Format: Cinema

Release date: 13 July 2007

Distributor: Tartan

Director: Gyí¶rgy Pí¡lfi

Cast: Csaba Czene, Gergely Trí­Â³csí¡nyi, Piroska Molní¡r, Adél Stanczel

Hungary 2006

91 minutes

Hukkle is available on DVD

Release date: 22 August 2005

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Gyí¶rgy Pí¡lfi

Cast: Ferenc Bandi, Jozsefne Racz, Jozsef Forkas

Hungary 2002

75 minutes

Gyí¶rgy Pí¡lfi came to the attention of British movie-goers a few years ago with the charming-with-barbs Hukkle (2002). In this famously dialogue-free film, what appears at first glance to be a casual saunter round a Hungarian village turns by stealth into a murder mystery. You do probably have to watch a couple of times to get every detail, but it is all there if you follow the clues carefully. There are other little dramas going on, however, in the rhythm of filming, and the idea of a world implied in it. The Hukkle aesthetic appears to be that of a nature documentary or meditation on the gentle rhythms of timeless peasant life. Along the way, the camera lingers in loving close-up over various insects, follows fish underwater, and a mole underground. When it shifts its attention from animal to human, there is no obvious change of rhythm or focus. The same gaze applies to the weather-beaten face of a cheery old fellow with hiccups (‘hukkle’), screwing up his eyes into the light as he sits outside his ramshackle cottage, or a shepherd girl resting under a tree. The stress seems to be on organic connection and continuity. The camera tracks the effects on the surrounding fabric of things made by the tiny vibration of each hiccup, and a ladybird provides an inconsequential segue from the shepherd girl to a lonely water-carrier.

But this makes Hukkle sound too much like Mikrocosmos (1997) or, god help me, March of the Penguins (La Marche de l’empereur, 2005). The smooth surface of Hukkle is punctuated by lots of tiny hiccups, little blips in rhythm and expectation. The hiccupping old fellow and his ramshackle house could be from any time in the last 500 years until a couple of cars go by, then have to go into reverse to let a truck past. The shepherd girl is similarly ‘timeless’ and quaint until you notice the earphones, and the camera shifts to close-up on her mini-disc player as she turns up the volume. Rather more blatantly, a jet fighter plane thunders along a river and under a bridge, briefly suspended in stop motion over the broiling water sucked into its jet stream. Here, the pastoral is broken not just by the intrusion of a high-tech artefact, but by the pointed introduction of cinematic artifice. Likewise, a mysterious birds-eye view at another point suddenly zooms to become a frame on a film roll, one of many hanging down to form, bizarrely, the bead-curtained entrance to a shop. Some of these moments risk being a little too tricksy for their own good, as does, say, the video rewind sequence of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997). But they do work as parts of a serious attempt to intertwine folk idioms with the Modern, in such a way that one is not simply enslaved by the other. One could say this is a very Hungarian tradition from the folkloric researches of Bartí­Â³k and Kodí¡ly onwards.

One goal of Hukkle seems to be to do justice to a world where very different time-scales co-exist, and folk song has a small but important role. Towards the end, the dogged local policeman (cf. Frances McDormand in Fargo, 1996), whose mullet and ‘tache defy any periodisation, seems to have solved the mystery, but shows no sign of doing anything about it (yet). He sits at the edge of a wedding celebration where the bride is already up to something, listening to a female choir singing a traditional number. Then the choir parts and a peasant girl steps forward to sing a Sí¡rkí¶zi (I’m not making this up) song whose middle verse, ‘Ki az urí¡t nem szereti’, advises a young wife who does not love her husband to cook carrots with paprika. This isn’t exactly the key to the whole film, but it brings a great number of little details into focus.

