Portraying Neonazis, Pessimism and the Works of Alan Clarke

Reflections from a Young Movie-Goer 

   Alan Clarke is a criminally underrated filmmaker, albeit one who never truly reached mainstream commercial success. Whether this would've meant personal success or failure to him is debatable, a lot of his work champions the underdogs in society, often pessimistic and anti-authoritarian in tone. His chief mode of output were BBC television plays, which perhaps clarifies the reason for his being overlooked owing to the snobbery against the medium. Yet his inability to expand beyond the small screen only attests to the politics behind his work. If he wasn't given the opportunity for bigger productions, it serves as a fitting parallel to the oppression his characters faced. If he was, it's convincing evidence that he stuck to his principles; the TV was the medium of the masses, it didn't have the glitz or the dishonesty of Hollywood. 

His anti-authoritarianism ran to the core of his film making; a lot of his work depicts a bleak, post-industrial Britain, with angry and misunderstood characters filmed from a cold distance. The audience are detached onlookers rather than active emotional participants. Often there is no music to goad us into a certain frame of mind and the narratives are simple rather than complex and involving, appearing as a series of incidental rather than interconnected events. Clarke's style was carried to its logical excesses in his penultimate film, Elephant (1989) [watch here], set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The film is 40 minutes long, features no dialogue, and is made up of 18 scenes which all feature long tracking shots (Clarke's most potent stylistic motif) and culminate in murder. It was the inspiration for Gus Van Sant's later film about the Columbine shooting, also called Elephant (2003), which mimicked a lot of Clarke's stylings. It's within this sparse, alienating approach that his anti-authoritarianism was most significantly manifested. The viewer is given full reign to interpret the events how they wish, completely subverting the fascistic trappings drawbacks usually associated with film. This brings to mind Jean Cocteau's remark about Jean Genet, "He is also a moralist, in the fullest sense of the word – but a moralist is not to be confused with a man who moralizes."

Everywhere American History X (1982) goes wrong, Clarke's collaboration with screenwriter David Leland, Made in Britain (1982), goes right, for the very reasons mentioned above. Both attempt to explore the mindsets of neonazis, however the former's heavy handed plotting is far too reminiscent of its subject matter's less sympathetic traits (Nazism), whereas the latter's is analogous to its protagonist's alienation and pessimism, something the audience can truly sympathise with. American History X never really gets to the bottom of its protagonist's outrage and disillusionment, but in Made in Britain, the main character is constantly surrounded by it. Setting plays such a significant role in character development, and exposition can be incorporated effectively into a location depending on the actor's ability to interact with it. In the case of Tim Roth's performance as Trevor, his presence perfectly compliments the decaying urban scenery. He rebels against authority in his very manner of occupying a space. The long walking shots are testament to this, seemingly encapsulating the entirety of the character through his angry strutting, all without a single word being uttered. As he looks into a shop window at a group of mannequins posed as a family there is a pervading sense of the uncanny, echoed later when he ends up at his social worker's flat before dawn, sharply juxtaposed by a scene within a prison cell. The film gives the audience time to exist within the places it presents, needless explaining and artificial mood-enhancers (music, excessive camera angles) are traded in for silence and atmosphere.

Clarke gives the characters room to breathe and grow through, perhaps a skill learnt from his work as a play director. That being said, there appears to be little explicit growth in Tim Roth's character, his performance is instead beautifully nuanced and it's as if through overt character development Clarke runs the risk of moralising and departing from the film's sacred social realism. Trevor's self-centred volition and refusal to change is as much a product of his environment as anything else. In these underlying politics, the film corresponds closely to our own world and, while its now over 30 years old, it still presents an alarmingly familiar situation. One could easily pass it off as nihilistic, but its inherent pessimism is as much a call to arms as anything else. The unresolved purgatory we see on screen, one that resembles our own social climate, gives us a chance to get up and fight for our own happy ending. This exemplifies the importance of pessimism in social realist film making, as Mark Fisher points out in Capitalist Realism, "[A]nti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism... [a] film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity." Supplanting the term "capitalism" with something along the lines of "current social climate", the statement is a lot closer to explaining Made in Britain's lack of clear-cut moralising. When clearly shown the way on film, we're a lot less inclined to find it ourselves in real life.

