Format: DVD

Release date: 5 January 2009

Distributor: Stoney Road Films

Director: Winterfilm Collective in association with Vietnam Veterans Against the War

USA 1972

95 mins

Staged by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and funded in part by celebrities like Jane Fonda (aka Hanoi Jane) and Donald Sutherland, as well as other anti-war activists, the Winter Soldier Investigation was an attempt to heighten awareness of the alleged war crimes being committed by American soldiers in Vietnam, and in the words printed on the invitations, ‘preclude the further scapegoating of individual soldiers for what is in fact Official United States Military Policy’. Held over three days in early 1971 at a Detroit Howard Johnson hotel, the investigation saw over 100 veterans give testimony of atrocities they claimed to have either committed or seen during their tours of duty in Vietnam.

The event was documented by a coalition of filmmakers, who credited themselves as the Winterfilm Collective. Using donated equipment and film stock, they shot the documentary over four days and nights in Detroit, and spent eight months editing the footage, which included interviews with some of the veterans, interspersed with colour photographs taken in Vietnam. The result is a shocking anti-war film that strives to demonstrate that atrocities committed against civilians – from murder to rape and torture – were ‘standard operating procedure’, tacitly approved by the government as a means of conducting the war against the Viet Cong. Although Winter Soldier won the International Critics’ Prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, it failed to secure a release in the US and was largely ignored by the mainstream media.

For the veterans involved, the investigation was a chance to lay blame at the feet of a military machine accused of encouraging brutality. One angry and ashamed veteran shows a photograph (eerily reminiscent of some of the images to come out of Abu Ghraib) of himself smiling over a dead body, urging the audience ‘not to let your government do this to you’. The litany of atrocities cited in the documentary paints a portrait of a vicious war that dehumanised both the young soldiers and their civilian victims, who, according to the testimony, were little more than animals, faceless ‘gooks’.

The stories recounted by the vets in the film are truly horrifying. But while Winter Soldier is a seriously disturbing film, it’s also extremely controversial. Critics (including veterans) have long claimed that many of the so-called vets who testified had never served in Vietnam; that the accounts of atrocities were either fabricated or exaggerated; and that the whole exercise was a case of anti-war propaganda that unfairly demonised veterans (see wintersoldier.com for an elaborate rebuttal to the investigation). John Kerry’s involvement in the hearing (although he appears only briefly in the film, he was a spokesman for VVAW and gave testimony in front of Congress later in 1971) explains the animosity he encountered from veterans during the 2004 US presidential election.

Winter Soldier is a powerful documentary that needs to be watched with a critical mind; most soldiers in Vietnam were not the monsters portrayed in the film. But regardless of the controversy, it’s a fascinating record both of an era and of a protest movement which, although well-intended, may possibly have used the same kind of heavy-handed propaganda tactics as the power it sought to criticise.

Sarah Cronin

Format: DVD

Release date: 1 December 2008

Distributor: BFI

Director: Lotte Reiniger

Germany 1922-1961

197 mins

‘What Cinderella suffered from, the two sisters and her stepmother, how she grew into a fairy princess, here is seen, told by a pair of scissors on a screen.’ Those poetic words provide the introduction to Lotte Reiniger’s 1922 animated short Cinderella, ‘a fairy film in shadow show’. Her silent classic, featured in the BFI’s terrific new retrospective of her work, is a wonderfully expressionistic film that begins with the silhouette of a pair of hands cutting out Cinderella’s shape from a piece of black paper, breathing life and grace into the figure of the princess.

Born in Berlin in 1899, Reiniger was captivated by shadow puppets from an early age. Though she initially studied acting with the theatre director Max Reinhardt, she became involved with the Berliner Institut fí¼r Kulturforschung, an experimental animation studio, while in her early 20s. There, she began turning her silhouette art, inspired by the shadow plays popular in China and Indonesia, into short films based on fairy tales, many from the Brothers Grimm.

One of the most notable silent films from her time in Berlin, featured in the collection, is The Death-Feigning Chinaman (1928). There is real beauty in the shape of the pagodas and lanterns that form the backdrop for the satirical story about the drunken Ping Pong, a favourite of the Chinese Emperor who stumbles from one mishap to another. As with the wicked stepsisters in Cinderella, Reiniger creates fabulous caricatures out of paper, depicting her characters with an almost grotesque exaggeration that mirrors the over-the-top acting in live action silent pictures.

Some of her most visually stunning films are those based on the tales of the Arabian Nights. Aladdin and the Magic Lamp (1954?) is the first film featured in the collection that was made for Primrose Productions, a company established by her husband Carl Koch with fellow émigrés (who, like Reiniger, had left Germany for England in the 1930s). She beautifully renders the opulence of ancient Baghdad, with its mosques and minarets, while creating wonderfully intricate, cut-paper clothes for the Princess Dinarzade. Her flowing silhouettes are set against atmospheric watercolour backgrounds, used to great effect in creating a sense of drama as Aladdin fights his way back to the princess.

