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HAXAN (WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES)

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Haxan

Format: Cinema

Screening on: 6 May 2007

Time: 3pm

Venue: The Barbican, London

With hammered dulcimer score performed by Geoff Smith

Also available on DVD

Distributor: Tartan Video

Release date: 24 September 2007

Director: Benjamin Christensen

Original title Häxan

Cast Maren Pedersen, Clara Pontoppidan, Elith Pio

Denmark/Sweden 1922

104 minutes

This legendary silent film, much admired by the Surrealists, is a spellbinding brew of ingredients that don’t naturally mix, at least not in modern cinema. Combining the scholarly and the outlandish, the fact-based and the supernatural, Häxan is simultaneously a documentary on witchcraft and a collection of wildly fanciful visions. Banned or censored in many countries on its release in 1922 for its candid depiction of nudity, sexuality and torture as well as for its strong anti-clerical tone, the film has retained a sulphurous aura to this day.

We have to remember that at the time the film was made there were no clear boundaries between documentary and fiction. In the yet uncharted waters of the nascent film art, the aim of director Benjamin Christensen was to make an educational, informative film that would also have artistic value. Christensen himself embodies the paradoxical position of the film, poised between objective and subjective, rational and irrational. The director is the first-person narrator in the titles and as such he is the voice of rationality that coolly comments on the mass delusion that gripped ancient, barbaric times. But in an intriguing personality split, Christensen – who started his film career as an actor – also plays the lewd, tongue-wagging Devil that represents the violent, uncontrollable irruption of the irrational in the human mind.

The factual content of the film was very important to the director, and this is obvious in the detailed, realistic depictions of medieval daily life and dress and of the torture instruments used at the witch trials. He had even hoped that scholars would write the ‘script’ for the film but his request was rejected by academics who thought that cinema was not a suitable vehicle for serious study. Christensen therefore did his own research, drawing on medieval woodcuts, illustrations and treaties, in particular Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a witch hunter’s manual written in 1487 by two Dominican monks.

Through the meticulous recreation of the past Christensen wanted to educate his audience about the consequences of superstitious and intolerant beliefs, demonstrating how they led to the persecution of anyone seen as different – in this case, the very old, the very ugly, beggars and cripples. These beliefs were stirred up and influenced by the Church and Christensen starkly denounces the responsibility of the Christian clergy for the burning of 8 million people at the stake (although the scholar Casper Tybjerg explains on the Criterion DVD that the figure is in fact closer to 50 000). In one of the titles Christensen explains that the ‘witch madness’ was like a ‘spiritual plague’ that followed wherever the monks of the Inquisition went: the monks were not the remedy as they claimed, they were the disease.

Christensen’s position is explicitly rationalist and he contrasts obscurantist medieval superstitions with enlightened contemporary society: ‘The belief in evil spirits, sorcery, and witchcraft is the result of naí­Â¯ve notions about the mystery of the universe’, reads one of the titles of the first section. Emphasizing the point, we later see two pioneer medical students accused of being witches because they have stolen bodies in the cemetery, which they were planning to open in order to learn more about how disease affects the human body.

Yet, for all the rationalist posturing it is the representation of the supernatural that makes Häxan so memorable. Christensen clearly relishes bringing to life the fears and horrors that lurk in the human mind. The masterful use of light and shadows, the actors’ rugged features, the red and blue tints that lend the black and white images an otherworldly quality all contribute to infuse the film with a pungent, macabre atmosphere. At times it is as if paintings by Goya, Bruegel or Bosch had been magically animated. The scene of the witches flying through the air above the sleepy town remains not only impressive in terms of special effects but strikingly poetic while the unholy scenes of the Sabbath, with their orgiastic excess, uprooted trees and sinister blue tint have a truly nightmarish beauty.

Christensen is least persuasive when he takes us back to the rational, modern world and attempts to demonstrate Professor Charcot’s theory that the phenomena associated with witchcraft were caused by hysteria. While he convincingly connects witchcraft to sexual repression in the medieval section, he doesn’t seem able to make a similar link with so-called ‘hysteria’ in the modern world. We see women affected by somnambulism and kleptomania but Christensen seems unable to engage with their troubled minds. As a result, while the medieval depictions of a monk being willingly flagellated for lusting after a young ‘witch’ or of a whole convent of nuns overcome by uncontrollable delirium are heady, potent sequences, the modern somnambulist and kleptomaniac are little more than dull, superficial case studies. It is as if Christensen’s attempt to remain within the strict boundaries of rationality in the last chapter had killed off his capacity for imagining the unspeakable corners of the human subconscious.

What’s more, blinded by his rationalist stance, Christensen is unable to see that Charcot’s pseudo-scientific diagnostic of ‘hysteria’ is just as extravagant as the previous witchcraft accusations – and just as misogynistic: women are no longer dangerous heretics to be burned at the stake but deranged patients who need to be treated in institutions. Granted, Christensen’s lack of perceptiveness is mitigated by the fact that he was after all a man of his time and couldn’t possibly have guessed that decades later hysteria would be widely discredited as a valid medical diagnosis by scientists and feminists alike. Paradoxically, this means that the film can now be seen as an unwitting denunciation of rationalist certainties: what was held as true in the Middle-Ages was reviled as superstitious drivel in the nineteenth century, but what passed for science in the nineteenth century has now been repudiated as unfounded nonsense. While this is obviously not what Christensen had in mind, it adds a piquant new layer to the film’s complex mix of fact and fiction.

Fifty years after its original release, Häxan remains a fascinating film for its alien beauty, its singular blend of the real and the supernatural and its intelligent investigation of the psychological mechanisms behind the witch hunt mania. In that, it is a timeless work, which just like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, applies far beyond its explicit (or implicit – McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt in Miller’s play) subject matter. Watching The Crucible performed last year was a powerful reminder of how relevant its dissection of the phenomenon is to our own times. Häxan sounds as stark a warning: the monks it depicts are convinced that they are protecting Christianity from evil; believing that they are fighting on the side of good against the terrifying threat of darkness posed by the ‘witches’, they feel entirely justified in their use of torture, brutality and deceit to extract confessions. See the parallels with our troubled times yet?

