Internationally Irish: The films of Neil Jordan – Part 5 of 5

Posted on October 17, 2011 by arnar

Back to Ireland.


Neil Jordan’s next movie was Michael Collins (1996), a big blockbuster epic starring Liam Neeson as the Irish freedom fighter. The film was shot in Ireland and financed by Irish, English and American companies.

Michael Collins paints a heroic picture of the Irish Republican Army’s inspired strategist and military leader, who fought the British Empire to a standstill and invented the techniques of urban guerrilla warfare that shaped revolutionary struggles all over the world.[1]

Despite the film numerous historical alterations it was considered an important testimony of Irish history amongst the general public. The changes in the script seemed only minor when such a grand film was being made about such an important figure in Irish history. This view prompted a PG rating from the Irish censor board although the film was very violent. Irish film censor Sheamus Smith issued statement defending his decision:

In the statement the release of Michael Collins was described as “a major cinematic event” and the film itself “a landmark in Irish cinema”. Consequently, the censor wished “to make the film available to the widest possible Irish cinema audience. Because of the historical significance of this film, many parents may wish to make their own decisions as to whether or not their children should see it” …[2]

 

The movie marks a significant moment in Neil Jordan’s career, he had become Ireland’s top filmmaker, internationally respected and making large scale movies seen around the world. Michael Collins can be seen as a way for Jordan to re-enter into the Irish film scene with a bang by making a big budget epic about one of the biggest icons in Irish history. Even with his next film Jordan stays at home and makes The Butcher Boy (1997). The film is an adaptation by an Irish novel written by Patrick McCabe and tells the story of a boy’s descent into madness because of a tragic childhood. Neil Jordan’s themes of violence and sexuality which had, in a sense, been lost in Michael Collins because of the films nature as a historical epic, reemerge in The Butcher Boy which was shot in Ireland, using Irish studios including the famous Ardmore Studios.

This film is, in a sense, optimistic. It suggests that children must undergo years of horrible experiences before they turn into killers. … We want to believe that violent kids have undergone emotional torments like Francie Brady, the young hero of “The Butcher Boy.” If they haven’t, then the abyss is closer than we think. … The Butcher Boy is original work, an attempt to combine magic realism with everyday reality, and tie it together with Francie’s own brash, defiant personal style (he is not a dumb kid).[3]

Jordan explores the development of violence in the individual, a child growing up to become a monster. The film has also been read at many different levels due to its expressive visuals. In ‘Pigs!?: polluting bodies and knowledge in Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy Ellen E. Sweeny talks about how many writers have read the film as a visual representation on the struggle between modernity and tradition in Ireland.

The film can thus be read as a kind of ‘state of the nation’ piece
in which affluent nation of the 1990s looks back at the period when the process of Ireland’s modernization began. Reading the film’s protagonist, Francie Brady, the abused child, as an allegory for Irish history.[4]

The Butcher Boy is in a lot of ways Neil Jordan’s most Irish film. We can see that by looking at the difference in American, English or Irish analysis on the film which varies in a lot of ways. International audiences, who do not know the book or the movie’s setting in Irish history and its criticism on Catholicism, see the film on a more superficial level then Irish audiences. The film exceeds Michael Collins in that sense. It speaks to the Irish audience in a different way than the international audience.

Full circle.

When we look at Neil Jordan’s films, we see a recurring theme of violence in almost every one of his movies. When this theme is absent, we can see that the film was not under his complete control. Neil Jordan is an auteur, a true author of his films. We can clearly see it in the diminishing value of those films we know he had not complete control over.

As an auteur, Neil Jordan is fascinated by the cause and effect of violence. Although this element is true for majority of popular film directors, we can clearly see how different the representation of violence is in Jordan’s films apart from commercial action films and thrillers: violence is never the sole point to the story, it derives from characters ambitions and actions and it is never without consequences. Another theme of Jordan’s is the misplacement of identity. It is best displayed in The Crying Game and The Butcher Boy. In one film the character is a woman born with the curse of being a man, in the other a boy is trying to hang onto his sanity as his environment is transforming him into a madman.

