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Cannibal Holocaust

Cannibal Holocaust

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 26 September 2011

Distributor: Shameless Entertainment

Director: Ruggero Deodato

Writer: Gianfranco Clerici

Cast: Robert Kerman, Carl Gabriel Yorke, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen, Luca Barbareschi, Salvatore Basile, Ricardo Fuentes

Italy 1980

95 mins

The year is 1978 and a respected group of American documentary-makers led by Alan Yates (Gabriel Yorke) have disappeared in the Columbian jungle while attempting to film the cannibal tribesmen reputed to live there. Professor Monroe (Robert Kerman) is dispatched to find out what’s happened to them. He makes arduous progress through the land and its peoples, finally making contact with the feared Yamamomo, or ‘Tree People’, who reveal to him the grisly remains of Yates’s crew, and several cans of undeveloped film, which he manages to take back to New York. The TV executives who financed the documentary are desperate to broadcast it as ‘the green inferno’ but the more Monroe hears about Yates and his methods the less he likes it, and when we finally see the footage our worst suspicions are confirmed. It’s a horrifying catalogue of rape, mutilation and murder in which the film crew burn down a village, kill livestock, and essentially stop at nothing to achieve ever more sensational footage, goading the ‘Tree People’ into brutal vengeance that they remain determined to capture on film even as their friends and lovers are slaughtered in front of them. It can’t be screened. ‘Who are the real cannibals?’ Monroe ponders as he walks out onto the NY streets…

Read the interview with Ruggero Deodato.

Context is everything. I first saw Ruggero Deodato’s film by chance rather than design one morning around 20 years ago, hung over and feeling none too clever in Alex B’s Lewisham flat. Alex is a musician, writer and inveterate gore-hound. It was a hand-labelled VHS tape of recent acquisition, a bootleg Japanese forbidden artefact, banned by the Video Recordings Act of 1982, which bizarrely left all of the violence and unsimulated animal cruelty (1) intact, but used an optical blurring effect over any shots revealing genitalia. I’d seen a Lucio Fulci film or two and thought I knew what I was in for. I was wrong. The film was, in my fragile state, utterly psychologically toxic; the nihilistic tone, brutal imagery and ugly portrayal of human nature didn’t leave me after the tape had played out and I’d found my way home, and would bother me for a long time after. It was probably my most extreme reaction to a film since the joy I had watching Star Wars at the age of seven.

2011: I encounter Cannibal again, but this time at the Cine-Excess V (‘the politics and aesthetics of excess’) conference. Deodato is one of the guests and will receive an honorary doctorate from Brunel University at the Italian Cultural Institute as part of the event. I’m waiting for a screening of his 1976 film Live Like A Cop, Die Like a Man (2) when one of the directors of the Institute refers to Deodato as ‘Il Maestro’, with evident respect. Over the weekend dozens of academics will present papers on ‘Cine-torrent: Remediating Cult Images in Online Communities’ and ‘Bad Sisters in Prison: Excesses and Gender Politics in 1970s Exploitation’ and the like (3). Cannibal Holocaust itself is shown in a brand new print at the Odeon Covent Garden. I’m sitting next to a nice bloke from Cardiff who has driven here for the film, he thinks of Cannibal as a classic. A much loved trip he is delighted to revisit on the big screen in the presence of its maker. I ask if it’s his Toy Story 2 and he happily agrees. That bootleg VHS nasty has become a revered totem of the golden age of exploitation, no longer forbidden contraband, now name-dropped as the first ‘found footage’ film, made long before The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. Watching it again is a strange and numbing affair. I’m not overwhelmed this time. I’m taking notes.

It’s a film of bone-deep misanthropic anger whose targets are the sensationalist media and the careless exploitation of the Third World. But it undermines and contradicts itself in various ways. I’m sure these contradictions serve to confirm its status as morally repugnant hackwork to many, but I think they also give the film an irksome power it wouldn’t otherwise possess. If it made more sense it would doubtless lose its nightmarish edge.

