Still from Chappaqua

Showing as part of Flipside’s psychedelia double bill with The Trip

Date: 21 June 2008

Venue: BFI Southbank, London

Flipside on MySpace

The now well-established Flipside, the cult slot programmed by BFI archivists Vic Pratt and William Fowler at the Southbank, was introduced last year as part of the institute’s efforts to revitalise its programming and revamp its image. With an increasing number of nights catering for the current appetite for B-movies and exploitation cinema, Pratt and Fowler’s approach remains one of the most open and interesting, mixing films that have traditionally been considered either ‘art’ or ‘trash’. ‘There is a tendency to say a film is either good or bad’, says Pratt. ‘The good films we can show again and again, the rubbish we discard in the dustbin. But when you think what the odds are of making a perfect film, or even just a tolerable one, that’s quite a small percentage. And if you’re going to write off everything that was made that wasn’t a great masterpiece, that’s a lot of cinema. You’ve got to be free to fail. And you’ve got to show the work of people who’ve failed in some way but may have done something else really well.’

Their first night last February was meant to be a Joe Meek special, but that didn’t quite go according to plan: ‘It was a big night, we had a lot of press, hundreds of people had come to this, it was amazing’, says Pratt. ‘Pop bands were ringing wanting to DJ at the night, we were like, wow, we might have done something quite cool!’ (laughs) ‘But then there was a massive power cut, all the lights went out, and everyone was just milling around outside, looking glum and cold, and we all had to go home. Apparently this may have been the Joe Meek curse. There’s a legend that everything associated with Joe Meek is cursed and if you try and do anything relating to him, it’ll go wrong, and sure enough…’

Since then, though, things have gone more smoothly for Pratt and Fowler and in the last eighteen months they’ve presented programmes ranging from Rupert the Bear and Tintin to Tod Browning and weird Westerns. The June night will be a full-on psychedelic extravaganza, including Roger Corman’s legendary The Trip as well as some mind-bending experimental shorts by Bruce Conner and Larry Jordan. The centrepiece of the night, however, is the rarely screened Chappaqua, which, although it stars such 1960s luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Moondog, The Fugs and Ravi Shankar, has remained little known. ‘Chappaqua is pretty much an autobiographical film’, says Fowler. ‘It’s about Conrad Rooks, who wrote and directed it, being addicted to alcohol and drugs and going to this strange treatment centre where William Burroughs works, to get off the drugs’. (laughs) ‘And you think at that time, with all the people involved, it would just be, “drugs are great”, but it’s a kind of cross between drugs as a revelatory experience with visions of Native Americans in the desert and Rooks being a bit of a mess. For 1966, it’s quite refreshing. And it looks really gorgeous’.

The next few months’ programmes are still under wraps at the time of writing, so here’s to looking forward to whatever wonderful B-side gems Pratt and Fowler will unearth in their gleeful rummaging through the BFI’s basement.

Virginie Sélavy

Event: Midnight Movies launch night

Date: 29 February 2008

Location: Curzon Soho

Showing: Society (1989)

A midnight movie is not just a film shown at midnight. Bridget Jones’ Diary shown at midnight would not be a midnight movie. Neither would a midnight screening of Time Regained – not unless the crowd were told to speak in French and to bash a teaspoon against a teacup when a compere gave the cue.

From its origins in 1950s America, the midnight movie slot has always been given over to low-budget, horror and trash. Top scores if the film is all three. Rather like the graveyard shift on radio, the midnight movie slot is meant for the niche or risqué stuff admired by nighthawks, insomniacs and the downright crazy.

The midnight movie concept was dead by the mid-80s. Until then late-night movie-goers had been able to feast on the horrors and delights of films such as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo and John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, going back time and time again for more. But things changed when the big studios saw the midnight screenings as an effective marketing tool and tried to reverse the bottom-up creation of cult films by releasing their movies at midnight in the hope of attracting an audience as loyal as the fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, for example.

Rocky is perhaps the most famous and persistent example of the midnight movie, its fans still meeting at cinemas the world over to watch a midnight screening and act out scenes from the film. Their crude and irreverent heckling of the characters in the film often reaches anarchic proportions and, as any visitor to a Rocky event can tell you, makes for a damn good night.

It is this spirit of fun and spontaneity that inspired the folk at Curzon Soho to bring back the midnight movie. But rather than show just the old classics, the events team hope to screen all kinds of films that reflect the spirit of the midnight movie. ‘We wanted to put on a night that people wandering around Soho after a few drinks could come to and enjoy. The first two screenings are of US films but we want to move away from just that and start showing European films, for example, which still have that gritty, grimy feel to them’, said Simon Howarth of Curzon.

Their first offering, Society, hit the right spot. Gory, dark and camp in equal measure, the film’s 1980s styling and casting of Baywatch goodie-goodie Billy Warlock lend it an added veneer of trash. By most people’s standards it is not a good movie and at any other screening could be justifiedly panned. But it is just right for the midnight slot, which turns its shortcomings into merits.

As a prelude to the screening the Curzon’s main bar area was given over to a party complete with free beer (well, one free beer per head) and hosts and hostesses dressed up like zombies. The dark 80s tunes, such as the theme from Twin Peaks, provided a suitable soundtrack to the revelling of cinema-goers who had been able to leisurely make their way to the Curzon and who were enjoying meeting and greeting other midnight film buffs.