These themes are valid anywhere in the world. They make Neil Jordan accessible as a director wherever his movies are shown. As we look at his work from Angel in 1982 to The Butcher Boy in 1997, we see a map: Jordan’s first work started a controversy that put him into a position of becoming an international director.

The nationality of Neil Jordan was often uncertain, audiences didn’t realize an Irish filmmaker was making some of the best British films and later the best American films. But after he makes his fortune with The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire, he comes back home and makes a big budget Hollywood style epic about an Irish hero. Which was a big deal at the time, never before had a movie about Irish history gotten such a wide distribution. Raita Merivirta-Chakrabarti writes about the movie:

Michael Collins is a national film text, produced by using Irish filmmaking infrastructure and the Irish government’s support mechanisms, as well as a Hollywood film studio for financing and distribution. The subject matter, the creative talent and the locations were Irish, but to make the film more appealing especially globally … the film was made utilizing the conventions of Hollywood film. These were, however, reworked or deviated from in places in order to make a point about Irish history or politics. Thus without selling out Irish tradition, Neil Jordan was able to deal with Hollywood and negotiate a place between Irish national cinema and Hollywood.[5]

This outlines what I like about Michael Collins, which I consider in many ways to be Neil Jordan’s crowning achievement as an Irish filmmaker. The pinnacle of any filmmaker’s career must be the time he makes a film that speaks to his country, his history and his profession in such a big way.

The biggest point I am trying to make is that in the first fifteen years of his career, Neil Jordan not only puts Irish filmmaking on the International map but also dominates Irish film history and casts his shadow onto every single new director that was taking his first steps in filmmaking. The films that came out in Ireland after Jordan started are all influenced by him. There has never been a filmmaker of Jordan’s magnitude in Ireland before. And in these first fifteen years Neil Jordan comes full circle. Any resentment about his first film or accusations that he abandoned the Irish film scene vanished in light of his achievements on the international scene.  He goes out into the world and proves himself as a great director and returns home as a national treasure.

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Internationally Irish: The films of Neil Jordan – Part 4 of 5

Posted on October 10, 2011 by arnar

International fame.

Mona Lisa (1986) made Neil Jordan noticeable in the United States. The film is about a ex-con named George that gets out of jail, only to find his stature within the crime community decreased and gets a job from the local crime boss to drive a prostitute called Simone to and from clients. At first they hate each other but soon fall in love. The film then turns into a thriller as Simone asks George to find and save a woman lost in the criminal underworld. Again Neil Jordan tells a story about sex, violence and obscure relationships:

Mona Lisa … was in [Jordan’s] own words about ‘a man and a woman who may as well live on different planets, with no comprehension’ … the film’s focus is on simple man adrift in a world he no longer understands; a world of mixed races and bought sex, where the simpler codes of an earlier age no longer apply.[1]

The film was nominated for an academy award in 1986 and got Jordan the recognition that he needed to get offers from American film producers. Which is perhaps why his next film, High Spirits (1988), was made and why it was considered such a failure. The film is a comedy starring Peter O’Toole as a man who pretends to haunt his castle, which is now a hotel, in order to save it from being bought out from under him. The film did poorly at the box office and with critics. Jordan has said that the producers had gone over his head and cut the final version of the film without his help.  Jordan’s version has never been released.

When the original leads, Sean Connery and Jeff Daniels, pulled out and as the American producers … became more and more intrusive, the film descended into considerable acrimony.[2]

This would mark the first time Jordan had little creative control over his own film. High Spirits was however a small return for Neil Jordan to Ireland in a sense. Although the film was completely financed by American film companies, it was shot in Kerry, Ireland. That was the first time since Angel that Jordan shot a movie in his home country.

Jordan’s next movie, We’re No Angels (1989), was shot in Canada. Again financed by American film companies, Jordan made a comedy about two escaped convicts who are mistakenly taken for priests in a small Canadian town. This was the first movie Jordan directed but did not write.

