All posts by Pam Jahn

Check it out, Festivals

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2013

EIFF_Taboor
Taboor

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19-30 June 2013

Edinburgh, UK

EIFF website

Beyond its general focus on British and international, independent and arthouse cinema, the Edinburgh International Film Festival offered two notable retrospectives this year: a comprehensive showcase of Jean Grémillon’s films from the late 1920s until the late 1950s, including feature films as well as shorts, and a smaller selection of films by Hollywood legend Richard Fleischer. The official selection, on the other hand, was a mixed bag yet again, with only a few discoveries to be made. Below, Pamela Jahn and David Cairns take a look across the various EIFF programme strands and report on the highs and lows of this year’s 67th edition of the festival.

Taboor (Vahid Vakilifar, 2012)

Not everybody’s idea of science fiction, this Iranian object of beauty follows a depressed exterminator around a nocturnal city, sometimes at great length. The shots are extraordinarily beautiful, and the intrigue behind his lonely perambulations keeps one watching. Why does he live in a tinfoil-lined house? Is he really at danger from microwave radiation? Confident in its own stylistic language, the film even manages to pull off a perverse bit with a dwarf that doesn’t seem like a Lynch crib, attaining its own shade of askew elegance. DC

7 Boxes (Juan Carlos Maneglia, Tana Schémbori, 2012)

Although easily mistaken as a ‘teen movie’, due to its fun, high-energy yet light-hearted approach, 7 Boxes is a riveting, amiable ‘easy-job-gone-terribly-wrong’ action ride that is worth almost every second of its 100-minute running time. The film follows 17-year-old Victor (Celso Franco) through Asunción’s jam-packed urban market, where he makes a poor living as a delivery boy with a wheelbarrow, while in his dreams, he is soon to become famous in Hollywood. When he’s offered the chance to take care of seven mysterious boxes with unknown contents from a butcher’s shop, in exchange for 100 dollars, guarding them with his life while police search the place, he simply can’t say no. But he soon regrets his decision as he finds himself chased by both the police and a bunch of unscrupulous gangsters, in their search for their macabre goods. Although danger is largely played out in shrewd twists instead of serious scares, 7 Boxes makes deft use of its bustling setting and the market’s tangled net of loose and calculated social connections to drive its story along. A small, terribly engaging film with a bitter-sweet heart that is more satisfying than much of the standard Hollywood action fair. PJ

Watch the trailer for 7 Boxes:

Constructors (Adilkhan Yerzhanov, 2012)

A fractured family have one week to build a house on a patch of land they own, or else the state will take it away. Alternately funny and sad, this haunting Kazakh film is most notable for the way it transforms its wasteland setting, dotted with building sites, into a vision of ineffable beauty, in which back-lit plastic sheeting and old, half-perished water bottles glow like alien artefacts. DC

My Dog Killer (Mira Fornay, 2012)

One would have thought that, by now, the general appetite for bleak, stark East European social dramas with non-professional actors and no hope to be found anywhere, has somewhat waned, but Mira Fornay’s Slovak–Czech film My Dog Killer, one of the three Tiger Award winners at Rotterdam earlier this year, proves that the formula still works. After setting her debut feature, Foxes (2009), in Dublin, this time the director works in her home turf as she follows the apathetic 18-year-old Marek (Adam Mihal) and his dog, Killer, through his daily struggles in a dead-end village near the Slovak–Moravian border, where an all-embracing anger, dodgy dealings and open, anti-Roma racism are the order of the day. When Marek finds out that he has a half-brother with gypsy blood in his veins, he doesn’t think twice before taking drastic action. Though Mihal delivers a strong lead performance (with Marek making the most of his screen presence), in the end the only thing one really cares for is poor Killer. This is a drab, hate-filled film which might well tick all the right boxes to become a solid force on this year’s circuit, but anyone looking for some fresh, less formulaic and more inventive drama may want to investigate further. PJ

EIFF_Fantastic Voyage
Fantastic Voyage

Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleischer, 1966)

The Richard Fleischer retrospective explored the Hollywood handyman’s knack for exploiting visual possibilities in any story. There was no film to represent his graceful use of 3D, alas, but several films showcased his Cinemascope compositions, and this one adds psychedelic special effects to the mix, as a team of secret agents and scientists pilot a miniaturised submarine through the circulatory system of a comatose Russian defector. Their mission: to destroy a blood clot in his brain with a laser gun. It’s all absurd, and exploited better in Joe Dante’s Innerspace, but this movie does have a cheeky sense of humour hidden away, and embraces its own corniest elements quite knowingly. There’s an early appearance by Raquel Welch, who plays a surgeon’s assistant and doesn’t disgrace herself: she’s not exactly convincing in the role, but neither is she the calculated insult to womanhood embodied by Denise Richards, nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough. DC

The Conjuring (James Wan, 2013)

James Wan’s follow-up to Insidious is perhaps too similar, despite a 1970s setting and a thin veneer of faux-documentary posing. But so what? The shocks are guaranteed to lift cinema audiences out of their seats, the suspense in the early stages before the serious manifestations is quite tantalising, and the movie is cheekily good-natured even as it scares the bejesus out of you.

