Adam Gyngell considers Waltz with Bashir

Ari Folman asks his friend why, twenty years down the line, he is now having this surreal dream from the war in Lebanon. Why can’t he remember the occasion this vision so powerfully depicts? His friend tells him about a famous psychological test, in which people are shown ten photographs from their youth, and asked if they recall the events shown in the photos. Nine of the photographs are genuine; one however, shows the young participant surrounded by the trappings of a fair ground. Eighty per cent of participants, Folman is told, declare that they remember the day vividly: being taken round by their parents, eating candy, going on the rides. Except that they weren’t there: the figure of the child has been superimposed onto a scene they were never present in. The mind, confronted by such seemingly objective ocular proof, revises its own uncertainties: memory displays the versatile and beguiling capacity to rewrite its own contents into conformity with the evidence.

The falsified photograph is a controlling image through out the fragmentary and fractured narrative of discovery in Waltz with Bashir. Folman’s film becomes a troubling reflection of the way in which technology has alienated man from his own humanity. A psychiatrist Folman later meets relates to him the story of a young amateur photographer called into action in the Israeli-Lebanese war. Wondering how the man maintained a steady head despite the brutality, he tells her that it was easy – the whole war become one long day trip – the bodies, the bombs, the devastation, all were composed in his mind as striking pictures, vivid snapshots. The photographer, thrust into the heart of such carnage, allows his eyes to replicate the hardened, unblinking gaze of the camera, the artificial eye. He merely sees the horror; he is not there in person, he is detached. War, as the Italian futurist Marinetti declared 50 years earlier, has become an aesthetic triumph of technology over man, a proliferation of images – an abdication of human response.

Folman’s friend Boaz looks through the crosshairs of the sniper rifle at his target as if watching a television screen. Photographically framed, the dogs he aims at cease to be living beings. Pulling the trigger, Boaz shoots the image, not the dog. The sniper’s sight enables him to distance himself from the act of killing; the shooter is able to evacuate his own agency, to transform his own situation into a simulation. This is why the photographer the psychiatrist talks about finds that his defence mechanism – appropriating the cool and unaffected vision of the camera lens – breaks down when faced with the agonizing scene of the maimed horses slowly dying. The horses represent the intrusion of the organic into the sterilized detachment of the mechanical. As we stare into the glazed-over eye of the dead horse, we see that the young soldier no longer sees what is around him, but feels it. Denied the mediation of his psychological ‘camera’ vision, he is sickened by a horror that is all too primal.

The very same technological advancements that provide us with more efficient ways of killing each other have, thoughtfully, given us new means of distancing ourselves from the depersonalized destruction they cause. Armed with machine guns and MAGs that rip the fabric of the air with interminable rounds of bullets, the Israeli recruits can remove themselves from the scene by imagining their trigger fingers are clicking a camera rather than unleashing deadly fire. Technology becomes a medium of disengagement. War demands human sacrifice in more ways than one. The technology of war dehumanizes the battlefield; soldiers, consequently, are compelled, not only to dehumanize their opponent, but to void themselves of their own humanity. Ari and his fellow soldiers ride around firing blindly into the enveloping darkness of night; when he is asked what they are shooting at, he replies, “I don’t know. Anything. Everything.”

Waltz with Bashir tracks the director’s efforts to find someone who can bear witness to the massacre. Every individual he talks to has at best a partial recollection of where they were, what they were doing, who they were with. Ari initially thinks of memory as a store-house of extinguished experiences, a lasting record of the lives we have lived. He soon discovers that memory is a survival mechanism, relying on the censorship of self-erasure for efficient operation. Memory, like a digital camera, can delete its files. This is why the choric response of all the veterans he interviews adopts the same computerized jargon for describing their self-enforced amnesia: “it’s not stored in my system.” In a technological age, memory must assimilate itself to the machine to ensure its survival. That technical, mechanized response betrays the inhumanity of their experiences of war. Forced to act like a killing machine, and not a human, the brain responds by refiguring itself as a hard-drive: trauma is translated into data-loss.

The modern era has come to see technology as an objective guarantor of truth. Technology, unlike the inconsistent, emotional, illogical human subject, carries with it the self-assured air of empirical certainty. The tapes we use can remember with fidelity conversations we have long forgot; the films we watch can immortalize scenes that have slipped into oblivion; the cameras we click can capture infinitesimal details the naked eye overlooks. Technology embodies the perfect objectivity that Western science has long aspired towards – the objectivity that our frail, physical limitations have long prevented us from attaining. Yet if technology is objective, it is also an objectifier, turning subjects into objects, people into things. The camera lens treats all things, animate or inanimate, within its range as objects alike. Frozen on film, the camera refuses to distinguish between the smiling baby, the birthday cake and the table it sits on. The camera transforms everything in its scope to petrified stillness – just like the guns that turn humans into corpses, subjects into lifeless lumps of flesh.

