. Yet more poignantly, Sarah’s unseen suffering taps into a deeper feeling that has followed Brexit – of individuals no longer represented by the system, left to feel essentially invisible, as the rich and wealthy leading Tories gamble with future stability, selling off parts of the NHS in trade deals with Trump’s America. And who will be the one’s that will pay the price for these choices? The Sarah Taylor’s of our country, whose life experiences are an abstract concept to those individuals in power.
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Redemption through creativity
Jellyfish by its conclusion is a mix of cautionary optimism, remaining cynical towards the political establishment. It is indeed a celebration of the creative expression of the individual, and how art is a unifying force. Sarah finds a means to express herself and connect with people in a way she had previously been unable to, but beyond the end credits, Jellyfish is a cautionary tale of aspiration. The question lingers on what follows this momentary success for Sarah? Will she be allowed to succeed, to overcome her social and economic status, or will she remain stranded in an impoverished existence? The creativity of her comedy as a means of expression, in this age of austerity in which arts funding and creative careers are facing increasingly difficult times, leaves one with the impression that there is caution to be applied to aspiration. It calls for cynicism towards the political system that represents a select few – arts and creatives often a justified sacrifice.
Not every one is represented, but like Sarah in that room, there are those of us that abandoned or overlooked, and in this adversarial era of Brexit, it is the political elite pursuing their own agendas and self-interest. Can they really be said to be representing us all, or even a majority? The main two parties fight inner battles amongst their ranks, while other parties including the Liberal Democrats and The Greens are fighting to get the message across that they hear our voice. Yet whose voice? Beyond Brexit, there are sub-plots impacting ordinary Britons, and the adversarial disagreement between ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ only threatens to increase the hardships of the most vulnerable in our society.
Jellyfish is available on digital HD on Monday, June 24th.
Anxiety. This is a word with connotations of trepidation, yet it is one that we are well acquainted with. It is something many of us are plagued with, but few of us know how to properly describe. At its worst, anxiety is harrowingly constant, emotionally draining, and seemingly inescapable.
His own feelings of angst compelled YouTuber and stand-up comedian Bo Burnham to write and to direct his debut feature, Eighth Grade. Premiering in the United States in the summer of 2018, but only now hitting UK screens, it tells the story of 13-year-old YouTube vlogger, Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher). Her YouTube vlogs are presented as monologues in which she provides insights into life for her viewers. Her range of topics include putting yourself out there, how confidence is a choice, and the inevitabilities of growing up.
We soon learn however that she does not practice what she preaches. In fact, despite coming off as bubbly and free-spirited in her videos, Kayla is, in reality, painfully shy. She is quiet, can barely hold a conversation with other people, and wallows in the escapism of the internet, both for comfort and intensified anguish. During the last week of eighth grade, her final year in middle school, Kayla decides it is finally time to put herself out there. Thus, the audience is made to watch as Kayla desperately tries to become more open and outgoing.
Eighth Grade is a tremendous film. In my top picks of the decade. I have seen it three times, and I find myself falling deeper in love after each viewing. It is capable of both heart-warming sentimentality and excruciating cringe, often simultaneously. Yet it is the compassionate sympathy it has towards being youthful and nervous that makes it the gem it truly is. Although it can be horrifyingly accurate in its presentation of unbearable anxiety, it is in truth an optimistic piece. It showcases the worst of what anxiety can do to us, but, by simply showing empathy and offering reassurance in its narrative and cinematic techniques, it also demonstrates comforting understanding.
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The internet gets emotional
There are a variety of ways in which the film does this, such as with its utilisation of social media. I spoke to Bo Burnham (pictured below, alongside with Elsie Fisher) on the red carpet for a brief interview during the Glasgow Film Festival. He explained to me that he wanted to “do justice to the experience he had on the internet”. Small montages of Kayla surfing the net, whether it be Instagram, Buzzfeed questionnaires, or blink-and-you-miss-it pop culture references in her internet tabs showcase the vastness of material, and or fodder, the internet can offer the young mind in the form of escapism.
