Format: DVD

Date: 24 August 2009

Distributor: Arrow Films

Director: Marcel Ophí¼ls

Original title: Le Chagrin et la pitié

Featuring: Marcel Ophí¼ls, Pierre Mendí¨s-France, Christian de la Mazií¨re, Helmuth Tausend, Georges Bidault, Emile Coulaudon

France 1969

249 mins

This famous French documentary, which looks at the town of Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne region during the German occupation in the Second World War, was made in 1969 but was withdrawn from distribution and not generally seen till 1981.

Why was the film so controversial in France? It has the reputation of having exposed the extent of wartime collaboration. But I don’t believe that it revealed much that wasn’t known already. A simple answer to the question is that it showed participants in the events of 1940 to 1944 discussing things that most of the people who had experienced them preferred not to discuss. And there was a new generation ready to hear what their parents might not have told them.

Particularly inflammatory, I would guess, were two allegations that the film makes impossible to ignore. The first of those, insinuated with bitter humour by ex-members of the Resistance, but made more mildly and explicitly by British agents, is that in France the workers were inclined to resist while the bourgeoisie preferred to keep out of trouble. As for the aristocracy, representatives are on hand to testify to their predilection for active participation in the fascist project, even to the extent of fighting in a German uniform on the Eastern front.

The other allegation that haunts this film is that there was a higher level of collaboration in France than in other conquered countries. This accusation is hard to substantiate, but it leaves a taint.

We should not be too quick to indulge in the satisfaction of sitting in judgement, particularly when it comes to sins of omission or accommodation in war. It is easier for many of us to sympathise with the Frenchwomen who consorted with Germans than with those who humiliated them afterwards. As this film makes clear, the urge to respond to some of the German occupiers as fellow human beings could be strong. Not the Gestapo: the interviewees consistently distinguish between them and the ordinary soldiers of the Wehrmacht. An old boy called up late on to fill the depleted ranks of the latter is remembered kindly by a Resistance member to whom he slipped an apple on a forced march.

For some private citizens there may be extenuation and condonement, but for the French establishment, the governing classes, there is no escaping condemnation. Pétain, the hero of Verdun, was still admired by many interviewed in the film; but he was justly convicted of treason in 1945. As head of state, he did an enormous service of legitimisation to Nazi Germany by urging French citizens to collaborate. For Hitler he was surely a useful idiot, to borrow Lenin’s cynical phrase. Laval, head of government from 1942 to 1944, fares worse: the interviewer breaks into the disingenuous protestations of Laval’s son-in-law to give the statistics that reveal the consequences of the deals struck by his father-in-law with the Germans. But this is a rare case where we are given the quantitative information necessary to make substantial historical judgement. For the most part, what the film offers instead is insight into diverse personal experiences of the Occupation.

The British participants provide many of the most illuminating moments. Anthony Eden recognises with some emotion the human cost of the destruction - essential to the Allied cause - of the French navy at Mers-el-Kébir. A pilot who crashed in the Auvergne recalls the perilous generosity of the farmer who took him in. A homosexual entertainer turned spy speaks tenderly of his German officer lover. The courage of this spy is praised by his bowler-hatted controller, striding through Westminster; but the spy himself merely notes that he was willing to take on this dangerous role because he had nothing to lose - and he suggests that this is the key to understanding the differing responses of the French social classes to occupation.

Aesthetically, the film has little merit. Perhaps that is a frivolous thought. But when we switch from the ill-framed headshots, loose structure, and explanatory gaps of the documentary to the confident images and vigorous conviction of the wartime propaganda films, we are reminded that aesthetics matters. The film does, however, exert a cumulative power, as apparently banal reminiscences gradually give place to admissions of shocking candour, and to denunciations whose rancour was still undimmed 25 years after the war.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: DVD

Date: 12 October 2009

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Directors: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury

Writer: Alexandre Bustillo

Original title: A l’intérieur

Cast: Alysson Paradis, Béatrice Dalle

France 2007

79 mins

In January 2006, in the wake of the ‘Pyres of Autumn’ that lit up the Parisian suburbs, Jean Baudrillard spoke of ‘a kind of eternal flame, like that under the Arc de Triomphe, burning in honour of the Unknown Immigrant’. Baudrillard saw the dispossessed arsonists of les banlieues as ‘savage analysts’ of the disintegration of Western society. ‘Today it is precisely “the best” it has to offer - cars, schools, shopping centres - that are torched and ransacked. Even nursery schools: the very tools through which the car-burners were to be integrated and mothered. “Screw your mother” might be their organising slogan. And the more there are attempts to “mother” them, the more they will.’

