les yeux les oreilles

realizing the added value of having an arab who speaks corsican, cesar luciani (the prison godfather) asks malik el djebna (rahim) to be his eyes and ears when it comes to his gang's surroundings in their french prison. amidst a current power shift in the cultural makeup of the prison, the relationship between cesar and malik grows in significance after most of cesar's gang is disbanded. he is the last of cesar's old gang and still the only half arab/half corsican who is able to straddle the defined boundary that separates inmate interaction and ideology between races. malik, who works for no one but himself, uses the destablization of prison equlibrium to his own advantage.

allowed to be released for a couple parolled days, thanks to cesar's influence and power, malik runs errands for his boss in the outside world. during his first trip, malik finds the time to recoup a bag of drugs left behind by one of his arab inmate friends who sets up another one of his released friends (ryad) with a drug running job. upon arrival back in the prison, cesar suspects that malik has alterior interests and threatens him by taking a spoon to his eye and digging it into the socket. his second trip is no less frightening. after several failed attempts at "wacking" one of luciani's rival mob leaders, malik takes it upon himself to assasinate him and his entourage during the middle of the day. while shooting inside an armoured car, malik leaves physically unharmed but looses his sense of hearing momentarily.

the most valuable assets to malik's survival in prison are endangered. malik's eyes and ears are his own and they represent his unique way of seeing, hearing, and existing. when corrupted through the veil of gang order and supremacy he almost loses them completely; he becomes a pawn in the chess game of others. however, when malik uses his senses independently he stumbles upon spiritual freedoms that he has never felt before. its during his parolled trips that malik experiences an empowerment of being. riding above the clouds in an airplane and walking through the ocean along a beach are sensations that release malik from an imprisoned world of his own senses. at his actual prison release, malik is greeted as a new kingpin (in the shadow of cesar's fallen empire) by a convoy of trucks. instead of acknowledging them, malik turns to ryad's widowed wife and walks with her with open ears and eyes.

family portait

going home for the holidays is an understatement when it comes to the zhang family, one of hundreds of millions of chinese migrant worker families, who go to desperate lengths to travel extraordinary distances during their sole vacation week, the chinese new year. the arithmetic alone of the largest human migration in the world is cause for awe. however, lixin fan paints a much more impressionistic picture of the emotional/psychological despair caused in the absence of parenthood (as it belongs to children and parents alike). while separated by thousands of miles, the greater distance between the zhang family is an opinion of the significance of sacrifice.

as the parents see it, their absence from the home is to better the potential futures of their son and daughter who unlike most rural children attend school full time. more than anything they would prefer to see their children not follow in their factory-job footsteps. as the children see it, they grow up in an environment where their only parental figure is their grandmother in addition to the income of their parents which doesn't even relieve them of their labourious existence. a life without the support of their parents feels like a life confined and imprisoned. an obvious reaction to this structure would be, as qin (daughter) does, to rebel and explore the freedom of independency.

her choice: to drop out of highschool a year early and pursue a factory job sewing jeans. at first qin appreciates her new found freedom and even finds a certain pride in her work. in one scene, qin and her roommate go shopping at a local mall and search for the brand of jeans they have put all their hard work into only to find that the department store doesn't carry them. as the exterior shots of qin's factory suggest, the mounds of denim they toil in are shipped and sold to a foreign market. nevertheless, this hardly phases qin who in her own search for affirmation gets a barbie-styled haircut that all the tourists share. in a less than positive appraisal, the haircut proves to be not quite what qin had anticipated. her search for expression/individuality comes up short. while she may be too stuborn to admit it to herself, a lonliness (the ghost of her parents support) pervades her new life.   

