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'The Sixth of May (06/05)' 2004 (dir. Theo van Gogh)

Ian Viggars MA (Hons) BA (Hons) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:37:26 +0000

'Using Fiction to explore Facts and Political Ideology' - 2008 by Ian Viggars MA (Hons) BA (Hons)

To British audiences the sixth of May will seem like an unremarkable date to name a film after but to the Dutch this day in 2002 will always hold significant resonance. However even their reaction to this momentous day will depend on which side of the political fence they sit upon, and in turn the film of the same name is also highly likely to divide opinions, more because of the ideologies it represents rather than its pro-filmic qualities. ‘The Sixth of May’ (2004) depicts a fictionalised account of what happened following the real-life cold-blooded assassination of politician Pim Fortuyn. In this respect it almost resembles a Dutch equivalent of ‘JFK’ (Oliver Stone, 1991) only shot using a heavily European style. Like its American counterpart ‘The Sixth of May’ entertains many conspiracy theories surrounding a relatively high profile political murder, only in this instance the killer confessed months later and the rather mundane facts were laid bare for all to see. Still, both films encourage the blurring of reality and fiction and both use fictional narrative frameworks to make sense of distressing, hard facts.

It is also worth noting at this point that the director himself, Theo Van Gogh, was assassinated shortly after this films release, thus adding another layer of interest that may colour people’s reactions, especially those interested in world politics. Theo Van Gogh was a famously outspoken columnist and journalist who regularly got fired from many newspapers for his caustic and outspoken views on politics and religion. His interest in theatre led him into film directing however, but he quickly used the form as simply another platform for his uncompromising political views. However it was his 2004 short film ‘Submission’ that provoked his very public murder rather than this one. Van Gogh was fiercely critical of the Muslim religion and, like many right-leaning people his views became increasingly more vocal following 9/11. Topical Islam-phobia or not, the films images of naked, faceless Muslim woman with verses from the Koran projected onto their bodies as they perform monologues conveying the apparent mistreatment of woman authorized in the Koran was enough to encourage Dutch Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri to very publicly assassinate him in the most brutal way possible. A letter attached to a dagger stabbed through his body linked his death to the film and his general views regarding the religion of Islam. Aside from drawing attention to the use of extreme violence in the name of religion, Van Gogh’s death also prompted debates regarding freedom of speech in films - his views may have been small-minded and intentionally inflammatory, but surely he should have been allowed to express them in the first place?

To say this film comes with excess ideological baggage would be a gross understatement. Interestingly though ‘The Sixth of May’ seems to have so much more resonance in relation to the latter statement regarding freedom of speech, as it concerns a journalist’s attempts to unravel the mysterious events surrounding the assassination. Unsurprisingly given Van Gogh’s past as an outspoken member of the popular press, the paparazzi-style journalist character Jim de Booy (Thijs Römer) is cast as the hero of the piece and is the only character without any obvious negative points, apart from maybe his slightly hedonistic lifestyle and unconventional attitude towards parenting: he had a daughter when he was 17 and shares custody of her with her mother. He drinks and smokes constantly throughout the film, although this is probably more in relation to the director’s own famously non-PC fatalistic attitude towards smoking rather than any allusion to the stereotypical hard-living film noir anti-hero figure. With this said though, the film does allude to many of the classical thematic and visual signifiers of the political intrigue, conspiracy thriller, and film noir genres even if its stylistic elements are distinctly modern European. The opening is extremely confusing and becomes more disorientating as it progresses. De Booy is taking photographs of an alluring young TV starlet before a car crashes into his bike and he hears six gunshots. This sequence is cut with footage showing a Turkish woman called Ayse (Tara Elders) leaving her house to meet her older immigrant lover. The connection between these two narrative strands doesn’t become clear until at least an hour into the film when helpful flashbacks reveal her to be an ex-animal rights activist recently released from prison where she was doing time out of blind loyalty for a murder her boyfriend committed years before. Immediately following the assassination however, these disparate characters all try to put the pieces together from constant TV news and radio reports that permeate everything. The omnipotence of the media is something Van Gogh seems to encourage though: being an ex-reporter and columnist himself he is clearly a strong supporter of freedom of speech and the general pervasiveness of the press. Hysteria prevails as people try to pin the blame but Jim de Booy especially develops a strong interest in the case: his co-workers mock him for being so close to the assassination and carrying a camera as it happened yet capturing nothing. Not only this, but coincidence keeps linking him with some of the main suspects, including Ayse. Just like the similarly themed and structured Watergate classic ‘All The Presidents Men’ (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) the resourceful and hard-living media journalist eventually solves the case, even if it does put him and his daughter’s life in jeopardy. As the film progresses the true enemies are revealed to be the scheming and corrupt state security organisation, a point that is made brilliantly clear when De Booy and Ayse are chased though a busy water park in broad daylight: in classic film noir tradition two characters initially opposed now forced to work together against a bigger enemy. The two escape to some secluded woods and the full nature of Ayse’s manipulation by the state and undercover police are revealed and De Booy, because of his meddling, realises he is now just as dangerously involved as she is.

So far I’ve mentioned several ways in which ‘The Sixth of May’ shares similarities with well-worn film genres of the past. However aside from explicit plot developments and themes the film alludes to many more basic visual signifiers of the classic crime, conspiracy, and film noir genres: bodies are found dumped in mysterious places, shadowy secret meetings are held between men in suits, chases ensue at least every twenty minutes, hidden camera photos are taken and examined, and smoking is ubiquitous amongst all the characters. While its thematic and visual signifiers are steeped in classical film tradition, the overall directing style is distinctly post-Dogme 95. Jump-cuts leave little time to piece the plot together in the breathless opening hour and the basic lighting creates a moody, realistic ambience. The camera is pretty much hand-held and shaky throughout the entire film apart from the more conventional thriller sequences such as the aforementioned water park chase. This urgent filming style makes what could have been a hackneyed over-detailed plot seem fresh and vital, and I was thoroughly impressed with the way the film switched gradually from disorientating confusion to high tension in a completely naturalistic way. The way in which the characters slowly become integrated is also remarkably impressive, as is the way your loyalties and opinions toward them change throughout, until the crushing truth becomes clear: much like many other films of its ilk, it’s the government and the state that are the true villains.

Stylistically the film is impressive and I became very involved with the multiple levels of intrigue and the at times heart stopping action. However, as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, any film as steeped in politics as this is bound to provoke other much stronger reactions in viewers and after doing further research, aspects of The Sixth of May started to leave a sour taste. Pim Fortuyn, the political candidate whose death is being explored, took an extremely divisive stance in the run-up to the election that he never saw (it was nine days away at the time of his assassination). Fortuyn, like the idiotic BNP in England, took to exploiting and targeting weak parts of society to score political points, and like the BNP this involved stirring up prejudices regarding immigration and specifically, the Islamic religion. Even before 9/11 this far-right populist was labelling Islam as a threat and “a backwards culture”. His murderer was a militant animal-rights activist called Volkert van der Graaf who claimed to have killed Fortuyn to stop him exploiting Muslims as scapegoats. The character of Ayse, herself a victim of loyalty to her activist friends, is portrayed sympathetically in the film, as is the obvious hero reporter De Booy. However I was increasingly disturbed by the amount of screen time given to Fortuyn’s far-right rhetoric throughout the film. We see him on TV spouting xenophobic phrases similar to those used by the extreme-right in all European countries, such as “Holland is full”. My suspicions of Van Gogh showing sympathy and maybe even admiration for Fortuyn were confounded as real footage of his funeral procession is shown respectfully underneath the closing credits. It was disturbing to then find out that despite being extremely vocal in his hatred of almost all of Holland’s major politicians, Van Gogh openly admired this controversial and much despised political figure. However the film is constructed in a way in which his admiration isn’t entirely obvious and so a casual viewer not wishing to delve into modern Dutch politics post-viewing may miss this important factor. Still, the film in itself is an extremely well constructed and entertaining thriller that expertly uses a fictitious narrative to explore factual happenings, but for me personally my subsequent knowledge of the director’s intentions ruined my enjoyment somewhat. This will forever be the case though with highly politicised filmmaking such as this, but as intelligent discerning film viewers it’s up to us to make our own minds up about whether or not we can enjoy a film for its formal and aesthetic elements alone without being drawn in by its ideologies, however explicit or implicit they may be.

Directed by: Theo van Gogh
Written by: Tomas Ross, Theo van Gogh
Produced by: Gijs van de Westelaken
DOP: Alex de Waal, Joost van Herwijnen, Thomas Kist
Editor: Merel Notten
Music Score by: Rainer Hensel
Starring: Thijs Römer, Tara Elders, Cahit Ölmez

Country: Netherlands
Budget:
Length: 117mins

Filmography:
'JFK’, 1991, Oliver Stone, Warner Bros. Pictures

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'The Other' 1972(dir. Robert Mulligan)

Wendy McCredie MA — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:24:26 +0000

'Children of the Damned' - 2008 by Wendy McCredie MA

‘The Other’ (1972) is a psychological horror adapted from a novel of the same name by author Tom Tryon, and directed by Robert Mulligan, better known for his sterling work on ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ (1962). The film follows the story of a set of boy twins in 1930s Connecticut, whose increasingly unsettling relationship and supernatural games come under suspicion, as accidents, death and destruction begins to unfold around them. Akin to many other classic horror films of the time, such as ‘The Omen’ (Donner, 1976) and ‘The Exorcist’ (Friedkin, 1973) it makes much of the relationship between children and the supernatural and the uncanny. That the story has at its centre a set of identical twins, themselves subject to a great deal of folk belief and superstition, only serves to emphasise the thematic link, and it is these aspects of the film that will form the basis of this examination.

The world inhabited by children has undoubtedly some striking differences to that occupied by adults, which are at once over emphasised and ignored by most adults. The way in which children can connect to the past and traditions, almost to an older version of humanity and are not entirely bound by the conventions of society causes disquiet and unnerves their elders. The particular cruelty of children, as yet untamed by the conventions of society, upsets those who wish to think of childhood as something pure and innocent. Children’s songs and games seem to flow between generations without any apparent teaching, following patterns that can be traced back through centuries of human history. Childish society is both far more complex and far simpler than the adult counterpart; yet utterly alien to those no longer part of it. Feeding into the adult fear and perhaps resentment, that they can reach something ancient and powerful that the rest of society has lost or left behind. If children represent to the modern adult world, something uncanny and somehow linked to an older time, even to the collective unconscious, then twins multiply this concept.

Twins have long been associated with the supernatural and superstition, with many primitive cultures regarding the birth of twins as a portent whether for good or evil. Whether the portent was positive or negative, twins were regularly associated with the supernatural, even within cultures which treasured twins they were considered to have strange gifts, from telling the sex of an unborn child to being able to stop a pot boiling through their will alone. As late as the last century, in parts of rural China one twin would always be sacrificed under the belief that evil spirits used this method to gain a foothold on the world. Even in the USA in the thirties and forties, people still believed that twins were less mentally bright than other people, and that one twin of every set was likely to be sterile, which have since been disproved by scientific testing – the latter being true only in cows. Identical twins in particular continue to be associated with the uncanny. Indeed some researchers specialising in the study of twins believe that if there it ever likely that scientific proof will be found for telepathy then the unspoken communications of twins with their identical brain wave patterns are the most likely to provide a clear answer either way. Today the term ‘evil twin’ is still part of popular culture whether as an affectionate term between friends for one who thinks just like the other and encourages them in acts of rebellion, or, more often in fiction, in a more sinister manner as someone who looks exactly like you, who will steal and/or destroy everything that is precious to their double. Playing as it does on issues of identity especially on Western notions of the essential quality of individuality, the horror of someone else wearing your face.

To begin with the film follows the traditional trajectory of good twin/bad twin, with dominant twin Holland (Martin Udvarnoky) the troublemaker, while gentler Niles (Chris Udvarnoky) gets pulled unwillingly into his brother’s schemes. As the film progresses and Holland’s pranks become increasingly nasty and dangerous, curiosity and suspicion begin to fall on the twin’s increasingly unhealthy relationship until a terrible truth is revealed to us. Holland has been dead since falling down a well on their birthday in March several months previously.

The Niles/Holland collective is an almost archetypal example of the concept of ‘the Other’. Primarily through the way in which the defining between each of their individual selves becomes eroded and how Niles psychological collapse stems from the loss of his twin, the ‘Other’ in opposition to which his whole personality and sense of self had previously been constructed. The notion that as identical twins, originally having been one single egg, are in fact two halves of a complete single being, is although a fantastical notional a useful one intrinsic to the plot of the film. Thematically it is being posited that if the self requires ‘the Other’ in order to define itself, then this is amplified in the case of twins. Prior to Holland’s death Niles’ whole world had revolved around him, in the aftermath his world revolves around Holland’s absence. Unable to cope with a world without his twin, or conceive of himself without his opposite, Niles creates the illusion of his brother. Possibly using the strange supernatural game Ada (Uta Hagan) taught them to project his memory of his brother onto the world. Niles seems intent on embodying Hegel’s notion that ‘each consciousness pursues the death of the other’, seeking the destruction of all those that are not like them. By the end of the film, Niles had completely lost the ability to distinguish between himself and ‘the Other’ that is, his dead brother. They have melded into one being, while at the same time his own self has broken into two separate entities or personalities to allow him to cope with and justify his own actions.

Additionally the concept of the other is often associated with Orientalism in regard to how Western societies traditionally subjected societies they wished to subsume and control. The boy’s grandmother Ada plays a different kind of Other to the twins. As a Russian immigrant she is cast as very much part of another older world. The connection between her religious beliefs and ‘the Great Game’ she teaches Niles seem to represent the subsuming of older pagan religions by Christianity, particularly when she talks about the angel in their church’s stained glass window coming to embody her childhood beliefs. The Russian word she calls the Angel, may be an accurate translation, but to the uninitiated it sounds more like the name of some ancient god. It is this connection to the Old World that leaves her open to understanding how deep into darkness Niles has fallen, to act, though ultimately in vain, to put an end to it. While everyone else, part of the modern ‘New World’ cannot comprehend the strange truth of the situation.

Perhaps inevitably due to the film’s period setting, there is a certain amount of religious significance, which ties neatly into the myths and superstitions regarding twins. The notion of innocence as a vehicle for evil is one, which would be particularly fascinating to filmmakers of this period. As Niles becomes increasingly obsessed with the notion of good and evil, and his own role as ‘good’ twin to Holland’s ‘bad’ twin his behaviour and reasoning becomes increasingly extreme and hysterical. He fixates on the differences between the two of them, even as he increasingly takes on his brother’s personality traits. Niles becomes obsessed with the story his grandmother tells him, in what later reveals to be an attempt by her to help him understand and accept his brother’s death, of the ‘Angel of the Brighter Day’ who will come for him when it his time to die. Towards the end as Ada appears making her preparations to burn them both to death, he seems almost eager for death, scared but longing for her arrival, and she in turn seems intent on playing that role. Whether he seeks an end to join his brother or to be free of him is unclear, perhaps because he himself remains uncertain of which he truly seeks. Whether he is more haunted or possessed by his brother is unclear but either way, in his lonely survival status at the end, he seems more like the ghost in a painting or photograph that everyone swears wasn’t there when it was taken.

At the start of the film sound is used to mark clear distinctions between the twins, with Holland moving sneakily and silently, while Niles stumbles along clumsily in his wake accompanied by the constant rattle of his precious tin. Sound is consistently used to build the ‘reality’ that Niles inhabits as an increasingly separate place from that experienced by everyone else around him; emphasising throughout the contradiction between surface appearances and inner realities. Even the film’s score gets in on the act, taking its cues from the theme songs of far more wholesome family dramas. The music conjuring up the image of those far too sunny and wholesome period American dramas; where the dark under currents of reality and history remain unspoken, so much more beloved by the parents than the children. Appropriately enough the composer Jerry Goldsmith would go on to compose the music for the bucolic drama ‘The Waltons’ part of the genre whose music the score reflects. That archetypal music is taken and twisted in a way that draws attention to and emphasises the undertones of faint creepiness in the type of drama it apes, using it for its own ends; that combination of stylised faux innocence and dark undercurrents melding perfectly with the film’s thematics.

Directed by: Robert Mulligan
Written by: Tom Tryon
Produced by: Robert Mullian
DOP: Robert Surtees
Editor: Folmar Blangsted, O. Nicholas Brown
Music Score by: Jerry Goldsmith
Starring: Uta Hagen, Diana Muldaur, Chris Udvarnoky, Martin Udvarnoky

Country: USA
Budget: £
Length: 96mins

Filmography:
‘The Exorcist’, 1973, William Friedkin, Hoya Productions
‘The Omen’ , 1976, Richard Donner, Twentieth Century-Fox Productions
'To Kill a Mockingbird’, 1962, Robert Mulligan, Brentwood Productions

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Living in Oblivion' 1995 (dir. Tom DiCillo)

Ian Viggars MA (Hons) BA (Hons) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:38:26 +0000

'The American Indie in Transition' - 2008 by Ian Viggars MA (Hons) BA (Hons)

‘Living in Oblivion’ (1995) started life as a short about the perils of independent filmmaking but in 1995 was expanded into a feature when, in true indie spirit, friends and wannabe producers started to offer their own funding. Finally being released on DVD this month the film now offers an interesting glimpse of the end of one of Americas most fruitful, exciting, and ultimately profitable periods of independent filmmaking, showing in an almost postmodern way (itself a buzzword of the mid-90’s) the era of flux between the earlier traditional indie pioneers such as Jarmusch, Soderbergh, and Spike Lee, and the late 90’s major studio affiliated productions of ancillary companies such as Focus Features and Sony Picture Classics. Indeed, in a world where films such as ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ (2006) are seen as being independent in spirit, ‘Living in Oblivion’s’ re-release couldn’t be more perfectly timed recalling as it does the days of genuine low-budgets and inspired individual creativity, even if it occasionally and successfully parodies this period.

The film concerns a fictional director’s frustrated attempts at completing a low budget feature whilst enduring all the frustrations and restrictions that can be expected within this mode of movie production. However a closer inspection of the film’s form and style reveals something deeper, offering if in a light hearted way a meditation on human creativity and the pervasiveness of dreams. The film is directed by Tom DiCillo whose loyal fans have since debated whether or not ‘Living in Oblivion’ reflects his own bad experiences of filmmaking, because four years previous he made the critical success ‘Johnny Suede’ (1991) which was, in typical debut feature fashion, a protracted and frustrating process by his own account. His sparse record of directing work since this film also compounds the theory that ‘Living in Oblivion’ may be somewhat autobiographical as DiCillo has subsequently only worked intermittently on television shows and as a jobbing cinematographer. This in itself is a shame as DiCillo was once a peripheral member of that influential first wave of American indie directors, working with Jim Jarmusch on his key debut film ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ (1984) and segments of his later ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’ (2003). However troubled its origins may be ‘Living in Oblivion’ is still a highly enjoyable film even as it parodies a style and mode of filmmaking that has sadly long since dissipated in a tide of major studio funding and an increasing lack of new and original voices.

Even the casting recalls the mid-eighties to early-nineties glory days. Indie stalwart Steve Buscemi plays the film’s director Nick Reve with all his usual highly-strung nervy cool intact while Catherine Keener plays the lovable but lost female lead and James LeGros the good looking, vain and ultimately dumb lead male character, whom many have since suggested was created as a vicious attack on ‘Johnny Suede’s’ star Brad Pitt (although DiCillo has often discredited this). Other relative unknowns play the rest of the crew but their lack of acting ability adds to the comedy of the roles they are playing- the pretentious cinematographer who insists on wearing a beret and an eye patch and the oafish sound and lighting men who are more interested in whether or not the lead actress will do a nude scene rather than their jobs at hand. (The film’s authentic indie origin is further attested to in the DVD extras when it is revealed that most of these people got their parts by putting up production money for the film.)

The film is roughly divided into three distinct sections, the first quarter showing Nick attempting to shoot what will be a key scene in his movie, a tearful confrontation and confessional between a mother (Danielle Von Zerneck) and her daughter (Keener). The shoot is dogged by an increasingly comedic series of mundane interruptions such as the boom mike creeping into shot and street noise invading from outside until a mysterious alarm sound sends Nick over the edge, coaxing one of Buscemi’s trademark bouts of misanthropic vitriol to spill out towards his entire crew and his two actresses. Suddenly the alarm sound is revealed to be Nick’s actual morning wake up call, and the scene we have just witnessed to be his bad dream, albeit one that reflects his mounting difficulties with the real shoot. At first this seems distancing, and there are no specific stylistic signatures that denote the difference between the dream world and the real world. In the opening the film within the film is shot in high definition full colour while the “real” offset action is shot in a grainy handheld black and white that recalls the work of DiCillo’s peer Jim Jarmusch. However once the dream world is left, the middle section employs stylistically different if functionally similar devices to denote the filming and the film itself. Here the actual footage is in a higher-grade black and white stock while the offset action is in full colour. The middle section denotes the arrival of the big movie star Chad Palomino (LeGros) who initially claims to be a big fan of arty independent directors but then predictably turns out to be a vainglorious airhead who only took the part because he thought the director was “tight with Tarantino”, a reference that firmly grounds the film in its specific period of creation.

The opening scene reveals that Keener’s character Nicole Springer had a regrettable one-night stand with Chad the day before he arrives on set, which understandably adds to her inability to take his vacuous acting attempts seriously in the scene being shot. He also ignores most of Nick’s direction instead making ridiculous suggestions and constantly changing his mind thus again raising the director’s frustration to boiling point as before. It is also revealed here that Nick has a secret unrequited crush on his leading lady that towards the end of the scene, following an angry physical confrontation with Chad, he confesses to Nicole. However she then wakes up revealing the middle section to be her dream, a device now used twice in a row with little regard for diegetic continuity, thus causing one to question the subsequent reality of the rest of the film. This turns out to be advantageous though as the last half hour proves to be the most incongruous but also the most humorous and touching of all three sections.

Nick is now filming a dream sequence involving Nicole wearing a wedding dress inhabiting a red room being taunted by a dwarf in a suit called Tito played by Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent, 2003). The references here point to an obvious yet affectionate parody of David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’ or perhaps the pale imitators of his work that littered the early nineties. Either way the scene reflects an increasing pretentiousness creeping into Nick’s film that he at first appears oblivious to until once again proceedings inevitably descend into farce as Tito the dwarf gets angry at someone of his diminutive stature being cast simply to make the dream sequence seem especially strange- before he walks out he angrily states that even he doesn’t have dreams with dwarves in them. This time no one wakes up from a dream proving the previous frustrations we have witnessed to coincide with the disastrous reality we are seeing now, but just as Nick is on the verge of quitting his film altogether he finds unexpected inspiration from his aging, slightly senile mother who had wandered onto the set earlier. The scene is surprisingly touching and suggests, in the least sappy way possible, that filmmaking is hard but worth the effort when it goes right. This doesn’t stop Nick from one last daydream though when during an imagined awards acceptance speech he bitterly attacks those he believes to have held him back over the years.

Stylistically the film never settles but this ultimately feels necessary to incorporate the complex web of dreams, and dreams within daydreams- Reve, the fictional director’s surname, is also a disambiguation of the French word for dream. As previously stated, what at first seems like a slightly annoying distancing effect actually suggests ways in which artistic frustration and inspiration can pervade into the dream world and vice-versa, making the overall effort seem almost like a more light hearted and visually low-key take on the themes of Fellini’s masterpiece ‘Eight and a Half’ (1963). While that film was a high watermark of the early 60’s worldwide acceptance of European art-house cinema though, ‘Living in Oblivion’ documents the end of a different period, the original run of success of American independent directors of the 80’s, and considering the self-reflexive postmodernist discourse that was popular amongst filmmakers and film critics alike during that period it seems oddly fitting that this is an independent film with independent filmmaking as it’s subject. The earlier Tarantino reference also turns out to be posthumously apt as he became perhaps the one director from this period to fully embrace wider audiences, bigger budgets and in turn arguably lower quality scripts in favour of high concept fanfare and exploitation film nostalgia. Since then it has become almost an industry standard for any promising new American director having made inroads into Hollywood through music videos, advertising, or short filmmaking to gain a substantial one-to-three picture deal with one of the many major studio offshoot companies that offer reasonable budgets for low risk, potentially award winning films. While it may seem wrong to criticise the relative ease with which new directing voices can now produce their first feature, ‘Living in Oblivion’ makes one slightly nostalgic for the times when passionate visionary young filmmakers with something to say had to call favours, max out multiple credit cards, and work several jobs just to get their first feature made. Although the process may never have been easy (as this film makes clear) it is hard to imagine the modern current day studio financed indies producing a new Coen Brothers or Richard Linklater, while promising modern filmmakers like Andrew Bujalski who do follow this older route often struggle to get their films shown in the increasingly competitive and business-like festival circuits. ‘Living in Oblivion’s’ reminder of the end of such a creative period in American cinema is saved from invoking too much sadness or nostalgia though by the fact that it is such a pitch perfect and highly amusing parody of not only a specific film movement, but also of the universal difficulties of the art of filmmaking and the foibles of human creativity itself.

Directed by: Tom DiCillo
Written by: Tom DiCillo
Produced by: Michael Griffiths, Marcus Viscidi
DOP: Frank Prinzi
Editor: Dana Congdon, Camilla Toniolo
Music Score by: Jim Farmer
Starring: Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, James LeGros, Daniella von Zerneck, Peter Dinklage

Country: USA
Budget: £980,000
Length: 90mins

Filmography:
‘Eight and a Half’, 1963, Federico Fellini, Cineriz
'The Station Agent', 2003, Thomas McCarthy, SenArt Films
‘Coffee and Cigarettes’, 2003, Jim Jarmusch, Asmik Ace Entertainment
‘Stranger Than Paradise’, 1984, Jim Jarmusch, Cinesthesia Productions
‘Johnny Suede’, 1991, Tom DiCillo, Arena

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'The Plague Of The Zombies' 1966 (dir. John Gilling)

Wendy McCredie MA — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:43:26 +0000

'A Very British Invasion' - 2008 by Wendy McCredie MA

When the classics of the zombie sub-genre come to mind, they invariably come with a distinctly American accent. Whether we think of Bruce Campbell’s chainsaw arm in the ‘Evil Dead’ (Raimi, 1987) films, or the survivors taking pot shots at the zombies from the top of the mall in ‘Day of the Dead’ (1985), iconic imagery of zombies and those that battle them are, in spite of some sterling work by the makers of ‘Shaun of the Dead’ (Wright, 2004), nearly all from across the pond. However, Simon Pegg’s cricket bat and pool cue wielding loser is not the first to take a thoroughly British shot at dealing with a zombie invasion. Made in the mid-sixties but set in the Edwardian era in a tiny Cornish village, ‘The Plague of the Zombies’ (Gilling, 1966) is classic Hammer horror B-movie fare. Originally intended as an accompaniment to Christopher Lee’s iconic scenery chewing turn as Dracula, the tiny budget doesn’t get in the way of it being a creepy, subtext laden little film.

George A Romero’s continuing efforts to hold a distorting mirror up to American society are not alone in featuring shambling figures whose unending quest for brains may have a more than cannibalistic bent. With the growing entrenchment of the superpowers and the constant threat that the cold war might suddenly disintegrate into nuclear holocaust or something subtler yet somehow worse, the politicisation of the young audience that has traditionally been the target of horror cinema was almost inevitable. Even the films without overt political emphasis were assigned significance by their already politicised audience, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (Siegel, 1956) managed to be considered as both an indictment of McCarthyism and a parable of the loss of the self within the soviet state. For, though neither meaning was intended by the creators, it still manages to act as a political allegory when read in context, becoming, almost against its will, what its audience needed it to be. ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (Romero, 1968) makes the most contemporary comparison to ‘Plague of Zombies’. As ‘Night of the Living Dead’ reflects the racial tensions of sixties America, so ‘The Plague of the Zombies’ embodies the issues of class and colonial disintegration facing British society at the time.

Much of the gothic literature of the nineteenth century plays on the fear of death and the dead that was prevalent within western society at the time. Although recorded cases of people being mistakenly buried alive were relatively rare, there were enough cases of supposedly dead people awakening in coffins pre-burial to feed rumour. The period setting that allows for the full exploitation of the gothic nuances of the story also has its uses as a distancing tool. By portraying the issues as those of the past, the audience is freed to deal with these ideas with hindsight from a safe distance. Many British horror films during the fifties and sixties, notably those produced by Hammer, use their period settings to provide an escape from contemporary context to deal with various societal issues. In particular post-war crises in terms of gender identity with social upheaval drawn in characters of extremes, the men either weak and crippled or cold, sexless scientists, while the women alternate from weak swooning damsels to powerful and/or sexual predators. Issues of class have a tendency to dominate in spite of this, the characters inhabiting a thoroughly bourgeoisie status quo whose closed minds and class snobbery often hamper them in successfully dealing with the monster. Although these films were conceived and viewed within the same political and military global situation as many better-known American horror and science fiction invasion films the invasion metaphor is used to different effect. Their use of the metaphor and positioning within the wider social, political and cinematic context gives a distinct ‘British-ness’ to them. There is something robustly physical and no-nonsense about the character’s response to the situation, (an aspect often credited to the professional nature of the actors involved and their ability to treat thoroughly weird situations with complete seriousness) the fight between good and evil is resolutely grounded in the real world even when witchcraft gets involved there is very little of the ethereal about it. The defining difference between the monsters of science fiction and those of horror is that science fictions monsters tend to come from without, from the unknown, whereas the monsters of horror come from within, are all too familiar. In confirming his suspicions the good Doctor (Brook Williams) makes use of the local minister’s library of Christian arcana, immersing himself in demons and witchcraft so that he can be sure of what he’s up against. For all that his younger colleague protests incredulously about such conclusions from a ‘man of science’, Forbes does in fact deal with the situation in a thoroughly scientific manner. He sees things that he does not fully understand; he researches them, forms a hypothesis, and proves by experiment (in this case standing vigil over recently dead Alice Thomson’s (Jacqueline Pearce) grave waiting for her to rise) that his theory is true, before confronting the perpetrator. There is something of Heart of Darkness (1994 –TV) about the whole situation, Squire Hamilton having returned from his travels in the West Indies with a selection of Haitian voodoo practices. Notably he has not brought a voodoo witchdoctor back with him for his own dubious ends, but has become one himself.

While at first glance the local population of ‘commoners’ seems to get a better deal than is normal for gothic horrors, the patriarchal protectionism of the protagonists ensures that they remain ignorant of the truth about the events transpiring. The attitude that they must be protected by men of learning from what they do not understand prevails. The real ideological battle lies not between the baying mob and the mad scientist in his tower as is often the case – with the monster left to take the, oft literal, fall for its creator’s crimes – but between the two opposing stereotypes of upper class power. (Though it could also be argued that fate of the Zombies and their masters, battling each other in the burning tin mine represents the cyclical and futile nature of class conflict.) Sir James Forbes (André Morell), a man of education and medicine representing the philanthropist using money and knowledge to improve the lot of those below him, while Squire Clive Hamilton (John Carson) plays the role of exploitive industrialist focused solely on power and profit caring only for getting his own way regardless of the consequences. This duality can also effectively carry across into the differing views on British colonialism as the country made the painful, though undoubtedly necessary, transition to the post-colonial era. Therefore it is also possible to read Squire Hamilton’s actions as representative of the section of society unable to cope with the inevitable break up of the British Empire. The overtly sexual overtones to the pursuit of Sylvia Forbes (Diane Clare) by the Squire and his cohort in the woods has a certain significance in the aftermath of the symbolic castration that was the Suez crisis. Their failed attempts to first dominate then delude her into submission a demonstration of the ineffectual nature of their posturing and exploitation.