The one real misstep is the citing of the Salem witch trials as backstory for the (barely explained) supernatural happenings. Don’t haul in a real-life, historical tragedy in which the women tortured and killed were innocent, Mr Wan! This is a filmmaker with a serious talent for playing an audience via misdirection and timing, and all he needs to make a really good film is the deeper application of his intelligence. DC

Watch the trailer for The Conjuring:

Betrayal (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2012)

Sleek arthouse mystery and anomie from Kirill Serebrennikov, director of Crush (2009). Two couples are intertwined in a web of infidelity, suspicion, attempted revenge-sex and acts of God. I found the ending unsatisfactory, but until then, this is a quite remarkable exercise in compelling the audience’s attention via slow-burn mystery, left-field surprises, noir glamour and loooong dramatic pauses. Breathtakingly lovely in its deep colours and spectacularly framed urban landscapes, and very much in love with its female characters’ bodies, in particular with red-headed Franziska Petri’s glassy stare. DC

Outpost 3: Rise of the Spetsnaz (Kieran Parker, 2013)

The latest sequel in the Scottish-shot, zombie-Nazi franchise, Outpost 3: Rise of the Spetsnaz plays more like a video game than ever. The most obvious, long-running problems of a disinterest in character and a sloppy attitude to its own concepts continues to blight these movies, with a hateful bunch of Russian elite soldiers battling no less horrible German Nazis and their mad science experiments in a low-budget bunker. The Nazis are led by a spectacularly unconvincing, amateur-dramatics Christoph Waltz knock-off, and everybody speaks with corny ‘Allo ‘Allo! accents.

The monsters seem to be merely deformed Germans this time, supposedly superpowered but actually defeatable by ordinary men, so what’s the point? When one of the ’heroes’ gets treated by the fiendish radiation device, some measure of complexity hovers shimmering on the horizon, but he’s soon killed off before anything interesting can result. The brutal action and carefully harnessed production values are fine, but the artistic bankruptcy is palpable. Surely this series has hit a reinforced concrete wall? DC

Watch the trailer for Outpost 3:

L’Etrange Monsieur Victor (Jean Grémillon, 1937)

The Jean Grémillon retrospective provided many treats, including this indefinable 1937 drama. When a gangster is murdered by fence Raimu, innocent Pierre Blanchar is jailed for the crime. Raimu cannot enjoy his bourgeois life with Blanchar behind bars, and when the convict breaks out, Raimu shelters him in his own home. And now Blanchar, spurned by his own trampy wife (Viviane Romance), is falling for Raimu’s (Madeleine Renaud, who plays jilted lovers and neglected wives in a startling number of these films). Everybody in this film is tortured by guilt of one kind or another, except the really guilty ones. Making it odder, the script provides plenty of humour for Raimu, a boisterous and inventive comedy player who can’t resist making the most of it, so the tone is violently uneven. But it’s all beautifully done, with Grémillon’s usual documentary attention to the details and textures of small-town life, Blanchar looking soulful and tortured with great cheekbones, and Renaud and the brazen Romance embodying the kind of parts they excelled at: angel and demon, respectively. DC

Festival report by Pamela Jahn and David Cairns

Check it out, Reel Sounds

Disembodied Voices: John Parker’s Dementia

Dementia
Dementia

I once saw Boyd Rice perform a live soundtrack to John Parker’s Dementia (aka Daugther of Horror, 1955), playing waterphone and bass harmonica, backed by Dwid Hellion from the hardcore band Integrity, in a cinema in central Paris. But mixed in among Rice and Hellion’s loops lay spectral traces of the film’s original orchestral soundtrack, by the former ‘bad boy’ of new music, George Antheil. Re-watching the film some years later, it’s clear that a major contributor to Dementia‘s singular atmosphere of oneiric noir is its score – one of the composer’s last, but by no means least, works.

As an American in Europe during the interwar years, Antheil had been at the very frontline of the avant-garde, collaborating with Dadaists and associated, for a time, with the machine music of the German November Group (Novembergruppe). But from the late 1930s on, the Trenton, New Jersey-born composer would embark on a career in Hollywood, composing comparatively unremarkable (and often uncredited) music for directors such as Cecil B. DeMille (The Plainsman, Union Pacific), Nicholas Ray (Knock on Any Door, In a Lonely Place), and William Castle (Serpent of the Nile, New Orleans Uncensored). In the mid-50s, however, at the time Dementia was in production, the now quinquagenarian composer would start to revisit some of the pioneering work of his youth, revising both the Ballet Mécanique and Jazz Symphony.

Following the murderous dreams-within-dreams of an unnamed female protagonist through a nighttime world of deserted street corners and jazz clubs, Dementia‘s soundtrack is alive with popular rhythms – from the cool, west-coast jazz of Shorty Rogers in the nightclub scene to the various transformations and transpositions of a simple habanera, which seem to crop up whenever the gamin (as Adrienne Barrett’s part is listed in the credits) encounters some attempted seducer. Antheil eschews stepwise melodic movement in favour of motifs made up of serpentine cadences in minor seconds and diminished sevenths. The soundtrack is full of neat touches like the brief flurry of a toy piano in the Rich Man’s apartment, or the sawing cello portamento as the gamin hacks off his dead hand in the street outside. The repeated thrumming of harp strings establishes the dreamlike mode from the very beginning of the film, in time-honoured fashion.

What is perhaps spookiest of all about this score, however, is the voice, often blended with woodwind to create a weird, theremin-like sound; singing eerie chromatic peals of wordless vocalese; Marni Nixon’s voice haunts this soundtrack like a guilty secret. A former child actress turned opera singer, you are most likely to have heard Nixon’s voice dubbing Marilyn Monroe’s high notes in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or as the singing voice of Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember and Natalie Wood in West Side Story (unbeknown to Wood herself). In this film without dialogue, Nixon provides a similar function in supplying her own disembodied voice to the voiceless body.

