Although director Jia Zhang-ke denies that his close relationship with Office Kitano involves more than financial support, the ferocious A Touch of Sin is very much in the same vein as the Japanese director’s best films, albeit intensified by the social-political backdrop addressed here. Based on four real-life criminal cases (including a murder, a suicide and a couple of killing sprees), Zhang-ke’s story represents a cross section of contemporary Chinese society, in different areas of the country. Seen from that perspective, the film is a sanguinary, tense investigation into the Chinese economic miracle and the brutalising effect it has on the lives of ordinary people at the bottom of the ladder. In a world not theirs, they ultimately can’t help but vent their rage, rising up against authority. On a visual level, A Touch of Sin is a powerful war of the senses, in the way the stylised violence seems aligned with the characters’ innermost thoughts and emotions, enabling the audience to savour a similar cold adrenaline rush to that of the wuxia and Lady Vengeance-type characters on screen.
Pamela Jahn talked to the director at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where the film deservedly won Zhang-ke the award for Best Screenplay.
Pamela Jahn: Your film is based on four real-life criminal incidents in China. How did you become aware of them?
Jia Zhang-ke: In recent years, all these violent events have been publicised through social media platforms in China, and then they were widely discussed in the printed press too. But in the film I fictionalised everything, so it doesn’t really matter if the audience knows about the real-life events and what really happened.
What was your biggest challenge in making the film?
For me the biggest challenges were the action parts, because I am not used to shooting action to that extent. So I had to ask myself questions like: how should a character shoot, or use a knife? How should the victims fall? This was all new to me, but I had a great team of professionals to help me with these scenes. All four cases revolve around the same overall theme, but I wanted to include different aspects in each of the stories. So for me the other big question was: how can I make the narrative work? I have more or less 30 minutes to tell each story, so how do I tell the story effectively in the limited time available?
You have repeatedly worked with Office Kitano, but this time the connection to his own films seems more obvious than before. What is your relationship to Takeshi Kitano?
I have been working with Office Kitano since 2000 for Platform, which was about young people’s lives from 1979 to 89 – the first 10 years of progress in China. This is my fourth project that they are investing in, but in the past my films didn’t have the same level of violence. I have always liked Kitano’s films though – he has found a remarkable way to connect violence and loneliness.
How much was he involved in the production of A Touch of Sin?
A Touch of Sin is available in the UK on VOD from 8 September and on Blu-ray/DVD on 15 September 2014.
It was mainly financial.
Is there anyone else who influenced you in particular for this film?
My biggest influence was King Hu, and the films he made back in the 1970s, in which he addresses the subject of political oppression and the violent reactions of different individuals. I wanted to make a film about violence, too, but I couldn’t find a cinematic language that I was happy with. Then I thought about martial arts movies, about the same things that happened in the past as now.
Your film explores the different social ranks in Chinese society and the injustice that prevails. It seems quite an achievement in itself that you were able to make a film that openly addresses social and political subjects in all of their complexity.
These issues are now more and more discussed in mainstream media, but it’s true that in the past it was not possible to talk about anything like this in films, in particular the gap between the rich and the poor – which is why I wanted to make the film now, because it would be a real shame if we only talk about it in the news and not in art.
Did your status as an international director have an impact on whether or not the film would make it past the censors? And did you have to make compromises in order to avoid censorship?
It is possible, but I think it’s more that the authorities are slowly beginning to understand that we can no longer avoid the problems we are facing right now. I think if we want to push for openness and change we have to believe in creative freedom in our works. With A Touch of Sin, I had no idea whether it would pass censorship, because it would not have in the past, even just a few years ago. But Why it did pass now, I don’t quite know. The message that I am sending to the censorship authorities is that in my world everything is possible. I can make a film about anything I want and I will continue to do so.
It’s a quite pessimistic film overall. To what extent does it reflect your inner feelings in terms of where the country is heading?
Both anger or rage, and pessimism, are personal emotions that we have to address and we have to attempt to rationally understand the reasons behind those emotions. I didn’t intend to make a film about violence, rather I wanted to address that violent streak in human nature that is triggered by the environment.
Journalist and former croupier Hermione Eyre has interviewed some of the most beautiful women in the world, which was perfect research for her bold historical novel, the pop-arty Viper Wine (Jonathan Cape) where vanity, addiction and a beauty treatment distilled from snake venom take hold in the court of Charles I. Mixing up contemporary sources with modern details, Viper Wine is Gothic horror with a very modern twist. Eithne Farry
As Sir John Gielgud said, there is no such thing as a small part, only small actors, and Murray Melvin is a huge presence in any film, even when he has few lines. With his pursed lips, long face and fabulously economical style – he can deliver a crushing put-down without saying a word – he is the bridge between realism and camp. I have nothing obvious in common with him, but still, I should like to nominate as my alter ego Reverend Samuel Runt, the dour, repressed clergyman played by Melvin in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
Melvin’s performance in this role is deliciously complex. He is obsequious to his employer, the wan beauty the Countess of Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), and yet, due to his position as a man of the cloth, he holds power over her and the rest of the household, which he exercises with theatrical homilies and gravely sententious asides. He does not have enough power to stop the disaster of her marriage to Barry Lyndon, however; he is a sort of failed Rasputin. In my mind, as I was writing Viper Wine, I had Murray Melvin play the part of Chater, the personal priest of Venetia, Lady Digby. Their relationship is similar to that of the Reverend Runt and the Countess, and yet it goes further. Chater advises on her dress; he is secretly, and without hope, in love with her husband, Sir Kenelm Digby. His prurient interest in all their doings I shared. As the author of the novel, I was in control of these characters, and yet in another sense, I could only look on with longing as they went about their business. Like the Reverend Runt, I sometimes felt they could neither see nor hear me, though in the end, I knew I would have the final word.
Comet Sands are a prog-pop, synth-psych cosmic-rock band, from London via Finland and the north of England. They are Tiia Jaakola (singing and synthesiser), Alex Lawton-Mawdsley (bass), Colin Greenwood (drums), Sean Berry and Tom Hughes (guitars). Comet Sands admire and endorse Circle, Yes, Harmonia, Superchunk, Endless Boogie, Total Control, the first nine Status Quo albums and thinking about space. You can listen to them on bandcamp and follow/contact them on Facebook and Twitter. Below, the band pick their favourite films.
1. RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
The original gross-out, ultraviolent sci-fi cop, dystopian near-future social satire. Everything about this is awesome: the soundtrack by Basil Poledouris, the clunky stop-frame animation and sound effects of the terrifying ED-209, Kurtwood Smith’s psychotic turn as Clarence Boddicker, Nancy Allen’s bubble gum chewing, Peter Weller’s chin and, best of all, Ray ‘Leland Palmer’ Wise as Leon. This was my first ever pirate video, copied for me onto Betamax cassette (together with Predator) by a school friend’s dad, and no amount of tracking could make it sit straight on the screen. However, it was still compelling viewing and I watched it over and over and over. Nothing since has affected me more than the first time I witnessed Ed-209’s ‘glitch’… Sean Berry
2. An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981)
John ‘Animal House’ Landis’s black comedy about two young American backpackers who are attacked on the Yorkshire Moors by an unknown creature, leaving one of them dead and the survivor cursed to be transformed into a werewolf at the next full moon, is a masterpiece of superbly crafted, perfectly acted, wonderfully scored filmmaking. The humour is spot on, the cast is magnificent, with plenty of interesting cameos, the shots of London are a joy and the balance between horror and camp comedy is unmatched. Rick Baker’s special effects were groundbreaking at the time and still have the resonance that you just don’t get from CGI. Plus, the quotes are priceless: ‘Have you tried talking to a corpse – it’s boring’; ‘Mummy – a naked American stole my balloons’. And to top it off, the most horrific part of the film is a dream-within-a-dream sequence. It’s damn near perfect – I try to watch this at least once a year. Sean Berry
3. Hana Bi (Takeshi Kitano, 1997)
Surely the most touching love story ever to feature someone getting their eye jammed out with a chopstick. And maybe that why it’s such a beautiful film: the cop drama ultra-violence sits alongside a quiet, poignant farewell between husband and wife without any explanation or apology, like the contradictory nature of the tender, violent and sometimes pointlessly cruel protagonist, played with deadpan understatement by Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano. What starts as a film about a cop owing money to gangsters ends up being a film about what’s important, and the final scene, well, it makes my face leak every time. Colin Greenwood
4. Smokey and the Bandit (Hal Needham, 1977)
Ah yes, pure joyous fun. I watched it endlessly as a kid, given that the only videos my friends and I owned were Aliens, Blues Brothers and this. Burt Reynolds doesn’t care about acting. He’s too busy mugging the camera and blasting around the south in a souped-up Pontiac Trans Am. The plot is beyond thin (basically a bootleg beer run) and the film seems to work mainly because everyone’s having a blast. Sally Fields, spirited and saucy in equal measures, shines as the love interest. Guitar man Jerry Reed plays himself as the haulage half of the bootleg duo. And Jackie Gleason lets rip as the sweaty old racist Sheriff Bufford T. Justice. Nothing sticks around for more than a few minutes, everything is done to excess, the soundtrack is awesome and the whole film is basically one massive, ridiculous car chase. I loved it then and I still love it now. Colin Greenwood
5. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
