Yearly Archives: 2012

Check it out, Cinema releases

Savage Messiah

Savage Messiah

Format: Screening presented by Days Are Numbers

Part of Ken Russell Forever

Date: 16 March 2012

Time: 3pm

Venue: The Montpelier, London

Director: Ken Russell

Writer: Christopher Logue

Based on the book by: H.S. Ede

Cast: Dorothy Tutin, Scott Antony, Helen Mirren, Lindsay Kemp

UK 1972

103 mins

After making The Devils, Russell felt exhausted, burned out. He turned to an adaptation of Sandy Shaw’s musical The Boy Friend, intending a light-hearted tribute to a childhood spent watching MGM musicals. The film proved nightmarish to make: ‘we had nervous breakdowns and near suicides among the company,’ Shirley Russell reported. Russell was once again near breaking point. Believing he had delivered a surefire hit, but finding that the sort of creative doors he wanted to open remained closed, Russell re-mortgaged his house to finance his next project, a personal film that took him away from art deco glamour and complex dance routines, and back to his days as a struggling still photographer living in West London.

Savage Messiah is the story of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (referred to as Henri Gaudier in the film) and his relationship with the unpublished author Sophie Brzeska, a Polish woman some 20 years his senior, whom he met in 1910 (and whose name he appended to his own). Russell had picked up a copy of H.S. Ede’s biography Savage Messiah (actually mostly just the couple’s correspondence, with explanatory gloss by Ede) while a young man, and something about Gaudier-Brzeska’s story profoundly affected him: the determination, the arrogance, the contrariness, the seemingly contradictory desire to transcend one’s drab, quotidian surroundings while at the same time resisting the pull of airy transcendentalism.

For the script, Russell turned to the poet Christopher Logue, who had previously acted for Russell, providing a superbly acid characterisation of Cardinal Richelieu in The Devils. And for the all-important set design (Gaudier-Brzeska: ‘I shall derive my emotions solely from the arrangement of surfaces, I shall present my emotions by the arrangement of my surfaces.’) he turned to another collaborator from The Devils, Derek Jarman.

But for such a grand, threatening title (actually a sobriquet given to Gaudier-Brzeska by Ezra Pound) and from a director with Russell’s reputation for controversy, Savage Messiah is actually a visually subtle, character-driven work, featuring little of what was to come; the gaudy comic-book primary colours of Tommy, or the giant phalluses of Lisztomania. The film sets the tone from the outset: a pencil scratching an image onto paper (with accompanying closely recorded sound effects) recalls past enthusiasms for a caméra-stylo approach to making films. At the time Russell felt paradoxically liberated by the external constraints on the film, but he later came to view the work as too talky, too static.

Although Logue’s script is indeed dialogue-heavy, Russell’s own analysis does not do justice to the film. It features a great variety of techniques; sometimes the pace is gradual and stately, sometimes the camera and editing are as restless as Gaudier himself. Scenes such as Gaudier’s impromptu rant outside the library seem to suddenly explode into life, banishing the passive, austere mood created by the previous sequence. These abrupt shifts in tone and mood seem calculated to infuriate Russell’s detractors, but they also reflect the fractious, volatile relationship between Henri and Sophie, the way in which tender moments between the two can suddenly flare up into arguments. Dorothy Tutin’s performance as Sophie is delivered sensitively. Though her character is tightly wound and prone to outbursts, she is somehow the perfect counterweight to Scott Antony’s testosterone-fuelled, posturing Gaudier, who wilfully changes his opinions and his plans by the day.

That Logue was the originator of Private Eye magazine’s Pseuds Corner column is visible in the characterisation of the art world’s glitterati, whom Henri and Sophie first meet at a dinner party at the house of Gaudier patron’s Corky (played with camp relish by Lindsay Kemp, perhaps best known to cinephiles for his role as the scrofulous landlord in The Wicker Man). What distinguishes Henri and Sophie from these shallow dabblers is that they are willing to take an idea to the end; Sophie’s novel is titled Truth: A Novel of the Spirit and Gaudier, when he tosses his famous female torso through an art dealer’s window in an act of rage, demands to be thrown in jail and insists that nobody pay his bail. It is principle, then, that underpins the value structure of this film, although Gaudier’s principles are sometimes clouded in contradiction (the idea that it’s only through paradox, oxymoron, that we can express what we really feel) such as when he tells the assembled dandies, ‘I like what everyone likes - and EVERYBODY likes war’. The real Gaudier-Brzeska heckled the poet and war enthusiast Filippo Marinetti during a lecture in London, but Logue’s script is not interested with presenting Gaudier as an earnest ideologue.

The character of Gosh Boyle is introduced as a counterpoint to Sophie. Gosh is a suffragette who impresses Gaudier with her disruptive demonstrations and her almost cartoonishly voluptuous figure. But when world war breaks out her imperialist background is too strong to resist and she joins the army (her father is a Major who commissions a bust from Gaudier). When Gaudier last sees her she is a crass, jingoistic parody, shorn of her previous feminist and bohemian tendencies. Some quarters may feel that as a character she is used to critique feminism (and with Russell’s prurient interest in her physical charms, such an interpretation is hardly surprising). In fact, she figures in the film’s commentary on commitment. Gosh is just another dilettante, like the luminaries of the art crowd that Gaudier is introduced to. Such characters soon reveal that their pretentions to artistic and political activity are motivated by social climbing rather than Gaudier’s relentless termite burrowing.

