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Cinema releases

DARATT

Daratt

Format: Cinema

Release date: 27 July 2007

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Cast: Ali Barkai, Youssouff Djaoro, Aziza Hisseine

Chad 2006

91 minutes

Commissioned for the ‘New Crowned Hope’ festival celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, Daratt is a dry, considered African take on familiar themes of revenge and absolution. In the wake of Chad’s civil war, the perpetrators of the conflict are given amnesty by the government. Teenaged Atim is told by his grandfather to avenge his father’s death by tracking down and executing the man responsible, ex-general Nassara. But upon confronting Nassara, Atim is unable to do the deed. He instead goes to work in Nassara’s bakery, biding his time until he can find the inner strength to commit murder.

This basic revenge narrative is simple, direct and allegorical, familiar to modern audiences from countless Westerns, fables and noir thrillers. Writer-director Haroun brings almost nothing new to the story, but tells his tale with such precise conviction that it’s hard not to be sucked in. The world depicted is fascinating, alien but familiar, ruled equally by religion and the struggle for survival, conflicting pressures which impinge upon Atim’s quest for justice. This is a world of shifting moralities, where killers are pardoned but urinating against a wall can provoke a serious beating.

There are moments of real power in Daratt. The first confrontation between Atim and Nassara comes about following a moment of unexpected generosity – Nassara hands out bread to the local children, and Atim uses this as an opportunity to get close to his intended victim. The boy’s hatred remains unspoken, but his nervous intensity speaks volumes.

The middle sections tend to slump. There’s precious little characterisation, the dialogue sparse and functional, like the events onscreen. The characters’ emotional lives are suppressed, leading to moments of tension but giving us little to hold on to. These are archetypal figures playing out a very structured drama, and as such there’s little room for individuality or invention, in either narrative or character. And Haroun makes some strange choices, dropping his most likeable character, petty thief Moussa, far too early in the story, and giving the radiant Aziza Hisseine, as Nassara’s young wife, almost nothing to do.

But the main actors fill their roles brilliantly. A first-timer, Ali Barkai’s very nervousness and uncertainty before the camera suits troubled, taciturn Atim perfectly, drawing us in where a more confident performance might have alienated the audience. By contrast, Youssouff Djaoro’s Nassara feels like the work of an accomplished thespian, intentionally holding back but managing to convey a real sense of weariness and regret, and a gradually awakening hope.

Only in the final stages does the film truly fulfil its potential. The climax has been meticulously prepared, and a long time coming – even at this late stage we genuinely don’t know whether Atim will have the strength to kill Nassara. Even the previously rather functional photography gains new life, with a beautiful reverse shot from the back of a truck, pulling out of the city and into the desert.

Tom Huddleston

Cinema releases

WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 June 2007

Distributor BFI

Director: Mikio Naruse

Original title: Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Masayuki Mori, Reiko Dan

Japan 1960

111 minutes

Although Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse (1905-1969) was a contemporary of Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, he never received the same kind of international recognition. His subject matter, dramas about women, are perhaps not as flashy or as noble as the masterworks of Kurosawa; nor are they as stylistically pure as the work of Ozu; but When a Woman Ascends the Stairs clearly reveals just how great a humanist Naruse was. For Naruse the essential nature of cinema lay in its ability to illuminate the interior life of humankind, and Naruse’s prime candidates for this interior life (not unlike Pedro Almodí­Â³var) were those women forced, for one reason or another, to make fundamental ethical choices in life.

The film is set in Japan’s post-war Ginza district, where unmarried women had few choices: either work in a bar, getting paid to flirt with drunken men, or open a bar of their own. While the issue of outright prostitution is never overtly signaled it remains a potential undercurrent in what effectively is a complete and seemingly successful commodification of a particular kind of erotic femininity; a vision of womanhood where every gesture is studied, where the color of one kimono may affect a night’s turnover. Keiko (Hideko Takamine), a popular hostess at one bar, watches as her younger colleagues leave for other jobs, drawing all the customers away. Keiko is still beautiful, but the suggestion is that it’s time for her to open her own bar before she gets outmaneuvered by a younger, more giggly set of hostesses. The trouble is, to raise money, she has to suck up to her wealthy male patrons. As the film opens, she ascends the stairs to the bar, explaining in voiceover how much she loathes it. Naruse paints Keiko as the remnant of a traditional Japan in which honour and dignity carry their own erotic charge; the problem, the narrative seems to indicate, is that such ideals are rapidly vanishing in an increasingly modernized and commercialized Japan. Surrounded by booze, the lights of the red light district, and vacuous men – who seek to be flattered above all – Keiko remains sober and business-like in her dealings with both patrons and working girls.

While Naruse’s style is not dissimilar to that of Ozu – straight on, long shots – Naruse focuses more overtly on the visual dichotomy between the stifling decorum of the interiors and the hustle and bustle of exterior Japan. In one of the rare moments when Keiko is allowed outside the bar (in an attempt to solicit payment from overdue customers) we see her crossing a bridge, the promise of travel, modernity and perhaps even freedom lurking somewhere in an otherwise gray and industrialized distance. The psychological realism that Hideko Takamine brings to the role is done with such self-assurance that, paradoxically, the viewer tends to forget that she is acting. The paradox is that Keiko is ‘acting’, not only in cinematic but also in gender terms. Her faí§ade of subservient femininity is such that she cannot even admit to a vow of chastity made to her late husband; it has to be implied rather than spoken of. Femininity, Naruse seems to indicate, is always a carefully elicited performance for Japanese women and ultimately something which they must maintain a constant awareness of through emotional checks and balances. Keiko – we soon realize – is alone, with all odds stacked against her; but she keeps trying, she keeps retaking the scene, she keeps ascending the stairs.

In this sense, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs qualifies above all as a modest, graceful masterpiece. Considering it is from 1959 Hideko Takamine’s performance is remarkably fresh and modern. A veteran of 17 Naruse films, Takamine seems to perfectly capture the melancholy sense of a postwar Japan unsure about its path from imperialist traditionalist society to something ambiguously modern. The film follows this ambiguity through its overall design; the cool jazz music both roots the film in an arena of Americanized 1950s capitalism (as do the beehives and dresses of many of the working girls) and yet Keiko remains modestly dressed in kimonos. The black-and-white widescreen photography, with its slanting signs, screens, and the repeated motif of the steps that she has to ascend, fit Naruse’s appreciation for life’s quiet disappointments and hardships. In metaphorical terms, Naruse not only stresses the importance of taking one step at a time but the fact that the visualization of this process is crucial for an understanding of his characters’ psychology.

