SCI-FI-LONDON 2014

OXV The Manual
OXV: The Manual

SCI-FI-LONDON

24 April – 4 May 2014

London, UK

SFL website

Out of synch numerically with each year it’s been in operation, this year SCI-FI-LONDON skipped (unlucky) no.13 and used November 2012’s first Stratford-based autumn festival to make up the numbers so that SCI-FI-LONDON 14 could take place in 2014. Taking place at Stratford East Picturehouse and BFI Southbank, and with notable events in other venues, the festival offered a rich array of films, taking on a wide range of topics from Star Wars to alien asteroid collision and subjugating frequencies.

Lost Time (Christian Sesma, 2014)
The opener to this year’s festival wasn’t a strong start. A mishmash of the last 30 years of genre clichés, from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) to The X-Files (1993-2002) with a healthy dose of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) thrown in, this half-baked smorgasbord of mysticism, alien abduction, parallel worlds and incarcerated lunatics would have been watchable if the script writers had chosen a couple of those themes rather than muddling through all of them. Stolid performances by B-movie actors Robert Davi and Luke Goss seem to be the project’s raison d’&#234tre. While the film opens well with an intriguing and disturbing juxtaposition of a cancer sufferer with her dreams of alien abduction and disembowelment, the following hour or so indeed feels like lost time for members of the audience waiting for the plot to successfully develop.

Watch the trailer for Lost Time:

Bunker 6 (Greg Jackson, 2013)
Luckily the second day of the festival saw not only the premiere of a terrific new Canadian sci-fi film but also the festival’s first use of an amazing, atmospheric screening location. Bunker 6 imagines an alternative 1970s where the increasingly claustrophobic survivors of an alternative Cuban Missile Crisis where the nukes flew are bickering over dwindling supplies in their subterranean fallout bunker. A tight, excellent cast and a real-life location – that apparently needed little kitting out to convince viewers of its period setting – combine to make a taut, intelligent thriller that deserves a larger audience. The screening at SCI-FI-LONDON took place in a genuine World War II bunker beneath the streets of Dalston and at times made the audience feel like a hole had been cut in the wall to reveal a drama beyond. One hopes the festival can programme more esoteric events like this in the future.

Watch the trailer for Bunker 6:

Beyond (Tom Large and Joseph Baker, 2014)
The third premiere of the festival apparently almost didn’t make it into the programme as there were doubts as to whether the film qualifies as science fiction (it depends on how you interpret the scenes set in the present). In any case, Beyond is a great new Scottish genre movie, set in two time periods – one before an extinction level asteroid is en route to the Earth and the other after aliens have depopulated the planet to a minority of survivors who successfully hid during the first cull. Cutting back and forth between the two, the plot follows the travails of a pair of engaging leads played by Richard J. Danum and Gillian MacGregor as the scenarios take their toll on the pair’s relationship. With a backdrop of impressive special effects and a sense of impending doom, the film often comes across as a sci-fi response to Once (2006), albeit one with aliens instead of singing, and that’s no bad thing at all.

Watch the trailer for Beyond:

Struggled Reagans (Gregg Golding, 2013)
If I described Struggled Reagans as a punk-trash porno tongue-in-cheek underground take on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993-present) then no matter how much I may explain how wretched a film-watching experience it is, it’s safe to say that it’d be bound to glean an audience of ironic hipster / student fans of gonzo filmmaking, or B-movie fanatics with a drink in their hands. For about half its running time Struggled Reagans is amusing or quirky enough to justify its existence, with the filmmakers channelling the style of early John Waters or Troma films reasonably well, but it is a struggle to persevere with the 85-minute runtime and the story would have been better received if delivered in shorter instalments like its TV forebear.

Watch the trailer for Struggled Reagans:

SOS: Save Our Skins (Kent Sobey, 2014)
Weirdly, SCI-FI-LONDON 14 had no fewer than three pairs of movies whose plots mirrored each other. SOS, like Beyond, is a British film that tells the tale of a giant rock about to hit the Earth, which presages an alien invasion (see below for reviews of another pair – OXV: The Manual and LFO), but here the story is told for comedic rather than tragic effect. In SOS, a duo of hapless geeks staying in New York to attend a sci-fi convention find a deserted city, with the only signs of life an elderly cannibal, an escaped female lunatic and a blue monster dogging their steps. The cast is filled with stalwarts from British TV comedy and the low budget is extremely well used, with shots of empty streets in Manhattan as effective and unnerving as anything from an American blockbuster. Films that juggle sci-fi, comedy and horror often struggle not to be uneven, but this is an amiable and accomplished piece that leaves the viewer wanting more.