Burnham goes even further. Because the initial idea came from his own feelings of anxiety, he had to find the right character template to encompass both his “emotional relationship” with the internet and the very nerves he and millions of other young people feel. Although Kayla was originally not supposed to be the lone main character, she became the sole focus for she seemed to be the perfect embodiment of what Burnham was setting out to do. He based Kayla on the young girls he was seeing making YouTube vlogs, he clarified to me.
These young girls, like Kayla, are part of a generation of self-publication; of young people using the internet as a means to project and express their thoughts and feelings, as if the internet itself is an entity in which the youth can confide in. Burnham specifically chose to focus on girls as, from his own research, boys tended to talk more about arbitrary topics, namely video games, while girls tended to use YouTube and social media as a platform to either express their emotions, or create the illusion of an adventurous lifestyle. Thus Kayla became the ideal means of bridging Burnham’s two inspirations.
The incorporation of the internet in such a delicate, naturalistic way acts as a catalyst for portraying the depth that Kayla and the film, possess. If the movie was but a mere collage of montages, the audience would still be able to build a concrete idea of what kind of person Kayla is purely from what social media she uses, and how she uses it. One could potentially view these montages, accompanied by an effervescent score from Anna Meredith, as Burnham’s own love letter to the internet as a whole.
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Lonely and fearful
Yet Burnham does not shy away from the internet’s more damaging aspects. Despite how connected the entire world can feel through the internet, it can also be a source of despair and isolation. As much as the internet can be a means for one to show off their life and how “cool” it is, it can potentially fan the flames of loneliness for those who crave more in their lives. Kayla fits this description suitably, scrolling through Tweets, Instagram videos, and Snapchat stories of her classmates, longing for friendship, romance, and basic connection. As such, late night internet surfacing and trying to snap the perfect selfie can be just as detrimental to anxiety as it is a way of escape from anxiety.
The YouTube heavy focus allows for deeper exploration of this. Kayla creates her videos under the guise of giving life advice, but they garner little to no views. Making this worse is that they serve more as a projection for her own wants in life. There is a particularly effective moment where she makes a vlog concerning trying new things, reciting a fabricated story about how she invited a shy girl to a party only to discover how interesting she was. But her dialogue plays over a scene of Kayla arriving at the luxurious house of her school’s queen bee, having been reluctantly invited to a pool party.
As Kayla speaks to her theoretical viewers about how good it is to be open to new people and ideas, the camera follows Kayla up the pathway, through the house, and into the bathroom, where she proceeds to have what I read as a small panic attack. This showcases Kayla’s inability to act on her own words, something she vows to change throughout the film. She is detailing and desiring a romanticised version of events on how she would like the pool party to go. But, just like with her minimal YouTube views, reality has other plans.
However, the pool party is only one example of the mesmerising craft that Eighth Grade displays. When I first saw the film, I was struck by Burnham’s fluency in film language, and he uses it to demonstrate how titanic Kayla’s teen angst is. The very first scene showcases Kayla filming a new vlog. Initially we are in a close up, with Kayla’s feigned confidence dominating the screen. Yet the more she speaks, with her muddled words and repeated sayings, the camera slowly pulls back, creating more and more distance between Kayla and the viewer.
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Far away so close
Distance is key to understanding the accuracy of which Eighth Grade depicts anxiety. The constant usage of the internet by Kayla is her way of talking to people, or spying upon the lives of others, should it be her classmates or celebrity superstars, at a comfortable distance. The pool party scene tends to film Kayla from behind, as if she wants to go unnoticed. In school, she is often seen towards the back or side of the classroom, as if keeping apart from her classmates. Even when interacting with her own father, distance is applied. An empty chair is left between the pair at the kitchen table, and during a scene where the two talk in Kayla’s bedroom, the camera is deliberately placed at the corner of the room, depicting Kayla in her bed at one end of the frame, and her father by the bedroom door at the other end.