Gaudier-Brzeska enthusiasts are often critical of the film, not only for its compression of the artist’s biography, but because it reveals little of the complexity of Gaudier-Brzeska’s thought and of his participation in the thriving pre-war avant-garde (no mention of Gaudier-Brzeska’s friendship with figures such as T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound.) The Vorticist movement as a whole is portrayed rather dismissively, as a group of style-over-substance dilettantes rather than the strident firebrands many of them were.

But here as in his biographies of famous composers, Russell is less interested in historical accuracy than in communicating the energy of the creative process. When Andrei Tarkovsky coined the phrase ‘sculpting in time’ he was in part trying to elevate cinema to a fine art, inspired by a divine muse and revered in a gallery. Russell uses the same medium as a figure for his aspirations: ‘The central image of our movie is the titanic struggle of the sculptor to release his genius from the intractable marble,’ Russell told Jarman, perhaps somewhat haughtily.

Unlike Tarkovsky, Russell was thinking less of the hallowed portals of high art and more of the sweat, exertion and chipping away that characterise the sculptor at work. It is instructive (and gratifyingly blasphemous) to compare the end of Savage Messiah with that of Tarkovsky’s own artist biopic, Andrei Rublev (1966). Both films end with a close look at their subjects’ artworks, but while Tarkovsky’s is hand-wringingly reverent, Russell’s approach is more ludic - he shows the sculptures in close-up, but he also shows them in a gallery, as passers-by consult their exhibition catalogues and seem mildly bemused. Two young women point and giggle at Gaudier’s now-celebrated head of an idiot - ‘art is alive; love it, laugh at it, but don’t worship it,’ as Gaudier bellows from atop a huge (and obviously not stone) Moai [near the film’s outset. The prim period dress of the gallery visitors seems utterly at odds with Gaudier’s vindication of primitive beauty.

The BBC’s recent documentary on Russell, attempting to cram a vast and prolific career into the sort of narrative that suits a 60-minute programme, ironed out many of Russell’s more quixotic moments. But to omit Savage Messiah, as the BBC did, seems surprising as it is one of Russell’s key films. Reducing the complexity of a film to the intentions/private obsessions of a single author can be reductive. But Gaudier-Brzeska can really be seen as an analogue for Russell; he loves life, hates the quotidian, often expresses his high ideals childishly or through paradox or provocation. Throughout, the film presents an individualistic philosophy, portraying the artistic community as a safety net of self-regard. Russell told his first biographer John Baxter: ‘Gaudier’s life was a good example to show that art, which is simply exploiting to the full one’s own natural gifts, is really bloody hard work, misery, momentary defeat and taking a lot of bloody stick - and giving it.’ A fitting epitaph for Russell himself.

Days Are Numbers present Savage Messiah on March 16 at The Montpelier, London, as part of Ken Russell Forever.

John A. Riley

Check it out, Home entertainment

Night Train

Night Train

Format: 4 Disc DVD Box-Set

Title: Polish Cinema Classics

Includes: Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Night Train, Janusz Morgenstern’s Goodbye, See You Tomorrow and Andrzej Munk’s Eroica

Release date: 12 March 2012

Distributor: Second Run

Title: Night Train

Director: Jerzy Kawalerowicz

Writer: Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Jerzy Lutowski

Original title: Pociag

Cast: Lucyna Winnicka, Leon Niemczyk

Poland 1959

99 mins

A man in sunglasses boards a train and insists on a sleeping compartment all to himself. A woman has already moved into his compartment and refuses to leave. Fellow passengers look on with curiosity, but this is just the beginning of their eventful overnight journey. Newspaper reports mention a wife killer on the lam: could one of the passengers in the sleeping carriage be the murderer?

Part of the Polish Cinema Classics box-set, the new Second Run DVD release of Night Train (1959) includes just one special feature, which doubles as a sneaky promotional clip for another upcoming release: My Seventeen Lives, a documentary about the director, Jerzy Kawalerowicz. While instructive, at just six and a half minutes this clip can only provide a minimum of information about Kawalerowicz, his film and its place in the Polish School of the 1950s.

Still, it’s hard to be disappointed in this DVD given the outstanding quality of the feature itself. Shot in lush black and white, striking compositions frame the actors’ expressive faces. Leon Niemczyk (who later starred in Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water) plays the solitary passenger, Jerzy. In the documentary, Niemczyk explains that Kawalerowicz didn’t like his actors to memorise their lines: he wanted to capture thought and hesitation on their faces. This helps to create an air of reticence and mystery, while a languorous jazzy soundtrack enhances the film’s charged atmosphere. When Jerzy enters the sleeping carriage, the viewer is immersed alongside him in a microcosm where it is difficult to keep track of all the individuals and their personal stories: the film begs to be re-watched in order to understand them, but will always retain some ambiguity.

Kawalerowicz says in the documentary that he wanted viewers to feel as though they were actually travelling on a train. A real train was too unstable a location for filming, so a sleeper carriage was set up in the studio, where a complex series of rear projections provided the scenery rushing past the windows. Skilful camerawork also contributes to the film’s lifelike impression, juxtaposing two spatial axes: up and down the train’s crowded corridors, and in and out of the cramped compartments. These two axes also represent the tenuous division between the public space of the corridor and the supposedly private space of the compartment.

