Format: DVD

Distributor: The BFI

Release date: 25 June 2007

Czech Republic 1964-1992

7 hours 44 minutes

Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer is probably best known in this country for Alice, his full-length animated version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland; but for a fuller sense of his achievements it’s to his short films that we should look, as this magnificent triple DVD box set from the BFI makes clear. That one of these shorts and one of the three documentaries also included in the box were funded by, respectively, the BBC and Channel 4, should also alert us to the extent of the current degradation of British TV culture. Gone are those heady days when Channel 4 would host a season of short films, and neither channel gives airtime presently to anything more serious than the latest mewlings of the Kaiser Chiefs or Razorlight, BBC4 notwithstanding. Indeed, except for the pop song, the short form across all fields - cinema, theatre, fiction - is a forsaken species. Unsurprisingly, then, the weakest piece in the whole DVD set is a video made by Švankmajer for a song by ex-Strangler Hugh Cornwell, an eminently forgettable piece of clichéd nonsense in which Švankmajer does little more than pay lip service to his own considerable body of work.

And this box set certainly reveals what a body of work it is. The discs cover over a quarter of a century of filmmaking between 1964 and 1992 and there are 26 films in total. In an interview on the third ‘extras’ disc, the Brothers Quay discuss how in 1983, having just been told about Švankmajer and never having seen any of his work, they felt compelled to go to Prague to make a documentary about him! They watched 15 films in a single afternoon - some shown by the Czech authorities and others, the banned ones, by Švankmajer himself at his home - before making their own film. Though something of a marathon effort, this is no bad way to expose oneself to the work as it allows for the tracing at a single sitting of Švankmajer’s particular thematic and technical continuities and developments.

The first disc opens with The Last Trick, in which two magicians attempt to outdo each other in their acts. In the opening credits we see the two actors donning oversized head masks and this combination of human and mannequin establishes a productive tension between live action and animation, which plays out so effectively in much of Švankmajer’s work, often to startling effect. The fact that we see the actors putting on the masks is a Brechtian ‘trick’, or non-trick, as the transformation from human to actor is made manifest rather than remaining hidden or assumed. Thus, throughout the film, we are always aware of the human presence beneath the fiction in spite of the ‘trickery’ that we are presented with, trickery that is as much about the camera as the magician’s magic. The fact that the action is played out in a theatre adds another tension between theatre and film, another recurrent motif in the Czech’s work whereby older and newer technologies are brought into fruitful interplay.

In later films, the human/mannequin tension is made much more explicit and is more disturbing as a result. In Don Juan (1969), actors again wear head masks but this time on top of each mask there’s a contraption with attached strings, which lead in turn to the hands. The actors are in effect auto-motivating puppets. It’s a powerful fusion of human and non-human made more disturbing by the fact that each actor moves with a puppet’s faltering gait. In the last film, Food (1992), Švankmajer again uses actors but employs stop-motion photography to make them look like animated figures, thus blurring the boundary between live action and animation. The effect is distinctly uncanny in the true Freudian sense.

In Les Chimères des Švankmajer, another of the set’s documentaries, the director is asked whether he has ever considered using computer-aided animation, to which he replies firmly that he has not. His preference for stop-motion photography, he reveals, is nothing to do with nostalgia for an older technology (though the early cinema of Meliès is a constant touchstone) but an aesthetic decision to do with the feel of the animated object. In fact, there is in his work an implicit critique of both technological progress and indeed human evolution. In ‘Factual Dialogue,’ the first section of what is probably his best-known short film, Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), two Archimboldo-esque heads, made from food and cutlery respectively, confront each other only to have the former consume the latter. After a process of pulverisation, painstakingly animated, the consumer head vomits out the consumed head and the process begins again - the consumed, pulverised head confronts another head, this time made up of office stationery, which it in turn consumes, pulverises and vomits out… Et cetera (itself the title of another of Švankmajer’s shorts in the box). The process is repeated and the pieces of each successive head become smaller and smaller until they are eventually transformed into undifferentiated human heads. This scenario, which dramatises the confrontation of violently opposing forces, could stand for the entirety of Švankmajer’s output. It’s certainly a part of his surrealism, which is explored in some detail in the interviews on the third disc. These interviews emphasise the difference between the French and (less well-known) Czech versions of surrealism, the latter much darker in its impulses.

However, what also makes the first section of Dimensions of Dialogue so compelling is the way in which the scene consists of two impulses moving in opposite directions. As the heads evolve into more recognisably human forms, in other words towards a state of implied ‘perfection’ where the animated object resembles more closely what it is ‘supposed’ to depict, the animation, the film’s processual meat and drink if you like, becomes less and less interesting - as the pulverisation becomes more complete, the number of ways of showing the confrontation is depleted. One of the ‘appeals’ of Dimensions of Dialogue is precisely to see how Švankmajer makes each head pulverise the contents of the other, and in often improbable ways. It’s one thing when scissors belonging to the first head slice up an apple belonging to the second, but it’s another to see keys destroying a lettuce! It’s like an extended, involved version of ‘Stone, Paper, Scissors’, a game alluded to in The Garden (1968). I’ve often wondered in what world paper could ever be said to ‘defeat’ stone simply by wrapping it up, but in Dimensions of Dialogue Švankmajer shows us as he has an envelope crushing an assortment of metal thimbles and a book destroying a plate!

It’s clear from all this that Švankmajer has an overwhelming interest in the materiality of objects (and in their particularities) and it’s this that is overridden by computer-generated animation. Shrek for example would be like the final head, undifferentiated matter devoid of particular texture. In all his shorts, Švankmajer favours the close-up, which reveals the hidden grain of everyday things and objects. Thus, in Punch and Judy, a puppet strokes a hamster but the camera is as interested in showing us the animal’s fur in almost microscopic detail. Similarly, walls are not simple flat surfaces but are photographed to show all their blemishes. The credits of The Last Trick are scratched like graffiti into a wall’s plaster, becoming a part of its very fabric. Other materials such as wood and stone are given the same treatment. One might go as far as to say that Švankmajer fetishises the materiality of the object, not as commodities to be exchanged, but as Marx himself does in Das Kapital, as things that are valorised for their use as opposed to their debased value in an exchange economy. And like Marx, Švankmajer has something of the occultist in him. In Les Chimères des Švankmajer he says the following:

In my films, people are often replaced by objects which have always seemed more permanent and more exciting through their latent content, their memory. In the films I have always tried to uncover the content, to listen to the objects and decipher their narration. Here’s the special appeal animation holds for me, which is to let objects speak for themselves.

