Passing Fancy

1933, Japan, directed by Yasujiro Ozu

From the wonderful opening scene, tracing the journey of a wallet through a crowd of ethically challenged patrons, Ozu's 1933 comedy creates a vivid sense of urban life in the midst of the depression, with little details like the few coins in a wallet or the tattered paper of a screen door telling reminders of the realities of the period, as was also the case in his earlier Tokyo Chorus.

Such details don't for a moment obscure the essential lightness of the characterizations, however: the film features the first appearance of Kihachi, the loving if barely competent father who appears in a string of subsequent Ozu films, as well as another in the series of lively urchins played by Tomio Aoki. What's perhaps most remarkable, though, is the subtlety with which Ozu transitions from knockabout comedy - a rambunctious child hitting his hungover father on the shins to wake him up, for instance - to a revelatory passage wherein the bonds of family are movingly revealed, without any abruptness and while remaining true to the flawed, engaging characters.

L'Homme du Niger

1940, France, directed by Jacques de Baroncelli

Where British colonial films generally kept their stars safely back in the studio, several similar French productions shipped the headliners overseas - as was the case for this muddled propaganda melodrama, which blends a tale of lost love and leprosy with attempts to extol the Niger irrigation scheme. That scheme was a long-gestating dream of some French colonials, who imagined they could create a cotton-growing scheme in the Sahel, partly to give French cotton manufacturers a stable supply line and partly, perhaps, to compete with pretty successful British efforts along the same lines in the Sudan.

The film's credits include thanks to the ministry for the colonies, although the real power in matters irrigation lay with the Office du Niger, a quasi-independent entity that was at the height of its powers around this time; the Popular Front government had attempted, with very limited success, to rein it in a few years earlier, and the final scenes are something of an orgy of celebration of the vast though ultimately unsuccessful irrigation effort.

The opening and closing sections were filmed in what's now Mali, including in a working leper colony in Bamako, with an extended sequence back in Paris sandwiched in the middle. Leprosy is a key plot element - indeed L'Homme du Niger is the second Harry Baur film within two years to feature leprosy, though Baur's character was not the victim in either case. There's a nice bit of business, involving a lighter, cigarettes and an observant physician, to reveal the leprosy problem, although it's telling, and entirely expected, that a single European character gets far more screen time than the entire hospital of African patients, most of whom are dismissed in the usual patronizing terms.

Although he was a prolific director, particularly in the silent era, very few of Jacques de Baroncelli's films are available today, and although he extracts several nice performances here, particularly from Harry Baur - who is especially good in the key diagnosis scenes - and Victor Francen, the love story elements fail to convince, which seriously hobbles a film that's already uncertain of whether to emphasize the politics or the drama.

Street of Shame

1956, Japan, directed by Mizoguchi Kenji

Mizoguchi's final film returns to the theme of socially marginalized women, in this case the workers in a brothel, with the narrative stitched to a backdrop of (real life) political debates on the outlawing of prostitution in Japan in the mid-1950s. Mizoguchi punctuates the film with radio accounts of the discussions in parliament, contrasting those more formal exchanges with the prostitutes' own conversations on their collective future, as well as with the (generally self-serving and yet not wholly inaccurate) views expressed by the brothel owner.

The film is essentially constructed in two halves, the first introducing the primary characters and their life stories, with the second commencing as each storyseems to come unravelled - with sometimes dramatic outcomes - before the cycle begins again in the raw final scenes, capped by the final shot in which a young prostitute tries to shrink behind a wall, a sharp contrast to the defiant directness of the central character at the end of Osaka Elegy.

I'm surprised that there is so little work that compares the films of Mizoguchi with those of Ousmane Sembène: leaving aside both filmmakers' interest in the social importance of women, they are both political filmmakers in a very direct sense, intervening in ongoing social debates and, arguably, acting as important influences in those debates. For Sembène, such engagement was more or less a career principle, whereas some of Mizoguchi's films are only indirectly concerned with contemporary social commentary, unlike this film, which doesn't feel at all dated despite the very topical concerns. The resonances between the cinema of Mizoguchi and Antonioni feel particularly strong here, with Mizoguchi's exteriors prefiguring shots from Antonioni almost a decade later.