Burnham allows us to visualise Kayla’s inner strife. Burnham’s direction allows the audience to see the barriers separating the teen from others. The bedroom scene uses physical distance between Kayla her father and as a proxy for mental disconnection. The way Kayla awkwardly engages or refuses to engage with others, such as trying to hide toward the back of a group photo at the pool party, or lying to her crush to win his attention, also adds to this sense of distance. The cinematography, editing, and even sound mixing recreate the feelings of panic and claustrophobia that come with anxiety; with being disconnected in a world more connected than ever. The screenplay’s authentic portrayal of teenage behaviour and dialogue further adds to the realism of this.
Add it all up and you get what sounds like a bleak experience. Some reviewers have noted how close the picture comes to a horror film, and how it captures the scary feelings of being shy and reserved. Elsie Fisher’s spellbinding performance helps a lot. Her subdued replication of teenage angst embodies the long lasting woes of the contemporary digital age.
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A glimmer of hope
Eighth Grade‘s underlying sympathy towards its protagonist – beneath all the sheer horror of her predicament – makes it one of the best films of the decade. It does not simply recreate teenage mannerisms and feelings because it can, or because it wants you to have warlike flashbacks to your own repressed teenage memories. It does not condescend to its audience, the way many teen based films do. Instead, it uses its all too familiar emotions in order to offer viewers guidance, empathy, and, most importantly, a robust sense of reassurance.
We have to sit through and watch as Kayla attempts to connect with others in vain. There are some glimpses of light in the form of a high school field day, or when she garners the strength to sing a karaoke song at the pool party. But it is otherwise a consistently unsettling piece where we long for Kayla to catch the break she hungers for yet fails to achieve, including an especially uncomfortable moment in a car.
Towards the end of the film, a key conversation between Kayla and her father over a fire in the backyard puts everything into perspective as he consoles his daughter, and by extension the audience, on how much she already has, and how much she still has to offer. What he is essentially telling her, and us, is that it does not matter how bad your teenage years, or even your current life, may seem, for in the end it will all be okay. Or, as Kayla says, “just because things are happening now doesn’t mean they’re always gonna happen”. This is where the scale of the film’s emotional solidarity with its audience becomes clear. We find ourselves asking, if Kayla can overcome her anxiety, then we too have the power to overcome ours.
Eighth Grade’s melancholic optimism thrives because it understands the mind of the contemporary teen. Burnham’s extensive internet background made him the perfect visionary to bring this story to the world. Eighth Grade is a miraculous debut feature – the script, Elsie Fisher’s stellar performance, the director’s firm grip. It is my hope that Eighth Grade will speak to all anxious and lonely people, young and old, and will continue to do so for generations to come.
I am now a strong and resolute woman in her forties, but back in 1997 I was barely 20 years of age. I was as vulnerable and gullible as one can be. I had married my first boyfriend James*, who turned out to be psychologically and financially abusive. He was basically a nasty control freak. We got married when I was just 19. Despite his manipulative behaviour, it never seemed like I would be able to find another love. He was also kind and loving at times, and that’s all that seemed to matter to me.
Yet somehow I summoned the courage to file a divorce. But that was just the beginning of the end. The battle got ugly, very ugly, but that’s all you need to know. It isn’t necessary to go into the details. Plus, shortly I submitted the paperwork, I found out I was two months pregnant. Had I made a mistake? Was this a sign that James was the right husband for me? Should I turn things around and make up with “the man of my life”? How could I go on without him and yet with his child inside my womb? The answers right now are as easy as apple pie now, but back then they weren’t as straightforward.
The final answer came one Sunday afternoon when I went to the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead. That’s before it was refurbished. It was a charming repertoire cinema where they showed all sorts of old movies. Double bills, triple bills, all for a fiver. Yes, there were mice running past. But so what? It was so cosy and homely. I was devastated when they shut it down the following year for a major make-over. Yet I was lucky enough to watch Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) shortly before it shut down for the works. It was the final sequence of the movie that gave me the strength to proceed with the divorce.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg isn’t a film about an abusive relationship. It tells the story of 16-year-old Geneviève (played by a dazzling Catherine Deneuve, in her breakthrough role) who runs a small umbrella boutique with her mother in the coastal town of Cherbourg (in Normandy). She falls in love with the handsome car mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuevo). But Guy is drafted to serve in the Algerian War, and their future is uncertain. They pledge make a pledge of unconditional love before he departs, and Geneviève becomes pregnant. Reuniting with her lover seems to be the only way forward, until the final sequence of the film challenges the orthodox notions of eternal love.
