“Writing Matters. Writing always matters”: considering the recent Robert Florence controversy

Although I have no real knowledge of contemporary video games, I’ve been reading with interest about the scandal which has affected Scottish comedian Robert Florence over the past few days, and his reaction to it. Florence writes a column for Eurogamer, and his most recent one looked at a picture of another, fully professional,* games journalist Geoff Keighley sitting beside a table of Mountain Dew and Doritos, and in front of a promo poster for Halo 4. Here is a writer indulging in shameless promotion for the same product he should be critiquing, as well as stuffing his face with garish manufactured foods, as well as the profits of these foods. 

 

Later Florence brings up an example of professional games journalists happily entering a Twitter competition to win a PS3, a competition which involved tweeting about certain games using a certain hashtag. An argument broke out between various writers arguing over whether it was acceptable for people in their profession to enter, and win, these competitions. Two who defended it are named as Lauren Wainwright and Dave Cook (again, I know little about gaming, and I’ve never heard of these two, so I’m quite out of my depth in this way. I only know Robert Florence from his excellent comedy Burniston, which you should definitely watch).

In his article Florence criticises Cook’s response: that a hashtag is not an advert. Which it is, hence why companies pay for sponsored hashtags to trend on Twitter, and companies give away PS3s to people to use their hashtag. Florence also wrote that, after reading Wainwright’s tweets defending this kind of corporate relationship with journalists he was unable to take any sentiments she had about gaming seriously.

This is where everything got out of hand. Enter scandal.

Lauren Wainwright complained the article was libellous, and Eurogamer pulled it. The article, which you can still read in full here, contains nothing libellous, certainly not that I can see. Wainwright is not even Florence’s target, as he takes care to note. His problem is with the system that binds together journalists and corporate PR men. Wainright, Cook and Keighley just happened to enter his field of view at this time. As he says, any other day and it could have been two different journalists. Had it happened even a day later it would not even had made it into his article.

In the first half of the article Florence also tackles the problem of the Games Media Awards, where the PR men of the games industry converge with the writers of the games industry to drink and slap backs. He says:

The GMAs shouldn’t exist. By rights, that room should be full of people who feel uncomfortable in each other’s company. PR people should be looking at games journos and thinking “That person makes my job very challenging.” Why are they all best buddies? What the hell is going on?

On the first read I thought that Florence was making a crass joke about gamers being socially awkward. He’s a better writer than this, obviously, and his greater point, and the point of this article, is that these people shouldn’t be friends, not because of personalities, but because of their jobs. The writers are ‘journalists’. They are intended to be separate from the industry, of which these PR men are very much a part. This fault line should run through all industries. It is expected that politics journalists should stand outside the political world, shining a light into the dimly-light rooms of power and showing the results to the wider world. This should be replicated at all levels of journalism, down to ones which are regarded as the least important, like film and games.

But it’s not the case. As Robert Florence points out in both of the articles I’ve linked to above, journalists and industry men mingle. It benefits both sides, in the short term – journos get rewarded with prizes and exclusives, the PR and marketing men get some help to shift their product, be it a new Michael Bay movie, JLS album, or Call of Duty. In the long term, however, the reputation of the writers are sullied – they are not longer proper journalists, but mouthpieces for companies. They are the new PR men, albeit on likely much lower salaries. The marketing guys, they continue as usual, moving from product to product. It matters not to them.

How does wrong-doing become institutionalised? The police force is institutionally racist not because it is comprised entirely of racists (they’re not, probably). What happens is that the racism of some is overlooked and accepted by those who may be non-racists. A bond is created where racist is accepted. Managers and bosses, who could use their rank to do something in fact do nothing, either because they do not want to risk a mutiny from their troops. New officers join a police force in which racism has been normalised, and the need to conform and fit into a group which may be hostile to newcomers means that they to turn a blind eye. And so it continues, wasting the lives of black and Asian youths with impunity. With the Savile investigation widening by the day, institutionalised child abuse and victim shaming may well be revealed. It will have come about in the same way, with the opinion formers (popular or high ranking police officers in the first example, celebrities and producers in the second) leading the way.

The examples are not on the same scale as writing about games from freebies, but the method is the same - the system adopts a method, the method becomes the system. It becomes so ingrained that to separate the two becomes impossible, and the system, the industry, or the professional, must be torn down and rebuilt, forever noting the lessons of the old.

I made a similar point about football earlier on this blog, and, of course, this is rather drastic. You may ask - is it even worth it for writing reviews of films or games or music? Florence tackles this as well. He said in his reply in the aftermath of the scandal that what he was saying was about writing and journalism on a wider scale, not a positive review of Fifa 13. I touched on this earlier. Writing 'always matters' he says, and it does. It definitely does. Again: journalists are how we mediate the wider world. They channel real life events into news, which is how the vast majority of us consume these events. You may say that writing about music does not matter, but what if every journalist wrote an article about how much of a cock Chris Brown is? Not just the rock/indie critics who hated his music anyway, and have fun with how creative they can get obliterating his album. I people who write about pop music, who's writing is actually read by the fans of Chris Brown.

