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.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a step in the right direction?

Are Video Games too violent to appeal to a wider audience?

Let's face it; Video Games have thus far in their short existence been pretty crap at storytelling. Even the most lauded of video game plots are, in the end, simply justifications for shooting and killing things, mcguffins for male-dominated power fantasies and such. It seems like the whole industry has fallen into a rut where they're stuck churning out the same violent game over and over; this one with soldiers, this one with aliens, this one with cowboys, this one with soldiers again. Because of this, there is an understandable snobbery against the medium, the term "Gamer" seems to lack the implicitly sensitive and cultured disposition of the "Reader" or the "Film buff".

One crucial difference between reading and gaming is that gaming is still seen as a hobby rather than an integral part of culture. Everyone reads in one form or another, but games seem to be stuck with the narrow audience of younger kids and older kids. It's a catch 22 for the industry, who assume that kids don't care about innovation or sophisticated storytelling as long as they get to kill something. Killing sells, and companies need a guaranteed return on their investment. Salvation for the medium might come in the form of indie games which are, on average, infinitely more innovative, varied and interesting than triple A games. And a simple mention of Minecraft is enough to evidence their enormous growth in popularity. There are plenty of brilliant indie games out there, many of which tell compelling stories, yet they haven't exactly opened the medium up to non-gamers. This is through no fault of their own, rather more it is a result of their limited media coverage in comparison to larger games, which also happen to make the loudest noise when at the centre of a controversy. As a result, video games can probably seem almost impenetrable to non-gamers, who might only have a passing, vague wariness of the medium and its apparent power to sap juvenile attention spans.

To those people the "walking simulator" would stand at odds with almost everything they know about video games. The name alone gives you a substantial idea of the genre's snailean idiosyncrasies, as well as its divisiveness amongst gamers. Walking simulator is a term indicative of derision as much as innovation, leaving gamers simultaneously baffled, exhilarated, bored, relaxed, awestruck and even annoyed. My own first experiences with the genre were in the form of Dear Esther and Proteus, both of which blew me away. Like the Dark Souls games, they required the player to re-think the way they interact with virtual worlds. The challenge they presented wasn't physical like most games, nor mental, but psychological. To really get the most out of the experience, one had to immerse themselves in the worlds they were presented with, and the narrative they garnered from it was unlike anything they could get from a film or a book. This is where the true innovation of the genre lies, making full use of the medium. By stripping it back to its core elements, player and world, one has to find the story for themselves. Most video games have imitated films when it comes to storytelling, implementing bits of explanatory cutscene between gameplay to give the whole thing a sense of momentum, but for walking simulators, the story was in the gameplay.

I was moved to write about the subject after recently playing Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, The Chinese Room's follow up and spiritual successor to the aforementioned, Dear Esther. As stated above, Dear Esther was my first experience of the genre; the sheer poetry of it completely reinvigorated my understanding of the medium. Yet, the graphical capabilities of the time still left more to be desired from the genre. A key element of the walking simulator is immersion, and coming up against the physical boundaries of the world sometimes burst my bubble of reverie. The Hebredian landscape, though stunning for the time, was never quite realistic enough. I'd be wandering along a bleak, jagged coastal path only to be reminded of its artifice by a pixellated surface, a minor glitch or a sense of irritation at having to plod through less interesting parts of the world. I wondered if non-gamers, who needed to be convinced of the medium's worth, would make those allowances necessary for enjoyment.

With EGTTR, those allowances are completely vanquished. Throughout the several hours I played of it, not once did I feel like I had to compensate for any shortcomings. And not once did I feel like I was trapped in an empty, soulless world, despite it being set in a village which is devoid of all human life. Set during the 1980s in the fictional Yaughton, in Shropshire, the player has to uncover the truth of what has happened to its vanished population. The only thing close to characters are a series of wandering orbs of light that enigmatically move between places. Approaching certain areas will trigger fragmentary pieces of exposition, acted out by ghostly figures composed of light. These scenes are rarely in any sort of chronological order, and the characters are often hard to tell apart. But this is a central part of the game's appeal, the player's hand is never held throughout the entire experience, rather they have to make whatever they can of the elusive plot. And after one play through, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of Yaughton.

