Cast: Tom Schilling, Katharina Schüttler, Justus von Dohnáyi
Germany 2012
83 mins
Best Film Director. Best Actor. Best First Film. Best Screenplay. Best European Film of 2013. After a gruelling 18 months on the festival circuit, German director Jan Ole Gerster’s first feature film Oh Boy is about to have a limited theatrical release in the UK, and as can be discerned it arrives with a bucketful of accolades including both critics and audience awards – rarely one and the same!
Oh Boy takes a wry look at a young man, Niko Fischer (impressively played by Tom Schilling) as he traverses Berlin – a Berlin of alienated people and locations not usually seen in the tourist brochures. He is an unemployed law student hailing from a wealthy family although, as the audience learn, his father is about to cut off his allowance, having discovered that his son has not actually attended classes in two years. He says he has been ‘thinking’. Now with no means of support, this Candide-like figure drinks and drifts across Berlin in the company of an actor friend. The pair find themselves in a variety of slightly surreal and absurd situations, resulting in a beautifully paced – and performed – cinematic text containing a reflective and moving series of vignettes that add up to an impressive and very confident first film.
It took a bold and assured directorial hand by novice filmmaker Gerster (who wrote the excellent screenplay as well) to decide on the visual style – it was remarkably shot in black and white – and to rein in the plot progression in order to allow generous amounts of shooting time for the story to unfold. His choice of lead actor, Tom Schilling, is an inspired one and Schilling turns in a remarkable performance as he makes the character sympathetic and charming while subtly hinting at his existential dilemmas. Even the opening scene is excellently judged as our (anti-)hero starts his day by rising from a bed shared with his girlfriend, from whom he is about to separate. A scene ensues between the two and as the camera focuses on this guilt-ridden and uncertain lone figure sitting at the end of the bed, the title, Oh Boy slyly appears on the screen, over-writing the shot. Then the credits roll as we begin our long day’s journey into the night.
James Evans talked to Jan Ole Gerster about the director’s interest in distanced characters, making a road movie inside Berlin, and looking for that timeless feeling.
James Evans: How did your screenplay come about – what impelled you to want to make a youth culture film about contemporary Berlin?
Jan Ole Gerster: I wasn’t thinking about making a ‘youth culture’ film, or a portrait of our generation or a portrait of our time or young people in Berlin because I think that this is the wrong intention to start out with. I had this character in mind that was somehow inspired by all the characters I always identified with in literature and films. I found it appealing to have a character who does nothing, who is very passive and still, but is wide awake and noticing things, and I thought it would be interesting to send him on a road trip without really leaving Berlin.
Your choice of visual style and the interesting and fitting use of black and white – was a gamble and, unlike some recent examples, did not seem to be gratuitous, modish or a ‘knowing’ visual gimmick. How did that decision come about?
I was afraid that it was going to be, as you said, received as a youth culture film or some sort of generational portrait that claimed to speak for how 20-somethings feel these days, but I was trying to do the opposite. I was trying to find a timeless atmosphere for the film and so every decision that I made, whether we were looking for locations or the visual style or even the music, was about finding that timeless feeling. I didn’t want electronic music, I didn’t want colour, I didn’t want super-modern architecture. It was important to me because there’s something old-fashioned about this character as well because he doesn’t seem to connect to the world he’s living in. He is distanced and alienated, and black and white provided this sense of distance that I was looking for. Of course, I am depressed that black and white has disappeared from the screen these days, but as you mention there seems to be a bit of a revival of it.
Watch the trailer:
The cast is very strong and Tom Schilling in particular is an inspired choice. He turns in a nuanced, balanced and finely honed performance and you give him and the other characters generous amounts of screen time to inhabit these characters. How did you cast him?
He was a friend…Well, he is still a really good friend of at least 13 years. We lived in the same neighbourhood and we hung out. We had the same interests and the same sense of humour, and we would go out and see films, and drink together and talk about life and work and the films that he is working on. So when I wrote the first draft of Oh Boy I sent it to him and he called me and said ‘Yeah, I like it, I’m gonna play that part – it would be an honour’. And I was pleased about this, but I said, you know it’s not really an offer, I just wanted to hear what you thought of it (laughs). But then he kept calling me and saying that he would be perfect for the part…And to be honest, the only reason I didn’t think of him was because I envisioned the character to be in his late 20s, and he looks about 20 but in the ensuing year he was smoking a lot, drinking a lot and then he became a father and something happened – he aged a lot in that time! I really think that it just took a lot of time to get used to the idea of working with a friend and of course I don’t regret it, it was the best decision of the whole process.
There are some discernable cinematic and literary chromosomes in the DNA of your film. I feel the spirits of Truffaut, Wenders, Salinger, Ashby, Cassavetes inhabit it. But I especially sensed Rafelson, and in particular his masterpiece Five Easy Pieces.
This is very interesting, you’re the only one who has mentioned Five Easy Pieces, and it was a film that I had in mind. People ask me if I had Manhattan in mind, but of course I wasn’t thinking about Woody Allen at all. I had Truffaut in mind and I watched Five Easy Pieces with Tom [Schilling] many times and we talked about this film a lot in preparing for our journey. I have just been re-watching all the films that I admire like The 400 Blows and Who’s That Knocking at My Door, which is a super personal film about growing up in a Catholic family among American Italians and in a gangster environment, and it is incredible because the whole Scorcese universe is in that first film. And it’s the same with the Jarmusch and Cassavetes films. So I thought there’s the key to finding your own handwriting – you have to talk about something that you really know and that you want to express – no matter what it is. And you’re right, it was more the spirit of these guys that inspired me than trying to be like them.
One question remains: what next? With all the road showing of the film, have you had any time to write?
Yes, I had a scholarship last year to spend three month in Los Angeles at a residence called Villa Aurora, which is funded by the German consulate and the Goethe Institute, and I’m going to Rome on a similar thing for two months, so I’m writing something new and enjoying it. After almost 5 years living with Oh Boy, I’m really ready to move on and do something else. It’s fun and it’s tough at the same time because, not being a full-time writer – I have only written one script – I don’t really have a routine, and it takes time to figure things out. I am not a fast writer and not a very patient person so it is torturing me a bit.
I guess there are now new pressures because presumably you can more easily attract higher amounts of money this time and there are high expectations for the dreaded second film after such fanfare for the first.
Maybe I should just do a high-budget flop next time!
Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick looks far younger than her 63 years with her short thick hair and forceful stare. When we met in a pub in London before Christmas, I was reminded of film critic Jim Hoberman’s 1980 article on her No Wave films, where he wrote about her ‘obsession with female macho’. Cut to 2010: at the time of Vivienne’s major retrospectives, perhaps echoing Hoberman, there were articles written entitled ‘Dick Flicks’ and ‘Dicking Around’. This ruffles, because, if anything, her work, then as now, is rigorously gendered and firmly rooted in French feminism. Since the heady days of 1970s radical art and feminist thought, the bright lights have certainly gone out in New York’s Lower East Side, and Ireland’s Celtic Tiger has bottomed. Despite this, Vivienne’s films remain consistently uncompromising and consciously connect the personal with the political, reminding today’s audience just how vital oppositional filmmaking is.
Born in Donegal in 1950, after a bout of global travelling Vivienne settled in New York’s Lower East Side in the mid-70s and became friends with a group of artists whose connection to music and a radical punk aesthetic suited her own emerging politics. Conjuring up the spirit of Maya Deren and 60s underground filmmakers such as Jack Smith and Marie Menken, her trangressive Super 8 shorts became known as No Wave films as she turned a fresh Warholian camera on intimate performances and (at the time, underground) New Wave music from her friends such as Lydia Lunch and Pat Place. Some of her key films from this time are Guérillière Talks (1978) and She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978), both of which had an influence on 80s feminist filmmakers Lizzie Borden and Bette Gordon. In the early 80s, she marked her return to Ireland with a biting satire on her birth country’s shameless tourism called Visibility Moderate (1981). She relocated to London in the mid-80s and became involved in the London Filmmakers Coop. In 1990, she made a film about her friends and London’s cultural diversity called London Suite (Getting Sucked In) . Then in the mid-90s she moved back to Galway to teach, make films and raise a family. Finally, last year she settled in Dublin and turned back to making films full time.
In anticipation of the UK premiere of Vivienne Dick’s new film The Irreducible Difference of the Other presented by Club Des Femmes and Open City Docs at the London Short Film Festival on 11 January 2014, which the filmmaker will attend, Selina Robertson of Club Des Femmes talked to her about art, politics, feminism and No Wave film.
For information on screening times and tickets for the premiere of The Irreducible Difference of the Other, visit the ICA website.
