Yearly Archives: 2016

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Battles without Honour or Humanity

Battles without Honour and Humanity
Battles without Honour or Humanity

Format: Dual Format (Blu-ray + DVD)

Release date: 8 August 2016

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Kinji Fukasaku

Writers: Koichi Iiboshi, Kazuo Kasahara

Cast: Bunta Sugawara, Hiroki Matsukata, Kunie Tanaka

Original title: Jingi naki tatakai

Japan 1973

99 mins

Fukasaku’s 1973 yakuza movie is imbued with a sense of the absurd stupidity of violence and anger at the mythology of the criminal clans.

Kinji Fukasaku’s influential 1973 yakuza movie Battles without Honour or Humanity opens with a freeze frame of the mushroom cloud. We are in a post-war Japan one step on from Ground Zero. Life is a confused and violent shambles, a shanty town existence – anticipating the opening of Brian De Palma’s Scarface – where a feral criminality lurks, with roaming GIs boozing and raping and yakuza families fighting and jockeying for territory. Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) is a demobbed soldier who agrees to confront a drunk yakuza as a favour for the local gang. The confrontation turns to murder. It is a hesitant, unglamorous and amateurish killing, but the symbolism is obvious. The traditionally dressed yakuza with the samurai sword represents the floundering figure of the failed old ways, his weapon an outmoded throwback. It is clear that these old ways are not necessarily more honourable – the man is a drunken psychopath and we’ve already seen the samurai sword used to lop off limbs as part of an extortion racket – but Hirono and his friends represent a new reality of instability and opportunism, created by the mushroom cloud that opens the film. In jail, Hirono will make friends, a blood brother indeed, and his loyalty will be rewarded with an entrance into a yakuza family.

The rest of the film follows outsider Hirono – although becoming a blood brother with one family, his loyalty remains with that of his old pals and their boss for whom he went to jail – as he negotiates his way into a gangster’s life. This picaresque hero is an amiable thug, an obstinately thick-headed lump, who barely understands the shifting feuds, the complicated double-crossing and the intricate interweave of loyalty and disloyalty that run throughout the film. His simplicity contrasts with the avarice and power plays around him as the families battle for territory and drug money. There is no dignified old guard here. The boss of Hirono’s family is a transparently venal and petty man provoking a war with his parsimony.

Fukasaku imbues the film with a sense of the absurd stupidity of violence. Each murder is met with a journalistic freeze frame with date and time title (the film is based on a series of newspaper articles written by Kôichi Iiboshi that were themselves adapted from the memoirs of real-life yakuza Kôzô Minô) as well as being punctuated by a blaring scream of American jazz trumpet. When a yakuza decides to cut off his finger in the most iconic of yakuza moments, the scene is played out as a ludicrous comedy with the severed finger flying off into the garden and the assembled gangsters crawling around on their hands and knees to find the missing digit.

It is precisely the mythology of the yakuza at which Fukasaku’s fury is aimed; the rituals and the lore of the criminal clans are literally shot to pieces by the film. The immediacy of his anger can be felt in the documentary style he adopts. His freeze frames are particularly well chosen, they suggest a dynamism most motion pictures lack. Even the yakuza themselves occasionally tire of their activities, one of them complaining that every night he has doubts, but in the morning, when he’s surrounded by his men, he gets back to it. The film was immensely popular and would spawn four sequels known collectively as The Yakuza Papers. Another cycle of films, New Battles without Honour or Humanity and Aftermath of Battles without Honour and Humanity, would also be launched. However, the law of diminishing returns applies and Fukasaku’s thesis had already been forcefully expressed in the first film.

John Bleasdale

This review was first published in 2002 in connection with the DVD release of Battles without Honour or Humanity by Eureka Entertainment.
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Sid and Nancy

Sid and Nancy
Sid and Nancy

Format: Cinema

Release date: 5 August 2016

BR/DVD release date: 29 August 2016

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Alex Cox

Writers: Alex Cox, Abbe Wool

Cast: Gary Oldman, Andrew Schofield, Chloe Webb, David Hayman

UK 1986

112 mins

Alex Cox’s retelling of the Sex Pistols bassist’s doomed junkie romance with an American groupie still packs a punch.

Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy is 30 years old and looking pretty damn fly for its age, well turned out in vintage bondage trousers and handsome Roger Deakins cinematography. Age changes a film, and in this case the years have been kind. It tells the true tale, you must surely know, of the utterly ill-starred relationship between Sid Vicious, the under-rehearsed bassist in the second line-up of The Sex Pistols, and Nancy Spungen, an American groupie/prostitute. It is a romance written in gob and heroin, mostly heroin, through which the couple ‘meet cute’, after a fashion, and through which they will both spiral, over a couple of years, towards a wretched murder/overdose in New York 79.

Being punkily inclined as a teenager, a decade or so after the movement’s heyday, I bloody loved Sid and Nancy, partly because it was one of the few and far examples of what could be termed punk cinema that could be found in the local video outlet, together with Cox’s Repo Man and the early works of Penelope Spheeris. I wore out my VHS copy with over-use whilst at the same time being fully aware that many lairy old ex-punks ‘who were there at the time’ had a bit of a downer on the film for its many transgressions,* and they had a point. It is, to be sure, a travesty of history, if you care about that sort of thing. The actual events are compressed, blended, shaken and stirred to fit a clear narrative arc. Anachronisms abound, and wrong notes are struck. But to criticise the film on grounds of accuracy seems wrong-headed. Cox sets out his stall early on: he puts ghosts in the Chelsea Hotel’s corridors, and fills London’s streets with St Trinian’s-style hockey-wielding little thugs. He has mounted cavalry trot past, drapes the punks in vintage Vivienne Westwood and covers the walls in Jamie Reid art and spray can graffiti. This, it is clear, is not aiming for realism. This, at least in its London scenes, is a ‘print the legend’ portrait. He fills his frame with background artistes and makes sure they have stuff to do, unleashing a three-ring circus of anti-social activity. He lets his set dressers and costume designers have a field day, and always one to prefer the idiosyncratic to the functional, he allows his actors to go broad to the point of caricature, a risky strategy that (as with Repo Man) continually draws memorable performances from even minor characters. So we have David Hayman delivering a winningly saturnine Malcolm McLaren, the cherishable Kathy Burke stealing scenes in Clockwork Orange get-up, and Debbie Bishop doing great work as Pistols secretary Phoebe, amongst a cavalcade of sharp little turns.

The film belongs to Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb, though. this was Oldman’s first man-sized role ( he was in Mike Leigh’s Meantime in 84, but not much else of note), and he grabs it with both hands. His Sid is an endlessly watchable blend of swagger and style and clumsy naivety, a likeable fool who’s won the lottery and landed his dream gig without having to do any heavy lifting. He plays up to the sneering, v-flicking, violent role the tabloids have created for him, but deflates the image with moments of sweet politeness and vulnerability – witness him begging Nancy to help him with the washing-up ’round his mum’s flat dressed in leopard print underpants and socks. He’s essentially a big, clueless kid who’s been given all the toys but doesn’t understand the game, and watching his descent to the snot-bubbling wreck on the NY subway is heart-breaking. Webb has the harder task of imbuing ‘nauseating’ Nancy with any qualities that would make her worth going to hell for, and does a fine job. Her Nancy is, for sure, an appalling human being, a leech whose every utterance is a whine or a scream or a shrieked insult when she hasn’t gotten her way, but she’s also possessed of a brash, ballsy energy and a lopsided devotion. Her horrified realisation that, dressed in Sid’s mum’s floaty scarves, she ‘looks like Stevie Nicks!’ is hilarious. Her quiet admission that the reason the couple have been thrown out of her grand-parents’ house early on, in a disastrous visit home to her folks, is simply that ‘they know me’ a quietly unnerving moment of self-awareness.

Together they form a tight little bond, immune to the truth, where he is a star for the ages and she is his soulmate and manager. This is emphasised by the sequences that punctuate the piece like dream interludes: slow-motion scenes where all noise drops away apart from the pretty, yearning music composed for the film by Pray For Rain and The Pogues, The first shows the couple walking in blissful drunken serenity away from the Pistols Jubilee boat party as all around them are brutally collared by the cops; a later one has them snogging in a New York alleyway as trash rains down around them. Both emphasise the bubble that the young lovers have built around them. In many ways it’s a film of two halves, taking a definite turn when we get to New York and the Chelsea hotel. The colourful burlesque drops away, the frames become less and less crowded, grim reality seeps in, until we’re left with two helpless people in a shrinking room. Junkie etiquette takes hold, a life of endless empty promises and all conquering need, where the world shrivels and the detritus accumulates.**

