As part of our apocalyptic theme, Douglas Noble reviews Richard Stanley’s dystopian cyber-horror movie Hardware (1990).
For more information on Douglas Noble, go to his website.
Hardware
Stake Land
Format: Cinema
Release date: 17 June 2011
Venues: Key cities
Distributor: Metrodome
Director: Jim Mickle
Writers:Nick Damici and Jim Mickle
Cast: Nick Damici, Connor Paolo, Kelly McGillis
USA 2010
98 mins
Jim Mickle’s Stake Land (2011) is a pretty good watch, with rousing action scenes where locals turned vampires tear up rural America, although this is hindered by some unneeded frills. The film is set in apocalyptic America (what has caused this is unexplained). Towns and cities are dysfunctional and many are deserted. Various groups jostle for position: an extremist Christian cult, disenfranchised ‘simple folk’ searching for a new frontier and a pack of blood-guzzling vampires, each aiming for supremacy.
The story follows the travels of vampire stalker Mister (Nick Damici, Mulberry Street, World Trade Center) and orphaned Martin (Connor Paolo, Gossip Girl), picked up by Mister as an apprentice/vampire killer pal (I hope named after George Romero’s awkward be-fanged teenager). They are trying to find the promised land, a mysterious place called New Eden.
Stake Land is part buddy movie, part road movie, part sci-fi, part social commentary, part Western. Watching the film is like flicking through cable channels: Mad Max follows Karate Kid follows The Champ, all with teeth. There is a lot going on and it’s impressive that the filmmakers manage to cover so much film territory. But it feels a bit like an attempt to cover their bases and have something for everyone: slowed-down glamorous sections where the leading actors look cool, set to a melancholic soundtrack, are next to gripping and noisy action scenes of blood lust and staking (the best part of the film for me), and sensitive bonding scenes between the characters as they travel through a stunning landscape. All this set to music that is so unnecessary it feels like being smothered with a pillow of emotional impact.
The subtext of the film seems to suggest that in a new era of sluggish economies and ecological disaster only the fittest will survive, and those commonly portrayed as a drain on resources and not ‘pulling their weight’ are cast out. Indeed, many sequences are reminiscent of media-fetishised disasters. Vampire-struck towns with deserted houses, shops and people scavenging for food reminded me of images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or images of terrorist attacks. The vampire format has been used before to flesh out a particular time’s anxieties (disease, addiction, etc), and here it’s a fear of terrorism. With Stake Land, we’re made more aware than ever of a ‘watch your back’ generation of Americans desperately in need of a bit of meditation and some Ritalin.
Some of these references to contemporary society work well. One of the film’s strengths is the way familiar American suburban tropes are adjusted to fit this apocalyptic vamp landscape. The scenes where these mythical beings are seen as roadkill for ‘Nam-styled Mister, or where an infected Santa Claus awaits his impending doom in a cul-de-sac, dripping with tar-like blood, are high points. On the other hand, the relationships between the characters are not allowed to fully develop, so that the audience can neither genuinely root for them, nor really despise them. Damici’s character has some great moments and his cool lines give the film some laughs, but part of the narrative draw is dropped too early. Four of the people that Mister and Martin befriend are promptly killed off, notably an old woman and a black man, and rather predictably, it’s the young white couple who survive long enough to try and reach the promised land in the end.
Nicola Woodham
L’âge d’or
Format: Dual Format: Blu-ray + DVD
Release date: 30 May 2011
Distributor: BFI
Director:Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
Writers: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
Original title: Lásky jedné plavovlásky
Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Caridad de Laberdesque
France/Spain 1930
63 mins
The BFI’s new Blu-ray release of Luis Buñuel’s L’âge d’or (1930) provides a comprehensive introduction to surrealist cinema. In addition to the 50-minute movie, the DVD includes Luis Buñuel’s shorter début film, Un chien andalou (1929), another collaboration with Salvador Dalí. These two titles are the most famous surrealist films ever made, but L’âge d’or was the only one that completely satisfied surrealist leader André Breton.
The DVD contains three other special features: a Spanish-produced documentary on Buñuel, a voice-over commentary on selected clips from L’âge d’or by Robert Short, and an introduction to surrealist cinema, also by Short, in the form of a talking-head lecture. The Spanish documentary gives a chronological survey of Buñuel’s life and career, and is enlivened by the variety of its contributors: it is composed entirely of anecdotes from the director’s friends, family and collaborators, with a few clips and quotations from the great man himself. While entertaining, the stories are also useful, as they shed light on the themes that dominate Buñuel’s entire oeuvre. Although many of the interviewees are recognisable from Buñuel’s films (Michel Piccoli and Angela Molina, for example), the documentary strangely fails to identify the contributors with the usual on-screen titles. The material from Robert Short suffers by comparison with this engaging documentary. Short’s contribution is informative, certainly: he assumes zero knowledge about surrealist cinema on the part of the audience, and provides all of the necessary material for a basic understanding of its history. He also offers relevant background details to the two films as well as some helpful interpretations. Still, Short’s style of expression is ill-suited to reading aloud and would have been far more enjoyable as liner notes.
