La Femme Nikita

The question on the poster stated it boldly: ‘Who is Salt?’ Enigmatically at first, during the early part of the advertising campaign, and then less so, with a picture of Angelina Jolie. So, the answer would be… Angelina Jolie. That’s who Salt is. Although it could just have easily been Tom Cruise, who the script was initially developed for. So the question might also be, how do you retool an action hero when Edwin Salt is changed to Evelyn Salt? In a post-feminist world, where women are apparently allowed to watch Sex and the City without feeling as if they’re killing their own children, this might not seem like a big deal. But the script changes are strikingly evident and strangely telling.

How do we conceive of a killing machine action hero when it has a vagina? First, we see Evelyn dressed like Martha Stewart, an office body, a bureaucrat, high-powered but still rushing home for an anniversary with her dopey-looking husband, exchanging banter with her boss, played by Liev Shreiber. In the process of a last-minute interrogation, a Russian defector names a mole infiltrated into the CIA as Salt. Salt is put under arrest, but escapes. First, she disables as many of the surveillance cameras as she can – one of which is taken out by taking off her knickers and covering the lens with them. It’s a reach but I imagine this wouldn’t have happened if it had been Edwin Salt. She makes a cannon out of cleaning products, which Tom Cruise might have done, but when Jolie does it her familiarity with detergents and antibacterial floor wash smacks of some banal commentary on women’s work. Instead of taking out SWAT teams, she should be tidying up and having a quick dust. When later on, she plugs a bullet hole with a Tampax, the patient viewer might be forgiven for throwing up their arms and saying, ‘OK, we get it, she’s a woman’. There is something about leavening the Bourne-like running and jumping and inching across a ledge seven storeys up with these ‘witty’ references to female hygiene products that feels glumly apologetic. What’s the point of empowering this woman if you keep reminding everyone how jarring this empowerment is? And even fobbing some of the sexists (or post-feminists) in the audience off with the prospect of a knickerless Angelina Jolie free-climbing apartment buildings doesn’t render the film immune from the complaint that the ‘relentlessly paced spy vs spy story glosses over how a lone woman, no matter how lethal a weapon, can repeatedly take out a dozen or more armed men’, (Todd McCarthy, Indiewire, 2010), without, you know, her tits getting in the way, or something. And yet the action set-pieces Evelyn Salt survives are no more ridiculous than the daring feats Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt and James Bond achieve despite their being weighed down by cumbersome dangling penises.

One element of Salt that seems de rigueur when it comes to promoting a female action hero, especially one who is a trained killer, is the make-over and wardrobe change. In La Femme Nikita, Luc Besson’s archetypal female assassin has Jeanne Moreau as a Fairy Godmother, who with a little bit of make-up, skilfully applied, gives Anne Parillaud’s sociopathic punk turned government killer a ladylike veneer for when she’s doing unladylike things. Evelyn Salt goes from office MILF to super-sexy super-spy, presumably with the rationale that the best disguise is to look stunningly and conspicuously beautiful, that way security guards and police officers won’t give you a second glance. She walks away from a multiple car pile-up and manages to deflect attention from herself by lowering her head slightly and glancing from side to side. At least, Nikita has a Mr Ben-like proclivity for a variety of disguises: sexy lady, chambermaid, and finally boring bureaucrat man. Evelyn Salt’s strategy seems to be to look as much like a Nikita-type femme fatale as possible. To be fair, the point, I suppose, is that the normal, conventional Evelyn at the beginning of the film was actually the disguise. The sexy super-spy is who she actually is.

But of course who she actually is, is also a construct. Leaving us to ask again: who is Salt?

Lisa Purse, in her recent book Contemporary Action Cinema, argues that there was a shift from the slightly mad ‘musculinity’ of heroines like Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor and Brigitte Nielsen’s Red Sonja of the 80s to more conventional-looking female action heroines of the 90s and noughties. However, she argues, even now filmmakers have ways of always containing their physically dynamic female leads. Although ostensibly celebrating grrl power, the Charlie’s Angels films employ several of these. Making no attempt at modernising the set-up of the 70s series, it keeps the women beholden to a male authority figure, Charlie. It places them in a non-naturalistic cartoonish universe, where ever more ridiculous events take place and the physical consequences of violence are rarely demonstrated: not a hair out of place. And in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), Demi Moore is cast as the villain who, unlike the feminine Angels, kind of wants to be a man, what with her fetishisation of guns and the dash of lesbianism.

In Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), the dichotomy is played out in one character. Geena Davis is an amnesiac, Samantha Caine, who, as a result of her condition, is prone to long voice-over exposition. She lives with her daughter in a Bedford Falls-like small town, works as a teacher and is romanced by a dopey boyfriend.

(A quick aside: all these action women invariably have dopey boyfriends, usually with floppy hair. Nikita has the guy from Betty Blue (1986), Geena Davis has this metro-sexual dingle berry, Salt shacks up with an inflated Harry Potter spider expert and one of the Angels has the indignity of Luke Wilson to contend with. I’m not sure, but I think it’s because these women are actually mother figures who will at some point during the film have to protect the weakling men from outside threat.)

After an accident, Samantha’s memory begins to come back and her earlier personality gradually begins to seep in. This, at first, takes the form of doing traditionally feminine jobs with homicidal gusto, chopping veg like a demon, becoming a tiger mom with her whiney child. She also begins to break out of the prim constraints of ladylike behaviour, using foul language to match Samuel L. Jackson’s seedy private investigator. Once transformed into her original identity, the androgynous Charly, she goes from pretty to pretty 80s, with a short blond hairdo like Brigitte Nielsen in Cobra (1986) and sporting Bruce Willis’s vest from Die Hard (1988). Throughout the film there are repeated and jokey references to male genitalia. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she asks Jackson. ‘I hope not, ’cause I’m thinking how much my balls hurt.’ Brian Cox’s CIA father figure hides a spare gun in his crotch because ‘agents don’t like touching a man’s groin’. Charly also becomes sexually aggressive. In place of her earlier criticism of Jackson’s leering at women, she is the one who instigates a clinch for the simply stated reason she hasn’t had any recently. This fantasy figure, and it is as much a male fantasy as anything to do with empowerment, of a sexually forward, independent and capable woman, does, however, have to be reined in via Jackson’s rather pathetic plea for Samantha to be a good mother: ‘there’s a little girl … almost Christmas … wants her mother.’ I’d like to think its feebleness was an intentional comment on the feeblemindedness of the idea, but Geena Davis and Renny Harlin were also responsible for Cutthroat Island (1995), so they have form.

Towards the end of the film, Charly’s violent energies have become focused and directed into becoming the avenging protective mother as she hurtles towards the Canadian border in an oil tanker turned bomb through a road block, shouting, ‘Suck my dick, all you bastards!’ Almost exactly the same line is used in GI Jane as Demi Moore overcomes the ingrained sexism of the US Marine Corp by virtually growing a pair. In this line, we have the tension of expressing a balls-out aggression for which there is no apparent female vocabulary. This is also seen in the use of a female adversary that the kickass heroine can refer to at some point as ‘you bitch’ before dispatching, thus appropriating misogyny as a way of empowering women. A classical example of this would be the Cameron containment of the Ripley character in Aliens. More recently, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol promotes Paula Patton’s character into an action heroine hard girl for some femme on femme action, only to demote her back to being eye candy for the ending. Most bizarrely, the ‘you bitch’ line was also used in the last instalment of Harry Potter, when Ron Weasley’s mum (Julie Walters) confronts Helena Bonham Carter’s Bellatrix Lestrange.

So female empowerment, especially when it comes to avenging mother figures, paradoxically involves reasserting misogyny. Powerful matriarchs often depend on, and police, the subjugation of all the women around them, even as they hold sway, pamper their boy-men and protect their children.

Ultimately, the end of these films involves a kind of compromise. [SPOILER] Salt jumps into the river to swim to the sequel. Samantha/Charly heads south with boyfriend and daughter, having become a kind of composite of both her personalities, happy to enjoy a sunset even as she skewers an annoying cricket with a lethal knife throw. Nikita has perhaps the most satisfying ending in that she escapes the male-dominated structures of either monogamy and possible marriage, or the father figure of Bob.

John Bleasdale

Available Space, 1979, at ASpace, Toronto - Barbara Hammer with rotary projector

Selina Robertson is one half of female-focused programming team Club des Femmes. She interviewed American filmmaker Barbara Hammer at the Berlinale in February 2009.

