Check it out, Interviews

A Serbian Film: Interview with Srdjan Spasojevic

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A Serbian Film

Format: Cinema

Release date: 10 December 2010

Distributor: Revolver Entertainment

Venues: key cities

Director: Srdjan Spasojevic

Writer: Aleksandar Radivojevic and Srdjan Spasojevic

Original title: Srpski film

Cast: Srdjan Todorovic, Jelena Gavrilovic, Katarina Zutic, Sergei Trifunovic

Serbia 2010

95 mins

After provoking heated debate at festival screenings around the world, A Serbian Film came to the attention of the British public in August, when it was pulled from FrightFest following a decision by the BBFC to cut it by nearly four minutes. UK audiences will now be able to see the film, albeit in its censored form, in theatres this month. The only opportunity to see it uncut was at an invitation-only screening in October, organised by the Raindance Festival to circumvent the BBFC’s ruling. The issues surrounding the censorship of the film have been discussed at length in our blog since FrightFest, but it is worth pointing out that the BBFC’s decision is symptomatic of a general reluctance among certain British institutions to consider film as art. It is because the British censors can only see cinema as entertainment that their understanding of A Serbian Film remained shockingly literal, and that they misconstrued the film as a violent spectacle, instead of seeing it for the denunciation of violence that it very clearly is. It is profoundly worrying and dispiriting to see such levels of cinematic illiteracy among the people entrusted with judging what the adult British public may or may not see.

A Serbian Film centres on Milos, a retired porn star with a wife and son, who struggles to make ends meet. One of his former co-stars introduces him to Vukmir, a mysterious filmmaker with powerful political connections. Vukmir is willing to pay Milos an astronomical fee to star in his new project on the condition that he agrees to shoot the film without seeing the script. Soon Milos is caught in a nightmare that drags him further and further down into the most revolting horrors. A Serbian Film contains extreme imagery and is certainly not for everyone. But those disturbing images and situations are the expression of a deeply felt anger against the moral corruption of authorities and the grotesque, absurd hell to which they subject the people they rule.

Virginie Sélavy talked to director Srdjan Spasojevic about censorship and the true meaning of exploitation and pornography.

VS: How do you feel about the fact that the film had to be released with cuts in Britain?

SS: Of course I cannot be happy about it, but then I can’t be too stubborn, and this is the only way for audiences here to see it.

How was the film received in Serbia?

Serbia is a very specific place, so we had lots of problems there but of a different kind. In Serbia we don’t have ratings, there is no law forbidding anything from being shown in a film and there is no law forbidding anyone from buying a ticket. But it’s a conservative country, and after all those years under a hard communist regime we have a kind of self-censorship. We tried to release the film theatrically in Serbia in February, but no one wanted to have anything to do with it. We couldn’t find any distributor or a theatre willing to screen it. So you don’t need any law for that. But after lots of festival screenings, and great reviews, and some awards, they softened, and we had an uncut theatrical release in September.

How did Serbian audiences react?

It’s the same as in other countries. There were different reactions, because there is no film that is for everyone. Some people liked it, some people hated it. Some people understood it, others didn’t. The biggest problem, especially in Serbia, is that part of the audience doesn’t know how to watch the film. They think that everything they see is something we promote, that I would like to do in my home. They don’t understand even the basic things from the film: you have a good guy and bad guys; the bad guys are doing bad things and the good guy is fighting against them. They don’t understand because the movie language that we use in the film is actually closer to that of Western films than to our own.

I think that was a problem here too, the censors didn’t seem to understand the film. They seemed to think that the violence in the film was meant to entertain and titillate.

Censors don’t try and don’t need to understand a film. It’s about following the rules in a purely bureaucratic manner. They’re not concerned about the meaning of the film, they’re just concerned about formalities. The BBFC ordered 49 cuts, and the problem with the version shown in the UK is that it’s been cut only by removing the shots that they marked, without re-editing, or without adding material to fill the gaps. I think half of these shots could be saved by re-editing them. For some shots, the problem is the meaning, their place and their combination with other images. But if you put them somewhere else, they would be OK. There was a problem with shots that, as they say, involve children in sex and violence. It doesn’t even matter to the censors that the film fights against the bad things that we’re talking about. Of course, it shows a lack of freedom of speech, but it also covers up crime. The film is a statement from the victim, but they’re not allowing us to talk about what happens. It’s not my fault, it’s not the victim’s fault that these things are bad. It’s my testimony and they’re forbidding me from telling it, because it’s too hard to watch. Well, I’m sorry, they should prevent the crime, not censor me. So we’re really not happy about this version, because the cuts were made in that way and the numbers are not justified. Four per cent is a big number. People from the Western world should understand four per cent – would you like your pay to be cut by four per cent? There’d be riots on the street. But for a film from Serbia, it’s like, OK, fine…

The extreme imagery in the film seems to come from anger, and this anger is directed at the state. The violence is committed by the state, essentially, and the authorities are responsible for the most immoral treatment of humans in the film.

Authority in general, yes, because first of all this film is an honest expression of the deepest feelings that we have about our region and the world in general. Concerning our region, the last few decades have been dominated by war and political and moral nightmares. The world in general is sugar-coated in political correctness, but it is actually very rotten under that façade. So we’re talking about problems in the modern world, only they’re set in Serbia. And it’s a struggle against all the corrupt authorities that govern our lives for their own purposes. So yes, there is anger in the film.

In the end, a new director takes over from Vukmir and continues the film, and this shows that what we’ve seen cannot just be attributed to one madman, but is part of a whole system.

Absolutely. Vukmir is just one of them. In a way, Vukmir is an exaggerated representation of all those corrupt authorities. The last scene that you mentioned is a culmination of some of the hard scenes in the film that are literally drawings of our feelings. Extreme scenes, such as the one with the baby, are absolute literal images of how we feel. I never thought, let’s make a shocking film, let’s make it controversial, let’s break the world record. That was never on our mind. We just wanted to express ourselves in the most honest and direct way possible. You’re raped from birth and it doesn’t even stop after your death: that was the point of the ending.

There has been a lot of talk about the violence against women and children in the film.

You cannot fight against that kind of violence if you don’t say anything about it. You will not prevent it if you say, for instance, ‘in this company you have to have 50 per cent of women managers’. Fine, but that will not solve the problem of domestic violence. In Serbia, in some rural parts of the country, we have big domestic violence problems. Women and children are treated like men’s property. Men can do whatever they want with them. Of course there are problems of that type all around the world, but in some regions it’s almost a tradition, and the written law is not helping, because in reality no one does anything about it. We wanted to talk about all the problems we experience. We wanted to face the demons of our time, including violence against women and children. Unfortunately, many people who say they are fighting against those problems and claim to represent women and children find this film too offensive.

At one point, Vukmir explains that ‘victims sell’ as a reason for making the film, and tells Milos he’s not a victim. But in fact Milos is a victim too, right?

Vukmir is a true believer in the things he does and of that society and industry. He is also an exaggerated representation of the new European film order. In Eastern Europe, you cannot get your film financed unless you have a barefoot girl who cries on the streets, or some story about war victims in our region. But of course, you should never go too deep, or show tough scenes, or point out the problems. Just say, it’s a hard life, we experienced war, we don’t have anything to eat, we don’t have any love, any family. And if you do that, you’ll receive $5 million. And that’s the only way you can get your film financed in Eastern Europe. So Vukmir represents that. He believes in this system, but he’s passionate, he’s going all the way, he wants to show a real victim. Also because the Western world has lost feelings, so they’re searching for false ones, they want to buy feelings. It’s like they’ll feel more human if they see victims and feel sorry, ‘oh we’re still human, we can feel sorry’ – but that’s a lie. That’s what Vukmir does, and he really believes that Milos is not a victim because he adores him, he’s his hero. He really believes he’s doing the right thing, that he’s a supporter of our region’s economy.

So it’s also a film about the perception that Western Europe has of Serbia.

