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Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Thursday, October 27, 2016
Thursday, October 27, 2016
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I consider myself pretty politically engaged. I volunteer on political campaigns. I attend marches. I help out with advocacy groups. I work in law reform. But would I pick up a rifle, head overseas and shoot fascists? In my romantic fantasies I'd like to think so, but in reality I probably don't have the guts. But, in the mid 1930s 2,500 men and women did. These were the men and women who formed the British Battalion of the International Brigades.
They were ordinary people, often with no military experience. Yet they recognised the evils of fascism, left their jobs and families behind and many ended up making the ultimate sacrifice in an attempt to stop Franco in his tracks. Somewhat overshadowed by World War II, the Brigades are an unjustly overlooked part of Britain's history, an inspirational lesson in the common man's willingness to stand up to evil at great personal risk.
Neil Gore's Dare Devil Rides to Jarama follows two such volunteers, speedway champion / dare devil Clem Beckett and milquetoast Pimlico writer Chris Caudwell. Were it not for the war its unlikely that the two would ever have crossed paths, one being a grease-smeared Mancunian and the other an earnest yet nervy London writer. Yet they found common ground in their anger at social injustice and corruption, each sincerely believing in the powerful transformative power of socialism.
Gore begins in the twenties, laying out the early speedway career of Beckett. As he rises through the ranks and achieves a modicum of celebrity he begins to rail against the exploitative treatment of racers. While he and his friends are out risking life and limb, the suits at the top pocket the profits while pushing for faster and more dangerous racing to draw in the crowds. Soon he's a proud member of the Young Communist League, gradually making his way through the party system until he's travelling the world as a sporting emissary of the British Communist Party.
It's just as he's settling down with a new wife and business that the call to arms comes. The mid 30s are dark times in Europe - Hitler, Mussolini and Franco all ascendant and Britain's Oswald Mosley eager to emulate their successes. For Beckett it's a no-brainer to heed the call to defend Spain from fascism and try to turn back the tide.
Caudwell is a different story - a slightly camp, bourgeois sounding intellectual, preferring to bury himself in party organisation and literature rather than engage in direct combat. Yet the argument that bullets are more effective that ink in defending Spain is difficult to refute, and soon the unlikely pair are off to the front, and eventually to the Battle of Jarama - one of the bloodiest conflicts the Brigades ever faced.
Split into two distinct halves, the first is a chirpy music hall biography of Clem Beckett. Played by David Heywood, Beckett is the epitome of the cheeky, cheery Northern lad, always ready with a wink and a smile. He's a dynamic, fun and easy to like character, simultaneously irreverent and sincere. Heywood infuses his every action with energetic life, grinning with happiness as he tackles motorbike stunts while doing his best to live his motto: "forever forward".
Post interval we're in Spain and the tone shifts considerably. Gone are the banjo and music hall trappings, replaced by a poetic seriousness. Clem Beckett's problems have progressed from motorbike accidents to worrying about his malfunctioning machine gun, a lack of ammunition, fighting with untrained and demoralised soldiers and a daredevil dealing with his own fears. Though not devoid of laughs, there's a poignancy and finality to these scenes as the soldiers realise that, despite all their bravery, they're militarily outmatched.
Dare Devil to Jarama often feels like a history lesson. There's a lot of necessary exposition to chew through; whether it's something as expansive as the history of socialism and antifascism in Britain or the politics of the Spanish Civil War; or as particular as the shoddy design and firing techniques of the Chauchat rifle ("the worst machine gun ever"). Working in Gore's favour is that the history is a) really interesting and b) he never once loses sight of his characters.
This makes the dense history navigable: we care about these charismatic characters and their political enthusiasm is infectious. In Beckett's voice, the dusty old anthems of the Young Communist League are infused with new vigour and life. Gore (playing every character other than Beckett) has a neat line in mimicry, excellently delivering the inspirational speeches that drive men like Beckett towards combat. A Peckham theatre in 2016 is a long way from the Spanish Civil War, but we feel like we have a glimmer of how these men might have flt.
Helping out with that is a generous smattering of audience participation. Heywood and Gore are constantly making eye contact with us and gently prodding the fourth wall. We're also provided with Unite branded plastic rattles to wave at key points, allowing us to create the din of the speedway and the enthusiasm of a much bigger crowd. We're also invited to sing along to the songs and, best of all, boo the hell out of Oswald Mosley (if only they'd supplied rotten tomatoes...).
By the time the play ends (to extremely enthusiastic applause) it's more than done its job. Gore has successfully interwoven history and politics, as well as doing justice to Clem Beckett and Chris Caudwell's lives. Dare Devil Rides to Jarama left me feeling inspired and informed, yet also slightly guilty. Would I do there the same if I were in their shoes? Just how many men and women of the International Brigade's calibre are around today?
The only contemporary parallel is extraordinarily depressing - the current people inspired to leave their country and take up arms for their beliefs are would be ISIS soldiers, eager to spread religious fundamentalism, mindless violence and oppression across desperate communities. (Man, maybe things really are just getting shitter and shitter.)
