Arthur Lipsett’s Very Nice, Very Nice

There is an element of surprise when a still image appears in a film; it creates an incongruous interruption in the endless rolling of 24 otherwise imperceptible frames. Still images offer the filmmaker a change in pace; a climax; an aside; a punch-line. It is often the frozen frame that lingers and floats before your eyes as you leave the cinema. So it creates a certain incongruity when the punch-line becomes the story itself.

Tate Modern’s current film season, PhotoFilm, presents an assortment of films that are all composed from still photographs. The selected works are stripped of the gradual unfolding action that characterises much of cinema, making the filmmaker’s craft immediately more apparent. The juxtaposition of still images reveals the filmmaker’s decisions and choices; and it also makes the audience a more active participant, allowing more time to reflect, make connections and let imaginations wander.

The programming provides a mixture of languid introspection and high-speed playfulness. Perhaps the most intensely contemplative film screening over the season’s first weekend was Ken Jacobs’s Capitalism: Child Labor (2006). A claustrophobic 14 minutes of relentless strobe flickering, the film consists of a single Victorian photograph of a factory floor. Jacobs focuses in on specific aspects of the picture – the cotton bobbins, the young boy’s bare feet, the stare of an older worker – always threatening to move beyond the single image but never able to leave it behind. Confronted with this interminable concentration on a single picture, the audience has no choice but to consider the serious implications of a seemingly non-descript, everyday image. Similarly, Toshio Matsumoto’s lyrical film on the work of Japanese stonemasons – Ishi no uta (Song of Stones, 1963) – presents us with a beautiful sense of time passing and history as the workers labour with the enduring, imposing rock-face. The more light-hearted films played with juxtaposing images to create humorous rhythms and connections, like Pas de repos pour Billy Brakko (No Rest for Billy Brakko, 1983), an early comic-strip animation by Jean Pierre-Jeunet, or De Tuin (The Garden, 1999), which cuts between different characters at a country residence to create a melodramatic soap opera of sexual tension, all merely suggested by constructing a knowing sequence of images.

The best films showing over the season’s first weekend managed to combine both serious observation and joyful whimsy. Arthur Lipsett’s Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) was a frenzied Pop Art short that created a critique of consumerist society while retaining a comic and celebratory love of montage. Der Tag eines unständigen Hafenarbeiters, (A Day in the Life of a Casual Dock Worker, 1966) may have had a more serious political or social aim in presenting the life of someone at the bottom of the labour hierarchy, but it also had a playful edge with its moving image interludes and nice set sequences presenting the dock worker’s morning routine. Agnès Varda’s Salut les Cubains (Hi there, Cubans, 1963) also had a political undertone with its love of ‘lyrical revolutionaries’, ‘romantic revolutionaries’. Its lingering still images allow the audience to reflect on Cuba’s political history; but the film does not separate its more sober aspects from beautifully lively montages of cha-cha-cha dance sequences. Cutting the photographs to a lilting voice-over, Varda’s pacing is extraordinarily perfect.

Loosely collected into different strands – the dancing photo on film, the photo novel, the filmic photograph – the films presented across the PhotoFilm season provide a great example of innovative and individualistic filmmaking, highlighting the processes and decisions that go into making cinema. Unfortunately, the thoughtful consideration of the programming is not reflected in its presentation: as the curators choose to introduce each individual film rather than providing a general introduction, the flow of the screenings becomes frustratingly fragmented. As the form of the photofilm encourages the audience to actively make connections within films and across works, it would be nice to allow the audience more room for contemplation. However, this problem aside, the curators have done a great job in bringing together rare works and drawing out some very interesting common threads within the genre.

Eleanor McKeown

Red, White and Blue

Indie punk horror rules in Rotterdam

If the term ’slacker revenge’ seem oxymoronic, tell that to Simon Rumley, director of festival discovery Red White and Blue, a film featuring some nifty genre-shifting and a killer soundtrack, which set the tone for a Rotterdam festival featuring many musical delights.