Virginie Sélavy

Cinema releases

JOE STRUMMER: THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN

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Joe Strummer

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 May 2007

Distributor Vertigo Films

Director: Julien Temple

UK/Ireland 2007

123 minutes

Joe Strummer always cut an incongruous figure as a punk. While the rest of the self-styled last gang in town were suitably weaselly and malnourished (Jones and Topper) or remote (Simonon), Strummer, well-built, full of face and with a mockney accent that belied his boarding school past, seemed too old, too worldly-wise for such a nihilistic movement. Not for him the anguished howl of alienation and misanthropy that Johnny Rotten embodied so well. Nor did his band stick to the DIY, three-chord aesthetic propounded by Sniffin’ Glue that seemed such an important tenet of punk, preferring instead to venture into reggae and ska. No, Strummer’s vision of punk was different, educational and multi-cultural, and at its worst had a proselytizing tendency uncomfortably close to that of Bono, and a po-facedness that’s mirrored in the legions of bands they spawned, from the Manics to the Libertines.

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is Julien Temple’s beautifully assembled love letter to his dead friend. Born John Graham Mellor in Ankara, Turkey to a foreign-service diplomat father, Strummer lived in various countries before being deposited in an English boarding school with his older brother David. Temple brilliantly evokes the cool austerity of the 50s and the vibrancy of the 60s with a collage of home movies and vintage footage, ending in the tragedy of David’s flirtation with fascism, his descent into depression and his suicide in 1970. We’re left to imagine the impression his brother’s death must have left on the young John Mellor, now calling himself Woody after his hero Woody Guthrie, as we follow him first to art school and then, following an incident with an artwork composed entirely of used tampons, to Newport, South Wales where, sporting decidedly non-punk flowing locks, he forms his first band.

Back in London in 1974 Strummer becomes involved in the squat scene of the time and Temple demonstrates how the political ideas of community and social justice, essentially hippy ideals from the sixties, that would come to define him were developed. After forming the 101’ers, Strummer is picked out by Svengali Bernie Rhodes to join a new band called The Clash and the film picks up pace, with grainy footage of amphetamine-fuelled gigs and the smell of ambition barely disguised as punk ethos, Strummer throwing everything into his new role. Topper Headon pops up to recount how he joined the band, complaining that he left his wife in the morning with long hair and flares and returned in the evening with a punk cut and zips. As a lesson in how punk changed everything overnight it’s perfect. The Clash bandwagon rolls ever faster, a vehicle for Strummer’s struggle for justice, decency and righteousness. Whether it’s protecting the kids from the bouncers, support slots for Grandmaster Flash (he’s booed off), or triple albums called ‘Sandinista’, Strummer walks it like he talks it.

Inevitably it can’t last. Drugs and drink and constant touring conspire to turn The Clash into a parody of the rock bands that, just three years earlier, they’d set out to destroy. Topper writes Rock The Casbah and is shortly afterwards dismissed for his addiction to heroin. Mick Jones writes ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go?’ (shown here live with Mick singing ‘It’s always Joe, Joe, Joe’, should you have ever wondered where Doherty and Barat got the idea for ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’ from) and shortly afterwards receives his own Clash communiqué from Strummer. ‘Are you discouraged by the rock’n’roll business?’, an interviewer asks Mick Jones. ‘It’s no worse than any other prostitution business’, he replies.

After The Clash fall apart Strummer is portrayed as a walking ghost, seeking consolation in the bottle. In one of the film’s funniest anecdotes (and there are a few) Strummer says: ‘I knew I had to cut down on the drinking. Just then the phone rang. It was The Pogues. They wanted to know if I could go on tour with them.’ Slowly though we see him pick up the pieces and eventually form The Mescaleros. We sense a man finding his purpose again, or at least determining what is important. The circle is completed when Mick Jones joins Strummer on stage for a benefit for London’s firemen. Ten days later he dies peacefully on his couch at home, reading The Observer.

Temple tells the story with no little skill, compensating for a lack of footage in the early and later years by mixing in sound snippets from Strummer’s BBC World Service radio show and animations of Strummer’s own cartoons. Perhaps his best trick though is a recreation of one of the Strummerville campfires that had become Strummer’s main focus in the last few years of his life, and which live on as a charitable foundation run by his family and by Temple himself. Gathered around the flames somewhere high above London, drinks in hand, Strummer’s family, friends and fellow artists talk openly and with affection about the man they knew, providing the film with an emotional heart and Temple with a wealth of material. It’s this warmth, from the director down, that is the film’s real strength, and yet paradoxically you catch yourself wondering how another director might tell the story. Occasionally we catch glimpses of a Joe that doesn’t quite tally with the other eulogies – the naked ambition on forming The Clash that led him to snub his former friends, an emotional Topper Headon recounting how Strummer had slept with his girlfriend on tour – and you wonder what else there might be. Temple puts it out there, but there’s a sense that the picture being painted is more of a memorial than a warts-and-all portrait.

Whether or not this is true, you come away from the cinema inspired by Joe Strummer the man. A generous, passionate, larger-than-life character who lived his life in the only way he knew how, fighting for people, for multi-culturalism, for rock’n’roll and for the politics of the left. A man who cried when he read that the American army had written ‘Rock The Casbah’ on a warhead destined for Iraq. If he never quite cut it as a punk, well, maybe he was more than that. After all, as John Cooper-Clarke says, ‘Punks were just hippies with zips’.

