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Lost Lovers

Lost Lovers

Format: Cinema

Screening dates: 5 + 16 August 2011

Venue: BFI Southbank

Directors: Shimizu Kunio, Tahara Sôichirô

Writers: Shimizu Kunio, Tahara Sôichirô

Original title: Arakajime ushinawareta koibitotchiyo

Cast: Momoi Kaori, Ishibashi Renji, Kano Tenmei

Japan 1971

123 mins

Mostly unknown to UK audiences, Tahara Sôichirô and Shimizu Kunio’s debut Lost Lovers (1971) perfectly encapsulates the spirit and function of the production company that enabled its creation. Formed in 1961, the Art Theatre Guild of Japan became a counter-cultural refuge for voices frustrated by Japan’s mainstream film industries and an exciting place of convergence for different artistic mediums. Lost Lovers brought together a TV documentarist (Sôichirô) and avant-garde playwright (Kunio) to produce an allegorical portrait of Japan’s youth in the wake of the 1960s’ failed student protests, a startlingly relevant subject matter in current times. The influence of both mediums is keenly felt; physical theatricality from the lead actors and elaborate staging are teamed with a voyeuristic, unobtrusive style of camera work, reminiscent of direct or free cinema. This impassive cinematography is particularly apparent at the outset of the film as the camera lurks among passengers on a bus or surveys dead fish heads at a food market.

The film follows a former champion pole-vaulter, Ko (Ishibashi Renji), on a rootless journey through desolate sand dunes and apocalyptically abandoned US army bases in Northern Japan. Carrying a canvas bag large enough to smuggle a human body, Ko is first seen strolling down an empty highway, Stetson hat cocked at a rakish angle, all Spaghetti Western outlaw swagger. But his cool is deflated when a speeding bus knocks him over in the dust. Ko lies, sprawled out, hugging his bag and crying out a girl’s name, ‘Chiko!’ From the start, Ko is a somewhat hapless and naive anti-hero, chattering endlessly and moving with a rubber, cartoonish physicality, with a hint of Malcolm McDowell’s charisma in Lindsay Anderson’s Mick Travis trilogy.

A jobless vagrant, Ko robs two of his fellow bus passengers - a suitably bourgeois middle-class couple - to make his way. He may be a petty thief but Ko commits the crime without violence and with a charmingly mischievous streak, throwing their trousers and skirt off the road bridge into the river below. While Ko is essentially harmless to society, society soon reveals itself to be a malignant force. After an unfortunate encounter in the food market, Ko is falsely accused of rape by a woman looking for sex and chased by members of the public, who dishonestly attest that they saw him commit the crime, and the police, who dismiss his strong protestations of innocence. Locked up in a cell, Ko looks out to the dark street below. A crowd gathers and fills the screen, holding glowing lanterns in their hands. Ko reaches out to the onlookers with words of protest: ‘I’m a domestic lion. I have no memory of the savannah. All I know is this small cage. My voice may be small but I will roar for you.’ Without a word in response, the crowd silently turns away and disperses from view.

Released and outraged by his treatment, Ko stages a one-man protest backed by a band playing Purple Haze-style riffs. As Ko makes an impassioned speech against the ‘sweet home of violence’ once again, disinterested listeners depart until a lone girl remains. Ko promptly gives up his rhetoric and attempts to have sex with his reluctant fellow protestor. In a self-fulfilling cycle, the victim becomes the aggressor. ‘Go away old bags,’ he shouts at two elderly women who are witness to his actions; and, to explain his sexual harassment, he cries, ‘We’re of the same generation’. From the outset of the film, Ko represents the unharnessed impulses of youth and their isolation from society. His failed attempts at speech-making symbolise the failure of the student protests and the inability of Japanese society to understand the grievances of its younger generation. It’s a fairly standard portrait of disenchanted 60s youth.

It is when Ko meets a young deaf-dumb couple that his odyssey really begins and the film becomes increasingly opaque and bleak, as well as witty and beautiful. Composed of a non-actor (the film’s stills photographer) and a newcomer, the deaf-dumb pair is wholly mesmerising. The isolated bubble they create as they float through the film, impervious to Ko’s nattering and unflinching in the face of various obstacles and dangers, is a magnificent achievement. Momoi Kaori is especially captivating as the enigmatic beauty, whom Ko swiftly falls for, and the ensuing love triangle takes precedence as society gradually disappears from the film’s frames. The trio swim in the sea and run across the sands, hiding out in the disused army bases, making a home in the barren wasteland. Ko learns to bury his chatter and use non-verbal forms of communication, learning from the sensual connection of the two lovers. When society begins to re-appear in the latter part of the film, it does so in increasingly bizarre and sinister ways: a group of men are invited by a rejected Ko to watch the deaf-dumb couple having sex; Kaori is kidnapped by the same shady group who arrested Ko in the food market; and the army marches over the dunes to test deadly weapons. The trio lie naked in the sand together before explosions wake them from their reverie and blind the young couple, blood pouring from their eyes. The final shot of Ko helping his deaf, dumb and blind friends along the sand is an inspired ending. A car speeds straight at the group but swerves at the very last minute, leaving the three heroes to continue their journey into the unknown horizon while it crashes and burns in the background. The protective shield of the couple’s missing senses has saved their lives.

