Format: DVD

Release date: 22 October 2007

Distributor: Network

Directors: Jerzy Skolimowski

Based on the story by Robert Graves

Cast: Alan Bates, John Hurt, Susannah York

UK 1978

83 mins

Although less well-known than some of his compatriots, Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski has built a unique, although little seen, collection of films both in his native Poland and elsewhere. Early in his career he served as a screen writer for both Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski (co-writing Knife in the Water) with whom, it could be argued, he shares a certain macabre sensibility.

Made in 1978, The Shout is a post-Hammer British horror film perhaps more reminiscent of the films of Nicolas Roeg, particularly Walkabout and Don’t Look Now. Like Roeg’s films it is intelligent, ambiguous and slow-paced and it puts much emphasis on mood of place – although in this case it’s a sleepy village in north Devon.

It is the story of a man who can kill with a shout – a skill he learnt, we discover, whilst living with (what is often short-hand for a pre-civilised society) the Australian aborigines. A somewhat unreliable narrator recounts the events in flashback to the writer Robert Graves (on whose story the film is based) whilst the two men keep score during a cricket match.

At times it seems like a well-directed episode of the Hammer House of Horror (if Harold Pinter had written it) but the mood and tension between the characters help it rise above that level. This is certainly helped by the top-class British cast – Alan Bates (in a strange reprisal of his role in Whistle Down the Wind) with Susannah York and John Hurt as the married couple whose complacent and staid relationship is slowly torn apart by this strange interloper. Bates’ mysterious ‘cuckoo’ dominates each scene but it is Hurt and York who give the film its humanity – although none of the characters are particularly sympathetic.

One of the film’s greatest achievements is the way in which it makes such quintessential symbols of Englishness as cricket scoreboards, church organs and cottages seem so strange and alien (perhaps due to the film being made by a Polish director). The cricket match is played between doctors and patients at a mental home. Susannah York’s soul is ‘captured’ through the theft of that hippy symbol – a sandal buckle. This clash between the mundane and the supernatural is particularly notable in the contrast between the realist photography and the extraordinary soundtrack. John Hurt’s character is an avant-garde musician creating sounds through recording everyday objects such as a broken spam tin or marbles rolling in water and altering them electronically. The character’s music is heard throughout the film although Bates’ Crossley claims his music is ’empty’ and lacks imagination. His own supernatural shout doesn’t disappoint when finally demonstrated and actually sounds as if it might kill. But it is the cry of the peacocks throughout the cricket match that is perhaps the most eerie.

It is a puzzling and ambiguous film that doesn’t seem to have any clear motivations but is more about creating a disquieting atmosphere – the slow pace certainly adds to the mood of intimate awkwardness. Whether it is a horror film or not is debatable but it undoubtedly succeeds in creating a disturbing and quite genuinely creepy world.

Paul Huckerby

Format: DVD

Release date: 24 September 2007

Distributor: Sony Pictures

Director: Satoshi Kon

Based on: the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui

Screenplay: Seishi Minakami and Satoshi Kon

Japan 2006

90 mins

If Satoshi Kon worked in live action, he would have a reputation as a director who confidently blends genres and seems happy to work in any of them. His oeuvre includes the films Perfect Blue (a Hitchcockian or rather De Palma-esque thriller about stalking) and Millenium Actress (a tale of ageing and lost love) plus the terrific TV series Paranoia Agent, about a creature from the collective subconscious who kills those overwhelmed by guilt and lost opportunities. Paprika combines all these themes but is somehow less than the sum of its parts. This might be because Paranoia Agent at its best is one of the finest animés ever produced while Perfect Blue (though overrated) has won such great reknown that audiences are waiting for a perfect follow-up.

This is not to say that Paprika isn’t entertaining or beguiling; there are plenty of scenes that will stay with the viewer long after the film has ended. This is a film that offers extraordinary spectacle, so it is a shame the first UK release comes on DVD. The visuals are crafted with great subtlety and photographic skill, and the film boasts the most exemplary handling of dappled and reflected light ever seen in a cartoon. This is not simply a technical accomplishment, but is used to infer that a person’s subconscious is a skewed reflection of the real world and that their dreams are realms of shadows and ethereal light.