There is a small-town feeling to passenger relationships on the train: the travellers just can’t resist invading each other’s privacy, offering unsolicited advice and flirting shamelessly. The film is understanding of human flaws, though, pointing to the traumas and disappointments that make individuals act the way they do. It is harder to excuse the characters for instantly turning on a fellow passenger who is suspected of murder: all previous companionship with the suspect counts for nothing, as they gossip about tell-tale signs of criminality. Similarly, rather than letting the police do their job when the murderer flees, the passengers join in the chase, forming a small but increasingly aggressive mob. Other people’s misfortunes become a spectator sport.

Night Train is only available as part of Second Run’s Polish Cinema Classics box-set.

Alison Frank

Check it out, Cinema releases

Gothic

Gothic

Format: Screening presented by Cigarette Burns Cinema

Part of Ken Russell Forever

Date: 10 March 2012

Time: 11:30pm

Venue: Rio Cinema, London

Director: Ken Russell

Writer: Stephen Volk

Based on: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Natasha Richardson, Myriam Cyr, Timothy Spall

UK 1986

87 mins

The story of one of the most famous literary friendships in the world is almost too good to make a good film. There’s something preposterous about Percy Bysshe Shelley’s and Lord Byron’s meeting in Switzerland at the Villa Diodati in 1816, like one of those imaginary dinner parties where you get to choose the guests from history; like Fantasy Island. Add to that the delicious irony that the literary outcome of the ghost story writing competition that ensued should be won hands down not by either of the two poets, but by the overshadowed 18-year-old wife Mary Shelley, who wrote… oh come on really? and Byron’s doctor, whose Vampyre would directly inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Ken Russell doesn’t give a monkey’s about historical or biographical accuracy and is much more interested in the flamboyant silliness of the whole thing. Julian Sands is a Shelley who might have stepped out of a Blackadder episode: ‘There’s nothing intellectual about wandering about Italy in a big shirt and trying to get laid, Mrs Miggins. The vegetarian and abstemious poet becomes a laudanum addict and boozer, channelling Coleridge presumably. Gabriel Byrne looks perfect as a clomping Byron, who is first seen standing in front of an enormous portrait of himself. Natasha Richardson is a rather arch, prudish Mary, with a vague Scottish lilt, and Miriam Cyr is Claire Clairmont, Mary’s half-sister and Byron’s lover. Timothy Spall rounds off the cast as a suitably repellent Polidori.

There is a lot of dashing about and what Nicholas Cage has recently called ‘mega-acting’, a sense of dynamic improvisation, possibly to try and enliven what otherwise is a one-location film. In fact, the structure begins to resemble a kind of phantasmagoria, a punkish Dead of Night, as the collected fruitcakes try to outdo each other in lurid scenes of nightmarish fantasy, play hide-and-seek and shriek quite a lot. Taking the title as a starting point, the film crams in a lot of the furniture and paraphernalia of the Gothic: skulls, snakes, armoured men, rats, creepy-crawlies, incest, ghosts, tilted stairways, thunder and lightning, endless corridors. It never once stops to actually build any tension, and it isn’t transgressive in any way because in this universe there’s no normality to transgress from. In an opening section, we get a glimpse of the outside world in the form of a bunch of upper-class tourists leering through telescopes trying to catch a glimpse of the famous occupants of the Villa. Likewise, the servants are happy enough to participate or peer through the keyhole and get their jollies that way. The music by Thomas Dolby is noisily in keeping with the general tone of the film.

These are by no means criticisms. The film is not a horror film as such. Odd to say, Russell lacks the discipline for horror: he refuses to confine himself to its grammar even as he’s willing to adopt its vocabulary. What you get instead is a wonderfully enjoyable carnival of daftness rounded off in the concluding quarter of the film by a strangely moving and in fact terrifying few minutes. Mary is gifted with a vision of the future, and for once the film quietly and unexpectedly begins to take its characters seriously. We see Shelley’s drowning and the subsequent burning of the body; the death of Byron in Greece, bled to death by his doctors. The next day all is well, but an audacious jump-shot brings us to the present day and the leering tourists are back. All that life and creativity long dead. It is one of Ken Russell’s best tricks. In the midst of all that craziness, there is a moment of clarity.

Cigarette Burns Cinema will launch Ken Russell Forever with a screening of Gothic on March 10 at the Rio Cinema, London.

John Bleasdale

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

Black Bread

Pa negre

Format: Cinema

Part of Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival

Date:11 + 13 March 2012

Venue: Cornerhouse, Manchester

Director: Agustí Villaronga

Writer: Agustí Villaronga

Based on the novel by: Emili Teixidor

Original title: Pa negre

Cast: Francesc Colomar, Roger Casamajor, Marina Comas, Nora Navas

Spain 2010

108 mins

A man is attacked in the Catalan woods, brutally murdered by a cloaked assailant; his son, in the back of their horse-drawn wagon, is driven over a cliff and left to die. Found by his friend Andreu (a terrific Francesc Colomer), the boy breathes out the name of a ghost in his final moments: Pitorliua.

It’s an incredibly dramatic opening to Agustí Villaronga’s 2010 award-winning adaptation of Emili Teixidor’s novel. Set in the years immediately following Franco’s crushing victory, Black Bread is not just another story, similar to Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), of the Spanish Civil War as seen through the eyes of an imaginative child. While history is important to the narrative, the director cleverly subverts the audience’s expectations, slowly revealing a much more nuanced and layered film, with a disturbing mystery at its core. It’s a gripping, richly textured work, and if the symbolism at times seems heavy-handed, that minor weakness is more than made up for by the twists that the plot takes.

