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Tenebrae

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Tenebrae

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 27 June 2011

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Dario Argento

Writers: Dario Argento

Cast: Anthony Franciosa, John Saxon, Daria Nicolodi, Veronica Lario

Italy 1982

110 mins

Other than John Waters, it is difficult to think of a filmmaker who revels so much in ugliness as Dario Argento. And yet his ugliness is not really the same. Rather than Waters’s grotesqueries, we have the ugliness of the nearly beautiful. In Tenebrae, his lighting is bright despite the title of the film, eschewing the shadows of the genre; his colour scheme is garish, bright reds and greens and yellows a-go-go; his actors and actresses are always a bit shy of movie star beautiful and even when they are conventionally attractive they have a pallid, unwell and plastic look to them. And Italy - il Bel Paese - becomes particularly un-bel, an almost entirely urban clutter of concrete and glass or rain-soaked streets populated by dirty old men, psychopaths, angry dogs and prostitutes. And that is before we consider the ugliness of the violence to which many of the characters are subjected.

Peter Lane (Anthony Franciosa) is a successful murder mystery novelist in Rome as part of a publicity tour when a series of murders begin to take place, each featuring a connection to his latest novel, Tenebrae. A woman is killed with an old-fashioned straight-edged razor and pages of the novel are torn out and shoved into her mouth. The list of suspects includes an obsessive ex and a deranged journalist and any number of demented fans. As with Deep Red, we have some unlocated flashback episodes that point to an earlier trauma and go some way towards explaining the insanity of the killer.

Generally considered Argento’s last good film before a precipitous decline, Tenebrae was a return, after experiments with supernatural horror, to the classic giallo formula: the black leather gloves, the endangered foreigner, the inventive murders and the killer’s point of view. It offers a series of satisfying twists and turns, although some of these are facilitated by almost transparent trickery, lapses in logic and a general holiness of plot to compete with the nearby Vatican. The acting is exactly one notch above porn and the comedy is weak - ‘are you going to wear that hat? Aren’t you afraid it’ll fall off?’ ‘What, this hat? This hat won’t fall off’ - but no one watches a Dario Argento film for the comedy, we watch for the horror. And there are genuine moments of tension and unpleasantness - the scene with the dog is a particularly gruelling moment.

Argento identifies more closely with the killer in this film than any other. The murderer is self-consciously artistic, taking photographs of his own crime scenes, many of which also feature in the publicity material for the film itself. He or she seems wildly protective of Lane’s book Tenebrae (which obviously shares the title of the film), killing a shoplifter who has purloined a copy. Anyone who downloaded the film illegally might be wary of sharing a similar fate. Argento revels particularly in the murder of the lesbian film critic who has accused Peter Lane of misogyny - the bitch will die in her knickers for having the gall - with the same bitterness with which Clint Eastwood had a Pauline Kael substitute murdered in The Dead Pool (1988). This double murder is introduced by a justly celebrated crane shot, lasting over two minutes without cuts and which took three days to film.

Argento pushes the bloodletting to the extreme and pulls off some genuinely shocking moments, which remain so even today. His gallon-sized tubs of red paint will always be preferable to the CGI gloop we are treated to nowadays. And his eye for the telling physical detail, the drool of a strangled victim or the slipperiness of a fatal spike, are more effective in conveying the pain than any kind of gore. Yet I can’t help but exit each of his films relieved, not because the tension has been resolved, the killer caught/done away with etc, but rather just to get out of that world of over-lit post-modern interior design.

John Bleasdale

Check it out, Cinema releases, Home entertainment

Solaris

Solaris

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 8 August 2016

Distributor: Curzon Artificial Eye

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Writers: Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Andrei Tarkovsky

Based on the novel by: Stanisław Lem

Original title: Solyaris

Cast: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet

USSR 1972

159 mins

Solaris is science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction.

This justly famous film is based on a Polish novel from 1961 by Stanisław Lem, which first appeared in English in 1970. Both are science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction. The film is easier to enjoy if you don’t know the book well. Tarkovsky’s work here is often brilliant, especially when there is not much happening, but he is erratic in his handling of the plot and clumsy with dialogue. The screenplay changes quite a lot of the mechanics and details of Lem’s story: sometimes it seems as though the writers have misunderstood the book, more often as though they are trying to correct it, and this usually has the effect of substituting crudeness for subtlety.

The worst bits are the talky passages, in particular a sub-Dostoevskian scene where the characters sound off bitterly and sarcastically at each other. And towards the end, the characters seem to be trying to explain the film to us by means of meandering philosophical ponderings. There are problems with the acting - plenty of hammy moments, and a general sense that the actors are not quite sure what they’re aiming for. A notable exception to these criticisms is the luminous Natalya Bondarchuk: the director himself observed that this 21-year-old fresh out of drama school outshone the rest of the cast.

The best bits are not just those with no actors on the screen, but also the mainly silent scenes, central to the story, between Kris the spaceman and Hari the woman from his past. A couple of dream/hallucination sequences are inspired additions to Lem, in terms of imaginative vision if not of content. The most striking invention is a weightless scene of great beauty and mystery. And with the exception of the dialogue scenes, the film is a visual tour de force. About two hours in (!) it really takes off, as the director seems to forget about getting the story straight and contents himself with making strange and beautiful variations on themes of doubt, unease and illusion.

For all its faults, this is an extraordinary film. But, especially if you admire the book, you might prefer the 2002 remake by Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. It concentrates on the crucial relationship between Kris and Hari, and it supplies what Lem and Tarkovsky both fail to come up with: a really excellent ending. If buried in you there are any feelings of regret or remorse about ended relationships, be ready to have them unearthed. The remake manages, like the book, to convey the sense that this work of science fiction is perhaps not really about strange happenings in an imaginary future, nor even about man and the unknowable universe, but about love and loss and memory in our own lives.