Cox and co-writer Abbe Wool’s most egregious sins against the facts of the case have all been in the service of making the film a love story, and I can see how its fanciful ‘taxi to heaven’ confabulations would seem like so much appalling bullshit to anybody involved with the actual squalor of gutter-level smack addiction. Within the film, all the Christiane F stuff sits a little uneasily with the earlier Carry On cartoonery. Other duff notes are the scenes with ‘Rockhead’, a thinly veiled and thinly conceived Iggy-esque*** creation inserted into the Soho sections of the story, whose appearances and purpose are a little baffling. And it has to be said that Andrew Schofield just doesn’t land Johnny Rotten, coming across decidedly more clownish Captain Sensible than malevolent Mr Lydon, and flatly underselling his ‘ever had the feeling you’ve been cheated’ moment.

All told, viewed today it’s an inventive and energetic raggedy thing, made with a wide screen chutzpah rare in British film, and held together by a committed charismatic lead couple. The music sounds fine, the photography is superb, it’s generous and inclusive and wide-eyed, and like most of the director’s work, feels just a little out of control. I wish Alex Cox had a longer purple patch, I lost track of his work after Highway Patrolman, but he made some damn cinema when he could raise the money. The Moviedrome seasons he curated and presented for BBC2 were a cinema education for a generation. Give the man some appreciation.

Mark Stafford

* The most obvious being that yer actual punk rockers of a certain vintage will never believe that Sid actually killed Nancy, much has been written, and at least one full-length documentary (Alan G Parker’s Who Killed Nancy, 2009) made, on the case for the defence, if you will.

** It’s jarring when Courtney Love turns up in a small role as a friend of Nancy’s later in the film, bringing to mind parallels with another smack-addled rock’n’roll horror show.

*** The real James Osterberg pops up later as a prospective Chelsea guest.

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Suture

Suture
Suture

Format: Dual Format (Blu-ray + DVD)

Release date: 4 July 2016

Distributor: Arrow Video

Directors: David Siegel, Scott McGehee

Writers: David Siegel, Scott McGehee

Cast: Dennis Haysbert, Mel Harris, Sab Shimono

USA 1993

95 mins

In this seminal American independent film, a black man takes on the identity of his ‘identical’ white twin brother.

Sampling a single frame from any of the features directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel offers evidence of the striking visual aesthetic that defines their work. A thrilling synthesis of composition, editing and design (visual and aural), Suture (1993), followed by The Deep End (a carefully calibrated update of Max Ophüls’s The Reckless Moment that gave Tilda Swinton one of her first American roles in 2001) and Bee Season (2005), has seen them imprint their indelible signature style on contemporary American filmmaking. Completed under the aegis of a major studio, Bee Season was a move up in division, but it was vastly under-appreciated on release, and so it is perhaps little surprise that McGehee and Siegel have returned to independent production with the as-yet-to-be-released Uncertainty, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2008.

Introduced by McGehee’s sister Kelly, who was studying at the San Francisco Art Institute alongside Siegel, Scott and David bonded over movies and discussed a possible collaboration. Neither had attended film school (McGehee was studying for a PhD in Japanese Film History at UC Berkeley; Siegel was doing an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design), but with Kelly as production designer the pair completed a number of short films before deciding to tackle a feature. Audacious enough in its conception stage to attract the attention of Steven Soderbergh, who came on board as an executive producer, the witty and supremely confident Suture made an immediate impact on the American independent landscape. When it was originally released in the UK at the Institute of Contemporary Arts I vividly recall going to see the film seven consecutive nights in a row. Some 16 years later, its potency and originality remain undimmed.

Despite having met his identical half-brother Clay (Dennis Haysbert, today best known as the pre-Obama black American president in 24) just once – at their murdered father’s funeral – wealthy sophisticate Vincent (Michael Harris) invites his blue-collar sibling to stay with him in Phoenix, Arizona. As this is ostensibly a bonding exercise, Clay is dismayed to learn upon arrival that a business trip necessitates Vincent’s immediate attention. After dropping his brother at the airport, Clay is involved in a horrific car explosion that leaves his face burned beyond recognition, his memory erased and Vincent’s desirable Rolls Royce a write-off. With the aid of a psychoanalyst and a leading plastic surgeon, Clay is slowly pieced back together. Unfortunately, he’s reconstructed as Vincent, now the primary suspect in his father’s death.