And again:

Hermetic teaching shows that by touching an object in a certain emotional condition one leaves one’s imprints, not fingerprints, but emotional prints and a person who touches that object imbibes them. So I don’t actually animate objects, I coerce their inner life out of them.

Objects have a hidden or dormant life that can be reanimated by the human hand. There is something very East European about this as the interviewees in Les Chimères des Švankmajer again confirm. Think of the alchemical tradition or the tradition of the golem, in both of which the city of Prague plays a central role. In the latter a 16th-century rabbi is reported to have created a golem or clay figure (not unlike those used by Švankmajer) to defend the Prague ghetto. However, it soon grows out of control, killing Gentiles and Jews alike, and he is forced to destroy it. The act of creation in both the alchemical and golem traditions is transgressive and fraught with danger.

The objects that Švankmajer unleashes in his films are similarly double-edged. He often brings the most mundane, everyday objects to life - furniture, clothes, food - which become terrifying in their auto-existence but also fascinating as a result. Witness A Quiet Week in the House (1969). The male protagonist descends on a bare and dilapidated house that may or may not be his own and which resembles a prison (this is reinforced by the fact that each night he scribbles out the date on a calendar as if he is doing time). He effectively incarcerates himself so that he can wake each day only to drill what seem like glory holes in various doors and spy voyeuristically on ‘scenes’ of objects brought to life. The first scene he watches is of a dismembered tongue which breaks through the wall of a kitchen and proceeds to lick a drawer-full of unwashed pots, pans and plates before mincing itself in a hand-cranked mincer. Another has a wind-up toy bird attached to a piece of string, which prevents it from reaching a saucer of corn. Eventually it breaks free and reaches the corn to the apparent delight of a nearby kitchen dresser - its drawers move in and out in a kind of demented applause - only to find itself buried by a mountain of clay spewed out by the very same drawers. These scenes are not merely re-enacting the old cliché of life’s futility to which its ‘protagonists’ are resigned but show how the latter are punished for their actions, which are made to seem transgressive as a result.

There are multiple ways of reading A Quiet Week in the House. Politically, it probably references the ‘Prague Spring’ of the previous year (1968) when Czechs saw a brief window of political optimism snuffed out by the invasion of Soviet troops. Imprisonment, however, is a recurrent theme in Å vankmajer’s work. He is fascinated by enclosed spaces - the coffin in Punch and Judy and The Fall of the House of Usher (1980), the fence in The Garden (made entirely of men and women holding hands), the cellar in Down to the Cellar (1983) and the simple room in Darkness-Light-Darkness (1989) where a ‘human’ head finds itself growing into a body that’s far too big for its allotted space. The drilling in A Quiet Week in the House is a form of escape and after his ‘quiet’ week is up, the man uses the holes as cradles for sticks of dynamite with which to blow up the house. As he is about to press the detonator, however, he stops and runs back into the house because he has forgotten to scribble out his final day on the calendar. Having ‘freed’ himself he is in effect still in thrall to another set of controls.

I would argue, however, that the motif of breaking through solid matter is also a testing of the limitations of the physical world. Švankmajer returns again and again to walls, which he often films opening up of their own accord, their surfaces peeled back or decaying through the animation process. In the Hugh Cornwell video the protagonist, a forlorn male figure in a room, wails about the inaccessibility of his love, eventually drawing an outline of her on the wall, which brings her to life like another golem. Her face, breasts, arms and legs emerge one by one from the plaster and she ends up absorbing him into the wall itself. If it wasn’t compromised by its misogyny - female as monster defined by separate body parts - this might be seen as a defining gesture with the body defying the very laws of physics. The wall is no longer a physical hindrance or barrier and animation becomes a kind of utopian endeavour allowing the filmmaker magical access to the otherwise impenetrable. This kind of absorption would indeed be ‘the last trick’, and the very attempt to pull it off makes Å vankmajer a true heir of the alchemical tradition. For the time being the cinema, or in the case of this wonderful DVD box, the living room, must remain the theatre where we can witness it.

Jeff Hilson

Format: DVD

Release date: 13 August 2007

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Jacques Becker

Title: Casque d’or

Cast: Serge Reggiani, Simone Signoret, Claude Dauphin

France 1952

96 minutes

Title: Touchez pas au grisbi

Cast: Jean Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Lino Ventura

France 1956

94 minutes

Title: Le trou

Cast: Marc Michel, Jean Keraudi, Philippe Leroi

France 1960

125 minutes

It’s as subtle as a slap in the face (of which quite a few are administered in the course of events). And yet . . . Jacques Becker’s terse, down-to-earth 1952 thriller Casque d’or keeps threatening to be art as well as entertainment. It opens with a timeless bucolic setting on a French river, bringing to mind the river films of Becker’s master Jean Renoir, in particular Une partie de campagne. And the resemblance of the following scenes, at a riverside café, to Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s famous paintings of promenades and social gatherings (in particular Le Bal au Moulin de Galette) is surely not accidental. But the lowlife ethos of Becker’s film is a notch or two down from Renoir pí­Â¨re’s respectable petite-bourgeoisie, let alone from the aristocratic leisureliness of Renoir fils (in La Rí­Â¨gle du jeu even spouses call each other ‘vous’; in Casque d’or even strangers are ‘tu’). Painterly tableaux recur through the film, but neither the camera nor the characters linger. So fast is the exposition it is as if they are rushing to keep to a deadline. But at the crucial turns of the story the camera fixes unblinkingly on the characters’ faces. Simone Signoret is the insolently voluptuous moll Marie, treated as a chattel by the gangsters with whom she consorts – ‘Voici l’objet’, they say when they fetch her in to see the vain and sinister boss Felix (Claude Dauphin). Signoret won an award for this role, but the most gripping performance is by Serge Reggiani as Manda, the tough but sensitive ex-convict who is trying to keep to the straight and narrow path as a small-town carpenter. Will Manda and Marie escape this thuggish world?

In Touchez pas au grisbi, Max wants to quit too. They’re getting too old, as he tells his partner in crime Riton, grabbing his jowls. But they have to dispose of their grisbi first – 50 million francs in gold bars in the boot of Max’s flash car. Touchez pas au grisbi (‘Hands Off the Loot’) opens with a four-square shot of that great block of Gallic masculinity Jean Gabin. As Max he wades through an impressive tide of comely young women, half his age, in and out of some fancy frocks. Their effortless chic must have been an eye-opener for British audiences whose native visions of with-it youth didn’t yet go much beyond the tweedy heartiness of Genevieve. Equally striking must have been Grisbi’s casual sexual frankness, in word and deed. Max complacently takes himself to be on groping terms, at least, with most of the damsels he encounters. Riton, by contrast, is having a hard time with the defection of his girlfriend Josy (Jeanne Moreau) to a younger and meaner crook. Max can’t help him with this – ‘Je ne peux pas policer les fesses’ – he has his mind on more serious things. Gabin dominates the film, leading the camera with him as he smokes and drinks and snogs his way up and down ornate staircases and lift shafts, from cabaret to restaurant to boudoir. Despite killings and violence (again gifles are dispensed liberally, especially by Max), the tone is less sombre than in Casque d’or, more playful. But by the end of the film Max loses more than his grisbi, which becomes too hot to handle.

