Memory is a recurrent element in the cinema of Hirokazu Kore-eda. In some of his films, it provides the perspective or structure. In others, it is the central theme, or a supressed undercurrent of anxiety that permeates the surface of a contemporary Japan where people rarely discuss their problems. In his first feature Maborosi (1995), the central character of Yumiko (Makiko Esumi) is haunted by the deaths of her grandmother, for which she still feels responsible, and her husband, who has committed suicide for no apparent reason. Relocating with her daughter from Osaka to a quiet fishing community, she tries not to dwell on the past. Nobody Knows (2004), based on the tragic true story of four young children who were abandoned by their mother in a small Tokyo apartment, presents a recollection of childhood that is steeped in trauma with its focus on confined space, inanimate objects, and psychological signifiers. Still Walking (2008) observes a strained family gathering, as unemployed art restorer Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) spends a few days at his parents’ house, bringing along his new wife and stepson. The events of the film are ultimately framed as memory in a closing scene that has Ryota visiting his parents’ graves and reflecting on the final visit that he made to their home, several years ago. If these protagonists are defined by their memories, the heroine of Air Doll (2009) is characterised by a lack of personal reference. After magically coming to life, sex toy Nozomi (Bae Doona) searches for experience, whether pleasurable or painful, in order to make sense of the world. However, the director’s most direct rumination on the individual significance and selective nature of memory is After Life, a reflective fantasy that filters its premise through the quasi-documentary aesthetic that Kore-eda has practised throughout his fascinating career to date.
After Life imagines a space between Earth and Heaven, where the recently deceased are taken once natural causes or physical misfortune have brought an end to their mortal existence. On arrival, they find themselves in a ramshackle office building where they receive guidance from case workers who are tasked with helping them go to the next stage. Each person must select the happiest memory from their life so that it can be recreated on film. Once the scene is complete, the deceased watch it in a screening room, and vanish, able to relive this moment for eternity. While the film begins with the deceased and their reactions to their respective deaths, the focus gradually shifts to the case workers, who must deal with the variable attitudes of these individuals: some believe that their lives yielded no memories of great significance, others struggle to decide from so many options, and one simply refuses to choose on the grounds that a single recollection cannot completely represent his mortal years.
The first half of After Life involves the detailed interviews that case workers must conduct in order to decide which memories to recreate, suggesting that such recollections constitute a stockpile of personal information that must be systematically sorted and considered in relation to suitability. Many of the memories, although eventually scripted, were actually researched, with 500 people being interviewed. Kore-eda cast the film during this process, balancing non-actors with professionals, and recruiting the documentary cinematographer Yutaka Yamazaki to achieve an otherworldly realism. The second half examines the tentative romantic relationship between two case workers, Takashi (Arata) and Shiori (Erika Oda) that cannot develop due to the emotional power of memory: Takashi is unable to reciprocate Shiori’s feelings as he still yearns for the fiancée that he left behind after being killed in World War II.
The process of recreating memory that these case workers facilitate serves to show how such recollections can be erroneous, or subject to embellishment. Indecision or inconsistency on the part of some of the deceased indicates that the memories that are chosen as their passport to eternal happiness are possibly falsely remembered, or partially fictionalised, although Kore-eda does not see this as a problem in the grand scheme of things, providing that sufficient personal resonance is evoked. After Life proposes that memories are ever-shifting, with certain details dependent on the situation in which past circumstances are recalled, or to whom they are being imparted. In the press notes for the film, Kore-eda states: ‘Our memories are not fixed or static. They are dynamic, reflecting selves that are constantly changing. So the act of remembering, of looking back at the past, is by no means redundant or negative. Rather, it challenges us to evolve and mature.’ While most of the deceased ultimately force themselves to examine their personal history, sifting through lives of disappointment and strife to find a positive moment that will take them forward, it transpires that the case workers have been trained for their positions due to being unable to choose a memory. This steadfast refusal, or emotional inability, to explore their past has resulted in a weekly office routine, presented in a pared-down fashion to reflect the salaried existence of many Japanese professionals. However, through assisting the elderly Ichiro (Taketoshi Naito), Takashi discovers that their lives are linked and is finally able to make a choice due to the recollection that is prompted by a realisation of interconnectedness. It is Takashi’s contented expression as his scene plays out that best summarises Kore-eda’s beautiful illustration of the role played by memory in belatedly finding meaning in life’s special, if sometimes fleeting, moments.
Best known internationally for his chilly, haunting melodramas Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008), Christian Petzold has yet again teamed up with actress Nina Hoss for his latest film Barbara. Hoss gives a mesmerising performance as Barbara Wolff, a doctor who has applied for an exit visa from the GDR only to find herself transferred from Berlin to a provincial hospital in the countryside, spied upon by the Stasi while her lover in the West is secretly preparing to help her escape via the Baltic Sea. Like all Petzold’s films, Barbara is informed by the director’s background in literature and cinema history, and yet it stands in its own right as a subtly balanced, emotionally restrained and elegantly shot drama crafted by a real auteur, with a style, vision and worldview entirely his own.
Pamela Jahn talked to Christian Petzold at this year’s 62nd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival in February where Barbara premiered in Competition and earned him the Silver Bear for Best Director.
Pamela Jahn: Your films are often inspired by literature. In Yella, for example, you are borrowing your genre conventions from James M. Cain’s cult pulp novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Your new film Barbara, however, feels more like a classic novella.
Christian Petzold: There are two books that served as an inspiration for me this time: Hermann Broch’s novella Barbara, which is set in 1928 and tells the story of a female doctor who takes a job in a rural hospital in order to hide her communist activities from the police, and Werner Bräunig’s novel Rummerplatz. In Bräunig’s book a doctor’s son is consumed by physical work for the first time in a uranium mine. He defines himself through this work, which is interesting because work as a theme had almost completely disappeared from the literature and cinema in the West. Another aspect that appealed to me was that the book tells how women replaced the workers who had been wooed by the West, which somewhat gave those women a new purpose and self-understanding, and I wanted to tell a story about this.
Barbara marks your fifth collaboration with actress Nina Hoss. How would you describe your work relationship?
Part of the reason why we work together so well is because we help each other develop and, at the same time, with each film our work relationship grows stronger. For example, when we were shooting Jerichow I felt that I had to do something different in my next film, especially with the ending, because I realised that I kept pushing Nina into tragedy every single time; like a writer, who keeps killing his heroine at some point so he can finish this book and get on to a new story. I got really annoyed with myself for always working within that same pattern. When Nina and I talked about the final scene, I told her that, next time, I would like to make a film with an open ending and we ended up having a very long conversation about what this means for my work, for our work, and for what we’re trying to achieve, which helped me a lot. And that’s the great thing about our collaboration: that we can have those conversations and support and inspire each other. That’s what makes it so exciting for me.
Aside from working with Nina Hoss, you have developed a very special way of casting people.
Yes, when I start casting for a new film, I first listen to the voices of actors. If you ask me, all these talent agencies should send out CDs instead of DVDs; there is much more to get from listening to voices. But if you find an actress like Nina Hoss and you work together for so many years, your attitude towards the character changes in a way. I don’t really describe her anymore in the script, which means she somewhat appears out of a situation; I don’t need to support her literarily because she already exists. But at the same time, I also need to keep a sort of respectful distance from that particular character.
Barbara is set in former communist East Germany in 1980. What fascinated you about this particular era and how did you approach it, since you grew up in West Germany?
My parents fled the GDR when I was still very young, so I grew up in the Western part of Germany. But my parents kept travelling back to the East part quite regularly and they took my brothers and me with them, so East Germany was not so unfamiliar to me. The problem is the kind of stuffiness that exists in Germany, that narrow thinking that only someone who has lived through a story has the right to tell it. But if you look at the great works of world literature, many of these stories are actually told from the perspective of an outsider. Like in The Great Gatsby, for example, the narrator is the only character who is dead. With Barbara, it was very important to me that the actors understand my particular perspective. Before I start shooting, I always watch selected films with my team in order to get everyone in the mood and, this time, one of the films we watched during the rehearsals was The French Connection. There is a scene in the film in which Gene Hackman’s character, [Jimmy] Doyle, wanders back to his apartment after a long shift and suddenly gets attacked by a sniper. What makes this sequence so fascinating and one of the most frenetic moments in the film is the perspective. Normally, any director would cut from Gene Hackman walking down the street to the sniper and then follow him through the reticle just before the gunshot to build up tension and suspense. But the film doesn’t do that: instead the camera keeps at eye level with Hackman during the entire chase. Only after 15 minutes of chasing the sniper through the jammed streets of New York, only in the very moment when Doyle seems to have caught himself in a dead end, when he struggles to stay in control, that’s when the camera changes its perspective and points at him. What I was trying to explain with this sequence was the importance of my viewpoint in Barbara, which is similar in terms of the camera position. I wanted everyone to understand why the camera has to be in a certain spot, why can’t it be anywhere else because that would change my perspective on the story.
