Still from The Ear (DVD available from Second Run)

All Power to the Imagination: 1968 and its Legacies

May 2- June 10

Various London venues

Programme

In 1965 and 1967, Czechoslovakia won its first Hollywood Oscars – for A Shop on the High Street (Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos) and Closely Observed Trains (Jiří Menzel, 1966). In the same period, Miloš Forman’s A Blonde in Love (1965) and The Firemen’s Ball (1967) were also short-listed, and at Cannes in 1968 – before Godard and Truffaut closed the Festival – three Czech films were in competition. It was a golden era for Czech and Slovak cinema and, for a time, names such as Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, and Věra Chytilová were up there among the leading art-house directors.

This change in the public face of one of the Eastern bloc’s most hard-line regimes was not deceptive. In 1968, the so-called ‘reform Communists’ took over and a new leader of the Communist Party was elected in the person of Alexander Dubček. ‘Socialism with a human face’ was the journalist’s description, yet the actual and proposed reforms went much wider – the rehabilitation of political prisoners, the curtailment of the powers of the secret police, the abolition of censorship, freedom of the press, the reintroduction of market mechanisms, the permitting of alternative political parties, the establishment of workers’ councils among them. In fact, to quote Dubček, ‘the widest possible democratisation of the whole socio-political system’. Without actually abdicating the ‘leading role of the Communist Party’, there was a genuine sense that Communism had taken the moral high ground – that the circle could be squared and that Communism and democracy could be combined. The ‘mistakes’ of the 1950s could be left behind, change was possible, and the dreams of a generation could be achieved.

In retrospect, particularly in the light of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, it seems inconceivable that anyone thought this would be allowed. The reforms did, after all, represent a threat to the whole system of bureaucratic rule established in the Eastern bloc. The West, since it had participated in the division of Europe at the Yalta Conference in 1945, would only shed crocodile tears if the experiment went wrong. Had the reformers succeeded, they really would have demonstrated that there were political alternatives to the fossilised models of East and West. Yet, when the Warsaw Pact armies invaded on August 21, it came as a profound shock and surprise. People defended the reforms, tried to explain the real situation to their perplexed invaders, and the Communist Party held its secret congress. But the government was kidnapped, taken to Moscow, and forced to sign an agreement legalising the occupation.

Over the next year, the reformers were systematically removed from office and a government amenable to Moscow’s demands was instituted. According to one source, the Communist Party was purged of 70,000 members and many more resigned or were ‘removed’. Many, particularly intellectuals, emigrated – up to 80,000 in the autumn of 1968. Major filmmakers associated with the cinematic New Wave such as Forman, Ján Kadár, and Ivan Passer, ended up in the USA, where they continued their careers.

It is often argued that the Czech ‘New Wave’, which attracted so much attention in the 1960s, was essentially a non-political movement, that it only produced art films and comedies for a middle-class international audience. But this was far from the truth. Forman’s films such as A Blonde in Love and The Firemen’s Ball had put a reality on screen that was far from the sanitised and idealised world promoted by Socialist Realism. Also, during 1968, more directly political films had begun to appear, among them Vojtěch Jasný’s All My Good Countrymen and Jaromil Jireš’s The Joke. Jasný’s film, released in July, had first been written in 1956 but was only passed for production in 1967.

The film focuses on the experiences undergone in a single Moravian village in the years 1945-57, together with an epilogue set in 1968. While it bluntly exposes the horrors and failures of agricultural collectivisation, its originality lies in the way in which it concentrates on a group of seven friends, whose lives and relationships become fragmented. The film is also a lyrical poem that asserts ‘the eternal course of Life and nature’ with some remarkable cinematography by Jaroslav Kučera (perhaps most famous for his work on Věra Chytilová’s more avant-garde Daisies). At the end of the film, a well-meaning Communist returns to the village and, with reference to the Prague Spring, indicates that everything is now changing.

All of these films were, of course, part of an approved programme of production which continued on course both during and after the invasion. Curiously enough, The Joke was shooting its celebratory scenes about the arrival of Communism during the invasion itself. Based on the novel by Milan Kundera, which had been published the previous year, it is a tale of revenge in which past and present are intercut in an ongoing critical commentary. Its hero, Ludvík, once wrote ill-advised comments on a postcard to his militant girlfriend in the 1950s as a joke – ‘A healthy spirit reeks of idiocy. Long Live Trotsky!’ The result is two years forced labour, three in the army, and one in military prison. On his release, he determines to revenge himself on his former friend, Pavel, who had been instrumental in his condemnation. However, his plans to seduce Pavel’s wife are misplaced, since Pavel has now abandoned her and has also allied himself with the cause of reform. But this seems to be no more than a superficial change and, by the time of the film’s release in February 1969, the failure of the reform dream was apparent.

Other films shot during the invasion included Juraj Jakubisko’s The Deserter and the Nomads, a three-part film focusing on the First and Second World Wars, and ending with a post-nuclear allegory. During filming, the Soviet tanks rolled into shot. With Soviet tanks in the next street, Karel Kachyňa was also shooting his film The Ear, a terrifying tale of totalitarian mentality set in the 1950s. Kachyňa’s film tells the story of a deputy minister and his wife who return home to discover that their house has been visited by the secret police in their absence. Shot very much in a film noir style, its journey into the atmosphere and state of mind of an era evokes a world of paranoia and fear. The world of Kafka has come to life, with inexplicable fates visited even on those at the centre of the system.

What the year 1969 saw, rather perversely, was the completion of the production programme planned during the Prague Spring. When the cinema should have died, it flowered. Among the films produced between autumn 1968 and the end of 1969 were: Adelheid (František Vláčil), Birds, Orphans and Fools (Jakubisko), A Case for the Young Hangman ( Pavel Juráček), Witchhammer (Otakar Vávra), The Ear, Skylarks on a String (Menzel), Adrift (Ján Kadár), 322 (Dušan Hanák), The Fruit of Paradise (Chytilová), Seventh Day, Eighth Night (Evald Schorm), and Funeral Rites (Zdenek Sirový). Paradoxically, film achievement was both critically and aesthetically at the same level – perhaps higher – than in previous years.

The real repression of cinema began in late 1970 and well over 100 feature films from the previous decade were banned during the next five years. Four of them – All My Good Countrymen, The Firemen’s Ball, together with Jan Němec’s allegorical tale of totalitarian power, The Party and the Guests (1966), and Evald Schorm’s comedy End of a Priest (1968), in which a fake priest engages in ideological discussions with the local Communist mayor – were to be banned ‘for ever’. Others were stopped in mid-production, and a further group of completed films could not be released.

The dead hand of ‘normalisation’ descended on the country for the next 20 years. As the political scientist Milan Šimečka put it, it was a period in which the Communist Party was to become what it had been in the past – ‘united only by obedience and a readiness to fulfil its role as a trustworthy receiver of instructions and directives’. It was to become ‘an age of immobility’.

Given the political changes and new economic realities, relatively few films from this late flowering reached international markets at the time and some – Kachyňa’s The Ear, Menzel’s Skylarks on a String, a stunning comedy adapted from Bohumil Hrabal, and Sirový’s Funeral Rites, an atmospheric journey into the corruption of the 1950s – only made their international debuts in 1990. Thus, Skylarks on a String had the distinction of winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival 20 years after its completion.

But filmmakers didn’t just follow the production programme of 1968, they also filmed the invasion itself. Much of the footage reaching Western media was smuggled out by Jan Němec and finally formed part of his film Oratorio for Prague (1968) – and was also used in Philip Kaufman’s later adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1987). Another powerful assemblage was Evald Schorm’s silent film Confusion (1968, released 1990), put together in association with Jan Švankmajer’s current producer, Jaromír Kallista.