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

Peter Momtchiloff

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Akira

Akira

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 27 June 2011

Distributor: Manga Entertainment

Director: Katsuhiro Otomo

Writers: Katsuhiro Otomo, Izô Hashimoto

Based on the manga by: Katsuhiro Otomo

Cast: Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama, Tarô Ishida, Mizuho Suzuki

Japan 1988

125 mins

In the mid-80s, the pop culture apocalypse was back in fashion. Previous decades had already seen sci-fi and fantasy reactions to the threat of nuclear war in both the East and the West - Japan favoured giant irradiated behemoths on screen such as Godzilla (1954-2004), America had incredible shrinking men and scientists with insect heads, and both countries had alien visitors warning us about the danger of ultimate war. By the 1960s comics got in on the act, with masterpieces of Japanese manga such as Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix: Future, predicting a machine-driven apocalypse in the 35th century, while Marvel Comics became a force to be reckoned with in Stan Lee’s indelible wave of irradiated teenagers with superpowers in the pages of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men, The Hulk and many others.

However, these two aspects of post-(modern) apocalypse - the irradiated teenager and the irradiated environment - didn’t combine notably until the 1980s in comic books, and later in their cinematic adaptations. Again, Japanese and Western takes on this combination differ wildly. Japan has never taken to costumed heroes with the same enthusiasm as the West. In Japan, supernatural powers were more common than super-powers in late-80s print manga, most notably in Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, where telekinesis and telepathy are imagined as evolutionary reactions to a dehumanised machine-driven world.

Based on Otomo’s serialised comic, which ran for over 2,000 pages between 1982 and 1990, the film of Akira necessarily condenses the plot of the manga to fit it in a running time of just over two hours, and is mainly based on the first third of the comic books. Akira is set in 2019, 31 years after explosions have devastated 20th-century Tokyo for a second time, now renamed Neo Tokyo. Violent street gangs terrorise the city on motorbikes, with the police and the teenagers’ educators having little influence on their behaviour. In the middle of one three-way fight between two gangs and the police, a scientist and his young ward, apparently suffering from progeria, escape from a research facility into the melee before the former is killed and the latter fades before our eyes. Witness to this are two of the gang members, Kaneda and Tetsuo, and Kaneda’s interaction with the mysterious child awakens his psychic powers, leading to the creation of another potential weapon of mass destruction, while an apocalypse cult pray for the return of Lord Akira. In Akira, the apocalypse has a human face as first, lead character Tetsuo, and then the resurrected Akira himself, have the power of a nuclear explosion at their fingertips, something the military and government want to curtail. But it is only the interaction of the super-powered with ordinary, albeit anarchist, humans that stops the (complete) destruction of Tokyo for a third time.

Several enjoyable scenes struck me on re-watching the film: the corrupt rat-faced politician who seems to have wandered in from another movie, the attack of giant patchwork demonic toys with skin that’s bleeding milkshakes, a chase through the sewers that is a mixture of the climactic scene of The Third Man (1949) and the opening credits of Batman: The Movie (1966), Tetsuo’s Superman-inspired red cape (particularly in long shot, punching a space station) and the Warner Bros-style animated slapstick as Kaneda dodges falling boulders prior to the arrival of Akira from below. Akira the film, like Akira the character, is a form of rebirth, reconstituted from the elements of what went before; it’s not quite as cinematic as later animé - except a terrific close-up on Kaneda at the start of the film’s final battle - but the skill and dedication of the animators in bringing an unwieldy epic to the screen shines through. It’s a shame that in both subtitles and dubbing, even the more recent translation is still lacking, including such Pythonesque gems as: ‘He’s a false messiah! This isn’t the rapture!’ and ‘That’s Mr. Kaneda to you, punk’, a line that only Clint Eastwood or Sydney Poitier could get away with.

Akira is a smorgasbord of influences and references: Fritz Lang had his protagonists in Metropolis (1927) witness prophetic visions and have psychic links with their dopplegängers as did the subterranean mutants in Ted Post’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970); and Akira’s imagery of childhood toys battling with technology had first appeared in Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland in the first two decades of the 20th century. But Akira combines so many disparate elements from comic books and films that the resulting collage results in something startling and new. While the renowned English-language comic books of the time had to mainly resort to superheroes to narrate their tales (Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s Marvelman and Watchmen), Akira didn’t exist in isolation: in Europe, the absence of capes led to a similar mix of science fiction, satire, psychic powers, false messiahs and apocalypse in Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius’s comic book The Incal, which ran concurrently with Akira in the 1980s (Jodorowsky even supposedly advised Otomo on the ending of his manga).

On its release in 1988 (Japan) / 1991 (UK), Akira proved to be a ground-breaking film as it presented concepts and imagery rarely seen on the big screen in animation, and even then there were only a few live-action films that captured a similar neon-lit world, including Blade Runner (1982) half a decade earlier. Animé broadcast in the UK had previously been restricted to TV series that were international co-productions with France (Ulysses 31 / The Mysterious Cities of Gold), Spain (Around the World with Willy Fog) or America (Transformers / Thundercats). In the 80s and early 90s, little of Hayao Miyazaki’s charming fantasy animation was available in translation other than the odd episode of Sherlock Hound and his unremarkable debut film The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). Against this backdrop, it’s unsurprising that the arrival of Akira seemed like the birth of an entirely new art form, and it was unfortunate that post-Akira, distributors didn’t look for the finest examples of the medium they could bring to the West - i.e. Miyazaki’s films - but rather brought other movies similar in tone, which led to a deluge of violent, undemanding animated manga that gave the word a bad name. Akira does contain many of the clichés of bad manga - ultra-violence, techno organic tentacles and bucolic flashbacks - but it was one of the first to include these elements. It started a sub-genre that includes the work of Mamoru Oshii - particularly his Patlabor (1988-1993) and Ghost in the Shell (1995-2008) animé franchises - and Satoshi Kon - Paprika (2006) - who worked as an assistant to both Otomo and Oshii.

