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Festivals, Home entertainment

Cannibal Holocaust

Cannibal Holocaust

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 26 September 2011

Distributor: Shameless Entertainment

Director: Ruggero Deodato

Writer: Gianfranco Clerici

Cast: Robert Kerman, Carl Gabriel Yorke, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen, Luca Barbareschi, Salvatore Basile, Ricardo Fuentes

Italy 1980

95 mins

The year is 1978 and a respected group of American documentary-makers led by Alan Yates (Gabriel Yorke) have disappeared in the Columbian jungle while attempting to film the cannibal tribesmen reputed to live there. Professor Monroe (Robert Kerman) is dispatched to find out what’s happened to them. He makes arduous progress through the land and its peoples, finally making contact with the feared Yamamomo, or ‘Tree People’, who reveal to him the grisly remains of Yates’s crew, and several cans of undeveloped film, which he manages to take back to New York. The TV executives who financed the documentary are desperate to broadcast it as ‘the green inferno’ but the more Monroe hears about Yates and his methods the less he likes it, and when we finally see the footage our worst suspicions are confirmed. It’s a horrifying catalogue of rape, mutilation and murder in which the film crew burn down a village, kill livestock, and essentially stop at nothing to achieve ever more sensational footage, goading the ‘Tree People’ into brutal vengeance that they remain determined to capture on film even as their friends and lovers are slaughtered in front of them. It can’t be screened. ‘Who are the real cannibals?’ Monroe ponders as he walks out onto the NY streets…

Read the interview with Ruggero Deodato.

Context is everything. I first saw Ruggero Deodato’s film by chance rather than design one morning around 20 years ago, hung over and feeling none too clever in Alex B’s Lewisham flat. Alex is a musician, writer and inveterate gore-hound. It was a hand-labelled VHS tape of recent acquisition, a bootleg Japanese forbidden artefact, banned by the Video Recordings Act of 1982, which bizarrely left all of the violence and unsimulated animal cruelty (1) intact, but used an optical blurring effect over any shots revealing genitalia. I’d seen a Lucio Fulci film or two and thought I knew what I was in for. I was wrong. The film was, in my fragile state, utterly psychologically toxic; the nihilistic tone, brutal imagery and ugly portrayal of human nature didn’t leave me after the tape had played out and I’d found my way home, and would bother me for a long time after. It was probably my most extreme reaction to a film since the joy I had watching Star Wars at the age of seven.

2011: I encounter Cannibal again, but this time at the Cine-Excess V (‘the politics and aesthetics of excess’) conference. Deodato is one of the guests and will receive an honorary doctorate from Brunel University at the Italian Cultural Institute as part of the event. I’m waiting for a screening of his 1976 film Live Like A Cop, Die Like a Man (2) when one of the directors of the Institute refers to Deodato as ‘Il Maestro’, with evident respect. Over the weekend dozens of academics will present papers on ‘Cine-torrent: Remediating Cult Images in Online Communities’ and ‘Bad Sisters in Prison: Excesses and Gender Politics in 1970s Exploitation’ and the like (3). Cannibal Holocaust itself is shown in a brand new print at the Odeon Covent Garden. I’m sitting next to a nice bloke from Cardiff who has driven here for the film, he thinks of Cannibal as a classic. A much loved trip he is delighted to revisit on the big screen in the presence of its maker. I ask if it’s his Toy Story 2 and he happily agrees. That bootleg VHS nasty has become a revered totem of the golden age of exploitation, no longer forbidden contraband, now name-dropped as the first ‘found footage’ film, made long before The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. Watching it again is a strange and numbing affair. I’m not overwhelmed this time. I’m taking notes.

It’s a film of bone-deep misanthropic anger whose targets are the sensationalist media and the careless exploitation of the Third World. But it undermines and contradicts itself in various ways. I’m sure these contradictions serve to confirm its status as morally repugnant hackwork to many, but I think they also give the film an irksome power it wouldn’t otherwise possess. If it made more sense it would doubtless lose its nightmarish edge.