As the film begins to unfold, the audience learns that Andreu’s father, Farriol (Roger Casamajor), and the murdered man were friends and fellow trade unionists, both on the losing side of the war. Was his death some sort of revenge, a score settling? Is Andreu’s father next? In the eyes of the police, the victors, Farriol must be guilty. His only hope is to flee over the mountains and into the relative safety of France, a route many men, lucky enough to escape the purge of the reds, have already taken. Andreu is sent away to live with his grandmother, who is a caretaker for a wealthy family headed by an overbearing matriarch, who will later hold the fates of Farriol and Andreu in her hands. Along with Andreu, his grandmother also shelters his family’s abandoned women and children, including the wild Nuria (Marina Comas), a cousin who lost a hand to a grenade. Although the adults pretend that her father also escaped to France, she knows the much more disturbing truth.

At night, Andreu and his cousins live in a shadowy world of superstitions and storytelling; there’s an air of menace in the dark and gloomy, claustrophobic farmhouse, perfectly captured by Antonio Riestra’s hand-held cinematography. The children, who are outcasts and misfits, paying the price for their parents’ socialism, see intrigue and adventure around every corner. And, in some ways, the children are right: conspiracies and cover-ups are everywhere. But the biggest mystery that Andreu has to solve is how the ghost of a man who is said to haunt the woods, cursed ever since the war, could be involved in the death of his young friend.

Complex questions about guilt and innocence aren’t neatly resolved; Farriol, who still professes devotion to his ideals, is not necessarily the victim he first appears to be when he’s persecuted for the murder by the fascist mayor (Sergi López), who once pursued Andreu’s mother (Nora Navas). And when the story spins in a completely unexpected direction, it’s not even clear that the vicious crime is directly related to the war at all. The truth is that a conflict of that horror and magnitude provides cover for a multitude of sins.

While the film isn’t a witch-hunt, it is unsparing in its criticism of the Church. The clergy, on the side of the fascists, sit in judgement on their parishioners, even controlling what they eat - allowing those unfortunates on the losing side only coarse, black bread as some kind of twisted punishment. It’s perhaps not entirely surprising that, in the end, a bitterly disillusioned Andreu chooses the path that he does.

Sarah Cronin

Check it out, Cinema releases

Altered States

Altered States

Format: Screening presented by Filmbar 70

Part of Ken Russell Forever

Date: 13 March 2012

Time: 7pm

Venue: Roxy Bar and Screen

Director: Ken Russell

Writer: Paddy Chayefsky

Based on the novel by: Paddy Chayefsky

Cast: William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, Charles Haid

USA 1980

102 mins

Altered States is Ken Russell’s most Hollywood film in a career that for the most part eschewed conventional and commercial cinema. As such it is an interesting case, an indicator of what Russell could have done had he toed the line. In fact, Richard Bancroft in his review of Lisztomania sees the film as a kind of penance, paid as compensation for Ken Russelling everyone to death in his earlier film.

Based on a novel and screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky of Network fame, Russell got the directing job after Arthur Penn bailed on the project. Russell claimed later to have been the twenty-seventh-choice director. Of course, Russell had in the past turned his hand to more conventional fare, the Harry Palmer entry Billion Dollar Brain (1967) for instance, but on the surface at least the subject matter had a wackiness that must have been appealing.

William Hurt, in his motion picture debut, plays Eddie Jessup, a scientist researching the links between schizophrenia and religious experience. A wild-eyed visionary and, like other Russell heroes such as Father Grandier and Tchaikovsky, a devotee to unconventional truth, Jessup answers a post-coital ‘What are you thinking?’ with the ludicrous ‘God … Jesus … crucifixions’. ‘I feel like I’m being harpooned by a monk,’ his lover Emily (Blair Brown) understandably complains. As part of his research, Jessup uses an isolation tank to try and regress to a more primal state of being. With the collaboration of his colleague Arthur (Bob Balaban) and against the opposition of Mason (Charles Haid, famous later for Hill Street Blues), Jessup begins experimenting with drugs to intensify the experience, but with increasingly dangerous consequences, especially when he begins to physically change under the influence of the altered state of his mind.

For the most part the film is conventionally shot by Jordan Cronenweth, who would go on to film Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Russell gets to have some fun with the hallucinations, taking advantage of the lingering influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to produce suitably ‘mind-bending’ visuals, multicoloured blobbing paint stuff, along with Cecil B. DeMille-like scenes of Hell (actually taken from Harry Lachman’s 1935 film Dante’s Inferno) and a whiff of religious controversy. The appalling pretentiousness of the whole film and the mumbo jumbo of the dialogue, taken verbatim from Chayesky’s book - he has to be one of the few screenwriters who took his name off a project because they kept his dialogue intact - is weirdly made into something almost clever by the way the performers rush headlong through it without any winking and Russell holds his camp in check, perhaps with the exception of a ludicrous monkey man escape/dog chase/zoo invasion section. When Jessup finally goes too far with his experiment and basically becomes a whirlpool, it is tempting to think that Russell is presenting us with a visual metaphor of the film disappearing literally up its own hole. With Jessup saved from being a Mugwump for life via the love of a good woman and a sequence that would go on to inspire an A-ha video, the film ends with the kind of conventional sentiment (love conquers all) that seems so clichéd and ridiculous that it might actually be true.

Filmbar 70 will screen Altered States on March 13 at the Roxy Bar and Screen as part of Ken Russell Forever.