Deserto rosso (1964, Italy, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Street of Shame (1956, Japan, Kenji Mizoguchi)

Women of the Night

1948, Japan, directed by Mizoguchi Kenji

As is the case with De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, made the same year half a world away, Women of the Night infuses neo-realist themes with the skill and settings of an experienced studio director: the flavour of post-war Japanese experience is sharp, but there's nothing rough-edged about the treatment, whether in the interior shots, often models of deep focus construction, or the elegant camera movements, such as in the gripping scene where one of the film's central characters descends a staircase while concealing contraband from a nearby policeman. Mizoguchi's use of music also functions as a discreet but unmistakable emphasis to the onscreen action at critical moments.

The long final sequence, on a soundstage carefully constructed as though it depicts a bombed-out neighborhood, is a corrosive explosion of grief, anger and sadness, giving full voice to the emotions of the exploited, often desperate women of the title, all of them used or abused by men who are almost uniformly weaker yet socially more powerful. There's an unexpected moment when we see Christian imagery in a stained glass window that has somehow survived the destruction - a moment that perhaps recalls Mizoguchi's own identification with the downtrodden, but which also suggests the deep gulf between spiritual succour and harsh material realities in the Japan of the late 1940s.

Osaka Elegy

1936, Japan, directed by Mizoguchi Kenji

As in so many of Mizoguchi's subsequent films, particularly those with a modern setting, women are seen here as both the strength of Japanese society - taking on burdens men are either unwilling or unable to assume - while also remaining the most vulnerable class in that same society. Their pragmatic decisions, often taken to preserve family life at all cost, are nonetheless the source of their exploitation and social shame, a contradiction that's at the heart of Mizoguchi's critique. The false happiness of the domestic scene near the end is devastating, though there's barely time to absorb Mizoguchi's undermining of the family idyll before he cuts to the blunt final shots, that hang like an accusation before the viewer.

The picture above is a frame grab created by Jim Emerson as part of a fascinating post on staging and deep focus at his blog Scanners; he makes insightful comments on Mizoguchi's shot choices in one striking scene from early in the film, which establishes several of the key relationships in the film. That sequence is among the most interesting in Osaka Elegy, which feels at times like a dry run for his subsequent, and more confident, Sisters of the Gion, shot later the same year.

Patu!

1983, New Zealand, directed by Merata Mita

A fascinating film both for its content - an account of protests against the 1981 South African rugby tour of New Zealand - and for its insights into the documentary form, Patu! retains an exceptional immediacy even thirty years on from the events. There's a shocking fury onscreen in many scenes, encapsulating anger at apartheid South Africa and, as the film progresses, at the New Zealand government, which seemed to be prepared to do more or less anything, including turning parts of the country into a fortress as well as sending police riot squads into action against their fellow citizens, to facilitate the tour. As such, the film provides a compelling insight into the sheer levels of force that a country needs to deploy to calm a restive population: the comparison with South Africa itself appears at every turn, duly underlined by the filmmakers.

Merata Mita, a key member of New Zealand's small film industry who sadly died in 2010, doesn't attempt to provide a two-sided account of the events: her film is designed as a corrective to the narrative peddled by the New Zealand government and much of the mainstream media, which tended to present the protesters as unpatriotic troublemakers and denied them a voice. She weaves together an extraordinary variety of on-the-fly footage to create a sense of the very real political and social stakes at the heart of the protests, with filmmakers like Roger Donaldson and Alun Bollinger contributing their skills as camera operators.

There are inevitable gaps in the documentary record, although Mita generally allows the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions rather than providing an over-arching narrative; that said, the use of sound effects that don't always seem to stem directly from the onscreen events certainly heightens the emotional impact of certain scenes. Much of the film is rough and ready, as befits the shooting conditions, but it has exceptional value as a historical record - an insight into the dynamics of protest almost from the beginning of the anti-tour movement, with some of those featured onscreen, like the roots/reggae band Herbs, remaining influential today.

The film is available for online viewing at the (excellent) NZ ON Screen site, which has a terrific collection of New Zealand television, short films, and some full-length features. 