For instance the moralising tussles between Monroe and the TV execs (4) seem absurd in the context of Cannibal Holocaust‘s excesses, its relish in putting everything on screen. Real animal mutilation and stock footage of actual executions are mixed in with the faked rape, forced tribal abortion, rape, dismemberment, rape, cannibalism, ritual murder and rape. You’re attacking the news media for its excesses and you’re showing us this? And while Deodato’s sympathies are mainly with the tribespeople, they still function as the film’s bogeymen, go uncredited and appear largely as an undifferentiated mass in various shades of mud, their status as victims made questionable as they commit savage ritual after savage ritual, invariably against defenceless women. Monroe is given to us as the moral centre of the film, in that he tries to treat the natives with respect for their customs, and fights with the TV company over funding and screening these atrocities, yet even he doesn’t seem to care much that it took the killing of a few Shamataris to ingratiate his group with the ‘Tree People’.

The film’s biggest dichotomy, though, is one between style and story. ‘Realism’ is emphasised throughout, there is no studio work, it’s all shot on real locations. It begins with a news report about the missing crew; documentary footage and footage from ‘the green inferno’ is wound in and out of the narrative. The found footage that dominates the second half of the film uses fogged, scratched and wrongly exposed film (even a sly shot where a camera is adjusted for the wrong diaphragm), all to achieve a remarkable verisimilitude. But this documentary ‘realism’ has to battle with an increasing sense of unreality about the behaviour of the Americans; they are so uncaring, stupid, disrespectful, and in the end, flat-out evil that they become absurd. The hard-won ‘realism’ scrapes against this over-the-top suicidal obnoxiousness, creating a trippy doublethink that underlies the final slaughter.

The new edit leaves the genitalia unsmudged, but optically fudges over scenes of real animal death, which are now totally unacceptable. As to whether the rest of the film is acceptable, or of worth, well, it’s still extraordinary, made an age before irony conquered all when exploitation films meant it. Its edges have been a little blunted by time; Riz Ortolani’s fine, strange soundtrack of inappropriate syn-drums, doomy chords and syrupy strings, and the style of the ‘TV’ sequences have dated. And the occasional flat performance and line of clunky dialogue now stick out more than I remember in a film straining for ‘realism’. But the smart structure, the skill of the filmmakers, the disturbing idea behind that last reel, where the urge to film takes precedence over self-preservation or humanity, all give the film a power that lifts it above most depravity shows of that era. There are resonances here that reach back to Peeping Tom, forward to Man Bites Dog and Four Lions. Its furious contradictions and lack of control mean that it remains troubling, a magnetic north indicating how far a film can go. It’s a misanthropic, misogynistic, gratuitously offensive piece of crap. It’s a seminal transgressive masterpiece. It is what it is.

Mark Stafford

1 Deodato probably regrets the scenes of animal abuse he incorporated in Cannibal Holocaust and Ultimo Mondo Cannibale (1976), mainly, one feels, because he’s sick of answering questions about it… ‘Everyone asks about animals… If you grow up on a farm, none of this is unusual… If I only showed the Americans killing other humans it would have no impact, they had to kill animals to be killers… We’ve been inured to real death… In the US they give a child a rabbit, ‘aw sweet bunny’, then the kid goes to school, kills 15 other kids, goes back to the bunny, sings ‘aw, sweet bunny’ Etc, etc… It wasn’t a trope he invented, it was there in the Mondo movies of the 60s and Umberto Lenzi’s Deep River Savages (1972), but outside of cult circles, those films have vanished from public sight. Cannibal Holocaust‘s profile means that Deodato’s still dodging flack.

2 If you were looking for a more nuanced insight into the human condition from Deodato outside of his misanthropic masterwork, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man wasn’t it. The film opens with an astonishing, perilous bike chase through Rome that raises hopes for something special, but it is, for the most part, crass, witless, sexist and fatally lacking in any kind of tension or credibility. It details the efforts of two ‘Special Force’ cops (Marc Porel and Ray Lovelock as Fred and Tony) to take down crime boss Pasquini using frankly random methods (burning the cars outside one of his clubs, sleeping with his nympho niece) while fending off his thugs’ assassination attempts. A case was made at Cine Excess that Live Like a Cop was Deodato’s reaction to Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, a period of violent political and social unrest. If so, it’s unfortunate that it most reminded me of The Bullshitters, TV’s ‘The Comic Strip presents’ parody of The Professionals, right down to the nylon underwear and homoeroticism. Fred and Tony are arseholes, from beginning to end (best encapsulated in the moment when they laugh at the idea that getting their maid’s daughter pregnant might be considered their problem), but they aren’t significantly better or worse than anybody else on screen. The result is a bit of a shrug.