The fact that Chris Brown attacked his girlfriend and showed no remorse for it would concern no one outside their immediate circle of friends, were Chris Brown and Rihanna not hugely influential and opinion forming for millions of young people. What does it tell pre-teens and teenagers, who are going through a formative stage of their lives, especially where relationships are concerned, that a man can attack his partner, and he will be forgiven, and continue to be successful? The reason Chris Brown continues to be successful is that he receives backing from a music industry with no moral compass, and is not repeatedly slaughtered in the pop press for what he did. Because, ultimately, these pop journalists are part of the same music industry. They continue to support the career of a vile man they could, and should, have ditched ages ago. But Brown turned a profit, something that is increasingly difficult to come by nowadays. Ditch him and you have to find some new singer to mould into a teenage heartthrob.

Of course, the nature of journalism does not always come down to incidents as important as this. At the root of all this is that old saying 'journalistic integrity'. Journalistic integrity is removed as soon as you step within the realm of the industry you claim to critique. As soon as you give something a positive review for a ticket to the Brit Awards. As soon as you prop up the career of a domestic abuser who happens to be a flavour of the month beloved by marketing and PR groups of record labels. As soon as you don't report a politician for wrong-doing because you have drinks together every Friday. As soon as you accept a PS3 for tweeting in support of a company. Without journalistic integrity what are we left with?

Empty words on a page. An industry not dead, but lifeless.      

  

*I use the term ‘fully professional’ here to denote a difference between Florence and Keighley, not as a slight at the former. From my perspective, Florence is a comedian with a sideline in games writing, whereas Keighley earns his wages solely from writing.

Album Review: Titus Andronicus - 'Local Business'

RATING: 8/10

How do you follow an album like The Monitor? It's an album adored by many people (me included), one of the best of the last decade. It sums up the ethos and attitude of Titus Andronicus so competely that it will always be regarded as their calling card.

The first point to make is that Local Business is not The Monitor. Nor is it simply The Monitor: Part Two. To try to top it would be foolish, so Titus Andronicus have shifted their sound to a different plane. The entire album feels less ramshackle. The songs are reined in, the band itself thinned down and refined to a core of five. Singer Patrick Stickles sounds less like he is hauling notes out of his throat from the pit his stomache, and the pace throughout is slower, like an album comprised of the first half of 'Theme From Cheers.' Overall, Titus Andronicus continue to draw from their punk rock background - when I considered this at first, I wanted to draw a comparison to The Clash recording London Calling, embracing a world of different influences as the confines of punk music dawned on them. But, despite adopting a style more suited to classic rock (there's even a hint of country rock at the start of '(I Am The) Electric Man') Titus still stay true to their roots. After all, they expanded a love of punk into a concept album about the American Civil War as a metaphor for a coming of age journey to New Jersey. The boundaries of genre perhaps do not matter here.

Punk or no punk, Stickles' lyrics continue the trend found in both The Monitor and their debut The Airing of Grievances. Albert Camus continues to linger a heavy influence ('Titus Andronicus Vs. The Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)' being a good example, with it's sole lyric of 'I am going insane'). The opening gambit of Local Business is: 

Okay, I think, by now, we've established that everything is inherantly worthless
And there is nothing in the universe with any kind of objective purpose

Later in the same song:

I heard about my authentic self - what would I say were I ever to meet him?
I guess "Yr guilty of a terrible crime, and I know it was my birth"
I'm doing twenty-six to life now on planet Earth

An obsession with Camus' Absurd prevails, but the most powerful section of the album is when Stickles addresses his eating disorder on the self-explanitory 'My Eating Disorder', (preceded by the ironic 'Food Fight!'). Detailing the 'amorphous monster' that prevents him from consuming food, he moves between the artifical medication of vitamin pills and the self-medication of cigarettes.

Again, like their previous two albums the lyrics are strong, with regular moments of genius.

Your gonna get your chance to be hung
You'll make a great gift to gracious girls
Try to swallow while your still young
That your dick's too short to fuck the world

is an early personal favourite. The only problem is that some the lyrics begin to seem lazy. Both 'Titus Andronicus Vs The Absurd Universe' and 'Food Fight!' are limited to one line each, while the album closer 'Tried To Quit Smoking' has good lines, but makes the mistake of stretching them over ten minutes which begin to drag half way through. The astonishing 'The Battle of Hampton Roads' which closes The Monitor, by comparison, runs for fourteen minutes and flies by, by virtue of cramming in as many ideas as you could find in entire albums by other bands.

And there, the main problem with Local Business raises it's head again - the spectre of The Monitor, in escapable. Simply, Local Business is on no level as good as it's predesessor. We never should have expected it to be. The trouble is not with the album, but with the expectations. As a stand-alone album, Local Business is great - as part of the wider Titus Andronicus canon, not so much.

