Film Jukebox

Film Jukebox: Josiah Wolf

Josiah Wolf

Why? are one of the most interesting US bands of recent years, combining pop, folk and hip hop to create lovely lo-fi gems. Now their drummer and multi-instrumentalist Josiah Wolf releases his debut solo album Jetlag (Anticon – 29 March). The album glides through folk, psychedelia and 60s pop, but as it is produced by his younger brother and Why? frontman Yoni, will still sound very familiar to the band’s fans. You can find out more on his MySpace. Wolf takes us through the story of his life through movies and talks of his admiration for Gene Hackman and Bruce Willis. LUCY HURST

1. The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Coen brothers are probably my favourite directors and I would add more of their films to my list if it were longer than 10. The dialogue and the interpretation of these characters come across so naturally that it seems as if this film could have been improvised. I love every character so uniquely that it’s difficult to send props to just one, but if I were given that challenge Walter Sobchak is my man. It’s as if John Goodman were made for this role. He is a fine actor and I’m proud to include him in this list.

2. The Unforgiven (1992)
I’d never really watched a Western until I saw this film. Having watched many since then, I realise this was quite different from the rest. I saw this film in the theatre when I was a kid. There are no real good guys or bad guys in the film, so it raises a lot of interesting questions about karma and the cycle of violence, which Eastwood often addresses in his films. Gene Hackman is one of my favourites in this film as in many others.

3. Superman II (1980)
As a younger child this movie played a large role in my life. For years, my brother and I quoted this movie although it’s hard to say exactly what it was we liked about it as after seeing it recently I realise that it’s not actually very good. At the time, I think it had something to do with the three super-villains and their pseudo-British accents, not to mention I’ve just been a fan of Superman practically since the day I was born. Props to Gene Hackman again, I’ve always loved how his character, Lex Luther, wanted to own Australia and nothing more.

4. Twelve Monkeys (1995)
I’ve always been a fan of Bruce Willis ever since Die Hard. I’m a sucker for movies that deal with the brain-twisting elements of time travel. Props of course to the Back to the Future trilogy, which unfortunately didn’t include Gene Hackman and couldn’t be included on this list. Visually this movie is awesome, and the way the plot unfolds really took me on a rollercoaster ride. It was my first year in college and I was just getting into psychedelics, it was the perfect time to see a movie like this.

5. Pinocchio (1940)
They don’t make ’em like they used to. I read about this film years later and I found out they upped the cells per second for this movie specifically, and you can really tell how beautiful this film is as a result. Every cell is hand-drawn, something you can’t replicate with computer animation. The plot is classic: always tell the truth if you want to be a real man in this world.

6. Mary Poppins (1964)
This may have been the first movie I ever remember seeing. My father loved musicals and we saw many growing up, including my brother’s favourite, The Court Jester, starring Danny Kaye. I have always loved Burt the chimney sweep played by Dick van Dyke (the Gene Hackman of his day). ‘Feed the birds’ is a beautiful and haunting song and someone like Rufus Wainwright should cover it.

7. Little Big Man (1970)
For years, my good friend Matt Meldon recommended this film to me and then I finally saw it. Matt’s taste is very specific in a way that is hard to describe, his other favourites being Dead Man and The Big Lebowski. The deadpan storytelling and Hoffman’s character as a bystander in his own life made me think of Matt the whole time I watched it. All three movies include a ‘wise Indian chief’ who plays a crucial role in guiding the protagonist through his journey; Old Lodge Skins in Little Big Man, Nobody in Dead Man and even the Stranger aka the Old Cowboy in The Big Lebowski. I’ll have to ask Matt about this connection.

8. Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
I watched this movie many times without any sound while working at a restaurant in the Bay Area. One day, I finally watched it with sound. The beautiful soundtrack is by Phillip Glass. Not a typical documentary, nor a typical film in general. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the images tell the story, there is no dialogue. I loved it. Amazing cinematography with very thought-provoking images.

9. Pulp Fiction (1994)
Not the biggest fan of Tarantino since this but Pulp Fiction did it for me. Props of course to Samuel L Jackson and to John Travolta’s comeback. And of course let’s not forget my man Bruce Willis. You’ve all seen it. You know the deal. On tour we stayed at someone’s house, and in the morning they were watching the gimp scene when Bruce Willis is choosing his weapon to save his enemy, Marcellus Wallace, from his ass-raping (the moral peak of the movie), and I will say it was hard to pull ourselves away into the van and onto the next city.

10. Rushmore (1998)
It was not easy to choose this over The Royal Tenenbaums for obvious reasons (Gene Hackman) BUT Bill Murray desperately needed props. This is one of my favourite of his many great roles. Wes Anderson created a great world full of eclectic characters that at times seem so familiar and yet so impossible. The soundtrack is great. The style is great. The ending is great.