From the numinous off-stage voices of the very earliest operas to the various talking automata of the 18th and 19th centuries, there has always been something deeply uncanny about a voice without an apparent (human) source – and all the more so if that voice is stripped of a clear lyric to anchor its meaning. As the Slovenian philosopher and author of A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar has suggested, ‘What defines the voice as special among the infinite array of acoustic phenomena, is its inner relationship with meaning. The voice,’ he continues, ‘is something which points towards meaning,’ and yet when that implied meaning is refused and obscured, the voice becomes a kind of fetish, pointing only towards the absence of meaning and the gap between sound and its source, or sense and signification. In the context of Dementia, then, Nixon’s voice is both that what bridges the gap between the real and the dream, between the work and its audience, and also what draws attention to the very existence of that gap. Antheil’s use of the voice here recalls finally Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream, in which the voice is ultimately that which reminds us of the impossibility of communication, of our isolation in an ocean of sounds.

Robert Barry

Alter Ego, Check it out

Daisy Hildyard is Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog The White Diomond1
The White Diamond

Daisy Hildyard was born in Yorkshire in 1984, but now lives in London, where she is studying for a PhD on 18th-century scientific literature. Interested in how scientific facts are made and communicated, and the idea and reality of the environment through history, her dazzling debut novel Hunters in the Snow (named for the Bruegel painting) is an eccentric history of England, from the invention of the printing press to the world of virtual reality. Eithne Farry

Werner Herzog’s alter ego is my alter ego. By that I mean Herzog, the character in Herzog’s almost-documentaries, not Herzog in real life. Not the film director who ate his shoe, moved the boat over the mountain or got shot. Or made films.

Half-fictional Herzog interrupts the films of Werner Herzog to ask questions, explain what’s happening, or, fairly often, to complain. I can’t remember where I saw him first, because I felt like I already knew the lugubrious German narrator, with his odd sayings and quiet glum background presence. Out of himself, Herzog has invented a character that is distinctive, slightly caricatured and weirdly familiar – like Dickens’s characters.

The films often turn on this person’s experience. In The White Diamond (2004), Herzog puts his camera behind a waterfall that is sacred to a local tribe, and sees, but doesn’t show, the footage. In Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog listens to a recording of Timothy Treadwell being mauled by a bear, and the film of his listening – but not the recording itself – makes its way into the last cut.

With his deliberate and emphatically bad accent (he always speaks in his second language, English) Herzog is as much an outsider in any of his peculiar scenarios as his subjects. In just a few of his ‘documentary’ films, Herzog looks into the lives of Antarctic geologists, Canadian hermits, Guyanese diamond miners, Himalayan Buddhists, Parisian academics, South American tribal elders. He listens to the people he encounters, properly, if not seriously.

The humour doesn’t come from jokes exactly. Herzog’s films are funny because they’re uncomfortable, partly because they appear to be real – it is not quite clear what is natural and what is manufactured; or what we know, and what we think we know.

This character is my alter ego because I am interested in the things he is interested in. The narrator in my book has something of Herzog’s awkward background presence. I like how he plays the fool. I admire how he is inept: comically and with bad temper, but necessarily, because he is enthusiastic about exploring things which are always a bit beyond him.

Daisy Hildyard

Check it out, Film Jukebox

Scott and Charlene’s Wedding Film Jukebox

Scott and Charlenes Wedding
Scott and Charlene’s Wedding

The brainchild of the amiable and unashamedly charismatic Craig Dermody, Scott & Charlene’s Wedding offer a generation’s glimpse of love, home-sickness, basketball, alienation, rock and roll and all things that matter to an expat Aussie stranded in New York. Dermody’s heart-on-his-sleeve lyrics reveal tales of everyday life, unhinged, humorous and poignant, while the music effortlessly sprawls across decades. Their new album, Any Port in a Storm, is out on Fire Records. Below, Craig Dermody picks his favourite films for the Jukebox.

1. The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)
The Holy Mountain has everything and the brutality is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. Jodorowsky is one of my favourite artists, he’s right into tarot cards and sleep deprivation.

2. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
The Dark Knight also has everything for me. There is a moment when he has that fella hostage in that building and he gets sucked back up into the airplane and you really know it’s the best film ever made.

3. Lucifer Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1972)
Lucifer Rising has Marianne Faithful, intense dark images and music from a member of the Manson family. Kenneth Anger was a massive influence for people like David Lynch and John Waters, and never quite got the credit he deserved, but this film is amazing!

4. Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972)
Now, this film really has everything: Trash trash trash trash trash trash xoxoxoxoxox

5. Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks (Dan Klores, 2010)
One of my favourite memories of the 90s was watching the Reggie Miller vs. The Knicks rivalry. I remember everything from this documentary as it happened, and it’s great to hear everyone talk about it retrospectively. High drama + NBA + the 90s = Everything.

6. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
This film really has everything. I could have chosen between a bunch of David Lynch films, and I love all of them, but chose this because it was the first one I got into. Incredibly weird and intense, David Lynch has a style all his own, and is a master of dream-like sequences.

7. Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau, 2010)
This film has everything too. Might be considered trash but I love trash, enough to watch it three times.

8. The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2008)
The Wrestler has an intense, dark reality and a character that is incredibly loveable, but incredibly flawed. I can relate to him in a big way, but he makes me feel ok about how I’m going.