L’âge d’or still holds an astonishing capacity to shock. The film’s male lead, Gaston Modot, kicks a puppy, slaps his prospective mother-in-law and knocks over a blind man. Co-star Lya Lys is introduced rolling in the mud with Modot, screeching with erotic pleasure; subsequently, she appears sitting on the toilet, sucking suggestively on the toe of a statue and reclining on a couch in post-masturbatory bliss. The film implies that society’s repressive attitude towards sex results in productive drives being sublimated into cruel and violent acts. The film also criticises the bourgeois for their selfishness: they are outraged by relatively minor affronts to people of their own class, but indifferent to true tragedies that befall their servants. While Un chien andalou, with its infamous eyeball-slicing sequence, is arguably the better-known of the two films, L’âge d’or succeeds where the surrealists felt that Un chien andalou failed. While the first movie was received with enthusiasm by the public, who didn’t bother trying to understand its dream-like images and missed its intended ‘call to murder’, L’âge d’or was banned for provoking far-right riots. The film’s attack on Dieu, famille, patrie had not been missed, and the surrealists basked in the ensuing scandal.
Alison Frank
Cría Cuervos
Format: Cinema
Release date: 10 June 2011
Venues: Key cities
Distributor: BFI
Director: Carlos Saura
Writer: Carlos Saura
Cast: Ana Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin, Mónica Randall, Florinda Chico
Spain 1975
110 mins
One of the great Spanish directors, Carlos Saura has not had the attention he deserves in the UK, perhaps because his recent output is not on a par with his 70s work. It is all the more welcome then that as part of their season on Spanish cinema after Franco, the BFI are screening Saura’s 1975 masterpiece, Cría Cuervos, a haunting reflection on memory, loss, history and transmission.
Shot in the summer of 1975 as General Franco lay dying, Cría Cuervos perfectly captures a moment of transition: that of a child into an adult, of life into death, and of a dictatorship into an unknown future. Focusing on eight-year-old Ana over the course of a summer after the death of her father, a high-ranking officer, the film is an achingly personal examination of the past that is also obliquely, but no less powerfully, political.
Cría Cuervos is released in the UK as a BFI Dual Format (DVD/Blu-ray) edition on 27 May 2013.
The film starts as Ana, awake at night, listens to whispers of lovemaking in her father’s room before seeing his married mistress leave hurriedly, dishevelled and half-dressed. Ana walks into the bedroom to find her father dead. She strokes his hair and takes the empty glass by his bedside away to wash it in the kitchen, a gesture we will only later understand. In that first scene, sex and death are inextricably linked, one a secret, the other a mystery, and it is this dark matter at the heart of her parents’ lives that Ana will probe throughout the film.
A few scenes later, the cold, rigid Aunt Paulina, now looking after Ana and her sisters, instructs them to kiss their father’s corpse in front of both his military colleagues and the mistress, who is there with her husband. But Ana refuses to perform the expected ritual; it’s her first act of resistance against her aunt’s determination to keep up appearances and maintain established social rules. Ana’s gesture, in this room lined by officers in uniform, is of course highly resonant.
Ana, the observer of adult life, unblinkingly lays her intensely serious eyes on all around her, her limpid, dark gaze in itself almost a reproach for the compromises and betrayals of adulthood. She sees more than she should, but as a child is impotent to alter the course of events - although she thinks she can, having been led by her mother’s innocuous lie to believe that she is in possession of the deadliest poison in the world. Unlike her sisters, the older Irene and the younger Maite, she is in between the adult and the child worlds, maybe because of the strength of the connection between her and her beloved mother.
Her mother appears early on, walking in as Ana washes her father’s glass in the kitchen, later brushing her daughter’s hair before the funeral. It is only later that we realise she is dead, and her playful, tender presence in those scenes makes her actual absence and Ana’s longing for her even more poignant. The film fluidly moves between reality and fantasy, past and present, never delineating them clearly, suggesting they all have the same texture in Ana’s mind and are part of the same continuum.
Adding to the narrative complexity, the adult Ana comments on her past in direct addresses to the camera. We don’t know what her adult life is like, but she talks in a confessional way, trying to piece together the events of her childhood. She is played by Geraldine Chaplin, who also plays her mother, a double role that emphasises the echo between past and present, and the film’s disquieting intimation that history will repeat itself, that the children will reiterate what their parents have passed on to them. This is evoked in the title of the film, a reference to a Spanish proverb meaning ‘raise ravens and they’ll pluck out your eyes’. Tellingly, Ana’s Francoist father bequeaths her his gun.
The large, gloomy house in which they live, and that is the setting for most of the film, is like a last vestige of the past in the middle of encroaching modern life, busy Madrid traffic, advertising billboards and loud city life, an enclave that is both a claustrophobic and repressive space of sadness and death, but also a protected bubble for the childhood imagination. Saura is exceptionally good at conveying the feel of the self-contained world of childhood through his depiction of Ana and her games with her sisters, which are often ambiguously funny, as when they dress up as their parents and re-enact an argument, or when Ana makes her sisters play dead. Particularly affecting is the scene in which they dance to Jeanette’s pop hit of the time, ‘Porque te vas?’, whose melancholy lament for a lost lover colours this bittersweet moment.
