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Tetsuo: Metal Machine Music

Tetsuo: Iron Man

Title: Tetsuo: Iron Man

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 4 July 2012

Venue: Hackney Picture House, London

Director: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Writer: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Cast: Tomorowo Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Japan 1989

67 mins

Title: Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 4 July 2012

Venue: Hackney Picture House, London

Director: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Writer: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Cast: Tomorowo Taguchi, Shin’ya Tsukamoto, Nobu Kanaoka

Japan 1992

83 mins

A man in a scrap yard cuts a gash in his leg and then shoves in a metal rod. Later he finds maggots in the wound, runs down the street screaming and is hit by a car. And we’re off.

Released in 1989, actor/director Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo is an utterly inspired and darkly hilarious black and white romp. According to Wikipedia, there is a story but it is only sketchily revealed as the film progresses, and even if you’re glad of a synopsis, you’ll be perhaps healthily distrustful. Stuff happens certainly, but the whys and the wherefores are almost beside the point. The point is the energy with which the film is shot through and the inventiveness and downright oddness of Tsukamoto’s vision.

The man with the rod in his leg (played by Tsukamoto himself) pursues the couple who were driving the car and exacts revenge upon them by turning the bespectacled man (Tomorowo Taguchi) gradually into metal. It starts with his electric razor hitting something in his cheek which tings, then there’s a demure-looking woman at the railway station who turns into a metal-infected demon. From the very beginning, we are in a universe of extreme physical craziness. Parts of the film feel like elaborate dance numbers, a danse macabre of metal, flesh, wires, sexual organs, memories, television screens, guilt, rust and blood that sprays as black as oil. The acting is exuberantly physical and pitched operatically high, wavering between terror, agony, wheezing anxiety and all-out panic. The dialogue all the while blankly denies this. As Taguchi undergoes a metallic rupturing in the next room, he reassures his wife: ‘Nothing’s the matter.’ There is a dream sequence in which the bespectacled Taguchi is anally raped by his wife with a snake like probe. But to say ‘there is a dream sequence’ is to misleadingly suggest that there can be such a distinction between dream and reality. In Tetsuo, reality is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

Often compared to David Lynch’s Eraserhead and the early work of David Cronenberg, Tetsuo is actually in a league of its own. In comparison, Lynch’s film is a stately, brooding work of quiet desperation, and Cronenberg, although thematically radical, is stylistically conservative, often filming with TV movie reserve. Tsukamoto directs like one of his possessed characters. Everything is thrown at the screen from stop-motion animation to camera trickery: the camera races down streets and through alleys and the percussive soundtrack hammers along with growing intensity. Although the comment that a film resembles a music video is often meant dismissively, here the comparison is perfectly apt.

The pace of the film ends up having a logic of its own as it rushes headlong towards a collision between the now almost totally transformed victim and the demonic joyous fetishist. This is what the narrative really is: a process of initially vicious but energetic mutation. There is sex and there is the idea that we are perhaps just machines anyway. The drill penis seems like a literal realisation of our own violent idiom, talk of screwing, nailing, banging, etc., which reduces (or promotes) sex to a kind of carpentry. We are machines that use machines. From the car to the electric razor, we are already intimate with machinery and metal. The naked lunch of forks scraping against teeth reveals our daily internalising of metal. When the main character is remembering something (usually having sex with his wife), we see it through the stroboscopic screen of a portable television set.

And yet, the horror is, in this metaphoric resemblance, becoming identical to a machine. While we see ourselves becoming increasingly reliant on technology and ever more intimate with it (a blue tooth you stick in your ear, a touch pad), Tsukamoto’s maniacal insistence takes the relationship between man and machine to a literal, if bonkers, conclusion. The Godzilla-like monster that threatens to destroy Tokyo and the world at the end is merrily apocalyptic. The film ends with the cheeky letters stamping out ‘GAME OVER’.

A far more conventional film than its predecessor, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer was made in 1992 with a significantly bigger budget and yet is still mad enough for many. This time round, Tomorowo Taguchi plays Taniguchi Tomoo, a sort of Japanese Mr Bean, similar to the role he played in the first film, but now with a wife, Minori (Keinosuke Tomioka) and child. Shin’ya Tsukamoto once more plays the catalyst for the story, Yatsu, the leader of a violent skinhead cyborg army who kidnap Tomoo’s child and by enraging him cause him to start changing into a terrifying metal weapon. Whereas Tsukamoto’s first film was a low-budget anarchic helter-skelter of accelerated mutation, Testuo II is sporadically and superficially punk. The Iron Man disdained to have a story, but Body Hammer has a familiar-to-the-point-of-bog-standard thriller plot of the weak-willed family man being pushed to the edge by ruthless violence. If they do an English language remake, Liam Neeson can play Tomoo.

Of course, this being Tsukamoto, the plot pushes itself over into parodic lunacy. Tomoo has a Rocky-like training montage in which his feeble attempts become metallically assisted. There are stock figures: a mad scientist who wears a white coat and talks about his brilliant brains, just before said brains get visibly blown out, and villains who grin, jibber and sneer. There is a car chase, during which Tomoo pursues the villains on a push bike, mutating as he goes until he is able to ram the car with his bike. It is witty and absurd, but the wit and the absurdity seem to be at the service of a plot rather than being the point itself. The villains dress like punks – one of them obviously gave Laurence Fishburne costume tips for the Matrix sequels – but the film’s radical vision seems to have become watered down, or exhausted itself.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Iron Man was really like watching a ménage á trois between metal, rust and sex. This wasn’t a story about mutation but mutation as story. World destruction arrived at the end, almost as an afterthought, something glibly funny to do with all this power. The cause of the mutation wasn’t explicitly given – the man didn’t get bitten by a radioactive spider or anything like that – and as brilliant as Wikipedia is, the plot is a reading into the film rather than a description of what we actually see. The first film has no characters as such. There is Man and Woman and Metal Fetishist. The limit of all this was that the film didn’t have much to say. It was a disturbing nightmare that left you confused – was supposed to leave you confused.

In Body Hammer, the family has arrived, and with the family comes narrative proper. The beginning, middle and end of narrative are the child, the parents and the holy ghost. A poisonous family romance (we will eventually learn) is behind the whole fracas, a wicked father, fraternal estrangement and oedipal passions. It is Tomoo’s old family that has effectively destroyed his new one. Body Hammer has explanations, exposition for crying out loud, and as such feels like the smaller film, despite having a more ambitious agenda. The concluding apocalyptic fusion is effectively a repetition of the ending of the first film and feels like an admission that it has nowhere to go.

The East End Film Festival opens on 3 July and runs until 8 July 2012. The Tetsuo double bill screens on 4 July at Hackney Picturehouse. For more information please visit the East End Film Festival website.

John Bleasdale

Watch the trailer:

Tetsuo: The Iron Man from East End Film Festival on Vimeo.

Cannes 2012 – Part 1: Italian realities, American dreams

Cosmopolis

65th Cannes Film Festival

16-27 May 2011, Cannes, France

Cannes Festival website

Welcome to a strange society: a world rigidly segregated where the population identifies themselves via a visible colour code: yellow, blue, white and red. Some have whispered that it is possible after the correct genuflections to the appropriate authorities to move from yellow to blue but the whispers are met with frank disbelief and no one would ever claim to move from yellow to red, and certainly not white. At the top of the hierarchy, the elite require no such colour coding; they are kept apart, protected, ushered from one place to the next, gawped at, worshipped, glimpsed, but occasionally exposed to the foulest abuse.

Welcome to Cannes: a miniature ten-day world, with its own police force, rules, protocol and gods. It is an alternate reality and through its various portals, the theatres Lumière and Debussy, Buñuel and Bazin, as well as the zombie, kung fu and soft porn infested market underworld, we go to our other realities.

