From Quantum of Solace to Sherlock Holmes

The novels of Ian Fleming have been around for a very long time. James Bond has been given life in so many forms and with so many different actors that is might be fair to suggest that the films (and Fleming’s novels) are among a small number of foundational stories that say a great deal about our culture and values. I will not dwell on this point. Suffice to say, that my viewing of Quantum of Solace, the latest Bond was profoundly influenced by what I have just said. The key metaphor that I want to draw from the film is the balance between fallibility and infallibility that is at the heart of Bond’s attraction as a hero. In an era characterized by the never-ending presence of terrorism, war and violence against innocent civilians, there were two moments in this film that said more to me than the entire film itself. The first came after an endless chase between Bond and a villain which led both men into an open-air arena with thousands of people attending a horse race. The villain fires his gun at Bond and hits a civilian. The film pauses for a backward glance and then returns to the chase.

This raises some important questions. We witness the injured woman falling and so the film feels morally inclined to show the effects of the villain’s violence and ineptitude. But, should Bond not have stopped to help her out? Aren’t heros supposed to be capable of engineering a good outcome to everything that they do? Is the new Bond of the last few films and especially this one really a tragic hero? And, is the death of a civilian merely one part of that tragedy? The answer to these questions can be found in the ways in which justice is defined not only within the film, but within our culture as a whole. In Bond’s world (and among many contemporary movies), the roots of evil are always encapsulated within a broader context of conspiracies driven by megalomania, the desire for absolute power and greed. The overarching goal therefore has to be to destroy the source of evil even if the innocent have to suffer. The villain is more important than the injured woman and what would otherwise be a moral conundrum becomes a passing moment in an endless battle.

The second characteristic of the film that is of interest to me is the way in which Bond escapes all injury during a series of spectacular encounters between himself and the seemingly endless world of evil. Every form of transportation is used to highlight his superhuman abilities and most of his encounters mirror previous challenges in previous films. The film tries to create a sense of potential weakness in his abilities and in the confidence that his boss “M” has in his character. This is all a charade of course, because he would not be Bond if he did not triumph. The ebb and flow between his weaknesses and his strengths opens up a small window for some discussion of the ethics of his violence but this too is no more than a plot vehicle. In the end, Bond triumphs notwithstanding his own lack of a moral framework for his actions.

This is of course the central challenge of the war on terror, itself a metaphorically terrifying and deeply contingent way of solving issues of far greater complexity than the term ‘war’ suggests. So, it was not a surprise to me to recognize that the new Sherlock Holmes film was really a meditation on absolute power, fear of new technologies and on the role of magic and religion in determining people’s actions. Yet again, Sherlock played by Robert Downey seems to evade every form of violence directed his way. He transcends, as in the comic books, every challenge he faces including a series of dockside explosions that throw him all over the place. So, although the war on terror is very much about our general fragility and vulnerability, we have new and recycled heros who are able to withstand whatever is thrown at them. The irony is that the moral centre that is needed to progressively engage with violence has shifted as terrorists have targeted more and more civilians through their most powerful weapon, suicide bombing. Very few contemporary films deal with this issue nor do they explore the issues of inflicting pain on suspects or perpetrators. Torture is present in both films but without much fanfare and even less concern for its implications. The reality is that for better or worse, the moral fibre of contemporary culture is being challenged by events that seem even less rational (if that is possible) than just a few years ago. The challenge is how to bring this theme into the foreground of popular forms of storytelling.

Up In The Air with Avatar

"Being in the air is the last refuge for those that wish to be alone." Jason Reitman) There are profound connections between Avatar and Up in the Air. Both movies come at a time that can best be described as dystopic. From Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries mired in war to the deepest and most serious recession since the 1930's, to the ongoing crisis of climate change, the first decade of the 21st Century has been characterized by waves of loss, violence and instability.

What then allows any individual to compose their identity and to maintain their sense of self as the air around the planet gets thinner and thinner? How does the imagination work within a dystopia?

Up in the Air explores the tropes of loneliness and travel -- the in-between of airports and hotels, those places that are not places but nevertheless retain many of the trappings of home without the same responsibilities and challenges. There are consequences to being on the road 300 days of the year and among them is the construction of an artificial universe to live in like the metal tubes we describe as airplanes. One of the other consequences is that frequent travelers have to build imaginary lives that are fundamentally disconnected from intimacy and genuine conversation.

Ironically, Avatar imagines a world that is for a time dragged into the dystopia of 21st century life and where at the end of the day, a new vision is constructed. Avatar's use of 3D will be the subject of another article soon, but suffice to say that the worlds James Cameron constructs through motion capture and animation are among the most beautiful that the cinema has ever seen.

Hidden behind both films is a plaintiff plea for love and genuine relationships. Avatar explores this through tales of transmigrating spirits and animistic notions that transform animals and nature itself into a vast Gaia-like system of communications and interaction. The N'avi are a synthesis of Cameron's rather superficial understanding of Aboriginal peoples, although their language is a fascinating blend created by Paul Frommer from the University of Southern California.

The flesh of avatars in the film are not virtual but as the main character, Jake Sully discovers, the N'avi are the true inheritors of the planet they live on, a exotic version of early Earth called Pandora. In Greek mythology Pandora is actually derived from 'nav' and was the first woman. The Pandora myth asks the question why there is evil in the world which is a central thematic of Avatar.

Up in the Air asks the same question but from the perspective of a rapacious corporation which sends its employees out to fire people for other companies or as the main character, Ryan Bingham says to save weak managers from the tasks for which they were hired. The film also asks why there is evil in the world and suggests that any escape, even the one that sees you flying all year doesn't lead to salvation.