Move the clock many years forward. Geneviève returns to Cherbourg with a young girl in the passenger seat of her car, who happens to be her child with Guy. She stops at a petrol station in order to fuel her vehicle, where she accidentally bumps into Guy, who happens to work there. They have a very short conversation inside the station store, while their daughter waits inside the car. Geneviève asks him whether he wants to see his daughter for the first time. He turns the offer down. Geneviève returns to the car and drives off. It all looks like doom and gloom. It’s impossible to get over unrequited love, particularly if there’s a child involved. The pain is insurmountable.
In a split second, however, the movie and my life changed. Literally in a split second: just watch the extract below, at 5:59. Moments after Geneviève drives off, Michel Legrand’s magnificent I Will Wait for You explodes into the speakers and Guy’s wife and child arrive. He embraces them. Happiness is to be found despite the unrequited love. Despite the baby. Incidentally, the iconic French composer Legrand passed away two months ago at the age of 85.
Geneviève’s story and mine are very different. In my case, my husband was mean to me. In her case, the circumstances (the war, the forced separation) were mean to her. What we both had in common is that we both loved our men profoundly and couldn’t see life beyond that. And that we had a baby. In both cases, life moved on and happiness prevailed. That baby is now 21 years of age and she’s expecting a baby herself. I couldn’t be happier!
* All names in this article have been changed, in accordance to the wishes of the writer.
Do you also have a story to tell about a movie that changed your life? We’d love to hear it! Just write to us at info@dirtymovies.org!
The Belgian film Girl tells the story of 16-year-old transsexual Lara, who dreams of becoming a ballerina and is undergoing a sex reassignment surgery. Our writer Tiago Di Mauro caught the film last year, when it premiered in Cannes. He gave it our maximum rating of five splats. The overwhelming majority of film critics were similarly impressed. The film hit UK cinemas last Friday. The reception wasn’t as enthusiastic.
Many people accused the filmmaker Lukhas Dhont and the main actor Victor Polster of opportunistic appropriation because they both are cis and the film protagonist is trans. You can see some of our readers’ comments here. The Curzon Blog also discussed such reactions (just click here). I believe that such criticism is wrong on many levels.
Firstly, the filmmaker used the very innovative concept of genderless casting for Girl. This means that he considered boys and girls alike for the main role. This is a very strong equality statement per se. Secondly, the film was based on the life of Nora Sencour, who was involved in the writing of the screenplay herself. And Nora was delighted with the outcome. She thought that both the director and the actor did her story real justice.
But even if no trans person was involved in the creative process, I would still defend Dhont’s right to make such a film.
At DMovies, we take representation very seriously. Equality is at the very heart of our core values, vision and mission. Until very recently, transface was a widespread issue in cinema. I denounced it myself in article written two years ago. The majority of trans roles used to go cis people. This has changed, and many trans films starring trans actors have been made since (this is just the tip of the iceberg). While we support representation, however, we do not believe that roles should be defined and limited by gender, colour of the skin and trans(sexuality). This is where the difference between representation and segmentation lies.
My argument also applies to film criticism. Just two months ago, a reader argued that I was not to be trusted to write a review of the superb Spanish Lesbian film Elisa and Marcela (Isabel Coixet, 2019; pictured above) because I am not a Lesbian. I wrote about the movue: “This is the real-life tale of two humans being who fell in love and took draconian measures in order in order to remain together, against all odds”. I also gave it the maximum rating available. This is by far the film that moved me most profoundly this year. Love is universal, and so cinema. If you beg to differ, you need to open up your heart.