How a society responds to the fears of its members tells us more about the society itself than the individual members. Horror cinema is arguably a very British genre of film. To the extent that some even argue that horror cinema is to the British Isles what the Western is to America, encapsulating all those things that the British are apparently renowned for being. Repression being a vital part of this, central as it is to both external images of the British and to horror itself. The opportunity to exorcise demons, whether fantastical or psychological, is often seized with an almost unseemly passion. As British society changes, old certainties change and identity becomes something mutable and threatened. Admittedly this is an unusual attitude for a society where historically uncertainty and rupture are the only real form of stability. Perhaps this is simply a refusal to accept that endurance is dependant upon change. This is the fear of regressing backwards at the expense of moving forwards. The problem with overcoming repression, that favourite term of psychoanalytic interpretations of film, is that it requires an acceptance of the idea of there being pleasure in change and in revolution.

The zombies here, though playing the ‘monster’, are treated with far greater sympathy than is normal in the circumstances. They are viewed by the film’s ‘hero’ as benighted victims of a dastardly plot, forced to toil in the tin mine instead of lying at peace in their graves. The main thrust of the plot being not to destroy these monsters but to free them from their enslavement and return them to their rightful place.

British horror cinema is regarded with some distain by a large section of the critical corpus, as though they are ashamed of its continuing popularity. But from the Hammer re-imaginings of the Universal classics to the gut-consuming zombies and soldier munching werewolves, home-grown horror in this country continues to draw large audiences with only a low budget, a creative attitude to Foley and home made special effects. By speaking in a language of ‘known’ cinematic tropes the audience know what to expect from horror and are allowed to relax and be ‘scared’ in a safe environment.

Directed by: John Gilling
Written by: Peter Bryan
Produced by: Anthony Nelson Keys
DOP: Arthur Grant
Editor: Chris Barnes
Music Score by: James Bernard
Starring: André Morell, Diane Clare, Brook Williams, Jacqueline Pearce, John Carson, Michael Ripper, Alex Davion, Marcus Hammond, Roy Royston.

Country: UK
Budget:
Length: 91mins

Filmography:
‘Night of the Living Dead’, 1968, George A. Romero, Image Ten
‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, 1956, Don Siegel, Walter Wanger Productions
'Shaun of the Dead’, 2004, Edgar Wright, Studio Canal
‘Day of the Dead’, 1985, George A. Romero, Dead Films Inc.
'Evil Dead II’, 1987, Sam Raimi, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG)

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Irma Vep' 1996 (dir. Olivier Assayas)

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:53:26 +0000

Review Oultine
An examination Irma Vep, as a film made by a recent writer for the once influential Caheirs du Cinema, in the context of the history of the French Cinema journal, French filmmaking in general, and films about filmmaking.

'Banality and Czech Identity in Miloš Forman's Fireman's Ball' - 2008 by Zoe Aiano, MA

Zoe Aiano, MA — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:10:26 +0000

'Banality and Czech Identity in Miloš Forman's Fireman's Ball' - 2008 by Zoe Aiano, MA

It is a virtual impossibility to purge Eastern European film of the spectre of Communism that lurks, if not in the actual celluloid itself, then in the eye of the beholder. This task is made even harder when, as in the case of Miloš Forman's black comedy 'Fireman's Ball' (1967), the film in question was made in Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Prague Spring of 1968 and was even banned on anti-authoritarian grounds by the Communist government. Nevertheless, to watch Forman's treatise on human inadequacy and see nothing but Stalin in disguise is to overlook a masterful and witty examination of Czech society.

'Fireman's Ball' follows the course of a community gathering held in honour of the elderly chairman of the local fire department, who is apparently dying of cancer. The main focus of the proceedings is to be a beauty contest using young girls picked out from the crowd, a raffle and the presentation of an engraved axe to the chairman. The ineptitude of the group of ageing firemen in charge of organising the ball is matched only by the frivolous immorality of the revellers attending it, and all of the planned events quickly descend into chaos. When the contestants in the beauty pageant are too embarrassed to get on stage a barn-yard style chase breaks out in an attempt to round them up, which is then forgotten with the news that a nearby house is on fire. The firemen fail to extinguish it and the whole congregation gathers as the building is reduced to cinders. When they eventually return to the hall most of the raffle prizes have been stolen, as has the commemorative axe.

The most instantly striking thing about 'Fireman's Ball' is how unsettlingly realistic it seems. Forman's use of naturalistic lighting and non-professional actors lends an almost amateur or home-movie quality to it, which is supported by the roaming camera and cluttered mise-en-scene. This adds plausibility to both the characters and setting, making the whole ball almost unbearably parochial and unglamorous, which is what a large part of the film's humour is derived from. This is especially true of the storyline concerning the quest for a beauty queen, whereby the old firemen trawl through the crowds of pointedly unattractive women completely, unabashed of their own lechery. The camera doggedly follows their progress, effectively taking on the role of an honorary juror; when the old men go up to the balcony to get a better view of the girls' cleavage the camera dutifully follows them and participates in their inspections. As the camera trawls through the throng of merrymakers and occasionally singles out individual faces, the concept of the young women in question entering a beauty contest becomes increasingly absurd and as such the tone becomes mocking and cruel. With the camera taking on the role of a fellow onlooker, the ugliness of the people it judges ridicules both the girls themselves and the old men ogling them.

This savage portrayal of Czech people, especially young Czechs, is the defining characteristic of Forman's works made in his native country, and can be traced as far back as his graduation film 'Audition' (1963), in which Forman filmed a number of genuine performances by teenage girls who believed they were auditioning to be singers in a rock band, then selected the most humiliating and edited them together. Though this approach may seem unduly aggressive, it is nevertheless effective precisely because it manages to touch a truthful nerve, and in his previous films 'Black Peter' (1934) and 'Loves of a Blond' (1965) Forman had shown profound insight into the awkwardness of youth. With the microcosm of 'Fireman's Ball' he targets Czech society as a whole, lovingly yet ruthlessly illustrating its inadequacies and illogical reasoning. This critical self-evaluation is in itself typical of both Czech film and literature, notable for their lack of heroic protagonists, and in which the main character is generally either weak-willed or ineffectual, and often with questionable moral standards. This has often been attributed to a Czech national trauma at having been subjugated by so many different regimes and a shared feeling of impotence at not being able to defend themselves or their culture.

Whilst this may not be immediately obvious in 'Fireman's Ball', this theory bears some significance to the film's treatment of the issue of authority. Often understood simply as a satirical allusion to the Communist government, the council of bumbling firemen represent the ball's authority figures in so far as they are its organisers and have some slighted elevated social standing as members of a community institution. Fundamentally incapable of either doing their jobs or preventing mayhem from breaking out, as well as being patently self-serving, they lend themselves well to a comparison with almost any unpopular governing body. The fact of their advanced years implies that their positions are not attributable to merit but more to a stagnating status quo in which the citizens are not sufficiently inspired to replace them with more efficient members. The crucial element which parallels the Communist authorities and the council of geriatric fire-fighters is their illogical reasoning. Perhaps the best illustration of this lies in their argument at the end of the film after one of their leading figures is caught trying to replace one of the raffle prizes, which had previously been stolen by his wife. Despite being the single noble act of the entire narrative, it plunges the firemen into panic about how to restore the damage caused to the brigade's honour, which, in the words of one member “means more to me than any honesty”. Similarly, when trying to decide a fair way to compensate the people who bought raffle tickets but didn't steal the prizes whilst punishing the those that did steal but didn't buy tickets, it is argued that anyone who didn't steal effectively lost the lottery by not seizing an opportunity which others did.

This badly reasoned prioritisation of appearances over the well-being of those affected is one of the crucial criticisms of Communism, but it can also be seen as specific to Czech mentality as a whole when examined in consideration of the people's response to it, which is predominantly one of adolescent rebellion; the party goers take every opportunity to run riot, brawling, storming the stage and treating the fire as a spectacle with someone even setting up a bar. Their most defiant act takes place when the lights are turned off with the intention of allowing the thieves of the raffle prizes to return their spoils anonymously. When the lights are turned back on however, not only have the missing items not been replaced but the little that remained has also been taken. This flippant and amoral reaction to shoddy leadership indicates that the people have learnt to capitalise on the distracted nature of those in charge for their own benefit rather than to push for productive change. Such an attitude in turn suggests that the stultification of the leadership has been long-standing, something particularly pertinent in a country which only had true self-rule for less than two decades in over four centuries. This argument also bears more weight than that maintaining the strict anti-Communist reading, as 'Fireman's Ball' was made during a censorial thaw and it if was truly intended as counter-propaganda would be unlikely depict the ordinary citizens in such a condemnatory fashion.

This also relates to the significance of banality with the film. As previously mentioned, the prevailing aesthetic is notably dirty, out-dated and generally mundane. The hall being used for the ball is tackily decorated, and every frame is littered with hundreds of half finished beer tankards. The raffle prizes are as Eastern European as they are undesirable and mediocre, including items such as a pig's head, more beer and a some porcelain figurines of farmers. The décor, lighting and characters all combine to produce a perfectly dire image of a small town, instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever lived in one. This is a common trait in Czech film, which has a strong tradition of concentrating on small people in small villages, something that can be found in 'New Wave' films such as Vojtech Jasný's 'Všichní dobří rodaci' (All My Good Countrymen, 1968) as well as in modern works like 'Divoké Včely' (Wild Bees, 2001). Again, this could be attributed to a national inferiority complex caused by the country's prolonged subjugation by large empires, but it also serves as the basis of Czech black comedy, of which 'Fireman's Ball' is a prime example.

Whether the origin of these factors lies in history or politics, the result of combining parochial mundaneness and ruthless humour is unmistakably Czech. It may well have developed as a strategy of dealing with oppression or simply be indicative of a inherent national tendency towards defiance and recklessness, but in any case 'Fireman's Ball' does not need to be understood as anything except a highly amusing, if somewhat cruel, reflection of a society that is proud of its ridiculousness and is not afraid to revel in its own banality.

Directed by: Miloš Forman
Written by: Miloš Forman, Jaroslav Papoušek, Ivan Passer, Václav Sasek
Produced by: Rudolf Hajek, Carlo Ponti
DOP: Miroslav Ondriček
Editor: Miroslav Hajek
Music Score by: Karel Mareě
Starring: Jan Vostrčil, Josef Valnoha, Frantisek Debelka, Josef Řehořek, Josef Šebánek, Vratislav Čermák, Václav Novotný

Country: Italy/Czech Republic
Budget: £
Length: 71mins

Filmography:
'Audition (Ôdishon)', 1963, Takashi Miike, AFDF
'Black Peter', 1964, Milos Forman, Filmové Studio Barrandov
'Loves of a Blond', 1965, Milos Forman, CBK
'All My Good Countrymen (Všichní dobří rodaci)', 1968, Vojtech Jasný, Filmové Studio Barrandov
'Wild Bees (Divoké Včely)', 2001, Bohdan Sláma, Ceská Televize

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Nouvelle Visage, Nouvelle Femme' - 2008 by Wendy McCredie (MA)

Wendy McCredie (MA) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:52:26 +0000

'Nouvelle Visage, Nouvelle Femme' - 2008 by Wendy McCredie (MA)

‘Eyes Without A Face’ (1960) is a French language, black and white horror film. A beautifully shot, dark psychological thriller, where gender, identity and motivation is a constantly shifting landscape, this film somehow manages to contain nearly everything I love in good horror cinema. The horror is not one of screams, jumps and sudden reveals, but of slow burning unease building through revulsion to a fitting climax. In ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979) Marlon Brando’s character insists that horror has both a name and a face, the anonymous narrator of Chris Marker’s ‘Sans Solei’ (1983), agrees but posits that if this is true, then beauty also has a name and a face. In ‘Eyes Without A Face’, the pivotal character of Christiane (Edith Scob) embodies both of these roles, playing as she does the princess locked in the tower and the monster lurking in the basement; encapsulating the contradictory nature of female portrayal in horror cinema in her dual role of monster and victim.

At its best and most basic, horror is about conflict and crossing boundaries; the pure versus the impure, the living against the dead. Look a bit deeper and the conflicts and boundaries blur even further, between men and women, heterosexual and homosexual even between human and monster. Part of the pleasure is the uncertainty and ambiguity, shaking up the audience’s world-view and making them reassess what they believe to be true, and traditionally take them back to a nice safe retreat with the status quo reclaimed. In the dark of the cinema, it is safe to be scared. The familiar will comfort the audience while it conflicts them, and below the surface the shifting plates of gender identity and conflict roll and slide.

Oddly, for a film so focused on the feminine in horror, there is very little screaming. The scream has for so long played a central role in relation to gender performance in horror cinema: if the men are scared and showing it, the women need to be nigh on hysterical to keep the balance. Screaming in ‘Eyes Without A Face’ is generally confined to death, a mark of surrender in the ongoing battle of the sexes. With the exception of Paulette (Béatrice Altariba), whose screams when she awakens on the operating table mark her rebellion, her refusal to surrender without a fight.

In aural terms the most well known symbol of horror is the female scream. While film theorists have much to say on the role of the scream in the coding of gender representations in horror cinema, the significance of the scream itself is generally under-explored. Academics exploring the horror genre often allude to the significance of the scream, sometimes referred to as ‘the genre’s most famous trope’, without ever explaining what that significance might be. As with several of horror’s most iconic tropes, its power remains acknowledged yet unspoken. But a scream somehow provokes a deeper and more powerful emotional response in the viewer, seeming to better connect viewer and victim. What Michel Chion refers to as the ‘screaming point’ is at the centre of countless horror films, a kind of black hole within the narrative, sucking everything towards it. The screaming female has defined the genre since before the scream could be heard, the silent screams of threatened females in ‘Nosferatu’ (1921) are no less central than the Faye Wray’s infamous histrionics in ‘King Kong’ (1933). The gaping maw of the screaming face embodies all that is unspoken and beyond thought, the scream as the ultimate expression of unadulterated, limitless fear.

Although the film opens like a Hitchcockian thriller, and employs a variety of touches throughout that suggest his influence, motivations and tropes employed have more in common with ‘Frankenstein’ (1931) than with Psycho (1960). As the film progresses Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) increasingly fills the role of mad scientist, his ‘secretary’ Louise (Alida Valli) only lacking the compulsory disfigurement for her devoted assistant role because he has rebuilt her face. He labours long and hard to replace the face he has destroyed, as though to erase his own transgression; indulging his god-complex every bit as much as Dr Frankenstein did. Perhaps because of this the moments of true horror in the film are of a medical nature, although not gruesome in nature or visually, the implications are quite horrific. Both the operation and the disintegration of Christiane’s new face are shot with a cold detachment at odds with the poetic nature of the rest of the cinematography, as though we were watching a documentary of medical procedures. The detachment and control with which Dr Génessier acts and speaks, as those his experiments are entirely rational and reasonable, that the deaths of the girls whose faces he takes are utterly justified, is unnerving. His daughter accuses him of caring more about the dogs he experiments on than the girls, and the audience doesn’t doubt it for a moment. The only affection he shows his daughter acts as a sort of emotional blackmail to justify his continuing experiments. A man in need of utter control and domination, he is set on reconstructing his daughter in his own image of her. Louise refers to her new face as ‘angelic’ a description that Christiane denies but that her father re-enforces. Prior to her accident she had her own life, a fiancé, was on the cusp of leaving the family home. In faking her death and funeral to disguise his own crimes he has erased the identity she had created for herself in preparation for replacing it with one he will create for her. As her father plans out her future for her, indulgently offering the choice of her new name to her, the sense of a gilded cage being built around her is almost palpable. The similarity of the mask to the face of a porcelain doll takes on a decidedly creepy layer of meaning. If we take Simone Beauvoir’s notion that one is not born but becomes a woman, that to be feminine is a construction of societal forces, then the film takes on the role of creation story, following Génessier’s failed attempt to intervene in Christiane’s development from child to adult, to make her the perfect feminine ‘other’, only for her to reclaim that role to become something ‘other’ entirely.

There is a poetic feel to the film; moments of grace and horror played out in beautifully shot and carefully constructed scenes. An air of watching a particularly brutal modern day fairytale play out before the audience suffuses it. If the film is truly a fairytale then Louise is its evil stepmother. Although her relationship with Dr Génessier is decidedly ambiguous, her role as surrogate mother to Christiane is clear, and it is to her that the young girl appeals for an end to her torment, for release from her father’s experiments. Though in vain for Louise’s devotion to Génessier is unalterable even in the face of murder. Besides her relationship with Christiane’s father, much else is ambiguous about Louise; the way in which she stalks and lures the young women back to the hospital has decided overtones of sexuality that imply that she has other desires than the purely medical in mind when preying on them. (Predatory lesbians are hardly strangers in the world of horror stereotypes; vampire films are full of them) It is Louise who moves the bodies and acts as jailor to Christiane and the faceless girls.

The character Christiane reaches out to, seeking him as her rescuer, ultimately fails in his task. Although her fiancé prompts the police to re-open the case, the plan is quickly abandoned in spite of the kidnapping of the young woman used as bait in the trap. Both he and the police abandon both girls to their fate at the hands of Génessier with little effort. Their only real benefit having been to provide a distraction that allows Christiane to find a point of identification with young Paulette (Béatrice Altariba) and thus affect their escape. The moment Christiane spends standing over the fearful waking Paulette is her moment of becoming, when she comes to accept her fate as a monster. To the girl on the operating table she is a monster as she is, but if she goes along with her father’s plan and regains her face she will become a different kind of monster. From this perspective, her murder of Louise and her father becomes more than purely vengeance upon those who created her monstrous self, but an act of redemption, as though by freeing and protecting Paulette she can make up for the other girls who she failed to protect from them. The dog mauled face of her dead father marking a symbolic reflection of the damage he has caused to others in his fruitless quest to make her less monstrous. The film ends with Christiane standing among the trees, a dove on her shoulder, oddly androgynous in her shapeless theatre gown and perfect mask like some twisted pastiche of a Disney princess, no longer awaiting rescue by her ineffectual Prince Charming. She does not meet an icy or fiery death locked in combat with her creator/jailor like Frankenstein’s nameless monster, nor does she stumble blindly through the dark to freedom in the style of the ‘last girl’. Her fate is different, more open, something else entirely. Christiane may end the film as full-blown monster, but it is a role, finally, of her own choosing.

Directed by: Georges Franju
Written by: Jean Redon, Claude Sautet, Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Pierre Gascar (Dialogue)
Produced by: Jules Borkon
DOP: Eugen Schüfftan
Editor: Gilbert Natot
Music Score by: Maurice Jarre
Starring: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli. Alexandre Rignault, Beatrice Altariba. François Guerin, Edith Scob, Juliete Mayniel

Country: France
Budget:
Length: 86mins

Filmography:
'Psycho', 1960, Alfred Hitchcock, Shamley Productions
‘Frankenstein’, 1931, James Whale, Universal Pictures
‘Nosferatu’, 1921, F.W. Murnau, Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal
‘King Kong’, 1933, RKO Radio Pictures
‘Sans Solei’, 1983, Chris Marker, Argos Films
‘Apocalypse Now’, 1979, Francis Ford Coppola, Zoetrope Studios

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'The Decline of the American Empire (Le déclin de l’empire américain)' 1986 (dir. Denys Arcand)

Jessica Mulvogue, BA MA — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:13:26 +0000

'The Decline of the Quebec Nation?' - 2008 by Jessica Mulvogue, BA MA

On the surface, Denys Arcand’s ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is a film about nothing much at all. The film centres on a group of intellectual Quebecois, some of whom are professors at the Université de Montréal; they are portrayed as self-obsessed, self-indulgent, and shallow. The film begins with the men, Remy (Rémy Girard), Pierre (Pierre Curzi), Claude (Yves Jacques), and Alain (Daniel Brière) discussing sex and their many infidelities in a lovely country house in rural Quebec, while the women, Dominique (Dominique Michel), Louise (Dorothée Berryman), and Diane (Louise Portal), are at a gym, discussing much of the same. The women join the men at the country house; they make a grand dinner and discuss...what else? Sex. An unusual theme and concept for notable Quebecois filmmaker Denys Arcand, whose work usually contains more pertinent moral and social concerns. But underneath Decline’s shallow facade, there lurks something more profound, precisely a critique on the state of the Quebecois nation and its slow disintegration into the ‘end of history’.

Benedict Anderson has famously defined the nation as an ‘imagined community’; he claims this imagined community arose from certain historical conditions including, the proliferation of vernacular language, the abolishment or reduced power of the monarchies, and the emergence of the printing press . These circumstances allow a community of citizens, who share the territory of a nation-state but many never know each other face to face, to be connected by a shared experience. Arjun Appadurai explains that “the modern nation-state…grows less out of natural facts…and more out of a quintessential cultural product, a product of collective imagination” . Today, electronic media, such as film and television, have an increasingly greater impact on this collective imagination, on how people imagine themselves to belong to a national society. Quebec has long struggled to define itself as a nation within an English Canada. Beginning with what is known as the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, Quebecois governmental leaders have been trying to create a ‘francophone Quebec’ and have pushed for sovereignty. While an ‘imagined community’ of a (mostly) francophone Quebec may exist, Quebec has never been successful in realizing this community on a political level, which would be its separation from Canada. Two referendums on sovereignty were held, in 1980 and 1995, but both resulted in a slim majority against separation.

Historically, ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is categorised as a ‘post-referendum’ film. The aftermath of the referendum left many left wing nationalists disillusioned; the struggles and the goals of the previous twenty years were felt to have been futile. But to categorise this film as being merely ‘post-referendum’ limits its reading to the site of Quebec; ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ also expresses anxieties not specifically Quebecois, but those which extend to a large portion of the world in general. The film is marked by absence. In an essay on Canadian contemporary cinema, Jim Leach claims that Canadian cinema in general is full of absences which signify its inferiority complex against Hollywood and European art cinema . But in this case, I suggest that the absence in ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is more of a recognition and mourning of the Quebecois cinema’s dying position as a politically inclined cinema. There is a strongly felt absence or lack in the portrayal of the protagonists, the plot, and the use of space. However, and perhaps more importantly, the film is completely absent of any Quebecois discourse, save the language.

The narrative structure of ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is relatively linear, taking place within one night, with the exception of a few flashbacks which depict the characters’ various sexual encounters. But it has a untraditional, perhaps postmodern plot, in that the film does not even have so much of a plot, as nothing really ‘happens’. There are no parts of a conventional story: the exposition, problem, climax, and resolution are all absent. The characters merely converse about idle matters, mainly their frequent and meaningless sexual relations. The first part of the film is organised with a parallel structure, we cut back and forth between the women while the men await the women at the country house. When the women arrive, the film continues in a completely linear form. As there is no climax, the end provides no resolution; at the end of the evening Louise discovers that her husband Remy has consistently cheated on her with her friends and her own sister. But even this results in a mere temporary trauma for Louise; the film continues the next morning in a cyclical pattern with their lives and discussions continuing again.

The incomplete, ambiguous aspect of the plot is also present in the characters. All we discover about them is their sexual preferences, their infidelities, and their quirky and often humorous sexual encounters. But beyond this, we learn nothing of depth. When Claude pees blood it is hinted that he may have a sexually transmitted disease, but this matter is never followed up; similarly Diane’s appetite for violent sex suggests that she may be dealing with some deep rooted emotional problems, but the film fails to investigate this further. The characters’ families are largely absent, although we see through a flashback that Diane has a young daughter, and at the end we discover that Remy and Louise have two children. We learn nothing about how the friends met, what they do as jobs or careers (besides the three who are history professors), or what kind of people they are; we can differentiate them only in terms of their sexual histories. The film is a ‘slice of life’ in the most literal sense.

But it is the absence of any depiction of society surrounding the characters and spaces that is the most prominent in this film. It occurs in two ways; firstly, through the physical spaces used and the framing of the camera, and secondly, through the lack of any Quebecois discourse. As far as the mise-en-scene, ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is spatially very enclosed and ambiguous. The characters are dominantly confined to a private space, the country house. Although two scenes take place within a university and a gym, both of which are public spaces, we see literally no one in the grand hall of Université de Montréal, made noticeable by the camera’s long and high take. The hall is an empty space and could only be recognisable as a university interior if you have seen this hall of this particular university or if you are astute enough to notice the small bulletin boards that line the walls which then could only lead you to possibly guess that this was a university. The gym space has one or two ‘extras’ but the camera tightens in medium close-ups on the actors bodies cutting out most of the background environment. The flashback spaces are similar in that they are most confined to closed rooms, giving very few indicators of where the characters are located. Many of these spaces in ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ can be considered, in Deleuzian terms, as ‘any-space-whatevers’ ; Deleuze describes an any-space-whatever as a “perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways” . We see the disconnection of characters in relation to the space they occupy as the camera cuts out much of the background so that the focus is on what the characters themselves rather than their relation to the environment. The one space that does have a kind of symbolic meaning is the country house, where most of the film is set; it functions as a bourgeois oasis, a remote but comfortable place far away from the problems of the big city. Shots of the surrounding country, complete with the rainbow of coloured leaves that mark early autumn in Quebec, establish the setting as isolated yet idyllic, a place for pleasure and relaxation. The characters place within the country can be read as a symbol for their distance from any engagement in society.

The absences within the film function both as a global and national critique. On a global level, ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is representative of the anxieties towards Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the ‘end of history’. In 1992, Fukuyama published ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, which stemmed from an article he wrote in 1989, in which he claims that we are witnessing the ‘end of history’, meaning that liberal democracy is the fulfilment of humankind’s search for the ideal social form. Fukuyama uses the Hegelian concept of History to define it as the realisation of a grand metaphysical plan. The ‘end of history’ arises when humankind has been fully realised and established its ideal form. For Hegel, this 'end' was the realisation of the 'World Spirit' and the self-reflexivity of History . For Fukuyama, however, the ideal form of society is liberal democracy; even though not all societies are liberal democracies, this is supposedly what every society is striving for.

‘The Decline of the American Empire’ aptly depicts the outcome of Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’; without any political or social struggles to engage with, these once left wing intellectuals are rendered petty, shallow, and in Arcand’s terms - being a devout Catholic - immoral. The main characters are, ironically, history professors, but they, like the film as a whole, are ‘history-less’; there is an absence of politics, of society, of religion, of morality. Accordingly, I would argue that these are not ‘characters’ at all, but merely ciphers for the fearful image of what individuals would be (or not be) with the acceptance of the ‘triumph’ of liberal democracy: selfish, empty, and meaningless. The ‘any-space-whatever-ness’ of the mise-en-scene allows for the plot and characters to stand for other people and places, not specifically Quebecois. In other words, by concentrating so closely on its characters within enclosed spaces, disconnected from society, the film is able to represent the general rather than the particular: the characters may be specifically Quebecois, but they also stand in as representatives of the archetype of the ‘western individual’. Even the plot of the film can be regarded as an ‘end of history’ as nothing happens. Arcand does not offer us solutions or alternatives to this negative depiction of the prevalence of individualism and capitalism, he merely judges it as negative. But perhaps his critical tone suggests that he is refusing to accept the ‘end of history’; he is acting in the spirit of Derrida who claimed that although there is no powerful political opposition to liberal democracy, we must not just accept it, we must keep the ‘spirit of Marx’ alive, we must continue to present and discuss other ideologies even in the face of a seemingly pervading capitalist world system.

Reading ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ alongside the idea of the end of history marks that the film is starting to be engaged with a newly emerging postnational context, but is ultimately still concerned with Quebec as a nation. As we have seen, what is lacking in the film is the space of the Quebec nation; therefore, the film’s absences symbolise the nation’s loss of unique identity. In this way, Arcand is able to critique not only the ‘general western subject’ but also specifically the Quebecois subject. As we have seen Arcand has left out all the ‘imaginings’ that constitute the Quebec nation. Although we recognise that the film is set in Quebec, because of the characters’ language, references to Montreal, Quebec, or Canada are largely left out. For a viewer not familiar with Quebec and/or Canada, the only clue to the geographical where beings of the film is a passing remark made regarding the characters’ proximity to the New York state border and how they are far enough away not to be affected by any nuclear threats. But by and large, the characters are literally disconnected from any social or political concerns. There are no overt references to Quebec politics, the Quebec national struggle, or Quebec identity. To someone who has not seen many Canadian or Quebecois films, these implicit absences may seem insignificant but if we acknowledge that historically Quebecois cinema has been a strong platform for communicating national-political ideas then this absence of anything remotely Quebecois is extremely telling.

‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is such a rich film in that it is able to put forth the general global anxieties of the ‘end of history’, the concern of the loss of human morality, work ethic, and tradition to idle individualism, a general ‘Americanisation’ of the western world, and at the same time, the particular and local Quebecois anxieties of the post-referendum sentiment of the loss of the nationalist struggle for independence, of the efforts to preserve Quebec culture and history as a ‘nation’ that stands in difference to the rest of Canada and the United States. ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is the first of Arcand’s trilogy, which also includes the fantastic ‘Barbarian Invasions’ (Les Invasions barbares, 2003) and the more recent ‘The Age of Ignorance’ (L'Âge des ténèbres, 2007).

Directed by: Denys Arcand
Written by: Denys Arcand
Produced by: Roger Frappier, René Malo
DOP: Guy Dufaux
Editor: Monique Fortier
Music Score: François Dompierre
Starring: Dominique Michel, Dorothée Berryman, Louise Portal, Pierre Curzi, Rémy Girard, Yves Jacques

Country: Canada
Budget: £979,750
Length: 101mins

Bibliography:
Anderson, Benedict, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Cultural Roots’ in Imagined Communities, London: Verson, 1991, pp. 1-36.
Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996, p. 161.
Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 161
Marshall Quebec National Cinema, p. 285; Mackenzie, Screening Quebec, p17.
Leach, Jim, ‘Reel Nation: Image and Reality in Contemporary Canadian Cinema’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, v.11 n.2 (1 Oct 2008), p.6.
Deleuze, Gilles. 'The Affection-Image' in Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: Continuum (2005), pp. 105-126. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p.113.
Fukuyama, Francis. ’By way of an Introduction’ in The End of History and the Last Man , London: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. xi-xxiii.
Sim, Stuart. Derrida and the End of History, Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999, pp. 72.
Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx, New York: Routledge, 1994.
Anderson, Benedict, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Cultural Roots’ in Imagined Communities, London: Verson, 1991
Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: Continuum, 2005
Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx, New York: Routledge, 1994.
Fukuyama, Francis, ’By way of an Introduction’ in The End of History and the Last Man , London: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. xi-xxiii.
Leach, Jim, ‘Reel Nation: Image and Reality in Contemporary Canadian Cinema’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, v.11 n.2 (1 Oct 2008), p.6-10.
Marshall, Bill, Quebec National Cinema, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001.
Sim, Stuart, Derrida and the End of History, Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999.

Filmography:
‘The Age of Ignorance’ (L'Âge des ténèbres), 2007, Denys Arcand, Cinémaginaire Inc.
‘Barbarian Invasions’ (Les Invasions barbares), 2003, Denys Arcand, Astral Films

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Drifters' 1929 (dir. John Grierson)

Greg W. Bevan — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:53:26 +0000

'Dramatising the Mundane: The Working Man Hero in John Grierson’s ‘Drifters’' - 2008 by Greg W. Bevan

“The herring fishing has changed. It was once an idyll of brown sails and village harbours – its story is now an epic of steam and steel.” – Drifters.

In a small, coastal village, a group of men gather in the late afternoon and head towards the harbour. The sea crashes against the rocky shoreline and the gulls glide and stare in anticipation. Hundreds of trawlers cram into the harbour; tall masts jutting through plumes of thick smoke. Huge cranes swing amongst them carrying crates of equipment and supplies, while a small army of men haul what they can carry onto the boats. The furnaces are alight, tons of coal being shovelled in to fuel the engines. Finally, the anchors are lifted and the boats roll out to battle.

These opening scenes of John Grierson’s 1929 silent film ‘Drifters’ vividly establish the epic struggle which is about to occur on the open seas - man versus nature; old versus new; tradition versus modernity. But they also establish the major themes which characterised many of the films produced during the British Documentary Film Movement from the late 1920s and onwards – the importance of ordinary labour and the dignity of the working man. Filmed on location, using real fishermen and actual situations, writer-director-producer-editor-theorist John Grierson was attempting something unique in British cinema at the time – to present “the drama that resides in the living fact” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.).

