Taste

"The only proof of taste is that one knows how to occasionally appreciate things which do not meet the criteria of good taste -- those who follow good taste too strictly only display their total lack of taste." Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times.

Cronenberg stills from here.

Imprisoned memories prowl through the dark …

The spectral Denis Thatcher (Jim Broadbent) surprises the still-living but senile Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) from behind the sofa: “Gotcha!” Did I imagine that moment? Is it purely coincidental that the most notorious one-word newspaper headline in recent history should now be thrown back at the monster it indirectly celebrated or is it actually a form of criticism? Hard to say: as the example shows, Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady is a film that forces you to project your own thoughts about Thatcher and Thatcherism onto that which appears on screen, or dig around for meaning, one reason why her enemies think it’s too soft and her supporters – are there any? – think it’s too harsh. On balance, it’s a Thatcher film minus Thatcherism and the only reason her remaining supporters have disapproved is because of the deteriorating Thatcher it gives us. But forget who that is and what she did, and you have an old-age-as-misery story we seldom get to see in the movies, almost play-like, set in the gloomy, afterlife-like rooms of the London apartment where she lives under virtual house arrest: the fading and unstable former leader unrecognised by the public, the cheerful ghost of her husband, the patronising help, the annoying daughter. Streep as Thatcher-in-old-age is better, and stranger, than any computer-generated effect, and her memories are slippery and unreliable: the film even allows you to think of Thatcherism itself as a dream or delusion that never happened, or enjoy the world-historical figure’s nightmare about what history may ultimately say about her (you think of other figures in twilight: Murdoch, Pinochet), or imagine a guilty conscience, which the film never openly suggests – other than in the “gotcha!” moment. It is also easy – and correct – to say that the script is not critical enough: the 1980s flash past, abbreviated and sometimes out of sequence (here, the miners’ strike comes before the Falklands War – or is that her unreliable memory?), and while there is acknowledgement of disagreement and protest, that protest seems indistinguishable from the sexism of the old-school Tories, and is therefore rendered meaningless. But there are thousands of ways to talk about who she was and what she did. Here is one that arrived in the post just yesterday …

"26 October. In bed with a cold I’m rung by a television company putting together an obituary of Mrs Thatcher. I’ve not much to offer though mention the trip I made c1990 along the M62 from Hull to Liverpool, a trail of devastation, decay and manufacturing slump that stretched from coast to coast, much of it the doing of the Iron Lady. It struck me then that no one had done so much systematic damage to the North since William the Conqueror …" from Alan Bennett’s Diary, London Review of Books, January 5 2012.

“Imprisoned memories prowl through the dark” – the first line of the narration on Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (1987).

Mobile phone pictures, September 2010-December 2011

September 6, 2010: the Moorhouse Avenue clocktower has stopped at the time of the first earthquake.

September 6, 2010: Alice in Videoland, High St.

Newcastle, New South Wales. October, 12, 14 and 15, 2010.

 The courtyard of the now ruined Peterborough building, Christchurch. December 5, 2010.

Spectral poster, Christchurch. January 26, 2011.

Campbell Kneale as Our Love Will Destroy the World, Chicks Hotel, Port Chalmers. March 25, 2011.

Log Lady. June 13, 2011.

Christchurch. July 2, 2011.

 November 8, 2011. Signs in the Heathcote river.

Unintended Planet of the Apes reference in post-quake sandwich bar wreckage, New Regent St, Christchurch. November 25, 2011.

Band names. December 17, 2011.

It's like Second Annual Report never happened (Total Girl magazine badge). December 18, 2011.

 Nearly a still from Robinson in Ruins. Harewood, Christchurch, December 22, 2011.

Updated advice, St Martins, Christchurch, December 24, 2011. (formerly this).

"The afternoon that stretched into evening": films of 2011 (and books, music)

FILMS

1 The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick). More to come on this in the new year, but here’s one thing: rewatch Godard’s mid-80s Hail Mary and you see a similar evoking of “spiritual” mysteries through searching voice-over and wind-in-grass shots – nature and holiness – only it’s that much more emotive and even sensual from Malick despite Hail Mary’s nudes. Also, wasn’t it a little inspirational to see an experimental film get such a profile and start so much discussion?
2 The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr). The opening scene is "a remarkable five minutes in which we see the horse driven by a grim, bearded man like a ship through a storm; this is all caught in one long, smooth take by cinematographer Fred Kelemen as mournful music rises and falls on the soundtrack and horse and driver battle a head-on, howling wind. Both look as though they are gripped or driven by guilt, or shame." More here.
3 Melancholia (Lars von Trier). "A potentially destructive planet hidden behind the sun – such a great metaphor for depression." More here.