The game manages to evoke simultaneous senses of immensity and compactness, noise and tranquillity, fleeting moments and perpetual existence. The story feels like it extends to every inch of  Yaughton, with wisps of exposition giving the player glimpses of something much bigger than them, reflected in the virtual space. As for the village itself, it is perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful ever conceived in a game. For a place so seemingly devoid of life, it's never quiet. The wind whistles, the trees sway and whisper, birds sing in the distance. Clouds pass in front of the sun, dimming and brightening the world. A delicate, mysterious haze punctuated by points of light hang around specific places. It gives a vision of a bucolic apocalypse, one at once both idyllic and eerie. Such a complex set of feelings wrought from seemingly so little is what catapults EGTTR beyond Dear Esther. The player is constantly moving towards some sort of conclusion, but it never feels like the conclusion is the actual goal, rather more it is about being able to exist in the world, and as such the more you put into it the more you get out. This is helped by superb voice acting and an awe-inspiring score that shifts from Vaughn Williams-esque orchestral to ambient and to choral. Unlike Dear Esther, the player can carve their own route through the village, making every second of play time feel unique. Discoveries made feel personal, the ambiguity of the world and the story leaves plenty of room for interpretation and revelation.

This is a type of storytelling wholly unique to the medium, and it is achieved with a nuance and delicacy unseen in other games which often slip into caricature and crass, comic-book sensibility. Those who have derided the game as pretentious and boring have simply not understood the challenge it presents. Like the film making of Andrei Tarkovsky or the music of Brian Eno, it demands something of its audience, and in return they can enter into a dialogue much more profound, meditative and insightful than at first expected. The world and the story seem one and the same, resulting in a powerful atmosphere which draws attention to the continuities of time and place. As the player moves through it, they realise they are only another element of it, both affecting and affected by it.

This type of game is a million miles away from the linear, quick-hit-dopamine dependency of other games. EGTTR's quaint, chocolate box setting and at times almost Archers-esque dialogue are completely different to the usual rotation of video game environments. With all these elements in mind, I can completely envision it opening up the medium to non-gamers. It just about slays every pre-conceived notion I had about video games, and perhaps might do for the uninitiated. The game's critics should consider whether it's a game that's even meant for them, they all seem to be too concerned with the lack of a "sprint button" so they can get the thing over with.

The Valerian trailer, French comics and why I dislike Zack Snyder

Reflections from a Young Movie-Goer

The follow up part of Supernatural International will be up shortly. It's become quite a research project now, demanding much more scrutiny than I'd originally planned. The next part will be looking at 60s British ghost films, Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968) and The Innocents (1961), but I also have plans to look at J-horror, haunted houses, a couple of really interesting Asian films from this year called The Wailing (2016) and Under the Shadow (2016), a few short stories, and maybe even a comparison of the two different versions of The Woman in Black. Once I started looking around, I found out there was a lot more out there than I had first anticipated. The subject matter is hugely interesting though as it seems to transcend the horror genre altogether. To merely associate ghosts with fear is to neglect how broad their cultural influence is and, furthermore, how they feed into our other emotions. Their very existence in our imaginations (both individual and collective) highlights the sheer poetry of our ability to interpret reality; how we interact as emotional, irrational beings with our surroundings, with others and with time.

In the meantime though, before I get carried away, I've been intending to write a post about the state of Science Fiction. I'd drafted a couple of posts about it but never finished them and, up until today, had since forgotten about it. However, after watching the trailer for Luc Besson's new film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), I thought now would be the perfect time to revive the topic, seeing as what I'd written then aligned perfectly with my reasons for getting excited about the film. For those that haven't already, you can watch the trailer here. Valerian looks like it will closely echo the stylings of Besson's previous film, The Fifth Element (1997), presenting a lush, distant future filled with colourful aliens, robots, spaceships and all the other staples of a space opera. It's based on the French comic, Valérian and Laureline, written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, first published in 1967. The trailer shows us little plot-wise, hopping from one richly detailed panorama to the next as The Beatle's Because plays in the background. The song is a brilliant choice, telling us that this won't be the gritty, self-righteous Sci-Fi we've become accustomed to, but rather be closer in spirit to the French comics scene on which the film draws from.