In an interview to promote The Monitor, Patrick Stickles remarked that the Civil War battleship from which the album took his name from hung over his thoughts, and his experience with New Jersey, that The Monitor, as impressive as it was, began to cloud everything. How right he was. 

Random thoughts on: the American election

Drones

One thing that creeps up in commentaries of the election now and again is that Americans don't really care that much about foreign policy, certainly not much further than advancing American superiority. The last of the three presidential debates, held earlier this week in Florida, focused on foreign policy, and drew the smallest TV audience of them all, the bigger concern of the economy having passed by. I'm not sure whether this has always been the case, but it certainly would explain why so many atrocities carried out by America have gone unpunished by the electorate.

Obama's use of drones in Pakistan, with the aim of tackling al-Qaeda, should be the subject of endless criticism, certainly by his own party. We can expect the Republicans to endorse such measures, but the Democrats have lost any sort of moral highground they may have had. Obama supporter Joe Klein offered a stunningly vile defence of the drone tactics, heavily criticised for the indiscriminate murder of innocent people, killed because they happen to be within half a mile of a suspect (I'd imagine the term 'suspect' in this case is stretching it, slightly). Glenn Greewald offers a brilliant dissection of Klein's comments on the Guardian, but they boil down to the fact that Klein believes, among other things, that the killing of children in the Middle East could be justified if it stopped the killing of American children. Greenwald notes this is the same mentality that many terrorists have - that their killing of American children will, in turn, protect their own. He places the life of an American above that of the life of anyone else, for the sole reason that they are an American.

As I said, coming from a neocon party that also wants to ban abortion and disenfranchise Democrat voters, would be sad, but expected. In the context of the 'liberal' or 'left' side of American politics (if such a thing even exists, it is made even worse. They are the 'good guys' - now, sunk to the level of the classic villains, they have rendered themselves worthless.

Mitt Romney

Obama is lucky to go up against Mitt Romney - Romney, hides Obama's many faults by simply showing off his far greater ones. The man is an idiot, to an astonishing level.  What's even more surprising is that this is somewhat of a trend for America, which is beginning to make a habit of support morons.

With Obama hemorrhaging liberal support, and the economy still suffering, had he gone up against a strong opponent he likely would have lost. Romney is, to use the media term, 'gaffe prone', much in the same way that Larry David is. This, perhaps, is why Obama's put down in the recent debate, where he explained to Mitt that the army doesn't need horses and bayonets anymore, was so popular - people perhaps believed that Romney literally had no idea how the army worked or what it did. It furthered the idea that Obama is more effortlessly comfortable than Romney could ever be. Obama, for all his faults, always has his cool.

Implications worldwide

A recent poll found that 40% of people worldwide would like to vote in the American elections, such is the influence of the country. But would this make a difference? America is not really a democracy - America, the self-regarding superpower functions outwith the poltical sphere of the country. It continues to remove whatever democratically elected governments it feels like. It supports coups, sells weapons to dictators at a profit before claiming they are glad to see them go during the Arab Spring. It launches global campaigns against 'evils' - communism, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism etc., rampaging around the world in pursuit of vaguely defined goals of victory. It will, no matter who is elected, remain run by businesses, and will murder innocent children in pursuit of killing someone who might be a member of al-Qaeda.

The elections surrounding the American machine are nothing more than way to choose the representative of said machine.

The end of the BNP is not the end of racism

Picture taken from politicalscrapbook.net

 

Nick Griffin severed another artery of his already mortally-wounded career earlier, tweeting the private address of a gay couple who had won a ruling against the owners of a B&B who had refused them entry based on their sexuality. The original story emerged a few years ago, if I remember correctly, but the court case only wrapped up today.

 

Griffin's basis for these tweets was apparently that people should be allowed to turn away anyone they want from their house - which is a neat way of disguising your homophobia, I reckon. As is using the phrase 'heterophobia', which has afflicted literally no one in history, except those who think not being about to daub 'fag scum' on a gay neighbour's car is classed as a breach on their human rights, and a breach undertaken solely because they're not gay. To complain about being disadvantaged as a heterosexual - in the same way a person would claim to be disadvantaged because they were a white, western, Christian male - is hugely offensive to those groups who have been genuinely disadvantaged in society, and continue to be at all junctures.

 

So Griffin's career is gone, even more than it was already. His BNP party, which for all intents and purposes he embodies, has limped through a collapse in finances (it couldn't even raise enough money to stand candidates in last Scottish local council elections), in-fighting (Griffin has used party rules to solidify his standing as leader, meaning that disgruntled members leave than attempt reform) a splintering of the far-right in Britain, between both political groups and street-level protest movements, and, as a result of all three, a hemorrhaging of votes at all levels. The surge of support the party experienced as a result of Labour voters leaving their traditional party has subsided as the Tories have regained their 'hatred figures for the working class' throne.

 

The BNP, once the figurehead of the British far-right, have faded from view, and will only keep fading. It didn't even seem that long ago that Griffin was panicking the establishment and provoking swathes of though-pieces with his impending appearance on Question Time. How he sits at home, tweeting angrily into the virtual abyss like the rest of us.

