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Gaea Girls + Shinjuku Boys

Gaea Girls

Format: DVD

Release date: 25 February 2010

Distributor: Second Run

Directors: Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams

Title: Gaea Girls

UK 2000

100 mins

Title: Shinjuku Boys

UK 1995

53 mins

Spotlights sweep across a wrestling arena, electronic music blaring, the announcer’s booming voice pumping up an audience of screaming fans. The main event: a no-holds-barred match between Nagayo Chigusa, founder of the GAEA Women’s Professional Wrestling team, and Lioness Asuka. Despite taking a ferocious beating, Chigusa pulls out a crucial win, a victory for her and her team of girls, who all live and train together in a glorified shed in the Japanese countryside, with just enough space for some tightly packed bunk beds and a wrestling ring.

Gaea Girls, the 2000 film from Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams, is one of five documentaries that the two filmmakers made together in Japan. In an excellent pairing from Second Run, it’s finally being released on DVD alongside their 1995 film Shinjuku Boys. Longinotto, who also directed the award-winning Divorce Iranian Style (1998), has earned herself a reputation for making powerful films that explore the lives of women living on the fringes of society, and these two films complement each other beautifully.

In a country where women are still expected to become demure housewives, the GAEA girls have forcefully broken with tradition in a quest to become ‘a somebody’. They will probably never marry or have children (a theme that reoccurs in both films). With little commentary and few interviews, the filmmakers capture life for these women over a period of months, closely following trainee Takeuchi as she prepares for her final test before she can go pro. While the professional matches may be more spectacle than real contest, the training these girls endure is brutal.

Over the course of filming, two girls run away; Takeuchi, who sees the ring as the only place where she can unload her aggression, fails her first test. Despite her pent-up feelings, she’s simply not tough enough, and faces the shame and humiliation of being tormented by Nagayo for her weakness. The masculine Nagayo, with her spiky, bleached blond hair, confesses in one of the few interviews that she loves these girls as if they were her own children. But in one of the film’s most disturbing scenes, it’s Nagayo who mercilessly pounds Takeuchi into the floor after she’s given a second chance to take the test.

While the film’s classic cinéma vérité style subtly probes beneath the surface of its characters, the film suffers slightly from a lack of context. More interviews with the GAEA girls would have drawn the audience even deeper into their lives, and explained some of the difficult choices they made in such a deeply patriarchal society. Despite the fact that it’s a cruder, more dated film, it’s the strength of the interviews in Shinjuku Boys that makes it an even more arresting documentary.

Gaish, Tatsu and Kazuki are three women who have chosen to live their lives as men. Outcasts from mainstream society, they all work as hosts at New Marilyn, a club for women, who enjoy being entertained by the closest thing they can find to an ideal man. Despite their shared profession, all three hosts embody very different types of masculinity. They also inhabit very different romantic relationships - one with another woman, one with a male to female transsexual. Gaish, the trio’s playboy, sleeps with some of his clients, but never takes his clothes off - not wanting to ruin the illusion that he’s a man. It’s a terrific documentary, and it’s only a shame that it’s not longer.

All of the women who appear in the two films defy easy categorisation - masculine, feminine, gay, lesbian or straight. And although Gaea Girls is less nakedly about gender and sexuality than Shinjuku Boys, both films are fascinating in what they reveal about women living lives that are so utterly remote from those of mainstream women, both in Japan and the rest of the world.

Sarah Cronin

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House

House

Format: DVD

Date: 25 January 2010

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi

Writers: Chigumi Obayashi, Chiho Katsura

Original title: Hausu

Cast: Kimiko Ikegami, Kumiko Ohba, Yôko Minamida, Ai Matsubara, Miki Jinbo

Japan 1977

88 mins

Midnight Movies present a pecial screening of House on 22 January at Curzon Soho, London.

Scroll down to watch the trailer.

There must have been something in the air in 1977: horror and surrealism combined to make some of the world’s most interesting schlock movies, which launched the careers of seminal directors who would define the decade to come. Alongside the more obscure House, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Dario Argento’s Suspiria and David Cronenberg’s Rabid were released in cinemas that year. Cronenberg and Lynch had previously made short experimental films, as had Nobuhiko Obayashi. Rabid was Cronenberg’s second feature, but his first to have reasonable international distribution and therefore influence, while Suspiria is possibly Argento’s finest, expertly fusing an experimental approach to lighting, camera design and score, rarely seen in European cinema. Certainly, B-movies were big business in the late 1970s, due to audience dissatisfaction with mainstream releases, and wide demand for horror, sci-fi and fantasy meant there was room for all sorts of expressions of those genres.

The plot of House has the kind of lurid fairy tale scenario that Asian cinema does well: a petulant Japanese teenager refuses to spend her holiday with her father and his new girlfriend and tracks down a long-lost aunt who lives reclusively in the woods with only a white cat for company. The girl brings along some friends from school for the visit and they get killed one by one as the house and its environs devour them in increasingly bizarre ways.