Sean Price

Cinema releases

THE BOTHERSOME MAN

The Bothersome Man

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 May 2007

Distributor ICA

Director: Jens Lien

Original title: Den Brysomme Mannen

Cast: Trond Fausa Aurvag, Petronella Barker, Birgitte Larsen

Norway 2006

90 minutes

A man steps down from a rattling bus at a rundown gas station in the centre of a deserted volcanic wasteland. He is expected. In a nearby city an apartment waits for him, a job, a whole new life. But something is wrong here. The inhabitants of the city seem happy, content with their lot. But the food tastes of nothing, the alcohol is ineffective, the music bland, the décor uniform and drab. Even sex is joyless.

The opening scenes of Jens Lien’s debut feature The Bothersome Man tick all the boxes in the now-familiar category marked ‘surreal/ existentialist’. A lone stranger. A world familiar, but not quite like our own. Plenty of empty silences, meaningful glances and quiet desperation. Scattered touches of delicate whimsy, and a handful of random absurdity (in this case, two men playing badminton in an open field). A lot of none-too-subtle social commentary.

The film is obviously intended as a Kafkaesque allegory on middle-class Scandinavian culture, and hammers its point home with numbing regularity. The characters, bemused hero Andreas notwithstanding, are uniformly dull and lifeless. They are obsessed with interior design, any hint of emotion or imagination terrifies them. Even when Andreas thinks he’s found real love, with blonde office junior Ingeborg, it turns out she’s just an empty vessel like all the rest.

The main problem the filmmakers face is that it’s very difficult to make a film about joyless people in a joyless world and still make the film, well, enjoyable. When virtually all your characters are dour and plastic, how is an audience supposed to relate? Even poor Andreas has no context in which to display his personality. He’s presented as the archetypal everyman, trying to make his way in an uncertain and unpredictable world. Trond Fausa Aurvag plays the character just a notch above unconscious, blinking warily at the steadily unfolding drama in which he has become an unwilling central player. The other actors essay their parts perfectly, but it’s hard to tell how talented they are when the characters are all essentially the same: cold, loveless, lifeless.

The final act of the film brings some spark to the proceedings. Following an abortive subway suicide attempt (in this world it’s impossible to die), Andreas overhears the distant and beautiful sound of music. He discovers a hole in the wall of an abandoned cellar, from which strange and emotive sounds and smells regularly emanate. He attempts to break through, but his efforts are impeded by the mysterious city authorities.

The suicide sequence is by far the strongest in the film. There have been shocking images before – a man impaled on railings, his intestines hanging out; Andreas cutting off his own finger, only to find it mysteriously re-grown. But when he jumps under the train, the film takes off in a new and temporarily riveting direction. Andreas is smashed, battered, dragged along and torn to shreds, all the while conscious and aware of what’s happening to him. And it’s all presented in horrifyingly vivid detail, every bone snap and crunch clearly audible. For a moment the film begins to resemble Miike Takashi’s Audition, another sly comment on middle-class mores which descended into surprising and disturbing violence.

But The Bothersome Man entirely lacks the earlier film’s integrity, or its intelligence. It’s hard to tell if Lien or screenwriter Per Schreiner realise quite how narrow and offensive the premise of their film is. This is a world in which the majority of people live drab, empty lives which mean absolutely nothing. They don’t enjoy the benefits they are given, they are small-minded, petty individuals with nothing to recommend them. The women, particularly, are trouble: self-centred, treacherous, beautiful but empty, unable to connect on any kind of human level. Is this how Lien and Schreiner view the world? Do they see themselves as Andreas, ‘real’ souls trapped in this prison of fakery?

There isn’t an ounce of subtlety in The Bothersome Man. It is a film as anhedonic and soulless as its characters, dripping with patronising superiority. What strength the film has lies in its ability to shock, but such moments are fleeting and purely physical. There is nothing here we haven’t seen before, or needed to see again.

Tom Huddleston

Cinema releases

THE NIGHT OF THE SUNFLOWERS

The Night of the Sunflowers

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 May 2007

Distributor Yume Pictures

Director: Jorge Sí¡nchez-Cabezudo

Original title: La Noche de los girasoles

Cast: Carmelo Gí­Â³mez, Judith Diakhate, Cesí¡reo Estébanez

Spain 2006

123 minutes

La Noche de los girasoles (Night of the Sunflowers) starts with two separate stories that are interwoven: the discovery of a cave that may or may not drastically change the fortunes of a small northern Spanish village, and the murder of a girl found in some nearby sunflower fields. Both storylines act as a catalyst for what subsequently takes place and are merged together through the arrival of speleologist Esteban (Carmelo Gí­Â³mez) and his girlfriend Gabi (Judith Diakhate) in the village. The film is told in six chapters that each expand as well as cast further light on the story. Each chapter starts further back in time than the previous one and ends further ahead, thus moving the story forward. Each chapter also has a new protagonist, often introduced towards the end of the preceding section, who is linked to the story in a coincidental way.

The first feature by young Spanish director Jorge Sí¡nchez-Cabezudo, it is one of those films that feel like they were constructed on a drawing board before they were actually written in order to make sure that, as the puzzle unravels, all angles are covered. The last ten years have seen a proliferation of such films: Se7en, The Game, Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to name but a few. However, those movies only used their elaborate construction and multiple twists and turns for no other reason than to cover up their own hollowness whereas La Noche de los girasoles is a far more sophisticated and mature film. By telling the story backwards Sí¡nchez-Cabezudo manages to convince us first of all that all these coincidences could plausibly occur – which is no mean feat considering how many there are. What’s more, by combining this with a construction in six chapters that each have their own titles, he very successfully manages to engage you in what are essentially six gripping and very different short stories, ranging in tone from the Taviani Brothers to Claude Chabrol and ending in a scene that can only be seen as a tribute to Ví­Â­ctor Erice’s Spirit Of the Beehive.

The main achievement here is how well it all works, how effortless the construction seems and how it gives Sí¡nchez-Cabezudo the chance to spin lovely side stories that give you a genuine sense of life in a little rural Spanish village. It feels like Sí¡nchez-Cabezudo really knows the environment he describes and although his choice of characters might be a tad predictable (travelling salesman, village idiots and policemen) he manages to flesh them out to be much more than just stereotypes.