Folman’s choice of graphic animation is fundamental to the film’s presentation of modern war. Animation enables the audience to experience a corresponding feeling of detachment from the horrors of war so explicitly visualized in the film. Presented with the callous execution of innocent women and children, animation makes the senseless and bloody violence that much easier to stomach. Mediated through the cartoon, war becomes just as unreal and unreachable as it does to those young Israeli soldiers called up to fight. Animation exquisitely captures the dissolving images and hallucinations that haunt the minds of those involved, decades later. Several soldiers attest that they are unsure of whether these phantasmal visions are subconscious, suppressed projections of real events, or whether they are memories simulated by a troubled mind. One solider Folman meets invokes a nightmarish scene of a wasted battlefield. “It was like a trip, like LSD, but it was real”: for the soldier, struggling to articulate in words the image inscribed on his memory, the ‘reality’ he recalls can only be explained as a hallucination, as a chemical imbalance of the brain’s synapses. Perhaps this is why Carmi anaesthetizes himself with steady pulls on endlessly rotating joints. Forced into the unwelcome act of remembrance by Folman, he seeks to dull his senses in the pacifying haze of marijuana smoke, to make things less real by means of chemical assistance.

Andy Warhol declared that “once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again”. Technology supplies that angle, and takes away an inconvenient reality. This is the experience that J.G. Ballard call de-cerebration. Driving cars, watching screens, firing guns – the individual finds himself no longer prompted by personal needs and desires. He feels his brain to be a motor, issuing directions to a body that resembles an apparatus. This is the disconcerting anxiety that the characters in Waltz with Bashir experience, that the psychological test exposes: it is not only our bodies but our sentimental lives that can be mechanically programmed. Warhol stated that he could not imagine being in love – surely it would resemble a made-for-TV movie, with faked rapture and flimsy scenery. The same dissociating numbness affects the Israeli soldiers. They cannot imagine being at war: instead, it resembles a photograph, a film, a cartoon.

Technology equates itself to truth. But it is a truth that has been voided of human significance, a truth that depersonalizes and dehumanizes. In Folman’s film, the sole person who can bear witness to the submerged horrors of the massacre, crucially, is not a soldier but Roni, the war reporter for Israeli television. It seems fitting that is only from behind the artificial eye of the camera, through the mitigating mediation of the television screen, that the full savagery of the atrocity can be felt. It is significant that the end of Folman’s road towards remembrance and revelation comes not in the animation that has provided the medium for the film’s hazy, hallucinatory fragments of memory, but in real, documentary footage. The film’s stark and sickening conclusion – images of piles of dead bodies filling doorways, limbs of suffocated infants poking through the rubble, overlaid with a cacophonous soundtrack of howling widows – has a visceral immediacy that the rest of the film studiously avoids. Confronted with this horrific reality, we are denied the ameliorating strokes of the cartoonist’s pen that have, to that point, provided a surreal glaze to the film’s phantasmagoric recollections. “What if I don’t want to know these things about myself?”, Folman asks a friend. The film’s final scene shows the camera refusing to baulk at sights the human eye instinctively shirks away from. It is a mortifying token of war’s inhuman capacity to disregard human life. It is also a shocking reminder of technology’s inhuman incapacity for emotional response. Faced with this final picture of desolate horror, we are more forgiving of the convenient amnesia of Folman and his comrades. Read more

Jess Chandler reviews Juno

As the writer’s strike continues to paralyse the Hollywood film industry, a film like Juno makes all too clear the foundational importance of a good screenplay. A director’s vision and a talented cast will of course determine a film’s final success, but it is the story, the dialogue, the textual foundation of a project that really matters. 

