Yearly Archives: 2008

Interviews

INTERVIEW WITH HARMONY KORINE

1 Comment
Harmony Korine

For much of the 1990s, writer-director Harmony Korine was readily identifiable as the enfant terrible of the American indie scene, a twisted prodigy with a penchant for drugs, drama and artful rebellion. Now, after a lengthy hiatus, he returns with his most surprising work yet: the tender, warm-hearted Mister Lonely, a comic parable of love, loss and the importance of faith.

Tom Huddleston: The writing of Mister Lonely coincided with you pulling yourself out of a long dark period. Can you talk about how you ended up there?

Harmony Korine: Well, I guess about ten years ago, during my last movie, something happened to me. I was living in New York and I wasn’t very happy. I started to feel disconnected, it’s no secret I was very much into narcotics at the time, and it started to fall apart. I started to feel like most of the people around me were phonies, crooks and idiots. And then I began to question myself, like, if these are the people that are around me, I must be putting off that as well. So then I wanted to do nothing but disappear, just get out of that world. Basically I just kind of more or less disintegrated.

TH: Did you honestly consider quitting the movie business?

HK: Definitely. Absolutely. And it wasn’t just quitting. I mean, I’ve had fantasies about quitting almost since I began. It was a weird thing, because all I ever wanted to do was make movies, and then when I started making movies all I wanted to do was quit making movies. It wasn’t the films, I loved making the films. It was everything that came before and after.

TH: Mister Lonely is about a character rediscovering companionship and happiness. In that sense is it a very personal story?

HK: Definitely. There are all these ideas about faith and hope, wanting to be someone other than who you are. Being in beautiful places and feeling awful. A lot of searching, inventing your own reality.

TH: There seems to be more of a sense of joy here than in any of your other movies.

HK: Well, the truth is… It’s no secret I’m not a big fan of plots in films. I mean, I love stories and I love characters, but with anything I’ve done I’ve wanted to create a mood, a tone, and a feeling. I felt this movie would succeed or fail based on me getting across this sense of hope and happiness. Or at least the idea that in amongst all the horror there’s still some beauty, there’s still a kind of poetry to it all. The film before, Julien (Donkey-Boy), in some ways was very bleak, like a dark hole, and it reflected my mental state at the time. But I was feeling differently with this, and I wanted to make people laugh, and do something different.

TH: You seem to have a poet’s ability to encapsulate very distinct feelings in single shots or brief scenes.

HK: Sometimes I don’t really know where they come from. I try not to question it too much, it’s good when it becomes an intuitive thing. Certain images speak. I can say more in images and music than I can in actual conversation.

TH: What made you want to tell a story about celebrity impersonators?

HK: Visually, it was interesting to me. I like the way they look. And I like obsessive characters. It seems such an odd way to make your way in the world, this bizarre existence. Living as someone else, living as an icon. But at the same time I thought it would be interesting to see, you know, Sammy Davis Jr. mow the yard, or Abe (Lincoln) tending sheep, or James Dean washing clothes. Those were just things I wanted to see.

TH: Were you concerned that it could become kitsch, or seem to be making fun?

HK: Definitely, that was something I was always aware of. Obviously, I didn’t want it seem like a joke. I didn’t want people to be doing impersonations the whole time, you’d get tired of them. I was more interested in the human underneath.

TH: Your father was a tap dancer, and there’s always this vaudeville influence in your films. What do you think it is about that era that fascinates you?

HK: More than anything, I’ve always admired show-people. I always had a great affinity for people who can walk on stage and do a little performance, give their blood, sweat and tears for the people out there, make ’em laugh, change the mood. People that live by their wits and their creativity. So I think I’ve always just loved those elements of performance and show-people, that carnival nature.

TH: It seems in your films that dancing, or any unconscious movement, signifies happiness and release.

HK: Man, it’s fun watching people dance. Sometimes I just sit on YouTube… you get a lot of these almost novelty dancers, with hip-hop and stuff, you get a lot of these strange dances that I really love.

TH: Conversely, do you think you mistrust intellectualism?

HK: It’s like what Herzog says, it’s false currency. I would rather you feel something than for me to have to explain it to you, intellectualise it. It’s not the way I work. It’s why I love Cassavetes’ films, because they just are, you just feel it. You sit through a movie like Husbands and it’s more than a movie, it’s like a life experience that you’ve just shared with these characters. And that’s not to say that all films should be like that, because I also really enjoy movies like Knocked Up, really debased comedies I enjoy as well, those just aren’t the kinds of movies that I make.

TH: You seem closer, more sympathetic to your characters here than in either Kids or Gummo, do you think that’s fair? There doesn’t seem to be any artistic distance between the camera and the subjects. You’re with them all the way.

HK: Yeah, I think so. But I think, in Gummo, at the time I didn’t feel that far away from some of those people either, I just think maybe they were more extreme, so it was more of a provocation. With this, I guess that some of the characters are maybe less sadistic.

TH: Do you think that’s a sign of growing confidence as an artist?

HK: (laughs) I hope not. I don’t know, as soon as people start saying things like that I start to get nervous. I don’t ever want to get that confident, or too mellow. But with this movie, after going through so much shit in my life, I really wanted to push myself. I wanted to do things I never thought I would do, and express ideas and feelings that I hadn’t before. I think it was important for me to try that.

TH:Do you feel like it’s perhaps more traditional as well, in terms of its character development and narrative?

HK:Yes, without question. Those movies were more deconstructed, they were more about breaking down image and language. Julien and especially Gummo were more about how I wanted to see films, in a kind of fragmented, random, chaotic order. With this story, I didn’t feel like it needed that. It needed something simpler.

TH:Obviously the key eccentricity in Mister Lonely is the parallel story. What do you think the importance was of telling these two stories simultaneously?

HK:Even though they never intersect, I thought that they both spoke to the same ideas, the same philosophy. This idea of wanting to be someone other than who you are, change and faith and obsession and identity. And in some ways I thought that the nuns’ story served as a kind of poetic punctuation, or an allegory of sorts.

TH:Did you at any point consider cutting the secondary narrative, issuing it as a short, or as a prelude to the main narrative?

HK:Definitely. Because they started out as two separate ideas, but I thought they’re very similar, they’re both saying something very close.

TH:Inasmuch as this is a film about faith, you seem in the end to be saying that such faith is essentially misguided, that it all turns bad. Do you think that’s fair?

HK:I think there’s a few ways to look at it. I don’t really have an intention, so maybe that is what it says, I don’t really know. Sometimes, to me, it seems like the people who are the biggest dreamers, and the most pure in heart, in the end get hurt the worst. Society and the real world, I’ve noticed, have a way of kicking your ass at the end. But I also think that, for me, there’s nothing more important than the dream. The dream sustains us. It’s not about a person’s individual successes or failures it’s about the dream. At least for me, it’s the dream that always helps me make it through the day.

TH:Do you yourself have faith in anything?

HK:Of course. I think it’d be awful to walk these streets without it. But, you know, faith in anything. I have faith in the trees. I have faith in the belly-dancers.

TH:Did you ever consider giving the movie a happy ending?

HK:I think it does have one.

TH:Not for the nuns.

HK:Right, right, right. Yeah, maybe not, but who knows? Maybe they’re in some other world right now.

TH:How has the film been received so far?

HK:So far, so good. With my movies, in some ways, I’m delusional. In the back of my mind I always think it’s going to be, you know, a sequel to The Shawshank Redemption, or that I’m going to have these massive commercial successes. Then when the film is shown people tell me how insane that is, and how misguided I am.