One of the most interesting films of the time was The Uninvited Guest (1969), a student graduation film made by Vlastimil Venclík. His original story, written two years earlier, was about a couple who receive an uninvited guest – a great hulking man – who decides to stay with them permanently. After originally planning to murder him, they decide to put up with his presence. In the meantime, they discover that all their neighbours have similar guests. Venclík, in this case, does not deny that he intended it as an allegory on the invasion and on the country’s ‘accommodation’. The film was confiscated by state security, and Venclík was expelled and charged with sedition. He finally graduated in 1990 when his film could at last be shown.

The extensive celebration of 1968 – All Power to the Imagination: 1968 and its Legacies – provides a rare opportunity to see some of these works. The season at the Barbican ‘Censorship as a Creative Force’ offers screenings of Skylarks on a String and Funeral Rites (both April 30) while, on May 6, at the Ciné Lumière there will be a screening of Confusion and a selection of contemporary newsreel coverage of the invasion. The evening will be completed by a revival of Leslie Woodhead’s seminal British documentary drama Invasion (1980), which he will introduce.

Woodhead, who headed a special unit at Granada Television, specialised in using documentary drama to explore contemporary subjects inaccessible to conventional reporting (Three Days in Szczecin [1976] among others). Invasion is based on the reminiscences of Zdeněk Mlynář (Night Frost in Prague, London, Hurst, 1980), a lawyer who played an important role in the drafting of the Dubček government’s reform programme. With performances by Julian Glover as Dubček and Ray McAnally as Josef Smrkovský (President of the National Assembly), it’s a remarkable portrait of what went on behind closed doors as a nation’s government was held to ransom, and a penetrating insight into the ways in which Brezhnev and his government viewed the activities and traditions of the smaller countries that fell under its control.

Peter Hames

Peter Hames is the author of The Czechoslovak New Wave, published by Wallflower Press. We have a copy of the book together with a DVD of The Party and the Guests to give away in our May competition. To enter, just spin the Film Roulette!

Still from P2, screening at Cine-Excess on May 1

Cine Excess Cinema

1-3 May 2008

Venue: ICA (London)

Programme

P2 is released nationwide on May 2

Distributor: Tartan Films

Director: Frank Khalfoun

Writers: Frank Khalfoun, Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur

Cast: Rachel Nichols, Wes Bentley, Philip Akin

USA 2007

98 mins

Launched last year as part of Sci-Fi London, the Cine-Excess festival was so successful that it returns this year as an independent festival hosted by the ICA (London) from May 1-3. Over three days, this cult extravaganza offers academic papers alongside film screenings and talks by leading genre filmmakers and critics. The guest of honour this year is Roger Corman, who will be presented with a lifetime achievement award. We talked to Xavier Mendik, director of the Cult Film Archive at Brunel University, author of a number of books on cult cinema and organiser of Cine-Excess.

Virginie Sélavy: You aim to bring together the academic world with the world of cult film fandom. How does that work?

Xavier Mendik: It might surprise you to know that academics have been really interested in cult movies for quite a while now. There’s been a lot of activity for the last ten years around genre filmmaking, around cult auteurs and particularly cult fans. So really what we’ve done is harness the interest that’s been there for ten years within a film festival format.

VS: What are the advantages of having a mixed festival?

XM: All the directors I’ve interviewed have been really interested in academic interpretations of their work. Someone like David Cronenberg, who I interviewed a few years back, really gave me a run for my money by saying things like, ‘well, actually, your interpretation of Freud is rather narrow there’, and I thought, wow, these people really do know the other side of the coin. In a way, all we’re doing is bringing to life those connections that remain hidden and we’ve found that people want to make those connections.

VS: Can you give us an idea of the kind of topics that will be discussed in the conference part of the festival?

XM: We’ve got 15 parallel strands that deal with everything from famous cult auteurs to Italian trash cinema, to global cult film traditions, particularly Third World traditions, to debates on the role of the cult performer and a panel session on cult soundtrack. We’ve also got a number of panel sessions around dangerous cult genres, one looking at the erotic image, one looking at grindhouse traditions, and later Stateside cult phenomena. What we’re doing is to indicate that cult these days is global, and we’re trying to capture the very best of the global market and hopefully bring it to an interested audience.

VS: Are the conferences open to all or are they only for the academic participants?

XM: It’s all about breaking down boundaries, so what I see is that ordinary cinema-goers will be as interested in the debates as they are in the UK premieres.

VS: You’ve also got a special panel discussion on Brit horror, chaired by Kim Newman. Is this part of an effort to focus on home-grown cult cinema?

XM: One of the things that we’re often guilty of is looking too far overseas when in fact there’s a wealth of talent outside the mainstream here in the UK. My background is in Italian horror, I did all my research on Dario Argento years ago, and that was probably more dangerous than doing Cine-Excess because in those days it was seen as really going out on a limb to be talking about continental cult cinema. In the last two-three years we’ve seen a mini-explosion in Brit cinema and Brit horror in particular, and we’re really interested in that.

VS: What do you think of the state of British horror at the moment?

XM: I think it’s really interesting right now. Cult never occurs in a vacuum, it’s always a social barometer of things that are happening in wider society. That’s why American cult cinema is so interesting, it always reflects tensions and fears. From Shaun of the Dead onwards, I think it’s a reaction to the fact that there’s something quite stale and moribund and not very exciting in wider British society right now. And I think the cult film generation, the new Brit horror directors that are coming through, are really shaking that up in interesting ways.

VS: To go back to something you said earlier, it’s interesting that you think that things have changed in the academic world since you did your research on Dario Argento. When did things start to change and why?

XM: What’s happened is a growing critical acceptance that creativity does in fact lie beyond the mainstream, that so-called underground or cult areas of activities are populated by fascinating, possibly off the wall, but very creative individuals. And because they’re not constrained by the mainstream, their productions can be far more creative and challenging and often far more political. I think the way to think about cult movies is the pulp as political, that’s what we often say and that’s still the case.

I think in the case of Dario Argento, his growth as a cult figure coincided with the very notorious period of the video nasties in the early 80s, which meant that you had to trawl halfway around the country and see some kind of dodgy market dealer called Brian to get hold of these movies on third-generation copies. And what you found when you watched them is that despite their so-called horrific labels, they’re actually quite artistic. Argento is interesting for a number of reasons, because he breaks down the barriers between commercial film production and avant-garde. You’re never quite sure if these are art-house movies or straight-to-video horror films. But they’re also interesting in terms of gender representation. We’re still very much used to the whole idea of woman as victim within cult horror and what you find is that Argento’s films are populated by monstrously aggressive women. I have to say, he’s lost a bit of ground in recent years so the attention has moved elsewhere, but I’m still proud to say that I did the first MA research on Dario Argento.

VS: What films will you be showing this year?

XM:We have the new cat-and-mouse thriller P2, which is made by the creative team that brought us Switchblade Romance and The Hills Have Eyes. Alexandre Aja, the director of those movies, is the producer here, and Frank Khalfoun, who was the actor in Switchblade Romance, is directing for the first time. It’s a really fascinating movie about a female yuppie trapped in a high-rise building block on Christmas Eve by a deranged mechanic. After so many years watching cult movies, commissioning them for festivals, it’s very rare for a movie to make me jump out of my seat and this one did, so I had to have it. What I find fascinating these days about those kinds of movie-makers is the fact that you’re finding them so readily imported into Hollywood, so there’s an awareness that this European filmmaking talent is really reviving the American film industry.

VS: But they’re influenced by American filmmaking themselves; Alexandre Aja is very much influenced by Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven and 70s and 80s American horror.

XM: Absolutely. Robin Wood wrote a fascinating book many years ago; academic texts tend to date very quickly but this book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan is as current now as it was in the early 80s. It’s about the fact that horror films in particular always reflect wider social crises and tensions, particularly in America. So in the 70s, in the years of Vietnam, the Watergate, race riots and political corruption, we had a whole slew of very pessimistic and nihilistic horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead. And lo and behold, in the years of 9/11 those are exactly the films that are being remade by a new generation of filmmakers like Alexandre Aja.

