Format: DVD

Date: 10 August 2009

Distributor: Terracotta Distribution

Director: Singing Chen

Writers: Singing Chen and Lou Yi-an

Original title: Liu lang shen gou ren

Cast: Singing Chen and Lou Yi-an

Taiwan 2006

119 mins

Taiwanese director Singing Chen’s second film God Man Dog is made up of four or five interwoven narratives. It made me wonder what the purpose of this cinematic form can be. Perhaps the stories might join together to make a single larger story. Or what happens in one story might reflect interestingly on what happens in another. Or it might just be that one of the ways a work of art or entertainment can give pleasure is by letting us see how a puzzle is solved.

God Man Dog is a converging ensemble piece í  la Altman, but lacks his masterly orchestration of disparate elements. It is hard to see a coherent narrative whole, or one element making sense of another. The stories are connected not intrinsically but by chance elements. The characters all make journeys, and there is some convergence of time and place (Taipei, a regional village, and the highway that joins them). But the stories do not contribute significantly to each other’s development or resolution.

Perhaps this is too analytical a way to approach what this film has to offer us. It may be better seen not as narrative-driven but as a set of contrasting studies of people confronted by weighty problems, to do with alcohol, depression, work, money, growing up, sex, parenthood, disability, death. We are shown how they try to get to grips with their lives, and in several cases are invited to consider the role that religious or superstitious feeling plays in this. God and the supernatural do not seem to give the characters what they need: we are left thinking that they face their troubles alone unless they find something in the human world to give meaning to their lives.

There is an impersonal feeling to the cinematography - little sense of a human touch in the filming, of the camera’s presence, of light playing on film. The blank, detached gaze of the camera emphasises the characters’ isolation, but also gives them a kind of equality: there are no protagonists or privileged characters in this film. They are on an equal footing not only with each other but with us, for there is no judgement and no irony in the way they are depicted - the viewer does not see more than the characters see, or understand better than the characters understand.

God Man Dog is not, I am pretty sure, a deep film, though it is ‘about’ Life, Death, and all that. However, it does show us things about people in ways that are perhaps its own. The acting always carries conviction: what we see seems real, even when it is intriguingly odd. The dogs? I think they are just random interlopers into the human stories.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: Cinema

Date: 10-21 July 2009

Venue: ICA (London)

Director: Paul Schrader

Writers: Chieko Schrader, Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader

Cast: Ken Ogata, Masayuki Shionoya, Go Riju, Yasosuke Bando, Kisako Manda

USA 1985

120 mins

Also available on DVD Region 1 from Criterion

Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor and leader of the private militia, the Tatenokai or Shield Society. Paul Schrader’s 1985 film, Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters, attempts to shed light on the development of this complex figure, famous for the circumstances of his death as much as for his literary work.

Schrader paints Mishima as a modern-day Byron, forever cultivating his celebrity image while seeking to fuse art with action and social change. The story mixes episodes from Mishima’s life and work and is told in flashback over four chapters. The fourth chapter depicts Mishima’s infamous siege of the Japanese Self-Defense Force headquarters while the earlier chapters go back to the past events that could have motivated him. Sequences in black and white indicate episodes from Mishima’s early life while hyper-stylised, hyper-colourful studio scenes represent the world of Mishima’s fiction.

Despite considerable aesthetic ambition, Mishima always feels more like a writer’s film than a director’s. I say this not just because it is about the life of a writer, but more because it is obsessed with the processes of writing and story-telling. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem in itself, but it becomes one as Schrader’s literary obsessions smother the cinematic potential of the film. (One is reminded that Schrader also wrote Taxi Driver, but that it was the cine-love evident in Scorsese’s direction that really made this film a classic). The scenes from three of Mishima’s novels that Schrader crams into the narrative are flat, repetitive, and nauseatingly over-staged. As episodes, they serve only to point out obvious parallels between Mishima’s life and work, and to contribute to a whole that is already too wordy, too codified, and too bogged down with information. The manically stylised images are entirely at the service of narrative information and intellectual ideas; they have no real feeling or truth of their own.