This brings us to Taxidermia, which is also an ambitious film, with an interest in consumption, and in the odd dislocations of Hungarian history. Taken together, the two films certainly suggest a young director who is onto something, but for me Taxidermia has something of the difficult second album about it. In places it seems to be straining a little too hard for effect, yet in others it is strangely thin. In fact, this amounts to a structural problem with the film as a whole. There is an intriguing opening section featuring the hapless hare-lipped private soldier Morosgoví¡nyi, victimised in Wozzeck-style by the commanding officer of an obscure outpost, presumably at the end of WWII. This section is mainly interested in the baroque ways in which Morosgoví¡nyi deals with his sexual frustrations. I have to say it had never occurred to me I might ever see a man with flames leaping out of his erect penis, and this in itself is surely already reason enough to see Taxidermia. Another, by comparison more normal, orgy involves a pig’s carcass fantasised into the commanding officer’s wife. From this ambiguous union is born, or so it seems, a pig-tailed baby who will grow into Kí¡lmí¡n, the gluttonous protagonist of the film’s second section. Kí¡lmí¡n is a Hungarian speed-eating champion, and vies with his number two for the affections of the ladies’ champion. This section is, for me, the weak link: the satire is at once vague and heavy-handed, with too many ‘look, they’re really fat’ jokes, and it just goes on too long.

In the final section, the inexplicably scrawny offspring of the champion guzzlers is a taxidermist in contemporary, post-communist Hungary. He is a slave to his father, who has the girth of Jabba the Hut, the disposition of Pí­Â¨re Ubu, and is completely immobile. The final cuttings and stuffings, and the runt Lajoska’s ingenious machine, are well done as far as they go. But why does a film that invokes taxidermy in its title do so little to explore the idea after such an orgy of attention to the sub-M. Creosote antics of the Communist-era fatties? The juxtapositions of fat and thin, the different modes of ‘stuffing’, set against the division into starkly different historical epochs, seem to want to say something about difficulties in managing consumption, but only end up labouring the point in places to no great effect.

Overall, structurally, this is a Big Mac of a film: a bloated glutinous middle dwarves the two ends of an undercooked bun. I could go on, but I don’t want to give too much away. The film is certainly well worth seeing for the good bits. Pí¡lfi has lots of flair, but I hope he works out what is really important to him next time. Taxidermia has been lavishly praised elsewhere, but art-house directors with an eye to cinematic trickery are especially ill-served by an over-grateful, uncritical response that potentially allows them to slip into mannerism.

Stephen Thomson

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 July 2007

Distributor Soda Pictures

Director: Bruno Dumont

Original title: Flandres

Cast: Samuel Boidin, Adelaí­Â¯de Leroux, Henri Cretel

France 2006

91 minutes

French film-maker Bruno Dumont has been hyped as a controversial, polarising director during a career that has seen two of his four films win the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. His latest, Flandres, walked away with the award at the 2006 festival to both applause and criticism.

The film is a bleak, minimalist vignette of the effects of de-humanization. Demester (played by Samuel Boidin) is a simple farmer in the barren, northern fields of Flanders. Called up to fight an unidentified, seemingly interminable war, he leaves behind the brutality of life on the frigid plains of Northern Europe for the barbarity of combat in the scorching desert, fighting an unknown Arab enemy. Also left behind is his childhood friend and casual play-thing, Barbe (Adelaí­Â¯de Leroux), who descends into a manic state, haunted by an intuitive knowledge of events in the war zone.

Dumont weaves Northern France and North Africa together, using the threads of sex and war to convey his dystopian vision of a ‘bestial humanity’ struggling with our baser instincts: desire, revenge, jealousy, brutality. Barbe’s life is devoid of any emotional warmth; she offers herself up to Demester, who screws her without compassion or sentiment, only a base, animal need. When he denies that they’re a couple, Barbe fucks the first man she can find – noisily and publicly, seeking revenge for Demester’s heartlessness. While Blondel (Henri Cretel), her latest lover, provides her with some warmth and compassion, he too has been called up to fight. With the men gone, Barbe continues to use her body for sex; receiving nothing in return, she becomes a broken, tragic little girl, eventually committed to an institution by her dispassionate father. The uncaring brutality with which she’s treated mirrors the savagery that Demester and Blondel find themselves mired in. When the group of soldiers take a female fighter captive, she is gang-raped and left to die, exposed and vulnerable. Her vicious treatment underscores Barbe’s own exploitation by the men in her life. Sex and war are dehumanizing tools of violence and desperation.

Yves Cape’s lingering cinematography, the hyper-realist sound recording and the muted, sombre acting cleave together to convey Dumont’s bleak vision. Every element of the film, from Demester’s brooding, craggy features and his detached, emotionless sex with Barbe, to the scorching desert where death is indiscriminate, paints a picture of a savage, primeval world. The squelching mud underneath Demester’s boots in Flanders evokes both the horrors of World War I and the filth and tedium of rural, peasant life; the sharp, staccatto gunfire in the desert, free from special effects, sounds hollow, empty, unglorified.

