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Medea

Medea

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 5 December 2011

Distributor: BFI

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writer: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Cast: Maria Callas, Giuseppe Gentile, Massimo Girotti, Laurent Terzieff

Italy/France/Germany 1970

111 mins

This fantasy vision of Greek myth seems to be some kind of hymn to the primitive, paean to the pagan: but better not to try to theorise it, just feel its poetic power. The vision is certainly alien and arcane enough to grip the imagination.

The early sections of Medea are trademark Pasolini: flesh, pain, cruelty, and death, in exotic garb, with much wordless standing around. But once he’s got that out of his system the rest is surprisingly tasteful, by his standards.

Maria Callas lends grandeur and gravitas as Medea the sorceress, equally expressive in stillness and in passionate animation. Giuseppe Gentile (an Olympic triple-jumper!) is an attractive and natural Jason. But what really makes a success of Medea, as with Pasolini’s subsequent films on mythic themes, is the beautiful cinematography (and production design). First, in Medea’s Caucasian homeland, the palette is blue and pale brown, foreground and background. The distinctly Italian faces of the supporting cast peer out from furs, skins, dyed cloaks and patchwork blankets, against sand, rock and scrub, and the wide blue sky. Then the shift to Corinth (played by Pisa) is signalled by saffron, turquoise and gold against the stones of the palace.

Certainly Pasolini’s Greece faces east, not west, as we are reminded by a suitably archaic soundtrack: quavering pucked strings, keening mourners and a women’s choir evoking the remote musical roots of the Orthodox Church.

Well-edited in comparison to some of this director’s work, the film is swift when it needs to be and doesn’t drag when the pace needs to slow. The weakest points are a couple of plonking explanations of the story by a centaur who sounds as though he has spent too long at the University of Bologna. I don’t think words were really Pasolini’s medium, but he gives us a few effective bursts of Euripides towards the end, as Medea simmers amid her chorus of attendants, as she is banished by King Creon, and then in her final confrontations with Jason.

Pasolini may not have created a work with the dramatic subtlety of Greek tragedy, and reports of its depth have been much exaggerated, but he realised some powerful and memorable scenes, and gestured at something fierce and elemental in Greek myth. In this symbolic representation of the clash of Mediterranean civilisation with the ‘barbarism’ from which it emerged, his sympathies seem to be with the latter. ‘Nothing is possible now’ is Medea’s closing line, and perhaps also Pasolini’s own cry of disenchantment.

Peter Momtchiloff

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A Man Vanishes

A Man Vanishes

Format: DVD

Release date: 24 October 2011

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Shôhei Imamura

Writer: Shôhei Imamura, Kôji Numata

Original story by: Akiyuki Nosaka

Original title: Ningen jôhatsu

Cast: Yoshie Hayakawa, Shôhei Imamura, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi

Japan 1967

130 mins

Mockumentaries have hit a rich vein of late, with the is-she-or-isn’t-she flirtation with truth and lies, the fact, fiction or faction of I Am Still Here, Cat Fish and Exit through the Gift Shop; the pranking of Borat and Bruno and the revival of the found footage horror genre of the Paranormal Activity franchise. Much of this can be traced to the nefarious activities of Endemol, and their swinish exploitation of reality to serve up Reality(TM), the human sacrifice (vote who to eliminate!), the pseudo-religious, cod-psychology rituals of the confessional and the gutting of any sense of distinction between the private and the public. Add to this our own starring in social networking sites and the fact that the political event of the decade resembled a set piece from a tent pole Hollywood movie but filmed in a way that anticipated Cloverfield. Jean Baudrillard couldn’t have written a better script for the noughties, the decade that made navel-gazing an internationally popular sport and gave us Saddam Hussein’s execution filmed on a camera phone and uploaded to YouTube.

It perhaps will come as a surprise then that over 40 years ago, Shôhei Imamura created the quintessential mockumentary, A Man Vanishes, a film essay revealing with cunning wit precisely these concerns and anticipating the traps of reality for filmmakers. In 1965, a plastic salesman, Tadashi Oshima, goes missing. There are many possible motives - guilt over an embezzlement at work, which was discovered and probably stymied his chances of promotion, the impending marriage to an overbearing fiancée. We are told that 90,000 Japanese men disappear every year, responding to social claustrophobia, work pressure and the watchful family. It is two years after the fact and a documentary crew, with the aid of Oshima’s fiancée - known as ‘the Rat’ - are on his trail. They try to reconstruct the events leading up to his disappearance, interviewing his family, his various girlfriends, his boss and workmates, and even a medium. We find out details of his life: he was a heavy drinker, successful with the ladies, used a lot of pomade on his hair. The crew often resort to hidden cameras and provocation of dubious ethical grounding. The pace of the film is insistent and driven, conversations and interviews overlap and fall out of synch with the images, still pictures are used and little black oblongs ostensibly preserve anonymity, but actually feel more like a stain of admitted guilt.