For instance the moralising tussles between Monroe and the TV execs (4) seem absurd in the context of Cannibal Holocaust‘s excesses, its relish in putting everything on screen. Real animal mutilation and stock footage of actual executions are mixed in with the faked rape, forced tribal abortion, rape, dismemberment, rape, cannibalism, ritual murder and rape. You’re attacking the news media for its excesses and you’re showing us this? And while Deodato’s sympathies are mainly with the tribespeople, they still function as the film’s bogeymen, go uncredited and appear largely as an undifferentiated mass in various shades of mud, their status as victims made questionable as they commit savage ritual after savage ritual, invariably against defenceless women. Monroe is given to us as the moral centre of the film, in that he tries to treat the natives with respect for their customs, and fights with the TV company over funding and screening these atrocities, yet even he doesn’t seem to care much that it took the killing of a few Shamataris to ingratiate his group with the ‘Tree People’.

The film’s biggest dichotomy, though, is one between style and story. ‘Realism’ is emphasised throughout, there is no studio work, it’s all shot on real locations. It begins with a news report about the missing crew; documentary footage and footage from ‘the green inferno’ is wound in and out of the narrative. The found footage that dominates the second half of the film uses fogged, scratched and wrongly exposed film (even a sly shot where a camera is adjusted for the wrong diaphragm), all to achieve a remarkable verisimilitude. But this documentary ‘realism’ has to battle with an increasing sense of unreality about the behaviour of the Americans; they are so uncaring, stupid, disrespectful, and in the end, flat-out evil that they become absurd. The hard-won ‘realism’ scrapes against this over-the-top suicidal obnoxiousness, creating a trippy doublethink that underlies the final slaughter.

The new edit leaves the genitalia unsmudged, but optically fudges over scenes of real animal death, which are now totally unacceptable. As to whether the rest of the film is acceptable, or of worth, well, it’s still extraordinary, made an age before irony conquered all when exploitation films meant it. Its edges have been a little blunted by time; Riz Ortolani’s fine, strange soundtrack of inappropriate syn-drums, doomy chords and syrupy strings, and the style of the ‘TV’ sequences have dated. And the occasional flat performance and line of clunky dialogue now stick out more than I remember in a film straining for ‘realism’. But the smart structure, the skill of the filmmakers, the disturbing idea behind that last reel, where the urge to film takes precedence over self-preservation or humanity, all give the film a power that lifts it above most depravity shows of that era. There are resonances here that reach back to Peeping Tom, forward to Man Bites Dog and Four Lions. Its furious contradictions and lack of control mean that it remains troubling, a magnetic north indicating how far a film can go. It’s a misanthropic, misogynistic, gratuitously offensive piece of crap. It’s a seminal transgressive masterpiece. It is what it is.

Mark Stafford

1 Deodato probably regrets the scenes of animal abuse he incorporated in Cannibal Holocaust and Ultimo Mondo Cannibale (1976), mainly, one feels, because he’s sick of answering questions about it… ‘Everyone asks about animals… If you grow up on a farm, none of this is unusual… If I only showed the Americans killing other humans it would have no impact, they had to kill animals to be killers… We’ve been inured to real death… In the US they give a child a rabbit, ‘aw sweet bunny’, then the kid goes to school, kills 15 other kids, goes back to the bunny, sings ‘aw, sweet bunny’ Etc, etc… It wasn’t a trope he invented, it was there in the Mondo movies of the 60s and Umberto Lenzi’s Deep River Savages (1972), but outside of cult circles, those films have vanished from public sight. Cannibal Holocaust‘s profile means that Deodato’s still dodging flack.

2 If you were looking for a more nuanced insight into the human condition from Deodato outside of his misanthropic masterwork, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man wasn’t it. The film opens with an astonishing, perilous bike chase through Rome that raises hopes for something special, but it is, for the most part, crass, witless, sexist and fatally lacking in any kind of tension or credibility. It details the efforts of two ‘Special Force’ cops (Marc Porel and Ray Lovelock as Fred and Tony) to take down crime boss Pasquini using frankly random methods (burning the cars outside one of his clubs, sleeping with his nympho niece) while fending off his thugs’ assassination attempts. A case was made at Cine Excess that Live Like a Cop was Deodato’s reaction to Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, a period of violent political and social unrest. If so, it’s unfortunate that it most reminded me of The Bullshitters, TV’s ‘The Comic Strip presents’ parody of The Professionals, right down to the nylon underwear and homoeroticism. Fred and Tony are arseholes, from beginning to end (best encapsulated in the moment when they laugh at the idea that getting their maid’s daughter pregnant might be considered their problem), but they aren’t significantly better or worse than anybody else on screen. The result is a bit of a shrug.