But Dumont’s emphasis on the brutal consequences of violence and sexual exploitation are hardly unexplored subjects, nor are they particularly controversial. The rustic farm-girl as ‘village whore’ is indeed little more than a tired cliché. Similarly, the scenes in the desert, which allude to both Iraq and the war in Algeria, hardly break new ground. Scores of movies have better conveyed the brutality and futility of war. The pacing is at times agonisingly slow, while the first half-hour of the film seems about as dull as the grey skies over Flanders. While not entirely unlikeable, there is certainly nothing shocking, groundbreaking or revolutionary in the film that seems to merit Bruno Dumont’s success at Cannes.

Sarah Cronin

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

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

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

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

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

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 June 2007

Distributor: The Works

Director: Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr

Cast: Jamie Gulpilil, Richard Birrinbirrin, Crusoe Kurddal, Peter Minygululu


Australia 2006

90 mins

Rolf de Heer’s charming Ten Canoes, set among the Yolngu community and billed as the first feature in the Aboriginal language, starts as it means to go on, humorously deflating myths and conventions. Over the magnificent opening views of Arnhem Land in Northern Australia the jovial narrator is heard saying ‘Once upon a time in a faraway land’, only to stop and add, laughing, ‘I’m only joking’.

Ten Canoes‘ rather wonderful adventure started with the thousands of black and white photographs that were taken by anthropologist Dr Donald Thomson in the mid-1930s. One of them, depicting a group of ten men in their traditional bark canoes on the swamp, caught the eye of director de Heer and Aboriginal performer David Gulpilil – the narrator and co-initiator of the project – striking them as a remarkable image that perfectly encapsulated the lost world of the Yolngu’s past.

Shot in black and white to mirror the Thomson photographs, the framing story follows a group of men on a goose egg hunting expedition a thousand years ago. Respected elder Minygululu is leading the expedition and, aware that his younger brother Dayindi lusts after the youngest of his three wives, proceeds to tell him a cautionary tale set in a distant, mythical past. Shot in colour, this ancient tale of jealousy, murder and sorcery alternates with the quasi-anthropological black and white footage of the Yolngu men making canoes from bark, collecting goose eggs or building platforms in the trees.

As the narrator tells us an anecdote about his ancestors, who themselves are telling an anecdote about their own ancestors, it soon becomes clear that Ten Canoes is about the eternal story of mankind – a repetitive tale of love, lust, jealousy, conflict, food, farts, shit and death. Although it presents itself as a morality tale, the film is anything but, the ending being a joyfully inconclusive illustration of the messiness of human life. In all this it humorously demystifies exotic people from faraway lands or from the distant past. There is no idealisation of the ‘good savage’ or of a paradisiacal past here – a dubious perspective last seen in Terence Malick’s unbelievably bad The Lost World.

This is no white man’s view of indigenous culture but a film that connects past and present, Western audiences and Aboriginal community in a fresh, dynamic way. Not only does Ten Canoes incorporate storytelling elements from both Western and indigenous traditions but the film was also an occasion for the Yolngu people to recreate some of the ancient crafts and skills that had fallen into disuse with the increasing influence of modern technology. By recreating their history, and the history of the encounter between the white anthropologist and their people, the Yolngu make the images he took of them their own, part of a renewed tradition engaged in a vivid dialogue with the modern, Western world.

Virginie Sélavy

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 June 2007

Distributor: BFI

Director: Jan í… vankmajer

Original title: Sí­Â­lení­Â­

Based on the works of: Edgar Allan Poe and Marquis de Sade

Cast Pavel LiÅ¡ka, Jan Trí­Â­ska, Anna Geisleroví¡, Martin Huba, Jaroslav DuÅ¡ek

Czech Republic/Slovakia 2005

118 minutes

With his latest feature-length release, Jan í… vankmajer promises an atmospheric gothic brew of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade set in a lunatic asylum, full of catalepsy, premature burial and kinky satanism. The true mystery of Lunacy, however, is how í… vankmajer can have come up with such a dull and undistinguished film. His most celebrated works such as Alice and Little Otik (Otesí¡nek) mix live action with animation to startling effect, but here the animation is peripheral and perfunctory. A motif of severed body parts threads its way through the action in tableaux separating live action sequences. The credits feature naí­Â¯ve cartoon tarot-ish playing cards depicting mutilation which also reappear later in an enigmatic board game. What, one wonders at first, is the significance of these merrily dancing tongues and eyes, and these eyeless and tongueless playing-card figures? In the end, however, once all has been explained (I won’t bore you with the details), their tantalizing, gratuitous quality seems a sham. The real problem is that the animation does not mesh with the overall art direction. It is tacked on, its exuberance forced, wholly subordinate to a rather tired thesis. Indeed, the film as a whole is just too significant, too allegorical.

