Format: DVD

Distributor: Austrian Film Museum

Director: Dziga Vertov

Original title: Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa

USSR 1930

67 minutes

It twists, it clunks, it shifts, it squeaks. Objects in motion, objects in synchronisation with sounds; audio-visual harmony, a perfect metaphor for Soviet collectivist supremacy. A pulsating network of people and machines and machines that make machines that people use to make machines to excavate coal and reap wheat and make movies. The dynamism of production shot with a gimlet-eyed mechanism and chopped with the finesse of a novice butcher.

Dziga Vertov’s symphonic 1930 experimental documentary film is primarily known as a bold foray into audio-visual synchronisation, commended for its deft and poetic use of concrete sound. Sound was not a new plaything for Vertov. Prior to experimenting with film, Vertov lurked in the orbit of cubo-futurist poet Mayakovsky, studied music, despatched miscellaneous essays and polemics about sound, radio and cinema and had attempted a major phonographic project - essentially a sound studio for the recording and cataloguing of concrete sound. He was also well versed in the art of propaganda film, having been an editor of the Kino-Pravda newsreels. He formed the Kino-eye collective, its remit to document actuality as opposed to theatrical or literary cinematic staging. Indeed, unlike that other Russian master of montage, Sergei Eisenstein, Vertov actually went out into the field, the factory, the street, to document quotidian life as it unfurled. Whereas Eisenstein would manipulate, restage and re-enact reality on scales both grand and pompous.

Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass deploys, as its title implies, a musical structure in three movements derived from the symphony. The first movement appears to riff on religion (as opiate) versus mass communication. The second engages with heavy industry and the third primarily deals with agriculture. The soundtrack bristles with a gorgeous Brillo pad fuzziness, the images the work of a kinetic, acrobatic, camera that has its roots firmly embedded in the follicles of constructivist geometry and futurist dynamism.

Enthusiasm begins with three sounds, a cuckoo and an andante pizzicato bass and woodwind motif. We see extreme close-ups of tightly framed faces, a telephonist or radio operator, symbolising the auditory. Vertov plays a Brechtian card - we see the conductor of the film’s musical score conducting the film’s musical score. The sound of a bell is juxtaposed with the image of an ornamental crown - the death knell of Czarist autocracy. Shots of fluid religious architecture follow - church spires, onion-domed temples that quiver in the lens, and phrenological studies of the proletariat. We hear Russian orthodox liturgy underscored with a cuckoo, people at prayer followed by the gorgeous close-up of a human ear. Vertov rather crudely juxtaposes religion with mass communication. He tries a few camera tricks - time-lapse, double exposure - to convey both ecstatic delirium and just what a man with a movie camera is capable of.

Then he pauses to show us a constructivist maquette of a factory, the merry-go-round of state industrial production. In a loop, miniature tractors and goods speed around, followed by shots of a real factory and a mine. Chiaroscuro industrial pornography shot from hard geometric angles - furnaces, gantries, chimney stacks, a bridge, a black mound of coke. These images are loosely affixed to the sound of a steam whistle edited into a modulating electro-acoustic drone, which recurs throughout Enthusiasm in different variations.

The final, agricultural, section features a dance in a grain field, demented folk music, a procession of collectivist agricultural workers intercut with yet more industrial smoke belches, filthy black mechanisms and more Stalinist brass band pomp.

Enthusiasm is ultimately a propaganda film for totalitarian Soviet collectivisation. However, the film does not depict Soviet efficiency so much as it is itself mechanised Soviet state capitalism incarnate. It was an innovative thing no doubt, yet the innovation took place against a backdrop of hardcore economic interventionism, famine, Gulags, ethnic cleansing and slave labour. Riefenstahl aside, one wonders why cinema historians don’t have the same regard for fascist cinema or, rather, why cinema critics are a little softer on communist totalitarianism than they are on fascist totalitarian art.

Philip Winter

Format: DVD and Blu-ray

Date: 27 April 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini

Based on the book by: Boccaccio

Original title: Il Decameron

Cast: Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Italy 1971

112 mins

Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, painter, writer, homosexual, Marxist, filmmaker and enfant terrible, was certainly a multi-faceted artist. His films similarly show great variety, from his late neo-realist gangster classic Accattone (1961) to Greek tragedy in Medea (1969), from intellectual allegory in Theorem (1968) to the popular pastoral bawdy romps that Pasolini called his ‘Trilogy of Life’. The Decameron makes up the first part of this trilogy; the other two films - The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974) - are similarly based on medieval folk tales and storytelling. However, from the opening shot, which shows the director’s regular collaborator Franco Citti (who starred as Accattone) bludgeoning an unseen victim, we are never in any doubt that this is a classic Pasolini film.