Otomo has the distinction of being involved in two of the finest Japanese animated films of the last quarter-century, Akira and Metoroporisu (Metropolis, 2001), which both share a brilliantly rendered futuristic city, which is a terrific example of the retro-(fitted) futurism as seen in Blade Runner. Both films also use the entire palette of the animator’s (digital) paint supply, with lurid reds on clothes and motorbikes contrasting with the pallid green/grey skin of the aged psychic children. As with Blade Runner‘s iconic Vangelis score, this retro-futuristic (apparently, 1980s sweatbands and Hawaiian prints are still big in 2019) city is also accompanied by a terrific soundtrack: Tsutomu Ôhashi’s mixture of Gamelan percussion and woodwind instruments, added to an eclectic voice work that includes a male choir whispering the names of the characters and Noh-style chanting. Otomo only wrote the screenplay of Metropolis (which is a loose adaptation of both Lang’s film and a 1949 manga of the same name) but did not direct it, and his other two feature-length animated films - Roujin Z (1991) and Steamboy (2004) - while fun, don’t live up to his urban cyberpunk classic.

While some aspects of Akira have dated and the rushed ending - a soupí§on of Kubrickian post-human light show plus shafts of divine light in a ruined landscape - strives too hard to be sublime, this is a classic animated Japanese film that is well worth adding to any Blu-ray collection, in a HD transfer that finally does justice to the film’s colour palette and intricate line art.

Alex Fitch

Home entertainment

The New York Ripper

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The New York Ripper

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 27 June 2011

Distributor: Shameless Entertainment

Director: Lucio Fulci

Writers: Lucio Fulci, Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino, Dardano Sacchetti

Original title: Lo squartatore di New York

Cast: Jack Hedley, Almanta Keller, Howard Ross

Italy 1982

91 mins

‘To paraphrase Verlaine, in subtlety lies the essence of things.’
‘Bullshit.’
(Dialogue from The New York Ripper)

With the media frenzy around the banning of The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (2011), it’s more illuminating than usual to watch Lucio Fulci’s notorious The New York Ripper (1982), a film that was not only banned in the UK, but had its review print escorted back to the airport by police, lest it infect the populace.

As hysterical as then chief censor James Ferman’s reaction might seem, there is plenty in the movie to provoke offence, even with a few seconds of nipple-razoring still redacted from Shameless Screen Entertainment’s new Blu-ray. Even so, disliking the film as much as I did (a response the film seems to welcome), I’m still glad Fulci became a filmmaker rather than pursuing the career in medicine he studied for: his keen interest in human suffering and mutilation and his apparent disdain for humanity would seem ill-suited for healthcare.

The movie itself is a basic giallo, divided between some hurried, permit-free location filming in the Big Apple and more careful studio interiors, allowing Fulci to take his time with the murder set-pieces that are the film’s raison d’ê. These feature a few striking uses of colour and framing, and Fulci pans, zooms and tracks, sometimes at the same time, to create a giddy momentum and instability. He also pulls off one the weirdest and ghastliest shots in the whole genre: since Fulci’s killer, like the real-life Yorkshire Ripper, who had only just been imprisoned when the film was released, mutilates his victim’s genitals, Fulci films a broken bottle thrusting into the camera lens, from the point of view of the victim’s vagina. As bad-taste extremes go, this easily trumps the shot in Jaws 3 where we see a shark eating its human prey, filmed from inside the shark’s mouth, in 3D.

The problem isn’t that the film includes numerous scenes of women being violently abused: the media attest that such cases do occur, and are therefore suitable for artistic treatment. The issue is the film’s gleeful cynicism in serving up such scenes as entertainment, and the slapdash and heartless way it goes about this.

Right at the start, after a dog retrieves a human hand from a bush, echoing Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and a girl is knifed to death in a car on the Staten Island Ferry (the owner of the car disappears, never to claim his vehicle, but he never becomes a suspect), the unlikely NYC detective played by Brit thesp Jack Hedley (looking world-weary, as well he might) chats with the pathologist who suggests that the two crimes are related. Hedley wanders to the front of the station house, where he meets his director, Fulci himself, playing a police chief, who berates him for telling the press there’s a serial killer on the prowl. Let me stress: this is a continuous sequence. Hedley has just been told about the crimes being related, and has had no time to talk to anybody. If that isn’t a good enough example of the film’s reckless construction, how about the fact that the medical examiner tells him, from a blood sample, that the killer is a young man who’s lived in New York all his life.

Remember, Fulci studied medicine.

Still, in an impassioned and intelligent essay culled from his book Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci and included with the disc, Stephen Thrower makes a convincing case for the film as a brutal vision of hell and a nihilistic assault upon its audience, while in the video extras, the director’s daughter explains that her father was a very nice man if you knew him, both of which statements I accept. It’s not so easy to guess what the director was driving at by giving his antagonist the hysterical quacking voice of Donald Duck, other than attempting to drag even the most seemingly innocuous aspects of Western civilisation into the sewer.

What doesn’t convince about the film, for me, is its equation of sexual decadence with homicidal murder. The hilarious production of a cock-shaped pipe as evidence of a minor character’s depravity is the purest example of this silliness: why should we be appalled that he likes to puff his tobacco fumes through a ceramic Johnson? By showing the forensic profiler covertly buying a gay wank mag, Fulci thinks he’s making a point about general hypocrisy and creeping perversion, but Thrower is stretching things too far when he asks ‘if a psychoanalyst is ashamed of his sexuality, what sort of help can he offer to anyone else?’ Firstly, the guy is a lecturer rather than a therapist, and secondly, his personal problems, if we even see them as such, needn’t invalidate his insights.

That’s where the film seems ultimately rather silly, in its vile way: fair enough if Fulci wants to lambast the decline of modern civilisation, but he can’t make his points stick if he doesn’t himself possess enough perspective to see the very real difference between cock-pipes and jazz-mags on the one hand, and a razor to the eyeball and a broken bottle to the crotch on the other. No slippery slope exists from one to the other.