It is your first historical film. How difficult was it for you to reconstruct the setting of the GDR in the early 1980s?
What I wanted to achieve with Barbara was to make a historical film but without evoking history merely through the setting where you have the hammer and sickle symbol in every frame. Instead, I tried to create an open space. There is a nice anecdote about François Truffaut and Jean Renoir having a conversation about Renoir’s The Golden Coach [1952]. Truffaut was of the opinion that you could only do history in the studio, you couldn’t show any sky, because the sky is always the sky of today. Renoir disagreed. In his view, you had to use both the studio and the sky, as in the historical and the present. If you pretend that the film was only about the past with no relation to our present time, then the film itself would be a lie. And I thought I actually agree with Renoir, which is why in Barbara, you see lots of sky, lots of wind, and lots of colour. But there was another aspect that was important to me in that regard: I watched Chinatown [1974] again because it’s a historical film and I kept wondering why the Los Angeles of the 1930s that is recreated in the film never feels like a German historical film, for example. I realised that it is because of the different aggregate states at play such as heat, drought, and male and female sweat, and I think all this is linked together. Or, take Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons [1971], he also managed to create a sense of the historical atmosphere with very little means, but still to great effect. It’s almost like a childhood memory, like with Proust, you smell something and history begins to unfold. The only other option would have been to go with Bresson, cool and distanced. Those were the two options I considered and, ultimately, I decided to go with The Merchant of Four Seasons.
Looking at your previous films, they seem to be strongly informed by the fundamental cracks in German society.
I find it very difficult to think about why this is, but it seems obvious that I am interested in people who don’t feel comfortable in their skin. I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that my parents fled the GDR and when we first got to West Germany I spent quite some time in transitional housing and never got the feeling that I arrived anywhere properly. I always felt more like an outsider myself, whereas my parents desperately tried to adapt to their new surroundings but, at the same time, it made them become even more estranged. All these are themes that worry me in a way but I think that, one day, I’ll just pay for a psychoanalyst to get to the bottom of it all (laughs). That said, my next film also follows a similar line – I just can’t help it.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your new film?
It’s set in Berlin in 1945, so it’s a historical film again. In short, it’s about a woman who survived Auschwitz and she now wants her life back.
Do you feel you had to go through different steps in your career before you could approach that part of German history?
No, it was not quite like that. The story almost fell in my hands in a way. My long-term co-author Harun Farocki and I read a crime novel from 1946 which had a similar plot line. That was about two or three years ago and for some reason it stuck with me. But it’s true that, back then, it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. A Jewish woman, Berlin, the Holocaust, it felt too charged, too close to me then.
How do you explain your particular interest in female characters?
Good question. To answer that, I probably have to go through at least 10 years of psychotherapy (laughs). No, honestly, I think some filmmakers have a preference for male characters and then there are others, who are more interested in female characters. David Lynch, for example, is a ‘women director’ in that way, and John Ford is a ‘male director’. That doesn’t mean that one is better than the other, it’s just how you project yourself into the world. And the way I look at women in my films is not like a pure Hitchcockian look, where the woman functions as an erotic object for the desiring look of the male. I am not fetishising anything. Especially with Nina, it’s more like there is someone whom I don’t know and who I can’t be, who is something completely strange to me. It’s like these female characters are somehow caught in a different world, like in exile, and they’re trying to get back in touch with the world I live in, the world we all live in. On the other hand, with my camera I am somewhat in exile too, and from there I keep trying to get to the core of the story. This is how it all correlates.
Nina Hoss has said elsewhere that she would love to make a comedy with you one day. Can you imagine yourself doing that too?
Of course Nina said that, because she is great in comedies (laughs). And I would love to make a comedy too. But it’s incredibly difficult to make a really good comedy and so I keep putting it off just as I keep putting off to quit smoking. I guess I am just not ready for it yet.
Will Wiles composed his darkly comic debut novel, The Care of Wooden Floors, on his daily tube commute from London to the suburbs. Heading away from the centre of town he was guaranteed a seat and a peaceful interlude, before heading to his day job as deputy editor on Icon, a monthly architecture and design journal, where he’s written about everything from Pot Noodles to Jumbo Jets. He’s now a full-time writer, and his filmic alter ego is Martin Blank from Grosse Pointe Blank. EITHNE FARRY
‘When you were young and your heart was an open book, you used to say, live and let live, you know you did you know you did you know you did …’
We don’t see what Martin Blank is seeing. He stops his black town car by the kerb and climbs out, mouth open, clearly agitated. After 10 years, this man without a past has returned to the Detroit suburb where he grew up and has decided to revisit his childhood home.
Then we see what he is seeing. His childhood home is gone, replaced by an ULTIMART convenience store. He peels his sunglasses from his face unable to comprehend what has happened. We see again. ULTIMART. Home is gone. Face like thunder, Blank stalks towards the store.
Nostalgia is a form of sickness, a bilious reaction to curdled memories. In Grosse Point Blank (1997), John Cusack’s contract killer has no real desire to attend his 10-year high school reunion, but is bullied into it by his personal assistant. Once he is back on his old turf, he gets nostalgia in a bad way, things ain’t what they used to be. His old house is gone, and his mother cannot remember who he is. Having spent a decade kicking over his own traces, he now finds his prehistory almost completely obliterated – a fact that makes him very angry. And, not being able to talk about his work, he doesn’t have a present to compensate.
It’s a nicely drawn crisis in narcissism. Blank had a completely one-sided deal with the past. He wanted to change completely and reject everything that made him him, but he expected everything in Grosse Point to be just the way he left it. And this deal turns out to be an illusion. He might have killed the president of Paraguay with a fork, but his vulnerability to the mundane facts of his upbringing make Blank an appealing everyman. He can’t go back, none of us can.
Cast: Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini, Udo Kier, Kevin McDonald
Canada 2011
94 mins
Keyhole is Guy Maddin’s latest and by far most ambitious film to date. Trying, as usual, to make sense of the memories and feelings from the past that haunt him day and night, Maddin this time has crafted a heady amalgam of sinister black and white 40s noir-gangster flick, Homer’s Odyssey (loosely adapted), Hollywood melodrama and haunted ghost story. Like all of Maddin’s work, it’s a perfectly twisted, dark, dreamlike cinematic encounter that stays in the back of your mind long after you have re-entered reality.
Pamela Jahn met with Guy Maddin at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival in February to talk about dreams, light switches and wolf heads, the importance of giving movies a second chance and the horror of watching your own films with an audience.
PJ: Let’s start with the obvious: do you actually believe in ghosts?
GM: It’s funny, I don’t believe in ghosts at all and I am not scared of the dark or things like that until I hold a movie camera in my hand. Then I believe in ghosts. Maybe there is some sort of natural selection at work but it’s just so convenient to believe in ghosts when you are a filmmaker, either as a metaphor or a way to get your sense of a story airborne, or even just to make yourself suspend disbelief. It’s all sorts of things, but the truth is, when movies are working well people start believing in things they wouldn’t normally believe in. So I am quite comfortable with that little camera-generated adhocracy. It’s just like when you’re a little kid and your grandmother is telling you a bedtime story. There are all sorts of things at play, and at least for the time being you believe in what she’s telling you. And it feels pretty good. But on the other hand, I feel very haunted all the time. Maybe I am far more than average a backward peering guy.
What are you haunted by?
Well, we all live in the past and the present simultaneously, but for some reason the past seems to have a stronger demand on my emotions than on most people’s. Sometimes I’m haunted just by the way things once were and by a longing that they could be that way again. But it’s also quite simple in the way that I’m haunted by a love that is gone. Don’t get me wrong, I like these hauntings. I have a dream life that is cramped with sadness for some reason. I don’t get nightmares, instead I get these kind of emotional injections. But I like them in the same way people like, say, listening to Billy Holiday.
What happens in your dreams?
I see people and places. Places are very important to me, especially homes that I once lived in and which really mattered to me. Or people that have already gone reappear with a vibrancy of recollection that I can’t master while I am awake. But I like these experiences. It is my way of keeping these old relationships alive. I even got to know my father better in my dreams. He is a much nicer man now and we agree a lot more on things. I remember I had a girlfriend once who had a very ‘New Agey’ attitude towards it and one day she told me: ‘You really shouldn’t be dwelling on this stuff. Next time someone reappears from the past in one of your dreams, just tell them you love them but that it’s time for them to go. So you can say goodbye to them and then they won’t reappear in your dreams anymore.’ Basically, after that, we just broke up.
What is the strongest memory you have had that found its way into the film?