The opening sequence depicting a cop’s nightmares, ranging from the big top to film noir, is startling and arresting. The idea of a dream virus that reduces people to babbling idiots in the conscious world and sees them trapped in a parade of junk imagery from late twentieth-century zeitgeist (showing the pollution of the collective subconscious with adverts and jingles, to use one of Alan Moore’s metaphors) is a powerful one. The film utilises a melange of imagery from not only the Western world but across Asia, and sees our heroine Paprika take on the identity of Monkey from the seminal 1970s TV series (itself based on a sixteenth-century Chinese folk tale) to fight giant frogs and good luck charms, a mishmash of international symbols. This may leave casual viewers bewildered, and as we near the end of the film, the narrative becomes as hard to grasp as the final monster of smoke and shadows. Add to that that the plot feels over-familiar and you have a film that is overall something of a mixed bag.

But if it’s spectacle you’re looking for, Paprika delivers in spades: Roll up! Roll up! Come see the amazing flying redhead on her magic cloud! Gasp as the fattest man on earth creates brain-scanning devices that bring your wildest fantasies to life! Paprika certainly has enough attractions to hook potential new fans, and will hopefully lead them towards the director’s more esoteric and challenging work.

Alex Fitch

Format: DVD

Release date: 7 January 2007

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Anders Morgenthaler

Writers: Mette Heeno, Anders Morgenthaler

Cast: Thure Lindhardt, Stine Fischer Christensen

Denmark 2006

78 mins

Anders Morgenthaler‘s first feature successfully fuses animation with a little live action to create an aesthetically superb film with a baffling message. The technique of merging visual formats is innovative and effective. Morgenthaler had used it in his graduation film Araki – The Killing of a Japanese Photographer, which ensures a clear stylistic continuity in the director’s work. Heavily influenced by animé, the gorgeous visual style of Princess can also be attributed to lead production designer Rune Fisker.

August, the film’s protagonist, is a young man of the cloth. Upon the death of his porn-star sister, August recovers Mia, his abused and neglected five-year-old niece, and she joins him on a crusade of bloody revenge against every man, woman and building involved in the Danish sex industry.

‘Fuck porno’, says Morgenthaler in his director’s statement, and this is clearly intended to be a political work. The pornography industry of Denmark is no doubt as seedy and savage as it is portrayed, and the film’s anti-porn sentiments are obvious. Morgenthaler’s actual motivations and intentions, however, are far from clear, leaving the viewer in the dark as to what the film is actually trying to say.

August’s mission is overtly Christian and God literally lights the way for his merciless, blood-drenched massacre at certain points. August and Mia hold nothing back during their killing spree. August arranges for Mia (bearing in mind that the character is five years old) to use a crow bar to hack away the genitals and then the skull of her former abuser. This level of violence, though animated, is strongly reminiscent of Irréversible – it is nauseating and hard to watch. Just because Tarantino made animé í¼ber-violence cool in his animated flashback in Kill Bill, an entire movie in the same style isn’t any less vacuous.

Understandably, Morgenthaler has aggressive views about porn and what better way to vent these than in the same medium he abhors; however, the extreme violence accompanied by the concept that modern Christian values would support this type of vengeance is preposterous. The notion that porn is so evil that it can only be conquered by psychotic waves of mass slaughter is horrible, it makes no sense and if anything makes Morgenthaler’s anti-porn sentiments ridiculous. His hero comes out far worse than the much loathed sex industry.

There’s a pretentious naivety about this muddled message: The sex industry is bad, whilst grotesque violence is cool. For Morgenthaler, porn means distance whilst eroticism means intimacy. Without wishing to defend the undoubtedly nasty industry that is porn, it seems quite obvious from the vastness of it, its diversity as a ‘genre’ and its overwhelming and perpetual popularity that the debate isn’t so black and white. I’m sure that bad outweighs the good when it comes to porn but the influences of Michael Winner and Lars Von Trier (the film was produced by his company Zentropa) have led to a film that is more polemic than political.

It might simply come down to Morgenthaler being by his own description a ‘neo-purist’, unlike the majority of his audience, this reviewer included. That said, the film is so thought-provoking, so visually impressive, that it comes highly recommended. If anything, it is sure to elicit a strong response, which is more than can be said about most current films.

