White Material: Interview with Claire Denis

White Material

Format: Cinema

Release date: 2 July 2010

Venue: Chelsea Cinema, Curzons Richmond, Soho, Renoir (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director:Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Marie N’Diaye, Lucie Borleteau

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Christophe Lambert, Isaach De Bankolé

France/Cameroon 2009

102 mins

With White Material, Claire Denis revisits Africa, the setting of her debut feature Chocolat (1988) as well as of her childhood years. Subtly political while also deeply personal, the film focuses on a French woman, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), who runs a coffee plantation in an unidentified African country amid racial tension and revolutionary combat. Obsessed with her plantation, she is blind to the realities that surround her and refuses to leave when the fighting between government forces and rebels gets worse and her position becomes increasingly precarious. Racial and political conflict is intermeshed with personal conflict and Huppert’s dysfunctional family disintegrates as outside events unravel. Denis paints a compelling portrait of a driven woman who can be harsh and ruthless to protect her passionate attachment to the African land she owns. Below, Claire Denis talks to Sarah Cronin about the inspiration for the film and its complex depiction of a troubled continent.

Sarah Cronin: In your director’s statement, you dedicate the film to Sony Labou Tansi. Can you tell me a bit more about him?

Claire Denis: Sony was a writer from Congo, who, along with his wife, died at the beginning of the 90s, without treatment, from AIDS. He’s a great writer, one of my favourites. He has this terrible quality, lucidity, and humour.

Did he write a lot about corruption?

He wrote about his own country. He was very active, he was actually in the rebellion, so he didn’t get treatment for his disease because of that.

How did the film originate? Were you interested in Maria’s story, or civil war in Africa?

It started with Isabelle Huppert. She wanted to work with me, and asked me if I knew the novel by Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing. I said, of course, not only do I know this novel, but it was a big inspiration for me when I made my first film, Chocolat. Although in my family, as opposed to Lessing’s, no one was farming, we were not settling in Africa, we moved all the time, so I had absolutely no experience of farming. I told Isabelle that the problem for me was that period South Africa was not really something that I wanted to do. I wanted to make a contemporary story. Actually, I found it watching the news on TV. There were elements I saw that I put together.

It’s a much more tragic film than Chocolat.

It has nothing to do with Chocolat. That was a film I made out of my own memories, with a sort of – not nostalgia – but I think it was a flashback of someone going back to the country where she grew up.

It seemed to me to reflect a disappointment in the last 20 years in Africa – things like the seizures of white farms in Zimbabwe and Rwanda.

I think that touched people in England more than in France, we were not aware of that, except that the President of Zimbabwe is completely crazy. I was more aware of South Africa, because I have been there many times. Rwanda is a different story, it’s a genocide – you cannot be inspired by Rwanda slightly – you have to be very explicit with Rwanda. No, I was inspired by the west coast. Sierra Leone, Kenya…

The child soldiers especially reminded me of Sierra Leone…

Also Liberia, Nigeria…

I really like the scene where the children are ‘playing’ in the house and find the white dog, and the music on the soundtrack tinkles, a bit like a music box. It’s a very poignant scene.

For me, the child soldiers were victims. They were number one children, and only after soldiers with guns. I wanted them to be children first.

At the very end, why is the last shot of the young rebel, rather than of Maria?

It was important to me to give a chance to a young kid to grow up with some hope. For Maria, her story ends there.

Was she taking out her anger on her father for putting her in that situation?

Her father-in-law. There is no more for her there. This violence expresses something about that.

And what about Manuel, Maria’s son, has he been corrupted?

Manuel is not corrupt. He’s a young boy, he’s crazy. Corrupted is a big word for someone young.

At the end, he plays with the kids – for him it’s almost like a game.

Yeah, it’s something liberating for him.

And what about the radio DJ who gives information to the rebels, how crucial is he to the film?

He’s not crucial, but there is no place in Africa without the radio being like a clock. You don’t live without a radio anywhere, so the guy is telling people to pack and run away. The white people are going to leave, so if you are on the side of the rebellion, be aware, you are going to be killed.

The film seems very ambivalent, you don’t seem to favour the government or the rebels…

The mayor and his militia are not really great, and while the child soldiers are dangerous, it’s not right to kill children in that way. I’m not ambivalent as a person. I don’t want to be a prisoner of cliché, but I’m not ambivalent. I’m very clear, I think.

Maria is infuriating at times, especially when she puts her workers’ lives at risk, but it’s also easy to have sympathy for her because she has lived there her whole life.

Yes, I feel that way too. I dislike what she represents, but she has something – she wants to believe in herself, that she has the power to transform, or force disaster into something successful, because nothing in this family is a success. And I think that’s why I like her so much… and because of Isabelle, Isabelle gave her something, some of her light.

I like the scene when she’s on the motorbike, and her hand is floating up in the air.

She enjoyed that moment. She felt free, like the queen of the world. She doesn’t want to be another person.

It’s the subtle things too – in that scene where she shows the workers where they’re sleeping, and the camera just briefly shows the old blankets lying on the floor. She loves Africa and loves the people but she doesn’t realise…

She lives probably like her father-in-law did. She is no different – she thinks she’s different, but she’s not.

Interview by Sarah Cronin

Terracotta Festival 2010


Accident

Terracotta Far East Film Festival

6-9 May 2010

Prince Charles Cinema, London

Terracotta website

The Electric Sheep team reviews the highlights of the 2010 Terracotta Far East Film Festival.

Accident (Soi Cheang, 2009)
The term ‘high-concept’ was coined to describe Hollywood blockbusters that can be summarised in a single sentence; however, it could also be applied to Accident, a Hong Kong thriller about a team of assassins led by the intensely disciplined Brain (Louis Koo), who disguise their hits as ‘accidents’ so that nobody realises that a crime has actually been committed. Produced by the prolific Johnnie To, Accident exhibits an icy aesthetic that keeps the audience at an emotional distance but serves to maintain suspense during the sustained set-pieces. The unexpectedly romantic score by French composer Xavier Jamaux, who previously collaborated with To on Mad Detective (2007) and Sparrow (2008), aims for a tragic resonance that is undermined by the comparatively one-note characterisations of Brain’s crew, but Cheang’s psychological approach towards pulp material ensures that Accident has a meditative quality that is rarely found in upscale action cinema. JOHN BERRA

Vengeance (Fuk sau, 2009)
Vengeance marks a return to what Johnnie To does best – stripped down gangster stories with a hard-boiled edge and slickly executed stand-offs. The plot is simple – a woman barely survives the assassination of her family and demands that her father Costello (Johnny Hallyday), a French chef, take revenge on those responsible. Costello employs a trio of hitmen (played by To favourites Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Gordon Lam and Lam Suet) to track them down, but there are a number of twists and turns as the group make their way to Simon Yam’s unrepentant crime lord. As usual, To provides some memorable set-pieces that are both playful and fraught with tension. It’s their simple poetry that gives To’s films a distinctive mark, with a touch of the bizarre and the humorous that sets his work out from the crowd. RICHARD BADLEY