9. Autonomy and Deliberation (UV Race and Johann Rashid, 2012)
Ok, ok, this film really has EVERYTHING. Rock ‘n’ roll by my great Melbs mates UV Race, following the story of lead singer Marcus trying to put the band back together. Heaps of Melbourne in-jokes – the Dogs in Space of 2013.

Check it out, Festivals

Terracotta Festival 2013

Rouge
Rouge

Terracotta Far East Film Festival

6-15 June 2013

Prince Charles Cinema, London

Terracotta website

Now in its 5th year, the Terracotta Far East Film Festival once again offered an exciting celebration of Asian cinema. Virginie Sélavy and Robert Makin report on their festival highlights.

Rouge (Stanley Kwan, 1988)

This year’s Terracotta Festival opened with a very special treat, Stanley Kwan’s 1988 sumptuous, melancholy ghost story Rouge, in homage to its two late great leads, Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung. Mui plays Fleur, a beguilingly beautiful hostess in a Hong Kong ‘flower house’ (brothel). When one night, dressed as a man and brilliantly sassy and insolent, Fleur performs a song for young heir Chan (Cheung) and his companions, it is love at first sight. But when his family objects to their union, they decide to commit suicide. Fifty years later, Fleur reappears in modern Hong Kong and tries to place a missing person ad in a paper to find Chan, who never showed up in the netherworld. Helped by the newspaper’s owner and his girlfriend, she forlornly wanders around a soulless Hong Kong, where the gorgeous theatres of the past have been replaced by ugly underpasses, trying to discover what happened to Chan. Visually exquisite, the film contrasts the splendour, elegant rituals and repressive social conventions of the past with the harsh, sordid reality of a mediocre, but less confining present, through the depiction of both the city and the characters’ lives. A superb and poignant film, it truly deserved to be seen on the big screen. VS

The Land of Hope (Sion Sono, 2012)

Within the fictional Japanese prefecture of Nagashima, an earthquake causes a nuclear meltdown at a local power plant. As a consequence the population of this small provincial district are forced to uproot. Local farmer Yusuhiko and his wife Chieko refuse to leave the contaminated area, while their son and his pregnant wife struggle to start a new life in a neighbouring town, having to face ineffectual authorities and an uncertain future. Meanwhile, a young couple, Mitsuri and Yoko, wander the devastated wasteland that was once Yoko’s hometown, desperately in search of her parents.

The Land of Hope will be released on Blu-ray + DVD in the UK on 26 August 2013 by Third Window Films.

From horror oddities such as Exte: Hair Extension (2007), where various victims are attacked by their hairstyles, and the epic story of love, religion and panty-shot photography that is Love Exposure (2009), to the brutal dystopia of Himizu (2011), Japanese director Sion Sono has gained a formidable reputation for having an exceptionally unique approach to filmmaking. The Land of Hope is a slight departure from his usual extremes, without being completely bereft of his surreal sense of humour and the occasional excursion into overtly symbolic imagery. Throughout this poignant domestic drama, Sono succeeds in achieving a restrained and proficient balance between naturalism and the visually poetic as he tackles head on a monumental disaster and its tragic repercussions. The only problem with the film is his overbearing use of classical music, which often feels cheap and unnecessary. But skillfully avoiding spectacle, the director’s heartfelt authenticity is unquestionable, making this his most accessible and personal film to date. RM

Watch the trailer for The Land of Hope:

Cold War (Lok Man Leung and Kim-ching Luk, 2012)

Hong Kong prides itself on being one of the safest cities in Asia, but over the course of one night, it’s about to become one of the deadliest. When a planted bomb tears the centre of the city apart, it’s initially assumed to be a terrorist attack – that is until an Emergency Unit vehicle carrying five police officers mysteriously disappears without a trace. A merciless gang of hijackers are claiming to be the culprits and demanding a hefty ransom. The race is on to hunt down the suspects and save the hostages. But it’s a perilous mission that not only poses a threat to the citizens of Hong Kong, but also begins to tear away at the hierarchical fabric of the police department.

First-time directors Lok Man Leung and Kim-ching Luk give it everything they’ve got with Cold War, determined to prove themselves as main contenders in the Asian cinema stakes, from the majestically cinematic aerial shots of the opening scenes to the gracefully composed but nerve-shredding action sequences. Their tactics have certainly paid off, with Cold War receiving nine Hong Kong Film Awards, including best film, director, screenplay, cinematography and editing. But, unfortunately, an otherwise lucid plot loses momentum during the last half-an-hour as the film tries to establish itself as a franchise. Nevertheless, this is Hong Kong action cinema at its most slick and visceral, re-establishing itself as a force to be reckoned with. RM

The Berlin File
The Berlin File

The Berlin File (Ryoo Seung-wan, 2013)

When an illegal arms deal in a Berlin hotel escalates into violent chaos, a surveillance team expose one of the escaped survivors as a North Korean ‘ghost agent’ (Ha Jung-woo), whose involvement remains unclear. Following on his trail, South Korean intelligence operative Jung Jin-soo (Han Suk-kyu) is determined to discover the agent’s true identity and prerogative. An intense investigation gradually unveils an international conspiracy involving Middle Eastern terrorists, the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, a deadly assassin, a shady ambassador and a female translator.