I think that a lot of US Sci-Fi must labour under the impression that it is impossible to be intelligent and have fun at the same time. Either that, or they just don't know how to. This could perhaps be because of their national obsession with good and evil narratives, and their taking stories way too seriously. The most obvious example of this is the work of Zack Snyder and, more specifically, the way he crudely shoehorns subtext into his version of Superman. All the humour in his work, rather than being neatly woven into the story, is a separate thing altogether, as if it were carelessly sprinkled on top of the plot. Although you can't blame him entirely for exploring the serious side of Superman, as morality forms the basis of the Man of Steel myth. Yet Snyder went completely wrong in trying to make Superman dark and gritty, pulling crass Jesus poses here and there, and frowning in the rain. My own favourite renditions of Superman have been ones which have room for humour and real ideas, like Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All Star Superman. Stylistically, All Star Superman is a lot closer to the French Sci-Fi comics of the 60s, because Morrison and Quitely know how to wield creativity to effective, meaningful ends. I think this difference between comic and film can be observed throughout many recent Super-outings, with films turning down comic-book outrageousness (weirdness, silliness, campness) in an attempt to be taken seriously. Another case in point; the X-Men. In truth, no amount of black leather and chrome will make these characters more serious and grown up, they're crime fighting mutants, one of them shoots lasers out of his eyes.

The overwhelming popularity of the Marvel films has to some extent infected the comics too, which are now simply spandex-clad soap operas. Ultimately, they pale in comparison to something like Métal hurlant, an “adult-oriented” French comic magazine that began in 1974. French comics can openly admit when they're smut, and they don't try and dress it up in sensible clothes or infuse lessons into their readers. They let the imagination roam free, providing an intoxicating, morally apathetic sense of escapism, and as a result feel a lot closer to Art than Entertainment. This is apparent in Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius' The Incal, whose fruitful panels are filled with copious amounts of colour, character and interest. For Moebius, the meaning of the comic is in the art itself, it echoes the Decadent movement providing us with art for art's sake. Like the Obelisk and Olympia press who between them published Ulysses, The Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch, art and pornography become to some extent indistinguishable. The eroticism of Moebius' work, abundant with naked bodies and sexual imagery, coupled with its chemically-suggestive psychedelia, is not just a railing against authority and good taste, but an affirmation of human sensuality. With this comes a sort of humour in the very absurdity of his fantastical creations, it is in the sheer conception of these things that the reader feels as if they are in communion with another mind, exploring the limits of the imagination.

Whilst a lot of French comics aren't overtly erotic or psychedelic, they carry this tradition with them, with a light humour that resembles the intangibility of imagination. A lot of US Sci-Fi attempts to limit the amount of imaginative stuff in a narrative in order to create a vaster sense of realism in accordance with their subtextual aims. As such, humour is a foreign element which needs to be worked in carefully, balanced correctly so as to not disturb the serious bits. Watching something like Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, one realises how much the humour is woven into its very foundations. It's a film that knows how to have fun, is unconcerned with providing a realistic, moral basis for its plot. A similar sort of approach is apparent in other French directors like Leos Carax, Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Sylvain Chomet, who understand that sincerity doesn't have to get in the way of entertainment, that in fact they can be interdependent. I think that a lot of recent American Sci-Fi films that have attempted to emulate the aestheticism of the French comics, stuff like the Riddick series or Jupiter Ascending (2015), have only failed because they don't understand the depth of their humour. Valerian, with its portly, spear-wielding aliens who don't so much as charge as waddle into battle, seems to be a good sign for Sci-Fi cinema. All the signs seem to be pointing in the right direction that it will be able to recapture the spirit of French comics, which American Sci-Fi sorely lacks at the moment. 

