Based on the novel A Hell of a Woman by: Jim Thompson
Cast: Patrick Dewaere, Andreas Katsulas, Myriam Boyer, Bernard Blier, Marie Trintignant
France 1979
111 mins
There is no non-diegetic sound in Série noire, and yet there is music almost constantly (especially in the first half). When Franck Poupart (Patrick Dewaere) isn’t singing in his car, or singing drunk with Tikides (Andreas Katsulas) in his flat, there is the radio. And the radio is like a character all of its own. In the very first scene, we see Franck alone with his car in La Zone, the wastelands beyond the city, dancing with the radio in his arms to Duke Ellington’s ‘Moonlight Fiesta’.
Alain Corneau transposes Jim Thompson’s harebrained tale of love, larceny and multiple personality disorder A Hell of a Woman to the Parisian banlieue. With the change in setting comes also a change of rhythm, from Thompson’s frantic hard-boiled Americana to the quickened pulse of late 70s urban France. Novelist George Perec’s dialogue, itself a kind of wild music composed of rapid-fire fragments of verlan and argot, is syncopated to the rhythms of French disco.
The film then becomes a kind of extended riff on Noel Coward’s thesis on the potency of cheap music, the songs acting sometimes in ironic counterpoint to the action – as in the use of Dalida’s Francophone Cockney knees-up ‘Le Lambeth Walk’ behind a tense scene in the office of Franck’s boss in which he airs his growing suspicions – at other times heightening the tragic pathos of the scene – Boney M’s ‘Rivers of Babylon’ as the young girl Mona (Marie Trintignant), prostituted by her aunt, strips for Franck.
Sometimes the choice of songs seems even to predict the action. As Franck fights with his wife, Jeanne (Myriam Boyer), in the bathroom we hear Sheila B Devotion’s ‘Kennedy Airport’, as if to suggest that Jeanne’s mind is already made up to leave – and that soon after she leaves she will start to think about returning (we hear the song one more time, later in the film, immediately before their relationship comes to a tragic end). But it is ‘Moonlight Fiesta’ that seems to represent the utopian element of the film. Both opening and closing the picture, it offers a glimmer of hope, the chance of escape, amidst the grim squalor of the banlieue.
Having spent his childhood shuttling between his dad’s flat in Austin, Texas, and his mum’s rentals in LA, screenwriter and novelist Ryan David Jahn ditched school at 16 for a job in a record shop and then headed off to join the army. Demobbed and glad to put that ‘ludicrous experience’ behind him, he used the hours spent reading James M Cain, Carver, Chandler and Stephen King in public libraries to good effect in Acts of Violence, his blood-drenched, contemporary noir debut. Based on a real-life crime – the killing of Kitty Genovese outside her New York apartment in 1964 – it explores the ‘bystander theory’ from multiple perspectives. His latest book, Low Life, is just as powerful – a tightly plotted, psychologically astute existential investigation of identity, murder and memory. Here he wonders what it would be like to be Jim Thompson. EITHNE FARRY
If it included having to live his life, no one thinking clearly would want to be Jim Thompson. The years of obscurity, the alcoholism that resulted in frequent hospitalisations, the money trouble, the strokes, and the anonymous death with his career at its nadir and every one of his books out of print: that’s not a life anyone would choose.
But if one could just be Jim Thompson the writer, that’s a different matter. Sitting at his typewriter he was fearless. He would not hold back. Most people can’t be completely honest with their shrink; Jim Thompson put his psyche on every page for the world to see. And more: he was entertaining as hell while he did so.
I think of Savage Night, in which the protagonist/narrator Charles ‘Little’ Bigger recounts meeting a man who claimed to grow sexual organs, ‘the more interesting portions of the female anatomy’, on a farm in Vermont:
‘I fertilize them with wild goat manure,’ he said. ‘The goats are tame to begin with, but they soon go wild. The stench, you know. I feed them on the finest grade grain alcohol, and they have their own private cesspool to bathe in. But nothing does any good. You should see them at night when they stand on their heads, howling.’
I think of the end of that same novel, when the goats return, and how it makes even the end of Cain’s Double Indemnity seem positively optimistic by comparison.
I think of the mad hell Doc and Carol McCoy find themselves in at the end of The Getaway, when they finally arrive in El Rey, towards which they’ve been running for the length of the novel. It’s a madness not even Peckinpah had the courage to try to capture on film.
‘The 50s were a great time to be a kid, because the whole culture was so juvenile.’
Joe Dante
‘Go get ’em, midnight!’ says the scarred man, sending his trained horse down by itself to attack the two riders in the valley below. ‘Lousy cops, always crowding a guy,’ snarls a teen hoodlum anti-hero swerving his car to avoid a back projection. Later he’ll be beaten up in a clumsy cafe brawl that he starts with the line ‘you’re outta your class, throttle jockey!’ Alfred Hitchcock pops up, presenting something. Then there’s Naked City spliced with a stag reel. The Lone Ranger patronises Tonto, Nabisco cereals are giving away ‘Defenders of America’ cards with their shredded wheat, baseball cards depicting US submarines, planes and missiles to warm the heart of your little cold warriors. The sponsors of Robin Hood, Wildroot Cream Oil, proudly announce that it ‘contains lanolin and cholesterol’, and on it goes: George Reeves’s Superman, Abbot and Costello, Rin Tin Tin, Bufferin and Lifebuoy soap, Alpha Bites cereal and Lustre Creme….