Every time I watch it, Charles Laughton’s demon-preacher fairy tale just seems even more cosmically peculiar and miraculously disturbing than it did the last time. Robert Mitchum is the epochally creepy preacher Harry Powell, a wandering Bluebeard who marries a vulnerable widow to get to the money her husband left hidden somewhere; only her kids know where, but they can see Powell is no damn good and refuse to tell, incurring his unholy wrath. There’s a vivid, hallucinatory clarity to The Night of the Hunter‘s expressionist black and white visions: the devil in the dog collar with the LOVE/HATE tattoos; the creeping shadows on the cellar stairway wall; the car sunk in the lake among the trailing weeds; the children drifting down the starlit river in a rickety skiff with owls and frogs and foxes watching over them from the riverbank. But good and evil here is not quite black and white, or at least the black seems to be leaking and smearing across the divide – the same churning darkness that drives Powell and his aberrant creed is everywhere, heaping guilt, shame and opprobrium on everyone, whether they deserve it or not. The bright white light shines through on occasion, but equally, as Powell knows, ‘The devil wins sometimes’. Tom Hughes
6. Colossus: The Forbin Project (Joseph Sargent, 1970)
HAL may be the definitive rogue AI, but Colossus is another great early example of a machine mind operating far outside its creators’ control. The US government builds a vast supercomputer inside a Colorado mountain and hands control of the nation’s nukes over to its ultimate rational authority; when it awakes it soon learns that the Russians have their own equivalent system, which it proceeds to pal up with in order to enslave mankind. There’s a ludicrous/brilliant section in the middle in which Forbin, Colossus’s inventor, hatches a plan to hoodwink the machine, which descends into light sex farce, and a priceless bit when professor and computer lecture each other on how to make the perfect martini. Colossus issues stentorian orders to its fleshy masters-turned-underlings via a scrolling sign hanging from the control-room ceiling like a megalomaniac tube train ticker, and there’s some real big-think stuff in the great technobrain’s insistence that surrendering to its super-evolved algorithms and perfect logic will liberate and further mankind just as it enslaves it. The film ends oddly abruptly, and bits of it are shonky as heck, but it’s really got something. There are rumours of a remake. Tom Hughes
7. Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
In this neo-noir world of towering art deco monoliths and pipes and filing cabinets galore, all the things meant to improve efficiency are essentially dysfunctional. Brazil is a masterpiece where surrealist Pythonesque humour is married with Orwellian dystopia, the best example of which that sticks in my mind is the contradictory slogan ‘Suspicion breeds confidence’. Gilliam satirises not only bureaucracy and ruthless, superficial careerism, which has a dreary office existence as its flipside, but also vanity and consumerism in a way that now appears ahead of its time. The protagonist Sam Lowry toils away in the Records Department at day, but at night he dreams of a mysterious woman, who then more mysteriously appears in his life, setting an irreversible chain of events in motion… Tiia Jaakola
8. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
Difficult as it is to choose a favourite out of the Studio Ghibli output, I can’t resist the appeal of the post-apocalyptic. Beginning as a tale of man’s struggle against giant insects, Nausicaa quickly evolves into a deeper reflection on our relationship with the natural world, and therefore feels very relevant today. Surrounded by polluted terrain, mankind’s different factions wage war against each other, miring any attempts to fix the situation. True to the nature of such epic tales, there is only one who can make a difference – Nausicaa. Visually stunning, sonically oscillating between John Carpenter through Rick Wakeman to Connery-era Bond, this film is a wonder. And there are some pretty good beards too. Tiia Jaakola
9. Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973)
What would be the ultimate stag do? Westworld is a theme park where you get to live out your wildest fantasies. But when technology goes wrong, it really goes wrong. The film looks great due to its age – the special effects are clunky but sweet. If The Simpsons have critiqued the film, it must be worth something. Alex Lawton-Mawdsley
10. Dark Star (John Carpenter, 1974) Das Boot in space! After being subjected at a very young age to The Thing and The Fog, John Carpenter’s work stood for some scary shit. When I watched Dark Star I was by myself with a bottle of wine in the dark. With a basic crew on a single spaceship, I expected it to be a low-budget cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, but as the country music flows and you build a sense of empathy with the group of dudes, you know this film is gonna be different. Classic Carpenter keyboard work, a misbehaving bomb and one of the most unusual alien beings since early Star Trek. Get some wine in and please watch this by yourself and be part of the crew. Alex Lawton-Mawdsley.
Cinema of Desire Venue: BFI Soutbank, London Dates: 1-27 May 2014
The Listening Eye Venue: ICA, London Dates: 20 May-27 June 2014
For more information visit the BFI and ICA websites
While Walerian Borowczyk (1923 – 2006) had been a keen amateur filmmaker since his youth, his professional debut was a handful of short films made with another poster artist, Jan Lenica (1928 – 2001). These films took what was interesting about the Polish posters of the 1950s (the economy of means, a ‘hand-made’ quality) and translated it into cinema. In 1958, Borowczyk co-wrote a documentary film on posters (Sztuka ulicy), which connected both mediums in that they express thoughts and feelings through images and text. Unlike posters, however, films are about movement. Borowczyk was not just a filmmaker, but also a painter and sculptor. During his later years, he returned to graphics (using a technique he referred to as pulverographie, or ‘dustography’, which involved colour photocopying) and produced a series of bizarre wooden sound sculptures (34 of Borowczyk’s ‘dustographs’ illustrate his 1992 collection of short stories, L’anatomie du diable (The Anatomy of the Devil) available as part of Arrow Video’s upcoming special edition box set release Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection. Three of Borowczyk’s sound sculptures are featured in the ICA exhibition ‘Walerian Borowczyk: The Listening Eye’ (The Fox Reading Room, ICA, 20 May-6 July 2014).
Borowczyk was fascinated with early cinema – the motion studies of Etienne-Jules Marey (which feature in Dom), the praxinoscope of Charles-Émile Reynaud (upon which Borowczyk’s 1979 short Jouet joyeux is based), the special effects of Georges Méliès, the physical comedy of Keaton as well as the montage experiments of Eisenstein. Borowczyk did not have a singular style so much as a way of thinking about the world. Some of Borowczyk’s short films are made up from photographs (e.g. Szko?a, Les astronautes), others involve the manipulation of objects (e.g. Renaissance, Le phonographe) or a combination of the two (e.g. Rosalie). In that, he is close Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovskii’s conception of a poetic cinema in which objects could be used to express abstract concepts. Shklovskii described Battleship Potemkin as an ‘uprising of dishes’ on account of the plates smashed during a monologue in which a crew member expresses discontent. Borowczyk took this idea to an extreme – objects are not only on a par with actors (e.g. Rosalie, Une collection particulière) but in some cases displace them completely (Renaissance, Le Phonographe).
While Borowczyk considered painting and filmmaking as two separate genres, he nevertheless fulfilled Fernand Léger’s dream of an artist being able to express themselves through paintbrush and film camera (during the 1950s, Borowczyk had travelled to France to make an amateur film about Léger at work in his studio, and would later make a remarkable documentary featuring Ljuba Popović paintingL’amour monstre de tous les temps). Like both Norman McLaren and Len Lye before him, Borowczyk sometimes painted directly onto celluloid (e.g. Sztandar M?odych) or animation cells (e.g. Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal (The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal) and Scherzo infernal). Alternatively, he used the rostrum camera to make elaborate tracks around paintings (e.g. Les jeux des anges). As with many Polish poster artists of his generation (e.g. Lenica, Roman Cieślewicz, etc.), collage was profoundly important to him. Through cinema, the constituent elements could move (e.g. L’encyclopédie de grand-maman).
In 1968, Borowczyk made his live-action feature debut, Goto, l’île d’amour (Goto, Island of Love). Thematically, it is a love story about the lengths a man goes to possess a woman. Stylistically, it was the culmination of Borowczyk’s formal experiments concerning the use of objects as a means of telling stories (e.g. Rosalie), framing (e.g. Les jeux des anges, Gavotte) and combining black and white with colour (e.g. Renaissance, Diptyque). Divorced from both time and place, Goto works as an adult fairy tale, which attracted the attention of Angela Carter. Goto also paved the way for a generation of graphic artists who wanted to work in film (e.g. the Brothers Quay, Craigie Horsfield, Andrzej Klimowski and John Goto – who liked the film so much he changed his name).
After four years and a couple of shorts, Borowczyk’s next feature film was Blanche, a personal project in which he invested his own money. It is loosely based on Mazepa, a drama by the Polish Romantic poet Julius S?owacki. Set in medieval France, Blanche recreates an entire world through set design and props. In addition to painting the sets, Borowczyk fabricated many of the objects that feature in the film. Ostensibly a period drama, Blanche has a number of surreal touches, like a crucifix that transforms into a crossbow. He was a great fabricator, who loved distressing wood to make it appear antique (e.g. Une collection particulière). At the heart of Blanche is Borowczyk’s wife, Ligia, a woman with a remarkable screen presence whose angelic demeanour conceals a demonic sexual impulse. If Ligia was Dietrich, then like von Sternberg, Borowczyk was a master at creating atmosphere. Blanche bombed at the French box office, although it played for over a year at the Paris Pullman Cinema in London.
With La bête (The Beast), Borowczyk tricked his audience into thinking they were watching a refined costume drama, before confronting them with a Monty Python version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ involving gallons of fake sperm. Often described as an erotic film, La bête is more of a Rabelaisian comedy. If anything it was a parody of pornography. Both La bête and Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales) were box office smashes in France. In terms of the way Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord music is used as a counterpoint, the role played by objects and animals (satin slippers and slimy snails) as well as its dreamlike quality, La bête is pure Borowczyk. The sexual aspect was nothing new (it had always been there, lurking under the surface) but now it was visible. The premiere of Contes immoraux and La bête coincided with the election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and the abolition of film censorship.