Antique (Min kyu-dong, 2008)
When arrogant yuppie Kim decides to open a cake shop, assuming that such establishments will offer plenty of opportunities to meet available women, his search for a pastry chef leads him to former high school classmate Min, who has become known as ‘The Gay of Demonic Charm’ after being sacked from numerous bakeries following flings with co-workers who find him irresistible. Somehow, this simple set-up serves as the springboard for multiple narrative strands to the point that there are three films competing for audience attention; Antique is ostensibly a comedy about the unusual professional relationship between Kim and Min, but it also takes a darker detour into thriller territory and flirts with the form of the musical through dizzying montages. There are some hilarious moments scattered throughout this adaptation of Fumi Yoshinaga’s popular manga, and the themes of friendship and forgiveness are effectively conveyed amid the colourful chaos. JOHN BERRA

Cow

Cow (Dou niu, 2009)
In Chinese director Guan Hu’s Cow, set in 1940, a village simpleton emerges from hiding to discover that his fortress home has been destroyed by Japanese soldiers. The narrow lanes are eerily quiet; the dirt in the square stained with blood. Confused and terrified, he discovers that the only other survivor is a ‘foreign’ cow that he’s promised to care for. Cow unfolds in a series of flashbacks, mixing humorous scenes of village life with the simpleton’s harrowing struggles to keep himself and the cow alive as his home is overrun by returning Japanese soldiers, the Kuomintang, and fellow refugees. The result is a tragic black comedy about the futility of war, told from a unique point of view in an already crowded genre. Initially curious and captivating, it’s a shame that the film starts to drift in the second half once the novelty of the plot and set-up start to wear thin. SARAH CRONIN

Summer Wars (Samâ wôzu, 2009)
This new animé from director Mamoru Hosada is more satisfying than his previous offering, The Girl Who Leapt through Time, although its promising beginning and beautiful animation are equally marred by a fairly simplistic message. The story revolves around a young boy, Kenji, who, while staying with the family of a classmate he has a crush on for the summer, accidentally helps a hacker crack the code to the ‘OZ’ network, a Second Life type of virtual world used by everyone, from private users to government and military institutions. As the mysterious attacker wreaks havoc in OZ with potentially disastrous consequences in the real world, Kenji has to find a way to stop him. The animation is excellent, with two contrasting styles used to represent real and virtual worlds, and the tone is charming and humorous. But while the story is initially captivating, it quickly descends into a basic good versus evil battle underpinned by an unsophisticated, conservative belief in traditional values. VIRGINIE S&#278LAVY

Phobia (See prang, 2008)
As with most horror anthologies, Phobia is a mixed bag. A quartet of ghost stories from Thailand that vary in stylistic tricks and genre clichés, they seem like extended 10-minute shorts hastily jammed together with no particular format. Some of the stories are linked by references to other characters but there’s no common theme or central thread, and the title itself is misleading: this isn’t an exploration of different phobias, just a straightforward play on people’s understandable and natural fear of ghosts. Last Fright is the most technically accomplished of the bunch, a slow-burning chiller that doesn’t rely on ropey effects, just old-fashioned storytelling. But the anthology’s stand-out is In the Middle, not because it’s particularly scary but because it keeps a tight, coherent plot, revolving around a group of lads on a camping holiday who are haunted by a friend after he’s drowned. RICHARD BADLEY

Read full reviews of Vengeance and Phobia, out on DVD in May 2010.

Afterschool: Interview with Antonio Campos

Afterschool

Format: DVD

Date: 8 March 2010

Distributor: Network Releasing

Director: Antonio Campos

Writer: Antonio Campos

Cast: Ezra Miller, Addison Timlin, Lee Wilkof, Michael Stuhlbarg

USA 2008

100 mins

Twenty-five-year-old director Antonio Campos’s debut feature Afterschool, set in an elite East Coast boarding school, is not the easiest film to sit through. Long takes, a static camera and the subjective point-of-view shots mean that action and dialogue often take place off-screen. But despite its unconventional, almost documentary-like style (the director cites Frederick Wiseman as an influence), the film is a riveting picture that builds in intensity as Campos captures the adolescent agonies endured by the lead character Robert (Ezra Miller), a misfit dealing with the deaths of two of the school’s most popular girls, which he unwittingly captured on video. A sparse, at times difficult film, it is an original and compelling addition to the high school genre and a strikingly assured directorial debut for Antonio Campos. Sarah Cronin talks to the director about high school myths and YouTube kids.

Sarah Cronin: Like Robert, you also attended an elite prep school. Is there something of you and your experiences in Robert? What inspired the film?

Antonio Campos: Yes, there were elements of my own experiences and the experiences of those around me that made it into the film. What really inspired the film, though, was my last year of high school, which began with 9/11 and the death of my best friend’s father that day; at the end of the year, a close friend died in a freak accident while travelling through Europe. As an 18-year-old at the time, all my previous ideas for movies and all the things that preoccupied my teenage life suddenly seemed very trivial. It was at that time that I had the idea of a boy witnessing the death of two girls by a drug overdose in the bathroom at a person’s party. That was all I had at that point, and over the course of the next four years, the story continued to grow and develop into what the final film is.

Why did you choose to shoot the film primarily using a stationary camera – both film and video – with much of the dialogue and action occurring off-screen or at a distance? Was it a tool to emphasise Robert’s alienation or is there more to it than that? At times you capture his point of view, at other times it’s much more ambiguous.

There were many reasons that were dictating those choices when we were making the film, like the one you pointed out, and thinking back, they make sense. But looking back on the film, I like to not remember them and just let them be part of the film and ultimately part of Robert.

Did you draw on any other films or filmmakers as an inspiration for this technique? And did you worry that the film’s aesthetic might alienate some people in the audience?

There is a scene in The Conversation early on where Gene Hackman walks into his apartment, sits on a chair, gets up and walks off-screen—the camera holds on an empty frame for a few moments and then, as though the man filming had suddenly woken up after falling asleep on the job, the camera pans left to find Hackman sitting on the couch. Then a conversation proceeds where Hackman gets up and is in and out of frame. The idea that the camera is present and someone is watching our character was something that I wanted to convey throughout Afterschool. Fortunately or unfortunately, I never thought about whether that choice would alienate some people; I had a greater hope that people would be excited by something different.

What is behind Robert’s attraction to anonymous, violent porn? In some ways it’s the most disturbing thing about his character.

Most teenagers are exposed to hardcore porn early on. I imagine Robert has seen most of the other porn out there and like he says in the film, the sites he watches don’t seem fake. In a world where it’s so easy for things to be called real but be completely manufactured, Robert seems interested in finding examples of raw emotion and authenticity, though his perception is a bit skewed at times.

Do you think of kids now as part of a YouTube generation? And has YouTube helped de-sensitise kids to violence? In the film’s first clips you show Saddam being hanged and dead American soldiers alongside silly human and pet tricks.

I feel like kids are inundated with images now more than ever, but it just seems like a natural progression in a way — just more, more, more of everything, especially in the United States. I imagine one big grab bag and you can stick your hand in and pull out a cute kitten or you can pull out cell phone footage of Saddam hanging; the fact that they all exist side by side changes their significance and how people can perceive them.

Do you think teachers and parents are struggling to keep up with the implications of new technologies? They seem happier to medicate their children than confront reality.

Medicating kids has become a consistent trend in the past couple of decades; I’m not sure if you can connect it directly with the technology. Obviously, in some cases, it is absolutely what is needed, but in many cases, it is like putting a band-aid on the problem and not allowing the person to actually deal with whatever it is that is bothering them. In some cases, it is a total mistake and then you have a kid who was actually fine but now on medication that is chemically altering his brain. Parents and teachers definitely are trying to keep up with the technologies, but the fact is they probably won’t be able to.

