Emerging from the escalators at Canary Wharf into an unseasonably cold and damp June evening, the first sight that greeted us was of two futuristic policemen standing guard, while air stewardesses in retro outfits guided ‘passengers’ to a Utopian Airways shuttle. After a few minutes on board, a man in a trench coat abruptly stopped the bus, alerting the passengers and crew that we were to be redirected to a holding station in the wake of a replicant rebellion. In case anyone hadn’t figured it out by now, we were on our way to a screening of Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi film Blade Runner.
The bus reached its destination a few moments later, a desolate yard in the shadows of Canary Wharf’s skyscrapers. Walking between rows of shipping containers, boys in uniform yelled at us to hurry inside the warehouse; we were harassed by refugees and disturbed by the site of three vertically challenged men taking baseball bats to a car. Inside was a stunning recreation of the film’s futuristic vision of LA, with its crowded stalls selling anything from noodles to replicant pets. Pole dancers, masks covering their faces, shimmied on top of scaffolding, overlooking the bar where Chrome Hoof, clad in gold, played a set of jarring, angular rock. Women with snakes draped across their shoulders roamed through the crowd. A woman in a see-through plastic coat sat at a vanity table applying make-up. An actress, dressed in torn stockings and a fur coat, wearing a blonde wig, wandered, oblivious, through the guests. Outside in the back yard, a fire-eater performed on top of an armoured vehicle.
While it was impossible to completely shake the feeling that it was all an elaborate set-up, the level of detail that went into organising the event was near genius. The army of actors, who portrayed nuns, strippers, police officers, Decker, Roy, Rachael, and almost everyone from the cast, were impressive in their ability to stay in character while surrounded by throngs of film-goers knocking back sushi and beer. A few drinks later, when we were finally ushered into the screening room, the recreation of J.F Sebastien’s apartment that greeted us was breathtaking; more actors and actresses dressed as his robotic playthings littered the remarkable set. By that time, the film itself was almost a side-show, the crowd even cheering at the scene when Decker and Rachael kiss. But there was still a surprise left in store for the audience: Decker and Roy, playing out their final scene, hanging off the brick wall of the warehouse, illuminated by a projection of the building’s façade.
It was a remarkable night; and it’s almost impossible to imagine how Secret Cinema will ever top it. I’ll certainly be there next time to see if they pull it off.
The Edinburgh Film Festival once more delivered an excellent, wide-ranging selection of short films, organised in eight programmes, including international and UK films, digital and animation, and Cinema Extreme, an initiative from the UK Film Council and Film4.
The clear highlight for this writer was Maska, the new film by the Brothers Quay, whose achievements in the field of animation were celebrated by the festival in a special event on June 22. Based on Stanislaw Lem’s short story ‘The Mask’, it tells the story of a robot created in the shape of a beautiful woman by an authoritarian king in order to seduce and destroy a noble man who opposed him. The robot tries to work out its identity, ‘it’ coming to know itself as an ‘I’, then as a ‘she’, before discovering that she is in fact a metallic construction resembling a praying mantis, which violently erupts from her previous female shape. The Brothers Quay’s elaborate animation style lends itself remarkably well to a rich visual exploration of the fluctuating identity of the creature and conjures up disturbing echoes that connect the female, robot and insect natures she successively adopts. Artificially gendered, then born of herself, she leads us on a journey through the dark mystery of creation and metamorphosis. Parts of Lem’s wonderful story are narrated in Polish and although the Quays are generally wary of using large amounts of text in their films, the fusion of the sumptuous imagery with the poetic narration and Krzysztof Penderecki’s unsettling music is here perfectly realised and richly evocative.
Other animated shorts of note included the Brothers McLeod’s excellent Gothic fairy tale The Moon Bird, which was shown earlier this year at Flatpack, and Max Hattler’s witty, Busby Berkeley-inspired war satire Spin. Nick Cross’s Yellow Cake was another smart political satire from the USA about the consequences of big cats’ exploitation of small blue creatures, in which escalating death and destruction was contrasted with a cute, childish animation style that underlined the ironic tone. In The Astronomer’s Sun, Simon Cartwright and Jessica Cope told the story of a young man who goes back to his father’s observatory and revisits a traumatic childhood memory, with unexpected consequences. Bathed in melancholy blue tones, the enigmatic story was a true delight. In an entirely different style, Stewart Comrie’s Battenberg was an impressive example of digital animation which saw a squirrel and a magpie locked into a power game inside a miniature cabinet of curiosities within an abandoned house. The objects, evoking the human world, created a bizarre, disquieting setting for the cruel fight to the death between the two animals. A work of startling originality and technical mastery.
In the live action shorts, Cinema Extreme was a somewhat disappointing section – although it is a very laudable scheme – partly because the films seemed rather tame in contrast with what could be expected from such a label. Daniel Mulloy’s Baby won the UK Film Council Award for Best British Film. The story of a brief encounter between a young white woman and a black boy from a street gang, it played with viewers’ assumptions, but reversed them in such an unsubtle way that it was utterly predictable from the start. Scott Graham’s Native Son, which focused on an outsider in an isolated rural Scottish community, was mysterious and menacing but the pace was not quite controlled enough. Tony Grisoni’s The Pizza Miracle, about a man having an imaginary dialogue with his dead Italian restaurateur father, was humorous but offered no genuine insights or emotions.
Among the international shorts, Joyce A Nashawati’s The Bite (La Morsure, France) stood out through its masterful composition, sharp editing and atmospheric quality. A young woman takes a little girl to a park, where she meets her lover. While they talk, the little girl disappears into the woods and has an encounter with a man who is sleeping rough in the park. The story had a fairy tale quality and was told in a nicely elliptical, suggestive manner, which contributed to the unsettling, ominous atmosphere. Magnus von Horn’s Echo (Poland) opened with the reconstruction of the apparently motiveless murder of a young girl by two boys and ended with the confrontation between one of the boys and her parents. It was bleakly realistic and looked fairly drab, but the constant rainfall, timeworn face of the detective and striking finale made it worth checking out.
In the UK shorts, Ben Lavington Martin’s Dust was a particularly affecting and ingenious work. Using NASA archival footage, Martin constructed the story of astronaut Glen Gordon, who is stuck on the moon after his mission goes wrong. As we see images of the moon, a spaceship, an astronaut on its silver surface, we hear Glen Gordon talk to man on the ground Jimmy, fellow astronaut Alan, and his wife Patty. The dying moments of a man alone in the universe are captured with humour and pathos, as he poignantly describes the astonishing experience of walking on the moon, reflects on what is important and ponders the existence of God. A very full and rich 10 minutes.