Jessica Fostekew

Read the interview with Anders Morgenthaler

Format: DVD

Release date: 10 September 2007

Distributor Classic Media

Director: Robert Garofalo

UK 2007

126 minutes

Every decade or so, when the stars are right and the aethers are correctly aligned, somebody announces a biopic of Aleister Crowley; Kenneth Anger, Ken Russell and more recently Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson spring readily to mind. The Edwardian adventurer, poet, painter, mystic and sexual athlete should make a fantastic subject, the multiple layers that wove through his life – magic and misery, art and arseholism, exoticism and exhibitionism – presenting aeons of richly layered, highly visual dramatic material from which to weave celluloid wizard’s robes.

That such a film has not yet been made remains something of a mystery, though Crowley’s spirit is present, albeit in caricatured form, in Night of the Demon‘s Carswell and The Devil Rides Out‘s Mocata, both films, it should be noted, of a certain age. Equally mysterious, especially given Old Crow’s penchant for self-promotion, is that no film footage of the man is known to exist. So there is none to be found in this ambitious DVD documentary, released on the 50th anniversary of its subject’s death.

Narrated by a throaty Joss Ackland, surely anybody’s choice to play the senior Beast, the DVD follows an unerringly straight and narrow biographical path for its two-hour running time. Despite some decent dramatised readings and reconstructions, its linear approach gives the feel of an illustrated biographical essay rather than a documentary film and, while information-rich, it lacks the tension required to bring this Beast to life, making getting through it in one sitting something of a challenge.

Content-wise, excluding some extremely minor factual discrepancies, the occasional instance of strange pronunciation and the odd random internet rumour thrown in for good measure, In Search of presents a solid overview of To Mega Therion’s life. But in breathlessly cramming in all the salacious details, it forgets ever to pause and wonder ‘why’? It’s not an easy question to answer, but in a world already seething with Crowleyana, any new addition to the pile might attempt to do so.

There are no surprises here. In Search of focuses primarily on Crowley’s deeds of darkness, presented in a Hammer horror monotone more suited to the era of John Symond’s 1952 biography, The Great Beast, than to the present day. The arch Goth visual design, all cracked facades and sepia tones, adds to the living storybook feel, while Rick Wakeman’s score flows over every available moment of screen time, adding a prerequisite sheen of melancholy and menace to an already well-polished surface. The presence of Wakeman, who once wore a cape and now, as a committed Christian, presumably prefers a cassock, personifies to a tee the film’s tone of prurient fascination.

The fifty years since his death have thrown up greater boogeymen than Crowley, and any new study ought to reflect the complexities of his personality and the turbulent times in which he lived. Although a decent biographical introduction for those who don’t want to read a book, In Search of sheds no new light on the man who succeeded so admirably as a magus and mythmaker, yet failed so miserably as a human being.

Mark Pilkington

Format:DVD

Release date: 24 September 2007

Distributor BFI

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Original title: Teorema

Cast: Silvana Mangano, Terence Stamp, Massimo Girotti

Italy 1968

105 mins

A distinguished philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper columnist, actor, painter and political figure, Pier Paolo Pasolini started his career aged seven writing poetry influenced by Rimbaud. It ended abruptly 48 years later when he was murdered on the beach at Ostia near Rome – either by a disgruntled rent boy or political enemies, depending on who you believe – but in the intervening period he directed twelve full-length films, spanning documentary, drama, satire and at least one Marxist retelling of the life of Christ.

Theorem, from 1968, is the ultimate summation of Pasolini’s creative preoccupations. His first big-budget international production, it’s part dream and part documentary, part parable and part political attack, part satire and part sex farce. It also amasses an array of stylistic and intellectual contradictions that amaze with each viewing.

This new BFI DVD – featuring the usual extensive liner notes and an exclusive interview with Terence Stamp – only reinforces those contradictions. The plot is almost wordless: a mysterious guest – Stamp at the height of his 60s beauty, wearing some of the tightest trousers ever depicted on screen – suddenly appears at the home of a prosperous middle-class industrialist, Paolo. There is no indication of his reason for visiting or his name, but he immediately becomes part of the household. Stamp then seduces (in order) the maid, the son, the mother, the daughter and finally the father in a series of curiously sexless encounters. At one point Stamp even frolics in his underwear with the family dog, although Pasolini spares us any acts of interspecial congress. A cipher for the family to project their desires onto, when Stamp leaves they each cope with his absence by suffering a series of breakdowns and revelations. The daughter becomes a catatonic. The son abandons his dreams of becoming an artist. The mother picks up strangers and has sex with them in fields. Paolo hands over the running of his factory to the workers, exposes himself in a busy railway station and runs up Mount Etna naked. Oddest of all is the maid, who achieves sainthood, eats nettles and performs several miracles before being buried alive.

