On the day before starting a job as a prison guard, Juan Olivier (Alberto Ammann), decides to take a tour of his new place of work. This turns out to be a very bad move, putting him in the high-security block at the same time that lifer Malamadre (Luis Tosar) has chosen to start a riot. In a desperate, split-second decision, Juan decides to pretend to be a new prisoner. The block erupts, hostages are taken, the media crews and SWAT teams close in and the tension rises. Juan’s future and his chances of getting back to his pregnant wife (Marta Etura) seem ever more doubtful in the midst of murderous cons, trigger-happy screws, corrupt cops and the duplicitous, weaselling authorities. Who can he trust, and what will he do to survive?
Daniel Monzón’s Cell 211 is a terrific, angry piece of genre filmmaking. It has the pace, the twists and turns and the forward momentum of a Hollywood production, but is a tougher, sweatier proposition; it doesn’t pussy out in the last reel, and has a political edge rare in mainstream entertainment. This is a complicated world of shifting alliances, black humour and sudden brutality where the police and government can get you killed just as fast as a psycho with a shiv, given authenticity by using real ex-cons in a genuine prison location. To be sure, some of the plot swings, the speed of the developing relationship between Olivier and Malamadre for instance, seem unreal in the cold light of day. I don’t believe that these events would happen like this in the real world, but for 113 tense, charged minutes I was wholly swept up in them.
Cast: Zoltán Latinovits, Eva Ruttkai, Eva Leelossy
Hungary 1971
90 mins
Much of the merit of Zoltán Huszárik’s Szindbád (1971) is likely to be lost on those uninitiated in Hungarian cinema and literature. The film has little narrative to speak of: what story there is centres on the title character Szindbád, who sails, like his namesake, but in a metaphorical sense. Szindbád has spent his life navigating seas of women, without ever quite fathoming the depths of their emotions. Set mainly at the end of this Lothario’s life, at the turn of the 20th century, the film follows him as he visits ageing former lovers and recalls his previous conquests in flashbacks, some lasting a few seconds, others several minutes.
The most accessible charm of this film is its aesthetic. Szindbád begins with a series of intriguing extreme close-ups, mainly of objects from the natural world: smouldering wood, a lock of blonde hair, rain dripping from roof tiles, lilies unfurling, all to a haunting soundtrack of dissonant piano notes and a woman’s playful laughter. The entire film is punctuated by similarly surreal shots of everyday objects, filmed so close that they become strange. The film’s extreme long shots are equally appealing, and capture the lyrical quality of the Central European countryside in every season: mist-wrapped mountains; onion-domed churches watching over lush green meadows; leaf-littered graveyards; snowy tree-lined avenues. Szindbád also benefits from saturated colour photography that emphasises the beauty and variety of the landscape, objects and costumes.
In spite of its surface beauty, there is something rotten at the heart of Szindbád. Scenes from Szindbád‘s later years are permeated with a tiresome malaise that cannot be attributed to fin-de-sií¨cle decadence. Szindbád’s unease comes from the regret of never having formed a meaningful bond with any of the scores of women he encountered: at the end of his life, he is left only with memories of fleeting pleasures. For the women, it is the sickliness of unsatisfied desire, which knows no end: they continue to languish after the unworthy womaniser.
Thankfully, Second Run’s new DVD release comes with clear and concise liner notes in which Michael Brooke gives the necessary background information to Szindbád. He explains that it was a daring adaptation of the work of Hungarian modernist Gyula Krúdy, whose Szindbád stories were driven by observations rather than events. The film is also remarkable in terms of its reception: despite being set in a bourgeois turn-of-the century milieu, it was approved by the censors, and despite its artistic ambition, it became a popular success. Even now, it ranks high among the favourites of Hungarian film critics and public alike.
The DVD includes just one special feature, but one so good it is almost all that is necessary. Peter Strickland, director of the Hungary-set Katalin Varga (2009), engages in an ‘appreciation’ of Szindbád: a discussion of the film’s merits that is thoughtful and detailed, yet disarmingly personal and relaxed. If you finish watching Szindbád and aren’t convinced that it was worth your while, let Strickland try to change your mind.