Nestled between Europe and Asia, Istanbul is undoubtedly one of most fascinating cities in the world – combining the sensibilities of both continents, it’s an exciting and constantly surprising cosmopolitan city with a rich vein of history. Istanbul is also a very vibrant arts capital: the city is awash with festivals, exhibitions, concerts and plays all year round – and perhaps the crowning event is the International Istanbul Film Festival.
The festival showcases the best of both mainstream and independent cinema for an intense and very exciting two weeks every April. It provides an excellent opportunity for foreign visitors to explore Turkish cinema with a selection of the best new productions, as well as restorations of classic (and sometimes thought to be lost) Turkish films. It also introduces audiences to important directors and actors/actresses and gives the prestigious Golden Tulip Award every year to one international and one national production, alongside the FIPRESCI Prize and the Council of Europe Award.
Here are some of the stand-out films from the festival, including the award winners:
The Misfortunates (De helaasheid der dingen)
(Winner of the international Golden Tulip)
Set in a small town in the middle of nowhere, Belgium’s entry for the Oscars last year follows the story of young Gunther Strobbe, who lives with his father, three uncles and his grandmother. While the male members of the house waste their days away drinking heavy quantities of alcohol, chasing loose women and getting into bar fights, Gunther tries to find his own role within this eccentric and decidedly odd household. Director Felix van Groeningen captures the stark brutality of growing up in what can only be described as unusually appalling conditions. The Strobbe Clan are like overblown, grotesque versions of characters from a Mike Leigh film. Their aspirations are inexistent, and it seems that Gunther might be destined to follow into the same kind of dead-end life. The film is exceptionally simple and yet walks a thin line between pathos and humour as it paints a portrait of an extremely dysfunctional, yet endearing family. The performances are stellar and Kenneth Vanbaeden, Valentijn Dhaenens, Wouter Hendrickx and Johan Heldenbergh shine as older members of the Strobbe family. Although there is no distribution deal for the film in the UK so far, one can only hope that it won’t be long before this small and charming masterpiece arrives on our screens.
Vavien
(Winner of the national Golden Tulip)
At once idiosyncratically Turkish and yet marvellously accessible to any foreign audience, the Taylan brothers’ third film delivers on the promises made in their previous feature. Borrowing heavily from the films and tone of the Coen Brothers, they create the darkest of comedies in a quintessentially Turkish setting. Engin Günaydin, who also wrote the film, stars as Celal, a hapless electrician whose business and marriage are not going so well. In love with a cheap ‘pavyon’ singer from Samsun, Celal decides the solution to his problems lies with his wife Sevilay’s secret stash of money, sent by her father from Germany. A devious plan slowly hatches in Celal’s mind whereby he can solve both his problems with one single act. Reminiscent of Fargo in mood and action, Vavien is a pitch-black comedy. The growing desperation of Celal, his attempts at wooing Sibel, and Sevilay’s abrupt conversations with her dad in Germany, are all played straight, and yet the humour never gets lost, thanks to an intelligent and well-written script. Special mention must also go to Serra Yilmaz, who, in spite of her short screen time, manages to steal every scene she is in. A must-see for any lover of intelligent and unique cinema, Vavien is also an indication of the new standards established within Turkish cinema.
Ajami
(Council of Europe Film Award)
Already screened at the London Film Festival to great success, Ajami holds the unique honour of being the result of a collaborative effort between Scandar Copti, a Palestinian, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli director. The film is set in Ajami, a tough neighbourhood in Jaffa populated by Jews, Arabs and Christians, and tells five different but interconnected stories using a daring narrative structure reminiscent of Amores Perros. The fact that the film was made using a largely non-professional cast also serves as a testament to the raw power the directors manage to extract from their material. At once a tough crime drama and a powerful statement about life in the multi-ethnic neighbourhoods of Israel, Ajami is an admirable effort using exceptional cinematographic language to tell an exceptional story.
I Killed My Mother
(People’s Choice Awards)
Canada’s bid for the Oscars in 2010, Xavier Dolan’s semi-autobiographical film is one of the most emotionally honest and refreshing stories to emerge in years. Focusing on gay teenager Hubert and his tempestuous relationship with his mother, for whom he feels both guilt and contempt, Dolan’s feature debut explores the myths and mysteries of adolescence in an unexpectedly direct, amusing and emotional way.
Gainsbourg (Vie Héroïque)
Almost as creative and outrageous as its subject matter, cartoonist Joann Sfar’s debut film based on his graphic novel covers the entire gamut of Serge Gainsbourg’s life, from growing up in 1940s Nazi-occupied Paris through to his death in 1996. Filled to the brim with Gainsbourg’s unique compositions, the film easily sidesteps the usual traps a biopic can fall into, instead creating an amusing and breathtaking ride through its never-felt 140 minutes. Eric Elmosnino’s performance as the titular character is exemplary, effortlessly bringing Gainsbourg’s charm and cool to the screen.
Phobidilia
A daring and unusual effort from Israeli directing duo Yoav Paz and Doron Paz, Phobidilia is a modern take on the horrors of the everyday world. After suffering an emotional breakdown in a public place, an unnamed young man vows never to leave his apartment: much to his delight, he quickly discovers that in today’s world all his needs can be met easily within the four walls of his apartment. But four years later, his idyllic existence comes under attack from two figures: Daniela, a free-spirited girl who barges into his life, and Grumps, the building’s real estate agent. But the young man is not willing to let anyone take his comfortable existence away from him. Both claustrophobic and visually inventive, the debut feature from the duo behind a number of exceptional music videos shows real talent. Add to this a script that dares to ask some very unusual, some might say controversial, questions and you have the makings of a genuinely transgressive film.
Kosmos Gala - Photograph by Mitesh Parmar
Kosmos
Following on from the success of My Only Sunshine, which played to great acclaim in the London Film Festival last year, Reha Erdem moves further into more inexplicable and fascinating territory. His new film tells the story of a thief who can work miracles. He arrives in an unnamed, snow-covered border town weeping and immediately rescues a boy from drowning. The townspeople look upon the thief as a wise man, but a sudden rash of robberies and his honest declaration that he is looking for love make them suspicious: in a short time the atmosphere becomes electrically charged. Erdem’s film explores the mystical and the unexplainable through a universal story set in one small town. Magnificent visuals aided by an intriguing story, and what is perhaps the best sound design of any film in the last 20 years, elevate Kosmos to a new level of filmmaking. Bound to create as much hatred as love and fuel many discussions, Kosmos represents the sort of European cinema that we seldom get to see.