That’s an interesting question because I haven’t had the courage to assess what insistent memory made it all the way to the final cut… I’m not sure. There are a couple of little mentions of things. For example, when Jason Patric, who plays the father in the film, enters a room – even though he is not sure who he is or whether or not he is alive – it’s just the fact that his hand knows exactly where the light switch is. I had a few very uncanny dreams about that in the past. I normally have no control over my dreams otherwise I would just stay in bed all the time, dreaming. But I had one or two dream experiences in my life where I could literally stay in a dream on purpose. I found myself in my childhood home, which for some reason I miss very badly. About four or five years ago I think, I stopped dreaming less and less about people and more about architecture, precisely, the architecture of an empty home. Sometimes there seem to be people present in the next room or so, but it is mostly architecture.
I had one dream where I was just in my old bedroom and I opened up my drawer, and that’s a scene that made it into the film, where I could actually see everything exactly the way it was in 1968. And it wasn’t me bullshitting myself, it really wasn’t uncanny. I remember looking into the drawer and seeing a razor and a pencil sharpener and a little ink pot that I hadn’t thought of for some 40- odd years. Things that I had forgotten all about were in that drawer. Then I decided to look up from the drawer because I couldn’t exactly remember what was on my shelves. When I looked up, I saw exactly what was there, and I started walking around in the room and I could remember where the light switches were and what the plastic plates around the light switches looked like. I do remember that, as a kid, I knew exactly were all the light switches where. At certain doors there were on your left and at other doors they were on your right when you entered the room. Sometimes you had to switch the switch upwards or you had to remember to switch it downwards. It took me many years to figure that out, lots of trial and error, but in my dream it was all clear. Then it became an issue not worth remembering at all because the house was sold. But in this dream it all came back.
I have heard that you don’t really forget anything and that your brain is full of all the memories you’ve ever had. It’s just a matter of accessing them. I had a similar dream that was not as good but where I could access everything as well and it felt like maybe I was dead. It felt like I was literally haunting. At first I was thinking: ‘Jesus, I’m haunted by this house.’ But then I realised it felt more like I was the one haunting the house, because there was no one in it except for me wandering around, trying light switches and looking in drawers. And while I don’t believe in ghosts it gave me gooseflesh to think that maybe in those moments I am just a ghost myself. Since we all live in the past and the present simultaneously, maybe I was living in the future as well, I don’t know.
Do you wake up and make notes immediately after you’ve had a dream like this?
I do find that if you write a dream down afterwards you will remember it forever, but if you don’t, you sort of forget it. But that one was so vibrant that I couldn’t forget it anyway. It hasn’t all stayed with me though. But then I arranged for a visit inside my old childhood home, and a lot of the light switches were still there. Also, I had my own bathroom as a boy, and there was a little chip in the plaster above the heating that you could only see when sitting on the toilet. You could see this little dent, someone had put some scotch tape over it and then painted it but, to me, it looked like a wolf’s head. That was the first thing I checked when this guy gave me permission to look through the house. I went straight to my old bathroom to see if the wolf’s head was still there, because I also had a couple of dreams about it and I was very worried that someone had chipped it off or fixed it but, luckily, it was still there. After that visit, I often wondered whether the guy who bought the house maybe also sees a wolf’s head in the tape, or if he sees something else because his childhood was so different to mine. He is exactly the same age, a My Lai survivor. So, when I was 12 years old and looking at Playboy magazines in my bathroom, he was in My Lai going through horrible things. Now he sleeps in my bedroom and I often wonder what he’s haunted by. It must be the most unhealthy way of planning one’s future, but if I ever get enough money, I would just buy the house back from him, or live with him. It’s a big house. And I love my childhood, so it would be a way to sort of slide back with perfect symmetry into my second childhood.
Keyhole is more than just a childhood memory though. There are many different elements coming together, and critics have talked about your films before as being impossible to grasp and to classify. Do you like that idea, or do you sometimes feel disappointed that audiences and critics don’t get what you are trying to do or say?
I always thought that it was great when people told me that my films are impossible to put in a drawer. So I’d say: ‘Oh, thank you’, and they’d respond: ‘No, that’s terrible. You would be doing yourself a big favour if you worked in a genre.’ And then they’d tell me I should work in science fiction, a genre I don’t find much of a connection with for some reason, even though it has so much potential. To some extent, science fiction and horror seem so close together as an element of fantasy. But I still like my horror films scary yet slightly allegorical to a degree where I’m not sure whether I can figure out the allegory. If I can’t figure it out, that’s even better. But it has to be rooted in something that we all feel, whether we believe in saucers or vampires or not. We all feel those things but they are dressed up in the horror genre garb. I like that.
Lately I’ve been trying to work in genres a little bit as well. I accidentally worked in genre, or more a hybrid genre, in 2002, when I accepted a commission to make a ballet version of Dracula. I was shocked, because it was originally just made for Canadian television broadcast and then it ended up getting a theatrical release. Then I realised that this genre advice was actually pretty good advice, because I think what enabled people to go and see this movie was the fact that they knew exactly what they would be getting. It’s Dracula and ballet, it’s two genres but at least it’s only two and you could see how they fused together. I think it gave people a point of reference from which to approach it. And it just made it easier on the picture and on myself that the public could figure out what it was.
With Keyhole, I thought again I would make a kind of hybrid genre film where gangsters meet ghosts. A bit like cowboys meet aliens, something you understand right away! But I’m actually not very comfortable with the gangster genre, because gangsters have guns and I didn’t want the script to get bogged down with all the technicalities involved with this, things like who is carrying a gun and who is not, and fill it all up with a lot of gun shots. I just wanted a story about gangsters. the protagonist’s father should be a gangster, some sort of alpha male hero that a boy could admire in the same way that Homer’s Ulysses is a soldier and a hero. I am not even sure why I picked a gangster, I just wanted something that looked right in black and white for my one last fling, or love affair, with black and white before I move on and try to challenge myself to colour.
Given the positive audience reactions it seems to have worked fine. In fact, Keyhole has been described as your most accessible film to date.
I think that when I set out to make Keyhole I wanted it to turn out a little more accessible. I was enjoying the fact that for various reasons my last two pictures have been increasingly accessible. I am used to really low ratio shows, like down to zero. But still, I do want to reach people with my movies, though maybe just more like an author wants to reach an audience rather than a member of the film industry who needs to reach people to be able to make another movie. But I do want to reach them, because I love the feeling of understanding how an audience feels when they are watching a movie. I was forced to watch My Winnipeg and Brand upon the Brain many times because I was narrating the films behind the stage, and I really began to feel more like a showman than a filmmaker, which was nice, so I’ve tried to keep that attitude going while making movies. That said, in a way, I never felt closer to a conventional filmmaker than when I was making Keyhole.
What inspired you to base the film on Homer’s Odyssey?
To be honest, that story was just an excuse for a structure and I am glad I found one that really fit in well with what I was trying to say. I was looking for any sort of narrative, because I’m not quite formal and crazy enough to make a movie about an empty house without any characters in it. So, I knew I wanted it to have a plot and certain characters and things that matter, even though my dreams are mostly about little objects. But those little tokens and objects and wolf’s heads, they all matter because they have soaked up a lot of people before they became precious to me.
At one point, I was tempted to use a plot structure suggested by Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea. It’s also an unrealised film by Leni Riefenstahl: just a couple of gangs holed up in a house fighting and then a gang of Amazonians come in and start hysterically tearing both fighting parties to shreds. But then I realised that what initially seemed a good excuse to explore every piece and corner of the house with all that war and fighting going on would probably just get derailed into gender politics in the end, so themes that I am nowhere near qualified to explore – at least not yet. I think I’ll wait until I’m a veteran of another war before touching on that.
Instead, I tried to concentrate on what really matters to me about the home, and maybe I also tried to sum up what I hope is the first half of my filmmaking career, and I realised that The Odyssey had a lot to do with my dream life. For instance, my very first movie was a short film about my father who had died, but actually in my dreams he hadn’t died. In my dreams, he just went off to live with a better family. He would come home almost every night just to get his razor or pick up some glass eye that he had forgotten, and every time I had about one minute to convince him that our family loved him and really missed him and that he should stay. But he never did stay. Nevertheless, they were still wonderful dreams because I got to hear his voice, a voice I couldn’t remember properly. And those dreams generally left me with a slowly dissipating pleasurable feeling until lunchtime and then a dream might return later that night or in a week or so. The years went by and, one day, I read Homer’s Odyssey and realised that it was just that dead father dream. It’s the ultimate ‘dead-beat-dad’ story, and I came to the conclusion that this is the story I should use for my storyboard structure. I like using a very durable structure and then abusing it as much as possible by overburdening it with my own concerns and seeing how much of it can survive.
Is it easier for you to develop your own story if you base it on a work of literature or a play?