It is the only time Jordan has worked as a director for hire and it left him with no desire to repeat the experience. He remains proud of the finished film, although it performed as poorly as High Spirits at the box office. … Whatever the box office returns of his last two films, Jordan had proven his ability to direct big budget movies …[3]

With movies like High Spirits and We’re No Angels, we can see a certain absence of elements that had up to that point been in every film directed by Neil Jordan. If we however look at where he was working at the time as a young director, we can assume that he was simply paying his dues is a sense. That is, he agreed to direct a few commercial films to get on the good side of major film companies, proving that he could direct and finish a film, so he could later get larger finance for his own projects.

This last point seems to be true, because in his next film The Miracle (1991), Jordan returns to personal themes of sex and sexuality and strange relationships. In the film a boy, unknowingly, falls in love with his mother. The film marked another turning point in Jordan’s career regarding Ireland, whereas the film was shot in Ireland and financed by English and Irish film companies.

Jordan’s next film was based on Frank O’Connor’s short story Guests of the Nation. Starring again Stephen Rea, The Crying Game (1992) is about an IRA soldier named Fergus who befriends a captive English soldier before he is executed. The storyline is known by most people as the film was an international hit and launched Neil Jordan into superstardom. Although many critics found the plot twist regarding the character Dil, to be the “pay off” of the film, as a key element of what made the film good, it deserves a much closer look to see what it is really about:

It is much more complex and labyrinthine – both in terms of simple plotting, and in terms of the matters of the heart that follow. Most movie love stories begin as a given; we know from the first frame who will be together in the last. Here, there are times when we know nothing, and times when we know less than that. Yet because we care about the characters – we can’t help liking them – it’s surprising, how the love story transcends all of the plot turns to take on an importance of its own.[4]

The film contained many of Jordan’s favorite elements: a close look at violence and its consequences, strange relationships, sex and displacement of identity. The film also dealt with Irish issues in a very direct way, which Jordan had not done since Angel. In a very powerful scene early in the film Jody tells Fergus a tale that is a symbolic meditation on the nature of man; Fergus is a good man and so is Jody but they are both just extensions of two opposite syndicates that are not good in nature. They are soldiers, and as such they do not have individual identities and when Jody is executed, Fergus tries to reclaim his sense of identity and individuality by finding Dil.

The film made it possible for Jordan to direct a big budget Hollywood movie called Interview with the Vampire (1994), which was based on the book by Ann Rice. The Crying Game had given him a status within the Hollywood movie industry that granted him access to finances he had never gotten before:

… from the casting of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt through the burning down of a plantation on the banks of Mississippi to a score which is composed with historically accurate instruments, Jordan had access to resources on a scale he had never before enjoyed.[5]

The film spans two centuries of the life of a vampire and Jordan’s style is evident in the relationship between the characters of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and especially in the character played by Kirsten Dunst as an old woman trapped inside the body of a child. The film was a success and affirmed Jordan’s status as a big Hollywood director.

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Internationally Irish: The films of Neil Jordan – Part 3 of 5

Posted on September 19, 2011 by arnar

First steps.

 

Angel is in a sense, a revenge thriller, a movie that deals with violence and its effect on people who are directly or indirectly responsible or victimized. The movie was influenced by a film John Boorman had made called Point Blank (1967) starring Lee Marvin. In the book Cinema and Ireland the two films are compared:

Both films [Point Blank and Angel] end at the locations where they began and just as Walker in Point Blank discovers how he has been manipulated by the Organization leader, Fairfax, so Danny in Angel now learns that he has been used by the police detective, Bloom … in order to uncover the assassins. While both men have assumed themselves to be in control of their actions, the endings reveal how they have also been turned into puppets.[1]

Although Angel takes its thriller structure from Point Blank, it deals in many ways more with the consequences of violence rather then displaying it solely for the entertainment factor. If we look at individual characters we can see how the movie is analyzing their responses and views on violence. This is evident when we watch how Danny, the protagonist slowly becomes increasingly fascinated with murder.[2]

There can be no doubt … that it was the thriller element, which turned the film into a minor hit. It sets a clear precedent for Jordan’s films, which are remarkable in their attempts to use the commercial possibilities of genre filmmaking to investigate genuinely original material.[3]