American Poltergeists and Vengeful Demons

Supernatural International

As those who have already visited this blog probably know, I am very interested in horror as a film genre. I think it's a great bridge between high and low forms of culture, the popular and the obscure, the entertaining and the artsy. Horror can provide shocking, visceral thrills or unnervingly probe the human condition, with the best of the genre able to do both. I've also previously stated that I find the best horror films to be those with the broadest grounding in reality, the most obvious of which can be found in the sub-genre called "psychological horror". Fear is an innate aspect of the human condition and, as films like Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) show, we are the only thing to be truly afraid of. Reading the works of Oliver Sacks or seeing some of Derren Brown's magic is some of the easiest to find proof of this, highlighting both the suggestibility and fallibility of the human mind. Whilst we consciously imagine ourselves to be entirely rational, we can never escape what lies beneath.

However, when horror does make forays into fantasy, it doesn't always mean a complete departure from reality. For instance, in Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014), the eponymous creature haunting the widowed single mother protagonist is a manifestation of grief. In other words, a projection of real human emotions. In a sense, all the best fantastical horror films are in fact psychological ones; the things that go bump in the night feed from our inescapable feelings of fear, desire, hatred. I find Ghosts to be, in some instances, the most obvious example of this. Their intangible, mystical quality removes them from the physical world and instead they occupy the psychological worlds of those that they haunt. Unlike Vampires or Werewolves, many people still believe in Ghosts and they are tied deeply into spirituality. Whatever your own opinions are on their existence, there's no denying their influence on our ability to connect with our surroundings. When it comes to sites of historical importance, or even places of personal significance, we often feel some sort of "presence", sometimes going as far to call a place "haunted". There's something deeply romantic about the idea of Ghosts, they result from a complicated mixture of feelings both primitive and artistic. The form they take derives from just how bizarre the mind can be, the emotional and irrational responses it takes towards places and events. In many instances Ghosts are, in fact, a by-product of psychological horror.

In this blog post, I will be examining two films that feature Ghosts; Poltergeist (1982) and Paranormal Activity (2007). This is part of an effort designed to ascertain how the supernatural is represented on film, which I will continue with over the next few weeks. The invention of photography allowed us to indulge our obsession with the supernatural, causing a trend in "Spirit photography", where the deceased were caught on film in spirit form making contact with the living. From this, one could say that the supernatural and film go hand in hand. Unlike the human mind, film cannot lie, giving Ghosts an unequivocal presence in reality. Over time, the supernatural has evolved on film. Different types of Ghost have emerged with different characteristics and behaviours, often highly affected by the places and people they're involved with. The two aforementioned films have a lot in common through the roles their Ghostly presences take, and one can determine a surprising amount about the cultures from which they originate.

Poltergeist (1982, dir. Tobe Hooper)

Directed by Tobe Hooper and produced by Steven Speilberg, Poltergeist is one of the most recognisable horror films out there, inspiring two sequels and a recent remake. Firmly entrenched in the canon of 80s US pop culture, it has been heavily referenced since its initial release, most notably in a spoof episode of Family Guy, Petergeist. In comparison to The Shining, as another famous ghost film from the same decade Poltergeist differs radically in its approach to the genre, highlighting the key aesthetic differences between Speilberg and Kubrick.

The plot follows a family from Orange County who live in a part of suburbia recently built by the company the father works for. One night, after the family have all fallen asleep, the youngest daughter awakes to see that the TV has been left on, tuned to static after programming has finished. She begins to communicate with it when suddenly a ghostly hand appears from the screen, it shoots from the TV set into the wall of the bedroom causing an earthquake. The family all wake up as the daughter turns round and announces, "They're here." Later on, the Mother begins to experience strange things happening in the house, including chairs being stacked up on the table, cutlery bent inexplicably out of shape and a mysterious force that pulls objects across the kitchen floor. Then, one night, the occurrences intensify violently during a storm; the son almost gets eaten by a tree that comes to life and the youngest daughter is sucked into a portal that opens up in her bedroom closet. The family contact a group of parapsychologists who attempt to make contact with the daughter and rescue her from the supernatural realm. Then, after the Father's boss explains to him his plans to erect new properties nearby on a cemetery, saying that the headstones can just be moved, things start to fall into place.