This is Joe Dante’s Movie Orgy, a hand-spliced avalanche of mostly monochrome pop culture, adverts, TV shows, B-movies, and whatever else Dante could find, made in 1968 and then toured round college campuses for the next two years. Screenings were supported by Schlitz beer, and the full thing lasted for seven hours (Dante: ‘after the third hour it got funny’). I’m watching a 90-minute edit courtesy of Cine-Excess, the cult film conference, and then sticking around as the charming Mr Dante is interviewed by Kim Newman afterwards. There was only ever one print of The Movie Orgy, and it played 200 dates, constantly falling apart, being added to, cut and re-spliced. No permission was sought for the use of the Orgy footage, and it carries a sly 68 anti-Establishment charge; Vietnam hangs heavily in the background (a trailer for John Wayne’s The Green Berets is one of the few contemporary clips to turn up), and the sexual and racial attitudes of the 50s are repeatedly brought into question. You can almost smell the dope smoke as you watch it today.
The teen hoodlum flick is called Speed Crazy, the cheapo Western remains unnamed, a random pattern that continues throughout; we know that Teenagers from Outer Space and The Giant Gila Monster are in there, and devotees will recognise Bert I Gordon’s The Beginning of the End and Jack Arnold’s Tarantula, but for much of the rest we’re on our own in a world devoid of explanation, the only context being provided by juxtaposition. Whole features are hacked down to their essentials, mined for weirdness and hilarity, the stuff that Dante and friends found funny at NYU at the time, and the stuff that they thought was cool when they were nine years old. At times it resembles a teenage mix tape made with love, at others a scabrous unveiling of the American subconscious, and mostly it’s a goofy mess. With its hand-lettered titles, varying sound levels, clicks, pops and hisses, it’s a distinctly low-fidelity experience, but that adds to its crude power. It’s like Andy Warhol via Mad Magazine, and though it’s largely shapeless there’s a definite method in the madness somewhere. Dante recalls that the original epic ended with a solid 20 minutes or so of the closing moments of dozens of different old shows, and the whole ‘happy trails, buckaroos’ montage would reduce most of the hardy souls who had sat through the whole thing to tears. In a world without video, DVD or the internet, all this material, this 50s juvenilia, had disappeared from people’s lives, and The Movie Orgy dredged it up, sliced it into pieces and fed it back to the viewers, in what must have been a strange and heady experience. Dante had the idea for The Movie Orgy after noting the popularity of a college screening of a complete 1940s Batman serial over five hours. Without the week-long wait between episodes that characterised the original run the audience were made forcefully aware of the repetitions of footage, the outrageous cheat cliff-hanger endings, and all the absurdities and narrative contortions of the type of entertainment that they had doubtless accepted at face value when they were children.
Susan Sontag’s influential essay on camp had recently been published, and The Movie Orgy followed its lead: to be included, footage had to be played totally straight, otherwise it wasn’t funny, and it should ideally push the buttons of the baby boomers in the audience. Rules are made to be broken, and some knowing satirical clips appear amid the Howdy Doody and Puralin, but for the most part it’s an unpolished, disarming trawl through the cathode ray hinterland I only knew through Drew Friedman’s genius comic strips. Here they are, the aging music hall comedians, hard-sell commercials and nightmarish kids’ shows, a festival of hokey staging and stiff delivery. It’s baffling and alarming and hilarious by turns; one moment you could be watching an ad for the Little Hostess Buffet set ‘by Marx’, a toy full dinner service for the career-free little girl, the next you’re pitched into the sheer proto-Lynchian hell of Andy’s Gang, where a live cat and mouse (Midnight and Squeaky) have been strapped into torture devices so that they can be filmed playing Salvation Army drums from a variety of angles while a distressed-looking fat man warbles ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so’ over the footage. It’s a good thing that the kids in the Andy’s Gang audience are provided by stock footage, otherwise they would be screaming in abject terror, as I would have been had I not been laughing so damned hard.
I would love The Movie Orgy for this sequence alone, and there’s plenty more where that came from. It’s a social document from the heady days of revolution, it’s a post-war treasure trove, and for Joe Dante fans it’s a touchstone. This is where the strait-laced dialogue from Mant, Matinee‘s film-within-a-film came from; here’s the first evidence of the anti-corporate, anti-military creator of Gremlins, Small Soldiers and The Homecoming; hell, here’s even the puerile knucklehead who had a hand in Amazon Women on the Moon. It’s a gas. Now, let’s get the full seven-hour cut over, somebody score some Schlitz beer and home-grown, pull up a beanbag, let’s watch this bastard properly.
Mark Stafford
The Movie Orgy (Joe Dante, USA, 1968) screened at Cine-Excess on April 29.