And yet for all the busyness and activity, Oshima is elusive. In fact, it is the very investigation itself - as indicated by the present tense of the title A Man Vanishes, not, as might be expected after two years have passed, ‘A Man Vanished’ - that erases his existence. He ceases to be a human being and becomes a missing person poster, an enigma, paradoxically flattened by the process of documentation. He now exists in Reality, and no longer reality.

The film begins to lose interest in him anyway and seems more concerned with revealing and examining its own methodology. The documentary makers meet like a secret cabal, a paranoiac’s worst nightmare. Their apparent objectivity is compromised by their obvious wish to manipulate and produce a good story. ‘It has to be more like an investigative film,’ the director (Imamura himself) mutters at one point. They use subtitles, not only to tell you who people are in relation to Oshima, but to pass on their own judgements. Why is Oshima’s fiancée known as the Rat? They become increasingly intrusive in the film as the investigation (like an investigation, but not actually an investigation) gets stuck on a hypothesis suggested in the interview with the medium. Was the Rat’s sister having an affair with Oshima? A tense dinner is arranged, which seems like one of those Big Brother moments when the contestants decide to have it out, and during which the sister (aka the Witch) is confronted with both the accusations and a witness (constantly referred to as the Fishmonger) who saw them together.

At this point, Imamura decisively intervenes, literally tearing the walls down and admitting the film to be a fiction, but the slipperiness of the construct and even the admission of fictionality doesn’t stop the film from its relentless pursuit of some larger meaning. This ‘meaning’ has completely erased the man of the title. In fact, if the man just turned up, the film would still go on searching for the ‘meaning’ that is only significant via its absence. It is no coincidence that the street argument that concludes the film (and which anticipates Jerry Springer’s spawn), as well as the argument at the dinner, hinges entirely on the veracity (or otherwise) of two mutually contradictory witnesses. Someone has to be lying for someone to be telling the truth. In fact, even Imamura’s confession that the film is a fiction is to some extent a lie. Oshima did exist and did disappear and the two sisters were real, though the Rat was paid a salary to appear in the film.

The intriguing sequel to this is the fact that Imamura went on to spend the next 10 years working exclusively on television documentaries. It’s almost as if A Man Vanishes represents a cautionary preface, an admission of the problematics before dedicating what was to be a significant chunk of his career to that strange and stained genre.

John Bleasdale

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Red Psalm

Red Psalm

Format: DVD

Release date: 24 October 2011

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Miklós Jancsó

Writer: Gyula Hernádi

Original title: Még kér a nép

Cast: Andrea Ajtony, András Ambrus, Lajos Balázsovits

Hungary 1971

82 mins

Filled with catchy revolutionary tunes and lush colour imagery of attractive peasants in a fertile landscape, Red Psalm (Még kér a nép, 1971) has an irresistible appeal, which is difficult to achieve with a largely non-narrative film with limited characterisation. Red Psalm centres on the Hungarian peasant uprisings of the late 1800s. The peasants engage in a series of confrontations with landowners, the Church and the military, each meeting an occasion for brief ideological exchanges. Crucially, unlike Eisenstein’s films, Red Psalm does not present stultifying certainties, but conflicting politico-economic ideas, which the audience can assess for themselves.

The film’s director, Miklós Jancsó, is a master of the long take: the entire film contains only 28 shots. With the large number of actors involved, and the fact that they are in perpetual motion (dancing as they sing, or pacing as they debate political ideas), it clearly took great skill to control the contents of each shot.

Jancsó’s style calls to mind two other directors, Béla Tarr and Aleksandr Sokurov. With the latter he shares highly choreographed long takes, and similarly uses visual interest to make up for limited narrative interest. Jancsó’s images are not as richly textured as Sokurov’s, yet their simple symbolism is equally pleasing. This is where there is something of Tarr in Jancsó: compensating for surface minimalism, there is a sense of equally important intangible elements at work. While not as otherworldly as Tarr’s films, Red Psalm, through symbolism and political debate, evokes ideas that ennoble the physical world, making it semantically richer.

The new Second Run DVD of Red Psalm contains one extra feature, also by Jancsó: Message of Stones (A kövek üzenete - Hegyalja, 1994), the third part in a documentary series, focused on the decimation of Hungary’s Jewish population. At the outset, the film is not promising: it feels more like a home video than a professional production, and revolves around taciturn old folk, rural roads and sleepy towns, without any voice-over to explain their significance. But Jancsó’s style soon asserts itself, and the relationship with the main feature becomes clearer. The documentary has a characteristically rousing soundtrack, and artistically composed shots come to balance more amateurish framings. Jancsó observes expatriate Jews returning to Hungary, where they visit ancestral monuments, abandoned synagogues and their parents’ and grandparents’ former houses and lands, long since appropriated by non-Jewish families. The film’s final scenes show a group of Jewish children learning folk dances, which they joyfully perform in a landscape where their ancestors were eradicated. When the children caper through ruined buildings, they seem like green shoots breaking through scorched earth. The sense of hope, renewal and determination these scenes evoke are of a piece with Red Psalm‘s spirit of unity and idealism.