Set in Austin, Texas, Red White and Blue starts as a character study of the ravenously promiscuous Erica, whose existence consists of picking up random men in bars and trying to hold on to the cleaning job at the guest house where she stays. Despite her frosty attitude, a tentative friendship blossoms with fellow lodger Nate, who, as it’s quickly apparent, is both disapproving and slightly unhinged.

Cut back to punk hipster Franki, an earlier Erica conquest, trying to get his band a European tour, giving his boss grief at his burger-flipping job, and looking after his ailing mother. On her death, Franki and Erica’s paths become entwined again in a twist that would jump out as controversy-baiting, had the preceding scenes not treated the characters in such a non-judgmental way.

From then the film shifts gear, unleashing a vicious streak of inventive violence that will satisfy gore-seekers (death by gaffa tape – the ultimate indie way to go?) but still retain the less squeamish brand of cinephile. ‘I liked the idea of making a horror film that people would enjoy but wasn’t an out-and-out horror film; almost subverting the concept of what is scary and what makes people disturbed,’ Rumley says. ‘With Red, White and Blue, it was about how to make a film with a killer, who’s not a traditional killer in that they don’t go round with a knife. I thought the idea of a person who uses their body as their lethal weapon was an interesting place to start.’

To talk more about the plot would spoil the film’s unfolding, but we can say much of the charm lies in the snappy pacing, a certain austerity of tone and an impeccable sense of place. Authentic feel was an important factor for Brit Rumley: ‘New York, LA and London all have their scenes. They’re different and they’re punk in their own way. There’s an Austin look too. It’s very much earth mother punk – a lot of tattoos, a lot of long hair, a lot of big beards. Marc Senter (who played Franki), is from LA and I don’t think he’d ever been to Austin before. We were discussing how the character and the band in the script are basically punk. I was saying I maybe wanted him blonde, and he was saying, “I see him more as Iggy Pop”, which I disagreed with. So I took him to Emo’s, the club in the opening scene. When I was filming there I saw the New York Dolls, Henry Rollins and Gallows play. It’s a very punky club. We went down the first evening he was in Austin, and he was like, “Oh my God, OK, now I totally understand what you mean”.’

The addition of Franki’s feather earrings, alongside a soundtrack of unknown Austin bands seals the film’s world. ‘While it’s not necessarily the look I would go for, I think a lot of people there look really cool. I was trying to recreate that,’ states Rumley.

Further subversive slackers

This seam of music and a stylised discontented youth was highlighted most obviously in two other films with indie credentials and unlikely genres: Hiroshima (hyper-realist/surrealist slacker) and The Sentimental Engine Slayer (slacker incest fantasy).

In Hiroshima – Pablo Stoll’s Uruguayan paean to the joys of the discman – we follow unemployed Juan as he drifts through a day of encounters with friends, family and a life drawing class. There is very little dialogue, and what there is is delivered through witty use of intertitles, while the film plays with its post-punk audio to cracking effect. It’s a film that’s in no hurry, and occasionally drifts out of interest, yet it packs a surprising amount in. And the opening scene sets a stylish tone that will swell the heart of any music fan with a pair of headphones in their pocket.

The directorial debut of Omar Rodriguez Lopez (of At The Drive-In and Mars Volta fame), The Sentimental Engine Slayer is a psychedelic odyssey with an enviable score and an El Paso setting shot with dizzying urgency by Michael Rizzi. However, the scenario, of which has Barlam (played by Lopez) as an unlikely virgin geek with a crush on his drug-addicted sister, is way too pleased with its characters to fulfill its premise. Thus an exploration of the transgressions of grief and resulting sexual confusion falls lazily into a hateful machismo that regales us with the philosophy that ‘all that matters is pussy’, bolstered by a string of violent transactions with prostitutes, while the plot gets tangled in its own quasi-experimental flourishes.

Let Each One Go Where He May

Cinematic sound delights

Aural pleasures with post-rock flavour were to be found in the bursts of indie distortion from Thai musician The Photo Sticker Machine in Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Mundane History. A Tiger award- winner, the film makes a choppy segue from a delicate relationship drama unfolding between an sick young man and his nurse into a full-on existentialist romp complete with journey into the sun and full birthing scene.