Similarly, although the film is shot in ‘Scope widescreen, Naruse’s compositions are far from luxurious; the extended horizontal framing emphasizes the congested interiors and enclosed spaces of the film and Keiko is rarely alone as she constantly attempts to placate both her male patrons and her female superiors and employees. The only singular element, in this respect, is the spare voiceover of Keiko, astonishingly in control whilst also wistful and evocative; it is – in other words – the voice of a woman who understands the inevitability of her situation even though it appears partly self-created.

It would appear obvious in this respect, to compare the roughly contemporaneous ‘women’s pictures’ directed by Douglas Sirk in America and Rainer W. Fassbinder later in Germany with Naruse’s work. Their similarities and differences are intriguing: both focus on social pressures and domestic disillusionment but Naruse’s focus is distinctly quiet vis-í­Â -vis Sirk’s melodrama, and internally painful where Fassbinder would probably externalize.

The plight of Keiko in Stairs dramatizes the fact that we are probably all to some extent stuck in the roles both given to and adopted by us, but such a statement belies the courage Naruse endows Keiko with. When asked if she’s lonely sometimes, she says, ‘Sure, but I have a brandy and go to sleep. That kind of fever soon passes.’ In public she glides as if on a conveyor of endless evenings and flattery, and yet she is also allowed to become painfully drunk in one sequence with disastrous and yet predictable results. A shot of Keiko (distraught and at her absolute lowest) vomiting blood at her club moves to a lazy tugboat pulling into a rural harbor, to Keiko seemingly safe and snug in her mother’s home, recovering. The stairs motif is similarly subtle and yet very obviously signals the painful attempt to ascend as a woman in postwar Japan. The final frames show a persevering Keiko. She may be slowly retracing the very steps that bind her to a life of misery, but in Naruse’s vision she is also the closest we have to an authentic heroine.

CB

Cinema releases

GHOSTS OF CITE SOLEIL

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Ghosts of Cite Soleil

Format: Cinema

Release date: 20 July 2007

Distributor Revolver

Director: Asger Leth

Cast: Winson ‘2Pac’ Jean, James ‘Bily’ Petit Frí­Â¨re, Eléonore ‘Lele’ Senlis

Denmark/USA 2006

88 minutes

In February 2004, after months of violent conflict and large-scale political protests, Haiti’s president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown and forced into exile. When US and French troops entered the capital, Port-Au-Prince, as a UN peacekeeping force, they faced a state in which corruption, violence and desperate poverty had combined to completely undermine the rule of law.

Asger Leth’s documentary, Ghost Of Cité Soleil, follows these events, concentrating on their impact on 2Pac and Bily; brothers, rivals and gang-leaders in the Cité Soleil slum area of Port-Au-Prince. Their gangs, known as Chimí­Â¨res (or Ghosts) were originally armed by President Aristide and employed by him as bodyguards and to intimidate opposition groups. As the film begins the two gang leaders are reaping the benefits of this connection. They have cars and guns and effectively run Cité Soleil themselves, Aristide having brutally subverted the city’s police force.

These characters, 2Pac and Bily, are the main focus and strength of the film. 2Pac, in particular, senses how precarious his position is, even as he enjoys its privileges. Both are vividly aware that everyone in Cité Soleil has only a tenuous grip on life, irrespective of their status. ‘Whatever I do, I die’, says Bily. Their attitudes towards the more wasteful and murderous instincts of their gang members are contradictory, like their attitudes towards the possibility of peace in Haiti and the future in general. 2Pac dreams of leaving. Inspired by his idol, Tupac Shakur, he works on his rapping skills, embracing hip hop as a voice and as a possible escape route. He even phones Wyclef Jean, who has Haitian roots, and raps to him.

We also see the attempts of Lele, a French relief worker, to help the people of Cité Soleil and her involvement with 2Pac and Bily. She relies on their influence to let her operate safely in the slums (presumably like Leth himself) and she becomes 2Pac’s lover and also an intermediary for the gangs as the UN and the new regime seek to disarm the Chimí­Â¨res.

Leth shows us his three main characters and their ambiguities straight. A gallery of talking heads give political context but otherwise we are left to ourselves to judge 2Pac, Bily and Lele’s actions and speculate about motives and unseen events. At times this is frustrating as questions go as much unasked as unanswered. Lele’s decision to work in Haiti is undoubtedly courageous but her links to the gang leaders must have compromised her position and the implications are not explored. Nor is the involvement of Wyclef Jean fully explained. He provides the soundtrack to the film and is seen talking with 2Pac on the phone but the background to this remains obscure.

Leth doesn’t explain his own decisions either. His father made several films in Haiti but neither this nor the path that led him from his home country, Denmark, to the Cité Soleil is revealed. Nor do we get any sense of whether the director, like Lele, was compromised by his closeness to the Chimí­Â¨res. It feels like his approach is consciously meant to emphasise the actions of 2Pac and Bily, reducing those around them to witnesses rather than protagonists. The advantage is that we get a well-focused portrait of the two brothers but is this justification enough to reject potentially intriguing lines of enquiry? Perhaps Leth was uncomfortable probing moral niceties in the middle of a slum with no food, no water and no justice. Alternatively, with the situation in Haiti being described as a ‘silent emergency’ it is possible that Leth was reluctant to dilute or confuse his attempt to break that silence. Either way, Ghosts of Cité Soleil feels like a brave and dangerous undertaking rather than skilful film-making, its efforts to engage undone by the simplistic viewpoint and the perplexing omissions.

Nick Dutfield

Cinema releases

RUNNING STUMBLED

Running Stumbled

Format: Cinema

Release date: 27 July 2007

Distributor Self Pictures

Director: John Maringouin

Cast: Johnny Roe, Virgie Marie Pennoui, Stanley Laviolette

USA 2006

85 minutes

Part twisted home-movie, part trash documentary, part screwed-up therapy, John Maringouin‘s Running Stumbled navigates the same muddy waters as Jonathan Caouette’s 2003 Tarnation. When Maringouin was just a baby, his father, the Cubist-influenced painter Johnny Roe, tried to kill both him and his mother. Twenty-nine years later, Maringouin, DV camera in hand, goes back to New Orleans and confronts his estranged father, recording the stupefying, constantly-on-the-brink-of-disaster and at times insanely hilarious existence he now leads with his death-obsessed, cancer-ridden partner Marie.