Space Tourists
Christian Frei’s new documentary takes the audience into a fascinating world full of wonder and surprise. Using breathtaking imagery as well as magnificent music by Jan Garbarek, Christian Frei tells the story of Anousheh Ansari, who was the first tourist in space after paying $20 million for the privilege. Her story is juxtaposed with the many other intriguing people who revolve around space travel, from Kazakh rocket debris collectors to photographers exploring abandoned Russian cosmonaut villages. The film is constantly surprising, unexpected and a delight to watch. Christian Frei was awarded the well-deserved Sundance World Cinema Directing Award in the documentary category this year.
Deliver Us from Evil (Fri os fra det onde)
Ole Bornedal returns to the big screen with another re-imagining of the genre film, just as he as done before with science fiction in The Substitute and film noir in Just Another Love Story. Taking the basic idea behind Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Ole Bornedal twists and reshapes the story into something surreal, disturbing and very, very unique. The film opens with Lars, a drunken failure, running over the town’s saintly figure, Ingvar. Although he is racked with guilt, he finds an easy solution in blaming the crime on the local Bosnian refugee Alain. Ingvar’s partner Frederik is furious – Ingvar was his only connection to the real world and the only person who could control and subdue his violent rage. The one person who stands up for Alain is Lars’s brother Johannes, who has recently moved back to town with his family. When he rescues Alain from being lynched by the mob and retreats to his place, an angry and vicious group lays siege to the only home he now knows. The results are both deadly and tragic. Featuring a blistering final 20 minutes, this film confirms Ole Bornedal’s credentials as a major filmmaking talent.
A Town Called Panic (Panique au village)
Based on the Belgian animated cult TV series, A Town Called Panic is perhaps the wackiest, most surreal comedy anyone can hope to see this year.
When Cowboy and Indian want to make a surprise homemade gift for Horse’s birthday, little do they know that their efforts will result in the destruction of their entire home and all their belongings. What is even stranger is that the events bring them face to face with an alien race who lives in the centre of the world and whose aim is to steal anything precious. A surreal, mad, hilarious and completely irreverent adventure ends up engulfing not only Cowboy, Indian and Horse, but also their neighbours, the postman and even the local police. With basic stop-motion animation and some of the most charmingly insane characterisations ever seen on the screen, this is the kind of film that reminds you of the power of comedy. It’s no surprise that the film won the Audience Award at Austin’s prestigious Fantastic Fest last year, as well as the Best Animated Feature award at Sitges 2009.
The Trotsky
Actor Jacob Tierney’s second directorial effort focuses on high-school student Leon Bronstein, who believes himself to be Leon Trotsky. After starting a strike at his father’s factory during a summer job, Leon finds himself quickly exiled to public school by his father. However, Leon’s instinct for revolution is not easily thwarted: this move gives him an even bigger cause than before – to prove that his fellow students matter to his arch-nemesis, the Stalin-like Principal Berkhoff. Witty, warm and exceptionally acted, The Trotsky comes across as a beautiful and thoughtful combination of Election and Rushmore. Hiding a serious message under its surface, this might be the best teen comedy to come out of Canada in years.
Directors Sergio Corbucci, Damiano Damiani, Enzo G. Castellari
Cast: Franco Nero, Gian Maria Volonte, Klaus Kinski, Lou Castel, Martine Beswick
Italy 1966-1976
300 mins
I prefer the concept of Chianti cowboys to the over-used term ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ as it maintains the spirit of the former while more accurately describing an enhanced viewer enjoyment of them: sit down with a decent glassful and savour the film. It works. And with all those violent scenes and mutilations there is the consoling thought in the back of the mind of how well Chianti and bloody human organs go together – at least according to that bon vivant, Dr Hannibal Lecter.
This month sees the new release by Argent (in this form anyway) of a box-set of Cult Spaghetti Westerns – God, how I loathe that appellation, ‘cult’; talk about capitalism’s ability to appropriate culture! – replete with interviews of Franco Nero, Enzo Castellari, Damiano Damiani and an introduction to each film by Alex Cox in what is described as ‘the style of his epoch-making Moviedrome BBC series’. The set includes Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966), A Bullet for the General aka El chuncho, quien sabe? (Damiano Damiani, 1966) and Keoma aka Django Rides Again (Enzo G Castellari, 1976), and as such constitutes a collection of some of the high points that this very special and unique genre had to offer. Each is a great exemplar of a tradition of Italian filmmaking that held sway in the period of 1964-1976 (be warned, accounts vary). This re-invention of the Hollywood Western appeared during a time of genre exhaustion in both film centres: Hollywood was giving up on the Western genre in favour of adult-themed contemporary dramas, youth-orientated films, epic VistaVision-type productions, spy stories and fantastical fare in an attempt to lure the television audience back to cinemas. Meanwhile, Italian studios were looking to cater for an audience that was fed up with the pepla cycle of classical mythological motifs – sword and sandal epics to you and me – with which they had made great profits in the late 50s and early 60s.
From 1964 to 1976, Italian studios made hundreds of Westerns, often invoking franchise characters like Django, Sabata, Trinity and Ringo, though in the Wild West of Italian producing, many plot devices, characters, and storylines were cavalierly ‘borrowed’ and passed around from writer to writer and director to director. It has been speculated in various accounts that it was the condition of Italy itself in the 1970s – corruption, uncertainty, terrorism, political incompetence, Mafia control, dirty bankers, tampered juries and bribing of officialdom – that inspired these largely left-leaning directors and that drew disaffected, largely working-class Italian audiences to the cycle. There is some evidence of this social criticism to be gleaned in most of the ‘Spaghetti’ films where the stock characters of Hollywood Westerns such as the sheriff, the Indian, the banker and the wagon trains full of ‘civilised folk’ are played down in favour of the individualistic, lone anti-hero. An anti-bourgeois, free-spirited main character (another trope of 60s cinema) whose morality and behaviours are steeped in ambivalence and who usually finds himself, if not the good guy, then the least bad guy, in the face of incompetent sheriffs, corrupt businessmen and impotent authorities, including the Catholic church, which is often presented as just as corrupt and corrosive an influence on the fictional under-classes populating the films. Popular settings for many of the films are also redolent of 60s and 70s European socio-political upheavals: many are set during troubled times, the Civil War (or the reconstruction period that followed it), in decaying and run-down towns (not new frontier towns, which should look pristine) and during the Mexican Revolution (an ideological class war). One of the best made in this sub-genre of Mexican Revolution films – arguably one of the best of any of the Spaghetti Westerns – was Damiani’s El chuncho, quien sabe? which influenced Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 Mexican Revolution film The Wild Bunch, which in turn influenced many Italian directors’ efforts. Enzo Castellari, for one, acknowledges the debt to Peckinpah and points out actual homage sequences that show up in his film Keoma in the interview extra that comes with the DVD. Certainly, Castellari’s film surpasses Leone’s enervated 1971 attempt, A Fistful of Dynamite aka Duck, You Sucker.
