The second volume of the World Directory Cinema series on Japan, edited by Electric Sheep contributor John Berra, will be published on 15 February 2012.

Building on and bringing up to date the material presented in the first installment of Directory of World Cinema: Japan, this volume continues the exploration of the enduring classics, cult favorites, and contemporary blockbusters of Japanese cinema with new contributions from leading critics and film scholars. Among the additions to this volume are in-depth treatments of two previously unexplored genres — youth cinema and films depicting lower-class settings — considered alongside discussions of popular narrative forms, including J-Horror, samurai cinema, anime, and the Japanese New Wave.

Accompanying the critical essays in this volume are more than 150 new film reviews, complemented by full-colour film stills, and significantly expanded references for further study. From the Golden Age to the film festival favourites of today, Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2 completes this comprehensive treatment of a consistently fascinating national cinema.

Two-Lane Blacktop

This is an extract from a previous article on Monte Hellman.

It seems remarkable that a major studio like Universal stumped up the cash for what Monte Hellman and producer Michael Laughlin proposed: a road movie in which all the characters have generic names, in which the cars also share the billing as ‘characters’, and in which the proposed competition fizzles out almost as soon as it starts with the competitors effectively helping each other out along the way. Indeed the move from Darwinistic struggle and the survival of the fittest to a programme of cooperation might seem a little belated in 1971. Easy Rider had already dealt with the end of the Summer of Love though with US troops still very much in Vietnam the call for mutual aid was still vital in many minds.

Jack Nicholson plays ‘G.T.O’, the driver of a yellow ’32 Pard Roadster’ who challenges James Taylor (‘The Driver’) and Dennis Wilson (‘The Mechanic’) in their grey 55 Chevvy to a race across the US from Los Angeles to Washington DC. As the only trained actor, Oates is the perfect foil for the laconicism of the other leads and without him the whole film might have been as grey and serious as the car they drive. Oates’s car, by contrast, is a mixture of schoolboy dream and camp excess and his character is all bluster and pompousness. Along the way they are joined by Laurie Bird (‘The Girl’) and they embark on a trip which, because it is from West to East, deconstructs the impetus towards American myth. Indeed, it’s tempting to see the Chevvy as a demythicised version of Melville’s great white whale, its dull matt grey signifying the end of days rather than the promise of glorious beginnings; it’s a road trip in which ‘nothing’ happens, with the race itself soon becoming something of a red herring.

Jeff Hilson

Troll Hunter

Norwegian monster mockumentary Troll Hunter is released on DVD this month. Here’s an extract from the review we ran for the theatrical release:

Troll Hunter, directed by André Øvredal, follows in the mockumentary footsteps of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity. The odd thing about all those American iterations of the idea (spoof verité footage with a fantastical intrusion from beyond) is how irritating the whiny characters are. Do American filmmakers assume that ‘real people’ are inherently dumb and annoying?

The Norwegians, thankfully, seem fonder of their characters, although admittedly in-depth characterisation isn’t something Troll Hunter concerns itself with. Instead we get understated, deadpan performances, especially from the titular employee of Troll Security Services, Otto Jespersen, an admirably gruff portrayal of a working Joe who decides, more or less on a whim, to blow off the lid of state secrecy concealing from the Norwegian public the existence of gigantic, boulder-eating monsters who can smell the blood of a Christian man…

The trolls themselves are rather splendid: their design is unapologetically comical, with phallic noses and Highland cow fur for the Mountain Kings, and equally gross and cartoony anatomies for the other sub-species we encounter. But the night vision photography and shaky-cam aesthetic allow these preposterous mooncalves to be cunningly incorporated into the surrounding film, making up in photographic verisimilitude what they signally lack in dignity and credibility.

Very handsomely photographed amid spectacular Norwegian scenery, all looming mountains and misty meres, Troll Hunter seems destined for cult status, and its likeable, easy-going approach doesn’t outstay its welcome. Enjoy it before the inevitable sequels and Hollywood remake sully its memory.

David Cairns

The Last Walk (Jordan Baseman)

On January 6, short films become the capital’s main attraction as the London Short Film Festival returns to the city’s cinemas and some more inventive settings like the University Tent at the Occupy London Stock Exchange Camp. Now in its ninth edition, LSFF continues to offer an ambitious and winningly broad programme with DIY work by emerging talents providing the perfect counterpoint to its industry events and comprehensive retrospectives of more acclaimed and established filmmakers.