Nippon Connection is now firmly established as the biggest festival of Japanese cinema held annually outside of Japan, and 2010 marked the 10th anniversary of the event with a diverse programme that ranged from major studio releases to independent films and digital video productions; the line-up included Toshiaki Toyoda’s psychedelic jidaigekiThe Blood of Rebirth (2009) and Shûichi Okita’s warmly received documentary The Chef of South Polar (2009), while Momoko Ando’s Kakera: A Piece of Our Life (2009) maintained its festival profile en route to potential crossover success. Appropriately enough for a festival in its 10th year, the Nippon Retro strand revisited some of the highlights of the past nine years, such as Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls (2002), Shinya Tsukamoto’s Vital (2004) and Michael Arias’s Tekkon Kinkreet (2006). Festivities were sadly undermined by the eruption of a certain Icelandic volcano, although the variety of films and other events (workshops devoted to voicing animé and shiatsu massage, lectures about Japanese television drama and Haruki Murakami’s latest literary opus), not to mention the generous hospitality of the Nippon Connection team, meant that few were particularly concerned about their flight arrangements until the festival was winding down. Hopefully, some of the following films will make the move from the festival circuit to general release in the next 12 months.
A Big Gun (Hajime Ohata, 2008)
When their ironworks is threatened with closure due to a lack of clients, the owner and his brother accept a proposition from a local gangster: to manufacture 10 copies of a revolver and to deliver the weapons by a strict deadline. When they are then expected to make more guns despite not receiving payment, they take matters into their own hands. For the most part, A Big Gun is a sparse, intense examination of the financial difficulties facing businesses in small communities, and the desperate measures that some resort to in order to stay afloat, although the realism is somewhat undermined by a climactic lurch into ‘splatter film’ territory. A Big Gun was programmed alongside the altogether less focused Schneider (Yusuke Koroyasu, 2009), which explores how tensions in a small town community are accelerated when the owner of a restaurant goes missing. Schneider also features some shocking violence in its third act, and once again questions the effectiveness of law enforcement in rural areas.
Crows Zero II (Takashi Miike, 2009) Crows Zero focused on a cast of teenage thugs whose ability to miraculously heal from even the most savage beating made it inevitable that they would all be back for a sequel that would up the ante in the brutality stakes. Genji (Shun Oguri) is now the top dog at Suzuran High School, but he has yet to fully unite all the factions, and must now face challenges from outside the institution. Takashi Miike delivers a testosterone-fuelled, youth-orientated action movie, which fully subscribes to the rule that sequels must be bigger, longer and louder – but not necessarily better – than their predecessors. With one particular fight sequence running for 27 minutes, there is little time for character development, and nominal hero Genji only manages three scenes with his love interest, the club singer played by Meisa Kuroki, between hyper-kinetic punch-ups and the navigation of plot machinations, which may not be entirely clear to those not familiar with the original manga.
Island of Dreams (Tetsuichiro Tsuta, 2008)
A young man works on Dream Island, an artificial wasteland in Tokyo made entirely of trash, and becomes a terrorist bomber. A police detective is assigned the task of tracking him down, and struggles to grasp the motivations for his crimes. Clearly influenced by the thrillers that Seijun Suzuki churned out in an almost unbelievably prolific manner in the 1960s, Island of Dreams is a rare Pia film that works as a genre exercise rather than as a social statement. The police procedural dialogue is leaden, and this is yet another thriller where the detective cracks the case by using Google and proceeds to provide exposition by reading from his laptop screen, but Island of Dreams excels when it is on the move; a foot chase through crowded city streets that takes in an underground club and the climactic race against time are both superbly handled.
Kaiji (Toya Sato, 2009)
Kaiji is a noncommittal job-hopper who lives month-to-month with little concern for his long-term financial security. When he suddenly finds himself burdened with a debt of two million yen due to the non-payment of a loan that he casually co-signed for a friend, Kaiji is forced to play a high-risk game onboard a cruise ship to try and clear it. It’s an ingenious premise, one that recalls the sinister escapism of David Fincher circa The Game (1997) and comments on current economic conditions in recession-hit countries where people are paying the price for taking out ‘easy’ credit. Unfortunately, Kaiji is undermined by an irritating central performance by Tatsuya Fujiwara, which makes the titular protagonist pathetic rather than emphatic, while Yuki Amani is merely window-dressing as the initially icy, ultimately sympathetic credit collector. An over-reliance on fast edits and swirling camera movements makes Kaiji an unfortunate case of a neat idea undermined by erratic execution.
Miyoko
Miyoko (Yoshifumi Tsubota, 2009)
Shinichi Abe became a well-known manga artist in the early 1970s due to his stories in Garo magazine, expressionistic portraits of doomed relationships that mirrored his own partnership with Miyoko, his regular model and later girlfriend and wife. This quasi-biopic of Abe represents the continuation of two trends in Japanese cinema: films about artists, either real or fictionalised, and films about long-suffering wives who stay with men who leave them unfulfilled. Miyoko moves at the same measured pace as Takeshi Kitano’s superficially similar Achilles and the Tortoise (2008), but is more lurid in tone and, by the time that Abe has acknowledged his schizophrenia, the audience probably feels as far removed from him as his strangely devoted spouse. The hermetically sealed world of Miyoko may not be particularly easy to engage with, but the film effectively blurs the real with the imagined as comic book panels fade in and out and the dual identities of Abe and Miyoko are emphasised through graphic re-enactments of the narratives that were published in Garo.