Her Sleeping Beauty (1953-54) is the perfect counterpoint to the idealised, sentimental Disney film released a few years later in 1959. There is an elegance in the silhouettes that is unmatched by more conventional animation, and a real sense of darkness in the tortuous thorns that smother Beauty’s home as she falls under the evil spell cast by a wicked fairy. Reiniger is equally evocative in depicting the natural world, crafting beautifully stylised landscapes in films like Snow White and Rose Red (also a more traditional telling of the Brothers Grimm tale than Disney’s distorted version).

Sarah Cronin

Format: DVD

Release date: 20 October 2008

Distributor: Starz Entertainment

Director: George A Romero

Writer: George A Romero

Alternative titles: Jack’s Wife, Hungry Wives

Cast: Jan White, Raymond Laine, Ann Muffly, Joedda McClain

USA 1972

104 mins

‘The least qualified person to understand a dream is the dreamer.’ (Therapist, Season of the Witch)

Also known as Jack’s Wife or Hungry Wives, Season of the Witch was a strong political and stylistic statement by George A Romero, who chose to critically explore female identity during some of the most dynamic years of the feminist movement while eschewing the zombies that had made him famous in favour of witchcraft. It’s tricky to say whether or not Romero was fully aware of the sort of statement Season of the Witch was making in relation to women’s liberation. Stylistically, however, it is clear that Romero was fully conscious of the break he was making, at least temporarily, with Night of the Living Dead.

The film was originally released as Hungry Wives – the trailer of which is included on the DVD as a special feature – and was marketed as a sexually charged exploitation film, with the emphasis on the sexual, violent and supernatural mischief bored housewives will get up to if left unchecked. The film’s star, Jan White, recalls (in an interview also included on the disc) the strong protests she made for the film’s title and trailer to be changed, as she thought audiences would be disappointed that the film was actually quite ‘avant-garde’ and not a ‘porno’ as they may have been led to believe. But whether the film is seen as art or exploitation, Jan insists that Season of the Witch is Romero’s take on women’s liberation.

The film follows the disintegration of bored housewife Joan (Jan White), then her subsequent rejuvenation as a witch through the discovery of dark sexuality and the occult. Joan is already seeing a therapist at the beginning of the film, but her mental state continues to decline as her nightmares are increasingly infused with her waking life. It is not until the leader of a coven introduces her to witchcraft that she begins to take some control over her existence: practising rituals and spells under her Catholic husband’s unsuspecting nose in the living room, seducing her daughter’s lover, and ultimately, engaging in an act of violence that seems to represent an extreme example of Romero’s take on the potential of feminism. This fear is also echoed through characters’ verbal references to two other films of the time, Rosemary’s Baby and The Graduate and in a visual reference in the opening sequence to Belle de jour. All three films also revolve around a bored housewife and the sexual, supernatural or violent potential within her: ‘all of them witches’!

Stylistically, the film immediately posits itself as a leap away from generic horror flicks. Its emphasis on dream and nightmare sequences push it further in the direction of Buí±uel than, say, Friedkin. One of the most visually powerful sequences in the film has Joan half-masturbate, half-sob on her bed while a storm rages outside and lightning illuminates the recurring motif of the ornamental bull on the dresser. The graphic images of Joan’s writhings keep a strange rhythm with her daughter’s loud orgasm coming from the room next door.

Regardless of Romero’s political intentions with the film, he proves himself a master of the unheimlich. The house he chose to shoot in was an existing cosy family home, which was used for the film with very little set dressing. The gnomish lamps that Romero repetitively features with dramatic lighting were apparently the clincher that made Romero decide on this particular house as his location. Thus, an unadulterated, real family home is transformed by Romero simply through lighting, repetition and soundtrack into something supremely uncanny. The family space is suddenly secretive, unsettling and a place of impending sexual violence. It is this creation of the uncanny through such extraordinarily simple stylistic methods that is the great success of the film.

Siouxzi Mernagh

Format: DVD

Release date: 13 October 2008

Distributor: Mr Bongo

Director: Glauber Rocha

Writers: Glauber Rocha, Walter Lima Jr, Paulo Gil Soares

Original title: Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol

Cast: Geraldo Del Rey, Yoní¡ Magalhí£es, Othon Bastos, Mauricio do Valle

Brazil 1964

120 mins

Hailed repeatedly as the greatest Brazilian film of all time, Black God, White Devil is at the very least a truly remarkable work. A key film of the stridently leftist Cinema Novo movement, Glauber Rocha’s second full-length is notable both for the fact that Rocha was only 25 when he wrote and directed it and that its sometimes uneasy alliance of drama and symbolism was supposedly an influence on the young Martin Scorsese.