VS: It’s interesting also that Aja is a French director because there’s no real horror tradition, at least not that type of horror, in France.

XM: It’s interesting because in France there was always an exploitation tradition. France had the kind of cachet to be able to market exploitation as art-house, particularly in the 60s and 70s where in other regions nudity was taboo. So it’s always smuggled cult under the wire and I think Alexandre is just making that explicit. It’s rare to say that a remake is better but much as I like Wes Craven I have to say that the remake of The Hills Have Eyes is absolutely top. So we’re delighted to have P2. What we’re trying to do with Cine-Excess is to always try and be on the tip of current trends so alongside P2 we’ve got a new American backwoods splatter movie called Timber Falls, by Tony Giglio. That comes out nationwide on May 23. What I liked about that movie is that it’s doing interesting things with the American survivalist genre and highlighting the craze around religious fundamentalism. There’s a lot of swipes at the American right in the movie and the whole politics-into-religion vibe that’s so current with the Bush administration. I am also proud to promote Brit horror and we have two exclusive Brit screenings. We’ve got the new sex and horror thriller Mind Flesh by Robert Pratten, his second movie. His first movie London Voodoo got rave reviews. I remember him saying to me last year he didn’t think the Cine-Excess audience would like London Voodoo because it’s more of a mood piece; what I would say is that they will love Mind Flesh, because it’s extremely gory, extremely explicit, but as with Robert Pratten’s other work, it’s extremely intelligent. It’s almost like a Freudian gore movie. We’re also delighted to have a movie by Julian Richards, who’s another intelligent Brit horror director. This is his new movie, Summer Scars, which is apparently based on an incident in Julian’s teenage past about a scary guy who wanders into a teenage group’s daily life and disrupts it with fairly traumatic consequences. We’ve also tied in to the Curzon Soho to bring cinema-goers an evening of Roger Corman movies – we’ll be screening The Intruder and Masque of the Red Death.

VS:How do you select the films? You’ve just mentioned gore in relation to Mind Flesh, any other criteria?

XM:I would say gore isn’t a key thing here, I think these movies have to be unnerving and I’m always particularly interested in the fact that cult movies tend to be political movies. I think cult wouldn’t work in a period of social stability. 80s horror is nowhere near as good as 70s horror, because what tends to happen is when society feels stable and comfortable the horror tends to be very joky and unthreatening, which is why Freddy part 8 is nowhere near the movies Alexandre Aja was influenced by. Right now we’re in such a profound period of instability both in the UK and the US, it’s producing great movies. So gore is not a key criterion, the ability to be shocking and socially critiquing is more of interest to me than the actual splatter quota.

VS: I thought it was interesting that you described the films on the programme as ‘new cult movies’. Can you really have a ‘new cult movie’? Isn’t a ‘cult movie’ a phenomenon that happens with time, something that grows organically from the spontaneous response of the audience?

XM: Very good point. There’s lots of different ways of defining ‘cult’. There are movies that are ‘cult’ by virtue of the genre, and content that they deal with, and by that virtue I think those are cult movies – and also because I feel you’ve put me on the spot so I’ve got to wriggle like an eel out of that difficult position now (laughs). I do agree with what you say, many cult movies are cult by evolution and what’s very interesting is how cult audiences make them cult movies. To give you one example, Paul Verhoeven’s lap-dancing spectacular Showgirls was roundly condemned when it was released a couple of years ago, but the movie was picked up by gay audiences on the Midnight Movies circuit who read it as a critique of male sexuality and then it got its cult status. So it’s part genre and part content, but there is an evolutionary aspect. Maybe what will happen is that these movies will start out as cult movies but after Cine-Excess they’ll go mainstream.

VS: This year you have Roger Corman as your guest of honour.

XM: Yeah, we’ve invited him to receive a lifetime Cine-Excess achievement award in recognition of the fact that this is one of the true creators of American cinema. He directed some of the most memorable cult movies of post-war America, from The Intruder, a cutting-edge race drama with a pre-Star Trek William Shatner to all those great Gothic horror movies with Vincent Price like Masque of the Red Death, to ground-breaking biker movies like Wild Angels. He’s really been a profoundly innovative film director. But that’s only half the story; he’s also the man who in many respects made the new Hollywood, he broke new talent like Robert de Niro, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, as well as directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. So we’re really celebrating a man of many unique talents and we’re delighted that he’s coming over to accept his award on Friday 2 May and giving an onstage interview on Saturday 3.

Fashion in Film Festival

10 - 31 May 2008

Programme

While the BFI’s Pop Goes the Revolution season was a slightly fluffy affair offering little insight into French cinema and May 68, this month sees the Southbank cinema host part of the Fashion in Film Festival, which conversely offers an impressively rich and well thought out programme. Funnily enough, Pop Goes the Revolution included a screening of Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, an absurdist, op-art inspired satire of the fashion world that would have been more at home at FFF – and was indeed screened at its first edition in May 2006. For this second outing, the festival explores the relationship between cinema, fashion, crime and violence through an imaginative selection that spans over ten countries, nine decades and a variety of genres from film noir to horror. In addition, seriously knowledgeable speakers will be discussing topics ranging from ‘the semiotics of stained clothing’ to the significance of the femme fatale’s mink coat in 1940s cinema.

The festival includes a number of silent gems, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927); seen by Hitchcock as his first proper film, it is a murder thriller inspired by Jack the Ripper, starring Ivor Novello in the role of a sinister stranger attracted to a blonde fashion model. Also of note is The Rat (1925), another British silent featuring Ivor Novello; when his cocky Parisian bad boy meets Isabel Jeans’s glamorous Zelie de Chaumet, sparks fly and the stage is set for a roaring melodrama.

Elsewhere, the programme draws from the bountiful supply of macabre stylishness provided by giallo cinema, including Mario Bava’s 1964 Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l’assassino), a gorgeously photographed baroque shocker set in a fashion house, and Dario Argento’s 1970 The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo), an Ennio Morricone-scored thriller about a serial killer clad in black PVC. Also from Italy is the rarely screened The Tenth Victim (La decima vittima, 1965), a futuristic, pop-art extravaganza starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress as the contestants in a deadly game, which somehow manages to fit in a fashion display of modernist geometric outfits.

Other films of interest include Follow Me Quietly (1949), an intriguing Richard Fleischer noir in which a detective uses a faceless dummy to reconstruct the crimes of an elusive serial killer. Vicente Aranda’s Fata Morgana (1965) is a formally daring thriller about yet another endangered model set in a dystopian future. Among the more recent films, Cindy Sherman’s first feature, Office Killer (1997), is a caricature of the psycho-killer genre, with a meek office worker transformed into a homicidal vamp. In The Red Shoes, Korean director Kim Youn-gyun delivers a gory update of the Andersen fairy tale that inspired the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classic. Among the documentaries, Zoot Suit Riots (2001) stands out, exploring the demonisation of the Mexican baggy-clothed youth in 1940s America.

In addition to the extensive film schedule, the BFI Southbank will play host to a weekend of 20s-style decadence and frivolity around the theme ‘Dressed to Kill’, including a jazz brunch, workshops, a Radio Days vintage stall, absinthe cocktails and a flapper evening entitled ‘The White Coffin Club’ (after the club featured in The Rat) hosted by Johnny Vercoutre (Time for Tea / Modern Times) and David Piper (Rakehalls).