The conversation then turned to Harmony’s earlier career, where the success and notoriety he earned writing Larry Clark’s infamous Kids quickly translated into mainstream fame, late night talk-show appearances and his own debut directing gig, Gummo.

TH:How was it being thrown into the spotlight so young? I saw you on Letterman (look on YouTube for these ridiculous interviews). You seemed to be playing with him a little.

HK:I was a kid, I was having fun. Making it up as I was going. I didn’t get in it for a lot of the reasons that most people get in it, so I figured if I was going to do it, I was going to make it my own. It was fun. I did a lot of stuff that caused me problems later in life, but I was enjoying it.

TH:Is it fair to say you were something of a nihilist as a young man? Life seems pretty bleak for most of your characters, even if they do have a little fun along the way.

HK:Sure. I’m sure there’s a lot of that in there.

TH:How much of Gummo came from personal experience?

HK:A lot of that movie was filmed with people and friends that I knew growing up, in locations that I was very familiar with. But it was kind of both, it was things that I was making up and manipulating, mixed in with straight documentary. That movie was really just trying to get images from all directions, wanting to create a tapestry.

TH:Do you think it’s fair to say you had a tendency at that stage to pick the most grotesque aspects of the world you were exploring?

HK:I don’t know. Those are things I’m interested in, those were the types of pictures that I wanted to take, and those were the types of people and characters. It’s what I loved, those were people that I loved, and found interesting. Some of them, yes, you could say that they were bizarre, you could refer to some of that as grotesque, but for me that’s what I loved, that’s what was exciting to me. Those were the types of images that I hadn’t seen on screen. And I still love it. It’s still what it is.

TH:We know what happened to the principal cast of Kids, but what happened to the cast of Gummo? Are you still in touch with any of them?

HK:A lot of them didn’t fare so well. A lot of my friends are in prison, a few of them died from, you know, sniffing paint. It was a rougher road for those guys.

TH:How was it directing Werner Herzog the first time on Julien Donkey-Boy?

HK:It was great. When you see him, that’s how he is. He’s always exciting to work with. When you explain the character, when he gets in and understands it, you kind of just let him go. Yeah, Werner is a real performer.

TH:How much improvisation did you do?

HK:Improv is based on ideas. Improvising, for me, comes with the script, and letting the characters, actors leave their lines and take it in some other direction. With someone like Werner you can do a lot, but there are some people who are horrible at it.

TH:You talked a lot at the time of Julien Donkey-Boy about finding a new cinema, about finding new narrative directions in film. Do you still harbour those kinds of ambitions?

HK:I guess it depends. With this movie, it wasn’t about that. It was because the story seemed, to me, like it needed to be told in a simple way. And so I think it changes with each film. I have no interest in doing straight movies, I just don’t care about it, it’s not my thing. I don’t think like that, so I think my movies will always have something to offer in the form of non-narrative or, you know, something different. But I’m not staying up at night trying to discover new forms of cinema. It’s not like a science project. It’s not a math equation.

Interview by Tom Huddleston

Features

WOMEN ON THE VERGE

Darling International

I worked as a cinema usherette for a while. One of the great things about the job was being able to observe the audience’s response to film. I would sit on my fold-down usherette’s chair, at the perfect angle to watch the audience watching the screen. One of the most striking responses occurred at a screening of Jane Campion’s The Piano. The film opens with a close-up of a girl’s face, looking out from behind her fingers, watching and shielding her gaze at the same time. Once the plot of the film is under way, it seems a throwaway image, almost incidental. But later in the film, when the husband violently acts out his revenge on his wife, I saw all the women in the audience holding their hands up over their faces in the same gesture. What was obvious was the gender division in this reaction. The men just looked, the women looked and hid. When I think of anything to do with women and film, I think of this unconscious gesture. It suggested to me that there was a distinct female way of seeing and that good female directors, like Campion, knew very well what they were doing when they exploited this.

The trouble is that The Piano came out over ten years ago. It was already the product of more than two decades of feminist experimentation in cinema. It did what very few feminist films had done before: it won acceptance in the mainstream. It won Oscars. With acceptance, however, came a full stop. The decade since has seen an emptying out of politics from popular culture, post-modern irony replacing it. The need for a critique of this and for an alternative space to accommodate an alternative way of seeing has never been more vital.

Last summer at Club Des Femmes we revisited Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames: a razor-sharp, political, edgy film, it effortlessly creates a new storytelling shape, a very female narrative shape that truly explores a democratic point of view through a communal narrative structure and an anti-heroic plot. The final section of the film sees a terrorist blow up the Twin Towers. I knew the scene was coming, I knew what it would mean to see this after September 11, and I felt the impact of watching premonition with hindsight.

Visionary art depends on freedom. With commerce dominating cinema programming we lose space for radical vision and our mass media narratives are led by consensus. There are a lot of vital fights to be waged about the position of women in film. Bird’s Eye View importantly takes on the mainstream, pointing out that women make up only 7% of film directors and 12% of screenwriters. It’s an appalling statistic. What we try to do at Club des Femmes is give space to the many women whose politics and aesthetics do not fit in the mainstream. We look for the alternative, we look for politics and dialogue and experimentation. Here is where cinema is alive. Godard suggested that ‘all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun’. It’s a cynical understanding of genre formalism that he exploits and subverts in all his work. At Club des Femmes we look for filmmakers who wield their cameras with force, because in the proper expression of vision comes liberation.

Sarah Wood

Short Cuts

SHORT CUTS: WONDERWOMEN

Kathy Acker

Fifteen years ago the Spice Girls flogged the concept of Girl Power, or ‘feminism with a Wonderbra’, as they described it. Shortly before her death ten years ago Kathy Acker – the pro-sex feminist writer – interviewed the group for The Guardian. She was bewildered by their political naïveté but charmed by the positivity and bravery with which they took on the music industry without a thesis to their names.

So what would Acker think about the showcase of films either written, directed, produced or featuring women shown during the London Short Film Festival, a few miles away from the O2 Arena where the Spice Girls are playing one of their reunion shows? Certainly the films chosen by Sarah Wood and Selina Robertson of Club des Femmes would have received her thumbs up. After all, they included Fuses, the sexually incendiary film depicting Acker’s friend and ally Carolee Schneemann having graphic, loving sex with her then partner.

The amazing thing about Fuses is that it still has the power to shock, embarrass and delight. Not for any Nuts or Loaded wet dream could a woman look so content in a carnal setting. Not only that, but shots spliced into the sex scenes reveal she’s in a happy relationship which extends out of the bedroom. This woman has it all – both the feminism and the Wonderbra.

Moving forward in time, Acker’s own screenplay for Variety shows how, despite the ardent women’s movement of the previous two decades, the 1980s could still be an oppressive place for women. The female characters are forced to make a living as strippers and barmaids for lack of work, the photographer having to graft in a bar full of lecherous men while waiting for a sale, while lead character Christine is looking for a job that doesn’t list having a big bust as its main requirement.

Variety is beautifully shot as should be expected from a film starring cult photographer Nan Goldin. But while the supporting female characters are sharply drawn, in particular through their discussions of their lives and loves, the depiction of Christine remains blurred. She somnambulates through life, aimlessly smoking cigarettes in the foyer of the porn cinema in which she begins to work, having an answerphone relationship with her mother and a nonchalantly half-hearted relationship with a man who couldn’t care less about her personal development.

