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Need reasons not to see Loving Vincent? Check out my latest review on Oxford Culture Review

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A paper I wrote during my Masters in Film Aesthetics at the University of Oxford.

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A Ghost Story, Directed by David Lowery (2017)

Please find below my review for A Ghost Story (which I ended up seeing 3 times in the cinema - a review in itself) and also a bonus rambing review beneath.

Oxford Culture Review: https://theoxfordculturereview.com/2017/09/10/review-a-ghost-story/

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The unfillable void that structures my being – let it guide me. No amount of pie will satisfy this tummy, the gap that is created by trauma, and consequently, belies desire, is made a kicking, thrashing absence by grief. This pie will not fill this tummy, the tummy is the home for all my lacking and thus, all my being.

All of time is everywhere, all at once, and love and being and consciousness ripple through this time. A glance across time is easy and rare. Memories are time travel. Space is consistent where time is not.

A Ghost Story speaks to me in the illuminated language of flicking light which structures both presence and absence. The ratio – at 4:3 – is very boxy and speaks to the language of nostalgia with the look of super-8 capturing memory in celluloid and travelling back in time when the home-movies are played and a tear wells up inside of you as those not lost are resurrected for a brief moment in time, but not in consciousness.

M and C lie in bed, and the camera looks upon them from above. A gentle eye that gives me a butterfly flap in the stomach as M’s big arms cradle C’s small body. The film tentatively draws me in but keeps me tense, a little scared, a little sad, melancholic and crying or surge of fear and love, a jump and a sigh, rarely a chuckle. “Death is nothing at all”, it is the absent body that holds in a sheet and gives form to grief. Its eyes are black, it cannot see, but can still show. There is no breath in death but still death can remain lively in time. Life and death are the same thing, they hold hands inside and outside of me, a speck on the lens of space and time, a kiss through the air that plants upon you.

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My review of Chistopher Nolan’s ‘Dunkirk’ is now published on the Oxford Culture Review website.

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Here is a link to the paper I presented at the Film-Philosophy Conference 2017 in Lancaster University titled “In Praise of ‘Knight of Cups’: A New Economy of Feeling” / James Lawrence Slattery

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Song to Song (2017), Directed by Terrence Malick

Directed and written by Terrence Malick

Director of Photography - Emmanuel Lubezski

Starring - Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender, Natalie Portman

Roland Barthes said that the most erotic space was where cloth meets skin. In Terrence Malick’s latest film, Song to Song, many items and areas becomes clothes or skins, overlapping and fluttering with erotic charge. The camera is transformed into a haptic and tactile eye which looks upon a world of wet and crisp textures, as the aural and visual landscapes house beautiful bodies engaged in lustful embrace.

Song to Song continues in the trajectory set by Malick’s more recent film-making excursions -Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012) and Knight of Cups (2016) – all of which are stylistically bound in both form and affect. Song to Song – along with the other recent titles – is certainly an acquired taste, and so it is no surprise it polarises opinions. Narrative plays backing vocals to the sweeping visuals, poetic and exploratory, capturing spectacle and the quotidian alike in its oneiric gaze. Whether in the intimate crease of entwined lovers or looking down upon a sea of people from a festival stage, all subjects are treated with equal desire, crystalized in a constantly moving camera, woven by Malick’s thread of light.

The central intertwining characters are all played by specifically good-looking and contemporaneous actors: Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling, Natalie Portman and Michael Fassbender, each of them possessing unblemished beauty. Alongside them, appearances from Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and John Lydon (amongst others) flitter in and out of scenes. Somehow, despite “playing themselves” and not “characters”, these cameo-type moments do not break with any cinematic illusion created. With Malick’s signature use of flowing, disembodied voices and constantly fragmented temporal and spatial articulations, the entrance and exits of musicians and characters alike becomes natural within the lyrical setting of the film.

[Whilst writing this, I cannot help think of my recent erotic encounters. I watched Song to Song on my own in a cinema in Chicago - walked through an industrial area and over two bridges to get the picture house. Between the time of watching then and writing now, I am sat in a car, trying not to pick the scabbing image of a blade running through my flesh, inked forever. Last week a man read the first four pages of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis to me in a café, unpacking it as he read, deconstructing each word and the sentence is subsequently strung. During his analysis, I peered behind his eyes. He could see things I could not see, like the white of the paper and not just the black ink that formed the words upon it. He was a troubled weed from early life but now, though still knotted and thorny, induced a floral opening in my tummy when he spoke. We embraced when we said goodbye. We swapped emails.]