If we applied the same exclusionary rationale to other areas, only blacks would make and review films about blacks, only women would make and review films about women, only men should make and review films about men, and so on? Let’s also get intersectional. Only black gays should make and review films about black gays. Sounds absurd? A reader two years ago indeed suggested that I wasn’t entitled to review Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2017; pictured below) because I am gay but not black. He questioned whether we have any black gay reviewers. In fact, we do have a gay black reviewer, but that’s not the point. It’s both impossible and undesirable to allocate all reviews according to both colour of the skin and sexuality combined. It’s healthy that people of different colours and sexualities have a say about Moonlight.
Identity politics have helped us to achieve more balanced representation for women, BAME and the LGBTQ+ community in many areas of the film industry. However, the extreme tactics described above can have precisely the opposite effect. They can make identity politics as divisive and prejudiced as nationalism. Representation does not equate to tribalisation. I do not want to see a world in which gender, race and (trans)sexuality are confined in an impenetrable bubble. I fear the day only gay men will make gay films, only women will make women’s films, only black lesbians will make black lesbian films, only Austrian trans people will make Austrian trans films, and so on!
That’s not called equality and tolerance. That’s called extreme sectarianism. That’s also dangerous and reactionary. It negates the universality of cinema and of human sensibility.
Everyone remembers the first time that their brains were forced to reconcile with that visceral and purposefully gruesome scene. Following an attempted car theft, the would-be assailant finds himself in dire circumstances, his front teeth clenched around the unforgiving edge of the curb. Forged by a maelstrom of unadulterated hatred, vitriolic rhetoric and an innate sense of injustice that he’d been wilfully seduced by in the face of a family tragedy, American History X’s (Tony Kaye, 1998) musclebound guide into the world of Neo-Nazism lifts his black combat boot and brings it crashing down upon the back of a young black man’s head with remorseless disdain.
One life extinguished while another is irretrievably altered, the close-up on the shaven headed, swastika emblazoned Derek Vinyard’s self-satisfied grin and callous stare as the LAPD close in has became an enduring parable for the ramifications of allowing hatred to warp a malleable young mind.
Having attained cult status since its release 20 years ago today, American History X may have been widely disavowed by its notoriously idiosyncratic director Tony Kaye but the pertinence of its characters’ journeys has never waned in cultural significance. In fact, the undiminished relevancy of its portrayal of pervading racial tension, the perils of gun violence and the indoctrination of disenfranchised men into hate-fuelled subsects is not only a testament to the film’s timeless story and the performances of Edward Norton, Edward Furlong, Beverly D’Angelo and others but a scathing indictment of society’s reluctance to broach these issues in the two whole decades that have elapsed since it first hit the screens.
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The collapse of the nuclear family
Orbiting around the ethnically diverse melting pot of Venice Beach, California, American History X may be a biting commentary on humanity’s misguided desire to impose barriers on our own kinship and compassion but is actually made all the more effective by being framed through the lens of a once harmonious turned highly dysfunctional brood.
The nuclear family personified, the Vinyards lived a comfortable life that contained all of the attributes of the ‘American Dream’ as viewed by an outside observer. Led by the patriarch Dennis Vinyard, the lives of his athletically and academically gifted eldest son Derek, wife Doris and kids Daniel, Davina and baby Ally all seem distinctly upper-middle-class. These characters can afford the luxury of discussing societal issues and the changing composition of the nation from the comfort of their dining room without having to worry about being unseated from their homely perch. Or at least that’s the case until the short-sighted vitriol that the father used to spew from the head of the table about “affirmative blacktion” and other such “bullshit” now has a warped affirmation for his kids due to his death at the hands of a drug dealer whilst on duty as an LA firefighter.
From there, all of the hardship and injustice that befell Derek Vinyard was inextricably linked to those convenient scapegoats that have been cited by the disenfranchised or aggrieved since time immemorial – those that are different from us. In the weeks and months that follow, the seeds of hate that were haphazardly planted on that day lead to Derek’s indoctrination into neo-Nazism by the parasitic Cameron Alexander (loathsomely realised by Stacy Keach) and his de-facto leadership of the “white power” gang the DOC that would eventually lead to his incarceration little more than 12 months down the line.