Let's leave that aside for now. Neil Gore's play is a great piece of drama and a worthy tribute to the men and women of the International Brigade. If you have the slightest bit of interest in history and politics it's a fascinating watch.
★★★★
Dare Devil Rides to Jarama is at the Bussey Building until Oct 29th, then on tour. Tickets here.
Photographs by Daniella Beattie
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
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"Ken Loach doesn’t think very much of me. In a broadside against critics, he described us as “the kind of people who live in darkened rooms” and who don’t “engage in political struggle in the real world.” Well, nuts to you Ken Loach, maybe your invective applies to the toads that squat in The Daily Mail newsroom, or the snooty crypto fascists of the Express, Star etc. but not to me. And what’s more Ken, I really enjoyed your film for (I think) the precise reasons you intended."
★★★★
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
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Finally a genuinely lefty action flick! Elysium is an unapologetically blunt political allegory, designed from the ground up to showcase inequality, cruelty and economic enslavement. But the politics are just the jam stuffed deep inside a delicious cinematic doughnut. The dough surrounding this tasty socialist jam is a visceral science fiction survival story with astonishing special effects, cool as hell future technology and several great performances.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Thursday, February 21, 2013
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Fire in the Blood exposes some unsettling truths about the consequences of Western economic dominance. It’s a catalogue of injustice and cruelty perpetuated without hate or malice, but, with a beady, utilitarian eye on maximisation of profits. What we see in this film are the blunt and bloody consequences of capitalism: desperate people gasping their last breaths in a hospital bed, bodies thrown onto an enormous pile millions of corpses high: a sacrifice to the almighty free market.
This documentary is about the supply of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to HIV/AIDS sufferers, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. In 1995, millions of people across Africa had no future to look forward to a slow and painful death. Suddenly through this gloom shot a ray of hope - a new course of treatment with results that seemed nothing short of miraculous. Skeletal, bedridden patients when administered ARVs began rapidly improving in health, a condition the doctors began to call “The Lazarus Effect”. In Fire in the Blood we see South African High Court Judge Edwin Cameron's life transformed from utter misery to competing in a long-distance cycle race entirely through the effects of ARVs. It’s not a cure, but ARVs make living with HIV/AIDS possible, to allow them to be able to work, exercise and appreciate life again. In these sub-Saharan countries, with vast swathes of populace stricken with HIV/AIDS this was a light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.
But there's a problem. Though the drugs cost peanuts to produce, the price was strictly controlled by enormous, avaricious drug companies. Treatment cost $15,000 dollars per year, a sum impossibly out of reach for the poor with HIV/AIDS. The message from the developed West from companies like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline is clear - if you haven’t got the money then get ready to embrace death, sucker. The resulting genocide of 10 million Africans is almost incomprehensibly horrific - men, women and children who died as a result of not having access to medicine that costs a few cents to make.
Much of Fire in the Blood is an impeccably and methodically researched argument explaining precisely why the price is so high and the moral contortions big pharma twists itself into to justify having the blood of millions on their hands. We come to learn that the reason these drug companies behave like this isn’t because the individuals running them are monstrously evil, it’s because they are entirely beholden to a system of maximising profit. Their reasoning was that if they lowered the price of ARVs in Africa, then they risk their US customers - their most profitable market - turning against them. If they allow generic ARVs (chemically identical to the patent version at a fraction of the price) to be imported, they run the risk of setting a legal precedent against their patents, potentially lowering the worth of their intellecual property. If profits dip from the stratospheric to the slightly less stratospheric, shareholders will get antsy and the board will be held accountable. The upshot is that on an accounting spreadsheet in an air-conditioned New York skyscraper, numbers are moved from one column to another. As a result in Uganda, hundreds of thousands of people die needlessly.
It’s easy to see how people buy into the drug company’s rhetoric - at first they seem to have some good points, but Fire in the Blood systematically demolishes them. These arguments range from the practical and vaguely plausible: "the reason these companies need to charge so much is to recoup what they spend in research and development". The implication being that if they sell these particular ARVs at a low price, then future R&D will be affected adversely. Gray shows us that far from these companies leading the way in development, they tend to gobble up smaller companies that have developed drugs using public funds. According to the film, they’re responsible for only 12% of R&d research worldwide.
The other end of the scale in the argument that poor Africans should be denied these life-saving drugs is far more insidious, dipping into outright racism. Spurious arguments are made that Africans can’t be trusted to follow a course of drugs (it eventually turns out they can - better than Western patients) with reasons ranging from some kind of innate laziness, to not being able to comprehend the idea of a clock - “they tell time by looking at the sun!” bleats one particularly gormless looking US senator. Even among HIV sufferers in developed countries there’s a fear that providing ARVs to poor Africans might lead to a drug-resistant strain of HIV/AIDS evolving, so, really it’s in everyone’s best interests if these Africans would just crawl off and die as quietly as possible, preferably without making too much fuss. As they say: “fuck you, got mine”.