Clearly awed by the spectacular human bankruptcy he is witnessing, Maringouin is filming almost hypnotically, as if unable to stop himself from watching. In the unspeakable squalor of their one-storied New Orleans home, Johnny and Marie swap sardonic insults and death threats, trip over the litter-strewn floor or waddle unwashed around unmade beds, their physical and moral degradation fuelled by years of rancour and mammoth doses of prescription drugs. Completing the picture is next-door neighbour and Johnny’s best friend Stanley, a slightly deranged motormouth Johnny Cash lookalike who cares for his dying mother while dreaming of being a star in Hollywood. Speaking in a heavily-accented drawl, Johnny, Marie and Stanley alternate between shattering lucidity and nonsensical rant, their exchanges peppered with strikingly bizarre, almost poetic phrases – ‘running stumbled’, coined by Johnny to describe his post-hip-operation state, being a case in point. Johnny and Marie have moved so far beyond the conventions of polite society that there are no limits to what they will say or do and it all comes out as raw as hell.

With such a subject matter, a certain amount of self-obsessed angst might have been expected from Maringouin, but he is in fact almost entirely absent from his own film, adopting a very different approach to Caouette’s in Tarnation. Where the latter film was an overwhelmingly narcissistic, if compelling, exhibition of Caouette’s troubled self, Running Stumbled reveals very little of Maringouin’s character, the director making only two brief appearances that bookend the film. Maringouin is clearly reluctant to get involved, and it is almost as if filming his father’s nightmarish existence is a way for the director to distance himself from it, the camera acting as some kind of protective screen. While the lack of any self-pitying probing comes as a relief, Maringouin disengages himself so much from what he’s filming that it often feels like he’s somewhat skimming the surface of things, unwilling to dig too deep into horrors that he can’t quite face.

Adding to this is the fact that Maringouin is uninterested in charting the family’s charged history, preferring instead to concentrate on what he calls Johnny and Marie’s ‘real time performance’, a ‘stunt’ on a par with ‘jumping the Grand Canyon’, as he describes it in the director’s statement. But while eschewing all family narrative to concentrate on the here-and-now is a refreshing approach to the dysfunctional family biopic, again here Maringouin’s refusal to delve deeper than the daily life of the characters only contributes to the impression that he’s skirting some major issues, making it at times an unsatisfying experience. There is something not quite right in the fact that the director’s statement is at least as interesting as the film, and much more revealing. Calling Johnny and Marie’s desperate lives a ‘stunt’ for instance betrays more about Maringouin’s character than anything in the film: the fact that he sees his father and step-mother not as washed-out victims of drugs and personal demons but as existential seekers of the extreme says more about him than it does about them.

Although it was shot with a DV camera, Running Stumbled looks like a vintage Super8 home-movie. Just like Tarnation, the film may use the latest technology, but it is very much in the tradition of the home-movie-as-art of the sixties Underground filmmakers, as represented in particular by Stan Brakhage. Not only does Maringouin make use of techniques such as solarization, split screens and coloured frames, developed by his sixties predecessors, but he also clearly adheres to Brakhage’s conception of filming as a way of making sense of life. Brakhage compulsively recorded all aspects of his home life, including the birth of his first baby in Window Water Baby Moving, explaining that this was the only way he could cope with the sight of such a spectacle: ‘I’m not so constituted to be able to take on an experience like that, at least the first time, without camera in hand (…). In fact, there’s very little to me that’s understandable about life, or even bearable, except the seeing of it. I have managed my whole sight by making films.’ It is easy to imagine that Maringouin, filming his traumatic encounter with his father, would agree with the sentiment.

However, while it is interesting to see the life-as-art approach of the Underground Cinema being revived through digital technology, there are limits to the similarities. While Brakhage was as intensely concerned with developing his art as he was with exploring his life, the two being absolutely inseparable, Maringouin’s work is more about life than it is about art. But while Maringouin certainly can’t compare with Brakhage in terms of formal inventiveness, he does conjure up a mesmerising vision of domestic hell, grainy, fuzzy and tinged with murderous red. And although Running Stumbled feels at times frustratingly incomplete, we can’t help but watch as hypnotically as Maringouin films because, to borrow from the Brothers Quay, there is nothing more compelling than the surreal nightmare that we call human life.

Virginie Sélavy

Home entertainment

THE CAVE OF THE YELLOW DOG

The Cave of the Yellow Dog

Format: DVD

Release date: 25 September 2006

Distributor Tartan Video

Director: Byambasuren Davaa

Original title: Die Hí¶hle des gelben Hundes

Cast: Babbayar Batchuluun, Nansal Batchuluun, Nansalmaa Batchuluun

Mongolia/Germany 2005

93 minutes

In 2003 director and writer Byambasuren Davaa gave us The Story of the Weeping Camel,,a beautifully constructed documentary based around a Mongolian nomadic family’s newest camel colt. In The Cave of the Yellow Dog, the setting is the same minus the camels and with a different Mongolian family, and Dayaa delivers another slice of humble cinéma vérité. While taking a walk, six-year-old Nansaa finds a little black-and-white spotted dog in a cave along the cliffs. She names him ‘Zochor’ (‘Spot’ in English) and takes him home with her. Only her father tells her to get rid of him because wild dogs can attack the sheep. When her father goes on a long trip to the city to sell some sheepskins, Nansaa keeps the little dog, who becomes her trusted companion. One day she loses sight of him in the tundra and, whilst searching for him, encounters an old nomad woman who tells her the legend of the cave of the yellow dog.

The child actors really are the centrepiece in Davaa’s films, their naivety pulling you along in the narrative and making you see the world through their eyes. During Nansaa’s conversations with her newfound best friend Zochor the dog, you become completely immersed in the child’s mindset. One of the most endearing scenes in the film occurs between Nansaa’s siblings, Babbayar and Nansalmaa. When Nansaa doesn’t come home one evening her mother is forced to go looking for her, entrusting her second eldest daughter to look after the home and more importantly Babbayar while she is gone. It is a scene that is nothing short of adorable while also revealing of Nansalmaa’s striking maturity. It is fascinating to see how bold and fearless the children are in Davaa’s Mongolian families, their parents trusting them to wander off and almost encouraging their independence – a far cry from our over-protective Western world. But The Cave of the Yellow Dog is not simply about the children and it also puts you in the position of the parents at different intervals. When Babbayar is accidentally left behind during the family move and almost falls prey to some blood-hungry vultures, the father’s desperate efforts to rescue his youngest child provoke unqualified sympathy in the audience.

The role of the ‘Yurt’ plays as highly in all of Dayaa’s films as it does in reality. Turkic for í¢â‚¬Å“dwelling placeí¢â‚¬Â or í¢â‚¬Å“homelandí¢â‚¬Â, a Yurt is a portable structure consisting of a circular wooden frame carrying a felt cover, and for the Mongolian families it is home. The importance of the Yurt is suggested in the film when the time comes for the family to move on and they start to gently deconstruct it in thoughtful silence. Such scenes are enough to entice any nature lover to explore this nomadic living so far removed from the city suit ant armies and unreachable property ladders of urban life. I remember Ewan McGregor in his Long Way Round documentary, commenting on Mongolia as he passes through on his motorbike, recalling it as a ‘breathtaking’ place that makes you feel a million miles away from civilization. Or rather, the civilization us Westerners are familiar with.