From the point of view of a modern audience, House seems both strange and familiar. The super-saturated colour and kitsch style of the film predicts the oeuvre of Tetsuya Nakashima (Memories of Matsuko). The bizarre shifts in tone between comedy, horror and teenage romance seem so similar to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films that I’d be fascinated to know whether Raimi came across House while at film school - he made his first short Within the Woods in 1978, which would be remade as Evil Dead and Evil Dead II in the following decade.

In terms of Japanese fantasy, the film is clearly influenced by the possessed animals and demonic flying severed heads of Yôkai fiction, the restless spirits of folkloric Kwaidan tales and the notion of the well as an entrance to hell. Obayashi takes these tropes and mixes them with a fetish for 1970s pop culture: the characters’ nicknames reflect both the contemporaneous popularity of Enid Blyton-style tweenage fiction and brand names in the increasingly pervasive advertising of the time - indeed the director himself, outside of experimenta, gained a reputation for slick adverts starring Kirk Douglas and Charles Bronson.

The score is relentless, repeating a catchy but ultimately annoying musical phrase that sounds like an instrumental version of ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ (a song allegedly not about inhaling marijuana). Its repetition is obviously intended to heighten the audience’s unnerved reaction to the lurid events on screen, but actually made me glad to be watching the film at home with a volume control. However, the startling visuals - memorable scenes include one of the girls being eaten by a piano and another spontaneously combusting while looking in a mirror - make up for the score and the often saccharine dialogue. As in many horror films, the audience enjoys the guilty pleasure of watching banal teenagers get dispatched in increasingly inventive ways by the forces of evil. Adding to the visual delights, the spectacle of possessed household objects used as unlikely tools of execution is complemented by the exaggerated deployment of over-saturated Matte paintings as backgrounds to many of the scenes.

House is another great example of late 1970s horror, which, like its peers, pushed the boundaries of the depiction of terror on screen and reveals the interest in the language of experimental filmmaking in genre and mainstream cinema of the time.

Alex Fitch

Midnight Movies present a pecial screening of House on 22 January at Curzon Soho, London.

Buy House [Hausu] Masters of Cinema [DVD] [1977] from Amazon

Home entertainment

Privilege

Privilege

Format: DVD

Date: 25 January 2010

Distributor: BFI Flipside

Director: Peter Watkins

Writers: Norman Bognor, Peter Watkins, Johnny Speight

Cast: Paul Jones, Jean Shrimpton

UK 1967

90 mins

Following the success of his television docu-drama Culloden (1964) and a surprise Oscar for the BBC-banned The War Game (1965), director Peter Watkins resigned from the corporation and went to Universal Studios to make his debut feature Privilege. Shot in the same docu-drama style complete with BBC-style narration, it was almost universally panned on release and has rarely been seen since.

With the former Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones and supermodel Jean Shrimpton in the cast, it seems that Universal thought they would be getting a marketable ‘Swinging London’ film. Instead, Watkins set his film in a dystopian future as in The War Game; the post-nuclear panic of the earlier film is replaced with a world of terrifying conformity where Conservative and Labour parties have formed a coalition government and youth rebellion is channelled through pop performances. Steven Shorter (Paul Jones) is the king of pop: his songs constantly play on all radio stations and he is even treated to Britain’s first ever ticker tape parade. His bizarre stage act involves being beaten by prison guards before breaking free, inciting the crowd into pantomime booing and hysterical stage invasions. As well as calming unruly youth, Shorter’s popularity is used to sell dog food and tackle the nation’s apple glut. It seems he has become a commodity himself - one ad claims: ‘When you buy here you’re buying Steven Shorter’. This empty personality is perfectly embodied by Paul Jones’s performance of studied blandness, which drew much criticism at the time. He seems ill at ease and/or bored, and at times looks like he is about to vomit, but no one seems to care. He is a poor overworked pop star, with Vanessa (Shrimpton), an artist hired to paint him, being the only one with any sympathy. His management makes plans for him to promote religion and nationalism amongst his fans. ‘A better way of life, a fruitful conformity’ is to be endorsed. That this is done without consulting him leads to an act of defiance (asking for hot chocolate instead of wine with his lobster).

Perhaps the highlight of the film is the music, with great original songs by Mike Leander (the man who later gave us Gary Glitter), from the pleading melodrama of ‘Privilege (Set Me Free)’ - famously covered by Patti Smith on her album ‘Easter’ - to Paul Jones’s poppy top 5 hit ‘I’ve been a bad, bad boy’. But best of all are the ‘hymns’ played by Shorter’s backing band, The Runner Beans, sporting tonsures and monks’ habits (not to be confused with the American GI band The Monks): we get a raucous rhythm and blues version of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and a gorgeous Byrds-esque ‘Jerusalem’.