 

I for one, as someone who would proudly call themselves an anti-fascist, am happy to see the BNP go. Thousands, millions of people across the country will cheer their demise, which is becoming clearer even to those with only a casual interest in politics (the initial signs of the death of the BNP came by piecing together the tabloid-style gossip articles of Hope Not Hate). However, I still feel uneasy. 

 

The BNP are not British racism as a whole. As a figurehead they essentially gave a face to the movement - a face to be egged, a face to be despised. But the demise of the BNP does not mean the demise of racism and fascism in this country. Many people who voted for the BNP were disaffected Labour voters looking for a protest vote, and the party were able to fill the void - something that the Lib Dems couldn't do, and the Tories wouldn't even bother trying to do. These people will perhaps not vote for them again, and may go back to Labour, which is fine.

 

But many more voted for the BNP because they genuinely hate and fear immigrants, Muslims, or homosexuals. These people require an outlet. Parties like the English Democrats, the British Freedom Party allow for this, despite their petty squabbles. More worryingly, the EDL, and it's Scottish and Welsh associates (which are, admittedly, less popular) have allowed frustrations with the slow movement of the BNP to develop into a hooligan-based street movement.

 

For example - the BNP promise a break-through at the next election. Months of campaigning follow, but they finished 5th, barely retaining their deposit. Wait another five years, they say, and we'll have another crack at it. For all that the BNP have warned of a current crisis of immigration and Sharia law, they don't seem capable of doing anything quickly.

 

Along come the EDL, which is able to hold flash-mobs just a few hours after they find out that ASDA is selling Muesli, which looks a bit like it says MUSLIM! They have a bad demonstration, they can just try again next weekend, rather than next year, or at some point within the next five. The EDL are a greater threat that the BNP ever were, mainly for this reason - they allow the mobility and physical manifestation of this hatred. We can only bless them for being a disorganised, drunken mess - had they taken on the usual neatness of fascism and all started wearing the same colour shirts the people would have got behind them years ago and the government would have fallen.

 

What has puzzled many people is why significant numbers of the electorate choose Nick Griffin and his BNP as their representatives, and, now, how they can also back the EDL, and their various off-shoots. One answer is the simplest - support for extreme politics always surges in times of economic crisis. It happened, perhaps most notably, in the Weimar Republic, where the vote of the Nazi party directly correlates with the state of the economy. Greece has experienced a rise from both sides, with SYRIZA and Golden Dawn both emerging from electoral obscurity in the past few years.

 

But the real answer is more worrying, and harder to face. The racism which manifests itself directly in the far-right comes from our society as a whole. It comes from the newspapers, like the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Sun, the Daily Star, which regularly run negative stories about asylum seekers and Muslims. These institutions would deny that they are racist, and will attack far-right groups (although the Star has, in the past, ran pro-EDL stories) they contribute to the creation of a racist hegemony. They maintain the idea of Britain as a white, Christian, straight country, and their attitude in the stories reflect this. 

 

If the only news you got about Muslims was from The Sun, and the only person you talked to about Muslims got their information from the Daily Star, the allegedly-subconsious pattern of anti-Islam stories would likely forment in your mind - especially if these people are made a scapegoat for your problems*.

 

Celebrating the death of the BNP, and perhaps soon the EDL, is good, and I surely will. But we, as a society, must not only be wary of the other groups that spring up in their place, but of racism as a whole. Racism does not only exist when manifested in a political group. It seeps into every area of society, usually hidden in plain site - on the front page of a national newspaper, for example.

 

*Just thinking aloud here (well, typing aloud, or something) but can there be any correlation between the fact that many people in post-industrialised areas live in deprivation because of the policies of Thatcher, and that the newspapers which run stories claiming that 'immigrants took all our jobs' supported Thatcher?    



 

Another rant about Gerald Warner

A while back I voice my opinions on the reactionary bigot Gerald Warner, who uses his column in the Scotland on Sunday to relentlessly warn against his narrow-minded view of 'cultural marxism'.

I'm going to do it again. Chances are, there'll be another one after this, unless Warner succumbs to a rage-induced heart attack.

Today Warner wrote about the Cuban Missile Crisis, apparently as part of his campaign to have himself seen as some kind of historic revisionist historian ('revisionist' in this case meaning 'everything that's ever happened proves the left-wing are scum').

He covers the event is standard way, working his way through the tense stand-off, noting the role that Kennedy played in stopping it tumbling into a nuclear war. Then, like a hyper-privileged Rod Sterling, Warner uses his closing act to hit us with a stunning twist:

It is fortunate our parents’ generation was willing to risk annihilation to halt Marxism in its tracks. Otherwise, today, we might be living in a society where every candidate at elections stood for the same agenda, where freedom of speech was replaced by Newspeak, where people had to consider whether they would offend the authorities by uttering certain opinions, where they could lose their jobs for being politically incorrect, where messages on social media could lead to arrest and where someone could be sent to jail for an offensive slogan on his T-shirt. When Marxism stops goose-stepping it is not dead: it is coming in by the back door.
 