Outside of neo-realist traditions and vérité styles, Italian audiences have always leaned to the operatic, the excessive, the theatrical, the transgressive, the comedic and the carnivalesque (commedia dell’ arte for instance) and especially the raw visuality of these in their popular culture, and this is perhaps due in no small part to the influence of the Church – itself anxiously concerned with many of those social expressions. Hence it was the Italian filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Paolo Cavara who cinematically travelled there and loosed upon the world the first mondo films, Mondo cane (1962), Mondo pazzo (1963) and Adios Africa (1966), which offered documentary and pseudo-documentary visions of weird and exotic sex, violence and bizarre rituals – the original shockumentaries. At the same time, a re-invigoration of the horror and thriller genre arose with the films of Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava in 1956 and 1960 respectively, which developed into a particularly Italian form, the giallo. The excessive threads of these three – pepla, mondo and giallo – can be seen to be stitched into the ‘Western all’ italianana’ – the Spaghetti Western. Saturated in blood, steeped in sado-masochistic overtones, crowded with ‘fallen women’, whores and Madonnas and chock-a-block full of ‘the old ultra-violence’, the films reinvented the Western genre – ‘violence vérité‘, as Damiani described them. They appeared at a time of history where drive-ins, youthful baby-boomer audiences, film societies, repertory houses – and most importantly, liberalisation of censorship standards – reigned supreme. Of course, by 1976, when Keoma was released, the cycle had rode the long, hard genre trail from innovation to the establishment of codes to the parody of these codes, finally resulting in the Trinity series – more spoofs than genuine, full-blooded genre pieces. As inevitably happens, the cycle had come full circle and in Keoma, the gunslinger returns to his home town to find that it is ruled by a gang of sadistic bullies. A reminder perhaps of Italy’s own troubled situation at this time, with organised crime and the rise in the drugs trade, political kidnappings, murder and the crises of government institutions. It also marked the beginning of privatised takeovers and the eventual monopoly of much media and film production by the Fininvest Group, run by one Silvio Berlusconi.
In Keoma, one of the last of the Spaghetti Westerns, this sense of the hero’s return is evident and signals a finality. ‘The world keeps going around and around. So you always end up in the same place,’ says Keoma. Franco Nero is starring again in a style of Western that he helped invent, and although Keoma does not feature a character named Django, it was re-titled Django Rides Again for markets outside of Italy, so inextricably linked was Nero to the role. And while his role in the film tries to shake off the character of Django that made him a star, and in spite of the fact that there had been dozens of other Django character rip-offs and actors in the role, he was after all the original, and in a sense the final one in this period. Corbucci has been oft quoted as saying that Ford had the Duke, Leone had Clint and that he had Nero – though the two later fell out. Nero only returned to the role once more in the 1987 film Django 2: il grande ritorno aka Django Strikes Again (directed by Nello Rossati and co-written by Corbucci) in the unlikely form of a monk whose daughter is kidnapped. Setting out to save her, he digs up his old Gatling gun, which is buried in a coffin under a headstone that reads ‘Django’. But perhaps it should have stayed buried – along with Rambo, Indiana and John McClane.
El chuncho, quien sabe? genuinely aspires to be a political Western, its most obvious credential being that it is based on a script adaptation by the Marxist author and polemicist Franco Solinas, who penned such ideologically-driven entertainments as The Battle of Algiers, State of Siege, Burn! and The Assassination of Trotsky. As Damiani puts it in the interview extra, interestingly disengaging himself from the genre: ‘the film is a tribute to Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata… I have always to remind critics that it is not a Western. Westerns happen north of the Rio Grande. South of the Rio Grande is Mexico, which has nothing to do with the American West. It is not a film about revolution either, I would say that it is a film about rebellion and revolution. It is a historical film because it depicts the upheaval in a South American country that is exploited by a selfish ruling class… The only thing it has in common with a Western movie is the horses.’
Damiani was not the only director who felt that there was some mileage in raising political consciousness via the Spaghetti Western. Sergio Sollima made two films in the genre, which were criticised as ‘disguised anarchist cine-texts’. In his book Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans From Karl May to Sergio Leone, Christopher Frayling notes that although the directors were utilising Hollywood techniques to tell their stories (a cause for complaint amongst leftists critics), ‘Pasolini certainly thought that A Bullet for the General represented an authentic form of political cinema (one that reached the displaced peasantry, perhaps) for it was as a result of this film that he agreed to appear (as a revolutionary priest, again with Lou Castel) in Carlo Lizzani’s Requiescant (1967), which concerned the struggle against foreign financiers who were propping up the counter-revolutionary federal government.’
The film title poses a question: Quien sabe? Who knows? And given the various twists in plot and especially in the characterisations, it is a good question. The main character, Chuncho Munos / El chuncho, played with great bravura by the talented Gian Maria Volonté (who had appeared in the Dollars films), starts the film as a half-hearted revolutionary bandito robbing trains and stealing weapons to sell them on to ‘General’ Elias, the leftist commander. During one of these raids, he takes an instant liking – that turns into an attraction (and a queer subtext as in many of Damiani films) – to a mysterious American gringo and interloper, Bill ‘Nino’ Tate, played by Lou Castel as the stereotypical outsider and immoral existential drifter character that re-surfaces in almost all Spaghetti Westerns. He has been paid by government officials to assassinate the ‘General’, for which purpose he carries a golden bullet. The box-set presents the film in its most complete version (114 mins), with all of its many plotlines and narrative developments restored after previous editing (butchering) jobs gave it a running time of only 77 mins in order to fit in a double bill. In its full telling it is quite an exhilarating journey – as well as a vast and spacious, visual and textual one – for both the audience and the characters. Damiani says: ‘The many shots of landscape and space contrasted with the deep feelings of the characters and the actors represent this will to live… an open outlook to things, not a narrow view… When dealing with characters who are larger than life and with wide landscapes and deep feelings, as well as the will to live, the result is a necessity for an open outlook to things – not a narrow view associated with more intimate films and inner psychological studies… Here the characters have moments which match the grandness of the landscape.’