Check it out, Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 4

Kanikōsen

In her final dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn reports on the Asian films in the programme, including new works by Zhang Yimou and Kôji Wakamatsu.

Kanik&#333sen
There is traditionally a strong Asian presence in the Forum section, and after last year’s inventive Korean features (including Baek Seung-bin’s debut feature Members of the Funeral) I was hoping for another batch of exciting films this year. Unfortunately, I missed the two Korean films on offer, but the most original of the four Japanese entries in the section was undoubtedly Sabu’s Kanik&#333sen. A witty, ferociously crafted screen adaptation of Takeji Kobayashi’s 1929 agitprop novel, the film mainly takes place on a battered cannery ship in imperialist Japan. The set is somewhat reminiscent of Metropolis, and the film tells a similar story, focusing on a crew of downtrodden workers who eventually rise up against their tyrannical oppressors. As one would expect from a filmmaker who is known for fast-paced action-comedies and anarchic satire, Kanik&#333sen is informed by a pitch-black sense of humour that at times turns into slapstick; yet Sabu manages to make the novel’s fundamental and still relevant critique clear by keeping the right balance between theatrical elements, brutality and idiosyncratic ingenuity. Employing an anti-realist approach to the historical context, Kanik&#333sen is a bizarre and often claustrophobic cinematic experience where Brecht meets Chaplin on the high sea.

Parade
Diving into the abyss of modern Japanese society, Isao Yukisada’s Parade is an often comical but increasingly gloomy urban tale revolving around the phenomenon of people in their mid-20s who refuse to grow up and face life. At first, the narrative is driven merely by dialogue and the infrequent actions taking place in a household of four troubled Tokyo drifters, but it sparks up the moment a homeless teenage hustler suddenly takes over the couch in the living room. The film is roughly divided into four chapters, each focusing on one of the tenants and his or her private obsession, and the dark nature of the story is emphasised by the soundtrack and sublime twists that carefully hint at the film’s surprise ending. Although Parade lacks the drive, visual subtlety and thoughtfulness that made Yukisada’s 2001 teen drama Go such a compelling watch, just following these offbeat, gentle dreamers is a pleasure, and it made this somewhat overwrought film stand out as one of the wittier and more honest works on show in the Panorama section.

Caterpillar
Excoriated as a ‘national disgrace’ in the Japanese press at the time, Kôji Wakamatsu’s Secrets Acts behind Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto) caused a stir when it premiered at the Berlinale in 1965, which ultimately helped push the pinku eiga pioneer to fame home and abroad. Forty-five years later, Wakamatsu’s eagerly awaited new feature Caterpillar – a loose follow-up to his 2007 monstrous docu-fiction drama United Red Army (Jitsuroku rengô sekigun: Asama sansô e no michi) – was screening in competition, but although it confirms Wakamatsu’s credentials as one of Japan’s most fiercely independent directors/producers to date, the style and backdrop of his latest effort are quite different from his earlier work. Set in a rural village during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1940, Caterpillar tells the story of severely disabled war veteran Lieutenant Kyuzo Kurokawa (Shima Ohnishi) who returns home disfigured and dumb, and with no arms and legs, but highly decorated, with three medals paying tribute to his heroic deeds. For his wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima), however, he is less a ‘war god’ than a burden, as rude and demanding with her as he was before he was maimed, and while carrying out her duty as the docile peasant, sacrificing herself by caring for the glorified soldier and taking him out for public display, her meek patience is thinning rapidly and eventually turns into a desire for revenge. Caterpillar uses documentary war footage, radio propaganda and excessive, brutal imagery that hint at the violently, sexually and politically provocative spirit of Wakamatsu’s previous work, but the film is strongest in its meticulous depiction of the strained relationship between Kyozu and Shigeko. Overall, it makes a fitting addition to the 73-year-old director’s remarkable oeuvre, which now stands at 100 films.

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (San qiang pai an jing qi)
Undeniably the most colourful entry in this year’s programme was Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop – a remake of sorts of the Coen Brothers’ 1984 debut Blood Simple. Moving the action to northern China in the imperial age, the film follows Ni Dahong, the owner of a noodle shop in the middle of the desert, who pays a killer to murder both his unfaithful wife and her squeamish lover. It’s a shame that the banal slapstick and oddball jokes that Zhang decided to employ instead of the black humour of the original inevitably turn his ambitious venture into a comic farce as the plot rolls on, and it is only in the film’s showdown that he manages to get back on solid ground. There are plenty of things wrong with this film, including the wildly varied and exaggerated acting on display, but A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is nonetheless a visual treat throughout, from the luridly coloured landscapes and floral costumes to the film’s deft cinematography that are clear reminders of Zhang’s earlier work.

