punk - communal living - 2005 - Mouth to Mouth

Mouth to Mouth
Alison Murray
2005
M2M Films
101 minutes

Mouth to Mouth is a film about a group of street kids travelling through Europe in a rusty old van, attending festivals, dumpster diving, and smoking and drinking. The group, called Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge, or SPARK, goes from city to city living as crusty punks, forming social bonds and drifting around until they make their way to a vineyard somewhere in southern Europe. At this point the group began living communally and working the land while they also take on the form of the charismatic cult that was hinted at during their earlier travels.

The group has a leader, Harry, who expresses a bland self-help straight-edge philosophy and repeatedly admonishes his followers to "stay strong". At one point, while the group is on the road, their youngest member cuts his throat on a piece of twisted metal and dies after he's flung into a dumpster to look for food. No one really takes responsibility for the death, including the boy's best friend who carelessly tossed him in there, but its Harry's disinterest that is striking as an early clue of his evil. Once they occupy the vineyard, Harry begins exercising authority more cruelly, punishing disobedient followers by putting them in a well. The film ends predictably when one member dies under such punishment and another, Sherry (the film's main character - it doesn't really suit the purpose of my blog to speak about her) rejects Jeff's authority and leaves the group.

The group is a charismatic cult with a complete absence of spirituality, much like the cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene. They are a self-help group with a bad man for a leader. Much like with that other movie, its easier for me to understand how the bizarre and psychotic millenarianism of Charles Manson, for example, could compel followers to invest in him as an authority figure, than it is for me to understand how a bland punk-guru's dull can inspire his friends to obey his every word.

Director Allison Murray also made the documentary Train on the Brain, the greatest of all hobo/train hopping films, so that's good.

The Bug is on the soundtrack, which is also very good.

animal liberation - film - 2011 - Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rupert Wyatt

Twentieth Century Fox

2011

105 min

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably among the top movies of the last two years and it is undoubtedly better than all of the nominees for Best Picture for 2011,along with The Muppets. It was certainly better than The Artist. The film provides the backstory to the “classic” sci-fi film The Planet of the Apes which Rise also far outshines. It is essentially a story of animal evolution propelled by human technology, resulting in armed revolution by animals against humans.

The story begins with a research scientist who conducts studies on chimpanzees pertaining to an alzheimer's treatment that may not only restore the subject’s brain functioning but even increase intelligence. This scientist has an ailing father whose suffering drives his son’s urgency to achieve success in his research.  One of the first successful test subjects, a chimp called Bright Eyes by the research team, goes on a rampage in defense of her infant son, and is killed right at the moment when the scientist is presenting his research to a corporate board meeting. The scientist then takes care of the infant chimpanzee, whom he names Caesar, and subsequently realizes that this young ape had inherited the superior intelligence of his mother.

The scientist administers the chimp-tested treatments to his father, whose condition improves. The father, Cesaer’s adoptive grandfather, shows the most emotion and concern for Caesar, and his quality of life, out of all of the film’s human characters. The elder man and the young ape experience their life changes at the same time, and at the moment when the grandfather relapses into alzheimers, Caesar is put into an ape refuge, a moment that comes after Caesar had defended his elder from a bullying neighbor. The moment of the grandfather’s death is also the moment where Caesar becomes that refuge’s alpha male.  This kind of pattern is interesting as it also charts the rise of the ape - as, of course, Caesar inevitably becomes a leader of an ape uprising, first against their refuge handlers, and then against law enforcement - against the decline of man, who, by film’s end, die out as a virus that the apes are resistant to spreads across the world along international flightpaths.  

Earlier in this post I referred to The Artist, and I think it is important to note that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is just one example of a movie that effectively carries the silent film, in part, into the present era. Rather than being some corny pastiche of 1920s era Hollywood, Rise shows the animals behave in often intensely expressive ways without verbally communicating. The emotions and meanings expressed by the apes are clearly conveyed by facial and bodily gestures, and the actions of the apes are clear as well. Whole tracts of the film are gripping in their portrayal of animal suffering without any words being exchanged or even human characters present to speak on their behalf.  