Bursts of ska, Spanish ballads and the Country & Western of a prison request radio show set a quirky tone that punctures the often brutal world of Samson & Delilah, an emotional punch in the face of a film about two Aboriginal petrol-sniffin’ misfits trying to get by. While momentarily undermined by the inclusion of a bombastic cover of David Gray’s ‘Nightblindness’, much of the score was composed and played by director Warwick Thornton and his children.

A beautiful moment of non-diegetic sound occurs in Ben Russell’s experimental FIPRESCI winner Let Each One Go Where He May. The film consists of 13 ten-minute takes, as a Steadycam follows brothers Benjen and Monie Pansa going about life in Suriname. Using the language of visual anthropology with a fine art sensibility, it becomes a work about ways of seeing and the viewer’s relationship with the observed. In one shot we are looking back at the crowded rows of passengers on a bus, when a woman takes the seat directly facing the lens. There is a palpable sense of the brothers trying not to smile or acknowledge the camera, and then some music starts (composed by Monie himself), and for a few minutes the bus bounces around in an upbeat rhythm and with a shy joy as Monie puts on his best poker -face and looks out the window; his expression that of a man in a film pretending to be a man who is in a film but doesn’t know it.

While festival scheduling meant that the Where Is Africa? focus at IFFR started as many delegates were heading home, it felt timely that several of the wider festival’s standouts were set on the continent including Claire Denis’s superb White Material and the Tiger award- winning short Atlantiques by Mati Diop (herself the star of Denis’s earlier 35 Shots of Rum).

Live performance and furniture humping

On the live front, the festival offered eclectic pleasures, including Lovid’s mind-warping circuit-bending AV performance Light from the Dark Ages, and the soul-nourishing experience of Luke Fowler’s 16mm accompaniment to Alasdair Roberts’s folk singing. Both occurred in the Break Even Store, a pop-up concept shop selling filmmakers’ books and DVDs and hosting talks and happenings throughout the festival.

Sonic experiments from Mike Cooper fused with Greg Pope’s projections in Cipher Screen, a slow build of dots and scratches: a tasty piece of expanded cinema that, while not ground-breaking, did the trick of talking to the brain with a language that only live projections can achieve. It was a fitting highlight in the closing programme of Kino Climates, a summit of independent cinemas from across Europe (including the UK’s Cube, Star and Shadow, Side and 7Inch Cinema), which discussed the future of alternative exhibition.

Finally there was Cameron Jamie’s short film Massage the History. ‘The single greatest dance film ever made!’ ‘Better than The Red Shoes!’ So proclaimed a hyperventilating Harmony Korine (in town pimping his own Trash Humpers with such oddball gusto that people were walking out during the introduction), taking time out to whip the crowd into a frenzy for Jamie’s premiere.

It’s a mind-boggling piece, based on a group of tattooed young black men in Montgomery, Alabama, that Jamie first encountered online. Bored and surrounded by soft furnishings, they make up little erotic dance routines, occasionally don white gloves, and basically hump the armchairs in a semi-balletic fashion. Jamie’s addition of a Sonic Youth soundtrack elevated the would-be YouTube curio to a warped state of grace.

Kate Taylor

With a running time of just 12 minutes (8 of which survive), Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time. Film archivists have been able to restore the film’s original colours for the first time in over 100 years.

Kanikosen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breathless

DVD of the month hands-down (and one of the most powerful films of the year) is Breathless (Ddongpari): In Yang Ik-joon’s stupefying film, gangsters are only marginally more violent than wife-beaters and equally as contemptible. There is nothing glamorous about the outlaws who inhabit the directorial debut of South Korean actor Yang, or about the astounding ultra-violence that punctuates the film. The main character, the psychotic Sang-hoon, and the boys under his command work in parasitic packs, intimidating and beating up unfortunate people because it is the only life they know. But Breathless is a lot more than a film about domestic violence in South Korea: it is no issue movie, but a profoundly singular, devastatingly powerful, intensely personal vision of both the explicit and hidden violence underlying social and familial relationships. Read more.