‘Drifters’ was the first practical demonstration of Grierson’s principles of documentary form and it was radically different to the vast majority of films being produced in Hollywood and Britain during the period. Real people, not actors. Real locations, not sets. Real stories, not fantasies. Yes, the Lumiere Brothers had already shown the working man on the big screen decades before, but there is a huge and undeniable difference. The Lumieres had depicted the worker in his daily routine, whereas ‘Drifters’, edited in the montage style of Soviet cinema, creates a dramatic tension between the rhythmic machinery of the trawler and the relentlessness of the wind and sea. Rather than reporting the plain facts of the fishermen’s lives – where they live, what they eat – Grierson dramatises their ordinarily mundane occupations. Helped in large part by the epic narration of the title cards, the fishermen’s labours are elevated to heroic acts, as man and industry are set against nature. Tradition and modernity battle it out, whilst the working man struggles valiantly to endure. Grierson said it is important “to make the distinction between a method which describes only the surface value of a subject, and the method which more explosively reveals the reality of it. You photograph the natural life, but you also, by your juxtaposition of detail, create an interpretation of it” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.). Controversially for many of today’s documentary filmmakers and purists, Grierson believed that dramatisation was an indispensable component of the documentary form.

Grierson was a progressive thinker and he chose the herring fishermen of the North Sea as the subjects of ‘Drifters’ for specific, ideological reasons. He was a great admirer of the American documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty. Grierson, however, had a problem with Flaherty’s choice of subjects for his films. For ‘Nanook of the North’(1922), Flaherty traveled to the icy wilderness of Canada to film the culture of the native Inuit population; whilst ‘Moana’ (1926) is an account of the daily rituals of the Pacific islanders of Samoa. Grierson believed that local subjects were of more value than Flaherty’s distant cultures in helping to reawaken public consciousness; he had a desire “to bring the citizen’s eye in from the ends of the earth to the story, his own story, of what was happening under his nose…the drama of the doorstep” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.). Under Grierson, the overwhelming majority of films produced by the British Documentary Movement dealt, like ‘Drifters’, with subjects that were of immediate importance to British society – from the deplorable conditions of housing in ‘Housing Problems’ (1935), to the functioning of the London-to-Scotland postal train in the iconic ‘Night Mail’ (1936). His preoccupation with local issues that were pertinent to contemporary society originated from his desire to educate, and film was simply a means of educating.

Superficially, ‘Drifters’ can be viewed as a complete record of the economic process of a modern fishing industry. The boats leave the harbour, the men catch the fish and return to market to sell – from preparation, to locating the shoals, casting the nets, catching, cleaning, icing, auctioning and distributing the fish. Indeed, this is the simple sequence of events that unfolds on the screen. But an understanding of the cinematic climate into which ‘Drifters’ was released is vital to a full appreciation of the film itself.

In the 1920s, American studio films were dominating British cinema screens. Grierson’s earliest theories of a realist form of cinematic expression were established predominantly as a counteraction to the escapist fictional filmmaking coming out of Hollywood at the time. In his essay ‘First Principles of Documentary’, Grierson presented his theory of a new film form. He wrote that “the cinema’s capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.), and that “the documentary would photograph the living scene and the living story” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.). He explains that -

“the original actor, and the original scene, are better guides to a screen interpretation of the modern world…They give it power of interpretation over more complex and astonishing happenings in the real world than the studio mind can conjure up or the studio mechanician can recreate….The materials and the stories thus taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article.” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.)

His disparaging criticism of escapist filmmaking unveils the passion with which Grierson propelled the documentary method of capturing and interpreting reality. He believed that the popular arts would one day replace the church and the school as the primary sources of information in society and he assumed his responsibilities as a filmmaker and film theorist with extreme austerity. For him, the documentary had a didactic purpose. He was convinced that the contemporary British public had become apathetic towards the problems in society and had ceased to be functioning members of the general social process. He sought to actively engage the public in social issues and he insisted that the documentary filmmaker had a responsibility to inform the population and to strengthen a shared sense of citizenship amongst native communities - “to create a will towards civic participation” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.). In a modern context, whenever we watch a documentary today we typically expect to learn something; whether it is simply a few trite facts or to gain a deeper understanding of some aspect of the world we live in. This expectation is largely due to the early theories of John Grierson and his formulation of and subsequent influence on the documentary form.

It is no coincidence that ‘Drifters’ received its 1929 premiere alongside the first British screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece ‘Battleship Potemkin’ (1925). Grierson was a dedicated and shrewd promoter and it is primarily due to his innovative approach to distribution that he is often regarded as the father of British documentary. ‘Battleship Potemkin’ was perhaps the greatest influence on Grierson when he made ‘Drifters’. (Incidentally, ‘Drifters’ was well-received by critics, the press and general audiences of the day – in contrast to the controversial ‘Battleship Potemkin’). In the first instance, the dramatic, montage-style editing of ‘Drifters’ mimics the form of the Soviet cinema of the period. Grierson also shared a similar artistic philosophy with the great Soviet filmmakers such as Eisenstein, i.e. that film should be used to raise the consciousness of the viewer; to enlighten and inform, rather than to provide superficial escapist fantasies. Furthermore, the emphasis on the heroic working man is a trademark of early Soviet cinema; and, after ‘Drifters’, the working man became a regular stereotype in the films of the British Documentary Movement.

Since its release, ‘Drifters’, like ‘Nanook of the North’, has received widespread criticism of its methods. The scenes of the fishermen eating dinner in the boat’s cabin, for example, were reconstructed. An identical set of the interior was built on shore to allow Grierson and Cameraman Basil Emmott to work with less restriction. Similarly, the shots of the herring, dogfish and conga eels were filmed in a London aquarium. This, apparently, goes against the ethics of documentary filmmaking. However, when considering the technical and logistical limitations of filmmaking in the 1920s, surely some allowance must be offered. Irrespective of this, it is only since the advent of Direct Cinema and the application of journalistic tenets to documentary that such rigourous adherence to actuality has been expected. For Grierson, the documentary would use real people not actors, real scenarios not those of “unfettered imagination” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.) – reconstruction was perfectly acceptable. In relation to this, it is useful to look at one of Grierson’s most famous elaborations on the function of documentary as he saw it:

“The documentary idea, after all, demands no more than that the affairs of our time shall be brought to the screen in any fashion which strikes the imagination and makes observation a little richer than it was. At one level, the vision may be journalistic; at another, it may rise to poetry and drama. At another level again, its aesthetic quality may lie in the mere lucidity of its exposition.” (Hardy, F. (ed.), 1946. Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins.)

Many highly successful documentaries have since made use of reconstructions to the derision of a significant portion of the industry. For me, if Grierson had in some way altered the truth (as Flaherty did in ‘Nanook of the North’) then the complaints would be justified. ‘Drifters’ remains an accurate and faithful portrait of the lives of the fishermen and, as such, the criticism is largely unwarranted.

Admittedly, for many viewers ‘Drifters’ will prove an incessant bore - a grainy black-and-white, silent film about fishing! It would be easy to dismiss ‘Drifters’ as being of value only to those with an interest in early documentary or the development of the fishing industry, but I think there are some other important points to be made that give the film a wider appeal. The cinematography by Basil Emmott, a pre-eminent cameraman of the period, remains exquisite and alluring; and it is especially difficult for modern movie-goers to appreciate the challenges he must have had taking large, cumbersome camera equipment into the confined spaces on deck AND on a rough sea. Secondly, Grierson’s direction is a perfect example of narrative structuring, successfully relating the operation of a single fishing boat to its wider industrial context. Furthermore, the exemplary montage editing truly does dramatise the mundane; it stimulates the imagination where straightforward relation of facts would serve only to exhaust and annoy. Although he oversaw the production of over a thousand films at the Empire Marketing Board and General Post Office Film Unit from the late 1920s to the 1930s, ‘Drifters’ was the only film on which John Grierson was credited as the director. The vast majority of the later films do not compare with the overall quality of ‘Drifters’; and, if only for this reason, the film retains its place as a crucial stage in the evolution of documentary form in Britain and beyond.

Directed by: John Grierson
Written by: John Grierson
Produced by: John Grierson
DOP: Basil Emmott
Editor: John Grierson
Music Score by: n/a
Starring: n/a

Country: UK
Budget: ₤3,000
Length: 61mins

Filmography:
'Battleship Potemkin’, 1925, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Goskino
'Night Mail’, 1936, Harry Watt & Basil Wright, GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit
‘Housing Problems’, 1935,
‘Moana’, 1926, Robert J. Flaherty, Famous Players-Lasky Corporation
‘Nanook of the North’, 1922, Robert J. Flaherty, Les Frères Revillon

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Dreamland' 2006 (dir. Jason Matzner)

Ian Viggars MA (Hons) BA (Hons) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:38:26 +0000

'The Poetry of the US Trailer Park' - 2008 by Ian Viggars MA (Hons) BA (Hons)

The humble American trailer park has acquired an almost mythical status on the cinema screen, at least to viewers who don’t live in the US. Often surrounded by wide open vistas of rural wasteland or towering mountains, the scenery lends itself to wide angled shots that can be mightily impressive. Conversely the inner workings of trailer parks and the intense dynamics that can arise amongst the close-knit community of inhabitants can provide highly dramatic conflicts that lend themselves to the often harsh yet beautiful surrounding landscapes. Contemporary high profile uses of such settings often cast the trailer park as a lawless no man’s land in which anything can happen, and the grim consequences of actions often come back as extreme violence. The Coens’ ‘No Country For Old Men’ (2007) featured a main character, the misguided Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), seeking stolen drug money as a way out of his sparse living situation, while Tarantino used the trailer park of Michael Madsen’s character in ‘Kill Bill Volume 2’ (2004) as the stage for some of the more visceral scenes this notoriously gruesome director has ever shot, including the sequence in which the Bride is buried alive. Further back than this David Lynch has intermittently used the trailer park as an area of unabashed strangeness, and in the case of ‘Wild At Heart’ (1991), a black hole of evil with Bobby Peru (Willem Defoe) as it’s insanely grinning centre, one of the most unpleasant characters ever committed to celluloid. At the opposite end of the genre spectrum Hollywood filmmakers have exploited the stereotype of the ‘trailer trash’ population for comedic effects, thus perpetuating the idea that inhabitants are ill-educated and lacking in every day social graces.

One thing all of the above examples have in common however is the fact that the characters living in these mobile home communities either aspire to leave, or find them self confined there due to some past trauma of wrong-doing. ‘Dreamland’ (2006), the New-Mexico trailer park setting for the film of the same name, is a place that features both types of character. However the fractured relationships of the main characters living there seem to prevent them from leaving, whilst the ones who are settled seem happy to fritter there lives away apart from popular culture and social life. Audrey (Agnes Bruckner), the protagonist who commands the most screen time, is the most tragic case of this conflict of desire. She writes poetry everyday and seems to harbour a vast talent that has gotten her accepted into a college in the city, unbeknownst to her alcoholic father. In an interesting twist of traditional patriarchal dynamics, Audrey acts as a reluctant mother figure to her father Henry (John Corbett), who drinks and smokes constantly in an effort to forget the death of her mother, the love of his life. Completing this unconventional family unit is fellow Dreamland dweller Calista (Kelli Garner) a name she has chosen for herself in keeping with her rather self-consciously written quirky character. She dreams of one day being an American beauty queen, despite the MS that is slowly and tragically taking her life. Audrey then, despite her supposed writing talent, has to stay in the trailer park caring for this bizarre son and daughter in the shape of her dad and her ill best friend. In between these duties and her bouts of poetry writing she reluctantly works at the nearby gas station, presumably the only local employer, where she enjoys a casual if unfulfilling sexual relationship with the other attendant, the spaced-out nerd Abraham (Brian Klugman).

Conflict arrives in the shape of Mookie (Justin Long), the son of a new couple who have recently entered Dreamland. He is a breezy and easy-going person and a talented basketball player on the verge of going to college on a sports scholarship. Both Calista and Audrey predictably fall for Mookie thus establishing a rift in their unusually close relationship. Mookie is initially attracted to the young Lolita-esque Calista and they begin a cheerily romantic courtship. However Mookie soon starts to fall for Audrey in a deeper way as he is intrigued by her poetry and her strong character. This conflict forms the basis of the film’s light narrative tensions but it unfortunately never really ascends to a dramatic level worthy of the cinematic medium, leaving the film often seeming like a well-shot trailer park set episode of ‘Dawson’s Creek’. Even though the closed community of Dreamland is quite clearly starved of young male suitors, Mookie is so all-round nice and ineffectual that it’s hard to imagine his arrival would cause this much of a stir. Justin Long is an actor who has carved out a niche for himself playing likable comic foils in such Hollywood fare as ‘Dodgeball’ (2004) and as Bruce Willis’ sidekick in ‘Die Hard 4:0’ (2007) but this film lays bare the fact that he may be lacking when it comes to more serious American Indie film type role. Kelli Garner plays Calista as her usual Lolita style temptress as seen in Mike Mills’ ‘Thumbsucker’ (2005) but here her medical condition lends her character a tragic depth that she mines quite well. Still her dialogue often appears laboured in its attempts to show her as free-spirited and kooky: during one of their many conversations in Dreamland’s tiny backyard pool Calista dreamily states that her perfect boyfriend would either be “Jesus Christ or Bob Marley”. This statement although intentionally overblown exposes Mookie’s shortcomings as a potential partner for her, as he is a simple all-American boy and so about as far removed from those two iconic figures as can be.

Calista isn’t the only character flawed by the overly sentimental script. Audrey’s father Henry is a stereotypical drunk romantic still pining for that first intense flourish of love which has seemingly been rendered infinite by his wife’s untimely death. While witnessing Calista and Mookie’s initial dates he utters the rather trite sentiment, “the only thing better than kissing on a first date, is almost kissing on a first date”. Finally Audrey too is prone to such sentimental outpourings, more-so because of the poetry she constantly writes and which regularly takes over the film as a voiceover. Her poetry is presented as an escape from her impoverished surroundings, as something beautiful and creative arising from the dry arid place in which she lives. However like the rest of the script the poetry is clichéd and hackneyed. Whilst she is obviously intelligent and mature, more so than her father, it’s hard to see how such ramblings would get her an assured place into college. The plot reaches predictable peaks and dramatic moments as Audrey and Mookie fall for each other behind Calista’s back. Calista eventually has an accident though and all of the gang’s previous confrontations are eventually smoothed out. Sensing that he is suddenly needed following Calista’s accident and the realisation that Audrey may eventually leave Dreamland to pursue her education, her father turns his life around from lovelorn alcoholic man-child to doting and considerate parent so quickly that it is completely unbelievable. It’s not that any of these characters are un-likable but rather that they are clichéd and not interesting enough to warrant this much screen time. Thematically ‘Dreamland’ has great similarities to Lasse Hallstrom’s ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’ (1993) but with the gender roles reversed: Juliette Lewis is an alluring female trailer-traveller visiting the small town inhabited by Johnny Depp’s Gilbert Grape who similarly cares for his handicapped brother and so is always conflicted about leaving his small community. ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’ is similarly soapy and overly-sentimental but features the considerable acting talent of big name stars Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Juliette Lewis. Although they’re all Hollywood players their presence lifts Gilbert Grape’s formulaic script to a slightly higher level, something that the main actors in ‘Dreamland’ struggle to achieve.

The film fares considerably better in stylistic and aesthetic terms. As stated at the beginning of this review the surrounding rural or outback style areas that trailer parks are situated are gifts to a talented cinematographer, and Dreamland is no exception. The film is filled with wide angle shots of white clouds drifting slowly over a wide open blue sky or of storms brewing over towering mountains, each of which lend a degree of drama and tension while on the other hand languid dreamy shots of the wide open dessert plains of nothingness poetically suggest the dreary isolation the characters feel better than Audrey’s actual poetry ever does.

First time director Jason Matzner appears to be aiming for the dreamy poetry and feminine reverie mastered in Sofia Coppola’s first three films. ‘Dreamland’ even explores similar themes of feminine longing and escape although here the characters truly are poor unlike Coppola’s often over-privileged-but-lost subjects. Many of the voiceover passages when Audrey recites her poetry are cut to stylised montages of the girls dancing framed by trees, grass, fireworks, or camera sun-flares, very similar to those used in Coppola’s ‘The Virgin Suicides’ (1999). However Tom Willett’s script lacks Jeffrey Eugenides’ delicate prose and some non-descript musical choices mean that the sequences don’t achieve the same beautifully transcendent effect as Coppola’s superior film. Having said this Matzner creates one brilliant scene that fuses music and film perfectly in the way that so many similarly inclined young directors often do. Following Calista and Mookie’s first date the trailer park inhabitants enjoy a cordial and relaxed barbecue but it is clear to us the viewer that Audrey’s jealousy of Calista is beginning to manifest. This sequence is set to Mazzy Star’s classic ‘Fade Into You’, it’s hushed, faintly Americana-esque longing perfectly complimenting the mood. Although it occasionally looks and sounds very appealing unfortunately ‘Dreamland’ fails to inspire much interest or excitement and perhaps Matzner’s lack of work since this debut film confirms this. It looks for an element of poetry and beauty in the geographically and culturally isolated community of the trailer park that it rarely achieves, much like Audrey fails to in her trite and sentimental prose.

Directed by: Jason Matzner
Written by: Tom Willett
Produced by: Alan Hunter, Archie Lamb
DOP: Jonathan Sela
Editor: Zene Baker
Music Score by: Photek, Anthony Marinelli
Starring: Agnes Bruckner, Justin Long, Kelli Garner, John Corbett

Country: USA
Budget: £
Length: 88mins

Filmography:
‘The Virgin Suicides’, 1999, Sofia Coppola, American Zoetrope
‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’, 1993, Lasse Hallström, J&M Entertainment
‘Thumbsucker’, 2005, Mike Mills, Bob Yari Productions
‘Die Hard 4:0’, 2007, Len Wiseman, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
‘Dodgeball’, 2004, Rawson Marshall Thurber, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
‘Wild At Heart’, 1991, David Lynch, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment
‘Kill Bill Volume 2’, 2004, Quentin Tarantino, Miramax Films
‘No Country For Old Men’, 2007, The Coen Brothers, Paramount Vantage

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Delicatessen' 1991 (dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro)

Rachel Matthews BA (Hons) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:54:26 +0000

'How Does the Aesthetic Treatment Created by Jeunet and Caro in ‘Delicatessen’ Differ from the Hollywood Norm?' - 2008 by Rachel Matthews BA (Hons)

‘Delicatessen’ (1991) combines horror conventions, such as murder and cannibalism, and cartoon humour (both directors have backgrounds in animated shorts, pop videos and commercials) in the creation of a slapstick gothic film. Set in a post-apocalyptic era where there is no obvious time period, Jeunet and Caro create a world that is both grotesque and comic in its appearance and themes. The synopsis is a follows; a young drifter named Louison (Dominique Pinon), arrives in a middle-of-nowhere town seeking work and lodging, and is given a place to stay above a local butcher's shop in exchange for his services as a handyman. This surrealistic world is a meatless and cannibalistic one, and 'real' food is a highly expensive commodity that is used as currency for grain. The local inhabitants of the town in which Louison visits all have a 'secret' agreement in which the Butcher supplies them with meat in exchange for their resisting of cannibal urges towards one another. However, unbeknownst to Louison, this agreement involves the Butcher supplying his very own-hired Handyman as food! This is just one subplot however, as there are many freakish and comic-book type characters and scenarios that exist amongst the disgusting background of the delicatessen.The intention to challenge conventions and create disturbing and deformed characters is coincided with a humorous/satirical tone. Whilst the theme of the grotesque runs freely throughout the film via the use of the cannibalism and suicide reference, the combination of comic style acting and aesthetics softens the possible horror effect that such taboos could create. As Jeunet explains himself, the use of constant humour reflects “a need not to take oneself too seriously” (Ciment, Rouyer, Thirard, 1999, p.150). Whilst ‘Delicatessen’ is not defined to any particular time period, the post-holocaust scenario presented to us interestingly runs parallel to a sense of nostalgia created by the aesthetic feel of a quaint 1940’s French farm house. Such confusion of time and place builds a sense of paranoia, a theme felt throughout the film. The creativity within the visual sets ‘Delicatessen’ apart from Hollywood, often challenging the conventions associated with the mainstream. Distortion and irregularity become the norm within the narrative and it is this difference to Hollywood that contributes to ‘Delicatessen’s’ very much European “feel.

The shots used by Jeunet and Caro (more so Jeunet as he took charge of the camera angles/shots) help create the distorted and disturbing feel desired for within the whole film. The use of the Dutch Angle shot portrays the characters psychological distress as the camera tilts and unnerves the conventional viewing pattern. For example as Aurore (Silvie Laguna) sits in the bath, waiting for her lover Robert to ring the doorbell and cause her suicide machine to start, the camera captures the whole bathroom using a long shot and is set at a tilt with Aurore positioned to the left of the frame. As a result the audience is presented with an unconventional shot appearance reflecting Aurore’s state of mind; that she is confused and mentally unwell. The Dutch angle shot can also be seen here as a means to add humour to an otherwise rather depressing and dark situation. Rather than filming the shot using a conventional angle, Jeunet and Caro tilt the camera, reconfirming that it is indeed a film we are watching, challenging the continuity style of mainstream Hollywood. Close up’s are regularly used as well, for example in Julie’s (Marie-Laure Dougnac) dream sequence as she watches out the window whilst Louison is killed. The camera moves into a close up at the same time as using a Dutch angle shot. The combination of both techniques results in a rapid movement from safe and comfortable personal distance to an extremely intimate/intense and somewhat uncomfortable shot. The constant use of close up’s not only shows the “many nuances and complexities of the human face” (Phillips, 2005, p.87) but, in the case of this sequence, unnerves the audience as they are constantly offered a framed shot that does not permit them much visual of background action, so are left unaware of events unfolding behind the framed character. High angle shots help isolate characters and represent their vulnerability. In Julie’s dream sequence the high angle shot is used a number of times, for example as she listens to the pipe for voices. Her small frame and distressed state are highlighted here as the shot looks down on her, as perhaps an adult would on a child. In keeping with the cannibalism theme, the camera shots often fragment the body, capturing just feet, heads, and torsos. As Julie lies asleep in her bed, the combination of the close up shot and bright lighting focused on her face (whilst the surrounding red bed covers are seen in shadow) highlights just her head. When Louison enters Mademoiselle Plusse’s (Karin Viard) room the low angle shot captures just the bottom of their legs and feet. This presentation of the dissected body reconfirms the horrifying actions of the butcher and creates a thought within the audience of ‘anyone could be next’.

The movement of the camera helps construct the horror theme. During Julie’s dream sequence we see a shot at a low angle, peering up at Julie, placing her in the more dominant position. Then, as if like a monster erecting itself the camera grows and changes to a high angle shot, shrinking Julie’s appearance and her position within the frame. As Julie watches Louison being hung by his feet from her window the camera swoops in to a close up, revealing rather intensely her distorted facial features (the under lighting resulting in harsh shadows across her face) which appear to us even more monstrous and distressing as it is thrust upon us with the swooping camera movement. Whilst the movement does increase the horror theme and tense atmosphere, it also helps create the comic type reference, for example as the camera tracks across Aurore’s suicidal contraption we follow the line of machines all joined together in order to help in her attempted life taking. It is this steady progression of knowledge into her overly integrated suicide ‘machine’ which causes the comic effect created in this sequence; as one part is revealed after another the situation becomes more and more humorous. Attention is given via the use of close up’s to the characters facial expressions which become the main animated part of the actors bodies, for example as Louison rescues Mademoiselle Plusse’s knickers using the Australian, the shot reverse shot is used allowing us to see both characters expressional faces quite clearly, whilst the foggy background controls the audiences attention, assuring the two characters are the focal part of the scene.

The sound used by Jeunet and Caro throughout ‘Delicatessen’ helps to create a distorted, empty and abstract world. Unconventional sharp tones, such as the rat caller, disturb and create a ‘skin crawling’ effect. Everyday sound amenities become heightened and contorted into an uncomfortable pitch, the piercing doorbell for example which Robert is instructed to ring ‘sharply’. During one section the action begins with the ringing of a Church bell which, on the third ring, becomes distorted and ‘moulds’ into a completely new sound, signalling the beginning of the dream sequence and perhaps instructing the viewer not to take the following images on face value. The sounds used within Julie’s dream are all constructed to create a disturbed reality and heighten the gothic theme, the screaming of both Louison and Dr Livingston as key examples. There is a constant use of echo which reconfirms the emptiness of the decaying world we find our characters living in. The echoing pipes become a signal to the butcher and a tool in Julie’s plight to save Louison from his impending murder. It is this ‘echoing tool’ however that also serves to create Julie’s fear for her lover’s and her own safety. As she presses herself against the pipe, desperately attempting to listen for her cannibal neighbours’ voices, her paranoia as to their plans for their next victim is made clear.

The mise-en-scene encapsulates all the main themes which run throughout ‘Delicatessen’. The dark sets, expressionistic lighting and sepia colour used create and sustain the gothic and historical feel presented to us, whilst the acting and make-up combined present the caricature effect, enhancing not only the ‘weirdness’ of the characters but also their comic roles. The use of sepia colouring offers a nostalgic presentation of the characters and the world they live in, giving a small indication into a possible time period that the film is set in. The musty brown of the stairwell, for example as Robert rings for his lover Aurore, presents of picture of historical proportions. Red proves a prominent colour throughout, for example Julie’s bed covers, Mademoiselle Plusses’ attire and Julie’s bedroom door, an obvious indication of the blood spilt regularly on their premises. This could also indicate, however, the life still breathing in what otherwise appears to be a dark and breathless world. The other surrounding colours (the murky greens and rusted greys) suggest an area of muck, grime and little life, much like a sewer where vermin is the only obvious occupant. This obvious use of red (whilst an indication for the butchers horrific act) can also be seen as a positive reference to those still living in this post-holocaust world.

Jeunet and Caro create an abstract world of uncertainties and deformities. Playing with the conventional methods and using extreme versions of lighting and camera shots, ‘Delicatessen’ forms a European film of different standards; one that uses satire and taboos alongside artistic and experimental formulas. The intention of a setting with no constructed time-period shows a “decaying city of the future” (Austin, 1996, p.136) aesthetically presented to us in a historical/nostalgic way. The combination of the unknown time setting and high angle shots which infantile many characters, forms the paranoia and lonely sense felt throughout the film. Whilst the taboo subject of cannibalism horrifies and unnerves, the caricature effect of the unusual looking actors and playful camera movement satirises the chilling effect. ‘Delicatessen’ shows both the humour and distortion needed in the creation of a distinctly uncertain and grotesquely absurd narrative.

Directed by: Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Written by: Gilles Adrien
Produced by: Constellation
Edited by: Herve Schneid
Music Score by: Carlos D’Alessio
Starring: Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus

Country: France
Budget:
Length: 95mins

Bibliography
Austin, G. (1996) ‘Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction’. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Ciment, G. Rouyer, P and Thirard, P. (1999) Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Delicatessen. In J, Boorman and W, Donohue. (ed.) ‘Projections 9: French Film-makers on Film-making’. London: Faber and Faber Limited, pp.144-151.
Phillips, W H. (2005) ‘Film: An Introduction’. 3rd Edition. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Delicatessen' 1991 (dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro)

Wendy McCredie MA — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:26:26 +0000

'Sounds From The Belly Of The Beast' - 2008 by Wendy McCredie MA

‘Delicatessen’ (1991) is a French language film, which may in fact be the most complete example of sound used to both horror and comic affect in cinema.

Although the directors Caro and Jeunet are better known for the colourful and whimsical Amelie (2001), this earlier offering, while sharing a certain oddity and charm, is a distinctly darker and less reassuring kettle of fish. While coming from the post-apocalyptic sub-genre (a genre French film-makers seem particularly adept at) rather than pure horror, it uses the tricks more commonly associated with horror to create its affect. One of the American DVD releases of the film is subtitled, ‘Presented by Terry Gilliam’ and both the macabre humour and visual extravagance share a distinct kinship with his work.

At first the cinematography appears to imitate sepia effect but in fact it is the rolling clouds of dust, which permeate everywhere and seems to suck the colour out of everything and everyone. Rather than, as the colouring and music at times implies, being a sepia tinged longing for the past, it is a macabre vision of the future where a thin veneer of civilisation is drawn over the surface of a Paris gone to the dogs in the face of starvation.

Being the tale of the lives of those who dwell in an apartment block above the eponymous Delicatessen, who has a gruesome manner of supplementing the meat shortage, the whole building seems to have a presence of its own. From the opening scene where the delicatessen sharpening his knives is seen to echo through the building’s ventilation system to further panic the lodger at the top of the building as he makes his daring but failed attempt at escaping his landlord’s cannibalistic machinations. The sound is constructed so that the building itself seems as cannibalistic as its owner, with its occupants as much at the mercy of the building as they are of their landlord. For example, early in the film the sounds of the incredibly creaky bed springs of Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard) as she and the landlord, Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), have sex, permeates throughout the building via the flu system for the stoves. The rhythm filters into the activities of the different residents, getting faster and faster with the rhythm in an almost musical but ultimately destructive manner. At first glance the scene appears to be purely about the comic elements of cause and effect and the way in which the tenants of the apartment block are bound together. However on closer inspection it can be read as an act of dominance, Clapet is well aware of how the sound travels and has purposefully left the stove door open as a way of reminding his tenants of both their complicity in his actions and the power he holds over them. He is playing with them just as surely as he was taunting the lodger in the first scene. Here it is the sound which prevents the portrayal from becoming heavy-handed; the creepy yet comic tone ensures that the scene is a good example of how the sound is used throughout the film to keep it darkly humorous without crossing the fine line into the merely gruesome or the ridiculous.

The sounds filtering through the flu-system become vital to the plot, from the landlord’s daughter Julie’s (Marie-Laure Dougnac) increasingly paranoid dreams, to the whispers that intentionally taunt Aurore (Silvie Laguna) towards her numerous suicide attempts. The landlord himself is well aware of the power of the way the sound travels and uses it to spy on his daughter’s conversations. Each character has their own music that reflects his state of mind, to the extent that when Julie, and the new handyman (and former circus artiste) Louison (Dominique Pinon) play music together (a haunting duet of cello and musical saw) it becomes a bittersweet act of making love without touching. Each individual apartment in the block has its own particular sound effect (Mademoiselle Plusse’s creaking bed springs, the Kube brothers’ (Rufus) drills, the Frogman’s (Howard Vernon) frogs) which along with the all pervading drip of water from the ceiling into the various basins and buckets and the creak of the plumbing reflect the building’s ailing state. The building becomes almost a character in its own right through the sound which personifies it; to the extent that when the building falls down around them and Louison and Julie fight their way out it is as though they’re escaping from the belly of some monstrous mythical beast.

Screams are used to considerable affect in the film, from the very outset the complicity of the other tenants in their landlord’s grisly activities is portrayed by their responses to the screams in the stairwell while also demonstrating the extent of the hold that he has over them. Even Clapet’s accidental death scene is marked by clever sound usage, despite the noise and destruction that has marked the rest of the scene his death is accompanied by silence except for his own quiet words and the sound of the knife. And naturally the female scream – perhaps both the most iconic, yet least analysed of horror tropes, its power acknowledged but unspoken – that follows closely behind. A screaming point that acts like a black hole within the narrative, sucking everything towards it in a manner that once reached seems both poetic and inevitable. Encapsulating more eloquently than words the extent of the inhabitants of the building’s descent into barbarism in their quest for survival through one animalistic scream.

Speaking of screaming, the aural world inhabited by Aurore is one filled with screams. Aurore and her husband Georges live in an immaculate apartment in the block just above the Kube brothers. The way that sound carries through the ventilation system is clearly an aspect of the building that is exploited not only by Clapet but also by Roger Kube to create ghostly voices to deepen Aurore’s paranoia and already fragile state of mind, while also attempting to simultaneously scupper her stilted (and perhaps one sided) romance with his brother Robert. The frequency of her screams, both of fear and frustration (often in the face of yet another foiled attempt at suicide) cause all sorts of misunderstandings. The screams become the embodiment of the brother’s unspoken rivalry, one to save her, the other to destroy her. Indeed it is a scream mistaken for Aurore’s that leads to Robert loosing an important part of himself to Clapet in an attempt to save her. The same scream ironically gives Louison a reprieve, for though Clapet had made Grandmere (Edith Ker) scream to lure out Louison to his doom, the same scream strains her heart causing her to collapse and die, thus causing a temporary solution to the ongoing food issue.