Selina Robertson: You always pick strong titles for your films. Can you tell us how you came to find the title for your new film The Irreducible Difference of the Other?
Vivienne Dick: The title comes from the writings of Luce Irigaray, whose work I am very interested in. Woman is the primordial Other, but otherness can be displaced in colonialism, and war, and through caste and class. We have to find a new way of relating to the Other which is not based on dominance and brute force.
In The Irreducible Difference of the Other, we are taken on a personal journey through many portals: literature, song, poetry, performance, pop music, landscape, gardening, welding, the Arab Spring, war, politics in Ireland and feminism. On first viewing, the film unfolds like a collage – where or what was your starting point?
The starting point was war, vulnerability and otherness. I set out to make a film that would be very open to different pathways or directions. It can be a risky way to work because it is only when you are editing that it begins to coalesce. Fortunately the Arts Council in Ireland is still willing to fund work like this.
Three artists, Olwen Fouéré, Antonin Artaud and Anna Akhmatova are woven into the narrative. How do they relate to each other in the context of the film?
Olwen performs Antonin Artaud and channels, rather than plays, Anna Akhmatova. I see Artaud as a seer for this century. With all the technology we have in our hands we seem to be killing each other with ever more ferocity. It seems to me there is a connection between our treatment of the Other and our treatment of the planet. We all belong equally to nature and culture.
For the London Short Film Festival programme, we asked you to pick another one of your films and you chose one of your early No Wave films She Had Her Gun All Ready from 1978. In what way do you see the films as companion pieces?
She Had Her Gun All Ready is about relationship. The two main characters are performed by Lydia Lunch and Pat Place. I have been interested in the politics of relationship from when I first began to make films.
Your No Wave Super 8 films were so incredibly cool. They captured an underground punk art scene in downtown NYC as well as critiquing patriarchy, power, capitalism and gender relations. Can you expand on how your feminism and politics today connect with your filmmaking practice?
I have many of the same concerns I had when I began making films almost 40 years ago. I am going back to researching prehistory and images of women. It is about using images as a creative impetus for change. The starting point for new work is often people I meet, or a place, or music. I was in Cairo recently and would like to get to know the city and culture better.
The moving debut by Manchester-born actress Anna Hope (she was Novice Hame in Doctor Who), Wake takes place over five days in November 1920, as the body of the Unknown Soldier makes its way from the fields of Northern France to its final resting place in Westminster Abbey, and hones in on the worlds of three very different women who are attempting to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the Great War. Wake is published in the UK on 16 January 2014 by Transworld. Below, Anna Hope tells us why her cinematic alter ego is Luna Schlosser from Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973). Eithne Farry
Sleeper was my favourite movie from earliest adolescence, and I watched it over and over again. There was Woody as Miles Monroe – the clarinettist and health-food shop owner who is cryogenically frozen when in hospital for a peptic ulcer, and wakes up 200 years into the future – giving us his best Buster Keaton, bouncing on top of evil guards to knock them out, nicking giant bananas and slipping on their skins; and there was… Diane Keaton.
As far as I was concerned, Diane Keaton’s character, Luna Schlosser, was brilliant. She got to swan around in feathers and slinky silver 1970s-version-of-the future-shirt-dresses. She got to say things like, ‘It’s keen. It’s pure keen. No, no, it’s greater than keen, it’s kugat’. She got to handle the orb, which looked like a lot of fun, and go into the orgasmatron whenever she wanted. And then, mid-caper, she got to throw off the shackles of totalitarianism and come to political consciousness in the great outdoors, while wearing all black and lots of kohl, and snogging that gorgeous one who was in Dallas for a bit. What’s not to love?
But then I re-watched Sleeper for the first time in years for the purposes of this piece, and, while the film remained as wonderful as ever, I have to admit, I was concerned. Was Luna too passive? Should I be championing such a crap poet? Someone who doesn’t know which comes first, a caterpillar or a butterfly? Shouldn’t I choose someone a bit less dippy? Lauren Bacall, say, or Katherine Hepburn – those women who exude cool and class and intelligence – who always know just what to say, and say it with a cocked eyebrow and a smoulder I’d find hard to summon in several lifetimes?
But I can’t help it. I love Luna. She may not be the sharpest space cadet the future has to offer, but she does a mean Marlon Brando impersonation. And nothing can beat her glorious hymn to liberation, sung in the woods in the Western District to the accompaniment of solo guitar:
‘Rebels are weee! Born to be freeee! Just like the fisshhh, in the seeeea!!’
Inspired by French prog, Angelo Badalamenti soundtracks, electronic experimentations and psychedelic rock, the genre-defying Teeth of the Sea continue to push boundaries with their brilliant third album Master which mightily combines potent riffs, hypnotic rhythms and filmic atmosphere. Teeth of the Sea play Electrowerkz, London, on 11 January 2014, and present a visual and sonic remix of Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England on 15 January as part of the London Short Film Festival. For more information, visit the Teeth of the Sea Facebook page. Below, the band tell us about the films that have most thrilled and influenced them.
1. Doomsday (Neil Marshall, 2008)
NEEEEEOOOOOW KERSPLATTT! What is it you want from your drunken Saturday night entertainment? Is it killer viruses? No, it’s knights on horseback! No, it’s Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic meltdown! In Scotland! No, it’s a car chase soundtracked by Frankie Goes to Hollywood! Can’t decide? Well fear not, lover of yucks, because Neil Marshall’s balls-out gonzoid masterpiece has all these things and exploding bunny rabbits besides. When we were asked to do our first live soundtrack event for Branchage festival a few years ago there was only really one film in the running. Doomsday‘s maniacal approach isn’t everyone’s cup of Irn-Bru, but its outrageous attempt to ransack every element of trash movie culture and bundle it into one 90-minute hymn to tasteless excess means it has remained a firm band favourite. Fearless and frequently unbelievable, one senses that in time it will get its due as a true pièce de resistance of lovingly sculpted trash cinema. (Mat/TOTS)
2. Phase IV (Saul Bass, 1974)
A psychedelic sci-fi head-spinner concerning ants (yeah, ANTS) developing a collective super intelligence and seriously fucking with some scientists in the desert, pioneering graphic designer Saul Bass’s Phase IV remains an overlooked masterpiece. Dialogue is scant at best, there is no action to speak of, and the soundtrack (by Brian Gascoigne) is a collection of abstract electronic noise, all of which adds up to a deeply unsettling trip of a film. Unfortunately it was Bass’s only full-length feature as a director, though he did make some great shorts (The Quest in particular is well worth seeking out). If David Bellamy took mescaline then watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, Phase IV is the film he’d make. (Mike)
3. Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)
Jules Dassin’s first film after being blacklisted by Hollywood in 1950 (during the making of Night and the City, another gem) meant he was fully based in Europe by this point. His knack of placing the city at the absolute heart of his films was undimmed, though, and the nightclubs, backroom card games and early morning street scenes of Paris exude exactly the right blend of allure and decay. Ostensibly the story is of an old-time robber arriving home from prison, determined to go straight until he discovers his ex-lover has taken up with a gangster and rival of his, whereupon he plans the perfect heist on which to retire. Whilst all noir is based on tropes such as this, the real genius of the film lies in conveying the requisite level of existential doom and amorality whilst keeping you on tenterhooks. The heist scene at the heart of the film unfolds in real time in virtual silence and lasts about half an hour – probably one of the greatest pieces of cinematic tension I’ve ever witnessed. (Sam)
4. Daft Punk’s Electroma (Daft Punk, 2006)
I don’t think anyone saw this coming: the world’s most successful dance duo make an abstract, wordless homage to 70s science fiction cinema, featuring no music by themselves but rather that of Brian Eno, Jackson C. Frank, and Todd Rundgren, amongst others. Featuring two robots wandering the desert and not a great deal else, Electroma is a hypnotic and considered piece of filmmaking. Whilst clearly influenced by films such as Phase IV, THX 1138, Zabriskie Point and Westworld, it never descends into pastiche (let’s not mention Random Access Memories, *shudder*) – instead becoming an unexpectedly emotional experience, and one that bodes well for Skrillex’s forthcoming remake of Last Year at Marienbad. (Mike)
5. Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980)