Virginie Sélavy

Format: DVD

Release date: 31 March 2008

Distributor: BFI

Director: François Ozon

Writer: François Ozon

Titles: Regarde la mer, Action vérité, La Petite mort, Une Robe d’été, Scènes de lit, X2000, Un Lever de rideau

France 1994-2006

152 mins

François Ozon’s short films are not so much exercises in visual narrative as visual studies of people in situations. The main subject is faces of naked people in a sexual context. Mainly people to whom the context is new. So (conveniently) mainly young people – teenagers, and other experimenters. Ozon is not here interested in sex in a relationship, sex as part of a shared life. He is interested in sex as passing pleasure, as self-discovery, above all as recreation. This of course positions his work well for hipsters, who, one supposes, like to think of sex in this way. And, one might think, also for middle-aged voyeurs, but I am pleased to report that I detected little Larry Clark-style salaciousness here. As well as faces, Ozon is quite interested in bodies, particularly male bottoms and genitalia, and I think we should be grateful that this director does offer good parts for penises, a neglected resource in cinema, if you discount pornography. The shorter films in this compilation are varied in tone, mainly light and often whimsical. Ozon does a nice job of capturing natural performances from his cast. They often seem gauche and embarrassed, perhaps not surprisingly, but it seems to work.

The medium-length Regarde la mer is an entirely different matter, a disturbing psychodrama in which sexual attraction takes on a threatening or threatened aspect. Admirers of Ozon’s full-length Swimming Pool might wish to investigate, if they are feeling brave. It is hard to imagine anything further from my own Ozon favourite, the good-natured musical diversion 8 femmes.

Peter Momtchiloff

The Mai 68s fit so perfectly with our 40th-anniversary-of-May-68 issue that some of you may think we made them up. But they’re real, honest, and they describe themselves rather brilliantly as ‘the sound of Dinosaur Jr if fronted by Ulrike Meinhof, the Ramones if they sniffed C86 comps rather than glue, and the band Phil Spector would have loved if he hadn’t gone the whole Starsailor/gunningpeopledownthang route (allegedly)’. Their single ‘Frothing the Daydream’ is due out soon on Cloudberry Records. They’re playing gigs in Leicester throughout May and June and you can also see them at the Indie Tracks Festival on July 26. For more details visit their myspace. Below, they pick their ten favourite films.

ZACHERY:

1- The Rebel (1961)
Tony Hancock, my lifestyle guru (at least in his kind-of-fictional, 23 Railway Cuttings guise) plays an enthusiastic but talentless artist, who abandons England and his suffocating office job for Paris, where he intends to pursue his vision of artistic greatness. Hancock’s childlike daubings and nonsensical explanations are seized upon by the local pseudo-intellectuals, who laud Hancock as a genius. The ignored, genuinely gifted artist with whom Hancock shares a studio, becomes disillusioned and abandons his work, leaving behind his paintings which, despite Hancock’s protests, are taken to be his, thus fuelling Hancock’s undeserved reputation for brilliance. Hancock’s innocence and bewilderment at his acclaim represent the main part of the film’s appeal, along with his proto-Reggie Perrin despair at the stifling nature of his daily life. His enforced conformity is epitomised when his boss, observing the row of identical bowler hats and umbrellas on the pegs by Hancock’s desk, notices that one umbrella is hung at an opposing angle to the others. The look of disapproval that he sends Hancock is unmistakable in its message: Individuality is not welcome. Both of my film choices feature a struggle between the expectations conferred by the collar and tie, and the need for a fantasy world; this concept is not entirely removed from my own life.

2- What’s Good For The Goose (1969)
Norman Wisdom was the most family of the family entertainers, whose films could be watched by all generations without any fear of embarrassment. No one was prepared, therefore, for his seedy, on-screen descent into the 1960s dream/nightmare of free love, loud clothes and loud, long-haired rock music. Driving to a banking conference with bowler hat and umbrella, the married character played by Wisdom is beckoned by two young women, who proceed to show him a lifestyle that he could never have known existed. His early declaration of love for one of the women reveals that he has not grasped the ephemeral nature of the pleasures on offer, and his consequent disappointment leads him to reconcile himself to his marriage, determined to show his wife the fun that he has just experienced. In the film’s most erotic scene, one of the women eats Wisdom’s sandwich while he is driving, and the way that his bearing conveys the possibilities that seem to be dawning upon him, during these silent moments, show what a fine actor he could be. With an underground club at which The Pretty Things were the resident band, and with Wisdom wearing clothes that could have graced Donovan, I still, as a Wisdom fan, marvel at the fact that this film was made.

JULIE:

3- The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
This is a Woody Allen film (which he doesn’t appear in) set in Depression-era America. It tells of Cecilia, a downtrodden waitress married to an uncaring abusive husband. The only escape for her is going to the cinema and she becomes so besotted with the dashing hero of a film that he notices her and steps out of the film to speak to her, leaving the rest of the characters in the lurch. Being fictional, he is, of course, flawless; he tells Cecilia ‘I love you - I’m honest, dependable, courageous, romantic and a great kisser’ because ‘it’s written into the character’. The pastiche of 1930s glamour in the film Cecilia watches is perfectly done. Of course the two-dimensional character has trouble adjusting to the real world and eventually has to return to the fictional realm, leaving Cecilia back where she started. This film is so funny and so poignant too (I always think I’d have stayed with the fictional guy - but I suppose that isn’t very realistic!) and it gets better every time you watch it.

4- It Happened One Night (1934)
This screwball comedy directed by Frank Capra stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert as a runaway heiress and a hard-bitten newspaper reporter (who thinks he can make some money if he gets an exclusive on her story) who meet on a night bus. Of course after many adventures they fall in love and after the almost inevitable misunderstanding, which always happens in these films, are happily reunited at the end. This film makes you realise why Clark Gable was such a big star in the 1930s. I love lots of Capra’s other films, such as It’s a Wonderful Life, Arsenic and Old Lace and You Can’t Take it With You, and am a big fan of other fast-moving comedies of that era such as The Thin Man and the Marx Brothers, so it’s quite hard to choose my favourites…

JONATHAN:

5- Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988)
The first foray by the Chiodo Brothers into the world of socio-realism and political theatre?? Well actually no, instead from a simple plot….. Alien clowns turn up intent on turning the inhabitants of a small town into candy floss, they manage to create an insane world filled with bad jokes, even worse visual gags and some of the funniest shadow puppet exploits ever set to celluloid… Like all good films/marmite Killer Klowns splits opinion down the middle… You come away thinking either it’s the best or worst film ever made and truth be told it’s bits of both. Instantly watchable and awesomely funny, comic horror genuinely does not get any better.

6- Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains (1981)
Lou Adler’s ‘follow up’ to the hit Cheech and Chong movie was a pseudo-documentary about an all-girl LA punk band – the Fabulous Stains – starring Diane Lane, Paul Simonon and various members of the Sex Pistols. Disappearing off the face of the earth, it has resurfaced a few times, mainly in badly cut versions shown on late night cable TV… The film is inspiring to watch (to see its influence you only have to look at bands like Hole, Bikini Kill, Babes in Toyland) and has an amazing soundtrack including the should-have-been ‘punk classic’ ‘(So you wanna be) a professional’. Essential watching for the riot grrrl in all of you…

JEREMY:

7- Breaking the Waves (1996)
The first time I saw this film I was utterly blown away. Like most of von Trier’s stuff this isn’t very pleasant to watch, I always think of Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya Forever too, when I watch it, although this has a happier ending of sorts. The shaky handheld camera techniques also used in his previous films almost give it a documentary feel, although the way it is split into chapters and the sepia effects used give it a fairy tale feel too. It’s a love story that simply batters you into exhaustion. It has been called the most moving movie ever made, and I would kind of agree with that. Emily Watson’s Calvinist, almost childlike Bess is completely mesmerising.

8- The Tin Drum (1979)
Refusing to grow up to join the world of adult perversity is something I have long agreed with! Although the central character is no Peter Pan. I don’t really go for war films as such, but this sets itself apart in so many different ways. The film is set in World War II Poland, in a town called Danzig, a free city invaded by the Nazis. A town with billowing smoke and towering spiral steeples. In other words, another fairy tale. The magical realism is captured brilliantly. It is about a boy living through the period who uses a tin drum to soundtrack the world around him. Most of the time Nazism is mocked; sarcasm is prevalent everywhere. The film gives a view on the mentality of the middle-class people in Germany and their racism and anti-Semitism before and during World War II. Next to that it also shows how little people did to prevent it, even though it was clear long before the war started, that what was happening would end in nightmares. I think it carries such a powerful message, which has a tremendous impact because it is seen through the eyes of a little boy.