3 It really is an odd event, fans of the word ‘contiguity’ should make a date. Iain Robert Smith’s presentation on International Guerillas (1990), a long-lost ‘masala’ movie from Turkey, wherein three squabbling brothers unite to go and kill Salman Rushdie, was an eye-opener…

4 A female TV executive on audiences: ‘The more you rape their senses the happier they are!’ Well, that’s Bargain Hunt for you…

Cine-Excess V took place from 26 to 28 May 2011 at the Odeon Covent Garden, London. For more information please go to the Cine-Excess website.
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Harakiri

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Harakiri

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 26 September 2011

Distributor: Eureka

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

Writers: Shinobu Hashimoto, Yasuhiko Takiguchi

Based on the novel by: Yasuhiko Takiguchi

Original title: Seppuku

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Ishihama, Shima Iwashita

Japan 1962

133 mins

Masaki Kobayashi, most often celebrated in the west for Kwaidan, his ghost story omnibus film, more typically made films of violent conflict reflecting his pacifist convictions. This is not as easy as it sounds.

Doing what little he could to resist Japanese militarism as a soldier in WWII, as a filmmaker Kobayashi threw himself into demonstrating the futility of armed struggle. In movies like Samurai Rebellion (1967) and 1962’s Seppuku (just released in the UK on DVD under its more common Western title, Harakiri), the director plays a cunning game, building up a cauldron of seething dramatic tension that finally explodes in a bloody climax, satisfying the demands of a genre audience who require chanbara swordplay, yet resulting in no beneficial effects, for anybody.

Crucially, Kobayashi isn’t opposed to the enjoyment of violent movies, so he doesn’t see any need to destroy audience involvement or render the battle scenes overly unpleasant with excessive gore, or unexciting via distanciation effects. His fights are stunning spectacles and absolutely thrilling to behold, especially after the hours of slow-mounting pressure that build up to them. For tales of defeat, in which not even the memory of a heroic effort will go recorded by history, these movies are surprisingly pleasurable, even at their grimmest.

What Kobayashi is opposed to, and very strongly, is the whole samurai tradition, and its continuing celebration in Japanese cinema. While some filmmakers, notably Kurosawa, were almost wholly approving of the idea of the noble warrior class, and others seem to have been largely agnostic on the subject, seeing it as purely a commercial genre element to be exploited, Kobayashi is devoted, in his period films, to destroying the pernicious myth of an honourable tradition of chivalrous combat and feudal rule. He does so mercilessly, though the tradition, here aptly embodied by an empty suit of armour, always remains at the film’s end, undefeatable. It’s a surprise to see that Shinobu Hashimoto, who adapted Yasuhiko Takiguchi’s novel, also worked on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai.

This slow, savage destruction of the mythic code of the samurai is delivered via a series of flashbacks, embedded in the action to produce an illusion of indirection - in fact, the story moves as directly and ruthlessly as a sword thrust. But the ingenious structure allows an incremental build-up of tension, the weaving of several narrative lines, and a final, cataclysmic coming together of all that’s been set up, resulting in a highly cathartic outburst of action.

Along with Kobayashi’s eschewing of delicacy and ellipsis, there’s an avoidance of humour, except for the very blackest sort, embodied by Tatsuya Nakadai’s sepulchral performance. The film is deliberately heavy and sombre and truly downbeat, yet it never feels weighed down, depressing or turgid: because it’s an embodiment of the true cinematic urge, the evocation of ideas with image and sound, delivered with passion and anger by a fearless and resourceful filmmaker.

See the original before Takashi Miike’s version of the same story hits UK screens in October.