With bums on cinema seats, author of The Cult Film Reader and director of the Cult Film Archive Xavier Mendik introduced the screening, explaining how Society showed the ruptures in the Reaganesque Conservatism of the 1980s in the US. It was interesting and informed but it was not quite the right time for that kind of talk. The crowd was loose and ready to heckle. They were obviously discerning film fans, and would have been interested in what Xavier had to say if it had been earlier that day or when the hangover subsided the next. But having him speak then was a bit like casting Laurence Olivier in a Carry On film. There were a few guilt-riddled heckles and some whoops and cheers but a quirkier, cheekier kind of compere would have been better suited to the mood of the audience. Statuesque and matronesque glamster Dolly Rocket of the Flash Monkey burlesque club came to mind as an ideal candidate. Or Vampira.

But compere queries aside, the return of Midnight Movies captured the spirit of the original phenomenon. It has obviously struck a chord with Londoners who were so eager to reserve for the next event (a screening of the Grindhouse Double Bill in its full glory) that an extra screening has been announced. Now we just have to sit back and wait for Odeon and Cineworld to announce that they are doing the same.

Lisa Williams

As the Bird’s Eye View Film Festival reminds us every year, there is still only a ridiculously small proportion of female directors working in the film industry. But while filmmaking remains a male-dominated world, there have been numerous opportunities within the movies themselves for women to get even. In a list where exploitation meets feminism, we look at ten of the sassiest, sexiest, baddest girls in the history of cinema.

1- Irma Vep (Les Vampires, 1915)
Played by Mademoiselle Musidora, Irma Vep was the first film villainess to don a catsuit to commit her dastardly deeds. Part of a gang of thieves and murderers called Les Vampires (her name is an anagram), she is indeed one of the original vampy heroines of cinema in more ways than one. Her carnal curves molded by an almost indecent, slightly see-through black fabric (latex was still decades away from being invented), a mask hiding all but her eyes adding to the kinkiness of the whole outfit, she prowls the rooftops of Paris like the repressed desires of the corseted middle-class incarnated. She is the bourgeoisie’s most scandalous and delicious nightmare, both the temptress that no man can resist, and the low-class criminal who threatens the social order.

2- Lulu (Pandora’s Box, 1929)
What makes Pandora’s Box truly exceptional is the union of Louise Brooks’ unique beauty, fiercely independent spirit and devil-may-care attitude with the character of Lulu, the childlike femme fatale, the guileless siren who causes ruin and death around her simply for following her desires. In Georg W. Pabst’s brilliantly ambiguous film, Lulu’s free spirit is punished at the end in a remarkable encounter with the ultimate woman-hater, Jack the Ripper. She remains, however, the subversive primitive force that cannot be controlled by social rules, and whose ability to live in absolute freedom can only cause chaos and disorder.

3- Gilda (Gilda, 1946)
The femme fatale of film noir is a feverish, paranoid creation that sprang up from post-WWII male unease. Beautiful but treacherous, calculating and selfish, she irresistibly drives men to self-destruction, using her charms to get what she wants. Too threatening for the male ego, she is brutally punished – often by death – for her provocative freedom and confident manner. But while male anxiety demanded the destruction of the femme fatale, it also magnified her power, creating some magnificent, unforgettable female characters. In Gilda, the ex-lover Johnny Farrell and the new husband Ballin Mundson do all they can to reign in Gilda’s devastating sensuality. Both uncomfortable about her dangerous allure and her free ways, they take refuge in what can only be described as a homoerotic friendship. But no matter how controlling Mundson is or how much Johnny denigrates her as sluttish, Gilda, played by a sublime Rita Hayworth, remains irrepressible, and the famous scene of the glove strip-tease only shows off the two men’s impotence. Treated as the ultimate object of desire, the femme fatale‘s only weapon is sex, and she doesn’t hesitate to wield it for power, doing what she must to survive in a man’s world.

4- Varla (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! 1965)
‘Russ Meyer’s ode to the violence in women’, proclaims the subtitle, and never before had audiences seen a female character beat the crap out of preppy idiots and dodgy cowboys with such spunk and vigour. Tura Satana cuts a formidable figure as the spectacularly bosomed, raven-haired, black-clad and thoroughly evil-looking vixen who can kill with her bare hands. The film may be labelled ‘exploitation’, but this is as much about female fantasies as male ones. Satana’s spectacular cleavage is no sign of availability and she is more likely to use brute force than charm to get what she wants. There had been dangerous females in cinema before but until this women had never been able to compete with a man in hand-to-hand combat (although Attack of the 50 Foot Woman introduced the idea, the ‘attack’ only takes up a short section of the movie and is explained as the result of a freak accident involving aliens). That’s why the fact that Satana is so physically powerful is insanely exhilarating to female audiences, used to seeing women depicted as weak, as well as encumbered by dresses, long nails and high heels for so long. Some may see this as a simplistic reversal of roles, but as the mainstream cinema of the time favoured frail, painfully thin actresses (Mia Farrow being the most glaring example) who looked ready to be slapped around and victimised at the first opportunity, and as this trend would only get worse in the following decade (see almost any film by Sam Peckinpah, Clint Eastwood, etc), the kind of primitive retribution that Satana metes out to men is all the more satisfying.

5- Otsuya (Irezumi, 1966))
Although there is an undeniable ambivalence on the part of Yasuzo Masumura towards his female characters, they are always the most individualistic, unconstrained and alive figures in his films. They are the ones most likely to rebel against society and challenge its oppressive rules and traditions. Otsuya, the young girl sold into prostitution who becomes a fearsome geisha after an artist tattoes a spider on her back, is one of Masumura’s most stunning creations. A complex, captivating character, she is a cruel, selfish, manipulative, murderous man-eater as well as a strong, independent woman who lives by her own rules.