Saura could not have painted such a vividly authentic portrait of childhood without the phenomenal eight-year-old actress Ana Torrent, whose uncanny seriousness is mesmerising, and small, expressive face deeply moving. How she managed to come across as so artless and sincere, to so profoundly inhabit her character, is unfathomable. Two years earlier, Torrent had played a similar role in Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive, another film that is as richly evocative of the world of childhood and as indirectly political as Cría Cuervos.
Despite the gloom, there is a real warmth to the film, in the character of the kindly, earthly maid Rosa, and in the scenes of Ana with her sisters or her grandmother. And even though Ana’s childhood is dominated by sorrow, there is a certain feeling of nostalgia. When the film ends with the three girls leaving the house, passing the advertising billboards to start a new school year, there is the sense that this is the end of an era, and the nostalgic feeling comes not from the fact that it was a happy period, but simply from the fact that that time, the time of childhood, has ended and will never come back.
Virginie Sélavy
Treme: The Complete First Season
Format: DVD + Blu-ray
Release date: 30 May 2011
Distributor: HBO Home Entertainment
Directors: Agnieszka Holland, Simon Cellan Jones, Anthony Hemingway
Creators: David Simon, Eric Overmyer
Writers: David Simon, Eric Overmyer, David Mills, Tom Piazza
Cast: Steve Zahn, Kim Dickens, Clarke Peters, Wendell Pierce, John Goodman
USA 2010
4 disc set (10 episodes)
Having spent the best part of two decades creating cop shows - albeit two of the best ever (Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire) - David Simon seems to have found himself with something close to a carte blanche as to what to make next. Avoiding self-indulgence, he used this situation to tackle some of America’s most traumatic and controversial moments of recent years. Thus Generation Kill (2008) and Treme (2010-11) depict the ‘War on Terror’ and Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath respectively. These intelligent realistic dramas are shows that needed a bankable name behind them, and in television (quality television at least) the writer/creator is the name above the title - the star. Of course the actors must be outstanding, and Simon provides us with a great ensemble cast including New Orleans natives John Goodman and Wendell Pierce (The Wire‘s Bunk) and many non-professional local actors such as Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, who was so memorable in Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke. But it was the guaranteed quality of Simon’s writing team that got these projects green-lighted.
Treme is an area in New Orleans right by the French Quarter. Largely populated by African-Americans, it is undoubtedly of great cultural importance, containing Congo Square, the birth-place of that great American art form, jazz. As my pre-Katrina tourist guide claims, ‘there aren’t many reasons to wander into the Treme’, and certainly not after dark, but compared to The Wire‘s Baltimore housing projects the Treme depicted here is something short of a fallen Utopia. Despite the mould, crumbling houses and missing neighbours the sense of community is a thing to behold. And of course, the great authentic New Orleans music is everywhere - played by locals for the locals away from the Bourbon Street tourist traps and ‘titty-bars’.
The series opens with the first ‘second line’ (marching brass band) parade since the storm. It might not be Mardi Gras but these smaller parades are an almost weekly event in New Orleans. It illustrates how important the music is to the people, who randomly join in the parade as it marches to its conclusion at a local bar. At a time when many Americans were asking whether the city was even worth rebuilding, this depiction shows why people love New Orleans and why it is worth preserving. It certainly appears to be a city unlike any other in America - there are still the highways cutting through the city centre, and I’m sure fast food chains (although we don’t see them), but even the failing Tower Records store has an arrangement with local musicians. It is also a city with a real sense of its own cuisine beyond a differently shaped pizza or local brand of frankfurter.
Where The Wire attempted to contextualise the police procedural - with each season focusing on schools, city politics, the press, etc. - Treme goes even further, to the point where the background takes the lead. This loosely connected bunch of characters represent the different aspects of New Orleans culture - a jazz trombonist (Pierce), a Creole/Cajun-food chef (Kim Dickens), a writer and lecturer (Goodman), a stoner DJ (Steve Zahn) and Clarke Peters (The Wire‘s Lester Freamon) as the chief of a tribe of Mardi Gras Indians. Much of the culture is merely shown with little direct explanation - for instance, who are the people organising and paying for the ‘second line parade’? And the curious world of the Mardi Gras Indians - an African-American subculture that involves dressing up in the most elaborate native American costumes - is left in part a mystery.
One of the great things about HBO television shows has been the space allowed for both plot and character development that the 90-minute cinema release can never hope to equal, and this is certainly the case here. The plots largely focus on rebuilding and attempts to return to some pre-Katrina normality - cleaning up homes, repairing roofs, trying to find a job or a gig, saving a business. There is no overall story arc to encompass these fragments - each story works its own way towards its own conclusion.
There is also room for some blatant political comments with John Goodman’s character’s interviews and YouTube rants. He explains how the flood was caused by negligent work and poor maintenance of the levees (‘this is a man-made catastrophe, not a natural disaster’). George W. Bush’s decision to view the disaster from the window of Airforce 1 flying overhead is ridiculed in Zahn’s musical satire (‘Shame on you Dubya’). The frustration with the federal government’s response can be seen everywhere - ‘Buy us back Chirac,’ asks one carnival float of French-costumed New Orleanians.
