This month our focus is on the delirious pop cinema of Seijun Suzuki.

This month it’s all greed, corruption and cruelty as we focus on the blacker than black vision of Henri-Georges Clouzot, the misanthropic genius of French cinema…

To coincide with the BFI’s Black Screen Icon poll that celebrates black cinema we look at Melvin Van Peebles’ 1972 incendiary Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and at Horace Ové’s Pressure, the stirring tale of a youth caught between West Indian and British cultures.

Why has Japanese director Yasuzo Masumura been so completely and utterly ignored in the West? Although credited with sparking off the Japanese New Wave in the 1960s, and recognised as a major influence on directors such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura, over here Masumura has remained little more than an obscure curio. The stunning audacity and hysterical beauty of his work certainly deserves a closer look and the release of some of his major films on DVD – for the first time in the UK – provides us with the perfect opportunity. Last month we reviewed Manji, this month we have Red Angel and Blind Beast.

Hooray for April! King of mavericks Alejandro Jodorowsky is coming to town and we can barely contain our excitement. The BFI Southbank will be screening three of the master fabulador’s films in anticipation of their DVD release next month and they are all reviewed here. We also caught up with Jodorowsky during his short visit to the UK - read the interview here!

The second issue of Electric Sheep is now ready and we have some rich pickings for you to graze on. First we take a magnifying glass to the weird and wonderful world of visionary animators The Brothers Quay with an interview and a review of their DVD of dazzlingly inventive shorts.

In a recent edition of BBC2’s Culture Show film critic Mark Kermode interviewed Paul Verhoeven about his new film Black Book. We’ve all heard of Verhoeven - he’s the man who gave us the mindlessly crude Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Well, according to Kermode, usually one of the more reliable and discerning critics, Verhoeven is an ‘auteur’ whose entire oeuvre is concerned with the theme of identity. To prove his point Kermode selected a clip from Total Recall - yes, you are reading correctly - in which Arnold Shwarzenegger is being addressed by his double from a TV screen. The TV double makes some mind-blowing revelation about how he really is his own self talking from the past, which Arnie greets with a resounding ‘No shit!’ We’ll give you a minute to ponder this remarkable insight… Either Kermode is the most brilliantly subversive TV commentator around or this is just another example of what mainstream media does to intelligent critics - turn them into robotic clones who spout out the same toothless, consensual platitudes.
The Electric Sheep Magazine team