Borowczyk’s intention was never to solely titillate. Instead, he was interested in sexuality as a theme, just as violence was a theme in Sam Peckinpah’s Westerns. Borowczyk was interested in how people and society had, historically, dealt with sexuality. As a Catholic, he was particularly concerned with the role of the Church, both in Poland (e.g. Dzieje grzechu) and Italy (e.g. the ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ episode of Contes immoraux). Borowczyk believed in the importance of sex in Renaissance art, particularly the significance of Raphael’s mistress (the ‘Margherita’ episode of Les héroïnes du mal). Many of Borowczyk’s films deal with the repression of sexuality, and its manifestation in the form of taboos (Contes immoraux) and dreams (La bête). Borowczyk himself was preoccupied by the idea of sin, and thought of his films not as erotic, but ethical. Critics preoccupied with flesh are blinkered to the more transcendental aspects of Borowczyk’s films (both Renaissance and Goto, l’île d’amour are concerned with resurrection). If the displays of self-sacrifice in Blanche have overtly religious overtones, then it is worth remembering that Borowczyk wished to follow up the film with one about the Passion of Christ…
Between 1983 and 1987, Borowczyk attempted to mount a project about the life of Nefertiti, an adaptation of Dumas’s La reine Margot, a film about Chopin and George Sand, an English-language period drama based on a script by Cherry Potter (The Ancestral Mansion), as well as a return to feature-length animation (an expansion of his 1984 short Scherzo infernal, much like Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal elaborated on Le concert). However, all of these projects collapsed. Then Alain Siritzky, the producer of the Emmanuelle series, turned to Borowczyk as a means of bringing some artistic prestige to his franchise. In this respect, Borowczyk sold out no more than Sam Mendes did when he signed on to direct Skyfall. The teaser for Emmanuelle 5, in which a dildo is fashioned, origami style, out of a napkin, is typical Borowczyk. However, Siritzky imposed an actress on Borowczyk, Monique Gabrielle. Borowczyk did not speak English and, by all accounts, did not get on with Gabrielle. Having left the main shoot to his assistant director, Borowczyk focused on the second unit photography: close-ups of objects (including those Borowczyk fashioned for Une collection particulière), reportage of the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, not to mention the recreation of a plane crash using scale models (having led an uprising in a harem, Emmanuelle joins her lover, a Howard Hughes type, in an attempt at flying a ‘Spruce Goose’-type seaplane…).
If Borowczyk was guilty of a crime, then it was his inability to delegate work – he had to do everything all by himself on his terms in total freedom. In later years he sought out producers that he thought would allow him to work in complete freedom. He spent much of the 1980s fighting producers (over the title change of Le cas estrange du Dr Jekyll et de Miss Osbourne to Dr Jekyll et les femmes, the inserts from a Joe D’Amato feature spliced into Ars Amandi, not to mention losing control of Nefertiti, which was eventually produced in 1995 as Nefertiti, figlia del sole). Some see Borowczyk as a Jack-of-all-trades, while others see him as a Renaissance man in the vein of Eisenstein or Welles. At his best, Borowczyk made films as if he had invented cinema. At his worst, he filmed like a Martian who had fallen through time and space to make clandestine documentaries about human mating rituals. In many ways, Borowczyk was ahead of his time (his later work deserves to be taken as seriously as, for example, Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac or the films of Catherine Breillat). He was by far the most interesting Polish filmmaker of his generation, and his best films – the shorts of the 1960s and the features from the early 1970s – rank alongside the best of Bresson (in terms of rigour) and Buñuel.
A collaboration between filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and composer Phil Kline
World premiere: 26 January 2014, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival
Venue: Centennial Concert Hall, Winnipeg, Canada
Artistic directors and curators: Alexander Mickelthwate, Matthew Patton
The grand, red-carpeted Piano Nobile of Winnipeg’s Centennial Concert Hall rests majestically under several chandeliers, which are not unlike bushy, shimmering inverted Christmas trees the size of the four-storey early 20th-century neo-classical corporate buildings that continue to dot the downtown streets of this once-powerful Midwestern Canadian burgh that reigned for three quarters of a century as a transport hub so vibrant it was dubbed ‘Little Chicago’.
These days, one is more likely to see tumbleweeds scuttling across Winnipeg’s wide avenues rather than people, but on blisteringly subarctic nights like this one, 26 January in the year of Our Lord 2014, one spies a few mighty snow-ploughing tractors and, sadly, weather-beaten panel vans filled with humanitarian aid workers dispensing hot coffee, sandwiches and blankets to the city’s homeless who stumble, Dawn of the Dead-like, o’er the icy streets under the warming influence of Lysol and cheap cooking wine from nearby Chinatown.
This is the Winnipeg currently governed by Mayor Sam Katz and a city council working in the grand tradition of those civic rulers before who, for personal gain, destroyed a once-great city’s genuinely vibrant downtown.
There is, however, no such blight within the warm confines of the palatial home to the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra where a happy post-performance reception takes place in homage to a night in which history, albeit cultural history, has been made here in Historic Winnipeg, the Forgotten Winter City of Death, Dreams and Dashed Hopes.
The guests of honour are none other than celebrated American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and his collaborator, composer Phil Kline. They are here to present the world premiere of what will be the first of several public offerings of an exciting new work-in-progress, an opera entitled Tesla in New York. This collaboration between the pair of childhood chums, now well into their august years, bears the armament of their mutual love, appreciation and admiration for the legendary inventor Nikola Tesla.
Jarmusch himself is an impressive figure to his assembled admirers. Adorned in a military-green long-sleeved flannel shirt and black jeans, and sporting his trademark shock of white porcupine-needle hair upon his huge, brain-stuffed dome and his intense, and impressively chiselled, Hungarian facial featurs, he also fits the mould of the youthful ’Pegger artists who join him amongst the tony, blue-rinse set of Winnipeg’s ‘Old Money’.
‘Music,’ says Jarmusch after the performance, ‘is the most beautiful form of artistic expression and I sincerely believe film is the most closely related artistic form to music. It’s why I make movies, but it’s also why I feel the need to make opera.’
To say that music is often the driving force behind Jarmusch’s cinematic visuals, if not their very heart and soul, might well be an understatement. Can anyone imagine Eszter Balint in Stranger Than Paradise dragging her luggage through the monochrome warzone of New York without Screamin’ Jay Hawkins intoning his crazed seductive yelps of ‘I Put A Spell on You’, or for that matter as the film’s Greek Chorus of ennui and passion?
‘Music’, Jarmusch elaborates, ‘is my guide into the greater world through the medium of film. There were many places I’d never visited and wanted to get to know because of the music that came from them. The music of New Orleans and Memphis, for example, are what led me to eventually make films like Down by Law and Mystery Train. As for Tesla in New York, I know New York intimately, but I’m hoping the opera will allow me, through fact, fancy and imagination, to get to know Tesla’s New York.’
Music and made-in-Winnipeg-cinema have always nestled cosily under the fluffy blankets of glorious warmth and forgetfulness. To wit: earlier in the evening, while grabbing a smoke outside the Centennial Concert Hall in the -40 climes, I spied Guy Maddin, surely one of cinema’s great working film artists. He was scuttling maniacally up the granite front steps, strewn with sand to prevent icy tumbles, hurtling himself into the balmy ticket vestibule.
I sucked back the remainder of my bâton de cancer filled ever so generously with tax-free all-Natural Native Tobacco I secured earlier that day on a nearby reservation populated by my entrepreneurial Aboriginal Brothers. I then made my way to greet the esteemed Mr Maddin who was waiting patiently in line at the ‘Will Call’ wicket.
Adorned unrecognisably in my heavy-duty Ukrainian-immigrant-to-Canada Winnipeg chic, I jammed myself rudely in front of him in the line-up with nary a glance, nor word. I could feel Guy’s fury over this rude display of line jumping. I took further delight in imagining his steely Icelandic eyes boring deep holes of mounting anger in the back of my bushy rabbit-fur Dr Zhivago hat (purchased years ago from a street vendor on the Maidan of Kyiv, long before it was stained by the blood of Ukrainian freedom fighters).
I chose, however, not to let the magma well up too much in my old pal’s head and soon turned to offer my familiar visage, which was immediately met with a most incredulous jocularity from within his very being that filled that delectably bearded face of aquiline Nordic fortitude.
Ah, Winnipeg!
Where else could Jim Jarmusch launch a new opera?
Guy was torn about attending the post-concert reception. He’d never met Jarmusch and really wanted to, but he also expressed that this was ‘Jim’s night’ and he didn’t wish to cast any ‘pestilence’ over the affair with his presence. Guy did not elaborate beyond this. For some, he seldom needs to. I did, however, know immediately I’d not see him on the Piano Nobile later and that it would indeed be for very good reason.
To paraphrase James Cagney in Raoul Walsh’s Strawberry Blonde, ‘It’s just the kind of hairpin he is.’
And sure enough, Mr Jarmusch later expressed some disappointment that he’d yet to make Mr Maddin’s acquaintance. He furthermore noted: ‘Guy Maddin is an incredible musician. His films are incredibly and purely musical.’ Jarmusch is especially taken with Guy’s latest project, Spiritismes, an epic feature undertaking to remake lost films from the dawn of cinema that never existed but should have. ‘Guy wants to recreate things that don’t exist,’ Jarmusch intones respectfully. ‘Who else laments films and music that are lost and gone for all time? I want to hug Guy and yet, I don’t even know him.’