Although Privilege is a fascinating and unusual film in some aspects, the allegory is often too heavy-handed (the chanting ‘We Will Conform’ and Nazi salutes albeit with Union Jack armbands). But its greatest flaw is that it fails to capture the way music and rebellion were being commodified and sold at that time and would be in the future too. Peter Watkins admits to knowing very little about the music industry when he made Privilege, picking up what he could from watching the documentary about American teen idol Paul Anka, Lonely Boy (1962). Where the narration in Culloden is informative about the economic and social structures behind the historical battle, in Privilege it fails to shed light on the workings of the music business in the way a film such as, say, DA Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back (1965) does. Unlike the disturbingly realistic The War Game, Privilege is convincing neither on a documentary nor dramatic level. And where The War Game and Culloden stand as two of the most distinctive pieces of television, Privilege holds a less exalted position in the history of cinema.

Paul Huckerby

Buy Privilege [BFI FLIPSIDE 007] [DVD] [1971] from Amazon

Home entertainment

Silent Night, Deadly Night

Silent Night, Deadly Night

Format: DVD

Date: 23 November 2009

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Charles E Sellier Jr

Writers: Paul Caimi, Michael Hickey

Cast: Robert Brian Wilson, Lilyan Chauvin, Gilmer McCormick, Linnea Quigley, Toni Nero, Britt Leach

USA 1984

85 mins

The slightest re-ordering of synaptic sequences and a sane man becomes psychotic; the slightest re-ordering of alphabetical sequences and Santa becomes Satan. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire? How about severed fingers? Stockings hung by a chimney with care? How about teens hanged with stockings by a chimney with care? A jolly fat man with six tiny reindeer? How about a depraved, homicidal psychopath dressed in red and white? Prefer the latter in every case? Then welcome to the obverse side of the cinematic Christmas coin. Welcome to festive dystopia - a time of chaos on earth and ill-will to all men, where the fraught Christmas film becomes the fright Christmas film.

The first and for various reasons the most influential of the slasher sub-genre of Christmas films (if genre they be) is the 1974 film Black Christmas, directed by Bob Clark and written by Roy Moore. Black Christmas set the parameters for almost all future slasher films: the slasher in contradistinction to the murderer, the ‘final girl’ scenario, the sorority house setting, the stalker/slasher point of view shots, the not-so-smart cops and adults, the ‘Is anybody there?’ motif, the ‘should have left the house but had to have one more look’ motif, and even the ‘leave narrative room for a possible sequel’ strategy. Clark and Moore can also lay claim for establishing the Christmas (or holiday/special day) variant of the slasher film, entailing as it does the additional elements of transgressive seasonal activity and dystopian, even oppositional, frames of mind that render traditional Christmas certainties impossible to maintain. Black Christmas remains, if not the best, certainly the most influential of slashers and opened up the market for more of the same - including an inevitable remake in 2006.

With the successful reception of Black Christmas (it made back six times its budget) and the cinematic Christmas slasher stencil established, other filmmakers turned their attention to the Christmas theme. Coming at the tail end of the psycho-Santa peak period, Charles E Sellier’s Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) was released at a time when alarm was being raised about the so-called ‘video nasties’, and debate raged about the sacrilegious nature of the film and the effects that film depictions of a psycho-Santa might have on children. In Sellier’s variation on the theme, a boy witnesses his parents’ death at the hands of a Santa-garbed thug and then grows up to become a Santa-garbed maniacal killer himself. Due to the controversy around the film, it acquired a small following and four sequels were made, each one decreasingly rewarding. With the last instalment, the poorly rated Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1991), director Martin Kitrosser condemned the whole Christmas slasher film cycle to the dustbin and by extension, forced our poor psycho-Santa into near-retirement.

James B Evans

This is an excerpt from James B Evans’s ‘Psycho Santa, qu’est-ce que c’est: The Christmas Slasher Film’, published in the winter 08 issue of Electric Sheep. It is available from Wallflower Press.

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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Format: Blu-ray

Date: 16 November 2009

Distributor: Second Sight

Director: Tobe Hooper

Writers: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper

Cast: Gunnar Hansen, Marilyn Burns, Allen Danziger, Paul A Partain, William Vail

USA 1974

83 mins

New Year’s night, the last weird hours of a house party, I walk in on two friends staring at a window. From downstairs there is the pulse of unrecognised music, muffled by plaster and carpet. Up here, it is quiet and almost morning but still dark outside and the yellowish light in the room reflects back at us in the black glass. ‘Man,’ says one. ‘Man… your curtain. It’s made of tanned human skin.’ The noise from downstairs surges as a door opens. The two friends rear upward, in unison, transfixed by some synthesis of sound and vision. The next day they will tell me that that was when the moon exploded. One of them will shake his head, almost affectionate. ‘I swear I could see old Leatherface.’