Oh, My Buddha! (Tomorowo Taguchi, 2008)
Jun is a first-year student at an all-boys Buddhist high school, who is more interested in listening to Bob Dylan and writing songs than he is in studying. He travels with two friends to the island of ‘free love’ for his summer vacation, hoping to lose his virginity, but things do not quite go to plan, and on his return to school he still struggles to break free of his middle-class constraints. Tomorowo Taguchi’s second feature is ostensibly a teen sex comedy, but Oh, My Buddha! is actually a much more culturally acute coming-of-age movie, mainly due to its copious references to pop culture; there are comparisons to Dylan ‘going electric’ as Jun listens backstage as a raucous rock ‘n’ roll group excite the crowd gathered in the high school gym, and realises that his heartfelt folk songs need more of an edge if he is going to compete. It is not clear whether the title refers to the three men who mentor Jun at various stages (his hippie tutor, the proprietor of the youth hostel, his father) or the counter-culture figure of Dylan that he worships, but Oh, My Buddha! is a genuine crowd-pleaser that blends brisk pacing with warm nostalgia.
One Million Yen Girl (Yuki Tanada, 2008)
Lightweight but likable, One Million Yen Girl finds writer-director Yuki Tanada following previous festival successes Moon and Cherry (2004) and Ain’t No Tomorrows (2008) with the story of Suzuko, a 21-year-old who moves from town to town, trying to conceal the fact that she has served a short jail sentence for a minor offence. Suzuko lives and works in each town until she has saved up one million yen (the amount needed for rent, deposit and fees in her next temporary home), and tries to avoid forming attachments to those she encounters. The irony of One Million Yen Girl is that, for all her moving around, Suzuko finds much the same experience in each town; a mundane job, the discovery of some ‘hidden’ talent, and a potential boyfriend. Tanada’s humour is mostly of an observational nature, although there is a hysterical scene in which a town council demands that Suzuko become their ‘peach girl’ and represent the community in an advertising campaign. Yû Aoi is almost defiantly low-key in the title role, building on her turn as a pizza-girl-turned-recluse in Bong Joon-ho’s segment of Tokyo (2008), and convincingly conveying the burden of a young woman who feels that she has brought shame to her immediate family.
Toad’s Oil (Kôji Yakusho, 2009)
Kôji Yakusho directs himself as Takuro, a private trader who takes great delight in earning – and even in losing – vast sums of money on the stock exchange, but has become somewhat disconnected from his family. When his son Takuya falls into a coma due to a collision with a van, Takuro learns about his offspring’s life through the history in his mobile phone. Making contact with his son’s girlfriend, Takuro keeps the youthful romance alive through a series of conversations and deceptions. Just as the film seems to be playing as an extended advert for the benefits of cellular technology, Toad’s Oil embarks on a wayward road trip when Takuya passes away and Takuro and his son’s best friend Saburo make the journey to Mount Fear to lay his remains to rest. There is a great running joke about the amount of money that Takuro pays in taxes, and the patriarch’s encounter with a black bear is also fitfully amusing. The more contemplative moments do cause pacing problems, but Toad’s Oil is a heartfelt directorial debut that offers some rich insight into Japanese familial life amid the occasional indulgences.
Zero Focus (Isshin Inudo, 2009)
In 1957, the naïve Teiko (Ryoko Hirosue) enters into an arranged marriage with Kenichi, a Tokyo-based employee of an advertising agency. Seven days after their wedding, Kenichi takes a business trip to Kanazawa, his previous posting, but when he does not return, Teiko becomes suspicious and launches her own investigation. Upon arrival in Kanazawa, Teiko encounters two other women who may hold the key to her husband’s disappearance; Sachiko (Miki Nakatani), the socially prominent supporter of a female candidate for the role of mayor, and Hisako (Tae Kimura), a company receptionist who was appointed despite lacking the required qualifications. It is debatable as to whether this second adaptation of Seicho Matsumoto’s novel (following the 1969 film by Yoshitaro Nomura) is entirely necessary, although this latest cinematic incarnation of Zero Focus is impeccably crafted; the story may deal with a particular period in Japanese history, but its cinematic reference points are Douglas Sirk and Hollywood dramas aimed at a largely female audience. The lead actresses are uniformly excellent, with Nakatani offering a chilling portrait of rural royalty and Hirosue subtly conveying Teiko’s shift from optimism to disillusionment.
On the Isle of Sheppey, birdwatcher Roy (Alex Macqueen) settles into a remote hide in the hope of spotting a rare sociable plover to add to his checklist of ornithological species recorded in the British Isles. With his buttoned-down appearance, use of a pen that was given to him by his mother, and habit of talking to a photograph of his wife, Roy does not seem like someone who is well-suited to spending time with others, but he soon has company in the hide when he reluctantly takes in the mysterious Dave (Phil Campbell) during a downpour. The two men engage in awkward exchanges, which are indicative of their opposing social backgrounds, although they eventually bond over chicken paste sandwiches. However, it soon becomes apparent that his new acquaintance may not merely be a man out for a stroll without the appropriate attire, although Roy’s own behaviour is odd enough to suggest that audience loyalty should not be too readily placed.
The concept of strangers engaging in a combative, yet subtly humorous, game of psychological cat-and-mouse in an enclosed location is by no means new, but with its barely concealed class warfare, Marek Losey’s debut feature The Hide makes for a particularly British addition to a rapidly growing sub-genre. The Hide was adapted by Tim Whitnall from his own play, and the roots of this cinematic tradition could be seen to be theatrical; Wait until Dark (1967), in which an Oscar-nominated Audrey Hepburn plays a recently blinded woman who is terrorised by a trio of crooks searching for the stash of heroin that they believe to be in her apartment, originated as a 1966 play by Frederick Knott. Sleuth, Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 play, was filmed by Joseph L Mankiewicz in 1972, then again by Kenneth Branagh in 2007, and revolves around the battle of wits between an ageing mystery writer and his wife’s young lover, with their psychological duel taking place around the former’s country estate. Robert Altman’s screen version of Donald Freed and Andrew M Stone’s Secret Honour (1984) concerns one man in his office, with the man being Richard Nixon (Phillip Baker Hall) and his stream-of-consciousness monologue taking in the Watergate scandal and his subsequent resignation.