The chutzpah-laden and occasionally wayward oeuvre of Ken Russell is a Teeth of the Sea aesthetic mainstay, from the thrilling transgressions of The Devils right through to the heinous hi-jinks of The Lair of the White Worm. Yet Altered States will always stand out from the rest of his lineage for us, partly due to the gung-ho trip-out sequences that found this film a home in the stoner fringes of the early 80s midnight movie circuit – and also on the sleeve of Godflesh’s legendary Streetcleaner album – yet also due to the incredible dialogue of Paddy Chayefsky, the maverick also responsible for the drop-dead velocity-verbiage of Network. Chayefsky may have thrown a wobbler and disowned his part in the movie, but hearing William Hurt and Blair Brown rabbit out that insanely verbose metaphysical rhetoric, in between either carnal carnage or a return to man’s simian origins, will never cease to raise our own primordial pulses. (Jimmy)
6. The Doom Generation (Gregg Araki, 1995)
A gloriously trashy, hilariously violent, pansexual road movie, the second part of Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse trilogy. Amy Blue and Jordan White are dysfunctional teen lovers who give the nihilistic (and, dammit, hot!) Xavier Red (geddit?) a lift one night. When stopping at a convenience store Xavier accidentally kills the store owner and the trio are forced to go on the run. The film plots their course as they move from incredible-looking motel rooms to fast food joints to thrift stores. Xavier gradually seduces both Amy and Jordan and they are pursued by violent, reactionary forces across the USA, always resulting in yet more bloody carnage. Gleefully anarchic and genuinely sexy, it’s also rather touching in places. (Sam)
7. Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)
Simple, unforgettable and more genuinely unsettling than any of the host of frighteners that get pumped into today’s multiplexes like so much rancid mayonnaise, Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space‘s marriage of horror movie assault on the senses and avant-garde technique ensures that it’s pretty much the ultimate Teeth of the Sea film. Tscherkassky takes a single reel from forgettable 80s scare-fest The Entity and brutally attacks it in real time; twisting, mangling and unspooling it until it resembles nothing less than the horrific death dance of the screen itself. His fetishistic revelling in the grainy matter of the film reel and its punctured, eruptive soundtrack means that the sensation of watching Outer Space is almost textural, lending it a powerfully psychedelic pungency that sticks with you like the memory of a bad trip long after your first viewing. (Mat)
8. Wild Zero (Tetsuro Takeuchi, 1999)
Herschell Gordon Lewis, eatcha heart out. Wild Zero, starring Japan’s three-chord gods of gonzo Guitar Wolf, remains an unequivocal triumph of sheer stupidity over common sense, and of style over content – one indeed so potent that the average trash connoisseur has to pinch themselves to check it hasn’t emerged screaming from some dope-fugged fever dream. Yet, as fast, loud, stupid, gory and relentlessly invigorating as one of the band’s Ramones-on-PCP tunes, this outrageously over the top and life-affirmingly guileless orgy of ravenous zombies, seedy nightclub corruption, obsessively teased Brylcreem quiffs, overheated amp stacks, utilitarian special effects and heart-warming romance is enough to put a smile on the most jaded second-hand record shop employee’s face. ‘FUUUUUCCKKK!’ is a key repeated line of dialogue here, not to mention the average reaction of any sane audience member. If only the director of Bula Quo! had watched this first. (Jimmy)
9. The Thing (John Carpenter, 2013)
A chucklesome Arctic groo fest? A beautifully balanced study of paranoia and alienation? A Cold War metaphor with teeth and tentacles? The ultimate celluloid example of Artaud’s theory of the screaming body? That John Carpenter’s The Thing is all of these and more is testament to its unforgiving and relentless power. Everything is so perfectly set up, from the desolation of the snowbound setting, to the inability of the protagonists to deal with the horrific events that ensnare them, to the hideous, ever mutating unknowability of their vile assailant, the stakes ratcheting up ever higher as the film draws to its hopeless conclusion. In its perfectly weighted balance of suspense and explosive, unbelievably vile body horror (‘You gotta be fuckin’ kidding…’) The Thing remains that rarest of entities: the practically perfect horror film. (Mat/TOTS)
10. Purple Rain (Albert Magnoli, 1984)
Movie vehicles for musical megastars have an uncanny habit of flirting with disaster, the métier of their subject matter being so ostensibly foolhardy that any attempt to elevate them to the celluloid form proves gauche at best – just ask any poor thousand-yard-stare-toting soul who’s made it all the way through either The Doors or S Club Seeing Double. Yet Purple Rain, for all its (many) flaws, is a different box of sequins altogether. At the culmination of one memorable-for-the-wrong-reasons evening in 2013, the members of Teeth of the Sea found themselves in a minus-one-star Nuremberg hostel with only a laptop and a DVD of this movie for company. We could have made mincemeat of Prince’s somewhat threadbare thespian abilities, the constantly irksome presence of Morris Day, the risible plot and any amount of other weaknesses all too apparent in this Herculean cinematic leap of faith. Yet instead, to the sound of the fellow in the next room apparently attacking his door with a claw hammer, we found ourselves strangely enervated. It wasn’t just the mesmerising concert sequences – in which the diminutive boy Nelson comes over as little less than some Weird-Science-machine-created vision of the perfect pop star beamed in from Venus. It was more importantly the sheer gall that was required to carry off this flimsy yet outrageously outtasight folly. In an era in which pop music frequently seems a gruesome treadmill fit to manipulate its audience’s emotions as vigorously as the stars it creates, the power of raw charisma can’t be quantified. Purple Rain is a magnificent playground for a particularly potent example of exactly this elixir. (Jimmy/TOTS)
Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada (above the 49th Parallel):
Toronto International Film Festival 2013: Miscellany
Miscellany is the theme of this final colonial report on the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, for this is ultimately the fest’s greatest stock in trade. One of the truly delightful activities during the Dominion of Canada’s greatest cultural event (bar none) is watching a variety of motion pictures from EVERYWHERE. So here, dearest scavenger of all things cinematic, is a grab bag of product I snuffled up during 10 days of movie gluttony. No better place to experience a whack of movies than in the colonies.
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Tracks (John Curran, 2013) **1/2
Robyn Davidson (played by Mia Wasikowska) was an Aussie hippie chick who abandoned a formal post-secondary education and instead lived with a bunch of radical animal-science types in Adelaide (where she learned a whole ton about God’s creatures). She subsequently joined a left-wing organisation of wanker egghead fruitcakes in Sydney (that included the likes of Germaine Greer) where she grooved the Bohemia Electric. In the 70s she settled in the middle of nowhere and learned everything she always wanted to know about camels (and was, decidedly, not afraid to ask). Her first experience was with a brutal camel farmer who exploited her until, finally, she met and worked for a kindly camel expert who taught her a great deal and partially bankrolled what was to become her biggest challenge – a 1700-mile trek alone across the deserts of Western Oz from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean. Well, she wasn’t completely alone – she had her faithful mutt and a handful of ornery, but loyal camels. Since the National Geographic Society financed the sojourn, she was occasionally in the company of Rick Smolan (Adam Driver), a photographer who would add the pictorial materials to Robyn’s eventual story in the famous wildlife magazine. The two enjoyed an on-again-off-again love affair and eventually Robyn wrote a memoir that this film is based upon.
This is by no means a dreadful film. Wasikowska is a pleasing screen presence and very easy on the eyes. The camels, being insanely cute, are even easier on one’s ocular orbs. Unfortunately, the movie feels like a Walt Disney True Life Nature Adventure crossed with a Harlequin Romance in the wilds of Australia, with occasionally chaste boinking twixt the human lovebirds, and sadly none involving the camels.
Watch the trailer for Tracks:
Le démantèlement (Sébastien Pilote, 2013) *****
Who is Sébastien Pilote? Seriously, who the hell is this guy, anyway? These were questions I asked myself upon seeing his extraordinary first feature film Le vendeur. This stunning Quebecois kitchen-sink drama was so raw, real and infused with a seldom-paralleled acute pain that the film’s quiet power instantly revealed its creator’s cinematic genius. Starring the great Gilbert Sicotte as an ace car salesman in a small factory town in Quebec on the brink of total financial collapse, this staggeringly powerful, exquisitely-acted and beautifully written motion picture was, for me, the first genuine Quebecois heir apparent to the beautiful-yet-not-so-beautiful-loser genre of English-Canadian cinema (best exemplified by films like Donald Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road, Peter Pearson’s Paperback Hero and Zale Dalen’s Skip Tracer). As if making a modern masterpiece of Quebec cinema as a first feature wasn’t enough, I eventually caught up with Pilote’s earlier short film Dust Bowl Ha! Ha! , which featured André Bouchard as a hard-working family man in small-town Quebec who stoically maintains his dignity in a world where nothing and nobody escapes the crushing weight of the financial crisis. This turned out to be one of the best short films I had ever seen – period – a phenomenal portrait of humanity, so graceful and so simple, that upon first seeing it I felt about as winded as I did after I first saw Le vendeur.