It seems that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is embedded in our subconscious, lurking in the synapses and still causing redneck death trips in suburban English bedrooms. Perhaps for this reason, Tobe Hooper’s 1974 psychedelic horror withstands reissues, reappraisals and deluxe treatments without losing its bite, even if - as it is released on Blu-ray with three hours of extras - we might question the necessity of yet another attempt to polish this exhilaratingly lo-fi vison. However, there is one area in which the remastering process has done more good than harm: in bringing to the fore Tobe Hooper and sound recordist Wayne Bell’s stunning soundtrack.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was scored with the same mix of pragmatism, rawness and experimental sensibility that imbues its cinematography, editing, and particularly art direction. Its haunting qualities are much admired, but little has been written about its formal construction aside from anecdotes about some of the junkyard/household items used as sound sources. This instrumentation is cited as yet another example of Hooper’s DIY attitude; in fact, it also demonstrates an understanding of 20th-century avant-garde music, with which the director was apparently familiar. The sound design might have been done on the cheap, but the clever interweaving of diegetic and non-diegetic sound in the film, which reaches its apex as the whirr of the title’s notorious power toool melds with the ominous low-pass filter of an analogue synthesiser but in fact occurs throughout, results in a sonic experience that is all the more noteworthy for the inexperience of its composers.

Hooper and Bell weren’t the first sound designers to use electronic music to illustrate fear, but their use of real sounds alongside electronic textures creates masterful shifts in perspective that illustrate, for me, the disorientation of being trapped in the ultimate nightmare. These are not the glacial synth melodies or demonic disco pulses of giallo soundtracks, nor terrifying sounds from outer space; this is everyday sound turned bad. In the opening credits, a lone cymbal (which sounds wonderfully cheap, like a dustbin lid), a scraped tuning fork and some heavy reverb set the scene; a growling oscillator announces the first murder; but we first encounter a full sonic attack when Pam - soon to meet her fate in the deep freezer - enters a room festering with chicken feathers, bone totems and a caged, chattering hen. Skeletal percussion and metallic tones clatter and jangle at increasing volume as outside an electricity generator whirrs and tin cans swing from a tree. We hear both ritual music of a particularly sinister intent, and the eerie presence of machinery gone diabolical. Pam is trapped in a place of death whose spells are both ancient and modern, and we can hear as well as see that she is not going to escape.

While other horror movies use harsh sonic textures sparingly, for dramatic effect alongside melody, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s soundtrack is unusually, relentlessly atonal. There are some expected cues: extreme shock is often signalled by high-end, painful electronic sounds. In other places, though, the composition is subtler, as in the grotesque dinner scene, in which Leatherface and his grim family bicker and gibber as they terrorise their victim, Sally. The scene is awkwardly choreographed, frenetic and almost slapstick, but a low, droning hum and white noise, layered with echoing, modulated percussion, convey a slow, dreamlike and horrendous aspect that is close to nauseating.

While roughly within the context of electronic composition of the mid-20th century, Hooper’s hands-on, DIY approach results in a wonderfully punk take on concrete music that would be echoed, many years later, in the visceral, atmospheric and very likely horror-influenced records of bands such as Michigan noiseniks Wolf Eyes. Most of all, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s feral electronics are a perfect match for the film’s deeper message - that, as Suicide were to opine a few years later over their own rough-edged synth sequences, ‘America, America is killing its youth’.

Frances Morgan

Buy The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – The Seriously Ultimate Edition [Blu-ray] [1974] from Amazon

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Lone Wolf and Cub

Lone Wolf and Cub

Format: Special Edition Blu-ray Collector’s Set

Date: 27 March 2017

Distributor: Criterion Collection

Includes: Sword of Vengeance, Baby Cart at the River Styx, Baby Cart to Hades, Baby Cart in Peril, Baby Cart in the Land of Demons, White Heaven in Hell, Shogun Assassin

Directors: Kenji Misumi, Buichi Saito, Yoshiyuki Kuroda, Robert Houston

Writers: Kazuo Koike, Tsutomu Nakamura, Robert Houston, David Weisman

Based on the manga by: Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

Original title: Kozure Ōkami

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Akihiro Tomikawa, Fumio Watanabe, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi

Japan 1972-74, USA 1980

596 mins (total)

The 70s Japanese series Lone Wolf and Cub, based on a popular comic by Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima, builds on the tradition of 20 years of samurai films. While it is one of the most violent examples of the genre, the staccato brutality suits the plot and is juxtaposed with elegiac scenes of travel through desolate landscapes. The overall story is quite simple, although individual episodes may leave the casual viewer wondering about characters’ motives and allegiances. The six instalments follow the travels of disgraced samurai Ogami Ittō and his three-year-old son Daigorō, who he pushes around 17th-century Japan in a cart, looking for work as a killer for hire while battling members of the Yagyū clan. The first instalment, Sword of Vengeance (Kowokashi udekashi tsukamatsuru), tells the tale of how Ittō goes on the run when members of a splinter faction of the clan murder his wife and household and frame him for treason in order to install one of their own as the Shogun’s executioner, a revered position in the social hierarchy. The rest of the first film and subsequent episodes have Ogami and ocassionally Daigorō dispatch various members of the Yagyū clan and perform work for hire from town to town.