It is El chuncho who travels furthest as he slowly comes to grip with his past, his present and his future. His future is as a true and dedicated revolutionary who finally realises the difference between random killing for personal gain and killing for higher political aims. Damiani again: ‘The psychological turning point is the sudden realisation by the main protagonist that he has fallen prey to greed instigated by a cunning man [the American gringo] whose main motivation is money. Suddenly the protagonist understands that these are the people to destroy: the people who take advantage of the suffering of the poor for money, these are to be eliminated… “Quien sabe?†means “who knows?†It is a title that reflects and sums up the main character who doesn’t know where he’s going, but little by little discovers his calling. I didn’t know – quien sabe? – what my life would be. Now I do, I have found out.’
Now, put the film on, pour a glass of Chianti and quien sabe?
Writers: Mario Amendola, Bruno Corbucci, Sergio Corbucci, Vittoriano Petrilli
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Frank Wolff, Luigi Pistilli
Original title:Il grande silenzio
Italy/France 1968
105 mins
Two years after Django (1966), Sergio Corbucci returned to the Western with an even stranger, bleaker story about the uneasy compact between lawmen and bounty hunters. Up on the conductor’s podium this time was Bruno Nicolai and the name on the score was Ennio Morricone, the pair made famous for their work on Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, which had culminated in the same year Django was released. Corbucci was an old friend of Leone’s and shared his fondness for big zooms, bigger close-ups, and plenty of bright crimson, but the film is distinguished by its hazy, snowbound Utah setting, and its more explicitly radical politics (Corbucci was a communist, and apparently hated hippies).
Morricone likewise takes a different tack. Eschewing the soaring heroic melodies and pounding horse-hoof rhythms of the Leone films, the music looks forward to his horror soundtracks of the 1970s. The cascading pitched percussion and pealing guitar notes anticipate Florian Fricke’s music for Werner Herzog (especially Heart of Glass) while at other points atonal woodwind motifs align Morricone with modernist composers such as Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez.
Since the great violin concertos of the late classical era, the interplay between a solo string instrument and an orchestra has stood in for the conflict between the individual and society, and Morricone’s music here works in the same way. The film’s hero, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, is a mute killer with a childhood vendetta against bounty hunters. He is known simply as ‘Silence’ because ‘wherever he goes, the silence of death follows’. Ironically, he is the only character in the film to have his own Wagnerian leitmotif. Upon each entrance, he is accompanied by a solo string instrument playing the interval of a fifth. When we see through his eyes and flash back to his childhood memory, the leap of a fifth is taken over by flutes, and as his father is killed before his eyes, the harmonisation turns gratingly discordant. A decade and a half after John Cage’s 4’33”, even silence has its own distinctive melody.
Writer Patrick Hargadon is obsessed with having a good view in the cinema, but has always been thwarted by people with large heads or big hair. His first film memory is watching Hitchcock’s Rope on television, but being told to turn it off to go to bed. This curtailed watching experience has led to countless viewing of Maya Deren’s and Alexander Hammid’s experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon in the hope of getting to grips with the avant-garde. He is currently working on a non-fiction book: 366 Grand Things To Do When the Sky Is Grey and You’re Feeling Blue. His alter ego of choice is Yul Brynner as The Gunslinger in Futureworld (1976). EITHNE FARRY
There are moments in life when being Yul Brynner in Futureworld would be very useful. You’d just get things done quicker and more effectively. I’m not really the gun-toting lunatic type though, just sometimes in my mind when I’m angry. But I’d rather be Yul Brynner as the Gunslinger. I think it’s the lasso-dancing with Gwyneth Paltrow’s mum that impressed me the most. I have never before been so amazed by a fantasy sequence. Blythe Danner sits in a large contraption that records her dreams. She’s obviously got some problems as her unconscious makes her run around an empty house in a floral dress only to be captured by men in red body stockings and then be tied to a large cross. Yul saves the day, not only untying her but also lassoing her into what can only be described as a dance of love, all the time keeping those little shiny eyes fixed on her in a permanent glare. He may be a gun-crazy psychopathic robot killer, but his android heart beats a rhythm that makes this lady just wanna dance. Well, you might, after narrowly escaping crucifixion. It’s the only sequence I know where the invincibility of a male superhuman gone mad is undone by a starring role in a middle-aged woman’s hot flush. At the end of the scene, the scientists explain to Blythe’s boyfriend that she will need some rest so they aren’t going to wake her up immediately – understandable given the range of her imagination. So the Gunslinger exits into the distance to fight another day, or perhaps not, as it is only truly at this moment that the cryptic tagline of the film makes precise sense: ‘Futureworld – where the only way to survive is to kill yourself.’
Cours Lapin are four film composers from Denmark, and their new, self-titled album is an evocative homage to cinema, lovingly performed in the French ‘chanson’ tradition. Louise Alenius provides the breathless, child-like vocals for the eleven theatrical, atmospheric songs performed by Peder Thomas Pedersen, Asgar Baden and Jonas Struck. The result is the perfect soundtrack to an imaginary film full of mystery, adventure and longing. The album is out on September 13 on Fake Diamonds Records, but in the meantime you can listen to their free track ‘Cache Cache’. Catch them live in London on July 7 at Death Disco, Notting Hill Arts Club and July 8 at Rough Trade East. For more information, go to their MySpace page. Below, they tell us about their favourite films. SARAH CRONIN
Peder Thomas Pedersen:
1. King of Comedy (1982)
De Niro is heartbreaking and sad, I’ve never seen him in a role like this.
2. Mulholland Drive (2001)
When I stepped out of the movie theatre I had a headache and no idea what just happened. But I loved it.
Louise Alenius:
3. Life of Brian (1979)
It is the best laugh ever – and it works for me every time. I’m not into comedies at all, they rarely make me laugh, but Life of Brian is just so extremely funny that I laugh just by thinking of it.