Although Ryoo Seung-wan’s espionage thriller lacks the dark menace of the Len Deighton, John Le Carré and Robert Ludlum adaptations that it’s unashamedly attempting to emulate, the film has enough of its own inventive energy and stylistic verve to stand its ground. The plot is ridiculously convoluted with an abundance of clichés involving poisoned ballpoint pens, murders on speeding trains, men in trench coats meeting in parks, self-destructing messages and blatantly obvious passwords.

But among its themes of loyalty and betrayal, the film’s greatest strength is Seung-wan’s complete respect and dutiful devotion to the spy genre and action cinema. Despite its flaws, The Berlin File races along at a relentless pace, with some truly astounding and dynamic action sequences meticulously choreographed by Jung Doo-hong. There’s also an eerie sense of melancholy generated from some very believable human relationships, in between the explosions and car chases. The Berlin File is an uneven but extremely thrilling and entertaining experience. RM

Festival report by Virginie Sélavy and Robert Makin

Check it out, Features, Screenings

There’s Something in the Fog!

TheFog_DinosChapman
The Fog vinyl cover artwork (© Dinos Chapman/Death Waltz)

Format: Limited edition double coloured vinyl (700 copies)

Release date: 14 June 2013

Label: Death Waltz Recording Co. via mondotees.com

Recently, a couple of my friends were having a light scuffle about music formats on Facebook. The conversation shifted from ‘Why are you listening to that?’ to ‘Why are you listening to that on CD?’ The suggestion was that any physical format for storing music was now absurd: ‘Why would you when you don’t have to?’ Such an outcry would be ignored by the boozy congregation that met earlier this month in Islington’s deconsecrated church The Nave. They were out in their legions to pay homage at the launch of the heavyweight 180g luxuriance that was the limited, double coloured vinyl edition of John Carpenter’s self-scored soundtrack to The Fog (1980), released by Death Waltz Recording Company, founded by Spencer Hickman in 2011. Also unveiled that night was renowned artist Dinos Chapman’s specially commissioned cover artwork: a spidery, skinless semi-human face that seems to emerge from a graphite fog and be consumed by it at the same time.

More information on Cigarette Burns Cinema can be found here.

Rare celluloid print screening masters Cigarette Burns, founded by Josh Saco in 2008, who co-hosted the event, treated us further to lurid trailers from 70s movies, including Burnt Offerings (1976) and Demon Seed (1977), getting us in the mood for the 16mm full scope projection of The Fog itself: Carpenter’s tale of 19th-century undead sailors who descend upon their old haunt, the Californian fishing town Antonio Bay, to avenge their betrayal. They were drowned when their ship was sunk by original Bay folk who were not keen on the sailors’ mission to establish a leper colony nearby. The eerie thick fog that heralds their anniversary visit is a portentous means of transportation. The fog is more than this though: its ubiquity and unearthly toxicity are incomprehensible. A motif perhaps, of the world beyond, an anarchic space outside society, that Carpenter evokes across his films. The Fog is certainly worth celebrating, and the dimly lit, smoke-filled arts venue provided some great visual echoes, especially during the scenes set in Father Malone’s church.

The Fog 44
The Nave (© Al Overdrive)

Carpenter is known for scoring and performing the music for his own film projects and The Fog’s soundtrack is indicative of his pared-down, minimal style. The detuned sense of foreboding puts me in mind of his outsider antiheroes, who are at odds with the dominant social forces. This includes my favourite Carpenter character, psychopath turned hobby bobby Napoleon Wilson, played by Darwin Joston in Assault on Precinct 13, who also turns up in The Fog as the coroner. Also, Michael Myers, played by Tony Moran, the slasher who gets to walk away unscathed at the end of Halloween. Whether Carpenter gives us the electro alienation of the Assault score or the agoraphobic mix of The Fog, these spaces are populated by drifters, the disenchanted and the vengeful.

Carpenter’s re-issued score would work on any format because it’s good, but I like Death Waltz’s double vinyl edition that can be handled and played on an analogue system. For me, this is part of the phenomenological pleasure of space, and objects that occupy three-dimensional space and reflect light. It’s also about an enjoyment of the residue of this: the whirring of the projector, cigarette smoke in a beam of light or the suspense of opening a double album, searching for inserts.

Nicola Woodham

Check it out, Features, Interviews

The Paradise Trilogy: Interview with Ulrich Seidl

Paradise Love
Paradise: Love

Format: Cinema

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Writers: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz

Cast (Love): Margarethe Tiesel, Peter Kazungo

Cast (Faith): Maria Hofstä;tter, Nabil Saleh, Natalya Baranova, Rene Rupni

Cast (Hope): Melanie Lenz, Verena Lehbauer, Joseph Lorenz, Michael Thomas

Austria, Germany France

2012

He is not bothered by the fact that people call his films ‘shocking’ and ‘extreme’, says Ulrich Seidl: ‘I am just trying to offer a realistic view of the world we live in.’ More importantly though, the Austrian director, who would have become a priest if his family had their way, prefers to think of love as one of the central motives in his body of work, which mainly comprises poignant and fiercely honest explorations of the incorrigibly odd side of society. Known for playing with narrative form by blending documentary style and drama in telling stories that oscillate between moments of raw (and frequently debauched) human behaviour and a dark, brutish sense of humour, it wasn’t until his 2001 film Dog Days (Hundstage) that Seidl found international acclaim, followed by his first appearance in competition at Cannes with Import Export in 2007. His latest project, which started off as an anthology film but ultimately turned into a trilogy called Paradise, revolves around three woman from the same family but with different quests and desires, namely sex, religion and true love.

Paradise: Love is released in the UK on 14 June 2013.