Towards the end of the film, after the fight between David and Robert, Robert’s effectively punished by Burke, the headmaster, while the twins and David are referred to as ‘good kids’. Are the adults so easily blinded by good looks and popularity? Is high school nothing more than a popularity contest? In the memorial video, the students all claim that they wanted to be just like the twins, even though they end up dead.

For Burke, the best thing for the school would be to remember the girls as good kids who made a mistake; it makes the school look good and the rich parents of the girls feel better, which in turn will help the school. The popular idea of what a memorial should be is to remember the positive, which is evident with every recent celebrity death. The idea to focus on who the person really was or the complexities of their life gets lost.

The fight between Robert and David ends up on the internet, echoing the cat fight that he watches in the very beginning of the film. Do you think kids are too easily giving up their privacy? That everything, even the deaths of the twins, is in the public domain?

Absolutely. The information that kids are sharing on their Facebook and MySpace accounts or in their blogs is dangerously personal at times. I feel now more than ever kids have become obsessed with watching themselves and their friends, and in their quests to define themselves online, they compromise themselves and their privacy. It’s been proven that the more you embarrass yourself or expose yourself online the more people want to watch; and teenagers in general think in the moment without considering what they’re actually doing.

Is the film’s downbeat view of high school partly a reaction to the idealised portrayal of adolescence in the John Hughes movies, and the high school genre in general? High School Musical and Gossip Girl have proved to be wildly popular.

The film can be seen like that, but for me, it was simply the film I wanted to make. Though the lack of a soundtrack in Afterschool and my other shorts dealing with adolescence was a reaction to the over-use of music in teen films.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing my script for Momma, which deals with a boy and his mother over the course of about 30 years in New York. I’m producing the feature Martha Marcy May Marlene for Sean Durkin, who was one of my producers on Afterschool, along with Josh Mond. And hopefully in the next few months, people will be able to see a film that we produced called Two Gates of Sleep, directed by Alistair Banks Griffin and starring Brady Corbet.

Buy Afterschool [DVD] [2008] from Amazon

Review of the Year 2009

Let the Right One In

The Electric Sheep team look back at the heroes and villains of 2009.

THE GOOD

Love Exposure
A four-hour long hymn to the redemptive power of love, Love Exposure creates a magnificently alien universe that careers from cartoony farce to serious drama. For all its oddness, the film has an epic, biblical quality, and there is a truth in the characters and their relationships that keeps us gripped despite the marathon length. ELEANOR MCKEOWN

Let the Right One In
This sweet and bloody subtle horror tale charts the relationship between lonely 12-year-old Oskar and vampire girl Eli. There is an ever-present sense of danger whenever Eli and Oskar are together and it is this threat underlying their love that makes the film so touching and melancholy, so real and unsentimental. Let the Right One In perfectly captures the nature of love as a delicate and dangerous balancing act, lovers poised for a fleeting, magical moment between need and defiance, trust and menace, sweetness and violence. TINA PARK

The White Ribbon
Violence is yet again the main subject of Haneke’s excellent The White Ribbon, which deservedly won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. The White Ribbon is very much a German film, and it is impossible to ignore that the overly quiet and polite children depicted here are the ‘Nazi generation’. But, more than that, it is, in Haneke’s words, ‘a film about the roots of evil’. It is a didactic play of sorts, but one in which the names of the culprits are as irrelevant as any direct answers or lessons. The finely crafted screenplay, the stunning black and white photography, the aural landscape, the use of omission and silence make this nightmarish fable one of Haneke’s most accomplished films to date. PAMELA JAHN

White Lightnin’
Merging real-life events and unbridled fiction, writers (and co-producers) Shane Smith and Eddy Moretti have crafted a bold, nightmarish tale of Southern darkness and director Dominic Murphy takes the subject matter to cinematic extremes, using a hand-held camera, bizarre angles and repeated blackouts to convey Appalachian mountain dancer Jesco White’s disturbed state of mind. Intensely imagined and vividly directed, White Lightnin’ is a raw, rabid, howling hillbilly hell trip that doesn’t let up. PAMELA JAHN

Afterschool
If, as is usually the case, high school/college movies are intended as portraits of America in microcosm, then this is the most bilious, vicious picture of that nation I’ve encountered in years. The dark nature of the story is emphasised by visually inventive, oddly framed photography throughout, imitating both the lopsided compositions of amateur cameramen and the disaffected gaze of a sociopath, building a woozy, unhealthy atmosphere, a world viewed through the wrong head. Creepy and smart. MARK STAFFORD

Johnny Mad Dog
Set in an unnamed African country, Johnny Mad Dog opens with a shockingly brutal, surreally violent scene in which a pack of frenzied, coked up, brainwashed children attack a village. The film plunges us into their perception of the senseless chaos and madness of war, avoiding any simplifying, worthy platitudes about the situation. They are both terrible victims of the war and terrifying murderers, childish and vulnerable on the one hand and capable of the most chilling acts of violence on the other. A cross between Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now, this is an extraordinarily powerful film. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

Moon
Duncan Jones’s independent debut feature is a fascinating and visually stunning sci-fi film that explores the alienation and bitter loneliness of space, as well as the very essence of the human condition. Filmed in little more than a month, and refreshingly making use of models rather than relying solely on CGI, the picture beautifully captures Jones’s unique vision, both aesthetically and philosophically. Moon is an instant classic of the genre, as well as one of the most impressive and original films to emerge from the UK in years. SARAH CRONIN

Big River Man
This unconventional documentary charts eccentric Slovenian swimmer Martin Strel’s extraordinary attempt to swim the Amazon. An unlikely champion, the rotund, hard-drinking, 53-year-old Martin combines a day job as a flamenco guitar teacher with a line in swimming the world’s most polluted rivers. The megalomaniac nature of the project, the strangeness of his relationship to his entourage and the spectacular Amazonian scenery make for one of the most enjoyable films of the year, a soulful journey into dark places, lunacy and the extremes of human behaviour that is at turns desperately farcical and profoundly affecting. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

THE BAD

Antichrist
Watching Antichrist, one gets no sense of the artist grappling with his materials, trying to strike a balance between order and chaos. Instead, von Trier seems a confused and desperate director, whose latest film has completely evaded his control. Having made good work in the past, he may well make good work again in the future, and should he do so, Antichrist may come to be seen as an intriguing low in the director’s oeuvre. Considered on its own, however, Antichrist is utter nonsense, an irredeemable mess, and one of the worst films I have ever had the displeasure to see. DAVID WARWICK

THE UGLY

Synecdoche New York
We are asked to sympathise with an outrageously self-absorbed, self-pitying blob of a man who cannot get over the momentous tragedy of his own mortality. Caden’s fixation with death stops him from living life, making him the most bloodless, gutless, humourless, lifeless cinematic character I’ve come across in a long time, and there is no sense of distance or self-deprecation to help us through this bloated, indigestible whine-fest. Structural convolutions fail to fill the film’s empty heart or disguise its stunningly narrow perspective on the world – Kaufman is absolutely incapable to see beyond the confines of a peculiarly North American, white, male, middle-class, middle-aged perspective. Depressing beyond words. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

53rd London Film Festival Round Up

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

53nd LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

14-29 October 2009

LFF website

As always, the London Film Festival acted as an advance preview for some of the big releases coming out in the next few months – including Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, John Hillcoat’s The Road and Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. We will have full-length reviews of those films on their release, so here we have to chosen to concentrate on the surprises and unknown pleasures of this year’s festival.