Made a decade after ATG’s inception and several years after the student uprising, Lost Lovers reveals an anxiety about the state of Japanese society and also an attempt to build something out of defeat. Towards the end of the film, Ko talks about being ‘free from all languages’ and not denying his physical existence. He says he wants ‘to use confused thought and make a leap into the future’. Yelling out these sentences to the sea, he eventually sees how his words are lost, tossed out to the waves. His angry, ineffectual speech-making gives way to a new kind of protest: a determined refusal to carry on and find different ways to exist in a hostile world. ATG offered outcast Japanese filmmakers a retreat from the mainstream and, in doing so, provided an environment to develop innovative modes of expression. The film is an allegory not only of the political situation but also of the artistic process. When audiences fail to listen, the speaker must find fresh ways of making him or herself heard or new paths to follow.

Eleanor McKeown

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The Taqwacores

The Taqwacores

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 August 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Network Releasing

Director: Eyad Zahra

Writers: Michael Muhammad Knight, Eyad Zahra

Based on the novel by: Michael Muhammad Knight

Cast: Bobby Naderi, Dominic Rains, Noureen DeWulf

USA 2010

83 mins

A bracing stroll through an emergent American Muslim punk sub-culture, The Taqwacores follows newcomer and straight A student Yusef as he moves into a shared house in Buffalo, New York, to get his head thoroughly rattled by its inhabitants. There’s a dope smoker, a feminist riot grrl, a flamboyant gay dude, various drinkers and promiscuous party people, all of whom claim to be devout in their own way. Thus we have skateboard sequences jostling with moments of unconventional worship (‘You gotta come to Friday prayers!’ ‘Totally, I’m there!’). We have a call to prayer played on an electric guitar and we have bands called Osama’s Tunnel Diggers and The Guantanamo Bay Packers. Tensions build within the house as the contradictory belief systems clash, and it all comes to a head at an ill-starred all-star punk blow-out.

The film The Taqwacores brings most readily to mind was Penelope Spheeris’s cult gem Suburbia, which detailed the LA squatter punk scene of the early 80s. Like Suburbia, it’s a bit gauche and earnest and embarrassing in places, with lots of on-the-nose dialogue as the ‘cores thrash out their conflicting ideologies. Like in Suburbia, the story has a tragic arc we can sense in the offing, and we have to endure a central character who’s mainly there to ask dumb questions and get opinions thrust at him. Unlike Suburbia though, The Taqwacores has pretty good performances, especially Noureen DeWulf as Rabeya, who manages to convey a forceful personality through a customised full burqa, and Dominic Rains as the mohawked poster boy Jehangir (‘I’m too wrapped up in my mismatching of disenfranchised subcultures!’). It has energy and humour and a nice bleached out look. And it throws a startling image or off-the-wall piece of dialogue at you every few minutes of its lean 83-minute running time.

Apparently the Taqwacore scene didn’t exist until Michael Muhammad Knight’s novel, on which the film is based, inspired a number of bands to spring into being. If so, more power to their various elbows, at least if they’re anything like the mess portrayed here, a welcome vision of Islam as something not set in stone by humourless pricks, but something fluid and playful.

Mark Stafford

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Funeral Parade of Roses

Funeral Parade of Roses

Format: Cinema

Screening dates: 14 + 18 August 2011

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Toshio Matsumoto

Writer: Toshio Matsumoto

Original title: Bara no sôretsu

Cast: Pîtâ, Osamu Ogasawara, Toyosaburo Uchiyama

Japan 1969

107 mins

High-concept is an Orwellian phrase when it comes to cinema, usually meaning one concept, as in one idea, which can be pitched, tag-lined and sold. And most high-concept films have a job getting that one idea off the ground. So we should celebrate this month’s screening of Funeral Parade of Roses, a film crammed with ideas, from soup to nuts. Released in 1969 and shot in black and white, the film has the temperament and daring of an underground art film, but without any of the drawbacks. The acting is uniformly excellent, from the young transsexual Eddie, played in his debut role by Pîtâ, with more than a passing resemblance to Edie Sedgwick, to a series of well-established Japanese stars (one of the samurai from The Seven Samurai no less) and TV personalities, who both play roles and appear in the film as themselves.