Watch the trailer for SOS: Save Our Skins:

Saving Star Wars (Gary Wood, 2004)
A bittersweet comedy-drama that follows a Star Wars fan to a sci-fi convention with the hope of meeting George Lucas. Saving Star Wars has inevitably an early Kevin Smith vibe complete with longueurs and scenes that stay beyond their welcome. However, this is a hard film to dislike, made with love, obvious familiarity with the subject matter and contemporaneous genre films, and a lovely turn by Dave Prowse – the actor who wore the Darth Vader suit in the original Star Wars trilogy – playing himself. The director’s cut shown at SCI-FI-LONDON was apparently a little shorter than the original version, which the festival showed 10 years earlier, but could have been tightened further; perhaps another 10 minutes shorn off the length could have turned a likeable farce into a cult movie. As with early Smith, some of the performances are pretty good, some are fairly dire, but the script generally saves even the most leaden scenes, and for fans of George Lucas (who in this film, ironically, is played by the most wooden actor in the cast) the movie is worth watching for Prowse’s extended cameo alone.

Watch the trailer for Saving Star Wars:

Senn (Josh Feldman, 2013)
The artist Moebius (Jean Giraud) has been a great inspiration both directly and indirectly for SF cinema over the last five decades. Although only one film directly based on his comic book work – Blueberry (2004) – was made during his lifetime, this is possibly the thematically closest movie to his oeuvre since Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element in 1997. Senn features a couple who work on tedious production lines on a human-settled alien planet, making incomprehensible objets d’arts to be shipped off to other worlds. Their blue-collar existence seems prescribed until the day they die. But when lead character Senn finds a glowing sentience in his locker, which is soon followed by the arrival of a massive alien vessel, he and his girlfriend will be taken across the galaxy on an ark-like ship to uncover an ancient mystery. Senn looks terrific, with alien languages designed by a master of the medium (cinematic Star Trek’s Britton Watkins). The languid plot, devoid of the laser beams, space battles and ugly aliens which have cursed science fiction to casual onlookers, is refreshing to say the least. Let down only by perhaps too few plot incidents to fill the running time – which feels longer than its 84 minutes – Senn is a gem that will hopefully accrue the cult following it deserves.

Watch the trailer for Senn:

Who’s Changing? An Adventure in Time with Fans (Cameron McEwan, 2014)
A crowd-funded British documentary about the history and current face of Doctor Who fandom, Who’s Changing? is a brisk and enjoyable documentary by Who expert Cameron K. McEwan who has also written a coffee table book on the programme and runs a website devoted to it. Various actors associated with the TV show’s past – Sophie Aldred, Louise Jameson – and present – Neve McIntosh, Dan Starkey – are interviewed along with comic book writers, producers and fans of the programme and its spin-offs. All the interviews are professionally conducted and filmed, many in the environs of SF conventions and festivals, and contrast Doctor Who fandom in the early years – when Whovians were somewhat ridiculed by society – and the present day – where there is more diversity in the gender and age of fans. McEwan touches on interesting aspects of all the above, but perhaps not with enough depth or the insight that an anthropologist or sociologist might bring to the project. Ultimately a documentary for the fans and by the fans, Who’s Changing? is worth watching for anyone with a casual interest in one of the BBC’s most loved programmes, but rarely rises above the quality of a Doctor Who DVD extra, when it could have been a lot more.

Watch the trailer for Who’s Changing?:

LFO: The Movie (Antonio Tublén, 2013)
The first of another pair of similarly themed and named movies (see below for OXV), LFO is a tight Scandinavian drama that is presented like a sitcom – based around the relationship between a loner, the ghost of his dead wife and the couple who live opposite him – but contrasts its comedic moments with increasingly dark themes. Picked by festival curator Louis Savy as the best film of the 2014 line-up (I’d disagree and give it to OXV) the plot depicts an unstable sociopath who discovers a low frequency tone that when played can hypnotise and subjugate others to his will. There are touches of both ever-so-hip Scandi-noir and Berberian Sound Studio (2012) as lead actor Patrik Karlson (a bit part actor in Wallander and The Bridge) becomes increasingly obsessed with manipulating the world around him, just as the soundtrack begins to suggest he may not be an entirely reliable narrator. Disturbing, intriguing, amusing and thought-provoking in turn, LFO shows that a great science-fiction idea can be convincingly presented on a small number of sets with a tiny budget, and if nothing less, is a masterclass in low-budget filmmaking.

Watch the trailer for LFO: The Movie:

OXV: The Manual (Darren Paul Fisher, 2013)
A companion piece to LFO (the third pair of films with similar plots at SCI-FI-LONDON 14 were Upside Down (2012) and Patema Inverted (2013), both about a boy falling in love with an upside down girl, neither of which I got a chance to see), OXV is a tremendous new film about a semi-dystopian Britain, where people’s lives are dictated by what ‘frequency’ their body emits. In a parallel to class, IQ or susceptibility to viruses (as explored in Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 a decade before), low frequency people get few perks or opportunities in life, along with a constant risk of bad luck, while high frequency people receive advantages, opportunities and good luck. This conceit is first used in the plot as a charming rom-com device to pair up a mismatched couple of opposing frequencies from school to adulthood. But it is then combined with the notion of secret, semi-magical words that can disrupt a person’s frequency and also bend a person’s will to your commands. A terrific cast, plot structure and cinematic aesthetic not only make OXV the finest film of this year’s SCI-FI-LONDON, but also the best British sci-fi film in years. OXV has found an American distributor – under the more prosaic title Frequencies – and one hopes an intelligent distribution company will also see it released in its country of origin.