Golden Slumber (Goruden Suramba)
With no more major surprises to be expected after a week of enjoying an inspiring, yet patchy festival programme, my last choice turned out to be something of a lucky draw. Golden Slumber is essentially a Japanese indie man-on-the-run conspiracy thriller that follows the conventions of the genre, but the imagery of Yoshihiro Nakamura’s film is all his own. Aoyagi (Masato Sakai), a delivery-truck driver, is meeting up with his old college friend Morita (Hidetaka Yoshioka) when the new prime minister is assassinated in a bomb attack during a procession through the streets of the Japanese city of Sendai, and, through some far-fetched coincidences, Aoyagi becomes the prime suspect. Nakamura deftly hurls his unobtrusive hero from one hair’s breadth escape to another, filling in his background in comic-style fashion, and even though the story feels a bit longwinded in the middle, it lays the groundwork for the triumphant climax. A witty, refreshing genre treat, and arguably one of the most easily enjoyable films at the Berlinale this year.

Read Pamela Jahn’s first report , second report, and third report from the Berlinale.
Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 3

Jew Suss: Rise and Fall

In a third dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn reports on a new American indie talent and Oskar Roehler’s unsuccessful take on a famous case of Nazi propaganda. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Winter’s Bone
An austere, dark adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s country noir saga about a teenager’s search for her missing father, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone is a chilling, nightmarish tale of rural struggle for survival complicated by family feuds. When 17-year-old Ree (impressively played by Jennifer Lawrence) learns that her drug-dealing father has disappeared after pawning the family home and jeopardising her sick mother and young sibling’s existence, she decides to find him – dead or alive. Looking for the truth among members of his criminal circle of friends and relatives scattered in the forests of the Ozark Mountains, she is faced with a series of dangerous and violent events, but gradually disentangles the web of lies that surrounds her father’s vanishing. As the mystery is solved, however, the story becomes overly sentimental, which feels at odds with the film’s otherwise intriguing atmosphere of mistrust, threat and everyday misery. But besides this, Winter’s Bone is gripping enough to keep you interested, with Granik showing an eye for detail and a genuine talent for building a creeping sense of obscurity and despair.

Jew Suss: Rise and Fall (Jud Süß – Film Ohne Gewissen)
Boos and incredulous gasps greeted the end of the press screening of Oskar Roehler’s Jew Suss: Rise and Fall, a star-studded and slick but overall disappointingly hollow Nazi drama about one man’s Faustian pact with the Hitler regime. A confused, clunky mix of satire and melodrama, the film tells the story of Austrian actor Ferdinand Marian (Tobias Moretti), who is forced to perform the role of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer in Jew Suss, a film based on Goebbels (ridiculously overplayed by a ranting Moritz Bleibtreu) and Veit Harlan’s fraudulent adaptation of a novel by German-Jewish writer Lionel Feuchtwanger. Married to a half-Jewish woman, Marian’s initial attempts to turn down Goebbels’s offer only serve to intensify the excitement of the latter, leaving the actor no choice but to accept and perform the part of the powerful, manipulative Jewish businessman and financial adviser of the Duke of Wurttemberg, who was hanged in Stuttgart in 1738. The main problem with Roehler’s film is that he focuses merely on Marian’s tragedy, ultimately turning the attention away from the history of the notorious film that became one of the Third Reich’s most offensive and commercially successful pieces of propaganda to concentrate on an all too predictable human drama.

Read Pamela Jahn’s first report and second report from the Berlinale.
Check it out, Festivals, Trailers and Videos

Videos: Art by Chance 2009

ART BY CHANCE is the brand new “Ultra Short Film Festival” that will be aired in May 2010 all around the world. Films will meet with us unexpected, non-theatrical venues around the world on digital advertising screens located inside metros, busses, railways, public transport. We have selected three films from last year’s festival that we really like. See below for details of how to submit your short film.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection Dana Kasdorf Around the World from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection Suleyman Yilmaz No More Overlap from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection Sam Moorman Barnett Religious Experience from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ART BY CHANCE is opened to movies of all kinds; fiction, animation, documentary and video art with the exception of training and advertising films. Enthusiastic and creative international filmmakers will be preparing 30-second long films on ‘Time’. Participants can also submit online from www.artbychance.org.