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2010, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Spain/Netherlands, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

This was my first opportunity to see one of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films on the big screen, and it's a stunning experience to be fully enveloped in his atmospheric world. His films are made very much to be projected on a large scale in the dark, the soundscapes and rhythms becoming that much more hypnotic when shorn of the distractions inevitable when watching on a television. That mesmeric quality seems to flow from one of his films to the next, each a kind of oasis from the sensual assault that is daily (urban) life. The city is a welcome absence here, with one character scornful of city life, although when Weerasthekul does film urban settings they seem shorn of the people and bustle one might expect.

As with the overall tone, there is a continuity of tropes throughout the director's work, with certain ideas cropping up over and over - car rides (all of his features feature an extended sequence shot from within a car if memory serves), medical matters, people in and out of their accustomed uniforms, folk tales reworked almost obsessively, and hovering behind everything the primeval power of the forest. That power isn't necessarily malign or alarming, though: the characters are perfectly comfortable with the idea of two different and interacting levels of reality, and there are flashes of humour as the two levels collide. Here the forest becomes a space of spiritual repose, as in the director's prior films Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours, although it's not abstracted from the realities of Thai life - the location near borders with Thailand's neighbours is a source of insecurity for some even while it provides solace to others.

Weerasethakul's imagery is as striking as ever: there's a scene in the forest at dusk where the light creates the strange impression that everything is underwater, while other shots make use of bright swatches of colour, such as the saffron robes of a somewhat reluctant monk or the eye-popping hues in a temple. The characters are always placed with great care in the frame, too - the shot at the top reminds me of one in Tropical Malady (pictured in my entry on that film) where one character is right at the front of the frame while the main action happens behind him. 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I

2010, UK/US, directed by David Yates

Although I'm sure that the prospect of global profits played a major role - if not the determining role - in splitting the final Harry Potter book into two films, the result is actually a much improved product on the cinematic level, with the breathing space to slow the action down a little - not a small consideration where the plot requires the central characters to experience an extended period of soul-searching/retreat. The additional running time allows for at least some character development, too, rather than simply a recounting of J.K. Rowling's plot, while director of photography Eduardo Serra uses his colour palette to channel some of the grimmer spirit of films like Children of Men, lending this installment a much more obviously adult feel despite the wizardry, with several sequences - a scene on a beach near the conclusion - feeling appropriately bleak. Since the narrative would otherwise be one distressing event after another, there's a nice smattering of humour to leaven the tone. Rupert Grint is assigned most of the best lines, although a sequence where the parts of the central trio of friends are played by three older actors, including the usually fearsome David O'Hara, is very nicely played, each of the veterans catching the mannerisms of his or her younger counterpart quite acutely.

Le Grand jeu

1934, France, directed by Jacques Feyder

Unlike Sanders of the River, Feyder's Le Grand jeu quite successfully marries its (fairly brief) location footage in North Africa with studio-shot material, although if anything this tends to underline the superfluousness of the overseas setting, which is used mostly as a means to justify using the Foreign Legion as a plot element. While the film further burnishes the regiment's legend, the action could - as Glenn Kenny notes in his appreciation of the film - have taken place more or less anywhere, such is the destructive spirit that animates the lead character, played by Pierre Richard-Willm.

Unfortunately, Willm is perhaps the weakest element in the film: although he didn't start in films until 1930, his style often seems like those of a silent film actor, more mannered and emphatic than was the norm by the mid-1930s; I felt as though an intertitle was about to pop up to provide further clarity. By contrast, supporting players like Charles Vanel and Françoise Rosay (Feyder's wife), who both had substantial experience in the silent days, feel entirely at home here; their cynical view of life's transactions is more in keeping with the film's overall tone, too.

While Feyder's sometimes intoxicating movement - the whirl through the casbah, for instance - is the more eye-catching stylistic element, he's as adept at more low-key moments, extracting great tension from the repeated card-readings (from which the film takes its title). I've always found there's something hypnotic in watching someone perform some feat of manual skill, whether it's Daniel Auteuil repairing a violin in Un Coeur en hiver or Rosay placing a series of cards or pouring a glass of wine - acts that slow down the rhythm of their respective films and draw the viewer into a world of carefully crafted gesture.