The debut feature of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, Inside (2007), a story that involves a tremendous amount of apparently meaningless and at times extremely gruesome violence towards a heavily pregnant mother-to-be, might seem at first glance to be little more than another regrettable symptom of just that disintegration. All this mindless sadism, we might say to ourselves, shaking our heads ruefully, a sad indictment of the decline of traditional Western values. But what this initial conservative reading misses is the degree to which this film offers just such a savage analysis of the malaise of which it is a symptom, both exploiting and dissecting the bourgeois fear of a threat no longer external. ‘This year,’ the movie tagline goes, ‘the terror is Inside‘.

The film opens with an almost pathetically ridiculous CGI foetus, resembling somewhat those brief glimpses of humans in Pixar animations. A voice-over soothingly says, ‘My baby, finally inside me. No one will take him from me’ before a violent crash jolts us out into live action. A car accident filmed with such high gloss as to resemble a car advert, albeit a car advert imagined by Paul Virilio. Almost the very first ‘filmed’ (as opposed to animated) shot in the film then, is of a burning car. A title card then sends us ‘four months later’; Sarah (Alysson Paradis), still scarred from the accident that killed her husband, is due to give birth the following day. While spending her last childless night at home, she is harassed, at first by nightmares of a violent birth, and then by a mysterious, nameless Woman (Béatrice Dalle) intent on murdering her.

Inside was released a year after Baudrillard’s article, and the conflagrations of 2005 form the backdrop to the film’s slender narrative. Mentioned a number of times near the beginning of the film, they are dismissed by Sarah, who makes money as a photographer taking pictures of such events, as ‘just kids having a blast, ’cause they’re bored’. The figure of the immigrant, as it were, returns at the very end of the film, in the form of Abdel (Aymen Saí¯di), a prisoner held by the police who turn up in the film’s third act. The choice of Sarah’s profession questions the ethical position of the artist who profits from the appropriation and exploitation of the image of the other. The close proximity of photographer to filmmaker likewise suggests a certain auto-critique of the film as exploitation cinema. Though the suburban outsider is never presented directly as a threat in the film, it is as though he is repressed, and forced to reappear in another form both more violent and dehumanised.

The thread that joins the banlieue fires to the Woman is lack. What does the Woman say? ‘I want your baby.’ She wants Sarah’s baby, because she herself has none, because, as she sees it, Sarah ‘stole’ it from her, just as she also ‘stole’ the symbolic identity of the suburban immigrants in her photographs (in fact, the very first thing Sarah tries to do to the Woman is photograph her, only to find that she cannot - as though, like a vampire, the Woman lacked the solidity necessary for her image to materialise on film). It is as lack that the grievances of both the socially and politically excluded residents of the banlieues and the Woman are expressed - a lack that is represented not by less but rather more, marked by a terrifying excess, most frequently expressed in the film as an overload of gore í  la Herschell Gordon Lewis. In her impassive insistence, her nameless anonymity and her seemingly unstoppably destructive drive and apparent (near-)invincibility, the Woman resembles a god. She stands metaphorically for the divine violence of the people, the brutal return of the politically repressed like a swarm come from heaven.

The terrifying encounter with the suburban other lies behind the violent imagery of the film, and in that respect it is comparable to the French films of Michael Haneke, particularly Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005). But where Haneke proposes an almost dry, patient cinematic analysis, Inside uses the generic codes of the horror genre, forgoing the analytic position to become both symptom and diagnosis. Body horror becomes the horror of the social body, spilling speechlessly over the boundaries of sense, like a scream without a tongue. When terror comes from inside, no fortification is possible. Such is the axiom of a cinematic mode that consists, as Baudrillard says of the Parisian arson attacks, in ‘successive phases of a revolt whose end is not in sight’.