Yes, if I just use it as a framework. For example, Cowards Bend the Knee is very loosely based on Electra, but totally debased from Euripides. I even changed a brother of Electra into a boyfriend. What I mean is that I am willing to change things so that it is all already psychologically a different thing all together but, on the other hand, it’s good to know that it is a pretty sturdy structure of a centuries-old story and still reads like something that has happened to me yesterday. So, yes, I am happy to make adaptations, I just happen to make them of ancient texts and in such a surreal way that no one can complain that I have messed with the original shape of the text.
Do you sometimes feel that, as a filmmaker, you’d have been better off living in the early days of cinema?
Naturally I went through a real biologically driven love affair with the 1920s when I was in my twenties and thirties and felt I needed to sexually possess the decade. But now I just think it looks nice. I have mellowed out about it, and I am happy not to be considered an impersonator, that I am not doing complete adaptations, that my editing style is different and that I am using digital tools. I am happy to eventually having graduated from being a false pioneer to a real pioneer.
What is also very unique about your films is that you seem to use music and film as interrelated languages. Is that something you do deliberately, or is this a natural process for you while making the film?
No, it is actually a goal of mine to shoot a film where I write the script and have the score written at the same time. That would be ideal. I had the chance to do this once on a short film called Glorious that I used as a rough sketch for Keyhole, because it is also a gangster story. The Netherlands-based British composer Richard Ayers and I worked on this by writing the script and writing the music back and forth in a series of emails and that was really amazing. Generally, most composers are given a somewhat flawed movie and then it is up to them to kind of fluff up scenes that are somewhat sagging, or they are supposed to really underscore something that needs building up. Famously, even with Vertigo, although that’s not flawed of course, Hitchcock apparently said to Bernhard Hermann: ‘Reel four especially needs your help’, or something like that.
But actually I think music and imagery are working together in a more occult way. It’s something that mystifies me and no amount of thinking about it can get me closer to an answer. I often have a piece of music in mind for a scene, but almost never does that piece of music fit in the end. I remember when I was making Archangel, I had special music picked out for certain scenes and when I got to edit the film it didn’t work at all. So, I tried switching scenes around, because I had it on magnetic tape and didn’t feel like recording new music altogether. But when I switched the scenes, the music I had picked before worked in exactly the different scenes that I had originally intended it for. I even thought that they worked very nicely, so I kept it like that. That’s when I realised that it really is witchcraft how these things work. But again, it is and it isn’t, because composers know how to create such visual sounds.
Thank you for mentioning music. It had been a long-term goal of mine to get people to trust their feelings about film as much as they do about music. When you listen to music you either like it or you don’t but, mostly, you don’t even know why, you are just letting yourself go. But when people are watching movies they get nervous if they don’t quite understand something. Even if they are enjoying it, they don’t know why, so a lot of them are shutting down saying: ‘I don’t get it, I don’t get it’, because they can’t just let go. But with music it seems so natural and I just wish we could all watch movies the same way we listen to music. So I try to fuse the two together as much as possible in my films, just in a desperate hope that somewhere along the line they take up and weld themselves in some sort of occult union and really work in ways that no one can explain.
It also seems more difficult to give films a second chance in the same way that you would listen to a song again until you get used to it and, eventually, you start liking it.
Yeah, absolutely. I have given some films a second chance. For example, the first time I saw L’Atalante, which is now one of my favourite films, I think I expected it to be a bit more like a Buñuel picture. I wanted it to be more surrealist and so I was disappointed in it the first time round. And then it just stayed with me, submerged in my memory for about five years until I found myself thinking more and more about it. And when I watched it again I fell totally in love with it. I think that’s the way we know it works with music, for example, when your favourite artist puts out a new album and you resist it first, but next thing you know, you realise that you have to put that thing back on and listen to it again. For some reason, it is just easier to do so with music than it is with movies.
Do you go back to your own films a lot?
No, not much, not if I can avoid it. I remember reading in Buñuel’s biography that he only watched his films once and then he knew what they were like and he never watched them again. At first, I didn’t believe him, partly because he was such a fantastic liar, but now I can understand him better, because I really don’t need the agony of watching my films with an audience more than once.
Why is it so horrible?
Because when you watch your films with an audience, you can poke your ear drums out and still sense the audience reaction. It’s just the fact that you know the audience is there and you can no longer kid yourself and tell yourself that it will all be OK. Instead, total objectivity is brought to you by the presence of an audience and, trust me, one experience like that per movie is enough. You give yourself a report card and it’s written in indelible ink, so you don’t have to go back again and again.
Do you dream about your films before, while or after making them?
Sometimes I do. A couple of times I have had dreams while making a movie in that I see myself watching it and it is obviously way better than in reality. But luckily, on some occasions, I had these dreams in time that I have actually been able to add things to the movie and improve it slightly. But that’s happened less than 10 times in my whole life, and if I dream about my movies then it’s almost always that they look better in my dream. So, when I wake up I mostly regret that I didn’t think to make those scenes.
You said elsewhere that you felt Careful was the only film that turned out exactly the way you wanted it to be. Is Keyhole coming close now though?
I think I have also come close with shorter film, for example, my short Heart of the World turned out to be exactly the way I planned. But, of course, with longer films that is less likely to happen. I think with Keyhole I did get the feelings right and also the levels of confusion which I was willing to have anywhere between perfect clarity and complete abstraction. But I also do care about Keyhole a lot for another reason, not even so much because of the dreams but because of the conversations I had with my mother about some of the years I drew my inspiration from for this movie. I have to say, my mother has got a kind of really sweet grade of dementia right now. She has become this lovely, sweet and agreeable old lady but she just told me the most brutally frank anecdotes about my family and my childhood, stories I had never ever heard of before. She has filled me with enough stuff that would have fit into the Keyhole universe to make another movie all together. I won’t do that though, I am leaving that subject behind now. But, God, it’s killing me that I didn’t get my mum to open up just half a year earlier. The movie could have been so much better. I mean, I don’t think anyone else would have noticed it, or people would have liked it more, but it just would have meant more to me. I think I would have managed to get my whole family in one piece in that house.
Do you feel that now that you have made Keyhole and that it turned out the way you wanted it to be you can eventually put your childhood memories to rest and move on?
Oh no! Thank God no! I don’t want my memories to rest, because I like them way too much. I won’t let that happen. Never!
Horror and the Horror Film
By Bruce F. Kawin
Anthem Press 252pp £25
Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema
Edited by Ian Conrich
I.B. Tauris 306pp £14.99
Following the annual London horror extravaganza that is FrightFest, it seems appropriate to review a couple of recently published horror tomes. Making an authorial contribution to this already well-mined territory is a brave move for a writer as well a publisher – what can there really be left to say? So with this reservation in mind let’s have a look at them.
A professorial stab at finding new approaches to the horror genre is the concern of Bruce Kawin’s book, Horror and the Horror Film, which describes itself – twice in the preface alone – as a comprehensive account, as well as a ‘complete description of the horror film’. Those are bold claims indeed and sent this reviewer running to the bibliography to check texts consulted. What is there seems solid enough (if American-biased) but, given his themes, what is not there – Grant’s The Dread of Difference, Jancovich’s Horror, The Film Reader, Hawkins’s Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde, Thrower’s Nightmare USA, Frayling’s Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: Science and the Cinema and, most alarmingly, Newman’s authoritative Midnight Movies (to name a few) – rather undermine claims to being comprehensive, let alone complete. That said, Kawin does explore over 350 films, first contextualising his methodology in the first part of the book and then, in the second part, examining them through a grid divided into categories of Monsters (constructed, composite, parasitic, amorphous etc.), Supernatural Monsters (demons, doubles, vampires, zombies, etc.) and, finally, Human Monsters (psychics, anomalies, mad killers, torturers etc.), all of which add up to a useful and logical approach to his topic, although he sometimes gets bogged down in classifying and clarifying the various genres, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres that he takes as his subject. Less convincing is the all too brief (an afterthought perhaps?) final section, which takes a very cursory look at the ‘related genres’ of Horror Comedy and Horror Documentary. An interesting read and a well-handled narrative in terms of the thematic approaches invoked to wrestle these hundreds of films into the author’s theoretical categories.
Horror Zone, edited by Ian Conrich, takes a wholly different approach to the genre, looking ‘around’ the subject and introducing fresh research into the cultural/economic/technological and transgressive aspects of recent horror cinema. As the author states, ‘this book seeks to address the cinema of contemporary horror moving beyond the common approach of focusing just on the film text… the articles within… explore the cultural parameters and… the boundaries and borders that these horror productions are pushing’. The various academic essays take a catholic view of horror from theme park rides and other synergies to web-based fandom, set and costume design and relationships of horror cinema with digital viewing. In so doing, Conrich’s book provides a very eclectic and up-to-date set of original approaches to the horror genre and successfully accomplishes the exploration of ‘horror cinemas as opposed to horror film’. A recommended title with plenty of food for thought.