The story takes on the arc of an Oedipal tragedy, which sees the young Eddie quietly but tenaciously rising through the gay scene to become a madam of his own gay bar, only to subsequently suffer a horrifying downfall. There are flashbacks of a childhood trauma, but also a film within a film as a documentary is being made about the gay scene, with lots of interviews about what it means to be a queen. The tone shifts radically from breathless gay erotica to Chaplinesque knockabout comedy, Godardian reflexivity to Hitchcockian suspense. Marnie (1964) seems to have been particularly in mind, but also Psycho (1960). The speeded-up sections and the use of flash imagery and ironic music are testament to the film’s impact on Kubrick, who cited it as a direct influence on A Clockwork Orange (1971). The rush of the film makes it slippery and difficult to pin down. The attitude to homosexuality is likewise playful and evasive. On one hand, it offers a sympathetic platform for the film’s interviewees and an affectionate, if not glamorous, portrait of a scene, while on the other, it follows a tragic trajectory that sees homosexuality born of violence and trauma - the ‘death to the vagina’ murder of the mother is particularly disturbing - and heads towards an inevitably tragic dénouement. But even this cannot be safely summed up. After a particularly gruesome murder, there is a frame-breaking interview with the actor, who says he likes being in the film as ‘Gay life is portrayed beautifully’. Defying expectations at every turn, Matsumoto constantly wrong-foots his audience, starting with the opening sex scene, shot beautifully in a gleaming white image. Melodrama is undercut with irony, the detachment of the documentarian is relieved by the madcap ‘happenings’, with the camera crew apparently flinging themselves into the action with abandon. Even the tragic conclusion is not immune. Ultimately, this is a film to watch and watch again. Genuinely high-concept.

Funeral Parade of Roses is available on DVD from Eureka Entertainment.

John Bleasdale

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Galaxy

Galaxy

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 26 July 2011

Venue: Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, London

Director: Masao Adachi

Writer: Masao Adachi

Original title: Gingakei

Japan 1967

75 mins

Part of Theatre Scorpio: Japanese Independent and Experimental Cinema of the 1960s

12-31 July 2011

Close-Up Film Club

Close-Up website

The recent international reappraisal of pink cinema, in many ways due to curators Roland Domenig and Go Hirasawa’s programming initiatives and Jasper Sharp’s publication Behind the Pink Curtain, has resuscitated many important filmmakers in danger of being buried under the carpet of Japanese film history. With its emphasis on carnal lust and the darkest libidinal desires, pink cinema is not exactly what Japan would want to offer as an official image of the nation, and yet, as Sharp argues in his book, its presence is undeniable and it is no longer possible to neglect its significance. Masao Adachi is just one of the names cast under this limelight in recent years and, now with retrospectives at the Cinémathèque franí§aise and Shibuya Vuera under his belt, he has secured his place as a key figure of his generation. As a director of unique pink films under the auspices of Wakamatsu Productions and the scriptwriter for many of the best titles directed by Kôji Wakamatsu, Adachi’s contribution to the evolution of pink cinema into more than just sex films cannot be ignored.

Although his name is shaded in pink, more colours are needed to paint Adachi’s portrait. At university, he was closely involved in the making of Bowl (Wan, 1961) and Closed Vagina (Sain, 1963) as a member of the legendary Nihon University Film Studies Club, which produced many pioneering experimental films in the late 50s and early 60s. Together with Motoharu Jônouchi, he was an instrumental figure within the VAN Film Research Centre, a filmmakers’ lab and artists’ commune where films like Document 6.15 (1961) were produced as a continuation of the protest movements that defined the decade. Adachi also worked closely with the leader of the Japanese New Wave, Nagisa Ôshima, as a scriptwriter for Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969) and actor for his seminal Death by Hanging (1968), even directing a lengthy trailer for the film, which became a trademark for titles produced by ATG. His film A.K.A Serial Killer (1969), made in collaboration with Ôshima’s scriptwriter Mamoru Sasaki and film critic Masao Matsuda, developed a theory of landscape (fûkeiron) in its portrait of a teenage murderer through shots of landscapes he may have seen during his upbringing and subsequent rampage. Adachi was invited with Wakamatsu and Ôshima to the Cannes Film Festival in 1971 and, with Wakamatsu, he visited Palestine on the way back to shoot PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), a newsreel film produced by the Japanese Red Army. In 1974, Adachi abandoned filmmaking to join the Palestinian struggle and disappeared until, over 20 years later, he was arrested in Lebanon in 1997 and extradited to Japan in 2002.

