Yearly Archives: 2009

Interviews

SUMMER SCARS: INTERVIEW WITH JULIAN RICHARDS

Summer Scars

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 June 2009

Venues: ICA (London) and selected key cities

Distributor: Jinga Films

Director: Julian Richards

Writers: Julian Richards and Al Wilson

Cast: Kevin Howarth, Ciaran Joyce, Amy Harvey, Jonathan Jones, Darren Evans, Christopher Conway, Ryan Conway

UK 2007

73 mins

British director Julian Richards has a number of successful micro-budget horror features under his belt, including 1996’s Darklands and 2003’s The Last Horror Movie. His latest, the adolescent thriller Summer Scars, has enjoyed a successful festival run internationally and now returns here for a screening as part of the New British Cinema strand at the ICA, to be followed by a DVD release from Soda Pictures. The film follows six Welsh teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks as they encounter a much older stranger while up to no good in the woods. What starts as a marginally uncomfortable situation soon escalates into a fight for survival.

James Merchant caught up with the director to discuss the benefits of filming in the woods, working with 14-year-olds, and his unconventional approach to selling the film.

James Merchant: Summer Scars clearly pays great attention to the representation of its teen characters. Did you draw on your own youth when making the film?

Julian Richards: The whole thing started off with a few childhood experiences rolled into one; the most notable being an event where myself and a friend were held hostage in the woods by a guy with an air rifle. Unsurprisingly, the experience stuck with me, and as I developed as a storyteller and a filmmaker I always wanted to find a way to turn that into a film. I had been approached by a writer in 1998. He was from Barrie in South Wales, a roofer who had jacked in his job and pursued a dream as a screenwriter. He had written a full-length script that I was impressed with. I thought he had a good eye for observing people and their behaviour, particularly the way they speak. So I approached him with my ideas for Summer Scars and he wrote it as a short 30-minute script to begin with. We put in an application to the Welsh Film Council to get Lottery finance, but we weren’t successful. At the same time, I was offered Silent Cry to direct, and soon after that did The Last Horror Movie. It took around five or six years for me to get back to the project, but when I phoned the writer back he had already rewritten it as a feature script. We put in another application with the Film Agency for Wales and this time we were successful.

JM: Did you find that by setting the film primarily in the woods you escaped some of the constraints of micro-budget filmmaking? The location also seemed to work well, considering the type of narrative you were working with, in that the woods provide an escape into a make-believe world.

JR: Very much so, plus the fact that it’s all set during the day and focuses on six characters held hostage in one single location. Even though the tradition says you should never work with kids, it was very manageable and achievable. I didn’t feel that my resources were being stretched at any point on set. You’re also right about the escapist qualities, as the run-down urban environment the kids live in, as seen in the opening few minutes of the film, is a stark contrast to the woods. The woods for me evoke memories of childhood, playing war games and such as kids, something innocent but with the potential to turn dangerous.

JM: The film is really built on the performances of the youths. Did the cast members have much acting experience prior to working on the film?

JR: I knew that the biggest obstacle was going to be getting the casting right, especially when you’re dealing with six 14-year-olds who are acting with each other rather than acting with adults, so I spent a lot of time casting. The first place I went to was an agent and actor’s workshop for children in Cardiff. They meet every Thursday to train in acting. A lot of these kids are from underprivileged backgrounds, the scheme set up in part to give them something constructive to work on. This was perfect for us as we’d found that many actors of that age are more stage school types who find it difficult to play the working-class kids the film depicts. I didn’t want acting, I wanted the real thing. I found all six of my actors from that one school, so they all knew each other outside of the film. This obviously had its benefits as much of the on-screen chemistry was genuine.

JM: How do you feel the film differentiates itself from the similarly themed Eden Lake, which was made after your film but got a theatrical release prior to Summer Scars? You are careful to avoid holding any moral judgment on these children in spite of their anti-social behaviour, whereas Eden Lake seems to place much of its focus on the stereotyped attributes of the working-class youth.

JR: I have discussed the film very thoroughly with (Eden Lake director) James Watkins. Even though there are a lot of similarities in the film they are very different. Eden Lake is essentially a classic backwoods story that we commonly see in the US, a type of urban myth story that demonises a certain class. It just happened to tap into the fears of youth crime of the zeitgeist. In Summer Scars, the writer and myself were out to portray the sort of childhood we had. You don’t often see those types of characters as most films are made by filmmakers from a certain background. I suppose there’s a Famous Five element to the film, though crucially they’re a gang of hoodies rather than well-spoken middle-class kids, so it was always a challenge to make these characters sympathetic. One of the arcs of the story is that you are presented with characters who aren’t likeable, but when they’re put in this situation, seeing how they react to it, you see they are vulnerable like the rest of us.

JM: Can you talk me through the character of the drifter, Peter, who is also a complex character and alternately elicits both empathy and hatred?

JR: From the beginning, we didn’t want to nail down that character’s backstory, as I often find in narratives that filmmakers try to justify why people are as they are. We looked at Peter and thought that he’s probably had some military background, but then realised that it would be better if he’s more of a fantasist in that he’d wanted to be a soldier and never followed through with it, but wears the uniform nonetheless. It was an element I had liked in films such as Taxi Driver and I found it worked well within this context. We also wanted to suggest that he was a product of a cycle of abuse. That said, he’s not the archetypal bad guy, and there are things about him that the audience can empathise with.

JM: You run your own sales agency (Jinga Films). How has this progressed since its inception?

JR: I founded Jinga Films through a frustration with the distribution of my first two films, where sales agents were effectively liquidating or were in the process of closing down. I decided that I would be better off selling the films myself, and my girlfriend and I set up the company to sell The Last Horror Movie, then began picking up third-party films. We’ve now been going three years and have built up a library of 28 films, all British, with a specialty in the horror genre, which is where my expertise lies.

JM: In recent years, we’re seeing more films being self-distributed theatrically, on the model used by Ed Blum with Scenes of a Sexual Nature, where everything up until the DVD release was handled in-house before selling the rights for the final home release. Do you find this model works for you?

JR: Yes, since we completed the film just over a year ago we’ve sold it to TLA in North America, and a few other territories like Germany, Spain, Yugoslavia and Thailand. We always find with UK films that the home territory is the hardest market to crack. About six months ago we closed the deal with Soda Pictures for a DVD release but felt that it needed a bit of theatrical exposure before this, so we’re screening at the ICA and we’re also booking it into 10 or 11 cinemas around the UK. We’re only just beginning to explore distribution. What we’ve found with a lot of the films we’re representing is that they’re lucky to go straight to DVD as there’s no theatrical window for them at all, so by doing this with Summer Scars we’re finding that there are possibilities to get the films out there.

Interview by James Merchant

Summer Scars will show at the ICA (London) from June 6 to 10. The screening on June 8 will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. The film is released on DVD on August 24.

Read about other films in the New British Cinema season at the ICA The Blue Tower and The Disappeared.

Festivals

FROM PROPHET TO ANTICHRIST: CANNES 2009

Mother

Festival de Cannes

13-24 May 2009

Website

Even before Cannes 2009 had started, critics and film buffs had celebrated this year’s line-up as the strongest official selection in years, primarily on the basis that some of the most bankable directors in world cinema had rushed through post-production to take their latest offerings to the Croisette. And with Michael Haneke’s excellent The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band) winning the Palme d’Or ahead of a handful of mostly satisfying entries, including Jaques Audiard’s intensely gripping A Prophet (Un Prophète), Park Chan-wook’s slick and stylish Thirst (Bakjwi), Johnnie To’s likable Hong Kong action drama Vengeance, and British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s assured second feature Fish Tank (also screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June), the prestigious competition section did to some extent live up to its promises, even beyond the usual predominant poles of Dardennes-style reality bites and mainstream juggernauts. Yet what really made Cannes a thoroughly enjoyable experience was the wealth of ‘smaller’, weird and wonderful films that screened in the festival’s increasingly popular sidebar sections or at the Marché du Film.

