Format: DVD

Release date: 11 June 2007

Distributor: BFI

Director: Jean Painlevé

Idiosyncratic French filmmaker Jean Painlevé was a poet in celluloid and a pseudo-scientist in brine. With friends such as Jean Vigo, Luí­Â­s Buí±uel (indeed Painlevé was chief ant handler in Dali/Buí±uel’s Un Chien Andalou), Eistenstein, Edgar Varese, George Franju (Painlevé co-wrote Le Sang Des Bí­Âªtes) and Alexander Calder to name but a few, Painlevé has come to be regarded as an avant-garde filmmaker.

By the 1920s science and film were already bedfellows. There had been antecedents – Marey, Commandon, Doyen – and by the time Painlevé started shooting equipment was already quite sophisticated; yet often science films were didactic, seldom were they poetic. Being the anarchist that he was, Painlevé took the rigid, musty nature of scientific filmmaking as a cue to do the exact opposite and deliver material that really engaged people with the subject. A true auteur, he worked semi-autonomously in his own lab, replete with customised equipment. Although his films are often structurally quite formal and relatively straightforward, they seemed so strange in the context of orthodox science film that their reputation as ‘avant-garde’ was sealed.

Science is Fiction collects eleven short films made by Painlevé between 1927 and 1979, with subjects ranging from liquid crystals to the mating rituals of various marine animals and, in collage form, the life of a vampire bat (the only airborne creature recorded here). Every single one of these films is a delight and I salute the BFI and the team that put it together.

The son of a mathematician/politician, indeed Prime Minister, Painlevé emerged from a haut-bourgeois background. As a youth he was a keen photographer with an interest in surrealist and dadaist art. By his early twenties he had flirted with film, working as an actor and producer on minor self-financed short films. He was also partly responsible for the publication of Surréalisme, a magazine dedicated to… you guessed it. It folded after one issue. Simultaneously, Painlevé was busy disobeying father, flunking out of mathematics and opting for marine biology, spending his days wading in the coastline of Brittany. During this period he met his wife and collaborative partner Genevií­Â¨ve Hamon. It wasn’t until 1927, when Painlevé was in his mid-twenties, that he started to take the camera out wading with him. Over the course of three years he made six short documentary films all dealing with molluscs or crustaceans. By the time of his death in 1989 he’d authored in excess of 200 films.

Despite his association with Breton’s movement, Painlevé was not a surrealist filmmaker by any means. He did, however, share the surrealists’ interest in the weirdness of procreation and psycho-sexual stimulation. Out of the eleven films collected here, four depict submarine mating rituals and birth. These are the most captivating of the selection, and not only do they reveal Painlevé’s preoccupation with animal reproduction but they also demonstrate a propensity for eroticism in their technical realisation.

In the opening shots of Love Life of an Octopus (1965), an octopus crawls across mud flats at low tide, its large humanoid eye blinking with a furtive, criminal shyness… it squeezes itself under a rock and nests there until the tide has risen. ‘Créature horrifique’, says the voiceover in mock disdain. Painlevé then presents us with a kaleidoscopic peep-show of octopi coitus, pregnancy, birth and foetal development. The lighting is soft-focus, the location intimate.

The molluscs are subjected to pornographic macroscopic close-up photography exposing labial, clitoral fronds, protusions and sensuous pink umbilicae; Wharton jelly smears; the curlicues and whorls of tentacular mating rituals; the synaesthetic mood pulsing of octopi, a special arm inserted into an orifice… It is reminiscent of an orgasmatron moment in Barbarella or an expanded cinema light show; with jerkier movement and fast editing it could even be Brakhage-esque forensic footage….

It is strange indeed, the love life of an octopus, but it is no stranger than our own sexual corporeality, sexual rituals, reproduction processes and the mysteries of our internal organs. We see other creatures copulate too in other Painlevé films but this scene in this two-years-in-the-making, forty-two-year-old sublime tour de force is particularly devastating and to me exemplifies Painlevé’s erotic poetic quality.