All this makes you realise how remote and untouched nomadic Mongolia really is, which gives an exotic charm to the film. Dayaa’s films paint a remarkably detailed picture of her motherland, from its culture and ancient Buddhist beliefs down to the organic working ethic among the natives. Mongolia was seeped in communism for years, its inhabitants systematically conditioned to view the Buddha Dharma as mere superstition, the opposite to all ideals of progress and modernity. But since 1990 Mongolia has adopted a democratic government that has brought religious and personal freedom to the people. They have been able to rediscover and once more enjoy the ancient way of life that had long defined their culture, before communists had taken control. The Mongolians’ independent spirit and joyful embrace of life are more than apparent on screen and Davaa brilliantly captures the beauty of nomadic Mogolian life. She would have been approaching her twenties when Mongolia was becoming a freer and more socially equal environment so no wonder she celebrates her country with such pride, wearing her heart on her silk sleeve.

It is easy to forget that The Cave is a documentary film because of Davaa’s unobtrusive direction and the natural performances of the nomadic family involved. You become utterly consumed in the storyline, the characters and the surroundings, almost as if you were working the camera yourself. The Weeping Camel was an original and deeply affecting film and it seemed unlikely that Davaa could equal it, but The Cave is more of the same, and just as good. With her second feature she confirms that she has truly created her own genre of documentary filmmaking.

Jo Overfield

Home entertainment

SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG

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Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Format: DVD

Release date: 28 November 2005

Distributor BFI

Director: Melvin Van Peebles

Cast: Melvin Van Peebles, Simon Chuckster, Hubert Scales

US 1971

97 minutes

Too often put in the same bag as the cynical, Hollywood-engineered wave of blaxploitation flicks it influenced, Melvin Van Peebles‘ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is pure, unadulterated ghetto anger that burns as fiercely now as when it was made over thirty years ago. Having started a filmmaking career in France with the support of Henri Langlois of the Cinémathí­Â¨que Franí§aise, Van Peebles landed a contract with Columbia in the US and made the successful race comedy Watermelon Man in 1970 before moving on to Sweetback, a project so radical that no major studio would touch it. Undeterred, Van Peebles raised meagre funds himself and shot his film, the story of a black hustler who goes on the run after killing two white cops, in 19 days, almost losing his sight during the intensive editing and alienating most of his family and friends in the process. After a shaky start Sweetback took off thanks to the support of the Black Panthers, ending up the highest grossing independent film of 1971, topping Love Story at the box office.

Sure enough, Hollywood swiftly repositioned itself, MGM rewriting its script for Shaft, originally meant for a white detective, recruiting black hunk Richard Roundtree to star, Isaac Hayes to score and Gordon Parks to helm for credibility, while Warner Brothers followed suit with Superfly, imaginatively hiring Gordon Parks’ son to direct and Curtis Mayfield to write the music. Although the blaxploitation wave was short lived, it lasted long enough to turn into caricature the heady mix of flamboyant ghetto get-up, funky music and rebel black hero that Sweetback had introduced. Hayes and Mayfield’s brilliantly seductive soundtracks only helped glamorise a boorish, sexist law enforcer and an unscrupulous drug dealer respectively. Sweetback‘s mutinous, inflammatory call for revolt against white rule was excised while the film’s prominent but complex sexuality was entirely misunderstood and travestied. The new black (anti-)hero who had just emerged was quickly reduced to a high-sexed macho stud more influenced by the womanising antics of James Bond than by the firebrand politics of Malcolm X.

The truth is, Van Peebles had to pretend he was making a porn flick in order to get past the all-powerful all-white unions. This was dictated as much by financial necessity – the director simply couldn’t afford to pay union rates – as by politics – Van Peebles wanted a multiracial crew, which the unions couldn’t provide. The only way to dodge the unions’ strict controls was to have enough sex scenes in the film to make them believe Sweetback was porn, which fell outside of normal regulations.

But while Van Peebles may have been forced to put sex in his film he used it to provide an incendiary comment on race relations in America. Unlike Shaft or Superfly, Sweetback is no sexy daddy proudly parading his manhood but a passive, glazed-eyed hustler who is pushed into sex. At the start of the film Sweetback makes a living performing in a sex show for both black and white voyeurs. As he goes through the motions, his face blank and lifeless, he is no paragon of triumphant virility but a sexual object used by other people for their own gratification. Later Sweetback is captured by a white motorbike gang who give him a choice between fighting and fucking. Sweetback has to perform surrounded by whooping and cheering bikers, egged on by the white woman’s teasing ‘well?’. Performing here is very much the right word. The sex is an act, a show put on by the black man to entertain his white audience and stop them from beating him up. Tellingly Sweetback is wearing an incongruous white bow around his neck during the scene, complemented by a black hat at the end. This bow that comes out of nowhere – it was definitely not part of Sweetback’s outfit before he undressed – marks him out as an entertainer, a jester, the black man forced to act out the eternal fool to the white man, forced to conform to the racist stereotypes that the white man has stamped on him – oversexed buck or buffoon. The point is pressed home in another scene, which shows a black man shining a white man’s shoes with his bottom to make him laugh. The black man is constantly performing, forced to put on the act that is expected of him to avoid the white man’s hostility. Sex, just like clowning around, is something he has to do in order to survive in a white world.

In that perspective, the controversial opening scene of the film becomes easier to understand. Taken in by prostitutes when he was homeless and hungry and brought up in a brothel, the pre-pubescent Sweetback (played by Van Peebles’ own son Mario, thirteen at the time) is coerced into sex by a much older prostitute. The BFI has chosen to black out those early images on the DVD, apparently to conform with the Child Protection Laws, even though an earlier video version of the film included them in and Channel 4 and the ICA have both screened the film uncensored. This is regrettable because while those images are undeniably unsettling, they are essential to understand Sweetback’s character: throughout his entire life Sweetback survives by letting people use him for sex, and the brothel scene is where it all started. This is made crystal clear as the young Sweetback lying on top of the prostitute turns into the blank-faced adult Sweetback. That early scene is a defining moment in his life: it is the prostitute who gives him his moniker, the only name he answers to throughout the film. And if any remaining doubts linger about Van Peebles’ intentions, the opening quote of the film spells it out: ‘Sire, these lines are not a homage to brutality that the artist has invented, but a hymn from the mouth of reality’ (Traditional Prologue of the Dark Age). Sweetback is no endorsement of sleaziness or underage sex but an attempt to portray the black man’s experience as truthfully as possible, including in its most unpalatable aspects.