Yes, of course. And we’re talking about those problems through the moving picture industry, because I don’t want to start about politics, it’s too complicated and crazy. European film funds and festivals, some of them, are looking for those kinds of films from Eastern Europe because it’s a problematic region with war and suffering. And that’s exploitation. Those films are real exploitation. It’s spiritual pornography.

There was a Serbian film called The Life and Death of a Porno Gang in 2009 that used pornography as a metaphor to talk about Serbia. How do you explain that?

Concerning A Serbian Film, it’s not about looking for a metaphor to present our way of life or my feelings. It came naturally, because after all these wars in Serbia, we have started to experience our lives as pure exploitation. In the kind of job you have to take to feed your family, you’ll end up being viciously exploited by your employer or the rulers. So pornography is used as an image for everyday life, it’s normal. If he did anything else, Milos would still end up with the same kind of problems. Anything in our lives and our culture is pornographic. I think the same thing happened with The Life and Death of a Porno Gang. It was probably the same idea, the same expression of the problems, although the approach and style were different.

The content of the film is so extreme that you expect a lo-fi, trashy kind of film, but it is in fact very well-made and stars famous, well-respected actors. Maybe it is this contrast that has made some people uncomfortable.

It was not the plan to combine those things. For me it was just a natural way to make the film, because that’s the kind of style I like. I was most influenced by American auteurs of the 70s like Friedkin, Peckinpah, Cronenberg, Carpenter, Walter Hill and others. Maybe you’re right, maybe some images are stronger and harder because the style is… nice. That’s a problem, because it’s almost a pattern in filmmaking. If you want to make a violent film, it has to be done in a dirty, documentary style. If you want to go to festivals, you have to have lots of long shots. In art, you’re not supposed to have patterns, and calculations of that kind.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Festivals

Toronto International Film Festival 2010 – Part 2

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Lapland Odyssey

Toronto International Film Festival

9-19 Sept 2010, Toronto, Canada

TIFF website

James Evans gives his take on TIFF 2010.

Hard to believe a year has passed since ES last reported on the Leviathan that is the Toronto International Film Festival. This year, a very different festival was experienced as the entire venue, from screens to press offices, from communications centres to hotels and hospitality – moved from its old uptown locale to its new home downtown near the lake. The reason for this move was the glittering new star of the festival, the purpose-built Bell Lighthouse, which now serves as the festival’s year-round HQ and new home. This state-of-the-art architectural monument to cinema has been years in the building and was officially opened during the festival this year. Sure to be the envy of many other film fests, the Bell Lighthouse houses six spanking new cinemas, cafes, exhibition spaces, offices and an exceptionally well-stocked library that will prove a boon to cinema researchers, students and writers. Also worth a mention was the fantastically organised and superbly run Filmmakers Lounge, which ran the course of the festival in a converted brick-built downtown loft space. Within days, the Lounge became the place for industry and press to meet and mingle and many a networking and friend-making evening was had – much aided by the sponsored free bar that ran every day. In previous years, the industry and press had been separated and both groups agreed that this year’s innovation was terrific.

Cinematically speaking, there were a few treasures to be found, and here is an overview of some of the best, worst and most interesting that this ES writer viewed.

First to impress – in the Contemporary World Cinema strand – was the Finnish film Lapland Odyssey (Napapiirin sankarit) directed by Dome Karukoski (who gave us Forbidden Fruit, The Home of Dark Butterflies and Beauty and the Bastard) and written by Pekko Pesonen. What can only be described as a freezing cold slacker road movie is the 34-year-old director’s fourth feature film and his first comedy. Downbeat and low-key with some absurdist elements, Lapland Odyssey clearly has it roots in the same ground as those other oddball Finnish masters of the deadpan, Aki and Mika Kaurismä;ki. In fact, one character even sports a mad waxed hair-do resembling the style sported by the Leningrad Cowboys. It is set in the Lapland area where, as the director notes: ‘the unemployment rate is over 40%. In the winter you barely see the sun. In the summer it doesn’t go down, so people can’t sleep and go crazy. I always questioned how one can live in these areas. But when you meet the locals, you understand. It’s because of the Finnish “perkele”. Perkele has no translation. Sometimes it’s used as a curse word but it actually means something between stamina, willpower and damning the gods. That perkele is what the people of Lapland have. Inside the biggest loser, a hero can be found. Inside the biggest cynic you can still find hope.’ Lapland Odyssey displays a lot of perkele.

Anurag Kashyap’s That Girl in Yellow Boots was about as far emotionally and climatically as you could get from Karukoski’s. Filmed and set in the underbelly of Mumbai’s ‘massage’ district, the film follows the trials and tribulations of a bi-racial young woman, Ruth (Kalki Koechlin), who works at a massage parlour in a job procured by her boyfriend – she has no work permit – trying to earn enough to take care of herself while having to support her boyfriend’s drug habit. She is also on a quest to re-unite with her father whom she cannot forget although she has few memories of him. With the rougher side of Mumbai as the narrative’s backdrop, Ruth tries to find her independence, her roots and her self-respect as she gets sucked deeper and deeper into the darker recesses of the city’s hidden and unpleasant underworld. What she finally discovers is a devastating truth about her life, which is perhaps a little over-egged as a psychological concern in the narrative, but still makes the film an engaging experience. Kashyap’s previous six films – especially Dev. D and Gulaal – herald the movement towards a contemporary, edgy and critical filmmaking in India, far removed from the polished genres of Bollywood and the received images of Indian cinema that persist in many minds. That Girl in Yellow Boots continues that new spirit of Hindi independent cinema in both style and subject. His next two projects are eagerly anticipated: Bombay Velvet, a 1960s thriller to be produced by Danny Boyle, and Doga, based on the comic book super-hero.

Mamma Gogo is a film by the Icelandic director Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, who was nominated for a best foreign language film in the 1992 Academy Awards for his second feature, Children of Nature. Mamma Gogo is his ninth cinematic excursion and is a deeply touching, extremely even-handed and sensitive evocation of a mother suffering from Alzheimer’s and the effects it has on her children and extended family – especially her favourite son, an unnamed film director played by Hilmir Snaer Gudnason who is having his own crisis, caused by the poor reception of his latest film. A moving meditation with a terrific performance by Kristjorg Kjeld as Mamma Gogo, this beautifully paced and thoughtful film will stay with you long after you have left the cinema and will be especially poignant if it has ever happened in your own family. A brave film that needed to be made about a subject that few want to deal with.

Among the films that opened in the Special Presentations strand were two American pieces directed by contrasting cinematic icons now both well into their 70s: Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger and Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter. The former is an enjoyable enough bit of entertainment – and considering late Allen films, a decent effort – which follows an ensemble group through their various life and emotional crises. But stop me if this sounds familiar – one of the stories concerns the wealthy Alfie (played by Anthony Hopkins), who abandons his wife of 40 years for… how did you guess? A buxom blonde gal decades his junior. Another story follows a frustrated writer, Roy (Josh Brolin), whose eye wanders from his long-suffering wife to a beautiful young guitar player (Freida Pinto) with whom he falls madly in love. Not one, but two amours fous of older men for younger women – Woody, get over it! This is an undeniably charming, but ultimately lightweight tale about fate, existence, randomness and chance – which are hardly thematic departures for Allen. You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger ends (defensively?) where it began: all sound and (some) fury; signifying nothing.

By contrast, Eastwood’s Hereafter is a meditation on the anxieties and insecurities of contemporary life – and death. It is an engaging, and slow-burning tale with three parallel strands that serve to develop a narrative around the theme of the after-life and its ultimate unknowability. Eastwood sets the various stories in locales as disparate as London, Chamonix, Hawaii and San Francisco. All the characters have been deeply affected by death in some form or another and it has significantly taken their lives in various directions. At the beginning of the film, a French television reporter has a near-death experience as a freak tsunami hits her idyllic beach resort. This scene, like the rest of the film, is shot with impressive economy, conviction and assurance. This is a fine film by a filmmaker at the height of his powers and who, at age 79, is still taking risks with the material he chooses to film – a rather far cry from his compatriot Mr Allen.