The ICA’s Lo-Budget Mayhem screening promises to be an anarchic assortment with an eccentric hand-drawn animation of Hulk Hogan (Peter Millard’s Hogan), an excruciatingly awkward tale of public transport (Naren Wilks’s Journey on a Bus) and a very strange story of motherhood (Matilda Myszka’s Baby Meat). LSFF’s delight in such offbeat offerings will also be in evidence at the Midnight Movies Nightcap event and Salon des Refusés, a specially curated selection of films that did not make it into this year’s LSFF programme. It’s a fun and original idea that should raise interesting questions about what makes a ‘successful’ festival film.

As with previous editions of LSFF, this year’s programme emphasises the sensory experience of watching films. There are several events dedicated to the interaction between music and cinema and various festival strands that present films selected solely on the strength of their cinematography. Leftfield and Luscious, in particular, promises strong work, such as Jordan Baseman’s The Last Walk, which sets a compelling spoken narrative to meditative abstract visuals. The medium of analogue film is also to be celebrated with showcases of work on 16mm and 35mm film. At the Hackney Picturehouse Attic, Suitcase Cinema will present a selection of Cold War archive footage and Screen Bandita will gather together junkshop and attic finds of discarded, forgotten reels.

London itself is another focus of the 2012 festival with two screenings organised in association with the Museum of London in the Docklands: My Community will present a selection of shorts by young urban filmmakers; and London Lives will explore life in the capital through a varied programme of new works. In the documentary strand, another view of urban life is expressed through Hackney Lullabies, an award-winning short by Japanese filmmaker Kyoko Miyake. The film explores the shared experience of immigrant mothers living in Hackney and keeping their original cultures alive by singing lullabies to their young children. The diversity of voices presented in this warm and thoughtful film is mirrored in the programming of the festival itself. Looking through this year’s calendar of events, it is clear that LSFF aims to present a broad social spectrum as well as a wide aesthetic range. The Amnesty Human Rights Action Centre has organised an event to discuss disability in film while the Not the Skin I Live In strand celebrates Black and Asian stories on film. Female filmmakers are honoured with a dedicated festival strand (which includes an excellent, serious, yet witty call to arms about Nigerian women, Radio Amina) and the special event Dirty Diaries, a showcase of feminist porn films from Swedish filmmakers. This attempt to explore and represent all sorts of subjects and filmmakers makes for a lively and exciting programme of events. LSFF looks set to continue the success of previous years, keeping London audiences engaged and entertained.

Eleanor McKeown

Hiroshima Nagasaki Download

We review some of the rare delights and provocative works offered by the second Zipangu Fest, which presented the best of cutting-edge and avant-garde Japanese cinema from November 18 to 24.

Nuclear Reactions

It seemed only natural that Zipangu’s curators would be interested in exploring existing Japanese reactions to nuclear issues. Two documentaries by Hitomi Kamanaka exposed long-standing opposition to nuclear power on environmental grounds; two other films screened at the festival took a more emotional approach to the devastating consequences of nuclear weapons.

Shinpei Takeda’s 2009 Hiroshima Nagasaki Download, made with an old friend from college, is a road movie-cum-documentary about the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors now living in North America. It’s also a film about the 30-something filmmakers trying to understand their country’s past; to experience, in a small way, the horrors that an older generation lived through. While it first seemed that they included too much of themselves in the documentary (travelling in their car, conversations with each other in diners), this approach actually allows for a little distance in an otherwise incredibly intense and emotional film. The audience, like the filmmakers, can barely imagine living through such a horrific event; the memories of the survivors, still clear and vivid decades later, are inexpressibly painful; their stories are harrowing, and sometimes inspirational.

Less immediate and evocative, but still interesting, was Kaneto Shindo’s 1959 docu-drama Lucky Dragon No. 5, about the crew of a fishing boat who are exposed to fallout from the American nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll. The opening scenes, as the villagers prepare for the ship’s send-off and the tuna fishermen first set sail, are impressionistic and visually absorbing; the race by scientists to determine what caused the fishermen’s illnesses when they finally return to land is tedious and over-long. The film is most rewarding towards the end, when it becomes a moving tribute to the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, represented in the guise of a dying fisherman. Sarah Cronin

The Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen (Kiyohiko Ushihara, 1938)

Screened by kind permission from the National Film Centre of Tokyo, The Ghost Cat is delightfully off-kilter. Believed to be lost, this recently re-discovered print of the 1938 film is dilapidated and scratched, with the images dissolving and fading as the spooky story unfolds. It’s a tale of jealousy, love, revenge and the supernatural, where the damaged film stock adds to the strangeness. Set against a theatrical background – two of the main characters are involved in a Kabuki ensemble – it tells the story of Mitsue, played with callous aplomb by Sumiko Suzuki, a possessive actress who loves sweet, but lowly Seijiro, a shamisen (a stringed musical instrument) player.