‘I love personal attention,’ says Barbara Hammer, the charismatic doyenne of lesbian experimental filmmaking. ‘That’s probably why I’m a filmmaker,’ she adds. Attention is not something this extremely energetic and inspirational 72-year-old woman has ever been short of, especially in recent years. This February, the focus comes to London with a major retrospective of her work at Tate Modern, entitled Barbara Hammer: The Fearless Frame.

The show marks the culmination of a remarkably creative and inspiring three years that began with a diagnosis of ovarian cancer in 2009. That year, her digital video exploring the experience, A Horse Is Not a Metaphor (2009), won the prestigious Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the Berlin Film Festival. The video saw Hammer return to using film’s materiality, after at least a decade of making documentaries, to deal with her recent diagnosis. It is a deeply layered, intimate visual essay, reminiscent of Malcolm Le Grice’s structuralist film, Berlin Horse (1970). Hammer explains: ‘It is an emotional story: a document of my personal inner experiences of going through very strong chemotherapy and surviving, and then thriving, and even thriving with hope as I go through it’.

The film, and her experience, augured an aesthetic turn that has propelled her work into prestigious galleries. Three weeks after Berlin, she was showing off her award (which she described as ‘cute’) while presenting Horse and another new film, Diving Women of Jeju-do, to a 400-strong audience at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of a month-long retrospective. This has also allowed her to bring her stories and unique style of presentation to a whole new generation. ‘I received a standing ovation,’ she says of her MOMA moment. ‘I got to walk up and down the aisle with a roving microphone answering questions! There is nothing I like more than responding spontaneously while standing and walking!’ This is classic Hammer and recalls when she was invited by Club des Femmes to the BFI Southbank in London in 2008 to present her new documentary on Claude Cahun, Love Other. After the screening she impishly acted out the ‘lesbian gaze’ to an ecstatic audience; in this way she always seems to leave a piece of herself in the room.

In tandem with her Big Apple retrospective, her highly successful memoir, published by The Feminist Press, has revealed to readers the world over a lot more about Barbara Hammer and her notorious sex life. The title tells it like it is: Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life (it was Hammer who added ‘and Life’). It begins with a 50-page erotic novel she wrote in the 1970s in a log cabin in the woods outside San Francisco. She says it’s so dirty that she couldn’t even show it to her current partner. ‘It catches the spirit of the time,’ she laughs cheekily.

Born in Hollywood in 1939, but a New Yorker ‘by choice’, she came to filmmaking in her 30s, surprisingly late considering her staggering output, after taking a film history class and watching early avant-garde pioneer Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). She recounts: ‘I was sitting with two feminist friends and finally Meshes of the Afternoon was projected. It was so different from the cinema I had seen that I was convinced, for those 15 minutes, that there was a women’s cinema that had not been told, and there was a blank screen, and this was where I could step in.’

With some 90 films and videos under her belt (she claims she has stopped counting), and a big heap of self-belief – ‘my mother thought I was great and that was all it took’ – Hammer has been unbelievably prolific. Always avant-garde in structure, her films have dealt with such topics as lesbian love, eroticism, age, women’s spirituality, radical feminist politics, lesbian and gay history, art and politics, feminism and technology, her own Ukrainian history and so much more. Her most famous work is the ground-breaking ‘dykes prancing around a field naked’ movie Dyketactics (1974), which is widely acknowledged as the first film to express lesbian sexuality on screen.

Following on from this, Hammer directed a whole host of films about lesbian sexuality – personal favourites include Double Strength (1978), Women I Love (1979) and Multiple Orgasm (1976). Her trilogy of documentary film essays on lesbian and gay history – Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fiction (1995) and History Lessons (2000) – received numerous awards and was given an international theatrical release. Nitrate Kisses famously broke the taboo on lesbian sexual desire by showing two older women making love as well as images of bondage, piercing and SM. The early 2000s saw Hammer draw on the politics of resistance in World War II, with Resisting Paradise (2003) and Love Other (2006).

Getting her life and work in order, partly because of her cancer and partly because of the book and retrospective, seems to have been very cathartic for Hammer, but it has thrown a few surprises her way. She has found some ‘orphans’: films that she has uncovered in her archive that have never been projected or seen the light of day. One in particular captures the imagination: in 1975 she drove to Guatemala – ‘on my 750cc white BMW motorcycle with my 16mm Bolex strapped on the back luggage rack’ – where she shot a local market place full of indigenous women. She wants to return to the same village and reshoot the film in the same locations. Sounds great, especially if that white BMW bike is dug up too. Apparently, there are more ‘orphans waiting to be embraced’, presenting an incredibly exciting opportunity for Hammer, and her audience, to consider this new work in her canon.

Jump to present day: Tate Modern’s important, month-long retrospective of Hammer’s work will be launched with the UK premiere of 2011’s Teddy Award-winning short film, Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), a tribute to Deren’s long-standing influence on the artist. Deren has frequently been cited by Hammer as her film mentor; similarly Hammer has become, over the years, a huge mentor to many women. She is of the ‘let’s get organised’ 70s women’s-lib generation, and because of this, feels like a breath of fresh air every time she enters a room. Animated, flirtatious and always curious, she is currently mentoring a young ‘pierced, tattooed, shaven-headed’ filmmaker, who is hand-processing a 16mm film that they have just made together called Generations – 2 Bolex Dykes.

The Tate retrospective will include screenings of early, rarely seen Super-8 films; her central body of film work; special events featuring artists and speakers from across Europe and North America; and, surely, the highlight, a free, live performance in the Turbine Hall. It will hopefully be a reprise of the outstanding event that saw Hammer literally shine at the 2009 Berlinale, where she performed an expanded, early cinema piece from 1979 called Available Space at the Hamburger Bahnhof, re-naming it The Changing Space of Film: Available Space and Bent Time.

It was interesting for a younger audience to see her in this new (but early career) context, and it was certainly clear that Hammer was in her element pushing around a 16mm projector on a trolley, while dressed in a reflective silver suit. ‘I was a performance artist when I became a filmmaker,’ she explains. ‘I was doing performance in Berkeley in a team, we called ourselves Double Strength. We performed on trapezes and often in the nude; we didn’t think that a costume could show what we were about, so much of which was the physical body.’

It is this physicality that is at the heart of Hammer’s practice – her lesbian aesthetic, as she calls it. ‘The development of touch and sight as my aesthetic, which comes from physically touching a woman whose body is similar to your own, reinforcing your sense of touch, made my cinema haptic, kinetic, sensational in the Jungian use of the word “sensae”, as a form of intelligence. I think that is what I have developed the most in my life, a physical ability to project a sense of touch on the screen.’

Hammer’s own connection with her lesbian sexuality happened around the same time as she started making films, and she put many of her partners in her work. ‘Sex with a woman changed my life,’ she states. ‘Making love with a woman directly influenced my filmmaking. My cinema followed with a desire to make the audience feel their bodies as they watched my films.’ As to what’s in store for Hammer in the years ahead, her cancer in remission, she says she wants to take up gardening, and draws on the example of avant-garde filmmaker Peter Kubelka, who teaches cooking in his film classes. ‘Why? Because you don’t have to have cancer to know that life is so rich and has so much to offer, and to spend all your time in the dark room looking at the screen is taking away from the vibrancy of the growing life, and the sun, and the rains, and the seasons. This incredible global world and the people who inhabit it, that is so different culturally. Why stick to a one-screen studio?’

Selina Robertson & Jonathan Keane

George Hardy in Troll 2

Guitar-slinger Dan Sartain talks to fellow Alabama native and cult movie star George Hardy below. His new album, Too Tough To Live, is a frenzied burst of machine-gun songs aimed at anything from Vietnam to Fridays, and includes guest star Jane Wiedlin from The Go-Go’s on ‘Now Now Now’. It is out on One Little Indian on 30 January 2012. For more information go to Dan Sartain’s MySpace or One Little Indian website.

George Hardy is the star of Troll 2 (1989) and its companion documentary Best Worst Movie (2009). Dentist by day and B-movie celebrity by grace of God, George is a hometown hero in his native Alexander City, Alabama. Troll 2 maintains a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a rating of 2.3 on Internet Movie Database: some have called it the worst movie of all time. It has horrible acting, awful dialogue, cheap sets, ridiculous costumes, and some not-so-special effects. What keeps Troll 2 from actually being the worst movie of all time, however, is how watchable it is. The movie flows seamlessly from one hilariously bizarre scene to the next. Most B-movies have moments of unintentional humour in them, but they are few and far between. Viewer fatigue is a non-issue with Troll 2. If Plan 9 from Outer Space must be dethroned by any movie, it had better be Troll 2.