These things aside, however, what is truly incontrovertible is that this (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do So to use its original Portuguese title) is a film that is a decidedly acquired taste. Its deliberately unnerving pacing (long slow passages are interrupted with brief scenes of jump-cut violence), minstrel-style sung narrative and employment of an overtly theatrical acting style that sometimes borders on the parodic, can often overshadow a story that has clear echoes in the spaghetti Western movement of the same period: in 1940s Brazil, impoverished ranch hand Manuel kills his landlord in an argument over cattle and escapes with his wife Rosa into the sertí£o – the drought-ridden hinterlands in the north of the country. There they face a choice between the religious fanaticism of a self-proclaimed saint and his deluded followers or a life of violence among some equally dogmatic caingaceiros, or rural peasant bandits. Forsaking both religion and the cold logic of the outlaws, Rosa and Manuel discover that only through self-determination can they truly become human – before the film rushes hurriedly towards its disconcertingly pell-mell ending.

An exotic and undeniably ambitious blend of European avant-garde cinema (on its release in 1964 Black God was applauded publicly by Luis Buí±uel) and Brazilian folk traditions, it’s hard not to occasionally feel as though a lack of knowledge of the latter might be a barrier to a true appreciation of the whole. That the film’s central thesis – extreme poverty engenders desperation, which leads to the kind of superstition, fanaticism and eventually madness that should be resisted at all costs – is no less resonant 45 years later is beyond doubt. But while Black God, White Devil is daring in its execution, the extremes of its style arguably mean that Rocha’s point is delivered in a manner that’s as emotionally arid as the plains of the sertí£o.

Pat Long

Hourglass Sanatorium is the second film by the Polish director Wojciech Has to be put out on DVD this year, following the release of his 1968 The Saragossa Manuscript in February. Also based on a literary work, this time Bruno Schulz’s remarkable collection of stories Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, Has’s 1973 film shares some of the same fantastical elements with its predecessor.

The film opens as our protagonist Josef (Jan Nowicki) travels on a dilapidated and mysterious train to visit his father at a sanatorium in the middle of the Polish countryside. On board, he’s assured by the blind, yet all-seeing conductor that he’ll know how to find his way. He stumbles across the Gothic hospital, and finds it abandoned, cobwebs strewn across the detritus of daily life, cakes and glasses still half-full. The doctor appears out of nowhere, explaining to Josef that his father Jacob, dead in the outside world, is still alive within the confines of the sanatorium. Precious time has been clawed back, and his father may even recover.

Like his father, Josef is essentially given the chance to live his life a second time. When he sees a young boy playing outside on the grounds, Josef pursues him only to find that he has wandered into a tangled world of real and imagined experiences. Credit must go to the cinematographer, Witold Sobocinski, for creating seamless transitions from one hallucinatory state to the next as Josef crawls through his past, from his cramped childhood home to a majestic synagogue. This remarkably ambitious film (at the time Poland’s most expensive) is considered to be one on Sobocinski’s triumphs, and its elaborate set-pieces are a testament to the ‘exaggeration of invention’ (as one character puts it) inherent in the film.

But this is a love-it or hate-it film, and the impressive cinematography cannot, at least in this critic’s opinion, make up for the nonsensical, pseudo-philosophical dialogue delivered in a maddeningly childish way by Josef throughout the allegorical film. The aimless, circular structure gives the unpleasant sense of being trapped in Alice’s rabbit hole, with no hope of getting out; a character voices, ‘One needs such patience to find the right meaning in this tangle’, but unbelievably lengthy digressions about historical figures like Emperor Maximilian seem utterly pointless.

Literary adaptations all too often strip away the magic that words convey, and Hourglass Sanatorium is unfortunately not any different in that regard, though fans of the surreal and psychedelic may approve of the approach (think The Brothers Quay and Terry Gilliam). Has does deserve praise for evoking the vibrancy of Poland’s pre-Holocaust Jewish community, as well as reflecting on the tragedy that befell it (Schulz was murdered by a Gestapo officer in 1942). But far too many gratuitous shots of half-naked women conjure up an image of a director more lecherous than respectful and prevent the film from being much more than a dated relic from the 70s.

Sarah Cronin

Format: DVD

Release date: 28 April 2008

Distributor: Shadowsnake Films

Director: Dez Vylenz

UK 2003

80 mins

Comics artist and founder of London Underground Comics Oli Smith reviews Dez Vylenz’s documentary on Alan Moore.

Do you like Alan Moore, comics writer extraordinaire? Me too.
Will you like Alan Moore after watching this bazillion-hour-long documentary about him? God knows.