But taking up even more screen time is the music. The plot takes a back seat while we watch yet another great musical performance. From traditional to modern jazz from blues to rhythm and blues - real musicians such as The Rebirth Brass Band, Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint (who recreate their post-Katrina New Orleans recording sessions), Dr John and Steve Earl all have cameos. As an English reporter suggests, New Orleans music may have lost some of its international importance, but locally it is still the beating heart of the city.
The series has flaws but pretty minor ones. The dialogue can be difficult to follow - peppered with New Orleans accents, jazz musician in-jokes and obscure references - but at least the characters are not speaking in the military acronyms of Generation Kill. At times the writing is too good: there are too many good lines, too many profound statements for it to be truly realistic and authentic. And there seems to be just too much integrity in the main characters. But the meandering pace is perfectly suited to the subject matter, and the moments of high emotion and drama are beautifully handled with great understatement.
Free from the need to sneak good writing into a cop show formula (Homicide), Simon delivers another of his epic Tolstoyan depictions of intensely personal stories and their socio-economic and cultural milieu. The Wire is widely recognised as one of the all-time great TV shows and with a few more seasons at this standard Treme could equal this status - as long as you like jazz.
Paul Huckerby
Cross of Iron
Format: Blu-ray
Release date: 6 June 2011
Distributor: Optimum Releasing
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Writers: Julius J. Epstein, Walter Kelley, James Hamilton
Based on the novel The Willing Flesh by: Willi Heinrich
Cast: James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason
UK/West Germany 1977
127 mins
‘God is a sadist… but he probably doesn’t even know it.’
For the purposes of Cross of Iron (1977), God is Sam Peckinpah, and the victims of his bloody vengeance are the German and Russian soldiers dragged through the mud in this impressively grim panoply of horrors. Misty Yugoslavian locations serve as the Eastern front, and a mixed pack of American, British and German actors play German soldiers on the slow, confused retreat from the Soviet Union.
Julius (Casablanca) Epstein’s script treads lightly around politics: there’s only one dedicated Nazi in the film, the sinister Zoll, the rest being a disillusioned bunch of pragmatic soldiers and one fanatic, but he’s a Prussian aristocrat intent on military glory, rather than a typical representative of the regime. As played by Maximilian Schell, he’s both the film’s main antagonist, and its principal source of comic relief: Schell’s witty performance stresses the character’s preening narcissism, incompetence and innate cowardice (his greatest fear: being found out and exposed).
Against this absurd madman, the film poses James Coburn as Steiner, initially presented as a noble and relatively humane killer, slowly revealed as a typically conflicted, neurotic Peckinpah hero, addicted to the strife of war, feeding on his hatred of officers, ultimately ineffective.
Coburn plays the role, oddly, with his Oirish accent from Duck You Sucker! (1971), which is mildly distracting at first. But he tamps down his lusty movie-star charisma and gives an impressively bitter, glowering performance. James Mason and Peckinpah regular David Warner provide support.
It’s no surprise that the film features lengthy, manically cut battle sequences at deafening volume, with slow motion deployed energetically for moments of mayhem and destruction. More pleasingly, there’s little of the modern fetishising of military technology. The Russian tanks have a dinosaurian rumble and sway to them, and are quite terrifying, but the filmmaker privileges death-porn over gun-porn. As early as in The Getaway (1972), Bloody Sam’s slo-mo had ceased any pretence to capture the adrenaline surge of death agony, and was celebrating the beauty of exploding hubcaps, paperbacks and banisters, a ballet of destruction that had more in common with the pyrotechnic climax of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) than with the original intent behind the mayhem of The Wild Bunch (1969). So while the script attempts a dissection of the urge to fight, the camera and cutting indulge in an orgiastic celebration of the aesthetic possibilities of large-scale destruction and slaughter. There’s certainly a tension between the two, but it’s not necessarily damaging.
The film, like Peckinpah himself, is nevertheless on the verge of disintegration. The jittery, blinking montage of the battles is carried on into conversation scenes (few of which are devoid of the sound of distant explosions). Like Borges’s mythical Aleph, Peckinpah’s cinema wants to see everything at once, so we restlessly snap from set-up to set-up, with a commendable, neurotic attention to nuances of performance. Time is distended, not just in moments of violence, but in the multiple exchanges of glances punctuating the dialogue.
Then, at the end of Act One, a Russian shell pitches Coburn through a series of random dissolves, like a melting hall of mirrors, and into a combat shock sequence that brilliantly uses Peckinpah’s deranged montage to evoke a disconnected, fractured state of being. Coburn wanders through this disjointed mindfuck with bandaged brow, his intelligent-simian face contorted into a lobotomised monkey glower.
This sense of disintegration anticipates the film’s startling ending, which folds in jauntily singing German schoolchildren, maniacal laughter, a quote from Brecht, and a stutter of freeze-frames to paint a vivid portrait of… what? Peckinpah’s over-indulgence in Slivovitz, a diabolic plum brandy that can remove the top of a human head if used correctly? His coke-frayed nerve-endings finally strained to snapping? The madness of war? The impossibility of making a film about it? Whatever the answer, this is an intense, nail-biting, seedy and mad-eyed movie.