Diablo Cody’s Bafta-winning debut, is refreshingly quirky and unconventional. Stories of unplanned teen-pregnancies have become weighted with unfortunately clichéd connotations: we anticipate a formulaic tale of a disadvantaged, irresponsible and neglected adolescent, presented through a tone of despairing disapproval. Cody transforms this framework of social commentary into a comedy about growing up; the pregnancy itself becomes a catalyst for an exploration into human relationships, the disappointments and complications of adult life, and the comedy inherent in the every day. The film is free from moralising judgements, and its 16-year old heroine attests to the intelligence and integrity of the young that is so often overlooked. Juno MacGuff is a highly articulate, confidently rebellious high-school student, who finds herself pregnant after losing her virginity to her best friend Paulie Bleeker. After hastily retreating from the prospect of an abortion, Juno decides to arrange an adoption for her unborn child. She is thrust into a world of adult experience and unexpected emotional complication. Her starkly ironic, sarcastic intelligence, imposed as protection from a disappointing world, is coupled with an emerging vulnerability and naivety, a gradual realisation of the formative nature of adult experience.

The film is founded upon wonderfully sarcastic humour, harmlessly amusing, and refreshingly honest, refusing any unnecessary solemnity or seriousness of tone, which would have been all too easy a trap to fall in to. Cody has created a series of quirky characters, all of whom unsettle expectations appropriate to their perceived situations. Paulie Bleeker, played by Arrested Development’s Michael Cera is a gentle, geeky athlete, whose unassuming affection for Juno is the mark of a loyal, and refreshingly genuine boy. Juno’s father Mac, an air-conditioning salesman, who could all too easily have become the beer-drinking, TV-watching, Homer Simpson stereotype, is in fact a wise, affectionate, and non-judgemental father, willing to support his daughter without question or criticism. Ellen Page (Hard Candy), has rightly received enormous praise for her performance as Juno. She brings the character a mixture of wry, superior confidence, and childish naivety; she shuns the superiority of adults, with an attitude of confident dismissal towards all words of advice. But beneath this exterior lies an idealistic perception of love and relationships that is waiting perilously to be undermined by a confrontation with reality. Her decision to give up the baby for adoption is initially a decision of necessity, but becomes an act of generosity as her relationship develops with the prospective parents. Mark (Arrested Development’s Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), whose all-too perfect smiles, and expensive suburban house, overflowing with air-brushed photos of the couple in loving embraces, are a Yuppie, American Dream product, whose perceived perfection is immediately exposed as a desperate veneer of unhappy frustration. Mark, evidently terrified of the prospect of fatherhood, is unable to escape the fantasies of youth, tied to his ambition to become a rock-star (his present occupation as advertising-jingle composer is typical of the tragicomic touches that pervade the film). Vanessa is his neurotic, highly-strung wife, desperate for a child, and determined that everything should be perfect – a clear sign that in reality things are not. Mark and Vanessa’s already fragile relationship, is further complicated when Mark starts to fall for Juno’s charms – a mutual love of rock music draws them together, and it is at this point that Juno’s naivety starts to show. Step-mum Bren (Allison Janney) warns her of the inappropriateness of spending time with a married man, asserting that there are complications Juno is too young to understand. Mark too comes to realise how he has fooled himself about her maturity, and part of what makes the film so moving, and real, is the reminder that she has been forced to confront things far beyond her maturity.

Beneath its charming comic exterior, a sense of real fragility and emotion carries the film. It is about tolerance, understanding, failed ambition, and uncomfortable realisation. The lo-fi, indie soundtrack conjures an air of cool, hippy, offbeat eccentricity, appropriate for a cast of characters who continually surprise with their cutting witticisms, and unexpected acceptance of difficult situations. This is not a film about politics, or a cultural critique, but a story about people; it makes us laugh at absurdities, and emotively reminds us of the importance of human affection, and the integrity of the individual.

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Stephanie Longden watches Pinter's The Lover/The Collection at the Comedy Theatre

Revived 45 years after these two one-acters were written for television, Jamie Lloyd directs two of Harold Pinter’s early plays, fittingly coupled together to explore the themes of unconventional sexual practices, fantasy, love triangles and the ensuing struggles for dominance within relationships.

The central twist of The Lover’s marital comedy of manners is that the husband is also his wife’s afternoon lover; their relationship includes a fantastical third member, a scenario which also serves as a possible interpretation of The Collection. This fetishistic game at first sustains the excitement of their marriage but by the play’s close brings the husbands to the brink of meltdown as he struggles to reconcile fantasy and reality. Unfortunately, although Richard Coyle and Gina McKee are instantly recognisable from many a British drama, a sure-fire crowd puller, their lack of onstage credibility makes their rendering of the husband and wife and their role-playing counterparts equally unconvincing, warping the important distinction between the reality of their hum-drum marriage and the fantasy that they choose to escape to.