Galaxy (Gingakei), in many ways, embodies a transitional point in Adachi’s direction as a filmmaker. Many of his fellow society members offered production support, and in a sense the film could be construed as a continuation of the activities of the Nihon University Film Studies Club. Although at this point Adachi was already involved with Wakamatsu, the film was produced as the inaugural title for the Theatre Scorpio, where people began to take pink cinema seriously. Yet, Galaxy is quite unlike anything else Adachi has been involved in before or since, a substantial piece of art cinema that reveals the singularity of the filmmaker’s vision.

The narrative is nearly impenetrable; the meshed storyline is entirely subsumed in the nameless protagonist’s subconscious as he attempts to navigate his inner psyche, which has become a mercurial realm where space and time constantly redefine themselves. In his perplexed state, he encounters a doppelgänger, his father dressed in Buddhist attire and his girlfriend, whose size varies from normal to monstrous, and they all have a go at explaining where and what he is, only to cast darker shadows of mystery on the enigma. Deeply influenced by surrealism, each of the film’s gestures pulls us further into a dreamscape where reality and imagination are inseparable and logics of continuity, sense and oscillation in emotion are constantly refracted in different directions. The cyclical structure of the film gives an illusion of coherence yet, within the sphere, clarity spirals out of control while somehow managing to sustain its own dream logic. However, it is clear from our protagonist’s reference to an unspoken event of ’20 years ago’ that he is confronting what he has become in the post-war years.

What is most remarkable about Galaxy is its continuous ability to discover a film language of its own and its command of the abstract universe it has envisioned. Visual tricks unremittingly throw the main character in and out of spaces, always using captivating stylistic methods delivered with playful confidence. Characters emerge out of splatters of paint or from beneath a river, only to altogether disappear, and figures are frozen in position while their surroundings abruptly transform. A sequence on an enormous set of stairs plunges the protagonist into a real sense of bewilderment and conveys a depleted sense of self due to the mischievous tricks the monk, allegedly his father, plays on him. The soundscape, orchestrated by Yasunao Tone, who performed for Japan’s first improvised music collective, Group Ongaku, and who later joined Fluxus, interweaves different aural flickers to further layer the muddled haze. The dialogue, its content unfathomably cryptic, is often delivered in whispers, overlapped with other voices and distorted to accompany the racket of sound arrangements. Yet, amid this cacophony of noise and images, there is a certain clarity and a defiant urge for innovation that sustains the film and makes Galaxy a standout title in the overcrowded line-up of dreamscapes in the history of cinema.

Julian Ross

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This Transient Life

This Transient Life

Format: Cinema

Screening dates: 3 + 13 August 2011

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Akio Jissoji

Writer: Toshiro Ishido

Original title: Mujo

Cast: Kotobuki Hanamoto, Akiji Kobayashi, Eiji Okada

Japan 1970

143 mins

This Transient Life reminds us that monikers like ‘new wave’ are misleading in the way they suggest a cohesion of like-minded artists. Tokyo’s Art Theatre Guild, during its two and a half decades as a production outfit, was home to a very diverse range of filmmakers, of whom Akio Jissoji was hardly the most typical. This Transient Life was the feature film debut of this veteran of television superhero series Ultra Seven, Ultraman and Operation: Mystery! (Kaiki daisakusen). The previous year, he had shot the Nagisa Ôshima-scripted short When Twilight Draws Near (Yoiyami semareba), which ATG distributed as a pairing with Ôshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Tokyo senso sengo hiwa).

Much more than the capable taskmaster his modest roots would suggest, Jissoji had gained fame for the singular approach he brought to his serials. Buddhist symbolism abounds in his small-screen work and he had a knack for juxtaposing the fantastical with the mundane, giving birth to what admirer Shinya Tsukamoto calls ‘yojohan SF’, roughly translated as ‘science fiction on the tatami mat’ - a paradox whose fascinating, surreal effects Tsukamoto himself applied through the everyday suburban setting of his own epoch-making debut Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989).