Things pretty soon go awry on the romantic front when Seijiro’s wandering cat brings the lovely Okiyo, daughter of a noble samurai family, to his doorstep. She falls for Seijiro, provoking the jealous wrath of Mitsue, who first dispatches Seijiro’s sleek, black cat with a hairpin before killing Okiyo, and, in a final act of jealous passion, throws Seijiro’s beloved shamisen into the river.

But the cat, Okiyo and the musical instrument refuse to rest in peace. The shamisen is rescued from the water, and its series of new owners are plagued by episodes of surreal hauntings, attended by odd screen blackouts and strange sounds. The film culminates in a hallucinogenic finale at a Kabuki performance, where the ghost cat, the ghost girl, an avenging sister, dressed as a monkey, and some impressively kaleidoscopic images, accompanied by a tensely, discordant shamisen ensure that Mituse gets her comeuppance in a suitably sinister style. Eithne Farry

Shirome (Kôji Shiraishi, 2010)

Japanese horror maestro Kôji Shiraishi is a director fixated on overused storytelling styles: ‘found footage’ horror and the notorious torture porn. The Curse and Occult both took the mock-doc route while his notorious Grotesque is banned in the UK because of its ‘spectacle of sadism’. With Shirome, Shiraishi has stuck with his tried and tested formula, this time following a girl-band called Momoiro Clover, who take part in a Derek Acorah-type TV show. Shiraishi himself takes the role of director and tells the teenagers that they’re heading into a haunted location to confront the urban legend of Shirome, an entity that can grant wishes but drags you to hell if you’re insincere.

What’s striking is that Shirome isn’t the BBFC-baiting horror you might expect. There’s no gore or on-screen death but Shiraishi builds a creepy atmosphere thanks to the restrained use of special effects and the near-hysterical screeching girls. There’s a lot of backstory but it adds to the realistic premise that this is a shoddy TV show relying on cheap tricks to make easy entertainment.

The film is an attempt to explore the quest for fame and what kids are prepared to sacrifice in order to get it. It’s a simple morality tale, which doesn’t outstay its welcome. Its ending might be blunt and a little obvious but Shiraishi has made an accessible film that dispenses with the ‘how sick can we make this?’ mantra of many current horror directors in favour of good old-fashioned scares. Richard Badley

Dreams of a Life

Joyce Carol Vincent’s body was discovered in her Wood Green flat three years after she had died. Documentary maker Carol Morley has attempted to piece the life of this mystery woman together and has built a portrait, not of the ageing shut-in that most people might have imagined from the tabloid reports, but a pretty would-be singer and bubbly social girl who seemed to hang around in other people’s lives and never quite become herself. Fascinating stuff, with brilliantly assembled material that makes you ponder what effect you have on those around you and what impression you will leave behind. It’s a pity that the long, stagey reconstructions just don’t work and seem to strain for an effect that they don’t achieve, because the talking heads quietly reduced me to tears.

Mark Stafford

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

After a 40-year career in music and performance art, during which he co-founded COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, Genesis Breyer P. Orridge and his late wife and collaborator Lady Jaye are the focus of Marie Losier’s unique take on the ‘rockumentary’ genre. By turns irreverent, touching and eye-opening, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye places its subjects’ romantic and performative relationship at its centre and incorporates archival material of Orridge’s various bands in action. Losier adopts a ‘cut-up’ technique to construct the portrait of Orridge, Jaye and their various friends and collaborators similar to the one so intrinsic to the work of one of the art and music worlds’ great outsiders. Hand-held footage, home videos, stills and graphics, with a soundtrack culled exclusively from Orridge’s diverse back catalogue, create a collage-like portrait of the man, the great love of his life and their ‘Pandrogyne’ project – wherein the married couple dressed alike and underwent various cosmetic surgery procedures to look like one another. Rather than appear as a narcissistic ‘freak-show’, Orridge and Jaye, with their clear devotion to each other, open-minded, creative instincts and disinterest in conventional mores, are engaging, inspirational and good-natured figures. The music may not be to everybody’s taste – ranging as it does from the grinding, proto-industrial drone of Throbbing Gristle to the psychedelic dance of Psychic TV – and the physical extremes of the ‘Pandrogyne’ project may disconcert some viewers (Orridge’s breast implants especially), but you’ll be hard-pushed to find a more strikingly candid, and unexpectedly moving, portrait of life, love and creativity at the experimental end of the rock’n'roll spectrum.