These two Becker films are now available on DVD, together with Le Trou (1960), a tense, stark, and compelling story starring non-professional actors and a strong candidate for the best ever escape film. Escape films – what a strange subgenre, now missing, presumed dead. The world must have changed in some way, but for a while in the middle of the last century the idea of escape from imprisonment was a potent stimulant of imagination, sympathy, and suspense.

Peter Momtchiloff

PS: I wonder whether the French acting community would consider reviving the custom of single names for actors? It’s always a pleasure to see that some supporting role or other is played by ‘Barge’ or ‘Bouvette’.

Format: Paperback + DVD

Date of Publication: November 2006

Published by Lux + Arts Council England

Number of pages: 160 pages

Illustrations: 870 full colour images

The Animate! Book: Rethinking Animation was edited by the Lux’s Benjamin Cook and by Gary Thomas, who was Head of Moving Image at Arts Council England at the time of publication. Despite the fact that its really quite awful cover looks like some kind of utilitarian Arts Council funding brochure the book is fine as a graphic object. The interior has plenty of frankly delicious images from many of the animate commissions and one can animate them with one’s eyes…. However, the section where the bonus DVD slips in doesn’t work and is an example of shoddy paper engineering, inconsiderate of the actual use of the object by a reader.

The book either posits radical reinterpretation of what animation is/is not or, thanks to Mike Sperlinger’s fruity interviews, simply engages in fascinating conversation with animation artists themselves. The book is refreshing because it generally resists a centralised argument and summary; neither does it attempt to homogenise diverse artistic practices beyond locating them in the very broad area of animation. The bonus DVD is actually surplus – duff despite the inclusion of a few gripping works. In the main, it doesn’t so much fail as disappoint, some of the artists interviewed in the book offering work that seems remarkably mediocre or pedestrian compared to their thoughts and musings on animation. They really talk it up well and then go pancake with the tweening.

Many of the artists are, naturally enough, primarily concerned with the cinematic, and in this case televisual, display of their work. Ian White’s essay ‘Occupation’ concerns itself with expanded cinema and installation-based work, but on the whole the book pays scant attention to video games, motion graphics, the internet and converged media (for example, mobile phones). It’s important to note that, as stated, the work included on the DVD was manufactured for a major British TV channel (C4) and is therefore likely to be suffering from an impeded artistic brief because you know they’ve just got to put something on between the animated adverts and American Football coverage.

Sadly the medium of TV is also squandered heavily as a topic in the book, which is odd considering the longstanding benevolence of the televisual industries to animators. Odder still, it is also squandered by the artists on this disc (who, it must be said, represent only a small sample of many of the artists commissioned since 1990). TV, that most coquettish of mediums and an environment only slightly more corporate than a Clear Channel billboard is a potentially fertile space for artistic resistance, one would think, but there is little here to conquer the small-fry détournement of animating the TV yourself by pressing little rubber numerals on a remote control handset at stroboscopic speed. Certainly, there is nothing that would make the casual accidental viewer ask anything other than ‘Is this an advert?’. Nothing is particularly confrontational and I so wanted the work to seethe with self-loathing at the futility of its very existence in the dank shadows of Pixar and Dreamworks.

Contrasting with the overall uninspired works, the essays included in Animate: Rethinking Animation are captivating, even when they appear to be quite silly and excitable. In Edwin Carrel’s ‘Animation = A Multiplication of Artforms?’, Carrel talks of the Russian term for animation multiplikatsija. Animation as a concatenated artform, then. This is a red rag to Carrel’s bull and he uses the term as a banner for his oblique polemic on animation. He argues that animation is unique as an artform because of the variety of techniques deployed and sensations it evokes; ‘a multiplication of stimuli: visual, perceptive, cognitive, art, historical, technological, emotional, racial, gender based, psychological, biographical, religious and gastronomic.’ This could also be applied to football, pop videos, a box of eggs on the back of a speeding motorcycle on a motorway in a snow storm, cinema, darts, roller skating, aerial displays by The Red Arrows, Pizza Hut, The Antiques Road Show, anything starring animals, a circus, an orchestra, the back of the bus or a pub. It is meaningless and feels like a slippery Belgian’s witty attempt to shake off the cloying grip of binary criticism and call a spade a spade. Looking for film-historical support Carrel opts for a quote from that master of aphorism Jean-Luc Godard (whilst riffing about Norman McClaren and multivalent artforms), the familiar cinema = truth = 24 frames per minute thing. A quote so over-used it ceases to have any meaning other than the inference one has when one sees it deployed; that the user is still soppy over the bourgeois Marxist cinematic unorthodoxies of the 1960s. I mean, sure, in loose application it kind of works because animation is usually a frame-by-frame process but so what…?

Nonetheless, it doesn’t prevent Carrel’s essay from being a thoroughly entertaining wee read that asks tonnes of questions. For instance, I was left asking myself the following: Are photographers the ultra-minimalists of animation? Reducing activity to one frame. A frame that undulates so rapidly it appears to be static. Maybe curators can be thought of as animators, organising images and physical objects sequentially in space and time; or it could be that architects and urban planners are the real animators, organising our perception of the totality of space and time… Overall, I think perhaps it’s best not to ask the question when the answer is so inconclusive… perhaps the best thing to do is worry not about how what is done is defined but to just do it.

Talking of doing it, Gareth Evans and Dick Arnall use the 17 years of Animate!’s existence as a prism to view changes in technology and therefore practice. In ‘Build It and They Will Come’ they place the animators within the context of Britain’s alternative cinema and briefly look at the pros and cons of the expanded creative autonomy that digital technology enables. They also lightly pick at the dichotomy between mass consumption and compromise that the average TV commission foists upon artists. The hybridization of Hollywood cinema and computer-generated imagery is examined too and they acknowledge that the fusion of cinematic live action with digitally synthesized live action should be the bulls-eye of any contemporary animator’s target. This last point still seems a little cock-a-hoop when one considers that even the most basic, entry-level, motion capture technology retails at $30,000 plus. But at least people in rubber suits are still getting the work 53 years since Ishiro Hondo’s Godzilla, and they don’t have to do anything depraved either.