So now I have even more reason to ask: Who the fuck is Sébastien Pilote? His second feature Le démantèlement completely and utterly knocked me on my ass. Starring the legendary Gabriel Arcand as a Quebec sheep farmer, the film extraordinarily blends a neo-realist sensibility with the sort of pace one takes while appreciating a work of visual art. As such, it is not only thought-provoking drama, but visually astonishing, gorgeously lit and composed by cinematographer Michel La Veaux in a classical tradition not unlike that of Haskell Wexler’s heartbreakingly beautiful work in Bound for Glory.
Gaby Gagnon (Arcand) has worked the family farm his whole life – long after his brothers abandoned rural life, long after his wife left him to say farewell to a suffocating existence and now he continues to painstakingly toil away, often missing, but seldom seeing, the daughters he loves so dearly and who live far away in Montreal. He has friends: his loyal pal and accountant (Gilles Renaud) who brings good humour, fellowship and counsel into his life (along with an unwanted clunker of a computer); a neighbouring widow (Dominique Leduc) who endows him with warmth and commiseration; and he has a sweet-eyed, 10-year-old dog who sticks to his side faithfully. They all offer some solace to Gaby’s isolation, but when his accountant pal speaks disapprovingly about how the family seems to have all but abandoned him, Gaby shrugs it all off as being an inevitability. Thanks to Arcand’s extraordinary performance, we don’t really buy his expectations of abandonment and disappointment. If there is anything that provides Gaby with genuine solace, it is the work itself. During the first third of the film, Pilote painstakingly details the drudgery of Gaby’s daily chores, almost to the point where one feels like the movie could be a sumptuously photographed documentary about sheep farming in rural Quebec (instilling avid interest in the rearing of mutton to the unlikeliest candidates for such tutelage). I might be insane, but I could have watched Gabriel Arcand tending to this farm in Frederick Wiseman-like breadth and girth for hours.
It is in this section of the film that we get an acute sense that Gaby’s heart and soul is farming, so much so that when we eventually get to the action of the film’s title we’re devastated in extremis. This is where another aspect of Pilote’s brilliant storytelling approach sneaks stealthily upon us – we not only understand why Gaby would never imagine another life, but it seems like there isn’t a single shot or story beat employed in which we don’t fall in love with the world of the farm either. There’s nothing overtly sentimental about this approach – Pilote never tempers his gaze upon the hardships and/or challenges of farm life, but in fact creates a sense of life’s infinite give and take. To put too fine a point on it: climbing Mt. Everest is full of pain, hardship and requires a meticulous attention to every detail, but Good Goddamn (!) it’s worth it.
Watch the trailer for Le démantèlement:
When Gaby gets a visit from his oldest daughter Marie (Lucie Laurier), he’s informed that her marriage is over and she needs a $200,000 loan to buy out her debt-ridden husband’s share of her home. For both her sake and her kids, he agrees to look into finding the money by using his farm as collateral. His youngest daughter Frédérique (an exquisitely radiant Sophie Desmarais), a carefree Montreal stage actress, actually seems to have more sense than her older sister and points out to Gaby that he’s being taken advantage of if he risks the farm. And like all good fathers, he shrugs and admits he knows this.
Almost as painstaking in its detail as the recreation of farm life is the ‘dismantlement’ (the English title is The Auction), and it is here where the elements of tragedy kick into high gear. There are several subtle allusions in the film to Shakespeare’s King Lear, and as in that immortal work, I defy any audience member to not be moved to tears on several occasions throughout this emotionally devastating series of events. There are sequences of almost unbearable pain. A visit to an animal shelter to ‘take care’ of the dog nobody wants rivals the old man’s visit to the dog-pound gas chambers in Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D, while a scene where Gaby tours a decrepit, low-income housing unit is equally fraught with the same grim, stark power generated by the Italian neo-realists. The final half of the film is thoroughly heart-wrenching, but most astoundingly, it is here where Pilote demonstrates such world-wise maturity that we come to recognise and accept with both sadness and joy that it is indeed death that yields regeneration. And what soaring, truthful and deeply moving regeneration the film offers.
Who is Sébastien Pilote?
One of the greatest filmmakers of Quebec, and that means something.
A lot, actually.
Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975) *****
A delivery boy strolls down the hall of a new luxury high rise just as a grotesquely corpulent old woman pokes her head out of a doorway and moans lasciviously: ‘I’m hungry.’ She waits for a response, then parrots petulantly: ‘I’m hungry!’ Lunging violently at the lad, her teeth bared, she screams, ‘I’m hungry for love!’ As she sates her unholy desires, a gelatinous blood-parasite is deposited down his throat as she sucks face with him. This is one of many vomit-tempting moments in David Cronenberg’s first commercial feature film, Shivers, which happily inspired incredulous Canuck pundits to demand government accountability, as the picture represented an early investment from the Dominion’s federal cultural funding agency. The 1973 horror classic has been restored by the Toronto International Film Festival, and premiered during the 2013 edition. It’s not only a scare-fest, but is also replete with all manner of nasty laughs, all of them wrenched naturally out of an utterly unnatural situation. Pre-dating the AIDS crisis, Cronenberg links sex with death. The delightfully simple tale involves a new form of parasitical venereal disease spreading like wildfire within a Montreal luxury community, gated by its island borders on the mighty St Lawrence. The disease turns its victims into homicidal sex maniacs.
Allow me to repeat that:
HOMICIDAL SEX MANIACS!!!
And what a frothy concoction Shivers truly is with all manner of viscous emissions:
• Blood parasites being vomited from a balcony onto an old lady’s clear plastic umbrella;
• Parasites roiling and bubbling just under the surface of Alan Migicovsky’s sexy, hairy belly;
• A lithe, nude body of a lassie formerly adorned in a school uniform has her midriff sliced open, her insides then drenched in acid.
Add to this frothy concoction a whole whack o’ babes, from pretty Susan Petrie as a weepy wifey, Lynn Lowry as a drop-dead gorgeous nurse, to the heart-stopping British scream queen Barbara Steele.
Stunningly, Cronenberg manages, in one salient area, to match the great Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Hitch, of course, infused utter terror in the minds of millions who dared to take a shower. In Shivers, Cronenberg delivers one of the most horrendous bathtub violations ever committed to celluloid. Best of all, the sequence involves Barbara Steele. ‘God bless you, Mr Cronenberg, God bless you!’
Watch the trailer for Shivers:
L’intrepido (Gianni Amelio, 2013) *
When someone annoys you, tell me you don’t want to just deck him, right? I mean, really fuckin’ deck him – just coldcock the sonofabitch with a solid roundhouse to the face. It’s perfectly understandable, yes? Alas, life and art are the great divide. In life, you deck the fucker. Art’s another story. If you put your fist through the movie screen, you’re guaranteed a trip to the hoosegow. Here I was, then, at TIFF 2013, watching Gianni Amelio’s latest movie – bad enough, I know – and I’m staring up at the BIG screen and forced to stomach a character I want to punch in the face.
Let me then introduce you to Antonio (Antonio Albanese). The guy’s a real piece of work. His eyes are always sparkling and he’s usually got a stupid half-smile plastered on his face. Life has dealt the loser with more than his fair share of crummy cards, but he’s so gosh-darn kind and cheerful all the time that your first impulse is to, well, you know – smash the fucker square in the face. He’s a great intellect, yet Italy is in such a financial mess that there’s no decent place for a middle-aged man like him to ply any reasonable sort of craft. He toils mule-like as a replacement worker in a myriad of menial jobs, and to add insult to injury, his wife has left him. (Any guesses why?) In spite of this, he’s such a happy fellow that when some scumbags steal pizzas out of his delivery container, he shrugs it off, goes back to the pizza joint, barters for more pizzas, delivers them to a bunch of old ladies in a sewing factory and, upon realizing that he might have a problem getting the dough he’s owed from these ravenous pizza-slurping harpies, he dazzles them with his prowess at the sewing machine. Adding to his coldcock potential, Antonio ‘meets cute’ with a gorgeous young babe. Obviously, it’s only in Italy (or in a Gianni Amelio movie) where grinning, balding, middle-aged losers with no secure employment have no problem charming the pants off young fillies. This, however, being a Gianni Amelio movie, he of the ‘I believe in the indomitable spirit of the EVERYMAN’ school of proletarian-boosting, the sickly sweetness of the tale will be tempered with bitterness, but goddamnit, we’re going to learn a good lesson.
Frankly, the only lesson I want to learn is how to coldcock a movie character living on-screen and/or in the mind of the insufferable director who’s foisted him upon me. Until then, I’ll find some dweeb in a film festival line-up, whacking me with his goddamn knapsack, shovelling granola down his throat and talking loudly with his detestable mouth open whilst his barefoot, granny-glasses-adorned, hippie-chick girlfriend who smells like she hasn’t seen a bathtub in weeks hangs on his every word. I’ll coldcock him and his girlfriend to avoid hoosegow-incarceration for vandalising a screen in a movie theatre by punching a huge hole or two in it.