In 1981 there were sky-high hopes for plane crash thriller The Survivor, which, coming in at a total of one million Australian dollars, became the country’s most expensive film. But what could have boosted the flagging national industry crashed and burned instead, with disappointing critical reception and box office sales.
Bizarrely, rather than use the country’s home-grown talent The Survivor is based on a book by British author James Herbert, has a British director (David Hemmings) at the helm and two British actors (Robert Powell and Jenny Agutter) in the lead roles.
Powell’s chiselled features are put to nearly as good a use here as they are in Jesus of Nazareth (1977) in his role as a pilot who wakes up in hospital to discover he is the sole survivor of a plane crash. The victims’ families, the press and officials carrying out an inquiry into the crash quickly make him the scapegoat, especially as he’s conveniently suffering from memory loss, but things take an eerie turn when a woman called Hobbs (Jenny Agutter, dressed in Railway Children-era garb) turns up to claim the victims are trying to make contact with the living. Tortured by the knowledge of how many people he might have killed and desperate to remember what happened on the ill-fated journey, he puts logic aside to ask for her help.
Disappointingly, after a promising start the plot moves at the rate of a taxiing plane rather than one in mid-flight, and instead of showing off the film’s flash budget, most of the action takes place in near-complete darkness. However, an eerie score by Brian May (another Brit) and some intensely creepy moments involving the ghost of a young girl killed in the crash warrant the film’s recent survival onto DVD format and save it from becoming a complete disaster.
The words ‘made for television’ are likely to send a chill through the heart of the dedicated horror fan. After all, for every TV horror gem like Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot or Nigel Kneale’s ground-breaking Quatermass franchise, there’s a wealth of cheap ‘haunted house’ movies and several faithful but entirely toothless Stephen King adaptations. Ironically enough, one of the more noteworthy King-produced mini-series of the 2000s was Kingdom Hospital, an English-language reworking of the 1994 Danish TV series The Kingdom (a.k.a. Riget), which is finally getting a UK DVD release this month. Supervised by writer/director Lars von Trier, The Kingdom was intended to be shown in three separate mini-series, but the third and final instalment was never made. Since several key characters have now died, it seems unlikely the series will ever be completed.
Set in Denmark’s largest hospital, The Kingdom is perhaps best described as the mutated offspring of a hospital-based reality TV show and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, but even that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Shot on multiple hand-held cameras, the footage has been heavily processed until only a grainy, yellow sepia-like tone remains, providing an entirely false note of cinéma vérité. Several central characters are introduced, including Krogshoj, an unambitious junior registrar with a knack for diverting hospital supplies into other avenues; the intolerable Stig Helmer, a megalomaniac Swedish doctor trying to avoid a malpractice suit; the elderly Mrs Drusse, a medium who believes the hospital is being haunted by the ghost of a young girl who died there 80 years before, and many others. Naturally, these characters provide endless material for comedy: Mrs Drusse tries to fake any number of illnesses so she can get re-admitted and continue looking for the ghost, while Stig Helmer ends each episode by standing on the hospital roof, looking across the sea towards Sweden and hurling abuse at the idiotic Danes.
However, it would be a mistake to categorise The Kingdom as a comedy. From the very first scene - an obsolete ambulance briefly appears outside the hospital in the middle of the night, with no driver visible - it is obvious that there is something very wrong here. A pregnant doctor’s unborn baby grows at an incredible rate; a child’s cries can be heard in the elevator shaft; blood begins to run down the walls, and the buildings themselves seem on the verge of collapse. In the hospital kitchen two teenagers with Down syndrome handle the washing up, and also serve as a Greek chorus, keeping the viewer up to date on the various developments. As the series progresses the horrific begins to take centre stage, although there are always humorous elements present. The Kingdom‘s horror might seem tame to viewers of Saw and Hostel, but von Trier manages to establish - and increase - a surprising level of tension and atmosphere, something that suits the work much better than explicit violence and gore. It might not be to everyone’s taste, but The Kingdom is absolutely essential viewing for lovers of horror or fantasy, as well as anyone with a passion for the weird.