David Cairns

Check it out, Home entertainment

Mad Max

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Mad Max

Format: DVD

Release date: 1 June 2006

Distributor: Warner Home Video

Director:George Miller

Writers: Byron Kennedy, James McCausland, George Miller

Cast: Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley

Australia 1979

89 mins

[SPOILERS]

Cinematic visions of society on the brink of collapse have rarely been as frightening - yet thrillingly visceral - as Mad Max, the pre-apocalyptic Australian action classic that marked the directorial debut of George Miller and demonstrated how cash-strapped genre movies could make a virtue out of threadbare production values. Working in accordance with ‘Ozploitation’ production practices, which stated that actors and stuntmen were cheap but celluloid was expensive, Miller wastes no time in establishing that the Australia of ‘a few years from now’ will not be a safe place; Mad Max opens with motorcycle gang member Nightrider escaping from police custody and attempting to outrun pursuing officers in a stolen patrol car. Miller gives the audience a glimpse of how far he is willing to go to show a society that is rapidly going off the rails by placing a child in the middle of the highway, with the infant almost being run over by the speeding vehicles. With the officers in pursuit being outmanoeuvred by Nightrider, the responsibility of stopping this psychopath rests with Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), a more capable lawman who uses his considerable skills behind the wheel to end the criminal’s vehicular rampage by causing an explosive crash. Max steps out of his patrol car to survey the burning wreckage, which is both a sign of a mission accomplished and a prophetic warning of what is to come: the Nightrider’s comrades in chaos, led by the villainous Toecutter, are on their way to town, and terrorising innocent bystanders is just their way of warming up for a war against the local law enforcement. However, they may have met their match in Mad Max.

Even though Max deals with such speed freaks in a calmly decisive manner, his psyche is being ripped apart; at home, he is a loving family man, but when patrolling the road, he is as merciless as the maniacs he takes down. Confiding in his wife, Max admits, ‘I’m scared. It’s that rat circus out there. I’m beginning to enjoy it. Any longer out on that road and I’m one of them, a terminal psychotic, except that I’ve got this bronze badge that says that I’m one of the good guys’. Although civilisation is collapsing, Max manages to keep his cool and it is instead his partner Goose who is first to snap; the infuriated Goose beats up gang member and rapist Johnny ‘The Boy’ Boyle when the perpetrator is released without charge as all witnesses are too scared to testify. Max restrains Goose and stands by a justice system that is insufficient in a world gone wrong, but realises that his personal and professional responsibilities are out of balance when his partner is burnt to death in a revenge attack. Taking an extended family vacation at a remote farm, Max is followed by Toecutter’s gang, who run down his wife and son; Max pulls his uniform back on and takes to the road in a super-charged pursuit vehicle to settle the score. This quest for vengeance effectively represents the end of any social order, and the method that Max uses to kill Johnny - handcuffing him to a wrecked vehicle and setting a fuse - suggests that he is now almost as unhinged as Toecutter. The hero has succumbed to the sadism of the ‘rat circus’.

Produced for just AUD$400,000, Mad Max exhibits a crude efficiency that holds up remarkably well in the age of CGI-enhancement. Mad Max 2 (1981) is often cited as a rare example of a sequel that is superior to the original, and Miller’s follow-up is certainly a fine exercise in narrative economy. However, the post-apocalyptic landscape presented by the second film is now overly familiar from countless straight-to-video imitations that pass off cheap desert locations as post-nuclear wastelands. Because of its budgetary shortcomings, Mad Max remains frighteningly credible, with its sparsely populated small towns, desolate highways and an almost abandoned Hall of Justice where law enforcers half-heartedly listen to the police radio and fail to prosecute the guilty. The film was inspired by the 1973 oil crisis, which had Australian motorists committing acts of violence in order to fill their petrol tanks, with screenwriters Miller, Byron Kennedy and James McCausland speculating on what society would be like several years down the line if the fuel situation were to continue; they envisioned a world where only savages and scavengers survive, a point made in a not-so-subtle manner when Miller pans up to a buzzard overlooking the activities of Toecutter’s gang. The raw intensity of the attack sequences - a couple being chased, Max’s wife running for her life with her son in her arms - makes Mad Max the action genre equivalent of Tobe Hooper’s relentless shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), with distressing sounds (screaming, smashing metal, the revving of engines) being used to keep the audience on edge in-between the rough-and-ready bursts of road rage. Brilliantly realised with limited resources, Mad Max remains an unrivalled example of future shock.

John Berra

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L’&#226ge d’or

L'âge d'or

Format: Dual Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 30 May 2011

Distributor: BFI

Director:Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí

Writers: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí

Original title: Lásky jedné plavovlásky

Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Caridad de Laberdesque

France/Spain 1930

63 mins

The BFI’s new Blu-ray release of Luis Buñuel’s L’âge d’or (1930) provides a comprehensive introduction to surrealist cinema. In addition to the 50-minute movie, the DVD includes Luis Buñuel’s shorter début film, Un chien andalou (1929), another collaboration with Salvador Dalí. These two titles are the most famous surrealist films ever made, but L’âge d’or was the only one that completely satisfied surrealist leader André Breton.

The DVD contains three other special features: a Spanish-produced documentary on Buñuel, a voice-over commentary on selected clips from L’âge d’or by Robert Short, and an introduction to surrealist cinema, also by Short, in the form of a talking-head lecture. The Spanish documentary gives a chronological survey of Buñuel’s life and career, and is enlivened by the variety of its contributors: it is composed entirely of anecdotes from the director’s friends, family and collaborators, with a few clips and quotations from the great man himself. While entertaining, the stories are also useful, as they shed light on the themes that dominate Buñuel’s entire oeuvre. Although many of the interviewees are recognisable from Buñuel’s films (Michel Piccoli and Angela Molina, for example), the documentary strangely fails to identify the contributors with the usual on-screen titles. The material from Robert Short suffers by comparison with this engaging documentary. Short’s contribution is informative, certainly: he assumes zero knowledge about surrealist cinema on the part of the audience, and provides all of the necessary material for a basic understanding of its history. He also offers relevant background details to the two films as well as some helpful interpretations. Still, Short’s style of expression is ill-suited to reading aloud and would have been far more enjoyable as liner notes.