Alongside the garbled but well-meant denunciation of war, Peckinpah’s more retrograde side is in evidence, although more muted than in the wild-man rampages of Straw Dogs and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: a rapist receives harsh punishment, but Coburn’s men seem on the point of committing sexual assault moments before. The camera leers, hand-held, over a voluptuous female bather. Homosexuals are untrustworthy. Killing is manly - but still terrible.
Optimum’s new Blu-Ray looks beautiful, and comes stuffed with extras. Alas, some over-zealous grading seems to have turned day-for-night scenes into brightly, if coldly lit dawn, making lines like ‘We go in at first light’, play nonsensically. A shame, since John (Witchfinder General) Coquillon’s smoky, glazed cinematography is one of the movie’s principle enticements.
David Cairns
Who Can Kill a Child?
Format: DVD
Release date: 23 May 2011
Distributor: Eureka
Director:Narciso Ibañez Serrador
Writer: Narciso Ibañez Serrador
Based on the novel by: Juan José Plans
Original title: ¿Quién puede matar a un niño?
Cast: Lewis Fiander, Prunella Ransome, Antonio Iranzo
Spain 1976
112 mins
Narciso Ibañez Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) is arguably the best Spanish horror film ever made. It’s also a classic of 70s horror, but you’re unlikely to find it on many ‘best of’ lists, from either fans or critics. This is mainly due to its half-hearted distribution; saddled with a number of other titles - including Island of the Damned and Death is Child’s Play - and shorn of up to half an hour of footage, Serrador’s film surfaced briefly on the drive-in circuit before slipping into obscurity. It did occasionally appear on television, however, and grey-market VHS copies circulated among fans of cult and horror cinema. Through this limited exposure, the film acquired a growing fan base, although it wouldn’t receive an uncut release in the USA until 2007. Finally, in 2011, Who Can Kill a Child? is being released in the United Kingdom.
Young biologist Tom and his heavily pregnant wife Evelyn (Lewis Fiander and Prunella Ransome) are on holiday in Spain. They decide to visit Almanzora, a small island off the coast. It isn’t necessarily the best place to go - there’s no doctor, no telephone and it takes four hours in a boat to get there - but they want to get away from the tourists. When they arrive, the island appears to be deserted, except for a handful of children. The shops are open, but empty, and it’s obvious no one has been there for several hours. Tom follows a group of giggling children into a building and finds them playing a game in the courtyard, swinging long poles at an object above their heads. But it’s not a piñata hanging from the ceiling - it’s the battered body of an elderly man. As Tom struggles to imagine what has happened on the island, he and Evelyn encounter one of the locals, hidden upstairs in the hotel. He tells them that the previous night the children took to the streets, laughing and playing, going from one house to another. Screams of pain and horror followed, as the children began killing every adult they could find. It’s time for Tom and Evelyn to leave, but will the children let them escape?
Like Village of the Damned (1960) and Children of the Corn (1984), Who Can Kill a Child? pits adults against children, this time working from the template established by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Unlike those films, Who Can Kill a Child? doesn’t dilute the horrific premise by making his children aliens or religious maniacs controlled or directed by a supernatural entity. The children of Almanzora were, until the night before, completely normal. Even now they’re behaving much as children should - playing, giggling, running around the town having fun. It’s just the nature of the ‘fun’ that has changed. Following Hitchcock in The Birds (1963) and Romero, Serrador provides no real information that might help to understand or explain the events taking place. Tom and Evelyn have better things to do than speculate about why the children have slaughtered the adults.
Serrador’s only serious misstep occurs almost immediately. As a prologue to his film he attaches 10 minutes of real-life footage depicting various wars and man-made humanitarian disasters, always stressing the number of children who died in each instance. This establishes the continued victimisation of children by adults (accidental or otherwise), opening the door for the children of Almanzora to turn the tables. Unfortunately, footage of concentration camps and African famines makes for an uncomfortable way to begin watching what is essentially a frivolous form of entertainment. Thankfully Serrador avoids such ham-fisted moralising for the rest of the film. When Who Can Kill a Child? gets going, it’s a masterpiece of atmosphere and a deeply unsettling, original experience, and one that deserves to be seen by a much wider audience.
Eureka’s new Region 2 edition carries the same content as the US Dark Sky edition, using the same high quality, uncut print and featuring documentaries about the director and the cinematographer.
Jim Harper
Alice
Format: DVD + Blu-ray
Release date: 23 May 2011
Distributor: BFI
Director:Jan Švankmajer
Writer: Jan Švankmajer
Based on Alice in Wonderland by: Lewis Carroll
Original title: N?co z Alenky
Cast: Kristýna Kohoutová
Czechoslovakia 1988
86 mins
Games have been a constituent element of many Czech films, from the improvisation and word play of Voskovec and Werich in the 1930s to the unpredictable inventions of V?ra Chytilová (Daisies) in the 1960s. When Jan Švankmajer made Alice, his first feature film, in 1987, he was already part of a culture in which the game was central. Indeed, one of his early films, in which he ‘plays’ with stones, forming them into different combinations and Arcimboldo-like faces, was called Game with Stones (1965).