4 Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller). The long-awaited third part of Keiller’s Robinson series – after London and Robinson in Space – is sparser and more contemplative than the preceding two, and less bitter. But his fictional Robinson, reported on now by Vanessa Redgrave as the narrator, replacing the late Paul Scofield, is still obsessed with the genealogy of capitalism in Britain, tracking back to the enclosure of the Commons, and observing some contested, haunted landscapes – Greenham Common and Harrowdown Hill among them. As in 1994’s London, much of what passes for British heritage seems parasitic to Robinson, as fake or invented tradition that serves someone else’s purpose – here, he observes 19th century neo-Gothic architecture and says, “It seemed strange that so much effort should be devoted to its preservation”.
5 Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn). The action movie and its attendant clichés rendered as romantic yearning, lit by sodium lights in city streets. As a whole, it sits just this side of parody.
6 Inside Job (Charles Ferguson). In this thorough catalogue of crimes and moral failings, who comes out looking the worst? Hard to say, but the complicit academics are definitely up there.
7 Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek). "The wistfulness of an epilogue." More here.
8 When a City Falls (Gerard Smyth). "Smyth’s version of the afternoon that stretched into evening, with the fires that kept burning in the CTV building, the armies of rescue workers, the silent crowds waiting in Latimer Square, is startling, pieced together from his own urgent footage and other sources, and playing out unmediated by reporters or news readers." More here.
9 The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne). The Dardennes have reached such a level of consistency that they risk being taken for granted. This effortless neo-realism owes more – title aside – to Bresson (films like Mouchette are in the background) than De Sica, and also offers something much closer to hope than usual.
10 Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog). Most nature documentaries peddle an optimistic vision – the natural world is knowable, all motivations can be uncovered and understood, progress is not illusory – but Werner “the jungle is obscene” Herzog, an arch-pessimist, has a different vision, which gives his nature documentaries (this, Grizzly Man) an unusual tension: there is discovery, sure, but there is also a vast gulf between us and them, now and then. Even in 3D, the cave-art footage didn’t move me as I thought it should and I liked the albino crocodile coda that everyone else seemed to hate – that probably makes me one of the pessimists.

11 Monsters (Gareth Edwards). Ultra-low budget and very obviously allegorical (the misunderstood monsters are kept behind a wall on the other side of the Mexican border), this widely overlooked sci-fi debut was also imaginative and eerie.
12 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan). The early scenes, hazy as a dream, as they drive through the empty landscapes at night, looking for where the body was buried.
13 Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky). “I confess that I meant to grow wings and lose my mind. I confess that I’ve forgotten what for. Why wings and a lost mind?” (Leonard Cohen, from “A Cross Didn’t Fall on Me”). Or, "Not quite horror and not quite camp; more an oppressive, phantasmagorical melodrama that blends both." More here.
14 The Orator (Tusi Tamasese). How often does this happen – a film showing you lives you’re sure you’ve never seen before? Tamasese’s mature debut was said to be the first feature shot entirely in Samoa and in the Samoan language – meaning it also got to be the first ever New Zealand entry for the foreign language Oscar.
15 Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (Sophie Fiennes). "The muddy grey and brown fields, and equally dismal skies, in some Kiefer paintings could double as Tarr’s landscapes, just as both share a kind of Gnostic sensibility. 'I can’t reach the core,' Kiefer says in his interview, in words reminiscent of Tarr’s darkness-habituated characters. 'I can’t reach the law that holds the world together.'" More here. Since this doco wrapped, the subject – artist Anselm Kiefer – has expressed interest in buying a shut-down nuclear power plant. Sequel?

Honourable mentions: Meek’s Cutoff. Operation 8. Kung Fu Panda 2. The Kids Are All Right (almost entirely because of Mark Ruffalo). Sleeping Beauty.



