Somewhere in Palilula

Somewhere in Palilula anything can happen, and frequently it does. We are invited into a world turned upside down in Silviu Purcărete’s carnivalesque triumph. Serafim, a young paediatrician, arrives in this ghost town, and we learn about the place and its inhabitants through his eyes and the stories he tells. Hard spirits and cigarettes are the staple diet of a community of drunks, doctors, cleaners, prostitutes and a hermaphrodite. There are no children, the hospital patients are not sick, and soon Serafim starts to adapt and feel like he belongs there. Purcărete lifts us to emotional heights with a scintillating score (by composer Vasilé Şirli) and awe-inspiring theatrical tableaux (production designers are Helmut Stürmer and Dragoş Buhagiar), then lets us fall into depths of visceral mire, then up again and so on. The director immerses us in fantasy but his tale is hugely allegorical. Here, the legacy of Soviet rule and the onset of market economy in Romania are parodied and mythologised. By pushing surrealist and magic realist genres of cinema, Purcărete carves out a space for himself alongside Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini. This UK premiere at the EEFF comes highly recommended.

Nicola Woodham

Kotoko

Kotoko starts with an intensity that doesn’t diminish throughout the film. The story could pan out as a recognisable tale of a woman whose anxieties are exacerbated by her role as a new mother. Kotoko is paranoid, exhausted, and losing her grip on reality. So far, so what? But Shin’ya Tsukamoto has a unique vision, as we know from his Tetsuo films. In actual fact, this familiar account, shot in vérité style, includes an extreme level of violence. This brutality takes place in the narrative world of the film: Kotoko experiences beatings but also administers them generously herself. It is also part of Tsukamoto’s treatment of her psychological state and her mental decline. One technique is to manipulate diegetic sounds to create a sense of overwhelming agitation. He makes cooking with a large wok sound like being run over by a truck. This is interwoven with sweet and contemplative shots, many lingering on Kotoko, played by Tsukamoto’s attractive writing collaborator and star of the film, Cocco. Images of beautiful women harming themselves don’t do it for me but, on the whole, this filmmaker’s capacity to portray transgressive violence on screen, which you can feel in your own body as you watch, is pretty phenomenal.

Nicola Woodham

Brand X: Sally Kirkland and Taylor Mead in the president039s press conference (Gianfranco Mantegna, care of the New York Public Library)

We are very excited about the screening of playfully anarchic underground movie Brand X on Wednesday 20 June at Tate Modern. Previously thought lost, this joyful satire of politics and media stars Abbie Hoffman, Sally Kirkland, Taylor Mead, Sam Shepard, Candy Darling and Ultra Violet. Not to be missed!

For more information, please go to the Tate website.

Children of the Revolution

The East End Film Festival has just started and we are very excited about the screening of Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Children of the Revolution. We have a pair of tickets to win, courtesy of the EEFF, see details on how to enter on our Film Roulette page. Look out for our review of the film to be published in the next few weeks!

Ulrike Meinhof and Fusako Shigenobu were two women who emerged from the student revolutions of 1968 to become the leading female revolutionaries of their time. Appalled by the killing in Vietnam, they set out to destroy capitalist power through world revolution, as leaders of the Baader Meinhof Group and the Japanese Red Army respectively.

This documentary introduces us to their daughters who provide us with a unique perspective on two of the most notorious ‘terrorists’ in contemporary history. May and Bettina emerged from difficult childhoods to lead their own extraordinary lives. With capitalism once more in crisis, they face up to their mother’s actions and we ask: What were they fighting for and what have we learned?

Rubber

Quentin ‘Mr Oizo’ Dupieux’s gamble of making a serial-killer thriller with a tyre in the role of the psychopath had Electric Sheep salivating in anticipation. It starts well, opening with a US cop in the desert warning spectators armed with binoculars that sometimes there is ‘no reason’ for what happens in films. Their entertainment programme begins when a tyre thrown away in the desert comes back to life and starts exterminating the animals in its path, blowing them up with the sheer force of its evil vibrations. So far so good, but all the deaths follow exactly the same pattern, so that it soon becomes very repetitive. Inventive cruelty is one of the essential ingredients of a good horror film and it is sorely lacking here. The tension and terror one could hope for fail to materialise, and it isn’t imaginatively surreal enough to hold the audience’s attention. A great idea, but ultimately a disappointingly underwhelming experience.