As she becomes more involved with her new job and the mysterious businessman who frequents the cinema, her feelings and desires become clearer but more problematic. She begins to follow him around the dark underworld of the city in which he works, watching him from afar. Stalking him as far as Staten Island, which he visits for a shady business trip, she takes the motel room next to his and goes through his things while he’s out. Rifling through his bag she finds a hardcore porn rag and is amazed by the pictures she sees.

In this way, Acker questions the male gaze of cinematic tradition: Christine is the woman looking at the man looking at the woman. In the same way, she begins to compose erotic prose which she recites to her distant boyfriend. But it isn’t until she trusses herself up in a sexy outfit and admires herself in the mirror that the gaze comes full circle and she controls both the gaze and the reflection. Or in other words, the feminism and the Wonderbra.

Go forward twenty years and the short films showcasing either female characters or females behind the camera show a drastically different world. Screened as part of Dazzle Short Film Label’s programme ‘Lipstick Cherry’, 100th of a Second depicts a front-line war photographer winning a prize for a shot showing the horrific killing of a child. It is a chilling look at the media’s representation of war zones and the conflict between the need to document and the temptation to exploit. Is it her female sensitivities that riddle her with guilt or the pure horror of the memories that haunt her? Things twenty years on are not so clear-cut.

In ‘Femmes Fantastique’ – a programme of new shorts depicting women with attitude, collected by Wood and Robertson – A Short Collection of Hilary Flamingo’s Dream Vocations shows a woman at work. She escapes the factory where she works by thinking of other jobs she would like to do. A wig designer, painter of men’s bare bottoms or showgirl are just some of the colourful ‘moving photos’ of Hilary’s imagination. Not anchored in the viewer’s mind by her marital status or sexual availability she is free to play out her fantasies without being judged as silly or childish. Hilary is a lovable, flamboyant character, proving LSFF organiser Kate Taylor’s belief that ‘interesting female characters on screen are as important as those behind the cameras’.

Similarly the character in When the Telescope Came – which won the Club des Femmes award – lets herself be taken away by her imagination in a beautifully rendered animation. Elsewhere, New Love depicts a world where beautiful women pay to court and have sex with beautiful men – a helpful set-up for the protagonist whose short memory makes it nearly impossible for her to form lasting relationships. The last couple of years have seen a growth in the number of artistic depictions of women who pay for sex and this was an interesting development of the trend as the woman in question was not fulfilling an emotional need but a practical one.

From a feminist point of view there is still more fighting to be done for and on behalf of women. It was disappointing not to see any films tackling things like sex trade trafficking, the appallingly low conviction rate for rape, and the disregard for women needing to work while bringing up children. But having said that, the overwhelming majority of films made by women shown during the festival were bold, thoughtful and entertaining. They showed that the emancipated women of today don’t have to choose between active feminism and Wonderbras. Now women can concentrate on what interests and excites them – be that astrology, sex, war or cupcakes. Acker certainly would be proud.

Lisa Williams

Film Jukebox

LADYFEST LONDON’S JUKEBOX

2 Comments
Ladyfest London

Ladyfest London is an arts festival which celebrates female creativity in all its forms. There have been Ladyfests all over the world and this year it’s London’s turn to host this exciting event. Showcasing women’s talents in music, art, comedy, photography, film and spoken word, Ladyfest London will be taking place on May 9-11, 2008. The ladies are currently seeking submissions from filmmakers and musicians. If you want to get involved, visit their MySpace. Upcoming events include a Samanthan Morton double bill at the Rio Cinema on March 16 and a Ladyfest-sponsored shorts programme at the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on March 30. Below, organisers Kanchi Wichmann and Josefeen Foxter tell us about their favourite films.

KANCHI:

1- Mi vida loca (My Crazy Life, 1993)
I was a teenager sharing a house with five guys who liked action, sci-fi, etc, and this is the first film I remember watching ‘cos it had a female director. It’s about a Hispanic girl ‘gang’ living in the Echo Park area of LA, but the film avoids all those clichéd ways of portraying people in gangs as a menace to society. I was a big Love and Rockets fan (the comic not the band) so it was really cool to see this world I knew from the comic books on screen.

2- Daisies (1966)
I was a film student bored by the French new wave when I discovered the Czech new wave! Vera Chytilová was the only female director in this movement and this film is amazing. I had never seen a feature film using such artistic techniques with no linear narrative, but still using actors, dialogue, etc. This film opened up a whole new world to me of arty/abstract/non-linear narrative cinema and I realised that there are actually loads of women making really cool films. I started working at the London Filmmakers Coop and discovered Tanya Syed, Alia Syed, Su Friedrich, Maya Deren, Abigail Child, Barbara Hammer, Chantal Ackerman’s first feature Je, tu, il, elle and many many more.

3- I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)
Lili Taylor is so cool as Valerie. And this is such a well-made film. The Scum Manifesto changed my life. This film helped to bring Valerie to the masses. I heart Valerie Solanas.

4- By Hook or by Crook (2001)
I was so glad that this film existed and luckily the directors Silas Howard and Harriet Dodge were at the screening I attended so I could tell them so afterwards. It is a great film, a butch lesbian buddy movie, and I also liked the fact that they wrote, directed and acted in it. I also love Tribe 8 (The band Silas plays in) and the film Rise Above – The Tribe 8 Story. It is totally inspiring to see (queer) women like this up on screen.

5- Cecil B. DeMented (2000)
I was working in a cinema and we showed this as a late show. Loads of us came in especially and it was such fun, this film was us (except for the guns in the popcorn)… And it’s got Harriet Dodge (see above) in it. John Waters is one of my favourite filmmakers.

JOSEFEEN:

6- Fire (1996)
I saw this film just after I got back from six months in India. It had got right under my skin but I was deeply struck by the appalling position of women in Indian society and the use of religious mythology to perpetuate this. Fire is such a sensuous, evocative work, addressing deeply taboo issues. The fact that on its opening day in India Hindu fundamentalists attacked theatres and that this film about love was eventually banned for religious insensitivity are indications of its significance.

7- Orlando (1992)
‘The longest and most charming love-letter in literature’ from Virginia Woolf to (and about) Vita Sackville West was adapted for the screen by Sally Potter. The luminous Tilda Swinton slips through transgenerational, transgendered gorgeousness exploring the transient nature of power, culture and love.

8- Ma vie en rose (1997)
A sweet look at gender identity in children as experienced by Ludovic, who knows instinctively he is a girl and trusts that a supernatural force will bring a natural resolution to the erroneous circumstance of him being in the wrong body. His endearing hopefulness and optimism permeate the film right to the end.

9- Boys Don’t Cry (1999)
You know it’s never going to end in anything but grief when you start watching this powerful film about sexual transgression and retribution in the Midwest ‘burbs. Hilary Swank’s Teena Brandon is a compelling blend of contradictions… the search for one’s authentic self and having the courage to live it out is an endlessly fascinating subject.

10- Herstory of Porn (1999)
I love Annie Sprinkle, she’s one of the first sex-positive artists who called herself a feminist as well.

Features

Into the Forbidden Zone with Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Pulse
Pulse (Kairo)

Title: Pulse (Kairo)

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 10 July 2017

A new special edition release, includes a High Definition transfer and brand new interviews with the filmmakers

Distributor: Arrow Video

Japan 2001

119 mins

Title: Bright Future (Akarui mirai)

Format: DVD

Release date: 19 November 2007

Distributor: Tartan Video

Japan 2003

115 mins

Despite being one of the most accomplished, intelligent and adventurous filmmakers to come out of Japan in recent years, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has inexplicably been ignored in this country. With the overrated Ring spawning a seemingly unquenchable thirst for anything that more or less fitted the ‘J-horror’ label, it looked like Kurosawa came to maturity just in time to ride the wave, but the subtler, deeper thrills of his films have kept him stranded on the shore. The fact that Kurosawa has worked in different genres hasn’t helped, his idiosyncratic approach to genre conventions even less so. Too oblique for the grindhouse, too creepy for the art-house, his films seem to have fallen in between audiences, penalised for being so utterly and wonderfully unclassifiable.