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History repeating
In one particularly galling scene that is taken from his tenure as the group’s organisational spearhead, we see Edward Norton’s Derek rally his troops with an impassioned speech about the plague of “border jumpers” that were “bedding down in their state” and wreaking havoc on the nation whilst they are, allegedly, “losing.” Preached to the converted assembly just minutes before they’d go on to raid a local supermarket owned by a Korean man and largely staffed by Mexican immigrants, the mobilising capabilities of this skewed ideology crestfallenly hits home when viewed in the paradigm of today’s US.
Just days ago, a right wing extremist that saw his nation as being defiled by the Jewish community took to a Pittsburgh synagogue with an assault rifle, killing eleven in total. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered”, proclaimed Robert Bowers on the far-right social media site Gab just hours before the attack, “screw your optics, I’m going in.” Teamed with the horrific prejudice that was on display at last year’s Unite The Right’Rally in Charlottesville, it is hard to believe that verbal incitements such as Vinyard’s could retain every bit as much destructive power as they did 20 years ago. Until you remember that in this dystopian fever dream, they are actually vindicated by a president who actively refused to condemn neo-Fascists at the Virginia event and has unrepentantly dehumanised Mexicans and immigrants from other ‘shithole’ countries on numerous occasions.
Flash forward to three years on from the height of Derek running roughshod over Venice, he re-emerges as a vastly different man than the embittered young insurgent that was given the lesser conviction of voluntary manslaughter due to his brother Danny’s reluctance to testify. The recipient of a philosophical rebirth after he was not only forsaken by his white ‘brothers’ that aligned under their vacuous credo but saved from certain death by his black co-worker Lamont, his appearance and mindset may have been irrevocably changed during his time in the Chino correctional facility but the groundwork he’d laid on the outside world has been expanded upon at an unforeseen rate.
Rather than viewing his brother’s plight as a cautionary tale, Furlong’s Danny Vinyard has faithfully retraced his steps and is now a prized protégé of the same organisation which its former leader wishes to renounce. Upon re-entering society, Derek is immediately forced to rationalise with both the tangible and more deep-seated ramifications of his actions on his family. Rather than the picket-fenced splendour of suburbia where he perpetrated his most heinous act, his mother and the kids have been forced to downsize to a tiny apartment which is more akin to the conditions in which the disadvantaged minorities that he’d once seen as a societal scourge subsist in.
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Is there a way out?
Hoping to disassociate himself from the vile hate speech which he used to espouse, Derek ventures to the very party which heralds their prodigal son’s return in order to tell Cameron and his bumbling yet dangerous comrade Seth that both he and Danny will be taking no part in it from here on out. In a chilling riposte that seems sickeningly prophetic when viewed in a modern context, Alexander attempts to reason with the reformed skinhead by stating “wait until you see what we’ve done with the internet.”
As much as he attempts to show the world his propensity to change, Derek can’t outrun the chain of events which he set in place all those years ago. From the moment that he began to proliferate on the benefits of a racially pure nation, he’s been set on a collision course with tragedy that concludes like all too many do- in a hail of gunfire. In an unsavoury American tradition that dates back to the 19th Century, the propagandistic hubris of Danny would exact a heavy toll as he was gunned down in cold blood by another student due to his overt disdain for his gang-affiliated black classmates.
As he cradles his brother’s bullet-ravaged and bloodied body, an inconsolable Derek sees the entire tale displayed before him as he babblingly yelps “what did I do? What did I do?” Harrowing as it may be, this introspective enquiry bittersweetly correlates with the words of Avery Brooks’ Dr Bob Sweeney who’d posed a simple yet cutting question to the imprisoned Derek: “Has anything you’ve done made your life any better?