Kim Nicolajsen

Cinema releases

JINDABYNE

Jindabyne

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 May 2007

Distributor Revolver

Director: Ray Lawrence

Based on: ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ by Raymond Carver

Cast: Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Deborra-Lee Furness

Australia 2006

123 minutes

Five years after the widely praised Lantana, Ray Lawrence returns with an adaptation of a short story by American writer Raymond Carver, ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ – which Robert Altman had also adapted earlier in Short Cuts. Lawrence relocates the story to the outback of his native Australia, more precisely to Jindabyne, a small town in the mountainous wilderness of the southwest.

Jindabyne opens with the murder of a young Aboriginal woman before introducing the protagonists of the story, Irish mechanic Stuart, his pals Carl, Rocco and Billy, and his wife Claire. At the weekend the four men go on their long-awaited annual fishing trip in the mountains. But on the first day Stuart discovers the body of the murdered woman in the river. Without any deliberation, they simply tie the body to a tree so that it won’t drift away and carry on fishing. When they report the murder to the police on their return two days later, their actions are met with disgust in town and provoke anger in the Aboriginal community. Profoundly disturbed by her husband’s behaviour, Claire makes misguided attempts to reach out to the murdered woman’s family.

Jindabyne has been fairly well-received by festival audiences and critics and there is no denying that it is a well-crafted film, the intertwined themes of moral choice and family life being dealt with in a mature, sober way. The disintegration of Claire and Stuart’s marriage is well observed, the incident bringing back to the surface old resentments and repressed feelings from their past history. Claire’s uneasiness, caused partly by her suspicion that her husband harbours somewhat shameful feelings in relation to the dead girl, is convincingly drawn. The thriller part is well handled, the killer remaining mysterious and terribly familiar at the same time, with no easy resolution.

And yet some extremely misjudged decisions make Jindabyne a rather unpalatable experience. While there is a real effort to be true to Carver’s style and convey the characters’ emotions through acts and situations rather than through words, that effort is thoroughly ruined by the awful yodelling pseudo-spiritual singing on the soundtrack. Blasted in our ears while we are treated to images of spectacular scenery, it is obviously meant to let us know that at that point we should be feeling in awe of the stunning wilderness that unfolds before our eyes. The same strategy is repeated at the end, and the traditional Aboriginal ceremony is turned to mawkish caricature by the lengthy, over-emotional a cappella singing. This is a rather unsubtle, irksome and un-Carver-like way to try and tell the audience how they should feel.

And then there’s the race angle, which plays no part in the original story. Lawrence clearly tries to use the plot to say something about the treatment of Aboriginal people in his country. But Claire’s misplaced, drippy race guilt provides no insight into this theme, and does nothing but represent a self-obsessed white perspective. She goes to a private ceremony even though she is not wanted there in order to assuage her own bad conscience. And although what Stuart has done is irreparably insulting for the Aboriginal people, there is an intimation that some kind of reconciliation between Claire and her husband might be possible. In the middle of the Aboriginal ceremony, what interests the director most is not the Aboriginals’ sense of loss but what is going to happen to the white couple’s relationship.

This may be a well-meaning film but its po-faced worthiness, its lack of sophistication in its handling of the race issue and its incapacity to see beyond an all-white point of view make it an altogether unpleasant experience. Better to save your cash to go and see Ten Canoes next month, an Aboriginal folk tale starring only Aboriginal actors, which offers a much more complex – and humorous – take on the issue.

Virginie Sélavy

Cinema releases

THE CAIMAN

The Caiman

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 April 2007

Distributor Optimum

Director: Nanni Moretti

Original title: Il Caimano

Cast: Silvio Orlando, Margherita Buy, Jasmine Trinca, Nanni Moretti

France/Italy 2006

112 minutes

The Caiman, Nanni Moretti’s follow-up to 2001’s The Son’s Room, is both a scathing political indictment of Silvio Berlusconi, and a bittersweet, nostalgic film about loss; the two are deeply intertwined in the Italy of the last decades.

Bruce Bonomo (Silvio Orlando) is a washed-up film-maker who achieved a certain notoriety as a producer of ‘genre’ films: in other words, B-movies such as Smutty Boots, Mocassin Assasins, Masciste v. Freud, and the infamous Cataracts, the bomb that ended his career a decade earlier. Handed a screenplay at a retrospective of his films by an anonymous young woman, Bonomo desperately seizes on the project as a way to breathe life into his own faltering existence: not only is his career a disaster but his marriage to Paola (Margherita Buy) is also falling apart. Bruce devotes himself to making The Caiman with Teresa (Jasmine Trinca), the unknown scriptwriter, failing to realise that her film is in fact a damning satire about Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s wealthiest man and former prime minister.

The arc of Berlusconi’s career in politics is traced throughout the film, itself structured as a series of vignettes, of films within a film: the over-lapping of Teresa’s script with Bonomo’s imagination, interwoven with the disintegration of his family life and the actual making of the fictional Caiman. Three different actors play Berlusconi during the course of the film, the first brilliantly realised by the impeccable Elio de Capitani. His scenes are the most mocking of Berlusconi and his reputation as an embezzler and a womanizer, a caricature who delivered populism to the masses through his media empire.

Berlusconi, whose campaign for prime minister in 1994 is criticised in the film as little more than an attempt to escape jail for fraud and tax evasion, sold himself to the electorate as an alternative to communism, exploiting the fear that the left would sweep the elections. The inter-play between the left and right in Italian politics is a crucial current running through The Caiman. Bonomo is initially dismayed to realise that he is making a ‘lefty political film’; Bonomo’s films were themselves a rally against ‘intellectualism’, populist critiques of the ‘dictatorship of auteur cinema’. He admits that he voted for Berlusconi, and it’s here that the bitterness and loss of innocence lie: the betrayal by a figure who promised Italy change, but instead became a politician better known for his face lifts and hair transplants, his tight control over Italian media and, as a result, the political spectrum.