L’âge d’or still holds an astonishing capacity to shock. The film’s male lead, Gaston Modot, kicks a puppy, slaps his prospective mother-in-law and knocks over a blind man. Co-star Lya Lys is introduced rolling in the mud with Modot, screeching with erotic pleasure; subsequently, she appears sitting on the toilet, sucking suggestively on the toe of a statue and reclining on a couch in post-masturbatory bliss. The film implies that society’s repressive attitude towards sex results in productive drives being sublimated into cruel and violent acts. The film also criticises the bourgeois for their selfishness: they are outraged by relatively minor affronts to people of their own class, but indifferent to true tragedies that befall their servants. While Un chien andalou, with its infamous eyeball-slicing sequence, is arguably the better-known of the two films, L’âge d’or succeeds where the surrealists felt that Un chien andalou failed. While the first movie was received with enthusiasm by the public, who didn’t bother trying to understand its dream-like images and missed its intended ‘call to murder’, L’âge d’or was banned for provoking far-right riots. The film’s attack on Dieu, famille, patrie had not been missed, and the surrealists basked in the ensuing scandal.

Alison Frank

Check it out, Home entertainment, TV series

Treme: The Complete First Season

Treme

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 30 May 2011

Distributor: HBO Home Entertainment

Directors: Agnieszka Holland, Simon Cellan Jones, Anthony Hemingway

Creators: David Simon, Eric Overmyer

Writers: David Simon, Eric Overmyer, David Mills, Tom Piazza

Cast: Steve Zahn, Kim Dickens, Clarke Peters, Wendell Pierce, John Goodman

USA 2010

4 disc set (10 episodes)

Having spent the best part of two decades creating cop shows - albeit two of the best ever (Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire) - David Simon seems to have found himself with something close to a carte blanche as to what to make next. Avoiding self-indulgence, he used this situation to tackle some of America’s most traumatic and controversial moments of recent years. Thus Generation Kill (2008) and Treme (2010-11) depict the ‘War on Terror’ and Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath respectively. These intelligent realistic dramas are shows that needed a bankable name behind them, and in television (quality television at least) the writer/creator is the name above the title - the star. Of course the actors must be outstanding, and Simon provides us with a great ensemble cast including New Orleans natives John Goodman and Wendell Pierce (The Wire‘s Bunk) and many non-professional local actors such as Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, who was so memorable in Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke. But it was the guaranteed quality of Simon’s writing team that got these projects green-lighted.

Treme is an area in New Orleans right by the French Quarter. Largely populated by African-Americans, it is undoubtedly of great cultural importance, containing Congo Square, the birth-place of that great American art form, jazz. As my pre-Katrina tourist guide claims, ‘there aren’t many reasons to wander into the Treme’, and certainly not after dark, but compared to The Wire‘s Baltimore housing projects the Treme depicted here is something short of a fallen Utopia. Despite the mould, crumbling houses and missing neighbours the sense of community is a thing to behold. And of course, the great authentic New Orleans music is everywhere - played by locals for the locals away from the Bourbon Street tourist traps and ‘titty-bars’.

The series opens with the first ‘second line’ (marching brass band) parade since the storm. It might not be Mardi Gras but these smaller parades are an almost weekly event in New Orleans. It illustrates how important the music is to the people, who randomly join in the parade as it marches to its conclusion at a local bar. At a time when many Americans were asking whether the city was even worth rebuilding, this depiction shows why people love New Orleans and why it is worth preserving. It certainly appears to be a city unlike any other in America - there are still the highways cutting through the city centre, and I’m sure fast food chains (although we don’t see them), but even the failing Tower Records store has an arrangement with local musicians. It is also a city with a real sense of its own cuisine beyond a differently shaped pizza or local brand of frankfurter.

Where The Wire attempted to contextualise the police procedural - with each season focusing on schools, city politics, the press, etc. - Treme goes even further, to the point where the background takes the lead. This loosely connected bunch of characters represent the different aspects of New Orleans culture - a jazz trombonist (Pierce), a Creole/Cajun-food chef (Kim Dickens), a writer and lecturer (Goodman), a stoner DJ (Steve Zahn) and Clarke Peters (The Wire‘s Lester Freamon) as the chief of a tribe of Mardi Gras Indians. Much of the culture is merely shown with little direct explanation - for instance, who are the people organising and paying for the ‘second line parade’? And the curious world of the Mardi Gras Indians - an African-American subculture that involves dressing up in the most elaborate native American costumes - is left in part a mystery.

One of the great things about HBO television shows has been the space allowed for both plot and character development that the 90-minute cinema release can never hope to equal, and this is certainly the case here. The plots largely focus on rebuilding and attempts to return to some pre-Katrina normality - cleaning up homes, repairing roofs, trying to find a job or a gig, saving a business. There is no overall story arc to encompass these fragments - each story works its own way towards its own conclusion.

There is also room for some blatant political comments with John Goodman’s character’s interviews and YouTube rants. He explains how the flood was caused by negligent work and poor maintenance of the levees (‘this is a man-made catastrophe, not a natural disaster’). George W. Bush’s decision to view the disaster from the window of Airforce 1 flying overhead is ridiculed in Zahn’s musical satire (‘Shame on you Dubya’). The frustration with the federal government’s response can be seen everywhere - ‘Buy us back Chirac,’ asks one carnival float of French-costumed New Orleanians.

But taking up even more screen time is the music. The plot takes a back seat while we watch yet another great musical performance. From traditional to modern jazz from blues to rhythm and blues - real musicians such as The Rebirth Brass Band, Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint (who recreate their post-Katrina New Orleans recording sessions), Dr John and Steve Earl all have cameos. As an English reporter suggests, New Orleans music may have lost some of its international importance, but locally it is still the beating heart of the city.