There is something undoubtedly sensuous about submersion in fluid. In an essay from 1935, ‘Feet In The Water’, Painlevé discusses wading, its instinctive, sensual pleasure and thwarted desire: ‘Wading around in water up to your ankles or navel, day and night, in all kinds of weather, even in areas where one is sure to find nothing, digging about everywhere for algae or octopus, getting hypnotised by a sinister pond where everything seems to promise marvels although nothing lives there. This is the ecstasy of any addict….’ It is possible, then, if you have a filthy mind like me, to see direct parallels with filmic eroticism in Painlevé’s films; if nothing else he gets very intimate with the molluscs.

Painlevé’s films are noted for their soundtracks and Love Life of an Octopus derives an essential part of its propulsion from the squelching macabre that is Pierre Henri’s gorgeous composition. Like a foetus in amniotic fluid, that other homme-grenouille Jacques Cousteau liked to listen to the mysterious, muffled, globular vibrations of hydrophonic recordings… Painlevé wasn’t averse to these sounds but generally chose music to accompany his films. It is largely this juxtaposition that gives his work its unique texture. Jazz, chamber music, musique concrí­Â¨te and other harmless noises provide ironic counterpoint to imagery that’s often as arcane.

Painlevé’s Parisian studio, a landlocked Nautilus… Sat amongst his aquaria in the heart of Paris, tinkering with exotic life-forms, Painlevé was, like many of the singular breed of people who keep subaquatic pets, a sado-masochist who enjoyed the tragic non-reciprocity of the relationship. A relationship wrapped in morbidity, since to have a more tactile rapport with the creature one would have to compromise its life. They cannot be in our world without life support: tanks with thermostatic regulators, water-treatment chemicals and filters. As we are constantly reminded of the fragility of their existence there is something inherently melancholy about these kinds of pets. Painlevé understood this since he experienced the agony in reverse, only able to exist in their world with life support too. To me this mutual empathy is quite evident, contrary to the critics who claim that Painlevé depicted the miscellaneous animals as exotic, outlandish aliens.

I look at the slip-case cover of the DVD – Painlevé kitted out as an aquanaut, ready to descend, respirators on his back, fat tube attached to a face-mask with shatter-proof glass, a huge underwater camera like a Jules Verne relic from the previous century strapped to his chest, all set for filming amoebic bodies and their undulations in brine, and it is Painlevé who looks far more like an alien species than any of the creatures I gawped at in his films of the marvellous.

Philip Winter

Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé features an alternative soundtrack by Yo La Tengo. The band will perform their soundtrack live to a selection of the films at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 9 September at 7.30pm.

Format: DVD

Release date: 3 September 2007

Distributor Optimum

Director: Shane Meadows

Titles: TwentyFourSeven, A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England

On the council estates of this our glorious nation the remnants of Britain’s working class, beaten down by Thatcher’s economic ‘miracle’ of the 80s, live unglamorous lives. The vast majority of them are decent people: mothers struggling to bring up their kids in the right way, fathers battling to hold down a decent job, and the kids, doing what kids do, being bright and sparky, running around in gangs, experimenting with drugs and sex before the harsh realities of adult life intervene. Then there is the damage: relationships stretched beyond breaking point, the boredom of everyday existence on the breadline, dreams broken through lack of opportunity, violence engineered from frustration. In the 1960s the British New Wave made films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey which told us of the lives of the people who lived in what were then pit-towns and centres of industry. Later, directors such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh documented the corrosive effect of Thatcherism on those communities. Now the mantle has passed to Shane Meadows.

This four-DVD box set includes all of Meadows’ major works to date bar the poorly received Once Upon A Time in the Midlands, the one occasion where he departed from his habit of using little-known actors in favour of an all-star cast that included Robert Carlyle, Rhys Ifans, Kathy Burke, Shirley Henderson and Ricky Tomlinson. The first of Meadows’ feature-length films TwentyFourSeven (1997) did, however, star Bob Hoskins as Darcy, a washed-up football coach who opens a boxing club in an attempt to wean the local delinquent youth off their self-destructive lifestyle of drink, drugs and casual violence. Shot in black and white, the film eloquently expresses the frustrations and low self-esteem of the town’s young men, eager to cling to the opportunity offered to them against a backdrop of unemployment and empty days. Hoskins puts in a bravura performance as the dreamer who has to earn the respect of the boys and, if the characters of the would-be-pugilists themselves aren’t as well developed, the relationship of one with his scornful, violent father is the real emotional heart of the movie. Clearly shot on a budget of no money whatsoever, the sheer story-telling talent of Meadows carries the film home.