Having started out as a director of low-budget pink and horror flicks, Kurosawa came to the attention of Western film-goers in 1997 with the release of the astonishing Cure, a richly enigmatic serial killer story that impressed festival audiences around the world. Kurosawa’s equally masterful Pulse (Kairo, 2001) was the subject of an American remake, but this did nothing to increase his notoriety in the West. More stunningly original films followed, from the tree-centred Charisma (1999) to the lighter Bright Future (Akarui mirai, 2003) via further forays into the supernatural with Seance (Kôrei, 2000) and Doppelganger (2003); but of the director’s prolific output only Pulse and Bright Future have, to date, been released in the UK.

A true film artist, Kurosawa has created an instantly recognisable cinematic world, all greenish, watery colours and eerie sound effects, moving lights and fleeting shadows, run-down buildings and strangely empty streets, and in the midst of it all the befuddled, determined or downright mischievous presence of the great actor Kôji Yakusho, who, appearing in no less than seven of the films, serves as something of a stand-in for the director. Weaving multi-layered metaphors, elliptical narratives and beautifully textured visual and aural landscapes, Kurosawa has created captivatingly complex universes that cannot be reduced to any straightforward, single ‘meaning’. Suggesting more than they affirm, his best films deal with the unexplainable, the unsayable, the rich phenomena that lie beyond the reach of words. Some of these phenomena take the form of supernatural evil or ghosts, but while this is the main focus of this article, these concerns are certainly not the only themes that Kurosawa’s work explores.

Each film is built around a cryptic visual motif imbued with multivalent meanings: the jellyfish in Bright Future, the wheelchair in Doppelganger, the tree in Charisma and perhaps most memorably the X in Cure and the red tape in Pulse. In Cure, murder victims are found with an X slashed across their throats. But in each case the killer is a different person. Soon Inspector Takabe (played by Kôji Yakusho) comes to believe that the link between the killings may be the enigmatic Mesmer student Mamiya who is seemingly able to suggest murderous thoughts through hypnosis to whomever he encounters. Later in the film, when the X appears on the wall at the house of a psychiatrist who has been questioning Mamiya and also at a doctor’s surgery the student has visited, it chillingly and wordlessly signals that both the psychiatrist and the doctor are about to kill. It is a symbol of extraordinary force, condensing the unknowable depths of human nature into two black strokes on a wall, and leaving the question open: is Mamiya really able to manipulate apparently decent citizens into committing homicide, or does he simply reveal the dark impulses that were already present within them?

A supremely ambiguous figure, Mamiya is a potent creation whose mere presence on-screen is enough to give the viewer goose bumps. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he says to everyone he meets, answering all questions that are put to him with another question, never disclosing anything personal. Is it possible that Mamiya should be truly empty, as he claims, and that by having emptied himself of everything that made him what he was, he has become the ultimate seducer, a sheer void that reflects their own selves back to people, enabling him to exert total control over them? Whatever the answer, evil in Cure is not limited to one character but is a diffuse phenomenon, an atmosphere that pervades everyone and everything, buildings too. Mamiya’s former haunt, a grimy warehouse partitioned by plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling and filled with caged animals and books on hypnotism, exudes an unwholesome, malign air; the same atmosphere of occult malevolence pervades a derelict building that was the venue for mysterious experiments in hypnotism decades previously. Building up throughout the film, it is all this that comes to be invoked in each re-appearance of the X, the profound enigma of evil, the contagion of the malefic through the air, through invisible waves that circulate between people and places.

In Pulse, the striking – and almost mundane – visual motif is the red tape that has been placed around various doorways to seal them shut. These are ‘forbidden zones’ occupied by the spirits of the dead who have begun to invade the world of the living. Those who ignore the red tape and enter those proscribed spaces find themselves face to face with some of the ghastliest creatures ever conjured on celluloid. They are both recognisably human and yet dreadfully inhuman at the same time – one female ghost’s creepily distorted, slow-motion walk is enough to scare one character out of his wits; another has the vague appearance of a living being, only paler and fuzzier, before his eyes suddenly come into disturbingly sharp focus. After a while, the simple sight of the red tape is enough to signify unspeakable horrors, inducing in the audience a powerful, unshakeable anxiety.

As he has repeatedly explained in interviews, Kurosawa’s films are concerned with what lies outside the frame. For the director, these ghosts are part of a wider world that we fail to perceive in our daily lives, part of the world beyond the frame. They are hidden behind doors, they appear through opaque windows, and in Pulse they make their way into the world of the living via computer screens. These doors, windows and monitors are portals between the living and the dead, echoing the cinema screen, the ultimate frame that divides the seen from the unseen. The ghosts are death made visible, and as they move from beyond the frame to inside it the characters are forced to face something which they would prefer to remain unseen. This is why the most frightening thing that can happen in a Kurosawa film is a door slowly opening: doors and windows are breaches through which the wider world that surrounds us can enter the comfort of our well-delineated spaces, allowing the irruption of the unknown, of forces beyond our control, into the familiar sphere of our lives.

This otherworldly reality is also evoked through sound, which plays a crucial role in all of Kurosawa’s work. Buzzes, low-pitched drones, shrill timbres, sounds that hiss, whir, ring and resonate in subtle modulations form elaborate, unsettling soundscapes that combine with the visuals to create a multi-dimensional, immersive world. These sounds are not generated through synthesizers but always come from the real world, as Kurosawa explains in an interview published in Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film. For instance, the ‘staccato, high-pitched sound’ that is heard every time the ghost is about to appear in Seance was created from the trill of a Japanese insect. What drives the director to use real sounds is, as with the visuals, the desire to ‘express (…) the world that lies beyond what is visible on-screen’. These ominous, alien sounds increase tenfold the effect of the visuals, adding an extra dimension to the unseen, stealthily submerging the audience into the film’s ambience and making for an experience of rare intensity.

Adding to the eeriness of the films is Kurosawa’s preferred viewpoint. Eschewing the conventions of traditional horror movies, Kurosawa films his characters from a distance. Rather than sticking the camera on the character’s shoulder and startling the audience when the bogeyman suddenly appears in the frame, Kurosawa observes the events from afar, putting us in a position from which we are able to see shadows move and shapes appear in the background, from which we can see everything, the living as well as the dead around them. Frequently, Kurosawa photographs scenes from behind windows, as though shooting from the point of view of the ghost. Throughout his films, the director chooses to position himself, and us, on the outside, like intruders, stalkers or spirits. In this way, he makes us part of the world that lies outside the frame, placing us on the other side of the screen, turning us, the audience, into ghosts, the passive observers of the living.

Never showy and shunning facile special effects to create elegant terrors, Kurosawa’s films generate a profound, lasting sense of unease in the audience because they make us experience that which lies beyond words. A master of disquiet, Kurosawa touches the forbidden zones of human life, revealing the unseen, probing the unspeakable.