in an attempt to convince qin to change her mind and go back to school, her parents pick qin up for their annual migration back home. she laughs and scoffs in a childlike-wonder while her parents cautiously wait among the masses for a single train ticket. waiting days on end is commonplace and qin's mother tries to instill the value of this painstaking wait. upon arrival back home, the zhang family is even more dysfunctional. in an extreme insult to the dignity and honour of her father, qin uses the word "fuck" and is physically punished for it. for further emphasis fan keeps in a shot of qin breaking the fourth wall - addressing the audience that this is the "real" her. the surface of the film, like the tear in the family unit, has finally ripped. while last train home certainly points to the disconnection of family and loss of generation, it imparts a sense of immediacy and need for action. the longer the common peasant worker in china continues to sew mindlessly, the greater chance that the unity of country/family will go past the point of being able to be mended.

cold shower

alpha male, staff sergeant william james (renner) is anything but tame. nicknamed the "wild one" he acts on destructive impulses and has a reckless abandon for protocol. dropping head sets, smoking cigarettes, and entering baghdad solo are the norm for this expert bomb-diffuser. dramatized or not, james' ego encapsulates a personality that gets off from being immersed in the chaos and horror of war. the tension of facing death every day (the episodic structure exposing the hauntingly routineness of it) gives james a natural adrenaline rush that makes him feel his most alive. under his bed he keeps deactivated detonators for trophies: he mentions how fascinating they are as instruments of death that could have killed him. underneath this though, they serve as a faint reminder of james' last fix. he is a man addicted to this rush. as bigelow's opening quote suggests, war is a drug.

unlike his partner who he accidentally sent to the hurt locker, james finds no comfort and zero ambition returning back home. the mundane experience of grocery shopping just doesn't compare to the kinetic urgency of bomb-diffusing. serving his country, and more precisely serving his own dependent need, james chooses to go back and fight in iraq. however "personal" this choice is, it represents a larger idea; that there are pleasurable impulses in warring. one reason america repeatedly engages in war is because it releases a natural high. its soaked into the genetics of history. in the scene after james shoots his partner, he enters a washroom alone and starts a shower to relieve his stress. as the water pours down his still military-suited body it rinses into a pool of blood. james is surrounded by a cold truth: death and injury of innocents are the cost of a body that, at its most nakedness, is always at war.

simultaneity

being many things at once is not a novel concept for detroit duo the white stripes, even if these things end up contradicting each other. as frontman jack white informs the viewer in malloy's the white stripes under great white northern lights, the most accurate review of the band he had ever heard is that they are simultaneously the most fake band and the most real band. an interesting thought, and one that malloy teases at throughout the documentary in cinematic fashion.

interviews with the bandmates reveal an idiosyncratic depth to the methodology of the white stripes. fully aware of their contrivance of style (red, white, black iconography) and limitation (being a two piece band) the band works within these parameters to produce (sometimes forcefully) something unique and creative. in the process of revealing how the white stripes function as artists, malloy mirrors the dimensionality of the band in the structure of the documentary.

equal parts performance, interview, and narrative the film also has many moments of purely visual purpose. at first, shots of jack and meg in front of airplanes painted red and white or the black and white shots of them walking on the frozen surface on nunavit may seem as nothing but an exercise in vanity. however, given the film's subject matter its more apt to consider that the inclusion of shots like these show an acceptance of  the band's superficiality and how it works in framing their identity. not including pure red, black, and white imagery would do an injustice to who the band actually is. those red and white smoke stacks capture the canadian landscape but illustrate a surface.

behind one surface lays another. the film also captures the band's ability above all to play music. combining theatre shows with secret shows, the stripes run the gamut of musical exhibition. in the process, malloy allows many songs to be filmed start-to-finish, giving the viewer an experience of the spaces the white stripes create. the band plays without set-lists and sometimes without set-locations; the result of such endeavours creates a purely unique musical experience. no show/performance is rehearsed or duplicated (often making the band second guess their individual execution). a vein of originality pulses through the "body" of the white stripes. to illustrate the raw, unfiltered texture of the band, the film almost exclusively uses grainy camerawork while they are on stage.

cynically, this could be interpreted as yet another device perpetuating the mystique of the stripes. this misses the point; the white stripes are a band who box themselves in multiple constrictions to force creativity. great white northern lights forces a spotlight on the concept of the artist. it is more than a document of a canadian tour its a document of identity. not just how the white stripes should be percieved or want to, but what goes into that perception. what makes-up who the artist is. the conclusion being that the white stripes are, after ten years, still the same band they started out as: gimmick and grit.

