EDITORIAL

DREAMING
OF ARCADIA

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

How it works

One of the joys our technological civilization has lost is the

excitement with which seasonal flowers and fruits were
welcomed; the first daffodil, strawberry or cherry are now
things of the past, along with their precious moment of arrival.

By Milan Babic

Derek Jarman
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territories and the implications for

societies that live within them. It
goes without saying, of course, that
the politics of real geographies spill
into the image zone, inevitably and
normally with arch enthusiasm.
What is seen and not, where is
represented (and by whom) the
established hierarchies, agendas
and truth around seeing have not
left the shot. Far from it.
At the same time, it is equally true
that it doesnt get any safer
reporting from regions in the
frontline. The increasing numbers of
journalists and camera-people killed
testifies brutally to that. That said,
new technologies are allowing
images to escape from authoritarian
areas, as well as changing
fundamentally how we consider
actual space and the experiences
and memories it generates.
Vast subject, only 56 pages
We have tried in this issue to raise
some of these questions and
concerns by looking at generally
less familiar moving image work
from across the world and across
disciplines, offering sketches
towards maps of these other
image territories, hoping to prompt
further exploration.
If this talk of sketching sounds
like a hedging of results, rest
assured that we are extremely
grateful to all our writers for their
striking and illuminating
contributions. They, like us,
appreciate that any examination of
sometimes more marginalised
film will inevitably raise issues
around the place of certain moving
images in a democratic culture, and
around the place of constructive
criticism of that culture.
In an associated vein, it is
unfortunately necessary to note the
price rise from this issue on. This is
not done out of choice: it simply
reflects the harsh economics of
specialist magazine publication.
However, we have increased the
pagination to soften the blow
slightly and encourage
subscriptions.
Thank you again, writers and
readers alike, for your continued

support. As Derek Jarman noted,

place is nothing if it is not shared
and celebrated and so we invite you
to join us for the launch of this issue
at the Curzon Soho cinema, London
this 28th February from 6pm, for
films and conversation. There are
many more journeys to be made,
many more places to visit v
Apology
In the previous issue we referred
to a film still by Stan Brakhage (pg
7) as Prelude. It should have read
Prelude 1.

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Its worse now. When I woke up in a sweat at three

oclock in the morning, I was scared and breathless,
not knowing what to do. It was the end of spring little
more than a year ago, and in three weeks I was
supposed to shoot my diploma film for National Film
and Television School. The story was set in a village, a
Bosnian village, that we were supposed to find in the
middle of the good ol England. Travelling abroad to
shoot films was forbidden by School rules, so for the
past two weeks, with Seeta, my wonderful set
designer, I had been roaming the roads and villages of
Buckinghamshire, and north to Norwich, unable to
find anything even remotely resembling the magical
place we wanted to create... we couldnt go to
Scotland for financial reasons.
So, in the wee hours of the morning, I was lonely
and desperate in my Raskolnikovian room, thinking
what a stupid idea it was in the first place to try to
make such a film in such an invented space. In Rome,
I thought, do as the Romans do, you idiot, you should
have done an English story set in England with
English actors.But on the other hand, I do believe that
in art you have to be honest and truthful so I felt that
I would not be able to do anything with true feelings in
an environment to which Im not attached emotionally.
And then I thought of those reasons why I started
making films in the first place, the restlessness of a
desire to make the story that I cared about, the
burning itch from hell that kept me awake at nights
telling me that I have to persist, to make something
beautiful! And the girls, of course.
I was also thinking of other refugee film directors,
who created outside their native countries. How did
they do it, what kind of stories did they tell? I was
thinking of Polanski and the films he made in English,
in French, such peculiar worlds he created. I thought
of Konchalovski and his Marias Lovers. In some little
town in Pennsylvania, 10,000 miles from home, he
created the Russia that was in his mind, in his heart.
I thought of Curtiz (a Hungarian refugee) and his
Casablanca, that was made not in Morocco but in a
Hollywood studio, and again it was a mixed up world,
full of rejects and refugees.
It is bloody difficult being a bloody foreigner,
I despaired, but in the end we did create the place we
wanted - in Surrey! And it doesnt look bad, believe
me, the short My Father Eduardo looks like it was shot
somewhere in Eastern Europe, in Poland, Hungary,
maybe Bosnia, but certainly not England. Ah, the
power of movie magic
But, Im telling you, its worse now. Now my burning
itch increases and I want to make a big film, a feature.
There are thousands of troubles lying ahead. Quite
coincidentally, I met Andrey Konchalovski this summer
at a film festival in Capalbio, in Italy. He told me hes
struggling to make his next film. It never gets any
fucking easier! he said, and then turned to sign an
autograph for the most beautiful girl Ive ever seen. v