What all of this means remains deliberately unresolved. Is Pasolini’s theorem that sex has replaced religion as our main mode of spiritual connection? Is bourgeois society only held together by sexual repression? Does challenging that repression beautify the working class? Is the visitor God? The Devil? The International Catholic Film Office certainly thought so – saluting the movie’s engagement with spiritual issues with a special award at the 1969 Venice Film Festival before Vatican protests saw the award being swiftly withdrawn.

‘It’s not important to understand Theorem’, said Pasolini in an interview given in 1969. ‘I leave it to the spectator… is the visitor God or is he the Devil? He is not Christ. The important thing is that he is sacred, a supernatural being. He is something from beyond.’ Rewatching Theorem it’s hard not to think of Pasolini in the same way.

Pat Long

Format:DVD

Release date: 1 October 2007

Distributor Optimum

Director: Basil Dearden

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Mary Ure, John Clements

UK/ 1962

109 mins

The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the height of the cold war. So it is hardly surprising that both The Manchurian Candidate and the lesser-known British film The Mind Benders were made that same year. Both films are concerned with brain-washing; the former based on the experiences of GIs in the Korean War and the latter on experiments in ‘the reduction of sensation carried out at certain universities in the United States’, according to the opening title. The technique is explained with the aid of a wonderful pastiche of a university science film (looking remarkably like something Steve Zissou might have made) which shows how a few hours in a sensory deprivation tank can affect a man – how it can ‘reduce him until he becomes a sort of soulless, mindless, will-less thing. Not even a man at all’.

Although the film begins like a cold-war thriller (‘with the drafty telephone boxes and park seats – the whole chilly paraphernalia of treason’, as John Clements’ Major Hall observes) it develops into something very different. Perhaps this is not surprising, considering director Basil Dearden’s pedigree. He is most famous for ‘issue films’: tackling race in Sapphire, juvenile delinquency in The Blue Lamp (in which Dirk Bogarde was cast against type as a teenage ruffian) and homosexuality in the ground-breaking Victim (again with Bogarde). Whereas in The Manchurian Candidate brain-washing can lead to presidential assassination attempts, in The Mind Benders it causes marriage difficulties. Mary Ure sees her marriage descend into another Look Back in Anger as her husband succumbs to the power of suggestion (he is told that he hates his wife while in his weakened state). However, it is this approach that makes The Mind Benders such a curiosity and perhaps also it is where the film ultimately fails. The cross between sci-fi and family drama is interesting but neither area is sufficiently developed for it to work. This may be because Ure and Bogarde’s marriage difficulties occur largely off-screen during a family holiday: the story of sexual humiliation in Amsterdam is told but not seen (although the film was surprisingly awarded an X-certificate on its original release).

Despite starring everyone’s favourite pin-up doctor, Dirk Bogarde, the film was a box office and critical failure at the time – with one headline reading, ‘Bogarde thriller is shabby and nasty’. Although this seems an exaggeration the film can be seen as a continuation of Bogarde’s move away from his Rank screen idol persona (although he was still to reprise his role as the charming Doctor Simon Sparrow throughout the 60s), a journey that was to lead to the genuinely nasty The Damned (1969) and The Night Porter (1974).

All in all, The Mind Benders is a fascinating failure. It is intelligent science fiction made for an adult audience (although hardly deserving its X-certificate). Dearden directs with his usual moody seriousness (and with the staid professionalism that always separated him from the younger generation of directors that included Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson). Even the mind-bending hallucinations in the tank (a few double-exposure shots) are handled with a degree of subtlety. The cast are excellent, particularly Bogarde, who in true Dr Jeckyll style, plays both scientist and guinea pig, and Ure as his suffering wife. Georges Auric’s score is also noteworthy but one can’t help thinking the subject matter might have been better suited to Roger Corman.