Other American films that caught the eye were John Turturro’s documentary love paean to Naples, Passione, which guides the viewer through the life and times of this ancient and beloved city through one of its cultural gifts to the world, its music. The songs, stylists and performers of this music of passion, anger, hatred, social outrage, love, loss, jealousy and death provide striking examples of the huge gamut of Neapolitan music. Passione aims to do for the music of Naples what Buena Vista Social Club did for the music of Cuba, and while not succeeding as well, certainly persuades. Buried (dir. Rodrigo Cortes) is one of a recent cycle of films (Saw, Iron Doors) that position the protagonist in an unknown, confined and inescapable space – a contemporary Kafkaesque situation without benefit of The Trial. One wonders if the new world of the individual, non-communal interior capitalist space of mobile phones, iPods, and gaming is really the anxious subtext of these films. A surprisingly well-cast Ryan Reynolds does a bravura one-man Beckett-like show and carries the film, which is saying plenty as the whole movie is set in a coffin. The lighting and cinematography are to be given a standing ovation for the very ingenious way they are used in such a restrictive setting. A clever twist at the end makes for a very engaging film.

The USA also produced a music documentary: Thom Zimny’s near-hagiographic documentary of Bruce Springsteen circa 1976-1978, recording – no, building – his opus, Darkness on the Edge of Town. The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town is one and a half hours of intimate detail and parallel editing of the original black and white footage interspersed with contemporary colour footage of the band reflecting on the album some 33 years on. Insightful, inspiring and at times, moving, this portrait of Springsteen and the making of the album is terrific, if over-long for non-fans. It is certain to turn up on BBC 4 soon on a Springsteen-themed night! A real labour of love – be sure to stick around as the credits roll for a very special band reunion and performance.

Finally, two highly contrasting international films are worth mentioning. The Last Circus (Balada Triste) is a wild and woolly film set in 1937 (shades of the Spanish Civil War), in the surreal and unsettling world of a circus. It fast-forwards to 1973 where the saddest clown, Javier (Carlos Areces), begins a hostile working relationship with a silly, and nasty, clown (Santiago Segura), with whom he later battles for the love of the dancer Natalia (Carolina Bang). The sure direction of Alex de la Iglesia and the black humour and set-pieces bring to mind a weird mix of Jodorowsky, Fellini, Buñuel, Argento and Almodóvar. The ending climaxes in a battle of wills at the Valley of the Fallen, a memorial that General Franco had built to honour the soldiers who died in the Civil War. The Last Circus is a sometimes absurd and over-the-top spectacle and is not without its problems, but is nonetheless well worth catching. By contrast, the understated and slow-burning Pelin Esmer film, 10 to 11 (11’e 10 Kala) is an honest and charming story of an elderly man (actually played by the director’s father) who obsessively collects the detritus and ephemera of his life in Istanbul, including countless audio tapes. He lives alone in his small apartment in a building about to be demolished and from which he does not want to move. He strikes up an acquaintance with the young caretaker of the building and the two become dependent upon each other for negotiating life in the contemporary city. A turn of events pointedly, but poignantly, ends the story. This is a beautifully paced film about time, memory, life and our own inevitable deaths.

All in all, a landmark year for TIFF.

James Evans

Film Jukebox

The Loves’ Film Jukebox


The Loves

The Loves are unashamed fans of 60s pop and rock, who throw in their unique, fuzzy, low-fi, comedic touches into the mix. The band, who formed in Cardiff in 2000, have decided to call it a day with the release of their fourth album, …Love You, released on Fortuna POP! in January, and will be breaking hearts with their last show on Valentine’s Day 2011. Their new single, ‘December Boy’, is out on December 6 on 7” and download. For more information go to the Fortuna POP! website. Frontman Simon Love tells Electric Sheep about some of his favourite films. SARAH CRONIN

1. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Or What I Thought Being in a Band Would Be Like. Liars. One day I’ll make the indie A Hard Day’s Night and it’ll involve: not getting soundchecks, being bumped down the bill because another band brought the drums, not getting paid, sleeping on floors, late night toilet stops at service stations, playing to three people in Stoke and the never-ending challenge of getting your mix CD played next.

2. Head (1968)
The Monkees attempt to get rid of their teenybopper image but just end up getting rid of their teenybopper fans. I saw this for the first time late one Friday night, coming through the static on S4C, on a portable black and white TV. They’ve never looked cooler than they do when they’re all in white performing ‘Circle Sky’. Except for Davy. He never looked cool. Bless him.

3. Harold and Maude (1971)
Everyone I’ve shown this film to has at first balked at the premise (19-year-old Bud Cort falls in love with 79-year-old Ruth Gordon), but by the end they are either in tears or singing, ‘If you want to sing out, sing out and if you want to be free, be free’. Everyone though still curls their toes when it shows them in bed together. For more examples of Bud Cort’s ossum-ness see Brewster McCloud or choice number eight in my list.

4. The Wicker Man (1973)
The film I’ve seen the most times in a cinema, and I still get freaked out by the Hand of Glory every time. I love this film because there’s no happy ending, no police helicopters come over the cliff to save Sergeant Howie, he dies. Sorry for spoiling it if you’ve not seen it before. Other spoilers: he’s two people, he might be a robot, he was a patient at the mental asylum all along, but Ben Kingsley thought it’d be good for him to pretend to be a policeman and all M. Night Shyamalan films are shit.

5. Star Wars (1977-1983)
Before triple-chinned, badger-haired, one-idea-for–40-years-not-counting-Howard-the-Duck director George Lucas raped my childhood with episodes one to three of the ‘saga’, the three original films brought nothing but pleasant memories to me. Like the time my father got me out of school early to go and see Return of the Jedi, telling my teacher that I had a dentist appointment just so we wouldn’t have to queue, and the time we ‘rented’ The Empire Strikes Back from his friend who had it ‘on pirate’ in a double bill with ET. In the playground I was Han Solo and Gavin Naish was Luke because he had blond hair. Glory days.

6. Back to the Future (1985-1990)
As well as wanting to be Han Solo, I also wanted to be Marty McFly when I was a youngling. I had a sleeveless body-warmer like him (but mine was maroon and white, not orange) and I begged my parents for a skateboard for Christmas in 1985. Instead I got a hi-fi. When I did finally get a skateboard it was wonky. If you leaned left you went right and vice versa, and somehow I managed to rip the nail off my little finger while sat on the board going downhill at high speed. Like all right-thinking people my favourite film is Part II, and come 2015 I will wear my clothes inside out.

7. Clerks (1994)
The filmic equivalent of a garage band – all heart and very little style. I saw Mallrats first and then spent a small fortune (for me) on getting this on video. I’m glad I did. Why is Jeff Anderson not a massive star now? This clip is a million times funnier than anything Adam Sandler’s ever done. But then again, an orphan being injected with cat AIDS and then being set on fire is a million times funnier than anything Adam Sandler’s ever done. The man’s a dick. Anyway, I love all of Kevin Smith’s films. Even Jersey Girl. Seek out his ‘Smodcast’ podcasts on iTunes. Or better yet, seek out the ‘Tell ‘m Steve-Dave’ podcasts.

8. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
This pick could be any of Wes Anderson’s films, but I chose The Life Aquatic because it was the first of his I saw in the cinema. All of his work has the things I look for in films : 1) symmetry in the shots; 2) captions or titles in the film (always in Futura in Wes’s case); and 3) brilliant soundtracks (his soundtracks piss on the ones put together by Justin Quarantino). Also The Life Aquatic stars Owen Wilson, who I am gay for. See this for further proof of Wes Anderson’s aceness.

9. The Sasquatch Gang (2006)
I’d read about this film a while ago because it was made by the producer of Napoleon Dynamite, but then heard nothing of it for a few years until I found it in CEX for £1.50. It’s the same story told from four different perspectives, and the timelines are all chopped up so everything only makes sense at the end of the film. The Loves watched it once when we had a night off from our gruelling tour schedule in Leeds and for the rest of the weekend we were shouting ‘Crap off!’ and ‘This bark smells’ to the bemusement of everyone who wasn’t us. It stars Justin Long (another person I am gay for) and has a cameo by the most excellent Stephen Tobolowlosky.