James B. Evans
GONE… BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
In keeping with the horror theme, I want to salute the work of John McCarty, who in 1986 gave us the wonderful book Psychos: Eighty Years of Mad Movies, Maniacs and Murderous Deeds. Typical of its time, it is lurid, generously illustrated (the days of lasseiz faire with regard to image usage) and downright fun both to read and to look at. He starts with the cinematic cultural roots in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Jack the Ripper and takes us on a journey – via early cinema to the (then) contemporary screen – through fictional and factual psychos, slasher psychos, delusional psychos and exploitation psychos. In fact, as the author of the novel Psycho states on the cover of the book by way of endorsement, ‘Here at last is the definitive book about psycho films – including the psychos who write them, the psychos who direct them, and the psycho audiences who love them’. Well put! A great pairing with McCarty’s equally fab tome, Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen (1984). Save these books! JBE
Film4 FrightFest the 13th duly delivered on blood, thrills and controversy with a blast of the best and the worst of current horror film. Evrim Ersoy reports on some of the most talked about films in this year’s programme.
V/H/S
An interesting exercise in combining the portmanteau picture and the found-footage genre, V/H/S is the new offering from some of the hottest indie directors on the block (Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, Radio Silence).
Following the usual genre rules, it sets out a wrap-around concerning a bunch of deadbeat guys who are hired to break into a house and find a certain VHS for an undisclosed amount of money. As they are faced with a mountain of tapes, their attempts to find the right one are the pretext for the other stories until the very final tale, which, in an unusual touch, explains the nature of what has gone before.
At two hours, the film outstays its welcome by at least one segment and the wraparound is a muddled affair delivering none of the punch expected from such a tale. However, despite all this V/H/S works very well, with some of the segments genuinely inducing a sense of dread and unease while others create a videotape reality that just delights with its own twisted logic.
The final story also pulls out all the stops making sure the entire anthology ends on a high, sending the audience out into the night feeling as if they’ve been through on a ghost ride.
All in all, definitely worth catching – although not necessarily at the cinema given the lo-fi specs.
Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the 70s
Director/writer Mike Malloy’s love letter to the underrated poliziotteschi genre of the 70s is an impressive magnum opus that not only serves as an introductory lesson to newcomers but also offers in-depth analysis that every lover of the genre will delight in.
Compiling clips and new interviews with cast and crew associated with the films, Mike Malloy divides his epic documentary into chapters explaining various aspects of the genre (beginnings, real-life crime, politics, misogyny, etc) and revealing the history bit by bit. This fragmentary approach works incredibly well: rather than alienate any audience member, Mike Malloy sensibly draws everyone in before weaving a tale of an era so madcap and unusual it’s almost impossible not to be enthralled.
Mike Malloy’s talent is apparent not only in the assured pacing but also in the well-conducted interviews with stars, directors and other crew members of the era: Henry Silva, Franco Nero and Enzo Castellari all make an appearance bringing with them some unusual tales that may never have been heard if not for this film.
An amazing achievement, this 137-minute bonanza is a brilliantly entertaining documentary: full of life and action, it’s a joyful tribute that fits the spirit of the genre it celebrates so well.
Tower Block
A disappointing exercise in survival, James Nunn and Ronnie Thompson’s Tower Block focuses on the residents of the 31st floor of a block of flats who find themselves the target of a sniper. As the incompatible bunch try to work together to survive the day, their numbers continue to dwindle.
Boasting a set-up that’s bound to intrigue, Tower Block unfortunately runs into the first of its many problems before long: the occupants of the tower block of the title all appear to be archetypes. Perhaps it’s writer James Moran’s intention to populate the floor with a microcosm of Britain and try to see how we all can work together, but, on screen, the entire cast appears theatrical and robotic and the relationships and dialogue are distinctly wooden.
However, there is also much to be admired in the film: the set pieces are incredibly tense, and once the action gets going, the stark terror caused by the sniper is shown without any compromise. This is a film that delivers on the visual front with plenty of gusto. Shame, then, that the final result ends up being so uneven: a third act descent into Scooby Doo territory and really does the rest of the film no favours. By the end of the film, we’re left with a sense of disappointment at the hollowness and emptness of the plot.
It’s hard to shake off the feeling that Tower Block might have worked better as a 30-minute short. In its current form it is just another forgettable urban thriller in a long line of low-budget British films.
Tower Block is released in UK cinemas on September 21 by Lionsgate.
Tulpa
It’s hard to tell where Federico Zampaglione’s disappointing attempt to create a neo-giallo film went wrong: Tulpa is such a strange creation full of conflicting moments that it becomes impossible to distinguish the individual good and bad points after a while.
Opening with a beautiful sequence where a bizarre S&M meeting between an unnamed man and a woman goes horrifically wrong, Tulpa centres on Lisa Boeri, a corporate financial analyst in a fast-paced cut-throat company by day, and a member of a mysterious club for spiritual and psychical release of a sexual kind at night. When someone starts to murder Lisa’s sexual partners she realises there’s a psychopath out there who has her in firmly in their sights.
While the murders in Tulpa adhere beautifully to the giallo tropes, the pacing is so uneven that any enjoyment to be gleaned from the film soon turns to boredom. Add to this a second half that grinds to an almost complete halt and it becomes impossible to understand who the film is intended for: giallo enthusiasts will not find enough visual pleasure to enjoy the film while genre newcomers will be bored stiff after a while by the awful script and the rather outrageous dubbing.
A huge mess of a film, Tulpa can only be recommended as a guide to what not to do when trying to make a neo-giallo. Here’s hoping that Mr Zampaglione’s next film fulfils the promise of his first feature Shadow and confirms him as a filmmaker to follow.
Maniac
Set across a dreamy and melancholic cityscape, Franck Kahlfoun’s take on William Lustig’s notorious 1980 shocker might well be the best genre film to be released this year.
Shot largely in first-person P.O.V., it features an intense performance from Elijah Wood, who manages to portray Frank as a man both frighteningly sadistic and heart-breakingly pitiful. Frank works as a mannequin restorer and seller at a dilapidated shop in LA, which used to belong to his promiscuous mother. He has uncontrollable feeling of abject hatred and fear of women, which explode in acts of unparalleled violence. When Frank meets Ann, who wants to use his mannequins in a photography exhibition she’s preparing, the two connect in an awkward but not implausible way. However, as their relationship develops, it becomes harder and harder for Frank to control his destructive impulses.
Utilising mirrors, windows and other reflective surfaces, Khalfoun creates a glossy but emotive visual language: while the horror of Frank’s barbaric acts is never underplayed, his character comes across as a tragic figure rather than as the one-dimensional psychopath that is the stereotype of the genre. Cleverly using the soundtrack to intensify the city and Frank’s experience, Khalfoun grabs the audience when they least expect it: added into the mix are the rare appearances of Elijah Wood’s face, his eyes exhibiting a dead, hollow quality that makes his acts even more disturbing. His voice-over, delivered in a child-like whisper, speaks volumes about a man whose life has been lost for a long time: reminiscent of the protagonist Paul in Tony Vorno’s forgotten grindhouse gem Victims, Frank is equal parts abhorrent murderer and unexpected victim.
It’s hard to think of another piece of filmmaking that will manage to pack the same visual invention and emotional punch into a measly 89 minutes. Do not miss.
The follow-up to the acclaimed, Berlin prize-winning rape-revenge drama Katalin Varga, Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio is a remarkable achievement. The accomplishment is amplified considering that it is a second feature. Among the most audacious European works in recent memory, Strickland’s film draws on his love of experimental film scores, sound effects and analogue recording equipment to create an elliptical, nightmarish tale that pays tribute to the Italian giallo genre and the Gothic horror of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and Dario Argento‘s Suspiria. Juraj Herz’s The Cremator and Peter Tscherkassky are also acknowledged influences.
Set in a beautifully replicated 1976, the film hones in on Berberian Sound Studio, the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed and sharpened there. Gilderoy (Toby Jones, incredibly game in a discomfiting role), a naïve and introverted sound engineer from England, is hired to orchestrate the sound mix for the latest film by horror maestro Santini (Antonio Mancino). Thrown from the innocent world of local documentaries into a foreign environment fuelled by exploitation, Gilderoy soon finds himself caught up in a forbidding world of bitter actresses, capricious technicians and confounding bureaucracy. Obliged to work with the hot-headed producer Francesco (Cosimo Fusco), whose tempestuous relationships with certain members of his female cast threaten to boil over at any time, Gilderoy begins to record the sound for ‘The Equestrian Vortex’, a hammy tale of witchcraft and unholy murder.