However, some formidable cinematic talents were exploring the cramped confines of restricted space before the aforementioned theatrical transfers. One of the earliest examples of the sub-genre is Alfred Hitchock’s Lifeboat (1944), which concerns the survivors of a ship torpedoed by a German U-boat, which has also been sunk by engaging in combat with their vessel. The survivors pull another man out of the water, but when he turns out to be the captain of the German U-boat, discussion turns from how the group will survive to what they should do with the enemy in their midst. In 1954, the Master of Suspense would deliver Rear Window, a classic thriller concerning a wheelchair-bound photographer (James Stewart), who spies on his neighbours out of boredom, only to come to suspect that the resident across the courtyard may have murdered his wife. The more socially conscious Sidney Lumet also weighed in with 12 Angry Men (1957), which takes place almost entirely in a jury room where 12 nameless men decide whether a teenage boy accused of murdering his father is guilty; Lumet employed telephoto lenses to enhance the sweaty atmosphere of the room as juror 8 (Henry Fonda) gradually persuades the others to reconsider their verdict.
The seemingly restrictive elements of films set in confined spaces (one location, small cast, emphasis on dialogue over action) has made the sub-genre extremely appealing to independent filmmakers working with limited resources. However, these films often break the unwritten rules of the sub-genre; James Wan’s Saw (2004) opens with two men waking up at opposite sides of a filthy bathroom, with a dead body between them, while Simon Brand’s comparatively little-seen Unknown (2006) begins with five men coming around in a locked-down warehouse with no memory of who they are or how they got there. However, Saw segues into flashbacks to show how the captive men came to be in their predicaments, while Unknown alternates between desperate escape attempts and the parallel FBI investigation. Even Quentin Tarantino’s legendary debut Reservoir Dogs (1992), which takes place in an abandoned warehouse where a gang of sharp-suited criminals have arranged to rendezvous following the heist, is interspersed with flashbacks to the ill-fated jewellery store robbery and the assembly of the crew.
Two independently financed examples of the sub-genre that do not play as fast and loose with its conventions are Vincenzo Natali’s ingenious Cube (1997) and David Slade’s gripping Hard Candy (2005). In Cube, six strangers wake up in a cubical maze and have to use their combined skills to defy a series of death traps in order to escape, with Natali offering ingenious science fiction on a bargain-basement budget by utilising the same set repeatedly and simply redressing it. Hard Candy opens with an establishing scene in a trendy coffee shop as 14-year-old Hayley (Ellen Page) meets up with charming photographer Jeff (Patrick Wilson) with whom she has corresponded on the internet, but soon relocates to Jeff’s suburban home, where his underage ‘admirer’ drugs and tortures him, convinced that he is a paedophile who uses internet chat rooms as a virtual hunting ground. Hard Candy flirts with the morally questionable ‘torture porn’ of the Saw franchise in a scene in which Hayley freezes Jeff’s body from the waist down in order to emasculate him but, as with The Hide, the film is more interested in toying with the sympathies of the audience, suggesting that Hayley may have accused the wrong man.
If the contemporary confined space films that have emerged from the independent sector have been conceived as vehicles for directors to prove their creativity, the major studio productions that have followed their lead have served as showcases for established stars, as with Rear Window and Wait until Dark in earlier eras. In Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth (2002), Colin Farrell’s slick hustler unravels due to taunts from the sniper who has him in his sights, while in 1408 (2007), John Cusack’s cynical writer spends a night in a ‘haunted’ room at a New York hotel, encountering some instances of paranormal activity before descending into madness as the décor of the room comes to reflect the demons within his own psyche. Both stars acquit themselves admirably, although the studio trappings of Phone Booth and 1408 entail that the audience never has any doubt that the trapped protagonist of either film will not fail to find a way out of their respective predicament.
As indicated, films that take place in a confined space usually find increasingly frayed tempers resulting in irrational action, with John Hughes’s high school detention drama The Breakfast Club (1985) and Kevin Smith’s convenience store comedy Clerks (1994) standing out as rare humorous entries in a sub-genre that is better exemplified by the almost unbearable claustrophobia of Wolfgang Petersen’s submarine classic Das Boot (1981), which dives ‘down below’ with the crew of a German U-boat during World War II. It is also a sub-genre that, in contrast to most other forms of cinematic escapism, is becoming logistically smaller as opposed to bigger; 2010 will also see the release of Buried, in which Ryan Reynolds wakes up to find that he has been buried alive inside a coffin with only a cell phone and a lighter to assist him. Although this thriller by Rodrigo Cortés sounds like the finale of George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988) stretched to 90 minutes, it does at least promise to add a political dimension to the sub-genre in that the trapped character is an American contractor working in Iraq. The Hide also offers some social-political commentary, with Roy’s discussion of his redundancy and how it has soured his marriage, but it works primarily as a taut, low-key thriller that utilises the confined space of its titular location – not to mention the sparsely atmospheric sounds of the moor on which it is situated – to unsettling effect.