Far from solely serving as an unflinching look at the US’s systemic issues or the ruinous nature of hate and discrimination, this is one of a myriad of examples in which both writer David McKenna and Tony Kaye must be praised for the sheer efficacy of the approach they took to bring the film to fruition. A stylistic yet impactful choice, the juxtaposition of each of the film’s explorations of the past being rendered in monochrome whilst the present is seen in technicolour beautifully symbolises the transformation of Derek’s mind from neo-Nazism to a inclusivity-based stance. In the past, Derek’s life was rendered solely in black and white, with his worldview set in stone and governed by a series of puritanical absolutes. Yet once he’s underwent his deprogramming, Derek can now see all of the shades of grey that make societal issues less cut and dry whilst also regaining the ability to see the beauty in the world that had once been obscured by his father’s untimely death.
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A film in the woodpile
Alongside this visual metaphor, what separates American History X from other films that portray members of hate groups is the naturalistic approach it takes to the central characters’ development. As we follow Danny Vinyard over what turns out to be the final 24 hours of his life, we see a young man that is not simply a vessel for a corruptive outlook but a multi-layered individual that’s capable of the full spectrum of emotions. Mere hours after we see him appeasing the deplorable Seth with talk of his hatred for anyone that isn’t white protestant due to them being a “burden to the advancement of the white race”, we then watch on as he picks up his infant sister and lovingly gives her an ‘airplane ride’ before pleading with his ailing mother to quit smoking for the benefit of her health.
In this instance; alongside the aftermath of the infamous dinner scene in which Derek displays his slew of Nazism-inspired tattoos to dissuade Dr Murray (Elliot Gould) from pursuing a romantic relationship with his mother, the viewer is given a glimpse of the redeemable humanity, love and empathy that ill-fittingly resides within these men that strive to maintain an outward appearance of cold-blooded monstrousness. Aligned with its heartrending conclusion that abstains from giving us the sort of redemptive narrative that is so beloved by celluloid in favour of a realistic depiction of a man reaping what he’s sown, it shows that the greatness of American History X doesn’t spring entirely from its continued applicability as a look at society’s flaws but the fact that it remains a stellar work of cinema even if viewed in isolation from all of its pervading relevancy.
Just as Danny heeds Derek’s wisdom to “go out on strong” on the quote of another, there’s no way to better encapsulate what makes this film so enduringly horrifying and brilliant all at once than to conclude with this profound remark that comes to the surface in the wake of his death: “Hate is baggage. Life’s too short to be pissed off all the time. It’s just not worth it.”
The movie that perfectly crystallised the schism of war and peace in 1960s America, Easy Rider (1969), made its director Dennis Hopper and producer Peter Fonda cultural icons. Easy Rider portrays two hippie drifters (also played by Hopper and Fonda) as they chase the American Dream on custom-built motorcycles across the land they call home, the same land that, ironically, does not want them there. The people they meet and the places they travel through define the 1960s in America. Easy Rider distils sadness, futility, and the improbability of living in a truly free society without ever commenting directly on the circumstances the country was facing, such as the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the Cold War.
The film’s success at the box office allowed Hopper and Fonda free artistic rein in the environment of the New Hollywood. Universal Studios were happy to supply the then-unprecedented one million dollars and cede complete creative control to each of these lucrative stars for their next film projects. Peter Fonda chose to direct and star in The Hired Hand (1971), a lyrical, slow-burning revisionist western in which he played a roaming cowboy returning home to his wife after seven years away. Hopper took his million dollars and his entourage of actors, friends, and hangers-on into the high mountains of Peru to make The Last Movie (1971), a tale of the adverse effects of an intrusive film production company on the indigenous people.
Hopper had envisioned the film as being his first directorial work. He and Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1956; pictured below) screenwriter Stewart Stern had begun the process in the early 1960s. However, the film strayed so far from the original screenplay that Stern felt it was not “… an accurate representation” of his work and that Hopper “didn’t use the scenes as they were written in the screenplay and that he chose to improvise with people who were not up to that kind of improvisation,” One could argue that Hopper’s own sense of mythmaking got in the way of producing a straightforward narrative film.
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Too dirty for school
As well as directing The Last Movie, Hopper also played the lead role of Kansas, a movie stuntman who stays behind once the production company has left and goes native with the Peruvian villagers. Perceiving some sort of (black) magic in the movies, the villagers begin to re-enact the pretend violent scenes they witnessed using wooden cameras, only this time the pretend violence they saw during filming becomes very real violence and Kansas is imprisoned and beaten by the villagers.