DEADLINE: Friday 26 March
Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 2

Exit through the Shop

In her second dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn tells us about Banksy’s first directorial effort as well as a German crime thriller based on the real-life story of an Austrian robber-cum-marathon runner. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Exit through the Gift Shop
Given all you know, or rather don’t know about Banksy, it comes as quite a surprise that for his first foray into filmmaking the clandestine street artist has made a documentary that to a certain extent features his secretive self. Billed as ‘the world’s first street art disaster movie’, Exit through the Gift Shop gives an exclusive insight into the street art scene of recent years as seen through the eyes of an over-excited French second-hand-clothing dealer, Thierry Guetta, who became obsessed with videotaping street artists and graffitists at work in Los Angeles and abroad, and ultimately plunged into the art scene himself. Both Guetta’s life and Banksy’s film take a dramatic turn as the illustrious Frenchman and the street artist become friends. Encouraged by Banksy to mount his own show, Guetta conquers the art world as Mr Brainwash and in return entrusts his enormous tape collection to Banksky who knows how to use the material to good effect. What follows has to be seen to be believed – or not. For entertaining as Exit through the Gift Shop is, it is not quite clear whether what we see is real or just another hoax, or as Bansky himself prudently claims in a video message that precedes the screening: ‘As it turns out, some of the people don’t believe it anyway and they think the film is some kind of spoof. This is ironic because Exit through the Gift Shop is one of the most honest films you’ll ever see.’

Exit through the Gift Shop is released in UK cinemas by Revolver Entertainment on March 5.

The Robber (Der Räuber)
Based on the real-life case of the Austrian serial bank robber who became known as ‘Pump-gun Ronnie’ in the late 80s, Benjamin Heisenberg’s The Robber was a welcome discovery in a competition section that so far has been rather dreary. The film tells the story of Johann Rettenberger (Andreas Lust), both a successful marathon runner and confirmed criminal, who is driven by a constant, uncontrollable need for speed and adrenalin rushes. Shortly after he is once more released from jail, Rettenberger inevitably falls back into his old habits, raiding and running, and soberly measuring his heart rate after any physical strain. He even breaks records as an athlete at local competitions, but neither the sport nor the unconditional love he receives from his girlfriend Erika (Franziska Weisz) can bring his troubled mind to rest. Following a man permanently on the move, Heisenberg succeeds in capturing the inner turmoil of Rettenberger’s animal-like spirit with the same meticulous precision and steely determination that his character puts into his strict training scheme. And although some might argue that with its bleak, cold visual style and sparse narrative The Robber doesn’t add anything new to the gangster genre, the film is well done and has an unsettling intensity and unfaltering energy from start to finish.

Read Pamela Jahn’s first report from the Berlinale.
Festivals

Himalaya Film and Cultural Festival

Himalaya Film and Cultural Festival

From 28 January to 12 February 2010, the Himalaya Film and Cultural Festival celebrated the rich and varied cultures of the world’s mightiest mountain range with film, music, art and photography. Eleanor McKeown sums up the aims and achievements of this unique event.

The UK’s first Himalayan Film & Cultural Festival came to an end on Friday, after two weeks of screenings embracing a broad sweep of cinematic culture, from Afghanistan to Szechuan. A mixture of documentary, shorts and fiction film (complemented by musical acts and an art exhibition), the programme allowed audiences to experience many works that would not normally reach London cinemas.

A case in point was the feature film Kagbeni (2007), a Nepali adaptation of WW Jacobs’s 1902 short story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. After the screening, I caught up with director Bhusan Dahal for a chat about the Nepali film industry. It was fascinating to talk with Dahal about the novelty of the industry in Nepal. The first Nepali film was made only 50 years ago and production has been inconsistent during the industry’s short history, interrupted by insurgency within the country. With Kagbeni, Dahal hoped to reignite a struggling industry and encourage others within Nepal to start making films again. He and his crew created a buzz around the film by employing unknown actors and using new technology. The film was the first ever Nepali feature to be shot on digital video: ‘We were criticised. A lot of people said digital cinema is not cinema. Film has to be on film. It has to be celluloid.’

This may sound strange to UK filmgoers, but surprises like this was what the Himalayan Film & Cultural Festival was all about. The cinema programming aimed to expose UK audiences to film industries from remote cultures that they might not otherwise engage with. This aim was nicely echoed in a special educational strand, which arranged video exchanges between children from Hackney schools and the Tibetan Children’s Village in the foothills of the Indian Himalaya. With lively and packed-out screenings, live musical performances and a specially-curated art exhibition, it is to be hoped that the festival goes from strength to strength in creating a dialogue between Himalayan cinema and London audiences in the years to come.

More information at www.himalayafest.org.uk.