So we’re presented with a situation where, as Professor Peter Mugyenyi, specialist in the field of HIV/AIDS simply puts it, “‘the disease is where the drugs are not”. To illustrate this we see cartoons of a skeletal man in a hospital bed reaching vainly towards a giant, locked pill bottle. Fortunately there are those who stood up against the drug industry, working both within and outside the law to get the ARVs where they’re needed most. The highlights are the Indian manufacturers of generic ARVs who devise a way to provide the medication for less than a dollar a day to HIV/AIDS sufferers - a yearly course costing just $350 rather than $15,000. We meet committed political activists who risk their own lives and liberty, like Zackie Ahmet, co-founder of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa who personally sacrificed his health in a boycott of ARVs until they could be provided for everyone. The above mentioned Professor Peter Mugyenyi ordered low-cost generic ARVs from India, defying Uganda’s patent laws and challenging authorities to arrest him until the drugs were allowed into the country - an action which opened the floodgates of low-cost generic ARVS into Africa. Some of the ‘good guys’ end up being quite surprising - for example it’s a pretty unique experience to think for a second “hey, maybe George Bush Jr wasn’t all bad...”.
Fire in the Blood is one of the clearest political arguments I've seen in a long time, but thankfully it works as a piece of cinema too. It’s frequently quite beautiful, the African scenery popping with colour and framed with an expertly artistic eye. There are some very clever cuts subtly linking ideas, like cutting from the grave of an AIDS victim in Uganda to the US Capitol Building in Washington DC. We never dip too much into the abstract, and Gray's confidence in the importance of his material shines through - he always lets his interviewees speak rather than bombarding us with a blizzard of quick cut visuals. Perhaps the only slightly disappointing aspect are some aspects of the score, which is a bit heavy-handed: long ominous bass tones when they’re telling us about terrible things, light orchestral triumphant pieces when something good has happened. Perhaps this is simply the nature of the beast in documentaries, but it’s a tiny bit frustrating to be emotionally prodded rather than trusted to react to the material in a humanistic way.
Fire in the Blood is a sober and eye-opening look at a topic so terrible, wide-ranging and complicated that many prefer to regard HIV/AIDS in Africa as “just one of those things”. Gray has created a film that breaks the situation down into easily digestible chunks, building his case against the drug companies piece by piece into an incredibly compelling whole. Apart from the central narrative, it becomes a searing indictment of free market capitalism. The frantic race towards maximising profits literally leads to mountains of corpses, the deaths of millions justified as a necessary evil in protecting someone's bottom line. A person that profits from restricting the supply of generic life-saving drugs to the world's poor should be on trial for crimes against humanity - they have consciously and coldly committed genocide for financial gain. Before watching the film I assumed the title Fire in the Blood referred to HIV/AIDS. It is, but it's also appropriate for the anger you'll feel when you learn about this senseless waste of life.
*****/*****
'Fire in the Blood' is playing at the Prince Charles Cinema on 22 February and across the country on the 25th of February.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
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Whenever
Pixar re-release one of their films in 3D there’s a faint whiff of the
cash-in about it. It’s unattractive
in a company that prides itself on originality and the pushing
forward of boundaries.
These aren’t films designed with 3D in mind, and these releases are partly a result of the fact that post-converting a computer animated film into 3D is a relatively easy
one, at least compared to a live action film.
For some
reason I’ve always viewed ‘Monsters Inc’ as one of Pixar’s lesser creations. For me, Pixar are at their finest when they’re
taking the audience on epic journeys: all three ‘Toy Story’ films have their
characters covering huge distances (relative to their sizes anyway), ‘Finding
Nemo’ takes us halfway around the world and ‘Wall-E’ explores the universe as a
whole. ‘Monsters Inc’ is far more
static, a comedy taking place in a handful of locations, maintaining a
tight focus on character development rather than high adventure.
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| The monsters go to work. |
The conceit
of the film is to examine the life and world of the ‘monster under the bed’. Children’s closet doors worldwide are
actually portals to ‘Monstropolis’, a city inhabited by monsters of all shapes
and sizes. The city is powered by the
company, ‘Monsters Inc’ by the screams of children, which are collected by blue
collar monsters spending their days popping into children’s bedrooms, scaring
the hell out of them and then hopping back through the portal. The ‘top scarers’ in this system are Sulley and Mike (voiced by John Goodman and Billy Crystal respectively).
Sulley
and Mike are absolutely perfectly designed.
They are overtly monstrous, but also relatable enough to get the audience’s
sympathy almost immediately. At first
glance the fuzzy blue Sulley seems incapable of scaring anyone, he’s got big
expressive eyes and a modest, friendly demeanour. But he is
a good scarer, as we see later in the film when we see him at work. He’s the straight man to Mike, a one eyed green
bowling ball with limbs. Mike is a
fantastic creation, frazzled and somewhat justifiably self-centered, yet also
deeply in love with a receptionist.
