 |
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508 
| ||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508
| ||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Screen savers
By Nigel Ryan
In these weeks of film frenzy, of occasional crowds outside the cinemas being used by the Cairo International Film Festival and excitement in the office over who is here and who not, who is giving interviews, who retaining a Garbo-like silence behind the wildly efficient protection offered by the festival's far from competent press office, one feels a little like the ghoul at the party not to be carried away by the spirit of it all. More ghoulish than ever, in fact, after reading the interview opposite given by Roland Joffé, head of this year's festival jury -- as convincing an argument as can be made for the continuing relevance of cinema as a vehicle capable of exploring some of the most pressing moral dilemmas of our age.
Yet still enthusiasm remains curiously lacking. It could, of course, be no more than a case of cinema fatigue. Not that I can claim to be a regular movie-goer: my forays are few and far between, not least because they so often end in disappointment, a reflection more of the kind of films that are on offer in Cairo during the 350 days of the year when the film festival is not happening, perhaps, than on the condition of international cinema as a whole.
What fills cinemas during the rest of the year -- apart from the ever decreasing number of local productions -- tend to be the kind of films that Joffé damningly characterises as a "cinema of lies." They are the big Hollywood productions, the studio formula films. Sadly, the best one can hope for within the genre is the vapid slush of Titanic, which rather than sink like a stone actually grossed a billion dollars at the box-office, a thoroughly terrifying achievement. I managed to sit through the film, fantasising that its heroine would be consumed by the icy waters, willing -- every time she leapt back onto the sinking ship -- that her fingers might slip and the end credits roll.
The amounts of money -- $200 million -- and the time and effort and resources and skills that go into the creation of such a farrago of utter nonsense are as mind-boggling as the numbers of people who flocked to pay and sit for hours as the ship sank. It remains less frightening, though, than a more recent release in local cinemas, The Patriot -- a film sufficiently offensive to make me leave the cinema during the interval.
The first 40 minutes of this spurious epic was enough to make one speculate on its funding: had it actually been partially bank-rolled by the Rifle Association? The barely more rabid white supremacist groups, who have a penchant for survivalist weekends, could easily have acted as technical advisers, though they might have had a problem with the film's portrayal of revolutionary America as a slave free society where black women are happy to do the laundry of white folks only for a decent wage, and where black men toil willingly on farms and plantations, doing an honest day's work and in turn receiving an honest share of the profits.
The patriot himself learned his resistance skills from the very same Native Americans whose inclusion in Joffé's adaptation of The Scarlet Letter earned him the almost unanimous condemnation of American critics. And a fat lot of good such skills ever did the Native Americans: for the non-natives, though, they allowed for a successful revolt against the British forces in North America, and the winning of the god-given American right not to pay taxes which has furnished the Republican Party with an electoral platform ever since.
This fantastical history is not only wrapped around in the resounding, constitutional rhetoric that was America's belated gift to the century of the Enlightenment, but is spurred on by none other than good-old family values, by a father's righteous indignation at the mistreatment of his son that had turned him, by the time I left the theatre, into a blood-thirsty serial killer, though no worse -- if anything, much better -- a parent for that.
Family values and the mutilation of others are, it would seem, the perfect Hollywood bed-fellows. And nowhere did they sit more comfortably together than in another film from which I fled, several years ago, at a time when state of emergency laws were enforced a little more stringently and absenting yourself from a cinema while the film was still being screened necessitated a vociferous argument with those on the door.
Seven -- which has established itself as a mini-cult -- is viciously pornographic. I do not mean that it is pornography in the sense that it belongs to a minor, if interesting, literary/narrative convention: the film has no ambitions within such a modality. It is pornographic in that the plot's sole rationale is to string together scenes of torture: a fat man is force fed on pasta for weeks and then kicked in the stomach till it ruptures; another man is kept alive by means of intravenous drips having been nailed onto a table years ago. So much for Greed and Sloth, and so on, through each of the seven deadly sins.
Sloth did it for me. The man nailed on the table, kept just this side of starvation, who had long ago bitten off his tongue in agony, who is blind from being kept in the dark and who can only twitch when discovered by the police is, we are told, a suspected paedophile. If he thinks the past few years have been hell, wait till he sees what's on the other side, or words to that effect, from the family-friendly law enforcement officer. Off to argue at the door.
"I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts."
A Wildean paradox, penned a century ago. And Hollywood has cottoned on to the fact that we like our bestiality to be family-value-friendly. So much for the moral sense. So much for the blockbuster. And sadly, an increasing aversion to films, at least the kind of films that gain international release.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