Meadows’ next film was the rites-of-passage tale A Room for Romeo Brass (1999), the story of two school kids, Romeo and Gavin, who befriend a peculiar young man called Morell (Paddy Considine) after he saves them from bullies. The seemingly simple Morell develops an infatuation with Romeo’s sister Ladine (Vicky McClure) and for a while the film seems like a light-hearted comedy as he clumsily attempts to woo her. Abruptly though, we discover a darker, psychotic side to Morell’s character and the relationship between this grown-up child and the youngsters takes on a disturbing edge that is emphasised when Ladine narrowly escapes a sexual assault at his hands. Meadows is again strongest on issues of fatherhood – Romeo’s father is absent and Morell fulfils the role of surrogate in much the same way as Hoskins does to his boxing charges in TwentyFourSeven, while Morell’s damaged psychology is partly explained by a violent relationship with his own father. Like all of Meadows’ films A Room for Romeo Brass manages to be funny, sad and disturbing by turns. Just like real life in fact.

Considine turns up again in Dead Man’s Shoes (2005), for which he also shares a co-writing credit. Here he plays a paratrooper returning to a small Midlands town with his simpleton brother Anthony to take a terrible revenge on a gang of small-time villains. By re-styling his usual social realism as revenge movie Meadows plays with the conventions of the genre. The gang are shown more as bored slackers escaping the mundanity of small-town life through drugs and crime, while we never see the actions of Considine’s psychotic paratrooper, just the devastating results. Considine gives an excellent performance in what could have been a one-dimensional role in other hands, and the shocking revelation that hits us towards the end of the movie provides a brilliant twist that throws the entire film into a more ghostly, poignant light. Production values are low, perhaps deliberately so, but once again Meadows demonstrates that inventiveness and ingenuity are the important ingredients in what is probably his best movie to date.

The release of This Is England (2007) came earlier this year to much acclaim. Set in 1983, it tells the story of an 11-year old kid, Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), whose father has died in the Falklands War. His search for belonging leads him into the arms of the local skinhead fraternity, a benign, multi-racial bunch led by Woody (Joseph Gilgun) and his girlfriend Lol (Vicky McClure again) who help dress Shaun in the regulation uniform of Ben Sherman, braces and boots. The idyll is shattered by the return from jail of Combo (Stephen Graham), a former member of the gang who now espouses the manifesto of the National Front. Shaun is susceptible to Combo’s arguments and, seeking a father-figure, joins up with him. Much as in A Room for Romeo Brass the film deals with the relationship of a vulnerable young person taken under the wing of a damaged older man, and again Meadows attempts to define the cause behind that damage, rather than simply portraying the character as a monster. It’s intelligent, complex and brave directing. The film fizzes with energy and, as with all of Meadows’ films, the use of music is exemplary, a potent mixture of reggae, ska, punk and 80s pop.

A decade on from TwentyFourSeven Shane Meadows has established himself as one of Britain’s brightest talents with a series of films that address the reality of life for the working classes in the UK. It’s further proof of his skill that these films are also brilliantly entertaining. While he is by no means a complete filmmaker (his female characters, although often stronger and more stable than their male counterparts, come across as under-developed) his films have a rare naturalness and an emotional truth that guards his work against dourness. As far from condescending stereotypes and facile miserabilism as can be, this box set is an electrifying blast of real life.

Sean Price

Format: DVD

Release date: 20 August 2007

Distributor: Manga + Bandai Entertainment

Director: Kenji Kamiyama

Original title: Kôkaku kidôtai: Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society

Japan 2006

108 mins

Although it’s being marketed as the third Ghost in the Shell film, the acronym friendly GitS: S.A.C. – SSS is the most recent (feature-length) episode of the TV series Stand Alone Complex. Based on the same manga by Masamune Shirow that inspired Mamoru Oshii’s two movies, Solid State Society is confusingly being presented as a sequel, although for the casual viewer there are enough connections with the originals both in terms of theme and returning characters to justify this.

SSS is ostensibly a police procedural thriller concerning the special police department Section 9, which investigates cyber terrorism. They are looking into a string of suicides caused by a mysterious character called The Puppeteer who hacks into people’s cybernetic implants in order to control their actions. As such the film seems quite prescient in its interests – as Bluetooth phone attachments get ever smaller and people walk down city streets apparently talking to themselves it taps into some primal fears the more Luddite members of society might have about being controlled by their machines.