This observation is again valid in Jordan’s next film The Company of Wolves. This is the classic story of Little Red Riding Hood and is based on the adaptation by Angela Carter. In his book World Cinema, Brian McIlroy makes a curious observation:

Strangely, the film ran into distribution problems: the British Board of Film Censors gave it an 18 certificate which meant that few children (its intended audience) could go and see it on their own …This is all the more strange since the joint script between Jordan and Angela Carter is very subtle in its layered narrative and framing devices.[4]

It’s curious to see McIlroy talk about The Company of Wolves so lightly, because although the story is essentially a children tale, the presentation is that of a horror movie; with dark forests and gothic settings. The movie deals also with sexuality in a dark way as Roger Ebert writes in his review of the movie:

A wolf is sometimes much more than he seems. … The key word there is “he.” There are no female wolves in this film, or at least not in the leading roles. The wolves are all male, and the males are almost all wolves. …  “The Company of Wolves” is a dream about werewolves and little girls and deep, dark forests. It is not a children’s film and it is not an exploitation film; it is a disturbing and stylish attempt to collect some of the nightmares that lie beneath the surface of “Little Red Riding Hood.”[5]

Although Ebert says the film is good, he calls it a definition of a nightmare. McIlroy’s observation is perhaps valid in a sense because although the film could be seen commercially as a new take on the Little Red Riding Hood story but when we look more closely at the film it investigates the elements of children coming of age, sex and sexuality and again, violence. The theme of violence and men is evident in the dialogue of the movie and goes back to Angel. The theme of Angel is stated by one of the characters: “men start out as angels and end up as brutes”[6] and the same thing happens in The Company of Wolves when Rosaleen says to granny: “I’d never let a man strike me” and granny responds: “Oh, they’re nice as pie until they’ve had their way with you. But once the bloom is gone… oh, the beast comes out”.

The film was a considerable success for Jordan, it was filmed and produced in England and made it possible for him to make Mona Lisa.

 

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Internationally Irish: The films of Neil Jordan – Part 2 of 5

Posted on August 7, 2011 by arnar

Grievances.

Neil Jordan made his first full-length movie in 1982. The movie was called Angel and starred Stephen Rea as a saxophonist who witnesses the brutal murder of his manager and a def mute girl and sets out to avenge her death. The movie was a big success for Jordan and launched his career as a film director.

The local Irish filmmakers however did not welcome the movie. The film had been financed partly by the Irish Film Board, which had just been formed, and although seven board members where suppose to be on the Irish Film Board, only three members had been appointed. One of the three was John Boorman who had just finished a film called Excalibur (1981). Neil Jordan had worked on Excalibur and made a documentary about the making of the movie. Boorman was also the director of the film company making Angel. The collaboration between the two men sparked a resentment felt by Irish filmmakers when Angel got a grant of 100 000 pounds and was the only movie to get funds from the Irish Film Board in 1981.[1]

The attitude of the independents to the Film Board’s investment in Angel, and the response by both Jordan and Boorman to the criticism of the Board’s decision, was to have a long-term negative effect on Irish film production.[2]

The controversy surrounding the financing of the film was very negative although the film proved to be a success. Neil Jordan had up to this point only been known as a short story author since his publication of Night in Tunisia and Other Stories in 1976 and had won numerous awards for his writing. Now he had entered the film industry with considerable ease, gotten financial support from the Irish Film Board and Channel 4 in England and made a full-length movie without almost any experience in filmmaking. But the controversy had much influence on the rest of his career, his next movie The Company of Wolves (1984) was made in England and he was accused of abandoning Ireland as a filmmaker, as he himself says in an interview published in the book World Cinema:

As for abandoning the Irish scene, well, I was kind of thrown out. The reason I went to England to make Company was because the reaction to my making Angel in Ireland was so vicious there, both from critics and from my peers. … I think it was really that I had never directed a film before.[3]

With the controversy of his first movie, Jordan is in a sense pushed out of the Irish film scene, getting offers to direct a movie in England. The hostile environment that had developed with the financing of his first movie essentially makes Neil Jordan an international director, his next two movies The Company of Wolves and Mona Lisa (1988) are both filmed in England and with Mona Lisa Jordan gets his first taste of real international fame, getting nominated for an Academy Award in the United States and the Golden Palm in the Cannes Film Festival.