Watch a scene from OXV: The Manual:

Alex Fitch

Cannes 2014

Lost River
Lost River

Cannes International Film Festival

14 – 25 May 2013

Cannes, France

Cannes Festival website

There is no better place than Cannes to be reminded of the differences in taste and perspective between oneself and the rest of the critics’ world. But this year, the fierce reviews that Lost River, Ryan Gosling’s first foray into directing, received after its premiere in the Un Certain Regard section, made me wonder what was actually at stake here. Judging from the 10-minute-long standing ovations for one of Hollywood’s biggest heartthrobs before and after the screening it was clear that it didn’t have anything to do with a waning of his celebrity power – in fact, it didn’t really matter to the majority of the audience what film was on show that night as long as Gosling was in the room. Looking at it more closely, his fairly impressive directing debut seems to have fallen victim to the same fate as Nicholas Winding Refn’s brilliant Only God Forgives (starring Gosling in the lead role and clearly serving as an inspiration for his own surrealist end-time tale) the year before: most critics didn’t know (or didn’t care) what to make of its alluring blend of affecting visual beauty and sparse (if, in Gosling’s case, slightly messy) narrative, and the few who loved it at first sight were instantly stared at with incredulity.

Watch the trailer for Lost River:

All in all though, there weren’t as many exciting films on offer as last year, despite some terrific surprises. In particular, Xavier Dolan’s Mommy (his fifth feature film since his 2009 directorial debut I Killed My Mother) yielded beautifully raw emotions, caustic humour and moments of cinematic brilliance. And outlandish Argentine competition entry Wild Tales, by Damián Szifró;n, was a popular, hard-hitting and often hilarious portmanteau comedy featuring a bunch of diverse and increasingly hysterical characters who spectacularly lose control and go off the deep end.

Resembling last year’s mad dash for the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, the biggest buzz this time revolved around David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars. A highly charged, cynical ghost story about today’s fucked-up Hollywood society, it stars Mia Wasikowska as the troubled daughter of a self-help guru who is battling her internal demons while working as a PA to a fading yet feisty actress (Julianne Moore).

Atom Egoyan’s cliché-ridden The Captive was the weakest competition entry for me, It faced strong competition from Olivier Assayas’s pretentious The Clouds of Sils Maria and from The Search, Michel Hazanavicius’s clumsy follow-up to The Artist, a muddled and sentimental war drama about a human rights worker who takes in a young Chechen refugee during the war in 1999. I also didn’t enjoy Asia Argento’s Un Certain Regard entry Incompresa for all its cockeyed quirkiness, although nothing could have topped the critics’ complete and unanimous disapproval of Olivier Dahan’s opening film Grace of Monaco.

But there was some noteworthy (if unsurprisingly rather heavyweight) art-house fare on show in the Competition this year. Nuri Bilge Ceylan impressed jury and critics alike with his three-hour-plus Chekhovian drama Winter Sleep about a wealthy, retired actor who runs a mountaintop hotel and fills his days with writing and dealing with his failing marriage. Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev draws more decisively on Tarkovsky’s inheritance in the poetic imagery and the gravity of his slow-paced, powerful and elusive thriller-drama Leviathan.

The usually slightly neglected midnight screenings were strong this year with David Michôd’s The Rover, his superb follow-up to Animal Kingdom (2010), and Kristian Levring’s conventionally plotted but deftly crafted Danish Western The Salvation. The third film screening at midnight was Chang’s rather predictable and slightly dull thriller The Target, which fell short of expectations but still managed to deliver the fun, big-screen action spectacle it was intended to be. In comparison, and more convincing in its mission to prove that the crafty and clever Korean crime thriller is not dead, was Kim Seong-hun’s A Hard Day.

Watch the trailer for The Rover:

Apart fom Lost River, the other standouts in the Un Certain Regard selection included Argentine director Lisandro Alonso’s unwieldy and progressively surreal drama Jauja and the only German festival entry, Amour Fou, Jessica Hausner’s rigidly stylised but original and witty portrait of the troubled Romantic writer and poet Heinrich von Kleist and his accomplice Henriette Vogel in the lead-up to their joint suicide in 1811. Typically, this year’s crowd-pleasing Un Certain Regard winner, Kornél Mundruczó;’s White God , split the critics once again: some saw it as clumsy and misguided social commentary, while others reacted warmly to the remarkable acting range of the dogs starring in the film.