Renowned for combining mind-expanding philosophy and jaw-dropping visuals Oshii’s two Ghost movies can be seen as part of the trend of hallucinogenic science fiction running from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Fountain. Being a more faithful adaptation of Shirow’s manga, the TV series has had considerably more time to discuss in depth the various technophobic and technophilic interests of its author. However, while SSS taps into some of the same themes of existential identity crisis as the original Ghost movies, it gets bogged down by plot and technobabble of the kind that makes more narrow-minded audiences flee from sci-fi. What’s more, there’s a streak of misogyny evident in certain scenes where a cyborg girl with shrink-wrapped breasts fights a phallic robot drilling machine and another where a bedridden old man is cared for by nurses in S&M costumes. This is the opposite of Oshii’s movies, which debated the objectifying of women in society as ‘dolls’. While Oshii looked to cyberpunk literature for inspiration, this seems to be influenced by the lurid films of Paul Verhoeven with the drilling machine reminiscent of one from Total Recall and the clunky anthropomorphic battle robots looking like relatives of ED-209 from Robocop. Verhoeven can get away with turning Philip K Dick into camp body horror, but Oshii’s cool aesthetic is what gave Ghost in the Shell its transcendent nature, and it is very much missing here.

While the original films (particularily GitS 2: Innocence) can be confusing because they deal with complex ideas, SSS is confusing because of bad writing. When characters discuss the identity of The Puppeteer or the true nature of the Solid State Society, they just come across as that occasionally annoying person you watch a film with who hasn’t being paying attention to the plot. There is none of Oshii’s philosophical thoughtfulness here and half of the dialogue is simply filler padding out the running time of a shorter TV episode to feature length.

The music is catchy enough to encourage nascent fans of J-pop to go out and buy the album as it is the kind of jazz, trip-hop, funk fusion typical of composer Yoko Kanno who composed the sublime music for the animé series Cowboy Bebop.

Fans of sequels who can put up with the law of diminishing returns may enjoy this film and welcome a return visit to the Ghost in the Shell universe, but if you’re new to the series stick with the much superior original movies instead.

Alex Fitch

Format: DVD

Release date: 6 August 2007

Distributor: Revolver

Director: Larry Fessenden

Cast: Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton, Zach Gilford

US 2006

107 minutes

The Last Winter follows an oil research team based in the untouched Alaskan Arctic planes. Tough and tenacious leader Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) is eager to drill into the rich oil resources that lie below the surface, but he is challenged by environmental expert James Hoffman (James LeGros), who believes the project will wreak havoc on the already fragile terrain. A sense of unease builds within the team after the mysterious disappearance and death of one of its members, and the camp is slowly engulfed in disorientation and paranoia as a ghostly threat starts to take hold of their lives. After a devastating plane crash at the base Pollack and Hoffman are forced to brave the winter wilderness in search of help, but against perilous conditions and supernatural forces their hopes for survival begin to fade away.

The film’s cinematography captures the expansive, inhospitable landscape of the arctic tundra perfectly, and the sense of hopelessness and isolation that grips the characters is palpable. The men are barely distinguishable in wide shots of barren, snowy planes, and the spooky howling wind is ever present, reinforcing the sense of loneliness. The remote environment is also a psychological landscape, evoking the fear of the unknown and a feeling of helplessness. The camera peers into windows through a flurry of snow, as if a voyeur, which further suggests that the team aren’t alone in the wilderness. The behaviour of the characters becomes more and more erratic as events unfold, and it is difficult to determine whether they are in the grip of their own unravelling sanity or dark forces of nature.

The film’s central conflict is between oil hungry Pollack and sober realist Hoffman and through their antagonism director Larry Fassenden highlights the struggle between the US government’s unwavering capitalist ideology and ever-increasing environmental concerns. In fact, Pollack could be seen as Bush to Hoffman’s Gore, and it’s no surprise that Pollack tries to remove Hoffman when his research findings threaten the project. The chilling ending clearly suggests that if American policy doesn’t change the consequences will be devastating.