Matteo Garrone’s Reality is an apt starting point. Badly misrepresented as a comedy, or worst still a satire, Garrone’s film is actually a Neapolitan slice-of-life drama, a mash of Visconti’s neo-realistic social concern wedded to a Fellini-esque portrait of an Italy of cheerful artifice and familiar and familial performance. Luciano (Aniello Arena) is a man on the make, who between illegal scams and his fishmonger’s stall has provided his family with some measure of security. However, when he reluctantly agrees to audition for Big Brother the lure of easy celebrity proves gradually corrosive, not only to everything he holds dear but his own sanity. The tackiness of reality television is only passingly attacked, taken as a given as in the vacuity of Enzo, a former house mate and local celebrity, with his luridly insincere English catchphrases. Garrone’s project is actually more subtle and ambitious than that. His target is a society that has been prepared by centuries of sanctified credulousness and the hypocrisy of the ‘bella figura’ (the cool Italian version of ‘keeping up appearances’), and consequently made ripe for amoral exploitation by Endemol and its ilk.

If Garrone’s film is ultimately a pessimistic portrayal of how an individual can be crushed by an oppressively realised alternate reality, Behn Zeitlin’s ecstatic debut Beasts of the Southern Wild is a paean to irresponsible freedom and youth; a childhood of slinging fireworks about and setting things on fire; an adventure that should end in tears, except for a brisk optimism and a tough-minded resolution not to shed a single one, goddammit. Hushpuppy lives with her daddy, in the Bathtub – a cross between skid row and a hippy commune located below the flood line in Louisiana. Physically, socially and geographically marginalised, the inhabitants of the Bathtub are heroic in their insistence on their freedom and way of life. This is the authentic Huckleberry Finn version of American freedom that would see the wheezy, flatulent Tea Party poseurs run a mile if they ever caught sight of it. The world is falling to pieces though, and ancient beasts are awakening. A storm is coming and, with her daddy ailing, Hushpuppy must prove herself.

Another version of American freedom came with the big Hollywood entries into the Official Competition. On the Road was a worthy, well-made, beautifully crafted, handsome yawn. It takes Jack Kerouac’s source novel unjustifiably seriously, its whole point being the writing of On the Road, which gives the whole project an overbearing air of self-congratulation while neglecting the question: if that was the point of the film, what was the point of the book? Was it so Walter Salles could make this film? Everyone is too handsome or pretty; the intellectuals wear glasses, funerals are held in the rain, books are placed with their covers in view as if the film is trying to impress us on a first date with the fact it reads Proust. Ultimately, Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) just becomes John Boy Walton, intoning chunks of his own novel as an older and wiser man over a lovingly produced Merchant Ivory reconstruction of an imaginary era.

The anti-road movie was given by David Cronenberg’s gridlocked Cosmopolis. Robert Pattinson plays Eric Packer, a billionaire financial trader who sets out on a journey by limousine across New York’s traffic-strangled streets in order to get himself a haircut. Of course, this is not a journey so much as an odyssey into the dark heart of the American dream. Taken from possibly Don DeLillo’s worst novel, the politics seem outdated rather than topical. The protest movement comes from central casting; the gobs of social commentary is smugly convoluted and blankly intoned and the secret admiration for Packer, who resembles nothing more than Patrick Bateman’s weedier brother, feels (like much of the film) to have more to do with the 80s than the present crisis.

Cosmopolis is released in UK cinemas on 15 June 2012 by Entertainment One

A much tighter criticism of the USA as a capitalist sink hole came with Andrew Dominik’s self-consciously un-epic genre piece Killing Them Softly. The crime drama tells a well-rehearsed tale of the knocking over of a mob-run card game and the consequences that follow. The story is familiar. In fact, Cogan (Brad Pitt), the enforcer called in by the mob, is so familiar with it that he gives us a pretty accurate précis of what’s going to happen before it even gets going. The interest is in the brilliantly played ensemble who create an underworld reality of criminals and their own rules. There might be changes, crises, murder even, but in opposition to Cronenberg’s infantile lusting for the apocalypse, Dominik is as clear-eyed as Cogan in seeing all this as no more than business as usual.

Other self-sustaining realities came in the shape of the Romanian religious community that featured in Christian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills and the dilemmas of Byelorussian partisans in the fascinating In the Fog, directed by Sergei Loznitsa. Both films indulge in long takes, a creeping pace and an acting style that could be kindly described as naturalistic or could perhaps more accurately be called monotonous, but whereas Loznitsa’s film gains a hypnotic power from these choices, Mungiu’s manages only to replicate the stultifying oppressiveness of the community he portrays.

Stylistically similar, but to far stronger effect, was the winner of Un Certain Regard, After Lucia, directed by Michel Franco. Set in Mexico, the film tells the story of Alejandra (Tessa la Gonzales), a 15- year-old girl who has moved to a new town with her father following the death of her mother in a car accident. At first things go well: she is welcomed to the school and makes friends with a bunch of rich kids, but following a drunken tryst she finds herself the target of her class for all sorts of abuse. The film is an unrelenting and often harrowing depiction of the psychopathology of bullying. The cruelty of adolescents has rarely been so effectively captured. The reality of the school and her peers is entirely separate from the glibly indifferent school authorities and her affectionate father, who is overwhelmed by his grief. Alejandra’s isolation is complete and as her ordeal worsens, the film becomes necessarily difficult to watch, but there is nothing here that we won’t recognise as a more extreme version of something we ourselves experienced or committed not that long ago.

The worst film of the festival was the arrogantly stupid Confessions of a Child of the Century. Directed by the previously talented Sylvie Verheyde, this period drama with no feel for its period is destroyed from within by a central performance by Peter Doherty as Octave, the libertine who falls in love and then becomes obsessively jealous and so on. Doherty is so bad you’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t Peter Doherty: not only can’t he deliver the lines with any sense of conviction, he can’t even wear a hat convincingly. The routinely awful Charlotte Gainsbourg as Brigitte, the object of his affections, actually seems quite good by comparison. And what is it about period films that they are now so fascinated with the weather?
Incidentally, the weather at Cannes this year was the worst in 15 years.

John Bleasdale

Sheffield Doc/Fest 2012 Line-Up

The Miners' Hymns

Sheffield Doc/Fest 2012

13-17 June 2012

Sheffield Doc/Fest website

Doc/Fest’s 19th edition will bring to Sheffield some of this year’s documentary heavy-hitters from the likes of Penny Woolcock, Julien Temple, Phil Agland, Alison Klayman, Lucy Walker, Morgan Matthews, Sean McAllister, Eugene Jarecki, Ross McElwee, and Michael Grigsby. The 2012 programme celebrates the Russian pioneer of documentary filmmaking Dziga Vertov as well as the peculiarities of British culture with Bill Morrisons’s silent documentary The Miners’ Hymns, which celebrates the now-extinct mining industry and Philip Trevelyan and Richard Massingham’s Roll Out the Barrel – The British Pub on Film.

The programme also has a strong music and poetry strand: the mysterious Mexican-American singer-songwriter Rodriguez will attend the European premiere of Searching for Sugar Man, punk poet John Cooper Clarke will attend the screening of Evidently… John Cooper Clarke, AMatt O’Casey’s Quadropenia: Can You See the Real Me? features Pete Townsend revisiting the “last great album The Who ever made”, Julien Temple will present Glastopia, his latest behind-the-scenes look at the world’s most famous music festival, and Penny Woolcock’s From the Sea to the Land Beyond will play with a live musical score composed and performed by British Sea Power.

Among the themes explored in the programme are resistance with Brian Knappenberger’s We Are Legion: The Story of Hacktivists and Karim el Hakim and Omar Shagawi’s ½ Revolution; art with Matthew Akers’s Sundance hit and Berlinale award winner Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry;
religion and homosexuality with Malika Zouhali-Worrall’s Uganda-set Call Me Kuchu and Macky Alston’s Love Free or Die; and sport with Marius Markevicius’s The Other Dream Team, Hugh Hartford’s Ping Pong and The Life and Times of Paul the Psychic Octopus.

