Meandering thoughts on statues, artists, reverence and rational compassion

The artist shouldn’t be held in reverence. They have their job, their role in civilisation, to act as a psychological mirror on humankind. To be able to fill out this role one, more often than others, must be different. There are clichés about the tortured, mentally unstable artist; it is an archetype that pervades culture high and low. But it is certainly true that we look to the artist to bring to us new ways of seeing, to challenge us and question our assumptions about the world. And, to achieve this, the artist must hold some different perspective. The artist doesn’t have to be an intellectual, they do not necessarily need to be right about their subject matter.

But in the age of celebrity, of manifold scrolling idols, the artist is needlessly catapulted into stardom. In the age of carefully constructed avatars, it seems that we must wear our culture, and that that culture must speak for us. We endorse it or discard it; art is reduced to a binary good and bad, right and wrong, righteous and problematic. We confuse the art with the celebrity; they must be beacons of humanity, they are idols. Rather than a curated, experiential history of thoughts and emotions, the gallery becomes a shop; this is good and this is bad, I like this one but not this one.

Although the free marketplace of ideas, like free markets in general, lies open to the abuses of power, of unquestionable privileges and underlying tribalism, we must identify where those abuses of power actually are. The apparatuses of culture; celebrity, mass media, social networks, certainly do not help the situation, they complicate it. But these apparatuses are a permanent fixture in our society. Perhaps we must understand that they are reflections of consumer wants and needs. It is the individual who ultimately shapes these apparatuses. It is the individual who interprets the cultural weather and formulates a response, primarily to meet their own needs of social assimilation. These apparatuses seek to commodify, to simplify; units of good and bad. They need stories with good guys, bad guys, and a moral. But the individual has a power to respond to this, in the free marketplace of ideas, it is the privileged individual who needs to make that intervention, to expose the simplifications of global storytelling. In the free marketplace of ideas it isn’t just knowledge which is power, but it is the ability to spread that knowledge.

In each instance, though, we mustn’t fall back into the comforts of idolisation, of cults of personality and simplistic ideas of right and wrong. Each step along the ways requires constant reflection, vast grey areas, rationalised compassion for fellow humans. Global storytelling wishes to make gods and demons out of humans, when it is the superstructures that are at fault. How we orient ourselves towards one another tells us everything.

Similarly, with history, we seek to simplify. We seek to sanitise and create easy to understand stories. We wish to orient the past to suit our modern, improved selves. But history is beautiful because it confronts us with our shame, it tells a complex story which requires constant reiterations, constant new discoveries, revelations. Again, it falls to the individual to interpret the past, especially in the built environment. A statue which once glorified can as much become a statue which represents how far we have come. The fault lies in our simplification. When confronted with troublesome pasts, we must respond with thoughts and reflection. How miserable would life be if our surroundings were so sanitised as to dissuade such thoughts? That would be the true relinquishment of our individuality, and our abilities to relate to each other as human beings. 

Three films that explode the English heritage industry

Combating the monotony of costume drama 

The national past, as seen through the silver screen, seems rather a dull place. It's a quaint, green and pleasant land of kind-hearted noblemen and humble, god-fearing peasants, all of them surprisingly healthy and clean looking. It's a place of lavish, well-lit manor houses and gentle society, where any sort of peril is ultimately subverted and any sort of politics trivialised. It's a rose-tinted spirit of '45, a Jane Austen novel with all the wit and sting taken out of it. Through its limited range, it creates a shallow historicity which peddles tired, often overtly conservative cliches about national identity. That being said, the primary purpose of period dramas today aren't to propagandise conservatism, but to be sold abroad. They're an exported commodity, just like the royal family and Harry Potter, and maintain that quaint image of an England entrenched in merriment, as seen on US television, a land of drawling upper class toffs and "guv'na" spewing cockneys. This is fair enough, but the period drama is still hugely popular here as well, clogging up television schedules alongside the likes of cash-for-antiques programmes which use history as a kind of wallpaper to shroud the underlying hunger for money.