4. Goodfellas (1990)
Because I loooove men with attitude saying cool things. If I were a man I would definitely be a gangster.
5. Blue Velvet (1986)
I’m fascinated by the characters, especially this sad, sad singer and her fucked up relationship with the freak. I must admit that I find it really interesting to watch extremely cruel people abusing some weak person without any ‘scruples’. It’s a theme I often work with in my own music and lyrics, and many of the lyrics on the Cours Lapin album are also about the relationship between a person doing something really bad, and the victim… In Blue Velvet we also meet this prototype young and sweet girl. She is all good but also really boring, and she almost makes me forget that it’s actually a good thing to be honest and helpful. I just find the dark side of people more interesting. The music is also amazing.
Jonas Struck:
6. Naked Lunch (1991)
I like the way Howard Shore’s score understates the mystery and darkness in this fantastic movie. The mix of the symphonic score with free-jazz virtuoso Ornette Coleman on top is absolutely stunning. The movie is very abstract and Peter Weller’s performance as drug addict William Lee taking bug powder is really far out.
7. South Park (1997)
The title theme was composed and performed by Primus. This crazy ragtime tells us what to expect from the episodes – and it’s really a funny signature that sums up the madness of Kartman, Kenny and the rest of the kids.
8. No Country for Old Men (2007)
I love most of the Coen Brothers movies but this one is really something special. It’s very exciting, violent and super-tense, and funny in a darkly comic manner. It’s very meditative with almost no music at all – and it works without music. I don’t miss a single note and it makes it even scarier with just silence. Javier Bardem as psycho Anton is scary but also very funny.
9. City of God (2002)
This is one of my all-time favourite films. It’s about gang wars, drug dealers and young people growing up in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. It’s very shocking but there’s also a lot of humour in it – a kind of Brazilian Tarantino vibe. The songs selected and the 70s score by Antonio Pinto and Ed Cortes really set the right mood. The characters are absolutely fascinating and very endearing, and they are convincingly played by young, unknown actors. The story is well told, and is alternately funny and brutally shocking. The style of the film includes Tarantino-style time-jumping, freeze-framing and titles to indicate the different chapters of the film. It is a sort of Brazillian Pulp Fiction or Goodfellas, but with its own unique flavour.
Peder Thomas Pedersen + Louise Alenius:
10. In the Mood for Love (2000) Peder: Extremely beautiful cinematography by Christopher Doyle… It’s like you’re standing next to the movie and watching it in extreme saturation. Maggie Cheung isn’t exactly bad-looking in all those colourful dresses, and the score is happening too. Louise: 100% because of its music. After I saw this film I began to write music for classical instruments, and that’s what I’ve been doing since.
Venue: Chelsea Cinema, Curzons Richmond, Soho, Renoir (London) and nationwide
Distributor: Artificial Eye
Director:Claire Denis
Writers: Claire Denis, Marie N’Diaye, Lucie Borleteau
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Christophe Lambert, Isaach De Bankolé
France/Cameroon 2009
102 mins
With White Material, Claire Denis revisits Africa, the setting of her debut feature Chocolat (1988) as well as of her childhood years. Subtly political while also deeply personal, the film focuses on a French woman, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), who runs a coffee plantation in an unidentified African country amid racial tension and revolutionary combat. Obsessed with her plantation, she is blind to the realities that surround her and refuses to leave when the fighting between government forces and rebels gets worse and her position becomes increasingly precarious. Racial and political conflict is intermeshed with personal conflict and Huppert’s dysfunctional family disintegrates as outside events unravel. Denis paints a compelling portrait of a driven woman who can be harsh and ruthless to protect her passionate attachment to the African land she owns. Below, Claire Denis talks to Sarah Cronin about the inspiration for the film and its complex depiction of a troubled continent.
Sarah Cronin: In your director’s statement, you dedicate the film to Sony Labou Tansi. Can you tell me a bit more about him?
Claire Denis: Sony was a writer from Congo, who, along with his wife, died at the beginning of the 90s, without treatment, from AIDS. He’s a great writer, one of my favourites. He has this terrible quality, lucidity, and humour.
Did he write a lot about corruption?
He wrote about his own country. He was very active, he was actually in the rebellion, so he didn’t get treatment for his disease because of that.
How did the film originate? Were you interested in Maria’s story, or civil war in Africa?
It started with Isabelle Huppert. She wanted to work with me, and asked me if I knew the novel by Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing. I said, of course, not only do I know this novel, but it was a big inspiration for me when I made my first film, Chocolat. Although in my family, as opposed to Lessing’s, no one was farming, we were not settling in Africa, we moved all the time, so I had absolutely no experience of farming. I told Isabelle that the problem for me was that period South Africa was not really something that I wanted to do. I wanted to make a contemporary story. Actually, I found it watching the news on TV. There were elements I saw that I put together.
It’s a much more tragic film than Chocolat.
It has nothing to do with Chocolat. That was a film I made out of my own memories, with a sort of – not nostalgia – but I think it was a flashback of someone going back to the country where she grew up.
It seemed to me to reflect a disappointment in the last 20 years in Africa – things like the seizures of white farms in Zimbabwe and Rwanda.
I think that touched people in England more than in France, we were not aware of that, except that the President of Zimbabwe is completely crazy. I was more aware of South Africa, because I have been there many times. Rwanda is a different story, it’s a genocide – you cannot be inspired by Rwanda slightly – you have to be very explicit with Rwanda. No, I was inspired by the west coast. Sierra Leone, Kenya…
The child soldiers especially reminded me of Sierra Leone…
Also Liberia, Nigeria…
I really like the scene where the children are ‘playing’ in the house and find the white dog, and the music on the soundtrack tinkles, a bit like a music box. It’s a very poignant scene.
For me, the child soldiers were victims. They were number one children, and only after soldiers with guns. I wanted them to be children first.
At the very end, why is the last shot of the young rebel, rather than of Maria?
It was important to me to give a chance to a young kid to grow up with some hope. For Maria, her story ends there.
Was she taking out her anger on her father for putting her in that situation?
Her father-in-law. There is no more for her there. This violence expresses something about that.
And what about Manuel, Maria’s son, has he been corrupted?
Manuel is not corrupt. He’s a young boy, he’s crazy. Corrupted is a big word for someone young.
At the end, he plays with the kids – for him it’s almost like a game.
Yeah, it’s something liberating for him.
And what about the radio DJ who gives information to the rebels, how crucial is he to the film?