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| Mike and Celia's relationship is genuinely sweet. D'aww. |
As the story begins they’re at the top of their game and life is good, but soon a spanner is thrown
into the works, namely the arrival of the human child ‘Boo’ into their world,
who arrives clinging to the back of Sulley.
Children are seen as a terrifying, poisonous and toxic presence in the
monster world, so Sulley and Mike endeavour to get her back to her bedroom
without anyone realising that she’s in their care. It’s a
compelling scenario, one is executed flawlessly. They've harnessed some dark arts over at Pixar; writers and artists with direct access to my heartstrings that
they’ll pluck relentlessly without me ever feeling manipulated. ‘Monsters Inc’ is for the most part a broad
comedy, and channels Warner Bros animated shorts in a big way. But it all hangs together as a whole due to
the relationship between Sulley, Mike and their unexpected charge,
Boo.
Boo is a
brilliant creation. Voiced by
2 year Mary Gibbs, she cutely babbles and wanders her way through scenes
with an innocence that hilariously undercuts a lot of the tension the
characters try to create. Her good nature powers the central bit of character development in the film, that of Sulley dealing with the responsibilities of unexpectedly becoming a surrogate
father. This change in Sulley directly impacts upon Mike. At the
start of the film they’re on the same page, but Sulley’s priorities shift so far
that the two come into conflict with each other; Mike wanting everything to go
back to normal whatever the cost, and Sulley wanting the best for Boo.
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| Boo, in a monster costume. |
Technically the film is nearly flawless. To 2013 eyes there are a few slightly ropey looking creations in the background, but Pixar have always known both the limitations and possibilities of their technology and nothing jumps out as obviously dated. The big technological step forward when this was released 12 years ago was Sulley's fur, this being the first time that they'd dare to try rendering a lead character covered in long hairs. The effect looks as impressive as it did then, so realistic you want to reach out and stroke it.
The voice work remains superlative. Generally voice actors perform their work alone, and the dialogue is spliced together at a later date, but Goodman and Crystal performed together at the same time, resulting in beautifully natural back and forth dialogue. I guess when you're recording dialogue for animated films, you use your voice actors when they've got free time in their schedules, and generally don't bother to get them all in at once at extra expense. 'Monsters Inc' shows that sometimes, this expense is worth it for the uplift that the spontaneity gives to the performances and the characters.
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| Billy Crystal and John Goodman together in the recording booth. |
'Monsters Inc' is interestingly plotted, the villains being an ambitious scarer who develops a sinister new way of extracting screams from children and Henry J Waternoose, a rapacious capitalist who cares more about the survival of his business than the human cost running it entails. I had only a vague memory of the plot from watching it on its release, and I was surprised to see a neat little anti-capitalist critique fuelling much of the main plot. The film presents us a classically styled besuited and portly boss, running a factory that literally runs on the screams of children. It's like a cartoon from the 'Socialist Worker'. Our heroes are blue-collar workers with an innate paternalistic trust in their boss as someone who has their interests in mind. Naturally he doesn't; he's developing a more inhumane yet more efficient method of extracting screams that will put Sulley and Mike out of a job.
"I'll kidnap a thousand children before I let this company die, and I'll silence anyone who gets in my way!" - Henry J Waternoose
I particularly like that after they've defeated this nefarious plot and saved the day, our heroes head outside to find that they have indeed put the company out of business and left the entire workforce unemployed and miserable. It's nice to see a film that considers the consequences of the actions of the hero, pointing out that even doing what is obviously the right thing can have unintended results on the wider community. Fortunately Sulley has realised that the sound of children's laughter is even more potent than their screams and reconfigures Monsters Inc. to harness this instead of their terror. Sulley replaces Waternoose as the factory boss, signified by his donning a tie and a clipboard to examine his workers.
Sulley's tie has disturbing implications. Throughout the film he's the epitome of the blue-collar worker (even down to literally being blue), but now he's begun to elevate himself above the other monsters. He's now his best friend Mike's superior and employer, a situation that can only inevitably lead to conflict between these two former buddies. In addition, while times are good in the factory at the moment and labour relations are positive how we are to know that the situation is sustainable? The desperate and sinister Waternoose was once a worker on the 'scare floor', and from the initial respect he has from his employees may have once been like Sulley. Is our furry, gregarious blue-furred hero destined for a slow transformation into a warped, manipulative, profit margin obsessed fat 'kitty'? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Perhaps if the monsters working on the scare floor had been properly unionised they'd have had the wherewithal to reorganise Monsters Inc as a worker's co-operative to prevent history inevitably repeating itself?
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| Times are good... but for how long? Notice that Sulley is no longer 'Sulley' now. He's James P. Sullivan CEO. |
It's also worth recognising that Disney itself has parallels to the fictional corporation of 'Monsters Inc'. While Monsters Inc makes money from using children's screams as a source of energy, Disney Corporation makes money exploiting child labour in China, and considering that there are reports of colleagues committing suicide as a result of being scolded by factory bosses may well literally be running a corporation reliant on the screams of children. It's for reasons like this that at the back of my mind I always feel that even when Pixar make wonderful films with an anti-materialist or environmental message, that there's a nugget of hypocrisy lurking deep down at the core.