Border (Alessio Cremonini, 2013) ***1/2
Fatima is a new bride. Her husband has gone to war and she lives a quiet life with her sister Aya in the conjugal flat. The sisters are extremely devout and spend a great deal of their time devoted to practising their faith. When news comes that Fatima’s husband has left the Syrian Army to join the Free Army of ‘rebels’, they have very little time to react. Aya is already a survivor of gang rape, torture and incarceration, and while she understands what could well await them, she’s also wary of the complete stranger sent by Fatima’s husband to whisk them out of Syria to safety and freedom in Turkey. Still, there’s really no choice for either woman. The actions of a totalitarian government and, to an extent, Fatima’s husband, have pretty much removed any vestige of self-determination in the matter.
After hurriedly throwing together a few essentials, they are plunged into following a man they do not know through ‘enemy’ territory. The only real choice the two women make, and it’s at great risk to their safety, is that they both refuse to remove their religious headgear which, while on the road, could well give them away. The trip is fraught with several unexpected turns that keep them from moving as quickly as had been hoped. Deception, double-crosses and danger lie around each corner.
When they discover a recently tortured and slaughtered family deep in a Syrian forest, the stark, brutal reality truly hits home, but upon discovering a lone survivor of the massacre, the women both realise that this might well be the symbolic hope they need to find safety. In so doing, however, they will also have to protect this person.
There are no false notes in Border. The superb performances, the exquisitely structured screenplay (by director Cremonini and Susan Dabbous) and finally, Cremonini’s terse helmsmanship of the action, create a tension that, at times, becomes far more unbearable than if the story had been presented in some overtly overwrought manner (as might have been the case if directed by an American). Border is, in its own way, a kind of celebration of self-determination in a world where so much is awry due to the warmongering of men, and where every step these women must take might be one step closer to the most unimaginable horrors.
Watch the trailer for Border:
Child of God (James Franco, 2013) ***** ‘Everybody knows you never go full retard…Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man, looks retarded, acts retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic yes, but not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump . Slow, yes. Retarded, no… Peter Sellers, Being There. Infantile yes. Retarded, no… Never go full retard… Ask Sean Penn, 2001, I Am Sam. Remember? Went full retard, went home empty handed…’ Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder
Scott Haze as Lester Ballard, the inbred, slow-witted Tennessee cracker-barrel hero of James Franco’s stunning film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Child of God, takes a crap on-screen, wipes his poopy-butt with a stick, delivers plenty of buttock flashes (replete with ass-crack) and dolls himself up in the most hideous drag ever wrought on the silver screen, but he most surely, undoubtedly and definitely does not serve up the aforementioned ‘full retard’. Haze’s genuinely affecting and bravely brilliant performance does, however, offer something a tad more egregious than ‘full retardation’ to keep him from his date with Oscar.
The family farm has been auctioned off and our hero, shotgun in hand, takes to an old hunting shack in the deep woods where he lives out his life. Sheriff Fate (Tim Blake Nelson) and Deputy Cotton (Jim Parrack) keep a healthy watch on Lester, since the boy occasionally flies off the handle and needs to be given some quality rest time in a padded cell. They seem oddly sympathetic to Lester, but ultimately, what can they really do when naughty shenanigans occur in the county? They’ve got to target someone. After all, our boy Lester is just plumb crazy.
Lester is also a full-bodied young lad, and when he discovers a lovers’ lane area in the backwoods, he develops a healthy penchant for peeping through the back seat windows of parked cars. As the vehicles bob up and down to the strokes of amore, the dulcet tones of moans wafting through the air, Lester handily (so to speak) beats his meat to the proceedings. One morning, he spies a vehicle still running. In the back seat are the bodies of a young couple locked in a lovers’ embrace, and they are stone cold from carbon monoxide poisoning. With keen interest, Lester notices that the young lady is awful purty. Hmmm. What’s an ornery country boy with a hard-on supposed to do in a situation like this? Well, he does what no Oscar-winning performance will ever be acknowledged for. And he does it repeatedly. Subsequent recipients of his man-juice are not quite stupid enough to die of carbon monoxide poisoning and leave their bodies lying around for pubic penetration from randy Lester. Luckily for our boy, he’s mighty handy with a shotgun.
Franco has managed to do the near impossible, in rendering a character (especially via Haze’s performance) who gains our empathy to a point where we even get the ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Lester, ya’ shouldn’t oughtta be doin’ that’ feeling.
Watch the trailer for Child of God:
Child of God is a genuine triumph. Franco handles the picture with verve and style. He even manages to utilise chunks of McCarthy’s prose in a series of odd ‘conversational’ voice-overs and literal title cards splashing across the screen. This technique cleverly roots the film in the glorious American literary tradition of Southern Gothic. Franco elicits a wide range of great performances and his actual coverage and composition of the dramatic action feels like the work of someone who’s been directing movies his whole career. The picture is grotesque, at times sickening and often shocking, but it is rooted in genuine humanity and is easily one of the best films of the year. (It also prompted more walkouts at the screening I attended than anything I’ve experienced at TIFF in quite some time. This alone says EVERYTHING).
Although most critics perceive Ken Russell’s career as having declined irretrievably by the 1980s, the latter half of the decade saw him produce three extraordinary films. All three works are inspired by 19th-century authors, and marry their taste for the ornate and Gothic with Russell’s bathetic, sometimes anachronistic touches of broad humour. The films are linked thematically too, by the trinity of woman protagonists that they present. I call this trilogy the female fugue; It’s a fugue in the musical as well as psychological sense, intertwining variations on the theme of female subjectivity seen from a man’s point of view, and an amnesiac discarding of Russell’s Romantic conception of the male anti-hero so prevalent in his 1970s work, now replaced by an errant voyage through three new female identities.
While Gothic (1986) deals with Mary Shelley and the laudanum-drenched night in 1816 when she conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein, Salome’s Last Dance (1988) is an inventive re-working of Wilde’s controversial play about the biblical seductress, staged as a private performance for Wilde himself by the denizens of a brothel. Finally, The Lair of the White Worm (1988) takes the figure of the femme fatale to inhumanly new heights in a joint celebration of Donald McGill sauciness and Hammer Horror stately-home stodge.
Watch the trailer for Gothic:
The browbeating morality of the Hollywood production code demanded a monster far more terrifying to Russell than any animated cadaver; a simpering Mary Shelley who reprimands her hero Baron Frankenstein for daring ‘to play God’. In Gothic Russell attempts an escape from the moralistic cul-de-sac created by films like Bride of Frankenstein, instead focusing on the raw creativity and the carnal debauchery of the Romantic poets. Byron, Shelley and Polidori are raving, drooling scenery-chewing fanatics, and inarticulate for all their verbosity, and Mary’s step-sister Claire seems content merely to be Byron’s plaything.
While Byron postures, proud of his Promethean literary creations, and Shelley celebrates the elemental power of lightning with a naked rooftop ritual, Mary is quietly preoccupied with a genesis of her own. She wants to escape her situation; to flee the drug-addled squalor but also to avoid the domestic drudgery of motherhood. This is also the wish of her creation, Frankenstein, who wants to transcend mortality but recoils in existential terror at the fact that he has created and is responsible for another life.
Salome is, like Mary Shelley, a female in an unwelcoming man’s world. Although she’s the subject of only a handful of verses in the Bible, religious and secular figures alike have zoomed in on the dance of the seven veils, and turned the young princess into an archetype of dangerous female sexuality, who uses her allure to ensure the death of the chaste and principled John the Baptist. Despite Russell’s use of buxom page three girls as Roman concubines, Salome herself is a far less conventional object of male lust. The actress Imogen Millais-Scott was half-blind and recovering from a rare illness, giving Salome the consumptive air of a tragic 19th-century heroine. Her velvet-voiced declamation of Wilde’s sublime lines is undeniably beguiling, certainly irresistible to Stratford Johns’s chubby, ineffectual Herod.
Watch the trailer for Salome’s Last Dance:
Just as Gothic has a modern-day epilogue, so the framing device of the play’s staging allows Russell to develop his theme. Arrested by the police as the play ends, Wilde laments that he should have played John the Baptist himself. However, Russell adds a further touch that blurs the lines as to who the victim is here. We find out that the fate of the chambermaid playing Salome mirrors that of her character; she was killed for real by the brothel owners to create a realistic climax to their performance.
Russell seems horrified by the exploitative callousness of Victorian society, but at the same time he retreats from this theme, making the death seem even more callous because it appears to be tacked on as an afterthought by Russell. ‘Maidservants in Victorian London were two a penny; she’d never be missed,’ is Russell’s only statement about the matter. As Wilde is hauled away by the police for sexual indecency, we are left with the feeling that little has changed since Roman times.