For full details of the programme please go to the Sheffield Doc/Fest website.

The Turin Horse: Interview with Bela Tarr

The Turin Horse

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 June 2012

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Directors: Belá Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky

Writers: László; Krasznahorkai, Belá Tarr

Original title: A Torinó;i ló;

Cast: János Derzsi, Erika Bó;k, Mihály Kormos

Hungary/France/Germany /Switzerland/USA 2011

146 mins

An austere film, and a hard watch in some respects, Belá Tarr’s The Turin Horse is also extremely rewarding. The film is an oblique take on an anecdote about Nietzsche, which recounts how the philosopher protested at a man who was beating his horse in Turin. The story has inspired many interpretations; Tarr chooses to focus on the horse, the man who owns it and his daughter. Set in a bleak, constantly wind-swept landscape, it is a soberly apocalyptic tale, a sort of creation story in reverse, as the characters’ world is gradually diminished and restricted over the course of six days until total darkness engulfs them. Tarr has said that it was his last film, and the disappearance of light at the end makes it a particularly poignant farewell to cinema.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Belá Tarr at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June 2011 about slowness, simplicity and Nietzsche.

Virginie Sélavy: The constant wind in The Turin Horse made me think of Victor Sjö;strö;m’s The Wind. It makes everything very claustrophobic. Was that the effect you wanted to create?

Belá Tarr: No, we just wanted to show you something about the power of nature. Since The Damnation, I’ve always thought about the questions: what is the power of humanity, what is the power of nature, and where we are, because we are a part of nature.

The Turin Horse has a very minimal set-up: a man and his daughter in hostile nature.

We were thinking, if God created the world in six days, what is happening now, and how we should destroy the world during those six days. We just wanted to say something about the six days, about the horse, and what is happening with the coachman if he doesn’t have a horse anymore. He will die, like his horse, because he has no work, he has no money, he has no life.

You said in the Q&A that it was the reverse creation of the world, the end of the world: every day the two characters have to give something up. There is an ominous, apocalyptic feeling about the film.

For me, the apocalypse is a big TV show, it’s a lot of things happening, it’s a really big event. And the way I see it, the end of the world is very simple, very quiet, without any show, without fireworks, without apocalypse. It’s just going down and getting weaker and weaker and by the end it will be over. The problem is, we have just one life, and when you get to my age you will see very clearly how the rest is shorter than what is behind you, and in this case you have to think about what you have done and what will be and what else you can do.

There is very little dialogue in the film and the longest speech in the film is made by a neighbour who comes round to get more pálinka. What he says is quite oblique, but he repeats, ‘they’ve debased everything’ and seems to be connecting ‘debasing’ and ‘acquiring’. Is that something that reflects your personal feelings about the world?

No, he’s an alcoholic guy, he’s run out of alcohol and he needs some more, and while he’s waiting he’s talking and this is his vision: how we touch something and how we can make it dirty because we are dirty. He’s repeating the words in a crazy way and saying nearly the same thing but it’s not the same.

You said in the Q&A after the screening, and this is something that emerges from your other films too, that there’s something that has gone wrong with the world.

It’s not as simple. At the beginning, when I was 22, I had a lot of power and I had big ambitions, I wanted to change the whole world. I was not just knocking but beating on doors and my first movie was full of energy, like a hurricane or a big storm. And it was absolutely against society. As I grew up, step by step, film by film, I had to understand that the world is a little bit more complicated. And the problems are deeper, maybe they’re not just social problems, maybe they’re ontological problems. And then I had to understand that it doesn’t only depend on people, maybe they are cosmic, universal problems and the shit is much bigger than I believed when I was 22. And I understood that it’s really hard to say something about the world and I learnt I have no right to judge anything. I cannot say anything is good or bad because I have to accept the world, and of course I have to accept and respect people. And that’s what we created, this is the world, it’s our world. And if we want we can change, but if we don’t want, nobody will change. That’s why it’s so complicated. And I’m just a poor filmmaker. We just wanted to show you something, some pictures, just some human eyes, something that is close to you.

Is it because the world is so complicated to talk about that you’ve made your film as simple as you could?

Yes, sure. I learnt and I wanted to make a very simple movie without judging, just to show really clearly what could happen and what has happened with the horse, because that is the main question.

Apart from the horse, are there other connections with the Nietzsche anecdote?

The Nietzsche story tells me very clearly about our limitations. We create some theories, or we create something, it doesn’t matter what, maybe just a table, and we believe so much in our creations and then we are faced with something like Nietzsche was, faced with the horse and the coachman beating him. And all of his theories were gone, he just stood next to the horse and he was protecting him with his body and hugging his nape, and that’s it. And you should see very clearly that all of our theories may be fake, may be wrong, and we have to understand and get closer to the real things. Of course, I was reading Nietszche and I know his theories very well. And the main issue when he says that God is dead is quite clear and really simple. I understand why he’s built this übermensch theory but we just wanted to show you that the world is maybe simpler, maybe richer.

Why do you prefer to work in black and white?

Because it’s very stylised. When you see a black and white film you don’t think you’re seeing reality. It’s not. You see immediately that it is a creation. I really don’t like colour movies because every colour is too naturalistic: on the one hand totally fake, because the green is too green, the blue is too blue, the red is too red; and on the other hand, you get a very naturalistic picture at the end. It’s far from you, it’s not my style.

Your work is also characterised by a very slow pace.

In the last 20 years, what I did was I was just destroying the stories and I tried to involve some other element like time, because our lives are happening in time, like space, natural elements – rain, wind – animals – street dogs, cats, horse – and lots of things which are a part of our lives. And when I go to the movies and I watch some real movies, what I see is a really simple thing. They are following the story line – information/cut/information/cut/information/cut, or action/cut/action/cut/action/cut. But what do we call information? What do we call action? Maybe dying is also information. Maybe a piece of wall, or when you are just watching the landscape and it’s raining outside, is also a part of time – and also part of our lives and you cannot separate that. And when we only give information, which just connects human action, we are in the wrong. I wanted to look at things and say this is also information, and if somebody is listening this is also information. And if I just see someone’s eyes, it’s also information, and not everything has to connect the primitive story line together, because anyway, the stories are not interesting anymore. If you read the Old Testament, everything is in there: how it started, Cain kills Abel, and then someone fucks their mother, and then there’s the holocaust and the mass murders, everything is in there. You cannot create new stories, it is not our job to create new stories. Our job is very simple, just to try to understand how we are doing the same old story; because we are repeating the same old story but of course everybody is different and everybody has some power to influence their own lives, and this could be interesting – because the differences are always interesting.

You show similar scenes day after day but with small variations, and it seemed to me that the film was about the incremental, almost imperceptible way in which things change.

Yes, it was very important to show the differences. Daily life is always monotonous, you wake up in the morning, you get up, etc. But every day there is always some difference.

You co-wrote the screenplay with László; Krasznahorkai, on whose novels your films Sátántangó; and The Werckmeister Harmonies were based. Can you tell me more about the way you work together?

We met in 1985. A friend of mine gave me the manuscript of Sátántangó; and I immediately fell in love with this book. I called László; Krasznahorkai and we met at Easter and from that day until the end of this movie we had a strong relationship. He didn’t come to the locations, sometimes we showed him some rushes, or the rough cut, but in our case the rough cut is nearly the ready movie. It was simple because we never talked about art, we always talked about life and real human situations, what happens to different people in reality. I had to find a way to make a movie about his novel, because if I missed anything I’d be in the wrong. I had to understand his novel and then I had to go back to reality and find the same thing that he was watching when he was writing the book. And this way I can have my point of view, which is mostly the same as the book, and then I will make a movie about this reality. I’m not working from the book directly, I have to go back to his reality and then I have to build up the film language, because literature is one language and film is another, and you cannot do a direct translation.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Himizu: Interview with Sion Sono

Himizu

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 June 2012

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Third Window Films

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Based on the manga by: Minoru Furuya

Cast: Shôta Sometani, Fumi Nikaidô, Tetsu Watanabe

Japan 2011

129 mins

Sion Sono’s latest film, Himizu, is an urgent and topical film. Located in the midst of the devastation caused by the 2011 tsunami, Himizu shows a society which is not only physically destroyed but also falling to pieces socially. Fifteen-year-old Yuichi Sumida (Shôta Sometani) lives with his neglectful mother in a boat hire shop. His drunken father only lurches into view when he needs cash. Sumida is also the object of a school girl crush on the part of the hyper Keiko (Fumi Nikaidô), to whom he is (at best) indifferent. The boat house is also a gathering place for a disparate bunch of refugees who serve as a Greek chorus and attempt to help Sumida in his troubles even as he hopelessly pursues his wish to lead an ordinary, normal and boring life.