BAND CHOICE:

9- Poor Little Rich Girl (1965)
Generally Andy Warhol’s films are either difficult to watch, art for art’s sake or just generally too long (24hrs??). Poor Little Rich Girl stands out by being both art and drama at the same time. The film itself is little more than two reels of Edie Sedgwick talking at the camera (one in focus, one horribly out of focus) yet it manages to draw you in and make you part of a world that even its inhabitants didn’t really occupy. The film gives the feeling that Warhol was trying to be both mocking and mould Edie into his Monroe, yet she comes across more of a tragic heroine; this makes the film uncomfortable to watch on occasion, yet it also celebrates a natural star who did not realise the talent she had.

10- Billy Liar (1963)
Based on the Keith Waterhouse book, this true to the story adaptation starring Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie is both beautifully shot and life-affirming. Anyone who has lived in a small town can empathise with the desire to escape from drudgery into fantasy. Like the majority of this list it (that awful word) stars people with a natural talent for reminding you that it is OK to escape from normal life and to dream of doing something different. Even if that dream is to be Head of the Federal Republic of Ambrosia. Sometimes people need to be reminded of that.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 April 2008

Venues: ICA, London and key cities

Distributor: Tartan

Director: Park Chan-wook

Writers: Jeong Seo-Gyeong, Park Chan-wook

Original title: Saibogujiman kwenchana

Cast: Lim Su-jeong, Rain

South Korea 2006

105 minutes

Park Chan-wook has followed up his brooding revenge trilogy with a whimsical, pastel-hued romantic fantasy set in a psychiatric hospital. But fear not, although graceful and tender, I’m a Cyborg is sharply stylised and odd enough to avoid sentimentality. Young-goon is a young girl who thinks she’s a cyborg and is institutionalised after she electrocutes herself in an attempt to ‘recharge her batteries’. At the hospital, she is befriended by Il-sun, a young man who suffers from a rather special kind of kleptomania – believing he can steal things like memories, politeness and ping pong skills. I’m a Cyborg may feel like a gentle interlude between Park Chan-wook’s weightier offerings, but it is as wildly imaginative as the director’s previous work, mixing futurism, manga influences and a love story in a fresh way. I’m a Cyborg premiered in the UK at the Korean Film Festival in November and on that occasion Park Chan-wook told us more about the ideas behind the film and gave us a tantalising insight into his next project.

Virginie Sélavy: After Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, I’m a Cyborg is much lighter and almost violence-free. Did you feel you needed a break from the serious tone of those movies ?

Park Chan-wook: It’s been a very long journey, I spent five years making the trilogy and I also directed a short film for Three, Monster [a collection of three Asian horror shorts, the other two directed by Fruit Chan and Takashi Miike]. All of them have been very dark and serious and I did feel like I needed to get away from that. With the trilogy the vengeance was the end of the journey, and that ended with I’m a Cyborg. It felt right to finish with I’m a Cyborg; it was the end of an era for me.

VS: It’s interesting that you should see I’m a Cyborg as the end of the trilogy because although it’s very different in tone from the other films, it deals with the same themes. In all three films revenge was always linked to love. Here it’s just a different balance between the two – I’m a Cyborg is more about love than vengeance.

PCW: I conceived the revenge series as three films plus I’m a Cyborg, and it may look like they were made by completely different directors, but I do believe that there is a common theme throughout. Fantasy has become more and more important to me in later works. My films are becoming more feminine, there’s more hope. The themes of love and hope have definitely become more prominent towards the end of these four works. I started with Mr Vengeance, which was very dark and serious and as you go towards the end of the cycle it becomes lighter and more fantastical, and love becomes more important.

VS: I’m a Cyborg is a very sweet film, and it might come as a surprise to some fans of your previous work, but I think that that sweetness was already present in the character of Ryu in Mr Vengeance and in the Geum-ja character in Lady Vengeance.

PCW: I have a daughter so the theme of bringing up a child, bringing up a daughter in particular, has really influenced me in Mr Vengeance and Lady Vengeance, and also in I’m a Cyborg. The image of a dad bringing up a child is becoming more important in my work. But there isn’t much of a sweet element in the current project that I’m working on. After I’m a Cyborg I wanted to get back to a more serious tone. But I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

VS: There is a nod to your previous films when Young-goon has violent revenge fantasies in which she becomes a killing machine and guns down all the doctors and nurses. Why did you include these scenes in what is otherwise a very gentle film?

PCW: I believe that this particular scene is not as violent as it seems. The audience already knows that it’s not reality, that it’s a fantastical scene. No matter how many people die it’s not as frightening as it would be if it were set in reality. I believe the scene was needed because Yung-goon is very angry at the adults in general and however sweet she seems she is still really furious. The movie doesn’t have a happy ending because her anger is not concluded. It’s like when young children are angry at their parents and they say, ‘mum, I want you to die’. It’s a very childish anger but it’s terrifying all the same. It’s that kind of anger that I wanted to put in that fantastical violent scene.

VS: In Oldboy you explore the idea of revenge as a positive emotion in the sense that it gives the two central characters this incredible will to live. There is a similar idea here, although of course in a lighter way, as Young-goon’s murderous fantasies are what keeps her going – in fact, right to the very end, when she thinks her purpose is to bring about the end of the world.

PCW: It comes from the idea of the ‘purpose of existence’. That phrase is repeated throughout the film. It’s not a phrase that you hear in normal conversation, it’s more philosophical. Teenagers are always asking that question and I believe that it’s completely natural that people should wonder that. Then comes the question, ‘why should I live?’, this longing to know your purpose in life. The reason why Yung-goon becomes the way she is is because she wants an answer to that question so badly. Then she realises that machines have very strict operating instructions and a very obvious purpose, which is something that she envies, completely misjudging the situation. And she realises that food also comes into it: she has to eat to exist so in the end the only reason for existence is to exist, there’s nothing more and nothing less. Her murderous fantasy of revenge fits into that rather than it being the reason for her existence. At the end of the film she believes that she’s found her purpose and it is to become a nuclear weapon and to blow up the world. That is a very fantastical idea, not only because it’s not realistic, but also because the probability of her getting enough power from lightning to become a bomb is very low. The way in which she looks at the purpose of her existence is very different from the way her friend Il-sun sees it.

VS: You said earlier that you were interested in moving more and more towards a fantastical kind of world. But at the same time the girl is a real girl, she’s not a cyborg, that’s all in her head. While you were writing the script did you think at any point that maybe she should be a real cyborg?

PCW: At the very beginning I thought of using a cyborg in the shape of a young girl, but first I realised that it would cost too much (laughs) and then there are already lots of similar films in Japan, so it wouldn’t have been anything new or fresh. At the beginning my idea was to make a movie about a psychiatric hospital so I decided to combine the two, psychiatric hospital plus cyborg. That’s when I came to the idea of a girl who thinks she’s a cyborg, but the reason why I made it a girl has nothing to do with sexuality. The most important thing for me was that the character should have a child-like quality, that she should be almost like a little girl.

VS: Did you find it easier or more difficult to deal with love compared to the violent emotions you’ve depicted in your revenge trilogy?

PCW: Telling a love story is definitely a lot more difficult than dealing with dark, serious material because when I film a dark story I know exactly what kind of thing I’m looking for, what expressions, scenes, imagery. With love, it’s very difficult to make it look real and not like a soap opera or one of those cheesy movies that there are too many of. You see it so often and it seems so fake and so false that when you see a young couple kissing in a film you don’t feel anything, you just think, ‘oh it looks pretty’ or ‘it looks fun’. Those kinds of images are too common. In Korea there’s an expression that says that it’s really embarrassing to watch a couple kissing on screen, so that was the most difficult scene for me to film. I filmed it but I had to scrap it all and start again. Now I’m very happy with the result, I’m sure that it’s the weirdest kiss there’s ever been in any romantic comedy and I’m very happy with that.