He’s not crucial, but there is no place in Africa without the radio being like a clock. You don’t live without a radio anywhere, so the guy is telling people to pack and run away. The white people are going to leave, so if you are on the side of the rebellion, be aware, you are going to be killed.
The film seems very ambivalent, you don’t seem to favour the government or the rebels…
The mayor and his militia are not really great, and while the child soldiers are dangerous, it’s not right to kill children in that way. I’m not ambivalent as a person. I don’t want to be a prisoner of cliché, but I’m not ambivalent. I’m very clear, I think.
Maria is infuriating at times, especially when she puts her workers’ lives at risk, but it’s also easy to have sympathy for her because she has lived there her whole life.
Yes, I feel that way too. I dislike what she represents, but she has something – she wants to believe in herself, that she has the power to transform, or force disaster into something successful, because nothing in this family is a success. And I think that’s why I like her so much… and because of Isabelle, Isabelle gave her something, some of her light.
I like the scene when she’s on the motorbike, and her hand is floating up in the air.
She enjoyed that moment. She felt free, like the queen of the world. She doesn’t want to be another person.
It’s the subtle things too – in that scene where she shows the workers where they’re sleeping, and the camera just briefly shows the old blankets lying on the floor. She loves Africa and loves the people but she doesn’t realise…
She lives probably like her father-in-law did. She is no different – she thinks she’s different, but she’s not.
The Electric Sheep team reviews the highlights of the 2010 Terracotta Far East Film Festival.
Accident (Soi Cheang, 2009)
The term ‘high-concept’ was coined to describe Hollywood blockbusters that can be summarised in a single sentence; however, it could also be applied to Accident, a Hong Kong thriller about a team of assassins led by the intensely disciplined Brain (Louis Koo), who disguise their hits as ‘accidents’ so that nobody realises that a crime has actually been committed. Produced by the prolific Johnnie To, Accident exhibits an icy aesthetic that keeps the audience at an emotional distance but serves to maintain suspense during the sustained set-pieces. The unexpectedly romantic score by French composer Xavier Jamaux, who previously collaborated with To on Mad Detective (2007) and Sparrow (2008), aims for a tragic resonance that is undermined by the comparatively one-note characterisations of Brain’s crew, but Cheang’s psychological approach towards pulp material ensures that Accident has a meditative quality that is rarely found in upscale action cinema. JOHN BERRA
Vengeance (Fuk sau, 2009) Vengeance marks a return to what Johnnie To does best – stripped down gangster stories with a hard-boiled edge and slickly executed stand-offs. The plot is simple – a woman barely survives the assassination of her family and demands that her father Costello (Johnny Hallyday), a French chef, take revenge on those responsible. Costello employs a trio of hitmen (played by To favourites Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Gordon Lam and Lam Suet) to track them down, but there are a number of twists and turns as the group make their way to Simon Yam’s unrepentant crime lord. As usual, To provides some memorable set-pieces that are both playful and fraught with tension. It’s their simple poetry that gives To’s films a distinctive mark, with a touch of the bizarre and the humorous that sets his work out from the crowd. RICHARD BADLEY
Antique (Min kyu-dong, 2008)
When arrogant yuppie Kim decides to open a cake shop, assuming that such establishments will offer plenty of opportunities to meet available women, his search for a pastry chef leads him to former high school classmate Min, who has become known as ‘The Gay of Demonic Charm’ after being sacked from numerous bakeries following flings with co-workers who find him irresistible. Somehow, this simple set-up serves as the springboard for multiple narrative strands to the point that there are three films competing for audience attention; Antique is ostensibly a comedy about the unusual professional relationship between Kim and Min, but it also takes a darker detour into thriller territory and flirts with the form of the musical through dizzying montages. There are some hilarious moments scattered throughout this adaptation of Fumi Yoshinaga’s popular manga, and the themes of friendship and forgiveness are effectively conveyed amid the colourful chaos. JOHN BERRA
Cow
Cow (Dou niu, 2009)
In Chinese director Guan Hu’s Cow, set in 1940, a village simpleton emerges from hiding to discover that his fortress home has been destroyed by Japanese soldiers. The narrow lanes are eerily quiet; the dirt in the square stained with blood. Confused and terrified, he discovers that the only other survivor is a ‘foreign’ cow that he’s promised to care for. Cow unfolds in a series of flashbacks, mixing humorous scenes of village life with the simpleton’s harrowing struggles to keep himself and the cow alive as his home is overrun by returning Japanese soldiers, the Kuomintang, and fellow refugees. The result is a tragic black comedy about the futility of war, told from a unique point of view in an already crowded genre. Initially curious and captivating, it’s a shame that the film starts to drift in the second half once the novelty of the plot and set-up start to wear thin. SARAH CRONIN
Summer Wars (Samâ wôzu, 2009)
This new animé from director Mamoru Hosada is more satisfying than his previous offering, The Girl Who Leapt through Time, although its promising beginning and beautiful animation are equally marred by a fairly simplistic message. The story revolves around a young boy, Kenji, who, while staying with the family of a classmate he has a crush on for the summer, accidentally helps a hacker crack the code to the ‘OZ’ network, a Second Life type of virtual world used by everyone, from private users to government and military institutions. As the mysterious attacker wreaks havoc in OZ with potentially disastrous consequences in the real world, Kenji has to find a way to stop him. The animation is excellent, with two contrasting styles used to represent real and virtual worlds, and the tone is charming and humorous. But while the story is initially captivating, it quickly descends into a basic good versus evil battle underpinned by an unsophisticated, conservative belief in traditional values. VIRGINIE SĖLAVY
Phobia (See prang, 2008)
As with most horror anthologies, Phobia is a mixed bag. A quartet of ghost stories from Thailand that vary in stylistic tricks and genre clichés, they seem like extended 10-minute shorts hastily jammed together with no particular format. Some of the stories are linked by references to other characters but there’s no common theme or central thread, and the title itself is misleading: this isn’t an exploration of different phobias, just a straightforward play on people’s understandable and natural fear of ghosts. Last Fright is the most technically accomplished of the bunch, a slow-burning chiller that doesn’t rely on ropey effects, just old-fashioned storytelling. But the anthology’s stand-out is In the Middle, not because it’s particularly scary but because it keeps a tight, coherent plot, revolving around a group of lads on a camping holiday who are haunted by a friend after he’s drowned. RICHARD BADLEY
Read full reviews of Vengeance and Phobia, out on DVD in May 2010.