THE POETRY
OF SPACE

ood things come to those

who wait, murmurs the
adage. Now, if the late,
great Derek Jarman is right (and he
is), you dont even have to wait any
more. But is what you get any
good? Whether its flowers, fruits or
films, our society finds itself now on
the strange threshold between
constantly increasing anticipation either reasonably harmless (next
years holiday booked immediately
after this one, etc.) or altogether
more sinister (daily trumpeting of
imminent terrorist attacks) and
instant satiation of all sensual
demands. Add in the prerogatives
of the information age, the impacts
of globalisation and the mindaltering insights of the new physics
and its clear that time, or our
perception of it, is now more
complex and fluid than ever. But
time, and experience as a register of
its working, operates somewhere,
in and on bodies and places.
This is what makes Jarmans
observation so bittersweet but true.
Linking location (and its harvest),
weather, taste and desire, he
emphasises in the lightest of ways
the potential (or lost) fecundities
and rewards of a keen attention to
place. For Jarman, and most of us,
such a sense of place might be one
arrived at without undue hardship.
However, as almost every news
bulletin now makes clear, place
who owns it, who fences it, who
controls its resources is again the
pre-eminent physical and
conceptual arena of conflict
globally. From Iraq to Palestine and
Central Asia to Fortress Europe;
from the non-places of corporate
urban development to keenly
defended local amenities and from
the Kalahari to Northern Ireland,
acknowledging the place of place,
and ones ability to move through it
(or not), is now pivotal to
understanding the current order.
Clearly, the nature and role of the
moving image is, in turn, central to
that process. As a (virtual) space of
its own, film is uniquely endowed
with qualities that can fruitfully serve
our interrogations of extant

THE GEOGRAPHY
OF UNCERTAINTY:
THOUGHTS ON
CITIES AND CINEMA
By Janet Harbord

ilm has consistently been thought of as a

time-based medium. In relation to many other
art forms, the material of film is duration, an
ephemeral substance we experience through time. This
emphasis on the temporal might in part be attributed to
the birth of cinema in the age of modernism,
characterised by a fascination with times differently
textured moments. Cinema has in many ways been
read as a monument to the psychic experience of
modernity, the tendency towards absence (the screen
rather than the object), and ellipsis and disjunction
(montage). Yet more recently films relation to space
has become a focus of interest and debate, for
filmmakers and critics alike. This subtle shift of
emphasis has everything to do with the current
context, an age of globalisation, which has radically
reconditioned our relationship to space.
At its most general level, globalisation eliminates
the specific histories of place and operates through a
connection across space. The global pretends to a
culture of homogeneity, yet is characterised by a
profound unevenness of its operations, producing
places that become networked and those that become
obscured. And even within the emerging centres of a
new network (global cities), the experience of place is
radically marked by difference, inequality and
dissidence. This dynamic of globalisation, of a
culture of homogeneity and power versus
heterogeneity and oppression, describes the relation of
mainstream cinema to its others. Hollywood product