South Korean cinema has also produced Chaw, a new contender to most ludicrous Korean monster movie ever made, although it is nowhere near as deliciously bonkers as The Host. This time, a huge human-eating boar attacks a small mountain village, and a crew of assorted misfits goes on the hunt. There’s the seen-it-all detective, the authoritarian, unprincipled chief, the moronic country cops and a comically professional gadget-laden, Finland-trained hunter. It’s silly and not one bit scary but it’s fun while it lasts.

Other March DVD releases include Takeshis’, part of Takeshi Kitano’s ‘auto-destruct’ series of films, Xei Fei’s Black Snow, the politically inflected tale of a former prisoner’s isolation and despair in Beijing, Sinking of Japan, a competent if by-the-numbers big-budget disaster movie that emulates Hollywood’s apocalyptic blockbusters. New horror releases include heavy-handed, exploitative Australian revenge thriller The Horseman, Chris Smith’s derivative but engaging time travel horror movie Triangle, awful low-budget Brit horror Salvage. Michael Haneke’s masterful The White Ribbon and Franti ek Vlácil’s Valley of the Bees, enticingly described as ‘a visionary and haunting medieval epic from the director of Marketa Lazarová‘, are also released this month.

Watch the trailer for Breathless:

Buy from Amazon:
Breathless (2-disc Special Edition) [DVD] [2008]
Chaw [DVD] [2009]
Takeshis’ [DVD] [2005]
Black Snow [DVD] [1990]
Sinking Of Japan [DVD] [2006]
Triangle [DVD] [2009]
The White Ribbon [DVD] [2009]
Valley of the Bees [DVD] [1967]

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

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

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

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

Marnie

To coincide with the Blonde Crazy retrospective, which runs from March 1-17 at BFI Southbank as part of the Birds Eye View Festival, Electric Sheep writers pick their favourite Hitchcock blonde. Tell us who your favourite is by leaving a comment below and win a pair of tickets to one of the films in the season! See details of the competition below.

LISA WILLIAMS: TIPPI HEDREN
For all his talent, Alfred Hitchcock was a tyrant and none more so than with Tippi Hedren. Just like the ‘poor little creatures caged up’ at the beginning of The Birds, Hitchcock bound Hedren so tightly to her contract that her career stayed in limbo until it was too late. In Marnie, she captures the haunted innocence of the title character but it is as The Birds’ Melanie that she is at her most iconic. Sometimes aloof, sometimes as overplayed as a B-movie actress, Hedren’s Melanie dominates the viewer’s gaze. Credit must also be given to her blonde bouffant, which, in its varying degrees of tidiness, reveals almost as much emotion as her face. The actress has since revealed that Hitchcock demanded real birds be used in her character’s final showdown, so part of her struggle is in fact genuine. This perhaps explains why she has since devoted her life to rescuing tigers, rather than anything of an avian nature.

TOBY WEIDMANN: EVA MARIE SAINT
My favourite Hitchcock blonde is Cary Grant’s ‘sparring’ partner in North by Northwest (1959), Eva Marie Saint. While Grace Kelly is probably the Master of Suspense’s archetypal woman, having starred in three of his films – Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, To Catch a Thief – I just feel Saint has a devilish quality that, to my mind, makes her more alluring. In many ways, Saint’s character, Eve Kendall, is an unusual Hitchcock blonde; yes, she oozes cool charm and well-mannered sophistication like many of the director’s other platinum-haired beauties, but unlike them, we also know almost immediately that she’s no virginal do-gooder. Her picture of innocence is tarnished from the off: we know she’s up to no good, we know she’s lying to Thornhill and we know she uses sex as a weapon (some kind of flyswatter) – she is, essentially, a ‘bad girl’ (who eventually comes good). And the allure of the dark side is always compelling. I know I would have fallen for Eve’s charms far sooner than Roger O Thornhill – a bewitching cock of the eyebrow, a dry quip, laden with double meaning, and the offer of a quick bunk-up in her cabin after dinner, and I would have been putty in her hands too. There may be better Hitchcock films, but is there a better Hitchcock blonde than Eva Marie Saint? I don’t think so…