The series has flaws but pretty minor ones. The dialogue can be difficult to follow - peppered with New Orleans accents, jazz musician in-jokes and obscure references - but at least the characters are not speaking in the military acronyms of Generation Kill. At times the writing is too good: there are too many good lines, too many profound statements for it to be truly realistic and authentic. And there seems to be just too much integrity in the main characters. But the meandering pace is perfectly suited to the subject matter, and the moments of high emotion and drama are beautifully handled with great understatement.

Free from the need to sneak good writing into a cop show formula (Homicide), Simon delivers another of his epic Tolstoyan depictions of intensely personal stories and their socio-economic and cultural milieu. The Wire is widely recognised as one of the all-time great TV shows and with a few more seasons at this standard Treme could equal this status - as long as you like jazz.

Paul Huckerby

Check it out, Home entertainment

Who Can Kill a Child?

Who Can Kill a Child?

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 May 2011

Distributor: Eureka

Director:Narciso Ibañez Serrador

Writer: Narciso Ibañez Serrador

Based on the novel by: Juan José Plans

Original title: &#191Quién puede matar a un niño?

Cast: Lewis Fiander, Prunella Ransome, Antonio Iranzo

Spain 1976

112 mins

Narciso Ibañez Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) is arguably the best Spanish horror film ever made. It’s also a classic of 70s horror, but you’re unlikely to find it on many ‘best of’ lists, from either fans or critics. This is mainly due to its half-hearted distribution; saddled with a number of other titles - including Island of the Damned and Death is Child’s Play - and shorn of up to half an hour of footage, Serrador’s film surfaced briefly on the drive-in circuit before slipping into obscurity. It did occasionally appear on television, however, and grey-market VHS copies circulated among fans of cult and horror cinema. Through this limited exposure, the film acquired a growing fan base, although it wouldn’t receive an uncut release in the USA until 2007. Finally, in 2011, Who Can Kill a Child? is being released in the United Kingdom.

Young biologist Tom and his heavily pregnant wife Evelyn (Lewis Fiander and Prunella Ransome) are on holiday in Spain. They decide to visit Almanzora, a small island off the coast. It isn’t necessarily the best place to go - there’s no doctor, no telephone and it takes four hours in a boat to get there - but they want to get away from the tourists. When they arrive, the island appears to be deserted, except for a handful of children. The shops are open, but empty, and it’s obvious no one has been there for several hours. Tom follows a group of giggling children into a building and finds them playing a game in the courtyard, swinging long poles at an object above their heads. But it’s not a piñata hanging from the ceiling - it’s the battered body of an elderly man. As Tom struggles to imagine what has happened on the island, he and Evelyn encounter one of the locals, hidden upstairs in the hotel. He tells them that the previous night the children took to the streets, laughing and playing, going from one house to another. Screams of pain and horror followed, as the children began killing every adult they could find. It’s time for Tom and Evelyn to leave, but will the children let them escape?

Like Village of the Damned (1960) and Children of the Corn (1984), Who Can Kill a Child? pits adults against children, this time working from the template established by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Unlike those films, Who Can Kill a Child? doesn’t dilute the horrific premise by making his children aliens or religious maniacs controlled or directed by a supernatural entity. The children of Almanzora were, until the night before, completely normal. Even now they’re behaving much as children should - playing, giggling, running around the town having fun. It’s just the nature of the ‘fun’ that has changed. Following Hitchcock in The Birds (1963) and Romero, Serrador provides no real information that might help to understand or explain the events taking place. Tom and Evelyn have better things to do than speculate about why the children have slaughtered the adults.

Serrador’s only serious misstep occurs almost immediately. As a prologue to his film he attaches 10 minutes of real-life footage depicting various wars and man-made humanitarian disasters, always stressing the number of children who died in each instance. This establishes the continued victimisation of children by adults (accidental or otherwise), opening the door for the children of Almanzora to turn the tables. Unfortunately, footage of concentration camps and African famines makes for an uncomfortable way to begin watching what is essentially a frivolous form of entertainment. Thankfully Serrador avoids such ham-fisted moralising for the rest of the film. When Who Can Kill a Child? gets going, it’s a masterpiece of atmosphere and a deeply unsettling, original experience, and one that deserves to be seen by a much wider audience.

Eureka’s new Region 2 edition carries the same content as the US Dark Sky edition, using the same high quality, uncut print and featuring documentaries about the director and the cinematographer.

Jim Harper

Check it out, Cinema releases, Home entertainment

Alice

Alice

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 23 May 2011

Distributor: BFI

Director:Jan Švankmajer

Writer: Jan Švankmajer

Based on Alice in Wonderland by: Lewis Carroll

Original title: N?co z Alenky

Cast: Kristýna Kohoutová

Czechoslovakia 1988

86 mins

Games have been a constituent element of many Czech films, from the improvisation and word play of Voskovec and Werich in the 1930s to the unpredictable inventions of V?ra Chytilová (Daisies) in the 1960s. When Jan Švankmajer made Alice, his first feature film, in 1987, he was already part of a culture in which the game was central. Indeed, one of his early films, in which he ‘plays’ with stones, forming them into different combinations and Arcimboldo-like faces, was called Game with Stones (1965).

The Czech Surrealist Group, which had remained ‘underground’ during the years of Stalinism after the Second World War, reconstituted itself in 1968 and Švankmajer became a member in 1970. When they were again forced underground after the Soviet invasion of the country in 1968, they began a whole series of group explorations and games, investigating such areas as touch, fear, eroticism, analogy, interpretation, creativity and, of course, dream, humour, and game itself. Collective games and interpretative experiment form the essential context of Švankmajer’s work.