John Bleasdale talked to Sion Sono at the Venice Film Festival in September 2011 and asked him about adapting a manga, incorporating the tsunami in the film, and softening his trademark violence.

John Bleasdale: When did you decide to adapt Minoru Furuya’s manga?

Sion Sono: It was before the earthquake: what we refer to as 3/11. Actually, I had already completed the screenplay when 3/11 happened, but I had to adapt the script after 3/11. The original screenplay was very faithful to the manga, but I could not ignore what had happened and continue to make the film.

The film is very different from the manga, especially the ending.

The manga was published 10 years ago, when Japan was a little more peaceful, and a little milder compared to now. Minoru Furuya wrote about a life of boredom and peace and the endless continuum of those days, but after 3/11 we were in a situation where we were living the unordinary, and the unordinary became our daily lives. The unending unordinariness is what we’re living now. The time has completely flipped. The manga is more depressing, because it was written in a more peaceful time. Now we’re not living in a peaceful time; we’re not secure enough to show these depressing things. That’s why it changed.

How did Furuya react to the changes?

He is very jealous, and he said, ‘I’m not going to read the screenplay because if I do, I’m probably going to give lots of notes, but as long as I don’t read the script I won’t feel I have to make any suggestions. So I’m just going to wait until you finish the film and then watch it.’

During the production was there any difficulty shooting the film?

The schedule for the principle photography didn’t change that much, as it was a low-budget film, and my crew wasn’t too open to incorporating the events of 3/11 into the film. But it was what I wanted to do, and so I very hurriedly rewrote the script because we already had a date to begin shooting.

In the film the protagonist seems to become a comic-book superhero, a masked vigilante, but that seems to be a parody almost, an idea that fails him.

[SPOILER] Looking back I agree, but he was in no way trying to be heroic. By committing parricide, he actually wants to kill himself, but in the time that he’s deliberating, he decides he wants to commit one good act for society, for mankind, before taking his own life. And he felt that to find and kill somebody who is obviously evil would help others. [END OF SPOILER] So it’s not like he’s a Kick-Ass type of character – he’s not a geek, he doesn’t read superhero comics – it’s not as if he’s emulating those heroes.

Like the anti Kick-Ass?

Maybe not even that, because he doesn’t have the reference.

Can I ask about the use of music? What influenced you in choosing Mozart’s Requiem and Samuel Barber?

When I was in editing, there was a melody that would haunt me. I wanted to be faithful to that, and I thought Mozart’s Requiem would be too easy a choice, but it’s just the best. It’s not about it being a requiem – that’s not the significance. It’s more about the melody. And I had seen a couple of films where there is a main theme that is repeated with variations, and I found that effective, so I always wanted to try that with the Requiem.

Were the ruins used in the beginning and closing of the film real?

I did actually go on location to a place that was hit by the tsunami, but I didn’t shoot the location like a documentary at all because Himizu is a feature film, a drama. I wanted to film the place in an un-documentary way, which is to say we had a different way of shooting. We had a very long tracking shot that showed the rubble, which is something a documentary film wouldn’t do – it will give you an idea of how vast that landscape is. It is very dramatic, as nothing in particular is going on, but it just shows you the scope of the devastation.

How did the actors react to being in a ruined place?

We actually shot the scenes very quickly, right before the light failed, so maybe three hours, four hours tops, and within that time frame I didn’t want to make it a big production, so we just had the actors and the cameraman. It was beyond a director directing it. The actors hadn’t been there before, they hadn’t seen the place where the tsunami hit, and so I was just filming their raw reaction.

What is the film’s relationship with violence? Is it an aesthetic choice?

In just this film?

In all your films.

I haven’t really compared them to others, and I can’t really talk in relation to other people, but it is quite normal for me. Say you have a Francis Bacon painting, and you go to Francis and you say: ‘Francis, you have very violent, grotesque expressions – why is that?’ He’ll probably just say, ‘that’s the way I draw, that’s the way I paint’. It’s like a tick. Like a tendency, or habit. It’s not that it has come out of a place of intent, it’s not planned in a conscious way. Like you see the sky, and some people will see it red. They don’t see the blue in the sky, and you might say where’s the red. I don’t see that.

There is much less violence in Himizu than in your previous work. The film is softer.

Yes, you are absolutely right. I think I was more restrained in my expressions of violence, but it’s funny because people keep asking about the violence in the film. I feel that it is much tamer than my previous films. Violence isn’t a theme of the film, and there are so many violent films, so why do mine stand out? I didn’t want to show the murder too graphically, because it is such a sad scene. I didn’t want to emphasize it.

There is poetry in the film. Do you still write poetry?

Before I started making films, I wrote poems. One day I realised that I had started making films instead of poems, and now I don’t write films any more, but all the impulses and passion I put into poetry, I now put into my cinema. It’s like making films is like writing a book of poetry.

The adolescent point of view is very isolated. The parents and the schools are not there, and the kids have to do it themselves. Were you influenced by any films told from the child’s point of view, for instance The Tin Drum?

The Tin Drum is one of my favourite films, but this was an adaptation of a manga. Within it, there was the character of a policeman who showed understanding for the boy. I didn’t put him in the film, because I wanted the boy and the girl to be (as you said) isolated. I wanted them to work things out, to drive the story; the world’s most isolated and alienated characters.

On TV we see that everything is in order now in Japan, but in the film there is chaos.

Journalism, I think, may not reflect the truth, so maybe it shows only a part of what the youth in Japan are going through now. Some journalists will say that the smiles are returning to the faces in Fukushima, but actually I went back a week ago to where we shot, and I didn’t see anyone smiling. Everyone is living in misery, and you can see the disparity between what is being reported and what is happening. In this sense my film is truer than the journalism.

Throughout the film we hear the sound of the earthquake, giving us the feeling that the earthquake is about to happen again. Could that be a social earthquake?

Yes. Absolutely, the apprehension of not knowing what is going to happen at any time. Ambiguous worries about what will happen in the future. To visually or cinematically convey that sense, I used that sound.

The community act as a second audience in the film. They seem to be the only community that works…

Yes, those characters had suffered so much. They had hit rock bottom and so they are able to bond. I went to the area that was hit most by the tsunami, and there were many bonds that were created as families lost members.

Is this an optimistic film?

I am going to make a film about Fukushima next, which is going to be much more about dealing with reality. This film in a way doesn’t feature radiation leakage issues that much, because if I delved into that, it would be too much. But with my next film I’ll deal with it. Talking to people, interviewing people, investigating – that is not optimistic or hopeful at all. The process itself… I am doing it so that I will find hope, but it isn’t optimistic now. To cover your ears isn’t good. You have to have the clarity and everything out in the open in order to find hope.

Interview by John Bleasdale

Watch the trailer:

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Theatre of Treachery

All about Eve

This article contains spoilers.