John Bleasdale

Check it out, Home entertainment

In Defence of Lisztomania

Lisztomania

Format: Screening presented by London Short Film Festival

Part of Ken Russell Forever

Date: 17 March 2012

Time: 11:30pm

Venue: Gate Picturehouse, Notting Hill

Writer: Ken Russell

Cast: Roger Daltrey, Nell Campbell, Sara Kestelman, Paul Nicholas

UK 1975

102 mins

Even Ken Russell fans tend to shy away from Lisztomania (1975). It is seen as the point where Russell goes ‘too far’ and collapses into self-parody. Audiences seem uncomfortable with many aspects of the film, perhaps most of all with the idea that he takes the classic Russell subject - the life of a great composer - but films it in the rock opera style of Tommy (1975), his previous and most financially successful film.

Being a Ken Russell fan has tended to mean being a Ken Russell apologist. That the director of sensitive films like Song of Summer: Frederick Delius (1968) and Women in Love (1969) later made a movie in which Roger Daltrey rides around on a giant penis while singing, is seen as the degeneration of a once promising talent. Lisztomania comes almost at the end of Russell’s run of fairly big-budget, successful 1970s movies - The Music Lovers (1970), The Devils (1971), The Boy Friend (1971), Tommy - and the critical savaging it received might explain why Russell made very few interesting films thereafter. Like some gaudy, camp Icarus, he flew too close to the sun and got so badly burnt that he was forced to go to Hollywood and make Altered States (1980).

In the popular imagination, Russsell’s films are full of bizarre fantasy sequences featuring religious imagery, over-literal visual metaphors and copious nudity. Lisztomania certainly delivers on those fronts. As a young ‘cult cinema’ enthusiast, I found it easy to fall in love with the film, while at the same time realising how very silly it was. The problem is that, because Lisztomania is intentionally absurd, it gives plenty of ammunition to those who tar the rest of Russell’s films with the same brush. Russell’s reputation has plummeted in recent years, and the mainstream critical view suggests that it was all downhill after Women in Love. Important films were only made available on DVD many years into the format’s lifespan (Lisztomania, 2009; The Music Lovers, 2011; The Devils, 2012), and there is no legal way of viewing his 1960s BBC work apart from one overpriced region 1 box-set.

The key to rediscovering that Lisztomania has merits beyond knockabout comedy is in comparing it to Russell’s long-banned film about Richard Strauss, Dance of the Seven Veils (1970). Like Lisztomania, it marks the end of a phase in Russell’s career (it was his last work for the BBC for more than 20 years); like Lisztomania, it equates classical music with Nazism; and like Lisztomania, it has no realistic scenes whatsoever.

The Strauss film is described as ‘A comic strip in seven episodes on the life of Richard Strauss’ and gives seven different versions of Strauss - the lover, the family man, the fawning Nazi collaborator, etc. It was the Nazi sequences that were most controversial, and led to Strauss’s family banning the film. The most disturbing sequence shows a Jewish couple being brutalised by Nazi thugs while Strauss plays his music louder and louder to drown out the screams. It is fairly sexually explicit for 1970 television and features a sequence where Strauss appears as a silent film star, Erich von Stroheim. It is also completely unrealistic - there is minimal dialogue, and it is as much ballet as straight drama. Strauss is played by dancer Christopher Gable, a Russell regular.

In this context, Lisztomania makes a lot more sense. While The Music Lovers or The Devils have unrestrained fantasy sequences, they are still coherent narratives with beginnings, middles and endings. Lisztomania is not. It is, in effect, a comic strip in nine or ten episodes on the life of Franz Liszt: the lover, the family man, the pop star, etc. Liszt appears as a silent film star (Chaplin), and the film is full of the kind of nudity that the BBC would never have been able to get away with. Just as in Seven Veils, the episodes are cartoony caricatures rather than realistic portrayals of episodes of Liszt’s life (something reflected in Lisztomania‘s most famous promotional poster). Laughing at Lisztomania for being unrealistic misses the point. The dialogue scenes are intended to seem just as unlikely as the scenes with singing Nazi children or giant penises.

Like in Seven Veils, the most contentious sequence links classical music and Nazism. Wagner - a musical vampire who drains inspiration from Liszt - is reborn as a Frankenstein Monster Hitler who murders Jews with a machine-gun guitar. Unlike the Strauss film, though, Litsztomania does not appear to make a serious point about Nazism and its relation to music. Wagner’s followers are portrayed as children, and Russell has found a similarity between Nazism’s fetishised hand gestures and those of pop music’s various dance crazes. But it feels more than a little adolescent, and Ken Russell was obviously far too intelligent to really believe that Wagner caused the Holocaust.

The main problems with Lisztomania are that it is badly paced (the early concert scene is close to interminable); and that, as Russell admits in the DVD commentary, it requires quite a lot of knowledge of Liszt and Wagner in order to ‘get’ the references. The target audience was probably the same people who had gone to see Tommy, not the best audience to appreciate jokes about Wagner sucking Liszt’s blood. This results in a film that feels like it was made for two separate audiences, neither of whom will fully appreciate it. And although it is easier to forgive clumsy dialogue scenes when you accept that they are probably intentionally clumsy, it does not make them any easier to sit through.

Perhaps Russell was a victim of his own excess. In his autobiography he claimed that the Rick Wakeman soundtrack was foisted on him by producer David Puttnam, who perhaps took it upon himself to nudge Russell into making a more archetypally ‘Ken Russell’ film than he had intended. Perhaps his great financial success with Tommy gave him a bit too much license to go over the top. In returning to the completely stylised filmmaking of Dance of the Seven Veils, but with fewer restraints on what he could show, Russell probably overdid it. A fantasy sequence loses its impact if there are no ‘straight’ sequences to compare it to.