 

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Internationally Irish: The films of Neil Jordan – Part 1 of 5

Posted on August 5, 2011 by arnar

Neil Jordan is without a doubt the most successful filmmaker in the history of Irish cinema. He has directed fifteen feature length films in all. Jordan’s films are special in a sense because most of his films are not made in Ireland or by Irish film companies. Partly because of the controversy regarding his first film Angel (1982), which resulted in his absence in the Irish film industry at the start of his career.

With each film he made throughout his career, his status as an international director, rather than an Irish one, grew. In this light we must examine Neil Jordan’s work in a certain light. His films display a history of a director who is never simply an Irish director but rather one who transcends, yet epitomizes nationality.

… Jordan’s films often do not pin their national identity on their sleeve. In fact, they do not really seem to have a coherent sense of corpus or oeuvre. Jordan obviously considers himself an auteur … Yet his films do not have a central bank of motifs or concerns that are drawn on again and again. Whilst there obviously are pieces that consider Irishness or questions of identity, there are texts that are concerned with fantasy, psychosis and sexuality.[1]

I believe the best way to examine Neil Jordan’s status as an Irish and international filmmaker is to look at his films, highlight their themes and the surroundings in which they where made. The themes in his movies are seldom exclusively Irish (and it would be unreasonable to demand it simply because he is Irish) which is partly explained by his absence in the Irish film industry. But despite his success as an international filmmaker he returns to Ireland after making his fortune to direct an Irish historical epic surrounding the life of Michael Collins and to adapt a very famous and respected Irish book to the screen.

His films have a recurring theme of misplaced identity, which could echo his own misplacement while making a name for himself on the international scene. By examining his films in chronological order from his debut with Angel to his adaptation of The Butcher Boy (1997), I believe we can see how Jordan goes beyond his nationality and later returns to it as a result of his increasing fame.

 

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Postmodern Cinema and the concept of memory: Wings of Desire

Posted on March 5, 2011 by arnar

Witnessing the history of memory.

In a way Wings of Desire (1987) is about memory. The main protagonist even remembers how the world was created. On the surface the movie  is a story about an angel that falls in love with a human woman. He falls so much in love with her that he decides to sacrifice his everlasting life as an angel and become human so he can live for, what must seem to a immortal, a short time with her on earth.

However, after watching the movie, one can propose the idea that the love story is an excuse to make a movie about something completely different. In fact most of the movie is about watching and witnessing common people do common things. We follow an angel that has been on earth since before time began. He cannot be seen or interfere with human progress, but he seems to be able to slightly influence people – but not very much. He is also not alone; we see many other angels in the movie and can only assume that there are many more all over the world. They walk among us and witness our actions and our lives. Roger Ebert explains the nature of the angels in his review of the film:

The angels … are not merely guardian angels, placed on Earth to look after human beings. They are witnesses, and they have been watching for a long time–since the beginning. Standing on a concrete river bank in Berlin, they recall that it took a long time before the primeval river found its bed. They remember the melting of the glaciers. They are a reflection of the solitude of God, who created everything and then had no one to witness what he had done; the role of the angels is to see.[1]

The film deals with many themes and one of the most important one is the concept of memory. Ebert points out that the angels are the agents of god, to witness what he made – according to this idea, human beings cannot appreciate the creation of the world and that of man, because humans are born and die. Our history as we write it is flawed because we do not know for sure what came before us and we cannot see the whole picture. The angels can see the whole picture and they live forever, they are witnessing one event that is taking millions of years to unfold.

This leads us back to the concept of memory. I noted before that memory is what makes us human because memory is knowledge and being human is to know that you are human. The film expands the idea of our individual memories into something else, a concept of memory that we all share. We can never relive the past, we can only remember it, recall it and see it in our minds. If you have no memory, if it is blank then you have no identity, you have no self – you just are.

