Raban is an artist influenced by Dziga Vertov whose films are "kino eye" city portraits, with Raban the city is always London. Raban wanted to make a film about how the recession had affected London, About Now MMX is the result. So he, ambitiously, wanted to see how it had affected the skyline of London, but more realistically he had to use a lot of mise-en-scene to make his point.
As that great rhetor and President of the French Republic Nicolas Sarkozy famously and more than a little shamelessly pointed out, this particular credit crunch can be seen as being of "Anglo-Saxon" genesis, and so the London location is very apt. Perhaps in a symbolic though not painstakingly accurate sense, the triumvirate of Canary Wharf buildings shown a lot in the film (HSBC/Citi/One Canada Square), can be seen as a hive of greed and financial meltdown. In that sense the film reminds me very much of Patrick Keiller's London which absolutely bemoaned the fact that London had become the financial capital of the world, the "City" a chancre on the city. One Canada Square, the most iconic of the buildings, was known at the time of erection as "Thatcher's Dick", fittingly referencing the Friedmanite lackey. In what must surely be a monumental coincidence, if we are to believe architect Cesar Pelli, the top of the tower is a pyramid with a periodically blinking beacon at it's tip, forcibly recalling the eye-tipped pyramid "the Eye of Providence" of the US one-dollar bill. So there are rich Pagan/mystic associations here, a dash of witchcraft mixed in with the capitalist atmosphere.
The film is exclusively shot from the 21st floor of the Balfron Tower, a rather hideous but imposing piece of social housing designed by Ernő Goldfinger in 1963, that I generally have to suffer seeing on the train journey up to London from the South West. A large proportion of the film consists of time lapsed pans, a technique that can produce images of outrageous beauty if used properly. All the pans are produced either horizontally or vertically, and Raban, perhaps with a little tongue in cheek, mentioned that the inspiration for this was Piet Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie Woogie, a painting which did not break De Stijl's rectilinear aesthetic code, but, in a human compromise, allowed the inspirational glitz and opulence of the New York setting to come through.
So what did Raban see during his four months stint in his Modernist eyrie? As mentioned the buildings of Canary wharf played a huge part, and towards the end the movement of the film (and the accompaniment) becomes very aggressive, time-lapsed pans sweeping back and forth again and again across the Citi offices. One expects the workers to leave at some point as the sky darkens, but the hiving continues unabated until Raban's robotic head-shake finally loses patience and moves on. There's also a New Year's fireworks display erupting magnificently over the London Eye in spectacular time lapse, which a bolshy audience member at the Tate Modern showing referred to as an ejaculation, citing Kenneth Anger's Fireworks as precedent.
For me some of the most interesting scenes were of school playgrounds, young brown skinned girls playing Follow the Leader tip-toeing along the edges of the lozenges of a blue mesh in their playground, in playful diagonal defiance of the Mondrian aesthetic. The children's games are fascinating. You can see that for the girls playing it's not a thing that any of them has control over, it's like something beautiful that comes out of the group unit. You also wonder how much the world of finance can be compared to these games, who has the steerage over Canary Wharf hive, where is the oversight? The sum result of all the individual greed is almost entirely unconscious, like the ideomotor responses driving the planchette on a Ouija board.
The only part of the natural world that you see in the film is a lonely shivering bend of rushes on the Thames. For the rest the city of London often appears as if inundated with acid, time-lapsed chimney-steam producing a kind of dissolving effect against a yellow sky.
There's perhaps too much concentration on the passage of the moon across the night sky, perhaps calling to mind the idea of lunacy. Luna or the moon, in Mediaeval times believed to control mental illness, here presiding over a kind of insane circus. The shots Raban takes are glorious but perhaps too many, resulting in an over-emphasis. On the other hand, watching a bull's eye moon turn from red to yellow over an illuminated maze is probably something I could do a lot of without tiring. Similarly watching queued up planes fall from the sky in a never-ending spew is quite hypnotic.