Neil Mitchell

No. 89 Shimen Roa

As with last year’s event, the 8th China Independent Film Festival was an exercise in under-promotion: a schedule that was only available in advance if you had the right email address, screenings in lecture rooms at the downtown campus of Nanjing University, and an opening ceremony at a moderately sized venue that provided sufficient seating for those in the know, but left curious latecomers standing in the aisles. This is not a method of organisation that is exclusive to CIFF, as any independent film festival operating in mainland China has to take such measures due to the inclusion of features that have not been approved by SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television). 2011 has been a particularly difficult year for such festivals, with the organisers of the Documentary Film Festival China being pressured to cancel the Beijing-based event (which would also have been in its eighth year) due to a tense political climate that coincided with the detention of the dissident artist Ai Weiwei and increased mainland internet restrictions. The 6th Beijing Independent Film Festival went ahead in October, although not without disruption, as the venue had to be changed twice and police presence was reported at the launch event. Representatives of SARFT were in attendance at CIFF, but did not intervene at either screenings or workshop sessions, meaning that the festival ran smoothly compared to its equivalent in the capital. With political conflicts effectively sidestepped, CIFF was able to offer another interesting selection of features, documentaries and experimental shorts, with filmmakers present for post-screening discussions of their work. It could be said that the ‘real’ festival took place at the local branch of Sculpting in Time (a Chinese version of Starbucks that serves alcoholic beverages in addition to over-priced coffee), where the network of directors, distributors, academics and journalists was further expanded.

While the features emerging from China’s independent sector are undoubtedly political, they often avoid sweeping state-of-the-nation surveys in favour of social microcosms to show the effect of national shifts on the family unit or the individual. Zhang Ciyu’s haunting Pear (2010) is a chamber piece concerning a young married couple who are struggling to complete the construction of their new house on a mountain slope; the wife ends up working in a brothel in town to earn the necessary funds and the husband is left to hang around the waiting room of the establishment while she services her clients. Regardless of how much money she makes, the couple can never keep up with the rate of economic acceleration and the pears of the title – the wife’s favourite fruit, which are brought to her in a basket by her husband – are left to rot, much like their dreams of a prosperous future. The eponymous heroine of Song Chuan’s insightful and quietly heart-breaking Huan Huan (2010) is a young village woman who becomes the mistress of the local doctor; she struggles to find her place in the world despite, or because of, a near-constant bombardment of social messages (birth control regulations, labour force drives, state-controlled television news). The turbulent political landscape of the late 1980s is filtered through a nostalgic lens in Shu Haolun’s No. 89 Shimen Road (2010), although reference to Tiananmen ensures that this engaging drama will not receive a mainland release. High school student Xiaoli lives with his strict but understanding grandfather in Shanghai following his mother’s relocation to the United States, and becomes romantically involved with two girls who represent opposing social ideologies; next-door neighbour Lanmi becomes an escort for easy money while classmate Lili is more politically motivated. Shu resorts to some coming-of-age clichés, but this is still an evocative snapshot of youthful uncertainty at a time of social instability.

If the nicely crafted No. 89 Shimen Road represents a middle-of-the-road approach to Chinese independent cinema – a universal narrative placed within a wider political context – then Pema Tseden’s Old Dog (2011) and Jin Rui’s The Cockfighters (2010) exist at opposite ends of the spectrum. Old Dog is a poetic portrait of Tibetan life in which the unauthorised sale of the titular animal by the owner’s son leads his father to retrieve the dog on the grounds that using an animal as a commodity is taboo in traditional Tibetan culture. It’s a thoughtful contemplation on the changing values of Tibet under state reform, with striking long shots of farmland divided by barbed wire and town streets that show slow but steady signs of economic progress. By contrast, The Cockfighters is aggressively commercial, a punchy rural thriller that follows the feud that develops between a youth from a wealthy family and a grassroots family man when the former loses his first cockfighting match to the latter. The narrative device of a destructive game of one-upmanship owes much to the genre cinema of South Korea, right down to the obligatory shaving scene before the climactic showdown, and The Cockfighters certainly makes a gripping bid for international box office viability. Developing links between China’s independent sector and alternative production in other Asian territories were adequately illustrated by Zhao Ye’s altogether gentler Last Chestnuts (2010), which was filmed in Nara, Japan, at the invitation of Naomi Kawase, director of The Mourning Forest (2007). A terminally ill Tokyo woman (Kaori Momoi) wanders the area, searching for her missing son, with only a couple of digital photos as clues to his whereabouts, and is assisted by helpful locals; Zhao conveys the time-sensitive desperation of the mother’s search, although the emotional impact is lessened by unnecessary meta-references to Kawase’s work in the same region.