The DVD’s liner notes feature an informative essay by Peter Hames, in which the scholar explains the significance of Red Psalm, defines Jancsó’s style, summarises the director’s career and contextualises his work.

Second Run have also released The Miklós Jancsó Collection Box Set on November 21, a 3-disc set comprising My Way Home (&#205gy jöttem, 1964), The Round-Up (Szegénylegények,1965), and The Red and the White (Csillagosok, katonák, 1967).

Alison Frank

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Magic Trip

Magic Trip

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 November 2011

Venues: Curzon (London only)

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 28 November 2011

Distributor: Studiocanal

Directors: Alex Gibney, Alison Ellwood

USA 2011

107 mins

Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters’ trip across America in the summer of 1964 is a keystone of the countercultural mythos, largely due to Tom Wolfe’s much read ‘new journalism’ non-fiction book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. The legend runs that Kesey, an ex-Olympic wrestling hope and Stanford graduate, on the rise after the positive reaction to his novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, took a yellow school bus and, with a revolving cast of kooks, painted it in rainbow colours, christened it ‘Further’ and took it on the road with Beat legend Neal Cassady (the Dean Moriarty of Kerouac’s On The Road) at the wheel. They made a long arc starting in La Honda, California, and sailing through LA, Arizona, and New Orleans to end up at New York to see the World’s Fair, and deliver Kesey to a promotional event for his second (published) novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. On the way much marijuana and LSD were imbibed, the pranksters hooked up with Timothy Leary and sundry Beat writers, many squares were freaked out and social conventions overturned and, y’know, everybody learned stuff about themselves, and the road was paved for the full-blown hippie freak-out of the later 60s, especially by the Acid Test, which occurred after the bus carried on moving after New York and became a kind of roving psychedelic party centre.

Kesey wanted to document the original trip, but seemed to believe that his prose wasn’t suitable for the task, and so filled ‘Further’ with tape recorders and 16mm movie cameras. Forty-odd hours of footage were shot, but unfortunately guys called Zonker tripping balls on acid don’t necessarily make for the most technically adept film crews. Much of the resultant film was haphazardly framed and composed, key events of life on the road went undocumented, and, more often than not they failed to synch up the sound correctly, resulting in chipmunk-voiced mayhem. Whatever Kesey’s ambitions for the film were, it largely ended up as background projection at various parties, with only the Dexedrine-assisted Cassady making it through the whole thing when the Pranksters attempted to screen it (unedited) for the first time. Magic Trip, a documentary by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, valiantly attempts to make something cohesive, feature-length and watchable from all that tape and stock, incorporating archive news reportage to give context, a little subtle reconstruction to fill in the gaps, some trippy animation frills and an artfully layered soundtrack culled from various interview sources, held together with a linking, questioning voice-over by Stanley Tucci.

The result is fascinating, but largely for the way it contradicts and undercuts the legend in various ways. For a start, the Merry Pranksters don’t look the part. They were, in Kesey’s words, ‘too young to be beatniks and too old to be hippies’, but I’m sure most readers of Wolfe’s work still pictured a mass of Indian-flared fabrics and flowing locks, not the vaguely preppy-looking Beach Boys session players the film reveals - Kesey is balding, for Christ’s sake. They are graduates, ex-marines, women seeking work at the World’s Fair aquatic ballet. These aren’t drop-outs or revolutionaries, at least, not yet.

Secondly, the trip was a bummer, or at least much more of one than most of the later hippies must have assumed. Wolfe’s prose (or Kesey’s, if he’d written his own book) could give forward momentum and meaning to the events depicted, putting you in the centre of the giddy psychedelic whirlwind. But other people’s trips, like their dreams, are personal, internal. 16mm film stock doesn’t record a kaleidoscopic audio-visual/emotional freak-out, it just shows a bunch of stuff happening, or, more often, not happening. Leary was apparently freaked out by the bus and his inhabitants and stayed in his room when they came to visit, Kerouac is a bitter old man nursing a cold beer, the World’s Fair is a let-down. Someone is left behind, another is lost to a psychiatric hospital. Time and again the voice-over reveals how much various Pranksters (mainly the women) wanted to get off the damn bus and go home, how much the soap opera couplings and uncouplings created tension and rancour, and how little of Cassady’s speed-freak psychobabble you could endure before wanting to beat him over the head with a steering wheel just to get him to shut the hell up for God’s sake. Magic Trip shows the ramshackle, unheroic reality of it all. An especially queasy sequence has the Pranksters rushing to dive in a lake outside New Orleans before realising, with mounting paranoia, that they are the only white guys there, swimming in the wrong part of a racially segregated lake. I’m sure that most viewers these days will be a touch disappointed that their reaction to this turn of events is not to throw together a desegregated protest party/bar-b-q, but to grab their stuff and get the hell out of there as fast as their pasty white legs can carry them.