In a scene that takes place in a car sale we get a glimpse of how the angels witness the world. They tell each other about what they see – and what they see are everyday things, which they write down as to record the history of the human race.

They listen to the thoughts of an old Holocaust victim, and of parents worried about their son, and of the passengers on trams and the people in the streets; it’s like turning the dial and hearing snatches of many radio programs. They make notes about the hooker who hopes to earn enough money to go south, and the circus aerialist who fears that she will fall, because it is the night of the full moon.[2]

In a way it is a reassuring thing that the angels choose to monitor history in that way. Humans have always written history books on grand things and with broad strokes. Only a handful of men throughout history are mentioned by name because of their actions that, according to historians, shaped the way history unfolded. Centuries are described in a few words – sometimes with the description: “nothing particularly interesting happened”. But the angels in Wings of Desire see something else, their account on history is focused on other things, they witness individuals. The reassuring thing about that is that your life had a meaning because someone witnessed it. Your actions, no matter how trivial, where witnessed by someone and therefore your existence, your individuality and humanity was acknowledged. You where not just a grain of sand that feel through the passage of time. This is something humans do to some extent with each other; when we die our friends acknowledge us by remembering us. They serve as the witnesses to our existence.

The loss of history, of memory is evident in the film, especially in the character of Homer, the old man who fears for the world as the storytellers die. The film reminds us that our memory does not only serve as a distinction of our humanity and individuality but also as a proof of it. Memory is not simply internal, it is written down into history books where men describe accounts and events that made the world as it is. And like our internal memory, this history is not written accurately. We have very limited resources to confirm the accuracy of our past. So we take what we can remember and go from there, no matter if its what really happened or not.

[1] http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980412/REVIEWS08/401010374/1023

[2] http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980412/REVIEWS08/401010374/1023

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The look of a good actor

Posted on February 25, 2011 by arnar

A recent whiskey commercial for Jim Bean reminds us why Willem Dafoe is a great actor.

In just over a minute the commercial has shown us multiple versions of one man. The soothing voice talking throughout the images ponders the choices we make in our lives and where they might take us. In every scene is a different version of the same man and with simple expressions we are given insight into his soul, his life and his dreams.

[vsw id="DDL5yXIWs28" source="youtube" width="425" height="344" autoplay="no"]

[vsw id="UTMRufBXhCY" source="youtube" width="425" height="344" autoplay="no"]

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Remembering Biogen (02.24. 1976 – 02.07. 2011)

Posted on February 19, 2011 by arnar

Sigurbjörn Þorgrímsson also known as Bjössi Biogen past away on February 7. 2011. I did not only know him as my friend’s older brother but also as a good and decent man that possessed a deep and sensitive soul.

He was a pioneer in the Icelandic electronic music scene, a writer, a poet, musician and  a filmmaker. Respected by his peers and loved by his friends and family. He possessed a unique talent for both music and film as is evident in the videos he made.

Moving, challenging, honest, beautiful and unique. Words that describe his soul and his work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpIw8osKkus

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Postmodern Cinema and the concept of memory: The Mirror

Posted on January 30, 2011 by arnar

Subjective memories.

If the replicant in Blade Runner had implanted memories, they could have well been uploaded from the movie The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky. The movie is about a man who is dying and on his deathbed he remembers his life. The movie is supposedly based on Tarkovsky’s own life and he is the protagonist. We never see him, only his apartment, and then we see scenes; memories from different times of his life in no particular order.

The film opens with a young man who stutters. A woman using some sort of hypnosis then cures him. The next scene shows us the protagonist’s mother sitting on a fence. Smoking. She looks at the open field in front of her as a man crosses it to talk to her. The same actress later plays the protagonist’s ex-wife in another sequence. If we where to make any assumptions about that we could say that in his memories, his mother and ex-wife look the same: as a dominant and caring figure in his life. The woman he sees as his mother and ex-wife might not look like either of them, but rather a combination of the two women.