Both films explore the loss of meaning, morality and principles in worlds both real and unreal. Avatar provides the simplest solution, migrate from a humanoid body and spirit to a N'avi to discover not only who you are but how to live in the world. **Up in the Air** suggests that love will solve the dystopic only to discover that casual relationships never lead to truth and friendship.

These are 21st century morality tales. Avatar is a semi-religious film of conversion not so much to truth but to the true God, who is now a mother. Up in the Air teaches Ryan that life is never complete when it is entirely an imaginary construction.

It is however, the reanimation of the human body in Avatar that is the most interesting reflection of the challenges of overcoming the impact of this first decade of the 21st century. Jake Sully is able to transcend his wheelchair and become another being, now connected to a tribe. He is able to return to a period of life when innocence and naivete enable and empower — when the wonders of living can be experienced without the mediations of history and loss. This of course is also the promise of 3D technology, to reanimate images such that they reach into the spectator's body, so we can share those moments as if we have transcended the limitations of our corporeal selves.

James Cameron's digital utopia, full of exotic colours, people, plants and animals suggests that escape is possible in much the same way as Ryan Bingham imagines a world without the constraints that are its very essence. 3D technology promises to allow us to transcend our conventional notions of space and time but it cannot bring the earth back to its pristine form nor reverse engineer evolution or history. At the same time, Avatar represent a shift in the way in which images are created, in the ways in which we watch them and also in the potential to think differently about our imaginations and about our future. (Imagine a 3D film about the destruction of the Amazon!)

Ray Tintori and the new Video

This video is about the making of Time to Pretend by Ray Tintori who is now collaborating with Spike Jonze. The video was made very cheaply and represents the convergence of low-end special effects, video editing using a computer and Youtube as a broadcast medium. Time to Pretend has had close to fourteen million hits.

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

Jay Hoberman, the Village Voice's best reviewer and one of the top film critics in the world is one of a few who have understood and richly analysed this extraordinary film. Inglourious Basterds is not only a classic Tarantino comment upon and play with cinema history, its archetypes, conventions and clichés, it is also and quite ironically a Jewish revenge fantasy. Hoberman comments that filmmakers like Steven Speilberg exercise their will over history by mixing realism and fiction with enough balance to keep audiences believing that truth will eventually win over lies and deceit. At a minimum, Schindler's List will tell the story even if the artifice is an extreme and necessary part of building the drama.

However, Tarantino revels in the contradictions of artifice and loves the multi-faceted ways in which the cinema unveils truth even as it hides it. Tarantino is at least honest about the impact of genre, style and set design upon any cinematic historical reconstruction. The opening of the film, one of the best in recent memory, celebrates not only the cinema of Sergio Leone, but also and more importantly the language of violence and the violence of language. There are always many sides to violence in the cinema. More importantly, violence is inevitably the most artificial part. Both the audience and the filmmaker know that the violence is not real. What they often do not realize is that the language surrounding that violence does more harm than the images.

For example, is there any word in the English language more devalued and yet more often used than 'Nazi'? Although historically specific, it has become a metaphor for violence of all types and a trope for genocide. The smooth talking Nazis of this film use talk to hide their murderous intentions even as they are about to die. They seem cultured but are always on the edge of violence. The key Nazi character, Hans Landa (wonderfully played by Christoph Waltz) plays both criminal and detective, gunslinger and murderer.

Much of the film centres on a cinema in Paris and on the showing of a film that celebrates the hundreds of people killed by a sniper who plays himself. The setting is taken from Le Dernier Metro the film by François Truffaut with further references to his later film, La Nuit Americaine.

Can you name a film in which Hitler dies or is murdered? Can you remember a film in which the entire high command of the Nazis dies?

The reason that so few films that deal with the Second World War allow themselves the poetic license to kill the perpetrators of the Holocaust is that for better or worse stories of victimization seem to fulfill the need to represent history in a truthful fashion. But, of course, as we know, it has been left to people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejhad to create and communicate their fictional universes. Ahmadinejhad and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are perhaps the best example of how fiction can be made into truth with a variety of effects that can actually change history itself. Everyone knows that the Protocols are a lie, but that has not prevented their continuous dissemination since the early part of the 20th Century and their most recent appearance on Egyptian television.

Tarantino knows all of this and has created a film that reflects in a serious manner on what would have happened if Western culture had recreated the many stories of the war in a different manner. And, he also understands that representations of the war need to reference the genres they use, otherwise they actually reinforce the picture of oppression as inevitable.

The film is as much an exploration of loyalty and betrayal as it is a brilliant piece of research into the underlying premises for nearly every war movie that has ever been made. Add to this, a further exploration of the Western genre as the prototypical example of how Americans view their own history and one realizes that Tarantino has created precisely the story we need to see. In the end, it is a Jewish woman (the only survivor of her family's murder) and a black man who willingly sacrifice their lives to kill the German high command.

Ella Taylor has a wonderful interview with Tarantino here…

David Edelstein has an interesting review here from New York Magazine.

A very negative review by Liel Liebovtiz can be read here.

And, if you can read French, here is a great interview from Cahiers du Cinéma

Create your own reputation

There has been a great deal of discussion recently about the many new ways in which aspiring cultural creators can find audiences and also make a living in in the notoriously challenging fields of film and television. "Here is the new way: filmmakers doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears." Michael Cieply The animation film KHODA by Reza Dolatabadi, below is an excellent example of this new approach to creation and distribution.

My graduation film Khoda.

Pause this film and you will see a painting. This idea inspired Reza Dolatabadi to make Khoda. Over 6000 paintings were painstakingly produced during two years to create a five minute film.