3 It really is an odd event, fans of the word ‘contiguity’ should make a date. Iain Robert Smith’s presentation on International Guerillas (1990), a long-lost ‘masala’ movie from Turkey, wherein three squabbling brothers unite to go and kill Salman Rushdie, was an eye-opener…

4 A female TV executive on audiences: ‘The more you rape their senses the happier they are!’ Well, that’s Bargain Hunt for you…

Cine-Excess V took place from 26 to 28 May 2011 at the Odeon Covent Garden, London. For more information please go to the Cine-Excess website.
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Harakiri

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Harakiri

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 26 September 2011

Distributor: Eureka

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

Writers: Shinobu Hashimoto, Yasuhiko Takiguchi

Based on the novel by: Yasuhiko Takiguchi

Original title: Seppuku

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Ishihama, Shima Iwashita

Japan 1962

133 mins

Masaki Kobayashi, most often celebrated in the west for Kwaidan, his ghost story omnibus film, more typically made films of violent conflict reflecting his pacifist convictions. This is not as easy as it sounds.

Doing what little he could to resist Japanese militarism as a soldier in WWII, as a filmmaker Kobayashi threw himself into demonstrating the futility of armed struggle. In movies like Samurai Rebellion (1967) and 1962’s Seppuku (just released in the UK on DVD under its more common Western title, Harakiri), the director plays a cunning game, building up a cauldron of seething dramatic tension that finally explodes in a bloody climax, satisfying the demands of a genre audience who require chanbara swordplay, yet resulting in no beneficial effects, for anybody.

Crucially, Kobayashi isn’t opposed to the enjoyment of violent movies, so he doesn’t see any need to destroy audience involvement or render the battle scenes overly unpleasant with excessive gore, or unexciting via distanciation effects. His fights are stunning spectacles and absolutely thrilling to behold, especially after the hours of slow-mounting pressure that build up to them. For tales of defeat, in which not even the memory of a heroic effort will go recorded by history, these movies are surprisingly pleasurable, even at their grimmest.

What Kobayashi is opposed to, and very strongly, is the whole samurai tradition, and its continuing celebration in Japanese cinema. While some filmmakers, notably Kurosawa, were almost wholly approving of the idea of the noble warrior class, and others seem to have been largely agnostic on the subject, seeing it as purely a commercial genre element to be exploited, Kobayashi is devoted, in his period films, to destroying the pernicious myth of an honourable tradition of chivalrous combat and feudal rule. He does so mercilessly, though the tradition, here aptly embodied by an empty suit of armour, always remains at the film’s end, undefeatable. It’s a surprise to see that Shinobu Hashimoto, who adapted Yasuhiko Takiguchi’s novel, also worked on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai.

This slow, savage destruction of the mythic code of the samurai is delivered via a series of flashbacks, embedded in the action to produce an illusion of indirection - in fact, the story moves as directly and ruthlessly as a sword thrust. But the ingenious structure allows an incremental build-up of tension, the weaving of several narrative lines, and a final, cataclysmic coming together of all that’s been set up, resulting in a highly cathartic outburst of action.

Along with Kobayashi’s eschewing of delicacy and ellipsis, there’s an avoidance of humour, except for the very blackest sort, embodied by Tatsuya Nakadai’s sepulchral performance. The film is deliberately heavy and sombre and truly downbeat, yet it never feels weighed down, depressing or turgid: because it’s an embodiment of the true cinematic urge, the evocation of ideas with image and sound, delivered with passion and anger by a fearless and resourceful filmmaker.

See the original before Takashi Miike’s version of the same story hits UK screens in October.