Tantalizing work not included on the DVD is discussed in Angela Kingston’s piece ‘Curating The Animators’. During 2005 and 2006 Kingston curated a touring exhibition entitled The Animators. It was an attempt to reflect on the cross-pollination of what is commonly known as artists’ films and animation and how this is mediated by digital technology. She talks of how she learns that animation as a term has become so expanded that it now includes ‘all manner of real-time footage that has been messed about with’. Thing is, I’m convinced that most mainstream movies – Dodgeball, The Fantastic Four, Hidden, you name it – consist of real-time footage that has been messed about with. Can we call these movies animation too? Probably, if the term is so elastic then it is only right and proper to stretch it.

In ‘Occupation: Animation & The Visual Arts’, Ian White takes on the subject of animation beyond the screen. He recounts Oskar Fischinger’s experience of xenophobia at Disney and successively examines an animatronic George W. Bush that in a Philip K. Dick-like twist is more convincing than the real George W. Bush; Paul McCarthy’s film/installation piece ‘Caribbean Pirates’, a mutant Disneyland theme park ride, a gross ketchup and chocolate sauce anti-Disney splatter-fest that antagonises the web of simulacra that comprises American home comforts, exports, entertainments and imperialism and perhaps even animation itself. He then moves onto Valie Export’s intriguingly paranoid, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers-style pyscho-sexual sci-fi horror ‘Invisible Adversaries’, which is an autopsy of Austria’s history amongst other things and closes with Catherine Sullivan’s ‘The Chittendens’, a kind of QE2 nightmare spread across multi-screens. All of these artists like to expose the seams in their work and favour the stylings of chaos over those of precision. Whether you concede that these people are animators or not is a test of your snobbery and patience but I take my hat off to Ian White for broadening the scope of this book and for being bold enough to deal with politics. In essence, I think White is saying that animation, especially of the kind exemplified by the aforementioned artists, can be a perfect metaphor for the macabre banalities of contemporary Western existence and those that it is imposed on. I disagree with this, I have been to Oxford Circus.

Philip Winter

Format: DVD

Release date: 25 June 2007

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Pedro Almodí­Â³var

Original title: Laberinto de pasiones

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Cecilia Roth, Pedro Almodí­Â³var

Spain 1982

94 minutes

It features two incest scenes, a nymphomaniac called Sexilia and a cross-dressing Italian princess undergoing fertility treatment, and yet Pedro Almí­Â³dovar’s Labyrinth of Passion fails to captivate as much as his other early works.

Filmed in Madrid in the early 1980s, the film trembles with the aftershock of the ‘movida madrileí±a’ – the social and cultural explosion that followed the death of General Franco and marked the end of the totalitarian regime. Depicting the hedonism of underground music venues and gay cruising grounds, the daring script shows Almodí­Â³var’s enthusiastic embrace of Spain’s new-found freedom of expression.

A simple love triangle was obviously not enough for the excess-loving director and here we have nothing less than a love pentagon – the titular labyrinth of passion. Tired of orgies, Sexilia wants to fall in love with the exiled son of a fallen Arabic emperor. Unfortunately the newly-fertile Italian princess has the same idea. She is being treated by Sexilia’s father – an eminent fertility doctor – who both Sexilia’s therapist and her best friend are determined to get into bed. Combined with a few more trysts and plots twists – including a plot to kidnap the Emperor’s son – the film takes a winding road down to an inconclusive ending.

Not that the ride isn’t enjoyable. The film is packed with the characters Almodí­Â³var does best – women. Parading through the film is the full gamut of Almodí­Â³varian female personalities: the dowdy, put-upon women, the feisty man-ivores, and the kooky ones with regional accents.

Then, there’s Almodí­Â³var’s outrageous sense of humour, which he has applied to everything from AIDS to child abuse throughout his work. Here he tackles incest with remarkable finesse. In contrast with the rape scene in Kika, which lost Almodí­Â³var a few female fans because of its bombastic humour, the director approaches his delicate topic with the right mix of sympathy and comedy here and consequently gets away with a graphic incestuous rape scene – which involves bondage no less.

On a more minor note the film is also worth watching for Almodí­Â³var’s appearance in full drag as a nightclub compere. The director also plays himself at the beginning of the film in a short but hilarious scene in which he directs a young transvestite junkie to butcher himself with a drill for a photo strip entitled Photo Porno Sexy Fever.

Sadly though, the rest of the film does not follow through in this vein. Although funny and vaguely intriguing, the film lacks the dark humour and memorable scenes of the director’s best films. Both the female leads are encumbered with too many boring worries to fully come to life. The rest of the characters are never developed enough to become truly sympathetic or consistently hilarious. Introduced to the film in a flurry of make-up, affected spanglish and camp coquettishness, Fabio – the star of the Sexy Fever photo shoot – could have been a great character. But as soon as we get to know him he disappears from the film without a trace or an explanation.

It is undoubtedly a treat to have access to another early Almodí­Â³var work in this country, especially one that captures the carefree spirit of eighties Spain and provides such a refreshing contrast to the glut of Hollywood’s cloned blockbusters. However, a dragging plot and the spotlight on the least interesting characters make Pedro’s labyrinth a less than compelling ride.

Lisa Williams

One of the best received British films of 2006, London To Brighton was inspired by a short film, Royalty, shot by director Paul Andrew Williams in 2001. Williams wanted to build on the characters and plot of Royalty to produce an effective, dark-edged thriller set in Britain, writing the impressive script over a single weekend and catching the attention of producer team Alistair Clark and Rachel Robey. A tough shoot in terms of cost, working hours and dedication, there is no doubt that the budget restrictions and general air of desperation contribute enormously to the pace and energy of the film.

The story begins suddenly as two girls, Kelly and Joanne, burst into a rundown toilet, blood, make-up and tears streaming down their faces. A series of gradually unfolding flashbacks establish their history together: it transpires that sinister pimp Derek has asked prostitute Kelly to find him an underage girl for one of his clients, a well-known gangster by the name of Duncan Allen. Initially Kelly takes a moral stand, but threats of violence from Derek force a change of heart. Scouring stations and alleyways, Kelly stumbles upon homeless youth Joanne, persuading her to meet with Derek. Both girls are taken to Duncan Allen’s house: scared and naive, all Joanne can think of is the money. But in the event she is unable to go through with it: she panics and defends herself, and the two flee on the train to Brighton, leaving Duncan Allen bleeding to death in the bathroom. But Duncan’s son, Stuart, is a very dangerous man, and demands answers. He tracks down Derek the pimp, informing him that he either finds Kelly and Joanne, or faces the consequences.