The work of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz may at first appear wildly disparate, ranging as it does from a ghost story (The Ghost and Mrs Muir, 1947), to a satire of the show-business world (All about Eve, 1950), a Shakespeare adaptation (Julius Caesar, 1953), a four-hour historical epic (Cleopatra, 1963), a murder mystery (The Honey Pot, 1967) and an ironic Western (There Was a Crooked Man, 1970). But there is one clear thread that runs through all these films: they are all concerned with the human heart’s seemingly infinite capacity for perfidy and betrayal.

In Mankiewicz’s most famous opus, All about Eve, the ambitious young woman of the title will stop at nothing to get what she wants: become a famous actress. She ingratiates herself into reigning stage star Margo Channing’s circle of friends, playing the sweet and humble ingénue, but in fact ruthlessly manipulating the women and seducing the men to achieve her goal. It gradually becomes obvious that everything about Eve is an act: her modesty, her gratitude, the story of her past – even her name is not real. We will know ‘all about Eve’, the narrating voice of cynical theatre critic Addison DeWitt promises in the opening scenes, as she prepares to receive an award at a ceremony. And slowly the film reveals the truth about the young star we see feted at the beginning: Eve is a construct, her identity nothing but a performance.

The young woman who calls herself Eve is frighteningly driven, and yet Mankiewicz is too keen an observer of human nature not to acknowledge that her treacherous machinations would not succeed if it weren’t for the frailties, weaknesses and blindness of others. Eve’s youthful charms make Margo jealously paranoid; her seduction of middle-aged writer Lloyd Richards, who falls for her apparent innocence and fake tears, is predictable, and his wife Karen, who at that point sees through Eve, is unable to stop the inevitable. ‘How could I compete?’ Karen asks one night, before Lloyd rushes off to the bedside of his supposedly nervous young star. ‘Everything Lloyd loved about me he’d gotten used to long ago’. Mad with insecurity about her age, Margo almost causes what she fears most to happen: that Bill should leave her. As for Karen, she only becomes aware of Eve’s true nature after she’s let the young arriviste manipulate her into betraying her best friend, simply because she thinks the latter needs to be taught a lesson.

Eve is also not the only one to act out her life, and this could be said about everyone else in the story – it is only a matter of degree. In All about Eve, all is theatre, and the unreal is more real than reality. It is one of the key themes of the film, and one that recurs throughout Mankiewicz’s work, most clearly in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), The Honey Pot and Sleuth (1972). The dialogue in All about Eve makes the parallels between life and theatre abundantly clear; so does Bette Davis’s magnificently flamboyant and volatile performance as Margo. During the star’s stormy birthday party, Karen explains: ‘Margo compensates for underplaying on stage by overplaying in reality’. After an argument, Margo goes off to bed, followed by her boyfriend, director Bill Simpson. ‘Too bad, we’re going to miss the third act, they’re going to play it off stage,’ says DeWitt, watching them disappear upstairs. Later, a row between Margo and Bill is played on the theatre stage. And Eve becomes Margo’s understudy, not just on the stage, but in life too, insinuating herself into the most private aspects of Margo’s life, including her relationship to Bill. But she is not interested in the person that Bill is, or later in Lloyd; she is only interested in them as a director and a writer respectively, both highly respected and successful. Her whole life is theatre. And that is where the line is drawn: no matter how dramatic the rows and reconciliations, there is real love between Margo and Bill. Eve’s only love is theatre.

Eve may be ‘an improbable person’ in DeWitt’s words, but there are many more like her. At the end, Eve finds a young girl in her hotel room, who calls herself Phoebe and dreams of being a star like her. As the actress rests, Phoebe puts on Eve’s coat in her bedroom, holds the award Eve has just won, and admires herself in the mirror, her image reflected to infinity by the multiple mirrors. Eve represents the eternal drive to fill the emptiness inside with applause (like ‘waves of love’, she says), to create one’s self from the reflection in spectators’ eyes, and new Eves will always come, eager to carve out their place in the limelight, no matter what it takes.

Despite the pain inflicted on the other characters by Eve’s deceitfulness, it also has positive consequences. Her perfidy is a catalyst that forces Margo to face reality and make difficult decisions about Bill and her future that ultimately lead to happiness. This nuanced take on betrayal also underpins A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Mankiewicz’s previous, and equally successful and Oscar-winning, film. It centres on three well-to-do women on their way to a picnic on an island, who receive a letter in which the town’s temptress reveals that she has left with one of their husbands. Stuck on the island for the day without any means of finding out which husband has left, they think back on their respective relationships. The threat of infidelity forces them to reassess their marriages, realise what is important to them, acknowledge their problems and try and fix them when they eventually return. In this instance, the possibility of betrayal leads to a happy ending.

In the earlier The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), Mankiewicz was not as optimistic, and the only trusting relationship the heroine of the title can enjoy is with a dead man. Recently widowed, Mrs Muir, played by the angelic-looking Gene Tierney, buys a house by the sea that is haunted by its previous owner, a rugged sea captain played by Rex Harrison. A lovely relationship develops between them, until Mrs Muir is wooed by caddish writer Miles Fairley, and the Captain disappears to allow her to form bonds with the living. Mrs Muir assumes that Fairley intends to marry her and is devastated when she inadvertently finds out that he is in fact already a married man, and that it is not the first time he has behaved in such a way. Giving up on ‘companionship, laughter, love’ after this heartbreaking betrayal, she spends the rest of her life alone in the cottage. But when she dies, the Captain re-appears to take her away. They walk together through the door and into the mist towards the sea in a poignant, bittersweet ending: Mrs Muir could not find companionship among the living because they either tried to control or deceive her, and only with death does she find the love that she craved.

In 1953, Mankiewicz’s interest in treachery took a historical (and literary) bend. With his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, starring Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, James Mason as Brutus and Louis Calhern as Caesar, the director tackled one of the most famous betrayals in Western history. Shot in oppressive, austere black and white, it depicts the bloody consequences of the lust for power in stylised sets, stripped down visuals and charged camera angles. Mankiewicz would return to these historical events with Cleopatra ten years later. In this famous four-hour-long, money-guzzling Hollywood epic, Elizabeth Taylor is the imperious Egyptian queen whose relationships to, first Caesar, and after his death, Mark Antony (Richard Burton), are as politically as personally passionate. The whole story hinges on the multiple betrayals perpetrated by lovers, spouses, enemies, rivals, soldiers and servants: treachery is the motor of this most eventful of historical periods. An early comment made by Caesar as the wily Cleopatra watches him in secret, through hidden holes in the wall, sets the tone from the beginning. Asked by his generals if he intends to trust Cleopatra, he replies: ‘Trust, not for a minute. Trust. The word has always made me apprehensive. Like wine, whenever I’ve tried it the after-effects have not been good. I’ve given up wine. And trusting.’ This, of course, does not save him from the murderous treachery of his political rivals.

The 243-minute original theatrical version of Cleopatra has been digitally restored and will be released in UK cinemas from 12 July 2013, showing at London’s Curzon May Fair and select cinemas nationwide. More information about screening dates and venues can be found here here.

Cleopatra nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox and derailed Mankiewicz’s career, and when he returned to the directorial chair in 1967, it was with a more humorously disillusioned view of human nature, which his last three feature films all share. In The Honey Pot, the rich Mr Fox invites three former lovers to his palace in Venice, feigning a deadly illness and telling each that he will bequeath his wealth to them. All three lovers are disloyal and greedy, and this set-up is the start of a web of intrigue and manipulation that starts in comic mode and ends in murder. Both There Was a Crooked Man and Sleuth pitch two men representing very different world views and morals against each other in a deadly battle of wits. In the former, Kirk Douglas is the unscrupulous outlaw trying to escape from the prison run by Henry Fonda’s upright warden, so he can recover the stolen money he hid in the desert. In Sleuth, Laurence Olivier is the ageing upper-class gentleman playing dangerous games with his wife’s young working-class lover (Michael Caine).