The documentary line-up also offered a range of approaches to independent filmmaking, from studies of creative culture to self-portraits and undercover reports. Wang Hao’s Seven Days in a Year (2011) documents the responsibilities of an internet-monitoring department in Chongqing, revealing how such restrictions are implemented by low-level state servants who spend the day browsing bulletin boards for negative comments and brainstorming SMS advertising strategies to encourage patriotic feeling. Beijing’s art scene was examined by Zeng Guo in two documentaries, 798 Station (2010) and The Cold Winter (2011). The former provides an account of how a thriving art zone comprised of galleries and studios has evolved from factory space, while the latter follows the unsuccessful efforts of artists to stop the demolition of the art districts that surround the central hub of 798 Station. The Cold Winter shows both the strengths and weaknesses of China’s artistic communities, with everyone committed to a certain ideal, but the movement compromised by a lack of agreement on how to practically realise it. However, as with the features, the most interesting documentaries were those that focused on the individual, exploring past and present Chinese society through daily routine or recounted memory. Wei Xiaobo’s The Days (2010) is a candid first-person account of the director’s cash-strapped lifestyle with his live-in girlfriend Xei Fang; they fight, make love and Wei undertakes various freelance assignments to pay the rent. Xu Tong’s Shattered (2011) follows Tang Caifeng, a woman with a chequered past (involvement in illegal mining and prostitution) who returns to her north-east home town to reunite with her father, a retired engineer who was educated under Japanese rule; Old Man Tang has kept many artefacts of the occupation, but his ‘living history’ is of greater value than the portraits of Lenin and Mao Zedong that clutter the home.

Due to the political implications of making films outside the system in China, not to mention the problem of securing exhibition and distribution for productions that lack the ‘dragon seal’ from SARFT, it is still appropriate to group such efforts under the ‘independent’ banner. Yet it should be noted that some films in this year’s CIFF line-up, such as No. 89 Shimen Road and The Cockfighters, find Chinese independent cinema moving towards an American independent model by locating their social concerns within recognisable commercial genres, not to mention boasting production values that contrast with the ‘hand-made’ qualities of Huan Huan or Pear. This is not necessarily a problem, as coming-of-age dramas or revenge thrillers with a certain level of social-political context appeal to the international art-house crowd, who regularly watch films that exist on the fringes of the mainstream but still adhere to genre parameters. However, it is hoped that such potential crossover successes will not overshadow more marginal works like Yang Heng’s Sun Spots (2009), a minimalist romance between a bored young woman and a violent gangster that is told in just 31 long takes with no close-ups. Sun Spots polarised audience opinion – some found it to be a patience-tester, others were hypnotised by its deliberate rhythm – but nonetheless generated much discussion due to its formal qualities. On the basis of this year’s CIFF selection, the Chinese independent sector appears to have achieved a balance between artistic exploration and commercial aspirations; these potentially conflicting versions of ‘independent production’ are able to comfortably co-exist, mutually supporting one another due to the difficult circumstances under which both are brought to fruition by their directors. CIFF has also encountered difficulties in terms of accommodating the growing interests of directors and viewers within a limited space and schedule, but like the filmmakers that it supports, the festival has managed to find a measure of freedom within a world of restriction.

John Berra

Selfless in the Bath of Lava

Perched on a leather stool facing three television screens with headphones hooked up below, it finally occurred to me that I was, in fact, in the wrong place. It was a haphazard start to my guided tour of the Hayward Gallery’s retrospective of Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist. The films opposite were early works by Rist; single-channel videos that had challenged the conventions of video art when they were produced in the 1980s and now spluttered and flickered away to an empty room. Embracing technical glitches and amateur aesthetics, the films presented layers of colour bleeds and interference with text that looked like it had been written using a primitive computer programme. The neon tones and the fuzzy lines of broken video have become quaint relics of a time when VHS tapes littered homes and MTV shocked parents. The video – a relatively new medium but a steady part of everyday life – was ripe for playful experimentation, just as digital technology excites artists today.

The works showed a female, self-orientated perspective. The relationships between men and women are on the whole antagonistic; a disembodied hand plunges a woman underwater in (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes (1988) while a naked man swings his fists at the camera in Sexy Sad I (1987). There is a bitter yet humorous reproach in You Called Me Jacky (1990) as Rist herself, immaculately beehived, lip-synchs to Kevin Coyne’s song ‘Jackie and Edna’. Looking like a sardonic karaoke-ing member of the B52s, Rist stares into the camera with a look of defiant insolence as images of train journeys and flames fade behind her.

When I finally caught up with the tour led by feminist philosopher Nina Power, in front of some more recent pieces, it was clear that analysis of the work would be loose and non-prescriptive. Rist’s artwork, while it has clear themes, is fluid and slightly evasive. The discussion threw up questions of feminism, scale, nature and narcissism but never arrived at any clear conclusions. In Rist’s later works, the simple format of the 80s videos is gone and replaced by more complex sculptural installations and inventive projection. Film is displayed on white walls, along sheets of material, on miniature monitors buried in the floor; it is hidden in handbags and conch shells, reflected on humongous mirrors and inside the model of an HIV virus. The female perspective shifts its focus on the woman’s body with dizzyingly claustrophobic close-ups of mouths and genitalia. The natural world starts to appear in a hyper-saturated, rave-inspired aesthetic. The speed of the moving images is excessively slow, almost trance-like, creating a hallucinatory, dreamy alternate universe.