Suture is a sophisticated, post-modern affair borrowing freely from the B-movie thriller, the American avant-garde and the film noir, including stylised chiaroscuro lighting, a complex flashback structure and the focus upon a moral landscape predicated on corruption and greed. The film nonetheless brings its own intoxicating embellishments to the Hitchcockian mix (1945’s Spellbound, with its Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequences, is an obvious and acknowledged influence). An intelligent analysis of identity, class, the Lacanian duality of mind and body and the physical and mental means by which we define ourselves, Suture features at its core compelling performances from Harris, who is slight and white, and Haysbert, muscular and black. ‘Our physical resemblance is striking’, remarks Vincent in a typically deadpan moment. The naming of a character after the philosopher Descartes and the use of ‘Ring of Fire’ (both Johnny Cash and Tom Jones versions appear) as a charred Clay is transported to surgery offer further evidence of the mischievous humour of the filmmakers – who both briefly appear as gurney operators – amidst the film’s lightly and comfortably worn highbrow tendencies.

Masterly shot in austere black and white by Greg Gardiner (who won an award for the cinematography at Sundance in 1994) and boasting Kelly McGehee’s stunning production design (the inventive use of modish 60s office interiors evokes Godard’s Alphaville), Suture is also significant in its compositional assurance and positioning of characters in relation to objects and buildings. The Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (The Consequences of Love, The Family Friend and Il Divo) would perhaps be the closest contemporary point of reference. The final face-off between Vincent and Clay, shot from high above in an ornate bathroom, an image that became the film’s enticing poster, is especially memorable. The film is also remarkable for its disjunctive editing and the overlapping use of sound from one scene to another, techniques that reference the pioneering work of the late 60s theorist Jean-Pierre Oudart, who drew parallels between the psychic processes of subjectivity and the structuring language of cinema.

Relatively rarely seen in recent years due to restricted availability, Suture is finally available on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK in a brand new 4k restoration so that first-time viewers and those who were seduced by its innumerable pleasures back in 1993 can now be reminded of the film’s originality and vitality.

Jason Wood, Artistic Director of Film at HOME, Manchester, will introduce a screening of Suture at the ICA on 7 July 2016.

Jason Wood

Watch a clip from Suture:

This review was first published in the aummer 09 print issue of Electric Sheep Magazine.
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Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 July 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Writer: Stanley Kubrick

Based on the novel by: William Makepeace Thackeray

Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee

UK, USA 1975

184 mins

An appraisal of the merits of Mr Stanley Kubrick’s considerable film essay on ambition and ruin.

It is the unenviable lot of every human being cast into this busy and brutal world that we must at once learn how to live life while at the same time living that very life we are attempting to learn how to live; and so it is perfectly possible, if not in fact probable, that the lessons that are the most important to our happiness, the invaluable realizations on how to get along in the world, on how to be content, on how to succeed, are bound to be worthless: for they come too late to be of any palpable use. It is for this reason indeed that we have modal verbs and the third conditional: I could have… should have … would have… etc., being essential adjuncts to our wistful condition. The great novelists tell us the same: Voltaire in Candide; Dickens in Great Expectations. And William Thackeray’s picaresque account of the rise and fall of an Irish rogue Barry Lyndon is a tragi-comic treatment on the same theme.

The erstwhile director of a series of remarkable moving pictures, Mr Stanley Kubrick, took on the novel following the collapse of his long planned epic on the life of Napoleon. Employing the research, he created one of the most authentic renderings of the Eighteenth Century, with characters who lived outside, exposed to the imminent weather, or huddled in candlelit rooms, poised and pinioned in their beautiful regalia. To speak of the film, one must first address its beauty. If Mr Kubrick were a painter, we would have to enquire as to where he procures his canvases, his pigments and oils, for all his films seem to be painted on a rich vellum with a wide range of nuanced colours apparently unavailable to other filmmakers. There is a peach-coloured tinge to the sky, his fires are pumpkin orange and the range of his palette – the spectrum of greens for instance – is simply breath-taking. ‘I do like the way the artist uses the colour blue,’ Barry Lyndon comments. Quite so, Mr Lyndon, quite so. Not to mention the framing – from the very first shot, which shows the duel that killed Redmond Barry’s father – the scene is composed so well, so finely structured – the diagonal run of the dry stone walling, the depth of vision – and so pleasing to the eye that the director rarely requires more than a single cut to tell his whole scene. The slow zooms are employed to reveal the world around his characters or to move in on a particular detail or individual, and later, in the second half, to reveal adultery and despair. But Mr Kubrick is varied in his means; a ruffian handheld syle suits a brawl and an almost documentary feel imbues a battle with immediacy and danger.