10. Superbad (2007)
I bought this because I had £15 burning a hole in my pocket, needed something to watch and loved Michael Cera in Arrested Development. I think it’s the film I’ve watched the most over the last five years, although I’m not allowed to watch it in company as I either laugh too hard or speak along with the characters, which annoys people. The comparisons of this and American Pie are ridiculous. You believe Cera, Jonah Hill & Christopher Mintz-Plasse would do the things they do for sex. The cast of American Pie looked like they came from an advert for Calvin Klein. Except for the pie fucker.

Honourable mentions go to Hudson Hawk, Chinatown, Hot Rod, Napoleon Dynamite, Starship Troopers, True Romance, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Double D POV.

Alter Ego

Sarah Moss is Filippa in Babette’s Feast

Babette's Feast

Author Sarah Moss’s atmospheric, ghostly debut novel Cold Earth (Granta) is set in Arctic Greenland. As the temperature drops, six ill-prepared archaeologists, who are attempting to unearth traces of a lost Viking settlement, begin to suspect that there’s something decidedly eerie watching their faltering progress. Fittingly, Sarah Moss’s choice of filmic alter ego also inhabits a haunted, wintery world… EITHNE FARRY

‘If I could be a character in a film…’

Before my children were born, I used to write early in the morning, sometimes finishing a day’s work before most people had got to the office. On those days, I rewarded myself with solitary afternoon cinema trips, settling back with blissful anonymity and fine chocolate in Oxford’s art house cinema, to watch anything at all as long as it didn’t involve people getting killed on screen. Cinema-going is among the worst casualties of parenthood, and I’ve hardly been at all in the last eight years, but I think if I could choose now I’d want to be Filippa in Babette’s Feast, and not only for the food at the end. Filippa and her sister Martina live almost in silence for most of their lives, honouring the commands of their dead father, a dissenting minister who forbade them from realising any kind of dream. Theirs are impoverished lives in almost every sense, but the cinematography makes their windswept headland and the dark clothes and simple movements of their daily lives hauntingly beautiful. From my house, full of toys and pictures and little pots of smoked paprika and recherché teas, the scrubbed floorboards, white walls and bare windows of the sisters’ cold home seem enormously appealing. I’m sure I’d hate it in reality – after all, I like new shoes and silly hats and over-priced cupcakes and would be much happier in the 1870s Paris Babette is fleeing than on the dour Danish peninsula where she finds refuge – but the low northern light, the wind through the grass and the greyness of the sea stay with me for days after I’ve watched the film.

Cold Earth by Sarah Moss is published by Granta.
Check it out, Festivals

The Spanish Weirdness of Segundo de Chomon

Ki Ri Ki Acrobats

48th New York Festival

24 September-10 October 2010

NYFF website

Segundo de Chomón’s Metempsychosis screens at Tate Modern in London on Friday 3 December as part of the 3rd Fashion in Film Festival

Fashion in Film on Tate Modern website

Segundo de Chomón belonged to a generation of nameless film directors; his films were cast with nameless stars. With film only just stumbling into the 20th century, cinema was still a credit-less art form. No title sequence, just an abrupt ‘Fin’. It was the studios that supplied a name and an identity. The iconic Pathé cockerel repeatedly pops up mid-action while de Chomón’s name is nowhere to be found. Yet de Chomón is not forgotten; by sifting and piecing together film history, his name has become attached to an impressive filmography of tableaux and film fragments, celebrated at this year’s New York Film Festival.

The programme of films – some broken and some complete – was held together by early cinema specialist and playful commentator Tom Gunning. Introducing the films in an entertaining and pleasingly unobtrusive manner, Gunning rejoiced in de Chomón’s ‘Spanish sense of total weirdness’, speculating that perhaps a young Buñuel or Dalí might have settled down to his Andalucian Superstition (1912) years before they started work on their Chien andalou (1929). There are many similarities between the works, although there is a difference in authorial temperament; Gunning painted de Chomón as less of the artistic, controversial auteur and more of a technician. He was working at the very beginning of film when technology was being mastered and explored. The key was not making a statement, but rather entertaining the audience and experimenting with ‘what the camera could do’.

His early films show a fairly straightforward approach. A historical reproduction of Spanish resistance to Napoleon was a static affair with muddled crowd scenes and, as Gunning amusingly pointed out, ‘dead bodies finding comfortable ways to die’. Next came a slapstick chase film, which saw a newly rich man advertising for a wife and then beating a hasty retreat from swarms of pushy females. Again the camera was positioned stock-still while the action rushed in and out of frame but the charming conceit obviously took off and many variations were made, most famously Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925). Gunning was quick to point out that in early cinema ‘ripping each other off was business’. Indeed, I also spotted similarities between de Chomón’s Electric Hotel (1908) and Keaton’s Electric House (1922), which both show electrical gadgets wreaking havoc on unsuspecting residents. Using a beautiful range of effects, de Chomón creates gizmos – from a mechanised letter-writer to an automatic undresser – to rival those of Keaton’s glorious silent comedy.

It was with such later films and in particular, Ah la barbe (1905), that the NYFF screening took a decided turn for the surreal. As Gunning said of the film, ‘there is no plot, just plain weirdness’. Seated in front of a full-length mirror, a man lathers up and begins to shave, but is repeatedly thwarted in his attempts as his reflection morphs into strange, animal-like visages. Increasingly bemused and frustrated, the actor turns to camera to pull puzzled, exasperated faces.

These expressive facial asides highlight the enchanting theatricality running through de Chomón’s work. Vaudeville theatre is key and a major contributor to the bizarreness of his visions. One of his films even takes place inside a miniature children’s theatre with wrestling and fencing puppets playing out the action. Magic tricks are ever-present. A magician oversees the action in Les cents trucs (1906), turning ballerinas into clowns and back again; in The King of the Dollars (1905), a hand deftly plays with gold coins, creating optical illusions before our eyes; and in The Unseizable Pickpocket (1908), a crafty thief turns into a slither of fabric in his attempt to evade the law. De Chomón was himself a magician with his camera work, using editing and stop-motion techniques that we would associate with 21st-century expertise. For his 1907 film, Ki Ri Ki Acrobats, de Chomón shot actors lying in various formations on a black sheet using an overhead camera. Through this trick in perspective, the acrobats appear to be performing gravity-defying gymnastics. The funniest routine involves a tiny acrobat straining and holding up his huge colleagues on a narrow plank of wood. The exotic troupe of ‘Japanese’ performers, the physical comedy and the optical illusions are pure vaudeville.

According to Gunning, in addition to this theatricality, the other key contributor to the weirdness of de Chomón was his Spanishness. The Andalucian Superstition takes its plot from a traditional Spanish folk tale; a woman seethes with jealousy on seeing her lover talking to a Romani woman and dreams that her lover is captured by gypsies. The dream sequence is worthy of Hitchcock’s 1945 Spellbound (giving further weight to the idea that Dalí, who worked on the film, did see de Chomón!), beginning with the camera pulling up to a close-up shot of the jealous woman’s face, all haunted eyes and furrowed brow. The following interlude with its gypsy cave of strange bottled creatures is a strange, fantastical marvel. Again de Chomón seems light years ahead of what one might expect; the use of psychology and odd surreal visions seems like it could belong to a much later period of film history. This enchanting use of folkloric material also shines through in The Red Spectre (1907). A nonsensical work that roughly plots the rivalry between a male and female magician (played by de Chomón’s wife), the repeated images of skeletons and fire seem like symbols from a traditional folk tale. Reading between the lines, the film reveals a pre-occupation with the manipulation of the female image. Tiny women appear trapped in glass bottles and an image of a woman appears on a box composed of moveable segments. They are images that linger in your mind, playing out in strange colourised tones.