The fourth chapter is admittedly better, as Schrader drops the camera acrobatics and focuses more on the action of Mishima’s final work in all its mad, heroic glory. This is the only place in the film where there is space to really look at the mature Mishima, to ponder what he was all about, and to feel genuine fascination at his enigmatic personality. It perhaps just saves the film from being completely bloated and boring, and leaves it standing as an informative introduction to an impressively dedicated life.

David Warwick

Format: DVD

Date: 29 June 2009

Distributor: Optimum

Director: Roger Corman

Writers: Don Peters, Robert Thorn

Cast: Shelley Winters, Don Stroud, Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern

USA 1970

86 mins

Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama is loosely based on the true story of Kate ‘Ma’ Barker and her criminal offspring, whose exploits in the American Midwest from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s led to avid media coverage and inspired James Hadley Chase to pen his 1939 novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which concerned a mob controlled by their matriarch. Their crime spree lasted 15 years, although the pace of Corman’s account, and the few concessions made to the ageing process, suggest a shorter timescale. His film also embraces the myth of ‘Machine Gun Ma’ as the head of the operation, a legend that was reportedly cultivated by the FBI in order to justify their eventual killing of an elderly woman.

An unsettling opening scene, in which a teenage Ma is raped by a gang led by her father, is one of Corman’s few attempts to speculate on the roots of her attitude towards society, with the director preferring to revel in the amoral activities of her outlaw family, and to evoke period trappings on a typically shoestring budget. Robert Altman’s Thieves like Us (1974) provides a more authentic snapshot of criminal life in Depression-era America, but Corman’s film is of interest to an audience beyond his core following of cultists, despite its inaccuracies. As Ma and her four sons - Herman, Fred, Lloyd and Arthur - travel across the United States, committing crime and occasionally lying low under the alias of ‘The Hunters’, they pick up two associates: Mona, a prostitute who has become Lloyd’s girlfriend, and Kevin (Bruce Dern), a sexually sadistic addition to the gang who ‘befriends’ Fred during a term behind bars. Their freewheeling lifestyle is curtailed by an overly ambitious kidnapping, which leads to a brutal shoot-out with the law.

Shelley Winters takes centre-stage as the domineering Ma, and Don Stroud is genuinely threatening as Herman, who becomes her second-in-command and ultimately overthrows his own mother to take control of the gang. Bloody Mama functions as a satire of the American family unit, with Ma effectively adopting the roles of both father and mother; keeping them afloat economically by masterminding robberies and kidnapping plots, and administering ‘tough love’ by physically scolding her brood whenever they have disappointed her, yet also comforting Herman when he has experienced one of his ‘bad moments’ and insisting that he ‘sleep with Ma’ to avoid having bad dreams. Herman is truly a product of her unconventional upbringing, a violent thug who is even described by his girlfriend as a ‘freak’; yet he is capable of moments of tenderness, allowing his lover to leave for Miami rather than risk her being killed in the inevitable climactic bloodshed.

However, it is a young Robert De Niro as Lloyd who offers the most fully-formed characterisation, one that runs the gamut from amusing to disturbing, to strangely sympathetic as he struggles to fit in with his more criminally proficient siblings. Lloyd becomes chemically dependent at an early age, initially getting high from sniffing glue while putting together plastic models, but is soon injecting dope, and De Niro reportedly shed 30 pounds for the role. His stoned seduction of an attractive female swimmer initially plays as an exercise in deadpan humour, but events take a more sinister turn as he pins the girl down to the deck and then kidnaps her, tying her to one of the beds in the family holiday home. ‘She was so cute I had to take a shot at her’, is his feeble justification for his actions. Lloyd is less volatile than Johnny Boy, the self-destructive character who would provide De Niro with his breakthrough in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), but he is as equally misguided. Despite being part of a tightly-knit family, Lloyd is arguably one of the many socially alienated loners, prone to moments of intense introspection, that the actor portrayed during his 70s peak.