In Love, which marks the first instalment of the triptych, Margarethe Tiesel stars as Teresa, a chubby single mother in her fifties, whose desperate search for love and affection turns increasingly wolfish when she steps out of her hotel room at a holiday resort in Kenya, where her friend has assured her that sex is plentiful. At first reluctant to go for one of the many underage beach boys on offer, she soon can’t help but give in to temptation. However, Seidl here slightly tones down the brutal rigidity of his earlier work as he moves into warmer territory, both climatically and emotionally.

Paradise: Faith is released in the UK on 5 July 2013.

The centrepiece, Faith, concerns Teresa’s sister Anna Maria (Maria Hofstä;tter), a fanatically devout Catholic, whose paradise lies with Jesus. She spends her vacation doing missionary work, taking a statue of the Virgin Mary from door to door around the countryside, in the hope of leading Austria back to the path of virtue. The tone is that of an uncompromising and mordant black comedy, which plunges into even darker tones from the moment Anna Maria is reunited with her Muslim husband Nabil (Nabil Saleh), an Egyptian confined to a wheelchair, who comes home after years away to demand his rights.

Paradise: Hope is released in the UK on 2 August 2013.

The final act, Hope, revolves around Meli (Melanie Lenz), Teresa’s 13-year-old daughter, who she drops of at a diet camp before heading to Kenya. But instead of trimming and toning, Meli can’t help but fall in love with her handsome doctor (Joseph Lorenz), who seems strangely attracted by the girl but, aware of the consequences, tries to keep his hands off. Meli, for her part, with her mother away buying love for money and her aunt busy praying, relies solely on her ebullient roommates to read the signs and follow her heart.

Pamela Jahn talked to Ulrich Seidl at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2013, where Paradise: Hope premiered in competition.

Pamela Jahn: What was the driving force in your venture to make three films relating to ‘paradise’?

Ulrich Seidl: We have a notion of paradise as the place of desire per se, and my intention was to make a film about three women and their particular longing, but ultimately with the aim of reaching paradise, in other words: reach love, affection, sexuality, attention, comfort. Very roughly speaking, that’s what the films are about.

How much irony is there?

None. It’s meant very seriously. But added to this is the fact that ‘paradise’ is a term that is used very often in the tourist industry, which is why it was so suitable for the first part of the trilogy. In travel magazines, every place is called paradise, and in every holiday resort there is a bar on the beach called Paradise too. But then, in the second film, paradise is meant in a religious way, while in the third part it becomes a place of desire again.

Paradise Hope2
Paradise: Hope

How did you choose the running order of the films?

We decided the running order after a very long process and time spent at the cutting table. I’ve been working on the films for about two years. First, it was meant to be just one film that would link the three different stories together, but once we started shooting, it became clear that it would be too complex to do that in terms of the emotionality of watching and following the three different stories at once. Then I started thinking about splitting them, first into two films, then three films, and once we had decided that it would be a trilogy, we had to determine the running order. For a long time, I thought I would start with the story about the mother, but followed by the story of the daughter. In the end, I changed my mind and put that last.

As in saying, ‘hope dies last’?

Not really. It hasn’t got anything to do with the title, it was mainly because there was a dramaturgic element to it. All three women are somewhat caught in a prison: a hotel resort for the mother, a house in Lower Austria for the sister, or a diet camp for the daughter in the final act. Each place has its own universe surrounding it, with its own images and its own style, but putting the story of the mother at the beginning and that of the daughter at the end provided a sort of framework for it.

What exactly does ‘paradise’ mean for Teresa in the first film?

She is woman who has been disappointed by men in the past. She’s a single mother at an age when she can’t easily find the man of her dreams, because she feels like she is no longer as attractive as she used to be. So she is looking to satisfy her desires, she is looking for the promises that the word ‘paradise’ contains. She is going to Africa to find her luck, to find happiness, which is a total paradox given the highly charged social, cultural and political environment there.

In a way she knows that she is looking in the wrong place from the start.

Maybe, but she can’t help it. It may sound trite, but all my films are somewhat mirrors of our society. As a filmmaker, I am always interested in outsiders, misfits, because my whole youth was pretty much contingent on that. Therefore my films are concerned with what people call the essential things in life: love, sexuality, beauty, loneliness, mortality, death, power relations. And of course the fact that Teresa is suffering because she doesn’t match today’s thin-ideal standard of beauty is part of this. In Africa she feels accepted, because women of her stature are seen as beautiful, regardless of their age. And the question is, why? And in a way this also shines light on our society and the way we look at things. In the second film, there is a similar thread in terms of the conflict between Muslim and Christian worldviews. So, there are always different layers to each of the three films.

Paradise Faith
Paradise: Faith

Men usually are given a hard time in your films. What is it that interests you so much in the female perspective?

I wouldn‘t necessarily say that about the men in my films, but it’s true that I find women more interesting than men. Why? I don’t know, but in general I think I have more sympathy for women when it comes to all those gender conflicts that my films are concerned with. And in this case it was a conscious decision I made to tell three stories about three different women, but I have also just finished a play which had only men in the cast, so it really depends on the project I am working on. Regarding the men in the trilogy, I have to say that male audiences don’t really like the films, maybe because they feel offended, because they have to ask themselves: Why do these women have to sleep with beach boys? Or, if you look at the third episode, it’s essentially a Lolita story, told from the perspective of the girl. But in the end, the man is stuck in a dilemma about whether or not he should give in to his feelings for Meli. And in the second part, the Muslim man feels ambivalent and somewhat trapped, because in the Western world he can have every woman he wants, which is different to where he comes from. But at the same time, he’s disgusted about it and thinks all these women are whores. This kind of inner conflict in Muslim men is something I have come across very often and which I find very interesting.