Lisztomania is still extremely entertaining and does not ask to be taken too seriously. It feels unfair to dismiss it as the point Ken Russell degenerated into silliness. It perhaps marks the point where he had done everything he could with a certain style of film, just as Dance of the Seven Veils was the culmination of his BBC work. Lisztomania is a similar bridge-burning effort, after which Russell would be forced to find something new. That it was followed by a frustrating period in Hollywood and then a long, slow decline is sad, but it is commendable that he struck off in other directions, rather than just making Tommy clones for the next ten years.

Lisztomania will probably never rank among the best Ken Russell films; the pace is too uneven and the comedy a bit too ridiculous. But it has some merits beyond just being the funny one with the giant penis, the Wagner Nazis and Ringo Starr.

London Short Film Festival will screen Lisztomania on March 17 at the Gate Picturehouse, Notting Hill, as part of Ken Russell Forever.

Richard Bancroft

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Repo Man

Repo Man

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 20 February 2012

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Alex Cox

Writer: Alex Cox

Cast: Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Tracey Walter, Miguel Sandoval, Fox Harris, Del Zamora

USA 1984

92 mins

There is a great joie de vivre in Repo Man (1984), the first feature made by film fan Alex Cox. But what followed was a convoluted story of official and unofficial sequels and spin-offs marked by discord and recriminations.

Unlike other ‘classics’ of the 1980s, Repo Man has aged well. Cox disingenuously lays much of the credit for this to cinematographer Robby Müller’s involvement, but the intriguing mix of elements - the punk soundtrack, Emilio Estevez’s brash performance juxtaposed with Harry Dean Stanton’s as his laconic elder mentor, Fox Harris’s mad scientist with an eye-patch and a radioactive car, the anonymous blue and white packaging labels of food and drink and so on - all add up to a unique experience that announced the arrival of an important new filmmaker.

Yet, Alex Cox never managed to sustain the reputation he gained with Repo Man: while its immediate follow-up, Sid and Nancy (1986), was relatively successful, subsequent films alienated and bewildered audiences. The 1987 double bill of Straight to Hell, with its inexperienced all-musician cast, and the America-baiting Walker sealed his fate as a ‘cult’ director. But although his budgets dwindled further and further, Cox has never made an uninteresting film.

Read the interview with Alex Cox.

The sequel to Repo Man, Repo Chick (2009), was released on the 25th anniversary of the original film and reunited half a dozen members of the supporting cast, including Cox regular Miguel Sandoval, with the director, who also cameos in both films. The breezy, if overlong, movie aptly takes a pot shot at reality TV, but replacing Estevez with a ‘valley girl’ and her entourage creates a less interesting dynamic than the one between Otto and his cohort. The film’s central MacGuffin - banks need to repossess everything in America from trains to ocean liners with the help of the new Repo team - has a certain absurd resonance in the current economic climate.

The CGI backdrops of Repo Chick were clearly inspired by Ralph Steadman’s ink-splattered hallucinogenic style, but the film’s micro-budget means its innovations, including shooting actors in front of a green screen then filled with unrealistic landscapes from cartoon to toy town, limited its audience. Steadman’s influence on Cox is also visible in the booklet included in the new Blu-ray, which reproduces the original four-page comic that was the first incarnation of Repo Man, expanded with the addition of further cartoon drawings by Cox, reminiscent of the style of the gonzo cartoonist.

In between the two Repo films, Cox wrote another instalment, Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday, which he couldn’t film. Estevez’s character Otto is renamed Waldo, so he could stay incognito on his return from outer space (and probably also to keep lawyers happy if a different studio to Universal had made it). Waldo is even lighter on plot than Repo Man: the title character roams through an even more polluted LA, going from one haphazard set-piece to another. If Waldo had been made in the late 90s as intended, it could have been part of the trend for ‘yuppie in peril’ films that briefly flourished after Cox’s first feature, including Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and John Landis’s Into the Night (1985).

Although the cast and crew of the original film were interested, Cox was unable to raise the money and so the script might have just remained typed words on a page, if the director hadn’t decided to allow others to have a crack at adapting it. A team of fledgling American filmmakers, helmed by producer-director Stuart Kincaid, showed an interest and set about filming it to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Repo Man. Unfortunately, there was some disagreement between Cox and them. When I spoke to Cox, he said they shot only a small amount, and his preference is clearly for people to experience Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday as the graphic novel that was released in 2008. But in a feature-length documentary on the matter, A Texas Tale of Treason (2006), the filmmakers claim they finished shooting the film in Texas in 2004, and that Cox told them to shut down production just as they were getting to post-production. With only a small amount of Waldo footage accessible online either in trailer form or as part of the documentary, it’s impossible to know how much Kincaid actually shot. If he did finish the film as Texas Tale attests, one hopes that he and Cox can eventually put aside their differences and let the movie see the light of day as the existing footage isn’t bad at all and I, for one, would be curious to see more.

Universal Studios retained the right to make a sequel to Repo Man, which they eventually exercised by releasing the similar sounding but unrelated Repo Men (2010) three years after it had originally been shot, muddying the waters when Cox was trying to get Repo Chick released. Understandably, Cox doesn’t have anything nice to say about Repo Men in his introduction to the new Repo Man Blu-ray, although the film’s actually quite good. It is best described as a cross between Blade Runner and Brazil as it was inspired by both Philip K. Dick and a Monty Python sketch about organ-legging (which appears on a TV in the film). Jude Law plays a Repo Man in a dystopian future, repossessing mechanical body parts from owners who need them to survive, with gristly consequences, and in some respects this is actually a better film than Cox’s own bona fide sequel.