The sexuality depicted in Sweetback also links the film to the Underground cinema of the sixties. Unlike the strictly straight, conventional couplings of Shaft or Superfly the sex in Sweetback comes in many a deviant form: aside from the prostitutes of the opening scenes, there are voyeurs, lesbian performers, a queer compere who calls himself the ‘Good Dyke Fairy Godmother’ and later a trio of camp gay men. These are characters who would not be out of place in the work of Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs or the Kuchar Brothers. Belonging to a de facto marginal subculture Sweetback, sporting an outrageous mustard crushed velvet two-piece, is at home among the misfits and outsiders who hang out on the fringes of the dominant, mainstream, straight, white culture. This may be why Van Peebles found that the forms and spirit of Underground cinema were perfectly suited to the depiction of the black experience. Displaying the same disdain for straightforward narrative Van Peebles strips the plot down to its bare bones, most of the film consisting of Sweetback running through urban wasteland. The bold visual style clearly owes a lot to the techniques pioneered by the sixties filmmakers, and Van Peebles makes great use of split frames, jump cuts, coloured negative images and collages of urban imagery. Sweetback runs through empty concrete aqueducts, seedy back alleys, derelict buildings, rubbish-littered streets, and sewers before leaving the city for the unforgiving desert. Hostile signs flash on the screen – ‘Caution’, ‘Keep Out’ – as well as neon lights promising religious redemption – ‘Jesus Saves’ – as if this was the only path for the black man – fenced in by the white man while promised a better (after-)life by the Church.

Even more so than the visuals it is the design of the soundtrack that really impresses. A complex assemblage of discordant sounds, a cacophony of police sirens, funky theme tune (written by Van Peebles and performed by Earth, Wind and Fire) and Gospel standards, it is raw, cool and edgy, an aggressive, electrifying celebration of African-American culture as well as an angry denunciation of the treatment of the black man by white society. Most striking of all is the menacing, chilling ‘Won’t Bleed Me’, a call and response type of song between a group of singers and Sweetback whose chorus is ‘They bled your momma/They bled your poppa/Won’t bleed me!’.

However, while Sweetback is clearly a political film, it is devoid of any speeches, lecturing or debates of Black Power ideas – see Horace Ové’s 1976 Pressure for contrast. Rather than talking about overthrowing white power, Sweetback literally strikes back against white police. But as with all other aspects of the film there is nothing simplistic about this. It is not that action is better than words, it is simply that Sweetback doesn’t have the words. As the cops proceed to beat up a black militant kid senseless, Sweetback just passively stands on the side, ground down by centuries of white oppression. When he snaps and starts hitting them back, it’s not revolution, it’s pure reaction to an ‘overdose of black misery’. Sweetback is not the leader but the forerunner of the revolt, the first one to stand up but without having the words to articulate the ideas. That role is Moo Moo’s, the young activist that he rescues from the cops. In a later scene he helps him again after the youngster has been wounded in a shoot-out, and when a choice has to be made between saving himself or saving Moo Moo he favours the latter, saying: ‘he’s our future’.

No matter how exhilarating it may have been for black audiences of the time to see a black man stand up to white power, however, the ending of the film is rather downbeat. In a concluding scene that evokes the fugitive slaves of the past, Sweetback manages to kill the hounds that are chasing him, dodging the law once again. If this is a victory of sorts, it is a rather bleak one: Sweetback may have escaped, but he can’t stop running; he’s survived but nothing has changed for the black community. As Sweetback disappears over a desolate mountain and possibly over the border into Mexico, there is no real sense of triumph, only the defiant threat that he will be back: ‘Watch out’, says the superimposed title, ‘A baad asssss nigger is coming back to collect some dues…’ Sweetback was originally conceived as a trilogy but Van Peebles couldn’t raise the money to make the two sequels he had planned. Sadly, on and off the screen the baad asssss hasn’t been able to make it back, kept safely away by white power structures.

Virginie Sélavy

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Home entertainment

PRESSURE

6 Comments
Pressure

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 September 2005

Distributor: BFI

Title Pressure

Director: Horace Ové

Cast: Herbert Norville, Oscar James, Frank Singuineau

UK 1975

120 mins

The first black director of a British feature film, Pressure (1975), Horace Ové was born in Trinidad in 1939 but moved to England in 1960 to study painting. After six years in Rome where he worked as an extra on Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) among other things he returned to Britain where he graduated from film school and set about making Pressure with the help of many of his former classmates (both black and white). Ové has had a long and varied career as a filmmaker – working in television directing serious dramas for Play for Today and episodes of The Professionals – but he is best known for Pressure and 1986’s Playing Away – in which an English village cricket team organise a match against a South London Caribbean side. He is also well-known as a photographer, particularly for his photographs documenting the British Black Power movement in the 60s and 70s in which he was personally involved. A few of these are included on the DVD, including a shot of Darcus Howe protesting the famous Mangrove Restaurant case.

Ové co-wrote Pressure (with novelist Samuel Selvon) and also wrote the lyrics to the theme song which is used almost like a narrator within the film. Pressure was financed by the BFI (a very small budget too) but then shelved for two years due to the controversial depiction of police brutality. It tells the story of a British-born teenager, Tony (Herbert Norville), who leaves school with good ‘O’ levels (‘the star of the class’ according to his friend) but meets with thinly veiled racism and rejection when he tries to get a job. He is left to find his own way between his friends’ petty criminality (shop-lifting tinned food) and his brother Colin’s involvement with Black Power politics.

The culture clash is established by the opening shot of that symbol of Britishness – bacon and eggs sizzling in a pan (with Encona hot sauce on the table instead of HP). Colin arrives with an avocado from their father’s shop, insisting on calling it by its Trinidadian name and berating Tony for his taste in British food and British music.
‘What’s wrong with bacon and eggs, fish and chips and Gary Glitter?’ Tony demands almost answering his own question. Taking his defence their mother says, ‘Don’t forget he’s not like us. He born here.’, to which Colin replies, ‘That don’t make him white.’ For the rest of the film Tony finds himself torn between two cultures he is both part of and separate from.

Tony’s accent marks him as different from the rest of his family (all, like Ové, born in Trinidad) and his West Indian friends (‘Don’t give me that cockney ‘mate’ thing’). A variety of accents are heard throughout the film from the American activists, Tony’s Jamaican ‘street’ friends, his ‘cockney’ school friends and the middle-class accent of the accountancy firm’s interviewer. Characters are placed instantly within their respective cultures by the sound of their voices as clearly as by their skin colour. The strong accents led to problems with the distributors – Ové even considered adding subtitles.