David Cairns

Check it out, Cinema releases

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

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Control (John Hurt) in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Photo: Jack English. All rights reserved. Copyright 2010 StudioCanal SA)

Format: Cinema

Release date: 16 September 2011

Venue: UK wide

Distributor: Studio Canal

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Writers: Bridget O’Connor, Peter Straughan

Based on the novel by: John le Carré

Cast: Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt

France/UK/Germany 2011

127 mins

With the resurgence of the super spy as seen in the popularity of the Bourne franchise and the Daniel Craig reboot of the perennial 007 series, it is only right that the corrective bucket of cold water be applied. David Cornwell, who took the pseudonym John le Carré under Foreign Office rules, has made a career of writing against Ian Fleming’s fantasy creation, again and again insisting on a reality of betrayal, banality and English skies, grey with waiting rain. Cinematically, he has been best served by directors who were foreign to the particularly English post-war crisis that he explores - Sidney Lumet, Martin Ritt, Fred Schepisi and Fernando Meirelles - and this tradition continues with Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

In a way, Alfredson’s film is not only an adaptation of the novel, but also a remake of the popular television series that made Alec Guinness synonymous with George Smiley, le Carré’s enigmatic bureaucratic spy master. Taking this role is Gary Oldman in his meatiest part for decades. Oldman brings a sense of hidden danger and tightly repressed rage to Smiley. It is a perfectly measured performance, which, in its restraint, allows the ample cast, drawn from the cream of British male acting talent, to provide the fireworks around him. He is the eye of the storm that imperceptibly directs the storm. Mark Strong, Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbacht are the three up-and-coming young Turks, and Colin Firth, Toby Jones and John Hurt are the old guard. If anything there is too much talent, and Ciaran Hinds and Stephen Graham (both fantastic actors), for example, have very little to do but fill places at the table.

The sense of place and time is perfect: a pre-swinging London, rain-drenched and as cold as the war being fought. Alfredson has an eye for the telling detail: Smiley eating his Wimpy burger with a knife and fork, the rundown hotels and the looming post-war office buildings with the orange wallpaper. Staying true to the spirit of the book, Tinker is the anti-Bourne. There might be a shooting but there won’t be a shoot-out; there are paper chases rather than car chases. One of the most exciting scenes in the film involves the movement of a file through an office building. Guns are signed for, pocketed, but perhaps never fired. It often comes down to men in rooms talking, men in parks talking, men on airstrips talking. The story is complicated but screenwriter Peter Straughan allows it to unfold with its byzantine complexity intact, probably assuming most of the audience will already know the plot from the series or the book. There are very few genuine twists, the film aiming more for a grinding inevitability, a weary despairing admission that what you always feared was true.

Perhaps the film’s most daring innovation is its rebranding of Cold War homosexuality. Whereas previously being gay in a Cold War context (especially in the aftermath of Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess) was seen as tantamount to being a traitor, here sexuality is something that must be hidden or itself betrayed. Aside from one explicitly gay character, there is an underlying bromance of sorts, which adds an emotional sting to the eventual revelations of betrayal.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy had its world premiere at the 68th Venice Film Festival where Electric Sheep saw it.

John Bleasdale

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Heavenly Creatures

Heavenly Creatures

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 12 September 2011

Distributor: Peccadillo Pictures

Director: Peter Jackson

Writers: Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson

Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, Sarah Peirse

New Zealand/Germany 1994

99 mins

This review contains spoilers.

What makes good kids turn bad? Bad parenting? Degenerate youth culture? This isn’t just a 21st-century debate: Peter Jackson’s 1950s-set film Heavenly Creatures (1994) tells the true story of a teenage girl named Pauline who murders her mother with the help of her best friend Juliette (Kate Winslet, in her debut film role). The title sequence underlines this incongruity, opening with archive travelogue footage of Christchurch, New Zealand, while a cheerful voice-over narrator identifies places of learning and worship, streets and parks, where citizens go about their perfect lives. The screaming begins just before the narration ends, and there is a switch to a point-of-view shot of the protagonists running through a forest. The girls emerge, covered in blood, and Pauline cries, ‘It’s Mummy! She’s terribly hurt’.

Although the film opens with a flash-forward to its ending, for viewers who don’t know the story behind the film there are few clues to identify the girls as potential murderers. Pauline’s lower-middle-class family must take in lodgers to make ends meet, but her parents are loving and she seems well-adjusted. Juliette’s parents are less attached to her: affluent professionals, they are happy to leave her alone for months at a time, even while she is recuperating from chronic lung problems. If you had to guess which of the girls’ mothers had retribution coming to her, you would expect it to be Juliette’s flighty, glamorous ‘Mummy’, not Pauline’s reliable, careworn one.