The film is primarily set in Austin, Texas at the SXSW festival (hence the presence of musicians.) Mara and Gosling (also) play musicians, with Fassbinder as an obnoxious producer and Portman as the naive and “pure” small town waitress. The tracks which populate the film create more of a soundscape than soundtrack or playlist. In what seems like one continuous melody, we encounter whispers of Die Antwood, Patti Smith, Lykke Li, Iggy Pop and countless others, each transforming into the sound of dreams under Malick’s visual rhetoric. Music envelops like the cloth, it makes us feel like a lover’s touch, dancing in a large group, the euphoria of sound, bells ring in my head when you kiss my face.  The screen is constantly punctuated with bodies in motion whom draw one another close, wearing see-through shirts which ripple over flesh. I wonder, is Malick creating a new erotic genre?

[A man held me in his bed and we stared into each other’s eyes. We laughed at how cute we were being. I felt no shame about the body I lived in that was growing bigger and fattier with each passing year, each passing month and week, and in America, each passing day. If held tight in a hand, my thighs or tummy or even upper arms would dimple, the texture that told you fat was caught beneath the surface. But I did not mind. I moved beyond my body and considered – You and I are two words and those words can merge, weld, meld. The words we are can transform into a more abstract mode, without the body of letters. Instead we can be dashed. --. You and I are a line that can flex and curve on your sheets and stain, like a wrinkle in my brain, my psyche.]

Malick uses Song to Song to create a new erotic discourse where all bodies – the visual body, the aural, the human, the camera, the spectator – are engaged in the enclosing of space that separates each figure. It is as if, without uttering words from their lips, characters infer concepts such as: music is an extension of me, you are part of my fabric, I envelop you in love, I desire to be enclosed by your sound.

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Thoughts on H.D [after viewing “Borderline”(1930) Directed by Kenneth Macpherson and produced by POOL group] / Thought on “Shooting Stars” (1928) Directed by Anthony Asquith and A. V. Bramble

[Letter to / H.D.]

I cried quietly, (almost) silently at the back of the wooden clad classroom about H.D. who I had only just been illuminated to and who shone out to me from screens, not only the cinematic but also the computer, from which I read the scans of their writings which had been published in the “Close-Up” journal. We were told about their [H.D.’s] loving, hating, maddening life, all cross-pollination of desire, sexual and mentally fractured and that jerked some wetness out the inner corner of my open eye. I am only just meeting you, and you are dusty in the ground for my forever. Did you pave the way for me, did you help birth the me I am now? You are the kaleidoscopic queer shard of moving light, of poetic being, of lively love. Your words join a dot-to-dot around my brain and body, ruptured from dualism into playful multiplicity. My look and your look are concentric circles and heated expression, words and light a pouted kiss that punctures in my gut, my tummy, my fleshy psyche.  

She presented us an original copy of “Close-Up” which housed your writing, a journal in which your transferrable dwellings are held in the reproduced, printed form. And despite all the mechanisms in-between your gestural sweep of ink and the language that now sits in my hands and eyes and mouth – my fabric – we are still sharing the tactile eye that falls upon the same words, albeit in a different time and space. If this is an original copy, did you hold this same small book in your cupped hands, under your calloused fingertips, and peer upon the same paper and ink under your inky and blackened, smudged eyes?

In the words that are written upon the pages (of the journal) we are told not just of form of light and shadow but also those who sat next to you in the cinema’s auditorium, whose secret whispering mid-way through changed your life in the simmering perspective shift.

Breathe with me.

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We spoke about Shooting Stars in class – why did the woman cheat on the lovely husband when there was no foreseeable reason? I also shed a pathetic little tear for this concept that bubbled from the individual and collective lips – a concept that retained belief in the sacred binding of the couple(d) articulation of marriage. She turns towards what she desires, she turns her back on that which she does not desire. He shoots her lipstick into her hand, he stares at himself upon the screen, he falls from the swinging lamp all bloodied and torn, she puts the bullet in the gun, she applied her lipstick with the bullet. The black lacking air inside that gun when objects are moved and exchanged in and out of its barrel– there I want to hide today.