Sanders of the River

1935, UK, directed by Zoltan Korda

Of limited cinematic value -- even in the 1930s at least some reviewers noted the problems of marrying studio-set plot material with "authentic" background footage shot on location -- Sanders of the River holds considerable historical/anthropological value, both for the record of certain aspects of African life provided by those location sequences and for the insights into the British colonial (and domestic) mind.

Viewed through a modern lens, it's a terrifically problematic film, with Paul Robeson's Bosambo character an excruciating, obsequious "native" stereotype who breaks into song from time to time. Although it sounds as though Robeson -- who disowned his participation in the film -- was gulled somewhat by the production team, it doesn't help that he's not the subtlest of actors, at least on this occasion. He's more a presence, and sometimes an impressive one, than an actor, and at times you get the sense that he's following Zoltan Korda's direction rather too literally rather than attempting to inhabit a character.

As in his other colonial films, Korda has little interest in giving us actual insight into the territories that came under British rule: the location footage is a mishmash from across the continent, blended together as a composite, undifferentiated "Africa," and the studio actors playing the major African roles are almost invariably non-African. Nonetheless, and presumably inadvertently, Korda gives us a fine insight into the realities of Britain's much-vaunted "indirect rule" system, where the only indirect aspect was the fact that the will of the local colonial officer was on occasion nominally transmitted through indigenous ruling structures. The film also provides a pretty good illustration of how the colonial administration shed all pretence of indirect rule and inserted itself directly in local affairs as soon as things got tough - a theme explored in Moses Ochonu's book Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression, particularly relevant here given the time period.

Note: This is part of my Watching Movies in Africa project. The film was shown in post-independence Ghana in 1956 and 1957 by the government-controlled West African Pictures chain. It had been imported, and presumably screened, earlier in the 1950s, too. While I wonder what exactly audiences of the time made of the film, it was apparently box office gold: the Accra screenings in September 1956 broke local records, raking in G£464 in two nights, a huge sum by local standards when a single cinema might only earn £1,000 in a month.

The image above is from the DVD Beaver review of the Criterion Collection Paul Robeson - Portraits of the Artist. The film is also available to view online at the Internet Archive, although the quality isn't great.

My Man Godfrey

1936, US, directed by Gregory La Cava

Like many a Depression-era film, My Man Godfrey plays the social commentary light, with the generally privileged characters exposed to the tougher side of the life - the shanties and "forgotten men" - without ever being in any actual danger of joining their ranks (indeed, at some points the film seems to suggest that impoverishment is a robustly authentic lifestyle choice).

In any case, incisive socio-political analysis is very much a subsidiary concern for one of the zaniest of the screwball comedies, which features a wealthy young woman, played by Carole Lombard, whose eccentricities make many a Katherine Hepburn character seem even-keeled. As amusing as Lombard is, delivering dialogue at a blistering pace, the film is hardly the best advertisement for the subtleties of her talent since her character is such a relentless ditz (you can imagine Gregory La Cava offscreen gesturing wildly, "more ditz! more ditz!"). William Powell gets to display much greater range, playing essentially three versions of his character, with subtle transitions from one persona to the next; none of those personas seems a likely match for Lombard, but that's the magic of Hollywood, and the pacing is generally so swift that there's no time for reflection (entire trips abroad seem to pass in a flash).

Terribly Happy

2008, Denmark, directed by Henrik Ruben Genz (Aka: Frygtelig lykkelig)

Given the rather low levels of actual violence in Denmark, it has produced a remarkably dark-toned cinema, whether in the form of the concussive urban tales of Nicolas Winding Refn (the actor Kim Bodnia, a veteran of Refn's debut film, Pusher, plays a key role here) or in the more bucolic settings of The Green Butchers or Terribly Happy. Indeed, the notion that the the countryside hides much greater horrors than the big city is the film's running - if overplayed - joke, with a big city cop finding himself in an apparently byzantine world of criminality far beyond his usual experience. For the most part, director Genz plays things very straight, controlling the tone in ways reminiscent of Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire, although the insistent repetition of incident ultimately makes the film seem rather longer than it is; that said, a genuinely disturbing scene about halfway into the film gives the tension entirely new, distressing dimensions that underline the sense of psychological turmoil experienced by the main character.