Best Worst Movie is so much more than a ’making of’ documentary. It is a film about turning a personal worst into a personal best. In 1990, Troll 2 was a straight-to-video embarrassment for George Hardy. His VHS copy of the film sat behind his television set collecting dust for the better part of two decades. Any hopes of a future in acting were gone. For 20 years George tried his best not to think about the film, but it would not go away so easily. The people who watched Troll 2 grew up and went to college in the ironic 2000s, and they never forgot what they saw. As the movie got passed around from party to party, Troll 2 finally found an audience as a dark comedy rather than a horror/fantasy genre piece. Troll 2 screenings and parties started popping up nationwide: the movie sold out the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, and the Upright Citizens Brigade theatre in NYC, among others.

George Hardy got a call out of the blue one day from a radio station asking if he was attending a Troll 2 cast reunion in Salt Lake City. Even though it had been 20 years since he had seen or talked to the other cast members and he only had two days’ notice, George hit the road. The VHS tape was becoming a thing of the past but Troll 2 was more popular than ever. Best Worst Movie follows George and the other cast members as they come face to face with the fans and one another. We get to look into the lives and see through the eyes of the people who made the worst movie of all time. We discover that being part of the joke is a lot better than being the joke. We watch total embarrassment turn into total redemption. For the stars of Troll 2, delayed success was a shock and a blessing.

We set out to interview George Hardy in his hometown of Alexander City, located near beautiful Lake Martin. It took us an hour-long trek on a beautiful Sunday through the back roads of Alabama to conduct this interview. If not for other cars on the highway and a few Wal-Marts, it would be impossible to distinguish 2012 from 1962. Much of rural Alabama remains untouched.

George Hardy is a Southern gentleman in every sense of the word. His perfect southern accent shines through in Troll 2 and in real life. It is a true southern accent, not a country accent. There is a subtle difference between the two, but there is a difference. Mr Hardy was a cheerleader for the University of Auburn football team from 1974 to 1977. He keeps a strict workout schedule to this day and it shows. It is hard not to like this man: he seems to be enjoying life to the fullest. After viewing Best Worst Movie, it is what I expected. The film depicts him as a kind and humble southern man, thrust into a foreign world of ironic, young and hip nerds. Still, I was not expecting George Hardy to be the vintage moog synthesizer-collecting, avant-garde music-loving, independent movie-watching intellectual that we met. Everyone we met in Alexander City, Alabama, knew who Mr Hardy was. People in Alexander City know George Hardy The Man before George Hardy The B-Movie Legend. We sat down with him in a taqueria for a chat.

George Hardy: So a lot of people want to know about the status of Troll 3.

Dan Sartain: It was my first question.

I just spoke with Claudio Fragasso [director of Troll 2] on the phone today, and we are moving ahead with it. It’s gonna be called Troll: 3D. The initial concern was, are we going to be able to capture lightning in a bottle twice? Well, I’ve read the script and it’s just great. Rosella Drudi [writer of Troll 2] wrote it, and it’s fantastic. I think we are going to try to shoot half in the US and half in Europe.

Are they scouting locations in the US to film Troll 3D?

I’m trying to talk them into filming here in Alabama.

It would match up visually.

It would.

Troll 2 found its audience as a dark cult comedy rather than a horror film as originally intended.

I think they were going for more horror/fantasy rather than straight horror.

Do you think Troll: 3D can be funny now that you and the rest of the cast are in on the joke?

I’ve read the script three times now, and there is no doubt in my mind that it will be funny.

There have been several horror franchises that have realised the audience was laughing at things that were not intended to be funny. The result was more jokes and intentional humour in horror movies. A prime example would be Evil Dead 2 with Bruce Campbell.

Oh, it has Bruce in it?

Do you know him?

No, but people keep telling me to check out his work. We are supposed to have similar features or something?

You both have the same job. B-movie actors with a cult following who fight rubber monsters.

Is that right! I’ll have to check it out.

What was the green stuff made out of in Troll 2?

Glycerin, food colouring, and corn starch or somethin’. It was water-based.

In recent years quite a few documentaries have come out about various horror series such as Friday the 13th, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm St and Halloween. Most of them focus more on the technical aspects of making the films. They don’t go home with the stars of the film and get to know them. They play more like a special feature rather than a heartfelt documentary.

That’s the last thing Michael Stephenson [the director of Best Worst Movie and star of Troll 2] wanted to do. It took about four and a half years to make Best Worst Movie, it was filmed in about 28 cities and eight countries, which a lot of people don’t know. It’s almost 420 hours of film footage that went into 93 minutes of film.

I saw on your IMDB page that you were in Street Team Massacre with Rowdy Roddy Piper (They Live) and Lloyd Kaufman (Troma).

I did that and a few other cameos. Most recently I did a movie called Junk for a director named Kevin Hamedani. Those cameo roles are fun, you can jump in and do your parts and leave.

You were a cheerleader for the University of Auburn from 1974 to 1977. You were with the team during Coach Shug Jordan’s last season. Do you have any fond memories about the legendary coach?

I do! He had an icon status not unlike coach Bear Bryant at Alabama. The head coaches back then had more of an iconic feel than the ones today. I met both Shug and Bear and they were the biggest celebrities I’d met in my life.

How did you end up in Utah [where Troll 2 was filmed]?

I was doing a post-doctorate programme in children’s dentistry.

Four out of five dentists recommend sugar-free gum. Are you one of them?

No! I think sugar is good for ya!

Feature by Dan Sartain

Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

SPOILER ALERT

Because of the nature of this article, it is impossible to give a spoiler alert for specific films. By simply naming the film, the spoiler is already done. So readers are hereby warned. I have made sure, however, that the most recent film I have used is from 2008 and so these are all films you have had a chance to see.

There is a definition of the difference between comedy and tragedy, which I think comes from the marvellously named Northrop Frye. It goes something like this: tragedy says ‘everybody dies’ and comedy says, ‘ah well, life goes on’. In tragedy, everybody (usually) does not die. We always have our Horatios, to ‘draw his breath in pain’ and recount the story of what happened. In cinema, likewise, Horatios abound; survivors of massacres and shoot-outs, who live on older and wiser, like on-screen audience members. Think of The Wild Bunch (1969) and Deke Thornton, played by Robert Ryan. He is the only original member of the gang to survive. Their bloody finale is a battle he witnesses, but does not participate in. His arrival also retroactively justifies their suicidal decision. Had they survived, they would have been forced into a fratricidal showdown with Deke and his bounty hunters. As is also the case in Red River (1948), a third party antagonist allows a much more painful family quarrel to be sidestepped.

Westerns and War Movies

When everybody dies in a Western, it is partly because as a genre its ruling theme is one of loss and decline. They Died with Their Boots On (1941) is still startling to watch today as Errol Flynn’s cavalry unit is wiped out. However, that was the portrait of a massacre, a massacre that itself went on to both erase and justify other much larger, much more destructive massacres: a genocide in fact. Once upon a Time in the West (1968) begins with death – the three waiting gunmen are dispatched with brilliant abruptness – continues with death – the massacre of a family and sundry hired guns – and ends with the death of the three male protagonists: Frank is killed on camera, Cheyenne’s death is indicated through the soundtrack and Harmonica’s is implied – he has in fact been dying from the very first shoot-out. As in The Wild Bunch, an old masculine way of life has died as civilisation and a new female-dominated space persist. Claudia Cardinale survives to run her business, perhaps to tell the tale, but probably secretly relieved not only that her tormentor is gone, but likewise her quasi-rapist saviours.

The West needs its men to die. Likewise war films demand high body counts, and the death of the main protagonists can be almost total. Of course, death is valued and figured differently in different genres. In a war movie, like Saving Private Ryan (1998), the meaningless deaths that begin the film are substituted with the meaningful sacrifices that conclude the film. Captain Miller’s last words insist that his death and the death of practically his whole squad be given meaning and in that way somehow redeemed. ‘Deserve this,’ he tells Matt Damon’s Private Ryan, and obviously in doing so the audience, whom Spielberg and historian Stephen Ambrose explicitly wish to remind of the heroism and sacrifice of the ‘good’ war. We are all being reprimanded. Even bad wars (Vietnam, Somalia) can be turned into life lessons. Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) both succeed in turning their whey-faced young innocents into hardened real men, usually via the meaning(ful)less deaths of their comrades in arms. But here we stray. People die during a war, lots of people, but not everybody. In fact, as with Saving Private Ryan, war movies see events from the perspective of survivors.