Dearest Cineastes of the Celluloid Ecumenical Order that is Electric Sheep:
I launch this colonial report on the art of cinema from the northern-most tip of the Bruce Peninsula in the Dominion of Canada above the 49th Parallel. Since landing on these remote shores of the Niagara Escarpment, I have borne witness to a wide array of fine cinema in addition to the flora and fauna of this magnificent UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. I am touched by the spirits of my long-dead Brethren of the Holiest of Orders when they, with their Black Robes and Rosaries, first traversed this grand Peninsula and penned their anthropological tomes oft-referred to as The Jesuit Relations.
With one road in and one road out, it is here, where a thin layer of soil allows some of the oldest trees to rest atop rock formations chiselled by the Great Spirit during the last Ice Age, that I can peacefully experience all that cinema has to offer. Like my Jesuit brethren, my flesh and soul will be pierced – not by implements of aboriginal torture, but rather through the feats of technology that deliver a means of experiencing cinema of the highest and lowest order. Nailing my feet to the floor of my rustic cabin, I attempt, for the umpteenth time, to sit through Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó as white-tailed deer feed upon lichen and moss affixed to boulders; magnificent orbs dotting the terrain like fossilised pellets expunged by the prehistoric Lepus americanus.
And just as the Jesuits experienced the wrenching pain of flagellation, I too alternately experience the Heavenly heights of pure orgasmic pleasure when at dusk, with the newly re-mastered Blu-ray of North by Northwest cued up, I notice a bulky figure on hind legs dining greedily from the bird-feeding trough. Hungry blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) fret needlessly as their convenient source of nourishment is snorted back. ‘Fear not, little ones,’ I call out, ‘The delectable treats will be replaced by morning and the noble Ursus americanus will retreat into the forest and out of the gun-sights of the locals (Hosers bobus dougus mackenzieus Canadianus) who, ensconced within the venerable Royal Canadian Legion Hall, prepare for the Great Hunt over a breakfast of rye shooters and Molson Canadian beer chasers’.
A strange brew, indeed!
Aptly, I pen my exploration of cinema from the village of Tobermory, a hamlet in Upper Canada that was named by its Irish, Scottish and British pioneers after the town in the Hebrides where Powell and Pressburger’s film classic I Know Where I’m Going was set. Coincidentally, the colonial namesake played host to the North American premiere of the aforementioned picture in the late 1940s wherein hundreds of peninsula denizens journeyed via ox-cart to celebrate the picture’s entry into our Dominion above the 49th Parallel.
When I first happened upon this Garden of Eden during one of its six weeks of summer, throngs of vacationers bloated the population of 300 to 30,000. Due to the overwhelming number of churches on the Peninsula, I had automatically assumed this was a pious community, but an overwhelming joy enveloped me when a sign hanging from a local business caught my eye as a beacon of unimagined permissiveness – ‘GS Watersports’. With salacious elation, I was most familiar with ‘GS’, an acronym for ‘golden showers’ and ‘watersports’, also in the quaint parlance of avid fetishists at such délicieux newsgroup cyber-hideaways as ‘alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.sex.fetishes.golden_showers’.
I approached a seemingly friendly and comely young lass at a souvenir and ice cream stand on the sidewalk near ‘GS’, pointed to the sign and queried her regarding the village’s spécialité de la perversion. She curtly informed me that Tobermory is – due to clear water, unfathomable depths, ancient rock formations and hundreds of shipwrecks – one of North America’s most sought-after scuba diving locales. I furthermore asked her why transport companies in the early days of the colonies used the tip of this deadly peninsula as a key port. Alas, a horrendously porcine American family who wished to order triple scoops of frozen dairy product interrupted her and she was unable to provide an answer. The question regarding so many ships going down in an obvious death trap is a mystery to me, but current residents seem grateful to the long-ago-drowned and rather boneheaded seamen, whose sacrifices provide locals a livelihood beyond hunting, trapping, fishing, fucking and boozing.
The joys of cinema and nature are ever so boundless on these far Commonwealth shores. As I write these words of welcome to this regular column for Electric Sheep, I prepare to view a magnificent new Criterion Collection DVD entitled The Golden Age of Television and look forward to providing you next month with a personal history of American anthology television and a detailed review of the above mentioned masterwork of home entertainment – small screen gems worthy of a large screen.
And this then, dear readers, is how I plan to explore the world of cinema from these colonies. Armed with Blu-ray, DVD and laserdisc players, a battery of remote controls, my trusty laptop, a strong satellite wifi signal courtesy of the Canadian Coast Guard, a roaring fire in my stove, a Baikal semi-automatic shotgun on my lap and picture-window views to remind myself of the flora and fauna when I briefly avert my eyes from the high definition screen, I hope Рin this quiet paradise of our fine Dominion Рto illuminate, inform, tantalise, engage and perhaps, to entertain you in the wonder of what was, over one hundred years ago, wrought by the immortal Brothers Lumi̬re Рwhen moving images first passed through light, and magic appeared, as it always should, larger than life itself.