The Lair of the White Worm takes up the themes of gender and class conflict found in the first two films but treats them less seriously. It also makes a link between the savagery of Rome and the 19th-century literary tradition, beginning with archaeologist Angus Flint uncovering a Roman-era temple in the Peak District.
Rugged Angus and Hugh Grant’s lord of the manor are the typical male heroes who have to protect two local girls, with the virginal names Eve and Mary, from the torments inflicted by Lady Sylvia Marsh, the monstrous, vampiric snake-worshipping villain, and clearly Russell’s choice for the real hero of the piece. The heroes are good-natured but unmistakably the sort of naive dullards that populated the quota quickies of Russell’s childhood. The male-dominated Victorian patriarchy threatens her exuberant sexuality (although the film is ostensibly set contemporaneously, it’s a curious time-warp hybrid of past and present that bears little resemblance to 1980s Britain) much like Salome’s, but she is also the closest female character to Russell’s own persona.
Watch the trailer for The Lair of the White Worm:
The film has a tense, coiled atmosphere, in which Russell imbues almost everything with eerie foreboding or sexual potential; a game of snakes and ladders hosepipe becomes both phallic and serpentine, the mouth of a cave becomes vaginal. Lady Marsh has a venomous bite that turns her victims into her slaves, and even momentarily touching the venom has hallucinogenic effects. Although four people come into contact with the stuff, only the Trent girls are given visions; psychotropic and campy visions of Roman soldiers attacking a convent of nuns while a massive rubber snake coils around a crucifix. In an eerie foreshadowing of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, released three years later, Eve is revealed through one of these visions to be the reincarnation of one of these early Christians, adding a further layer of counterpoint to this fugue of interlocking female identities.
It’s an original rendering of an old stereotype; the women then have emotive, empathic powers (here taken to the extreme) while the men, although divided by class, have the common-sense practicality needed to outwit the enemy and restore order. The moralistic formula of Hammer-style horror dictates that good must finally triumph over evil, which it does – but only temporarily. Russell permits Lady Sylvia a last mocking laugh, and one that suggests our dashing male heroes are more than just friends.
Priapic, prurient and politically incorrect, Russell’s female fugue is as ambitious as it is irreverent. In each film Russell presents an increasingly complex portrayal of female subjectivities in a patriarchal environment. But changing critical fashions and truncated budgets ensured that the passionate cult followings these films developed would never be matched by critical attention. They stand as Russell’s last burst of frantic, thematically coherent creativity before the wilderness years of the 1990s, a decade Russell later claimed to barely even remember.
As part of their current ‘Gothic’ season and regular Sonic Cinema strand, the BFI presented a night of Gothic-inspired sounds and images on 13 December 2013, curated by the artist and composer Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner. The evening opened with Chris Turner’s fashion film G(O)OD+(D)EVIL, which slickly plays with horror imagery, and features a dark ambient score by Scanner. This was followed by an astonishing musical show by Gazelle Twin, introduced by a disquieting short film featuring the performers in a supermarket. Wearing a wig and a blue hoodie, her face disguised by tights, Gazelle Twin was accompanied by two musicians in red hoodies providing the sounds and beats on laptops. They looked like strange faceless creatures in the semi-darkness, not unlike the demonic East End figures of Philip Ridley’s Heartless (2009); the creepy, haunting vocals, ghostly melodies, doom-laden bass lines and mesmeric, intricate beats created an intensely immersive, obsessive soundscape. After such a powerful performance, Anna and Maria von Hausswolff’s Trace the Spark was a bit of an anti-climax. A by-the-numbers experimental short film consisting of split-screen abstract imagery that repeated and mutated to a drony soundtrack, it was fairly unsurprising, and failed to make truly inventive or interesting connections between the sounds and the images.
Scanner’s new live album, Electronic Garden, is released on 24 February 2014.
Giving the event its name, Scanner then performed his take on Lachrimae, exploring the musical variations on the theme of tears, developed by 17th-century English musician John Dowland. The work is a collaboration between Scanner and Chris Turner, who provided the visuals: a black and white short film showing an attractive woman moving in slow motion. The film was as glossy and empty as an advert, but the music was captivating and hypnotic, and loosely in sync with the images. Starting with a beautiful melody punctuated by menacing bass lines and cascading percussive noises, it turned into lone piano notes contrasted with explosive sounds, underpinned by a quieter repetitive sequence full of whispers, before growing into higher-pitched sounds that evoked wrecked spaceships drifting through dark skies.
The final act, and the undeniable highlight of the night, was Carter Tutti (former Throbbing Gristle members Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti), who performed their score to an extract of F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). Murnau’s images remain dazzlingly magical, and Carter Tutti’s score matched them with remarkable precision and imagination, making it the finest instance of visual and sonic concordance of the night. The ominous drone and industrial noises incorporated sounds of explosions, a crowd, wind blowing, a heartbeat, all of which directly matched specific visual events, while evocative whispers and flowing water, weeping violins and dissonant cellos underscored the mood of the scenes. The seamless way in which one piece of music segued into the next was particularly impressive. It was a mighty, dense performance that uniquely brought out the brilliance of the film and left the audience staggering out into the light, stunned and amazed by the dark wonders they had just witnessed.
As part of the BFI’s ‘Gothic’ season, veteran film director and producer Roger Corman visited London in October 2013 to introduce a screening of his film The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). Alex Fitch interviewed the filmmaker about his career from the 1950s to the present day, and continuing on from the first part of the interview, which looked at his work on Edgar Allan Poe adaptations and remixing Russian sci-fi films, here they discuss Corman’s work as a producer and pioneer of new technology.
Read the first part of Alex Fitch’s interview with Roger Corman here.
Alex Fitch: As a producer you’ve garnered a great reputation for finding young talent – directors like Peter Bogdanovich, Jack Hill, Francis Ford Coppola and Joe Dante. Where do you think that instinct came from?
Roger Corman: It came from a specific reason. When I was making low-budget films, I could go for directors, cameramen, art directors, actors, and so forth, who would be all right for the task. Veterans of the industry had a certain level of expertise, but as a young man around Hollywood, I knew some of the brighter young people, and I thought it was better to gamble on somebody I knew and thought had potential, on the basis that even if he or she had less experience – or sometimes no experience – there was a talent there which would get me a better moving picture.
But it does almost seem like you had a bit of a preternatural instinct at finding good talent you could nurture. Were there dozens of people you turned down for every director that you did choose for a project?
More than dozens!
You’ve worked in various genres – science fiction, horror, Westerns. Do you think that in each decade you’ve worked in the business, different genres have reflected different themes of the times?
To a certain extent. I think they reflected my concerns as I’ve moved through time and through my life, and also what was happening at each particular time. For instance, in the 1960s, I moved from the classical Gothic horror films of the Edgar Allan Poe series to things like The Wild Angels (1966) and other Hell’s Angels and biker movies, then on to The Trip (1967) and LSD-inspired movies. They were subjects I was interested in, but they were about what was happening in culture at that time.
Watch the original trailer for The Trip:
Working with people like Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, you encouraged them not only to be actors, but also to work behind the camera. Did that go back to your days of having worked on set, and to the idea that to have a proper understanding of film, you need to try out more than one role?
Yes, I like to have everyone working in multiple capacities wherever possible.
Have they given you feedback on how that’s helped their careers?
Jack told me a very interesting story when he was doing The Shining (1980). When he was working with me, people said that I always printed the first take – I didn’t, generally I would use the second, third or maybe fourth take – and he said he did one scene with Stanley Kubrick, where it was over a hundred takes! He’s a good guy: he stood there until his 120th take or something like that, and finally Kubrick said: ’Print’ and that was it. Jack told me that he went up to Stanley and said: ‘I’m with you all the way, but I have to tell you, I generally peak around the 70th or 80th take!’
As the 1970s progressed, you became more of a producer than a director, and helped start the careers of the directors I mentioned. Did you feel like a proud parent as they went off to do other projects for other studios?
I was very pleased, particularly with Joe Dante and Peter Bogdanovich, and with Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, James Cameron… I always forget to mention somebody, and very often get a call from some Academy Award winner who says: ‘Hey, you forgot me!’
It’s interesting that a lot of those directors have gone on to make movies that cost $100 million and more. I wonder if there’s advice that you might give to directors starting out in the industry, that, actually, if you start off with low budgets – because you know how to efficiently spend money at that level – it prepares you better for the mega-budget films later on?
For more information on Roger Corman’s life and career, the documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel is released in the UK on Blu-ray + DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment.