Electric Sheep liked Frozen (Shivajee Chandrabhushan)
A graceful, elegant film, both visually and thematically, Frozen is a slow-paced evocation of a rebellious young girl’s life with her father and brother in the remote Himalayan mountains. When one day the Army disrupts the desolate peace of their surroundings and erects a camp opposite their house in order to fight some vague terrorist enemy, it is the first sign that the family will be forced to change their way of life. Elliptical and subtly suggestive, infused with thoughtful spirituality, filled with memorable images, it is a deeply affecting, soulful film. VIRGINIE SELAVY

Features

The Human Angle: Wolf Suschitzky

Film still from the production of Entertaining Mr Sloane - photo by Wolf Suschitzky

Format: Exhibition

Title: A Man Named Su – Wolf Suschitzky Photographer and Cameraman

Date: 19 Jan – 28 Feb 2010

Venue: Austrian Cultural Forum, London

More details on the Austrian Cultural Forum website

Eleanor McKeown talks to the veteran cinematographer who shot Get Carter.

Seated in his living room, overlooking a dark and frosty Regent’s canal, Wolf Suschitzky is sifting through pages of typewritten notes: ‘Oh, I missed out Ulysses!’ Running through a fascinating record of cast and crew lists, his lilting Viennese voice pauses only briefly for offers of tea and sherry or the occasional chime of the grandfather clock. There is a lot to talk about. Joseph Strick’s 1967 adaptation of James Joyce’s novel is one of some 200 films shot through the eye of Suschitzky’s camera. Suschitzky is 97 years old (he eloquently expresses it: ‘I’m two and a half years away from my first hundred’) and his work spans a broad sweep of the history of film. He talks about the introduction of CinemaScope and digital film with an immeasurable, truly unique, perspective.

Suschitzky’s career as a cinematographer started in the 1930s with an introduction to filmmaker Paul Rotha, the leading figure in the British Documentary Movement. Up to this point, Suschitzky had focused on still photography under the influence of his sister, Edith Tudor-Hart, a student of the Bauhaus who became a well-known social documentary photographer. Cameras seem to run in the Suschitzky genes: Peter, one of Suschitzky’s offspring (‘I can’t call them children – my eldest is a grandfather four times over!’), works as David Cronenberg’s cinematographer and his own son has also become a cameraman. Initially, Suschitzky studied photography in Vienna for three years (‘I could have learnt the same in three months… the aesthetics of photography were never discussed, only the mechanics and chemistry’) before leaving the country with his Dutch girlfriend in 1934, outraged by the growth of Austro-fascism: ‘We had a civil war, which is swept under the carpet nowadays; two thousand dead and no one talks about it.’

The following years present a fascinating example of how shifting political situations and personal destinies intertwined in 1930s Europe. Having been turned away from London, Suschitzky ended up in Amsterdam and married his Dutch girlfriend; ‘we tried to earn a living but it didn’t work out and luckily she left me after a year because had I stayed on, I wouldn’t be here’. He returned to England and was able to stay with his sister and her English husband. There, Rotha invited him to work on his film, Zoo Babies (1938), shot on location at London Zoo and Whipsnade. It was the beginning of a long, fruitful partnership and Suschitzky’s growing reputation as a documentary cameraman, with a speciality in location work. He was initially considered an ‘alien enemy’ and unable to take on any paid work in England, but the Second World War provided a new opportunity, as cameramen were drafted into army film units to produce propaganda films: ‘As I refused to take on a German passport from my Austrian one, I only had a piece of paper saying I was stateless, but suddenly I had no problem travelling all over Britain making films for the government.’

Given this new right to work and commended by Rotha, Suschitzky became a leading cinematographer in a fascinatingly creative period of British cinema. There was no film school (‘we were really all amateurs in documentary films’) and no budget (‘films were sent out for tender to various documentary companies and I suppose the cheapest one got the job!’) and despite (or maybe because) of this, filmmakers gave a fantastically creative treatment to their subjects. Although some works may seem jarringly moralistic or paternalistic to contemporary audiences, no one could fail to be delighted by the originality and vivacity of the visual composition and editing. The documentary films that Suschitzky worked on – such as World of Plenty (1943) or Cotton Come Home (1946) – remain beautiful examples of experimental, rhythmic filmmaking. It is no surprise when Suschitzky tells me the editors from this period were reading Eisenstein and Pudovkin to learn the structure of film. This delightful rhythm and energy is also evident in a later project that Suschitzky worked on: Snow (1963), ‘a very nice little film’ commissioned by the British Transport board. Filmmaker Geoffrey Jones slices and arranges Suschitzky’s beautiful shots of workers clearing the snow off the railway line into a wonderful crescendo of building music and speeding trains. Suschitzky seems to have enjoyed working on these rhythmic pieces of cinema and has a keen respect for the editing process: ‘I always regretted that I never worked in the cutting room… The cutting room is the place where you should start to learn the grammar of film.’