There are paradoxes in The Caiman that add an intriguing depth to the narrative, and offer an insight into the making of the film. Bonomo and Teresa’s film is rejected by RAI, Italy’s main network (arguably under Berlusconi’s indirect control) as a ‘film not born out of urgent need’. Playing himself in the film, Moretti initially rejects the role of Berlusconi; he throws doubt on the project, arguing against telling a story that is public knowledge. Teresa is the foil, adamant that The Caiman must be made: the film is a history of contemporary Italy, and that history is Berlusconi. In the end, after another actor walks away from The Caiman for a role in a more lucrative, commercial film, Moretti does take on Berlusconi, portraying him as a chilling, arrogant politician, utterly above the law; it is the film’s most personal and gripping attack on the politician. Unlike Bonomo, Nanni Moretti is a successful film-maker, himself an ‘auteur’ and a darling of Italian cinema, and perhaps one of Italy’s few film-makers capable of making such a film.

Acerbically funny, often charming, The Caiman is a film successful in its parts, rather than as a whole. The brilliant, subtly acted performances are unquestionably the film’s strength. It is the mix of family drama and political satire that never seems quite balanced, the one detracting from the other. Released shortly before the 2006 election, which Berlusconi lost to Romano Prodi, The Caiman is nonetheless an evocative look at a country mired in disillusionment.

Sarah Cronin

Cinema releases

THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN

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The Seashell and the Clergyman

Format: Cinema

Screening on: 13 April 2007

Venue: Union Chapel, London

With score performed by Minima

Director: Germaine Dulac

Writer: Antonin Artaud

Original title: La coquille et le clergyman

Cast: Alex Allin, Genica Athanasiou, Lucien Bataille

France 1928

41 minutes

The Seashell and the Clergyman is now commonly recognized as the first surrealist film of the 1920s and 30s, and yet, despite such avant-garde credentials, and the fact that a female director directed the film, most people still consider Luis Buí±uel’s Un Chien Andalou the pre-eminent surrealist film of its time.

There are reasons for this and they are not simply to do with Buí±uel’s later canonical status, nor with a sexist leaning towards male filmmakers. The Seashell and the Clergyman is first and foremost an exercise in visual lyricism and although it has the pre-requisite surrealist sub-narrative, or rather sub-conscious language of lust, morality, hypocrisy and desire, its narrative is and remains entirely meaningless. This is to say that although the visual lyricism is clearly pre-occupied with images of dreams, complete with fantastic fantasies of dozens of chambermaid-clad concubines and splashing water, in the end there is no sense of time or action having occurred: there is effectively no discernible beginning, middle or end, which would explain what’s happened. What we do get is a fragmented series of scenarios, which appear to incorporate symbolic vessels being handled, broken and transported by our clergyman, a tremendous amount of raised eyebrows in close-up, and – to my own personal relief – some nicely turned-out choreographed ladies in 1920s hats, gloves and shoes.

Interestingly, Antonin Artaud, who wrote the script, was allegedly so displeased with Dulac’s realization of his scenario, that he sought to prevent its screening. Angry with the ways in which the film’s anti-clericalism (a priest runs around manifesting a lustful passion that he fails to satiate) is undermined rather than accentuated by the director’s visual lyricism, Artaud perhaps realized what others have failed to since – namely that lyricism in the service of surrealism tends to undermine its political subversiveness.

All the more amusing that the British censor of the time banned it with the legendary words ‘If this film has a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable’, a phrase which has since almost become more famous than the film. These words are also clearly what the musical score to the film, as played beautifully by Minima in the Union Chapel performance, in many ways has forgotten. Minima, who formed in 2006, excel in performing new soundtracks to silent films with a line-up of drums, bass, guitar and cello. As they proudly state on their website: they have no laptops or backing tapes, a statement which is clearly meant to authenticate their musical abilities while making them also somehow more intuitively in sync with the performance as it occurs; an admirable mode of operating – at least in principle.

Nevertheless, in the case of the Dulac film, rather than stress the fragmentation of the narrative and the bizarre, potentially subversive quality of the imagery, Minima chose to incorporate harmonious leit-motifs, romantically accentuating certain moments in the film and adding decidedly dramatic effects through key moments of vigor in the score. At the end, if one can call it such, the music builds up to a climactic moment complete with a sweeping refrain. In doing so, Minima, whilst clearly in control of their chosen medium, also slot themselves firmly into recent trends of taking silent films and modernizing them by adding a score, which guides rather than confuses an audience, which above all, must not be bored. This in effect says to viewers, relax, what you are watching is not as difficult as you may think even though – yes, surprise – it contains no sound. The effect, in this case, is to make a potentially provocative, and wonderfully incomprehensible piece of filmmaking into a nicely wrought exercise in aesthetic refinement. Dulac would have appreciated the film being screened today but whether she meant it to be wrapped up in the romance of Minima’s well-intended score is another matter.

CB

Cinema releases

KNIFE IN THE WATER

Knife in the Water

Format: Cinema

Screening on: 5 May 2007

Time: 3:30pm

Venue: The Barbican, London

Director: Roman Polanski

Original title: Ní­Â³z w wodzie

Cast: Leon Niemczyk, Jolanta Umecka, Zygmunt Malanowicz

Poland 1962

94 minutes

Showing as part of the Roman Polanski season at the Barbican, the Polish director’s first feature is a landmark of sixties cinema, an outstanding debut that more than holds its own among the New Wave masterpieces of the time. Already evident there are the unnerving sense of menace and the scalpel-sharp psychological dissections that he would later develop in such masterpieces as Repulsion and Chinatown – which are also included in the programme.

Knife in the Water is a minimalist classic, a tight, bare, existential thriller low on budget but high on imagination. Andrzej and Krystyna, a well-off couple, are on their way to a lake for a boat trip when they almost run over a hitch-hiker. They give him a lift and invite him to join them on their excursion. Once on the boat in the middle of the vast lake, Andrzej begins to play a perverse power game with the young drifter. Tensions simmer as he orders the young man about, daring him to take risks, and the feeling of danger becomes more palpable when the young man reveals he carries a large knife. As the two men clash over and over again, the escalation of macho bravado leads to an increasingly volatile situation.