It is often difficult to evaluate Corman as a director, and to pinpoint his authorial signature, as his cinematic legacy is forever intertwined with the filmmakers who served their professional apprenticeships within his ‘B’-movie factory; directors such as Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Demme, who would re-invigorate the Hollywood mainstream in the 1970s and the early 1980s. Corman stages his action scenes efficiently, identifying the marketable attributes of the gangster film, yet his subversive spirit does filter through to elevate Bloody Mama above the status of a low-budget programmer to something more memorable, even if the film is, at times, an uncomfortable hybrid. Consequently, Bloody Mama has much in common with Corman’s Death Race 2000 (1975): it is a fast-moving exploitation item, yet one which exhibits some finely observed, almost throwaway, satire at the expense of American society. These elements of Bloody Mama are more interesting today than the still shocking scenes of violence that were the film’s main selling point on its initial release.

John Berra

Format: DVD

Date: 22 June 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Jacques Tati

Writer: Jacques Tati

Cast: Jacques Tati, Karl Kossmeyer

France 1974

84 mins

It is an honour for me to write about Jacques Tati, for whom I have felt unconditional admiration and affection since childhood. The only films for which I remember my father showing enthusiasm were Tati’s masterpieces Jour de fíªte (1949), Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), and Mon Oncle (1958). They enjoyed some mainstream success in British cinemas back in the days before our culture turned curatorial and they became pages in the annals of cinema history. (Amazingly, Jour de fíªte found a distributor here before it did in France.) I believe that these comic visions of rural, seaside, and suburban France respectively were, for my father, a nostalgic link with his francophone youth. Their deployment of speech as sound rather than communication must give them a special resonance for anyone growing up in a foreign-language culture. I came to realise that my father’s fondness for the comedy of gesture with wordless sound, of misunderstanding, and of the absurd banal, were Tati-underpinned. These innocent forms of humour have long tended to seem dated: one would court embarrassment if one tried to enact the first, especially, in sophisticated company today. But the work of the master Tati defies cultural change and can still make cynical 21st-century metropolitans laugh like delighted children.

Parade is very different from Tati’s other films. It is ostensibly a real-time documentary record of a circus performance in a Swedish cinema. The performance that Tati shows us is not only that of the circus artists but also that of the audience, whose lurid hippy clothes are nicely captured on fuzzy colour-saturated film stock (mainly videotape, it appears). As filmmaking, Parade is surprisingly shoddy for a meticulous craftsman like Tati. His preference for dubbing sound afterwards (shared by many great filmmakers) is a key element in the art of his other films, but here is bodged. Eclectic techniques are employed. A camera weaving through backstage comings and goings is reminiscent of Altman or Tati’s friend Fellini. The ‘real’ members of the audience are mingled with planted performers and cardboard cut-outs. A freaky rock group is filmed with wild abandon, which is surprisingly apt, though expressive more of bewilderment than excitement. In general, the blurring of the image, the crude editing, the abrupt switches from one kind of deteriorating film stock to another, from blazing to faded colours, all buy spontaneity at the price of coherence. In its whimsical, chaotic mood, its self-consciously studio-bound character, its visual punning and love of the incongruous, and its variety-bill structure, Parade is more reminiscent of anarchic British TV comedy like Do Not Adjust Your Set than of any cinema film.