Despite being a little patchy this year, the Un Certain Regard selection remained a good place for discovery. One of the most pleasurable entries here was Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos’s prize-winning Dogtooth (Kynodontas), a nice little oddity that centres around the daily life of three teenage siblings cut off from the outside world and confined to the fake, grotesque universe dictated by their parents’ cruel games and extraordinary educational methods. A hyperbolic piece of absurdist satire that skews genre conventions to the extreme, the film creates a convincingly bizarre world beyond the garden fence where the kids spend their days dwelling in their induced infantilism, until nasty, violent reality catches up with them in the form of a woman who is allowed into the house to have sex with the son.

From the fairly large selection of Asian titles, I quite enjoyed the new film by Hirokazu Koreeda, Air Doll (Kûki Ningyô), a poetic and soft-centred urban fairy tale about an inflatable sex doll that suddenly comes to life (based on the graphic novel by Yoshiie Gouda), as well as Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Nymph (Nang Mai), a slow-paced, abstruse yet strangely engaging ghost story about a pseudo-happy married couple who take a trip into the forest. But the pick of the festival for me was the superb and beautifully accomplished Mother by The Host director Bong Joon-ho. Offering a standout lead performance by long-time Korean TV actress Kim Hye-ja as a feisty widow determined to prove the innocence of her fragile, dim-witted son who has been accused of murder, the film merges a stunning visual language and use of sound with a brilliant script. It creates a poignant exploration of pure, uncompromising motherly love against the backdrop of a tense, twisted murder mystery, intensified by rare moments of violence.

The biggest disappointment by far this year was Lars von Trier’s latest work, the constrained and increasingly infuriating horror essay Antichrist. Another let-down was Spanish thriller Hierro, which had its premiere at the market. After the first showing was cancelled when a mob of demonstrating French electricity and gas workers blacked out cinemas around the Palais des Festivals, the rescheduled screening revealed an initially decent but ultimately weak and hollow thriller about a woman’s frantic search for her missing son. Eagerly awaited (and hyped) as the latest hit in Spanish cinema’s wave of feral, aggressive and stylised chillers, the film failed to deliver anything like the powerful, subtle and uniquely terrifying experience provided, for example, by last year’s Cannes stand-out, Pascal Laugier’s controversial French horror tale Martyrs.

All in all, this year’s festival offered a passable feast of gore and horrific thrills, and it was perhaps Park Chan-wook who contributed with the most enthusiasm. His Thirst not merely adds another pleasurable angle to the renewed interest in the vampire genre but shows signs of Park getting back to form, with a style that is reminiscent of his wildly imaginative, brooding Vengeance trilogy. It’s a tale of a troubled and sick priest who volunteers for a dangerous medical experiment and who, to his utter disgust, inadvertently becomes a vampire as a result. While the film certainly has its flaws and the plot becomes increasingly erratic and messy, Thirst is a visually riveting and peculiar experience, as indeed the festival was overall.

Pamela Jahn

Interviews

ZIFT: INTERVIEW WITH JAVOR GARDEV

Zift

Format: Cinema

Screening at the 28th International Istanbul Film Festival

4-19 April 2009

Director: Javor Gardev

Writer: Vladislav Todorov

Based on the novel by: Vladislav Todorov

Cast: Zahary Baharov, Tanya Ilieva, Vladimir Penev, Dimo Alexiev

Bulgaria 2008

92 mins

Submitted as Bulgaria’s official candidate for the Oscars, Zift is the striking directorial debut of Javor Gardev, whose theatrical background did not prevent him from conceiving and realising a film exuding cinematic knowledge from every frame. Mixing the aesthetic codes of noir with the absurdist provocation of sots-art (Soviet Pop Art), Zift follows Moth, an innocent man who was thrown into jail just before the communist coup in 1944 and is released on parole in the totalitarian Sofia of the 60s. The film plays on the binary opposition between the austerity of an oppressive regime and the murky atmospheres of the noir genre, here injected with a destabilising amount of irony (a diamond is secretly embedded in the oversized penis of an African statuette). The genre deconstruction parallels the critique of the pompous façade of Soviet sternness, sublimating the artistic project into the shiny black immanence of the zift (shit), whose meaning is as saturated as its coloration. The film possesses the rare gift of inventiveness and implies an artistic distance towards the sort of fare that crowds our polluted screens, and yet, besides a screening at the East London Film Festival we will probably be denied any further opportunity to enjoy this fine piece of filmmaking.

Celluloid Liberation Front met Javor Gardev in the entangled scents of Istanbul, eager to understand why being dangerous keeps you alive…

Celluloid Liberation Front: For a first-time director you handle the codes of film noir very confidently. Where does this confidence come from?

Javor Gardev: I researched the film noir genre extensively with the screenwriter. We watched lots of films from the 30s to the present, and like a sponge I absorbed all the constitutive elements of the genre. I also attentively watched over and over entire sequences in order to grasp the creative structure and the editing logic behind them. This preparation work resulted into a 280-page script where the whole film, sequence by sequence, image composition included, was written down in full detail. The image composition and the lighting were also prepared in advance with the director of photography with whom I looked for a compositional balance between the aesthetic process and its position within the montage, but also within the broader alchemy of the whole film, soundtrack included. It’s also interesting to note that the creative crew behind the film (except the DOP) is entirely constituted by first-timers with whom I had already worked with in theatre; the young music composer started writing the soundtrack when the film was still being shot.

CLF: Does the twisted deconstruction of the noir genre somehow parallel the critique of a totalitarian and austere regime?

JG: Yes, sure, the film is in fact very much influenced by Sots-Art (an avant-garde artistic current developed in 80s Russia) whereby the pompousness of the Soviet iconography was being undermined by placing it within absurd and ridiculous settings and situations. I proceeded along a similar perspective, trying to articulate what I personally call ‘grotesque social criticism’, that is, poles apart from Socialist Realism, the deconstruction of the façade certainties of the regime as much as those of a cinema genre. For example, in Zift there are Bulgarian folk stories injected with a dose of black humour and irony that function as a provoking challenge to today’s Bulgarian society in relation to its communist past.

CLF: How did the idea for Zift come about?

JG: The film is based on the first fictional book by Vladislav Todorov (the screenwriter of the film). His previous work in philosophy and cultural anthropology has included some interesting speculations about the symbolic overproduction of appearances in order to cover up the scarcity of goods characterising the Soviet era. The hard-boiled genre is also a novelty on the literary landscape of Bulgaria, and I immediately thought that the book was extremely apt for a cinematic adaptation.

CLF: Why not for a theatrical one?

JG: The book is very evocative in terms of landscape, it needed images, I couldn’t possibly have adapted it for the stage. Furthermore, the writer was iconographically influenced by cinema when writing the novel.

CLF: At some point, the main character hears ‘tobacco-stained voices’. I really liked this ‘sonic image’ and I thought it was representative of your eloquent aesthetic approach. Were soundtrack and photography conceived in close connection?

JG: All the filmic inputs are conveyed together, we worked with the idea of a choral composition, always looking for a harmonic balance between the different elements. The smells of the movie are conveying its moods.

CLF: Which elements from your theatrical background helped you in realising your first feature?

JG: The timing of dramaturgy is surely one of them. Editing helps you a lot in cinema, but the management of the perception of time and how to make it work during the screening in order to interact with the audience is something I learnt in theatre.

CLF: Do you think it is different to direct an actor on stage and on set?

JG: Yes, definitely. On set, there is no continuity. In theatre, once the actor has entered the role it is easier for him/her to maintain it, but on set the actors are continuously interrupted. Hence it becomes much harder to keep the necessary concentration that the character requires; it’s very easy to ‘lose the role’. Cinema is a synergetic work, therefore a more fragmented one, where acting is built around different temporal coordinates.

CLF: How was the film received in Bulgaria and abroad?

