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.

Commodified Spirituality and Minimalism: A Documentary about the Important Things

 Reflections from a Young Movie-Goer

Documentaries, more so than other films, are perfect manipulators of reality. Their direct intersection with real life bears a resemblance to news reports or advertisements, all three have to convince their audience of this version of events, in the hopes they might act upon the given information. But unlike these other two forms of media, Documentaries have a filmic scale that gives one the opportunity to become more fully immersed in the worlds that they present. One expects some complexity from this, if not less bias, so that their worlds (and arguments) become more convincing. In most cases, Documentaries that do cherry-pick the features of their worlds are overtly political, think Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom  (2015) or the work of Michael Moore. In these instances, the films are excusable for all their flaws or tipexed-out bits because their rhetoric has a more direct urgency to our own world. But for Minimalism: A Documentary about the Important Things (2016), in the absence of complexity or political gravity, we have, instead, an overlong advertisement.

It opens by bombarding audience with wobbly Cloverfield-esque footage of black friday, people with PhDs telling us how consumerist we've become, and a timelapse of a gigantic Best Buy, punctuated by a neon-lit permanence, getting swarmed by a Malthusian mass of meaningless, existential people-blurs. Then, from this philistine, soulless world two trendy prophets arise with the answer. Like all good entrepreneurs they have a back story (which shows emotional involvement); they were living inauthentically and were unsatisfied with their corporate existences. But then they found the light, a cure which they could communicate to the masses; minimalism. The doctrine of minimalism is to renounce mass-consumerism, and live with only the things which add value to your life. They are the popes of this movement, giving themselves the snappy moniker of "the Minimalists", and they've happened to write a book about it which you can buy. They're nice guys who travel across America giving talks and don't care if there's only two in the audience because they've still been able to "spread the word". They're insistent that you know they prefer hugging over handshakes. And they want you to buy their book. But wait, you ask yourself, surely it can't work if you have a wife and kids. Think again, they say, this guy has a wife and kids and still does minimalism. But wait, it can't actually improve your mental and physical wellbeing, can it? Think again! This woman has a debilitating condition, but when she applied minimalism, it cleared it up instantly! But wait, these guys are just in it for the money, right? Wrong! This guy's mum died of cancer, and he's on his own sort of spiritual journey to appease her vengeful spirit. This is the extent of the documentary, it's an advert.

It surrenders any factual coherence in favour of a weak plot that follows "the Minimalists" on their tour, stuffed with little touches of characterisation that attempt to prove their humanity, that they care deeply about your wellbeing. They act like a checklist for the successful business types of the 21st century; laid back, casual but trendy clothes, inspiring talks, making friendliness a part of their brand, trying to instil their product with humanitarian purpose. It's almost laughable how many times they're shown telling people that they're "huggers" rather than hank-shakers, shoehorning it into their brand appeal. It's made worse by the fact that there's a lot to salvage from their message, perhaps a much more noble documentary which takes a journalistic approach to the topic. It plays into the whole phenomenon of commodified spirituality, alongside the likes of mindfulness and yoga, which present themselves as icky trends for Middle Class consumption that put off outsiders with their cultish, dogmatic presence. The same can be said for environmentalism and healthy eating, whilst their branding makes them easier to consume amongst those who can, they remain shallow, overbearing and unaffordable to those who can't. And rather than showing minimalism as a political, collective activity, it's sold directly to the individual under a guise of political effectiveness. This faux-politics becomes glaringly obvious at one of their talks, where a homeless-looking-black-man in the audience spouts some sort of anti-establishment people power wisdom, an ugly Hollywood stereotype laden with racism, and to this the two minimalists, with a businessman-like cunning, agree and swiftly assimilate it to their cause, without developing the point any further.

The problem is that this is an exploitative mode of Documentary-making, because it poses its anti-consumerist message in the form of a consumable. It highlights a tendency towards virtue signalling in America, something tied up with a perverted cross-breed of Capitalism and Religion, where badges-of-goodness are more important than rational thought. This is why we need complexity in Documentary making, so that it avoids dogmatising its subject matter. Even if the result is still largely one sided, the audience can be shown rather than told. Minimalism fails to reach any substantial layer of complexity or factual exploration which leaves it a shallow advertisement, too easy to step in and scatter into nothingness.

Better than Inception; Paprika and Cinema's relationship with Dreams

Reflections from a Young Movie-Goer

Dreams are an obsession of cinema. The two are interwoven through their artifice and intangibility, creating and recreating spaces that range from familiar to foreign, abstract to uncanny. It's a relationship as old as the medium itself, evident right from the beginning in many of George Méliès phantasmagoric visions, tapping into a Gothic sensibility which revelled in the dark side of the human psyche. It can be traced through the whole of cinematic history; Un Chien Andalou, The Wizard of Oz, Meshes of the Afternoon, the works of Tarkovsky and then David Lynch. If not directly about dreams, these works at least move and behave like dreams. With Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), dreams became a window into character psychology as well as an excuse to do cool CGI things. But for all its cinematic splendour and wow-factor Inception lacked something its predecessors excelled at; poetry. Satoshi Kon's Paprika (2006) triumphs in comparison by doing that which Inception didn't, and avoiding some of the things it did.

The film is set in a near future where a recent invention called the “DC-mini” allows Psychotherapists to enter their patients' dreams. Following its theft, the team in charge of the device, including a Doctor Atsuko Chiba and her alter-ego Paprika, attempt to track it down. Cue rabbit hole; dreams enter reality, reality enters dreams. The line between the two grows increasingly obscure in a way that serves a deeper, more profound purpose. Bringing online spaces and the medium of film itself into the mix, Satoshi Kon creates a sense of balance between the internal and the external that feels wholly appropriate to Japanese cinema. It's a nuanced narrative idiosyncrasy that Nolan and the rest of Hollywood sorely lacks, usually placing emphasis on chasing the macguffin rather than pausing to explore the path that it uncovers. Paprika doesn't overstay its welcome, but it manages to ask some interesting questions on the way with delicate flourishes here and there, largely through its Detective character. The times spent in Paprika's website-bar discussing his student film, echoed by his recurring dreams about a homicide case are among the film's most poignant moments. It's a nice touch that we never learn much about the homicide case or get bogged down in useless details surrounding it, as many Thrillers seem to do fetishistically. Furthermore, Paprika's existence is never truly explained which, while perhaps to the chagrin of many, keeps the film neat yet open-ended. This, combined with an attention to the geography of dreamscapes, and imagery only anime can conjure up, imbue the film with a unique vision of its own.

The charges it faces of not being quite as thrilling as Inception or quite as fantastical as Spirited Away (2001) miss the point. Paprika doesn't tread a middle ground between these two but creates something completely different. It isn't a Science Fiction Thriller, but closer in tone to the philosophical fantasies of Jorge Luis Borges. It's a film that's easy to overlook for a variety of reasons, even watching it with the wrong expectations might be enough to turn one off of it. It doesn't reach the magnificent heights of some of its immediate neighbours, but it does understand exactly what it wants to be and it achieves it with a modern, introspective quality and an utterly unique style that guarantees it a place in the canon of Poetic-Dream-Films.