The uprising of the ape’s is a great scene. First, it includes aspects of revolutionary activity which are often neglected in other representations. For example, the apes have a symbol for their movement, the design of the windowframe from the attic of the scientist’s house where Caesar grew up. There’s a whole motif of looking through windows and glass in this film that may provide the base material for a film studies student’s course paper someday! Furthermore, the apes in revolt almost immediately find a revolutionary hero-martyr in the gorilla of the refuge who hurled himself at a helicopter machine-gunner - bringing down the aircraft even though it killed him. Meanwhile, Caesar is the quintessential revolutionary leader (with strands from Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces), who fearlessly fights his enemies with whatever means are at hand while unfolding brilliant strategies to defeat the San Francisco Police Department with limited manpower and weaponry. It seemed as though the apes won their fight against well armed and armoured men with few casualties and little effort. Finally, Caesar also feels intensely for his people, as shown when he cradles the body of the fallen gorilla after the battle had ended.  

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably the great film of animal liberation, imagining a fantasy of the animals liberating themselves at the same time that humanity falls, never to oppress or exploit apes again.

radical media - film - 2000 - Cecil B. Demented

Cecil B. Demented
John Waters
Studio Canal+
2000
87 Minutes

Roger Ebert bothered to give a this movie a poor review, commenting on its poor acting and the sense it creates that its the result of a group of friends goofing around.  These charges can be levelled against ANY John Waters film, but there’s a mild sense of jouissance in that he said it about this particular anti-Hollywood Waters production.  John Waters is one of a few reknown countercultural filmmakers.  His work is always transgressive, willfull schlock, hence William S Burroughs honoured the director by naming him the “Pope of Trash.”  One of the recurring themes in Waters work is the blending of the transgressive with the transcendant in what is often a weird and carnivalesque spectacle augmented by intentionally low production values.

This film’s central character, Cecil B. Demented, is a terrorist film director who is followed by a crew of violent movie revolutionaries who seek to dismantle the system that produces mainstream films.  Each crew member is tattooed with the name of one of the great non-mainstream auteurs of cinema, including “David Lynch” (on the art director’s knuckles) and the occultist director, Kenneth Anger (across the chest of the satanist, recalling Anger’s own chest tattoo that reads ‘lucifer’).  

Each crew member has a unique anti-social personality which they bring to the whole, drug abuse, deviant sexuality, a relentless will to violence, they’re all represented in Demented’s crew.  The crew kidnap a major Holywood film star and make her the central figure in their film, recalling the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst (who appears in this film) by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

The film operates as an exaggerated telling of some of Water’s own methods of filmmaking.  In a 1988 documentary about Waters he discusses how he would jump out a car, shoot a scene with Divine on the Baltimore sidewalk, then jump back into the car.  

Cecil B. Demented’s directorial methods are similar, except that he threatens outsiders to his crew with death if they don’t participate according to his orders.  Demented's goal is to achieve a representation of "real terror" in film.  To make a film in such a way, with a Hollywood star, is perhaps a fantasy to film terrorists everywhere.  The film progresses in such a way that Melanie Griffith's superstar character becomes integrated into the group to the extent that she starts participating in the havoc they wreack. and many of the crew (including Demented) die over the course of a number of shootouts and violent melees with opposing forces, including the Baltimore Police, the Teamsters, and the security personnel of the theaters the Demented crew raids.  

The group bonds tighten over these shootouts (even as they shed members) and the Hollywood star becomes one of them.  They also bond over rituals as each member forments their dedication to the group by being branded with a group logo (they already have the director-name tattoos as a group thing) and howilng “demented forever.”  Cecil B. Demented displays a group fanatically dedicated to an art form, and intertwining terror and art in a way that recalls Don DeLillo’s art and terrorism novels, Mao II and Falling Man, except that for Waters, the terror is combined with fun.  Ultimately, even though most of the Demented crew dies, they succeed, because they finished shooting their film.

red army faction - film - 2008 - The Baader-Meinhof Complex

The Baader Meinhoff Complex
2008
150 minutes
directed by Uli Edel

   The Baader-Meinhoff Complex is a 2008 film directed by the German director, Uli Edel, who I otherwise only know from a mediocre 1989 film adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn.  In this film he creates a partial and fragmented dramatic history of the Red Army Faction which serves to display them as violent freedom fighters without much critique of their methods.  The result is that quasi-Marxist terrorists are portrayed as the heroes of an action movie.  Whether or not this was the director’s intention was unclear, but this film conveys a similar cinematic vocabulary to the Star Wars films. 