Recently television has become a much more highly esteemed medium. Programmes like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead are causing a much bigger stir than anything the film industry has to offer. With this, though, has come more public focus and executive control over content. Clarke's TV work really excelled because of his ability to fully realise his visions using the medium, his only real problem being post-production censorship issues. Perhaps if he were alive today his primary mode of output would be independent film, his work fits closer into that canon than anywhere else, with all his BBC work recently released on blu-ray by the BFI. He treads a similar filmic path to Ken Loach whom, in comparison, appears soupy, sentimental, and too much a social justice warrior. In Loach's Cathy Come Home (1966) we know who to root for, but that is part of the problem, it comes off as mere pamphleteering against the poetry of Clarke's work. Building on the point made by Mark Fisher; Loach has done our crusading for us, but Clarke leaves the sword to be taken up by his audiences, the thousands who watch behind small screens.

Alan Clarke's steadicam shots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIpeGVdr_60 

Is there any good modern Horror out there?

Reflections from a Young Movie-Goer

In reference to my last piece on Robert Eggers' The Witch, in which I claimed that cinema was in need of more good horror; I partially take that back....

Kill List (2011, dir. Ben Wheatley)

Despite what others might say; I would class this as horror. It both breaks and revitalises the genre, creating something chillingly authentic. Also check out A Field in England (2013) and Sightseers (2012). Each film Ben Wheatley makes is utterly original and innovative, delving deep into the human psyche without ever leaving the audience behind. I'm not even going to begin to describe the plot because its best watched with a pair of naive, unsuspecting eyes. 

Antichrist (2009, dir. Lars von Trier)

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a grieving couple who retreat to a cabin in the woods for a vacation (echoing Don't Look Now) and bizarre things start to happen. The first in Lars von Trier's "Depression Trilogy" (followed by Melancholia and Nymphomaniac), its easy to file Antichrist under "showy pretentious rubbish", but that would only validate its provocative brilliance. Like most other good horror, the real monsters are inside your head, its simply a matter of how this can be communicated with film that reveals the director's true genius. All art is essentially a psychological experiment, this gives horror a fast track to digging up and exploiting our deepest fears and anxieties. Those who down-rate Antichrist for its showiness forget that they are also participating in the film just as much as those behind the screen. 

Under the Skin (2013, dir. Jonathan Glazer)

Perhaps my favourite film from the last decade, if not of all time, Under the Skin is both a visceral and a sublime experience. The plot is minimal but never leaves you in want of more; Scarlett Johansson plays an alien disguised as a human driving around Glasgow, picking up men from the streets to harvest for her mothership. I say "harvest for her mothership", but in the sequences where this happens, anyone's interpretation is as good as mine. It is slow, hypnotic and visually stunning. Check out my review of it from January. Even better, watch it for yourself and try to work out who the true monster is.

Troll Hunter (2010, dir. André Øvredal)

With the falling costs of CGI and decent film-making equipment, smaller production companies are now able to realise and bring to life visions wholly unimaginable a couple of decades ago. Back then, Jurassic Park (1993) was a big-budget A-list film on the cutting edge of technology. Its incredible how something like Trollhunter can create something just as effective on a fraction of the budget. Furthermore, its a film completely rooted in Norwegian folklore and culture. It would be awesome to see more films like this from across the globe that integrate their own cultural and folkloric elements into the story, seeing as we're already pretty familiar with America's. 

Berberian Sound Studio (2012, dir. Peter Strickland)

Starring Toby Jones as a quiet English sound engineer who goes to Italy to work on recording the sound for a Giallo film, Berberian Sound Studio is a psychological meta-horror (for lack of a better term) where all the scares are implied rather than shown. Its slow moving, claustrophobic and alienating albeit in a very subtle way, perhaps too subtle for most horror fans. 

This is not to mention the likes of Cabin in the Woods (2012), It Follows (2015), Creep (2014) or Drag me to Hell (2009), but you get the idea. 

There have been at least a handful of films over the last decade or so that have utilised the horror genre to brilliant effect. However most if not all of these are independent films. Aside from something like Cabin in the Woods, most don't receive the full recognition that they should in comparison to what usually passes for Horror recently. We're too used to defining horror by those exhaustive, executive-driven franchises like Saw and Paranormal Activity, or those god-awful soul-crushing remakes such as the 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The real problem is what we think constitutes a horror film. We're stuck with these dry expectations; jump scares, zombies, gore, things jumping out and making snarly faces. We're stuck with the same characters, the same situations, the same places, the same effects, and they've lost all their genuine scare value. Its given the genre an image problem, and a chance for executives to churn out sequel after sequel and remake after remake. In spreading awareness of good horror, perhaps change can come from below, from the audience who truly have more power over the industry than the executives.