Originally broadcast in two seasons of four episodes each, the first season was edited into a single movie for a British VHS release in 1998, but this is the first time that both seasons have been available in this country. Thankfully, the new release includes all the supplementary material found on the Danish box-set, so we have scene-specific commentaries, trailers/TV spots, background details and some of director Lars von Trier’s more memorable commercials.
Sawako’s life is less than stellar. Given that Japanese director Yûya Ishii opens his film with the titular heroine having a spot of comic colonic irrigation, it invites comparison to a more fundamental element. Sawako lollops out into the lacklustre landscape of a very unglamorous Tokyo, and then heads to her fifth dead-end job, wearing a washed out pink uniform and a resigned expression, as her bosses boss her around, and her slouchy co-workers criticise her attitude and her mediocre love life. The television news hum with fears of global warming, and crime reports are full of parents murdering their children. Beer-swilling Sawako’s resigned motto for life is ‘It can’t be helped’, and her divorcee boyfriend, a jumper knitting, eco-friendly, unimaginative sacked toy maker doesn’t add any sparkle to the darkness. Even the gorilla at the zoo is depressed.
And then her uncle calls with the news that her father, whom Sawako hasn’t seen for five years, is dying form cirrhosis of the liver, and encourages her to return to the countryside and rescue his ailing fresh water clam business. In the hands of Hollywood, the soundtrack would lift with inspiring strings, as Sawako takes a train to her destiny. Here it’s a lonesome accordion and a melancholy drumbeat that accompanies her on her homeward bound train, with her boyfriend and his young daughter along for the ride.
With her mop of dark hair and her engaging face, Hikari Mitsushima is a bright presence. The scenes with her father in the hospital and at home are tender, her first appearance at the clam factory, surrounded by judgemental older women, a study in befuddlement and reluctant responsibility, a delicate contrast to the sometimes too broad sweeps of Ishii’s humour.
Sawako’s past is gradually revealed, the stealing of her best friend’s boyfriend at the age of 18 and her elopement with him, her anger at her father’s affair with a clam factory worker, her continued belief that she’s ‘a sub-middling woman’ and that all she can expect from life is shit, as she ladles sewage onto the family’s vegetable plot.
Nonetheless, Sawako is inspired to change this. Temporarily ditched by her hapless boyfriend, she tries to forge a link with his daughter, a pat metaphor of her own relationship with her dad, and sets about transforming the clam business. Dropping the company song, with its bleakly ironic anthem of ‘blue rivers… mutual co-operation, and bright futures’, she tells it like it is, in a funny, down-with-the-government song that proclaims that ‘our work is tedious and boring’ and the clams come ‘from the bottom of the river’ but are heading ‘into your hearts’.
Yûya Ishii’s film is about ordinary people, who live ordinary lives; they cheat, break up, get dumped, make mistakes, but get on with it. When Sawako’s father dies, a watermelon that’s grown in the vegetable plot is brought along by Sawako to the funeral, a tragicomic mixture of heartbreak and slapstick that reinforces Ishii’s message. Life is mostly crap, but there’s a sweetness in recognising reality, even if it isn’t an awe-inspiring Hollywood happy ever after.