However, the chemistry between the two lovers is well sustained, culminating in an impressive final scene as McKee impressively portrays the wife’s ultimate resilience in the face of her husband’s breakdown. Thankfully, the interval introduces Charlie Cox’s West end debut and theatre-veteran Timothy West as The Collection’s gay couple; a relationship invaded by James (Coyle) with accusations that bisexual Bill has slept with his wife (McKee). Cox perfectly articulates the witty banter characteristic of Pinter’s dialogue, as he toys with the sexually insecure James, and the production is worth seeing if only for West’s brilliant rendering of Pinter’s famous “slum slug…slug mind” monologue. However, this rather cautious production plays down the sexual tension within the gay love triangle, sidelining the themes of sexual insecurity and ownership which are really at the heart of the play. The Collection was written without concession to orthodoxy and it seems only right that this should be reflected in these liberalised times almost half a century later.

Although both plays were originally written for television, The Collection is a particularly ambitious play to stage on account of its duel-household setting and fast pace of scene changes. The necessity of combining two distinct living rooms, in addition to the menacing phone box, on the Comedy Theatre’s relatively small stage makes for a confused set. However, this technical fault is partly compensated for by the resulting presence of McKee in the background of many of the male-dominated scenes, her ghost-like dominance of the stage throughout the play effectively conveying her superiority in keeping her head whilst all the men around her lose theirs. In contrast, The Lover’s clean-cut 60s set is perfectly reminiscent of the era when Pinter shocked audiences by not only dramatising domestic sexuality but by televising it. Further, The Lover’s set is fittingly claustrophobic for a play centered around the intimacies of marriage, whereas The Collection’s set is merely cluttered. In particular, the former’s horizontally-split stage into a clearly-defined bedroom and living-room successfully represents the territories assigned to the wife as she plays the parts of her husband’s spouse and her husband’s mistress.

Despite the faults of these performances, Pinter’s skill in crafting perfectly formed one-act sketches is well expressed. The theme of struggles for sexual dominance and the roles that fantasy and mystery play is central to these plays and they therefore provide an important basis for exploring his later, better-known plays such as The Homecoming and Betrayal. However, as these stage productions show, the plays are best left to the context of television for which they were originally intended.

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Georgina Hill reviews Speed-the-Plow at The Old Vic

On the surface Speed-the-Plow depicts a film producer’s struggle with the perennial conundrum of art or money. But in this recent production directed by Matthew Warchus this question becomes secondary to an exposition of a male relationship, and how this is configured when one is consumed with self-doubt and a desire to be ‘liked’.

Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum are excellent as the two film producers, and their inherent movie fame provides a neat irony, in that they too have been complicit in the Hollywood whirlwind. Spacey’s ‘Fox’ is presented in the first act as hyperactive, on coke, demanding coffee, bouncing around Gould’s (Goldblum) office. By contrast, Gould is easy with himself, excited, but relatively in control. The set in which their dynamic is revealed is authentically ‘Hollywood’, with a huge, modern desk, wooden floorboards, lights which resemble lighting equipment in films, glass blocks, and the obligatory brown leather sofa. The set also conveys Gould’s status as having only just arrived, since a step-ladder and paints are placed around the office; there are moving boxes; and the large poster for the wall is not hung. It implies that Gould’s success might be transitory and dependent on his next move: whether that be in favour of art or money.

This is not a real question for the producer since the option for ‘art’, a novel adapted to film about radiation and the end of the world is evidently dire and no match for a block-buster ‘prison movie’. Additionally, the proponent of ‘art’, Karen, Gould’s assistant is so unconvincing, not to mention slightly irritating that it seems impossible that she could win. It is hard to discern whether Laura Michelle Williams is merely reacting to an under-written part, or whether she is not up to the standard of Spacey and Goldblum. Her faux-American accent is grating and she is inconceivably, a real hustler, sleeping her way to the top.

Karen though, is a perfect foil for Goldblum’s acting abilities, which are consummately comedic. His lolling gait as he walks over to seduce her in his office is very funny, as too is the way he plumps cushions behind her in order to prepare for sexual consummation while she is talking earnestly about ‘truth’. Fox does not take her seriously either, scoffing at her noble ambitions. The men, in contrast to the simpering woman are, despite being not entirely wholesome, full of humour and excitement. This is the way the male partnership overtakes the philosophical question.

The final act in which Fox and Gould physically and verbally fight, sees a reversal of roles with Fox now in the authority chair, trying to get Gould back on side. That he succeeds is nigh on inevitable and achieves a strangely satisfying effect; you end up plumping for the money argument to win because the two men together is the better, and extremely entertaining, couple.