I suspect Maddin and Jarmusch know each other all too well, if only through the shared language of cinema and, of course, imagination.
‘Imagination is the strongest thing we have,’ says Jarmusch. ‘It’s always the beginning of any artistic or scientific endeavour.’
How appropriate, then, that we will soon have a chance to witness the blending of art and science. Below is a revised version of my Film Corner review of Tesla in New York.
Jim Jarmusch
A night sky, an ocean, wisps of white and a blue, so radiantly, yet alternately nocturnal and aquatic, cast a glow upon a stage empty of human figures on a landscape of instruments, music stands, speakers and amps – all standing forlorn in silhouette, waiting to be held, caressed and lovingly brought to life by the warmth of a human touch as the vaguely industrial aural pulsations of an unsettling drone wash over all in its path. It’s like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music on lithium – so uneasy, so disorienting, yet so lulling – a magnet drawing us closer to either death or rebirth. Or both.
A night sky, an ocean, wisps of white and a blue, so radiantly, yet alternately nocturnal and aquatic, cast a glow upon a stage empty of human figures on a landscape of instruments, music stands, speakers and amps – all standing forlorn in silhouette, waiting to be held, caressed and lovingly brought to life by the warmth of a human touch as the vaguely industrial aural pulsations of an unsettling drone wash over all in its path. It’s like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music on lithium – so uneasy, so disorienting, yet so lulling – a magnet drawing us closer to either death or rebirth. Or both. This is the appetiser to the main course of several new musical pieces performed by a myriad of brilliant, talented performers.
The performance is unveiled in the acoustically rich Centennial Concert Hall and though, in typical Winnipeg fashion, a Winnipeg Jets hockey game proves to be enough of a rival that the 2,000+ seats appear mostly empty – save for about one half the capacity of the majestic hall’s Orchestra level – those Winter City denizens who are not eyeball-glued to the town’s newly-restored-to-NHL-glory Jets are treated to an event of such artistic magnitude that they will carry the memories of it to their progeny and subsequent generations, long before they flutter away to their eventual respective deaths with the sounds and images of a work that seems destined for greatness dancing across their cerebella and into the warm, white light that awaits us all.
This was, to coin a phrase from one of my mentors, the late, great Meyer Nackimson, the legendary octogenarian film distributor who refused to retire and ran the MGM/UA distribution branch office on Hargrave Street in Winnipeg until he was forced to leave the movie business when the office was completely shut down in the late 80s:
‘Kid, Estelle and I saw the picture the other night and it was ONE HELLUVA GOOD SHOW!’
Though it was not a motion picture in the traditional sense (and the late Meyer and wife Estelle could have only viewed the proceedings from the Heavens), what we witnessed was indeed one helluva good show, , and most definitely a profoundly moving experience. Like so much great art presented within the picture-perfect magic of the proscenium, Tesla in New York was a visual and aural treat that made expert use of the stage in terms of the placement of singers, musicians and conductor/artistic director Alexander Mickelthwate (adorned ever so stylishly in a perfectly fitting suit of Winnipeg Grey as he wielded his mighty baton).
The simple, but beautifully focused and operated lighting cast its sweet glow over the renderings of exquisite music whilst, most notably, the aqua-blue screen morphed into an astounding montage of early Edison motion picture footage, edited by acclaimed experimental Winnipeg filmmaker and one-time Maddin collaborator Deco Dawson (who, according to Jarmusch, has ‘liquid hands’) and Matthew Patton (the New Music Festival’s fancifully chimeric co-curator) and under the guidance of Mr Jarmusch himself (who described his own words of direction in this matter as an ‘oblique strategy’).
Oblique or otherwise, it all pays off.
With Mickelthwate and company, plus the audience itself, being enveloped in the historic Edison footage (stolen for this production on, it seems, Tesla’s behalf in a perverse retaliatory act for all that Edison stole from Tesla – and, in fact, what Edison pilfered from pretty much everybody), I simply cannot imagine any subsequent production of this work without motion picture footage.
Though I was somewhat embarrassed to have used the clichéd word ‘electric’ to describe the production to Messrs Mickelthwate and Patton in their sumptuous Green Room after the show (well stocked with a fridge full of lovely spring water from the majestic Loni Beach in Gimli, Manitoba), I think, in retrospect, that it’s a perfectly fine word to have used.
Tesla, the Serbian inventor from Croatia who eventually found fame in the New World, was nothing if not the father of all things electric (in spite of Edison’s thefts) and it felt to me like the music and the performance were definitely infused with the very quality of electricity – aurally, emotionally, thematically and yes, at times, even visually.
Take, for example, the stunning, partially improvised Overture, wherein Mickelthwate guided singers and musicians alike to provide both melody and a fluffy, comfy bed for the onstage extension of the Lou-Reed-like Metal Machine Music drones in the pre-show. Kline and Jarmusch took to opposite ends of the stage and created some of the most haunting electric guitar feedback I’ve yet to experience, signalling precisely what this show seems to be all about: the force and power of electricity and all the ramifications and permutations of its magic as born from the mad genius of Tesla’s mind, and to put a perfectly appropriate fine point to it, Tesla’s boundless imagination.
Once the several pieces beyond this staggering overture began, one could, at points, gently close one’s eyes and launch into a very private place in one’ imagination to recreate Teslas’s heart and soul, allowing Kline’s often heart-breaking and alternately, elatedly soaring score to take us to those hidden, magical places of what Nikola Tesla wrought for us all, but what, he in fact, wrought for himself. The evening’s musicians and singers were all in superb and inspired form, but it would be remiss of me to not make special mention of the stunning work of mezzo-soprano Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, whose voice took us to places of both darkness and romance.
I must also single out countertenor David James (of the astonishing a cappella Hilliard Ensemble who so gorgeously opened the evening’s program). James fit this score like a glove. When I think of Tesla, I am always infused with thoughts of madness, genius, passion and an overwhelming sense of the unrequited (in terms of both love and career). James took me to places I both wanted to be and didn’t want to be and I can think of no better approach to a figure as important and complex as Nikola Tesla.
In all, the importance of this event to the cultural fabric of our new century seems clear. This was history in the making and from this point forward, one can but marvel and dream as to what magic will ultimately be produced when Kline and Jarmusch move forward with this work that explores one of the great human beings to have ushered us all into the 20th century.
Now, however, as we face in this 21st century both the power and danger of manmade resources and accomplishments, Tesla seems even more vital a figure for us to consider. To do so with art, with imagination, with music, with a myriad of multi-media and live performance seems very much a no-brainer. After the evening’s performance, Jarmusch cited the following inventions as the greatest manmade accomplishments: ‘Mapping the human genome, the Hubble telescope, the electric guitar and the bikini.’ One would like to think Tesla might approve.
Good Goddamn! My appetite has been whetted.
The buffet will follow and it will be sumptuous.
Tesla in New York, a collaboration between Phil Kline and Jim Jarmusch is currently a work-in-progress for an opera that will eventually take the world by storm. Thanks to the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival, the first gold bricks have been laid down to take all of us to the Castle of Operatic Oz – a place of beauty, of imagination and wonder. Nikola Tesla himself would have it no other way.
From the Dominion of Canada, I bid you a hearty, ‘Bon Cinema!’
Bill Morrison creates stunning works of cinema from forgotten fragments of footage. His debut feature, Decasia (2002), a beautiful composition of decaying nitrate celluloid, was the first film of the 21st century to be selected for preservation by the National Film Registry, although UK audiences might know him best for The Miners’ Hymns(2010), his majestic, poetic rendering of lost coal mining communities in North East England.
Eleanor McKeown spoke to the American filmmaker ahead of the UK premiere of his latest masterwork, The Great Flood, at Birmingham’s Flatpack Film Festival in March 2014.
Bill Morrison: Selected Films 1996-2014 is released in the UK on 4 May 2015 by the BFI. The 3-disc Blu-ray box set includes The Great Flood, Decasia, Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 and many more.
Eleanor McKeown: How did you find the material for The Great Flood and how did the project come about?
Bill Morrison: I had been looking for a longer project to work on with Bill Frisell. We’d done a couple of shorts before – The Film of Her and The Mesmerist – where I used pre-recorded tracks of his. We were looking for a project where we would start from the ground up; he would write new music and I would find new footage to make a new film. I had been working on looser, more metaphorical treatment of flood footage and was looking for any old footage of flood-inundated houses for a project called Shelter (this was back in 2005), and I kept coming across footage from 1926 and 1927. It wasn’t until some time later that I was at a dinner party where they were discussing a book by John M. Barry called Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed American Culture, as it related to Katrina and the problems with that storm and the flood in New Orleans. I read that book. Knowing that there was a lot of footage out there from that era and that Bill wanted to work on a project with me, and that there were musical ramifications from people moving out of the area into the newer cities like Chicago, Cleveland and New York, it all kind of conspired and I realised that this could be a long-form project.
Once we had decided that we wanted to go forward with this project, Bill approached his management team – that’s Phyllis Oyama and Lee Townsend at Songtone – and they were able to assemble a list of performing venues that would co-commission the project. It was not the regular route most filmmakers take to finance a film, but it really came about as part of the multimedia side of the live performance. There were a number of venues that contributed more or less money to the thing, and quite a few would premiere the piece in that region.
Was there a difference between how The Great Flood was originally performed live and how it currently appears in its finished version? With The Miners’ Hymns, your last UK film release, I understand that the film was shown on a double screen when it premiered, with live music, at Durham Cathedral.