Mother

Following his success with monster movie The Host, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho returns to less commercial territory in his fourth and possibly best film to date, pouring his genre-defying talent into a dazzling psychological thriller that is both a disturbing family drama and witty detective story of sorts. Mother features a striking central performance from Korean TV actress Kim Hye-ja as the vigilant mother who will stop at nothing to protect her grown-up, mentally impaired son. When the emotionally fragile Do-joon is accused of murdering a high school girl and lazy policemen squeeze a questionable confession out of him just so they can close the case, the feisty widow sets out to prove his innocence, investigating the mysterious crime herself. Pushing past the bounds of conventional film noir, Bong elegantly wraps his superbly twisted narrative in stylistically assured, smartly composed scenes while creating an atmosphere that is somewhat ironic and wonderfully sinister at the same time. A festival favourite worldwide. PAMELA JAHN

Showing as part of the Bong Joon-ho retrospective at the BFI Southbank, London, on November 14.

Metropia

Blending the acute paranoia of the best dystopian science fiction with the noir futurism of Blade Runner and Dark City, Metropia is a brilliant little gem. In a permanently dark Europe where life is mostly confined to the underground and cycling has become an extreme sport, an everyman named Roger starts following a beautiful and inevitably mysterious blonde woman who may be able to explain why he’s started hearing voices. The stunning, innovative animation creates a richly detailed world that is both fascinatingly strange and disturbingly familiar. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

45365

Winner of the audience award at the SXSW festival, 45365 is a surprising discovery. A low-key but moving documentary, it weaves together the storylines of the inhabitants of Sidney, Ohio – from the high school kids on the all-important football team to the police in their patrol cars, the judge running for re-election and the local troublemaker and his damaged mother. Created by local filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross, the result is a subtle, intimate look at both the highs and lows of life in a small town. The film’s cinéma vérité aesthetic is brilliantly rendered; refreshingly, the young brothers reject the traditional narrative voice-overs and talking heads that so many documentaries rely on, instead letting the often lyrical visuals speak for themselves. It’s a tender, loving, and utterly captivating film. SARAH CRONIN

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

When I saw an ad for this last year, I was mystified. Now I’ve seen it, I still am, in a good way. How Werner Herzog ended up helming a kind of remake of Ferarra’s film, starring Nicholas Cage I don’t know, and don’t really want to. I prefer to think of it as a product from an alternate universe where Herzog does this kind of thing all the time. What you need to know: it’s a blast, and funny as hell, with Ferrrara’s gritty tortured Catholicism tossed in favour of wilful absurdity and a plethora of lizards. Cage is terrific, with a lopsided gait and a crackpipe laugh, torturing grannies and shaking down football stars, screaming one quotable line after another. I watched the whole thing grinning like a loon. It’s every cop show cliché reflected in a hall of mirrors – wholly indecent fun. MARK STAFFORD

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)

The well-deserved recipient of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes festival, Giorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth is an inventive and riveting film that blurs the line between the real and the utterly grotesque and is infused with a science fiction feel. The story (the less you know, the better) takes place almost entirely within the confines of a spacious family house, inhabited by a married couple and their three grown-up children, who have never set foot outside and are confined to the ludicrous universe created by their parents’ cruel games and peculiar educational methods. Opting for fixed, meticulously framed shots and a dazzling, yet unhurried visual style, Lanthimos gradually reveals the details of this twisted, self-enclosed world while crafting a consistently troubling atmosphere of hilarious otherworldliness and lurking evil. Full of amazing twists, dark, silly humour and irreverent spirit, Dogtooth is an obscure mini-marvel not to be missed. PAMELA JAHN

Planned UK release.

44 Inch Chest

Colin (Ray Winstone), is lying, drunk as a lord, on the floor of his trashed house, listening to Nilsson’s ‘Without You’, on repeat. His wife (Joanne Whalley) has revealed that she loves someone else and he isn’t taking it well. His crew of dodgy old geezers (John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane, Ian McShane) decide something must be done, so they kidnap the young loverboy and arrange for Colin to administer justice. Malcolm Venville’s 44 Inch Chest has much going for it, a great cast on cracking form, crisp photography, a meaty script by the writers of Sexy Beast, a bravura cinematic opening, and… and I really wish it didn’t all feel like an unsuccessfully retooled stage play, mainly confined to a single room, full of unreal speechifying, and with an unsatisfying conclusion to boot. Still, just hearing these actors delivering this biblically profane dialogue is a pleasure, and the thing gets pretty damned trippy and intense as we go further into Colin’s fractured mind. MARK STAFFORD

UK theatrical release: 22 January 2010.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot)

The long-lost raw footage of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished 1964 big-budget psycho-thriller L’Enfer is still intriguing and dazzling to look at, infused with swirling lights and blue-lipped, cigarette-puffing fantasy temptresses. A real shame, however, that although director Serge Bromberg has managed to speak to quite a few members of the original crew, this behind-the-scenes investigation has so little to say about the reasons behind Clouzot’s failure to complete the film. PAMELA JAHN

UK theatrical release: 6 November 2009.

Paper Heart

If you can put up with that whole lo-fi home-made cutesy indie scene (Demetri Martin, check, Gondryesque cardboard puppet sequences, check, naïve acoustic pop songs, check) More to the point, if you can put up with whiny-voiced scrunch-faced munchkin Charlyne Yi, then the neat central conceit of director Nicholas Jasenovic making a documentary about the search for true love destroying any hope of true love occurring by swamping a budding potential romance with his desire to film fake love clichés (kooky montages, walks on the beach, trips to Paris) will work for you. And a whole series of games with reality and illusion will open up. I can appreciate it’s a stretch. Aside from the ‘fake’ romance with Michael Cera (check) stuff, the ‘real’ documentary throws up some singular characters and amusing stories. Up to you. MARK STAFFORD

UK theatrical release: 6 November 2009.

Hollis Frampton: Hapax Legomena

The LFF offered a rare chance to see Hollis Frampton’s Hapax Legomena series of seven films in its entirety. A central figure of American avant-garde cinema of the 60s and 70s, Frampton was a supremely sharp film theorist and a witty, cerebral filmmaker. Together with Zorns Lemma, Hapax Legomena is Frampton’s most well-known work. The first film, (nostalgia), from 1971, is one of his most accessible and pleasurable, presenting a series of photographs that are burned as a narrator recounts memories and anecdotes relating to each image. The twist is that the photographs and the narration are out of sync, allowing the film to explore the relationship between image and sound as well as the nature of memory. The following six films take as their point of departure a similarly formal set-up to investigate image, space, perception, consciousness and ultimately, life. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

Lebanon

The one-line sell for this claustrophobic little war movie runs ‘Das Boot in a tank’, and for once that’s pretty damn accurate. Based on writer-director Samuel Maoz’s experiences, it’s about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (as seen in Waltz with Bashir), and we the audience are trapped with four ill-prepared and uneasy crew inside an armoured box dripping with sweat, muck, dog ends and soup croutons (don’t ask). We only know what they know, which is precious little, only see what they can see through their sights, and apart from the opening and closing shots of the film, we are very much inside the tank for the tight 92-minute running time. Tempers fray and victims mount, unwelcome guests are received and everything falls apart. It’s heavy-handed in places, and a little clichéd, but it feels authentic: grimy, stinky, delirious and chaotic. It works. MARK STAFFORD

Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue)

After a disappointing venture into romantic costume drama in her previous film, The Last Mistress, Catherine Breillat returns to the festival this year with a gentler and more personal work than before – a younger sister herself, she focuses on sibling rivalry. Originally scripted and produced for French television, Bluebeard is a subtly suggestive retelling of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale about an ugly and extremely wealthy lord whose wives disappear after a year under mysterious circumstances until he falls for the much younger Marie-Catherine who agrees to marry him in order to escape the shadow of her beautiful, talented older sister. What makes this understated, low-budget film a pure pleasure is the bold, teasing dialogue between the two sisters in the film’s framing plot, set in modern time, in which Catherine, the younger girl, thoroughly enjoys terrifying her older sister Anne by reading her the infamous tale from a book in the attic. Playfully grim and increasingly disturbing, with a wonderfully cruel narrative that hints at the fiercely, sexually provocative spirit of Breillat’s previous work, Bluebeard slowly inveigles you before hitting you hard. PAMELA JAHN

Planned UK release.