JG: In Bulgaria, it was very successful, it was a box office record and even did better than the US blockbusters, and as soon as it leaked on the internet it was downloaded 42,000 times in two days. Nonetheless, it also sparked a bit of controversy since parts of the Bulgarian audience couldn’t deal with that kind of irony challenging their certainties. The film has been shown to critical acclaim in many festivals (Toronto included) and will be distributed in two very big markets, Russia and the USA.

CLF: Does the concept of national cinema concern you?

JG: Not in strict terms. Bulgaria is very concerned with this concept, but I believe that it brings up ideological predispositions that transcend cinema to go into ‘politics’. I wanted to engage the audience in a non-representational debate about Bulgaria’s past and its effects on the present, trying to figure out the metastases paining a social body burdened by its communist past.

CLF: Your film reminded me aesthetically of Lang’s M and the dense chromatism of Jean-Pierre Melville. What are your filmic influences?

JG:Early Kubrick, Dassin, Ritchie, Tarantino, the Cohen brothers and Russian avant-gardist Aleksei German.

CLF: What does Zift represent for you?

JG: You mean the film or the zift itself?

CLF: er…

JG: (Laughs) I expressly overloaded the word with meanings so the film would reflect this signifying density covering the holes of reality, sticky entrapment, the shit of life, the inability to get rid of it… the Zift.

Interview by Celluloid Liberation Front

Interviews, Short Cuts

SHORT CUTS: INTERVIEW WITH ROB SPERANZA

Mother, Mine

Still from Mother, Mine

Glimmer: 7th Hull International Short Film Festival

21-26 April 2009

Reel Cinema, Hull, UK

Glimmer 2009 website

The recent Glimmer Festival showcased a wide variety of outstanding short films from around the globe, bringing further exposure to a form of filmmaking that is as industrially important as it is artistically invigorating. Three of the short films that were screened at the 2009 event were produced by the South Yorkshire Filmmakers Network, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to promote filmmaking in the region through developing shorts and running events and competitions, such as the recent 2 Weeks 2 Make It. The network’s Glimmer entries included Susan Everett’s award-winning Mother, Mine, about a young woman tracking down her natural mother, and Matt Taabu’s Into the Woods, in which a family outing in the countryside takes a dangerous turn following the appearance of a stranger. Both are suspenseful and unsettling thrillers, while Kieron Clark’s Joy is an entirely different proposition involving a singing fish. Each film was produced by Rob Speranza, a native New Yorker who relocated to Sheffield 13 years ago to undertake post-graduate study, and is now the Head of Operations of the SYFN and will be line-producing his first feature film this summer. John Berra met with him to discuss his recent projects, the importance of festivals, and the supposed marginalisation of short films.

John Berra: What is the development process for short films at the SYFN?

Rob Speranza: When I get a script, I ask myself if it’s something that people are going to want to watch. It sounds really simple, but it’s the sort of thing that a lot of producers forget about; they ask themselves, ‘do I want to make it?’, and that’s a good question, but I ask that question after asking, is this something that people are going to want to see? Is it something that festivals are going to show? Is it something that is actually going to be marketable? Can I get bums on seats with this film, and can I see people enjoying it? If I can answer ‘yes’ to most of those questions, especially the festival one, then I ask if I want to make it and if I am interested in the subject matter. I might read the script and say yes to all those other questions, but the script might be about windsurfing, and I have no interest in windsurfing. But then I might read a script about a boy who wants to connect with his long-lost father, or a script about a war veteran returning to normal society, and I like those subjects, so then I ask myself if it’s going to be likely for me to have a working relationship with the writer and the director.

JB: Festivals are often discussed in terms of representing a creative community, but there is always an intensely competitive element to such events in terms of securing financing for future projects.

RS: I’ve rarely attended a short film festival with a direct view to financing, aside from Cannes. I love festivals. I go to them with a view to selling the film. I know a lot of producers who don’t like going to them, who don’t like networking and schmoozing with lots of filmmakers, but I really enjoy it, to an extent. After three or four days, I want to go home because when I go, I’m really intense; I go to all the screenings, all the events, I’m at every drinks reception, I’ll keep my mouth open and keep talking and, after a while, I don’t want to drink anymore, I don’t want to give away any more business cards and copies of my film, I just want to go home. But the most important thing about festivals is to go and watch other films, to enjoy other people’s work, and see what else is going on and go, ‘why didn’t I think of that? That’s a great idea, why didn’t I make that film?’

JB: It seems that much of your responsibilities involve handling the film after it has been completed and keeping it alive on the festival circuit?

RS: I’m very fond of saying that a producer’s job begins when the film is finished. It’s relatively easy to shoot a film, and I say that with an emphasis on the word ‘relatively’, but when it comes to getting it seen, that’s when you have to really step up your game. You have to get the film out there, send it to the right festivals and sell it. There is so much talent out there; everybody and their brother are shooting films on DVD camera or on mobile phones, so it’s a very competitive world.

JB: What can an award from a festival do for a short film or filmmaker?

RS: When you start to collect awards, as with a film like Mother, Mine, which is doing really well and has won multiple awards, you get a different kind of reputation where people hear of you and you get a bit of renown, which is very positive. Then, of course, sales agents come to you, and you start to see articles in magazines, and that’s the kind of thing that awards can do. They create a sense of importance, talent and maybe a bit of glamour, especially around the director because it’s a director-led industry.

JB: Do you think that putting a short film on the internet can suggest a lack of confidence on the part of the filmmaker?

RS: If you have a decent short film, you shouldn’t be putting it online first. If it’s a good short film, do the festivals first, put it out there, because that is where you are going to meet the people who will want you to make more films and pay you for the one that you’ve just made. I’m not saying that if you put it online, you can’t direct a sales agent to it, but there are all kinds of chances that you might scupper with a lot of festivals.

JB: The performances in Mother, Mine are very naturalistic and affecting. What is your approach to casting a short film, and is there much time for a rehearsal process?

RS: I always try to build in time for rehearsal for my directors. With short films, you don’t have a lot of money or a lot of time, so it’s wise to rehearse for as long as you can. With Mother, Mine the first thing we did was to get Rachel Fisher, our casting director, on board and she worked very closely with director Susan Everett; Sue wrote out her character descriptions and she had a short list of talent that she had been building up for a couple of years, because the short is a pared down version of a feature script she had written, so she had a short-list of names that she had gathered from either films or television. It takes time to generate the relationship between the director and the character, especially if the director didn’t write the script, and then for that person to suddenly come alive when they find them on the internet, or on the screen, or as a result of a casting director showing them clips. Most of the time when I’m working with somebody and they meet an actor who would be suitable for the role, they know it right away.

JB: Into the Woods is a very tight piece. How important is it to balance atmosphere and aesthetics with narrative urgency, and was the finished film stripped down from the original screenplay?

RS: The film did initially have a longer introduction. In the script, we spent longer with the family, they were walking through the woods, we were getting to know them, and it was clear that the mother and father were fighting and that the father may have had an affair at some point; but that was back-story, and back-story is the death of short films, so get rid of back-story, it’s not important. What is important is the way they are going to handle this confrontation because the subtle message in this film is that everybody probably has some kind of prejudice that emerges when you are confronted with a situation like that, when a stranger comes out of the woods, looking scary and bloodied, and saying all kinds of things in different languages.

JB: Why did you want to produce Kieron Clark’s Joy, a black and white film about a singing fish?

RS: Kieron is not the sort of director that I usually gravitate to but there was something about this story. He wanted to make a trilogy about the sea, and he is a very quiet guy, very reserved, extremely clever, very funny in a subtle way, and he knows what he wants. I thought it was a quirky little story, and he said he wanted to do it in black and white, and that there would be no dialogue, just a song. It appealed to my roots in poetry, because some of the first films that I made were eight short film-poems. I’m a much more mainstream, narrative, sales-and-festivals-driven producer now, I like to think I make things that people want to see, but Joy was a good mix because people do want to see it, because it’s not too weird, it’s not too avant-garde that it makes you go, ‘What in the world was that about?’