Virginie Sélavy

This feature was first published in February 2008.
Interviews

INTERVIEW WITH NOEL LAWRENCE

Noel Lawrence

Photo: Noel Lawrence

Other Cinema

Listen to the podcast of the full interview on Sci-Fi London

Having started as an underground film venue 25 years ago, the Other Cinema also became a DVD label in 2003, releasing the works of experimental filmmakers such as Craig Baldwin, JX Williams and Bill Morrison. Alex Fitch talks to co-founder Noel Lawrence and finds out more about their ‘mad, bad and rad’ aesthetic. This interview was originally podcast on Sci-Fi London.

Alex Fitch: Experimental cinema isn’t that widely available in the UK; your DVDs are sold in the ICA bookshop and are region 0, so they fill a gap in the market.

Noel Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. England was a particularly hard nut to crack for us as you’ve got that dated rating system.

AF:What sort of films do you show when you tour your programme to countries like the UK?

NL: I do a combination of things – I showed Experimental Eros in a variety of places, in Switzerland and the Netherlands this year. We show full programmes from the Other Cinema catalogue, some titles that have been released, forthcoming ones to test the market / the audience, to see what they like, that sort of thing. I’ve been in England before, we showed at The Cube cinema in Bristol and at The Horse Hospital in London. I went up to Newcastle: they have a fairly vibrant underground film scene there.

AF: Are you the main curator for titles? Do you decide which releases go ahead?

NL: I’m not exactly the main curator… Let me give you a little history of how The Other Cinema went ahead. We started as an underground film venue in San Francisco about 25 years ago and that was founded by an avant-garde filmmaker called Craig Baldwin who has done several well-known pictures composed of found footage, most significantly Tribulation 99. He started with what’s known today as the micro-cinema movement, which was the idea that we don’t have to show films in movie theatres – anyone with a screen and a couple of folding chairs could set up a cinema and show what they want, something outside of mainstream, outside of what big studios are distributing to the public. Other Cinema is based in the Mission District in San Francisco. It’s a storefront theatre with folding chairs and not the best high-end projection equipment but, how should I put it, a lot of spirit and enthusiastic audiences. The idea of Other Cinema – the DVD label too – is to show ‘outlaw’, marginal cinema that can be broken down into three ingredients; this is how Craig has always explained it: The Other Cinema programming aesthetic is ‘The Mad’, ‘The Bad’ and ‘The Rad’!

AF: Okay!

NL: Let me explain that. ‘The Mad’ being alternative subjectivity, bizarre uncommon ways of looking at things that are ‘mad’ or ‘schizophrenic’. You can make a million associations with that. ‘The Bad’ being kitsch, low culture. We’re all about high culture or low culture – there’s no middle ground! And then ‘The Rad’ is radical politics, progressive politics – the idea that film can be used as a way of changing the world by changing people’s ways of looking at things. Does that make sense?

AF: Absolutely. Those are the sort of things that are part of underground culture in San Francisco and California in general…

NL: I’d say we’re tuned into that… you know, that underground sensibility that characterised California – certainly counter-culture California – for many, many years. Some people talk of West Coat and East Coast rap; there’s certainly a West Coast / East Coast flavour to experimental filmmaking. We’re on the West Coast side of that. Of course, it’s more complex than that – we represent a great number of New York filmmakers on our label, they’re certainly not ghettoised or anything like that. But I feel that we tend to be a little more fun in what we do than some of the things that come out of the New York Film Festival in their avant-garde programme – not to say anything bad about them ’cause they do a great job – but we’re a little more playful.

AF: In a way your label is like a film festival, spread over a number of discs.

NL: That’s an interesting way of looking at it! One of the reasons I became a film curator is that there was certainly a point where I thought, ‘Maybe I should found a film festival’, then I realised, ‘Why bother? There’s a million of them!’ There’s about 150 festivals in San Francisco alone! DVDs have an enduring material legacy that is not possible when you do a festival. Things go to a festival, there’s a big crowd and then they disappear and there’s nothing left. To a lot of undistributed films, that’s what happens: they do their festival run and they get shown in a lot of places but in a few years no one remembers what they are. Even the big stuff that’s going through Sundance or wherever. But because DVDs have this material component, they’re going to be floating out there forever. There are hundreds of video stores that have our catalogue and from today until whenever the DVDs break, people are going to be watching them and that works! So even though a DVD label can be really difficult – ’cause it’s really stressful to put out these discs – it has advantages over showing these things in a film festival… Or showing them in Other Cinema itself, which is a great venue where I’ve seen hundreds of films over the years, but the problem is that you’re limited to whatever audience happens to show up on a Saturday night to see it! Whereas the idea with the label is that we can export the magic that happens at the cinema and put it onto a disc and then everyone around the world can see it at any time.

AF: Another thing about your label is that the packaging is very well designed. You’ve made it collectable, which is important if you’re making something that you want people to keep for a while.

NL: Yeah, I think that’s very important actually. You’re right, we spent an enormous amount of time studying over the packing – there’s not the tiniest detail that is not going to be approved by Craig or myself. That materiality, that aesthetic component of the discs, is really important to what we do and I have a fear that it’s going to be lost because we’re moving into a digital age, where everything can be downloadable from the internet. Ever since I was a young lad I collected old records. When I was fifteen years old I would go to ‘the big bad city’ and go to the underground record shop and get punk rock albums and it was really a rush to go into a store and pick up something rare. I think that’s sort of getting lost today, with the internet now anything can be accessed by a few keystrokes. In a way that’s great, but at the same time, I kind of miss the idea that you have to search these things out.

AF: Definitely. I’d be the first person to argue that the loss of the corner video shop is a terrible thing, because if you’ve got shelves of esoteric titles, it’s much easier to browse them in the flesh and if you’ve got someone vaguely knowledgeable behind the counter, they’re going to point you in the right direction.

NL: Exactly! There’s a really great record shop in San Francisco called Aquarius Records and it’s not a particularly large shop at all, it’s probably the size of my apartment, which is not very big, it’s a studio! They sell a fraction of what you might get in a big HMV, but everything is so lovingly presented; they write these tiny reviews of every disc in this incredibly small hand-writing and it looks like someone has spent two hours writing this little index card review with a magnifying glass! You walk in there and you ask the person behind the counter, ‘I’m looking for this kind of music…’ and they can point you exactly to the CD you’re looking for. You can’t do that at an HMV and you definitely can’t do that on the internet.

AF: Is it important for you to balance the number of short films with the number of features that you’re releasing?

NL: We tend to put out more collections of short films than we do feature films, but it’s not like any kind of hard and fast rule. What we do, running a DVD label and competing in a market place where we’re against the likes of Harry Potter and we’re trying to peak the public interest in our work, is to curate thematically with our DVDs. So a lot of our compilations have been on a subject that everyone knows about, like a lot of people don’t know who Craig Baldwin and Mike Kuchar are but they know about horror films or they understand the concept of the seventies. I put out this disc dealing with themes of sexuality and called it Experimental Eros and everyone’s heard of sex! They might not know the particular short films on the disc, but people get interested because of the theme that gets addressed on the disc and they pick it up for that reason. I’m hoping that from there, people familiarise themselves with the artists that are behind some of this stuff and seek out more of their work.

AF: With the Eros collection, you seem to be tapping into the zeitgeist a bit. I don’t know if it’s the same in America but in Britain, there’s an exhibition of art about sex on at the Barbican at the moment, they had a collection of 70s Swedish erotica on at the ICA recently and before that there was a collection of Edwardian pornography called The Good Old Naughty Days shown in London. To get around the ratings system, you had to join a ‘sex club’ in order to see this film of sex acts that were recorded 80 years ago… So with the ‘mainstream’ becoming increasingly mainstream and people having less challenging films to watch, I guess sex is still a subject that’s somewhat taboo.