After Paul Rotha Productions disbanded, many members of the company, complaining that they wanted more freedom, decided to create the first co-operative film unit in Britain. The collective proved successful and was chosen by the national coal board to make monthly newsreels about miners, their social lives and developments in mining equipment. Having to work with heavy, enclosed 500-watt lamps in hot, dark conditions was a technical challenge but Suschitzky speaks very fondly of the miners and their work: ‘As far as I was concerned, they couldn’t pay the miners enough – they were working under a three-foot ceiling, unable to stand up for most of the day. They were great chaps and we got on well with all of them.’ Indeed, the social-political aspect of the British Documentary Movement seemed to appeal to Suschitzky, who was born above his parents’ socialist bookshop and whose sister, Edith, played a key role in recruiting members of the Cambridge Spy ring and NKVD (Soviet political police).

The collaborative aspect of film also appears to have been an important element for Suschitzky. Throughout our conversation, he is constantly generous about cast and crew members. With one exception (an English actor who vainly complained that Suschitzky ‘did not know how to light a star’), the actors he worked with are invariably ‘lovely’ and ‘wonderful’. One gets the sense that collaboration and interaction were vital to his enjoyment of camerawork. His conversation is peppered with personal stories, from the focus-puller snipping off the burning end of Vincent Price’s cigarette on the set of Theatre of Blood (1973) to Alfie Bass, fooling passers-by dressed up as an old man during the shooting of The Bespoke Overcoat (1955). His still portraiture photography, in particular, shows a keen interest in the human subject. Even animals at the zoo take on anthropomorphic expressions and soulful depth under his lens. And although it is clear that Suschitzky deeply respected Rotha’s work, he has one complaint: ‘He was a bit intellectual for my taste… The human angle didn’t come into his documentaries like it did with Harry Watt or others.’

The Austrian Cultural Forum’s photo exhibition presents rare, behind-the-scenes shots from Wolf Suschitzky’s films, as well as unpublished portraits of directors, actors and actresses with whom he has worked. More details on their website.

But Rotha, as well as initiating Suschitzky’s documentary career, was also instrumental in his move into features. Given his adept work on location, Suschitzky was the perfect choice as cinematographer for Rotha’s fictional film, No Resting Place (1950), a tale about Irish tinkers, shot on location in Ireland. Despite some problems with the weather (‘We spent most of the time sitting in the bus waiting for the rain to stop’), the film was very innovative as most British films were shot in the studio at this time, and it garnered a lot of interest: ‘Someone from the government film bank even visited the set to see how a location film was made, and all I remember he said to me was, “Don’t talk to me about 3D films, I’ve only got one eye!”’ It was the start of Suschitzky’s varied and very successful career in feature films, from Jack Clayton’s Oscar-winning short, The Bespoke Overcoat (1955), to Mike Hodges’s cult classic, Get Carter (1971) (‘my most famous film… which everyone in Britain has seen!’). Despite such high-profile and respected projects, Suschitzky is very humble about his work in film. He finds the title Director of Photography too pompous and tells me: ‘I always tried to put on the screen what the director wanted. I wasn’t an ambitious artist as some cameramen were. Of course, one discussed shots with the director and the operator… it was a matter of discussing between the three of us usually.’ This humility is a hallmark of Suschitzky’s conversation but it is clear that he has made a great contribution to British film. Cinematographers are too often the unsung heroes of cinema. Thankfully, the Society for Film and Media at Vienna has gathered together rare, behind-the-scenes photographs from Suschitzky’s films, as well as many of his unpublished portraits of directors, actors and actresses. This beautiful record of his cinematic work not only tells the tale of his own work, but incidentally traces the history of 20th-century British cinema.

Eleanor McKeown

Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 1

Metropolis

The 2010 edition of the Berlinale has just started and in her first dispatch from Berlin Pamela Jahn tells us about the highlights of the first few days. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Metropolis
This year’s Berlinale opened on Thursday 11 February, but the real standout event was the gala screening of the newly restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at the Friedrichstadtpalast on Friday 12, with live accompaniment from the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Part of the myth surrounding Fritz Lang’s best known work comes from the fact that the original was cut shortly after the premiere of the film at the Ufa-Palast in Berlin on 10 January 1927. Although the restored version is 30 minutes longer than the print released in 2001, it still doesn’t completely recreate the original version. One sequence of the 16 mm negative of the film that was miraculously found in Buenos Aires in 2008 was simply too damaged and had to be narrated in intertitles. The newly added scenes not only help to better understand the fragmentary plot of Lang’s futuristic epic about the struggle between workers and bosses in a capitalist dystopia, but they also ensure an entirely unique and captivating cinematic experience. In addition to sequences depicting the conflict between industrialist Joh Fredersen and scientist Rotwang, creator of the machine woman, and extended scenes at the end of the film, when Maria is pursued by the masses of uprising workers, stunningly mounted images of Metropolis‘s red-light district Yoshiwara and inserted biblical references intensify the fantastical portrait of a time and place that feel both strangely affecting and disturbingly familiar. This reconstructed classic was the perfect – if ‘unofficial’ – opening to the 60th Berlinale.