However, amongst the genre, there exists a small number of films which genuinely do innovate. Films which don't fetishise the past, and tell stories with weight and cultural value. The only problem is, though, that the uninformed could easily mistake these films as containing the same banal drudgery as their factory-assembled neighbours. As a result; there's little incentive to watch these films by the likes of those outside the heritage audience. This shouldn't be the case, the medium has enormous potential to bring history to life, to not just educate and entertain but to possess the same profundity and depth as art. The following are three films which achieve this, and subvert the genre's dullness. Canonised history in the sphere of capitalism becomes a commodity, and therefore is some sort of cultural threat. Resistance comes in the form of diversity and innovation, subverting the mantras of the canonical past. We are constantly remaking the past to fit the present. As such, it follows that a fixed notion of the past becomes a present with no forward momentum, no future. Or, at least, the future becomes a nostalgic pursuit of the past, like a dog forever chasing its own tail. It's the money-making institutions of history that facilitate this, as Jonathan Meades writes on English Heritage

This preposterous quango – composed, apparently, of the blind and the bland – has the temerity to oppose, say, Renzo Piano's London Bridge Tower yet sanctions the debasement of marine archaeology, naval history and the magnificent dockyard itself by encouraging the sale of crass souvenirs which are no doubt 'accesible'. It is all too evident what sort of England English Heritage wishes to preserve (or create): an England fit for beige cardigans and Country Casuals, an England that is ancient, deferential and dreary. ('fuck e**lish* *erit*ge' from Museum without Walls)

The organs of power, of taste making, are driven by a need for profit and this results in low risk commercialisation, appealing to the lowest common denominator of plebeian society.

The Draughtsman's Contract (1982, dir. Peter Greenaway)

Peter Greenaway's first feature film is a rubik's cube of a murder mystery, posing as a costumed country house drama. Its static, painterly shots and elevated artifice help to establish a sense of altogether otherwordly weirdness. Yet, despite this, it feels a hundred miles away from the sterile, contrived atmosphere of other costume dramas and, therefore, a lot truer to both its historical setting and human nature. Landscape, intrigue and eroticism combine to create a narrative further enriched by its cultural references, more valuable as history than the deluge of other tedious costumed manor house affair.

A Field in England (2013, dir. Ben Wheatley)

The minuscule budget and black-and-white cinematography only serve to enhance the looming sense of chaos in Ben Wheatley's period horror. Set during the Civil War, a group of battle-deserters in search of an ale house become instead entangled in the search for buried treasure. After they ingest a batch of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the film takes a turn for the even weirder. Murky, textured, close, terrifying, philosophical, wondrous and ferocious, the film is by turns claustrophobic and agoraphobic, chaotic and calm. The jumbling of psychoactive alchemy, magic, religion and reality convey a strange wilderness of the mind almost never seen in period films. The banal field becomes the wild west, a stage for the dark, writhing toils of humankind. That we never leave the field is in itself a rejection of the miniature toy-sets of other period dramas.

Mr Turner (2014, dir. Mike Leigh)

Mike Leigh's tragicomic realism makes for an awesome mode of historical storytelling. The autonomy of his cast and richness of dialogue creates characters that are pointed but nuanced, hilarious without ever feeling caricature. This attention to detail extends to settings and space, creating an experience of the past much more authentic than other contemporary work that fills historical characters and places to fit into modernised cliches. Furthermore, the fragmented narrative leaves more room for speculation, the audience's imaginative participation, and less for manipulative, inaccurate filler. This open-endedness is a lot truer not just to history, but to life itself.