David Cairns

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Heavenly Creatures

Heavenly Creatures

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 12 September 2011

Distributor: Peccadillo Pictures

Director: Peter Jackson

Writers: Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson

Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, Sarah Peirse

New Zealand/Germany 1994

99 mins

This review contains spoilers.

What makes good kids turn bad? Bad parenting? Degenerate youth culture? This isn’t just a 21st-century debate: Peter Jackson’s 1950s-set film Heavenly Creatures (1994) tells the true story of a teenage girl named Pauline who murders her mother with the help of her best friend Juliette (Kate Winslet, in her debut film role). The title sequence underlines this incongruity, opening with archive travelogue footage of Christchurch, New Zealand, while a cheerful voice-over narrator identifies places of learning and worship, streets and parks, where citizens go about their perfect lives. The screaming begins just before the narration ends, and there is a switch to a point-of-view shot of the protagonists running through a forest. The girls emerge, covered in blood, and Pauline cries, ‘It’s Mummy! She’s terribly hurt’.

Although the film opens with a flash-forward to its ending, for viewers who don’t know the story behind the film there are few clues to identify the girls as potential murderers. Pauline’s lower-middle-class family must take in lodgers to make ends meet, but her parents are loving and she seems well-adjusted. Juliette’s parents are less attached to her: affluent professionals, they are happy to leave her alone for months at a time, even while she is recuperating from chronic lung problems. If you had to guess which of the girls’ mothers had retribution coming to her, you would expect it to be Juliette’s flighty, glamorous ‘Mummy’, not Pauline’s reliable, careworn one.

After the film’s opening, the only foreshadowing of violence is in the girls’ elaborate fantasy world. Through dress-up, letters, stories, and sculpture, they create and inhabit the characters of a mediaeval royal family, complete with a bloodthirsty wayward son. This fantasy world appears to seep into reality when Pauline encounters adults who annoy her: she imagines them being impaled or sliced in two by one of the clay figurines come to life. There are also several scenes in the film that literally recreate the world through the girls’ eyes, complete with castles, unicorns and giant butterflies.

Though it makes sense in light of Peter Jackson’s later fantastic bent as director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, at the time it may have seemed strange to infuse a true story with so much of the imaginary. As Pauline’s own diaries sealed the murder case against her, it is fitting that the girls’ inner world should form a central part of the film. Heavenly Creatures is arguably more enjoyable precisely because none of it takes place in a courtroom. Instead, the film focuses on its compelling portrait of adolescence, showing the girls as they are pulled by childish energy and imagination on the one hand and, on the other, increasing autonomy and sexual desire.

Why did a normal transition lead to tragedy in this case? The parents’ squeamish response to their daughters’ sexuality? The girls’ solipsistic impulsiveness? The film sympathises with every character, but provides no clear answers.

Alison Frank

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Children of the Revolution

Fusako Shigenobu in the Middle East (Children of the Revolution)

Format: DVD + VOD

Release date: 5 September 2011

Distributor: E2 Films

Director: Shane O’Sullivan

Ireland/UK/Germany 2010

92 mins

Children of the Revolution website

Cinematic re-imaginings of 1968 have flooded our screens in recent years to mark the 40th anniversary of the global phenomenon of revolutionary action. Such films are often coloured in a dangerous hue of nostalgia or, even worse, attempt to market their subjects as seductive youths titillated by violence, cheapening the political vigour that drove them. Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Children of the Revolution is certainly immersed in the same fascinations, yet comes from a different vantage point, offering a unique point of reference: the daughters of the revolution.

Children of the Revolution looks at the immediate aftermath of 1968 in Germany and Japan, from where revolutionary politics burst globally in the 1970s to have a long-lasting impact on our contemporary age. O’Sullivan positions Germany and Japan alongside each other for their shared histories as aggressors in the Second World War, as broken nations in its aftermath and, most importantly for this documentary, as countries that experienced large-scale civil revolt in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Both the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Japanese Red Army, leading activist groups of their respective nations, came up against limitations while operating within their own national borders and broke through internationally, ending up in Palestine to join its liberation movement. Both activist organisations involved women as central leading figures, namely Ulrike Meinhof and Fusako Shigenobu, and O’Sullivan details their personal histories through interviews with their daughters, Bettina Röhl and May Shigenobu, who were born and raised amid the chaos.