[The Mirror] jettisons anything close to a plot, stirring past and present, colour and monochrome, newsreel and fiction into a kaleidoscope of the director’s ponderings on childhood, memory and a century of Mother Russia. Don’t forget, Mirror’s personal and historical reflections aren’t meant to slot together conventionally, instead flashing in and out of each other with dreamlike whimsy.[1]

We are moved back and forth in time. We are seeing the life of this man through his minds eye, never knowing if his memories are accurate or if they are fantasies or dreams. Although many viewers might think that the film is incoherent in its presentation it is perhaps more likely that it is too straightforward. It presents us with insight into the psyche of a man dying, his thought process seems only incoherent to us because we are not him.

Memory is the key theme in Tarkovsky’s [The Mirror]  … and the memories are clearly his own. The film’s scenes range from painful and nostalgic memories of childhood, beautiful archive footage from the (WWII) era, dreams and the indescribable. Tarkovsky had claimed the simplicity of the film as being a story, but narratively it is his most complex – stretching the limits of cinematic narrative structure.[2]

When we remember our past, we do not remember it in a classic narration like in the movies or books – we remember it randomly, not in a chronological order. We also never remember things accurately; we sometimes combine our fantasies and dreams with our memories. In The Mirror there is a scene when our protagonist as a young boy encounters a strange woman who suddenly appears in the living room. Is she a ghost? A hallucination? Or is she simply a random fantasy that happened to blend with an old memory? If we think about it, that kind of thought-process happens constantly to us, our minds wonder, we think of many different things happening at the same place at different times and they cross and mix easily.

Our memories also blend with out fantasies such as the scene where we see either the protagonist’s mother or his ex-wife run through the printing factory, anxiously trying to see if she made a typo before her work is printed. That sequence is remembered by our protagonist as a fantasy, she might have told him about it sometime after it happened to her, and now we are simply seeing his version of what he imagined happened along with whatever emotion he feels for her and her situation.

Memory is also the key weakness. Nothing in the film is meant to be symbolic or surreal (Tarkovsky denied both), and essentially it all has to be read as literally and simply as possible to fit Tarkovsky’s vision for what the film was meant to be. … In interviews he expressed a confusion over why many consider the film to be “difficult” – but this confusion most likely came from the fact that he had the benefit of hindsight, whereas the rest of us do not.[3]

In connection to our discussion of memory and knowledge, The Mirror offers the perception of an individual. He is without a doubt not remembering his life objectively or correctly – but he is remembering, and although we never see him in the present, we get a sense of his individuality, of what kind of a person he was. We are witnessing what defines him, what makes him human and what makes him – him. This is what the replicant Rachael wants in Blade Runner, she wants memories, fantasies and individuality. When Deckard confronts her and tells her that her memories are false and where implanted by the Tyrell Corporation, she is stripped of her individuality and her identity.

But later in the film we see romance develop between Deckard and Rachael. Although they both know that she is not human and her memories are false, he still falls in love with her and she with him. We might ask the question, what is it that Deckard is falling in love for? If we assume that his love for Rachael is not based on lust for her body and appearance, we must assume it because of her personality – but personality is based upon memories and experience – but her memories are false and her experience is limited to her short life as a replicant.

What is important here is to remember that although Rachael has implanted memories that are not authentic – she still possesses them and they influence her behavior and thought process. That is the reason why the Tyrell Corporation implanted memories inside her mind, so they could control the future replicants better; your personality is defined by your memories. Similarly, the other replicants who where not given memories of a whole lifetime like Rachael – are shaped by the memory of their short lifetime as slaves on another planet.

The point is that Rachael remembers. What she remembers is not accurate, in the way that it didn’t happen to her, but when she remembers things from her artificial past she remembers it with the same intensity that we do. Our protagonist in The Mirror might as well be a replicant because he isn’t remembering real things either, just how he recalls them and he mixes his memories with his fantasies so nothing is like it really happened but that’s the point – it’s not about what really happened, it’s about our perception of memories and our feelings towards them which in turn shapes us and makes us human. So we might then ask; in what way is Rachael not human?

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2004/07/21/mirror_2004_review.shtml

[2] http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/02/06/021856.php

[3] http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/02/06/021856.php

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Postmodern Cinema and the concept of memory: Blade Runner

Posted on January 23, 2011 by arnar

Do humans dream objectively?