Throughout the film Julie is the polar opposite of her father. While he is a passionate cannibalistic survivor, she is reserved, repressed and vegetarian. She tries and fails to reason with her father as he descends further into savagery. Julie’s only escape from her situation is her music, and through it she finds common ground with Louison and thus hope. In seeking to protect that hope and Louison from her father she seeks help from outside (recruiting the assistance of a band of underground vegetarian freedom fighters who live in the sewers) and ends up overthrowing her father’s barbaric regime. If in British horror the power lies in the monster unbound among repressed society, here among the more passionate French, Julie’s very repression becomes the source of her freedom, her refusal to give in to her baser instincts allowing her to escape from her barbaric house-mates.

The world of the underground vegetarian freedom fighters (The Troglos) deserves some consideration. Although peripheral to the majority of the plot through their existing outside the world of the apartment block, their own environs have a no less distinctive aural character. The watery underground world they inhabit among the sewers manages to be on one hand hostile and unnerving, yet equally to represent escape from imminent peril to safety. Much as they largely embody the light comic relief of the film, for all their earnestly bumbling incompetence, they do facilitate Julie’s emotional development that will finally provide her with the tools to rescue Louison herself. The distinctive spluttering static of their short wave radios both above and below ground defines them as different both in their own and the general population’s eyes. The strange wind-up radios they use to communicate seem almost as likely to emit a jack-in-the-box as guidance on escape, yet once Julie has one in her possession it becomes the embodiment of her quiet, but determined rebellion against her controlling father as personified by the all hearing ventilation system.

Throughout the film, news from the outside world is rare and always bad, and the inhabitants of the building hide from that world as much as possible. Clapet tells Mademoiselle Plusse that “At least here we have a system”, as though the veneer of civilisation they are struggling to maintain within the building elevates them above the mass outside. As an example of how easy the descent into savagery can be, it is excellent. The very embodiment of horror cinema, the monster is not just in the safe haven with us, but the monster is us.

Directed by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro
Written by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro and Gilles Adrien
Produced by: Claudie Ossard
DOP: Darius Khondji
Editor: Herve Schneid
Music Score by: Carlos D’Alessio
Starring: Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Karin Viard, Rufus, Ticky Holgado

Country: France
Budget:
Length: 95mins

Filmography:
'Amelie', 2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Claudie Ossard Productions

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'The Conformist (Il Conformista)' 1970 (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci)

Zoe Aiano, MA — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:57:26 +0000

'The Politics of the Individual – Bertolucci and The Conformist' - 2008 by Zoe Aiano, MA

The most succinct explanation of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 masterpiece The Conformist would be to say that it concerns the pivotal moment in the life of a man in 1930s Italy forced to chose between rescuing the woman he loves from certain death or turning his back on Fascism. This is how it is established at the very beginning of the film, yet as the narrative unfurls into a sporadic series of flashbacks it is soon made clear that this is not a straightforward polemic between romanticism and ideology, but rather a sinister insight into the mind of an individual desperate to reconcile himself to a seemingly hostile society.

Marcello Clerici (Jean Louis Trintignant), the eponymous conformist, feels an all-consuming urge to achieve normality and convinces himself he can achieve this by joining the Fascist party. In order to secure the favour of his superiors he volunteers himself on a mission to ensnare Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), his one time mentor now living as a dissident in Paris, a trip which he manages to combine with his honeymoon. The situation is complicated when Marcello develops an instant infatuation for Quadri's wife Anna (Dominique Sanda), who in turn develops an infatuation of her own for his young bride Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli). Marcello fulfils his original obligation and arranges Quadri's assassination but learns at the last minute that Anna will be with him when it happens. He rushes to save her, but remains passive at the crucial moment and impotently watches the couple be killed. The film could be read equally convincingly from either a political or psychological perspective, yet to separate them entirely or preference one over the other would be to miss the heart of Bertolucci's film, which dwells in the place where the two concepts meet.

With the exception of a number of flashbacks concerning Marcello's childhood, the film spans a large part of the Italian Fascist era, beginning with its rise well under way and ending abruptly with its fall. Correspondingly, Marcello's career as a conformist takes definite shape with his belief that the Fascist regime can provide the means to attain normality, and collapses when the news of Mussolini's defeat forces him to realise how futile his sacrifices were. Nevertheless, though Marcello's fate is indisputably - and by his own design - intertwined with that of the Fascists, there is some ambiguity in the film as to whether or not his character is intended to represent that of the average Fascist supporter. At several points in the film it is commented that Marcello does not reason like a true Fascist, or rather, like a normal Fascist, defined in the film by a ministry official as being motivated by either fear or greed. Trapped in a paradoxical cycle, Marcello is continually made to stand out precisely because of his very desire to conform. In effect his existence runs parallel to that of the rest of society, the fundamental point of departure being his own self-awareness. As Giulia remarks, the majority of church-goers and even priests don't believe in God, but the only person troubled by this hypocrisy is Marcello. What he seeks is an unquestioning, inherent conformity, something which is impossible to achieve with rationalised intent. This is essentially the core of what the Fascists were to trying to achieve on a mass scale, as such Marcello is not representative of a Fascist supporter, but of Fascism itself, both historically and conceptually: Marcello's story is not an only exemplary product of his own era, but a metaphor of that same era.

This duality of meaning is heavily supported in the film's intricate construction and mise-en-scene.

As mentioned, the narrative is composed a series of almost stream of consciousness-like remembrances which keep jumping between the fateful car journey in pursuit of Anna and the events leading up to it, though not necessarily in chronological order. It is explicit from the start that what the audience is shown is coming straight from the inner workings of Marcello's mind, an impression which is strengthened by occasional surreal deviations from the logical progression of the plot. One notable example of this occurs when Marcello accidentally peers behind a curtain in the minister's office to find a bureaucrat at a desk cavorting with a woman identical to Anna. Within this brief episode the establishment of space is constantly shifted from a series of apparently point-of-view close ups to longer panning shots, until it eventually becomes clear that Marcello is actually at the end of an immense hall containing nothing but the desk in question at the far end, and which Marcello should not be able to see clearly enough to distinguish the woman. The dreamlike atmosphere created in this scene reminds the viewer that this is of the allegorical and psychological nature of the film, and also provides one of the first clear indications that the entire architecture of the film is actually a manifestation of that of its protagonist's subconscious as he reflects back on the events which lead him to his current predicament.

The conjunction of set design and camera-work is one of the clearest methods Bertolucci uses to achieve this, and Marcello's relationship to his surroundings is almost always revelatory. Throughout the film it's possible to trace his transformation from the vast, linear, overbearing Fascist architecture of Rome which dwarfs him and emphasises his solitude, to the oppressively intimate environment of Paris, most notably in the famous scene where he becomes engulfed by a spiralling wave of dancers, his awkward position in the centre of the action highlighting his status as an outsider more poignantly than ever. The length and organisation of the shots also become correspondingly disordered, culminating with the traumatic murder scene in the forest shot jerkily with a hand-held camera.

This is furthered by Vittorio Storaro's sublime use of lighting, forcing the characters in and out of the darkness, as if pursued by it. The key to understanding the meaning of this is revealed midway through the narrative when Marcello is finally united with his former Professor, Quadri. The two discuss Plato's 'Myth of the Cave', in which the philosopher describes a situation in which a group of people who have spent their entire lives shrouded in the darkness of a cave watch the shadows of objects being carried past the cave entrance and mistake the shadows for real people. Quadri likens the allegorical prisoners to the citizens of 1930s Italy, who are incapable of seeing the Fascist dictatorship for what it truly is. Marcello, whose interest in the Fascist party only extends as far as it serves his selfish needs and not those of his country, is aware of the true nature of Fascism, and though he tries to block it out the 'light' of this knowledge dogs his every move. One of the moments which shows this most spectacularly takes place in the forest just as the Quadri’s are about to be murdered. Marcello has chased them to this point with the intention of rescuing them, yet as the light of dawn bursts through the trees he realises the futility of his predicament and lets Fascist justice take its course. Similarly, as he passes through the streets of Rome after the news of Mussolini's deposition, the city is flooded in darkness yet he is blinded by the harsh lights of passing vehicles as he is forced to acknowledge the gravity of his current situation and his previous actions.

Though the context of Fascism is obviously one of the central elements in 'The Conformist', it should not be considered the only theme. As a renowned, young left-wing intellectual, Bertolucci was greatly affected by the events of 1968, which took place only two years before the film was made. This is a question which continues to dominate recent works by Bertolucci such as 'The Dreamers' (2003), and as such its impact on 'The Conformist' cannot be ignored. The optimistically didactic ideologies which gradually infiltrated Italian film over the decades following World War Two inevitably biased any portrayal of either Fascists or Communists, but the failure of the student revolutions lead to a mass disillusionment that stopped this dead. 'The Conformist' is a prime example of the typically bleak depiction of a society without hope of redemption found in post 1968 European cinema. In condemning Fascism, Bertolucci isn't criticising Italians for their past but warning them of an equally unpleasant future. It is for this reason that it is significant that Marcello's desire to conform began before the advent of Fascism – Fascism flourished because of people's willingness to sacrifice their morals for personal gain.

The film ends when Marcello rediscovers a man that he believed he had killed in an act of self-defence against his sexual advances when only a young boy, an experience which he considers the key to explaining his need to conform. He explicitly blames him for the murders of the Quadri’s and denounces him as a Fascist to the crowds exulting in Mussolini's demise, and after working himself into a frenzy proceeds to also denounce his blind friend Italo (José Quaglio), who he abandons to carried away by the tide of marchers. In absolving himself of any culpability, Marcello has learned nothing and will simply re-adjust his belief system to suit the new consensus morality. Through this one character, Bertolucci manages to create a powerful symbol of Fascist, Italian and bourgeois society, poignantly reminding us how easily entangled the three can become, as well as how important it is to consider the human aspect of a dictatorship.

Directed by: Bernardo Bertolucci
Written by: Bernardo Bertolucci (from the novel by Alberto Moravia)
Produced by: Maurizio Lodi-Fé
DOP: Vittorio Storaro
Editor: Franco Arcalli
Music Score by: George Delerue
Starring: Jean-Louis Tritignant, Dominique Sanda, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio

Country: Italy/France/West Germany
Budget: £
Length: 111mins

Filmography: 'The Dreamers', 2003, Bernardo Bertolucci, Recorded Picture Company (RPC)

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'The Circle' 2000 (dir. Jafar Panahi)

Sarah Jung, BA (Hons) MA — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:57:26 +0000

'“That’s your problem, not mine”: Female Oppression in ‘The Circle’' - 2009 by Sarah Jung, BA (Hons) MA

When Jafar Panahi released ‘The Circle’ (2000) it was not the first Iranian film to represent the plight of women in a sympathetic light but the international success it garnered paved the way for others to follow in its footsteps. The director’s sympathy towards the female protagonists is clear through the very blunt tag line used, “her only crime was being a woman.” In just under 90 minutes the audience is shown the various social problems as experienced by several women; a female prisoner, Solnaz (Solmaz Panahi), has given birth to a baby girl and faces divorce as a result; Pari (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy), an ex-prisoner, is pregnant out of wedlock; Arezou (Maryiam Palvin Almani) is forced to prostitute herself for money while Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh) feels compelled to find her daughter a new financially stable home. Initially I wondered whether a film with such a high number of female criminals would somehow endorse the idea that women are in some way innately corruptible. However this film goes to great lengths to portray the opposite and to show just how restrictive an existence these women live. Through doing this it supports the claim that it is in fact the environment the women inhabit, complete with its misogyny and claustrophobia, that is responsible for their various fates.

Panahi is careful however, to make sure his film is not simply a struggle between the genders. Instead he presents an arena where women struggle not necessarily because of men but because of a system imposed by men, a system whose victims are largely female. The system can be manipulated by men in a way which eludes the women but there are times when the men come to rely on the women for help (a young soldier has to ask Pari to phone his girlfriend so as not to arouse the suspicion of his beloved’s male relatives). In order to survive in this labyrinth each woman acknowledges that she must somehow disappear into it completely. The writer Katy Wilkinson has observed that the women are repeatedly framed behind doorways, windows and cars and I would argue that this makes their marginalisation spatial as much as social.

The representation of these women as victims of the state implies that they cannot openly commit an act of rebellion without suffering the consequences; the bruises on Nargess’s face are a visual reminder of the potential ramifications. Unable to express public dissatisfaction, the women in ‘The Circle’ are shown to seek comfort in quiet acts of unassuming dissent, most notable is their repeated attempts to smoke in public, for which they are continuously rebuked. The only woman in the film who manages to successfully smoke a cigarette is the prostitute and only then because the men in the police van complain that they all wish to smoke. She is unable to carry out this small act of defiance without the aid of the men. In several interviews Panahi has placed a particular emphasis on the character of the prostitute and it is clear that she is the least idealistic of all the women (when a policeman asks her rather impetulantly why she works as she does she responds with the straight to the point, “Are you gonna pay the bills, honey?”). She is the last woman we are introduced to and she is the most disillusioned, she is the one woman who seems to have completely understood and reluctantly accepted, the nature of the society she lives in.

Apart from the narrative and dialogue used in ‘The Circle’ Panahi also adopts plenty of visual techniques to align the viewer’s sympathies and often their point of view with each of the individual women as we meet them. The confusion faced by Solmaz’s mother as she awaits news of the birth is experienced by the viewer as Panahi situates the camera close up to the small white shutter of the delivery room door, so that all we see is a white screen. We can hear babies crying and yet it is not immediately clear to the viewer where we are and exactly what is happening. The overall effect is very unsettling. The camera angles used throughout the film are very reminiscent of documentary style filming and there is definitely a fly-on-the-wall feeling for much of the film. In order to position us with the characters, the camera often mimics their movement; when Nargess and Arezou are fleeing from police they duck down to hide and so does the camera; when they look from behind a car’s window, the shot is seen through the car’s framework and more significantly, through their eyes. The effect is that the viewer feels they are directly behind the two, fleeing with them and subsequently, sharing their sense of urgency and panic. Later, when Nargess watches Arezou ascend a spiral staircase, unbeknownst to her in order to prostitute herself for money, Nargess’s wonder is reflected not only through the actress’s face but through the way the camera pans all the way up the staircase following Arezou’s every move. When she later attempts to seek out her friend peering through corridors and staircases, once again the camera is behind her and moves to reflect her actions. During the events of ‘The Circle’ we are very much physically behind the women as well as sympathetically engaged with them. We do not simply observe them, we actually follow them and inhabit their world.

However there are a few exceptions when the camera angles deviate from this routine and these exceptions are significant. At one point Pari sits in a taxi and there is a long close up of her face. The use of a close up is a new concept in Iranian cinema and the importance of this should be clarified. Traditionally in non-exploitative Iranian films, women were usually filmed in long shot, sitting down or standing up, as it was considered improper to have lingering shots of their bodies or faces in case it caused sexual distraction for the male viewers. Here this is not only ignored but done so that the viewer can see how distressed Pari actually is.

One of the most repeated motifs experienced by most of the women in ‘The Circle’ is the image of being caged, as if imprisoned in their surroundings. When Nargess and Arezou are running around the streets of Tehran they stop by a gated door and hold onto its rails as if clutching the bars of a prison cell. They have escaped jail and yet it is as if they are still there. When we meet Monir the ticket attendant, she is behind a booth with a metal railing on the front. As Pari clutches Monir’s hands this same prisoner motif is evoked. Towards the end of the film all the women are united in a prison cell and yet this cell is a wide room with the absence of the ‘caged’ image. The irony is that the real cage then is the city itself. The room shown to us is also important because it reminds us how the individual stories interweave and that all the women are connected by their troubles.

Panahi also presents the difficulties faced by women through the behaviour of the men they meet, who are usually although not always, unhelpful or indifferent at best. Nargess and Arezou have to deal with a leering boy on a bicycle as well as a telephone vendor who won’t even look at them when they address him. Nargess encounters a totally unsympathetic ticket operator at the coach station. Pari’s father shows her no sympathy and wants to keep her trapped in the house while her brother initiates a violent altercation which results in her fleeing her home. When the prostitute and her client are arrested, the policeman releases the client (who has the audacity to complain to the prostitute that she has gotten him into a mess) but insists on taking the prostitute to the station. It is significant that the women in ‘The Circle’ are not judgemental towards each other. Although Pari is initially appalled that Nayereh is going to leave her daughter she does not criticise her because she knows that she has also committed an act which her society considers reprehensible. This scene is very clever because Panahi juxtaposes the two women’s sadness with the arrival of a wedding party in full celebration. As one family is falling apart, another is being created through the socially acceptable union of marriage.

We can establish then that 'The Circle' succeeds in showing us representations of women who are experiencing extreme social problems and it portrays their predicaments in a way which makes us as viewers feel sympathy for them but also acknowledge that their environment is oppressing them and creating many of the problems that they encounter. The film represents women as being the victims of a system obsessed with maintaining an archaic status quo. Panahi’s women are victims of society, buckling under the weight of social and cultural oppression, desperate for an escape and a solution. Panahi cannot give them a solution but by depicting the troubles they face he has certainly brought them one step closer to it.

Directed by: Jafar Panahi
Written by: Kambuzia Partovi
Produced by: Mohammed Attebai
DOP: Bahram Badakshani
Editor: Jafar Panahi
Music Score by: n/a
Starring: Nargess Mamizadeh, Maryiam Palvin Almani, Mojgan Faramarzi, Elham Saboktakin, Monir Arab, Solmaz Panahi. Fereshteh Sadr Orafai, Fatemeh Naghavi

Country: Iran, Switzerland, Italy
Budget: £5,000
Length: 87mins

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb' 1975 (dir. Seth Holt and Michael Carreras)

Wendy McCredie MA — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 19:11:26 +0000

'Abject Failures' - 2008 by Wendy McCredie MA

Seth Holt’s final film ‘Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb’ (1971) is better known for the disasters and traumas that befell its production than as a film in its own right. Possibly the only Mummy movie to lack an actual mummified corpse, though it does manage a creepily active dismembered hand to compensate for its ‘monster’s’ strange inertia, lush cinematography, strange sound design and clever lighting somehow disguising quite how small the budget really was. Unusually for a film of its type, the setting is roughly contemporary to its production and the issues that it touches upon are very much of their time. From feminist debates, to theories of abjection, to mistreatment of patients in asylums, to disillusion in the hippie dream, the film bears the (whether conscious or unconscious) marks of the time in which it was made.

Peter Hutchings suggests, in his notable history of the Hammer studio’s output, that ‘Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb’ attempts to engage with elements of contemporary feminist debate although not very successfully. On first viewing the notion appears faintly ridiculous, much as the film makes an engaging and entertaining little romp, its views of gender are thoroughly unreconstructed. The central female character(s) spending the vast majority of the film half naked for no discernable reason, and being played by an actress better known for her roles as a Bond girl and in a variety of Carry On films than her acting abilities. Yet, if one turns down the distain and cynicism for a moment and looks closer there does appear to be something more complicated and interesting going on.

The two main female roles, excluding Tera as a symbolic law unto herself, within the film Helen Dickerson (Rosalie Crutchley) and Margaret Fuchs (Valerie Leon) perform both parts of the classic female double bind. Helen, as a former archaeologist and member of Fuchs’s original team, is drawn in a very masculinated role (right down to her exotic effeminate companion) fulfils the role of having identified with the father and ‘become’ him part of the, apparently eternal, patriarchal society which suppresses both Tera and her own self. Whereas Margaret identifies with Tera as the primal mother figure and is thus subsumed by both the patriarchal society of her father and his peers who manipulate her and on another level by Tera who seems intent on consuming her. The dualistic relationship between Margaret/Tera is best understood in terms of the, then new, notion of the abject. Tera embodies the abject in a variety of ways; she is a corpse of several thousand years, yet she maintains the appearance of life, her dismembered limb still bleeding. Margaret responds to the dream in which Tera’s hand is removed as though it was her own and throughout the film bears a scar on her own wrist that matches where Tera’s was severed. Not only does the hand serve as abject due to its dismembered state but for Margaret there is an extra significance as the hand belongs to someone who looks exactly like her, not only is it no longer part of a whole but part of a whole that is; but isn’t her. The distinction between Margaret and Tera is slowly but steadily disintegrating, forming the horror that is central to the film’s premise. The audience learns that Margaret was born at the exact moment that Tera’s tomb was opened, both mother and daughter having died in childbirth and Margaret’s entire existence is wholly dependant on Tera having chosen her as a vessel for her own reincarnation. Tera has in a sense given her life, creating a pseudo maternal relationship between them, Margaret identifies Tera and the things which she loved, even at various points seeming to speak her thoughts. While Professor Fuchs’s (Andrew Keir) relationship with Tera has shades of the uncanny, he covetously worships her corpse, yet his daughter lives and breathes in her image, it only serves to reinforce the pseudo mother/daughter relationship. Margaret’s journey seems to follow a path of return to the primal mother whom she has never entirely abjected, regressing in order to finally free herself. Significantly it is rituals that are used to maintain the boundaries between nature and society, and it is during the ritual to resurrect Tera that Margaret is able to free herself from the various forces attempting to control her and re-establish her own identity.

Dreams play a central role in the film, binding Margaret and Tera together across the millennia. The film has a certain dreamlike quality to its very fabric. Not quite a nightmare, but more of a dream faded and tainted. An awareness of the way things should have been yet never truly were; it lives and breathes among the sort of dreams that can possess and obsess and steal the dreamer’s life away. Margaret speaks of Tera’s dreams, of another place, another time that she seeks, where she can be free of death and ritual and know peace. The focus on love as the be all and end all of the society which she seeks has obvious throwbacks to the sixties hippie movement with its focus on peace and love and equality. Tod’s dismissal of the likelihood of this society ever coming to be, fits with the changes in society, with the counterculture movement being slowly absorbed into mainstream culture in some ways and soured in others. It could be argued that Margaret’s vision of the world that Tera has been seeking is correct and that her later bloody and merciless revenge is borne of frustration that after thousands of years at the fundamental level nothing has changed. Perhaps she truly wishes for an end to the cycle of death but seeks to punish humanity for its failure to realise a better society by wiping it clean. Similarly Margaret and her father take so long to break free of Tera’s spell because they desperately want to believe in that dream, to deny the nightmare unfolding in front of them until the world begins to, almost literally, fall down around them.

There’s something almost opulent about this film, despite its tiny budget. The cinematography is lush and somehow manages to turn the cheap set dressings into something seemingly glorious. In particular every shot of Margaret and Tera has a sense of being a loving – if doubtlessly firmly sexual – caress setting up both girls for their roles not only as objects of desire, but of fear and worship. Tera in particular maintains a position of ‘look, don’t touch’, for all that she spends almost the entire film in a comatose state the only actual physical contact she has with anyone, if we exclude the man-handling of her exiled hand, is with Margaret as they wrestle with the knife. For all that Tera is portrayed as ‘an evil Egyptian queen’, we see little to justify this, her apparent malevolence manifesting only to exact revenge upon those who first killed her, and later those who had disturbed her tomb. Notably Professor Fuchs, who had reconstructed her tomb in his basement, is only given a non fatal injury to begin with as a warning not to interfere with Tera’s plans only receiving a mortal wound when he fails to heed the warning and attempts to lay hands upon her. Tera’s only two other victims seem to meet their fates as much at Margaret’s behest as Tera’s. Both Tod (Mark Edwards) and Dr Putnam (Aubrey Morris) having posed a threat to Margaret (Tod in slapping her to make her see sense, and Dr Putnam attempting to sedate her, albeit at her father’s request) by trying to, ostensibly, ‘save’ her.

For all that the film touches on the relevant issues of its time, it never quite succeeds in fully engaging with them. The loss of Tera’s hand may serve as an effective metaphor, using the destruction of female physical integrity as the foundation of an inherently weak and regressive patriarchal order, but for all the film’s apparent attempts to align itself with contemporary thought, it offers no solution or escape from the unjust situation its characters find themselves in. There is only a fascination and a longing to possess that ancient matriarchal power and glory. Pleasurable as the film may be there is a certain disappointment that it never fully exploits its themes to their full potential.

Although much of the film’s original shock and fear element have faded over time, ‘Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb’ does retain some decidedly creepy moments, in particular the scenes with the benighted Professor Berrigan (George Coulouris). Clearly profoundly disturbed, he spends all his time in frenetic researching and writing, obsessed with finding a way to prevent either Tera from resurrecting or his former colleagues from resurrecting her, which of these is never clear but Berrigan appears equally unclear about the situation so this has little bearing on the plot. Completely fixated upon the snake idol that he took from Tera’s tomb, it seems to be the only thing that can calm him during psychotic episodes, something the nurses use to both calm and provoke him. Notably the version of the film originally seen by British cinema audiences was cut by the BBFC to remove the shot of Professor Berrigan being hit in the face by one of the male nurses. While this seems an unusual cut among the somewhat gruesome murders that pepper the film, even for the BBFC’s unusually snip-happy attitude to horror films, the apparent cause was an ongoing concern among the public regarding the mistreatment of mental health patients at the time. He serves the role of favourite plaything to the decidedly unsavoury male nurses who serve as his warders, their unsavoury glee at the ‘dawn chorus’ of their wards is truly horrible to observe. Man handled, beaten and taunted by turns for misbehaving and for failing to ‘perform’, Professor Berrigan’s condition only worsens with the appearance of Margaret whose invocation of Tera in her attempts to get the truth from him mark the beginning of her time as Tera’s pawn. However gruesome and unnecessary his death at the hand of the astral projecting Tera, it does seem almost merciful in releasing him from his various torments.

The Clash once argued that there’s a million reasons why hippies failed. Look closely at ‘Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb’ and the main reason shows through with abundant clarity. Tera’s long wait among the stars for a world of peace and freedom and equality ends in an orgy of blood, vengeance and betrayal for the very same reason. Human Nature.

Directed by: Seth Holt, Michael Carreras
Written by: Christopher Wicking (script), Bram Stoker (novel)
Produced by: Howard Brandy
DOP: Arthur Grant
Editor: Peter Weatherley
Music Score by: Tristram Cary
Starring: Andrew Kier, Valerie Leon, James Villers, Hugh Burden, George Coulouris, Mark Edwards, Rosalie Crutchley, Aubrey Morris, David Markham

Country: UK
Budget: £200,000
Length:> 94mins

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Black Moon' 1975 (dir. Louis Malle)

Ian Viggar MA (Hons) BA (Hons) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 18:47:26 +0000

'Malle’s Failure of Surrealism in Black Moon' - 2009 by Ian Viggar MA (Hons) BA (Hons)

I’ve written about two Louis Malle films for Montage Film Reviews in the past – ‘Milou En Mai’ (May Fools - 1990) and ‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’ (Goodbye Children - 1987) – noting how they both perfectly represented this consistent and reliable director’s extraordinary knack for exploring political issues from the humanistic perspective of convincing individuals, thus making their situations all the more affecting and compelling. However his 1975 offering ‘Black Moon’ marks something of a side step from this style and unfortunately winds up being a disappointment. Fittingly it was also the most badly received film of his illustrious career, failing to attract a positive reception from either audiences or critics. Its inconsistencies in style and genre with the rest of his oeuvre isn’t the problem, as Malle built his career on forever avoiding the auteur trappings favoured by his French New Wave contemporaries such as Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. He often chose to make films in various genres, settings and languages, as evidenced by his two most well received films being the aforementioned Au Revoir Les Enfants, a French language study of how the Nazi occupation affected boys in a privileged boarding school, and ‘My Dinner With Andre’ (1981), an American-set English language piece revolving solely around a conversation taking place between two aging playwrights. What ties his more popular films together is instead his humanistic approach and focus on believable characters.

The main problem with ‘Black Moon’ is that the film’s pursuit of avant-garde elements in the setting, narrative, style and form doesn’t allow for his natural qualities to ever take hold. It isn’t a total failure however: at this point in his career Malle seemed incapable of producing anything entirely devoid of merit, and the film certainly contains some memorable images and atmospheres, two of the aspects you’d expect from the non-narrative trappings of surreal films. It’s just that the film doesn’t gel as a whole and results in the distinct feeling of a project made too far outside of its director’s comfort zone. This is even more disappointing when you consider that many of the expected elements of a decent surrealist avant-garde film are present. The German actress Therese Giehse plays a bedridden old woman hooked up a retro-futurist life support machine that she uses to communicate with some unseen ally. She became famous for her friendship with the hugely influential German theatre writer Bertolt Brecht and so already had an impressive history of pushing the boundaries of narrative forms. Malle also collaborated on the film’s brief dialogue excerpts with Joyce Bunuel, daughter of Luis Bunuel who in 1929 famously collaborated with Salvador Dali on ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (An Andalusia Dog) to create one of the first true surrealist films. Star of Andy Warhol’s underground cinema Joe Dallesandro also has a non-speaking role in the film, cementing ‘Black Moon’s experimental ambitions even further. Such elements show that Malle certainly researched his film well and knew his stuff in the field of edgier non-narrative filmmaking. Why then do these references fail to gel and cause the film to fail in its ambitions?

The answer isn’t initially clear as the film begins rather encouragingly with a visually striking opening. A static long-shot of a badger snuffling around in the middle of the road in a downcast French countryside setting is a suitably absurd image rudely interrupted by a fast approaching car that fails to stop in time, running the poor badger over. It is being driven by Lily (Catheryn Harrison), a fragile looking blonde French girl. After some further driving Lily encounters some kind of warfare. A line of women in army gear are lined up then gunned down by a group of similarly military-attired men. On spying Lily they turn on her, so she drives away and hides away in the countryside. It is an expertly shot, visually arresting sequence that flits discomfortingly from the absurd to the horrific, made more ominous by the beautiful rural setting being virtually deserted and silent apart from the occasional misplaced sounds of war. Following her escape from the military men the rest of the film fails to live up to this impressive opening. Wandering through the fields of grass Lily encounters many animals which Malle’s camera lingers over with an almost anthropological eye for detail. She then sees a typical French country mansion house (Malle’s own) which provides the setting for the remaining film’s actions: these amount to a relentless series of absurd images and scenarios involving her, the aforementioned old lady, and Sister and Brother Lily (Alexandra Stewart and Joe Dallesandro), a mysterious couple who appear and disappear seemingly at random, don’t speak, and may not even be real. Animals also come and go in a magical and sometimes sinister fashion. Lily repeatedly witnesses a group of naked children following and goading a large pig, as well as a mysterious unicorn that Lily comes to believe has the answer to just what is going on with the war and the house. Of course, the unicorn can and eventually does talk to her, but still fails to offer any reasonable explanations to her or us, the audience.

A telling quote from the director himself reveals that he was maybe slightly confused about his motives too. "I don't know how to describe ‘Black Moon’ because it's a strange melange… it's a mythological fairy-tale taking place in the near future. There are several themes; one is the ultimate civil war...the war between men and women… because through the 1970s we'd been watching all this fighting…and this was, of course, the climax and great moment of women's liberation. So, we follow a young girl, in this civil war; she's trying to escape.” Malle is of course referring to the decade in which feminism went over-ground and entered the mainstream, particularly in the field of film studies, spearheaded by writers such as Laura Mulvey and her hugely influential 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema”. The idea of a director such as Malle exploring such huge seismic cultural and sociological shifts is a brilliant idea and if he’d tackled the changing mores in gender roles and women’s equality in his usual realist style then ‘Black Moon’ could have been a classic to rank alongside his best. However more often than not any exploration of these themes gets buried under the film’s increasing tide of fairy tale indulgence and grotesque weirdness. The opening shots of men and women actually engaged in armed combat resembling an actual war are incredibly gauging and would have been a much more effective treatment had he stuck with it. However, once inside the house the film’s constant slips of reality reveal that the war may not even be happening. Instead we get images of a confused abusive old lady who is occasionally and disturbingly breast-fed by Sister Lily, and many scenes of the young Lily in various states of undress, torment, and confusion as she wanders the house and its grounds. What little dialogue there is remains painfully oblique and disjointed, an effect not helped by the English dubbing (about 40% of it is also spoken by animals). Lily also occasionally grapples with the man of the house, Brother Lily. He is first glimpsed digging in the garden and singing in an opera style voice. He doesn’t have any real dialogue but this is perhaps a blessing as ‘Little Joe’, as he was famously dubbed in Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side, was never the greatest actor, more of a pretty face perfectly given to Warhol’s detached non-directing style that required its stars to simply be themselves in front of his camera’s passive gaze.