Unlike the manga, the films don’t have a definitive conclusion as the comic was still being serialised while the films were produced, with the final episode printed in Weekly Manga Action in April 1976. However, the films do increase in violence as they go along, with the final film White Heaven in Hell (Jigoku e ikuzo! Daigorō) depicting a battle between Ogami Ittō and 150 assailants, the largest body count caused by a single individual committed to screen in one scene (although the Rambo franchise boasts more over its entire length).

The legacy of the Lone Wolf series has influenced work in various media in a number of ways. The violence alone was parodied in a memorable scene in The Addams Family (1991) where Wednesday and Pugsley hack each others’ limbs off in a school play, spraying the audience with blood. The American remix of the first two films - Shogun Assassin - was withdrawn from distribution in the UK for 15 years following the backlash against ‘video nasties’ in the early 1980s. It is interesting to see how adaptations of comics in Western cinema are now approaching the level of violence depicted in their Japanese counterparts 30 years ago. American comic book creator Frank Miller was also impressed by the series, providing covers and introductions for the first dozen issues of the 1980s US reprint before casting similar samurai and ninja characters, fond of dismemberment and decapitation, in his series Ronin and Sin City. The 90s comic book The Road to Perdition, adapted for film in 2002, was also influenced by the series both in its plot of a wandering assassin travelling with child on a path of vengeance and the name of the comic itself, as Ittō refers to his journey as meifumadō (The Road to Hell). As the Cormac McCarthy novel The Road and subsequent film also feature a man pushing his child around a desolate landscape in a cart, you can see that Lone Wolf and Cub is a series that has influenced both pop culture and literature alike.

Before manga and exploitation Japanese cinema were better appreciated in the West, many fans of the saga would have been introduced to the characters by the American release of the second film Baby Cart at the River Styx (Sanzu no kawa no ubaguruma) as Shogun Assassin in 1980, which adds flashback scenes from Sword of Vengeance but subtracts 10 minutes from the overall running time. This structures the film more episodically, which means that connections between some scenes are lost, but paradoxically also makes the film seem closer to the self-contained weekly episodes of the serialised manga. However, the addition of an omniscient voice-over by an older Daigorō adds unnecessary pathos and the simplification of the plot reduces our affinity with the characters.

The popularity of the various incarnations of Lone Wolf and Cub in the West can be attributed to the obvious - the engaging plot and characterisation, the excellent direction and performances - but also to the brief interest in ninja films in the early 1980s and the cross-referencing between the series and Spaghetti Westerns. While Sergio Leone’s films refer to the plots and brief but terminal melees of 1950s samurai films, in turn the Lone Wolf series uses many of Leone’s trademark devices such as close-ups of eyes during the tense build-up to duels and the placing of characters in long shot within a landscape. These elements, together with the simplicity of the plot, the reoccurring characters and blood as lurid as anything in a contemporaneous horror film, add up to a winning formula that’s terrifically watchable and leaves the viewer frustrated when it comes to an early end. It should come as no surprise that Japan produced further Lone Wolf and Cub TV series, but the original films are a great evocation of both the 17th-century Edo period - the subtitles and subplots have a surprisingly educational quality to them - and 1970s manga and filmmaking. Now distanced enough from the taint of exploitation associated with their initial American releases, they still have the ability to greatly impress modern audiences.

Alex Fitch

This review was first published in November 2009 for the DVD box-set release by Eureka Entertainment.
Cinema releases, Home entertainment

The Queen of Spades

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The Queen of Spades

Format: Cinema + DVD

Release date: Boxing Day 2009

Venues: various UK cities

Distributor: Optimum Releasing + ICO

DVD release date: 18 January 2010

Director: Thorold Dickinson

Writers: Rodney Ackland, Arthur Boys

Based on the short story by: Alexander Pushkin

Cast: Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans, Yvonne Mitchell, Ronald Howard, Anthony Dawson

UK 1949

91 mins

All the advance indications predisposed me to like this old-school British melodrama. It’s a shadowy tale of obsession, mystery, and the supernatural set in Catherine the Great’s Russia. The leading man Anton Walbrook had just made The Red Shoes and Colonel Blimp with Powell and Pressburger, and was about to make La Ronde with Max Ophí¼ls. And ranged against him is Dame Edith Evans, in what appears to have been her first talkie, two years before her famous ‘handbag’ role in The Importance of Being Earnest. Quite a debut it is too, lurking in lace, croaking and squalling with that unique voice, quaking in her crinolines and veils like a crumbly old cake on a trolley. She was only 60, just eight years older than Walbrook, but certainly carries conviction as a relic of a generation long past.