Is it the breaking of taboos that fascinates you in a way?

No, at least that’s not my aim. I am not making films to simply provoke people or anything, but sometimes the truth, reality as such, provokes a scandal, which is good. In my films, I only try to guide people to look at things that are ‘normal’, things that people sometimes don’t dare to look at, although, or because, they are presumably ‘normal’. To me, art means pointing people and audiences to something that helps them think about themselves or the world we live in. And every single one of us has a handicap, nobody is perfect! Every person has a deficiency in one way or another. So in a way, this is about all of us.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Check it out, Features

Apocalypse Then

Apocalypse Now4
Apocalypse Now

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 9 January 2012

Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Writers: John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Herr (narration)

Based on the novel Heart of Darkness by: Joseph Conrad

Cast: Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne, Sam Bottoms, Frederick Forrest, Albert Hall

USA 1979

153 mins

Apocalypse Now is a modernist novel made film in more ways than one. The opening montage is a palimpsest of a Dante-esque, napalm fuelled hell, with Martin Sheen’s blank Hindu stare inverted and staring back; all to the sound of The Doors basically announcing ‘in the end is my beginning’ to quote T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’. It won’t be the last quotation.

From the mission-inciting Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) quoting Lincoln to Dennis Hopper’s veritable golden treasury of verse (Kipling and Eliot again), Francis Ford Coppola litters his film with literary associations like an anxious host leaving books scattered artfully around an apartment before a dinner party. In fact, the camera drifts over Kurtz’s bedside reading – From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer. Both books were vital to the writing of ‘The Wasteland’, almost as if Kurtz is Eliot and ‘The Wasteland’ the poem he is writing around himself, shoring up his fragments. He reads a stanza of Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’, tactfully neglecting the Conrad quotation at the front of the poem which reads ‘Mistuh Kurtz, he dead’. In searching him out, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) will basically read himself up the river, as he pours over the files and narrates with the jaded literary tone of Michael Herr’s tersely perfect Marlovian (though Chandler, more than Conrad) wit.

The film is based on the key modernist text of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Coppola reiterates in every audio commentary and documentary (see Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, 1991) that he took the book to the shoot instead of the script; that he read Brando the book from cover to cover as a way of getting him into the role; that he increasingly saw the book as his inspiration rather than the more straightforward war movie screenwriter John Milius had envisioned. (Ironically, Conrad also began writing basic adventure yarns, before making a move for something altogether more ambitious with this enigmatic novella.) Coppola was also aligning himself with Orson Welles, who had famously failed to adapt Conrad’s book for his debut film, the first of what was to become a string of tantalisingly failed projects. What’s more, his self-aggrandising myth valorises the confusion and chaos of the production as part of his process: every film Coppola makes somehow takes on the modus operandi of its subject and so Apocalypse Now becomes Heart of Darkness, becomes Vietnam.

Putting the rumbling of the gigantic production to one side, the film is actually a remarkably tight and accomplished piece of work – especially when compared to the flabby, dissipated and unnecessary Redux released in 2001. After the hallucinatory, drunken visions of the opening, the film takes a brisk cold shower, lays on some riveting exposition and gets on the boat – and of course the boat, called the Erebus (not Marlow’s more prosaic Nelly), like the Orca in Jaws and the Pequod in Moby Dick is a symbol/cross-section of male America. On board, we have the relaxed, spaced out and utterly untrustworthy Lance (Sam Bottoms), the jumpy New Orlean Chef (Frederick Forrest), the black youngster Clean (Laurence Fishburne) and Chief Philips (Albert Hall), the father figure and conscience. Sheen’s Willard, on the other hand, is basically ‘American involvement in Vietnam’ embodied. He’s the reason they’re all where they are: he’s the one who refuses to turn back and he remains ambivalent to the purpose of his mission, unsure of whether he will fulfil it or not but morbidly, cynically fascinated by the journey. In this, he resembles Kinski’s Aguirre on Xanax, viciously unconcerned about the damage he is causing, casually murdering a wounded unarmed woman merely to speed up his mission. His wistful unperturbed gaze at the horrors and the self-satisfied rightness of his narration – ‘charging someone with murder here is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500’ – makes him the cool appraising judgement that Brando’s Kurtz is so neurotically afraid of. Willard has found the total freedom that comes with obeying orders (especially orders that don’t officially exist) and he has come to murder the more agonised freedom of Kurtz’s, making it up as he goes along. ‘You disapprove of my methods?’ Kurtz asks when they meet. ‘I don’t see any method at all,’ Willard waspishly responds.

Despite ‘the horror, the horror’ of Kurtz’s mad excess, Apocalypse Now is an unrelentingly beautiful film. Following David Lean’s lead in the famous poppy field scene in Doctor Zhivago, Coppola realises that war can be both brutal and gorgeous. The Ride of the Valkyries is justifiably regarded as one of the best sequences American cinema has produced, but Chef’s search for mangos and Lance’s LSD inspired wandering with Willard in search of a commanding officer are just as dazzlingly filmed. When Lance disposes of the chief’s body, the corpse almost dissolves in the molten and golden light of the river. The darkness is aesthetically luxuriated in as Brando’s wonderful pate dips in and out of it like warm water. And Kurtz himself is a knowingly theatrical presence, whose set decoration is too avant-garde for the authorities, but who at least has the opportunity to script and direct his own leaving of the scene.