Samson and Delilah

In a decidedly Third World aboriginal community in central Australia, we watch gas huffing ne’er-do-well Samson and dutiful Delilah start an awkward, almost wordless teenage relationship. Warwick Thornton’s fine film sets up a world out of repeating daily rhythms and rituals (a chugging ska band, ants, solvent abuse, an unanswered telephone, taking wheelchair-bound Nana to the health clinic), and then upsets it to devastating effect. Our young couple go on the run and end up on the streets of a nameless suburban sprawl, where bad things happen. Samson and Delilah is visually accomplished, funny and moving, putting the audience through tension, fear, and despair before delivering a moment of sweet heart-tugging release. And then it carries on for another half an hour. Ah well. MARK STAFFORD

Kinatay

If it hadn’t been for Antichrist, Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s second feature Kinatay might well have been the most controversial Cannes entry this year. To a large extent filmed in real time and adopting a detached, observational style, Kinatay depicts the kidnapping, rape, murder and dismemberment of a drug-addicted stripper as seen through the eyes of a participating police academy student. This is certainly not a film for everyone, but it is a bewildering and uncompromising screen experience that explores very murky moral territory. PAMELA JAHN

SIN NOMBRE: INTERVIEW WITH CARY FUKUNAGA

Sin Nombre

Format: Cinema

Release date: 14 August 2009

Venues: nationwide

Distributor: Revolver Entertainment

Director: Cary Fukunaga

Writer: Cary Fukunaga

Cast: Paulina Gaitan, Edgar Flores, Tenoch Huerta, Kristian Ferrer

Mexico/USA 2008

96 mins

One of the highlights at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, Cary Fukunaga’s excellent debut Sin Nombre is a thrilling drama about gangs and illegal immigration in Central America. In a dangerous bid to start a new life in the States, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a teenager from Honduras, begins the journey across Mexico on rusty freight trains with her father and uncle. When she is attacked by the vicious, cold-blooded Lil Mago (Tenoch Huerta), leader of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, she becomes entangled with gang member Willy (Edgar Flores), who is forced to go on the run after he saves her.

Electric Sheep‘s Sarah Cronin sat down with the American director in Edinburgh to talk about Mexican prisons, tattoos and non-professional actors.

Sarah Cronin: Did you come to the idea for Sin Nombre through your short film Victoria para chino (about a group of immigrants who died in a refrigerated trailer when trying to cross the US border)?

Cary Fukunaga: Yes. We were doing our second-year films at film school, and I really wanted to do a short that was, not controversial, but something that was based on a real story, and not just explore my own family history in a ten-minute therapeutic short film. I didn’t have much money, and I wanted to figure out something that was of limited scope. I read about this trailer in Mexico and it was the perfect story to tell in a short format because we could get the audience in the trailer with the immigrants, and that would be a real experience. Victoria para chino wasn’t supposed to be the film that started up my career, but it started to travel around festivals and win awards, and suddenly Sundance was asking if I had a script to turn in for the Sundance Labs. I hadn’t really planned on that, so I had to quickly put together an idea based on the short film. I wrote a pretty mediocre draft of the script to give to the Sundance Labs, and they said it was interesting but I should keep developing it. So I went down to Mexico and started doing research.

SC: At that point, had you already included the gangs in your script?

CF:Yeah, the first draft was more of a triptych. It involved the trailer more, a kid in Honduras, and a kid in a gang who saves a girl. In the end, I kept the kid from the gang, he saves the girl and kills the leader. I made her one of the kids from Honduras because the first couple of people I travelled with in Mexico were from Honduras.

SC: I think one of the interesting things in the film is the hostility the immigrants face in Mexico, as in the scene where kids throw rocks at the train.

CF: There are a few things that are in the film but you just can’t fit in everything – there are no bandits, which are quite common, and very little of the immigration controls that exist – the Mexican version of the American INS or border patrol. There just wasn’t space for it in the story but they’re definitely there – also the smugglers, who are there controlling certain train cars. Maybe if I was a smarter writer I could have figured out ways to get in those details without taking time away from the main story.

SC: How did you gain access to the gang members when you were doing your research?

CF: My friend Gabriel Nuncio, who ended up doing the translation on the script, was a producer on my short film and his father was a journalist and an anthropology professor down in Chiapas. When you’re doing research, you meet one person and they say you should meet this other person, and then this person and this person. One of the people we really wanted to meet was Horacio Schroeder, who was the head of state security in Chiapas at the time. He’s always in the news, he’s one of the main people that you want to meet if you’re doing a story about immigration and gangs. He gave us his permission to visit prisons in Chiapas, so I started creating relationships with the prison in Tapachula and the one next to Tuxtla, the capital of Chiapas. We started working with the social workers there and gained access to the gang members. In the middle of our research, the government changed in Mexico and basically everyone got fired. There was a whole new group of people running everything, but luckily one of the people placed in charge was a friend of Gabriel’s from high school. It’s all who you know, your connections. After spending about two years interviewing the kids in the gangs I had lots of fact-checking to do, and details that I kept having more questions about, so I started to develop a relationship with two guys near the prison in Tapachula – one was active, one was non-active, and they ended up being really helpful in creating the dialogue.

SC: They didn’t object to the way gangs are portrayed in the film?

CF: I told everyone I met – I’d say to them, I’m making a film about immigration, and you can choose to help me, and if not, I’m still making the film. They’re pretty aware of how poorly they’ve been represented in the newspapers, and in some ways they wanted to do a little PR work for the gang – not that my film necessarily does that.

SC: It’s very hard to tell what’s authentic and what isn’t – who’s a gang member, who’s a professional actor…

CF: In the scenes in the house, there are a couple of guys from gangs, not from the Mara Salvatrucha, but from other ones. That was interesting – I gave Tenoch responsibility for taking care of everyone there, so he was always the one who told them what to do when we were off camera, and got everyone ready.

SC:The tattoos are pretty amazing – they must have been difficult to do.

CF: Yeah, that was a process, figuring out what inks to use, how long they could stay on for. The ones on the hands and the face had to be washed off the same day, you couldn’t go home wearing those. There was one time when one of the actresses was having a cigarette off set when we were in Veracruz, which she shouldn’t have been doing, and a local pulled up in a truck with a machete and got out in front of her – she quickly went back to the set! There’s a lot of anger towards the gangs and if people see one by themselves they’re like the sick animal of the herd.

SC: Were the tattoos all based on photographs?