Writers: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fritz Müller-Scherz
Original title:Welt am Draht
Based on the novel Simulacron 3 by: Daniel F Galouye
Cast: Klaus Löwitsch, Barbara Valentin, Mascha Rabben, Karl Heinz Vosgerau, Wolfgang Schenck, Günter Lamprecht, Ulli Lommel
Germany 1973
2 x 102 mins
First screened on German television in 1973, Fassbinder’s sci-fi two-part series World on a Wire revolves around the computer game nature of virtual reality. It may come as a bit of a shock to modern viewers who think of this concept as relatively new – having perhaps first encountered it in the ‘cyberpunk’ novels of the 1980s or in films from Tron (1982) to The Matrix (1999) – to realise that it has actually been around for four decades. Perhaps modern viewers inevitably link computer games with VR, assuming the two arrived simultaneously, but writers such as Ray Bradbury, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K Dick and Daniel F Galouye, who penned the novel that World on a Wire is based on, had already been developing the concept in the 1950s and 60s. For the sake of confining this argument to ‘virtual reality’ as we define it today, I won’t go back as far as Plato and his cave.
In World on a Wire, as in The Matrix and TV series like Ashes to Ashes and Lost, there is a double philosophical quandary at the heart of the drama, specifically concerning the nature of the reality the characters perceive to be real and questions about one’s own identity within a world that may not exist. Indeed, the Wachowski brothers, though they didn’t like to discuss their own films, were very happy that The Matrix trilogy inspired much philosophical debate (however sophomoric that debate might have been).
Interestingly, almost every example of films and TV series about virtual environments also uses elements from action films, perhaps because whenever a character finds out they are in a simulation and are being watched, they feel paranoid and hunted, and inevitably go on the run. So as well as being an early example of the VR genre, Fassbinder’s mini-series has scenes familiar from the likes of The Fugitive and Alfred Hitchcock’s prototype action films The 39 Steps, North by Northwest and Vertigo. Indeed, the latter does deal with a character who simulates another ‘real’ person’s identity.
It is difficult to discuss the central themes of World on a Wire without mentioning the twist/cliffhanger at the end of part one of – something I guessed within 10 minutes of the start of the mini-series due to my familiarity with the tropes of the sub-genre – so if you don’t want to know the nature of this twist, please skip to the end of the review.
[SPOILER ALERT]
As I already knew that World on a Wire was about virtual reality, the director’s use of blank, staring models made me realise fairly quickly that the world the central character believes to be real is in fact a simulation, and that those vacuous extras are also virtuals whose personality is ‘under-programmed’ in comparison to the lead – like the infected humans in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (any version), who become devoid of emotions when taken over/replaced by alien doppelgä;ngers. We indeed find out that the lead character and his world are both virtual, but also that in the world we are first confronted with, there is a further simulation – a simulation within a simulation. The virtual characters are studying the behaviour of artificial life, so they can predict events in the ‘real’ world.
There are similar simulations within simulations in The Matrix – white voids where Neo does his combat training for example – and in Mamoru Oshii’s underrated Avalon, where each ‘level’ of reality is more colourful and ‘realistic’ than the last. The last of Kôji Suzuki’s Ring books, Loop, deals with a similar concept of worlds within virtual worlds, which might seem too strange a shift in direction for the franchise, even to audiences familiar with The Matrix – the book has yet to be filmed and I don’t expect it will be the basis for The Ring 3D, due in 2012.
In World on a Wire, even if the twist is predictable to modern viewers, the revelation that the lead character is a copy of someone from a higher level of reality still feels fresh, as it is an intriguing philosophical concept that not enough science fiction films have dealt with. When Galouye’s Simulacron 3, which World on a Wire was based on, was filmed again more recently as The Thirteenth Floor, the virtual world was clearly delineated as being different from the real world right from the start (by being shown as a film noir / 1940s simulation). Conversely, in the original novel and adaptation, all three worlds are broadly similar, and it is only the characters’ perceptions of what is real or legitimate as far as their existence is concerned that differentiates the different layers of reality, something that has greater profundity and disturbing potential compared to other examples of the genre.
[END OF SPOILER]
While certain aspects of World on a Wire were designed to create a world that seemed unusual at the time – such as shooting many scenes in the shopping malls and newly built developments of Paris, which were unfamiliar to viewers in 1970s Germany – there are continuing tropes from Fassbinder’s own oeuvre that mark it out as simply his style of filmmaking. For example, the idiosyncratic sound design and overtly ‘theatrical’ performances from some of the cast and extras do create the feeling of a world inhabited by ‘the other’, when viewed in isolation and without having seen many of the director’s other films. Ironically, it’s these idiosyncrasies that give the series a science fiction feeling, rather than his conscious efforts to shoot in ‘alien’ locations. From a current perspective, all 1970s European architecture seems broadly similar, and this is both a blessing and a curse to filmmakers who want to create a futuristic world by seeking out the modern locations of their time. Michael Winterbottom’s use of a global architectural collage in Code 46 and Jean-Luc Godard’s choice of brutalist architecture in Alphaville to create a Paris of the future have quickly dated (Fassbinder was a fan of Godard and acknowledges his debt to Alphaville by giving Eddie Constantine a cameo in World on a Wire).
Viewing World on a Wire in May 2010 is a strangely appropriate experience. Despite its age, the film still seems fresh, and this combination is unsettling to modern viewers. Although a little slow overall – in part due to the fact that it was conceived as two two-hour-long parts with commercials, which makes the first episode seem padded – it is continuously engaging, intriguing and suitably strange, thanks to the performances and the director’s use of disorientating camera angles as well as shots framed with mirrors reflecting other mirrors. As an early example of a genre, it’s interesting to note that it has almost exactly the same ending as the final episode of Lost (and as the co-creators of Lost, who wrote that episode, are refusing to give any more interviews on the subject, I guess we’ll never find out if they’re fans of Fassbinder).
It has recently been reported that scientists have successfully created artificial life, albeit on the level of microbes; extrapolating this into the potential for the creation of artificial human intelligence, it’s interesting to speculate whether the creation of virtual worlds where human visitors can interact with virtual humans will lead to environments that are indistinguishable from our own, or ones that let us holiday in outré retro or futuristic environments. Certainly, the idea that such a world might be created first for its potential to influence the activities of big business as in World on a Wire seems a very likely one.
Alex Fitch
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