On the whole, even with (or perhaps because of) the wide diversity in the reception of the films and a little less hype about the programme, these highlights prove once more that Cannes remains a great hunting ground for the weird, wild and unexpected.

Check out our previous Cannes coverage.

Festival report by Pamela Jahn

A Touch of Sin: Interview with Jia Zhang-ke

review_A-Touch-of-Sin
A Touch of Sin

Format: Cinema

Dates: 16 May 2014

Distributor: Arrow Films

Director: Jia Zhang-ke

Writer: Jia Zhang-ke

Original title: Tian zhu ding

Cast: Jiang Wu, Luo Lanshan, Meng Li

China 2013

133 mins

Although director Jia Zhang-ke denies that his close relationship with Office Kitano involves more than financial support, the ferocious A Touch of Sin is very much in the same vein as the Japanese director’s best films, albeit intensified by the social-political backdrop addressed here. Based on four real-life criminal cases (including a murder, a suicide and a couple of killing sprees), Zhang-ke’s story represents a cross section of contemporary Chinese society, in different areas of the country. Seen from that perspective, the film is a sanguinary, tense investigation into the Chinese economic miracle and the brutalising effect it has on the lives of ordinary people at the bottom of the ladder. In a world not theirs, they ultimately can’t help but vent their rage, rising up against authority. On a visual level, A Touch of Sin is a powerful war of the senses, in the way the stylised violence seems aligned with the characters’ innermost thoughts and emotions, enabling the audience to savour a similar cold adrenaline rush to that of the wuxia and Lady Vengeance-type characters on screen.

Pamela Jahn talked to the director at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where the film deservedly won Zhang-ke the award for Best Screenplay.

Pamela Jahn: Your film is based on four real-life criminal incidents in China. How did you become aware of them?

Jia Zhang-ke: In recent years, all these violent events have been publicised through social media platforms in China, and then they were widely discussed in the printed press too. But in the film I fictionalised everything, so it doesn’t really matter if the audience knows about the real-life events and what really happened.

What was your biggest challenge in making the film?

For me the biggest challenges were the action parts, because I am not used to shooting action to that extent. So I had to ask myself questions like: how should a character shoot, or use a knife? How should the victims fall? This was all new to me, but I had a great team of professionals to help me with these scenes. All four cases revolve around the same overall theme, but I wanted to include different aspects in each of the stories. So for me the other big question was: how can I make the narrative work? I have more or less 30 minutes to tell each story, so how do I tell the story effectively in the limited time available?

You have repeatedly worked with Office Kitano, but this time the connection to his own films seems more obvious than before. What is your relationship to Takeshi Kitano?

I have been working with Office Kitano since 2000 for Platform, which was about young people’s lives from 1979 to 89 – the first 10 years of progress in China. This is my fourth project that they are investing in, but in the past my films didn’t have the same level of violence. I have always liked Kitano’s films though – he has found a remarkable way to connect violence and loneliness.

How much was he involved in the production of A Touch of Sin?

A Touch of Sin is available in the UK on VOD from 8 September and on Blu-ray/DVD on 15 September 2014.

It was mainly financial.

Is there anyone else who influenced you in particular for this film?

My biggest influence was King Hu, and the films he made back in the 1970s, in which he addresses the subject of political oppression and the violent reactions of different individuals. I wanted to make a film about violence, too, but I couldn’t find a cinematic language that I was happy with. Then I thought about martial arts movies, about the same things that happened in the past as now.

Your film explores the different social ranks in Chinese society and the injustice that prevails. It seems quite an achievement in itself that you were able to make a film that openly addresses social and political subjects in all of their complexity.

These issues are now more and more discussed in mainstream media, but it’s true that in the past it was not possible to talk about anything like this in films, in particular the gap between the rich and the poor – which is why I wanted to make the film now, because it would be a real shame if we only talk about it in the news and not in art.

Did your status as an international director have an impact on whether or not the film would make it past the censors? And did you have to make compromises in order to avoid censorship?

It is possible, but I think it’s more that the authorities are slowly beginning to understand that we can no longer avoid the problems we are facing right now. I think if we want to push for openness and change we have to believe in creative freedom in our works. With A Touch of Sin, I had no idea whether it would pass censorship, because it would not have in the past, even just a few years ago. But Why it did pass now, I don’t quite know. The message that I am sending to the censorship authorities is that in my world everything is possible. I can make a film about anything I want and I will continue to do so.

It’s a quite pessimistic film overall. To what extent does it reflect your inner feelings in terms of where the country is heading?