The events of Shôhei Imamura’s cruelly entertaining Pigs and Battleships take place during the transitional period for Japanese society when the once-proud nation was still reeling economically and spiritually from defeat in the Second World War while being occupied by the American military due to the renewal of the American-Japan Security Treaty. In the port town of Yokosuka, young couple Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) and Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) are reaching a crossroads in their relationship; Kinta associates with a low-level yakuza crew, aiming to become a ‘big shot’, while Haruko wants to leave town and encourages Kinta to take a stable, if low-paid, factory position in a neighbouring community. Kinta and Haruko may have different ideas about how to ensure a better future, but both are reacting to their surrounding environment, which is essentially a red light district populated by pimps, prostitutes and petty criminals, with the local economy being propped up by the after-hours activities of the American Navy shipmen stationed there. The mutual and individual choices of the central couple are also informed by their respective familial circumstances, as Kinta has seen his hard-working father struggle to make ends meet, while Haruko’s parents want her to follow in her sister’s footsteps by entering into an arranged marriage with an American soldier. Despite protestations from the down-to-earth Haruko, the naí¯ve Kinta believes that he can become a prominent underworld player if he takes the fall for a hit that he did not commit and help with a scheme to start a pig farm. Imamura surrounds Kinta and Haruko with a motley assortment of acquaintances, most of whom are swindlers on some level, thereby showing a morally polluted cross-section of post-war Japanese society.
In narrative terms, Pigs and Battleships is rather ramshackle, but more rooted in genre than such subsequent Imamura works as The Pornographers (1966) and Profound Desires of the Gods (1968), meaning that this is arguably one of his most accessible films. Still, the director certainly orchestrates a collision of styles, with black comedy, crime drama and social-political critique jostling for tonal supremacy, making Pigs and Battleships a typically ‘messy’ film by modern cinema’s foremost cultural anthropologist. The opening scenes serve to set up Imamura’s social investigation, with his camera initially focusing on the brand new buildings adorned with the American flag that have been constructed on higher ground, before panning across the town, then down to the slum where sailors wander the otherwise empty streets. From this omniscient daytime view of Yokosuka, the director cuts to a street-level excursion around the red light district after the sun has gone down and sailors are sufficiently drunk to open up their wallets for sexual services. Amid the squalor, Imamura skilfully introduces Kinta and Haruko when the former steals the cap of a sailor as a means of leading the American to a back-street brothel, while the latter is seen working as a waitress in the adjoining bar. With the rocky relationship between the young couple and the machinations of the local mobsters providing narrative foundation, Imamura allows his stylistic impulses to run riot: restless tracking shots, ‘Scope photography, and the celebrated use of a spinning camera to capture the violation of Haruko by a trio of sailors are examples of Imamura’s then-emerging virtuosity. Yet, he often returns to the plight of Haruko in order to keep his energetic crime caper on the rails.
Due to her strong-willed individuality, Haruko is the only character for whom Imamura seems to hold out any hope; she is seeking escape not only from the temptations of Westernisation, but also from the trappings of familial traditionalism, eventually resulting in a breakdown in relations with both Kinta and her parents. Haruko is not perfect as she makes errors in judgment and remains loyal to Kinta when she should just cut and run, but Imamura often portrayed women as survivors, and the progressive Haruko is no exception. Everyone else is either corrupted by the lure of easy money, or simply incompetent, hence Imamura’s mockery. Dark humour abounds, especially when a corpse washes up after being dumped at sea and then fed to the pigs, only for the bones and false teeth to turn up in a pork lunch, while the climax - with blazing machine guns and pigs running wild in the streets - is pure farce. Pigs and Battleships caused such controversy on release in 1961 that Imamura was suspended from filmmaking for two years by studio Nikkatsu. He used the time to develop screenplays as contractual conditions prevented him from seeking directorial work elsewhere, and returned from the wilderness with The Insect Woman (1963), a powerful portrayal of rural poverty. However, it is possible that his suspension had less to do with his cynical depiction of American-Japanese relations - Nikkatsu was known for chasing trouble in order to boost box office takings - than it did with angering studio executives by going over budget on the action scenes. A vivid indictment of a nation struggling with a serious identity crisis, Pigs and Battleships is a biting social satire by a truly brilliant filmmaker.