The story is simplicity itself. A young Irishman, Redmond Barry of Barryville (an outstanding performance from Mr Ryan O’Neal, best known for the sentimental drama Love Story), is forced to leave home after a romance with a cousin leads him to duel, he thinks fatally, with an English officer, an excellent and concise comic turn from the superb Mr Leonard Rossiter of Rising Damp fame. His journeys lead him from highway robbers to the English army, the Prussian army, a career as card player and conman and finally the successful seduction of a woman of wealth and station and the securing of his position in society. This is but part one and the second half of the film shows the other side of the hill, as Redmond Barry, now styled Barry Lyndon, is unable to hold all he has attained secure in his grasp, and through a combination of his own fecklessness and the unforgiving nature of the English upper class, his financial, social and familial standing are reduced to disaster and ultimately a sad mess of grief and tatters.

Over the years, the films of Mr Stanley Kubrick have acquired the reputation of coldness and Barry Lyndon is often posited as an example, but on rewatching the film such arguments appear wrong-headed. Barry Lyndon is a remarkably moving and humane piece of work, about a man in desperate search for love who fails to appreciate it when he finds it. A fatherless child who is to become a childless father to the sound of Sarabande, the triple timed dance that becomes a reminder that all marches are funeral marches in the end. It is a hard lesson, and like all lessons on how to live life it is learned only once life is over.

Mr John Bleasdale

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Penda’s Fen

Pendas Fen
Penda's Fen

Format: Blu-ray

Part of Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969 – 1989) limited edition 13 disc box-set

Release date: 20 June 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Alan Clarke

Writer: David Rudkin

Cast: Spencer Banks, John Atkinson, Georgine Anderson

UK 1974

90 mins

Alan Clarke’s visionary coming-of-age dream still lingers in the minds of 1970s children.

‘You can tell he’s not a nice man because of his television plays.’

So says Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks), possibly the screen’s least hip tortured teenager, referring to a fellow inhabitant of the village of Pinvin, the lefty playwright Arne (Ian Hogg). Stephen is wholly on the side of the Mary Whitehouse-alike figure popping up in the papers in wanting all this 70s permissiveness and insurrection off the air. He prefers Elgar to rock n’ roll, believes in supporting ‘the Aryan national family on its Christian path’ and is, generally, a priggish, self-righteous, eminently slappable sort. But all this is about to change in writer David Rudkin’s utterly unique 1974 Play for Today. The line seems wryly prescient about Alan Clarke, who hadn’t become pegged as the controversial chronicler of Britain’s violent criminal underclass yet – that reputation began in earnest three years later with Scum. Penda’s Fen would appear to be an odd item on his CV:* it’s rural rather than urban, mystical and elliptical rather than plain speaking, and is largely concerned with the kind of Worcestershire villagers that Radio 4 makes dramas about, rather than the working class ne’er-do-wells that would come to dominate his later social realist works. And this most definitely goes beyond the bounds of social realism.

For Stephen, military cadet, church organist and son of a parson, starts to have dreams and visions, and dreams that turn to visions, interfering with his certainties and upsetting the status quo. He has dreams of sweaty heaving rugby scrums that it wouldn’t take an advanced Freudian to interpret (underlining the repressed enthusiasm he has for the saucy milkman). He will see an angel on the riverbank and a demon in his bed, cracks growing in the church floor, and an unsettling image of smiling mutilation in the Elysian grounds of a country mansion. He will see an aged Elgar himself during a rainstorm and chat with him about the secret of the Enigma Variations. Even his village’s identity becomes slippery. Is it Pinvin, Pinfin, Pendefen? Could it be Penda’s Fen, burial place of the last pagan king of England? Already an outcast at school for his grating piety he will be subjected to increasing humiliations that the masters ignore or condone. He is not what he thought he was. Certainties of race, sexuality and religion are stripped from him, leading to his climactic acceptance of his new identity during a strange confrontation in the Malvern Hills.