After the film’s opening, the only foreshadowing of violence is in the girls’ elaborate fantasy world. Through dress-up, letters, stories, and sculpture, they create and inhabit the characters of a mediaeval royal family, complete with a bloodthirsty wayward son. This fantasy world appears to seep into reality when Pauline encounters adults who annoy her: she imagines them being impaled or sliced in two by one of the clay figurines come to life. There are also several scenes in the film that literally recreate the world through the girls’ eyes, complete with castles, unicorns and giant butterflies.

Though it makes sense in light of Peter Jackson’s later fantastic bent as director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, at the time it may have seemed strange to infuse a true story with so much of the imaginary. As Pauline’s own diaries sealed the murder case against her, it is fitting that the girls’ inner world should form a central part of the film. Heavenly Creatures is arguably more enjoyable precisely because none of it takes place in a courtroom. Instead, the film focuses on its compelling portrait of adolescence, showing the girls as they are pulled by childish energy and imagination on the one hand and, on the other, increasing autonomy and sexual desire.

Why did a normal transition lead to tragedy in this case? The parents’ squeamish response to their daughters’ sexuality? The girls’ solipsistic impulsiveness? The film sympathises with every character, but provides no clear answers.

Alison Frank

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Post Mortem

Post Mortem

Format: Cinema

Release date: 9 September 2011

Venue: Key cities

Distributor: Network Releasing

Director: Pablo Larraín

Writers: Pablo Larraín, Mateo Iribarren

Cast: Alfredo Castro, Antonia Zegers, Jaime Vedell, Amparo Noguera

Chile/Germany/Mexico 2010

98 mins

History is sometimes written by neither the winners nor the losers, but by the invisible transcribers and administrators - like Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge in Downfall (2006), or autopsy attendant Mario Cornejo in Pablo Larraín’s bleak, disturbing Post Mortem.

This third feature film from the young Chilean director revisits the 1970s Santiago of Tony Manero (2007), his story of a Saturday Night Fever-obsessed loner, but sets the scene some years earlier, in the midst of the 1973 military coup that installed Augusto Pinochet as the country’s leader. The films are superficially alike: the solitary Mario is played by Alfredo Castro, who, as ageing Travolta lookalike Raúl, provided Tony Manero‘s dark heart; once again, cinematographer Sergio Armstrong gives a grainy, deliberately faded hue to the various shabby settings. But where Tony Manero, with its story of talent contests and disco fans, offers some moments of release - we respond to rhythm and sound, dance and music, however twisted and clichéd - Post Mortem is unrelentingly, often distressingly, slow and even static.

Larraín’s restraint isn’t just a stylistic affectation, though. It is entirely appropriate, creating an atmosphere of quiet horror and incipient crisis, and reflecting the morbid, flat world of his new protagonist. Mario, who describes himself as a ‘functionary’, is surrounded by death: his job is to type up autopsy reports at the local morgue. His neighbour, Nancy (Antonia Zegers), is a cabaret dancer with whom he develops a sexual obsession that turns into a vague affair. She is painfully thin, whether through poverty or anorexia isn’t clear. In the background of this, far from the screen, the momentous events of a revolution are occurring and, as Nancy’s family of socialist activists disappear overnight, Mario is called upon to transcribe at the autopsy of ousted president Salvador Allende and finds his department swamped with dead and dying victims of the military, slumped on and toppling off over-stacked trolleys. It is made clear that he now works for the new regime.

In other hands, these events might be the catalyst for heroic acts, or feelings of resistance, or at least some kind of sympathetic character development. But Mario moves among the corpses with morose detachment, impervious to his colleague Sandra’s distress, his main preoccupation still Nancy, who tries to elicit his help in hiding her from the authorities. As the city locks down into the fearful silence of dictatorship, Larraín keeps the action tightly focused on his small cast, closing in on a claustrophobic, macabre ending that works as a neat summary of all the deprivation and cruelty that has led up to it.

While it’s hardly a dialogue-led film, some omissions and errors in Post Mortem‘s subtitling will perhaps prompt non-Spanish-speaking viewers to concentrate most on the film’s considerable visual impact. But there is a sense anyway that language fails in crisis, leaving us little choice but to focus on the very fact of the body: its needs, its responses, and the ease with which it can be damaged and obliterated by others. The only criticism of Larraín’s confident and brutal minimalism might therefore be that it’s hard to see where he could go next with this subject matter, and perhaps with this cast and crew; but I will be watching whatever he and Alfredo Castro do next, however harsh.