Only when he’s testing microphones or poring over tape spooling around his machines does this timid man from Surrey seem at ease. Surrounded by Mediterranean machismo and, for the first time in his life, beautiful women, Gilderoy, very much an Englishman abroad, devotes all his attention to his work. But the longer Gilderoy spends mixing screams and the bloodcurdling sounds of hacked vegetables, the more homesick he becomes for his garden shed studio in his hometown of Dorking. His mother’s letters alternate between banal gossip and an ominous hysteria, which gradually mirrors the black magic of Santini’s Vortex.
The violence on the screen Gilderoy is exposed to, day in, day out, in which he himself is implicated, has a disturbing effect on his psyche. He finds himself corrupted; yet he’s the one carrying out the violence. As both time and realities shift, Gilderoy finds himself lost in an otherworldly spiral of sonic and personal mayhem, and has to confront his own demons in order to stay afloat in an environment ruled by exploitation both on and off screen.
Named after the yellow (giallo) covers of the trashy crime novels used for storylines, this period of cinema in 1960s and 70s Italy produced numerous thrillers and horror flicks that privileged style over script. As Berberian Sound Studio makes clear, key ingredients of a typical giallo tended to include girls, daggers, blood, witchcraft and chilling screams. At the time, directors such as Dario Argento (Profondo Rosso) and Lucio Fulci (The Black Cat, Zombie Flesh Eaters) commissioned composers including Ennio Morricone and prog outfit Goblin to score their slasher films. The title of Strickland’s fictional studio, Berberian, refers to Cathy Berberian, the versatile American soprano who was married to the Italian electronics pioneer Lucio Berio, a giant of 20th-century composition. Peter Strickland himself has dabbled in sound art and electronic production as part of the trio The Sonic Catering Band.
Sound, and Gilderoy’s umbilical connection to it, is the heart of the film. To that extent the creation of the sound studio was pivotal and the film was always likely to stand or fall on the authenticity of the hermetically sealed bunker and the equipment on which Gilderoy toils. Production designer Jennifer Kernke (who worked with Berberian producer Keith Griffiths on Institute Benjamenta) has worked wonders, constructing a sound studio as it might have appeared in 70s Italy by scouring the UK for original vintage analogue sound equipment. For Strickland, an aficionado of vintage sound recording apparatus, amassing all this out-of-date gear felt wonderfully anachronistic. ‘I had to question myself. I thought, are we riffing off what these films did back in the 70s or are we taking cues from the spirit of those films? It seemed rather perverse to celebrate analogue within the digital medium.’ But it is precisely the fetishistic nature of Gilderoy’s relationship with his beloved machines – perhaps the only objects he truly understands – that Strickland is celebrating. ‘I like the idea of filling the whole frame with these strange machines as we celebrate this period when these things looked so futuristic and alien,’ the director comments.
The film’s general arcane sensibility is also enforced by the tape boxes and papers the film lingers lovingly over, all of which are designed by Julian House. A record designer whose work recently graced CAN’s The Lost Tapes box-set, House also envisioned the fake title sequence, one of the most arresting and genuinely thrilling moments in the film.
Giallo movies frequently had exceptionally advanced accompanying soundtracks that meshed free jazz with the avant-garde and high art with sleazy exploitation. The score for Berberian is courtesy of James Cargill of Broadcast (whose sleeves House has also designed), who conjures an ethereal soundscape in which sound and music cut back and forth from the reality of the studio into the giallo Gilderoy works.
Santini’s ‘The Equestrian Vortex’ may be a schlocky giallo slasher, a classic horror, but Berberian Sound Studio has a more absorbing, hauntological bent. ‘Horror was the starting point but I would never call it a horror,’ says Strickland. ‘I guess the rule was to bounce off that genre – to immediately say, no blood, no murder – but still make it scary. What was exciting about that genre was it has its own history, rules and regulations that you can manipulate and mess around with. There’s something very gratifying in taking a template and turning it into something very personal.’ While avoiding didacticism, Berberian Sound Studio also explores the fascination with violence and the potentially corrupting nature of graphic imagery. Gilderoy’s exposure to the sequences he is forced to endure slowly erodes his levels of tolerance. In the end he is quite literally ingested by the images and psychologically broken.
Despite its willingness to engage with complex and prescient issues, there is also a deep vein of black humour, most clearly during the foley sequences in the auditorium when sound artists hack watermelons and stab cabbages to imitate the sound of heads being split or witches being bludgeoned in Santini’s movie (images that are seen to be projected but which the viewer, crucially, never sees). The disconnection between the effects Santini is trying to generate and what’s causing it is often knowingly comical. As the film is so much about sound and the creation of it, Strickland was careful to bring in characters involved with exhibitions of sound and figures involved with making music. Experimental artists Pal Toth, Josef Czeres and singer Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg all appear, another example of reality imaginatively blurring with fiction.
Film4 FrightFest presented a preview screening of Berberian Sound Studio on August 26.
Cast: Clive Owen, Andrea Riseborough, Gillian Anderson
UK/Ireland 2012
101 mins
‘Tell me the truth and you’ll live,’ says IRA investigator Kevin Mulgrew (David Wilmott) at the climax of Shadow Dancer, a fretful thriller set in 1990s Belfast. A simple question, yet in this film there are no simple answers; the truth isn’t depicted as a shining light illuminating the dark, but rather as a series of shifting shadows that shrink or swell with every new emotion and gradually dissolve with time.
Directed by documentary-maker James Marsh, the film prudently suggests that in this kind of conflict, there is no truth, only representations of it. And yet to achieve this complex portrayal, Marsh fought hard to seek out truths, and strove, in everything from his research to his casting choices, against any kind of misrepresentation.
Shadow Dancer, which hits the UK’s screens on August 24, focuses on single mother Collette McVeigh (played by Andrea Riseborough), a Republican living in Belfast with her mother and hardline IRA brothers. She is arrested during an aborted IRA bomb plot in London, and MI5 officer Mac (Clive Owen) offers her a choice: go to prison for 25 years or return to Belfast and spy on her own family. With her son’s future in her hands, Collette chooses to betray all she believes in and return home as a tout.
The characters and story are fictional, but were written by journalist Tom Bradby during his time as a TV correspondent in Northern Ireland. Bradby wanted to dig deeper into the heart of the conflict, and it was fiction, not journalism, that enabled him to do this. ‘Writing this was an opportunity for me to inform people about some aspects of the conflict, like the world of running informers, that you couldn’t put on the TV news at night, so I built the story as a way of telling what was really happening in this war and the real intensity that lay at the heart of it,’ says Bradby, who used his contacts on both sides of the conflict to research his subject thoroughly.
Marsh’s documentary background (he won an Oscar for 2008’s Man on Wire and picked up the Best Director award at Sundance for 2011’s Project Nim) brought an investigative approach to the material. In preparation, Marsh read the history of Ireland, from William the Conqueror to the present day: ‘When the actors had questions I was able to answer them and give them contexts about the politics. Ireland is a place where history really matters and I felt it was my duty to understand that and to offer advice.’
In order to find an authentic cast, Marsh was not nervous about stepping off the beaten track. ‘The first person I cast in fact was BrÃd Brennan,’ says Marsh. The fact that Brennan had grown up in West Belfast during the troubles was significant to Marsh: ‘A lot of our actors were Irish and that was important firstly because it felt like they knew this world better than I did and I felt they could help me and guide me.’
When English actress Andrea Riseborough, who plays lead Collette McVeigh, came on board, she moved to Belfast and spent time with some people who were at the centre of the conflict. In this way she was able to really inhabit the part. ‘Once you understand all the things [Collette] might have had to sacrifice, you can start to instinctively feel what characteristics she might need to survive,’ Riseborough says.
This detailed research and dedication to the facts can be felt in the profundity of the performances, but the one thing that doesn’t ring true with this film is the fact that, although it is set in Belfast, it was shot in Dublin – a seemingly major inconsistency, both politically and visually.
However, cinematographer Rob Hardy explains that Shadow Dancer is set in the 1990s, at the end of the troubles and the beginning of the peace process: ‘It was a tired world, a place where people were wanting to start anew. You sense that idea of transition and that longing to move on.’ Shooting in Dublin meant they could avoid the classic red brick estates that are associated with the Falls Road and the Troubles films. Shadow Dancer‘s distinctive grey tones seem to more accurately capture what it felt like for the people still living this worn-out war in the 1990s. ‘We tried to create a Belfast that was a Belfast for our story and so we were quite cavalier with our choices,’ explains Marsh.
But it is the choices such as this, where fiction is allowed to speak more freely than fact, that furnish this film with a reality that is more compulsive and, in a sense, truer than bare facts can depict, and that enables us to really feel what it was like for people living through the conflict. ‘You want to make the details of the world convincing and to pass the test of those who lived through it, but at the same time, I think the bigger imperative here is to make something so we can all understand what it is like and something that is true to itself,’says Marsh.
Don’t touch that meteorite: an attempt to make a beeline for the video art of dOCUMENTA (13), while politics-of-space debates rage from all directions.