The Czech Surrealist Group, which had remained ‘underground’ during the years of Stalinism after the Second World War, reconstituted itself in 1968 and Švankmajer became a member in 1970. When they were again forced underground after the Soviet invasion of the country in 1968, they began a whole series of group explorations and games, investigating such areas as touch, fear, eroticism, analogy, interpretation, creativity and, of course, dream, humour, and game itself. Collective games and interpretative experiment form the essential context of Švankmajer’s work.
Cruelty - indeed, one might say sado-masochism - was an element of many of his short films, from the competing magicians of The Last Trick (1964) to the self-devouring and destructive heads of Dimensions of Dialogue in 1982. His three films dealing with childhood - Jabberwocky (1971), Down to the Cellar (1982), and Alice (1987) continue to explore this vein. Švankmajer argues that childhood is a time with which he maintains a continuing dialogue but that he remembers it as a ‘time of cruelty’. His Jabberwocky (1971), with its references to Carroll’s nonsense poem and to the pre-war leader of the Czech surrealists, Vít?zslav Nezval, focused very precisely on the world of children’s play. As the then leader of the Surrealist Group, the poet Vratislav Effenberger, put it, the film was a variety show from a child’s imagination with its individual ‘turns’ divided by a wall of bricks repeatedly knocked down by a black cat.
Extras include the first screen adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic, 1903’s Alice in Wonderland, the Brothers Quay’s Alice-inspired Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married? and Stille Nacht IV: Can’t Go Wrong without You as well as a 34-page booklet.
This, together with Down to the Cellar (1982), which grew out of the Surrealist Group’s exploration into the subject of Fear, were obvious precursors of his work on Alice. Although based on his own experiences of being sent ‘down to the cellar’ to fetch potatoes, his heroine is a young girl. In this sense, the film recalls both Alice and Little Red Riding Hood, as the girl confronts the unknown. In the cellar, she meets a man who makes a bed out of coal and offers her a place beside him, an old woman who bakes cakes from coal dust, an enormous cat that stalks her, shoes that fight for a piece of bread she is eating, and potatoes that follow a life of their own and escape from her basket.
Alice, technically a Swiss-British-German co-production although, in all creative respects, entirely Czech, was filmed in Prague with Švankmajer’s regular team. Significantly, the Czech title translates as ‘Something from Alice’, indicating that it should in no way be considered a straightforward adaptation of Carroll. Having said that, one could argue that the similarities are greater than one would have expected. However, where Carroll attributes the origins of Alice’s dreams to the reassuring sounds of the countryside, Švankmajer anticipates the images of her fantasy ‘in the brooding preliminary shots of her room, with its shelves of relics and mysteries from other, previous lives - the furniture she has not yet earned the right to use. Alice’s quest is a hunt for her own context.’ (Philip Strick)
While Alice is played by a real little girl, the world of her imagination or dream world is represented by puppets and animated figures. Her transformations in size are represented by changing from human to doll and, in this sense, Švankmajer seems to suggest an instability in identity. On the other hand, the intermittent close-ups of Alice’s lips speaking short lines of narrative suggest that she ultimately has control of these imaginings. At the end of the film, when she has been condemned to death and the White Rabbit, armed with a pair of scissors, appears as an actual executioner, she announces: ‘Perhaps I’ll cut his head off.’
Like Faust, in Švankmajer’s later ‘variety collage’ of the Faust stories, Alice moves from scene to scene and from world to world and, in this sense, the film also provides a parallel to the earlier Jabberwocky. But, unlike Carroll’s original, the characters have become much more explicitly threatening. The principal puppet figures that she meets all have the appearance of old toys - to echo André Breton on the ‘magically old’ - ‘old-fashioned, broken, useless…’ The March Hare constantly has to be wound up and have his eye pulled back into place, the Mad Hatter is made of carved and beaten wood and, despite his hollow innards, constantly drinks cups of tea. The White Rabbit continually has to replace his stuffing - a constant resurrection revealing, suggests Brigid Cherry (in Kinoeye), the influence of Gothic horror, and representing the Undead. Undoubtedly, the rabbit is far from reassuring, arrogant, domineering and, armed with his pair of scissors, a ‘castrating’ figure.
Švankmajer’s most nightmarish creations are his ‘animals’, who pursue her at the White Rabbit’s behest after she has escaped from his house. These skeletal monsters - imaginary beasts made largely from bones - first made their appearance independently as part of Švankmajer’s sequence of constructions entitled Natural Science Cabinet in the early 1970s. They include a coach pulled by chickens with skull heads, a fish-like skeleton with legs, a skull dragging a bone body, and a skull head that snaps out of a jam pot. This array of visions is far from the antiseptic world of Disney or the reassuring middle-class images of Sir John Tenniel. But, as one Czech critic put it, Alice’s confrontations with fear and humiliation are more than compensated by her ‘outstanding character and extreme intelligence’.