Virginie Sélavy

Cure

This year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme focuses on the marked resurgence of Japanese cinema from the mid-1990s onwards. Including established names such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa as well as up-and-coming talent Yuya Ishii, the featured directors have carved a new path for the future and contributed to the recent success of Japanese cinema around the world. Showcasing a great breadth of creativity, the 2011 line-up offers UK audiences an insight into a pivotal period which changed the landscape of Japanese cinema and provided the industry with a new lease of life.

Don’t miss the fantastic Cure, which we previously wrote about in an article on director Kiyoshi Kurosawa:

In Cure, murder victims are found with an X slashed across their throats. But in each case the killer is a different person. Soon Inspector Takabe (played by Kôji Yakusho) comes to believe that the link between the killings may be the enigmatic Mesmer student Mamiya who is seemingly able to suggest murderous thoughts through hypnosis to whomever he encounters. [...]

A supremely ambiguous figure, Mamiya is a potent creation whose mere presence on-screen is enough to give the viewer goose bumps. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he says to everyone he meets, answering all questions that are put to him with another question, never disclosing anything personal. Is it possible that Mamiya should be truly empty, as he claims, and that by having emptied himself of everything that made him what he was, he has become the ultimate seducer, a sheer void that reflects their own selves back to people, enabling him to exert total control over them? Whatever the answer, evil in Cure is not limited to one character but is a diffuse phenomenon, an atmosphere that pervades everyone and everything, buildings too. Mamiya’s former haunt, a grimy warehouse partitioned by plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling and filled with caged animals and books on hypnotism, exudes an unwholesome, malign air; the same atmosphere of occult malevolence pervades a derelict building that was the venue for mysterious experiments in hypnotism decades previously. Building up throughout the film, it is all this that comes to be invoked in each re-appearance of the X, the profound enigma of evil, the contagion of the malefic through the air, through invisible waves that circulate between people and places.

Brighton Rock

We heartily recommend the BFI’s short season of nitrate films, which start today with a screening of Brighton Rock.

From 1895 to 1952 films were shot on cellulose nitrate stock, which can be highly flammable and subject to drastic deterioration. Archives the world over have tried, sometimes in vain, to preserve this fragile medium which, Dracula-like, can crumble away into dust.

This short season, which continues in August, gives audiences the first opportunity in ten years to view some of our nitrate prints in the only public cinema in the UK with the licence to screen them.

The higher silver content in nitrate prints is what lends black and white films a wonderful lustre, while an original dye transfer Technicolor nitrate print with its vibrant colours offers an unmissable experience. Don’t deny yourself these pleasures.

Poster for Tarantula

‘The 50s were a great time to be a kid, because the whole culture was so juvenile.’
Joe Dante

‘Go get ‘em, midnight!’ says the scarred man, sending his trained horse down by itself to attack the two riders in the valley below. ‘Lousy cops, always crowding a guy,’ snarls a teen hoodlum anti-hero swerving his car to avoid a back projection. Later he’ll be beaten up in a clumsy cafe brawl that he starts with the line ‘you’re outta your class, throttle jockey!’ Alfred Hitchcock pops up, presenting something. Then there’s Naked City spliced with a stag reel. The Lone Ranger patronises Tonto, Nabisco cereals are giving away ‘Defenders of America’ cards with their shredded wheat, baseball cards depicting US submarines, planes and missiles to warm the heart of your little cold warriors. The sponsors of Robin Hood, Wildroot Cream Oil, proudly announce that it ‘contains lanolin and cholesterol’, and on it goes: George Reeves’s Superman, Abbot and Costello, Rin Tin Tin, Bufferin and Lifebuoy soap, Alpha Bites cereal and Lustre Creme….

This is Joe Dante’s Movie Orgy, a hand-spliced avalanche of mostly monochrome pop culture, adverts, TV shows, B-movies, and whatever else Dante could find, made in 1968 and then toured round college campuses for the next two years. Screenings were supported by Schlitz beer, and the full thing lasted for seven hours (Dante: ‘after the third hour it got funny’). I’m watching a 90-minute edit courtesy of Cine-Excess, the cult film conference, and then sticking around as the charming Mr Dante is interviewed by Kim Newman afterwards. There was only ever one print of The Movie Orgy, and it played 200 dates, constantly falling apart, being added to, cut and re-spliced. No permission was sought for the use of the Orgy footage, and it carries a sly 68 anti-Establishment charge; Vietnam hangs heavily in the background (a trailer for John Wayne’s The Green Berets is one of the few contemporary clips to turn up), and the sexual and racial attitudes of the 50s are repeatedly brought into question. You can almost smell the dope smoke as you watch it today.