Like nearly all of Malle’s films there is very little music, diegetic or otherwise, and it doesn’t help that the pacing is unbelievably slow even for an avant-garde film. Moments of drama or genuinely arresting images are few, apart from the brilliant opening. In this respect it could be argued that Malle also fails to make proper use of his impressive mansion location. The huge country house has been a staple of French cinema from Jean Renoir’s masterpiece ‘Le Regle Du Jeu’ (The Rules of the Game - 1939) onwards, providing the site of many a familial breakdown or comedic romp. This is perhaps because the house was the director’s own, making Malle almost too free to do what he wanted, freeing from the trappings of shooting on a built set or a public location. In short, the film’s elements never really gel or say anything too interesting despite the obvious pedigree of the cast and crew involved. I’m a huge fan of Louis Malle and of surrealist cinema too, and so wanted to like ‘Black Moon’, but if anything it stands as an example of how directors who are skilled and established in creating moving and dramatic human stories of real life drama or comedy should be wary of dabbling with surrealist film tropes, one of which is a lack of professional technique and narrative. At this point in his career Malle was incredibly adept at subtle storytelling and had a masterly yet un-showy technique to his directing, which can probably explain his failure in directing the uncharacteristically surreal ‘Black Moon’.

Directed by: Louis Malle
Written by: Louis Malle, Joyce Bunuel
Produced by: Claude Nejar
DOP: Sven Nykvist
Editor: Suzanne Baron
Music Score by: N/A
Starring: Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart, Joe Dallesandro

Country: France/West Germany
Budget: £
Length: 100mins

Bibliography:
Visual Pleasure In The Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey

Filmography:
‘Milou En Mai’, 1990, Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films (NEF)
‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’ 1987, Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films (NEF)
‘My Dinner with Andre’, 1991, Louis Malle, Saga Productions Inc.
‘Un Chien Andalou’, 1929, Luis Buñuel
‘Le Regle De Jeu’, 1939

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Bangkok Love Story' 2007 (dir. Poj Arnon)

Rob Gallagher MSt — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 18:15:26 +0000

'Cloudbursting' - 2009 by Rob Gallagher MSt

The tale of a hired gun who falls in love with the man he’s ordered to kill, Poj Arnon’s ‘Bangkok Love Story’ has been packaged in the West –where, to date, it has done surprisingly well - as an exotic story of forbidden love. The box art features the two leads shirtless on a leather sofa, one defiantly staring the viewer down as the other toys with a penile revolver. The b/b Bonnie and Clyde vibe is reinforced by strap lines that range from ‘love is dangerous’ to ‘do you need a reason to love someone?’ to ‘to be together they will break every law.’ Initially the film comes on like a post-‘City of God’ (2002) urban crime drama, all grainy footage of tower blocks and sodium lights glistening on sweat-soaked flesh and cold steel. The opening, which portrays hitman Mehk (Rattanballang Tohssawat) dispassionately stalking and offing his targets, gives the impression that we’re in for a hard-edged journey through Bangkok’s underworld. This impression is misleading however, and viewers who come to ‘Bangkok Love Story’ looking for a grittily realistic mafia saga or a post-modern lovers-on-the-run movie a la Stone’s ‘Natural Born Killers’ (1994) are likely to be sorely disappointed. For ‘Bangkok Love Story’, which scored a hat trick at Thailand’s national film awards, actually belongs to a genre that we don’t really produce in the West anymore, one we prefer to think we’ve outgrown. As the emotional flashpoints and bitterly ironic twists of fate stack up, it becomes apparent that this is nothing other than a good old-fashioned melodrama - a gay, Thai, underworld melodrama, but heir nevertheless to a noble lineage of Victorian potboilers and golden-era Hollywood weepies. As with all melodramas, the characters’ personalities are less important than their status as playthings of the malign and capricious fates, and the plot is less a narrative than a catalogue of afflictions. Suicide, disfigurement, disease, revenge and other such slings and arrows of outrageous fortune hit home in jaw-droppingly rapid succession, and each emotional wrench is accompanied – with sledgehammer-subtle pathetic fallacy – by the clouds opening and the stirring strains of the film’s theme striking up (the theme, incidentally, will be irremediably graven onto the wax cylinder of your mind by the time the film finishes). The downpours are not just intense and frequent, they’re instructive too, hinting to viewers that they’re expected to respond to what they’re seeing by making like the sky and crying their damned eyes out.

The film’s adherence to these (to Western eyes) naff and outmoded generic conventions might best be contextualized by a comparison with Jim Jarmusch’s Eastern-influenced hitman movie 'Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai' (1999), a film shot-through with an awareness that when it comes to gangster movies, you can’t make ‘em like they used to. Ghost Dog’s desiccated mobster stereotypes and Wu-Tang soundtrack were suggestive of an America (and a cinematic genre) in transition between 'The Godfather' (1972) and 'The Wire' (2002), a state of affairs where honour, hierarchy, violence and money remain key but are undergoing radical recontextualization. Ghost Dog, a man out of his time, looks to the East for a sense of purity and purpose, immersing himself in samurai lore but ultimately succumbing to the contingencies of time and place. Arnon, unlike Jarmusch, refuses to entertain the possibility that honour and heroism could ever seem played-out or exotic or absurd, that a good vs. evil structure could be thought reductive or anachronistic, that audiences might be able to cope with political and economic contextualization. 'Bangkok Love Story' is as far removed from such mundane concerns as its heroes’ rooftop love nest is from street level. One benefit of this simplistic approach is that you don’t alienate demographics who might be bored or alienated by such complexities – like, say, teenage girls. ‘Bangkok Love Story’ has more than a whiff of yaoi (the Japanese culture of girl-made or girl-targeted portrayals of gay male romance - often unofficial spin-offs from established books, films or videogames) about it. Mehk and Iht (Chaiwat Thongsaeng) sometimes feel like they’ve been transplanted from another fiction and made to couple in compliance with the wishes of a hormonally overheated fan. There’s sequences in the film that resemble nothing so much as those fan-made YouTube tribute videos where a montage of love scenes from something like ‘Twilight’ (2008) gets set to a top 40 ballad – not that this has deterred fans from piecing together their own homages, much to the delight of sundry commenters with Goth-y-sounding usernames, whose comments both testify to the film’s affective heft and prove that there are viewers out there to whom the idea that the film could be thought camp would never occur. It’s entirely in keeping with the film’s pop video vibe that Mehk, though initially presented an amoral gay murderer in the vein of Jean Genet’s Querelle, stalking victims through the nocturnal city, turns out to merely be a mixed-up, affection-starved and rather shy young man. Glaring sulkily from under his sable mane, with his emo attitude and his motorcycle, he’s a modern take on the old Brando/Jimmy Dean archetype of the bad boy biker with a heart of gold. As with the movie in general, Mehk only makes sense if you take him totally seriously - something that proves easier said than done.

But are we meant to take ‘Bangkok Love Story’ seriously? After all, director Poj Arnon’s last feature, 'Haunting Me' (2007), was a lighthearted farce about a transvestite ghost. A cross between 'Ju-On' (2000) and 'Hairspray' (1988), the movie featured a reputedly excruciating parody of 'Brokeback Mountain' (2005). There’s also a 'Charlie’s Angels' (2000) pastiche on his C.V. How then, is one supposed to interpret Arnon’s decision to follow the film with a (so to speak) straight-faced portrayal of star-crossed gay love? One answer might be that Arnon is simply a very clever man. What would otherwise have been a run-of-the-mill action-heavy melodrama has, by virtue of its homosexual content, become a courageous and controversial film. While its anguished seriousness may appear over the top, in a Thai cinematic tradition where gays are often portrayed as flaming caricatures it’s a departure from the norm, and has won Arnon respect from activists. 'Brokeback Mountain' has repeatedly been invoked in descriptions of 'Bangkok Love Story', and, to the extent that both movies take genres that have always had a strong homoerotic subtext (the Western and the buddy/action movie) and use them as the basis for telling decade-spanning gay love stories, it’s a valid comparison. They’re very different movies though, and unlike the brooding and glacial 'Brokeback Moutain', Arnon’s movie is unashamedly flashy and exhilaratingly camp. While it takes pains to paint its heroes love as pure it’s also a highly body-centric movie: there’s plenty of shirtlessness and bathing and erotically fraught field surgery (bullet removal, ripped tees for tourniquets, sedulous wound dressing) and one of the leads is a former underwear model. TLA, the film’s US and UK distributor, has a portfolio that encompasses all aspects of queer cinema, from po-faced coming-of-age dramas to ultra-puerile gay gross-out movies. As such, it’s not inconceivable that they’re aware ‘Bangkok Love Story’ - as a film which can be taken either as a serious love story or as a seriously camp slice of Eastern esoterica (my liver’s spasming just thinking about the drinking games you could use this film as the basis for) – has formidable crossover potential. Susan Sontag noted in her controversial ‘Notes on Camp’ that ‘One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp... Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.’ But just how is one to distinguish? And who’s to say that everyone in a cinema or on a film set has to agree as to whether the movie in question is a legitimate masterpiece or a camp classic? Tohssawat and Thongsaeng’s absolute conviction actually comes off as strangely moving, fitting their characters’ status as fate’s dupes. Socialist playwright Howard Brenton described as ‘sudden lights’ those moments in his work when stock characters become self-aware, realising that they are mere caricatures (‘It is’ he observed of the effect, ‘very cruel’). After everything 'Bangkok Love Story’s' heroes go through (from bereavement and maiming to having to wander around all the time in pants that are patently several sizes too small) you can only feel grateful they never attain self-reflexivity. Even Job would have crumpled at the news God was only being ironic.

Linda Williams argued in 'Hard Core' that it’s porn and horror movies’ focus on (and solicitation of) bodily fluids that is to blame for their marginality. The same could be said of melodrama, a genre meant to get the pulse pounding and the tears flowing. Whether it’s tears of sorrow or of laughter that 'Bangkok Love Story' elicits will depend on your disposition, but either way the film’s credulity-testing twists make it, in its own way, kind of compelling. While it’s hard to claim the film is on a par with the masterful melodramatics of Fassbinder or Sirk, it might at least cause you to wonder why a Western gay mob melodrama is so tricky to imagine.

Directed by: Poj Arnon
Written by: Poj Arnon
Produced by: Somsak Techarantanaprasert, Poj Arnon
DOP: Tiwa Moeithaisong
Editor: Tiwa Moeithaisong
Music Score by: Giant Wave
Starring: Rattanballang Tohssawat, Chaiwat Thongsaeng

Country: Thailand
Budget: £
Length: 90mins

Filmography
‘Brokeback Mountain,’ 2005, Ang Lee, Alberta Film Entertainment
‘Charlie’s Angels’ 2000, McG, Columbia Pictures Entertainment
‘City of God,’ 2002, O2 films, Fernando Meirelles,
‘Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai,’ 1999, Jim Jarmusch, Artisan
‘The Godfather,’ 1972, Francis Ford Coppola, Alfran productions
‘Hairspray,’ 1998, John Waters, New Line Cinema
‘Haunting Me,’ 2007, Poj Arnon, Five Star Productions
‘Ju-On,’ 2000, Takashi Shimizu, Toei Video Company
‘Natural Born Killers,’ 1994, Oliver Stone, Warner Bros. Pictures
‘Twilight,’ 2008, Catherine Hardwicke, Summit Entertainment

Bibliography
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Vintage, 2001
Libda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible, University of California Press, 1999

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Au Revoir Les Enfants' 1987 (dir. Louis Malle)

Ian Viggars MA (Hons) BA (Hons) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:31:26 +0000

'Malle’s unsentimental portrayal of a French boarding school during the holocaust' - 2009 by Ian Viggars MA (Hons) BA (Hons)

It’s a testament to Louis Malle’s unfussy and straightforward direction that he can make a film about a subject as portentous as the Nazi invasion and the holocaust without resorting to the sentimentality or blustery politicizing that has hindered many lesser directors who approached the subject. Malle began his directing career in the mid-fifties as the French New Wave was starting to make small but influential waves. However as directors like Jean-Luc Godard abandoned narrative cinema to explore didacticism and video art and Francois Truffaut made increasingly sentimental movies that harked back to some bygone age of cinema history, Malle steadfastly stuck to developing a concise and consistently engaging oeuvre. This led to him being unfairly dismissed by the French critics that had once championed him as a pioneer, as if the idea of films being accessible and well-loved the world over was a negative thing, when Malle actually achieved this positive reception without pandering to commercial tastes anyway. He may lack a defining pro-filmic style ala Godard, and he may further confuse auteur-ists by exploring many different subjects in different countries and languages but one thing ties his films together, and that’s his emphasis on a humanistic approach to his stories. When exploring a subject like the May ’68 riots, as he did in ‘Milou En Mai’ (1990) he examined this huge political upheaval from the viewpoint of how it affected a bourgeois family temporarily stranded in their countryside retreat, who were in many ways the exact type of inherently rich people the revolt was against. By doing so he showed us how political actions affect individuals, thus making it much more relatable for an audience who may be far removed by time and distance from the original actions.

If an individual humanistic approach to political upheaval is one of Malle’s preferred subjects, then ‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’ (1987) could be his key film subject-wise, whereas in terms of style and storytelling it is arguably his most satisfying. The film is written by Malle himself and based on real experiences he had during World War Two. During the last few years of the war Malle was taught in a Roman-Catholic boarding school that housed Jewish children by giving them different names and protecting them, a conceit that forms the basis of Au Revoir Les Enfants. It centres on a tenuous friendship that builds up between the pampered popular kid Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) and a suspicious new arrival called Jean Bonnet (Rapheal Fejito). At first the boarding school’s natural hierarchy sees Bonnet get bullied but Julien quickly bonds with him over a shared love of literature and their natural abilities in class and games. However the resourceful Julien quickly picks up clues that reveal Bonnet’s true identity. His reluctance to talk about his family and his refusal to share Catholic communion leads Julien to investigate Bonnet’s personal items which reveal his real surname to be Kippelstein – Jean is really a Jewish child being sheltered at the school, Bonnet is his disguise name.

Such subject could easily have (and has since) turned saccharin and sentimental in a lesser director’s hands but Malle’s direction emphasises the subtlety of their burgeoning friendship. Even more believable is the way Julien reacts upon his discovery. It’s taken as a given these days that school children over Europe would have learnt about World War Two in history class but those schooled at the time may have had a lesser understanding of the war’s larger implications, just as kids in school today may not understand wars that have taken, or are taking, place overseas. A brilliant piece of dialogue entails shortly after Julien uncovers Bonnet/Kippelstien’s secret. He asks his older brother Francois “why do we hate them [the Jews]?” to which he replies “because they’re smarter than we are and they killed Jesus”. The smart and ever questioning Julien responds with “but it was the Romans who killed the Jews”. Julien is clearly confused as to why such hatred would take place and result in a war, so he continues to accept Jean as a good friend.

Such subtlety doesn’t only apply to the film’s key friendship but also colours the entire depiction of boarding school life. The school is a much explored area in French film cinema. Two obvious examples are ‘400 Blows’ (1959) and ‘The Class’ (2008). Made by Malle’s contemporary and key nouvelle vague director/writer Truffaut,’400 Blows’ explored a poor child’s negative experiences in a harsh inner-city school, while Laurent Cantet’s ‘The Class’ is currently wowing critics, awards bodies and art-house crowds worldwide with it’s depiction of a multi-racial Paris suburb classroom. Here is an equally realistic depiction of school life, although the situation is markedly different. Many of the children, like Julien, seem to come from nurturing and privileged backgrounds. While the typical schoolyard hierarchy allows mild teasing and rough playground games, everyone generally gets on with each other and makes the most of their superior education - the older kids are seen discussing existentialism while the younger children talk of women and the implications of death. Even as their everyday routine of hymns, classes, and confessions are regularly interrupted by actual air-raids, such challenges are met with camaraderie by the boys and teachers alike. The monks and teachers that run the Catholic school are also seen as being supportive and respected, hence their willingness to take in Jews under assumed names to shelter them from the Nazis (as a result of such actions in real life sources claim that almost 75 percent of French Jews survived the war).

The Nazis themselves are an ever threatening presence throughout but as the film is set towards the end of the war their powers seem curiously diminished in two key scenes. The first occurs during a ‘hunt the treasure’ exercise in a nearby forest. Jean and Julien eventually find themselves separated from the rest of the troupe and as night falls a roaming group of Nazi soldiers find them. Jean naturally runs away in fear but as the soldiers catch them they merely take the boys back to the school, reasoning that they are Catholics too. The other scene sees Jean attend a restaurant meal with Julien’s wealthy family. They are seated next to some highly decorated German officers when two younger soldiers enter and ask an elderly Jewish gentleman to leave. However the officers stick up for the elderly man and dismiss the younger Gestapo members. With this said though, the climactic arrival of the Gestapo at the school inevitably ends in tragedy, without giving too much away. The final scene is largely witnessed through Julien’s eyes and the film ends with a lingering shot of his face as he watches the atrocity unfold, much in the same way that ‘400 Blows’ ended on a lingering close-up of its protagonist’s face during a key moment. It proves the pinnacle of Malle’s intimate humanistic approach to such a harrowing subject matter, in focusing the effects of such an unspeakable evil on a vulnerable group of individuals.

If the school life and depiction of friendship is pleasingly subtle, it is matched by the formal and aesthetic qualities of the film. A wintry mise-en-scene is employed consisting of a minimal palette of cool blues and greys, while the editing is typically unfussy and crisp. Music wise Malle cleverly avoids a hugely sentimental score that many other directors might have employed. Instead the only accompaniment comes from the diegetic source of the boys’ piano lessons, and re-appears non-diegetically on occasion throughout the film. The boys receive piano lessons from the lusted after female teacher Davenne (Irène Jacob), and provide another interest apart from books for Julien and Jean to bond over. At first Julien is jealous of his new classmates natural playing abilities but a scene soon occurs that sees the two teaching each other jazzy standards while the rest of the school is holed away during an air raid. This wouldn’t be a film made by a director involved in the original French New Wave if it didn’t contain a scene that romanticised a bygone era of cinema and the collective joy experienced in movie-going, and ‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’ proves no exception. Not long before the end we see the boys, monks, and the priests crammed into a screening room watching a Charlie Chaplin movie with accompaniment provided by the piano teacher. Everyone is united in laughter and escapism, making it the film’s most outwardly sentimental scene that doesn’t really drive the plot forward, but can be forgiven as neither does it particularly detract from the emotional subtlety displayed elsewhere.

In many ways Malle’s treatment of his subject and themes makes it the anti-‘Life Is Beautiful’ (Roberto Benigni, 1997), a Spanish film that explored similar themes only with a much more sentimental and light approach. Admittedly there are differences in that Life Is Beautiful is actually largely set in a concentration camp while in Malle’s film the camps are a looming threat, but in tackling a similar subject matter a duel examination of both films makes clear how successful ‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’ is in procuring an emotional response from the viewer without resorting to its counterparts pandering and unsubtle approach. Although it received plaudits and awards on release many critics have since denigrated ‘Life Is Beautiful’ for it’s clowning around, as if it is effectively showing ‘the lighter side of the holocaust’. For those who agree with this view ‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’ will be an ideal tonic. Because above all Malle seems to understand that his narrative has an intrinsic power in itself that no amount of sentimental music, hammy acting or manipulative direction could express better, and so leaves the story unhindered by his usual commendable clearheaded direction.

Directed by: Louis Malle
Written by:> Louis Malle
Produced by: Louis Malle
DOP: Renato Berta
Editor: Emmanuelle Castro
Music Score by: Starring: Gaspard Manesse, Raphael Fejtö, Francine Racette, Stanislas Carré de Malberg, Philippe Morier-Genoud

Country: France/West Germany
Budget: £
Length: 104mins

Filmography
‘400 Blows’ 1959, François Truffaut, Les Films du Carrosse
‘Milou En Mai’, 1990, Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films (NEF)
‘Life Is Beautiful’, 1997, Roberto Benigni, Cecchi Gori Group
‘The Class’, 2008, Laurent Cantet, Haut et Court

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Boystown (Chuecatown)' 2007 (dir. Juan Flahn)

Rob Gallagher MSt — Sun, 066Jun 2010 17:01:26 +0000

'Comico-hetericidal Cinema' - 2009 by Rob Gallagher MSt

Leo and Rey (Pépon Nieto and Carlos Fuentes), the heroes of ‘Boystown’, are an amiable pair of gay geeks who happen to live in an up-and-coming district of Madrid. Their discussions of superhero lore are credibly esoteric, though – whether through translatorly bafflement or fear of Marvel’s lawyers - the subtitles tend to render them slightly garbled. Though they role play as X-Men in the bedroom, the comic book heroes who the couple most resemble are Asterix and Obelix – affable, no-nonsense Mediterranean’s, dopey and prone to bickering but thoroughly good natured. Indeed, for all its ball-gags, stranglings and threesomes, 'Boystown' reveals itself to be decidedly Goscinny and Uderzo in vibe, a feel good romp in which decent unpretentious folk triumph against mendacious calculation, personal vanity and matricidal psychosis. The villain of the piece is Victor (Pablo Puyol), a Patrick Batemanesque property developer prepared to stop at nothing – including homicide - in order to bring about his dream of turning the Chueca district into a haven of wealthy, voguish homosexuality. His programme of urban renewal turns out to involve killing off elderly residents who refuse to move out and driving a wedge between Rey and Leo, the latter of whom he attempts, via a regime of waxings, workouts and art openings, to transform from an unreconstructed slob of a driving instructor to a paragon of gay metropolitan sophistication. Needless to say his schemes are brought to naught by our heroes and a supporting cast of downright decent eccentrics, including a vulgar lesbian fruiterer, a mother and son detective team (she‘s slave to a catalogue of recherché phobias and neuroses, he’s realising he might be gay) and a cripplingly nervous student of Leo’s.

As should be pretty apparent by now, ‘Boystown’ aspires to little more than raising a few smiles. In this regard it amply succeeds; while hardly inspiring, it’s a fun film with a likeable cast, and boasts its fair share of sly and outrageous moments. But – and the same can be said of many comedies – for a film so little interested in intellectually or emotionally taxing its audience, 'Chuecatown' also manages to de-lid some pretty interesting cans of worms. Like Leo and Rey themselves, who blunder into a deadly serious situation proving oafs may venture where the po-faced fear to tread, Flahn’s movie wades blithely into a whole host of ticklish controversies regarding identity politics, gay rights and political correctness. Through Victor - an educated bourgeois as bigoted as any redneck homophobe – the movie mounts a critique of the recuperation of homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, a mode of being that entails couture literacy, assiduous personal grooming routines, mordant snobbery and the patronage of minimalist wine bars. The notion that homosexuality is only recognisable or tolerable in combination with cultural snobbery and body fascism is of course thoroughly deserving of mockery and scorn; what ‘Chuecatown’ proposes instead, however, is a neutered and weirdly contradictory liberal permissiveness. The candour with which Leo and Rey’s sexuality is presented is commendable, but there are several points where there ‘ordinary Joe’-ness seems overdone, the lack of interest or even distaste with which they approach less mainstream areas of cultural, political and sexual life (foregrounded in a scene where Rey’s trying to give the murderer the slip in a gay bathhouse; cue plenty of farcical stumbling-in-on in flagrante couples) a little troubling.

Comedy, of course, relies on inversions and reversals (Hahaha! The old woman is more foulmouthed and hornier than her hunky son! Ohoho! Straights are as rare in ‘Chuecatown’ as credible gay characters are in mainstream cinema!). It also, of course, works by lampooning the over-serious, the affected, the pompous and presumptuous. So I’m well aware that I risk (arguably legitimate) claims of taking dumb fun too seriously when I say that I find ‘Chuecatown’s’ lampooning of liberal muddle-headedness and advocacy of down-to-earth tolerance both fascinating and a little distressing. Tolerance comes naturally to our easygoing if somewhat slobby heroes. By contrast, Victor, the villain of ‘Chuecatown’, is a high maintenance kind of guy, who is as discriminating sartorially as he is discriminatory socio-politically. But are ‘discriminations’ in the sense of bigotry and ‘discrimination’ in the sense of connoisseurship, of the investment of time, taste and effort in order to decide what one should endorse and associate oneself with, necessarily the same? ‘Tolerance’ often amounts to little more than a disinterested shrug, but discrimination (as the clunky P.C. term ‘positive discrimination’ seeks to remind us) can refer to proactive and decisive measures taken in order to best allocate resources; it by no means always denotes exclusivity or prejudice. By poking fun at things which seem affected or unnatural, the product of calculating discrimination rather than ‘natural’ inclination (outlandish art world fashions, extravagance, po-facedness etc.); 'Chuecatown' actually adopts what has traditionally been a homophobic stance. Of course (and here I’m beginning to tie myself in liberalist knots in exactly the fashion that the film derides) you could construe it as delicious irony that it’s queers, here, who defer to ‘natural’ common sense and scorn affectation - and you could definitely mount a cogent argument for the ridiculousness of P.C. hypercorrectness and the prevalence of emperor’s new clothes syndrome in the art world. Even so, the film’s essential preference for life’s simple pleasures has some depressing implications.

There’s been a lot of talk on the blogs of certain cultural critics recently about the importance of recovering discrimination - in the sense of an arduously-acquired faculty of taste and expertise which entails the elevation of some things over others. As consumers, we’re more and more encouraged to be - and rewarded for being - dilettantes, up for trying anything once. This catholicity of taste is presumed to go hand in hand with a more general broad-mindedness that entails tolerance for those of other faiths, cultures, races, sexualities etc. With a few exceptions (like tribal loyalty to a football team - though even that is increasingly an advertising pitch rather than a reality) single-minded loyalties and strong preferences are seen as sad, illogical or even perverse. If we can expect to have to change our profession however many times why should we not be equally flexible taste wise?

What gets lost in this attempt to lose out on nothing is depth of engagement, and, with it, those areas of culture and society less amenable to being packaged into unintimidating bite size servings. ‘Chuecatown’, even when it’s being crude or outrageous or slightly subversive (the ball-breaking matriarch who watches torture porn while ironing and doles out hair-raisingly vivid homophobic slurs to her son’s boyfriend, the homophobic female politician who turns out to be a drag queen, the whole idea of anti-straight hate crime), remains pretty tame. It’s pointless to criticise a film on the basis of what it doesn’t do, but the movie’s attempts to satirise the promotion of a saleable, PR-friendly model of homosexuality fall flat because it is itself so complicit, so eminently consumable. While it is, as I’ve said, both a likeable and a funny movie, and while seeing a gay spin on well-worn rom-com conventions is still kind of novel and interesting, one wishes ‘Chuecatown’ was a little more daring, a little more inventive - maybe a little less likeable.

For though it’s to be applauded for insisting that, homosexuality by no means inevitably entails drag, style-consciousness, witty urbanity, sexual promiscuity, S&M or, indeed, any other mode of behaviour or self-expression, by doing so ‘Chuecatown’ suggests it was never homosexuality that was the ‘problem’ in the first place - just gays’ pesky habit of behaving flamboyant and contentious and their hyper-stylised ways. Writing in the late 1980s, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick noticed that although psychoanalysts seemed to have taken steps to counter their discipline’s traditional homophobia and were ‘prepared to like some gay men,’ the sort of gay man they tended to favour ‘a) is already grown up, and (b) acts masculine.’ Even among politically progressive queers, she argued, the perceived need to counter stereotypes about ‘effeminate’ gays and ‘mannish’ lesbians had led to the allocation of a ‘marginal or stigmatised position’ to such members of the homosexual community (Sedgwick, Tendencies, 156-7). ‘Chuecatown’ - in which groomed, style-conscious or sub culturally-affiliated gays (drag queens, leathered-up bears) tend to be presented as villains or clowns - risks the same thing. Its refreshingly blokeish heroes are a departure from gay cliché, but their sheer normalcy, their suspicion or unconcern with erudition, politics and leftfield tastes brings with it its own problems.

Gays can make enjoyable Euro comedies about mothers in law just as well as straights; but this is no reason not to prefer the risky, risqué, occasionally pretentious and/or obnoxious output of queer auteurs like Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith or John Waters. Watching ‘Chuecatown’, I found myself wishing the villain of the piece had been better developed. Conniving, ruthless and driven, he could have been made much more of, especially had we been made to see things more from his point of view. Turning off ‘Chuecatown’, pretty well entertained but also kind of saddened, I was put in mind of two recent attempts at presenting a history of queer culture: the National Portrait Gallery’s Gay Icons exhibition and Electronica duo Matmos 2006 album The Rose has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast. The former - which saw various queer cultural luminaries selecting images of ‘icons’ gay and straight in order to commemorate the Stonewall riots - was, for the most part cosy, safe and generally well-intentioned - if sometimes queasily popularist. The latter, by contrast, presented aural portraits of figures (Valerie Solanas, William Burroughs, Patricia Highsmith) who were often tragic, divisive or downright unlikeable, but whose legacies were incontestably rich and vital, still capable of evoking debate and response rather than cosy consensus. Both approaches have their merits and drawbacks - if the National Portrait Gallery show was too ‘nice’ then the Matmos LP’s focus on mercurial fuck-ups might be said to suggest some kind of essential correlation between homosexuality and the overwrought, tragic and abrasive. While its villain has some of the subversive criminal allure of the figures Matmos were drawn to, ‘Chuecatown’ ultimately belongs falls firmly in the ‘Gay Icons’ bracket. It’s a fun enough film in its own way, but if it only cared more about caring more, I suspect I might have cared a little more about it.

Directed by: Juan Flahn
Written by: Dunia Ayasop, Juan Flahn
Produced by: Marivi de Villanueva
DOP: Juan Carlos Lausin
Editor: Ascen Marchena
Music Score by: David San Jose
Starring: Carlos Fuentes, Pepon Nieto, Pablo Puyol

Bibliography:
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies. Rouledge 1994.

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Last Exit to Brooklyn' 1989 (dir. Uli Edel)

Rob Gallagher MSt — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:38:26 +0000
'No Way Out' - 2009 by Rob Gallagher MSt

When Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn was published in 1964, the novel’s unflinching portrayal of the squalor and viciousness of New York circa 1952 proved so controversial that it stood trial for obscenity in Britain and was banned in Italy. But if it was the documentary exactitude and believability of Selby’s fiction that was the secret of the novel’s success, then Uli Edel’s cinematic adaptation works because it both addresses and occupies the gap between fiction and reality. A portrayal of 1950s America from the post modern perspective of 1989, Edel’s ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ both incorporates aspects of American life that popular media of the time tended to ignore – among them political ferment, domestic violence, social deprivation and homosexual experience – and acknowledges that, partial and sanitised as they may be, period media are one of the only ways we have of understanding the era; for better or worse life in the 20th century was thoroughly pervaded by manufactured representations and generic codes, and denying as much is pointless.

The film accepts culture’s insufficiencies, the incommensurability of cultural representation and lived experience – a disjunction especially apparent when it comes to the mass media of the 1950s. Rather than aim for pathos and wind up bathetic, Edel plays on this disjunction, portraying fathers who clown around like sitcom patriarchs, representing queer boys forced to shape an identity out of pornography and Hollywood melodrama and - perhaps most horribly - juxtaposing the trite but heartfelt prose of an honest man’s love letter with a scene of gang rape. Edel doesn’t wallow in tragedy or attempt to wring emotion from the viewer. While the score – traditional, emotive, period-sounding orchestral music provided by Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler – swells and trills in sympathy with the characters’ subjective states as it would in a 1950s movie, the camera remains dispassionately aloof, treating joy, violence and sorrow alike with the same crushing indifference.