JB: How do you feel about the general perception that short films are marginalised, especially when compared to short literary fiction?

RS: Since the internet has taken off, you have all these different websites, popular websites like YouTube, Screening Room and DailyMotion.com, to show your film, and as a result of that, festivals are starting up all over the place. Every little town has a festival popping up, and bigger towns and cities a myriad of them, so there are so many ways to get your film seen. Short films are perfect for small, hand-held devices that do not have enough memory to store a feature film, like mobile phones and PSPs, so the market is expanding so quickly that there is a really good future for shorts. Short literary fiction was always marginalised, and yet now there is a massive market for short stories, mostly anthologies, and there are also more compilations of short films being produced and distributed.

JB: Do you think that short films should take more of an influence from commercial feature films in terms of narrative?

RS:A few years ago, people could only make a short funded by the Arts Council if you had to think about what it meant, but because of the popularity of short films now and the way that festivals like Times BFI London or Encounters have grown you have a very different world for short films now. People are making short films that have got great stories, great ideas, even if some of them are one-trick-ponies, and there are plenty of filmmakers out there who work in features but want to make short films in-between. You could make an argument that films like Short Cuts and Magnolia have got short film elements because they piece fragments together. Short Cuts is a good example because it’s based on a collection of short stories, but Robert Altman decided to merge the elements together and make the stories cross over. I love the way that a lot of short pieces can combine to create a really interesting whole and those are probably my favourite kinds of films.

Interview by John Berra

Rob Speranza is currently undertaking production work on two short films for Screen Yorkshire, shooting in 2009. Visit www.syfn.org for more information about the South Yorkshire Filmmakers Network.

Film Jukebox

THE PHANTOM BAND’S FILM JUKEBOX

The Phantom Band

Photo by Steve Gullick

As 2009 has progressed the mysteries of The Phantom Band have been steadily revealed. With their debut album Checkmate Savage (Chemikal Uinderground) released in January to a swathe of critical acclaim with terms like ‘early contender for album of the year’ liberally bandied about, their initial identity confusion appears to have been ironed out. No longer changing their name before every gig or wearing bags over their heads, the Glasgow-based folk-meets-krautrock sextet combine humour with a very black outlook. Their single ‘The Howling’ was released in May and after a lengthy UK tour in the spring, the band are next set to hit the summer festivals. For more information check their website or MySpace. LUCY HURST

GERRY:

1- Gregory’s Girl (1981)
It’s basically a film about a girl trying to get in the school football team and a boy falling in love. Sounds terrible doesn’t it? It’s not. For no other reason than watching protective 15-year-old Gregory being patronised by the hip 12-year-old who is trying to pull his sister, watch this film. If you ever felt awkward at school, watch this film. If you’ve ever been in love, watch this film. To say that discovering the lighting tech at our gig in Stirling was Andy from Gregory’s Girl was one of the highlights of The Phantom’s British tour would be no understatement.

2- Grease (1978)
Why is Grease my favourite film? Is it because Olivia Newton John is cinema’s hottest ever sex kitten in skin-tight trousers? Possibly. Is it because she looks even hotter as the sweet girl next door? Probably. Is it because all the songs and the whole film make me so damn happy? Absolutely. Is it because John Travolta had the great idea to base it on the teachings of The Church of Scientology…?

DUNCAN:

3- The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974)
My favourite of Herzog’s documentaries. The super slow-mo footage of the ‘ski-fliers’ endlessly falling, first through the air then cart-wheeling in the snow as they misjudge a landing, accompanied by Popol Vuh’s eerie soundtrack sends me into some kind of fugue state each time I see it. I’ve never been interested in ski-jumping but Walter Steiner makes the sport seem like an absurd yet necessary escape route out of the world.

4- Dead Man (1995)
I chanced upon this film on late night TV back when they used to show interesting stuff in the small hours (Alex Cox’s Moviedrome on BBC 2 in the early 90s was an invaluable education). I couldn’t believe this film existed; Johnny Depp looking like Buster Keaton in a plaid suit playing the reincarnation of William Blake, in an expressionist Western directed by Jim Jarmusch, sound-tracked by Neil Young – surely not? I love the deadpan dialogue; Crispin Glover’s disturbingly irrelevant monologue, and Iggy Pop as a transvestite cannibal describing a Philistine as ‘a really dirty person’. I still wonder if this film actually exists.

RICK:

5- Highlander (1986)
I remember when I was a kid there was always some film I really, really wanted to see. I would briefly glimpse a poster in the video rental shop and it would be enough for me to go home and fantasise about it for weeks. The first time I think this happened was with Highlander. It was about Scotland; it had sword-fighting and Sean Connery in it; the soundtrack was by Queen! Are you kidding?! What was not to like? Incidentally quite a lot when you watch it now, but back then it seemed like it was easily the best film I had ever seen.

6- Nightbreed (1990)
This movie reminds me so much of the summer when I was 16. My friends would come over and we’d record loads of ridiculous songs onto a tape recorder then get drunk and watch Nightbreed. In the middle of the night we’d go out walking in the countryside, sometimes there would be this fog hanging over the fields, but it would be really light as well because the moon was so full and the sky was clear. The movie itself was marketed as a slasher picture but it is in fact more of a fantasy/horror/superhero movie. OK, it is a little stupid but I used to be a big Clive Barker fan and it represents to me all of the films I used to love when I was growing up.

ANDY:

7- Blade Runner (1982)
Aside from an amazing Vangelis soundtrack that helped spark a nerdy love for electronics, it’s perhaps the first film that made me really consider my humanity philosophically (‘maybe we’re all replicants?’ – that sort of thing). The first band I ever did a live gig with was (is) named Voigt Kampff, after the test in the film. Also, I had the wants for Sean Young, even with her androgynous Kraftwerk aesthetic. The opening scene in the hover car, with the firey towers in the distance is just like when you drive past the oil refinery in Fife. I’ve seen things…

8- Wild at Heart (1990)
We need a David Lynch film in the list. I was initially drawn to Wild at Heart because I really like ‘Wicked Game’, the Chris Isaak song that made it famous, and I love the way the soundtrack seeps onto the screen infecting the narrative like a musical, as when Nicolas Cage breaks into Elvis and a live metal band suddenly forms his backing group. The concept of travel (and escape) denoting psychological shifts references another great road-movie/musical, The Wizard of Oz (1939), and it uses the concepts of commodity and freedom to paint a nightmarish picture of the American Dream. Like all good David Lynch films, Wild at Heart touches you in ways you don’t want. And it’s Nick Cage before he was shit.

DAMIEN:

9- Carlito’s Way (1993)
Carlito’s Way is my favourite film. The cast are all excellent and Carlito Brigante is, in my view, Al Pacino’s last great performance. Sean Penn has never been better as Kleinfeld, the crooked shyster lawyer. Even if he’d been awful he’d have deserved the Oscar for his White-fro/tracksuit combo. Benny Blanco is also a great turn from John Leguizamo. The period detail of mid-70s New York and the soundtrack make it. And the end set-piece in Grand Central Station betters that of The Untouchables (1987) – another of De Palma’s nods to the Odessa Steps scene in Battleship Potemkin (1925). Every time I watch it I still think Carlito will make it.

GREG:

10- It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Every Christmas I get drunk and go to see It’s a Wonderful Life at the pictures. It’s the least challenging, sentimental load of nonsense I’ve seen and I cry and cry every time. Sometimes in summer I remember it snowing when I left the cinema. It never has. Sometimes you just don’t need more piss and vinegar.