Cruelty - indeed, one might say sado-masochism - was an element of many of his short films, from the competing magicians of The Last Trick (1964) to the self-devouring and destructive heads of Dimensions of Dialogue in 1982. His three films dealing with childhood - Jabberwocky (1971), Down to the Cellar (1982), and Alice (1987) continue to explore this vein. Švankmajer argues that childhood is a time with which he maintains a continuing dialogue but that he remembers it as a ‘time of cruelty’. His Jabberwocky (1971), with its references to Carroll’s nonsense poem and to the pre-war leader of the Czech surrealists, Ví­t?zslav Nezval, focused very precisely on the world of children’s play. As the then leader of the Surrealist Group, the poet Vratislav Effenberger, put it, the film was a variety show from a child’s imagination with its individual ‘turns’ divided by a wall of bricks repeatedly knocked down by a black cat.

Extras include the first screen adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic, 1903’s Alice in Wonderland, the Brothers Quay’s Alice-inspired Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married? and Stille Nacht IV: Can’t Go Wrong without You as well as a 34-page booklet.

This, together with Down to the Cellar (1982), which grew out of the Surrealist Group’s exploration into the subject of Fear, were obvious precursors of his work on Alice. Although based on his own experiences of being sent ‘down to the cellar’ to fetch potatoes, his heroine is a young girl. In this sense, the film recalls both Alice and Little Red Riding Hood, as the girl confronts the unknown. In the cellar, she meets a man who makes a bed out of coal and offers her a place beside him, an old woman who bakes cakes from coal dust, an enormous cat that stalks her, shoes that fight for a piece of bread she is eating, and potatoes that follow a life of their own and escape from her basket.

Alice, technically a Swiss-British-German co-production although, in all creative respects, entirely Czech, was filmed in Prague with Švankmajer’s regular team. Significantly, the Czech title translates as ‘Something from Alice’, indicating that it should in no way be considered a straightforward adaptation of Carroll. Having said that, one could argue that the similarities are greater than one would have expected. However, where Carroll attributes the origins of Alice’s dreams to the reassuring sounds of the countryside, Švankmajer anticipates the images of her fantasy ‘in the brooding preliminary shots of her room, with its shelves of relics and mysteries from other, previous lives - the furniture she has not yet earned the right to use. Alice’s quest is a hunt for her own context.’ (Philip Strick)

While Alice is played by a real little girl, the world of her imagination or dream world is represented by puppets and animated figures. Her transformations in size are represented by changing from human to doll and, in this sense, Švankmajer seems to suggest an instability in identity. On the other hand, the intermittent close-ups of Alice’s lips speaking short lines of narrative suggest that she ultimately has control of these imaginings. At the end of the film, when she has been condemned to death and the White Rabbit, armed with a pair of scissors, appears as an actual executioner, she announces: ‘Perhaps I’ll cut his head off.’

Like Faust, in Švankmajer’s later ‘variety collage’ of the Faust stories, Alice moves from scene to scene and from world to world and, in this sense, the film also provides a parallel to the earlier Jabberwocky. But, unlike Carroll’s original, the characters have become much more explicitly threatening. The principal puppet figures that she meets all have the appearance of old toys - to echo André Breton on the ‘magically old’ - ‘old-fashioned, broken, useless…’ The March Hare constantly has to be wound up and have his eye pulled back into place, the Mad Hatter is made of carved and beaten wood and, despite his hollow innards, constantly drinks cups of tea. The White Rabbit continually has to replace his stuffing - a constant resurrection revealing, suggests Brigid Cherry (in Kinoeye), the influence of Gothic horror, and representing the Undead. Undoubtedly, the rabbit is far from reassuring, arrogant, domineering and, armed with his pair of scissors, a ‘castrating’ figure.

Švankmajer’s most nightmarish creations are his ‘animals’, who pursue her at the White Rabbit’s behest after she has escaped from his house. These skeletal monsters - imaginary beasts made largely from bones - first made their appearance independently as part of Švankmajer’s sequence of constructions entitled Natural Science Cabinet in the early 1970s. They include a coach pulled by chickens with skull heads, a fish-like skeleton with legs, a skull dragging a bone body, and a skull head that snaps out of a jam pot. This array of visions is far from the antiseptic world of Disney or the reassuring middle-class images of Sir John Tenniel. But, as one Czech critic put it, Alice’s confrontations with fear and humiliation are more than compensated by her ‘outstanding character and extreme intelligence’.

When the film was shown on British television one Christmas, episodes were shown during the day and the whole film late at night. The experiment of day-time screenings was never repeated. Swiss parents apparently removed their children from cinema screenings. But is this world of imagination really more harmful than the readily available synthetic violence of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers? As Švankmajer once said: ‘Unless we again begin to tell fairy tales and ghost stories at night before going to sleep and recounting our dreams upon waking, nothing more is to be expected of our Western civilisation.’

There will be a screening of Alice on June 16 at the Barbican (London), followed by a Q&A with Jan Švankmajer and Peter Hames.

Peter Hames

This article was first published in the autumn 08 issue of Electric Sheep Magazine.

Check it out, Home entertainment

Suicide Club

Suicide Club

Format: DVD Region 1

Release date: 18 November 2003

Distributor: Tla

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Original title: Jisatsu Sí¢kuru

Cast: Ryo Ishibashi, Masatoshi Nagase, Mai Hosho

Japan 2001

99 mins

Maverick Japanese director Sion Sono’s best-known film, Suicide Club (2001), opens with a statement: a jaw-dropping sequence depicting the mass suicide of 54 Japanese school girls at Shinjuku train station. Suicide Club is an extremely confrontational and deeply enigmatic film, and it is not surprising that it has been met with wildly different reactions, from adoration to disapproval and puzzlement. In an interview with 3AM Magazine, Sono called Suicide Club ‘a hate movie’, adding, ‘I hope [the] Japanese hate me… I hope almost all people hate this movie’. Sono was clearly settling scores with his homeland in the film; it is almost as if he were throwing its own destructiveness back in the face of Japanese society. Japan has a high rate of suicide, particularly among young people, and the internet has been blamed for collective suicides seemingly arranged through online chat rooms. Sono appears to be partly motivated by a desire to unsettle complacent audiences, which may go some way towards explaining his gleeful predilection for extreme gore. But here, as in the rest of his work, the violence is accompanied by humour: although you may not notice on first view, the opening scene of Suicide Club is set to a bizarrely cheerful little tune, which undercuts the impact of the orgy of death on screen.