What follows is a descent into the darkest despair, an edge-of-the-seat chase as Derek tracks down the two girls, finally catching up with them at a house in Brighton. The stage is set for a genuinely surprising twist ending, and an unexpected shift in sympathies. The characters remain unpredictable to the very last scene, keeping the audience involved and guessing. The film’s tone is dark, uneasy and compelling, transforming a deceptively simple story into the successful British thriller the director was aiming for.

At times Williams utilises a powerful documentary aesthetic, employing shaky, naturalistic camera movements. This air of authenticity is enhanced by believable performances from all the lead actors. Johnny Harris is utterly convincing as the brutal, heartless Derek, and Lorraine Stanley gives a genuinely realistic performance as the downtrodden Kelly. Georgia Groome, making her debut, faces a real challenge with the part of Joanne, but displays enormous maturity and understanding in the role of this bitter, helpless runaway. A notable DVD extra outlines the director’s search for his perfect Joanne, before settling on Groome: a wise choice, as she proves herself an exceptionally talented young actor. Williams began his own career in front of the camera, an experience evidenced by his sympathetic direction and perfect eye for casting.

The film achieved widespread critical acclaim, picking up prizes at both the Dinard and Raindance festivals, and the New Director Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. London to Brighton may be difficult viewing, but it proves itself essential for any film connoisseur: a major modern contribution to British cinema.

Jo Overfield

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 June 2007

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Original title: Le Salaire de la peur

Cast: Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Vera Clouzot

France 1953

144 minutes

One of the greatest French filmmakers if not one of the best known, Henri-Georges Clouzot made 11 films between 1942 and 1968. His two most famous works, Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear), winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes, and Les Diaboliques (1955) established his reputation as the ‘French Hitchcock’, a comparison based on his mastery of suspense as well as their shared pessimistic world view. Tellingly, Hitchcock had attempted to buy the film rights to the source novels of both those films but the writers wanted them to be made in France. Just like Hitchcock, Clouzot is renowned for his tough, some would say sadistic, directing style, which, legend has it, included slapping actresses and even forcing Brigitte Bardot to drink whisky and take tranquilisers in order to look suitably out of it in La Verité (1960).

Although set in an unnamed Latin American country Le Salaire de la Peur was filmed in the south of France (convincingly transformed with a few palm trees and semi-naked or poncho-wearing extras). Divided into two distinct parts it is set in the town of Las Piedras for the first hour while the second part follows trucks full of nitro-glycerine driving through the jungle. Opening with a shot of local children torturing bugs – surely an influence for the similar scene in The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah 1969) – the film then introduces a town much like the one in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston 1948), in which a collection of down-on-their-luck types (from anywhere and everywhere) seek low-pay short-term work. As Mario (Yves Montand in a role that established him as one of France’s biggest stars) says, ‘it’s like prison here. Easy to get in but with no exit’. Sitting in a café with four other jobless, stony-broke compadres, sharing one lemonade between them in order to be allowed to stay there, Mario is desperate to find a way out. Work is scarce and when it is found it is of the type that ruins your health: Mario’s friend Luigi, who works at the cement factory, is told by the doctor to quit or die. This is no Erin Brockovich, though, and in this dog-eats-dog world a battle for compensation would be laughably out of the question.

This opening section is often criticised for being ‘over-long’ but it is there crucially that the characters are emotionally, socially and economically defined. It is because they have been fully developed that we care whether they are blown to oblivion in the white-knuckle ride that follows – a masterful grounding that often sorely lacks from today’s suspense thrillers. Through the extended set-up we see the rivalries and jealousies of the characters develop. Mario rejects his old friend and provider, Luigi, (as well as the ‘love interest’ Linda) for his new best friend, the flashy Jo. With this relationship we get an inverted version of the Hollywood buddy film. They start off loving each other and fall apart when the going gets tough. Jo’s bravado slips away when faced with real fear – he claims his sweats and shivers are a ‘touch of malaria’. However, his cowardice makes him all the more human while Mario, who he accuses of being too unimaginative to be afraid, is selfishly uncaring to the end. Shots of tires spinning in the mud and close-ups of the drivers’ sweaty faces rack up the tension, the sense of constant danger driving a wedge between them.

As always with Clouzot it is the negative characters that dominate the film. The loyal, generous Luigi almost becomes the antagonist whereas the ‘heroes’ Mario and Jo are both lacking in positive traits. The great journey through the jungle with a ton of nitro-glycerine is not motivated by some noble cause, but is a mercenary venture, done simply for money. However, in a film where good and bad are blurred almost beyond recognition, you easily find yourself rooting for such nasty characters as Mario and Jo as they balance at the edge of cliffs. Perhaps it is because, although they are thoroughly unpleasant, it is nothing compared to the cynicism of the oil company that employs them as expendable labour.

Although the film could be seen as an attack on imperialism and capitalism (‘anti-American’ scenes were cut from U.S. versions of the film – as were any scenes that hinted at homosexuality – a good 40 minutes in all) the film’s real concern is the human psyche (or even the soul). It is a cruel misanthropic film or rather, it is a film that depicts a cruel misanthropic world in which human beings are reduced to their basest, most selfish instincts by poverty, and most of all by fear. Clouzot emerges here as a master filmmaker, achieving edge-of-the-seat tension through his taut, economical direction and remarkably, without having recourse to incidental music to manipulate the emotions of his audience. His trademark mix of nastiness and suspense remains unmatched even by Hitchcock – although maybe with the exception of the 1972 Frenzy.

Paul Huckerby

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 June 2007

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Cast: Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, Micheline Francey, Pierre Larquey

France 1943

92 minutes

Although it was beset by controversy, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau is one of the most fiercely brilliant works of French cinema. As noir as noir can get, it offers a vision of humanity as devastating as such masterpieces of misanthropic cinema as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed or Fritz Lang’s M. The film was made in 1943 during the occupation of France by the Germans, at a time when the French film industry, at least in the North, was under the control of the German company Continental. It was for Continental that Clouzot made Le Corbeau, which earned him the reputation of being a collaborator. Tellingly, Clouzot’s vitriolic attack on humanity managed to offend all sides, and while the French Left believed the film promoted a pro-Nazi view of a degenerate France, the Germans saw it as a direct criticism of their rule. At the end of the war Clouzot was tried by the newly reinstated French authorities and banned from making films until 1947.