In This Transient Life, the juxtaposition is of an eternal nature: sex and spirit. Its protagonists are a brother and sister from a rich Kansai family who resist the roles given to them by tradition: she refuses the many marriage proposals that come her way while her brother has no interest in enrolling in a university. Their close spiritual bond gives way, through a playful game with No masks, to incestuous coupling. When the sister finds herself pregnant, the siblings concoct a plan whereby she will accept the wedding proposal of a naí¯ve suitor and pretend the child is his. The brother departs for Kyoto to become an apprentice to a sculptor of Buddhist statues and begins an affair with his mentor’s wife - with the impotent older man’s blessing. But the incestuous lovers will not be kept apart for long.

Jissoji’s film was the first ATG production to gain success outside of the company’s established circuit, going on to win the Grand Prix at Locarno in the year of its release. It was not, however, the only ATG-produced film from the period that tackled incest, a doubly controversial subject matter in Japan for its prevalence in the history of the imperial family (even the two mythical ur-deities from which the family supposedly stems were brother and sister). Examples abound in the ATG catalogue, one of the most notable being Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no soretsu, 1968), with its homosexual retelling of the Oedipus myth. Masahiro Shinoda even tackled the issue of imperial incest head on with his rendition of the story of prehistoric empress Himiko (1974).

Equally memorable are Jissoji’s stylish visuals. The hyperactive camera makes this a movie that truly moves, something the director intended as an evocation of the titular concept of transience, or the Buddhist belief that everything in this world is fleeting.

Tom Mes

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Pitfall

Pitfall

Format: Cinema

Screening dates: 2 + 10 August 2011

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara

Writer: Kôbô Abe

Original title: Otoshiana

Cast: Hisashi Igawa, Kazuo Miyahara, Kunie Tanaka, Sumie Sasaki

Japan 1962

97 mins

Pitfall was the first feature film to be directed by the multi-disciplinary artist Hiroshi Teshigahara. It was his initial collaboration with the celebrated novelist and playwright Kôbô Abe, a creative partnership that would lead to Woman of the Dunes (1964), The Face of Another (1966) and Man without a Map (1968). Pitfall was also the first Japanese film to be released by the Art Theatre Guild, a company that had been founded in 1961 as a distribution operation with its own cinema chain in order to bring such classics as Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Citizen Kane (1941) to the emergent art-house audience. By the late 1960s, the Art Theatre Guild had ventured into production financing on the basis that budgets would be low but directors would be allowed complete freedom of expression, with Shôhei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes (1967) and Nagisa Ôshima’s Death by Hanging (1968) being early beneficiaries of this scheme. The template for these later successes - an experimental filmmaker engaging with pressing issues through an abstract approach to existing narrative form - would be suggested by Pitfall, which finds Teshigahara making points about the inherently corrupt nature of Japanese society through Abe’s allegorical ghost story. The director had already made the fascinating shorts Ikebana (1956), a study of the art of flower arrangement, and Tokyo 1958 (1958), a snapshot of the Japanese capital during a particularly industrious period, but Pitfall would establish him on the world stage when it was given an award by the NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and released internationally.

The film begins with an act of desperation and ends with the realisation of expendability: a miner, his young son and another worker make their escape from the mining camp where they have been not so much employed as contractually imprisoned. Attempting to make a living as a migrant hired labourer, the miner resorts to posing as a coal prospector in order to secure food and lodging for the night, a scam that is observed from a distance by an inscrutable man in a white suit, who takes a photograph of the miner. Moving on before it becomes apparent that he is a penniless worker rather than a prospector, the miner is able to settle with his son into some semblance of routine at their next location, where employment is offered. Yet, events take an eerie turn when the miner is informed by his supervisor that his professional services are wanted by a larger operation, with a photograph of the worker being provided to confirm the request. Upon relocation, the miner and his son end up in a ‘ghost town’ inhabited only by a candy store owner who informs them that the nearby mine has been closed due to potential collapse. The reappearance of the man in the white suit leads to the miner’s demise, taking Pitfall in a new direction as the soul of the deceased rises to ask questions about the meaning of his life and the reason for his death.

As with the Teshigahara and Abe collaborations that followed, Pitfall reflects their concerns about Japanese society in the 1960s - in this case, the lack of corporate concern for the living and working conditions of uneducated labourers - but it is arguably the unsettling spectral atmospherics that have ensured its cult status. Teshigahra achieves a sense of realism by shooting in the region of Kyûshû, where a number of mining disasters had occurred and communities were suffering from starvation as the area had been brought to an economic standstill due to mine closures. However, the director ultimately seeks to expose unscrupulous trade union activities through existential enquiry, causing Pitfall to be variously categorised as a horror film and as an example of the Japanese New Wave. Described by Teshigahara as a ‘documentary-fantasy’, the film is as sparse as it is surreal, with the barren landscape of deserted towns and desolate quarries serving as a purgatory where the condemned are left to contemplate the choices that keep them in a state of perpetual motion. This anxiety is emphasised by Tôru Takemitsu’s score, which eschews conventional arrangements in favour of unsettling sound effects that convey distress and isolation, while Teshigahara employs simple but effective superimposition in order to visualise the realm of the afterlife. Unlike some of the other directors featured in the Shinjuku Diaries season, Teshigahara’s work is widely available on DVD, but the inclusion of Pitfall offers an excellent opportunity to experience his uniquely haunting debut on the big screen.