Frances Morgan

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Troll Hunter

Troll Hunter

Format: Cinema

Release date: 9 September 2011

Venue: UK wide

Director: André Øvredal

Writers: André Øvredal, H&#209vard S. Johansen

Original title: Trolljegeren

Cast: Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Johanna M&#248rck, Tomas Alf Larsen, Robert Stoltenberg, Knut Naerum

Norway 2010

103 mins

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

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

(For the film’s nearest ancestor, do check out Zak Penn’s Incident at Loch Ness, in which Werner Herzog goes in search of the monster of the loch - and finds it…)

Øvredal’s scenario isn’t exactly bursting with ideas, but it does play imaginatively with its single premise, postulating an ecology and rough social order for its monsters, and exploring just how and why the Norwegian state has managed to keep the public in ignorance (until now). To its credit, the film never gets caught up in trying to make this absurd conceit plausible, and derives a lot of enjoyment from the bare-faced silliness of it all.

The trolls themselves are rather splendid: their design is unapologetically comical, with phallic noses and Highland cow fur for the Mountain Kings, and equally gross and cartoony anatomies for the other sub-species we encounter. But the night vision photography and shaky-cam aesthetic allow these preposterous mooncalves to be cunningly incorporated into the surrounding film, making up in photographic verisimilitude what they signally lack in dignity and credibility. The script cunningly weaves in every ‘fact’ and situation you’re likely to recall from children’s tales, right down to a cameo appearance by the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

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

Troll Hunter screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June and was a big hit at FrightFest in August.

David Cairns

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Children of the Revolution

Fusako Shigenobu in the Middle East (Children of the Revolution)

Format: DVD + VOD

Release date: 5 September 2011

Distributor: E2 Films

Director: Shane O’Sullivan

Ireland/UK/Germany 2010

92 mins

Children of the Revolution website

Cinematic re-imaginings of 1968 have flooded our screens in recent years to mark the 40th anniversary of the global phenomenon of revolutionary action. Such films are often coloured in a dangerous hue of nostalgia or, even worse, attempt to market their subjects as seductive youths titillated by violence, cheapening the political vigour that drove them. Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Children of the Revolution is certainly immersed in the same fascinations, yet comes from a different vantage point, offering a unique point of reference: the daughters of the revolution.

Children of the Revolution looks at the immediate aftermath of 1968 in Germany and Japan, from where revolutionary politics burst globally in the 1970s to have a long-lasting impact on our contemporary age. O’Sullivan positions Germany and Japan alongside each other for their shared histories as aggressors in the Second World War, as broken nations in its aftermath and, most importantly for this documentary, as countries that experienced large-scale civil revolt in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Both the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Japanese Red Army, leading activist groups of their respective nations, came up against limitations while operating within their own national borders and broke through internationally, ending up in Palestine to join its liberation movement. Both activist organisations involved women as central leading figures, namely Ulrike Meinhof and Fusako Shigenobu, and O’Sullivan details their personal histories through interviews with their daughters, Bettina Röhl and May Shigenobu, who were born and raised amid the chaos.

Addressing the daughters of the revolution is certainly an inspired choice. Our protagonists inherit the legacies of the revolutionary acts as if they’d been genetically bequeathed, an unavoidable part of their upbringing. Their appearance within the frame immediately elicits considerations of the aftermath of revolutionary action and whether we have a choice in the process of the past influencing our present. Moreover, O’Sullivan rebalances the often male-driven, testosterone-fuelled narratives of revolutionary action by focusing his attention on the female leaders who, in these cases, were not just participants, but leaders of the rebellion.

What is extraordinary about Children of the Revolution is the daughters’ differences of opinion about their mothers’ involvement in revolutionary politics. As journalists, both Bettina and May have a remarkable ability to critically observe a history so intertwined with their upbringing, yet have come to distinct conclusions. Although they don’t represent their respective nations’ standpoints, it hints at the fact that the way in which history enters the collective consciousness varies in each country. With both historical narratives fraught with factual complexity and incomplete chronicles, it was a brave decision for O’Sullivan to tackle both in one film; and, at least for this writer, a worthwhile choice if only for the revelations that emerge through comparative study.