As we speak, a tent embassy of sorts has been set up in the main square of Kassel, Germany. The organisers are calling themselves Doccupy, in the spirit of the Occupy movements across the globe. Simultaneously, a very public debate is raging over whether it is right or wrong for two dOCUMENTA artists to transport an ancient, culturally precious meteorite from its home with an indigenous community in Argentina to Kassel (at a huge expense), for the purposes of art.
For dOCUMENTA (13), it seems that this meteorite, along with the activities of Doccupy, is what has been grabbing the headlines across international media. dOCUMENTA(13), showcasing 200 international artists and showing for 100 days until September 16 in Kassel (along with satellite events in Kabul-Bamiyan, Alexandria-Cairo, as well as Banff and Switzerland), has run once every five years since 1955. And this year, these debates, centered on a politics of space, are threatening to steal more attention than the exhibited artworks themselves.
In her essay on dOCUMENTA, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the artistic director, states that there are four positions around which dOCUMENTA (13) is articulated: Siege, Hope, Retreat and Stage. These, she intuits, are ‘four possible conditions in which artists and thinkers find themselves acting in the present’. A zeitgeist full of contradictions; a time when contradiction is a welcomed state of mind, perhaps? Christov-Bakargiev also surmises that dOCUMENTA (13) explores ‘terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific fields and in other knowledges, both ancient and contemporary’. In other words, political debate and creative explorations are inseparable: dOCUMENTA is a place of transition, and of being in transit within these explorations. And in the midst of an overwhelming sprawl of artworks across the city of Kassel, the legs of visitors will certainly get a sense of being in transit, if nothing else. The place is huge.
It is not unique to dOCUMENTA, of course, to debate the concept of space in a political sense within the context of art. This very debate is a hot topic right now across the art world. It’s just that the meteorite incident and Doccupy are such strong visualisations of this particular, Western world/ developing world tension, making it easy for the international media to grab a hold of it. In another recent colourful example, this year’s Berlin Biennale experienced a staged subsuming of the festival by another art group called ‘Occupy Museum’, also parroting the Occupy concept. They borrowed the turns of phrase, methodology and even some of the exact slogans used in real-world protests and uprisings – all while maintaining really cool hair…
For dOCUMENTA, however, this dedication to politics is precisely the point of its existence, as it has been since 1955. In a press release, Christov-Bakargiev expressed her welcome of Doccupy, stating that the movement ‘continues the wave of democratic protests that have been spreading across many cities in the world. It enacts the possibility of re-inventing the use of public space and appears to me to be in the spirit of the moment and in the spirit of Joseph Beuys, who marked dOCUMENTA and its history significantly, embodying another idea of collective decision making and political responsibility through direct democracy’. Doccupy’s opponents argue that the movement is an attempt to fulfil personal artistic aims by intellectually piggybacking a form of political action used in bloody situations such as those of Egypt and Syria. For the artistic director, however, Doccupy works towards the ‘germination and flourishing’ of ideas, befitting dOCUMENTA.
It follows, then, that a festival concerned with the germination and flourishing of ideas between art and politics should have such a strong video-art presence. Video possesses the immediacy and accessibility to communicate urgent political messages, and is of course widely respected for its power as a political weapon, as well as a documentary and ethnographic tool. Video art, when traditionally screened, is also far more ephemeral than other art forms in terms of the space it physically occupies. When it’s effective, it occupies the space within us (psychically) far longer than its existence in the gallery space. For dOCUMENTA (13), video pieces occupy the traditional spaces (cinematic projections) along with far more surprising spaces; they are projected on the arched ceiling of a planetarium, on hand-held iPods, within cabins in the woods, and situated as a film-in-progress within the minds of hypnosis subjects in trance. Of course, some occupy their chosen space with far greater effectiveness than others.
Every morning in Kassel, for the 100 days of dOCUMENTA (13), video artist Albert Serra shoots a part of his film, titled The Three Little Pigs. He then edits in the afternoon and shows the new extract in a dOCUMENTA cinema the following morning. The film is an audiovisual portrait of three famous German figures – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Adolf Hitler, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder – engaging in conversations taken from historical records. The artist claims that he has used the rule of three as a method to arrive at a solution that will avoid the disaster of the proverbial wolf, as well as using the third cultural approach in order to tell this story successfully – not literature or history, but film. Based on viewing just one of the daily excerpts, however, it could be argued that (similar to the attempts of Doccupy to embody their manifesto) the idea of the film is far more interesting than the results on screen.
In the adjacent cinema, another video work, this time by the Otolith Group, is being shown. It is titled The Radiant and is concerned with the aftermath of the recent nuclear disaster in Japan. The most striking aspect of it is the interview with a Japanese man in his sixties, who is arguing that spaces contaminated by nuclear radiation in Japan should now only be occupied by people of his age group or older. He argues that the young are too vulnerable and have their whole lives ahead of them, whereas he and other elderly people will most likely be at the end of their lives by the time the radiation affects them. His proposal of a self-sacrificial occupation of space in Japan based on age is both alarming and heart-warming in its urgent selflessness.
Downstairs in the Hauptbahnhof (or main train station) is an interactive sound-and-image work by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, titled Alterbahnhof Video Walk. At first glance, it appears to be very much in line with Cardiff’s earlier aural and film installations. A few minutes into the experience, however, the work causes an emotionally violent collision between the real space in the present and the real space of the past. The work plays with your experience of your present space through the artists’ re-imagining of it, via sound and images recorded in that same physical space. You play the work through a hired iPod, and are led by Cardiff’s recorded voice around the station, in synch with the movements of her video of the space. It is as if she is leading you in a tango dance between the present and the past, the real space and the recorded space. This could seem just a clever gimmick, with a few personal and uncanny touches thrown in, until it hits you that Cardiff is guiding you to one station platform in particular. It is the very platform from where so many people were transported to concentration camps during World War II – many of whom, as we are all acutely aware, never returned. It’s an inordinately emotional moment when the video forces you into this realisation. You are standing in a place of tragedy. That tragedy is dragged suddenly into the present once more. It’s a re-mapping of time and space that blurs history with a recorded ‘present’ to force you to re-evaluate the real-world present and the space you occupy. This is a feat that is arguably very rarely achieved in film or indeed art of any medium.
Past the Hauptbahnhof, in the desolate train yard, is a four-storey house that is perhaps a century or so old. As you reach the threshold, you are asked to leave even the smallest of bags in the cloakroom. Immediately upon stepping inside the house, it becomes clear why your belongings could be considered hazardous inside. The house is plunged into almost complete darkness, with only tiny pools of light emitted from the video art scattered throughout several rooms. With only this light to guide you, your eyes are forced to pay attention to these works. The stillness and simplicity of the images are mesmerising and comforting as you are forced, fumbling, around the blackness. As you climb the stairs, the house gets lighter, although still the ‘House of Horrors’ sensation pervades. Each storey of the house contains more video work, but also blank, beautifully bound books, as well as letters exhibited on the walls that are the only clue to piecing together the history that has been created for this house. They are letters between two men over several years. The letters’ content is beguilingly simple, hiding an undercurrent of longing, nostalgia, loneliness and desire. Up in the attic are two large metal balls standing solemnly, their only artistic companions being the orchestral string music trickling into earshot. Their mystery is a fitting end to the tour of the house, whose history, created by Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer (The End of Summer, 2012), generates more questions than answers. (It later became apparent that the music is part of Turner Prize-winner Susan Phillipsz’ latest sound installation, featured nearby at the Hauptbahnhof. No matter – the synchronicity of music and place only served to further articulate the sense of longing in this house.)
Back outside, towards the station, is an opening that leads to Artaud’s Cave, a film projected within a concrete ‘reconstruction’ of Plato’s cave. Created by Javier Téllez, the film was inspired by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and shot in a psychiatric institution in Mexico using non-actors. Viewers must crunch along a gravel path and clamber over cold stone walls to view the work. Somehow the combination of cave and film are claustrophobic, with the sense that you too are confined in an institution of sorts, with no clear way out.
Nearby is a five-channel video installation by Indian artist Tejal Shah, titled Between the Waves. The work is thematically positioned around an archaeological excavation in India that hopes to find the possible true origins of the unicorn. The work uses live-action video, animation and even an iPhone Morse code app to tell its story, and repositions a traditionally Western mythological creature back within its purportedly accurate Indian heritage. As Shah explains about her work: ‘All clues lie within, decoding them is a matter of our own cognitive or imaginative limits.’
Wooden cabins scattered across Kassel’s beautiful parkland, Karlsaue, contain all manner of installations and video works, including sail boats washed up in trees; a film depicting archived impressions from a Swiss sex commune from the early 20th century; a film and sound installation exploring the existential space of the voice that is at once haunting and frustrating (Manon de Boer, One, Two, Many, 2012); along with a narrative film depicting a privileged white family sitting around a candlelit dinner table, speaking about their son’s racist ‘honour killing’ of a violent man (Omer Fast, Continuity, 2012). At last, unassumingly nestled amongst the fir trees, is a cabin that you must book to visit and is an absolute must for your dOCUMENTA experience: the Hypnotic Show in the Reflection Room (Marcos Lutyens, Raimundas Malašauskas).