6- Bonnie Parker (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967)
Bonnie and Clyde may have been inspired by the French new wave, but while Godard & co.’s women were often whiny, silly, misogynistic creations, Arthur Penn dreamt up a true action woman capable of wielding a gun with her chic beret still perfectly in place. Bonnie is not simply Clyde’s sidekick but is a true outlaw in her own right, fully and fearlessly embracing crime. What’s more, Bonnie is an unusual female character for the period in that she is the sexually confident, experienced one in the relationship, while Clyde, bold and gutsy as the gang leader, is nervous and uneasy whenever it comes to sexual intimacy.

7- Sasori (Female Convict Scorpion, 1972-73)
In the late 60s, Japanese cinema developed a taste for vicious female yakuzas and delinquent gang leaders. The mixture of violence and nudity was meant to boost a declining audience, but as in the case of Faster Pussycat and Foxy Brown, what was meant as exploitation cinema allowed new types of subversive female characters to appear. Of all the ‘pinky violence’ anti-heroines, the laconic Sasori (Scorpion), played by Meiko Kaji, remains the most interesting. The combination of her dark beauty and Shunya Ito’s inspired direction bring mystery and charisma to the character of a female prisoner intent on revenge against the male authority figures who have wronged her. As in Masumura’s films, the central female character is the ultimate rebel, and represents absolute freedom against the male-imposed rules of society. Meiko Kaji followed the role of Sasori with Lady Snowblood, another female avenger striking down male villains in early twentieth-century Japan. The line between female exploitation and female empowerment in ‘pinky violence’ is a fine one, and while Female Convict Scorpion and Lady Snowblood work because they contain very little nudity and focus instead on conjuring up a strong central character, other films such as Female Yakuza veer too much towards sexploitation. Reiko Ike does her energetic best in the title role to create a spirited, rebellious gambler, but the film is so crammed with gratuitous scenes of naked fighting girls that, while female audiences can appreciate the deranged excess of the film, Female Yakuza can never be a leader in the bad girls’ pack.

8- Foxy Brown (Foxy Brown, 1974)
Women had a lot of avenging to do in the 70s… In this blaxploitation classic, Pam Grier plays a woman who goes after the drug pushers responsible for the deaths of her boyfriend and her brother, inflicting an eye-popping, brutal revenge on them. Drug gangs are also the villains in Grier’s earlier film Coffy and in Cleopatra Jones (starring Tamara Dobson in the title role): the women of blaxploitation not only hit back at the evil men in power but also perform a public service by ridding the black community of the criminals that have oppressed it for too long. Just like Tura Satana, Pam Grier and the 6-foot-2 Tamara Dobson are both spectacular women and can compete with men on an immediate, primitive, physical level. These films may have been part of Hollywood’s cynical attempt to cash in on black audiences’ new-found appetite for the movies, but with the rest of the blaxploitation crop peddling ultra-sexist views (see Shaft or Superfly), films such as Foxy Brown and Coffy offered a rare empowering view of African-American women.

9- Perdita Durango (Perdita Durango, 1997)
Perdita Durango snarls and spits out menacing one-liners like she’s Tura Satana’s little sister (smaller, but certainly no less fierce). A true wildcat, she is no mere sidekick to her demonic sorcerer/criminal lover Romeo (played by Javier Bardem, sporting a pre-No Country For Old Men outrageous haircut), but is the one who suggests kidnapping a couple of hapless American teenagers with the view of torturing and killing them – for fun. Perdita and Romeo are fascinating monsters, characters of excess who know no limits and are beyond the rules and morals of conventional society. For all the comic book quality of the story, Perdita is a surprisingly rounded character, made more complex by her relationship to Romeo and by the flashbacks that reveal the hard-knock life she’s been leading. In the end, while Romeo is doomed by his superstitions and his inflexible code of honour, Perdita proves she’s a tough-skinned survivor.

10- Lee Geum-Ja (Lady Vengeance, 2005)
After completing the first two films in his revenge trilogy, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Oldboy, director Park Chan-wook decided to focus on a female character in the final instalment. Just out of prison, Lee Geum-ja is intent on revenge against the man who had her convicted of murder and ruined her life. But while revenge in Sympathy and Oldboy was complex and multilateral, with characters that came in all shades of grey, Lady Vengeance is a somewhat simplistic, black-and-white portrait of a half-angelic, half-evil figure. In fact, she is more white than black as we soon find out that she’s not even guilty of the crime of which she was convicted. Did Park Chan-wook have trouble imagining a woman who could be as radically amoral, angry and cruel as his male characters? Lady Vengeance should have been the direct successor to Female Convict Scorpion and Lady Snowblood but, disappointingly, she’s just not quite bad enough.

Virginie Sélavy

I worked as a cinema usherette for a while. One of the great things about the job was being able to observe the audience’s response to film. I would sit on my fold-down usherette’s chair, at the perfect angle to watch the audience watching the screen. One of the most striking responses occurred at a screening of Jane Campion’s The Piano. The film opens with a close-up of a girl’s face, looking out from behind her fingers, watching and shielding her gaze at the same time. Once the plot of the film is under way, it seems a throwaway image, almost incidental. But later in the film, when the husband violently acts out his revenge on his wife, I saw all the women in the audience holding their hands up over their faces in the same gesture. What was obvious was the gender division in this reaction. The men just looked, the women looked and hid. When I think of anything to do with women and film, I think of this unconscious gesture. It suggested to me that there was a distinct female way of seeing and that good female directors, like Campion, knew very well what they were doing when they exploited this.

The trouble is that The Piano came out over ten years ago. It was already the product of more than two decades of feminist experimentation in cinema. It did what very few feminist films had done before: it won acceptance in the mainstream. It won Oscars. With acceptance, however, came a full stop. The decade since has seen an emptying out of politics from popular culture, post-modern irony replacing it. The need for a critique of this and for an alternative space to accommodate an alternative way of seeing has never been more vital.