The DVD release includes a re-edited version of Shane O’Sullivan’s previous documentary Under the Skin (2002), with an interview with revolutionary filmmaker Masao Adachi added to the impressive list of speakers, which includes Toshio Matsumoto, Kôji Wakamatsu, graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo and critic Donald Richie, to introduce Japan’s 1960s counterculture and the politics that bound it. Although less focused, it is a generous companion piece to Children of the Revolution and reveals O’Sullivan’s growth as a documentary filmmaker.

Julian Ross

Watch the trailer:

Children of the Revolution trailer from E2 Films on Vimeo.

Check it out, Comic Strip Reviews, Home entertainment

Black Heaven

Directed by Gilles Marchand from a script co-written with Dominik Moll (who gave us the brilliant Harry, He’s Here To Help), Black Heaven follows a young man’s obsessive descent into a dark world of suicide pacts and dangerous games after he and his girfriend stumble upon a lost mobile phone. Black Heaven is released on DVD by Arrow Films on 5 September 2011.


Comic review by Liam Cobb
For more information on Liam Cobb, go to his website.
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Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven

Format: Cinema

Screening dates: 2-30 September 2011

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Terrence Malick

Writer: Terrence Malick

Cast: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz

USA 1978

94 mins

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This review contains spoilers.

Days of Heaven is almost perfect. Almost to the point of being too beautiful, it is gorgeously photographed, much of it in the ‘magic hour’ between dusk and sunset, with stunning shots of the landscape and natural features. (In the Philippines, the film was released with the title Wheat: the Movie.) Ennio Morricone’s music, taking as his inspiration Carnival of the Animals: Aquarium by Camille Saint-Sa&#235ns, which opens and closes the film, is both luscious and frightening. The acting is subtle and intelligent: the young Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, both of whom boasted Kojak episodes and not much else on their film acting CVs, and Sam Shephard, who hadn’t even done Kojak, having worked, like Gere, mostly in theatre up to that point. The writing is witty, the story is told with a beguiling simplicity and the period is meticulously realised, not only in farming equipment and costume, but in attitudes and faces.

So why almost perfect? Why not perfect? I would argue (irritatingly, I know) that Terrence Malick consciously defies perfection. The whole point of the film is imperfection, the unsustainability of heaven on earth and the tragic consequences that come from such overreaching ambition.

Bill (Gere) and Abby (Adams), with Abby’s sister Linda (Linda Manz), escape from Chicago after Bill has been involved in a fight. From the very get-go, there is ambiguity and ambivalence. Linda’s voice-over makes no mention of the fight (which may or may not have resulted in murder) and instead frames their escape more as a quest in search of adventure. Her comments will consistently tell us things that seem out of joint with what we are seeing. Her final comments, which close the film, seem to be about Abby but are actually referring to a marginal character whom she has just happened across.

The biggest niggle, the central tragic niggle from which all else flows, is Bill and Abby’s ruse to pose as brother and sister. It is reminiscent of the kind of cockeyed shenanigans in which Martin Sheen’s Kit indulges in Malick’s debut feature Badlands, faking his own signature to avoid other people copying it. The inexplicable deception is part and parcel of Bill’s character. He works in the Chicago steel mill and later the wheat fields dressed in an entirely inappropriate white overcoat (in the shooting script he boasts a cane and hat as well). He is a man at odds with his position in the world, at one point running away to join a circus. The ploy leads to the hoodwinking of the rich farmer, a ghostly Sam Shephard, who marries Abby and invites Bill and Linda to move in with them. However, the farmer is not simply a victim. No one else is fooled by Bill and Abby’s deception. Bill fights a man who asks him if his sister keeps him warm at night and the farmer’s grandfatherly foreman cottons on immediately, even if he lacks proof. In fact, the farmer and Bill are both adept at, and apparently needful of, self-deception: one’s existence grimly limited by poverty and the other’s by loneliness and an imminent death.