Pitfall is available on DVD from Eureka Entertainment.

John Berra

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Stalker

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Stalker

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 22 August 2016

Distributor: Curzon Artificial Eye

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Writers: Arkadi Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Andrei Tarkovsky

Based on the novel by: Arkadi Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky

Cast: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Alisa Frejndlikh, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko

USSR 1979

163 mins

Stalker transcends the traditional trappings of the science fiction genre to create an elegiac vision of the remnants of the past, a tangible present and an imagined future.

Ingmar Bergman deemed him to be ‘the greatest of us all’, and to enter Andrei Tarkovsky’s world is to have your appreciation of cinema as an art form forever enriched. Perhaps the clearest crystallisation of Tarkovsky’s power and lasting influence as a filmmaker came in the shape of Stalker, his second foray into science fiction after the adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris in 1972. Produced by Mosfilm Studios and loosely adapted by Tarkovsky and the Strugatsky brothers, Arkadi and Boris, from their own equally critically acclaimed novel Roadside Picnic, Stalker is a visually extraordinary exploration of man’s search for fulfilment, knowledge and emotional nourishment. Largely shot around two abandoned hydro-electric plants and an old Flora chemical factory in the post-industrial wastelands of Tallinn, Estonia, during the Brezhnev era, Stalker depicts a ravaged future in which the citizens are desperate for a release from the constraints of an oppressive, beaten down society. It draws from the social nightmare of the former Soviet Union at the time and, retrospectively, is a prescient precursor to the visual and mental horrors of the Chernobyl disaster. The film’s narrative (part allegorical, existential road movie and part socio-philosophical tract) transcends the traditional trappings of the science fiction genre to create an elegiac vision of the remnants of the past, a tangible present and an imagined future.

The titular Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) is a professional, but highly illegal, guide to ‘the Zone’, a forbidden region surrounding a decaying, unnamed city, where time, space and reality constantly shift, where the slightest deviation from the path can be fatal and where at its heart a mysterious room is supposedly able to make one’s deepest desires come true. Thought to be the by-product of a visiting alien civilisation, the Zone is consequently rendered off limits by the fearful government, and the knowledge of its apparent powers suppressed from the masses. The Stalker’s latest clients - the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn), a fractious, despondent dreamer, and the more logical, sceptical Professor (Nikolai Grinko) - have different but equally obsessive reasons for risking their lives in the pursuit of enlightenment and an imagined subsequent peace of mind. The physical journey through the Zone mirrors the inner psychological trip made by the Writer and the Professor as they wrestle with personal torments, existential angst, each other’s worldviews and, eventually, the hidden motivations that threaten not just themselves, but society as a whole. In Tarkovsky’s hands, the linear, simple plot of Stalker is the framework around which the formation of indelible, haunting imagery and soundscapes, the excoriation of the human condition and provocative cultural, social and political dialogue are wrapped.

The dreamlike atmosphere and otherworldly quality that pervade the film are realised through the complete integration of camerawork, sound, colour, image and dialogue. The bleak, repressive world outside of the Zone is filmed in a sepia tint that, even in depicting a future time, makes the images reminiscent of engravings, Victorian-era photographs or woodcuts, thus conjuring up the idea of a society rooted to the past. In contrast, the Zone is shot in colour, introduced in a seamless but striking shot, symbolising the three travellers’ emergence into an unfamiliar, potentially liberating and diametrically opposed space to that from which they have ventured. Tarkovsky muddies the waters between the two distinct environments, in keeping with the overall ambiguity of the narrative, by alternating the sepia tint and colour sequences during a dream sequence inside the Zone and latterly as the Stalker is reunited with his wife and daughter during the film’s fourth wall-shattering climax.