But that's enough politics. 'Monsters Inc' is a classic of animation that's perhaps unfairly overlooked compared to some of Pixar's more overtly ambitious technical and narrative ventures. It's a rock-solid comedy with a brilliantly original premise that executes it perfectly. It's also astoundingly self-contained, telling us all we need to know about the characters and their world in an hour and a half. There's a sequel due this summer, 'Monsters University', which I have reservations about. Is it going to be a 'Toy Story 3' or a 'Cars 2'? While I'd rather Pixar be putting out original films, if anyone can make the subject matter work its them.
The 3D adds nothing of note by the way, but it doesn't distract either.
****/*****
****/*****
'Monsters Inc 3D' is on general release from January 18.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
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In London On Saturday over 150,000 people beat a raucous and angry path through the corridors of power. It was a march for 'A Future That Works'. From all over the country they gathered: teachers, nurses, bakers, shop workers, civil servants, schoolchildren and many, many more. Whistles were blown, banners were raised, drums were beaten and brass bands played triumphant tunes. The leader of the opposition spoke to the gathered crowd in Hyde Park, followed by the luminaries of the Trade Union movement. It was a glorious day. And it achieved fuck all.
Does that sound harsh? As the crowds walked down the Embankment and through Westminster on their way to Hyde Park spirits were high. It's hard not to feel inspired at the sight of tens of thousands standing up for the rights of essential workers, standing up for those who strive away on vanishing or frozen wages to keep the country running. Under this government the populace sometimes feels like it's undergoing a mass conversion to an unsympathetic, cruel and predatory outlook. The victims are those who rely most upon the state, the ill, the poor, the young, the disabled, the unemployed, the elderly. Meanwhile, Cameron shamelessly enacts a tax cut that means those earning over a million pounds a year will be £40,000 a year better off. Who can stand to live in a land where those with the least pay for the mistakes of those with the most? The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer (or just die off, whichever is quicker).
As we march through the streets we see all kinds of banners. Some have (literally) been through the wars, rail workers banners faded with age showing streamlined art deco locomotives speeding through the countryside. Shipbuilders use the RMS Queen Elizabeth as a symbol of their technical excellence. Trombonists play happy tunes as they march under the orange and black banner of the GMB. You begin to get caught up in the fever of the crowd. "Surely" you think, "surely if this many people feel strongly, if this crowd can gather from around the country, then something can be done!"
But what can be done? There's a lot of sound and fury here, but it feels increasingly and frustratingly unfocussed. As we get to Hyde Park we're directed towards the stage. The ground is soggy underfoot, with wood chips being put down to try and soak up some of the puddles that dot the field. As I move towards the front to get a good view I realise "... is that Glenn "he's old and sullen vote for' Cullen up there?". It is! Or rather, it's James Smith wearing a fetching scarf and explaining the health and safety procedures for the site to us. Seeing him up there gives the moment an odd tinge, satire and reality are colliding. 'The Thick of It' is frequently spookily prescient at times, and at that moment I wouldn't have been particularly surprised if Nicola Murray had wandered on stage to give a typically incompetent and blithering speech.
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| James Smith |
But first some music by Natalie McCool. After building up this head of steam through London, and finally arriving at Hyde Park, pumped up, ready to cheer and yell, it was a bit strange to watch a band for a bit. Especially as their songs were pretty apolitical. The highlight of their short set was an acoustic cover of some of the 'Drive' soundtrack. Now, I really like the 'Drive' soundtrack, especially 'Night Call' and 'A Real Hero', which they mixed together, but what I wanted to hear was something spiky, sloganeering and punky. I wanted to hear a call to arms, to see some real anger on stage. But I suppose some low-key acoustic indie music about feelings n' stuff is good too. I understand that Natalie McCool and her band were there as grateful recipients of some young person's music grant, which is nice, but as good as they were I wished they'd played something with a little more fire in the belly.
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| Natalie McCool |
Like a general surveying his troops he majestically mounted the stage, and you could just tell that behind that noble countenance was a speech primed to unite us all under his banner, the battlecry that would fill us with vim and vinegar and send us out off around the country to devote our time and energy to kicking this cabal of stuck-up, psychopathic rich boys out of government. A hush fell upon the crowd. Miliband began his speech and told us that basically he agrees with what the government is doing but if he was in power maybe he'd try doing it a bit slower.
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| Ed Miliband |
It was the speech of someone who was obliged to be there rather than someone who wanted to attend. Strategically speaking his lack of effort has a point. I mean, this isn't exactly a crowd of undecided voters, no-one here is hardly likely to decide to vote Conservative just because he doesn't tell them what they want to hear. But it just seemed too transparent, as if he not only assumes he has our votes, but refuses to even humour us by acknowledging our existence. The momentum that I'd felt during the march itself seemed to dissipate like a mirage in the desert. Standing up on that stage was the real face of political change, and it's the exact same thing as I detest, just with a slightly more attractive surface coating of red paint.