Penda’s Fen is an odd beast, a coming-of-age drama of sorts laced with elements of folk horror, full of psycho-geographical ruminations about the layers of history and endless meanings contained within the English landscape. The camera seeks out the sacred and arcane, the choir sings William Blake. It wouldn’t be a 1970s TV drama without earnest political arguments in the Parish hall. But here conversation also turns to the heresy of Manichaeism and the fact that the word ‘pagan’ originally meant ‘belonging to the village’. Modern music and media are unseen and unheard. Clarke’s treatment of the weirder elements is deft and physical and unfussy, his demon is a dark gargoyle straddling Stephen as he wakes from his wet dream slumber, like Fuseli’s nightmare, winningly sticking around when the light’s turned on. He drops out the sound for the hazy visionary sequence where children queue to get their hands lopped off save for the noise of the chopper hitting home. The appearance of Graham Leaman as Elgar sticks in the memory, in his dotage and wheelchair-bound, a ghost haunted by memory. But Clarke was always good with actors, and there are a fair few striking performances here.

It’s not perfect, a sub-Quatermass strand about a horribly burned youth and secret military bases underground is unceremoniously shelved after a substantial build-up. The pacing is uneven, dragging in the early stages, going bonkers in the latter, with a penchant for dense theological discussions in the cornfields in a decidedly ‘tell, don’t show’ mode. It’s a tying together of disparate elements into an ungraspable whole, and I doubt even its biggest fans would claim to wholly get what Rudkin’s getting at in places, but the mysterious is part of its DNA and part of its charm. It carries a rare emotional heft, aims for the visionary and actually gets there. Stephen’s ‘I am nothing pure!’ speech at its climax is unexpectedly rousing, a rallying cry for an alternative England. You can see why it lit a spark in the likes of the young Grant Morrison.

The fact that there were only three channels meant that the one-off TV plays of the 70s could draw a sizable audience no matter how abstract or intractable they were. Beamed once or twice into millions of homes and then never seen again they would often linger as a series of singular images and ideas long after the title and tale had been forgotten. Penda’s Fen is a perfect example of this, a film with followers who might not know its name but remember gargoyles in bedrooms and burning men on green hillsides. It’s wonderful that it’s finally getting a decent release 40-odd years after it first came into the world, its themes still resonant, a strange and impure child.

Mark Stafford

* Then again, this is the man who gave you Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, cinema’s only snooker-based horror musical. Which is an odd item on anybody’s CV.

Penda’s Fen screens at Close-Up Film Centre on 26 June 2016. For more information and to buy tickets visit the Close-Up website.
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Baal

Bowie Baal
Baal

Format: Blu-ray

Part of Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969 – 1989) limited edition 13 disc box-set

Release date: 13 June 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Alan Clarke

Based on the play by: Bertolt Brecht

Translated by: John Willett

Cast: David Bowie, Robert Austin, Jonathan Kent

UK 1982

64 mins

David Bowie brings star swagger to Alan Clarke’s take on Bertolt Brecht’s dissolute poet.

Baal is a debauched poet and boozy douchebag who leaves a trail of ruined women and exploited friends behind him. He has an enthusiastic following amongst the drunken crowds in the cafes where he performs, but has nothing but contempt for bourgeois society and its measures of success. Opportunities for publication are squandered, patrons are insulted and wives and daughters are shagged, only to be abandoned when boredom or unborn children arise. His poems reveal a certain yearning tenderness for the natural world, his words and actions an utter callousness towards everything else. Finally, inevitably, he murders a man, becomes a fugitive and dies alone. But he never lied about what he was, which makes him a kind of hero, existentially.

I remember hearing, gawd knows where, that the British film industry, in its early years, had a massive inferiority complex, being seen, in the land of Shakespeare, as a vulgar novelty when set before the venerable art of theatre. The result of which was that a good chunk of UK output didn’t really trouble itself with the aesthetics of the new medium, with all that movement and montage, and the average brit-flick more resembled a night at the Lyceum with a camera plunked front and centre of the stalls, occasionally panning left and right to keep the performers in shot.* I bring this up because Alan Clarke’s treatment of Bertolt Brecht’s first play Baal most resembles that notional idea of moribund British film. Except that it all works rather well. Each scene takes place on a new set (a drawing room, a bar, a junk-strewn flat), with the actors artfully arranged therein. It’s lit, at times, like a Caravaggio painting, except when it’s not, and the sets disappear entirely. There are no edits, each scene is played through in its entirety. And the only close-ups occur in short chapter-heading sequences between scenes where we are informed what is about to occur by text on screen whilst Baal engages us directly with a little performance of his dyspeptic poetry. The result compels. What would seem natural techniques on stage acquire a distinctive strangeness on screen, appropriately enough, ‘Brechtian alienation’ and all that.