Alex Cox talks of the unrealised Repo Man comic as ‘what might have been’ (he gave up after four pages because it was too much work – read the interview for more details) and an investigation into the sequels - finished, unfinished and adapted - makes that statement all the more poignant. With Repo Man available as a Blu-ray, it’s certainly time to re-appreciate the original film for its many great qualities and enjoy that at least, in the best home format it’s ever been.

Alex Fitch

Note on the Blu-ray extras:

The Repo Man Blu-ray includes excellent additional features: aside from the original comic there is also an amusing censored TV edit, with the immortal expletive ‘Melon Farmer’ replacing a more familiar expression with the same initials and number of syllables - the TV edit is almost as worthy as the ruder original because of the absurdity of the ridiculous language.

Check it out, Cinema releases

Rampart

Rampart

Format: Cinema

Dates: 24 February 2012

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Oren Moverman

Writers: James Ellroy, Oren Moverman

Based on the novel by: Vera Caspary

Cast: Woody Harrelson, Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon, Ice Cube

USA 2011

102 mins

Although James Ellroy’s novels have been turned into films before, most notably LA Confidential (1997) and The Black Dahlia (2006), Rampart is his first screenplay, co-written with director Oren Moverman, who also wrote Jesus’ Son (1999) and I’m Not There (2007). Ellroy claims the film is his most personal work to date, and the lead character, maverick LA cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), certainly resembles the author, with his balding buzz-cut and scabrous wit. He is the epitome of the Ellroy flawed anti-hero - like LA Confidential‘s Budd White (Russell Crowe), but without his intelligent and politically savvy counterpart, Guy Pierce’s Ed Exley, to guide him. This classic Hollywood masculine protagonist is the descendent of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956) and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (1971). Rampart is essentially a character study of this violent man of action who makes the world safe for civilisation but can never really be part of it.

Brown’s relationship to the home is at the core of the film, as much as his work in the streets of Downtown LA. Although such characters normally have no place in the ‘feminine’ civilised world, at the start of the film he is at least on its threshold. He lives next door to his family - two sisters with whom he has fathered two children (both daughters) - and is invited in for meals, but sent home again if he gets too aggressive. The famous last shot of The Searchers, when the door closes on John Wayne outside the home, is echoed here to heartbreaking effect.

Read Michael Almereyda’s text on The Searchers‘ final shot, illustrated by Sean Azzopardi, in The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology.

The film is shown from Brown’s point of view, with Woody Harrelson, dominating every scene and giving the performance of his life, somehow imbuing this violent, bigoted misanthrope with personality, charm and humour. Whether battering criminals, seducing women, endlessly smoking, looking old and vulnerable with reading glasses, panicked and paranoid, or off his head on drugs, we are given a real roller-coaster performance that should be showered with awards.

For a film that is all about the Hollywood (anti-)hero, Rampart gives him very little to do. James Ellroy’s convoluted plots and political machinations, which drive The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, are discarded. The real-life ‘Rampart Scandal’ of the late 90s - a tale of police corruption and cover-ups in the precinct of that name - seems almost tailor-made for Ellroy, but is merely the backdrop here. Brown is never going to get to the bottom of such layers of intrigue; in fact he barely even scratches the surface of the mystery. He is left to rage impotently against forces he can neither stop nor understand.

Oren Moverman, directing his second feature (his debut was the 2009 Oscar-nominated The Messenger, also with Harrelson), shows what a great talent he is. The hand-held realism at first appears rough and ready. The natural lighting, provided by Californian sunshine, reveals why the film industry moved to Hollywood in the first place, while the overlapping dialogue and actual LA locations, complete with quirky piano bars and flamenco restaurants, further add to the film’s realist style. But the, at times, strikingly unusual framing and imaginative use of close-ups - putting us almost tangibly in the middle of the action (particularly disconcerting in the toe-sucking scene and the how-not-to-eat a burrito scene) - showcase Moverman’s great visual sensibility. He is also adept at building a convincing sense of confusion and paranoia, mostly by leaving much of the story untold.

Although it perhaps does not go quite as far as 1992’s Bad Lieutenant (a film Rampart has much in common with), this film takes the maverick cop character to its conclusion. It is a warts-and-all depiction, but with moments of real humour, and even pathos.

Paul Huckerby

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Check it out, Cinema releases

Laura

Laura

Format: Cinema

Dates: 24 February 2012

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: BFI

Director: Otto Preminger

Writers: Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Elizabeth Reinhardt

Based on the novel by: Vera Caspary

Cast: Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price

USA 1944

88 mins

The opening credits in Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir roll over an oil painting of a beautiful woman; this is Laura, but as the story begins, she has already been found murdered. ‘I shall never forget the weekend Laura died,’ says Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in a voice-over, as the camera pans around his museum-like apartment, lingering on luxurious objects collected by the wealthy society figure, who delights in excoriating Manhattanites in his newspaper column and radio show. We soon learn that Laura has been shot in the face at close range, right in the doorway to her apartment, and Waldo is one of Lieutenant Mark McPherson’s (Dana Andrews) chief suspects.

So is Shelby (Vincent Price in an early role), something of a once wealthy playboy, now fallen on hard times. We discover through flashbacks, as their stories are recounted to McPherson, that the two men were engaged in a tussle for Laura’s affections. Lydecker ‘discovered’ Laura (played by the beautiful Gene Tierney), helping to further both her career and her climb up New York’s social ladder. So enamoured of his own status, Lydecker struggles to understand how Laura could fall prey to Shelby’s charms, failing to see the appeal in being with a younger, more attractive man (who also appears to have a lot to hide, including a love affair with Laura’s wealthy aunt).