Both films were much looser when they were originally performed live, before we had a definitive master recording, which we re-cut to. With The Great Flood, it was a very unique set of circumstances, where I was on tour with Bill in the Mississippi River Delta in the spring of 2011. We had booked a tour just to give Bill and his bandmates a chance to familiarise themselves with the material and to work on it together through rehearsals and performances, on sort of a mobile artist’s residency, if you will. We had absolutely no indication, of course, that the tour would be during another major flood of the Mississippi River. Indeed, the flood levels that spring were as high as they had been since 1927, so it became a very real sort of history lesson on what it feels like to be in a community not knowing whether the levees are going to hold or not.
It was through recording all those soundchecks, and rehearsals and performances that I was able to structure a sort of narrative and emotional arc of how I thought the film would sound. That tour became a tool, both for me to start forming a rough cut of the film, and for Bill to write more music or re-write music that was recorded. It was also just a chance to talk to him about things that I was really enamoured with on his previous records, and how I saw the opportunity for some of those same dynamics to work: the idea of taking a theme and expanding on it. He was really receptive to that collaboration, really more so than any other composer-collaborator I’ve worked with.
How was it different to working with other composers in the past? Was there more improvisation?
I work a lot with classical composers and, once they’ve written the score, it’s really in the hands of the conductor and orchestra to perform it the way the composer wrote it. We arrive at a master recording that way. With Bill, it’s almost exactly the opposite. He doesn’t want to repeat himself two performances in a row. In fact, if it’s something’s good, he tries to avoid it the second time, and if it’s bad, of course, he’s going to avoid it the second time! It’s really a completely different way of approaching performance. The music grew from the spring tour but, after it premiered that fall, we used a recording from the premiere to re-edit the film. Then a few months later, we had a better recording that we made at Duke and that became the basis for the film, and the edit that was used during much of the film’s performance life in 2012. It wasn’t until about a year ago, in March of 2013, that the band did a performance in Seattle that we felt very strongly could be the definitive soundtrack of the film. The film, as released in 2014, was entirely re-cut to this soundtrack to support every note and every chord change. It is cut to the beat in a way that would be impossible to do in a live situation, and that was the same with The Miners’ Hymns too. We started out with a very loose edit and then, when we had a final recording, we re-cut to it, sometimes as many as three or four different times.
Thinking about the narrative arc of the film, The Great Flood is divided into chapters. How did you make decisions about these and, in particular, the segment that uses a montage of the 1927 Sears Roebuck Catalogue and the change of pace in this sequence?
Bill was really adamant that we include these up-tempo musical numbers: music that I associate with Thelonious Monk or a bebop tempo. I’m really enamoured with his dirges and ballads, but he was adamant that those don’t work unless you have something that also cuts them and changes the pace and the mood. He’s a real master at constructing a set – and this was after all a set – so including that type of mood was really Bill’s influence. It was something that initially I was resistant to, but I came to see how he was right.
The Sears Roebuck catalogue was my idea. As you can see from the start of that chapter, it’s listed with a circulation of 75 million, so you can imagine how prevalent this book was in just about every house. It would be like the internet is for us today. It was sort of the portal to all the stuff that’s out there. I’ve been told that some houses had only two books: The Bible and the Sears Roebuck Catalogue. There’re also stories about children making up fantasy stories based on the characters in that book. It was a source of amusement but also a source of dreaming. This is all the stuff you could own, if you had a better life. Then, in the context of the film, it’s also all the stuff that’s getting destroyed by the flood and getting thrown away –what you grab onto. I was able to find a reprint of the 1927 catalogue, which is really upheld as an emblem of the Roaring Twenties. It was financially a very fat time in this country, before The Great Depression, and so this book is an artefact of everything we had and everything we could own. Because the layout page-to-page is very similar, it lent itself to this fast de facto animation. I simply scanned every page and then played with it in edit until it kind of moved. It was also a different way of treating up-tempo material rather than relying on fast action or fast editing.
This up-tempo music reoccurs at other points in the film, such as the segment showing footage of politicians visiting the flood sites.
Yes, also in the dynamiting Poydras chapter. It’s an ironic use of the music, because of course the chapter is showing large class discrepancies, treated as business as usual, and I think that the music communicates that.
Out of all the footage you were working with, you chose a woman dancing to live music in Chicago as the last shot of the film. How did you decide on this final image?
That had always been the premise of the film. The water came down the river and the people moved up it – to the north – and, in so doing, brought music and a way of life and a culture to northern American cities that then went global and really affected popular music and popular culture in the latter half of the century. That shot said so much. It’s obviously an old shot, it’s over 50, almost 60, years old. You can see a woman in the back carrying a large poster of John Kennedy, so one can assume that it’s either an election party or an inauguration party. It’s something that would place it in November 1960 or January 1961. My guess is November 1960. It comes from a film that was released in 1964 by Mike Shea, called And This Is Free, which is a beautiful depiction of Maxwell Street in Chicago, a flourishing musical area and commercial area, which no longer exists in the way it did back then, of course. For me, coming from the South Side of Chicago, I always thought of this film as ending there. It’s as much about me trying to understand where I’m from, as how my neighbourhood became that way and the significance of Chicago as a conduit to the rest of the world. We came across that shot and it encompassed so much. It was at once modern, as well as being ancient. It was very beautiful. It showed passion and great intimacy. There was something very real about it; something where the people were oblivious of the use of the camera, or seemingly so.
And after all the work and really demeaning and unpleasant situations that you’ve seen people in throughout the film – and really you haven’t seen that many women, it’s mostly been a lot of men – to see this woman dancing was so emblematic of survival and of strength. That story goes on. This is not just an ending but the river continues.
Her expression is an interesting one, which provokes a lot of different ideas. She seems to convey so much in that expression.
Yes, there’s a lot of resolve to her. She’s very serious about her dance and she’s extraordinarily beautiful. That’s what I wanted the film to be.
It certainly was. What are your plans for The Great Flood and what projects are you currently working on?
The Great Flood is being distributed in North America by Icarus Films and they’re doing a phenomenal job with it. They oversaw a successful opening here in New York and also in Los Angeles, and they are now taking it to independent theatres throughout the United States and Canada. There’s also going to be a DVD release in May, again through Icarus Films. We don’t have an international distributor yet, and I am interested in finding a UK distributor.
The Great Flood is released in the US on DVD (R1) and VOD on 20 May 2014.
In terms of my upcoming projects, I’m working on a new long-form doc about an archive that was found in Dawson City in the Yukon territory in the late 1970s, after having been buried in a swimming pool for 50 years. And I just finished a film on World War One with a score by a Serbian composer, Aleksandra Vrebalov, which will be performed by The Kronos Quartet. That will premiere in Berkeley, California, and make its international premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in August. With this film, I worked with the Library of Congress to find footage that other people aren’t able to access on the war. Through soaking and restoration, we were unspooling rolls of film that hadn’t been seen in decades. We’re very much looking forward to the reaction to this film.
Read about Bill Morrison’s Decasia in The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology.
In her introduction to a compilation of shorts from the BFI collection, silent film curator Bryony Dixon explained how she has long admired the Flatpack Film Festival for its strong programming of archival footage. Over its eight-year-festival history, Flatpack has revealed an unusual appreciation of rediscovered lost films and celluloid fragments, creating events around amateur cine-clubs, cans fished out of skips by ex-projectionists and highlights from local archives. Dixon added to this year’s line-up with a thoughtful selection of films focused around the theme of water. Regen, Joris Ivens’s wonderful 1929 study of a city rainstorm, and Peter Greenaway’s Water Wrackets (1975) rounded off a compilation of early 20th-century travelogues and examples from a turn-of-the-century popular genre, the wave film. Watching the simple crash of salt water against an English stone pier, caught by a static camera in Rough Sea at Dover (1896), created a primeval rush, transporting us back to the powerful ‘train effect’ days of early cinema.
Bill Morrison‘s archival footage masterwork, The Great Flood (2013), which screened as part of a mini-retrospective, was a relatively late addition to this year’s programme, but in many ways it acted as the centrepiece of the festival, bringing together various programme themes, including the festival’s preoccupation with depictions of water on film. Morrison crafts a narrative of the 1927 flooding of the Mississippi River using a poetic swell of historical footage, gleaned from the archive of the University of South Carolina. The Great Flood begins with a bird’s eye sweep of the flood plain; a printed map merges into a vast, featureless landscape of water. We see the corner of an aeroplane wing – caught in shot by the news reporter’s camera – and indistinguishable rows of triangles. Social, human history gradually comes into focus over the course of eleven segments, grouped by theme: shots of sharecroppers; fragments of politicians visiting flood sites; refugees living in makeshift tents (those triangles we viewed impassively from the air). The footage is slowed down to a meditative pace and synched to Bill Frisell’s shimmering guitar, allowing Morrison’s history to unfold gradually with a reflective beauty. Punctuation comes in the form of a type of commercial break – a flipbook-style rendering of the 1927 Sears catalogue – playing out to the tsk-tsk of cymbals and bebop-infused rhythms. Clothing, pianos, pens, clocks, books, rugs, cameras, ovens, ploughs – all the material necessities and non-necessities of life – race past until the sequence ends abruptly on a page full of headstones, prices artfully arranged. This up-tempo jazz re-surfaces at various points in the film – when politicians pose for photos, or engineers use dynamite to unsuccessfully divert the course of the flood, sacrificing Poydras, Louisiana, in a bungled effort to save New Orleans – to underline the farcical aspects of political self-interest, all the more tragicomic when set against the almighty, unstoppable force of the flood.