Choosing 10 stories from Boccaccio’s 100, and dispensing with the framing narrative - seven women and three men (with their servants) tell stories to while away the time spent in the country to avoid the Great Plague of 1348 - Pasolini’s film nevertheless perfectly captures the spirit of these tales. The film is divided into two parts, each composed of five stories, one framing the other four. All are faithful to Boccaccio’s originals but are also well suited to Pasolini’s world view: sinners are remembered as saints, evil doings go unpunished and religious hypocrisy is rife. Typically, Pasolini also juxtaposes contradictory tales to emphasise their political aspect. We go from aspirational parents who insist on marriage when they catch their daughter in flagrante with the son of a wealthy man, to the famous ‘Pot of Basil’ story, in which a girl is caught with a lower-class lover, with grisly results. The latter tale is kindly shortened, allowing the girl to keep her pot of basil and water it with her tears, in contrast to Boccaccio’s original tale or Keats’s great poem. Although Pasolini is interested in the political subtext of the tales, he hardly offers a Marxist reworking - the bawdy folk tales are told simply and the film never feels didactic.

Pasolini himself plays an artist dreaming of and painting frescoes of heaven and hell on a church wall. In Boccaccio’s epic, the artist is the Early Renaissance painter Giotto, although he is modestly recast here as a ‘student of the master’ (in The Canterbury Tales, Pasolini similarly plays Geoffrey Chaucer). The film has a painterly look with colours that seem to have been taken directly from Giotto’s palette, although the scenes are perhaps more reminiscent of Breughel or Bosch. Perhaps Giotto’s most important legacy was his introduction of the technique of life drawing; a similar impulse can be seen in Boccaccio’s embrace of popular folk tales and particularly in his decision to write in vernacular Italian rather than Latin. Similarly, Pasolini, it seems, is striving to create a vernacular cinema.

The depiction of the Middle Ages may not be quite as filthy as that in Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975), with its mud-encrusted peasants, but with carefully chosen locations and non-professional actors (framed in Pasolini’s long, still close-ups) clearly cast for their medieval dentistry, we get an essentially realist depiction akin to Rossellini’s Francesco Giullare di Dio (1950). Unfortunately, the clumsy post-synchronised sound seems to be the price we pay for those great locations.

The emphasis on simplicity means that the stories seem slight and at times underwhelming (even Ennio Morricone’s score is free of bombast and confined to folk ditties), and the humour (falling into cesspits, etc.) is not so far removed from a Carry On film. However, there is an honesty about sexual relations rarely found in 20th-century literature or film, as well as a determination to entertain the audience that was key to the storytelling tradition. These films were Pasolini’s biggest box-office successes. This led to a series of imitation bawdy romps to be released in Italy, which caused Pasolini to write a repudiation of his trilogy and to return to a rather less crowd-pleasing cinema with his next film - Salí³, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).

The Decameron, like most of Pasolini’s work, never fully satisfies, lacking the epic sweep that such an adaptation deserves, but it is a serious and worthy attempt. The film ends with Giotto’s student (Pasolini) looking at the completed dream-inspired frescoes, asking a question that could be applied to any such adaptations or even to artistic creation itself, one that fully captures Pasolini’s self-doubts: ‘Why paint a picture when the dream is so much better?’

Paul Huckerby

Also available from the BFI on DVD and Blu-ray: Arabian Nights and The Canterbury Tales.

Format: DVD and Blu-ray

Date: 27 April 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writers: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dacia Maraini

Based on: Arabian Nights

Original title: Il fiore delle mille e una notte

Cast: Franco Merli, Ines Pelligrini, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti

Italy 1974

129 mins

How would a notable director make a film based on the Thousand and One Nights now? Enlist some notable actors, build some spectacular sets, spend a lot of money on CGI to give visual expression to the fantastic. Maybe, for a highbrow audience, include some knowing or ironic framing material, to encourage consciousness of our apartness from this exotic world of stories, of our status as post-colonial voyeurs…

Pier Paolo Pasolini, choosing this for the last in his series of three erotic picaresques, took a different route. He enlisted a ragtag of young Italians with little acting experience, and trailed around spectacular locations (in Ethiopia, Yemen, Iran, Nepal), apparently picking raw local talent on the spot to fill out the cast. Nor is there any question of distance from the story: he plunges us straight in, and the best way to enjoy the film is to submit to the tale-telling. Pasolini dispenses entirely with the story that frames all the other stories, and which gives piquancy to the narrative’s endless inventiveness (Scheherazade’s survival depends on her being able to keep up the entertainment). This makes the film less subtle than its literary source, but does perhaps help us forget that we are playing make-believe.