DVD only: Carlos (Olivier Assayas) – the full, five and a half hour/three disc version. In its rise and fall, glamour turning into cynicism, youthful promise into bloat, this Ilich Ramirez Sanchez biopic runs like Euroterrorism’s Raging Bull.
Acting: Claire Danes in Temple Grandin, Fa’afiaula Sagote in The Orator, Christian Bale and Amy Adams in The Fighter, Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine, Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia, Carey Mulligan in Never Let Me Go, Ryan Gosling in Drive, Gwyneth Paltrow as a good-looking corpse in Contagion.
Duds: Crazy, Stupid, Love. No Strings Attached. The Devil’s Rock (giving Nazioccultsploitation a bad name). The King’s Speech.

MUSIC

Live: The Clean at CPSA, Christchurch, November 26 – yes, that night (for about two hours, you forgot). Our Love Will Destroy the World at Lines of Flight 2011, Chicks, Port Chalmers, March 25 (plus Wellington’s Sign of the Hag and Dunedin’s Eye – same festival, previous night). Swans at Powerstation, Auckland, March 6. Both Swans and OLWDTW were mind emptyingly-loud (a good thing). Shayne P Carter at Kings Arms, Auckland, May 14, and at CPSA, Christchurch, November 18. Yeah, twice – the second time as thanks for the first, but more that I needed to see this back catalogue show twice to really process it. The first time – in Auckland -- you’re caught up in the celebratory nature of it all (we’re celebrating him, ourselves, these songs – and what these songs have said to us, about us), the second time – in a quieter Christchurch, following an erratic Ghost Club set – you actually get to hear “Dawn’s Coming In” and “Randolph’s Going Home” and you really take in the shape of the set, his curated nostalgia trip and your own (perceptions vary -- the likes of “Needles and Plastic” and “Joe 90” were already old songs when I first heard them; for others, the Straitjacket Fits songs will always have been old – and so, maybe, all of the post-1996 songs, like the 14-minute Krautrock sex song and set closer “Seed”, will always be new. These nostalgia shows can get emotionally and temporally complicated).

Some recordings: Cyclobe, Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window (CD edition). Earth, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1. Radiohead, The King of Limbs. The Caretaker, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. Six Organs of Admittance, Asleep on the Floodplain. Torlesse Super Group, s/t. White Saucer / Currer Bells – split cassette. Wooden Wand, Death Seat. The Fall, Ersatz GB (hated on first listen, liked on the second – that seems to happen a lot with the Fall). Rediscovering the 3Ds’ “Meluzina Man” (“The song I still believe to be their best” – Bruce Russell in the liner notes) through various takes on We Bury the Living: Early Recordings 1989-90. You can never have too many versions of “Meluzina Man”.

BOOKS

Pip Adam, Everything We Hoped For. Paul Auster, Sunset Park. Jane Bowron, Old Bucky and Me. Hamish Clayton, Wulf. Alexander Cockburn, The Golden Age is in Us. Guy Debord, Panegyric. Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street and Running Dog. Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One. Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life and Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Martin Edmond, Dark Night: Walking with McCahon. Laurence Fearnley, The Hut Builder. Peter Graham, So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder that Shocked the World. Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and Militant Modernism. Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless. Christopher Hitchens, Arguably. Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker. J Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies. Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian. Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010. Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table. Charles Portis, True Grit. Chad Taylor, Electric. David Vann, Caribou Island and Legend of a Suicide. Ian Wedde, The Catastrophe. Tim Wilson, The Desolation Angel. Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. Slavoj Zizek, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce.

I'm down on bended knee

When a City Falls

What kind of film would Gerard Smyth have made had the February 22, 2011, earthquake never happened? That question might come to you a few times as you watch Smyth’s feature-length (106 minutes long) Christchurch quake doco, When a City Falls. Smyth, a Christchurch cameraman and documentary-maker (he did the Alun Bollinger film, Barefoot Cinema), got started on this straight after the September 4, 2010 quake – the surprise 7.1 quake that did plenty of damage but killed no one – and the narrative of the following five months is preserved in When a City Falls. That period is now prelude, mined for poignancy in hindsight: the Catholic Bishop of Christchurch, Barry Jones, shows off the intact interior of the Basilica, so wisely quake-strengthened some years earlier; a Christchurch resident remarks that the city must be blessed, that someone is watching over us. Then the really bad one hits: no one feels blessed anymore; the Basilica is seriously damaged and must be dismantled. Other architectural treasures that were marvelled over in the previous section are equally ruined.