Tati is the compí¨re, benign presiding presence and modest star. He offers us five mime routines, dating back to his music-hall act of the 1930s. At the age of 65 he still executes them brilliantly. Although Parade cannot stand comparison with Tati’s best loved works, there are moments of genius in the film that amply justify its existence.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: DVD

Date: 22 June 2009

Distributor: E1 Entertainment

Director: Gerald McMorrow

Writer: Gerald McMorrow

Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green, Sam Riley, Bernard Hill

France/UK 2008

95 mins

For someone who has never been a fan of the myopic, small-scale social realism that is too often synonymous with contemporary British cinema, the stirrings that are currently visible in the work of home-grown filmmakers are an exciting development. These ferments are evident in the season of new British cinema hosted by the ICA, which includes films such as Summer Scars, The Disappeared, The Hide and Crack Willow, which respectively attempt to infuse the reality of hoodies, council estates, bird watching or daily misery with something deeper, darker, richer and more mysterious. Simultaneously, June sees the DVD release of Gerald McMorrow’s Franklyn, an inventive, ambitious, genre-defying debut also located on the borderline between the real and the imaginary, which deserves more attention than it received on its theatrical release.

Franklyn opens in the retro-futuristic world of ‘Meanwhile City’, which combines Gothic architecture with post-apocalyptic urban stylings and is ruled by religion (any religion, adherence to one of the myriad cults, which include for instance the Seventh Day Manicurists, being compulsory) and policed by ‘Clerics’ clad in austere 17th-century black garb. We are guided through the bazaar-like atmosphere by a masked narrator called Preest (Ryan Phillippe), a mysterious lone operator who expresses himself in clichéd noir language and is up against the Individual, the leader of one of the most powerful religious sects that rule the city. The film cuts back and forth between this fantasy world and the real world, where we follow the three parallel stories of Milo (Sam Riley), a young man who has just been dumped by his fiancée; Emilia (Eva Green), a troubled young artist who attempts suicide every month as part of her art project; and Peter Esser (Bernard Hill), who is looking for his son, an ex-soldier who has disappeared from the mental institution where he was interned.

Aesthetically and conceptually, McMorrow aims high, but while he dazzles on the former level, he is not as successful on the latter. Although the film was made on a tight budget, Meanwhile City is beautifully crafted and is brimming with atmosphere and visual ideas. Preest’s striking hollow-eyed mask is perfectly sinister and marks him out as an ambivalent character from the start, contrasting with the narration that naturally places the audience on his side. The first transition between fantasy and real world is effected through shots of Gothic details of the Houses of Parliament, a great idea that draws attention to the beauty and magic of pre-industrial London, as it co-exists with the soulless steel and glass conformity of the capital’s modern developments.

Characters appear in both worlds in various guises, and the manner in which the many strands of the story fit together is not revealed until fairly late into the film. The labyrinthine narrative is pleasurable while it lasts, and by contrast the explanation, when it comes, feels rather trite and overly simplistic. So much effort and imagination have gone into creating a sumptuous, textured, enigmatic fantasy world, that it seems a shame to just explain it away in such a manner. None of the initial ambiguity and complexity remain at the end as the focus shifts to what is essentially a twisted but sentimental romantic drama.

Despite these flaws, Franklyn is a bold, impressive debut feature that attempts to break away from the narrow scope that has characterised much of recent British filmmaking. Visually, McMorrow shows himself to be a remarkably accomplished director; all he needs now is a script that matches his talents and provides substantial concepts on which to build even more elaborate cinematic constructions.

Virginie Sélavy

Format: DVD

Release date: 25 May 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Arnold Louis Miller

UK 1964/1965

76/87 minutes

The BFI’s new Flipside strand unearths overlooked and obscure British films, but the almost-swinging 1960s presented in London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965) is a version of the myth we know well already, whether from cult movies like Beat Girl (1959), The Knack (1965) and Smashing Time (1967) or the more mainstream retro fare of Austin Powers (1997-2002) and The Boat That Rocked (2009). Post-war London, its rapidly changing landscape an ideal metaphor for accelerated culture, marauding sexuality and the shock of the new, here becomes an exotic backdrop for Arnold Louis Miller and cinematographer Stanley Long to undertake their ‘anthropological’ study of the city’s moral habits – a quest that leads almost inevitably back to breasts and buttocks, jiggling in proto-gyms, dancehalls, beauty contests and strip joints.