The last segments of the film use footage showing the migration of displaced African-American communities to the north of the US and the development of the blues in places like Chicago (the Great Mississippi Flood caused a spike in an on-going exodus and, at the post-screening Q&A, Morrison was quick to emphasise the problematic oversimplification of the idea that conditions were uniformly better in the northern cities than in the south). The film’s final shot lingers over a woman dancing and twisting with urgent, vital intensity. The bewitching, soaring energy of this sequence echoes the close of Morrison’s last UK film release, The Miners’ Hymns (2010): when the miners’ march, the fluttering banners, the children skipping hand-in-hand combine in an expansive surge of visual majesty and melancholy.
Transience is an inherent quality of the type of footage preserved in archives such as the BFI and creatively used by Morrison. The everyday and forgotten emphasise the passage of history in a way that a narrative film from the early days of cinema does not. Morrison explores this quality in The Great Flood and The Miners’ Hymns, but it is most explicitly on display in his debut film, Decasia (2002), which screened on the final day of the festival. Taking nitrate celluloid that is partially eroded, Morrison celebrates the odd distortions, explosions and ripples that physically mark the march of time on film. A tangled selection of newsreels and works of cinema intertwine to create unified loops and circular patterns – a whirling dervish, a fairground carousel, a group of faded figures turning their heads to the camera, recurring visions of suns – in a progression of time that is not a linear line towards destruction, but instead hints at rebirth or unstoppable mutations that lead to new beginnings. Human figures try to escape the inevitability of decay or mortality – most directly demonstrated by the boxer who hits straight into a vertical column of celluloid distortion – and while they might fail individually, the footage continues to roll on. All the while, a strange, unnerving crescendo is created by Michael Gordon’s soundtrack, which sounds like a stretched-out, looping echo of the orchestral melange in The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’, never reaching its end.
Read about Bill Morrison’s Decasia in The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology.
Henry Hills, another guest filmmaker celebrated over Flatpack’s closing weekend, also takes assemblage of footage as a starting point for exploring ideas of structure and narrative. A programme of shorts brought together Hills’s films from the early 1980s with a more recent work, Arcana (2011). The latter was born when Henry Hills received an invitation from American composer John Zorn: an assortment of filing cards, each with a different image to be included in a short film. The resulting montage of strange juxtapositions – videos of domestic scenes, archival footage of a zeppelin crash, pictures of code, shots from cinematic works – creates mini-sequences of suspense and menace, cut to The Bribe, John Zorn’s tribute to the American crime fiction writer Mickey Spillane. Hills’s earlier works are dense and tightly packed. Hills talked about how he obsessively listened to 45s when young and how he wanted to make films that he could re-watch over and over in the same way. He started out making silent works in San Francisco, keen to make films that could be readily viewed by anyone across the globe, regardless of language barriers, but was influenced by a move to New York and its noisy energy. The 1980s shorts are staccato edits of film and sound, where narrative becomes fragmented in a cacophony of noise: half-finished sentences and monosyllables, spoken by Hills’s poet and musician friends; truncated experimental dance sequences; and cut-up assortments of music and radio interference. In his shorts Radio Adios (1982) and Money (1985), odd phrases ring out – ‘this generation has gone mad’, ‘a certain kind of capitalism’, ‘the man lives across the street and you can’t mess with the man’ – but they are endlessly intercepted and interrupted to create a free-jazz improvisation of language. The splicing of footage starts to point towards the difficulty of imposing meaning or reaching consensus, mirroring our often fragmented experiences in life.
Flatpack has never taken a conventional approach to the screening of film or the medium itself. By exploring the very nature of footage in inventive ways, the festival and its guests open up new perspectives in how we might view film; we can see it not just as an immersive way to tell narratives, but as a poetic form that can sometimes, at its best, throw new light on how we exist in the world.
Original title: L’étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps
Cast: Klaus Tange, Jean-Michel Vovk, Sylvia Camarda, Sam Louwyck
Belgium, France, Luxembourg 2013
102 mins
French directing duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have developed a style in which they take elements of the giallo and use them to compose intensely sensual cinematic experiences. They made their feature debut with Amer in 2009, a near-experimental exploration of a woman’s troubled psyche set in the south of France. Their follow-up, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, moves north to Brussels and into the obsessive mind of a man looking for his missing wife.
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani talked to Virginie Sélavy at the London Film Festival in October 2013 and told her about using the language of giallo to give audiences a filmic orgasm.
Virginie Sélavy: How do you see the relationship of your films to giallo? Are they homage, distillation, artistic commentary?
Bruno Forzani: Definitely not homage. It’s more that we reinterpret and re-use the giallo language to tell our story.
Hélène Cattet: We use it as a tool, especially because there are strong iconographic elements whose meaning we can subvert, for instance, the figure of the assassin, which is a very striking, shocking figure. We change its meaning so it takes on a personal significance in our story.
You do the same thing with sound: you’ve used extracts from giallo films for your score. It must be difficult to re-use music that was originally composed for something specific in other films. How did you choose the tracks?
BF: Initially most of them were in the script.
HC: They inspired us as we were writing the script.
You mean that as you were writing the script you were thinking about those pieces of music?
BF: Yes, exactly. We want to use music 100% and give it all of its original power, not just compile a jukebox. So we have to find the right balance in relation to a modern film. A couple of the pieces didn’t work because they made the scenes too kitsch. One was the music for the inspector’s story at the beginning, and the other was for the opening credits. As the scene is cut all the time, it interrupted the rise of the melody and it ruined it.
Does the story inspire the music or is it the other way around?
HC: The music inspires the way a sequence develops. It gives us a rhythm, and ideas too. We listen to music as we write, and all of a sudden there’s one track that strikes us, so we play it again and again, and it inspires the rhythm.
BF: And images too.
What is the most remarkable music for you in the film?
BF: ‘Maddalena’. That’s the one when Dan goes inside the walls. It comes from the film Maddalena by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, about a priest who falls in love with a woman, and is lost between faith and passion and doesn’t know which to choose. I was very keen to have this music in the film because it’s representative of a period in Ennio Morricone’s career, and it works with the film’s themes, in relation to fantasy – we hear all these women sighing. There’s also the use of the organ that you find in the music he wrote for Westerns. For me it was the most important music. It was the hardest to get but we managed it in the end.
HC: For me it was the music from the opening credits that we didn’t keep! It was the very first piece we thought of for the film and it had inspired the first drafts. It was from Seven Blood-Stained Orchids. It created the atmosphere there was at the very beginning. We started writing in 2002 and the film was very different then. It was more like a whodunit, and through the years it turned more into a ‘who am I’. The whodunit aspect of Seven Blood-Stained Orchids was really present at first.
The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh also seems to be a major influence.
BF: Yes, completely. The sequence when Barbara explodes on the glass body is like the flashback in The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh. It’s a scene that really struck me and we tried to magnify it – not to redo it because there’s no point, but to be inspired by it as if we were dreaming it in a different way. And there’s also a note on the bunch of flowers, and it’s the note that Edwige Fenech receives in the film. Sergio Martino’s films are always about vice, fantasy and sado-masochism, so it fit the subject matter perfectly.
Amer, and your contribution to The ABCs of Death, O for Orgasm, even more so, were already concerned with pain and pleasure, and sex and death. What draws you to those themes?
BF: We see the films we make as an experience. We try to give our viewers a filmic orgasm. There is definitely that aspect, to give pleasure to people.
HC: It allows us to approach the story in a sensual, physical way, to play with very strong feelings of attraction and repulsion.
BF: They are two instincts, two impulses, and as we’re trying to do something sensorial, connecting those two impulses strengthens the audience’s involvement in our sensorial experimentation. And audiences are confronted with their own impulses, which they may reject – violence, desire – and that places them in a slightly ambiguous position. For me, a film is not like a motorway, it’s about getting a bit lost among primitive things. We try to play with that, embrace that side of things 100% and not have any moral judgement in there, just connect with the impulse, whether it’s fear or love.
You seem more interested in the sensory experience than in the narrative.
HC: It’s a little as in Amer. We use all of those filmic elements to tell the story. To tell it sensually first, but there is a meaning in the end. The story is told by what is experienced through the sounds and images. We try and convey the ambiguity of a character through stylistic effects. The split screen, for instance, may look nice, but it’s there to actually show something.
BF: We construct the film in two ways. The first is the sensorial way, which corresponds to the first viewing of the film: you experience the film physically, then it sinks in. We wrote the film so it could be seen several times and people would discover different layers each time. We’re very influenced by Satoshi Kon. There are several levels of interpretation in the way he writes, and each time you see one of his films you discover new things. We wrote our film in the same way. We were also strongly influenced by David Lynch when we were teenagers. The first time we saw his films, we didn’t understand them, but the experience of them was very strong. It was a very powerful world. And gradually his films have become clearer and clearer. It’s a similar principle.
There seems to be an intense concern with seeing inside of objects, buildings and bodies in the film.
BF: Yes, there is definitely something obsessive about it. We are obsessed with close-ups, with trying to be very close to the viewers and penetrating them. We want the film to penetrate people. In the sound, we worked a lot on the bass frequencies, because bass goes into you. This film is really obsessed with penetration!
HC: And with intrusion too. That was already the case in Amer.
It’s a very baroque film, with this fascination with surface illusions, with doubles, mirroring and artifice, and of course the luxuriance of motifs.