Interviews

Timecrimes: Interview with Nacho Vigalondo

Timecrimes

Format: DVD

Date: 4 May 2009

Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment

Director: Nacho Vigalondo

Writer Nacho Vigalondo

Original title: Los Cronocrímenes

Cast: Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernández, Bárbara Goenaga, Nacho Vigalondo, Juan Inciarte

Spain 2007

92 mins

Timecrimes (Los Cronocrí­;menes) combines elements of science fiction and psycho thrillers to create a film full of intriguing ideas and imagery. Alex Fitch spoke to director, writer and star of the film Nacho Vigalondo about his influences and love of genre movies. [WARNING: SPOILERS]

Alex Fitch: What was the genesis of this film? Had you been a fan of time travel movies or did the idea come to you as a short story?

Nacho Vigalondo: I’ve been a science fiction lover all my life. I spent my childhood reading sci-fi and I’ve always dreamt of becoming a science fiction filmmaker. But because Spain doesn’t have a sci-fi tradition, it’s very difficult to convince the business people and the industry people here to make that kind of film. It’s easier to make comedies or drama. But in 2005 I became this little celebrity in Spain because one of my films was nominated for an Oscar for best short. At that time, I decided that if I had an opportunity to make a feature film because of my Oscar situation, that out of all my projects, I’d make the crazy, complicated, science fiction one! So that’s why I insisted on making Timecrimes.

AF: The film has a complex plot, but it involves only five actors, and even though it’s science fiction it doesn’t require any special effects.

NV: I think that powerful science fiction comes from ideas, and it isn’t related to big concepts in terms of production but in terms of script-writing. For example, this movie seems very cheap but even a cheap film is expensive to make here. It wasn’t easy to sell this idea because you’re dealing with a time travel device that twists the reality of the character again and again. I tried to make a movie that is easy to watch on the screen, but you can figure out how complicated the script was. Here in Spain, if you want to raise money, you have to go to these commissions related to public funds and the TV industry, and it’s pretty complicated if you want to convince these guys to invest based only on the script. As a result, it took me many years to finish the film.

AF: Still, in some respects, it’s a relatively simple premise: a man observes what he thinks is a murder and then inadvertently becomes the murderer himself.

NV: Yes, of course. But the genesis of the idea for me was this: what if I make a time travel story that becomes a crime story, and in that crime story, what if the innocent guy and the villain and the guy who pulls the strings from the darkness are all the same? What if we push the ambiguity of crime stories like The Postman Always Rings Twice, for example, by putting in a time machine that makes the good guy the villain at the same time.

AF: I don’t know if you’re a fan of classic thrillers like Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage?

NV: Yes, of course! The Italian giallo is one of my favourite genres! I wanted to join my two passions in one film – one of my passions is sci-fi and the other is the kind of thriller that combines a specific point of view, bizarre killers and this kind of erotic stuff. Argento is one of my favourites, but other thrillers I have in mind are Body Double by De Palma, and of course Alfred Hitchcock.

AF: A recurring theme in a lot of these thrillers is the idea of the doppelgänger and you’ve taken that to its logical conclusion.

NV: Yes. There were several drafts of the story – it was maybe draft four or five when the girl entered the story, and her appearance became the heart of the film. It’s similar to the theme of the doppelgänger and the simulacra because we are dealing with the point of view of a certain character. Later we learn that the point of view belongs to someone hidden from the view of the audience. I love those kinds of games!

AF: The look of the film, the aesthetics, was that influenced by films like Se7en, which have a high contrast ratio? Did you use the bleach bypass/silver retention method to get that look?

NV: I love the look of Se7en, I’m really in love with David Fincher! Se7en became known as a very 1990s film, but the strategy for that film was to make it look like a 1970s picture, like The French Connection, for example. In Timecrimes, we tried to make a film that didn’t feel like any particular decade. Imagine someone watching this film in 50 years – we wanted that audience of the future to feel confused about the age of our film: is it the 1970s, the 80s, the 90s or the 21st century? Some of the elements of the film look contemporary, but at the same time other elements feel like Doctor Who from the 70s or the 80s. Some of the creepy material from Se7en doesn’t feel contemporary, but I feel that if you don’t stick to the aesthetics of your time, you’ll stop the movie from dating.

AF: In a way, watching any movie is a kind of time travel because as a viewer, you’re travelling back in time to the period it was made, so in Timecrimes, you’re playing with that in a way.

NV: Yes, the fact that you have time travel in a movie reflects the fact that a movie itself is something that travels back in time. That’s the nature of filmmaking.

AF: You play the role of the scientist in the film. Was it important for you to play that part? In a way, you have cast yourself as some kind of Deus ex machina, you’re ‘God’ within the story.

NV: I’ve been working as an actor since the 90s, in commercials, short films, in some feature films working with models, but I would never play an important role in one of my films. In this case, it felt funny to me to direct the film from inside it, experiencing all the contradictions related to filmmaking. When you’re a director, you’re like a god, you are pulling the strings, but at the same time you are the first victim of everything. The movie itself is pulling the strings and controlling you. It’s funny because that’s more or less what’s happening to the character in the movie. Some of the promotional stills from the movie are labelled as: ‘This is Nacho Vigalondo directing the main actor, Karra Elejalde’. But those stills actually show me acting in the movie – it was my character directing Karra’s character, and that is funny.

AF: What other time travel films are you a fan of? Inevitably that scene where you draw an arrow on the wall, to explain the path of time, brings up images of Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future?

NV: When we were making the movie, Primer came out, as well as Tony Scott’s Dé;jà Vu and the time travel episode in Lost. But at the time when I was writing the film, it wasn’t common to find time travel plots on the screen. Obviously, some of my big influences are Back to the Future and Twelve Monkeys, but the kind of time travel I wanted to bring to the screen were the short stories of Philip K. Dick, writers like Robert Heinlein or Stanislaw Lem, who wrote Solaris, which is one of my favourites. These writers deal with this kind of twisted time travel in which you’re not travelling far from home, but you are making a trip where you’re multiplying your past. There’s a short story by Heinlein called ‘All You Zombies’, and in this tale the guy becomes his own mother and father! I love those kinds of quirks!

AF: Do you think free will is possible in a time travel story? It seems from the moment that Hector observes the girl, he’s trapped in his own fate. It seems like a mix of the consequences of voyeurism and also quantum mechanics – when you observe something, it’s fixed in its state and cannot change.

NV: The quantum mechanics aspect is the girl. We put an image of Schrö;inger’s cat on the girl’s shirt – there’s a point in the movie where she’s dead and alive at the same time; it depends on what Hector sees, he defines whether she’s dead or alive. The theory of this film is that you only have free will within the limits of your perception. If you haven’t seen what happens inside a room, you can change what happens there, but if you have seen inside the room, you cannot change anything. When I was writing the script it was something that came to me. It’s a quantum physics conclusion. For me, that seemed fairer than giving the character the freedom to change everything.

AF: I suppose that, maybe more so than in other films, the actors must have had a lot of questions about what they were doing in each scene, particularly when there were three different Hectors acting simultaneously! How difficult was that to direct?

NV: It was pretty difficult. There were moments while we were shooting when we had to stop everything, because suddenly there’d be a question. We’re shooting in the middle of the night, in a forest, and suddenly a member of the crew says: ‘Wait, if Hector 2 is here, which tone of the lights are we using?’ And we’d have to stop filming and try and solve the problem! Until that moment, you think you have the film under control. The worst thing is when you go back to the hotel at the end of shooting each day and you can’t avoid thinking that nothing fits in with anything and everything’s a disaster. When it comes to editing the results, you come back to life again and realise that somehow everything fits. For me, it’s a nightmare until you see the finished material.

AF: The film has been marketed as a horror film to a certain extent. How do you feel about that? Is it because the plot is quite difficult, so if you introduce it to people as a sort of psycho thriller, you can ease them into the idea that it’s about time travel later on?