CF: There are a lot of photographs of existing gang members, but you couldn’t just copy the tattoos because there’s rights attached to them, so we had to change everything. The ink department was pretty busy the entire film and there were days when we had to get 10 extra people to help out and put tattoos on everybody. Edgar Flores, who plays Willy, got pretty good at doing his own tattoos with this little pen that’s like a Sharpie, but the ink is just subtly faded so the tattoos look real.

SC: How did you find Edgar? He’s not a trained actor, is he?

CF: No. He was a real non-professional, but by the end he was like Bowfinger, he knew all of the words, and he was really professional – he really liked it. It was fun for him at first, not because of the responsibility, but because of all the attention. Here was this kid from off the streets who’s suddenly being taken care of, talked to differently. Hair and make-up can be a director’s worst enemy, they’ll make someone feel like a star. I didn’t want Edgar to feel like a star, I wanted him to feel grounded, because he was surrounded by really good actors who were playing supporting roles, and he was starting to act a little cocky. I was like, Tenoch, can you please teach this young man a lesson and let him know how lucky he is. It was hard for him to concentrate as well, he doesn’t necessarily have the tools to jump from joking before the camera rolls to being in character. So I’d have to do things like antagonise or isolate him, or purposely not let anyone talk to him so I could keep him in character, and those kinds of things were very difficult for him. He was also very lonely on the shoot, leaving his father and grandmother behind and suddenly being alone in Mexico. Sometimes when the most amazing things are happening to you you’re also the most depressed – I don’t know why that is.

SC: He wouldn’t know if this would ever happen again, if he’ll ever make another film.

CF: I tried to tell him that this might be the only film he makes in his life, and he should save his money. I said, you’re getting a lot of attention, but then it’s going to disappear and you’re going to feel terrible. We talk once every couple of weeks. He’s a PA for a video production company in Honduras, but there’s not really a film industry down there, so it’s not like he’s going to become a leading man. And in Honduras, he’s considered black, because although there are Latino people with darker skin than his, he’s got these African features and he has black blood, and that puts him in a weird lower class.

SC: I think there’s still a lot of prejudice in South and Central America.

CF: Absolutely. It’s hard for me to figure out sometimes. It’s like Tenoch – amazing actor, charming, and handsome by Western standards, but in Mexico he’s too brown to be a true leading man, which to me is like, are you kidding me? Why not?

SC: What was it like riding the trains when you were doing the research?

CF: Well, it’s not Amtrak. It’s pretty similar to what you see in the movie, which is based on what I saw. In some ways it’s one of the most free-feeling, exciting ways to travel, and there are moments of danger between long hours of boredom. One of the roughest times was when I was crossing Veracruz on a night train and it was really fast and really rough. We were trying to sleep on top of some really sharp metal sheeting with these ridges, it’s like lying on a bed of nails, and I didn’t have a belt to tie myself onto the train car. I had to jam my arm underneath it, and the train was really jerky, I was trying not to roll off, and it was raining and I was wet and cold. I was not in a good mood the next morning – but it really gave a good sense of what it’s like. The best memories I have are some of the surreal moments.

SC: How important was it having Canana, the company started by Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, on board as producers?

CF: They weren’t on-set producers, but it was great to have them – it sort of legitimises the project in Mexico, and definitely makes it more of a Mexican production. It’s really a co-production in all senses – the only gringos on set were me and Abi Kauffman, the producer.

Interview by Sarah Cronin

MEMBERS OF THE FUNERAL: INTERVIEW WITH BAEK SEUNG-BIN

Members of the Funeral

Format: Cinema

Edinburgh International Film Festival
17-28 June 2009
EIFF website
Director: Baek Seung-bin

Writer: Baek Seung-bin

Cast: Lee Joo-seung, Yoo Ha-bok, Park Myeong-sin, Kim Byeol

South Korea 2008

99 mins

Members of the Funeral is an inventive, clever film from first-time South Korean director Baek Seung-bin, which screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June. Constructing the narrative around the funeral of a teenage boy named Hee-joon, the director uses flashbacks to trace the individual relationships that three family members – father, mother and daughter – had with the deceased 17-year-old, an aspiring writer whose debut novel mirrors the lives of the complex and intriguing family.

Electric Sheep‘s Sarah Cronin asks Baek Seung-bin about funerals and storytelling.

Sarah Cronin: What was your inspiration for the story?

Baek Seung-bin:When I lost one of my family members a few years ago, the bereaved endured the period of mourning in silence. But at some point, silence seems to become a way of life, not just a way of mourning. It seems to me that we, the bereaved, are the dead, not the one whose ashes have already scattered in the air a long time ago. That was the time when I had the idea for this story.

SC: The narrative situation also recalls Pasolini’s Theorem. Was that an influence on the film?

BS:Theorem is my favourite Pasolini film, so possibly, yes. But I didn’t think of the film intentionally while I was writing the script.

SC: Why did you choose to structure the story around a series of deaths and funerals, with Hee-joon’s at the centre?

BS: This film is about people being affected by death and loss. So I put the funeral at the centre of the film, and made all the characters gather around it. Whose funeral it is was the most important thing in this context. I needed someone who can trigger memories of death and loss buried in each character’s mind, and he is Hee-joon. Hee-joon should be the central figure because he is the only one who can give the feeling of being a member of a family to the other characters, and make them meet up altogether.

SC: The film is built around a number of echoes, not just the various funerals, but also the novel that mirrors the film, and the repetition of words and attitudes in the different relationships. What was the idea behind this?

BS: The original scenario had even more echoes and counterpoints. You may have heard of a music terminology, canon. I wanted to apply canon structure into film. I tried to make a structure of variation, for example, the second chapter becomes a repetition or variation of the first chapter. Although I couldn’t 100% embody that, I was seeking the most relevant structure to describe the various characters’ influence on each other, to give hints of what had happened to them through the novel.

SC: Jeong-hee, the mother, treats her students in the same horrible way that she was treated by her grandfather. Are you suggesting that people can only perpetuate the same behaviour that they’ve experienced in the past?

BS: I was trying to show that no one can be 100% freed from trauma, rather than suggesting people can only perpetuate that behaviour.

SC: The dead boy is passive in some ways, and by just letting the mother, the father (and the daughter to a certain extent) impose certain kinds of relationships on him, he reveals the secret vulnerabilities of each of the characters. Is that his role in the story?

BS: The boy must be the most vague, fuzzy, unrecognisable figure. Hence, he never appears on screen by himself. He is there to reveal the complexities and hurts of each family member. So his vulnerabilities are also part of his plan, in this respect.

SC:The boy remains an enigma and an absence at the heart of the story. Is he meant to represent the author of the film in some way?

BS: Hee-joon doesn’t look like a real person, flesh and blood. It is because he does represent the author of the film. But this story cannot be completed without him.

SC: The father, Joon-ki, is a very complex figure. What is more important to him – the physical contact with Hee-joon or the idea of being a father to him?

BS: Joon-ki’s father has been ill for almost half of his life. So young Joon-ki wanted to obey to, moreover, be in love with his coach, who seems to be a strong and healthy man. But it turns out that the coach was not the powerful man, the father figure he was looking for. What would happen when this traumatised boy becomes an adult, a father? I thought he would want to find a son, and be in love with him under the mask of a father.

SC: Ah-mi, the daughter, seems to have embraced death from an early age after she loses her cat and her best friend, and as a result seems like a happier person than her parents. Why?