Although not a war movie as such, Spielberg’s Schindler’s List approaches the Holocaust from this perspective. And here this emphasis threatens to distort the actual subject. If all you knew of the world was gained from watching Schindler’s List, one could be forgiven for thinking that as bad as the Holocaust was, it wasn’t difficult to survive as long as one had a kindly Nazi to hand. Spielberg’s lucky Jews even survive the gas chamber – being led to a shower room which, despite a false alarm, is actually a shower room. Compare this to the little seen The Grey Zone (2001), directed by Tim Blake Nelson. Here, the Jews who make up the subject of the film are not lucky, nor innocent. The sonderkomando are prisoners who are responsible for seeing to the day-to-day mechanics of the gas chambers and ovens under the watchful eye of the German guards. It is they who usher in the prisoners from the train to the bathhouse; they who calm fears with lies, and they who lock the doors and then loot and burn the bodies. A Jewish pathologist working with Mengele is given special treatment, but anguishes over his decisions. Quarrelling with a fellow prisoner, he says he might bring something good out of all this and is rebuffed. ‘You give the killing purpose,’ the prisoner (played by Daniel Benzali) growls. Giving meaning to death is the most immoral reaction. The same prisoner, in organising a revolt, makes it clear that his aim is not escape, but sabotage. Survival, rather than being an imperative, becomes morally dubious. As Vasily Grossman writes of a sonderkomando in the same situation: ‘he was dimly aware that if you wish to remain a human being under fascism, there is an easier option than survival – death.’

As a film, The Grey Zone insists that everybody dies. Not only the Jews in the gas chambers, but also the sonderkomando who rebel, and the sonderkomando who don’t (they are exterminated and replaced every four months). The film’s coda also informs us that the Nazi commandant is also executed and the pathologist dies. His wife dies in the 70s. This is the opposite of Spielberg’s coda, which is almost tasteless in its argument that Schindler’s survivors have had lots of babies, as if this was a problem that could be solved with arithmetic. The ending of Schindler’s List is comic – life goes on – whereas The Grey Zone refuses to give the killing extra-narrative meaning and is decidedly tragic. Everybody dies, even the survivors will die.

Gangster and Horror

The most common films in which everybody dies are gangster and horror films. In gangster films, the offing of large numbers of principal characters can easily be explained as the old studio imperative that crime mustn’t be seen to pay (but that this must only come at the end after we’ve had our vicarious vice). It did for James Cagney in White Heat (1949), Al Pacino in Scarface (1983) and the runaways of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Going back to Jacobean tragedy for a second, Reservoir Dogs (1992) manages to kill everyone, outdoing Hamlet. Mr Pink (the weasel) appears to escape, but the soundtrack leads us to believe he was likely gunned down outside. Likewise, Mr White gets an off-screen death scene. There is no Horatio, no Deke Thornton. The film has a pleasingly classical completeness. The only speaking role who survives is Mr Orange’s superior officer and I like to think that Mr Pink got him with a stray bullet before himself falling under a hail of gunfire.

The Final Destination, Hostel and Saw franchises depend on the wholesale slaughter of their casts, making the inevitability of their deaths into something like a game. The poster line for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) – ‘Who will survive and what will be left of them?’ – runs true for a number of horror films. Going one better are the films that tell you from the very beginning that everyone involved in the incidents related in the film has been killed, or ‘gone missing’. Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is an early example of this. We know everyone has died. All that remains is to see how. Likewise in The Blair Witch Project (1999). Here, Horatio is the camera itself and the tapes or footage left behind. The same device is used in Cloverfield (2008).

Where this isn’t pre-agreed, the death of everyone can come as a shock. The most effective examples of this can be found in The Long Weekend (1978) and Open Water (2003). These are both revenge-of-nature films, and the genre implies that someone will ultimately survive to tell the tale. Both films involve couples rather than groups, and so this might lead to their vulnerability. Both films also imply the indifference of the universe to us, and therefore by extension to our need for narrative comfort. Despite its environmental credentials, 1972’s Silent Running shares a similarly terrifying view of the larger indifference of the universe.

Everybody Dies

There is a film where everybody really does die. Not just the protagonists – everybody. The main characters, the bit parts, the non-speaking extras, people who never appear on screen and the audience. Dr Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964) is the opposite of Schindler’s List. Whereas Schindler’s List is a tragedy operating in a comic universe, Dr Strangelove is a comedy realised in a tragic netherworld. The implied annihilation is rendered certain by the final shots of mushroom clouds. Even the doomsday machine doesn’t condemn humanity as finally and completely as the sound of Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’ does. This irony doesn’t work without our accepting our own complete destruction. Other post-nuclear films concentrate on either the fantasy or the nightmare of a splinter of humanity remaining. However unpleasant that might be, life does go on. Dr Strangelove is unique in positing that life does not go on and is even more radically interesting in suggesting that (humanity being what it is) our all ending could be the only happy ending. The often skipped-over subtitle says it all. We love the bomb because ultimately we deserve it. The laughter inherent in Kubrick’s masterpiece is wrought with pain but also indicative of relief. Finally, life does not go on.

John Bleasdale

Some of the ideas in this article were developed with the aid of a discussion thread at film-philosophy.com and I would like to thank the film scholars who made suggestions and participated in that thread.

Ghostwatch

A Screen One Special drama for Hallowe’en by Stephen Volk, starring Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene, Mike Smith, Craig Charles.

Ghosts no longer inhabit stately homes and rattle chains. They live in ordinary council houses like that of Mrs Pamela Early. For months she’s suffered strange noises, awful smells and bent cutlery, but is her’s really the most haunted house in Britain? BBCtv turns the cameras on the ghoulies, ghosties and things that go bump in the night.

The Radio Times billing for writer Stephen Volk’s Ghostwatch (Lesley Manning, 1992)

Such was the furore Ghostwatch caused after its first and only ever BBC broadcast on October 31, 1992 that the staff of the Radio Times was briefed never to mention the programme again.

Origins

Writer Stephen Volk had originally wanted to write a supernatural drama/investigative thriller in which a parapsychologist would be accompanied by a TV journalist as they inspect a contemporary haunted house. He originally pitched the idea as a five-part series, which was rejected until it was suggested it be produced as a 90-minute special. Volk realised that the idea could be reworked so that the investigation would unfold as a live studio broadcast. By doing this the drama would imply that the fictional events of the programme were happening in the audience’s contemporary reality and in (their) real time. However, the BBC was concerned, as Volk explained:

People needed a lot of convincing to do it. It finally got the go-ahead when Ruth [Baumgarten, the programme’s producer] persuaded them that, with so much factual reconstruction-type TV around, if they didn’t do something like this now, then someone else would do something very similar very soon. (J. Rigby, ‘Heads Must Roll: The Story of Ghostwatch’, Shivers no. 29, May 1996)

The script was developed over a period of months with the ‘final’ version being shot in the summer of 1992. Manning first filmed the long, complex ‘live’ broadcasts from the Early family home, which was then played back on the multiple TV screen walls in the faked studio for Parkinson and Gillian Bevan (playing parapsychologist Dr Lin Pascoe) to respond to. In this final part of the shooting, both writer and director encouraged Parkinson to develop the script and to ad lib questions that he would ask if it were real. During filming and post-production it was uncertain whether the programme would be broadcast:

Right up until the last minute, the transmission was threatened with being pulled due to corporate nervousness, but we made it by the skin of our teeth. When Ruth arrived from TV centre to report that the BBC phone lines were jammed, we knew we had created an effect far beyond anything we had anticipated. (S. Volk, ‘Ghostwatch Returns’, Shivers no. 101, January 2003)

Reality

The programme is a perfect pastiche, a flawless illusion of reality with a tongue-in-cheek sense of drama and narrative: combining a live studio broadcast with a phone-in and cutaways to various outside and on-location broadcasts, the first 30 minutes of Ghostwatch appear to be an actual one-off production that hopes to, in presenter Michael Parkinson’s words, ‘show for the first time irrefutable proof that ghosts really do exist’.

The programme begins by establishing the outside broadcast at the reputedly haunted home of the Early family. Co-hosts Sarah Greene and Craig Charles are at the location with Greene allocated the role of eyewitness in the house while Charles conducts vox pops with the local residents. From then on, Ghostwatch follows the set format of countless news and investigative programmes: Parkinson interviews parapsychologist Dr Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan), a dialogue that is interspersed with live coverage from the house, the odd vox pop, live telephone calls monitored by Greene’s real-life husband, Mike Smith, and a counter-argument from a sceptic who offers his opinion, via satellite link, live from New York.

The first successful strategy Ghostwatch deploys is its use of Parkinson, Greene, Smith and Charles: at the time of its broadcast, these four were both familiar and popular television presenters whose presence lent authenticity and authority to the programme. This was particularly true of Parkinson who had, by 1992, become a celebrity through his regular BBC chat show, in part for his willingness to ask the questions others would not. As a consequence he was, in his own way, the voice of the people, a figure whom the audience trusted (1).

As the programme begins its investigation into the haunting, small events occur – the cameraman’s watch stops, the sound of scratching can be heard behind the walls, a damp patch appears, and then heavy clanging on the central heating pipes reverberates through the house. As frightening as these may seem, it becomes apparent that at least one of the occurrences has been faked by one of the Early family’s children, the prepubescent Susan (Michelle Wesson). As Susan claims she was made to act that way by the ghost, whom she has named Pipes, Parkinson tries to round up the show with some concluding remarks from Pascoe. Here Volk uses Parkinson’s persona to the full, as he bluntly questions a distressed Susan and then Pascoe about the hoax. His questions do not necessarily undermine the parapsychologist’s authority but imply that she has been as misled as everyone else. Yet despite Parkinson’s confrontational questioning, Pascoe is unwilling to believe the years of poltergeist activity have been a hoax and she warns, in an ominous tone, that things are only just beginning. This scene reverberates throughout the remainder of the programme for Pascoe’s sustained belief becomes so convincing that she virtually usurps Parkinson’s role as the programme’s voice of reason.

At this point, Ghostwatch shifts from what appeared to be a genuine news programme into a contemporary fictional ghost story as the subsequent dialogue and events are all clearly engineered to generate the maximum amount of tension and fear: there are repeated references to cats scratching at the walls or screaming; tension between mother and daughter and the family and the film crew mounts; lights begin to flicker; the children refuse to leave the house; a picture flies off the wall; a mirror falls and shatters, severely injuring the soundman; the seemingly spectral cats start screaming again and Susan is found to have her face covered in scratches. All are interspersed with live calls to the studio that slowly reveal the horrific truth about the house. Events take a dark turn as chaos reigns and concludes with the abduction of Susan and Greene, both seemingly assaulted and probably killed by the ghost of Pipes.

This graphic escalation of events should have been enough of an indicator to the audience that Ghostwatch was indeed fake, but such was the quality of the programme’s verisimilitude that the spectral events sustained the illusion of reality instead of breaking it. Herein lies the programme’s greatest strength: it mimics the visual language of reportage television so fluently that its fiction is, in some way, successfully incorporated into the illusion. The expected unsteady camera work, the poorly composed images as the cameraman adjusts his framing, the use of cutaways, vox pop and live calls all function to create a genuinely frightening work of fiction while simultaneously declaring it as real. It is the perfect synthesis of technical craft and concept, a true perversion of the language of television.

This sense of realism is further established by apparent mistakes: the cutting to an unprepared presenter; production crew appearing on the stage and ushered off by Parkinson; a video tape being rewound while being broadcast. These are small and seemingly insignificant moments but their inclusion serves to compound the programme’s sense of realism – the audience is aware that technical errors can occur during live broadcasts and so, to a certain extent, expects to see them. As Pipes’ manifestations gain in frequency and strength so do the technical faults to the extent that the live transmission from the house breaks down into multicoloured static and is replaced with a title card that states, ‘Normal transmission will be resumed as soon as possible’. In the context of the show’s reality these glitches take on a dreadful malevolence, functioning not just to create a heightened sense of verisimilitude but working to prove Pipes’ existence: when the programme returns to the house all is seemingly normal with Greene playing a board game with Susan and her sister until Pascoe realises that it is footage from earlier in the evening and that the ghost is well and truly in the machine.

The programme ends in almost apocalyptic fashion, perverted by Pipes into a séance of sorts: a wind blows through the studio, the overhead lights flicker then explode as the ghost of Pipes briefly manifests in the gantry, plunging the studio into darkness. Parkinson can still be heard, mumbling as he stumbles around the studio. The transmission returns and he approaches a camera, reading a nursery rhyme from the autocue, his voice slipping into the possessed drawl of Pipes.

Impact

In the weeks leading up to the broadcast, the BBC apparently became concerned that the audience would not be able to distinguish the precisely faked ‘reality’ from actual events and began to make efforts to ensure that the programme was defined as a drama: the aforementioned Radio Times bill described the show as ‘A Screen One Special drama’ while the actual broadcast had the Screen One ident tagged on at the start of the broadcast and the show itself had a full end credit sequence to further imply the fictional nature of the programme. Yet, for all these clear signifiers of the programme’s constructed nature, a significant number of viewers believed the programme was actually happening, there and then, before their eyes: according to a number of articles written about Ghostwatch, the BBC switchboard received approximately 30,000 calls of complaint during the programme’s broadcast. Ghostwatch’s greatest asset, the central conceit of a perfect false reality, became its downfall. As Volk has commented:

Such is the power, we now know, of the visual language of live TV… None of us had any idea that people’s innate trust in that Crimewatch, 999, Newsnight style could possibly override their common sense and rationality. But it did. (S. Volk, ‘Ghostwatch’, Fortean Times, no. 166, January 2003)

The subsequent public uproar (2) has been well documented (3) so indicative examples need only brief reiteration here:

‘It’s disgusting – the BBC is making a joke of this’, said Peter Jackson of Hove. ‘It’s wrong to show this as if it were true in documentary style’, said Mrs Valerie McVey, Maidstone, Kent, while John Turvey, Euston, North London, stated ‘I was terrified. They really had me fooled by the phone-in and I was in a right state when they showed the girl covered in blood and disfigured.’ (Rigby)

Within these and the many other complaints perhaps lies the truth of the public’s response to Ghostwatch: they were frightened by what they saw because they were misled by the manner in which the fiction was presented to them. As Volk has commented:

The complaints all boiled down to the fact that the viewers hadn’t been told what it was going to be; they weren’t angry at the programme itself, so much as at the BBC for not telling them what it was about. It was perceived as duplicity on the part of the BBC – whom the viewers trust with their lives. (Rigby)

Through its accurate but fictional depiction of a live broadcast and the consequential response of its audience, Ghostwatch raised a single but very significant question: if a programme can be faked to the extent that it deluded a significant number of people, then what else has been faked and what else will be faked? This disturbing proposition was compounded by its transmission on the BBC, the broadcaster whom the British public rely upon for unbiased and sensitive reporting, for seeking out the truth and reporting it with honesty and integrity. Volk has suggested that it is the most significant subtext Ghostwatch offers:

OK, it was a ghost story but it was also about how much we trust what the media tells us. If you put someone on screen and call them Dr Bloggs and they tell you a load of cobblers, then you believe it. But it could be anyone! We don’t really think about the editorial judgments that go into everything, even factual things. My biggest disappointment was that, in all the ‘it shouldn’t be allowed’ furore, no thought was given to what we’d been trying to do. (Rigby)

James Rose

1 In his discussion of the programme, Volk has commented upon the believability of Michael Parkinson, stating: ‘One friend of mine, whom I’d told the week before that I had a drama on TV at 9.30 the following Saturday, phoned to tell me that she totally believed it was happening for real. I said, “But I told you I’d written it!” “Yes, I know,” she said, “but as soon as I saw Michael Parkinson I thought you must have got it wrong!”’ (Volk, 2003)

2 The public’s response to Ghostwatch varied considerably: one complaint received by the BBC was a request for financial reimbursement for a man who had soiled his trousers, in fear, while watching the programme; schools apparently cancelled their lessons on Monday morning to discuss the programme with frightened children; the British Medical Journal cited Ghostwatch as the first television programme to cause post-traumatic stress disorder in children (4 February 1994); and in a much more serious manner, the programme was blamed for the suicide of Martin Denham, yet at the inquest into this death, the coroner did not once mention the programme or the possible effect it had had upon Denham.

3 The public’s reaction to Ghostwatch is recorded and evaluated in Panic Attacks: Media Manipulation and Mass Delusion by Robert E. Bartholomew & Hilary Evans (Sutton Publishing, 2004) and Media Studies: Texts, Production & Context by Dr Paul Long and Tim Wall (Longman, 2009).

One Minute of Darkness

It’s been two years since Channel 4 unveiled its ambitious yet patchy Red Riding Trilogy, which was adapted from David Peace’s crime novels, with each of the three episodes made by a different home-grown director. Following a similar principle, the three-part German TV project Dreileben, which screened in the Cinema Europa section at this year’s London Film Festival, was directed by three of the country’s leading filmmakers, Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow), Dominik Graf (Germany 09) and Christoph Hochhäusler (The City Below, Germany 09). This screening may not have been met with the same level of enthusiasm by UK audiences as back in Germany, when the films premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, yet Dreileben is a bold, innovative and largely compelling experiment in cinematic storytelling that deserves more attention than it has received during its limited festival run.

Almost more fascinating than the outcome is the initial extensive email conversation between the three filmmakers about film aesthetics, which ultimately led them to continue their heated exchange on screen. ‘The three of us had a long and extremely intensive correspondence on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the DFFB, the German Film and Television Academy Berlin,’ says Petzold. ‘It started off with a discussion about the so-called “Berlin School”, which Dominik criticised. According to him we were in danger of compromising our view, our deep and passionate criticism, in favour of a common style, which would ultimately lead to a feeling of artificiality, constraint, and a distrust in communication, in language. We wrote to each other on a daily basis for about six weeks. Suddenly, the DFFB anniversary had passed, but we missed having these conversations, so we continued to meet and to talk, without any recording devices or designated use, until we decided to start this film project together.’

Defined by Hochhäusler as ‘sibling films rather than a trilogy’, each of the resulting films feels very much like a separate piece of work, although there are more or less obvious plot links and reoccurring characters, similarly to the format of the Red Riding Trilogy. Most importantly, the filmmakers agreed upon a criminal case as the golden thread that binds their individual narratives: the escape of a convict from police custody into a small town called Dreileben. Located in the beautiful yet chilling Thuringia Forest, in the former East Germany, it seemed to be the ideal place for what the directors where trying to achieve. ‘I knew Thuringia from my childhood,’ says Petzold. ‘My mother grew up there, and I made Christoph and Dominik go and visit the area. Despite its proximity to Weimar, the home of Goethe and Schiller, it has always been a very poor area. People didn’t want to live there, they left if they could, and those who stayed told dark stories to each other. We liked that.’ As a consequence, Dreileben draws heavily on the German romantic tradition in terms of its approach to nature – seeing it both as a place of danger and a place of inspiration.

This becomes most evident in the third part, One Minute of Darkness, directed by Christoph Hochhäusler, which also proves to be the most compelling episode. The film focuses on the investigations by the local detective in charge of the case of Frank Molesch, the escaped murderer, who – if only in the eyes of the detective – may actually be innocent. ‘What I find very intriguing is that we can never be sure about anything,’ says Hochhäusler. ‘Instead we have to construct reality time and again. And what interested me most about Molesch’s character was the question: to what extent are we the authors of our own destiny, and to what extent do other people have an influence on that? Molesch is an extremely malleable, extremely soft persona, whose entire life has been dictated by his foster mother and external authorities, and I thought it would be interesting to explore what happens if such a diktat no longer exists. Can he actually make use of this moment of freedom? Where does it lead to?’

Hence Hochhäusler’s episode is told mainly from Molesch’s viewpoint. In one of the film’s most gripping scenes, Molesch, despite his almost brutish actions, enters into a wonderfully tender bond with a young runaway, who also happens to be hiding in the woods. Meanwhile, the police inspector tries to get inside the head of Molesch, in order both to find him and prove his innocence. Shot in the cool and sparse New German Cinema manner, One Minute of Darkness may bring nothing terribly new to the genre, but it still makes for an effective and solid thriller in its own right.

In contrast, Petzold’s Beats Being Dead (the first episode in the trilogy) dazzles on the aesthetic level, but fails to keep up the tension and intensity from start to finish. Petzold reveals very little about the murder; instead, we meet Johannes, a young male nurse, who begins an affair with an immigrant girl from Eastern Europe who works in a nearby hotel. While the hunt for Molesch always remains in the shadow of the film’s main narrative, Petzold decides to concentrate on the mismatched couple as they struggle with life as much as with their young, and doomed, relationship.

Sitting in between the two episodes is Dominik Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around, in which a police psychologist has been ordered to Dreileben to help the local police in their investigation. Adopting a style that is less cool and detached than Petzold and Hochhäusler’s approach, Graf manages to deftly weave a compelling personal story about two women, who fell for the same lover in the past, into the crime scenario. However, he gets slightly too carried away by his own ambitions for the project, rather than simply sticking with its initial premise.

Taken as a whole, Dreileben might have benefited if Petzold, Graf and Hochhäusler were slightly less hard-headed filmmakers. There seems to be a potential in their work that is not quite realised, a kind of brilliance that keeps bumping against the same creative blockages. Still, aesthetically and conceptually, Dreileben is an innovative and engrossing, if slow-burning, TV-style crime-drama experiment that often hits a note of genuine mystery and discomfort in its attempts to break away from the narrow scope that has characterised much of recent German filmmaking. It’s certainly worth four and a half hours of your time, even if it’s not quite the triumph that might be expected from each of these three directors.

Pamela Jahn

The Artist

Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist may be the first ‘silent film’ made in America to trouble the attention of the Oscars committee for several generations; and yet, paradoxically, no other film this year pays such close attention to sound. It is the absence of sound that first makes us pause. As the film begins, we find ourselves caught in a mise en abyme: in a cinema, watching an audience in a cinema watching a silent film. So the sound of your traditional silent film music comes as no surprise. It is only when this film ends, and the film music with it, and the camera pulls back to reveal the wildly applauding audience, that we are confronted with the curious horror of nothing to hear. Wherever we expect sound, we are confronted with its absence (elsewhere, the music stops just as someone puts a needle on a record, for instance).

We have just about got used to this uncanny reversal when the beginning of the second act is announced with a dream sequence. More properly, a nightmare. It is a nightmare, precisely, of synchronised sound. For what could be more horrifying to a star of the silent screen (such as our George Valentin, played by Jean Dujardin) than the sudden coherence of sounds with their source. A glass falls and clinks against a wooden desk and the sound – because it is the first sound ‘effect’ of the film so far – is like a knife in the ear.

George Valentin, our titular ‘artist’, is haunted throughout the film by the traumatising power of the voice. What becomes increasingly clear as the narrative progresses is that it is not any particular quality of the voice or any given enunciation. It matters not what the voice is saying. It is the horror of the voice as such: the voice in its orality, the infinite demand of its insistent address. While the musical soundtrack (almost) literally never shuts up with its endlessly signifying chain of references to classic Hollywood scores, the voice remains that which says nothing, communicates nothing.

Robert Barry

Wendigo

Larry Fessenden is a prolific figure in the world of horror. As a director, he has made only five full-length films, but he has produced and starred in over 40 other features. As actor and producer, Fessenden’s films range from B-movies, best watched after several drinks on Halloween night, to cult classics in the making by up-and-coming directors. However, as an auteur filmmaker (he produces, writes and stars in most of the films he directs) he has brought a refreshing new voice to a genre that seems too often unwilling to experiment – ironic for a type of storytelling that is all about the fear of the unknown.

At this year’s FrightFest, he spoke on stage as part of a panel of his peers (Ti West, Lucky McKee, Adam Green, Joe Lynch and Andrew van den Houten), who are almost exclusively directors of slasher movies and ‘torture porn’, and, with the exception of McKee, have done little to innovate. Hilariously, these directors had the arrogance to complain about big-budget horror remakes in recent years being helmed by ‘unknowns’ – second-unit directors and editors of Hollywood schlock. But the truth is, their own output is barely known outside of the cultish clan of aficionados with a high tolerance for the drivel often found at horror festivals.

Fessenden’s work is also little known outside of the pages of Fangoria or independent video shops, but in his four horror films (his 1985 Experienced Movers has rarely been seen since its year of production) and one TV episode, he has established himself as a terrific filmmaker. First was a thoughtful trilogy that commented on the classic tropes of horror films – Frankenstein in No Telling (or The Frankenstein Complex, 1991), vampires in Habit (1995) and werewolves in Wendigo (2001) – followed by The Last Winter (2006) and Fear Itself: Skin and Bones (2008), in which he further explored the myth of the Wendigo.

In Native North American folklore, the Wendigo is a kind of cannibalistic spirit with a shape-shifting exterior. In Fessenden’s films, the Wendigo’s appearance changes, depending on who is telling the narrative. In Wendigo, it first appears (or rather, doesn’t appear) when the members of a family who survive a car crash all encounter different aspects of an animalistic shape, one part sticks rustling in the wind and one part fur-covered Arctic predator. Here, the Wendigo has some kind of amorphous role in protecting its environment, but the link between the creature and the land is made more explicit in The Last Winter. As a multinational company starts drilling in the Arctic tundra, the humans who have braved the lethal environment encounter the spirit: first as a flock of birds, ready to peck out the eyes of anyone crazed enough to stay outside to the point of hypothermia, then as madness that drives the men into the cold, then as an enormous shadowy figure made of smoke that stalks the land at night. Finally it appears as a flock once more: dark, velociraptor-style predators gorging themselves on the human remains. In The Last Winter, Fassenden presents the monster as a monitor and destroyer of the men who encroach on its territory or endanger the planet. In his TV episode Fear Itself, Fessenden reveals it to be the animal within, as a character in the show transforms into the Wendigo.

Fessenden is interested in the ambiguity of horror and of storytelling, and in unreliable narrators. Fessenden challenges every aspect of mankind, from our position at the top of the food chain, to being subservient to an eco-system we try to master, to the unreliable perception of the environment itself. Science fiction wouldn’t be a challenging enough genre for this kind of storytelling – although the director flirts with it in No Telling when a mad scientist experiments on the animals in his care. Fessenden wants to disrupt, to unsettle and to disturb, while keeping an ecological leitmotif in all of his horror films, except Habit (and even then, perhaps, the transformation of man into vampire is a type of evolution).

Since 2001 his films have been beautifully shot and thoughtfully directed, evolving from his more underground, ultra-low-budget roots to slick verisimilitude, which seems comparable to the work of the Coen Brothers (if they only worked in horror). The only flaw in the director’s tales is his unwillingness to provide his films with a definitive or satisfying ending – but if horror is to disturb and unsettle, perhaps one should leave the cinema with the sense of a drama left unresolved. Certainly with Fessenden, the journey to a final door left ajar is always one worth taking.

I spoke to Larry Fessenden immediately after the panel discussion on modern horror at 2011′s August FrightFest.

Alex Fitch: You spoke eloquently on stage about how you had a love of classic horror films as you were growing up, of RKO films like King Kong, and then in the 1960s, films like Night of the Living Dead. But, as well as an interest in those classic horror tropes, something that’s very prevalent in your movies is your anger about how man is destroying our environment. What sort of experiences in your formative years created that anger?

Larry Fessenden: I’m not impressed with people who put on airs, and I think the whole of humanity has that element. I had a passion for thoughtful and eccentric people – I went to a great school when I was young, and I thought that was the way of the world. Then when I went out into the real world, I saw that many people were faking it, and were un-genuine, and would call on the name of a religion in a false way. So it’s an anti-authoritarian thing. I also grew up going to Cape Cod and liking nature, respecting it. I’m not an outdoors man, I just believe in respect for your elders, and there’s nothing older than the Earth. Although some in America would question that, too.

In films like No Telling, humanity has manipulated evolution for our own survival. When it comes to presenting that on film, horror is a very good way of doing it, but how do you avoid making it just an issue movie?

Well, some people would feel that I do preach – at least in No Telling, I think things got carried away. There’s a central scene where they’re arguing at a dinner table, and the point I’m making in that scene, which the casual viewer sees as preachy, is how we can’t communicate. You go to parties and people do talk about politics, and you walk away and you realise you can’t change people’s minds. I find that fascinating. So, in a way, I try to have movies where there’s some dialogue about a situation. But then there’s the reality that you’re showing cinematically, and then the one that trumps it – because reality will trump all this conversation. You can say something like global warming is not true, but the fact is, there’s going to come a time when it simply is true and then you have to deal with that.

That basic betrayal of our potential as a species and as individuals is really what drives me. Habit is about how that guy cannot rise above his alcoholism, cannot find his better self, and that’s the tragedy of humanity, I think. That’s why my movies are personal, even though they have this political veneer. If you deal with the environment, people will be defensive, because in our heart of hearts, we all know that we are part of the problem, which I also find interesting and horrific. It’s really what I love about horror – it’s the truth-teller of the genres. I don’t want to make movies that preach about politics, I find that uninteresting, so I have a monster come along, and that vindicates nature!

I suppose the supreme example of that is Wendigo, because it’s very much about the myth of a creature on whose description no one can agree.

Exactly.

It seems very brave of you, that unlike a lot of filmmakers, you will show that it looks different to many people. To the audience that can be frustrating, but there’s an honesty there.

I believe that if you show the monster in different ways, you’re getting at the essence of another theme that interests me, which is the subjective nature of reality. I mean, to one character in Habit, his girlfriend’s a vampire; to his friends, she’s an interloper, taking away his attentions from their party life; and then in the end, there’s a very subtle thing where you realise that both stories are true. He’s either fallen out of the window alone, or he’s fallen out with her. I love this slippery reality. I believe in a very deliberate ambiguity in storytelling because that is how life is. It’s appalling, sometimes, when you talk to someone and realise they hold a different view, and they’re absolutely coming from a genuine place. You realise it’s hard to connect, and it has to do with their upbringing, and every subtle thing that creates a human personality is in play – I like to show that in movies. I think the nature of horror is that it allows you to delve into issues of split personalities, of unreliable narrators and untrue, slippery reality.

The ambiguity of horror films seems to be an antidote to the encroaching apocalypse presented constantly in the news. You spoke on stage about the August riots on the streets of London – but if society is going to collapse, maybe it’s these communal myths that can bring us together again?

Well, that’s also my business. In my films, I’m trying to show not which myth to follow, but how important myths are to give us meaning – because otherwise you’re left with a very bald, desperate reality that is amoral. So I celebrate, and I want people to acknowledge, that if you are clinging to mythologies and your world view is formed for a reason, then you can at least get a window into someone else’s world, and that gives you some hope. I really think the pinnacle would be to make a film that created a new paradigm for people to get behind, and that’s why I’m trying to suggest that could be nature in some way. It’s funny, most people think that my movies are about nature getting revenge and being threatening, but I’m saying: ‘Have awe. Have respect.’ I’m not really saying it’s a baddie. But you realise you can be easily misinterpreted when you’re dealing with something so primal as our relationship to the rest of the world. That’s why I’m not interested in The Exorcist type of film, because it’s dealing with God and the Devil, and I’m like, ‘Let’s stop talking about good and evil and let’s look at this whole other paradigm.’ So, while I’m not going to single-handedly save the world, that is my preoccupation, to sort of put forth a new way of looking at our reality, and if we could agree on that, then maybe we could get to this business of saving ourselves!

Interview by Alex Fitch

Night Fishing

Short films were represented by two screenings at the London Korean Film Festival. Each showcased different works selected from Korea’s Mise en Scène festival, which celebrated its tenth edition this year and was originally set up by the filmmaking powerhouses Park Chan-wook (Old Boy) and Bong Joon-hoo (Mother) as a platform for the country’s shorts.

Both screenings opened with their star attraction, Night Fishing (2011), a collaboration between Park Chan-wook and his brother Park Chan-kyong. Steeped in Korean folklore and traditional religion, the film passes through three distinct atmospheres. It begins with a stylish musical prologue with a jerking, twisting front man and his band performing amid colourless reed beds. The camera soars away to a lone man sitting on a riverbank, his fishing rod primed and tinny radio playing, and the film takes on the air of an ominous horror film. Then, in a gloriously unexpected twist, the film makes a high-energy ascent into a colourful cacophony of mournful wailing and religious chanting. It is a strange journey and one made more so by the way in which the film was made: every single shot was filmed on an i-Phone 4. It would have been a bizarre, beautiful film regardless, but the technology creates further interesting effects as the camera flips 360 degrees or shoots the fishing scenes in grainy night vision.