Eureka Entertainment have just announced that they will release the newly restored version of Metropolis in UK cinemas later in the year, before making it available in a new DVD and Blu-ray edition in The Masters of Cinema Series.

Howl
Also worthy of note in the first few days of the festival was Howl, one of the American films in competition, which dramatises the landmark 1957 obscenity trial revolving around Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name. Combining animated sequences, dramatic narration and documentary style, the film offers a captivating, yet partly unsatisfying, insight into the creative process and personal struggle that Ginsberg was going through while writing poetry. The dark Kafkaesque animation – which is reminiscent of the visual style of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir – creates a vibrant and fascinating imagery that brilliantly evokes the poem, complementing the dramatic courtroom scenes and fragments of a re-imagined interview with Ginsberg (played by James Franco), given to an unseen interviewer and interspersed with flashbacks from his past. Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman aim high both aesthetically and conceptually, but they only really dazzle on the former level. Yet, despite a slightly artificial, long-winded feel, Howl is a vivid, engaging and lovingly made film.

Check it out, Festivals

Feb 26-27: FrightFest at Glasgow Film Festival 2010

Amer

FrightFest returns to the Glasgow Film Festival for 5th year and we like the sound of Belgian giallo homage Amer (Bitter), and to stay with the genre, the re-mastered, uncut version of the classic Lucio Fulci movie, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin. Also definitely worth checking out is the new film by Vincenzo Cube Natali, Splice. And if we were in Glasgow we wouldn’t miss the first Icelandic exploitation film, Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre…

More info on these films from the press release:

AMER (BITTER) – UK Premiere
Gialli fans will not want to miss co-directors Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s immaculately executed and flawless valentine to the 70s thriller genre popularized by Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Recreating the motifs, clichés and visual codes from the vintage Italian back catalogue (including A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Suspiria and Deep Red), the Belgian duo unfold a virtually dialogue free tale of frightening obsession, sexual sensation and stunning black-gloved murder. Scored to recycled Italian soundtrack selections in the Tarantino tradition, the hypnotic and ethereal allure of the classic gialli lives again in this boldly imaginative cult phenomenon.

A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN – World Premiere
Enjoy this re-mastered, restored and never-before-seen fully uncut version of Italian gore-meister Lucio Fulci’s hippy, trippy 1971 giallo classic. Did rich socialite Carol Hammond (gialli goddess Florinda Bolkan) kill her nymphomaniac neighbour during a depraved orgy of LSD-induced sadistic sex? Or is she just being framed by her philandering husband? Swinging London decadence, scandalous blackmail, neurotic visions and gory throat slashing all wrapped up in one of Ennio Morricone’s finest scores. Quirky touches of Fulci fantasy horror make this stylish psycho thriller a quintessential masterpiece of the giallo genre.

SPLICE – UK Premiere
From Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube and Cypher, and visionary producer Guillermo del Toro, comes a new kind of monster movie. Rebellious scientists Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley defy legal and ethical boundaries and forge ahead with a dangerous experiment: splicing together human and animal DNA to create a new organism. Named ‘Dren’ the creature rapidly develops from a deformed female infant into a beautiful chimera, who forges a bond with both of her creators. But then that bond turns deadly in a Frankenstein fable for the modern era…

REYKJAVIK WHALE WATCHING MASSACRE – World Premiere
A group of tourists embark on a sightseeing trip aboard a whaling vessel with none other than Captain Gunnar (Leatherface) Hansen himself. It’s when the ship breaks down the terror starts because the day-trippers come under attack from a crew of deranged Fishbillies hellbent on mayhem and slaughter. Let the bloody sea battle begin in director Julius Kemp’s horror comedy hybrid with a strong surreal flavour, the first exploitation film ever made by the Icelandic Film Industry.

Full programme at www.frightfest.co.uk.

Check it out, Features

Suspiria: Possessed Bodies and Deadly Pointe

Suspiria

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Date: 18 January 2010

Distributor: Nouveaux Pictures

Director: Dario Argento

Writers: Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi

Cast: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Alida Valli, Udo Kier

Italy 1977

98 mins

Any witches’ covens looking for a cover could do worse than a dance academy. Open the doors of your remote labyrinthine pile and waifs of good family will simply flock to be subjected to severe sado-masochistic discipline. As played by Jessica Harper with an unsurpassed 40-year-old-woman-in-the-body-of-a-14-year-old-girl oddness, Suzy Bannion is the natural prey of the sort of humourlessly leering Teutonic dykes and faded beauties made up to a grotesque parody of their former selves who run such establishments. Horrible as it is, Suzy accepts this situation as her lot: maybe this distracts her from the even more horrible truth.