All three films have an interest in gambling and game-playing (highly theatrical games in the case of The Honey Pot and Sleuth) and reconnect treachery to the French origin of the word, ‘tricheur’, a cheat. At the beginning of The Honey Pot, when Fox, as part of the elaborate charade he plans to stage for his former lovers, interviews part-time gambler and would-be actor McFly to be his ‘stage manager’, he asks: ‘McFly, wouldn’t you say that ‘making it’, as you put it, in both Las Vegas and Hollywood, had much in common as gambling ventures?’ Here again, life is theatre, and surviving in theatre is not much different from gambling successfully. Wealth is a façade maintained by characters hoping that this illusion will get them the real thing. And the many secret doors and passages are in keeping with the tricks and sleights of hands they perform. Sleuth marks the culmination of this theme. Olivier’s Andrew Wyke plays cruel, humiliating games with Caine’s Milo Tindle in a mansion crammed with strange toys, including an all-white puzzle and an ancient board game. When Milo seeks revenge, the game turns into a vicious, unpredictable power struggle, alternately dominated by each adversary as they reveal the aces up their sleeves.

But the immoral tricheurs in these films are not the ones who win the jackpot. In There Was a Crooked Man, Kirk Douglas’s gleefully amoral, cynical Paris Pitman thinks nothing of eliminating his accomplices to keep all the money from a burglary committed at the very beginning of the film. Henry Fonda’s Woodward Lopeman could not be more different from Pitman: a principled, idealistic man who believes in rehabilitating the convicts by improving the prison environment. And yet, even though Pitman betrays, cons and manipulates everyone for his own interest, he shows up the limits of Lopeman’s progressiveness and socially determined, rigid moral code, questioning the latter’s plan to hang a 17-year-old accidental murderer. In the end, pushed by Pitman’s destruction of all he had worked for, Lopeman foregoes his moral principles and is the one to profit from Pitman’s crimes – who is the most immoral of the two?

The Honey Pot ends with a similar twist. The mousy nurse of one of Fox’s former lovers, Sarah Watkins, is described throughout the film as the Voice of Morality. She tries to do the right thing, believes love is more important than money, and warns Fox when she thinks he’s in danger. And yet, her very goodness may in fact force the killer to commit another murder. Her innocence is as dangerous as the treachery of all the other characters, because she doesn’t play by the rules of the game – honesty can be just as deadly as dissimulation. And in the end, having done the right thing throughout the film, she performs a little trick of her own, and, as in There Was a Crooked Man, the Voice of Morality ends up profiting from the crimes of others.

The ambiguous morality of the final films and the complexity of human nature throughout Mankiewicz’s work are mirrored in intricate narrative structures: his films are full of flashbacks, labyrinthine plots, dizzying twists and turns and restricted points of view. His work has been criticised as stagey and static, but that may be because he was more interested in human nature than in showy décors. His sets may be often stylised, but they are always used to convey aspects of the story visually. The lighting is expressive, the mise en scène meticulously precise, the dialogue razor-sharp, the narrative structures as dense and convoluted as the human heart. It is theatre, yes, but it is the theatre of life.

Virginie Sélavy

The Ghost and Mrs Muir

Cine Books on Iran, Conspiracy and Saucy British Cinema

Iran: Directory of World Cinema
Edited by Parviz Jahed
Intellect 293pp £15.95

Conspiracy Cinema: Propaganda, politics and paranoia
By David Ray Carter
Headpress 271pp £24.99

Keeping The British End Up: Four decades of saucy cinema
By Simon Sheridan
Titan Books 287pp £24.99

A rather eclectic group of books this instalment, which range from the serious to the paranoid to the smutty. Fabulous!

Parviz Jahed is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable authorial voice on Iranian cinematic matters to be added to a list which includes, among others, Ali Issari, Hamid Dabashi and Hamid Sadr. Jahed has been close to the Iranian film scene for many years and displays a deep historical knowledge from his unique vantage point as an Iranian and as a transplanted European. He has also been involved with filmmaking as his excellent documentary, Bonjour Mr Ghaffari, demonstrates. All these factors make his account of the historical and critical development of Iranian film, Iran: Directory of World Cinema, as authoritative as could be expected in this concise a book. As is the format for this series of Intellect Books (which seem to pop up like mushrooms on a very regular basis), the book consists of focused thematic essays followed by critical appraisals of key films. There can be a certain unevenness in the editorial quality, consistency and scholarly rigour of some of the titles in the series, but Jahed’s book exemplifies the best of them. He has taken on much of the essay writing himself and has turned a critical eye on many of the films – in many ways this could have been a single author work although there are some fine contributions from others, notably Saeed Aghighi’s essay, ‘The New Wave Movement 1969-1979’. Many claims have been made for New Wave and contemporary Iranian cinema as any recent university syllabus will illustrate, but what is most interesting in Jahed’s book is his overview of the lesser-known territory of early Iranian cinema through the fascinating account of Film Farsi (and the Jaheli cycles) and on to an overdue salute to the forerunners of the New Wave such as Farrokh Ghaffari and Ebrahim Golestan. All in all a fresh and intelligently pithy story of Iranian cinema.

Rimbaud called for a systematic derangement of the senses in order to capture poetic essence and authenticity – to open oneself up to a different world view. And it is a systematic derangement of all historical sense, as the Preface for Conspiracy Cinema points out, as well as logic and sometimes sanity that is called for in reading David Ray Carter’s utterly fascinating book. Little, if any, writing has been focused solely on this topic and Carter has opened up and shed light into this very dark basement of cinematic endeavour. The sheer range of these theories is breath-taking, and encountering them is to bathe in the unprovable, the illogical and the downright paranoid. All the usual conspiratorial topics are present and accounted for: the two Kennedy assassinations, the Martin Luther King assassination, Diana, the ‘extermination’ of Koresh and his followers at Waco, Elvis, 9-11, to name a few of the more familiar subjects. But these barely reach the wilder shores of HIV/AIDS conspiracy theories (Department of Defence experiments run wild, UN’s World Health Organisation administering the virus via smallpox injections in order to depopulate Africa, Soviet plots) or secret ionospheric auditory transmissions sent out by the government to alter planetary weather and chemtrails emitted by all passenger jets doctored with aluminium to reduce skin cancers in the service of insurance companies to cut down on skin cancer payouts – and these just suggest the rich but bizarre pickings to be found in Carter’s book. Having viewed hundreds of independently produced films on these and other topics, Carter organises his findings into eight themes and introduces each with a short synopsis of the facts, the official version and the conspiracy theories around them before he reviews the many films addressing each particular theme. Enough said: this book is a terrific, mesmerising and bizarre piece of weird scholarship. Un-put-down-able! Like Wilde said, ‘Beware the half-truth, you may have got hold of the wrong half’.

Finally, there is only space to sing the praises of another breath-taking piece of wonderfully weird cinematic scholarship of sorts, Simon Sheridan’s fascinating antidote to academic texts, Keeping the British End Up, in a new, revised edition. Scrupulously researched and generously illustrated within the covers of a quality Titan publication, the book recounts – in suitably cheeky prose – the, er, rise and fall of… well, you know what! Anyone with an interest in the ‘other’ British cinema, which takes us on a journey from Nudist Paradise through the Confessions series via chapters entitled ‘Comings’, ‘Doings’, ‘…Goings’ and ends with a who’s who of actors and actresses in ‘Knobs and Knockers’, will be unable to resist this book. “The ‘Wisden’ of British smut’ as Matthew Sweet accurately called it.