NV: There are many sci-fi festivals around the world, but very few festivals where the richness of the genre is not restricted. There are not many mixed genre festivals. There are two kinds of horror festivals: the ones where there are only ‘pure’ horror films and the more open horror festivals that have become fantastic genre festivals. So your film will be seen next to a gore fest or a psycho-killer thriller there. I’m not worried about people seeing my film as a horror film, because while I have this time travel device, I put in a lot of giallo iconography. As I said before, my inspirations for the script were mainly sci-fi, but my inspirations for the filmmaking were closer to Alfred Hitchcock, Mario Bava, Dario Argento.

AF: It’s interesting to think of Hitchcock, because Timecrimes is like a reversal of Rear Window, where the middle-class voyeur becomes the killer. Do you think there is this tension with the middle classes that they have their new houses and their Ikea kitchens but all it takes is some encounter with the uncanny and they’ll become unhinged?

NV: Yeah. At the beginning of the story, we have this Hitchcock element: we have a woman, who is working and building a table, and all the time she is thinking about putting the table inside the house. And then there is a man looking through binoculars at the forest. This is a real Hitchcock opening: you have a great house in a great forest, you have this great life, but you are looking through binoculars far from home. Why? What is he trying to find? Once he finds this fantasy of a naked girl in the middle of nowhere, he becomes a Hitchcockian character because he’s dealing with his own fantasies.

AF: Just like Norman Bates in Psycho, he’s a victim as well as a criminal?

NV: Karra, me and Jon, the other actor,we watched Psycho together and we tried to Norman Batesify the characters! This is one of the things we brought to the film: we copied some of Norman Bates’s gestures for Hector. While I love the shower scene, my favourite sequence in Psycho is the one after the shower, when Norman is taking the corpse of the girl to the car, and sinks the car in a swamp. All of those scenes where he’s cleaning the bathroom, putting the plastic around the corpse, I love that part of the movie, that’s one of my biggest influences. You’re not dealing with suspense, it’s almost something else; it’s like a musical and dancing. There’s this kind of sinister beauty in the sequence and we watched it again and again!

AF: Like Psycho, your film has a twist in the ending that makes you want to see it again.

NV: We’re in the DVD age, and you have to face the fact that people are not going to watch your film just once, so you have to be prepared to put enough ‘hidden’ elements in, which you might miss the first time, but see the second time. In the Spanish DVD, we added an extra cut of the film from a chronological point of view. Instead of following one Hector, we watch the actions of the three Hectors at the same time. Watching the film again – it lasts 30 minutes – it turns into this kind of gracious filming with a lot of Hectors at the same time! It doesn’t work as a real film because it’s too confusing, but if you’ve just seen the normal version, it shows you how things really work in the story. I feel very proud because you can check that everything matches.

Interview by Alex Fitch

Interviews

MARTYRS: INTERVIEW WITH PASCAL LAUGIER

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Martyrs

Format: DVD and BLu-ray

Release date: 24 May 2009

Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment

Director: Pascal Laugier

Writer: Pascal Laugier

Cast: Morjana Alaoui, Mylène Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin

France/Canada 2008

97 mins

A story about the love between two damaged young women, their revenge against those who abused one of them, and, more generally, the intense pain of human life, Martyrs is a horror film, certainly, but one where the horror stems from a profound existential despair. Director Pascal Laugier takes his subject matter, his actresses and the audience’s preconceptions as far as they will go and beyond, and if the film does not always succeed, it is because it so fearlessly jumps into the unknown. Opinions have been fiercely divided and Martyrs has been beset by controversy ever since its screening at the Cannes festival last year. It was hit with a rare and prohibitive 18 certificate on its release in France, and although the decision was quickly reversed and the certificate downgraded to 16, in the UK it only had a limited theatrical release at the ICA in London in March.

Virginie Sélavy: To describe Martyrs as a horror film seems too reductive, as it is so unusual and unpredictable. Was your intention to make a horror film?

Pascal Laugier: Yes, because I always liked the genre. In the 70s in particular, it produced very singular works, made by filmmakers who were using it to express very personal things and a certain vision of the world. We now see John Carpenter as an auteur, in the most European sense of the word. I modestly wanted to reconnect with that spirit and to make a film that, while using the codes and archetypes of the genre, would be as unexpected as possible. Horror film should be a space of freedom, a territory for experimentation. But what happens is often the opposite. I was fed up with formulaic movies that just copy the classics, I thought that the original meaning had been lost. The genre had become politically correct, as safe as any other genre, whereas its origin lies in fact in transgression. I tried to make an uncomfortable, unpredictable film. I don’t know if I succeeded but that was the intention.

VS: What motivated you to make such an extreme, excessive film?

PL: PL: I was going through a difficult time in my life. I was in a very sombre, pessimistic mood. Our epoch is not very glorious. There are no utopias, ideologies have collapsed and our faith in the future with them. I realise it’s not very original to say this, but I really believe that the Western world is sick. Individual anxieties are at their highest, everyone lives in a constant low-level fear, it feels like we’re going to crash into a wall, there’s something very deathly in our current society. Horror cinema allowed me to express this in a very direct way. Martyrs is almost a work of prospective fiction that shows a dying world, almost like a pre-apocalypse. It’s a world where evil triumphed a long time ago, where consciences have died out under the reign of money and where people spend their time hurting one another. It’s a metaphor, of course, but the film describes things that are not that far from what we’re experiencing today.

VS: At the heart of the film lies the definition of the word ‘martyr’, which explains the extreme suffering to which the characters are subjected. Can you tell us more about this?

PL: For me, the martyr represents the one who, having no other choice but to suffer, manages to do something with this pain. Of course it’s an extreme projection, entirely disenchanted, of what I was telling you about today’s world. Since we don’t believe in anything, since the world is increasingly divided between winners and losers, what is left to the losers but to do something with their pain? Deep down, it’s what the film is about.

VS: There seems to be a fascination for suffering in the film, whether physical or psychological, whether with those who inflict it or those who are subjected to it.

PL: It’s not really a fascination, but a questioning. The film is a personal reaction to the darkness of our world. And I like the paradox within horror film: take the worst of the human condition and transform it into art, into beauty. It’s the only genre that offers this kind of dialectic and I have always found this idea very moving – to create emotion with the saddest, most depressing things in existence. I’ve always felt that horror was a melancholy genre.

VS: There is also a lot of tenderness in the film between Lucie and Anna, who are very moving characters. How important is their relationship to the film?

PL: That was a crucial element for me. I didn’t enjoy making this film very much. Everything, from writing the script to editing, was, for different reasons, very difficult. What gave me the strength to tell this story, to spend two years of my life in such a dark world, was the love story between Anna and Lucie. It was what connected me viscerally to the film. It’s a love that is not shared. Anna loves Lucie unconditionally and this love will kill her. That’s something very real that we all experience: to fall in love with the wrong person, the one who, without consciously wanting to, will destroy you. Just because they are what they are. Anna loves in an absolute manner, and in that sense, she is a sort of modern saint. She gives all of herself and she will pay for it very dearly. The world and its trivial reality are fatal to people like her…

VS: Watching the film is a profoundly unsettling experience as we are led on the same journey of pain as the central characters. What sort of reaction did you want to provoke in the audience?

PL: I swear that to disgust audiences has never been my motivation. When critics describe the film as butchery, a display of guts and gore, it saddens me very much. I see my film as a rather reserved work, in fact. And I would like it to touch the viewers, to plunge them in a state of profound melancholy, just like mine when I was filming – because I think that Martyrs is really a melodrama. Hard, violent, very disturbing, but a melodrama all the same. I hope it will be a powerful experience for those who will see it because I put everything I had into it.

VS: What was the reaction of the public in France and elsewhere? Were you surprised?