Tarkovsky’s long, at times glacial, takes and subtle camera movements are an essential element to Stalker, as is Eduard Artemyev’s score. Artemyev, responsible for scoring Solaris and Mirror, responded to the director’s appeal for sounds that represented ‘space frozen in a dynamic equilibrium’ with a trance-like, synthesised, partly distorted score encompassing both Western and Oriental rhythms and instrumentation, and natural sounds taken from the film itself. By mixing the score in with the sounds emanating from the screen (rushing water, heavy winds, machinery and vehicles) and also through the intermittent disconnecting and overlapping of those sounds from and with their source imagery, Tarkovsky instils the sense of everything, both on-screen and off, being intrinsically linked, of bleeding into each other but also, specifically in relation to the scenes in the Zone, of being constantly in flux.

The blasted, atrophied landscape of the city and the Zone, with its industrial edifices, abandoned tanks consumed by vegetation, strewn detritus and chemically poisoned river, is fully exploited by Tarkovsky and provides a startling and unsettling environment for the characters to inhabit. That these images, shot in the late 1970s, and the terms ‘Stalker’ and ‘the Zone’ would themselves come to be associated with Chernobyl in the 1980s speaks for the film’s lasting influence on contemporary culture. Suffused with quasi- and outright religious imagery, an ambiguity allowing for multiple interpretations and exuding a uniquely realised visual aesthetic, Stalker is a towering achievement both for its greatly missed director and for the medium as a whole. Essential viewing.

This review was first published for the release of Stalker as part of Artificial Eye’s Andrei Tarkovsky Collection box set in June 2011.

Neil Mitchell

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Poetry

Poetry

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 July 2011

Venues: key cities

Distributor: ICO/Arrow

Director: Lee Chang-dong

Writer: Lee Chang-dong

Original title: Shi

Cast: Yun Jung-hee, Ahn Nae-sang, Kim Hira

South Korea 2010

139 mins

When Mija, played with ornate naturalism by veteran actress Yun Jung-hee in her first role in 15 years, is informed that her grandson was involved in a gang rape that led to the suicide of a high-school girl her expression shows little visible change. She proceeds with her daily routine, attending to her daycare service for an elderly disabled man, and continuing to feed the teenage boy as part of her maternal obligations. Hints of forgetfulness lead to her discovery that she has developed Alzheimer’s, yet not even this realisation jolts her into dismay as she carries on with her life as if little had changed. Nevertheless, underneath her skin panic is freezing her blood and her heart is sinking in dread; rather than descending into sentiment, director Lee Chang-dong chooses to depict trauma by slowly filtering the emotions in a process that denies grandiose gestures.

Read our interview with Lee Chang-dong.

In an attempt to keep hold of her memories perhaps, Mija begins to attend local poetry lessons and readings where she is advised to observe the small details of everyday life for artistic inspiration. No matter how hard she tries, however, she seems to be incapable of finding words for her feelings and struggles to put her thoughts into verse. Instead, Lee’s camera takes on the task, its eye surveying the minute subtleties of Mija’s personality. The plot progresses at a leisurely pace, often pushed into the background in favour of mood as if the film shared its protagonist’s absent-mindedness; as in many good poems, the storyline is hidden behind the language and the feelings it elicits.

Together with Mija, the film searches for the beauty of life to translate into poetry, yet struggles to direct its lens away from the indecent behaviour that surrounds and continually interrupts its quest. The parents of the teenage rapists and the school are far more concerned about the future of their children and their soiled reputation, acting on the assumption that money will solve such matters. Mija’s grandson and friends show no remorse about the heinous act they committed, seemingly unaware of the implications, and they don’t suffer any consequences. In such an abhorrent world, it is difficult for Mija to discover pure moments of creativity in which to scribble onto her white pad, which remains painfully empty throughout the film. Only spots of rain pen the bare pages in beautiful patterns that convey the melancholy that pervades the film.

Nonetheless, Mija is not as innocent or clueless as her distrait conduct might at first suggest. Like a poem, Yun Jung-hee’s performance allows us to read Mija’s gestures from varying angles, encouraging a multitude of interpretations in a role Lee wrote specifically for her. Her sexual favour for her disabled client seem a selfless act of compassion at first, yet the tone subtly changes when it is suggested that this is to be used as blackmail to cover the cost of silencing the dead girl’s family. Most of Mija’s actions seem to have little logical motivation and remain unexplained, and we are left to figure out to what extent her behaviour is impulsive and whether her dreamy demeanour is simply a strategy to veil her inner turmoil. Her visits to spaces the young girl once occupied, places where she was raped and where she decided to die, suggest the death has had a substantial effect and haunts Mija. It is a memory she is unable to erase from her steadily deteriorating mind. In effect, Mija’s failures as a poet are more than compensated for by Lee’s camera and its ability to capture the complexities of its subject. Her quiet gestures, gentle gaze and tender pose transform themselves into stanzas as they rhyme with Lee’s cinema.