As I’ve already suggested, 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' is, in one sense, a very post-modern film. It’s full of allusions and references to mid-century culture, with the spectres of 'West Side Story' (1961) and Tennessee Williams’ oeuvre looming especially large. George (Alexis Arquette), dancing over the flung switchblades of the gang, suggests Bernstein’s balletic Jets and Sharks. Tra La La (Jennifer Jason Leigh) passes the marquee of a theatre where 'South Pacific' is showing while having her own romance with a soldier. But where some post-modern cinema is gleefully irreverent, revelling in incongruous and ironic splicing for its own sake, Edel’s film retains a moral compass. A conservative reading might, in fact, locate a pretty unforgiving ethical backbone to the movie: seen from a certain perspective, the plot (which remains fairly faithful to Selby’s novel) seems to punish George, Harry (Stephen Lang) and Tra La La for wanting too much – too much love or money or acknowledgement. It seems closer to the truth, however, to say that the film is a critique of a culture and a media which promise more than they can supply, creating a dangerous surplus of desire, a surplus that has prove pernicious and even fatal consequences for certain characters.

Supply, in fact, is one of the film’s primary concerns. As its title hints, 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' is a movie concerned with flows and blockages. When the film opens the longshoremen’s union are weeks into a strike; the union has to supply food to men with no income, the strikers have to form barricades and obstruct the flow of produce and capital. The water canons turned by the police on the rioting strikers reflect actual police procedure, but they also provide an image of the fact that control over the direction and intensity of flow is the preserve and instrument of those in power. It’s against the backdrop of the strike that the film’s personal and domestic dramas play out, and these likewise hinge on questions of circulation and supply. Donna’s (Ricki Lake) water breaks as her mother is trying to contain her pregnant belly in a wedding dress, while Donna’s father (Burt Young) is furious at having failed to block access to her, to maintain control of his bloodline. While Harry is riding high in the union, he enjoys making gestures of lordly beneficence, overseeing the free flow of beer from the union’s tap, funding cab trips all around the city. Tra La La, by contrast, prides herself on her ability to draw a steam of men toward her, to induce motion and solicit outpourings of money without even lifting a finger.

Control over the flow of images is especially important. As I’ve already said, the film shows how the newly omnipresent technology of television – ‘the tube,’ to give it its colloquial name – emits a monodirectional torrent of images into the homes and bars, the lives and minds of the characters, dosing them with radiant images of violence and glamour. Tra La La, with her platinum hair, pale skin and lozenge-shaped coiffure, doesn’t just look like the sort of woman you’d see on a TV or cinema screen, she looks like the screen itself. The film’s gay and trans men are similarly meticulous in their emulation of celluloid glamour, as the fateful drag party demonstrates. Alienated and under-represented, they collect and arrange images and objects that seem to offer an ideal of beauty, a refuge from the real world’s hostility and banality. George loses control of the circulation of images in the scene in which his homophobic brother ransacks his closet, revealing and forcing their mother to acknowledge George’s collections of lingerie and pornography (“look at these disgusting pictures!”).

It is only one of film's many scenes of violation. The gang rape may be the most obvious and egregious, but other subtler and more malicious violations occur – such as when the boys who would normally jump the servicemen Tra La La lures to the waste ground hang back and watch as she’s forced her to go through with it with a sailor – a form of remote rape. Voyeurs, trained by a media-saturated culture, they treat Tra La La’s exploitation as if it were a spectacle. When, earlier in the film, they’re shown jeering and whooping through the windscreen of a car at three headlight lit soldiers they’re chasing, they look as if they’re watching a movie, as if the car’s headlights are projectors. The asymmetry of this viewer/viewed relationship - the ability to look at others and feel no compunction or connection – is something the film questions and challenges. Judith Butler has recently argued, following Levinas, that our obligations toward others ends at the point when we can definitively differentiate ourselves from them – her point being that it is impossible to establish any such divisions and that, as such, we are all interimplicated, as convenient as it is to deny that fact (Frames of War p.14). Edel’s film mounts a similar argument, perhaps most clearly via the story of Harry. Harry is repeatedly shown just looking, the camera lingering on his rapt face as he tries to calculate the relation of equivalence between himself and the objects of his gaze. Any distinctions he might try to establish, any self/other binaries, are shown, however, to be fragile and provisional: at the start of the film he looks into the eyes of a beaten soldier being lead, bloodied, from the scene of a brawl, while at the end of the film he himself is beaten; at the start of the film he meets the desiring gaze of the extravagantly camp George, at the end he has been brought low by his unreciprocated desire for the dandyish Regina (Bernard Zette). Harry’s riches to rags trajectory constitutes a reminder of reversibility, of the connectedness that too many characters are wont to deny.

Speaking of connectedness, one of the film’s central themes is the inextricably interwoven status of sex and violence. The sexual assaults the film depicts are the most obvious expression of this interweaving – though even there the film suggests that sex and rape are perhaps not as neatly dissociable as we would prefer to think - but 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' also abounds in instances of unexpected or ironic substitution of sex for violence or vice versa. Bodies enter into all manner of unexpected and extreme assemblages: George gets a knife in his leg when he’d sought a different kind of penetration; Tra La La has to have sex with a sailor when normally the sailor would be mugged, and Harry is beaten after trying to seduce a boy. The sexual violence culminates, of course, with Tra La La’s rape. It’s unfortunate – if predictable – that Jennifer Jason Leigh’s portrayal of Tra La La came to dominate discussions and perceptions of the film; as brilliant and magnetic as she is (and her Oscar was well-deserved), it’s hard not to read fore groundings of her character’s story as attempts to – whether consciously or not - de-politicise and de-queer 'Last Exit to Brooklyn', placing the emphasis on the timeworn Hollywood staples of heterosexual romance and beautiful, childlike but morally suspect women. Given that this is a film all about the complexity of the political, socioeconomic and affective ties that bind the members of societies, this sort of selective reading does 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' a grave disservice. Insisting on the equivalence and interconnectedness of apparently distinct identity categories and positions, Edel’s film achieves a truly novelistic scope, striking a deft balance between the political and the personal, the poignantly anachronistic and the enduringly relevant. Twenty years on, it remains a queer, complex, remarkably powerful film, one that still has much to say.

Directed by: Uli Edel
Written by: Desmond Nakano
Produced by: Bernd Eichinger
DOP: Stefan Czapsky
Editor: Peter Przygodda
Music Score by: Mark Knopfler
Starring: Stephen Lang, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Burt Young

Bibliography:
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable, 2009, Verso

Filmography:
West Side Story, 1961, Jerome Robins, Robert Wise, Mirisch Pictures

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Blood for Dracula' 1975 (dir. Paul Morrissey)

Rob Gallagher MSt — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:09:11 +0000
'Moral Vampirism' - 2009 by Rob Gallagher MSt

Shot in 1973, ‘Blood For Dracula’ (also known as Andy Warhol’s Dracula) is normally regarded, for better or for worse, as a gratifyingly camp soft-core schlockfest. The premise is simple (so much so that some of the title’s lengthier European variants practically constitute plot synopses): in desperate need of virgin blood, Dracula (Udo Kier) heads to Catholic Italy where he sets about wooing the daughters of an out-of-pocket titled family. The resulting film is absurd, grotesque and often gorgeous but – like a certain Transylvania aristocrat – it also conceals a sinister secret. For, despite his preoccupation with sex, violence, sadism and addiction (even more evident in earlier Warhol-affiliated productions like ‘Flesh’ (1968)) director Paul Morrissey is also a Catholic Republican, a hard-line conservative who’s previously held forth on the pernicious effects of liberal permissiveness and lamented the waning of institutionalised religion. Gary Morris, addressing this circumstance in a 1996 issue of Bright Lights film journal, concluded ‘it's impossible to reconcile these knuckleheaded views with Morrissey's unique body of work.’ Morris is wrong however; despite all the gore and skin on show in ‘Blood For Dracula’ one can’t help but be struck by the seam of alternately wistful and resentful anti-liberalism that runs through the movie. At the level of narrative it’s practically a parable, one in which the last representative of an old culture (Dracula is described by Morrissey as a ‘failed idealist’) sets out on a search for purity and traditional values but finds instead a dissolute nobility and a self-serving lower class who cloak their hedonism and violence in leftist ideology. The father of the Di Fiore family (Vittorio de Sica) is a compulsive gambler, the house is decaying rapidly and the two marriageable daughters (Dominique Darel and Stefania Casini) are vain, indolent nymphomaniacs who divide their time between pleasuring Mario the Marxist manservant (played – with characteristic sulky reserve – by Morrissey mainstay ‘little’ Joe Dallesandro) and incestuously canoodling with one another. Mario’s rote socialism may be merely a screen for his resentment and sexual sadism, but his fury and virility are genuine and ultimately it is the count who comes off worst in this clash of cultures old and new – an outcome Morrissey represents as entirely regrettable. The fear of being outbred by an Other represented as bestially sexual and virally fertile is, of course, a staple of anti-Muslim/black/communist/‘chav’ prejudice (delete as appropriate), and while in Bram Stoker’s famous novel it was the vampire who represented a threat to English purity, here it is Dracula himself – sickly, emasculated and too civilised for his own good - whose bloodline is threatened by the real bloodsuckers he finds himself among, the hypocrites and wastrels he foolishly pins his hopes on. This is at least an original and ironic spin on traditional vampire lore.

Depressingly, the same cannot be said of the film’s portrayal of lesbianism, which is as predictable as it is unenlightened. There’s a long tradition of linking female homosexuality to vampirism, one that runs from Nineteenth century works like Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla,’ Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ to a host of less exalted works cinematic works roughly contemporaneous with ‘Blood for Dracula,’ including ‘Vampyres’ (1974), ‘The Vampire Lovers’ (1970) and Jesus Franco’s groovy ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ (1971). Even when a degree of sympathy or solidarity informs these portrayals  (and Baudelaire identified so strongly with Paris’ “femmes damnees” that he considered calling his landmark collection ‘Les Lesbiennes’), lesbian appetites are still portrayed as exotic, insatiable and vicious. When we first see Saphiria and Rubinia Di Fiore they’re doing some gardening, hacking art a patch of sterile soil where flowers used to grow and playfully exposing themselves to their younger sister Perla (Silvia Dionisio). They soon leave off in order to flirt with Mario however. Immediately lesbianism is linked with entropy and infertility, while simultaneously being constructed as something girls only get up to when bereft of men or else for men’s benefit, to tease or entice them. The idea that lesbian intercourse isn’t real sex – just a bloodless, passably diverting substitute, little better than masturbation – is also reinforced both by the persistent presence of mirrors in their scenes and by the sisters’ resemblance to one another, which both helps to equate lesbian sex to sex with oneself and suggests that it isn’t proper sex because proper sex between siblings wouldn’t be something fit to represent as erotic. After being semi-vampirised (not being virgins they can’t become full vampires) the sisters are seen languorously caressing each other on a divan as a record spins on the gramophone, an image that succinctly demonstrates Morrissey’s apparent belief that lesbian sexuality is ersatz, narcissistic and unproductive, that it goes nowhere.

In fairness, ‘Blood for Dracula’ never takes itself as seriously as the above critique might suggest, and reducing it to a conservative allegory misrepresents a film which, however problematic, simplistic and contentious its politics are, nevertheless rewards viewers in various other ways. Perhaps here its worth invoking Roland Barthes' distinction between significance - the messages that the film, however implicitly, conveys – and signifiance – the textures, affects and feelings, incommensurable with any particular message or meaning, that it generates. For, within its essentially reactionary narrative framework, ‘Blood for Dracula’ supplies a considerable amount of humour, colour, beauty and pathos, not to mention a handful of especially arresting images and the odd unexpected cameo (Roman Polanski is terrific as a wily local peasant). As I’ve already suggested, Morrissey likes to have his cake and eat it too, and revels in the portrayal of the same moral laxity he affects to deplore, sugaring his anti-liberal message with lashings of glamour and titillation. As such, the film affords viewers ample opportunity to spy on the decadent pleasures of the aristocracy (disapprovingly, of course) even as they’re supposed to be rooting for the ailing, out of his time Dracula. By the same token, the film affords more politically progressive viewers ample opportunity to take in its sensuous sumptuousness (disapprovingly, of course) even as they’re supposed to be critiquing its attitude to society and sexuality. And, despite all the impassioned finger-wagging in this review’s preceding paragraphs, I’m forced to admit that – like the feminist film critics who Slavoj Zizek claims deconstruct film noir in an attempt to legitimise their enjoyment of it – I enjoyed the thrills ‘Blood for Dracula’ has to offer, cheap as they sometimes are.

Not least among these is the pleasure of just gazing. Light and colour are deployed to create a range of arresting non-naturalistic effects - the shimmering reds, creams and champagnes of the Di Fiore mansion, for example, induce an almost amniotic sense of languid stasis. As always with Morrissey’s work, the lead actors are uniformly beautiful; if Dallesandro and his conquests seem to find endless satisfaction in staring into the mirror then one can hardly blame them. The statuesque, heavy-lidded Darel and Casini spend most of their screen time lolling about in (or half out of) skimpy lemon-coloured nightclothes, and Dallesandro’s Olympian physique gets plenty of exposure as he goes about his business (which, whether it be chopping firewood or bedding the sisters, is always undertaken with the same dispassionate frown on his face). Dallesandro is a far from compelling ideologue - given Morrissey’s politics he’d hardly want him to be - but he does convince as an aggrieved outsider prepared to play on his looks to get what he wants from people he despises – which, essentially, is to say he convinces as Joe Dallesandro, the grudging Warhol superstar fascinated but a little sickened by others’ propensity to fawn over him.

Although Warhol’s involvement with Morrissey’s movies had become literally nominal by the time of ‘Blood For Dracula,’ the spectre of the Factory - with its gallery of beautiful, doomed cosmopolite pin-ups being idol-ised by the vampirically pale, frail Andy – haunts the film (certainly Morrissey would subsequently complain of Warhol’s Draculaesque leaching of acclaim for work which he really had very little to do with). The first scene, in which the etiolated Dracula makes himself up and applies what looks like boot polish to his milky hair before an empty mirror, also has Warholian resonances, evoking Lou Reed singing ‘Make Up’ and Peter Hujar’s photograph of Candy Darling (the ‘drag queen superstar’ featured in Morrissey’s ‘Flesh’ and ‘Women in Revolt’ (1971)) fully dolled up on her deathbed. In a sense, though, it’s a pity that 1970s NYC isn’t more present in ‘Blood for Dracula.’ The film is set in the 1920s, at the point, as Morrissey claims in the commentary, ‘when the modern world started to evolve into the toilet that we live with today.’ But a Dracula movie that harnessed Morrissey’s flair for portraying seedy urban street life might have been more interesting, especially given the continuity of concerns (sexual morality and exploitation, addiction and overdoses) that, as I’ve already suggested, links ‘Blood for Dracula’ to more realistic Morrissey fare like ‘Trash’ (1970).

Test footage backs up the director’s claim that he’d planned for the film to be less wackily ‘absurdist’ than ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ (1973), intending for Dracula to be a serious and sympathetic figure. A quirk of fate meant Kier had to step in at the last minute to substitute for Srdjan Zelenovic, the gangling, pallid Yugoslavian originally meant to play the title role. In the screen test Zelenovic exudes a wan, subdued gravity – Morrissey calls him ‘aristocratic... reserved, aloof and uncommunicative’. By contrast, Kier – with his huge grey eyes and a livid diagonal vein running across his forehead - plays the count as brittle and wracked, prone to seizures and all-but wheelchair-bound. Although his Dracula may have ended up hammier than Morrissey would have wished (his accent renders virgin “wurjin” – something of a barrier to credibility), the portrayal is nevertheless magnetic and affecting, and succeeds in generating sympathy for the bloodsucker. The first meeting between Dracula and the Di Fiores’ eldest daughter, a skewed-looking proto-spinster brilliantly played by Milena Vukotic, is genuinely moving. Shots of Kier leaching nutrition from a blood-soaked loaf of bread and lapping blood off of the floor also conjure a certain pathos, and while the scenes of him voiding the sisters’ impure blood into the bath - having mistakenly taken them for ‘wurjins’ and bitten them - are histrionic, they’re also beautiful; the shot of Kier with his head tipped back as blood wells from his mouth, striping his neck, is phenomenally striking. The effect is enhanced by Claudio Gizzi’s extravagantly pretty soundtrack, which flirts with schmaltz but generally maintains an appropriately bittersweet tone.

‘Blood for Dracula,’ then, is a strange film; ‘artier’ and more accomplished than most of the vampire sexploitation movies of the era (Morrissey is scathingly dismissive of Hammer’s output), it nevertheless feels somewhat zany and slight next to, say, Herzog’s ‘Nosferatu’ remake (1979). As notable for the array of names and talents it brings together (and the contexts it places them in) as it is in its own right, the movie’s status as a curio is deserved. Perhaps the most surprising thing, for viewers more familiar with Morrissey’s earlier work, is what a good fit the world of Victorian Gothic – a world of nostalgia, paranoia and prejudice – is for the director, how sharply the setting throws into relief the moral and political conflicts and contradictions that characterise Morrissey’s work.

Directed by: Paul Morrissey
Written by: Paul Morrissey
Produced by: Andrew Braunsberg, Andy Warhol, Jean Yanne
DOP: Luigi Kuveiller
Editor: Jed Johnson, Franca Silvi
Music Score by: Claudio Gizzi
Starring: Joe Dallesandro, Udo Kier, Dominique Darel, Stefania Casini, Arno Juerging

Filmography:
‘Flesh,’ Paul Morrissey, 1968, Factory Films
‘Flesh for Frankenstein,’ 1973, Paul Morrissey, Compagnia Cinematigrafica Champion
‘Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht,’ 1979, Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
‘Trash,’ Paul Morrissey, 1970, Filmfactory
‘The Vampire Lovers,’ 1970, Roy  Ward Baker, American International Pictures
‘Vampyres,’  1974, Jose Ramon Laraz, Lurco Films
‘Vampyros Lesbos,’ 1971, Jesus Franco, CCC Telecine
‘Women in Revolt,’ 1971, Paul Morrissey

Bibliography:
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, Fontana, 1977
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, OUP, 1998
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, Penguin, 2004
J. Sheridan le Fanu, A Glass Darkly, OUP, 2007
Bram Stoker, Dracula, Penguin, 1995
Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, 1997

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'La Antena (The Aerial)'

Ian Viggars BA (Hons) MA (Hons) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:20:55 +0000
'Updating Gunning’s Cinema of Attractions' by Ian Viggars BA (Hons) MA (Hons)

In 1968 film theorist Tom Gunning wrote a hugely influential article called ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’. In it he successfully re-thought ideas concerning early cinema, particularly its popular yet inappropriate labelling as primitive cinema. The terms ‘attraction’ and ‘the spectator’ alluded to in the essays title acknowledged the way in which early cinema, unable due to the length of film available at the time and the lack of recorded sound, created attractions that directly addressed the viewer. Before cinema became narrative there was no diegetic fourth wall between the audience and so directors were concerned merely with visual tricks, jokes, and illusion-istic spectacle. Of course these ranged from a train pulling into a station (see the Lumiere Brothers’ early efforts) to George Melies’ much more adventurous ‘A Trip To The Moon’ (1902), which used early stop-motion animation techniques to compound the idea of film as the ultimate provider of visual illusions and flights of fancy. As feature film running times inevitably became longer the ideas of more ambitious directors grew suitably in stature. Eventually this coincided with the advent of synchronised sound, and the feature length narrative of classical Hollywood cinema was born. Many theorists argued that cinema itself became a bastardised medium when it embraced sound and narrative as it began to draw on the mediums of theatre and the novel in order to provide longer story’s and inspiration for actors who now had to talk as well as move around on sets. However due to technical limitations and the constraints that war created in Europe, this advent didn’t happen on a simultaneous worldwide scale. Visionary European directors like Fritz Lang were still making films that took advantage of longer screen times but eschewed recorded sound.

Argentinian director Esteban Sapir’s ‘La Antena’ (2007) is a throwback to these times. It is effectively a silent film in that only two of its characters can actually talk (although they do so very little), it is in black and white, but has the post-Cinema of Attractions, pre worldwide synchronised sound running time of 90 minutes. However the film also makes use of many of the devises and visual tricks discovered during the pioneering early days of cinema that Tom Gunning re-evaluated. It has a very clear and tight plot that almost transplants itself into the sci-fi thriller territory, but due to its lack of spoken dialogue it has to rely heavily on visuals. Thankfully the film succeeds on these terms brilliantly. Either Sapir has tirelessly studied the work of directors such as FW Murnau, Eistenstien, Lang, and the Lumiere brothers (as anyone who’s studied film would have done), or he is a naturally gifted and resourceful director who has a painterly eye for shots and composition in the face of self imposed restrictions. This is especially impressive considering that its many effects were achieved in-camera and without the use of CGI. Although the films narrative tension fades slightly towards its climax, on the whole ‘La Antena’ is a magical and spellbinding update of silent film techniques and aesthetics.

The film is based in a dystopia called The City Without a Voice, so called because it’s inhabitants have lost the ability to speak. but according to the introductory title cards, “no-one seems to mind”. Communication is still possible through some kind of wordless exchange: how this works within the fantasy world of the film is never really explained, but is represented to us the viewer as creative and inventive text and typefaces appearing on the screen next to the people who are speaking. This is a clever and visually arresting update of the kind of inter-titles that were used in the pre-sound days, the type directors only ever really use these days for comedic purposes. Sapir’s update on inter-titles avoids such contrivances but gives us a valuable insight into the characters motivations. The inhabitants have lost their ability to verbally communicate due to the shadowy rule of the dictator-like Mr TV. Yes, the naming is rather unsubtle, and it’s not hard to detect Sapir’s allegorical sub-text, but any un-subtleties can be forgiven due to the highly visual nature of the film he has chosen to make. The city, shot in a classic high contrast black and white that recalls not only noir but early surrealism, is gloomy and strangely anonymous and it snows constantly, meaning it could practically be any city in the northern hemisphere. The heroes of the piece are a dysfunctional family unit who begin the story separated but are brought back together through their efforts to overthrow Mr TV’s sinister plot to eradicate words entirely from the population, making the already strained channels of communication an actual impossibility. The unnamed father is a TV repair man, an ironic job title as his intentions from the off are to bring down Mr TV’s media rain. His daughter is Ana (Sol Moreno), a resourceful and caring little girl, while his ex-wife, initially prickly and indifferent, eventually gets caught up in he ex-husband’s revolutionary cause and falls back in love with him in the process. Meanwhile a mysterious female simply called The Voice lives over the road from Ana and her mother, she is the only resident with the power of actual speech, aside from her own son who was born with no eyes. This lack of senses is a theme in the film- while only two characters are able to verbally communicate, the son lacks the gift of sight while his mother The Voice is a faceless character, her upper body concealed in a mysterious hood, much like the creepy dreamlike figure in Meya Deren’s also silent avant-garde classic ‘Meshes of The Afternoon’ (1943). The Voice and her son are seen as mythical saviour-like characters and they become key figures in the battle against Mr TV’s tyranny.

The plot and the characterisation are simple but involving enough and the characters are likable and as well sketched out as you can expect in a largely dialogue free film. Instead it is the visuals and the music that make up the films main pleasures. Every inch of ‘La Antena’ is beautifully designed and constructed, whether depicting simple conversations and exchanges or its more fanciful moments set in the cityscape, the film is consistently breathtaking. The sets, most of which look hand-built from various cheap materials, have the intentional falseness and charm of early cinema and the constant snow adds a wintry sheen that is magical rather than dour and unwelcoming. The lack of speech makes for some delightful passages aside from the already mentioned inventive use of text and subtitles. There are some great scenes of Melies-esque stop-motion animation, such as an early section when the pages of a letter are spread out on a table only to form into an origami-like image of a human that then performs a delicate ballet-like dance in front of an enchanted Ana. There is also a grimly amusing section set in a bar: in the absence of voices singers are left to mime to old records on stage, but when the record gets stuck the singer merely mimes along to the repeated phrase until someone gives the record player a nudge. On the whole though, besides the black and white and the snow, the main visual motif is one of spirals. The sinister TV station is represented by a drawn spiral that regularly appears on the screen and hypnotises viewers. All of the food the inhabitants eat is circular, being as it is manufactured by the same TV company, and in perhaps the films most blatant nod to Melies, the moon itself makes a few appearances as a human face surrounded by white rock.

Whilst the visuals are arresting the film wouldn’t be half as successful without its other major achievement, the original score by Leo Sujatovich. Just as in the days of silent cinema, when a live pianist would play along with the film in real time to add expression and emotion to the pictures, here a full orchestra scores the entire film. Apart from the occasional bit of dialogue from The Voice and her son ‘La Antena’ doesn’t concern itself with any notion of diegetic realism regarding sound and so the band seems to have been given full reign, resulting in a perfect synchronicity that is rarely achieved in movies today that focus almost exclusively on dialogue. The score is incredibly expressive, atmospheric, and perhaps more importantly given the lack of sound, hugely eclectic. Perhaps most impressive is the way the musical elements often directly stand in for sound effects: screeching violins denote the crushing of ice, while staccato one-note trumpet blasts represent car horns, and fast drums stand in for machine gun fire. The success of this makes one wish that perhaps more films eschewed speech and favour of musical expression.

As previously stated the film does drag slightly at the end in terms of plot and so may have benefited from being slightly shorter, as after around 70 minutes of such spell-bindingly beautiful imagery a kind of hypnotic quality takes over and the intended drama of the final scenes was lost on me slightly, although this didn’t scupper my overall appreciation of the films qualities which are mainly to do with the visuals, the musical score, and their resulting synchronicity. What Sapir is trying to say with his film is pleasingly never made fully apparent: an obvious distaste for mass-media television broadcasting and its numbing effects on the human population is evident throughout, although setting his film in a fantastical time and place makes such allusions purely allegorical. Still, using the visual and aesthetic tropes of Gunning’s Cinema of Attractions to denounce the small-screen world of TV broadcasting is a powerful statement in itself, and it’s not hard to see why directors and perhaps more often academics get nostalgic for the pre-sound cinema era. On this evidence it may be a good idea to place such technological restrictions on modern directors so that they may perhaps rediscover what the pioneering directors of the early cinema sought to capture- the power and fascination that brilliantly crafted images displayed on a huge flickering screen can have for an audience.

Directed by: Esteban Sapir
Written by: Esteban Sapir
Produced by: Federico Rostein
DOP: Cristian Cottet
Editor: Pablo Barbieri Carrera
Music Score by: Leo Sujatovich
Starring: Alejandro Urdapilleta, Valeria Bertuccelli, Julieta Cardinali, Rafael Ferro, Sol Moreno

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Another Public Enemy (Gonggongui jeog 2)' 2005 (dir. Woo-Suk Kang)

Oliver Davis — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:32:06 +0000
'Another Public Enemy’s portrayal of extremes in a civil society' by Oliver Davis

The concept of society is constantly evolving with time, or more precisely, with the lessons learnt by man as a result of time. By default, our world contains the most civil society because it is the most recent incarnation. Then why does one still pine for the violence, the heroics, the pornography of the screen, book and. Every person entertains that angel and demon which perch on either shoulder, and each ear will listen. The head in between decides which to obey, but it always knows the one ignored still sits there, whispering about the world. Maybe this is why there is such a social craving to glorify the athletes and the heroic, and why the equally opposite attraction to crime and its celebrities simultaneously exists. And maybe all this is why the most enjoyable of action films must contain the most spectacularly psychotic villains to foil the most incorruptible and heroic of men. Bruce Willis’ John McClane up against Alan Rickman’s money hungry terrorist; Harrison Ford’s president standing up to Gary Oldman’s Air Force One-jacker; Christian Bale’s vigilante Batman in his eternal battle against Heath Ledger’s Joker – all at the top end of a genre normally regarded as boyish and dumb. There are, of course, exceptions; those films which have their protagonist battle against an unknown conspirator or group of faceless foes may satisfy realism, but though these films are good they are not nearly as fun as watching two absurdly polar characters battling for 90minutes. A great action film relies on escapism, that escapism which lets the angel on my left shoulder and the demon on my right climb up onto the screen and fight for one’s morals.

There is no shame admitting a love for action films and other things similarly trashy. Not much can compare to the delight caused by the constant one-up-manship between hero and foe, and this is what ‘Another Public Enemy’ (2005) executes so well. The genuine hate between the two; the intellectual battle which ensues; the pushing of each other to the very limits of filmic stereotype ultimately to decide that evil will fall and justice shall prevail. The thought of the victorious villain is unthinkable in its genre and ‘Another Public Enemy’ makes the prospect of his winning even less desirable. Who would want to live in that civil society where the most despicable can jump through loop holes and laugh at us as they land? Our society is one where if the justice system fails there are those men which can go above it and save us all from humiliation. Well, at least in the world of film there is.

‘Another Public Enemy’ follows the aforementioned hero and villain roles as manifest in Prosecutor Kang (Kyung-gu Sol) and Criminal Han (Jun-ho Jeong), from their first encounters in school to the ultimate moment where one will succeed over the over. Kang is initially presented as a likeable rogue, skipping from person to person either showing them up (pulling faces behind his superior’s back) or taking advantage of them (tricking his colleague into paying for dinner). Kang is most definitely an enjoyable character to watch on screen, yet to know him in real life would grate even the friendliest people. The film succeeds in making him affable for the audience’s relation, but Kang is one of those social extremes that can work in fiction and become a hero, but would fail in reality. In contrast, one of Sang-Woo Han’s first appearances is his impulsive killing of an elderly road sweeper. Immediately Kang’s foil is produced; a reckless, obsessive man perching on my other shoulder.

Kang is portrayed as a successful and committed prosecutor, often crossing the job boundaries into orchestrating police raids and setting up his own cases. The pleasure he receives from catching the criminals he so deeply hates is shown in the first of these raids when he manages to tie up three cases with one swoop. Of course, this is not done by the book and infuriates his superiors; but this is what our loveable heroes do, they go where we cannot. In a meal with the chief prosecutor after this feat, Kang spies his former school mate, Han, on a television screen promoting his new golf academy in America. From this moment on, Kang builds up a case around Han based on a gut feeling. That these suspicions turn out to be true does little to validate Kang investigating anyone he supposes. Han’s viciousness does little to hide the fact the entire case is based upon Kang’s personal vendetta against ‘the boy who got away with everything at school’. Although Kang bases his success and demeanour on his instinct, it is his complete devotion to justice which prevents him from being the criminal he so strongly despises. Without that little angel of the superego constantly reminding Kang of his own ethics, the instinct and impulsion he prides himself on so much would push him in opposition to justice. And this is what ‘Another Public Enemy’ provides in Han.

Han is immediately established as a powerful trouble maker; rallying his classroom battalion to fight rival schools; the distrust from his dead father’s close friend; the unshakable air of arrogance. The devil is not so much whispering in Han’s ear, but shouting with such force and venom that the angel on his left can do nothing but recoil in horror. This is perfectly presented in the aforementioned sequence where Han murders an elderly gentleman. Han, smugly sitting in his parked sports car, tosses a cigarette out of the window. An elderly gentleman, one who is as pleasant and polite as only a man of twilight age can be, walks over and tells Han that he reminds him of his son, and that he always taught his son not to litter. There is nothing condescending in it. Nothing antagonistic. Just quaint and well mannered. But a rage builds up in Han; one can see it in his narrowing eyes and curling lip. Maybe this man reminds him of his father; but what does that matter if his father is never mentioned beyond his death? A man without motive will always horrify more profoundly than one with cause. Han drives slowly off only to turn and speed towards the gentleman. The car’s impact with the man sends him up beyond the bonnet and over the rest of the car. There was no thought process in Han’s mind, only the carnal screams from the depths of the brain, that animal urging which acts on impulse and hate and jealously and pride. Han has no superego angel, Han is only evil. Not once does Han redeem himself for the remainder of the film. He has no remorse, nor love and his one dimensional character pursuit is only of wealth through greed.