A large part of the reason it plays well in 2016 is that Baal is portrayed by David Bowie, whose death has given his screen appearances a poignant vibrancy. During his lifetime there was often a debate as to whether he was a ‘good’ actor or not. What seems obvious now is that he could be terrific used by the right director in the right way, especially if the role played up to his recurring artistic themes of alienation and reinvention. His Baal here hits all the right notes of arrogance and disdain, augmented with a healthy dose of rock god swagger. His first speech to camera, a monologue about the Ichthyosaurus refusing to board the ark and preferring to die, sets out his stall with admirable concision. All life here is miserable and wretched, he says, as he regards us with an insolent, mocking, black-toothed grin, and dares us to claim that we care.

Mark Stafford

* In this version of events it took the likes of Hitchcock and the Kordas and Powell and Pressburger to shake out the cobwebs and drag us all kicking and screaming towards the Art Of Cinema. Discuss.

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Elephant

ELEPHANT
Elephant

Format: Blu-ray

Part of Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969 – 1989) limited edition 13 disc box-set

Release date: 13 June 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Alan Clarke

Writer: Bernard MacLaverty

Cast: Gary Walker, Bill Hamilton, Michael Foyle

UK 1989

39 mins

Alan Clarke’s bold, stripped-down take on sectarian killings in Northern Ireland remains as provocative as when it was first screened on the BBC.

Through spaces industrial and domestic men move, in pairs or alone, tracked relentlessly by fluid Steadicam, negotiating doorways and traversing empty halls, down roads and paths and corridors, encountering nobody, until somebody is located, a gun is produced, and they are killed. Alan Clarke’s legendary (at least in my school) Elephant traces murder after murder after murder, with no music or context or explanation, 18 in all, over 39 minutes, with only a title card to clue us in to the fact that it’s based on actual sectarian killings in Northern Ireland. The title is a reference to the phrase ‘the elephant in our living room,’ which Belfast-born writer Bernard MacLaverty used to describe the conflict.

Elephant may well be the most audacious piece of film ever screened by the BBC. It’s blunt and difficult and simple and achieves whatever effects it does through repetition. We get a Steadicam killing, then a lingering still shot of the corpse for a few seconds, then on to the next. There are variations and surprises, but the emphasis is decidedly upon the repetition: the steady pace, the footfalls, the gunshots. Shock gives way to confusion gives way to a kind of numb dread, the brief running time and relentless forward motion staving off a slide into traumatised boredom. Tossed into the last years of the Thatcher reign like a bilious little hand grenade it evaded the usual controversy and clumsy censorship through its Spartan nature; robbed of telling information, you couldn’t accuse it of taking sides, or collusion. You can only say for sure that it was anti-killing, laying bare the grubby, brutal acts that are usually cloaked in partisan bullshit and political rhetoric.

I missed it on TV at the time, goddamnit, but can remember the reaction of friends at the time being one of disbelief that such a thing had been made and screened on TV. Going by their descriptions it actually sounded like an inevitable endpoint for all those stalk and slash horror movies we were dragging home from the shelves of Star Video on a Thursday night: the film that was all murder and nothing else: the political nuances lost on hormonal teenagers with a pitiful grasp of the Troubles. I wonder if a teen catching it today would see it as an uncool warm-up exercise for the first–person-shooter aesthetics of Hardcore Henry and the like; doubtless most modern audiences will only possibly be aware of it as a key inspiration for Gus Van Sant’s austere high school massacre movie of the same name, or be familiar enough with the idea of the film that they don’t feel obliged to actually watch the thing. They should, though, because it’s a strange and unsettling film, provoking reaction after reaction. What would it be like longer, or shorter? What‘s happened to these huge spaces, are they all developed now? Gentrified or demolished? You wonder if the peace process will hold. You wonder about murder as the background noise of your weekly shop. You wonder at the blood that flows under every civilised street.

Mark Stafford

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Gimme Danger

Gimme Danger
Gimme Danger

Seen at Cannes International Film Festival 2016

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 November 2016

Distributor: Dogwoof

Director: Jim Jarmusch

USA 2016

108 mins

Jim Jarmusch’s film strikes a fine balance between a serious and comprehensive appraisal of The Stooges’ career.

Gimme Danger is the second film by Jim Jarmusch to be premiering at this year’s Cannes festival, and it’s a different beast entirely: an affectionate, loud, and thoroughly entertaining tribute to The Stooges and their universal, ever-lasting dirty, gutter-glam influence.