Poltergeist is a radical departure for Tobe Hooper from his previous film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), a lot more family oriented and oozing with Speilbergian trademarks. Unlike the former's raw, relentless sadism, this film is consistently good-natured, showing a family brought together to combat dark, malevolent forces. Rather than psychologically implied nastiness, everything is shown on screen, a phantasmagoria of 80s special effects which, while heavily dated by today's standards, are ten times as fun and magical than the reductive CGI we're seemingly stuck with today. The colourful production is topped off by an imposing score that holds our hand along the way, telling us what to feel and when.

Overall, the film is a paranormal-themed romp more than anything, providing the audience with plenty of upbeat thrills and few authentic chills. In this sense, it fits into Speilberg's oeuvre and, as a result, it suffers from a tendency to turn anything truly unnerving into sentimental mush. Good, American spirit endures and the music constantly reminds us of this, invading scenes with clear cut melodious moralising. For the most part, it's a fun film with an awesome ending (conjuring the spirit of Sam Raimi), however fans of doom and gloom will not be impressed.

The film is very telling about Hollywood's approach to the supernatural. Ghost stories usually generate their chills from the minimal; quiet knocks and brief glimpses, but Poltergeist completely subverts this with its heavy reliance on effects and faster paced action. As such, the Poltergeist is the perfect paranormal entity for an impatient Hollywood audience. Its violent, malevolent nature, portrayed alongside a protagonist who might do wrong but is ultimately good-hearted presents the audience with a binary approach to morality. The American film industry is obsessed with good-and-evil narratives, often to the detriment of horror which often requires a sense of moral ambiguity to generate a deeper sense of terror. This is especially true for the supernatural which thrives by evoking the mystical and uncanny, something otherworldly but deeply rooted in people and places, something that Kubrick excels at in The Shining. Poltergeist has many salvageable parts which conform to these ideas; the colonial-guilt-type subtext of disturbing ancient land and the Ray Bradbury-esque strangeness amongst the everyday. However, it's through aesthetic execution that the film becomes wrongfooted and lost to problematic Americanisms, the underlying politics and satire ironically drowned out by the superficial.

Trailer for Poltergeist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ytjaMfoF2M

Paranormal Activity (2007, dir. Oren Peli)

A film that both perfected and ruined the "found footage" genre, Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity was a smash hit on its theatrical release, becoming the most profitable film ever made relative to its minuscule budget. Despite how critics might regard it now, it is in fact a hugely innovative piece of film-making. Succeeding the likes of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Blair Witch Project (1999), it built on these by relocating from the strange and threatening to the safe and familiar, bringing the danger into the home. This itself isn't a new setting for a horror film, but utilising the realism of the home movie camera, it's given a simple twist which results in a piece of authentically chilling entertainment.

It centres on a young couple, Katie and Micah, who live in the suburbs in San Diego. Micah starts recording video footage in the house in an attempt to capture supernatural occurrences after Katie describes an evil presence which has haunted her since childhood. They enlist the help of a psychic, who informs them that Katie is being stalked by a demon feeding off of her negative energy, recommending that they get in contact with a demonologist. Instead the couple try to tackle the issue on their own, spurred on more by Micah's self-confidence than by Katie who on several occasions insists that they give up trying to get rid of it. The film is split into day-time and night-time segments, of which during the latter all the paranormal activity usually occurs. Installing the camera in the corner of their bedroom, the audience are left to endure the eerie tension, waiting for something to happen.