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“Silence” (2016) Directed by Martin Scorsese

Silence, the new film by Martin Scorsese, tells the tale of two Portuguese priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who travel to Japan to seek their mentor and teacher who has apparently apostatised and left Catholicism.

In the first half of Silence, the viewer is frequently introduced to scenes with a white mist that renders the screen opaque, from which figures emerge. They form slowly, a slightly darker hue of grey from which they become visible, disrupting the monochromatic screen. In their subtle, visual arrival, the figures are neither shadows nor silhouettes, but more like ethereal beings, angelically ascending from cloudy air.

What is silence? A mist that settles over matter? A harmonious absence that slowly dissolves and reappears? The occurrence in between the sounds of crickets which populate the film’s diegetic soundscape? Sadly not. By the second half of the film I came to realise that silence was, like all narrative elements of the film, much more abrupt, much more didactic, a block and not a mist. The presence of absence of the voice of God – this is what silence became in Silence.  The film’s complete obsession with Catholicism struck out narrative nuance. Wider dialogues concerning oppression, religious freedom, belief or faith, were shrunken under the catholic specificity that rigorously and politically posited right from wrong and good from bad, with Christianity singularly reigning in the positive.

Andrew Garfield was awash in golden hues appeared as if beautifully plucked from an illustrated bible where all figures are rendered suspiciously handsome. Ceremonies of Christian sacrifice and blasphemy alike were graceful, poised, visually sculptured in a manner that sublimated the suffering bodies that were eaten by flames and waves. As tortured bodies were released and limply brought down from crucifixes they found their painterly magnificence, articulating the existence of the soul through its absence in the inert corporeal.   This, in the mise-en-scene that was a gallery of fine religious artworks, is the film’s success. Despite the reserve for its catholic ideology, it retained movement in its beauty, in its skilled storytelling that never bored in the extensive running time of two and a half hours, in its swelling stillness of camera, it’s constant pouring of light.

So what does this mean? It means see Silence for the framing of bodies, colour, lights, elemental playground of environmental, natural force that we do not need religion to enlighten for us. The cinema is a church of light.  The landscape, the wetness that surrounds a small hut at the bottom of a mossy green bank, a yellow sun on sandy ground where feet tread on images of Jesus and Mary, small straw crosses folded into hands.

 James Lawrence Slattery, 2017

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My review for Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea is not online:

http://oxfordstudent.com/2017/01/29/review-manchester-sea/

And in print in the Oxford Student paper x

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Top Films of 2016

Hi! Find my top films of 2016 at The Oxford Student- In print and online:

http://oxfordstudent.com/2016/11/25/top-10-films-2016/

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“Nocturnal Animals” (2016) Directed by Tom Ford

Hi, Check out the link to read the complete review of “Nocturnal Animals” as well as a more general look at Tom Ford’s directorial style in a piece I wrote for The Oxford Culture Review>

https://theoxfordculturereview.com/2016/11/16/film-in-oxford-melancholic-luxury-in-a-single-man-and-nocturnal-animals/

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“I, Daniel Blake” (2016) Directed by Ken Loach

Hi, Please follow the link to read my full review of “I, Daniel Blake”, directed by Ken Loach, which I wrote for The Oxford Culture Review >

https://theoxfordculturereview.com/2016/11/02/review-i-daniel-blake/

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American Honey

Hi, please follow the link to see my review of Andrea Arnold’s new film ‘American Honey’ (2016) published at the Oxford Culture Review

https://theoxfordculturereview.com/2016/10/17/film-in-oxford-american-honey/

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The Big Short (Interior Vision / Exterior Perception)

The Big Short, 2015, 2h 10m

Director: Adam McKay

Writer: Charles Randolph (screenplay), Adam McKay (screenplay), Michael Lewis (book)

Stars: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling

Viewed: 25/9/2016, home viewing

Before introducing the central players, The Big Short’s prefacing sequence is comprised with an extremely quick rundown of banking and the financial crash. Though brief, this introduction not only gives a speedy overview to the situation, but also lays way for a recurring motif: looking. Those who “saw what was coming” are described as “a few outsiders and weirdos”, but weirdos who “knew where to look”.  After the title card appears and disappears, the opening sequence reinforces this optical mark of access by inscribing Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale, with a perception defect which I will argue can be used as a successful allegory for alternative vision within the film.