As more mass suicides follow across Japan, the police begin a criminal investigation, with a number of clues seemingly pointing to some kind of organisation behind the deaths. White sports bags left at some of the suicide scenes contain gruesome rolls made of 10-centimetre pieces of human skin sewn together, which, the police later discover, come from the next group of suicides. A strange website consisting only of orange and white dots seems to be counting the deaths, new dots appearing just before new suicides, or so claims a mysterious hacker who goes by the nickname of ‘The Bat’. A pre-pubescent all-girl pop band called ‘Dessart’ may also have something to do with the suicides. Detective Kuroda, helped by Detective Shibusawa, follows the various trails, only to become personally affected by the phenomenon he’s investigating.

Suicide Club has been seen by many critics as a satire of pop culture and of suicide as a fad. Pop culture undoubtedly appears in a negative light in the film, not only through Dessart and the possible connection between the inane messages in their lyrics and the suicides, but also through a weird glam-punk band led by a bleached-blond, androgynous, psychotic young man who calls himself Genesis. In a bizarre Rocky Horror-style sub-plot, Genesis and his gang claim to be the Suicide Club to attract the attention of the media. A scene in which Genesis sings seems to confirm the connection between entertainment and destructiveness: as he performs, one of his henchmen rapes and kills a girl they have abducted. The Rocky Horror interlude may not be entirely successful, but this scene is another example of Sono’s gift for creating memorably nightmarish visions. Genesis and his men are holed up in an abandoned bowling alley and the people and animals they have kidnapped are squirming across the floor, each wrapped in a white sheet. The image of those whimpering, writhing forms, which we know are living beings, but can’t see, is truly disturbing. Even more so when Genesis casually stamps on one of the animals and blood seeps through as the form lies still, with the suggestion that it’s all a spectacle.

As for Dessart, the innocuous-looking pop band seems to hide clues in their lyrics and promotional posters that would appear to point to some sort of cult of death led by children. However, there is no resolution, no explanation of any kind, and the suggestion of this unlikely conspiracy is left open to interpretation at the end. More important than knowing whether the Suicide Club is really a secret society of children is the total separation and incomprehension between young people and adults that its possible existence reveals. Whatever it is that may lead young people to commit suicide, the film suggests that the adults will always be inherently unable to comprehend it.

Sono is particularly interested in secret societies and cults, which is partly to do with the fact that he joined a cult when he was younger and later became a member of a terrorist group (as he explains in the 3AM interview). His early experiences inspired his film Love Exposure (2008), which features the Catholic Church as well as a sinister religious cult. In fact, the Suicide Club could almost be a sect: the children and presumed members ask questions such as ‘Are you connected with yourself?’ and pronounce nebulous statements that would not be out of place in a new age cult. Talking about Love Exposure in the Japan Times, Sono explained: ‘I like exploring borderlines. In this film, it’s the borderlines between perversion and normality, the Catholic Church and cults.’ That statement can be applied to Suicide Club too. Sono does not simply use a religious cult as the perverted contrast to the normality of the Catholic Church, but the cult serves also to highlight the perversions in what we perceive as the norm. In the same way, the possibility of the existence of a secret society called the Suicide Club reveals the fault lines of the supposedly ‘normal’ society, notably the seemingly unbridgeable divide between youth and adults.

Suicide Club has been described as ‘muddled’ and Sono criticised for not making his satire of pop culture and denunciation of the media clear enough. But the ambiguity of the film is precisely what makes it interesting. The Suicide Club is an elusive phenomenon that cannot be attributed to any specific group of people with any certainty. It is a diffuse idea that pervades the whole of society and is not controlled by any one person or group. It’s this idea that makes the film so powerful and disturbing. The Suicide Club remains very abstract and impossible to pin down to any material reality or evidence. The website that seems to count the suicides before they happen is only a collection of coloured dots on a screen. The name of the pop band Dessart is spelt differently in Roman characters throughout the film: ‘Desert’, ‘Dessert’, etc. The police officers are unsure whether the phenomenon they are investigating is accident, suicide or murder. And when a new website appears with the aim of fighting the Suicide Club, it consists only of a revolving white circle: the counter-suicide club can be nothing but another abstract geometric pattern to combat the indefinable, insubstantial threat. The intangible nature of the Suicide Club is at the heart of the film, and it is therefore logical that there should be no final resolution.

By the end of the film, the only thing that seems clear is that the Suicide Club has introduced chaos and disorder into society. The fact that there is no rational or criminal explanation for the suicides upsets and unsettles assumptions about the nature, stability and functioning of society. In many suicidal fictions, the impulse for self-destruction stems from a loss of meaning, a disillusion with the values offered by society, and corresponds to a distrust for language (see the various spellings of ‘Dessart’), seen as a vehicle for the authorities that govern that society, and therefore perceived as corrupt. So while for one person to decide that life is meaningless is an act of nihilism that may cause some disruption to the social fabric, when a group of people decides to form a society devoted to self-destruction, it becomes an all-out attack on the values of society at large, almost an act of existential terrorism. This connection between organised self-destruction and the threat to social order is an idea that runs through fictional depictions of suicide clubs, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1882 short story ‘The Suicide Club’ to Sono’s film, via quasi-suicide clubs such as Fight Club (1999). And yet, despite their fascinating implications and subversive potential, suicide clubs remain a surprisingly rare kind of secret society in cinema, with Sono’s film one of the most formidable, labyrinthine and provocative examples.

Virginie Sélavy