Cast: Anthony Franciosa, John Saxon, Daria Nicolodi, Veronica Lario
Italy 1982
110 mins
Other than John Waters, it is difficult to think of a filmmaker who revels so much in ugliness as Dario Argento. And yet his ugliness is not really the same. Rather than Waters’s grotesqueries, we have the ugliness of the nearly beautiful. In Tenebrae, his lighting is bright despite the title of the film, eschewing the shadows of the genre; his colour scheme is garish, bright reds and greens and yellows a-go-go; his actors and actresses are always a bit shy of movie star beautiful and even when they are conventionally attractive they have a pallid, unwell and plastic look to them. And Italy - il Bel Paese - becomes particularly un-bel, an almost entirely urban clutter of concrete and glass or rain-soaked streets populated by dirty old men, psychopaths, angry dogs and prostitutes. And that is before we consider the ugliness of the violence to which many of the characters are subjected.
Peter Lane (Anthony Franciosa) is a successful murder mystery novelist in Rome as part of a publicity tour when a series of murders begin to take place, each featuring a connection to his latest novel, Tenebrae. A woman is killed with an old-fashioned straight-edged razor and pages of the novel are torn out and shoved into her mouth. The list of suspects includes an obsessive ex and a deranged journalist and any number of demented fans. As with Deep Red, we have some unlocated flashback episodes that point to an earlier trauma and go some way towards explaining the insanity of the killer.
Generally considered Argento’s last good film before a precipitous decline, Tenebrae was a return, after experiments with supernatural horror, to the classic giallo formula: the black leather gloves, the endangered foreigner, the inventive murders and the killer’s point of view. It offers a series of satisfying twists and turns, although some of these are facilitated by almost transparent trickery, lapses in logic and a general holiness of plot to compete with the nearby Vatican. The acting is exactly one notch above porn and the comedy is weak - ‘are you going to wear that hat? Aren’t you afraid it’ll fall off?’ ‘What, this hat? This hat won’t fall off’ - but no one watches a Dario Argento film for the comedy, we watch for the horror. And there are genuine moments of tension and unpleasantness - the scene with the dog is a particularly gruelling moment.
Argento identifies more closely with the killer in this film than any other. The murderer is self-consciously artistic, taking photographs of his own crime scenes, many of which also feature in the publicity material for the film itself. He or she seems wildly protective of Lane’s book Tenebrae (which obviously shares the title of the film), killing a shoplifter who has purloined a copy. Anyone who downloaded the film illegally might be wary of sharing a similar fate. Argento revels particularly in the murder of the lesbian film critic who has accused Peter Lane of misogyny - the bitch will die in her knickers for having the gall - with the same bitterness with which Clint Eastwood had a Pauline Kael substitute murdered in The Dead Pool (1988). This double murder is introduced by a justly celebrated crane shot, lasting over two minutes without cuts and which took three days to film.
Argento pushes the bloodletting to the extreme and pulls off some genuinely shocking moments, which remain so even today. His gallon-sized tubs of red paint will always be preferable to the CGI gloop we are treated to nowadays. And his eye for the telling physical detail, the drool of a strangled victim or the slipperiness of a fatal spike, are more effective in conveying the pain than any kind of gore. Yet I can’t help but exit each of his films relieved, not because the tension has been resolved, the killer caught/done away with etc, but rather just to get out of that world of over-lit post-modern interior design.
Cast: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet
USSR 1972
159 mins
Solaris is science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction.
This justly famous film is based on a Polish novel from 1961 by Stanisław Lem, which first appeared in English in 1970. Both are science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction. The film is easier to enjoy if you don’t know the book well. Tarkovsky’s work here is often brilliant, especially when there is not much happening, but he is erratic in his handling of the plot and clumsy with dialogue. The screenplay changes quite a lot of the mechanics and details of Lem’s story: sometimes it seems as though the writers have misunderstood the book, more often as though they are trying to correct it, and this usually has the effect of substituting crudeness for subtlety.
The worst bits are the talky passages, in particular a sub-Dostoevskian scene where the characters sound off bitterly and sarcastically at each other. And towards the end, the characters seem to be trying to explain the film to us by means of meandering philosophical ponderings. There are problems with the acting - plenty of hammy moments, and a general sense that the actors are not quite sure what they’re aiming for. A notable exception to these criticisms is the luminous Natalya Bondarchuk: the director himself observed that this 21-year-old fresh out of drama school outshone the rest of the cast.