BS: It sounds interesting to me that you thought Ah-mi is happier than her parents. I agree with you to some extent, but I don’t think she is ‘less unhappy’ than her parents. She is indifferent towards trauma and loss, but she doesn’t embrace them. It is also an unhappy result in a way. She seems relatively happy because she found a peace of mind with Jin-goo (the undertaker) in her own world. I hope she can find happiness eventually, so I put the scene where she burst into tears after seeing the corpse of Hee-joon at the end of the film.

SC: In the last shot you show Hee-joon at his own funeral. Are you suggesting that everything that has happened before is a work of fiction, that he’s arranged everything?

BS: It would be better to let audiences interpret the ending, probably. But talking about the scene of Hee-joon present at his own funeral, I wasn’t intending to tell the audience that what they have seen was all fiction from the beginning. Precisely speaking, I didn’t present Hee-joon the dead, but introduced the narrator who has been reading the story of ‘Members of the funeral’ for the first time.

SC: In the last few years Korean cinema has gone from strength to strength – what do you think is responsible for the growing success and popularity of the country’s cinema?

BS: I think it is because many young, passionate filmmakers are coming out in Korea. Digital media encourages them and helps to set up a new paradigm of independent production. But above all, the Korean film industry is full of passion and vibrancy. That is behind all those wonderful films, I think.

Interview by Sarah Cronin

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS: INTERVIEW WITH AARON ROSE

Beautiful Losers

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 August 2009

Venues: key cities

Distributor: Revolver Entertainment

Directors: Aaron Rose, Joshua Leonard

USA 2008

90 mins

Beautiful Losers is an infectious documentary that celebrates the loose artists collective that sprung up around the Alleged Gallery in New York in the early 90s. Totally outside the mainstream, these artists, often self-taught, were inspired by street style and the subcultures of punk, graffiti and hip hop, embracing a DIY aesthetic so they could ‘make something out of nothing’. Directed by Aaron Rose, who owned Alleged, the film features illustrators, designers, photographers and filmmakers like Mike Mills, Geoff McFetridge, Barry McGee, Ed Templeton, Shephard Fairey and Harmony Korine, who are now busy remaking contemporary pop culture in their own image.

Sarah Cronin sat down with Aaron Rose to talk about inspiration, being an outsider and starring in his own film at last year’s London Film Festival.

Sarah Cronin: What did you want people to get out of watching the documentary?

Aaron Rose:I guess there are a lot of things going on in the filmmaking process, but the documentary really found its direction when I finally came to the realisation that our original motivation, before I got mixed up in what the movie needs to be and all that pressure, was that we wanted to inspire people. You can do pretty much anything you want in this world, and it’s not all that difficult – you just have to ignore the people who tell you that you need to go this way, and it’s the only way. If you just try a different road, nine times out of 10 it will lead you, if not to the same place, then to some place equally beautiful. More than anything, that’s the message that we wanted to get across in the film, it’s more important than the artists or the art in the film. They were just vehicles.

SC: Are there similarities between curating and directing a film?

AR:In an exhibition you create a narrative, there’s a flow to how things are laid out. There’s an order and you want to tell your audience a story as they go through the exhibition. I understood that part of it – storytelling – but that was where the similarities end in the creative process. Although editing is a bit like curating – when you curate a show there are a lot of things that don’t fit. It was like that with the movie, there were lots of things I loved that had to go because they didn’t work in the overall picture.

SC: What did you personally gain the most from making the film?

AR: The message that I wanted to put out – I should say we, because filmmaking is a collaborative experience. I’m reluctant to take all the credit, I’m the director but so many people put love and care into the film. Our motivation – that you can do anything – was something I had forgotten, even though I was putting out the message. After making the film and hearing the audience reactions, I was reinvigorated to constantly be doing that myself, so that was the most rewarding thing that I got from this process. Life hasn’t been easy for me in some departments, and I still need to go where it’s hard.

SC: I think one of the main themes is about being an outsider – do you still feel like one? And what about this idea of selling out?

AR: The word ‘selling out’ is like a 90s term (laughs).

SC: But in the film, Geoff McFetridge still seems defensive about the ads he did for Pepsi.

AR: Well, Geoff is a product of the 90s, of selling out, and punk. We call it punk rock guilt. Whenever we make money, we joke about what the punk rockers would say. I do still feel like an outsider, I think most artists feel like they’re outside society – no matter how many accolades they receive, or how much money is in your bank account, whatever is going on in your life on the professional side. I don’t think that feeling of being an ‘other’ really goes away, it’s essential to being able look at the world and interpret it. But unfortunately, it has its downside, which is that you feel alienated a lot of the time, especially from the real mainstream of the world.

SC: You’ve said that your alienation grows the more successful you become.

AR: Of course, because you get further and further away from what makes you comfortable, and that’s other alienated people. I’ve noticed in my life that as you work on more things with more people, you spend less time hanging out with other people who are artists, creative people who give you a sense of family. Because I’m always on productions, running around, working on projects, I feel less and less like I’m part of a community.

SC:So how do you feel about doing interviews to promote the film, is it another distraction for you?

AR: No, I’m a writer, so I interview people all the time, and I think of it as being a very creative process. And because you’re a writer, I feel like interviews are something that’s artist to artist, that we’re collaborating on something. Giving interviews is actually one of the most creative parts of the film promotion process.

SC: I like the passage in the film where Mike Mills says that the ‘nerds have inherited the creative earth’. I get the feeling that a lot of the artists had this suburban, middle-class childhood that they hated.

AR: The suburbs are incredibly oppressive. I actually believe that the suburbs are much more dangerous than the ghettos. In the ghettos, it’s all upfront, you can see what’s dangerous about them. The suburbs have this sheen, this facade that everything’s ok, but some of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen have been in the suburbs. Of course, now I like the imagery from suburbia, but when I was a teenager I couldn’t wait to get away from it.

SC: How much do you think gentrification has affected New York, do you still think there can be a similar scene there?

AR: There’s still a scene there, New York is New York, but it’s a moneyed scene, especially in Manhattan. The cool street kids in Lower Manhattan are pretty much all rich kids, who are slumming it in the Lower East Side. It doesn’t mean that they’re bad people, and there are some good artists, but anyone who’s not from that background is pretty much excluded from that scene. It’s still vital and creative, but it’s not as diverse as it was. It used to be that any kid from the Midwest could show up in New York with $20 in his pocket and figure it out. That’s what I was, I had $100 and I spent it in the first two days.

SC: It seems like a lot of the artists have moved to California.

AR: A lot of artists in our group left New York for California because it was manageable. You could have a big studio, and have head space to create, whereas you couldn’t do that anymore in New York. The whole West Coast is like that, there’s endless space, you can spread out – it’s like a metaphor for your creative mind too. You can go there and make your work, and then go to New York and make your money.

SC: There’s a lot of cuteness in the art – pastel colours, teddy bears – where do you think that comes from?

AR: I don’t know, I try not to analyse it too much. I do know that for all the artists it’s very important to speak in a vernacular that can be understood by everyone. It’s not work that’s created for intellectuals, and that kind of imagery needs to be easily digestible.

SC: The DIY aesthetic seems very important.

AR: It’s the most rewarding. It takes a little bit longer, but it’s like a cliché, the journey is more important than the destination. Going about things in a DIY fashion just makes the trip that much better, it’s like a story generator.

SC: Did you find it difficult being in the film? It’s also your story, and the story of your gallery. Was it hard to stay objective?