Yes, and I talked to James Cameron about that after Titanic (1997)… I thought the special effects were great and I said to Jim: ‘How did you do it?’ He said: ‘I just did what I always did for you, I just had more money!’
By the end of the 1970s, you’d become – to use an uncomfortable word – a ‘brand’, with your name above the film title. Did you feel that as people got to know the kind of work you were making, you were under more pressure to deliver films that were beyond their expectations?
I’ve always felt that. I’ve always felt that I should give the audience more than they expect when they come to see a film. Generally that’s happened. Occasionally, it’s not happened.
One aspect of your career that perhaps you’re not that well known for is that you also became a distributor of foreign language films in America, presenting films that perhaps local audiences would have never seen if you hadn’t shown an interest in them. Did you get much in the way of thanks from the industry for doing that?
I don’t know if I got thanks, but I got recognition. What I felt was that I’d built my company New World Pictures into what was really the strongest independent distribution company in the 1970s, and I simply wanted to distribute the films of these auteurs. They were being distributed in two ways: very often by small companies that were little more than aficionados, and didn’t really have distribution strength to book the films the way they should be; or they were distributed by major studios who were great distributors, but for a certain type of film, they didn’t quite understand how these films should be distributed. I felt we were in between. We were small enough to give these films individual attention, but strong enough to book them into the right theatres in the right terms, and I simply wanted to distribute these filmmakers’ work. I wasn’t a charity, I wasn’t going to have nothing out of them, but I wasn’t expecting a big profit. I tried to break even or make a couple of dollars, so we ended up with Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Kurosawa, and the list goes on!
I guess to a certain extent, as you were saying, that meant presenting their films in a certain way because the American audience of the time didn’t know what to expect from international filmmaking.
Well, our general pattern was this: we would open the film in New York and Los Angeles, and get reviews from critics in those two cities. Based on the grosses from there, we would book the films around the country. We had a very interesting way of doing that: we went to a lot of college towns and if we opened, say, Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972) in somewhere like Detroit, we would then open in Ann Arbor, the home of the University of Michigan, because we found that way we made very big grosses. It became a little more complicated if we opened a film in San Francisco, we’d simultaneously open in Berkeley – home of the University of California – and Palo Alto, where you find Stanford.
Your final film as director was Frankenstein Unbound (1990) and I think it’s a really underrated gem. It’s a film that partially adapts Mary Shelley’s original novel and adds time travel to it. Suitably, one of the themes of the original book is the juxtaposition of old technology and new technology, and Frankenstein Unbound takes that to a different science-fictional level. Was that something you were considering when you made the film?
Those themes were definitely in my mind. What had happened was that Universal Pictures had done some market research and came up with the decision, result or whatever, that the idea of ‘Roger Corman’s Frankenstein’ would be successful, and they asked me if I wanted to make it! I said: ‘No, it’s going to be just another Frankenstein film, and there have been 50 or more of them. It’ll just be the 52nd…’ but they kept coming back to me every six months and kept offering me more and more money!
Finally I thought: if I can just find a new way to do Frankenstein, then I’ll make it. Brian Aldiss – a very good British science fiction author – had written a novel called Frankenstein Unbound, in which a statesman from the 21st century travels back in time and meets Doctor Frankenstein. I thought it was a great idea, but I changed the lead character to a scientist, because I wanted to do exactly what you said, I wanted a scientist of the future with knowledge of all future technology, to go back 200 years or so and meet a scientist at the beginning of modern science. I thought the juxtaposition would be interesting.
Watch the original trailer for Frankenstein Unbound:
But you didn’t film Aldiss’s sequel novel Dracula Unbound. Was it too difficult a book to adapt or did you want go in a different direction?
I just wasn’t quite that delighted with the film I’d made – some of the circumstances were beyond my control – I think I did a fairly decent job, but I felt the years piling up. It was easier, going back to being a producer.
Were you never tempted to direct again as the years progressed?
I’ve thought about it occasionally, but what would I do? There are two things I’d do: I would find a subject that was special to me that I definitely wanted to make, or I might just take the next script that comes off our assembly line and just shoot it as one of those types of films. Somehow I just didn’t get round to doing it.
In recent years you’ve been dealing with new technology. It may be smaller and faster, but there are all the little things like digitizing, adapting to different file formats and so on, to keep the machines happy. It’s not quite as simple as just turning a 35mm camera on…
I’d assumed it was. I felt I’d learned just about as much as you could with 35mm film without becoming a cameraman; digital came in and I only understand a part of it because every 90 days a new camera comes out or there’s a new technique, and it turns out that it’s far more difficult than I thought it was to shoot with. We have a technician on the set at all times doing I have no idea what, but he’s sitting with the cameraman. Then he goes through various stages of the work before you can cut with this stuff. So, I’d assumed this was immediately going to be faster and cheaper… It’s a little faster to shoot, but you lose time and money in the transferring back and forth.
You’ve also been encouraging directors to make what are called ‘micro-budget films’, an example of which was Alex Cox’s Searchers 2.0 (2007). Was that because new technology opened doors to even lower-budget movies than shooting on film, even with the problems you mentioned?
Yes. The idea actually originated with Jon Davison, who started his career with me, first as the head of our advertising department, then as a producer. He went on to produce Robocop (1987) and some giant-sized science fiction films. He’s younger than I am, but semi-retired and he came up with the idea of doing the film and doing it with Alex. The idea seemed to me a very good and interesting one and it wasn’t going to cost that much money, so we did it simply as an experiment. I thought the picture turned out well, I thought Alex and Jon did a very good job.
Watch the original trailer for Searchers 2.0:
You have a cameo in the film as a sort of parody of yourself. Whose idea was that?
It was Jon’s (laughs). You’re the first person to ask me about Searchers 2.0! The film did all right, but we expected more. It was such an unusual film, and it was such a hip idea. At the end we went up to Monument Valley, where John Ford shot many of his Westerns, and had the classic gun fight between the two guys, which I thought was great fun.
Frankenstein Unbound and Searchers 2.0 are available to import to the UK on Region 1 DVD.
I suppose that’s almost an inevitability when you’re working with a director like Alex Cox, who often has references to other movies in his films. It must have been so tempting for him.
It was his idea, originally, and again I thought: ‘This is a really unusual and good idea.’ Like I said, the film did all right, but you never know how things will turn out financially…
We’ve spoken about how you nurtured young talent on the set, and a few years ago, you brought out your autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. I was wondering if any young filmmakers come up to you and say that the book inspired them to work in the industry?
A surprising number have, and they’re not all Americans! I go fairly often to foreign film festivals and people come up to me out of the blue. A director in Odessa, at the Ukrainian film festival last year, said he’d read the book.
Do they say what skills it’s helped give them?
They’re never specific, just in general that it’s helped!
Another example of your use of new technology was Joe Dante’s mini-series Splatter (2009), which you produced. Having watched an episode, the audience could vote on how the story should progress, so for a three-part series, you had to shoot about twelve different variants. Was making cinema interactive something you’d been thinking of previously?
I’d been thinking about it, but the idea came from Netflix. They called me and said ‘Here’s what we’d like to do: three 10-to-15-minute segments of a horror story in which somebody is killed in the first segment and the audience votes on who they want to kill in the second. The second segment must be written, made, edited, and on the air one week later. Then the audience will vote again!’ I took the idea just because I thought it would be fun, that this is something new and an incredible challenge to do everything not in seven days but six, as we had to wait a day for the votes to come in on who was going to be killed. I called Joe and said: ‘This is going to be back to where we all started! Are you interested?’ And he said ‘Yes’ on the same basis that I did. He said: ‘It’ll be a challenge and it’ll be fun.’
It was actually my wife who came up with the solution. She said: ‘What we could really do is shoot the death of everybody in advance and then shoot connecting scenes’, so we’re still doing what the audience says. If they want character A killed in the second episode, we’ll give them that, but everything, including the multiple lines that lead to it, are already shot, and all we have to do is cut it all together to create the death of whoever everyone votes for. That was what enabled us to do the thing on a reasonable budget.
Watch the teaser trailer for the final episode of Splatter:
Do you think working at that speed helps to keep the filmmaking process fresh, because you’re not planning shots endlessly, and you’re working on instinct to a certain extent?