Interestingly, de Chomón started out working as a colouriser and would end his career in a similar technical role, working as a cameraman for the Italian director Pastrone, and as one of the many technicians on Napoleon (1927). He may not be remembered like a Keaton, a Dalí or a Hitchcock, or even like his contemporary Méliès, but his work as a director is imaginative and extraordinary and deserves a credit at last.

Segundo de Chomón’s Metempsychosis screens at Tate Modern in London on Friday 3 December as part of the 3rd Fashion in Film Festival.

Eleanor McKeown

Check it out, Short Cuts

Lewis Klahr’s Prolix Satori

Lethe

54th BFI London Film Festival

13-28 October 2010, various venues, London

LFF website

The LFF Experimenta strand provided the first opportunity for UK audiences to see collage artist Lewis Klahr’s Prolix Satori series. Composed of mid-century American imagery such as advertising and comic books, Prolix Satori is loosely structured around a repetition of visual motifs and thematic threads: melodramatic cartoon couples, post-war interiors and pop songs are woven into variations on love, loss and death. Prolix Satori is an ongoing series, and the films presented at the LFF ranged from 8 to 23 minutes, the shorter ones being part of a sub-series, ‘The Couplets’. The Couplets explore the interaction of image and sound through the repetition of imagery paired with different soundtracks, creating surprising shifts in mood and feeling. Klahr was present at the screening, and the Q&A that followed the films offered fascinating insights into his elaborately constructed work.

As Klahr explained, the starting point for Prolix Satori was False Aging, a film he made in response to the suicide of his friend and fellow experimental filmmaker Mark LaPore (there were other works dedicated to LaPore in the Experimenta programme, by David Gatten and Phil Solomon). The film starts with a quote from Valley of the Dolls, as a woman’s voice talks about the climb up Mount Everest to reach the Valley and the feeling of loneliness during the journey, followed by her desire for new experiences. This segues into the ‘Theme from the Valley of the Dolls’, whose unusual lyrics imbue the first part of the film with feelings of longing, confusion and loss of certainties about one’s self and the world. The song colours our perception of the imagery, which includes quaint, flowery wallpaper patterns, a yellow bird cut from another wallpaper and coins – maybe small mementoes of home – as well as intimations of a journey: a cut-up globe, markings on a road, a suitcase and a car.

The next section, introduced by the label ‘Poison’, sees a cartoon couple, a bike, locks, doors, a medical diagram of a human torso and a chart for endowments at age 30 accompanied by Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Lather’, the lyrics of which revolve around ageing – more specifically turning 30.

The final section is constructed around a number of substitutions, using extracts from Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs for Drella, in which Cale quotes from Andy Warhol’s diary, voicing what Warhol once said about him: ‘What does it mean when you give up drinking and you’re still so mean?’ The recounting of a nightmare on a snowy night and quotes such as ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I died in this dream?’, ‘I’m so scared today’ and the final ‘Nobody called’ transpose the poignant sense of anxiety, bitterness and loneliness of Warhol’s diaries on to a cartoon blond man looking at an American cityscape. That character is Illya Kuryakin, from the Man from U.N.C.L.E comic, and this is another substitution: Kuryakin stands in for LaPore, as Klahr explained during the Q&A, ‘because he was a handsome man’ (the comic representation of the character is also a substitute for the actor David McCallum).

Klahr commented that False Aging initiated a new way of working with lyrics and images, with motifs that recur throughout Prolix Sartori; for instance, a caterpillar seen crawling in some of the earlier films finally turns into a butterfly before getting captured and killed in Lethe.

Lethe stood out from the selection not only for being longer at 23 minutes, but also for being more narrative than Klahr’s other films. Evoking the feel of classic Hollywood melodramas, this tale of doomed love in a sci-fi setting was fashioned out of 1960s Doctor Solar comics. The original comic centres on the impossible love story between the radioactive Doctor Solar and his blonde assistant. They also work with an older scientist, and the physical similarity between him and Doctor Solar prompted Klahr to twist the story line so that in Lethe, Doctor Solar becomes younger through the experiments they conduct. Doctor Solar’s transformation continues until he becomes pure energy and his lover has to shoot him, a scene that segues into her shooting at an eclipse, in one of the most poetic moments of the film.

The cold modernist décor and the recurrence of a strange clock throughout the film, with odd symbols indicating time, create an otherworldly atmosphere and the impression that we are in some sort of parallel world. After another scene replays the traumatic moment when the blonde woman shoots Solar (this time he has turned into a hairy monster) and then puts the gun to her head, she is seen driving around, lost. A police officer asks her, ‘Where did you cross over?’ reminding us of the underworld river evoked in the title. She then crashes the car and the strange clock goes backwards. Both she and Doctor Solar go through several deaths, as if the moment of death was constantly replayed, maybe to make sense of it, so that they finally realise they have been dead all along.

Lethe is set to a Gustav Mahler symphony, which guided the composition of the narrative through its dramatic moments; Klahr called these ‘peak moments’, to which he felt he had to respond. The filmmaker chose Mahler because the symphony reminded him of the score to Vincente Minelli’s melodrama’s The Bad and the Beautiful. This is another instance of the substitution process that seems so central to the construction of Klahr’s work, as well as of the use of music as a structuring device.

The Couplets use substitution in a different way. Nimbus Smile, loosely centred around the thematic motif introduced by the speech balloon, ‘I haven’t been sleeping too well lately’ (which recurs in Lethe), sets imagery of comic characters, a man and a woman, to the Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’. Interestingly, the film didn’t seem to work initially, because all the emotion just came from the song, rather than the imagery. This was followed by Nimbus Seeds, which sets the same imagery to rain fall and other sound effects. This completely changed the perception of the images, removing the pop video aspect of the previous film and making the visuals more mysterious and evocative. The third Couplet, Cumulonimbus, uses the same soundtrack as Nimbus Seeds, but with different imagery. Wednesday Morning Two A.M. uses this substitution device within the same film, the Shangri-Las’ ‘I’ll Never Learn’ initially accompanying cut-ups of 60s comic images of a couple, before it is repeated to score images of pure colour and abstract patterns. Across the Couplets, the variations of visual and aural motifs wove a remarkably evocative, intricate fabric that suggested a complicated web of thematic, formal and romantic interconnections.

Prolix Satori was one of the highlights of LFF, not just in the Experimenta section, but across the whole festival. It was great to see the NFT cinema packed with curious film-goers with appetites for unconventional, adventurous, poetic filmmaking. They were rewarded with a particularly rich and memorable experience that was augmented by Klahr’s engaging presence.

Virginie Sélavy

Interviews

Leap Year: Interview with Michael Rowe

Leap Year

Format: Cinema

Release date: 26 November 2010

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Axiom Films

Director: Michael Rowe

Writer: Lucia Carreras, Michael Rowe

Original title: Año bisiesto

Cast: Monica del Carmen, Gustavo Sáchez Parra, Armando Hernández

Mexico 2010

94 mins

Australian Michael Rowe’s Leap Year is a claustrophobic, disturbing little gem, set almost entirely within a small apartment, with a tiny cast of characters. A freelance journalist working from home in Mexico City, Laura (Monica del Carmen) is lonely and isolated. She watches any couples with hungry eyes, deals with her distant mother by phone, indulges in a series of unsatisfying one-night stands, and crosses off the days on the calendar. But then the sadomasochistic Arturo (Gustavo Sáchez Parra) turns up. Alternately brutal and caring, he awakens something in her, and a weird relationship starts. He returns again and again, subjecting the willing Laura to ever more degrading sex acts, as spanking leads to choking leads to whipping, and the film takes a dark, strange turn… The film has a clever, ambiguous script, and del Carmen’s fantastic performance makes Laura a wholly believable, complicated and troubled woman that you can truly care, and fear for.

Mark Stafford interviewed Michael Rowe during the London Film Festival, where they discussed directing his first film and his minimal aesthetic.

MS: It’s an amazing, brave and intimate performance by Monica del Carmen. How the hell did you get her to trust you considering that it’s your debut film?