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Will Bowers on Martin Amis's The Second Plane

Amis’s sixth, and much publicised, collection of essays The Second Plane is concerned with the ramifications of the September Eleventh attacks on politics and literature.

The volume is chronological, beginning with an article published in The Guardian a week after 9/11 which gives Amis’s first reaction to the tragedy. Half a decade after the event this first essay provides an emotive reawakening of the atrocity through its concentrated style and its refusal to look for rational explanations. Constructions like ‘the bile of its atrocious ingenuity’ and a provoking reference to De Lillo’s ‘world hum’ being ‘as audible as Tinnitus’ show Amis’s prose artistry and grasp of literature are suitable for the subject. He focuses on the need for an America revaluation of its own self image, rather than the middle-east, and for an understanding of Islam.

With this in mind, are the liberal press and Terry Eagleton wrong to chastise Amis for his journalistic output concerning 9/11? In short, no. The first essay is the exception to a volume which only occasionally shows Amis’s unique ability to craft written English and is for the most part a poor diatribe on Islamism. The central essay of the collection ‘Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind’ and the smaller ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’ flitter between interesting debates on literary theory, Amis’s dull ponderings on writer’s block and badly researched critique of Islamism.

Amis desperately tries to consolidate the disparate threads of literary theory and extremist Islam, but to no avail. When he begins to be engaging on the fall of Leavisism in ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’ he insists on relating it to Osama bin Laden, who throughout the collection he seems just as obsessed with as the average mujahid. Later, in ‘The Wrong War’, Amis highlights the similarities between Saudi-Arabia and Texas: ‘great heat, oil wealth, brimming houses of worship, and weekly executions’. This witty insight is undercut by Amis’s stagnant polemic on nuclear weapons and a scrappy comparison of Islamism and National Socialism two paragraphs later.

The short stories in the collection, where one would expect a novelist of Amis’s talent to excel, offer no respite. A colloquial idiom which seems suitable in Amis’s earlier western-based fiction seems staged in ‘In the Palace of the End’, and echoes the clunky mysticism of a Paul Coelho novel. Amis also seems hypocritical in criticising the film United 93 in an early essay for ‘artistry’ of such a major event, and then providing a fictional monologue of a suicide pilot in ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ nearer the end of the volume.

Amis’s fiction is truly remarkable when writing about his own environment (in Money or London Fields) just as his non-fiction thrives on subjects (like Updike and Nabokov in The War Against Cliché ) in which he has a level of expertise. In this volume he is at his worst, because of his lack of cultural experience and intellectual knowledge on the subjects of global terrorism and Islam, which make this collection appear a droll publicity stunt by a once great writer.

Martin Amis - The Second Plane is published by Jonathan Cape in hardback at £12.99. A paperback edition will be released on 1st January 2009.

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Geirmund Knutsen reviews In the Valley of Elah

Regardless of which connotation Paul Haggis aims for with In the Valley of Elah, his slingshot misses its target.

Paul Haggis’ latest offering, In the Valley of Elah, follows a string of ambitious narratives attempting to talk the American psyche out of it’s post-9/11 neurosis. The multi-cultural awareness vehicle Crash won Haggis a best motion picture at the 2006 Oscars; the historical double-apology Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima reconfigured patriotism a little with the near-insignificant revelation that public relations matter even in the time of war; In the Valley of Elah is a soul-searching critique of recent US foreign policy ventures in Iraq through the effects felt at home.

Based on true events, the story follows a father’s (Tommy Lee Jones as Hank Deerfield) search for his soldier son who has gone AWOL since his return from a period in Iraq. The search soon becomes an investigation into his murder when the son’s charred remains are found on military grounds. Well, in fact, the actual murder took place on public property before the body was moved, as is established by the ex-military policeman Deerfield when he is shown the crime scene by the good Samaritan Detective Sanders (Charlize Theron). This allows the distractingly pretty Sanders to muscle the investigation back from the jurisdiction of the military, through a number of implausible encounters, providing the definitive low-points of the film. The redeeming feature is perhaps the banality of the murder, which was seemingly a random event among friends, rather than the often-used conspiratorial military cover-up. This turn of events allows the viewer to accept that the effects of war are terrible, without apportioning blame on war’s tools, and spurs him or her on to seek an understanding at a more fundamental level. Such a sense of inquisitive liberation is, however, brief, and comes to an end when a ragged US flag is hoisted upside-down in the final scene, signalling distress at a national level.