So Smyth might once have made a shorter, happier film, full of stories of good fortune and miraculous escapes, keep-calm-and-carry-on responses to the city’s mountains of silt and the flooded streets, Kiwi humour in adversity, and so on. And then the bad one came – which means that Smyth has already communicated the most important truth about the February quake, which is that it seemed unthinkable because we thought it had already happened. More than 100 people died in the CTV building alone; 182 people died in total. This was all exhaustively covered at the time, but Smyth’s version of the afternoon that stretched into evening, with the fires that kept burning in the CTV building, the armies of rescue workers, the silent crowds waiting in Latimer Square, is still startling, pieced together from his own urgent footage and other sources, and playing out unmediated by reporters or news readers. Did you ever see the blocks of stone come off the Anglican Cathedral, like a rockfall? That was new to me.

Covering the aftermath was always going to be harder for Smyth (or anyone). How to balance the complex tasks, the sensitivities involved in interviewing surviving family members about their losses, while also surveying the ways that the disaster affected different parts of town and documenting both the progress over weeks and months – in the post-quake timeline, demolitions are a form of progress – and the shifts in the general mood? It would require you to have several different perspectives at once, to work on several different scales at the same time.

Smyth doesn’t try to get all that in. His film is largely an individual response not a comprehensive one. Like columnist Jane Bowron – and there is some overlap with her book of columns, Old Bucky and Me – Smyth starts from his inner-east Christchurch neighbourhood and works out. His – and Bowron’s – Christchurch is one where Piko and its surrounding shops were central and Merivale and Riccarton go unmentioned. Smyth weeps off-camera at the sight of the ruined Basilica, where he had once been an altar boy, and we note that his Christchurch is more Catholic than Anglican, generally bohemian and working class, or at least egalitarian. From a Press feature on the film (by Bowron):

The Film Commission flew down a few days after February to look at Smyth's footage and quickly saw it was something that wasn't being shown on mainstream TV. From the rushes, initially the Film Commission thought it a political film because the people seemed to be working class with the middle to upper classes of Christchurch absent from the footage.

"They didn't take into account that people were looking grubby and unshaven till I said, 'That person there's the wife of the Crown prosecutor, that man employs 43 people, that guy's a doctor'. We all got levelled to the same person," Smyth says, at pains to describe the film as grassroots and very much "of the people".

Smyth is not reporting the official lines or following the official timeframe. His is an earthquake story largely free of CERA, Bob Parker and Gerry Brownlee, one that focuses instead on community responses and individual ways of coping. Beyond Smyth’s inner-east neighbourhood, the emphasis is on Avonside, Bexley, Aranui, Linwood and Lyttelton, with trips to Sumner and Kaiapoi. It is the Christchurch of Lianne Dalziel and Garry Moore, rather than Peter Beck – although Beck does appear briefly with his Anglican Cathedral – and Christ’s College. The bigger picture, as reported in most media – events like the "share an idea" expo, or the red-zone land offers and insurance wrangles – has been deliberately overlooked in favour of smaller stories. And there is a good chance that in the years to come, personal accounts like these – Bowron’s book, too, and Fiona Farrell’s The Broken Book – may ultimately matter more than the stories composed in the clean and neutral language of most journalism.

The film is personal in both choices and style: Smyth stays off-camera but we get to know him from his quiet responses and his gentle questions. He appears to be a sensitive interviewer, and some of these stories are – no surprise – very tough indeed. There is the young woman whose father was killed by rocks above Lyttelton (she found his body). There is the widow of architect Don Cowey, who was killed in his garden. There is – and this might be the strangest and most affecting of all – the story of how elderly people comforted rest home workers.

The structure is loose, the events of September 4, December 26, February 22 and June 13 are the natural chapter breaks, and the ending was always going to be problematic (at what point will we say that the event has ended?). Not all critics have been convinced (see Peter Calder) by a trip to the US with urban designer James Lunday to see how San Francisco, New Orleans and Portland recovered – Portland from a post-manufacturing slump not a natural disaster – but these scenes seem to both summarise and extend the endless conversations that Christchurch has had about its rebuild since February. People outside need to realise that the utopian daydreaming of such conversations – will we be the green city, the safe city, the creative city, the new model city? – can often seem like a way of coping.