From the very start, there is no room for anything to breathe or resonate. í… vankmajer himself appears on the screen to deliver a far from fresh speech on psychiatry and the modern world: we are caught between extremes of discipline and liberty, and end up living with the worst of both worlds. Doubtless new things remain to be done with this theme, but here it dates the film to its director’s youth, to a very sixties convergence of surrealism and anti-psychiatry. The story concerns a young man, Jean Berlot, who is prone to lucid dreams featuring two leering, burly, shaven-headed goons pursuing him with a straitjacket. Having trashed his hotel room in the throes of this dream, Berlot is rescued by the ‘Marquis’, whose anachronistic costume and tendency to gales of insane laughter go largely unremarked by those around him. At this point, there are promising signs: the Marquis’ coach and horses trundling preposterously along the motorway is nice. But once Berlot has been taken into the Marquis’ castle, and changed into ancien régime attire, the ambiguity of setting largely disappears. As Berlot spies on a sort of black mass/orgy we are firmly in the world of 70s art-trash gothic. As the Marquis hammers nails into a crucifix, his followers gorge themselves on chocolate cake before being fellated under the table by nubile wenches in monks’ cowls. The sexual politics are fairly 70s too: the girls have been selected for a quite particular quality of breast and not much else.

Having said this, Charlota requires slightly more involved discussion. She first appears right at the beginning as a wan face caught by Berlot at the window of a departing bus. Now in the gothic setting she seems to try to escape from the Marquis’ rather hum-drum orgy. In the next phase of the film she moves centre stage. The Marquis traces Berlot’s persecution dreams back to his mother’s death, incarcerated in Charenton. The cure he proposes involves a sort of reverse psychology: spend some time in a lunatic asylum. At the asylum, Charlota reappears as the alleged daughter of Dr Murlloppe and once more appeals to Berlot to help her escape. The lunatics, she claims, have mutinied and taken over the asylum. The true director, Dr Coulmií­Â¨re, is locked up in the cellar. What we see when Charlota takes Berlot downstairs are creatures whose identity is obscured by tar and feathers, but whose outline suggests hulking aggression rather than a role in the caring professions. One of the film’s most visually accomplished scenes comes with the release of these fleshy demons, hurtling out of the hatches and straight back into their functions as brutal riot-police of madness. Poor lunatics, celebrating a year of freedom with an extended pillow fight: in a blizzard of feathers they are truncheoned back into their boxes. For, who would have guessed it, the lunatics were the better custodians of chaos. Dr Coulmií­Â¨re and his goons now have a free hand to reinstitute their regime of brutality and mutilation. Now it only remains for Berlot’s nightmare to be made real. All Charlota’s fault!

Misogyny by numbers. Over the course of the film, Charlota has gone from defenceless waif to merciless whore following a depressingly familiar pattern. í… vankmajer doubtless wants us to see her as an ambiguous and troubling figure, but she isn’t. The moment where she does embody a genuine tension (as opposed to a tedious duality) is, tellingly, one that í… vankmajer has explored much more effectively in the past. Charlota’s trips to the cellar to feed the monstrous attendants cannot but recall Alzbetka in Little Otik. What leads a little girl to lure her neighbours into the maw of a ravenous log is never programmatically explained, but a mixture of compassion and a desire to see the cruelty of a folk-tale played out is implied. In Little Otik, í… vankmajer presents ‘normal’ desires remorselessly driving people into grotesque and deadly circumstances, and the whole thing is played out with grim humour. Burdened with a horribly protruding thesis, Lunacy just cannot generate the sort of tensions and ambiguities it say it wants to, and Charlota’s perfunctory innocent/whore shifts are the surest symptom of this.