Paul Huckerby

Format: DVD

Release date: 29 October 2007

Distributor Second Sight Films

Title: The Black Cat

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Cast: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners

US 1934

63 minutes

Title: The Raven

Director: Lew Landers

Cast: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Irene Ware

US 1935

59 minutes

Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat and Lew Landers’ The Raven were made only a year apart in the mid-1930s. Both films were ‘suggested’ by stories from Edgar Allan Poe and were the first two instances in which Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff – each already a star in his own right – co-starred. These Universal B-Movies have little else in common, however. Ulmer’s film is based on a solid story, sharply scripted, is beautifully photographed and contains fine performances from both its leads as well as adequate support from its minor actors. In contrast, The Raven is a very poorly edited cash-in on the successes of Lugosi as Dracula and Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, with the leads’ roles practically identical to these but with no attempt to allow these stars any chance to play off each other, resulting in poor performances from each. The contrast between the two films is of interest because it displays the extent to which the quality of elements such as direction, editing and story can have an impact on actors’ performances.

While it seems that in The Raven the stars’ central performances are all that matters, the opening scenes of The Black Cat reveal a more sophisticated approach. We are presented with a recently married American couple on a train to Hungary who are told by the porter that due to booking complications they will have to share their carriage with a stranger. The ominous, silent intrusion of Lugosi’s psychiatrist Dr. Werdegast is like a Hitchcockian stain, insinuating itself violently but only apparently momentarily into the happy couple’s pleasantries. Werdegast saves the girl from being ‘crushed’ by her case, which falls from above her as the train jolts, and a good-natured smile opens a cheery conversation. This early scene gleans a subtle performance from Lugosi who delivers the line ‘I go to visit an old friend’ in a slow, enigmatic tone that seems to imply both that the doctor is greatly fatigued by life and that he has gained a deep inner strength from difficult past experiences.

Lugosi is crucially performing ‘against the grain’ here, both as an actor and as a character, for Karloff’s architect Poelzig is anything but an ‘old friend’ to Werdegast. This manner of performance, encouraged by the storytelling, is fundamental to the film’s overall strength. Karloff’s Poelzig is equally restrained as he stands locked in a brutally rigid attitude before the American honeymooners. This pose, which is certainly menacing, also brilliantly suggests Poelzig’s efforts to avoid giving away too much, all of Karloff’s acting concentrated in the cautious look he gives the strangers. Throughout The Black Cat the presence of the Americans forces Lugosi’s and Karloff’s characters to keep us on a knife’s-edge, proving the worth of Hitchcock’s famous claim that far more important than shock are the restraints of suspense, which are here provided beautifully by the subtleties of restricted performance.

The Raven may be of interest to those who enjoy B-Movies for their often ropey special effects. The Black Cat, however, transcends the supposed limitations of a low budget: it is a deeply atmospheric, visually innovative film and it offers Lugosi and Karloff the perfect roles to play together.

Ben Dooley

Ben Dooley is the co-founder of A Year in the Dark.

Format: DVD

Release date: 13 August 2007

Distributor: Tartan

Director: Sergei Eisenstein

Titles: Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October

Original Titles: Stachka, Bronenosets Potyomkin, Oktyabr

USSR 1925-1928

Eisenstein’s celebrated use of montage, fast cutting, and odd abstract counterpoints to brutal action have guaranteed him lasting fame and respect. The abattoir scene intercut with the slaughter of innocent workers in Strike is still bold and nasty. Perhaps his most famous shot of all is the baby’s buggy trundling disastrously down the Odessa Steps as advancing lines of infantry indifferently mow down unarmed workers, women and children alike (Battleship Potemkin). It is a remarkable scene in its casual cruelty, and remains a benchmark in spectatorial helplessness. It even survives Brian De Palma’s ‘homage’ in The Untouchables. Indeed, the very banality and irrelevance of De Palma’s use of the scene rests on its fundamentally cinematic quality, its irresponsibility as spectacle.

To be honest, I probably first heard of Eisenstein through De Palma; either that or thanks to a reproduction photo of Eisenstein himself shaking hands with Mickey Mouse given away with the Glasgow magazine The List in the mid-80s. In either case, it is a curious consequence of frenetic cutting that a director should be largely remembered through a number of brilliant stand-out shots and scenes. For a long time before I had seen a single second of moving footage, I knew Eisenstein through stills of weeping women in crowds, and the back-tilted head of a man with an extremely pointy beard in which Roland Barthes sees his enigmatic ‘third sense’. I have never been able to work out what this is supposed to be: I think it has something to do with the beard. But the proof of the power of the image lies in its ability to suggest something just beyond our understanding is taking place.