Still, a fair bit of the footage makes you envious that you weren’t on the bus, at least for a short while; the restored photography is crisp and colourful; the landscapes, and some of the passengers, are beautiful. A great sequence creates entertaining imagery to accompany Kesey’s tape-recorded Stanford University LSD experience (part of the CIA’s MKULTRA programme!). There is much here to amuse, bemuse and tantalise; we get to see the inside of a particular bubble, with Ginsberg and Kerouac and the Grateful Dead, a nascent scene before it went global. And then trace it’s decline. Cassady was a nowhere man outside of the ‘Further’ driving seat, ending up dead on some rail tracks in Mexico. The Pranksters atomised, and Kesey never wrote another novel worth a damn. Still, we have this. It’s a record of being where it’s at in 1964, even if where it’s at is never truly, y’know, all that. Groove on that, brothers and sisters.

Mark Stafford

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The Ballad of Narayama

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The Ballad of Narayama

Format: Dual Format (Blu-ray + DVD)

Release date: 24 October 2011

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Shôhei Imamura

Writer: Shôhei Imamura

Based on two stories by: Shichirô Fukazawa

Original title: Narayama-bushi kô

Cast: Ken Ogata, Sumiko Sakamoto, Tonpei Hidari

Japan 1983

130 mins

In Chekhov’s short story ‘Peasants’, a waiter from the city has fallen sick and takes his family back to his village to be looked after, and wait for death. Almost immediately he realises this is a mistake. He’s just another mouth to feed and before long his own family are making it clear to him he should hurry up and die. The cruelty of survival is similarly the focus of Shôhei Imamura’s stunning film, based on a conflation of two short stories by Shichirô Fukazawa, each of which had already been given separate film treatments. In a remote mountain village, winters are harsh and basic survival is ground out of the earth. As a result, the elderly, on reaching 70, go up the mountain to die. Granny Orin (played by the excellent Sumiko Sakamoto) is a sturdy 69 with a mouthful of her own teeth, but feels her time has come. It is partly out of respect for tradition, partly because of religious beliefs that in that way she will see her ancestors again, but also because of a not-so-subtle societal pressure: she begins to be the butt of jokes and songs about the demon hag who has 33 teeth. The memory of her husband’s disappearance still makes her feel she has lost face.

As in the Chekhov short story, there is a shocking frankness about death and the need for a society on the edge of survival to get rid of its excess baggage, even when these are your relatives. Female babies are sold to the visiting salt merchant, unwanted children are killed on birth. A new born babe that is found in the field sets off a quarrel, not about murder, but about fly-tipping: ‘I don’t need that kind of fertilizer,’ an aggrieved peasant complains. Sexual behaviour is also restricted, with only the eldest son allowed to marry and the other men having to make do with what sex they can grab. Risuke, Granny Orin’s smelly second son, makes do with the neighbour’s dog when the urge takes him.

Imamura unashamedly places the village in the context of a nature that is drippingly red in tooth and claw. As humans hunt, so do eagles, sometimes stealing the same prey; as human rut, so do frogs; as humans are cruel, so we see the murderous affections of the praying mantis. And their survival is genuinely on a knife’s edge. This is not a Malthusian abstraction, or a Logan’s Run dystopia. Each family continually keeps track of the mouths to feed and does the math. They watch as potatoes are counted out and infractions are punished with an appalling severity. ‘I wonder if we’ll survive this winter,’ one villager muses aloud.

And yet for all the harshness and difficulty this is a bizarrely beautiful film, as it follows the village through its four seasons, from winter on. The change of the light, the landscape with the dominating and death-threatening mountain as well as the fire-lit interiors are beautifully rendered, without ever appearing anything other than real.

Before going up the mountain Granny Orin needs to resolve some unfinished business. Her eldest son’s wife has died and he needs a replacement. Stinky Risuke, who uses his breath as a weapon, also needs to have some sex otherwise the neighbours are going to find out about why their dog is so unhappy. The younger son is in a relationship with a girl from a bad family, who are suspected of thieving. The fall of this family is precipitous and is anticipated by the snake that serves as their house god abandoning their hut.

The main relationship is between Granny and Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata), her eldest son. She fears he is soft-hearted, too much like his father, and he is reluctant to let her go up the mountain. It is partly to convince him that she is ageing that Orin bashes her own teeth out, the actress having her own front teeth removed for the purposes of the film with an admirable commitment to realism. However, Tatsuhei is a complex character, troubled literally by ghosts from the past, and although he might demur from carrying out a punishment one day, on another he might well participate. And in the end it will be Tatsuhei who will carry Granny Orin up to her final resting place as the first snows threaten to fall.

Imamura’s achievement here is in presenting a radically different society with values that clash directly with what we today consider universal and inalienable rights. And yet this is not of mere anthropological interest, he is neither romanticising nor patronising the villagers. There is broad comedy and deep tragedy, both the beauty and the cruel indifference of nature, tenderness, humour, love and cruelty. Our understanding of the village is never allowed the privileged position of judgement. The last 30 minutes of the film are as moving and magical as anything I’ve ever seen.