VS: You said your next project, which I believe is called Evil Live, will be a return to darker material. Can you tell me more?

PCW: It’s not called Evil Live actually, I’ve decided to change the title, and the English title hasn’t been chosen yet. The reason why I decided not to call it Evil Live is because it sounded a bit too much like a horror film, and although it is about vampires, it’s very difficult to specify what kind of genre it’s going to fall into because it’s more about a love triangle and being unfaithful. It will star Song Kang-ho, who was the dad in Mr Vengeance. He’s a vampire who falls in love with a married woman and murders the woman’s husband…

VS: Vampires and a love triangle, it sounds great! (laughs)

SCI-FI LONDON

30 April - 4 May 2008

Venue: Apollo Cinema

Festival website

A couple of years ago I took a friend to see a film at the Sci-Fi London Film Festival and on the way out he casually said to one of the organisers that he was enjoying the convention… This brought the swift rebuke, ‘this is not a convention, it’s a festival!’ I can understand the confusion. In many respects it’s never been easier to be a sci-fi fan in this country. Doctor Who is the second most popular show on British television and in America, Battlestar Galactica gets plaudits from highbrow magazines and newspapers alike. Before either of these shows were revived, it was considered embarrassing to admit you were a fan of the old versions (except as some kind of ironic appreciation of retro TV) and it would have been immediately assumed that you were a 30-something, anorak-wearing social misfit who still lived with their parents. If you were a fan - and I use the word in italics to suggest that the word itself came with negative connotations and the baggage of stereotype - then to find out more about your niche interest, you might go to conventions to meet other fans. There, you could exchange over-priced merchandise, buy fanzines and audio tapes based on your favourite shows and pay £15 for the signature of a D-list actor who once played a Klingon 20 years ago.

Nowadays, these kinds of conventions still exist and yes, you may find stereotypical fans at Sci-Fi London but since science fiction has become more socially acceptable, the festival also attracts casual consumers of sci-fi who want to see something more underground or ‘art-house’ than what TV and big-budget cinema have to offer. Now in its 7th year, SFL has been held in the centre of the city since its conception – and not in some warehouse in Outer London, as might be expected. Like the bigger, more generalist London Film Festival, SFL brings us films that may never get released in regular cinemas or even on DVD in this country. At the last few festivals, I’ve seen some of the best genre films of recent years – Subject Two, 1 point 0, Robot Stories, The Great Yokai War – some of the worst – The Fall of the Louse of Usher (sic) and Captain Eager and the Mark of Voth – and some of the most overrated – Primer – but this is the way with all specialist film festivals, be it the Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, the German Film Festival, etc. While it would be great if (art-house) cinemas had weekly slots for unseen sci-fi, gay or German films on a regular basis so you wouldn’t have to cram a year’s worth of a certain genre into a long weekend, this is the current state of affairs, so we should celebrate what we have.

This year’s Sci-Fi London has already announced two premieres that justify the existence of the festival alone. First there’s Dante 01 by Marc Caro, co-director of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. When Jean Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro went their separate ways after The City, Jeunet continued to make successful films on his own such as Amelie, while Caro became an art director on the likes of Vidoc, a genre classic that deserved more attention than it got on its release seven years ago. Not much information has been released on Dante 01 yet, but since Vidoc’s ‘steam-punk’ look, which made nineteenth-century Paris look like a living oil painting through the use of evocative CGI, I’ve been looking forward to Caro’s follow-up. What’s more, Dante 01 mixes the prison genre with sci-fi and fantasy elements, so I hope that it will continue the tradition of such great films as Cube, Prison, Fortress and Maléfique.

The other exciting premiere this year is La Antena, an intriguing, silent, monochrome Argentine movie that occupies the middle ground between the films of Guy Maddin and Guillermo Del Toro. Plot-wise, it reworks Orwellian themes of cultural domination, brain-washing by TV and state symbols of oppression into an expressionistic fairy tale. La Antena was the first film to be shown as both the opening and closing film of the Rotterdam Film Festival this year and comes with a raft of awards. Following the success of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Orphanage, this will hopefully continue the Latin American fantasy renaissance that flowered in literature half a century ago and now seems to have come to fruition in cinema as well.

Like its horror counterpart Frightfest, SFL also does all-night screenings (something that the BFI IMAX has started to copy over the last year), and these have previously included animé and black and white British sci-fi films. This year as ever, there’s a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 all-night screening, which combines improv comedy with screenings of ‘turkeys’ from the last fifty years. It’s events like these and the ‘talkeoke’ sessions in previous years that have kept a bit of the convention flavour going in the festival, even if the organisers are at pains to suggest otherwise.

There are still many old-school fans in attendance but SFL also attracts cooler fashionistas looking for alternative programming. By having a variety of events that range from highbrow to lowbrow – encompassing the Douglas Adams Memorial Debate, the Arthur C. Clarke Awards and a little bit of cosplay – the festival tries to be all things to all (sci-fi) men and it almost always succeeds. That said, I miss the days when some of the films were shown at Curzon Soho and some at the Other/Metro Cinema and worry that by being hosted at the Apollo West End it has gone for a venue that is slightly intimidating and overpriced for both sci-fi and art-house fans. But the friendly atmosphere, free gifts and celebrity guests (such as last year’s John Landis and Stuart Gordon) make up for this a great deal and I can’t think of a better way to spend the May bank holiday.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 April 2008

Distributor Optimum

Director: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

Writers: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

France 2007

95 mins

Marjane Satrapi’s adaptation of her own Persepolis graphic novels deservedly won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes festival. Although the film is a necessarily stripped-down version of the two volumes, which respectively describe her childhood in Teheran and her exile as a teenager in Austria, the film version retains all the elements that made them so successful: the mix of Satrapi’s personal story with her country’s history, the wryly humorous look at the absurdity of political power games, the penetrating observation of both Iranian and European societies and the powerful contrast between simple animation and the complex, difficult events it depicts. Full of life and irreverent spirit, this is a film that is simply impossible to dislike. The same can be said of Satrapi herself, who proved to be a wonderfully entertaining interviewee when we caught up with her during last year’s London Film Festival.

Virginie Sélavy: The film is an adaptation of the two Persepolis books, and this works very well as they are really two sides of the same story: they are complementary both in terms of your personal history and in the contrast between Western and Muslim cultures.

Marjane Satrapi: I didn’t want to make a movie with a sequel, Persepolis I, like there’s Rocky I, Rocky II… Actually, I liked Rocky I, not so much Rocky II, sequels are always bad… It was also very important to do both together because it’s the story of one person’s life. The linchpin of the story is the exile. The book starts in 1978 and it stops in 1994. It’s a nostalgic point of view, it’s the point of view of someone who goes into the airport and who cannot go back, and she re-evaluates her whole life.

VS: Why did you choose this nostalgic viewpoint for the film instead of following the same linear structure as in the books?

MS: Because at the time I was writing the script I was extremely nostalgic. At that point in my life the fact that I didn’t go back to Iran really started to weigh on me. Of course, if I made the movie today it would be a different movie because now I’m not nostalgic anymore. And also, the flashback structure shows that I’ve distanced myself even more from the story than in the book, in which I’d already taken some distance, in order to be able to laugh at myself.

VS: Your life has been shaped by momentous political events, and it seems to be inseparable from the history of your country, which makes your autobiography much more interesting than most people’s!

MS: But I don’t like the word ‘autobiography’ for my own work because it’s not really an ‘autobiography’. It’s a book that you write because you have problems with your family and friends and you don’t know how to tell them, so you write a book and you take your revenge. I didn’t want to make some kind of political or historical or sociological statement because I’m not a politician, a historian or a sociologist. I am one person who was born in a certain place and in a certain time. It’s a very personal point of view and I think that is also why it has become universal; because the only point of view that can eventually become universal is of course one person’s point of view. This is my French side, this is my very individualistic side. (laughs)

VS: It’s a very interesting perspective, especially in these times, when the Western world and the Muslim world have become completely polarised, partly due to the politicians’ simplifications. Your viewpoint is very interesting because it’s that of the outsider, both in the Western world and in the Muslim world.

