Tropical Malady / Drawing Restraint 9

Over the next month I will be turning some attention to film, what with the London Film Festival opening and all, and there being some interesting stuff about.

When I was a lad, the term Indie or Art House cinema really seemed to mean something, artists producing work far from mainstream Hollywood fare. Now Indie cinema is too often just a brand for something maybe low budget but which in many ways does the same kind of stuff as big budget films, reinforcing the myth of consensus reality as Rudy Rucker put it in the Transrealist Manifesto (see my review of a Disappearing Number). Here though are two films way way away from the kind of stuff we are normally fed.

First up, Tropical Malady by Thai director Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethaku. It passed me by when it came out a few years ago, but he has been getting rave press about this film and his latest, Syndromes and a Century (which I am seeing this week). Both films come in two parts, two separate stories which may or may not be variations or possibilities of the same story; maybe male and female, or yin and yang versions.

The first half of Tropical Malady is a gentle gay love story, between a soldier and a country boy. They hang out, hold hands a bit. Everyone is very tolerant. Whilst the soldier is looking at pictures of his boyfriend, another film bleeds into this one, with a folk tale of a shaman with the ability to change into the shape of animals. The edges between the folk tale and the second half of the film are blurry. In the second half, a soldier in the forest is hunting and being hunted by a ghost/man possessed by a tiger spirit/tiger possessed by a man spirit. Each hunts the other but also yearns to be consumed by the other. The film becomes dark, hypnotic and mysterious, its meaning(s) elusive. It finishes with soldier and tiger locked in a stare.

There was that wonderful sense at the end that the audience were united in a collective state, of glorious bewilderment, of so much unsaid and unsayable, of possibilities. So subtle and elusive, I left in an altered, hypnotised state. Outside the NFT, on the beach underneath the festival pier, someone had set up a rave: vintage reggae blasting out over the river, people feeding a bonfire with pallets. I wondered if Joe had put me in a trance.

On one level the film is contrasting the etiquette of polite courtship with the animalistic nature of sexuality, but to try and put a unified meaning on it does not do it justice.

I woke up still thinking about the film, remembering details which resonated between the two halves, like the odd scene towards the end of the first part where the lovers lick each other’s hands. At the start of the film, a group of soldiers find a body, which we don’t see – was this the soldier of the second part? Shortly after we see a naked man running across the forest – the ghost/spirit? The body is wrapped up, a character comments on the body shifting as the spirit is released. The resonances between the two halves continued to haunt me, until blasted away by…

Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 is an even more difficult piece to describe. I’m not even sure it is a film, although it is much too expansive to be called video art. Barney talks about “narrative sculpture” but whilst there are actions and things happening, it has no plot as such. Perhaps its best considered as a manifestation in video form of Barney’s ongoing Drawing Restraint series (see Richard Dorment’s comments, again in A Disappearing Number.) In the course of the piece, various things are made, cut up or dissolved, remade, often in the form of whales. There is much use of petroleum jelly (to remind myself of Dorment’s interpretation – “for [Barney], what is valuable in art is not so much the finished product as the tension between the desire to create and the discipline required to funnel that desire into the making of art. This is why petroleum jelly is such an important symbolic material for Barney. Being formless, it can be heated or cooled, shaped and transformed, restrained in a mould or allowed to flow free like molten lava.”

The ‘film’ is set on board a Japanese whaling ship. Onto the ship come two “Occidental Guests”, Barney and (his real time partner) Bjork. After undergoing grooming, dressing and tea rituals fusing Japanese tradition with something marine and sea-salty, they embrace and proceed to cut each other up and are remade into whales.

Knowing what (little) I do about Barney, there is much more going on than this, but I suspect it will take me some time and further research to get to the bottom of it.

For a long film, with many slow moving scenes which defy immediate understanding, it was surprisingly watchable. Although many of the actions involved were not immediately yielding of meaning, nonetheless it had a conviction and a kind of forward propulsion which kept me going.

Of course the soundtrack by Bjork was wonderful, but I already knew that having bought it a few years ago when it first came out.

Before DR9, I caught the trailor for Atonement. There was a time when the trailers were the best bit, but this trailer left me feeling utterly contemptuous. The fast cutting and constant manipulative sweeping and soaring (and clichéd) strings of the soundtrack repulsed me for their blatant, unashamed manipulation of emotion. It’s as corny and fake as Yentob’s nodding to interviewees that he has never met, doctored Reuters photos, phone ins that you can never win etc etc, - abusive manipulative spin. More and more I feel that we live in a time when our emotions are being blatantly exploited, in advertising/retail, in language, in politics, in print, on tv and in the cinema. I keep going back to that Rucker quote about reinforcing the myth of consensus reality. We must stand up for ourselves, people! The revolution will not be televised!

Art has the power to move us, to transport us, as LSO/Kissin did to me, as Tropical Malady did to me, to a place that is not defined, that is elusive, difficult, contradictory, stimulating, confusing. This is for me becoming the standard by which I judge the things I do, see and create.