It’s not as if there aren’t enough danger signals right from the off. Indeed, Suspiria almost doesn’t recover from a blistering opening 15 minutes. Horror movies generally take some time to establish a notion of normal life, gradually allowing the supernatural or murderous to infiltrate. Here, it’s all up in about 10 seconds. As the opening credits run, a bland voice-over tells us Suzy is coming to Germany to study dance. The arrival board flashes up, Suzy passes through security, and she is already saucer-eyed. Seconds later, she is soaking in a howling gale as Goblin‘s pulsing, hammer dulcimer-led theme kicks in. After an angsty taxi ride, out of the blackest storm there floats towards us a Gothic pile so ruddy it seems to be engorged. So this is the dance school. To make matters worse, as Suzy tries to get in, a deranged girl runs out. By now Goblin are drumming and howling fit to burst, and we follow the raving girl to a friend’s apartment block. It seems a dubious refuge: the bizarre, oddly-luminous panelling of the lobby itself seems murderous. And in a way it is. Knifed and noosed by an unseen assailant, the girl’s still twitching body plunges through the stained-glass lobby ceiling, stopped short of the floor by the tightening noose. As the camera pans down, we see her friend on the floor, her face bisected by a shard of stained glass.

Read our interview with director Dario Argento.

From this point there has to be a retreat into some sort of everyday, but even then it’s a weird one. Suzy’s classmates – hissing, preening, would-be prima ballerinas – are witchy enough in all conscience. But even the more Chalet School moments are undermined by the weirdness of the sets. So oppressive is the academy’s gory facade, Argento struggles to make it look less scary in daylight. Suzy’s digs are brightly lit, and in black and white, marking a welcome release from the tyranny of saturated colour. But even here the wallpaper wants to coils its tendrils round you. Everywhere else is marked by strange geometric panelling, pulsating with light, as if to merge with the stained glass that crops up from time to time. All this is framed by glistening lacquered boards, panels, and art nouveau arabesques. The whole is frequently heavily filtered, with occasionally paradoxical lighting, as one part of a shot is bathed in warning red, another in bilious green, like the ‘before’ segment of an ad for a hangover cure.

Goblin’s theme music matches and amplifies the infested quality of the visuals uncannily. In fact, it seems almost immanent in the very air of the film, rendering conventional distinctions between diegetic and non-diegetic sound moot. You find yourself wondering how Suzy can’t hear it, it is so evidently the sound of what is there before you visually. Despite the many quite apparent warning signs hinted at above, Suzy’s first serious realisation that all is not well at the academy comes as she encounters the stares of a whiskery hag and malevolently angelic Midwich cuckoo in Fauntleroy garb halfway down a corridor. A blinding flash from a strange pyramid of metal the hag is polishing physically strikes Suzy, leaving a sort of snowy cloud in its wake. As Suzy staggers on to the end of the corridor, she looks like she’s moving through treacle. Insanely loud, Goblin’s music is the thickness of the air she is moving through.

This scene is sandwiched between Suzy’s two forlorn attempts at actually doing some dancing. The dance studio is one of the few areas of modern décor, clean lines and surfaces, normal daylight and air. Yet, even here there is an odd counterpoint to the rest of the academy. What we see are bodies controlled by music, students prancing to a maddeningly jaunty piano waltz. It’s sinister enough in its way, and it proves too much for Suzy: she spends the rest of the film more or less bed-ridden. The nightmarishness of dance is confirmed in a brief respite from the academy when we follow the freshly-sacked répétiteur to a Bavarian beer hall. Here, in one of the most chilling scenes in the film, we witness – horrors – the synchronized thigh-slapping of group Lederhosen dancing. It is perhaps the pianist’s good fortune that he is blind. Were he not, this would be one of the last things he sees as, on his way home, he is mauled and eaten by his guide dog.

Working out the steps is, on the other hand, how Suzy starts to fight back. Here we enter what you might call the Nancy Drew phase of the story as Suzy, along with classmate Sarah, first figures out that the teachers only pretend to leave the school at night, and then works out their mysterious movements by noting the number and direction of their steps. Following the steps leads Suzy to freedom, and poor Sarah to a tangle with razor wire. But never mind the story: sit back and let the pullulating sound and vision crawl all over you.

Stephen Thomson

Buy Suspiria (Blu-ray) [DVD] [1976] from Amazon

Buy Suspiria [DVD] [1976] from Amazon

audio Listen to the podcast of the Dario Argento interview + Goblin Q&A led by Alex Fitch at the Supersonic music festival in Birmingham.

Watch the trailer for Suspiria: