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

Road to Nowhere

As Monte Hellman’s legendary Two-Lane Blacktop is released on Blu-ray by Eureka, we publish an interview with the director on his latest film.

In Road to Nowhere (2010), his feature comeback after 20-odd years, Monte Hellman deftly blurs the line between cinema and reality: the film depicts a young director shooting a crime drama based on a true story, using the actual locations as a source of inspiration. During the shoot, he falls in love with his lead actress, who uncannily resembles the real-life crime’s femme fatale, and soon things get alarmingly tangled up, especially in the mind of one imaginative member of the crew. Although there is no denying that its decidedly artificial touch and wooden dialogue make this a flawed film, the director’s approach is complex, intriguing and worthy of attention. Ultimately, Road to Nowhere amounts to little more than a series of bravura noir scenes in which the tension and emotion sometimes build up too slowly, but a great meta-B-movie feel and fitting cinematography make it an enjoyable watch.

Monte Hellman talked to Pamela Jahn at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in July 2011 about how it feels to be back on set, what it takes to let things go and other things you don’t usually learn in film school.

Pamela Jahn: Road to Nowhere is your first feature film in over 20 years but in the meantime you had been working on various other projects that didn’t come to fruition. What was different this time?

Monte Hellman: My daughter decided that we would stop waiting for other people to give us permission to make movies and instead do it ourselves. So she went out and raised the money. She fell in love with the script and that was something that fascinated me because it’s a movie about my life in the sense that it’s about the process of making movies – it’s a film about the making of a film.

How important is the process of making a film to you as compared to the final outcome on screen?

Both things are important to me. In this case, the process was exciting because we tried something different. Filmmakers are control freaks, but we tried to give up this whole idea of controlling every aspect of it. I guess I got tired of it. Instead we tried to pursue something that was less intellectual and more emotional. I tried to get everybody to turn off their brains and let the subconscious take over. It’s not an easy thing to do, particularly for people who like to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. Actors are trained to examine themselves like, ‘what was I doing 10 minutes ago’ and ‘where am I going with this’. And all this is very much about control. But we tried to find a way to forget about all that and just let this thing happen. It requires an awful lot of trust, of course, and faith. Both their faith in me and also their faith in themselves. But it worked. It was amazing.

How did it feel to be back on set after so many years?

It’s always the same for me. Before starting any movie I feel like I don’t remember what to do and how to do it and I am always terrified until the moment I get on the set. And it was the same this time. It’s been over 20 years… well, not really, because I directed a segment in a film called Trapped Ashes in 2006. But I get on the set and think, ‘This is where I belong to’, and I feel comfortable, and suddenly all the fear is disappearing.

Is there a relation between Mitchell Haven, the director in the movie, and yourself? How much of the young Monte Hellman do you see in him?

It started out that way. When we were sitting together working on the script, people would just shout out certain eccentricities that I have and put them into the script. But as soon as I hired an actor I realised that this was a mistake, particularly since he’s an actor who loves that kind of thing and I didn’t want to give him that comfort. And so, fortunately, he agreed not to do that and he even rejected some of the things that remained in the script.

Road to Nowhere is actually based on quite a simple story if you look at it a certain way, but on first viewing it can be a rather baffling experience.

I never thought of it as difficult or delusive or anything. We’re seeing this movie within the movie out of sequence but there is so little to that story, and actually we see the same scene over and over again. I didn’t expect it to be as hard to unravel as it turned out to be for some audiences.

It’s very film noir in its look and spirit.

Yes, and this is something that does attract me. The fact that no one can ever figure out the most difficult movies of the genre, like The Big Sleep for example. Even Howard Hawks said he could never figure it out. But that never bothers me, because I’m not really interested in figuring things out. I’m interested in entering into a dream world, it is partly my own dream and partly the movie’s dream, and I’m just letting things go and I’m going with it. That’s the way I relate to Road to Nowhere, and I unconsciously expect the audience to do the same thing.

Was it easier for you to have your daughter producing the film than, for example, Roger Corman?

Roger Corman was a good producer for me because he left me alone. My daughter was much better though because she not only left me alone, but she kept me unaware of the financial crisis and anything that would not be part of my creative process. She kept me really isolated so I could do my work. And she did her work, she was great.

Do you need complete isolation in order to work?

I don’t want to be worrying about things that are unnecessary for me to worry about.

Roger Corman produced several of your early films. How did the collaboration come about?

My wife at the time was an actress working with Roger, so I met him socially and he invested a small amount of money in a theatre company that we had. And when this theatre was disbanded because we lost our venue after it was sold and converted into a movie theatre he said that we should take that as sign and I should start making movies. He asked me to do one and there was no looking back after that.

Your most critically acclaimed film to date, Two-Lane Blacktop, failed at the box office in America at the time of its initial release but has long reached cult status. Where you disappointed that it didn’t become the breakthrough film for you that it was meant to be?

I don’t remember it as such. I was angry that they did such a bad job of distributing the film. Especially because it was a big thrill for me to see the success of Two-Lane Blacktop in London at the Islington Screen on the Green. So much so that I invited my London agent to come to the screening and then he couldn’t get in because it was totally sold out. That was fun. But in the end, I just went on to my next project which, I think, never got made. Well, most of my projects didn’t get made [laughs], but I just kept plunging on.

When you did Cockfighter, it also failed commercially on release, but then Corman tried re-editing it. Where you aware of it at the time?

Yes, Corman did recut the film in a version called Born to Kill, which is weird because chickens are not born, they are hatched. I knew he was doing it. But luckily the original was restored afterwards, when they put it out on video they asked for the original version. So there’s now a good DVD version available in the States.

Of all the projects that never got made in the end, is there a particular one that you are hoping to still be able to do at some point?

I am currently working on an old script but, yes, there is another one that I was hired for by Bert Schneider and Paramount in the early 80s, which is one of my favourites.

What’s the story?

It’s a film noir as well. It was written by Lionel White in protest at the fact that Stanley Kubrick wouldn’t hire him to do the screenplay of Lolita, so he wrote his version of it as a film noir. I have the script, though first of all I need to persuade Paramount to sell me the rights. But I really hope to do it some time.

You’ve also been teaching film for several years now. What’s the main advice you give to your young directing students?

To be honest, I think teaching film is pretty much a sham. It’s something that can’t be taught. So one of the first things I tell my students is the same advice the director gives in Road to Nowhere, which is, if an actor asks, ‘How do you want me to act?’, you say, ‘Don’t’. Students are trained by the system and by other teachers to direct, and I always say to them, ‘Don’t’. Most great directors don’t direct, you don’t direct actors. Like Clint Eastwood said, ‘How can I tell Morgan Freeman how to act?’

What was the first thing you have learned in your career?

Fortunately, I learned very early on not to expect that pre-planning would lead to anything, which was very interesting. And so instead of staying up all night and doing little storyboards, I get a good night sleep and I trust that I’m going to be inspired once I get on the set. And most the time that works!

Interview by Pamela Jahn

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

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

Outrage

Having started his career as a comedian and television presenter in the 1970s, Takeshi Kitano has always been more than the writer-director and actor of his own films. Already established as a multimedia superstar (working as a TV personality and actor) in Japan under the name ‘Beat’ Takeshi, Kitano earned himself an international cult following with yakuza gangster movies such as his feature debut Violent Cop (1989), Sonatine (1993) and Hana-Bi (1997). But the recent series of what Kitano has self-deprecatingly called his ‘auto-destruct’ cinema, including Takeshis’ (2005) and Achilles and the Tortoise (2008), has disconcerted distributors and damaged his standing, leading to increasingly limited or straight-to-DVD releases for his films outside of Japan in recent years. Yet, his latest offering, Outrage, which premiered in Competition at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, sees Kitano back with a vengeance both behind and in front of the camera, in what feels like one of his most refreshing and enjoyable yakuza thrillers to date.

Pamela Jahn took part in a round table interview at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival in which Kitano talked about tackling genre conventions, dentist horror scenarios and what it feels like to be the boss of it all.

Q: Outrage marks your return to the crime genre but there is clearly a shift in tone compared to your early yakuza films such as Violent Cop and Sonatine. Although the film is equally violent, the characters are not as cold and cool as they used to be and and you seem to have fun playing with the genre conventions. Was it a conscious decision you made when you started the project to test new grounds with this film?

Takeshi Kitano: Of course it would have been much easier to focus on the main protagonist played by myself and make a straightforward yakuza genre movie with lots of violence rather than trying a different route. But when I started working on the film I noticed that many people were very interested to find out what I was going to do next and I thought that if I simply repeated what I have already done in the past people would say, ‘Well, he’s just doing the same old stuff again’. So, yes, I consciously tried to do something different with this film. First of all, I intentionally changed the pace and the rhythm of the whole film and incorporated a lot of dialogue, which I hadn’t really done before in my earlier movies. I also stepped back from the limelight as the main character. I mean, although I am the main character, the film is not just about this one protagonist. It’s more about the whole group of gangsters, so it becomes an ensemble film. Most importantly, however, it has this kind of detachment, it’s like watching one of those nature documentaries shows where you see the bugs in the woods killing each other, or ants chasing worms – I kind of treated the characters in the film in that way. So, the emotional aspect is much less important here.

Did all this evolve quite naturally or did you work on the script for a long time?

I worked on the script for this movie backwards in that the very first scene, the very first idea that I had, was the sequence when one of the yakuza characters gets beheaded with the string attached to his neck and gets dragged away by a car. And from that point on I went backwards in terms of developing the story line. I started thinking of the many ways of killing people, and it was only then that I came up with how the whole trouble begins and what would be the cause of the warfare. But after the first draft I noticed that there were too few scenes featuring myself to make this movie work, so I had to add some more scenes with myself in them because otherwise I would have had too many scenes with different characters and the story wouldn’t have worked as a whole.

How did you come up with the idea of the man getting beheaded by the car?

It is the development of an idea that I ended up not using for my previous movie Achilles and the Tortoise, where I thought that the protagonist that I played in that movie would hang himself. He would attach a string to a tree and put the rope around his neck and then the car beneath him would slowly move forward. But then the woman would drop from the tree and he would fail to kill himself. But I dropped that idea after discussing it with my crew, who said it would look too much like a comedy and that it wouldn’t fit with the rest of the story. The scene in Outrage is almost a revised version of that.

You said elsewhere that you wanted to make the audience feel the pain…

While I was writing this script and while I was shooting, my intention was that all the violence should look as painful as possible because that’s how it is in real life. Violence is a painful thing. But then I felt that it was actually very difficult to find a balance in portraying the violence because if you bring a chainsaw into a yakuza movie it suddenly turns into a horror movie. So you can’t get too carried away with how people get killed in a gangster movie. But one of the ideas I came up with was the dentist scene, which is inspired by me having treatment at a dentist in the past. What happened was that while I was receiving treatment, my dentist’s phone rang and she said, ‘Mr Kitano, I have to take this call, do you mind waiting for a moment?’ I said ‘OK’ and she went out of the room. And then I had this weird idea thinking, ‘Oh my God, what if somebody broke into the room right now and started drilling my teeth, that would be a nightmare’. And suddenly it hit me, that this could be a great scene in the film and as soon as I got out of that chair I wrote it down.

Then there is this tongue scene, I thought that worked really well in terms of trying to combine the violence and the humour, especially because I noticed the reactions of the audience at the official screening. I didn’t have the intention to make those violent scenes comical at all, but I noticed during the editing that many of the scenes are almost hilarious unintentionally. But although it wasn’t my intention in the first place, it eventually turned out to be a good thing because it somehow works as a relief for the tension.

Outrage is very much a film about men in conflict about their egos, their self-serving aspirations and ambitions. In real life, being the boss of your own production company Office Kitano, do you often come across these sort of ego problems with other people, or do people in general get a bit nervous around you?

I don’t think people are usually nervous around me because there is never any conflict on set. I have never screamed at anybody on set, in fact, I am a very quiet director, I think. I try to be as cooperative as possible with my crew, and I am open to listening to their ideas. So I’d like to think that my producers and crew members just like to help me too. They might even think I cannot do anything without them and that they have to help me, so actually they might be my nurses rather than being nervous.

From your film’s perspective, do you think much of the influence and tactics of the yakuza have changed over the years since you made Violent Cop? Do you have, or used to have, close contacts to members of yakuza gangs?

I don’t think this film is a very reality-orientated kind of yakuza movie. Although it is not entirely fictional it is not intended to be realistic either, simply because the conflict and warfare scenes in Outrage are slightly exaggerated. Those things are not really happening in the Japanese gang wars and the violence is not as explicit as in the film. But in terms of yakuza businesses, how they work and how they make a profit, this is an open secret for any Japanese, you don’t have to do much research to know how they operate. Japan is one of the very few countries where the gangsters don’t hesitate to show that they are gangsters, they even put a billboard up on their building saying ‘so and so family office’. You don’t see this in Western countries, right?

Aside from dealing with the same subject matter, is there a common thread that runs through your yakuza films?

I haven’t given it much thought to whether there is some sort of common thread that runs through my films or my career, because as an actor it is important to try to achieve what you are required to achieve in a project rather than to think about the consistency of a series of similar or different movies. For instance, even if I work purely as an actor for other directors, I basically try to be as cooperative and faithful to the director’s instructions as possible, not thinking about my own ideas, not thinking about my priorities, I am only listening to the director. And when I work on my own movies, it is really the film that calls for a particular performance and it is important to convey that in each project. So it is really difficult for me to reflect upon my work and find out what is different or what has been added to each movie.

Another difference that you haven’t mentioned earlier is that you seem to be using a rougher soundtrack than in previous films?

In terms of sound, including the music but also the sound effects and the acoustics of the whole movie, I wanted to bring in some notion of comic book sound effects, this same sort of exaggeration. Like in a manga, where you actually read the sound, like ‘bang’ is written on the picture, and I wanted that kind of effect on the sound.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Take Shelter

Michael Shannon is Curtis LaForche, a caring family man and reliable construction worker, who slowly loses touch with reality as he deals with the panic that arises from a series of terrifying dreams in writer-director Jeff Nichols’s remarkable second feature Take Shelter. The film is a thrilling, genre-twisting and masterfully crafted drama, sensitively tackling what could have been lurid material in other hands, and it seems that Shannon and Nichols in their second collaboration since Shotgun Stories (2007) have only grown closer as a formidable director/actor team. What really makes this film, however, is its subtle ambiguity. Curtis’s dreams are either forebodings of an apocalyptic storm coming in, or the first symptoms of the same life-destroying paranoid schizophrenia his mother has suffered since he was a kid. In a standout performance, and supported by an equally convincing Jessica Chastain as the caring wife who is desperate to understand what is happening to her husband, Shannon portrays Curtis’s inner struggle with powerful conviction. For his part, Nichols manages not only to convey a sense of the dizzying confusion and nerve-racking tension that drive Curtis to desperate action but to build up to a climax that, depending on interpretation, is as devastating as it is peaceful.

Pamela Jahn took part in a round table interview at the London Film Festival in October 2011 where Michael Shannon talked about what drew him to the project, the difference between anxiety and mental illness, and the key to being an imaginative actor.

Q: Can you tell us a little more about what attracted you to the part in Take Shelter?

MS: I worked with Jeff [Nichols] on Shotgun Stories, which was his first movie, and I really think he is unique. I can’t think of any other young director in America today who is as focused as he is and who has as distinctive a vision as he has. He showed me the script and I could relate to the material because I was having similar experiences to Curtis in that it is a story about a young father who is having anxieties about trying to protect his family and, at that point, I was starting a family myself. Obviously it wasn’t to the extent that Curtis has in the movie – I didn’t have any dreams about storms. But anybody who starts a family would have some empathy for what Curtis is going through. Other things were similar as well in that Curtis’s father had just passed away and my father had just passed away. So there was some synchronicity between what Curtis was going through and some experiences I was having in my own life, and that’s what drew me to it.

Do you know whether Nichols wrote the part with you in mind?

No, he absolutely did not have me in mind. Jeff wrote this story regardless of anything. It was a very personal story for him. He was writing about some things he was going through himself. It just happened that we were both having similar experiences. It’s funny because he didn’t intend to do a very topical movie, in the way that there are a lot of other films about people sensing an apocalypse, or the end of the world, that deal with it more directly. For Jeff, the genesis of it was all very personal.

How much research did you do for your role? Did you delve into personality disorder and mental illness?

No. I didn’t think about mental illness at all. To me this isn’t a film about mental illness. I mean mental illness is on the spectrum of possibilities because I think in our culture we’re all very aware of it and we’ve been instructed to be on the lookout for it. But I don’t ultimately think that this is what Curtis is experiencing. I have heard Jeff saying that the whole storyline is not necessarily a red herring because that would be manipulative, but that it is just not what the film is about. I don’t think anxiety is a mental illness. Anxiety is healthy. I think that people who don’t have any anxiety about anything are strange. I also didn’t want to know more about what Curtis was going through than Curtis did, because I think what’s happening to him is a mystery to him as much as to everyone around him. Part of the journey of the film is him trying to figure out what’s happening there, and I simply didn’t want to be ahead of him.

The film becomes even more interesting on second viewing when you have the ending in mind. Where you always very aware of the ending throughout the process of shooting?

I was very aware of the ending. It was actually one of the first things that Jeff thought of when writing the script. It wasn’t something that he tagged on at the end of the process, it was one of the original thoughts that he had for making this film. But personally I think the ending is a bit tricky. I think there is a big shift in tone in the movie, it alternates between a super-realistic, blue-collar, gritty everyday Americana slice of life and a very poetic and lyrical element. I think this works because it’s a film about dreams and the dreams are establishing a duality of consciousness, your waking life and your dream life. And the end of the film, to me, is not necessarily meant to be taken literally, and it’s not necessarily there to say that Curtis was right or Curtis was wrong. This is not the point of it, because the fact of the matter is that the world is in the process of destruction. That’s not open for discussion, at least not in the way I look at it. Who could argue against that? It’s more about how you deal with it. And the important thing about the end is that the family is together. That’s the difference between the beginning and the end of the movie. In the beginning of the film, you’re seeing a man standing in his car park looking up at the sky all by himself, and in the end he is standing there with his family, he is not by himself anymore.

In a weird, twisted way it almost seems like a happy ending.

Yes, I mean, that’s the way Jeff describes it. I can’t debate it in the same way that he can because it’s ultimately his vision. I only have my own interpretation of it, but he always said he sees it as a hopeful ending.

You and Nichols seem to make a very good team. You seem to trust and respect each other very much. Did you have any influence on the development of the film at any point while shooting it, or did you totally trust Nichols in what he was doing and wanted to achieve with the film?

Jeff is very thorough when he writes. When Jeff shows up he knows what he wants to do and you can’t really surprise him with a question because he’s considered every angle. He is very rigorous in his writing style and with himself. So, it wasn’t like he was asking, ‘So Mike, what do you want to do with this here’ or ‘What do you think should happen there?’ He had it all pretty well thought out, and I think the reason we are good together is because I can tell where he is going with something. It’s kind of an unspoken understanding that we have. And I really trust Jeff visually now that I’ve worked with him twice. Each time I see the film I am really impressed with the way it looks. Jeff is actually very old-fashioned, for example, he insists on shooting on film. He shot his first film 35mm anamorphic, his entire budget was just for film stock, so he basically had to get everything else for free.

So there wasn’t much of a rehearsal period before the shoot this time either?

No, because I had just finished working on the first season of Boardwalk Empire on a Friday, and on the Monday I was shooting Take Shelter. We shot just outside of Cleveland, Ohio, and I met Jessica [Chastain] for the first time in my life on the Saturday, so we had one day to hang out and get to know each other and then Monday morning we were shooting. So I was really lucky that it was someone as brilliant as Jessica, because if there had been any trepidation on the part of the woman playing Samantha, if there had been any fear there, I don’t know if we would have been able to pull it off. But Jessica just leaps into things, she’s fearless, so it really made a huge difference.

How would you describe your approach to acting?

It’s very instinctual. I don’t like to talk too much about something before I do it because I think it takes the spontaneity out of it. For me, the most important thing is to make sure that whatever is exciting or interesting about a scene happens in front of the camera and not off camera. The first time I worked with Jeff on Shotgun Stories, Jeff and I showed up and then the cast showed up and Jeff was confiding in me because, at that time, I had the most credits. A lot of the other people where immature and non-professional actors, or not even actors at all. So Jeff said to me, ‘What shall we do, shall we rehearse?’, and I said, ‘Don’t do anything, because probably the most exciting things these people are going to do will be the first time they do it. And the more you are trying to talk about it and make sure everybody understands everything the less likely it is that something spontaneous is going to happen’. So, that’s kind of my approach. I have a very fertile imagination. When I read things, I have a vision that comes to me, that’s just my imagination. It’s very childlike though, it’s not super-sophisticated. Children can do this, you give them the story and they can figure it out for themselves. And I think the struggle is, more than anything, to hold on to this ability and not lose it. Not to get sullied by the business of it all.

Attenberg

Two women stand against a white wall, their tongues intertwined but their bodies stiff as they stand as far apart from each other as possible. It’s perhaps one of the least erotic kisses seen on screen. Twenty-three-year-old Marina (Arian Labed) has never kissed a man before; she lives in a modernist, failed workers’ utopia that still houses a factory but few inhabitants. Living alone with her father, a disillusioned architect who is terminally ill, she sees life through the prism of Sir David Attenborough’s documentaries, the human species as animal; her relationship with her only friend, the much more experienced Bella, is primitive, physical.

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s film is a beautifully observed, often playful, study of one woman’s alienation; Marina, awkward, naïve, contemptuous, slowly learns that she needs more than just her father and Bella. It’s a refreshing and unsentimental film about sex, relationships and death. Aesthetically, the film mixes elements of the nouvelle vague with touches of performance art, plus a terrific soundtrack (Suicide is Marina’s favourite band); there’s also a brilliant scene sung to Françoise Hardy’s ‘Tous les garçons et les filles’. There’s real beauty in the shots of the empty town and factory, and the clean, crisp modernist spaces inhabited by the actors.

Tsangari also produced last year’s Dogtooth (director Yorgos Lanthimos appears in Attenberg as The Engineer) and while Attenberg is a very different work, it’s exciting to see such original filmmaking emerge from their collaborations.

Sarah Cronin met the Austin-based director at the 2010 London Film Festival, where they discussed intimacy, making films in Greece, and science fiction.

SC: What was the inspiration for Marina’s character?

ART: That is always the most difficult question. What did you think?

It seemed very personal to me.

Did you identify with her at all?

I did, quite a lot. I think it was that feeling that you don’t necessarily belong anywhere.

Yes, that’s it. It’s the first movie that I’ve made in Greece. It took me years to figure out if I could make a movie in my own language and if I did, what it would be. It’s very difficult to see myself as a filmmaker in Greece because I was in America for so long, and it’s difficult to write in Greek. So it was about a girl who does not belong in her environment or in society. It’s something that came very naturally to me. And also, the relationship between father and daughter is primordial, especially in Third-World countries – or Second-World, somewhere between First and Third.

I was quite surprised by the discussion of cremation in the film. Is it true that it’s banned in Greece?

It’s not allowed yet because of the Church. I think they are passing a law to allow cremation, but that’s partly because of the lack of real estate. For someone like the father, who held ideals that were examined and failed, his last act of resistance is to be buried the way he wants to be. The film is structured as a series of negotiations between people, and I felt that it was a fair negotiation, the father asking Marina to help him die in a respectable way – and to ask her to become a bit more human, for her to belong in society.

I thought the love scenes with the engineer were incredibly well handled. They really captured all the fear and nervousness, and Marina’s own insecurities. The scenes didn’t seem gratuitous, but integral to her development.

I liked the idea that Marina would just keep talking while exploring this foreign thing. It was quite nice because there was so much camaraderie between us, we are all friends, and it wasn’t just a matter of directing actors. I think that intimacy shone through. We didn’t really rehearse those scenes very much because it would have been too awkward. It also astonishes me – I’ve been teaching for a while – that girls from the generation after me are so into sexuality and have no fear about their bodies – they’re not quite exhibitionists, but almost. Intimacy is something that’s lost on Facebook.

One of the aspects I liked was this great chemistry between Marina and Spiro and the rapid-fire way in which they speak. Was that all scripted?

In terms of the dialogue, very little was not in the script. It was strictly rehearsed in terms of the lines and also their body language. I have an obsession with screwball comedy, Howard Hawks and films like His Girl Friday. I really don’t like sentimentalism, or naturalist melodrama. In this plan that I had, that everyone had to negotiate something with someone, you also need a third person to work as a catalyst. That was very important to me. I’m slowly trying to develop my own language, this relationship between emotion and distance, and how you can negotiate the two without being far out or artistic and detached, and without being all like… chick film. I don’t like it when people say a movie is a great women’s film. Especially in Greece, it’s amazing: if you’re a woman, you don’t make cinema, you make women’s films. There is this idea that women largely make sentimental movies. It’s not that I totally resist that – I like films across the spectrum that are about women, even Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Do you think people will be shocked by the opening scene, as well as Marina’s relationship with her friend Bella? Did you want people to be disturbed by it?

No, I don’t – it’s just a kiss. I think mostly men are shocked by the opening scene. I think it’s even more controversial because it’s not a lesbian scene – it’s not about two women being together, loving each other, or discovering that they’re gay. It’s about one girl teaching another how to do something fundamental. It’s like the relationship between the father and daughter, who are trying to be on the same page and be kind of equal, which is very rare in Greece. She has a very close relationship with her dad, but a very antagonistic relationship with Bella.

You’ve started your own production company in Greece and were involved with producing Dogtooth. Are you trying to inject some life into the Greek film scene?

This is already happening. I’m a part of something that’s been going on for a couple of years. The first film that I produced in Greece was Yorgos’s first feature Kinetta. I love to produce my own stuff because it gives me a sense of freedom and independence, and I also take some kind of perverse pleasure in organising and making budgets. I love collaborating, and we do kind of have a collective. Greek cinema is working out right now, it’s very exciting. Some people say that Dogtooth and Attenberg have some things in common, although I don’t really think so, but there is a kinship between Yorgos and I, we’ve been discussing and working together for a long time.

Both Dogtooth and Attenberg have a very modernist feel to them, with the locations in particular.

I went back to the town where I grew up to shoot. It was a company town, built in the 60s. Lots of young engineers moved there in the 70s and moved their families into this kind of modernist utopia, which was half-French, half-Greek, because the company belonged to a huge French conglomerate. We left, and my sister and I kept going back in the summer, so we had an image of it as this place where sexual awakenings happened, like Marina’s – you know, boy-crazy summers at the disco.

I thought the town was very beautiful in a way. There’s the scene with her father when she says that she finds uniformity very soothing.

It is very beautiful, and I definitely find uniformity soothing. I remember the town as very vibrant, and very happy, full of sport and art. It was such a cultural environment. Going back there with the crew in the winter, it felt like a bit of a ghost town, which suited me very well. It fitted with Spiros’s acknowledgement of the failures of the 20th century. But for all of us it was very strange as a crew, shooting in this very empty, uniform town, with all these white blocks – it was like the lunar, extra-terrestrial version of the town, which I liked. It was devoid of anything traditional, of expected beauty.

There’s a very animalistic quality to Marina and Bella, and the scenes of them performing like animals are interwoven throughout the film. Was that an initial element of the film?

We watched lots of Attenborough clips because it was important to me to develop the characters like animals. Each of my actors had a favourite clip and a favourite animal. It was a memory that they had while they were acting. I’m an avid, passionate admirer of all things Attenborough, I’ve been watching him since I was a little girl. He’s near and detached at the same time, like melodrama, as I call it. It really suits me as an aesthetic. He’s so gracious and has so much tenderness towards nature and his subjects. It’s a big example to me, in how to approach characters in cinema.

Do you think you’ll make a film in Austin?

I would like to. My writing partner, Matt Johnson, who is also my editor, and I have just finished writing two science fiction scripts. It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

What attracts you to science fiction?

I really like J.G. Ballard. I like stuff that’s like a projected present, or the future of the past, and it has elements of Western, like going to this frontier and discovering yourself. I also really want to make a science fiction movie in Europe. I was recently in Reykjavik – it felt like a combination of a Greek island, Iceland and the Isle of Man. There were all these colours, all this grass, and then this rocky landscape. I loved Duncan Jones’s Moon. I don’t know why it’s so difficult to make genre movies in Europe – it’s like it has to be either art-house or social realism.

Interview by Sarah Cronin

Our Day Will Come

Having started making short films with the collective Kourtrajmé when he was only a teenager, French director Romain Gavras is best known for his controversial videos for electro band Justice and M.I.A.’s ‘Born Free’. The latter describes a society that violently hounds red heads, and Gavras’s first feature film revolves around a similar idea, focusing on two men with red hair who feel persecuted: one, Rémy, a mixed up teenager, the other, Patrick, a depressed and mischievous psychiatrist played by Vincent Cassel.

Romain Gavras talked to Virginie Sélavy at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June 2011 about being seen as a provocateur, finding round cars depressing and the freedom of road movies.

VS: Why did you return to the idea of the ‘Born Free’ video for your first feature film?

I actually shot the M.I.A. video after making the film, although the video was released first. The idea was that the video was set 30 years after the film, as if they’d succeeded in creating an army of red heads. And I was frustrated that I couldn’t have lots of red heads in my film, so I put tons in the video!

The video was very controversial. Were you surprised?

Yes and no. I was surprised it was that controversial. M.I.A. is a big artist in the United States and ‘Born Free’ was her comeback title. She said, ‘go ahead, ruin my career’. She was the one who wanted something strong.

Why red heads?

When we started writing the script they were not red heads. My co-writer [Karim Boukercha] and I started thinking we could maybe make them albinos to make them more striking, but that was too complicated. I liked the idea of red heads because they’re a visible minority, but there is no religious or cultural community. Later we decided that they wouldn’t really be red heads to avoid it being too farcical. I liked the fact that they think they belong to a community that doesn’t exist, that it’s really something that is in their minds.

The film alludes to divisions between various social and ethnic groups, when Patrick insults Jews, Arabs and peasants, in particular. It seems to echo what is happening in France. Is that fair to say?

Yes, because when I was growing up everyone mixed together, but now there is a sort of withdrawal into communities, and when you withdraw into your community you are in a de facto situation of confrontation with other communities. And that can lead to something completely absurd and dangerous. That said, the film is not a statement, just elements that we evoke and touch on. It’s also about the confusion of the characters. Their way of thinking is confused, their fight is confused, and that’s because we live in a period of confusion.

There are some explicit commentaries on France, for instance when Vincent Cassel describes a French car: ‘It’s just like the country, round, banal, boring.’

It’s the character speaking, I don’t control my characters. They say what they want!

You don’t agree?

Yes, I agree with the line on cars. I hate round cars, they’re rubbish, ugly – they’re just like Geox shoes, comfort over style. I can’t stand it. I don’t even drive, so in fact I don’t really care, but visually, when I set my camera down and there’s a Twingo in the field, it just depresses me.

The film centres on the relationship between Patrick and Rémy, but there is something absurd in the fact that they get together because they have red hair and feel that the rest of the world is against them.

Yes, the idea was to have a story that was a bit silly but treated very seriously, like a Greek drama. It’s about two blokes who are completely lost and who go on this impossible quest. It’s a relationship that goes nowhere, a quest that goes nowhere, a film that goes nowhere.

How important is the sexual element in their relationship?

It’s an identity quest, especially for Rémy. He wonders who he is, whether he’s a victim or an aggressor, and it’s also about sexuality. And as the character of Vincent Cassel can see that Rémy is confused, he teases and pushes him to annoy him, and to make him doubt himself until the moment when Rémy confronts what he is.

Do you see Patrick as a bit of an agent provocateur?

Yes, but it’s not always his fault. He’s not a Machiavelli; he provokes situations because he’s bored and disgusted with everything, and in the end he’s disgusted with himself after he goes too far in the Jacuzzi scene. He manipulates people, but not for a specific purpose – more to make things happen and to feel alive.

They are rebels against a society that they perceive as repressive, but there is also a pathetic side to them. Would you agree?

Yes, absolutely. Rémy is a rebel in the way many young people are, i.e. he has all the reasons in the world to rebel, but he doesn’t know what to direct his violence against.

The scene in which he shaves his hair off is very powerful. What was the idea behind it?

It’s a sort of visual suicide, a bit like when Britney Spears shaved her head. And he does it for real.

Was it inspired by Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver?

Not specifically, but of course I am influenced by a lot of films, Buñuel, Blier, Pialat.

The film starts with a fairly realistic depiction of a northern town, and then surreal and absurd elements are introduced into the story. Was the mixing of these different styles important to you?

Yes. As they’re on an impossible quest, the idea was to start almost like a Bruno Dumont film in the north and have something really anchored in realism, and little by little we enter their minds and their delusions, we plunge into their madness with them. That’s why everything around them becomes a little strange.

The desolate, post-industrial landscapes of the north of France fit the story perfectly. Is that why you chose to set the film there?

I’d shot in Lens and I have friends in Lille, so I know the north quite well. I really like this region because you could be in England, or Belgium, or Germany. The area has a universal aspect. And there are amazing landscapes that reflect the state of mind of the two characters, two blokes who get worked up in a completely empty place, a quasi-post-apocalyptic décor.

The film becomes a sort of road movie in the second part. Is that a genre you’re interested in?

Yes, I’m interested in the freedom it gives you. I didn’t want to make a first film with a tight plot where you discover the identity of the killer at the end, with guns and money in suitcases. I wanted to have something completely free, where things can happen that you don’t need to set up and with the freedom of tone and movement that road movies allow.

Many reviews of Our Day Will Come have insisted on the provocative aspect of the film and seem to take what Patrick says as your own words. Were you trying to provoke with your film?

No. My videos are a lot more provocative because that’s their aim. But the film is different, much gentler. There is a character who is a provocateur in the film, but that doesn’t make me one. It’s really in France that the debate has been about whether the film is gratuitous provocation. I think it’s because of the videos I made, so people have associated me with the character of Patrick. OK, I don’t like round cars, but I don’t agree with everything he says! I see the film as quite gentle and funny. It’s been presented as a drama but it’s more of a black comedy.

Everything you do seems to attract a degree of controversy. That was also the case with A Cross the Universe, the film you made about Justice’s American tour. How do you feel about that?

Controversy is a question of point of view. That was entertainment, there’s nothing controversial about it. I find things shocking that don’t shock people. Rob Marshall’s films, such as Nine, for instance, make me want to puke, they make me mad. Bad taste shocks me. To take 8 ½ and turn it into a big vulgar turd, that shocks and revolts me.

Vincent Cassel produced Our Day Will Come, as well as acting in it. How did he get involved?

I’ve known him for a long time. He helped us when we started, and played in our short films.

In Kourtrajmé ?

Yes. We created Kourtrajmé with Kim [Chapiron], and Vincent was a bit like a godfather to us. He said that if I wanted to make a feature film, he’d produce it. He said, ‘if you want to make the film that you want, there won’t be much money. If you’re happy to compromise, there’ll be more’. We chose the former and I made the film I wanted to make.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Poetry

Lee Chang-dong is a Korean novelist, screenwriter, filmmaker and even a former Minister of Culture and Tourism. Poetry, his fifth film, is about an ageing woman who must cope with the distress of discovering that her grandson is implicated in a horrific crime, and its fallout.

Sarah Cronin interviewed Lee Chang-dong by email and asked him about the death of poetry, the beauty of small things and the importance of ‘seeing well’.

SC: Where did your inspiration for the story come from? Was it the rape and suicide of the young girl, or the character of this older woman facing dementia?

LCD:It started with a sexual assault case that had actually happened in a small town in South Korea, which was committed by a group of juveniles. But the real case was a bit different from the film; the girl, the victim, didn’t commit suicide. However, this case had penetrated into my mind and did not leave. And although I wanted to talk about this issue through my film, I was not sure about the means. Of course, there would be easy ways that I can think of. For instance, have the victim fight for justice with difficulty, or have a journalist or a police detective, or a third person striving to search for the hidden truth, etc. However, I didn’t want to adopt those conventional ways. This case eventually became the story for my film when I came across the main character, a woman in her 60s wishing to write a poem for the first time in her life, who faces Alzheimer’s disease. To sum up, this story was finally born from a combination of different elements: the sexual assault case, the suicide of a girl, and the lady in her 60s writing a poem.

Why did you choose to build the film around the central theme of poetry?

While I was trying to figure out a way to deal with this sexual assault case in a film, I was travelling in Japan when I happened to watch a TV programme intended for the sleepless tourists in my hotel room one night. Watching the typical landscape visuals with meditation music-type sounds of peaceful rivers, flying birds, fishermen throwing their nets, it suddenly occurred to me that the title of the film dealing with this cruel case should be Poetry. The film character and plot came to my mind at the same time, along with the title. All these things didn’t come through logical thinking but instinctively and intuitively. But perhaps my old questions and thoughts suddenly found their small resolution at that moment. Questions of what? Questions like, why do I write novels and make films; and to what extent my writings or films can affect the world. Art is a pursuit for beauty and there is the question of how it is related to the filth and vice of the world. The question is similar to what Theodor Adorno had asked: is it possible to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz? The character Mija in the film asks those questions instead of me. She may be old, but she is naive enough to ask them. Like all beginners are naive.

One of the poets that Mija meets says that ‘Poetry deserves to die’ – is there some truth in that? And why do you think film and poetry are dying?

People nowadays do not read or write poetry. Do you see any young people who write poems around you? Students learn poetry as if they are learning archaic words. People would ask back, ‘Can you make a living by writing poetry?’ They’re right. Poetry doesn’t guarantee anything. It doesn’t guarantee any pleasure or desire. It has no value economically. Maybe it exists only in a form of advertisement copy. Poetry is dying. If poetry is an act of pursuing hidden beauty or truth, an act of questioning our lives, it can also be another form of art, it can be cinema. In this regard, cinema is also dying. While some films are massively consumed as ever, other films, films that I’d like to create, films I’d like to see, are becoming more difficult to find. Films that make people observe the world with different eyes, to feel invisible beauty and to question life. Do those films still exist? Do you wish for those films to exist? These are the questions that I want to ask.

What appealed to you the most about Mija’s character, and also Yun Jung-hee? Mija is this very feminine older woman, who also seems very enigmatic. You never explain anything about why her daughter left, or what happened to her husband.

When I first thought of the character Mija I wrote her down as ‘Wearing a hat and a fancy scarf, she looks like a girl going on a picnic’. The description ‘like a girl’ was important in showing her character. She may be an old lady, but she is like a little girl inside. She is innocent and naive, like a child who wonders about everything that the child sees for the first time. A beauty that goes against time, like a dried flower. An unrealistic character who still feels and talks like an immature girl, despite her age. Which are also the characteristics of the actress Yun Jung-hee. I named the character Mija because I couldn’t think of any alternatives. Though the name Mija is old-fashioned and it is not common nowadays, it has the meaning of ‘beauty’ in it. Anyway, Yun Jung-hee’s real name turned out to be Mija. I didn’t think it was coincidence, but fate. Mija’s past life might not have been easy. Maybe she has been abandoned by a man. Maybe her daughter was following in her footsteps. However, I didn’t want to describe their backgrounds directly to the audience. Rather I wanted the audience to feel and understand them through their present.

The poetry teacher stresses that the ‘important thing in life is seeing’ and ‘to see well’. Do you feel the same as a filmmaker – that it’s your duty to see what’s around you, and reveal it on film?

That comment made by the poetry teacher represents my thoughts to some extent. ‘To see well’ is a fundamental aspect in writing poetry or making films. Films show the world on behalf of the audience’s eyes. However, the films that we make, what kind of eyes are they in showing the world to the audience? Some films make us see the world differently, while some make us see only what we want to see. And some films do not let us see anything.

Do you believe that it’s important to always find beauty in small things – the apricot that’s fallen to the ground, for example? Is that something you also try to express in your films?

To discover hidden beauty and meaning in small and trivial things is the fundamental element, not only for film, but also for all art genres. The problem is, beauty doesn’t exist per se. Like the light and shadow, whether it’s visible or not, beauty co-exists with pain, filth, and ugliness. Apricots need to fall down to earth to create a new life. Therefore, art is an irony as itself. As so are our lives.

Your films often feature characters who are disabled – in this case it’s a man who’s had a stroke. Why is his relationship with Mija central to the film?

They are mostly characters with communication barriers, rather than being physically disabled. I always dream of communicating with audiences through my films. So, those characters in my films, in a way, represent the part of me that is not communicated, that longs to communicate. However, the old man character in the film having a fit of apoplexy represents disabled masculinity. That is, the macho man’s sexual desire, which makes him beg to ‘be a man’ for one last time after becoming ill and helpless, despite the money and power that he achieved in the past. And when Mija accepts that desire, she defiles her own body like the dead girl.

It’s very disturbing that the fathers care so little about the gang rape and death of the girl. Is this attitude – pay off the mother, the school, newspapers – common in Korea? Are you trying to make a wider comment on corruption?

I admit that parents in South Korea tend to be overprotective of their children. However, I believe that all societies have similar attitudes to sexual violence, although there are variations. People, especially men, think revealing the problem never helps anyone, even the victims. That is why they do not seem to feel guilty in covering up the problem.

Mija’s poem, ‘Agnes’s Song’, turns out to be a beautiful, poetic suicide note, written from the young girl’s point of view. When you started the script, did you already know that was the form the poem would take? It’s an incredible moment in the film, when the young girl’s voice takes over the narration.

Agnes is the Christian name of the dead girl. Mija is eventually able to write a poem after she accepted the pain of Agnes as her own, the life of the girl as her own. Therefore, the one poem that Mija leaves in the world is the one that she wrote on behalf of the girl. Mija speaks out with the voice that the girl would have wanted to leave behind. The two become one through the poem. When Mija’s voice changes into Hee-jin’s, the audience can feel that the destinies of Mija and the girl are overlapping, and that the two characters are united as one.

Why did you choose to close the film with a shot of Agnes turning to look at the camera, rather than a scene with Mija, or Wook? It’s a very powerful, but also very open-ended conclusion.

I wanted the audience to face her directly at the end of the film. I wanted people to remember her faintly smiling face and expression directly looking into the camera, and to accept her emotions along with Mija’s poem. Mija has gone after she has finished writing the poem. I wanted to make people feel Mija’s absence while listening to her poem. Where did she go? I left the answer up to the audience. I pictured the film to have much space, as poems do. Blanks that the audiences could fill in. In that sense it can be seen as an ‘open’ film. The conclusion will be in the audience’s mind.

Interview by Sarah Cronin