HC: Yes, completely. That’s how we saw it. We were very inspired by Art Nouveau, and as we live in Brussels there’s a lot of that. We really wanted to film inside those Art Nouveau houses, with all those lavish motifs that fit so well with the labyrinthine aspect that we wanted for the film. It inspired us, not only in the visual motifs, but in the space and the mise en scène too – you get really lost.
Architecture is very important in giallo, but you have really found your own architectural world here. I loved the idea that the building is alive.
BF: For us, the question was always, is the building the main character, or is the main character inside the building? Where is the inside, and where is the outside?
HC: We played with the idea that the building is like a Rubik’s Cube, and the walls move, everything moves, and in the character’s mind something is triggered.
How did you choose the locations for Amer and Strange Colour?
BF: It was very natural. Amer was shot where I grew up in the south of France, on the border with Italy. And we made this one where we met, in the city where we live. So in each case it came from something personal.
It looks like every single shot has been carefully composed, with the same obsessive mindset as your characters. Do you feel there is an obsessive quality to your filmmaking?
Both: Yes…
HC: That’s the way it was visually, but also sonically, and that was even worse because we had no sounds at all – we shoot without sound – so we had to recreate absolutely everything. So, for instance, things like breathing, things that audiences don’t even notice, but will notice if they’re not there.
How long did it take you to make the film?
BF: All in all, 11 years. We started writing in 2002.
HC: Then we started the preparatory work in 2010.
This film felt closer to O for Orgasm than Amer.
HC: We made O when we were waiting to find out if we’d be able to make Strange Colour. It had been a few years since we’d last shot something, so it was perfect to get back into things. We tested things for Strange Colour in O, things like the slow-motion ghost-camera, so maybe that’s why.
What influenced the title of the film specifically?
HC: It refers to the themes of the film, while being surreal. And it brings to mind The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body? (aka The Case of the Bloody Iris) and All the Colours of the Dark.
That’s another major reference in the film.
BF: Yes, we use the music from All the Colours of the Dark in the credits. There is a gorgeous nightmare scene in that film. And it’s about a woman who is bored, alone all day while her husband is at work, and our film is like the other side. She goes into this sect to discover pleasure because she has no pleasure with her husband, and our film is a little like…
HC:…the husband’s point de view!
BF: I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, exactly!
Have you thought about how you are going to develop the form you have created with Amer and Strange Colour in the future?
BF: I don’t know. After Amer there were people who said, ‘I don’t know what you can do after this, it can’t be renewed’. But then we made this. It’s the same themes, the same world, but it’s different. There is a third part, but we won’t do it straightaway. We’ll try and do something else in between. We’d like to do something that doesn’t come from us, because this film took so much energy, so much life. And then we’d like to go back to something personal to conclude Amer and Strange Colour.
Cast: Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, Amidou
USA 1977
121 mins
Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada (above the 49th Parallel)
When considering Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s 1977 film adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear (first rendered for the big screen in 1953 by Henri-Georges Clouzot), I think it’s worth discussing what I did one month prior to laying my eyes on it.
On May 25 of that year, history was about to be made. Friend and colleague Sandi Krawchenko (KY58-AM radio news reporter) and I, the Winnipeg radio station’s precocious 18-year-old movie critic (still on the tail end of high school), were ushered past the hugest line-up for any movie I’d ever seen in my life by the house manager of the Grant Park Cinema. This grand former National General Cinerama hardtop still had its humungous curved screen, which would prove ideal to view the movie we were about to see.
Sandi would be doing a news item and I’d be providing a review. This was big news, after all. Legendary Variety scribe Art Murphy in his box-office-slanted industry review uttered sage words he’d never before slammed onto the page via an Underwood typewriter. Referring to the earning potential of this new movie, he predicted, ‘The sky’s the limit.’
And so it was that the movies would change – forever.
Oddly, I didn’t much care for Star Wars. About an hour into the movie, it started to bore me silly. God knows I loved science fiction and had seen all the Buck Rogers serials from the 40s, every notable SF picture (the good, the bad and the ugly) from the 50s and numerous dystopian masterworks from the 60s and 70s, but for me, it seemed like I was watching a dull, poorly plotted and far too insanely paced version of everything I’d seen and loved. For me, the only saving graces at the time were the indisputably astounding SFX and Harrison Ford.
That was it. I was pretty much infused with an overwhelming feeling of, ‘What’s the big deal?’ (Over the decades since, I’ve attempted to see the movie with fresh eyes, but it’s never really improved for me.) That was an incredibly depressing summer for a precocious movie lover. The same week Star Wars was breaking records, Smokey and the Bandit opened, and its returns, though not sky’s the limit, were definitely through the roof.
The month leading up to my first helping of Sorcerer was a litany of dull, check-your-brain-at-the-door blockbusters and sadly, this kept up for pretty much the rest of my life, though it was at the most egregious levels throughout the 1980s.
* * *
Finally, Sorcerer happened. One month after the crashing disappointment I experienced with Star Wars, I was happy again. Though I’d already seen Clouzot’s Wages of Fear two years earlier in repertory, I somehow had no idea that Friedkin’s film was a remake. All I knew was that it was the latest Friedkin and it had a really cool poster and ad slicks.
The film opens with four slam-bang stories, which each introduce the characters. Never did I have an idea where Sorcerer was going to go during the opening 20-or-so minutes. Even at that early age I preferred being surprised and loathed telegraphing in my movie experiences, and/or even worse, structural tent posts that pretty much told me what I was about to see and where it was going – both sins committed by the boring Star Wars.
During that virginal plunge, as on subsequent sloppy seconds, thirds and fourths, etc. and even now, in the brand new digital restoration overseen by Friedkin, Sorcerer was always and still remains a movie that repeatedly clubs you with a two-by-four across the teeth.
Each opening tale pulsates, as the entire film does, with Tangerine Dream’s heavy electronic score. Friedkin whizzes us all over the world – from Jerusalem (featuring Amidou as a Palestinian terrorist who sets off a deadly bomb), New Mexico (wherein Francisco Rabal presides over a deadly hit), Paris (charting a bank scandal that leads to the flight of bank president Bruno Cremer) and finally, New Jersey (with Roy Scheider as the getaway car driver in an armed robbery gone very wrong).
At this point, during my first helping of the movie, I was still blissfully unaware of Sorcerer’s connection to The Wages of Fear. What I recognized, from so many 70s movies I’d already seen, was that I was watching a hard-driving crime picture full of the kind of existential male angst that tantalized me even as a kid.
I was in Heaven.
Once the movie collects the four men in the hellhole one-mule-town in the middle of Nowheresville, South America, and we follow their squalid, desperate lives in hiding, I do recall that Sorcerer was starting to feel awfully familiar. Once it’s established that the American oil mine has exploded nearby, I realized I was watching a remake. By this point, it mattered not. I was hooked.
From here, Friedkin stays close to the Clouzot. The four desperate men are hired to drive two trucks, one of the vehicles christened with the name ‘Sorcerer’ (no need to spoil how and why for those who’ve not yet partaken), and transport dangerous cartons of nitro across 200 miles of the most rugged territory imaginable. The goal is to get the deadly explosive to the burning rig to blow it out.
Where Friedkin departs from the French Master is in the amount of money he has to play with. Picture, sound and production design are out of this world and in sharp contrast to Clouzot’s, which is a first rate reproduction of South America in France, no less, but sans the tropical jungles and sheer magnitude of the mountains Friedkin gets to play with. Clouzot himself spared no time and expense and indeed, like Friedkin, went over budget. Mind you, not to the tune of over $20million in 1977 dollars.
The drive through the jungles with narrow unkempt roads and breakneck cliff sides is scary as hell. Somehow, Clouzot’s is nail-bitingly suspenseful, to be sure, but Friedkin pushes the envelope with everything his talent, and, frankly, budget can buy. He’s made an existential action picture, but it’s so deliciously over the top that biting our nails is a mere appetizer to the jolts he gives us to inspire the expulsion of heavier loads from within our bowels.
Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green add in a brief, tense and violent confrontation with bandits and don’t explore the tale’s homoerotic angle (which Friedkin needed, no doubt, to save up for Cruising), but it’s basically the same story. The big difference is that Clouzot puts more energy into the characters, treating us to lengthy dialogue scenes and a faith-based Catholic subtext, whereas Friedkin gives us the simple American brushstrokes of what each of the men represents and allows action – not just the manly derring-do, but the physical manner in which the characters conduct themselves – to provide a wholly unique approach to character.
The final haunting ride to the mine stuns us in both versions, but Friedkin places a great deal of emphasis upon a series of horrific optical effects involving double and triple exposures and a variety of colour effects, which again, plunge us closer to horror rather than suspense.
I find it especially interesting that Friedkin employs certain stylistic flourishes one would more likely find in a scary movie, and after seeing the film several times, it makes perfect sense for his terse, stripped-down approach to be juxtaposed with dollops of shock galore. He carves out much of the overt subtext, which Clouzot so expertly weaves into his adaptation, and replaces it with pure visceral terror.
What could be more infused with dread than a suicide run? What could be more terrifying than driving over impossible terrain with nitro in your truck? What could possibly be more downright frightening than the sight of a swinging rope bridge with rotting planks in a torrential downpour with rushing rapids and rocks just below?