AR: That was why I didn’t want to be in the film at all. I thought it was a huge conflict of interest to be the director and the subject – it’s very sketchy territory to be in. I’ve seen what’s happened to other directors who have done that – I won’t name them for this article. But in the process of making the film I realised that what bound all these artists together was the damned gallery. I had outsiders watch the film to tell me if I was coming off as authentic, and not just a guy who was making a puff piece about himself and his friends. I was constantly sending the film in a very raw state to people on the outside, and listening to their judgements, because I knew there was no way I could judge it.

SC: You mentioned having a chip on your shoulder when you began to lose some of the artists to bigger galleries. Do you still feel that you need to compete with the big guys? Was that part of your motivation for making the film?

AR: That shit sent me down a very dark and dangerous path towards trying to compete with people that I should never have tried to compete with. I lost my business, I lost my marriage, I became addicted to drugs, and it was all because of this ‘I can fight you, Power’. So I learned from that. To tell you the truth, I never really cared if this film came out, because the people who needed to see it would get it. You can get home-made DVDs, it would be out no matter what. It was about making a film that’s true and honest and tells the story of these people and what they’re about, and if the mainstream watches it, well, I still don’t care.

Interview by Sarah Cronin

LIDF: JOHN SAMSON RETROSPECTIVE

review_samson.jpg

London International Documentary Festival

John Samson Retrospective

Screening on: Saturday 28 March and Monday 30 March

Venue: Horse Hospital, London

LIDF website

A political activist who came of age in Scotland’s shipyards during the tumultuous 1960s, John Samson (1946-2004) discovered documentary film after he met his wife-to-be, a student at the Glasgow School of Art. Trading precision tool making for the bohemian art world, Samson began experimenting with photography before moving on to filmmaking in the early 1970s. His first short, Charlie (1973), earned him a scholarship to the National Film School.

A 2008 exhibition at London’s Seventeen Gallery that featured three of Samson’s films was entitled ‘More Quoted than Seen’, an indication of both his cult status and the paradox of his obscurity. This year, the London International Documentary Festival is featuring a special retrospective dedicated to the ground-breaking filmmaker, screening five of his rarely seen films: Tattoo (1975), Dressing for Pleasure (1977), Britannia (1979), Arrows (1979) and The Skin Horse (1983). Drawing on his own experience as an outsider, Samson’s films reflect a fascination with the lives and behaviour of people living on the margins of conservative, mainstream society.

Tattoo opens with tight close-ups of a work-in-progress: a man’s arm is being shaved, the skin prepped for a tattoo that takes shape throughout the film. Interviews with both artists and the tattooed delve into the links between exhibitionism, pain, and very personal desires. But the film’s climax lets the tattoos speak for themselves: the camera lingers on the elaborately decorated bodies of both men and women, wordlessly offering the audience a glimpse at an otherwise very private art form.

Banned by London Weekend Television, Dressing for Pleasure is an intimate, candid film about people with a rubber fetish. An interview with John Sutcliffe, the legendary clothing designer who also founded AtomAge, ‘a magazine for vinyl wearers’, is woven through the film, while blown-up pages from the magazine are used as a backdrop to the carefully composed scenes of participants parading their outré costumes. An interview with a shop assistant at Sex, the King’s Road boutique owned by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, one of the few places that openly sold latex and rubber wear, links fetish wear to the equally scandalous punk scene. There’s nothing deliberately sensational in Dressing for Pleasure, and what emerges is not a film about people into S&M, but a portrait of an alternative lifestyle that embraces pleasure without shame.

One of Samson’s more compelling films, despite its relatively tame subject matter, is Arrows, a 1979 film about Eric Bristow, aka The Crafty Cockney – a young, cocky champion darts player who became a national celebrity in the UK. The most captivating scenes are those of Bristow drinking pints and smoking his way through an exhibition at a working men’s club; the film is a revealing snapshot not only of Bristow, but also of an England that’s virtually disappeared.

Although there are elements in Samson’s films that are undeniably dated – notably Tattoo‘s classic 70s soundtrack – the lifestyles he captured on camera are still strikingly relevant. His refusal to sensationalise and exploit his marginalised cast of characters makes his documentaries all the more remarkable in the current era of gossip-driven reality television.

Sarah Cronin

The John Samson retrospective is screening on Saturday 28 March and Monday 30 March at the Horse Hospital (London). More details on the LIDF website.

REALITY FICTION: Japanese Films Based on Actual Events

Who's Camus Anyway?

6-12 February 2009

Venue: ICA, London

ICA website

TOUR DATES:

7-21 February

Watershed, Bristol

2-5 March

Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast

11-19 March

Filmhouse, Edinburgh

9-19 March

Showroom, Sheffield

The Japan Foundation is returning to the ICA for a second year to present its new touring film programme, ‘Reality Fiction’. Featuring six films, the season explores the way Japanese directors have used actual events as the source material for their work. While the selection of films is not entirely devoted to crime drama, murder is definitely a popular theme.

Picked from the archives, the 1965 film A Chain of Islands (Nihon retto) begins with the discovery of a drowned US Army Sergeant, found floating in Tokyo Bay; the 1970 film Live Today, Die Tomorrow! (Hadaka no Jukya-sai), directed by Kaneto Shindo, probes the background and motivations of 19-year-old Norio Nagayama, who murdered four people between October and November 1968 using a gun stolen from US troops; in Junji Sakamoto’s 2001 Face (Kao), mild-mannered Masako, who kills her sister in a fit of rage, learns to live on the run in the aftermath of the devastating Kobe earthquake.

In Who’s Camus Anyway? (Kamiyu nante shiranai, 2005), Mitsuo Yanagimachi uses the motiveless killing of an elderly woman by a teenager in 2000 as the basis for a clever film-within-a-film that owes as much to pop culture and teen movies as it does to the crime genre. An impressive long take introduces us to the main characters as the camera tracks around the sunny campus of an arts college: the young, charismatic director, the cool, good-looking cameraman, even the film geek, who enthuses over the infamous opening shots in Touch of Evil and The Player. Their student project is to make a film based on the murder, but their attempts to get into the mind of the killer (which include the obligatory reading of Camus’s The Stranger) lead them into dangerous situations of their own. Yanagimachi could have done more to ramp up the suspense throughout the film, but the terrifically shot, well acted bloody ending leaves the audience unsure of where the boundary between reality and fiction lies.

A much more modest, but powerful film is Yasutomo Chikuma’s Now, I… (Ima, Boku Wa), made in 2007 with a budget of less that $5000. Chikuma, who also wrote and directed the film, plays Satoru, a 20-year-old NEET (‘not engaged in employment, education or training’) who virtually locks himself away in his bedroom in self-imposed isolation. His distraught mother stages an intervention in the form of an acquaintance who offers Satoru a job, but his refusal to engage with the outside world is virtually insurmountable. Chikuma’s sullen, monosyllabic Satoru is both infuriating and strangely endearing, while dramatic moments (which initially seem outsized for such a low-key film) make his exile all the more disturbing.

The Reality Fiction season spans a variety of budgets, eras and genres (historical drama gets a look in with Chosyu Five, about a group of samurai who travel to Europe in the mid-19th century in a bid to master Western technology), but the films all have one thing in common: a desire to understand what drives people to extreme behaviour, whether it’s murder, self-imposed seclusion or sailing halfway around the world.

Sarah Cronin