MARK STAFFORD: TIPPI HEDREN
Others were fully formed before they reached his hands but Ms Hedren was Hitchcock’s custom-built blonde, designed and sculpted for mounting unease and screaming terror. Witness to the malicious ecological nightmare of The Birds, she looks fabulous darling with that skin, those clothes, that hair, that car, drawing the suspicion of locals as if she must be responsible for the vicious attacks simply because she looks so damn fine. And no wonder, she is like a visitor from some sleek space-age future that never was, here to tell an outpost of the 50s that a swingin’ paradise awaits. Of course, she must be punished for this and spends much of the film’s second half yelping in terror with a variety of feathered fiends screwing up that immaculate coiffure, pecking that perfect skin… As frosty Marnie she displayed a new range of traumas against a fake backdrop of matte paintings and modish psychodrama, in a great film that’s as difficult to love as its heroine. That was it for Hedren and Hitch, and she was never used so well again. But she wears a flapping crow well, and that’s a talent to be reckoned with.

EITHNE FARRY: GRACE KELLY
There is James Stewart sweatily asleep in his dark apartment, with his leg in a plaster cast and his mind on the goings-on in the flat opposite, and here comes Grace Kelly to wake the grumpy sleeping beauty with a kiss and light. Switching on three lamps, she introduces herself with golden insouciance: ‘Reading from top to bottom, Lisa…Carol…Freemont’. Self-contained, confident, beautifully dressed and bringing a catered dinner. She is a princess, with a couture wardrobe and a knack of packing an immensely beautiful negligée and delicate slippers into a very small suitcase. But she’s also the prince, heading into peril on a quest for the freighted-with-meaning wedding ring, and a murderous husband. Crisp of diction and dressed to the nines she’s a girl who’ll take chances, embark on adventures. By the end of Rear Window, she’s wearing the trousers, (and a very becoming) tailored shirt, pretending to read Beyond the High Himalayas. Checking to see that Stewart, now with both legs in cast up to the thighs, is still asleep, Ms Kelly swaps her travel book for a copy of Harper’s Bazaar. Very cool.

PAUL HUCKERBY: TIPPI HEDREN
Appearing in arguably two of Hitchcock’s greatest films – and certainly two of the juiciest female roles in the filmmaker’s oeuvre – The Birds and Marnie, Tippi Hedren was the ultimate and last of Hitchcock’s icy blondes. Strikingly beautiful with the same cool elegance as Grace Kelly, the model was ‘discovered’ by Hitchcock when watching a television commercial. Perhaps it is because she was moulded by the director himself that she became the most perfect example of his female ideal, through which he could play out his favourite fantasy – watching the urban sophisticate whose cool exterior is destroyed by a force of nature. Seeming older (already a mother in her 30s when making her film debut in The Birds) and more worldly than Kelly, she also was willing to suffer indignities more famous actresses would never have allowed – having birds tied to her and even thrown at her. Her terror as seagulls claw her hair can clearly be seen to be real. But perhaps she remains the perfect Hitchcock blonde because she barely made any other films for any other directors. Naturally, she is cool and aloof today when discussing why it was they fell out – why she refused to work for him and why he refused to let her work for anyone else – paying her to sit idly for two years while others clamoured to cast ‘Hitchcock’s new Grace Kelly’ in a multitude of roles. She occasionally hints that it was something to do with Hitchcock’s obsessive nature and that it would probably be classed as sexual harassment nowadays, but whatever it was, it seems it was worse than having live seagulls thrown at your face.

PAMELA JAHN: KIM NOVAK
In Vertigo, Kim Novak gives one of the greatest performances ever in a Hitchcock film, one that is carried by a deep understanding of the curious double-sided nature of her character, and which for me surpasses any other Hitchcock blonde in both its sensuality and vulnerability. It’s hard to imagine how the film would have turned out if Vera Miles (who starred in Hitchcock’s earlier film The Wrong Man and would later appear in Psycho) had played the part of Madeleine/Judy as originally planned, but – fortunately – Miles became pregnant just before the shooting was to start, and Novak took on the part. Dressed up in a wig and that close-fitting grey suit, she not only brilliantly portrays a woman who must impersonate another woman to please a man, but she also strives against Hitchcock’s disappointment at having to work with his second-choice blonde. She succeeds in both tasks and proves that Hitch for once was wrong in his initial choice of cast. A tough job incredibly well done.