Lunacy made me wish at various points I was watching a number of other films: some of the late eighteenth-century interiors brought Werner Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser fondly to mind, and the feather-storm in the asylum had me dreaming of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite. Apart from the echo of Little Otik, it made me think very little of í… vankmajer. Back to the drawing-board.

Stephen Thomson

Format: Cinema

Release date: 15-28 June 2007

Distributor: BFI

Director: John Cassavetes

Cast: Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara

USA 1977

144 minutes

Within one minute of screen time, John Cassavetes’ Opening Night introduces us to three discernible theatrical spaces: backstage (the space of where actors ‘prepare’ to embark on a role); onstage (the space of the drama); and the auditorium (the space of the audience). Having from the onset drawn the boundary lines between these spaces, defining each in turn by the behaviour of, in particular, our heroine the Broadway actress Myrtle Gordon – played by Gena Rowlands -, the film now spends the next two-and-a-half hours doing its best to eliminate those boundaries.

Like all of Cassavetes’ best work, Opening Night goes beyond being merely a self-reflexive investigation into the perils of cinema making. Made immediately after what may be Cassavetes’ best film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), the film tells the story of the week or so of out-of-town performances before the New York opening night of a play entitled ‘The Second Woman’ – in which Myrtle, who plays the title role of a woman cast aside in favour of a younger one, becomes unhinged after the death of a young female fan one night outside the theatre. Haunted by unbelievably real visions of the girl, Myrtle suddenly finds herself in the midst of a full-blown identity crisis. This initiates what Myrtle herself describes as an attempt to ‘find a way to play this role in which age doesn’t make any difference’, which, of course, counters the entire premise of the play she is in.

What makes this so typical of Cassavetes is the way in which this psychological crisis impacts directly on the film’s formal structure and subsequent events. As Myrtle’s sense of both time and space disintegrates so does that of the audience (as in us and the spectators of the drama being ‘staged’). In this respect, Cassavetes appears to aim for nothing less than to rethink what drama and play-acting actually are as well as the issue of female identity, sexuality and anxieties about aging in the process. Paradoxically, it is probably the latter, which – if anything – has (no pun intended) dated or aged the film and it is somewhat grating to modern viewers. It is an issue that quite literally looms over the proceedings in the oversized photograph of an elderly woman on the set of the play. It’s not merely that the spectre of old age haunts Myrtle in the form of a supernaturally beautiful younger version of herself (the dead fan), but that Myrtle drinks herself into oblivion continuously in order to survive this haunting. Granted, all the characters in Cassavetes’ oeuvre express concerns with time but here, Rowlands/Myrtle’s entire identity as a woman and an actress is completely consumed by the sense that things are slipping away. A rather depressing assessment of female creativity to say the least.

It is possible, of course, to consider this as a commentary on the death of theatre, or if you will, on the end of a palpable distinction between onstage and offstage, performer and audience. Thus, while it is Myrtle who keeps stumbling along the corridors of the backstage in a drunken stupor all the other characters, male and female, also appear liable to break down at any moment. There’s a wonderful scene where the director of the play goes through one of the sets on opening night, deliberately aiming to make it look more ‘messy’ as he agonizes over the complete chaos in which the play already finds itself.

By no means a perfect film, at two hours and twenty four minutes it’s at least half an hour too long, and for me personally, there was a bit too much emphasis on Myrtle’s drinking throughout as a perhaps rather trite, and dare I say, theatrical response to her schizophrenia. Nevertheless, in the grand finale when the play’s director Manny refuses to help her even stand or walk, and makes her crawl to the stage, we cannot help but be caught up in Myrtle/Rowlands’ bravura performance. By no means a standard Hollywood miraculous dramatic ending, Myrtle recovers moment by moment, within the work and the work within the work. Allegedly, Cassavetes even staged the faux play within the film in front of a real live audience, to gauge their natural reaction. Like us, the audience of the play is allowed to voice dissenting opinions on whether Myrtle/Rowlands really pulls it off. Despite her coming through in the end, there’s no reason to expect that she has really resolved anything, and the trick of the film, in a sense, is to make us be fine with this. Ultimately, it is not a film about recuperations or success, but about the agony of making choices. As Cassavetes put it himself: ‘The character is left in conflict, but she fights the terrifying battle to recapture hope. And wins!’

CB