It is after the accountancy job interview that Tony starts to ‘get the message’. The interviewer spouts a selection of ‘mildly’ racist questions – ‘How long have you been in this country?’ ‘Do you play cricket?’ ‘Have you been in trouble with the police?’ – and ends with a final and insincere ‘We’ll be in touch with you…Pretty soon.’ The effects of this ‘softer’ racism (but from a position of power) are felt just as much as that of his white girlfriend’s landlady screaming, ‘I’m not having people like that in this house.’ But the most damaging kind is the racism that is coupled with both power and aggression – that of the police. It was the film’s depiction of that ‘institutional racism’ that caused so much controversy on its original release. Police are seen raiding a peaceful meeting and then framing activists for drug offences. In the interview on the DVD Ové claims these scenes are based on personal experience.

The film is very successful in the way it includes politics without being too didactic. Political discussion stems from the drama – Colin’s involvement with the Black Power groups – as well as from reports on the radio or read aloud from newspapers. The meetings and talks are timed to reflect Tony’s situation (a speech on education and finding work follows Tony’s unsuccessful job interview). However, there are arguments within the group of activists that give more than one side to the debate, for instance when they disagree over whether all whites oppress or just those with economic power.

Ové sees Christianity – ‘That hippy cat, Jesus Christ Superstar’, as one character puts it – as an organ of repression. The black preacher (played by an actor addressing an unsuspecting genuine church audience) is heard promulgating the age-old black/white division. ‘Drive all black thoughts from your heart and replace them with good white holy thoughts’, he tells a real-life congregation of black churchgoers who show no reaction. As the American writer James Baldwin says in the other Ové film included on the DVD, slaves were kept ‘under the whip, the threat of the gun and the even more desperate and subtle threat of the bible’.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the film is its cinéma vérité/neo-realist style. It was shot on the streets of Ladbroke Grove (without obtaining permission) with the ‘extras’ either unsuspecting or often looking into the camera to see what’s going on. Ové claims it was whilst living in Rome that he discovered the films of Vittorio De Sica and Luis Buí±uel. The film even has a Buí±uelesque dream sequence where Tony sneaks into a colonial style house and murders a pig hiding under the bed clothes. Whether the pig symbolises English bacon or the police is not clear but then dreams seldom are.

The DVD comes with Horace Ové’s incredible documentary Baldwin’s Nigger, the filmed record of a brilliant speech James Baldwin gave in London in 1969 followed by an even better Q&A session. It informs Pressure not only through its discussion of the political issues but also as a document of the kind of militant meetings that are shown in the film. Baldwin tackles a variety of issues – economics, White liberalism, Christianity, usage of the terms negro, black, nigger, coloureds etc. with great wit and much humour. And by simply replacing Vietnam with Iraq and Detroit with Paris its relevance to today is obvious. These are two important films that are as valid now as they were thirty years ago.

Paul Huckerby

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Home entertainment

FITZCARRALDO

Fitzcarraldo

Format: DVD

Release date: 21 May 2007

Distributor: Anchor Bay UK

Also screening at: The ICA

Date: 10, 16, 21, 30 June 2007

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale, José Lewgoy, Miguel í­Ângel Fuentes

Peru/West Germany 1982

158 minutes

In 2006 during an interview with Mark Kermode for the BBC’s Culture Show, Werner Herzog was famously shot with an air rifle, apparently by a crazed fan – not that surprising perhaps for LA and, if the director’s own words are to be believed, not that surprising for Herzog himself. The occasion of the interview was the release of Grizzly Man, one of Herzog’s more understated ‘documentaries’ and I kept wondering at the time whether the shooting incident might not have been staged to give Grizzly Man some kind of notoriety, the kind of notoriety that attached itself in the early eighties to Fitzcarraldo which is now re-released on DVD, accompanied by Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, a ‘making of’ documentary, to mark its 25th anniversary. For a film-maker like Herzog who has often blurred the boundaries between documentary and feature film it’s perhaps odd to think of someone else turning the lens on his own film-making processes but like Hearts of Darkness which charted the misfortunes of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, there’s clearly a story to tell.

The story of Fitzcarraldo itself is well known. Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, or Fitzcarraldo as he is known by the locals because they can’t pronounce his name, is an opera-loving Irish émigré played by Klaus Kinski. He has tried to make his fortune in South America through various speculative schemes from the building of a trans-Andean railway to the manufacture of ice. Dubbed ‘the conquistador of the useless’ by one prospective financier, his latest project is to build an opera house in the jungle town of Iquitos so that he can bring his favourite opera star, the great Enrico Caruso, to perform. To raise money for the project he decides to embark on one final scheme – the processing of rubber – to which end he has located a vast area of jungle untapped by other speculators because of its geographical inaccessibility and indigenous head-hunting tribes. Only reachable by river (the Rio Ucayali), what lies in the way of immense riches is a series of deadly rapids called the Pongo das Mortes, certain death to any large river-going vessel necessary to transport the rubber back downstream for processing. In an epiphany however, Fitzcarraldo notices on a map that this area can be accessed, and the rapids avoided, by navigating a parallel river, the Rio Pachitea, and there’s a point where the two rivers almost touch. All that’s needed is for the riverboat to be dragged across dry land – a kind of grand-scale portage – from the one river to the other. It is with this journey, from the securing of a loan to buy the riverboat, to the seemingly insurmountable task of pulling its 70 tonnes over a kilometre of dense jungle, that the film largely concerns itself.

It is tempting to see the parallel rivers, which lie at the film’s geographical heart as well as occupying the protagonist’s mental life, as a metaphor for much of what unfolds. When Fitzcarraldo experiences his eureka moment, Herzog has the camera linger for a long time – far too long – on the map showing the near convergence of the Ucayali and the Pachitea. Fitzcarraldo is clearly mesmerized to the extent that he can’t answer simple questions: ‘Have you ever seen a shrunken head’ he is asked, to which he replies; ‘Yes…I mean no…sort of.’ Can you ‘sort of’ see a shrunken head?! Later as they approach their destination, Fitzcarraldo draws the same map for the captain of the riverboat and we as viewers are shown the same configuration again. His fascination I would argue also is also made ours and we are invited to ‘read,’ even over-read, the map too. Like the weird hieroglyphics in another great adventure story, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (have a look at Chapter 23) the lines of the two rivers turn themselves into shapes that are more than what they are supposed to designate. They become for a while the outlines of two faces staring at each other like the face/cup alternative of a gestalt test. Then again the whole configuration turns into a diagram of the female reproductive organs, and the point at which the two rivers converge can be seen as a kind of birth canal. I found myself staring at the map like Fitzcarraldo trying to come up with more ingenious significations – one of the bonuses, or curses, of watching a DVD.