Last summer at Club Des Femmes we revisited Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames: a razor-sharp, political, edgy film, it effortlessly creates a new storytelling shape, a very female narrative shape that truly explores a democratic point of view through a communal narrative structure and an anti-heroic plot. The final section of the film sees a terrorist blow up the Twin Towers. I knew the scene was coming, I knew what it would mean to see this after September 11, and I felt the impact of watching premonition with hindsight.

Visionary art depends on freedom. With commerce dominating cinema programming we lose space for radical vision and our mass media narratives are led by consensus. There are a lot of vital fights to be waged about the position of women in film. Bird’s Eye View importantly takes on the mainstream, pointing out that women make up only 7% of film directors and 12% of screenwriters. It’s an appalling statistic. What we try to do at Club des Femmes is give space to the many women whose politics and aesthetics do not fit in the mainstream. We look for the alternative, we look for politics and dialogue and experimentation. Here is where cinema is alive. Godard suggested that ‘all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun’. It’s a cynical understanding of genre formalism that he exploits and subverts in all his work. At Club des Femmes we look for filmmakers who wield their cameras with force, because in the proper expression of vision comes liberation.

Sarah Wood

Despite being one of the most accomplished, intelligent and adventurous filmmakers to come out of Japan in recent years, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has inexplicably been ignored in this country. With the overrated Ring spawning a seemingly unquenchable thirst for anything that more or less fitted the ‘J-horror’ label, it looked like Kurosawa came to maturity just in time to ride the wave, but the subtler, deeper thrills of his films have kept him stranded on the shore. The fact that Kurosawa has worked in different genres hasn’t helped, his idiosyncratic approach to genre conventions even less so. Too oblique for the grindhouse, too creepy for the art-house, his films seem to have fallen in between audiences, penalised for being so utterly and wonderfully unclassifiable.

Having started out as a director of low-budget pink and horror flicks, Kurosawa came to the attention of Western film-goers in 1997 with the release of the astonishing Cure, a richly enigmatic serial killer story that impressed festival audiences around the world. Kurosawa’s equally masterful Pulse (Kairo, 2001) was the subject of an American remake, but this did nothing to increase his notoriety in the West. More stunningly original films followed, from the tree-centred Charisma (1999) to the lighter Bright Future (Akarui mirai, 2003) via further forays into the supernatural with Seance (Kôrei, 2000) and Doppelganger (2003); but of the director’s prolific output only Pulse and Bright Future have, to date, been released in the UK.

A true film artist, Kurosawa has created an instantly recognisable cinematic world, all greenish, watery colours and eerie sound effects, moving lights and fleeting shadows, run-down buildings and strangely empty streets, and in the midst of it all the befuddled, determined or downright mischievous presence of the great actor Kôji Yakusho, who, appearing in no less than seven of the films, serves as something of a stand-in for the director. Weaving multi-layered metaphors, elliptical narratives and beautifully textured visual and aural landscapes, Kurosawa has created captivatingly complex universes that cannot be reduced to any straightforward, single ‘meaning’. Suggesting more than they affirm, his best films deal with the unexplainable, the unsayable, the rich phenomena that lie beyond the reach of words. Some of these phenomena take the form of supernatural evil or ghosts, but while this is the main focus of this article, these concerns are certainly not the only themes that Kurosawa’s work explores.

Each film is built around a cryptic visual motif imbued with multivalent meanings: the jellyfish in Bright Future, the wheelchair in Doppelganger, the tree in Charisma and perhaps most memorably the X in Cure and the red tape in Pulse. In Cure, murder victims are found with an X slashed across their throats. But in each case the killer is a different person. Soon Inspector Takabe (played by Kôji Yakusho) comes to believe that the link between the killings may be the enigmatic Mesmer student Mamiya who is seemingly able to suggest murderous thoughts through hypnosis to whomever he encounters. Later in the film, when the X appears on the wall at the house of a psychiatrist who has been questioning Mamiya and also at a doctor’s surgery the student has visited, it chillingly and wordlessly signals that both the psychiatrist and the doctor are about to kill. It is a symbol of extraordinary force, condensing the unknowable depths of human nature into two black strokes on a wall, and leaving the question open: is Mamiya really able to manipulate apparently decent citizens into committing homicide, or does he simply reveal the dark impulses that were already present within them?

A supremely ambiguous figure, Mamiya is a potent creation whose mere presence on-screen is enough to give the viewer goose bumps. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he says to everyone he meets, answering all questions that are put to him with another question, never disclosing anything personal. Is it possible that Mamiya should be truly empty, as he claims, and that by having emptied himself of everything that made him what he was, he has become the ultimate seducer, a sheer void that reflects their own selves back to people, enabling him to exert total control over them? Whatever the answer, evil in Cure is not limited to one character but is a diffuse phenomenon, an atmosphere that pervades everyone and everything, buildings too. Mamiya’s former haunt, a grimy warehouse partitioned by plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling and filled with caged animals and books on hypnotism, exudes an unwholesome, malign air; the same atmosphere of occult malevolence pervades a derelict building that was the venue for mysterious experiments in hypnotism decades previously. Building up throughout the film, it is all this that comes to be invoked in each re-appearance of the X, the profound enigma of evil, the contagion of the malefic through the air, through invisible waves that circulate between people and places.

In Pulse, the striking – and almost mundane – visual motif is the red tape that has been placed around various doorways to seal them shut. These are ‘forbidden zones’ occupied by the spirits of the dead who have begun to invade the world of the living. Those who ignore the red tape and enter those proscribed spaces find themselves face to face with some of the ghastliest creatures ever conjured on celluloid. They are both recognisably human and yet dreadfully inhuman at the same time – one female ghost’s creepily distorted, slow-motion walk is enough to scare one character out of his wits; another has the vague appearance of a living being, only paler and fuzzier, before his eyes suddenly come into disturbingly sharp focus. After a while, the simple sight of the red tape is enough to signify unspeakable horrors, inducing in the audience a powerful, unshakeable anxiety.