Both anger or rage, and pessimism, are personal emotions that we have to address and we have to attempt to rationally understand the reasons behind those emotions. I didn’t intend to make a film about violence, rather I wanted to address that violent streak in human nature that is triggered by the environment.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Watch the trailer:

Hermione Eyre is Reverend Samuel Runt in Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon

Journalist and former croupier Hermione Eyre has interviewed some of the most beautiful women in the world, which was perfect research for her bold historical novel, the pop-arty Viper Wine (Jonathan Cape) where vanity, addiction and a beauty treatment distilled from snake venom take hold in the court of Charles I. Mixing up contemporary sources with modern details, Viper Wine is Gothic horror with a very modern twist. Eithne Farry

As Sir John Gielgud said, there is no such thing as a small part, only small actors, and Murray Melvin is a huge presence in any film, even when he has few lines. With his pursed lips, long face and fabulously economical style – he can deliver a crushing put-down without saying a word – he is the bridge between realism and camp. I have nothing obvious in common with him, but still, I should like to nominate as my alter ego Reverend Samuel Runt, the dour, repressed clergyman played by Melvin in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

Melvin’s performance in this role is deliciously complex. He is obsequious to his employer, the wan beauty the Countess of Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), and yet, due to his position as a man of the cloth, he holds power over her and the rest of the household, which he exercises with theatrical homilies and gravely sententious asides. He does not have enough power to stop the disaster of her marriage to Barry Lyndon, however; he is a sort of failed Rasputin. In my mind, as I was writing Viper Wine, I had Murray Melvin play the part of Chater, the personal priest of Venetia, Lady Digby. Their relationship is similar to that of the Reverend Runt and the Countess, and yet it goes further. Chater advises on her dress; he is secretly, and without hope, in love with her husband, Sir Kenelm Digby. His prurient interest in all their doings I shared. As the author of the novel, I was in control of these characters, and yet in another sense, I could only look on with longing as they went about their business. Like the Reverend Runt, I sometimes felt they could neither see nor hear me, though in the end, I knew I would have the final word.

Hermione Eyre

Comet Sands’ Film Jukebox

review_CometSands
Comet Sands

Comet Sands are a prog-pop, synth-psych cosmic-rock band, from London via Finland and the north of England. They are Tiia Jaakola (singing and synthesiser), Alex Lawton-Mawdsley (bass), Colin Greenwood (drums), Sean Berry and Tom Hughes (guitars). Comet Sands admire and endorse Circle, Yes, Harmonia, Superchunk, Endless Boogie, Total Control, the first nine Status Quo albums and thinking about space. You can listen to them on bandcamp and follow/contact them on Facebook and Twitter. Below, the band pick their favourite films.

1. RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
The original gross-out, ultraviolent sci-fi cop, dystopian near-future social satire. Everything about this is awesome: the soundtrack by Basil Poledouris, the clunky stop-frame animation and sound effects of the terrifying ED-209, Kurtwood Smith’s psychotic turn as Clarence Boddicker, Nancy Allen’s bubble gum chewing, Peter Weller’s chin and, best of all, Ray ‘Leland Palmer’ Wise as Leon. This was my first ever pirate video, copied for me onto Betamax cassette (together with Predator) by a school friend’s dad, and no amount of tracking could make it sit straight on the screen. However, it was still compelling viewing and I watched it over and over and over. Nothing since has affected me more than the first time I witnessed Ed-209’s ‘glitch’… Sean Berry

2. An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981)
John ‘Animal House’ Landis’s black comedy about two young American backpackers who are attacked on the Yorkshire Moors by an unknown creature, leaving one of them dead and the survivor cursed to be transformed into a werewolf at the next full moon, is a masterpiece of superbly crafted, perfectly acted, wonderfully scored filmmaking. The humour is spot on, the cast is magnificent, with plenty of interesting cameos, the shots of London are a joy and the balance between horror and camp comedy is unmatched. Rick Baker’s special effects were groundbreaking at the time and still have the resonance that you just don’t get from CGI. Plus, the quotes are priceless: ‘Have you tried talking to a corpse – it’s boring’; ‘Mummy – a naked American stole my balloons’. And to top it off, the most horrific part of the film is a dream-within-a-dream sequence. It’s damn near perfect – I try to watch this at least once a year. Sean Berry

3. Hana Bi (Takeshi Kitano, 1997)
Surely the most touching love story ever to feature someone getting their eye jammed out with a chopstick. And maybe that why it’s such a beautiful film: the cop drama ultra-violence sits alongside a quiet, poignant farewell between husband and wife without any explanation or apology, like the contradictory nature of the tender, violent and sometimes pointlessly cruel protagonist, played with deadpan understatement by Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano. What starts as a film about a cop owing money to gangsters ends up being a film about what’s important, and the final scene, well, it makes my face leak every time. Colin Greenwood