Simon Amstell's Carnage and Pragmatic Utopias

Utopian thinking can be revitalised through art and culture

So recently I finally got around to watching Simon Amstell's new film, Carnage, available on IPlayer. Set half a century in the future in a Utopian world where veganism has become the norm and people openly weep at their memories of eating meat, it recounts a semi-fictional history of how humankind collectively decided to give up consuming dead animals for good. Indeed the sublime punnage of its title reflects Amstell's own attitudes towards the subject matter, but where the film stands out amongst its vegan contemporaries is the way in which it rejects that movement's self-righteous anger and rather bloated self-importance. Its cultural fabrications, including a vegan-themed Eurovision entry from Albania and an opera led by a cow, are somehow both utterly believable and hilariously absurd. Set alongside footage from actual incidents and occurrences, they simultaneously lampoon the vegan movement whilst paving a real road for the future. Yet, as it culminates in an overtly fantastical arcadian future where middle-class teenagers sit around in the countryside feeding each other vegan delicacies, one might wonder how sincere its message actually is. The film in this regard manages to be both wonderfully clear and wilfully obscure as Amstell shows that sometimes fact can be stranger, and a lot funnier, than fiction.

The same day I watched it, I also managed to finish Rutger Bregman's recent work Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There. Similar to Carnage, Bregman revitalises his subject matter and imbues it with a renewed relevance. He argues that it is essential for the Left to recapture the spirit of Utopian thought in order to provide a more effective resistance against a currently more dominant Right. The work reclaims the whole concept of Utopias from dogmatism, instead showing how they are, instead, pragmatic, all demonstrated in the following quotation from Oscar Wilde, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." Bearing this in mind, the fantastical, futuristic elements of Carnage suddenly become a lot clearer in their intentions. The faux-historiography the film creates evidences humankind's changeability where, in fact, rather than the fictional elements seeming real, the real elements seem fictional. Meat-crammed footage from today's celebrity chefs, including an excerpt of Nigella Lawson cracking a chicken's breastbone become darkly humorous and almost shocking under the posterity-gazing of a speculative future. One has to bear in mind that this isn't a current historiography, but a Utopian one. Perhaps it is one in the making; in a Q&A for the film, Amstell states that veganism is inevitable, but in the mean time it is, nonetheless, a product of Utopian thinking. And, as Bregman shows, Utopias aren't blueprints for the future, but vehicles for contemporary ideas.

Utopias also encapsulate our current hopes and dreams, they are more than just dry ideas. Like the Right utilises nostalgia, a fabricated past, for political effect, so too can the Left with a fabricated future. Utopias are products of the here and now, they guide rather than dictate. And, as such, they are discardable; they are best represented in art and culture. We look to the artistic Utopias of the past to understand bygone frames of mind rather than as failed political projects. We find cultural value in them despite their outdatedness. We can use them to empathetically engage with our ancestors, find a common cause, and evidence of a deeper, unchanged humanity.

The distinction between the cultural and the actual needs to be made in order for Utopia to become politically potent once again. Currently, Utopia seems to infer naivety and hollow radicalism. Utopias are swatted like flies by people who reject the idea of progress, they insist that these future worlds are unfeasible because "that's not how the world or people work". Utopias, to be pragmatic, need to be discardable and, through an ironic, self-aware distance, Carnage achieves this. Above all else, Amstell achieves it through humour, casting off the much disliked guise of self-righteous fury, echoed by one of its main characters, activist Troy King Jones, who distances himself from his angsty teenage self and accusatory first book, aptly named "Blood on our Forks". The future that the film shows is obviously a fantasy, but the road to get there seems almost analogous to our own reality. The future will still be plagued by problems, but we as humans have an insatiable wanderlust, a need to, as Oscar Wilde says, "look out" and "set sail" for a better country. Utopias should be about ideas, rather than ideology.  