VIRGINIE SÉLAVY: TIPPI HEDREN
Tippi Hedren may not be as dangerously pulpous as Kim Novak or as coolly urbane as Grace Kelly, but she is the ultimate Hitchcockian object of desire, and although delicate-looking, she turns out to be more resistant to aggressive male attention than many of her blonde counterparts. In The Birds, she comes under freak avian attack shortly after meeting an attractive man and being taken to his home. In Marnie, she is the pathological kleptomaniac who is given the dubious choice of marriage or prison by the boss (Sean Connery) who catches her. In both films, she is a woman in trouble, but she somehow eludes the obsessive, fetishistic suitors who try to keep her/birds/life under control. In Hitch’s world, blonde sophistication masks the predatory nature of romantic relationships and Hedren embodied this perhaps more strikingly than any other of the director’s muses.

ALEX FITCH: KIM NOVAK
In Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot wrote: ‘In every parting there is an image of death’… This could apply to Alfred Hitchcock’s depiction of Kim Novak in Vertigo, her entrances and departures into John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson’s life leading to the death and resurrection of her character. Hitchcock’s obsession with unobtainable blondes on screen is obvious to even the casual observer, but Novak is the most exquisite example in what is his most overt film on the subject. At face value, Scottie falls in love with a woman only to see her die, and then while dealing with post-traumatic stress tries to craft a stranger into her doppelgänger. If every Hitchcock blonde is a reflection of the ultimate woman in the director’s mind’s eye, then this explicit rendering of the theme turns the viewer into both psychoanalyst and voyeur as we see a desperate man try to overcome death through metaphorical necrophilia. If every Hitchcock blonde is a reflection, it is appropriate there was such a large filmic concatenation of afterimages following the film’s release. The fake Madeleine, a reflection of an unseen ‘real’ woman in Vertigo, gives a monologue about her former life in front of a felled redwood, a tree that has seen a hundred generations of deaths precede its own, a speech that was then adapted for the script of Chris Marker’s La Jetée in 1962. Sound and images from Vertigo were later used in Marker’s Sans Soleil, in Terry Gilliam’s remake of La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys, and in video works by artists Douglas Gordon (Feature Film) and Wago Kreider (Between 2 Deaths). Since Novak’s character and her scenes from Vertigo had such a remarkable afterlife, it is appropriate that she and Hitchcock collaborated once again, in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, introduced by the director (in archive footage) suitably from beyond the grave.

COMPETITION:
Leave a comment below to tell us who your favourite Hitchcock blonde is and explain why in no more than 200 words. The best two entries will win a pair of tickets each to a film of their choice in the Blonde Crazy retrospective, (subject to availability), courtesy of the BFI. Closing date for entries: Thursday 25 February.

Straight 8 2010 is calling for entries now, it’s the same rule as before: you get one roll of super 8, no editing, and if it’s selected you get to see your film for the first time at cannes or at one of their other screenings throughout 2010 – Benicassim, Rushes Soho Shorts, Raindance. Deadline is April 6.

The straight 8 2010 launch party screening is at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton at 9pm, Thursday 18 February. Tickets £1 from straight8.net.

If you need inspiration, watch Springlove, one of our favourite straight 8 films of 2008:

Electric Sheep contributor John Berra is the editor of a new guide to Japanese cinema, which offers in-depth essays, research resources and an A-Z of reviews on everything from samurai warriors, yakuza enforcers, anime heroes and atomic monsters to the political works of the Japanese New Wave.

Read John Berra’s reviews of the Fukasaku Collection and Nagisa Oshima’s Violence at High Noon.

Amer

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

More info on these films from the press release:

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

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

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

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

Full programme at www.frightfest.co.uk.