Robert Barry

Pic credit: Nick Cave photographed by Shannon McClean

Format: DVD

Date: 9 November 2009

Distributor: Warp Films

Director: Jonathan Caouette and All Tomorrow’s People

Featuring: Belle and Sebastian, Sonic Youth, Grinderman, Animal Collective

UK 2009

82 mins

Close your eyes if you will and imagine the perfect music festival. There would be great bands of course, with the event curated by one of your favourite artists. There will be some bands you love, but have never had the chance to see, and some you’ve never heard of, but you just know are going to be amazing. There would be no camping or grappling with tents in the rain, you’d even get your own little flat with a bathroom. The gigs would be indoors with a decent sound system. There would be no elitist VIP section, bands and punters would intermix with no sense of us and them. There would be a beach when it’s sunny and shelter when it rains. And no portaloos!

Such a festival does exist and its name is All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP). It is the brainchild of Barry Hogan, who got the idea after he promoted Belle and Sebastian’s Bowlie Weekender in 1999. And now a film has been made about it. Brought together by Jonathan Caouette (Tarnation) and music video director Vincent Moon, it captures the essence of the UK ATPs, which are held several times a year at the quintessentially British institution of ‘the holiday camp’ by the seaside, made more ironic by the fact that most of the bands playing are from the States. They probably find the whole thing even more bizarre than the Brits whose only experience of a holiday camp is from watching Hi-de-Hi!

Comprised of footage from the festival contributed by filmmakers, fans and bands using Super8, camcorder, mobile phone and still imagery, the film is a mish-mash of live footage, interviews and people just enjoying the festival. It reflects ATP’s musical aesthetic; wild and edgy, obscure and funny, capturing the rawness and the post-punk attitude of the event. Having been to many of these events myself, I felt a gurgle of joy bubbling up inside me as each frame flashed a memory, an anecdote, good times and ‘I was bloody there!’ outbursts.

The film opens with fan footage of the check-in queues on the first day of the event, interspersed with 60s footage of traditional holiday camps. It is quite surreal to be watching old-fashioned Red Coats and knobbly knees contests backed with music from obtuse noisnicks Battles, who are the first band that we see.

For fans and previous attendees of ATP, there are several fun games you can play while watching the All Tomorrow’s Parties film. The first one is to ‘guess the band’: some of the live footage is accompanied by the band name and the year that they played, but more often than not the artists are unlabeled, so knowing which is which is a real nerd’s pleasure. There’s also the ‘spot the friend’ game. I think I counted at least 10 people I know who were either interviewed or appeared in some background scene.

Or how about the brilliant ‘remember when…’ game? Do you remember the crazy Chinese guy running around in the cape? Or when Lightning Bolt played outside their chalet and people from the neighbouring houses complained? Or when David Cross (pre-Arrested Development) went down like a lead balloon during his stand-up routine? Or when Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian played five-a-side football with the regular folk?

It’s also great seeing bands like The Gossip playing the small stage at Camber Sands before they burst into the mainstream and onto naked magazine covers. I remember bumping into Beth Ditto in the loos before she went on and she had a huge chunk of toilet paper stuck to her shoe. I gave her a sideways look in the mirror and said ‘you may want to sort that out before you go on stage!’ She laughed and thanked me for pointing it out. I felt like I really contributed to the success of that particular show!

There is also some enjoyable interview footage with some of the curators (Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and Warren Ellis from The Dirty Three) as well as the organiser of the festival, Barry Hogan. There’s a great scene when he’s watching a news report about ATP on TV in his chalet and is cringing at his own interview.

This film probably won’t be of interest to those who aren’t into the bands or haven’t been to an All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival, but for those who have, it is a reminder of how utterly unique and special this event is.

Lucy Hurst