When the film was shown on British television one Christmas, episodes were shown during the day and the whole film late at night. The experiment of day-time screenings was never repeated. Swiss parents apparently removed their children from cinema screenings. But is this world of imagination really more harmful than the readily available synthetic violence of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers? As Švankmajer once said: ‘Unless we again begin to tell fairy tales and ghost stories at night before going to sleep and recounting our dreams upon waking, nothing more is to be expected of our Western civilisation.’
There will be a screening of Alice on June 16 at the Barbican (London), followed by a Q&A with Jan Švankmajer and Peter Hames.
Peter Hames
This article was first published in the autumn 08 issue of Electric Sheep Magazine.
Le Quattro Volte
Format: Cinema
Release date: 27 May 2011
Venues: Key cities
Distributor: New Wave Films
Director: Michelangelo Frammartino
Writer: Michelangelo Frammartino
Cast: Giuseppe Fuda, Bruno Timpano, Nazareno Timpano
Italy/Germany/Switzerland 2010
88 mins
Anybody who has found themselves occasionally gazing up into the heavens and wondering about life, death, their existence on this world and what it all means will be glad to hear that Michelangelo Frammartino’s disarming Italian film also ponders the big questions, in its own idiosyncratic and deliberate fashion, and he’s come up with an answer for you: it’s all about charcoal. Well, charcoal and goats. Charcoal, goats, reincarnation and ritual. Some combination of those…
Looking at first like an austere observational documentary about life in an isolated Calabrian village, Le Quattro Volte establishes the sights and sounds and repetitive rhythms of everyday life for an ageing herdsman guiding his goats out to pasture and back again until he falls ill (and there’s a message here for anybody who’s putting their trust in Catholic medicine). The life of one of the newborn kids that would have been under his care takes centre stage for a while, until the focus shifts again. We are made to consider the connections between everything on screen, a tree, a dog, a truck, the animate and inanimate, animal and vegetable, all assume their own importance in a wordless tale told through composed, resonant images and ambient sound.
If all of this sounds too much like hard work, Frammartino assuredly does not make it so; he understands that if you’re going to use long takes, make them good-looking, eventful or funny. When he tells the kid’s story, he shoots from its eye level, and immerses you in its world so completely that when the poor little bleeder gets left behind by the herd, it’s deeply distressing. He manages to hold your interest in the fate of a tree, the processes of rural life, odd rituals, domestic details and strange bits of church and village business that must have been taking place here for decades and centuries.
Le Quattro Volte‘s ace card, however, is its animal cast. Look no further for hot goat-on-goat action: this is by some distance the best goat-related art-house feature film I’ve ever seen. They are fantastically entertaining, without ever being anthropomorphised or sentimentalised à la March of the Penguins. They take over the screen, clambering over everything, curious and tottering and playful. The film’s highlight is a jaw-dropping single-take shot that creates beautifully orchestrated comedy chaos out of the herd, a badly parked truck, an Easter crucifixion parade and a dog that deserves to win a goddamn Oscar if there’s any justice in this world. The film definitely loses something when its focus moves on, but remains engaging on some level. I’m not sure how profound it all is, in the end, or how much Frammartino has played with his material to make the connections he does. But for 88 minutes le Quattro Volte weaves a curious spell, like a live action Sylvain Chomet animation, a bucolic meander through the mysteries of life and death.
Mark Stafford
Suicide Club
Format: DVD Region 1
Release date: 18 November 2003
Distributor: Tla
Director: Sion Sono
Writer: Sion Sono
Original title: Jisatsu Sí¢kuru
Cast: Ryo Ishibashi, Masatoshi Nagase, Mai Hosho
Japan 2001
99 mins
Maverick Japanese director Sion Sono’s best-known film, Suicide Club (2001), opens with a statement: a jaw-dropping sequence depicting the mass suicide of 54 Japanese school girls at Shinjuku train station. Suicide Club is an extremely confrontational and deeply enigmatic film, and it is not surprising that it has been met with wildly different reactions, from adoration to disapproval and puzzlement. In an interview with 3AM Magazine, Sono called Suicide Club ‘a hate movie’, adding, ‘I hope [the] Japanese hate me… I hope almost all people hate this movie’. Sono was clearly settling scores with his homeland in the film; it is almost as if he were throwing its own destructiveness back in the face of Japanese society. Japan has a high rate of suicide, particularly among young people, and the internet has been blamed for collective suicides seemingly arranged through online chat rooms. Sono appears to be partly motivated by a desire to unsettle complacent audiences, which may go some way towards explaining his gleeful predilection for extreme gore. But here, as in the rest of his work, the violence is accompanied by humour: although you may not notice on first view, the opening scene of Suicide Club is set to a bizarrely cheerful little tune, which undercuts the impact of the orgy of death on screen.
As more mass suicides follow across Japan, the police begin a criminal investigation, with a number of clues seemingly pointing to some kind of organisation behind the deaths. White sports bags left at some of the suicide scenes contain gruesome rolls made of 10-centimetre pieces of human skin sewn together, which, the police later discover, come from the next group of suicides. A strange website consisting only of orange and white dots seems to be counting the deaths, new dots appearing just before new suicides, or so claims a mysterious hacker who goes by the nickname of ‘The Bat’. A pre-pubescent all-girl pop band called ‘Dessart’ may also have something to do with the suicides. Detective Kuroda, helped by Detective Shibusawa, follows the various trails, only to become personally affected by the phenomenon he’s investigating.