James B. Evans

GONE… BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
In reviewing Simon Sheridan’s book, Keeping the British End Up, in this month’s Cine Lit column it is only fitting to pay homage to an earlier account of the ruder end (oooh missus!!) of sexy and soft core British cinema once – and still? – reviled and ignored by the critical establishment, the 1992 book, Doing Rude Things: The History of the British Sex Film, 1957 -1981 by David McGillivray. Published by the little-known sun tavern fields press, this was one of the first accounts to historically describe and archive this irresistible stream of sexploitation and low-budget films, which would be screened in only the seediest of Soho’s Macintosh brigade cinemas and no, that ain’t computers we’re referring to! McGillivray lovingly recounts those halcyon and opportunistic days (many a well-known ‘proper’ thespian appeared) and introduces many primary sources in the form of interviews and quotations from those involved. Pamela Green remembers how her nudie films caused such offence to some Women’s Hour listeners that she was invited on the programme to debate them – another time indeed. McGillivray is an informed and hospitable critic when reviewing the period and the films. Illustrations are copious – and copulatory. Copies of DRT are very difficult to find and sell for exorbitant amounts online. Save this book! JBE

The Treachery of Memory and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Blade Runner

My first memory of watching Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is on New Year’s Eve 1983. A family friend had a new VHS player and I, my mum and her partner had been invited round. I remember the images blinking through the fog of cigarette smoke. We were watching in the dark, which was strange to my 11-year-old self. I was drawn into this world of sky-climbing buildings and the euphoric Vangelis soundtrack. I may also have nodded off for some of the time. I could see the clock on the video player shunting through the minutes, then hours, and gradually ease its way towards midnight. No one said anything, no one switched over to the TV for the countdown, no celebratory drink was poured, nothing. The display flicked to 0.00 and I wondered if I was the only one who had noticed. Far from feeling the coolest 11-year-old on the block, I felt cheated, and that, I suppose, is why the memory is so vivid. Now of course, I usually delete this emotionally weighty part of the story and give the cut version, that yes, I saw Blade Runner when it came out, and started my second decade well versed in cinematic sci-fi. Such is our capacity to retrieve and retell memories, to have our own variations of events.

Blade Runner is set in 2019, just seven years away from the time of writing, and the projected reality in the film appears to be close at our heels. Touch-sensitive, zoomable screens mimic Deckard’s (Harrison Ford’s) photo enhancer, and the division between organic memory databanks and digital data spaces is breaking down. Photo albums backed up on flame-proof Flickr, years of diaries turned into blogs or Facebook timelines that we can carry anywhere.

The film leaves you with a nagging feeling, a dark paranoia, that our memories are a key to our sense of knowing ourselves, a way of holding on to valued experiences. When Deckard shows he knows android Rachel’s (Sean Young) personal memories, she is heartbroken.

Deckard: ‘You remember the spider that lived in a bush outside your window? Orange body, green legs, watched her build a web all summer, then one day there was a big egg in it, the egg hatched…’
Rachel: ‘The egg hatched… and a hundred baby spiders came out, and they ate her.’
Deckard: ‘Implants. They aren’t your memories, they’re somebody else’s, they’re Tyrell’s niece’s.’

Rachel, close up, in semi-darkness, has a lost, empty look. She shows an attachment to these memories that reveals the success of Tyrell’s project. She actually responds to betrayal as a human would. Of course, psychologists might tell us that memories are retained and pulled out of our mental archives for many reasons, largely involuntary. Nonetheless, for the most part, they feel like they are ours. It’s notable though that I write this at a time when neurologists are successfully implanting simulated memory traces of fear into laboratory mice. Memories now merge with film sequences, images seen before, dreams. We have to double-take and unravel the mess, driven by a need for authenticity. Facebook, with its best friend digital photography, allows this to happen publicly with sometimes thousands of photographs being uploaded to an individual user’s account.

Ridley Scott has released many cuts of Blade Runner. Noticeably, he marked every new video format on the market with a new version. To name some, theatrical versions were distributed on VHS in 1983, as was the Director’s Cut 1992. This was later released on LaserDisc in 1993 and was an early film to be released on DVD in 1997. A digitally remastered version of this DVD was put out in 2006 but with the 2.0 stereo soundtrack. The Final Cut in 2007 was released during the HD format wars and came out on HD DVD and Blu-ray with Dolby Digital Surround Sound 5.1. Each new version promised new answers. Would it finally reveal more of the beloved cult film, more cut scenes, more added scenes? Would Scott make any more suggestions that Deckard was a replicant? But this searching for answers is commensurate with the way the film in its various versions seems to shrug off our questions.

Part of Blade Runner’s appeal for me is its 80s futurist aesthetic merged with noir: Atari in neon; lip gloss with 40s hair rolls; oversized technology. It is a film made for clunky VHS distribution. The format’s very materiality is tied to the materiality of organic memory. It is in keeping with the human attachment to memory that is at the core of the film, where characters are driven by their questioning of the reliability of memory. To remember is a process of betrayal. We seek cogency from memories, but they exist as fragments, an affect, a trace, a sentence or two. The visual field produced by VHS is unstable, blurry, low-grade compared to contemporary formats. In Blade Runner, we see youthful faces against a metropolis that, although illuminated, remains in low contrast, where neon bleeds into incoherency and reds elude us. VHS magnetic tape corrodes with age and use and allows the surface to break down, the image and sound slip away, a dignified erosion. The VHS version of Ford and Young produces a romantic couple melting away with each watch.

What happens off screen is as important as the film fragments that fill our minds in a formulation of the memory of a film. Testament to this is a new generation of VHS collectors. A YouTube search for ‘my VHS collection’ reveals a category of uploads from teenagers discovering their parents’ VHS collection, or showing off their own Ebay purchases. A clip featuring a 1983 print of Blade Runner is a prime example. Here ‘VHS-ness’ is a prompt, a trigger and a way into the nostalgia for these films. The collectors seem to value the materiality of the tapes, fastidiously archiving various indices of authenticity. VHS boxes are carefully set out on makeshift backgrounds; the format involves a shot of the front cover art work, the spine of the tape box, the back, shots of the actual tape, the label and a recitation of the print dates. These collectors also proclaim the originality of their tapes by uploading opening previews and closing credits of their tapes in fierce competition. All this stands in for, and at the same time, is part of, the experience of the collected film. A way of feeling connected to the memory of the memory of the film (perhaps here their parents’) via memorabilia. Perhaps in the face of inorganic forms of digital communication such an activity has a special draw.

With the DVD format in the mid-90s came the remaster, a facelift for VHS. Films viewed through a haze of degrading magnetic tape were suddenly clear and crisp. With each release we have the new and still newer Rachel and Deckard. In Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007), Harrison Ford seems to have defied time. He plays a hyperreal, uncanny Deckard, inorganic, invincible and situated in an immersive, three-dimensional space. The VHS Deckard seemed in tune with time, ageing and decay. To watch a new version is to give in to the rewriting, to turn your back on an intimate connection with your version, your personal favourite. The memory of Blade Runner as was, is corrupted, replaced with fragments of the new, each replicant attempting to supersede the last.

Nicola Woodham

Full of Sound and Fury: The Tragedy of Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Back in the early 70s, the Third Ear Band were the festival band. Wherever there was mud, cider and an outdoor PA system, there would be Glenn Sweeney’s merry band with their strings and their hand drums, wigging out on some epic jam which somehow managed to blend together the collective folk music of half the world. Curiously, only when they were asked to provide an explicitly period soundtrack did they find it necessary to add an electronic synthesizer to their line-up. Simon House, later of Hawkwind, joined the group for the Macbeth soundtrack and left shortly after. He played a VCS-3, a keyboard-free analogue synth beloved of Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire (not to mention Karlheinz Stockhausen), and designed in London by the composers Tristram Cary and Peter Zinovieff (with engineer David Cockerell).

This sudden addition of electricity to the previously acoustic group seems to suggest an understanding that the sheer macabre weirdness of Shakespeare’s play – especially as interpreted by Roman Polanski and Kenneth Tynan – demanded something other, some element of fantasy that went beyond what could be notated on manuscript paper.

For a group whose previous compositions averaged close to 10 minutes in length, the Third Ear Band are here remarkably restrained. The extended prog-rock ragas of Alchemy and its eponymous sequel are here compressed to clips of but a few seconds’ length. And for most of the play’s first act, they stick to a fairly straight medievalism, the pentatonic melismas of Paul Minns’s oboe doing a serviceable imitation of a twelfth-century shawm. The only note of something sinister – and obviously anachronistic – comes from the bass playing of Paul Buckmaster: one minute plunging into psych head music, the next evoking the drones of the tambura in Hindustani classical music. This soundtrack was Buckmaster’s only recording with the Third Ear Band, a performance turned in between arrangement work on Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate and Miles Davis’s On the Corner.