This topical issue is pursued through the supernatural horror genre, which could have been an interesting approach if it had been done in a less conventional way. The general set-up echoes The Thing, the foreboding presence of crows circling the sky above is reminiscent of The Omen, and the pecking of eyes and flesh recalls The Birds. The atmosphere of paranoia and solitude creates some genuinely creepy moments, and the dread is most compelling when the threat remains unknown and imagined. But the overall pace of the film is too slow to successfully build anticipation, and the ghostly forces that overwhelm the team have a distinctly underwhelming effect once they are exposed.

Fessenden is known for his ‘intelligent and socially conscious horror films’, and there is no doubting his commitment to the issue of global warming. In The Last Winter, he sternly warns of the dangers of the American government’s reluctance to make changes. But while he creates a convincing atmosphere of tension and uses the bleak landscape to great effect, The Last Winter is burdened by the weight of the issues, and the explicit significance of the message makes the film that much less enjoyable.

Lindsay Tudor

Format: DVD

Release date: 3 September 2007

Distributor: Optimum

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Alternative title: Trigger Happy

Cast: Margaret O’Hara, Brian Keith

US 1961

93 mins

Sam Peckinpah was already an experienced director (and screenwriter) before he came to make his first feature The Deadly Companions in 1961. He had worked extensively in television, usually on Western shows such as Gunsmoke and The Westerner. The Deadly Companions was produced by its star Margaret O’Hara, for whom Peckinpah claims he worked as a hired hand. He was allowed very little input in the writing and thus it lacks his typically strong authorial signature.

Despite this, the film is in many ways an unusual Western. Yellowleg, a former Union cavalry officer played by Brian Keith, star of Peckinpah’s television series The Westerner, accompanies Kit (Margaret O’Hara) and the body of her dead son across Apache territory to be buried with his father. It is as much a fight for survival as it is a search for redemption. Yellowleg is at the end of a five-year hunt for the confederate soldier who tried to scalp him. With the man as his unwitting companion he is left to question what to do after he takes his revenge – how he might live without his driving motivation. However, perhaps to give the producer/star Margaret O’Hara more screen time (certainly more than any other woman in a Peckinpah film), the film develops into a romance, moving away from the revenge thriller that the opening seemed to promise.

The town they are leaving, Gila City, certainly matches the Peckinpah ideal of a Western town. The taming of the West is rarely a positive thing in his films. Women and children, those Western symbols of civilisation, are as nasty in their own ways (gossiping and teasing) as the gunfighters. The hypocrisy of the townsfolk is exposed through a dispute over whether it is Monday or Sunday, and through the closing of the bar, as the saloon becomes the chapel (for those who believe it is Sunday). The congregation whisper aloud snide comments about the undesirables, Kit and her fatherless son. These are characters who clearly mirror the abstinence marchers caught in the crossfire at the start of The Wild Bunch (1969).

The Deadly Companions is a decent but unremarkable Western, let down by a confusing ending (re-cut without Peckinpah’s approval), some poor dialogue and some two-dimensional characters, particularly Billy the black-clad gunman. But the biggest problem is that we have learnt to expect something a little bit different from Peckinpah. Not just the flawed heroes and the filthy ‘gutter trash’ (usually played by Strother Martin – the preacher in The Deadly Companions) but a sense of humour and some bizarre occurrences, such as the arrival of motor cars, or the camel vs. horse race in the brilliant Ride the High Country, made just a year later. Unsurprisingly (for 1961), there are none of the voguish stylisations of late-sixties Hollywood, such as slow motion, sunlight glares on the camera lens and split-screen photography, that Peckinpah made his own. And although The Deadly Companions has a theme song beautifully warbled by O’Hara it is nowhere near the great soundtracks of The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and the Bob Dylan score for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

The Deadly Companions is as uninspired a beginning to a career as the CB-radio comedy Convoy (1978) was an end. Fortunately, Sam Peckinpah made many great films in between.

Paul Huckerby

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 July 2007

Distributor: Metrodome + Third Window Films

Director: Johnnie To

Cast: Simon Yam, Lam Suet, Maggie Siu, Ruby Wong

Hong Kong 2003

88 mins

Johnnie To’s stock has been rising steadily in the West ever since his two Election films garnered critical acclaim and brought the Hong Kong action director to the attention of mainstream audiences. His latest, Exiled, a smart, energetic and dazzlingly stylish actioner, was unanimously and deservedly praised, cementing that success. Following a short run at the ICA, one of his earlier efforts, the 2003 PTU (Police Tactical Unit), has now been released on DVD in the UK.