Upon your arrival, you must take off your shoes and follow the artist downstairs. There, once alone with the artist, you will find yourself in an almost bare wooden room, which is still somehow cosy. You are told that you are being filmed. You are told to relax and choose a ‘story’ from a book consisting of no words, only colour combinations. And from there on in, the hypnotist and your unconscious mind take over to become the featured artwork. The hypnotist works to project your inner thoughts back to you in the form of verbal descriptions woven into the narrative he speaks. In this sense, each individual session results in a completely new ‘artwork’, which is captured in an ongoing video. This process is accompanied by a series of events when the artist switches roles and places himself under a trance-like state. The artist, while in this state, escapes the cabin to roam the streets of Kassel, filming the results of his interactions with people going about their days and nights. This work is a disquieting example of how art can occupy your utmost personal space: it fixes the exhibition space of the film directly inside the unconscious mind.
The Hypnotic Show in the Reflection Room has the potential to occupy all four positions of thinking as outlined by Christov-Barakiev, depending only on the state of mind of its subjects: Siege, Hope, Retreat and Stage. And the same could be said for the poor meteorite trapped in the midst of all these artistic and political debates. The meteorite is at once besieged from all sides, hopeful for resolution, attempting to retreat and yet spot-lit on the world stage of media attention. One can only wonder what thoughts the meteorite itself would have under the spell of hypnosis. Four thousand years’ worth of tales to tell us. A humbling thought.
‘The riddle of art is that we do not know what it is until it is no longer that which it was.’ Christov-Barakiev
The heavy rain that poured on the 65th edition of the Cannes International Film Festival might have put a damper on some of the beach parties and special anniversary celebrations, but the programme was strong, with much love and death at its heart, some welcome oddities and two certifiable masterpieces. One was Michael Haneke’s formidable Love (Amour), which eventually took home the Palme d’Dor while the other, Leos Carax’s original and brilliantly elusive Holy Motors came away empty-handed – a decision that left many critics baffled.
Compared to Haneke’s earlier works, Love stands out for its astounding sensitivity and subtle tenderness, but ultimately, the story, which centres around 80-odd-year-old retired music teachers George and Anne, is no less hard-hitting. As the couple are faced with Anne’s physical and mental deterioration after two successive strokes, the film scrutinizes, in a profoundly intelligent and unsettling way, the consequences of life and death, and the role that long-standing love plays when one half of an ageing couple is facing the end. As one would expect from a filmmaker as precise and skilful as Haneke, Love is finely scripted, superbly composed, and often hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad. The quiet grandeur of the film, however, would be lost without its two main actors: Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose astonishing, disarmingly honest performances breathe life into Haneke’s formal perfection in capturing the realities of terminal illness in meticulous detail. In fact, for the first time in his career, Haneke, the grand puppet master, seems to have dropped his strings: with a troubling and omnipresent sense of inevitability, his method here is not to masterly lead his characters into gloom and hopelessness, but to follow the couple through their spacious Paris apartment with the utmost trust and delicacy, without a trace of pathos or sentimentality. Crafted with passionate conviction and a mastery of film language, Love is that rare work of genius: an acute philosophical inquiry that’s highly emotionally charged, but also dramatically gripping, incredibly discreet and utterly credible in its depiction of human behaviour.
Despite the resemblance in title, and the fact that both directors come from the same country, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe) couldn’t be more different. In Seidl’s film, which marks the first instalment of his Paradise triptych (the second part, Hope, is premiering in competition in Venice later this year), Margarethe Tiesel stars as Teresa, a chubby single mother in her fifties, whose desperate search for love and affection turns increasingly wolfish when she steps out of her hotel room at a luxury holiday resort in Kenya, where her friend has assured her that sex is plentiful. At first reluctant to have sex with one of the many underage beach boys on offer, she soon can’t help but give in to temptation. However, not unlike Haneke, Seidl slightly tones down the brutal rigidity of his earlier work as he moves into warmer territory, both climatically and emotionally – for many, a welcome relief that nonetheless doesn’t prevent the film from being yet another of the Austrian provocateur’s apt, poignant and fiercely honest explorations of the incorrigibly odd and debauched side of society.
As the festival, and the rain, continued, more films emerged that concerned themselves with the joys and sorrows of love. In this context, the more accessible approach offered by Miike Takashi’s For Love’s Sake (Ai To Makoto) turned out to be mildly entertaining. Based on Ikki Kajiwara and Takumi Nagayasu’s 1970s cult manga The Legend of Love and Sincerity, Miike’s revitalised screen version blithely mixes exuberant action, daft comedy, narrative-framing animé sequences and tongue-in-cheek high school musical scenes galore, as it follows the boisterous romance between the rebellious Makoto (Satoshi Tsumabuki) and innocent student Ai (Takei Emi), their chemistry at moments exploding like pop-art fireworks against a burning sky. For Love’s Sake certainly has style and ambition to spare, but a flawed script and overlong execution leave it somewhat unfulfilling. Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Japanese venture Like Someone in Love was equally too flat and overlong. More interested in its Tokyo environment than in anything else, it was too plodding and self-regarding to be charming. The film tells the story of a brief encounter between elderly professor Takashi (Tadashi Okuno) and young, erratic, part-time call-girl Akiko (Rin Takanashi), who in turn is the object of desire of clinging, jealous Noriaki (Ryo Kase). Perhaps a more rigorous editor than Kiarostami’s son Bahman could have disposed of the protracted dialogue sequences, and made the few great scenes and ideas cohere into a deeper narrative. But whereas Kiarostami’s best films keep haunting, nagging and daring you to think about them long after watching them, this one is instantly forgettable.
The Directors’ Fortnight offered a first glimpse of the smaller-scale cinematic pleasures on show with Pablo Larraín’s No. Gael García Bernal plays an ambitious, young Chilean advertising man who is asked to help create a persuasive campaign for the anti-Pinochet ‘No’ vote in the 1988 national plebiscite, which ultimately ended the military dictatorship that had ruled the country for 16 years. Not as dark, and much less surreal and distinctive in style than Larraín’s previous work revolving around the repressive Pinochet regime, No is an extremely watchable lesson in historically and politically charged filmmaking.
The other stand-out in the Director’s Fortnight was a documentary exploring the inner meanings of a horror classic that was shot over 20 years ago, namely Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Brimming with clips from the original film and enriched with footage from the shoot, as well as detailed sketches and maps that reveal the architectural layout of the notorious Timberline Lodge, Rodney Ascher’s intriguing and lovingly constructed Room 237 does a brilliant job of staging the mind-boggling and often hilarious interpretations of the film’s subtext, offered by various narrators. Ascher never dismisses any of the outlandish arguments (for example, those concerning Kubrick’s involvement in the ‘faked’ Apollo 11 moon-landing footage) or takes the side of the more plausible ones. It’s a special treat for film fans (not only those of Kubrick’s film or the horror genre as such), and the perfect excuse to re-watch The Shining again for the umpteenth time.
Without doubt, however, the most polarising and excitedly discussed film of the festival – and my personal highlight – was Holy Motors, Leos Carax’s comeback film after over a decade of failed projects and aborted dreams. Some of these might even have found their way into this story of an actor at work and a man challenged by, as Carax put it, ‘the experience of being alive’. Played by Denis Lavant, Monsieur Oscar is chauffeured through the nocturnal streets of Paris in a white stretch limo by his assistant Celine (Edith Scob), rushing from one mini-acting job to the next. Each of them requires him to read a script and change his look entirely using the pre-selected outfits that he finds carefully prepared for him in the fully equipped dressing room that is the back of his car. Some of the episodes – in particular, when Lavant becomes an old man on his deathbed; or as he squeezes into a slick, black Lycra suit to act in an erotic motion-capture scene together with another performer – are brilliant. Others, like the sequence in which he turns into the Monsieur Merde (from Carax’s segment in the 2008 anthology film Tokyo) and kidnaps Eva Mendes at a fashion photo shoot, are just goofy. In all, however, the sundry characters burst with imagination, personality and drama. Carax knows that mixing cinema and reality can be a dangerous game, but in Holy Motors, life seems way too short to waste time with conventions. It is the kind of film Cannes should be celebrating. It’s a delightful oddity, a dazzling and daring labour of love that reawakens faith in – and appreciation for – cinema, and the art of acting. In fact, that alone would have made it worthy of an award.
Holy Motors is released in UK cinemas on 28 September 2012 by Artificial Eye.
Pamela Jahn
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