In the Valley of Elah is not a bad film; it is simply a disappointing use of three former Academy Award winners, where the value of Susan Sarandon’s part starts and stops with her impressive real-life affiliation with anti-war activism, Theron’s talent is drowned by her looks in a part which requires a ‘nobody’ detective for it to be believable, and the presence of both Lee Jones and Josh Brolin in another ‘outback’ setting begs the question whether the budgets and locations for this and No Country For Old Men were somehow conjoined. Further, this dreary story with a somewhat condescending message to its audience, adds to the growing genre of post-9/11 reflections, which is itself beginning to have a tangible effect on the world. Such an effect is evidenced in several arenas, one of which is academia where UCL now offers a ‘post-9/11 literature’ module in English. Many literary topics have come and gone since the inception of English as a study, and very few are deserved of a permanent place in the field. Although the introduction of this module is hardly a result of Haggis’ work, his films help to condition our minds into accepting the presupposition that the world has been different since that morning.

In the Valley of Elah is available now on DVD at £19.99.

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Georgina Hill reviews Harold Pinter's The Homecoming at the Almeida Theatre

Michael Attenborough’s production of The Homecoming places emphasis on the disjointedness of the family of Pinter’s script.

The ochre-set with chairs placed in a crescent shape each have a gap between them symbolic of the family’s separateness. The acting, as well, demonstrates the disjunction between the inhabitants. Max, played by Kenneth Cranham, adeptly portrays himself as the patriarch of the household and practitioner of verbal, and probably, physical, violence. His longer pieces of dialogue often erupt into vicious, hissing speech where the meaning of the lines becomes obscured by his anger. He also effectively conveys a sense of his own dissolution, by wistful or self-reflexive looks out to the audience during pauses. Lenny his son (Nigel Lindsay) is also well-acted as a London wide-boy: he is both natural and able to produce comedic effects.

Teddy and Ruth, visitors to the household, despite not living in the house convey their own personal disparity. When they enter they do not seem united in their stance, and their acting serves to demonstrate their underlying antipathy to one another. This is compounded by the introduction of Lenny to Ruth; they have an immediate frisson suggesting Ruth’s marriage is not all that stable.

Sam, Max’s brother (Anthony O’Donnell) is the only character with real compassion: his allusions to Max’s late wife are drawn out by the actor to achieve a sense of his personal and unresolved love of her. He has real dignity and an air of frustration amidst this dysfunctional household.

In Act Two, the action becomes more bizarre with Ruth’s embrace of Lenny and then his brother, Joey. The rendering of the scene is balletic almost: they embark on a kind of sexual dance. This sets about the reconfiguring of the masculine home: Ruth (Jenny Jules) ends up taking control of the men and demanding what she likes. Teddy is left to return home to America and Ruth takes her place in the central arm-chair. Attenborough leads us to see Ruth as the new dominant figure of the London household with the men all positioned towards her at the end.

This is certainly an ambiguous play: one wonders how Ruth can decide that living in this disjointed home is better than her old life; and also how the men can choose to share her. Jenny Jules as Ruth is distinctly cool and detached in her part, but at times this is too much; with all that occurs one imagines she might show more ambivalence to her situation. Her curling grin in the last moment of the play shows an unexpected pleasure in her new world. Read more

Will Shutes reviews Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and his Work, Volume One: The Young Genius, 1885-1920

As A. David Moody admits, it is not easy to write about Ezra Pound. He left a huge output of prose, poetry and, especially, letters, in which he is given to extensive self-fashioning. The pictures he paints of himself are at loggerheads with each other, and with the descriptions of him by others, which themselves are often self-contradictory. William Carlos Williams, a close friend, good-humouredly thought him ‘Artificial,’ for example. If Pound’s character is not always obvious to understand, then his poetry is more or less never obvious.

Yet it is the link between the man and his work, as suggested by the title, which Moody uses as his “key” to crack the Pound code. As such, this is the first critical biography of Pound, and it is invaluable. It becomes clear that to understand Pound, one must read his character alongside his writings. He would have agreed. Leaving America for London, via Venice, Pound wanted to be known strictly as a poet (rather than as a man who writes poetry). His voice, according to Moody in a discussion of the 1908 collection A Quinzaine for this Yule, was ‘a voice of pure poetry.’ At times, mainly in his early life, Pound’s affecting and infectious enthusiasm for poetry was not balanced by an unreservedly happy social life. Pound said, ‘I don’t suppose anyone can live in books steadily & not get grouched occasionally.’