These over-readings of the map can of course be folded back into the film. Although Herzog argues in Burden of Dreams that Fitzcarraldo is not a piece of ethnography (like Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North or even Herzog’s own film about the plight of Australian Aborigines, Where Green Ants Dream) claiming that he’s more interested in the way the native Indians are acting than simply ‘being,’ it does dramatise the convergence of two conflicting cultures in the form of the exploitative, colonising European and the exploited indigenous ‘other.’ The exalted romance of Fitcarraldo’s ‘visions’ of opera in the jungle and the demented portage of a huge riverboat are both individualist and interferist gestures. Neither of these grand projects belongs in their new contexts. Like other river narratives – from Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and even Coppola’s Apocalypse Now – the boat is a figure of hierarchical power and exploitation, both on and off board. The point at which Fitzcarraldo decides to play a recording of Caruso to quell the sounds of beating war drums hidden behind the inscrutable shoreline is a case in point. He sets the gramophone at the front of the boat’s roof with its trumpet sticking out like another ship’s figurehead and the sound of Italian opera cutting through the banks of the river is as violent a gesture as Frederick Forrest’s Wagnerian helicopters in Apocalypse Now. For a minute or two a fusion between the two sound worlds seems possible as drum beat and opera commingle in an awful presaging of world music but it’s the great Caruso who is victorious. The native Indians are charmed and won over by the sounds of the West like the children who are fascinated by the same music earlier in Fitzcarraldo’s house. The native/child connection is of course the oldest one in the book.

Herzog isn’t pressed by the makers of Burden of Dreams on the extent to which Fitzcarraldo reinforces rather than questions colonialist tendencies. The native Indians – or ‘bare asses’ as the ship’s crew crudely calls them – are clearly exploited labour for Fitzcarraldo and the scenes of them clearing the jungle to make way for the boat are at times reminiscent of Sebastiao Salgado’s sublime but shocking photographs of Brazilian miners. Those photographs reveal a scarred and wounded landscape as do the shots in Burden of Dreams of the bulldozer that was necessary to raze the ground for the portage of the boat. I couldn’t help but think of this as a small scale version of the land clearance that was happening at the time on a vast scale across parts of the South American continent in the name of economic progress. But then Herzog has a curious attitude to the land. He thinks of the jungle as a cursed, unfinished landscape. There is harmony, he suggests, but it’s ‘a harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.’ Nature is for him completely alien and he ‘admires’ it against his better judgement. Whilst this is laudable in that it avoids the kind of mawkish anthropomorphism that clogs our TV screens on a daily basis it can also lead to a laissez-faire politics as far as land management is concerned.

The other question Burden of Dreams never explicitly poses is whether we might consider Fitzcarraldo as an avatar of Herzog himself and his vainglorious enterprises a version of Herzog’s own heroic ‘struggle’ to make his film. There’s clearly as much obsession on Herzog’s part in working out the mechanics of dragging the riverboat as there is on Fitzcarraldo’s except that Herzog has also managed to capture the feat on camera! Both are acts of extreme vanity. Burden of Dreams also reveals that Herzog ignored the engineer who warned him of the dangers of using the chosen pulley system with such a heavy payload. The sublime and uncanny sight of the boat making its way up the incline fascinates Herzog to the extent that he holds the diagonal shot, boat filling the frame from corner to corner, for over a minute.

This slippage between Herzog and his own protagonist again brings to mind the convergence of the two rivers as indeed does the relationship between feature and documentary in this twin DVD release. At times it’s an unsettling experience watching Burden of Dreams for the way that it replays or ghosts scenes from Fitzcarraldo. After the boat (incidentally named the Molly Aida in homage to Fitzcarraldo’s beloved mistress and opera – another ‘twin’ if you like) is dragged a little way up the incline it rolls back under its own weight and two native Indians are pulled out from underneath having been crushed to death. We see the same scene in Burden of Dreams shot from a slightly different angle, the bodies pulled out in the same way. One of the bodies lies bloodied and lifeless for longer than is ‘strictly’ necessary and for an awful moment there’s the possibility that a native has actually been killed. When he eventually opens his eyes and leaps to his feet, visibly grinning, it’s almost weirder than if he’d stayed dead.

Unlike Herzog’s however, Fitzcarraldo’s avowed mission eventually fails. Having succeeded in hauling the Molly Aida between the two rivers – and it is, I would argue, a kind of monstrous birth, a violent breach delivery if you like – he and the crew drink themselves into unconsciousness in celebration and in their oblivion the native Indians cut the ropes sending the boat downstream where it overshoots the prospective rubber plantation and crashes through the rapids before listing feebly home. The explanation given by the natives for their behaviour is that it is to appease the angry gods of the Pongo das Mortes and this shows the cultural chasm that exists between native and coloniser. It is of course also a kind of nemesis for Fitzcarraldo’s hubristic act. In a pyrrhic victory however, he sells the Molly Aida and with the proceeds brings a touring European opera troupe to Iquitos. The final shots of the film show them performing on board the boat decked out like a stage set with a beaming Fitzcarraldo sucking on a huge cigar as lord of all he surveys.

Burden of Dreams reminds us that Herzog had finished shooting most of the film with Jason Robards playing the lead role (with Mick Jagger as his sidekick) before amoebic dysentery forced him to pull out. Robards has I think too much gravitas for the part. Kinski is of course the perfect protagonist. There’s a child-like otherworldliness to him that makes him both charming and terrifying but the charm doesn’t allow you to dwell too long on the prospects of the terror. This also sums up Herzog as director. You watch Fitzcarraldo constantly pondering its ambivalent politics but are won over by the sublime imagery which lets Herzog almost get away with murder.

Jeff Hilson

Cinema releases

THE WILD BLUE YONDER

The Wild Blue Yonder

Format: Cinema

Release date: 15 June 2007

Distributor Soda Pictures

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Brad Dourif, Capt. Donald Williams, Dr. Ellen Baker

USA 2005

72 minutes

Despite receiving its premiere as part of BBC4’s Storyville season back in 2005, Werner Herzog’s mesmerizing docu-fantasy The Wild Blue Yonder is only now making its British big screen debut. Billed as science fiction but bearing closer relation to the work of Chris Marker and even David Attenborough than Spielberg or Lucas, the film utilises footage shot on the space shuttle STS-43, along with haunting images photographed beneath the polar ice cap, all loosely held together with a rambling, delusional voiceover by actor Brad Dourif.

Dourif’s character claims to be an alien from a planet somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, a frozen ocean planet known as the Wild Blue Yonder. His people fled an unnamed ecological catastrophe, travelling for thousands of years across the blackness of space before finally arriving at Earth. Their history on our planet seems confused: Dourif at first describes them as being greeted like heroes, but later their presence seems to have been forgotten, with the exception of those members who infiltrated their way into the political or scientific communities. Dourif himself claims to have worked for the CIA, where he was involved in the cover-up surrounding the Roswell incident.