The film was based on a real-life case of poison-pen letters that caused havoc in the sleepy town of Tulle in 1917. The script, written in 1937, took on a charged significance in the context of occupied France where thousands of anonymous letters denouncing acquaintances, relatives or neighbours for being Jews or Communists were sent to the authorities. In Clouzot’s film, set in an unidentified small town, the anonymous letters, signed ‘Le Corbeau’ (‘The Raven’), bring to the surface the vices simmering under the seemingly placid provincial life, revealing the greed, adultery and hypocrisy of its most respectable citizens. The morally rigid Dr Germain, newly arrived in town and harbouring a secret in his past, is the main victim of the letters, which bad-mouth his practice of medicine as well as his relationships with two women: Laura, the pretty, young wife of the jovial psychiatrist Dr Vorzet, and Denise, a vampy, crippled temptress. Laura’s sister, Marie Corbin, is a frustrated, embittered nurse, and soon it is on her that the suspicions fall.

Aside from Dr Germain, authority figures are the most obvious targets of the Raven’s vicious attacks. The letters reveal how the leaders of the town are weak, corrupt, petty and foolish. Preoccupied solely by their own positions, they are incapable of taking any decisive steps towards the capture of the Raven, much as the impotent, morally bankrupt Vichy Government could not ward off the Germans. As everything else in the film, the Raven’s letters are deeply ambiguous. On the one hand they are little more than cheap rumour mongering and unfounded defamation, upsetting the community and creating an atmosphere of hate and distrust. On the other hand they denounce the hypocrisy on which the town’s life is based, thereby subverting the authority of the town’s undeserving leaders.

But corruption is not restricted to the top and ordinary people are just as objectionable as their leaders. People spy on each other and read letters not addressed to them; a young girl devises an elaborate scam to obtain money from acquaintances; a woman uses the rumours about Dr Germain as a pretext to refuse to pay his bill; even a sweet-faced child steals a letter and lies about it. In Clouzot’s world no one is innocent. Worse still is what happens when these regular folks gather together: egged on by rumours, they suddenly turn into an angry mob ready to lynch one of their own – the nurse Marie Corbin. A sour, unpleasant woman, Marie Corbin is set up from the start to be the obvious fall guy. Clad in a black nurse’s uniform and veil she cuts a sinister, and very much raven-like figure. But as she flees down the deserted streets, pursued by the sounds of the baying mob, our sympathies are violently repositioned, and we now root for her pathetic, lonely, victimised figure. Just as in M‘s famous trial scene, the character targeted by the mob’s fury may be repulsive and even criminal, but the savagery of the mob, its frightening pack mentality and its Old Testament sense of justice, is what is shown to be truly disturbing.

The film’s preoccupation with good and evil is rendered visually by an elaborate play of light and shadows, even more markedly than in other film noirs. The characters’ shadows projected on the walls suggest unseen dark sides; shapes and patterns superimposed on their faces subtly modify their expressions, giving them an almost fantastic, sinister appearance. At the heart of the film is a particularly striking night-time scene in which the indulgent Dr Vorzet tries to demonstrate to the righteous Dr Germain that the boundaries between good and evil are not cast in stone by setting a light bulb in motion. As the light swings, painting grotesque shadows on the walls, with the faces of the two men alternately dark or lit, Dr Vorzet says to Dr Germain: ‘You think people are all good or bad. You think good is light and evil is dark. But where does each begin? Where’s the frontier? Do you know which side you’re on?’ And soon enough indeed we see Dr Germain trip every so slightly, as Dr Vorzet had predicted.

Although it is a very dark film, Le Corbeau is by no means dreary or dispiriting but exudes an extraordinary vitality. This is partly due to Dr Germain’s energetic, resolute efforts to stop the Raven; but it is even more strongly connected to Denise’s sensual love of life and to her total disregard for social rules and conventions. It is her free-spirited attitude and her strength of character, together with Dr Germain’s intransigence, that give the film its gutsiness. And while most of the characters remain beyond redemption, there is some progression for Dr Germain: having learnt to live with the past, there is hope for new love at the end of the film. This conclusion is, however, thoroughly unsentimental, and hope for the future is coupled with the acceptance of the brutality of life, the acceptance that for life to carry on, babies have to be born and mothers sometimes have to die.

On a personal level then, Le Corbeau ends on an almost positive note. But for mankind as a whole the prognostic is bleak. In an astonishing climax, someone is institutionalised, someone dies and a murderer walks free. There is no resolution here, as one crime ends with another. The last image of the film, the black, veiled, raven-like form of a widow walking down a sun-lit street as children play nearby, is a chilling reminder that there is simply no end to evil. Just like the dark figure of Marie Corbin earlier in the film, it tells us in no uncertain terms that every one of us could be the Raven – that every one of us has the capacity for evil. So while the venal authorities, the letters of denunciation, and the mob mentality clearly resonate with the malaise of occupied France, the film’s study of evil goes far beyond its historical context to paint a scathing portrait of a fundamentally corrupt humanity. Clouzot’s ferocious lucidity remains unequalled, and with its masterful technique, tight plotting and vigorous direction, Le Corbeau is not only Clouzot at his best, but also one of cinema’s greatest achievements.

Virginie Sélavy

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 June 2007

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Cast: Suzy Delair, Bernard Blier, Jouis Jouvet, Simone Renant

France 1947

106 minutes

Quai des Orfí­Â¨vres opens strikingly with singer Jenny Lamour posing for saucy photos to give to her husband Maurice, who exchanged the conservatoire for the nightclub to be her accompanist. It closes with a snowy Christmas scene of reconciliation; after the sweaty anxiety of the intervening events, the sentimental resolution for once seems well earned. The film is a seemingly effortless evocation of the low life in 1940s Paris – a shadowed, intimate, but open world through which ugly and beautiful, young and old, victim, suspect, and pursuer move freely. No door ever seems to be locked. Unlike the city today it is a world of belonging – everyone seems connected with everyone else. Showgirl, concierge, policeman, cloakroom attendant, all the denizens of the nightclub and the alley are equal in the eye of Clouzot’s camera. Jenny and Maurice embroil themselves in a crime through emotions with which it is all too easy to sympathize – jealousy, and a desperate desire to escape from poverty. Apart stands the distant-eyed photographer Dora, a ray of glamour amid the seediness. ‘Une drôle de fille’, she calls herself; the nature of her emotional entanglement is recognized and saluted in the end by her counterpart, the film’s other clear-sighted loner. This is Antoine, the maimed Foreign Legionnaire turned police inspector; like the others he is a troubled, flawed soul redeemed through love, in his case for the son he has brought back from Africa. Frank but not lurid, grim but humane, Quai des Orfí­Â¨vres is a perfectly realized thriller of the mundane, never cynical enough to be noir, and all the better for it.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: DVD