To chart the development of Pound is to chart the invention of Modernism, for want of better terms. His aim, to become by living in books a flawless artist, was achieved (if we allow the idea of flawlessness). Not merely a book about Pound, then, Moody presents a panorama of the main proponents of Modernism, as well as its lesser-known precursors. Describing Pound’s successful search for Yeats and, later, Joyce, Moody enlivens the interactions which would go on to form modern literature. It is undeniable that Pound was not only at the centre of it all, but the centre itself. For example, he founded Imagism (although, as Moody recognises, this is debated), and experimented with Vorticism. Some people go so far as to say that Pound was co-writer, by being editor, of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the exemplary Modernist poem. In any case, it can be argued that Pound made it a Modernist poem. Without reservation, Moody credits him as being the most important exponent during this period of vers libre, ‘disturbing the established order’ as he did throughout his life.
Pound’s revolutionary drive, linking his early aesthetic and the epic Cantos, was, in Moody’s words, ‘to set a strong dream at the heart of the everyday world.’ In London it soon became clear to Pound that this would involve injecting American energies into old world, European civilization, and indeed Europe was to Americans the locus fo culture. Developments around this theme are to a great extent the story of Modernism, and will appear in Volume Two of this study. This will be indispensable, and Volume One, ending with Pound bidding farewell to London for Paris, is enticing, a beginning in itself.

This is both literary criticism and a biography of human comedy and tragedy. The latter of course will be the defining feature of Volume Two due to Pound’s subsequent politics. Moody has an understated and moving capacity of earning sympathy for Pound through simple stating of sadness. For example, Pound ‘was perceived by his classmates as having little to do with them. For his birthday, 30 October 1904, he took himself to Il Trovatore in nearby Utica.’ Pound had to work to find fame, defeating his loneliness in London to know, surely without exception, everyone literary of the period whom one might talk about. This is to some extent the overriding narrative of the book.

In one of his many important dicta, Pound announced that ‘Literature is news that stays news’, and really the great achievement of this book is its animation of the man and of his effect on the literary scene, making them news again. The tone is at once informative, anecdotal, serious, literary critical, and always enjoyably readable. Moody makes Pound and his world vibrantly current. After all, Pound, indulging from early on in Celtic and Romance languages and literature in a foreshadowing of his and Eliot’s use of allusion, believed that the ‘old gods’ of literature are current, that their ideas, expressed in poetry, were “indestructible”. Pound, perhaps in some cases more referred to than read, is here an old god made current, fuelling the idea that the aims and causes of Modernism are not irrelevant today. Pound is, then, not old, and after all, if poetry, as T. S. Eliot ordered, must be ‘difficult’, why would it have become “easy” since then?

Ezra Pound: Poet: The Young Genius 1885-1920 v. 1 is published by Oxford University Press at £25.0

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Ashley Mak sees the Unseen: Guy Bourdin at Phillips de Pury & Company

Last November, as a friend and I wandered through an exhibition of unseen Guy works, the image of Veronica Corningstone in a Lucozade coloured skirt-suit bubbled into the brain. 

For that small percentage of college-age readers who are unacquainted with the quagmire of farce that is Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Ms Corningstone is the feisty lady reporter who falls for, yet usurps, the lead news anchor of a gloriously chauvinistic television network in seventies America. A pastiche of every brilliant alpha female of the era, she could be seen rolling her eyes at workplace phallocentricity, while having glossy, glossy hair. As all-woman Veronica, we can thank Christina Applegate for not only providing the pretty, but also for the percussive perfection with which she delivers the line, “Mr Harken, this city needs its news. You’re going to deprive them of that because I have breasts?. . Exquisite breasts?” Corningstone’s ambitions, frustrations, and unapologetic sexual self-esteem are here all at once betrayed - she can see no good reason for being denied, fundamentally speaking, her only misstep was to be born something other than male, with inevitably different bits. Bits which happen to be exquisite. End. And so we return to Parisian photographer Guy Bourdin, who undeniably took a similar interest in such female charms.