But these aliens are far from the advanced, benevolent angels of sci-fi lore; they’re not even malevolent infiltrators or invaders. As Dourif himself points out, ‘most aliens suck’. The survivors have been travelling for so long that they’ve forgotten much of the science that made their journey possible, and their time on Earth has largely been spent attempting to assimilate into human society, becoming a nation of little Thomas Jerome Newtons, building a separate community complete with congress, senate and shopping mall, a hopeless enterprise that soon fell into disrepair because ‘nobody wanted to buy anything’.

But the plight of the survivors merely sets the stage for the main plot of the film: the journey of six Earth astronauts to the dying oceans of the Wild Blue Yonder. Initially fleeing a microbial outbreak on the home planet (which turns out to be a false alarm) the astronauts travel through newly discovered ‘chaos tubes’ which connect distant stars and galaxies to one another. They explore the new world, scoping out sites for settlement. Then they return to Earth, only to find that hundreds of years have passed and the entire planet is deserted, returned to its primeval state. Where the inhabitants have gone is a mystery which Herzog leaves open, suggesting the possibility that they have either scattered to the outer fringes of the universe, or just as likely wiped each other out.

The bulk of the film’s visual content fits into three categories. The first depicts Dourif wandering in aimless frustration around a dilapidated desert town, ostensibly the proposed site for his great alien capital. The earlier parts of his story are occasionally intercut with flickering historical footage intended to represent the arrival and assimilation of the original ‘alien founding fathers’.

Then there is genuine space footage, shot by NASA astronauts in Earth orbit exclusively for this project. This footage bears little relation to the story being told, merely depicting the inhabitants of a tiny, cramped spacecraft going about their daily routines. Dourif’s voiceover describes the pressure these so-called interstellar travellers are under, but we see very little evidence of this onscreen. There is also very little footage of outside, the Earth below or the stars above, merely repetitive shots of astronauts eating, exercising, or lying down to sleep.

The distant Wild Blue Yonder is represented through footage shot beneath the polar ice cap by Henry Kaiser. These are the most visually exciting moments in the film, as the ‘astronauts’ explore this pale, barren underwater world, drifting through floating clouds of geometric ice shards, or exploring the great husks of half- formed coral structures. Dourif’s voiceover becomes notably more lyrical here too, remembering his homeworld in simple but poetic terms.

Running through all three sections of the film are a series of interviews with slightly deranged Caltech scientists, who use equations and computer models to explain unfathomable concepts or describe the ludicrous physics behind interstellar ‘chaotic travel’. Like random excerpts from alternate universe Open University lectures, these little snippets of scientific banter are perhaps the most entertaining portions of the film.

It’s hard to say how seriously Herzog takes any of this. Between the fantastical concepts of the aforementioned professors and Dourif’s dry, ironic musing, the film displays an awareness of its own absurdity completely at odds with the hauntingly beautiful underwater sequences, or the flatly scientific NASA footage. The voiceover continually points out its own conceptual flaws, describing the search for other Earth-like planets in our solar system, introducing the concept of the alien disease then just as quickly abandoning it. At times it’s as though Herzog is simply uninterested in the real science behind the fantasy, at others it seems like a ploy to make us question the veracity of Dourif’s statements, treat him more like a deluded madman than a real live ‘alien’. Similarly, the references to sci-fi staples like Roswell or wormhole travel walk a fine line between pandering to and mocking the clichés of science-fiction cinema and literature.

There are points at which The Wild Blue Yonder feels like something genuinely new, a radical and fascinating approach to the presentation of documentary footage. But at others it feels random and rather amateurish, attempting to tie together disconnected reels of ‘found’ footage in a manner awkwardly reminiscent of Ed Wood. It’s hard to divine exactly what the film is trying to say: there’s certainly an ecological subtext here, but it’s (perhaps mercifully) buried beneath layers of scientific mumbo jumbo and Dourif’s absurdist rambling. What remains is a fascinating curio; visually arresting, conceptually flawed but never less than entertaining.

Tom Huddleston

Home entertainment

onedotzero_select DVD 5

onedotzero5

Format: DVD

Release date: 4 June 2007

Distributor: Vital UK

Directors: Guilherme Marcondes, Adam Smith, Takagi Masakatsu, Joe Trussell and more

onedotzero brand themselves as one of the UK’s leading promoters of contemporary digital moving image, both through the international film festivals that they stage and through their onedotzero_select DVD series. The fifth edition, released June 4th, is a captivating compilation of work, including short films and music promos, that combines both high-quality live action and innovative, often humorous animation.

Viewing the DVD is a bit like dipping into a collection of short stories: though lacking a cohesive narrative, there is a commonality between the artistic works. Most of the shorts exhibit an irreverent sense of humour (while the few that don’t all tend to veer towards a dystopian view of society). Music is a hugely important component of the clips: those that aren’t actual promos are still fashioned as elements of contemporary music culture. In the animated War Photographer a Nordic marching band faces off against heavy-metal Viking warriors on the high seas in a battle for their honour while the live-action What Goes Up Must Come Down is a Streets-like urban rap trip through a twilit London. Despite differences in style and technique, all of the films are created to appeal to an audience characterised by a devotion to digital innovation as well as an urban design aesthetic; the DVD would equally be at home on the walls of a Shoreditch club as in a mainstream cinema.

Though the quality of all the work on onedotzero_select 5 is exceptionally high, there are some pieces that stand out. The animated short The Tale of How from South African collective The Blackheart Gang is a brilliant work: an operatic, fantastical tale about a sea creature threatening a colony of Dodo birds. Surreal Japanesesque wood blocks seem to come to life in a sea filled with tentacled monsters, piranha ducks, and the distressed birds struggling to survive in the choppy, dangerous waves. At the other end of the spectrum, Toner by Takagi Masakatsu, is an aural and aesthetic delight, a riot of gorgeous colour accompanied by the Japanese artist Cornelius on the piano, as well as the nostalgic sounds of a dot-printer.

At a time of ever-greater media consolidation and the rise of the bland pop promo created to appeal to the lowest common denominator, onedotzero_select provides an opportunity to see digital art that would otherwise struggle to find an outlet. While videos for the Bloc Party and Ninjatune-veterans Coldcut can get airtime, it’s unlikely that the charming, Miyazaki-esque Soot Giant from France, or the Brazilian film Tyger, a combination of puppetry, animation and photography inspired by a Blake poem, would find a widespread audience in the UK without support from onedotzero. The films on this compilation are well-deserving of our time, and will amply reward repeat viewings.

Sarah Cronin