As he has repeatedly explained in interviews, Kurosawa’s films are concerned with what lies outside the frame. For the director, these ghosts are part of a wider world that we fail to perceive in our daily lives, part of the world beyond the frame. They are hidden behind doors, they appear through opaque windows, and in Pulse they make their way into the world of the living via computer screens. These doors, windows and monitors are portals between the living and the dead, echoing the cinema screen, the ultimate frame that divides the seen from the unseen. The ghosts are death made visible, and as they move from beyond the frame to inside it the characters are forced to face something which they would prefer to remain unseen. This is why the most frightening thing that can happen in a Kurosawa film is a door slowly opening: doors and windows are breaches through which the wider world that surrounds us can enter the comfort of our well-delineated spaces, allowing the irruption of the unknown, of forces beyond our control, into the familiar sphere of our lives.

This otherworldly reality is also evoked through sound, which plays a crucial role in all of Kurosawa’s work. Buzzes, low-pitched drones, shrill timbres, sounds that hiss, whir, ring and resonate in subtle modulations form elaborate, unsettling soundscapes that combine with the visuals to create a multi-dimensional, immersive world. These sounds are not generated through synthesizers but always come from the real world, as Kurosawa explains in an interview published in Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film. For instance, the ‘staccato, high-pitched sound’ that is heard every time the ghost is about to appear in Seance was created from the trill of a Japanese insect. What drives the director to use real sounds is, as with the visuals, the desire to ‘express (…) the world that lies beyond what is visible on-screen’. These ominous, alien sounds increase tenfold the effect of the visuals, adding an extra dimension to the unseen, stealthily submerging the audience into the film’s ambience and making for an experience of rare intensity.

Adding to the eeriness of the films is Kurosawa’s preferred viewpoint. Eschewing the conventions of traditional horror movies, Kurosawa films his characters from a distance. Rather than sticking the camera on the character’s shoulder and startling the audience when the bogeyman suddenly appears in the frame, Kurosawa observes the events from afar, putting us in a position from which we are able to see shadows move and shapes appear in the background, from which we can see everything, the living as well as the dead around them. Frequently, Kurosawa photographs scenes from behind windows, as though shooting from the point of view of the ghost. Throughout his films, the director chooses to position himself, and us, on the outside, like intruders, stalkers or spirits. In this way, he makes us part of the world that lies outside the frame, placing us on the other side of the screen, turning us, the audience, into ghosts, the passive observers of the living.

Never showy and shunning facile special effects to create elegant terrors, Kurosawa’s films generate a profound, lasting sense of unease in the audience because they make us experience that which lies beyond words. A master of disquiet, Kurosawa touches the forbidden zones of human life, revealing the unseen, probing the unspeakable.

Virginie Sélavy

Photo © Lisa Williams

Event: Secret Cinema

Date: 16 December 2008

Location: The Vaults in London Bridge, London

Organised by: Future Shorts

Signing up for Secret Cinema was a leap of faith. Accustomed to making informed choices about which screenings to attend, I placed blind trust in those behind Secret Cinema (Future Shorts/Tartan Video) to come up with something worth passing Sunday evening doing.

Firstly I had received an email with instructions and directions for the day. But this didn’t arrive ’til five hours before the event. Not only that, but the directions instructed us to bring warm clothes. Where were they taking us?! Would we be watching a film in a wind tunnel? Perhaps I was about to watch a silent movie reflected in the cold water of the River Thames? I was sceptical.

But walking towards the venue I felt a shiver of excitement. I knew I was in good hands and I liked the fact that I had no idea what I was going to be watching. Turning the corner I found the alleyway next to a London Bridge boozer teaming with people in fur coats and hoodies, and a Secret Cinema logo projected onto a brick wall. Adding to a sense of privilege about being in-the-know, my existential twins and I waited around by some fenced gates while those without tickets were turned away.

When we were let in, my pathway was stalled by an errant skateboarder who lurched in front of me, then fell to the ground. Stranger still was a high-school locker installed by the entrance, and further on a television showing a Fox-style news broadcast.

Moving in under the railway arch was a mock classroom past which several more skateboarders whizzed. Catching site of a skate video projected onto a wall it became clear that we were about to see Paranoid Park – the latest Gus Van Sant film. Where better to see a film about a death on a railway track than in the dank underbelly of London Bridge? Obviously a skate park in Portland would have been spot on, but given the circumstances they had got it just right.

Relaxing into the closely-packed plastic seating I was relieved to have bypassed the overpriced sodas and garish bowling-alley style décor of the cinema. Maybe, just maybe Secret Cinema could bring back the sense of magic to the cinema-going experience, and if not then it certainly felt like it had more soul than the local multiplex.

My one qualm was that it might be a cheap shot at publicity. Rather like the drag queens hired to rev up the audience at showings of Showgirls. Not so, according to Fabien Riggall, founder of Future Shorts and the one behind the conception of Secret Cinema. ‘It’s not going to be just pre-releases. It’s really going to be a mixture of strong pre-releases, thought-provoking animation and old, classic films. It is about showing films in a different environment as cinema-going has become so formulaic in my view’.

And perhaps Secret Cinema can tempt even the most discerning film buffs away from their carefully considered to-see list and into the dark corners of the city where mystery and intrigue still rule.