From their ambitious Michigan beginnings to their ironic Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction, Jarmusch passionately details the legendary band. With frontman Iggy Pop’s distinctive voice infusing the film from beginning to end, Gimme Danger reveals the band’s tumultuous birth in late 60s Detroit, their flirtation with stardom in the early 70s, their battles with critical and record company indifference and their descent into a drug-fuelled chaos and eventual implosion.

It’s true, much of this story has been documented before, but one way or the other Jarmusch manages to make it his own. Given the director’s close relationship to the subject at hand, the film strikes a fine balance between a serious and comprehensive appraisal of the band’s career and a somewhat bizarre and original representation of the their image and attitude. And while a lot of the focus is, of course, on the living legend that is Iggy Pop, Gimme Danger also shines considerable light on to the other founding members Scott and Ron Asheton, original bassist Dave Alexander and later guitarist James Williamson.

Witty, loving and fuelled by some of the finest rock n’ roll music, Gimme Danger is unashamedly nostalgic, yet it also makes you leave the cinema with a lump in your throat that there’s just no one quite like the young Iggy in music anymore. At least not for now.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our Cannes 2016 coverage.

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The Neon Demon

The Neon Demon
The Neon Demon

Seen at Cannes International Film Festival 2016

Format: Cinema

Release date: 8 July 2016

Distributor: Icon Distribution

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Writer: Mary Laws, Nicolas Winding Refn, Polly Stenham

Cast: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendrix, Bella Heathcote

France, Denmark, USA 2016

117 mins

The Neon Demon is a hollow, surface-level satire that is pretty to look at, but little else.

The latest offering from Nicolas Winding Refn, following his brilliantly accomplished Only God Forgives, was no doubt one of the hotly anticipated films of the festival – sadly, it failed to deliver.

Set in L.A. in the ruthless world of fashion, The Neon Demon centres around young Jesse (Elle Fanning) who arrives in the big city determined to work her way up in the industry by covering herself in blood and gold for an endless string of bizarre photo shoots. And things seem to be going well: first she meets make-up artist Ruby (Jena Malone), who takes her under her wing, then she lands a modelling agent (Christina Hendricks), and it doesn’t take long before she bewitches every man that crosses her path. However, being the small town ingénue she is, Jesse seems totally unaware of the competition and jealousy that is beginning to mount around her. And what starts as an overly stylised 1980s thriller slowly transforms into surreally morbid horror.

The Neon Demon appears to utilise the contrast of darkness with flashing bright neon lights to develop a somewhat mystifying atmosphere, which is maintained for the majority of the film. And it must be said, with its glitter showers, pulsing coloured lights and hazy sunsets, the film does look every bit as polished as the world it points its finger at – if only to fall victim to its own charms. If anything, Refn has created an aesthetic experience, a hollow, surface-level satire that is pretty to look at, but little else.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our Cannes 2016 coverage.

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The Wailing

The Wailing
The Wailing

Seen at Cannes International Film Festival 2016

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 November 2016

Distributor: Kaleidoscope Entertainment

Director: Na Hong-jin

Writer: Na Hong-jin

Cast: Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee

South Korea 2016

156 mins

A tense blend of genres, The Wailing succeeds at combining a mood of deep unease with visceral gore.

Na Hong-jin emerged on the scene in 2008 with his accomplished feature debut The Chaser, and two years later established himself as a talent to watch with his follow up, The Yellow Sea. Both films are dark thrillers involving lone, lost men caught up in events far beyond their control and, on the surface, The Wailing seems to follow a similar path.

The film tells of a small suburban village that is quickly overshadowed by a wretched sickness. The focus is on the beleaguered police sergeant Jong-Goo, played by Kwak Do-won with a brilliant mix of exhaustion, indecisiveness and fear, who is baffled, along with the rest of the local police force, by the onset of a series of horrifically violent and inexplicable murders. The killers all show the same zombie-like symptoms and as the bodies pile up and Jong-Goo’s own daughter is affected by the strange curse, he decides to team up with a mysterious woman and a spiritualist in a desperate attempt to break the cycle of hell.

A tense blend of genres, The Wailing succeeds at combining a mood of deep unease with visceral gore, buddy cop comedy, and a hallucinogenic mix of horror tropes, and in this sense the film becomes a unique creation of its own, setting its terrible events against the gorgeous landscapes and mountains of South Korea. And although overlong and not without flaws, there is enough in The Wailing to warrant a viewing, and the subtle force of the film confirms Na Hong-jin’s reputation as a director to be reckoned with.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our Cannes 2016 coverage.

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