Amid the stunning bodies and idealised visions of nature, a hint of carnage seeps through. One of the centrepieces of the exhibition, Lobe of the Lung (2009), projects images onto three large walls as the viewer sinks into velvety carpet and scattered cushions. Bright tulips, glistening apples, a snuffling pig appear beautiful in their otherworldly colours but the illusion is slowly distorted by interruptions of violence; a machine harvests the flower heads, a woman lurches naked on all fours like a farmyard animal, fruit rots, blood appears between a woman’s legs. Even in this fantasy world of riches, there is an eerie, creeping sensation that all is not right.

The slowness and otherworldly aesthetic of this dream world is magnificently seductive. The Hayward’s exhibition promises visitors an ‘eyeball massage’ and wandering between the rooms was a soporifically languid experience. The viewer is so overwhelmed by the works’ immersive nature and large format, it becomes hard to offer hard analyses or impose logic. Stumbling up from the cushions and away from the tour, a little unsure what to make of it all, I re-visited the early videos and wandered into a room I had previously missed. Projected on the far wall was Rist’s 1997 work Ever Is All. Like You Called Me Jacky, the film is a kind of elegant two-fingered salute. A beautiful woman dressed in a chiffon Grecian dress and red heels strides down a European city street, a tall-stemmed tropical flower in her hands. Lost in her own impervious world, she walks along the empty pavement to an ethereal Hawaiian slide guitar and slowly fractures the window of each parked car with the exotic stalk. This act of aggression is performed with both a startlingly calm efficiency and child-like glee. At one point a police officer passes but just nods and smiles. The combination of female beauty, playful subversion, humour and violence is key to Rist’s work. She creates an escapist vision but one that points out the societal and physical constraints of our everyday lives with a joyfully anarchic spirit. In particular, the limits of the female experience are wrought large. Death and decay break through awkwardly and with an incongruous fierceness; perhaps it is in this way that Rist’s alternate universe mirrors our real lives more than we would like to acknowledge.

Eleanor McKeown

Las Acacias

To characterise the 36th TIFF, it is probably most relevant to invoke the phrase that seemed to be making the rounds in the press lounge this year: The Austerity TIFF. There were small but clear indications throughout the festival events that economic hair-cutting was the order of the day. Sponsored events were fewer and further between, and the previous year’s more magnanimous gestures were dramatically cropped at this still humongous and prestigious film festival. The big money seemed to be ring-fenced for the impressive Hollywood band-wagon that inevitably arrives for three or four days and sets the city’s residents into a celebrity frenzy usually held in check by their cautious Canadian personae. Come festival time, all restraint is thrown to the wind. This year they had George, Johnny, Madonna, Bonehead – sorry that’s Bono – Francis, Martin, Vigo, Keira, Ryan, Brad et al to rubberneck at.

As for the films themselves, there were the usual number of high-profile premieres of American productions as well as the more interesting hundreds of international features, documentaries and shorts. This report concentrates on films that remain in mind after dozens have slipped into the muddy streams of visual unconsciousness.

I had the privilege of eavesdropping on distributors as they hotly enthused and kept deepening their pockets for the rights to William Friedkin’s Killer Joe, a nasty little number that features Matthew McConaughey – in a career-stretching role – as a Dallas cowboy-cop who moonlights as a very cool and ruthless hit man. He is hired by a bumbling trailer trash family to kill their no-good mama in order to inherit her insurance money – a good example of a staple trope of classic noir being resuscitated and transplanted into a neo-noir (or film soleil, as some would dub it). Friedkin, who knows a thing or two about chase sequences (The French Connection, 1971) treats us to a good one here, and the only criticism that might really be raised is the rather gratuitous stretching out of the final bloodbath. Adapted from a 1993 play by Tracy Letts, the film introduces a fried chicken leg in the starring role as a blowjob recipient – made problematic by the nasty circumstances under which it is delivered. But Killer Joe sees the veteran director William Friedkin in a real return to form of sorts, after several below par outings in the last years. Coen Brothers meet Tarantino.