The remainder of the plot is delightfully minimal, never getting bogged down in tedious exposition and always focusing on the relationship between Katie and Micah. Rather than plunging its audience directly into the action, like Poltergeist, the film instead takes its time in establishing a tense, creepy atmosphere. The realism inhabits not just the characters and setting but the very framing of the plot; what we are shown and not shown. The familiarity extends beyond this to even smaller aspects such as the inclusion of a tacky, mass produced ouija board and a garish website that the couple visits to read an account of an exorcism. Furthermore the film is relatively free from the fascistic tendencies that other horrors insufferably rely upon; there's no music to force an atmosphere and no unjust jump scares. These details go a long way in creating a sense of the unheimlich, establishing a world we're totally ready to believe in, especially during those earlier disturbances. When horror films show us ancient artefacts or blatantly fantastical occurrences, we're less inclined to engage with their version of reality because they differ too much from our own. Instances of unaccountable noises heard at night or perhaps irrational feelings of an otherworldly presence are familiar to us all, and Paranormal Activity cleverly exploits this type of fear by never straying too far from reality.

The film has since earned itself a bad name after its own exploitation by Hollywood, spawning five unwanted sequels in the space of six years, as well as leading to an explosion of "found footage" horror films. Cheap to produce and effectively scary (as proven) the sub-genre has dried up very quickly, leaving people looking back on Paranormal Activity with some distaste. Really, it's an idea that only works once. Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed watching it, I could never bother sitting through it again. Both it and Poltergeist share this phantasmagoric quality, where we're dazzled with things that happen, but there's little underneath it all. In this sense, the stripped back found footage is a natural successor to expensive special effects of the 80s. Any notion of intellectual depth gets buried beneath the purely visceral thrills, and the audience is pushed to feel but not to think. This is one of the problems of the American ghost story, and why Hollywood often has to resort to the noisy, violent poltergeist rather than the quiet, equivocal spectre.

Trailer for Paranormal Activity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UxLEqd074

Both Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity are about noisy ghosts in suburban homes. In both, the ghosts are malevolent, and both have christian undertones. These elements are so often detrimental to horror, removing any psychological or poetic complexity. Many American ghost films try to establish their own scientific sense of lore, with god-fearing paranormal professors or cross-bearing ghost hunters who talk about "paranormal realms" and have equipment to carry out supernatural experiments. It exhibits a type of American mindset where spirituality corresponds to an individual's quantifiable innate goodness. This is also evident in many other recent American ghost films; The Conjuring (2013), The Last Exorcism (2010) etc. The malevolent spirit is either a demon or a vengeful spirit refusing to move on to the afterlife and, therefore, always portrayed as the villain. In the end, the film turns out to be a spiritual conflict between good and evil, and good often has the upper hand. Films like The Shining break this trend whilst exploring what the American ghost story could be instead. Much like a Western, The Shining has an underlying sense of man against the wilderness, both geographically and psychologically. The haunted Overlook Hotel is a physical manifestation of both Jack Torrence's mental state and American colonialism. The ghosts here are ambiguous syntheses of these two aspects, manifestations of a relationship between mind, place and time. Consequently, the interplay between mind, place and time has much greater poetic traction than the interplay between good and evil.

These elements of history and location are often forgotten about in American supernatural films, with the same old haunted house cropping up again and again. Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity are good enough distractions from this trend, but they fail to do much more than distract. In the next few blog posts, I will compare these to other supernatural films from around the globe, exploring how they differ in their portrayals of the paranormal. Rooted in folklore and religion, ghosts can change vastly in their manifestations from culture to culture, often in ways that completely reshape the narrative. As shown here, there is a definite set of trends in American ghost stories including Christianity, colonial anxieties, and good and evil. The two films I have examined here both diverge from the beaten path of creepy old houses (which I would like to explore at a later date), and are oriented to feel partially relatable by the audience (through family, suburbs etc.). Furthermore both films were produced to be big-screen hits, intended to thrill rather than provoke ideas. Next week I'll be skipping across the pond to look at the British ghost on film, focusing specifically on The Innocents (1961) and Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968). Comments and suggestions for other films to look at would be greatly appreciated!

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.