I first watched this movie at the Brighton Comics expo in 2006 and the big screen and shiny graphics juxtaposed with Moore’s husky tones delivering words of wisdom blew me away. I watched it again at another comics convention the following year, then bought it on DVD to show me mum. She sat through it, got bored, fell asleep, woke up and turned to me during the ending credits to say:

‘Does he really believe all that rubbish he’s talking?’

Followed by:

‘THAT’s your hero?’

Ending with a condescending sniff and reinforced idea that I should do something useful with my life.

And that’s the problem; Alan Moore is too ironic for a film such as this. Mindscape takes itself too seriously, hanging on every word from the master and representing them with pretentious imagery. The whimsical details of his life and philosophy, culminating in a quite frankly ludicrous world view (although meticulously justified), are fascinating if you love the man, but if you do love him, you already know that it all needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Sure Moore is an idealist, but he’s an entertainer first, and that’s what he’s good at. The best moments of the film are the reconstructions of scenes from his comics with Moore narrating. His capacity to realise the voices in his head, especially Rorschach from Watchmen, is stunningly good. But dear god there’s padding. Maybe Dez Vylenz couldn’t afford a cutting room session after forking out all that money to make a man walk backwards in slow motion with his hand on fire. If only the running time had been cut to an hour, it could have been THE definitive documentary on Mr Moore.

Included on the disc are a series of interviews with various other artists and writers talking about the projects they worked on with Moore, but I didn’t have the strength to sit through them. Having met some of them in person, it’s a shame these interviews couldn’t have been incorporated into the main feature; they could have put some much needed perspective onto the ramblings of a man whose REAL persona remains a mystery to me to this day.

This is a lovely package for Alan Moore fans (it comes in a cardboard sleeve!) and I’m sure the special features give an even greater insight into the mind of the great man but to me it works only in context, and as such is probably not the best thing to convert your mates into graphic novel whores.

V for Vendetta is.

Oli Smith

Format: DVD

Release date: 20 October 2008

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Ralph Thomas

Writer: Janet Green

Cast: Trevor Howard, Jean Simmons, Kenneth More

UK 1950

81 mins

Ralph Thomas’s 1959 version of The 39 Steps is often used to illustrate the genius of Alfred Hitchcock – by contrast. However, in The Clouded Yellow (1951) Thomas does a much better job of emulating the mood and drama of Hitchcock’s classic British chase films: Young and Innocent, and of course, The 39 Steps.

Trevor Howard stars as former secret service agent David Somers, who retires to the countryside to catalogue butterflies – including the titular ‘clouded yellow’. There he finds himself caught up in a murder mystery and helps the chief suspect, Sophie Malraux (Jean Simmons), escape. Like John Rambo in First Blood (but in a very British, cravat-wearing way), he uses his superior survival skills to evade the hapless police search parties.

Whereas Hitchcock would famously use a narrative device – the ‘MacGuffin’ – to set the story rolling (in Young and Innocent it is a raincoat belt that washes up alongside a body two minutes into the film), here the set-up takes some three quarters of an hour, but despite this the plot is no more convincing. Plausibility, Hitch would claim, was not really the point, but here the great effort spent creating a less flawed plot perhaps leads us to expect more. Somers is a professional spy and is never really in danger in the same way Hitch’s plucky amateurs Richard Hannay and Robert Tisdall are, and thus the level of suspense is lowered. Thomas is more concerned with telling the story and less interested than Hitchcock in manipulating the audience’s emotions. Although the film hints at Freudian notions of repressed memories, this is purely a plot device, and little else is made of it.

However, the film certainly matches (if not surpasses) the master with its varied and dramatic locations – the waterfall at Sourmilk Gill in the Lake District, the dark back alleys of Newcastle, tearooms in London and even a Chinese restaurant in Liverpool. Unlike Hitchcock’s British thrillers, the film is shot almost entirely on such locations – at times seeming like a precursor of the Free Cinema movement, especially with the wonderfully naturalistic performance from Maire O’Neill as the Guinness-supping landlady. There are few of the technical innovations – no sweeping camera movements, matte shots or back projections – that form the Hitchcock style but Thomas makes up for this with some stunningly framed shots, particularly in the Lake District scenes.

Of course, Hitchcock did not invent or own the couple-on-the-run film and it is perhaps unfair to compare The Clouded Yellow to his work. It was probably not made as a conscious homage in the same way as Polanski’s Frantic (1988) was, for instance. But it is difficult not to feel that the film is lacking the style, suspense and sense of humour that Hitchcock would have given such a project. In spite of its flaws – the relationship between Howard and Simmons is never very convincing and the ending somewhat abrupt – it is a great movie to discover by accident on a Wednesday afternoon. Ralph Thomas shows that, like that other British war-horse J Lee Thompson, he was at times capable of making some perfectly decent entertainment.

Paul Huckerby