I want to discuss the concept of memory in light of three movies that are considered to be postmodern, namely: Blade Runner (1982) Zerkalo (The Mirror, 1975) and Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987). I am especially interested in the importance of memory regarding our humanity and individuality.

In Blade Runner the idea of what makes us human is very dominant. It tries to determine what conditions we need to fulfill to be considered humans. One of these conditions, I believe, is memory. The Mirror takes this idea further and explores how our memories work and how our minds present them when we recall moments in our past. The Mirror and Blade Runner both raise questions regarding the truthfulness of out memories in contrast to our perception of reality. Are our memories reliable? Can we ever remember something objectively?

Finally I want talk about memory in light of the movie Wings of Desire. Although I realize that Blade Runner and The Mirror are more closely linked in the discussion of individual memory. I believe that Wings of Desire is an important addition to this discussion and allows us to reflect on the concept of memory and humanity on a larger scale. Although I do not expect to resolve these issues in this essay, it is my intension to start the discussion and reflection into the concept of memory in these films and into the nature of identity.

In the movie Blade Runner we are introduced to a futuristic Los Angeles in the year 2019. The world has survived a great disaster that almost wiped out all animal life on earth. The movie follows a rather unusual detective named Rick Deckard, who is given the job to find and eliminate four robots running loose in Los Angeles. This world has two technological wonders that define it:

Firstly, we are now capable of creating artificial entities that look and behave like the originals. … And secondly, we have started the difficult and dangerous job of colonizing the other planets …[1]

The work involved in colonizing another planet is so difficult that we make robots, or “replicants” as they are called in the film, to do the work for us. Each replicant is designed to best suit the job it was made for, so some replicants are very strong, some are intelligent or attractive. The replicant share however a common standard: they are look and behave like human beings.

This basic story comes from a Philip K. Dick novel with the intriguing title, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” The book examined the differences between humans and thinking machines, and circled warily around the question of memory: Does it make an android’s personal memories less valid if they are inspired by someone else’s experiences — especially if the android does not know that?[2]

There is a scene in Blade Runner, where a replicant named Rachael, who doesn’t know she is a replicant, tries to prove to Rick Deckard that she is in fact a human being. She gives him a picture of a woman and a child and says that this is she and her mother. Deckard responds by asking her if she remembers things that happened in her childhood and he names things only she can know: when she was a child and played doctor with her brother or when that spider laid eggs under her windowsill. He explains that she is indeed a replicant and her memories where implanted into her mind to deceive her into thinking she is human.

The scene raises an interesting question: how do you prove to someone that you are human? In Blade Runner, the replicants are exposed through psychological tests. In the first scene we see a blade runner checking every employee in the infamous Tyrell Corporation to see if they are all humans. Why doesn’t he simply put them all trough an x-ray machine or take a blood sample? The movie suggest that this is not enough, the human race has made machines that are exactly like humans in almost every way including blood, organs and bones.

The idea behind Blade Runner is to explore what makes us human. In the scene mentioned before and throughout the film we are reminded that one of the things that make us human is our memory. Memories are not simply a device that we use to stay active in society by remembering the names of the people we interact with or remember where we parked our car. Memories are what distinguish our own identity and individuality.

If it has no memory of its own thoughts; if it cannot lay them up for its own use, and be able to recall them upon occasion; if it cannot reflect upon what is past, and make use of its former experiences, reasonings, and contemplations, to what purpose does it think? They who make the soul a thinking thing, at this rate, will not make it a much more noble being than those do whom they condemn, for allowing it to be nothing but the subtlest parts of matter.[3]

Memories are knowledge; knowledge makes us human, because to know that you are human is to remember it – to know it. Every action we take and each thought we think is determined by our past experiences and knowledge. We cannot for instance imagine the future without remembering the past because we need a sense of time and a sense of evolution of ourselves and the things around us. But Blade Runner also ventures deeper into this idea and challenges us to consider the possibility of false memories, what if we where all born yesterday but have artificial memories of a whole lifetime? How do you prove your past? With photos? Stories? Witnesses? Continue reading →

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