Watch Carnage here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04sh6zg/simon-amstell-carnage

Three films that I think Rotten Tomatoes got wrong

Can a film be rated with a number? The objective of film criticism seems to be to take a film in its entirety and reduce it to a figure indicative of its merits, where it can then be compared to other films. Yet, it's a system that works well enough in summing up a critic's general sentiment, and I find Rotten Tomatoes to be an invaluable source when it comes to carrying out cultural research. Film ratings give the industry a deeper, richer character and history; provoking debate, allocating cultural value, and reflecting political and social realities. It's interesting to see how our ideas of what films should be shape and are shaped by this. These are the stories we live our lives by; this is what we want from our escapism. The worlds we see on screen are often worlds we aspire to or rebel against; worlds with resolution, worlds that follow a sense of logic. Cinema is important because of our innate irrationality, we cannot help but be affected by these fictions, and there are certainly some fictions we prefer to others. This isn't to say that most critics simply hold up hoops for films to jump through, but it is interesting when films I would personally consider good are penalised for failing to do something the right way. I've picked a few films which I thought Rotten Tomatoes got wrong. Like Metacritic, the website takes all the reviews it can find and condenses them into a single score, so of course it isn't a definitive judgement. But, it is one of the most reliable sources of public sentiment out there and, more often than not, it precisely estimates a film's cultural value. 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Score: 49%

Critics Consensus: Visually creative, but also aimless, repetitive, and devoid of character development. 

In the above verdict, they say "aimless, repetitive, and devoid of character development" like it's a bad thing. The whole objective of Fear and Loathing is to evoke a sense of directionlessness, moral apathy and nausea. It's a picaresque romp through a heart of darkness, throbbing in the corpulent body of the motherland. Our hero, Raoul Duke, exposes the psyche of Las Vegas through his constant chemical communion, exposing skeletons that fit the role of both victim and perpetrator. Here we find the American Dream dead, rotting on the roadside somewhere near Barstow. And in a world of bright, sugary neon, fetid debauchery and slot machines, sobriety comes only through intoxication. In such a world "character development" and "progress" would only seem out of place. 

Inside Out (2015)

Score: 98%

Critics Consensus: Inventive, gorgeously animated, and powerfully moving, Inside Out is another outstanding addition to the Pixar library of modern animated classics. 

Pixar, once a beacon of hope in a landscape otherwise populated by penny pushing executive-driven animation, has dulled significantly over the years. It first showed signs of faltering with the abysmal Disneyesque Cars. And then, after managing to scrape out a few more good ones; Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up, it sighed and threw in the towel. Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, were the three following films which showed that Pixar had lost its mojo. Then, when Inside Out was released in 2015, the near-hysterical response would have you believe it was a majestic return to form. It wasn't.

Inside Out isn't a bad film, on the contrary, it's quite a good one. But the mass outpour of critical appraisal, resulting in a score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, seems thoroughly unjustified. While Pixar has previously prided itself on ingenious ideas and sleek storytelling, creating fantastically complex worlds and characters, Inside Out just seemed too straightforward. Its central idea; exploring the role of emotions in our lives, seemed contrived. The delight one gets from experiencing the worlds created by Pixar is absent. The setting is sugary and Disneyesque, and therein lies the problem. 

Antichrist (2009)

Score: 50%

Critics Consensus: Gruesome, explicit and highly controversial; Lars Von Triers [sic] arthouse-horror; though beautifully shot, is no easy ride.

There is hope for Horror, yet. A torrent of smart, innovative scary films have revitalised the genre recently, and many have been commended for it. Yet, one is left scratching their head when they find that one of the ones leading the charge, Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, wallows at a mere 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. There's perhaps something at least vaguely prudish about this film's downrating. It won plenty of awards in Europe, but US critical opinion seems viciously polarised. A lot of critics didn't get on with the blend of Arthouse and Horror, concluding simply that it was pretentious. If one ponders for too long on whether it's supposed to be one thing or another, they miss out on the primal thrill of it. Roger Ebert's review for the film got it right when he said

"Von Trier, who has always been a provocateur, is driven to confront and shake his audience more than any other serious filmmaker. He will do this with sex, pain, boredom, theology and bizarre stylistic experiments. And why not? We are at least convinced we're watching a film precisely as he intended it, and not after a watering down by a fearful studio executive."

