Stephen
The German multi-media artist Melanie Manchot makes her directorial debut with an avant-garde work likely to divide opinion big time.
The London-based German artist Melanie Manchot has long been noted for her work in performance spaces but, following from a few short films, Stephen marks her debut as the director of a cinema feature. It's a work for which she herself provided the concept and devised the story and it has been described as a piece blending documentary and drama. It’s a fusion that extends to casting a number of professional actors alongside participants in active addiction recovery. They come together in a work that is described in its publicity as being a look at the world of addiction while also using the filmmaking process as one which for the non-actors involved would itself provide therapy and a sense of purpose. The leading figure who gives his name to the title is Stephen Giddings and, to quote the publicity statement, he is a budding actor whose life has been marked by addiction, in his family’s lives and in his own.
Unusual as this project is, reading about the film reminded me of a work made by the Taviani Brothers in 2011 which I regarded as a masterpiece. That film was Caesar Must Die. Having learnt of how prisoners in Rome's Rebibbia prison were responding to participating in stage work undertaken there, the filmmakers determined to film them in action and picked out Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as a play that would chime with the real-life experiences of the inmates. The finished film offered a shortened but highly effective rendering of the play while also becoming a detailed documentary about the prisoners and the impact on them of taking part in an artistic endeavour.
The novelty of the piece did not prevent Caesar Must Die from being a readily accessible work. That is not, however, the case with Stephen. It is not out of keeping with Melanie Manchot's background that her film comes across as being of the kind that would be at home in the Experimenta section of the London Film Festival. But such works however pleasing to admirers of avant-garde cinema rarely get released by an established body such as Modern Films which is distributing Stephen in the UK. What they have is a film made with patently good intentions but one which has been handled in a way that will surely leave most viewers confused and therefore distanced.
As though presenting Stephen’s story in a manner that blended enactments and documentary aspects was not complex enough in itself, Manchot has chosen to link this modern-day tale with a short silent film made in 1901. Arrest of Goudie was a reconstruction of a crime by a Liverpool bank employee named Thomas Goudie who, addicted to gambling, embezzled £170,000 to pay his debts and was jailed for ten years. That movie seen at the outset of Stephen is incorporated to suggest parallels between Goudie’s struggles with addiction and those of Stephen Giddings, albeit that his were alcohol-related. Stephen is also an inhabitant of Liverpool although Manchot’s film makes little of the location and the parallel never feels significant enough to justify the weight put upon it. Even so, Goudie is made central here since we are introduced to Stephen as somebody who is auditioning for the role of Thomas Goudie in a film to be made about him. He is accepted and we see much footage of this film being shot although it is often far from clear whether or not Stephen is speaking as himself or in character as Tom. One reason for that is that most improbably the film within the film, which includes for example a scene in which Thomas talks with his brother Paul who is played by an actor, is made without any sense at all of it taking place over a hundred years ago.
Such details ensure that a sense of artifice extends over the entire film and while to some extent we can guess which of the people on screen are real-life addicts there is no clarity as to the extent to which they are speaking directly about themselves and no indication of what benefit they are getting from their involvement. At times we are given scenes that lack any sense of realism as well as brief bits and pieces that serve no clear purpose. There is, however, a repeated stress on the idea of linking Stephen and Thomas. It seems that themes of identity appear in other art works by Manchot and here a blending of names is rammed home with our central figure identifying not only as Stephen Giddings and then as Thomas Goudie but also as Stephen Goudie and Thomas Giddings. It might be possible to make a film which tellingly indicated that certain problems that existed in society in 1901 are still present today whether it be in the form of mental health issues, drugs, alcoholism or gambling. But Stephen is so caught up in its own stylistic cleverness that, despite the efforts of Stephen Giddings himself, its confusion invites rejection when what it needed was clarity, ready identification and concern capable of being powerfully communicated to the audience.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Stephen Giddings, Michelle Collins Paisley Reid, Kent Riley, Michael Strike, Lanre Danmola, Ian Brown, Graham Williams, Anthony Woolley, Rachel Pennington, Joanne Irving, Cass Rogers, Joe Murphy.
Dir Melanie Manchot, Pro Melanie Manchot and Elena Hill, Screenplay Leigh Campbell from a story and concept by Melanie Manchot, Ph Andrew Schonfelder, Bevis Bowden and Roger Chapman, Pro Des Stephanie Ohara, Ed Graeme Hanks and Liza Ryan-Carter, Music Forest Swords, Costumes Sidonie Roberts.
Stephen Film-Modern Films.
78 mins. UK. 2023. UK Rel: 26 April 2024. No Cert.