It is odd then how Kang and Han are so remarkably similar. Both are intellectuals. Both are alone in their lives. But most importantly, when they are cornered they lash out like wild dogs. After Kang’s best detective is killed by Han’s men and as the increasing lack of support from corrupt higher authorities (because they reside in Han’s pocket) amounts, Kang realises he cannot defeat Han within the confines of a civil society. He must go above the law and take it into his own hands. The further away he strays from the law, the more like Han he becomes in his behaviour. Progressively more desperate and impulsively violent, culminating in fighting Han outside his mansion during an attempted flee to America. Kang nearly goes as far to kill him, and his peers condone it. Whilst Kang holds a gun to Han’s head the others who work at the prosecution office turn a blind eye. Their primal conduct is not only in their action, but in their words. Allusion to animals, in particular dogs, is ripe throughout the film. Kang is often nick named Mad Dog and the justice department is sometimes likened to a jungle. Kang’s angel may be lecturing him throughout, but as the film progresses, Kang lends more and more of his ear to the devil on the opposing shoulder, resorting to aggression.

Han is quite obviously isolated; killing his father, brother, and anyone else who obstructs his desires; completely selfish. Kang, however, is deceptively alone. Although being surrounded by people and interacting with ease, he is still an unmarried man with no one close to him to speak of. Kang has been raised with an overabundance of superego; creating a complete compulsion to do what is right. His constant urge to separate right from wrong has led to a personality which is always telling itself it is not doing enough right. This is has created a workaholic in Kang, unable to form any real relationships because he will never believe he is good enough. When Kang sits in his car on the way to work a self-improvement tape can be heard coming from his radio. It tells him to “wear that smile”. This is a mask, a mask to hide his real broken self from the world. Just like his Prosecutor title – he is no Prosecutor, he is a detective; a vigilante.

So presented are the completely hate-filled Han and his rival Kang, our devil and our angel perched on either side of the film to fight for our morality. We are the ones who decide which to listen to, but they both still exist in us. Action films are therefore modern day morality tales. Crime is wrong and justice will prevail. But how to convey this? The most enjoyable way is the clearly polar protagonist and antagonist; fighting till the end and then on to infinity.

Directed by: Woo-Suk Kang
Written by: Woo-Suk Kang
Produced by: Woo-Suk Kang
DOP: Kim Seong-bok
Editor: Go Im-pyo
Music Score by: Jae-kwon
Han
Starring: Chul-jung Kang, Jun-ho Jeong

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Animal Crackers' 1930 (dir. Victor Heerman)

Oliver Davis — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:46:25 +0000
'The Change in Cinematic Spectacle' by Oliver Davis

When Thompson hit seventy, he decided to change his lifestyle completely so that he could live longer. He went on a strict diet, he jogged, he swam, and he took sunbaths. In just three months’ time, Thompson lost thirty pounds, reduced his waist by six inches, and expanded his chest by five inches. Svelte and tan, he decided to top it all off with a sporty new haircut. Afterward, while stepping out of the barbershop, he was hit by a bus.

As he lay dying, he cried out, “God, how could you do this to me?”
And a voice from the heavens responded, “To tell you the truth, Thompson, I didn’t recognise you.”

‘Animal Crackers’ (1930) was only the second Marx Brothers film, and their last stage to cinema transfer. The plot, not that it really matters, follows Captain Spaulding’s (Groucho Marx) welcome home party from exploring Africa. During this party, a famous painting is stolen which the Marx Brothers ‘help’ to recover.

Just like the other four films from the Marx Brothers’ Paramount era, the plot is merely a string to thread together a relentless series of jokes and musical numbers. What mattered here was the ability to entertain, and plot was never going to get in the way of that.

So if ‘Animal Crackers’ cannot contribute much in terms of plot or character development, what else can it offer other than entertainment?

‘Animal Crackers’ was released in 1930, a lengthy 88 years ago. Before man landed on the moon. Before World War Two. Before the invention of Velcro. This is an old film in the true sense. It was one of the first films to utilise the blossoming relationship between image and sound. ‘Animal Crackers’ is an artefact of time, allowing the viewer to watch just as the 1930’s audience would have. As a result, ‘Animal Crackers’ can be used as a reference point when considering the advancement of filmic language up to the present day.

This is not a contemporarily recognisable film in terms of direction, possessing a far more theatrical style of cinematic language presented. Conversations are filmed in medium or long shots with both speakers in frame, opposed to the shot/reverse shot cutting which distinguishes film from stage, and the depth of field is often too shallow for the subject to be in focus. When Groucho is looking for his horse underneath a table, he becomes fuzzy when wondering into the background, whilst the foreground containing Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont) and Horatio Jamison (Zeppo), remains in focus. Groucho here, as always, is the main subject on screen, yet the lens does not follow him. The camera acts as a member of a theatre audience, and the Marx Brothers are on the stage.

‘Animal Crackers’ is filmed this way because of being heavily influenced by vaudeville. Vaudeville theatre was the name given to the travelling acts which would perform throughout America’s theatres from the end of the civil war to its own demise brought about by talkies. These acts ranged from finely tuned tenor singers to farmers milking their cows with dance. Vaudeville was, in fact, where the Marx Brothers started off, touring the circuit with their comedy acts ‘Fun in Hi-Skule’, ‘The Coconauts’, and even the stage version of ‘Animal Crackers’. The main purpose of vaudeville acts was to entertain. The more entertaining an act, the more likely you were to be booked again. Because of this extraordinarily diverse array of acts, and the competition at the top, the Marx Brothers had to excel in more than comedy. Besides being funny, between them they could sing, play piano, play the harp, perform tough physical comedy, and dance.

The Marx Brothers always performed with the idea of entertaining. If a joke fell flat, there would be one straight after to cushion its fall. A song number needed no introduction, it was sung. Neither the Marx Brothers or their audience presided much over plot, they wanted to entertain and be entertained.

Vaudeville’s stage-like presence can be felt throughout the film, but none more than the opening of ‘Animal Crackers’ and its series of impromptu musical pieces. At the beginning of the film, each member of the Marx Brothers are introduced as a spectacle. Just as in ‘Duck Soup’ (1933), each Marx Brother walks (or in Groucho’s case, is carried by four African men) down a grand flight of stairs on their first appearance. These days such introductions are reserved for musicals, but here ‘Animal Crackers’ highlights the star status of the Marx Brothers. A film this aware of its own purpose (to exhibit the Marx Brothers’ multiple talents) therefore immediately excuses its lack of plot and finesse.

By inventing its own set of rules, the musical numbers in ‘Animal Crackers’ seem perfectly plausible. After one scene involving the two lovers in the garden, the camera tracks right to reveal Harpo and his harp. What follows is so beautiful to watch and listen to that you no longer care whether the plot will completely materialise and become fully enchanted with Harpo’s own spectacle. Although out of nowhere and with no aid to the film’s narrative, Harpo’s harp is one of the film’s highlights. It is impossible not to be astounded at how magnificent the harp sounds, and how at peace Harpo appears. He is not here for laughs, he is here to play the harp alone. For four minutes. And that fucking rocks.

The other musical spectacle is Chico’s incredible piano playing. This scene is more formally introduced, with all the party’s guests waiting to be entertained by the piano. After the compulsory fooling around, Chico begins to play “one of [his] own compositions, by Victor Herman”. Just like Harpo’s harp, one can only marvel at how well the piano is played. Chico’s own ‘shooting the keys’ technique only adds to the amazement. These performances are even more impressive because they are the actual actor’s talents. The variety appeal of vaudeville is ever present in ‘Animal Crackers’, the spectacle never CGI, but genuine awe.

So ‘Animal Crackers’ is not a conventional film. It may have been by its contextual standards, but compared to contemporary films it seems like a mess. One way to learn about a society is by documenting its actions, its employment figures, its quintessential ‘facts’. But when one sees what used to make them laugh, brief glimpses of their souls are provided. Film offers the opportunity to see this first hand. With ‘Animal Crackers’ being from the dawn of recorded sound, the viewer can use ‘Animal Crackers’ as an insight into a world of yonder.

Watching ‘Animal Crackers’ transports you back in time. The viewer watches the frames just as one would in 1930. I laughed at a joke about a rumble seat. I do not even know what a rumble seat is. But does that matter? I felt like I knew what a rumble seat was because Groucho is my window. He, and his brothers, let me look first hand at another age.

Verisimilitude is the magical quality which makes ‘Animal Crackers’ understandable. Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo have established a world of absurdity where entertainment is all that matters. By creating instantly recognisable characters the Marx Brothers have achieved longevity. Each character can be used as a window into their contextual culture. Groucho occupies the same status as the fairytale prince or the dastardly villain in terms of society’s cultural needs. These characters in entertainment seem pre-embedded in the audience’s collective social mind. Groucho is an eternally familiar character, one which all generations can fall in love with. He therefore provides us a reference point, a window if you will, into that age.

Groucho often serves as the audience’s guide through the film, inviting the viewer into the film with direct address. After making a joke about the make of his coat, Groucho looks directly into the camera and exclaims “They can’t all be funny.” This sort of self-reflexivity allows the viewer to engage further with the Marx Brothers’ zany world, and to become fully enveloped in their vaudeville spectacle.

Harpo’s presence in ‘Animal Crackers’, however, is different to Groucho’s. Whereas the character of Groucho seems to have spawned directly from the personality of Julius Marx, Harpo appears to be left over from the era of silent comedy. Rather than being a stand alone character like Chaplin’s tramp, he is instead symbolic for the entirety of silent film. It is arguable that Harpo character was to bridge the gap between silent comedy and the talkies, but it seems more like he is defending, almost attacking the onset of speech. Groucho and Chico both make full use of cinema’s new found sound recording, whereas Harpo, who does not talk at all, often steals the scene by making fools of the people who do.

‘Animal Crackers’ has transcended the medium of film and is now an ‘experience’. It is a relic of its time; a reflection of the 1930’s imprinted onto film. When one watches ‘Animal Crackers’ it is difficult to recognise the elements of film that today takes for granted. Shot and reverse shots, the proper use of close ups, a plot – are all things rather lacking from ‘Animal Crackers’, but do not make it any less of a film. Maybe film is now unrecognisable when compared to how it started, yet everything owes a great debt to what came before it. With the spectacle becoming progressively hollow in the age of CGI, maybe variety was better. Just like God’s reply to that dying man, “To tell you the truth, Thompson, I didn’t recognise you.”

Directed by: Victor Heerman
Written by: George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind
Produced by:
DOP: George Folsey
Editor: Pierre Collings
Music Score by: Harry Ruby
Starring: Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, Margaret Dumont

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'American Beauty' 1999 (dir. Sam Mendes)

Alice Wybrew (BA) Hons — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:09:59 +0000
Dysfunctional families and suburban illusions in ‘American Beauty’ by Alice Wybrew BA (Hons)

‘American Beauty’ (1999) won the Best Picture Oscar of its year not only because of its affluent script, impeccable acting and creative directing, but because of the way it approached the suburbia of America.

As a setting for many movies over the years, we all recognise the white picket fences and perfectly cut lawns as a sign of suburban living, particularly that of white, middle-class America. Originally presented on television in its virgin form, as the peaceful, clean and happy home to thousands of American citizens, it soon came under scrutiny, resulting in it being cast as the antithesis of what it previously displayed.

Robert Beuka has noted that the film industry eventually recognised ‘that something was never quite right with the image of suburban domesticity presented on television in the 1950’s’ (Beuka, R. 'SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth- Century American Fiction and Film' 2004:108). Indeed as exemplified in many films over the past few decades, it seems that today:

‘the small town is a far likelier setting for terror than reassurance, but the basis of the terror is still the exploitation of the gap between expectations of a haven and the discovery of hell’ (Mackinnon, K. 'Hollywood’s Small Towns: An Introduction to the American Small-Town Movie' 1984:153)

The ‘gap’ Mackinnon speaks of plays an imperative part in Sam Mendes’ ‘American Beauty’. Here we see the exemplification of the divide between ‘image’ and ‘actuality’. As stressed by real estate voyeur Buddy King (Peter Gallagher) (and wholly embodied by the protagonist’s wife Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening)) ‘in order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times’. Indeed at an important work meeting, Carolyn tells her husband Lester (the protagonist played by Kevin Spacey) to live the image, saying that ‘part of my job is to live that image…act happy tonight’.

The idea of going to extreme extents to hide ones flaws in order to maintain a consistent, ideal image is seen throughout so many films. ‘Arlington Road’ (1999), another suburban movie of the same year illustrates this well, along with the obvious ‘The Stepford Wives’ (1975). The concept of living a nightmare, or to sacrifice various moral and ethical beliefs in order to maintain the façade of a ‘perfect’ lifestyle is plentiful in these films, and indeed the façade they work so hard to maintain is almost entirely for the benefit of the outside world and not for themselves.

It is this confliction between the projection of reality and the reality itself that causes the dissolution not only of the Burnham ‘family’, but of the community around them and ultimately the American Dream itself.

The image we are initially presented with in Mendes’ drama is far from what was presented on the TV in the 1950’s. The stereotypical suburban family in this sense is only present in terms of material objects – the big house, big car and impeccably kept front garden are all present.

Lester Burnham is a forty-something business man with a belligerent wife and a disgruntled adolescent daughter, both of whom despise him. He is presented almost exactly how Robert Beuka describes the ‘male’ in suburban films - ‘the pathetic target of scornful humour…or an ineffectual, symbolically castrated victim dominated by an all-powerful matriarch’ (Beuka, R. 'SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth- Century American Fiction and Film' 2004:109) Indeed this is demonstrated during the opening scenes of the film where Carolyn and Jane (Thora Birch) are waiting for Lester by the car, as he rushes out Carolyn says ‘Lester could you make me any more late please?’ at which point his suitcase drops open and papers fly all over the path. However, to say here that Carolyn is an ‘all-powerful matriarch’ would be somewhat generous, as although she is aggressively confident and career focused, rather then dominating Lester, she lives her life completely independently of him. Each member of this family suffers with their own particular problems – Jane is consumed with adolescent insecurities about her body, Carolyn is unhealthily obsessed with her career and Lester, in an attempt to escape his dissatisfaction in both his job and home life, develops a sexual fixation with his daughter’s friend. However, in the face of the community they are just another family with no issues and ‘wonderful roses’.

The first neighbours distinguished early in the film are a homosexual couple who live next to the Burnham’s. Standing out from the conventional norm of heterosexual suburban families, the two ‘Jim’s’ are the only consistent factor in the film. By being an unconventional suburban family (their relationship representing nothing of the stereotype) they turn out to have the happiest and most functional relationship of the entire film. Since they are not constantly trying to impress their neighbours, but instead embracing their own normality, they provide the only constant relationship in the film. For example, when one of the Jims’ is speaking to Carolyn about her roses, there is the feeling that he is genuinely interested in her gardening skills, while it is obvious she is putting on a complete act in order to ensure further compliments and popularity. The other neighbours (new arrivals that are unknown and alien to the setting) offer a more introverted, yet just as disturbed, ideal of family life. In Ian Nathan’s review of the film he refers to this household as ‘a terrifyingly real depiction of an utterly inert family deadened by emotional tyranny’ (Ian Nathan. 'Empire Reviews Central: Review of American Beauty' 1999). This family make far less external effort to ‘keep up with the Jones’, keeping mostly to themselves and struggling with their personal issues in a far more introverted way. It is when the two families meet (specifically Jane and Lester with Ricky (Wes Bentley)) the real issues of each household are revealed. The pressure of ‘looking good’ for the benefit of others is a concept that holds little appeal to the younger generation of each family and they revel in each others disparity. Indeed, as each character begins finding pleasure in activities that exist outside the restraints of suburban living they begin to care less and less about the image that they present. Jane, after establishing her relationship with the ‘weird’ boy Ricky Fitts, begins to see the friendship she has with Angela (Mena Suvari) for what it really is. Likewise, when Lester meets Angela and becomes determined to bed her, any nostalgia he felt for the life he and his wife used to have evaporates and he reverts to the life of a teenager, smoking pot and working in a burger bar. Carolyn starts an affair with her biggest business rival and becomes even more withdrawn from her family than before.

However, now that they are living their reality rather then simply trying to depict one, it seems that, for Lester especially, they have just retreated into a reality as unreal as the first. A middle aged man smoking weed and devoting his time to bedding his daughter’s best friend is something from a soap rather then the real world, so even though Lester has rejected the dismal existence his lived before, it seems that the previous existence was more ‘real’ (or perhaps simply more plausible) than the first. This is seen through Jane as well as she plans to run away with her new love whom she has only meet for a few days – maybe weeks – and is happy to give up everything to simply be away from the horror her family represents.

These alternate realities that the family morph into are abruptly halted. First for Lester when he is finally about to sleep with Angela and she tells him she is a virgin, and then for the rest of the family when a gun shot rings out and they realise that Lester has been shot. Although the effect that Lester’s death has on the family is not shown, the way the event unfolds suggests that everyone is somewhat shaken back into the real world and that the fantasy is at an end.

In ‘American Beauty’ we do not see one conventional, functional family. We are not privy to the easy comparisons that are distinguished in ‘The Stepford Wives’ or even ‘Edward Scissorhands’ (1990). Mendes’ only works with the three families outlined at the beginning, all which have their issues. Because the Burnham’s are not surrounded by the ‘image’ of other ‘perfect’ families, the ‘ideological image’ of a perfectly functioning family is not acknowledged as imperative or significant within the narrative. This assumption is created by the viewer, aware of other media representations of suburbia in conjunction with the ‘American Dream’. Rather then an obvious visual comparison on screen, there is only the viewer’s mental impressions with which to compare it. Lester’s story attends to the desires of a man feeling underappreciated and bored with his life – at the beginning when describing his life he says ‘in a way I’m dead already’. He does not however, indicate a longing for the ideal family that the films genre suggests is lacking. There are obvious moments when he expresses a wish to be closer to his daughter, at one point saying ‘What happened Janey? We used to be pals’ suggesting a previous unity that has been stripped through the toll of suburban life. This is also implied by a cheerful family photo in their house depicting the three of them at a younger age is in black and white rather then colour; as if to suggest that the happiness they shared is so far distant it cannot be recalled in their life now. Lester expresses nostalgia at his previously fruitful relationship with his wife, saying ‘she wasn’t always like this, she used to be happy’. However, rather then trying to reunite his family and create a happy home, he becomes entirely self involved and pushes himself further away from them. Indeed the degradation of the family unit emanates from each individual and the distinct lack of any family values in the first instant.

There has also been the idea that once the family is in jeopardy ‘everything is’, which, having looked at the Burnhams seems only to apply when it is a functional family to start with. The Burnham’s, due to their utter lack of communication and obsession with themselves, were never (at least in the scope of the film and presumably for a while in the story beforehand) the ‘perfect’ family, and their problems and issues were always going to lead to the destruction of their family unit if left unaddressed. This is also true of the Fitts’ family. If one were to view the question as the implication that once the Burnham’s family was at risk, so was the community, the only community we are made aware of are the Fitts’ and the gay couple. Since the Fitts’ family is as much of a time bomb as the Burnham’s it seems unfair to assume that the destruction of their family is a result of the Burnham’s. There are obviously links between the two family’s that aid each others downfall i.e. Ricky selling drugs to Lester causes his father to misinterpret this as his son selling himself for money, consequently banishing his son from the house and ultimately shooting Lester. However, both family units were in peril from the start and it seems obvious that at some point Jane and Ricky would have left their parents in resentment anyway, whether they had met each other or not.

The illusion and reality that play with the whole idea of reality is one that seems continually present in suburban set films. Whether the illusions are addressed directly, much like here in ‘American Beauty’ or more subtlety as in ‘Little Children’ (2006), the boundaries of the real and unreal are always being explored. As a medium, film itself is a constant experiment in terms of what is projected. What is chosen to be shown and how exactly it is presented is an illusion and re-configuration of reality itself. Mendes’ work here therefore, is even more enticing when viewed from this standpoint, as one could consider that if the choice of actors, locations and style of shot were altered but the script remained the same, through the various components of cinematic production how much of the film , and the image of suburbia, change?

Directed by: Sam Mendes
Written by: Alan Ball
Produced by: Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks
DOP: Conrad L. Hall
Editor: Tariq Anwar and Christopher Greenbury
Music Score by: Thomas Newman
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Annette Benning, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari

Filmography:
Arlington Road, 1999, Mark Pellington, Screen Gems
The Stepford Wives, 1975, Bryan Forbes, Palomar Pictures
Edward Scissorhands, 1990, Tim Burton, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
Little Children, 2006, Todd Field, New Line Cinema

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'The Amazing Transparent Man' 1960 (dir. Edger G. Ulmer)

Alexander Mijatovic BA (Hons) — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:22:12 +0000
'The Amazing Transparent Man: Invisible and Deadly' by Alexander Mijatovic BA (Hons)

The film opens in the cover of darkness. A very typical prison break occurs. The criminal makes for the woods, hunted by guards, dogs and an ever present search light. The criminal eventually comes across a lady, Laura Matson (Marguerite Chapman), driving through the area. She drives him to safety, and before the rapid, tense and repetitive music has a chance to crackle out, the first scene is complete.

‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1960) is far from amazing by any standard. Received poorly by critics in the 1960s, this film safely secured its position in the short and cheap B-movie market. I for one found the film, clocking in at just under sixty minutes, was too short to give the characters and genuinely interesting science fiction device any real time to develop.

The main character, Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy) is the before mentioned criminal on the run. Jailed due to theft, he is highly skilled in lock picking and safe cracking. He soon discovers that an ex-Military Major, Paul Krenner (James Griffith) has busted him out on the basis that he helps Krenner get more radium (needless to say, something under lock and key) to further his experiments. This is when he introduces Joey to the Scientist, Doctor Peter Ulof (Ivan Triesault). Ulof is building a machine that will turn anything invisible, but only for a short period of time. Krenner plans to turn Joey invisible in order to make it easier to steal more radium. The greater goal is to use the machine to create an invisible army. Joey is reluctant at first, even angered when his wife and daughter are brought into the equation.

That night, Joey is guarded by Krenner’s henchman; in the form of a local Police officer with a shotgun. He soon knocks the police officer out and goes to see Dr Ulof to find out more about his part in Krenner’s scheme. Ulof has been forced to do this, with the threat of his daughter (locked in the room next door) being killed if he refuses. Joey is then caught by Laura (Marguerite Chapman), but he soon turns her by promising to split any money he steals whilst invisible. Joey steals the radium, but soon turns to robbing a bank. Later, he discovers that the new radium has caused permanent damage. Joey double crosses Krenner and is incredibly ruthless with his new abilities. However, just when we think he has left Laura for dead, he goes back to save her. She is killed by Krenner, forcing a fight between Krenner and Joey, resulting in a massive explosion which kills them both.

A summary of ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ could be worded as a: condensed narrative with minimal characters, locations and production value. However, one could debate the quality of this film in this respect all day. What should be considered above this are the themes of science fiction and political analogy. One thing consistently found when analysing the genre of science fiction, is that it tends to reflect current real life society more than it does some fantastic or cinematic future depiction. If you break through the thin surface, the analogy is clear. A possible interpretation at least, is that this film acts like most other science fictions; by creating a narrative that represents current affairs of the time. In this case; The Cold War.

American media was understandably obsessed with this topic during the 60s. Leading up to its peak in 1963, tension between the two superpowers was high to say the least. Escalation therefore is a key element in this films narrative. It adheres to many well known components of science fiction. Bernardi once suggested that “The genre has been more reactionary and paranoid than it has progressive” (1998:81), and this film is no exception.

For some, Joey Faust might initially induce thoughts of a Humphrey Bogart type character. With his swarve, careless and effortless macho demeanour; he gun tots, fist fights, cigar chomps and womanisers his way through the fifty-seven minutes of science fiction meets political thriller meets film noir (at least in a cinematography sense). But this man has an extra edge; he is a criminal after all, and by the time the classic style bank heist comes around (swag bag and all), you know he’s enjoying the mission he was originally ‘forced into’.

This film can easily be considered a little cliché, perhaps not at the time, but certainly by today’s standards. The opening credits are like any black and white American 1950/60s thriller. The flash light, ‘searching’ for the titles, is not just a foreshadowing of the proceeding prison break, but a nudge and wink at the very transparent theme of the film.
The cinematography is particularly dark and filled with shadow throughout. One cannot help but feel this was designed to hide cheap sets. The opening sequence is especially dark; perhaps a conscious choice of tone, or a side effect of filming during the day and attempting (rather badly) to mimic nightfall.

Despite these clichés, the film has become part of a winning formula; invisibility. Quintessentially science fiction at its best, rivalled only by aliens and time travelling, this film could be said to have inspired many Sci-Fi’s that followed it. One that immediately springs to mind is the Paul Verhoeven film, ‘Hollow Man’ (2000). Similarly, Dr. Peter Ulof can’t help but conjure up images of Frankenstein. His demeanour, lab-talk, crazy hair and eastern European accent are similarities that cannot be denied. Just as Frankenstein asked questions about an emerging technology, electricity; ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ used a nuclear based invisibility machine to ask even bigger questions about the fears surrounding nuclear missiles and their extremely devastating abilities.

Some might even link this style and execution of technology, complete with flashing consoles and futuristic noises to having influenced a certain sci-fi series created by a man called Gene Rodenberry a little over half a decade later.

On the special effects side of things, there are some clever uses of strings and other tricks to suggest objects are being moved by an invisible Joey; not to mention some convincing moves by actors pretending to have their clocks cleaned by Joey. A surprisingly little amount of time however is actually spent with him being invisible, but then considering the length of this film, that is understandable.

A noticeable element in this film is its inherent marginalisation of women; like most science fictions of this era, especially that of pre-Star Trek times, women would serve a psychodynamically prescribed role of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. Taking the only two females in ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’; Laura, the main love interest is easily manipulated by the powerful central male Joey. She is eventually killed for disobeying her master, Krenner. The other female, Ulof’s daughter Maria (Carmel Daniel), spends the majority of the film locked away and in need of a good old fashioned rescuing. If this attitude towards women holds any relevance in this essay, it’s that the portrayals supply good evidence that this film does conform to a classic science fiction structure.

A more subtle but none the less poignant theme of morals and family values is more clearly conveyed by the character of Dr Ulof. Despite his technological devotion, he ultimately turns his back on it in order to save his daughter. In addition to this, he rants to Joey that their lives are not important, and that they must focus on saving their families. This can be seen to go hand in hand with the nuclear war analogies, for the importance in continuing the family line into the next generation was of unrivalled proportions at this time.

Krenner, the Bond type villain in this story, has ideals that have been misguided by an intense sense of patriotism. He now uses his power to manipulate and threaten people to do as he says. Whether this is a reflection of Russian leaders or American leaders, it doesn’t really matter when considering different perspectives. The moral attitude remains the same; one-upmanship will lead to M.A.D (Mutually… assured… destruction).

The ending of this film is a direct reflection of the possible outcomes when fighting with nuclear power. Both Krenner and Joey die whilst they fight in the lab. The outcome; most of the surrounding county is destroyed. Clearly showing what the build up of tension could result in. When the police officers arrive on the case, they question the Doctor, asking him if this technology could some how be saved and used again. The doctor quickly urges that this should be considered a warning to everyone and that this unspeakable power should die with Joey and Krenner. The Ending line: ‘what would you do?’ is clearly aimed at the world leaders sitting with their fingers on the button.

This film is a like a cake. On top, the icing; a short, cliché, poorly received, cheap B-movie. But the more substantial layer underneath suggests greater value. It is an interesting contribution to science fiction with political undertones. This element however is pretty much the only thing to have stood any real test of time. As a whole, its value is measured only by the viewer’s preference to which layer of cake they most enjoy and appreciate.

Directed by:Edger G. Ulmer
Written by: Jack Lewis
Produced by: Lester D. Gutherie, Robert L. Madden, John Miller
DOP: Meredith M. Nicholson
Editor: Jack Ruggiero
Music Score by: Darrell Calker
Starring: Marguerite Chapman, Douglas Kennedy, James Griffith, Ivan Triesault

Filmography
Hollow Man, 2000, Paul Verhoeven, Columbia Pictures
Star Trek (1966), Gene Roddenberry, Paramount Pictures

Bibliography
Bernardi, D (1998) Star Trek and History: Race-Ing Toward a White Future, Rutgers University Press: New Jersey, USA.

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Almost Nothing (Presque Rien)' 2000 (dir. Sébastien Lifshitz)

Martin Taylor MA — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 16:35:28 +0000
'Relationships, Not Relationship! ' 2008 by Martin Taylor MA

On the surface ‘Almost Nothing’ (2000) is the story of how a young man, Mathieu (Jérémie Elkaim) falls in love with Cedric (Stéphane Rideau), how their love blooms and then eventually ends. What comes to light as the film progresses though is that this relationship is just one element of Mathieu’s very troubled mental state and how the many relationships in his life either fuel or are a symptom of that state.

We are introduced to the film with a very melancholy vocal track accompanied by a guitar track. We see Mathieu stood in the middle of a busy street, the colours are very dull and he simply stands for a time. We follow him as he takes the train to a beach setting. As the train journey goes on Mathieu stares out of the window as the trees and passing scenes blur past the window, he also records some of his thoughts on a Dictaphone, leading the audience to feel that they have come across a very reflective character. This sets the tone for the rest of the film in that the audience is transported in time from these scenes, with the older Mathieu, then to the younger Mathieu during one summer when he, his sister, his depressed Mother and their helper Annick (Marie Matheron) were staying at the same beach and Mathieu originally met and fell in love with Cedric and scenes in a hospital where Mathieu spends a lot of time talking to a psychiatrist about Cedric, which can only be assumed to take place between the other two time zones.

What makes this film stand out from just being another film about ‘young love’ is that it is all about Mathieu and his ‘warped’ relationships. Mid way through the film Mathieu refers to his family as “My crazy sister and depressed Mother” which sums up the essence of the film. Mathieu has all these very troubled relationships in his life, so much so that he has developed a rather self-destructive attitude to any new relationships that may arise, which is where Cedric comes in.

To begin with Cedric almost hunts Mathieu like a predator to its prey. The early scene on the beach where Cedric simply stares at Mathieu and then follows him and his sister home sets up how Cedric as a character is used to relationships in his life. As a viewer you are expecting this to be a very sexual, fast relationship, indeed this is probably on some level what Mathieu was expecting. What the viewer, and Mathieu gets instead is a very gentle relationship, Mathieu and Cedric begin with a kiss on the beach and see one another a few times before making love in a very gentle and non-gratuitous way so, as a viewer you are convinced the pair are in love. Later Mathieu is asked by his sister a series of very annoying questions, one of which seems to have a rather traumatic impact on Mathieu when she asks ‘are you in love?’ to which he does not reply. The next scene is of a very rough lovemaking moment where the two lovers do not make eye contact and you get the feeling as the viewer that the romance side has died and Mathieu has turned, or is trying to turn this into a physical rather than emotional relationship. This is perhaps in further response to one of his sister’s earlier questions; ‘isn’t it gross?’. Mathieu is doing that which is considered the negative aspect of his relationship by another person by focusing on the physical aspect; the part his sister sees as ‘gross’. After this Mathieu seems to start to slip away until Cedric becomes injured whilst climbing down into a cave and is then rushed to hospital where Mathieu meets Cedric’s father. The father seems to accept Mathieu, perhaps replacing his somewhat absent father who is referenced throughout the film. This then seems to aid the decision of the two young men living together in Nantes which, for a reason we are never told ends with the two breaking up and Mathieu seeing a psychiatrist.