The best bits are not just those with no actors on the screen, but also the mainly silent scenes, central to the story, between Kris the spaceman and Hari the woman from his past. A couple of dream/hallucination sequences are inspired additions to Lem, in terms of imaginative vision if not of content. The most striking invention is a weightless scene of great beauty and mystery. And with the exception of the dialogue scenes, the film is a visual tour de force. About two hours in (!) it really takes off, as the director seems to forget about getting the story straight and contents himself with making strange and beautiful variations on themes of doubt, unease and illusion.
For all its faults, this is an extraordinary film. But, especially if you admire the book, you might prefer the 2002 remake by Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. It concentrates on the crucial relationship between Kris and Hari, and it supplies what Lem and Tarkovsky both fail to come up with: a really excellent ending. If buried in you there are any feelings of regret or remorse about ended relationships, be ready to have them unearthed. The remake manages, like the book, to convey the sense that this work of science fiction is perhaps not really about strange happenings in an imaginary future, nor even about man and the unknowable universe, but about love and loss and memory in our own lives.
This review was first published for the release of Solaris as part of Artificial Eye’s Andrei Tarkovsky Collection box set in June 2011.
In the mid-80s, the pop culture apocalypse was back in fashion. Previous decades had already seen sci-fi and fantasy reactions to the threat of nuclear war in both the East and the West - Japan favoured giant irradiated behemoths on screen such as Godzilla (1954-2004), America had incredible shrinking men and scientists with insect heads, and both countries had alien visitors warning us about the danger of ultimate war. By the 1960s comics got in on the act, with masterpieces of Japanese manga such as Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix: Future, predicting a machine-driven apocalypse in the 35th century, while Marvel Comics became a force to be reckoned with in Stan Lee’s indelible wave of irradiated teenagers with superpowers in the pages of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men, The Hulk and many others.
However, these two aspects of post-(modern) apocalypse - the irradiated teenager and the irradiated environment - didn’t combine notably until the 1980s in comic books, and later in their cinematic adaptations. Again, Japanese and Western takes on this combination differ wildly. Japan has never taken to costumed heroes with the same enthusiasm as the West. In Japan, supernatural powers were more common than super-powers in late-80s print manga, most notably in Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, where telekinesis and telepathy are imagined as evolutionary reactions to a dehumanised machine-driven world.
Based on Otomo’s serialised comic, which ran for over 2,000 pages between 1982 and 1990, the film of Akira necessarily condenses the plot of the manga to fit it in a running time of just over two hours, and is mainly based on the first third of the comic books. Akira is set in 2019, 31 years after explosions have devastated 20th-century Tokyo for a second time, now renamed Neo Tokyo. Violent street gangs terrorise the city on motorbikes, with the police and the teenagers’ educators having little influence on their behaviour. In the middle of one three-way fight between two gangs and the police, a scientist and his young ward, apparently suffering from progeria, escape from a research facility into the melee before the former is killed and the latter fades before our eyes. Witness to this are two of the gang members, Kaneda and Tetsuo, and Kaneda’s interaction with the mysterious child awakens his psychic powers, leading to the creation of another potential weapon of mass destruction, while an apocalypse cult pray for the return of Lord Akira. In Akira, the apocalypse has a human face as first, lead character Tetsuo, and then the resurrected Akira himself, have the power of a nuclear explosion at their fingertips, something the military and government want to curtail. But it is only the interaction of the super-powered with ordinary, albeit anarchist, humans that stops the (complete) destruction of Tokyo for a third time.