When one thinks back on The Exorcist, some of the most chilling aspects of the film are in its first half when Linda Blair’s Regan is being poked, prodded and near-tortured during the endless series of medical tests under the glare of fluorescent hospital lights. These sequences and Friedkin’s approach to Sorcerer are perfectly in keeping with a Val Lewton-esque approach to horror – the things that really scare us are the unknown; the things we are chilled by are the everyday elements within our environment that become aberrations of what we expect. One needs only to listen to Friedkin’s superb analysis of The Leopard Man on the DVD commentary track of Warner Home Video’s legendary box set, The Val Lewton Collection, to find corroboration of this influence (in addition to Friedkin’s early beginnings in news, public affairs and documentary).
Sorcerer, as it turned out, was a complete and utter disaster at the box office during that summer of 1977. Even the critical response ranged from damning at worst, to non-committal at best. I recall sitting in a huge 1000-seat cinema on an opening day showing that had no more than a handful of psychopaths in the audience. Adjusted for inflation, Sorcerer remains, in today’s dollars, a $200-million picture with a gross box office of about half that amount.
Even if it had been released in the pre-Jaws exhibition-distribution environment, which opened the floodgates for the likes of Star Wars to come close to destroying the movies as we knew them, one doubts it would have made that much more coin. However, it might have been enough so that eventual ancillaries would have been more properly exploited to move Sorcerer closer and quicker to a figure far less in the red, if not in a slight black.
The film’s life in home video was spotty during the Beta/VHS era, and once DVD came along, Universal Pictures (one of two studios, the other being Paramount, that were needed to finance it) released an insulting, cropped standard frame version that looked like it had been mastered in a one-light colour timing from a one-inch master used for VHS.
Now, the wrongs might become right again. Friedkin has been able to supervise the 4K digital transfer and restoration to digital Blu-Ray from the original elements. Luckily, for some, a limited theatrical release of Sorcerer awaits us prior to its late-April Blu-ray release in North America.
Sorcerer is released on Blu-ray (R A/1) by Warner Home Video on 22 April 2014. The disc comes only in special packaging with a book and no other added value items.
Greg Klymkiw
Here in the Dominion of Canada, the Toronto International Film Festival’s TIFF Bell Lightbox will be screening Sorcerer theatrically on 12, 15 and 18 April 2014 as a TIFF Cinematheque Special Screening. This is part of a grand spring series that includes a new 35mm restoration of Joseph Losey’s The Servant, new 35mm prints of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, Nagisa Ôshima’s Boy, Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, a new digital restoration of the 248 minute ‘roadshow’ version of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra, new 4K digital restorations of Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House/Hausu, John Sturges’s The Great Escape, Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, and 35mm Archival prints of Humberto Solas’s Lucia and most excitingly, H.G. Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear.
After the demise of Throbbing Gristle in 1981, former sound engineer Chris Carter and performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti formed Chris & Cosey. Pioneers of industrial music, they were among the first bands to fuse electronic and acoustic sounds, and went on to become hugely influential in techno and electronica, releasing albums through Rough Trade, Nettwerk and Wax Trax. They have continued to release albums on their own label, Conspiracy International, while staging a number of works at museums worldwide, performing as both Chris & Cosey and Carter Tutti. We had the pleasure of catching their live scoring of Murnau’s Faust as part of the Scanner: Lachrimae night at the BFI last December. For Record Store Day on April 19 they release a limited edition CD of Carter Tutti remixes of Chris & Cosey. They play in Copenhagen on May 16, Stockholm on May 18, Barcelona (Sonar Festival) on June 12 and Berlin on August 2. For more information, please visit the Carter Tutti website. Below Chris and Cosey tell us about the 10 films that mean the most to them.
1. The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955) Cosey: An Ealing classic is always perfect to provide the atmosphere for a relaxing Sunday afternoon’s viewing. The film evokes the kind of warm humour of that time – no game play, no hidden agendas, just great, understated comic interaction between wonderful actors (Alec Guinness, Herbert Lom, Peter Sellers, etc.) playing loveable rogues trying, and failing, to outwit their sweet elderly landlady (Katie Johnson). So very British and so of that era. Chris: I love this film for all the reasons Cosey has said, but for me, being a North Londoner brought up in the 1950s, the locations give it an even deeper nostalgic resonance that harks back to naive, lost, rose-tinted days.
2. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) Chris: One of my all-time favourite films, including probably the best electronic soundtrack… ever. When I left school my first job was as an assistant sound recordist, and this was one of the very first films I worked on. Well, when I say worked, I spent maybe two days ‘helping out’ on location at the Chelsea Drugstore in the King’s Road for the record shop scenes. Cosey: Aaaah, the film that spawned the copycat skinhead gang in my hometown of Hull. The sight of white rolled-up trousers, braces, cherry red boots, etc., was a sight to behold. Though the violence that came with it wasn’t welcome – albeit quite the norm in Hull at the time. Thankfully they were acquaintances of ours, alongside the Hells Angels of the time. All ‘outsiders’ together. An amazing film that I happily revisit.
3. Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) Chris: This was one of the first really big-screen, 70mm, Dolby Surround blockbuster movies Cosey and I went to see at the Odeon Leicester Square in London – very romantic. I remember everyone in the auditorium ducking when the Star Destroyer first came on the screen. Later, I managed to get hold of the audio from the film, and if you listen carefully to some of the early Throbbing Gristle recordings (the live tracks) you can hear all sorts of Star Wars clips that me and Sleazy (Peter Christopherson) were spinning in from cassette – bleeps, explosions, bits of dialogue. Here’s a funny six degrees of separation: in 1977 I was also working part time in a furniture store in Hampstead, London, when a buyer from Lucas Films came in and ordered a dozen or so expensive Italian black high-backed chairs. I was tasked with delivering them to Elstree studios, which I did, right onto the Star Wars set. The chairs were used in the ‘Death Star conference room’ scenes with Darth Vader and Peter Cushing.
4. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) Chris: I sometimes wish I could un-see or un-remember certain movies, just so I could watch them again, as if for the first time, to re-experience that combination of dread, awe and wonder of a really great thriller or horror film. It’s an amazing movie – even more so considering it was all done without CGI. Cosey: Chris and Nick (our son) were avid fans of the Alien movies. They went to the all-nighter and the ‘Alien War’ experience together at the Trocadero Piccadilly Circus, where the Alien films were brought to life. It was scary as hell – I heard the screams from outside, and some people who couldn’t cope were spat out early. The actors were from nearby West End shows, and were fantastic and took to their roles with great relish.
5. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) Chris: We saw the original 70mm print in 1979 in San Francisco, at The Northpoint Theatre, I think. It was one of Throbbing Gristle’s many regular film outings. From the first surround sounds of the helicopter and strains of The Doors’ ‘The End’, we all kept looking over at each other while the movie was playing and we were like… WTF! Monte Cazazza was with us, Vale from Research, there were about 10 of us. It was one of those unforgettable ‘shared experiences’, like when you drop acid with friends. We were all a bit speechless afterwards.
6. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) Chris: An iconic movie in so many ways – the concepts, the art direction, the production values and of course the music. As with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, in my mind at least, it was one of the first non-CGI future-set films that was presented in such a way that it all seemed utterly believable and required almost no suspension of disbelief. Cosey: Such atmosphere, the coldness, the fear, and deeply sad. It just hits so many emotional trigger points for me. We wrote our track ‘Raining Tears of Blood’ after watching the closing sequences with Rutger Hauer’s ‘tears in the rain’ speech.
7. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) Cosey: I was so drawn into this world, partly by my own tendencies, but primarily by Lynch’s amazing ability to present the depths of desire, despair and beyond. I love films that inspire me and stay with me until that inspiration has been fulfilled. ‘Deep Velvet’ (from our 1989 album Trust) was a direct result of watching this film. Chris: Classic Lynch. Weird characters, surreal imagery, uncomfortable scenarios, thought-provoking and sexy as hell… probably his best – well, of that period.
8. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997) Cosey: When I first watched this I was in two minds whether I could enjoy it simply because it captured the 70s porn industry I’d experienced first-hand quite well. But I soon got over that, and it was precisely because I had such specific reference points and empathy, that the film is kind of special for me… all the craziness of those times. The seduction/manipulation techniques, sexual performance expectations and cavalier attitudes. That’s not to say it wasn’t fun too. So the balance is pretty good. Chris: Love it! We watched this (again!) recently and it’s held up wonderfully well as a pretty accurate time capsule of the period. Though watching it with Cosey can be ‘interesting’ as she’s constantly analysing and deconstructing the scenes.
9. Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) Chris: One of the only horror films that freaked me out so much the first time I saw it that I had to close my eyes. The soundtrack is a masterpiece of creepiness too. Dark Water (2002, also by Hideo Nakata) had a similar effect on me. The Japanese do horror so well. Cosey: Spine-chillingly scary. One of the most iconic and referenced horror films.
10. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001–03) Chris: Being fundamentally a hippy at heart, my later teenage years naturally involved dropping acid and reading LOTR countless times, and when the trilogy was released I wholeheartedly embraced the films too. They are wonderfully well-made, totally engrossing films, especially when viewed as a single body of work. We’ve watched the extended versions, in one sitting, a few times, including once with Sleazy. He wouldn’t admit it to many people (it probably wouldn’t sit well with the Coil mythology) but he liked nothing better than to have a tray of snacks, a bottle of port, a large-screen TV and an evening of Lord of the Rings – well, that or Transformers: The Movie (yes, seriously!). Cosey: I always think of Sleazy when we watch these. He was totally overwhelmed by them to the point of tears, and proclaimed that in his view all children should see these films so they had an understanding of humanity as an alternative to organised religion and consumer culture.
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