Lisa Williams

Format: DVD

Release date: 22 October 2007

Distributor: Second Sight

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Based on novel by Alfred Döblin

Cast: Günter Lamprecht, Hanna Schygulla, Gottfried John, Barbara Sukowa

Germany 1980
910 mins

Ever wondered how Homer Simpson would have fared in the economically ruined and morally compromising world of Weimar Republic Berlin? Franz Biberkopf is a dopey big oaf, sensual and mediocre, but with some sort of basic decency. The precise nature of this decency is not always easy to locate: he has after all done time for killing his girlfriend in a rage. This violent scene is replayed countless times in flashback throughout the series, which begins with Franz leaving Tegel prison. He hesitates on the threshold, deafened by the roar of the city, before trying to dive back into the relative security of incarceration. As he stands with his hands over his ears in close-up, the first chapter heading appears: ‘the punishment begins’. This is in line with Alfred Döblin’s novel, which from the word go makes no secret that Franz is its plaything, and that he will be allowed a little fun before being squashed like a fly. Fassbinder’s adaptation is likewise punctuated by storyboard intervals of pointedly didactic narration brutally denying any idea of free will, and forestalling any possibility of a happy ending. Its indulgence towards Franz’s wife-beating rages may say as much about the 1970s as anything, but it is certainly not out of keeping with the novel’s vision of a harsh world that poisons the sweetest sentiments and the best intentions. In other words, Berlin Alexanderplatz is not everyone’s idea of fun. It has an enormous reputation as a pioneering piece of television, and as Fassbinder’s masterpiece, but has barely been seen since its early 1980s release. Digitally restored, thanks to recent technological advances fascinatingly detailed on the bonus disc, it stands as a reminder of time when art was ‘grimly compelling’.

The fact that Alexanderplatz offers considerably more than historical interest has a lot to do with the intensity of many of the performances. Günter Lamprecht brilliantly conveys Biberkopf’s insane swings from puppyish optimism to baffled rage as he lurches from one dead-end job to another, flirts cluelessly with Nazism, and struggles to go straight in a pervasively criminal economy. The hysterical edge to his gaping smile is caught by the golden glow of the cinematography, which at once produces the idea of an idyll and perversely highlights the grubbiness and tattiness of the surfaces it covers. And we are periodically reminded that this is only light after all: when things go really wrong, there is darkness broken by the lurid pulse of neon from the street. Then things turn really hysterical. Hysteria, of course, is what Fassbinder does: in all times and in all places, Fassbinder’s creations just are hysterical, because that’s the way he likes them. To a certain extent this is something his films reflect on as well as act out: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) in particular is a study in hysteria. To maintain control over the script of her life, Petra needs someone like the pliant, essentially indifferent, Karin. Her theatre is unsustainably brittle from the start, but when Karin’s indifference becomes active it shatters utterly. The only Petra von Kant figure in Berlin Alexanderplatz is Fassbinder himself, and you can see why he was drawn to Dí¶blin’s novel: in its Weimar Republic, everyone is a marionette. In desperate times, we are driven on all the more uncomprehendingly by our own obscure compulsions, just because satisfying them is such a brutal struggle. The aesthetic upshot of this in novel and screen adaptation alike is directorial tyranny tinged with pity.

In the Fassbinder series, this also manifests itself in a noticeably theatrical mise en scène. Alexanderplatz is sometimes puffed as an extremely long film about the bustle of the modern city and so forth, and so is written up into the pantheon of late twentieth-century art cinema. It is questionable how accurate this is. Firstly, though it has been screened as a film, Alexanderplatz is shot on 16mm, is over 15 hours long, and breaks down neatly into episodes. In other words, it’s a TV series! Perhaps even more critically, the vaunted scenes of city life are surprisingly few, and are vastly outnumbered by quite stagey scenes in a fairly small number of interior sets. The (excellent) making-of film on the bonus disc makes a great deal out of the city street set as exemplifying scale and ambition. This is partly a matter of money: such scenes graphically advertise the budget of the project (though the set itself was economically filched from Bergman). But they also stage the film director as heroic commander of a vast technical effort. When Fassbinder is being, rather than playing, the director, he is much more given to theatrical blocking in claustrophobic settings. Dialogue in Alexanderplatz is routinely conducted, not face to face, but with both characters staring into ‘the audience’, one mid-stage, the other with their nose pressed against the fourth wall. To a certain extent, this is about alienation: what determines the characters is not so much their relationship with each other, as the inscrutable force of a whole situation that engulfs them all. But the technique comes, as does Fassbinder himself, and indeed many of his actors, out of the theatre, and the effect can be a little dated.

Not as dated, however, as Fassbinder’s ostentatiously art-cinema epilogue. Here Biberkopf wanders through a sort of underworld fugue on the themes of the series. Accompanied by two ‘angels’ outfitted in the manner of Wagnerian hard rock of the period, Franz meets dead characters who comment helpfully on their roles. Swastikaed brown shirts march past and tussle with communist workers. There’s a Nativity with Franz’s head pasted onto the body of the infant Christ. An atom bomb explodes, providing the obligatory mushroom cloud. Anyone who has come to cultural consciousness in the late 70s and early 80s will recognise the iconic status of such images, and understand the signal that politically-informed film is taking place. What is striking at this distance is how gestural all this was, and how little it adds up to a thought-out critical portrait of the threat of totalitarianism and so forth. With the current blossoming of German cinema dealing with WWII and its fallout, it might seem there has never been a better time to revisit Alexanderplatz. And this is true, but its take on the politics of the 1920s is rather more oblique than one might be led to expect. On the bonus disc, the generally thoughtful Hanna Schygulla suggests that Mieze’s plan for Eva to have a child by Franz shows the threesome briefly and idyllically putting aside the scrabble for possessions in favour of a sort of 1968 idealism. But again this seems rather a plausible appeal to a reflex notion of leftism rather than a reflection on the complexities of the series.