PTU takes place over one night in Hong Kong, during which the eponymous Tactical Unit led by Sergeant Mike Ho, tries to recover the gun lost by their goofy colleague Sergeant Lo during a scuffle with a gang of thugs. They have until dawn to find it and avoid a scandal that would cost Lo his promotion. A race against time ensues as the team trawl through a deserted, glacial Hong Kong, resorting to violent tactics to get the information they need. The situation becomes even more desperate when another team of police officers, working on the related case of the thugs’ murdered leader, start to view the Unit in general, and Lo in particular, with growing suspicion.

Opening with a brilliant set piece of slapstick power games that involve Sergeant Lo, the thugs and an apparently hapless kid fighting over a diner table, PTU offers a satirical view of police cynicism and incompetence. The satire is never too serious, though, and the film is less about flagging up social issues than about the humorous absurdity of fate. The random laws of chance rule and neither Lo’s dubious old-school tactics nor Ho’s scarily ruthless professionalism bring them any closer to the misplaced gun. Interestingly, as this is after all an action movie, action is shown to be futile and pointless here, and the plot is resolved only by a series of chance happenings and freak coincidences.

Famed for his stylish virtuosity, To certainly does not disappoint in PTU. His Hong Kong is all slick urban spaces and metallic surfaces, entirely deserted but for the police and the gangsters, so sanitised as to be slightly unreal. The cold, hard blue light of the streets at night contrasts with the reddish tones of the chilling game arcade scene, in which Ho forces a thug to remove a tattoo on his neck by rubbing it until it’s sore. The director creates an exquisitely over-stylised world that is at least as captivating as the gratuitous convolutions of the plot.

PTU has been criticised for its tonal shifts, but the mixing of registers – in this case satire, light-hearted humour and intense violence – is typical of Asian filmmaking. More problematic is the plot, clever and tightly scripted in the first half, but losing all sense of direction and fizzling out like a damp squib in the second half. As a result, although PTU provides enjoyable, intelligent Hong Kong action fun, it’s one for To fans only.

Virginie Sélavy

Format: DVD

Release date: 6 August 2007

Distributor: Paramount Home Entertainment

Directors: Walter Hill

Cast: Brad Dourif, Robin Weigert, Timothy Olyphant, Ian McShane, Keith Carradine


US 2006

691 mins

Although it looks like season three will be the last, Deadwood has been another triumph for the US premium channel HBO. Like many viewers I had been looking forward to something like the seven seasons and ten years that The Sopranos had. Deadwood has built its own cast of compelling characters and in Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) it has a complex, charming sociopath to rival Tony Soprano. But it is true to history that Deadwood should be short lived; the real town was destroyed by a fire in 1879 (the cost of rebuilding the set perhaps put HBO off funding a fourth series) and, perhaps more damaging to the prospect of further seasons, shortly after the rebuilding the Methodists closed the brothels.

With Deadwood, HBO has certainly cemented its reputation for ‘cinema quality’ programming. The first episode was directed by experienced western filmmaker – a rare breed nowadays – Walter Hill. Included among his many credits are Wild Bill (1995)(partially set in Deadwood of course), Geronimo (1993) and one of the great mud-and-blood westerns, The Long Riders(1983). Not only that, but he brought his cinematographer, Lloyd Ahern II, with him. Although the two men only worked on the first episode, a standard for the look of the show was set that was maintained throughout. Later episodes were directed by two key Sopranos directors Alan Taylor and Tim Van Patten while eighties indie legend Michael Almereyda was even brought in to direct one. The show’s main director is Ed Bianchi, who also worked on the equally acclaimed TV series The Wire. However, as is always the case with television (and almost never with cinema), the man most recognised as the auteur of the piece is its key writer, David Milch.It was Milch who also created two of the most successful cop shows on TV, Hill Street Blues (1981-87) and NYPD Blue (1993-2005), two series that were praised for their realism and in the latter case for its strong cinematic style.