MR: Good question, it wasn’t easy, actually. In the casting, she did the same two scenes as the other 37 actresses, but when she did them I had to leave the room. She made me cry, it was just really upsetting. So it was quite clear that I wanted her, but she only knew those two scenes, one where she blew bubbles, one where she got fired. The question was, when she read the whole script, how would she react? So she read it and I met up with her the next week. I asked her what she thought and she said, ‘Um… It’s a very strong script…’ (laughter) And I said, ‘What would you say if I told you that you had the part?’ She said, ‘I honestly don’t know…’. So she went home, she talked to her boyfriend, to her mum and to a couple of female feminist theorists and then she came back to me and said, ‘I’m in, let’s do it’. I think it was a complete leap of faith for her to trust me because she’d never seen anything I’d done, nobody had ever seen me direct. I think the sensibility in the script perhaps led her to trust me. Her mum told her, ‘Do whatever you think is right, but whatever you do, don’t do it with fear’. She was the most amazingly committed actress I’ve ever seen in my life.

Was the whole film on the page, or did she come up with bits and pieces?

We worked together on the script for two months beforehand. And we didn’t rehearse at all. We went through the script with a fine tooth comb before we got to the set. She would say, ‘Why is she looking up here, not down?’ ‘Why is she cooking this and not that?’ ‘Why is there a comma here and not a full stop?’

There are little things she does, waggling the pencil in front of her eyes…

That I actually came up with on set. That’s one of the few things that wasn’t scripted. She was doing something else, just looking out the window or something and I suggested it.

It’s odd what works. After the press screening I attended, chatting with other journalists, that gesture got mentioned a few times. It’s just such a human thing. Did the actors improvise anything?

Bits. When her little brother puts his feet up on the bed, I wasn’t expecting that, they cooked that up between the two of them. I think they didn’t tell me because I’m a screenwriter originally, so I’m a bit strict about following the script because I sweated over it, the format, and every full stop that’s in it, for weeks. So they didn’t ask, they just did it and thought, ‘We’ll see what he says’. And it worked. There were a few things that Monica was very clear about, where she knew the script almost better than I did. For example when she shaves her pubic hair, I’d scripted the first part of the process, not the end, I just had her starting out. She said, ‘It would be way more effective if we had the bare skin’. I was unsure, but I thought let’s do it, and when I saw it I thought, ‘of course!‘ You need to see the finished project.

Was it always going to be set entirely within her apartment? Not, I hope, a decision made for entirely budgetary reasons…

Yes it was, but in the sense that I conceived this script because I was 37 years old, I was a screenwriter who hadn’t had a feature credit, I’d been trying to get somebody to produce and direct my first feature film for 10 years without success and I thought, ‘OK! It can’t be that complicated!’ and read two books on how to direct movies, quit my day job and bought a small HDV camera, biggest and best I could afford, five grand’s worth or something, and tried to round up the equipment I needed to make a decent film. I sat down and wrote a script designed for my budget, which was nothing. Two people in a room. I spent about six months chewing it over. What I was looking for was a story that would actually gain in power from the fact that it had a reduced number of characters, rather than one that would be weakened by that, so it was conceived out of necessity.

Your budget is your aesthetic, as they say. We just saw Blue Valentine, which apparently has been given an NC-17 rating in the States. What are the chances of your film being released over there considering the subject matter?

It’s been picked up by Strand Releasing, and it’ll be released in April.

I can’t see it being advertised in local papers or stocked in Wal-Mart, because it’s pretty strong meat.

It’s not that bad!

No, no it isn’t, but considering a film like Blue Valentine gets an NC-17, and we were all going ‘What?!!’

The Americans are a bit nutty. We’ll see, I haven’t had contact with that whole conservative element yet.

What’s the reaction to the film been like so far, any feminist reactions?

There’s been one reaction like that, unfortunately from a critic who saw it in Toronto, writing for the New York Times. She dedicated about four lines to it and said ‘it’s been said that this film has a lot to say about solitude and the human condition, but frankly I find it difficult to take any interest in a film which portrays the brutalisation of a woman’, and that was it, full stop, that was the end of it. I just thought that wasn’t very professional. She’s not doing her job. Her job’s to talk about the film, not about her prejudices. And another review talked very badly about the film, ignoring that everything they mentioned was justified within it. Saying that movies that are shot a certain way with fixed cameras are wrong, it was all just their taste and prejudices.

It’s your first film, and in many sequences it’s oddly framed. Did you develop your own visual aesthetic as you went along? Have you always, when you were writing, pictured things a certain way?

I write the shots into the screenplay, I mean I don’t write a technical script, a shooting script, but the shots are implicit in the way the sentences progress. Every time I set up a new shot I change a paragraph for example. This is just my personal discipline as a screenwriter, I know not everyone does it. I always have a clear view of what’s going on. Funnily enough, in the pre-production process I changed the aesthetic. I originally had about six or seven camera movements, but about a week before shooting I took them out. I actually left one in and shot it, a dolly back, but it looked silly because it jumped out so much.

Because the camera is locked in static compositions all the way through?

I strongly believe that what you need is a good story and good actors and that’s it, just with some kind of machine that tapes the images. So I wanted to reduce the other elements as much as possible. Let the audience concentrate on the actors and give the actors the greatest possible chance to perform their art without the hindrance of manipulation in terms of music, or camera movements…

The reaction to the film seems to be good. Are you going to be a director now?

I am now, yes. I love directing. It’s funny, I resisted for so many years. I thought directing was something else. I thought directors had to yell a lot, that they needed to know a lot about cameras and light meters and lenses, that it was all technical. Anything with a lot of buttons scares me away. What I found was that, after 20 minutes of directing the first scene I was imbued with a deep, deep sense of peace. I felt (relaxed sigh), ‘My God! For the first time in my life I’ve got a job where I know all the answers. This is what I do’.

It wasn’t what you feared.

No! All you have to do is sit there and they come up and say, ‘Sir, um… Red or blue?’ and I say, ‘Blue’. I’ve seen it here (taps temple). And they say, ‘Sir, this view on the camera, or lower?’ and I look and say, ‘Up and to the left’. Because I’ve already seen it, all I have to do is tell everyone what’s in my head. It’s the best job in the world. Once you’ve written a screenplay you know how to direct a film. I think 80% of directing is casting. If you get the right actors and let them work, don’t interfere with them and give them all the tools they need, trust them. And get a cameraman who knows what he’s doing… what else is there? I really think that 90 or 95% of camera movements and indeed cuts within a standard movie are the result of accepted convention or attempts at emotional manipulation of the audience, rather than a result of genuine attempts to tell the story in a better way. I think it’s an enormous boon for me not to have gone to film school, in that sense. If I’d been to film school I would have had a whole heap of shit in my head that wouldn’t have helped.

Interview by Mark Stafford

Festivals

7th China Independent Film Festival

Perfect Life (Image provided by CIFF)

7th China Independent Film Festival

21-25 October 2010, Nanjing, China

CIFF website

Compared to the film festivals that are held regularly in Beijing and Shanghai, the annual China Independent Film Festival is a relatively low-key affair. Largely organised by volunteer staff, screenings take place at the two main campuses of Nanjing University, the Gulou campus in the downtown area of the city, and the more recently developed Xinlin campus located on its outskirts, with related gatherings at nearby art galleries and eateries. As not every film in the line-up has received the stamp of approval from the Film Bureau of the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), this celebration of Chinese cinema occurs under the political radar, and the lack of the promotion means that many students of Nanjing University are not aware that an important film festival is taking place on their campus until a few banners appear in the days leading up to the event. However, the festival organisers somehow manage to make this ‘invisible’ festival sufficiently noticeable and 2010 screenings were well-attended, leading to a series of productive Q&A sessions with the filmmakers in attendance and valuable networking events.