The Queen of Spades was described by Martin Scorsese as ‘a masterpiece, one of the very best films of the 1940s’. But I regret to say I think it is more of a curio than a classic. It is not in the same league as Thorold Dickinson’s true masterpiece Gaslight (1940). No doubt times have changed, and the grimy noir tension of the earlier film suits the tastes of today better than the mannered costumery of The Queen of Spades. I found myself unable to make the imaginative leap needed to immerse myself in the story, and could only enjoy it as an uninvolving spectacle. Certainly Dickinson created a remarkably atmospheric St Petersburg in Welwyn Garden City (!), and there is plenty of semi-expressionist visual pleasure on offer, together with a typically grotesque cameo from Ealing stalwart Miles Malleson, and sundry moonlighting ballerinas thrown in for good measure.

So what’s the problem? Partly the source material - Pushkin’s story. It made a great opera for Tchaikovsky in the late 19th century, but I’m not sure there was enough to the plot to sustain a film in the mid-20th - you can see where it’s going, and the twist is not a surprising one. All hinges on the two protagonists, a gambler and an aged countess. In Pushkin’s original, it is love that provides the initial driving force for the gambler, but Dickinson seems to play down this side of the story, perhaps sensing that it declines in interest as events progress, to the point of being forgotten by the end. It is hard work to make a gambling compulsion an appealing foundation for a romantic anti-hero, and I fear that Walbrook distances us from the gambler’s character first by moody brooding and then by wild-eyed raving. He errs on the side of solipsism: the drama is too much an internal one to exert a strong emotional pull.

In the end, though, the buck has to stop with the director: the film is just not as spooky as one would like it to be.

Peter Momtchiloff

Home entertainment

The Sorrow and the Pity

The Sorrow and the Pity

Format: DVD

Date: 24 August 2009

Distributor: Arrow Films

Director: Marcel Ophí¼ls

Original title: Le Chagrin et la pitié

Featuring: Marcel Ophí¼ls, Pierre Mendí¨s-France, Christian de la Mazií¨re, Helmuth Tausend, Georges Bidault, Emile Coulaudon

France 1969

249 mins

This famous French documentary, which looks at the town of Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne region during the German occupation in the Second World War, was made in 1969 but was withdrawn from distribution and not generally seen till 1981.

Why was the film so controversial in France? It has the reputation of having exposed the extent of wartime collaboration. But I don’t believe that it revealed much that wasn’t known already. A simple answer to the question is that it showed participants in the events of 1940 to 1944 discussing things that most of the people who had experienced them preferred not to discuss. And there was a new generation ready to hear what their parents might not have told them.

Particularly inflammatory, I would guess, were two allegations that the film makes impossible to ignore. The first of those, insinuated with bitter humour by ex-members of the Resistance, but made more mildly and explicitly by British agents, is that in France the workers were inclined to resist while the bourgeoisie preferred to keep out of trouble. As for the aristocracy, representatives are on hand to testify to their predilection for active participation in the fascist project, even to the extent of fighting in a German uniform on the Eastern front.

The other allegation that haunts this film is that there was a higher level of collaboration in France than in other conquered countries. This accusation is hard to substantiate, but it leaves a taint.

We should not be too quick to indulge in the satisfaction of sitting in judgement, particularly when it comes to sins of omission or accommodation in war. It is easier for many of us to sympathise with the Frenchwomen who consorted with Germans than with those who humiliated them afterwards. As this film makes clear, the urge to respond to some of the German occupiers as fellow human beings could be strong. Not the Gestapo: the interviewees consistently distinguish between them and the ordinary soldiers of the Wehrmacht. An old boy called up late on to fill the depleted ranks of the latter is remembered kindly by a Resistance member to whom he slipped an apple on a forced march.

For some private citizens there may be extenuation and condonement, but for the French establishment, the governing classes, there is no escaping condemnation. Pétain, the hero of Verdun, was still admired by many interviewed in the film; but he was justly convicted of treason in 1945. As head of state, he did an enormous service of legitimisation to Nazi Germany by urging French citizens to collaborate. For Hitler he was surely a useful idiot, to borrow Lenin’s cynical phrase. Laval, head of government from 1942 to 1944, fares worse: the interviewer breaks into the disingenuous protestations of Laval’s son-in-law to give the statistics that reveal the consequences of the deals struck by his father-in-law with the Germans. But this is a rare case where we are given the quantitative information necessary to make substantial historical judgement. For the most part, what the film offers instead is insight into diverse personal experiences of the Occupation.