One can almost imagine Milch pitching Deadwood to the HBO execs as ‘The Sopranos out west’ and it is certainly closer to that genre (the HBO adult drama) than to its predecessors in western TV history such as Gunsmoke (1955-75) and Bonanza (1959-73). Only Lonesome Dove (1989) had similarly high production values, with a first-rate cast and a great script but its setting, a cattle drive, makes it a very different show to Deadwood; the style and mood of the two series are worlds apart. If Deadwood has any forebears they are more likely to come from the cinema – particularly the ‘revisionist westerns’ of the sixties and seventies. The look of Deadwood with its sepia tones (and the copious mud) is reminiscent of McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) although it does not go as far as Robert Altman’s film – much criticised for its blurry images. Both works depict the growth of a mining camp into a town with images clearly based on nineteenth-century photography. However, Deadwood gives us complex, intelligent characters (Warren Beatty’s John McCabe is neither) and more plotting and scheming than I, Claudius or Dynasty. It has much in common with the soap-opera – all that is missing is a Joan Collins conniving ex-wife.

Deadwood begins in July of 1876, two weeks after the death of Custer at the Little Big Horn. Much of what takes place is based on historical fact: the gold rush turning to deeper mining; the small pox outbreak; the political machinations as the Black Hills become part of South Dakota State (more complicated than The West Wing). What’s more, a surprising number of characters are based on real former Deadwood inhabitants – not just the well-known Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane but also Seth Bullock, Al Swearengen, E.B.Farnum, Sol Starr and many others too. However, this certainly doesn’t mean that one should expect faithful historical accuracy from the show. As David Milch says, ‘history is just a lie agreed upon’ and nowhere is that more true than in the western. The falsification of the west began almost immediately through dime-store novels and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the nineteenth century. Many of (the ‘real’) Calamity Jane’s stories of ‘indian hunting’ with Custer have proved to be false. The ‘revisionist western’ is usually caught between wanting to show things as they really were and wanting to be a ‘western’. Thus, in Unforgiven (1992) the myth of the dime-store novels is exploded, only to have it ride through the storm and take revenge in the finale. In Deadwood the western myth is not given the serious debunking it gets in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) but neither does the series portray the west of Kevin Costner – where historical accuracy seems to equal big moustaches.

Deadwood‘s cast of characters is one familiar from many a western: the corrupt saloon manager who runs the town, the straight-shooting sheriff and the prostitute with a heart. Perhaps the only character that isn’t familiar to westerns is the female drunk. Jane (never called ‘Calamity’ – she just is one) is a million miles from Doris Day and far closer to Dean Martin’s character at the start of Rio Bravo (although she shows no sign of ‘getting it together’ to save the day). But unlike the typical western, Deadwood has a soap-style ensemble cast and is not centred on the hero/sheriff. If anyone is the central character it is the show’s ‘J.R.’ – Al Swearengen – the town boss, saloon keeper and whore-house owner. It is normally against such characters and their hired guns that the western hero must avenge himself as Sterling Hayden does in Terror in a Texas Town (1958). But revenge is rarely a motivation in Deadwood. It is a place of business, of laissez-faire capitalism where more noble motivations are not to be trusted. As the legendary Wild Bill Hickock soon finds out, it is a place where heroes are shot in the back. With this shift of focus away from the hero the western stock characters are given depth, motivations and their own running storylines.

But the most strikingly original aspect of Deadwood is the language. Never before in film or television have the people of the Wild West spoken this way. We have become so used to the cowboy’s ‘aw shucks’ and ‘darn it’ (the occasional use of a ‘hell’ always reprimanded by the house matriarch with a ‘mind your cussing’) that the language of Deadwood seems anachronistic. One assumes David Milch researched this and found ‘cocksucker’ the most common curse of the 1870s. Still, as with David Mamet and his swearing estate agents, one wonders whether this is how they really spoke or whether Milch is using language in the same way that he’s using the sets and the cinematography – to create a unique world.

In his 1972 book on the genre, Michael Parkinson claimed with some justification that ‘the TV western has only ever followed behind its big brother in the cinema’. Well, with Deadwood the television western has finally equalled, if not surpassed, its cinema equivalent. Perfectly adapted to the hour-long soap-opera structure, produced by an impressive team of writers and directors, featuring acting of the highest quality as well as a brilliant soundtrack, Deadwood has truly revolutionised not only the western, but also the TV series in general, and all this despite the casting of Lovejoy as the main character.

Paul Huckerby