when the child was a child

he's just a boy pretending to be a wolf pretending to be a king. this is douglas' regretful observation of the wild things' newly founded king, max. while douglas would like play make-believe, keeping the status quo for carol's sake, he tries to quell his tempermental friend with a bit of truth. not having it, carol bursts into a fit of rage and is more than ready to eat the "terrible" king who, according to carol, failed to keep them safe and take care of them. echoing max's tantrum with his mother (with the caveat that max has never eaten anyone, just bitten), carol's emotions reach uncontrollable monstrously-sized proportions. 

and so, max runs; away from danger and straight into the maternal body of k.w. (the main source of carol's emotional turmoil). its while hiding from carol inside k.w. that max comes to the conclusion he has to go home and be with his mom. max instinctually feels the need for domesticity: the comfort of family and warmth of loving parents. in a sense, max comes back down to size. he recedes from a world where even his wildest imaginations can't conquer the fear of growing up and finds solace in the tranquil housing of a mother's womb.

this fear of aging permeates max's physical and psychological space throughout the film. before he even gets to the island, max is confronted with examples of aging and, as is with most children, internalizes these modes of change into feeling. be they abstract thoughts (like the demise of the sun, among other human catastrophes) or visceral feelings (like the abandonment of a sister who's already grown up), max naturally wants to stabilize the disorder around him. hence his quest to establish order with the wild things. at one point he asks bob and terry (k.w.'s feathery friends) for some wisdom: "how do i make everyone o.k.?" all max is concerned about is the safety and happiness of his friends. to do it he imagines everything from a "sadness shield" to the "ultimate fort."

at home max uses his mom as his own sadness shield. she becomes his protective force when the raw energy of primary emotions like fear, anger, and sadness become to much to tackle alone. after max faces the learned truth that everything is fun and games til someone gets hurt (max under his igloo fort) his mom let's him know that she wouldv'e done something about it. likewise, when max is worried about his mom while she is fixing reports on her computer, she notices max's desire to be with her. from max's point of view (at her feet), she appears as a larger than life figure; surrounding him physically and emotionally. asking him to tell her a story, max authors a tale about a vampire who bit a building, lost his teeth, and was ostricized from his vampire friends because the teeth he lost weren't going to grow back. max's fear of aging is, as he confesses, a fear of leaving behind a time of baby teeth, childhood, and wild things.

vanishing american

neil diamond's nfb documentary, reel injun, appropriately examines the evolutionary portrayal of indian culture in hollywood cinema. framed chronologically, the film provides an iconoclastic deconstruction of each decade's stereotypic representations of the "injun" and, in turn, the difficulties in constructing an identity lost to genocide. an insightful interview with filmmaker jim jarmusch brings attention to how the birth of cinema coincided with the colonization of native peoples allowing america to replace an exterminated culture with a mythology of the indian. technology taking over for centuries of tradition.

this thought really puts into perspective the fragility of native identity, which independent of its own free will is inextricably linked to the power of cinema. as a result, any form of cliche, from the "noble" indian (silent, peaceful, mystical) to the "savage" indian (loud, warring, barbaric), de-humanizes and warps native/popular conceptions of what it means to be an actual indian. it takes from the original and imparts creations of convenience (non-existent headbands); alters truths of appearance (plains indians did not wear headdresses); and instills fallacies of fiction (that signature woo-ing warrior call, an invention of hollywood) into the replacement.

with such a media-based identity, technology has also helped in the reconstruction and empowerment of native culture. sacheen littlefeather's stand-in for marlon brando's best actor (the godfather) boycotted acceptance speech gave visibility to real adversities (wounded knee) in the native community. and a current for-us by-us mentality in native filmmaking has given a voice and gaze to native peoples that is utterly native. prize winning atanarjuat (fast runner) ends with a presumedly dead man running out of a tent completely naked across the arctic ice in a scene that volumizes the rebirth of the on-screen injun; stripped down and the future ahead of him.