As Shakespeare’s story grows darker and weirder, so too does the music. While Macbeth contemplates murdering Duncan, a fizzling hum of shuddering VCS-3 and scraping guitar noise underscores the famous ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ soliloquy. Upon the deed itself, a wild dervish of free improvisation. As the film draws towards its conclusion, with the army approaching upon the hill and mist engulfing the screen, a thick fog of dissonance drifts in likewise, seemingly emerging directly from precisely the kind of snaking modal oboe line which had once seemed to speak of happier times. As Macbeth finally meets his end, high tremolando violin merges with more VCS-3 in a pitch of piercing tinnitus.

The Third Ear Band’s music for this film has been compared to both the chamber music of György Ligeti and Masaru Sato’s soundtrack to Kurosawa’sThrone of Blood(1957). The Tragedy of Macbeth has often been called the bloodiest of all Shakespeare films. With its murderous tones, forever teetering on the edge of some horror, this music may be bloodier still.

Robert Barry

Iron Sky: Interview with Udo Kier

Iron Sky

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 23 May 2012

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Revolver

Director: Timo Vuorensola

Writers: Johanna Sinisalo, Jarmo Puskala, Michael Kalesniko

Cast: Julia Dietze, Peta Sergeant, Udo Kier

Finland/Germany/Australia 2012

93 mins

Partly financed through fan crowd-funding, which offered supporters a chance to help not only producing the film but developing the plot, Timo Vuorensola’s eagerly awaited Iron Sky is an overwrought and unashamedly daft symbiosis of tongue-in-cheek sci-fi lunacy and old-school guerrilla filmmaking. It’s a film about a bunch of Nazi punks in outer space who, just before the end of the Second World War, managed to build a space station on the dark side of the moon. The action starts in 2018 when an African-American astronaut discovers the swastika bastion led by a Führer called Kortzfleisch (Udo Kier – who else?). Kortzfleisch leads an attack on Earth with an army of steel-armoured zeppelins, which ultimately causes a new war between world leaders. The film requires a reasonable amount of good will to get past the daft jokes, but the few sparks of true brilliance make Iron Sky a joyful B-movie space odyssey.

Pamela Jahn met with Udo Kier at the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival to talk about his career, the art of dying on screen and playing the game of truth.

Pamela Jahn: Your career started off in 1968 in London. How did that come about?

Udo Kier: I lived in London because I went to school there. I was a young, photogenic actor and after a small part in a short film called Road to St Tropez I was hired by William Morris, one of the biggest American talent agencies, who also had a branch in Germany. Soon after that, in 1968, I was cast in a black and white film called Shameless, directed by Eddy Saller, in which I played the lead role, the boss of the Vienna underground. The next film right after that, Mark of the Devil, became a cult film classic. And that was it. I knew I wanted to be an actor, and here I am.

Almost 45 years later your filmography counts about 200 titles. You’ve shot seven films in the last 12 months. What drives you to work so much after so many years?

Each of these seven projects was interesting to me for different reasons, so I wanted to do them all. For example, if a director like Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose work I greatly admire, asks me to play the pope, or if Lars von Trier asks me to play the wedding planner in Melancholia, or if I am asked to play a Nazi leader on the moon, or to be part of a Fatih Akin production in China, of course I won’t say no. I admit it would have been nice to have a bit more time in between the shootings, but it actually worked out quite well in the end. I started off in China, then went to Canada to shoot Keyhole with Guy Maddin, moving on to Copenhagen, then worked on a Turkish film playing Bela Bartok, from Turkey went on to Prague to star as the pope with Hirschbiegel, then went to Frankfurt to do the Nazi leader, spent Christmas back home, and from there went to Australia to finish Iron Sky.

How do you choose your projects?

The director is very important. If it is a director who I know and whose work I value, then in most cases I do it. I am much more careful though when it comes to young unknown directors. But, for example, I’m now going to Paris with Guy Maddin to shoot 100 short films, and I’m really looking forward to this. We already started while we were working on Keyhole. In the morning I would play a Russian tsar, at lunch time the German emperor and in the evening a drunk sailor trying to teach a gorilla how to do maths. For an actor, this is the best practice you can get.

What attracted you to the part of Kortzfleisch in Iron Sky?

The idea of playing a Nazi leader on the moon, especially because it’s a comedy. I have played Adolf Hitler twice in my career, in films by Rob Zombie and Quentin Tarantino. Both were comedies as well. When I saw the finished film yesterday for the first time, I laughed at the same jokes as the people in the audience. But the most interesting bit really was the idea of setting the story on the moon, not playing another Nazi.

You are famous for playing villains, and the most dangerous ones at that. Iron Sky is another example, but it is yet another film in which your character has to die. Do you find that difficult?

I always insist on having my eyes open. I never die with my eyes closed, because I find it very boring – you are just lying there like a piece of junk. It’s much easier to die with your eyes open, so you can stare at a particular focus point. And the trick is that it leaves the option of a sequel open. We have even thought about this with Iron Sky: we go back to the scene on the roof and then Kortzfleisch wakes up, gives himself a shot and the story goes on. If they can make people change their skin colour, they can rise from the dead too.

In your early career you have worked closely with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. You said elsewhere that one of the things you learned from him was to always tell the truth in interviews.

Not only in interviews. I always tell the truth, but especially when you are giving many interviews, chances are high that you become caught up in your own trap if you start lying about things. During the shoots, the truth was also very important. There was a game we used to play in the evenings while sitting in the kitchen with his crew after shooting. We called it ‘the game of truth’. For example, if another actor or member of the crew had said something bad about me, I mentioned it to Fassbinder. He would listen to me, but not say anything at that time. Then, in the evening, when everyone was sitting around the table and we played the game of truth, he would say: ‘Udo, what did you tell me earlier today? What did she or he say about you?’ And then I would tell the story again in front of everybody, including, of course, the person who had said this about me, and then we talked about it. It was great, because there were no intrigues.

It was also an unwritten law that if you worked with Fassbinder you couldn’t work with Werner Herzog or Wim Wenders at the same time as that would have been seen as committing espionage, right?

Yes, that’s true. I have made two films with Herzog but only much later, one in America about two years ago, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? , and before that Invincible. And with Wenders I made The End of Violence. But back then, it was Fassbinder only. But Fassbinder wouldn’t have cast someone like Bruno Ganz either. Wenders had Bruno Ganz, Herzog had Klaus Kinski and Fassbinder had his gang. That’s how it worked with the auteurs. Even today it’s very similar, for example with Lars von Trier. I quite like belonging to a circle of people around one director, where sometimes you play the lead and sometime you only play a small part. Twenty-odd years ago I started off playing the lead in Medea, and in his latest film I play a very small part, because the film is set in America again and my German accent is still very strong, so I talk less.

How did you start working with Lars von Trier?

I saw Element of Crime and was blown away by it, so I wanted to meet the person who directed it. To be honest, I imagined he would be someone like Kubrick or Fassbinder, a real character, a tough guy, moody, with a leather jacket, etc. But when I met him he looked like a well-behaved little school boy. We had a beer together and after that I found him a distributor for his film. After a while I got a phone call from his, saying: ‘Udo, I’m making a film about Medea and I’d like you to play Jason. Stop shaving, stop showering, because you’re going to be a Viking king and you just don’t look like that at all.’ When I arrived on the set, smelly and dirty as I was, he said to me: ‘Don’t act. I got you a horse as a symbol of virility, two huge dogs and a chain armour – just be a tired king.’ That’s the only direction he’s ever given me in our work together.

Interview by Pamela Jahn