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| Outside Downing Street |
The government has managed to legislate their way exactly where they want to be in relation to strikes. Any 'legal' strike would be challenged this way and that through the courts until the 'correct' verdict was reached. Any illegal strike would merely be another cudgel for the government to beat 'shirking' workers with and further their policy of divide and rule against the working class. A ripple of alarm might spread through Westminster if they realised the workers could organise themselves in one nationwide strike, but the government has the tools, both legislatively, politically and physically, to contain it.
What is the effective response to austerity? Around the world governments are bulk-buying tear gas to defend themselves against their angry citizens. It seems that after a certain economic choke point there springs a violent street based resistance to austerity, as seen across Europe and particularly in Greece. But what's as apparent is that governments will not shy from inflicting violence back upon those who might threaten the enactment of their crippling and failed economic philosophy.
We're seeing our public services being diced up piecemeal and sold to shady, politically corrupt companies while millionaires become multi-millionaires on the proceeds. In a way it's darkly funny that David Cameron accuses Ed Miliband of waging a class war. As if we should be so lucky. Weirdly enough it falls to one of the richest men in the world to point out what is blindingly obvious, as Warren Buffett says: "There's class warfare alright, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." It's a depressing notion, and if you consider the current government as waging a social war against the poor, then it becomes increasingly apparent that we have no weapons with which to combat them.
As I was walking away from the protest I came across a miniature street occupation at the corner of Oxford Street and Bond Street. Music was pumping out, and people with scarves wrapped around their faces were busy dancing and blocking traffic on one of the busiest thoroughfares in London. Police vans dotted the streets, with officers looking on, presumably waiting for the order to go in, batons swinging. It was a pointless bit of protest theatrics, the equivalent of an ant tickling an elephant's foot. But pointless and juvenile as it was, it was still as effective as anything I'd seen the union leaders on stage at Hyde Park suggest.
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| Police on Oxford Street |
Of all the positive, optimistic banners of strength through unity I saw there was one that stuck in my mind in it's frankness, accuracy and anger. It scared me a little, but if anything is pointing the way to the future, it's this:
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
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‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ is a fantastically original, imaginative film with outstanding performances, amazing cinematography, gobsmacking production design and is jam-packed full of iconic and beautiful imagery. And I kind of despise it.
This is a tricky one to unpick and it’s taken me a while to try and work out why the film left me disappointed. On paper it feels tailor-made to my tastes, very much in the mold of ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, or a Studio Ghibli film (it’s even got giant pigs!). While in the process of watching it, it gripped my attention artistically and emotionally almost from beginning to end. But in the hours that followed after the credits had rolled I couldn’t work out why I felt a strange nagging unease that just wouldn’t go away.
‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ tells the story of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a six year old girl living in an area known as ‘The Bathtub’. Her mother is dead, and she lives with her father Wink (Dwight Henry), who we soon learn is seriously ill and is teaching Hushpuppy the necessary survival skills to allow her to survive after his death. The Bathtub is a swampy island community beset by rising flood waters, every storm brings fresh catastrophe; it’s so dangerous that the government are trying to totally evacuate the area. We focus on the survival of a small community here, an eccentric and self-supporting group who refuse to leave their homes or change their lifestyle even in the face of disaster and death.
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| Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) |
This unique world is perceived wholly through the eyes of Hushpuppy. It’s a damn heavy load for a young actress to bear: the film goes to great lengths to immerse us in the world it creates but it would all be for nothing if Hushpuppy weren’t portrayed just right. Thankfully, Quvenzhané Wallis is absolutely mesmerising and Zeitlin is a lucky, lucky man to have discovered such a talented child actor. Wallis’ performance spills from her totally unconsciously, nothing she does ever feels rehearsed or calculated. This sense of spontaneity and life that Wallis imbues Hushpuppy with is a large part of why the film impresses – we don’t so much watch a performance as feel that we’re peering into her world, documentary style.
The character of Hushpuppy is very much a product of her environment, and her vibrance is echoed by her surroundings. The world of the Bathtub is a fantastic creation, a world of rich primary colours absolutely teeming with life. Throughout the film we see a multitude of swarming animal and human life. The people here seem constantly in motion, moving around the world almost like a dance. Tight closeups and roving handheld cameras allow us to follow our characters anyway they go.
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| Wink (Dwight Henry) and Hushpuppy |
This abundance of life is also shown in the food they eat and the wildlife around them. We’re repeatedly shown huge, writhing piles of crayfish which the characters tend to eat raw. Catching a catfish is shown to be as simple as putting your hand in the water and waiting a few minutes for one to bite you. This intrinsic connection these people have with nature adds up to a filmic world that the characters fit like a glove, these people exist harmony with their environment. The world feels vaguely Eden-like towards the beginning, food is everywhere, and everyone is friendly and open. But these are desperate people living in poverty, and this is a community that is constantly very close to the brink of disaster. It’s difficult to say if this film is set in the distant or near future, or even the present, but regardless it looks extremely post-apocalyptic. The fact that it’s entirely plausible the film is set in the modern day gives this post-apocalyptic imagery some pretty worrying implications.