As in Anchorman, breasts in Bourdin’s work are presented as a badge of total femininity as well as the inevitable symbolic target for masculine belittlement, and it is often up to the viewer to decide which of the two they are witnessing. For interpretations of Bourdin’s portrayals of the feminine body can swing all too easily from disturbed – he persistently alludes to violation, objectification and disaffection - to delicate, sometimes exquisite. Consider for example the photograph of eerily pale breasts framed precisely by a deep-emerald and scarlet bedsheet. Is the woman beneath that sheet being depicted with a revering tenderness? Or does the impossibility of seeing her face (even if her head were uncovered, it would be out of frame) insinuate the insignificance of her identity; imply that her sex is the only thing the viewer will ever need? It isn’t in Bourdin’s nature to tell us - his photography takes no interest in obvious polemic, and making judgments of our own is close to futile when images such as these are to be found alongside Bourdin’s more austere work; such as the black and white photograph of (male) hands cradling the ribcage of another bare-chested woman. In the extreme close-up of this image, in the slight wide angle distortion that thrusts the powdery expanse of the woman’s sternum toward the viewer, there is an unexpected intimacy and dignity so unlike Bourdin’s more iconic images of jewel-toned, Jessica Rabbit lascivity.

Those images could too be found in this exhibition – abundantly. Held by Philips de Pury & Co, the selection housed at Victoria House last November comprised not only private stills, but pieces from Bourdin’s print advertising campaigns and vast fashion editorial work. Noses will wrinkle at the mention of fashion - but to dismiss Bourdin as mercenary happy-snapper is to underestimate the influence his images hold over modern visual culture. Much in the same way that Richard Avedon and Irving Penn transcended the commercial motivations of their careers to be recognised as inimitable artists, Bourdin consistently darted between consumerism and high art to finish atop a satisfying body of work with as much emotive clout and technical integrity as that of Salvador Dali or Man Ray. Bourdin, who died in 1991 aged sixty-two, is also credited with encapsulating the gleaming, hedonistic allure of the seventies and eighties, his red-lipped ladies echoic of Jerry Hall in a barely-decent jersey dress, stalking out of Studio 54. Without conceit nor vanity (in the 22 years of his collaboration with Vogue Paris, he never allowed his photograph to appear on the contributors’ page), Bourdin condescended to fashion to produce double-page spreads, calendars, and advertising campaigns for such labels as Ungaro, Gianfranco Ferré and Charles Jourdan that were as memorable as they were masterful. So memorable in fact, that that pop-culture plagiariser Madonna deemed several of his images worthy of appropriation for her ‘Hollywood’ music video in 2003. That Bourdin’s unique formalist/surrealist style was enough to garner him the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1985, and would translate nearly two decades later to 21st century mass media, demonstrates his knack for straddling the high-low dichotomy. Vibrant colour, clever spatial manipulation and meticulous composition are all at work beneath Bourdin’s titillating content, which could at any time reference pulp fiction, B-movie storylines, and fetish culture. It’s no wonder that his high-impact imagery - incorporating crotch shots, below-waist nudity, girl-on-girl etc- has become a kind of shorthand for modern sexual expression, especially for our attention deficient generation with its anything goes attitude.

But this isn’t done vulgarly, Bourdin’s images are a far cry from today’s porn-ified media in which breasts are promoted as blunt objects to bludgeon the buying public into arousal. For all the accusations of being too provocative – his photographs for Vogue would often result in angry letters and cancelled subscriptions - Bourdin was never unthinking in his depictions of eroticism. His most perverse tableaux are at the same time highly conceptual, to the point where it can come as a surprise that they were intended for the vapid showcasing of clothes, accessories and make-up. In any case, these photographed taboos are presented in such a manner that the responses they stir say more about us, than they tell of him. At the Victoria House exhibition we faced one editorial piece of a reclined woman, naked except for a black lace panties and a fishnet body stocking, her head cropped out of view, with a handheld mirror on top of her crotch. What was most disconcerting wasn’t the voyeuristic position that we suddenly found ourselves in, but the fact that the mirror reflected another woman’s face. The device provoked confusion, our pseudo-feminist wrath, and an admiration that such placement was achieved in a time untainted by Photoshop. Yet the narrative of the photograph will remain purposefully obscure. Bourdin could be reproaching the smut-minded by interrupting the immediate stare towards the vagina with the face of a real woman. Otherwise he may be enacting the objectification of women by cynically dividing his subject into components of sexual desire: breast, thighs, privates, with the face only secondary in importance. All we can be sure of is that half the fun is in the speculation.

Supposedly one of the reasons why Bourdin embraced fashion photography was its perishable nature, that it is cyclically consumed and disposed with each publication: he felt it intensified the mystery of his work, ensured that whatever understanding his audience had gained would be fleeting. He might consider it a failure then, that upon viewing his images we are so intrigued and viscerally stunned, that they linger in the mind for a long time following.

For more information Guy Bourdin by Alison Gingeras is published by Phaidon at £14.95. Read more