Release date: 25 September 2006

Distributor Tartan Video

Director: Byambasuren Davaa

Original title: Die Hí¶hle des gelben Hundes

Cast: Babbayar Batchuluun, Nansal Batchuluun, Nansalmaa Batchuluun

Mongolia/Germany 2005

93 minutes

In 2003 director and writer Byambasuren Davaa gave us The Story of the Weeping Camel,,a beautifully constructed documentary based around a Mongolian nomadic family’s newest camel colt. In The Cave of the Yellow Dog, the setting is the same minus the camels and with a different Mongolian family, and Dayaa delivers another slice of humble cinéma vérité. While taking a walk, six-year-old Nansaa finds a little black-and-white spotted dog in a cave along the cliffs. She names him ‘Zochor’ (‘Spot’ in English) and takes him home with her. Only her father tells her to get rid of him because wild dogs can attack the sheep. When her father goes on a long trip to the city to sell some sheepskins, Nansaa keeps the little dog, who becomes her trusted companion. One day she loses sight of him in the tundra and, whilst searching for him, encounters an old nomad woman who tells her the legend of the cave of the yellow dog.

The child actors really are the centrepiece in Davaa’s films, their naivety pulling you along in the narrative and making you see the world through their eyes. During Nansaa’s conversations with her newfound best friend Zochor the dog, you become completely immersed in the child’s mindset. One of the most endearing scenes in the film occurs between Nansaa’s siblings, Babbayar and Nansalmaa. When Nansaa doesn’t come home one evening her mother is forced to go looking for her, entrusting her second eldest daughter to look after the home and more importantly Babbayar while she is gone. It is a scene that is nothing short of adorable while also revealing of Nansalmaa’s striking maturity. It is fascinating to see how bold and fearless the children are in Davaa’s Mongolian families, their parents trusting them to wander off and almost encouraging their independence – a far cry from our over-protective Western world. But The Cave of the Yellow Dog is not simply about the children and it also puts you in the position of the parents at different intervals. When Babbayar is accidentally left behind during the family move and almost falls prey to some blood-hungry vultures, the father’s desperate efforts to rescue his youngest child provoke unqualified sympathy in the audience.

The role of the ‘Yurt’ plays as highly in all of Dayaa’s films as it does in reality. Turkic for í¢â‚¬Å“dwelling placeí¢â‚¬Â or í¢â‚¬Å“homelandí¢â‚¬Â, a Yurt is a portable structure consisting of a circular wooden frame carrying a felt cover, and for the Mongolian families it is home. The importance of the Yurt is suggested in the film when the time comes for the family to move on and they start to gently deconstruct it in thoughtful silence. Such scenes are enough to entice any nature lover to explore this nomadic living so far removed from the city suit ant armies and unreachable property ladders of urban life. I remember Ewan McGregor in his Long Way Round documentary, commenting on Mongolia as he passes through on his motorbike, recalling it as a ‘breathtaking’ place that makes you feel a million miles away from civilization. Or rather, the civilization us Westerners are familiar with.

All this makes you realise how remote and untouched nomadic Mongolia really is, which gives an exotic charm to the film. Dayaa’s films paint a remarkably detailed picture of her motherland, from its culture and ancient Buddhist beliefs down to the organic working ethic among the natives. Mongolia was seeped in communism for years, its inhabitants systematically conditioned to view the Buddha Dharma as mere superstition, the opposite to all ideals of progress and modernity. But since 1990 Mongolia has adopted a democratic government that has brought religious and personal freedom to the people. They have been able to rediscover and once more enjoy the ancient way of life that had long defined their culture, before communists had taken control. The Mongolians’ independent spirit and joyful embrace of life are more than apparent on screen and Davaa brilliantly captures the beauty of nomadic Mogolian life. She would have been approaching her twenties when Mongolia was becoming a freer and more socially equal environment so no wonder she celebrates her country with such pride, wearing her heart on her silk sleeve.

It is easy to forget that The Cave is a documentary film because of Davaa’s unobtrusive direction and the natural performances of the nomadic family involved. You become utterly consumed in the storyline, the characters and the surroundings, almost as if you were working the camera yourself. The Weeping Camel was an original and deeply affecting film and it seemed unlikely that Davaa could equal it, but The Cave is more of the same, and just as good. With her second feature she confirms that she has truly created her own genre of documentary filmmaking.

Jo Overfield

Format: DVD

Release date: 28 November 2005

Distributor BFI

Director: Melvin Van Peebles

Cast: Melvin Van Peebles, Simon Chuckster, Hubert Scales

US 1971

97 minutes

Too often put in the same bag as the cynical, Hollywood-engineered wave of blaxploitation flicks it influenced, Melvin Van Peebles‘ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is pure, unadulterated ghetto anger that burns as fiercely now as when it was made over thirty years ago. Having started a filmmaking career in France with the support of Henri Langlois of the Cinémathí­Â¨que Franí§aise, Van Peebles landed a contract with Columbia in the US and made the successful race comedy Watermelon Man in 1970 before moving on to Sweetback, a project so radical that no major studio would touch it. Undeterred, Van Peebles raised meagre funds himself and shot his film, the story of a black hustler who goes on the run after killing two white cops, in 19 days, almost losing his sight during the intensive editing and alienating most of his family and friends in the process. After a shaky start Sweetback took off thanks to the support of the Black Panthers, ending up the highest grossing independent film of 1971, topping Love Story at the box office.

Sure enough, Hollywood swiftly repositioned itself, MGM rewriting its script for Shaft, originally meant for a white detective, recruiting black hunk Richard Roundtree to star, Isaac Hayes to score and Gordon Parks to helm for credibility, while Warner Brothers followed suit with Superfly, imaginatively hiring Gordon Parks’ son to direct and Curtis Mayfield to write the music. Although the blaxploitation wave was short lived, it lasted long enough to turn into caricature the heady mix of flamboyant ghetto get-up, funky music and rebel black hero that Sweetback had introduced. Hayes and Mayfield’s brilliantly seductive soundtracks only helped glamorise a boorish, sexist law enforcer and an unscrupulous drug dealer respectively. Sweetback‘s mutinous, inflammatory call for revolt against white rule was excised while the film’s prominent but complex sexuality was entirely misunderstood and travestied. The new black (anti-)hero who had just emerged was quickly reduced to a high-sexed macho stud more influenced by the womanising antics of James Bond than by the firebrand politics of Malcolm X.

The truth is, Van Peebles had to pretend he was making a porn flick in order to get past the all-powerful all-white unions. This was dictated as much by financial necessity – the director simply couldn’t afford to pay union rates – as by politics – Van Peebles wanted a multiracial crew, which the unions couldn’t provide. The only way to dodge the unions’ strict controls was to have enough sex scenes in the film to make them believe Sweetback was porn, which fell outside of normal regulations.