This is film noir set in the rarefied milieu of the elite, rather than in the mean streets below the glittering penthouses. They eat out at the legendary Algonquin, not at seedy diners. Their world is beyond McPherson’s reach; his only chance at coming close to a woman as refined and elegant as Laura is through the - possibly distorted - imaginings of Lydecker and Shelby. Lydecker (who is given many of the film’s best lines, his caustic wit one of its highlights) in fact reprimands the detective when he crassly refers to Laura as a ‘dame’. For all of her success - she rises to the top of the advertising world, even hiring Shelby when he’s down on his luck - Laura is neither vamp nor moll, leaving McPherson and the audience to puzzle over her true character. What is clear is that McPherson finds himself seduced by the idea of Laura; and, in a terrific plot twist, it’s left to the audience to decide whether his desire for her, and with it his need to solve the case, is merely a fantasy, or something more real.

Always lingering beneath the genteel surface is the shocking brutality of the violent murder; Preminger makes the blistering case that the rich elite are capable of any crime if it means getting what they want. All of this makes Laura a thrilling, absorbing and original example of the genre; it’s also beautifully shot, pure escapist entertainment. It dates from a cinematic era when two characters could still fall in and out of love seemingly overnight, and when plots could be full of holes (common in the genre) without critics deriding the film as unrealistic. Despite some of the all-too-human mistakes that she makes, Laura is also a strong, independent and desirable woman, and an unusual, almost accidental femme fatale.

Sarah Cronin

Check it out, Home entertainment

Zift

Zift

Format: DVD

Release date: 20 February 2012

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Javor Gardev

Writer: Vladislav Todorov (based on his novel)

Cast: Zahary Baharov, Tanya Ilieva, Vladimir Penev

Bulgaria 2008

92 mins

Moth (Zahary Baharov), a would-be boxer and full-time loser, emerges from prison in the 60s, having missed out on most of his youth and a communist coup in 1944, serving time for a murder he didn’t commit, having taken the fall to protect his lover Ada (Tanya Ilieva) and their unborn child. He is barely out of the prison doors when he is abducted by army thugs and taken to be tortured by Slug (Vladimir Penev), once a small-time con man, now a commissar in the new hierarchy, hell-bent on finding a diamond that went missing after that murder decades ago…

Bulgarian neo-noir, anybody? Javor Gardev’s Zift makes no bones about the fact that it’s running on familiar rails. Ada’s femme fatale status is flagged up immediately when she is given the teenage nickname Mantis, and reinforced for those who haven’t got it yet when she reappears under the stage name Gilda in a slinky black number singing a tune that Rita Hayworth would find familiar. Moth is, of course, fatally drawn to his old flame. He seems to be smart enough to deliver the dry, world-weary voice-over, but not smart enough to avoid trouble, getting into the wrong car, falling into Slug’s traps. He spends the second half of the film as a dead man walking (with obvious nods to 1950’s D.O.A.) and the rain-sodden graveyard finale seems so inevitable that it feels oddly flat when it actually happens.

So Gardev, heavily assisted by screenwriter Vladislav Todorov and D.P. Emil Hristov, is serving us a very familiar brew, plot-wise, but, as if to compensate, goes mad on the decoration and delivery. Zift is full of inventive camera work and artful monochrome compositions. Moth staggers around in a sharp leather jacket and white shirt combo when he’s not naked and tattooed, his shaven scalp looking decidedly anachronistic for the 1960s (though various flashbacks tell us this is saving us from a coiffure that looks like a cheap carpet). His story is continually interrupted with grainy cutaways that illustrate other tales and ideas. What would be tense sequences in other films are undercut here by deliberately OTT touches, so an escape from Slug’s torturers results in Moth sliding on his arse through a Turkish bath full of screaming naked women chasing a glass eyeball. Elsewhere, it’s self-consciously cool in a way that reminded me of Europa-era von Trier and other art-house darlings of 20 years back, seeming to take place in its own hermetically sealed nightmare world. Well, either that or Bulgaria is a lot freakier than I think we all imagined. The clock is striking 17, 18, 19, and there are dwarf women selling insects in jars at flea markets in the woods, fart-lighting grave-diggers and creepy grinning nurses; everybody at a hospital seems compelled to tell stories of horror or embarrassment, and most of the cast seem prone to the kind of gutter philosophising that comes naturally to drunks or men serving hard time.

Zift comes to life in prison flashbacks and fever dream hallucinations, in its grotesques and non-sequiturs, and disappoints when it clambers back to its story. It’s hard to know how seriously we’re supposed to take all this: the off-the-peg plot and go-for-broke stylisation work against any kind of emotional tug. Are we meant to feel anything for these hard-boiled archetypes? Does it matter, when there’s all this neat stuff to look at? Ilieva is pretty damn sexy as Mantis. In a role that’s written as pure male fantasy, she manages to suggest that there’s more going on behind those eyes than Moth will ever comprehend. Baharov gives good lug as Moth, whose hangdog fatalism means that he never seems all that concerned by his own damnation. The whole thing is engaging and off-kilter and a little unsatisfying. It’s worth watching for those odd moments of Bulgarian business, but you can’t help wishing that all this invention and craft had been festooned around a story that needed telling.

Mark Stafford