Although the festival programme split the selected titles into the two distinct strands of feature films and documentaries, three films almost defied such categorisation. Emily Tang’s spellbinding Perfect Life (2008) juxtaposes the fictional narrative of a woman working in a somewhat seedy business hotel in Shenyang with documentary footage of a Hong Kong resident who is undergoing a messy divorce and struggling to support herself as a dancer-for-hire in a tacky club. Jia Zhangke served as the executive producer of Perfect Life, and the fusion of fact and fiction recalls his masterpieces Platform (2000) and 24 City (2008), but Tang steps out of the shadow of her financial benefactor by imbuing proceedings with an element of magical realism as the real and the imagined eventually come to co-exist. Zhao Dayong’s The High Life (2010) features Dian Qiu, a real-life prison guard and ‘trash poet’ who insists that prisoners read his verses aloud as a means of raising their spirits, but does so within the context of a fiction narrative. This recreation of the artistically inclined prison guard’s routine serves to bookend an entirely fictional mid-section about a small-time scam artist who runs a fake employment agency and seeks meaning through the opera routine that he performs on his rooftop. The behaviour of the inhabitants of the crowded city slum in which The High Life is located is as morally questionable as it is economically desperate, but Zhao also finds evidence of the human spirit amid the urban squalor. Li Luo’s Rivers and My Father (2010) is beautifully shot in black and white and echoes the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul as the director weaves together a series of family recollections of childhood. The final third of this meditative experience consists of comments and criticism that Li’s father made about the film after seeing an early cut, a lovely touch that emphasises the manner in which memory is altered when filtered through the medium of cinema.

The other features were more clearly defined in terms of narrative, but were no less innovative or insightful. Liu Jian’s edgy animation Piercing (2009) takes place in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and follows the misfortune of a young man who loses his factory job and is then beaten up by supermarket guards after being mistaken for a thief. Although overly bleak at times, Piercing creates a credible world where bribery, poverty and police brutality work in tandem, and no good deed goes unpunished. Some much-needed humour was provided by Hao Jie’s hilarious Single Man (2010), which episodically explores the sexual activities of the bachelors of a small village. Hao works wonders with amateur actors and a scene in which the villagers gang up on a pair of tight-fisted watermelon buyers serves as both a comedic set-piece and a commentary on village mentality in situations of conflict. The only disappointment in the feature strand was Liu Yonghong’s Tangle (2009), a drab drama about a small-town traffic cop dealing with familial responsibilities. Yongshong served as cameraman on Li Yang’s Blind Shaft (2003), arguably one of the best films from mainland China in the past decade, but Tangle was less aesthetically and thematically sure-footed.

The documentary strand found filmmakers adopting a variety of perspectives – communal, environmental, individual and institutional – to examine modern China. Zhou Hao’s Cop Shop (2010) was at once remarkable and mundane; the filmmaker had managed to secure permission to shoot for 15 days in a police station in Guangzhou Railway Station, but the audience becomes as hardened to the daily grind as the officers that Zhou is documenting as they deal with petty disputes and repeatedly explain that they cannot help to secure train tickets. Chen Xinzhong’s deeply moving Red White (2009) chronicles the efforts of the survivors of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to overcome personal grief and rebuild their community; Chen picks up on personal approaches to dealing with tragedy (a Taoist worshipper tries to prevent another earthquake by comforting the spirits of the dead, an elderly man cuts hair in a makeshift salon to avoid dwelling on the loss of his grandson) but also considers how the town has been failed by the state in terms of preparing for such a disaster. Yang Yishu’s On the Road (2010) was filmed during the snowstorm that swept through Southern China in early 2009 and follows two truck drivers as they set off from Nantong to make a delivery in Guizhou, only to find that one road after another is closed due to treacherous weather conditions. A compelling study of how friendship is tested under pressure, On the Road captures the alternately dangerous and tedious nature of the drivers’ predicament as they navigate an increasingly risky route or take refuge from the storm in cheap motels. While each of these documentaries dealt with a microcosm of contemporary Chinese society, Guo Xiaolu’s superbly realised Once Upon a Time Proletarian (2009) is a comparatively sweeping state-of-the-nation study; 12 vignettes, including an old peasant who has lost his land, a weapon factory worker who wishes that Mao was still in charge, and a disillusioned flower-arranger in a high-class hotel, form a mosaic of modern China that considers the impact of economic reform on the individual.

The 7th China Independent Film Festival served to emphasise that alternative production in China is very much in a state of transition, moving from an ideologically charged ‘underground’ movement to a self-sustained ‘independent’ sector. Although still politicised, the sector is not only showing signs of the formation of its own industrial networks but an awareness of how to work around the state, rather than to stubbornly work against it. This is evident in the manner in which a wider political context was absent from many of the films and documentaries in the festival, although this presumptive measure to side-step the restrictions of SARFT is also a political statement in itself. Some of the films at CIFF had already secured DVD and VOD distribution in the United States, while Single Man was reportedly warmly received at San Sebastian in September and could be a contender for crossover success, but other titles are less likely to find screen time beyond the festival circuit. As such, it may seem perfectly reasonable to wish that this particular festival was able to enjoy more exposure, but in order to maintain the quality of the 2010 event, to continue to hide in plain sight seems like the more suitable strategy.

John Berra

Check it out, Interviews

The High Life: Interview with Zhao Dayong

The High Life (Image provided by CIFF)

Format: Cinema

Director: Zhao Dayong

Writer: Zhao Dayong

Cast: Xiu Hong, Liu Yanfei, Dian Qiu

China, 2010

93 mins

For more information on the film go to the Lantern Films website.

Screening as part of: 7th China Independent Film Festival

21-25 October 2010, Nanjing, China

For more information go to the CIFF website.

Zhao Dayong’s The High Life is an unflinching portrait of the human condition in the city streets and prison cells of Guangzhou, China, and it marks the director’s move into narrative cinema following two acclaimed documentaries, Street Life (2006) and Ghost Town (2008). Although the intersecting narratives of The High Life are entirely fictional, the casting of real-life prison guard and aspiring poet Dian Qiu as himself serves as a reminder of Zhao’s documentary roots, while Dian’s world-weary presence effectively bookends the film with a combination of authority and humanity. The mid-section is devoted to the story of Jian Ming, a small-time scam artist who takes advantage of migrant workers via his fake employment agency, creating a collage with the photos from their application forms on his apartment wall. Jian Ming’s life begins to unravel when he develops feelings for Xiao Ya, a young woman from the countryside who he has placed in a sleazy hair salon, and makes the mistake of becoming involved in an ill-fated pyramid scheme. The narrative strands inform, but do not necessarily impact on, one another, creating an authentic representation of one of Guangzhou’s most dilapidated districts. Zhao Dayong spoke to John Berra at the 7th China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing.

JB: As you have a background in documentary filmmaking, why did you choose to feature the prison guard and poet Dian Qiu as a character in a fiction narrative rather than documenting his daily routine?

ZD: I chose to make a narrative feature because documentary is restrictive in that it has to respect reality. With fiction, you have the freedom of representation and can be more subjective. Because the prison guard is a symbol of power, it is more powerful to represent this character through fiction. Dian Qiu and I have been friends for a long time, I know him very well. Therefore, his real life gave me lots of inspiration. I combined his life with my original story about the slum and they became one movie. I originally had a story in which an outsider comes to this environment to find work and tries to survive. Although this story was in my mind for a long time, I decided that if the movie only told this story, it would not be interesting enough.

The film features two living spaces, the slum and the prison, and you make cultural and institutional comparisons between them.

Yes, they have similarities. Because this old slum is almost like a prison; it’s surrounded by high-rise buildings, which are like a prison wall. Within this space, the people are free, but it’s a superficial freedom because they have to deal with lots of invisible control. On the other hand, the prison is an enclosed space, too. The people within it, both the prisoners and the guards, are also oppressed. Dian Qiu tries to find ways to resolve his oppression; poetry is one way, conversation with the female prisoner is another.

The character of Jian Ming runs a fake employment agency and becomes involved in a pyramid scheme. How did you research this kind of illegal activity?