holds a monopoly on the super-highways of film

dissemination, whilst the independent/alternative
cinemas are forced into smaller channels of production
and distribution.
This much describes an over-familiar situation. But
a further consequence of this global disparity reemerges in the film cultures themselves and their
differential relation to time and space. Hollywoods
main preoccupations with large-budget, high concept
films work through a time line, the restaging of
past events or the projection of futurist fantasies.
Whether looking back or forwards, Hollywoods
mastery is of the temporal, epic in scale and mythic in
tone. In response, alternative cinemas are increasingly
presenting us with a sense of the striated, uneven
texture of space, and in so doing, rewriting the
experience of globalisation from a position of alterity.
Yet this is not simply an issue of representation, of how
space appears; the spatial turn in film is more
ambitiously rewriting the rules of story structure.
COLLIDING TALES
Alternative cinemas have various ways of engaging
with the spatial, too numerous to document here. Of
particular note is an engagement with the global city;
not that there is a global city, but rather symmetries
and connections with the experience of living in these
iconic centres. From a distance (a satellite perspective)
these nodes light up like a string of fairy lights across
the globe, set aglow by the energy of finance,
information and population flows. In proximity, at
street level, the energy is far more chaotic, dispersed
and colliding. In Amores Perros the global city is
Mexico city, in Code Unknown a less than glamorous
Paris, and in Ten the constantly moving backdrop to
the taxis window is Tehran.
These are films that shift the conventional terms of
story towards their opposite: narrative progression and
unity gives way to a co-existence of stories, the
purposeful development of plot gives way to a
randomness of connections, the poetry of chance. The
temporal of course plays its part as the emphasis rests
with the simultaneous occurrence of events rather than
a sequential unravelling over time. Yet it is the limited
pathways of lives, and stories, that navigate a chaotic,
disconnected route through the city that confer a
special status on space.
The city in the era of globalisation is a different
imaginary space to the rationalized efficient organism
of modernitys dream. It is an eclectic space yet such
eclecticism is played out as lives striated, lived
proximately yet distanced by social inequality. Amores
Perros is a film divided into three parts, and located in
three social enclaves. It is the story of a young man
struggling with an impoverished life of hardship and
survival, a successful model and her married lover, a
former guerrilla socialist turned tramp.
3

narrative form, this is pushed further in Code

Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys. As the
subtitle suggests, the form of the film enacts the
fracturing of narrative coherence. The film effectively
stages the alienation of city life for the audience
through its refusal to make connections, interpret
events as meaningful, to effectively decipher a code for
us. Yet the spatial relations of the film are not simply
reproducing alienation but presenting the imaginary
impossibility of a shared social space, the failure of the
city as an emblem of unity.
Furthermore, the city is seen to be constituted
through its relations with elsewhere. The film opens
on a Paris street, the centre of cosmopolitan life, yet
immediately the integrity of that is questioned. A
woman is met by her partners young brother who has
deserted rural life with his father for the dream of the
city. Their meeting is then complicated by the boy
dropping rubbish into the lap of a woman begging. The
boy is then held to account by a man witness to this
who attempts to force an apology, which ends in a
tussle. The police arrive and swiftly arrest the other
young man whose guilt is read by the colour of
his skin.
Code Unknown brings together stories from different
places which converge in Paris. Here, the emphasis is
not on collision but the failure of communication. The
city is a site of provisional linkages in an increasingly
mobile world. But the experience of other spaces is
carried over, inscribed in each character. The
photojournalist who has been in the war zone of the
former Yugoslavia is compelled to return there (the
experience of elsewhere conditions the experience of
the here), the economic migrant who begs on the
streets of Paris and is deported makes a journey back to
Paris, the boy who lives on a farm with his father
cannot exist there knowing the life of the city, and the
African-born father leaves Paris to visit his homeland.
Mobility transforms our relationship to space; travel
is not the unproblematic opening of new horizons, but
a psychic marking, more often a scarring. We are the
product of where we have been. And with this

accumulated spatial baggage, the possibility of any

homecoming is eliminated. The idea of a shared space
being the locus of a common social experience is
shattered as the film frays into separate stories and the
impossible telling of those tales.
If the incompleteness of the title of the film warns us
against the expectation of a central unifying story, this
is a trope reiterated by editing. Scenes begin in the
middle of a conversation and cut out before the
resolution of an ending. Such radical cutting mitigates
against our full understanding of a scene, our ability to
connect stories. It re-enacts the impossibility of
communication between characters, finding a filmic
language that reproduces the experience of social
fragmentation. And it is a language whose rules
appear as arbitrary as the human encounters
manufactured by the city. Code Unknown does not
simply represent the dissipated condition of city life
but allows the language of film (of editing and story
structure) to be rewritten in the process.
These films foreground the paradoxes of
globalisation: proximity without intimacy, exchange
without understanding, spatial clustering without
sociality. It is a type of filmmaking that undoes the
global myths of spatio-temporal compression and
connection, of world solutions to world problems, of
global communities. There is no stabilising shot of the
city, but as in Ten, a view from a taxi window of a
fleeting city-scape, a view never quite pulled into
focus. We are inside a moving car whose direction is
subject to the control of the paying passenger. We
witness the stories of those who we do not even face
and these may be moments of a provisional intimacy or
a banal exchange. We share space in an arbitrary way
as we attempt clumsily to navigate our individual
paths through it. This is the underbelly of the global
beast, below the networks of corporate control and
secure routes of commodity exchange, an experience
of chaotic pathways and random collisions. v

Janet Harbord is a lecturer in Film Studies at Goldsmiths and

the author of Film Cultures (Sage, 2002).