Boom: it was all a dream! It was earth all along! He was talking about marxism all the time!

Now, I'm a marxist, and I don't think about marxism as much as Gerald Warner does. I didn't get a column is a national newspaper just to piss it away criticizing a political philosophy based on what I wrongly assume its tenets are. Maybe Gerald is like those Southern preachers who react so strongly to homosexuality because they're trying desperately to suppress their own sexuality? Perhaps.

That paragraph is the microcosm of Warner's politics - it basically lists everything he believes marxism stands for, and everything he complains about on a daily basis.

• 'Every candidate at elections stood for the same agenda' - these candidates, who are indeed largely saying the same thing, are doing so out of their own free will, and the free will of their party. The fact that both Labour and the Tories have effectively merged into centrist mess, joined by the soul-selling Lib Dems, has nothing to do with marxism
• 'where freedom of speech was replaced by Newspeak, where people had to consider whether they would offend the authorities by uttering certain opinions, where they could lose their jobs for being politically incorrect' - again, this 'freedom of speech' complaint is a strong theme in Warner's work. He believes, as I pointed out in the last blog, that his right to be racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic etc. overrides the right of people not to be abused in these ways, or to be oppressed by a system designed by people like Warner to benefit people like Warner.
• 'where messages on social media could lead to arrest and where someone could be sent to jail for an offensive slogan on his T-shirt'* - similar to the last point, and, again, I do not see what this has to do with marxism. From what I can gather, he sees marxism as the creation of a godless, pro-communism hegemony, and criticises it as such. This ignores the role that hegemony plays in every political ideology. Marxism does intend, as Gramsci said, to create a working class hegemony, much like how capitalism creates a ruling class hegemony - the latter defended to the death by Warner. The problem is that Warner does not seem to see the creation of a capitalist hegemony. And if he does, he has no problem with it, thus making him a hypocrite.   
• 'When Marxism stops goose-stepping it is not dead: it is coming in by the back door' - a nice outing for the old 'far-left and far-right politics are both at the extreme ends of the spectrum that the spectrum turns into a circle, or something. Whatever, both are the same thing. IT WAS CALLED THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY FOR A REASON YOU KNOW!' fallacy.

Gerald - just shut up, pal.


*Here, I assume Warner is referencing Barry Thew, who was jailed this week for wearing a shirt reading 'One Less Pig - Perfect Justice' and 'kill a cop 4fun.com ha, haaa?' [sic] the day that two police officers were shot and killed in Manchester. In this case, I am actually inclined to agree with Warner - Thew should not have been jailed. His t-shirt was offensive, but his wearing it on that day was a coinsidence - he was wearing it the day before as well. The 'one less pig' part should testify to this - surely, if he was referencing the shooting, he would have written 'two less pigs' or something similar. The media reporting of the story has also failed to mention an important fact - that Thew's son was killed by the police three years ago. I planned to make this into a longer post, but never had the time or effort required.

On Caitlin Moran and feminism

The above (taken from the STFU Moffat tumblr site, which is doing lots of good stuff) created a Twitterstorm (are they still called that) based around Caitlin Moran, who is probably the British figurehead for feminism at the moment.

For a bit of context, Moran stated that she did not care that Dunham's hit TV show Girls contains no ethnic minorities, despite being set in New York, a city with a huge variety of people of different races. I haven't actually seen Girls, as I don't think it's been shown in Britain yet, so I don't know if the 'complete and utter lack of people of colour' refers just to the main characters, or to the cast as a whole. Either way, this seems like a strange case of casting.

The main issue that people took with Moran was that she stated that she didn't care about the race inequality in the show, prompting people to argue with her. Later, in an act of self-aggrandisement that would make Ricky Gervias baulk, proceeded to personally thank everyone that defended her.

The problem with Moran's statement is that she acts as if the role of race in the media doesn't matter. It does. Everything does, in terms of the media. Moran, as a feminist, should be aware that patriarchy is spread - partially, but not totally - through the portrayal of women in the media, the prime example being the prominence of rape culture.

In the case of Girls, which was frequently labelled the successor to Sex In The City, there's a belief that it may become one of those cult shows which people will want to model their life around - there's a consensus that the growth in popularity of coffee-shop socialising in the nineties was due to Friends (Friends wasn't quite a cult show in the strictest sense of the word - it had a devoted fanbase, but the fanbase was massive. It's not cult in the way Arrested Development is.) I'd imagine that Sex In The City prompted groups of women in fours to sit in cocktail bars and talk about their sex lives. Emulating lives lead on screen is a natural extension of escapism.

But Girls (as with all the shows mentioned above, in fact) the lack of a variety of race, though subconscious, will have an effect. All the above groups are populated entirely by white people - usually middle-class white people. What does this say to people - it says that the perfect group of friends you can have are white, middle-class, cis-gendered, straight, etc.