These elements are beautifully portrayed by the two actors; Elkaim and Rideau and the two love making scenes contrasted together say it all. The first directed at night with very little shown, creating a more intimate setting where you can feel the love these young men have for one another. The second shot in the harsh sun light from further away removing that intimate nature. To aid this contrast both scenes are shot on a beach. The almost cold way that Mathieu tells his mother that he is moving in with Cedric is brilliant, making it seem like he has removed all emotion from what should be a very happy and exciting occasion for a young man. This, as a viewer becomes the reason why we can assume this relationship died. Mathieu can only seem to accept his own relationship with Cedric if it is going to be frowned upon. His sister, Sarah is jealous of her brother’s relationship with Cedric. One scene in particular where she stares at them on the beach as they play around in the water, you can see very clearly that she feels forgotten and Cedric who has seen her staring runs around the beach with Mathieu almost stealing him from her. This seems to result in her then ultimately asking the question that seems to be the catalyst for destroying the relationship.

The nature of Mathieu’s character is established very early on in several scenes, most notably when he finds a dead bird on the ground. He takes this bird home and late at night when he can’t sleep he picks up the bird, which he now has right next to his bed and strokes his lit cigarette through the bird’s feathers. He is established in this moment as a character attracted by ‘decay’ and that which is not decaying he is not interested in.

All these elements are communicated brilliantly by all the actors, and the lighting in the different time zones helps to set the scene whilst the use of music only in the latest time zone (post all these events) seems to illustrate a certain harmony that Mathieu has now found in his life. The trouble with these times zones and their use in the film is more frustrating from a viewer’s point of view. The scenes where Mathieu is in the hospital are almost redundant and interfere with the narrative; one could quite happily make up the sections between the relationship time zone and the late time zone. Hearing the psychiatrist ask a lot of questions about the relationship is just unnecessary and difficult to digest. This middle time zone helps those people who nipped to the toilet mid way the film to catch up.

Having said this the way that Mathieu nurtures the very thin cat that eats from the same food as he does in the later time zone works very nicely, the cat, like the bird exemplifies the state of his relationships – Mathieu is only interested in something that decays, the health of this cat is undeniably poor so Mathieu is happy to share his food and life with it, at least for the few scenes it is in, even referring to him as ‘my little prince charming’ making that connection to Cedric. Had this been a healthy cat he would not have been interested.

The scene where Mathieu realises Cedric has hurt himself when he climbs into the cave seems rather forced in the sense that the writer almost needed a quick way to keep Mathieu interested in the relationship after we saw the lack of love in the second love making scene. Either this love scene needed to come later or as viewers we needed to not see anything further in this time zone. The part with Cedric’s father accepting Mathieu, whilst relevant is a little obvious for what has been a rather symbolic film so far and is almost a disappointment that it is included. What is nice about the rest of the film is that everything seems to happen by chance but the introduction of Cedric’s father is ‘set-up’ as a device and the organic nature of the film disappears for the 10 minutes that we are dealing with this element.

Similarly earlier in the film when we are introduced to Cedric’s ex-boyfriend is a plot device to firstly allow us to hear about Cedric’s prostitution background, which as a viewer we could do without. Cedric is rather brilliantly played and the viewer can piece his background together by themselves; this film is about Mathieu. Secondly the ex-boyfriend is introduced so Mathieu has someone to sum up the film with at the end and again one is left with the feeling that this is perhaps for the viewer who went to the toilet mid way through the film again.

These aspects understood it is without a doubt that this film is a wonderful exploration of how some people have a self-destructive approach to all their relationships ultimately pushing others away from them. The juxtaposition of the opening and closing scenes work very nicely to sum up the film. To begin with Mathieu is on the hectic street alone but surrounded by busy people racing past him and at the end he is sat on a cold beach staring as Cedric’s ex-lover plays football with a young boy. This sums up the film, Mathieu begins surrounded by family but still feels alone and by the end he has resigned himself to be the outsider, watching and observing. This is a film about how Mathieu changes the nature of his relationships and, whilst he may look miserable and seem lonely, this is how he wants it!

Directed by: Sébastien Lifshitz
Written by: Stéphane Bouquet and Sébastien Lifshitz
Produced by: Cécile Amillat
DOP: Pascal Poucet
Editor: Yann Dedet
Music Score by: Perry Blake
Starring: Jérémie Elkaim, Stéphane Rideau, Dominique Reymond, Marie Matheron, Laetitia Legrix

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofin

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'Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut' 2004 (dir. Oliver Stone)

Martyn Conterio — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 09:56:08 +0000
'Historical Revisionism and the Director's Vision: Oliver Stone's 'Alexander Revisited'' 2007 by Martyn Conterio

Oliver Stone's 'Alexander' (2004) is maligned as a cinematic catastrophe, and few critics have kind words for it. I doubt it has many admirers of the cinema-going kind either. 'Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut' (2007) (we are promised) is the third attempt at releasing the movie.

Stone’s most audacious film to date seems to have refused to let go of him, as the past three years have seen further tinkering with the collected footage. The first cut of the film had a dreadful pace and appeared rushed. 'Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut' goes a long way to iron out the initial problems and adds textured layers, a completely different narrative structure and seems more completely in line with Oliver Stone's original intentions. Stone says in the introduction:

"Over the last two years I have been able to sort out some of the unanswered questions about this highly complicated and passionate monarch -- questions I failed to answer dramatically enough. This film represents my complete and last version, as it will contain all the essential footage we shot".

The film's costly $150 million budget seems an insane amount of money to give to a filmmaker as un-Box Office as Oliver Stone. He may be a prestigious, awarding-winning and thought provoking filmmaker but one thing Oliver Stone is not is a sure-fire Hollywood hit machine. However, few directors could be up to the task of creating an intelligent, logistically complex epic that harks back to the days of Abel Gance, Fritz Lang and C.B. deMille.

Alexander the Great and his life story is a wonderful subject for a modern day epic. The Macedonian king’s exploits have passed over time from history to myth. The film lavishes in all manner of cinematic excess: a three hour plus running time, exotic locales, rich production design, lush panoramic cinematography, visceral and viscera-displaying battle scenes centred on an interestingly complex central character.

If the film's aesthetic apes the bygone days of the religious epics of Hollywood and Abel Gance's 'Napoleon’ (1927), Stone's movie is a thoroughly post-modernist take on the Macedonian leader's life.

A major factor in Alexander’s life, and toned down for the film, are the bisexual aspects. The film does not exactly shy away from the theme; however, Oliver Stone is hardly the most subtle and sensitive of filmmakers. Firmly rooted in exploring/exploiting Rosario Dawson‘s body, the ‘gay’ scenes are very coy indeed. A major problem for the script and indeed the advertising of the film was how to successfully tell the story of a military leader who conquered the known world and also took male lovers.

Another recent Greek epic 'Troy' (2004) virtually ignored the homosexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. It seems almost inconceivable to a vast majority of film audiences that the heroes of Greek mythology or infamous historical figures who conquered and destroyed empires could be bisexual. Oliver Stone’s ‘Alexander Revisited’ goes some way to explain that Alexander’s relationship with Hephiastion (his long life friend and lover) was the most enduring and stable of his short life.

There are problem in terms of cinematic representation too. 'Alexander Revisited’ is a historical drama marketed as a violent battle filled epic along the lines of the more financially successful 'Troy'.

A rather bizarre step towards notoriety for the film lies in its casting. The film's characters are played by Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great, Val Kilmer as Philip of Macedon, Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy, Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Casander, Angelina Jolie as Olympia, Christopher Plummer as Aristotle, Jared Leto as Hephaistion and Rosario Dawson playing a princess.

To call the casting decisions 'eccentric' is a large understatement. Whether the performances deliver or fail is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, but nobody can doubt Colin Farrell's commitment to the role, no matter how unintentionally comical it is on occasion.

Casting an Irishman in the role seems to have set off the consensus that most of the American cast must follow suit with Irish lilts - Val Kilmer and Jared Leto in particular. Angelina Jolie attempts a very broad Slavic tone in her speech and the closest any actor gets to the typical Royal Shakespeare Company ‘voice’ is Anthony Hopkins in his small role as the narrator and 'older' Ptolemy whose reminiscences lead the viewer into the world of Alexander the Great.

Every time a character speaks in a cod Irish accent (other than Farrell and Rhys Meyers, of course) there is a slight air of amusement to the proceedings as it is so damn unusual. However much the RSC-style actors have dominated epic movies in the past, the use of their voices is no more ridiculous than having ancient Macedonians speaking with Irish accents. ‘Alexander Revisited’ due to the unusual array of accents and attempts at accents, is lumbered with a rather unfortunate comic weight.

There does seem to be an inherent problem with the script’s dialogue too. ‘Alexander Revisited’ is a film full of grandiose verbosity that is completely unmemorable, yet often delivered with gusto. There is not a single quotable line of dialogue in the entire film - surely an indicator of classic movie status.

Whereas Mel Gibson’s battle cry of ‘Freeeeeedom!’ in 'Braveheart' (1995), for example, became instant cinema history, there is nothing remotely approaching that emotional, pivotal scene. It is quite a shame as Oliver Stone’s movies in the past have been littered with memorable scenes and dialogue, yet in ‘Alexander Revisited’ there is nothing approaching the level of his other screenplays.

The struggle for Oliver Stone, and it could be described as a dialectical struggle, was to produce an epic movie, to push the cinematic boundaries, to yield a story and vision with which he became passionate about, indeed, obsessed by versus the demands of producers and the modern audience that want to be thrilled, captivated and engrossed.

Oliver Stone’s attempt to craft a ‘complete’ and perhaps definitive movie version of the life of Alexander the Great was helped by British historian Robin Lane Fox. However one needs to look closely at the demands of cinema as an art, practice and discipline compared to the demands of historical perspectives. Oliver Stone's 1992 'JFK' similarly revised history to suit its particular theories.

There have been many viewpoints and opinions given on the reputation of Alexander the Great, his life and achievements. Much that is known of Alexander's life comes from books copied from original accounts now lost, the cult of Alexander the Great gained momentum in the Middle Ages, and Stone certainly casts the Macedonian king's deeds in a romantic light with Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography bathing whole scenes rich textures that are highly reminiscent of pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Mixed in with the romantic vision are displays of tactical military genius and scenes showing Alexander's tolerance of other cultures. Alexander is cast as a part dreamer and part adventurer - for a tyrant, he's a pretty astute and tolerant. Oliver Stone's romantic historical revisionism offers no room for questions of bloody tyranny, the multiple genocides committed throughout Asia and most strikingly glaring - there is no acknowledgement, discussion or opinion of Western Imperialism. It seems Stone wishes to ignore modern day political warmongering and empire building as it would clash with his romanticised creation.

Stone sets Alexander the Great as a troubled man - a Hamlet-like figure, a military genius, and willing to push himself and the rest of the world into a new age of discovery.

The film's highlights are easily the Battle of Gaugamela on the dusty plains of Persia and the jungle battle in India. These scenes are simply staggering in their logistical complexity, and Stone excels himself by offering the viewer some of the most gruesome footage of hand to hand combat ever committed to celluloid. Rodrigo Prieto’s sun drenched, orange-hued photography and handheld close ups places the audience deep amongst the chaos. Oliver Stone and his editors expertly cut the shots - splitting the battles into ‘zones’ and employ cross-cutting between various blocks of action to demonstrate the clever tactics used by Alexander and his generals to confuse the Persian army.

It is in these scenes that Oliver Stone’s skill as a filmmaker truly astounds. The later jungle battle in India, although shorter in length than Guagamela, is even more chaotic and bloody thirsty. The Indian battle features a most heart-stopping, jaw dropping tableau vivant - arguably the single best shot in any Oliver Stone movie:

Alexander and his trusted horse Becephalus attack a battle prepared elephant in a slowed down long shot that builds to a staggering climax. The elephant and the horse rise up on their hind legs in confrontation - Alexander’s sword is raised high above his head.  It is a shot that encapsulates all of the madness, bravery and genius that Stone sees in his imagined version of Alexander the Great.

As Alexander is struck by a spear to the chest, he falls to the ground as Becephalus is hacked and stabbed to death by the Indian soldiers. Alexander looks up to the trees and in another audacious masterful cinematic stroke, the photography switches from deep greens and rich earthy colours to a bleached out red and pink hue. It is a dreamlike moment, as Alexander appears close to death - the world and all its possibilities slowly dissolve. Alexander is carried by his men, almost as if drifting through a reverie.

‘Alexander Revisited’ is a vastly superior cut than the original, rushed cinema release in 2004. The narrative structure is less linear and skips back and forth throughout the thirty-two years of Alexander’s life exploring his family set up in closer detail and his relationships with both his male and female lovers.

As Oliver Stone says in his filmed introduction; ‘Those of you who loved the original cut will love this even more and those that hated the film, will probably continue to hate it’. ‘Alexander Revisited’ is undoubtedly a labour of love for Stone - tellingly it could have ruined his entire career...his follow up movie being the truly ludicrous and sycophantically studio-pleasing ‘World Trade Center’ (2006).

Oliver Stone’s final version is still a bizarre viewing experience that is often unintentionally camp, weighted down with ponderous dialogue, eccentric performances and yet often scales the heights of cinematic artistry with its costumes, cinematography and a fantastically bombastic score from Vangelis. ‘Alexander Revisited’ is not the disaster many claim, and overtime, it might gain a cult following.

Directed by: Oliver Stone
Written by: Oliver Stone, Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis
Produced by: Moritz Borman, Thomas Schuly, Iain Smith and John Kilik
DOP: Rodrigo Prieto
Editor: Tom Nordberg, Yann Herve and Alex Marquez
Music Score by: Vangelis
Starring: Colin Farrell, Anthony Hopkins, Jared Leto, Val Kilmer, Angelina Jolie, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Christopher Plummer

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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'Ahlaam' 2005 (dir. Mohammad Al Daradji)

Sarah Jung, BA (Hons) MA — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:38:19 +0000
'Ahlaam: A City in Despair' by Sarah Jung, BA (Hons) MA

Warning: This review contains spoilers deemed necessary for an accurate discussion

The title of Mohammad Al Daradji’s ‘Ahlaam’ (2005) is translated as dreams. After an initial viewing one could be forgiven for thinking the word for nightmare would have been as appropriate. The film takes the viewer through the events that affect three protagonists; Ali (Bashir Al Majid ), Mehdi (Mohamed Hashim) and of course Ahlaam (Aseel Adel). The film opens with a mixture of flash forwards and flashbacks during which we see shots of a woman who is later revealed as Ahlaam dressing for her wedding day. The director chooses to intersperse these particular scenes with lots of over the shoulder shots and extreme close ups, but not of people’s faces, rather their animated body parts, giving these scenes an almost voyeuristic quality. After all, the bride is getting dressed and viewer is in fact peeking. These events are then juxtaposed with the real life news footage of bombs going off in Baghdad during a war. In the event that anyone was unaware of Iraq’s fate in recent years this is a swift reminder of the type of violence the city suffered.

Credits remind the viewer when we are watching scenes from the Gulf War, before the fall of Saddam and immediately after. Prior to the war, we see that Baghdad’s streets are overflowing with children. The city is therefore symbolically full of life. It has a hope for a future which these children represent. Ali, is a soldier, who is kind to children and beggars and yearns for a day when he is no longer a soldier. He is frequently told by others that “one day military service will be but a memory”. At this point one notices that he can still dream of a life outside of the army, be it looking after his mother or taking on a different career. In a different part of the city Ahlaam is being courted by Ahmed (Mortadha Saadi) a man who is deeply in love with her, much to the happiness of her family and indeed herself. Mehdi is a stressed student but one who has fun with his fellow students. In the scenes prior to Saddam’s downfall the viewer can also see that each of the three individuals faces their own everyday life stresses. Ahlaam has studies and family responsibilities; Ali had a sick mother and Mehdi has the worries of his future as a doctor.

However even before the war they all have troubles to deal with. Ali’s best friend Hassan (Kaheel Khalid) has had enough of army life and complains that “we’re not even treated like humans here” to which Ali’s hopeful response is “we can’t let them affect us”. Superior guards and soldiers are rude and aggressive to their subordinates and the depiction of army life is not a positive one. It is revealed that Hassan has spent years being given incorrect medication from the army for a condition. He understandably feels that decent treatment lies over the border, outside of Iraq. Mehdi’s dreams are dampened when a fellow student points out that he is unlikely to be accepted for the Masters degree he wishes to study as he is not a member of Saddam’s Baath’ist party and as his father was executed as a communist this is even less likely. The sudden look of sadness and concern on Mehdi’s face is almost crude but the expression is effective and this is not a film about subtleties. The point is clear: during the reign of Saddam Hussein if one wished to advance in a professional vocation then party allegiance played a huge role and your family’s politics was equally as important in deciding such matters. Ahlaam has different concerns as she is frightened by seeing people being beaten and arrested in the street, taken from their loved ones to who knows where. As the filmic countdown to the war begins we see all three become more anxious and alarmed at the events they are experiencing and witnessing.

However things take a shocking twist when we see the city two days before the fall of Saddam. If life was bad before it is terrible now, as Ali and Ahlaam are now residents in the psychiatric hospital that Mehdi is working in. They are both severely unhinged and are not even shadows of their former selves but shadows of those if such things exist. Flashbacks reveal that Hassan was killed in a bomb attack which has left Ali traumatized. He is unable to accept the loss of his friend. We see that he attempted to carry the body of his comrade over the border to gain him medical help as if by giving Hassan what he wanted he would somehow survive his injuries. It is positively painful to watch him stumble while carrying Hassan’s body and he carries his friend from night fall to well past sunrise. He is found by soldiers who then arrest him and his incarceration in the hospital seems wrong. The viewer learns that he tried to desert the army but this is a man who is clearly not sane anymore and to punish him through a military court by severing his ear seems immoral. A sane man can acknowledge his actions but Ali is in a completely different state of consciousness. The viewer is forced to question the nature of punishing the mentally ill: if a man is mad why inflict such punishment on him?

Ahlaam is in the hospital in her wedding dress, the result of mental trauma brought on by the sudden arrest and disappearance of Ahmed. She appears to have totally lost her mental faculties. The images of her shock therapy are alarming and realistic. They are then juxtaposed with images of bombs going off. As the city is being blitzed, so to is Ahlaam. When she later wakes from the treatment (and a dream of Ahmed) she finds that the doctors and nurses (who brutally held her down during her treatment) are dead and the place is being looted as a result of an air strike. The incoherent Ali sees Mehdi hurt in a scuffle and this seems to affect him and the viewer sees him change from infantile to focused within minutes (although it is not clear how the half naked Ali will round up the lost patients!). As he starts to find his former helpful self he rescues an injured man from in front of an oncoming train. If the film’s setting was not so upsetting one would feel nostalgia during this scene for the black and white silent rescue films where a damsel is saved by the handsome stranger from a fate worse than death.

An interesting moment is when Ali manages to find a working light after contemplating over a broken torch that he previously found. He is no longer in the darkness of his confined cell and yet these symbols of light are meaningful to him. We can argue that torches are a visual connection for the viewer of the link between Ali and Hassan, who used to either ask for lights to be turned off or shine torches in his friend’s face. Light plays an interesting part in this film. In the scenes prior to the fall of Saddam, much of the film is shot in the dark and yet the characters had hopes and dreams in their lives. Hopes of a future at the very least (In Ahlaam’s case this involved having 500 children!). After the fall, when the looting takes place and the sun is out, they all seem lost, physically and emotionally.

Towards the very end Ahlaam is sexually abused and this is indicative of the horrific events that can take place in a city or country internally during a time of a national crisis. During a war human beings are capable of showing bravery, mercy and compassion…but as we are shown, they also take advantage and violate others. The crime of rape is considered inhumane in the Middle East. To show one in a city which is being blitzed implies that that the inhumanity of some is always lingering beneath the surface and unlike war films which show people working together, here we are presented with a different reality, one where an immoral man can still take advantage of a vulnerable woman. The fact that the rape scene is immediately followed by shots of the empty city is very unsettling, particularly when we go back to Ahlaam and see drops of blood being washed away in the bathroom where the crime takes place. There was no one around her, she was literally cornered and to see the rapist and his friends simply dump her unconscious body in the street like garbage, even though they previously called her ‘gold’ leaves the viewer somewhat despairing also. It all seems so relentless and cold.

Stylistically the film is brave. ‘Ahlaam’ uses many non-professional actors and at times this is noticeable, such as when Mehdi looks forlorn on hearing of his future prospects. This does not cause an obvious distraction but one cannot help observe this at several points in the film, perhaps because an audience will heavily garner information from an actor’s use of body language. Occasionally the translation of the subtitles seems rather formal and static, even a little clunky. This is particularly the case for the scenes with long greetings but this is a minor point. One actual criticism however is that the film is a little too long. Ten minutes could easily have been edited off particularly if these had been the repeated scenes of Ali, Ahlaam and Mehdi at the time of the hospital patient’s escaping. If the reason for this was to cause a confusion in the mind of the viewer which reflected the confusion of Ahlaam as she wandered helplessly then some success has been achieved. However aside from this, the repetition does not seem to have any other narrative function and will potentially cause a different type of confusion and dare I say it, indifference in viewers who start to tire of seeing the minutes of the endless wandering.

At the end Ali finds the lost Ahlaam, only to be shot by a sniper. Just before he dies he remembers who he is and his final words are ‘I am Ali’. It is clear that Ali felt he needed to be redeemed but we do not necessarily agree with this or see why. Yes he was haunted by feelings of being unable to save Hassan but this was out of his hands. In contrast, the director chooses to have Ahlaam's rapist not suffer any consequence and yet surely he is the one who really needs to atone or be punished for what he did, a crime which in Iraq is considered by many to be deserving of execution as a punishment. The events that unfold in this film are shocking and will fill a viewer with different amount of anger, frustration and anxiety. The city is being ravaged and so are the inhabitants. As one character points out, “It is sad. Baghdad has fallen. So we all must fall.”

Directed by: Mohammad Al Daradji
Written by: Mohamed Al-Daradji
Produced by: Mohamed Al-Daradji, Atea Al-Daradji
DOP: Mohamed Al -Daradji
Editor: Ian Watson, Ghassan Abdallah
Music Score by: Naseer Shamma
Starring: Aseel Adel, Bashir Al Majid, Mohamed Hashim, Behjet Al-Juburi

© Montage Film Reviews / Eskimofinn

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Another Gay Sequel: Gays gone Wild 2008 (dir. Todd Stephens)

Rob Gallagher MSt — Sun, 7 Jun 2009 08:03:52 +0000
'Back for More' by Rob Gallagher MS't

‘Another Gay Sequel’ is totally inessential. Its title, with that implicit exasperated question mark – another? Really now? - admits as much. While the first ‘Another Gay Movie’ retained an (admittedly tenuous) grip on reality, this follow-up, subtitled Gays Gone Wild, is proudly outrageous and implausible from the off. Production values are low, the acting by turns wooden and hammy and the plot paper-thin: a bunch of guys vacationing in Fort Lauderdale compete to see who can get laid the most. But despite its lackadaisical attitude and resolutely lowbrow tone the movie is both likeable and – albeit more or less unintentionally – a fascinating commentary on the mechanics of modern gross-out comedies. In fact it is precisely because everything about ‘Another Gay Sequel’ is so blasé and slapdash that this is the case; ostensibly anarchic and irreverent mainstream comedies are exposed as tame, contrived and cynical by comparison. Ironically, then, Todd Stephens’ film is worth bothering with chiefly because it isn’t bothered by what you’ll think of it.

That ‘Another Gay Sequel’s’ title suggests a surfeit of ‘gay’ movies is, of course, also ironic; for if the multiplexes are glutted with movies that could be called ‘gay’ in the pejorative, synonymic-of-‘lame’ sense, there are very few movies that centrally or sensitively represent homosexual experience. When male/male eroticism does figure in Hollywood comedies it tends to be – befitting a culture where ‘gay’ has become a put-down - as something the audience should consider inherently funny and/or gross (representations of female/female eroticism, of course, tend to be about the titillation of a male audience). While recent ‘bromantic’ comedies like ‘I Love You Man’ (2009) and ‘I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry’ (2007) may gesture towards P.C. tolerance, they hardly represent significant departures from this model. Indeed, a kiss between Kevin James and Ben Stiller was reportedly excised from the latter for fear that the American ratings board would deny the film a revenue-optimising PG-13 rating. Given the reliance of much modern American comedy on ‘I can’t believe they showed that!’ moments such censorship is especially exasperating. The suppression suggests the classic homophobic formulation about having no problem with homosexuality but there being ‘no need to shove it in people’s faces.’

Such attitudes have been discussed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon. Dubbing ours a ‘culture of “knowingness”’ they have attempted to trace the circulation of rumour, innuendo and open secrets within it. The problem, they argue, with ‘the reserve force of information, the reservoir of presumptive, deniable and unarticulated knowledge’ at large in society is that this tacit and implicit information can be denied, disavowed and repressed as soon as it becomes convenient to do so (or compromising not to do so). Such denials allow the ‘public [to] imagine[] itself as a reservoir of ever-violable innocence’ (Tendencies 222). Tabloid papers’ contradictory self-presentation, their oscillation between the roles of unhoodwinkably jaded sages and perennially outraged moral guardians, is a prime example of this mechanism at work. Presumed acknowledgement, toleration or consensus can evaporate when it comes into play, with social minorities tending to suffer the consequences. And it is exactly this capacity to convince ourselves we’re surprised, shocked and/or amused by things that we actually already know that is central to a lot of comedy – not least gross-out movies, which are abetted in their attempts to shock by how sanitized and prettified even Hollywood ‘realism’ is. Although such films induce awkward laughter rather than outraged ire, that laughter tends to be as normative as the hysteria whipped up by tabloid scare mongering, reinforcing hegemonic values and prejudices. This is something that becomes especially apparent when watching ‘Another Gay Sequel’, which, for a gross-out movie, is remarkable for not looking over your shoulder, digging you in the ribs and demanding you be disgusted/appalled/incredulous all the time. It’s both more explicit and less proud of how explicit it is than mainstream comedies – especially, of course, when it comes to the representation of gay sexuality, which is both present and emphatically embodied in a way unthinkable in comparable movies (the extent to which letting guys look at semi-nude guys is part of ‘Another Gay Sequel’s’ appeal – and the extent to which it self-reflexively acknowledges this – is something I’ll consider later). This up-front attitude makes for a weirdly mature gross-out movie. It also makes it more acceptable when, as they often do, jokes fall flat; rather than press-ganging viewers into going ‘eeeeew’ the movie merely shrugs, moves on, tries again.

And when ‘Another Gay Sequel’ really tries to be gross it can reach nigh on Artaudian levels of unpleasantness. Incest, dismemberment and the full spectrum of bodily excreta all feature. The quantities of piss, spit, vomit, blood, faeces and spunk that get flung about align the film as much with porn and horror – marginal genres centrally concerned with the body and its modalities – as with comedy. This focus on the Kristevan abject has its counterpart at a meta- level, insofar as the film also perpetually exhibits messy and off-putting aspects of movie production, foregrounding the sort of processes that normally go on behind closed doors. Thus there’s in-jokes about having to recast characters who appeared in the first movie because their agents got uppity about them being typecast as gay, while a raft of flagrant product placements afford an insight into how Stephens scraped together a budget. The film is also unabashed about letting viewers ogle its actors. At one point a couple engage in a narrative-advancing conversation during foreplay, almost as if the movie is sugaring the expository pill with some consolatory nudity (incidentally the scene, despite its slightly exploitative tone, also feels realistic – how many important decisions do get made in bed?). This focus on keeping the customer satisfied, along with the lurid grading (hyper-vivid, David LaChappelle-style aqua and fuchsia tints abound), the animated sequences, the self-referential humour, the ‘celebrity’ cameos (Ru Paul, Perez Hilton) and the shonky special effects all serve to announce the film’s artificiality, its made-ness, and do so with the same refreshing unconcern for convention and the suspension of disbelief that is ‘Another Gay Sequel’s’ hallmark, distinguishing it from mass-market comedy.

The film also differs from recent teen comedies in other significant ways. While hat-tips to horror classics (‘Carrie’ (1978), ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968)) and staples of the camp canon (‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane’ (1962), ‘Showgirls’ (1995), ‘Splash’ (1984), Busby Berkeley musicals) pepper ‘Another Gay Sequel’, the movie is more than a tissue of spoofs a la Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg’s ‘Scary Movie’ (2000), ‘Date Movie’ (2006), ‘Epic Movie’ (2007) and ‘Meet the Spartans’ (2008). Unlike Seltzer and Friedberg’s lazy cash-ins, wherein ‘getting’ what they’re riffing on is the whole point of the exercise, ‘Another Gay Sequel’ doesn’t expect viewers to have seen everything it cites – just as well given how old and/or esoteric many of these movies are. You might feel more included if you do pick up on a reference but you won’t feel excluded for failing to do so. Moreover, the film’s attitude to the movies it cites is one of affection - however ironically inflected - rather than the derisive mockery of most parody films. The difference could be equated to laughing with someone as versus laughing at them, a distinction anyone remotely queer is likely to be all-too familiar with. Thus when Nico (Jonah Blechman) channels bygone silver screen heroines his vamping is funny but transcends pastiche by virtue of a palpable affection. Blechman’s performance, in fact, is one of the film’s strongest facets; he manages to imbue a character that could easily have been a shrill caricature with plausibility and a genuine emotional pull – no mean feat when all around him is cursed tikis, mermen and splooging seagull shit. He even makes a twenties-style song and dance number about the erotics of piss (“whenever I feel dour / I dream and count the hours / ‘Til I dance in golden showers / With you”) moving. And just as Blechman’s character is more likeable than he should be, so the film (which - and I may not have made this clear enough – is mostly awful) manages to be more than the sum of its distinctly sub par parts. It’s lazy, puerile and far too transparent in its bid for ‘so bad it’s good’ status – an accolade which, as any aficionado of camp will affirm, can only be attained when not aimed for – but it retains a certain appeal nonetheless.

This makes it all the more frustrating that the movie fails to develop potentially interesting ideas and plot strands. Perez Hilton’s performance is as painfully funny as anyone who’s visited his blog might expect. His concussion-induced conversion to Catholicism, however, and his subsequent upbraiding of the shag-happy holidaymakers for perpetuating and substantiating stereotypes of gay hedonism, raises issues about ethics, archetypes and identity that could have been fruitfully explored, but which the movie fails to really grapple with. If there is a ‘message’ it’s a pretty vague one. By the time the credits roll the ‘slut’ of the group’s met a cut Cuban virgin and learnt he could stand to be a bit more monogamous, the couple have had a resoundingly successful threesome and realised they could stand to be a bit less monogamous and the diva-ish Nico has come to terms with the fact that everybody feels a bit lonely sometimes. Hardly profound philosophical insights – but who would look for those from a gross-out film? The last scene also sees another sequel mooted, with Nico toasting “Another Gay Movie Strikes Back: Gays in Space.” As hair-raising, charming and peripherally thought-provoking as ‘Another Gay Sequel’ occasionally is, one can’t but think that - even for a franchise that specialises in taking things over the top - that would be a bridge too far.

Directed by: Todd Stephens
Written by: Eric Eisenbrey and Todd Stephens
Produced by: Jonah Blechman, Derek Curl
DOP: Carl Bartels
Editor: Spencer Schilly
Music Score by: Marty Beller
Starring: Jonah Blechman, Jake Mosser, Aaron Michael Davies, Jimmy Clabots

Bibliography
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, 1994, Routledge
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982, Columbia University Press

Filmography
Another Gay Movie, 2006, Todd Stephens, Luna Pictures
Carrie, 1976, Brian de Palma, Redbank Films
Date Movie, 2006, Aaron Seltzer, New Regency Pictures
Epic Movie, 2007, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, New Regency Pictures
I Love You Man, 2009, John Hamburg, Dreamworks SKG
I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, 2007, Dennis Dugan, Universal Pictures
Meet the Spartans , 2008, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, New Regency Pictures
Night of the Living Dead, 1968, George A. Romero, Image Ten
Scary Movie, 2000, Keenen Ivory Wayans
Showgirls, 1995, Paul Verhoeven, United Artists
Splash, 1984, Ron Howard, Touchstone Pictures
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962, Robert Aldrich

© Montage Film Reviews & Eskimofinn

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