MS: When I was a child I always had doubts about people who believed in astrology. You know, is it possible to believe that there are twelve groups of human beings? Now it’s not even twelve groups, it’s two groups, the Muslims and the Christians, West and East. If you’re French does it mean that you love all French people and you understand all of them? What common points do I share with a fanatic of my country? None. What common points does an American liberal share with George Bush? None. What common points does a fanatic of my country share with George Bush? A lot. So it’s not a question of where you come from. It simplifies everything and it just shows that the basis for the war is bullshit. There is only one division in the world, that between the fanatics and the rest of the people. Fanatics are absolutely everywhere. And the way they think is the same everywhere. The reason why they’re more powerful than the rest of us is that they push emotional buttons. They use people’s emotions to lead them into the streets. What you or I try to do is ask questions, so you’re asking people to think, to use their logic; and of course the process is much longer and it doesn’t have the immediate effect that emotions have. That’s why you see them much more than you see us but there are many more of us. We, the people who are not fanatics, have to be united because whether they wear a bow tie or a beard, these people are very dangerous for the whole of humanity.

VS: In the second part of the book you said you felt you didn’t belong anywhere when you went back to Iran. You’ve lived in France for many years now, so do you still have that feeling of not belonging anywhere?

MS: I belong to nowhere and I belong to everywhere at the same time. It’s a very convenient situation because if you give me a hotel room anywhere in the world, and I have a comfortable room with a bath tub – a shower is not enough – I feel at home completely. But at the same time, no matter what happens, you have a relationship with the place where you were born that you don’t have with any other place. It’s kind of a genetic memory, something like that, it’s there and it can never change. I always say that if I was a man, I would say that Iran is my mother and France is my wife. My mother can be hysterical, she can blackmail me emotionally, whatever, she’s my mother and I cannot pretend otherwise. My wife, on the other hand, I enjoy living with her very much but I can cheat on her, I can leave her, I can have a baby with another woman… (laughs) At the same time, I am very French. For the Iranians, I am very French and for the French I am very Iranian. (laughs)

VS: What did you hope to achieve when you started writing Persepolis?

MS: The only thing I wanted was for people to ask themselves questions. Whenever they talk about it on the radio they just talk about fanatics. But these people that they’re scared of, these people that are reduced to abstract notions, these people that we know nothing about, aren’t they really like us? And if they are, then we have to rethink our whole position. That’s all. As an artist, you have to remain humble as to what changes you can make in the world. Marilyn Manson said something very interesting about turning kids into Satanists, he said that if music could change anything, the whole of the world should be love because 99% of songs are about love. So it can’t change much. But we try.

VS: The medium of the comic book may seem a strange choice for a story that is about very complex political issues, as traditionally it’s not associated with being able to explore those issues in depth. Why did you choose that medium?

MS: I read Maus by Art Spiegelman and I understood that it was a medium like any other. Traditionally, it’s not used in that way because most kids stop drawing at the age of 7 so for 99% of people drawing belongs to childhood. Plus at school you learn very early on to interpret what poets and authors say but you never study what painters and illustrators mean. We don’t know how to judge, we don’t have the tools for it so we are scared of talking about the drawing. For that reason I do understand that people may think that comics are odd but it’s a medium like any other and it has lots and lots of possibilities. Especially since people think that it’s a limited medium, you can just go for it, you can do a lot of different things. And the use of the image, the frame and the sequencing gives you a freedom that I don’t have when I write. When I want to describe a feeling I need a drawing. I don’t need pages and pages and pages.

VS: Visually it’s very cute but at the same time you talk about very dark subject matter and the contrast is very powerful.

MS: It should be. If it all went in the same direction it would become redundant. I used to be a complete psycho and that’s why I decided I had to dress like a bourgeois because if I dressed in a way that reflected how much of a psycho I was I wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere! (laughs)

VS: Was it a conscious decision to draw it in that particular style?

MS: Absolutely. Especially because in a comic the drawings are part of the narration, it’s not just an illustration of the text. I had a lot of text, the story was very complicated so I couldn’t have a very complicated drawing because it would have been too much. I had to purify the style of the drawing as much as possible.

VS: Were you influenced by the work of other graphic novelists when you started drawing?

MS: Not so much because I don’t come from a culture of comics. I started reading comics only after I wrote mine. At the same time, saying that I don’t have any influences would be too pretentious and not true, but they don’t particularly come from comics, they come from Matisse’s paintings, they come from Flaubert, from music, from cinema, from a lot of different things. So of course I’m the result of whatever I have experienced, whatever I have lost, whatever I have seen, but not particularly of comics.

VS: Why did you decide to turn the comic books into a film?

MS: It’s the worst idea in the world. (laughs) I didn’t decide to do it but I was in a situation where I could make a movie. Suddenly we had the right to play with this big toy, a movie, even though we didn’t know how to play with it. And we just said yes without knowing what we’d do. It was like diving into the water with Vincent [Paronnaud, co-director of Persepolis] and once we were in the water, we were like, now we have to learn how to swim. Now I really like the result so I could invent 1200 good reasons for doing it but even though I’m happy I did it, it was not a good idea.

VS: Were there any particular difficulties involved in adapting the comic books to film?

MS: Yes, the most difficult thing was the family scenes. They are absolutely useless but without them you don’t have a movie because it’d just become a patchwork of very hectic moments. You actually need these useless moments to cement the whole story. When the whole family is in the living room and they’re doing nothing, we had to think about how to make it attractive, how to make sure that it wouldn’t become boring, change the angle of the camera to make it more dynamic, things like that.

VS: Visually there is a difference between the comic books and the film and it seems that you were able to use some effects, like charcoal backgrounds and lighting, to give a more sinister atmosphere to the darker scenes.

MS: We kept the characters in black and white, the way they were in the comics. But you cannot make a whole movie simply in black and white because either you make people blind or you provoke an epileptic crisis, it’s unbearable. (laughs) So we had to find a way, we had to change a lot, it was necessary.

VS: It introduces an element of nuance in the black and white.

MS: Absolutely. It’s not possible otherwise, it would be like the Danish dogmatism, and we’re not here to make people pay – not only people have paid for their tickets, but if they have to throw up when the movie is finished this is not the point.

VS: And obviously because it’s two books condensed into one film, and you couldn’t make a five-hour film, you had to…

MS: …but if it was another time and my name was Erich von Stroheim I would have made an 8-hour movie. But nowadays nobody wants to pay for that. And nobody wants to watch it. I’m a very obsessive type of person, I love to watch 8-hour movies.

VS: It must have been very difficult for you to limit what could go into the film and to decide which scenes to get rid of.

MS: You have to go straight to the essential things, you can’t just joke around and take time to say things. You have to be efficient. It’s also extremely exciting to work this way because you have to think about ways of doing this.

VS: One of my favourite scenes in the book is the one where your character goes to visit her childhood friend Kia after the war and he’s in a wheelchair, he’s been horribly injured and he tells her a really tasteless joke; and Marjane doesn’t know whether to laugh or not, but then she realises that you just have to laugh when things are this bad. I thought it was a brilliant scene but in the film it’s truncated.

MS: Yeah, we tried to put it in but it was impossible. The problem in cinema is that you have to stick to one storyline. For example, Gangs of New York is a very bad movie because there’s a love story and there’s a reward story and all the different gangs; it goes in many directions and in the end it doesn’t work because you’re like, what is the story? On the other hand, you have Jean-Jacques Annaud, who made The Name of the Rose. Of course, the book by Umberto Ecco is much more about the philosophy and the whole history of the Church in the Middle-Ages. Annaud was extremely intelligent in that he put that in the background and he made the film as a detective story and the movie works perfectly because it doesn’t go in all directions. So we made the whole movie around the idea of exile, and we didn’t have the possibility to tell all the stories. This way, people will also have to buy the book if they want to read the jokes! (laughs)

VS: Why did you decide to write it in French rather than Persian?