               Even before he speaks Burry is cast as an outsider, playing drumsticks on his knees to a sound only he is able to hear, situating him in an isolated aural environment to which we have yet to penetrate. As we intercut with an upsetting childhood memory we learn from voice over about Burry’s glass eye, which he relates to his separation from others.* The glass eye has several functions. The distancing effect it has for the character within the diagesis is one aspect, but it also functions to rethink where vision is placed and directed. Burry (blurry) can see past the stock market’s myth and foresees its future collapse because he has an alternative way of looking at the world. It is as if the regularly functioning eye can peer outwards whilst the lacking-eye is forced to look inwards. Because outward vision is impossible for the absent eye, it must roll into interiority, as if swallowed into the body and leaving a gaping wound which the glass prop must fill. He sees what others cannot because he sees what is not instantly visible, and his internal optics allow a peering beneath the shroud of the housing market façade. The film’s structure also relates a type of introspection technique: self-reflexivity. Ryan Gosling, amongst others, looks and speaks to camera, advertising tropes are knowingly employed (such as celebrities relaying banking terminology) as well as quasi-documentary style mise en scene (hand held camera, black and white, news clippings.) The mash of imaging methods bounces around notions of “authenticity”, reminding us that these are historically recent “real events” whilst also furthering the reflection of the housing market’s dubious structure. As with the film’s antics, what is perceived as factual and what is actually, materially present are not harmonious and fluctuate between varying degrees of graspable and ungraspable synthesis.  As an audience we are lead to believe that the money-induced hallucination of security blinded (almost) everyone, even those selling the sub-prime mortgages. Those that could see past the rhetoric and into the mathematical infrastructure were able to exploit the housing bubble to make a lot of money. Another scene which highlights the optical allegory is one in which Mark Baum (Steve Carell) goes to see a woman at the ratings firm. For almost the entire duration of this scene her eyes are covered with dark, black shades which perch across her face like a censorship bar. She mentions she needs to see the eye doctor, but also complies with a wider metaphor: that she has blinded herself in order to ignore the outrageous fraud happening in front of her very eyes which pinnacles at giving faulty AAA ratings. Of course, what we learn by the end (what we all probably saw coming) is that even those who aren’t myopic, are all eventually brought into the overriding issue which is the fold of greed.

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Hell or High Water, 2016 (Dir. David MacKenzie) With Spoilers

Hell or High Water, 2016, 1h 42m (WITH “SPOILERS”)

Director: David MacKenzie

Writer: Taylor Sheridan (screenplay)

Stars: Ben Foster, Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges, Gil Birmingham

Viewed: 14/9/2016 at The Electric Cinema, Birmingham, UK

Cowboys and Indians* is served up in Hell or High Water as a visual presence, a historical backdrop, and a point to consider geographical landscape and land ownership. The central roles are those of two brothers Tanner and Toby Howard (played by Ben Foster and Chris Pine), who rob the banks that have been robbing the people. The role reversal of justice is a ready place of departure with little dispute that the banks are the “real bad guys” in this layer of narrative. The economic landscape literally hovers above the spatial one in the form of billboards containing simple block letters exclaiming “DEBT”, visualising the constant presence of financial worry bestowed upon the poor inhabitants of the small Texan town.  We come to learn that the specific reasoning behind the bank robberies is to buy the recently deceased mother’s land which the banks are trying to repossess after discovering oil beneath it. It is a dark, black, slick mirror that reflects the opposition to the “DEBT” above with the flowing “$$$” beneath the land in the form of the exploitable earthly resource.