Suicide Club has been seen by many critics as a satire of pop culture and of suicide as a fad. Pop culture undoubtedly appears in a negative light in the film, not only through Dessart and the possible connection between the inane messages in their lyrics and the suicides, but also through a weird glam-punk band led by a bleached-blond, androgynous, psychotic young man who calls himself Genesis. In a bizarre Rocky Horror-style sub-plot, Genesis and his gang claim to be the Suicide Club to attract the attention of the media. A scene in which Genesis sings seems to confirm the connection between entertainment and destructiveness: as he performs, one of his henchmen rapes and kills a girl they have abducted. The Rocky Horror interlude may not be entirely successful, but this scene is another example of Sono’s gift for creating memorably nightmarish visions. Genesis and his men are holed up in an abandoned bowling alley and the people and animals they have kidnapped are squirming across the floor, each wrapped in a white sheet. The image of those whimpering, writhing forms, which we know are living beings, but can’t see, is truly disturbing. Even more so when Genesis casually stamps on one of the animals and blood seeps through as the form lies still, with the suggestion that it’s all a spectacle.
As for Dessart, the innocuous-looking pop band seems to hide clues in their lyrics and promotional posters that would appear to point to some sort of cult of death led by children. However, there is no resolution, no explanation of any kind, and the suggestion of this unlikely conspiracy is left open to interpretation at the end. More important than knowing whether the Suicide Club is really a secret society of children is the total separation and incomprehension between young people and adults that its possible existence reveals. Whatever it is that may lead young people to commit suicide, the film suggests that the adults will always be inherently unable to comprehend it.
Sono is particularly interested in secret societies and cults, which is partly to do with the fact that he joined a cult when he was younger and later became a member of a terrorist group (as he explains in the 3AM interview). His early experiences inspired his film Love Exposure (2008), which features the Catholic Church as well as a sinister religious cult. In fact, the Suicide Club could almost be a sect: the children and presumed members ask questions such as ‘Are you connected with yourself?’ and pronounce nebulous statements that would not be out of place in a new age cult. Talking about Love Exposure in the Japan Times, Sono explained: ‘I like exploring borderlines. In this film, it’s the borderlines between perversion and normality, the Catholic Church and cults.’ That statement can be applied to Suicide Club too. Sono does not simply use a religious cult as the perverted contrast to the normality of the Catholic Church, but the cult serves also to highlight the perversions in what we perceive as the norm. In the same way, the possibility of the existence of a secret society called the Suicide Club reveals the fault lines of the supposedly ‘normal’ society, notably the seemingly unbridgeable divide between youth and adults.
Suicide Club has been described as ‘muddled’ and Sono criticised for not making his satire of pop culture and denunciation of the media clear enough. But the ambiguity of the film is precisely what makes it interesting. The Suicide Club is an elusive phenomenon that cannot be attributed to any specific group of people with any certainty. It is a diffuse idea that pervades the whole of society and is not controlled by any one person or group. It’s this idea that makes the film so powerful and disturbing. The Suicide Club remains very abstract and impossible to pin down to any material reality or evidence. The website that seems to count the suicides before they happen is only a collection of coloured dots on a screen. The name of the pop band Dessart is spelt differently in Roman characters throughout the film: ‘Desert’, ‘Dessert’, etc. The police officers are unsure whether the phenomenon they are investigating is accident, suicide or murder. And when a new website appears with the aim of fighting the Suicide Club, it consists only of a revolving white circle: the counter-suicide club can be nothing but another abstract geometric pattern to combat the indefinable, insubstantial threat. The intangible nature of the Suicide Club is at the heart of the film, and it is therefore logical that there should be no final resolution.
By the end of the film, the only thing that seems clear is that the Suicide Club has introduced chaos and disorder into society. The fact that there is no rational or criminal explanation for the suicides upsets and unsettles assumptions about the nature, stability and functioning of society. In many suicidal fictions, the impulse for self-destruction stems from a loss of meaning, a disillusion with the values offered by society, and corresponds to a distrust for language (see the various spellings of ‘Dessart’), seen as a vehicle for the authorities that govern that society, and therefore perceived as corrupt. So while for one person to decide that life is meaningless is an act of nihilism that may cause some disruption to the social fabric, when a group of people decides to form a society devoted to self-destruction, it becomes an all-out attack on the values of society at large, almost an act of existential terrorism. This connection between organised self-destruction and the threat to social order is an idea that runs through fictional depictions of suicide clubs, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1882 short story ‘The Suicide Club’ to Sono’s film, via quasi-suicide clubs such as Fight Club (1999). And yet, despite their fascinating implications and subversive potential, suicide clubs remain a surprisingly rare kind of secret society in cinema, with Sono’s film one of the most formidable, labyrinthine and provocative examples.
Virginie Sélavy