Julian Ross

Check it out, Cinema releases

Bobby Fischer against the World

Bobby Fischer against the World

Format: Cinema

Release date: 15 July 2011

Venues: UK wide

Distributor: Dogwoof

Director: Liz Garbus

USA/UK/Iceland 2011

90 mins

Liz Garbus’s absorbing documentary tells the strange and tragic story of Bobby Fischer, a self-taught chess prodigy from Brooklyn who won the Cold War for the USA in 1972 by beating the USSR’s Boris Spassky in the World Championship at the grand age of 28. Fischer became massively famous, but if America wanted an uncomplicated poster-boy for the game of kings they had backed the wrong horse. He had achieved greatness through a monomania about the game, to the exclusion of everything else, and once he had reached the apex of his world he had nowhere else to go, apart from seriously off the rails. In a masterclass of self-sabotage he forfeited his title through obsessive demands about gaming conditions, and set about alienating pretty much anybody who might have helped him find another life.

Garbus’s film goes some way towards exploring the mystery of why a Jewish boy genius could end up falling for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion hook, line and sinker and spend the second half of his life spouting anti-Semitic bilge, ranting about Mossad, nuclear Armageddon, the russkies, the CIA, and popping up on Tokyo TV to crow as the twin towers fell. His chaotic and unsupportive family background is explored, along with the theory that greatness at chess pretty much goes hand in hand with a helping of crazy: ‘a good chess player is paranoid,’ states one expert, and plenty of examples are found among previous grand masters to back this up.

The film is a briskly paced montage of well-chosen footage, Life photographer Harry Benson’s remarkable stills, some welcome explanatory graphic animations and an impressive roll call of talking heads including Henry Kissinger, Malcolm Gladwell and Gary Kasparov. It charts Fischer’s meteoric rise, concentrates on the 1972 Championship games to establish his genius, and then follows his decline through increasingly long lenses as he became a fugitive, first from the media, and then from the United States after he broke a UN embargo to play a rematch with Spassky in Yugoslavia during the civil war.

Garbus tells the tale well, and does a good job making the matches exciting even for those, like me, who don’t play the game. But Fischer still remains a bit of an elusive figure, largely, I suspect, because nobody actually knew him very well. He was a loner in hiding for much of his life, a man who disowned anybody who criticised him and antagonised those who tried to remain on friendly terms. Maybe, apart from those great games, there just isn’t much to know. We are left with footage of a man, socially maladroit and forever ill at ease in front of a camera, cheekily self-assured when talking about his ability and status, lost, tense and nervous when discussing anything else.

Mark Stafford

Check it out, Cinema releases

Cell 211

Cell 211

Format: Cinema

Release date: 15 July 2011

Venues: key cities

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Daniel Monzón

Writers: Jorge Guerricaechevarría, Daniel Monzón

Based on the novel by : Francisco Pérez Gandul

Original title: Celda 211

Cast: Luis Tosar, Alberto Ammann, Antonio Resines

Spain 2009

113 mins

On the day before starting a job as a prison guard, Juan Olivier (Alberto Ammann), decides to take a tour of his new place of work. This turns out to be a very bad move, putting him in the high-security block at the same time that lifer Malamadre (Luis Tosar) has chosen to start a riot. In a desperate, split-second decision, Juan decides to pretend to be a new prisoner. The block erupts, hostages are taken, the media crews and SWAT teams close in and the tension rises. Juan’s future and his chances of getting back to his pregnant wife (Marta Etura) seem ever more doubtful in the midst of murderous cons, trigger-happy screws, corrupt cops and the duplicitous, weaselling authorities. Who can he trust, and what will he do to survive?

Daniel Monzón’s Cell 211 is a terrific, angry piece of genre filmmaking. It has the pace, the twists and turns and the forward momentum of a Hollywood production, but is a tougher, sweatier proposition; it doesn’t pussy out in the last reel, and has a political edge rare in mainstream entertainment. This is a complicated world of shifting alliances, black humour and sudden brutality where the police and government can get you killed just as fast as a psycho with a shiv, given authenticity by using real ex-cons in a genuine prison location. To be sure, some of the plot swings, the speed of the developing relationship between Olivier and Malamadre for instance, seem unreal in the cold light of day. I don’t believe that these events would happen like this in the real world, but for 113 tense, charged minutes I was wholly swept up in them.

Mark Stafford