Polanski’s brilliant direction infuses exceptional depth and intensity into the simple set-up. The claustrophobic shots that enclose the three characters convey a sense of menace and doom that is emphasised by the stark black and white images and the moody jazz score. The film offers no hope: although the two men seem to be opposed in age and social standing, they are essentially the same, as a disillusioned Krystyna points out. From Polanski’s dark view of mankind emerges an impressively subtle psychological study that concludes with marvellous ambiguity. A lean and mean, misanthropic gem.

Virginie Sélavy

Also showing as part of the Roman Polanski season: Repulsion (May 12), Cul-De-Sac (May 19), Chinatown (May 26), The Pianist (June 2).

Cinema releases, Home entertainment

EL TOPO

El Topo

Format: Cinema

Screening at: BFI Southbank

Date: 6-19 April 2007

Also available on DVD

Release date: 14 May 2007

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Cast Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky,Mara Lorenzio, David Silva

Mexico 1971

124 minutes

The first thing that needs to be said about El Topo is, it has its longueurs but it’s a lot of fun. I had always been led to believe that this ‘metaphysical’ western, reportedly bursting with weird imagery and extreme violence, was ‘difficult’. In the end, I think there’s a danger of talking up ‘difficult’ into ‘inaccessible’, which it certainly isn’t. What El Topo certainly has been is unavailable. Applying the equation, ‘cult’ equals ‘reputation’ over ‘availability’, El Topo must score pretty highly. But there’s a danger, after such a long time in limbo, and with so much ink spilt in the meantime, that the freight of expectation could become something of an albatross.

How do you pitch El Topo? The original tagline plumps for zany and freakish: ‘See the naked young Franciscans whipped with cactus. See the bandit leader disemboweled. See the priest ride into the sunset with a midget and her newborn baby’. All of which you will indeed see í¢â‚¬â€ though I’m inclined to think the bandit leader, having been de-wigged and stripped to red silk boxer shorts, is actually castrated rather than disemboweled. At any rate, the tagline may be one way of selling the film, but it hardly does justice to the way slapstick merges seamlessly into dispassionate cruelty. And none of this explains where the ‘metaphysical’ side comes in. The dialogue does feature an element of explicit philosophising, but the mise en scí­Â¨ne seems if anything more important: vivid events, whether philosophical or silly, or both, are set against the same vast, empty and indifferent landscape. In the opening frames, a heat-blurred black spot gradually comes into focus out of the blazing expanse of desert. Once in the foreground, the bearded gunslinger clad in stylish black leather, punctuated by a less obviously heroic black umbrella, dismounts and bids his naked 7-year-old son bury his childhood í¢â‚¬â€ in the form of a teddy bear and a photo of his mother. So the solemn and the ridiculous are intertwined from the start, and this is key to Jodorowsky. If the film has anything as simple as a moral, it is arguably that El Topo has to learn to accept the ridiculous with humility. Presenting the film as either chin-scratchingly intellectual or trashily sensational misses the point of a very personal vision that marks no such distinction.

The first half of the film charts El Topo’s fall, which dates roughly from the moment he grandiloquently proclaims, ‘Soy Dios’, by way of justification for castrating the colonel. Taking oneself for a god may be a natural hazard of riding about in the desert in black leather avenging the downtrodden, especially when the opposition is so flatteringly mediocre. The problem is not just that El Topo has come to believe his own PR: he has also done too good a job of impressing the seductive but demanding Mara (Mara Lorenzio). She first persuades him to desert his son to the Franciscans, and then insists he must prove himself by defeating four ‘masters’, a succession of mystical hermit gunslingers. As he is not in fact God, he has to do so through low trickery rather than skill, cheered on enthusiastically by the results-obsessed Mara. But El Topo is tormented by the superiority of his opponents even in death, and repents at the very moment of success. At this point Mara transfers her affections to El Topo’s rival in love, the mysterious and sexy woman in black (Paula Romo), who promptly shoots loser ex-boyfriend in the belly. Left for dead by these dreadful harpies, he is found by a passing band of midgets and dragged away on a litter.

In the second half, he awakens years later under a mountain where the midgets (the deformed outcast offspring of incest, imprisoned under the mountain by the wicked townsfolk) mistakenly revere him as a god. By this point he is a dead ringer for Matthew Barney in Cremaster 3, with white candy floss hair, doll-like rouge and powder make-up, and an outsize nappy. Once restored to his senses and apprised of the plight of his new people, he embarks on a Mosaic quest to tunnel a way out for them. In the meantime, with the help of a lovely midget played beautifully by Jacqueline Luis, he earns money by clowning for the vicious, hypocritical folk of the town at the foot of the mountain; not an easy gig, given that they hunt and brand slaves for entertainment and worship the all-seeing eye from the Great Seal of the United States.

Viewed in terms of allegory, the film is quite moral, even religious. And it is the allegorical structure that feeds speculation over the film’s ‘meaning’: the two halves, as is often remarked, could correspond to Old and New Testament; each of the ‘masters’ teaches El Topo a valuable life lesson; the film ends with a sort of redemption, and a holocaust from which only a woman and El Topo’s two children escape. On the other hand, you might just as well say this last element is reminiscent of The Alamo. In any case, the ‘allegorical’ aspect is as much formal and aesthetic as anything else. As in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or classic Japanese children’s TV series Monkey (Saiyûki) for that matter, baroque monads remain patiently seated in their pavilions in the midst of a wasted landscape, waiting only for the fated challenger to happen along. The sheer lack of context makes them uncanny. There is nothing to suggest how, for example, the second master and his fortune-teller mother í¢â‚¬â€ chubby folk swathed in furs and accompanied by a lion í¢â‚¬â€ can subsist in the meantime in their hollow of bleached-out clay. The third master’s bunny farm is likewise less symbolic than visually redolent of discomfitingly improbable life.