NL: It’s interesting you should mention that. Even today, as ubiquitous as porn has become because of the internet, there are still a lot of difficulties in distributing sexually explicit material on DVD and I don’t just mean porn – with Experimental Eros there were a lot of stores that would not pick it up and I couldn’t get it replicated at certain factories that wouldn’t handle that kind of material. There’re a lot of problems that are still present when you’re showing that kind of material and in America they still occasionally do arrest porn directors on obscenity charges and that sort of thing. I don’t know if that happens in England or not… It’s strange because the legal status of porn is still very ‘grey market’ in the United States, particularly under the Bush administration, which is a lot more puritanical than some of the more recent democratic administrations like Clinton’s.

AF: The demarcation between porn and erotica in this country seems to be very much delineated by the artistic intent of the filmmakers. You can show full penetrations and erections in films if you can show that they have some kind of artistic meaning.

NL: There was a famous court case in the United States where the Supreme Court talked about obscenity being offensive to community standards and having no socially redeeming value. So as a result, back in the 60s and 70s when this court case was first decided, you would always see these naughty books that were just wall-to-wall sex, but the first page would always have an introduction by some kind of professor with a PhD who would say something like, ‘This is talking about the social conditions these people are living under’, which is absolutely ridiculous because it was just a pornographic book. But, in any case, our work is erotica and supposedly it has a socially redeeming value! There’re a lot of arguments to what constitutes socially redeeming value, in the sense that all porn – even the most gutter porn – still has relevance in terms of its documenting of social behaviour. There still could be arguably an anthropological argument for that! I heard about a university, I don’t remember if it was Berkeley or not, they were keeping an archive of all of this 70s porn, basically to study the furniture that was used on the sets because most Hollywood films are not filmed in real places – they’re filmed on sound stages, they’re completely make-believe – but 70s porn films were shot in someone’s living room. So people can get an idea of what actual 70s furniture looked like by looking at porn!

AF: It’s funny you should say that because there was a documentary on the very subject on BBC Four a couple of months ago. It was very much looking at these 70s interiors in California in particular, and how the look of these 70s porn films have a certain cultural cachet that has outlasted the films themselves.

NL:Oh yeah. It’s very interesting to watch that stuff – the sex is boring – but they have these really bizarrely tacky soundtracks and I’m particularly enamoured with the bad acting between the sex scenes because it seems like something straight out of some Warhol movie! So, it’s downright bizarre at times which I really enjoy a lot! It’s kind of experimental film, unintentionally.

AF:All of your stuff – the Eros collection particularly – does demonstrate the fusion between high art and low art because it shows an aesthetic quality and at the same time it’s being appreciated for its trashiness.

NL:Exactly! You’re right – that’s the Other Cinema aesthetic right there: the work in Experimental Eros tends to be footage that’s been appropriated from porn, which is pretty much the lowest rung in the totem pole of genres, and it’s been taken by avant-garde filmmakers and made into something completely different. It’s strange; it’s made very beautiful in a lot of cases – I’m think about, for example, the film The Color of Love by Peggy Ahwesh. Do you remember that one?

AF:Yes, it looked really good.

NL:Exactly. Basically what happened was: she found a decayed reel of super-8 porn, took it into her workshop, dyed it, massaged it, changed the look of stuff and made it into something incredibly beautiful. In terms of the low-brow and high-brow ends of the spectrum, she’s definitely in the high-brow end. She’s a published academic, she teaches over at Bard College, she’s a serious artist from New York. That is definitely a good example of our programming style.

AF:I’m glad you mentioned that title because it leads on to Decasia, which is possibly one of the most famous films, at least over here.

NL:Well, that’s Bill Morrison, he’s a good friend of mine and a very nice guy. We released it – the DVD – in something of a limited edition. The idea of it was that he had a print of Decasia that he didn’t need, so we cut it up into pieces and with this edition they would not only get the DVD but also an actual piece of the film. We’re going into that materiality which is very important to the work we show on DVD. What else can I say? It’s a masterpiece, it’s a very important film – one of the most important experimental films that came out in the last decade or so – and I’m a big fan of it! It’s kind of hard for me to find the words to describe it, to be honest with you. I was also really pleased because we just released a new DVD called Experiments in Terror 2, which obviously follows Experiments in Terror 1, and Bill gave us a new film that he made called The Mesmerist for that. Bill took this silent film called The Bells with Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff and worked his magic on it; I don’t know exactly what it is that he does in his studio but he creates… When you see a Bill Morrison film there is a certain look to the film that is magical and that film definitely has it.

AF:There seems to be a new interest in silent movies. People have looked into this phenomenon and it seems to be that when a couple of generations have died off and there’re no longer family members left with memories of, say, the 1920s, that’s when young people get into it. It’s the opposite of what you might expect.

NL:Yeah, I don’t know! I guess! I really like old stuff – even my parents seem kind of archaic! It is fascinating the way film can be used that way, to give people the ability to go back in time. What fascinates me is that watching an old movie is an experience that can literally be unchanged from 50 years ago. You see a film like Casablanca in 1942 when it came out or whenever and when you see it 50 years later, it’s still essentially the same experience in a dark room watching this movie and in that sense it’s really the ability to go back in time. Does that make any sense?

AF:Definitely. Particularly when they restore old movies for the film print and not just the DVD; about ten years ago they did a new print of Vertigo where they went to the trouble of finding the cars that were in the movie and matching the colour of the celluloid cars to the paint colour of surviving models so that they looked exactly the same.

NL:Of course, and this being a San Francisco film, I know it well! In fact, speaking of Vertigo, there’s a film on Experiments in Terror 2 called Between 2 deaths and the filmmaker, Wago Kreider, went to the church known as Mission Dolores with a video camera and he retraced Jimmy Stewart’s steps through the church in that scene that was filmed 50 years ago. The film very carefully fades in and out from Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the filmmaker’s version of that scene. It’s really amazing, ’cause he synchs up all of the architecture perfectly, so you see it constantly going from the past to the present, from the present to the past…

AF:…and that exemplifies exactly what Vertigo is about in the first place, by trying to recreate the past using…

NL:I hadn’t even thought of that! That’s a brilliant point that you’re making there. I don’t know if that was the thought that Wago had when he was making it or if he was just being clever… I just took it on a literal level – I just enjoy watching it. I hadn’t thought about that part.

AF:Thinking of the ‘Rad’ aspect of your catalogue, another title that’s well-known over here is Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y…

NL:We’ve enjoyed a lot of success selling that title. It’s especially popular in Europe and it continues to sell very well to this day.

AF:How did you pick it up for your label?

NL:Johan came to us with that actually. I think he had probably tried to sell it to somebody else and it hadn’t worked out. We take weird stuff that other mainstream distributors are not going to be interested in. At the same time, I think it’s a fairly accessible work. It’s an experimental documentary without any kind of cohesive narrative but it’s surprisingly watchable.

AF:It’s weird that the kind of documentary films that are popular in the cinema these days – the sort of Michael Moore titles – are very polemic and try to make you adhere to a storyline, in comparison to documentary footage that lets you draw your own conclusions.

NL:You’re right. I like Michael Moore’s work, but there’s a certain authoritarianism with that A to B, ‘this is the point’ kind of filmmaking; you’ve got to follow all these steps to what the conclusion is. It’s much more fun to have this ambiguous kind of work like Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y that lets you draw your own conclusions. We had another documentary too called The Net, which is basically the same thing but is more of a ‘talking heads’ documentary. But it wasn’t there to say, ‘this is the point we’re trying to make’, it just offered a sort of polyphonic view of a certain subject, which was the links between the internet, the Unibomber and LSD…

Interview by Alex Fitch

Read the review of Experiments in Terror 2.