In the US, there is a bizarre, almost fetishistic divide between high and low forms of cinema, one being "Art" and the other "Entertainment". Alongside this is a Victorian-like expectation of moral content, and films that reject this are cast out as "adolescent" and "exploitative". European cinema is leaps and bounds ahead of this, a lot less afraid of exploring human nature.

Ultimately these numbers can't confer any conclusive sense of judgement upon a film. The culture industry will always be able to dig up and re-evaluate hidden treasures, and it often does. Likewise, films once thought to be brilliant can fade into obscurity. Film criticism stands apart from film itself, it can help shape popular opinion and taste, but it can't stop artists from realising their visions and committing them to cinema. But criticism also shouldn't be thought of as a mass of mutually agreed opinion. In each of the above films I found views similar to my own, critics who disagreed with the consensus. We need criticism but, more importantly, we need a diverse array of opinions and perspectives. Critics are the ones who can soil a film's reputation, but they are also the ones who can save it.

Savaging the West; The necessity of Giant-monster flicks

Can Kong: Skull Island revitalise a much needed genre?

I have a strange fascination with giant-monster flicks. Usually one to shy away from the likes of most big-budget CGI-laden blockbusters, I find that there's something inherently interesting in the mythos of big-monster cinema. Not that I would be in a hurry to see them, though, I'm interested more in their cultural value than in their cinematic merits. When Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong came out, it remained a favourite of mine for a surprisingly long time growing up. And then, when the Godzilla remake came out in 2014, I felt obscurely compelled to go and see it. It wasn't that great. But, it didn't spoil my interest in the genre. And with the recently released Kong: Skull Island (2017), I once again feel the urge to invest time and attention into a film which might not even be that great. Incidentally, I have yet to see the two biggest breakout hits of the genre; Monsters (2010) and Cloverfield (2008). None of these films might ever linger in my memory (Aside from Pacific Rim (2013), which got it completely right), but I think that the giant-monster genre has an important role to play in the current political climate.

The giant-monster usually works as a metaphor for human destruction; the original Godzilla was the atomic bomb, the 2014 edition drew parallels to 9/11 and, more recently, the setting of the latest King Kong is a take on the Vietnam war. But, really, the metaphors run a lot deeper than that. They aren't just about direct human destruction, but folly and ambition, causing indirect harm. And, a lot more significantly, they aren't just about the ways in which man can hurt man, but the relationship between man and the natural world. In the same way that Superhero films explore otherness by amplifying and caricaturing it to Hollywood levels of fun, the giant-monster film examines the spectacle of human destruction via ecological exploitation. As we see in the original King Kong (1933), the beast is integrated into the tribe's way of life, they know of its power and offer Ann sacrificially in order to please it. But when Kong is captured, exported to the States and exhibited for money, he breaks free and causes havoc across New York. Nevermind that he is eventually shot down and killed, he has still wrought a massive amount of destruction upon Western society.

Humankind's immoral exploitation of nature, driven by capitalism and colonial tendencies, will ultimately result in its own destruction. This swatting down of humankind, though, is not to discredit it. It is wrong to nihilistically think of humans as a cancer on Earth, as some environmentalists do. Rather, the giant-monster film today dissects the ethics of neoliberalism and foreign intervention (or lack thereof). Undoubtedly we live in a globalised, market-driven world, but this does not have to be incompatible with ecological protection. In giant-monster films, man is only attacked when he has done something to provoke nature. It is for this reason that these films should matter today, to highlight the wrongdoings of the Western world. Kong is a great uncivilising force, reminding us that we are not omnipotent on this planet. In an age of Google Earth and Wikipedia where every inch of the globe is available for public scrutiny, the mysterious giant-monster lurks undetected. And with a U.S president not just apathetic to but actively opposed to environmental protection, the genre now has a more profound urgency. It's a shame to see monster films dominated by the genteel b-movie industry, endlessly churning out harmless titles like Sharknado (2013) and Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014), softening the genre. Kong: Skull Island seems to have its b-movie sensibilities and flourishes, but hopefully it can transcend those aesthetic boundaries to deliver something a lot more complex, and a lot more timely.