John Bleasdale

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Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Format: Double play (Blu-ray + DVD)

Release date: 24 October 2011

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: John McNaughton

Writers: Richard Fire, John McNaughton

Cast: Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold, Tom Towles

USA 1986

82 mins

John McNaughton characterised Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, his acclaimed, controversial 1986 thriller, as a horror film using the technique of realism to achieve its effect on the audience. This sounds maybe a little cold-blooded and opportunistic, and maybe it is: it seems to suggest that those who see the film as a deep insight into the mind of a murderer could be wasting their time, since all the filmmaker wants to do is scare you, and he realised that being as convincing and low-key as possible was a good way to do it. Never mind that Henry Lee Lucas, the allegedly wildly prolific real-life killer McNaughton took as inspiration, was in all probability a fantasist who confessed to dozens of unsolved killings because he liked visitors while he was in jail.

Still, the film has an undeniable power in its merciless bleakness. McNaughton had been commissioned to make nothing more than a cheapjack exploiter, and he chose something more ambitious, a character study and an evocation of the deadened, affectless world of the psychopath. His movie is commendably free of overt sensationalism and slasher cliché, which sets it apart from nearly everything made on the theme of serial homicide in the decades since it appeared. Many of the killings are presented as crime scenes (a little fetishised, it’s true) with only the sound of the murder itself echoing, disembodied, on the soundtrack. The performances are marvellously restrained and naturalistic. Michael Rooker naturally garlanded most of the attention for his still, quiet work as Henry, but Tracy Arnold as Becky is the most believable and normal character, which is a hard job to pull off, and Tom Towles, as her repulsive brother Otis, really pushes personal unpleasantness as far as it can go in a performance that’s not so much free of vanity as wallowing in obscenity. As the most ebullient character, he has to walk a fine line to evoke Otis’s offensive heartiness without violating the total conviction the movie needs to pull off its central trope.

Music is always an issue in realistic films: the trio of composers credited here manage a menacing ‘Henry theme’, which sometimes seems to risk glorifying its killer by empowering him, and elsewhere we get some revolting synth sax on a love scene and a bizarre accompaniment to Becky’s job search: some attempt to play ‘jaunty normality’ as a musical motif, I guess. Dreadful. So the movie works best without any dramatic mood elevation, with the impassive camera observing coldly; even better, the home invasion murders filmed by the killers themselves and seen only on playback on a boxy tube TV, the scene the British Board of Film Censors felt compelled to prune. In the new DVD it’s back, uncut. The dead eye of the camcorder imparts a horrible documentary snuff flavour that adds another layer of faux-reality.

The victims are mostly shown without sympathy, perhaps as Henry would see them. A dignified lady dog walker is spared, and we’re being teased with the possibility that Henry might have redeeming traits. He tells a sob story of childhood abuse, but when he describes killing his mother, the method keeps changing: like the visitors in Haneke’s Funny Games, he shuns simple explanation by offering a succession of fake stories. The reasoning here is perhaps simply that Henry will be more frightening if he remains free from reassuring Freudian interpretation. He can’t be tidied away.

So, taking McNaughton at his word, I see Henry as a Halloween tale for grown-ups: skilfully made, convincing while it lasts, packing a few nasty twists and some seriously disturbing images, but not ultimately rooted in any deep understanding of what makes a psychopath, and so not chilling in a way that outlasts the taut running time. Maybe I’m just desensitised?

David Cairns

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Phase IV

Phase IV

Format: Cinema

Screening dates: 22-27 October 2011

Venue: ICA, London

Format: Region 1 DVD

Release date: 23 September 2008

Distributor: Legend Films

Director: Saul Bass

Writers: Mayo Simon, John Barry

Based on the novel by: Barry N. Malzberg

Cast: Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy, Lynne Frederick, thousands of ants

USA 1974

84 mins

Environmental fears have long presented a rich vein for fantastic fictions. Arthur Machen’s 1917 novella The Terror depicts a world in which normally docile animals begin to turn against humankind in a strange reflection of the horrors of the Great War. During the Cold War, the mushroom clouds of the 1950s spawned one mutated colossus after another, while the subtler, more insidious environmental fears of the 60s and 70s produced a swarm of ecological horror films, some of them very good.

Gonzo-entomology doc The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971) won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, despite being presented by an entirely fictitious, gleefully deranged mad scientist, Nils Hellstrom, who clearly can’t wait to welcome our new insect overlords. On the other side of the Pacific, Colin Eggleston’s haunting Long Weekend (1978) saw a self-absorbed suburban couple who behave inconsiderately on a beach holiday get their come-uppance from Mother Nature herself. Both of these are well worth seeing, but for sophistication, imagination and ambition, none can match Saul Bass’s Phase IV.

Famed as a graphic designer of posters and title sequences for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho), Stanley Kubrick (Spartacus) and Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas), Bass only got one shot at directing a feature, and by all accounts didn’t enjoy the process much, but the resulting film is a period masterpiece that is both a microcosm of contemporary progressive issues and a beautiful, intelligent science fiction film.