4. Smokey and the Bandit (Hal Needham, 1977)
Ah yes, pure joyous fun. I watched it endlessly as a kid, given that the only videos my friends and I owned were Aliens, Blues Brothers and this. Burt Reynolds doesn’t care about acting. He’s too busy mugging the camera and blasting around the south in a souped-up Pontiac Trans Am. The plot is beyond thin (basically a bootleg beer run) and the film seems to work mainly because everyone’s having a blast. Sally Fields, spirited and saucy in equal measures, shines as the love interest. Guitar man Jerry Reed plays himself as the haulage half of the bootleg duo. And Jackie Gleason lets rip as the sweaty old racist Sheriff Bufford T. Justice. Nothing sticks around for more than a few minutes, everything is done to excess, the soundtrack is awesome and the whole film is basically one massive, ridiculous car chase. I loved it then and I still love it now. Colin Greenwood

5. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
Every time I watch it, Charles Laughton’s demon-preacher fairy tale just seems even more cosmically peculiar and miraculously disturbing than it did the last time. Robert Mitchum is the epochally creepy preacher Harry Powell, a wandering Bluebeard who marries a vulnerable widow to get to the money her husband left hidden somewhere; only her kids know where, but they can see Powell is no damn good and refuse to tell, incurring his unholy wrath. There’s a vivid, hallucinatory clarity to The Night of the Hunter‘s expressionist black and white visions: the devil in the dog collar with the LOVE/HATE tattoos; the creeping shadows on the cellar stairway wall; the car sunk in the lake among the trailing weeds; the children drifting down the starlit river in a rickety skiff with owls and frogs and foxes watching over them from the riverbank. But good and evil here is not quite black and white, or at least the black seems to be leaking and smearing across the divide – the same churning darkness that drives Powell and his aberrant creed is everywhere, heaping guilt, shame and opprobrium on everyone, whether they deserve it or not. The bright white light shines through on occasion, but equally, as Powell knows, ‘The devil wins sometimes’. Tom Hughes

6. Colossus: The Forbin Project (Joseph Sargent, 1970)
HAL may be the definitive rogue AI, but Colossus is another great early example of a machine mind operating far outside its creators’ control. The US government builds a vast supercomputer inside a Colorado mountain and hands control of the nation’s nukes over to its ultimate rational authority; when it awakes it soon learns that the Russians have their own equivalent system, which it proceeds to pal up with in order to enslave mankind. There’s a ludicrous/brilliant section in the middle in which Forbin, Colossus’s inventor, hatches a plan to hoodwink the machine, which descends into light sex farce, and a priceless bit when professor and computer lecture each other on how to make the perfect martini. Colossus issues stentorian orders to its fleshy masters-turned-underlings via a scrolling sign hanging from the control-room ceiling like a megalomaniac tube train ticker, and there’s some real big-think stuff in the great technobrain’s insistence that surrendering to its super-evolved algorithms and perfect logic will liberate and further mankind just as it enslaves it. The film ends oddly abruptly, and bits of it are shonky as heck, but it’s really got something. There are rumours of a remake. Tom Hughes

7. Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
In this neo-noir world of towering art deco monoliths and pipes and filing cabinets galore, all the things meant to improve efficiency are essentially dysfunctional. Brazil is a masterpiece where surrealist Pythonesque humour is married with Orwellian dystopia, the best example of which that sticks in my mind is the contradictory slogan ‘Suspicion breeds confidence’. Gilliam satirises not only bureaucracy and ruthless, superficial careerism, which has a dreary office existence as its flipside, but also vanity and consumerism in a way that now appears ahead of its time. The protagonist Sam Lowry toils away in the Records Department at day, but at night he dreams of a mysterious woman, who then more mysteriously appears in his life, setting an irreversible chain of events in motion… Tiia Jaakola

8. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
Difficult as it is to choose a favourite out of the Studio Ghibli output, I can’t resist the appeal of the post-apocalyptic. Beginning as a tale of man’s struggle against giant insects, Nausicaa quickly evolves into a deeper reflection on our relationship with the natural world, and therefore feels very relevant today. Surrounded by polluted terrain, mankind’s different factions wage war against each other, miring any attempts to fix the situation. True to the nature of such epic tales, there is only one who can make a difference – Nausicaa. Visually stunning, sonically oscillating between John Carpenter through Rick Wakeman to Connery-era Bond, this film is a wonder. And there are some pretty good beards too. Tiia Jaakola

9. Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973)
What would be the ultimate stag do? Westworld is a theme park where you get to live out your wildest fantasies. But when technology goes wrong, it really goes wrong. The film looks great due to its age – the special effects are clunky but sweet. If The Simpsons have critiqued the film, it must be worth something. Alex Lawton-Mawdsley

10. Dark Star (John Carpenter, 1974)
Das Boot in space! After being subjected at a very young age to The Thing and The Fog, John Carpenter’s work stood for some scary shit. When I watched Dark Star I was by myself with a bottle of wine in the dark. With a basic crew on a single spaceship, I expected it to be a low-budget cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, but as the country music flows and you build a sense of empathy with the group of dudes, you know this film is gonna be different. Classic Carpenter keyboard work, a misbehaving bomb and one of the most unusual alien beings since early Star Trek. Get some wine in and please watch this by yourself and be part of the crew. Alex Lawton-Mawdsley.