The most powerful emotional moment in the film comes with Bill’s realisation that Abby now loves the farmer and is irretrievably lost to him. For once, the hot head does not lose his temper and woefully, but maturely admits, ‘I’ve got no one to blame but myself’. This is an admission that Kit would never have been able to make (but one that Colin Farrell later echoes in The New World) and so it is with a formidable dose of tragic irony that Abby and Bill find themselves in Badlands for the rest of the film. This is tragic irony in the classical sense. The farmer spies conclusive evidence of a love affair between Bill and Abby, whereas what he is a witness to is the conclusion of that affair and, strangely (if only he knew it), his victory.

Abby and Bill’s flight is a gloomy shadow of the sunny adolescent running away of Badlands. The love affair is over by the time they flee and, dressed in her widow weeds, Abby is pulled along uncertainly. Bill and Abby are both doomed and it is left to Linda to escape the stultifying conformity of a girl’s school, complete with ballet class. For her it’s going to be cigarettes and meandering. The perfection sought by a finishing school just doesn’t feel right.

More information on the BFI website.

John Bleasdale

Check it out, TV series

The Story of Film

The Story of Film

Format: TV

Series 1, episode 1

Date: 3 September 2011

Time: 9:15pm

Channel: More4

More info on the Channel4 website

Unparalleled in scope, The Story of Film: An Odyssey marks the completion of a labour of love for writer and filmmaker Mark Cousins. Five years in the making and covering six continents and 12 decades of cinema, it is, as Cousins describes, a ‘love letter’ to the medium. The origin of the project was Cousins’s best-selling book of the same name. One of the few truly indispensable film publications of the last decade, the book showed how filmmakers are influenced both by the historical events of their times and by each other.

Opening with a quote from Lauren Bacall proclaiming that ‘the industry is shit. It’s the medium that’s great’, Cousins determinedly avoided any discussion of the industry per se, showing no interest in box office, marketing or any other part of the hullabaloo that goes hand in hand with any art form that is also a business. In doing so Cousins, whose past activities include a celebrated stint as the Festival Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and presenting the late, lamented Moviedrome, produced an invaluable guide to some of the forgotten treasures of cinema and some of the figures whose work has been obscured by what is unarguably a Westernised history of filmmaking. Those unfamiliar with the cinema of central Asia and Africa will find themselves particularly surprised by the great and often unsung contributions the two continents have made to the film lexicon.

Unspooling over a 15-part series, The Story of Film argues that innovation is at the heart of movie history (the contention that ‘money doesn’t drive movies, ideas do’ are the words of a romantic purist but we should forgive him for that) and extends the central thesis of the book to reveal the true and frequently forgotten global pioneers of filmmaking. As an opening salvo Cousins declares the history of cinema as we understand it to be by its very nature ‘exclusionist and racist’. Revealing how these incredibly influential figures drove cinema forward, Cousins films each section of the story in a different country, visiting many of the key sites in the history of cinema, from Hollywood to Mumbai, from Hitchcock’s London to the village where Pather Panchali was shot. Cousins’s globetrotting gives a potent, illuminating and often rather moving reminder that, though fictive, movies are very much a product of the real world and therefore reflective of our hopes, dreams and aspirations. Cinema, as Cousins points out, is pivotal in shaping how we feel, love, look and hope.

Anyone familiar with the pioneering Scene by Scene series will recall that Mark Cousins is an exceptionally skilled and intuitive interviewer and the ‘cast’ of The Story of Film is mightily impressive. Stanley Donen, Kyoko Kagawa, Gus Van Sant, Lars von Trier, Claire Denis, Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Towne, Jane Campion, Wim Wenders and Claudia Cardinale are just a handful of the legendary filmmakers, actors and writers that offer insightful commentary over a series of extended interviews. The use of archive clips is extensive, exemplary and quietly inspiring and while the programme presents an illustrated story of film it also manages to be a particularly accomplished and technically adroit piece of filmmaking in its own right.

Since the disappearance from our screens of programmes such as Moving Pictures there has been little air time given to a consideration of cinema that extends beyond celebrity tittle-tattle and a cinematic border that ends with the Hollywood hills. Invigorating and intelligent, The Story of Film is also remarkably accessible and entertaining and should fulfil the absolutely imperative task of engaging younger, inquisitive minds as well as more seasoned academics. Touring numerous international film festivals, the series gets a prime-time Saturday evening slot at 9:15pm on More4 from September 3. Make a date, and don’t dare break it.

Jason Wood