MS: I had to write it in French, because I was writing it for the French. This book was my answer to the world, you know, things are really not the way you think. And you see it in the structure of the book, I give too many explanations, what is this, and what is the New Year, etc. If I had written the book for the Iranians, I wouldn’t need to explain all that because they know it. We talk the way we think. So in order to be able to think about how others would consider my story I had to think in their language, not in mine. So that’s the philosophical side of it. And I have always studied in French school. Writing in French is easier for me, especially as the spoken and written Persian are very different. There are a few Persian writers who know how to deal with that perfectly but I don’t, because I’ve always written in French. And I love the French language too, I’ve always loved it.

VS: Finally, there’s one part of your story that seems completely at odds with what we see of your personality in the rest of the book – it’s the bit where you become an aerobics instructor. What happened?

MS: I was stupid, I don’t know what happened! That is called a historical mistake. (laughs) I don’t understand it either. I have photos, you know. I’m dressed in pink and purple, with a hair band. I’m like, what was I thinking? (laughs) I don’t have any explanation either. I’m very surprised by myself too. (laughs)

Photo © Evan Freed

RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Robert Kennedy

Director: Shane O’Sullivan

Showing at the East End Film Festival

Date: Wed 23 April, 6:15pm

Venue: Stratford Picture House

Director: Shane O’Sullivan

The East End Film Festival runs 17-24 April

Festival website

On May 18, 1968, 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan sat in his room in Pasadena and wrote repeatedly in his notebook, ‘R.F.K. must die - RFK must be killed Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated… before June 5 ‘68′.

JFK’s younger brother was running for President on an anti-war ticket, the great white hope of poor black communities torn apart by rioting in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination six weeks earlier.

On June 4th, Bobby Kennedy won the all-important California Democratic primary and looked set to challenge Nixon for the White House. After a rousing victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shots rang out in a kitchen pantry. Witnesses saw Sirhan firing his gun several feet in front of Kennedy and he was convicted as the lone assassin. But according to the autopsy, the fatal shot was fired from an inch behind Kennedy’s right ear, suggesting a second gunman was involved.

My new feature documentary, RFK Must Die, explores the controversies surrounding Kennedy’s death. How could Sirhan have fired the fatal shot if he was several feet in front of Kennedy? Who was the girl in the polka-dot dress seen with Sirhan in the pantry who later fled down a fire escape, exclaiming, ‘We shot him! We shot him!’ And why has Sirhan never been able to remember the shooting?

At first, these struck me as intriguing ingredients for a screenplay but during my research, I discovered new video footage of three alleged CIA operatives at the hotel that night - men who had previously worked together on plots to assassinate Castro. I pitched BBC Newsnight and they commissioned a twelve-minute film to find out why these men were at the Ambassador Hotel that night.

So began a long and very odd journey as a first-time investigator into sixties conspiracy. The Newsnight piece and a Guardian article led to a US distribution deal for a feature documentary and a book to be published on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination in June.

At the heart of the mystery is Sirhan himself. At 5′2″, he trained to be a jockey but a bad fall from a horse left him on the dole and increasingly disillusioned. He got into mysticism and started hypnotising himself in his room, practising ‘automatic writing’ - repeatedly writing down his goals, to help make them come true. But what led him to write ‘RFK must die RFK must die’?

Since the early fifties, the CIA had been trying to create a hypnotically-programmed assassin, a real-life Manchurian Candidate who could be trained to kill with no conscious memory of being programmed. Dr. Herbert Spiegel, America’s leading expert on hypnosis, believes this is what happened to Sirhan.

Today, Sirhan is still in the same California prison as Charles Manson. He told me he feels trapped in a Kafkaesque world, imprisoned for a crime he doesn’t remember. Now, a new audio recording of the gunshots has emerged. Sirhan’s gun held eight bullets but audio experts have concluded there are thirteen shots on the tape, suggesting Sirhan may well have been a decoy for the real assassin.

Shane O’Sullivan

RFK Must Die screens in the East End Film Festival on April 23 and is released on May 16. Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy will be published in June.

Event: Midnight Movies launch night

Date: 29 February 2008

Location: Curzon Soho

Showing: Society (1989)

A midnight movie is not just a film shown at midnight. Bridget Jones’ Diary shown at midnight would not be a midnight movie. Neither would a midnight screening of Time Regained – not unless the crowd were told to speak in French and to bash a teaspoon against a teacup when a compere gave the cue.

From its origins in 1950s America, the midnight movie slot has always been given over to low-budget, horror and trash. Top scores if the film is all three. Rather like the graveyard shift on radio, the midnight movie slot is meant for the niche or risqué stuff admired by nighthawks, insomniacs and the downright crazy.

The midnight movie concept was dead by the mid-80s. Until then late-night movie-goers had been able to feast on the horrors and delights of films such as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo and John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, going back time and time again for more. But things changed when the big studios saw the midnight screenings as an effective marketing tool and tried to reverse the bottom-up creation of cult films by releasing their movies at midnight in the hope of attracting an audience as loyal as the fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, for example.

Rocky is perhaps the most famous and persistent example of the midnight movie, its fans still meeting at cinemas the world over to watch a midnight screening and act out scenes from the film. Their crude and irreverent heckling of the characters in the film often reaches anarchic proportions and, as any visitor to a Rocky event can tell you, makes for a damn good night.

It is this spirit of fun and spontaneity that inspired the folk at Curzon Soho to bring back the midnight movie. But rather than show just the old classics, the events team hope to screen all kinds of films that reflect the spirit of the midnight movie. ‘We wanted to put on a night that people wandering around Soho after a few drinks could come to and enjoy. The first two screenings are of US films but we want to move away from just that and start showing European films, for example, which still have that gritty, grimy feel to them’, said Simon Howarth of Curzon.

Their first offering, Society, hit the right spot. Gory, dark and camp in equal measure, the film’s 1980s styling and casting of Baywatch goodie-goodie Billy Warlock lend it an added veneer of trash. By most people’s standards it is not a good movie and at any other screening could be justifiedly panned. But it is just right for the midnight slot, which turns its shortcomings into merits.

As a prelude to the screening the Curzon’s main bar area was given over to a party complete with free beer (well, one free beer per head) and hosts and hostesses dressed up like zombies. The dark 80s tunes, such as the theme from Twin Peaks, provided a suitable soundtrack to the revelling of cinema-goers who had been able to leisurely make their way to the Curzon and who were enjoying meeting and greeting other midnight film buffs.

With bums on cinema seats, author of The Cult Film Reader and director of the Cult Film Archive Xavier Mendik introduced the screening, explaining how Society showed the ruptures in the Reaganesque Conservatism of the 1980s in the US. It was interesting and informed but it was not quite the right time for that kind of talk. The crowd was loose and ready to heckle. They were obviously discerning film fans, and would have been interested in what Xavier had to say if it had been earlier that day or when the hangover subsided the next. But having him speak then was a bit like casting Laurence Olivier in a Carry On film. There were a few guilt-riddled heckles and some whoops and cheers but a quirkier, cheekier kind of compere would have been better suited to the mood of the audience. Statuesque and matronesque glamster Dolly Rocket of the Flash Monkey burlesque club came to mind as an ideal candidate. Or Vampira.

But compere queries aside, the return of Midnight Movies captured the spirit of the original phenomenon. It has obviously struck a chord with Londoners who were so eager to reserve for the next event (a screening of the Grindhouse Double Bill in its full glory) that an extra screening has been announced. Now we just have to sit back and wait for Odeon and Cineworld to announce that they are doing the same.

Lisa Williams