The Inexplicable and eerie English ghost

Supernatural International

Recently I have briefly examined one quirk of American supernatural Horror films; the Poltergeist. A vengeful, confrontational and often violent paranormal manifestation, the Poltergeist is a perfect receptacle for both the American obsession with good and evil moral narratives, and Hollywood's need for constant on-screen spectacle and excitement. However, this cannot be simply boiled down into an analysis of whats good and whats bad in Horror. There was plenty to admire in the films I looked at in the previous post, Poltergeist (1982) and Paranormal Activity (2007). They were both innovative in their own ways and, as a result, very entertaining at times. Yet, it wasn't so much the films themselves that were at fault as much as the culture they fed.

Unlike some more strictly art-house films, a lot of Horror cannot be viewed entirely outside of its cultural context. As a form of popular culture, it corresponds closely to social or political circumstances, including the appetites of the public. This is what makes Horror so interesting as a genre, it reflects the dynamic between people and institutions. The brief success of the Paranormal Activity series is a prime example of this, illustrating a clear logic of supply and demand. Just as the effects of a horror film linger with us long after the credits have rolled, so too can its ideas and implications stay and influence us on a wider cultural level. Establishing an orthodoxy of popular Horror can be damaging to those that stray from it. Such was the case for M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (2004) and Robert Egger's The Witch (2016), both victims of false expectations. Currently, Horror suffers from a very narrow emotional and intellectual spectrum. In truth, we're horrified by a lot more than we ever see on screen, and we're scared in a variety of different ways. The industry has abandoned this in favour of simple, tried and tested formulas that bring the production of new culture to a halt. Ofcourse genre is defined by its conventions, but it also relies on innovation within these conventions, approaching things from a different perspective and bringing in new elements, to progress.

As such, Both Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity, despite their good bits, can be partially blamed for their contribution to popular culture. Whilst we live in a world where pop culture can be transported and replicated across the globe, these films highlight a specifically American tendency which arises from its own cultural and social formations. This week I'll be looking at the British film; Jonathan Miller's Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968). The Ghost, with its attachment to place and time, serves as a very good illustration of cultural differences in cinema, and comparing these two films to Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity is proof of this. In The English Ghost Peter Ackroyd writes,

"The popularity of the English ghost tradition – the English see more ghosts than anyone else – is deeply rooted in its peculiar mingling of Germanic, Nordic and British superstitions. The English are also in many respects obsessed with the past, with ruins, with ancient volumes. It is the country where archaeology is placed on national television, and where every town and village has its own local historian." (Peter Ackroyd, The English Ghost, 2010)

In Poltergeist, there is a gap between the pristine, new suburban house and the Native American burial ground it stands on, whereas the continuity of History is a lot more present in English ghost stories. Rather than echoing the utter devastation of racial genocide and colonisation, the English supernatural is usually found tucked away in small and hidden corners. The ghost is far more likely to be a Romantic manifestation of the vertigo felt by people when confronted by sublime, ancient places. This is the case with many of M. R. James' stories, which often involve a city-dweller travelling out to somewhere in the countryside and undergoing a supernatural experience. A lot of the time, usually in country houses, the supernatural presence (often ancestral) is tolerated and accepted as a necessary part of the home, providing some sort of bond between family and place, and thus spiritually legitimising heritage and ownership. The English ghost can still be hugely political though; its poetic undercurrents embody the uneasy relationships between classes and the shifting of urban/rural dynamics. Sometimes the ghost is a manifestation of tragic, forbidden love, or deeply buried family secrets, dead relatives who refused to conform in life. Other times the ghost represents the oppression of rural peasantry, the moving of the nation from agriculture to industry and then to finance, resulting in the depopulation of the countryside.