The story of Krzysztof Komeda provides a very good argument for US health reform. While in the States at the end of the 60s to compose the music for Rosemary’s Baby, the Polish jazz pianist sustained severe head injuries in a random accident. Lacking any health insurance, he was unable to get treatment and immediately put on a plane back to Poland. He died shortly afterwards without regaining consciousness. He had been one of Poland’s most celebrated jazz musicians, and the first to start a modern jazz group in Poland. His distinctive style was characterised by a mix of the cool school of Gerry Mulligan and the Modern Jazz Quartet, mixed with the bebop he’d witnessed at tiny jam sessions in a basement in Krakow. Under the influence of his years spent composing film scores, his 1965 album, ‘Astigmatic’, was noted for its unique approach to structure, and came to signal a whole new European influence on the development of jazz.
Markedly different from the Wagnerian approach of most Hollywood composers at the time, notably in the way it attaches leitmotifs to specific characters or themes and so on, Komeda’s music for Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962) acts more like punctuation, breaking up the tension of the dialogue scenes almost theatrically. But, as Steven Shaviro has commented, the most noteworthy thing about what he calls the ‘scansion’ of the soundtrack is its frequent recourse to silence. Tension is built up, not by the hysterical maximalism of Bernard Herrmann, but through gaps and absences. It is the horror of reading a crucial life-or-death document, partially blacked out by the censor’s pen. At what we might consider the dramatic climax of the film there are no swirling crescendos of discordant strings, no pounding brass or crashing cymbals, just a wandering bassline, circling, seemingly aimlessly, around some indistinct tonality, never quite resolving itself, or finding its home.
On Sunday 28 March, as the clocks sprung forward and the hangovers kicked in after a raucous night of plasticine revelry, some brave souls dragged themselves out of bed for Puppetoons: a celebration of Georges Pal’s puppet marvels from the 1930s and 40s. Pal’s charming stop-motion techniques were spotted by the electronics company Philips, who were looking for an offbeat way to promote their radio sets and decided to commission a series of commercials. The resulting films – imagine the woodentops sashaying to jazzy trumpets and Latin American rhythms – provided a lovely Sunday wake-up call. The programme also presented some of Pal’s work from the 1940s, which saw his retreat from war-torn Europe to the world of Paramount Pictures in America.
Read about the short films shown at Flatpack 2010.
His best-known film, Tubby the Tuba (1947), which tells the tale of a ruddy-faced and ostracised tuba trying to find his way among a group of sneering, snooty orchestral instruments, screened alongside Pal’s most controversial character, the racially stereotypical Jasper. Following Jasper’s in a Jam (1946), which featured a smoldering Peggy Lee number, came John Henry and the Inky-Poo (1946) – Pal’s attempt to re-balance the racial stereotyping found in his Jasper series. Indeed, at the time, the African American magazine, Ebony, praised the latter as ‘that rarest of Hollywood products that has no Negro stereotypes, but rather treats the Negro with dignity, imagination, poetry, and love’. Personally, I did not find too many positives in a tale focusing on a worker’s struggle and death on the railroad (!) but the animation and beautiful soundtrack (this time supplied by the powerful Luvenia Nash Singers) once again supplied a visual treat. The final film in the programme was Tulips Shall Grow (1942) – a tale of a smitten and be-clogged Dutch couple and their windmill, which is suddenly besieged by The Screwballs, an army of malevolent nuts and bolts. An allegory for the Nazi invasion of Europe, the film was in some ways a sentimental fairy tale, but it was also incredibly touching as the couple were eventually re-united, their windmill came back to life and tulips grew back among the fields. Knowing that Pal himself fled Europe during World War II made the subject matter doubly affecting. Puppetoons provided a great and rare opportunity to see the work of an immensely talented animator and one who, for various reasons, provided a lot of political food for thought.
Lali Puna have been offering an irresistibly lovely, off-kilter take on electronic pop music for well over a decade. Combining glitchy electronica with guitar pop the band create gorgeous pop songs, held together by Valerie Trebeljahr’s airy vocals and The Notwist’s Markus Acher’s rhythmic guitar. Hailing from Weilheim in Germany, the band have been a staple of Berlin’s Morr Music roster, with intelligence and invention being at the forefront of their musical output. Their new album ‘Our Inventions’ is out now. For more information, go to the Lali Puna webiste. Below, they tell us about their favourite films. LUCY HURST
Valerie
1. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
A girl’s film, I know: love story, Audrey Hepburn, happy ending. I know. But it is my favourite film. It’s heartbreaking when Hepburn sings ‘Moon River’ on the stairs and when it rains in the end. The 60s were such a great decade!
2. Princess Mononoke & Spirited Away (1997 + 2001)
I love Studio Ghibli, it began with a Totoro figure that I bought in a museum without knowing anything about it. When I found out where it came from I tried to get as much information as I could about director Hayao Miyazaki. I can’t decide which is my favourite out of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. They are both very impressive with gorgeous images and strange stories. They’re best seen in the cinema, I saw Mononoke in a tiny cinema and one part was missing – but even then it was good.
3. Lilo & Stitch (2002)
Sequels and series are usually really bad but Lilo & Stitch: The Movie captured my heart from the beginning. The story sees a little girl adopting a small blue alien monster (Experiment 626) from dog pound. Monster Stitch was programmed to destroy but in Hawaii there’s not much to destroy. I usually hate all the newer Walt Disney films from the start after seeing the posters, but Lilo & Stitch is really different.