Fassbinder’s artistic and political interests, leftist or not, lie elsewhere. One of the most compelling characters and performances is Gottfried John’s Reinhold. He embodies someone for whom the moral compromises of a chaotic and desperate social milieu present no problem. He initially hooks up with Franz as someone who can take his girlfriends off his hands when he grows bored with them, which routinely happens after a month or so. Franz’s willingness to oblige, while it does not exactly make him a moral figure, is not condemned and seems to reflect the same sort of dim and misdirected generosity of spirit that sees him briefly don a swastika armband in the cause of order, whilst having nothing personal against Jews. Heartiness and a good appetite, it seems, are ultimately good, even if they lead to some dubious choices. John’s Reinhold, who is in fact one of these dubious choices, is all the more menacing and repugnant because he is spineless, stammering and effete. He represents a notion of evil not as strength, but as resentful weakness with opportunity. He is indebted to Franz for a capacity for pleasure he does not himself possess, and thus also hates him for it, and happily betrays him at every turn. Yet, even when Franz realises this, it is Reinhold, rather than the fundamentally decent working-man-turned-criminal Meck, that he considers his friend. Franz’s bewildering trust precipitates the final catastrophe when Reinhold tries to carry on their old triangular arrangement with Franz’s own girlfriend Mieze. The epilogue somewhat spells out a thesis on this in a scene where Reinhold finds true love with his cellmate in prison. In the series proper, scenes between Franz and Reinhold crackle with obscure and unspoken motivation. The final showdown between Reinhold and Mieze in an artificially lit nightmare fairy-tale wood is one of the most brilliant and shocking things in the whole series.

Overall, watching Berlin Alexanderplatz is a queasy experience. That its hero is at all sympathetic is a tribute to Lamprecht’s performance, but also to the sheer nastiness of the world Biberkopf inhabits. Its strength lies in its ability to make us care about grubby lives doomed from the start. It has a far more uneasy conscience than most cinema or TV today. This can make it hard going, but in a time of well-meaning but simplistic tales such as Sophie Scholl, it is fascinating to peer into a less affluent, less attractive time when moral choices did not seem so clear-cut. And I don’t just mean the 1970s.

Stephen Thomson

In an effort to be seasonal we take a look at ten different approaches to gluttony from the stuffing-centric Taxidermia to Oldboy‘s infamous live-octopus-devouring scene via the heroic overeating of Cool Hand Luke before finishing with Luis Buñuel’s inverted view of eating and defecating in The Phantom of Liberty.

1- La Grande bouffe (1973)
A fate worse than death by chocolate: for La Grande bouffe (1973) Marco Ferreri corralled Europe’s leading fatuous males – Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli and Ugo Tognazzi – alongside the ineffectual Philippe Noiret, as a group of successful but jaded gastronomes taking their food obsession to its ultimate conclusion. Each wraps up his daily business surrounded by admiring female subordinates before heading off, like podgy avatars of Huysmans’ Des Esseintes, to Noiret’s secluded mansion to await the arrival of van-loads of flesh, and a gaggle of apparently obligatory but ultimately supernumerary hookers. Into a whirl of lounging, vintage porn slide-shows and cake art, wanders Andréa Ferréol’s primly fleshy schoolteacher. As the hookers are eclipsed by their hosts’ cuisine-bonding, and possibly disgusted by Piccoli’s heroic struggle with flatulence, only Andréa remains. Ferreri’s always impressive misogyny never came closer to seeing its preposterous logic. Poor Marcello and Michel: they can only declare their love in the language of cake. Skinny pink turtlenecks over seventies waistlines abound. Sadly for our heroes it was probably the additives that did it for them before the calorific. STEPHEN THOMSON

2- Se7en (1995)
The image of gluttony in Se7en is a memorably grotesque one – a massive, sauce-spattered figure lies face down in a plate of spaghetti and vomit, flies buzzing around his swollen head. The first victim of Kevin Spacey’s biblical psycho, poor Gluttony has been force-fed to death, his wrists and ankles bound with barbed wire, made to eat until his intestines ruptured, a human foie gras. To be honest, it seems somehow unfair to lump this poor sap in with the more intentionally greedy monsters on this list, but we are assured by the coroner that he was already quite rotund and therefore, presumably, deserved it. Perhaps there are worse ways to die than shovelling spaghetti sauce until your guts burst, but offhand I can’t think of any. TOM HUDDLESTON

3- The Meaning of Life (1983)
The most obvious movie glutton is of course Mr Creosote – Terry Jones in perhaps the world’s largest fat suit projectile vomiting in a chic French restaurant. Carefully perusing the menu (once John Cleese’s head waiter has wiped off the vomit) before grumpily announcing, ‘I’ll have the lot’. However, watching it nowadays, I realise I may have misunderstood the punch line. I’d always assumed the ‘waffer-thin mint’ to be the straw that made the camel’s guts explode. But having recently discovered the cinematic delights of YouTube I now understand the science behind it all: it is the combination of mint confectionary and fizzy drinks (mixing six crates of brown ale and a Jeroboam of champagne with an After Eight). PAUL HUCKERBY

4- Cool Hand Luke (1967)
One of the more bizarre but ultimately winning displays of gluttony in cinema appears in this 1967 prison camp classic, as Paul Newman’s eponymous inmate (jailed, in a similar display of wilful recklessness, for cutting the heads off parking meters while drunk) forces himself to down fifty hardboiled eggs for a bet. The sight of our hero forcefully cramming yet another slippery white oval into his already overstuffed maw is at first amusing, then worrying, then horrifying, then depressing, and finally sort of heroic. This is gluttony as rebellion against the system, even if the system doesn’t really notice, or care. TOM HUDDLESTON