There are a number of instantly iconic cinematic images throughout the film: Hushpuppy standing proud at the stern of her father’s improvised boat; swimming through the deep ocean, running with fireworks in her hands or staring at the entrails of a dead dog. My favourite comes in a flashback sequence told to Hushpuppy by her father. He lies snoozing on a deckchair as an alligator crawls out of the swamp towards him. Waking up, he stares in fear at it, completely frozen. Hushpuppy’s mother steps into frame and shoots the alligator with a shotgun. From the father’s perspective we see her lower body, shotgun in hand, her inner thigh drenched with blood. This single image prefigures much of what is to happen in the film, and the alligator, blood, shotgun and her reaction neatly encapsulates much of the motivations and symbology tied up in Hushpuppy’s mental picture of her dead mother – elements which are later used in different configurations in the latter half.
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| It's a beautiful film. |
All of this is pretty unambiguous praise, so why didn’t I like this film? After a lot of thought, it’s come to down to the way the character of Hushpuppy’s father is portrayed and the worrying political implications of the film.
The relationship between father and daughter is the emotional core of this film and informs almost every action that the two take. For the film to succeed we need to utterly buy into this relationship and if we don’t, then no matter how compelling your performances are, and no matter how beautifully and creatively you shoot the film the whole house of cards collapses. As Hushpuppy says:
“The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece... the whole universe will get busted.”
Which is exactly what happens. Despite all the admirable elements, the emotional core just didn’t hang together for me. When I realised that I was actively rooting against a lot of what Hushpuppy’s father does, the film lost me emotionally.
The character of Wink is explicitly presented as a man with serious flaws, he’s got a quick temper and his relationship with his daughter at the beginning of the film seems shaky at best. It’s telling that she doesn’t even live in the same place as him –relegated to her own caravan and summoned by a bell being rung. As the film progresses he hits his daughter, intentionally terrifies her, gets violently drunk, shouts at her and generally bullies her into conforming to his expectations (forcing her to ‘beast’ her crab in the dinner scene). Later in the film we see him being given some bad news by a doctor, and his reaction is to violently attack the man in the middle of a hospital, eventually only being dragged off and restrained by a hospital orderly. All of this confused me a bit. We’re supposed to be viewing everything in the film from the perspective of Hushpuppy who clearly loves her father despite his flaws but we repeatedly see him painted in a negative light. This film would be trite if he was some perfect super-dad, but the script and performance add up to a singularly unpleasant man, and it became difficult for me to empathise with, or even like him.
In some respects the film is a victim of its own success, Wallis is so good as Hushpuppy that I instinctively wished the very best for her. As a result when her father ignores the evacuation warnings and causes his daughter to risk her life during a deadly flood, its easy to condemn him. He had every opportunity to remove her from danger, but chose not to. I was a little frustrated when I realised towards the end of the film that somewhere along the line I’d lost the emotional thread, especially as people around me were sniffling into their hankies.
I also disagree with the fundamental politics of the film. Inadvertently or not, Zeitlin endorses a worryingly conservative, libertarian mindset. The characters we identify with in the film follow a simple and straightforward philosophy. They are self-sufficient, off-the-grid and proud of their land. They feel they can survive in the Bathtub without any government assistance, and violently oppose any outside interference in their lives. They’re fun, charismatic people who live an enjoyable, happy and carefree life, whereas the government is portrayed as cold, sterile and authoritarian. We glimpse distant helicopters hectoring the residents to move on, or gangs of anonymous social workers coming to forcibly drag people from their homes. Later we see a government run hospital, which is designed and shot like a repressive prison camp. The film’s imagery inescapably brings to mind Hurricane Katrina, a disaster where government assistance was desperately needed and inadequately provided. So the fear of ‘big government’ in the film sits uneasily with me – and begs the question, what kind of person would make a film where the antagonist’s weapons are state healthcare, education and housing?
It’s difficult to tell whether this is a symptom of a plot whose implications haven’t been entirely thought through, or a genuine attack on state intervention in poverty. The film seems to try and consciously gloss over its politics, taking pains to focus our attention on the overtly mythic elements in the story. I foresee an argument against this as being along the lines that examining the events of the film too logically is a mistake, after all, everything we see is filtered through the perception of a six-year old girl, with all the attendant fantasies, biases and misunderstandings. This film would prefer you to examine these characters as archetypes: Hushpuppy is not a realistic person, she is a universal stand-in for innocence and childhood. Wink should not be examined clinically and judged, he represents a complex, intermingled adult world of regret, violence and passion that’s incomprehensible to a child. Events and objects become their platonic ideals; this is not ‘a’ flood, this is The Flood, it’s not just any alligator it’s the essence of everything Alligator. The film admittedly does an excellent job of making the relatively mundane seem epic.