4. Full Metal Village (2007)
This documentary examines a small town in northern Germany, Wacken, home of one of the biggest heavy metal festivals – the Wacken Open Air. It is about the locals (a farmer, a young girl, some old women and one former festival organiser) dealing with the festival and its fans. It shows how the locals and the metal fans get along and even harmonise. The film gets a special note because it’s directed by a Korean woman, who has created a sort of Heimatfilm.
5. Fargo (1996)
I don’t just watch romantic and animated films all the time… There is a place for science fiction and heavy dramas too as well as dark comedy such as Fargo. It is great to see Frances McDormand as a pregnant sheriff and William H Macy as a salesman who thinks he’s in control but everything just gets worse and worse and worse. Great dry sense of humour.
Markus:
6. Badlands (1973)
Hypnotic and minimal, Badlands is a very quiet and very violent movie with intense colours, American landscapes and Carl Orff. A nightmare but very beautiful…
7. Stroszek (1977)
Bruno S is a very impressive character. One will never forget him after seeing this movie.
8. The Apartment (1960)
I don’t like romantic comedies at all. Maybe that’s why I like this movie so much.
9. Yi Yi (2000) Yi Yi tells the story of a family. It’s very long, so at first, it might seem to be very boring, but actually it’s one of the most absorbing and haunting movies I know. I just wish it would be possible to see more films by Edward Yang.
10. Jan Švankmajer – Every movie Švankmajer is a surrealist animator from Prague. He made all sorts of films, long and short, and in a way these are all parts of one story. Aside from the incredible artistry and fantastic visual experience, they also have great original music.
The relationship between film and video games is a tricky one; while their quality is often questionable, the amount of games that have been transposed into a movie and, on the flipside, the number of games that have been based on film franchises indicates that there undoubtedly a strong bond between the two. With the February release of Sony and Quantic Dreams’ Heavy Rain, exclusively on the PlayStation 3, the cross-pollination of the two formats has moved ever closer.
When Heavy Rain was unveiled at the Leipzig Games Convention in 2008 (yep, it’s taken longer than a film to be realised) it was pitched as a game that was taking brave new steps in the industry, both in content – by offering an adult thriller with a complex plot – and in gameplay – the player shapes the story by making the kind of choices that decide how it will unfold. While cinematic in nature, on a basic level it’s more akin to those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books that were so popular in the 1980s-90s.
The game wears its film pretensions on its sleeve. It is a modern noir thriller that takes its inspiration from the likes of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Se7en (1995), Zodiac (2007) and the original Saw (2004). You play four characters who are all trying to decipher the identity of a serial child killer called the Origami Killer, so named because they leave an origami animal at the scene of the crime: there’s Ethan Mars, whose child has been kidnapped by the Origami Killer and so must go through a series of violent trials in order to find out where his son is being held; there’s Madison Paige, a journalist on the hunt for a good story, who befriends Ethan; Norman Jayden is a drug-addled FBI agent on the killer’s trail; and finally there’s Scott Shelby, a private eye who has his own reasons for retracing the killer’s steps. So far, so clichéd…
OK, so the characters are archetypes, but they grow on you as the game’s compelling narrative and unique story structure develops. The player takes control of each character in a series of vignettes that range from the mundane – taking a shower – to the more violent – cutting off a finger. The player is presented with various options, both in how to act and in what to say, and these trigger how the story develops – make a wrong decision and this can lead to the death of a character, who then will play no part in the rest of the story. Although the identity of the killer always remains the same, there are multiple story threads and finales that can ensue.
To coincide with the launch of Heavy Rain, Neil LaBute made a short documentary, How Far Would You Go?, in which he asked the likes of Nic Roeg, Hanif Kureishi, Samuel L Jackson and Stephen Frears, ‘How far would you go to save someone you love?’ The documentary can be dowloaded for free on the Heavy Rain website.
Heavy Rain is far from a traditional game, but to call it an ‘interactive movie’ is not quite accurate either. It’s certainly immersive, like many other games, but where it is at its best is in affecting the player on an emotional level and to a degree that has not really been done before. In that sense, it is closer to a movie than a game.
The best films engage, challenge, provoke, entertain and often move the viewer, rewarding them for investing in both the story and/or the characters. Games can do this too, with the added appeal of being interactive – although admittedly games predominantly focus on the challenge and entertainment elements above the emotive or provocative. Few games manage to match the capacity of film to deliver on the above attributes: The Godfather or Scarface games, for instance, are evocative of their source material but fail to deliver the emotional gravitas of the films, providing a visceral and action-orientated experience instead.
On this level, Heavy Rain works very well, with the gameplay, narrative and evocative music making it akin to taking part in a dark thriller film; the major difference being that here the viewer is also the narrative’s main protagonists, developing the story as they go. Playing the game, you do feel connected to the characters and having invested in their emotional development you then care what happens to them (often fearing for their safety).
The game is far from perfect, and actually works better as a viewing experience than a playing one (perhaps unsurprisingly it has already been optioned for a film), but as a template for how an interactive format can work beyond the often formulaic structure of video games, Heavy Rain is ground-breaking. As the game’s creator, David Cage, told the Guardian website on release: ‘I strongly believe that interactivity has the potential to become an art, it is just a matter of time.’ If Heavy Rain is an example of things to come, then gamers could be in for a thrilling ride.
Toby Weidmann
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