The Red Army Faction were a group of West German based Marxist rebels active during the 1960s into the 1970s.  The RAF believed in armed struggle and may be interpreted as a European analogue to a similar American group called The Weathermen. The title of this film referrs to the alternative name for the group, the Baader-Meinhoff gang, referring to its two best known members, Andreas Baader, and Ulrike Meinhoff.  The film depicts these two figures as engaged in a dialectical struggle of thought vs action which is a perrennial issue manifest in the rhetoric of activism.  Ulrike Meinhoff was a brilliant journalist with far-left leanings who became the intellectual voice of the group while Baader was a criminal with little education, and formed the id of the group consciousness.  Baader is represented as uninterested in political concerns in any way that does not appear superficial, and rather appears to sense that action is the most important course to take.  

While Baader and Meinhof appear to represent the two poles of the group, (and serve as metaphors for the two poles of all of radical politics) there is a third major character, Klassen Grundun, poised between the two best known group members, who may actually represent the axel of the unstable unit.  In Edel’s film, Grundun nurtures Baader’s will to violence, even if its directed towards ridiculous gestures such as an arson attack on a department store.  Grudnen also shames Meinhoff into committing to violent revolutionary action by ridiculing her profession.  Finally, Gruden pacifies Baader when he succumbs to his rage at group meetings, and recalls the exact perfect Mao Tse-Tung quotation to recite to the group to steel their resolve in a hard time.  She is the unacknowledged force that drives the group, while Baader is portrayed as the same kind of reckless wildman  archetype that propels every movie.

The film goes from scene to scene depicting the most dramatic periods of the group’s existence, without getting bogged down in any socio-political details that might take away from its pace or action.  Bombings, retaliations, the capture of the RAF by police, trial and deaths as well as a few episodes from the 2nd and 3rd generations of the RAF are all depicted, transposed into movie convention reasonably well by Edel.  The origins of the group are uncertain in the film, Ulrike Meinhoff appears to join the Red Army Faction sometime after an encounter with an incarcerated Gunden, but otherwise the terrorist cell appeared to have already existed, already bombing things that have no connection to their political cause.  So any reason for its existence is left unstated, and they appear to commit acts of politically motivated violence for unspecified or poorly articulated reasons.  Occasional quotes from Meinhoff’s writings aside, the intellectual side of the group is subsumed in the film by the spectacle of explosions.  The RAF’s prehistory, the allusion that these were the children of the Third Riech, generation, is a mere statement on the back of the DVD case.  It may be something worth exploring, but it’s not given any meaning in the film.  Instead, the group’s post-formation history is mined as a source of action packed scenes with the terrorists poised as heroes.

Edel’s film displays a terrorist group that is active in a Western democracy without justifying its existence.  Still, Edel constructs his RAF characters as sympathetic figures simply by humanizing them while portraying the police they fight with as nameless hordes.  The Red Army Faction appear as youthful, energetic fighters, while their enemies are the anonymous henchmen of old men who sit and dryly plot at a conference table.  

    The historical significance of the RAF can be set aside, really, as this film is little more than an action movie that unfortunately takes a complicated semi-Marxist terrorist organization as its subject matter.  In real life, police authority and liberal-democratic social organization continues to dominate western countries.  Recent films that use countercultural groups, if not armed rebel movements such as the RAF, as their subject matter, consistently portray such groups sympathetically, if not outright heroically.  Why is there such disparity between dramatic representations of such subject matter, and actual social attitudes towards the sorts of groups being represented?