The British participants provide many of the most illuminating moments. Anthony Eden recognises with some emotion the human cost of the destruction - essential to the Allied cause - of the French navy at Mers-el-Kébir. A pilot who crashed in the Auvergne recalls the perilous generosity of the farmer who took him in. A homosexual entertainer turned spy speaks tenderly of his German officer lover. The courage of this spy is praised by his bowler-hatted controller, striding through Westminster; but the spy himself merely notes that he was willing to take on this dangerous role because he had nothing to lose - and he suggests that this is the key to understanding the differing responses of the French social classes to occupation.

Aesthetically, the film has little merit. Perhaps that is a frivolous thought. But when we switch from the ill-framed headshots, loose structure, and explanatory gaps of the documentary to the confident images and vigorous conviction of the wartime propaganda films, we are reminded that aesthetics matters. The film does, however, exert a cumulative power, as apparently banal reminiscences gradually give place to admissions of shocking candour, and to denunciations whose rancour was still undimmed 25 years after the war.

Peter Momtchiloff

Home entertainment

Inside

Inside

Format: DVD

Date: 12 October 2009

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Directors: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury

Writer: Alexandre Bustillo

Original title: A l’intérieur

Cast: Alysson Paradis, Béatrice Dalle

France 2007

79 mins

In January 2006, in the wake of the ‘Pyres of Autumn’ that lit up the Parisian suburbs, Jean Baudrillard spoke of ‘a kind of eternal flame, like that under the Arc de Triomphe, burning in honour of the Unknown Immigrant’. Baudrillard saw the dispossessed arsonists of les banlieues as ‘savage analysts’ of the disintegration of Western society. ‘Today it is precisely “the best” it has to offer - cars, schools, shopping centres - that are torched and ransacked. Even nursery schools: the very tools through which the car-burners were to be integrated and mothered. “Screw your mother” might be their organising slogan. And the more there are attempts to “mother” them, the more they will.’

The debut feature of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, Inside (2007), a story that involves a tremendous amount of apparently meaningless and at times extremely gruesome violence towards a heavily pregnant mother-to-be, might seem at first glance to be little more than another regrettable symptom of just that disintegration. All this mindless sadism, we might say to ourselves, shaking our heads ruefully, a sad indictment of the decline of traditional Western values. But what this initial conservative reading misses is the degree to which this film offers just such a savage analysis of the malaise of which it is a symptom, both exploiting and dissecting the bourgeois fear of a threat no longer external. ‘This year,’ the movie tagline goes, ‘the terror is Inside‘.

The film opens with an almost pathetically ridiculous CGI foetus, resembling somewhat those brief glimpses of humans in Pixar animations. A voice-over soothingly says, ‘My baby, finally inside me. No one will take him from me’ before a violent crash jolts us out into live action. A car accident filmed with such high gloss as to resemble a car advert, albeit a car advert imagined by Paul Virilio. Almost the very first ‘filmed’ (as opposed to animated) shot in the film then, is of a burning car. A title card then sends us ‘four months later’; Sarah (Alysson Paradis), still scarred from the accident that killed her husband, is due to give birth the following day. While spending her last childless night at home, she is harassed, at first by nightmares of a violent birth, and then by a mysterious, nameless Woman (Béatrice Dalle) intent on murdering her.

Inside was released a year after Baudrillard’s article, and the conflagrations of 2005 form the backdrop to the film’s slender narrative. Mentioned a number of times near the beginning of the film, they are dismissed by Sarah, who makes money as a photographer taking pictures of such events, as ‘just kids having a blast, ’cause they’re bored’. The figure of the immigrant, as it were, returns at the very end of the film, in the form of Abdel (Aymen Saí¯di), a prisoner held by the police who turn up in the film’s third act. The choice of Sarah’s profession questions the ethical position of the artist who profits from the appropriation and exploitation of the image of the other. The close proximity of photographer to filmmaker likewise suggests a certain auto-critique of the film as exploitation cinema. Though the suburban outsider is never presented directly as a threat in the film, it is as though he is repressed, and forced to reappear in another form both more violent and dehumanised.

The thread that joins the banlieue fires to the Woman is lack. What does the Woman say? ‘I want your baby.’ She wants Sarah’s baby, because she herself has none, because, as she sees it, Sarah ‘stole’ it from her, just as she also ‘stole’ the symbolic identity of the suburban immigrants in her photographs (in fact, the very first thing Sarah tries to do to the Woman is photograph her, only to find that she cannot - as though, like a vampire, the Woman lacked the solidity necessary for her image to materialise on film). It is as lack that the grievances of both the socially and politically excluded residents of the banlieues and the Woman are expressed - a lack that is represented not by less but rather more, marked by a terrifying excess, most frequently expressed in the film as an overload of gore í  la Herschell Gordon Lewis. In her impassive insistence, her nameless anonymity and her seemingly unstoppably destructive drive and apparent (near-)invincibility, the Woman resembles a god. She stands metaphorically for the divine violence of the people, the brutal return of the politically repressed like a swarm come from heaven.