5- Taxidermia (2006)
While many American films look outward at ‘the other’ to disturb audiences, Taxidermia finds horror in looking inwards by telling the tale of three generations of Hungarians who like stuffing themselves. The first character likes stuffing his favourite appendage into whatever he can, his son likes stuffing his face and his grandson likes stuffing dead animals. The first two, more comedic, acts of the film contain horrific scenes (a pig being graphically slaughtered and an eating contest where the massively obese gorge themselves and then regurgitate) that will elicit gasps and laughter in equal proportion; but it’s the third act, concentrating on the life of the taxidermist that slips over into full-blown horror. I’d like to think I’ve got a strong stomach, but this is one of the few films that has made me feel somewhat faint and genuinely nauseous, so be warned! ALEX FITCH

6- The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)
In British cinema rough working-class types have no place in fine dining restaurants. Mr Creosote and East-End gangster Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover are no exceptions to this rule. Usual social faux-pas, such as using the wrong cutlery, don’t even register. You wouldn’t wish customers like these on Gordon Ramsay. Both share a similar bullying way with restaurant staff (beating them or puking on them) and they can be disturbing to fellow diners (stabbing forks into their cheeks or drenching them in semi-digested food). They are both unimpressed by the restaurant’s pretentiousness – ‘Give it some more parlez-vous Franí§ais’, Spica advises a hapless waiter. And they feed on delicacies in a most indelicate manner – Creosote orders foie gras, caviar, truffles and quails’ eggs all mixed together in a bucket (with the eggs on top). But of course gluttony is a deadly sin and both Creosote and Spica get their come-uppance in memorable fashion. PAUL HUCKERBY

7- Stand by Me (1986)
Heroic gluttony is a rare thing, but Davey ‘Lardass’ Hogan, like Cool Hand Luke before him, is a pioneer in the field. Appearing in a campfire yarn told by budding writer Wil Wheaton to his childhood compadres, Lardass’ story is one of pies, intrigue, humiliation, revenge, and more pies. Swearing vengeance on the town that spurned him, Lardass drinks a pint of castor oil, swallows a raw egg and enters the Tri-County Pie Eat, shovelling down five whole blueberry pies with both hands tied behind his back. Needless to say the results are deeply disturbing. Never have the words ‘when the smell hit the crowd’ brought on quite such a Technicolor display of human explosion. TOM HUDDLESTON

8- Super Size Me (2004)
Along with Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock is one of the most successful documentarians of his generation and like Moore, he picks obvious, albeit clearly guilty bad guys. With McDonalds he has one of the easiest targets on the planet, associated with obesity and the never-ending Americanisation of our culture. Shock value and tabloid paranoia make this a fascinating but repulsive film to watch. When Spurlock vomits his Supersize meal on what is only the second day of his experiment, it almost seems too soon and too predictable but as is often the way with modern documentaries, the points have to be made disturbingly loud and clear. For your average Guardian reader this is preaching to the converted – of course eating every meal at McDonalds for a month will make you ill – but this is a credible exaggeration of a lifestyle that doesn’t send enough people to the vomitorium. ALEX FITCH

9- Oldboy (2003)
Having just escaped from a mysterious prison where he was kept locked up for fifteen years without ever being told why, Oh Dae-su sits down in a sushi restaurant for his first meal as a free man. The waitress places a live octopus in front of him but before she can chop it up for him Oh Dae-su grabs the mollusc, stuffs its viscous grey head into his mouth, viciously tears it off and proceeds to masticate with frightful determination while the beast’s tentacles squirm and writhe in his hand. Most filmmakers would have shown Oh Dae-su’s thirst for revenge by having him gun down a roomful of villains but Park Chan-wook puts all of his character’s pent-up rage into this brief but intense display of primal gluttony. Almost unbearable to watch, it brilliantly conveys Oh Dae-su’s equally unbearable inner turmoil. VIRGINIE Sí‰LAVY

10- The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

Today there is going to be gold.

This micro-feature is supposed to be about gluttony but being the contrarian that I am I prefer to look at gluttony’s occult, shit.

A social gathering in a bourgeois house. Guests sit at a large dining table and chat and gossip banally about their hair-do’s, sex lives, politics, business; they do so sat astride rather fine porcelain toilets, trousers at their ankles, skirts hitched up to their hips. In Luis Buñuel’s 1974 portmanteau film The Phantom of Liberty the conviviality of a typical middle-class dinner party is inverted. It is the norm to defecate socially and collectively but to eat is another matter; to do this the guests cough lightly and ask to be excused from the niceties of group defecation in order to go off and eat in the illicit confines of a special cubicle that is reminiscent of nothing other than a lavatory. A true Freudian surrealist, Buñuel makes the process of eating appear to be a socially embarrassing act to indulge in and a grotesque thing to listen to too. Buñuel really exploits the mystifying echo-chamber-like acoustics of lavatories and the bestial chomp and slather of eating.

In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek talks about the toilet being a conduit between us and a primordial underworld and not just a conduit between us and the equally fascinating worlds of plumbing and sanitation. One only has to gaze briefly at the 1968 version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to see a connection between effluvia, greed, plumbing and terrifying nether worlds. The greedy Bavarian boy Augustus Gloop drinks from a faecal-looking chocolate river and is eventually sucked up a large colon-like pipe. But as the end of this featurette encroaches upon us, let’s move from Dahl to Dali, and close with a quote from a man more than au fait with excrement. In his diary (Diary of a Genius) entry for September 1st, 1958, he states: ‘At daybreak I dreamt that I was the author of several white turds, very clean and extremely agreeable to produce. When I woke up I said to Gala, “Today there is going to be gold”’. PHILIP WINTER