An unusual planetary alignment in our solar system exposes planet Earth to anomalous electromagnetic fields. Initially it seems that nothing has happened, but entomologists begin to observe odd behaviour on a very small scale: different species of ants, normally aggressive to one another, are joining forces to prey on larger animals, including humans.

The ants march across America, destroying whole towns, gnawing through wooden structures and destroying crops and livestock. In an attempt to find out what’s going on, and try to stop it, English entomologist Dr Ernest Hubbs (a frothingly good Nigel Davenport) and American mathematician James Lesko (Michael Murphy) set out to observe a colony of the super-intelligent ants from the apparent safety of a geodesic biosphere in the Arizona desert.

What follows is a long, tense stand-off between ants and humans, both enclosed within their architecturally expressive command posts: the ants build angular skyscrapers, the humans shelter in a hi-tech buckyball.

While the ants seem to have reached a mutual agreement - to destroy all other life on Earth rather than one another - the humans wage a battle of their own: Hubbs, cantankerous and autocratic, wants to destroy the ants, while the younger Lesko attempts to communicate with them by transmitting geometric forms at their structures. [As an aside, the film is curious for featuring the first ever crop circle, made by its ant stars, a couple of years before we humans developed our own in the Hampshire countryside.]

Although its interiors were shot at Pinewood, Phase IV‘s arid, ant-ravaged locations convey a convincing sense of a dying America and, as you’d expect from a first-class designer, the film looks exquisite. The two warring civilisations are presented through their contrasting environments; the human decorated with huge computers, tangles of magnetic tape and piles of computer printouts looks like a chaotic maelstrom compared to the gleaming, pristine myrmecological world shot by Ken Middleham, who also filmed the insect sequences for The Hellstrom Chronicle. A brooding score, featuring eerie synthesiser sounds from White Noise’s David Vorhaus, further accentuates the mood of alienation and impending ant-nihilation.

Read our Reel Sounds column on the soundtrack of Phase IV.

Enigmatic and intriguing, Phase IV remains ultimately ambiguous as to which future we should choose: the faceless bio-mechanical harmony of the ants, or the chaotic, destructive but emotionally rich world of the human?

Nobody can have expected this low-key, philosophical and ultimately rather downbeat film to be a commercial success, but Paramount still tried to exert control over the final cut, leading to a quarrel over its ending. Bass shot a final sequence showing the remains of the human world after the ants had won, but the studio re-edited it (perhaps finding its post-human vision too depressing) to create a more oblique solarised psychedelic montage, which still works, though I’d love to see what Bass originally intended.

An already remarkable film, Phase IV is made all the more so by being something of a one-off - Bass never made another feature, while writer Mayo Simon only wrote one more (Futureworld, a sequel to Westworld) and a pilot for the Man from Atlantis TV series, before starting an award-winning career as a playwright.

For a long time hard to see, Phase IV is now available on a no-frills DVD from Legend Films in the US, while an ant-sized, fan-led movement is petitioning to have the director’s cut made available.

Phase IV screens at the ICA, London, from Oct 22 to 27.

Mark Pilkington

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Damnation Alley

Damnation Alley

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 September 2011

Distributor: Final Cut Entertainment

Director: Jack Smight

Writers: Alan Sharp, Lukas Heller

Based on the novel by: Roger Zelazny

Cast: Jan-Michael Vincent, George Peppard, Dominique Sanda

USA 1977

91 mins

The post-apocalyptic adventure Damnation Alley begins with nuclear conflict as represented by stock footage from Operation Crossbow (1965) and Earthquake (1974), before on-screen text appearing over a barren desert landscape informs the audience that ‘The Third World War left the planet shrouded in a pall of radioactive dust, under skies lurid and angry, in a climate gone insane’. Radiation has caused insect life-forms to mutate, with eight-foot-long scorpions making it dangerous to venture across the desert, while storms are as sudden as they are devastating. The military officers stationed at an air-force base in California have survived nuclear fall-out, but while Major Eugene Denton (George Peppard) and Lt Tom Perry (Kip Neven) still follow the chain of command, rebellious Lt Jake Tanner (Jan Michael Vincent) and laid-back guard Keegan (Paul Winfield) have decided to take it easy. When the base is destroyed due to a carelessly discarded cigarette, the four men board the Landmaster, a futuristic 12-wheel truck designed to tackle any terrain, and embark on the cross-country journey to Albany, New York. They are searching for the fellow survivors who have been sending out radio transmissions in the hope of rebuilding society and aim to reach their destination by taking a stretch of road that Denton has dubbed ‘Damnation Alley’ as it runs between intense radiation areas. As with most journeys, this one has its share of speed bumps, such as losing two members of the team, evading killer cockroaches and escaping from small-town psychos.