The terrifying encounter with the suburban other lies behind the violent imagery of the film, and in that respect it is comparable to the French films of Michael Haneke, particularly Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005). But where Haneke proposes an almost dry, patient cinematic analysis, Inside uses the generic codes of the horror genre, forgoing the analytic position to become both symptom and diagnosis. Body horror becomes the horror of the social body, spilling speechlessly over the boundaries of sense, like a scream without a tongue. When terror comes from inside, no fortification is possible. Such is the axiom of a cinematic mode that consists, as Baudrillard says of the Parisian arson attacks, in ‘successive phases of a revolt whose end is not in sight’.

Robert Barry

Home entertainment

All Tomorrow’s Parties

Nick Cave by Shannon McClean

Pic credit: Nick Cave photographed by Shannon McClean

Format: DVD

Date: 9 November 2009

Distributor: Warp Films

Director: Jonathan Caouette and All Tomorrow’s People

Featuring: Belle and Sebastian, Sonic Youth, Grinderman, Animal Collective

UK 2009

82 mins

Close your eyes if you will and imagine the perfect music festival. There would be great bands of course, with the event curated by one of your favourite artists. There will be some bands you love, but have never had the chance to see, and some you’ve never heard of, but you just know are going to be amazing. There would be no camping or grappling with tents in the rain, you’d even get your own little flat with a bathroom. The gigs would be indoors with a decent sound system. There would be no elitist VIP section, bands and punters would intermix with no sense of us and them. There would be a beach when it’s sunny and shelter when it rains. And no portaloos!

Such a festival does exist and its name is All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP). It is the brainchild of Barry Hogan, who got the idea after he promoted Belle and Sebastian’s Bowlie Weekender in 1999. And now a film has been made about it. Brought together by Jonathan Caouette (Tarnation) and music video director Vincent Moon, it captures the essence of the UK ATPs, which are held several times a year at the quintessentially British institution of ‘the holiday camp’ by the seaside, made more ironic by the fact that most of the bands playing are from the States. They probably find the whole thing even more bizarre than the Brits whose only experience of a holiday camp is from watching Hi-de-Hi!

Comprised of footage from the festival contributed by filmmakers, fans and bands using Super8, camcorder, mobile phone and still imagery, the film is a mish-mash of live footage, interviews and people just enjoying the festival. It reflects ATP’s musical aesthetic; wild and edgy, obscure and funny, capturing the rawness and the post-punk attitude of the event. Having been to many of these events myself, I felt a gurgle of joy bubbling up inside me as each frame flashed a memory, an anecdote, good times and ‘I was bloody there!’ outbursts.

The film opens with fan footage of the check-in queues on the first day of the event, interspersed with 60s footage of traditional holiday camps. It is quite surreal to be watching old-fashioned Red Coats and knobbly knees contests backed with music from obtuse noisnicks Battles, who are the first band that we see.

For fans and previous attendees of ATP, there are several fun games you can play while watching the All Tomorrow’s Parties film. The first one is to ‘guess the band’: some of the live footage is accompanied by the band name and the year that they played, but more often than not the artists are unlabeled, so knowing which is which is a real nerd’s pleasure. There’s also the ‘spot the friend’ game. I think I counted at least 10 people I know who were either interviewed or appeared in some background scene.

Or how about the brilliant ‘remember when…’ game? Do you remember the crazy Chinese guy running around in the cape? Or when Lightning Bolt played outside their chalet and people from the neighbouring houses complained? Or when David Cross (pre-Arrested Development) went down like a lead balloon during his stand-up routine? Or when Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian played five-a-side football with the regular folk?

It’s also great seeing bands like The Gossip playing the small stage at Camber Sands before they burst into the mainstream and onto naked magazine covers. I remember bumping into Beth Ditto in the loos before she went on and she had a huge chunk of toilet paper stuck to her shoe. I gave her a sideways look in the mirror and said ‘you may want to sort that out before you go on stage!’ She laughed and thanked me for pointing it out. I felt like I really contributed to the success of that particular show!

There is also some enjoyable interview footage with some of the curators (Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and Warren Ellis from The Dirty Three) as well as the organiser of the festival, Barry Hogan. There’s a great scene when he’s watching a news report about ATP on TV in his chalet and is cringing at his own interview.

This film probably won’t be of interest to those who aren’t into the bands or haven’t been to an All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival, but for those who have, it is a reminder of how utterly unique and special this event is.

Lucy Hurst