PL: I knew that I was sending out such a blast of dark energy to the audience that I had to be ready for any reaction. It’s the rule of the game. I had some amazing experiences at festivals around the world. Some people insulted me and were angry with me; others reacted very warmly. Martyrs forces people to take a strong stand, and that suits me fine. Horror in my view shouldn’t be a unifying genre. It must divide, shock, make cracks in the certainties of the audience and their propensity to a certain conformism. Horror is inherently subversive. Otherwise, I don’t see the point.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Festivals

Terracotta Festival 2009

The Detective

Still from: The Detective

Terracotta Far East Film Festival

21-24 May 2009

Prince Charles Cinema, London

Terracotta website

Over just four days, Joey Leung hopes to dramatically change your perception of Asian cinema. With his specially selected program of 13 films from all over the Far East, Leung’s Terracotta Festival is an ambitious attempt at breaking the stereotype that Asian films are all just about extreme horror, guns and spooky ghosts.

One recognisable name in Terracotta’s program is Oxide Pang – the Hong Kong director responsible for The Eye (2002). But the film of his that is being screened isn’t yet another sequel to that notorious horror franchise. The Detective (2007) is a much more restrained film about a young gumshoe searching for a missing girl in Bangkok’s Chinatown and shows his strength as a director without having to rely on flashy visuals.

Similarly, Johnnie To is best known for his crime thrillers but Terracotta will give audiences the chance to see the director working on a different level in the light-hearted 60s-influenced crime caper Sparrow (2008): ‘Everyone keeps saying the end is like Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)’, says Leung, ‘It didn’t do well in Hong Kong but film fans can appreciate the stylistic and artistic picture he’s trying to paint. That’s the point of a festival – to unearth films that might not be commercial.’

As well as art-house ponderings – also showing are Kim Ki-duk’s surreal Dream (2008) from Korea and Taiwan’s Keeping Watch (2007) about the strange reconnection of two childhood friends – Leung is making sure that action fans are also provided for in his intriguing cross-section. The festival is set to open with a bang thanks to Korea’s heist thriller Eye for an Eye (2008), but Legendary Assassins (2008) should be the most entertaining film on offer: ‘Jacky Wu’s first film is a throwback to 80s Hong Kong B-movie action. Li Chung Chi from Jackie Chan’s stunt team co-directs.’

The Terracotta Festival will provide the one and only opportunity to see these films in the UK. In the case of High Kick Girl (2009) – the debut of real-life teenage karate champion Rina Takeda – it’s even showing before its release in Japan. ‘Terracotta is a big push for Asian titles’, Leung explains. ‘We’re getting together with distributors such as Manga and Third Window so we can pool our resources and target the market in one go – a shot in the arm to get Asian film to the forefront of people’s minds.’

Leung’s own Terracotta Distribution will release Singing Chen’s God Man Dog (2008), a drama examining the changing social classes of Taiwanese society. A much different, and much weirder, social statement can be seen in Malaysia’s Zombies from Banana Village (2007): a comedic insight into the country’s village life, ‘it has political overtones about Malaysia and it’s giving an insight into Islamic life and its strict hierarchies’.

Other comedies such as Thailand’s Me… Myself (2007) and Japan’s caper After School (2008) are also in the mix alongside the animé update Ghost in the Shell 2.0 (2008) and kick-boxing actioner Muay Thai Chaiya (2007). As Leung puts it, ‘I’m trying to tread a line between being commercial and putting on an event I’d like to go to’. Terracotta looks set to be a festival where film fans of all kinds will find something to enjoy.

Richard Badley

Interviews

Interview with Ulrike Ottinger

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Madame X

Still: Madame X – An Absolute Ruler

Screening at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

25 March – 8 April 2009

BFI Soutbhank, London

Festival website

A nice surprise in the line-up of this year’s London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival was a mini-retrospective of German director Ulrike Ottinger’s extensive body of work. The three features and one documentary that were screened offered a brief insight into the fantastic, colourful and stylised universe she creates. One of the most important women filmmakers to emerge from the experimental fringe of New German Cinema in the late 1970s, Ottinger initially worked as a painter and photographer in Paris in the 60s before turning to film. In 1977, she made Madame X – An Absolute Ruler (Madame X – Eine absolute Herrscherin), a ferocious exploration of traditional role models that is often referred to as a ‘lesbian feminist pirate movie’. Ottinger used the pirate genre as an ironic framework for her distinctive visual style. The film stars underground icon Tabea Blumenschein as a spike-fisted, leather-clad dominatrix and caused a stir when it was first shown on German television.

Most of Ottinger’s subsequent narrative films also focus on exceptional female characters: from Orlando, a symbolic figure who changes sex and lives over several centuries (Freak Orlando, 1981) to Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia (1989) and Dorian Gray, played by the actress and model Veruschka von Lehndorff in Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse, 1984). However, the term ‘feminist film’ doesn’t suffice to describe the unique narrative blend of her futuristic fairy tales and sumptuous cinematic voyages. Vigorously independent, Ottinger acts as writer, director and producer of all her films, including documentaries in which she has explored her fascination with both the traditional and unusual aspects of contemporary culture, following the minorities and outcasts of Berlin as they crossed the newly fallen wall between East and West in Countdown (1990) or migrating with Mongolian nomads across the Taiga forest (Taiga, 1992). Pamela Jahn spoke to Ulrike Ottinger during the LLGFF in April 2009.

Pamela Jahn: Your films come out of a tradition of fantasy and surrealist filmmaking. What sparked your interest in the unreal?

Ulrike Ottinger: It is true that my films are often set in futuristic landscapes and create a surreal imagery, but my inspirations often come from reality, from observing the world, the people, their different cultures and traditional role patterns. In film, however, you can’t show things just ‘as they are’, you have to do something with it, you have to condense reality. When I first started making films, I soon became very fascinated with the idea of using fragments of reality in a collage process, including my personal experiences, often related to my travels, but also references to literature, art and art history. The viewer then has to add his or her own imagination to make it all work. I’m interested in so many things and I like to show this in my films. I’m playing with genres and with citations but what is most important in the end is how these things come together. So in a way, fiction and fantasy are always frighteningly close to reality in my films, and vice versa.

PJ: How did your experience as an artist, especially in Paris in the 1960s, influence your work as a filmmaker?

UO: Of course, this was the time of the Structuralists in France. So I saw a lot of films, not only the nouvelle vague, but the older German Expressionist cinema, which I liked a lot, and also some early American independent cinema. It was all a bit like ‘learning by seeing’, and I don’t think I would have developed this strong desire to make films if I had only been able to see the so-called ‘commercial cinema’. On the other hand, through my work as an artist, I have become extremely sensitised to visual images. I construct my films with images. Before I started shooting Freak Orlando, for example, I took hundreds of photographs with the actress Magdalena Montezuma, who I’ve done several films with. She’s also worked with Fassbinder and Werner Schroeter. I always make a lot of photographic studies to work around a certain theme and to find interesting images.

PJ: Another connection between your films seems to be a fascination for excessive female characters, as in Madame X in particular, where the crew on the pirate ship is composed of a very bizarre collection of extreme women. Did you have a set concept in mind before you started making the film or did it ultimately develop out of the collaboration with the female cast?

UO: When I started working on the film, I actually wanted to use completely different women. But then Yvonne Rainer, who plays Josephine de College in the film, happened to have a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship in Berlin at the time and when I met her, I thought she was perfect to play the part of the artist. Then there was this very famous prostitute from Zurich, Irene von Lichtenstein, who had worked with many artists before. I got to know her through Schroeter, and so I used her as the photo model character ‘Blow Up’. Lutze is another artist, who was living in the Lower East Side in New York at the time, and she was just wonderful in her role as the American housewife; there was also the woman who looked like she was from Tahiti – she wasn’t actually from there, but it was great to have her in the film as the ‘native’ character. So we got together all these different kinds of women, but there was an enormous amount of stylisation. It was an unbelievable coming together and it was perfect in its character composition.

PJ: It was bound to create controversy.

UO: Oh, yes, I think people today can no longer understand the kind of shock this film was for the public. I never again had such an extreme reaction from the audience to a film.

PJ: Did you expect that kind of reaction? Did you intend to provoke people with your films at the time?