Of course, Miller and Long (who went on to shoot The Wife Swappers and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate in the 1970s) were not, in any respectable sense, documentarists – yet this mondo double bill, by its very transparency of intent, is a fascinating insight into not only the British exploitation genre, but also the preoccupations that were ripe for being exploited. It is no surprise that sex is chief among these, but it’s primarily sex as fantasy and performance, with the realities of the act itself still a taboo. The body is viewed repeatedly as grotesque theatre (exotic dancers of all sorts, not only striptease artists, punctuate the first film, while martial arts, beauty parlours and body-builders pop up in the second); and some awkward teenage, working-class beatniks are asked their opinions about ‘free love’, as if representative of a libertarian lifestyle that in fact they’re unlikely ever to experience.

As historical artefacts of a pre-permissive society, both films deserve their reissue, but there’s little to elevate London in the Raw above curio status. Too many long sequences of stolid couples enjoying a taste of the ‘exotic’ in Indian and Moroccan restaurants do little but drive home the grim parochialism of the era, although a scene in the Universal Health Club, in which women in tights blithely lift weights to a chugging brass soundtrack with clanging industrial percussion, is wonderfully perverse.

Follow-up Primitive London is more enjoyable, if questionably so, revelling in its mondo status and upping the shlock tactics and nipple count accordingly, a solemn voice-over bemoaning the ‘synthetic eroticism’ of the day as the camera pans to yet another nylon-clad crotch. Horror composer Basil Kirchin provides music, and in true mondo style, sexualised murder gets a look-in, with a Jack The Ripper sequence alongside reconstructions of a contemporaneous series of killings of young prostitutes. These eerie, titillating shots of bodies dumped on suburban waste ground are a jarring reminder of the era’s attitudes towards women in the sex industry, lest we burlesque-fanciers get too comfortable in our nostalgia for the retro lingerie, ‘real’ bodies, furtive punters and quaint routines of the film’s many strip sequences. The inherent, often unpleasant, truth in clumsily staged, exaggerated versions of reality is what really fascinates with the mondo genre, and even more so when set against the mutable, war-ravaged, but instantly recognisable streets of London.

Extras include the semi-fictionalisted stripper doc Carousella (1966) on the Primitive London DVD while London in the Raw has three documentary shorts from Peter Davis and Staffan Lamm, their soft black and white tones and unobtrusive direction a respite from the preceeding brashness. Pub (1962) observes an evening in the comfortable fug of a local boozer, the camera and microphone drifting between half-heard conversations. Strip (1965) and Chelsea Bridge Boys (1966) intersperse fly-on-the-wall footage with interviews which, at times, sail close to the prurience of Miller’s youth vox-pops. Perhaps Davis and Lamm were shooting exploitation films of a less overt sort, asetheticising and fetishising those disempowered by youth and poverty, but the visual compassion shown to these young subjects and their surroundings, not to mention the value of capturing the actual voices - the timbre, accents, vocabulary - of the era, invite sympathetic reappraisal.

Frances Morgan

Read our review of the third Flipside initial release, the demented satire The Bed Sitting Room, based on a play by Spike Milligan, directed by Richard Lester and starring Peter Cook, in the summer 09 issue of Electric Sheep. Substitute is the theme of the new issue, with articles on the fraught relationship between Takeshi Kitano and ‘Beat’ Takeshi, the various cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, interchanging identities in Joseph Losey’s films, the dangers of false impersonation in neo-noir Just Another Love Story, the paradoxes of black and white twins in offbeat lost classic Suture, not to mention cross-dressing criminals, androids and body snatchers. Also in this issue: interview with Marc Caro, profile of whiz-kid animator David OReilly, comic strip review of Hardware, and The Phantom Band’s favourite films.

