Martin Red
03-26-2003, 07:46 AM
classic film, haven't seen it for a few years, but always a winner. graemlins/thumbsup.gif
http://www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/dub/babylon/graphics/logo.jpg
http://www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/dub/babylon/graphics/nme1.jpg
http://www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/dub/babylon/index.html
Directed by Franco Rosso Starring Brinsley Forde and Karl Howman (Osiris)
RHYTHMS swarm and pound through Babylon: the warrior charge sound of Aswad, the voltage punch of sound systems, the collision and crash of different cultures, the inhibited body blows of prejudice, the beat of fleeing. fighting and freedom.
Superficially, Babylon is the story of a South London reggae sound system and its battle for survival and success. But its themes extend and embrace wider and deeper - as might be expected of Franco Rosso, a director renowned for an unflinching attitude toward questions of racial culture and racial ignorance; recall the BBC ban slapped on his Linton Kwesi Johnson Dread, Beat And Blood documentary before the last election.
Rosso is an Italian who grew up in London - an upbringing that probably accounts for his acute empathy with (displaced) black culture, and his ability to prise open British politics at their bloodiest and most personal base without any hint of hack dialectic. Babylon succeeds on three distinct but, crucially, always interlocking levels: as a movie, as movie about a specific subject, and as a movie about being young and British in 1980. it succeeds where other recent attempts failed miserably (Jubilee, the execrable Rude Boy, Breaking Glass).
The word ‘babylon’ is a mnemonic for oppression, in all its manifestations, spiralling down from a monetarist, middle-class government, through SUSpicious police patrol cars, intolerant and unduly violent members of the community to something as glum as a docked wage packet. Babylon isn’t undergoing (the) recession - it’s enjoying enforcing it.
Babylon gets that atmosphere. Ital Lion is the film’s ‘fictional’ sound system, run by a group of friends in South London. The speakers are saved for, stolen, home made - records bartered for. Dreadhead (Archie Pool) is the father figure who directs - well dressed and cool. Blue (Brinsley Forde of Aswad) and his white mate Ronnie (Karl Howman) work in a garage (whose owner is played by Mel Smith of Not The Nine O’Clock News) by day, and put everything into Ital Lion by night. As they progress toward a battle with Jah Shaka (real life Number One sound in London) trouble and strife with employment, sex, money, family and community have to be faced. After a night during which he is picked up on SUS, his girlfriend leaves him and he is an unwilling party to a brutal mugging, Blue returns to the garage where Ital Lions store their gear only to find the lock forced, the system trashed and the interior smirched with racist graffiti. When the others arrive and the discovery sinks in, the anger so far contained finds its irrational locus in Ronnie - the most emotionally charged, jarring, honest and perhaps even pessimistic scene in the film.
All the gut contradictions and problems of racial fear and racial sympathy gell and splinter: just how do we go on from here? Rosso, however, misses being overtly moralistic by miles.. Prejudice, helplessness and hopeless ire are all put firmly in contextually determined places. No one is guilty perse - everyone is a product of a variety of influences, of subtle propaganda.
The film’s conclusions are yours to see and feel - its penultimate progress is urgently moving and that movement of meanings cannot be ignored. Babylon must be seen.
http://www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/dub/babylon/graphics/post1.jpg
[ March 26, 2003, 07:47 AM: Message edited by: Martin Red ]
http://www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/dub/babylon/graphics/logo.jpg
http://www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/dub/babylon/graphics/nme1.jpg
http://www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/dub/babylon/index.html
Directed by Franco Rosso Starring Brinsley Forde and Karl Howman (Osiris)
RHYTHMS swarm and pound through Babylon: the warrior charge sound of Aswad, the voltage punch of sound systems, the collision and crash of different cultures, the inhibited body blows of prejudice, the beat of fleeing. fighting and freedom.
Superficially, Babylon is the story of a South London reggae sound system and its battle for survival and success. But its themes extend and embrace wider and deeper - as might be expected of Franco Rosso, a director renowned for an unflinching attitude toward questions of racial culture and racial ignorance; recall the BBC ban slapped on his Linton Kwesi Johnson Dread, Beat And Blood documentary before the last election.
Rosso is an Italian who grew up in London - an upbringing that probably accounts for his acute empathy with (displaced) black culture, and his ability to prise open British politics at their bloodiest and most personal base without any hint of hack dialectic. Babylon succeeds on three distinct but, crucially, always interlocking levels: as a movie, as movie about a specific subject, and as a movie about being young and British in 1980. it succeeds where other recent attempts failed miserably (Jubilee, the execrable Rude Boy, Breaking Glass).
The word ‘babylon’ is a mnemonic for oppression, in all its manifestations, spiralling down from a monetarist, middle-class government, through SUSpicious police patrol cars, intolerant and unduly violent members of the community to something as glum as a docked wage packet. Babylon isn’t undergoing (the) recession - it’s enjoying enforcing it.
Babylon gets that atmosphere. Ital Lion is the film’s ‘fictional’ sound system, run by a group of friends in South London. The speakers are saved for, stolen, home made - records bartered for. Dreadhead (Archie Pool) is the father figure who directs - well dressed and cool. Blue (Brinsley Forde of Aswad) and his white mate Ronnie (Karl Howman) work in a garage (whose owner is played by Mel Smith of Not The Nine O’Clock News) by day, and put everything into Ital Lion by night. As they progress toward a battle with Jah Shaka (real life Number One sound in London) trouble and strife with employment, sex, money, family and community have to be faced. After a night during which he is picked up on SUS, his girlfriend leaves him and he is an unwilling party to a brutal mugging, Blue returns to the garage where Ital Lions store their gear only to find the lock forced, the system trashed and the interior smirched with racist graffiti. When the others arrive and the discovery sinks in, the anger so far contained finds its irrational locus in Ronnie - the most emotionally charged, jarring, honest and perhaps even pessimistic scene in the film.
All the gut contradictions and problems of racial fear and racial sympathy gell and splinter: just how do we go on from here? Rosso, however, misses being overtly moralistic by miles.. Prejudice, helplessness and hopeless ire are all put firmly in contextually determined places. No one is guilty perse - everyone is a product of a variety of influences, of subtle propaganda.
The film’s conclusions are yours to see and feel - its penultimate progress is urgently moving and that movement of meanings cannot be ignored. Babylon must be seen.
http://www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/dub/babylon/graphics/post1.jpg
[ March 26, 2003, 07:47 AM: Message edited by: Martin Red ]