But I can’t disentangle the politics from this mythology. Consciously or not, the film portrays child abuse as acceptable parental behaviour, demonises socialised healthcare and shows us government intervention in poverty as sinister and oppressive. It’s a US Republican’s wet dream.
This might sound like a strange thing to say because the film can be read as a straightforward environmental parable about the consequences of global warming, which in the US is strongly identified with liberal Democratic Party politics. As far as I’m concerned global warming is not a partisan political issue: it’s a matter of hard science – personal opinion is essentially irrelevant in the face of data. The role of the state in taking responsibility for the welfare of its citizens is a political issue though. I’m watching this film in a country where the assets and functions of the state are being systematically sold off to shady private companies by a neoliberal conservative government. This film condemns these essential functions of the state, paints civil servants like social and health workers as ‘the enemy of the free’ and so plays right into the hands of an ideology I despise.
‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ is a wonderful piece of cinematic art, but very, very flawed. I want to like the film but ultimately I find can’t help but find it politically repugnant. This coupled with the emotional detachment I experienced in the latter scenes makes it impossible to recommend.
If anyone can convince me that I've wildly misinterpreted everything, please tell me in the comments as I'd love to be turned around on my opinion. This film contains so much stuff that I enjoyed that it's a bit sad that I find it so politically problematic.
‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ is on general release from 19th October 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
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Back to the Hackney Empire for more from the Isango Emsemble. Despite not really being able to understand what the plot of La boheme was I had a pretty good time. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a bit more up my street though, and I was familiar with the book. Nonetheless, this time I took no chances, and read through the programme before it started. This also allowed me to find out just what was going on in La boheme. In retrospect, I should have bought a programme last week.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a musical based on the 1914 book by Robert Tressell. The book is a classic of socialist literature, with the action set in the South of England and showing how the working class of the town are exploited by their employers. This musical version is set in South Africa during apartheid. The central characters are employed as painters and as the plot develops, we witness the effects of capitalist theory on the working class. This version, with an entirely South African cast also looks at the effects of colonialism and racism. Setting the events in South Africa is not an arbitrary decision, Robert Tressell was an Irishman who at one point lived and worked in Cape Town and Johannesburg. It was here that he became involved with trade unions, and with the socialist philosophies that fill his book.
The staging here is quite similar to that of La boheme, with the gently forward sloping stage, and with minimal set. The set is bathed in earth tones, complementing the characters shabby clothes. When there is bright colour on stage it tends to stand out. In the first act giant green letters are slowly painted blue over the course of the act, and they seem to glow bright in the light. At the start of the second act, the male characters don their ' minstrel stage wear', red and white polka-dotted evening coats and white trilbys. The bright costumes seem to make their everyday wear seem even more dowdy.
In La boheme, the instrumentation was entirely African, in this production there is no orchestra, and very little instrumentation. The voices of the performers, nearly always singing in harmony more than fill the room. The fact that most of the songs only work when all of the performers are acting as one also works thematically. There are very few parts in the room where the workers sing alone. Their 'bosses' however are placed in isolated areas of the stage and sing alone. As before, the singing was exemplary. Admittedly, I don't really have the critical framework to decide whether someone is singing brilliantly or just extremely competently, but each performer injected the personality of their character into the songs.
Now that I have a programme, I can pick out individuals to praise. In both Isango productions I've seen, Mhlekazi Mosiea has been the standout performer. He's played the leads in both, and manages to show deep inner anger coupled with an innocent fragility. As the callous and money-grubbing superintendant, Noluthando Bogwana is also a stand out. She stalks around the stage in a floor length coat, striking strange angular poses and looking somewhat terrifying with her widened eyes. There is a particular fun scene where, pretending to have a close relationship with the workers she attempts to conduct them in a choir. Almost every weird pose she finds is hilarious. As she contorts the sound of the choir shifts and warps to match her motions, it's something I've never seen before on stage, and must be pretty damn complicated to rehearse.
One scene in particular stands out above the rest. It's when our hero, Nkosi Songo explains just how the workers are being bamboozled and exploited by capitalism. He playacts the role of a factory owner, using slices of bread as the raw materials of the land. He puts his friends in the position of working for him, making the bread into sandwiches and paying them for their work. Then when they've finished making sandwiches, he asks what they're going to eat. They pay back their wages, and get a single sandwich. They are left with nothing, and the boss's wealth increases at their expense. The cycle is infinite and the workers are essentially trapped at a near-poverty level. It's a neat demonstration of Marx's theory of surplus value. I've tried to read Capital, and despite my best efforts found it somewhat impenetrable, so the fact that this staged version is able to quickly, efficiently and convincingly illustrate one of the pillars of his economic theory is a credit to both Tressell and the production.
I enjoyed this much more than La boheme. The songs, production and the politics were much more to my tastes than the opera I saw last week. I'd like to see the third of their shows, Aesop's Fables before they finish just to complete the set. In popular culture it's uncommon to see something that so unashamedly advocates socialist values, so I consider this a rare treat.
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