As the action takes place in a post-apocalyptic world that is evoked through desert locations and superimposed radioactive skies, Damnation Alley could be generously described as a decent B-movie if it were the product of American International Pictures or New World. However, this was actually a 20th Century Fox production that carried the hefty price-tag of $17 million and was intended to be a summer blockbuster. Unfortunately, production delays caused by the inability of the special effects team to successfully realise mutated insect life resulted in the planned 1976 release being postponed to 1977. During this time, another Fox science-fiction project by the name of Star Wars (1977) opened to phenomenal business, making the desert-bound heroics of Damnation Alley immediately obsolete when compared to the saga of a galaxy far, far away.

Yet in other respects, Damnation Alley is actually ahead of its time: it fitted the definition of ‘straight-to-video’ before the rental market actually existed, predicting countless low-budget action films that passed off wide open space as post-nuclear wasteland. While the aforementioned stock footage is easy to spot, the special effects that show the effects of radiation on the Earth’s eco-system are simply embarrassing; the ‘giant’ scorpions appear with the assistance of blue screen and never pose a serious threat to the motorcycle-riding Tanner due to the lack of spatial continuity, although the armour-plated cockroaches briefly take Damnation Alley into the realms of eco-horror by eating the flesh of one team member and trapping Tanner in a department store.

As with most road movies, Damnation Alley is episodic in structure, meaning that the protagonists eventually run out of threats to deal with - a group of gun-wielding hillbillies get more screen time than the scorpions or the cockroaches because they are a more cost-effective menace - and a radioactive storm is used to wrap everything up. Some musings on post-nuclear existence are interspersed with the set-pieces; Tanner wonders if he has ‘finally gone over the edge’ when recounting his ride across the desert with a mannequin on the back of his bike, as if the dummy was his girlfriend; Keegan insists, ‘There would be a hell of a lot more people feeling and thinking, and playing baseball, and singing, and making love, and raising babies’ if militaristic routine was disregarded. The best scene is a stop-off at a sand-strewn Las Vegas casino that prompts shared nostalgias for the pre-nuclear world - the soundtrack is filled with long-gone chatter and table action - until the entrance of another survivor, European showgirl Janice (Dominique Sanda), abruptly ends the slot machine session. The team later pick up frightened teenager Billy (Jackie Earle Haley) and form a makeshift family unit, with the homely atmosphere of the Landmaster turning what should be an imposing vehicle into a glorified Winnebago. Damnation Alley is too average to deserve cult following, although any film with the line ‘This whole town is infested with killer cockroaches. I repeat: Killer cockroaches!’ at least warrants a footnote in the history of science-fiction cinema.

John Berra

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Soylent Green

Soylent Green poster

Format: DVD

Release date: 29 September 2003

Distributor: Warner Home Video

Director: Richard Fleischer

Writer: Stanley R. Greenberg

Based on the novel by: Harry Harrison

Cast: Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young

USA 1973

97 mins

Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green, a loose adaptation of Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, is a prescient eco-science-fiction drama that earned itself cult status among science fiction fans due to its ‘shock’ climax. Released in 1973, a year after Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull) and the closely aligned but largely forgotten Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth) (Michael Campus), Soylent Green fuses a noir-ish police procedural plot with a dystopian vision of a future world ravaged by dwindling resources, over-population, corporate corruption and environmental damage. After starring in Franklin J. Schaffner’s seminal Planet of the Apes (1968) and Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man (1971) Charlton Heston, the era’s go-to action hero, returned to the science fiction genre to star as Robert Thorn, a tough, cynical and deeply disillusioned detective in the decaying New York of 2022. Heston’s co-star Edward G. Robinson made his final screen appearance as Sol Roth, Thorn’s elderly apartment-sharing ‘book’ - a person employed to read the remaining archives of written material stored in the city to glean information of possible use in criminal investigations. Roth is the film’s heart and soul, his nostalgic yearnings for the pre-eco-meltdown world still act as a mindful warning to this day. With New York acting as a microcosm for the ills affecting the planet, Fleischer’s movie is of interest to contemporary viewers more for its enduring themes than for its actual entertainment value, as in the cold light of day it fails, much like Michael Anderson’s eco-science-fiction-based thriller Logan’s Run (1976), to fully deliver on its intriguing premise.

Soylent Green is not short on narrative ambition, its plot taking in corporate-sanctioned assassination, references to ‘the greenhouse effect’, food riots, a global conspiracy, racketeering, assisted suicides and an irreparable divide between the isolated rich and the teeming, poverty-stricken masses. The scarcity of food dominates proceedings, with the common citizens (a futuristic version of the Soviet-era proletariat) reduced to surviving on the Soylent Corporation’s range of processed foodstuffs, including the titular product that Thorn’s murder investigation uncovers horrific facts about. The fetishisation of actual food is seen in the reverential manner in which black market acquisitions (lettuce, apples, beef, brandy) are treated by Thorn and Roth during a sequence in which they sit down to a ‘dinner party’ amid the squalor and cramped conditions of their apartment. That those foodstuffs have been stolen without conscience by Thorn from the luxurious apartment of the dead businessman William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten), whose assassination is the catalyst for Thorn’s discoveries, highlights the levels of corruption and desperation running through this future society. The juxtaposition of poverty and wealth runs throughout the movie, the exclusive apartment complex (complete with concierge) stands in stark contrast to the sparse living conditions and homelessness seen elsewhere and has uncomfortable connotations, given the rise of gated communities and continued influence on political decisions wielded by big business in the modern world. It is in these comparative angles that Soylent Green has its strengths; never more so than in Sol’s assisted suicide at a government-run facility, echoes of which are felt in our society with the ongoing debate on the issue and Martin Amis’s calls for a euthanasia booth on every corner where people can end their lives with ‘a Martini and a medal’. Robinson’s death two weeks after shooting wrapped adds an extra level of poignancy to the sequence, which remains the stylistic highlight of the movie.