You’re doing both, because generally I do a lot of preproduction, but then during the filming I’m working partially on instinct as you never shoot the picture exactly the way you planned it. If something doesn’t work out or you get a better idea, at least you’re starting from that framework, but improvising as you go along. Maybe that keeps you fresh and it suits my personality – it’s attractive to be somewhere between a sprinter and a long distance runner…
Cast: Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Aud Egede-Nissen, Gertrude Welcker
Original title:Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler
Germany 1922
242 mins
‘M’ marks the spot: Murder, Metropolis, Mabuse. At the heart of Fritz Lang’s most innovative period, from 1922 to 1933, lies a fascination with metropolitan modernity and the ambivalence of mass phenomena. On the one hand, in M (1931), the sheer number of milling souls amounts to a sort of chaos into which a child murderer can easily disappear, until a capital ‘M’ chalked on his back puts him back on the map. Yet the city is also, as in Metropolis (1927), a vast machine in which individuals are mere cogs, and chaos may only be an appearance generated by the limited point of view of each cog. Mabuse above all names the spectre of someone who has grasped the laws of this ordered chaos, but who has no desire to rule, only to play, to show how thoroughly the everyday can be simulated and controlled.
Rather like cinema itself, Mabuse is a force that links disparate scenes with precision timing. What can connect a man feigning sleep in a train compartment with a chauffeur standing by his car in a country lane in Dr Mabuse, the Gambler (1922)? Rhyming close-ups of their respective watches point back to Mabuse at his desk. The rail traveller leaps up to steal his fellow passenger’s briefcase and throws it out of the window just as the train crosses a bridge, and just as his colleague’s car passes underneath. A toot on a horn from the chauffeur, and a brisk cut to an engineer atop a telegraph pole: Mabuse knows the deed is done almost to the second. The very efficiency and order of modern transport and telecommunications have been turned against themselves, and film, the cannibal of modernity, is in its element. The secret trade contract in the stolen briefcase, Mabuse ordains, will be ‘found’ again in exactly 30 minutes. Cut to the Stock Exchange. Amid the panic caused by falling shares, a glossy moustachioed figure mounts a table, impassive above the throng, buying when everyone else sells, then selling at the top. At close of trading, over the paper-strewn empty space, the giant, superimposed, Cheshire-cat head of the rogue trader looms, before melting into the face of – Mabuse.
Dr Mabuse, the Gambler
But behind even Mabuse there is another face, which has loomed over the Stock Exchange from the very start of the scene, a vast luminous clock with the 24 hours picked out in a single dial. Ideally, it ought to stand as the patron deity of orderly commerce, a monumental display of reliable regularity. But time itself is indifferent, available for whosoever cares to master it. This is the first of a series of remarkable clocks punctuating the film. Before we see the lobby of the Hotel Excelsior, its 24-hour clock, with Arabic and Roman numerals in concentric circles, fills the screen. Again, what is meant as a sign of affluence and security is actually the sign that Mabuse is at work. Vast as they are, these clocks are not out of keeping with the great majority of the film’s interiors. For a nation in the grip of economic disaster, Germany seems to be composed of cavernous chambers full of oddly lit planes and alcoves like some expressionist-cum-art deco hallucination. From spivvy casinos run by war profiteers, to hotel suites and private residences, there is nothing resembling a comfortable domestic space here. This is a world of gigantic imposture and in many ways Mabuse is merely an extrapolation of its logic. At any rate, dwarfed by an architecture meant to represent their own grandeur, the effete aristocrats of 1922 are easy pickings. It is hard to feel too much sympathy for the limp Count von Told as, under the spell of Mabuse, his impressive collection of ethnic fright masks turns against him. Mabuse is not above murder, but inducing suicide is more worthy of his talents. Having invited his future destroyer into his home, von Told asks him what he thinks of expressionism. ‘Spielerei,’ replies Mabuse: everything is game-playing these days. A languid aristo who dabbles insipidly in representations of extreme psychological states is fair game.
The Testament of Dr Mabuse
When Mabuse returns in The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), he is confined to an insane asylum, but being a spectre anyway, has no difficulty spreading the word. He acts only as a voice from behind a curtain in a basement room whose walls bear the outlines of decommissioned urinals, but the goal of anarchy for the hell of it is more insistent than ever. That his empire was crushed by a mere shoot-out in the first film was due to the urbane amateurism of State Prosecutor von Wenk. This time, he has a different sort of adversary in beefy police inspector sensuel moyen Lohmann, fresh from tracking down Peter Lorre in M.
The Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse Box Set is out on DVD in the UK as part of Eureka Entertainment’s Masters of Cinema Series.
The forces of order are, in other words, a little more professional, more bourgeois. Likewise the decor is more in keeping with Germany’s parlous state. Indeed, one could say desks are the heroes of the piece. Beautifully composed workspaces litter the film, filling the screen like still lifes. A pane of glass bearing enigmatic scratch marks is the object of a number of wonderful compositions before they are finally deciphered as spelling ‘Mabuse’. Later, as the tide turns, Lohmann shows one of Mabuse’s captured associates the evidence: two bullets in a little case are set against a beautiful composition of file and gun, all crisscrossing at 45 degrees. As the crim looks on, an oblong magnifying glass glides into view, perfectly covering the case. Round-headed Lohmann stands behind the desk in a spotlight with the map of the city behind him. Order has almost been restored.
But desks also communicate with each other in some pretty strange ways. At the very start, fallen cop Hofmeister has already tried to tell Lohmann that Mabuse is back, but while he is on the phone he is driven mad by some unspecified shock. Later, when Lohmann visits him in his cell, we see Hofmeister still on an imaginary phone at a spectral desk littered with animal ornaments in glass, superimposed, doubly transparent. Madness, clearly, but how do these relate to the little glass crocodile on Lohmann’s own desk? The desk behind the curtain from which Mabuse booms his orders is an empty shell. But the desk that communicates to it gramophonically is not straightforwardly occupied either. The scene in which he takes possession of it, so to speak, makes staggering use of superimposed images, and remains genuinely spooky to this day. In both films, psychoanalysis is an instrument of deception defeated by common sense and decency. But Lang’s eye is a little bit of the devil’s party.
By 1960, Mabuse’s sphere has narrowed to a single hotel once frequented by Nazis. And after years of relatively routine cop flicks, Lang is at the end of his career. As it turns out, Mabuse’s was only getting started: The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960) begat the thousand sequels of… Even so, the film is well worth seeing, and it is fitting that Lang returned to place the third and final pillar of a giant ‘M’ over his career.
This article was first published in the Winter 09 print issue of Electric Sheep Magazine.
British writer Martyn Waites was born in Newcastle and studied drama in Birmingham to become a professional actor. Live theatre was his passion, but he also appeared in The Bill, Inspector Morse and The New Adventures of Robin Hood – ‘wigs, leathers and overseas filming’. Inspired by 1990s American crime (Walter Mosley, James Ellroy and James Lee Burke), he started writing his own brand of gritty, urban Newcastle noir. Having been nominated for every major British crime fiction award, his latest book, The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (Hammer, £9.99), is his first foray into the horror genre. Eithne Farry
Well, it had to be her, didn’t it? As the writer of the sequel (Angel of Death) to Susan Hill’s original novella, I had to choose the Woman in Black. She’s been a big part of my life for quite a few months now, and well before that too. She’s also now a bona fide mainstay of popular British Gothic culture, thanks to Nigel Kneale’s 1989 TV drama (directed by Herbert Wise), the long-running West End play and, of course, Hammer’s record-breaking 2012 movie (the sequel, by a strange coincidence also called Angel of Death, follows in 2014).
So a woman as an alter ego, you say? When I’m clearly a man? I’ve got previous here. As well as writing under my own name, I’m also responsible for five (so far) internationally bestselling thrillers under the name Tania Carver. The distaff side holds no fears for me.
What’s more, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is one of the greatest ghost stories in the English language. In the creation of Jennet Humfrye she gave us one of the most fully rounded, motivated supernatural apparitions of our time. Her actions, in haunting the solicitor Arthur Kipps as he ventures to Eel Marsh House, are entirely believable, driven as they are by the twin engines of rage and grief. Her family all but disowned her after she became an unmarried mother, giving her son Nathaniel to her sister and husband to be brought up as their own.
The subsequent death of Nathaniel in the marsh drove Jennet to despair and her own death. She then returned to haunt the house, taking vengeance on anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path. Jennet follows a literary lineage that includes not only Miss Jessel, Henry James’s malevolent spirit of a children’s governess, but also a supernatural (un)living embodiment of Charlotte Brontë’s much-copied Gothic trope of the mad woman in the attic. The form and style in which Hill tells the story of her novella – that of the first person narrative of an innocent who stumbles upon evil forces which he can’t comprehend but must nonetheless battle – also strongly references another James, that of Montague Rhodes, the Godfather of the English ghost story and, for my money, still the best practitioner of the form. Reading James by the fire at Christmas is a little tradition, and I still find myself practising. This year I may also add Susan Hill.
And return to Eel Marsh House once again…
More information on Martyn Waites can be found here.
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