Festivals

THE END OF THE PIER FESTIVAL

Tommy the Kid

Format: Cinema

Release date: April 25-May 3

Venue: Bognor Regis

More details on the website

A typical assumption about film festivals is that they all take place in major cities or picturesque European provinces, where yachts, schmoosing and canapés feature prominently. For some this may symbolise the end product of a year’s hard work and financial strife, an opportunity to get a foot on the career ladder, or just a place to boost your ego while sipping champagne with a budding French actress, who’s just been promised a role in the next Franí§ois Ozon picture. This world couldn’t be further from the seaside resort of Bognor Regis, which this April sees the start of the fifth annual End of the Pier Festival.

Headed by Bryan Gartside, who has resided in the town since 2001, the festival has seen a dramatic rise in popularity since its creation. Last year saw screenings of 170 shorts and 6 features from as far afield as New York. Gartside has been a film fanatic since his youth, when Saturday mornings were filled with the likes of The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon. He firmly believes that the coastal town has much to offer in the way of filmmaking. ‘You can definitely get more here than just great fish & chips’, he muses. ‘It might not be obvious but Bognor has a really interesting film history’. He may have a point. Not only was it the birthplace of cinematic pioneer Cecil Hepworth, the town was also the setting for the cult classic The Punch and Judy Man.

The key ethos of the End of the Pier Festival is to demystify the common assumption of what a film festival is, demonstrating to filmmakers that they don’t need to spend money they don’t have flocking to European festivals to get their work exhibited. ‘For most young filmmakers in the UK, the thought of getting over to Cannes or Berlin to promote their film is just a pipe dream’, Gartside explains. ‘It’s important that projects made in the area and the UK in general have a place to be seen’. He also talks of his excitement to exhibit films from all over the world: ‘There’s so much you can learn from a culture from viewing their films’.

The biggest problem facing the festival, it would seem, is getting local residents to the screenings. ‘The one unfortunate factor is that in Bognor the word ‘culture’ seems to be regarded as an expletive. We can attract international audiences but for some screenings there will only be a handful of locals. This is really disappointing’. Gartside aims to tackle the issue this year with special screenings of films set in Bognor Regis that reflect the local traditions, and by commissioning new films to be shot around the area. ‘It’s really a dream to bring the town together for events like this’.

I ask him where he sees the festival in another five years’ time and he has clear ideas about the direction to take: ‘Obviously we want to continue to grow and to screen more films, particularly those made by young filmmakers. I really want to enhance the End of the Pier as a brand in the hope that we can branch out and operate projects around the country. But most of all I really want to establish links with other international film festivals so we can share our discoveries with the rest of the world and learn from other institutions’.

James Merchant

Short Cuts

SHORT CUTS: THE SMOKING CABINET

Smoking Cabinet collage, photo by Simon Howarth

The Smoking Cabinet: A Festival of Early Burlesque and Cabaret Film (1895-1933)

7-9 December 2007

More details here

Taking place last December, The Smoking Cabinet presented itself as a celebration of cabaret and
burlesque cinema from 1895 to 1933. The three-day festival at the Curzon Soho specifically concentrated on Germany and Europe rather than looking towards the later burlesque scene in 1950s America. Their centrepiece screening was the 1930 film by Josef von Sternberg The Blue Angel, which launched the career of Marlene Dietrich. The film is set around a small German town nightclub that hosts the touring burlesque stars of the day. It’s mostly frequented by young male students from the local university, but one night their outraged professor follows them there, and falls under the seductive spell of Dietrich’s Lola.

The screening was followed by an excellent panel discussion about burlesque in general, featuring Amy Lamé, host and founder of the notoriously outré vaudeville club Duckie, held weekly at the Vauxhall Tavern; Marisa Carnesky, a long-time burlesque performer with a number of plays and art projects under her belt; and Bryony Dixon, expert and curator of silent and historical film at the British Film Institute. It was interesting to hear both Carnesky and Lamé pronounce burlesque dead at a time when it seems to be in the throes of a massive revival, with countless nights documented weekly in Time Out‘s Social Club section, and risqué outfits gracing the pages of many a fashion magazine. Commenting that a star like Dita Von Teese has made burlesque overground and safe, Carnesky described the current cabaret nights as ‘students in their Hennes underwear’. This is why The Smoking Cabinet as a cinematic experience was so important: it provided an educative programme to an audience who may only know burlesque in its sanitised, modern form.

Elsewhere in the festival, short films weren’t as blindingly obvious as people were perhaps expecting. In an era when old found footage of dancing girls in grainy black & white can be found on any nightclub wall, the Smoking Cabinet programmers have tirelessly researched early cinema to give us work that doesn’t immediately fit into the burlesque canon. The early half of the twentieth century was an important time for all art forms, a time when cinema, live performance, music and dance all interacted with one another in the work of artists such as Man Ray, Norman Bel Geddes, Jean Cocteau, and George Mélií¨s. The Smoking Cabinet recognised these connections, in the screening of such films as the futurist Ballet Mécanique from 1924: using all sorts of mechanisms from airplane propellers to giant bells the film recreates the madness of dance, all accompanied by a highly percussive tribal score that evokes the new musical forms of the 1920s.

Outside of the films, the Curzon Soho bar area gave added attractions and perfect flourishes, from DJs playing 1920s cabaret music to free fairy cakes hand-decorated by the Smoking Cabinet festival organisers themselves. You wouldn’t see the director of Cannes or Edinburgh sitting in full view pouring hundreds & thousands into a creamy paste to tip onto sponge cake! Here’s to a further Smoking Cabinet, and perhaps to widening the net to look at America in the 50s or Britain in the 60s.

Philip Ilson

Philip Ilson is the co-founder of Halloween and organiser of the London Short Film Festival.

Film Jukebox

SIR FRANCIS DASHWOOD AND THE HELLFIRE CLUB’S JUKEBOX

Sir Francis Dashwood

We’ve had our eye on Sir Francis Dashwood and the Hellfire Club for a while. They play a fantastic atmospheric surfy bluesy psychobilly punk concoction AND they list Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kenneth Anger and David Lynch among their influences: a band after our wicked heart… Don’t miss them on Feb 9 at the Pitty Pat Club, Nottingham (Valentine’s Ball at monthly burlesque club), and on March 8 at the 12 Bar Club, London. Find out more here. Below frontman Sir Francis discusses his 10, er, 11 favourite movies.

1- Harvey (1950)
This film is just the perfect parable of the Pooka (Guardian Spite) … the whole concept is oddly akin to Aleister Crowley’s concept of the Holy Guardian Angel. In this film Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart), the main character, is at first regarded as a harmless mild-mannered eccentric: he talks away to his ‘imaginary Friend’, a six-foot Rabbit, whom we don’t ever get to see!.. At some point his sister tries to shop him to the funny farm, BUT… the rabbit changes time conditions and events and saves Mr Dowd from any difficult scrapes that he may get into. No one who sees this would ever want anything bad to happen to Mr Dowd, he’s just too sweet and an invincible fool.

2- Theatre of Blood (1973)
Vincent Price is perfect and cheap at the Price… in this classic Horror. A derided Shakespearian Actor who has been thought long dead returns to kill off his critic enemies, each in the style of a piece perfect Poetic Justice, every one exquisitely executed in the precise details of a significant Shakespearian murder. There’s one hilarious scene where a guy’s wife thinks he’s snoring in bed… but he’s actually having his head carefully sawn off.