Moran's brand of feminism - I guess you could call it 'liberal feminism' - fails to address the theory of intersectionality - that social inequality is not simply found on one plain, and that gender inequality cannot be separated from the class struggle, the civil rights movement, the fight for homosexual rights - essentially, all fields of identity can, and should be considered.

I've touched on this once before on this blog, during a post about George Galloway's 'in the sex game' comments about Julian Assange. He claims to be a socialist, but, by being a misogynist, he simply cannot be - equality, in class terms, cannot just be for men.

Many people have had objections to Moran's liberal feminism, largely critquing her massively successful book How To Be A Woman. I haven't read it, so my views of it do come from blogs which have written about it. These blogs do quote heavily from the book, and usually give as much context as it is possible to give, so hopefully I am not too far off from what Moran meant, and won't look like too much of a fool.

From what I understand Moran regularly makes jokes about woman, jokes which you'd expect to find being made by someone who reached their twenties before poltical correctness emerged.* Jokes about woman being overly emotional, or scared of spiders, or being unable to drive. Essentially, jokes which force woman into a single hegemonic grouping. Moran's use of these jokes is an extension of the point which I made above - her ignorance of the cultural hegemony which allows patriarchy to survive.

Similarly, and this a point which I don't understand, she asks for over-the-top praise of male feminists. Treating a male feminist in this way, and worshipping his body in such a way, is problematic for a number of reasons. Us men shouldn't be congratulated for being pro-feminists/feminist allies - it should be expected. Certainly, not enough men are pro-feminists, but we should not be treated as superior to female feminists for being so.

Secondly, the sexualised imageary advances the stereotype of men pretending to be feminists so that they can sleep with women. Under no circumstances should this idea be popularised, as it would build a hollow-shell feminism which would crumble as soon as the men found a new way to talk women into bed.

I don't doubt that Moran is actually a feminist, and, like the poster on STFU Moffat, think that she has done of good job of pulling feminism back into the mainsteam (slightly) and helping to remove some of the stigma attached to calling yourself a feminist (although this still has far to go). The problem is that Moran has limited this burst of feminism to a type that ignores the factors surrounding gender equality.

My belief, for what it's worth, is that patriarchy is implicit in capitalism. Capitalism reduces people to the roles exploiters and victims on all levels; the standard bourgeoisie and proletariat system; the system of imperialist nations and colonies; and, in amongst all this, the relations between men and women. Women are tasked with a vast amount of unpaid labour - raising children, looking after the family home. This idea is being erroded, slowly, but it is still commonplace. By taking apart the class system, we can remove the patriarcal aspect of society. The women's rights movement and class struggle are interlinked. I would hate for Britain for transform into a socialist state, only for women to still be subjugated.

So when we embrace feminism, we should not embrace it as a singular, isolated cause. Feminism must be used in tandem with the struggle for equality of all people. 
  

*Or, alternatively, on of those morons who think they're being clever by being willfully politically incorrect. People who think not being able to use the n-word in public is a disgrace to the concept of human rights. They can often be found saying things like 'You can't even say the word blackboard anymore!' I call this Clarkson Syndrome.

Ten Films - Part 1

This post originally started as a feature I planned to write for my college magazine. As I’ve graduated now, I imagine this will be the last time I regurgitate and reform a piece of writing that was intended for the pages of Fusion magazine first.

There was no specific reason that this wasn’t published – I asked my editor if it would be possible for me to write a brief article that broached the ‘films to see before you die’ subject. I decided to settle for ten, because it’s a round number that could fit into the space available. Any more and it would have just been a list with a sentence each for description. Right from the very start I planned it to reflect my own personal tastes, and to be open about that – the same rule applies here.

I part wrote it, but never finished it in time for my second-to-last issue (I’d been given two pages, spread over two editions) and I forgot about it in time for my final issue, due to exams and such.

Ten films is, actually, far too insignificant to cover the history of cinema. It couldn’t cover a decade, and, in a lot of cases, couldn’t cover a full year.  

But any more and it’s a mammoth task that I don’t have the energy or interest to properly devote myself to. If you do want this kind of list, you can’t do any worse than the annual ‘1001 Films To See Before You Die’ tome, which introduced me to countless great films I likely would never have heard of otherwise. Similarly, Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film is similarly expansive and, if you wish, can be treated as a reading list.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

A classic example of the minimalist, religious power that Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film channelled, The Passion of Joan of Arc is simply a beautiful film. It was Dreyer’s last silent film, one which was adapted straight from actual records of Joan of Arc’s trial. There would likely have been a temptation to make a film on this subject a huge, D.W. Griffiths-style melodrama, but Dreyer went in the complete opposite direction – much of the film is shot in extreme close-up, the screen framing Renee Falconetti’s face as she is interrogated by demonic court – who are also shot close up to emphasis their inhumanity and leering cruelty. Mark Cousins recognises these shots as what began to differentiate cinema from theatre – cinema allowed actors to move closer to the audience, or further away. Like the films of Sergei Eisenstein, The Passion of Joan of Arc helped to define cinema as a unique, special entity.