But while Van Peebles may have been forced to put sex in his film he used it to provide an incendiary comment on race relations in America. Unlike Shaft or Superfly, Sweetback is no sexy daddy proudly parading his manhood but a passive, glazed-eyed hustler who is pushed into sex. At the start of the film Sweetback makes a living performing in a sex show for both black and white voyeurs. As he goes through the motions, his face blank and lifeless, he is no paragon of triumphant virility but a sexual object used by other people for their own gratification. Later Sweetback is captured by a white motorbike gang who give him a choice between fighting and fucking. Sweetback has to perform surrounded by whooping and cheering bikers, egged on by the white woman’s teasing ‘well?’. Performing here is very much the right word. The sex is an act, a show put on by the black man to entertain his white audience and stop them from beating him up. Tellingly Sweetback is wearing an incongruous white bow around his neck during the scene, complemented by a black hat at the end. This bow that comes out of nowhere – it was definitely not part of Sweetback’s outfit before he undressed – marks him out as an entertainer, a jester, the black man forced to act out the eternal fool to the white man, forced to conform to the racist stereotypes that the white man has stamped on him – oversexed buck or buffoon. The point is pressed home in another scene, which shows a black man shining a white man’s shoes with his bottom to make him laugh. The black man is constantly performing, forced to put on the act that is expected of him to avoid the white man’s hostility. Sex, just like clowning around, is something he has to do in order to survive in a white world.

In that perspective, the controversial opening scene of the film becomes easier to understand. Taken in by prostitutes when he was homeless and hungry and brought up in a brothel, the pre-pubescent Sweetback (played by Van Peebles’ own son Mario, thirteen at the time) is coerced into sex by a much older prostitute. The BFI has chosen to black out those early images on the DVD, apparently to conform with the Child Protection Laws, even though an earlier video version of the film included them in and Channel 4 and the ICA have both screened the film uncensored. This is regrettable because while those images are undeniably unsettling, they are essential to understand Sweetback’s character: throughout his entire life Sweetback survives by letting people use him for sex, and the brothel scene is where it all started. This is made crystal clear as the young Sweetback lying on top of the prostitute turns into the blank-faced adult Sweetback. That early scene is a defining moment in his life: it is the prostitute who gives him his moniker, the only name he answers to throughout the film. And if any remaining doubts linger about Van Peebles’ intentions, the opening quote of the film spells it out: ‘Sire, these lines are not a homage to brutality that the artist has invented, but a hymn from the mouth of reality’ (Traditional Prologue of the Dark Age). Sweetback is no endorsement of sleaziness or underage sex but an attempt to portray the black man’s experience as truthfully as possible, including in its most unpalatable aspects.

The sexuality depicted in Sweetback also links the film to the Underground cinema of the sixties. Unlike the strictly straight, conventional couplings of Shaft or Superfly the sex in Sweetback comes in many a deviant form: aside from the prostitutes of the opening scenes, there are voyeurs, lesbian performers, a queer compere who calls himself the ‘Good Dyke Fairy Godmother’ and later a trio of camp gay men. These are characters who would not be out of place in the work of Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs or the Kuchar Brothers. Belonging to a de facto marginal subculture Sweetback, sporting an outrageous mustard crushed velvet two-piece, is at home among the misfits and outsiders who hang out on the fringes of the dominant, mainstream, straight, white culture. This may be why Van Peebles found that the forms and spirit of Underground cinema were perfectly suited to the depiction of the black experience. Displaying the same disdain for straightforward narrative Van Peebles strips the plot down to its bare bones, most of the film consisting of Sweetback running through urban wasteland. The bold visual style clearly owes a lot to the techniques pioneered by the sixties filmmakers, and Van Peebles makes great use of split frames, jump cuts, coloured negative images and collages of urban imagery. Sweetback runs through empty concrete aqueducts, seedy back alleys, derelict buildings, rubbish-littered streets, and sewers before leaving the city for the unforgiving desert. Hostile signs flash on the screen – ‘Caution’, ‘Keep Out’ – as well as neon lights promising religious redemption – ‘Jesus Saves’ – as if this was the only path for the black man – fenced in by the white man while promised a better (after-)life by the Church.

Even more so than the visuals it is the design of the soundtrack that really impresses. A complex assemblage of discordant sounds, a cacophony of police sirens, funky theme tune (written by Van Peebles and performed by Earth, Wind and Fire) and Gospel standards, it is raw, cool and edgy, an aggressive, electrifying celebration of African-American culture as well as an angry denunciation of the treatment of the black man by white society. Most striking of all is the menacing, chilling ‘Won’t Bleed Me’, a call and response type of song between a group of singers and Sweetback whose chorus is ‘They bled your momma/They bled your poppa/Won’t bleed me!’.

However, while Sweetback is clearly a political film, it is devoid of any speeches, lecturing or debates of Black Power ideas – see Horace Ové’s 1976 Pressure for contrast. Rather than talking about overthrowing white power, Sweetback literally strikes back against white police. But as with all other aspects of the film there is nothing simplistic about this. It is not that action is better than words, it is simply that Sweetback doesn’t have the words. As the cops proceed to beat up a black militant kid senseless, Sweetback just passively stands on the side, ground down by centuries of white oppression. When he snaps and starts hitting them back, it’s not revolution, it’s pure reaction to an ‘overdose of black misery’. Sweetback is not the leader but the forerunner of the revolt, the first one to stand up but without having the words to articulate the ideas. That role is Moo Moo’s, the young activist that he rescues from the cops. In a later scene he helps him again after the youngster has been wounded in a shoot-out, and when a choice has to be made between saving himself or saving Moo Moo he favours the latter, saying: ‘he’s our future’.

No matter how exhilarating it may have been for black audiences of the time to see a black man stand up to white power, however, the ending of the film is rather downbeat. In a concluding scene that evokes the fugitive slaves of the past, Sweetback manages to kill the hounds that are chasing him, dodging the law once again. If this is a victory of sorts, it is a rather bleak one: Sweetback may have escaped, but he can’t stop running; he’s survived but nothing has changed for the black community. As Sweetback disappears over a desolate mountain and possibly over the border into Mexico, there is no real sense of triumph, only the defiant threat that he will be back: ‘Watch out’, says the superimposed title, ‘A baad asssss nigger is coming back to collect some dues…’ Sweetback was originally conceived as a trilogy but Van Peebles couldn’t raise the money to make the two sequels he had planned. Sadly, on and off the screen the baad asssss hasn’t been able to make it back, kept safely away by white power structures.

Virginie Sélavy

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