Addressing the daughters of the revolution is certainly an inspired choice. Our protagonists inherit the legacies of the revolutionary acts as if they’d been genetically bequeathed, an unavoidable part of their upbringing. Their appearance within the frame immediately elicits considerations of the aftermath of revolutionary action and whether we have a choice in the process of the past influencing our present. Moreover, O’Sullivan rebalances the often male-driven, testosterone-fuelled narratives of revolutionary action by focusing his attention on the female leaders who, in these cases, were not just participants, but leaders of the rebellion.

What is extraordinary about Children of the Revolution is the daughters’ differences of opinion about their mothers’ involvement in revolutionary politics. As journalists, both Bettina and May have a remarkable ability to critically observe a history so intertwined with their upbringing, yet have come to distinct conclusions. Although they don’t represent their respective nations’ standpoints, it hints at the fact that the way in which history enters the collective consciousness varies in each country. With both historical narratives fraught with factual complexity and incomplete chronicles, it was a brave decision for O’Sullivan to tackle both in one film; and, at least for this writer, a worthwhile choice if only for the revelations that emerge through comparative study.

The DVD release includes a re-edited version of Shane O’Sullivan’s previous documentary Under the Skin (2002), with an interview with revolutionary filmmaker Masao Adachi added to the impressive list of speakers, which includes Toshio Matsumoto, Kôji Wakamatsu, graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo and critic Donald Richie, to introduce Japan’s 1960s counterculture and the politics that bound it. Although less focused, it is a generous companion piece to Children of the Revolution and reveals O’Sullivan’s growth as a documentary filmmaker.

Julian Ross

Watch the trailer:

Children of the Revolution trailer from E2 Films on Vimeo.

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Black Heaven

Directed by Gilles Marchand from a script co-written with Dominik Moll (who gave us the brilliant Harry, He’s Here To Help), Black Heaven follows a young man’s obsessive descent into a dark world of suicide pacts and dangerous games after he and his girfriend stumble upon a lost mobile phone. Black Heaven is released on DVD by Arrow Films on 5 September 2011.


Comic review by Liam Cobb
For more information on Liam Cobb, go to his website.
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Strigoi

Strigoi

Format: DVD + Download

Release date: 22 August 2011

Distributor: Bounty Films

Director: Faye Jackson

Writer: Faye Jackson

Cast: Constantin Barbulescu, Camelia Maxim, Catalin Paraschiv

UK/Romania 2009

101 mins

Dark business is afoot in an isolated Romanian village. There are inept executions in the dead of night, and the whole town seems to be in on something. All in all it’s a bad time for faint-hearted local boy Vlad (Catalin Paraschiv) to return from Italy and start poking his nose into a local drunkard’s death. The local priest (Vlad’s father) is involved somehow. The local cop seems more concerned with his marijuana supply. His grandfather is clearly barking. Vlad appears to be on his own, but any conspiracy is going to be impossible to maintain if the bodies refuse to stay buried….

Faye Jackson’s winningly offbeat vampire/zombie picture is a welcome addition to the genre, functioning more as a dry-witted magic realist mystery than a conventional horror film. The strigoi are quite chatty for the undead and seem to have a hard time grasping the ramifications of their state. They are florid of face and incessantly hungry, and the cause of some consternation among the villagers, who quibble about folklore and seem more concerned that the inconvenient buggers are upsetting the boat than anything else. Jackson foregrounds the small-town politics and the inability of anybody to get to grips with the problems that rise out of the communist past, inherited through land and blood.

Anybody demanding the kick-ass kung fu or CGI splatter scenes that have dominated the vampire flick over the last decade or so will be disappointed. But Strigoi is more interesting than all that guff, with a tone closer to Whisky Galore! than The Wicker Man. It keeps you on the back foot with eccentric characters and cat-and-mouse dialogue, odd visual flourishes and strange situations. As when a terrified woman spends the whole night feeding a ravenous strigoi all the food in the house to stop the creature from supping on her, a scene that’s weird and funny and domestic at the same time, and typical of a film that’s playing a different game to the one you might expect. It’s a UK/Romanian co-production in English, and the DVD comes with a Faye Jackson short, Lump, a queasy little medical tale. Well worth a look.