These ‘metaphysical’ encounters also follow on from, and may to some extent be punitive replays of, the burlesque first encounter with the bandits. El Topo’s hubris is to declare himself God when all he has done is overcome a band of cackling murderous cretins straight out of Spaghetti Western. All-too human, these small-time incompetents display their grotesquely misplaced sensuality by slavering over ladies’ shoes amongst the desert scrub, dancing romantically with monks (before riding them bare-back with cactus whips) and, a little later, barking and begging like dogs for a taste of a real lady (Mara). The bandits foreshadow the town of the second half of the film. There, desire lost in the wilderness has likewise been forced to expose itself as makeshift fetishism, all the more monstrous for being carried out on a civic scale. Only a collective perversion can enthusiastically embrace a religion based on Russian roulette as a legitimate form of Christianity. The town dignifies its worst excesses with a morality summed up in the puffed-up grimace of respectability worn by the matrons of the community (probably superannuated whores), whether checking up on their husbands in the saloon in the guise of the league for decency, or applauding the torture and murder of slaves. There is perhaps another, less ‘metaphysical’ and less discussed, context at work here; Mexico’s role in the scramble to carve up the Americas, and its violent entanglement with the USA in the lawless prosecution of its ‘manifest destiny’. I found myself at some points thinking of Cormac McCarthy’s ultra-violent and sort-of metaphysical Blood Meridian, and wondering what Jodorowsky might make of it. Brutish figures decked out in outlandishly ill-assorted costumes í¢â‚¬â€ each garment the document of a murder í¢â‚¬â€ would do him very well. But in the end I think Jodorowsky would want something with more kindness and a little bit of clowning thrown in. There is some fairly brutal violence in El Topo. There are also landscapes of crystal-bright unnerving desolation. And there are some rather sweet and silly moments. All of this, mixed up but somehow cohering, is what makes Jodorowsky.

Stephen Thomson

Cinema releases, Home entertainment

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN

2 Comments
The Holy Mountain

Format: Cinema

Screening at: BFI Southbank

Date: 5-14 April 2007

Also available on DVD

Release date: 14 May 2007

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Cast Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horí¡cio Salinas, Zamira Saunders, Juan Ferrara

Mexico/USA 1973

105 minutes

After years of disappointing transfers which drained the original print of colour and used optical fuzzing to cover over the film’s frequent recourse to nudity, Jodorowsky’s legendary third feature gets a UK DVD release and we can finally experience, albeit on the small screen, the glory of his first foray into cinemascope. The legend itself is well known – John Lennon and Yoko Ono liked El Topo so much they stumped up the money for The Holy Mountain which at $1,500,000 made it the most expensive Mexican production to date. Allen Klein, the Beatles manager, produced though he refused to relinquish legal rights to the film hoping to profit financially from its re-release in the eventuality of the director’s death. Jodorowsky and Klein have since made up however, and a restored print was shown (along with El Topo) at Cannes in May 2006.

Many reviewers of The Holy Mountain have thrown up their hands in dismay at its lack of unified narrative but this is merely indicative of an end-obsessed culture with an infantile craving for punishment and reward served up for years by an impoverished cinematic diet of suspense and delay. I remember the American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage explaining this was one reason he dispensed with his camera altogether and began making films just by manipulating the film stock and running it through the projector. And anyway there is narrative in The Holy Mountain if you want it and plenty of it if you really do want it that badly. Its prologue (also the title sequence) might have caused some of this anxiety. In it a black-clad figure, possibly a High Priest, ritually washes and shaves the heads of two blonde women over the soundtrack of chanting Tibetan monks. This ‘scene’ however is broken into by a series of static abstract arrangements of arcane imagery (eyeballs, peacock feathers, pearls, a snake, a Magritte-like vignette of recumbent statues above a cocooned butterfly) much of it in a striking palette of blues and greens. What to do with all this? The bringing together of a pearl and an eye reminds us of Ariel’s speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘Those were pearls that were his eyes’ says the spirit of Ferdinand’s drowned father; ‘Of his bones are coral made…/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange.’ I can think of no two better words than ‘rich’ and ‘strange’ to describe much of The Holy Mountain, which like the drowned man is also about the magic of transformation. In effect the prologue offers up a series of images through which we are invited to view the rest of the film and thematically metamorphosis is a central preoccupation of much that follows.

The main narrative concerns a figure whom we later learn to be a thief. We first encounter him lying unconscious on a dusty road, his face obscured by flies. Brought round by a limbless dwarf (a recurrent trope in Jodorowsky’s films) he undergoes a journey through an unnamed South American city where his physical resemblance to Christ causes him to be subjected by various unscrupulous parties to well-known scenes from the gospels and to which he initially succumbs. One of these is his own crucifixion by a group of naked pre-pubescent boys though it’s typical of Jodorowsky to have his journey begin with this event (thus reversing the Christian myth) and to have him free himself and smoke a fat spliff with the dwarf! After a further series of gruesome trials, including one in which he awakes to find himself surrounded by hundreds of life-sized casts of his crucified form – Christ awakening to the nightmare of history one might say – the thief recognises the corruption of the Church and renounces his collusion in what he realises is essentially nothing more than a theatre of cruelty.

Thus ends what might be called the first section of the film. The thief is subsequently drawn to the lair of an alchemist who impresses him by metamorphosing his shit into gold. Evidently still in thrall to the lure of worldly wealth, the alchemist tells him: ‘You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.’ He then shows him a sequence of grotesque satirical vignettes of the lives of seven other wealth-obsessed industrialists and politicians, all thieves in a different guise – a maker of cosmetics, a weapons manufacturer, an art dealer, a toy maker, an architect, a chief of police and a presidential financial adviser. Each figure points to the industrial-military complex as an illusory impediment to what the alchemist calls ‘the true alchemical work,’ the transformation of the earthly self through spiritual enlightenment. After this presentation (which shows Jodorowsky’s background in theatre – each vignette is a kind of celluloid masque-show) the alchemist summons the figures and together with the thief they all embark as pilgrims on another journey this time to the eponymous Holy Mountain where according to the alchemist they will find the secret of eternal life by seeking out and killing the Nine Masters of the Summit.

