the grammatical era's end

Having made the decision to go to the cinema, instead of to bed, I am now returned and agog at what I have seen.
If anyone should have the opportunity, and the mind, to view Hidden (Caché) – you frankly must.
Not once in attending the cinema have I ever experience so much air sucked into so many lungs in one instance;
and I cannot have been the only one in the audience to have shrunk deep into my chair, hoping that my heart would not turn itself inside at the stunning moment.

Quite a wonderful film-maker, Michael Haneke is. I was much more repulsed at the shocking moment in The Piano Teacher (2001) but then violence had been quite central during the final third of the film; Hidden’s is only ever a suspected violence, a feeling of inevitability. The tangibility of the menace is stunning though – and that is precisely why Haneke is a great film-maker, with his actors actually ensuring an audience feels something.
Haneke has reminded me of Godard’s mid-to-late ‘60s movies during my whirlwind courtship of his films: the meaningful, though seemingly aimless, ambling of characters; the lingering camera-work, yet filled with jarring editing techniques; male-female relationships, their inherent power struggles and quest for truth; unspoken pasts affecting the present. The sequence where Majid divorces the rooster’s head from its body and then the documentation of its nerve-shocked body flapping, jerking and bouncing around is quite clearly in simpatico with Godard’s goose decapitation and pig-slaughter in Week-End (1967). That we should become agitated by these ‘brutal’ moments, when compared to the actions people perform upon each-other on a daily basis needs a couple of eyebrows raising. Haneke is much less polemical and more subtle than Godard’s hectic ‘65-‘68 films – perhaps in part due to a lack genuine politics to be outspoken for more, more politics to merely be depressed by – and thus often seems cynical and removed from events. Of genuine intrigue, and worthy of praise, is that Haneke focuses upon middle-class characters – often in a superficially sympathetic manner – in order to express the ills of the world. In The Piano Teacher, the central characters are a sexually repressed, though without doubt fantastically perverse, piano teacher and a smug little cunt of a rich boy. The repression and evils done between these two is stunning, serving well to query convention, for what reasons we allow ourselves to be bowed by society and the ease with which our prejudices are brought to the surface. Code Unknown (2000, Haneke again) features a montage like cast of varying classes, though more attention seems to be paid to the wealthy and indulgent lifestyle afforded to Juliette Binoche’s character. The juxtaposition of illegal immigrants begging, an African man being punished for getting into a fight with an obnoxious white boy, the romanticised yet heavy rural farm work, and the laissez-faire freedom of the Parisian middle-classes is something that Haneke created five years ago in order to articulate the prejudicial inequalities of modern Paris, and metonymically Europe/the world. The fact it took five years for those concerns to have achieved some kind of violent and vocal expression on behalf of those focussed upon and hinted at – the marginalised, ignored and vilified North Africans and Eastern Europeans pushed to the derelict outskirts of Paris – is some kind of miracle. As Haneke gracefully notes, France is still in deep deep denial about its actions against Algeria in the 1960s, the massacres and war, and perhaps this is why it fails to approach its growing population of North Africans, though why it is incredibly indignant towards British involvement in Iraq is a little tough to swallow. I think, for the very fact that I have inspired to actually sit down and type (badly or otherwise), Michael Haneke is an extraordinary talent and one which I hope to follow over the years. Whether I like it or not.

On other subjects, I shall be attending the Crucible theatre tonight to view Sam West’s production of Howard Brenton’s The Romans In Britian. I am both extremely excited and incredibly tentative. I have scanned, briefly, the reviews by the Berliner-sheets and other sources, but do not wish really to become bogged down in it. There seems to be far too much to actually review regarding this play, at this point in time, that is outside of the production: it is new artistic director Sam West’s first direction at the Crucible, it is the first professional run of the play in twenty-five years, and everyone seems so fucking pleased with themselves by being able to draw parallels between Brenton’s play and current events in Iraq. I dearly hope that it is simply an aggressive, well-produced and tightly performed play. I am guaranteed a healthy dose of polemic – though hopefully not half as much as last year’s dreadful production of Edward Bond’s Lear which appeared to have aged well before its time, amply supported by a terrifically inaccurate, over-indulgent performance by ‘the man who played the emperor in Star Wars’ - which I imagine will be dated slightly, as everything political before 1989 has, yet still has a valid place in the theatre. The inevitability of comparison with Iraq is a rather laboured and dim-witted conclusion, with Brenton already having made the relationship between occupying forces and colonial struggle quite visible in his text. Nonetheless, I am highly eager to go, though I find theatre-in-the-round quite vile. I have problems accepting the authenticity of performance anyway, without some pig excavating a Mintoe or blood-clotted snot across the auditorium.

I am currently reading The Orton Diaries, wherein John Lahr has compiled the last nine months of Joe Orton’s diaries before his horrific murder by long-term partner Kenneth Halliwell in August 1967. Though the man appears to be quite vile and searingly unpleasant company, he is definitely one of the most charismatic characters on paper. It is an horrifically guilty pleasure to read of his cutting remarks regarding Kenneth Williams (of which there are many, despite being very close), his tale of seven-man gay orgies in public toilets, trips to Libya and sex with 13 year-olds. Aside from that though, the entries referencing Kenneth Halliwell are very interesting; K. H. is clearly suffering from severe depression and possible psychotic episodes, but Orton is either unaware of the severity or avoidant of the issue in his diary. I am tearing through it at a rate of knots and will no doubt feel bad when the final entry Orton makes is regarding an argument with K. H. Very fascinating read, and full of licentious detail of the theatre world.

I have gone on, so shall go off.

# posted by gregory : Thursday, February 16, 2006  8 comments