3- The Holy Mountain (1973)
I have enjoyed, and been given some guidance and answers to some of the more convoluted aspects of Alchemy, Tarot and the western Hermetic Tradition in general through the Medium of Alejandro’s Films. I think it really is time for such a one with this capacity to Put this into moving image unlike no other, to finally come to the fore! Through this fact, I am sure others shall be led into the same studies that gave Him the keys to tap into his Genii! – and therefore likewise themselves become beacons of Creative Fire!!!. . in fact , this is after all the underlying message of such films as Holy Mountain … The acceptance and TRANSFORMATION of Various conditions of what most consider MUNDANE LIFE – is what is depicted through most of his work!

4- Whistle and I’ll Come To You (1968)
Adapted from an MR James ghost story this was a TV film for the BBC OMNIBUS series. The Truly great and most Ghoulish thing about this film is that there is almost no dialogue, there is no music, it is just about an Old guy in Tweed (Michael Hordern) who finds a bone whistle sticking out the side of a crumbling mud cliff, beside the sea. It has an inscription, ‘Whistle and I’ll come to you’… He gives it a toot… and the rest gets progressively creepier. Indeed this is the Most creepy Ghost thing I think I ever saw, its TV budget limitations on the usual production tinsel are precisely its greatest strengths. It has a cold atmosphere, tension, silence and fear.

5- Santa Sangre (1989)
As this Magazine well knows I love The Holy Mountain, but I also must include Santa Sangre. I love everything about this film, the plot, the colour, Atmosphere… It also Has Horror mixed with absurd Hilarity in equal measure, in just the way I like it! Oh! and Really Great Mambo Music! This film may appeal more to those who find they cannot grasp the abstract nature of Holy Mountain… It ‘seems’ to have a more definitive plot. I can’t be bothered to describe something I love so much. So here I end with this one. See it!!

6- Faust (1994)
Another Big Favourite, a wonderful cross mix of animation and real film, with lots of macabre puppetry and black Humour, it sticks well to the original theme of Faust, and loses none of its potency. Prague (one of my very favourite cities) lends its unique atmosphere to many of the film’s scenes. By the way I once saw an Alchemy Exhibition many years ago in Prague that Å vankmajer helped put together, by contributing many Highly unusual Vessels to it. He’s for real!

7- Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970)
Joe Orton’s Stage classic in film form… it’s just great, I never tire of seeing it… It opens with Beryl Reid sucking a rainbow Zoom Lolly in A graveyard, watching a funeral in a see-through Baby Doll Nighty… (You get the picture ??) complete with groovy Georgie Fame soundtrack, well worth it if you’re into this kind of Black Humour. Handsome, amoral and unattached Sloane is offered a room in the house that the middle-aged Kath (Beryl Reid) shares with her brother. Sloane attempts to manipulate them… but you can imagine! it doesn’t quite stay that way.

8- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Simply a classic, I love the themes, the whole journey from the outer to the inner, from the past to the future which is really the past… etc, etc… a real Goer of a film for psychedelic space-heads (of which I was one for a long time). Will always love it.

9- Ed Wood (1994)
This is superb! … Ed Wood was a low-budget Cross-dressing Hollywood filmmaker, and managed to get Bela Lugosi to be in one of his films, by then Bela was a well gone Junkie and died during the making of the film. To all purposes this is set as Wood’s Auto Biography featuring heavily on the making of Plan 9 from Outer Space, one of Hollywood’s saddest B-movies. The 50s styling, costumery and overall sentiment I am drastically in love with.

10- Kaidan (Ghost Story, 1964)
This film is amazing, A beautiful Supernatural Japanese film. I recommend everyone get out and see it now!… the plot is too complex, and in four parts (as only the Japanese could do!) The best bit is about a blind musician who summons the Spirits of a Dead Samurai army, but he doesn’t even know they’re dead (as he’s blind). It turns out the other monks who share the monastery with him realise what he has done and consider it a major Blashphemy. They paint every inch of his body in sacred text and get him to Banish the ghouls… BUT !!…

11- Flowers and Smoke (an experiment in ultra-human contact through the use of flowers and smoke, by Lamda, 2007)
Oh … and an 11th film! (11 is a magick number!!)
This is a truly weird 13-mins short film I recently came across, 50 % of what happens is in the viewer’s own brain, Consecrated roses are burnt, the smoke is filmed and mirrored, the result is a real psychedelic trip-out, Godforms from Many Pantheons appear at you through/in the smoke… and apparently this is just the way it turned out (no trickery!) This is a real operation in Magickal evocation caught successfully on film possibly for the first time ever!! The soundtrack music is amazing also, it glides ebbs and throbs in sync to the imagery until you just don’t know who, why or where you are any-more. Pure Art! (in the Alchemystical sense of the word)!

Features

MAKING CINEMA MAGICAL AGAIN: SECRET CINEMA LAUNCH

Secret Cinema December 07

Photo © Lisa Williams

Event: Secret Cinema

Date: 16 December 2008

Location: The Vaults in London Bridge, London

Organised by: Future Shorts

Signing up for Secret Cinema was a leap of faith. Accustomed to making informed choices about which screenings to attend, I placed blind trust in those behind Secret Cinema (Future Shorts/Tartan Video) to come up with something worth passing Sunday evening doing.

Firstly I had received an email with instructions and directions for the day. But this didn’t arrive ’til five hours before the event. Not only that, but the directions instructed us to bring warm clothes. Where were they taking us?! Would we be watching a film in a wind tunnel? Perhaps I was about to watch a silent movie reflected in the cold water of the River Thames? I was sceptical.

But walking towards the venue I felt a shiver of excitement. I knew I was in good hands and I liked the fact that I had no idea what I was going to be watching. Turning the corner I found the alleyway next to a London Bridge boozer teaming with people in fur coats and hoodies, and a Secret Cinema logo projected onto a brick wall. Adding to a sense of privilege about being in-the-know, my existential twins and I waited around by some fenced gates while those without tickets were turned away.

When we were let in, my pathway was stalled by an errant skateboarder who lurched in front of me, then fell to the ground. Stranger still was a high-school locker installed by the entrance, and further on a television showing a Fox-style news broadcast.

Moving in under the railway arch was a mock classroom past which several more skateboarders whizzed. Catching site of a skate video projected onto a wall it became clear that we were about to see Paranoid Park – the latest Gus Van Sant film. Where better to see a film about a death on a railway track than in the dank underbelly of London Bridge? Obviously a skate park in Portland would have been spot on, but given the circumstances they had got it just right.

Relaxing into the closely-packed plastic seating I was relieved to have bypassed the overpriced sodas and garish bowling-alley style décor of the cinema. Maybe, just maybe Secret Cinema could bring back the sense of magic to the cinema-going experience, and if not then it certainly felt like it had more soul than the local multiplex.

My one qualm was that it might be a cheap shot at publicity. Rather like the drag queens hired to rev up the audience at showings of Showgirls. Not so, according to Fabien Riggall, founder of Future Shorts and the one behind the conception of Secret Cinema. ‘It’s not going to be just pre-releases. It’s really going to be a mixture of strong pre-releases, thought-provoking animation and old, classic films. It is about showing films in a different environment as cinema-going has become so formulaic in my view’.

And perhaps Secret Cinema can tempt even the most discerning film buffs away from their carefully considered to-see list and into the dark corners of the city where mystery and intrigue still rule.

Lisa Williams