Format: DVD

Distributor: Austrian Film Museum

Director: Dziga Vertov

Original title: Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa

USSR 1930

67 minutes

It twists, it clunks, it shifts, it squeaks. Objects in motion, objects in synchronisation with sounds; audio-visual harmony, a perfect metaphor for Soviet collectivist supremacy. A pulsating network of people and machines and machines that make machines that people use to make machines to excavate coal and reap wheat and make movies. The dynamism of production shot with a gimlet-eyed mechanism and chopped with the finesse of a novice butcher.

Dziga Vertov’s symphonic 1930 experimental documentary film is primarily known as a bold foray into audio-visual synchronisation, commended for its deft and poetic use of concrete sound. Sound was not a new plaything for Vertov. Prior to experimenting with film, Vertov lurked in the orbit of cubo-futurist poet Mayakovsky, studied music, despatched miscellaneous essays and polemics about sound, radio and cinema and had attempted a major phonographic project - essentially a sound studio for the recording and cataloguing of concrete sound. He was also well versed in the art of propaganda film, having been an editor of the Kino-Pravda newsreels. He formed the Kino-eye collective, its remit to document actuality as opposed to theatrical or literary cinematic staging. Indeed, unlike that other Russian master of montage, Sergei Eisenstein, Vertov actually went out into the field, the factory, the street, to document quotidian life as it unfurled. Whereas Eisenstein would manipulate, restage and re-enact reality on scales both grand and pompous.

Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass deploys, as its title implies, a musical structure in three movements derived from the symphony. The first movement appears to riff on religion (as opiate) versus mass communication. The second engages with heavy industry and the third primarily deals with agriculture. The soundtrack bristles with a gorgeous Brillo pad fuzziness, the images the work of a kinetic, acrobatic, camera that has its roots firmly embedded in the follicles of constructivist geometry and futurist dynamism.

Enthusiasm begins with three sounds, a cuckoo and an andante pizzicato bass and woodwind motif. We see extreme close-ups of tightly framed faces, a telephonist or radio operator, symbolising the auditory. Vertov plays a Brechtian card - we see the conductor of the film’s musical score conducting the film’s musical score. The sound of a bell is juxtaposed with the image of an ornamental crown - the death knell of Czarist autocracy. Shots of fluid religious architecture follow - church spires, onion-domed temples that quiver in the lens, and phrenological studies of the proletariat. We hear Russian orthodox liturgy underscored with a cuckoo, people at prayer followed by the gorgeous close-up of a human ear. Vertov rather crudely juxtaposes religion with mass communication. He tries a few camera tricks - time-lapse, double exposure - to convey both ecstatic delirium and just what a man with a movie camera is capable of.

Then he pauses to show us a constructivist maquette of a factory, the merry-go-round of state industrial production. In a loop, miniature tractors and goods speed around, followed by shots of a real factory and a mine. Chiaroscuro industrial pornography shot from hard geometric angles - furnaces, gantries, chimney stacks, a bridge, a black mound of coke. These images are loosely affixed to the sound of a steam whistle edited into a modulating electro-acoustic drone, which recurs throughout Enthusiasm in different variations.

The final, agricultural, section features a dance in a grain field, demented folk music, a procession of collectivist agricultural workers intercut with yet more industrial smoke belches, filthy black mechanisms and more Stalinist brass band pomp.

Enthusiasm is ultimately a propaganda film for totalitarian Soviet collectivisation. However, the film does not depict Soviet efficiency so much as it is itself mechanised Soviet state capitalism incarnate. It was an innovative thing no doubt, yet the innovation took place against a backdrop of hardcore economic interventionism, famine, Gulags, ethnic cleansing and slave labour. Riefenstahl aside, one wonders why cinema historians don’t have the same regard for fascist cinema or, rather, why cinema critics are a little softer on communist totalitarianism than they are on fascist totalitarian art.

Philip Winter