Carlos

2010, France, directed by Olivier Assayas [Three episode mini-series version]

An absorbing, necessarily elliptical account of the career of the Venezuelan-born multi-national terrorist, Carlos isn't simply a biopic but an effective re-creation of the specific time of social ferment and debate during which such a figure could emerge. If anything, the running time of the mini-series isn't quite generous enough: while Assayas's central focus remains with Carlos, the side trips to explore the German extreme left wing have the potential to become compelling episodes in their own right, in the manner of Edgar Reitz's even more expansive 1993 social canvas Die zweite Heimat.

The film is especially compelling in exploring the contradictions between Carlos's own self-image - his experience of his actions, and his account of his motivations - and the actual success of Carlos and his fellow operatives. As depicted by Assayas, Carlos's planning is often haphazard and his negotiating skills flawed in the extreme, but he continues to believe in his own standing in the shadowy spy/terrorist nexus, as well as in his own skill as a leader, even where it's clear he's barely capable of controlling his own crew.

Assayas is always an astute user of music, and he deploys post-punk/new wave bands like The Dead Boys as a counterpoint to several of the film's most charged scenes - underlining the adrenalized experience of violence from the perspective of the perpetrator but also illustrating the way in which Carlos and his collaborators imagined themselves as media objects, complete with soundtrack, from the get-go. Indeed, it's in the smallest of details - the way a glass of Scotch is cupped, or the way that Carlos adjusts his sunglasses - that this obsession with self-image appears. It's an obsession that undermines Carlos's rhetoric of revolution at every turn, and which also marks him off as distinctly different from his more ascetic German colleagues. Those contradictions are acutely capture in Edgar Ramírez's terrifically committed performance: although he's a little too photogenic to be a fully convincing stand-in for the actual Carlos, whose magnetism was less apparent to the outsider, he embodies Carlos's sense of himself as a global, stateless actor.

Breaker Morant

1980, Australia, directed by Bruce Beresford

A fascinating, morally complex film, Breaker Morant affords an illuminating glimpse into some of the confusions and contradictions of Empire, centered on a trio of Australian soldiers (one English-born) tried under British military law for their part in events that occurred during the Boer War in South Africa.

In so far as the historical record can be trusted, the provides a fairly accurate account of the actual events that led to the trial, and while the overall tone suggests at least agreement with the notion that Breaker and his colleagues were folk heroes of a kind, their violent actions aren't soft-pedalled. Beresford is more interested, instead, in examining the demands placed on men at war, and the standards of behaviour that they are supposed to uphold.

Unlike Kubrick's Paths of Glory, the men at the centre of Breaker Morant are accused not of cowardice but what might be termed excess of zeal; what unites the films is the way in which military administrations use disciplinary procedures against their own men. There's also, in Breaker particularly, an important class element, with the British hierarchy both profiting from and condemning the more free-wheeling Australian attitude to soldiery (the film takes place against the backdrop of the federation of Australia, although it plays with the timeline somewhat to cast the men as political pawns in a broader game; that's hardly necessary, given that they are already pawns in the hands of the military administration).

The film is drawn from a stage play, and while Beresford "opens up" the play by roaming far from prison and courtroom to dramatise the events at the core of the trial (those scenes are beautifully shot by Donald McAlpine, using South Australia as an effective stand-in for South Africa), he also uses a variety of striking shot choices to avoid a stage-like presentation - close-ups, shots from the side, overhead angles, all of which also contribute to a sense of disorientation in the courtroom which reinforces the sense the justice and logic are being upended. Beresford is also blessed with an extremely strong cast, with two of the mainstays of Australian cinema, Jack Thompson and Bryan Brown, doing some of their best screen work here, abetted by English veteran Edward Woodward as the eponymous "Breaker".

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2009, US/UK, directed by David Yates

After the relatively brisk previous installment, the running time for the sixth film in the Harry Potter creeps back up again as director David Yates struggles to deal with the huge amount of plotting in J.K. Rowling's source novel; as a consequence, several plotlines are given extremely short shrift, so much so that at times you can't quite figure out how the characters got from one location to the next (all that magical disapparation presumably helps). The need to cram in all the action lends a breathless tone to much of the the film, though Yates is nonetheless able to find time to craft a number of evocative sequences, particularly one in the "room of requirement," a cluttered, musty place used to hide objects: even if the outside world begins to loom larger for Harry and his friends as the film advances, the filmmakers always seem on surer ground within Hogwarts, an atmospheric location if ever there was one.