THE QUIET GENIUS OF

Each story is a thread within the dense fabric of the city,

overlapping with others coincidently as characters
witness each other unknowingly. The only real
connection takes place through collision, a car crash
that acts as a point of convergence repeated in the film.
We return to this event not as a decisive moment of
enlightenment but as the nightmare of an eternally
recurring loop. The boy is hurt and his friend killed, the
model incurs injuries leading to the amputation of a leg
and the end of her career, the tramp steals the human
artefact of a wallet and takes the boys dog to nurse
back to health.
f we are used to coincidence as in Hollywood
comic capers of chance meetings, mis-timed
events and misunderstandings, Amores Perros
works through a more darkly rendered sense of
contingency and violent encounter. The violence of
such collisions is not contained by a narrative structure
leading towards an explicable resolution, but
continues to flare out into separate journeys once
again: the boy leaves the city for a life elsewhere, the
relationship of the model and her lover is
fundamentally challenged and potentially damaged, it
is only the tramp who is transformed for the better. His
story is one of reparation with his daughter and an
implied return to a visible social role.
Yet the act of reparation is itself telling: the tramp
breaks into the daughters apartment to explore and
inhabit her space whilst she is absent. In another twist
of the spatial relations of the city, the character can
inhabit the same space as his daughter yet have no
contact. Just as proximity in city life is not equal to
intimacy, so intimacy does not depend on the
synchronous sharing of space. And just as a face to face
encounter does not result in communication, human
connection increasingly occurs through mediated
forms. If human encounters have become impossible,
characterised by brutality (the dog fights, the car
crash), human connection is realisable only in the
absence of the other.
If there is a symmetry between the spatial
segregation of the city and the fragmentation of

VICTOR ERICE

If we are used to
coin-cidence as in
Hollywood comic capers
of chance meetings,
mis-timed events and
misunderstandings,
Amores Perros works
through a more darkly
rendered sense of
contingency and
violent encounter.

By Geoff Andrew

VICTOR

The music that I like best

is the sound produced by
the editing of all the
images. The rhythm of the
images has a music of its
own and thats much more
difficult than just placing
music on top of a film.

Victor Erice makes (or has been able to make)

films so rarely, he is in danger of becoming one of
contemporary cinemas forgotten masters
shamefully, he wasnt even given an entry in the
most recent edition of David Thomsons
Biographical Dictionary of Film. But with the
recent Lifeline, his at once typically modest but
magisterial contribution to the portmanteau film
Ten Minutes Older The Trumpet, Erice gently
but very effectively reminded the world that while
his output may be far from prolific two shorts
and three features in 35 years he remains one of
the very finest film-makers around today. Hes
proof that you neednt shout to be heard; there is
something magnificently human not only about
the concerns of his work but also about its tone
and scale. Like Kiarostami, Malick, Angelopoulos,
Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jarmusch and our own Terence
Davies, he is one of the contemporary cinemas
most eloquent poets; his films are simple in terms
of story but enormously rich and subtle in
meaning and resonance. Ravishing in their
painterly precision, illuminating in their exact
evocation of time and place, philosophically
contemplative yet profoundly compassionate,
they are cinematic gems to treasure: multifaceted, exquisitely beautiful reflections of the
world as seen by a truly distinctive artist.
What follows is an edited version of an on-stage
interview that took place at the National Film Theatre on
2 September, 2003.
Geoff Andrew: You dont make many films. Why did
you make your latest, Lifeline?

1-2. Code Unknown

3. Ten
4-5. Amores Perros

Victor Erice: The producers of Ten Minutes Older

approached me, their only stipulations being that the film
must not last longer than ten minutes, and that its main
theme should be time and the expression of time. Thats
what inspired me to make the film.
5