The coming-of-age adolescent film is well-mined territory and coming up with even a slightly original slant is difficult. Jens Lien in Sons of Norway accomplishes just this by inverting the scenario. The relatively straight-laced 14-year-old Nikolaj (Åsmund Høeg) and his younger brother live with liberal hippy-ish parents. His father, Magnus (Sven Nordin), is a super-energetic eccentric character with yellow crash helmet and crazy souped-up bike to match, who falls into a depression when his younger son is killed. When he snaps out of it, his eccentricity and diatribes against capitalism are heightened and young Nikolaj searches for a way to rebel to gain attention as well as find out who he really is and emerge from young adolescence. Difficult to do when your father approves and encourages all and every kind of rebellion. Nikolaj finds an outlet in neo-punk and The Sex Pistols music. Executive-produced by none other than John Lydon, who makes an appearance in the film, Sons of Norway is in the same vein as Fucking Amal (1998) or C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) and as such is a charming sleeper that deserves distribution. Another charmer is the Filipino film Fable of the Fish, directed by Adolfo Boringa Alix Jr. (Adela [2008], Chassis [2010], Presa [2010]). Seamlessly stitching together naturalism, magic realism and Filipino folk tales, it follows the travails of the childless, middle-aged couple Miguel (Bembol Roco) and Lina (Cherry Pie Picache) as they move from impoverishment to scavenging for their existence. Lina becomes miraculously pregnant and instead of bearing a child gives birth to a milkfish. She soon becomes a local celebrity but Miguel is humiliated and ashamed, and we see the schism between the two as she becomes happier and full of life and grace while he sinks lower and wants to deny the ‘child’. This satire is played straight and is always sympathetic to its characters, who emerge as good and kindly human beings. A fine achievement and a strong addition to the growing number of quality low-budget films emerging from the Philippines.

In the annual City to City strand, which this year featured Buenos Aires, I took a shining to Pablo Giorgelli’s very slow-burning, poetic road movie Las Acacias – the tale of a hitchhiking woman Jacinta (Hebe Duarte) and a baby who are picked up by a curmudgeonly truck driver, Ruben (Germán de Silva). The story is told mostly within the cab of the truck with little dialogue and no non-diegetic sound – there is just the constant background sound of the truck’s engine. Simplicity and a tutorial in elegant filmmaking that relies on camera work and facial insinuation and gesture rather than an abundance of text (or excessive music for that matter): a strategy often utilised by small-budget filmmakers to compensate or over-compensate for some perceived lack of action or motion in their straightened economic conditions. Las Acacias moves at its own measured pace with the drone of the truck engine and the slowness of the characters in exchanging conversation providing the viewer with the perception of a near real-time experience. Giorgelli is to be commended for his commitment and vision to what might be called ‘slow cinema’. This no-frills, realistic film is a deeply human and humane piece of work, all the more notable and laudable for being the director’s first feature. It was a deserving winner of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes this year, which has been followed by wins for the director at San Sebastian, Mumbai and London Film Festivals.

Among other Argentine films to feature at Toronto were an interesting pairing from 2011 and 1969. The latter is a little seen Argentine classic, Invasión (Hugo Santiago), which tells a futuristic and fascistic dystopian story of invasion from the rebels’ point of view. It is an allegorical tale about a group of guerrilla intellectuals attempting to halt and reverse the onslaught of an invading force in a city named Aqueila but looking for all the world like Buenos Aires. The script was co-written by literary luminaries Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares and their collective paranoid sensibilities in Invasión presciently anticipate the coming military junta. Invasión has been called an Argentine Alphaville and on this viewing one can see why. Perhaps losing some of its political edginess in current times, this is no less a major work of cinematic art in both the Argentine context and in its obvious adoption of French New Wave and Godardian form and content. And while it is often commented that contemporary Argentine cinema has lost its appetite for engaged political films, an exception to this observation can be found in the Santiago Mitre film, The Student (2011), which takes as its subject the remnants of Marxist and committed socialist politics as encountered by a young bourgeois non-political student, Roque (Esteban Lamothe). His political pilgrim’s journey takes him from apathy to commitment to disillusionment. The same can be said of the arc of his love affair with Paula (Romina Paula), a much more sophisticated and informed political siren. As engaging as the film is, it is difficult to see how it might transcend its obvious Argentine-specific sources and travel outside the country. Nonetheless, a fine pair to see back to back to compare and contrast the socio-political lay of the land.

A noticeable theme in recent European cinema has been the issue of the impact of mass illegal migration upon the shores of Eurozone countries, especially focusing upon the ‘problem’ of Africa. Two such films screened in Toronto explore these issues as they affect small island communities trapped between maintaining history and tradition on the one hand and globalisation and tourism on the other. Color of the Ocean is the story of a Canary Island cop, José (Alex González), whose job is to decide the fate of the hundreds of African boat people who wash ashore onto this idyllic ocean paradise. When sun-soaking bikini-clad German tourist Nathalie (Sabine Timoteo) witnesses the sight of bedraggled and suffering refugees as they stagger ashore, she begins to help out and makes a connection with one of the refugees and his young son. Against the wishes of her husband, Paul (Friedrich Mücke), who wants her to keep out of it, she helps to effect an escape for Zola (Huber Koundé) and his son Mamadou (Dami Adeeri) from the local internment camp. But rather than assisting she unwittingly makes it more difficult for him as he becomes involved with criminal smugglers. As Nathalie gets more deeply involved, she comes to the attention of policeman José and both find that they have issues to address in their own lives as well as making sure their actions will create positive rather than negative change. As the tag line has it, to free someone, you may have to free yourself.