The film is not just a random string of disconnected tales. The themes of captivity, escape and freedom run through it. We see, perhaps, that life is harsh, but that freedom and pleasure can be found through resourcefulness. We can also ponder the film’s motto: the truth is revealed not in one dream but in many. The stories are out of our reach, we can hardly see them as true. But they do show us some true things about our world.

The use of amateur actors works wonderfully, at least in dramatic terms. These stories were invented, enjoyed, embellished, and passed on by the folk, and it is entirely appropriate to see them inhabited by the folk. Never mind that most of the leading actors clearly do not belong in the locations as the rest of the cast do. This is a film in which European viewers are invited to enter into the world of the stories, as the European actors do. The effort of suspending disbelief is not great, thanks to the vigour of the performances. The crude dubbing can be distracting, but probably the scenes would not have been performed with such spontaneity under the constraints of live sound recording.

One thing that a filmmaker would certainly not do now, on pain of scandal, is enlist teenagers from much less sophisticated cultural backgrounds than his own and get them to enact sexual scenes. Well, this certainly does give a sense of freshness to the erotic content running through the film, but is also likely to make the viewer feel some discomfort at enjoying watching the cast go at it. My judgement, naí¯ve maybe, is that Pasolini’s film is knowingly transgressive, but not in a cynical or debasing way. The use of amateur actors was one of the enlivening features of post-war Italian cinema, and I would like to think Arabian Nights is an honourable continuation of that tradition. Whatever the ethics of Pasolini’s relationship with his cast, in that uninhibited era, I think what we have now is a film that the participants could be proud of, rather than ashamed of. Though ribald, sexually explicit, and violent, it is not coarse or brutal – a series of dreams, flickering only occasionally into nightmare.

Peter Momtchiloff

Also available from the BFI on DVD and Blu-ray: The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales.

Format: DVD

Date: 18 May 2009

Distributor: Peccadillo Pictures

Director: Laurent Achard

Writers: Laurent Achard, Nathalie Najem

Based on the novel by: Timothy Findley

Original title: Le Dernier des fous

Cast: Julien Cochelin, Annie Cordy, Pascal Cervo, Dominique Reymond, Fattouma Ousliha Bouamari

France/Belgium 2006

95 mins

The Last of the Crazy People is the second feature film from French writer/director Laurent Achard, adapted from Timothy Findley’s 1967 novel of the same name. Not dissimilar from the films of Michael Haneke, it is a work of formal sophistication and psychological complexity.

The film opens in a dark room, on a softly illumined eye peeking outside through a chink in a door. We soon learn that this eye belongs to Martin, the somber, 10-year-old boy who we follow throughout the film. Martin lives on a farm with his family and their maid. His mother, Nadí¨ge, seems to be psychotic; she refuses to leave her bedroom and is prone to fits of screaming. His brother, Didier, is a would-be writer/poet, tormented by self-doubt and by his impossible relationship with a man who is engaged to be married. The other characters act as provocateurs and/or peacekeepers to the intense atmosphere of the household, while the action centres more and more on the suffering of Nadí¨ge and Didier, and on its effects on Martin.

Fear and doubt are at the heart of The Last of the Crazy People, permeating form and content in equal measure. Achard depicts a world that is uncertain, violent and, worst of all, meaningless, the horror of which affects all the characters, but chiefly Nadí¨ge. Lingering on her remote, glaring eyes, the film asks: Is Nadí¨ge mad? Or just much more sensitive than the average human being? Perhaps Nadí¨ge is the only sane one, the only one who is really awake, and it is all the ‘normal’ people who surround her, and who give no thought to the horror of reality, who are actually mad?

Formally the film plays a game of push and pull with its audience, encouraging both our disorientation and our sympathy for the characters. In turns, we are tempted to think that the film unfolds from Martin’s innocent perspective, from a detached, realist perspective, and from a fantastical, hyperreal perspective. It is never certain whether the point of view is subjective or objective, reality or illusion, schizoid hallucination or prophetic vision. We search for a single fixed truth, which ultimately doesn’t seem to exist. Like the characters we are lost between the equally undesirable poles of illusion and nothingness.

There is no denying the bleakness of the film, but this is not to criticise. The Last of the Crazy People is a work of honesty, not miserabilism. One would perhaps see a glimmer of hope in Didier and his poetry, were it not for the weight of the prevailing order, and of fate, which sit so heavily on his shoulders. The world doesn’t want a poet. Perhaps it did once, as Didier’s piles of old books suggest, but not anymore. The world now seems to say, ‘you’re either normal or mad; you’re either with us, or you’re on your own’. Didier, not quite mad perhaps, but very much alone, broods unhappily towards a resolution. When he finally makes his decision at the end of the film the consequences are nothing short of apocalyptic.

The Last of the Crazy People is an excellent film. It is by no means easy viewing, but as a rare piece of serious cinema, it is essential.

David Warwick