Several enjoyable scenes struck me on re-watching the film: the corrupt rat-faced politician who seems to have wandered in from another movie, the attack of giant patchwork demonic toys with skin that’s bleeding milkshakes, a chase through the sewers that is a mixture of the climactic scene of The Third Man (1949) and the opening credits of Batman: The Movie (1966), Tetsuo’s Superman-inspired red cape (particularly in long shot, punching a space station) and the Warner Bros-style animated slapstick as Kaneda dodges falling boulders prior to the arrival of Akira from below. Akira the film, like Akira the character, is a form of rebirth, reconstituted from the elements of what went before; it’s not quite as cinematic as later animé - except a terrific close-up on Kaneda at the start of the film’s final battle - but the skill and dedication of the animators in bringing an unwieldy epic to the screen shines through. It’s a shame that in both subtitles and dubbing, even the more recent translation is still lacking, including such Pythonesque gems as: ‘He’s a false messiah! This isn’t the rapture!’ and ‘That’s Mr. Kaneda to you, punk’, a line that only Clint Eastwood or Sydney Poitier could get away with.
Akira is a smorgasbord of influences and references: Fritz Lang had his protagonists in Metropolis (1927) witness prophetic visions and have psychic links with their dopplegängers as did the subterranean mutants in Ted Post’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970); and Akira’s imagery of childhood toys battling with technology had first appeared in Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland in the first two decades of the 20th century. But Akira combines so many disparate elements from comic books and films that the resulting collage results in something startling and new. While the renowned English-language comic books of the time had to mainly resort to superheroes to narrate their tales (Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s Marvelman and Watchmen), Akira didn’t exist in isolation: in Europe, the absence of capes led to a similar mix of science fiction, satire, psychic powers, false messiahs and apocalypse in Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius’s comic book The Incal, which ran concurrently with Akira in the 1980s (Jodorowsky even supposedly advised Otomo on the ending of his manga).
On its release in 1988 (Japan) / 1991 (UK), Akira proved to be a ground-breaking film as it presented concepts and imagery rarely seen on the big screen in animation, and even then there were only a few live-action films that captured a similar neon-lit world, including Blade Runner (1982) half a decade earlier. Animé broadcast in the UK had previously been restricted to TV series that were international co-productions with France (Ulysses 31 / The Mysterious Cities of Gold), Spain (Around the World with Willy Fog) or America (Transformers / Thundercats). In the 80s and early 90s, little of Hayao Miyazaki’s charming fantasy animation was available in translation other than the odd episode of Sherlock Hound and his unremarkable debut film The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). Against this backdrop, it’s unsurprising that the arrival of Akira seemed like the birth of an entirely new art form, and it was unfortunate that post-Akira, distributors didn’t look for the finest examples of the medium they could bring to the West - i.e. Miyazaki’s films - but rather brought other movies similar in tone, which led to a deluge of violent, undemanding animated manga that gave the word a bad name. Akira does contain many of the clichés of bad manga - ultra-violence, techno organic tentacles and bucolic flashbacks - but it was one of the first to include these elements. It started a sub-genre that includes the work of Mamoru Oshii - particularly his Patlabor (1988-1993) and Ghost in the Shell (1995-2008) animé franchises - and Satoshi Kon - Paprika (2006) - who worked as an assistant to both Otomo and Oshii.
Otomo has the distinction of being involved in two of the finest Japanese animated films of the last quarter-century, Akira and Metoroporisu (Metropolis, 2001), which both share a brilliantly rendered futuristic city, which is a terrific example of the retro-(fitted) futurism as seen in Blade Runner. Both films also use the entire palette of the animator’s (digital) paint supply, with lurid reds on clothes and motorbikes contrasting with the pallid green/grey skin of the aged psychic children. As with Blade Runner‘s iconic Vangelis score, this retro-futuristic (apparently, 1980s sweatbands and Hawaiian prints are still big in 2019) city is also accompanied by a terrific soundtrack: Tsutomu Ôhashi’s mixture of Gamelan percussion and woodwind instruments, added to an eclectic voice work that includes a male choir whispering the names of the characters and Noh-style chanting. Otomo only wrote the screenplay of Metropolis (which is a loose adaptation of both Lang’s film and a 1949 manga of the same name) but did not direct it, and his other two feature-length animated films - Roujin Z (1991) and Steamboy (2004) - while fun, don’t live up to his urban cyberpunk classic.