The Italian director of Respiro (2002) and Golden Door (2006), Emanuele Crialese, covers similar issues in Terraferma, his take on the timely topic. Set on the island of Linosa, off of Sicily, the film focuses on the trials and tribulations of the centuries-old fishing community as they grapple with the realities of the global age. Tensions rise within a family as the patriarch refuses to give in to the new demands of tourism and face up to the harsh realities of depleted fish stocks, while his son and daughter embrace the new realities facing the island. The familial tensions are exacerbated by boatloads of illegal immigrants suddenly appearing on their shorelines. As the fishermen try to uphold an ancient tradition – to rescue anyone in distress upon the high seas – they find it almost impossible not to come to the aid of the struggling refugee families from North Africa. The patriarch and his family’s lives are turned upside down when they find themselves aiding and abetting a young pregnant African woman. The law states that they must turn her in but they are in a quandary about this and have radically different ideas about what to do. A thoughtful and provocative film, it raises questions about the issue without bludgeoning the viewer into siding with one or another of the possibilities articulated in the smart script. Again, the issue of ‘liberal’ tourists, their near-decadent appearance in the world of the local inhabitant and their need to not be subjected to the reality of beaches ‘besmirched’ with desperate refugees are seen in a fair but complicated light. Two thoughtful accounts then, of the same phenomenon, though I lean to Color of the Ocean as the marginally superior film.

The docu-drama Always Brando was a poetic and reflective film by the Tunisian director Ridha Behi (Bitter Champagne [1984], Swallows Never Die in Jerusalem [1994]). A very interesting storyline mixing fact, fiction and speculation, Always Brando is described by programmer Rasha Salti as ‘at once a loving and lucid elegy to the cinema, and the director’s naked, uncontrived meditation on its imperious allure and cruelty’. And that description is little short of the truth. Behi’s film weaves a meditation on his unlikely relationship with Marlon Brando – who unexpectedly and after many years of solicitation from Behi, summoned him to his Hollywood home to work on a script – and Behi’s meeting with a Tunisian actor, Anis Raache, who bore a striking resemblance to the young Brando. This gave the director the idea to make a fictional film about this Brando lookalike and how this opportunity to work on an American movie being filmed in Tunisia deludes the actor into thinking he will achieve fame and fortune in Hollywood. Exploited and seduced by a middle-aged man who promises to cast him in a Brando biopic, Anis is led on a downward spiral that ends in futility and failure. Meanwhile, in real life the idea of a collaboration with the real Brando, which was being worked on in the actor’s Mulholland Drive mansion, came to an abrupt end with the death of the great man. From these fragments from Behi’s life, he has made a film that is ‘specifically tailored to the two Brandos’. This is cinema that is thoughtful and intriguing and shot through with possibilities.

Less thoughtful and intriguing – in fact the biggest disappointment of the festival – was the new quasi-vampire/horror flick Twixt by The Man Formerly Known as Prince (of directors), namely Francis Ford Coppola. In Twixt, Bruce Dern, who is almost always in overwrought and over-acting mode (à la Nicolas Cage), plays the part of a local sheriff who has fantasies of co-writing a novel about the mysterious death of a local young girl. He pitches his idea to down-on-his-luck visiting thriller author Hal Baltimore (embarrassingly played by Val Kilmer). When the near-delusional Baltimore has a visitation from the girl’s ghost, the preposterous filmic story commences. As the writer hallucinates and confuses dreams with reality, we are taken on an unwelcome journey with him as he starts hanging out with a resurrected Edgar Allan Poe, who gives Baltimore pointers on the finer aspects of horror writing and detection. I kid you not. Po-faced, or should I say Poe-faced Coppola’s once mentor, Roger Corman, has done far better service to Poe – and the horror genre – than Coppola has here. Corman’s Gothic at least had style and panache. This film is plodding and cringe-inducing and I would have liked to see a dozen young filmmakers split the budget of this real-life horror film between them and see what they would have come up with; surely something livelier and more engaging. And the few minutes of 3D spectatorial (non) glories to be glimpsed halfway through the film and in the inevitable and predictable bloody ending were gratuitous and ill-advised. Not one from the heart then, but one from the faint-hearted. Forget about it.

James B. Evans