The teen hoodlum flick is called Speed Crazy, the cheapo Western remains unnamed, a random pattern that continues throughout; we know that Teenagers from Outer Space and The Giant Gila Monster are in there, and devotees will recognise Bert I Gordon’s The Beginning of the End and Jack Arnold’s Tarantula, but for much of the rest we’re on our own in a world devoid of explanation, the only context being provided by juxtaposition. Whole features are hacked down to their essentials, mined for weirdness and hilarity, the stuff that Dante and friends found funny at NYU at the time, and the stuff that they thought was cool when they were nine years old. At times it resembles a teenage mix tape made with love, at others a scabrous unveiling of the American subconscious, and mostly it’s a goofy mess. With its hand-lettered titles, varying sound levels, clicks, pops and hisses, it’s a distinctly low-fidelity experience, but that adds to its crude power. It’s like Andy Warhol via Mad Magazine, and though it’s largely shapeless there’s a definite method in the madness somewhere. Dante recalls that the original epic ended with a solid 20 minutes or so of the closing moments of dozens of different old shows, and the whole ‘happy trails, buckaroos’ montage would reduce most of the hardy souls who had sat through the whole thing to tears. In a world without video, DVD or the internet, all this material, this 50s juvenilia, had disappeared from people’s lives, and The Movie Orgy dredged it up, sliced it into pieces and fed it back to the viewers, in what must have been a strange and heady experience. Dante had the idea for The Movie Orgy after noting the popularity of a college screening of a complete 1940s Batman serial over five hours. Without the week-long wait between episodes that characterised the original run the audience were made forcefully aware of the repetitions of footage, the outrageous cheat cliff-hanger endings, and all the absurdities and narrative contortions of the type of entertainment that they had doubtless accepted at face value when they were children.

Susan Sontag’s influential essay on camp had recently been published, and The Movie Orgy followed its lead: to be included, footage had to be played totally straight, otherwise it wasn’t funny, and it should ideally push the buttons of the baby boomers in the audience. Rules are made to be broken, and some knowing satirical clips appear amid the Howdy Doody and Puralin, but for the most part it’s an unpolished, disarming trawl through the cathode ray hinterland I only knew through Drew Friedman’s genius comic strips. Here they are, the aging music hall comedians, hard-sell commercials and nightmarish kids’ shows, a festival of hokey staging and stiff delivery. It’s baffling and alarming and hilarious by turns; one moment you could be watching an ad for the Little Hostess Buffet set ‘by Marx’, a toy full dinner service for the career-free little girl, the next you’re pitched into the sheer proto-Lynchian hell of Andy’s Gang, where a live cat and mouse (Midnight and Squeaky) have been strapped into torture devices so that they can be filmed playing Salvation Army drums from a variety of angles while a distressed-looking fat man warbles ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so’ over the footage. It’s a good thing that the kids in the Andy’s Gang audience are provided by stock footage, otherwise they would be screaming in abject terror, as I would have been had I not been laughing so damned hard.

I would love The Movie Orgy for this sequence alone, and there’s plenty more where that came from. It’s a social document from the heady days of revolution, it’s a post-war treasure trove, and for Joe Dante fans it’s a touchstone. This is where the strait-laced dialogue from Mant, Matinee‘s film-within-a-film came from; here’s the first evidence of the anti-corporate, anti-military creator of Gremlins, Small Soldiers and The Homecoming; hell, here’s even the puerile knucklehead who had a hand in Amazon Women on the Moon. It’s a gas. Now, let’s get the full seven-hour cut over, somebody score some Schlitz beer and home-grown, pull up a beanbag, let’s watch this bastard properly.

Mark Stafford

Heartless

Our friends at the Prince Charles Cinema are showing Philip Ridley’s latest film, Heartless, on Wednesday 19 May. It tells the menacing and magical tale of Jamie (ACROSS THE UNIVERSE star Jim Sturgess) born with a heart-shaped birthmark on his face. Shunned by those who find him repulsive, the photographer’s son lives in a part of London’s East End notorious for gang violence. When his mother is viciously murdered, the media reports it’s by a hoodie wearing a devil mask. But Jamie soon realises the thugs aren’t wearing disguises at all; they really are demons and hell on earth is beginning to plague the capital city. Yet all is not what it seems in enfant terrible Ridley’s unique horror fantasy landscape ingeniously informed by the current climate of fear running through every strata of modern society.

The film will be introduced by director Philip Ridley.

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