Walerian Borowczyk: The Motion Demon

review_The_Theatre_of_Mr_&_Mrs_Kabal
The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal

Walerian Borowczyk Retrospective

Cinema of Desire
Venue: BFI Soutbank, London
Dates: 1-27 May 2014

The Listening Eye
Venue: ICA, London
Dates: 20 May-27 June 2014

For more information visit the BFI and ICA websites

While Walerian Borowczyk (1923 – 2006) had been a keen amateur filmmaker since his youth, his professional debut was a handful of short films made with another poster artist, Jan Lenica (1928 – 2001). These films took what was interesting about the Polish posters of the 1950s (the economy of means, a ‘hand-made’ quality) and translated it into cinema. In 1958, Borowczyk co-wrote a documentary film on posters (Sztuka ulicy), which connected both mediums in that they express thoughts and feelings through images and text. Unlike posters, however, films are about movement. Borowczyk was not just a filmmaker, but also a painter and sculptor. During his later years, he returned to graphics (using a technique he referred to as pulverographie, or ‘dustography’, which involved colour photocopying) and produced a series of bizarre wooden sound sculptures (34 of Borowczyk’s ‘dustographs’ illustrate his 1992 collection of short stories, L’anatomie du diable (The Anatomy of the Devil) available as part of Arrow Video’s upcoming special edition box set release Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection. Three of Borowczyk’s sound sculptures are featured in the ICA exhibition ‘Walerian Borowczyk: The Listening Eye’ (The Fox Reading Room, ICA, 20 May-6 July 2014).

Borowczyk was fascinated with early cinema – the motion studies of Etienne-Jules Marey (which feature in Dom), the praxinoscope of Charles-Émile Reynaud (upon which Borowczyk’s 1979 short Jouet joyeux is based), the special effects of Georges Méliès, the physical comedy of Keaton as well as the montage experiments of Eisenstein. Borowczyk did not have a singular style so much as a way of thinking about the world. Some of Borowczyk’s short films are made up from photographs (e.g. Szko?a, Les astronautes), others involve the manipulation of objects (e.g. Renaissance, Le phonographe) or a combination of the two (e.g. Rosalie). In that, he is close Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovskii’s conception of a poetic cinema in which objects could be used to express abstract concepts. Shklovskii described Battleship Potemkin as an ‘uprising of dishes’ on account of the plates smashed during a monologue in which a crew member expresses discontent. Borowczyk took this idea to an extreme – objects are not only on a par with actors (e.g. Rosalie, Une collection particulière) but in some cases displace them completely (Renaissance, Le Phonographe).

While Borowczyk considered painting and filmmaking as two separate genres, he nevertheless fulfilled Fernand Léger’s dream of an artist being able to express themselves through paintbrush and film camera (during the 1950s, Borowczyk had travelled to France to make an amateur film about Léger at work in his studio, and would later make a remarkable documentary featuring Ljuba Popovi&#263 paintingL’amour monstre de tous les temps). Like both Norman McLaren and Len Lye before him, Borowczyk sometimes painted directly onto celluloid (e.g. Sztandar M?odych) or animation cells (e.g. Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal (The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal) and Scherzo infernal). Alternatively, he used the rostrum camera to make elaborate tracks around paintings (e.g. Les jeux des anges). As with many Polish poster artists of his generation (e.g. Lenica, Roman Cie&#347lewicz, etc.), collage was profoundly important to him. Through cinema, the constituent elements could move (e.g. L’encyclopédie de grand-maman).

In 1968, Borowczyk made his live-action feature debut, Goto, l’île d’amour (Goto, Island of Love). Thematically, it is a love story about the lengths a man goes to possess a woman. Stylistically, it was the culmination of Borowczyk’s formal experiments concerning the use of objects as a means of telling stories (e.g. Rosalie), framing (e.g. Les jeux des anges, Gavotte) and combining black and white with colour (e.g. Renaissance, Diptyque). Divorced from both time and place, Goto works as an adult fairy tale, which attracted the attention of Angela Carter. Goto also paved the way for a generation of graphic artists who wanted to work in film (e.g. the Brothers Quay, Craigie Horsfield, Andrzej Klimowski and John Goto – who liked the film so much he changed his name).