By the time of M. R. James, the English countryside was an eerie and uncanny place, the pastoral qualities often shrouding something much darker and disturbing. An example of this can be found in his story, A View from a Hill, cited by Robert Macfarlane as one of the author's "most unsettling" in the article, "The eeriness of theEnglish Countryside" (click for link). It's about a Cambridge academic who travels down to the deep south-west of England to stay with a friend. When they propose to go on a long walk, the academic asks if he can borrow some binoculars, whereupon his friend gives him an old, heavy pair in a wooden box which he explains were made by a local antiquary who died mysteriously years earlier. On a hilltop, the academic looks out to another green hill which is dense with trees and then, viewing it through the binoculars, sees that it has altered radically and become barren and bleak, with a dead body hanging from a gibbet. This is only the opening of the story, but it serves almost as a checklist for M. R. James stories; the rational academic, the deep and idyllic countryside, the deceased antiquarian and the ancient artefact, the reveal of an unsettling, eery other side. All these elements can be boiled down to a narrative of progress versus conservation, wich isn't so much a battle as an exploration of the two forces. The same goes for James' other story, Oh, Whistle, and I'll come to You, My Lad, which was adapted in 1968 by Jonathan Miller for the BBC and re-titled, Whistle and I'll Come to You.

Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968, dir. Jonathan Miller)

Set along the coast of East Anglia, Whistle and I'll Come to You sees Geography and History converge in a way wholly typical of M. R. James. It follows an arrogant Cambridge academic, Professor Parkin (played by Michael Hordern), staying at a guest house who, one day, stumbles upon an old grave. From it, he finds a bone whistle which he decides to keep and, back in his hotel room, he notices that it's inscribed with the words, "Quis est iste qui venit", which translates to, "Who is this who is coming?". After blowing on the whistle, the wind picks up outside and, later that night, he hears noises in his room. Parkin's self-assured, academic rationality is slowly and steadily brought into question as he faces increasingly bizarre occurrences that one wouldn't hesitate to call supernatural.

The film builds to a quiet and unnerving climax which is made all the more powerful for its simplicity. It is an efficient and effective horror masterpiece that is by turns chilling and hilarious, and it is perhaps this latter quality which maintains its status as a classic. Professor Parkin is a brilliant creation, detached from reality by his introvertedness and pompous pretension. He mumbles incoherently like a pot boiling over with useless self-importance, and his pedantically calculated responses seem unaccustomed to physical speech, perhaps rather more suited to being written out on a letter behind a cushy desk. He is a cartoon philistine whom the audience can laugh at as much as they can be frightened with simultaneously. These small details and comical flourishes do more to characterise and entertain than many latter day "non-believer" horror protagonists. Incidentally, a lot of recent horror seems so much engaged in creating a marketable and scary monster that they forget to give their protagonists a personality. With a monster so intangible and seemingly absent from sight, it is Hordern's job to imbue the ghost with a psychological presence and reflect it through his character. And when he finally drops his condescending affectation out of sheer terror, one can only be convinced of a supernatural presence.

This psychological reflection serves as one of three essential ingredients to any good ghost story, with the other two being; place and time. The bleak and windswept Norfolk coast, punctuated by the eternal roll of the waves and a watchful but apathetic sun, encapsulates these other ingredients perfectly. A grave, overgrown with vines and hidden away, evokes a sense of temporality, of life returned to the Earth, whispering from a forgotten corner of the landscape. Parkin, the mortal intruder, disturbs this natural balance and pays the price for it. But one can only be sufficiently moved by this paranormal threat if they invest themselves enough in the setting. The place-time continuum is one that has the effect of dwarfing the individual and his ability to reason. They become overshadowed by not just the scars and memory of a shifting and eternal landscape, but their innermost thoughts and feelings, a primal instinct which is much greater than them. Ghost stories are about our involuntary animal reaction to a place, anthropomorphising it with a malevolent and omnipotent agency. The idea of a "ghost" draws on the inexplicable and concentrates it into a mysterious phantom Other who always has a greater claim to place than the mortal individual. Where the individual has conscious knowledge, the ghost has unconscious knowing.