Falconetti, at the instruction of Dreyer, wore no make-up – it is as if it was removed to let the full emotion of her terrific performance get to the camera, and to further his quest for complete minimalism. The walls of the sets were painted pink to remove any glare that could be caught by the camera. Dreyer, recognising the one-off performance of Falconetti, was content to allow her to loom over the film, instantly becoming its defining characteristic. Even though it is shot in such a refined way, Dreyer still finds space for small acts of symbolism. Falconetti is frequently shown with pale light around her head, like a halo. The religious Dreyer would reprise this lighting in his later films, such as the austere Ordet.

In many ways, The Passion... is a ‘difficult’ film. Watching silent films from the 21^st century, when we are so used to dialogue, means that it can often be difficult to follow the exact nature of the plot in silent films. The Passion... is no exception – the title cards, which do carry text, are sparse compared to the amount of talking that the actors actually do on screen, leading to a sense that something is missing.* And the intensity of the close-ups can be wearing. But the austere beauty of Dreyer's vision always shines through.

 

L'Atalante - 1934

I'm a huge fan of Jean Vigo. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 29, leaving less than three hours worth of films - three shorts and L'Atalante, his only feature. But all are injected with his anarchic style, all attempting a mixture of social realism and surrealism (a trait picked up by Lindsay Anderson, hugely inspired by Vigo's work). I struggled to pick between L'Atalante, and the film that Vigo made just before it, Zero for Conduct (of which Anderson's classic If..., which nearly made it on to this list itself, is largely derived from) but in the end went for L'Atalante.

Jean and Juliette are that old cinema stapled - young lovers chasing excitement, with life bound to come between them. While Jean is a sea-faring adventurer, Juliette dreams of living a Parisian life of glamour. They get married, and inhabit Jean's barge L'Atalante with Pere Jules, a drunken madman who lives in a nest of nick-nacks he's collected from his years at sea.

 

Vigo was able to draw on the irrevent style of his earlier short A propos de Nice, as well as mixing it, in a fantastic scene near the end of the film, with Eisenstein's montage methods. But whereas Eisenstein used this method to convey the horror of the Odessa steps, Vigo uses it to express the longing of the separated lovers. L'Atalante sees Vigo channelling a romantic tale which was being told before the Lumiere brothers ever thought of stringing photographs together, and subverting it with the various styles and ideologies that cinema had offered up ever since. Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou played as big a influence as any of the romantic dramas which served it plot-wise.

Vigo's tragically young death, which left a cinematography shorter than any one Transformers film, does not, as you may expect, hang over L'Atalante, even though he had died just a few months before it had finished shooting. It almost seems to run on the energy of the love of Jean and Juliette, bounding with enthusiaism, not just for idealistic young love, but for what cinema can do, and what it can achieve, and what, most importantly, it can make people feel.

 

A bout de souffle (Breathless) (1959)

It was two Frenchmen who invented cinema, and it was two Frenchmen who, in the late fifties, helped to revolutionise it once again. Jean-Luc Godard and Raoul Coutard dragged cinema, kicking and screaming, from the studios and onto the Champs Elysees.

Coutard, a photographer like the Lumiere brothers before him, filmed scenes on a handheld camera, allowing them to effectively shoot while on the run. Jean-Paul Belmondo's chain-smoking, unbelieveably cool car thief Michel Poiccard, is himself on the run from police after shooting dead an officer. As he races about the streets of Paris, the film races after him. The film, like Poiccard, stands still for barely a second (barely, meaning that it does allow time for a Godard Standard - a long, bedroom set conversion between the leading man and woman). The film was shot without permission giving the cast a feeling of tension and excitement, which transfers onto the screen.

What A bout be souffle is most remembered for is breaking the 'rules' of cinema. Before, films were shot as if there was a line behind the camera, where the film stopped and the audience began. Shots didn't cross this line. Godard decided against this rule, and many others. Like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane (arguably the last Western-made film before Breathless which had the same revoltionary impact on film), Godard was accused of being a hack who had no idea what he was doing (he still gets that, actually). But, like many of his French New Wave contemporaries, he was a writer for Cahiers du Cinema, and knew exactly what he was doing (Welles, in a bid to prove that he had indeed learnt the rules of the trade before ignoring them, made The Stranger, his most 'Hollywood' film, and his only financially successful one).  

It is fitting that Godard won the Prix Jean Vigo award for A bout de souffle, (an award given in homage to Vigo to reward a French director who displays an independent spirit in their film making) because it simiarly uses a standard plotline, revolutionising around it. Godard borrowed a lot from old Film Noirs (Humphery Bogart gets a number of references throughout), while Vigo, as we have seen, made a romantic film. Both managed to use the basics of classic cinema to change it further - both fit perfectly into the ever-changing, ever-evolving styles of film.