Coming to view the full chaos of the films can, then, be an unsettling experience. There are many moments of lyrical beauty and weirdness, but they are caught up in the rush of events and there is never much time to dwell on them. In October, as the bridges are raised to cut off the workers’ quarter, the still-warm body of a woman rests on the brink, her hair briefly raised in a last moment of animation after death; a dead white horse slides slowly over the edge, dangling from its harness, held poised by the counterweight of the carriage it was pulling, before finally falling like a gravity-afflicted ghost into the water of the Neva. One is left divided, between the surge of narrative and the desire to capture the moment.

These are also odd moments of pity, punctuating an otherwise remorseless march of history that divides up humanity with the moral subtlety of a run-of-the-mill Western. The lackeys of the state jeer uncontrollably as they stick the boot into vigorous but defenceless workers. Reactionary ladies are particularly dangerous, whether in the form of the Women’s Death Battalion, or merely the frilly pleasure-cruising creatures who butcher an insurgent with parasols. Political moderates, whether Kerensky cowering by a telephone in the Winter Palace, or the Mensheviks with their ridiculous call to avoid bloodshed, are met with scorn. The triumph of the workers is a glorious if indecorous affair: a proletarian child grins uncontrollably as he rolls around in the vacant throne in the Winter Palace. The absent royal family are, indeed, represented only by their vacant thrones: the Csarina’s toilet, the Csar’s bidet. These crude devices are often funny, but they suggest montage is not always very clever.

This has at least as much to do with the propagandistic nature of these three films í¢â‚¬â€ commemorating events in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 í¢â‚¬â€ as with the formal matter of montage. The standard critical response has generally been to cast Eisenstein as an experimentalist forced to adapt his art to the demands of the revolution. Yet this underplays a degree of complicity between technique and subject. The films were indeed criticised by the authorities for not telling the story straight. But the frenetic succession of spinning machinery, marching feet, a statesman’s cowardly retreat seen as the diplomatic flag on his speeding car, crowds teeming over ceremonial architecture, and (dis)heartening slogans í¢â‚¬â€ ‘Down with the lackeys of the bourgeoisie!’ í¢â‚¬â€ also mark the point where modernism and propaganda meet. As with the Futurists, the shoutiness of Eisenstein is a direct consequence of montage. What Eisenstein might have done with the technique had he been left a free hand remains a moot point.

Watching these films again, I was constantly led back to Fritz Lang. In Strike, the leering secret policeman with his wide-brimmed hat and spectacles, skulking through the city, peering into the window of a café, reflected upside down in a glass ball as a carriage rolls past; the marking out of districts on a map in October; the constant themes of pursuit and struggle for the territory of the city; all bring to mind the differently political M. Lang’s film holds itself in troubled pity before an individual psychosis, and asks, what is to become of our children? Eisenstein’s films are already quite sure that our children are being butchered by a senseless administration devoid of psychology. The future in these films is identical to the present of their making: ‘the revolution’, a period as well as a sudden event, paradoxically holds history in suspension, answers all its questions.

As I suggested earlier, the abiding fascination of Eisenstein lies in weird moments that escape this rationalism-run-riot, and suggest something more like the unease of the world of The Testament of Dr Mabuse. The eerie self-reassembly of the statue of Alexander III in October may ‘represent’ the betrayal of the Provisional Government, but it is the sheer strangeness of the lighting and the teetering of the head back onto its socket that command attention. Likewise, in Potemkin, once the mutinous sailors have fled execution by firing squad, the sheet used to cover them lies empty, billowing ominously on the deck. As with the woman’s hair and the dead horse caught on the bridge in October, it is left to the uncanny animation of the dead and the inhuman to introduce a pity alien to the bug-eyed belief in humanity’s ability to determine its progress.

The most bizarre scene in Strike has to be where the secret policeman mounts a hill crowned with a gibbet for dead cats before his rendezvous with the king of the slums, who summons his ramshackle Lumpenproletariat out of a ‘cemetery of barrels’. What they are all doing there, other than uncannily anticipating Samuel Beckett and Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, is never explained. These moments belong neither with the square-jawed determination of the workers, nor with the weaselly perfidy of the bourgeoisie. They haunt the films with a sense of a properly cinematic phantasmagoria that ‘the revolution’ cannot control, and indeed scarcely thinks of, unless in its nightmares.

Stephen Thomson