I was actually involved with MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) when I first came to Guangzhou, more specifically with Amway, which was a very famous MLM network back then. This was around 1995, in the early days of MLM. My friend invited me to a meeting and I saw some Westerners on the stage talking about ‘the legend of Amway’. I was told that I could earn millions within a year but I immediately said that it was all bullshit. However, I have since been fascinated by these events and I would later look for opportunities to go to them because I am always interested in the people who attend. They always look very serious, thinking that they will become millionaires the following day. The actor who plays Jian Ming has also been involved in MLM before, but he is now a chef in real life.

Did the police ever raid a meeting that you attended, as seen in The High Life?

I was involved when everything was legal. MLM was a pyramid scheme for selling real goods in 1995, so the police were not paying any attention to it. In recent years, MLM has become a scam. Therefore, the government has declared that MLM is no longer legal and sometimes the police will arrest people for engaging in such activities. However, they have managed to continue operating by changing their business description to ‘Direct Selling’, which is essentially the same activity, but considered legal.

I was wondering why Jian Ming puts the photos up on the wall of his apartment. Is it because of feelings of guilt from tricking these migrant workers? It seems that he could help these people to find jobs if he really applied himself as he recognises their potential and has a connection with them on some level.

You are too involved in the story! You can interpret this in many ways; you can interpret this as his achievement, you can also interpret this as his understanding of human beings. There are many storylines in the film, so it is also intended to mislead you.

The High Life is reflective of reality in that it does not have a big climax and certain stories, such as Jian Ming’s burgeoning relationship with Xiao Ya, are dropped just as they seem to become significant.

This is more real, because life is just like this, absurd, disordered and without reason. This film has four storylines and each story is an individual story. If I followed the Hollywood style, The High Life could be separated into four movies. But at some point, each storyline stops and transforms into another storyline, then a surprise ending appears. This represents the real world. The film also shows the goodness that is in the world, but the characters can never get hold of it. For example, Jian Ming and his lover are one step away from being happy together, but that storyline ends with separation. Jian Ming also looks for hope through his relationship with the girl in the salon.

But they are both on the bottom rung of the social-economic ladder, so they cannot help each other.

Yes, happiness always slips away. But misfortune can come at any time.

The character of Jian Ming evokes the film noir archetype of the small-time criminal on a downward spiral. Were you influenced by any Western genre films when writing the screenplay?

Not really. I watch very few films because my background is painting and I have not had any training in the field of filmmaking. The film is based on my life experiences and my observations of the world. I do not borrow from, or imitate, other filmmakers because I believe that my life experiences are sufficient for creative inspiration. It is important that a director is instinctive and intuitive; if someone has no instinct, he is not suited to being a director. Narrative filmmaking is very much related to documentary filmmaking. When you make a documentary, you observe and capture people in order to make a story from reality; you have to train yourself to unconsciously observe reality. I have always said that, if you want to make a feature film, you must make a documentary first.

The High Life has a richly textured aesthetic. How did you achieve such a striking visual style on a relatively low budget?

My background is in advertising and I work with a very good team. This film has cost 800,000 Chinese yuan. However, in order to achieve the same level of quality, other directors might need three or even five times that budget. People who have good resources are rather rare within the independent filmmaking sector in China. All my productions follow professional procedures. Although the budget is low, everything from the camerawork to the lighting, the set dressing, the editing and sound recording are all up to the same standard as a blockbuster so that the film can be shown in the cinema. But I am open-minded. If anyone asked me to make a commercial movie, either domestically or abroad, I would go for it as I would like to make commercial movies as well.

Interview by John Berra

Check it out, Festivals

Zipangu Fest

Man-Eater Mountain (Ero Guro anime)

Zipangu Fest

23-28 November 2010

London and Bristol

Zipangu Fest website

We are very excited about the forthcoming Zipangu Fest, a UK festival devoted to Japanese cinema curated by Jasper Sharp.

Here’s what they have on offer:

Zipangu Fest begins on Tuesday 23 November with a special event entitled Nippon Year Zero: Japanese Experimental Film from the 1960s-1970s, presented in collaboration with Close-Up at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. This retrospective programme will introduce audiences to the early Japanese avant-garde filmmaking scene with rare screenings of works by three landmark figures, Donald Richie, Motoharu Jonouchi and Masanori Oe, who captured the period they were an intrinsic part of, articulating themselves in ways that range from the poetic to the abrasive.

The festival officially gets underway on Wednesday 24 with the Zipangu Fest Opening Party at Café 1001 on Brick Lane, featuring the UK premiere of Pyuupiru 2001 – 2008, Daishi Matsunaga’s moving documentary charting the physical, psychological and artistic metamorphosis of the flamboyant transgender artist Pyuupiru. The evening will also feature a selection of shorts and a screening of Rackgaki: Japanese Graffiti, a documentary examining Japan’s explosive graffiti scene, and concludes with a set from London’s top Japanese DJ Tomoki Tamura + SUPERMETHOD.

The following evening, on Thursday 25, Zipangu Fest will continue at Café 1001 with the Live Tape ‘Live’ Night at Café 1001, a music-themed evening that sees the UK premiere of Rock Tanjo: The Movement 70s, a documentary looking at the birth of ‘New Rock’ in 1970s Japan featuring interviews and performances from bands including the Flower Travellin’ Band, and the UK premiere of Live Tape, the award-winning one-take concert film featuring singer-songwriter Kenta Maeno that has been making waves at festivals around the world. The festival’s special guest, Live Tape director Tetsuaki Matsue, will be in attendance to introduce his film, which will be followed by a live set by Maeno accompanied by Yuki Yoshida on the Chinese harp.

Friday 26 November sees Zipangu Fest moving to Genesis Cinema in Mile End where the main festival programme begins with Yuriko’s Aroma, Kota Yoshida’s humorous portrait of an aromatherapist besotted by the scent of a sweaty high‐schooler, and ends with the UK premiere of Gen Takahashi’s epic Confessions of a Dog, a gripping indictment of corruption within the Japanese police, as the closing film on Sunday 28th November.

Other UK premieres include Annyong Yumika, an innovative documentary homage to legendary Japanese pink film actress Yumika Hayashi who was mysteriously found dead after returning home from her 35th birthday celebrations, and the second title by Zipangu Fest special guest Tetsuaki Matsue, Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano, a revealing drama about exploitation and abuse in Japan’s Adult Video industry, directed by the infamous Hisayasu Sato, who will be in attendance to introduce the film; the all new Mutant Girls Squad, from Noboru Iguchi, director of the hits The Machine Girl and RoboGeisha; and Footed Tadpoles, a quirky coming-of-age drama from Tomoya Maeno.

Zipangu Fest is also proud to be presenting a selection of some of the finest in Japanese independent animation. The Zipangu Fest Ero Guro Mash Up Night features three nightmarishly morbid works in the ‘erotic grotesque’ tradition from the underground animators Hiroshi Harada and Naoyuki Niiya, while the Beyond Anime: CALF Animation programme features recent envelope-pushing works from Mirai Mizue, Kei Oyama, Atsushi Wada and TOCHKA.

Also featuring as part of the main programme are the Zipangu Retro screenings of two classic but very different titles rarely shown in the UK, Children of the Beehive (1948) and NN-891102 (1999). Directed by one of the masters of Japanese cinema, Hiroshi Shimizu, Children of the Beehive relates the journey of a group of war orphans (in real life all orphans taken in and raised by the director) as they are taken under the wing of a nameless soldier and set out across a shattered, postwar landscape in search of a more certain future. NN-891102, the debut feature by cult hero Go Shibata, depicts a traumatised Nagasaki survivor’s obsession with recreating the sound of the atomic bomb.

Following the festival, a selection of titles from the programme will be screened at the Arnolfini in Bristol, from Thursday 16 to Sunday 19 December. The Arnolfini programme consists of Annyong Kimchee, Children of the Beehive, Footed Tadpoles, Live Tape, NN-891102, Confessions of a Dog and a selection of shorts.

Full details and descriptions of the films and other events can be found on the Zipangu Fest website .