This, the third section of the film if you like, shows us the trials and tribulations of their journey as they all seek to cast off their earthly limitations. The journey is one of the overarching structural tropes of The Holy Mountain and in many cultures its physical side is imbued with a rich spiritual dimension. Interviews with Jodorowsky reveal his abiding interest in the latter. His fascination with the Tarot is well known – he even designed his own Tarot pack – and The Holy Mountain is, unsurprisingly, saturated with its esoteric symbology. At the beginning of the film beside the prostrate body of the thief we see two twinned cards of the Major Arcana, The Fool and The Crocodile. Later the Tower makes an appearance which the thief scales to reach the alchemist. The alchemist is himself an avatar of The Magician.

Knowledge of the meaning of this complex symbology is not however strictly necessary for the uninitiated (like myself) coming to The Holy Mountain. I’d argue that Jodorowsky’s placing of the image of a golden Key towards the end of the prologue is a provocation for us to see its arcane imagery as unlocking some obscure meaning at the heart of the film. Besides, Jodorowsky is as concerned with immediate historical and political context as he is with any ‘timeless’ spirituality. The city the thief wanders through at the beginning of the film is swarming with uniformed militia, reminders of South America’s turbulent colonial and post-colonial history. They parade the streets holding aloft standards bearing flayed animal carcasses. Scenes of physical violence are insanely photographed by tourists including a husband who gleefully films his wife as she is raped by a soldier. This is not simply a broad satire of the madness of consumption but also evidence of a mind acutely attuned to the erotics of power. One of the most memorable scenes is a chameleon and toad circus which depicts the Conquest of Mexico. Filmed in close-up, it’s a glorious orgy of amphibian slow motion with toads (the invading Spanish) dressed in monk’s cowls and armour clambering over gaudily dressed chameleons (the Aztecs) before the whole set (a scale model of an Aztec city complete with ziggurats) is blown to bits, all played out to a Nazi marching tune.

Part of the appeal of this scene – and part of its sophistication – is the slippage between what is played out before our eyes and what we hear. There’s no need for ‘comment’ on what’s happening as two historical eras are brought together and it ‘works’ through disjunction. It’s what the Russian Formalists called ostrananie or ‘making strange.’ It’s a concept Jodorowsky would have found as a theatre student from his reading of Brecht and Artaud and it’s a much used device throughout The Holy Mountain. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the film’s handling of violence. Rather than attempt to portray it naturalistically (as for instance in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, released four years before The Holy Mountain) Jodorowsky emphasises its strangeness. A group of young protesters are shot and have buckets of blood thrown over them. Another line of protesters are shot and bleed in yellows, blues and greens. A dead man has a length of ribbon drawn from his chest, another a chicken pulled from his stomach. In another scene a woman’s head drips blue, not from a wound but from the metal piping quite visibly attached to her temples. This is all much more surprising – much richer and stranger – than the sublimity Peckinpah was reaching for in his use of slow motion to depict on-screen carnage. It aims not for empathy – what’s the point? – but for understanding.

It is also Jodorowsky’s very evident sense of humour that should warn us not to take the film’s spirituality too seriously. Witness the camp, lederhosen-clad gatekeeper who welcomes the pilgrims to the island of the Holy Mountain – it’s Tiny Tim meets The Sound of Music! Plus the mountain itself looks more like something off a cheap alpine postcard than a possible seat of the Gods. Perhaps it’s also a light-hearted nod to Leni Riefenstahl and Arnold Fanck’s 1926 paean to Aryan health and fitness also called The Holy Mountain. It’s the very end of the film however that reveals Jodorowsky’s tongue is firmly in his cheek. As the pilgrims reach the top of the mountain the alchemist reveals that the Masters of the Summit seated at their magic round table are nothing more than lifeless, hooded manikins at which point he begins to laugh and cocks a snook at everyone. It’s infectious and laughter breaks out amongst all the assembled. He then utters the following which is worth quoting in full:

‘I promised you the great secret and I will not disappoint you. Is this the end of our adventure? Nothing has an end. We came in search of the secret of immortality, to be immortal like the Gods and here we are, mortals, more human than ever. If we have not obtained immortality at least we have obtained reality. We began in a fairy tale and we came to life, but is this life reality? No, it is a film. Zoom back camera. We are images, dreams, photographs. We must not stay here prisoners. We shall break the illusion. This is Maja. Goodbye to the Holy Mountain. Real life awaits us.’

The camera zooms out accordingly to reveal all the hidden paraphernalia of film – the lights, the sound boom, the crew. It’s the world of Fellini’s 8 1/2.

However it’s also the world of the theatre again. The alchemist’s words echo the magician Prospero at the end of The Tempest as he breaks the spell that has kept the audience confined in a magical state of suspended disbelief for the duration of the play. Just as Prospero breaks his staff and casts his magic book into the sea, the alchemist overturns the Summit Masters’ round table. It’s just a prop. What we are brought back to at the end is that we have been watching a film and in this film about the dangers of illusion we must remember that what we are seeing is also an illusion. The alchemist has of course been played all along by Jodorowsky himself. He’s the director as alchemist and magician and thinking back to his initial meeting with the thief, turning shit into gold is also what the film-maker does. It’s a metaphor for many aspects of the cinema (certainly for the industry as Hollywood sees it) and a reminder that film-making is about chemical transformation. However it’s also about transforming the viewer who leaves the cinema a changed person and the end of the film is the signal for the audience to carry on its work in the world outside of the theatre. This new DVD release will enable a new generation of viewers to take it up again, as rich and strange as it was over a quarter of a century ago.

Jeff Hilson