The continual presence of the Cowboy/Indian dichotomy weaves in and out of the picture to varying degrees, often acting as a kind of double. The two Officers encapsulate this with Marcus as the Cowboy and his partner Alberto as the Indian, with racial slurs clogging the air wherever they go. After robbing the banks, the Howard brothers must go to the Native American owned casino as a legal purification ritual where dirty money can be cleansed, becoming once again allowable in the purchase of the mother’s land. What the money is then destined for is interestingly at such odds with early Native American ritual and practice, where nomadic life and respect for Mother Nature meant that land ownership and digging into the earth was not part of practice. Here we witness how Hell or High Water highlights the multitude of exploitation that modern capitalism must incite to exist, which stretches all the way back to the creation of the United States. In this film money becomes the only privileged asset, the only material that has access and flow between geographical spaces, as even the cars that the brothers use must be frequently stopped, dropped and buried.  In a scene near the end of the movie, during the shoot-out between older brother Tanner and Officer Marcus, notably it is when Tanner calmly utters “I am the King of the Plaines” that he is effectively shot.

 *I use Cowboys and “Indians” to think about the stereotypical image, and to use the language of the film, not to reinforce the disrespect in this term but to use it to think through some of the issues the film raises. Native American or Indigenous People is the respectful terminology.

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Captain Fantastic, 2016 (Dir. Matt Ross)

Captain Fantastic, 2016, 1h 58m

Director: Matt Ross

Writer: Matt Ross

Stars: Viggo Mortensen, George MacKay, Samantha Isler

Viewed: 15/9/2016 at The Electric Cinema, Birmingham, UK

As is so often the case, the opening scene of Captain Fantastic can sum up the film rather swiftly, acting as a good example for the impending and thinly veiled problems that underscore the films entirety. The scene opens out in the wilderness, a deer wonders, tracked by the camera, our eyes, and small white eyes of the family that peer out from black(ened) skin hidden in plant life. When the deed is done and the deer is killed, one life is started as the other ends. The killing of the animal is the heavy red curtain that opens to introduce the emblematic, patriarchal gesture as the father bestows manhood onto the boy. As a confirmed man, he bites into a raw organ and dons the blood upon his face which glistens, the moisture shining in relief to the mattified black mud. Camouflage? A way to make the body invisible? More like an unfortunate allegory of Captain Fantastic’s erasure of race.

               Captain Fantastic tells the story of a family who have opted out of the easily identifiable and sub/urban landscape of contemporary consumer capitalism to live in the woods. In attempting to describe an “alternative” way of life, the woods, however, only seems to function as an alternative backdrop, a difference in wardrobe, which never the less shares many of the same problems as that which the central family so loftily seem to believe they have risen above. In short: the middle class (if not upper middle) white family is often found reinstating patriarchy, heteronormativity, inherent racism, and to some extent simplification of mental illness.  The two older sisters are forbidden to speak their own language (only they understand Esperanto, the language constructed by linguists, perhaps perceived as having less “naturalised origin” if such a thing existed) and as mentioned before, the film begins and then later ends with the eldest son’s passage into the new masculinity defined by “manhood”. All truth is stemmed from knowledge, a trivia driven idea of understanding that excludes many. When the youngest sibling asks what sexual intercourse is, the most banal exercise in the reinstating of heterosexual “fact” is uttered: a man’s penis enters a woman’s vagina. As alternative as this father is, he still can’t seem to fathom that bodies other than a cis woman and cis man can perform sex, the reasoning for which is pleasure and repopulation. The nuclear family is consistently remembered and upheld throughout the film, from the son’s cringy proposal and mention of child-rearing up to the grandparents. Despite these ignorant perpetuations of dominant culture, perhaps the most blindingly obvious issue is that of race. Not only is there no POC/non-white representation on camera whatsoever, there is also no mention of any cultural artefact not situated in a white North American or European discourse. The only valuable music: European classical, the only valuable writers: white guys like Noam Chomsky whose birthday they transform into a personal holiday (no celebration of Paul Robson’s birthday.) And with all the showing off the father propels in the narrative, patronising the “normalised” (see: comatose, anaesthetised) suburban family, the main stains of dominant ideology splatter everyone. As with the opening sequence, blackness is made invisible because it is hidden, but that cannot stop racism from lingering just below the surface. Just as in the standardised American dream, the alternative American dream is also upheld by the social cleansing it pretends not see by not uttering its name.