RoboCop

1987, US, directed by Paul Verhoeven

Paul Verhoeven has always struck me as the ultimate have-your-cake-and-eat-it director, and perhaps never more than in his debut American film, a satire on, among other things, the violence of American life that's one of the most violent -- although often cartoonishly violent -- films of the 1980s.

His ostensible main target, though, is the violence of corporate America, content to re-shape cities and people for its ends - and certainly the choice of Detroit as a location lends the film sustained relevance today, given how that city has been transformed, or more accurately chewed up, by the arrival and then the slow, catastrophic departure of industry. Despite the fact that today's media landscape looks nothing like the future imagined on film - network TV still looks like the norm - many of the adverts have the ring of truth nearly 25 years on, while their very ubiquity for a viewer in a world where every TV show, baseball half-inning and website seems to have a corporate sponsor feels entirely on the nose.

The filmmaking has a terrific visceral edge, never more so than in the sequences set in an abandoned steel mill, the camera racing through the decrepit locations. The sequence which introduces us to RoboCop, seen entirely through the machine's eyes, is also a clever taste of what's to follow, although some of the subsequent special effects look a little creaky now, closer in spirit to Ray Harryhausen than to the CGI which began to dominate soon afterwards.

Sixty Six

2006, UK, directed by Paul Weiland

More interesting in conception than execution - a Jewish coming-of-age set against the backdrop of the 1966 World Cup in England - Sixty Six generally makes good use of what's clearly a pretty limited budget, and finds a nice niche in the gentrifying Jewish East End, but suffers from inconsistencies of tone: it can't decide whether to be a pretty wry comedy or a depressive drama, with some characters fitting poorly into the overall scheme of things, while the slow tone drains the drama which should be key to any film driven by the rhythms of a sports tournament.

Zombieland

2009, US, directed by Ruben Fleischer

There's little cinematic or other substance to Zombieland, which never pauses to assess the wider implications of a society falling prey to rapidly spreading infection (this is no 28 Days Later or even Shaun of the Dead), but I must confess that it was not difficult to set such questions aside and enjoy what's mostly a pretty breakneck (literally and figuratively) affair. Jesse Eisenberg's a typecast nerd, albeit one who can wield a shotgun with some skill, Woody Harrelson's an equally typecast wild man, and Emma Stone's already displaying the zest with which she infused Easy A; the cast look as though they had a blast coming to work each day, and sometimes that's just enough to keep me amused, too.

Monsters

2010, UK, directed by Gareth Edwards

A testament to the triumph ingenuity over budget - it helps when you only give credit to two onscreen players and when the director can wear four other hats - Monsters doesn't for a moment feel like a movie shot on a relative shoestring, making virtues of its limitations and using its Central American locations to atmospheric, often poignant effect. Edwards also realises the critical importance of a good soundscape: whether in scenes of battle or quieter jungle sequences, the sound palette is enveloping and frequently eerie, harking back to the creative use of sound in Orson Welles's radio version of The War of the Worlds. There's also a real sense of interest in the Central American locations - although the protagonists are moving as fast as they can toward the US, the film gives a clear sense of life for those who don't have the same opportunities, and the ending might be read as a metaphor for the experience of crossing onto US soil at the end of an arduous, hope-filled journey.

[Note: This movie received no special consideration despite the director's terrific first name; I was named after another Gareth Edwards].

La Grande séduction

2003, Canada, directed by Jean-François Pouliot (aka Seducing Doctor Lewis)

A regional British comedy that somehow ended up in Quebec, La Grande séduction tries very hard for Brassed Off territory - economic woes, a village losing its sense of self - but ultimately has neither the latter film's tough-mindedness nor, ultimately, sufficient respect for its characters - we're mostly invited to laugh at rather than with the broadest of caricatures. It' a pity, because the film starts off quite promisingly with a kind of spoof fairytale opening that suggests a rather more robust sense of humour; the film returns to that tone near the very end, but rarely reaches the same heights for the remainder of the running time, though there is a gloriously surreal sequence when the fisherman-villagers play a rule-bending game of cricket - as part of the title's great seduction - on an island in the middle of the harbour.