UO: Absolutely not, I was completely shocked myself, you know, because for me it was a very playful film with a lot of sympathy but also a lot of humour in it. Although I was confronting something that was not talked about openly until then, it was the form more than the theme that was so shocking, and that made people have such strong feelings about it. The film was first shown at prime time on German television and I received thousands of letters afterwards. And people from all over the country turned up in front of my house in a tiny street in Berlin to speak with me because they went crazy after seeing the film. I was absolutely amazed by this, it was a huge surprise for me.

PJ: What is so striking in Madame X is the contradiction of the role itself, Madame X as a master but also as a promise of freedom.

UO: When I returned from Paris in 1969 it was the height of the student movement and the women’s movement, and my theory about feminism was to find alternatives, and not to be caught again in a cage. However, I found some of the new figureheads or leaders of the movement just built new cages by setting new rules and limits, like Madame X in a way. This is why some women said that the film was against the feminists’ movement, but, of course, it wasn’t, quite the contrary. But although I find the movement itself very important, I think we need to be aware of the power of traditional patterns, and this is what Madame X is about too. It took a while for people to understand that there was an artistic freedom in my films. In the beginning, some of the women in the movement only wanted a film that would clearly and ideologically fit into their line like a political slogan, but this is not the way I make films.

PJ: Your latest documentary, The Korean Wedding Chest, just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, but I believe you’re already in the middle of shooting your next film called The Blood Countess, a vampire story.

UO: Yes, I’m very excited about this film. I wrote it a long time ago, but never had enough money to make it and so I made other things in between. As often in my films, it is very inspired by location, by the history of these locations, which, in this case, is already so crazy that it makes for a great film. And, yes, it’s a vampire film set in Vienna, which depicts a dark part of the history of the royal Habsburg family. It will also include some documentary elements, but of course it’s a fantasy fiction story.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Short Cuts

SHORT CUTS: SEX ON SCREEN AT BIRDS EYE VIEW

Top Girl

Still from Top Girl

Birds Eye View Film Festival

March 5-13, 2009

Various venues, London

Festival Website.

‘I can’t imagine this talk happening anywhere else but Britain’, said Mike Figgis at the conclusion of Bird’s Eye View Festival’s Sex on Screen panel discussion. He had a point, for although the debate had touched on subjects such as sexual taboos, pornography and masturbation, this was executed ever so politely.

Talking about how gay porn had influenced mainstream cinema, the event’s chair, former Erotic Review editor Rowan Pelling, said: ‘The flipside of that is that it makes you think, “if I don’t like it up the back entrance then there’s something wrong with me and I should go and live on a desert island somewhere”’.’

Under The Skin director Carine Adler, who didn’t seem keen to talk about anything – let alone sex – before the debate was in full swing said to fellow panellist pornographer Petra Joy: ‘I would not have the courage to do what you do, I avoided any nudity, I don’t have the guts to do it, I want to stay ‘artsy’. My mother! Oh my god.’

A similar reaction came from the audience, who burst into embarrassed giggles when Joy described the misogynistic sexual acts depicted in mainstream porn – leaving her to joke that she was used to talking at erotic film festivals and hadn’t perhaps prepared herself for this altogether more polite affair.

But thank god for Joy who spoke loudly and proudly about sex on screen, from her unique viewpoint as a female pornographer, and well done to Bird’s Eye View for enlisting her. She raised the night’s most interesting point; distribution of her films, she said, was hindered by a censorship process that made no sense. Both she and Figgis (suitably attired, some might say, in a long, navy Mac) argued that arbitrary censorship meant that graphic violence slipped through the net, while graphic – read realistic – sex, with orgasms and erections, was not able to. ‘What’s the problem with making a film to arouse people? We see lots of violence in films, like Baise-Moi, and [that’s allowed because] they say, “well the sex wasn’t made to arouse”. But that’s the problem because you can’t control what’s going to arouse people’, she said. Pelling summed it up well, saying: ‘Surely the least harmful form of sex on screen is that which is specifically designed to arouse rather than repel or horrify?’

The problem was compounded, Joy said, by porn shops who balk at supplying films that have no big-name stars and no male ‘money shots’ or other such clichés. What’s more, cinemas need licenses to show hardcore porn – her films shown that night at the ICA were cut to comply with censorship regulations – which puts up yet another barrier between the films and their target audience.

Sam Roddick, founder of upmarket sex shop Coco De Mer, said she too had been restricted by licensing laws, which control the percentage of ‘directly sexual’ products she sells in the shop and subject each item to a permissibility audit. ‘They were very very vague about it’, she said, ‘so I had to get a bit more explicit. I said, ‘I’m carrying 18th-century prints, and they’re of two bridesmaids and a bride and they’re going down on her, and they said fine’. She defined erotic cinema as ‘a lot more emotional, more abstract’ than pornography, which she sees as ‘functional’: ‘When people watch porn they are either doing it to have sex or to wank. There is an outcome.’

Joy called for more films to show female pleasure – ‘women are multi-orgasmic and they can keep on coming after the man has but we never see that’ – gay men who weren’t suicidal, positive sexual role models, and the crucial matter of contraception: ‘it’s sex education as well as entertainment’.

It remains true that most films gloss over the use of contraception, unless the matter is overblown into a comedy sequence. Are viewers to believe so many people don’t give it a thought? Or do filmmakers have the right not to be realistic? Possibly, contraception is inherently unsexy and therefore an unwanted distraction to big screen sex scenes.

Realistic sex is not what Adler finds titillating. Discussing the much praised sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, she said: ‘A married couple having great sex is not something I find exciting. Maybe if they’d had sex with the murderous dwarf I would have found it more so’.

For his part, Figgis declared all pornography ‘boring’ and said what really excited him was unexpected erotica cropping up in non-erotic films: ‘I like it in The Misfits when they suddenly start smacking Marilyn Monroe, it’s one of the sexiest things I’ve seen. You can’t keep that woman down, she is so sexy – maybe she insisted on that scene.’

While he praised Joy’s positive outlook, he admitted that he liked miserable things to happen in films, so dysfunctional sex was no problem for him. Looking at his own body of work, this shouldn’t come as a surprise: Leaving Las Vegas, for instance, is a doomed and tragic love story with scenes in which sex is brutal, forced or impossible.

The short films shown after the discussion were nothing like that. A combination of Joy’s own work and Coco De Mer’s collection of erotic shorts, the films were light-hearted, beautiful and – dare I say it – sexy. Joy’s In Her Wildest Dreams was most definitely a porn film. With no plot or dialogue, the film showed a woman being indulged in many sensual ways by an ensemble of men and women. Following the principles the filmmaker had outlined during the talk, it showed the female orgasm, a positive, sexual, female role model, and as Joy put it, plenty of ‘guy candy’. The action took place behind various layers: part of the film was shot underwater, another part was shot through a beaded curtain across the doorway and mainstream porno’s procession of body parts gave way to more holistic shots taking in clothes, setting and some very contented-looking faces.

Clothes also played a big part in Eva Midgley’s Honey and Bunny, which consisted in a series of cheeky vignettes in which the two actors played out various fantasies. Kitted out in lustrous fabrics and beautiful shoes, the women were not passive sex objects but agents of their sophisticated sexuality. Similarly, Midgley’s Erotic Moments showed gentle, loving, consensual contact, such as the striking Footsie, which depicted a man being pleasured by a woman’s foot.

But nothing was more honest or more moving than the sex scene in Top Girl, a film by Rebecca Johnson that screened as part of another shorts programme during the festival. In the coming-of-age tale, a teenage girl, in her effort to become a rapper, finds herself being led to the bathroom of a DJ’s flat where he encourages her to fellate him. Full of adolescent feistiness, she delights in the encounter until she gets taunted for it at school. It succinctly expressed the joy, secrecy, awkwardness and taboo of sex.

Particularly British sex.

Lisa Williams

Watch the trailer for Top Girl.