Mark Stafford

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Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai

Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 4 July 2011

Distributor: Manga Entertainment

Director: Mizusho Nishikubo

Writer: Mamoru Oshii

Japan 2009

72 mins

Suitably for a film written by Mamoru Oshii, Musashi is alternately beautiful, intriguing, enlightening, impenetrable and frustrating. As with his earlier film, Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast-Food Grifters (2006), it’s a type of animé unlike any I’ve seen before. While Tachigui was a fictitious drama made in the style of a documentary and animated in a unique way, Musashi is an animated documentary with dramatised scenes, mainly narrated by a Chibi-style CGI professor. Occasionally, the narration is sung and the animated set-pieces taking place in the 16th and 17th centuries are contrasted with live-action footage of the same locations in modern times.

In addition to the simplistic style used for the narrator, reminiscent of early Pixar short films, the animation style varies from chapter to chapter as we are told the story of Miyamoto Musashi, writer, artist and samurai who lived from approximately 1584 to 1645, and given lessons in the history of sword fighting in the East and the West, army tactics and the development of chivalry. You might have guessed that a film trying to cover all these topics and more in its brief 72-minute running time would feel a bit rushed, and as an educational tool, it would possibly work better as an extra on a box-set of Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy (1954-1956), which starred Toshirô Mifune as Musashi. The excellent animation used for the various scenes of the samurai at battle only leaves the viewer wanting more, as while we’re told how brilliant and innovative Musashi’s tactics were on the field of battle, it’s better to show rather than tell - particularly in animation - and excised from a greater narrative, the fight scenes don’t give us particular insight into the character as a real person.

Allowing for the frustrating nature of the film, there is still much to enjoy on screen. For a film made by a single director, it’s intriguing how many different animation styles are used, from monochrome, sepia-toned pencil work used to evoke silent movies, to stark black and white with a splash of red, and more caricatured line work depicting the cruelty of some of the foes Musashi meets in the field of battle, rendered in the style of Peter Chung. This anthology approach recalls an earlier Studio I.G. production, Batman: Gotham Knight (2008), which assigned a different director to each segment, and given the number of commentators and disparate films on Musashi’s life there have been, suits the material well. The film’s director, Mizuho Nishikubo, is an old colleague of Oshii’s. They both started their careers on the TV series Gatchaman II (1978-79), the sequel to an earlier show, better known in the West as Battle of the Planets (1978-85). This makes me wonder if the two men now use opportunities like Musashi and Tachigui to make films that are experimental and willfully obscure, their bulletproof reputation built on three and half decades in the industry permitting them to take on projects that wouldn’t be commissioned otherwise.

The film’s excellent visuals are accompanied by a terrific soundtrack that mixes Rôkyoku singing, funk, ambient and Western classical music, let down only by a dreary power ballad that accompanies the end credits. Although the film is short, a 45-minute edit without the CGI professor would be better still. But while not quite a good enough project in its own right, Musashi is a great introduction to both the character on screen (10 films so far, plus cameos elsewhere) and animated samurai cinema in general. If nothing else, this film made me want to track down Mizuho Nishikubo/Project I.G.’s TV series Otogi Zoshi (2004-5), about five folk heroes who save Kyoto from destruction during the Heian period, and their reincarnations in the modern day, which at a total running time of 626 minutes, unlike Musashi, presumably won’t suddenly be over just as it feels like the plot has begun.