John Bleasdale

Alter Ego, Check it out

Philip Hoare is Thomas Jerome Newton

David Bowie_Man Who Fell to Earth_1
The Man Who Fell to Earth

Philip Hoare was born in Southampton and is the author of seven non-fiction books. His latest work, the magical The Sea Inside (published by Fourth Estate), is an invigorating tour of the sea, its islands, birds and beasts. Along the way, Hoare meets a cast of recluses, outcasts and travellers, from eccentric artists and scientists to tattooed warriors, as well as marvellous creatures, from a gothic crow to a great whale. Philip is a keen sea swimmer. Even in the depths of winter. Philip Hoare’s filmic alter ego is Thomas Jerome Newton from The Man Who Fell to Earth. Eithne Farry

There is no contest as to my avatar. He is Thomas Jerome Newton, the flame-haired, paper-skinned, grounded angel in The Man Who Fell to Earth. In 1976, when Nicolas Roeg’s movie came out, I went to see it three times at the cinema. I even took my cassette recorder and taped the soundtrack. I so identified with Newton that friends accused me of making my nose bleed in a Tube lift to emulate a similar scene in the movie. I also wore plastic sandals like Newton. I nearly fainted at the private view of ‘David Bowie is’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum earlier this year when I came face to face with the black suit and white shirt Bowie wore for the film.

But it wasn’t just about my adulation for the Thin White Duke (whom I saw for the first time that year on the Station to Station tour at Earl’s Court; the opening act was Bunel’s Un chien andalou (1929), and Bowie performed in a similar black and white outfit, lit by Dan Flavin-like white strip lights). Roeg’s fantastical film has elements of Powell and Pressburger as much as it has of science fiction or surrealism.

The film’s references to Auden and Icarus echo Bowie’s shape-shifting personae (as well as 1970s dystopia). At one point, Newton is being driven through the American wilderness (a sequence inspired by the Cracked Actor (1975) documentary, which prompted Roeg to cast Bowie) when you suddenly hear a burst of hillbilly banjo and see, through a weird watery sepia, a vision of 19th century sharecroppers.

Newton crosses zones and cultures, an existential figure, a stranded alien in search of water for his parched planet. The scene in which he stands at the end of a dock was, to me, a direct echo of Jay Gatsby standing at the end of his Long Island dock, looking out to a green light and ‘the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us’.

For someone addicted to swimming in the sea every day, often in the dark and lonely hour before dawn, Newton’s predicament still strikes me, long and deep.

More information about Philip Hoare can be found here.

Philip Hoare

Check it out, Film Jukebox

Fol Chen’s Film Jukebox

Jukebox_Fol_Chen
Fol Chen

The L.A. based collective Fol Chen describe their music as ‘opera house’, mixing beats and addictive melodies with lyrical storytelling to create soundtracks for an imaginary future. Their latest album, The False Alarms, is out on Asthmatic Kitty. Below, singer Sinosa Loa selects her top 10 favourite films.

1. Vibrator (Ry&#363ichi Hiroki, 2003)
Set in beautiful industrial Japan in the snow, with two levels of internal monologue that you might think are happening in your own head. A couple of strangers run off together and it’s wonderful and heartbreaking in all the best ways. I love this.

2. Fucking &#197m&#229l (Lukas Moodyson, 1998)
If you’ve ever been a teenager, you know what it’s like to hate where you live, suffer for who you love, and in a few wonderful moments get a taste of life not being so awful all the time. The English title is ‘Show Me Love’, which is a pity.

Fol Chen play Point Ephemere in Paris on 4 June and The Shacklewell Arms in London on 5 June. More information on touring dates can be found here.

3. The films of Bas Jan Ader (1970–1975)
Mostly silent, some as short as seconds long, all the more haunting since he disappeared at sea. Also great is the documentary on his work called Here is Always Somewhere Else.

4. The Ambassador (Mads Brügger, 2011)
I don’t endorse Mads Brügger’s death wish, but the world he exposed is spellbinding. Possibly the realest danger someone has put themselves in, on purpose, on film.

5. The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger, 1975)
This was one of the first films I saw after I accidentally moved to Hollywood when I was 20. It had the unlikely effect of actually endearing me to the city and I found the tragedy of a million doomed dreams utterly romantic. I still love LA and all its fucked up charms.

6. Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2004)
We all have our tricks to feel better no matter how sick, sad, lonely, or pissed we are. Here’s one of mine. You can have it, too. Enjoy crying from happiness.

7. Before Sunrise / Before Sunset / Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, 1995, 2004, 2013)
These movies caught me at all the right times. Also, I don’t care what anyone says about Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy is a queen.

8. Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1979/Zack Snyder, 2004)
Zombie movies are generally great, with apocalyptic landscapes, political allegory, exploration of human nature. This one’s tops because it’s set in a suburban shopping mall. I also support the remake because the opening titles are fantastic, and 25 years is a perfectly reasonable amount of time for an update.

9. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
I really like this story of childhood friendship and the extra stuff that happens when one of you is a vampire. The ending is really sweet.

10. I am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)
Sondheim’s dark operetta brought to life by Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman and Helena Bonham Carter. One of the finest musical movies I’ve ever seen – the non-singer-but-singing actors actually manage incredibly well in what’s acknowledged to be one of the most challenging scores to sing.