Both Hopper and Fonda’s films—though brave and in some quarters critically acclaimed—were commercial failures. The Last Movie won the critics’ prize at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, but its original New York screening lasted only two weeks. The film also failed to garner any respectable mainstream press or positive reviews. With the failure of The Last Movie, Hopper’s desire to make important, socially conscious movies came to an end, at least for a while.
He exiled himself in his New Mexico compound and waited for Hollywood to come crawling back for his bankability, or for Hollywood to catch up with his artistic vision. Neither of these things would happen for a very long time.
Despite all of this, The Last Movie is clearly an accomplished piece of art cinema. The film flows on a phantasmagoria of sound and images that conjure up a disjointed yet affecting experience. As Andrew Tracy, in his critique of the film for Reverse Shot, points out: “The overall effect is to remove the viewer from any kind of perspective perch, to erase the illusion of a guiding viewpoint and a stable base of judgment and force the viewer to confront the film as a persistently confounding object.” It is interesting to view the film as per Tracy’s description and to take oneself out of the narrative and observe the film as a singular artistic object.
The Last Movie positions itself as ethnography—a way in which one can study a culture and people by immersion. But this ethnography has now expanded to not just to include the indigenous people present within the film. In retrospect it is an immersive look at film culture of the early nineteen-seventies. The Last Movie is an example of Hopper’s desire to transcend film and art into an immersive and sensory experience.
However, the film’s title would be prophetic, as due to the critical backlash and commercial failure it was to be Hopper’s last directorial film for a nearly a decade. Yet it was also the first and last of its kind for a long time: an art house film made within the confines of Hollywood’s mainstream studio system.
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Dreaming, in retrospect
As a companion piece to The Last Movie, one must also witness the documentary film The American Dreamer (1971; pictured above). This voyeuristic film fills in some of the gaps and answers questions as to why Hopper’s relatively straightforward screenplay became so distorted.
The documentary was directed by Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Kit Carson. Carson would later go on to adapt the screenplay for Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) and write the original screenplay for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986), which would also star Hopper. The documentary chronicles the intense post-production of The Last Movie whilst also taking time to allow a tripped-out Hopper to theorise about life, film, art, religion, and sex. These stream-of-consciousness mutterings bear some resemblance to the madcap statements made by Hopper’s photojournalist character in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1976)
The American Dreamer adds something to the mythical quality that Hopper was attempting to establish around himself. The rambling interviews interspersed with footage of Hopper – bearded and in ragged jeans, gun under arm, walking over windswept landscapes, accompanied by rambling folk songs on the soundtrack – are for the most part evocative of the outlaws and bandits that once roamed the frontier wilderness.
The interviews reveal a great deal about Hopper’s intentions and obsessions regarding his film and with film itself as an art form. It also demonstrates the many distractions and temptations that Hopper faced in the aftermath of Easy Rider’s fame. Drugs, drink, and women begin to pull him away from the task of finishing his film within the given time and budget. One scene in particular is deeply uncomfortable. A group of young girls are bussed in to actively participate in an orgy with Hopper. With his manic stare, shaggy beard, long hair, and surrounded by lovelorn females, one cannot help but see visual similarities to cult leader and serial killer Charles Manson. The American Dreamer is a shambolic attempt to paint Hopper in the colours of an American folk hero. To be fully understood, it has to be seen alongside The Last Movie and in the context of that film’s artistic triumphs and commercial failures.
Thankfully we have an official release and a clean digital transfer of The Last Movie that will hopefully open up the appreciation that this film truly does deserve. For decades the film has been viewed through the lens of its own obscurity. This has meant that audiences have either had to see it via film print at late night screenings or a distorted VHS transfer. If one cannot at least appreciate the narrative (or lack thereof) at least the film’s magnetic beauty can be seen in the glory in which it was intended.
A crisp and brand new 4k restoration of The Last Movie is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 14th.