 

The Red Desert (1965)

Earlier this year The Guardian, and no doubt a decent number of film blogs and magazine, ran articles focussing on the fact that Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman died on the same day, and that Bergman was incorrectly sitting on the throne of European Art-House Film King. It should have been Antonioni, they argued. It should be. Bergman called Antonioni 'boring', and he sometimes was - but so, sometimes, was Bergman. Bergman's films sometimes feel as if they have become stereotypical European Art-House works (probably due to their ubiqitous nature in parodies), and Antonioni offers more to explore in his films.

Like Carl Theydor Dreyer, Bergman was heavily interested in religion, and the human spirit in these conditions. His films were dark, but overall humanity came out more positive than negative, even if we struggled at times. Antonioni's attitude to the human race is largely negative - he rarely, if ever, portrayed his protaganists as likeable, or even tolerable. Often they had a disinterest in life - they suffered from ennui, and they couldn't even care about that.

Like L'Avventura before it, and Blow-Up after it, The Red Desert fails to really find a plot, despite presenting the audience with a mystery. In L'Avventura it's a disapperance, in Blow-Up, a murder, and in The Red Desert it is the nature of Monica Vitti's depression. She wanders around an industrialised landscape somewhere in Italy - it is bleak, and the bleakness is emphsised by Antonioni's use of colour - or, more specifically, his lack of it.

 

Much of the landscapes which Vittis haunts - and haunt her, as the film goes on - are filled with flat greys, greens, blacks and blues, with an occasional burst of technicolour in the background. It is reminiscent of Fritz Lang's M, which, despite being at the forefront of the sound revolution, showed restraint in it's use of dialogue and natural noises, where others overloaded. This was Antonioni's first colour film, and the effects are the same - the restraint places more emphasis on what the colours/sounds actually are, rather than just that fact that they are there. 

The Red Desert is not only a key work in Antonioni's filmography, but perhaps the best use of colour in film history (for me, the only thing that comes close to beating it is Bertolucci's The Conformist.  

 

La Haine (1994)

La Haine works better under it's English translation title - Hate. La Haine is a neo-realism drama without the humanity. It follows three 'banlieue' kids the day after a riot in a Parisian suburb. A friend of theirs - although it's suggested they barely knew him - his been hospitalised by the police, leading, as it does regularly, to the tension between poverty-aflicted youths and the police force finally giving out to violence. Vinz, the most unhinged, cop-hating of the three, has stolen a police gun, and is threatening to use it. Hubert and Said follow him around the city, picking through the chaos that lies in a run down housing estate both after a riot and in general.

 

It may be hugely stylised, by La Haine is a hugely powerful film - it doesn't lose any of the social impact that a film would if Quentin Tarintino would, for example. The three boys come from three distinct social background - Vinz is Jewish, Hubert Afro-French, and Said Maghrebian (it's never revealed his specific country of origin, but this does leave it open to suggestions that he's part of an Algerian immigrant family, which further expands the dynamic between the three, and their role in society). At one point they meet with a group of Le Pen supporting Neo-Nazis; at another they argue with a camera crew looking for a story about the violence the night before; in between, they clash with the police at various points. Throughout, director Mathieu Kassovitz's attempts to explore contemporary France could not be clearer.

La Haine succeeds because it articulates the anger - the hate - which rules the everyday life of thousands of people like Vinz, Hubert and Said. It does so with fantastic flair - one stand-out scene, from a film full of them, features a DJ playing a remix of 'Fuck Da Police' and Edith Piaf's 'Non, je ne regrette rien'. It has to be seen to be believed.

  

Part two will be out at some point during the week, I hope. Let me know how much you disagree with these choices below.

*Earlier this year I volunteered a silent film festival in Bo’ness, where, among films like Safety First and I Was Born But..., I was lucky enough to catch 'The Lost Art of The Film Explainer'. It was once of the best experiences I have ever had at the cinema. Accompanied by a two-person, multi-instrumental backing band, ‘The Film Explainer’ Andy Cannon showcased a forgotten art-form – during the silent film era, many of the people who attended the cinema couldn't read, or films were shabbily put together so that, even if you could read the title cards, they were difficult to follow. So film theaters began to hire people who would read out the intertitles of the film, as well as just generally narrate it. 

          Often they were just the manager of the cinema who lazily read off the screen, but many other people made a living from it. They were especially popular in Japan, where cinemas would advertise films based on what Film Explainer was going to be narrating. They did it in all manner of styles - political, comedic, serious. They were so popular that when 'talkies' were introduced in Japan many cinemas turned down the sound so that they could keep their Film Explainers.    

          Andy Cannon's style was lovely - the films he choose were forgotten, and largely crap, and he made fun of them, but in an affectionate way, in a way that you can tell he genuninely loves film, silent film especially. There's more information here: http://www.reelscotland.com/the-lost-art-of-the-film-explainer-19-august-filmhouse-edinburgh/ and I cannot urge you enough to go see it if you get a chance.