The geographical focus of a ghost, though, cannot be attributed to a nation. Rather, a ghost belongs to a locality. Folklore and myth precede the existence of nations, and are created from the act of dwelling. Ghosts are particular to a house or village, tangible places. The nation, on the other hand, is abstract. The only way in which one can have a discussion about the ghosts of different nations is simply to find patterns in their geographies. America has a lot of wide open flat spaces, deserts, mountains, old sacred grounds and new developments, and therefore the type of ghost which occurs will correspond to these features of landscape. The English, on the hand, have a landscape filled with history, green rolling hills, curving roads, ancient villages and towns, ruins. Both nations have their own civil wars to draw from (historical violence and struggle always makes a good ghost). Britain has the ghosts of Empire, the US has the ghosts of the slave-owning south. But only in these patterns can we associate the paranormal with a nation. Culture exists first and foremost on a regional scale, and the folklore of, say, Yorkshire, would differ greatly from that of Somerset. One has to take into account the socio-economic aspects of an area, how populous it is, its language and colloquialisms, its own particular history, to get a true understanding of the ghosts one can find there.

I'm currently reading George Monbiot's Feral (2016), in which there's a chapter about how the drastic spike in big-cat sightings is a collective psychological response to our need to re-wild ourselves, attributing it to a much older phenomenon, "Certain paranormal phenomena afflict every society, and these phenomena appear to reflect our desires; desires of which we may not be fully conscious." He notes how Victorians saw more ghosts because of their higher mortality rates. This is analogous to my own ideas, of the ghost as a romantic response to the place-time continuum. Their attachment to the land could be seen as inherently conservative, but in the impermanence of things they could also be simply distant memories. There isn't a simple answer to what a ghost represents; they are that which is beyond reason, as we see in Whistle and I'll Come to You. This is more the case than in Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity, which essentially rationalise the ghosts into being. There could be any number of reasons for this, be it; historical, religious, cultural or geographical. Typically, the English ghost story stops where the comprehension starts.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness review

Reflections from a Young Movie-Goer

 Less a documentary and more a visual essay, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013) is a collaboration between Ben Russell and Ben Rivers. It follows musician and artist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe through three separate locations; a commune in Estonia, a forest in Finland and a black metal gig in Norway. This is perhaps all there is to say on the plot. All three segments have their own distinct style of film-making. The commune is observational, capturing conversations both inane and philosophical (and often both). For instance, there is a discussion following an orgy in a sauna about whose finger was in whose rectal cavity, and later one woman explains with a child-like innocence the spiritually unifying force of Trance music. The Forest has a meditative, poetic quality to it where the shots cease to resemble any sort of a narrative and sometimes linger for minutes. The black metal performance, in contrast, is claustrophobic and raw. Yet, filmed in only one take that rotates slowly around the band, there's something hypnotic about it that gives the film's very final moments of quiet an immense sense of catharsis.

While all three "spells" feel completely different, not just physically but emotionally, they all have a meditative, isolating and intuitive quality to match their natural settings. More than anything, one is struck by a sense of anarchic alchemy, where each shot feels caught rather than contrived, unique and particular to that moment. The exchanges between commune-dwellers. The incredibly long take of Robert rowing out into a lake, watching a log cabin burn. The unflinching endurance of the last segment. There is a rawness and honesty in this technique, which similarly evokes this lurking darkness within and without. Place and person form a kind of duality, at times part of one another, and both permeated by the darkness that accompanies a brooding loneliness. And each mortal moment evokes a sense of temporality and eternity, one is left to answer how each "spell" brings value to an otherwise meaningless life.

At first one could mistake it for a music video from some obscure, hipstery post-metal band. The pretensions of those earlier conversations, the aestheticism of the forest and the brutality of the black metal performance are easy to pass off as style over substance. But if one can get past those initial irritants, there's a more profound, resonant purpose to their inclusion that lurks just beneath the surface.