It was an impossibly strong start and at the second screening, which I attended, the following shorts never quite matched its quality. That said, the standard was high and I especially enjoyed Kim Bo-ra’s The Recorder Exam and Lee Chang-hee’s Broken Night (both 2011), two wildly different films. The Recorder Exam is a beautifully small-scale, poignant film that follows a young girl’s preparation for a school music test. The film makes snatched references to the 1988 Seoul Olympics but the narrative focuses on the domestic story of an unhappy home life, a million miles away from grand, international ceremonies. In contrast to the slow and still approach of The Recorder Exam, Broken Night is a fast-paced nightmare of high-speed road accidents and shifting moral perspectives.

The sinister atmosphere was echoed in Yi Jeong-jin’s Ghost (2011), which followed a man hiding out in a derelict housing block following the murder and assault of a young girl. The film never made its message or the subject of its empathy clear so, while its creepiness was well executed, the story seemed to peter out, feeling like the start of a longer film rather than a completed short. I felt that the weakest of the selection was Kim Han-kyul’s Chatter (2011), a comedy focusing on a meal out between friends that quickly descends into a battle of gossip and ill-feeling as secrets and insults are exchanged. I found the humour to be a bit laboured (an effect further hampered by poorly translated subtitles) but I think this was a matter of personal taste; the ICA cinema was soon filled with laughter. Indeed, the audience seemed to be engaged throughout the screening and there were very positive murmurings as the selection came to an end. The chosen films provided an interesting chance to see material beyond Korea’s internationally screened feature films and it appeared that everyone at the ICA was very appreciative of that.

Eleanor McKeown

Gaggle

Gaggle are a multi-membered all-female contemporary choir led by classically trained Deborah Coughlin. A powerfully intelligent and creative group (a ‘gaggle’ in fact…) of women, their music ranges from beats to opera and is powered by vocal force. Gaggle’s debut album will be released on Transgressive in early 2012. For more information please go to the Gaggle website. Below, ten different members of Gaggle, named at the end of their contributions, pick their favourite films. Delia Sparrer

1. Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)
I only like films that pass the Bechdel Test (it has to have at least two women in it, who talk to each other, about something other than a man). I wish I had known about the test, and wish I had watched this film when I was 12, the same age as the protagonist Dawn Weiner. This is no ordinary pre-teen coming-of-age film; Dawn could be a 12-year-old riot grrrl or young Enid Coleslaw from Ghost World. The film is realistic yet kitsch in its portrayal of female outsiderness and suburban ennui. It captures the awkward yet sacred rituals of girldom perfectly, especially in the scene where Dawn performs an incantation over her DIY shrine to her dreamy teen crush Steve, glitter and candles flickering on her bedroom carpet. Welcome to the Dollhouse doesn’t pander to any of the ‘ugly duckling turned swan’ pre-teen film clichés, nor does everything turn out alright in the end, and it’s all the better for it. Glossolalia

2. The Evil Bong (2006)
The first time I watched this film I was half drunk on Kopparberg and eating Camembert (that might have been heart-shaped) on baguettes in a huge Gaggle Tour Bus, sat next to my bezzie mate Boadicea. We had this TV on the coach with literally thousands of films on it. As Gaggle are one big happy family, Daddy Gaggle Simon (writer, sound engineer, producer), who obviously had the remote (cock reference anyone?) skimmed through the options and eventually we found this – a gleaming gem of a film that no one thought we would watch all the way to the end. But we did, and I thank Christ every day for it. Apparently, what keeps 30 women entertained and quiet for more than half an hour is tits and drugs. Evil Bong is essentially a dumb stoner movie made on a budget better suited to YouTube. It eloquently tells the story of a group of stoners that inhale more than they bargained for, smoking from a possessed Amazonian bong. After a few ‘tokes’ the stoner boys are transported into a strip club (so far so good) and are danced around by hot topless ladies (great) who later murder them (Uh oh!), leaving their straight-living nerd roomy to save the day… It’s not pretty to look at, the plot’s bizarre, but it has the boyish charm of Beavis and Butthead and a billion other Vice/MTV rotters before it. Which basically makes it Lipstick Gaggle’s dream come true. If I wanted ‘Culture’ I’d go and watch Amelie. Lipstick

3. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
God – where to begin for reasons… It’s such a heart-wrenching tale about love, discrimination, disability, creative expression and done in such a fantastical, imaginative and sensitive way. A grown-up fairy tale. The production design and general style of the film is so incredibly cool, even today. I love that bit when all the cars come out of their pastel-coloured driveways in perfect timing – it’s such a brilliant shot to represent the eeriness of suburbia… And also when Edward cuts all the women’s hair and they all pretty much jizz their pants… And that bit when Kim dances in the garden under the snowflakes that Edward is making from his ice sculptures… And it’s got Johnny Depp… swoon… and Winona before she went mental and started stealing things. WONDERFUL! WigWham

4. The Seventh Seal (1957)
This is a film that totally stuck in my head after I watched it, even though it’s really different from and more serious than the type of films I usually tend to like. Max von Sydow is perfect as the soul-searching knight playing chess with Death – he barely even seems to say that much, it’s all in his sad eyes! It has a great mixture of being subtle in its telling but surreal in its content. The Crusades, the ever-present threat of the Black Death and the reality of witch burnings provide a backdrop that is both bizarre but familiar and totally fascinating. Apart from that, it’s strange to see iconic imagery that you then realise has been parodied and pastiched many times over (most comically perhaps in Bill and Ted – who play, and beat, Death at Twister and Battleships). It also inspired one of my favourite songs by Scott Walker. Sredni Vashtar

5. Sliding Doors (1998)
I’ve never looked at the world in the same way since watching this film. It made me question whether one moment really can change your path forever or if our fate is decided from the outset and the succession of events leading up to the end result is what we know to be life. I can turn my head in knots thinking about it and it does baffle me but I also find it very exciting – I can’t wait to see what life brings my way. Belle

6. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)
Centred around two characters who feature quite largely in Hamlet’s life as his best friends, but are dispensed with in just one line and no further comment in the rest of the Shakespearian play. In this film adaptation of his own play, Stoppard (who is a genius when stretching the limits of language to absurdity) uses the medium to its advantage, creating a funny, surreal, nonsensical and cyclical piece of cinema. Also I just love Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, they are definitely British acting gems. Corvus

7. The Dark Knight (2008)
First of all Christopher Nolan: the man is a genius, and in my humble opinion has yet to make a bad movie. In The Dark Knight, Batman is simply badass, and when you take the Batman universe from the comic and drop it straight into a real-world crime drama you are on to a winner! All the campness of the 60s TV series and the awful Joel Schumacher movies are replaced by a dark and gritty atmosphere. The film is so well crafted with rounded characters all with depth and inner conflict, beautiful cinematography (Chicago makes an amazing Gotham City), and some breathtaking action set-pieces that aren’t reliant on crappy CGI. Jezebel

8. Hairspray (1988)
The John Waters one OF COURSE. Because it has the best fucking soundtrack, and it’s got the best performance of people doing the Madison in it. The best fucking hair, DIVINE GOD BLESS HER SOUL, and Ricki Lake AND Debbie Harry and Sonny Bono and Rik Ocasec as a beatnik – I don’t think I need to explain anymore than that. Strick

9. Mullholland Drive (2001)
I love the dark atmosphere of this film and how you can interpret the story in several different ways as it shifts between reality and the unconscious. The non-linear approach to storytelling is truer to life. Naomi Watts plays such a stand-out role in this, bringing to life several different characters through the movie and each one as believable as the other. Mixed with the surreal element and set against the backdrop of Hollywood, it gives a great dark insight to the depths of what is usually portrayed as an aspirational and glamorous place. Swanimaru

10. Now, Voyager (1942)
After much deliberation (Jurassic Park, Sister Act, Eraserhead, Slaves of New York, Lost Boys didn’t make the cut!) I think I have to contribute Now, Voyager. Stylish and moving, Bette Davis plays a really inspirational woman who finds her own happiness, ignoring the expectations and conventions of others. It explores some pretty modern ideas considering it was made in 1942 – from the stigma of suffering from depression and the success of talking therapies to women’s independence and a celebration of unconventional family relationships, with some timeless lines and a complicated but happy ending thrown in. McClean