During the filming of Eraserhead

From this photo set.

Parker and Hulme go to the pictures

So Brilliantly Clever, Peter Graham's book about the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder, its build-up and its aftermath, is published this week -- my newspaper feature on it is here -- and the book is pretty much essential reading for anyone interested in this unendingly fascinating murder case. Graham got hold of a copy of Pauline Parker's diary and scattered within it were the titles of some of the films she and Juliet Hulme saw. Central Christchurch at that time was packed with cinemas, and the girls were obsessed with Hollywood in general and some male movie stars in particular, so you can imagine that there were quite a few titles. At some point I started taking down page numbers every time one turned up in the text ...

All the Brothers Were Valiant (Richard Thorpe, 1953). They saw it at the Majestic on Manchester St when it was still a cinema (in the 70s, it became a nightclub called Moby Dick's and then a church).
Beat the Devil (John Huston, 1953). Possible source of Pauline's "Gina" nickname -- Gina Lollobrigida is in it.
Dangerous Crossing (Joseph M Newman, 1953). They saw it on April 29, 1954.
The Desert Fox (Henry Hathaway, 1951) and The Desert Rats (Robert Wise, 1953). Juliet liked James Mason as dashing Nazi Erwin von Rommel.
The Great Caruso (Richard Thorpe, 1951). With Mario Lanza as Caruso.
Hans Christian Andersen (Charles Vidor, 1952).
The Highwayman (Lesley Selander, 1951). A swashbuckler that Peter Graham suspects influenced Pauline's short story, which featured "bedroom scenes ... highway robberies" and "more than one violent death a day".
Ivanhoe (Richard Thorpe, 1952). Because of actor Guy Rolfe.
Julius Caesar (Richard L Mankiewicz, 1953). With James Mason as Brutus. Mason was "almost too wonderful to be true ... I was much pleased to see how young [he] looks ... superb physique", Pauline wrote.
King of the Khyber Rifles (Henry King, 1953). Guy Rolfe and Michael Rennie were "utterly divine", thought Pauline.
Mogambo (John Ford, 1953). Apparently they hated Clark Gable but loved Ava Gardner.
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951). Pauline saw it with her mother about six months before she killed her. "It is the most perfect story I have ever known," Pauline wrote afterwards, and James Mason was "far too wonderful to attempt to describe".
Prince Valiant (Henry Hathaway, 1954). With James Mason sporting a beard (they approved). Pauline thought the picture was dreadful but Mason "was wonderful". 
The Prisoner of Zenda (Richard Thorpe, 1952). Opened at the Majestic in April, 1953. Said to be the beginning of the girls' James Mason obsession and influential on their imaginative world.
A Queen is Crowned (Christopher Fry, 1953). A QEII coronation doco that was shown at school. "Rather boring as a picture," Pauline thought but she liked the pageantry.
The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953). Pauline saw it at the Savoy on the Square in January 1954; in this Biblical epic, she observed that "Caligula was exactly like the Devil".
Scaramouche (George Sidney, 1952). Because of actor Mel Ferrer. Pauline: "Absolutely superb ... thoroughly divine." It's unclear whether she means the film or Ferrer. Or both.
Secret Mission (Harold French, 1942). More James Mason.
The Spider and the Fly (Robert Hamer, 1949). More Guy Rolfe.
Trent's Last Case (Herbert Wilcox, 1954). The beginning of a short-lived obsession with Orson Welles. "He is dreadful ... but I adore him." -- Pauline.
The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, 1945) More James Mason.

Inevitable caption to the above picture -- Twentieth Century Fox: James Mason as Rommel.

They do the whole sacrifice thing to get this rotten world back on track

Time of the Wolf, 2003. Photography by Jurgen Jurges.

Foreign city

"... and even if he is home again, this New York is not his New York, not the New York of his memory. For all the distance he has travelled, he might just as well have come to a foreign city, a city anywhere else in America." -- Paul Auster, Sunset Park, 2010.

From the top: the Victoria, Devonport, Auckland (1912-  ); the Capitol, Balmoral, Auckland (1922-  ); the Majestic, Christchurch (1930-1970, then converted); the State, Christchurch (1935-1977, then converted); the Regent, Christchurch (1930-2011).