While some aspects of Akira have dated and the rushed ending - a soupí§on of Kubrickian post-human light show plus shafts of divine light in a ruined landscape - strives too hard to be sublime, this is a classic animated Japanese film that is well worth adding to any Blu-ray collection, in a HD transfer that finally does justice to the film’s colour palette and intricate line art.
The unquestionable stand-out of this year’s Sci-Fi London was Daniel Cockburn’s You Are Here, an original, inventive and engagingly cryptic film that is left wide open to interpretation. Billed as a ‘meta-detective story’, it is a non-narrative, abstract meditation on the processes of the mind that is intellectually stimulating, as well as charming and playful.
It starts with a lecture in which the speaker tells the audience ‘You are here’, before explaining that the self exists in time and in solitude. Next, a voice-over narration explains that the crowd of people we see on the screen is called ‘Alan’. ‘Alan’ picks up a red ball and almost gets hit by a taxi. Although ‘Alan’ avoids being killed, he feels that ‘something has already gone wrong’. ‘Alan’, represented by a multitude of characters of both genders and various ethnic backgrounds, goes through his day and performs his daily tasks, but cannot log into his computer at work because he’s forgotten his password. He sees a door high up on a building, which does not lead anywhere, and wonders what its purpose is.
Another sequence of the puzzle shows people in an office controlling agents out on the streets, charting their movements in a bizarrely pointless activity that they all take very seriously. Elsewhere, a man invents a prosthetic eye that allows blind people to see, but it turns out that he has a sinister agenda. In another strand, a woman has built an archive of documents - tapes, videos, photos, etc. - that she has found by accident. One of these is a videotape that shows a man in a room in some sort of institutional facility; we later learn that he is a scientist performing an experiment. Locked up in a room, he has to translate and respond to sheets of Chinese characters that appear under the door, without knowing a word of Chinese, and with only the help of a multi-volume reference book. We are told that the experiment is meant to represent the way the brain works.
In the end, the various situations set up during the film unravel: ‘Alan’ falls out of the door that opens on nothing; the woman’s archive starts re-ordering itself and she decides to give it up; two street agents find themselves in the same place, which is not supposed to happen. Neatly concluding the situations set up at the beginning, the film culminates in death and disorder.
As noted by Chris Chang in Film Comment, the reference to John Searle at the end of the film gives some indication of the ideas behind it. An American philosopher interested in the workings of language and the mind, Searle devised an experiment called the ‘Chinese room’. The point of the experiment was to show that a computer can use language without actually understanding it. Literally representing that experiment and placing it at the heart of the film, Cockburn investigates the way in which the human brain perceives, pictures and orders the world around it, including its own self. The various surreal and seemingly absurd activities performed by the characters may be representations of the way the brain works, including processing information, mapping out one’s surroundings, and remembering things and events. Alternatively, the characters could represent computer processes - albeit those of an archaic and inefficient machine. All the situations construct systems of information storage that gradually become overloaded, leading to their destruction, which may be a comment on our world made in an oblique and deliberately low-tech form (see the enormous mobile phones used by the street agents). There is certainly a subdued sense of disquiet running through the film, which comes from the collapse of the systems, but also from the creepiness and paranoid feel of some of the stories, including the street agents, the eye inventor and the brain experimenter.
The film has many layers and their relationships are complex, with characters from one strand appearing in other stories: the scientist in the Chinese room experiment appears in the archivist’s story; she herself appears in the street agents’ story; and while the lecturer who opens the film seems to have a framing role, he later returns ‘inside’ the film, with a trio of kids turning the camera on him while he films the very images of the ocean that we have seen him use in his initial lecture. As we watch the film, our own brain is perceptibly working to organise and understand what it is seeing, so that You Are Here also leads us to dive into our own consciousness and become aware of its processes. It is a tremendously rich experience, invigorating and joyous as well as unsettling and thought-provoking, and, when the consciousness we have seen at work throughout the film dies out at the end, a surprisingly moving one too.
For more information on You Are Here, please go to the film’s official website.
Virginie Sélavy
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