The role of women in Soylent Green‘s vision is limited to one of two choices - either a faceless, desperate existence among the masses, or a paid role as ‘furniture’ to a rich owner, a sub-plot that the screenplay touches on via Thorn’s affair (as much about the luxury of the apartment and the food) with Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), Simonson’s former live-in lover, who comes with the apartment. The film was released during the era of second-wave feminism and this aspect of the narrative would have struck a powerful chord with audiences. But due to the bland, lifeless performance delivered by Taylor-Young and the perfunctory nature of the sub-plot, subsumed as it is by the conspiracy at the heart of the movie, it’s an under-explored theme.

Despite its thematic relevance in the modern world, Soylent Green is only intermittently engaging and is an ultimately unsatisfactory experience, with its revelatory climax attempting, but failing to match the Statue of Liberty sequence in Planet of the Apes for shock value. The screenplay and pacing are leaden at times where a more upbeat tempo, punchier dialogue and a fuller exploration of the many narrative sub-strands could have placed the movie in genuine classic territory. The two big action sequences - a mass food riot and Thorn’s exploration of the Soylent ‘waste disposal’ plant - are adequate at best and while the scenes of over-population and squalor are relatively well-drawn the luxury dwellings, gadgets and fashions that surround the elite now look kitsch in the extreme. The outdated feel isn’t helped by an unmemorable soundtrack that veers between Americana folk and funk where it cries out for a throbbing, discordant blast of electronica to mirror and add another layer of gloom to the onscreen pessimism. As much as I generally loathe remakes, reboots and re-imaginings, Soylent Green is a film that, on paper at least, would benefit from just such an undertaking, in a manner similar to Nicholas Winding Refn’s proposed updating of Logan’s Run.

Neil Mitchell

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Juice

Juice

Format: DVD

Release date: 3 October 2011

Distributor: Second Sight

Director: Ernest R. Dickinson

Writers: Ernest R. Dickinson, Gerard Brown

Cast: Omar Epps, Tupac Shakur, Jermaine Hopkins, Khalil Kain, Samuel L. Jackson

USA 1992

91 mins

It’s been a long time coming but Juice finally arrives on DVD for the very first time, and despite being made almost 20 years ago it’s incredible how well the film holds up.

It would be easy to write Juice off as just another entry in the 90s urban crime/black cinema genre and the story, about the breakdown of the friendship between four Harlem boys (played by Omar Epps, real-life rapper Tupac Shakur, Jermaine Hopkins and Khalil Kain) after crime enters their lives, is not a particularly original one. But unlike its predecessors, such as Boyz N the Hood (1991) and Straight out of Brooklyn (1991), it takes a different approach. While these films focus on (and usually glamorise) gang life, Juice is much more of a morality play, pulling no punches in its portrayal of what happens to ostensibly good people when a life of crime beckons.

Violence seems endemic in the ghetto, but while Tupac Shakur’s bullied Bishop is drawn to the thug life, particularly after he gets hold of a handgun, the lead protagonist Q, played by a teenage Omar Epps, searches for a life beyond that, forming a relationship with a mature girlfriend and seeking to fulfil his dream of becoming a DJ. Both are looking to gain respect, or ‘juice’, as they mature into manhood, but with their lives drifting in different directions and loyalties put under pressure, a final reckoning becomes inevitable, giving the film’s third act an air of nervy tension.

Beyond its strong and highly quotable script (‘Riverside, motherfucker!’), the film offers plenty more to enjoy, not least the fantastic performances of its young cast, Epps and Shakur in particular. Co-writer-director Ernest R. Dickinson, who, before making his directorial debut with this film, cut his teeth as Spike Lee’s cinematographer on Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991) and Malcolm X (1992), also shows a clear understanding of the material and handles the portrayal of the four friends with both skill and style. The music too is sensational (although perhaps only if you like hip-hop), and the eagle-eyed will spot some notable faces from the world of rap, not just Tupac and Queen Latifah (who cameos as the organiser of a local DJ competition).

The only disappointment with this DVD release is the lack of any extra features - a real shame as the film is crying out for the special edition treatment. However, the fact that it has been released on DVD at all (finally, we can replace those well-worn VHS copies) is something worth celebrating. So isn’t it about time you got the Juice?

Toby Weidmann