Most of the films mentioned can be found on Netflix, Amazon Prime or BFI player.

 

The Witch (2015, dir. Robert Eggers)

Reflections from a Young Movie-goer

   The jump-scare is perhaps one of the worst afflictions of cinematic horror today. Countless films recently have forgone the often emotionally-complex slow burn of atmosphere building to instead churn out a series of uniformly dull, predictable shocks with no inherent reward, value or insight to them. The need to make a quick buck drives this trend; jump-scares are easy, cheap and, to a lot of people, enough for the price of admission. This is problematic for horror as it doesn't give the producers any incentive to risk making more complex, thought-provoking pictures, on account of the fear that they won't perform at the box-office. However, this is a vicious circle as the average cinema-goer has been conditioned to expect cheap, superficial thrills from horror. When they are confronted with a film that doesn't seem to provide these, they won't bother with it. This means that when indie films like The Witch (2015), devoid of jump-scares and full of ideas, get mainstream attention, its something to be quite excited about.

Robert Eggers' directorial debut, describing itself as "A New England Folktale", centres on a family of Puritans in colonial New England who are expelled from their plantation over what seems to be differences in religious belief. The family moves to the edge of a forest, where they build a new home and a farm to live on. Frequent, lingering shots of the vast landscape and forest, almost completely absent of human life save for the family, create a sense of almost overwhelming isolation, almost sublime in its quietude. The youngest of the children, Samuel, mysteriously vanishes while under the care of the eldest daughter, Thomasin. What follows is a dizzying, paranoid descent into the delusional minds of a fanatical family on the edge of absolute wilderness, and the persecution that follows. There are few cheap thrills, but what the film suggests rings true in a deeply disturbing way.

It's essentially a story about stories, and this is where the film's real genius is. Elsewhere people have claimed that it should have been marketed as art-house rather than horror. Perhaps this would have better accommodated some people's expectations, but it would deprive The Witch of the full power of its central thesis. It shares this self-awareness with Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014), another recent horror film that fully utilises the conventions of the genre to illustrate its message. (I won't spoil its brilliance by deconstructing it here, but I will say that it goes further than The Babadook in its clever usage of horror.) In an industry divided amongst the axes of art and entertainment, films that seem to transcend this rigid apparatus stand out as perhaps the most authentic. And while The Witch isn't the most transcendent of these authentic visions (as evidenced by its leaving many baffled), it makes a brilliant case for the potential of the genre in cinema today.

Using horror to such effect, it rivals the likes of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (2009), another film examining religion's effects on family and community. Perhaps it surpasses it through its very contrivance, the idea behind it satisfies immensely. In terms of production, the film is also exceptional. The acting, while at first seeming a bit stiff, stuck up in the drama of its world, progresses and culminates into some breathtaking scenes. Performances all round become spectacular, especially Anya Taylor Joy as Thomasin and Ralph Ineson as the father (his low, rattling northern accent fits the scenery perfectly). Both lighting and camerawork bring out the full creepiness of the landscape and the sheer primitive struggle of the period, creating ripe conditions to examine the humanity in unnerving depth. Its usage of ye-olde dialect and language accentuate the sense of alienation, the distance of characters from one another and the audience. Its a clever technique, which puts the audience right into the middle of the paranoia; what we see is as fantastically equivocal as what the characters see. Its interesting in comparison to Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God (2013), which achieved a similar affect through a completely different, more visceral means. Rather than creating a claustrophobic, stream-of-consciousness-type atmosphere, with characters leering down the lens at you, The Witch's audience involvement requires a level of intellectual participation.

The only real negative aspect of the whole experience ironically stems from the limitations of the genre. This isn't really a problem inasmuch as a hindrance of the film reaching a state of pure poetry. Genre will always be prosaic and this can hold it back from reaching total cinematic sublimity. As long as it's horror, one will always know roughly what to expect. Compare this to a Tarkovsky film, which is pure poetry, the viewer can be carried away into lofty, spiritual reaches. The Witch is first and foremost a statement and as such it can never reach the open-ended wonder that some other brilliant films do. This isn't a large price to pay for what we get instead, its barely even an actual qualm. What it is, though, is a comparison of genre to non-genre cinema, or perhaps comparing poetry to prose. Cinema needs both, and its particularly in need of more innovative, masterful prose as we get from the likes of good horror, especially The Witch.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQXmlf3Sefg