After four years and a couple of shorts, Borowczyk’s next feature film was Blanche, a personal project in which he invested his own money. It is loosely based on Mazepa, a drama by the Polish Romantic poet Julius S?owacki. Set in medieval France, Blanche recreates an entire world through set design and props. In addition to painting the sets, Borowczyk fabricated many of the objects that feature in the film. Ostensibly a period drama, Blanche has a number of surreal touches, like a crucifix that transforms into a crossbow. He was a great fabricator, who loved distressing wood to make it appear antique (e.g. Une collection particulière). At the heart of Blanche is Borowczyk’s wife, Ligia, a woman with a remarkable screen presence whose angelic demeanour conceals a demonic sexual impulse. If Ligia was Dietrich, then like von Sternberg, Borowczyk was a master at creating atmosphere. Blanche bombed at the French box office, although it played for over a year at the Paris Pullman Cinema in London.

With La b&#234te (The Beast), Borowczyk tricked his audience into thinking they were watching a refined costume drama, before confronting them with a Monty Python version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ involving gallons of fake sperm. Often described as an erotic film, La b&#234te is more of a Rabelaisian comedy. If anything it was a parody of pornography. Both La b&#234te and Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales) were box office smashes in France. In terms of the way Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord music is used as a counterpoint, the role played by objects and animals (satin slippers and slimy snails) as well as its dreamlike quality, La b&#234te is pure Borowczyk. The sexual aspect was nothing new (it had always been there, lurking under the surface) but now it was visible. The premiere of Contes immoraux and La b&#234te coincided with the election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and the abolition of film censorship.

Borowczyk’s intention was never to solely titillate. Instead, he was interested in sexuality as a theme, just as violence was a theme in Sam Peckinpah’s Westerns. Borowczyk was interested in how people and society had, historically, dealt with sexuality. As a Catholic, he was particularly concerned with the role of the Church, both in Poland (e.g. Dzieje grzechu) and Italy (e.g. the ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ episode of Contes immoraux). Borowczyk believed in the importance of sex in Renaissance art, particularly the significance of Raphael’s mistress (the ‘Margherita’ episode of Les héroïnes du mal). Many of Borowczyk’s films deal with the repression of sexuality, and its manifestation in the form of taboos (Contes immoraux) and dreams (La b&#234te). Borowczyk himself was preoccupied by the idea of sin, and thought of his films not as erotic, but ethical. Critics preoccupied with flesh are blinkered to the more transcendental aspects of Borowczyk’s films (both Renaissance and Goto, l’île d’amour are concerned with resurrection). If the displays of self-sacrifice in Blanche have overtly religious overtones, then it is worth remembering that Borowczyk wished to follow up the film with one about the Passion of Christ…

Between 1983 and 1987, Borowczyk attempted to mount a project about the life of Nefertiti, an adaptation of Dumas’s La reine Margot, a film about Chopin and George Sand, an English-language period drama based on a script by Cherry Potter (The Ancestral Mansion), as well as a return to feature-length animation (an expansion of his 1984 short Scherzo infernal, much like Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal elaborated on Le concert). However, all of these projects collapsed. Then Alain Siritzky, the producer of the Emmanuelle series, turned to Borowczyk as a means of bringing some artistic prestige to his franchise. In this respect, Borowczyk sold out no more than Sam Mendes did when he signed on to direct Skyfall. The teaser for Emmanuelle 5, in which a dildo is fashioned, origami style, out of a napkin, is typical Borowczyk. However, Siritzky imposed an actress on Borowczyk, Monique Gabrielle. Borowczyk did not speak English and, by all accounts, did not get on with Gabrielle. Having left the main shoot to his assistant director, Borowczyk focused on the second unit photography: close-ups of objects (including those Borowczyk fashioned for Une collection particulière), reportage of the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, not to mention the recreation of a plane crash using scale models (having led an uprising in a harem, Emmanuelle joins her lover, a Howard Hughes type, in an attempt at flying a ‘Spruce Goose’-type seaplane…).

If Borowczyk was guilty of a crime, then it was his inability to delegate work – he had to do everything all by himself on his terms in total freedom. In later years he sought out producers that he thought would allow him to work in complete freedom. He spent much of the 1980s fighting producers (over the title change of Le cas estrange du Dr Jekyll et de Miss Osbourne to Dr Jekyll et les femmes, the inserts from a Joe D’Amato feature spliced into Ars Amandi, not to mention losing control of Nefertiti, which was eventually produced in 1995 as Nefertiti, figlia del sole). Some see Borowczyk as a Jack-of-all-trades, while others see him as a Renaissance man in the vein of Eisenstein or Welles. At his best, Borowczyk made films as if he had invented cinema. At his worst, he filmed like a Martian who had fallen through time and space to make clandestine documentaries about human mating rituals. In many ways, Borowczyk was ahead of his time (his later work deserves to be taken as seriously as, for example, Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac or the films of Catherine Breillat). He was by far the most interesting Polish filmmaker of his generation, and his best films – the shorts of the 1960s and the features from the early 1970s – rank alongside the best of Bresson (in terms of rigour) and Buñuel.

Daniel Bird