Alex Fitch

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Funeral Parade of Roses

Funeral Parade of Roses

Format: Cinema

Screening dates: 14 + 18 August 2011

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Toshio Matsumoto

Writer: Toshio Matsumoto

Original title: Bara no sôretsu

Cast: Pîtâ, Osamu Ogasawara, Toyosaburo Uchiyama

Japan 1969

107 mins

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

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

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

John Bleasdale

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The Miners’ Hymns

The Miners' Hymns

Format: DVD

Release date: 20 June 2011

Distributor: BFI

Director: Bill Morrison

Music: Jóhann Jóhannsson

UK/US 2010

50 mins

Bill Morrison and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s The Miners’ Hymns made its first appearance last year in Durham Cathedral, a setting that appears at the end of this film, which is constructed from archive footage of Durham miners’ lives from the 1900s through to the pit closures and strikes of the 1970s.

Perhaps because it was originally conceived as a live music and cinema performance, with Jóhannsson’s powerful score played along with the film by a brass ensemble, The Miners’ Hymns‘ impact lessens slightly when transported to the small screen with this DVD release. Not only do we lose Morrison’s haunting double-screen set-up, but also the warmth and presence of music performed live in a very significant (not to mention resonant) space. Excerpts from the performance are included here as an extra, and it’s easy to imagine the chills felt by the audience as the building they sit in appears in ghostly multiples on screen, making clear the film’s dual themes of loss and continuity while the music swells around the cathedral’s ancient walls.

However, the opportunity to pore more closely over the footage in The Miners’ Hymns, sourced by Morrison from BFI National Archive as well as local TV archives, is a welcome one, as is the chance to appreciate Morrison’s skill in transforming this documentary material into poetic, often mysterious, cinema. While showing us some of the miners’ daily graft in unsentimental detail, the director, whose 2002 film Decasia was an ode to the degenerative processes of old film, is also mesmerised by the formal qualities of his source material, lingering on the coal itself as it’s hacked from its seam and poured in obsidian-like fragments through the machinery that will take it to the surface. Elsewhere, in contrast to the dark underground footage, men pick up coal fragments on a pebbled beach and load them into a horse-drawn cart, in a slow, meditative sequence that feels especially timeless.

This sense of temporal oddness is deliberate: Morrison has trawled the archives for sequences that echo one another over the years, so the men and horses we see in one shot might be from the 1950s; in another, the 1920s. This device, particularly when we see children from two different generations playing on slag heaps, is very moving, but its strangeness stops it being overly romantic or nostalgic - rather, it’s slightly distancing. Perhaps Morrison’s literal distance from his subject matter - in that he’s from the US - adds to this effect; a similar quality seems to be present in the way Jóhannsson, who’s Icelandic, tackles his musical source material.

Music is at the core of The Miners’ Hymns, from the title - taken from the song ‘Gresford’, which commemorates a Welsh mining disaster in 1934 - to the choice of brass instrumentation, inextricably associated with colliery bands. Jóhannsson’s score is simple but cumulative in effect: short melodic sequences are repeated and built upon throughout the film, with a layer of electronic texture and concrete sound used sparingly alongside some of the more industrial, abstract footage. With each note slow and measured, we’re invited to focus on the timbre of the brass, noting its austere, mournful qualities and drawing parallels with the heavy machinery and raw power of the industry it laments. Occasionally the dynamics are a little extreme, with dramatic, emotional swells in volume at what feel like odd points in the film; again, you can imagine this aspect of the music being far more effective in a live setting.

Jóhannsson’s melodies are drawn from hymn tunes such as ‘Gresford’, and at times you sense those Victorian, Church of England-ish inflections in a certain cluster or notes or a particularly emotive cadence. But perhaps because he’s coming to them from relatively anew, the composer makes these familiar tunes fresh, interrogating the passion and faith at their core. I started the film feeling that the music was too ‘obvious’; yet by the climax, where miners process into Durham Cathedral for the yearly Miners’ Gala, it was hard not to be swept up in the solemnity and dignity of both sound and picture. Both Jóhannsson and Morrison treat the miners’ stories with great respect, teasing out the elements that resonate with them as artists with starkly moving results.

Frances Morgan

Check it out, Cinema releases, Home entertainment

Pitfall

Pitfall

Format: Cinema

Screening dates: 2 + 10 August 2011

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara

Writer: Kôbô Abe

Original title: Otoshiana

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

Japan 1962

97 mins

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

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

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

Pitfall is available on DVD from Eureka Entertainment.

John Berra